Rather than Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library,” this could have been called “Browsing My Library”: in Silent Conversations: A Reader’s Life, across some 630 pages (plus more than a hundred of bibliography), Anthony Rudolf constructs an unchronological autobiography by other means. How? Through the act of looking at, dipping into, sometimes re-reading, finally writing about the books that surround him in his apartment. It’s not a work of criticism, despite some shrewd but glancing critical aperçus along the way, but rather “a reverie, a network of association,” entirely personal in nature. Rudolf—remarkable reader, writer, translator, poet, all-round man of letters—voyages around his library in categories that are, by nature, somewhat arbitrary. It’s no accident that his starting points are, on the one hand, France and French Literature—this is Yves Bonnefoy’s translator, after all—and Jewish Worlds, but at the center of this exploration are autobiography and related genres, and then criticism, reading, and the essay. In the section on autobiography, he dwells on the importance of fleeting or indirect connections; for instance Denise Levertov noticing, in Tesserae, the feelings aroused by the knowledge that her father had laid eyes on Kropotkin, or by seeing “Mr. Eliot’s hat and rolled umbrella on the hall stand” while visiting the poet’s housemate, John Hayward. Maybe these connections are something like the connections we make with authors through reading. What difference does it make that one has read this book rather than another? Like having met an author, “it doesn’t make me more important,” Rudolf admits. “To accuse me or to accuse myself of name-dropping or vicarious glory may be accurate but is not the main point, which is that the phenomenon adds branches and lines to the ontological flowchart.” In the best possible way Rudolf makes me feel ignorant, makes me hear the clamor of all the books I still haven’t read, often had never heard of. I wrote to him saying that someone could devote a life to following in the footsteps of his reading, to discovering all the books that he’s, as it were, laid out on a seemingly endless library table for the rest of us to peruse. He replied skeptically; a better response would be what he called “a written pushback, rather than reading the same books.” But how to competently push back without having read them all? Well, for me it’s too late anyway. Just to delve into the Judaica he’s explored would probably take me the rest of my life. But still, the last time I can remember feeling something like this was when I read Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil—the feeling that I had in my hands the key that would let me unlock all the treasures of a tremendously rich tradition: I was going to look up every musician Veloso mentioned and, thanks to the magic of the internet, gain an encyclopedic understanding of música popular brasileira. Well, that didn’t get far—I’m too easily distracted. But it’s wonderful knowing that I still could go there from one moment to the next. Rudolf, who recurrently bemoans his status as what he calls “a professional sidetracker,” is probably also rather distractable, but his remarkable range of references finally ends up seeming to map a sort of country of his own—call it Rudolfia, perhaps. Saul Steinberg would be the one to draw its map. And I don’t think it’s false or even real modesty that led him to dismiss the idea that someone might follow the course of his reading but rather his deeper sense of doubt about whether the books he’s loved have been “the royal road to lucidity…or a bunch of by-ways to protect me from reality.” Maybe both? Anyway, that’s always my question too. But maybe less so when it comes to poetry. “I bought or acquired or kept poetry books in order to stay warm,” he writes, which makes it sound like poetry is one of those biblical bushes that burns but is never consumed. Books bring joy but also melancholy. On Dürer’s Melencolia I, “the best engraving ever, according to Paula [Rego, his companion], who has a reproduction of it on her mantelpiece,” he cites Günter Grass: “Dürer’s melancholy ‘grew from knowledge and understands itself.’” Rudolf understands a lot too but spins a fine and subtle thread of self-deprecation, saying, with an old friend in mind: “I would have found me a pain had I been him, but I wasn’t him, so that wasn’t my problem; except it was.”
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Anthony Rudolf, Silent Conversations: A Reader’s Life, is published by Seagull Books, London, New York, and Calcutta, 2013.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.