Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

In youth, I read promiscuously. With age, one loses that kind of energy. One makes choices. With an old favorite (here please insert your own selection: mine include Austen, Cather, Dickens, George Eliot, Forster, Woolf), you know you won’t go wrong. I reread Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion every few years. I must have read Mrs. Dalloway so many times—including once sitting on the floor of a university library when I had several hours to spare—that I have virtually memorized it as if it were a lyric poem. I have reread both Moby-Dick and Middlemarch within the past decade, and each took up the better part of a year. I know that David Copperfield, which enchanted me in seventh grade, will enchant me still. An essay by Montaigne: anywhere, anytime.

  As a habit, reading takes hold early and lasts as long as eyesight does. Or even beyond: many former readers, now sight-impaired, rely on audiobooks, and some of them insist on using the verb “read” to describe what they do while listening. Readers tend to be dreamy and escapist, imagining other worlds, other selves. Some are skimmers; some are divers. Some stick to the surface, darting from item to item like my promiscuous adolescent self; others like to submerge themselves, reading deeply rather than widely, like an adult happily committed to a partner or spouse. They want mastery; if one work of a writer seduces them, they look forward to more of the same. These people—maybe obsessives, maybe just intellectuals—wish to learn as much as possible about a given subject or author. The late Guy Davenport hated the word “erudite” but had as encyclopedic a mind and a reading history as one might imagine. He was the kind of voracious lifetime reader, rare even in the mid-twentieth century, who is a member of an endangered species today. Mark Scroggins describes visits to his former mentor in Lexington, Kentucky, the two friends facing each other in easy chairs, discussing what they have been reading: “The canonical went without saying—he knew his Shakespeare, his Dickens, his Shelley and Coleridge. He had worked his way through all thirty-nine volumes of Ruskin’s works, and had spent a summer with Sir Walter Scott’s twenty-seven Waverley novels. One time he lamented that he might not get around to reading all of Bulwer-Lytton.”

  I dare anyone to find more than a handful of people, even or especially literary academics, most of whom have buried themselves in the minutiae of their subspecialties, of whom one might say, “The canonical went without saying.”

  Guy Davenport neither drove a car nor owned a television. Like Larry McMurtry, reputed to have known the whereabouts of everything in his now partly depleted sprawling stores in Archer City, Texas, he was first and foremost a man of the book. McMurtry—a professional bookman as well as a reader and writer—has called hanging around used bookstores the greatest part of his education. The critic Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, the novelist Shirley Jackson, inhabited a ramshackle frame house in North Bennington, Vermont, every nook overflowing with books, every room stocked floor to ceiling. Both the critic and the novelist could say where anything was: “the bookcase at the top of the stairs, second shelf from the bottom, on the left-hand side,” or words to that effect, according to generations of admiring colleagues and students. A life devoted to, and defined by, literature, by reading as the all-consuming passion, is harder to imagine in the twenty-first century. C. K. Stead, New Zealand’s preeminent man of letters, titled a 2008 selection of essays and reviews Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Critic. Stead is himself a poet, novelist, and essayist. In other words, not only a man of the book but a man who considers his “self” to be a book, or to be made of books. Think of other encyclopedic readers: the late Canadian scholar Northrop Frye, who could “anatomize” and categorize imaginative and critical literature because of his wide-ranging expertise; or the Stanford professor Franco Moretti, a skimmer rather than a diver, who prefers what he calls “distant” reading to close reading in order to take long views of his specimens; or the anomalous critic Harold Bloom, whose prodigious memory makes him a one-man Google. Giants of reading are never snobs; they take to everything, traveling in the realms of tin and brass as well as silver and gold. Book men and women are rare birds, but they seldom flock together. Each moves idiosyncratically, sensitive only to the demands of instinct and curiosity.

  We ordinary or “common”—the term beloved of Dr. Johnson—readers, even academics like me, often lack the stamina or retentive powers to emulate let alone compete with the geniuses of total recall. But we, too, wander at will among literary types, genres, and quality. Virginia Woolf had it only partly right in the summary distinction from her 1916 essay “Hours in a Library”: “Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connection whatever between the two.” Although I understand what she means, many of us love both.

  From the sublime to the mundane, the ennobling to the trashy, a genuine reader will pick up anything in sight, often regardless of style or substance, rather than do something else. When trapped, he’ll aim for a matchbook cover. Anything will serve. Reading inspires, amuses, and instills more than wisdom or even information. In the age of instant reference, when facts (that may turn out to be factoids, fictions, or falsehoods) are always available with a flick or click of the finger and a trip to the Internet, we have less need to perform heroic mnemonic acts. And surfing is not the same as browsing, at least for people of a certain age who can recall scanning library or bookstore shelves, looking for something and then finding more interesting the books that stood next to it. Children who catch the reading bug early know all too well the power and pleasure that arise from having mastered first one’s letters, then the words, the sentences, and the meanings discovered on the printed page. That combination, rather than information seeking, keeps them going into adulthood.

  The question of what one reads, and how reading habits change with age, inevitably inspires a complementary one: What does one think about, and do with, the physical books themselves? Many of us remember beloved books, the dog-eared copies that were the literary equivalent of the favorite panda, rabbit, teddy bear, or blanket we carried around until it finally deteriorated after too many insults or washings. As we became more serious, we began accumulating, at first unconsciously and then with greater deliberation, our own collections. For people who think of libraries as safe havens, islands of calm in the sea of life’s storms, the easiest way to propitiate the gods of chaos is to buy or build real bookshelves, which act as metaphorical protective bulwarks, capable of withstanding the assaults of surly siblings, unsympathetic or uninterested parents, and then other bullies and unpleasant data from the external world. The bedroom, the library, or—as in the case of Hyman and Jackson—the entire house becomes a literary fortress.

  What happens when you must dismantle the fortress? When you have to move? Everyone over a certain age has experienced at least one version of the dreaded experience. You have built student bookshelves from boards and cinder blocks or purchased cheap bookcases from IKEA. You have filled rooms with books left over from college courses, which you have never opened again but think you might, and other books bought for pleasure, which you might have reread and annotated. You have decorated a room, an apartment, a whole house, with books. You now find that it is time to leave it behind or to take it all with you. You have changed jobs, sold a house, had a divorce. You put everything into boxes. You carry the boxes—if you are poor or unlucky—down and then up stairs. You replace them on other shelves in your new digs.

  How many times can one do this? At least wedding gifts you have never opened can rest comfortably in the attic, garage, or basement and await the moving men when you must relocate. Or you can drive them directly to Goodwill. They do not take up interior domestic space that might be filled to better purpose. Getting rid of things has advantages. Some years back, I wrote a book called Seven Pleasures. I think of it as my book of gerunds: Reading, Walking, Looking, Dancing, Listening, Swimming, and Writing. When I was only a little younger, I might have added “Accessorizing” to the mix. Now I would replac
e that with “De-accessioning,” the pleasure that leads to the beauties of spareness and simplicity.

  At the age of forty, I sold a house and put all my worldly goods in storage for the year I left town. I knew that I would purchase, and move into, a smaller place when I returned. I had my big chance to clean, to clear, to cull. How to proceed? I began removing the books from the shelves, individually and lovingly; a gentle patina of dust covered all of them, but each one brought back memories or told a story about where I read it and why, a story about who I was when I read it. How can you sell your children?

  Abstruse philosophy turned out to have a respectable practical value: Hegel helped to break the ice. Who would have thought it? I opened my paperback copy of his Phenomenology, unregarded for more than twenty years. The print was—still—small, and the pages had yellowed. The spine had lost its glue. I realized that I would never read or need this book again and that if by some bizarre chance I had to reread Hegel, I could always find a better copy in the university library. Borrow books, for free! As a college student, I insisted on ownership; as a wiser adult, I understood that ownership, like all pretenses to control, is itself both a burden and an illusion. Into a cardboard box went Hegel’s Phenomenology. Then the floodgates opened. More volumes followed Hegel into the bins slated for resale. I have never missed one of them. And I still have not reread Hegel.

  In 2005, I chatted with the late poet Mark Strand about a move he was making from Chicago to New York. He had taken a position at Columbia with a lease on an apartment much smaller than his previous one. I asked how he had pared down belongings, especially books. “Willard,” the seventy-year-old sage replied, “you don’t really need more than a hundred books.” A young person, especially a serious reader with a bibliophile’s acquisitive instincts, will not recognize the truth of Strand’s wise remark. An older person will. “Reason not the need,” urged King Lear, who should have known better. In the digital age, all that recommends books as material objects, unless you are a scholar with specific or arcane demands, is their aesthetic appeal, their manifestation of cultural capital, or their marginalia, reminders of your former self. In London and elsewhere, I have seen antiques shops that sell books by the meter or yard, often merely fake cardboard boxes with genuine leather spines turned out, which will give the appearance of a gentleman’s library. Books used to furnish rooms. Now the entertainment center has replaced both the library and the hearth. It symbolizes power, pleasure, connection, and community. And, as I have noticed, only older houses and apartments have anything resembling a library. It has gone the way of the working fireplace.

  * * *

  If a person is what he reads as well as what he eats, you can take his measure by a quick look at his nightstand. Not the coffee table with its picture books, its ornamental art and collections of photography, and not even the bookshelves, which bear witness to collecting and to work untouched in years. Like the medicine cabinet and the refrigerator, the bed stand bears witness to daily habits or, more precisely, nocturnal ones. It is an intimate, revelatory piece of furniture. A person creeps into bed and either fuels or at least occupies himself as he escapes from the world and work. He begins an inner journey, one that may first keep him up and then knock him out.

  Here is my latest inventory: Sarah Ruden’s lively verse translation of the Aeneid; Jonathan Galassi’s bilingual version of the Canti of Giacomo Leopardi; the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell; art criticism by Jed Perl and music criticism by Alex Ross; Helen Vendler on the poems of Emily Dickinson; a cheap paperback detective novel by Erle Stanley Gardner presented to me by a Perry Mason fan. All of them have sat piled up for about a year. I read, as I move, more slowly at night. I dip in at random. I rearrange the books in their several piles. Supine, I do not stay awake for more than thirty minutes in bed. I try to make my reading serious, but at my age I am fighting a losing battle. Sleep always wins, and sooner now than it used to, when I propped myself up in bed at summer camp, a flashlight under the covers, engaging in an activity both stimulating and forbidden after we were supposed to shut down for the night. These days, I am usually out before the lights are.

  My bedside books lack long, and usually any, works of fiction. None approaches bestseller status; none is from this year. Most tellingly, they are all things that can be read, even poked through, nonsequentially. Virgil tells a story, of course, but I have read the Aeneid so many times, in so many versions, that I can open his epic of arms and men, and women, to any page—like those medieval readers who were throwing the sortes vergilianae, seeking answers from the poet regarded as a magus, whose wisdom can help with life’s questions—and pick up the story and its hero for as long as I wish. The Bishop-Lowell correspondence makes for a kind of dual biography, best read from front to back, but for someone who knows the poets and their work, it is legitimate to open and read anywhere. The poets’ letters answer one another, but each entry has a life of its own. “Tolle, lege”: the words of Saint Augustine come to mind. “Lift, read”: it is the classic formula because the simplest. Begin here. Begin anywhere. Then continue. Stop. Begin again.

  Except for trips and vacations by road, train, or air, I have put aside long works of fiction in favor of shorter works or others, like those I mention above, that can be dipped into. The Big Book (“Big Book, Big Evil,” said the smart third-century B.C.E. Greek poet Callimachus) still beckons, but it also intimidates. I resist its siren’s call unless I can find optimal conditions in which to hear it. Wallace Stevens once said that a long poem “comes to possess the reader and … naturalizes him in its own imagination and liberates him there.” True enough, and equally true for long works of prose. Time remains the necessary ally as well as the enemy. You need a lot of it. Virginia Woolf advised would-be readers to avoid entirely Spenser’s Faerie Queene: “Put it off as long as possible.” She continues with a list of mundane activities to pursue instead, “and then, when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun, make a dash for The Faery Queen and give yourself up to it.” As with many long books, the best time and place for such self-sacrifice, abandoning oneself to a book, is when one is laid up in bed with an illness that incapacitates mildly but does not impair one’s faculties, something that involves immobility, maybe a few light drugs, and little pain. A broken leg, with a little traction, perhaps.

  We seldom have that kind of time. Brevity becomes the soul of wisdom and passion, as well as wit. My preferred tastes now run to shorter things. No longer Joyce and James, except for their stories and novellas, no longer Proust, but Willa Cather, William Maxwell, and Peter Taylor among twentieth-century novelists, or any other master of cool clarity, sharpened perception, and a transparent style, the art that hides art. William Trevor, Alice Munro, and John Cheever come to mind: masters of short fiction whose power takes hold immediately but subtly, drawing one in, and both captures and—in Stevens’s phrase—liberates. Or other writers, now well beyond middle age, who can show us the way and reveal what lies ahead. I think of the English octogenarian Jane Gardam. And I try to be fair to those younger writers—Edward St. Aubyn, Caleb Crain, and Jhumpa Lahiri can stand in for many others—whose work gives fresh, unexpected pleasures and lets us in on what the new generations are up to.

  At least as important as genre or length are tone and style. For me, a senior reader, the sentence matters, perhaps most of all. Lucidity now trumps opacity and difficulty. I understand, as my younger self did not, that complexity is not synonymous with depth, nor simplicity with superficiality. Style makes its own demands. I badger my students with my definition of good writing: it is what makes you interested in something you are not interested in. Quality of syntax and language indicates quality of mind. The unexpected adjective, or a surprising adjective-noun combination, can jump from the page into a reader’s mind.

  Edith Wharton, master of nuance and social detail, can take one’s breath away with the simplest gesture. Here’s one such unobtrusive, easy-to-miss sentenc
e that, on the one hand, has nothing to do with the action of the narrative and, on the other hand, everything to do with the mind of a character. A man has embarked on an illicit love affair that will have terrible consequences as the novel progresses. At the theater in Paris, he is happy to be seen with a beautiful woman on his arm in a public place where no one will recognize them. But “happy” is not how Wharton limns her man: “Darrow, lighting a cigarette while she sucked her straw, knew the primitive complacency of the man at whose companion other men stare” (The Reef). “Primitive” is an unanticipated but accurate choice, especially in combination with “complacency.” Wharton, the astute observer of manners and morals, has depicted the essential crudeness at the root of a sophisticated masculine psychology. Men, she seems to say to us, they’re all the same, wherever and whenever you find them.

  Two favorite contemporary writers, one still alive, the other recently gone, both octogenarians, have written their final books. Shirley Hazzard and James Salter can insinuate thoughts and feelings quirkily or with unforeseen turns of phrase, unexpected metaphors, off stylistic gestures. This gift alone can keep a reader going. Through its style even more than its subjects, Salter’s memoir Burning the Days opens up to us its author’s paradoxical feline heterosexuality, a combination of Hemingway’s cool machismo and James’s subtleties of perception. Here is Salter on the eternal erotic promise of Rome, following his inventories of the available women and the louche men who pursue them:

  It was a city of matchless decrepitude: muted colors, fountains, trees on the rooftops, beautiful tough boys, trash. A southern city—there were palms on the Piazza di Spagna and the sun incandescent in the afternoon. A venal city, flourishing through the ages—nothing so often betrayed could retain a shred of illusion. In the day it was beautiful. At night it became sinister.

  One moves forward through the prose, stopping to admire the adjectives (“matchless” and “muted” linked through alliteration; “beautiful” and “tough” linked through opposition), to realize that the city is like a person, capable of being betrayed, and lacking all illusion. The city becomes its people—beautiful by day, sinister by night. Any page of Salter can sound like this. His last novel, All That Is, proves that great masters in their late styles can strip away everything inessential to reveal necessary essences. Late Matisse cutouts come to mind.