Our readingest premier?
In a 389-page book published just about 40 years ago, Joseph Smallwood set aside slightly more than four pages to list what he described as “some of the authors who made life rich for me.”
The book was “The Time Has Come to Tell.”
When I first scanned the lengthy list of 233 mostly wellknown authors (yes, I counted them) my first reaction was, well, what a brag.
But as I thought about the several on the list with which I was familiar, I decided that pretty well anyone who “reads” could come up with a fair list.
So, Smallwood’s point that these people made life rich for him may very well be a valid point and not “look at how wellread I am!”
As a mere youth, Smallwood read Horatio Alger. This was an author who “set idealism aside” and preached adventure to boys of simple and humble roots, urging that the “only worthwhile motive in life was self-advancement” (Brooks & Bettmann, “Our Literary Heritage,” 1956).
Those of you who know/remember something of Smallwood (and there are many, of course) will find the list makes for a motley crew.
There are, for instance, The Holy Bible (obviously, a book rather than an author) and Charles Darwin. That suggests a reader who would seek both sides in an argument, remembering that the Bible says man was made in God’s image and Darwin said that man was descended from the apes. (In each case there, I err by brevity and, perhaps, dangerously so.)
For diversion, Smallwood chose George Ade, among others. Ade wrote what he called “fables.” Here’s how he started one: “Once upon a time there was a slim girl with a forehead which was shiny and protuberant like a Bartlett pear.”
For spiritual guidance and/or development quite apart from the Bible, Smallwood experienced a book created by a man from a bleak childhood, with scant education who spent a portion of his younger years in prison.
I refer to John Bunyan, born in 1628, author of the bestseller “Pilgrim’s Progress.” This book, according to the unidentified preface-writer of my 1885 edition, “irradiated the rude lives of the Christians of the 17th and 18th centuries.”
In Smallwood’s peripatetic sampling, the seal-fat-and-hardy-men author George Alan England rubbed elbows with cerebral Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the early 1920s New Englander England went to the seal front aboard two of our vessels, Eagle and Terra Nova. Smallwood, “the Barrelman” radio host to be, would have nodded in agreement with England’s recounting of an evening’s entertainment of songs, stories and recitations aboard a vessel at the ice. Describing our traditional songs England wrote, “nearly all the Newfoundland pieces were mournful, in the habit of the race. As a rule this northern singing is moist and funereal. Shipwrecks and drowning finger most of the stops of the Newfoundland pipe.”
I was surprised when I first spied the wildly famous Zane Grey on Smallwood’s list. As you will know, Grey was a shoot-emup, chase-em-down, lasso-em western storyteller. I became unsurprised when I remembered that Smallwood once had a ranch. And Smallwood also read (and once interviewed) philosopher Bertrand Russell, one of whose books was entitled “Wisdom of the West.”
Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde helped shape Smallwood, as they did thousands of others. And can anyone imagine two more divergent poets than Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Ezra Pound? Smallwood read both.
Of Pound it has been said he had “an element of the gangster in him. A lover of sensations and violence ...” (Brooks & Bettmann). Elizabeth was hardly Ezra’s match.
The north was also on Smallwood’s reading list: Sir Wilfred Grenfell and Jack London, both, I suspect, into a mixture of fact and fiction about things that happen in their chosen and frozen part of the world.
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), who provided peeps into the private life of a late 17th century English civil servant (himself) and John Ruskin, art critic, philosopher and sometime diarist were both embraced by Smallwood even as they were polar opposites.
What might be the take-away from Smallwood’s book list? Perhaps that he was widely read, possessed of a commendable intellectual curiosity but also a scattered reader? That he championed our move from impoverished independence to a turn at the Canadian row of nipples may have been helped by the likes of Churchill, Beaverbrook and the “important social commentator” Thomas Carlyle (so-dubbed by Wikipedia).
In his book Smallwood admits, “I had no guidance for my reading habits or tastes, but read whatever I came across, whatever I drifted or stumbled into, good, bad, indifferent. A lot of it had to be trash, obviously. I have been educated, informed, stimulated, excited, inspired by books — and angered, disgusted, bored.”
Unguided though his reading may have been, he learned to distinguish between trash and treasure. I suspect that learning how to winnow all on your own is not without merit.