The Most Durable Books

The question of what books one would take with one for a prolonged sojourn on a desert island is an old one. I thought it had lost its interest for me, as too remote. For I do not propose to live on a desert island; and if ever, by accident, I am cast upon the shore of one, clinging to a solitary plank, it is unlikely that I shall have spent the last hour on shipboard selecting mental food for a highly problematical future as a hermit. But a letter from a distressed man in the trenches revives my interest in the question. He complains that he very rapidly exhausts the books that are sent him; that few of them are much use as permanent companions; and that, as they take up room, he can carry only a small bundle of them about with him. He cannot make up his mind which ones to get and stick to; and he ends by putting the ancient poser to me: “What three” (it is always three) “books would you rather have with you if you had to live on a desert island?” He adds, with somewhat unnecessary bluntness, that he will not believe me if I say that one of them would be the Bible.

I suppose there must be some definition of what a book—what one book—is. Otherwise one’s first impulse is to demand, as the companions of solitude, the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Dictionary of National Biography, and the Oxford English Dictionary—say some hundred and twenty volumes in all. With these one could spend a fairly long life in retreat without ever reading the same page twice. One might even read with a definite scheme which would give one the semblance of systematic inquiry united with a happy unexpectedness of route. Suppose, for example, one were to start each day from something one had seen in the morning. A boa-constrictor, for instance. Having twisted its neck and left it for dead—castaways are very powerful fellows—one would go home to the old hut and refer to Boa in the Encyclopædia. Having learnt all about its anatomy, progenitiveness, and habitats, one would then refer to the Oxford Dictionary for the derivation of its name. Underneath the philological discourse would be quotations from authors who had referred to the beast or to its feathery similitude. The swift advent of the tropic night would find one still immersed in the D.N.B. lives of these authors. On a large rock outside one would keep, with a charred stick, a list of the objects already dealt with; once in a way perhaps, for sentiment’s sake, one would start from an old word again and revive memories of the Boa Trail. A person of simple tastes, granted the island produced enough goats and not too many constrictors, might well spend in this way a life as contented as Horace’s. But to select those three books would be cheating.

One might fairly suggest, in such a connexion, that a book is either (1) any single coherent work by one author, or two in collaboration; or (2) any series of works which either has been, or might reasonably be expected to be, published in a single volume. The edition for island use would not, however, necessarily be a one-volume edition. This rules out these distended works of reference, whilst letting in every single piece of creative literature that exists. There may seem to be an unfair discrimination between author and author, the poets, especially, as a body, being at a great advantage over the novelists; but if novelists will be so verbose they must suffer for it. What, then, would one’s three books be?

I can think of a good many books that I have not read and that I hope to enjoy reading. There is The Life of John Buncle, there is Old Mortality, there is Hard Times, there is Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, there is Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity—and I am imperfectly acquainted with the works of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. (I have also not read Ordeal by Battle, and I don’t intend to.) But the mere fact that one has not read a work which one knows to be interesting is not enough to qualify it. It would be enough if one were proposing to be marooned for a fortnight or three weeks and then taken off the island by “willing hands”; but the books one wants for a residence of many years are books one is sufficiently familiar with to be certain that they will not grow stale at the fifty-fifth reading.

Well, Gibbon is a large and a very long book. I have been through it once, and I am pretty sure I shall do so again. But after that I suspect that the passages with pencil-marks beside them will satisfy me. I certainly could not, just after finishing it, recommence it at once, as Lord Randolph Churchill used to do, or make a practice of dipping into it daily. Great as it is, it is not sufficiently varied or sufficiently human. For perpetual reference no general history, I think, would do; one must have something more of the flavour of everyday humanity in it. And every mood and every kind of character must be represented. Though the books may supplement one another, one finds one’s choice growing at once very narrow. Even Horace Walpole’s Letters or Saint-Simon’s Memoirs would pall—at any rate on me. Shakespeare will do; but I cannot personally think of anything which, for me, would contest the other places with Boswell and Rabelais, unless it were Morte d’Arthur.

There are people, no doubt, who would take Don Quixote or Montaigne. One man I know thinks that Tristram Shandy would go with him. But Sterne is too short; one would get to know him by heart in a month or two. Robinson Crusoe would have obvious advantages, especially in an illustrated edition—which would provide one with useful models when one was cutting out one’s garments. But I think I should take the three I have mentioned—unless, indeed, I approached the matter from quite a different angle. There is a strong case for taking a selection of the more morose and bewildered modern novels—say La Curée, Le Paradis des Dames, and L’Assommoir, or a judicious selection from Artzybascheff, Mr. Cannan, and Mr. D. H. Lawrence. For these would do a great deal to reconcile one to one’s lonely lot. Whenever one was regretting the world of men one would find an everflowing spring of consolation in them. “After all,” one would say, after each agued page, “there is a good deal to be said for a desert island.”