'My Reluctance to Let Certain Books Go'

A reader in Philadelphia, a retired attorney, tells me he and his wife are moving into a retirement home, “what a jovial neighbor calls ‘the final solution.’” He has already scouted the shelves in his new residence and discovered three titles by Elizabeth Bowen, which looks promising. 

“But our apartment,” he writes, “is far smaller than our six-bedroom home so I am situationally compelled to perform a massive bibliotomy. Like that portmanteau word? I placed the dispossessed volumes out on the curb under a ‘free’ sign. What is remarkable is how many have been taken by passersby, including some Melville duplicates. Nobody’s gonna have my Signet novellas by the same, with ‘Bartleby’ and ‘Benito Cereno.’”

 

I don’t envy him the task of culling his library. One gauge of worth is re-readability. I would be unlikely to dump a title I might want to read again, or at least consult. Books frequently reread maintain continuity with the past – always a source of consolation. They live in us like pleasingly pleasant memories, the bittersweet sort we revisit and savor.

 

“So far, though, I have been fickle, selectively debriding my library of 20^th-century novels and journalism. I’ll keep Liebling. I’ll keep Rebecca West. And I desperately want to hold on to my biblical commentaries and philosophical writings— Plato, Aristotle — and some good stuff in Spanish, such as Unamuno and Vargas Llosa and Javier Marias. Nabokov stays. Hemingway went. My wife wanted to hang on to Faulkner (I do have a weakness for As I Lay Dying and some stories but few of the others).”

 

When young I was a James Joyce acolyte. Today I would unload everything but my fifty-five-year-old edition of Ulysses, swollen with pasted-in notes and held together with a rubber band. Reading tastes and loyalties change across time. Many early enthusiasms get pitched while a few remain (Swift, Defoe). I wouldn’t think twice about throwing the Library of America edition of Hart Crane overboard, and would happily jettison much literary criticism as basically second-hand and redundant. Of course I would keep Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt and Yvor Winters.

 

“The real challenge is when I get to poetry. Celan over Miłosz? I’ll keep Hardy come hell or high water. Frost will melt away. I’ll fight to keep Leopardi and Montale even though my lifelong effort to learn Italian has produced half-ass results (well, the volumes are bilingual, anyway).”

 

Shakespeare, Yeats, Larkin, Cunningham, Zbigniew Herbert? Keepers, all. What about L.E. Sissman, Donald Justice, Cavafy, Geoffrey Hill (fourteen volumes, a third of one shelf) and Henri Coulette? I’m glad I don’t have to immediately make such decisions.

 

“Dante? I have Prof. Singleton’s six-volume Bollingen presentation of Dante, which gives you the poem, an English translation and mountains of erudite commentary. But when I weigh whether to keep it or donate it I am reminded of the Spanish playwright Lope De Vega who as he lay dying asked his doctor, ‘Am I dying?’ When told he was, he dropped back on the pillow and declaimed his last words: ‘Good. Dante makes me sick.’” 

 

I too have Singleton’s translation, along with Ciardi’s and Sisson’s. I would probably keep only the last, sadly.

 

In his essay “Books Won’t Furnish a Room” (In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage, 2007), Joseph Epstein recounts the painful, invigorating process of reducing his library from 2,000 volumes to four-hundred. Only five writers are retained in their entirety: Henry James, Gibbon, Santayana, Proust and Beerbohm. Epstein writes:

 

“I tried to devise principles for keeping the books I did. Usefulness and re-readability was the best I could come up with. (Add to this pure pleasure: I couldn't let go of a small paperback of The Lyrics of Noel Coward.) I thought I had a few other principles under construction, but each of them, freshly devised, fell before my reluctance to let certain books go.”