Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (2 page)

I have said that I aimed to make this book conversational, and I do. Clarity is a great virtue. But sometimes things cannot be made instantly clear, and there are times when a form of heightened concentration may be required. This is one of the favors literature has done for me—it has taught me the pleasures of close attention. A work of commentary or criticism is not necessarily a work of literature, but it can aspire to that condition and be the better for it. I aspire, in this little book, toward the qualities I have admired in novels and poetry, including the compression, the indirection, the inherent connections, the organic shape.

There are no topics that absolutely had to be covered in this book. There are no essential facts that I needed to convey to you about literature. There are certain questions that I have long been curious about, and that I wanted to answer for myself as well as for you—questions about the nature of suspense, for instance, and why we feel it even when we know what will happen; questions about our connection to specific characters, as well as their connection to their author; questions about the kinds of sentences that bring a novel into being, or usher us out of it; questions about belief, and doubt, and the historically true, and the fictionally imagined. And then there are the works of literature that have raised these questions in my mind, and through which I hope to answer them. Whether they are fourteen-line poems or six-hundred-page novels, all of these literary works contain multitudes. They refuse to fit neatly into separate chapters and instead reappear as needed, offering their answers to each different question in turn. Nor do they present themselves on demand: they are willful creatures whose movements I do not completely control. Thus I may admire Tolstoy as much as I admire Dostoyevsky (even more, perhaps, if I have just finished reading
War and Peace
), and yet it is Dostoyevsky who insists on returning again and again to this book, whether I am talking about intimacy or authority or plot, while Tolstoy remains largely behind the scenes, holding himself aloof. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” boasts a character in Shakespeare’s
Henry IV, Part One
, to which another character sensibly answers, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?”

So the book has taken its shape organically, as the various willfulnesses, mine and those of the literary sources, battle with each other and resistantly work together. Yet out of this conflict has come some kind of order. I like to picture the final shape of the book as something like a spiral, on which you and I are progressing upward (or perhaps downward) but also round and round. Each new chapter represents a new level of the spiral, so we know we are getting somewhere; and yet we are always circling around the same elongated core, greeting now-familiar works as we pass by them once again. There is movement, but it is not exactly forward movement. There is repetition, but each time the repeated material is seen from a different view. And there is simultaneously a feeling of internal division and a sense of natural flow, since each chamber of the spiral remains connected to the one that came before it and the one that will come after. Happenstance rather than certainty governs the process of growth. Yet once it is finished, the structure will seem to have arrived at its only possible shape, so that there will be some sense of completion, I hope, even in its open-endedness.

ONE

CHARACTER AND PLOT

I had meant to keep these two things separate. I intended to start with a chapter about character and then move on, in the next chapter, to plot, since that is pretty much the order in which I choose what I want to read. The two labels had a kind of inevitability in my mind, as if mathematicians had discovered them in nature. And it’s true that writers and readers and teachers and critics have been using these terms for such a long time now that it would be hard to do without them. Yet they turn out not to be oppositional categories, or even fully separable ones. As I discovered when I began to press harder on the distinction, it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of plot
versus
character: plot modifies character and character modifies plot, and there can be no meaningful version of one that exists purely without the other.

Henry James (who always gets there before me) observed in his sharp, generous essay about the novels of Anthony Trollope:

If he had taken sides on the droll, bemuddled opposition between novels of character and novels of plot, I can imagine him to have said (except that he never expressed himself in epigrams), that he preferred the former class, inasmuch as character in itself is plot, while plot is by no means character. It is more safe indeed to believe that his great good sense would have prevented him from taking an idle controversy seriously. Character, in any sense in which we can get at it, is action, and action is plot, and any plot which hangs together, even if it pretend to interest us only in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle, plays upon our emotion, our suspense, by means of personal references. We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

And, he might have added, we know what people are only by seeing what they do when confronted with what happens to them: this is what James means when he says that character, “in any sense in which we can get at it,” is action, or plot.

One has only to look at his own novels to see how this works. Characters like Isabel Archer, Kate Croy, and Maggie Verver, though they may spend whole chapters musing to themselves, essentially think in the same way they speak: rationally, socially, effortfully. Despite James’s reputation as a novelist of great psychological depth, there are virtually no scenes in which he peers beneath the verbal surface, telling us that whereas So-and-so
appeared
to think this, she
really
thought that. Behavior is the manifestation of thought, in James. In the few cases where his characters attempt to think deviously—as does, for instance, Mrs. Gereth in
The Spoils of Poynton
—they are almost always mistaken, or misguided, or at the very least misled as to the efficacy of their own wishes and beliefs. In this respect, the purely psychological interior is not the place where James’s deepest truths dwell. Nor do his characters dream, for the most part. If they have an unconscious, it is as invisible to them as it is to us.

It is not just a matter of
our
knowing these people through their actions. That is how they come to know themselves. Isabel Archer does not fully define herself to herself—does not, in that sense, arrive at her long-sought fate—until, at the end of
The Portrait of a Lady
, she renounces her own hard-won freedom and returns to Rome for the sake of her stepdaughter, Pansy. Kate Croy, in
The Wings of the Dove
, does not realize how deeply she hates the squalor of poverty until she finds herself manipulating her fiancé into marriage with a dying heiress. And Maggie Verver, in
The Golden Bowl
, has no sense of the reserves of her own psychological fortitude, no awareness of how much power she is capable of exerting, until she sets out to separate her husband from his mistress, who happens to be her beloved father’s wife. These women do not come ready-packaged with a character that accompanies them through life, like a kit-bag of charms carried by the generic hero of a fairy tale. On the contrary, they become their characters—they develop into them—by facing up to the various things that life throws at them, some as a result of chance and others stemming directly from their own actions. But even to distinguish chance from self-imposed destiny is to belie the atmosphere of a James novel, where character is both forged and manifested through its confrontation with all kinds of events—events which, as this perspicacious author repeatedly suggests, arise from an indistinguishable melding of self, environment, history, will, and coincidence.

Henry James’s chosen task, as a novelist, was to locate such moments of self-creation, self-definition, self-discovery—call it what you will—in the often superficial, frequently deceptive, socially complex life of his times. It is not always a pretty sight, this moment at which the person finds out who or what she is, but it is always interesting, which is why the last hundred pages of a James novel invariably zoom by in a flood of suspense. If this payoff for the character, and for us, comes at the end, for the novelist himself it always began much earlier, at the dinner party or the polite gathering where, in the casual conversations taking place around him, he first caught a glimpse of his precious
donnée
, that “given” item of news or hearsay from which he could begin to weave his fictional web. To see him at home after the party as he writes up his almost-nightly notebook entries, working out the details of what he has captured on the fly, is practically to feel in one’s own body the palpable thrill of authorial discovery. The initial stimulus is never sufficient, the shred of gossip never enough: he has to work it over and over, teasing and tinkering and toying with it, until what he was handed becomes what he wants. The given turns into the wrought-upon, as the self imposes its own nature on the bare events it is faced with. It is a recapitulation of the very process his characters go through.

It was at a dinner on December 23, 1893, that James first heard, from a Mrs. Anstruther-Thompson, the core of the tale that ultimately became
The Spoils of Poynton
—a “small and ugly matter” involving a young laird who, upon his marriage, planned to dispossess his widowed mother of her house and all its beautiful possessions, as he had a legal right to do. The plot, as we now have it in the novel, is practically all there from the beginning: the mother’s hatred of the new wife, her removal of the precious objects, the threat of litigation, and so on. But the elusive heart of the story is still evading James as late as the fall of 1895, nearly two years later. On October 15, he uses his notebook entry to explore the problem. “What does she do then?—how does she work, how does she achieve her heroism?” he asks himself about the character of Fleda Vetch (a creation of his own, distinctly
not
a figure in the initial dinner-table story). “It’s the question of
how
she takes care of it that is the tight knot of my
donnée
,” he goes on. And then, before our very eyes, he loosens that knot by worrying at it:

That confronts me with the question of the action Fleda exercises on Mrs. Gereth and of how she exercises it. My old idea was that she worked, as it were, on her feelings. Well, eureka! I think I have found it—I think I see the little interesting turn and the little practicable form … How a little click of perception, of this sort, brings back to me all the strange sacred time of my thinkings-out, this way, pen in hand, of the stuff of my little theatrical trials … My new little notion was to represent Fleda as committing—for drama’s sake—some broad effective stroke of her own. But that now looks to me like a mistake: I’ve got hold, very possibly, of the tail of the right thing. Isn’t the right thing to make Fleda simply work upon Mrs. Gereth, but work in an interesting way?

And here, with his metaphor of the “tail,” he suggests how he is being led by something outside himself, is merely following an idea that has been thrust upon him with that nearly audible “click of perception.” Is this process internal or external, character-driven or plot-driven? The question makes no sense, because the two are inseparable.

*   *   *

Still, I would have to say that for me character is always at the forefront. I cannot enjoy even a plain old mystery if the people (the detectives
and
the killers, but especially the detectives) do not on some level strike me as persuasive. And in this view I am supported, it turns out, by that grandmaster of plotting, Wilkie Collins. “It may be possible, in novel-writing,” he wrote in the 1861 preface to his wildly popular thriller
The Woman in White
, “to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can effectively be told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers, is a narrative which interests them about men and women—for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves.”

To be persuasive, a character need not necessarily adhere to the rules of humdrum reality. Nor need she be a fully shaped human figure with descriptive qualities attached. Sometimes, as in a poem, she can simply be a voice. But what she
does
need to have, if she is to persuade us of her reality, is a plausible relationship to her own context. That context resides in the content of the work of literature (its situation, its setting, its plot), but also in its form, by which I mean its language, its diction, its mode of address. So there are at least two kinds of surrounding environment: the one the character perceives, because she exists there as a real person, and another of which she generally remains oblivious, because it defines her as a fictional character. Both collaborate to shape her personality and our response to it.

Every character springs from and belongs to his own specific world, and though he may be successfully relocated from that context (as Hamlet, for instance, is relocated to an existential-absurdist performance in Tom Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
), he will not be the same character in the new setting, even if he is still given his old lines. Because the tendrils that hold him to his original work are at once so delicate and so firmly wound, it doesn’t really make sense to distinguish a character from the other literary elements—situation, language, event, other characters—that surround and create him. Yet writers and readers have always made precisely this distinction. Perhaps we insist on it because we ourselves,
as
selves, feel separate from and independent of all the multitudinous factors that have gone into our own making and continue to influence our actions. To the extent that we believe ourselves to be autonomous individuals in the world, we tend, or at least wish, to grant the same autonomy to literary characters.