On Sunday the Friends of the Princeton University Library held its official annual meeting, which was followed by its annual dinner. The after-dinner speaker for this event is usually some eminent “book person,” in this instance Prof. Maureen Corrigan, who surely is one of the best-read readers around. She is well known to a popular audience as the book critic for National Public Radio, and to many general readers as the author of So We Read On, the subtitle of which is How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. This is a big year for literature lovers at Princeton. It marks the hundredth anniversary of the most famous title by our most famous alumnus novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or near alumnus; he never actually graduated. So Corrigan was the perfect expert to speak about Gatsby, and she gave a memorable talk. Command of material is always augmented by spirit and humor in its deployment, and she had plenty of both. Joan and I had the honor of sharing a table with, among others, Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter.
The Friends of the Library is a group in which civic virtue and personal pleasure meet. It is easy to be a friend of a library. You begin by loving to read, doing a lot of reading, and helping others to love, study, acquire, and preserve books. You will build a personal library of however modest a nature. Almost anyone can afford to construct a small private library at modest expense. Or, if you are a person of means you can purchase rare titles for a public institution at staggering prices. Perhaps your collection will have a dedicated theme. You will do all in your power to encourage literary habits in others and to practice them yourself. Our organization of Friends has some members in all these categories, among others.
Unfortunately libraries have enemies as well as friends. Among the political tidbits recently in the press was one concerning our somewhat specialized topic of interest: libraries. “At the U.S. Naval Academy, it's not what's on the shelves that's drawing attention -- but what's missing. The institution's Nimitz Library has been stripped of 381 titles, according to a list first published in the New York Times, including works exploring race, gender, and national identity.” Now this news article fits into a conventional genre. It is not about the crisis of shelf-space familiar to places that house too many books, such as, for example, the Fleming home. As you read it, your focus must be on the apparent content of the books. Here’s a hint. It begins with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist. It includes Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman : a Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade. You may already have caught the drift. This is an article about that form of censorship usually called “book-banning.” In the dreaded academic triad of approaches to humanistic study—class, race, and gender—all three have proved perennial stimulants to controversy.
But there is a paradox here. While book-banning is a topic that should concern anybody concerned with—well, with anybody capable of being concerned about anything—book-banning has historically been pretty good for some authors. Everybody wanted the latest banned book from Voltaire. For a certain period of time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the New England Watch and Ward Society stimulated many a faltering author’s sales by declaring their books banned in Boston. To be able to boast that your book was banned in Boston was probably better for your sales than being able to display a glowing review in some literary journal.
But my experience as a teacher and American citizen and a friend of libraries is that the real problem about reading in our country is not that by and large Americans are being deprived of books, but that they simply don’t read books. There is no necessity for bad actors to ban books; our flimsy culture is doing that for us. We have a very bright granddaughter, aged eleven, who mainly reads “graphic novels,” basically comic books. That’s apparently just fine with her Brooklyn school teachers. More paradox: the number of new novels published each year appears to me to vary inversely with the number of people who read lots of novels.
Since in my career I have been an English professor I need to be clear that I am here not speaking as one. A college education will, I hope, introduce many thousands to some very good books and millions to a wide variety of technical or utilitarian ones. But not everybody should or will be a French literature minor. Yet if your national educational aim is universal literacy, as ours has long been, everyone should be encouraged to be a life-long reader of something useful.
Please do not suppose that I have lost the plot in this essay if I move on to an apparently political topic. My subject is reading and readers. But Ms. Corrigan’s prowess as a reviewer, and her stated belief that The Great Gatsby is the greatest of American novels has set me on a track that I hope no one will mistake for run-of-the mill academic Trump-bashing. During my lifetime I have benefitted from the thoughts of book reviewers who seemed to me to have read everything. When I was young there was Clifton Fadiman. More recently the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt occupied that role at the New York Times. Ms. Corrigan herself fits the category. The American president is a graduate of one of our most prestigious universities. Surely it is impossible that he achieved his degree without reading books? Indeed, he is the alleged author of a book on one of his apparently favorite topics, deal-making. Its title indeed is The Art of the Deal. In reviewing Trump’s book Lehmann-Haupt had this to say of the author: “The more important fact is that he arouses one's sense of wonder at the imagination and self-invention it must have taken to leap from his father's shoulders and reach for the deals that he did. Jay Gatsby lives, without romance and without the usual tragic flaws.” Jay Gatsby lives.
The ghost-writer of the book under review, Tony Schwartz, along with the book’s original publisher, deny that Trump wrote a word of it. I have no independent information, but “of disputed authorship” is a well-established category to students of, say, Elizabethan drama. The book was a best-seller, and has many admirers to this day. Lehmann-Haupt’s review of it for the Times may have been the occasion by which the name “Trump” first became fixed in my mind. Jay Gatsby lives, Mr.Lehmann-Haupt wrote, without romance and without the usual tragic flaws. Going back in memory to the ‘Eighties, when The Art of the Deal appeared, has been for me a clarifying imaginative experience. The book was followed by several other Trump titles.
The uneven distribution of monetary resources in our country, often called the wealth divide has grown ever starker in our consciousness in recent decades. It overlaps only somewhat with the literacy divide, but by a pretty large somewhat. In a fast-moving world our public schools are graduating fewer and fewer young people prepared to find traditional “middle class” jobs or even jobs likely to lead to one. This is already a serious social issue and may well become a national security issue. But I believe most high-school English students have at least heard of The Great Gatsby, and not a few have read it.
