Read The First Part Last

Sorting through some old notes, I find an old newspaper clip suggesting the names of “unpopular classics”—books that people know about, but that remain unread and, well, unreadable. Most I can’t judge because I haven’t read them (Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness just never made it onto my list). Some, I have to say, not knowing they were unreadable, I actually read and enjoyed. George’ Eliot’s Romola, to take one example, is not as good as Middlemarch, but it’s still a pretty good book. And Addison’s Essays are wonderful (can’t say the same for his play, Cato, though).

One item gives me a bad conscience. It’s Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. Someone gave me a copy for Christmas 50 years ago and it’s been on the shelf ever since. My friend Gudrun encourages me to read it, She says “just skip the Prelude.”

Ah, yes. “Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless? Bottomless indeed, if”--? Yawn, clunk. Hello? Hey, wake up, I’m talking here. But I guess I can understand why I never stayed awake past the first page.

And there may be a general principle here. Seems to me there a lot of books where you ought to skip the intro. “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Recognize that? Course you do. It’s the first sentence of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” It’s familiar to a lot of people because it’s the only sentence of Proust they ever read. Indeed, the first 40 pages, the invocation of the “petit morceau de madeleine,” is enough to persuade them that Proust is just not their tasse de thé.

Well, I can testify that Proust is wonderful, but you can read that part last. It’s full of anticipations that just don’t make any sense until you’ve read the rest of the book, and can be a big turnoff otherwise. Read it last.

Same goes for Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury. “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” Yawn. Look, I don’t want to do any plot spoiling here, bu there are four parts to Sound and the Fury. Try it this way: try the second or the third part first—your taste. Then do the other one. Then do the first part. Then do the fourth part fourth. I don’t know, this may spoil some grand artistic design. But at least you will have read the book—and a very good book it is, too good to go back on the shelf.

Hegel’s Phenomenology belongs here, too. As I recall, Hegel wrote the Preface last, as if to explain it all to himself.

There must be more, but this is enough to make the point (now that I think about it, I suspect somebody has written a dissertation on in it). Still, rule of thumb: when in doubt, read the first part last.