The More-Than-A-Lifetime Reading Plan

by

Paul Clark

Some time in my 40s, I started looking at my reading life the way a life insurance salesman looks at an actuarial chart. How many books was I reading each week? Adjust for changing lifestyle—the kids getting older, for example, I would have more time to read, so factor that into the equation? Eventually I would retire and have even more time to read, right? Then, how long will I live? Based on these crude calculations, I came up with a number of likely books I would read (or re-read) before my terrestrial library card was permanently cancelled.

For example, if I average a book a week for the rest of my life, I will read 2,340 more books in my life—give or take a decade and subtracting a few from that total if I ever attempt Proust’s or Anthony Powell’s multi-volume works. Since I am actuarially smack in the middle of life, I’ve likely read a smidge more than that number of books in my lifetime. I was an early reader, and I worked in a bookstore for five years, some years of which I was averaging a book a day. But I’ve been a parent for 19 years, and many of those years I didn’t get through more than one book a month that didn’t have pictures or Dr. Seuss rhymes in it. So, a book-a-week seems like a roughly accurate gauge of my reading life.

I don’t keep a record of books read, and I don’t torment myself when I pick up some brain candy or re-read a favorite genre book for the third time. But I did think of this actuarial exercise as I was paging through Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature. Ford is probably best known for writing one of the finest novels of the 20th century, The Good Soldier (1915) and his four-novel sequence of books about World War I, Parade’s End, the last novel of which was published in 1928. (I’ve read all these novels, and an upcoming re-read of The Good Soldier will count against 2,340 books I have left.)

In 1937, Ford spent some time living at the Tennessee home of poet Allen Tate and his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon. He had just been appointed writer-in-residence at Olivet College in Michigan, and he took advantage of his living and working situation to produce March, a 900-page overview of eastern and western literature, from Confucius to Conrad.

In a letter to Olivet College president Joseph Brewer that is reprinted in the book, Ford noted the total population of the United States and the British Empire was about 600 million people (circa 1938, when March was published). Ford estimated that a good sale for a book in the United States was 40,000 copies and 14,000 copies in England. Noting also that there were over 50,000 professors of literature, he concluded that all this work by all these professors was producing 1.08 pupils who became lifelong readers after graduation. (Ford had as much experience with numbers as I do, so we will just accept his figuring at face value.)

“The solution of the problem,” Ford wrote, “seemed to us to be that the presentation [of literature] must be in the wrong hands—that, in fact, such tuition, whether by word of mouth or in books, should be, not in the hands of the learned, but in those of artist-practitioners of the several arts—in the hands, that is to say, of men and women who love each their arts as they practice them.”

In other words—depend on writers, not professors, to guide you through literature. As Ford states later in the book:

The intrusion of the learned into the fields of literature is almost always a disaster and the whole paraphernalia of universities, scholars, professors and dons, serves, as a rule, for little more than philological exercises having as much use for the world as, say, a collection of postage stamps.

[It] is to be remembered that songs and legends are the last comfort and refuge of the destitute. Indeed, from the histories of these great, lost civilizations, one is sorely tempted to make the generalization that the literature of a people will be great, nervous and virile only as long as the people is simple, in poor circumstances and without the spirit of imperialism. But as soon as a people becomes rich, with a luxurious civilization, its talents will expend themselves on the plastic arts, on furnishings, on monuments, on painted tablets displaying the victories and splendors of ancestors, or on temples inscribed with poems to the glory of the avenging or succoring gods. [When an empire dies out], nothing is left but the desert sands whirling in the winds and settling on the ruins of the temples and on the inscriptions recording their forgotten glories. Their legends and tales and chants will far outlive them.

Nothing might be farther from your thought than any study of comparative or revealed religion; and no subject is more dangerous to peace or more apt to lead to confusion. But, if only because it has been the habit of those servants of the gods called priests continually to call to their aid those servants of mankind called poets, you have no chance of escape from that dangerous study once you embark on the search for poetic illumination. To avoid it, you would have to do without all the literature of the Books of Stone, of nearly all of Homer, of nearly all Greek drama, of all the Old Testament except perhaps the “Song of Solomon,” of all the New Testament and an immense proportion of modern verse and prose.