Feeling despondent? So am I. Then I remembered, books can help.
This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best – temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world.
More personally – it was my birthday after all – I also thought about how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise. Should I follow the advice of Voltaire’s “Candide” and simply cultivate my garden, in effect just turn my back on the world outside? There are, after all, books I’ve never gotten to, and I could spend the next four years – or even the rest of my life – reading them, working around the house, enjoying the company of my friends and family. I’m way past retirement age, so why not?
And yet I’ve never quite been able to forget those lines from “Ulysses,” Tennyson’s poem about growing old: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/ To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!” All workaholics, not just journalists, will recognize those feelings. But as Jean-Paul Sartre said in “What Is Literature?,” writers, in particular, need to be engaged with their time. There will certainly be much to engage serious writers – whether novelists, journalists, playwrights or poets – in the years ahead.
I say “serious writers” since our country and its citizenry have grown so dangerously unserious. Instead we live in an age that too often honors and rewards histrionics, flashy staginess and flummery over substance. It’s been said that the specific virtue of the hero is steely self-control, a quality never associated with the president-elect, who is in every way a petulant creature of impulse, vanity, mendacity and self-aggrandizement. To elect him once was misguided but forgivable, to do it again defies understanding. As has long been clear, the past dozen years can readily supply several additional chapters to Charles Mackay’s classic, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”
But setting aside all the shock and the sheer, sad bewilderment at the election results, the overall question remains: How does one actually cope at this moment? D.H. Lawrence offered the best general advice: “Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness.” Let me also suggest looking to books for respite and renewal.
The best course is immersion in some great or compelling works of the past. Some people may turn to scripture for hope and consolation; others to philosophy or poetry. But there are other, less obvious options for self-care when the soul is roiled and the world looks dark.
The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. Today, one might turn to such multivolume series as Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin nautical adventures, Dorothy Dunnett’s swashbuckling “Lymond Chronicles” or the Sharpe saga of Bernard Cornwell.
In my own case, for repose during the noisy years ahead, I will at long last make my way through the five volumes of Cao Xueqin’s “The Story of the Stone,” as this Chinese classic is called by its best translators. I also hope to remedy the lifelong embarrassment of never having read Anthony Powell’s 12-volume “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Still, like Dr. Johnson, it is “the biographical part of literature that I love the most,” along with intellectual history. So I’ve assembled a few biographies – all old-fashioned classics – that show how some extraordinary leaders navigated the shoals of politics and life in earlier eras. As we are doing now, they all lived through what the purported Chinese curse calls “interesting times.”
Duff Cooper’s “Talleyrand” and David Cecil’s “Melbourne” pay critical homage to two consummate politicians of France and England in the late 18th and early 19th century. The wily Talleyrand has long intrigued me, if only because of his most famous remark: When asked about the French Revolution, he drily answered, “I survived.” Cecil’s life of Melbourne was one of John F. Kennedy’s 10 favorite books, some say his very favorite.
In this same period of history emerged England’s greatest naval hero, Horatio Nelson. In previous generations, Robert Southey’s “Life of Nelson” was widely regarded as the model of what a short biography should be. Besides being a second-tier Romantic poet, Southey also created a work of fiction that once read, or more likely heard, is never forgotten. Featuring a little girl named Goldilocks, he called it “The Story of the Three Bears.”
While I bow only to Max Beerbohm in my admiration for Lytton Strachey’s irony-rich and acerbic style in “Eminent Victorians,” I’ve never quite gotten around to his more ambitious, if not so highly regarded biography “Queen Victoria.” Still, anthologies of English prose often feature the carefully orchestrated paragraph – a single long, lyrical, breathtaking sentence – in which Strachey imagines the thoughts of the dying monarch, as “her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history – passing back and back, through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories” and finally closing with the oldest of all, “a yellow rug, and some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees and the grass at Kensington.”
These are just some of the books that I’m relying on to provide oases of repose and refreshment in the overheated months ahead. What are yours?
Will you turn for comfort to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or to a favorite poet, say George Herbert or Emily Dickinson? Or might you, perhaps, aim to acquire a cooler, more Olympian perspective on the present moment by reading various novels, all well received, that re-create the lives, peccadilloes and intrigues of the best-known Roman emperors: Thornton Wilder’s “The Ides of March,” John Williams’s “Augustus,” Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius,” Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian,” Gore Vidal’s “Julian.” But maybe these hit too close to home?
Given four years to deal with, this might well be the time to finally read Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Montaigne’s “Essays,” Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” William Faulkner’s entire Yoknapatawpha saga, or every Fantagraphics album collecting Carl Barks and Don Rosa’s comics about Scrooge McDuck, the only billionaire many of us have ever really liked. All that matters is that whatever you choose, the books must be as all absorbing as a game of chess. They must create a world of their own, in which you can live for a few hours when the real, stress-filled world is too much with you. Stepping back precedes all great leaps forward.
It’s now a few days after my birthday and the Washington weather is still beautiful, but there’s been little relief for the damp, drizzly November in my soul. My colleagues at the Washington Post, being professionals, are carrying on in their work. It all seems like business as usual. But in my darker moments I remember the English critic Cyril Connolly’s scary metaphor about the Nazi threat to civilization and the dire consequence of trying to remain dispassionate and unconcerned: “We have walked through the tiger-house, speculating on the power and ferocity of the beasts, and looked up to find the cage doors open.”