`I Will Be Tired of Life Itself'

We don’t bother with the shoes a shoe salesman fancies, or a welder’s choice of brazing rod. Why do we care about the books a writer touts? This is not a trick question, of course, because mostly we don’t care. That Norman Mailer deemed Das Kapital and Studs Lonigan “good and great” surprises no one and confirms what we already knew about the awfulness of his books and sensibility. Likewise, Kurt Vonnegut’s claim that Look Homeward, Angel is “still a terrific book” is about as revelatory as President Bush’s well-known devotion to Camus. Ask most “name” writers which books “in some way influenced or affected you most deeply, `spoke to’ you the loudest,” and what you get is posing and pontificating in the cause of self-puffery.

Of course, I, too, fell for the lure of For the Love of Books: 115 Writers on the Books They Most Love, edited by Ronald B. Schwartz and published by Grosset/Putnam in 1999. I was searching the library catalogue for something by Jacques Barzun and this curious volume showed up. A few genuinely “good and great writers” participated, including Barzun, Guy Davenport, Joseph Epstein, Penelope Fitzgerald, William Gass, Anthony Hecht, Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick and Richard Wilbur, but mostly it’s a parade of mediocrity, with Dave Barry and Joyce Carol Oates marching in lockstep with Robert Creeley, Herman Wouk and the odious Oliver Stone. Not surprisingly, the better writers generally cite better books. Here is Barzun on William James’ Principles of Psychology:

“…it read like a novel of adventure – which, in fact, it was: the adventure of discovering what was believed about human consciousness and what stood the test of analysis and of comparison with controlled experience. In James’ handling, this undertaking was a series of plots and denouements on successive topics. I gathered from the narrative, with its sallies into all regions of culture, that the mind works natively not like a recording camera, not like a logical machine, but like an artist.”

Characteristically, Davenport answers by declining to answer and delivering instead an encomium to life as a dedicated reader. He praises Hugh Kenner and lists six “books of the highest achievement, perfect in their way and of their kind”: Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples; Samuel Beckett’s Molloy; Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker; David Jones’ In Parenthesis; C.M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta; Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. My only dissent is Dinesen, and the only surprise is Smollett, but it was Davenport who first suggested I read Doughty’s masterpiece. He writes of his undergraduate years at Duke:

“…I had begun reading Joyce, and had discovered several books that I’ve read and re-read ever since, notably Santayana’s Realms of Being, D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, and Spengler’s The Decline of the West. When I become tired of these three books, I will be tired of life itself.”

On Davenport’s recommendation I read and re-read the Santayana almost 30 years ago. In The Pound Era, Kenner suggested Thompson. Only Spengler did I find on my own, two fat volumes on a library shelf.

Fitzgerald’s list is brief and exquisite: The New Testament in the authorized version, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Ozick, too, is pithy. She mentions “Romantic Religion,” an essay by Leo Baeck; E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey; and a sampler of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Conrad. Then she writes:

“The works of fiction that most engage me combine originality of language (I will not read pedestrian prose) with a purpose larger than `human relations.’ I am drawn to novels with a sense of thick context, of history, of ontological wonder. (Thomas Mann satisfies all three; and so does George Eliot; and so does Saul Bellow.)

“And I confess I am violently irritated by short fiction written in the present tense.”

Bravo. Pedestrian prose is painful but the gimmick of present-tense narration is intolerable, and now it has even seeped into the more pretentious regions of hack journalism.