The library of empty books

In 2002 Donald Gray had begun to complain of weak eyesight. He had retired early from a low-stress civil service career and no doubt anticipated a lengthy and untroubled retirement.

In a message to his daughter Megan while visiting relatives that summer, he complains, ‘reading would be fine if it wasn’t for the damn print’. This throwaway remark may have been also a moment of revelation, which soon after was lit up by opportunity. Changing trains in Birmingham on the way home, he stepped into a station bookstore and bought a notebook. Settling down on the journey south he began his practice of reading blank texts.

An adjacent passenger, or one sat just behind him, might have been puzzled, assuming at first that someone who stares at a blank page may be awaiting inspiration (but he holds no pen or pencil) or has drifted off to sleep. Yet now the page is turned, offering to the eyes (the reader’s, legitimately focused; the observer’s, ashamedly furtive) another pair of blank pages. And within a leisurely couple of minutes, another; and another.

Gray kept that first book—which he described as ‘rather dull’—and apparently all subsequent empty books. It was called ‘Plagiarism in the digital age’. He seems to have acknowledged immediately that the texts he imagined had to be short, perhaps more like lengthy, half-remembered poems or essays—not that they had to be committed to memory, but because of the need for a sense of containment, a manageable reading experience, given the intense concentration needed to appreciate them.

We know little about the next phase of the development of this practice, although Megan Collis-Gray recollects him asserting the importance of titles, claiming ‘it is impossible to proceed without a title’, and it is not at all clear where they came from. Given what we know of Gray’s personality, they could be the consequence of his musing at a newsagent’s shelf, as he allowed a notebook to lure some idea from the undergrowth of his unconscious; otherwise perhaps, some pre-meditated theme that he intended to explore. Every notebook is different, with the title written variously on spine, cover or inside the cover. But wherever the titles come from, the rest of the work is done by the reader.

The titles are not the only recorded words in this library. Several items apparently are non-fiction, and in some cases Gray has annotated the margins. For example, on the fourth page of ‘Humans: an evolutionary history’, he has written

‘So how come never develop(e)d ability to see in dark?’

And in the notebook called ‘Check against delivery: speech-writing in British politics’ there are several terse jottings including:

‘And his grammar, shd have been sacked just for that’.

On this basis, slight though it is, we can hardly accuse Gray of aspiring to become an author. But the question is central to any assessment of these artefacts: is there any sense in which he can be said to have authored these texts? It seems to contradict all that we know about his approach. These documents can only be regarded as ‘empty books’ through explanation of their origin (these examples all appear to have come from Gray himself, although there is no reason why they should have done, necessarily); and of the role of the reader. In art, the concept of the blank canvas or empty musical score is hardly new (although it might have been new to Gray). But he may well have been the first to arrive at the concept of a blank text solely from the consumer’s point of view rather than the creator’s.

According to Megan, her father had even mentioned plans for reading groups and for experimental theatre based on blank playscripts; but he never overcame the difficulty of establishing shared understanding of what it was that he read. We have to ask, who is the reader? Is this exclusively private art, or can any of us appreciate it?

Gray seems to have had no difficulty envisaging on the page more than just the makings of a text, but a formed, structured, articulated text, which he was able to follow at least to some extent and reflect on. We do not know if he felt compelled to re-read from time to time, returning to previous sections in order to reconsider meanings or to seek clarity, because of interruption perhaps or subsequent allusion. But if he did, what markers in the bare landscape could he possibly have used to find his way?

Nor does he seem to have had any difficulty detaching himself from authorship. He seems to have seen himself emphatically as reader, not creator, of these imagined texts. In a message to Megan [17 April 2006] we find him delighting in a passage, to such an extent that he takes the trouble to transcribe it:

Had to change at Milton Keynes and the view from the platform of that dreadful building reminded me of the passage in the Gavin Tawley story I told you about, where he studies the window cleaners on the office block:

‘One hundred and sixty columns, sixteen floors. Two men in a nest, lowered by cables, sweeping their blades in regular gestures. The mechanism apparently programmed, so their progress constant. Then up again non-stop, two across, down again steadily, wiping, releasing the view for the inmates who think only of formulae and cells’.

If there is a clue here to the way these texts could have taken shape in his mind and/or on the page, it might be in the hint at highly systematic thinking, the framework of spreadsheets and the logic of progression, rational processes coming habitually to a trained and committed government official. Professionally, Gray would also have been experienced at distancing himself morally from the authorship of whatever he was drafting. He was rooted in anonymity and detachment. And if there is a clue to his role as a reader, as not-author, it is surely in his apparent delight at recalling a previous ‘reading’, finding it mimicked in everyday life, and in sharing it with his daughter.

However, another interpretation of this message is that Gray’s psychological defences against being an author were for some reason allowed to drop, momentarily. As far as we know, the self-quoted paragraph above is original text written by Gray himself, and the only fictional sample that we have. It is noteworthy that the words are wrapped in their own subterfuge; and that they feature the fictionalised representation of an actual construction, with humans on both sides of opaque windows. It remains plausible to suggest that Gray was a creative artist whose suppressed creativity was readily stifled. It is also plausible to suggest that this single passage was the centrepiece of his art—a concise paragraph floating as if unsupported at the centre of his own artifice, both transparent and opaque.

So much for the written word. With regard to the unwritten word, there remains one particular curatorial fascination: all the surviving notebooks have titles, but they may not all have been ‘written’, ‘started’ or ‘read’, in Gray’s terms. Conceivably, some could be blank empty books, picked up at a shop and awaiting the effort of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’, at the time of his death.

This leaves us with the question of performance, the enactment of reading blank texts on trains and in waiting rooms and cafés. Was there a sense in which this quiet, modest man was performing in public, like an indiscernible mime-artist?

The texts in the empty books were imagined by Gray and evaporated with his death. What we seem to be dealing with is the production of traces, with nothing but the shell left to indicate that there were traces. Gray’s deliberately unacknowledged art involved creating and enacting performable traces of things imagined, suggesting that imagination can be quite independent of the reality we think we recognise.