In My Life, One Book Often Leads to Another

Neighborhood reflections

One day last week here in the shop, I started reading Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, quite a well-known book but unfamiliar to me except for its dust jacket. Wilson leads off his study with Jules Michelet, the French historian and natural history writer, and I was immediately entranced by details of Michelet’s life, but it was the way Wilson wrote about Michelet’s History of France that made me want to retire immediately and spend the year reading French history as written by Michelet! Though I wonder if even a year would be sufficient, since it is a 19-volume work.... Although, truthfully, I am not interested in the earlier volumes and would be content to begin with the Renaissance. As it happens, in any case, I won’t be starting that reading in the near future, as I cannot afford the editions I want and refuse to be satisfied with cheap modern paperback reprints. Content is most important, but I care about the physical object, as well.

 

Did you know that Jules Michelet is the person responsible for the term ‘Renaissance’? He lived from 1798 to 1874 and looked back on the end of the Middle Ages and subsequent flowering of culture and science as a true rebirth of Europe. People lived through the Renaissance without having a name for it. What will our age be called? Never mind—let's not take that road today!

Winter aconites have had many naps and reawakenings this year.

Taking a deep breath and consigning Michelet to my old-old age reading (along with those volumes of the vitalist philosopher Louis Lavelle that I bought in Paris decades ago) and skipping ahead in Wilson, I saw a chapter on “The Myth of the Dialectic,” and that led me to put down Wilson and pick up Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which so far I am finding much more reader-friendly than a volume by Adorno alone, one I am wading through in odd moments, page by weary page. It is a paperback reprint, as is the Dialectic, but both are quality paperbacks from a reputable publisher.

 

Edmund Wilson must share credit with a novel sent to me by a friend, however, a fictionalized life of Walter Benjamin, for sending me to Adorno. My friend did not care at all for Benjamin, at least in the novel, Benjamin’s Crossing, and I can see where the man would have been a difficult companion, but I do not find him altogether unsympathetic, especially after reading his short memoir vignettes in Berlin Childhood Around 1900. (Those are truly magical!) So the novel my friend rejected led me to several other books and lives.

 

You may recall, if you pay attention to my bookish meanderings, that a novel based on the life of Belle la Costa Greene led me to read her biography, also. Now, in part because of what I learned of her work for J.P. Morgan, I am reading a biography of Duveen (he is usually called only by his surname), the famous art dealer of that particular turn of the century, now over 100 years ago, and altogether I feel very steeped in the late 19^th and early half of the 20^th centuries. 

Current bedtime book

I appreciate the old-time, high-quality cloth binding under the jacket.

Does that happen to you? Does something in a book put you on the trail to other books? 

 

I vowed to stick to books today, after the over-the-top, nonliterary rant of my last post—not that I am apologizing for it, but this is, after all, Books in Northport. But dogs are an okay detour, though, aren’t they?

 

Sunny Juliet and I got to the dog park twice this week, on both Sunday and Tuesday, and she had a chance to play with her friends Daisy and Louie both times, and also with Jackson on Sunday. Sunny knows the word “friends” and perks her ears alertly when I ask her if she wants to see her friends. In that, she is like me. It was good to be with friends Monday evening to remember dear Larry Coppard, and a chance encounter on Tuesday at Samaritan’s Closet with friends I don’t often see had me smiling for the rest of my afternoon off. 

Outdoors at home

At home, I’m getting at the big job of raking my yard after the mess left behind by fall and winter, one bit at a time (with many pauses to launch tennis balls in the air for Sunny), and I’m happy to announce that all the snow is gone from our yard! For the time being, that is. It’s still April, after all.

In my favorite booth

And it’s also still cold, so I wore my puffy winter jacket when I went to meet another dear friend who had invited me to dinner at the Happy Hour. I timed my arrival a few minutes early, so I could sip my "brewski" (as the Artist used to say) while reading the introduction to Walter Benjamin’s  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, but my friend wasn’t far behind me. Quiet when we arrived, the joint was jumpin’ by the time we left. 

Friendship warms the heart on the coldest of Up North evenings, and happiness is the signature, as well as the eponymous, mood of my neighborhood roadhouse. (Ha! I've been looking for a chance to use that word 'eponymous'!) 

Everyone is happy here.

My friend, a fellow reader --

In My Little Corner of the World

  

She was a glamorous librarian, whose image lends panache to an often undervalued profession, an astute collector who shaped an internationally renowned library of rare written and artistic treasures from around the world. 

-      Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (2007)

 

This is the second book about the life of Belle Greene that I have read since the beginning of the year. The first was a novel, The Personal Librarian (2021), by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray, a fictionalized account of the famous librarian’s life and career. Both books spent considerable time dwelling on Greene’s racial heritage, her lengthy, on-again-off-again affair with Bernard Berenson, and her many other flirtations and possible affairs. I turned to the biography after the novel in hopes of learning more about the bookish aspects of Belle’s life.

 

She worked in the Princeton library and pursued “informal studies of rare books and illuminated manuscripts,” as well as taking a few classes there and elsewhere along the way, and then Greene, who acquired no degree and had no academic standing, was hired as J. Pierpont’s “personal librarian” at the age of 26 and remained with the library through the death of its founder and on throughout the life and death of the founder’s son, retiring only shortly before her own death that same year (1950). What I wanted to know was more about how she acquired and built on her knowledge of rare books and manuscripts, and while much of that remains a matter of mystery and speculation, I found hints in Ardizzone’s biography, most tellingly perhaps this one: In April of 1949, when the Morgan Library mounted an exhibit in her honor, Lawrence Wroth (historian, author, and John Carter Brown librarian at Brown University) gave a speech in which he “likened her ability to recognize quality to the gift of perfect pitch in a musician, and noted that her ‘inherent taste’ had been molded ‘through years of association with great men, great books, and great productions of artist and craftsman’” [quoted in Ardizzone, 2007].

 

Certainly Greene took advantage of every opportunity to learn from those with whom she came in contact—scholars, collectors, and dealers—but I believe, from what I have read, that her “inherent taste” and natural “ability to recognize quality” formed the basis on which all subsequent learning was built. Knowledge can be passed from one person to another, insatiable curiosity can reap much from books and experience, but what the Artist and I called “the eye” seems to be much more a matter of natural gift. Some people never develop “the eye” (or, in music, “the ear”), despite years of study.

 

Benedict and Murray’s novel was my first encounter with Belle da Costa Greene, but once on my radar she started to turn up again and again. Shortly after the novel, I read Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, and there again was Belle da Costa Greene, receiving letters from Curtis asking for her intercession with his patron, J.P. Morgan, so that now I can hardly look at one of Curtis’s magnificent portraits without thinking of Greene and Morgan and how Curtis was so determined to publish his 20-volume great work that he agreed to take no salary for himself but only use Morgan’s money for expenses. Belle Greene did not always reply to his letters; Curtis must have seemed very much the uncivilized frontiersman in sophisticated New York.

 

How fascinating it is to assemble even a few pieces of the enormous jigsaw puzzle of the turn of the 19^th century to the 20^th, and to learn something of how great names of the past weathered earlier wars and economic crises in our country! Greene was far from destitute, thanks to her position at the Morgan Library, but the stock market crash of 1929 pretty wiped out what she had been saving for her retirement. As it turned out, however, retirement played almost no part whatsoever in her life. 

 

Then, reading the acknowledgements at the end of Ardizzone’s book, I came upon this surprise: 

 

…Conrad Rader wisely refused all offers to become my full-time unpaid personal assistant, but he kept the cats out of the office and the dishes washed, dragged me out to Warren Dunes at least once a week, and provided a calm center in my life. For that and so much more, I dedicate this book to him. 

 

Warren Dunes? Sure enough, I see now on the jacket, the author (who teaches at Notre Dame) lives in Niles, Michigan. She is a Michigan author!

As for the rest of my recent reading, I binged through seven books of a detective series (it was not the complete series), books about The Sanibel Sunset Detective, by Ron Base, given to me by a friend, and then I boxed them up to send to my baby sister, who is recovering from a broken leg. She will pass them on to our other sister, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are back in Northport sometime this summer. The stories are action-packed but also include more than a few laughs. True escape reading!

And now it’s back to Robert Reich’s Aftershock; Yvonne Sherratt’s Hitler’s Philosophers; etc. The serious stuff.

 

Dog and Yard Notes

Difficult to get much in the way of decent photographs at the dog park, even with a phone, but Sunny and I managed to get there to see friends both Sunday and Monday of the last two weeks. Rapidly disappearing snow in our yard makes tennis ball play and Frisbee a lot easier at home; however, socializing is as important as exercise—for both of us.

In general, my yard is in great need of attention—raking, mostly, at this stage of the season—and yet it’s encouraging already to see bright green hellebore leaves, now that the snow covering them is gone. I absolutely love hellebore and thank my friend Susan every time I look at the ones she gave me. Stay posted for the lovely blooms. On the other hand, if you were looking for one of my inimitable political rants, see here and/or here. No need to wait for that stuff!