'Pride of Reading Is a Terrible Thing'

One of life’s modest pleasures is happening on a previously unknown writer and finding his work interesting if not exactly excellent or “major.” To appreciate such discoveries, a reader must stifle his instinctive sense of literary snobbery or at least defer it for a decent period of time. Let’s remember that Herman Melville was largely forgotten for thirty years after his death until resuscitated in the twentieth century by readers and critics. Time is cruel and the only critics who count are readers. 

I’m thinking now of the American teacher, editor and essayist Frank Moore Colby (1865-1925). His name meant nothing to me until last week when a reader sent a link to his 1904 collection Imaginary Obligations.  The first essay in the collection, “Books We Haven’t Read,” illuminates the plight of “minor” writers like Colby, ignored and forgotten in favor of the merely fashionable. Colby formulates a memorable description of common literary snobbery:

 

“Pride of reading is a terrible thing. There are certain literary sets in which the book is an instrument of tyranny. If you have not read it you are made to feel unspeakably abject, for the book you have not read is always the one book in the world that you should have read. It is the sole test of literary insight, good taste and mental worth. To confess that you have not read it is to expose yourself as an illiterate person. It is like admitting that you have never eaten with a fork.”

 

Colby’s prose is witty, clean and plain-spoken. No theory or ego-driven obfuscation. Any intelligent reader will find him accessible. His voice is like a friend’s who has good taste. I was delighted to see Colby refer to the final book Charles Darwin published in his life, the delightful Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (1881):

 

“We need all the comfort we can get. Small literary ambitions trip up many of us every day. Many a man lives beyond his literary income from an absurd kind of book pride. Why should we not own up like Darwin--change the subject to earthworms if they interest us more? There was more ‘literary merit’ in what he said of earthworms than in what most of us say about belles-lettres. It is not the topic that gives the literary quality.”

 

That final sentence in particular is a treasure. I’ve just finished rereading Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers. Most people read it, I assume, for his recounting of what he invariably calls the “Hiss Case,” and for that alone the book is obligatory reading. But Chambers also gives us a memorable conversion story, a love story, a history of Soviet Communism in the U.S. and a lengthy digression on small-scale dairy farming. The last is not a subject of significant interest to this reader but remains a delight to read. A good writer can make almost any subject interesting. Consider A.J. Liebling on boxing, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes, Ronald Knox on detective stories, Guy Davenport on Balthus. Colby closes his essay with this passage:

 

“And if the only thing a multitude of books have done for a man is to enable him to mention them and quote them and appear to be in the ‘literary swim,’ he is no fit person for the company of honest authors. He does not belong in Arcadia at all, but behind the counter in a retail bookshop, where there is a good business reason for plaguing other people about the books they haven't read. By these and kindred reflections we may console ourselves in part for our deficiencies and ward off the temptation of the sham.”