“An
unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope
for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he `has read’
them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?”
We
all know readers who treat books, even great books, like one-night stands. Close
the covers and it’s time to move on. This makes sense, of course, if one is reading
trash. Who rereads Stephen King or Donald Barthelme, which begs another
question: Who reads Stephen King or Donald
Barthelme? No, a “literary man,” in Lewis’ estimation, pledges his troth to the
best books, making him a sort of serial monogamist, though seasoned readers are
well known for being generous with their loyalties. Two sentences later, Lewis says
excitement “must disappear” from subsequent readings, and here I think he’s
mistaken. As a reader and a human being, with deepening maturity and a fallible
memory, I change between readings. The man reading Macbeth today is not the book-drunk thirteen-year-old who read it
for the first time, nor the eighteen-year-old English major, and so forth. Good
books grow at least as fast as we do, often faster. Lewis writes: “You cannot,
except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened,” but then
clarifies his meaning: “The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises
(which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness.”
Lewis
is writing of stories, of plots with suspense and narrative pull. Once we know
the captain and crew of the Pequod go
down with the ship, and only one “did survive the wreck,” do we put away Moby-Dick and never return? A first reading
is a rehearsal; the show is the rest of your life with the book. Nabokov in Lectures on Literature (1980) put it
like this: “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A
good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Here’s
an example: A book I keep in almost constant rotation is The Anatomy of Melancholy. By its rambling, learned, frequently
rewritten, ever-expanded, stuff-it-all-in nature, Burton’s treatise is built
for rereading. Straight through, I’ve read it three times. More often I dip
into it bibliomanically, for amusement
and morale-boosting. For a first-time reader intimidated by the bulk of the Anatomy and its Latin-infused prose, I
suggest the slender Burton on Melancholy
(Hesperus Press, 2013), a 108-page selection edited by Nicholas Robins. He uses
the 1927 edition edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, with all the Latin
translated. For a book ostensibly about the madness of those afflicted with “black
bile,” Robins writes in his introduction, “there is nothing insane about the
voice that carries us through [the author’s] long journey—nothing saner or more
reasonable; more personable or personal.”
Lewis
concludes “On Stories” like this: “In life and art both, as it seems to me, we
are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is
not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how
to do it, so that at least either the meshes will become fine enough to hold
the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the
bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think it is
sometimes done—or very, very nearly done—in stories. I believe the effort to be
well worth making.”
Pleasingly,
Burton reports that some sportsmen take Lewis’ metaphor quite literally and find
relief from melancholy in fowling and capturing birds in nets. In a section
titled “Exercise Rectified of Body and Mind,” he writes:
“Fowling
is more troublesome, but all out as delightsome to some sorts of men, be it
with guns, lime, nets, glades, gins, strings, baits, pitfalls, pipes, calls,
stalking-horses, setting-dogs, decoy-ducks, &c., or otherwise. Some much
delight to take larks with day-nets, small birds with chaff-nets, plovers,
partridge, herons, snipe, &c.”
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