Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (23 page)

This perhaps goes some way toward explaining why Dostoyevsky makes so many appearances here and Tolstoy so few. Dostoyevsky specialized in imperfections; at times one can feel he is
all
imperfections. But this very roughness allows one to cling to him—to get a foothold in the cliff face of his grandeur—whereas Tolstoy’s marmoreal splendor can come across as smoothly slippery and coldly forbidding. Even Tolstoy isn’t perfect, of course. But he tends to strike one as flawless from the distance created by memory.

The kinds of problems that invite one into a literary work do not remain the same over time. Dickens is as flawed as Dostoyevsky, and I love him just as much, yet he has barely deigned to make an appearance here. Is it that I have already thought about him too much? I don’t think one can—and even if that were possible, Henry James would certainly fall into the same category. I think the reason is more likely to be that different books speak to you at different times in your life. I am sure Dickens and Tolstoy will come back to me eventually, but at the moment I find myself in greater need of James and Dostoyevsky. We may think we are choosing what books to read, but they choose us as well.

*   *   *

It is not just that some books have refused to put themselves forward for my consideration. Looking back on the ones I’ve discussed here, I can’t help feeling that even those that presented themselves also insisted, to some extent, on remaining hidden. This is because no analysis, no description, can ever do full justice to a work of literature. Only the thing itself, rendered in full, can serve as a satisfying example; a snippet won’t do. Yet even when I have reproduced a poem in full (as I did, for instance, with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “As kingfishers catch fire”), the attention paid to it doesn’t seem adequate. Kay Ryan, whenever she reads her short poems before an audience, always reads each one twice, as if that’s the least she can do to allow people to take it in. I would have reproduced the Hopkins poem twice if I thought I could get away with it. But then, I would have liked to reproduce all of
The Brothers Karamazov
as well, not to mention every other work I’ve mentioned. If I had done as I wished, I would have been left with no book of my own, just a library of other people’s works. There are many times when I’ve been tempted to break off our conversation and say, “Don’t listen to me. Just go read!”

It needn’t be either/or, though. You can listen to me
and
go read. I suppose the great advantage of having a conversation of this sort is that it gives us a chance to linger on the smallest details. Pleasure reading is a hungry activity: it gnaws and gulps at its object, as if desirous of swallowing the whole thing in one sitting. But we need to slow down, and at times even come to a dead stop, if we are to savor all the dimensions of a literary work. I wouldn’t love even the longest of these books as much as I do if they didn’t sustain my interest at the level of the sentence. The novel, it turns out, consists equally of the small and the large, the sentence and the overarching structure. Both must contribute to the ultimate design; both must be sufficiently good—sufficiently great, even with their flaws—if one is to find the novel satisfying. And this can be as true of translated works, where the sentences are those of, say, Alfred Birnbaum or Margaret Jull Costa, as it is of the books written in English.

If anything, my interest in the sentence has grown over time. As a young person, I used to read more for plot and character: my eye would begin to drift toward the period if Dickens or James went on for too long. Now, though, I revel in the extra clauses and glide around the sinuous switchbacks with delight. I am better, now, at hearing the author’s particular, intimate, humor-inflected voice expressed in his idiosyncratically constructed sentences, and it is that voice which remains my constant companion throughout the book. Like Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager or Conrad’s linguistic mist, the companionable voice does not get between me and the characters; on the contrary, my awareness of its presence paradoxically helps me feel closer to them. Style, in this sense, does not function in opposition to content, but instead brings it forth and makes it real. In the novels I love, there is no battle between the individual sentence and the overall shape of the work, just as there is no conflict between authorial design and character self-determination. Each is the handmaiden of the other, and serves its designated part.

I suppose this is even more obviously true of poetry. But I have just realized something, as I near the end of my self-imposed quest, where the pursuit of why I read has turned into a discovery of how I read. What I now understand is that I read poetry much as I read prose, and nonfiction in much the same way I read fiction. I read them all for meaning, for sound, for voice—but also for something I might call attentiveness to reality, or respect for the world outside oneself. The writer Harold Brodkey used to say, when he was alive, that literature consisted of one speaking voice plus one other genuinely existing thing. Or so I remember him saying. Perhaps I have simply amalgamated him to my own ideas, incorporated him into myself, as we do with our remembered dead. Perhaps he has amalgamated
me
, the way so many of my beloved writers, living and dead, strangers and familiars, have a habit of doing.

Sometimes it is hard to keep in mind that they were all living, once—even Milton; even Cervantes; even Sophocles. We shouldn’t let time mummify them, as it tries to do. The best musicians, it seems to me, play Bach as if he had written the piece just yesterday, for them, and that is how one ought to read literature. But reading in this way entails maintaining at least two apparently contradictory beliefs. The first is that a good book exists as an independent entity, completely outside of time. The second is that every book is the specific creation of a particular person at a precise historical moment.

For many years I labored under the delusion that biography and history dragged good art down, forcing it into generic categories. Now I know that is not the case. Nothing can drag a good work of literature down, and any additional insights that help you get a fix on it are to be welcomed. If the new information doesn’t help, it can be ignored with no harm done: the work itself is strong enough to withstand any such intrusions. With that in mind, I have occasionally brought in bits of biographical or historical information about some of the authors I discussed here. The function of such description was never to “explain” the literary works; explanation is neither required nor fully possible, when it comes to literature. If I offered a few biographical facts about the men and women who wrote these books, it was because I know such information interests us (as Wilkie Collins might have said) for the perfectly obvious reason that we are men and women ourselves.

Because every author was originally a human being, capable of making errors and sometimes capable of correcting them, there is nothing predestined about the way any work of literature turned out. From the perspective of hindsight—which is our own perspective, as readers—the greatest books, and even some of the less great, may appear to have a quality of inevitability. But that was never actually the case. They could have gone this way or that. Some of the greatest
did
go this way
and
that, and we still can’t be sure which version we should be keeping. Think of Henry James, with his early and late editions, the latter entailing a massive, detailed rewriting of his own youthful style. Think of William Wordsworth, who did much the same thing, but more extensively and, many think, more damagingly, with his early and late poetry. And think of Shakespeare, with all those textual “cruxes”—those little crossroads, those moments of verbal discrepancy, at which numerous scholars are still parting ways.

Before I ever had anything to do with the theater, I thought that the Shakespearean cruxes were entirely attributable to transcription errors. When Othello refers in some texts to a “base Indian” who threw away a pearl, and in others to a “base Judean,” I figured that was just because the written
I
and the written
J
looked so much alike. But now, having watched rehearsals at which playwrights changed their words until the last minute (and even sometimes after that), I wonder. The mistake wasn’t necessarily a mistake. It could have been that Shakespeare made both choices at different times: one pointing toward that exciting New World which had only recently been discovered, or else that exotic Eastern world after which the New World inhabitants were named; another toward the anti-Semitism that represented a different kind of prejudice—a prejudice Shakespeare had fully explored in an earlier play—rather than the one his black Othello suffered under. These by no means exhaust the possibilities. And
Othello
doesn’t necessarily become a better play or a worse play with either choice: just very slightly different.

The question of “better” and “worse” hovers over this book, because in talking about why I read and what I read, I am making judgments at every turn. I do not now intend to shy away from these judgments. They are at the heart of my enterprise. I would just like to stress that they too, like the works they apply to, could have come out differently. It is impossible for any one person, or even a large collection of people, to make literary judgments that will last for all time, or even for a lifetime. Knowing this, I have determined to practice to the full my right to be wrong. This is why I have included so many odd genres—science fiction, mysteries, journalism, diaries—along with the usual varieties of traditional literature. This is why I have cited living authors and even writers I know as well as those long dead. I would like the act of judging to be full of risk and vitality; I would like it to be a real choice. I am not interested in creating a museum of approved works—or if I am, it would be like the art collection Albert Barnes assembled in his house near Philadelphia, with remarkable Seurats and ageless Picassos hanging next to paintings by relative unknowns like Ernest Lawson and Charles Prendergast. For Barnes, they were all simply artists whose paintings he liked; the work of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries hadn’t yet hardened into an established hierarchy. Not everything at the Barnes Foundation is equally good. But the collection as a whole is alive with Barnes’s taste, and each room feels like a discovery.

I cannot, of course, hope to reproduce exactly this kind of experience in the pages of a book. At the Barnes Foundation, as at most museums, you can go through the rooms in any order you wish. With this book, on the other hand, you are tied to my whims. You must take each subject, each observation, in the order I choose to dole it out. (Though “choose” is a loaded word here, and probably not an accurate one: think about how compulsions work, and recollect those spirits who refuse to come when called.)

Literature is by its very nature linear, by which I mean not just that each line of poetry or prose leads to the next, but also that each chapter of a book is meant to follow the one before it. Ideas get carried through and plot gets carried out, in nonfiction as in fiction. Even a collection—of poems, of stories, of essays—has usually been arranged by the author in a precise sequence, so that you jump in midway at your own peril. That is as true of this book as of any other. Its plot, so to speak, is intended to be followed from beginning to end. I may talk about circles and spirals, but what I have really constructed, it would seem, is a line. This is not to say that there aren’t digressions and anticipatory peeks and retrospective musings, but they are all meant to be encountered in the order in which they appear on the page.

Certain kinds of art—sculpture, painting, architecture, and to some extent dance—free your glance to make its own choices, allowing it to roam as it wishes, focus on what it desires, and move at will from side to side or top to bottom. Even film, theater, and opera, though they are narrative art forms tied to the passage of time, leave some latitude for the eye: the plot may progress in a specific way, but the viewer’s gaze can dart into corners, peek at what is going on in the background, and still remain rooted in the story. Literature is not like this. The written word moves relentlessly forward, and you are required to take in the sentences in the order in which they come. If you stop focusing for even an instant, you lose the train of thought and must go back. There is only one pathway, and you and the author must follow it together.

I have always found this to be one of the most salutary things about reading—that it forces me to submit to a pattern set by someone else. At any rate, that’s the way it is when you read through a printed book, a series of pages whose sequence has been determined by their author. Who knows how long this will remain true? The prophecies about the future of the book are becoming increasingly dire, the various freedoms offered by the screen more alluring; linearity itself seems under threat. Yet I would be sorry to think that this benign form of limitation, essential to how and why I read, could ever completely disappear.

AFTERWORD: THE BOOK AS PHYSICAL OBJECT

I have before me a cartoon from the May 7, 2012, issue of
The New Yorker
. In it, an older scholar, or monk, or scribe—a man wearing a long, double-pointed beard and a melon-shaped fur-trimmed hat—sits at a rough wooden table with a younger scribe who has his arms crossed triumphantly in front of him. The older man is examining something the younger one has clearly just brought him: a leather-bound, clasp-backed book whose pages he appears to be turning. “Nice,” the older scribe is saying, “but as long as there are readers there will be scrolls.”

I don’t know if a young person would find this funny. I think it’s dourly hilarious—not laugh-out-loud, fall-on-the-floor hilarious, but pointedly funny. The joke is at my expense. It spells the end of the world as I know it, and it catches my own tone and that of most of my friends exactly. We are confident that books, as books, will never be obsolete. However many people adopt the new technologies, we are convinced that those cherished objects with which we have filled our houses, and our lives, are here to stay. After all, how could other people, even those unimaginable people of the future, bear to live without them?