The serendipity express made an unscheduled stop in my head today
My Penguin copy of Hesse’s Peter Camenzind is dated 1977. I remember reading a lot of Hesse before I went off to university. His books are one of the reasons I expected my time there to be about late-night garret discussions about art and politics and love and life.
That’s not the way it panned out.
So, I’m reading Hesse again, for no reason other than during my ongoing book purge, the slim Penguin editions of the early books — Peter Camenzind, Gertrude, and The Prodigy — all looked ready to be picked up and raced through once more. It turns out, however, that although the books may be short, Hesse’s prose is multi-faceted and not to be hurried.
More memories erupted as I started reading. This was less to do with the text than with the fact that stuck in the book was a bookmark from the early days of Waterstone’s, the bookshop I worked in for a few years in the mid 1980s.
The bookmark lists three branches — the first three that were then open. All in London, of course, back then: Old Brompton Road, Charing Cross Road, and Southampton Row. The latter two branches are long gone, as are most of the bookshops on the Charing Cross Road that made it the capital’s book street and a great place to work and browse.
I had a girlfriend working with me in the Charing Cross Road branch, who was moved to the Southampton Row branch when we were caught kissing — and I mean a fairly chaste affectionate kiss rather than a full on snog — during a stock take.
It was hardly a drastic punishment because we often worked different shifts anyway. What it did mean was that I walked across to meet her from work a few nights a week and enjoyed the stroll past the British Museum on the way. London then was a patchwork of exciting small self-contained districts and I loved moving from the edge of Soho where I worked and which represented a brash physicality — not simply in its sex shops and sex workers but also in the Italian restaurants, cafés, and delis — into and through the more bashfully intellectual Bloomsbury, home to both the museum and university buildings.
The woman for whom I frequently made that walk is no longer in my life. This, too, seems fitting in relation to the Hesse novel. Its eponymous hero experiences many bitter disappointments in love. In my case, I think I was the bitter disappointment.
John Berger’s essay The Storyteller was published first in 1978, a year after I discovered Peter Camenzind. Hesse’s novel is the story of an Alpine peasant who escapes his roots and travels in the world, both geographically and intellectually. Berger’s essay is about the life of the Alpine village to which he moved in the 1960s. I read the Berger essay for the first time today on the train up to London. Part of the penultimate paragraph is relevant to the Hesse:
Contrary to what is usually said, peasants are interested in the world beyond the village. Yet it is rare for a peasant to remain a peasant and be able to move. He has no choice of locality. His place was a given at the very moment of his conception. And so if he considers his village the centre of the world, it is not so much a question of parochialism as a phenomenological truth…. He believes that what happens in the village is typical of human experience.
The more I read, the more I expect this sort of serendipitous cross-referencing. And to add one last connection in today’s series of rather random connections, the Berger essay came from a collection called The White Bird and, more specifically, from an uncorrected proof of that collection of essays from 1985 — the year of my solitary enjoyable walks to Southampton Row. Such proof copies of upcoming books was one of the perks of the job at Waterstone’s.
