Literary Profiling

The Perils of Literary Profiling
By GEOFF NICHOLSON
Published: January 28, 2011

It’s probably time to update the list on my Facebook profile for the books I “like.” If you think that “liking” a book is a fairly nebulous and meaningless concept, you’ll get no argument from me. I made the list a couple of years back and jotted down the first few titles that came into my head (“Gravity’s Rainbow,” “The Big Sleep,” “More Pricks Than Kicks” and “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” if you must know). They weren’t selected entirely at random — they’re all books I think are great — but I didn’t spend much time pondering the selection, and on another day I might well have chosen four completely different titles.

Looking at the list now, however, I can see that it contains elements of the pretentious littérateur and the moody loner, both of which are obviously to be avoided. And if the horror of the Arizona shooting has taught us anything, it’s that some place a high value on what can be gleaned from a man’s reading habits, whether actual or simply professed. I have no idea if Jared Lee Loughner was really a great reader of Plato, Lewis Carroll, “The Will to Power” or “The Communist Manifesto,” as he claimed, but he wanted the world to think he was. And perhaps you really can judge a man by the books he displays on his bookshelf (or keeps on his Kindle).

In which case I pray that no F.B.I. agent, criminal profiler or (worst of all) news pundit ever gets a look at my bookshelves. There, alongside Swift, Plato, Lewis Carroll and Marx, you’d find the Marquis de Sade, Mickey Spillane, Hitler and Ann Coulter. Books are acquired for all kinds of reasons, including curiosity, irony, guilty pleasure and the desire to understand the enemy (not to mention free review copies), but you try telling that to a G-man. It seems perfectly obvious to me that owning a copy of “Mein Kampf” doesn’t mean you’re a Nazi, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Thanks to Timothy W. Ryback’s “Hitler’s Private Library,” we now know that Hitler read “Don Quixote,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” and considered them “among the great works of world literature,” in Ryback’s words. This is problematic enough, since a taste for great literature is supposed to make us more humane and empathetic, isn’t it? But then Ryback tells us that Hitler had “mastered” the writings of Karl May, an ultraprolific German author of cowboy novels featuring the characters Old Surehand and Old Shatterhand. Hitler’s fondness for tales of the Old West may mean something, but if you’re trying to understand Hitler there are more obvious places to start.

Reading habits would seem to be relevant enough to someone’s biography, especially if that person is a writer. In his study “Built of Books,” Thomas Wright attempts to reconstruct the contents of Oscar Wilde’s library, which was dispersed and auctioned off between his imprisonment and trial. It’s worth knowing (though hardly surprising) that Wilde read the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, Hegel and some French pornography, but difficulties arise when Wright tries, in a self-described moment of “quixotic madness,” to make the book a partial autobiography, in the belief that if he read everything Wilde had read, Wilde would become a “Socratic mentor, who would help me give birth to a new self.”

Forging a deep link between criminals and their books can be even more quixotic. Ed Sanders, in “The Family,” tells us that one of Charles Manson’s favorite books was Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” but we’re also told that Manson was barely literate. Both John Hinckley Jr. (Reagan’s would-be assassin) and Mark David Chapman (the murderer of John Lennon) have been connected to “The Catcher in the Rye,” Hinckley by having a copy in his hotel room, Chapman by calmly reading the book outside the Dakota apartment building while waiting for the police to arrive after he shot Lennon. But it’s hardly surprising that a book that has sold well over 35 million copies has occasionally fallen into the hands of criminals.

The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham got things about as wrong as can be when he argued, in “Seduction of the Innocent” (1954), that the fact that prisoners and juvenile delinquents read “crime comics” meant that comics were causing, or at least stoking, their criminal tendencies. Current evidence suggests that if criminals read at all — and let’s not forget how many prisoners are functionally illiterate — then they read much the same books as the rest of us, business and self-help books included. This, anyway, was the conclusion reached by Glennor Shirley, who in 2003 conducted a survey of prison librarians for the American Library Association and learned that prisoners’ favorite writers included Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Danielle Steel and “all authors of westerns.” Admittedly, she is referring to their reading habits in prison rather than outside. (Here I might add that when I learned one of my short stories had appeared in an anthology used in a prison literacy program, I was relieved to know I was part of the solution, not part of the problem.)

The self-help nature of some prison reading can be disturbing. Scandal arose in Britain two years ago when it was revealed that prisoners were being allowed to read “inappropriate” books, including the memoirs of other, more successful criminals, stories of prison escapes and, inevitably, “Mein Kampf.” (More cheeringly, Avi Steinberg, the author of the recent memoir “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” reports a vogue for Anne Frank’s diary among some female prisoners he worked with.)

For my part, I can say that the presence of Mickey Spillane’s books on my shelves hasn’t persuaded me that I need to start packing heat, nor has ownership of an Ann Coulter volume moved me to denounce Arabs. Such explorations of the dark side notwithstanding, most of us read books that reinforce the opinions and tendencies we already have. And yet and yet . . . the fact is, books really do have the power to influence and change people. That’s why some of us like them so much. A generation of European students (not to mention Russian revolutionaries) read “The Communist Manifesto” and thought it made a great deal of sense. Right now somebody is reading Jack Kerouac and deciding to go on the road, or reading William Burroughs and thinking it might be a lark to become a gentleman junkie.

So, if you actually did examine my bookshelves you could probably reach some reasonably accurate conclusions about my age, class, nationality, sexuality and so on. You would see that I’m not some dangerous, volatile, politically extreme nut job. Rather, you would decide that I’m a bookish, cosmopolitan sophisticate, with broad, quirky and unpredictable interests, a taste for literary experimentation, a sense of history, a serious man with a sense of humor and a wide range of sympathies. At any rate, that’s what I’d like you to think.