Author Archives: Stan Deaton

What I’m Reading Now: May 8, 2018

Beat to Quarters: Horatio Hornblower, Vol. 1, by C.S. Forester (1938, Book of the Month Club Edition, 220 pp.)

The theme this week, like last week, is: where have these books been all my life? How am I just now discovering the glory that is C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series?

I well remember seeing the ads for the television series that was broadcast from 1998 to 2003, but I never found the time to watch. I hadn’t even heard of the books upon which the series was based.

At that time, 18 years ago, I bought an omnibus edition from the Book of the Month Club that featured the first three Hornblower novels in one volume. When it arrived, I promptly put it on a shelf, and there it sat. Why am I reading it now? Because Jonathan Yardley reviewed this book in Second Reading, which long-suffering readers of this blog will recall I was reading three weeks ago. So what if it took nearly two decades to get around to? When I was finally prepared to receive its wisdom, there it was.

And a ripping good read it is, too. I was introduced to the fascinating grisliness of 18th and early 19th-century naval warfare through Evan Thomas’ splendid biography, John Paul Jones (2003). Anyone who’s watched the opening battle scenes from Master and Commander (2003) knows well the carnage wrought by shot and shell across a warship’s quarterdeck, leaving body parts and severed heads in their wake.

Rigid naval discipline meant that commanders like Jones and Hornblower were expected to stand tall on the quarterdeck throughout the terrifying ordeal of battle, rigid and unflinching, while bloody and mutilated comrades fell screaming all around. Any sign of cowardice brought shame and dishonor, worse even than losing limbs. Courage, discipline and level-headed seamanship under fire counted above all.

C.S. Forester’s knowledge of Napoleonic-era battleships and warfare is astonishing. The granular detail and intense descriptions of battle on the high seas make for gripping reading indeed. In Hornblower, a junior level captain in His Majesty’s Navy, Forester created an historical character whose interactions with his crew, the Lady Barbara Wellesley, and his own internal demons make him a fascinating psychological study in leadership. Like Sherlock Holmes, he is not always the most affable character, but you root for him even when you don’t always like him.

Forester is himself an interesting study, having appeared on a 1956 episode of Groucho Marx’s TV show, “You Bet Your Life,” and he is additionally the author of The African Queen (the 1935 book upon which the movie was based) and a 1942 children’s book entitled Poo-Poo and the Dragons. Any author who managed to work the words “hornblower” and “poo-poo” into his book titles is worthy of distinction.

Having serendipitously found the remaining twelve volumes in this series at the GHS book sale two weeks ago, I am going to become well acquainted with the further adventures of Mr. Hornblower.

What I’m Reading Now: May 1, 2018

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The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888; Easton Press edition, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth, 328 pp.)

Unlike many people—and for reasons I can’t now fathom—I never read Robert Louis Stevenson as a boy. Not until my mid-30s did I read Treasure Island, and then 10 years more elapsed before I got around to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Now another decade has gone by before reading The Black Arrow, Stevenson’s wonderful tale of history and romance set during England’s War of the Roses (1455-1485). (Still to come: Kidnapped, along with nearly everything else he ever wrote.)

I’ve read and re-read Treasure Island, and it’s safe to say that Stevenson is now one of my preferred authors. His short story “The Body Snatchers” has long been a favorite, a tale of supernatural horror that I’ve dipped into many times over the years on blustery winter evenings seated before a fire. No less than Arthur Conan Doyle considered Stevenson’s story “The Pavilion on the Links” (no, it’s not about golf) to be the height of perfection. It has the distinction of being one of the first short stories in the world.

Despite his reputation, Stevenson is not a children’s author. That label dogged him in the years immediately following his death, but by the middle of the 20^th century he had rightfully taken his place among the distinguished writers of English literature. His work speaks to anyone who loves a good story, great writing, and the thoughtfulness of a man who puzzled over the ambiguities of the human condition but who never professed to fully understand it.

Stevenson suffered most of his life from tuberculosis, and he traveled restlessly across the globe from one place to another seeking relief and good health. He finally found it in the South Pacific but died tragically in 1894 on the island of Samoa from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was only 44.

He lies there still, buried on Mount Vaea, with his own haunting poem, “Requiem” on his tombstone:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

What I’m Reading Now: April 24, 2018

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The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, 256 pp.)

I first discovered Clifton “Kip” Fadiman 30 years ago through a battered copy of his 1960 book, The Lifetime Reading Plan, found while prowling the stacks at Oxford Too, that beloved now-defunct used bookstore in Atlanta’s Peachtree Battle Shopping Center.

Fadiman became one of the 20^thcentury’s most public of public intellectuals after anti-Semitism kept him out of the academy. The head of the English department at Columbia noxiously informed him in the 1920s, “We have room for only one Jew,” and the seat was filled.

Instead, Fadiman extolled the virtues of reading everywhere he could in the public arena, from books to newspaper essays to 10 years as book editor of the New Yorker. For nearly 50 years he served on the board of the Book of the Month Club, which played an outsized role in determining post-war America’s reading tastes. He was on the board of the Encyclopedia Britannica for 40 years and became one of its most public faces in that pre-Google age when it held unchecked authority for all things factual. In radio’s latter days and in television’s infancy he hosted a highly popular program called “Information Please” (not unlike NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”), where he might ask the panelists to close their eyes and try to remember the color of their ties. He wrote countless forewords, anthologies, and book reviews, co-wrote the mammoth The Joys of Wine, and published four editions of The Lifetime Reading Plan before his death at age 95 in 1999.

The Lifetime Reading Plan celebrated unashamedly the Western Literary Canon, though to his credit the 4^th edition of the Plan, written with John S. Major, included for the first time many volumes of the Eastern Canon as well.

Fadiman’s advice was sound: The Great Books could enrich our lives and help us “avoid mental bankruptcy.” Take your time, he advised: “They should not be read in a hurry, any more than friends are made in a hurry. This list is not something to be ‘got through.’ It is a mine of such richness of assay as to last a lifetime.” I’m still reading the books on Kip’s list and plan to have a bookmark in one on my last day.

The Wine Lover’s Daughter is a moving tribute to Fadiman the father, reader, and yes, wine lover, from his daughter Anne, no slouch herself. Kip was enormously proud of his daughter and rightfully so. Her book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award, and I devoured her collections of bookish essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007).

There’s much more about wine here than books (disappointing to this bibliophile), but we do learn that Kip read 80 pages an hour in his prime. No wonder he could read so many books. Tragically, his last decade brought near-blindness, but—reader to the end—he happily embraced the joys of audiobooks.

After her father’s death—on Father’s Day, no less—Anne Fadiman lovingly scattered his ashes on “a few carefully chosen graves” in Concord, Massachusetts—those of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Bronson Alcott.

It was a beautiful gesture, a fitting closure to the life of a Great Reader.

What I’m Reading Now: April 17, 2018

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Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited by Jonathan Yardley (Europa Editions, 2011, 351 pp.)

Jonathan Yardley served for almost a third of a century as one of the great book reviewers at the Washington Post. The other of course was and still is Michael Dirda. They are two of the foremost literary critics of our time and between them, their books will lead you on to countless other literary treasures, both well-known and obscure.

For nearly seven years between 2003 and 2010 Yardley published longer essays about “notable and/or neglected books from the past” in a Post column with the same title as this book. He ultimately wrote 97 essays, 60 of which appear in this volume, while the remaining 37 are conveniently available at www.neglectedbooks.com.

Yardley delightfully meanders his way through these 60 titles, only five of which I’ve read already but I’m happily adding many others to my list, including: Reveille in Washington, 1861-1865 by Margaret Leech; The Dreadful Lemon Sky and the rest of the Travis Magee novels by John D. MacDonald; The Reivers by William Faulkner, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, as well as others by Nora Ephron, Roald Dahl, John Cheever, Timothy Crouse and H.L. Mencken.

While Dirda’s style is light and friendly (I’ve extolled his virtues elsewhere on this blog), Yardley is curmudgeonly and refreshingly grumpy. Some of his juicier bon mots: Gore Vidal and Henry Adams are “overrated and unreadable”; David Baldacci and Allen Drury write in “execrable prose”; Joyce’s Ulysses is “a book I simply cannot read.” He proclaims J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye one of the worst books in American literature: “the combination of Salinger’s execrable prose and [Holden] Caulfield’s jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.” In the space of a single review of a Rose Kennedy biography in the Post but not in this book, Yardley called her cold, controlling, spoiled, petty, self-indulgent, shallow, vain, and uptight, while Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was “assiduously sycophantic,” and the book itself littered with “clunky, clotted, graceless prose.”

Well, harrumph. But it’s so much fun to read.

The Post published Yardley’s last column on December 5, 2014, but here’s hoping that many of the other reviews he wrote over a 33-year career will be published in book form as well.

All of this makes me wonder: when Dirda follows Yardley into retirement, who will fill the shoes of these two literary giants? Are there other great book columnists out there I don’t know about?

What I’m Reading Now: April 10, 2018

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Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence (University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, 325 pp.)

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” So said Vincent Starrett, the author of this memoir. I agree.

I love books about books—that is, authors who write about their love of books, their collections of books, and/or the authors who wrote them.

I have an entire bookcase dedicated to them—familiar classics like The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, overlooked gems like I.A. Richards’s How to Read a Page, and more recent offerings by Nicholas Basbanes like Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World, and A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. And no book lover’s collection would be complete without all the works of Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda. I’ve got books about libraries, books about book clubs, and even one about the history of the book shelf.

Vincent Starrett was the author of the “Books Alive” column for 25 years in the Chicago Tribune. His memoir, which I first learned about, naturally enough, in Dirda’s Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books (2015), is a charming account of his lifelong love of the printed word that began with his birth above his grandfather’s bookshop in Toronto. He was part of the second wave of the Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925) that included novelists Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, poets Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay, and reporters Ben Hecht and Ring Lardner.

Above all else, Starrett revered two things that I also love: books and Sherlock Holmes. He was one of the 1934 founders of that most famous and exclusive of all Sherlockian fan clubs, the Baker Street Irregulars, along with fellow literary critic Christopher Morley—himself the author of the one of the greatest books about books ever written, Parnassus on Wheels (1917). Get a copy and read it.

Starrett collected primarily first editions, like most “collectors” as they are classically defined. I don’t share that love, I’m afraid—I care more about the words inside than I do about the edition itself. Only in the last ten years have I become a hopeless hardback-book snob, habitually “upgrading” anything I have in paper when I come across a cloth-bound volume of the same title. Alas, this is why book-collecting is known as the “gentle madness.” As Starrett famously said, “It is possible that the most misunderstood man upon earth is the collector of books.”

A final word about the quality of this particular volume: In this age of disposability, when our electronics are obsolete in one year and many publishers print their books on pulp paper that soon turns yellowish brown, the University of Oklahoma Press in 1965 could refreshingly proclaim that “the paper on which this book is printed has an intended life of at least three hundred years.”

I’m sure my iPhone and Kindle will both last that long too, don’t you?