Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (7 page)

*   *   *

These two characters, “you” and “I,” also inhabit the world of nonfiction literature. Our tendency is to take them at face value there—to believe, for example, that the essayistic, reportorial, journalistic narrator is the real thing in a way that the voice of a poem or the protagonist of a novel is not. But the reverse could well be the case. As Janet Malcolm has pointed out, “In a work of nonfiction we never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.” In other words, the author of imaginative literature presumably knows everything there is to know about her characters (or, if she does not, then who is to contradict her, for no one at any rate knows more). But with essays or journalism or autobiography, much necessarily remains unknown to the author, who is essentially constructing characters out of what he can grab as reality flings it past him. The fictional character
is
herself; the essayistic character is only a Platonic shadow, flickeringly cast upon the page, of a reality that fully exists elsewhere. And nowhere is this more true than in the case of the essayist’s “I.”

The doubt that the nonfiction writer instills in us is central to his enterprise. He makes us depend on that friendly fellow who engagingly tells us his life story or recounts an interesting set of events or observations, and then he undercuts that dependence by making us suspicious of his veracity. This suspicion is not an unfortunate by-product of his effort; it needs to be there for the nonfiction piece to work. If the author neglects to alert us to a sense of his own unreliability, we may discover it on our own, bringing the whole house of cards down in one swift blow. (This is what happens, I think, in the first-person accounts of extremely narcissistic writers like Emma Goldman and Anaïs Nin, who believe too strongly in their own perspectives. Because they are incapable of doubting themselves, we do the doubting for them, and it ends by ruining their books.) But the balancing act required of such an author is a delicate one, for the suspicions can’t be so strong as to undercut our dependence. We need to recognize doubt, but then we must somehow be encouraged to take the leap of faith that gets us to the other side of this chasm. If we end up in the abyss, the nonfiction writer has failed; if we remain stolidly on the safe side of the broken bridge, he has also failed. He needs to get us across, but with full foreknowledge of the dangers involved. It is both a trick and not a trick.

J. R. Ackerley, one of the most appealing nonfiction writers of the twentieth century, wrote in the brief foreword to
My Father and Myself
:

The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the method of ploughing to and fro over my father’s life and my own, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the plough turned.

By confessing this at the beginning, Ackerley both hands us our doubts and assuages them. Would we have noticed the problem on our own? Perhaps not. But now we are convinced that despite his desire to tell us a good tale, his willingness to tinker with history to keep us engaged, this author is bent on conveying the truth to us.

The confession need not be explicit to be effective. In Tobias Wolff’s memoir
This Boy’s Life
, the main thing we learn about the youthful Toby is what a liar he is. He lies to protect himself from his brutal stepfather, Dwight, but he also lies repeatedly to various other authority figures, like schoolteachers and police officers. What is to keep us from feeling that he is lying to us as well? Nothing—especially since there seems to be an insuperable gap between the boy this story is about, this terrible student who can’t even graduate from a public high school, and the man who is constructing the elegant, persuasive sentences that tell us the story of the boy he once was. That is the gap Wolff must get us to leap over if we are to believe he is telling us the truth. Some of us may do it unconsciously, and that is fine. If you give this book to a thirteen-year-old boy, especially one who has had a troubling stepfather, he will take it into his room and not emerge until he has finished it. He does not care about authorial doubt; he cares only, for the moment, about the great, well-told story. But as one reads and rereads the book over the years (and as future generations read it, detached from its original context), it will become apparent that the story would not succeed without strenuously demanding of us that leap of faith.

In my own life, the nonfiction author who has most powerfully persuaded me both to believe him and to doubt him is George Orwell. When I first read the essays, I was like that thirteen-year-old boy: I was smitten, and I believed every word. Later, I came to feel that Orwell was lying to me—that he was relying too heavily on something like Ackerley’s capitalized “Art,” that he was constructing a self which bore no relation to any real person called George Orwell or even Eric Blair. (The fact that he had adopted a pseudonym was part of the evidence against him, in my most accusatory phase.) Only lately have I come to see that the doubt is a necessary part of the belief, and that Orwell need no more be the “I” of his sentences than I need to be the “you” in order for the sentences to carry their ethical weight. In fact, Orwell’s “you”
is
his “I.” To the extent I imagined myself spoken to personally by him, I was mistaken. If we merged on the page (as Emily Dickinson and her imagined reader did), it was not because he became me, but because he insisted that I transform myself into him. This was not at all bad for me. I tend in any case to have an excessive sense of self, and it was good for me to be changed, even if only temporarily, into a grumpy, clear-eyed British socialist of the 1930s. It may have been a rhetorical device, but it was a device that I still believe is grounded in certain truths—the ones about class and identity and moral obligation, for example, that Orwell points out so tellingly in
The Road to Wigan Pier
, where he observes how “humiliating” it can be to watch coal miners at work:

It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an “intellectual” and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the
Times Lit. Supp.
, and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of
Marxism for Infants
—all of us
really
owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

I may resist that “you” (as in other phases of my life I have resisted the casually homophobic insult to the “Nancy” poets, or the sentimental characterization of “superior persons” versus “poor drudges”), but the resistance is essential to Orwell’s method. It is part of what will make these beautifully paced sentences continue to ring true even after there are no more coal miners left in the world.

If the second-person pronoun is a central character in Orwell’s essays, it is one that is nearly absent from Montaigne’s. This has much to do with their very different aims. Orwell, who was self-consciously refining the essay form for use as a publicly deployable weapon, was focused on the presence of an audience. Montaigne, who was inventing the essay essentially from whole cloth as a way of exploring his own personality and his own ideas, wrote for nobody but himself—or, if he wrote for anyone else, it was for a dead best friend who would never read his words. The world of Montaigne’s essays is a severely enclosed one, and it can seem airless in comparison to Orwell’s. It is not an easy place in which to spend time; its only character (aside from a host of distant and long-dead authors from whom Montaigne is constantly quoting) is that sole and perennial “I.” But this limitation is not a shortcoming. It gives Montaigne the capacity to speak about things that Orwell and other conversational authors could not. Death, for instance, as he does here, in the late essay “On vanity”:

Not from fear but from cunning, I want to go to earth like a rabbit and steal off as I pass away. It is not my intention to test or to display my constancy during that action. For whom would it be? Then all my right to reputation and all my concern for it will be at an end. I am satisfied with a death which will withdraw into itself, a calm and lonely one, entirely my own, in keeping with my life—retiring and private … I have enough to do without having to console others; enough thoughts in my mind without fresh ones evoked by my surroundings; enough to think about without drawing on others. This event is not one of our social engagements; it is a scene with one character.

Montaigne’s seemingly personal observation doesn’t claim to be the last word on death—nothing could be that, after all—but the strength of this passage is nonetheless profound. Its charm and its astuteness both stem from the same curious tonal mixture of overt selfishness and secret companionableness. His own life, his own writing, may be particularly solitary, but in death we are all, finally, alone: that is why Montaigne, as a self-professed isolate, can serve as such an apt guide to this experience that none of us will ever fully have. Yet even to put it in this bald, imploring way is to subtract from the delicate irony with which he treats the untreatable. “This event is not one of our social engagements; it is a scene with one character.” How is it that he can suggest the idea of theater and in the same gesture take it away, so that all thoughts of audience, of pretense, of a public of any kind, are banished from that scene?

*   *   *

Death may lower the final curtain on life, but it does not necessarily have the same effect in literature. This is yet another version of the space between: that liminal space which, in literature alone, marks the uncertain borderline between the dead and the living. Unlike the people who surround us in our daily existence, the characters in a literary work can continue to speak their minds to us from beyond the grave. (We may imagine that we can similarly hear from our own beloved dead, in dreams or hallucinations or simple remembrances, but these are
our
minds speaking to us, not theirs.) A literary character can be both dead and conscious; both dead and perceptive; both dead and reflective. A dead author can be this too, but not quite in the same way. Reading Henry James, who died thirty-six years before I was born (
only
thirty-six, I am amazed to realize, given that I once considered it another era—but he and I are growing closer and closer as I grow older and he stands still), I hear a voice that continues to speak its mind to me, making jokes I still find funny and psychological observations I still assent to. But even I, besotted as I am with this author, understand that he wrote these sentences as a living person, basically the same kind of living person that I am now. Whereas for those of his characters who incline toward the supernatural—the narrator of “The Jolly Corner,” who returns to his long-ago home and meets his alternate self; the famous author in “The Private Life,” who carries on an active social life while his double sits writing in the upstairs study; the governess in
The Turn of the Screw
, who imagines her charges have been invaded by morally evil ghosts—the border between life and afterlife is much more permeable.

This is actually less true of James than it is of certain other writers, because his best work deals with how those left behind feel about the departed, and not vice versa. He is essentially a chronicler of the regretful living and not the regretful dead. To attend closely to the latter, we need to turn to someone like Javier Marías, a Spanish writer whose “When I Was Mortal” (the title story of his first collection to appear in English) ably conveys this aspect of his fiction. The dead who watch the living, and long for them still, and wish to be back in that space where time passed, and mattered, and took its toll: this is the explicit subject of a few works by Marías and the implicit subject of many. “I often used to pretend I believed in ghosts,” the narrator of “When I Was Mortal” starts by telling us, “and I did so blithely, but now that I am myself a ghost, I understand why, traditionally, they are depicted as mournful creatures who stubbornly return to the places they knew when they were mortal. For they do return.” Javier Marías has a special feeling for these people who are no longer people; they preoccupy him, and he sympathizes with them to an unusual extent. This was apparent to me not only from his writing, but also on the one occasion I saw him speak at a public event. “Can you tell us something about the role of magicians, or seers, or tricksters, or ghosts in works of literature—specifically, your works of literature?” the onstage interlocutor asked him. “I choose ghosts,” Marías answered, in English that was expressively perfect but not quite idiomatic, before going on to articulate the connection, at least in his own mind, between authorship and the dead.

Javier Marías is still very much alive, but something additional happens to such ghost-ridden works when their author himself dies. I used to listen to Thom Gunn read aloud his poem “Death’s Door,” in which he imagined how

After their processing, the dead

Sit down in groups and watch TV,

In which they must be interested,

For on it they see you and me.

Something of Thom’s endearing wit steadily infused this dark poem, in which he imagined four of his friends—strangers in life, but dead in the same month—watching the black-and-white set together and gradually losing interest, until “snow blurs the picture” and they are “weaned from memory,” loosed into the timelessness of the archaic dead. And I can still hear Thom’s wit when I reread this poem to myself. But the voice in which it was conveyed is fading now, for he too has joined the dead and been swallowed up in that snow.