Wednesday, January 31, 2024

'They Are Wary of My Plain-speaking'

A reader alerts me to a parlor game proposed by The Guardian in 2017: Which books do I wish my younger self had read? Julian Barnes suggests volumes devoted to “the true nature of war, empire and race,” which sounds a bit like retrospective virtue-signaling. William Boyd’s choice has the genuine virtue of novelty: Nabokov’s second novel, King, Queen, Knave (1928; trans. 1968). Most of the other titles suggested are negligible, not unlike the answers politicians give when asked to name their favorite books. 

In general, I wish I had read less fiction (especially contemporary fiction) and more history and biography. Also, fewer fashionable titles du jour. Instead of wasting my time with Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse and Eldridge Cleaver, I should have been reading Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968), supplemented with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). I don’t regret having read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which admitted me to an American world I didn’t know existed. To call oneself naïve when young is almost redundant. Like many young and inexperienced people, I indulged a childish and deeply intolerant utopian streak, at least in private. I never threw a Molotov cocktail.

 

Among poets, I wish I had read Yvor Winters, who would have saved me a lot of foolishness, boredom and embarrassment. The same goes for Jules Renard, who could have taught me the value of unclubability. On this date, January 31, in 1898, he writes in his Journal:

 

“My independence has its price. I tell people I have a horror of banquets and grand dinners: consequently I am not invited to them. I am invited separately, out of consideration. Otherwise I might put my foot in it. They are wary of my plain-speaking.

 

“Invited alone, I can have things my way, and the meal is soon over. Soup, two dishes, no choices, and a desert. I am kept sober. I am here for the conversation. Quick, clear the table! Let us go into the salon for coffee and get down to some talk.”

 

[See Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

2 comments:

  1. I never read Wodehouse until my 30's or Waugh until my 40's or Trollope until my 50's - I wish I had read all three much earlier.

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  2. I myself wish I had discovered William Boyd much earlier in his career, because he's written so much and I find so much of it excellent. Now this is strange: I discovered "King, Queen and Knave in my early twenties, and read it over and over before I turned 40. "King, Queen and Knave" struck me as one of the books like "Pnin", where Nabokov crosses paths with Wodehouse. Last year, I got "King, Queen and Knave" on audiobook, to listen to while walking -- but I couldn't listen to more than a chapter. Nabokov must be read with the eye, I think.

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