' I Have Read a Lot of Mixed Literature'

It ought to be a simple question: what are you reading? The answer is complicated because the question prompts another question: What do you mean by “reading”? (I apologize for the Clintonian evasiveness.) On my bedside table are stacked Hitler: A Global Biography (2019) by Brendan Simms, Louis Auchincloss’ novel The Education of Oscar Fairfax (1995) and Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932 (1961).

All represent what people conventionally mean by “reading.” A bookmark is inserted in each. I am moving through them sequentially, first page to last. I jump from one to another as the spirit moves me. I’m in no hurry. Obviously, the Hitler biography is grim reading – less for what the Nazi leader did than for the ease with which he rallied millions to carry out his will. I must be naïve. I’m still appalled and depressed by the spectacle of seemingly decent people happily committing atrocities.

When it gets too heavy I shift to Auchincloss whose title is a play on The Education of Henry Adams. His novel is a character study of an upper-crust, old-money Wall Street lawyer. Auchincloss’ point is that such a description is simplistic and tells us very little. What the novel shares with the Hitler book is immersion in an alien world where the rules are different from anything I've known first-hand. Isn’t that the least we expect of almost any book, particularly fiction? V.S. Naipaul once compared reading Balzac to eating good chocolates. Once he got started he couldn't stop indulging. That's what reading Auchincloss is for me. He published thirty-one novels (including his finest, The Rector of Justin), and I’ve read about half of them. Even his lesser efforts are worth your time.

I came to the Holmes-Pollock letters by way of Auchincloss, who somewhere said he preferred them to the wonderful Holmes-Laski letters. All of these men were formidably well-read. Eavesdropping on their exchanges brings to mind reading the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters – a similar casual erudition and respectful informality. An example: On Feb. 24, 1909, Pollock devotes his opening paragraphs mostly to legal shoptalk and a health update, then moves on to something more important, his reading:

“In waking hours I have read a lot of mixed literature, ranging from the classic Izaak Walton—a little bit overrated I think—and more than classic Charles Lamb to Maurice Donnay’s serious or frivolous plays. . . . I have been trying Wilkie Collins’s stories of adventure which fascinated the people of 1850-70 or thereabouts. . . . [H]ow childish is the Anglo-American workmanship of that period compared to Robert Louis Stevenson’s, not to speak of any modern Frenchman who knows his trade! . . . Lamb’s letters are a perennial joy. Now and then I mumble over a chapter of Montaigne: an author who has for a lazy reader one great merit, that it is no matter where one takes him up.”

And that final point brings us back to my idiosyncratic understanding of “reading.” I’m a flitter. Since last weekend, along with the three volumes mentioned above, I’ve read two short stories each by Joseph Epstein (from Fabulous Small Jews) and Borges, one by John Cheever (“Reunion”), several Lamb letters, essays by Herbert Gold (“Death in Miami Beach”) and Thomas De Quincey, and scattered poems by Larkin and Betjeman, not counting assorted pieces online. This is all rereading. Something prompts a memory or a hunger and I make a brief detour. It’s reassuring to know both Holmes and Pollock appreciated P.G. Wodehouse.