At the Portico Library
by Myna Trustram
This is a re-worked version of an essay I read at the Library’s Made in Translation symposium in 2017. I use a novel and a book review to knit together some of the thoughts and sensations I had on an earlier visit to the Library.
On the train on my way to the library I read a review of Ariel Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (2017). She describes a writing assignment in Mongolia, where alone in a hotel room she miscarried, and held in her hand her five-month foetus son as he died.
In response to the account of the miscarriage, Lidija Haas the reviewer wrote,
there is a kind of grief that, while real and permanent, cannot point to much beyond itself’ (London Review of Books 4 May 2017 p.25)
By the time I was climbing the stairs up to the Library, these harsh words had settled deep inside myself. The point of grief is to work with it, not through it, it doesn’t end. How might I use the Library to work with it? The point of libraries and museums is indeed to point beyond the actual thing you encounter. The point of a library, at least the Portico type of library, is also to be real and permanent.
The Portico Library’s historic Reading Room
When I walked into the Portico after an absence of nigh on twenty years, I wasn’t drawn to it as a place of knowledge, as a place of the real and permanent, as a place that points to things beyond itself, but to the smell of lunch and the glimpse of the kitchen through the open door by the counter, the combination of institution and domesticity was intriguing.
A tea pot on a table cloth.
A woman sitting alone.
A young woman walking past the book stacks with a tray of food.
Chatting in the kitchen.
Clattering of crockery.
A young man fixing a chair.
The young woman, this time with an empty tray, came up to me. ‘Would you like anything?’ I didn’t know what I wanted, though I knew I didn’t want to look through the prism or go up in the air balloon (both elements in the Made in Translation exhibition), even though these might have shown me something of what lies beyond. I wanted to stay at home in this house of meals and novels.
Another Perspective: Looking Up To The Ground, Down to the Clouds by Kirsteen Aubrey & Alice Kettle (2017)
Two things occurred to me.
First of all, meeting with Eddie Cass in the 1990s in a kind of grand back room of the Library. Eddie was a trustee of what was then the National Museum of Labour History and I was its Keeper of Collections. He was a member of the Portico and he bought me lunch. I chose quiche and he sandwiches. He had been a coal miner at Bradford Colliery in East Manchester, then a Royal Bank of Scotland bank manager and then an academic. He was a kind man who made you feel noticed and he loved Manchester and its history, especially that of working people. We’d meet here a few times each year to discuss museum business, curatorial business rather than financial. He died in 2014 aged 77. I used to quip that lunch with Eddie was the closest I’d ever get to being welcomed into a gentleman’s club.
The other memory that came to me was reading Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, published in 1981 long before her famous Gilead trilogy. I asked Thom the librarian whether they had Housekeeping, he walked over to the catalogue, pulled out a drawer and flicked through the cards. I thought crumbs, this really is an old-fashioned place!' But then he gave the very modern explanation: our online catalogue’s been hacked by Russians. Or did he say The Russians? He said he likes using the cards because each one has the style of the person who did the cataloguing: ‘you can tell which one is written by Emma and which by Brian’.
They didn’t have the book.
Housekeeping is one of those books that makes me ask when I finish it, what can I possibly read now?
I’m drawn to the melancholic and Housekeeping is full of it.
Myna’s 1982 copy of Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
It’s about two orphan girls growing up in the 1950s with their aunt, Sylvie, in Fingerbone, a small town in the north west of America. Fingerbone is dominated by a lake that ‘thundered and groaned’ (p.64) when it flooded. Sylvie’s father, the girls’ grandfather, worked for the railway. He drowned when his train slid off a bridge into the lake. The girls were orphaned when their mother, Helen, killed herself by driving over a cliff into the lake.
Sylvie eventually came home to look after them, but at heart she’s an itinerant: her thoughts are always elsewhere, she seldom removes her coat and her stories are about trains or bus stations. The book describes her attempt to stay put, to keep house for her nieces who are haunted by a fear that Sylvie too will leave them.
Museums, and libraries, are full of melancholy. Like the girls’ minds, this library is a store of the past. It’s kept here and not allowed to leave, whether down the stairs or up in the air balloon. It’s ordered and shelved, tidily house-kept. Sylvie tries to keep house.
Balloon by Kirsteen Aubrey & Alice Kettle (2017)
I used to be a museum keeper and, as I say, when I walked into the Portico after twenty years, it was its domesticity, its house-ness that I breathed in.
Ruthie, the eldest of the girls and narrator of the story, says,
Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping. She soaked all the tea towels for a number of weeks in a tub of water and bleach. […] on one early splendid day she wrestled my grandmother’s plum-coloured davenport into the front yard, where it remained until it weathered pink. (p.77)
Acts of housekeeping and of collecting suffuse the book.
Ruthie’s grandmother had a collection of things in the bottom of a chest of drawers: balls of twine, Christmas candles, a shot glass, brass buttons, a pincushion, old photographs. Ruthie says they were all ‘randomly assorted, yet so neatly arranged, that we felt some large significance might be behind the collection as a whole (p.80).
Ruthie asks, ‘What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?’ (p.82).
Is that what this library collection is waiting for, to be knit up finally in order to reveal its large significance?
The bandaged books at the Portico Library
The girls’ grandfather
would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jack-knife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses. (p.19)
‘When she had been married a little while’, the girls’ grandmother ‘concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate’ (p.14). The holding of objects in a museum, in a library, in a hand, doesn’t mitigate the longing for whatever the hand holds, for whatever it would really like to keep.
In this way, Marilynne Robinson touches lightly on what might lie behind acts of collecting, holding and keeping. Grandfather puts the symbols and concrete signs of death in his pocket along with the everyday things he needs to carry on living.
A notice in the Library says the books are very fragile. Some are bound over with a narrow bandage that makes them stand out upon the shelves. They are fragile like the leaves Sylvie swept ‘that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins’ (p.76). Ruthie suggests that when Sylvie swept the leaves she,
took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise. (p.76).
Unlike the scattered leaves, the fragile books stand erect upon the shelves, secured by each other.
Example of the fragility of historic books in the Portico’s collection
One night Ruthie and her sister sleep out by the lake, having left it too late to find their way home along the dark shore. Ruthie says,
While it was dark […] it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent. (p.103)
As though the darkness of a museum and a library (when it’s locked up and the keepers have left for their real homes), regardless of its content, is what matters. The perfect and permanent darkness of the library.
When the girls arrived home the next morning Sylvie wrapped a quilt around each of them and gave them ‘Brimstone tea’ of boiling water, condensed milk and ‘a quantity of sugar’ (p.104). Ruthie fell asleep with the thought that ‘So this is all death is,’ (p.105).
A tea pot on a table cloth.
Death can’t point beyond itself. It is the beyond.
there is a kind of grief that, while real and permanent, cannot point to much beyond itself (London Review of Books 4 May 2017 p.25)
A lack of a beyond makes me, on this day, not much interested in the books.
It’s what isn’t here that I dwell on and that makes me live on. I’m drawn to the Library’s vulnerabilities and dark corners, less so to its ‘unique insights into the minds of the men who contributed to the making of the city at a time when Georgian Manchester was making international history’ (http://www.theportico.org.uk/library/the-collection, accessed 19.5.17). But it was this, the collection, that Eddie loved.
When I next visited the Library, the digital catalogue was up again (it had been lost for about fifty hours) but someone called out across the reading room that the NHS system had been cyber attacked! I found the breaking news on a website and thought again about the news that breaks and the lack of a beyond.
In the end Sylvie gave up housekeeping and left Fingerbone, but she took Ruthie with her. They set off together in search of what had been lost.
Dr Myna Trustram lives in Stockport and has worked as a historian, curator and academic. She uses these perspectives to write experimental essays that consider themes such as mourning, loss and separation.
