The library, Trinity College, Cambridge
Just before we left Paris there
appeared in one of the national daily papers a lengthy article concerning the
state of the tourist industry in France.
The tourist industry in France is, in a word, robust. Not merely is France the number one tourist
destination in the world, this year’s
cohort of visitors is likely to prove the largest in recorded history. No one staying in an apartment near the
Eiffel Tower, as we were, would be tempted to suspect this was Fake News; but
we didn’t grasp the full implications of it until we got to Charles de Gaulle
airport about noon on Monday. Even
though the authorities had accelerated the perfunctory process of “passport
control” to the speed of the production line in the factory in Modern Times, it took the better part of an hour and a half to run us through the
mill. And the torture of the egress from
Paris was actually less wearing than that of the ingress to Newark. But to dwell on the only unfortunate twelve
hours of an otherwise blissful three-week-long trip would be all wrong.
Our trip
devolved in the three stages I outlined in an earlier post: an intensive educational
tour in southern and eastern England, a short week of lotus-eating in the Var
in the south of France, and a variegated week of cultural, social, and
gastronomic immersion in the City of Light.
A
professional medievalist can perhaps be assumed to indulge somewhat rarified
tastes, but I can now confess that even I was a little dubious about the
sustaining power of our proposed tour of great libraries, even one sponsored by so cerebral an outfit as Princeton
Journeys. To be sure I myself find few
things more engaging than old folios stoutly bound in calf. But how about the famous species homme moyen sensuel, of which there must be one or two representatives among the
body of Princeton alumni? Well, I should
have worried rather about whether I could match the erudition and the mental
energy of my so-called “students”. What
wonderful places we went, what wonderful things we saw! Between the expert and imaginative
preparations of the travel professionals, and the cohesive bonhomie of our
traveling bibliophiles, it turned out to be, as the saying goes, the trip of a
lifetime.
I am an
Oxford man, and over the years I have willingly if mindlessly participated in
the kind of boring banter which the alumni of the two ancient universities sling
back and forth. But I have to say that
the collegiate libraries of Cambridge seem to me to surpass those of Oxford
both in beauty and variety. Such
comparisons are of course finally otiose.
Better to be simply thankful for the nearly miraculous preservation of
Duke Humphrey in the top of the old Bodleian in Oxford or the Wrenn masterpiece
at Trinity College Cambridge.
The sitting room at Knebworth House, Herts.
The tour
included visits to various ancillary literary shrines: the archives of
Canterbury Cathedral, the Dickens Museum in London, and the extraordinary
stately home once the possession of Bulwer-Lytton, author of twenty-nine
novels, twelve illegitimate children, and the immortal opening line “It was a
dark and stormy night…” We also took in
a number of antiquarian book dealers in London, including Jarndyce (just across
the street from the British Museum), whose extraordinary range of Dickens items
was of particular interest to the several Dickens enthusiasts on the tour. Though an English professor and a great
admirer of the nineteenth-century novelists, I must confess that my own
favorite unaffordable book was of a political genre, and related to my work on
anti-Communist literature. There was on
offer at Peter Harrington’s on the Fulham Road in Chelsea a signed and inscribed first edition of Karl Marx’s Kapital,
vol. the first, 1867. The asking price
for this rare item: £1,325,000. One may
view this bibliographical phenomenon either as a refutation of Marx’s labor
theory of value or as a stunning confirmation of his analysis of the audacity
of capitalist commodification.
This
library trip did keep us on the run a bit—I gave a few lectures and tried to
respond intelligently to the numerous questions that came up—and though I was
sorry to see it end, I was more than ready for the down time that
followed. We had a wonderful week with
our very old and very dear friend Andrew Seth at his paradisal establishment in
the south of France: soft, lazy days, lots of reading, lots of challenging
conversation, and probably too much good eating. The final week was in Paris, where another
very old friend was being fêted by her extensive family for her eightieth birthday. I am not moving all that fast these days, and
we limited our activities to a single event or museum per day. There was a big Mary Cassatt show at the
Jacquemart-André Museum. At the Petit
Palais there was a fascinating exhibition concerning French impressionists who
had for longer or shorter periods been exiled in England, mainly as a result of
the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Paris Commune. Who knew?
Not me. So that’s the brief
report. I am back now to sweltering
Jersey heat and humidity, and the blog has come back with me.
