YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS cover. But you can judge a friend by the books on his shelves. And I’m afraid that I do.
I’m naturally nosey. One of the reasons I became a journalist was to give my inordinate curiosity about other people a measure of respectability. I loved the opportunity that journalism gave to discover facts about individuals in the news and to build up a picture of them. But the most effective way of getting a fix on anyone is to scan their bookshelves.
The biographies or novels in someone’s front room give the biggest clues to the biography, and the clearest indication of what’s novel, for any individual.
This inveterate nosiness, I’ll admit, makes me a potentially annoying guest. Just when you want me to sit down, enjoy a drink and join in the conversation, my eyes will stray as I try to spot if that really is Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives next to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
I’m not alone in succumbing to this temptation. Both the editor and the deputy editor of this section have confessed to the same sin. Perhaps we should seek absolution from an understanding priest. But we would inevitably find our gaze wandering during confession as we tried to work out whether that really was Gazza’s autobiography next to The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola on the vestry mantelpiece. Our choice of books over a lifetime provides a more accurate chronicle than anything else of how our passions have developed. Are those dog-eared P. G. Wodehouse novels, the Penguin editions from the 1970s, evidence of a youthful enthusiasm for the master? And is the clutch of Updikes from the 1980s evidence of how tastes matured? What does it reveal about my apparently conservative host that he has every Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood? Why does this woman of emphatically progressive views have shelves of Waugh and Mitford? Bookshelves do provide windows into our souls.
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And for anyone who wants to peer into one of the last century’s most complex, and fascinating, souls there is a marvellous opportunity this month. The London bookshop Heywood Hill has just published a catalogue of the late Sir Edward Heath’s book collection. John Saumarez Smith, its proprietor, was asked by the executors of Sir Edward’s estate to prepare the collection for sale earlier this year. The catalogue faithfully re -creates the organisation of the former Prime Minister’s own bookshelves. It lists, in chronological order, all the books that he acquired from his schooldays in 1931 until after he entered Parliament. It subdivides many of the books that relate to his particular passions. As a result, it is a uniquely revealing chronicle of a Prime Minister’s intellectual development and inner character.
The young Edward Heath does not appear to fit the mould of a rising man of the Right. Some might say he never did. The range of political works he bought as an undergraduate shows someone with a keen interest in left-wing thought. The first book he bought on going up to Balliol College, Oxford, is the deeply socialist Harold Laski’s An Introduction to Politics. Heath’s college shelves also boasted works by the future Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton, the favourite economist of Thirties progressives, John Maynard Keynes, the guru of the Left Book Club, Victor Gollancz, and the Stalin apologist Walter Duranty.
Heath was never a conventional Conservative. He refused to back the official party candidate in the 1938 Oxford by-election, when support for Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was the central issue. He worked for the anti-appeasement candidate Sandy Lindsay, who was Master of Balliol.
Given that stance, it is instructive that one of the few works by a contemporary Tory politician that the young Heath owned was Ourselves and Germany by the actively pro-German Marquess of Londonderry.
That choice, along with the preponderance of strongly left-wing works, suggests that the student Heath was using his time to explore the thinking of those with whom he disagreed. It is often true that individuals confident in their own position choose not to spend time reading works that simply confirm their own views, but seek out authors who will challenge them. The student, or indeed the journalist-turned Conservative MP, whose shelves are stocked with works by Stalinist sympathisers and Hitler apologists is more likely to be trying to find how to halt totalitarianism than to be making up his mind which of the two he prefers.
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Heath was far from being a man who lived solely for politics. Although political dis- appointment cast a long shadow over his retirement, he found solace in the fields of music and sailing. The Heywood Hill catalogue rewards close reading as a guide to Heath’s lifelong love of music, from his first book, Musicians’ Wit, Humour and Anecdote, through the hymn books he used as an organ scholar to the facsimiles of original Handel scores and autographed gifts from Leonard Bernstein.
But music wasn’t his only aesthetic interest. His home in Salisbury, where he had his library, enjoys one of England’s most beautiful views, and Heath collected an extensive range of works on art, especially architecture, including an impressive set of Pevsners.
It’s hard to imagine what might be catalogued in a future sale of our current Prime Minister’s book collection. The End of the Affair? The Man Who Would Be King? A Confederacy of Dunces? If you want to spend a half hour scanning a real Prime Minister’s bookshelves, all from the comfort of your own armchair, catalogues are available from Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, London W1J 5HH (020-7493 3742).
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Michael Gove is Tory MP for Surrey Heath