The Consolations of Iiteracy LL EY cumly managed fo lean nothing, My wlan wcll inorder to plague the By PHY cane alma mater was one of those univer- young with “Il Penseroso.” I hadn't sities founded and supplied by the read “Vanity Fair” or “Ethan Frome” a HERE is state which in the West everybody or “Essay on Man” or “Anna Karen- mething t2atends as automatically a kindor~ ina” or “he Hound. of Henver™ or ital fora garon. Thore aremor were then "The Dubliners” (yee wes ¢ cone bed education ho eniance examinations Anybody temparacy "hut the furore over By any stand- could come end everybody did, for “Ulysses” was a mist that obscured ade mine was de- the proms and the footiall Games; a younger work) Almost mene of Dlorable: and T apd liey sa under a fuelty which the aleged anits, Under whose deplored infor for relentless mediocity matt have burden tho student i suppoocd to yours in pevate outatipped any in the ld 80 by bow, had T pected into ehher for nd in public T putting my mind to etwas able fo pleaure or for ered Fvunted tas merge fom four years tere quite "Asa consequence, although T cae were a mada a Rnd of cultural Pur-' uncorupted by knowledge, Lat me to them later] came to them without le Heart which both excused my de— amend. that &0 literary knowledge, prejudice, We met on tans com Esences and let luster to my’ mild Somewhere along the ney out ‘ot fletey flendyr and T do not sk achievements. But as time goes on I a jumble of courses in Sociology, the well-educated can always claim tmurmur against i ese I find that Rouschald Chomisty, Helene, Bee aa mich ven Ignorance has its brighter se: inners German T vomeber pick: I cmierte, Indeed, with people For it 1 grew up no boter in og up bis and piece of larg for whom "Silas Maree” war okee | structed about the world of books designnd’ to “enrich myles the sequred reading. They tell or [et | ‘Theory of Refrigeration; the fact that permanent scars on thelr childhood; 14 German and Anglo-Saxon were and Iam certain. they could not ‘wo languages balefully akin ‘and spproech George Mot we openmind- ‘equally revolting; and the law about edly as I did, only a year or two landscape; to that, to. nearly the no oflring’s having eyes darker ago, when I Wied “Adam Bele” a5 whole length and breadth of classic than the eyes of the darker of his one might try for the fist time an English waiting, T came as an aston two parents Thad also, in one semes~ollve. "But ifs magnificent” I went ished stranger. No one who first ter, been made to bolt Shakespeare round exclaiming to my friends. cniers that country ona conducted entire, including the sonnets) and tour can have any notlon what it is the result of such forced feeding bad like to travel i alone, on foot, and left me with an acute allergy to the at his own pace Bard I was years geting over, Otber= ‘Tam not exaggerating, My educa. wise, few Great Books hed impinged tion really was bad. As a child 1 on my life. Through a complicated lived en a yanch in Colorado. with system of jugeling credits and wheedl~ the nearest “one-room schoolhouse Ing heads of departments, had been able to evade even the Standard General Survey of English Litera- ture, T had read things, of course, Iwas even considered quite bookworm bby my sorority sisters, who had glven Up foing to the library alter polishing off "The Wirard of Ox" But it was the contemporaries who occupied me, Thad reed Mencken but not Marlowe, ‘Atherton but not Austen, Hoffenstela but not Herrick, Shaw but not Swift, Kipling but not Keats, Millay but rot Marvell, Unbeliovable as it may seem to an undergraduate, T had never even read A. E. Housman. a ‘Although T had scribbled verses im | (A) MANY-SPLENDORED THING my notebooks during geology lec- | “The melting pot of the Orient” fetes Thad not so muchas heard of | ghey led Hang Won. Unde nl Herbert or Donse or Cay or Prior | The pace where everyone meh and ‘or Hopkins. 1 bad shunned Chaucer a and avoided Dryden. Oliver Gold- saith T knew by hearsay as the guthor of a dull novel called “The fowever, it was at college T ser! Vicar’ of Wakefield” Milton had PRODUCED BY UNZ ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITEDnotebook, Fach is my own discovery. Often such discoveries have been ombstrassing. Once I bad begun to read for pleasure in a century not my own, E kept stumbling across treasures new to me only. Cr ber when T frst pulled out of a boarding-house bookease shortly after I had left college. For ‘weeks I kept buttonholing my friends to insist they taste with me that re- matkable and charming tidbit written by some unheard-of wit who signed herself simply “Mrs. Gaskell.” And Precall how [ blushed to learn they. hhad nearly all read it-and disliked ites juniors, Although 1 no longer so about beating the drum for each ‘maetorpiece I unearth, neither am I apologetic about someone's having been there before me. After all, Cortez. (or Balboa, if one insists on being iteral) must have known, when he surveyed the Pacific from that peak in Darien, that generations. of Indians had seen it earlier. But the view was new to him, His dis- covery was important because it ‘came at the right time in his career. So mine have come, ‘Thore are books that one needs maturity to ‘enjoy just as there are books an adult ‘ean ome on too late to savor. I have never, for instance, been able to get through “Wuthering Heights.” That T should have read before I was six- teen. T shall never even try “Treasure Island,” which I missed at twelve On ‘the other hand, no child can possibly appreciate | “Huckleberry Finn” That is not to say he can find no pleasure in it. He can and does. But it takes @ grown-up to realize its wry and wonderful bouquet, Im- ‘gine opening it for the first time at forty! That was my reward for an underprivileged youth. For that Mark Twain shall have my heart and hand forever in spite of what he said about Jane Austen, “It a pity they let her die a natural death,” he ‘wrote to Wiliam Dean Howells, Per- hhaps the young Samuel Clemens road her as patt of a presoribed curricula, Otherwise how could even that opinionated and undereducated genius have so misjudged an ironic talent more towering than his own? Had I been younger than thirty when T first happened on Miss. Austen T right have found her dry. Had F read her muck later I might have been too dry, myself. Her season suited me. OR no matter how enchanting to the young are the realms of gold, maturity makes one a better traveler there, Do not misunderstand me, I wish with all my heart that I had taken to the road earlier—T do not Basically all we are doehing® ish dn pyebo~ neurosis ta. the Eight from Felt, s+ 1 “Of Making Books | There Is No End”, Our Indefotigable Authors: ge smn narn nooo. wreneomrar semen boast because I was provinelal so long. But since I began the journey late, T make uso of what advantages T have. So for one thing, I capitalize fon my lack of impatience, I am not fon fire to see everything st once, There is no goal I must reach by any sunset, And how fresh all the land- scape is to met I wander as far afcld as T care to, one range of hills opens PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ‘out into another which T shall ex- plore. in due time. T move forward or backward. I retrace my steps when T please. I fall tn love with the formal grandeur of the eighteenth century and stop there for aa many months as the mood holds, Boswell’s “Lon- don Jounal” leads me back into Johnson himself and into the whole (Continued on page 38) ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITEDHae atealerty Continued from page 21 great age. I vead Pope and Gray and Goldsmith end backward stil through Richardson and Fielding, I reed the lotters and dlavies of Miss Bumoy Decause Dr, Jobrson calle her his “dear litle Fenny.” (The view there {fg unimportant but amusing.) And that leads me forward once more to Jane Austen, I eould not proceed at pace so leisurely wora 1 twonty ‘once more and Ia haste to keep up with the fashionable eults. 1 go whore 1 like. 1 read Gibbon one woek and Sarah Orne Jewett the next, with ‘catholic pleasure, Henry James enter= tains me mot baenuse he is In the ‘mode but beeause he is enthralling, and T continue to prefor "Tho Bos tonlans” to “The Golden Bowl.” T do ‘hot need to praise Kafka; end T can oop Montalgne and Clarence Day and Coleridge on the same bedside stand, ‘Beoauso am grown-up I am undor xno compulsion trom either the erties fr the professors to like anything, If T try “Triste Shandy” and find it heavy going, T admit tt and never ‘open the second volume. If T do not agree with the world. that "Moby Dick” Is the Great American Novel, studded with the richest posable symbolism, T need not pretend to enloy Melville, T think Trollope dull, ‘That is nothing against Trollope; 1 reed not dwell in the country he has invented. ‘And it ts wondostul to be @ mem- ber of no party! T pick my own way among the landmarks. No Baedsker distracts me from tha scenery. I ean bbe behind-times enough to like "Ten- nnyson and Browalng. 1 can prefer ‘Crawshaw to Donne and Willa Cather to Ronald Birbank, I'can read (and Woolf on fonday and on Tuest amiable quesrel with Newman; nor do T find it a dizzy Might. And so ‘much stil 10 see! Peak upon peak unfolds, But thers are also dollghtful Mille fenced fields and Rowsry eul- verts where I ean rest when I do nat wish to climb, T have not yet read “War and Peace,” But then I've never read anything by Rider Haggard, aither, oF Wilkle Collins, ox anything ‘of Mary Webbls except “Precious Bane.” I haven't read Pepys's Diary ‘or Katherine Mansfold’s. I have "The Houso of Seven Gables" ahead of me, and I bave lsc “Our Mutuel Friend.” Fo ot at my cooverog neuiy ther mat ‘bremtlets was Dickens Kimselt. How many of the educsted can even suspect the delights of mush fa delayed, encounter? think we owned n “Collected. Works" when 1 wwas a child, But I hed tiled "David Coppurteld® to9 early and had ‘be ved all my life that he was not for me, One night last wintor Twas sleepless and. somebow without a ‘book, From our own, shelves 1 took down “Litile Dorit” which people tell me now is one of the least be- fquling of the lot, But Keats first looking on his Homer could have Deen no more” dazzled then I first poring on my Bor I felt asa trensuro- ‘hunter might feel had he tripped over the locked chest that belonged to Captain Kidd, "Oh, my America, my new-found land!” How many novels were there? Thisty-odd? And every fone of them atlll to be possessed! T fet as drunk on Dickens for a WI fs T used to on the Cavallor poets when I first dscovered them, I zead {in auick succession, "Gront tions,” “Mfartin, Chuzzlewit, ‘Twish “The Pickwick Expecta- ” "Oliver posterous, magnlfeent, exasperating, Hidleulous, and utterly engrossing "Bleak House.” 1 stopped there for foar T should have a aurielty but Ife ‘conscling to know the rest of the novels are there waiting for me, none ‘of them grown stale ar too familiar for enjoyment, ‘There is silll much to deplore about my education. 1 shall never yead Latin verse in the original or have © tasto for the Brontés, and those are crippling lacks, But all handicaps have compensations and 1 have Tearned to accept both cheer= fully, ‘To have first” met Dickens, “Austen, and Mark Twain when I was ‘capable of giving them the full court ‘euctsy 1g beatitude enough for any ‘reader. Blessed ara the Uiiterate, for they shall inherit the Word! PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG sicuon Continued from page 16 ‘bly evil people, Cilles do Retz and the Marquis de Sade come to mind Mavie-Madoleine D’Aubray do Bri villieng who Rourishedl in the relgn of Louis XIV belongs with them. "Pretty fend much courted . .. with a fasel- nating alr of childish innocence”—e0 ik Is recorded—this daughter of one of tho land’s noblest houses, after Jong and cold-blooded experiments ‘with thoso who sought her charity, poisoned hor fathae (Whom she ap- peats still to have loved) and ate anged for tho poisoning of hor two ‘brothers, That she did not aleo polzon hor sistersin-law and one of her daughters was not In any way her Mc, Maass’s prinelpal object ie to make us understand her motivation and it he does not suoceod entirely It is because what she feels I so far from what we feel that it is not pos- sible even to imagine ourselves in her place. Other than that he does very well, although 1 do not like the arti- ficialy happy ending which he ar anges for the book's second most Important character, her lover Belan= court. He also throws a white reves! ing light upon the Sun King’s court, Marie de Brinvilliers was not an iso~ lated character, and it was here, and hot by poor Marie Antoinette with her fatuous “let ther eat cake,” that the seeds of the French Revolution were sown, Latter-Day Bunyan stcerr OF eramuat ures Hensy Myers, suthor of "The Utmost faland” has Wotten his latest novel about two of his favorte preoccupations: Tange ity and myth, He has interbwined both {a leisurely fable that rusceeds in Delp at once charming, entertaining, and Intellcctually atimulating, What ‘ore ean tho reader ask? ‘There are. several qualities which Aistinguish “0 King, Live For Ever” (Crown, $8) from the current run of ftion, First, tix watiten in a Tusid prose that is neither monosyllable not Attenuated, Second, it does not pur= to give a Worm imited aie, like huckstering, or foldloting or drug addiction, but deals rather with the primary fact af lif ise. Ted) I oflersaftrmative rather than negative values. Ir these fealutes make Mr, Myers novel peer an anachronism, s0. much better for Mr. Myers ghd go much the ‘worse for our times. Besides his vig orous and explicit style, which is ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED.