To say you love literature would seem to be a prerequisite for life as a teacher and critic. But it’s also the case that when students, buffs, and fans profess that they love Shakespeare or they love Jane Austen—the two most frequently mentioned love objects, in my experience—the teacher often worries as much as she rejoices. Love is not a critical stance; it does not necessarily welcome interpretations, especially multiple interpretations. What Freud accurately called “the overestimation of the object”—the idea that the loved one is imbued with extra value, with superlatives, even with perfection, as a way of ensuring that the lover stays in love—is sometimes a way of avoiding analysis and critique rather than pursuing them.
Like many other people who teach and write about literature for a living (the biographer R. W. B. Lewis once memorably said to me that “teaching Shakespeare was taking money for jam”), I’ve often encountered undergraduate and graduate students who were concerned that literary criticism, literary analysis, and literary theory would take away their pleasure in reading rather than making it richer and fuller. Happily, that tends to be a brief moment rather than a lasting one, since the delights of literary immersion, whether through an examination of imagery, symbolism, prosody, rhetoric and syntax, historical context, and/or performance, tend almost always to produce new ways of loving familiar texts as well as encounters with new texts to love. Still, there are moments of evasion, avoidance, disavowal: “I don’t want to spoil it for myself.” But there is no cause for concern. Poems, plays, novels, critical essays, aphorisms—these are all vivid, vigorous, healthy, tough, resistant: they will survive. Dismembering them through analysis and interpretation is one of many ways of engaging with and remembering them. Works of literature are not soap bubbles or daylilies or meteors or mirages: they will last, indeed much longer than any reader or critic.
The idea of an “English major” is a fairly recent development, as institutional histories go, dating from the last decades of the nineteenth century. When he was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1850s, wrote Andrew Dickson White, later the cofounder and first president of Cornell University, “there was never a single lecture on any subject in literature, either ancient or modern … As regards the great field of modern literature, nothing whatever was done. In the English literature and language, every man was left to his own devices.”1 Frederick Barnard, who would later become president of Columbia College, reported that he gained what literary training he could, not in Yale’s courses, but in the literary societies.2 The novelist Henry James, who spent a brief time at Harvard Law School (but took no degree), said, “A student might read the literature of our own language privately, but it was not a subject of instruction … Professor [Francis James] Child provided an introduction to the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer. There, so far as English literature was to be considered, the College stopped.”3 Child was then the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; it was not until 1876 that he was appointed the first, and at that time the only, professor of English at Harvard. From 1834 to 1854, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres, where, in addition to teaching English, he supervised students in Italian, Spanish, French, and German, as well as offering, or being prepared to offer, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic.
When English was taught in the university, it was often in the form of historical surveys (“without reference, necessarily, to the texts of the classics themselves”4) or the study of philology and rhetoric. The first real courses in English were not offered at Harvard until 1872–73 (long after Henry James was a student), and even then two of the three courses were in Anglo-Saxon and in the history and grammar of the English language. Shakespeare, a popular subject for undergraduates, became a Harvard course in 1876, but even so, the reading and discussion of English poetry and of Shakespeare continued to be largely relegated either to family training at home (or through tutors) or to social clubs on college campuses. Love of literature, when it existed—as manifestly it did, since the period produced numerous writers and poets of distinction—was a personal pleasure, not an academic goal. Was literature useful—or useless? For Emerson, Longfellow, and Henry James, it was invaluable; they lived it and breathed it. Longfellow retired from teaching and devoted himself to writing once his income from publishing permitted him to do so. James decided he did not want to study law (and as we’ve seen, he couldn’t have studied English or literature in the sense we understand those fields today). Instead, he traveled in Europe, wrote fiction, and began to contribute to magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly.
In the novels of Jane Austen, both women and men read aloud for their own pleasure and for the pleasure of their listeners. In Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny Price is inclined to resist the too easy manner of Henry Crawford, but she has to acknowledge his skill as a performer when he takes up the “volume of Shakespeare” she herself had been reading aloud to entertain the indolent and demanding Lady Bertram:
[H]is reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. To good reading, however, she had been long used; her uncle read well—her cousins all—Edmund very well; but in Mr. Crawford’s reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. The King, the Queen, Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always light, at will, on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity or pride, or tenderness or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty.5
Even more striking is the way in which courtship is accomplished through reading aloud in the posthumously published Persuasion (1818), where the flighty Louisa Musgrove, confined to a sickbed because of an accident, is wooed, and won, by the widower Captain Benwick, described as “a clever man, a reading man,” who sits by her bed and reads her poetry. However dissimilar they might be, muses the heroine, Anne Elliot, they would become more alike over time. Louisa “would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry.”6
Reading aloud, taking books from the public library, participating in book clubs and reading groups—these were not only modes of self-improvement but also opportunities for pleasure and sometimes for romance. As they are still today. Oprah’s Book Club and thousands of individually organized book groups invite lovers of literature (or “lovers of books”) to participate in weekly or monthly discussions. Some of these groups read best sellers; others read classics or books chosen to reflect on a central theme. Special-topic areas, like African-American women’s reading groups and gay men’s reading groups, have formed, and are flourishing, around the country and the world. Lists of book-group favorites are posted, and authors of popular novels and self-help books periodically make themselves available to attend sessions. Dozens of Shakespeare reading groups advertise online and by personal invitation offering an opportunity to read the plays aloud. And many successful adult professionals, having made careers in fields like law, medicine, economics, and technology, return to extension and continuing education courses, in person or online, to pursue their interest in, and love of, literature.
The number of American college students graduating with B.A. degrees in English, which in 1950 was about 17,000, or 4 for every 100 bachelor’s degrees, increased in the next decade, peaking in 1971 (when there were more than 64,000 English graduates nationwide, or 7.66 per hundred total bachelor’s degrees). From that point it began to decline, with a minor uptick in the early nineties. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the percentages had returned to the level of fifty years previously, 4 in 100.7 (Meantime, other humanities fields were experiencing even more serious declines.) By 2006–7 the number had decreased further, to 3.62 of every 100 bachelor’s degrees.
A variety of reasons for this decline can be offered or guessed at, including the economy, information technology, the lure of lucrative careers in the financial sector, the great expansion of academic fields beyond the basic subject areas of midcentury, the national push for science education, and so on. Many English (and other modern literature) majors always planned to go on to law school or other kinds of professional training after college, but the old truism—that a degree in English made you seem literate and well grounded in general education—was gradually replaced by a new truism, that the English major was useless. It was only a short step to thinking that perhaps this made it somehow self-indulgent, whereas ambitious young students ought to be networking, laying the groundwork for a legitimate career, developing marketable skills—in short, thinking ahead. If they thought far enough ahead, they might envisage themselves enrolling in evening courses or cultural tour groups in an attempt to get back in touch with their interests in literature.
It’s always been difficult to explain to administrators and fund-raisers why criticism and theory are research. Undergraduate education in the literary classics is considered a part of general education, but specialization, while normative for intellectual advancement in the social sciences and the sciences, has often been looked upon with skepticism or suspicion when conducted in the humanities. Epithets like political or ideological (terms that are, incidentally, perfectly acceptable categories of analysis in other areas) have been hurled at literary scholars as if such interests somehow undermine or make less pure their interest in works of poetry, fiction, and drama. Robert Alter’s 1989 book The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age argued that pleasure and love of literature was the proper province of literary study. If literary scholarship were to become too professional, the elusive but crucial element of love might drop out. You can see that this is a kind of double bind: if literary study is centered on love of literature, it is regarded as basic but not advanced, general but not specialized, ancillary and pleasurable but not essential. But when literary study moves into the realm of theory, or editorial practice, or material culture, or any other of its myriad edges, left or right, up or down, it runs the risk of abandoning its main mission to give pleasure, inspire love, and be, in effect, its own reward.
If a scientist were to tell us he or she loved science (as scientists frequently do), we probably would not consider such a remark tantamount to saying that science was not professional, or did not involve research or specialization, or that the speaker was a fan or a dilettante rather than a working scientist. Love of politics does not mean that the lover is not also a potential scholar, or candidate, or bureau chief. But love of literature (or love of art or music) often is taken to indicate a set of recreational interests or a level of social—rather than intellectual—sophistication.
So literary criticism and literary studies, which were once considered the accoutrements of a gentleman’s or a lady’s social education, or alternatively, in the spirit of Matthew Arnold, a bootstrapping opportunity for the achievement of meritocracy without the advantages of inherited wealth or position, or, in the spirit of the Great Books movement and James Conant’s General Education in a Free Society, the necessary preparation for productive citizenship in a democracy, are now again—for slightly different reasons and with a different populace—an “extra,” an elective, an enhancement rather than either a necessity or a power position.
What used to be called “appreciation” (and, at the advanced or professional or donor level, “connoisseurship”) is now sometimes folded into aesthetics or into the history of affect or taste. It was partly in resistance to this idea of literary culture, and the accomplishments of the gentlemanly art of belles-lettres (literally, beautiful or fine writing), that some early-twentieth-century scholars turned to history or to philology as more scientific, archival research fields. What was at issue, sometimes explicitly, was the status of literature as an amateur or a professional pursuit. As time has gone by and the difference between amateurs (who, etymologically at least, are in it for love) and professionals (who do it as their profession and expect to be paid for their work) has continued to erode in fields like sports, music, or politics, literary studies has continued to worry, and to worry about, the distinction. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this. One key reason, certainly the one most pertinent to this discussion, is the belief that literature and love have a special relationship to each other: that loving literature is, after all, what literary study is all about.
The poet and literary critic R. P. Blackmur began a justly celebrated essay called “The Critic’s Job of Work” with a declaration that was also a gauntlet deftly thrown down: “Criticism, I take it, is the formal discourse of an amateur.”8 We might notice, admiringly, the seeming casualness of “I take it”—and the rhythm that this personal aside imparts to the utterance. Without it, the statement would be flat, prescriptive, far less interesting: “Criticism is the formal discourse of an amateur”—an example of the very kind of “doctrine” he will go on to critique in his next few pages. Blackmur is not, however, doctrinaire when he comes to the question of the use of concepts that may be “propitious and helpful in getting over gaps,” so long as that use remains “consciously provisional, speculative, and dramatic.” Writing in 1935, he observed that the “classic contemporary example of use and misuse” was “attached to the name of Freud.”
Freud himself has constantly emphasized the provisional, dramatic character of his speculations; they are employed as imaginative illumination, to be relied on no more and no less than the sailor relies upon his buoys and beacons. But the impetus of Freud was so great that a school of literalists arose with all the mad consequence of schism and heresy and fundamentalism which have no more honorable place in the scientific than the artistic imagination.9
The little word has here tells part of the story: Freud was still alive when this essay was written, but his work had already begun to be literalized and turned into doctrine. Yet Blackmur was a perceptive reader (and user) of Freud, as he demonstrates in this elegant peroration in the penultimate paragraph: “Art is the looking-glass of the preconscious, and when it is deepest seems to participate in it sensibly”—by which he means with the senses. And what of criticism? What is its nature and role? “Criticism may have as an object the establishment and evaluation (comparison and analysis) of the modes of making the preconscious consciously available.”10 To make the preconscious consciously available is the task of the critic. But what does he mean by “the formal discourse of an amateur”?
Blackmur himself was an amateur only in a technical sense. He had no higher degrees, and from 1928 to 1940, he was a freelance poet and critic, until he began an affiliation with Princeton University and became a professor of English. He unpacked the notion of love at the beginning of his essay: criticism “names and arranges what it knows and loves, and searches endlessly with every fresh impulse or impression for better names and more orderly arrangements.”11 Those names and arrangements are the formal aspects of the work. The discourse is the mode of communication: the presentation of the critic’s ideas as a connected series of utterances so they provide a unit and a model for analysis. And amateur? Does it mean lover or reader? Critic rather than textual editor or historical scholar? A close reader of the text rather than the context?
Because Blackmur begins with this wonderfully tendentious phrase about an amateur, it might be easy to mistake his meaning—until the reader plunges into the heart of his essay. “A Critic’s Job of Work” (the appealingly homely title is a bit misleading) speaks out in favor of Plato and Montaigne, of “imaginative skepticism and dramatic irony” that “keep the mind athletic and the spirit on the stretch,” and, wittily, of the “juvenescence of The Tempest,” and the “air almost of precocity of [G. B. Shaw’s] Back to Methuselah,”12 venerable texts about age that remain forever young. What Blackmur objects to is contemporary criticism that is “primarily concerned with the ulterior purposes of literature,” and here he cites three texts, all well reputed, that he thinks are pointing in the wrong direction for literary study: George Santayana’s essay on Lucretius, Van Wyck Brooks’s The Pilgrimage of Henry James, and Granville Hicks’s The Great Tradition. The problem with all three, however different they may seem, is that they are “concerned with the separable content of literature, with what may be said without consideration of its specific setting and apparition in a form; which is why, perhaps, all three leave literature so soon behind.”13
Remember that this is an essay from 1935. Its own juvenescence, if we may put it that way, seems considerable: “the ulterior purposes of literature,” “the separable content of literature,” and “leav[ing] … literature behind” are very contemporary concerns, as timely now as they were then.
Several years ago I wrote an essay about “The Amateur Professional and the Professional Amateur.”14 What I meant by “amateur professional” was someone who did not have specific training in a field but nonetheless had become a respected practitioner in it, like C. P. Snow, a scientist who wrote novels and cultural criticism, or Carl Djerassi, a chemist who writes plays, or Judge Richard Posner, who has written on law and literature. What I meant by “professional amateur” was someone who disavowed the status of professional in favor of the preferred role of amateur, gaining points by not being a professional: the book reviewer, the belletrist, the polymath, and the public intellectual. Two examples I cited from this category were Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson, both of whom wielded enormous critical clout and had a great influence on the literary field in the twentieth century.15 Wilson went to Princeton, became a highly regarded critic, and wrote books that influenced literary taste and judgment (several of which became classics on academic course curricula). Burke dropped out of Columbia to be a writer, became the editor of a little magazine, The Dial, and wrote highly influential works of literary criticism and philosophy. Neither was a traditional college professor.
Over time Edmund Wilson developed contempt for what he regarded as “academic pedantry,” and for the “PhD system” that produced and depended upon it—a system he thought ought to have been scrapped after World War I as a “German atrocity.”16 His gleeful animadversions against academia and the Modern Language Association, occasioned by a book series whose editorial practices he disapproved, were published in an article in The New York Review of Books (later republished as a separate booklet) and elicited a strong response from scholars, of which the following, from Gordon N. Ray, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, is worth quoting in full:
The recent attack in The New York Review of Books on the Center for Editions of American Authors of the Modern Language Association of America raises complex questions of taste and emphasis. It must be obvious at the same time, however, that this attack derives in part from the alarm of amateurs at seeing rigorous professional standards applied to a subject in which they have a vested interest. Here, at least, the issue is not in doubt. As the American learned world has come to full maturity since the Second World War, a similar animus has shown itself and been discredited in field after field from botany to folklore. In the long run professional standards always prevail.17
Ray’s own scholarship was focused on the life and work of William Makepeace Thackeray, whose letters and private papers he edited (in four volumes) and about whom he wrote a two-volume biography. His reply to Wilson, which stands as the epigraph to an MLA pamphlet called Professional Standards and American Editions, is clearly both personal and professional, since his was apparently the kind of scholarship Wilson thought the world would be better off without. But Ray’s riposte, and the prominent place given it in the pamphlet, is symptomatic of a particular time in intellectual and professional history. The quarrel of the amateurs and the professionals seems at that moment to have erupted in a way both vivid and virulent. What was at stake? Ray mentions “the alarm of amateurs” at the arrival of “rigorous professional standards,” and the newly achieved maturity of the “American learned world.” After World War II, with the expansion of the state universities and the G.I. Bill, a wave of comparative democratization hit the U.S. academy, together—not altogether paradoxically—with a growth in graduate programs, a sophistication of editorial practices, and (as Wilson notes dismissively) the need for more, and more varied, projects for dissertation students to undertake. What he calls the “boondoggling of the MLA editions”18 and what Gordon Ray calls “professional standards” are two sides of the same coin.
The tension felt, the challenge detected and resisted, was not only between amateurs and professionals, between self-made critics and PhD-bearing scholars, but also between the New York world of books, magazines, and intellectual life and the rest of the country. The corridor traversed by the old Pennsylvania Railroad, with all paths leading to or from New York, had long tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, been the province of arbiters of taste and intellectual leadership. In The Fruits of the MLA, Wilson had begun by mildly mocking a letter from an unnamed correspondent, the editor of one of the MLA volumes, which presumes to say something about the climate of the East Coast, where Wilson spent his summer vacations: “he professes to envy me my enjoyment of spring on Cape Cod—which is actually rather bleak—since the part of the Middle West to which he is at present condemned cannot be said to have a spring.”19 Gordon Ray, though by then the head of a New York–based foundation, was a graduate of the University of Indiana and had been an administrator at the University of Illinois. The other contributors to Professional Standards and American Editions (which bore the subtitle A Response to Edmund Wilson) included two scholars based in Iowa and one from Berkeley, California.
The original idea for what became the MLA editions had been generated by the American Literature Group of the MLA, headed by a Princeton professor, Willard Thorp, in 1947–48. But by the time of these editions, produced by a team of five Emerson scholars, appeared from Harvard University Press (to be immediately lambasted by the critic and journal editor Lewis Mumford in an article called “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire”)20, the series had garnered financial support from the National Endowment on the Arts and Humanities and smaller grants from the U.S. Office of Education. It had become a national project.
Edmund Wilson had other ideas, not about the national scope of such a series but about what form it should take. “I myself,” he wrote, “had had a project for publishing these classics in an easily accessible form such as that of the French Pléiade series.” His target, he said, was “the ordinary reader.” He included in his article the full text of a letter he had sent to Jason Epstein, then an editor at Random House (and one of the founders of The New York Review of Books), in which he described the Éditions de la Pléiade at greater length as a series that had “included many of the French classics, ancient and modern, in beautifully produced and admirably printed thin-paper volumes, ranging from 800 to 1500 pages.” Copies of the letter to Epstein, Wilson noted, had been sent to a group of other people whom he thought might be supportive: “W. H. Auden, Marius Bewley, R. P. Blackmur, Van Wyck Brooks, Alfred Kazin, President Kennedy, Robert Lowell, Perry Miller, Norman Holmes Pearson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Robert Penn Warren.”
Poets, literati, public intellectuals, and men of letters: these recipients could also presumably be counted on to know what Cape Cod weather was like in the spring. Of these, Wilson reports, only Perry Miller, “a Professor of American literature at Harvard,” raised any question about the problem of preparing authoritative texts, and even Miller, he said, admitted that “the project on Hawthorne, to cite only this one, being undertaken by the University of Ohio is perhaps more ‘academic’ than the average reader needs.”21
The ordinary reader and the average reader were to be the ideal clientele for Wilson’s American Pléiade edition, which he and Epstein cofounded in 1982 as the Library of America. Back in 1968, when he wrote Fruits of the MLA, Wilson was convinced that money intended to come from the National Humanities Endowment to support his project had been “whisked away, and my project ‘tabled’—that is, set aside, dismissed. The Modern Language Association had, it seemed, had a project of its own for reprinting the American classics and had apparently had ours suppressed.”22 “Whisked,” “dismissed,” “suppressed”: this is hard language; bitter, even (one would be tempted to say, were the source not so eminent) paranoid language; and Wilson goes on, in his inimitable fashion, to explain to the “ordinary reader” of The New York Review of Books what the MLA is, or was, and what, by inference, it was not. The Modern Language Association, we learn, “publishes a periodical … which contains for the most part unreadable articles on literary problems and discoveries of very minute or no interest.” To underscore this point Wilson had recourse to a practice that, though it still can be found in journalistic accounts of academic conferences, was as unprofessional then as it is now: the citation of the titles of various academic papers as apparently self-evident indications of their worthlessness, indeed their risibility, without the writer taking the trouble to hear or read them. In this case, Wilson was quite sure he would be better off skipping papers on topics like “Flowers, Women, and Song in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams” and “The Unity of George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale.”
Edmund Wilson’s critical essays and other writings were formative for my own thinking about European and American literature. I am not sure, though, that it wouldn’t be possible to joke about the titles of essays called “Uncomfortable Casanova” or “Justice to Edith Wharton” or “The Kipling That Nobody Read,” all to be found in his collection The Wound and the Bow. The tactic of mocking what one has not read is overused and seldom precise. The problem is not that it is unfair but that it is lazy and contemptuous.
However, as we’ve noted, Wilson felt aggrieved. His proposal had been whisked and dismissed. Persons of no fame, many of whom lived far away, some of whom—especially since they were “teachers of American literature”—might never even have heard of the Pléiade series, had prevailed over the publishers, writers, and others to whom Wilson had copied his letter. “I knew,” he says, “that the MLA had a strong and determined lobby to further its own designs and that representatives of the MLA had attempted to discourage our project and had, it seems, very soon succeeded.”23 The three damning initials appear over and over, as if they were CIA or FBI or KGB. “Representatives” of this “determined group” were busy furthering “the designs” of the organization: what could a lover of literature do?
Although I don’t like Wilson’s dismissive tone, I understand his publishing dreams. Still, I have some difference of opinion about the results. I own several Library of America editions; they may be classics, and printed on acid-free paper to ensure their longevity, but they are also bulky, cumbersome, and lacking in the kind of preface and contextual information that I, even as a non–“teacher of American literature,” would have found helpful. (The LOA’s single slender green-ribbon book mark, a presumptive sign of elegance and leisurely perusal by the ordinary reader, is always supplemented in my copies by a myriad of decidedly inelegant Post-its, each indicating a passage to which I want to return.) Wilson posited a schism between the concerns of the scholar-pedants he caricatured and the ordinary reader. “What on earth is the interest of all of this?” he asks, when discussing some of William Dean Howells’s early travel articles and a diary of his travels with his wife, both of which Howells used as source material for his book The Wedding Journey. “Every writer knows how diaries and articles are utilized as material for books, and no ordinary reader knows or cares. What is important is the finished work by which the author wishes to stand.”24 Echoing Mumford, he calls source materials “literary garbage,”25 and he does not hide his contempt for the clueless academics who undertake their scholarship without lucrative contracts with publishers that would provide for advances and royalties. “A professional writer is astounded by the terms accepted by academic persons for work that may take many years. It seems incredible that, in the case of university presses, they sometimes have no contracts at all. They think in terms of academic prestige, and it is time that some solid achievement in this line should be given some more solid compensation. To examine an MLA contract gives a professional writer the shudders.”26 Notice the repetition of the phrase “a professional writer” at the beginning and the end of this supposedly altruistic piece of advice. Where the pamphlet is never shy about mobilizing the first-person-singular pronoun, now we have twice, instead of the word I, “a professional writer”—like Edmund Wilson.
Gordon Ray’s tart reply, in a publication conspicuously called Professional Standards, lumps Wilson with the amateurs who see that their time is passing. But Wilson himself proudly claimed to be a professional writer in comparison with the academic pedants, penniless but sifting the garbage of major authors, who exemplified to him the “ineptitude of [the MLA’s] pretensions to reprint the American classics.”27
We might ask why, in a diatribe so deeply concerned with discrediting professional scholars as drudges who distance themselves from ordinary reading, Wilson should take this determined swerve at just about the last moment (the final page of his piece as it appeared in The New York Review) away from being the champion of the ordinary reader and toward the mantle of professionalism. He damns the eminent bibliographer Fredson Bowers with faint praise: “I am on friendly terms with Mr. Bowers, and I know that he is an impassioned bibliographer as well as an expert on Elizabethan texts … [b]ut I have found no reason to believe that he is … much interested in literature. It has been said, in fact, I believe, by someone in the academic world that, in editing Leaves of Grass, he has done everything for it but read it.”28 (Would a professional journalist be satisfied with “it has been said … I believe … by someone”?)
Wilson is covering all his bases: he will be the true lover of literature—rescuing it from what he elsewhere calls “the very small group of monomaniac bibliographers”29 who are “[not] much interested in literature”—and also the true professional, who could laugh at the ineptitude of scholars so dim they will work for years on a literary project without any assurance that they will get paid for it. Wilson quite plausibly equates “professional” with “writes for money.” The unnamed academics, while they draw salaries, are writing for “prestige,” which might translate itself into a new job or a promotion but is also, like the “esteem” of succès d’éstime—or the esteem of self-esteem—a kind of love. But Gordon Ray’s claim, also plausible, is that the resistance to footnotes, sources, explanatory information, and other “literary garbage” is itself an amateur move. As another of the contributors to Professional Standards argues, “where a major author is concerned, there is very little literary garbage.”30
Which is the amateur and which is the professional? Do any of these persons, or any of these institutions, from publishers to universities, love literature? It seems most reasonable to say that they all do, in their fashion. Reason and love, as Bottom so well observed, keep little company together nowadays. In the upshot, Wilson got his archival series of uniformly bound classics, and scholars got their annotated editions, and the world moved on. This was a contretemps—perhaps it would be just as accurate to call it a spat—that predates the Internet, hypertext editions, and an expansion (and professionalization) of the American academic scene well beyond what was imagined or caricatured in the late sixties. But one thing I’d venture to say is that it never works to accuse someone else of lacking the capacity to love.
What’s love got to do with the use and abuse of literature? For one thing, love—as news stories remind us every day, and as classic novels, poems, and plays have told us for centuries, is often about use and abuse. And as with literature, it is sometimes not easy to tell the difference. Consider Hamlet and Ophelia, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, Achilles and Patroclus, Humbert Humbert and Lolita. (Adepts of The Faerie Queene will recall that in Book 3 of Spenser’s poem, the enchanter Busirane briefly captures the maiden Amoret.) Even, or perhaps especially, in religious poetry, this intrinsic doubling occurs, from Herbert’s “Jordan” poems to Donne’s Holy Sonnets (“Batter my heart”) to “Sir Gawain” and the quests of Spenser’s knights. That love is one of literature’s favorite, indeed obsessive, topics creates a certain kind of feedback loop, or what is sometimes called, in literary study, a textual effect, which means that something in the text is shaping, often without the conscious awareness of the reader or critic, how the text is being read.
Consider John Donne’s lyric “The Canonization,” which uses as one of its master tropes the coincidence of sacred and profane love to make the earthly lovers also saints, “us canonized for love.” The direct, intemperate, and colloquial address of the first line, “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love,” once revisited at the end of the poem, turns out to have more than one connotation, since the poem suggests that their love is “for God’s sake” as well as for their own. Donne’s poem, a favorite of the New Critics and therefore often taught and studied in introductory English courses, became foundational in the mid-twentieth century to what was described as the English literary canon. In effect, then, the poem, as well as its fictional legendary lovers, was canonized—we might even say canonized for love.
Scenes of reading in literature are often sites of seduction (for literary characters) as well as seductive (for the reader). We’ve already noticed this in the case of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, where the unlikely couple of Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick are said to have “fallen in love over poetry.” One of the most famous scenes of reading is found in Dante’s Inferno, where Paolo and Francesca are seduced by reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere and become, themselves, adulterous lovers:
One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot—how love had overcome him.
We were alone, and we suspected nothing.
And time and time again that reading led
our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,
and yet one point alone defeated us.
When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by one who was so true a lover,
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.
A Gallehault indeed, that book and he
Who wrote it, too; that day we read no more.
Dante, Inferno, 127–13831
Gallehault, or Galeott, was the go-between who brought together Lancelot and Guinevere. His name became a synonym for pander, which is, as the poem suggests, what the book they were reading became for Paolo and Francesca—and what this passage has become for other poets and other readers: a go-between linking literature and life.
But if the topic of love is in a way not only as old as literature but also coterminous and coextensive with it—if, to stretch the point only a little, all literature is about love, whether it’s human love, divine love, disappointed love, love of nature, love of art, love of country, or self-love—then to ask how we should feel about love of literature is to ask the question less precisely than we might. To accuse someone of lacking a love for literature is to say he or she doesn’t love literature in the same way we do. What we might rather want to propose is that (1) loving literature is the beginning rather than the end (or the use) of a relationship with it, and (2) like all loves, love of literature is risky, sometimes dangerous, and occasionally disappointing in part precisely because of “the overestimation of the object.”
Two examples from Virginia Woolf may helpfully complicate this question of love and what it might have to do with the use (or use and abuse) of literature. The first is from her essay “How Should One Read a Book?,” which we’ve already noticed as the locus of some of her thoughts on the contemporaneity of literature. In this case, Woolf’s subject might be called the overprofessionalization of book reviewing, “when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot,” and thus may miss the mark as frequently as he or she hit it.
If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work?32
People reading for the love of reading may, she speculates, make books “stronger, richer, and more varied.” This pleasant fantasy—Woolf herself was a book reviewer as well as a novelist and essayist, and she depended upon published critics and criticism—is succeeded by another, equally fanciful: she imagines readers coming to the gate of heaven at the Day of Judgment “with our books under our arms,” to be told they need no further reward: “We have nothing to give them here,” Woolf’s version of the Almighty says to her version of Saint Peter. “They have loved reading.”33
However uncharacteristically warm and fuzzy this may seem to us (the original version of “How Should One Read a Book?” was delivered at a private school for girls), it echoes the theme begun with the title of Woolf’s essay collections The Common Reader, a phrase she borrows, with full attribution, from Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Gray.” By choosing Johnson’s phrase as the title of her book of collected and “refurbished” essays and reviews, Woolf raises an interesting problem of identification. The sophisticated writing published under this seemingly modest title was hardly the work of a common reader as described by Johnson or Woolf. Originally described in her diary as a “Reading book” and then under the provisional title “Reading and Writing,”34 The Common Reader included knowledgeable, opinionated essays on major and lesser-known literary figures from the Paston letters and Chaucer to Montaigne, Elizabethan drama, John Evelyn, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, and the second volume in the series would continue and expand this range. Though Woolf surely did read for her own pleasure, her essays continually, and often brilliantly, do both “impart knowledge” and “correct the opinions of others.”
Moreover, if we were to look at the context of Dr. Johnson’s famous paragraph, we would discover that it runs quite counter to most of what he has to say about the poet in his “Life of Gray.” Having devoted several pages to biography, Johnson now turns to his work.
Gray’s poetry is now to be considered [Johnson writes, having devoted several pages to biography] and I hope not to be looked on as an enemy to his name, if I confess that I contemplate it with less pleasure than his life.
The poem On the Cat was doubtless by its author considered as a trifle, but it is not a happy trifle.
The Prospect of Eton College suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel. His supplication to Father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself.35
And so on, through the entire corpus of Gray’s poetry, often stanza by stanza and word by word, culminating in a general assessment of his work before the paragraph on Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” that, coming at the end of the “Life,” contains the phrase that Woolf uses in the preface to her book.
In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claims to poetical honours. The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning “Yet even these bones” are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.36
The sentiments of the common reader are thus invoked only at the end of a long and detailed assessment of Gray’s poetry, which, in the main, finds his successes intermittent at best, and some of his work incomprehensible or overrated. This is the only moment in the “Life of Gray” when Johnson concurs with the common reader, and he does so in a graceful, concessive spirit that leads up to his superbly crafted, quietly devastating final sentence: “Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.” We might linger for a moment on Johnson’s phrase “useless to praise,” which carries the notion that the poetry speaks for itself (and thus that the common reader’s views would prevail without any intercession on the part of the critic). This is clearly a condition contrary to fact. The existence of The Lives of the Poets likewise contradicts the utopian notion that in an aesthetically just world, quality always prevails. If love of literature is linked to the judgment of the common reader rather than that of the professional critic or scholar, the practice of these two meticulous and learned arbiters of literary taste, Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, puts that connection in question even as it seems, or is taken, to uphold it. Neither critic defers to the common reader, though both imagine him or her as a crucial ancillary part of the world of readers. Each in fact demonstrates an uncommon love of literature precisely by combining it with learning—as well as with a strongly urged, felicitously phrased, hard-won, and often infectious set of literary prejudices.
The second example I’d offer from Woolf on the question of literature and love is her intriguing set of observations on the English romantic essayist William Hazlitt. A hundred years after Hazlitt wrote, he was for her an important figure, and from her account of him, his work was, at least among her contemporaries, a familiar voice: “The famous passages about reading Love for Love and drinking coffee from a silver pot and reading La Nouvelle Héloise and eating a cold chicken, are known to all.”37 She admires his energy, his intelligence, his vivacity, and his prose style. “Hazlitt strode through the greater part of English literature and delivered his opinion of the majority of famous books.” Never mind that he had decided, for one reason or another, not to read some of them:
Hazlitt is one of those rare critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with reading. It matters very little that Hazlitt had read only one poem by Donne; that he found Shakespeare’s sonnets unintelligible; that he never read a book through after he was thirty; that he came indeed to dislike reading altogether. What he had read he had read with fervour.38
Woolf quotes a long passage from a Hazlitt essay on old English writers that begins, “It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one’s own initials always staring one in the face; to travel out of one’s self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters, to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page,” and offers this response:
Needless to say that is not criticism. It is sitting in an armchair and gazing into the fire, and building up image after image of what one has seen in a book. It is loving and taking the liberties of a lover. It is being Hazlitt.39
What is “not criticism” to Virginia Woolf? In this specific case, it is what we might call free association—or rather, because nothing is really free (of context, of motivation, of effect), associative thinking. From “Egyptian” and “Hebrew,” presumably, Hazlitt’s mind moves not only to palm trees in the margins but also to “camels moving slowly on in the distance of three thousand years,” to “the dry desert of learning,” the “insatiable thirst of knowledge,” the “ruined monuments of antiquity,” “the fragments of buried cities (under which the adder lurks),” and so on. No piece of poetry, no historic fact, no detail from the text of an old author is cited—what the reader gets instead is the mind of the essayist, dreaming, or, as Woolf says, “taking the liberties of a lover.” In Hazlitt, we may say, if we like, that this is delightful or, if we like, that it is romantic or, if we like, that the essayist has earned the right to be fanciful—or, if we prefer, that this is indeed “not criticism” and that we wish he would return to the critical task at hand. For Hazlitt, presumably, all such attitudes are plausible. But what if a critic today undertook such a set of associations, “taking the liberty of a lover”? With a published critic, readers are likely to find it of some interest—if, for example, such a reverie were to appear as a back-page essay in The New York Times Rook Review. But would we allow such liberties to a sophomore English major? What is the relationship of this kind of love, that permits itself to wander far from the textual starting point and the study of literature?
Woolf’s piece on Hazlitt was itself a piece of criticism: she was reviewing his collected works, first for the New York Herald Tribune, and then, in a slightly revised form, for The Times Literary Supplement.40 But what is also striking, and typically witty, is Woolf’s iteration of the idea of love in connection with Hazlitt, an author celebrated for having written an essay “On the Pleasure of Hating”41—an essay Woolf never mentions in her review, but that seems to inform it nonetheless. Hazlitt contended that love and hate were closely allied in literature and in life. He suggested that the popularity of the Scottish novel in his time was related to its harking back to old feuds, while part of tragedy’s appeal is that it permits the resurgence of primal feelings that refinement has compelled society to repress. “As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity: ‘Off, you lendings!’ The wild beast resumes its sway within us.”42
The pleasure of hating in this sense was a literary pleasure, however it might also function in politics or in social life. As such, it was also, arguably, a useful pleasure, in that it allowed for vicarious action, strong emotion without visible repercussion, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings diverted, (almost) harmlessly, into the activity of reading—and into the development, without conscious awareness of its psychic utility, of a best-seller list and a literary canon.
Sigmund Freud made a similar argument when he came to describe the difference between Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Oedipus acts, however unwittingly, in killing his father and marrying his mother. Hamlet, famously, delays, contemplating the killing of the king (and, in Freud’s reading, having incestuous feelings for his mother), but failing to act. Inaction, mental conflict, delay; these were evidence of “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.”43 Discomforting as these conflicts might be for the patient, their results when it came to literature were more ambiguously interesting. Repression produces neurosis; neurosis produces a compellingly conflicted modern character, torn between desire and inhibition—and so, by implication, becomes instrumental in the development of modern literature.
But this is an argument about the tensions within a literary character. What possible relevance can it have to the question of pleasure and unpleasure, or love and hate, when it comes to the writer and the reader? What’s love got to do with that? This, too, was a topic that Freud took up, notably in an essay called “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” first delivered as a lecture in the rooms of a Viennese bookseller and publisher and later printed in a literary magazine.44 If a daydreamer were to communicate his fantasies directly, Freud suggests, “he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures”—indeed his fantasies (wrote the analyst in a pretabloid, pre–Jerry Springer age) would “repel us or at least leave us cold.”
But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure … The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. All the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.45
This displacement of personal fantasies into an author’s imaginative writing speaks to the popularity of what is sometimes called personal writing—the appeal of memoirs, confessions, inspirational stories, survivor’s tales, and other self-revealing narratives that collectively constitute a genre of literary schadenfreude omnipresent in today’s tabloid journalism. At the same time, Freud’s erotic theory of literary enjoyment, the idea that “the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure” which a writer offers us in the presentation provides a kind of fore-pleasure prior to a “release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychological sources,” proposes yet another kind of answer to the question of literature as love.