Auto-Bibliography: Books and Life

The term was coined by Seth Lerer, and I encountered it in a TLS review by Leah Price. Here’s how she describes it: 

“As interested in the narrator’s readings as in his doings, such memoirs typically open with a lonely and precocious child, unappreciated by the coarser souls who surround him. (The author’s first memory is often a printed page; his second, resisting his mother’s injunction to go outside and play with other children).”

That’s me, all right! And I enjoy such memoirs. But to be honest, my first question is always, “Did he like the same books I did?” And even, “Did she like them for the same reasons?” If the answer is no, my interest is likely to flag. 

The memoirs don’t have to be about childhood, of course, but there is a special sweetness in recalling favorite children’s books. (Price was probably thinking of Francis Spufford’s 2003 The Child that Books Built, a classic of the genre). Proust suggested that a collector of children’s books should look not for first editions, but for the editions in which he first read them. Finding one of these is a great pleasure, and then you can offer them to your children or grandchildren. Or perhaps “push” is a better word than offer. The kids will then -- I guarantee it -- break your heart by not liking them at all.

So you can reread them yourself instead. Wendy Lesser wrote an enjoyable memoir about rereading (adult) books she had read decades earlier. Her menu includes Don Quixote (which she first read at eleven), Portrait of a Lady, The Idiot, and Huckleberry Finn, among others, and one movie, Vertigo. I found her reactions acute and thought-provoking and I recommend both the book and the experiment. 

It’s an experiment that I’ve also conducted a few times lately, enticed by the free editions of classic fiction that I can download on my Kindle. An old favorite, Trollope’s Orley Farm, left me wondering why I bother to read any one other than Trollope. The Brothers Karamazov produced more mixed reactions. When I first read it in the 1950’s, it was accepted practice to suspend one’s own biases for the duration of the novel. Atheist though I was (and am), I could accept Dostoevsky’s religious fervor as the premise of his fiction, just as I could accept elves and orcs when I read Tolkien. After decades of socially conscious criticism, that is much harder to do. Nevertheless, the extraordinary psychological penetration of the novel enthralled me as it did when I was a teen-ager, and I was swept away.

Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club reverses the pattern; it’s a memoir not of childhood but of (his mother’s) old age and death. When Mary Ann Schwalbe received her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, mother and son undertook the project of reading books together and discussing them to while away the longeurs of waiting rooms and chemo drips. It’s immediately obvious that this scenario combines two of the most poplar formulae for upscale non-fiction: the reading memoir and the death memoir. So how does it work out?

For the most part, it works well. Schwalbe has an engaging writing style, and the choice of books is wide, if the discussion of them is a bit shallow. What gave me pause was the sugar-coated picture of the Schwalbe family, and even of his mother’s death. Mary Ann Schwalbe was obvously a remarkable woman, with a high-profile career first in education, then in serving the oppressed of the earth. It is hard to believe, however, that any family was so free of conflict as this one, or that anyone remains so selfless and upbeat in the face of death. Of course, one must always speak well of the dead, and it is good policy to speak well of one’s relatives when they are still alive. But it doesn’t make for spine-tingling reading.

No such problem with Joe Queenan’s One for the Books. This time it’s a whole-life memoir, by a bibliophile who knows how to be funny. Here he is on Nordic noir:

      “The books a borrow from the library are often about bitter, hard-drinking coppers who’ve been divorced three times, whose children hate them, whose new girlfriend is a diseased slut, and who are trying to figure out why decapitated bodies keep popping up in a drainage ditch in that play area right behind the nursery school. A lot of these books are set in Scandinavia, a hotbed of angst, anomie, alcoholism and decapitation.”

(Its only later in the book that you learn he really likes Nordic noir).

This is a book you probably won’t be able to put down, if you like reading and you like memoirs. No place for piety here, toward authors, critics, or family. Even when you disagree, you’ll have a good time.

So -- about disagreement. I was crushed to find that both Schalbe and Queenan hated -- hated -- Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, which I’ve read three times. (Though Schwalbe’s mother liked it. Maybe it’s a generational thing). In fact, Queenan scarcely lets a page go by without skewering Mann, or people who like to read him. On the other hand, both liked Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, a novel about Queen Elizabeth II discovering a newfound passion for books. It sounded forced to me, not to mention that I’m dubious about using a living person as a fictional character. But I’ll give it a try. Both of them read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; only Queenan uses it as a jumping-off place to recommend lesser-known and much better Nordic noir. Queenan detests George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, but he likes Jane Eyre and at least some Dickens. As for me, I’ve seldom met the Victorian novelist I didn’t love.

Neither has a good word to say for Kindles. That must be because neither one thought of downloading a free copy of Orley Farm.