A Reader on Reading

Thanks to the new technology, the writer’s memento mori has become a vanity chest. You have published a book, you reasonably suppose it is among the three million offered by Amazon.com, you type out its title, and, presto! You are given the exact ranking of your book among its peers. Think of the satisfied sneer (like that of the last passenger to make it into the last Titanic lifeboat) with which best-selling author number 3,000,000 can now look down on Soames’s anonymous fellow sufferer, lost in the unlisted 3,000,001st place.

Laws stranger than those of chance determine which authors are in and which are out, and, ever since 1895, when the first best-seller list appeared in the pages of The Bookman, books make the grade for reasons that apparently not even the Devil himself can fathom. Of course, if your name in lights is all you want, there are methods to procure you this modest satisfaction. For example, ask each of your friends to buy, on the same afternoon, a copy of your book, and you are likely to shimmer, for one exquisite hour, on the Amazon. com ranking. But for those unwilling to take such steps, it may be salutary to skim through the names enshrined in the best-seller lists of just a couple of years ago. With few exceptions, who are these people? Who are these Ozy-mandiases whose now utterly forgotten books presumably sold in the hundreds of thousands, were counted among the blessed by the compilers of bestseller lists, and then vanished without a trace?

But it is we, the readers, and not casual performers such as Vise and Bezos, who are the paradox. When Sam Goldwyn was negotiating with George Bernard Shaw the sale of the rights to one of celebrated author’s plays, the mogul expressed surprise at the fee demanded. Shaw answered, “The problem, Mr. Goldwyn, is that you are interested in the art, while I am interested in the money.” Like Goldwyn, we demand that everything we do yield a financial profit, and yet we like to think that intellectual activities should be free from such material concerns; we have agreed that books should be bought and sold and taxed just like any other industrial product, and yet we feel offended when our obscene commercial tactics are applied to prose and poetry; we are keen to admire the latest best sellers and speak of “the shelf life of a book,” but we are disappointed to find that most books are no more immortal than an egg. In spite of Bezos’s efforts, the saga of Vise is a cautionary tale whose moral was enshrined many years ago by the writer Hilaire Belloc: “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: / ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’”

It is perhaps unfair to ask what all this counting means. Lists are delightful things in themselves, the very essence of poetry (as W. H. Auden once remarked), and it would be mean-spirited to deny the author of Fungoids the pleasure of introducing himself at a dinner party with “Hello, I’m best-selling author number 2,999,999. My book sold seven copies!”

But it may be that a little vanity is a requisite quality in literary endeavors. “Seven copies,” reflects the protagonist of Thomas Love Peacock’s early-nineteenth-century novel Nightmare Abbey, “have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world.” In these days, when greed is considered a virtue, who would dare quarrel with such modest ambition?

Jonah and the Whale

“You don’t know how to manage Looking-Glass cakes,” the Unicorn

remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 7

OF ALL THE SNARLING OR moaning prophets who haunt the pages of the Old Testament, I believe that none is so curious as the prophet known as Jonah. I like Jonah. I have a fondness for Jonah, in spite of his posthumous reputation as a purveyor of bad luck. I think I’ve discovered what it was about Jonah that made people nervous in his presence. I think Jonah had what in the nineteenth century was called an artistic temperament. I think Jonah was an artist.