In France, at the Lyon public library, I was surprised to bump into so many romans fleuves, whatever those are.  They were notable on the shelf because these long series of novels are now published in monumental, highly visible, omnibus editions.  The library assumes that you want to take all 2,400 or 4,800 pages homes at once for some reason.  I wish I had noted some of the authors, aside from Proust and Romain Rolland and Roger Martin du Gard.  There were so many others.  French literature went through a roman fleuve craze. Rolland and Martin du Gard both won Nobel Prizes but the latter’s Les Thibault (1922-40, 8 vols) never caught on in English and the former’s Jean-Christophe (1904-12, 10 vols) has withered.  I remember that thirty years ago the big, highly visible, Modern Library omnibus of Jean-Christophe was in every used bookstore.  I haven’t seen one for a while.  Sometimes literature seems to follow an ecological model, where the most successful species of the type (Proust) starves its competitors out of its ecological niche.  In France these books still have readers; the niche is clearly more resource-rich. The winner in British literature has been Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75, 12 vols), although this is a matter of definition, I know.  I take the family saga as a different species.  U.S. authors seem to prefer to occasionally revisit a character over time, as in John Updike’s Rabbit books (1960-90, a mere 4 vols), rather than intentionally plan out a long series.  But the river still flows so what is the difference, really?  I guess I do take intentionality as part of the difference, although I remind myself that In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927, 7 vols) was intended to be (1913-15, 3 vols) and in fact would have been if the war had not interrupted publication giving Proust years to “revise” his novel. And come to think of it, I can only think of two more British romans fleuves, Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose books (1992-2012, 5 vols) and A. N. Wilson’s Lampitt Chronicles (1988-96, 5 vols).  I’ve actually read that last one.  I had a little A. N. Wilson phase thirty years ago for some reason.  No, I know the reason, I read a good review of his novels.  I read a good review of the University of Chicago reissue of A Dance to the Music of Time which I have remembered ever since – I have never forgotten that the most prominent recurring character is named “Widmerpool” – although for some reason it did not inspire me to read the novels. But now I have read some of the Dance novels, the first four, which are: A Question of Upbringing (1951) A Buyer’s Market (1952) The Acceptance World (1955) At Lady Molly’s (1957) It took me a while but now I imagine I can at least write down some notes on Powell’s books.  Not that there is any hint of that in this preface.  Perhaps in the next post.  I will tack on the Nicholas Poussin painting that, along with Proust, inspired Powell, just to add a little color.

A reader asks what novels by William Makepeace Thackeray I would suggest he read. My answer is brief and not terribly helpful: Vanity Fair. It’s the only book by Thackery I have read, and that was a long time ago. I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Barry Lyndon in 1975. Thackeray remains a hole in my reading life, one I’m unlikely ever to fill. Among his contemporaries, I’ve read all of Dickens and Eliot, some of their titles several times, but only four by the relentlessly prolific Anthony Trollope and nothing by Wilkie Collins. Every reading life is idiosyncratic, alternating between heavy devotedness and shameful ignorance.  Jules Janin (1804-74), the French novelist, critic and feuilletoniste, gives readers like me an attractive excuse: “A gourmet is not a glutton.” It’s a truth too often disregarded in matters of food and books. A look at Nadar’s photo of Janin suggests he was by nature a gourmand. The Canadian translator Andrew Rickard has rendered into English a passage from L’Amour des livres (1844):      “In your reading become attached to this philosopher, to that poet; grow fond of both of them, and when you place them triumphantly on your bookshelf, bound in fragrant Russian leather, make sure that you can say: ‘Until next time. I know you well now, and I share the opinion of those great souls to whom you were a role model and a source of counsel!’”   My cop-out is “next time.” Most of my reading has become rereading, especially in fiction. The phenomenon is not unusual among people my age, and I can identify several reasons. Books that have already proved their worth are always attractive. Reading them means encountering our younger selves, lending the text a pleasurable subtext. It also means encountering the generations of readers who preceded us. In addition, we have entered one of those periodic literary dry spells. Little being published today looks interesting, and fiction seems nearly dead. This contrasts with my younger years when Nabokov, Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Maxwell and Cheever were at work.        Janin writes, “Read well, read little,” the mirror image of Yvor Winters’ “Write little; do it well.” As I get older, I find it easier to value quality over quantity, in books and other things, as did Janin who writes in early middle age:    “If someone is obliged to read everything he has bought in its entirety, he thinks twice before making a purchase; he is a little more wary of things that are rare and strange and sticks to the masterpieces that mankind holds in high regard. And so you will begin by acquiring — not haggling for — good and beautiful copies of those few, essential books that one reads and rereads again and again.”

Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists’ lives to remind them that art, at its best, is “an occasion for unselfing”? And yet who could fault them: Not just their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of… read article

“. . . I am closer to the ‘life of the spirit’ than you are. You are talking about the right of one or another type of knowledge to exist, whereas I’m talking about peace, not rights. I want people not to see war where there isn’t any. Different branches of knowledge have always lived together in peace.”  For Chekhov as for Nabokov, science and art, reason and imagination, could dwell in the Peaceable Kingdom of Human Thought without cancelling each other. No need for mutual hostilities. Those blessed with Keats’ “Negative Capability” are not intimidated by alien thinking. Chekhov is writing on May 15, 1889, to his editor and occasional friend, Alexi Suvorin. The pair would differ, especially when it came to the Dreyfus Affair (Chekhov was a Dreyfusard and admirer of Zola; Suvorin was casually anti-Semitic), but remained cautious friends. The letter continues:   “Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent: they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely no reason for them to fight. There is no struggle for existence going on between them. If a man knows the theory of the circulatory system, he is rich. If he learns the history of religion and the song ‘I remember a Marvelous Moment’ in addition, he is the richer, not the poorer, for it.”   Do I think alchemy and the vaporings of Madame Blavatsky are ridiculous? Was Yeats credulous and prone to embrace any occult nonsense he encountered while remaining a poet of genius? You bet. Never look for consistency among humans. But I have no desire to correct people who believe silly things; nor did Chekhov. For a nineteenth-century Russian, and even by the standards of our own time and place, he was remarkably tolerant, unthreatened, open-minded and at ease with himself. As he puts it to Suvorin:   “It is not branches of knowledge that war with one another, not poetry with anatomy; it is delusions, that is, people. When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels discord within. Instead of looking for the causes of this discord within himself as he should, he looks outside. Hence the war with what he does not understand.”   [The translators of the letter are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973). In a footnote to the song mentioned above, they write: “An art song by Mikhail Glinka, which is the setting of one of Alexander Pushkin’s most popular lyrics.”]

Here's the recording from our literary salon discussion.