John Floberg was my college classmate, my neurologist until he retired, and remains my long-time friend. John earned his way through college on a Navy ROTC scholarship and served as a Navy officer following our graduation. He returned to school following his Navy service and graduated from the University of Minnesota Medical School. Now retired and living in Ely, Minnesota, John lets me know whenever he returns to the Twin Cities so that we can get together and talk about subjects of mutual interest, our reading foremost among them. When I noticed a few years ago that John is always reading long, long books and multivolume historical works, I asked if he would write something for us on his reading of “doorstops.” John delivers in this characteristically thoughtful column:
By any measure, Julian Jackson’s biography of Charles de Gaulle is a doorstop of a book. Published in 2018, it runs to 777 pages of text, 91 pages of bibliography and notes, as well as photographs, text illustrations, maps, and a twelve-page introduction. What little I previously knew of de Gaulle was unflattering. I thought him arrogant, overly proud, nearly delusional, contemptuous and contemptible. On reading the biography, I found all these qualities documented. And yet I fell under his spell. It still rankles that when de Gaulle decided to quit NATO, all US forces had to be withdrawn from France. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, on instructions from President Johnson, asked de Gaulle: “Does that include American cemeteries?”
What are the physical characteristics of a “doorstop” book? By my lights, it should be at least 600 pages of text, not counting the preface, introduction, notes, and index. It is often something most people have heard of, like War and Peace or Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It should sit on shelves, partly, mostly, or completely unread.
It may be almost entirely unheard of or largely forgotten, like Bertram Wolfe’s A Life in Two Centuries (713 pages plus an afterword by Sidney Hook). He was an early member of the Communist Party, who argued with Stalin and left the Party before most American Communists even became active. Another example is The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (800 pages). Famous in its time, it is now forgotten, except by specialists in “the literature of exhaustion.”
It may be a book of which there is a vague awareness, such as Telford Taylor’s Munich: The Price of Peace (1004 pages). In painstaking detail the author, who succeeded Robert Jackson as the lead prosecutor of the Nazi war criminals in twelve trials before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals, outlines the background of interwar international relations and then the Hitler era, culminating in the Munich agreement.
Or it may be a book most people are aware of, but would never presume to take so seriously as to read more than a page or two. An example would be Bill Clinton’s autobiography My Life (957 pages). Given his record as Chief Executive of the USA, one would assume at least half of it is fictional.
These are all examples of doorstops. How is one to sort through all the possibilities and decide how to spend the limited resource of time reading? One reason doorstops are so long is that a good book has to provide the context for the drama. The author must be wary not to allow context to consume the narrative, but sufficient to explain the story.
A doorstop should open a world, hitherto either unknown or only dimly perceived. For example, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West appeared on the Modern Library’s “100 Best Non Fiction Books” of the 20th Century. My edition is the two volume Viking Compass issued in 1964, 1150 pages. To quote from the back cover:
This monumental work, an adventure through time as well as space, is the record of a pilgrimage made at the end of the 1930’s…through the country of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In thus depicting, on the largest possible scale, one corner of Europe and one segment of the earth’s population, Rebecca West brings to life the whole recorded history of Yugoslavia, from Roman times to the eve of the Nazi infiltration…
The book touches on all aspects of the subject: history, philosophy, art, literature, geography, religion. As with all such classic works, there is a link to the present that is palpable, though not directly stated in this case.
Whether or not to begin a doorstop touches on the questions of culture, personal taste, and time restraints. Joseph Epstein has described different types of “knowing” and his classification system could be adapted to the different kinds of doorstops. First is knowledge “about the Now…required to be au courant on everything in the news.” Second is knowing “about the Now and a fair amount about the Then.” Third is knowledge of the “with-it” by those who pride “themselves on knowing the Next Big Thing…the rest of us are still in the dark about.”
The first category would include Bill Clinton’s autobiography—superficial, largely made-up, mostly irrelevant. The third category would by The Sot-Weed Factor, imaginative, clever, but ultimately of interest to a narrow cognoscenti, and of doubtful long-term significance.
The second would include Munich or A Life in Two Centuries. These books describe events, put them in context, connect the Then and Now, and provide material for contemplation.
[Editor’s note: John includes no examples in the third category. In fiction, Tom Wolfe’s novels seem to me a good example. See Wolfe’s 1989 Harper’s essay — his literary manifesto for the new social novel — “Stalking the billion-footed beast.”]
Epstein also has a fourth category. His fourth category refers to the “cultured, who insofar as possible restrict themselves to knowing what is genuinely worth knowing.” This is where the doorstop lays down the gauntlet to the prospective reader insofar as it aspired to be a classic: timeless and accessible to all. It recalls Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.
So if the reader/watcher opens the door, how is he or she going to keep it open? A doorstop, naturally. And as for de Gaulle, he was heroic. But it took a doorstop to get me to that conclusion.
