If I had been in the house all day reading during a long Ohio winter, invariably my mother would say, “Go outside and blow the stink off.” My parents took a kid reading as a reproach, something unnatural and probably unhealthy – one more reason for me to be secretive. When I was twelve, getting a room of my own with a door that locked was a godsend.  Three years ago I wrote about a poem by Walter de la Mare titled “Books” published in the July 1906 issue of The Bookman. It includes the lines: “Books—to wax solid on, to wane less fat; / To grasp what long-gone Wisdom wondered at.” Now I find he published another poem with the same title and collected it in one of his books for children, This Year: Next Year (1937). The 289-line poem is composed in rhyming couplets and begins:   “A boy called Jack, as I’ve been told, Would sit for hours — good as gold — Not with a pie, like Master Horner, And plums, for dainties, in his corner. But silent in some chosen nook. And spell-bound — by a story-book!”   In my case it wasn’t always stories. I also favored biographies and nature guides. I read about people like Mark Twain and Marie Curie, and learned to identify butterflies, trees and wildflowers. I saw no disconnect between what I read and what I experienced in the real world. Today, that’s basically an article of faith, one of the reasons I so dislike the way most academics treat literature, as though books were cadavers and they were pathologists.   Jack’s mother in the poem echoed mine: “How often his mother would sigh, and cry — / ‘Up, Jack, and put that trumpery by! / See, Spring is in the sky! / The swallow is here, the thorn’s in blow — / Crimson, pink, and driven snow; / Lambs caper in the fields . . .” We didn’t have a lot of lambs in Cleveland but the message was identical. Jack, you see, “In books found marvellous company, / Wonder, romance, and mystery.” De la Mare cites fairy tales (Andersen, Grimm) and nursery rhymes, the earliest texts most kids encounter, followed by Gulliver’s Travels (bowdlerized, of course), the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe. Nice to see the poet reproducing my boyhood reading list fifteen years before I was born. De la Mare lends Jack a sort of poet’s apprenticeship:   “Never believe it! What Jack read Refreshed his senses, heart, and head. Words were to him not merely words — Their sounds rang sweet as bells, or birds; Nor could he tell, by any test, Whether he loved — he once confessed — Their music, or their meaning, best.”   Dela Mare reminds us that books are more than escape, for children and adults -- an understanding that trivializes the power of reading. Sure, they fill idle moments, and that’s perfectly respectable. Consider de la Mare’s closing lines:   “This seems to me at least to hint. That if we give what wits we have To Books, as Jack himself them gave — To all we read a willing slave — The while we dream, delight, and think. The words a precious meat and drink. And keep as lively as a spink. There’s not much harm in printer’s ink.”   A spink, by the way, is a finch, often the chaffinch. A lovely phrase in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “Like a summer flye or Spinxes winges, or a raigne bow of all colours.”

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.”  Of course, Nabokov is describing himself in “Good Readers and Good Writers,” the introductory lecture he delivered to his students at Cornell University. I look for “enchantment” even among writers judged the most “realistic” – a word Nabokov said should always be written in quotes. I take enchantment to mean the creation of a convincing alternative world which may or may not resemble our own. A gifted stage magician performs a trick that inspires wonder. How did he do the impossible? we ask, and we’re blissfully, bafflingly seduced as surely as any lover.   No writer have I been reading for so long – almost sixty years -- who has reliably given me such pleasure. The first book, of course, was Lolita. I looked for the dirty bits and they weren’t there, but I was taken by the prose and the mingling of depravity and farce. I know I missed a lot but many subsequent readings have supplied clarity without taking away that original sense of delight. Soon, Nabokov was on the cover of Time magazine, when that still meant something. He had just turned seventy and published Ada (full nineteenth-century-sounding title: Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle), his seventeenth and longest novel. Nabokov was the only contemporary novelist I regularly bought in hardcover because I never had much money. Ada’s cover price: $8.95, a mint when I was sixteen.   Certain readers and critics dismiss Nabokov as haughty, disdainful or cold. He can be snobbish, his bearing is often aristocratic, it’s true, and some of his critical judgments are sure to offend gentle souls, but I know of few passages in all of literature so powerfully, dismally sad as the pedophile Humbert Humbert’s soliloquy at the close of Lolita:   “What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”   As my late friend D.G. Myers wrote: “. . . Humbert finally acknowledges, in his last few moments as a free man, the sin he has committed against her—the sin of removing her voice from the chorus of children at play.”   As to Nabokov’s alleged emotional coldness, consider that Lolita isn’t the only child in jeopardy in his work. The emotional heart of Pale Fire is not the solipsistic madness of Charles Kinbote but the suicide of Hazel Shade. The only scenes in modern fiction comparably heartbreaking to the final meeting between Humbert and Lolita are Leopold Bloom’s vision of his dead son Rudy in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, and the death and afterlife of Hazel and her father's “longing of the living to be reunited with the dead.'”         Nabokov was born on this date, April 22, in 1899 and died in 1977 at age seventy-eight.   [“Good Readers and Good Writers” is collected in Lectures on Literature (1980).]

Catharine Savage Brosman describes her late husband, Patric Savage, like this:  “I am bereft   “of curator, you see, of one who cared tremendously— for books, for me—but would have sacrificed the whole collection for my sake.”   The poem is “Pat Curating His Library” (Arm in Arm, 2022). In 2008, Brosman remarried Savage, her first husband, a lifelong dedicated reader who died at age eighty-eight in 2017. In his obituary, presumably written by his widow, listed among Savage’s pastimes is “reading (omnivorously).” Her poem uses her husband’s bibliophilia as the scaffold on which to build a love poem. Her bookish elegy is touching but what most impresses me is how much I seem to have had in common with Patric Savage, at least regarding books, though our tastes overlap only occasionally, judging by the authors she mentions:   “Mostly men’s authors. But lots of poetry as well, hard-bound, great names both British and American, some French, and poets of our time—Heaney, of course, Sylvia Plath (hardly in my view, whatever others think, a worthy name to stand with those of Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Poe, Eliot, Yeats).”   I’m with Brosman on Plath and can’t stomach Poe. Savage favored history and books of exploration, always good reading. “He had two books out, always, sometimes / three, in different rooms and chairs.” Of course. Obviously. Who can read one book at a time, except perhaps while traveling or hospitalized?   “So I see him standing there, before a bookshelf, reading sideways down the spines, or taking out a first book, then a second, checking or comparing,   “rectifying misalignment, laying aside a jacket to be mended or discarded (though he held them always in a high regard and preserved them carefully for years—they also should be read, a paratexte).”   One is always fussing, shuffling among the shelves. I’m reminded of a friend with a sizeable collection of books, mostly jazz and humor, who promptly threw away dust jackets when he brought home new ones — an uncharacteristic lapse into insanity. The poem’s closing lines choked me up: “Now, I return the favor as I can, bestowing on him fresh creations—full of his own Irish spirit, often. I select a gorgeous book of his, leaf through, and find the makings of new poems and the reason I should make them, writing, shaping tombs in words.”

Dinant is a small city in the Walloon region of Belgium, on the Meuse River. It is one of those otherwise obscure places (Fort Pillow, Lidice, My Lai) that has lent its name to an atrocity. On August 23, 1914, in the early weeks of World War I, German troops slaughtered almost seven-hundred Belgian civilians – men, women, children – and burned down most of the buildings in the city. In her “Dinant, August 1914” (Arm in Arm, 2022), Catharine Savage Brosman describes the massacre as “foreshadowing the trenches.” True, but it also foreshadows the second round of German barbarism less than thirty years later.  “Late June ’14: an Austrian archduke died by an assassin’s hand. A pawn, that’s all. The chessboard changed; alliances and pride moved pieces toward an end none could forestall.   “Mid-August, Feast of the Assumption: war now two weeks old. In Belgium, on the Meuse, Dinant had been contested twice before. This time the Teuton forces would not lose.   “French fighters occupied the Citadel, when Jägers, with machine guns, overcame them, leaving one-half dead. The stronghold fell again that very day—a deadly game   “foreshadowing the trenches. Germans massed Their troops, secured pontoons. First, raids at night. The 23rd, they crossed: blast after blast, grenades and cannon, houses fired, to spite   “resistance. In one month, a thousand dead civilians, pillage, executions, rape, two libraries in ruins—and ahead four years of butchery, with no escape.   “To what avail were pacts, with Europe, torn, gouged out, perhaps nine million soldiers killed? Though time grew late, the peace was never born. War is the poisoned fruit that we have willed.”   In The Times on September 2, 1914, in response to Dinant and other German atrocities – known collectively as “The Rape of Belgium” – Rudyard Kipling published “For All We Have and Are”:   “Our world has passed away, In wantonness o’erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone!”