'Indubitably I Should Miss Them'

Every year, in the weeks preceding Christmas, I face the question I’ve been asked since I was a kid, and my answer always leaves me feeling sheepish. “What do you want for Christmas?” “Well, ah . . .” “Yeah, we know: books.” Piteously, I’ll add, “Socks. I could use some socks,” which is not a lie but I answer that way out of a desire to seem more conventional. But why do I care if my desires are obstinately mundane? I have friends who ask for things like fishing gear and Scotch, which even to me seem more normal, when all I want is that new biography of Anthony Hecht. 

In 1972, Philip Larkin was asked to write a foreword to that year’s program for the Antiquarian Book Fair, titled “Books” when collected in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. One is surprised to learn this unclubable man, though a university librarian by profession, agreed:

 

“I am quite the wrong person to write this foreword. I should never call myself a book lover, any more than a people lover: it all depends what’s inside them. Nor am I a book collector: when a don asked me how many books I had, I really couldn’t reply, but this didn’t matter as all he wanted to tell me was that he had 25,000, or 50,000, or some improbable number.”

 

All true for me as well, particularly Larkin’s irritation with the book braggart. The poet describes himself as a “compulsive reader,” and that also fits. “[T]his has meant,” he writes, “that books have crept in somehow.” If I were asked to describe in one word the nature of my relationship with books, I would once again resort to the mundane: “reader.” A serious reader of necessity becomes a “collector.” You have to accumulate these shelves of volumes if you want to read them – “on demand,” I almost added. I’m a connoisseur not of first editions and hand-tooled leather bindings but of their contents. I like Larkin’s curation of close-at-hand volumes:

 

“Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen. True, I reach to the right more often than to the left, but the twelve are there as exemplars. All in all, therefore, I should miss my books. I like to think I could do without them -- I like to think I could do without anything -- but indubitably I should miss them.”

 

Getting back to Christmas: about that new Dino Buzzati translation . . .