Making up for primal deprivation
Michael Tanner on the compulsions that drive a collector
0 f the innumerable ways of dividing people up into two kinds, one of the less investigated is into collectors and non-collectors. As with some of the other categorisations, the members of the two classes find it extraordinarily hard to understand one another in this key respect. Non-collectors tend, I have noticed, to occupy the moral high ground since they are not the victims, as they see it, of a compulsion which is really as much of an addiction as any of the better-advertised ones. Furthermore, they are interested in objects of a certain kind for their own sakes, while those who collect them need them only to fulfil a craving, often taking no interest in them once they have them.
Take, not at random, collecting LPs or CDs; I have done both, in succession, for 40 years. The thought of a recording which I don't have of a musical work for which I have a passion, or by one of the performers whom I idolise, is enough to obsess me, sending me on long searches, sometimes even resulting in my reorganising what was supposed to be a sightseeing holiday in, say. Rome, into a desperate exploration of the city's record stores. When I was there nine years ago there was a short-lived Italian 'pirate' label which carried performances I had only dreamed about, and which I knew by experience would disappear as suddenly as it had arrived. I was with a non-collecting friend, who found that we were heading for our next monument or gallery by strangely roundabout routes, all at the behest of the daemon that told me that what, in the pirate series, (which was elaborately hidden from the general view) I hadn't yet found I might possibly discover in a little store in, say, Trastevere. He realised that if I didn't investigate the unlikely home of some of these exclusive CDs I would be miserable, at any rate until I finally got them. When I got back to England I was exultant at having obtained the whole series; and though they soon appeared in some specialist English stores at about half what I'd paid for them in Rome, it was worth it, since I had had them for several months, to the envy of people similarly afflicted.
Probably not all collectors, not even collectors of CDs, are motivated strongly by competitiveness, but certainly it looms large in the makeup of many. It is the mean pleasure of owning something that someone else would like; but as competitiveness goes, this is perhaps less contemptible than many forms of it. More significant is the need to have, as I said, every last version of a piece, even though it is incredibly unlikely to be as fine as the greatest that one already owns. One can rationalise that need as deriving from the possibility that even a poor account of a piece may reveal unexpected aspects of it; but that's not very convincing. I've never managed to find an explanation of this mildly bizarre phenomenon which is. What is still more bewildering is that once one owns a version of something, even if one has heard that it is virtually without merit, it's very hard to let it go. Once again implausible rationalisations arc at hand, such as that one needs it 'for reference', or to demonstrate speedily to one of those numerous people who suspect that one performance is very like another that actually there can be a world of difference — and that reason for keeping things has some sense. But that isn't, or doesn't feel like, the real ground for one's cupidity and avarice.
I'm sure, in fact, that there are various and quite widely differing explanations of the collector's urge. The one that seems to fit my experience most closely is something to do with making up for what feels like a primal deprivation. I have found that the music which I care about most seems to be something of which, until I got to know it, I was outrageously deprived; possibly that it the root of the love of many things — and
that is surely no revelation. The consequence is a form of jealousy (I realise, from the number of times I'm using 'a kind of', 'a form of, that I'm groping). And it is that which makes intelligible, though no less painful, the extraordinary difficulty of getting rid of a collection, or weeding it out. For I am in the middle of that. and so have been prompted to think harder than I usually like to about why I'm prepared to catch a train to London if a specialist record dealer advertises a recording of a 'live' performance of Tristan from Trieste with singers and a conductor I've never heard of. For surely — the non-collector striving to be sympathetic is likely to say — now that I've lived with my collection for so long I must know which items in it I am going to listen to again often, which have an ex-officio place, which are weird but wonderful, and which are most unlikely ever again to get another airing.
Mostly that's true, yet it fails to diminish the problems; it seems that collections have a surprising tendency to assume an organic status, so that removing a part of them seems like, if not an amputation, at least a tooth-removal. And there's the further issue of pride: to get rid of an item is tantamount to admitting that it was a fairly fatuous purchase or acquisition in the first place. Even worse: any 'serious' collector has many items in their (in fact `his' would be almost entirely accurate) collection which they have never listened to, or not more than an excerpt. And that opens up a whole further perspective on collecting. For those with encyclopaedic or polymathic tendencies acquiring things is often a substitute for listening to them (or, to take what is often a more acute case still, with books a matter of reading them). One feels foolish getting rid of something that one has done nothing more than acquire, though if the acquisition took place more than, say, 30 years ago, that does suggest that the need to listen is not very pressing. Yet as long as one possesses the thing one feels the obligation to listen to it sometime.
This line can be taken still further. Christopher Ricks, contemplating the lunacy of my library, said that it was my defence against death. He could be right, though at the time I was annoyed by what I felt was a glib jibe. As long as there are books unread, records unheard, not only do I owe it to myself to read and listen, life owes it to me to give me a chance. A casual calculation reveals that to get through all my records and books I need to live to be over 200 years old, supposing I increase my reading speed only slightly (there's nothing one can do about listening speed, though some of the best-known names in the
record-reviewing business must surely have found some accelerated mode of absorption). There is a unique comfort, at least that is what I find, in being surrounded by things that have a peculiarly intimate connection with one, awaiting one's attention. The idea that they will all get it is absurd, but is it ridiculous?
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