'A Pile of Damp Ashes and Smashed Boards'

The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Harvey approaches. Memories are fresh and nerves a little frayed. My family and I got off easy last time. More than one-hundred people were killed. Damage was estimated at $125 billion. As I posted on August 27, 2017: “Power out. Car flooded. Books dry.” We watched the water level creep up the driveway – then slowly recede. Electricity was restored after four days and in less than a week I had a new car. Friends lost their house and most of its contents. With their teenage daughter and four cats, they lived with us for three months while rebuilding. 

Up front, I acknowledge the irrationality, but I worry about the books. What are their chief enemies (besides universities, I mean)? Water and sunlight, and we get plenty of both. Even without flooding, what might happen? Seepage? Spore proliferation? As described in her essay “Book-Building After a Blitz,” the English novelist Rose Macaulay lost everything but her life during a German air raid on London:

 

“Of furniture, books, and pictures nothing stayed but a drift of loose, scorched pages fallen through three floors to street-level, and there lying sodden in a mass of wreckage smelling of mortality, to trouble me with hints of what had been. Here was a charred, curled page from one of the twelve volumes of the Oxford Dictionary, telling of hot-beds, hotch-pots, hot cockles, hotes, and hotels; there, among a pile of damp ashes and smashed boards, were a few pages from Pepys, perhaps relating of another London fire, a few from Horace Walpole, urbane among earthquakes, revolutions, and wars, knowing that all things pass. But no book remains; my library, with so many other libraries, is gone.”

 

Macaulay (1881-1958) was an admirably cool customer. She embodies what Americans of a certain age still think of as British sangfroid. No whining. No sense of being singled out for her loss. Not a trace of self-pity. One moves on:

 

“When the first stunned sickness begins to lift a little, one perceives that something must be done about lost books. One makes lists; a prey to frenetic bibliomania, I made lists for weeks; when out, I climbed my ruins, seeking in vain; when in, I made lists. A list of the books I had had; that is the saddest list; perhaps one should not make it. A list of those one cannot hope (for one reason or another) to have again. A list of those that one hopes to replace one day, but not yet. Another of those to replace at once, directly one has shelves again — the indispensables. Another of the good riddances.”

 

Macaulay’s only wartime short story was “Miss Anstruther’s Letters,” which recounts the title character’s loss of her flat during a German attack. Her novel The World My Wilderness (1950) is set in the bomb-blasted ruins of London. It makes perfect sense that Macaulay would write Pleasure of Ruins (1953), my favorite among her books. She makes no explicit reference to her own experience during the war, but in the book’s coda, “A Note on New Ruins,” she writes:

 

“Even ruins in city streets will, if they are let alone, come, soon or late, to the same fate. Month by month it grows harder to trace the streets around them; here, we see, is the lane of tangled briars that was a street of warehouses; there, in those jungled caverns, stood the large tailor’s shop; where those grassy paths cross, a board swings, bearing the name of a tavern . . .”

 

And, as more time passes:

 

“The house has put on melodrama; people stop to stare; here is a domestic scene wide open for all to enjoy. To-morrow or to-night, the gazers feel, their own dwelling may be even as this. Last night the house was scenic; flames leaping to the sky; to-day it is squalid and morne, but out of its dereliction it flaunts the flags of what is left.”