'The Sign of Memory and the Sign of Ecstasy'

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023): “[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experience that might be called ‘pre-reading,’ when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.” Brombert’s example in his own reading life is Baudelaire. As a boy growing up in Paris, attending the lycée, he walked the city streets as an unknowing flâneur, predisposing himself to loving the great poet long before embracing the author of Les Fleur du Mal. I understand the process but in my case it was less linear and immediate, more halting and delayed. I shed various bookish enthusiasms along the way before settling on the “receptivity” to the writers who possesses me today. With the passing of adolescence I adopted some of the American realists, of varying talents and readability – Dreiser, Sinclair, Dos Passos, Farrell, Anderson, even Steinbeck. That didn’t last…