'My Sneaking Preference'

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly caustic sensibility:

 

“So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions.”

 

I’m reminded of the silly ritual of politicians naming their favorite or most influential books. We don’t, of course, believe a word of it. Some years ago, when Hillary Clinton named Little Women and said, “Like many women of my generation who read this novel growing up, I really felt like I lived in Jo’s family. This book was one of the first literary explorations of how women balance the demands of their daily lives, from raising families to pursuing outside goals. The book was written more than a century ago, but its message resonates today,” we’re left with the certainty that she has never read Alcott’s book or read it only at the command of her handlers’ playbook. Her husband named Marcus Aurelius (who wrote in Book VII of the Meditations: “Be thou erect, or be made erect.”)

 

Repplier’s essay was published in the July 1889 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which also includes work by Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett. I’m not certain any book has ever “hindered” me but I can think of several that I read only under duress – namely, textbooks and Norton anthologies. I’m a great believer in independent reading guided only by curiosity and respect for literary tradition. My seventh-grade English textbook (1964-65), I remember, might have been published in 1889. It was heavy with sub-literary Americana: Edward Evertt Hale’s “The Man Without a Country” and too many poems by William Cullen Bryant. In college I resented the warehousing of literature represented by the Norton behemoths. Repplier respects those readers who “are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have not found it so easily attainable.”

 

Still pervasive among Americans is a neo-Puritanical impulse to read, or at least claim to read, books of “self-improvement,” pleasure be damned. Repplier writes of a preachy-sounding children’s novel previously unknown to me, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89) by Thomas Day. “Altogether,” she writes, “Sandford and Merton affected me the wrong way; and, for the first time, my soul revolted from the pretentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to the malign influence of that tale that I owe my sneaking preference for the drones and butterflies of earth.” Repplier then launches into a delightful apologia of inarguable common sense:

 

“I do not now believe that all men are born equal; I do not love universal suffrage; I mistrust all popular agitators, all intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, all self-styled friends of the people. I cannot even sympathize with the noble theory that every man and woman should do their share of the world’s work; I would gladly shirk my own if I could. And this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its responsibilities is due to the subtle poison instilled into my youthful mind by the too strenuous counter-teaching of Sandford and Merton.”