Since the loss of his sight, my father has inhabited a Homerically aural realm. When I was a small child, he read to me constantly, specializing in Dr. Seuss. Many years later, while I was recovering from a tonsillectomy, he read me book 1 of War and Peace, with the result that I still associate all Russian names of more than three syllables with sore throats. Now I read to him. The generational table-turning was disorienting at first; I seemed the parent and he the child, but the child frequently corrected my pronunciation. The blind Milton did the same with his daughters, who read him Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Italian, and French, none of which they understood. Eventually they grumbled so vehemently that they were sent out to learn embroidery instead. I read only in English, and I always enjoy it, except when I call my father with the obituary of one of his old friends. There’s no getting around the intimacy of reading aloud. He cannot grieve in private, the way he could if I mailed him the scissored page. As I hear him cough softly on the other end of the line, I plug doggedly toward the list of survivors and the location of the memorial service, knowing my voice is coming between him and his friend instead of bringing them together.
“In reading aloud,” wrote Holbrook Jackson, “you are greatly privileged, first to consort with all that is noble and beautiful in thought and imagination, and then to give it forth again. You adventure among masterpieces and spread the news of your discoveries. No news better worth the spreading; few things better worth sharing.”
If the masterpiece you’re sharing is your own, you’d better be one hell of a reader. Dickens was; the tragic actor William Charles Macready assessed the “Sikes and Nancy” reading as worth “two Macbeths.” His listeners had to pony up several shillings, whereas we can hear celebrity authors read gratis at our local bookstore or, in the case of Jay McInerney, recently promoting a book called Dressed to Kill; James Bond, the Suited Hero, in the Saks Fifth Avenue men’s designer-clothing department. On the whole, I find public readings far less interesting than private ones. Who would not have wished to eavesdrop on Pliny, who entertained guests with his own work, or on Tolstoy, who often read his day’s output to his family? Or even on the endearingly narcissistic Tennyson, who once read Maud to the Brownings and a few other friends, stopping every few lines to murmur, “There’s a wonderful touch! That’s very tender! How beautiful that is!”
The most private of all readings, of course, are performed by lovers. I remember sharing my college boyfriend’s narrow bed one afternoon, lying head-to-toe in order to postpone temptation until the end of the study session, handing a huge maroon edition of The Romantic Poets back and forth while we took turns reading from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” We didn’t get far. Seven hundred years earlier, Paolo and his sisterin-law Francesca had run into trouble doing something along the same lines:
Time and again our eyes were brought together
by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.
They were reading Lancelot du Lac to each other, and when they reached Guinevere’s forbidden kiss, their own fate was sealed. As Francesca discreetly put it in canto V of Dante’s Inferno, “That day we read no further.”
And where did Paolo and Francesca end up? In the second circle of Hell, the final resting place for carnal lovers, where they were tossed about eternally by a gale-force wind. Which just goes to show that like most things worth doing, reading aloud can be dangerous. In fact, just hearing Francesca’s story was enough to make Dante pass out on the floor of Hell.
George and I, too, often pass out when we read to each other, but like most couples with small children, we are overtaken by sleep more frequently than by anything likely to land us in Dante’s second circle. Choosing the right book for the marital bed is not a task to be taken lightly. Randolph Churchill insisted on reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to his wife Pamela, and look what happened to them. George and I tried The Old Curiosity Shop, but I called a halt after chapter 3 when I began to suspect what Dickens had in store for Little Nell. Then we tried Middlemarch, but we stalled on page 2 after George fell asleep three nights in a row during the prologue about Saint Theresa. Finally we hit upon Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey. So far, so good. We’re in the middle of book 5, and we haven’t missed a night.
It was lovely to hear George read the lines I used to read in Greek, lines that had faded from my memory along with most of my knowledge of the language:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
But our journey is so slow! Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase. At the rate we’re going, it will take us six months to get Odysseus home to Ithaca—which isn’t so bad if you consider that it took him ten years. In fact, our leisurely pace may prove to have some advantages. The poem will unfold gradually, its velocity geared to Ionians of the eighth century B.C. rather than to harried modern New Yorkers, and as it progresses, it will slow us down, too. When we started, I felt we were too busy to read Homer. Now I feel we are too busy not to read him.
Our only problem is staying awake. When George catches me nodding off, he keeps me on my toes with a little judicious emendation. For instance, Telemachus may tell his old housekeeper Eurycleia:
Come, nurse,
draw me off some wine in smaller traveling jars,
mellow, the finest vintage you’ve been keeping,
Perhaps something in a Mouton Cadet
As I descend still further into the Land of the Lotus-Eaters, my critical faculties descend with me. “Those suitors,” I murmur languorously. “They remind me of the Cat in the Hat.”
“They do?” says George.
“You know how he barges in, raids the refrigerator, eats a cake, leaves a big pink bathtub ring …”
“Yes,” says George sleepily. “I know just what you mean.”
As he leans over to kiss me good night, I do not regret having graduated from the amorous sprints of our youths. Marriage is a long-distance course, and reading aloud is a kind of romantic Gatorade formulated to invigorate the occasionally exhausted racers.
One of the obituaries I read my father three years ago was that of the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller. Toward the end of his life, when his memory was failing, he and his wife, Shirley Hazzard, read aloud every day after breakfast. The New York Times reported: “The day before his death, Ms. Hazzard said, the couple had just finished reading Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ to each other ‘for the umpteenth time,’ surrounded by the potted geraniums he loved to tend on their terrace over the Bay of Naples.”
I hope George and I will be as lucky.
THE P. M . ’ S EMPIRE OF BOOKS
A few years ago I bought a secondhand book titled On Books and the Housing of Them. Actually, to call it a book is to stretch—or compress—the meaning of the word, since, although it was hardbound, it was only twenty-nine pages long. I dimly registered that it was written by someone named Gladstone, but it did not occur to me that he could be that Gladstone. What loosened my pursestrings (to the tune of eight dollars, an extortionate twenty-eight cents a page) was the topic. I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Then I lost the little volume. Or rather, it lost itself. Too slender to bear a title on its vermilion spine, On Books and the Housing of Them was invisibly squashed between two obese shelf-neighbors, much as a flimsy blouse on a wire hanger can disappear for months in an overstuffed closet. Then, last summer, when I pried out one of the adjacent books—the shelf was so crowded that a crowbar would have aided the operation—out tumbled the vanished ectomorph. This time I looked at it more carefully. It had been published in May of 1898, in a limited edition of five hundred, which made the eight dollars seem more conscionable. The frontispiece was a sepia portrait of an old man. His hair was white and his cheeks subsided comfortably into his jowls, but his gaze was as
fierce as a raptor’s. The caption read, “William Ewart Gladstone, 1809-98.”
It was that Gladstone: four times British Prime Minister, grand old man of the Liberal Party, scholar, financier, theologian, orator, humanitarian, and thorn in the side of Benjamin Disraeli, who, when asked to define the difference between a misfortune and a calamity, replied, “If Mr. Gladstone were to fall into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity.”
I later learned that On Books and the Housing of Them was originally published in 1890 in a British journal called The Nineteenth Century. M. F. Mansfield, a New York publisher, esteemed it highly enough to reprint the essay in what I now realize was a memorial edition. Gladstone died on May 19, 1898; my little volume was rushed into print before the end of the month. (Boot up your computers and match that, Random House.) And then the book quickly sank into an obscurity so profound that it was not even mentioned in Gladstone, Roy Jenkins’s recent 698-page biography.
It should have been. If you wish to understand the character of both W. E. Gladstone and Victorian England, everything you need to know is contained within the small compass of On Books and the Housing of Them. In the index of the Jenkins biography, under “Gladstone, William Ewart, Characteristics,” we find: Energy. Priggishness. Disciplined nature and control. Conceit. Probity. Neatness and passion for order. Authoritarianism. Singlemindedness. These quintessentially Victorian traits suffuse every page of Gladstone’s book. The well-regulated efficiency that he desired so keenly, but often so vainly, for the British Empire, he desired equally—and achieved—within the miniature empire of his own library.
The theme of On Books and the Housing of Them was simple: too many books, too little space. The problem, said Gladstone, could be solved by a shelving system that might “prevent the population of Great Britain from being extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions of their own libraries.” This observation was simultaneously facetious and earnest. Gladstone had a Scotsman’s natural parsimony. His diary, which he began at fifteen and abandoned at eighty-five after he was blinded by cataracts, often detailed his days down to fifteen-minute intervals: it was, in his words, “an account-book of the all-precious gift of Time.” Just as his father, a canny businessman, never squandered a penny, so Gladstone never squandered a minute. James Graham, who served in the cabinet with Gladstone in the 1840s, marveled that he “could do in four hours what it took any other man sixteen to do and … he worked sixteen hours a day.” If he stuffed into a day what would take another man a week, it was only reasonable that he should wish to stuff into a single room enough books to fill another man’s house.
Here was the plan: “First, the shelves must, as a rule, be fixed; secondly, the cases, or a large part of them, should have their side against the wall, and thus, projecting into the room for a convenient distance, they should be of twice the depth needed for a single line of books, and should hold two lines, one facing each way.” This was just a warm-up. It took several thousand more words to fill in the details. Gladstone’s parsimony did not extend to his diction. As a parliamentary orator, he was, according to Disraeli, “inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,” and as a writer, he may be the only man in history to have written a long-winded twenty-nine-page book. The bookshelves that projected at right angles into the library, he declared, “should each have attached to them what I rudely term an endpiece (for want of a better name), that is, a shallow and extremely light adhering bookcase (light by reason of the shortness of the shelves), which both increases the accommodation, and makes one short side as well as the two long ones of the parallelopiped to present simply a face of books with the lines of shelf, like threads, running between the rows.”
One can see why, during an 1884 cabinet meeting, Joseph Chamberlain, the president of the Board of Trade, composed this premature epitaph for the world’s most analretentive statesman and handed it across the table to another cabinet member:
Here lies Mr. G., who has left us repining,
While he is, no doubt, still engaged in refining;
And explaining distinctions to Peter and Paul,
Who faintly protest that distinctions so small
Were never submitted to saints to perplex them,
Until the Prime Minister came up to vex them.
Mr. G. calculated that a library twenty by forty feet, with projecting bookcases three feet long, twelve inches deep, and nine feet high (“so that the upper shelf can be reached by the aid of a wooden stool of two steps not more than twenty inches high”), would accommodate between eighteen thousand and twenty thousand volumes. I trust his arithmetic. He had, after all, been Chancellor of the Exchequer. This shelving plan would suffice for the home of an ordinary gentleman, but for cases of extreme bookcrowding, he proposed a more radical scheme in which “nearly two-thirds, or say three-fifths, of the whole cubic contents of a properly constructed apartment may be made a nearly solid mass of books.” It was detailed in a footnote so extraordinary it bears quoting nearly in full:
Let us suppose a room 28 feet by 10, and a little over 9 feet high. Divide this longitudinally for a passage 4 feet wide. Let the passage project 12 to 18 inches at each end beyond the line of the wall. Let the passage ends be entirely given to either window or glass door. Twenty-four pairs of trams run across the room. On them are placed 56 bookcases, divided by the passage, reaching to the ceiling, each 3 feet broad, 12 inches deep, and separated from its neighbors by an interval of 2 inches, and set on small wheels, pulleys, or rollers, to work along the trams. Strong handles on the inner side of each bookcase to draw it out into the passage. Each of these bookcases would hold 500 octavos; and a room of 28 feet by 10 would receive 25,000 volumes. A room of 40 feet by 20 (no great size) would receive 60,000.
The system of rolling shelves that Gladstone invented here is used today in the Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera and at The New York Times Book Review, among many other places. Like its author’s life, it contained not a wasted cubic inch.
I have seen a photograph of Gladstone in his own library at Hawarden Castle, which he called the Temple of Peace. He sits in a wooden armchair, surrounded by leatherbound volumes on shelves that are, of course, constructed according to the principles set forth in On Books and the Housing of Them (the right-angle-projection plan, not the rollingshelf plan). For forty-four years, the Temple of Peace provided a haven from his political life. Gladstone wrote the little book there between his third and fourth premierships, not long before his eightieth birthday, noting its composition in his diary on December 17, 1889, the day before he “[r]eviewed & threw into form all the points of possible amendment or change in the Plan of Irish Government &c. for my meeting with Mr. Parnell.”
When the leadership of Great Britain pressed too heavily on him, Gladstone did one of three things: felled large trees with an ax; walked around London talking to prostitutes; or arranged books. It was an odd trio of diversions, especially the second, which, although its ostensible purpose was to reform fallen women, sometimes stimulated so many carnal thoughts in the reformer that he whipped himself afterward with a contrition-inducing scourge. Treefelling also had its perils (bruised fingers, splinters in the eye). Only book arranging, which Jenkins describes as occasionally reaching the level of “frenzy,” was invariably safe and satisfying. Parliament might be maddeningly resistant to Gladstone’s plans for reduced defense spending or Irish Home Rule, but his books were always pliant. He never entrusted the task—an unending one, since he bought books by the cartload—to a secretary. “What man who really loves his books,” he asked, “delegates to any other human being, as long as there is breath in his body, the office of inducting them into their homes?” A few months before he wrote that sentence, he had endowed a library in the village of Hawarden, moved twenty thousand of his own books there by wheelbarrow, and placed every one on the shelves himself.
I believe that books—buying
them, reading them, annotating them, indexing them, housing them, and writing about them—saved Gladstone from paralyzing stress. Without them, he might not have lived to the then-astonishing age of eighty-eight in spite of erysipelas, bronchitis, tonsillitis, indigestion, lumbago, catarrh, pneumonia, and, finally, cancer of the palate. “The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase,” he wrote. “And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!”
As I contemplate the vista of my own book-choked apartment, I sometimes wonder whether the only thing that could prevent my library from extruding me onto the streets of Manhattan would be a visit from Gladstone and a few rolling shelves. We could work side by side—two happy compulsives with dust on our sleeves—and when we were finished, the little book with the red spine would have room to breathe.
SECONDHAND PROSE
On the morning of my forty-second birthday, George informed me that I was about to be spirited to a mystery destination. I followed him to the subway. We got off at Grand Central Station, where he commanded me to stand at a discreet distance during his sotto voce procurement of two round-trip tickets to somewhere. After a half-hour’s ride through the Bronx and Yonkers, we disembarked at a town called Hastings-on-Hudson. What could possibly await us here? A three-star restaurant? A world-class art collection? A hot-air balloon, stocked with a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and a pound of caviar, from which we would achieve a hawk’s-eye view of the Hudson Valley?