Pleasure on Parnassus

What should a man read in order to be well-read? To Sir William Haley, scholarly editor of the London Times, no master list or five-foot shelf can possibly give a proper answer. Even if a man should read three books a week for 60 years, he would still have "no more than a small holding on Parnassus." But last week, over the BBC, Sir William offered a few suggestions--a rambling series of pleasant prescriptions for booklovers.

Among them:

P: "When you feel like acquiring a good book, buying a volume which attracts you, or you feel ought to attract you, or because it is a bargain, don't restrain the impulse. Get the book at once."

P: "If you . . . don't feel like reading the book, or begin it and find you don't want to go on, put it on your shelves as an investment; don't discard it at a loss. It is strange how you can have a book--or a whole row of books by the same author --on your shelves for years . . . and wonder what on earth made you acquire them. Then suddenly one day . . . you will find yourself picking up the volume, settling down to it, enjoying it, and be completely at a loss to know why you never came to it before."

P: "You can derive a good deal of pleasure, and often find a reason to link up one or other of the hither to neglected books, by having some kind of loose system in your reading. I don't suggest anything like a set list, or 'planned reading'; one's instinct rightly rebels against such regimentation . . . But there are all kinds of excitement and adventure to be had from associative reading. I have never thought very much of Wordsworth as a poet, or found him a man attractive in himself.

The one likeable figure in his circle seemed to be his sister Dorothy . . . So, recently, I at last got hold of Professor de Selincourt's fine edition of her Journals. They led me to his life of Dorothy Wordsworth, to Margoliouth's Wordsworth and Coleridge, back with a new eye to Hazlitt's My First Acquaintance with Poets, to De Quincey . . . The advantage of reading of this kind is that it takes you through life continually opening up new vistas of old country, slowly filling in a pattern of memories and emotions and associations such as no strictly formalized reading can give."

P: "In all the criticism, all the books about books and authors . . . all the literary guides and aids and dissertations, I have rarely seen any serious attention given to the order in which a writer's work should be read . . . Flinging oneself blindly at each and every new author simply does not work. We get too many hard knocks . . . A failure to get through The Monastery robbed me of Scott for half a lifetime. Imagine the fate of the man first introduced to Shakespeare through Troilus and Cressida, to Trollope through He Knew He Was Right, to Hardy through Jude the Obscure or to Flaubert through Bouvard et Pecuchet . . . Tolstoy is the only author I know whose novels and major stories can be read in any order without deterrence."

P: "If completeness is your aim, choose an author who is easily embraced, that is, whose works you can collect, assemble, and see as a whole. Fielding, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Stendhal, Turgenev, Hardy, Conrad, Bagehot, Matthew Arnold--such writers are not too voluminous; each one has kept up a steady standard, and endowed his works as a whole with a corporate character. Voltaire, Goethe, George Sand, Wells, Bennett, and Belloc, on the other hand, are no use for this purpose . . . They all wrote some rubbish. And to the scholars can be left the mountainous minutiae of Walpoleiana, or the Boswell Papers. Above all, do not let Montague's 'true intimacy' with even 'a dozen supremely loved authors' exclude your interest in all else. As he would have been the first to tell you, 'Ripeness is all.' "

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