To read or not to read
Benny Green
The other day somebody very kindly offered me a free copy of the new Penguin edition of Dos Passos's trilogy, USA. I accepted it eagerly and with much gratitude, but now that it is, mine the thought occurs to the that I may never read it, at least not in its entirety. It consists of 1,184 closely-printed pages, comprising, I should say at a rough guess, around half a million words, or enough matter to fill my weekly space in this journal for the next ten years. As it stands, bland and virginal on my bookshelf, looking rather like a cross between a block of wood and a small packet of detergent, I must say it seems a beautiful piece of book-making, svelte enough to gladden the eye, although I admit to a certain vague misgiving connected with the fate of the Penguin edition I bought in 1960 of Mann's The Magic Mountain. That volume comprised 716 pages and, within a few weeks of my acquiring it, had split itself, amoebalike, into 358 separate sections. Still, Penguin bindings usually turn out to be everlasting, and it is not that which worries me about Dos Passos's colossal work.
The fact is that even as I consider the possibility of my reading it, I am quite sure I already have. There is in my mind, clear as crystal, a colour snapshot of myself sitting on the upper deck of a trolleybus gliding through one of the freezing nights of the snowbound winter of 1946-7, doggedly reading the last few pages of The 42nd Parallel, part one of the trilogy. A saxophone case rests against my knee, and my woollen gloves are causing me considerable difficulties in turning the pages over. And yet last weekend, when I opened my new edition and examined the closing words, "At last he made Charlie understand he wasn't supposed to talk to him," neither it nor any of the other sentences evoked the faintest flicker of recognition.
Yet one thing I do remember is that in my late teens, when I was already embarked on my modest undertaking to read every American novel of any consequence ever written, and had already registered points victories over Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Willa Cather, Thomas
Stribling (who?), Thornton Wilder 'and I forget how many others, Dos Passos loomed as a major fi
gure. Whatever happened to those half a million words that slipped my mind? Why did the impression of not even one of them prove to be indelible? Why have Fitzgerald's orgiastic future and Run yon's " a fink is a character who is lower than a mudcat's vest pocket" and Lardner's " Shut up,' I explained " and Poe's "This is the mark of no human hand" and Twain's " Ain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a majority in any town?" never left me for a moment in the intervening quarter century, while 882 cubic inches of Dos Passos's social realism have vanished without trace? Perhaps it was too cold on the bus that night, or maybe it was a different book I was reading, but whatever the explanation I have the uneasy feeling that I will never turn those 1,184 pages to find out.
One of the conclusions I have come to in my capacity as a weak imitation of a bibliophile is that it is bad for the soul to be confronted by too many books which you know you will never quite be equal to reading. One of the bitterest reproaches in my entire library, for instance, is my edition of Don Quixote (940 pages). Protruding from page 736 is a slip of white paper, yellowed with age
now, indicating the point at which, in the summer of 1956, I was distracted from my campaign to finish reading the book and somehow never found the time to come back to it, It is the point where Sancho remarks that it is "a good thing to command, even if it is only a herd of cattle." And at that juncture, just when I was embarking on the final lap of the long journey, the season suddenly ended and I had to pack my suitcase and go back to London. I should explain that I spent the summer of 1956 playing the saxophone to the moderately passive inmates of a holiday camp on the ,Isle of Wight, that my duties did not start each night before 7,30, and that I spent the rest of the day dieting, practicing the leg-break and reading a great many books I had always wanted to read whose only common denominator was that they were all very long. Offhand I can remember Little Dorrit, A History of Western Philosophy, Churchill's Marlborough, The Peloponnesian War and Trollope's ' Palliser' novels, and the only reason that the long book to end all long books, War and Peace, was not among them was that I tried it and failed.
But I eventually made it the following spring, though it took a sea voyage to manage it. I was travelling to New York in the company of some musician friends of mine, and recall that the only serious distraction was the arrival under the cabin door each morning of the Cunard Line's competition for the day. One morning about 500 miles out from Southampton Water on the home run, Sharpe came into my cabin. with a puzzled look on his face. and the day's competition in his hand. It was a quiz whose answers comprised the surnames of ship's passengers, the captain having thoughtfully supplied a full passenger list with each puzzle. Sharpe was within one answer of solving the whole thing, and was baffled by "Instrument in all directions." Sadly I put down War and Peace, just where Tolstoy goes into his deflating Epilogues, and looked at Sharpe compassionately. "Sharpe," I said, "you are a philistine. The answer is ' Sharpe,' " and I went back to Tolstoy. Sharpe duly won a table lighter as his prize for solving the puzzle, and when the thing fell apart a week later, it be' came possible for him to give me half as an acknowledgement of my part in his triumph.
Previous page
