Recalling us our own mortality and reminding us of the vanity of so much of what preoccupies us

Eternal Youth, Eternal Kitsch

by Theodore Dalrymple 

A kind friend of mine, knowing my interest in such matters, recently sent me a little book containing a collection of inscriptions found in second-hand books collected by a diligent anthologist, a man called H. B. Gooderham. The books were not, on the whole, precious old volumes but rather cheap and relatively recent paperback editions, many of them in rather scruffy condition. Nor were the inscribers famous persons, nor even identifiable. They were, rather, Everyman.

In his brief introduction to the book, the anthologist says that:

… the overriding emotion evoked by these inscriptions is one of pathos. At their most basic level all are records of human connections – or at least attempts at human connections – given added poignancy by the fact that all have been discovered among the shelves of second-hand book shops and, for whatever reason, are no longer in the hands of the original dedicatees.

I am wholly in agreement with this: there is nothing quite like an inscription in a book no longer owned by the dedicatee to capture the melancholy, the bittersweetness, of the passage of time, to recall us to our own mortality and to remind us of the vanity of so much of what preoccupies us.

I love looking at the inscriptions in my books, for they are also a powerful stimulant of my imagination. Of course they raise questions that now cannot be answered, but it would be a dull world in which every question could be answered. For example, I have an edition of Julius Caesar which was published after the MGM film version of 1953, in which Marlon Brando played Mark Antony, James Mason Brutus, John Gielgud Cassius, Deborah Kerr Portia and Greer Garson Calpurnia. It was published with schoolchildren in mind, and the preface says something that I doubt would be permissible in a schoolbook nowadays:

On the stage and screen Shakespeare’s influence is as profound today as when he lived: profound because in this world of joy and sorrow man disobeys Divine Law. Shakespeare the teacher shows us in his 14 tragedies how, when the PRIDE of Coriolanus, the Jealousy of Othello, the REVENGE of Hamlet, the GREED and WEAKNESS of Macbeth, the LUST of Antony, the short-sighted IDEALISM of Brutus, etc., are allowed to dominate man, unhappiness, unrest, and often war result.

Sir John Gielgud, the great actor, provided an introduction to the play, though I am not sure how keen personally he was on the Divine Law, in which he describes actors’ difficulty with the play, especially when performed in Roman dress:

The classical costumes, though becoming and graceful to players of fine physique, can be ridiculous and hampering to men who are too short, too tall, too thin or too fat. There is always the danger of the effect of a lot of gentlemen sitting on marble benches in a Turkish bath.

That is an image that I shall treasure for ever.


............................


Read more: www.newenglishreview.org/