Books as They Are Read

PEOPLE blessed with a stable residence are apt to think reading a simple matter. That is because they can select their books. We who must spend our time more or less on the wing, a few months here, a few months there, always in foreign countries, and nearly always where the language spoken is not our own, have difficulties of which stay-at-homes never dream. Our books are selected for us — there’s the rub.

With an author of your own choice, there is no need for ingenuity. You begin with the first page and read to the end. His thought fits your mind as a made-to-measure suit fits your figure. But try one of those hand-medown novels which find their way into the bookcases of the Continental pension, and see if it does not gall you into despair. These books are invariably left behind by transient locataires. Naturally, they take the good ones with them. Equally of course, the management wastes no money buying literature.

Buy your own? It can hardly be done after leaving England. Beyond Paris it cannot be done at all. Books are like driftwood, the lighter they are, the farther they float. In the provinces, in Italy, Austria, and beyond, the only books in English offered for sale are those long since dead at home. Even in the small English departments of the subscription libraries the same law of distribution shows itself. The catalogue of the Literatur-Institut of Vienna, for instance, devotes a full page to Mrs. Alexander, a page and a half to Mary Elizabeth Braddon, nearly two pages to Florence Marryat, and is liberal with Frank Frankfort Moore. But it has not a full set of Kipling, says nothing about Conrad’s Lord Jim, and as for anything recent — go to.

Three things are left to do: read French, read the language of the country you are in, or ’reconstruct.’ I omit a fourth and a fifth thing, — ‘read twaddle,’ and ‘do not read at all’ — for they are both, in the long run, quite impossible. As for books in the language of the country, if the country happens to be Austria, I find the newspapers a strain enough in that direction. As for French — it is delightful; but after all, one has an American soul to be fed. Italian and Modern Greek? You might as well say Russian, and be done with it. Hence the necessity of what I have called ‘reconstruction.’

I pick up a copy of The Grey Knight, by Mrs. Henry de la Pasture. Under ordinary circumstances I would not pick up The Grey Knight, by Mrs. Henry de la Pasture. But I am in Vienna. The employees of the Literatur-Institut are out on strike, and I am reduced to loans from the collection of a local ‘teacher of English,’ seventeen years resident in Austria, with whom I sometimes manage to converse — through the medium of the German language. So, as I said, I pick up The Grey Knight, and read the opening paragraph: —

‘A woman rested upon a bench placed beneath a gayly striped awning in the front court of a small French provincial hotel.’

Obviously, it won’t do. The woman and the bench are the only substantatives unescorted by adjectives in the whole sentence. Invidious distinction. Why not a ‘small’ woman and a ‘large’ bench? Why any woman, or any bench, at all? It is easy to see, with these ‘gayly striped awnings,’ and this ‘front court,’ and this ‘small French provincial hotel,’ that we are at the beginning of a long descriptive passage, which has an accurate relation, no doubt, to some one small French provincial hotel visited by the author, but which will visualize nothing at all for the reader — who would be glad enough for the soul of the provincial French pension, the French pension in general, laid before [him in a defenseless position, where he could slay it.

I skip to the middle of page 138, as I should have done in the first place, and read: —

‘ “Anna, before I go, won’t you congratulate me and say you are glad?”

‘“Glad is n’t the word,” said Anna, gruffly. “It’s a load off my mind: I don’t think you ’reat all the sort of person who is suited to live alone, and any kind of a husband is better for you than none.” ’

That ’s better. One is interested in Anna immediately. We must look for more of her, and turn, say, to page 195: —

‘She has been in the chapel, which is like an ice house; that’s why Margaret went in there. Something has happened.’

It says nothing about Anna, though, for all we know, it may be Anna speaking. Yet it seems hardly likely. The rich feminine frankness of Anna is missing. There is something more youthful here — as of a backfisch still able to extract pleasure out of the possibility of impending disaster. Of course, it may be a young man speaking. There can be no sex-differentiation discernible in a mind still capable of comparing a chapel to an ice house. One thing is certain, however: that delightful ‘something has happened’ refers to something satisfyingly material

— a throat cut, a body hanged, a fainting fit at the very least. Anna, with all her humorous charm, would have meant nothing more than a psychological crisis.

But is n’t the book already vastly improved? How far we have come from striped awnings beneath which nothing can happen. Intended by the author for a hammock tale, we have transformed it into a detective story, fit to read in the dead of winter before an open fire.

The same ‘reconstruction’ method will work wonders with the next book

— it happens to be Peter, a Parasite, by E. Maria Albanesi. Let us plunge into the midst of the eighth page_ —

‘Why the deuce had Cochrane brought up that old business of the Chessinghams? It was really rather absurd of him to imagine that Peter should have kept in touch with them.’

And then, on page 9: —

‘I hope Sybil Cochrane will not try and unearth Mrs. Chessingham. I must nip that intention in the bud.’

Quite obviously we are in the presence of the villain. Just as obviously, at the foot of page 24, we are in the august company of the heroine, and may skip, —

‘No matter how tired she might be, she never brought anything but a cheery, bright atmosphere into her mother’s presence.’

It is not pleasant to have one’s own shortcomings thrown into relief in this way. Besides, it is one of the cardinal principles of ‘reconstruction’ to leave out the hero and heroine parts entirely. The subordinate characters and wicked people — unless one of the latter chances to be a regular ‘heavy’ — have some traces of humanity. But the hero and the heroine — no amount of skipping backward and forward suffices usually to save them.

Try the method over on your own library. Don’t live and die with the idea that the dictionary and the encyclopædia are the only books which require discrimination in their perusal. Browning once spoke of ‘sundry verses of St. Paul, which, read directly, sanctify the soul, but muttered backwards cure the gout and stone’ (I quote from memory). The transforming influence of reconstructive reading was never better set forth.