Ernest Metzger: Recognising The Quirks Of Authorship

Historian and teacher.

An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln by Mark E. Steiner, and The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth by Joseph Roth.

I grew up in Central Illinois in the 60s. Children’s books were available mostly in school libraries and for purchase through book catalogues distributed by the Scholastic Book Services. There was also a mobile lending service, called the Bookmobile — a blue bus that travelled from school to school. Unless you were in a large city, there were very few, if any, shops with books for children. It’s odd to think of this now.

I don’t think there’s a single book capable of launching a young person in just the right way. But there are books we’re grateful we’ve read early so that when we read them again through life we keep the memory of that powerful, juvenile reading. So: The Odyssey by Homer. If you read it as a child in, say, 2005, then in your mind the Trojan War, Circe, and the Lotus Eaters will always be among the events of 2005. Any later in life, it doesn’t work.

Data entry for a local bank. The very opposite of joy.

Yes.

I’m an academic lawyer, so the usual advice is to immerse yourself in whatever narrow stream of ideas you’re pursuing. But I think the better advice for an academic lawyer is to read any book — legal or otherwise —in which the author is trying to convey challenging ideas. If you spend all your time with intellectual traditions and transcendent meanings and such, you won’t get enough practice recognising the quirks of authorship, and how can a person understand a text without acknowledging the author in the act of reading?

Some years ago a close colleague died and I was quite sad about it. I somehow got it into my head that I could treat my unhappiness by reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It was then in a recently published series, with different translators for each volume. As therapy, it worked beautifully, though I couldn’t say how. Maybe it was just the amount of time that I passed in reading it. When another close colleague died a few years later I read it again, this time in the older series translated by Scott Moncrieff. Another successful self-treatment.

Yertle the Turtle by Dr Seuss. An allegory about dictatorship.

Precarious times: it includes fiction and nonfiction. Precarious times usually flank terrible wars, which is its own genre.

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams is a model of the genre, recording the author’s bewilderment about the new world leading to WWI. Another outstanding example is Earthly Powers by Michael Burleigh (in the latter sections), which describes the adoption of religious imagery by autocratic governments, again leading to WWI.

Later, for the time between the Wars, there’s Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, both enjoying renewed appreciation. These are excellent reads: The Impossible Exile by George Prochnik, Summer before the Dark by Volker Weidermann, Messages from a Lost World by Stefan Zweig, What I Saw by Joseph Roth, and The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth. There are other great works by Roth I don’t mention; he was a thoughtful chronicler (and fabulist) of the break-up of the Dual Monarchy of Austria Hungary, which he saw as ushering in, first, nationalist feeling, and following closely, animal behaviour.

For the period immediately following WWII, there’s a wonderful book, not often cited, which first made me aware of the genre: The Reawakening by Primo Levi. Postwar displacement and confusion.

But for precarious times, the literature of South America is hard to match. Just to mention four: The General in his Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez shows Simón Bolívar surveying the failure of his independence campaigns; in The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez there’s a mythical dictator using familiar instruments of terror and repressions; The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, in my opinion one of the best of the genre, recounts the end of the truly awful regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and should be read along with In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, at least if you can stand reading about the murder of three heroic women.

If you mean the question literally: it’s a world where you have to remember everything, abandoning each person to know only what he or she can apprehend in a lifetime. But if you mean ‘how do I conceive the experience of living without books’, I’m pretty charitable. Books don’t speak to everyone, and some people gain more from art, architecture, music etc. There are obvious limits to those other forms; the ‘Brisket Symphony’ wouldn’t tell you how to cook brisket.

When you’re young you think those authors are everywhere, but with time you realise even the best authors write duff books, and the exercise of reading everything by an author isn’t worth it. That said, there are certainly authors you can approach with some confidence that a randomly selected book will be good — the ‘fairly safe bets’. For me, they’re: Muriel Spark, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and Henry James. For non-fiction: Christopher Hitchens, Tom Wolfe, Isaiah Berlin.

My private theory, founded on nothing, is that texts which are ‘used’ — such as academic literature, scientific papers, government documents — will be digital, while texts which are ‘enjoyed’ will remain available in paper.

No single book, just a degree of self-respect that recognises it does matter what you read.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith. A dull title for a very lively book that made Adam Smith an international star.

My professional reading is overwhelmingly specialist and technical, but I’ll mention two excellent books for a more general readership, both by Aldo Schiavone. They’re wonderful: The Invention of Law in the West, and Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory.

I think I’ll be reading all of David Foster Wallace that I haven’t read so far. So I guess I wasn’t telling the truth up above.

Mommy Dearest. Joke.