BiblioWars

 

            People accuse me, probably rightly, of being out of touch, even antiquarian.  This is mainly because I have never had a Twitter account.  I did sign up for Facebook in a fit of temporary mental aberration, but since I forgot the password many years ago, you could not call me a heavy user.  The regular email inundation is sufficient.  On occasion the cause of my outofitness is attributed to my reading habits.  Although I read a fair number of books, not a lot of them have been reviewed in the New York Review of Books in the last couple of months.  I suppose that this fact can  indeed be explained in terms of temperament, but I would prefer to put it in the following terms.   Suppose you are a lover of many kinds of artistic expression, not only good literature but painting, sculpture, the theater, ballet, opera, music generally.  Indeed there is probably little need for supposition here.  The odds are that you quite keen on one or several of them.  Surely, no matter how eager you might be to keep up with recent developments, you would not want to limit your experience to works written, composed, or created in the last half decade?  Indeed the danger in some of these field (one thinks perhaps of classical music) is that the established repertoire is so rich as to lead to the neglect of contemporary experimenters.  Even with regard to popular music and the cinema, fields in which powerful economic forces encourage the hallowed American consumerist pattern (use/discard/replace) there emerge patterns of the admired “classic” and its slightly downstream sibling, the “vintage”.

 

            A lowball estimate puts the number of new books published in the U. S. last year at  a quarter of a million.  Call that Group A.  The Boston Public Library has about fifteen million old ones—meaning published before last year and in various parts of the world.  Call that Group B.  Group A is comprehensive and promiscuous, including a large number of valuable items on septic tank drainage and the true interpretation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that will not survive the selective principles and budget constraints governing Group B.  Even so I know for a fact that both groups,  even when on general principles of manageability arbitrarily reduced by, say, ninety-five percent, would contain many titles that I would want to read, need to read, benefit from reading.  But I could never read them all.  Ars longa, vita brevis est.*  One must, alas, be selective here as regarding so many other of life’s possible pleasures.  Under these circumstances book reviews are of some use, of course.  But much better than a single review is a general reputation built up over several years, decades, or preferably centuries.

 

            Novelty is often a virtue, but a lover of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or George Eliot is unlikely to consider it an omnipotent one.  To this end I must dust off a personal anecdote, possibly with a few rhetorical elaborations, that for all I know I have already published in one of these pages.  “Old men forget,” as Henry V says in his most famous speech.  There are now 599 of these essays in the continuing series, and I can’t remember even writing most of them, let alone what is in them.  But I remember the episode itself, and I can pin it down to a definite year, 1979, because of its association with a particular book published in that year.  The book was The Coup by John Updike, an author I greatly admire.

 

            The culturally conservative impulse long evident to historical scholars is a feature of literary history as well.  E. B. Tylor, one of the founders of cultural anthropology, whom his scholarly progeny have been killing off in classic Oedipal fashion for several decades now, has a memorable summary of the conservative principle: “Most things that exist in the world exist for the reason that they once existed.”  This is relevant to literature in many ways.  So powerful were the examples of what we often call the Latin classics that medieval poets like Dante, Jean de Meun, and Chaucer had to struggle self-consciously to present their vernacular works as worthy to be thought of in the same terms as those of Ovid and Virgil.   Even after the development of rich literatures in the European vernaculars,  after Shakespeare and Cervantes and Madame de Lafayette, the critics kept up the debate.  Literary historians describe an episode in eighteenth-century culture that they often call the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”.  One well-known product of the episode was Jonathan Swift’s satire, The Battle of the Books.

 

            A current version or echo of this ancient “battle” will be familiar to anyone like myself interested in trying to convey older literature to today’s students, with “older” here meaning something like “before Bob Dylan”.  To be really hip as a professor of literature, you will do well to study contemporary writers and, if possible, bob  around as much as possible in their cultural wake.  I tried hard not to be jealous of my modernist colleagues who were very much in the swim of the here-and-now and hung out with folks who didn’t even realize there had been a there and then.  These people were so au courant that their preferred mode of reading a novel was in the author’s spare set of proof sheets.  These people went to glamorous cocktail parties in New York.

 

            I was never at such soirées until, by a strange fluke, I found myself in an administrative position that required me to attend one or two, and this brings me to my anecdote.  My role as one of the judges for the awarding of a literary prize—a role into which I was thrust ex officio by a provision of the defunct prize-giver’s will—placed me in an elegant wine-sipping event in which I found myself in heavy literary dialogue with a glamorous youngish woman in publishing.  I actually didn’t have to say too much, because she was a great talker.  That was a good thing, because she didn’t seem exactly enthralled by what little I was saying.  Still I was able to fake adequately  until she asked me what I thought of the latest Updike novel.  I looked nonplussed, as though I couldn’t tell which latest Updike novel she had in mind.  “You know, The Coup,” she said.  I had to admit that I had not read The Coup.  (I don’t think I committed the further indiscretion of saying that I had never heard of it, as was probably also the reality.)  This admission seemed to have a dramatic and disconcerting effect on my interlocutor, as though I had just pleaded “No Contest” to a charge of pedophilia or, at the very least, released in her direction an epic halitosis.  All traces of the interest I had imagined I sensed drained from her expression.  “Oh,” she said, “what a pity.  You know, it’s been out for six weeks.”  With this she began that well-known type of cocktail party pivot,  occasioned by the sudden discovery on the part of one conversational party of the urgent necessity to go to the loo, grab a canape, feed a parking meter, in any event to be somewhere else doing something else.  Male fragility?  Medieval fragility?  I don’t know quite what to call it, but I knew I had suffered a most palpable hit.  Indignation trumped embarrassment, however, and I was determined to defend myself.  After all I was a man who had read quite a lot of Updike, mainly short stories, sure, but I definitely remembered having read Couples, and that couldn’t have been out for more than a decade.  So as she was in the very act of turning away, I said to her “Let me ask you,” as though oblivious to the obvious fact that our conversation was over, “have you read the Consolation of Philosophy?”  The question was sufficiently bizarre to stop her in her tracks.  “The What of Philosophy?” she asked.  “The Consolation,” I said.  “The Consolation of Philosophy.”  When she still looked nonplussed I added, “by Boethius….Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius”.  You need to be sure you’re talking about the right Boethius.  “No,” she finally admitted, though not without a hint of hesitation.  “What a pity,” I said.  “It’s been out for one thousand, four hundred, and fifty-five years.”  Then I made my own pivot.

 

*The Latin epitaph from the headstone of the infant John Longbottom (Nov. 17, 1742-Feb. 3,1744) in the churchyard of Saint Æthelbert, Rackover Magna, Worcs.)