A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  Readers browsing through the severely damaged library of Holland House in West London, wrecked by a fire bomb on 22 October 1940. (photo credit 21.5)

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  Patient as one of the alchemists, I’ve always imagined

  and attempted something else, and would be willing

  to sacrifice all satisfaction and vanity for its sake, just

  as in the old days they used to burn their furniture

  and the beams of their roofs to feed their furnace for

  the magnum opus. What is it? Difficult to say: simply

  a book, in several volumes, a book that is truly a book,

  architecturally sound and premeditated, and not a

  collection of casual inspirations however wonderful

  that might be.… So there, dear friend, is the bare

  confession of this vice which I’ve rejected a

  thousand times.… But it holds me in its sway and

  I may yet be able to succeed, not in the completion of

  this work as a whole (one would have to be

  God-knows-who for that!) but in showing a

  successful fragment.… proving through finished

  portions that this book does exist, and that

  I was aware of what I wasn’t able to accomplish.

  STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

  Letter to Paul Verlaine, November 16, 1869

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  n Hemingway’s celebrated story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the protagonist, who is dying, recalls all the stories he will now never write. “He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?”1 He mentions a few but the list, of course, must be endless. The shelves of books we haven’t written, like those of books we haven’t read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library’s farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.

  Among the books I haven’t written — among the books I haven’t read but would like to read — is The History of Reading. I can see it, just there, at the exact point where the light of this section of the library ends and the darkness of the next section begins. I know exactly what it looks like. I can picture its cover and imagine the feel of its rich cream pages. I can guess, with prurient accuracy, the sensual dark cloth binding beneath the jacket, and the embossed golden letters. I know its sober title page, and its witty epigraph and moving dedication. I know it possesses a copious and curious index which will give me intense delight, with headings such as (I fall by chance on the letter T) Tantalus for readers, Tarzan’s library, Tearing pages, Toes (reading with), Tolstoy’s canon, Tombstones, Torment by recitation, Tortoise (see Shells and animal skins), Touching books, Touchstone and censorship, Transmigration of readers’ souls (see Lending books). I know the book has, like veins in marble, signatures of illustrations that I have never seen before: a seventh-century mural depicting the Library of Alexandria as seen by a contemporary artist; a photograph of the poet Sylvia Plath reading out loud in a garden, in the rain; a sketch of Pascal’s room at Port-Royal, showing the books he kept on his desk; a photograph of the sea-sodden books saved by one of the passengers on the Titanic, without which she would not abandon ship; Greta Garbo’s Christmas list for 1933, drawn up in her own hand, showing that among the books she was going to buy was Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; Emily Dickinson in bed, a frilly bonnet tied snugly under her chin and six or seven books lying around her, whose titles I can just barely make out.

  I have the book open in front of me, on my table. It is amicably written (I have an exact sense of its tone), accessible and yet erudite, informative and yet reflective. The author, whose face I’ve seen in the handsome frontispiece, is smiling agreeably (I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman; the clean-shaven face could be either, and so could the initials of the name) and I feel I’m in good hands. I know that as I proceed through the chapters I will be introduced to that ancient family of readers, some famous, many obscure, to which I belong. I will learn of their manners, and the changes in those manners, and the transformation they underwent as they carried with them, like the magi of old, the power of transforming dead signs into living memory. I will read of their triumphs and persecutions and almost secret discoveries. And in the end I will better understand who I, the reader, am.

  That a book does not exist (or does not yet exist) is not a reason to ignore it any more than we would ignore a book on an imaginary subject. There are volumes written on the unicorn, on Atlantis, on gender equality, on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets and the equally dark Youth. But the history this book records has been particularly difficult to grasp; it is made, so to speak, of its digressions. One subject calls to another, an anecdote brings a seemingly unrelated story to mind, and the author proceeds as if unaware of logical causality or historical continuity, as if defining the reader’s freedom in the very writing about the craft.

  And yet, in this apparent randomness, there is a method: this book I see before me is the history not only of reading but also of common readers, the individuals who, through the ages, chose certain books over others, accepted in a few cases the verdict of their elders, but at other times rescued forgotten titles from the past, or put upon their library shelves the elect among their contemporaries. This is the story of their small triumphs and their secret sufferings, and of the manner in which these things came to pass. How it all happened is minutely chronicled in this book, in the daily life of a few ordinary people discovered here and there in family memoirs, village histories, accounts of life in distant places long ago. But it is always individuals who are spoken of, never vast nationalities or generations whose choices belong not to the history of reading but to that of statistics. Rilke once asked, “Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we’ve always spoken about its masses, as if we were telling about a gathering of people, instead of talking about the one person they were standing around, because he was a stranger and was dying? Yes, it’s possible.”2 This misunderstanding the author of The History of Reading has surely recognized.

  Here then, in Chapter Fourteen, is Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and treasurer and chancellor to King Edward II, who was born on January 24, 1287, in a little village near Bury St. Edmund’s, in Suffolk, and who, on his fifty-eighth birthday, completed a book, explaining that “because it principally treats of the love of books, we have chosen after the fashion of the ancient Romans fondly to name it by a Greek word, Philobiblon”. Four months later, he died. De Bury had collected books with a passion; he had, it was said, more books than all the other bishops of England put together, and so many lay piled around his bed that it was hardly possible to move in his room without treading on them. De Bury, thank the stars, was not a scholar, and just read what he liked. He thought the Hermes Trismegistus (a Neoplatonic volume of Egyptian alchemy from around the third century AD) an excellent scientific book “from before the Flood”, attributed the wrong works to Aristotle and quoted some terrible verses as if they were by Ovid. It didn’t matter. “In books,” he wrote, “I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates: all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”3 (Our author doesn’t mention it, but Virginia Woolf, in a paper read at school, echoed de Bury’s contention: “I have sometimes dreamt,” she wrote, “that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.’
”)4

  Chapter Eight is devoted to an almost forgotten reader whom Saint Augustine, in one of his letters, praises as a formidable scribe and to whom he dedicated one of his books. Her name was Melania the Younger (to distinguish her from her grandmother, Melania the Elder) and she lived in Rome, in Egypt and in North Africa. She was born around 385 and died in Bethlehem in 439. She was passionately fond of books, and copied out for herself as many as she could find, thereby collecting an important library. The scholar Gerontius, writing in the fifth century, described her as “naturally gifted” and so fond of reading that “she would go through the Lives of the Fathers as if she were eating dessert”. “She read books that were bought, as well as books she chanced upon with such diligence that no word or thought remained unknown to her. So overwhelming was her love of learning, that when she read in Latin, it seemed to everyone that she did not know Greek and, on the other hand, when she read in Greek, it was thought that she did not know Latin.”5 Brilliant and transient, Melania the Younger drifts through The History of Reading as one of the many who sought comfort in books.

  From a century closer to us (but the author of The History of Reading doesn’t care for these arbitrary conventions, and invites him into Chapter Six) another eclectic reader, the genial Oscar Wilde, makes his appearance. We follow his reading progress, from the Celtic fairy-tales given to him by his mother to the scholarly volumes he read at Magdalen College in Oxford. It was here at Oxford that, for one of his examinations, he was asked to translate from the Greek version of the story of the Passion in the New Testament, and since he did so easily and accurately the examiners told him it was enough. Wilde continued, and once again the examiners told him to stop. “Oh, do let me go on,” Wilde said, “I want to see how it ends.”

  For Wilde, it was as important to know what he liked as it was to know what he should avoid. For the benefit of the subscribers to the Pall Mall Gazette he issued, on February 8, 1886, these words of advice on what “To Read, or Not to Read”:

  Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Rogers’ Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers, except St Augustine, all John Stuart Mill, except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’ History of Philosophy, all argumentative books, and all books that try to prove anything.… To tell people what to read is as a rule either useless or harmful, for the true appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching, to Parnassus there is no primer, and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.

  Private and public reading tastes are discussed quite early in the book, in Chapter Four. The role of reader as anthologist is considered, as collector of material either for oneself (the commonplace book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the example given) or for others (Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), and our author very amusingly shows how concepts of audience modify the choice of an anthologist’s texts. To support this “micro-history of anthologies” our author quotes Professor Jonathan Rose on the “five common fallacies to reader response”:

  • first, all literature is political, in the sense that it always influences the political consciousness of the reader;

  • second, the influence of a given text is directly proportional to its circulation;

  • third, “popular” culture has a much larger following than “high” culture, and therefore it more accurately reflects the attitudes of the masses;

  • fourth, “high” culture tends to reinforce acceptance of the existing social and political order (a presumption widely shared by both the left and the right); and

  • fifth, the canon of “great books” is defined solely by social elites. Common readers either do not recognize that canon, or else they accept it only out of deference to elite opinion.6

  As our author makes quite clear, we the readers are commonly guilty of subscribing to at least some, if not all, of these fallacies. The chapter also mentions “ready-made” anthologies collected and come upon by chance, such as the ten thousand texts assembled in a curious Jewish archive in Old Cairo, called the Geniza and discovered in 1890 in the sealed lumber-room of a medieval synagogue. Because of the Jewish reverence for the name of God, no paper was thrown away for fear it might bear His name, and therefore everything from marriage contracts to grocery lists, from love poems to booksellers’ catalogues (one of which included the first known reference to The Arabian Nights), was assembled here for a future reader.7

  Not one but three chapters (Thirty-one, Thirty-two and Thirty-three) are devoted to what our author calls “The Invention of the Reader”. Every text assumes a reader. When Cervantes begins his introduction to the first part of Don Quixote with the invocation “Leisured reader,”8 it is I who from the first words become a character in the fiction, a person with time enough to indulge in the story that is about to begin. To me Cervantes addresses the book, to me he explains the facts of its composition, to me he confesses the book’s shortcomings. Following the advice of a friend, he has written himself a few laudatory poems recommending the book (today’s less inspired version is to ask well-known personalities for praise and stick their panegyrics on the book’s jacket). Cervantes undermines his own authority by taking me into his confidence. I, the reader, am put on my guard and, by that very action, disarmed. How can I protest what has been explained to me so clearly? I agree to play the game. I accept the fiction. I don’t close the book.

  My open deception continues. Eight chapters into the first part of Don Quixote, I am told that these are the extent of Cervantes’s telling and that the rest of the book is a translation from the Arabic by the historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. Why the artifice? Because I, the reader, am not easily convinced, and while I don’t fall for most tricks by which the author swears truthfulness, I enjoy being pulled into a game in which the levels of reading are constantly shifting. I read a novel, I read a true adventure, I read the translation of a true adventure, I read a corrected version of the facts.

  The History of Reading is eclectic. The invention of the reader is followed by a chapter on the invention of the writer, another fictional character. “I’ve had the misfortune of beginning a book with the word ‘I’,” wrote Proust, “and immediately it was thought that instead of attempting to discover general laws, I was analysing myself in the individual and detestable sense of the word.”9 This leads our author to discuss the use of the first person singular, and how that fictitious “I” forces the reader into a semblance of dialogue from which, however, the reader is excluded by the physical reality of the page. “Only when the reader reads beyond the writer’s authority does the dialogue take place”, says our author, and draws his examples from the nouveau roman, notably from Michel Butor’s La Modification,10 written entirely in the second person. “Here,” says our author, “the cards are on the table, and the writer neither expects us to believe in the ‘I’ nor presumes us to assume the role of the condescended to ‘dear reader’.”

  In a fascinating aside (Chapter Forty of The History of Reading) our author advances the original suggestion that the form in which the reader is addressed leads to the creation of the principal literary genres — or at least to their categorization. In 1948, in Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk, the German critic Wolfgang Kayser suggested that the concept of genre derived from the three persons that exist in every known language: “I”, “you” and “he, she or it”. In lyrical literature, the “I” expresses itself emotionally; in drama, the “I” becomes a second person, “you”, and engages with another “you” in a passionate dialogue. Finally, in the epic, the protagonist is the third person, “he, she or it”, who narrates objectively. Furthermore, each genre requires from the reader three distinct attitudes: a lyrical attitude (that of song), a dramatic attitude (which Kayser calls “apostrophe”) and an epic attitude, or enunciation.11 O
ur author enthusiastically embraces this argument, and proceeds to illustrate it through three readers: a nineteenth-century French schoolgirl, Éloise Bertrand, whose diary survived the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and who faithfully recorded her reading of Nerval; Douglas Hyde, who was prompter at the performance of The Vicar of Wakefield at the Court Theatre in London, with Ellen Terry as Olivia; and Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste, who read (partially) her employer’s extensive novel.

  In Chapter Sixty-eight (this History of Reading is a comfortingly fat tome) our author raises the question of how (and why) certain readers will preserve a reading long after most other readers have relinquished it to the past. The example given is from a London journal published sometime in 1855, when most English papers were full of news of the war in Crimea:

  John Challis, an old man about 60 years of age, dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the golden age, and George Campbell, aged 35, who described himself as a lawyer, and appeared completely equipped in female attire of the present day, were placed at the bar before Sir R.W. Carden, charged with being found disguised as women in the Druids’-hall, in Turnagain Lane, an unlicensed dancing room, for the purpose of exciting others to commit an unnatural offence.12

  “A shepherdess of the golden age”: by 1855 the literary pastoral ideal was very much a thing of the past. Codified in Theocritus’s Idylls in the third century BC, appealing to writers in one form or another until well into the seventeenth century, tempting such disparate writers as Milton, Garcilaso de la Vega, Giambattista Marino, Cervantes, Sidney and Fletcher, the pastoral found a very different reflection in novelists such as George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Émile Zola and Ramón del Valle Inclán, who were giving readers other, less sunlit visions of country life in their books: Adam Bede (1859), Cranford (1853), La Terre (1887), Tirano Banderas (1926). These reconsiderations were not new. As early as the fourteenth century, the Spanish writer Juan Ruiz, arch-priest of Hita, in his Libro de buen amor (The Book of Loving Well), had subverted the convention in which a poet or lonely knight meets a beautiful shepherdess whom he gently seduces, by having the narrator encounter in the hills of Guadarrama four wild, burly and headstrong shepherdesses. The first two rape him, he escapes from the third by falsely promising to marry her, while the fourth offers him lodging in exchange for clothes, jewels, a wedding or hard cash. Two hundred years later, there were few such as the elderly Mr. Challis, who still believed in the symbolic appeal of the loving shepherd and his shepherdess, or in the amorous gentleman and the innocent country maiden. According to the author of The History of Reading, this is one of the ways (extreme, no doubt) in which readers preserve and retell the past.