Staying at home and maintaining rigorous rules of isolation as one must in this time of plague – I find myself spending a lot more time in my library-study. This lovely space tends towards chaos but always yields treasures.
Two impulses contend in me – one is to allow chaos to take hold and the other is to keep everything tidy and in good order. The mass of stuff builds and builds into unsorted piles collapsing on the study floor and thickening files and folders of paper-clutter accumulate. But eventually the tidying impulse wins. Every so often I conduct a great clearing-up operation – put the books at home in neat categories, with a pang of regret throw away old magazines, clear out my desk drawers in the study, fix papers and files in new and orderly-looking heaps. My wife rejoices. My sons tell me I could have stored everything on a computer anyway.
When the tidying impulse overtakes me I take a special pleasure in destroying accumulated bits of paper and throwing out old newspapers. This can be exhilarating. There comes a feeling of self-satisfied achievement in getting rid of a mass of useless rubbish that is gradually piling up and threatening to take over every nook and cranny in one’s living and working spaces. Disposing of detritus is a little like returning life to greater simplicity and more focused meaning. There is a good feeling of clearing the decks and starting again. It gives the semblance of the hope we all like to have of getting another chance to do better. It is a little bit like an athlete losing weight and feeling fitter.
And yet every time I tidy up and throw away there is a part of me that flinches as if I was catching myself in an act of vandalism. And indeed from a certain perspective it is vandalism. In the eye of history what will be considered rubbish? I remember that truly great Guyanese, Joel Benjamin, an outstanding archivist and bibliophile, telling me that everything is grist to the historian’s mill – that today’s ephemera will be endlessly fascinating in another age. When I destroy last week’s badly printed political pamphlet or a strange poem sent by an old man or prospectuses for this venture or that or a batch of increasingly onerous GPL bills or yesterday’s invitation to a dinner party or the programme for the latest show at the Cultural Centre or the estimate for a small orchid house we built in the garden, I sense Joel shaking his head in deep reproof. He praised the wonderful incapacity to throw away waste paper, which – to his cultivated eye – was not waste at all.
In London, quite a while ago, the truth in this came home to me. I was browsing in a book store which more than anything I love to do when in a great city. It was a bookstore which specializes in antique books and memorabilia. As always I looked out for old Demerara volumes but found none on this occasion. What I did find, and spent considerable time browsing over were five facsimile volumes, published in 1987 by Boydell and Brewer in association with Cambridge University, of the scrapbooks in which Samuel Pepys, the great English civil servant and diarist, pasted his vast and miscellaneous collection of popular songs of the day.
What a treasure trove! He was a compulsive hoarder. Nobody else in his time – not even people at the national archives or the great libraries – bothered to keep such trivia. So now the Pepys hoard is unique and priceless. He kept all the latest tunes and ballads and street-songs like a squirrel gone mad, pasted them carefully into his notebooks, and lovingly annotated them. When Pepys died they were deposited with the rest of his papers in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College in Cambridge.
There they lay for three centuries. Then a few years ago among the magpie hoard of papers and books and all the sundry scraps Pepys could never bear to throw away this particular goldmine of curious information in his scrapbooks was discovered by a Joel-like sort of person called Geoffrey Day. He also found that Pepys had kept more than 4,000 woodcuts illustrating the ballads in the popular art form of the day, a glorious addition to the already unique treasure.
Long ago they were just the latest pop tunes one heard for a short while in the streets – here today, gone tomorrow. Now for the political historian the ballads bring back to life popular attitudes to such diverse events as the execution of Walter Raleigh and the Glorious Revolution. For the social historian there are accounts of city life in vivid detail: murders, gin shops, midwives at work, court gossip, theatre, sermons, the Great Fire of London, prize-fighting, the effects of plague. Students of literature have found great interest in the full texts of the ballads from which Ophelia sings snatches in Hamlet. There is a whole volume of bawdy ballads, as one would expect of Pepys, fit to match our most lurid modern-day calypsos: for instance, “An Excellent Song about an Engagement between a French privateer and an English fireship” which leaves very little to the imagination. “The Happy Man or the Virgin Betrayed” is illustrated by a beautiful but somewhat unsuitable woodcut of Adam and Eve.
To think that such intriguing documentation once was simply consigned to the rubbish bin in households of the day! Chaos, the patron saint of the untidy, at least made sure that one obsessed collector’s detritus was preserved for future delectation. Now I must think twice before I throw away anything at all. There are only two problems about this. Will my wife allow it? And, even if I succeed in this resolve, which archive in Guyana, please tell me, can be depended on to preserve my precious collection of ephemera for three centuries?
Everything is interesting
