On collecting

WHAT POSSESSES A PERSON TO FATHER A COLLECTION OF 8EER BOTTLES OR

TYPEWRITERS?

n August 2000, sitting on the restaurant ter­race of an op­ulent Palladian villa hotel outside Pisa, I committed one of the great faux pas of my life (and be­lieve me, there have been plenty). I was dining with the great film director Bernardo Bertolucci and liis wife, the equally brilliant cineast. Clare Pepl(x\ I had just come from Naples, where Bertolucci had dispatched me to un­dertake some research with a view to a little doctoring on an extant script that was giv­ing liim problems.

In previous conversa­tions with the Maitre—as I thought of Bertolucci—I had realized the curious fact that he viewed me as an im­possibly rarefied intellectual, a sort of Thomas Mann without the LA. connection. Discussing the new movie, he had said to me, "Weel, I already have an actress een mind for Ihees feelm. Perhaps you have heard of her? Her name ees..." and here he enunciated very carefully, "Sha-jvn Stone."

But wliile I had done my best to convey I had the faintest apprehension of Ms. Stone (rather than admitting I had spent hours replaying the notorious leg-crossing scene from Ra.sk lmtirui on my VCR), my unworldly shtick fell apart, on that Tus­can terrace when we fell to discussing the basic human instinct to collect tilings and I poured scorn on it, say­ing, "Pah! I mean, besides gay people, I can't imagine anyone really likes collect­ing tilings—except, that is, the childless!" 'Iliere was a strained silence as the Maine regarded me balefully, with immense disappointment. Eventually he cried out," But I detest collecting!" And it was then, of course, that I realized he himself was with­out issue—and I was prob­ably without a job.

'Iliere is, of course, an inverted pride in telling sto­ries against oneself, but tliis wasn't simply a faux pas—it was also a lie, because not only do I collect, but far from my children deflecting

me from collecting, I some­times suspect the reason I've collected four of them is because it enables me to collect by proxy. I mean, it would be difficult in mid­dle age to admit to desir­ing quite so many stufled animals, Star Wan Lego sets and .002 scale toy soldiers. But even if I set the kiddies' collections to one side, there are still my own, and these conform to two of the four basic types of collection—as I understand them: the sen­timental, the serial, the fet-isliistic and the investment.

Not that these basic di­visions are by any means rigid—collections of collec­tions are by definition slip-peiy things—and lx)th my sentimental and my serial collections have a distinctly fetisliistic character, as will become clear. First off, my sentimental collection— these are the tchotchkes I have assembled on my desk that mound dustily about the base of my Anglepoise lamp. There's no real cri­terion for inclusion in tliis collection except a feeling I have about sometliing, and the objects range from the fascinating (a 400,000-year-old hand ax fashioned by Homo heidelbergensK) to the affecting (a Lego clone walk­er fashioned by my 11-year-old son) to the kitsch (a set of glass pyramidal paper­weights brought back from Egypt by my wife).

In a way, I like to tliink this collection is a diminu­endo of another far more celebrated collection that assembled a few hundred yards from where I live in Vauxhall, South London a few hundred years ago. Tradescant's Ark was the work of a father-and-son team—John and John Tra-descant—who were travelers and naturalists. Firmly es­tablished as one of the sights of London by the 1630s, the distinguisliing character of the collection was its diver­sity: As one 17th century vis­itor reported, "a Man might in one day behold and col-lecte into one place more Curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all liis life in Travel!." Typically such

collections contained the fantastical, such as unicorn horns and relics, and objects from non-European cul­tures, alongside more homely oddi­ties. Reporting on a similar collection during the same era, the diarist John Kvelyn was particularly taken by a collection of petrified tilings: "Wal­nuts, Kggs in wliich the Yealk rattl'd, a peare, a piece of beef with bones in it...[a] whole hedgehog, a plaice on a Wooden Trencher turned into stone... & veiy perfect."

Although the Tradescants' collection was eventually bequeathed to the antiquary Elias Ashmole and went from liini to bec:ome tlie basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, wliidi is still with us today, there is a vitality to these early collec­tions that sets them apart from the dry taxonomy and factual-ism of the modem museum. If you want to visit a similarly odd contemporary collection, tiy the Museum of Jurassic Technol­ogy in Culver City, Los Angeles, wliich witli its microminiature paintings and sculptures, its mosaics made from butterfly wings and assemblage of trailer park artifacts faithfully replicates the idea of a collection based on a world felt rather than analyzed.

My little collection of ichotchkes also has petrified tilings—a wizened banana rescued from behind my eight-year-old's radia­tor, a dead wasp, a blackened lemon—as well as a lot of stones I've picked up on my travels: marble from the Mafia town of Corleone in Sicily, limestone from Mont Ventoux in Provence, obsidian from an extinct volcano on Easter Island. When I picked these tilings up I assured myself they would lx- aide-memoire, enabling me to recapture the whole sensual heft of these far-ilung places, but unfortunately my memoire seems beyond aiding, and even to me they just look like nondescript rocks.

Still, at least personal collections of tchotchkes have an idi­osyncratic feel, and we who assemble them are in elevated company. Freud was a great collector of knickknacks, amass­ing more than 2,000 items in liis famous consulting room, in particular "tabletop" gods from various cultures, including Sphinxes, Eros statuettes, a baboon-faced "Ihoth and assorted phalluses. Wliile it was Alfred Binel and Richard Krafft-Ebing who evolved the theory of sexual fetishism, in wliich one part of the body is taken for the whole, it was Freud himself who related the collecting impulse to fetishism, considering it to

bo a form of symlxilic replacement— undertaken mostly by men—for their own mothers' missing phallus, 'there­fore, to obsessively collect lots of the same tiling—whether beer bottles or Bulgari—is in reality to be searching for the ideal Mummy dildo.

I confess Freud's analysis has the ring of truth when I consider my feel­ings about my own serial collections: Whenever I get hooked on acquir­ing lots of one tiling, it feels as if I'm seeking the one-and-only—although I never thought it was the one-and-only strap-on. Rattier, I suspect the serial collection stands in the same relation to the emotional one as preindustrial society does to the age of Fordism. To me, all of us who obsessively search for more versions of any tiling—from cars to condoms—are turning ourselves into miniature assembly lines.

I've got two serial collections in the room where I'm typing tliis piece, and one of them is pretty dildoish, consti­tuting as it does a sort of loose bun-

die of tobacco pipes—perhaps 40 in all. I won't try you witli the story of how I came to smoke a pipe, but all you need to know is that there is an indefinable gestalt bound up in any given pipe experience, compounded of the tobacco, the accompanying beverage and the pipe itself. Once I began to enjoy pipe smoking I had to maximize that enjoyment, and so my obsessive acquisition of pipes— and tobaccos—began. There had to be a different pipe for each of the

major blends: an elegant straight Savinelli lor Italian forte to­bacco, a behemoth of a rustic briar (given to me by the son of an original surrealist) for rough French petit gri\ tobacco, a Turk's head meerschaum for latakia blends—and so on.

But the dreadful tiling about serial collecting is that it soon outstrips any reasonable functionality, and tliis is how you know it's letishism. I may have kidded myself that these were functional—if hedonistic—artifacts, but soon enough, like some­one pei-vingon Nicole Kidman's Ux-nail clippings, I was desiring pipes for their own sake. I particularly coveted big pipes, anil the economics of pipe production Ix'ing what they are, bigger is more expensive. I became obsessed by a huge bent briar pipe costing a axil $1,000 that squalled in the window of a nearby tobacconist. I used to go and stand letching over the damn tiling, knowing that sooner or later I would fall victim to its allure.

I did—and naturally I barely smoked it. Barely smoked any of them, in fact, because one day the whole pipe-smoking ma­nia left me as if it had been a dream, leaving behind naught but a sour mouth and a useless collection. 'There's no resale pos­sible, unlike the antique dildo collection that was auctioned for $5,800 in England earlier tliis year—of that, dickless Mummy would've approved. My other serial collection has the Ix-nelit of still being functional—or some of them at least. When my real Mummy died she left me her beautiful Olivetti Lettera 22 type­writer, and in due course I acquired a second one of hers from my brother. A few years ago I actually began writing on these machines—a lurch back in techno-time occasioned by a grow­ing sense that computers were sucking my brains out through their microcircuitry. Fail' enough, you might say, these are gen­uine tools—but then the red mist descended and I found myself acquiring, in quick succession, a couple of old Imperial Good

Companions of 1930s vintage, a 1950s Remington and a 1960s Olympia.

My room was getting cluttered with more typewriters than I could reason­ably use, and what was worse, I'd Ix1-come obsessed with maintaining them. I discovered the only typewriter engi­neer still operating in Greater London, Shalom Simon. He'd arrive from the outer biirbs in a white van to pick up my macliines and discuss liis latest trip to Israel with me over a cup of tea, be­fore tearing my machine away. I was terribly worried that Shalom would retire, leaving me with an obsolete technology, so I began acquiring type­writers simply in order that he could service them—and how mad is that?

Pretty insane, but this was still in line with the functional. The truth was I'd started fetisliizing typewriters just as I had pipes, and in late 2008, while the world's liquidity was being sucked into a howling void, I spent hour upon hour online, staring at a beautiful 1959 Groina (concluded cm page 116)

OH COLLECTINtf

(continued from page 90) Kolibri, the flattest typewriter ever manufac­tured—as slim as a laptop—which was for sale for a mere $500. Tliis use; of a technology I loathed to seduce a useless object dearly was deranged—it was the collecting equivalent of taking Viagra to have sex with a prostitute. The problem was I had to have it.

And did, but resolved to put a stop to my typewriter collection there and then. True, tlie Groma is a lovely thing—and I've actually written the first draft of this piece on it—but with each acquisition, as every serial collector knows, the hit gets a little weaker, the high that much more elusive. At least the truly fetishis-tic collector—whether of dildos, penis lings or movie-star toenail clippings—is involved in a pure form of this reduction ad tedium xilae. He knows he's on a hiding to nothing, so every extra beating is a bonus, (liven that Cormac McCarthy was able to sell his Olivetti Lettera 32 for $254,500 at Christie's in New York last year, it could be I'm onto a good tiling with typewriter—but somehow I doubt my liteiaiy rep will produce the same synergy.

And tliis leads me to collecting for invest­ment, arguably the most sensible kind there

is. The past 30 years have seen an exponential increase in collecting, particularly of art but also of all manner of other things, purely in order to realize their resale value. Indeed, arguably, the whole ring-lxing-tanlara! phenomenon of con­temporary ail owes its existence to collecting for investment. Art collecting flatters rich and ignorant people with the idea that they've got a "g<xxl eye" (or at least know someone who does), wliile also providing them with hand-painted wallpaper for their serial real estate crimes and giving them an excuse to get out of the house. I'm not knocking it, but it does seem to represent an ugly fusion of the serial and the fetisliistic collecting drives. Moreover, it can't tx-accidental that it was Warhol's celebrated "mul­tiples" that heralded the new collecting era with their ironic take on the mechanical reproduc-ibility of what used to be unique things.

Sadly, Warhol's multibillionaire collectors are largely irony deficient, so they go on writing checks and inflating prices. No doubt sooner or later the whole tiling will go up in a puff of dry ice and they'll be left with the only col­lections that really matter, the tchotdikes they have scattered on top of their executive desks and hefty armoires—just like the rest of us.

"The

collector is a

true

inmate

of

the

interior."

-Walter Benjamin

FREUD WAS A GREAT COLLECTOR OF KNICKKNACKS,

AMASS t«n MORE THAN

2,000 ITEMS IN NfS

CONSULTING ROOM.