`Whole Catalogues of Volumes of All Sorts'

What can be so gratifying as watching a reader reading a book that obviously gives him pleasure? I witness such scenes every week in libraries and parks, and I remember years ago observing fellow passengers on city buses, books in hand, obliviously swaying and bumping with the stops and starts of the great stinking machine. Comparable pleasure can be had any time at Ivebeenreadinglately, the blog kept by Levi Stahl of Chicago. As he writes: “Most of what I do with my time is read, and that's what fuels this blog.” Lucky man.

I’m moved to mention Levi’s blog by his Saturday post, “Steps in the Dance.” Levi shares my admiration for the late Anthony Powell’s 12-novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time, and gives a nice reading of a paragraph from the third novel, The Acceptance World (1955). This is literary criticism of a gentle, generous sort, and Levi goes on to quote a favorite paragraph from the same novel:

“I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some `ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.”

I also enjoy Powell’s enthusiasm for Robert Burton and his The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of the few essential books in the language. Powell found the title for his early novel, Afternoon Men, in The Anatomy: “They are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men.”

The narrator of A Dance, Nick Jenkins, writes a book about Burton, as Powell wrote one about Burton’s younger contemporary, John Aubrey. In the second-to-last paragraph of the cycle’s final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Powell has Jenkins write:

“For some reason one of Robert Burton’s torrential passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind:

“`I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, firs, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honors conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.’”

Another paragraph follows at the close of A Dance, but you must have read the preceding 12 volumes to hear the no-longer-secret melodies and all the themes resolved. Levi is very good at inciting enthusiasm for Powell’s wonderful novels and “whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts.”