Michael Dirda - Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

Illustration by Susan Davis

MICHAEL DIRDA

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

Copyright 2000 by The Washington Post

Individual essays 1993-1999 by The Washington Post Reprinted with permission.

All rights reserved

Published by arrangement with Indiana University Press

First published as a Norton paperback 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dirda, Michael.

Readings : essays and literary entertainments / Michael Dirda.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-253-33824-7 (alk. paper)

I. Title.

PN4874.D475 A25 2000

814'.6dc21 00-033598

ISBN 0-393-32489-3 pbk.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W I T 3QT

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

To My Mother and Sisters

and in Memory of My Father

Contents

P R E F A C E | ix

The Crime of His Life

Light of Other Days

The Quest for Scrivener

Data Daze

Talismans

Four-Leaf Clovers

Maxims, Etc.

Sez Who?

Heart of the Matter

Lament for a Maker

Bookman's Saturday

Clubland

Supplementary Materials

The Learning Channels

Listening to My Father

Guy Davenport

Romantic Scholarship

Eros by Any Other Name 150

Weekend with Wodehouse 43

Frank Confessions

An Abecedary

Mememormee

Mr. Wright

Tomes for Tots

Heian Holiday

Three Classics

Childhood's End

Vacation Reading

The One and the Many

One More Modest Proposal 177

Commencement Advice

Shake Scenes

Four Novels and a Memoir 78

After Strange Books

The October Country

Awful Bits

Bookish Fantasies

Turning 50

Pages on Life's Way

Blame It on Books

A Garland for Max

On the Road Not Taken

Read at Whim!

Excursion

Comedy Tonight

Millennial Readings

From the start, I imagined the essays in this book as "literary entertainments." The pieces themselves were intended to take up serious issues, but the approach was to be resolutely personal, lighthearted most of the time, occasionally wistful or nostalgic. Showing her usual perspicacity, my then-boss Nina King eventually gave in to my shameless entreaties and agreed to let me try this experiment in playful journalism for half a year or so. My first column was published in January 1993 on page 15 of the WashingtonPost Book World, and seven years later it still appears there once a month.

In every way, Book World has been immensely accommodating and generous. So long as I touch on books, reading, publishing, or collecting, I have been permitted to be highly personal (the portrait of my father), utterly fanciful (parodies of various literary genres), fairly serious (my "advice to graduates" address), or a blend of all these (the notorious Florida midlife crisis piece). I've written columns in the shape of diaries, plays, and memoirs; there have been essays on forgotten novels, soft-core pornography, The Tale of Genji, and the joys of book-hunting; at holidays I've recommended current books and old favorites; during the summer I've advised on beach fiction. In short, "Readings"as the feature is calledhas been a catch-all, a chance for me to talk about some of the books I love. Happily, there have been a great many

The voice, I hope, is my own, though I may have learned by imitating the dulcet tones of others. As a very young teenager with a library card, I checked out the genial, easygoing essays of Clifton Fadiman. In college I discovered the distinctive prose of Cyril Connolly ( The Unquiet Grave), M.

F. K. Fisher {The Art of Eating}, Ezra Pound ( Literary Essays), and Randall Jarrell {Poetry and the Age). Even later, I read (and sometimes tried to palely emulate) the journalism of Joseph Mitchell, Janet Flanner, Kenneth Tynan, Joseph Epstein, Guy Davenport, Robertson Davies, Brigid Brophy, H. L

Mencken, Desmond MacCarthy, G. K. Chesterton, Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal, Virgil Thomson, John Updike, W. H. Auden, Robert Phelps, Hunter Thompson, A. J. Liebling, Joan Didion, and William Gass. Each of these writers transformed magazine reportage or casual piece work into something stylish, personal, and artful.

I also learnedI hopefrom the essays of my colleagues at the Post, especially the late Henry Mitchell (gardener, dog-lover, and wise man) and my fellow critic Jonathan Yardley. Most important of all, I talked books for a dozen years with my good friend David Streitfeld, long the premier publishing reporter in the country but now, alas, covering digital technology and Silicon Valley. Let me also mention other friends at Book World past and present: K. Francis Tanabe, Ednamae Storti, Marie Arana, Elizabeth Ward, Mary Morris, Jennifer Howard, Jabari Asim, Michele Slung, Robert Wilson, Brigitte Weeks, Curt Suplee, William McPherson, and, not least, the late and much-missed Reid Beddow. Equally missed is Susan Davis, who provided wonderful pictures for my essays. Bobbye Pratt assisted me in the Post's library, and Rudy McDaniel of the University of Central Florida kindly offered his computer expertise. John Gallman and Jane Lyle of Indiana University Press contributed encouragement, sage counsel, and expert editorial advice. Above all, my wife Marian and our children Christopher, Michael, and Nathaniel have periodically reminded me that people are more important than books.

In an introduction to an omnibus volume of his fiction, P. G. Wodehouse once advised his admirers to go slowly, to ration the stories over several weeks, lest his idiosyncratic prose start to pall through sheer excess.

May I beg the same indulgence? Don't rush through these essays all at once. Dip into the book at random. Browse. Trust the gods of serendipity.

As Randall Jarrell once proclaimed, Read at whim!

Michael Dirda

Readings

The Crime of Bis Life

The weed of crime, according to the Shadow, bears bitter fruit. But not always. One afternoon some thirty-five years ago, a 13-year-old boy was lingering in the book section of O'Neils department store, surreptitiously turning the pages of Tarzan the Untamed. The Grosset & Dunlap editions of Lord Greystoke's adventures ($1.50 each) cost too much to actually buy, except on the rarest and flushest of occasions, but no store officials seemed to care if an obviously devoted student of the apeman simply stood there, in that quiet corner, and read through an entire novel in the course of a lazy summer day.

I was to meet my mother, bargain shopper extraordinaire, out in the parking lot at 5 P.M. Rather to my surprise I finished that Burroughs masterwork with half an hour to spare, examined the various Hardy Boys selections and found I knew them all, then looked disdainfully at the pricey Scribners Illustrated Classics (Parent-Approved Kiddie Lit) and even glanced through one or two of the deluxe leatherette Bibles. A bit antsy by now, I started to roam through the store when, near the cash registers, I spotted a virgin stand of paperbacks. Having recently lost sleep over a Pyra-mid edition of