by Wendy Lesser
In fact, the Victorian novel I mentioned a few paragraphs back, the one that grows from 875 to 2,933 pages when it moves from tablet to phone, is James’s The Tragic Muse. I downloaded it from Gutenberg to both devices as I was preparing to read it again. The opening pages, though, gave no indication about whether this was the early version, which James wrote when he was in his forties, or the late-style rewrite, which he produced for the definitive New York Edition twenty years later. Though I like both versions well enough, not knowing which one I was reading gave me slight qualms. So I went to my own shelves and plucked off my Penguin Modern Classics paperback, which contained a helpful “Note on the Text.” The three-paragraph note briefly explained the history of the rewrite, gave two small examples of its effects on this novel’s style, and then announced: “Either text was equally available for this edition; after comparing them, the publishers have deliberately chosen that of the first edition (Macmillan 1890) on grounds of taste.” On grounds of taste! When was the last time you read that in an unsigned scholarly note? I was so moved and persuaded by this commendable audacity that I instantly plunged into the Penguin, leaving my digital downloads untouched.
Digital editions are certainly not the only ones to suffer from editorial shortcomings. That can happen in bound books, too. Sometimes the omissions are all too purposeful, resulting from publishing-house economics which dictate that a multivolume work is too expensive to print and that only a single-volume abridged edition will do. This is a problem that digitalization, with its elimination of paper, ink, and bindings—with its elimination, in a way, of the whole idea of length—would seem perfectly designed to solve. Unfortunately, you can’t yet count on getting everything you want digitally, and I often feel that the choice about what to put online has been made with extreme arbitrariness. Why, for instance, can I download all the volumes of Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and none of those by a much better writer, Alexander Herzen?
The Herzen autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, offered the occasion for one of my more extreme encounters with both the dangers and the rewards of seeking out a print edition. I can no longer remember how I first heard about the book—as a throwaway reference, I think, in a review on some other topic entirely, but such an interesting reference that I felt obliged to follow it up. I checked Project Gutenberg first: no Herzen. Then, because there are no actual bookstores in my vicinity anymore (the last two, Cody’s and Black Oak Books, disappeared about a decade ago), I resorted to the various sites that sell printed books via the internet. The only version of My Past and Thoughts that clearly fell within my budget was a paperback edition published by the University of California Press and edited by Dwight Macdonald. Fine, I thought: nice left-wing credentials, excellent scholarly reputation, no problem. So I ordered the paperback.
When it arrived, though, it turned out to be an abridged edition. Not knowing Herzen yet, I thought perhaps I could live with this. After all, a nine-hundred-page abridgement is still a big book. But I got a bad feeling about the editorial process when I read in Macdonald’s preface that he had “regretfully” been forced to cut a long section from Volume Two called “A Family Drama.” This was Herzen’s own title for his agonized, self-examining, often frenzied account of an affair between his much-loved wife (she is actually one of the two intimates to whom he at times addresses the memoirs) and a close friend of his. I would not have thought this was the kind of thing that any editor in his right mind would cut for space-saving reasons. Still, I persisted with the Macdonald edition. And then, as I was closing in on the end of a youthful section called “Prison and Exile,” I came across the following footnote:
At this point Herzen begins the story of his wife, Natalie—his first cousin and, like him, the illegitimate child of a wealthy aristocrat: her solitary and unhappy childhood, their courtship and early married life. It takes up the last hundred pages of the first volume. They are omitted here—as are the last one hundred and seventy pages of the second volume, about their tragic later married life (“A Family Drama”)—for reasons of theme and space as explained in the Preface. (D.M.)
At that point I threw the book on the floor. Really, I did. Then I picked it up and mailed it to my son (who is intensely interested in politics and history, and wouldn’t mind as much as I did about the missing marital story), and got back online to search for the complete version.
I had learned enough from Dwight Macdonald’s preface to know that the edition I wanted was the four-volume set published in 1968 by Chatto & Windus in England and Alfred A. Knopf in America. Based on Constance Garnett’s original six-volume translation, this edition had been updated by Humphrey Higgens, who added a number of useful footnotes from various authoritative Russian editions as well as new Herzen material he’d dug up on his own. Most of the copies for sale on the internet were either incomplete (“Vol. 1 only”) or ridiculously expensive. At last, however, I found what seemed to be the whole thing, offered by the Friends of Webster Groves Public Library for the very reasonable price of fifty dollars. I clicked on that one, inserting a long comment about which edition I was seeking and asking that the sale not go through until this had been verified. Since the order was placed on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I assumed I wouldn’t hear anything more until business reopened on Tuesday.
But that Monday, on the holiday itself, I got a response from someone named Ann. Thus began a brief but satisfying epistolary love affair between me and the Friends of Webster Groves Public Library. (I still have no idea where Webster Groves is. It sounds like something Thornton Wilder would have made up, and I prefer to keep it that way.) In that first note, Ann informed me that she thought the one they had was the four-volume edition, but she couldn’t be sure until she checked it on Tuesday. I thanked her and wished her a happy Memorial Day. A few hours later, still on the holiday, I got another email:
Hi, Wendy. I was able to get to our book storage area and did find the 4 volume set of Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts translated by Constance Garnett with revisions by H. Higgens. This is exactly as you described. It appears no one used these books, they are in excellent condition. I did notice the previous owner wrote her name on the inside front page. The cardboard case that comes with this set does have a tear down one side and it looks like one edge was hit against something and it has an indentation in the corner. The books are not affected. I brought this set home with me and can mail these to you tomorrow after I hear from you. Happy Memorial Day to you too. Ann Friends of Webster Groves Public Library.
Some of the pleasure I got from reading this book—which I did in full immediately after it arrived, and then again, in sections, over the years since—came from the warmth of that transaction. As I told Ann, I really like to own books that have the previous owner’s signature in them, much as I enjoy living in a Victorian house, where the habits and tastes of its earlier residents are still discernible in places. And the edition itself was even lovelier than I had expected: the margins were generously wide, the pages were the beautiful thick kind, and the otherwise identical dust jackets were printed in four different colors. The volumes looked—and still look—marvelously substantial, sitting there in their yellow slipcase on my bookshelf, with the four black Borzois bounding across their spines. They could almost make one believe that books will last forever.
I lived for that whole summer with Herzen; he was my constant companion, even when I was not reading him. If I was out to dinner with friends, I would find myself thinking, “Who are these people? I want to be back with my real friends, Herzen and Natalie. I want to know what happens to them next.” This is a little sick, but any avid reader will recognize the symptoms. One of my closest friends excused herself early from a dinner at my house by saying she had to get home to read The Maias, and I know exactly how she felt. For those of us in the midst of a good book, the characters’ fates hang in the balance now. It matters to us not one whit that they were already fixed on the page a hundred years ago.
A digital-b
ook proponent might point out that my Herzen experience would have been a lot more flexible and relaxed if I had managed to acquire the book on my iPad. I would not have been restricted to those moments when I happened to be seated in my well-lit, comfortable chair at home. The entire four volumes would have been lightweight, portable, and easy to read in out-of-the-way places such as subways, airplanes, cafés, or the living rooms of my friends’ houses. I could even have read it in bed, without the assistance of a reading light and without straining my wrists or spreading dust on the bedsheets. While I read, I could have used earphones to listen to any background music I chose. And besides all this, I would have been able to interrupt my reading at any time to check email, or look at headline news, or do whatever else I might need to do at any hour of the day or night. The book and my regular life could have been completely integrated.
But that, you see, would be a disadvantage as well as an advantage. All the pluses of portability and multifunctionality are, to a certain kind of reader, simply undesirable distractions. Alexander Herzen resided, for me, in a specific place that summer, and whenever I retreated to that place, I was alone with him. This (in addition to his great writing style, his keen mind, and his remarkable material) is what made the experience of reading him so intimate, so immersive. I sat for hours doing nothing but reading. I didn’t care about what was in my email inbox. I didn’t care about breaking news.
I am not going to natter on here about the distractability of the high-tech generation and the youthful inability to focus. That is not my point. We are all distractable. And reading has its own kind of distraction already built into it, as I learned (or was reminded) when I went to buy my first iPad.
I was having the new device set up for me at the store, which took more than an hour of intensive consultation. About halfway through this process, the smart young Applewoman who was helping me with the setup wondered what I might want to do with the iPad besides the obvious functions of checking email and surfing the web. Read newspapers and magazines, I suggested. Write short things when I’m away from my computer. Listen to all the music I have stored up on my iPod. And read books. “In fact,” I added enthusiastically, “I guess now I can listen to my music and read a digital book at the same time, when I’m on a long airplane flight or something.”
She nodded in a friendly way, and then told me that she actually preferred to use her own iPad to listen to audio books. “It’s easier for me to concentrate if I’m listening,” she explained. “When I read with my eyes, sometimes I find that my mind drifts and I have to reread the same sentence over again to find out what it means.”
I looked at her for a second in silence. “That’s how reading works,” I said.
* * *
In my more broad-minded moments, I am willing to acknowledge that there is no inherent difference between reading from a printed page and reading from an electronic device. It just depends on what you are used to. Those of us who have grown up reading bound books will miss them if they disappear, not because printed books are objectively preferable, but because we will feel deprived of something we care about. Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, writes intelligently about the difference between gaining something and losing something. It turns out that people are, as he puts it, “loss averse”—that is, we are more likely to make a decision that allows us to keep something we already have than to gamble on something that, in economic terms, is equally valuable. Before Kahneman demonstrated this through a variety of psychological experiments, economists had pretty much assumed that all such choices were made on purely rational grounds, dollar for dollar, benefit for benefit. But Kahneman showed that whereas Econs (his term for the mythical beings who populate economic theory) would always choose according to the exact mathematical odds, Humans valued what they already possessed over what might be gained, and therefore slanted their risk-taking decisions toward retention rather than acquisition. So for me, for any of us, to want to keep our physical books on our physical bookshelves is not necessarily a sign that we are Luddites. It just means that we are Humans rather than Econs.
Robert Pinsky has written a poem called “Book” that celebrates, in part, this old-fashioned attachment to the physical object. It was originally composed as part of a series called First Things to Hand, a collection of poems about the various objects that the poet could reach out and touch with one hand while he was sitting at his desk. From the poem’s opening lines, the tactility of the actual book—its feel, its physical presence, its riffled pages that “brush my fingertips with their edges”—is primary. But this first sensation gradually modulates in the course of the poem into something else, something more abstract and metaphorical, something more to do with spirit or essence. So, about halfway through, the poet alludes to the “reader’s dread of finishing a book, that loss of a world,” along with an opposite dread, the fear of becoming “Hostage to a new world, to some spirit or spirits unknown.” It is a vision of reading which reminds us that even the thing to hand, beloved as it may be, is secondary to the voice it stands in for, that absent speaker who might once have declaimed his lines aloud but who now speaks only to our inner ear, reachable through the eye alone. And though the poem returns intermittently to the touchable object and its physical qualities (“The jacket ripped, the spine cracked, / Still it arouses me”), it ends by invoking the intangible. Or rather, it ends with a transubstantiation that mingles the two:
And the passion to make a book—passion of the writer
Smelling glue and ink, sensuous. The writer’s dread of making
Another tombstone, my marker orderly in its place in the stacks.
Or to infiltrate and inhabit another soul, as a splinter of spirit
Pressed between pages like a wildflower, odorless, brittle.
Reading this poem, I wondered at first if it would be meaningless to future generations who had read only electronic books. What would they make of those cracked spines, those smells, those pages? Then I realized that, unless history disappears along with books, the meaning of this poem will remain accessible, just as that cartoon about scrolls makes sense to us even if we have never actually seen an ancient scroll. The poem itself could even be part of what helps transmit the past (that is, our present) to the future. In that as-yet-unimaginable time when the visceral pleasures Pinsky describes are all gone, some “splinter” of them will remain in the “odorless, brittle” form of the poet’s reported experience.
Such losses happen all the time in literature, and yet we readers manage to transcend them; we manage to continue getting the joke, despite the disappearance of the circumstances that gave rise to it. I’m thinking now of an actual joke that occurs in the pages of Don Quixote, somewhere near the beginning of Volume Two. In order to understand the joke, you have to know that eleven years passed between the publication of the first volume and the appearance of this second one in 1615, and that during the intervening decade, the knight and his adventures became famous throughout Spain. But you don’t have to know this before you start reading, because Volume Two tells you this in its opening pages. Everyone Don Quixote meets in the second book has heard of him already, and all these new fans are anxious to see him do something foolish and chivalric before their very eyes. He has become the hero of his own novel in a setting that is supposedly outside that novel. The lunatic knight accepts this as nothing more than his due, but the practical, earthy Sancho Panza finds the existence of two selves, the “book” self and the “real” self, confusing and disturbing. He is especially perturbed by one interlocutor, Sansón Carrasco, who insists on grilling him about the disappearance and then inexplicable reappearance of the ass he was riding in Part One. Eventually Sancho just throws up his hands: “‘I don’t know what answer to give you,’ said Sancho, ‘except that the one who wrote the story must have made a mistake, or else it must be due to carelessness on the part of the printer.’”
To have a character in a novel talk about that novel’s printi
ng errors when print was relatively new must have been a startling and witty thing to do. But it seems to me that this line has remained just as startling and witty over the course of four centuries. The joke lies, of course, in the character’s impossible perspective, the way he can peer in at his own story and comment on the shortcomings of the book that made him. We don’t actually have to know how the book was made to find this funny—we don’t have to picture the printer laboriously setting out the rows of metal type and then feeding each page through the press—because no matter how it was made, it seems unlikely that this kind of plot flaw could be due to a printer’s error. Cervantes is both accepting the blame and winkingly trying to spread it around, so he allows Sancho to seize on any possible alternative to the idea “that the one who wrote the story must have made a mistake.” The ploy should feel cheap and obvious, and instead it is vertigo-inducing, as if the lid had been blown off the creative process, and all of its participants—author, character, reader—had shrunk to the same size, or grown to the same size, or at any rate become equals. And the joke works equally well in all the different manifestations of the book. It works whether I am reading Don Quixote in my beautiful hardcover edition from 1949, still set in hot type, though on an automated press rather than a hand-driven one; or in my cheaper paperback from 1986, by which time the type would have been set electronically; or in a Project Gutenberg digitalized version, where the very name of the beneficent “publisher” alludes to that technological bombshell of 1450, the invention of movable type, which made printers’ errors possible on such a wide scale. I suspect it is a joke that will never die, no matter what happens to the physical form of books.