It’s happened again, I won’t say against my best efforts, but there it is, or rather there they are, books all over the joint with my bookmarks in them. Do I have more than 20 books going at once? I am a bit nervous about counting them, for they are all-too-vivid a sign of the lack of organization, control, order in my life.
This isn’t going to be a very sexy piece, so let’s begin in the bedroom. On my night table, I note that I have seven books going. The one I’m reading most intently just now — that is, at the rate of 10 or 12 pages a night — is His Father’s Son: The Life of Randolph Churchill by Winston S. Churchill, the son of Randolph. I am a sucker for all things Churchillian — I recently bought from a firm in Vermont a blue bow tie with small white polka dots advertised as the Blenheim — and this book doesn’t disappoint. When Randolph marries, his father remarks that “all you need to be married is champagne, a double bed and a box of cigars.” When the young Randolph loses his third parliamentary election, Noel Coward remarks, “I am so very fond of Randolph; he is so unspoiled by failure.” Irresistible.
The Churchill biography is 510 pages but is easily surpassed by Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur, an English translation (despite its title) of a novel of 974 pages. I seem to have read 354 of them; it’s rich stuff, and I hope to get back to it for another hundred or so pages, then perhaps drop it again for another few months. It is brilliant, though in a satirical vein. But brilliance, perhaps, like confession, is best when brief. Mae West was wrong in saying that one can’t get too much of a good thing.
Cigarettes Are Sublime by Richard Klein is the other non-fiction on my night table. I had heard good things about it, and, as a serious ex-smoker, I wanted at least to read about smoking since I can no longer do it. But the book is too much summary of what others have written about smoking, and thus left me more let down than the last cigarette of a long night in the bad old days.
As for my other night-table books, I see that I’ve got to chapter 16 of Nabokov’s Transparent Things, which is far enough to realize that this book isn’t first-class Nabokov, but probably worth finishing anyhow. I note that I’ve read 366 of 500 pages of The Portrait of a Lady. I hadn’t read this great novel for more than 20 years, and when the movie version of it came out not long ago, I thought I’d reread the novel instead. It’s as great as I remembered, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is that I’ve found myself too tired of late to stay up with James, the reading of whom requires one’s greatest alertness. I’ve made little progress with John O’Hara’s The Big Laugh, which I bought purely on the basis of a single blurb from Fran Leibowitz: “The greatest Hollywood novel ever written.” The O’Hara may be better as a bathroom book, and I may soon transfer it there.
Just now I have two bathroom books going. One is St. Petersburg by Solomon Volkov, a cultural history of a great city and another bulky tome (598 pages). The other is Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace, which is about Miss Storace’s year in Athens. Bathroom books should be readable in short takes, and both these books are. I read the better part of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time in the bathroom. I consider it no insult to an author to read him in the House of Commons, as the Welsh used to call it. An editor once invited me to write for his magazine, saying he couldn’t pay me anything, but he wanted me to know that the magazine was intensely read. “They take it to the john,” he said.
Other tenth- and quarter- and half-read books are spread throughout my apartment. Allow me a quick inventory: The End of the Line, the final memoir of Richard Cobb, the richly idiosyncratic historian of France, a book I ordered from England; a collection of what turn out to be quite brutal stories by Angela Carter; a biography of Walter Winchell by Neal Gabler; the art criticism of Henry McBride; Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin; the poems of Wislawa Szymborska; some letters from Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s one-time Paris correspondent; a book on the 1950s by Peter Vansittart; Light Years, a novel by James Salter, whose impressionistic writing I find especially readable on sleepless nights; and the most recent collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin.
What’s going on here? None of this makes any sense. It causes me to look up, for maybe the eighth time, the word desultory. Its first definition is ” marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose.” Its second definition is “not connected with the main subject.”
Plan, regularity, purpose? The main subject? I wonder if I could get back to you a little later on all that — once I’ve had the chance to finish a few of these books.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
