I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class neighborhood who had “gone to college,” as the common phrase had it. In my experience, that status was confined to doctors and teachers. My father was a high-school dropout. Higher education seemed like a gift reserved for the anointed, whether by wealth or genius. Naturally this inspired a strain of suspicion and resentment. After high school, I applied, without assistance, to two universities – Harvard and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. My naiveté was stunning. The state school accepted me and after three years I dropped out. It was probably my generation that first came to believe everyone should go to college. I no longer think that’s the case, especially because a university degree no longer signifies a true education. I’ve known too many degree-holding alliterates and even border-line illiterates. Robert Conquest chooses his words carefully in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999): “Not all young, or old, people are susceptible to education.” Conquest’s analysis of education is interesting. His formal education at Oxford was excellent and he became a gifted historian, poet, novelist and all-around man of letters – a rare breed today. He bolsters his argument with allusions to Edward Gibbon and Marcus Aurelius. Some young people are, Conquest writes, “more or less uneducable. Others have had a good education by the time they are eighteen, or even younger, but have neither the desire nor the bent for ‘higher’ education.” This confirms my observation that some of the brightest, most well-read people I’ve known are degreeless. “For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all," Conquest writes, "as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds -- except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.” It’s always a pleasure to meet and talk with an autodidact, a self-directed learner, as opposed to a formally educated pedant or drone. Often the former is motivated by love of learning; the latter by status, money, fashion, indifference. Of the amateur class, Conquest writes: “No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.”

Thomas Parker is a longtime reader and frequent commenter on this blog. On Monday’s post he recalled a passage he thought may have been the work of George Saintsbury. Unable to track it down for attribution, he quoted from uncertain memory: “Nothing pains me more than the contempt with which people treat second-rate writers -- as if there were room in life for only the first-rate.”  Dave Lull tells me the writer in question may have been not Saintsbury but a comparably situated critic in French literature, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who has little standing in literary circles today, at least in the English-speaking world. Dave identified this sentence, though not the source, as Saint-Beuve’s: “Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.”   Clive James devotes a chapter to Saint-Beuve in Cultural Amnesia (2007). Dave quotes James, in part: “The student should be slow to join in the denigration. Sainte-Beuve really was the greatest literary critic of his time, even though he sometimes gave too much praise to mediocrity, and not enough to genius.” I would distinguish “second-rate” status from “mediocrity,” though James continues: “Sainte-Beuve certainly had a gift for slighting the gifted while rabbiting on endlessly in praise of mediocrities.”   No writer is minor while we are paying attention to his work, enjoying it, admiring it, sharing it with other readers. Every serious reader agrees that Swift and Tolstoy are major writers – “first-rate” – whom we are obligated to read if we wish to be fully literate. That’s easy. But what about their contemporaries; say, Matthew Prior and Nikolai Leskov? Who would wish to miss the latter’s novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”? “Second-rate” is better than “thirteenth-rate,” and even thirteenth may be worth pursuing.   In her life of Siegfried Sassoon, Journey from the Trenches, Jean Moorcroft Wilson says Sassoon shared with his friend Edmund Blunden an interest in “the neglected by-ways, a taste which reflected their literary interests as a whole. Though both had a proper respect for the major writers of the past, it was the minor figures who intrigued them.”   “Minor,” I suspect, is not a qualitative term, precisely. It ought to be used carefully, with discretion and due respect. After all there’s a class of writers judged unimportant by the usual standards, by the usual people – minor (such a patronizing word), un-engagé, witty rather than weighty, blithely indifferent to literary fashion and significance. The English seem to specialize in this species. Think of Sydney Smith, Walter Savage Landor, Maurice Baring, Saki, Walter de la Mare, Lord Berners and Henry “Chips” Channon. The unlikely alpha male of the bunch, the major English minor writer is, of course, Max Beerbohm. Among his friends was another, the New Jersey-born British essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith, a writer whose resistance to pigeon-holing and portentousness defines him. All of these writers are entertaining, sometimes even wise. I would read any of them before I would the latest, much-heralded tour de force.

Jonathan Swift often stayed at Quilca, the country home of his friend the Rev. Thomas Sheridan (1687-1738) in County Cavan, Ireland. There he wrote portions of Gulliver’s Travels. Not surprisingly, Swift was an inspired kvetcher. There’s a long tradition of English writers complaining about accommodations. Think of Smollett, Carlyle and Waugh. Three-hundred years ago today, Swift wrote a letter to Sheridan containing three poems inspired by his stays at Quilca. Here is “The Plagues of a Country Life”:  “A companion with news, A great want of shoes; Eat lean meat, or choose; A church without pews. Our horses astray, No straw, oats or hay; December in May, Our boys run away, All servants at play.”   By Swiftian standards, pretty mild. No scatological substrate. In the body of the letter he writes: “The ladies room smokes; the rain drops from the skies into the kitchen; our servants eat and drink like the devil, and pray for rain, which entertains them at cards and sleep; which are much lighter than spades, sledges and crows.” Another traditional complaint -- the laziness and unreliability of servants. He might also be describing the poverty typical of rural Ireland in the eighteenth century. Swift says the “maxim” of the servants is:   “Eat like a Turk, Sleep like a dormouse; Be last at work, At victuals foremost.”   Swift worked hard to feel gratitude for rural, in “The Blessings of a Country Life”:   “Far from our debtors, No Dublin letters, Not seen by our betters.”   One year earlier, Swift has written a brief prose piece titled “The Blunders, Deficiencies, Distresses,and Misfortunes of Quilca.” It’s a list of complaints. I especially like this one: “The kitchen perpetually crowded with savages.”

“Of course, you live life forward and think about it backwards.”  I’ve spent the last month or so thinking about the summer of 1973, when I visited Europe for the first time. This retrospective was prompted by my youngest son, who graduated in May from Rice University and the following day flew to Bangkok. He and friends have visited ten countries, from Cambodia to Turkey to Croatia. He’ll fly from Italy today and return to the U.S. on Wednesday. I spent most of my summer fifty-two years ago in France, usually in Paris or the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, with brief side trips to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium.   I was twenty and my son is twenty-one and far more mature and sophisticated than I was. Much was lost on me, less on him. In a pleasing piece of symmetry, he’s reading my old copy of Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which I carried around Europe and read for the first time that summer along with Spinoza’s Ethics. The headlines on French newspapers were dominated by Watergate and the marital shenanigans of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In that less globalized world, the only Anglophone songs I remember hearing were Paul Simon’s “Love Me Like a Rock” and George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” Everywhere I saw posters for Pink Floyd’s tour. Airline hijackings by terrorists were fashionable and for the first time I saw policemen in airports carrying machine guns. I ate snails for the first and last time, and horsemeat, once.   One of the pleasures of having children is sifting through the aspects of personality they share with you and those they lack. I’m not looking for a clone. On the whole, my sons are jumbles of me, my wife and qualities out of left field, and I find that surprisingly gratifying. None possesses my severest failings. The observation at the top is taken from an interview the American poet Howard Nemerov gave The Massachusetts Review in 1981. Nemerov continues:   “You might spend a lot of time in embarrassment about the silly, trivial things you did when young, that you didn't know you were doing silly trivial things when you were old too. You know, there is a beautiful place in Proust where the painter Elstir talks to Marcel about this. Marcel has just discovered that this great master must have been the silly young man who was referred to at parties, and Elstir, instead of turning away and refusing ever to see him again, sets him down and gives him a little talk about growing up and about how it’s only nonentities who have nothing to be ashamed of in their past, how you have to overcome what you were before, and it’s only, he says, in this way that something a little above the common life of the atelier is achieved.”

That certain mediocre books are judged “classics,” at least by teachers and librarians desperate to stock their shelves, fill bulletin boards and placate administrators, is well-known and nobody says much about it. I’m uncertain what mysterious collective formulates this canon and stamps it nihil obstat, ensuring that young minds won’t be sullied by its contents. Books on the list are usually distinguished by the conspicuous presence of a “message” that can be easily extracted from the text like a rotten tooth. I’m thinking of such titles as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath and Animal Farm, not to mention the plague of “YA” novels. The emphasis on a work’s message certainly makes it easier to teach. No need to deal with those pesky, elusive literary qualities. Consider the long-term impact this has on readers. Reading becomes a sort of forensic exercise. A formulaic “good book” confirms the values you already hold.  No one is suggesting that your average fifth-grader should be reading Ulysses (though prodigies do exist). Please, never discourage a curious or precocious child from reading. His or her classmates (and teachers, sometimes) will take care of that. Ambitious readers learn to go underground and communicate with others like them. Marriages and lifelong friendships have grown out of such relations. One of my favorite literary essay collections is Pleasures and Speculations (1940) by Walter de la Mare. In his introduction, de la Mare suggest a moderating approach when choosing a book to read:   “No reviewer, no common reader, no lover of books, however, is likely to spend his days solely in the consumption of masterpieces. They are in the nature of touchstones, and talismans, and the miraculous; and a diet restricted to them may be the supreme ideal. Yet there is much to be said for what falls short of this elevated standard, and even far short. The ‘hundred best books’ — when there may be only ninety and nine! Perfection may prove a sort of stubborn mental pemmican for otherwise admirable digestions and an extreme fastidiousness an ivory tower, with needlessly limited accommodation.”   Why not suggest de la Mare’s own Memoirs of a Midget, or one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels? Or Robinson Crusoe. Dickens. Books cherished by generations of common readers, people who read almost exclusively for pleasure.