Browsings

by Michael Dirda

  Obviously all these titles fall, more or less, into the category of “books about books.” Stories and poems and works of history and humane letters are all I ever write about, albeit through a very personal lens whenever possible. As I’ve said more than once, I shy away from calling myself a critic—I don’t possess that kind of analytic mind, though I also hope that I’m more entertaining than most of the critics I read. (Sorry, no names.) In fact, I’m a bookman, an appreciator, a cheerleader for the old, the neglected, the marginalized, and the forgotten. On sunny days I may call myself a literary journalist.

  What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them. Last week, for The Washington Post, I reviewed a reissue of Shepherd Mead’s humorous How to Live Like a Lord Without Really Trying; this week, I’m indulging a lifelong fascination with religion by writing about Trent: What Happened at the Council, and the week following that I’ll be discussing the noir fiction of Cornell Woolrich. Harper’s Magazine recently ran my overview of Thornton Wilder’s varied and undervalued work, while The Weekly Standard published my reflections on the nonfiction of A. J. A. Symons (author of the biographical classic, The Quest for Corvo) and Bookforum brought out a piece about George Minois’s The Atheist’s Bible, a historical study of a late medieval polemic attacking “the three impostors” Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. In the next couple of months I’ll be taking on subjects as various as John Keats, the fantasies of M. P. Shiel, the short stories of Sherwood Anderson, some recent science fiction scholarship, and the fiction of James Salter, among much else, including those inexorable weekly reviews for The Post. Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I’m just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style. You be the judge (and for those who’d like to be in my pay—please send in your application).

  Of course, all this work is merely journalism, and it’s hard to make it seem anywhere near as important as a book. Indeed, it isn’t. Books possess a shape and permanence that scattered pieces—disjecta membra—don’t.

  When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I’m tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else’s life offends my vanity. I don’t want to submerge myself in another man or woman’s existence, I want to write about me, about the books and writers that I like. And I want to be able to finish any commitment within a year at best, so that I can get on to something else. I have, it would seem, the temperament of a reporter—always intensely interested in a subject for a week, but soon ready to move on to the next assignment.

  For a while now I did have one big project in mind: “The Great Age of Storytelling.” I hoped to write about the amazing flowering of popular fiction in England and elsewhere from roughly 1860 to 1930. All the modern genres really start then, and during this period many of our iconic figures sprang to life, from Peter Pan to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Alas, back in 2010, when I first suggested such a book, no trade publisher was willing to fork out enough cash to support my household for two years, the time I felt I needed to do a good job. I may try again in the near future, perhaps approaching a university press, but I would still require a significant amount of money. That’s something in short supply at universities these days.

  Of course, what I really should do is turn my energies to creating a reality TV show called Books. While I was in New York, I managed a couple of quick coffees with my son Mike, who works for a big public relations firm there. He told me that his classmate from Oberlin College, a young woman named Lena Dunham, was voted the coolest person in America by Time magazine. She is, I’ve since learned, the driving force behind an award-winning television series called Girls. I’ve never seen it. It would be kind of creepy if I had. Still, I just read that the fortunate Ms. Dunham has received a $3.5 million book contract. I suppose that whatever she writes will attract one or two more readers than something called “The Great Age of Storytelling.”

  Sigh. Cutting edge I’ll never be, unless, of course, old-fashioned suddenly becomes hip and cool. Which could happen, right? Right?

  [Note: I eventually found a publisher for The Great Age of Storytelling, though the advance was modest. I’m hoping the book will appear in 2016.]

  Ending Up

  Over the past year I’ve enjoyed writing these “Browsings” essays, meditations, and rants. The time has quite sped by. I hope you—whoever you are—have enjoyed reading them. Some of them anyway.

  At all events, last week I decided it was time to pass this particular baton to someone else. The American Scholar’s editors have not yet announced my successor, but fairly soon you will discover a new name gracing the Friday slot on the magazine’s website. I hope you’ll give that new person a try.

  While I’ll probably contribute columns for another week or two, I thought it worthwhile to try and settle in my own mind why I am walking away from work that I enjoy. Time is one reason. I find, to recall a favorite saying of my father, that every 15-minute job now ends up taking an hour. Another is coming up with new topics. I envy those bloggers who can express strong opinions about everything. Me, I just metaphorically saunter along, whistling a happy tune, and hope that my effusions turn out to be mildly entertaining.

  More and more, though, I worry that my pen has gleaned my teeming brain and that what I produce is weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. (Guess the sources of the two quotations—both mentioned and identified in earlier columns—and win a prize!) The furrows of the brain occasionally need to lie fallow.

  And still another reason is money. I do live by my pen, or keyboard, and while there’s considerable prestige attached to writing for the Scholar, it doesn’t reward its contributors as handsomely as, say, The New Yorker or Esquire—not that I’ve ever written for either of those magazines. The American Scholar is an intellectual quarterly and what it lacks in lavish compensation, it makes up for in intelligent, appreciative readers.

  Still, I have developed some low-grade champagne tastes, especially in my book collecting, which all by itself demands a healthy bank balance. In my youth, I was happy just to unearth any copy of, say, E. F. Benson’s mystery The Blotting Book. I now own both the English and the American first editions. These aren’t terribly pricey items, to be sure—one cost $35 and the other $15—but if you buy lots of such treasures, it gradually adds up.

  For instance, just this past Wednesday I tore myself away from this desk and drove downtown to have lunch with the poet and translator A. M. Juster. Juster is the pen name of a very senior government official who translates Latin poetry, often fairly obscure Latin poetry, as a pastime. Sounds positively Victorian, doesn’t it? And wholly admirable too. Gladstone, England’s most famous 19th-century prime minister, built a personal library of more than 32,000 volumes and it was for use, not ostentation. His rival Disraeli, when out of power, brought out excellent and witty novels. At best our leading politicians may occasionally open a book if shown how. Former presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich did crank out some pot-boiling adventure fiction, but that’s not quite the same thing.

  After an extremely enjoyable lunch (Juster had onion soup, I had moussaka), with talk—and I’m not kidding about this—of Maximianus’s elegies, acrostic poetry, and the riddles of Aldhelm, I said goodbye and hurried back to my car with three minutes to spare on the parking meter. At that point I should have pointed my wife’s Prius toward Silver Spring and gone home.

  Needless to say, I didn’t.

  Instead I drove toward Second Story Books in Dupont Circle and spent 15 minutes looking for a place to park. I then scouted the offerings ($3 each) on the bookstore’s sidewalk shelves and turned up a nice first of The Panic Hand, a collection of Jonathan Carroll’s elegant and eerie short stories. Long ago, when I reviewed one of his early novels�
�Sleeping in Flame—I described its overall feel as a cross between the magazines Weird Tales and Vanity Fair.

  At which point, I really should have plunked down my $3, taken my purchase, and gone home.

  Needless to say, I didn’t.

  Instead I sauntered into the store itself and began, just idly, to look around. Right away I noticed a copy of Baron Corvo’s Hubert’s Arthur for $100, but decided that was too much, especially since I’d just recently written about Corvo and his biographer A. J. A. Symons for The Weekly Standard. I wasn’t likely to read any more of this paranoid decadent’s work for a while. So I poked around some more. I nearly bought a very nice first of M. F. K. Fisher’s Map of Another Town, her account of a long sojourn in Aix-en-Provence. I’m fond of this book because I too once lived in Aix, and, as it happened, roomed for six weeks with the same landlady as Fisher. But I knew Madame Wytenhove 20 years later. I sometimes fantasize that the gorgeous Mary Frances and I slept in the same bed.

  But I already owned Map of Another Town, so even though it was just $6, I left it on the shelf for some other lucky Francophile.

  I kept on browsing. I thought about a somewhat worn copy of Mark Girouard’s The Victorian Country House, but I’ve got a stack of his books on the piano now, including Life in the English Country House and The Return to Camelot. I figured I should wait and see if I read those two before I began buying more Girouard. Sound logic, yes, but I now rather regret leaving the book.

  After exploring the fiction, art and architecture, literary criticism, and poetry sections, I lingered over science fiction and fantasy. The store was selling paperbacks of William Morris’s prose romances, in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter, for $4 apiece. The thing is, I own some of the Morris books already—I knew I had The Well at the World’s End because it bears one of the most haunting titles in all of English literature. But did The Sundering Flood and The Wood Beyond the World repose somewhere in a box in the basement? I thought so but couldn’t remember. In the end, I placed the Second Story copies back on the shelf.

  As usual, I then wandered through mythology and folklore—nothing—followed by history. In the Medieval section I pulled out a first edition of Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, translated by John Jay Parry and published by Columbia in 1941. I’d studied a paperback of this 12th-century rule-book for lovers back in college, and then a revised version in graduate school. But I don’t really like paperbacks—except for 1950s mysteries with sleazy covers featuring blondes in dishabille—and this was a handsome, if jacketless, hardback, and I just wanted it. So, I shelled out $15 and finally prepared to go home.

  But I didn’t.

  On the way out a bookcase full of elegant sets, some leather-bound, caught my eye. Now I admit to mixed feelings about Oeuvres Completes and long rows of matching books—altogether too official-looking—but I noticed that there were seven or eight Pléiade editions displayed, including the two volumes of Flaubert’s collected novels. As God is my witness, to quote the immortal Scarlett O’Hara, I opened one of them and my eyes fell on my favorite passage from The Temptation of St. Anthony, the section where the Queen of Sheba appears to the austere anchorite to tempt him with the delights of her body. Her enticements rise to a climax with the words: “Je ne suis pas une femme, je suis un monde.” And it was just those words I had opened to: “I am not a woman, I am a world.”

  So, naturally I had to buy the Flauberts, since one doesn’t just casually defy the Sortes Virgilianae: The book gods would withdraw their favor. Still, I like Pléiades and own quite a few. Okay, more than a few. As everyone says, they really are more attractive than the slightly clunky Library of America titles and these two were bargain-priced. In a twinkling, the Dirda bank balance was down another $40.

  At which point, I really, really should have gotten in my car and driven home.

  But did I? Need you ask?

  Instead I headed down P Street to Georgetown and The Lantern Bookshop, operated for the benefit of Bryn Mawr College. There I wandered in and noticed, on the rare and vintage shelf, a copy of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, the 1930s travel classic about the Middle East and Central Asia. I already possessed the Oxford paperback of this book and the handsome Folio Society hardback of it, too. But this John Lehmann edition called to me—it had been published in 1950 and it would match my John Lehmann edition of Byron’s The Station (about Mount Athos). It wasn’t the first edition, which appeared in 1937, so I discussed the price with the manager and it was dropped to $25.

  That wouldn’t have been so bad, except that I’d also spotted a copy of Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies for the same price—as well as nice $5 editions of Angus Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After, and Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, the latter the English first. Plus there was this book called Twenty Years in Paris, by some guy named Robert Sherard I’d never heard of, but that featured photographs of 19th-century literary eminences, including a striking one of Maupassant. At $5 I had to get that too. I later looked Sherard’s book up online and discovered it was, in theory, worth quite a bit more than I’d paid for it. Always gratifying. Often it turns out the other way round.

  In the end I dropped $75 at The Lantern.

  And at that point I finally did go home, where I surreptitiously smuggled my new acquisitions into the house.

  Now this is bad, very bad. These days I can hardly step away from this desk and not find myself gravitating to a used-book store and pulling out my credit card. I can almost always justify my purchases as sensible, reasonable courses of action. All addicts do this. Still, those book outlays add up quite dramatically when the monthly Visa bill comes due.

  So that’s why I’m bringing the “Browsings” column to a close. I’ve got to figure out how to break into Vanity Fair or The New Yorker, where the big bucks are. Bloody likely. But it’s either that or take a part-time job at Second Story Books or the Friends of the Library Book Sale Room in Wheaton. Those employee discounts would come in mighty handy.

  A Positively, Final Appearance

  As it happens, this will be—to borrow the title of the third installment of Alec Guinness’s autobiography—my “positively, final appearance,” at least as the Friday “Browsings” columnist. No doubt the Scholar’s persuasive editors will occasionally inveigle me into writing a book review or article for the print magazine. In the meantime, thank you all for reading my effusions of the past year.

  By this point anything else I say is bound to sound anticlimactic, and I should probably just take a bow, wave cheerio, and exit stage left. But I do have a few last thoughts to share. Let me number them, as it conveys the impression that I’ve thought systematically about all these matters.

  1) To my mind, reading should be a pleasure and, through these columns, I’ve tried to pass along some of the excitement and rewards of my own bookish life. All too often the work of today’s literary journalists calls to mind a remark made by Wilfred Sheed about the once-well-known critic Irving Howe. What Sheed said, more or less, was this: When you read Irving Howe’s criticism, you can tell that he’s not doing it for fun.

  I certainly hope these various essays, in their differing, dithering ways, have been fun. I’ve done my best to be amusing, silly, and sometimes a little weird. As my old friend Bill Greider, the national affairs correspondent for The Nation, once told me: Writing that isn’t fun to read usually doesn’t get read.

  2) I hope that the past 50 or so columns have reminded readers that the world of books is bigger than the current best-seller list. Thirty-five years ago this spring, I was hired as an assistant editor at The Washington Book World. Before long, I quietly inaugurated my own personal crusade: to entice people to try unexpected books, old books, neglected books, genre books, upsetting books, downright strange books. May I share a favorite, and famous, passage from Kafka? “The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more t
han ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

  Once, this seemed to me to describe the sort of soul-shattering literary experiences we should always be seeking. Not so much now. For Kafka, reading, like criticism of the Irving Howe school, was something you didn’t just do for fun. It was hard work and you needed to use an ax and you probably felt exhausted afterwards and ready for some hot compresses.

  There are, of course, books—great, good, and bad—that do require the last full measure of devotion. A reviewer’s lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul, a novel of consummate, unmitigated tedium, interrupted by a few coloratura passages of great beauty and observation. Some people—not I—have complained about Proust’s meandering sentences, Henry James’s fine distinctions, or Thomas Aquinas’s logic-chopping. Well, I say if you don’t like them, don’t read them. You’re not in school any more. Even the best mountaineers aren’t always up for an ascent of Mount Everest. Sometimes a reader just wants to spend some idle days on the Yann, or drift slowly along with Hercule Poirot as he solves some hideously complicated murder, or quietly revel in the mishaps of Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle. Just remember, though: keep trying books outside your comfort zone. At least from time to time. True readers boldly go where they haven’t gone before.

  3) Books don’t just furnish a room. A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know. When I was growing up, there used to be an impressive librarian’s guide entitled Living with Books. I think that’s the right idea. Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world.