Everything an Anchor

Omnia cum crux sint, crux anchora facta.When all things are the cross, the cross becomes an anchor.

—John Donne, “To Mr. George Herbert”

At my age—I count seventy-eight heavy-laden years—some formerly unalloyed pleasures have acquired bittersweet favors. Among these are food, politics, girl-watching, woodsy walks, alcohol, and reading. I have had to give up certain dishes, such as frecracker shrimp; I still enjoy the brangle of politics, but the dependence of partisans upon clichés is immensely depressing; the girls are still wonderful but so distant that I must admire them rather as I admire the rings of Saturn; my knees and hips complain so angrily when I walk that I fear they may bring suit against me; and now I drink only wine, no beer or hard stuff, though I do insist upon adequate amounts of wine.

Reading has not palled, nor have its pleasures paled, but they are some-what changed in nature. After forty years of teaching at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, I retired and at once decided to start from the beginning again. I would reread or read for the first time the classics of western literature, setting out from Homer and ending with whatever lies on my bedside table at the hour of my death. I have held to this plan with surprising constancy and fnd myself currently fuddling through the bloody confusions of Josephus, The Jewish War. Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, Plato, Aristotle, and the dramatists lie behind me; and I shall not have time to turn to them again. The freshest surprises have been Aristophanes and the pre-Socratic philosophers: they opened shiny perspectives new to me. I shall not turn to them again either. The knowledge that I shall not come again to the ways of Sophocles and Sappho, Homer and Herodotus is melancholy. I had not looked into Thucydides before I stepped forth on this last pilgrimage, and now I wish I had read him three or four times.

The classics have not made up the whole of my perusal. Professional duties and the obligations of friendship adduce me to a great amount of contemporary writing. And I am too much the voluptuary to forego reading random books for the fun of it; or just because I happened to recall a title; or because I have become curious about whether one of my old favorites would still hold up. It was upon this latter impulse that I plucked from the shelves two novels by Joseph Conrad. Conrad draws me. Like Faulkner he immerses me. His confdence assures me and the materials of his narratives—the settings and backgrounds, in particular—are far removed from my circumscribed experience, so that a touch of the exotic is a bonus attraction.

The Conrads that found my hand were The Secret Agent and Chance. Not fancy editions, these, but funky, beat-up old paperbacks that have been with me since I entered Duke University in the 1950s. Both editions are Anchor paperbacks from its parent company, Doubleday. At that time they were called quality paperbacks to distinguish them from drugstore titles like Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and every Louis L’Amour. Quality paperbacks were more costly than mass paperbacks. I could buy Spillane or James M. Cain for a quarter; to purchase Chance I had to add a dollar, which cut brutally into my beer allowance.

Another and more important difference was in the matter of authors. For a quarter I could take home Edna Ferber or Robert A. Heinlein, but George Santayana, Alfred Kazin, and Francis Fergusson commanded that additional dollar. Though they were expensive, I acquired these editions by the dozens and still possess a goodly number. Some are old friends, and they have served me well through the decades as I studied, taught, and scribbled. They must have informed the cast of my mind to an extent I shall never discover. The authors were among the leading lights of the time and if, during the intervening years I have come to view them with some skepticism, as age nudges...