CHILDREN generally read what they please, but addictive adults (writers especially) can get tangled in the toils of choice. There may be as many kinds of reading as there are books, each one demanding its own form and degree of active participation; our choices can depend on whether we relish the exertions of volleyball, as it were, or prefer a meandering round of croquet. A writer like Henry Green, for example, sets down the merest hints on the page, leaving us practically to write the book ourselves, the way archaeologists reconstruct a tomb from three chunks of stone and a dip in the ground. Others, George Eliot, say, make us feel a trifle superfluous. We come ready to do our share, only to find that the author, like a solicitous mother, has anticipated our every need and errant fancy. I’ll choose the coddling every time, yet more spartan types rave of the beauties of Henry Green, about whom I feel as I do about marathon running: I’d like to do it, but I just haven’t the constitution.
At times the ramifications of choice verge on the metaphysical, the moral, even the absurd. To read the dead or the living, the famous or the ignored, the kindred spirits or the bracingly unfamiliar? And how to go about it—systematically or at random?
At bottom, of course, the issue in choosing what to read (and what to do and how to live) is the old conflict, dating from the Garden, of pleasure versus duty: what we want to read versus what we think we ought to read, or think we ought to want to read. Set out this way, it seems a simple distinction. And the extremes are indeed simple—books I am paid to review, as opposed to unheralded, unfashionable books I gravitate to like a respectable businessman shuffling into a porn movie house. In between lie acres of ambiguity, the many books (the many acts) I cannot in all decency leave unread (undone)—or can I?
An unusually clear case some years ago was Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools. Reviews proliferated like cells splitting in an embryo; literary pages were monopolized for weeks. (Pity any less celebrated author whose book appeared at the same time.) Yet something put me off. Beyond the reported twenty-year gestation period and the arrogance of its metaphor (such relentless meaning), it was the awe that greeted it, an awe more fit for hugenesses like the Grand Canyon, and which made it obligatory reading. How to escape? In conversation, I lay low. Lying, as I mentioned earlier, was out of the question. But you can always say you haven’t read something “yet.” “Yet” extended longer and longer, like string from a spool. I still haven’t read it, but the “yet” is gone—I let go the string. I waited it out.
Much of the time, though, the distinction is not simple at all—at least I am not among the happy few who can readily distinguish want from ought. We are taught from our first breath to want what others think we should want. They dress up “ought” in the insidious garb of want, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, so that life’s greatest task becomes the unmasking of false desire to reveal the bleak bare-toothed ought, and the unearthing of true desire.
Aside from the magazine pieces, the authors I read as a child were dead, and I still fancy the dead, a taste nowadays almost dowdy. To read current books, in our age detached from history, is to be forever young, forward-looking, partaking of the merciless energy of daybreak joggers and successful deal makers, rubbing shoulders with celebrity writers. (Could Villon or Baudelaire have dreamed writers would join the ranks of the beautiful people?) Current books are modishly sleek inside and out, low-fat, low-cholesterol, sort of like Lite beer—not bad on a hot day yet hardly the thing for a seasoned drinker. Meanwhile the books of the dead stay heavy and dun-colored, their pages not quite white, their typefaces stolid and ingenuous (except for those fortunate few treated to brand-new paperback attire, like a face-lift or hair implant). Reading the dead is being a meat-eater in a vegetable age, mired in superseded values. When someone at a dinner party asks, Read any good books lately?, Jane Eyre or Pamela is not a fertile answer. These are closed issues, closed books. (Although nowadays the question is more apt to be, Seen any good films lately? This shift illustrates the much-noted decline of the printed word and the ascendancy of screens bearing images. The common currency of getting-acquainted discourse, or even of discourse between friends, is no longer about what we are reading and thinking, but what we are seeing. A pity that they should have to be rivals.)
The pressure to read the living is moral as well as social. We must know our own times, understand what is happening around us. But I know my own times. I am in them. I have only to walk down Broadway or Main Street to see what is happening. It is the times of the dead I do not know. The dead are exciting precisely because they are not us. They are what we will never know except through their books. Their trivia are our exotica. As writers, transmitters, the dead can be more alive than some of the living.
I can hear the protests: I am romanticizing, not even granting the dead their proper context but allowing distance to contour and laminate them. Today’s living will someday acquire that fine airbrushed otherness. Why not be daring and appreciate them now? Besides, the dead writers have been preselected; no discrimination is necessary. I needn’t sift through five dozen nineteenth-century Russian novelists and decide, okay, this arrogant, tormented count, this loony gambler with the dubious past, this dapper smooth fellow, that sweet country doctor. I am forfeiting the opportunity to judge, to rank, to shape the tradition.
The question of judgment, of who is worth reading and what constitutes the tradition, has grown difficult and complex. Until lately it was assumed automatically that the writers whose works endured were the most significant. With the spur of feminist criticism, with the freeing of vision to include literatures other than Western and attitudes other than white and male, the idea of the “canon” has come under cross-examination—not only its contents but the notion of an exclusive body of “the enduring” or “the best.” Who has chosen the revered works and by what standards? What has escaped their vision? How do such decisions and rankings encourage some voices and discourage others? Above all, how does a biased literary tradition cramp our present and future reading and writing?
These are not new issues by any means, but they need to be reexamined with each shift in social circumstances. For very possibly the canon of great works does not emerge naturally from history, but our view of history from a fairly arbitrary canon, in which case the way to a truer history is through a more inclusive tradition. The familiar dead have brought us to where we are. But supposing we wish to take ourselves to a different place? What if our forms of political action and discourse had been determined not by reading Machiavelli, but, say, Confucius or Lao-tzu?
Being truly current (not merely low-fat) demands that we resurrect or re-emphasize works—by the dead and the living—overlooked through faulty vision, which is presently being done by scholars and editors. It does not mean, though, that the canonized dead must be crowded out because others join them. In art there is no problem of space. The road is broad and forever under construction, as Eliot has pointed out, forever being refurbished and widened. With the advent of each new writer who will someday be “dead” in my romantic sense—a Garcia Marquez or Gordimer or Coetzee or Calvino—it undergoes major alteration. Every writer’s work is changed. Not that we are influenced in any specific or even noticeable way, but that we work with an awareness of new lanes, new curves, and new road signs.
On a small island off the coast of Spain I met an American writer, an expatriate, if the term still applies—he had not been stateside in many years. He had never heard of Raymond Carver. A good or a bad thing? I wondered. It definitely mattered one way or the other, as it might not have mattered centuries ago. Whatever Carver’s work means decades from now, today it signifies a development, a provocative shift. If the man I met was a genius, I decided, a Shakespeare or Sophocles, the gaps in his knowledge would matter very little: he would go his own way, creating his context out of genius, not temporal conditions. (Though what would Shakespeare have been like without his Italian forebears?) But if he was simply a good and serious writer, he ought to know.
The more purposeful a writer is, the more her work defines a particular connection to her time and surroundings. Or, if “defines” sounds a bit deadly, let’s say “shows,” for no writer consciously sets out to do it (or does so at her peril). The connection is evident in the writing to the degree that it is strong in the writer. If she does not feel context—time, place, spirit—pressing in on her like humidity, the work will be ephemeral and self-referential, brittle as a fallen leaf. Part of context is what other writers are doing with the same context.
So despite my necrophilia, I read the living to know in what terms the connections are being illustrated. Then I can use, abuse, or neglect these terms in full consciousness. For inevitably, every living writer is a part of every other, all of us bumping up against each other like passengers in a loaded bus. Some feel and smell better than others, and we may wish certain ones would just disembark, but for the moment they must be taken account of. When there is a pothole in the road, we are all jolted.
I can vacillate lengthily, and foolishly, over whether to read at random (as I did on my bed in the fading light) or in some programmed way (as we all did in school). I like to cling to the John Cage-ish principle that if randomness determines the universe it might as well determine my reading too; to impose order is to strain against the nature of things. Randomness continuing for long enough will yield its own pattern or allow a pattern to emerge organically, inscrutably, from within—or so I hope. On the other hand, how comforting to have a plan. It harks back to the satisfaction of pleasing authority and earning a gold star. With a few months’ effort, anyone can become an expert on Balzac or medieval epics or Roman comedies, and how reassuringly American, too, are expertise, thoroughness, inclusiveness—offshoots of manifest destiny, no doubt, the need to control the entire territory.
The case of random versus order is an old duality among the many that Western thought likes to ease into, safe harbors after the tossings of ambiguity, just as nineteenth-century symphonies, after fretful harmonic uncertainty, resolve into their tonic chords, somewhat begging the question, it seems. Isaiah Berlin, in The Hedgehog and the Fox, quotes the Greek poet Archilocus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” meaning that hedgehogs connect everything to one all-embracing principle, while foxes “entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal … seizing upon a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves.” The quote may be read more literally and mundanely too. The hedgehog knows one thing—physics or ballet or the movements of the tides—and therefore knows the world, for nature works the same patterns everywhere, with surface variations; while the fox is a quite respectable dilettante, knowing the huge range of variations, with a smattering of methodology.
Swift divided writers into spiders and bees, the one buzzing from flower to flower gathering their diverse sweetnesses to transform into uniform honey, the other gazing inward, spinning elaborate, sticky webs out of the dirty stuff of the self. And yet true contemplatives are not self-absorbed in Swift’s scorned and narrow sense. The Zen master, sitting and breathing, sees, or will see eventually, the whole world via the emptiness (readiness) of the self, the world compellingly real and multiform, flashing into the receptive eye.
I tend to think writers—and readers too—may be spiders and bees, foxes and hedgehogs, depending on mood and timing and need. I spent a hedgehog winter years ago reading the Greek tragedies. There are many good reasons to read them. Mine was that I had ordered a set from a discount catalogue. Anything acquired in such a carefree way—sitting at the desk, a mere matter of pen and paper—must be used, to justify the indulgence. All the frosty season I lived with royalty, amid high tragedy. Clearly, life was not the endless trivia it sometimes appeared to be, but a struggle of principle and impulse, passion and duty bearing down on primal family bonds. Yet for all we know, while gouging out Oedipus’s eyes, even Sophocles had his own on the clock for the moment when he had to go to the fishmonger or write a recommendation for a promising student or drive his mother-in-law to the dentist. Without biography, which cannot help but take its subjects down a peg or two, we are free to imagine him dwelling nobly in the realms of tragedy. So reading ennobles life, or at least makes noble illusions possible.
Without any calculated plan, though, I read every novel by Jean Rhys and Barbara Pym as soon as I could get my hands on them. It was like eating candy—the chocolate-covered nuts of the cinema or the celebrated potato chips of which you can’t eat just one. The variations in their novels were in fact no more than the slightly different planes and convolutions in each potato chip, and each one predictably tasty. I became an expert in self-indulgence.
When, every so often, I have a spasm of needing to get organized, I make lists of books to read. In between reading the books on the list I am sidetracked by the books pressed on me by friends, or the shelved books suddenly demanding loudly, after much postponement, to be read right away, or the piles of books arriving in the mail with notes from editors beseeching that I read them. If they only knew the convoluted agonies of choice!
Except for a few that capture my fancy, these last can be skimmed or shelved or passed on to the needy. But the urgings of dear friends—“You must read this, I loved it”—present a graver problem. They refer to more than books; they are an index of the friendship’s value and durability. Although sharing a love of the same books is affirmation of a friendship, not sharing it may be an even stronger testimony. “You wouldn’t like it, it’s not your kind of thing,” is a happy sign that the friend understands, as well as a reprieve. But when she raves about a book, what else to say but, yes, thank you. For us conscientious types, the words become a pledge of the same order as, “I’ll be there to hold your hand before the surgery,” or “Sure I’ll take the kids so you can meet him”—IOUs we must be ready to have called in. Luckily, our friend often forgets the book or gets excited about a new one. We may escape with reading one in four, we may well love them. What I love for certain, though, is listening to the friend talk about the book, sometimes the best part.
Months, even years, go by. I return to my list to find I’ve read perhaps a third of the books on it, not bad, under the circumstances. But by then I am a new person, with a new list under way. The unread books get carried over, and over, until eventually I cross them out. They are no longer necessary. I can hardly recall what allure they held for the person I used to be. Still, drawing a line through a title feels like inflicting a flesh wound—that much of me remains the same.
I am glad, at heart, of the inefficiency of my reading lists. Who wants to be an efficient reader? For a short time I was one, or was expected to be. Besides cooking and The Apartment, in the junior high smorgasbord we called “departmental” was another new course: Library. Twice a week we repaired to an unusually pleasant room for a public school at that time—big windows, lots of light, thriving plants, walls lined with books, blond wood tables comfortably seating six. Maybe memory embroiders—it sounds too lovely.
SPEECH IS SILVER BUT SILENCE IS GOLDEN, said the sign on the library wall. What bizarre alloy did this make of reading, a form of silent speech? On the first day, the librarian, a gentle gray-haired woman with no special subject to impart and thus no anxious fervor, told us to choose a book from the shelves, any book, and sit and read it. This was familiar, I did it all the time at home. But I had never done it in a room with thirty other people. In fact, reading was about the last activity I would have associated with school. For those forty-five minutes, school took on a homey feel. I got absorbed, as I did curled on my bed, and almost forgot the surroundings. But not entirely. Any private pleasure appropriated by an institution is in danger of losing its savor, and alas, reading took on an official tinge.
The librarian taught us how to keep a chart of our reading. A narrow column for the date, a wide one for the title of the book, one for the author, and finally, one to note the pages read. It had not occurred to me that the number of page
s, the rate, mattered. What could quantity have to do with reading? Yet from that moment there it was, sour and inescapable. In college we groaned ritually over long reading lists—how to get it all done? We calculated our speeds in different subjects (fifty pages an hour for a novel, thirty for history, twenty for philosophy) and parceled out our time. It is a blasphemous way to read, like a Black Mass, mocking the act by denaturing it. What a mercy it was to finish with school and be able to read again.
When I can’t remember what I read last week or mean to read tomorrow, I think of keeping better lists, and keeping to them. Then I recall that sour old library chart recording prowess. Better to forget than to chart. Anything I really need will spring to mind sooner or later: chance is provident.
That is to say, reading at random—letting desire lead—feels like the most faithful kind. In a bookstore, I leaf through the book next to the one I came to buy, and a sentence sets me quivering. I buy that one instead, or as well. A book comes in the mail and I begin it out of mild curiosity, to finish spellbound. A remark overheard on a bus reminds me of a book I meant to read last month. I hunt it up in the library and glance in passing at the old paperbacks on sale for twenty-five cents. There is the book so talked about in college—it was to have prepared me for life and here I have blundered through decades without it. Snatch it up quickly before it’s too late. And so what we read is as wayward and serendipitous as any taste or desire. Or perhaps randomness is not so random after all. Perhaps at every stage what we read is what we are, or what we are becoming, or desire.
Ruined By Reading Page 9