“I like
books of observation, memoirs, letters, anything that tells how people actually
lived. Truth is certainly better than fiction, if you can get a bit of it.”
That’s C.H.
Sisson explaining his tastes in reading to Michael Schmidt at the start of his
eighth decade. The interview appears in PN
Review 39, published as part of a 1984 Festschrift
on the occasion of Sisson’s seventieth birthday. He mentions reading the Historiettes of Tallemant Des Réaux, Saint-Simon’s
memoirs and Madame de Sévigné’s letters. Sisson’s drift to the factual late in life
mirror’s my own reading experience and reminds me of William Maxwell’s preference
for biography, memoir, diaries and correspondence when selecting books to
review: “what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were
afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea
of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.” Such books, he says possess
the “breath of life.” [The Outermost
Dream: Literary Sketches, 1989]
My ostinato book,
read casually but consistently in the background in recent months, has been
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. After
almost twenty years I’m reading it a second time. Last weekend I read Victor
Sebestyen’s new biography of Lenin and David Thomson’s Warner Bros (2017). Bob
Barth suggested I try a 1963 pamphlet by the novelist Caroline Gordon, A Good Soldier; a Key to the Novels of Ford
Madox Ford. Flitted
among are Chekhov’s stories, Frederic Raphael’s Byron (1982) and Lincoln’s Sense
of Humor (2017) by Richard Carwardine. Raphael notes of Lord Byron as a
boy: “[He] was already a keen reader, particularly of Roman history and
Mediterranean legend. (Poetry he despised.)”
One result
of steady reading is steadily discovering new and desirable books to read. On Sunday,
Nige tipped me off to the novels of Dezső Kosztolányi, which I hope to
investigate soon. And I’m scheduled to review a couple of new books about the
Gulag that are still in transit. Sisson says at the conclusion of his
interview:
“It is nice
still to have so many gaps in one’s reading when one grows old; it provides
novelties in old age.”
3 comments:
Re: Maxwell’s preference for biography, memoir, diaries and correspondence when selecting books to review: “what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.” Such books, he says possess the “breath of life.”
Joseph Epstein (unknown source):
Early in his biography Boswell remarks “that minute particulars are frequently characteristick, and always amusing, when they relate to a distinguished man.” In the hands of an artful biographer, these minute particulars, like so many well-placed dots in a pointillist painting, conduce to provide a satisfyingly full picture. So it is with the “Life of Johnson.” Boswell shows us his subject’s gruff table manners, how he walked, his laugh (like that of a rhinoceros), his terror of death, his immense—one can only call it his Christian—generosity to the poor and those defeated by life.
From A Biography as Great as Its Subject.
Dave Lull,
Thank you.
Mike
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