'It Is As Natural to Read Books Many Times'

I was looking online for something Jacques Barzun had written about the pleasures of riding on trains when I found “Recommended Summer Reading,” a feature published in the Summer 1958 issue of The American Scholar. If I saw such a headline in a journal or newspaper today, I would promptly turn the page, assuming that the recommendations would be lying, inbred puffery and simple bad taste. Barzun’s presence kept me reading, and we learn that he, in turn, has been reading a foundational American work, a new edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

“The volume sent me back to Lincoln’s writings at large, which I never tire of dipping into: he is probably the greatest stylist America has yet produced, and I read his slightest note with awe and despair, for each is a gloss upon the Necessary Word, besides being a peep-hole into one of the strangest and finest minds of the nineteenth century.”

Non-readers and readers impervious to literary grace will be surprised to learn that one of our presidents was a writer of the first rank, as was another, Ulysses Grant. Of course, two years later, Barzun published his brief monograph, “Lincoln the Literary Genius,” in which he writes:

“[H]is style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook which colors every act of the writer’s and tells us how he rated life. Only let his choice of words, the rhythm and shape of his utterances, linger in the ear, and you begin to feel as he did – hence to discern unplumbed depths in the quiet intent of a conscious artist.”

By this point, I gave up on Barzun on trains, at least temporarily, and kept reading. Joseph Wood Krutch rightly recommends Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond. Saunders Redding, a name new to me, likes Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape, an excellent bedside book. But the real payoff came with a brief but dense burst of bookish recommendations by Randall Jarrell. He was a mediocre poet, a world-class reader and one of our best critics. He begins: “Everyone hears an opera, looks at a picture, over and over and over; it is as natural to read books many times. Most of my list are books I've read again during the last year.” A true reader, as Nabokov said, is a re-reader. Among the new books Jarrell has read are titles by Sybille Bedford, Peter Taylor, Philip Larkin and Nabokov (Pnin). The rereading tally begins:

“I’ve recently read again and would like to recommend: Saint-Simon’s Memoirs; the first half of D. H. Lawrence’s Complete Short Stories -- some are as good as any short stories in English; Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the best and most endearing of books of criticism; Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a  wonderful prose book by the greatest of modern poets; Verga’s stories and his House by the Medlar Tree; Leskov’s ‘The Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District’ and ‘The Amazon’; Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems; Sir Kenneth Clark’s books on landscape, the nude, and Piero della Francesca . . .,” and so on.

It’s an admirably inspired list. One can quibble about Lawrence’s presence but Jarrell is an industrial-strength consumer of books, whose motive is love and pleasure. He recommends Turgenev’s greatest story, “A Lear of the Steppes,” and, of course, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. He closes, and wins our hearts: “I continually reread Chekhov and Remembrance of Things Past -- and anyone who loves Proust will certainly love Jean Santeuil, the letters, and Contre Saint-Beuve.”

I never did find Barzun on trains, though I think what I wanted may be in God’s Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love, Spiced with a Few Harsh Words (1954), which I don’t have a copy of at the moment and probably ought to reread.