The New Lifetime Reading Plan

In my view The Narrow Road is an example of a very rare thing—a perfect book. I would not change a syllable of it. By the time he wrote it Bashх had completely mastered the art of combining prose and haiku verse into a seamless narrative of the utmost simplicity and economy of style. It is a very short book, far less than a page per day for his six-month journey. (Contrast this with the long-windedness of many travei writers today.) Everywhere he went, Bashх distilled his response in haiku verse. In untalented hands haiku are simply boring and insignificant little snippets of pseudoverse (and many people think of haiku the way they think of abstract painting: "Anyone could do that." Anyone can try, that is; the results are usually awful.) In the hands of Bashх and a few other masters, haiku are tiny marvels, each one a small flash of Zen enlight- enment. The Narrow Road shows a genius at the height of his powers.

J.S.M.

51

DANIEL DEFOE

1660-1731 Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous books in the world. Its publication, however, though successful, was a minor inci- dent in its authors crowded, singular, and not entirely unspot- ted life. A butchers son, Defoe traveled widely in his youth; was once captured by Algerian pirates; went bankrupt for sev- enteen thousand pounds—which he later paid off; supported William of Orange in 1688; served as pamphleteer, propagan- dist, and secret agent under four sovereigns; changed his alle- giance without ever abandoning what we would today call a liberal political position; got into trouble through his partisan writings and was stood in the pillory, from which rather unlit- erary vantage point, with true middle-class enterprise, he man- aged to sell quite a few copies of a broadside entitled "Hymn to the Pillory"; saw the inside of a prison; wrote Robinson

Crusoe, the first of his novйis, when he was almost sixty; in ali composed over four hundred books and tracts, very few of which bore his name on the title page; and, according to one account, died hiding out from his credito rs. He also married and engendered seven children.

Defoe was perhaps the first truly outstanding professional journalist (or hired hack, if you prefer) in England; the father of the English novel (try his Moll Flanders, if you haven't read it); and a master of the trick of making an invention seem so true that to most of us Robinson Crusoe (a figment, though suggested by a real episode) is a living person.

Robinson Crusoe is supposed to be a boys' book. However, like its greater cousin Huckleberry Finn [92], it is a boys' book only in that it satisfies perfectly those male dreams that happen to be most vivid in boyhood but continue to lead an under- ground life in most men until they die. Virtually every male dreams of being completely self-sufficient, as Crusoe is; of building a private kingdom of which he can be undisputed lord; of having that deliciously lonely eminence emphasized in time by the establishment of a benevolent colonial tyranny over a single slave (Friday); of accumulating wealth and power that can never be endangered or vulgarized by competition; of enjoying success through the wholesome primitive use of mus- cle and practical good sense, as against the effete and trouble- some exercise of the intellect; of doing ali this in an exotic set- ting quite remote from his dull daily habitat; and finally of living in a self-made Utopia without any of the puzzling responsibilities of a wife and children. (Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick [83] are the two great novйis that manage superbly without involving more than one sex. They have never been popular with women.)

Robinson Crusoe has no plot. Its hero, though a sturdy stick, is nonetheless a stick. On reflection, the book's smug mercantile morality seems offensive. Ali this matters not at ali against the fact that it is a perfect daydream, a systematic and detailed wish-fulfillment. Its appeal is heightened in that the most romantic experiences are related in the baldest prose. Its utter lack of fanciness makes the daydream respectable. We believe it precisely because it is not "literature."

When we were young we could see only that it was enter- taining. Now, rereading it, we can perhaps see why it is also, as books go, immortal.

C.F.

52

JONATHAN SWIFT

1667-1745 Gulliver's Traveis

Thackeray [76] once said of Swift: "So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.^,> Swiffs mind was not comprehensive, perhaps not even very subtle. But it was extremely powerful, it was the mirror of an extraordinary temperament, and so its frustration, decay, and final extinction do suggest the tragic dimensions of which Thackeray speaks.