'I Cannot Stop Reading Him Even Now'

A friend of roughly my age is reading Proust again. He wrote to me on Friday: “A declaration: I think the fifty pages or so of Proust’s writing about the illness and subsequent death of his grandmother might be the best fifty pages I’ve ever read.” My friend is an unreconstructed hedonist when it comes to books, and Proust is pure pleasure, which is not the same as saying I will read his novel again. Twice is sufficient. I read him when young (ages nineteen and twenty-nine) and still omnivorous, but the time investment today would be daunting. A writer of hefty volumes I may revisit in toto is Edward Gibbon. Like Proust and Shakespeare, he’s a part of our mental furniture and I would read him for his portraiture and glorious prose. In a 1951 letter to Bernard Berenson collected in Letters from Oxford (2006), the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper writes:

“I, unlike you, prefer my books to be long (though this may be a sign of laziness: it spares one the mental effort of repeated choice); and I am now re-reading, for the nth time, that greatest of all historians, as I continually find myself declaring,--Gibbon. What a splendid writer he is! If only historians could write like him now! How has the art of footnotes altogether perished and the gift of irony disappeared!”

No one reads Gibbon for a crash course in Roman history, though an inspired editor might easily excerpt a book-length assortment of Plutarch-style character studies. I’d forgotten that Gibbon’s best-known observation is not a free-standing aphorism but a brief aside tucked into his profile of Titus Antoninus Pius:

“Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. In private life he was an amiable as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed with moderation the conveniences of his fortune, and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.”

Unlike Trevor-Roper, I have no preference for long over short books, or vice versa. Nor am I averse to dipping into a volume already read cover to cover and enjoying the serendipity of a choice passage. Good books share this quality with good friends: their interest is inexhaustible. We can’t wear them out. Trevor-Roper continues in his letter to Berenson:

“I took a volume of Gibbon to Greece and read it on Mount Hymettus and the island of Crete; I read it furtively even at I Tatti, where 40,000 other volumes clamoured insistently around me to be read: and I cannot stop reading him even now.”

In a letter to Berenson written four months earlier, Trevor-Roper proves himself as wise as he is well-read:

“I used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes: I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx.”