7 minute read
BODY LANGUAGE
Beloved author Bill Bryson’s new book – an expansive history of the human body and what we know about it – is his latest project written and researched in the “last good place in the universe”
“I’m in a tricky situation at the moment,” says Bill Bryson. “I’m actually experimenting with retirement.” This will come as sad news to the writer’s untold numbers of fans, who have enjoyed roughly 15 million copies of his books worldwide – including Notes from a Small Island and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, respectively about his adopted UK and growing up in the US. But taking leave of active publishing would also have drawbacks for Bryson. “I told my wife I would,” he says, “but I have to have a reason to go to the Library.” A supporter of libraries – Durham University, where he was chancellor for six years, named theirs after him – Bryson has called The London Library “the coolest place I know on the planet”, and has been a member since 2011. It makes perfect sense that a person with his irrepressible curiosity would feel a strong connection with it.
Although he is possibly still best known as a travel writer – his 1995 tour of the UK, Notes from a Small Island, has a special place in the hearts of the British, and he’s given fond and hilarious accounts of Australia and Europe – he’s also written on language, Shakespeare, history and science, always retaining his easy wit and eye for a killer to understand the universe and everything in science”, he says) was the bestselling non-fiction book of 2003 (and of its decade), and his newest, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, On a January day in the Library, Bryson has checked out a biography of Ernst Chain, who helped refine penicillin, to check a fact for The Body’s paperback edition. There are traces of white emulsion on his knuckles from doing up his house, and he is as good-natured in person as he is on the page, offering this magazine’s photographer, who attended Durham but never met Bryson, a mock ceremonial graduation blessing.
Although his latest book takes on biology, it is, as Bryson says, “really as much about the sociology of the body as about the science”, and The London Library’s biography and history departments were as useful to him as its supplies of medical books. “I just ranged all over the place… all of the library research I did was done in this building.”
“I love a big, broad topic,” Bryson says, somewhat unsurprisingly. “To be able to go off in lots of different directions – that, for me, is why this Library is so perfect. It’s got something of everything.” It also, he adds, “has stuff that you wouldn’t find anywhere else”. Researching One Summer, his account of a momentous few months for America in 1927, he was “particularly amazed” to find in the stacks a tell-all memoir from the same year about the 29th president of the United States, Warren G Harding. Written by Harding’s mistress Nan Britton, it was “such a scandalous book that most bookshops wouldn’t handle it and those that did tended to sell it under the counter in plain brown wrappers”. The President’s Daughter is now still not readily available even in the US.
anecdote. A Short History of Nearly Everything (“me trying is another Sunday Times Bestseller.
“But of course, which library still has a copy?”
For a man who went in search of the quintessential 1950s small town in 1989’s The Lost Continent, and whose acerbic takedowns of the British multi-storey car park, cyclists and rude service staff are famous, it’s no surprise that, with its peace and politesse, he finds the Reading Room “the most congenial spot in the whole Library”. He’s slightly pained when asked to be photographed inside it (“this is like a church during services…”) but gamely poses for a few minutes.
Bryson is also often to be found in the Periodicals section, perhaps not the Library’s most glamorous spot, because “it’s nice and quiet, it’s well-lit and it has a couple of little corners you can sit in”. He also likes “a secret desk way, way up in the annuals on the top floor… but it’s so quiet that I sometimes fall asleep, so if I’ve really got work to do, I tend not to”. “I've often said to my wife this is the last really good place in the universe because everybody behaves here,” Bryson adds. “The only time I’ve ever had conversations
The Body - published in May 2020
Bill Bryson in his favourite writing haunt
with other members because we’ve both been troubled is at the photocopier.” Most importantly, he loves this institution’s particular capacity for digression, enabling those “magical moments” of discovery. “The number of times I’ve picked books off the shelves just because they caught my eye... And sometimes you end up wasting a whole afternoon. But that’s one of the glories of life.”
He says the Library’s “eccentricity” is key to this. “I would be heartbroken if they tore it down and built some modern, sensible, systematic building. Even after all these years, I’ll go down a back staircase and be amazed to have just emerged in the art department.” He recently whiled away a halfday in a section on Grant Wood, a fellow Iowan and painter of the 1930s Realist school most famous for American Gothic.
He can also indulge his love for walking, using London’s great parks as a route to and from the Library when he’s at his flat near South Kensington. Being able to use the Library as an office is “useful in a kind of life-enriching sense… it’s a little bit like going to the cinema – a movie is a lot better when you’re in a room with lots of other people. There’s something about being in a space with others that are broadly like-minded and engaged in the same activity that just makes it feel collegiate and worthwhile.”
When Durham’s Bill Bryson Library was unveiled in 2012, its namesake’s speech began: “Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding…” Is coming here an escape? “You have to switch your phone off, you’re not getting emails,” says Bryson. “You don't even really know if it’s raining for the main part, especially if you’re down in the basement. So it’s isolated but in this glorious, rich abundance of stuff.”
He says he hasn’t quite determined how he will resolve the retirement conundrum. “I might spend some
Bill Bryson at work - a familiar sight in The London Library
years researching a book that never gets written; I’d just sort of pretend that I'm working on it.” It does seem a shame that there may not be a follow-up to The Body, on whatever topic it might be. Factual writing as accessible as Bryson’s is a rarity. Although he’s covered science before – and won the prestigious Royal Society Science Books Prize and the EU’s Descartes Prize for doing so – Bryson says his last book was one of the “riskiest” things he’s ever done. Because its subject is so much more relatable than particle physics and more widely understood, by your average doctor for instance, “if I made a mistake about how your kidneys operate I’d hear from lots of people. And I have!” Whether this is true, the book is, as The New York Times says, “delightful”. In close to 400 pages, it zips around strange and surprising facts (puberty is linked to an appetite hormone; crying and hiccuping are total mysteries) and characters that pop up along the road to our present knowledge (such as Walter Jackson Freeman, who performed lobotomies with an icepick, and the early endocrinologist whose “enthusiastic but misguided endeavours” involved him injecting himself with ground pig testes). Bryson’s new-found knowledge at first inspired panic. “After a while, I got a perspective on it and realised that there’s no reason to think my kidneys are failing just because I happen to be reading about them.” The biggest challenge, he says, was keeping the brain from taking over the book, because “virtually everything that is interesting about you as an organism is from the neck up”. One hopes he will keep enjoying the cerebral exercise that The London Library can offer, and annoy his wife by publishing the results. •
