Posted on 04/21/2011 2:43:04 PM PDT by Borges
"Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind," Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.
"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling? "Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados--or Trilling himself?"
I read through this list with dismay. I have read all but two of those writers, love some, and met five. Yet I know with a sinking feeling that Ozick asks the correct question. Who at this hour is reading them? Paul Goodman, whose books so deeply influenced and formed me? Edmund Wilson, a role model? James Farrell, whose naturalistic Studs Lonigan evoked a decade of Chicago life? Mailer, who boasted he had beaten all of his contemporaries?
How many of them have you read? Some, I suspect, but they belong to your past. Most of you will have read Ginsberg's "Howl," but how much more of his poetry? I have his collected poems on my shelf, but don't care to take them down. Whitman's poems, on the other hand, are at the side of my chair and I read one every morning. I have every one of Edmund Wilson's books, in the sublimely uniform Farrar Strauss & Giroux editions. Who cites him? Susan Sontag? Remembered for defining Camp.
The occasion for Ozick's sad litany was her review of the letters of Saul Bellow, the one figure among all those contemporaries she believes is still read and will endure. For the same magazine many years ago, James Atlas wrote an argument that the search for the Great American Novel can end, because Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is that book.
Yes, Saul Bellow is still read, and I am still reading him, and I confess I have no plans to return to any of the other authors on her list in whatever time I have remaining. I have, however, recently started reading The Ambassadors by Henry James for the third time. Soon I plan my third journey through Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, another author I believe will endure.
I have always read for pleasure. I once thought I might be a professor of English, and made it through one year of PhD study at the University of Chicago before recognizing that film criticism had captured me full time. I was not congenitally a good student, but I was influenced by my teachers as role models. In graduate school at Illinois I had one of the great Shakespeare scholars, G. Blakemore Evans, general editor of the Riverside Shakespeare. I'd read Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school, and then not another word until I entered his classroom. It was clear Evans knew Shakespeare and loved him. Visiting his office, so filled with musty volumes, I was captured by the romance of his occupation, started reading Shakespeare with a passion and never stopped--always using my worn-out Riverside edition, although I have three or four others.
I've written before about the mentor of my undergraduate years, Daniel Curley, he of the corduroy pants, Sears boots and rucksack. In English 101 he assigned us Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, James, Forster, Cather, Wharton, Joyce, Hemingway. I still read all of them. In 1960, he told us, 'What will last of Hemingway's work are the short stories and The Sun Also Rises.' Half a century later, I would say he was correct.
My first exposure to Henry James was the short story "The Real Thing." I thought no one had ever written sentences so obdurate and baffling. They had the fluency of a crossword puzzle. By the time I arrived at The Ambassadors, I was beginning to catch on. His sentences are a labyrinth of diffident but precise observation. In their construction is the creation of character; in their reluctance to boldly state something, we feel the reality of what goes unsaid.
Having read Great Expectations under some duress in high school, I went through seven years of college without ever encountering Dickens again. It was in about 1980 that I signed up for the Folio edition of Dickens, picked up Nicholas Nickleby, and was hooked. No one is more compulsively readable. But I had to come to that myself. Oddly, I started sooner on Trollope. "He is such a consolation," Curley told me one day in a London pub. "During the London Blitz, Trollope enjoyed an enormous popularity." Where should I start? I asked. "Oh, with the Barsetshire novels, I should say."
That's how I've done my reading: Haphazardly, by inclination. I consider myself well read, but there has been no plan. Reading Cynthia Ozick's article brought me up short: I realized I knew almost every writer she was referring to, and I realized they were no longer read. In deciding to begin this piece with the list of all the names in its second paragraph, I realized I would probably alienate many readers. I decided that was all right. This would only be of interest to those who knew a name or two.
All right, then. Bellow has lasted and may continue to last. Setting aside living writers, who is still read? I speak of considerable writers, not potboilers. Dickens, George Eliot, Austen and Trollope, and then some people get to Mrs. Gaskell. Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Kafka. Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal and Hugo. Poe. Mark Twain. James and Wharton. The big four Americans of the first half-century, Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. The smaller Americans, Chandler, Steinbeck, Hammett. John O'Hara? Not so much. Sinclair Lewis? Not at all. Nabokov. From Britain, Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Greene, Forster. Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, Wodehouse. From France, Georges Simenon endures and Camus hangs on. From South America, Borges and Marquez.
I do not mean to make a list. Many names and entire nations are missing. You will find those writers you enjoy, and value them. I have been in a little discussion recently about how readable Beckett's plays are. Every month or so someone pops up who has discovered Willa Cather and fallen under her vision. There are certain books that are milestones in my reading. I've been going through the 12 volumes of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time again. Later this year I will again pick up Paul Scott's The Raj Trilogy. On my shelf The Cairo Trilogy by Mahfouz is waiting.
There is no pattern. My only goal is to enjoy reading. I learn that he average American teenager spends 17 minutes a weekend in voluntary reading. Surely that statistic is wrong. Do they mean reading of "serious" novels? I would certainly count science fiction, graphic novels, vampires, Harry Potter, newspapers, magazines, blogs--anything. Just to read for yourself for pleasure is the point. Dickens will come later, Henry James perhaps never.
At the end of the day, some authors will endure and most, including some very good ones, will not. Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn't impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That's how you get pregnant. May you always be so.
I read for my pleasure, not to impress other people. Some of what I read winds up on the literati’s list of what people “should” read, most of it doesn’t, I don’t care one way or the other. Most folks who throw around quotes are just douches trying to impress people, I learned long ago that anybody that feels an internal need to impress the people around them isn’t impressive, so as soon as somebody throws a literati quote out I know to ignore them.
Taste has to be developed. If one doesn’t like Henry James or James Joyce the fault is not with them but with the reader. The obligation is on you to get to their level of sensibility.
I have personally found some of the “best” writers to be shallow and dull.
I think literature should be read for enjoyment and historical reference.
For me, writers are merely talented humans. There works are their art. I don’t look to them for the meaning of life.
If I am looking for true meaning, I go to God.
Like who?
Just because something is “crap” doesn’t mean it’s not fun. Not all of life is about the superior, some of it is just about the enjoyable. I can read a Harry Potter book in under 18 hours, it’s not a bad way to kill a day when I don’t feel like sinking my teeth into Dune. Some days you eat fillet mignon, some days you eat popcorn, because some days are good for popcorn.
(Pssst. Dune isn’t great literature either.)
;-)
I’d never heard of Alice Adams before this article.
Rowling is not the best writer, she may be this generations Cervantes, considering how limited this generation is.
What makes literature great? Is it how well it is written, how timeless the story is, how well a particular generation regards it?
I think the Potter books will be last. I don’t think she will replace Tolstoy or Dickens in terms of how future generations regard literature, but she has made a mark.
Twilight, however, really does suck.
The generation that grew up reading her will keep that stuff alive at least as long as they live. I don’t know if their kids will like it much though.
But who says it’s the “best” of Western Culture? If you don’t like something you don’t like it, there’s no reason to suffer through it just because the literati say it’s “the best”. Even if it is the best that doesn’t mean you’ll like it. A friend of mine’s mom makes the best liver pate in the city, or so folks who like liver pate say, I tried it once, tasted like liver pate, for my pallet that’s not a compliment, I think liver pate is gross. The literati worship “Howl”, to me it’s just more beat poetry, which again doesn’t agree with my pallet, so while it very well might be “the best” that doesn’t mean I should read it.
I'm reminded of Twain's quote on classic books:
I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic -- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Taste doesn’t have to be anything. People like what they like and anybody that thinks there’s a problem with somebody else’s taste is quite simply wrong and should mind their own business. James Joyce was a drunk whose writing is crap, and Henry Jame is dull. I have no obligation to suffer through books that bore me. If you like them fine, but that doesn’t make you right and me wrong, that makes you someone that likes those books and me someone that doesn’t.
Yup, I love that Twain quote.
Guess that explains why it’s enjoyable. I wasn’t actually putting it forth as great literature, I listed it as something to read that takes more effort than Harry Potter because it has a much denser plot and language. Still enjoyable reads, but not something I can crank through in 18 hours.
I’ve never met anyone who dislikes Paradise Lost.
I like it too.
Works great to kindle a campfire...
Well a scientist can write fiction that might be complex but that wouldn’t make it literature. Thomas Pynchon is literature.
The literati’s need to push the drunken ramblings of Joyce as literature is all the proof any sane person will ever need that the literati are idiots that just want to torture people. If you really must worship drunken ramblings just go to a bar, it’ll be more fun.
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