Books Won’t Furnish a Room

More than thirty years ago, I trimmed down a much smaller library. In my twenties then, I was moving from New York to Little Rock, and couldn’t afford the expense of sending by movers the three hundred or so books I then possessed. So I called in the owner of a used-book store on Fourth Avenue. Off went almost all my books in a couple of shopping carts. I remember my sadness as I watched them go. Nothing fancy was included; it was chiefly the library of a young man, slightly Anglophiliac, with literary aspirations: novels and poetry, some ancient and some British history, some philosophy. I had acquired most of these books during lunch hours when I worked on a political magazine on 15th Street; in those days I roamed the Fourth Avenue and University Place used-book shops, the intellectual equivalent of the drunken sailor in port, in Shanghai, after months at sea.

I did keep a small number of these books. Among them was a handsome Bodley Head edition in green covers of Ulysses, six or seven slender volumes of Max Beerbohm, and a six-volume edition of Macaulay’s History of England. Until recently I continued to own these books — though, after letting it sit unread on my shelves for more than thirty years, I finally sent the six volumes of Macaulay’s History off to my son. There I expect they will remain unread for thirty or so more years, at which time I hope he will pass them along to his son, who will go and do likewise.

I reacquired all the books I gave up and many hundreds more in the intervening years. Books long ago threatened to take over my apartment; and my guess is that, had I remained a bachelor, they would easily have done so. Any flat space is fair game to the book collector, and there are the stories of scholar-bachelors — Harry Wolfson of Harvard among them — using ovens and refrigerators to store books.

My friend Edward Shils was too good a cook to permit that in his own apartment, where he kept some fifteen thousand books (with another five or six thousand in his house in England). But he did convert a small bathroom in his apartment into a book repository, having bookcases built around and over a bathtub and toilet and sink. Eight-foot-high bookcases lined the walls in all the rooms and all the hallways in his large apartment. Books, magazines, and manuscripts covered all the tables and chairs not in use.

You may have some nodding acquaintance with this library, because it appears in a spiteful portrait of Edward Shils in Saul Bellow’s recent novel Ravelstein. “When you first came into his apartment,” Bellow writes, “your respect for him grew. On his shelves there were full sets of Max Weber and all the Gumplowitches and Ratzenhofers. He owned the collected works of Henry James and of Dickens and the histories of Gibbon’s Rome and Hume’s England as well as encyclopedias of religion and masses of sociology books. Useful for propping up windows when the sash cord broke, I used to say.” Not bad as far as it goes, though it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. It leaves out the delight acquiring these books gave their owner, who was not a passionate collector merely, but had read every book he owned and seemed to forget nothing about any of them.

As one of the trustees of Edward Shils’s estate, it fell to me to dispose of this magnificent library. I hated to see it broken up, for it was in itself a work of art. But I finally sold it to a local bookseller who later, I am told, sold it to a small German university. There, presumably, it sits, used by earnest German undergraduates getting up various lengthy and heavily footnoted papers of a doubtless dour kind.

Alone, surrounded by my friend’s much-loved personal library in his empty apartment, I would wonder about the purpose of laying in so large a supply of books. These books gave Edward Shils keen pleasure, and he put them to the highest use. Their pertinence was so much greater when he was alive to preside over them. Now they seemed inert, cumbersome, almost grotesque in their plenitude. Look on these tomes, ye learned, I thought, and despair.

The possibility of cutting back my own personal library first hit me with real force a month or so ago, when I visited the apartment of a new neighbor, a productive historian of America who had recently moved into our building. After he had shown me around his apartment, I asked, “But where do you keep your books?” To which he jauntily replied that, apart from some dictionaries and fairly standard reference books, he didn’t have any books; with a good public and a large university library within three blocks, he didn’t feel the need. His apartment seemed light, airy, much more spacious than mine, though it is in fact a bit smaller. And this man, please understand, wrote books that required serious research; he was no mere schmoozer, unlike another writer I know — me, who almost remained nameless.

An apartment without lots of books in every room? Was this possible? With the exception of our bathrooms and kitchen, every room in our apartment had at least one and usually two or three or more jammed bookcases. A small number of these books were my wife’s, but the vast cumbersome majority were mine. The thought of living without books in our midst simmered in my low-fire brain for a week or so, and then, like a basketball team breaking with a resounding clap from a huddle during a time out, I said to myself, all exclamation marks: “Yes! Go! Do it! Now!”

Getting rid of most of my personal library comported nicely with my long-held fantasy of traveling light, existing with minimal encumbrance, living simply. A fantasy it has always been, for the longer I have lived, the heavier has my equipage grown. Neckties, spectacles, fountain pens, wristwatches, tuxedos, prints, small sculptures, and of course endless books — accumulation has gone on and on. I am a man who owns an electric shoe-shining machine. Far from simplifying, I have complicated my life; far from lightening up, I seen everywhere to have weighted myself down. But if I could toss off all these books, here, yes, was a felicitous start.

My library could have been much larger, you understand. Bulky though it seemed, I actually tried in recent years to keep it under control. At one point, when I edited a magazine that ran a book-review section, books arrived at my apartment in what it would not be imprecise to call profusion. Soon, though, discrimination kicked in, and I realized that I didn’t need any books about the New Deal, let alone studies of the WPA, nor any on ecology, theology, technology, and a number of other large subjects. Still, I was a sucker for biographies of composers, the letters of poets, the memoirs of high-level European statesmen. Surely, one couldn’t have too many critical studies of Turgenev, or biographies of Matthew Arnold, or diaries of Mittel-European dilettantes, could one?

Turns out, one could, and soon I did. I began to weed things out, lest books threaten to take over, leaving me, like the poor fellow in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” completely bricked in, or, in my case, booked in. I began to tell myself that, for every new book I allowed in, one had to go out. I ceased dropping into used-book stores, those pool halls for the bibliomane. I bought very few new books. Yet I continued to collect sets of books, such as the Yale edition of the works of William James in multiple volumes. Someone gave me the Cambridge Modern History of Europe, a mere thirteen vols. How could I turn it down? How could I not provide a home for four exceedingly well-edited volumes of the letters of Samuel Johnson? And so it went. My attempts to set up restrictions on the model of strict immigration quotas didn’t come to much; the print hordes could not be stopped.

How much of all this did I actually read? If I give the impression of a fairly well-read person, it is an impression merely. Much of what I have read has been in connection with things I have written. Like most writers, I am a slow reader; as a writer, when reading I try to discover how the better writers do it and, while I’m at it, steal from them what I can for my own scribbling. This tends to slow a fellow down. Gazing at my library, I realized that, given all the hours I spend reading newspapers and magazines, I probably had more — much more — print on hand than I could hope to read in the time remaining to me on the planet. Getting rid of most of these books would be an earnest of my belief that life was finite, a fact in which I claimed to believe.

Having read a book, most people seem to feel it has become a part of their autobiography and thus must be saved, like an important family document. I am not among these people. Deciding which books to banish, I found an almost shocking absence in myself of such sentimentality.

George Orwell was a key figure in my education, but I was surprised to find myself able to let go his four volumes of collected journalism and letters without a whimper. Edmund Wilson was even more important, and I owned the two dozen or so of his squat books and four or five books about him. Those babies are out of here, and all I saved is a recently published volume of his uncollected writings (which I haven’t yet read), Night Thoughts (his book of light verse and parodies), and Shores of Light (his first collection of book reviews). A. J. Liebling gave me more pleasure than any other journalist of my time, but at the moment this apartment doesn’t contain a single baroque sentence of his. I also let go four volumes of Joseph Mitchell, though kept his The Bottom of the Harbor, because he sent me an inscribed copy. Orwell, Wilson, Liebling, Mitchell, these are writers whom I loved when young and greatly respect even now. That I so easily let them go will give you some notion of the ruthlessness of the man you are reading.

I tried to devise principles for keeping the books I did. Usefulness and re-readability was the best I could come up with. (Add to this pure pleasure: I couldn’t let go of a small paperback of The Lyrics of Noel Coward.) I thought I had a few other principles under construction, but each of them, freshly devised, fell before my reluctance to let certain books go. No need for biography, I thought, but then I decided to keep a scholarly edition I own of Boswell’s Life of Johnson; and also — why not? — Donald Frame’s biography of Montaigne. I also kept a biography of John Dryden, because I’ve never read one. I let go biographies of Rousseau, Balzac, Hazlitt, Jowett, Emerson, Henry James, William James, Justice Holmes, Keynes, Edmund Gosse, Walter de la Mare, Vladimir Nabokov, Lord Berners, A. J. Ayer, and many others.

I sold off not only the recent biography of but all the books I owned by Isaiah Berlin — the complete run, I believe — even though over the years I think I learned a thing or two from his writings, especially about the great nineteenth-century Russian writers. Berlin put me onto Alexander Herzen, whose four-volume My Past and Thoughts I did not dispose of. I first read it in my late twenties, recall how rich it is, and dream of reading it once again before check out time.

Yet having derived pleasure from a writer in the past didn’t strike me as a good enough reason to keep his books forever. Not a scrap of H. L. Mencken is now in this apartment. I almost lost my nerve and saved the three volumes of Mencken’s autobiography, my favorite among his works, but decided — steady, friend, steady — to be stern and let the old boy go without a tear.

Lots of history wound up on the book-buyer’s cart. I parted with 602 pages of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 654 pages of Men, Women, & Pianos, and a cool 1,018 pages of A History of the Byzantine State and Society. I kept mostly ancient history: Thucydides and Herodotus and Plutarch, the narrative Alexander to Actium by Peter Green, a few volumes of Theodor Mommsen on Rome. I sent off to a younger friend six volumes of the essays and lectures of Arnaldo Momigliano. No works on American history remain on the premises, apart from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Henry Adams’s histories of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison and the historical volumes that I have in the Library of America series.

I rid myself of six volumes of the plays of George Bernard Shaw without a flicker of doubt. The only plays I now have in the house are those of the three guys from Athens and the thirty-six written by the fellow with the receding hairline and large forehead from the river town in England. I’m not keeping a word of criticism about the man. But then I never have had much interest in the unremitting torrent of books of Shakespeare criticism — it is a Big Muddy into which I never cared to step, lest I come up, bespattered, in the fleshy-armed embrace of Professor Harold Bloom.

I watched the books of Walter Benjamin leave without registering the least fibrillation. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities accompanied them with the same equanimity in my breast. (I wish I had owned some of the French literary theorists, if only for the delight it would have given me to get rid of them.) I was not, overall, kind to German writers. I kissed poor Franz Kafka goodbye. I bid good day to ThomasMann, keeping only Joseph and His Brothers, which I haven’t yet read. I did keep a few items — in paperback — of Nietzsche and two of three promised volumes of a biography of Goethe by Nicholas Boyle along with Conversations with Eckermann. Goethe is a writer I’d rather read about than actually read. I kept a few Schopenhauer items, including The World as Will and Representation; his unrelenting darkness for some reason charms me.

I shall genuinely miss a number of books I couldn’t somehow justify keeping: Delacroix’s Journals and Julius Meier-Graefe’s van Gogh, though I felt no qualms about unburdening myself of ten books by E. H. Gombrich. I shall miss the amusing and highly idiosyncratic books on France and French culture by Richard Cobb. I gave up a deluxe paperback set of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which provided much delight when I first read it. I gave up, too, the six volumes, in another deluxe paperback edition, of Casanova’s memoirs, which I’ve never read and probably never will. Leaving the room in which it sat, I used to run my index finger across its spines and query, “Yo, Giacomo, getting much?”

Asked if he read novels, the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle replied, “Yes, all six,” by which he meant the six novels of Jane Austen. For someone who reads more novels and stories than anything else — “the biography you can make up,” Peter Ackroyd once said, “the fiction has to be the truth” — I am not keeping all that much fiction. I did hold on to my Oxford University Press edition of Jane Austen. I kept a two-volume boxed edition of the stories of Somerset Maugham. I retained three volumes of Jorge Luis Borges — stories, poems, non-fictions — that astonishing blind man of Buenos Aires who, through the purity of his literary impulse, turned himself into a figure in world literature.

The Russians did not do well in this purge. I let go all the stories of Chekhov, plus two biographies and two collections of letters, even though he is a writer for whom I have great admiration; I kept a two-volume Penguin edition of War and Peace, but no Dostoyevsky whatsoever. I retained the Complete Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, and Speak, Memory, but not Lolita. In paperback, I’ve kept seven Balzac novels and The Leopard and Confessions of Zeno, the latter two swell continental novels that I love and hope one day to reread.

I retained books of poetry by Cavafy, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Larkin, Leopardi, Auden, MacNeice, Betjeman, L. E. Sissman, Henri Coulette, Howard Nemerov, and Czeslaw Milosz, among others. I’m also holding on to that most impenetrable of modern books, Finnegans Wake, on the assumption that one ought to have at least one book, no matter how small one’s library, that one will never quite get around to reading. Except for that by T. S. Eliot and Randall Jarrell, all criticism of poetry got the delete key.

Keep no writing about other writers, I announced early in the game, but then I found myself making a few exceptions. I couldn’t let go of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. I kept Paul Valery and Desmond MacCarthy on literature, Clement Greenberg on art, Edwin Denby on dance, and Donald Tovey on music. I seem to have written four books of essay on literature myself; these — you will be shocked to learn — were given special dispensation and have been allowed to remain; also nine other of my books, sacred and profane. I also kept the two copies each of the two books in Yiddish that my grandfather wrote and that my father paid to have published. I hope my own grandson will one day be as kind to me.

I let go of nearly a full bookcase of books of music criticism and biography, though keeping two volumes of my late friend Samuel Lipman’s essays on music. I hesitated about saving some Virgil Thomson, whose prose is always a good reminder of what lucidity looks like, but finally cut him loose. I had less compunction about seeing off the less than lucent books of Charles Rosen and the vastly more fluent ones of Ernest Newman. I have always enjoyed reading things by and about Stravinsky, but I retained only a slim book of his called Memories and Commentaries. I kept a book of Ravel’s writings, because he is in my pantheon of modern artists, not alone for his elegant music but for saying that he got more artistic use out of an hour of joy than out of months of suffering. Lots of musical biographies will now have new homes. Was I ever really going to find time to read a five-hundred-plus page biography of Gabriel Faure? Not, I strongly suspect, in this life; and perhaps not in the next life, either. I had meant to keep a collection of pieces by Proust’s friend the composer Reynaldo Hahn, but it got away.

Proust, however, didn’t. I saved a full shelf of Proust, in a glass (if not cork-lined) bookcase, along with three fat Proust biographies. Proust is among a small number of writers whom I not only love to read but can endlessly read about. Henry James, Edward Gibbon, and George Santayana are three others, and I kept all of their books that I had (most of James’s fiction is in my Library of America volumes). The works of these four writers, along with those of Max Beerbohm, fill one bookcase.

What does it say about me, I wonder, that, after a lifetime of reading, these are the five writers about whom I care most? Three of the five were overweight. None was exactly a sexual conquistador. All took up a detached attitude toward the life of their times — the entire quintet produced no children — and cared tremendously about style. I would love to tell you what the deeper meaning of my love for them is, but I cannot because I gave away my six volumes of the Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, and though I kept the two-volume Principles of Psychology by William James, I don’t think he will be much help in this line.

I kept thirty or so reference books: French, Latin, Italian, and German dictionaries, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Bartlett’s and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Chambers Biographical Dictionary, a couple of music dictionaries, a French and an English grammar, the excellent Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, and (my main man) Merriam-Webster’s ninth Collegiate Dictionary. I once yearned to own the multi-volumed Oxford English Dictionary, but, now that I have the use of it through my computer, I have ceased to long for its bulky, magisterial presence on my shelves. I had two sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for which I long ago worked, and unloaded the later one that Mortimer J. Adler mucked up by dividing it into dreary things called Propaedia, Macropaedia, and Micropaedia.

I need a new coffee table, if only to support the small number of coffee-table books I have kept. These include a volume of the drawings of Piranesi and another of those of Saul Steinberg and a third of the caricatures of Max Beerbohm and a fourth and fifth of the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Atget. Add to this a volume on Vermeer and a collection of the drawings and cartoons of Ralph Barton.

I have three different Bibles in the apartment — a work, the Bible, I’ve not yet read all the way through and tell myself I must before I am hit with a most unpleasant quiz administered at certain pearly gates. I unloaded Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed, since I am myself far too perplexed on the subjects of which he writes to make much use of it. I let go two works on Jewish mysticism, reasoning that I am still a long way from mastering Jewish rationalism. I did keep one volume of Plato and two containing all of Aristotle. I also kept nine slender volumes, most of them in paperback, of Wittgenstein — not because I pretend to understand him or that he gives me solace but because I like the shape of his sentences, even in English translation. Of the French moralistes, I retained La Rochefoucauld and LaBruyere, but let Joubert and Chamfort go. I shall know where to find those boys if I need them.

I’m counting, really, on finding any books I need at my nearby libraries. One of the longstanding cliches of book owning is that, as soon as one gives a book away, one instantly has need of it. Doubtless it is fine to have all the books one requires at hand, so that one only need step into the next room to discover the precise phrasing of that quotation, date of that royal marriage, spelling of that place-name. But the best way to arrange this is to move into the library, living the way certain wealthy retired men choose to do on the edge of a golf course.

I have almost as little desire to live in a library as I do on a golf course. I seek a compromise: living in a place where not every wall has a bookcase. I hope that by now the book collector’s impulse is dead in me. With luck, I expect always to have the right books to keep my mind engaged, to put me gently to sleep at night, to be on hand to distract me during bouts of insomnia. I’m far from ready to go so far as Philip Larkin and say that “books are a load of crap.” But in selling off my books I felt I was freeing myself in some way, entering another stage in life — though I’m not altogether clear what it might be. Behind my selling all these books was a longing to streamline my life a bit, make it feel less cluttered, encumbered, book bound. In doing so, I feel as if I had gathered my desert-island books about me without actually having to sail off for the island.

Fine things books, but perhaps the moment has come to stop taking them so seriously. Who was it said that people who are always reading never discover anything? I’m not sure if that is true, but I do know that reading and thinking are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes reading supplies the most cunning of all means of avoiding thought. It would be good once in awhile to try thinking without the stimulus of books, to become not an out-of-the-box — never, please, that — but at least an out-of-the-book thinker. Books may furnish a room, but there surely are other things quite as suitable for furnishing a mind. Time, I think, for me to attempt to find out what these might be.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.