The backlash to Marie Kondo’s suggestion that we chuck out books that don’t “bring joy” shows how attached we are to physical books, even in a digital age. I think Kondo is very impressive. I like how she advises us to fold a shirt with love in our hands. Why not? All the same, I’m not going to give it a go because I believed Virginia Woolf when she advised female writers to kill the angel in the house. Hopefully, we did that with love in our hands. (Actually, I thought it was quite exhilarating when Kondo experimented with ripping books apart so they fit better on shelves. Perhaps it’s even a bit dada.)
It is true that in the current phase of my life, I have emptied my shelves of many books I have carried around with me for decades. I finally realised that I was not attached to them. Like a relationship that has neared its end, I lived in hope they might reach out to me. To put it more animistically, if these books were speaking to me, I no longer wanted to listen to them. I threw away books I had started, never finished, and I finally owned up to never wanting to get involved with them in the first place. Fiction, in particular, can be boring for the same reasons that make people boring. Its mind is closed, it cannot tolerate doubt, it has no interest in the subjectivities of others, it cannot access the apparently unknowing part of its mind (sometimes described as the unconscious), it is relentlessly cheerful or relentlessly despairing, and most importantly, I am not interested in how it thinks.
It is unlikely that my remaining book collection will make people love me, because I don’t necessarily love people who read a lot of clever books. This was a hard, sad, revelation. I am obviously attracted to people who own books that I admire. Yet it would seem that often the enduring, sexier relationship is with the book itself and not the person who owns it.
Most of the books I have kept do bring me joy, but I know my sort of joy is not going to be yours. For a start, filed under the “L”s are Jacques Lacan (theory so difficult he has been nicknamed Lacant), Elmore Leonard, Primo Levi. I can tell you that I have reread Lacan many more times than Leonard. That’s because I don’t understand most of Lacan’s writing, but I don’t consider that a bad thing. Reading Levi does not make me happy like reading Muriel Spark makes me happy, oh God, no, except for joy at the miracle that he survived the death camps. When I think about what it must have taken for Levi to relive his time in Auschwitz, to go back there every day as he revised and edited If This Is a Man, I understand that it was a great sacrifice, as well as a historical necessity. I have filed Levi next to WG Sebald’s 2001 novel, Austerlitz. Books are often in conversation with other books.
Strangely, I have kept most of the now tattered novels I read in my late teens, including Jack Kerouac and Colette. When I started reading Colette’s Claudine series, then moved on to The Vagabond, Chéri and her more esoteric The Pure and the Impure, there was something transgressive in her writing that appealed to me. She had one foot in and one foot out of the bourgeois life of her era, and I loved that on those feet she wore mannish open sandals to torment her conventional second husband.
I do have a liking for collecting the work of “lost modernists” such as Hope Mirrlees, even though I only really admire her long poem Paris, written in 1919, an electrifying journey through a day in the post-first world war capital. I have partly kept it for the substantial and enlightening introduction by Sandeep Parmar, in which I discovered that it was the daring Hogarth Press (owned by Leonard and Virginia Woolf) who published Mirrlees, and who indeed first published, in Britain, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
I suppose I have started to theme books historically. Next to Mirrlees I have placed quite a few of Gertrude Stein’s baffling and beguiling works. Stein was also living in Paris in 1919 and records looking down from a hotel balcony at the exhausted, wounded soldiers returning home. At the moment I am writing about Stein’s long psychology training at Radcliffe College under the tutorship of the philosopher William James. For this reason, I have placed James’s The Principles of Psychology next to Stein’s The Making of Americans.
The most orderly shelves are the “B”s. I have kept almost everything written by JG Ballard, our greatest literary futurist, some of William Burroughs, nearly all of James Baldwin, also Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Claire-Louise Bennett, NoViolet Bulawayo, and so on. What’s the point of lists? The point of all these books is that they have given new dimensions to my life. For example, the reach of Ballard’s imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream when he first started out as a writer, but I, from another generation altogether, was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer. This is important to me, especially when it comes to various arguments about autofiction and life writing, and the misunderstanding that somehow writing from life means one is not an imaginative writer.
Back to Kondo. I would like to know how to fold my clothes in a way that makes them stand up on their own in neat rows, as she has skilfully shown us. The trouble is I’m not sure this kind of order would make me feel freer, happier, more connected to the world than my disorderly book collection.
• Deborah Levy’s new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, will be published in August by Hamish Hamilton.
