'It Puts Every Reader in a Good Humour'

A friend has sent me a link to George Stuart Gordon’s Companionable Books (1927), an old favorite and a model for how to write about the books we love. Gordon was an academic and scholar, the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1928 until his death in 1942, which makes his enthusiasm for good books notable. Today one can’t imagine a professor or college administrator writing such a book. Gordon’s taste is excellent, he has no wish to arbitrarily malign the great works of the past and he seems happily unburdened with politics. The essays were originally delivered as talks on the BBC in 1926. Though revised for print, they retain the informality and gusto of good conversation.     

The OED defines “companionable” as “sociable, friendly; pleasant or agreeable as company.” Let’s face it, we prefer the company of some books to some people. Good books have good manners and seldom disappoint us. Gordon writes in his preface, “There is a companionable quality in some books that skips the centuries, and I was reluctant that any one should miss it through mere timidity and misunderstanding.” He devotes a chapter each to Pepys’ Diary, Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, Tristram Shandy, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, William Cowper’s letters, Kinglake’s Eothen and “The Humour of Charles Lamb.” A sequel, More Companionable Books, was posthumously published in 1947. Here is Gordon on Pepys:

“The first thing we notice about the Diary is that it puts every reader in a good humour. For, in the first place, Pepys himself enjoys everything so much: his clothes, his house, his work, his jaunts, the respect people paid him, the pretty women he saw and the pretty women he kissed, the music he heard and the music he made, the theatre, his dinner parties, his books, and not least—indeed the condition of all the rest—his steadily increasing bank balance.”

And on Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“Though it suits all ages, it is a book, I fancy, best appreciated in the middle years, and by those who have had to fight for their experience, who have not found life easy, and who are still in the battle. Intelligence is not enough, even superior intelligence, as Macaulay proved.”

Gordon knows why we love certain books. He’s a mensch.