There are books . . . which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks. Those journeys, with their serendipitous discoveries and misguided side trips, allow us to probe our characters, indulge our passions and prejudices, and finally choose books for which we possess a real affinity. Why turn, with wan languor, the pages of the current Brand Name Author when you might grow truly excited by the work of Jean Toomer or Jean Stafford, Djuna Barnes or Jeanette Winterson?
So why are people in general so sheepish, so lemminglike when it comes to the books they will spend hours with? The best seller list deserves much of the blame, because too many of us simply follow its imperious and arcane dictates. Rather than visiting a bookshop or library, rather than actually picking up a new novel or biography and skimming a few pages, we automatically buy the latest hot or fashionable title.
The best seller list tends to distort the character of entire genres. Mention fantasy, for example, and the world thinks elves, magic swords, quests, and Tolkien rip-offs, often set down in a language the likes of which was never heard on land or sea. Similarly, science fiction means Star Wars tie-ins or bloated works of space opera. But, as with crime fiction (Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, K. C. Constantine), true artists work in these fields, and they should be better known. Read Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, or Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs. For many readers, these are already established American classics. None of these authors produces the kind of prose only an engineer could love.
If we undercut the hegemony of the fashionable, people might be more willing to try older books from the past. As the Victorian man of letters Samuel Butler observed, “The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.” In a sensible world, those of us with a yen for chills wouldn’t simply read Stephen King; we’d also slaver over the strange stories of Robert Aickman and the haunting ones of Vernon Lee. One of the ancient goals of criticism was called the correction of taste. No one should grow world-weary thinking that John le Carre alone defines the British spy thriller, not in a century that has also produced John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, Michael Innes, Len Deighton, and Ian Fleming. But when was the last time you heard anybody talking about Ambler’s A Coffin for Dim-itrios or Household’s Rogue Male}
Consider major works of intellectual history written in the 1990s. Richard Fletcher’s The Barbarian Conversion, John Hale’s The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places, Peter Washington’s Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America, and John Brewer’s study of eighteenth-century England, The Pleasures of the Imagination—all proffer the same sort of engaging anecdotes and easygoing didacticism we associate with Dava Sobel’s Longitude. But these more substantial books go largely unnoticed because they are judged too scholarly, too ambitious, too long. Rather than cutely packaged, bite-sized finger food, these histories spread out like holiday smorgasbords. Think tomes, not totes. Yet anybody who enjoys a best-selling charmer like Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman would certainly revel in Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning, a sus-penseful historical reconstruction of the murder of Christopher Marlowe.
How can the ordinary reader find out about such work? Look through the review sections of newspapers and magazines. Talk to friends about their favorite books. Whenever you meet someone in an interesting profession, ask him or her about the important works in that field or the best introduction to it. Check out the acknowledgments, blurbs, and bibliographies of books you like. The historian Anthony Grafton led at least one reader to Frances Yates’s literally marvel-filled Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and The Art of Memory. Essay collections are often useful: John Updike’s several capacious volumes offer introductions to writers both celebrated and neglected. There’s even a whole sub-genre of books about books, from Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan to his daughter Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris. And, of course, the Internet offers an ever-changing array of blogs, author Web sites, Listservs, and online chats. Most of all, though, just go to libraries and bookstores. Browse. Make such visits a regular part of your life. Ask for guidance, or be adventurous. Trust your instincts, not fashion, and, to paraphrase the poet Philip Sidney: Look in thy heart and read!
Most serious novels are machines for producing anxiety. Pick up a classic or a current best seller, and you’ll find people in trouble: At the very least marriages break up, serial killers strike, World War III threatens. What, we wonder, will happen next—and to whom? We riffle through the pages with, as reviewers used to say, our pulses racing, stomachs in knots, hearts pounding.
Profound emotion is upsetting; it overturns our lives, uses up our psychic energies and defenses, leaving us vulnerable and more tenderly sensitive to the shocks of life. Well, almost none of us enjoys feeling as though we’ve just been batted around like a tetherball. Yet this is what most serious novels aim to do, and why we sometimes have to steel ourselves to crack one open.
In fact, the rapport between a reader and his or her book is almost like that between lovers. The relationship grows, envelops a life, lays out new prospects and ways of seeing oneself and the future, is filled with moments of joy and sorrow; when it’s over, even its memory enriches as few experiences can. But just as one cannot psychically afford to fall in love too many times, suffer its gantlet of emotions too often and still remain whole, so the novel-reader cannot read too many books of high purpose and harrowing dimension or do so too often. Burnout, a failure to respond with the intensity literature demands, is the result. As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.
This is why rereading is so important. Once we know the plot and its surprises, we can appreciate a book’s artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with tenderness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters—as a good first reader ought—we can now look at how the book works, and instead of swooning over it like a besotted lover begin to appreciate its intricacy and craftsmanship. Surprisingly, such dissection doesn’t murder the experience. Just the opposite: Only then does a work of art fully live. As Oscar Wilde once said, if a book isn’t worth reading over and over again, it isn’t worth reading at all. That’s a bit extreme—there’s a place for the never-to-be-repeated fling—but essentially he’s right. This is why Hamlet, Persuasion, and Absalom, Absalom! are endlessly rereadable, why teachers look forward to discussing them year after year. Major works of the imagination only gradually disclose the various facets of their artistry; only slowly do they reveal the subtleties of their construction. The great books are those we want to spend our lives with because they never cease to reward our devotion.
1. In a very general sense, poets tend to use language in two ways: the artful or the natural. Either they transmute their thoughts through metaphor, striking imagery, or unusual syntax into something rich and strange; or they pack their meaning into what Wordsworth famously called the language really used by men (and women). On the one hand, Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Jorie Graham; on the other, William Carlos Williams, Archilochos, and Billy Collins. Most poets opt for flash and filigree—after all, “O, for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene” (Keats) sounds like poetry. It takes real confidence, and sure judgment, to set down words as simple and deeply moving as “Pray, undo this button” (Shakespeare).
2. Where a “Complete Poems” is a monument, a “Selected Poems” is an invitation, a sometimes needed icebreaker for shy new readers. In other words, most of us. Just as expository prose generally aims to ingratiate, emphasizing clarity and communication, so a lot of poetry blithely ignores the ordinary courtesies: It is simply there, true to itself. Let me be fanciful: If you picture good prose as a smooth politician deftly reaching out to the crowd and welcoming everyone into the party then poetry is Clint Eastwood, serape flapping in the wind, standing quietly alone on a dusty street, pure coiled energy. He’s not glad-handing anybody.
3. To read a volume of poetry is to enter the world of the mesmerist. In a serious artist’s collected poems, the single constant is usually his or her distinctive, increasingly hypnotic voice. Without relying on plot, dramatic action, or a cast of characters, lyric poets, especially, must entrance us with their words until we cannot choose but hear. Eager for more, we turn page after page because we find ourselves in thrall to a particular diction.
4. Nearly everyone can come up with good explanations for why they don’t keep up with contemporary poetry, but the main one is simply that reading strange and unfamiliar poems sounds a lot like schoolwork. The language often seems so . . . high-pitched and bizarre or just plain hard to understand. In fact, the best way to enjoy contemporary verse is simply to read it as though you were dipping into a magazine, listening to a news report, overhearing a conversation. Don’t make it a big deal, simply thrill to the words or story. As the critic Marvin Mudrick once proclaimed: “You don’t read for understanding, you read for excitement. Understanding is a product of excitement.” Later on, you can return to the poems that speak most strongly to you and make them a part of your life.
5. Memorize the poems you love most. As Anthony Burgess wrote: “The dragging out from memory of lines from Volpone or The Vanity of Human Wishes with the twelfth glass is the true literary experience. I mean that. Verse is for learning by heart, and that is what a literary education should mostly consist of.” When I was a teenager, I used to walk to high school. To pass those tedious twenty or thirty minutes I decided to memorize favorite lines and stanzas from Oscar Williams’s anthology, Immortal Poems of the English Language. “With rue my heart is laden.... I met a traveller from an antique land.... We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship.... The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. ... That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.... Our revels now are ended.” In all my life no time has ever been better spent.
There’s more to literature than fiction, drama, and poetry. Here are sixteen superlatively entertaining and artful works of literary nonfiction, some of which should be better known. To narrow a wide field, I’ve focused on twentieth-century writers in English and arranged them in loosely chronological order.
1. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians. Polished, witty, and ironic accounts of four pillars of nineteenth-century England, including Florence Nightingale. Strachey transformed biography from the marmoreal “life and works” to the artful portrait.
2. A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo. Not only a biography of Corvo, a decadent writer of the 1890s, but an account of how Symons researched his life: the eccentrics he met, the gossip he was told, the archival materials he unearthed. Symons made Corvo’s biography personal—he might even be the forgotten founder of New Journalism—and portrayed himself as a literary detective.
3. Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana. Acclaimed for its originality and importance as The Waste Land of travel writing: two young Brits and their misadventures in the Middle East. “Water is the main difficulty of such a journey, as sufferers from syphilis of the throat, who are numerous, are apt to choose the wells to spit in.”
4. Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel. The finest “New Yorker profiles” of them all—wistful, poetic, and bristling with life. The subjects? Street-corner preachers, patrons of McSorley’s saloon, gypsies, Mohawk Indians, watermen, and people who live in caves.
5. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” So opens what is for many the most beautiful memoir of the century.
6. M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating. Our most sensuous writer on food—and France and love and what one might call the Mediterranean pleasures of life.
7. Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave. Abandoned by his wife as World War II begins, a moody, introspective man of letters reflects on failure, literary masterpieces, the function of civilization, and his memories of the past. “I regard the burning of the Alexandrian library as an inconsolable private grief.”
8. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. How is literature structured? Encyclopedic in range and packed with startling insights— a work of criticism to reread just for the prose and the wonderful clarity of its author’s intelligence.
9. Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince. An enthralling introduction to a strange and beautiful world: medieval Japan and the society described in the great Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, where what matters are myabi, or courtly beauty and elegance, and aware, a sensitivity to the “tears in things.”
10. S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives. How have critics, biographers, crackpots, and readers constructed or imagined Shakespeare’s life? A capacious masterpiece of entertaining scholarship, written with gusto, authority, and low-keyed humor.
11. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce. The finest literary biography of the twentieth century, and the best general introduction to the life and work of the Irish genius who gave us Ulysses.
12. Alison Lurie, V.R. Lang: A Memoir. Early in her career, Lurie composed this memoir as a tribute to a playwright friend who died young, and the result is a delicious account of the literary world of Harvard and Cambridge in the early 1950s. Look for cameos of the young Edward Gorey and John Ashbery, among others.
13. Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia. The most influential travel book of our time. A young Englishman not only explores a romantic and forbidding country but also creates a haunting mood-piece in ninety-seven short chapters, each built on stark yet perfect sentences.
14. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood. The murder of a Kansas family and its aftermath, retold as a “nonfiction novel.” Capote’s style, reportorial genius, and hard work produced the first masterpiece of New Journalism.
15. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination. Scholar, translator, teacher, poet, and short-fiction writer, Davenport was superlative as all these, but utterly breathtaking in his wide-ranging essays about primitive culture, modernism, and innovative work in all the arts. Literature “is a complex dialogue of books talking to books.”
16. The Paris Review“Writers at Work” collections (especially the first four). Conversations with William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and many others. These interviews established a new subgenre, providing inspiring insights into the literary life. Ernest Hemingway: “I rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.”
In 1557 Girolamo Cardano, notes the historian Anthony Grafton, “became the object of the most savage book review in the bitter annals of literary invective. Julius Caesar Scaliger.. . devoted more than nine hundred quarto pages to refuting one of Cardano’s books, On Subtlety” Grafton adds that this may be “the only book review ever known to undergo transformation into a textbook.”
W. H. Auden once wrote about some of his favorite book reviews, all imaginary, citing in particular several made up by the British humorist J. B. Morton. For instance, No Second Churning, by Arthur Clawes is “an almost unbearably vital study of a gas-inspector who puts gas-inspecting before love. Awarded the Prix de Seattle, this book should enhance the author’s growing reputation as an interpreter of life’s passionate bypaths.” Brittle Galaxy is aptly described as “1,578 pages of undiluted enthrallment.” Those last two words, of course, sum up what all authors want to hear said about their work.
Why is it so hard to talk—not write but speak-—about art and literature? A friend asks about a new novel or collection of poetry? Almost any response tends to sound at least faintly prissy, hokey, pretentious, academic, or utterly banal.
The most typical character flaw of the bookish is the desire to show off. Many years ago I knew a kindhearted, vastly well-read guy who liked to bring up rather esoteric titles in conversation. Mentioning, say, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, he’d pause for a moment, just to see if the name registered. If, by chance, you exclaimed, “Oh, I just adore Peake’s writing” and started chattering away about Steerpike and Titus Groan and the burning of the castle library, my learned friend, slightly irked, would lose all interest— and then casually allude to some other difficult, possibly even more obscure book. Did you know Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus? Well, not precisely; The Magic Mountain, of course, but somehow—At which point, happy again, this encyclopedic autodidact would shift into high gear: “Oh yes, The Magic Mountain, quite a good book, one that everyone reads and should read. But Doctor Faustus is the real masterpiece,” and away he’d go, secure in the knowledge that you were ignorant of Mann’s truest and most demanding chef d’oeuvre.
What makes for a good book review? H. L. Mencken insisted that “a book review, first and foremost, must be entertaining. By this I mean that it must be dexterously written, and show an interesting personality. The justice of the criticism embodied in it is a secondary matter. It is often, and perhaps usually, quite impossible to determine definitely whether a given book is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The notion to the contrary is a delusion of the defectively intelligent. It is almost always accompanied by moral passion. But a critic may at least justify himself by giving his readers civilized entertainment. ... If he is a well-informed man and able to write decently, anything he writes about anything will divert his readers.”
The eminent critic George Steiner once visited his Oxford adviser, the austere Humphry House, and on the don’s lectern noticed a copy of his own recenly printed Chancellor’s English Prize essay. “I waited, I ached for some allusion to it. It came when I was already at the door. ‘Ah yes, yes, your pamphlet. A touch dazzling, wouldn’t you say?’” Steiner remarks that “the epithet fell like mid-winter.”
When Franz Kafka submitted “The Metamorphosis” to the Berlin newspaper Neue Rundschau, one of its editors—the novelist Robert Musil, no less—asked him to cut the novella by a third.
Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the sea. Getting known.. . [pause] ... Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. —Samuel Beckett (Krapp’s Last Tape)
It does seem to me that critics and reviewers can be loosely divided into two camps: Those who never let you forget that they are judge, jury, and, if need be, executioner; and those who humble themselves before a poem or novel, waiting for it to reveal its secrets to them. The first kind of critic aims to absorb the book; the second hopes to be absorbed by it.
In general, the macho critic is more fun to read. He (or she) is opinionated, controversial, argumentative, funny. Behind the showmanship, however, often lurks an ideologue’s desire to persuade: This novelist is too self-absorbed; that biography is pedestrian; those views are wrongheaded; these stories are wonderful. For such a self-confident intellect the measure of all books becomes ultimately the critic’s own taste, imagination, and convictions.
The receptive critic, by contrast, presumes that the work under review is the measure. He tries to avoid preconceptions and instead make himself open to the book’s argument or its particular magic. If such a critic finds a novel boring or strange or mystifying, he more often than not assumes that he has failed to understand it. Rather than pass summary judgment, this unassertive but sensitive reader prefers to present an author’s work accurately and sympathetically, employing his own artistry, sometimes considerable, in the service of the book.
Of course, most practicing critics mix these two approaches, sometimes uneasily, hoping to balance argument with information, razzle-dazzle with reverence, all the while trying to avoid the pitfalls of both. The strong critic sometimes grows tendentious, supercilious, or holier-than-thou, and actually might be happier as an op-ed columnist. In his turn, the gentler critic can seem to possess no standards at all, to be one of those people who likes everything; he may even relax into a carpet-slippers-and-port literary essayist, dreamily relating the adventures of his sensitive soul among the masterpieces.
I have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.—Somerset Maugham
One never forgives a work of art that is general and vague. —Steven Millhauser
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts. —Arthur Schopenhauer
I have been told that when the late Sir Edward Marsh, composing his memoir of Rupert Brooke, wrote “Rupert left Rugby in a blaze of glory,” the poet’s mother, a lady of firm character, changed “a blaze of glory” to “July.”—EL. Lucas
Every great story. . . must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique. —Willa Cather
The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. —Edward Gibbon
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.—Arthur Miller
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. —Wallace Stevens
Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself. —Leslie Stephen
When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder. —Anton Chekhov
Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity —Italo Calvino (the traits in writing that he most admired)
Treachery, unrequited love, bereavement, toothache, bad food, poverty, etc. must count for nothing the moment one picks up one’s notebook.—W. H. Auden
Caress the details, the divine details.... What color was the bottle containing the arsenic with which Emma Bovary poisoned herself?—Vladimir Nabokov
It is reported that when Pericles spoke, the people said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, the people said, “Let us march.”
“We like,” said Thoreau, “that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.” Yes, but literature also needs ornamentation and dazzle, a touch of the idiosyncratic and gonzo. Certainly Shaker plainness is best for most writing, but sometimes it’s nice to get all dressed up and strut your stuff. Make it new and strange and musical and fun.
Examples of such flamboyance? Read the the prose of Robert Burton, Jeremy Taylor, and Edward Gibbon; the poetry of John Webster, Milton, and Wallace Stevens; the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green, John Updike, W. M. Spackman, William Gaddis; the essays of Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Edward Dahlberg, and William Gass; and the early journalism of Hunter Thompson. These writers’ diction aims to astonish and seduce. Here Nicholson Baker, in his novel Room Temperature, defends old-fashioned punctuation:
Such hybrids—of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too—might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subder subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms—and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able ... to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weight was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.
William Gass even more exuberantly calls for colorful language at the conclusion of his novella Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife:
Let us have a language worthy of our world, a democratic style where rich and well-born nouns can roister with some sluttish verb yet find themselves content and uncomplained of. We want a diction which contains the quaint, the rare, the technical, the obsolete, the old, the lent, the nonce, the local slang and argot of the street, in neighborly confinement. Our tone should suit our time: uncommon quiet dashed with common thunder. It should be young and quick and sweet and dangerous as we are. Experimental and expansive—venturesome enough to make the chemist envy and the physicist catch up—it will give new glasses to new eyes, and put those plots and patterns down we find our modern lot in. Metaphor must be its god now gods are metaphors.
And here is a one-sentence marvel from Henry Green’s Concluding:“At this instant, like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it, the sun came through for a moment, and lit the azaleas on either side before fog, redescending, blanketed these off again, as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window, to shut behind them a blonde princess undressing.”
One may find similarly poetic rhythms even in writers thought to be as bluff and hearty as Rudyard Kipling: “She liked men and women, and she spoke of them—of kinglets she had known in the past, of her own youth and beauty, of the depredations of leopards and the eccentricities of Asiatic love” (Kim).
But no one excels Thomas Browne in baroque splendor, especially in “Urn Burial”: “There is therfore some other hand that twines the thread of life than that of nature; wee are not onley ignorant in Antipathies and occult qualities, our ends are as obscure as our beginnings; the line of our dayes is drawne by night, and the various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible; wherein though wee confesse our ignorance, I am sure wee do not erre, if wee say, it is the hand of God.”
The beauty of words, the sound and fall of sentences, a writer’s distinctive voice rising from the page—these, in the end, provide the greatest and most lasting pleasures of a reading life.