Season for stories

I've been asked to be a

book reviewer, and I've

been asked to be a book

writer, but I've never

been asked to be a book

seller. By all means it

calls for the highest

refinement of our more

admirable capacities,

and I think the tenden-

cy to test this postu-

late is at its most in-

tense in Advent because

of our heightened sen-

sitivity to the seduc-

tiveness of stories. To

gauge their comparative

power and appraise their

taste in means, for spe-

cific thirsting strangers 

is a gift, situating lit-

erature where it belongs,

and weaves a gratitude no

sommelier or tailor can a-

spire to. Now this Christ-

mas my bookseller reveal-

ed the reason for this to

me with stunning panache:

a tolerable progression

toward one's bethlehem of

knowing is the measure of

our pleasure. I demur from

any revelation's blazing

terminus, but I greatly

enjoy the journey, and its 
offer of becoming closer.

On the telephone with him

the other day, admitting

one was shopping only for

oneself, I requested four

or five diverse attrac-

tions from the shop's sea-

sonal list, balancing ex-

perience with a writer or

a subject with an assess-

ment of probabilities for

a "tolerable progression,"
interlaced with frames of
gastronomy and similar ar-
guments.

I then allowed, this would

all be fine with me, but

that I hadn't yet asked if

he thought I might be over-

looking something I should

have.

Ah, yes. Well, he's an in-

teresting figure, Scott

Moncrieff, and there is a

fine study of him now -- .

And then, well, of course

he sounds a little familiar,

but in a way he isn't: Homer.

Gorging myself on chunks now 
of both recommendations, I'm
refreshed by pure generosity.
Here the character of lyric-
ism, itself, is approached
with a physical persistence,
revealed as a moral function.
I think if E.M. Forster had

been weaned from Cambridge,

he might have made a jour-
neyman bookseller. Possibly

this is what he's trying in

A Passage to India and How-
ard's End. He's asserting, 
with diffidence; he's meter-
ing out his invention to se-
cure a taste for it, not a 
habit. But the bookseller 
knows something that nobody

ever suspected of Forster, 
who never cared for teaching. 
He knows how I can be quieted.


Merry Christmas, in every-
one's own generous way.

Jean Findlay
Chasing Lost Time
  The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff
  Soldier, Spy and Translator
Chatto & Windus, 2014©

Adam Nicolson
The Mighty Dead
  Why Homer Matters
William Collins, 2014©