A tippler I take to be someone who boozes in small quantities but regularly, stopping just short of actual drunkenness. Your tippler tends to operate on the sly, if not the sneak. He ducks into a bar for a quick one. He keeps a bottle in the office, maybe a flask in the car. The thought of being cut off makes him ill. He can’t, poor devil, help himself. He needs his drink.
Exchange the word drink for the word print, and I am, as I have long known myself to be, a classic tippler, literary division. I do not — cannot — leave the house without reading material. Living on the sixth floor of an eight-story building, I usually manage to get in a paragraph on the elevator. I read in bank and supermarket lines. I read during television commercials, and, in the battle between telly and text, seven times out of ten text wins. When driving alone, I keep a magazine or book on the empty seat next to me. I get in a paragraph or two at a stoplight and am usually interrupted by a honking — and slightly ticked — fellow driver.
The families of literary tipplers, like those of alcoholics, do not have it easy. All they can do is go along with the program. Too often they turn into literary tipplers themselves. My wife, a woman of great natural refinement and hence lovely manners, I notice has begun to read with her breakfast and, sometimes, lunch. My own tippling over the years, which cannot have been easy for her, has driven her to tippling on her own.
Naturally, I tipple in the House of Commons, as the English used to call the bathroom. Practicing silence, exile, and cunning of a kind perhaps never dreamed of by the young Stephen Dedalus, I recently read the better part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man there. Large stretches of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time were also devoured in the House of Commons, not to speak of innumerable long magazine pieces. “I am sitting in the smallest room in my house,” wrote the German composer Max Reger to a hostile critic. “I have your review before me. It will soon be behind me.”
Ought writers to prefer not to be read in the bathroom? I am not at all sure that they oughtn’t to be pleased — just as they ought to be pleased to know that readers have taken their books into the hospital with them. It is in such places — bathrooms, hospitals — that one reads what one really wants to read, not something that one feels one ought to read. Years ago an editor who asked me to write for him, after telling me that he couldn’t pay me a fee, added that his paper was read with great enthusiastic intensity. “They take it to the john,” he said, implying no higher compliment was possible.
My literary tippling often but not always entails prose I do not need to read with the keenest concentration. I don’t tipple with things I have to make notes upon or that I will myself be writing about. Some genres are more tipple-worthy than others: letters, diaries, novels for which one hasn’t the highest expectations. I can also tipple with fairly serious books: I mentioned Joyce, and my current bathroom book is Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars. Poetry, however, doesn’t tipple well. Nor does philosophy. Movie criticism makes a nice tipple.
At its most intense as a pure addiction, literary tippling takes the form of reading while walking. In Evanston, Ill., where I live, one of the local sights is the writer Garry Wills walking the streets, his nose in a book or magazine. An acquaintance of mine claims this is a very great affectation — that it can’t really be done. He is wrong; it can be done. I know because I have done it, and on quiet streets sometimes do it still. The great historian Macaulay is said to have been able to read while threading his way through the most crowded London streets. A good man, Macaulay.
What is the meaning behind this need — this insistent and incessant need — for taking in all this print? So much to read, so little time, might be one answer, though it would not be mine. Reading beats actual experience, might be another, though here I seem to recall Wallace Stevens writing to a young poet that he ought to read less and think more — probably good advice, even though I myself read it and didn’t think it up on my own.
No, my pleasure in almost perpetual reading has to do with the love of the sentence as a tranquilizer. Something there is about an elegantly turned sentence or a well-made paragraph that calms me and makes me feel that order is possible and life is, against all strong evidence to the contrary, perhaps just manageable. So pleasing is this sensation that I feel, like the tippler from another realm, that I really must have another one — and as soon as possible.
You wouldn’t by any chance, happen to have a spare paragraph on you, would you, pal?
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
