From a writer’s notebook
26th of September
The book fair was last Saturday, the autumn one, and I have no self-control whatsoever. It is run by the animal charity twice a year in the salle des fêtes, trestle tables down both sides and along the middle, everything donated, everything a euro fifty, and two women on the till with a cash box and a biscuit tin for the rescue dogs. I went in with one bag and a clear idea of what I was allowing myself. I came out with three bags and a numb left hand.
There is nothing like a table of other people’s books. Somebody’s entire Simenon collection with the spines gone soft. A hardback of Rebecca with a name and a date inside the cover in fountain pen, 1961, from somebody called Jean to somebody called Pat. Two Agatha Christies in French, which I buy every time because they are how I learnt half my vocabulary. A life of Colette. A terrible-looking cookery book from the seventies that I bought purely for the photographs of aspic.
And then the best part of the whole thing, which is the afternoon afterwards. I take everything out onto the kitchen floor and sort it, and then I go round the house finding homes for it. This is a serious business and nobody is allowed to help me. The French crime goes on the shelf by the back door where I keep the books I read in bed when I am tired. The Colette goes in the library with the other women who wrote about desire in their sixties. Rebecca went on the landing, with Jean and Pat left exactly where they are, because you do not write in a book somebody else has already written in.
I have shelves in nearly every room now and that was deliberate. A house where you can reach a book from wherever you happen to be sitting is a house that looks after you. I spent twenty-odd years in a home where the books lived in one place and were tidy, and I have thought about that a good deal since.
Thursday was the group, and my chapter. Nine of them had read it with a pencil and I sat there with my hands round a cup I was not drinking from.
It went well. I am going to write that down plainly because I spent a fortnight certain it would not. The thing I was most frightened of, the cruelty in it, the passage on page four I nearly cut, was the thing three of them named without any prompting from me as the reason the chapter works. Marguerite said it earns its place. She is not generous for the sake of being kind, so I have taken that and put it somewhere safe. The useful criticism was that chapter one ends two pages after it should, which is completely right and which I could not have seen on my own in a hundred years.
The Harvest moon comes up full tonight over the maize stubble, and when it sits that low it goes enormous and apricot-coloured. The moonstone and the pyramid are already out on the kitchen windowsill waiting for it, which is what I do every month, and they will stay there until morning. A full moon is for looking at what has actually arrived. Three shelves rearranged, somebody else’s Rebecca on my landing, and a chapter that holds. Quite a lot, as it turns out.
If books are where you go to be looked after, the full Literary Prescription for Comfort — books, poems, quotes — is waiting there.