Literary Values
I have been nibbling away at this book - Literary Values, by John Burroughs
- for months. Now that I'll be teaching American Literature it became wise to blaze through this looking for anything I can use in that class.
Burroughs is one of my favorite essayists, and I've been working my way through his collected works. This is the 12th volume of that set. He is known for having been an early advocate of Walt Whitman, and one of the earlier volumes was all about Whitman. Still, his literary opinions are not really what I read him for; and that accounts for my slowness in getting through this.
That said, I did find interesting material here, along with a couple of essays I may assign the students. He listed some authors whose names didn't ring bells, and that added to my list of choices. (He remarks on the two up-and-coming famous poets of his time, Edwin Markham and William Vaughn Moody, who are in Bartlett's, but are no longer famous. I'll be using them both, if only for contrast to the names we know.)
His essay "On the Re-reading of Books" is an excellent window into a time. He talks about what kind of book survives re-reading, and his own particular tastes. Dickens is my favorite author, so I was mildly shocked that he expressed doubts as to whether Dickens would be read much in the future. This was based, however, on his slogging through A Tale of Two Cities, which is Dickens's most artificial book, and one I least wish to re-read. Burroughs also notes in self-contradiction that his son of 18 (this is around 1900) was enjoying Dickens's books. Burroughs then discusses the strength of Dana's Two Years before the Mast, which each generation discovers anew, and which "I can myself re-read ... every ten or a dozen years." He claims the same power for Parkman's Oregon Trail. And finally he opines that Grant's memoirs might also be immortal, due to the lack of literary intent in the composition.
Since my wife and I are reading Two Years before the Mast (first time for her) on car trips, and finding it fascinating; and since Grant's memoirs were one of our favorite trip books, we'd have to say that much of Burroughs's judgment has been sustained.
He has also convinced me to buy Gilbert White, whose praises he sung in earlier volumes, and who gets another essay here. The New York Times Book Review echoed this recently, so another book is going on my frightening pile of unread volumes.
I should remark that finishing this volume gives me the feeling of losing an old friend. I have the complete works of Burroughs, but not all in one set. There used to be an annual used book fair in St. Louis, under a tent in Clayton, and many the Riverside Literature Series book did I get there. One year I assembled the Burroughs mainly from to sets, the first of which bears book plates saying "Private Library, Edward S. Daniels" and also the number of the volume. Daniels was a member of a couple of naturalists' societies, and he had the habit of noting the date, in pencil, when he finished reading each essay. Some he read three times. The penciled notes stopped in an earlier volume, so I'm guessing he never read this far. And this is the last of his set.
CBsIP: 2666, Roberto Bolano
The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler
Life of Black Hawk, Black Hawk