Selections from the inheritance of a late friend's book collection
Apples among the cedars of a library lovingly bequeathed
A little over a year ago an old friend passed into glory. He left in his wake a vast collection of books. While some small claims were laid on portions of that collection, I had the delight of working through the majority with his widow and determining where each member of the library should go. Some found new homes in other people’s collections, some remained with the family of the deceased, some were donated, etc. A great many I had the joy of bringing home to dwell with me.
The collection formed a picture of the wide-ranging interests of my friend, as well as highlighting with aureate brilliance his quirks and curiosities. Alongside hard-back collectors’ editions of the works of Shelley with a very early print date one might find a coin-collector’s guide circa 1993. And next to that a tourist’s guidebook for Ljubljana published just after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the middle of which the answer-key for a midterm he gave his students in the summer of 2004 might have been used as a book-mark.
In this collection, as a further sampling, were (1) at least five shelves double-stacked with pulp paper-back mystery and western novels published between the 40s and 70s, (2) multiple well-used Bibles of various translations, (3) numerous academic monographs on subjects like French Cinema, American studies, global violence, foreign Policy, (4) two full collections of every volume of the Hawaiian Journal of History, (5) rolls of maps bound by rubber-bands or triple-stuffed into card-board cases alongside movie-theater film-posters; (6) Bible-study curriculum from NavPress and Campus Crusade which bore the marks of decades of hard use and the ear-tabbing and highlighting of continual study; (7) a documentary history of silent-movie era “Stag Films”; (8) the collected works of Sigmund Freud; (9) the collected works of Marcel Proust.
…You get the idea.
Having known the man I have little reason to doubt that he read most of the collection, and that he at least hoped to read all of it. You must understand, dear reader, that for my friend there existed no topic that was not interesting. Though the user guide to Windows 97 I found on one shelf (crammed alongside some architecture books and a few Penguin Classics) might be a sign of a magpie acquisitiveness, I can imagine with ease the possibility that he might have seriously entertained “doing a book on the history of PC user-manuals.” Or I can imagine him sitting-down eagerly and telling me about a paper he was working-on which brought Jacques Ellul into conversation with the emergence of the Microsoft Corportation. I don’t know why he had the user manual, I don’t know if it was ever going to be a part of a project, but I would not be surprised if it had been so intended. He was like that.
Easter Sunday fell this year on the anniversary of his funeral. This week I found myself reflecting on those books from his collection which had been bequeathed to me. What follows is a loving meditation on some of the special delights from that inheritance —an anacreotic in praise of those books who for various reasons (beauty, strangeness, down-right weirdness, rareity, etc.) I have set my affection.
In no particular order:
Charles Williams, All Hallows Eve. An early printing of one of Willaims' best works. An absolutely wild read which grabs one by the hair like the prophet Ezekiel and carries them between heaven and earth to gaze on the mysteries of Iniquity and Redemption. In an age wherein the archetype of the itinerant therapeutic guru has made a revival, Williams’ last work is truly haunting.
Earl Chapin May, The Circus from Rome to Ringling. Blessed are the books written by the unauthorized insider, who comes with little-to-no credential other than personal anecdotes and all the research a well-stocked public library system can provide. It is interesting to see that whereas the first circuses (i.e. the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, etc.) came to an end with the invasion of barbarians and the rise of Christianity as a dominant force, the demise of the modern circus could be seen when John Ringling became a man of corporate sense “wearing perfectly tailored business garments running to blacks or soft shades of browns…” (329).
Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas Processes and Trade Secrets. A book filled with the kind of things that searching for on the internet would trigger a warning system in your browser’s algorithm. Entries on Electroplating and Dentifrices and Useful Workshop and Laboratory Methods. My son refers to it as “the wizard’s book” because of the intricate diagrams and lists of chemical formulae.
Paul Wellman, The Comancheros. Deceptive little volume. Plays like someone doing Louis L’Amour with a bit more literary and historical anchoring. I picked-it up thinking it’d be a light and enjoyable read without the all-too-easy sluggishness of peplum, but then Wellman continues to turn-out phrases like, "“Midafternoon, two days later, and the sun a flood of infinite fire, saturating earth and sky, sending heat billows almost as palpable as smoke wavering upwards from the blinding landscape” (74).
Francoise Truffaut, Hitchcock. A series of dialogues between Francoise Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock… dulce periculum…
W.H. Auden, Nones. A collection of poems by the glorious W.H. Auden. Excellent as ever. Well-bound, cleanly type-set, early edition in hard-back. Reading it in this way reminds me, soul and body, that reading is always, has always been, despite whatever illusions we may support to the opposite, an embodied experience. The light serif font, the moderate, tempered, seasoned speech of Auden, the single trans-textual hole book-worm hole that scars each page right near the binding at the bottom of the page, the smell of the pages. The book is not an idea, it is an event. An example of classic Auden (from ‘Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times’):
"Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views."
Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking. The subtitle says it all… and, what’s more, while there’s a newer version available with a different subtitle, this edition I’ve inherited was published in 1986… 1986! Roszak is, also, refreshing for his genius. For all his literary style, he is no ill-formed thinker, nor is he a romantic: he has the eye of an investigative journalist and the thinking of a scholar.
Marianne Sinclair, Hollywood Lolitas. A terrifyingly strange study of “the nymphet syndrome” as it has played-out in Hollywood and, downstream of that, in American culture. Is the gaze which David fixes upon the starlet Bathsheba so different from the way in which Hollywood gazed at Nastassia Kinski?
George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind. A collection of MacDonald’s stories, with twelve illustrations in color by Maria L. Kirk. A line in one of the pieces captures, I think, the way it feels to read any of MacDonald's work: “He woke, not out of his dream, but into it, thinking he heard a child’s voice, calling…”
Eric Alterman, Sound & Fury. Alterman traces the rise of popular pundits and their relationship to the American political system. He does not say much of anything I did not think before reading the book, he proves it. I am like Geoffery Rush’s Inspector Javer screaming “I KNEW IT!” Celebrities who do the thinking for the “folks-at-home” on television in between commercial breaks from studios modelled after the Ed Sullivan Show probably has not resulted, in the long run, in greater democratic health.
John Hawks, For a Good Cause? How Charitable Institutions Became Powerful Economic Bullies. Once again the subtitle says it all. I did not know this book existed before I received it. And, like Alterman’s text above, refreshingly confirms what I’ve felt in my gut. The massive, relatively unchecked power of NGO’s and Nonprofits has dramatically altered what is meant when we talk about politics and economics. Against the force of things like the Rockefeller Foundation or the Gates Foundation or Doctors Without Borders, older accounts of politico-economic life (a la Marx or Smith) seem not quite sufficient. If unchecked Capitalism or brutal Marxism have become images of “The Beast” then perhaps we need some new theological-economic theories to give an account for NGO-governed life as a kind of “Harlot” —a mocking popinjay of the Church…?
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Hardback. Cloth-bound. Excellent condition. What’s it about? Well, it’s about a man undergoing a great despair who finds himself “living […] in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall…” Tolle lege!
These are just a few of the weird and lovely treasures lovingly bequeathed to me. But whose books are they? His? Mine now? Both now. They bear the marks of our double ownership. And I fill-up the cup of his labors in my own life by reading them and reflecting on them. Aristotle once considered the act done by a friend in-with-and-through another friend, concluding that “what we do by means of our friends, is done in a sense, by ourselves.”1 My now departed friend, in some real sense, continues the influence of his life in mine. Friendship is a form of love, after all. And love is set stronger than death (Songs 8:6).
Aristotle, Ethics iii.3; as quoted by John Milbank, The Suspended Middle, 2nd Ed., (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2005), xi.