'A Reassuring Survivor'

“As for a book to mark the settled sobriety of my advanced years, I keep Boswell’s Life of Johnson close by. Its praise of steady judgment, as well as its moral force, make it a reassuring survivor.” 

Here’s a reader/writer worth paying attention to. William M. Chace is a retired professor of English and university president of the old school, the sort who taught the books they loved and often reread. A reader sent me a link to a recent essay, “My Books,” published by Chace in Commonweal. The premise is a familiar one: after a life of accumulating books, what to keep? What to sell or give away? His choices overlap with mine, though not entirely. He’ll keep Shakespeare and Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide but also, sadly, The Catcher in the Rye and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Never have I encountered a reader whose tastes and fallibilities were identical to mine, though Chace’s are close.

 

“As for all the other books,” he asks, “why keep them? Because some were written by friends or colleagues, now dead; their knowledge and intelligence must be honored. Out of another kind of piety, I am keeping books inscribed and given to me. And a special space is being held for those books that, in their sheer monumentality, have represented to me intellectual or artistic achievement of the highest order: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joyce’s Ulysses, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and most of Henry James, Proust, Dickens, and Faulkner.”

 

Chace formulates an interesting category of “keepers”: “Their authors tell me that I have never known myself well and still haven’t dug deep enough to see what I’m truly made of.” For him that would include Franz Kafka, Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor. He also prizes some books as objects – “a formidable ingenuity of effort now dying away.”

 

I suspect that every serious reader ponders the post-mortem fate of his library. Will the collection remain intact? Will survivors divvy them up? Will some end up in the Dumpster? Of course, we’ll be past caring.