'Too Much the Voluptuary'

The North Carolina poet and novelist Fred Chappell, now eighty-six years old, begins his 2015 essay “Everything an Anchor” with a mock-litany of loss: 

“At my age—I count seventy-eight heavy-laden years—some formerly unalloyed pleasures have acquired bittersweet flavors. Among these are food, politics, girl-watching, woodsy walks, alcohol, and reading.”

 

That so gracefully bookish a writer might have to give up up reading seems sad and impossible, but Chappell quickly clarifies his meaning:

 

“Reading has not palled, nor have its pleasures paled, but they are somewhat changed in nature. After forty years of teaching at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, I retired and at once decided to start from the beginning again. I would reread or read for the first time the classics of western literature, setting out from Homer and ending with whatever lies on my bedside table at the hour of my death.”

 

Chappell’s plan is wholly praiseworthy – for him -- but I’ve never been given to making grandiose plans in any area of my life. I’m too fickle, too contrarian and lazy, even with my own resolutions. There have been exceptions. Years ago I resolved to read all of Shakespeare and Melville, first work to last in chronological order, and did so. Later, for almost six months when I returned to university to complete my B.A. in English after thirty years, I read almost nothing but books by or about Henry James. Otherwise, my reading has always been happily chaotic, governed more by whim than central planning. Chappell admits he failed to treat his reading as symptomatic of obsessive-compulsive disorder:

 

“I am too much the voluptuary to forego reading random books for the fun of it; or just because I happened to recall a title; or because I have become curious about whether one of my old favorites would still hold up. It was upon this latter impulse that I plucked from the shelves two novels by Joseph Conrad. Conrad draws me.”

 

Same here. I’ve always respected Conrad, since I read Heart of Darkness in high school. I’ve read most of his titles but haphazardly. Now I’m going through them out of order, having started with the political novels – Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and, soon, Nostromo. More than respect, I’m experiencing pleasure of a specific sort, at once literary and intellectual. Conrad often seems to write prophetically. He knows our world and understands its squalid politics. I can tell I won’t stick with Conrad exclusively because books already read, especially novels, have a sort of genetic linkage with titles by other writers – in this case, James’ The Princess Casamassima. Plus, on Wednesday my middle son told me he had just finished reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon in French, which moves me to borrow the recent translation into English from the library.

 

Chappell digresses into a celebration of the paperback  revolution (“Vintage, Beacon, Grove, Harper Torchbooks,” he sings) – which made books, classics and otherwise, available to students and others among the less-than-wealthy. (I’ve been busy lobbying my library to acquire a new collection of essays about C.H. Sisson listed at $139.99). I still have paperbacks I bought half a century ago, including Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities ($2.95) and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides ($3.95).  The title of Chappell's essay is a nod to the line of trade paperbacks, Anchor Books (a Conradian name), started by Doubleday in 1953. Some sport covers by Edward Gorey, making them highly collectible. He concludes:

 

“I cling to a hope—or perhaps it is only a fancy—that some day one of my earnest young friends [students] will blunder into an odorous used-book store, come across a yellowed, beer-stained, thumb-worn paperback, Vintage K-24, Poems and Essays by John Crowe Ransom, browse a few pages, and, shocked by revelation, will look about in wild surmise—'Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’”