Be Serious, Now

Reading seriously is something one usually does only when required. Textbooks, for instance, even or maybe specially in subjects one may not find inherently interesting, as I remember it, require a kind of concentration seldom experienced elsewhere in life. Most work, even work we undertake with enthusiasm, seldom requires the same intensity of focus necessary, for me at least, to do even a simple equation involving fractions. I pored over an algebra text in the seventh grade with all the sweaty devotion of sinful monk at as prayerbook, and ended as nearly convinced of Hell. But seriousness is not necessarily a matter of necessity. It is not always what we need to know that makes us take up a book, or a subject, looking to exhaust the thing before we are through. Some of the most serious reading that I have done in my adult life I did to no better purpose than to know more about something about which I was already reading but really needed to know nothing at all. Literary biography has often been for me just such resource, but it is by no means the only direction in which my more serious reading usually takes me. In fact, I consider the reading I do most serious, and what I'm reading most worthy of being read seriously, when I can not seem to read what I want without reading other books in support, as it were, of what I can not stop reading. Sounds a little nutty, I know.

The argument is made that the greatest literature exists as a thing discreet not only from tradition and precedent, but in much modern critical theory, as independent even of its author, the very existence or possibility of whom, the theorists of this school would happily deny on every page, after that on which their own name appears. Another school holds that there is no such thing as a discreet unity in any single piece of art and that every book, by any author, is in fact nothing more nor less than the point at which all the forces of art and society and language happen to snag at a moment in time. This sort of thing is taken very seriously, as I understand, if only by those with an interest in seeing to it that no one reads anything that isn't accompanied by exegesis, as that, after all, is what such folks primarily read nowadays amongst themselves and sadly the only thing they seem to be able to write. I can think of one revolutionary character, with a book out just this year, who has even convinced himself that not only can no other writer exist without him, but that he is in fact entitled do away with other people's names altogether and just publish whatever he happens on as entirely his own, and would do, had he not been forced by his publisher's recalcitrant lawyers to append an index to his commonplace book.

Obviously, I do not subscribe to any of this theoretical vaudeville, or find it very entertaining. I can in fact think of few things other than Regnery Publishing or the Christian Science Reading Rooms that have actually contributed less to sum total of human happiness than The Norton Critical Editions of the classics, and they at least have the full text of the books they would sink.

But I am not such a hermit and autodidact as to think I can or ought to read what I read, great and little, without benefiting often as not from the reading others have already made of the books I choose to read. Critics, and biographers, historians and philosophers -- though that last, as a class of person, tends to talk past me -- may be eagerly sought by me even if only to help me read a romance. I doubt very much that most of these writers had someone like me much in mind when they set to their subjects, or ever envisioned their ideal reader as an all but anonymous bookseller with, for instance, a taste for Dumas, and a spotty education in, say, French history. Nevertheless, I have a history, reading historical romance, of wanting more history as I read. Stands to reason. Dumas makes me want to know what he knew and whatever else I might about the people he brings to such vivid life in, for example, The Forty-Five.

I am so old, and so old fashioned, that simply checking Wikipedia does not seem sufficient to satisfy my curiosity, so now and again I will pause while reading an historical novel, just long enough to pick up other related books; the actual history of the period, biographies of the major players and the like. I can end up fairly far afield, doing this, but for the most part I tend to stick to what's relevant to the narrative before me. Sir Walter Scott, when I read his Quentin Durward, made me curious enough to find Paul Murray Kendell's Louis XI: The Universal Spider, which was just as much fun as it sounds. Dumas' The Two Dianas tells the story of Diana de Poitiers, the great love of Henri II of France, and her daughter, Diana de Castro. Having already read at least one full length biography of Catherine de' Medici while reading Dumas' Queen Margot, and attempting Marguerite's own memoirs, I took on The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King, by Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent, as a supplement to the "Dianas." The two rivals in that last history being Catherine de' Medici & Diane de Poitiers, and the Princess being a legitimate descendant of dear Diana, the reader may imagine how well Catherine comes out in that one. But then, even when her earlier biographer attempted to rehabilitate the old girl, it was with many a caveat, as I remember. Dumas of course, even with his usual sympathy for his villains, casts Catherine as perhaps most poisonous of the whole nest of Valois vipers.

Reading The Forty-Five, just as our friend Chicot set off for Navarre, what should come across the desk but Henry of Navarre: Henry IV of France, by one Lord Russell of Liverpool. The book was brief enough that I started it the same day and finished at lunch the next. Nothing much as literature, Russell's book did review at a happy clip the life of this great king, just when I wanted reminding of the facts. Learned one or two along the way as well. (Just an aside, but I did not know they had Lords and such like in Liverpool.)

Years ago, when I was still trying to like his brother Thomas, I discovered Heinrich Mann and his honking great masterpiece, Young Henry of Navarre & Henry King of France. I realized reading the little biography by Russell, that what I knew of this man I came by through first Mann, and then Dumas. Turns out, both were pretty good about their history. (Rather tempts me to reread the second volume of Mann's novel again, as we also just acquired, presumably from the same source, the second book in both the Overlook paperback and hardcover. Hmmm... )

Where all this leads of course is to an ever longer line of books I might read. Vidal's Burr led me to Washington Irving and on and on, Stevenson and Macaulay sent me after the Stuarts, and now, again, Dumas has me chasing after not only Henri IV, but as of today, the Guises, another pack of wonderfully awful aristos. Martyrs & Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe, by Stuart Carroll, tempted me as far as the third chapter so far. (Who could resist? There was a massacre in the very first chapter!)

This then is what I usually mean when I make reference to my "serious reading." I don't mean the kind of reading done by what we used to call, when I was in school, a "grind," but rather the kind of reading that excites curiosity, mine anyway, the kind of curiosity that is not satisfied by just the book that inspired it. Such a book need not, as I mentioned, be historical romance. Finally reading, with happy astonishment, a novel by Beckett after years of avoiding him, sent me after biographies, memoirs, criticism, and finally the first volume of Beckett's letters before I'd exhausted, for now, my enthusiasm. Don't even want to think about how many books I've now read about Dickens, or Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb, just to name the most obvious favorites.

Just now then, I find myself seriously interested in a period and place otherwise only redeemed for me because the times were Montaigne's. (And that, I'll save for next time.) What matters now is how good it feels to be reading a romance, and reading it, as it seems, more seriously than I've read anything much in ages.

This is not something that would be possible, please note, without the wonderful synchronicity of books, old and new, bookstores and the careful avoidance of any actual responsibilities. Ah, joy.