Landscape of the Mind

ONE YEAR'S READING FOR FUN (166 pp.)--Bernard Berenson--Knopf ($5).

The late Bernard Berenson called World War II a "manquake" and calmly retired to his book-lined storm cellar--the 50,000-volume library he had amassed 'at his famed Tuscan villa, / Tatti, near Florence. This took a certain amount of fatalism in wartime Italy, Nazi Germany's ally, since Berenson was born a Jew (he was converted to Roman Catholicism), and his only safety lay in a promise from Mussolini's son-in-law, Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, that he would not be molested. The master pundit of Renaissance art, his ailing wife Mary (who died in 1945), and his secretary-companion, read singly or aloud to one another in a kind of gentle latter-day counterpart of the plague-quarantined knights and ladies of Boccaccio.

One Year's Reading contains the jottings that "B.B.," then 77, made at the end of every long day over a twelvemonth span. It depicts a landscape of the mind rather like that of B.B.'s villa. There is an interior fire of intellectual curiosity; there are well-kept gardens of esthetic hedonism and horizonal vistas of man's culture and fate. Fully as attractive as the book's observations is the afterimage it leaves of the civilized use of enforced leisure, the serene play of the mind amid 20th century bustle and terror.

Six Languages. Reading for Fun is an archly deceptive title. B.B.'s idea of literary fun was both rarefied and formidable. It ranged over more than half a dozen languages (German, French, Italian, English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin) and considerably more centuries. There was no pattern to his year's reading, but B.B. had a mind in which even fragments became touchstones of his aristocratic, rational, classicist temper. Sample reflections: P:"I have always instinctively dreaded mysticism (although fascinated by it) as endangering the light of reason--a poor light, nearly always smoking, and often stinking, but yet all we have to let us go forward a few feet in a century." P:I "Ahab [of Moby Dick] is only a rebel, not a Prometheus but rather like many a hero of early German sagas . . . capable of bursting asunder out of rage, and of playing the Samson unprovoked." P: "The German [scholar] insists, like so many children with their toys and first watches, on smashing the subject he is treating to see how it works." P:"The overworked, driven person or class is seldom creative, while leisure, even wasteful leisure, may end creatively." P: "Goethe owed much to his not being afraid of uttering commonplaces, and of being prolix and even dull ... Is ponderosity, then, something that impresses and inspires respect even when we carry away from it boredom and confusion?" P: "Athens too had its folks who had gramophones beside them, or jazz, or bridge to keep talk away. But in our time the dread of conversation has invaded classes higher than in Athens." P:"To me it seems puerile to regard anything as ugly except in the sense that it is lifeless."

Nothing in Reading for Fun is lifeless, though some of Berenson's entries are highly esoteric, and his scorn of modern literature very nearly amounts to a total eclipse of what was around him. He thought the works of T. S. Eliot, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Faulkner and Hemingway largely rubbish. But even Aladdin had only one lamp, and Bernard Berenson had burnished his insights too long over the magnificence of Renaissance Italy to find the modern age other than trifling and tawdry. At book's end he seems to step back into a quattrocento painting like a visitor returning to "a fairer world, where lovely people were taking part in a gracious ceremony, while beyond them stretched harmonious distances line on line to the horizon's edge."

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