`A Man's Companion for Life'

Among the last century’s most affecting memoirs is The Noise of Time, by Osip Mandelstam. Guy Davenport described it and the Russian poet’s other prose as “delightful, lapidary, bright narratives,” though Mandelstam was fated to live in a mad age, in a country with little delight or brightness. We think he died late in 1938, anonymously in Siberia, one of millions. Davenport writes:

“A page of Mandelstam’s prose is a kind of algebra of ironies over which the same hand has drawn comic furniture and objects with a life of their own à la Chagall. The Noise of Time is a spiritual inventory of the mode of life swept away by the Revolution – men condemned to stations on the moon might write such books about life on earth: a book that would teach us that the usual and the routine look like miracles once you have lost them forever.”

Mandelstam published The Noise of Time in 1925, when he was 34 and before the Stalinist noose was pulled fatally tight. Its atmosphere of nostalgia is bittersweet, like Nabokov’s in Speak, Memory (both attended the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg), but not yet shadowed by the future. In Chapter IV, “The Bookcase,” he writes:

“The bookcase of early childhood is a man’s companion for life. The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of the spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. And as for books which were not included in that first bookcase – they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled.”

I regret I can’t apply Mandelstam’s pronouncement literally to my life. The few books in my childhood home were my mother’s, mostly bestsellers from the nineteen-thirties and –forties. I haven’t preserved any books from those years, though my brother has, and I don’t remember having my own bookcase until I was 11 or 12. We did have a set of Childcraft Books, and the volume I remember most clearly and that was most worn from use contained poetry for children – Lear, Carroll, Stevenson, McGinley.

I can recall a book of potted biographies of historical figures, and others about the American presidents, Davy Crockett and butterflies. Also, I have three studio portraits of myself, probably taken around my first birthday, displayed in a cardboard triptych supplied by the photographer (“Frances Foster Studio: Tiny Tot Portraits”). In the middle picture I’m holding a book titled Baby Animal Friends, of which I have no memory.

In other words, my bookcase is less literal and more figurative than Mandelstam’s, but fairly predictive of the future. I’m being only slightly fanciful when I say that the three categories of childhood books I have identified – poetry, history, nature – remain strong pleasures. The Noise of Time includes elements of all three, and much else. Of it Davenport wrote:

“Mandelstam’s economy with words was Spartan. He envied the mediaeval philosophers their clarity and precision. Fragmentary and capricious as his prose seems, it has a sense of wholeness.”