Vintage Reading Read online

  Robert Kanigal

  VINTAGE

  READING

  FROM PLATO

  TO BRADBURY

  A Personal Tour

  of Some of the

  World’s Best Book

  Copyright 2010 by Robert Kanigel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by Bancroft Press (“Books that enlighten”)

  P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209

  800-637-7377

  410-764-1967 (fax)

  www.bancroftpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  I. ON EVERYONE’S LIST OF LITERARY CLASSICS

  As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner

  The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James

  Look Homeward, Angel — Thomas Wolfe

  Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte

  Kim — Rudyard Kipling

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll

  Justine — Lawrence Durrell

  Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens

  Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

  A Passage to India — E. M. Forster

  My Antonia — Willa Cather

  Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert

  II. ON MANY A LIST FOR BURNING:

  Heretics, Subversives, Demagogues

  Stories — Dorothy Parker

  The Prince — Niccolo Machiavelli

  The Devil’s Dictionary — Ambrose Bierce

  Mein Kampf — Adolf Hitler

  Nana — Emile Zola

  Ten Days That Shook the World — John Reed

  Native Son — Richard Wright

  III. BOOKS THAT SHAPED THE WESTERN WORLD

  Essays — Montaigne

  Dialogues — Plato

  The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith

  An Essay on the Principle of Population — Thomas Malthus

  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon

  The Origin of Species — Charles Darwin

  The Histories — Herodotus

  The Federalist Papers — Hamilton, Madison, Jay

  The Annals of Imperial Rome — Tacitus

  The Peloponnesian War — Thucydides

  Democracy in America — Alexis de Tocqueville

  IV. MAKING HARD WORK EASY:

  The Great Popularizers

  Only Yesterday — Frederick Lewis Allen

  Microbe Hunters — Paul de Kruif

  Selected Works — Cicero

  Coming of Age in Samoa — Margaret Mead

  The Outermost House — Henry Beston

  The Amiable Baltimoreans — Francis F. Beirne

  What to Listen for in Music — Aaron Copland

  Gods, Graves, and Scholars — C. W. Ceram

  The Stress of Life — Hans Selye

  The Greek Way — Edith Hamilton

  V. NOT BRAVE NEW WORLD, NOT ROBINSON CRUSOE:

  Lesser Known Classics

  A Journal of the Plague Year — Daniel Defoe

  The Doors of Perception — Alduous Huxley

  Elective Affinities — John Wolfgang von Goethe

  Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell

  Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud

  Arrowsmith — Sinclair Lewis

  Roughing It — Mark Twain

  VI. LIGHTER FARE:

  Good Reads, Best Sellers

  A Study in Scarlet — Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Song of Hiawatha — H.W. Longfellow

  The Rise of David Levinsky — Abraham Cahan

  Java Head — Joseph Hergesheimer

  Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight — R. Austin Freeman

  A Bell for Adano — John Hersey

  The Martian Chronicles — Ray Bradbury

  Gentleman’s Agreement — Laura Z. Hobson

  VII. “BUT I KNOW WHAT I LIKE...”

  On Aesthetics and Style

  The Ten Books of Architecture — Vitruvius

  The Live of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters And Sculptors — Giorgio Vasari

  The Seven Lamps of Architecture — John Ruskin

  The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form — Kenneth Clark

  The Elements of Style — Strunk and White

  VIII. ONE-OF-A-KINDS

  A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf

  The American Language — H.L. Mencken

  The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint Exupery

  The Education of Henry Adams — Henry Adams

  Flatland — Edwin A. Abbott

  Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neal Hurston

  A Mathemetician’s Apology — Godfrey H. Hardy

  My Life — Isadora Duncan

  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn

  IX. THE REALM OF SPIRIT:

  Holy and Human

  Gilgamesh — Babylonian epic

  Confessions — Saint Augustine

  The Golem — Gustav Meyrink

  The Razor’s Edge — W. Somerset Maugham

  The Seven Storey Mountain — Thomas Merton

  Death Be Not Proud — John Gunther

  Ecclesiasties — Old Testament

  Lost Horizon — James Hilton

  The Bhagavad Gita — Sanskrit poem

  Night — Elie Wiesel

  The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

  Introduction

  Somehow, despite myself, I’d gotten stuck in the same stupid bind as everybody else. After more than a decade spent keyboard-pecking and deadline-squirming to the freelance writer’s quickstep, by the early 1980s I felt like every harried business executive, teacher, programmer, or parent— or, for that matter, like every drudge of a nine-to-fiver: I loved to read, yet wasn’t reading much. And what I did read was usually what I had to read. Oh, one time an assignment to profile Yiddish storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer gave me the chance to read some of his strange, otherworldly creations. And a piece about city living sent me back to Jane Jacobs’ classic, The Life and Death of Great American Cities. But more often, I suffered the sad affliction of our age: Hopelessly caught up in the now, I had no time for those great old books of richness, subtlety, and originality I’d grown up hearing about, that were part of my cultural heritage, that I really wanted to read.

  As it happens, my writing included the occasional book review, usually of books editors assigned to me. But, what if, the thought struck me one happy day, I picked what I’d review? And not books just then the object of some publicist’s intemperate pleadings, but classics of their kind, ones that had been around for fifty years, maybe, or five hundred.

  I approached an editor at the Baltimore Sun. Would he be interested in reviews of old books? No, not too often, I reassured him. Not so often as to compete for editorial space with the latest war, fashion, or scandal. But maybe, say, once a month?

  Thus was born “Vintage Reading,” a column which appeared first in the Baltimore Sun, then for much longer in the Evening Sun (now sadly folded into its bigger brother) and concurrently, for a while, in the Los Angeles Times, where it was called “ReReading.” For seven years, I took time out from articles on bicycle racing, laser surgery, and the space shuttle to dip into Kipling and Thucydides, Flaubert and William James.

  Vintage Reading gave me the chance to read old books I wanted to read, then turn around and write
about what reading them had been like. I am forever grateful for those years now. “Vintage Reading” was my own private liberal arts education (term papers and all). Except that rather than write to suit some professor’s pedagogical agenda, I was writing for readers of a daily newspaper— folks like myself who, however intelligent and professionally accomplished they might be, rarely had time for the books they didn’t have to read.

  My credentials? Those only of a working writer, and of a long-time voracious reader and lover of books. The essays you find here are not the work of a scholar or academician. They are the work, and the pleasure, of a species of literary dilettante. They are middle-brow essays reflecting, I suppose, middle-brow sensibilities. They draw their inspiration from the friendly, more or less knowledgeable guide who brings to life the ruins of Pompeii or the glories of Chartres for visiting tourists.

  A tour guide will not, of course, suit everyone. In particular, those of more academic stripe may come away hungry from these brief essays. They are, first of all, brief. But more, that very delight and sense of wonder many of us felt in college, say, as we met new authors, new books— an experience we associate, after all, with 18-year-olds—may seem to more refined palates simplistic or naive.

  Still, I offer no apologies. My wish all along has been not to “protect” the great books behind daunting battlements, but to lower the drawbridge and welcome readers inside. If some find these essays less discriminating than they might prefer, I choose to see them as less standoffish— more open, accessible, welcoming.

  Other readers may question my particular choices. Some, certainly, are predictable enough; who would omit Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from any list of candidates for rereading, or first reading? But other choices may seem problematical or perverse— such as works by the relatively unknown English detective story writer R. Austin Freeman, the Bavarian fantasist Gustav Meyrink, or the now forgotten American novelist Joseph Hergesheimer; or by frank popularizers like C. R. Ceram; or distinctly unliterary figures like, well, Adolf Hitler.

  The brutal truth, dear reader, is that I chose these books for my benefit, not yours— because I wanted to learn something; or venture to an old time, or new place; or because circumstances awakened me to the merits of some long-dead author; or in a few cases because a book just happened to cross my desk or catch my eye. Typically, my choices reflected the whim of the moment, and so include vintage books that might not make every top ten list of immortal classics, but to which I nonetheless turned for literary, emotional, or intellectual sustenance at the time.

  Is this, I wonder, so wrong a way to direct one’s reading? Maybe that seat-of-the-pants hunch about what to read next makes as much sense as leaving it to nagging shoulds-and-oughts. A friend gave me an old leather-bound copy of Longfellow’s Hiawatha; it sat on a shelf for months until I was ready for it—and then, suddenly, I was. Some books mentioned to me a hundred times left me unmoved; then, the 101st, I’d pounce upon it. So it was, for example, with The Federalist Papers.

  From the beginning, I was determined to free my choices from chains of class and category. I wanted neither to flee from intellectually formidable territory nor dismiss lighter, more popular works just because they were popular; neither to exclude familiar names just because they were familiar, nor omit the unknown and idiosyncratic. Readers will find here mixed together not only fiction and nonfiction but an epic poem, a short story collection, a book from the bible, even a reference work or two. I did, however, exclude plays; Shakespeare and Beckett are primarily theatrical experiences, not for reading. And this being Vintage Reading, I’ve included only books that have had time to age; readers will find here nothing more recent than the early 1960s.

  I hope readers will bring to my attention favorites of their own they’d like me to know about. But I hope they will not introduce them to me as books I’ve unaccountably “left out”; I’ve left out thousands, many of which I hope to some day read. To me, it is no source of regret, as I’ve heard some say, but rather of anticipation, that so much great reading awaits me. I’ve still not read War and Peace, nor Macaulay’s History of England, nor Plutarch’s Lives; I will some day. I have, though, recently read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and just last week— for the first time, at age 51— Jane Eyre, which I enjoyed greatly.

  The eighty books I’ve written about for Vintage Reading include, by my count, 38 American authors, five German or Austrian, five French, two Italian, and twenty-two British. Thirty-three are fiction, the rest nonfiction. Forty-seven first appeared after 1900, fifteen in the nineteenth century, eight in the previous three centuries, one in the early Christian era, nine in antiquity. Ten were penned by women, at least half a dozen by homosexuals, none by Hispanic authors, two by Afro-Americans. Eight have an Asian setting or “Eastern” flavor, four raise identifiably Jewish themes or subjects. One takes place on Mars. Books by tyrants, knaves, curmudgeons, and misanthropes number at least five. In a spirit of usefulness, I dutifully transmit the results of these calculations. I leave to others to figure out what they mean.

  I

  On Every List of Literary Classics

  As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner

  The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James

  Look Homeward, Angel — Thomas Wolfe

  Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte

  Kim — Rudyard Kipling

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll

  Justine — Lawrence Durrell

  Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens

  Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

  A Passage to India — E. M. Forster

  My Antonia — Willa Cather

  Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert

  _________________________________

  A sadly unadventurous grouping?

  The truth is, the dozen novels here would land on almost anyone’s list of admired classics. Oliver, Madame Bovary, White Rabbit, Kim, and the other characters who appear in them are by now almost no longer fictional; they live in our collective imagination. We encounter them, third hand, in the movies and plays most of these novels have inspired. But how much better to meet them personally, within the warm embrace of print, in the way Dickens and Flaubert intended us to meet them?

  Look Homeward Angel

  ____________

  By Thomas Wolfe

  First published in 1929

  This is a Great American Novel.

  Nothing about it is small. From its sheer length to its soaring, sometimes overswollen language, to its magnificent characters, to a romantic publishing history awash in the glow of a famous editor (Maxwell Perkins), to the towering narcissistic personality of its author, Look Homeward Angel is, and always was, a Literary Event.

  Plot? The plot is that Eugene Gant is born and grows up, period. This is a coming-of-age novel, one relating Eugene’s rich inner experience while growing up in a small southern city—“Altamont”—in the early years of the century. “A Story of the Buried Life,” Wolfe subtitled it.

  Eugene, set apart early from his brothers and sisters as the family scholar, inwardly thrills to the glories of the Iliad and of Shakespeare, dreams of maidens and warriors, virtue and purity. He feels confined and out of place in Altamont—“Oh, lost!” is Wolfe’s refrain—but he is rescued from a life of unremembered dailiness by Mrs. Leonard, a kindly teacher and intellectual mentor.

  Eugene’s mother, Eliza Gant: No paragon of sweetness, she. Her mind forever clicking to a calculus of real estate deals, she sees Altamont as a gridwork of future roads and rising land prices. Her boardinghouse takes in everyone from part-time prostitutes to dying consumptives.

  Eugene’s father, Oliver Gant: A great human hulk of a man that American literature will not soon forget, if only for his rolling diatribes, sometimes drunken and sometimes not, that thunder down and across the pages, lamenting his life, cursing his fate or his foes. As, for exampl
e, in this performance, delivered to hapless draymen who have dared to sprawl on the steps in front of his shop:

  “You are the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. You lousy, goodfor-nothing bums: You have brought me to the verge of starvation, you have frightened away the little business that might have put bread in my mouth, and kept the wolf from my door. By God, I hate you, for you stink a mile off. You low degenerates, you accursed reprobates; you would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes, as you have from mine, fearful, awful, and bloodthirsty mountain grills that you are!”

  And the setting for this Great American Novel, this would-be well-spring of the American character? Why Asheville, N.C., of all places, here named Altamont. Asheville equals Altamont?

  If normally it’s dangerous to term a novel autobiographical and proceed to search out exact correspondences between the author’s fiction and his life, here they are indisputable. Thomas Wolfe’s father was a stonecutter, his mother the proprietress of a boarding house; so is Eugene Gant’s. Wolfe was precocious, well-read beyond his years, by all accounts a prodigy. So is Eugene Gant. Wolfe attended the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Eugene the state university at Pulpit Hill.

  Altamont is so unambiguously Asheville that following the book’s appearance, Wolfe was sued for what amounted to malicious gossip. One woman wrote him that though she disapproved of lynching in general, she would not lift a hand were he dragged across the public square and strung from the nearest limb. For it was not the Asheville of its boosters that Wolfe described, but of pinch-mouthed landladies, and raging drunken brawls, and cross-racial “Niggertown” liaisons.

  Today, half a century later, readers can experience Wolfe’s Asheville in great outpourings of sentiment and grandiloquence, in riotous paragraphs that careen down the pages: Eugene “heard the ghostly ticking of his life; his powerful clairvoyance, the wild Scotch gift of Eliza, burned inward across the phantom years, plucking out the ghostly shadows of a million gleams of light—a little station by the rails at dawn, the road cleft through the pineland seen at twilight, a smoky cabin-light below the trestles, a boy who ran among the bounding calves, a wisp-haired slattern, with snuff-sticked mouth, framed in a door... “