'Where Reading and Rereading Are Concerned'

It’s likely you’ve never heard of Anthony Rudolf. He’s an eighty-year-old London-born poet, memoirist, editor, translator, founder of Menard Press and world-class reader. Years ago he introduced me to Piotr Rawicz’s novel Le Sang du ciel (1961), translated as Blood from the Sky in 1964. I’m skimming Rudolf's 2013 volume Silent Conversation: A Reader’s Life (Seagull Books). He lifts the title from an old favorite, Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, the dialogue titled “Aristoteles and Callisthenes” (1824): “What is reading but silent conversation?”

I say “skimming” because Rudolf’s appetite for the pretentiousness of theory (e.g., Roland Barthes)  and the avant-garde (Robert Duncan) is heartier than mine. My only other kvetch is the absence of an index. The book is a sort of literary taxonomy, an application of one man’s customized Dewey Decimal System. Across 748 pages, he classifies the books he has read, those he values and those he is yet to read. Because he has known so many of his subjects as well as their books, Rudolf spices things with gossip and criticism. I’m reading the entries for the writers I prize and those devoted to writers new to me who sound interesting. Any serious reader will nod his head in agreement when reading the opening sentence of Rudolf’s introduction:

 

“My book, like many literary works, involves excess, desire and the controlling hand of absolute possession, certainly where reading and rereading are concerned.”

 

He knew Zbigniew Herbert for twenty-six years and writes: “He is a classic exemplar of that splendid synergistic tradition, the European poet/essayist (Osip Mandelstam, Yves Bonnefoy,  Czesław Miłosz are other examples), a highly educated and intellectual writer, and in his case an offensive ironist, as it were, rather than a deployer of the defensive irony beloved of our own [English] dear literary tradition.”

 

Rudolf quotes Charles Lamb’s essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” and approvingly cites, of all people, the other Charles, Baudelaire: “Hypocrite lecteur, -- mon semblable, -- mon frère!”

 

In passing, he approves of Guy Davenport, though I wish he had devoted more space to him.  Nobly, he mentions Brian Lynch’s great novel based on the life of William Cowper, The Winner of Sorrow. Think of Rudolf as a literary scout, charting familiar ground and unexplored territory.