Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (8 page)

I once saw a copy of
Mayflower Madam
inscribed by Sydney Biddle Barrows
To Patrick
—
Richard has told me so much about you
. Henry Miller could have written an entire novel about that inscription. It would take Turgenev to write a novel about the inscription I found in
The Golden Book: The Story of Fine Books and Bookmaking
. It read:
To Father on his birthday, March 16, 1928. In the nature of a peace offering? Alan
. After sixty-seven years, that heartbreaking question mark still hangs in the air. I only hope that
The Golden Book
found its way to a bookseller long after Father’s death. If not, Father, shame on you.

Fortunately, the very finest inscriptions, like the finest love letters, rarely pass out of a family. The most bravura performance I’ve seen—testimony that the art of the romantic inscription was not buried
with
Byron—graces the Oxford Classical Text of the complete works of Virgil, given to my friend Maud Gleason when she was reading
litterae humaniores
at Oxford. Maud says she would no sooner part with it than with her son’s first tooth. As she explained to me, “I had repaired to the King’s Arms, the pub closest to the Bodleian Library, with a fellow student, a dashing but bullheaded young Scotsman who proclaimed over coffee that Homer was vastly inferior to Virgil. As a Homeric partisan, I was much miffed, even though, as the conversation progressed, I had to confess that I had never actually
read
Virgil. ‘If you think Virgil’s so great,’ said I, the brash American, ‘why don’t you give me a copy?’ Soon thereafter a blue volume arrived on my doorstep, inscribed on the flyleaf with thirteen lines of Latin dactylic hexameter—Virgil’s preferred meter.” The inscription began
Poscimur; atque aliquid quando tu, cara, requiris / Dabitur
(A request has been made, and when you, dear, ask anything of me, it shall be given); continued with an apostrophe to Maud, whom the Scotsman declared that he admired, as all poets were wont to admire Virgil,
quanta desiderat astra / Papilio volitans
(as the fluttering butterfly longs for the stars); and ended with a pledge
amoris arnicitiaeque
(of love and friendship).

“So what happened?” I asked Maud, who now teaches classics at Stanford.

“I never slept with the boy,” she said. “But I fell for Virgil, and I’ve slept with the book many times.”

The best inscription
I’ve
ever gotten—it may not be as dazzling as the Scotsman’s, but I wouldn’t trade—is on the title page of
The Enigma of Suicide
, by George Howe Colt. I’ve never slept with the book, but I’ve slept with the author many times. It reads (how far we have come, George, since our new true friendship!)
To my beloved wife… . This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours
.

 Y
O U
 A
R E
 T
H E R E
 

O
n November 12, 1838, Thomas Babington Macaulay set out by horse-drawn coach from Florence to Rome. “My journey lay over the field of Thrasymenus,” he wrote in his journal, “and as soon as the sun rose, I read Livy’s description of the scene.”

The moment I read that sentence, I knew that Macaulay and I were peas in a pod. It is true that I had never reformed the Indian educational system, served in the House of Commons, or written a five-volume history of England, but those were paltry details. He would surely have agreed that we were alike where it really counted: we were both hard-core devotees of what I call You-Are-There Reading, the practice of reading books in the places they describe.

The discovery of our mutual passion was particularly gratifying because Macaulay was probably the greatest reader of all time. He started reading at the age of three, died at fifty-nine with an open book in front of him, and in between, as his nephew observed, read books “faster than other people skimmed them, and skimmed them as fast as any one else could turn the leaves.” He particularly liked to read while in transit. He read Bulwer-Lytton’s
Alice
while walking across the Pontine Marshes, Plato while rambling on the heath at Tunbridge Wells, and innumerable books while zigzagging rapidly, and apparently without collision, through the crowded streets of London. While sailing to India he read Homer, Virgil, Caesar, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Bacon, Cervantes, and all seventy volumes of Voltaire. That’s a partial list. “What a blessing it is to love books as I love them,” he wrote to a friend, “to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”

When he read Livy at Thrasymenus—in Latin, of course—Macaulay achieved a kind of Double Word Score whose peculiar frisson will be instantly recognized by anyone who has ever read Wordsworth at Grasmere, Gibbon in Rome, or Thoreau at Walden. Thrasymenus, a lake in eastern Etruria, was the site of one of the worst disasters in Roman military history. In 217 B.C., Hannibal, riding the sole survivor of the thirty-eight elephants that had set out across the Alps the previous year, defeated the Roman legions, led by the consul Gaius Flaminius, in the second major battle of the Second Punic War. It was a classic ambush. While inarching at dawn through a narrow defile with steep hills on one side and the lake on the other, the Romans were charged simultaneously from the front, the rear, and the left flank by torrents of Carthaginian infantrymen who had been concealed by a dense, low-lying fog. The Romans who weren’t hacked to pieces ended up in the lake, where many of them drowned under the weight of their armor. In three hours, 15,000 Romans died.

When I looked up Livy’s description of the battle—it’s in book XXII of his history of Rome, which he wrote about two hundred years after Flaminius’s defeat—I anticipated dry fare. Well. By the fifth page I was on the edge of my seat; by the tenth my heart rate had palpably accelerated. And that was reading
in my living room
. I had forgotten how incredibly gory, stirring, and intimate combat was before the invention of firearms, when in order to kill your enemy you had to be close enough to stab him with your sword or pierce him with your javelin. “The fog was so thick that ears were of more use than eyes,” wrote Livy,

and the groans of the wounded, the sound of blows on body or armour and the mingled shouts and screams of assailants and assailed made [the Romans] turn and gaze, now this way and now that… . When it became apparent that their only hope of safety lay in their right arms and their swords, then every man became his own commander and urged himself to action… . And such was the frenzy of their eagerness and so absorbed were they in fighting, that an earthquake, violent enough to overthrow large portions of many of the towns of Italy, turn swift streams from their courses, carry the sea up into rivers, and bring down mountains with great landslides, was not even felt by any of the combatants.

Two thousand and fifty-five years later, Macaulay wrote, “I was exactly in the situation of the consul, Flaminius—completely hid in the morning fog…. So that I can truly say that I have seen precisely what the Roman army saw on that day.” He had arrived at Thrasymenus not only at the same hour as the original battle but in the same weather! When his coach reached the hilltop, above the fog, he, like Hannibal, had a clear view of the scene. “I then understood the immense advantage which Hannibal derived from keeping his divisions on the heights, where he could see them all, and where they could all see each other, while the Romans were stumbling and groping, without the possibility of concert, through the thick haze below.”
Haec est nobilis ad Trasumennum pugna
. Such was the famous battle of Thrasymenus. Such was Macaulay’s conversation with the dead.

W
hat makes You-Are-There Reading so much more thrilling to us buffs than You-Are-Somewhere-Else Reading? I think it’s because the mind’s eye isn’t literal enough for us. We want to walk into the pages, the way Woody Allen’s Professor Kugelmass walked into
Madame Bovary
, triggering a flurry of scholarly confusion about the bald New Yorker in a leisure suit who had suddenly appeared on page 100. Failing that, the nearest
we
can come to Macaulay’s living “amidst the unreal” is to walk into a book’s physical setting. The closer we get, the better. For example, reading Steinbeck in Monterey won’t do; we must read him on Cannery Row. Even that backdrop falls short of perfection, for Cannery Row has changed more in a half century than Thrasymenus had in two millennia, and the details on the page no longer match the details before our eyes. The consummate You-Are-There experience requires us, like Macaulay, to see
exactly
what the author described, so that all we need do to cross the eidetic threshold is squint a little.

I’ve never equaled the sensory verisimilitude of my friend Adam, who once read the ninth book of the
Odyssey
, in Greek, in what is believed to be the Cyclops’s cave, a Sicilian grotto Homerically redolent of sheep turds. But I have read Yeats in Sligo, Isak Dinesen in Kenya, and John Muir in the Sierras. By far my finest You-Are-There hour, however, was spent reading the journals of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first expedition down the Colorado River, while I was camped at Granite Rapids in the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

In one crucial aspect, I bested Macaulay. Alone on his grand tour, he had no one with whom to share the rapture of Thrasymenus except the shade of Livy. In the Grand Canyon, I had George. It was our first vacation together, and it was full of revelations: that George was afraid of mice; that I never went backpacking without my baby pillow; that we both loved skinny-dipping in water so cold it gave us headaches.

Alone on a beach of almost Caribbean whiteness, walled in by cliffs of black schist and pink granite, George and I had washed each other’s hair in the Colorado River and then settled ourselves next to the churning rapids with
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
. “G. reads from Powell,” I wrote by candlelight in my journal that night, “holding the book on his bare legs. Amazing to hear of Powell’s equipment and food and how hard it was for him to run the rapids, with the rapids
right in front of us
!!” There was an engraving of Granite Rapids in the book. Nothing had changed.

“We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown,” read George. “Our boats, tied to a common stake, chafe each other as they are tossed by the fretful river… . We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.” We had no idea at the time that these are among the most famous sentences in expedition literature. We thought we had discovered them. I am grateful for our innocence, just as I am grateful that I didn’t know then that Powell’s journals were hashed together from the skimpy notes he scrawled on strips of brown paper during the expedition, overlaid with impressions from a second trip two years later, further overlaid with two sets of revisions.

In a voice that could barely be heard above the roar of the Whitewater, George read of spinning in whirlpools, bashing against rocks, capsizing in waterfalls, losing food and oars and guns and barometers and blankets and an entire boat. In the worst stretches, including the rapids at our feet, Powell couldn’t turn right, couldn’t turn left, couldn’t slow down, couldn’t get out, couldn’t do anything but hold on to a leather strap he had fastened to the gunwale and ride his leaky dory like a bucking bronco. Years later, when I read Livy, I was struck by how much Powell’s adrenaline-soaked confusion resembled that of the soldiers trapped in the defile at Thrasymenus. Caroming through Granite Rapids, no one would have noticed an earthquake either.

“It is especially cold in the rain to-night,” read George. “The little canvas we have is rotten and useless; the rubber
ponchos
with which we started from Green River City have all been lost; more than half the party are without hats, not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket apiece… . We sit up all night on the rocks, shivering.” That was the night of August 17, 1869. Powell and his men had just run Granite Rapids. As the sun set beneath the South Rim, George and I snuggled in polypropylene and Gore-Tex. “For us, only the illusion of peril and discovery,” I wrote. “For Powell, the real thing.”