Books of the Day
The Best Books in the World
A FEW years ago I used to have luncheon about once a week with an Oriental diplomat, at that time accredited to the Court of St. James's. He was a most charming man, whose witty and scandalous conversation I used greatly to enjoy. His only social disadvantage was that he was so formidably cultured, and inclined to trade on his intimidating con- versational resources. He traded most irritatingly through the medium of a paper-game which he used to insist upon playing at table. After writing materials had been produced, he would turn on his guests his gayest beam and say: " Now let us put down the names of the six greatest novels in the French language." Or " the five greatest non-classical Greek writers." Or "the four greatest erotic, but non-pornographic, painters." Our varying selections then inevitably inspired an argument lasting until it was time for tea. It was a trying game, and greatly though I enjoyed the company of my friend, my regret when he was transferred to another capital was tempered by the reflection that I should have to play the game no more. Certainly I never thought that I should live to enjoy playing it in other company. But Mr. Somerset Maugham has just produced a book which is at its greater length the precise equivalent of what we used to produce at the luncheon table, and I have enjoyed every word of it.
Books and You is an annotated book-list to the masterpieces of English literature and to such masterpieces of other litera- tures as are available in good translations. It is, in fact, designed to recommend to a popular audience the best books in the world, the books which anyone with any pretensions to literary education will in all probability have read already. The books listed here are books to be read not for instruction but for enjoyment—books which one would definitely feel the poorer for not having read. I am perfectly aware that the reason why I have so much enjoyed reading Mr. Maugham's recommendations is that I almost exactly share his tastes.
With rare exceptions—his space being strictly limited, for this book is based on American newspaper articles—Mr. Maugham recommends only one book of any author. One of the exceptions is Stendhal, whom he admits to be his favourite novelist. He is also mine, and if—to introduce another paper game—I were compelled to make a list of the twenty books I should choose to have with me if I were to be confined in solitude on a desert island, Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chart- reuse de Parme—in Scott-Moncrieff's superb translation, if the books were to be in English—would certainly be at the head of my list. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu—which I should try to persuade my jailers to consider as one book and not fifteen —and Madame Bovary would come next. Mr. Maugham once wrote that he preferred being bored by Proust to being amused by any other writer, but now, while still putting Proust among the greatest writers of the world, says that a second reading has made him assume " a more sensible attitude " and that a certain element in Proust " fatigues." This is one of two occasions where I wish that Mr. Maugham had kept to his first impressions, not because I feel that his first view was not exaggerated, but because it is disillusioning to find that Mr. Maugham's enjoyment of Proust has diminished. He is so right in saying that Proust, if he were nothing else, would still be magnificently worth reading as a humorist. Madame Verdurin and the Baron de Charlus are, as he says, the richest creations of the comic fancy our time has seen, and I almost believe that I should welcome the desert island of the con- ventional hypothesis if it were to provide me with the leisure to re-read the whole of Proust again.
The other writer over whom I wish Mr. Maugham had kept to first impressions is Tolstoy. When he prepared to write his book, Mr. Maugham intended to recommend Anna Karenina instead of War and Peace. Having read both books again, he is now certain that War and Peace is incomparably the greater. I also Jiave just re-read the two, and I am as convinced that Mr. Maugham is wrong. Granted that Anna Karenina has some of the qualities of a moral tract, that Tolstoy
so disapproved of Anna's love for Vronsky that he loade 1 the dice against her and made her out to be a less interestin s and attractive character than in his heart he knew she mu have been, the book as a whole gives such a staggeringly good picture of the whole of Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century that the faults are really immaterial. I agree that War and Peace contains passages that are unequalled in literature. Natasha is the most attractive character in the whole of fiction. The description of the day on which Nikola and she ride out to hunt is one of the loveliest things ever written. Before the majestic scale of the book one can feel only awe. But most of the battle scenes are boring, Pierre", Freemasonry is incredibly tedious, and the last fifty pages are a disaster. As a whole, I feel the book suffers much more than Anna Karenina from Tolstoy's tendency to preach. I should, of course, want both books on my island, but I should read Anna Karenina first, and I would not swear that before I turned again to War and Peace I should not re-read most of the other French and Russian books on Mr. Maugham's list. I should certainly read Pere Goriot and The Brothers Karamazov. I might read Don Quixote, skipping, as Mr. Maugham suggests, the boring short stories which Cervantes put in as padding. And though I do not think that I should attempt Wilhelm Meister, which I must confess I have never been able to finish, I think I should permit myself the ever- green delights of Candide and also the enchanting Princess of Cleves of Madame de la Fayette—of which incidentally a new edition is about to be published by the Nonesuch Press.
Mr. Maugham's selections from English writers are rela- tively uncontroversial and seem to me admirable. He puts Moll Flanders as the best of Defoe, Gulliver's Travels of Swift, Tristram Shandy of Stern; and Tom 'ones of Fielding, and all of them among the best of all English novels. He says that Dickens is the greatest English novelist and David Copperfield his best book, and I shall not quarrel, because I know that my total aversion from Dickens and all his works is a blind spot. Mansfield Park he considers the best of Jane Austen, whose novels, from what he says about her, I believe give him more real pleasure than anything by Dickens. He recommends The Way of All Flesh, Middlemarch, The Egoist, Barchester Towers (this corrected from The Eustace Diamonds), Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair as the other novels which one should not leave unread. Of non-fiction books he plumps for Gibbon's Autobiography, Hazlitt's Essays (how relieved one is to see the customary recommendation of Lamb as our finest essayist withheld), and Boswell's Johnson. Personally, I regret the omission of The Vicar of Wakefield, which is certainly a book I should be sorry not to have read, but the heart is warmed by the total omission of anything by Bunyan, Milton, Scott, Carlyle, Pater and Thomas Hardy. Mr. Maugham deals rather summarily with poetry, confessing that he likes anthologies ; and it was surely unnecessary for him to have excluded living writers. E. M. Forster's Howard's End and Norman Douglas's South Wind are surely both better books than anything Trollope ever wrote.
Mr. Maugham's final section deals with American literature, to which, since American literature is young, he admits that he has applied distinctly lower critical standards. Melville, Whitman and Poe are the only American writers to which he ascribes genius, though Henry James is in his opinion the most distinguished American writer, with The American his best book. He also likes Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Parkman's The Oregon Trail (which most Europeans will probably not be ashamed to admit that they have not read): This chapter on American writers was a graceful compliment to readers of The Saturday Evening Post, but even when the point of view from which it is written is explained, it seems unduly inconsistent with the rest of the book. Melville is undoubtedlk a great and original writer, but Twain and Poe were surely not the equals of many European writers whom Mr. Maugham has left unmentioned. The uncouth and strident Whitman I personally find unread- able with pleasure, though it is obvious that he has historical importance as the trunk from which—to adopt Mr. Maugham's metaphor—the branches of twentieth-century American litera- ture have sprung. On my island I should prefer some of the extremely talented branches to the trunk. But, enjoy them as I might, I am sure I should stick to the view that Melville is the only great imaginative writer that America has yet
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