'An Old, Tried, and Valued Friend'

Most of the books I read today I have read before, whether last year or half a century ago. So too, many of the books I purchase are old acquaintances. Sometimes the copy I already have is literally falling apart, or I might want to replace a frayed paperback with a sturdy hard cover. I almost agree with William Hazlitt: “There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.” On Thursday I bought four volumes I already own, all hardbacks, at Kaboom Books here in Houston. 

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both translated by Max Hayward, I read when the latter volume was first published, and several times in later years. I judge them among the essential books of the last century. Mandelstam (1899-1980) was an acidic truth-teller, no respecter of the despotism that had murdered her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. She was notoriously tough, cynical and defiant. My old copy of the latter volume (almost seven-hundred pages) has split into four pieces along the spine and is held together with a rubber band. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda writes:

 

“We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.”

 

Osip had been arrested in May 1938, sentenced to five years in correction camps for “counter-revolutionary activities” three months later, and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938.

 

I found good, clean, unmarked copies of Rebecca West’s A Train of Powder (1955) and The New Meaning of Treason (1964), rare examples of first-rate journalism-as-literature. West’s novels are disappointing but the nonfiction is excellent, especially her coverage of the Nuremberg trials and the trial of the English traitor William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw. Collected in the first volume is “Opera in Greenville,” originally published in The New Yorker. West covers a 1947 lynching trial in South Carolina. Unlike many other writers of her time, she understood the tricky, devious ways of evil. She was seldom naive:

 

“There could be no more pathetic scene than these taxi-drivers and their wives, the deprived children of difficult history, who were rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger. For an hour or two, the trial had built up in them that sense of law which is as necessary to man as bread and water and a roof. They had known killing for what it is: a hideousness that begets hideousness. They had seen that the most generous impulse, not subjected to the law, may engender a shameful deed.”

 

All of the words I have quoted from Mandelstam and West I have read before and even recall. Hazlitt explains the enticement of familiar books:

 

“When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. When the entertainment is altogether new, I sit down to it as I should to a strange dish, -- turn and pick out a bit here and there, and am in doubt what to think of the composition. There is a want of confidence and security to second appetite. New-fangled books are also made-dishes in this respect, that they are generally little else than hashes and rifaccimenti [OED: “a new version or remodelling of a literary or artistic work; a reworking”] of what has been served up entire and in a more natural state at other times. Besides, in thus turning to a well-known author, there is not only an assurance that my time will not be thrown away, or my palate nauseated with the most insipid or vilest trash, -- but I shake hands with, and look an old, tried, and valued friend in the face, -- compare notes, and chat the hours away.”