'A Collection of Good Books'

“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.”

Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statement or evidence of “interleckchul” (Flannery O’Connor’s spelling) status are comically pretentious. Aldous Huxley published his essay “If My Library Burned Tonight” in the November 1947 issue of House and Garden magazine (!). He posits a fire that destroys his library: “[A]s an emergency measure, in the first few weeks after our hypothetical fire, I shall buy myself only the most indispensable aids to mental health and security.”

Many of Huxley’s choices are admirably predictable: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, Dante. He doesn’t select obscure titles merely to show off – a common scam among bloggers and other readers. Nor does he sanctify even those he chooses: “There will be Wordsworth because he is one of the forces of nature, and this in spite of the fact that he could write worse than anybody and that, after Milton and Dante, he was probably the least sympathetic of the great poets.” Donne, Baudelaire, Yeats and Eliot follow.

Among novelists: Proust, Joyce, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens. A few debatable surprises: Stendahl, Choderlos de Laclos. Benjamin Constant, Fielding, Voltaire. Again, Huxley asserts winningly personal criticism: “. . . Swift, perennially comic and a misanthrope whose distaste for the human race finds in every successive year of our history new and ever more hideous justifications. As for Smollett – no; my sense of humor is not robust enough to rejoice unreservedly in syphilis and broken legs.” Trollope, yes; Goethe, Scott, Thackery, no. With Flaubert, a surprise: “Bouvard et Pecuchet, however, will be among the first books to be re-bought. . . . Compared with it, Swift’s Advice to Servants and Polite Conversation are mere Theocritean idylls.” D.H. Lawrence? Huxley, a hearty yea. Kurp, nay. His endorsement of Conrad is reluctant.

Next, essays and other forms of nonfiction. Montaigne and Pascal, of course. Bacon and Balthazar Gracian. A nice surprise is Huxley’s inclusion of Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, which he calls “the beautiful expression of that supernatural joy which is one of the fruits of the spirit.” Hume, Johnson, Coleridge (“only in his notebooks and his Aids to Reflection”), Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay (“who writes like a military band and is the best possible reading for a rainy afternoon”), Emerson (a stentorian Kurp “nay”), Bageot, Saint-Beuve, Arnold, Ruskin, Schopenhauer. A polite and welcome partial-dismissal of Virginia Woolf follows. The letters of Keats and the Goncourt Journals.

Conspicuous omissions: Greek and Roman writers except for Homer, Sterne, Leopardi, Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, Henry James, Chekhov, Auden. Huxley closes with a line from a Matthew Arnold sonnet:

“‘What props, thou ask’st, in these bad days my mind?’ One of the answers to Arnold’s curiously unpronounceable question remains today what it has been ever since man first invented the art of writing: a collection of good books.”

[Thanks to Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books for alerting me to this essay. Isaac has published fifteen Huxley titles.]