The Cream of the Jest - James Branch Cabell (life changing books to read TXT) 📗

they did. To her superior knowledge of the feminine mind I can but bow: with the addition (quoting the same authority) that a “twoser” is a trousered individual addicted to dumbness in company and the very thrilliest sort of playacting in tête-à-têtes.

At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennaston⁠—not even after I came to understand that the man I knew in the flesh was but a very ill-drawn likeness of Felix Kennaston. After all, that is the whole sardonic point of his story⁠—and, indeed, of every human story⁠—that the person you or I find in the mirror is condemned eternally to misrepresent us in the eyes of our fellows. But even with comprehension, I never cordially liked the man; and so, it may well be that his story is set down not all in sympathy.

With which Gargantuan parenthesis, in equitable warning, I return again to his story.

X Of Idle Speculations in a Library

Felix Kennaston did not write very long that night. He fell idly to the droll familiar wondering how this dull fellow seated here in this luxurious room could actually be Felix Kennaston.⁠ ⁠…

He was glad this spacious and subduedly-glowing place, and all the comfortable appointments of Alcluid, belonged to him. He had seen enough of the scrambling hand-to-mouth makeshifts of poverty, in poverty’s heart-depressing habitations, during the thirty-eight years he weathered before the simultaneous deaths, through a motor accident, of a semi-mythical personage known since childhood as “your Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” and of Uncle Henry’s only son as well, had raised Felix Kennaston beyond monetary frets. As yet Kennaston did not very profoundly believe in this unlooked-for turn; and in the library of his fine house in particular he had still a sense of treading alien territory under sufferance.

Yet it was a territory which tempted exploration with alluring vistas. Kennaston had always been, when there was time for it, “very fond of reading,” as his wife was used to state in tones of blended patronage and apology. Kathleen Kennaston, in the old days of poverty, had declaimed too many pilfered dicta concerning literary matters to retain any liking for them.

As possibly you may recall, for some years after the death of her first husband, Kathleen Eppes Saumarez had earned precarious bread and butter as a lecturer before women’s clubs, and was more or less engaged in journalism, chiefly as a reviewer of current literature. For all books she had thus acquired an abiding dislike. In particular, I think, she loathed the two volumes of “woodland tales” collected in those necessitous years, from her Woman’s Page in the Lichfield Courier-Herald, for the fickle general reading-public, which then used to follow the life-histories of Bazoo the Bear and Mooshwa the Mink, and other “citizens of the wild,” with that incalculable unanimity which today may be reserved for the biographies of optimistic orphans, and tomorrow veers to vies intimes of high-minded courtesans with hearts of gold.⁠ ⁠… In fine, through a variety of reasons, Mrs. Kennaston quite frankly cared even less for books, as manifestations of art, than does the average tolerably honest woman to whom books do not represent a source of income.

And you may or may not remember, likewise, what Kennaston wrote, about this time, in the colophon to Men Who Loved Alison. With increased knowledge of the author, some sentences therein, to me at least, took on larger significance:

“No one, I take it, can afford to do without books unless he be quite sure that his own day and personality are the best imaginable; and for this class of persons the most crying need is not, of course, seclusion in a library, but in a sanatorium.

“It was, instead, for the great generality, who combine a taste for travel with a dislike for leaving home, that books were by the luckiest hit invented, to confound the restrictions of geography and the almanac. In consequence, from the Ptolemies to the Capets, from the twilight of a spring dawn in Sicily to the uglier shadow of Montfaucon’s gibbet, there intervenes but the turning of a page, a choice between Theocritus and Villon. From the Athens of Herodotus to the Versailles of St.-Simon, from Naishapur to Cranford, it is equally quick traveling. All times and lands that ever took the sun, indeed, lie open, equally, to the explorer by the grace of Gutenberg; and transportation into Greece or Rome or Persia or Chicago, equally, is the affair of a moment. Then, too, the islands of Avalon and Ogygia and Theleme stay always accessible, and magic casements open readily upon the surf of Seacoast Bohemia. For the armchair traveler alone enjoys enfranchisement of a chronology, and of a geography, that has escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually existing.

“Peregrination in the realms of gold possesses also the quite inestimable advantage that therein one’s personality is contraband. As when Dante makes us free of Hell and Heaven, it is on the fixed condition of our actual love and hate of diverse Renaissance Italians, whose exploits in the flesh require today the curt elucidation of a footnote, just so, admission to those high delights whereunto Shelley conducts is purchased by accrediting to clouds and skylarks⁠—let us sanely admit⁠—a temporary importance which we would never accord them unbiased. The traveler has for the half-hour exchanged his personality for that of his guide: such is the rule in literary highways, a very necessary traffic ordinance: and so long as many of us are, upon the whole, inferior to Dante or Shelley⁠—or Sophocles, or Thackeray, or even Shakespeare⁠—the change need not make entirely for loss.⁠ ⁠…”

Yes, it is lightly phrased; but, after all, it is only another way of confessing that his books afforded Kennaston an avenue to forgetfulness of that fat pasty fellow whom Kennaston was heartily tired of being. For one, I find the admission significant of much, in view of what befell him afterward.

And besides⁠—so Kennaston’s thoughts strayed at times⁠—these massed books, which his predecessor at Alcluid had acquired piecemeal