'I Hopped All Over the Canon'

“There was no pattern to my reading. It was all hand-to-mouth.”

When young I was indiscriminate, reading anything I fancied and that chance put in front of me, from Julius Caesar to Philip K. Dick. If one’s critical sense is to amount to more than mere snobbery, I don’t know any other way to develop respectable tastes later in life. I’m almost saying, “Junk is good for you,” at least in moderation and in the narrow sense of giving you something against which to contrast good writing. Any book, potentially, can teach you something, even if it’s only never to read it again.

 

In passing on Thursday I mentioned reading while in high school Jews, God and History by Max I. Dimont. A reader wrote to ask if I was Jewish and, if not, “Why did you read it? It seems like an unusual choice for a high-school student.” No question, I was an unusual high-school student. And not Jewish. I had always been interested in Judaism and Jewish history, I had Jewish friends and the Six-Day War likely had something to do with it. Dimont’s book in its day was a bestseller. There was nothing exotic about it. I bought the Signet paperback (95¢).

 

The passage at the top comes from an interview with the late Irish poet Michael Longley, who appears to have had a mind that habitually made linkages. In this, he reminds me of my brother who very early developed an interesting Borgesian method for selecting the next book to read. The current book would provide the inspiration. In it he would find an allusion, a footnote, a passing reference to another work, and there you were. I remember once a book on the paintings of Albrecht Dürer led him to a biography of the American photographer Weegee. The interviewer asks about Longley’s early reading in poetry and the poet replies:

 

“At Trinity I hopped all over the canon. As a classicist much of it was new to me. I read George Herbert as though he'd been published the previous week. (And I never had to answer an exam question on him!) From Britain the three contemporary volumes that meant most to me were Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived, Ted Hughes’ Lupercal and Geoffrey Hill’s For the Unfallen. . . . Likewise Richard Wilbur. A matchless virtuoso. I bruised my brain trying to write Wilburese.”