Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

by Wendy Lesser

  Herzen—who himself tried to write novels before settling more comfortably into the nonfiction mode—attributes Russia’s literary achievements in large part to the national and individual awareness of tragedy. Personal and collective suffering, he suggests, are what account for the fictional truth-telling. “The Russian novel is nothing but pathological anatomy,” he says; “it is only a statement of the evil that gnaws at us, a continual accusation of ourselves, without respite or pity.” Contrasting his compatriots with Goethe and the other German idealists, he points out that in Russian literature “you do not hear a gentle voice come down from heaven, announcing to Faust forgiveness for sinful Gretchen. No consolation is sought: the only voices raised are those of doubt and damnation.” Yet it is this very descent into negativity—a mode Herzen characterizes as “Melancholy, skepticism, irony … the three chief strings of the Russian lyre”—that offers the only real hope for redemption. “He who frankly avows his defects feels that there is something in him that can escape and resist his downfall; he understands that he can redeem his past,” Herzen concludes.

  In his own calmly secular way (and Herzen is truly our contemporary in this regard, as in so many others), he was able to put into such words both Dostoyevsky’s view and Chekhov’s, both the self-lacerating despair of the deeply religious man and the darkly humorous, skeptical vision of the scientific humanist. They are very different kinds of authority, it would seem, but in the remarkably unified world of Russian literature, they speak with a similar urgency and a similar strength. And they speak to us still. That is perhaps the oddest thing of all: that we needn’t come from Russia, or live under the tsars, or believe in the orthodoxies or counter-orthodoxies of that time and place (or even know what they were, in any great detail), to understand that what is being conveyed to us is the truth. Whether it will be true for all time is impossible for me to say, but I cannot imagine a world in which Oblomov and Rasknolnikov, Prince Andrei and Uncle Vanya, would not have a recognizable reality. I would not want to live in such a world, for it would have ceased in some essential way to be human.

  This is probably not something I need to worry about. The slight, the facile, and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter. On the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

  * * *

  Literary authority is not something that appears only in life-or-death circumstances. The nineteenth-century Russians may have been its masters because of their unusual situation in history, but each era, however debased, has its own version of it. In my daily life as an editor, I encounter it mainly in fleeting form, in the first sentences of a very small percentage of the submissions that arrive at The Threepenny Review. Such a sentence is like a beacon seen from afar, an instantly recognizable source of hope. This kind of authority can come from anyone—a young, unpublished writer, a seasoned professional, a hidden genius working alone, a long-dead master revisited in translation. It is not entirely a matter of voice, though voice enters into it. It is rarely a matter of subject, though certain topics signal its likely absence. A story that begins “When I was in second grade,” for instance, almost never possesses a sense of authority. Nor do stories that start with Mom and Dad fighting, or an older sister being mean, or a boyfriend or girlfriend insisting on a breakup. This is not because such events are untrue to life. On the contrary, everyone has been through them. You might say that they are too true to life. The material has not yet been sifted by the imagination, recast in a way that turns it into literature. It remains in the realm of what anyone, with or without literary ability, might think or say.

  There is nothing wrong with the quotidian. We all, or almost all, dwell in that realm. But to have authority, a literary work must be able to turn the quotidian into something strange—as, for instance, Beckett does in his plays, or Kafka in his stories. These writers obviously have an uncanny aspect, an affinity for the patently unreal, but it is in fact their obsession with routine life, over and above the strangeness that punctuates it, which distinguishes these masters from their less eerie, more wilfully bizarre imitators. One can’t just try for strangeness, as it turns out: a too-obvious effort to surprise is just as bad as straight dullness. Stories that start “I never thought I would see a zombie in Macy’s” or “Paul, waving a loaded gun in my face, told me to shut up” get put into the rejection pile as quickly as those about second grade or a mean older sister. The latter kind of story presumes that everything about the writer’s daily life will interest us; the former assumes that nothing will, and that therefore the writer needs to lie or fantasize to get our attention. Kafka never lies, and neither does Beckett. Even their wildest exaggerations—a boy turning into a bug, old people housed in garbage cans—smack of a felt truth.

  It is easier to disguise lack of authority in a third-person story than in a first-person one. Somehow the distance imposed simply by the pronoun “he” or “she” allows the writer greater room to maneuver, making the narrator seem more knowledgeable or at least more coolly reflective than the naked, breast-beating “I.” But this too is a deception, and it will wear off within a couple of sentences if the literary work is no good. Fake situations and fake emotions are surprisingly easy to spot in fiction. The literary work, however far-fetched, has to ring true for the fiction to carry the weight of our potential suspicion. (If we are not suspicious at all, it is because we have given up, as readers, and are just killing time. That is what “trash reading” means.) This credibility is not just a matter of the author believing what she is saying. We too must on some level believe it, even if we know it to be made up. Especially when we know it to be made up.

  Authority, though, is not the same as the absence of doubt. I would go so far as to suggest that all the most convincing works of literature must possess an element of doubt. That is the calling card with which they delicately persuade us to open our doors to them; it is the proof that they do not intend to deceive us. And if this is true at the beginning of a novel, a story, or a poem, it is even more noticeably true at the end. A question will always hover over the authoritative author’s conclusions, so that they are not merely conclusions, but also an opening out, a releasing of other possibilities. Occasionally the openness can take the form of an actual question, as in Kay Ryan’s “How can something / so grand and serene / vanish again and again / without a hint?”—the last line of her brief poem “Tune,” which itself comes at the end of her collection The Best of It. But much more often it will appear in the form of an assertion that contains and nourishes its own self-contradiction.

  Henry James specialized in such conclusions, and the effect is to make us wonder all over again, every time we read the novel, how it is going to turn out, even if we already know. “We shall never be again as we were,” says one of the two protagonists at the end of The Wings of the Dove. Yes, but which of the two lovers says it, Merton Densher or Kate Croy? I challenge you to guess from memory, and then check yourself. I think you are more likely than not to be wrong, as I was the last time I read the book. It is like the end of The Brothers Karamazov, where you can’t remember from one reading to the next whether Dmitri is guilty or not. He is both guilty and not guilty, just as Kate and Merton are equally capable of saying that line (or of thinking it, before the other has said it). A novel like James’s or Dostoyevsky’s has authority partly because it turns out to be larger—in its scope, in its outcomes—than anything the author could have planned. He brings his novel to an ending because he has to, but in some ways it also keeps going without him. The conclusion must be credible enough to satisfy, but part of its credibility is that it can never fully satisfy.

  Of course, all these laws exist to be violated. (That too is one sign of authority, the writer’s willingness and ability to break the rules.)
Wendell Berry can write a story about when he was in second grade and make it work. I hadn’t remembered it this way, but when I went back to look at one of his autobiographical Andy Catlett stories, I found that his first line was actually quite close to the opening I have been deploring: “In grades one and two I was a sweet, tractable child who caused no trouble.” Yet I think that even here, in just these few words, you can sense the imposition of a certain distance, something that makes this other than a bald, flat presentation of childhood experience. Listen to how another of these Catlett stories starts: “Early in my childhood, when the adult world and sometimes my own experience easily assumed the bright timelessness of myth, I overheard my father’s friend Charlie Hardy telling about the drouth of 1908.” Or still another, which begins: “Andy Catlett was a child of two worlds.” The voice is the same, whether it is inside or outside the main character. It is a voice that simultaneously lives through events and recalls them, experiencing the child’s emotions and perceptions even as it reflects on them from a position of age. A young person could not write these stories; Wendell Berry himself couldn’t have written them when he was young.

  But the fact that Berry’s authority comes from age—the fact that he has actually managed to learn something in the course of his many decades, and not just pass through them—does not mean that all authority needs to come from the elderly. In the same issue of The Threepenny Review that ran one of those Andy Catlett stories was another piece of fiction by a young, barely published writer named Shashi Bhat. “Aarthi kept her receipts punctured through their middles on a bent coat hanger, which she placed in a corner to avoid injury” begins this story about a helpless, hapless miser in her mid-twenties. The narrative voice does not pretend to a larger view than that of its named character, and yet there is a breadth, a strength here that goes beyond the merely anecdotal. One can locate it partly in the absence of ostentation (the sentence has no adverbs whatsoever, and only a single, necessary adjective), as well as in the subtle, distant humor of that “to avoid injury.” You would have to read the whole story to be sure, but if you came upon just this one sentence in a stack of undifferentiated manuscripts, it would beam at you like a lighthouse at sea.

  Is this kind of authority the same as literal truth? No. I do not have to believe that Shashi Bhat has lived a miser’s life to appreciate her story. I can suspect—indeed, I can know—that Andy Catlett shares many qualities and experiences with his author, but this knowledge is finally irrelevant to my evaluation of Wendell Berry’s fiction. The story works convincingly on the page or it does not work at all, and whatever knowledge the author possesses must be subsumed into the fiction for it to come across as believable fact. Tolstoy, they say, disregarded actual military records and set forth a number of false or imagined details in his depictions of Napoleonic battles. This does nothing to dampen our collective and justified sense of belief in the authority of War and Peace. Its truths exist at a deeper level than that of normal reportage or demonstrable history. They echo our experience of the world, and at the same time they teach us things we didn’t know about the world before we encountered them in Tolstoy’s pages.

  This equilibrium is a delicate one, and it is always shifting, for we do not read literature from a fixed position. We change as we read, and not only because of what we read. I, for instance, read War and Peace for the first time mainly to find out whom Natasha would marry. At the age of twenty-two, I cared excessively about young women and their marriage possibilities, perhaps, in part, because I myself was a young woman who had no likely marriage in sight. So the Peace parts were the only sections of the book that really held my interest; I flipped through the War parts as if they were so many obstacles in my way. It was only when I came back to the novel some thirty years later that I understood how much I had missed. I had been looking for another Anna Karenina, in my youth, but War and Peace now strikes me as a much greater book, and it is the War sections that make it so.

  If authority of the kind I am speaking about here—not historical authority, not legal authority, not even moral authority, exactly, though it may have something to do with that—is not completely identifiable with everyday truth-telling, then even less is it congruent with what we might call authenticity. There is nothing “authentic” (except in the sense of being old and original) about Homer’s Odyssey or Shakespeare’s Tempest, and in quite a different way there is nothing authentic about Beckett’s Endgame or Kafka’s Castle. No one could point to the experiences recounted there and say, “Yes, I’ve seen exactly this, I’ve done exactly that.” These works bear only the most tangential relationship to reality as we know it. That the relationship is nonetheless important, indeed essential, does not mitigate the degree of its tangentiality. Literature is made up. (And this is true even of nonfiction literature, where the “I” is the author’s careful construct and the rest has been heavily edited.) As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them. Only lies—lies of a particular type, lies that are the creations of great authors—have the capacity to convey certain kinds of truths to us.

  Literature is, among other things, an undermining of the coherent worldview. Things can only be true in a specific way, for one reader at a time, at a particular moment in that reader’s life. This may not seem like much, but it turns out to be a great deal, because it happens over and over, each time in a different way. The truths in literature are incidental and cumulative, not global and permanent. In some moods I think that those are the only kinds of truths that really matter.

  A writer who clearly stands with me on this is D. H. Lawrence. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I stand with him. Literature may be made up, but it is also borrowed, even stolen (as that line is itself borrowed from T. S. Eliot, who remarked in one of his essays that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal). I am constantly surprised by how much of my own mind is composed of the ideas of others, and so it is in this case. A few days after writing the preceding paragraphs, I ran across this passage from D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature: “Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.” I cite this not as any kind of scholarly authority (Lawrence would be horrified to think he could ever be called as that kind of witness), but because I find his sentences beautifully persuasive, and it gives me immense pleasure to write them down.

  As it happens, this brief paragraph of Lawrence’s appears on the same page as the lines I most often quote from him: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.” These may not be the most powerful or touching words D. H. Lawrence ever wrote, but they are certainly the most useful. I recite them in almost every class I teach—to keep students from jumping to conclusions inspired by biographical or historical knowledge, to defeat the assaults of gender-based or other theory-inspired criticism, to rein in any tendencies toward know-it-all assertion, and, above all, to undermine the supposed authority of the artist’s own statements about what he was setting out to do. The effect, as Lawrence no doubt intended, is to remove any possibility of proof. The writer’s own spoken words about his mission and its accomplishment might be taken as evidence, legalistically, if we were to allow the artist to speak. But the tale makes no direct statements (if, indeed, it makes any statements at all). It can only be interpreted, and that job is finally up to each of us individually. We can get help from our predecessors, and we can rely to a certain extent on collective agreement, but in the end the decision to trust must be our own. To attribute the only authority to the tale itself is to foil any direct access we might have to an authoritative view.

  And yet Lawrence was by no means giving away the whole store. As you can tell from his tone, he very much relied on his own version of authority. He was emphatic almost to the point of hysteria. He was convinced that when
he wrote, he was writing the truth—and this conviction applied at least as much to matters of opinion and fiction as it did to fact. (Actually, it applied nearly exclusively to those more debatable areas: in the few cases where Lawrence wrote about factual matters, such as the look of the Sardinian landscape, his tone was much less aggressive.) Ranting and railing are Lawrence’s default mode, and this is true equally of the essays and the fictional works—though it is somewhat less true of the stories, and rarely true of the poems, which is why some people who can’t bear the novels can still appreciate his poetry.

  A lot of people can’t bear the novels, and this has been true since they first began appearing in the early twentieth century. Time has not dulled their capacity to irritate. I still can’t stomach Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and The Plumed Serpent sends me into a rage, when it does not send me into fits of disbelieving giggles. But I know of no book more true than Sons and Lovers. I would stake my life on its truths about mothers and their sons, young women and their lovers; I have staked my life on them, at key moments of emotional crisis or existential despair.

  There are many opinions floating around in Sons and Lovers, and only some of them belong to the author. The characters have very strong views about their lives, and about their desire to interfere with other lives, and about their desperation to get away from such interference, whether instigated by themselves or others. These people are bundles of conflicting emotions, with the conflicts running both between and within individuals. The sight of them trying to disentangle themselves reminds one of those demonic hand toys that capture your fingers and won’t let them go, so that the harder you try to pull away, the more tightly you are gripped. The feelings in Sons and Lovers are alive, and they are alive now; they reignite every time you or I or anyone else reads the book.