Montaigne's Library

12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognise its place in the genealogy of classic works.

At this point I can no longer postpone the crucial problem of how to relate the reading of classics to the reading of all the other texts which are not classics. This is a problem linked to questions like: ‘Why read the classics instead of reading works which will give us a deeper understanding of our own times?’ and ‘Where can we find the time and the ease of mind to read the classics, inundated as we are by the flood of printed material about the present?’

Of course, hypothetically the lucky reader may exist who can dedicate the ‘reading time’ of his or her days solely to Lucretius, Lucian, Montaigne, Erasmus, Quevedo, Marlowe, the Discourse on Method, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Coleridge, Ruskin, Proust and Valéry, with the occasional sortie into Murasaki or the Icelandic Sagas. And presumably that person can do all this without having to write reviews of the latest reprint, submit articles in the pursuit of a university chair, or send in work for a publisher with an imminent deadline. For this regime to continue without any contamination, the lucky person would have to avoid reading the newspapers, and never be tempted by the latest novel or the most recent sociological survey. But it remains to be seen to what extent such rigour could be justified or even found useful. The contemporary world may be banal and stultifying, but it is always the context in which we have to place ourselves to look either backwards or forwards. In order to read the classics, you have to establish where exactly you are reading them ‘from’, otherwise both the reader and the text tend to drift in a timeless haze. So what we can say is that the person who derives maximum benefit from a reading of the classics is the one who skilfully alternates classic readings with calibrated doses of contemporary material. And this does not necessarily presuppose someone with a harmonious inner calm: it could also be the result of an impatient, nervy temperament, of someone constantly irritated and dissatisfied.

Perhaps the ideal would be to hear the present as a noise outside our window, warning us of the traffic jams and weather changes outside, while we continue to follow the discourse of the classics which resounds clearly and articulately inside our room. But it is already an achievement for most people to hear the classics as a distant echo, outside the room which is pervaded by the present as if it were a television set on at full volume. We should therefore add:

13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.

—Italo Calvino, Why Read The Classics? [1983]

Mutual relationship between writers, whatever their age, is always delicate, not so much — as commonly supposed — on account of jealousy, but because of the intensely personal nature of a writer’s stock in trade. For example, St John Clark seemed to me a ‘bad’ writer, that is to say a person to be treated (in those days) with reserve, if not thinly veiled hostility. Later, that question — the relationship of writers of different sorts — seemed like so many others, less easily solved; in fact infinitely complicated. St John Clarke himself had made a living, indeed collected a small fortune, while giving pleasure to many by writing his books (pleasure even to myself when a boy, if it came to that), yet now was become an object of disapproval to me because his novels did not rise to a certain standard demanded by myself. Briefly, they seemed to be trivial, unreal, vulgar, badly put together, idiously phased and ‘insincere.’ Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professional nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved? Fortunately these speculations, heavily burdened with the idealistic sentiments of one’s younger days, were put to no practical test; not only because St John Clarke was sitting at some distance from me, but also on account of the steps he himself immediately took to change a subject likely to be unfruitful to both of us. He quickly commented on the flowers in the vases, which were arranged with great skill, and turned out to be the work of Blanche.

‘Flowers mean more to us in a city than in a garden,’ said St John Clarke.

—Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

‘Think of having to listen to interminable stories about his girls,’ said Maclintick. ‘I could never get through Casanova’s Memoirs. Why should he be considered a great man just because he had a lot of women? Most men would have ended by being bored to death.’

‘That is why he was a great man,’ said Moreland. ‘It wasn’t the number of women he had, it was the fact that he didn’t get bored …’

—Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

By that hour the Mortimer had begun to fill. A man with a yellowish beard and black hat was buying drinks for two girls drawn from that indeterminate territory eternally disputed between tarts and art students.

—Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

Once upon a time, they were my kryptonite.

The ballroom was all golden: smooth on the cornices, uneven on the door frames, in a pale, almost silvery design against a darker background on the door panels and on the shutters annulling the windows, thus conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel case shut off from an unworthy world. It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a color so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers.

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio’s heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves immortal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943.

—Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard

It’s a little disconcerting that the narrator is writing from almost a hundred years after the events of the novel, even though it rarely comes up.

His distress was great; it still lasted as he moved mechanically toward the door to receive his guest. When he saw him, however, his agonies were somewhat eased. Though perfectly adequate as a political demonstration, it was obvious that, as tailoring, Don Calogero’s tail coat was a disastrous failure. The material was excellent, the style modern, but the cut quite appalling. The Word from London had been more inadequately made flesh by a tailor from Girgenti to whom Don Calogero had gone in his tenacious avarice. The tails of his coat pointed straight to heaven in mute supplication, his huge collar was shapeless, and, what is more, the Mayor’s feet were shod in buttoned boots.

—Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard

This was a really wonderful novel, and this was a pretty entertaining passage about how a wealthy tradesman is trying to move in royal circles.

I’m tempted to go back and reread the book, but I want to get started on this month’s Anthony Powell: Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.

Now the road was crossing orange groves in flower, and the nuptial scent of the blossoms absorbed all the rest as a full moon absorbs a landscape; the smell of sweating horses, the smell of leather from the carriage upholstery, the smell of Prince and the smell of Jesuit, were all cancelled out by that Islamic perfume evoking houris and fleshly joys beyond the grave.

—Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard

After reading this praise for Di Lampedusa’s posthumous novel, I’ve decide to read The Leopard before engaging in this month’s installment of A Dance to the Music of Time, the charmingly titled Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. I’ll let you know how that goes.