'Relief, Joy, or Nostalgia'

“Of course, no one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific time in one’s life, and the particular book’s smell, typeface, and paper can be as much a part of the experience as one’s physical and emotional circumstances.” 

I used to think this sort of thing was drippy sentimentality, a wallow in a make-believe past. Now it’s nearly an everyday occurrence. For books – good books -- my memory hasn’t seriously faded. I don’t think of Lolita. I think of the Crest Giant paperback I bought in 1968 from James Books in Parma, Ohio, and read on my parents’ porch that summer.   

The passage at the top is from Tess Lewis’ review/essay “Once Is Not Enough: Rereading and Remembering,” published in the Autumn 2002 issue of The Hudson Review. Lewis is a fairly tough-minded reader. She quotes Nabokov’s well-known declaration in his Lectures on Literature (1980): “One cannot read a book, one can only reread it.” In fact, almost the only books worth reading are the ones you will want to read a second time, at least. Lewis writes:

“Pace Nabokov, you never do read the same book twice, and the betrayal of earlier selves and the  flirtation with possible new ones that rereading occasions can bring relief, joy, or nostalgia as much as it can piquancy.”

In 1888, three years before his death, Melville self-published John Marr and Other Sailors in an edition of twenty-five copies. The title poem is prefaced with a brief prose passage that is almost a short story. I was exchanging thoughts the other day with a reader about Willa Cather’s prairie novels and “John Marr” came to mind. Marr is a former sailor who “settles down about the year 1838 upon what was then a frontier-prairie, sparsely sprinkled with small oak-groves and yet fewer log-houses of a little colony but recently from one of our elder inland States.” Which in turn recalls a passage from “Loomings,” Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick: “Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies . . .”

I first read “John Marr” in the Penguin paperback Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (1970), purchased in a bookstore in Savoy during my first visit to France. On the title page I wrote my name followed by “7-24-73 Chambéry.” The pages are browning but after half a century the book remains intact and perfectly (re)readable.

Lewis’ essay begins as a review of Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (2002) – the first book I ever ordered from Amazon. The book arrived at our house in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on a rainy day and was ruined. They promptly replaced it and I was impressed. I had interviewed Lesser two years earlier in Berkeley for a freelance newspaper story I was writing.

All of this is confirmation of my conviction that all books are one book, as Borges told us long ago.