'A Friend to Out-of-Doors Reading'

“This morning I saw, for the first time in my life, a young boy, walking along the street, reading a book. And the beatific smile on his face, no one could believe.” 

An extensive library devoted to the perils and pleasures of reading while walking can be found online. (Here, for instance.) It had never occurred to me that I might need instruction in either activity. I regularly walked to my grade school, about a mile from home, book in hand. I was already clumsy and no doubt tripped on buckled sidewalks, but I don’t remember. I specifically recall walking to school while reading a 1953 novel by Henry Felsen, Street Rod, the much-anticipated sequel to his Hot Rod (1950). I remember because the book report was due that day and I hadn’t finished reading the book.

 

I’m speaking now retrospectively. I can’t read in a moving automobile, though buses are fine, nor can I read for any length of time or distance while walking. It would be difficult to visually focus and I would fret about tripping into trees and trucks. I rely on a cane, and concentration on a text would be risky. As it is, my previously mentioned clumsiness has never left me, despite all those years of ballet lessons. I feel affinity with Charles Lamb, as expressed in “Detached Thought on Books and Reading”:

 

“I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner [Not Ring. This guy.]. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.”

 

We gave many of our sons’ books from childhood to a boy who lives two doors away. He’s a statistical anomaly – a dedicated reader – and I’ve often seen him walking down our cul-de-sac reading myopically, with his face literally in a book. The smiling boy described at the top was sighted by Louise Bogan in Dublin. In April and May of 1937 she was visiting Ireland, her ancestral homeland, on what remained of her 1933 Guggenheim Fellowship.

 

Bogan loved Ireland without romanticizing it and often wrote about Joyce and Yeats. She reviewed Finnegans Wake for The New Yorker (“Joyce keeps unerringly to style’s economy, precision, and weight”) and wrote at least six reviews and essays devoted to Yeats. In the May 1938 issue of The Atlantic, eight months before the poet’s death, Bogan wrote a long profile of Yeats and his work:

 

“In age, he shows no impoverishment of spirit or weakening of intention. He answers current dogmatists with words edged with the same contempt for ‘the rigid world’ of materialism that he used in youth. He is now content to throw out suggestions that are not, perhaps, for our age to complete, as it is not for our age fully to appreciate a man who reiterates: ‘If we have not the desire of artistic perfection for an art, the deluge of incoherence, vulgarity, and triviality will pass over our heads.’ But adherence to that creed, and that creed alone, has given us the greatest poet writing in English to-day, and Ireland the greatest it has ever known.”

 

[You can find the poet’s April 14, 1937 letter to Morton Zabel, as well as the Joyce and Yeats material, in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005).]