From Loretta:
I’ve been answering a lot of questions lately. But no, the police have not asked me to assist them in their inquiries. My alumni organization, which is putting together some kind of directory or nostalgia album or something sent out questionnaire. One question was, “What’s your favorite memory of Clark?” My answer: “I don’t remember.”
Like many others, I was really too immature at age 18 for college, so the early years were not only a blur but a waste: time squandered. On the other hand, I learned some things, which we can put into the Life Lessons category. After leaving school a few times and going back a few times, I finally settled down and became a model student. That last year I remember somewhat. This enabled me to answer the question, “Who was your favorite faculty member?”
He was an English professor who specialized in what I thought of as the Really Old Stuff: Medieval literature, Old Norse Sagas, Chaucer, and Shakespeare,. He also taught a course in Tragedy. Except for Shakespeare, these did not constitute my favorite areas of English literature. Give me a choice between tragedy and comedy and I will always choose comedy. Old Norse Sagas, for those of you who have not encountered any, are usually tragic. Lots of fighting and killing and revenge. But I thought the world of this professor, and would take any class he taught.
Meanwhile, my favorite subject--the English novel of the 18th-19th centuries, somehow got lost in that Life Lessons part of my education. I really don’t remember what happened then--it was the Vietnam era and I think we shut down the school at one point--but I somehow managed not to read at least half the novels in the syllabus. Same goes for American Literature.
In short, I was not always the nerd I am today.
I was thinking about this not long ago when I answered a questionnaire from Waterstones, in connection with my Carsington books, which recently started to appear in the UK from Piatkus Books. One question stirred up the ghosts of my squandered youth:
Q: Which classic have you always meant to read and never got round to it?
A: Tobias Smollet’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.
I got that answer right away, because, after college, I set out to read nearly all the books I should have read while in college. I discovered that the author of Moby Dick had a sense of humor, and the book wasn’t a boring fish story as I had supposed. Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy turned out to be crazy and funny, strangely modern. George Eliot wasn’t a bore but an insightful and witty writer with a keen understanding of human psychology. I also discovered that I still didn’t like Thomas Hardy but at least I understood why.
There were other Important Books not on the syllabus, that others had read and I hadn’t. Look Homeward Angel was a revelation to me, when I finally got around to it. Little by little, in the years since college, I’ve filled in the gaps in my Must Be Read list.
The one book on my shelves I have still somehow not managed to read--or even open--in the last two or three hundred years, is The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. I still have the copy I bought in college. It gazes at me reproachfully from the shelf.
I keep meaning to read it, but something else comes along. It never makes it to the top of the TBR list, though I’m sure it ought to, and will probably give me ideas for one of my stories.
But there it is, the one reminder of my careless youth.
Maybe it needs to be there, as a reminder.
Or maybe I’ll read it next, right after I finish the two books about Venice.
It’s not the only book I’ve always meant to read but never got around to. There’s Ulysses, too. But, frankly, I don’t think that’s going to happen. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the writing is. I no longer have the patience for modern literature impossible to figure out without the aid of several volumes of critical explication and a college professor. Smollett has a much better chance.
What about you? We all have TBR piles, but is there one of those Great Books waiting sadly on your bookshelf for you to choose it at last?
Have you a classic or classics you always meant to read and never got round to?