WENDY LESSER
FOR WRITERS, LITERATURE IS A TALENT SHOW: THOSE WITH the most talent win. Readers of literature are more fortunate: everybody wins. Literature wields no magic to make you a more ethical person—Ezra Pound is exhibit A—nor does literature offer any usable moral instruction, any lessons in living outside sin. What exactly would be the lesson of Anna Karenina? Love only your unexciting spouse or else end up flattened beneath the wheels of a locomotive? I. A. Richards once asserted that “poetry is capable of saving us,” but be cautious of those who wish to saddle literature with messianic programs or any design for social reform. Matthew Arnold entertained the possibility of replacing religion with poetry, knowing full well that once poetry replaces religion, poetry becomes religion, becomes both dogma and doggerel.
But literature is the most consummate access you can gain to the inner cosmos of another, to the psycho-emotional systems of people wholly different from you, and therein lies its indispensable worth. Dance, sculpture, painting, music, film: they can’t come close to literature’s intimate portal into other lives, into aching or exuberant psyches you otherwise have no hope of knowing. Quality reading exercises the crucial dialogue with yourself, the dialogue you must undergo in order to become yourself, in order to know where on the fabric of existence you can place your own selfhood and awareness. The best books provide a life-giving rhapsody of imagination, rain for the roots of mercy, and a blueprint for wisdom that begins always with the questions, Who are you in relation to and against these people on the page? How do the dimensions of language lend life to our world? The potential answers to those inquiries are capable of quelling the animal befuddlement we all walk around with.
In his Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov, with typical Nabokovian acuity, chided those many readers “who talk about books instead of talking within books.” That might appear a distinction without much difference, but Wendy Lesser’s lovely Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books demonstrates the tremendous chasm between Nabokov’s two prepositions. An intellectual of unflinching dignity and gravitas, author of nine previous books—including literary memoir, cultural criticism, and an incandescent study of Shostakovich—Lesser talks within books as few now are able to do.
She is no doubt aware of the significance and pedigree of her subtitle: serious pleasure. Of any work of art, Walter Pater asked: “Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence?” Harold Bloom, via Percy Shelley, has tagged literature “a difficult pleasure”: difficult because only lobotomized bestsellers are simple; pleasurable because great books must offer an ecstasy of aestheticism before they can offer anything else. For Bloom and Lesser, the pleasure is always aesthetic and never ideological, never modishly political. Criticism is passionate and personal or it is impotent and dull. Lesser practices a criticism of appreciation in the mold of Dr. Johnson and William Hazlitt in part because she understands the nexus between the fertility of imagination and the inevitability of selfhood.
We turn to a book such as Lesser’s not only for assistance in unraveling the DNA of literature—what Hazlitt named the gusto in the soul of literature—but to commune with a mind abler than our own, to augment our own appreciation, our own grasping of notions that must be grasped if we are to endure, to ready ourselves for both a certain dying and the uncertain living that precedes it. Everywhere in Why I Read lay ribbons of literary wisdom to remember: “great satire, to last, needs to be offensive even to those who agree with it”; “to have authority, a literary work must be able to turn the quotidian into something strange”; “the truths in literature are incidental and cumulative, not global and permanent.”
Lesser’s voice on the page is so congenial, measured, authoritative, and sane, it seems impervious to quarrel. From Hopkins to Cervantes to Dickinson, from Herzen to Klemperer to Louise Glück, she is equally discerning and deft. At one point she briefly engages Conrad to navigate the improbable canal between Norman Mailer and Janet Malcolm. But it is Henry James who presides over this book like a nudging sprite: Lesser conjures the master with the profoundest affection and regard. She doesn’t summon this Jamesian alliteration but it’s precisely what she does so well: “perception at the pitch of passion and expression.” And for a credo to emblazon on every chalkboard in America, choose these lines by Lesser:
The slight, the facile, and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter. On the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.
In 1914 James contended that novelists didn’t have enough criticism by which they could know themselves—a bolstering of Arnold’s brash idea that literature requires literary criticism to thrive—and yet by the late 1980s there was enough criticism for any writer to feel turned-around and pricked in the briar. As early as 1960, Frank Kermode wrote that readers “have long ago accepted the complicated din of modern criticism as one of the nuisances of an epoch of promiscuous communications, like the noise of helicopters.” Kermode, who died in 2010, lived long enough to see promiscuity speed into saturnalia. What better description of social media than “the noise of helicopters”? Lesser has nothing to say about social media because for the true bibliophile there’s nothing to say about social media. (She does, however, in the book’s brief coda, nod assent to electronic reading, and it’s no coincidence that when she considers our gadgets of distraction her prose turns chatty and slack with automatic jargon.)
Bloom believes that “any distinction between literature and life is misleading,” which almost endorses the widespread pabulum that great books concern something called “the human condition.” They do not. We aren’t able to isolate “the human condition,” and life contains none of the contours or protocols of literature. Literature cannot be employed as a confirmation of our own personalities but only as a challenge to those personalities. We know by intuition and study that great books disclose a condition both greater and lesser than human, and our job is to place ourselves somewhere on the continuum between those shifting poles, to welcome a gravid agitation or be willing to undergo some form of personal torsion—to have our selfhood both threatened and amplified. For Wendy Lesser as for Dr. Johnson, literature is a method and manner of fuller living. In Why I Read she has written a necessary addition to the canonical titles of appreciation, a clamant reminder of the place serious reading must have at the hub of our lives, and one that best be handed to every high schooler and undergrad in this land.
—The New York Times Book Review, JANUARY 24, 2014