“So often it is disappointing to pick up a work of art that charms us in youth, and read it later in life.”
True, but that only means
we have grown up. If, at forty, we read with comparable delight the same books
that charmed us at twelve or twenty, perhaps we haven’t put away childish
things. It’s the old Heraclitean paradox – we can’t read the same book twice. The
lasting test of any book is happy rereadability. By that measure, Gulliver’s
Travels, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Kim and a
few other books I first read as a boy have endured. Most have not. The passage
above is from the July 13, 1962, entry in the painter Charles Burchfield’s
journal. Here is the full paragraph:
“This afternoon, searching
for a book to read to divert my mind so as to see the painting problems I was
involved in, more detachedly, I chanced upon Yeats, Dramatic Poems, vol.
2 – and was delighted (and surprised) to find that the first one I read in, ‘Countess Cathleen’ still had a lot of charm and beauty for me after so many years (I
read these poems eagerly in Art School) – So often it is disappointing to pick
up a work of art that charms us in youth, and read it later in life.”
Burchfield graduated from
the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1916, the year he turned twenty-three,
suggesting he first read Yeats as a young man, not a boy. One wonders what he
thought of the later Yeats, the great phase – The Tower (1928), for
instance. Burchfield had exceptional taste in literature. He loved the great
Russians -- Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He read and
appreciated Winesburg, Ohio by fellow Ohioan Sherwood Anderson when it
was published in 1919. He adored Willa Cather, read all of her books as they
appeared, and internalized her vision. Here’s a journal entry, ostensibly
non-literary, from October 15, 1948:
“The grass colors
beautiful – orange yellow, sun-lit, rich reddish brown, pastel shades of pale
brown pink, pale ochre, light gray creamy white, and some weed that gave off a
slate gray color. With the sunlit fields of dead grass against a blue-black
eastern sky, I thought of My Ántonia.”
Burchfield first read Moby-Dick
in 1924, near the start of the Melville revival, and often quotes from it in his
journal. He reread it in 1938, quotes a passage from Chapter CXXXII (“The Symphony”), and writes: “Nowhere, I believe, but in the Bible, is there such
fine writing as that.” Burchfield also repeatedly read Robinson Crusoe, The
Call of the Wild and Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil.
[In 1993, the State
University of New York Press published the 737-page Charles Burchfield’s
Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by Benjamin Townsend.]
1 comment:
I once had a conversation with a writer you admire, Theodore Dalrymple, about the work of D.H. Lawrence. We were walking through the streets of Birmingham, where he still lived (it was 2003). I was there to write a feature article about him. The subject of writers admired in youth had come up, and I mentioned how much I had loved The Rainbow and Women in Love as a teenager, but that I had never reread them. He strongly advised me not to do so, since he had also once loved those novels, but, unlike me, had reread them years later, only to find them 'repellent' (or words to that effect).
Years later, I saw that he had published an essay describing his decision to give DHL yet another go. To his surprise, the bright flame of his adolescent admiration was fully reignited, while the sage disillusionment of his earlier reevaluation had been consigned to the waste basket in his study. I admired his honesty, and wonder if we shouldn't be more cautious when deriding so many first literary loves. Perhaps we are not only using a pretense of hard-earned wisdom to dismiss those who once had the ability to delight us, but also to dismiss our once easily delighted selves as well.
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