'Living in a Ghost Story'

As usual when I visit Kaboom Books I leave with a stack of books I have already read. I’m a reader, not a collector. To find by serendipity a previously unknown book worth reading (which means reading at least twice) is rare in my experience. For many, a book is like a Kleenex – use it once and dispose of it. When I buy one, new or used, I’m virtually guaranteed to read it again. Saturday’s haul: 

Elias Canetti: The Human Province (1973; trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Seabury Press, 1978).

 

Elias Canetti: Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes 1954-1971 (1994; trans John Hargraves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

 

I’ve been reading Canetti since my freshman year when I stumbled on his novel Auto-da-Fé (1935) in the library stacks. I have spent the subsequent half-century urging people to read his work, without much success. The same goes for my other purchase: Undertones of War (1929) by the English poet Edmund Blunden. This is the first American edition of his Great War memoir, published by Doubleday, Doran & Co. The dust jacket has fallen apart and someone tucked it into the book. The spine is sturdy and the pages have turned only slightly yellow. It’s a good reading copy of what I judge the finest of all World War I memoirs.

 

 By all accounts, Blunden was a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy man, who would name two of his children, John and Clare, after the mad poet John Clare. He saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918 and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. In November 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”

 

While paying for the books, the owner of Kaboom, John Dillman, suggested I read Poilu: the World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 (1978).