Once I patronized a library book sale where volumes were sold not by age, condition, whether paperback or hard cover, and certainly not by literary worth but by weight. On the table by the exit was a scale, the flat-topped sort associated with butcher shops. The arrangement was a gimmick the librarians found endlessly amusing, with much joking about “adding another pork chop.” Most of the books on sale, as usual, were self-help and popular fiction, and I found nothing to buy, which disappointed me because I would have enjoyed owning a volume valued in so egalitarian a fashion. Late in life, Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen) wrote the column “Bones of Contention” for The Nationalist and Leinster Times in Ireland, using yet another pseudonym, George Knowall. Earlier he had written the better-known and generally funnier column “Cruiskeen Lawn” for The Irish Times. O’Brien (1911-66) is one of the funniest writers in the language (see At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, et al.). In 2012, the Lilliput Press published Myles Away from Dublin, a selection of the later columns. Here is one titled “Weighty Volume”: “At this sixpenny barrow I bought the autobiography, in two volumes, of Henry Taylor. When I got the books home, I weighed them on my wife’s balance in the kitchen and they weigh four and a quarter pounds. I have never heard of Henry Taylor but the books were published in 1885 Longmans, Green and Co. I have not read Mr Taylor’s account of himself but a furtive glance at one volume gives me the suspicion that this man was a poet, or thought he was. A frontpiece portrait shows him looking very old and sporting an enormous white wig. Why did he waste so much valuable time growing so very old and writing that poetry that nobody nowadays reads and probably never read? “The subtitle of the first volume intrigues me. Just this modest phrase – ‘Vol. I: 1800-1844’. Forty-four years of abject futility, squeezed into one volume, weighting over two pounds avoirdupois.” Yes, Henry Taylor (1800-86) was a genuine poet, dramatist and a clerk in England’s Colonial Office, and like O’Brien/Knowall I’ve never read a word of his work. O’Brien was a master of the blackest of Irish black humor and wrote authoritatively of “abject futility.”

“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live? Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer — not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new… read article

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.”

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.

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