A Passion for Books Read online

Dora felt very guilty when she saw my state. She made me come every evening for a whole month afterward to give me extra rations. By ghetto standards Dora was a wealthy woman, as her services were in demand, and she continued to receive food smuggled in by her old cook.

  Those ten days were purgatory, but somehow they helped expunge my guilt over Edelstein. I gained a little perspective on the whole event, and with the extra rations and several days’ rest I was ready to return to school. Much to my surprise, neither the teachers nor the pupils connected Edelstein’s death to the book I had given him. He was simply caught trading and died, as so many people did.

  Another surprise was the fact that Cooky went to our “library” almost every day. I had sworn I’d never go near the place again. Perhaps he kept going because he didn’t actually see the murder of Mr. Edelstein. Perhaps he somehow became courageous when I got scared.

  From time to time he would bring me a book or two, and after about a month I finally returned with him. In this evil place people not only lost faith in God, they lost faith in society and in mankind itself. Only in the books did I find consolation. Then one day my mother came back early from work and caught me reading. She was so upset that I promised myself I would not bring books home anymore.

  Cooky and I spent more and more time up in our attic hideout, reading or discussing what we’d read, and one day Cooky took out an old Bible we had among the Hebrew books. I’m not sure what prompted me to salvage it, as my upbringing was secular; perhaps I thought that a library without a Bible wouldn’t be a Jewish library.

  “I think we should say Kaddish for Mr. Edelstein,” Cooky said after some hesitation. I looked at him in astonishment. Whenever we discussed religion, Cooky dismissed it. Both his parents were agnostic, and Cooky was brought up by them to despise religion.

  “I know what you are thinking, but I think we owe it to him. After all, he did get killed because of our book. I think perhaps he would have wanted someone to say Kaddish for him,” Cooky explained with some embarrassment. And so I wrote down the words of the Kaddish on a slip of paper, and the next day after school we stopped at the cemetery and read the words at his unmarked grave. Strangely enough I felt better for it, and I continued to visit and tend Edelstein’s grave in the months to come. When the weather warmed I planted some peas there. To my surprise they grew into bushes and eventually bore fruit, which Cooky and I shared. I knew Mr. Edelstein wouldn’t mind.

  Where books are burned in the end people will be burned, too.

  —HEINRICH HEINE

  From Areopagitica

  BY JOHN MILTON

  Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

  Books Unread

  BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

  This essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1904. The pity is it is simply too long to put on a tombstone.

  No longer delude thyself; for thou wilt never read thine own memoranda, nor the recorded deeds of old Romans and Greeks, and those passages in books which thou has been reserving for thine old age.

  —MARCUS ANTONINUS, III, 14

  In the gradual growth of every student’s library, he may—or may not—continue to admit literary friends and advisers; but he will be sure, sooner or later, to send for a man with a tool-chest. Sooner or later, every nook and corner will be filled with books, every window will be more or less darkened, and added shelves must be devised. He may find it hard to achieve just the arrangement he wants, but he will find it hardest of all to meet squarely that inevitable inquiry of the puzzled carpenter as he looks about him. “Have you really read all these books?” The expected answer is, “To be sure, how can you doubt it?” Yet if you asked him in turn, “Have you actually used every tool in your tool-chest?” you would very likely be told, “Not one half as yet, at least this season; I have the others by me, to use as I need them.” Now if this reply can be fairly made in a simple, well-defined, distinctly limited occupation like that of a joiner, how much more inevitable it is in a pursuit which covers the whole range of thought and all the facts in the universe. The library is the author’s tool-chest. He must at least learn, as he grows older, to take what he wants and to leave the rest.

  This never was more tersely expressed than by Margaret Fuller when she says: “A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.” A few men of leisure may satisfy themselves by reading over and over a single book and ignoring all others, like that English scholar who read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey every year in the original, devoting a week to each canto and reserving the minor poems for his summer vacation. Nay, there are books in the English language so vast that the ordinary reader recoils before their text and their footnotes. Such, for instance, is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, containing substantially the history of the whole world for thirteen centuries. When the author dismissed the last page of his book, on June 27, 1787, in that historic garden at Geneva, knowing that he was to address his public at once in four different languages, is it not possible that he may have felt some natural misgiving as to whether any one person would ever read the whole of it? We know him to have predicted that Fielding’s Tom Jones would outlast the palace of the Escorial and the imperial eagle of Austria, but he recorded no similar claim for his own work. The statesman Fox, to be sure, pronounced the book to be “immortal” simply because, as he said, no man in the world could do without it; and Sheridan added, with undue levity, that if not luminous, it was at least voluminous. But modern readers, as a rule, consult it, they do not read it. It is, at best, a tool-chest.

  Yet there lies before me what is perhaps the most remarkable manuscript catalog of books read that can be found in the English-speaking world, this being the work of a man of eighty-three, who began life by reading a verse of the Bible aloud to his mother when three years old, had gone through the whole of it by the time he was nine, and then went on to grapple with all the rest of literature, upon which he is still at work. His vast catalog of books read begins with 1837 and continues up to the present day, thus covering much more than half a century, a course of reading not yet finished and in which Gibbon is but an incident. One finds, for instance, at intervals, such items as these: “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, read twice between 1856 and 1894”; “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, third reading, 1895”; “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, vols. 1 and 2, fourth reading”; followed soon after by “Gibbon’s, vols. 3–6, fourth reading”; “Gibbon’s, vols. 7–8, fourth reading.” What are a thousand readings of Tom Jones compared with a series of feats like this? And there is a certain satisfaction to those who find themselves staggered by the contemplation of such labor, when they read elsewhere on the list the recorded confession that this man of wonderful toil occasionally stooped so far as cheerfully to include That Frenchman and Mr. Barnes of New York.

  The list of books unread might properly begin with those painted shelves of mere book covers which present themselves in some large libraries, to veil the passageway. These are not books unread, since they are not books at all. Much the same is true of those which perhaps may still be seen, as formerly, in old Dutch houses round Albany: the effigies of books merely desired, but not yet possessed; and only proposed as purchases for some day when the owner’s ship sho
uld come in. These were made only of blocks of wood, neatly painted and bound in leather with the proper labels, but surely destined never to be read, since they had in them nothing readable. Almost as remote from the real books are those dummies made up by booksellers to be exhibited by their traveling agents. Thus I have at hand a volume of my own translation of Epictetus, consisting of a single “signature” of eighteen pages, repeated over and over, so that one never gets any farther; each signature bearing on the last page, by one of Fate’s simple and unconscious strokes, the printed question, “Where is progress, then?” (page 18). Where, indeed! Next to these, of course, the books which go most thoroughly unread are those which certainly are books, but of which we explore the backs only, as in fine old European libraries; books as sacredly preserved as was once that library at Blenheim—now long since dispersed—in which, when I idly asked the custodian whether she did not find it a great deal of trouble to keep them dusted, she answered with surprise, “No, sir, the doors have not been unlocked for ten years.” It is so in some departments of even American libraries.

  Matthew Arnold once replied to a critic who accused him of a lack of learning that the charge was true, but that he often wished he had still less of that possession, so hard did he find it to carry lightly what he knew. The only knowledge that involves no burden lies, it may be justly claimed, in the books that are left unread. I mean those which remain undisturbed, long and perhaps forever, on a student’s bookshelves: books for which he possibly economized, and to obtain which he went without his dinner; books on whose back his eyes have rested a thousand times, tenderly and almost lovingly, until he has perhaps forgotten the very language in which they are written. He has never read them, yet during these years there had never been a day when he would have sold them; they are a part of his youth. In dreams he turns to them: in dreams he reads Hebrew again; he knows what a Differential Equation is; “how happy could he be with either.” He awakens, and whole shelves of his library are, as it were, like fair maidens who smiled on him in their youth and then passed away. Under different circumstances, who knows but one of them might have been his? As it is, they have grown old apart from him: yet for him they retain their charms.

  Books which we have first read in odd places always retain their charm, whether read or neglected. Thus Hazlitt always remembered that it was on the 10th of April, 1798, that he “sat down to a volume of the New Eloise at the inn at Llangollen over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken.” In the same way I remember how Professor Longfellow in college recommended to us, for forming a good French style, to read Balzac’s Peau de chagrin; and yet it was a dozen years later before I found it in a country inn, on a lecture trip, and sat up half the night to read it. It may be, on the other hand, that such haphazard meetings with books sometimes present them under conditions hopelessly unfavorable, as when I encountered Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for the first time on my first voyage in an Azorian barque; and it inspires to this day a slight sense of nausea, which it might, after all, have inspired equally on land.

  Wordsworth says in his Personal Talk, “Dreams, books are each a world”; and the books unread mingle with the dreams and unite the charm of both. This applies especially, I think, to books of travel: we buy them, finding their attractions strong, but somehow we do not read them over and over, unless they prove to be such books as those of Urquhart—the Pillar of Hercules especially, where the wealth of learning and originality is so great that we seem in a different region of the globe on every page. One of the most poetic things about Whittier’s temperament lay in this fact, that he felt most eager to visit each foreign country before he had read any books about it. After reading, the dream was half fulfilled, and he turned to something else, so that he died without visiting any foreign country. But the very possession of such books, and their presence on the shelves, carries one to the Arctic regions or to the Indian Ocean.

  “After all,” as the melancholy Rufus Choate said, “a book is the only immortality,” and sometimes when a book is attacked and even denounced, its destiny of fame is only confirmed. Thus the vivacious and cheery Pope, Pio Nono, when asked by a too daring author to help on his latest publication, suggested that he could only aid it by putting it in the Index Expurgatorius. Yet if a book is to be left unread at last, the fault must ultimately rest on the author, even as the brilliant Lady Eastlake complained, when she wrote of modern English novelists: “Things are written now to be read once, and no more; that is, they are read as often as they deserve. A book in old times took five years to write and was read five hundred times by five hundred people. Now it is written in three months, and read once by five hundred thousand people. That’s the proper proportion.”

  Any man with a moderate income can a ford to buy more books than he can read in a lifetime.

  —HENRY HOLT

  Ten Books That Shaped the American Character

  BY JONATHAN YARDLEY

  For their April/May 1985 issue, the editors of American Heritage magazine invited Jonathan Yardley, book editor and columnist for The Washington Post, to write an article entitled “Ten Books That Shaped the American Character.” Although his first instinct was to compile a list of books that changed the political life of America, on further reflection he decided to make a list of those that affected the cultural, social, and domestic life of the nation. Some of the books he discussed—like Walden—are books one would expect to see on such a list, but others will in all likelihood come as a surprise. Here, then, are the ten books he chose, as well as the runners-up. This list can be compared to the one compiled by Robert B. Downs for his Books That Changed America, which appears on page 96.

  THE LIST

  Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)

  Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)

  Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York by Horatio Alger (1867)

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

  The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer (1896)

  The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen (1899)

  The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)

  In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)

  How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)

  The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock, M.D. (1946)

  THE RUNNERS-UP

  The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington by Mason Locke Weems (1800)

  The Clansman by Thomas Dixon (1905)

  Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920)

  Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage by Emily Post (1922)

  Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)

  The Man Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton (1925)

  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

  Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946)

  The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman (1950)

  The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)

  Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956)

  Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

  The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961)

  The New York Times Cook Book by Craig Claiborne (1961)

  The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

  Roots by Alex Haley (1976)

  Books That Changed America

  BY ROBERT B. DOWNS

  Fifteen years before the editors of American Heritage asked Jonathan Yardley to compile his “Ten Books That Shaped the American Character” (see page 94), Robert B. Downs had written a book with a similar purpose. Published by Macmillan in 1970, Books That Changed America provided an analysis of twenty-five books whose impact on the American consciousness had, in his estimation, profoundly affected our way of life. It’s clear from Downs’s list that he had taken a somewhat broader view than Yardley, who concentrated specifically on books that affected the cultural, social, and domestic life of the nation and who accordingly included only popular books. Nevertheless, it’s suggestive of the d
iversity of thought on this subject that not a single book appears on both Downs’s and Yardley’s lists.

  Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams (1910)

  An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Austin Beard (1913)

  Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion by William Beaumont (1833)

  Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1888)

  The Nature of the Judicial Process by Benjamin Cardozo (1921)

  Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

  The Mind of the South by Wilbur Joseph Cash (1941)

  Medical Education in the United States and Canada by Abraham Flexner (1910)

  The A fluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)

  The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1843)

  History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1814)

  Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture by Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Lynd (1929)

  The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660–1783 by Alfred Thayer Mahan (1890)

  Reports by Horace Mann (1837–1849)

  Prejudices by H. L. Mencken (1919–1927)

  An American Dilemma; The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy by Gunnar Myrdal (1944)

  Common Sense, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America by Thomas Paine (1776)

  The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1905)

  The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith (1830)

  The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens (1904)

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

  The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911)

  Resistance to Civil Government by Henry David Thoreau (1849)

  Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835–1840)