by James Salter
If true, it is depressing that teachers should be reluctant to make aesthetic judgments about the worth of words, to say that these, arranged in a line, a chapter, a book, have a beauty that is worth your attention, as those do not, and to explain why that should be so. Beauty, truth, preference, order, value are words to make the new-knowing wince and wink. Uncomfortable with style, these individuals leap instead on lifestyle and fey anthropology, which may explain some of the strange scholarship that’s bred in literature departments these days: stuff on cross-dressing, the iconography of Jackie Kennedy or Madonna, the imperialistic reach of Walt Disney. Will anyone read these books in five years? They should be carried by skeletal models on fashion runways, for they will stay current no longer than the season’s prized synthetic.
Have the universities engaged in a great leveling process in the presentation of literature, as in much else, and, by so doing, have they forsaken traditional notions of what a liberal education should be? Such an education has to be about discrimination, dismissive and embracing judgments, differences calculated with an unclouded eye. Let technical vocational skills be uniformly imposed: the bridge should remain suspended, the tunnel unflooded, the spacecraft aloft, the ship afloat, the accounts in balance, the patient alive. Let liberal education champion value, disagreement, rank, all the elements celebrated by guileful Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: degree (not the same thing as a university’s production-line piece of paper), priority, place, course, proportion, form, office, custom, in all line of order. He could be offered no campus presidency, this eloquent, slippery man (“Wouldn’t he be a good fund-raiser?”), but universities have done worse: “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets / In mere oppugnancy.” Which is where a lot of America meets now.
The “canon,” about whose hegemonic hold on curricula we have heard too much in recent years from those uneasy with degree, is really no more than an A-list of things to consider reading. Life is choice, you have x amount of time to spend reading, apportion it wisely. If you’re a serious reader, look here. It’s a list both porous and expansive. What’s canonical is so, by and large, because it has for some time satisfied minds and hearts, not because it has met some Noah’s ark notion of inclusiveness. Those who scorn the very idea of a canon had better come up with a powerful alternative. It won’t do to mandate that work be read because it represents the category of, say, hermaphrodite fiction—and right-handed hermaphrodite fiction at that, sinister hermaphrodite prose being a separately privileged genre. All literary texts are not created equal, and their worth is not in their provenance or their good intentions, just as their achievement is not to be gauged by their conformity to the moment’s panethnic pansexual Panglossian social or political enthusiasms.
Imagine that in time the society will divide into readers, who want information and don’t much attend to the form in which it comes, and Readers, who want music, implication, wit, transformation, resistance. You can guess who’ll be in charge. The Readers will shrink to a circle as sealed as the Druids’, and as irrelevant and doomed. At least the tree folk lost out to Rome and Christianity. Where’s the glory in Reading your fate on a pulsing blue screen, or in a friend’s shrug and blank stare?
Talk given at Woodrow Wilson Center
October 25, 1995
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the books and journals in which the pieces in this volume were originally published.
“Some for Glory, Some for Praise.” In Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, edited by Will Blythe. Back Bay Books, 1999.
“The Writing Teacher.” The New York Times Sunday Book Review, March 8, 2005.
“Odessa, Mon Amour.” Narrative Magazine, Spring 2009.
“Like a Retired Confidential Agent, Graham Greene Hides Quietly in Paris.” People, January 19, 1976.
“An Old Magician Named Nabokov Lives and Writes in Splendid Exile.” People, March 17, 1975.
“From Lady Antonia’s Golden Brow Springs Another Figure of History.” People, February 24, 1975.
“Ben Sonnenberg Jr.” Men’s Journal, May 2001.
“Life for Author Han Suyin Has Been a Sometimes Hard But Always Many Splendored Thing.” People, November 8, 1976.
“D’Annunzio, the Immortal Who Died.” The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 1978.
“Cool Heads.” Joe, 1999.
“An Army Mule Named Sid Berry Takes Command at the Point.” People, September 2, 1974.
“Ike the Unlikely.” Esquire, December 1983.
“Younger Women, Older Men.” Esquire, March 1992.
“Karyl and Me.” Modern Maturity, April–May–June 1997.
“When Evening Falls.” GQ, February 1992.
“Talk of the Town on Bill Clinton.” The New Yorker, October 5, 1998.
“The Definitive Downhill: Toni Sailer.” The New York Times, November 7, 1982.
“At the Foot of Olympus: Jarvik, Kolff, and DeVries.” Typescript, May 26, 1981.
“Man Is His Own Star: Royal Robbins.” Quest, March–April 1978.
“Racing for the Cup.” Geo, December 1982.
“Getting High.” Life, August 1979.
“The Alps.” National Geographic Traveler, October 1999.
“Offering Oneself to the Fat Boys.” Outside, December 1995.
“Passionate Falsehoods.” The New Yorker, August 4, 1997.
“The First Women Graduate.” Life, May 1980.
“Almost Pure Joy.” The Washington Post Magazine, August 13, 1995.
“Eat, Memory.” The New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2005.
“Paris Nights.” Food & Wine, October 1998.
“Chez Nous.” European Travel and Life, Spring 1990.
“Once and Future Queen.” Rocky Mountain Magazine, 1994.
“They Call It Paradise.” Geo, November 1981.
“Snowy Nights in Aspen.” Colorado Ski Country USA, 1997–98.
“Notes from Another Aspen.” Aspen Magazine, Winter 1996–97.
“Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now What?” In Writers on Writing, Collected Essays from The New York Times, introduction by John Darnton. Times Books, 2002.
“Words’ Worth.” Talk given at Woodrow Wilson Center, October 25, 1995.