Required Reading : A ‘Failed Literary Person’ Gets Back to the Classics

I have always intended to write a book called “Confessions of a Failed Literary Person.”

I don’t know who would read it except a few people, like me, who have not read all the books one is supposed to have read.

The other day I received a note from a friend and colleague saying that he had at last finished reading the entire “Story of Civilization,” by Will Durant.

What shame I felt.

I started reading Durant’s series back in the 1930s when the first volume, “Our Oriental Heritage,” was published. I read the third volume, “Caesar and Christ,” in pocket-book form on a troopship headed for Iwo Jima.

But Will Durant could write faster than I could read, and after the war I fell behind. Durant finished “The Age of Napoleon” before he died, but I was still in “The Renaissance.”

I know now that I will never catch up.

In the beginning I meant to read everything. I cut out Mortimer Adler’s list of “100 Great Books,” which no educated person could afford not to read, and set out to read them all. I’d be surprised if I’ve read 20 of them.

As a boy I read most of Mark Twain. In my youth I read feverishly, if without direction. I read the books that heated my generation. I read most of Hemingway and most of Fitzgerald. I read every word that Thomas Wolfe published. That was before I needed eyeglasses.

But after one has a job and a wife and children, the fever wanes; the appetite fails; the thirst no longer torments.

In early middle age I became aware of certain landmarks I had missed. At a tea one afternoon in Hancock Park I met Rosemary Sisson, a British TV writer, who confessed, when I mentioned it, that she had not read “Alice in Wonderland.”

I could hardly believe it. A British writer not having read “Alice in Wonderland!” It was like an American writer not having read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

She was so embarrassed by her lapse that I decided to confess mine. I had never read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

She could hardly believe it.

I have since read “Huckleberry Finn” twice.

But I’m a long way from catching up.

I didn’t even read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” until I was past 50. It hardly

seems possible that I could have endured my youth without reading that forbidden fruit. Having read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was an essential part of the equipment of any college man, and one of course had read a copy that had been smuggled in through customs.

Actually, I liked “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” better than “Huckleberry Finn,” perhaps because I was already middle-aged.

Another landmark book in the education of any youth was “Madame Bovary,” to which I also was not exposed until my later years. I had always heard that Flaubert was a master stylist, but, alas, I encountered him too late to profit from his influence.

I set out once to read the Bible, but when I ran into Numbers, I began to skip. To this day there are many chapters of it that have escaped my scrutiny.

Of the great foreign novels, I read “Les Miserables” as a boy and was in love for a long time with the waif Cosette. One of my true accomplishments is that I also read “War and Peace,” having tackled it under favorable circumstances while working on the night desk of the Honolulu Advertiser during the blackout in the first year of World War II. There was nothing else to do.

Although I did read “Crime and Punishment,” I failed miserably in several attempts at “The Brothers Karamazov.” I am told it is one of the great novels, but I foundered on it like a bark on a rock.

I keep trying, however, to patch the gaps in my education. Only the other day I ordered a six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson. He was perhaps the most admirable of Americans. I am reminded of John F. Kennedy’s remark before an assembly of brilliant guests in the Oval Room:

“Ladies and gentlemen, there are more brains gathered in this room tonight than at any time since Jefferson dined here alone.”

I feel that, as an American, I ought to know all I can about Thomas Jefferson. No short-cuts. Read the whole set.

So far I am through Page 103 of the first volume. Jefferson is still a young member of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, Va.

So now when people ask me what I’m reading these days, I say: “Well, I’m into Dumas Malone’s life of Jefferson.”

Most of them not only haven’t read it, they haven’t even heard of it. It puts me one up.

The truth is, I keep regressing. I go to bed fully intending to read myself to sleep with Jefferson, but instead I pick up the latest Elmore Leonard or Robert B. Parker mystery novel and Thomas Jefferson has to wait another day.

One thing I do promise myself. If I ever finish Thomas Jefferson, I’m going to try “The Brothers Karamazov” again.