I
Last year, I immersed myself in a long season of Mad Men, more than ninety episodes. I’m not going to bore you with the obvious, which is that it’s one of the best television series ever produced. I’m going to focus on what interests me for these columns, my diary entries: what the screenwriters imagine these executives read.
Here we have executives publishing books on entrepreneurship, self-help, and how to manage your wealth, but they don’t read. They don’t even read in the 1960s, a decade in which we’ve been told that everyone read classic novels, got high, and started revolutions. Well, in the series, it’s the women who read: bland Betty, unhappy Peggy, Peter’s miserable wife, and so on. It’s true that we sometimes see Draper reading something other than the newspaper, but it’s anecdotal.
There is one very literary character, Peggy’s poor boyfriend, who is obsessed with denouncing and defeating capitalism by moving to a slum where the nights are filled with gunshots and all you can hear is people shouting and fighting. He reminds me of those poor newspaper reporters who, in order to follow an editorial line, invent stories full of “a source who preferred to remain anonymous.”
There is a character who is a writer whose stories are published in a prestigious magazine, but under a pseudonym, because what is an executive at a high-end advertising company writing literary fiction when his job is to produce fiction that has direct implications for what people buy?
In the end, as someone has said, the series is like most marriages: the women do the reading. Except for mine: we both read.
II
Literature is also conceived on the basis of certain images. A country photo of Nabokov chasing butterflies with a net in his hand, one of Sciascia and Bufalino picking mushrooms in the Italian countryside, Marianne Moore with her pony, Faulkner in a worn riding jacket entering his old shed—which can still be seen and which I saw in Oxford—Joyce and that mathematician, Eugene Jolas, in the streets of Paris…
Or that portrait of Bakhtin posing as an even more frugal Rasputin, whose spiritual curiosity ran along other paths. Every image is an objection, one might think, given that the archive is finite but currently unfathomable.
Since 2016, the project of La escalera de Vico has been just that: the iconography of the modern writer and his wallpaper, the library. The pretext was to explore a vast iconography that, as a companion to literary work, can be found on the internet. The only requirement was that the image should point to two areas of interest: the relationship with the library, the raison d’être of the project, and also the writer in his space, his “cave,” his laboratory, the intimate place where a work is finally produced.
Out of pure curiosity, I began to take an interest in the moment when the representation of the writer is associated with the library. We see that this is not yet the case in the 19th century, when writers often appear in photographic studios—Dickens with a small table as a backdrop, Whitman with a boy—sometimes outdoors. In other words, at that time, the library is not yet a representable location; it is not yet part of the writer’s public “space.”
And yet it is curious that one of the few portraits of José Martí, the one by Hermann Norman, shows him at his desk with books in the background.
III
In line with the above, there is a syndrome that only affects God-level readers, and that is the ghost library, the hidden library. In what was my city in the 1990s, that was the library of my friend E.
Rumors circulated everywhere that his was the best stocked, that he resorted to arts that were forbidden to us, and that even bishops and ambassadors contributed their share so that those shelves would remain the most robust. He had connections and knew how to exploit them. It was said that the latest editions arrived there barely a week after being presented in Barcelona, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires.
There were also stories that this friend was unforgiving: if you weren’t careful, that book that had passed through the demanding customs of Castroism yesterday would disappear from your shelves to become part of that library’s catalog. And then, Lucas, you would never see it again.
But there was a problem: no one had ever seen it. Or only a very few people had gained access to a space that, like a chapel for readers with exclusive privileges, was available to only a select few. Getting there required courtship and seduction. The process could be long and not without difficulties. Our friend zealously honored what he had achieved, his private “cave.” He was extremely distrustful, an exquisite connoisseur, a bibliophile gourmet, if you’ll pardon the redundancy.
But we got there, with a little patience and skill. The library existed and it was fantastic. And my friend knew how to be generous once we crossed that threshold. It was an inspiration, but now I can say, my friend E., that it has been surpassed. By far. And all that’s left to say is thank you.
