`We Were Walking Anthologies'

“A single allusion, to a familiar book or poem, could create affinity.”

The speaker is Shirley Hazzard in the interview she granted The Believer in 2004. Hazzard refers to literature’s currency among educated people in the days before television. In Greene on Capri she relates her first meeting with Graham Greene. He was seated with a friend in a café on Capri, reciting Browning’s “The Lost Mistress” but unable to recall the final line. As she was leaving, Hazzard supplied it – “I will hold your hand but as long as all may,/Or so very little longer!” -- and thus sparked their friendship.

I’ve known similar experiences from both sides -- as the one making the allusion and as its recipient. After failing out of sheer laziness to respond to several letters from a recent acquaintance, I started my postponed response with three honest, guilt-ridden words – “I’m a fool.” He recognized them as the title of a story by Sherwood Anderson, whom we both admired and had discussed, and friendship ensued. That was in 1975.

Several years later, I was sharing a table in a Toledo, Ohio, restaurant with several acquaintances. I took the senior member of our group for a farmer, as he wore brown overalls, flannel shirt and baseball cap. In fact, he had founded and was soon to sell a pharmaceutical company. He dropped a line from “Lycidas” as a sort of test, which I passed. I learned he had two bookish and seemingly incompatible enthusiasms – Milton and William Carlos Williams – and had even published articles about the latter.

The third such “affinity,” as Hazzard calls it, was the happiest and briefest. As a reporter, I had several times spoken with a professor of English at a university in New York. He was vastly well read and unexpectedly humble, and complimented several things I had written. I was seated in his office one afternoon when I realized he was testing me but trying to disguise the fact. The clincher came when he mentioned a novel about an artist who created scarecrows. He was cannily vague about details of nationality and era. I suggested Dog Years by Günter Grass, and he was delighted I knew the book, one of his favorites. This was 13 years before Grass admitted his youthful membership in the Waffen-SS.

I’m sad to say the first friend has disappeared (I last heard of him 15 years ago) and the others are dead. So, what remains of our affinities? By one reckoning, nothing, or nothing but memories. I’m comforted by the certainty that books and a bookish nature – “the intersection of books and life,” to coin a phrase -- can, despite the dedicated reader’s reputation for maladjusted solitude, bloom into the rare affinity (literally, “bordering on,” a sort of kinship by proximity). Hazzard again, later in the interview:

“Through reading, I grew up. I am still hoping to grow up through reading, through music, through experience. When I was sixteen, living in Hong Kong, I went to work in an office of British Intelligence. The young English officers there knew Asian languages, had fought in the war, were clever and amusing. The only card I had to play was literature. They were full of poetry, and so was I. We were walking anthologies. That was a great happiness and, in those times, not unusual.”