'Livelier in Pleasant Weather'

Magazines have long been fond of asking well-known writers to recommend books appropriate to certain times of year, usually as Christmas gifts or so-called “beach reading.” The results tend to be surprisingly conventional and unrewarding, with pleasing exceptions. Consider this:

 “Since I long ago gave up reading for any reason except pleasure, my literary diet does not vary much by the season. If anything, I find I am apt to indulge myself in less trivial fare during holiday months than in the winter -- I have more leisure for savoring and less need to drug myself to sleep with something uncerebral.”

 

The writer is the much-underrated American poet Phyllis McGinley (1905-78) responding to the “Recommended Summer Reading” feature in the Summer 1962 issue of The American Scholar. Among her co-respondents are other members of the journal’s editorial board, including Alfred Kazin and the historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Carrer of Jim Crow). Sorry to say, most of the responses are dull. McGinley distinguishes herself by enthusiasm, good taste and no evidence of showing off.

 

Like her, I’ve never understood how reading in the summer differs from any other time of the year. The choice of reading matter is an internal affair, not subject to the influence of sunlight, warm temperatures and other external factors. McGinley makes an exception for travel:

 

“On a motoring trip, for instance, my husband and I always carry along A. E. Housman. You have to be young to enjoy Housman, and young is what one is inclined to feel while driving happily along strange roads. Enclosed, insulated from real life by speed, movement and the abandonment of domestic duties, the adolescent pessimism, the pseudoclassic despair and the impeccable music of that verse seem satisfying as they did when we were college freshmen. It does not do for bedtime reading but it is delightful to chant aloud en route.”

 

I’m charmed by the scene of a middle-aged American couple, sometime during the Kennedy administration, reciting in tandem one of Housman’s lyrics while touring the country. McGinley recommends other good titles – Kim, Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, Austen’s Persuasion, H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks, Adam Bede, Trevelyan’s History of England. That final three-volume work is, she writes, “as romantic and satisfactory a book as one could ask. In fact, a vacation is a natural and proper time to renew one’s friendships with early enthusiasms. The wells of joy are apt to be livelier in pleasant weather.”

 

In his introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, in 1892, Housman says: “The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.”