Retiring Librarian of Congress Stays Off Shelf

“A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you,” says Daniel J. Boorstin, who retired in September as librarian of Congress. “You can embrace a book. You can hide it, it becomes part of you. You own it in the best sense of the word--in the sense that it owns you too if it’s a great book.”

Boorstin was explaining why spending the last 12 years as keeper of 84 million books at the Library of Congress had been rewarding--”though the job was no sinecure.” Appropriately enough, he was relaxing before making a speech at the dedication of another library, the Claremont Colleges’ new $7.6-million complex.

Wiry, bespectacled, shrewd of eye and wry of mouth, he sported a red bow tie with a yellow shirt, an ensemble that had the arresting effect of a set of traffic lights with one bulb missing.

He talks about books with a sensual delight that is rarely inspired by brittle pages and cold print. He is a voluptuary of volumes, a fondler of folios, a Casanova of Caslon type. If all the world were paper and all the sea were ink, that would be just fine with Daniel Boorstin, one imagines.

Boorstin was not actually clearing out of the Library of Congress, bag and baggage, by retiring (his successor is historian James Billingston). By an unprecedented act of Congress, he has been made librarian emeritus. “The act provides,” he explains, “that I should have an office and clerical assistants and of course a parking place--which is the prize of prizes.”

He will be using the library for research. Skeptics wonder whether this will mark any difference from his habits of the last 12 years, considering that in that period he has had several books published, including his 1983 best-seller “The Discoverers” (745 pages in paperback), a history of man’s search to know the world and man’s self.

Boorstin emphasizes that he got up early every morning and that he worked weekends in the four-story Washington house he shares with his wife, Ruth. He researched at home with books that he was allowed to borrow from the Library of Congress as a staff privilege.

“The Discoverers” joined a long list of works that had left Boorstin garlanded with literary prizes and honorary doctorates. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1973 for “The Americans: The Democratic Experience.” Now he is beginning “The Creators,” a companion piece to “The Discoverers.”

The latter, he says, will “do for the arts what ‘The Discoverers’ did for the sciences” and will cover architecture, painting, sculpting, writing, music and dance--”not battles and treaties, but mankind’s fulfillment of itself.”

As a creator of books, did Boorstin find the librarian’s task of marshaling other people’s books and making them more accessible to be uncreative, frustrating drudge work? Not at all.

For a start he loved being surrounded by books. Second, because the library was founded in 1800, had had some good organizers and still has a good staff, he found organization already in healthy momentum. His role, he felt, was to give direction. Some of his first acts were largely symbolic.

“I wanted to open the place up. There are some large, heavy bronze doors in the entrance. Those were kept closed,” he said. “When I asked why they were kept closed, they said: ‘Why, if we open them, that will cause a draft.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s exactly what we want to do.’ So we did open those doors. That was a symbol to remind people that we were there as the nation’s library, the world’s library.”

Boorstin also stopped the practice of searching people for bombs as they came in. “I thought that was a very unwelcoming gesture, and that we should take our chances.”

He is proud of the books published by the library during his tenure, including “Treasures of the Library of Congress” by Charles Goodrun. At Boorstin’s suggestion, a Center for the Book was established by Congress. One of its aims, he says, was “to encourage people to regard television not as an enemy of the book, but as an ally of the book.” He would like to see the titles of relevant books given more often at the end of television programs.

Boorstin has yet another book coming out Oct. 21, “Hidden History” (Harper & Row, $19.95). Dedicated to the Library of Congress, it is an anthology of his works under such headings as “The Rhetoric of Democracy” and “A Flood of Pseudo-Events.” A dominant leitmotif is his hatred of dogma and of absolutes.

A barroom psychoanalyst might suppose that Boorstin was reacting against an authoritarian, religious father, a theory he calls reasonable but wrong. “No, I had a very permissive father. It is hard to tell, about oneself, why one distrusts what one distrusts or has faith in what one has faith in. I was raised as a Jew but in a very informal way. My paternal grandfather, whom I adored, was an Orthodox Jew, went to synagogue every day and observed the Sabbath vigorously, but that was not the case in my home, my father was very much of a Westerner.”

Boorstin’s father, Samuel Boorstin, was brought by his parents from Poland as an infant. He was reared in Monroe, Ga., and later ran a small store there.

Embodied American Saga

“My father was what I call a ‘booster’ of America,” he says. “His story is a kind of American saga, as a matter of fact. He saved tobacco tags.

“In those days people who wanted to smoke would buy in country stores a package of loose tobacco in a little cloth bag which had a tag. The tobacco company would give you a prize if you saved enough tags and sent them in. So he saved those--he was in a good position to do that, owning a store--he sent them to the tobacco company and got a camera and was an enthusiastic photographer.”

That was around the turn of the century, and Samuel Boorstin took his camera with him when he went to the University of Georgia to study law. According to the son, “He went into the office of the president with his camera, and said, ‘Mr. President, I would like to be the official photographer of the University of Georgia.’

“The president said, ‘Well, Boorstin, why do I need a photographer?’ He said, ‘Well, you want to increase your appropriations with the state Legislature, don’t you? Want to get a better building? I see some cracks up there on the ceiling.’ So my father took some pictures of the decrepit buildings of the university; and with those pictures the president increased his appropriations.”

Boorstin’s father became an attorney. The family moved to Tulsa, where the younger Boorstin attended high school. He read voraciously. One of the books that fired his imagination was Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West.”

“It’s a poetic book that treats world history as a series of cultures and civilizations. It’s led me to believe that great history had to be great literature. If you wanted to be a historian, you had to learn how to write.”

At Harvard, where he majored in history, Boorstin encountered the greatest single influence on his thought and style: Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” A portrait of the chubby-cheeked Gibbon hangs today in Boorstin’s Washington study.

“The fluency, elegance and eloquence of his style impressed me. And his humanity. He doesn’t fail to tell you the way people looked, and the way they treated their parents or their children or their wives. Nor does he fail to give you the rumors, which are sometimes more revealing than the reputed facts. Also, he is not a dogmatist. There’s no Gibbonian school of history.”

Filled With Epigrams

Like Gibbon, Boorstin spices his narrative with epigrams. Some examples of Boorstinisms: “We easily forget that smog is the price of our freedom of our streets from manure”; “The successful historian at his best demands and secures a willing suspension of knowledge”; “There is no known device for artistic contraception.”

In 1934, Boorstin won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he took a “double first” in jurisprudence and qualified himself to practice as a barrister. He is one of the few Americans today who could practice in Her Majesty’s higher courts.

He thought of staying in England as a lawyer. “But by the time I finished at Oxford I realized that I was really more American perhaps than I had imagined. I came home with enthusiasm and was led to study American history, which I had never studied formally.”

It was a distaste for some English ways that made Boorstin turn to American history. “I distrust distinctions--philosophic distinctions and social distinctions. England is a country that I love, but it does fondle its social distinctions, including distinctions of language and accent. I can tell what an Englishman’s background is when I hear him speak two words.

“One thing I like about America is this fuzziness of social classes and attitudes toward everything. We don’t make a distinction in this country between high and low culture. Almost everybody in America expects his children to go to college. This creates problems too: We have made colleges easy enough for anybody. But that fluidity, the creative chaos of democracy, is something that I value.”

Less Agreeable Views

In the past, Boorstin has expressed views that chimed less agreeably in liberal ears. He poured the acid rain of his wit on environmentalists who behaved “as though there was no environment before they came along.”

He is a scourge of “minimal art” and Pop art. In “Democracy and Its Discontents” (Random House, 1971) he wrote: “The last thing the able young Negro needs is ‘Black Studies’--which simply reinforces the unfortunate narrowness of his experience . . .” and suggested that the historic purpose of America had been to create, “not a nation of ‘minorities’ but a nation of Americans.”

In the same book he deplored “the voguish reverence for youth and the ‘culturally deprived’ ” and added, “unless we cease to look to the vulgar community as arbiters of our schools, of our art and literature, and of all our culture, we will never have the will to de-provincialize our minds.”

Boorstin sees no reason to recant any of these opinions today.

On the literacy of the American people, Boorstin is “a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist”:

“We are not doing as much as we could to encourage people to read; but we must be wary of generalizations about what people do and don’t read. Because one of the special charms of reading is that it’s secret and private. Nobody knows how much you read or what you get out of your reading, or what you mean by reading something.

“So we cannot trust what people tell us about their reading. We can test them perhaps on what they’ve got out of their reading . . . we should be aware that reading is from its very nature not statistically verifiable in the same way as the prevalence of diseases can be described.”

Importance of Family

Boorstin thinks the family is the most important element in encouraging reading. The real enemies of literacy, he says, are parents who don’t read to their children and with their children. Book clubs, bookstores and of course librarians, are the allies against illiteracy. And, he believes, the book world must come to terms with television:

“When the printed book came in, why, professors were the loudest in their objection to it, the learned professors in Venice were certain that if those books that were coming off the presses of Aldus Manutius (the 15th-Century Venetian printer) and others were spread around, it would be the end of knowledge.

“One of the things they no doubt had in mind was that their lectures would no longer have to be attended, and people might just buy them instead.

“Similarly, I think, we have to be wary of the attacks of academic people on television. Because television is simply a new technology, and can be the ally of the book, lead people to books, and give a new dimension to dramatic literature.”

Boorstin is particularly wary of what he calls the “displacive fallacy”--the notion that the new technology displaces the old, “that television was going to be the end of radio, which of course is a fallacy--there are more radios now than there ever were.

“Television,” he says, “is not going to be the end of the book.”

‘Only a Historian’

“Of course,” he adds, “I’m only a historian, not a prophet, but I think that it is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily--for police purposes or technological or scientific purposes. The book, with its intimacy, its forcibility, its accessibility, its freedom from outside energy sources, its ability to reach into tyrannic countries, and be hidden under mattresses, and besmuggled in the false bottoms of suitcases--all these are great advantages. Some of these advantages we enjoy when we go to the beach or when we go to bed at night, before we turn the lights out.”

Boorstin takes a deep breath. The words just flow out, in serene sequence, straight from the Age of Reason:

“People who don’t read are living in jail. And if they live in a country which does not allow them to read freely, the country is their jailer . . . And librarians who ally themselves in that effort are simply serving as warders in the jail.”