My bookshelf
Iseem to have accumulated a huge library of books, packed around the walls of a front room in my house, sometimes spilling on to the floor like drunks at a party. Some of these are absolute gems. I have a first edition of Ulysses; I have a copy of Joseph Conrad’s dramatised The Secret Agent, signed by Conrad himself. There’s a Dublin poetry magazine signed by Sam Beckett and signed plays by John Osborne and Tennessee Williams.
I have a hardback three-volume Life of Trotsky with marginal annotations in the hand of its previous owner, the dashing Bolshevik Michael Bassett. I have a signed Words by Jean Paul Sartre and a signed The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir; they lie together.
I have a copy of Evergreen Review’s second issue, the one with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl appearing in print for the first time. To balance this up I have a signed copy of Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters — she used to hang around with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, poor soul. I have Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs of a Catholic Childhood with a letter from Ms McCarthy inside (“I quite like the priests and nuns. It’s the laity I can’t stand.”). I have poetry signed by Eileen Duggan and Seamus Heaney and an original 151 Days signed by Jock Barnes and Dick Scott. I have that sexual enchantress the Duchess of Windsor’s The Heart Has Its Reasons, signed, and Richard Nixon’s 1962 Six Crises (how venomously he stabs the page with his pen when he crosses the x in Nixon!).
But absolutely bestest of all are two top-shelf books. The first is a small hardback entitled — in Russian — My Silent War. Inside the cover, on a fly-leaf, is a hand-written inscription: “To the Minister of public security of Mongolia. With respect from the author, Kim Philby, April 4, 1985.” Philby himself! His hand! The second is a large volume in a plain, faded red cover, The Black Diaries, containing the writings of gay Sir Roger Casement, knight of the realm, chronicler of various black men’s penises he’d paid good coin for access to in the Belgian Congo.
He ended up well hung himself for running guns to Irish republicans in the 1916 Easter Rising. I once showed The Black Diaries to my friend the Grey Lynn chanteuse Linn Lorkin, had her open it and look at the signature of the previous owner. She clutched her heart and fell backwards. Now Linn’s been around a bit, covered the waterfront, and it takes genuine talent to impress her. But this was the goods. “Oh, my God — Guy Burgess!” she exclaimed. For indeed it was.