Michael Dirda isn’t a scholar, although he has the learning to do scholarly things. He isn’t a critic, either, although his writing consistently shows a finely edged sensibility. The man isn’t even a writer, strange as that is to say about someone who has written six books, edited another dozen or so, and has a quick and easy prose.
No, Michael Dirda is a reader, down at the root of his being. A man who gained his scholarly knowledge and critical sensibility from reading whatever came to hand as he pawed through the dusty shelves of used bookstores. Writing—well, yes: If you’re going to keep from starving as a reader, you’ve got to find a bookish job, and writing is one of the possibilities, especially writing book reviews. He is, really, only what he claims for himself: Bookman, plain and simple. “An appreciator,” he adds, “a cheerleader for the old, the neglected, the marginalized, and the forgotten. On sunny days I may call myself a literary journalist.”
In “Armchair Adventures,” one of the essays in this new collection, Dirda asks, “Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read?” As he ages, he finds that it’s not the hip new releases he wants to read, but the old stuff: fast-paced adventure tales like those of John Buchan, comic boy-meets-girl stories like those of P. G. Wodehouse, children’s books like The Phantom Tollbooth, wild modernist classics like The Master and Margarita.
Browsings is not as deep as some of Dirda’s other works: His 2003 account of his childhood in the Midwest, An Open Book, for example; or his study of Sherlock Holmes’s creator, On Conan Doyle (2011). But this new book isn’t intended to be a thick study of anything in particular. Running from around 500 words to 2,000, the essays in Browsings began life as a column Dirda wrote for a year, appearing at the rate of one a week on the website of the American Scholar. “I hope,” he concludes his reflections, “that the past 50 or so columns have reminded readers that the world of books is bigger than the current bestseller list.”
Dirda is widely celebrated in the bookish world, winning such awards as the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. But even though the weekly book columns have now been issued in a print collection, the work he performed over the course of that year of writing deserves greater recognition. It had a kind of turn-of-the-last-century/Arthur Quiller-Couch feel to it, or a 1920s/Christopher Morley sense—a feat of literary journalism as marvelous and old fashioned as the books that Dirda loves best. Its dedication mentions Clifton Fadiman and Cyril Connolly, and in the literary performances of those now sadly faded figures the reader can discern the model Dirda set out to follow.
Along the way, he discusses his preference for old phonograph records above digital music, the ridiculous literary doodads—bobbleheads of authors, action-figures of Sherlock Holmes—he keeps in his office, and his impatience with book collectors who want only high-quality books they then refuse to touch. An “inexplicable feeling of buoyant youthfulness” overtakes him as he browses the selections on used-book shelves and tables, and the old dusty ones are what he wants—the ones whose covers and battered conditions speak of the glamour they once had.
There’s some highbrow content here—Proust and Joyce, Augustine and Rousseau—and plenty of the middlebrow trending toward the lowbrow: the heroes in Lord Dunsany and Jules Verne, Fu Manchu and the supernaturally besieged figures in H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. Even the Flash and the Hardy Boys. But the key to Dirda’s work is the lack of much distinction between the various brows that were once thought to distinguish the educated reader from the great unwashed. Anything that moves a story along can be a good read, and anything that’s a good read can prompt Michael Dirda into a fun and interesting set of reflections on books and manners and culture and life.
There’s an era of popular literature that its aficionados call the gaslight era after the foggy streets of late Victorian London—although it’s a bit of a misnomer since the era really extends from such middle Victorians as Wilkie Collins to authors as late as E. Phillips Oppenheim and the early Agatha Christie in the 1920s. You can see the imputed unity of the era in the conventions of steampunk or in Alan Moore’s comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which unites such figures as H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man, and E. W. Hornung’s exemplary thief, A. J. Raffles.
This gaslight era remains Dirda’s favorite, but we lack any good explanation for the creation of those stories. The authors were writing what (at the time) was considered merely popular entertainment, lacking the accouterments of such acknowledged masters as Henry James or Virginia Woolf; but they created a set of characters that rival Shakespeare’s Othello and Dickens’s Scrooge in their power to remain in the imagination. From Sherlock Holmes to the Scarlet Pimpernel, from Mowgli to Jeeves, Dracula to Phileas Fogg, the gaslight era somehow gave us the archetypes of memorability, and Dirda is right to show his fascination with these stories.
In fact, so often does his mind turn to them that he promises his next volume will be called “The Great Age of Storytelling,” and its writing will allow him to focus his wonderful, bookman’s talents on the question of why our imagination is so often drawn back to that moment in literary history. Michael Dirda insists that he retains “the bright enthusiasms and the fresh, unspoiled mental outlook of a slightly inebriated undergraduate.” It’s a line from P. G. Wodehouse, and that seems appropriate: For readers and bookish types, the meanderings of the columns collected in Browsings are exactly what Jeeves would have brought in on a silver tray as a morning pick-me-up.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
