Rereadings
For John Bethell, teacher then and now
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword: On Rereading
DAVID SAMUELS - Marginal Notes on the Inner Lives of People with Cluttered Apartments in the East Seventies
PATRICIA HAMPL - Relics of Saint Katherine
SVEN BIRKERTS - Love’s Wound, Love’s Salve
VIJAY SESHADRI - Whitman’s Triumph
ARTHUR KRYSTAL - Kid Roberts and Me
DIANA KAPPEL SMITH - My Life with a Field Guide
LUC SANTE - A Companion of the Prophet
KATHERINE ASHENBURG - Three Doctors’ Daughters
JAMIE JAMES - “You Shall Hear of Me”
VIVIAN GORNICK - Love with a Capital L
MICHAEL UPCHURCH - Stead Made Me Do It
ALLEGRA GOODMAN - Pemberley Previsited
PICO IYER - Lawrence by Lightning
BARBARA SJOHOLM - The Ice Palace
EVELYN TOYNTON - Revisiting Brideshead
PHILLIP LOPATE - The Pursuit of Worldliness
DAVID MICHAELIS - The Back of the Album
About the Author
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Copyright Page
Foreword: On Rereading
When my son was eight, I read C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy aloud to him. I had originally read it when I was eight myself, and although I’d reread the better-known Narnia books—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Magician’s Nephew; The Silver Chair—in the interim, more than forty years had passed since I’d read The Horse and His Boy.
Reading a favorite book to your child is one of the most pleasurable forms of rereading, provided the child’s enthusiasm is equal to yours and thus gratifyingly validates your literary taste, your parental competence, and your own former self. Henry loved The Horse and His Boy, the tale of two children and two talking horses who gallop across an obstacle-fraught desert in hopes of averting the downfall of an imperiled kingdom that lies to the north. It’s the most suspenseful of the Narnia books, and Henry, who was at that poignant age when parents are still welcome at bedtime but can glimpse their banishment on the horizon, begged me each night not to turn out the light just yet: how about another page, and then how about another paragraph, and then, come on, how about just one more sentence? There was only one problem with this idyllic picture. As I read the book to Henry, I was thinking to myself that C. S. Lewis, not to put too fine a point on it, was a racist and sexist pig.
I’d read two biographies of Lewis and knew that his relations with women, colored by the death of his mother when he was nine, were pretty peculiar. I’d read “The Shoddy Lands,” a creepy misogynist fantasy in which the (male) narrator encounters a giantess whose nude body makes him gag. However, I remembered The Horse and His Boy only as a rollicking equestrian adventure, sort of like Misty of Chincoteague but with swordfights instead of Pony Penning Day. My jaw dropped when I realized that Aravis, its heroine, is acceptable to Lewis because she acts like a boy—she’s interested in “bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming”—and even dresses like one, whereas the book’s only girly girl, a devotee of “clothes and parties and gossip,” is an object of contempt. Even more appalling was the way Lewis treated his villains, a brown-skinned, scimitar-wielding people called the Calormenes. (Forty years ago, the crude near-homonym had slipped by me. This time around, I wondered briefly if Lewis was thinking only about climate—calor is Latin for “heat”—but decided that was unlikely. It’s as if he’d named a Chinese character Mr. Yellow: it had to be on purpose.) The book’s hero, Shasta, is the ward of a venial Calormene fisherman, but, as a visitor observes, “this boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine but the boy is fair and white.” That’s how we know he belongs to a noble northern race instead of an uncouth southern one. Of the Calormene capital—the seat of a fat, obnoxious, vulgarly bejeweled potentate called the Tisroc—Lewis remarks that “what you would chiefly have noticed if you had been there was the smells, which came from unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions, and the piles of refuse which lay everywhere.”
It was difficult to read this kind of thing to Henry without comment: the words, after all, were coming to him in my voice. I held my tongue for the first hundred pages or so, but finally I blurted out, “Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy isn’t really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?”
Henry considered this seriously for a moment. “That’s not true,” he said. “The Tisroc is a bad guy, and C. S. Lewis doesn’t say he has dark skin.”
“Well, he’s a Calormene, and all the Calormene are dark. Of course”—I could hear myself start to fumble—“fifty years ago, when this book was written, lots of people had ideas that weren’t true, about whether boys were better than girls, or whites were better than blacks, or—”
Henry shot me the sort of look he might have used had I dumped a pint of vinegar into a bowl of chocolate ice cream. And who could blame him? He didn’t want to analyze, criticize, evaluate, or explicate the book. He didn’t want to size it up or slow it down. He wanted exactly what I had wanted at eight: to find out if Shasta and Aravis would get to Archenland in time to warn King Lune that his castle was about to be attacked by evil Prince Rabadash and two hundred Calormene horsemen. “Mommy,” he said fiercely, “can you just read?”
And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were performing simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it, when it had seemed as swift and pure as the Winding Arrow, the river that divides Calormen from Archenland.
Eight years ago, when I became editor of the literary quarterly The American Scholar, one of the first decisions I faced was how to organize the books department. Of course we needed to review recently published books, but how could we also honor the fact that for all true readers, the bonds that count are not with books we haven’t yet met but with those we already know intimately? As the poet Austin Dobson observed in 1908, new books “have neither part nor lot in our past of retrospect and suggestion. Of what we were, of what we like or liked, they know nothing; and we—if that be possible— know even less of them.” The solution was so obvious I wondered why every magazine didn’t do it: we’d open our books section with an essay not on reading something new but on rereading something old.
And thus these Rereadings were born. In each issue of the Scholar, a distinguished writer chose a book (or a story or a poem or even, in one case, an album cover) that had made an indelible impression on him or her before the age of twenty-five and reread it at thirty or fifty or seventy. The object of the writer’s affections might be famous or obscure; a venerated classic or a piece of beloved trash; a fairy tale read as a child, a novel read in the throes of first love, a reference work that guided the early stages of a career.
In short order the Rereadings became the most popular part of the magazine. Perhaps that is because they weren’t conventional literary criticism; they were about relationships. The relationship between reader and book, like all relationships that matter, changes over time. A book that seemed a fount of wisdom to a fifteen-year-old might seem a trough of hogwash to a fifty-year-old; on the other hand, passages that were once dull or incomprehensible might be transformed by life experience from dross into gold
. The Rereadings, as it turned out, revealed at least as much about the readers as about the books. Each was a miniature memoir at whose heart lay that most galvanic of topics, the evolving nature of love. Even if decades had passed, many of the writers remembered the color of the original book cover, the chair they’d sat in, the season, the time of day. Of course they did! Don’t you remember the room in which you lay with your first lover, the way the bed faced, the color of the sheets, whether the pillows were soft or lumpy?
This book contains my seventeen favorite Rereadings: favorite not just because they’re so good but because they’re so dissimilar. Though all the writers are American, they live in five different countries; the books they write about represent eight nationalities. Their perspectives, their literary styles, and their senses of humor are as variegated as a patchwork quilt assembled partly from Balenciaga gowns, partly from torn blue jeans. But all of these essays pursue the same fugitive quarry—the nature of reading—and, taken together, they have helped me understand why the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
According to that peerless rereader Holbrook Jackson, the Reverend Alexander Scott read Carlyle’s French Revolution four times; Edward FitzGerald read Richardson’s Clarissa five times; John Stuart Mill read Pope’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey at least twenty times; and The Times of London, in 1928, reported the existence of a society “for which a twenty-fifth reading of ‘Esmond’ was the necessary qualification of membership.” Much as I admire Thackeray, I suspect that the members of that society experienced diminishing returns.
The first time, especially if it’s in childhood, is induplicable. It is customary to speak of children as vessels into which books are poured, but I think the reverse analogy is more accurate: children pour themselves into books, changing their shape to fit each vessel. “I have been Tom Jones,” said David Copperfield; he was also Roderick Random and, armed with the centerpiece of an old set of boot trees, “Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price.” We haven’t become ourselves yet, so we try on literary identities, fantastic at first and then closer and closer to home. Am I more like Mole or like Toad? I asked myself at six, undeterred by such trifling details as size and species. At eight, when gender was still no barrier: Aravis or Shasta? At sixteen: Dorothea or Rosamond? I think that’s why so many children prefer fiction and so many adults prefer nonfiction. As we age, we coagulate. Our shapes become fixed and we can no longer be poured.
Tom Jones also left its mark on William Hazlitt. In “On Reading Old Books,” the greatest essay on rereading I know, Hazlitt wrote:
It came down in numbers once a fortnight, in Cooke’s pocket-edition, embellished with cuts. I had hitherto read only in school-books, and a tiresome ecclesiastical history (with the exception of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest): but this had a different relish with it,—“sweet in the mouth,” though not “bitter in the belly.” It smacked of the world I lived in, and in which I was to live.
How wonderful to think of a time when Tom Jones wasn’t an English-class assignment but the most exciting escape-reading imaginable! The edition Hazlitt mentions cost sixpence and was published serially, leaving him hanging “just in the middle of a sentence, and in the nick of a story, where Tom Jones discovers Square behind the blanket.” It came out in 1792, forty-three years after the book’s original publication, so Hazlitt would have been fourteen, just the age at which a certain kind of smart, imaginative, and (for the time being) unhappy child gets along better with the characters in his library than with his peers. His pores are open; he is painfully impressionable; his enjoyment of literature is enhanced not by knowledge but by ignorance. Hazlitt understood this perfectly:
A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years. Oh! what a privilege to be able to let this hump, like Christian’s burthen, drop from off one’s back, and transport oneself, by the help of a little musty duodecimo [a pocket-size book], to the time when “ignorance was bliss,” and when we first got a peep at the raree-show of the world, through the glass of fiction.
From a child’s vantage, the literary raree-show often seems more full of life than life itself. Perhaps that is why most young readers are more interested in characters than in authors. Thinking about the act of composition—of people grinding out marketable sentences like bakers assembling cheese danishes—forces them to acknowledge that the characters were made up. They know that, of course, but they’d rather not have their noses rubbed in it. They’ll be taking up Christian’s burthen (a reference to the heavy load the ragged hero of Pilgrim’s Progress carries on his back) soon enough.
The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. “The sharp luscious flavor, the fine aroma is fled,” Hazlitt wrote, “and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left.” Terrible words, but it can happen. You become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: “My characters are wooden! My plot creaks! I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!” (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love. Conditions are the very thing you’re asked to learn.) You read too many other books, and the currency of each one becomes debased.
Is rereading, then, doomed to be an exercise in disillusionment, letdown, loss? Of course not. Sometimes the book may be so great that familiarity enlarges it rather than diminishes it; it expands like the chambers of a nautilus, growing as you grow. Nobody has ever said, “Gee, War and Peace seemed kind of thin the second time around.” Or it may be so difficult that it simply can’t be assimilated all at once. When I read my first Shakespeare play—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at twelve—I was exhausted by the time I’d located the subjects and verbs and had little energy left for such niceties as plot and character. Or on the first go-round you may get it wrong. When I read Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” at thirteen, I didn’t understand that the narrator had murdered his wife; that’s the whole point of the poem, but it was like invisible ink, legible only on rereading. Or maybe the book is about something you haven’t yet experienced—love, parenthood, vocation—and until you reread it fifteen years later, all you can do is press your nose against the glass.
One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.
If a book read when young is a lover, that same book, reread later on, is a friend: “the best of friends,” wrote the Victorian artist William James Linton, “That cannot be estranged or take offence / Howe’er neglected, but returns at will / With the old friendship.” This may sound like a demotion, but after all, it is old friend
s, not lovers, to whom you are most likely to turn when you need comfort. Fatigue, grief, and illness call for familiarity, not innovation. In bed with the flu, you do not say, “Hey, I’ve never tried Afghan food! Let’s order some takeout, and heavy on the turmeric!” You crave chicken soup. Similarly, you’re likely to crave a book you know well, perhaps a slightly childish one that will countenance a soothing regression. Down from the shelf comes Jane Eyre. Jane is the perfect visitor: her bedside manners are excellent, her conversation isn’t too taxing, and her dependable progress toward a happy ending sets an example for your recovery.
The words reread at a vulnerable moment, however, need not always be easy or cheerful. Four months before he died, Alfred Kazin, whose work I’d published in The American Scholar, wrote me a letter that concluded:
Yesterday, sick at heart at the struggle with my 82-year-old body as I fought a violent cold rainstorm, I finally got home, picked up Hardy’s poems and read myself back to life, as it were, thanks to his gift for putting one back into the whole design of life and death. No false optimism there, but what bracing truth in the very lilt of the words.
Hardy? Under those circumstances I might have chosen a jollier companion than the man who wrote, “We are old; / These younger press; we feel our rout / Is imminent to Aides’ den,—/ That evening shades are stretching out, / Gentlemen!” But I have little doubt that Hardy was exactly the friend that Kazin needed.
After my truncated exchange with Henry, it took us another couple of weeks to finish reading The Horse and His Boy. Parts of it were very beautiful: the night that Shasta spends at the Tombs of the Ancient Kings; the day that Aravis, wounded and exhausted, spends in the stone house of the Hermit of the Southern March, lying on a bed of heather. I liked the way the Hermit sportscasts the great battle at the end of the book: “Lune and Azrooh are fighting hand to hand; the King looks like winning—the King is keeping it up well—the King has won. Azrooh’s down. King Edmund’s down—no, he’s up again: he’s at it with Rabadash …” Even though I knew it was coming, I savored the moment when Shasta, who had been kidnapped in infancy, is revealed to be a prince. I was charmed by the resolution of the main characters’ relationship, which seemed less misogynistic than refreshingly antiromantic: “Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid, even fights) with [Shasta], but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”