'And of Course Homer and Shakespeare'

“So what should those extraordinary individuals, the real leaders, read?” 

Lincoln, we know, read Bunyan, Burns, Byron, Cowper, Defoe, Euclid, Gibbon, Gray, Poe, Pope and much Shakespeare – seven poets, one geometrician, one historian, two writers of fiction. In Reading with Lincoln (2010), Robert Bray tells us:

 

“From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself.”

 

Today, one can’t imagine an American president or other world leader deciding that reading books was a useful application of his time and energy. Asking the question at the top is Adam Zagajewski in Slight Exaggeration (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2017). The other ambitious reader among leaders who comes to mind – admittedly, from an age utterly unlike our own -- is Winston Churchill. In Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Allen Lane, 2018), Andrew Roberts reports that while stationed in India from 1896 to 1898, the future prime minister undertook a rigorous regimen of self-improvement: “Churchill’s reading programme began with Edward Gibbon’s 4,000-page The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -- which he was to re-read twice more over the course of his life, and parts of which he could quote from memory.” We can’t conclude from this that deep reading makes one a great leader, or that non-readers are excluded from tough, inspired leadership. Zagajewski continues:

 

“I was raised on literary culture, which has its bona fide heroes, truly remarkable, in which Kierkegaard and Kafka, Dostoevsky and Celan, receive their due. But if I try to think myself into the minds of those who bear the responsibility for a whole nation, if I imagine the nightly vigils of someone facing the monumental challenges of, say, a Churchill, would I really  recommend Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Notes from Underground, Metamorphosis, wonderful texts, books, categories, images that are our hymns, the hymns of our introspection, articulating our uncertainties, our mistrust of all authority?”

 

You already know how Zagajewski will answer his own rhetorical question: “I wouldn’t dare.” To suggest the literary angst squad to a leader trying to resolve potentially catastrophic events is a sophomoric stunt, the fantasy of a theory-besotted, overeducated twit. Zagajewski completes his paragraph like this:

 

“For the time being, these great leaders—do they exist?--must reach for Thucydides, Plutarch, Livy. And of course Homer and Shakespeare.”

 

I bought Slight Exaggeration on Sunday from Kaboom Books here in Houston, along with another Zagajewski prose work, Solidarity, Solitude (trans. Lillian Vallee, 1990). Also, a nice first edition of William Maxwell’s The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (Knopf, 1989) and the Everyman’s Library edition of Elizabeth Bowen’s Collected Stories (2019).