Flyleaf fortuity: The threads of joy and learning that run through books

Can one ever have enough books? My father never thought so. My mother couldn’t wait to clear the bookshelves in her house after he passed away. I follow my father and his precious memory in this matter. I have a very packed library – mostly of secondhand paperbacks. Books that I can afford to buy, and crucially, books that I cannot wait to read. As a writer, my library is an essential part of my craft. I come back to books that I have had on my shelf for 20 years, or even longer. I flip through the pages to find the exact wording of a barely remembered phrase or idea. I sometimes google of course, but there is deep value in turning the pages. The old sentences and paragraphs coming alive again in memory, showing you things you never expected to rediscover.

Recently I went through a Flaubert phase – as one does. He was certainly eccentric and sometimes even misogynistic, but his prose is captivating and his insights into human character often take us beyond his 19th century male limitations. It was with this in mind that I set out to look for a collection of his letters to help me understand him, his insights and his books better. I came across one at one of my favourite shops: Bookdealers. The owner, Doron Locketz, is an old friend whom I met at his first shop on Rockey Street in Yeoville, back in the early 1990s. Doron had the only copy of Flaubert’s letters that I could find in Joburg.

“It’s from Lionel Abrahams’s library,” he told me. He couldn’t quite remember exactly how he had come to possess the precious book, but he thought it had come from the library of Jane Fox, Lionel’s wife. She is a well-known writer and cultural figure who wrote Letters to Lionel, a deeply moving tribute to him after his death in 2004.

Its provenance was special indeed. Lionel was a well-known South African writer and highly regarded poet. Author of The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan, The White Life of Felix Greenspan and five collections of poetry, he was a giant of South African culture when real meaningful literature was scarce in this country. Writing from the true heart, and standing for the moral value of literature against apartheid was hard, even dangerous. The threat of the security police and of imprisonment for your words that the regime might not like, was ever present.

Lionel engaged courageously with the South Africa of his time, refusing to submit to the white racism that was so common, and accepted, then. He started Renoster Books as early as 1971, as the grip of the apartheid laws was growing tighter and tighter. He published work by Oswald Mtshali and Mongane Wally Serote which most companies wouldn’t even consider.

He was, by all accounts, a generous and perceptive writing teacher, too. And, at the time I first met Doron, I was growing my library and learning how to write myself. I had written a novel which I submitted to various publishers – to no avail. But one publisher was kind enough to write me a personal letter. My writing showed promise, she said, but perhaps I should sign up for Lionel Abrahams’s writing workshop.

I wanted to, but I was earning my living as a TV soundman and apprentice field producer. The early 1990s was a violent, turbulent time, and I was constantly covering the near civil war that rocked our country as the forces of right-wing reaction battled against the changes that Nelson Mandela and FW De Klerk were bringing to our society. Most weeks it was all I could do to find time to record some of the events in my diary and to write occasional articles about what I was witnessing.

I always regretted that I never had time to attend Lionel’s workshop. It was justly admired by writers all over South Africa, and I’m sure I would have benefited from his creative wisdom and poetic talent.

But more than 30 years later I was standing in my old friend Doron’s bookshop with a yellowed, tattered copy of Flaubert’s letters, the old excitement at finding a book that I knew contained treasures rose inside me. I had a little time to kill so I went to a nearby coffee shop, ordered a sandwich and tea and eagerly opened the book.

Written in blue ink across the top of the flyleaf in Lionel’s tiny, barely legible hand was this inscription: “Lent to Vivienne Miller by Lionel Abrahams during the 20th century.”

I don’t know who Vivienne Miller was, or is, but she clearly was a good friend judging by the tone of his inscription – and, what’s more, she certainly knew how to give as good as she got.

Further down the flyleaf was written something that hints at the history of the old book itself. Perhaps Vivienne kept it longer than Lionel had expected, but he was generous, if slightly wry in his next inscription in the same blue ink:

“If I could forget that I bought it, why shouldn’t you forget that you borrowed it?” L. Abrahams.

And Vivienne replies in pencil: “If you could forget that you bought it, do you really want it back?” V. Miller.

How would one ever respond to that? What a precious bit of book lovers banter passed down to us across the years. I can almost hear the gentle laughter that I imagine must have accompanied the writing of these inscriptions.

The old personal messages on the flyleaf give us an invisible but powerful thread of joy that runs through this old book. They give it a value that goes beyond the yellowed pages. I sometimes think today that in our world of frenetic, instant electronic connection, book lovers are keepers of an ancient way of knowledge. I think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem The Dead Pan. She writes of the death of the old Greek gods. “Can your mystic voices tell us/Where you hide?... Pan, Pan is dead.” She writes, remembering a famous work by Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of Oracles, where he recounts sailors hearing a haunting voice coming to them across the ocean: “The great god Pan is dead,” as the old world faded and the ancient oracles ceased to utter their prophecies.

I mourn the loss of those mystic voices. There is something poignant in their passing, leaving us all poorer in spiritual complexity. I sometimes think those who find comfort and wisdom in the words written in books, read slowly, savoured and understood in each unique human way are like those who looked to the ancient oracles for knowledge of their world, as perplexing as our own. Each unread book is like the blank emptiness of the ocean after the tragic cry of Pan’s death had echoed its last.

Books and the meaning they hold for us, though, refuse to die that easily. I have a friend who gives his books away. “They must find their way to the people who need them in their lives,” is what he says. I, on the other hand, keep my books; but I suspect he may have the better attitude – not very different to that of Lionel and Vivienne. Their warm banter written with posterity in mind, aimed ultimately at another book lover like myself, reminds me that while too many books today are unread, we never do forget the books we have read.

Their silent, but insistent, voices are never reduced to mere echoes across emptiness. They all lie somewhere within us, in the way each one of them has changed our lives just some little bit – even if we never do get them back.

In the end, while I never got to attend his workshop, Lionel, unbeknown to him, did teach me something precious about the value of books and sharing them with others. I’ll always treasure that knowledge, as I will the old, tattered book he wrote it in for me to find so serendipitously. DM