'A Blissful Eternity Would Not Suffice'

“I was rereading as well as reading. The record, I suppose, is Journal of a Man of Letters, 1898-1907, by Paul Léautaud, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury [Chatto & Windus, 1960]. I even have a note: “bought 2nd April 1960, at the Ancient House Bookshop, Reigate—one of the most important moments of my life.” 

Léautaud (1872-1956) is an inexportably French writer. I know this because I read the book in translation, all the while sensing I was missing something. I first encountered Léautaud’s name in the Canadian poet Robert Melançon’s For as Far as the Eye Can See (trans. Judith Cowan, Biblioasis, 2013). In an email, Melançon confirmed that he couldn’t imagine Léautaud having an intelligible existence in English. In his collection’s Sonnet 85, Melançon renders a booklover’s paradise:

 

“Here on this side are the call letters PA

for Latin, and over their the letters PQ

for Romance literature, which is to say                                

 

“for paradise: so much prose and poetry

that a blissful eternity would not suffice

for us to read it all, from Lucretius and Horace

 

“to Saint-Denys Garneau, Borges and Montale,

from Aulus Gellius to Joubert, to Cioran, to Léautaud.

One could just as well say Seneca, and Ponge, and Leopardi,

 

“Petrarch, Pessoa, Montaigne . . . one recites these names

And those of Sbarbaro, Erasmus, or Martineau, giddy

At having inhaled the inexhaustible catalogue.”

 

This was irresistible but Léautaud was largely lost on me. I found little charm in his crankiness but I suspect the failing was mine, not his. That, plus the language barrier noted by Melançon. Mavis Gallant, the wonderful Canadian story writer, devotes a good essay to him in Paris Notebooks (1988). The author of the passage at the top is Michael Mott (1930-2019) in his essay “Filling Bookshelves for a Lifetime,” published in the  Fall 2012 issue of Sewanee Review. Previously, I had read only Mott’s 1984 biography of Thomas Merton. His essay continues:

 

“A little overenthusiastic, perhaps, but I see I wrote ‘agree!’ four years later. And I have read the book thirteen times over the years. In this case the moment of buying a book was as important to record as the times of reading a book.”

 

Mott was an enthusiastic lifelong reader, not merely a book collector, and he was seemingly without snobbery or pretensions. Along with Léautaud, his bookish loves included Ambrose Bierce, Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Boswell, Sterne, Gibbon and Madame de Sévigné. What was it about Léautaud that moved him to read the book thirteen times? Ulysses I’ve read five times, Proust twice. Swift, Defoe, but I’ve never kept count. The Bible and Shakespeare consistently but usually in piecemeal fashion, with emphasis on the Psalms and King Lear. What about you, reader? What books and writers have you read most often?