Half a century ago, in the Winter 1976 issue of The American Scholar, the journal’s editor Joseph Epstein published an essay (under his usual pseudonym, Aristedes) titled “The Opinionated Librarian.” It’s a feast for serious readers, an account of trying “to trim down my personal library.” Book lovers will share his resolve to cull volumes and the near-impossibility of doing so. “Although I did not know it when I first set out to do this,” Epstein writes, “I was engaged in a task of the most intimate literary criticism.” The operative word here is “intimate.” The dedicated, book-besotted reader understands that our relations with books often rival in tenderness and loyalty our relations with human beings.
My middle son noticed when
he visited at Thanksgiving that hundreds of books are stacked horizontally on
shelves already densely filled with vertical volumes. That’s a sure symptom of
overstocking and the imminent need for culling. Long ago, because of limited
shelf space, I could no longer arrange all my volumes according to author or
subject. I’m mildly neurotic about that, so the fact that one heap includes
books by Thom Gunn, Otis Ferguson, Christina Campo, Whitney Balliett, Paul Klee
and Heimito von Doderer is like an itch I can’t quite reach. Here is Epstein describing
a highly specialized species of literary criticism:
“Trimming down a library
in this way makes me wish I owned certain books I do not in fact own--if only
for the delight of getting rid of them. The novels of Harrison Salisbury, if I
owned them in the first place, would, I should imagine, be easily jettisoned. Books
about show business, about politics in Latin America, about auto racing; books with
titles that begin The Death of ... or The Politics of ...; books on new forms
of psychotherapy, on urban renewal, on arms control--shelves and shelves of
these, if only I owned them, could go without a quiver of hesitation on my
part.”
I share Epstein’s sense of
imaginary pleasure. How I would enjoy ridding my shelves of John Steinbeck,
Stephen King, Mary Oliver, Lee Child and any title that has appeared on the New
York Times bestseller lists in the last, say, forty years.
The books I retain represent
a form of autobiography. Attached to most volumes are memories of
times and places when read and reread. I think of my books as a covert C.V., one that
would hold no interest for a prospective employer.
Fiction is easy. Most ages poorly. “Fiction is my next big cut,” Epstein writes, “especially contemporary
fiction of very recent years. Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov, though I do not
adore their work, may stay. The work of their imitators, or workers in the same
vineyards--Barthelme, Barth, Gardner, and the rest--I have come to consider
English department teaching aids, and no longer read them. They go.”
What fiction do I retain?
The usual suspects: Sterne, George Eliot, Conrad, Henry James, Chekhov and
Tolstoy, Proust, Nabokov, Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, a
scattering of others. Most of what I hold on to are books I might reasonably expect
to reread or at least consult. Philosophers? Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine,
Aquinas, Spinoza, William James, Wittgenstein, a few others. What odds and
ends? Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson, Guy Davenport, Edward Gibbon, Nadezhda Mandelstam and her
husband, Beerbohm, Rebecca West, J.V. Cunningham, Zbigniew Herbert, Ronald
Knox, A.J. Liebling, Theodore Dalrymple, Montaigne, Geoffrey Hill, Auden, MacNeice . . .
“Having cleaned out these shelves,” Epstein writes, “and disposed of several of the superfluous books in my library, I feel a bit like Henry James, who, having shaved off his beard and prepared to enter upon his major phase, remarked that he felt ‘forty and clean and light.’ An illusory feeling for me, of course, not only because I am most distinctly not Henry James, but because the likelihood is great that in no time at all I shall load up the shelves again.”
[The Epstein essay is collected in Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life (1979).]
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