An Interview with Stephen Carter
LEAH PRICE: How far back does your collection stretch? When were the first books that you still own acquired? At what age did you start buying books? Which ones have you kept, and shed, as you moved?
STEPHEN CARTER: In the beginning, I bought comic books. The first books that I made any effort to collect were the Tom Swift books. This would have been in the early and mid-sixties, when I was still in grade school. Although they are now mostly boxed away, I still own nearly every book I ever bought for a high school, college, or law school course, apart from a few science and mathematics texts that I sold during my undergraduate years. I find myself constitutionally unable to part with a book. My office at Yale is heaped with books. So is our basement at home. Several boxes of old paperbacks molder in our garage.
At what phases of your existence has reading books, and owning books, been most important to you? Have there been periods of your life when you stopped reading?
When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I took down from my father’s bookshelf a copy of Nietzsche’s Man and Superman. No doubt I hoped for adventures of a comic book hero. I could not understand a word of the text, of course, but I have a sharp memory of deciding, at that instant, that I would someday understand such books.
Could you say something about the books you selected for our top ten?
Bryce, Modern Democracies (two volumes, first edition, 1921). It is our habit to treat Alexis de Tocque ville as the great European observer of America, but Bryce is far more penetrating.
Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I go back and reread this epistolary novel at least every other year, and each time I learn something new—about morality, or about writing, or about faith.
Hogben, Mathematics for the Million (1940 revised edition). One of the volumes I loved taking down from my father’s shelves. What is truly remarkable about the book is that although it was written to popularize mathematics, it was published before the age of dumbing-down, with the result that Hogben covers a number of quite sophisticated mathematical techniques. The book is not easy going, but so what? There was a time when lots of people would have struggled through it anyway. Today’s popular works on similar subjects are often designed to spoon-feed people, worried, no doubt, about the modern attention span. Ugh!
Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (four volumes, 1939). Another book I learned from my father to love. I used to take down his set of Sandburg and leaf through it at random.
The Holy Bible. The one on my shelf is a rather worn King James Version. In a case at my office at Yale are some even older copies. I am by no means a formal Bible collector. I am a Bible reader.
Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. I read this book for a seminar back in college. To this day, I have yet to encounter a better statement of the many ways in which ideological commitment puts at risk the entire project of the Enlightenment—and therefore of liberal democracy.
The Book of Common Prayer (1928 version). Episcopal churches today are not permitted to use the 1928 prayer book, except by special permission of the bishop, but the modern versions are so watery that they have hardly any theological content.
Bonhoeffer, Ethics. The book that remained unfinished when he died in a Nazi camp.
Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. The title essay to this volume argues that we must leave time in our busy lives for doing nothing—not reading, or painting, or Facebooking, but doing nothing—letting our minds wander—or we will never be able to understand clearly what we ourselves think.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Oxford Press edition, 1938). What can I say?
How do you arrange, or attempt to arrange, your books? How do you know how to find them on the shelf, if indeed you do know? (Alphabetical order, subject, size, chance …?) Does this resemble the way you arrange (or don’t) your other possessions?
My books are not, for the most part, arranged. The Lincoln books are together on a couple of shelves, as are the chess books. (I also have several chess shelves in the basement, and another at my office.) But everything else has been shoved where it could fit. It does not bother me that I might have trouble finding a particular book. How dull to have everything at one’s fingertips! To never be surprised, to never say to yourself, “I had forgotten I even owned a copy of this!”
Do you use an e-reader (Kindle, iPad, et cetera)? Do you read books on your phone?
No Kindle. No iPad. No phone smart enough for books.
I would like to add a small story.
I learned to read at an early age—much earlier, my mother always said, than most children would. But for many years, what I read was, quite simply, junk. Comic books when I was small, science fiction when I reached my teens. Then, when I was in tenth grade (at Ithaca High School), my English teacher, Mrs. Judith Dickey, took me aside and asked why I wasted my mind on the sort of books I read. Naturally, I took umbrage: who was she to say that her taste was superior to mine? Mrs. Dickey offered a challenge. She would read any three books I gave her if I would read any three books she gave me.
I agreed.
My life was changed. The books she gave me opened my mind to the simple realization that there is in the world such a thing as truly great literature; and that I would never discover it by mere hit-or-miss, or by reading only what interested me.
(By the way, when I tell this story, somebody always asks which books Mrs. Dickey assigned me. The terrible part is that I really have no idea. That was a good forty years ago, and although I remember quite clearly my response to the books, I cannot call to mind a single title.)
Carl Sandburg Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, vols. 1–4
Book of Common Prayer
William Shakespeare The Complete Works
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Ethics
Holy Bible (King James Version)
Karl Mannheim Ideology and Utopia
Bertrand Russell In Praise of Idleness
Lancelot Hogben Mathematics for the Million: How to Master the Magic of Numbers
Viscount Bryce Modern Democracies (in 2 vols.)
C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters
