OF THE hero of his novel, One Fat Englishman, a publisher and hence a man dedicated to the advancement of literature, Kingsley Amis says at one point: ‘If there was one thing which Roger never felt like, it was a good read.’ Any novelist can get away with anything, provided he sticks it in the mind or mouth of a character, but it requires courage for an English university don to say, as John Gross says in his recent book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, that he ‘can understand the point of view of the character,’ meaning that there isn’t, after all, an ungainsayable virtue in stocking your house with the best ever thought and said and sticking in every evening to drink it down.
A good read doesn’t, I take it, mean a session with the current Life or Playboy or Portnoy’s Complaint or Goldfinger or whatever Mr Mailer is going to write about the first men on the moon (although this, perhaps, already trembles on the verge of being a good read. Read on. This article incidentally is not a good read). A good read means something written in an age when there was nothing to do with your spare time except have a good read. It means Middlemarch, The Virginians, Moby-Dick, Under Western Eyes, Proust’s monster, The Golden Bowl.
It also means anything produced in a later age (an age in which it was, is, possible to do something in your spare time except have a good read) which pretends that there is nothing to do with your spare time except have a good read. This means the overfacing water-ices of Sir Hugh Walpole, Anthony Adverse, Giles Goat-Boy, Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale, A Glastonbury Romance. The archetypal good read is War and Peace.
Good reads are not much concerned with the watchmaker’s art, Fabergé delicacy, the chiselling of sentences or week-long waiting for the mot juste. Salammbô is no more a good read than The Waste Land. The true good read is good for you: it has a lot of uplift. It also has a lot of highly visual cameos and scenic description. The uplift is a substitute for the cinema.
Whatever they say in literature classes, if the cinema, complete with Panavision and stereophonic sound, had been going strong in, say, 1837, there would have been no need for all those good reads which we have inherited from the age of gaslight and the family circle, when a good read followed a good feed. ‘Where did I leave off last night, my dears?’ – ‘At where Mr Poddydodge is hauled up from the well and then goes off in a diligence.’ – ‘Ah, yes. Here we are. “Notwithstanding the indisputable and verifiable fact that our good friend Mr Septimus Augustus Poddydodge, master of arts and justice of the peace in the county of Suffolk, possessed, in addition to a very considerable unresilience of character, a quite remarkable endowment of avoirdupois, to which his recent prolonged bever had not insensibly made addition…”’ – ‘Hahaha, papa.’
We don’t really want to go through all that again, any more than we want to rebuild Crystal Palace. Is it not better to sit in an air-conditioned cinema, seeing the polychrome titles come up on a very wide screen? Or look at the commercials on television – those subtle dissolves, that skilful animation – knowing that, all in colour too, at least five full-length features will be available to come between us and sleep, or, at about 4 A.M., merge with sleep to generate a new art-form? That we’re no longer capable of a good read isn’t really decadence; it’s rather that those who were capable of nothing else were unlucky enough not to be in the position to be accused of decadence. Blacksmith’s muscles were a fine thing when there was a need of blacksmiths. Nowadays they would be a load of useless luggage.
I will go some way with McLuhan, though not all the way. The electronic eye has made some literature supererogatory, but not all. It has rendered needless the kind of literature that has come into its own as film or the television serial. A lot of Dickens was trying to be cinema, but unfortunately cinema hadn’t yet been invented. Having seen 24 instalments on BBC TV of The Idiot, Martin Chuzzlewit and Portrait of a Lady, and about 48 instalments of The Forsyte Saga, I feel absolved from taking the originals down from the shelf.
Madame Bovary, also serialised, is different. I like the plot and the characters, but I’m much too interested in the words to let the book be totally crushed up by the cameras. If it were proposed that The Waste Land be televised (it was made into a radio drama – BBC North Region, 1936), then The Waste Land, which is primarily words, would still have to be read. I dreamed a fortnight ago, in the throes of chicken pox, of a film of Ezra Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.’ I said ‘Nonsense!’ in my sleep: I’d better add ‘Nonsense!’ awake too. Because it’s just about technically possible to make a film script for ‘Mauberley’ and leave out everything that Pound wrote.
One aspect of the book that is a good read is dilution, an easy-going jogtrot spurning of the condensed and the concentrated in favour of the repetitious, the periphrastic, the watering-to-taste with a faucet-filling of good old moral truths or appeals to good old sentiment. I espy an anomaly coming up: is not such reading appropriate to an age like ours, which likes its entertainment highly coloured and glamorous but is not too happy about verbal-cerebral engagement along the lines of Finnegans Wake or the poems of William Empson? And is not the alternative (Joyce and Eliot and Pound and so on) something that I (this present writer) wish to integrate into the electronic age merely because I like it? Is not this bookish man speaking, who would like a good read really but is too lazy to get down to it? Would not a man more honest and less verbally prejudiced admit that literature as a big popular force is done for, and that the future lies with a kind of hyper-McLuhanism, led by a man who has not, like ordinary living McLuhan, already read all the books there are and now feels like it’s safe to sit down before the box, which used to be called the idiot’s lantern? Reply, reply.
My answer is that books must go on being published, for the simple reason that there are people who want to write books. As the old good reads are now gutted to feed the visual media, I would suggest another kind of gutting, or reinterpretation, appropriate to the more literary literature. As publishers have readers, so readers might have readers too (on the analogy of the Vicar’s Warden and the People’s Warden in the Church of England). America has many universities and, as fewer and fewer classes are held in them, the calls of the armoury not giving time, so more and more of the faculty might get down to what there is already a certain amount of, though not quite enough – I mean criticism. The new books of difficult merit will be read, appraised, and be encountered by the successors of today’s serious readers only in the form of critical studies. The critical work will be a substitute for the subject – more than substitute really, since it will contain the subject and more.
There are many of us who know certain authors only through Edmund Wilson’s writing about them. He summarises them so well, analyzes them so penetratingly, and lists their qualities so clearly that to go to the original would somehow spoil things. The thrill we get from good criticism is incomparably greater than anything we could obtain from the work itself. ‘In his later novels Mr Siblegeru becomes increasingly obsessed with the problem of securing maximal tension between form and subject. The first chapter (or the last, depending on which way the reader looks at it) of Breaks From Thee Then a Billion is a devotional sonnet sequence cunningly disguised as prose (the final sonnet, in the manner of Milton’s ‘Tetrachordon’ piece, codas added to the sestet). Knowing Siblegeru’s aims, we begin looking for a complicated incest motif, and we soon discover that we are witnessing a morning scene in Jack Bickerstaff’s apartment, or rather bed, with his mother, sister and father engaged in certain characteristic mudras…’ Having read that, it would be disappointing to go to the novel itself. I myself might, still being inclined to literature: but by the time the Criticism becomes the Thing Criticised we shall have wide-screen stereophonic television sets; and good literature, for all I care, can go the way of the good read.
New York Times, 15 June 1969