I’ve forgotten more books than most people will ever read.
That’s not meant as an obnoxious boast (even if it sounds like one), but simply as a statement of fact. As an English professor, I’ve read a lot of great literature, along with the occasional clunker, but I can’t complain. My job, “reading,” is a pretty pleasant gig.
But here’s a confession: I don’t remember most of what I’ve read. Several hundred books, perhaps even a couple of thousand, are gone with the wind.
Indeed, Gone With the Wind is a fine example of a novel I can hardly recollect, which is a bit ironic since every morning, on my way to work, I drive past the boardinghouse where Margaret Mitchell wrote the book — “the dump,” she called it. I recall the line “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again,” but I hear it in Vivien Leigh’s sultry cadence, which suggests that I’m channeling the movie rather than the novel.
I remember that Mitchell took her title from a poem by Ernest Dowson, but I forget Dowson’s title (which I’m pretty sure is in Latin). I remember two lines from Dowson’s poem, whatever it’s called: “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,” and “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion,” but nothing else. I can’t quite place Cynara: the girlfriend, maybe? “I have forgot much": I like that, as a personal mantra. One’s foibles seem more respectable when they’re inscribed in a poem.
I don’t have dementia, at least not that I’m aware, though it’s not impossible that I’m experiencing what Julianne Moore’s character (I forget her name: Alice something) suffered in the movie Still Alice. Alice is a professor at Columbia, the same place I got my Ph.D. I realize that connection is diagnostically irrelevant, but it seems portentous.
At 53 (three years older than Alice), I fumble for the right word more often than I used to, and I misplace the occasional name, though the Internet counsels me not to worry.
But my internal library-of-the-mind is getting spotty. Beyond broad plot outlines, I forget what happened in most of the novels I’ve read. Scanning my bookshelves, I retain only a fuzzy sense of characters. In Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, the antihero, Pinkie, is a sociopath, a murderer I’m pretty sure, but with some oddly redeeming resonance?
Virginia Woolf’s Miss La Trobe, from Between the Acts, is a control freak and a closeted lesbian. (Actually, Google — a useful resource for professors of a certain age — suggests that Miss La Trobe is just a regular lesbian. I thought she was on the down-low, but I’ve probably misremembered.) Arms and the Man is about a scurrilous munitions dealer. No, sorry, that’s the other Shaw play I teach, Major Barbara.
I do better with snatches of poetry, though my repertoire shrinks a bit every semester: More than once I’ve launched into a passage I felt sure I could recite to the end, but sputtered midstream. This is especially embarrassing when the point I’m trying to make is that rhyme, rhythm, and prosodic structure are designed for mnemonic ease of recall, which explains how bards of yore could remember and recite the entire Odyssey.
Forgetting used to bother me more than it does now: I’ve come to a Zen-like acceptance.
Interestingly, poems I memorized in high school remain intact verbatim. So when I falter in the middle of a stanza from an Auden elegy, I may segue into the Longfellow classic “Paul Revere’s Ride” (I grew up outside Boston), just so my students can appreciate that it is fun and impressive to declaim poetry, however randomly.
But I need to reread Mrs. Dalloway cover to cover annually — every time I teach it. I’ve tried once or twice just looking at my notes and marginal comments before lectures. It doesn’t go well; I don’t retain most of the nuances and narrative energy that make it such a powerful novel.
As I become more advanced (and more forgetful), I mind much less what I once considered the wasted extra work of rereading. It’s not quite as if I’m having the experience of pure amnesia — seeing Citizen Kane over and over as if for the first time — but something along those lines. I like to tell my students, and I actually think this is true, that novels like Ulysses and To the Lighthouse are so rich that readers will find new gems lurking in them, as I do, even on the 20th go-round. Though it’s possible that I’m simply rediscovering things I’d noticed on my fifth reading and have since forgotten.
I once thought that intellectual advancement was additive: that every year I would get a bit smarter (measurably!) because I would have read more books. For a time, at the beginning of my academic career, this seemed true. When I studied for my doctoral exams in grad school, I set aside six months during which I read two books a day, and — as far as I can remember — I remembered them.
But now I feel as if specific works are being exchanged in and out of my mind as I read. I’ve just finished Ian McEwan’s The Children Act, and I like to imagine that it displaced one of those Arnold Bennett novels I thought would be more useful to me than they have been. I’m just starting Edward Mendelson’s Moral Agents, which seems like a vastly ambitious book about the transformation of American literature in the 20th century, and I’m pretty sure it will push out a couple of books that seemed so salient when I read them back in the 20th century, perhaps Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot or Raymond Williams’s Politics of Modernism.
The critics (Louis Menand, Hugh Kenner, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar) and teachers (Carolyn Heilbrun, Jeffrey Perl, Edward Said) whom I’ve most admired seem to have read everything and remembered what they read. I took that as the model: Read a lot and keep it all in your head, ready to access at just the right time for the most impressive comparisons, contrasts, references, and influences.
At first I was able to work that way. A book I wrote 20 years ago featured 150 iterations of a common motif, all from literary sources I had read (and remembered!).
But lately I’ve adapted my scholarly methodology to accommodate this more limited access to my memory archive. I have come to terms with my inability to trot out the broad panorama of cultural and literary traditions that Said used to define Orientalism or that Kenner used to capture Modernism. Instead, I’ve embraced the case study: highlighting a single work, or a few, that I can keep in my mind while I inspect them under my humanistic microscope.
While theory was never my forte, I’ve found it practicable to present a template, a system, or a scheme of some sort, and then encourage those in my audience to go and apply it themselves to all the texts they remember. I wish I could do more of that myself.
Forgetting used to bother me more than it does now: I’ve come to a Zen-like acceptance. Maybe I’m in the deaccessioning phase of life. I’ve slowed down or stopped acquiring lots of other things besides the literary ballast that I used to collect and display: stained glass, vintage Fiestaware, insulator caps.
Shakespeare consoles us in Othello (at least I think this is meant as consolation, though I forget the context) when somebody (I forget who) says: “But men are men; the best sometimes forget.”
Randy Malamud is a Regents’ professor of English at Georgia State University.
