'The Most Perverse Gesture'

“Books are friends, oracles, household gods, characters in the ongoing drama of our minds.”

Understandably, Lance Marrow gets a little sentimental about books and their needless destruction. We resist soft-headed fetishism but for some of us, discarding or destroying books, even lousy ones, amounts to barbarism – “sacrilege and profanation,” in Morrow’s words. In this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal, his “Requiem for a Dumpster Full of Books” made for squeamish reading. Several years ago by the curb outside the church on the corner, I saw knee-high stacks of Bibles, hymnals and religious tracts virtually dissolving in the rain. In his account of a book-filled trash dumpster behind an arts center in upstate New York, Morrow writes:

 

“There’s theology in this. Libricide is Satan’s work: We think of the Nazis’ ritual burning of ‘un-German’ books in cities all over the Reich in May 1933. It is true that certain books may also be Satan’s work. Think of ‘Mein Kampf’ or ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ When the discussion degenerates into cultural politics, you get people claiming that ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ are evil.”

 

There are evil book-burners, usually motivated by politics or religion, of course. But  there’s another species of book destroyer -- those who reduce books to empty objects,  like tin cans ready for the recycling bin or landfill. The words they contain, the stories and ideas, stand for nothing, which makes it easy to discard or destroy them. Perhaps the sole purpose of a volume in the attic or on the bottom shelf in a library (or the dumpster) is that it be read by a single reader who unknowingly opens it and changes his life. Think of Eric Hoffer discovering Montaigne's Essays.

 

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) is not a poet who has ever much interested me (the poor thing was briefly engaged to Ezra Pound). But while living in London during the Blitz, she wrote some memorable lines in The Walls Do Not Fall (1944). You can add it to the list of books written by civilians  -- Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green – during the German raids. Here is the ninth section of that poem:

 

“Thoth, Hermes, the stylus,

the palette, the pen, the quill endure,

 

“though our books are a floor

of smouldering ash under our feet;

 

“the burning of the books remains

the most perverse gesture

 

“and the meanest

of men’s mean nature,

 

“yet give us, they still cry,

give us books,

 

“folio, manuscript, old parchment

will do for cartridges cases;

 

“irony is bitter truth

wrapped up in a little joke,

 

“and Hatshepsut’s name is still circled

with what they call the cartouche.”