Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (11 page)

A play is a form of literature that only completely exists onstage. That is merely its shadow, or its embryo, that we read in script form, and if one’s theatrical expertise is insufficient, as mine certainly is, a script alone may fail to yield up some of the work’s most important effects. It took Cromer’s fully embodied version of
Our Town
to remind me of something I’ve had to rediscover repeatedly: that deep feelings are by no means incompatible with artistic self-consciousness. Both the human heart and the theatrical fourth wall were pierced by that singular performance, and the familiar paradox lay in the fact that my awareness of being in a theater space with other silently weeping audience members contributed to, rather than shattered, the illusion. And what
was
the illusion, exactly? That these characters were alive? (But they told us themselves they were long dead.) That human lives could be viewed from a distance, as if historically or even geologically? (But the play itself was allowing us to see things in that way.) Or perhaps that these quotidian tragedies—hope disappointed, early death, longing, regret—had some kind of bearing on our own lives? If that is an illusion, I wonder what reality might be.

*   *   *

The kind of magic Thornton Wilder accomplished through his Stage Manager—that intermediary between the characters and ourselves, that broker of their experience to us—has long been performed in a less explicit way by nondramatic writers. In a novel or a poem, the stage manager is language, and the challenge for the author is to use it in the way Wilder used his: as a screen between us and the characters that somehow intensifies rather than diminishes our sense of felt connection with these fictional people. The language needs to point to itself as a tangible medium and at the same time afford us the transparency of a window onto another life. It must get in the way and get out of the way, all at once. I can think of many remarkable works that accomplish this, starting with
Don Quixote
if not with Homer, but for now let me focus on two writers of my own era.

Louise Glück is a poet whose works have always depended primarily on the powerful presence of a speaking voice. Whether she is writing discrete lyric poems, as in
The Wild Iris
, or linked narrative poems, as in
Averno
, we feel addressed—almost buttonholed, in a Coleridgian sense—by that emphatic speaker who is conveying his or her feelings to us. This is not exactly dramatic monologue in Browning’s terms: the voice is less personal than that, the character less specific. It is a voice that exists on the page alone and comes fully to life only when we are reading its words. The voice may have a backstory—often a complicated and rather disturbing backstory, in Glück’s seriously intelligent and sometimes uncomfortable work—but it does not generally cohere into anything as specific as a biography. The episode, the encounter between us listeners and that Orphic speaker, seems to be complete in itself.

But in her recent volume
A Village Life
, the balance appears to have shifted slightly. The emphatic voice is still there, but it takes up residence in one person after another—one character after another, we would say if this were a novel. Yet
A Village Life
is not a novel, or even a collection of linked stories; it is very clearly a collection of separate but somehow related poems. What links the poems is not just geography, that undefined but apparently Mediterranean village in which all this speaking is taking place. It is also language, the European language (again undefined, but of a particular place and time) from which Glück seems to have translated all these speeches into English. It is an excellent, pure, almost transparent translation: there are no grammatical errors, nothing that is not perfectly idiomatic, perfectly in keeping with our everyday speech. And yet there is a sense of foreignness that hangs over the whole transaction. These voices, and the stories they tell us of their lives, are coming to us from elsewhere. The language is, in that sense, a barrier between us and the speakers, but it is also what conveys them so fully to us that we almost feel we are meeting them in person. And, as in
Our Town
, we sense that in meeting them we are also, in some obscure and indirect way, meeting ourselves. It is the distance, I suspect, that enables us to open ourselves to this feeling—we would be more guarded if the seemingly foreign language did not assure us that we had no self-scrutiny to fear.

A similar mechanism, though not the same one (for each author invents her own revolution, however quietly), governs the language of Penelope Fitzgerald’s best novels. Fitzgerald was a writer who came to writing late: she published her first book, a biography of an English poet, at the age of fifty-eight, and she published her first novel two years later. Over the next twenty years or so—practically up to her death in 2000, at the age of eighty-three—she continued to develop as a novelist until she became an undisputed if rather strange master of the form. I’m thinking particularly of her last three published novels, each of which is set in a different place and time:
Innocence
, which occupies two Italys (the sixteenth-century incarnation that appears briefly at the beginning of the novel, and then the mid-twentieth-century version);
The Beginning of Spring
, which takes place in Russia in 1913; and
The Blue Flower
, which reproduces, or imagines, the atmosphere of Novalis’s late-eighteenth-century Germany.

In all three books, the language Fitzgerald employs, while partaking of her usual qualities—authorial wit, refusal of closure, suppressed but tangible emotion—also contains something that is specific to its location. In
Innocence
, this has largely to do with rhythm, a kind of run-on, comma-separated pileup of clauses that somehow evokes the rapidity and vivacity of Italian speech. In
The Beginning of Spring
, it has more to do with tone: the conversations among the Anglo-Russian characters have both the philosophical intensity and the melancholy humor of late-nineteenth-century Russian prose, even as they also contain a note of British asperity. And in
The Blue Flower
, which is probably Fitzgerald’s most extreme effort in this direction, the English is so heavily flavored as to seem, at times, a direct translation from the German. No, that’s not quite right: not a translation, but an imagined German, the way German would sound in our minds if we knew it as fluently as we know English. It is English functioning as German while still retaining the flexibility of English.

This is especially clear in a phrase like “the Bernhard,” which is how the family at the center of
The Blue Flower
(and, at times, the author) refer to the youngest son, a sprightly, original boy named Bernhard. Its sense in English is clear enough—a kind of family joke, a singling-out of the smallest, oddest child—and there are even English examples of a similar usage in children’s nicknames:
The Piggle
, for instance, is a D. W. Winnicott case study about a little girl. But the phrase also evokes the German
der Bernhard
, which is a colloquial, sometimes regional way of expressing familiarity, as if to say, “Oh, that Bernhard! That is so typical of him.” This is one of those authorial gifts we needn’t fully receive to enjoy. That is, you can still get a kick out of the name “the Bernhard” even if you don’t know the German habit of speech, but if you do know it, the phrase is made even richer.

The effect of such linguistic strategies (which go by much more quickly, and therefore with much more subtlety, than I have been able to suggest) is to create a sort of magically thin and nearly transparent scrim between us and the characters. We are looking directly at these people—inhabiting them, in some cases—but we are also looking at the medium through which they are brought to life. Fitzgerald’s novels point to themselves as written objects and at the same time continue to insist on the psychological reality of their characters. They do not let us off the emotional hook in any way. On the contrary, they appear to strengthen our connection with the characters by making us feel that
all
of us, readers and characters alike, somehow recognize the existence of the transmitting paper and print. In
The Beginning of Spring
, this sense is reinforced by the fact that the main character, Frank Albertovich Reid, runs a Moscow-based printing business called Reidka’s. There is always a special interest, I find, that attaches to novels focusing on the printing or paper business (Arnold Bennett’s
Clayhanger
is one, and Balzac’s
Lost Illusions
is another). In such novels, the object in your hands points, however indirectly, to the process of its own making, as if to level the difference between your reality and its own.

Yet that is not the only function of the linguistic scrim. It unites us with the characters, but it also sets us apart from them, as if to suggest with its veiling habit that all insights are partial and most questions unanswerable. When we reach the end of a Penelope Fitzgerald novel, we are generally at a loss. We do not know what will happen next; we may not even fully comprehend what has already happened. Like Henry James at the end of
The Bostonians
, but with much less of a melodramatic flourish, she leaves us in doubt. In keeping with this, her novels tend to hinge or even end on moments of spontaneous silence. It is in those wordless moments—the ones between the lines, or before the lines begin, or after they end—that her tales have their secret life. What she gives us on the page, she manages to suggest, is only a small part of what is really there.

If Penelope Fitzgerald is the mistress of this technique, then Joseph Conrad is its master. Very few of his novels or novellas come to a firm conclusion. Reaching the end of
Nostromo
or
Lord Jim
, the first-time reader almost invariably turns back to the beginning. One finishes
Heart of Darkness
and realizes that the warning in the title, though ill-heeded, meant what it said: clear answers will never be forthcoming. This obscurity may be in part a function of Conrad’s deep-seated irony, an authorial distance from his characters so extreme that it lends an otherworldly despair to his work—as if God, say, had tried to see into mortal souls but then given it up as a bad job and abandoned us to our random fates. But there is something more human going on here as well, something that can be felt mainly at the level of language. Once again, there is that faint screen, that nearly indiscernible layer of mist, lying between us and the characters. It is not exactly a narrator (though in some of Conrad’s works there is indeed a narrating figure superimposed on the story); it is more of a linguistic slippage. Perhaps this is due to the fact that his first language was Polish and his second French, so that English, when he came to it, always retained some of the tantalizing allure of the incompletely familiar. Perhaps it is due to something else entirely. Whatever the cause, Conrad’s prose has a slightly alienated quality that makes it the perfect environment for inscrutable characters and their incomprehensible actions.

The two novels which seem to me to do this best—to present the inexplicable in a way that draws us completely inside and at the same time leaves us hanging—are
The Secret Agent
and
Under Western Eyes
. Both are political novels of a sort, and both reflect an anti-Russian bias that perhaps comes naturally to a Pole. But to be anti-Russian, in the sense of being suspicious of the tsarist government’s autocratic and tentacular reach, is also to be very Russian indeed. It is precisely this attitude that Conrad shares with Turgenev, with Dostoyevsky, with Gogol, with Chekhov, and with all those other pre-revolutionary writers who would not necessarily have felt they had much in common with each other. This Russian atmosphere so permeates
Under Western Eyes
that the last time I read the novel, I found myself carelessly turning back to the title page to see who had done the translation. I caught myself and laughed, but my mistake had alerted me to a realization: that the novel’s portrayal of Russian activists and Russian spies felt absolutely like a view from within, despite or perhaps even because of its terrifying Conradian irony.

Both the immersion and the distance are habits of mind he could have gleaned from the Russians, and no doubt did. For every writer that came after them, those towering nineteenth-century figures became the essential source, the standard to measure oneself against—and this is as true of writers from China and South Africa as it is for Europeans and Americans. No one had ever before learned to tell the truth as those great Russians did, and no one would ever do it better. I am not sure how to account for their superiority in this regard; I am not even sure how to describe it fully. But if I were to characterize what they had in common, one of the words I would use is authority.

FOUR

AUTHORITY

For those of us who came of age during a period of rebellion and unrest—whether in 1789, 1848, 1917, or 1968—the word is bound to carry a negative connotation. To some, it evokes uniforms, officialdom, governmental interference in the rights and activities of the private individual. To others, it suggests parents, teachers, clergymen, deans, and the whole range of unpleasant “authority figures” designed to prevent one from doing exactly as one wishes. In either case, it is seen as a bad thing, something to be dismantled or at the very least resisted.

But that is not at all the sense in which I mean it here. When I speak of authority in a work of literature, I am referring back to the word’s root, its connection to the idea of authorship. The kind of authority one finds in a literary work is the opposite of the guns-and-uniforms kind (or even the spankings-and-homework kind). It has no legal power to enforce anything. It cannot punish or deprive. It depends for its effect on the acceptance, the acknowledgment, of those receiving it. The writer possesses authority, but only by virtue of the reader who senses it. Not everyone will discern authority in the same set of writers, and people will disagree about which elements give rise to it even if they agree it is there. It is one of the trickiest areas to discuss, and its presence in a given work is impossible to prove to anyone’s complete satisfaction.