Home // August.21.2018 // Keith Botsford

THE BOTSFORD GUIDE TO KULCHUR, or,
All the Books You Ought to Have Read That You Will Never Get to Read in Class

Botsford in Costa Rica, in 2006.

Word came to us yesterday that Keith Botsford had passed away in his flat in Battersea, England, over the weekend. He leaves a substantial legacy through his work as a teacher, editor, novelist, and journalist. We feel his loss as a man of letters, and as friend and booster to many of us in the world of writing and publishing. As some of us, his former students and editorial staffers, exchanged emails and calls throughout the day, we remembered fondly his habits—a prodigious appetite for languages, caffeine and tobacco; a preference for insults in non-English languages—as well as his lessons. Well-known among these latter was his infamous, idiosyncratic, contentious and dauntless “Guide to Culture", shared over the decades in various drafts and through various venues. Shared, or rather thrust upon any young turk whom he perceived (usually rightly) to be alliterate and in need of education. Here we reprint a version of the Guide dating to 2015. A few typographic errors have been corrected, and a few names which were initialized in the original have been expanded in order to aid the reader in looking those authors up.

S·T·T·L, professore. - ZWB

There was a happy time when more or less every educated person could agree on what he should have read. Much of that ‘foundation’ lay in the Greek and Latin classics and I would agree that these—but not all of these—are indispensable. At least to many people. Some of them, including Plato and Aristotle for starters, are part of the background noise of civilization. Which is not to say they should not be read first-hand, because the ‘hard’ reasoning of Aristotle and the Socratic method are both part of the way we look at the world and try to reason about our place in it. In those earlier days there were assumptions about what one had read that were foundations for discourse of all kinds, whether of conversation or argument or writing. Homer was Homer, no two ways about that. One emerged from an education with the ‘basics’ and those basics were as well known in Budapest as in Boston. After university, one read at leisure. Winters were always long and dark and without television. A well-stocked library, pleasingly free from books of ‘facts', lay to hand. An educated seventeenth century ‘western’ library might number two hundred volumes; by the nineteenth century that might have tripled; official libraries and ‘paying’ libraries took care of the rest, such as new novels and poems. I confess that I like the browsing aspect of the reading that was: a hard core at home, the fluff down the street. Of course memory played a great part in that world, an educated mind probably having several hundred literary ‘tags’ in his mind to trot out at will. As almost anything is now available to all, memory is no longer a great part of learning, though it plays a formidable role in linking the disparate strands of culture—spotting, for instance, the links between W.G. Sebald and Sir Thomas Browne.

The Academy and its Germanic specializations has done much to destroy that common culture. Professors teach ‘romantic’ literature or Portuguese or ‘baroque'. Many academic terms are spent examining the lesser regions of culture. Like minor nations, the professorate ‘owns’ its territory. Venture into it and you'll know something about Marino and Góngora or Joyce and Kafka, but not much else. Nor will you form your own judgment about the works of these authors. You are prompted to see them as the professor does. A second (but not secondary) baneful influence is the modern notion of ‘boring', which is generally equated with length or with time-wasting. In a sense all art wastes time. It is not essential to life, which is as lived through by un-readers as by readers; nor is it directly ‘profitable, for you cannot really turn art into advancement, shares that will forever rise, or a rich marriage. As for length, that is up to you. I have never been deterred by the length of a book—I value the prolonged contact—and often charmed by the brief. Patience is required for the three-volume novel of the nineteenth century (which flourished well into the era of television), but concision requires, as a poem does, greater concentration. But then I go nowhere without a book and get through a lot of books in short snatches. Good sauces stain the pages of books propped up and read during meals.

I make modest claims for literature. Without it, I would cease to enjoy life. But that need not apply to you. But I do argue that it will enhance life, your understanding of life’s many complexities and unresolved questions, that it is fun in and of itself, and not seldom a far better guide to the past than its cousin germain, history; that poetry (and great prose) will teach you more about language (that prime distinction of the human mind) than any other self-discipline; and that the universality of literature (and the other arts) is far greater than the spurious ‘internationalism’ than the United Nations, world courts or, for that matter, the notion of democracy. It has no boundaries, is open to all. And beautifully private. While one can enslave the body, the well-stocked mind remains free and true to its owner. It never betrays and only invites you to share its power.

The list that follows is meant to introduce to you the notion that all literature has some value to someone, that some of it is ‘superior’ to the rest (which neither makes it unassailable, nor renders the ‘lesser’ uninteresting), and that what strikes you as valuable in your youth may not be so valuable in the end-game of your life. There are books with which to start one’s reading (that is, introduce you to a lifelong passion) and books which will still greatly influence an adult or even an aged mind. The suggested readings that follow are ‘literary'. That is, they are worth reading because they have something to say and a particular way of saying it. They are also highly personal. That I have little desire to re-read Proust or Joyce or Kafka today does not mean that I will not re-read them tomorrow; but what I believe is worth reading includes the entirety of literature. The authors and books listed hereafter may be said to constitute a part of literature that you might not come across on your own. In most cases, I didn't. In some cases I did so through an insatiable curiosity. I would like to pass it along, largely along the lines of language—though all the books I mention are available in English.

I start with the most ‘alien’ literatures, those of the Orient, excluding Chinese, for—alas!—I have yet to find a readable Chinese novelist, ancient or modern.

JAPAN. Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji is not only the first novel (in the modern sense) ever written, it is also one of the summits, entirely beguiling. I prefer the old Waley translation to the modern Seidensticker version, which is hard-edged. In modern literature, I commend Tanizaki, Kawabata and Yukio Mishima, whose tetralogy is the best introduction I know to Japan.

INDIA. This enormous sub-continent with its many languages has in the last century produced some writers of the first rank. Nirad Chaudhuri’s The Continent of Circe, though much disliked by Indians, is a fine piece of analysis of a national culture. G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr I consider the great comic novel of the XXth century. The stories of Rabindranath Tagore (forget his Nobel) are well worth reading; so are the novels of Narayan.

[As is the case with Spain (cf. infra), India is also a setting for fiction. Pre-eminent here are E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, the far eastern stories of Somerset Maugham (reviled because he is much read) and the novels of Paul Scott, while Anthony Burgess’s trilogy on Malaysia is equally remarkable.]

To the West lie:

RUSSIA. As you all know, Russia’s is an immense and hugely influential literature. I cannot read Dostoievsky, but chances are you will—I gobbled him up in my early ‘teens. There is no way to manoeuver around Tolstoy: War and Peace remains a monument; Anna Karenina is the ultimate novel of betrayal. But both these writers you might encounter even in the Academy. The same is not true of the three other novelists Russians esteem most: Nikolai Leskov, a mad maverick, not enough translated; Gogol, whose stories and (of course) Dead Souls are the foundation-stones of Russian fiction; and Goncharov, whose Oblomov, the tale of the ultimate lazy Slav, is unjustly omitted from Russian Lit classes. Aksakov’s memoirs of his childhood and youth are limpid and gorgeous. Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time lies at the origin (in some ways) of many modern attitudes. Chekhov, of course; Turgenev, maybe.

Closer to our own time, Solzhenitsyn is a giant figure: The Gulag Archipelago would weigh on the conscience of whoever has not read it. The Cancer Ward is an extended metaphor about the disaster that was the Soviet state. Next to Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak seems soft: if he weren't, why would Hollywood had filmed him? Isaak Babel is indispensable. So are Zoschenko and that great comic pair, Ilf and Petrov. But by the 1930s, poetry remained the only safe and secret literature. I am less fond of Akhmatova than most, but if I had to read only one poet it would be Osip Mandelstamm. For all the remarkable poets, whose versions you read are all-important. Some translations are, in a word, dreadful. If you seek a contemporary, Yuri Buida is it.

POLAND. Like Italian and Portuguese, Polish literature is one of our culture’s best-kept secrets. Norwid is one of the very greatest nineteenth century poets, as good as Heine, as Keats. Czesław Miłosz—as poet, political essayist and memoirist—is a central figure. He’s to be read in fragments, one bite at a time. His collaboration with Alexander Wat, which produced Wat’s My Century—a great history of a terrible time—is one of literature’s rare saintly acts. The Poland that was and is you will find in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s wonderful Trilogy (having read it in French, I don't know whether it’s been englished*), but in what other literature would you find the essays and poetry and plays of Kazimierz Brandys and Zbigniew Herbert, or S. Lec? And that’s to pass over the wonderful Yiddish literature that developed in Poland: a Singer, a Peretz, a Picard, an Aleichem. You have to seek these out, and keep an open mind.

On to the rest of Eastern & Central Europe…

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, now split, has Hašek’s wonderful Good Soldier Švejk. Kundera is too French for my taste, but Klima and Škvorecký are both world-class writers.

HUNGARY has a raft of splendid poets, and also a delectable, slow trilogy in three long connected novels by Miklós Bánffy.

ITALY. Again, this literature is a well-kept secret—as is often the case with ‘minor’ languages. Much of it is not even translated; and let us leave aside the question of whether it is well-translated. Dante is the most-celebrated writer to have resisted all attempts at translation. From Longfellow through contemporaries, translators have labored in vain. Furthermore, Dante’s world—that of the Church and Empire—has so receded that he is almost impossible to read. So that in some translations a glimmer of the poetry comes through; in others, nothing does. To my mind, the Charles Singleton bilingual version is by far the best. Robert Pinsky’s much-acclaimed Inferno is more Beowulf than Dante. So learn Italian! By reading Dante! Of the modern writers in prose, the most interesting are Calvino. Much less well-known but as good are: Beppe Fenoglio, Arturo Loria, Mario Tobino. The ‘secret’ book is The House of Others (which I have translated), by Silvio D’Arzo, a precocious genius. Likewise wonderful are Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba. It is a literature in full flowering in both poetry and prose, though the great poet is indubitably Eugenio Montale, finely englished by the late William Arrowsmith.

SPAIN. Of Spanish literature, Cervantes comes first and greatest—though known more by reputation than by reading. Quevedo, his equal, is hardly read at all. There is a long lull before Latin-American literature takes up the challenge of the mother-country, though, believe me, beyond Borges there is much wonderful stuff. Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude is his single remarkable work (the rest is negligible in my view) is easily outdone by the prolific and inventive Mario Vargas Llosa—two of whose books, The War at the End of the World and La fiesta del chivo are full-scale masterpieces. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier, famous thirty years ago, neglected now, is a great read. José Hernández in Argentina, and then Arturo Barea with his three novels on the war in Morocco, are ‘underside’ of ordinary life writers.

PORTUGAL is most memorable for its poets, but Brazil excels in both prose and poetry. Brazil also boasts one acknowledged masterpiece of world literature, Euclides da Cunha’s unclassifiable (it starts out in geology and ends in an epic war) Rebellion in the Backlands. This is a do-not-miss ticket, though the first chapter, the setting, deters many and can be read after the rest. Poets abound; the most to my liking is João Cabral de Melo Neto—available in several translations; the rest can be found in Elizabeth Bishop’s anthology and elsewhere.

GERMANY. A magnificent literature greatly ignored in the United States. Heine, Lichtenberg are first rank poets. Berthold Brecht’s plays (like Ionescu’s and Genet’s) are at the heart of the XXth century repertory. Günther Grass’s The Tin Drum is more brilliant than what follows in his work, but none is negligible. Two favorites are Ernst van Salomon’s The Questionnaire, and the Swiss writer (almost unknown) Hans Werner Bergengruen, especially A Matter of Conscience. Robert Walser is peculiar and interesting. Kafka you will find in the canon, but Stefan Zweig? Adalbert Stifter? Of course German literature has never had a more brilliant place than in W.G. Sebald, all of whose work I consider essential.

FRANCE. If you read what the French think are peaks you will be sorely disappointed. But from the rubble: Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, always a protean poet. Proust yes, but the professors have got him. A great diarist, Paul Leautaud, is largely untranslated. Gide is a good and brave writer, but too few read Louis Guilloux, whose WWI novel, Sang Noir, translated in the 1930s, is one of the best works in the war genre, certainly more truthful than Hemingway. I commend Giono to you, and Mauriac, and Emmanuel Bove, as well as the urbane Paul Morand. But the king of the XXth century French novel is Celine: an appalling man, a ferocious stylist, mad but with more energy than the rest put together.

ENGLISH. I will just list authors who deserve better fates. In England: Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, condemned for being readable and read. P.G. Wodehouse, for the best classic English style since Dryden. Also David Garnett, E.H. Benson, William Gerhardie, Walter de la Mare—all neglected. In Ireland, above all William Trevor, a marvel: start with Miss Gomez & the Brethren, but he’s still writing. Hubert Butler’s essays are compelling and penetrating. Flann O'Brian is a constant, funny and irreverent.

In the US: Dreiser must be read: both Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy: unfashionable but foundation-stones. Sinclair Lewis is no longer read; that’s wrong. Nathanael West is a cult; rightly so. Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is our only major political novel; between Willa Cather and Wright Morris, the vast heartland of America is justly probed. Joe Matthew’s history of the Osage is a neglected masterpiece, and much of John Jay Chapman is about as incisive as you can get and remain a critic; ditto for Edmund Wilson, who is worth two generations of English professors all by himself (and who wrote a deadly funny erotic novel called All About Daisy, which I rank a close second to Nabokov’s Lolita (and the rest of VN’s output; they were friends and rivals).

It is in the Antipodes that the liveliest work since Bellow is being done; you can have all of Roth & Co. for Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Murray Bail, Chloe Hooper—see the Australia issue of Granta magazine for a guide.

Finally, if I could read but one magazine it would be the Times Literary Supplement, the TLS. It’s been feeding my curiosity and my mind for nigh on sixty years.

* KB originally gave Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz as author of The Trilogy. The source of this misremembering might be the article “Notre Sienkiewicz” published by Iwaszkiewicz in La pologne littéraire in 1927. - ZWB // return

Banner graphic source: Botsford’s library in Casa Kike, his home in Costa Rica, in 2007. Photo by Christian Richters; used in excerpted form here under fair use guidelines.

See also: [NERObooks homepage] [Borges’ book selections] [video of Olivier Bloch-Laine’s interview of KB] [a literary tour of Poland]

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