“Talismanic”
is not a word with much application to my life, or so I thought. Despite a
touch of OCD (counting telephone poles, cracks in the sidewalk – harmless hobbies),
I’m largely free of superstition. Books are different. I concluded long ago
that I’m happiest and most at ease in their company, even if they’re not mine
and I’m not reading them. I enter libraries and bookstores with a sense of
anticipation: What am I going to find? As a newspaper reporter I interviewed
people in their homes and was often surprised and saddened by the absence of
books, even Bibles or bestsellers, though I came from a largely bookless family.
What can people be doing with their time?
The
sentence quoted above is from “The Top Shelf: On Books I Need Beside Me,” an
essay by the poet Floyd Skloot collected in Revertigo:
An Off-Kilter Memoir (Terrace Books, 2014). Skloot refers to a piece PhilipLarkin wrote in 1972 as part of a program for the Antiquarian Book Fair, and
later collected in Required Writing:
Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. In it, Larkin, a university librarian by
profession, denies being a book lover or collector, instead characterizing
himself as “a compulsive reader” (the “C” in OCD). Skloot refers to this
passage in Larkin’s brief blurb; in particular, the catalog of necessary poets:
“Within
reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets
on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward
Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen. True, I reach to the
right more often than to the left, but the twelve are there as exemplars. All
in all, therefore, I should miss my books. I like to think I could do without
them -- I like to think I could do without anything -- but indubitably I should
miss them.”
A
talisman is a charm or amulet possessing magical powers. It’s a stretch, but
that’s not a bad description of a book. As infants, all my sons were attracted
to them as interesting physical objects, the way the pages riffled (and tore),
the way a brick-shaped object can mutate into a figurative bird. But that’s stage
magic aimed at occupants of the cheap seats, at least until we learn to read
and begin, some of us, to read to live. Skloot shares with us his top shelf, “a
never-changing core group” of six poets – Frost, Eliot, Bishop, Stevens, Dylan
Thomas and Larkin. An auxiliary member is his friend and former teacher, the
Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. On deck are Roethke, Williams, Lowell, Sexton and
John Montague.
Skloot’s
“exemplars” remind me that talismans are highly idiosyncratic, customized for one’s
sensibility and often non-transferrable. All are of the twentieth century. All
wrote in English. Thomas, Roethke and Sexton seem as untalismanic as I can
imagine poets being – but that’s why they’re on Skloot’s list and not mine.
Magic is private. My talismanic short list includes Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Larkin’s Complete Poems, Montaigne, The Geography of the Imagination, Shakespeare and Gulliver’s Travels. Only Larkin
straddles both, though I love Eliot.
The
funhouse reflection of Skloot’s “Top Shelf” in Revertigo is “The Bottom Shelf: On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read.” His taste in novels he’s unable to finish reading is exquisite – Sophie’s Choice, Doctor Zhivago, The Magic
Mountain, The Sunlight Dialogues and
Jay Cantor’s Great Neck, among
others. Only about Humboldt’s Gift, a
novel I reread every few years, do we part company. I would dismiss Skloot’s “failures”
as just that – failed novels, but his reaction is more thoughtful:
“In
the presence of certain material, whether subject matter or style or emphasis
or structure, I read with a combination of eagerness and avidity, of need and
hope, that defines essential aspects of my essential self. I’m a reader, I’ve
discovered, for whom the stakes can be absurdly high, and who – however experienced
and trained and knowledgeable – is vulnerable to almost inexplicable passions
and responses to the books that get most deeply under my skin.”
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