Bookish
Oxford, Saturday, October 24, 1987
“I woke up at 9:30 in the morning, after three hours sleep, and it’s a gorgeous day. One of those sunny, golden October days in Oxford when all the trees are russet and yellow. The whole town is the color of Keble College bricks. Everywhere it is just magnificent.
I got up and made buckwheat pancakes, bacon, and loads of coffee. It was wonderful. I have the glass coffee table right next to the bed; I indulged myself and bought a soft, fluffy pillow. So, I have two pillows on my bed, plus the triangular green one, so I can read in bed very comfortably. In fact, I spend too much time in bed. I turned on the tape player and listened to classical music while I was having breakfast. It was lovely.
Then I walked down to the Bodleian Library—the Bodleian, I have to say, is the only thing left, of all the delights I used to experience in Oxford. It gives me intense pleasure to be in that place. I was in my element and happy all morning, working until it closed at noon.
What I am trying to do right now, in addition to the dissertation work, is to maintain a steady accumulation, or consumption, of materials about the modernist period, as well as reading in the period (outside of Joyce’s works), collecting the background and setting of the whole period, so when I go to teach it I will have a firm base. . . . I am also fairly intensely studying Finnegans Wake. I read one whole book called The Finnegans Wake Experience by Ronald McHugh, which was very good because essentially it was a history of Finnegans Wake scholarship from the late 1960s. McHugh wrote the annotations to Finnegans Wake, which I am presently using to read the book, page-by-page. It’s a very time-consuming process. I hope it doesn’t take me as long as it took Ron McHugh, which was three years. I’ve heard that Jacques Derrida read Finnegans Wake over the course of a summer. I hope to read it over nine months, somewhat closer to Derrida than to McHugh. Of course, I have the benefit of McHugh’s annotations to help me get through it more quickly than he did. It would take at least a week to track down all the allusions for a single page of Finnegans Wake. That book is the most difficult, barely readable, book in the English language. And it is something that anyone who studies Joyce has to do; you have to make yourself sit down and come to grips with that book. It is not an easy process, not easy at all.
So, I am following a three-prong strategy: do the dissertation (two-thirds of the time), then the remaining third divided between regular daily readings of five pages of Finnegans Wake, every single day without excuse, and also a small amount of time devoted to the accumulation of knowledge about the modernist period. I forgot to mention, I am also sitting in on the modern lectures on literary criticism by Terry Eagleton.”
Here is the opening of Finnegans Wake—not even a capital letter. Nearly every word has an annotation, and this goes on for about 650 pages. I bolded a few words for my friends and family in South Carolina.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time1
John Aubrey on Reading and Books
Books in the seventeenth century lacked the innovative features of having a title printed on the spine of the book and a dust jacket with information about its contents and endorsements. They were also more susceptible to mold and mildew because of being bound in leather covers.
Easton Pierce, 1634
“I love to read. My nurse, Kath Bushnell of Ford, taught me my letters from an old hornbook. The letters were black and purple and difficult to recognise. The parish clerk of Kington St Michael first taught me to read. His aged father was clerk before him and wore a black gown every day with the sleeves pinned behind, which was fashionable in Queen Elizabeth’s time.”2
A hornbook was like a square ping-pong paddle with a sheet of paper that contained the alphabet attached to it. The paper was then covered with a layer of horn or mica. So, it bears little resemblance to a book in the modern sense.
Oxford, 1642
“All this time I am falling deeper and deeper in love with books. Here in Trinity [college founded in 1555], Dr Ralph Bathurst has an excellent collection: well chosen and broad-ranging. He lets me turn them over and peruse them, for which I am truly grateful. . . . In London, I get lost among the piles of books for sale in St Paul’s churchyard; most of them are sold in sheets, but some are already bound. I pick up one after another without any idea where to begin: the books that are bound all look alike. How to tell which will be worth buying with my spare money? I come away empty-handed, overwhelmed, as though the books have become trees again and I am wandering blind in a forest. Back in Dr Bathurst’s library, I explore more calmly; I am starting to find my way.”3
Thank you for reading, not just this, but also books.
James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake (Chapter 1.1),” Genius.com. https://genius.com/1587939
Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life (New York: New York Review of Books, 2015), 19–20.
Ibid., 39–40.
"as though the books had become trees again..." Wow.
Wow, this horn thing kind of looks like a more "modern" version of the "scrolls" that parts of the bible were written on or that Moses had. lol