Song of Solomon

Admiring Greatness

I HAD A FRIEND who read more voraciously than anyone I’ve ever met, not just after he retired but throughout his entire life. He had been a playwright and a college professor, and he loved books passionately. But he was also one of the most vigorous and adventuresome people I’ve ever known, with a life that took him from service in naval intelligence in Morocco and Europe during World War II to travels all over the world. He was a strong swimmer, who loved the water. He was classically handsome, wickedly funny, charmingly contrarian, and profoundly smart, though he wore that quality so lightly he made everyone around him feel smart as well. He was my whole family’s best friend and had friends of all ages and backgrounds. Right up to his very last days, he maintained a voluminous correspondence with dozens of people around the world, a never-ending stream of postcards and letters. He also kept a typed diary, from his teens until he died. And he took and saved thousands of photographs.

Throughout the first half century or so of his life, my friend amassed a great collection of books, many thousands of volumes. But when he reached the age of about seventy, he began to sell or give away almost all his books. And as he began to approach eighty, he decided that he would henceforth keep exactly one hundred books. For many people, that’s still a lot of books. But to a lifelong book lover and retired professor, that’s hardly any at all. To keep his collection this small, he devised a rule for himself: he could keep a book he had recently read only if he gave one of his hundred away.

This friend died in his early eighties, shortly after suffering a stroke. The one hundred volumes he left behind gave those of us who loved him a remarkable portrait of his life: an autobiography composed not of sentences but of books. Because he loved to travel, works by Isabella Bird, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, and Jan Morris were on his shelf. Because he loved Morocco, books by Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, and Mohamed Mrabet were there, too. He was a scholar of George Bernard Shaw. So he had cheated a bit: the six-volume Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces was allowed to count as one book among the hundred. And there were also books of photography, including Diane Arbus: Revelations.

Many of the books were fairly eccentric—not what the world generally regards as great works, but ones that held meaning for my friend. A love for martinis required that he keep several books on the history of that classic cocktail. A lifelong obsession with the French Foreign Legion meant that a first edition of the 1924 novel Beau Geste by P. C. Wren remained one of his treasured volumes. Not many other novels survived on the shelves, but among the few that did was Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

I remember talking with him over the years about Song of Solomon, at first when I was studying it in college. He had read it a few years before that, soon after it was published in 1977.

Song of Solomon was Morrison’s third novel. In 1993, after her sixth, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation from the Swedish Academy read: Awarded to Toni Morrison, “who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate of the United States, described Morrison in a 2015 speech before the National Book Critics Circle as “not only a prose virtuoso but also a master of poetic sensibilities and lyrical language: Her influence on discourse, idiom and the vernacular has transformed our perception of the intricate paths to the interior consciousness.”

I envy anyone who has yet to read Song of Solomon. I will never forget my first reading of it, the growing tightness in my chest and throat, page after page.

At the heart of this novel is the migration of a character named Milkman Dead from north to south, the opposite of the twentieth century’s “Great Migration” of African Americans from the rural south to the cities of the north. And images of flight are present throughout—flight as escape from peril, and as a symbol of freedom; flight by foot and through the air. Song of Solomon is a novel of characters in motion.

Rereading the novel, I noticed something that had barely registered in my prior readings, and that is the role that a particular book plays in the life of Pilate, Milkman’s aunt. One of the unusual things about Pilate is that she has no navel, for which she is often shunned, forcing her to leave one place after another. She travels with almost nothing: just some rocks, a spool of thread, and one book—a geography book—that not only accompanies her but guides her.

But even when not forced to leave, she grows restless and feels compelled to move along, from one place to another: “It was as if her geography book had marked her to roam the country, planting her feet in each pink, yellow, blue or green state.”

Just one book, opening up the world.

Remembering my friend and his one hundred books got me thinking about what books would make the cut should I ever decide to limit my own library in the same way. Even if I could have only ten books, Song of Solomon would be among them. It was at the top of the list I recommended to that West Point cadet on our turbulent flight to Las Vegas.

The apartment my husband and I share is stuffed with books. We both collect books. Everywhere. Every table is a bookshelf. The floor is also a bookshelf. To walk from one place to another requires navigating between piles of books stacked precariously, one on top of another, without regard to shape or size.

Whenever I knock over a stack, the thought of the zero-sum bookshelf becomes especially appealing.

But it’s not just for reasons of space. (I also sometimes read books on an e-reader, and there is certainly no reason to delete any book from my library there.) There’s something challenging—in a good way—about trying to compose your own one-hundred-book library. It forces you to figure what matters to you most. I love the British radio program Desert Island Discs, where the guest has to explain what eight records she or he would take to a desert island. Choosing your one-hundred-book library is like Desert Island Discs on steroids, with books in place of albums.

I love my odd, eccentric books, just as my friend loved his. They are part of who I am, and many of them have earned a permanent place on my shelf—even if I later decide that shelf can contain only one hundred volumes. And I like my mediocre pleasures, too—modest books that I will pass along once I’m done so someone else can enjoy them, too.

But when I look over at my copy of Song of Solomon (which sits on a proper shelf, not on the floor), I remember what it feels like to read something truly great, which often inspires me to search for books that can hold a place beside it.