The Times
.
And no talk about the Reading Room can omit mention of Miss Elizabeth McDonald, who died
in 1980, and who from the 1930s was a daily user of the Reading Room for nearly fifty years.
(How she would have disapproved of the current system of extended closures of the Reading
Room at Christmas and other bank holidays.) She was well-known for her white shorts and
plimsolls, and for arriving on her bicycle at the British Museum each day to head for her seat at
J.8 as soon as the room opened at 9 a.m.
In the early 1950s an outstanding personality in the Reading Room was Angus Wilson, the
novelist, who was then the Deputy Superintendent and whose taste in neckties brightened the
room considerably. He made a point of being friendly to the readers (something which not all
his predecessors had done) and introducing people to others who were working in a similar
field. One of those whom he befriended was Colin Wilson who attracted great publicity when
at the age of 25 he published
The Outsider
in 1956. This is how Colin Wilson remembered his
namesake in an article which he wrote in 1969.
I often saw Angus Wilson walking around the Reading Room – he was deputy
superintendent at the time. I’d read his first novel,
Hemlock and After
, and, while it
wasn’t really my cup of tea, been impressed by the quality of his observation. Most of the
regulars knew him, because his telephone voice was so penetrating and the conversations
often fascinating. ‘Hello, is John Gielgud there please? … Hello John, how are you? Did
you get back all right?’
25
24
J. Penn,
For Readers Only
(1936), pp. 181-2.
25
Colin Wilson, ‘Outsider in the Reading Room’,
British Museum Society Bulletin
, no. 2 (15 October1969), pp. 9-10.
15
The Reading Room in Literature
eBLJ 2019, Article 5
We are now approaching the end of our story, but before the final reading,
26
I should like to recall
two or three episodes from life in the Reading Room in the 1960s and 1970s. It was at this time that
flocks of young and attractive Italian girls used to invade the Reading Room each summer, allegedly
to compose dissertations of some kind. They proved a grave distraction to some of the male readers –
curiously enough more particularly to elderly male readers. (In his novel entitled
Rates of Exchange
Malcolm Bradbury referred to Italian girls shouting hotly for company round tea-time and tempting
serious scholars into folly.) In the mid-1960s the book supply service had considerable problems
and greatly tried the tempers of many of the readers. One Cambridge academic was so incensed that
he expressed a fervent wish to relieve his feelings by punching the Deputy Superintendent in the eye.
Then there was the occasion when a reader was discovered using ink and Tippex to amend the text
of the book which he was consulting. When challenged he said that he was entitled to do so because
the book was his own. It was pointed out to him that the book in question bore the ownership stamp
of the Library. ‘I know that’, he replied impatiently, ‘but I wrote the book and I am just correcting
some errors in it’. It took a long time to persuade him that he was not entitled to do so.
Our final reading is from David Lodge’s novel
The British Museum is Falling Down
, which
was published in 1965.
27
Adam passed through the narrow vaginal passage, and entered the huge womb of the
Reading Room. Across the floor, dispersed along the radiating desks, scholars curled,
foetus-like, over their books, little buds of intellectual life thrown off by some gigantic
act of generation performed upon that nest of knowledge, those inexhaustible ovaries of
learning, the concentric inner rings of the catalogue shelves.
The circular wall of the Reading Room wrapped the scholars in a protective layer of
books, while above them arched the vast, distended belly of the dome. Little daylight entered
through the grimy glass at the top. No sounds of traffic or other human business penetrated
to that warm, airless space. The dome looked down on the scholars, and the scholars looked
down on their books; and the scholars loved their books, stroking the pages with soft pale
fingers. The pages responded to the fingers’ touch, and yielded their knowledge gladly to the
scholars, who collected it in little boxes of file-cards. When the scholars raised their eyes from
their desks they saw nothing to distract them, nothing out of harmony with their books, only
the smooth, curved lining of the womb. Wherever the eye travelled, it met no arrest, no angle,
no parallel lines receding into infinity, no pointed arch striving towards the unattainable; all
was curved, rounded, self-sufficient, complete. And the scholars dropped their eyes to their
books again, fortified and consoled. They curled themselves more tightly over their books,
for they did not want to leave the warm womb, where they fed upon electric light and inhaled
the musty odour of yellowing pages.
28
So we conclude our account of a building and an institution which has aroused a great deal of
affection, irritation and admiration on the part of its users. Members of the staff too have mixed
feelings about the Reading Room. A colleague once said to me – ‘This place would be all right
if it were not for the readers’. The remark was made at the end of a long, hot and wearisome
day, so I knew how he felt. I reminded him however that if there were no readers, he, I, and
many others would be out of a job. He saw the point of my observation – but at the time I do
not think that it consoled him much.
26
But before the final reading: but before asking Professor David Lodge to read from his novel The British
Museum is Falling Down, which was published in 1965,
27
Our … 1965: Now Professor David Lodge will read two extracts from
The British Museum is Falling Down
.
28
David Lodge,
The British Museum is Falling Down
(London, 1965), pp. 50-51.
