Now, Read it Again

Above the table on which I'm now writing hangs an old framed print showing Mr. Pickwick's street-smart servant, Sam Weller, prophetically pointing out to his chubby little master—in tights, gaiters, and spectacles—a vast, teeming mob of tiny figures: the characters Charles Dickens was to create in the novels to come after The Pickwick Papers. I still haven't identified all of them, but I see Fagin and the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, Little Nell and her grandfather from The Old Curiosity Shop, the sanctimonious Mr. Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, the choleric Major Bagstock from Dombey and Son, and Bob Cratchit from A Christmas Carol carrying Tiny Tim. Ah, and that must be the mad old dealer in secondhand clothes from DavidCopperfield. His name, in what appears to be an odd self-tribute, is Charley—Dickens names another madman in that same novel Mr. Dick—but I remember him best, as you will if you've read the book, for his greeting to young David: "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!" It's because I can't get enough of characters like these that half my Dickens paperbacks now have their covers held on with duct tape.

 

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The other day I went to the bookstore and laid in a couple of newly published volumes I've been eager to read—Samuel Beckett's letters and Blake Bailey's biography of John Cheever—but I'll be spending most of this summer revisiting all of Dickens yet again. (So far I've gone through Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and Little Dorrit; next up, Oliver Twist.) This time I've got an excuse—I'm teaching a Dickens course in the fall—but I've never considered that I needed one. Most of the "joys of rereading" pieces you come across tuck in an obligatory apology for indulging in the "childish" pleasure—this is a bad thing?—of "obsessive" repetition. You often hear a distinction made between strictly literary rereading, the kind of close study scholars and writers undertake, and the "comfort" reading relegated to the beach, the bathroom, and the bedroom. But is there really such a sharp line between the respectably energizing and the shamefully narcotizing? I'd never put Dracula on a syllabus, or read myself to sleep with Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. (Though some people might find it a sovereign cure for insomnia.) Still, I suspect that the most widely reread writers in English have been Dickens, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen—hardly a month goes by without my revisiting one of them—who combine the sleepy-time comforts of story and character with all the challenge and complexity, the inexhaustible newness, that anyone could ask for. I've taught them all in the classroom, while in the bedroom their books have slipped from my hands as their stories shaded into my dreams.

In a recent New York Times op-ed in defense of rereading, Verlyn Klinkenborg lists some of his old favorites—he turns out to be a Dickens hound too—and concludes: "This is not a canon. This is a refuge." And in an even more recent New Yorker piece, Roger Angell refers to "a sweet dab of guilt attached to rereading. We really should be into something new, for we need to know all about credit-default swaps and Darwin and steroids and the rest, but not just now, please." Most of us, though, have our own musical canon—or why do they sell so many iPods?—and no one feels guilty about listening to, say, Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" just once in a lifetime. My own list of perennial rereads ranges from Jim Bouton's Ball Four and Galen Rowell's In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods—about a K2 expedition that entertainingly falls apart over the climbing team's acrimonies—to John Dean's Watergate memoir Blind Ambition and Brendan Gill's magazine memoir Here at the New Yorker, to Humphrey House's biography of Ezra Pound, A Serious Character, and Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. This is beyond a refuge. It's a world, with continent after continent, each as densely populated with heroes, villains, and oddballs as that Dickens print on my wall. They give me a circle of friends and acquaintances far wider, and in some cases far deeper, than I—or anyone—could have in what we're pleased to call the real world.

In W. H. Auden's essay "The Guilty Vicarage"—collected in The Dyer's Hand, which I've kept on my night table for years—he analyzes his self-confessed "addiction" to whodunits: "I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin." I share Auden's fondness for Sherlock Holmes and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, but his reading habits could hardly be more different from mine. "I forget the story as soon as I have finished it, and have no wish to read it again. If, as sometimes happens, I start reading one and find after a few pages that I have read it before, I cannot go on." I've reread all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many of the Father Browns, more times than I could count, and I seldom have fewer than a half dozen of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries there on the night table next to The Dyer's Hand. In fact, I never travel overnight without one or two in my bag. And, as far as I can tell, without a sense of sin.

Lovers of these stories—can we not call them addicts?—often note that part of their appeal lies in their comfortingly familiar atmospheres: Holmes and Watson's rooms on Baker Street, with the "gasogene" (whatever that is) and the Persian slipper filled with pipe tobacco, or Wolfe's townhouse on West 35th, with its kitchen on the first floor and its plant rooms on the roof. But the real draw is the people: the arrogantly rational Holmes (whose impenetrable reserve compensates for God knows what); the stolid yet insecure Watson; the petulant, sedentary, impossibly erudite Wolfe—a fellow rereader, whose office is lined with favorite books—and his Watson, the hyperkinetic, never-insecure Archie Goodwin, wielder of one of the most engaging first-person narrative voices in all of fiction. And don't forget the villains. Not just the recurring archenemies—Dr. Moriarty and Arnold Zeck (Wolfe's Moriarty)—but such wonderfully nasty specimens as the fraudulent "solar priest" exposed by Father Brown in The Eye of Apollo, or the drab middle-aged lady in Stout's A Right to Die who turns out to be a murderous racist. I've just spoiled two endings, by the way, but they were spoiled for me years ago without diminishing my pleasure a bit.