Reflections
The bibliophiles we love to read about
You cannot resist getting your hands on this book, provided of course that you come by it. That Adolf Hitler was a great reader, that his private library was stocked with 16,000 volumes, is what Timothy Ryback tells you in his pretty gripping work, Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life. Which makes you wonder. Did those books --- and they were so many --- really shape the Fuhrer's mind? It all depends on how you rate his reading or how you trace his passage through his books. There were the works he admired, such as Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. And he did that because it put Shylock in a bad light. And Shylock, you will remember, was a Jew. Anything that spoke to Hitler of the dark sides of the Jewish personality appealed to him. He was upset that Goethe and other German writers focused on mid-life crises and the like and so came nowhere near the English bard in their comprehension of life as it was lived and as it was portrayed in literature. 'I shall see thee at Philippi', hissed Hitler at anyone who did not agree with him. And those were the days of the Third Reich. Men notorious for their cruelty to other men generally do not read, or so you think. Dwell on Joseph Stalin. His reading was prodigious. And he had a fascinating ability to retain what he read. He was as much at ease in rushing through the books on his table as he was in disposing of his enemies during the purges of the 1930s. In the long nights he spent carousing with his fellow communists at the Kremlin, before the atmosphere turned grim with the purges and the sending off of enemies into exile, he quoted with facility from the literature of Europe. Not many of us know of these realities, but if you read Simon Sebag Montefiore's excellent biography of Stalin, you will be in for a pleasant surprise. You might wish to know how a man who happened to be a voracious reader could also turn out to be a habitual tyrant. Ah, but there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Beyond Hitler and Stalin, there is a bigger and more incontrovertible truth which sprouts from the innards of the earth. It is that communists happen to be the most dedicated of readers, not just of Marx and Engels and Lenin but of diverse authors around the globe as well. Among such communists in search of knowledge you can cite the suave Chou En-lai, whose reading of world history and philosophy left pretentious men amazed and, in some cases, angry. Did John Foster Dulles, when he refused to shake Chou's hand in 1954, have any idea that the Chinese was far above him in his understanding of politics and everything else that mattered in life? And it was not merely Chou whose grasp of men and matters came from a studious observation of the printed word. There is Mao Tse-tung, who by the time he completed his Long March in the 1930s, had educated himself in history, philosophy and literature to an extent that would have shamed his enemies. The universally accepted truth is that men who identify themselves with leftist causes are the ones whose collection of books and capacity for reading are immense. Francois Mitterrand was, apart from being a leading politician in France, a scholar in as much as Andre Malraux was in the era of General Charles de Gaulle. And note that de Gaulle (and he was no leftist) too was an avid reader, the proof of which came through his parleys with visiting global readers. In 1969, as Richard Nixon ventured into a long monologue over the causes and effects of the Second World War at the Elysee, the Frenchman stopped him with these words: 'Mr. President, in the Second World War, all the nations of Europe lost. Two were defeated.' America's new president was rendered speechless in admiration. Scores of politicians in Africa pursued the scholarly even as they turned politics into a profession. Senegal's Leopold Sedar Senghor remains emblematic of the intellectualism which defined much of colonial Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Beyond him, there were the others. Uganda's Milton Obote loved poetry; and he was an unabashed admirer of John Milton. Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, an anthropologist by profession, never failed to read books despite the ferocity of his struggle against British rule. Tanzania's founding father Julius Nyerere, revered as mwalimu (the teacher) by his countrymen, read voraciously. His translations of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Kiswahili are even today a point of reference in any study of Africa's approach to foreign language literature. Robert Mugabe devoured books as a child, a habit which was never to leave him. His politics these days may irritate a whole lot of people, but there can be little question about his belief that reading maketh a full man. The hapless Patrice Lumumba, murdered through a conspiracy of the CIA, the Belgians and Moise Tshombe in 1961, was a self-made man catapulted into historical prominence by his long struggle, substantiated of course by his vast range of reading. Let your mind dwell on the ayatollahs who were to force an end to the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran in 1979. They are all men steeped in the knowledge of literature, philosophy and Islamic jurisprudence. When you consider that the Shah was a moron when it came to an acquisition of knowledge, you cannot but feel uplifted that Iran found freedom through the arrival of men like Khomeini, Shariatmadari and Montazeri. Books have been their companions, as they have been of Fidel Castro and Jyoti Basu and Tajuddin Ahmed. India's Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan lived among books; and Jawaharlal Nehru was to earn in his lifetime the reputation of being an eclectic reader. India's first prime minister did not read at random. He gathered books, sifted them and then went into his reading. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, despite his long stay in jail and for all his ceaseless political struggles, was at peace in his personal library. His favourite writers were George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, during his trips abroad as a leading Pakistani politician, did not miss browsing in the bookshops and coming away with enviable buys. Bill Clinton is reputed to read as many as five books at one time. And judging by the oratorical skills of Barack Obama, you can convince yourself that he is a remarkable bibliophile. The same was true of Abraham Lincoln, who would do anything short of committing murder in order to find a book to read. The newly dead Michael Foot was the quintessential reader. His obsession with books was greater than his obsession with himself. Hair dishevelled, eyes gleaming, he was the scholar-politician that people loved to hear but would not dream of placing in power. Outside the world of politics and in that of the cinema, Richard Burton made sure that a bagful of books always accompanied him to his shooting locations. The breaks between the spells of shooting were spent in an intensity of reading. The Indian Aamir Khan, perhaps the most versatile actor in his country today, falls in the Burton mould: he loves to read and never tires of it. And there we have it, this penchant for reading. Books, said Henry Ward Beecher long ago, are not made for furniture. But there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. Think of the shelves, creaking with the weight of books, that must have spurred the enlightenment on in the lives of the men now lost to time.
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