The London Library Library Magazine - Spring 2023 (No.55)

HELENA BONHAM CARTER WITH SIMON CALLOW April 2023

Josie Rourke Simran Hans

Keep the story going…

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Remembering The London Library in your Will can help build a significant and lasting legacy for the writers, readers and thinkers of the future.

The London Library is an independently funded charity and relies on your support. Free of inheritance tax, a gift in your Will is an efficient and effective way of donating to The London Library that costs nothing in your lifetime and leaves a lasting impact. Ask your solicitor about how charitable gifts in Wills above 10% of the value of your estate can reduce inheritance tax to 36%.

“The London Library collects the books of each generation and hands them down as an heirloom to the next. What could be a more fitting purpose for a legacy?”

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If you would like to find out more about how a gift in your Will can help the Library, or if you would be interested in attending one of our events, please contact us at legacy@londonlibrary.co.uk or 020 7766 4731.

SanttuMatias Rouvali

Sheku KannehMason Bryn

Stephen Hough Benjamin Grosvenor

London season highlights

Paavo Järvi conducts Mahler 3

Thursday 16 March, 7.30pm

Romeo & Juliet Forever: Pekka Kuusisto conducts

Thursday 23 March, 7.30pm

Bryn Terfel sings Wagner

Sunday 26 March, 3pm

Santtu conducts Tchaikovsky & Shostakovich

With violinist Randall Goosby

Thursday 27 April, 7.30pm

Tickets from £10 philharmonia.co.uk 0800 652 6717

Stephen Hough plays Beethoven

Thursday 4 May, 7.30pm

Scriabin’s Prometheus & Rachmaninov’s The Bells

Thursday 11 May, 7.30pm

Santtu conducts Stravinsky: The Firebird & Petrushka

Thursday 18 and Sunday 21 May, 7.30pm

Santtu conducts Beethoven & Strauss

With Nicola Benedetti, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Benjamin Grosvenor

Thursday 8 June, 7.30pm

Terfel

Nicola Benedetti

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ISSN 2398-4201

WELCOME Setting the scene

Welcome to our spring issue, which is devoted to “stage and screen” and celebrates The London Library as a source of inspiration and support for actors, directors, playwrights and filmmakers. In our cover feature, we are delighted to present new Library President, Helena Bonham Carter in conversation with fellow long-term Library member Simon Callow. Helena and Simon both joined the Library in the 1980s and worked together on A Room with a View, based on the novel by former Library Vice-President EM Forster. They discuss how they have used the Library over the years and reveal how it has inspired and contributed to their long and successful careers.

Also in this issue, Josie Rourke talks to us about her career as a theatre and film director and how the ambience of the Library, as well as its resources, has provided her with a reassuring space to research and prepare for productions. On page 26, cinephile Simran Hans charts her exploration of the stacks for hidden treasures. And on page 12, we have an extract of Ideas for a Film Set in The London Library from former London Library Emerging Writer, Paolo Chianta (number four is a particular favourite!).

It is always such a pleasure to hear and share stories about the various ways our members use the Library –I find it such a powerful reminder of its tremendous value and the wonderful creativity of our members. I hope you enjoy reading our latest batch. •

Philip Marshall, Director

LAPTOP-FREE STUDY

Based on ongoing feedback, The Study will remain a laptopfree space for members who wish to engage in silent study without the potential distraction of electronic devices. The Study takes over from the main Reading Room, which prior to the pandemic was the Library’s only laptop-free space. In 2020, originally to allow for social distancing, the Library began to permit laptops in the Reading Room. Since that time, use of the Reading Room has increased by 63%.

In 2022, The Study was designated a laptop-free space on a six-month trial basis. This followed the most recent member survey, in which 34% of responding members stated that a laptop-free space in the Library is ‘somewhat’ or ‘very important’. The Library received ongoing member feedback showing appreciation for the provision of a laptop-free space, asking for it to continue.

Members are welcome to use laptops in all other reading rooms and workspaces. The Library is a silent study space throughout and devices must be set to silent mode and used with consideration to other members. It is hoped that use of The Study will continue to grow. •

THE MOST-BORROWED BOOKS OF 2022

In our first issue of 2023, we look back at what flew off the shelves last year. Of the nearly 56,000 books borrowed by members, these topped the charts.

Fiction

1. The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson

2. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

3. Love Marriage by Monic Ali

4. Lessons by Ian McEwan

5. Tiepolo Blue by James Cahill

Non-Fiction

1. Super-Infinite: the Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

2. Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars by Daisy Dunn

3. The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown by Anna Keay

4. Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

5. The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class That Tried to Win the Cold War by Philip Oltermann •

MEMBER GROUPS

In 2022 and early 2023, the Library was pleased to see the creation of three new reading groups: the German Language Book Club, the Art Discussion Group and the Italian Reading Group. The member groups began as a way to meet, collaborate, share interests and swap reading recommendations while deprived of the physical building during lockdown.

Beginning life as a handful of group meetings over Zoom, the initiative has since grown into a number of small communities, covering subjects from Philosophy to History and Non-fiction writing.

“Starting the Italian Reading Group has been wonderful,” says Royston Vince, its coordinator. “The Library is a place where we come to find solitude to focus. But I think it is a lot less likely that members would have found each other, were it not for the group. This group offers a chance to relax, collaborate and explore the wonders of the Italian collection together.” •

→ To browse the full list of member groups, or to find out how to start your own, visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ members/members-groups

NEW FACES

The London Library has welcomed a number of new faces to its ranks in recent months. Formally confirmed at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) in October, Helena Bonham Carter CBE was announced as the new President, taking over from her predecessor Sir Tim Rice. Writer and lawyer Rosalynn Try-Hane (pictured above), advertising executive Neil Christie and businessman Paul Aylieff were also announced as new trustees at the AGM, along with trustee placements Anna Zanetti and Victoire Neve.

Also, in the US, Mayme Hackett and Sarah Slack were appointed as co-Presidents of the International Friends of The London Library (IFLL). Both Mayme and Sarah are committed supporters and patrons of the Library, and we are delighted to welcome them in their new positions. Learn more about IFLL at ifll.org •

THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF LONDON

COLLECTION STORY

Uncovering plays from the Spanish Golden Age of theatre

Of the two original copies of the late-16th century play La Adúltera Virtuosa by Antonio Mira de Amescua known to exist, one is at The London Library. With more than 1,500 editions, its holding of Spanish plays is one of UK’s largest. Though scholars consider Mira de Amescua to be among the best of Spanish Golden Age dramatists, his works were never collected in a single edition, meaning he is less well-known than contemporaries such as Félix Lope de Vega. Born in 1562, Lope d e Vega was one of Spain’s most prolific dramatists. Scholars differ over how many plays are attributable to him, but it is agreed to be more than 400, and perhaps as many as 1,800. A mong the collection’s single volume editions dedicated to specific periods, one is described in Spanish on the spine as the “Age of Lope”. To Miguel de Cervantes, his literary peer, he was the “phoenix of Spanish wits” and “ the prodigy of nature”. Today, he is known as the “ Shakespeare of Spain”

In the mid-1800s, John Rutter Chorley, an expert in Spanish literature and friend of Thomas Carlyle, donated around 70 bound volumes of early-modern Spanish drama from his personal collection, which now forms the bulk of the Library’s holding. In total, there are works by more than 300 playwrights, including the leading figures of the period.

Ranging from the early-1600s to mid-1800s, the collection spans from comedies and autos sacramentales (one-act religious plays) to musical works There are translations, too, and around 100 pieces by Lope de Vega.

Numerous works from the Spanish Golden Age of theatre appear – generally agreed to have been between 1590 and 1681. This followed the Spanish Renaissance during the 16th century, when the arts became a more central feature of society. Thanks to aristocratic patronage, the number of plays being written and performed dramatically increased, while attending the theatre also became a popular pastime among the lower classes. •

All of the Library’s special collections are kept in closed stacks and are available for members to view under invigilation. To learn more, visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ ll-collections/our-special-collections

La Adúltera Virtuosa by Antonio Mira de Amescua is one of the rarest works in the Library's collection of Spanish plays. Photo: Ameena Rojee

AND… ACTION!

A horror, a rom-com, a dissatisfied mouse? Paolo Chianta’s pitches cover it all, in this extract from Ideas for a Film Set in The London Library by the Emerging Writers Programme alumnus

1.

A comedy about tourists who want to visit the Library and don’t realise that it’s membership only. I don’t know how you’d set it in the Library if they can’t actually get in, maybe it’s that they try various tactics to get inside in a screwball way and the library staff have to foil them. You know, seeing through their “famous author” disguises, shoving off their ladders from third-floor windows and watching them fall backwards bug-eyed, that sort of thing.

2.

A romantic comedy about two Library members who don’t recognise each other because of their face masks. I mean they don’t realise they actually know and hate each other outside the Library, whereas wearing masks in the Library they fall in love. Then later when they remove their masks they realise they already know and fully hate each other and it’s bad for a while, then it’s fine.

3.

A horror film set in the Library Back Stacks; there’s something on the loose but nobody’s sure what. I don’t know how people wouldn’t notice the thing that’s on the loose in between the killings, you’d have to find a way for it to hide somewhere, maybe it keeps hiding in between the bookshelves and switching places whenever someone comes round to that particular bookshelf. It should turn out that whatever is on the loose there and killing people is actually extremely lonely and misunderstood, and Eddie Redmayne should play the protagonist who eventually befriends the poor monster.

Extract from Ideas for a Film Set in The London Library by Paolo Chianta, originally published in From the Silence of the Stacks , New Voices Rise Vol. III , an anthology of work from the 2021–22 cohort of the Library’s Emerging Writers Programme

4.

A film about a mouse who lives in the Library, but it isn’t a kids’ film, it’s a serious adult film. I don’t know how you’d work this exactly but it’s a serious adult film about this mouse and he has serious, relatable problems. Not in a Ratatouille way, the mouse isn’t doing wacky things, what I’m saying is that a child watching the film would be fully unable to relate to the mouse’s problems that are unique to adult life. Basically what I’m saying is that you would have to have reached a certain point in life and have gone through a certain amount of toils to be able to even vaguely appreciate what this poor mouse is going through. It shouldn’t be so adult that a child isn’t

allowed to watch it though, in theory a child could watch the film and be unable to relate to the mouse’s problems but then grow up and become an adult themselves and go through problems similar to those of the mouse that would eventually bring them to rewatch the film as an adult and be able to relate. This way you guarantee two watches from a single person, in which case it could potentially be marketed as a family film, to trick kids into watching it when in fact this film about a mouse and his relatable adult problems is not even remotely for them. The film shouldn’t be that enjoyable either; ideally critics should describe it as “a hard watch”.

5.

A musical set in the Library, but nobody can sing at full volume because it’s a library, so everyone sings really quietly, so quietly that you can’t make out the lyrics and as a consequence the plot and character development are largely unintelligible. A few famous singers are in it as well as a few actors who can’t sing but are famous enough to be in it and try their best to sing, and there will be one non-singer actor who surprises everyone by singing amazingly well, maybe even better than the real singers, and the real singers are intensely jealous and refer to the non-singing actor in interviews as “an excellent amateur voice”. •

“A child watching the film would be fully unable to relate to the mouse’s problems”

SCREEN TIME

For as long as it has been in operation, The London Library has been a working lending library. Wander through any of the atmospheric reading rooms or Back Stacks, and you will find members browsing the shelves, curled over desks or snoozing conspicuously in an armchair.

But sometimes, after the doors have closed and the sun has set on Mason’s Yard, the Library serves a different purpose. Throughout the years, it has featured in a number of films, television programmes, and even music videos. You may have seen it providing handsome backdrops in the BBC’s New Tricks and Killing Eve, or even ITV’s Love Island (yes, really).

Filming requests are considered on a case-by-case basis. For instance, does the crew wish to film during core hours (which might disrupt the Library’s day-to-day operations)? Laura Anderson, the former Events and Venue Hire Manager at The London Library, fielded many such enquiries and says they sometimes felt ridiculous: “We are still a working library, which means, no, we can’t close the Reading Room for two days.”

During one late-night shoot for the Bollywood black comedy Judgementall Hai Kya ( Are You Judgemental, 2019), however, an entire section of grill flooring was removed

to achieve a bird’s-eye view shot of the obsessional main character, Bobby, running through the Back Stacks after researching a potential serial killer. “We just had to make sure the grills were put back before the Library opened to members in the morning,” says Anderson.

The London Library has received a flow of enquiries from production companies since the late 1970s, but it is particularly special when a request relates to an adaptation of a work written by a former or current Library member – such as AS Byatt’s Possession, released as a film in 2002. The opening scene of Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel famously takes place in the Library’s Reading Room, where it was also shot for the film.

In the lead-up to filming, Alan Bell, the Librarian at the time, was able to review the screenplay and Byatt’s feedback on it. In a postcard to Bell, Byatt says that she “objected most forcibly to the new American Roland” and his “insulting attack on a London Librarian for mis-shelving”. In an earlier letter to the script editor, Byatt had asked: “If [Roland] must insult librarians, I’d be glad if you could change the library, since The London Library is full of splendid people who have been nothing but helpful.” The script was changed, and copies of this correspondence are preserved in the Library’s archives.

Its traditional interiors make the Library a much-desired film and TV location – but as a full-time literary institution, making time and space for shoots isn’t as simple as it might seem

Below: A selection of correspondence relating to filming in the Library, including a postcard from AS Byatt to the Librarian at the time, Alan Bell. Photo: Ameena Rojee

“Using equipment such as smoke machines and hot lights near books is strictly forbidden”

Right: Fiona Shaw as Carolyn Martens and Adeel Akhtar as Martin in the second series of Killing Eve (BBC). Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh / BBC America

While the Library isn’t always involved in the creative process, much preparation is required for a film crew’s visit. There are certain “quirks” to the building, Anderson explains. For example, attempting to balance a tripod in the Back Stacks is a challenge. Considerations must be made for collection care, too. Using equipment such as smoke machines and hot lights near books is strictly forbidden. And filming is famously time-consuming. When the Library was used as a setting for a modern-day retelling of Dickens’ Oliver Twist (Twist, Sky, 2021), a 40-strong crew arrived to set up at 4pm and stayed in the building until midnight. The resulting shot was 20 seconds long.

Actors often come with their own requirements and requests, too. In 2020, when the building was closed to members due to Covid-19 lockdowns, filming took place in the Art Room for the satirical Netflix mockumentary Death to 2020, starring Hugh Grant and created by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones. (During the pandemic, filming became a revenue-generating lifeline for the Library and requests were much easier to facilitate.) “At the time, Grant was also working nights,” says Anderson. “So we put a mattress in The Study so that he could nap between takes.” A still from the show hangs on the wall of the Red Stairs leading up to the Reading Room.

Over the years, the Library’s stacks have been used as backdrops, its books and desks as props, and its archival artefacts and rare materials referenced in documentaries. Films shot here have been nominated for awards in set design, including both Judgementall Hai Kya and Death to 2020. But when it comes to the Academy Award for Best Production Design, the Library’s win is yet to come. •

Elaine Stabler is a contributing editor of this magazine

CONNECTING THE PROSE AND THE PASSION

Helena Bonham Carter and Simon Callow on Forster, family and falling in love with libraries

Helena Bonham Carter was announced as the new president of The London Library in 2022. Photo: Sane Seven

Helena Bonham Carter was joined by the writer and fellow actor Simon Callow at home this spring to discuss her new role: Library President. The two are longtime members and met filming the 1985 EM Forster adaptation A Room With a View. Bonham Carter was 19. It was the first of many Merchant Ivory productions for her, including Maurice and Howards End , before Hollywood called, with a role as the suicidal love interest in David Fincher’s Fight Club. Work with her former husband, Tim Burton, came next, as well as a contribution to the Harry Potter franchise and more. Callow’s acting career includes stage roles in Shakespeare, Beckett, pantomime and contemporary theatre and beloved British films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral. He is a biographer of Oscar Wilde and Orson Welles and a renowned Dickens expert. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

HELENA BONHAM CARTER Simon, it’s very nice to see you here. Welcome to my Presidential home! I’m not having a clever day – do you find that, or are you always clever?

SIMON CALLOW Always. But I think I might be daunted by being the President of The London Library. Such a wonderful title, such a wonderful entity.

HELENA I love the title. The older I get, the more I like having conversations with dead people – for instance my dad, who made me a member when I was 21. For the Library to then ask me to be President…

SIMON Fantastic.

HELENA I used the Library a lot then, which was also when I first met you. I was sort of roaming and feeling lost, having a great time filming but feeling out of my depth everywhere. My peer group had gone to uni, and I was suddenly just on my own path and really unequipped to deal with it. I had a massive chip on my shoulder. So The London Library was my college. I felt legitimate, and I thought I could wander in and dress up like Virginia Woolf.

SIMON It’s like going right back to the source, isn’t it? There it all is, and there they were.

HELENA There they were! It’s not only a conversation with my dead dad, but a conversation with EM Forster. If it was not for him, we wouldn’t be here.

SIMON A Room With A View is my favourite film of all the films I’ve been in, and I’m still astonished by its freshness.

HELENA It still works.

SIMON It really does. It was my second film and I was incredibly relieved – I’d been in Amadeus and detested every second. When I got the script [for A Room With A View], Ismail [Merchant, the producer] said to me: “We want you to play the leading part!” So I thought, “This is great, he sees me as George. I’ll go on a diet immediately.” Then my agent discovered I was in fact playing the Reverend Beebe. And I thought, “No, outright no.” I was terribly hurt.

HELENA And totally miscast.

SIMON Beebe’s the fat old parson; I can’t possibly play him. Finally I gave in to discover that suddenly I was with the aristocracy of British film and theatre: Maggie [Smith], Judi [Dench] and Fabia Drake, no less. And you. Who was completely new.

HELENA I was a foetus.

SIMON What I remember about you then was the incredible speed with which you spoke.

HELENA Oh, seriously? That’s like my daughter.

SIMON You would change tack in the middle of a sentence and contradict yourself.

HELENA I don’t think that’s changed. I’m interested that I spoke at all. I remember myself as a mute, a total mouse, and so in awe of everyone. I was aware that you were a writer and talking about Mozart a lot, so I thought, “He’s the Renaissance man that I have to become.” Also, without being too indiscreet, you were one of the kinder adults.

SIMON Fabia was an absolute holy terror. What was great was to be working on a script drawn from

such a wonderful novel. Ruth [Prawer Jhabvala, who adapted the original novel for the film] incomparably excelled at weaving the words from the novel into a real script, so that these were really people talking to each other. My favourite scene in any movie I’ve acted in is our scene at the piano.

HELENA It was the most important scene. You, as Mr Beebe, caught Lucy [Honeychurch, my character] playing in private. He’s so tender and I love that. “If only you knew how to live as you play.”

SIMON Beebe, certainly as written by Ruth – less so by Forster actually – is essentially benevolent. I remember the first read through, in London somewhere?

HELENA I was terrified. Maybe it was the first time I read with Maggie and Judi.

SIMON Maggie terrified me by saying, “Why are you calling him ‘Beebe’? It has to be ‘Bee-be’. Beebe sounds as if we’re at the Beeb!” Were you always a great reader of novels?

HELENA Quite a good reader, though I was slow. I was taught at English A Level by Penelope Fitzgerald.

SIMON I knew and loved her. Was she a good teacher?

HELENA Extraordinary. Did you ever read Offshore ? I love that. But I thought that it would be good to look as if I read, because then every heroine in every book or film was a reader or writer. I wanted to be Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career. It was probably quite healthy, instead of fixating on a physique, which is what most people do these days because of Instagram. I wasn’t very sexual for a long time.

SIMON You were wearing lots of clothes.

Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View (1985), with her spinster cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, played by Dame Maggie Smith. Photo: Katya Grenfell; Goldcrest

Simon Callow as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus by Peter Shaffer at the Olivier Theatre, London in 1979. The play was later adapted into a film, in which Callow played Mozart’s friend Emanuel Schikaneder.

Photo: Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock Photo

HELENA So many clothes.

SIMON One couldn’t even begin to guess what the woman beneath would be.

HELENA No, there wasn’t a body.

SIMON It was extraordinary, you were a sort of Oxfam shop on two legs.

HELENA I don’t know where that came from. I think I had a real complex. Maybe because I was in such a male world. I went to Westminster [School], which was all boys, so before I even walked into period movies, I was dressed as a Victorian. It was always about pretending to be in the past. I over romanticised or felt I belonged in the past, actually.

SIMON The biggest relationships in my young life were with my grandmothers. I asked one to make me an 18th-century costume for a Christmas present.

HELENA Oh, I love that. So you dressed up as Mozart?

SIMON In effect. I loved the fabrics, the shimmer of it all.

HELENA On Maurice [1987] I did hair and makeup for all the men, which was rather a good way of dating people. It was Tinder then. In terms of influence, how important were your parents?

SIMON The only one of my family that read novels was my grandmother, though she never talked about them. A book can be just for you. You have a relationship with the characters and have somehow subsumed them into your psyche.

HELENA I always feel like you want to share the wonder.

SIMON Your family are very literary, aren’t they?

HELEN Well, my grandmother Violet definitely was, on my dad’s side. She was [Prime Minister H H] Asquith’s daughter [and president of the Liberal Party from 1945–47]. My maternal grandmother was a special character, but found it difficult to read. I think she would have been diagnosed as dyslexic now, but she wrote beautifully. My mum, her whole life has never been without several books. My dad

developed cortical blindness, which meant he couldn’t see faces, but could read, so he read his way through the last 24 years of his life. We had half of The London Library in our home because they’d send him books.

SIMON Oh, fantastic.

HELENA Violet was formidable and wrote a lot of letters. I came back from filming with Woody Allen in a monastery in Taormina, and Dad was editing them. There was a postcard to her husband in 1940 saying: “Have just finished Morgan’s latest Howards End.” She knew Edward Morgan Forster. When I came to film Howards End with you, I read Violet’s [unfinished] autobiography and thought, “Oh god, she was basically like the Helen Schlegel character, a sort of radical bohemian, a bluestocking…” And would have been the same age. So maybe she was a bit of a model for Helen.

SIMON Forster wasn’t a recluse until later at King’s College Cambridge, I think.

HELENA Did you ever get a sense of what he was like?

SIMON Everything in his life was the opposite of what he espoused: the passion, the connecting. This gives his work its force, because it didn’t come easily to him. He had to struggle to make it happen.

HELENA He did have relationships though, didn’t he?

SIMON Famously with a married policeman, Bob Buckingham. But also earlier, in Alexandria, and later, with a Bulgarian art collector, 45 years his junior. All very discreet. As a young gay man, I was impatient with him. Instead of thinking how extraordinary it was for its time, I just thought, “Come on, we’ve gone beyond all of this”. It felt a bit spinsterly. Now I think it’s passionate and unbelievably brave and exquisitely written. Then, I was more taken by DH Lawrence, which was all oceanic… My entire ambition was to be a writer. Do you write?

HELENA I’ve been asked to, and I’ve written the odd article. My attention span is troubling, but I do enjoy it when I apply myself.

SIMON I have to work very hard at it, and do terrifically long days. I can be at the laptop by seven.

HELENA In the morning? Jeez. OK, so you’ve got Morning Brain.

SIMON I’ve got a night brain, too. But no afternoon brain.

HELENA The afternoon is not really good for much.

SIMON Yes. I have difficulty in the theatre, rehearsing in the afternoon.

HELENA I have to have a snooze, no matter what. The snooze has been a pillar of my living. Do you ever write in books when you’re reading them, or is that sacrilegious?

SIMON I do when I’m reviewing, but that’s with proofs, so I can scrawl all over them.

HELENA I’ve got a thing about having a relationship with a book, so I will, unfortunately, write sentences in them. Also in the hope that somehow it’s going to stick in the brain.

SIMON Let’s talk about the Library – its location, for instance. St James’s Square is enchanting.

HELENA Yes, and I do think that places work magic on us and influence what we think. It is very creative. Also, just silence. To go and sit with others with no danger of conversation, but you’ve got the company of other people concentrating. If you’re going to seriously write, it could be very lonely. You have to go to battle with yourself, but it’s alleviated at the Library because you’re with other people who are going into battle with themselves.

SIMON Libraries generally have a very curious combination of this quietness and focus, coupled with a very sexy feeling. It’s the silence.

HELENA I was going to raise that, but you start.

SIMON I wonder why that is exactly. It’s just because everybody’s in their own space and in their own world somehow, and you know that as you drift into that sort of semi hypnotic state, sex is going to be in there somewhere.

HELENA Yeah, it’s always there.

SIMON So it’s the subconscious. It’s sort of milling around the Library. I think I said this before, it’s like a book bordello. You just go up and take whatever you want to.

HELENA Have your pleasure. I like that.

SIMON The Library’s postal service is also miraculous. And everyone’s so sympathetic. Years ago, my dog acquired a passion for 17th-century literature; it turns out it was the fish glue used to bind the spines. One day I came home and there was a priceless volume in pieces all over the place. I offered to replace it somehow but the Librarian said: “I have dogs: I understand.”

HELENA How do you use the Library?

SIMON Not for writing or reading. Just to borrow books. The collection of arcana is vast. Writing about Orson Welles, I needed to know what it was like to be a tourist in Morocco in 1930. The Library had six – six! – guides from

“Before I even walked into period movies, I was dressed as a Victorian. I felt I belonged in the past, actually”

Helena Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel in Howards End (1992), a character that resembles her grandmother Violet, whom EM Forster met.

Photo: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo

the period. I don’t know anywhere else I could have found that. I love clambering up the metal stairs and finding things that nobody’s taken out for 100 years.

HELENA You think George Eliot is going to actually appear.

SIMON It still is enchanting to me to do that.

HELENA As a writer, do you have a ritual?

SIMON Procrastinate as long as possible. I was so relieved to discover that Ibsen could spend four hours rearranging his desk before starting to write. Unlike Dickens.

HELENA He just sat down?

SIMON He was always writing at least two things at once, sometimes more – he wrote the last of The Pickwick Papers and the first chapters of Nicholas Nickleby simultaneously. He worked it all out, I’m sure, on his long walks.

HELENA Have you seen his original manuscripts?

SIMON Almost illegible; you feel the heat of his creative energy. He talks about the characters dancing down the pen.

HELENA I love that – when somebody takes possession.

SIMON As with acting: when it’s good, it’s not you playing the character, it’s the character playing you. •

Helena Bonham Carter and Simon Callow at the Library’s Christmas Party in 2022.

Photos: Amanda Ward

READING LIST

Six books that celebrate Simon Callow and Helena Bonham Carter’s literary acting careers

A ROOM WITH A VIEW BY EM FORSTER (1908)

A visit to Florence helps free Lucy Honeychurch from rigid social mores in this comic novel. Forster was a Vice President of the Library 1961–70, while Bonham Carter’s portrayal of Lucy in the 1985 film launched her career.

HOWARDS END BY EM FORSTER (1910)

Many consider Howards End – which examines shifting class relations – to be Forster’s masterpiece. The film adaptation featured Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel, alongside Emma Thompson as her sister Margaret.

FRANKENSTEIN BY MARY SHELLEY (1818)

Mary Shelley was just 18 when she conceived what is considered to be the spur for the entire horror genre as we know it. In 1994, Bonham Carter played Elizabeth Lavenza, the sister of protagonist Victor Frankenstein.

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1892)

The Library appears as a setting in a 1924 Holmes story, The Adventure of the Illustrious Client. Bonham Carter plays matriarch Eudoria in t he recent movie spin-off s of Enola Holmes.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS BY CHARLES DICKENS (1861)

Dickens was among the Library’s 500 founding members in 1841. Among the adaptations of Great Expectations, his penultimate completed novel, is David Nicolls’ 2012 film, starring Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham.

LONDON’S GREAT THEATRES BY SIMON CALLOW (2019)

Callow writes of the “intoxicating” atmosphere of London’s historic West End theatres in this series of “verbal sketches”, which accompany striking images by the celebrated British photographer Derry Moore.

A CINEPHILE’S GUIDE TO THE STACKS

Film critic Simran Hans explores the Library for hidden treasures

Photography by Ameena Rojee

On a bookshelf in my childhood bedroom, a copy of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art is gathering dust. I bought it, used, ahead of embarking on an MA in Film Studies nearly 10 years ago. I never read it.

That period of study led me to become a film journalist and, for several years, a newspaper critic, where I tried to juggle my love of movies with an anxiety about not having done the traditionally required reading. Somewhere like The London Library allows me to take a different approach to the prescribed ‘way in’.

What strikes me as unique, and uniquely annoying, about my specialist subject is how many of its students and lovers are encouraged not to stray beyond the bounds of the art form, should they hope to master it. Complete a director’s entire filmography; conquer a canon; treat the decennial Sight and Sound Greatest Films Poll as a checklist. The Library has an extensive back catalogue of this periodical, but also books that reveal what filmmakers have created outside of their main discipline – and that shed light on their politics, their sensibility and their tastes, too.

Before the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène made films, he was a novelist. Les bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood ) (1960) is based on his experience of participating in the 1947 Dakar-Niger railway strike, and is alive with the anti-colonial spirit that animates his later films, such as La noire de… (Black Girl ) (1966) and Le Mandat ( Mandabi ) (1968). Gordon Parks, the African-American filmmaker and photojournalist, was an author too. The opening scene of his novel The Learning Tree (1963), which he adapted into a feature film (1969), reads like a screenplay:

Extreme close-up on a swarm of ants from the perspective of 12-year-old Newt Winger as a cyclone approaches in the background; cut to establishing shot of Newt and Big Mabel running through the Cherokee Flats in the rain; sex scene; slow fade (“And though the storm blew on it was not long before Newt completely forgot its blowing”).

On the mezzanine level of the second floor’s sleek Art Room, shelved under A. Photography is Through a different lens: Stanley Kubrick photographs (2018), a collection of

Above: Batiquitos (1995) and Purple Lake (1993) – two paintings by Manny Farber from his book, Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings (2019)

Right: Simran Hans finds a quiet desk in the Central Stacks, next to B. Biography

black and white portraits by the director (and Library alumnus – his loan card was on show last autumn in the display case outside The Reading Room).

Last summer, while browsing the photography stacks, my eye landed on a pocket-sized volume authored by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. Des histoires vraies ( True Stories) (1994, reissued in English 2013), comprises 46 of Calle’s intimate memories, each illustrated by a photo or drawing. A section titled “The Husband” recounts her brief marriage to American artist Greg Shephard, some of which I recognised from Double Blind, the experimental film she made with him in 1992.

But director-as-auteur can become a tiresome line of enquiry. A sparkling wit on an eternal quest for fun, the Golden Age screenwriter Anita Loos left as much of an authorial stamp on Red-Headed Woman (1932), The Women (1939) and, of course, the technicolour musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) as the films’ directors. The latter began its life as her 1925 novella of the same name; I hoovered it up in an afternoon. To find out more about Loos and her life, I took myself to B. Biography, in the Central Stacks, on one darkening Saturday afternoon. She was not there, but in English Literature, in the St. James Stacks in the adjacent building, I was able to locate Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments in Fiction (2003), co-edited by her niece Mary Anita Loos and film historian Cari Beauchamp. The book weaves Mary Anita’s personal memories of her aunt with Loos’ unpublished short stories and screenplays, including a detailed treatment for a wartime satire called Women in Uniform Desperate for more Hollywood gossip, I dipped into producer Julia Phillips’ infamous memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. First published in 1991, it is unflinching in its depiction of both her struggles with drink and drugs, and of her celebrity colleagues. (Goldie Hawn, it turns out, was “borderline dirty with stringy hair”.)

When researching the Library’s titles on film, I learned that until a few years ago, the A. Cinema shelfmark

(housed under Art) used to live in Science, under S. Cinematograph. Other books are hiding in unexpected places, such as James Andrew Miller’s Powerhouse: The Untold S tory of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency (2016), a 700-odd-page tome weighty with history and gossip, which is shelved under S. Industries, or Christopher Andrew and Julius Green’s Stars & S pies: I ntelligence O perations and the Entertainment B usiness (2021) laying low in S. Spies.

It feels fitting, then, to conclude this guide to the Library’s collection on cinema, with a book of paintings. The American film critic Manny Farber, who died in 2008, wrote about art, furniture and jazz too. That early criticism, written for The New Republic in the 1940s, is collected in the art book Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings (2019), which lives in the Art Room under A. Painting. Written contributions from the likes of filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, essayist Durga Chew-Bose, and restaurateur Alice Waters (whose Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse was a favourite of Farber’s) provide fresh ways of close-reading his work, just as he close-read films. The book itself contains glossy reproductions of Farber’s still-life work; each painted tablescape is a kind of miseen-scène crowded with details that tell a larger story. At first glance, the cluttered desk in Farber’s Domestic Movies, 1985, suggests a distracted mind. But its flowers and sticky notes, crayons and film leader reveal a different narrative, of productivity and creation. The table itself is half yellow, half blue; Farber’s allegiance to painting and writing is also split down the middle.

In an essay in the Surface, Depth, Flow collection, Lucy Sante writes about how best to approach Farber’s paintings and essays, neither of which could be described as linear. I have used her advice as a map to my own discoveries: “You start anywhere, and end up anywhere.” •

Simran Hans is a writer and film critic. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, GQ and The New Statesman

“To find out more about Anita Loos and her life, I took myself to B. Biography on one darkening Saturday afternoon”

Left: A photo from Through a different lens: Stanley Kubrick photographs (2018), shelved under A. Photography on the mezzanine level of the Art Room

AS SHE LIKES IT

Director Josie Rourke’s detailed approach to film and theatre begins with a thorough analysis of text, and the Library is the perfect place to do it

Photography

by Ameena

Rojee

From her days as an “insanely bookish” child, Josie Rourke has been obsessed with texts. Every time the theatre and film director embarks on a classical play – Shakespeare in particular – she will sit down and parse every line herself, extracting every nuance of meaning and intimation, and sometimes pushing it into new and unexpected places.

Nowhere was that more evident than in her production of As You Like It, which ran from December 2022 to January 2023 at the new West End theatre @sohoplace. The show, which starred deaf actor and Strictly Come Dancing winner Rose Ayling-Ellis as Rosalind’s cousin Celia, was partially performed in a “very theatrical” charismatic sign language, which comprised elements of British Sign Language, gesture, Sign Supported English and visual vernacular.

This part of Rourke’s directing practice, of getting into the nitty gritty of a playtext and making it sing (literally, in the case of As You Like It, which also had a strong musical element), “actually did start in The London Library”, she tells me when we meet at the Soho flat she’s renting with her writer partner and their excitable small dog.

“I started directing at quite a grown-up level as quite a young person,” Rourke says of directing productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company in her mid-20s. “I think we all, to an extent, suffer from imposter syndrome, but I was legitimately an impostor at that point. So, to make sure that I felt like I had the authority to be at the Royal Shakespeare Company directing big classical productions, I probably over-prepared.”

A member since 2001, Rourke “found the resource and also the ambience of the Library to be a really reassuring space in which to do that. And that set my practice on classical plays going forward. The majority of my preparation for a rehearsal process is very painstaking work with the actual text of the play.”

Starting with the first folio, she’ll “go through that as a first pass, and modernise all the punctuation and look up a bunch of the words”. She also uses a concordance – a book that details all of the instances where a word has appeared across Shakespeare’s plays – to understand how the word has been used and its intended meanings in different contexts.

Usually the couple live in rural Suffolk, but As You Like It was the first of three shows in London that Rourke is directing back to back.

Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons

Lemons by Sam Steiner at the Harold Pinter Theatre, starring Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman, followed. And Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa opens at the National Theatre on 6 April.

From that “clean version”, she’ll edit it, “and that gets me ready for the rehearsal room and really confident with the material”.

It speaks to Rourke’s meticulousness that her experience alone isn’t enough. She started directing plays while studying English literature at Cambridge; now aged 46, she has been artistic director of two London theatres.

“We all suffer from imposter syndrome, but I was legitimately an impostor at that point”

Above left: Josie Rourke in rehearsals for Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner at the Harold Pinter Theatre, starring Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Above right: Tom Mison as Touchstone in As You Like It at @sohoplace theatre earlier this year. Photo: Manuel Harlan

The first was the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush: a mecca for new writing, which she moved from a tiny space above a pub to its new home in the former Passmore Edwards Public Library. (Part of her legacy there is the creation of a library of playtexts, many donated by publishers.)

The new space opened in 2011 with the typically ambitious 66 Books, a 24-hour performance cycle of 66 short plays by writers from Enda Walsh and Anne Carson to Laura Dockrill and Wole Soyinka. Each of the plays was based on a different book of the King James Bible, to celebrate 400 years of the Church of England translation.

Then she ran the Donmar Warehouse from 2012 to 2019. More than a decade before, she’d been resident assistant director there under Sam Mendes. Not only was she the Donmar’s first female artistic director, she was also the first woman to be appointed to run a major London theatre. She presided over numerous triumphs there, including Phyllida Lloyd’s pioneering all-female Shakespeare trilogy; James Graham’s innovative play on data security, Privacy ; and his equally ingenious The Vote, which was set in real time in a Lambeth polling station over the last 90 minutes of voting for the general election of May 2015. It was televised on More4 from 8.30–10pm on election night – the first play to be broadcast live from the place and time of its setting.

Breaking new ground is something of a habit. It’s one of the reasons that Rourke was thrilled to become a Vice President of The London Library – not just for the “swishy” feeling of being involved with an institution for which she has “a great and very personal sense of its status”, but also

because she felt inspired by the efforts to open the Library up, especially to new writers, and to support new writing.

“There’s almost no better energy than the energy that exists around new writers and new plays,” says Rourke, “and what it is for people to be at the beginning of their careers and finding influences and mentors and partners in crime. It feels like the Library is creating a space for that.”

Though she acknowledges that many people adore The London Library for its atmospheric nooks and corners, “I actually love the main Reading Room. I think that there’s something really wonderful about the quality of light through those big windows over the square. I just think it’s one of the great spaces [in London].”

Not that she’s especially fussy about where she does her reading. She grew up in Salford, Greater Manchester, in the 1980s and 1990s and, like many of us who came of age in that time and place, she was a visitor to the legendary Haçienda nightclub: “I was so bookish that I finished reading EM Forster’s Howards End in the toilets. So I can talk about the solace and comfort of The London Library but I am capable of finishing a novel in the toilets of a club.”

She puts her love of reading down to her upbringing. Her mother Vivienne was an English teacher for many years, and taught Rourke to read when she was “very little. I don’t know if this is true, but my mum says that I could read when I went to nursery at three. There’s a story in my family that my parents were called into my school and slightly told off because I told the teachers that I’d read all the books in the library.”

Left: Josie in the Reading Room, looking on to St James’s Square

“I think that there’s something really wonderful about the quality of light through those big windows over the square”

Her parents were “massive readers. My dad had sets of books; he had a set of Dickens. So as a very little girl, I read all of Dickens. I’m sure I didn’t understand it, but I’d just run out of other stuff to read.”

A tradition of autodidacticism goes back several generations in her family of Irish diaspora in Salford, she says: “That idea of part of your education being reading that you do at home, not reading you’re set in school. My dad will decide, apparently out of nowhere, that he wants to know everything about the Holy Roman Empire and just read around the Holy Roman Empire for six months.”

Her work feeds into this voracious appetite for knowledge and, for that, the Library has been invaluable, she says. “Directing is such an interesting job, in that you become a kind of temporary expert on something.” In 2018 Rourke made her first feature film, Mary Queen of Scots,

which required her to delve deep into Tudor history, and she is currently working on three more, one of which she describes as “a kind of constitutional comedy”.

“I’m required to read up on democracy in England, and the history of it. Then one of them is an adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, so I think the last book I borrowed from The London Library was her autobiography.”

“The other one is about the broadcast ban in Northern Ireland in the 1980s–90s. The Library has been brilliant, because it has some quite specific academic publications around the broadcast ban, but the subject is incredibly niche. The Library has those books that, if I were to buy them, would be 140 quid. It’s just a great resource – and incredibly cool.” •

Nancy Durrant is the Culture Editor at the Evening Standard

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EVENTS

Enter the psychic realm of Greek mythology, explore the conflicted life of a spy in Martin Luther King’s inner circle and celebrate the best of Black British poetry

30 March UNDER THE COVERS: NATALIE HAYNES

The bibliotherapist Ella Berthoud brings her illuminating Under the Covers series of talks to the Library for the first time. She puts the acclaimed novelist, classicist, broadcaster and comedian Natalie Haynes on the ‘biblio couch’ to talk about her new novel Stone Blind , which reinterprets the story of Medusa.

Natalie Haynes has been called ‘a rock star mythologist’ by The Washington Post. Her books explore antiquity, often giving voice to the women who inhabit the dark, patriarchal world of classical mythology. In Stone Blind, Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of Gorgons. When the gods condemn her to a life in the shadows and transform her hair into a mass of writhing snakes, her destiny is changed forever.

Putting herself on the metaphorical couch, Haynes speaks to Ella Berthoud, co-author of The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies, about the novel, the books that have inspired her throughout her life and, crucially, receives her bibliotherapeutic analysis and reading prescription.

7.30pm – 8.30pm, in person

Above: Natalie Haynes

6 April THE KNEELING MAN

Marking the 55th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s death, essayist Leta McCollough Seletzky joins us to discuss The Kneeling Man, in conversation with novelist Isabelle Dupuy. In the memoir, Leta investigates the conflicted life of her father, Marrell ‘Mac’ McCollough: a Black spy in the Civil Rights era and the kneeling man in the famous photo of King’s assassination. Seeking to understand the truth behind accusations of her father’s involvement in King’s murder, Leta sets out to discover what motivated her father’s career with the police, and how his story affected her own perspective on what it is to be Black in America. The Kneeling Man is a compelling tale of alienation and ambivalence; struggle and selfdefinition. The twists and turns of one man’s life trace the story of Black America in the 20th century.

7.30pm – 8.30pm, in person and online

20April

R.A.P. PARTY: MORE FIYA

Poet Inua Ellams brings his exhilarating live literature phenomenon, the R.A.P. (Rhythm and Poetry) Party, back to The London Library for a nostalgic, no-clutter, no-fuss evening of hip-hop-inspired poems and favourite hip-hop songs.

This time we’ll be celebrating More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry, edited by Kayo Chingonyi for Canongate, with some of the book’s contributors, including Raymond Antrobus, Eric Ngalle Charles, Inua Ellams, Samatar Elmi, Rachel Long, Nick Makoha, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Degna Stone, Keisha Thompson and Kandace Siobhan Walker.

Ten poets + a DJ = the best night out you’ll ever have in a library – or anywhere, for that matter.

7pm – 9.30pm, in person, BSL interpreted

For more information, and to be the first to hear about events at the Library, refer to the fortnightly newsletter, scan this QR code or visit londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on

MEET A MEMBER

Director and producer Margy Kinmonth on researching in the Library

My earliest memory of the Library is of all these books with The London Library stamp piled high on the hall table at my grandfather’s house in Sussex. It would be fascinating to know what the books were now. My grandfather was the Director of Naval Intelligence and was very well-read. He was the original prototype for James Bond’s M –Ian Fleming was his assistant.

I’m obviously a pictures person: my whole life has either been painting or making films. But as a director, you have to do a lot of writing. I’ve been a member for decades, because it’s such a good place to write. I tend to work in the Reading Room; I think if I went to work in one of the secret nooks, I’d probably skive off. I love the young influx, too. It’s a fantastic environment – everybody around you is writing and working. I’m always excited about exploring the Back Stacks and finding stories for films. BAFTA is five minutes away, so I can be a producer, a director and a writer all in this little square mile.

I’m also in a classic book club. I come to the Library to get the earliest possible edition. That’s been amazing

because I have these really fantastic books, with beautiful illustrations – Les Miserables, for example.

In 2007, I made a film about The Nutcracker – going right back to the earliest versions of the story. I needed to have a sequence with a little girl opening a book. Here at the Library, they have these very rare tomes of fairy tales in German. Great big things with creaking leather and really lovely illustrations – it was absolutely wonderful.

My most recent film is about Eric Ravilious, the war artist. The 80th anniversary of his death was in 2022. I felt very strongly that he should be up there with Turner, Constable, Gainsborough and Hockney as one of our great British artists. A lot of the film is based in Sussex, so I did research in the Library’s maps department for that. I’m always looking for women’s points of view – that’s really my mission. For my next film, I’m looking in the art section for some very particular female war artists and the books I’ve found in the Library are invaluable. •

As told to Alex McFadyen

Photo: Foxtrot Films