Book by Book (15 page)

This is why rereading is so important. Once we know the plot and its surprises, we can appreciate a book's artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with tenderness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters—as a good first reader ought—we can now look at how the book works, and instead of swooning over it like a besotted lover begin to appreciate its intricacy and craftsmanship. Surprisingly, such dissection doesn't murder the experience. Just the opposite:
Only then does a work of art fully live. As Oscar Wilde once said, if a book isn't worth reading over and over again, it isn't worth reading at all. That's a bit extreme—there's a place for the never-to-be-repeated fling—but essentially he's right. This is why
Hamlet, Persuasion
, and
Absalom, Absalom!
are endlessly rereadable, why teachers look forward to discussing them year after year. Major works of the imagination only gradually disclose the various facets of their artistry; only slowly do they reveal the subtleties of their construction. The great books are those we want to spend our lives with because they never cease to reward our devotion.

1. In a very general sense, poets tend to use language in two ways: the artful or the natural. Either they transmute their thoughts through metaphor, striking imagery, or unusual syntax into something rich and strange; or they pack their meaning into what Wordsworth famously called the language really used by men (and women). On the one hand, Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Jorie Graham; on the other, William Carlos Williams, Archilochos, and Billy Collins. Most poets opt for flash and filigree—after all, “O, for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene” (Keats) sounds like poetry. It takes real confidence, and sure judgment, to set down words as simple and deeply moving as “Pray, undo this button” (Shakespeare).

2. Where a “Complete Poems” is a monument, a “Selected Poems” is an invitation, a sometimes needed icebreaker for shy new readers. In other words, most of us. Just as expository prose generally aims to ingratiate, emphasizing clarity and communication, so a lot of poetry blithely ignores the ordinary courtesies: It is simply there, true to itself. Let me be fanciful: If you picture good prose as a smooth politician deftly reaching out to the crowd and
welcoming everyone into the party then poetry is Clint Eastwood, serape flapping in the wind, standing quietly alone on a dusty street, pure coiled energy. He's not glad-handing anybody.

3. To read a volume of poetry is to enter the world of the mesmerist. In a serious artist's collected poems, the single constant is usually his or her distinctive, increasingly hypnotic voice. Without relying on plot, dramatic action, or a cast of characters, lyric poets, especially, must entrance us with their words until we cannot choose but hear. Eager for more, we turn page after page because we find ourselves in thrall to a particular diction.

4. Nearly everyone can come up with good explanations for why they don't keep up with contemporary poetry, but the main one is simply that reading strange and unfamiliar poems sounds a lot like schoolwork. The language often seems so . . . high-pitched and bizarre or just plain hard to understand. In fact, the best way to enjoy contemporary verse is simply to read it as though you were dipping into a magazine, listening to a news report, overhearing a conversation. Don't make it a big deal, simply thrill to the words or story. As the critic Marvin Mudrick once proclaimed: “You don't read for understanding, you read for excitement. Understanding is a product of excitement.” Later on, you can return to the poems that speak most strongly to you and make them a part of your life.

5. Memorize the poems you love most. As Anthony Burgess wrote: “The dragging out from memory of lines from
Volpone
or
The Vanity of Human Wishes
with the twelfth glass is the true literary experience. I mean that. Verse is for learning by heart, and that is what a literary education should mostly consist of.” When I was a teenager, I used to walk to high school. To pass those tedious twenty or thirty minutes I decided to memorize favorite lines and stanzas from Oscar Williams's anthology,
Immortal Poems of the English Language.
“With rue my heart is laden.... I met a traveller from an antique land.... We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship.... The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. ... That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.... Our revels now are ended.” In all my life no time has ever been better spent.

There's more to literature than fiction, drama, and poetry. Here are sixteen superlatively entertaining and artful works of literary nonfiction, some of which should be better known. To narrow a wide field, I've focused on twentieth-century writers in English and arranged them in loosely chronological order.

1. Lytton Strachey,
Eminent Victorians.
Polished, witty, and ironic accounts of four pillars of nineteenth-century England, including Florence Nightingale. Strachey transformed biography from the marmoreal “life and works” to the artful portrait.

2. A. J. A. Symons,
The Quest for Corvo.
Not only a biography of Corvo, a decadent writer of the 1890s, but an account of how
Symons researched his life: the eccentrics he met, the gossip he was told, the archival materials he unearthed. Symons made Corvo's biography personal—he might even be the forgotten founder of New Journalism—and portrayed himself as a literary detective.

3. Robert Byron,
The Road to Oxiana.
Acclaimed for its originality and importance as
The Waste Land
of travel writing: two young Brits and their misadventures in the Middle East. “Water is the main difficulty of such a journey, as sufferers from syphilis of the throat, who are numerous, are apt to choose the wells to spit in.”

4. Joseph Mitchell,
Up in the Old Hotel.
The finest “New Yorker profiles” of them all—wistful, poetic, and bristling with life. The subjects? Street-corner preachers, patrons of McSorley's saloon, gypsies, Mohawk Indians, watermen, and people who live in caves.

5. Isak Dinesen,
Out of Africa.
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” So opens what is for many the most beautiful memoir of the century.

6. M. F. K. Fisher,
The Art of Eating.
Our most sensuous writer on food—and France and love and what one might call the Mediterranean pleasures of life.

7. Cyril Connolly,
The Unquiet Grave.
Abandoned by his wife as World War II begins, a moody, introspective man of letters reflects on failure, literary masterpieces, the function of civilization,
and his memories of the past. “I regard the burning of the Alexandrian library as an inconsolable private grief.”

8. Northrop Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism.
How is literature structured? Encyclopedic in range and packed with startling insights— a work of criticism to reread just for the prose and the wonderful clarity of its author's intelligence.

9. Ivan Morris,
The World of the Shining Prince.
An enthralling introduction to a strange and beautiful world: medieval Japan and the society described in the great Japanese novel
The Tale of Genji
, where what matters are
myabi
, or courtly beauty and elegance, and
aware
, a sensitivity to the “tears in things.”

10. S. Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives.
How have critics, biographers, crackpots, and readers constructed or imagined Shakespeare's life? A capacious masterpiece of entertaining scholarship, written with gusto, authority, and low-keyed humor.

11. Richard Ellmann,
James Joyce.
The finest literary biography of the twentieth century, and the best general introduction to the life and work of the Irish genius who gave us
Ulysses.

12. Alison Lurie,
V.R. Lang: A Memoir.
Early in her career, Lurie composed this memoir as a tribute to a playwright friend who died young, and the result is a delicious account of the literary world of Harvard and Cambridge in the early 1950s. Look for cameos of the young Edward Gorey and John Ashbery, among others.

13. Bruce Chatwin,
In Patagonia.
The most influential travel book of our time. A young Englishman not only explores a romantic and forbidding country but also creates a haunting mood-piece in ninety-seven short chapters, each built on stark yet perfect sentences.

14. Truman Capote,
In Cold Blood.
The murder of a Kansas family and its aftermath, retold as a “nonfiction novel.” Capote's style, reportorial genius, and hard work produced the first masterpiece of New Journalism.

15. Guy Davenport,
The Geography of the Imagination.
Scholar, translator, teacher, poet, and short-fiction writer, Davenport was superlative as all these, but utterly breathtaking in his wide-ranging essays about primitive culture, modernism, and innovative work in all the arts. Literature “is a complex dialogue of books talking to books.”

16. The
Paris Review
“Writers at Work” collections (especially the first four). Conversations with William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and many others. These interviews established a new subgenre, providing inspiring insights into the literary life. Ernest Hemingway: “I rewrote the ending to
A Farewell to Arms
, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.”

In 1557 Girolamo Cardano, notes the historian Anthony Grafton, “became the object of the most savage book review in the bitter annals of literary invective. Julius Caesar Scaliger.. . devoted more than nine hundred quarto pages to refuting one of Cardano's books,
On Subtlety”
Grafton adds that this may be “the only book review ever known to undergo transformation into a textbook.”

W. H. Auden once wrote about some of his favorite book reviews, all imaginary, citing in particular several made up by the British humorist J. B. Morton. For instance,
No Second Churning
, by Arthur Clawes is “an almost unbearably vital study of a gas-inspector who puts gas-inspecting before love. Awarded the Prix de Seattle, this book should enhance the author's growing reputation as an interpreter of life's passionate bypaths.”
Brittle Galaxy
is aptly described as “1,578 pages of undiluted enthrallment.” Those last two words, of course, sum up what all authors want to hear said about their work.

Why is it so hard to talk—not write but speak-—about art and literature? A friend asks about a new novel or collection of poetry? Almost any response tends to sound at least faintly prissy, hokey, pretentious, academic, or utterly banal.

The most typical character flaw of the bookish is the desire to show off. Many years ago I knew a kindhearted, vastly well-read
guy who liked to bring up rather esoteric titles in conversation. Mentioning, say, Mervyn Peake's
Gormenghast
trilogy, he'd pause for a moment, just to see if the name registered. If, by chance, you exclaimed, “Oh, I just adore Peake's writing” and started chattering away about Steerpike and Titus Groan and the burning of the castle library, my learned friend, slightly irked, would lose all interest— and then casually allude to some other difficult, possibly even more obscure book. Did you know Thomas Mann's
Doctor Faustus?
Well, not precisely;
The Magic Mountain
, of course, but somehow—At which point, happy again, this encyclopedic autodidact would shift into high gear: “Oh yes,
The Magic Mountain
, quite a good book, one that everyone reads and should read. But
Doctor Faustus
is the real masterpiece,” and away he'd go, secure in the knowledge that you were ignorant of Mann's truest and most demanding
chef d'oeuvre.

What makes for a good book review? H. L. Mencken insisted that “a book review, first and foremost, must be entertaining. By this I mean that it must be dexterously written, and show an interesting personality. The justice of the criticism embodied in it is a secondary matter. It is often, and perhaps usually, quite impossible to determine definitely whether a given book is ‘good' or ‘bad.' The notion to the contrary is a delusion of the defectively intelligent. It is almost always accompanied by moral passion. But a critic may at least justify himself by giving his readers civilized entertainment. ... If he is a well-informed man and able to write decently, anything he writes about anything will divert his readers.”

The eminent critic George Steiner once visited his Oxford adviser, the austere Humphry House, and on the don's lectern noticed a copy of his own recenly printed Chancellor's English Prize essay. “I waited, I ached for some allusion to it. It came when I was already at the door. ‘Ah yes, yes, your pamphlet. A touch dazzling, wouldn't you say?'” Steiner remarks that “the epithet fell like mid-winter.”

When Franz Kafka submitted “The Metamorphosis” to the Berlin newspaper
Neue Rundschau
, one of its editors—the novelist Robert Musil, no less—asked him to cut the novella by a third.

Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the sea. Getting known.. . [pause] ... Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. —Samuel Beckett
(Krapp's Last Tape)

It does seem to me that critics and reviewers can be loosely divided into two camps: Those who never let you forget that they are judge, jury, and, if need be, executioner; and those who humble themselves before a poem or novel, waiting for it to reveal its secrets to them. The first kind of critic aims to absorb the book; the second hopes to be absorbed by it.

In general, the macho critic is more fun to read. He (or she) is opinionated, controversial, argumentative, funny. Behind the showmanship, however, often lurks an ideologue's desire to persuade: This novelist is too self-absorbed; that biography is pedestrian; those views are wrongheaded; these stories are wonderful. For such a self-confident intellect the measure of all books becomes ultimately the critic's own taste, imagination, and convictions.