Voices of the Page

Every stage of life brings new pleasures along with its new challenges, even senectitude, which on the whole is more on the challenging side.  One of the pleasures of a financially adequate retirement is that it allows us to play at a doll’s house version of being Patrons of the Arts.  We are officially designated Friends of most museums within a hundred-mile radius, and we give token financial support to numerous other cultural and educational institutions.  On Friday night we attended a local fundraiser for People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos, a group that “believes in the power of literature to change lives”—a mission statement most literature professors can get behind.

            For us this fundraiser was not hard duty.  It began with a low-key supper party given by a board member, a delightful friend who is also a superb cook, the other guests being amiable and interesting conversationalists.  Then it was off to the Nassau Club for further socializing and a reading by Richard Ford, a prize-winning author of considerable eminence, and a very nice fellow to boot.  He’s the right man for the job in more ways that one.  He has a fine southern voice, strong and audible but not domineering.  I knew about his niceness first hand, as I had a few encounters with him many years ago when he was settled in Princeton for a while.  And even though a crowded fund-raiser was hardly the occasion to puff at the embers of a tenuous acquaintance lapsed for at least three decades, I could inwardly bask in something of the satisfaction of the man in that Browning poem who “once saw Shelley plain.” 

 Richard Ford, writer and reader

            I happen to be a lover of the short story, which is naturally the genre of choice for “People and Stories,” and I had correctly anticipated that we would hear a couple of good ones.  In fact we heard precisely two: one by John Cheever, the other by Ford himself.  There was a salient connection between them.  They shared a title (“Reunion”) appropriate for their shared narrative situation and setting, a brief meeting of two men in Grand Central Station.  In Cheever the principal characters are father and son.  The narrator is Charlie, the teen-aged son, a child of divorce, who by pre-arrangement is meeting up for lunch with his long-absent father during a fortuitous layover between trains.  Ford’s story is both a beautiful homage to Cheever and a free-standing gem on its own.  And how classical, and how literary is that!   Everybody knows what “writing” is, but not everyone knows about “literature”.  Literature is artistic writing consciously engaging with other artistic writing, as Virgil engaged Homer, Dante engaged Virgil, Milton engaged Dante, and most English poets since have bobbed about in Milton’s wake.  In Ford’s “Reunion” the Grand Central encounter is a chance one between two men of middle years, their first meeting since in an indeterminate but not distant past the discovery of the Narrator’s adulterous affair with Man Two’s wife had precipitated unseemly fisticuffs, marital dissolution, and (possibly, but only possibly) increments in self-knowledge.

            There is probably general agreement that Cheever is one of the all-time great masters of the short story.  I certainly think so, even if I hold that John Updike is even greater.  It took me a while to warm to either of them.  Their cognate fictional social worlds of the East Coast bourgeoisie, as circumscribed as the world of Jane Austen and to me equally foreign, was hard for me to credit until I had absorbed a few years of encountering their offspring in Princeton classrooms and taken out my own subscription to the New Yorker.  Cheever and Updike are both gone, but not forgotten.  I have the Library of America editions of both on my shelves.

John Cheever (1912-1982)

            Many centuries ago even private reading was done aloud, and early writers sometimes call words “the voices of the page”.  Almost any good piece of writing is magnified by being read aloud.  Dramatic literature demands it.  Our literature was born in orality, the word spoken or sung, the word heard and engaged. Modern technology is perhaps returning us to a bardic culture in which recitation is scarcely subordinated to composition.  My wife, a voracious reader, does her reading mainly through earbuds.

            What happens in Cheever’s “Reunion”?  Practically nothing, and a very great deal.  A young lad who barely knows his father, yet yearns for connection to him, has a ninety-minute opportunity for connection between his trains in and out of the city.  The father will treat him to lunch.  But though they enter four different restaurants, there is no lunch.  What there is is a display of the father’s character so appalling, so awful, and so economical that the embarrassed reader learns in three pages what would require ten pages of discursus to lay out.  This is mostly achieved through the invented spoken words of one character. The mother never appears, but you intuitively grasp the essence of the marriage and the inevitability of the divorce.  You don’t even need to be told by the young narrator what in fact you are told in the story’s first and final lines: “that was the last time I saw my father.”

Though I did not remember having read Cheever’s “Reunion” before, I had a dim sense of déjà vu—or was it entendu?—while listening to Ford read.  When I went to the Internet in search of a text, I discovered a possible explanation.  There is actually a New Yorker podcast of Ford reading the story.  In fact, I take it he has made something of a set piece out of tandem public readings of the two “Reunions”.  You don’t need to take my word for it.  You can hear it for yourself.

Finding a Good Book

        

              My blog essays vary considerably in their lack of ambition, but mainly readers get a snapshot of my Tuesday mind around lunchtime when I realize with a start that it is Tuesday around lunchtime.  This week was an exception.  I had a really serious topic—what I’ll call in short hand the Stanford rape case—and I was mulling over some issues in my head for a couple of days.  Then the Orlando massacre occurred, an event so horrible as to silence more modest revulsions, yet one concerning which I have nothing conceivably useful to say. 

Furthermore there came into my mind from the ether the advice of the Apostle: “whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report… think on these things.”  A scholar’s life is like all others in most respects.  Its girders are family and friends, its secondary framing the other human relationships connected to them and to one’s professional duties and habits.  How lucky I have been in all these regards.  One particularly marvelous aspect of the scholarly life is that you actually get paid for reading books.  It occurs to me that at least a few readers who read just for the love of truth, beauty, enlightenment or amusement might be interested in some professional advice.

“Of making many books there is no end,” wrote the biblical sage at a time when there were many millions fewer of them than there are today—before adding sagely “and much study wearies the body.”  A time will arrive in your life, if it has not already arrived, when you will realize with a pang that there is no possible way that you will be able to read all the books you will want to read, need to read, would be better for reading.  So many books, so little time.

One classic mistake sometimes made by even sophisticated readers is an overemphasis on the contemporary.  You probably ought to do no more than a tenth of your reading from among titles taken from the current book reviews.  You would never limit your appreciation of music to works composed in the last twelve months or your enjoyment of painting to canvases finished in the last two weeks.  There is nothing wrong with reading to “keep up”—that is, from a desire to be able to participate intelligently in a larger cultural conversation—but the conversation you really want to be interested in covers centuries and continents.  It is a conversation—like all the best aspects of culture—that brings the living into colloquy with the dead.  Remember Milton’s wonderful observation in Areopagitica: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

You can find your quarry by trial and error in a leisurely walk through the stacks of any reasonably well stocked public library, but I have found it helpful to call upon the aid of others who have thought longer and more systematically than I.  Among my books there are three to which I make recourse on a pretty regular basis.

The first of these is now called An English Library: a Bookman’s Guide, by F. Seymour Smith.  The first edition, dated 1943, which I picked up back in the Fifties, was one of those funny old wartime British books that seemed to be printed on crumbling toilet paper.  The edition I now use—there may well be a more recent one—dates from 1963.  Its new introduction begins: “An English Library, like wartime willow-herb, grew on a bomb site.”  It is double the size of the original effort, but still true to the old subtitle: “An Annotated List of Classics and Standard Books”.  If you were to read half of them, you’d be reading at a very high standard indeed.

The second reference work is a much more recent addition.  I became addicted to it only during my fairly recent residence in Paris.  The second-hand book trade in France is miserable.  The old joke about boarding house fare—“the food is absolute poison, and such small quantities”—seems vaguely relevant.  There is not really a lot on offer, and the prices will strike an American as shockingly high.  But at the Saturday market in Georges Brassens Park in the Fifteenth I was willing to pay 10€ for La Bibliothèque idéale, which is one of the “Encyclopédies d’aujourd’hui” of the Livres de poche series.  Its subject matter, cunningly distributed over a thousand pages, is French-language books (including many translations) that a couple of Parisian intellectuals consider your best intellectual diet.  They have forty-nine categories, and in each of them they list and characterize what they take to be the ten most important, the twenty-five most important, and the forty-nine most important titles.  Notice that they leave you a whole category to make up for yourself, and within each category you get to choose one additional title.  Robbespierrean democracy.

Finally, I use an American book—Steven Gilbar’s Good Books: A Book Lover’s Companion (Ticknor and Fields, 1982).  This is another huge and promiscuous catalogue, organized by interesting and often enough eccentric category, that eschews the obviously highbrow.  A nice feature of this book from my point of view is that it has a foreword by Clifton Fadiman—a name that will be familiar to you only if you are getting on in years.  He was one of the great public literary intellectuals of the Fifties, and the host of a popular quiz program.  He features tangentially in my Anti-Communist Manifestos.  We also just happen to have two elegant modernist Danish wood and leather beds that once belonged to him in our crawlspace, though I shudder to imagine their current condition.  I’ll reserve the account of how Clifton Fadiman’s beds got into my crawlspace for the next time I am desperate for a blog topic.  The next time you are desperate for some good bibliographical advice you can turn to any of the three books mentioned.

Readers or Viewers

Recently I read somewhere an interesting article about readers and non-readers.  The distinction was not between literates and illiterates—that is, between people capable or incapable of reading—but between those who do and those who don’t read books. 

            Of the latter  (“non-readers”) there was what was for me a surprisingly large number, and it was growing.  There are quite a few people who do not read a single book in a year, and some who do not read a book for years on end.  The non-readers tend to watch videos and stuff.   I hope that I myself am living proof that it is possible both to read books and to watch videos and stuff.  The author’s focus was the possible correlation of reading books with social class.  Sociology can be full of surprises, but not this time.  People who read books are on the whole better educated, more financially secure, and of “higher status” than those who do not.  The issue of relating correlation and causation, which is always vexing in such “studies,” was probably insuperable here, and I don’t believe it was touched upon.   But it does seem to me intuitively correct, not to say obvious, that people who are better off materially are likely also to be better in that all-important branch of spiritual life that is the fruit of serious, habitual reading.

            Something interesting happened, though, when I decided that I would like to revisit the article preparatory to writing a blog essay of my own.  I could not find it.  I could not in the first place remember whether I had read it in print or on-line.  When I Binged it—and I consider Binging of higher social status than Googling—I found dozens if not hundreds of items so similar that I was unable to identify the particular piece.  The irony did not escape me: I was foiled in my research into changing reading habits by my changed reading habits.

            These findings would discourage me, did they not contradict others in which I have more confidence—those of my own Subway Test.  (The test actually includes buses as well, though trains and planes require a special metric.)  Unusual personal circumstances determined that I became familiar with the London Underground and the Paris Métro well before I knew much about the New York Subway.  When my children moved to New York, however, which was quite a while ago now, I became an occasional subterranean traveler myself.  What I noticed early on was that in London about one in three straphangers would be reading a book—usually a distinctive orange and white Penguin paperback, suggesting intellectual quality.  London r[ea/i]ders are not merely numerous but above average in erudition.   (I once sat next to someone reading the Elementary Turkish Grammar edited by my friend and colleague Norman Itzkowitz.  It was all I could do to restrain myself from telling the guy, but it was way too unBritish.)  In Paris there would be a couple of readers in any half-full car, and everybody knows that all French books ooze intellectuality.  In New York the subway reader was much rarer.           

           

            Things could be worse, mind you.  My experience with public buses in Italy, although limited, has left me with the firm opinion that Italian bus-riders are not book readers.  I only ever saw one reader reading one book: Sesso nel confessionale.  This was a scandalous book of the moment, written by a blasphemous journalist who went around various churches making inventive confessions of imaginary sexual sins and then reporting the wildly differing penances imposed.  If you think our drug laws are incoherent….but I digress.

            Over the past couple of decades the evidence for American literacy has been, let us say, ambiguous.  If I judge things from the perspective of my royalty statements, there is little room for hope.  On the other hand, when I judge by the Subway Test, books seem to be making a strong comeback.  One sees quite a few book-readers, especially if you take an optimistic attitude to riders holding electronic tablets.  Most other people are reading something on their tiny telephone screens.  Almost everybody under sixty is sporting ear buds, and it is at least remotelyi possible that the guy with the closed eyes and the rhythmically nodding head is grocking on Jane Austen on Audible rather than Chet Atkins on acoustic guitar.

            Indeed I am beginning to believe that the much-maligned hand-held device may prove a stimulus to authors of serious books.  At the moment e-book publishers are trying hard to make the pixiled page look ever more like the printed one, but that may change.  My brainy granddaughter Sophia, who is studying brain science with other brainiacs at Johns Hopkins, just introduced me to what may be the Next Big Thing in readings: Spritzing.  If you check it out you will immediately grasp both the potential and the infuriation.  You will probably also agree that although people occasionally survive simultaneous texting and driving, things are unlikely to work out so well with Spritzing.

           

Dangerous Reading

Blog day has arrived, and once again I have been so preoccupied with life as to have neglected art shamelessly. If you will forgive a comparison between things minute and things much greater, I once again I find myself in the situation so frequently faced by Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century. Johnson was one of our language’s greatest journalists, and one of the very first Englishmen to earn a living almost entirely from his writing. Journalism used to have something to do with journals, and journals (as any graduate of French 101-A) will know, has something to do with jours (days). To digress only a few steps more, it should be obvious that our word journey must be a cousin to journalism, a journey once being the distance one could walk in a day.

In any event Johnson always faced deadlines on a weekly basis, and he often faced deadlines on a daily basis. Whether weekly or daily, however, his modus operandi was unchanged. He would often begin writing his pieces only when the printer’s devil arrived importunately at his door to pick up finished copy to take back to the shop.

Thus I begin. The entry will be anecdotal, as so much great journalism has been over the centuries. I have a very clear idea of the subject matter, but I am at a loss for a title. Three possibilities: (1) “Physics and Fatality”; (2) “When Inanimate Objects Animate”; or (3) “How Harriet Beecher Stowe Gave Me a Fat Lip”. Of course the readers of this blog, being a highly select group, are probably capable of coming up with something better; and I invite them to do so.

First, however, a literary quiz. How many of you recognize the following dialogue from an opening scene of a great twentieth-century novel? If by any chance you have not read this great book, I advise you to do so soon.

"Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place..."

Mikhail Bulgakov

Here’s a hint. The speaker is actually the Devil, well disguised, of course, and travelling under the name of “Woland”; the person he is addressing is a somewhat Faustian Soviet literary critic named Berlioz. Berlioz has no idea what Woland is really telling him: namely, that he, Berlioz, will very soon be decapitated. How could he know? He has no idea who Annushka is, not that it matters, and he rarely if ever contemplates the fashion in which an oleaginous substance might modify the wonted friction of a shoe sole against a pavement. No, Belioz’s mind is fixed not upon the fatality of physics but upon flimsier literary matters.

Indeed so was mine, a few days past, when I set out to recover a striking passage I half remembered reading in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days. It was the story of a nurse attached to one of the Union hospitals in the Civil War.* This woman died and, by her own request, was given a military burial among the men to whom she had ministered.

I keep my volumes of the “Library of America” on two of the upper shelves of a tall bookshelf in the dining room. I have them organized according to a private system, roughly though not slavishly chronological, with occasional thematic medleys. One of these is the Civil War, which happens, at the moment, to be center-right on the very top shelf, barely accessible even to my long reach.

The space allotted is finite; yet the admirable productions of the Library of America continue to appear. The results, in my household, are a very tight fit and even some double shelving. I had to pull rather hard to release the Whitman volume from its crowded spot between General Grant and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe—or, as it turned out—between a Rock and a Hard Place. I had to pull so hard, in fact, that three books came out of the shelf, but only one in my hand. With the lightning reflex and native athleticism of my vanished youth I was able to catch Grant in my left arm and hug him to my breast. This left me, with both hands full, helpfully cooperating with the descending novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, still in their strong and sharp-cornered box, by presenting my face to its full impact.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is most famous for having written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that had a tremendous impact on American public opinion concerning chattel slavery. It was with reference to this book that President Lincoln, upon being presented to the author, is supposed to have asked the following question: “Are you the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war?”

“Little lady,” indeed! Let me tell you, this “little lady” gave me a fat lip. Don’t mess with her. She’s deceptive, like the Monty Python rabbit. Next time I’ll take my chances with General Grant.

*She was 'A lady named Miss or Mrs. Billings'”. See p. 754 of the Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, as I eventually did, following emergency first aid.