SUMMER READING: Risks, Rules & Rewards

"DORIS?" says a character in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. "She's the one who's always reading War and Peace. That's how I know it's summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace." Whether or not Doris ever suffers through all 365 chapters of Tolstoy's masterpiece, she is plainly a member in good standing of the summer self-improvement league, that earnest, ever growing army of readers who would sooner put a cherry in a martini than leave for vacation without at least one Great Book.

As a result, the Unread Classic has become as much a part of vacation nostalgia as the unvisited museum or the unclaimed laundry. The catchall bookshelf in a rented summer cottage, once the hallowed repository of mildewed National Geographies and Mary Roberts Rinehart, now often runs to Pasternak and Proust, to Galbraith and Gideon's Trumpet. Even in the remotest fishing village, the drugstore often offers a conscience-pricking range of paperback titles. Inevitably, as he scoops up Louis Fischer's Life of Lenin, Camus' The Plague, George Orwell's Essays, and four Ian Flemings for insurance, the vacationer is torn between dreams of intellectual grandeur and the gnawing suspicion that he will only finish the Flemings. Once again, the seasonal Shakespeare skimmer might observe, vaulting ambition hath o'erleaped itself.

If summer has become the time for tomes, the first rule of the season, as vacationing Playwright Jerome Kilty pointed out in Rome last week, is that "you don't have to read the books you take with you." One of his own favorite unopened authors is Toynbee. Rule No. 2 is that you don't have to finish anything. Indeed, half the charm of vacation bookmanship is in returning to the same unconquered magnum opus as if to Everest. A Madison Avenue executive back from Martha's Vineyard this month confessed that he had attacked Dante's Divine Comedy for the fifth straight year, only to bog down once again in the first canto. "But," he added bravely, "I'm getting sort of fond of Inferno." His secret hope, and that of many another frustrated bibliophile, is that next year it will rain during his entire vacation.

Time was, of course, when summer fare was strictly "hammock reading": Agatha Christie, Erie Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Thurber, Smith (H. Allen, Logan Pearsall or Thome), Bob Benchley, Eric Ambler, Erskine Caldwell --authors who could be read by firefly or by fishing stream, and required no expenditure of thought. Few weighty books were published in summer, and few were bought.

The Annual Oasis

In recent years, however, year-round reading habits have changed. "People don't read many light books any more," says a Beverly Hills bookdealer. "These are not light times." Seasonal froth still abounds, but more vacationers nowadays tend to ballast their bags with classics or important current books. Main reason for the shift is that the heightened pressures of business, community and social life leave less and less opportunity for serious reading during the workaday year. Reading has become a game of guilt. Wrote Walter Kerr in The Decline of Pleasure: "We are all of us compelled to read for profit, party for contacts, lunch for contracts, bowl for unity, drive for mileage, gamble for charity, go out for the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house." Who has time to read for pleasure?

If the reasonably successful and conscientious American family is left with any time for literature, it tends to read in winter what used to be regarded as summer fare. The holiday reading list increasingly represents an escape not from serious literature but toward it; vacations loom as the annual oasis where people can soak up the topical or timeless, talked-about or dreamed-about books.

The task has been made easier by air conditioning (hammocks were hardly an aid to concentration), by the proliferation of paperbacks, and by the hard-cover publishers, many of whom nowadays bring out serious books in the months when the public has time to tackle them.

Naturally, there are still many constant readers who follow the same schedule all year round, and they seem somehow surprised to discover that everybody's habits are not the same. Says Novelist Peter De Vries, who is on many a vacation book list himself: "I'm always amazed at lists of summer reading. Mine is the same as fall, winter, spring--it doesn't shift gears, throttle down, rev up, or anything." Although he has taken only a week off so far this summer, De Vries has already zoomed through Bruce J. Friedman's Stern and Italo Svevo's The Confessions of Zeno, is currently reading or rereading Coriolanus, Anthony Powell, Stendhal, Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot. His schedule is modest compared with the ten-foot shelf that French Critic Claude Roy claims to have taken on his vacation: all of Henry James, Proust, Chekhov and Henri Michaux; three volumes of Sartre's Situations; Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky, in three volumes; four F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and two by Hemingway; six art books; Nan Hoa Tchen King by Tchouang Tzeu; Leopardi's Zibaldone; and Alice in Wonderland.

Such grandiose lists prompted the Saturday Review several years ago to discontinue polling writers on their reading. Many authors reacted as if they were being given an intelligence test. As Saturday Review Editor Norman Cousins remarked: "A man knows even less about his reading habits than he does about his sex habits."

The Ever Rising Wall

On the other hand, a man is apt to know his nonreading habits only too well. In the eyes of the overworked businessman or scientist whose leisure-time intake during the past year has consisted of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and 94 pages of The Group, even the lip-moving fellow commuter who mumbles his way through a Leon Uris novel is someone to be regarded with awe. The nonreading executive often feels like an Edgar Allan Poe character who is slowly but surely being sealed off from the rest of the world by a wall of unread books. At the wall's foundation are the Pickwick Papers, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, Plato's Dialogues, Henry James, Boswell's Johnson, and countless other classics. At eye level are Paul Tillich and Samuel Eliot Morison, Barbara Tuchman and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, O'Hara, Mailer, Roth, Updike and Gunter Grass. "The multitude of books," as Voltaire observed, "is making us ignorant." Voltaire should be alive today.

The middle-aged shutin should first discard the summer reading list. He would never get around to all those titles anyway. Besides, as the old adage has it, a man who reads to improve himself is probably beyond hope of improvement. The catch-up reader should then resolve to shun all the authors he feels obliged to read. If his conscience impels him toward Marlowe, he should settle for Harlow; if his secret ambition is to get through all of Dumas, he should try a Du Maurier. For the habitual nonreader to leap into Finnegans Wake or Wittgenstein is almost as unseemly and possibly as dangerous as it is for a middle-aged stockbroker to demonstrate push-ups at a party. By the same token, the would-be title-dropper should stay firmly away from The Golden Bough, the Aeneid, Kierkegaard, The Wealth of Nations, Rousseau, Thucydides, The Origin of Species, Teilhard de Chardin, and any other reading that assistant professors of English call "seminal."

The initial aim of summer cramming for the neophyte, as Author Richard Armour cautions, should be to "learn something--and be able to hold forth at the dinner table about it." Armour adds sagely: "If you want to score points, you've got to get the conversation around to something you've read, and prove you're up on the subject." No one scores points by babbling about a novel that everyone else has forgotten for two years. For that matter, it is safe to skip all Major Novelists, since everyone else is presumed to have read them anyway. This narrows the field considerably, since all novelists published in the U.S. since World War II have been Major. The dinner companion who admits reading the soft-center bon-bon writers--Taylor Caldwell, Michener, Helen Maclnnes--actually loses points. History, on the other hand, is prestigious, but a sticky wicket for the novice, who by fall usually forgets which battle took place where and when, and just why General Thingummy lost it.

The Non-Bookworm Turns

High points go to readers of biography, particularly if the book is longwinded and the subject long dead. Top scorer at many dinner tables this fall will be the man who has read L. Pearce Williams' Michael Faraday (531 pages) and can laconically explain how the 19th century English scientist contributed to Einstein's General Field Theory. For the average nonreader, however, the safest summer investment might well be one of the numerous British novelists who produce short, superbly written books on subjects of total inconsequence: Octogenarian Frank Swinnerton, for example, who learned to write when Proust was an apprentice, and has turned out more than 30 novels of manners and malice (his latest: Quadrille) with a fine disregard for every development in fiction over the past 60 years.

An even more painless stratagem is to latch on to a mystery or thriller writer who is not yet widely known. Fleming and le Carre, of course, are old-gat. So are Britain's Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) and John Creasey (Death of an Assassin), whose books have been made into movies. Georges Simenon, the prolific French author whose Inspector Maigret has solved more than 60 book-length cases to date, has yet to win a mass following in the U.S., despite his fine ear for Gallic nuance and a geographer's eye for locale. One enterprising reader, 1965 Harvard Graduate Roy Cobb, recently rediscovered Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu books, he predicts, are a sure bet for rediscovery--at least by the camp set. But some of the best contemporary mystery writers remain curiously underappreciated. Among them are Englishman Andrew Garve (The Cuckoo Line Affair); John D. MacDonald, the O'Hara of the whodunit; Australia's Arthur W. Upfield, whose detective hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, is half aborigine; Donald Hamilton, whose Matt Helm is a sort of Yankee 007; and Ed McBain, a master of suspenseful prose, who in real life is Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle.

The ultimate purpose of reading for points should be to tranquilize the non-reader's guilt and restore his self-confidence. One sure sign that the non-bookworm has turned and is reading for pleasure instead of improvement comes when he switches from hardbacks to paperbacks. It is almost an article of faith nowadays that paperbacks are for reading, hard-covers for coffee tables. Though the big-book syndrome lingers on among some bona-fide readers, notably Ivy League freshmen returning on home visits to the cultural outback, any volume big enough to be spotted three lounge chairs away immediately puts its owner in doubt.

Maximizers & Repeaters

Even in paperback, the Alexandria Quartet, Anthony Powell's The Music of Time series, Gide's Journals and all of C. P. Snow are apt to stir poolside suspicion. Anyone who takes his summer reading seriously must weather such risks--or else tuck his Doctor Zhivago inside Doctor No. The lowbrow in search of status will reverse the process and hide Sexus under, say, Koestler's The Act of Creation. The camouflage problem is more complicated for the compulsive careerist, who always gets "some good new books" before he leaves on vacation. But how can he bury The Speculative Significance of the Inner Action of the Market under Sam Snead's How to Hit a Golf Ball? An antithetical quandary faces the Communer with Nature who vows that reading is the curse of civilization and goes off to a remote isle to stare into space. After four days of memorizing every label in the medicine cabinet and pantry, he appears wild-eyed in the nearest drugstore and hauls off The Ambassadors, Jude the Obscure, Conversations with Stalin, three old Margery Al-linghams and Pornography and the Law.

One of the most ardent of all literature luggers is the Experience Maximizer, who seeks to extract every ounce of significance from his travels by boning up on the history and folklore of the place he is visiting. For a sojourn in Italy this summer, a Manhattan couple came armed with H. V. Morton's A Traveller in Rome and A Traveller in Italy, Luigi Barzini's The Italians, and a clutch of Moravia novels. Another species of Experience Maximizer is represented by Washington's Laughlin Phillips, a former State Department officer, who during shore vacations in Maryland cracks nothing but shellfish and books on shellfish.

For many readers, vacations mean a ritualistic return to the old favorites that an Edgartown, Mass., summer resident calls "come-as-you-are books." Cartoonist Al Capp chuckles himself to sleep by dipping into Martin Chuzzlewit or Little Dorrit. A sophisticated young matron on New York's Fire Island unabashedly begins her vacation with Frank Yerby's Pride's Castle and Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios. Another confirmed repeater is Author Barzini, who claims that "you can always open Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and find some wonderful sequence about a Byzantine emperor gouging his son's eyes out." A psychiatrist might sneer that the compulsive repeater needs a familiar book for the same reason that Linus totes his blanket--as a form of security against the bristling insecurities of a strange environment.

Politicians, by contrast, generally read to protect themselves from the slings and arrows back home. New York's Mayor Wagner went off for a honeymoon in Florida with James Koran's The Seat of Power, a close-to-the-bone novel about organized crime and police corruption in New York City. Just about everyone in Washington has taken along Teddy White's The Making of the President, 1964. President de Gaulle's recent reading has included Josephine, a new biography of Napoleon's light o' love, and L'Histoire de Jesus-Christ by R. L. Bruckberger, a Dominican priest who writes like an angel. De Gaulle was so moved by the latter that he assured the author, "When I read your book, I really felt as if I had lived then"--as many of De Gaulle's subjects have long suspected.

Setting the Feast

The secret of vacation reading, as of most other activities, lies in striking a felicitous balance between mental pleasure and intellectual profit. A formula that works for many readers is to blend: 1) a favorite book of verse, such as the love poems of John Donne, that can be dipped into at easy intervals; 2) a novelist read long ago, say an early Evelyn Waugh or a Graham Greene "entertainment"; 3) a meaty current novel--perhaps John Cheever's The Wapshot Scandal; 4) a sprinkling of suspense and frivolity; 5) a serious but unformidable history or biography, such as Lady Longford's Queen Victoria or Is Paris Burning?; 6) one tome they have no intention of opening, such as A History of the Jewish People; and 7) a book related to summer pastimes, such as Bill Robinson's Book of Expert Sailing or, for the compleater-than-thou angler, Walbaum's classic Life History of the Striped Bass (Roccus saxatilis).

With effort, anyone at any age can recapture that first tingling realization that reading is not an exercise by rote, like learning the multiplication table or the battle lines at Gettysburg, but an act of liberation, a lifelong passport to Huck Finn's Mississippi and Jack London's Yukon, to the worlds of Long John Silver and Merlin and Leatherstocking. This--not the ability to dissect Nelson Algren or Aeschylus at a dinner table--is the peculiar, and private, pleasure of reading. In an age of hurry and specialization, books more than ever are a necessary nourishment for mind and spirit. Summer is the time to set the feast.

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