'The Future Lies Inside the Silences'

There’s a valuable, seldom acknowledged service performed by writers who are themselves grateful readers. By documenting the importance of particular books to their lives and work, they are recommending them to us. 

Thanks to Guy Davenport I first read George Santayana’s Realms of Being and John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera. Joseph Epstein directed me to Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. I was introduced to the books of historian John Julian Norwich by Robert D. Kaplan when reading the latter’s Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece (2004). That was the first Kaplan title I read, eighteen years ago, and since then I’ve tried to keep us with his prolific body of work. His job description is tough to pin down with a single word: journalist, political analyst, historian, travel writer, even literary critic. Kaplan is one for whom the intersection of books and life is a much-visited destination.

 

I’ve been reading In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016), the prologue to which is titled “Nabokov’s Room,” a nod to his story “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (1937; trans. by author, 1941). Vasili Ivanovich escapes a noisy tour group and enters an inn where he takes a “most ordinary room.” From the window “one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and its castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness.” Vasili Ivanovich realizes that “in one radiant second . . . that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be.” He would require few possessions, including books. Kaplan takes over:

 

“What would be the books—two dozen at the most, enough for a shelf—that I would bring to such a room in order to live out the rest of my life? Each of these books would have to hold deep meaning for me; to have pivotally affected my life, and not altogether for the better, for life to be life requires complications and even unpleasantness.”

 

Kaplan has already told us he’s no rare book snob, no collector of first editions. “One book means freedom; too many books, though, act as a barrier to further discovery of the world.” His most treasured volumes are decades-old paperbacks. Chief among them is The Governments of Communist East Europe (1966) by H. Gordon Skilling. He recounts buying the 1971 paperback in Jerusalem when he was about to leave the Israeli Defense Forces. It gave him, he writes, “a vocation, a direction: a fate.” In his prologue, Kaplan goes on to tell book stories the way some veterans tell war stories – Buddenbrooks, Fathers and Sons, John Reed’s The War in Eastern Europe (1916).     

 

In Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1994), Kaplan chronicles his debt to Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941). In the first chapter of In Europe’s Shadow, “Bucharest 1981,” he acknowledges the importance to his thinking of Joseph Conrad’s two “monumental works,” Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). The latter is on my short list of the greatest novels. Kaplan writes:

 

“Indeed, Conrad makes you feel that the destiny of the universe depends upon one poor man, or one sick child, while also letting you know the seeming hopelessness of their situation. This is why Conrad could be history’s greatest foreign correspondent, greater than Herodotus even. Because the future lies inside the silences—inside what people are afraid to discuss openly among themselves, or at the dinner table—it is in the guise of fiction that a writer can more easily and relentlessly tell the truth.”

 

[See also “Conrad’s Nostromo and the Third World,” published by Kaplan in 1998 in The American Interest.]