Rereadings by Anne Fadiman

I imagine quite a lot of you have read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, and hopefully you loved it as much as I did. It was one of the earliest examples of those little books-about-reading that have proliferated in the past couple of decades – and I love the genre wholeheartedly. There was something special about Ex Libris, and it felt like finding a kindred spirit in an era before blogging and before social media took off.

She followed up Ex Libris with Rereadings (2005), which my brother bought for my birthday in 2010. As so often, it sat on my shelves for a long time – and I took it on my recent Scottish holiday, and found it was the perfect time for it. I absolutely loved reading it.

While Anne Fadiman’s name is on the cover as the editor of this collection, she only writes the foreword. What follows are 17 essays on rereading, which first appeared in The American Scholar (which Fadiman edited). I’d only read two of the books mentioned – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Journals, Letters and Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Others mention authors I know for other books (D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Joseph Conrad, Knut Hamsun, J.D. Salinger) while others focus on books by authors I’d never even heard of – H.C. Witwer, Enid Starkie, Helen Dore Bolyston and more. It really didn’t matter which book or author was being discussed, because I was swept away by every single essayist’s contribution.

Each essay talks about a book from the past, of course, but they are really more about the experience of rereading than they are about the individual books. They are about looking back over decades of time to a younger self, and comparing what you were to what you are. That might mean you’ve totally changed your mind about the book. It might simply mean that the world of possibilities, which you were living when you first read the book, has shrunk to a world of actualities, for better or worse. It was curiously moving to read each essay. A poem by Walt Whitman or a guide to wildflowers might be the hook on which the essay is hung, but they are really memoirs in miniature.

Here’s Vivian Gornick, on The Vagabond by Colette:

I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.

And here is Sven Bikerts, talking about rereading Pan by Knut Hamsun:

For such is the power of a book, a memory, that it can in a flash outwit any structure or system we have raised against it. I had, yes, steeled myself against Glahn, against the sorrow of his story, against his complete destruction by the passion that had erupted in his unguarded heart. I had not, however, braced myself against the encounter with myself, the sixteen-year-old who went at the world, at the dream of love, with the same unscreened intensity. I read Pan, but the person I met on those woodland paths was my feverish younger self. I felt sorrow from the first sentence on, sorrow so sweet and piercing that it was hard to turn the pages. Worse, though – for sorrow recollected can bring a certain pleasure – was my self-reproach. As I read I indicted myself. I had, in stages, without ever planning it, traded off that raw nerved-up avidness. I’d had to, of course; it was inevitable. We do not survive the dream of love, not at that pitch. We build in our safeguards and protective reflexes. We give in to the repetitions, let them gradually tame the erratic element. We grow wise and find balance – or perish. Still, to encounter the stalking ghost of the self here, now, at midlife…

That ended up being a longer excerpt than I intended, because once I started writing I couldn’t stop. I found his reflections profoundly beautiful. Maybe most of us could be some book in place of Pan and feel much the same way.

I could read volumes and volumes more of this, though sadly no more collections were ever published. I had only heard of one of the contributors, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a stunning, moving collection of essays that any lifelong reader will warm to – as soon as you open it, you know for sure that you are among friends.