`Look It Up in Burton, Lad'

People speak glibly of books changing their lives, though I suspect it seldom happens. The explanations such readers give usually sound self-serving and melodramatic, crafted to make them appear more thoughtful or intelligent than they could ever hope to be. It’s a common strategy among politicians and other celebrities, and the book they cite most often, of course, is the Bible.

I’ve read thousands of books since I learned to read 50 years ago and that, certainly, has had a cumulative impact on my life – all that time I could have spent bowling or watching the History Channel -- but I can’t identify a single volume that possessed such transformational power. Books have helped populate my interior landscape, overhauled my imagination, buffered me against loneliness and despair, kept me amused, honed my critical faculties – but in what sense are such things life-changing? In the aggregate, they mean something; in isolation, little or nothing. That I can recall much Shakespeare and Eliot is a great comfort because it leaves me no excuse for boredom, but I can also pull up lyrics to pop songs and commercial jingles from 1961. So what?

One of the rare convincing testimonials to the power of reading in this sense is given by the English critic and story writer V.S. Pritchett, a reader of heroic proportions. In the first volume of his wonderful memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968) – a rather unbookish book from so bookish a man, but filled with great stories – he describes his Uncle Arthur, “the skeptic and man of knowledge,” who learned to read as an adult:

“A passion for education seized him. He took to learning for its own sake, and not in order to rise in the world. He belonged – I now see – to the dying race of craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last he found it: he taught himself to read by using [Robert] Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He reveled in it. `Look it up in Burton, lad,’ he’d say when I was older. `What’s old Burton say?’ He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument. And he would add, from his own experience, a favorite sentence: `Circumstances alter cases.’

“Burton [vicar of St. Thomas Church at Oxford] was Uncle Arthur’s emancipation: it set him free of the Bible in chapel-going circles. There were all his relations – especially the minister – shooting texts at one another while Uncle Arthur sat back, pulled a nail or two out of his mouth and put his relatives off target with bits of the Anatomy. He had had to pick up odds and ends of Latin and Greek because of the innumerable notes in those languages, and a look of devilry came into his eyes under their shaggy black brows. On top of this he was an antiquarian, a geologist, a bicyclist and an atheist. He claimed to have eaten sandwiches on the site of every ruined castle and abbey in Yorkshire. He worshiped the Minster [cathedral] and was a pest to curators of museums and to librarians.

“In short, Uncle Arthur was a crank.”

And what a charming, irresistible crank he must have been. Most cranks are merely cranky, seldom charming, bores forever chastising the world with theories and convictions. But what sort of man remains illiterate until adulthood, chooses Burton as his primer and turns it into surrogate scripture, an anti-Bible? This is Olympic-class crankiness, enabled but not caused by one book. It might have been another (Mein Kampf? Das Kapital? Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures?), though not likely one so charming and benign. Burton put it like this:

“As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books: we are oppressed with them; our eyes ake with reading, our fingers with turning.”