Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

by Wendy Lesser

  It is not just a matter of our knowing these people through their actions. That is how they come to know themselves. Isabel Archer does not fully define herself to herself—does not, in that sense, arrive at her long-sought fate—until, at the end of The Portrait of a Lady, she renounces her own hard-won freedom and returns to Rome for the sake of her stepdaughter, Pansy. Kate Croy, in The Wings of the Dove, does not realize how deeply she hates the squalor of poverty until she finds herself manipulating her fiancé into marriage with a dying heiress. And Maggie Verver, in The Golden Bowl, has no sense of the reserves of her own psychological fortitude, no awareness of how much power she is capable of exerting, until she sets out to separate her husband from his mistress, who happens to be her beloved father’s wife. These women do not come ready-packaged with a character that accompanies them through life, like a kit-bag of charms carried by the generic hero of a fairy tale. On the contrary, they become their characters—they develop into them—by facing up to the various things that life throws at them, some as a result of chance and others stemming directly from their own actions. But even to distinguish chance from self-imposed destiny is to belie the atmosphere of a James novel, where character is both forged and manifested through its confrontation with all kinds of events—events which, as this perspicacious author repeatedly suggests, arise from an indistinguishable melding of self, environment, history, will, and coincidence.

  Henry James’s chosen task, as a novelist, was to locate such moments of self-creation, self-definition, self-discovery—call it what you will—in the often superficial, frequently deceptive, socially complex life of his times. It is not always a pretty sight, this moment at which the person finds out who or what she is, but it is always interesting, which is why the last hundred pages of a James novel invariably zoom by in a flood of suspense. If this payoff for the character, and for us, comes at the end, for the novelist himself it always began much earlier, at the dinner party or the polite gathering where, in the casual conversations taking place around him, he first caught a glimpse of his precious donnée, that “given” item of news or hearsay from which he could begin to weave his fictional web. To see him at home after the party as he writes up his almost-nightly notebook entries, working out the details of what he has captured on the fly, is practically to feel in one’s own body the palpable thrill of authorial discovery. The initial stimulus is never sufficient, the shred of gossip never enough: he has to work it over and over, teasing and tinkering and toying with it, until what he was handed becomes what he wants. The given turns into the wrought-upon, as the self imposes its own nature on the bare events it is faced with. It is a recapitulation of the very process his characters go through.

  It was at a dinner on December 23, 1893, that James first heard, from a Mrs. Anstruther-Thompson, the core of the tale that ultimately became The Spoils of Poynton—a “small and ugly matter” involving a young laird who, upon his marriage, planned to dispossess his widowed mother of her house and all its beautiful possessions, as he had a legal right to do. The plot, as we now have it in the novel, is practically all there from the beginning: the mother’s hatred of the new wife, her removal of the precious objects, the threat of litigation, and so on. But the elusive heart of the story is still evading James as late as the fall of 1895, nearly two years later. On October 15, he uses his notebook entry to explore the problem. “What does she do then?—how does she work, how does she achieve her heroism?” he asks himself about the character of Fleda Vetch (a creation of his own, distinctly not a figure in the initial dinner-table story). “It’s the question of how she takes care of it that is the tight knot of my donnée,” he goes on. And then, before our very eyes, he loosens that knot by worrying at it:

  That confronts me with the question of the action Fleda exercises on Mrs. Gereth and of how she exercises it. My old idea was that she worked, as it were, on her feelings. Well, eureka! I think I have found it—I think I see the little interesting turn and the little practicable form … How a little click of perception, of this sort, brings back to me all the strange sacred time of my thinkings-out, this way, pen in hand, of the stuff of my little theatrical trials … My new little notion was to represent Fleda as committing—for drama’s sake—some broad effective stroke of her own. But that now looks to me like a mistake: I’ve got hold, very possibly, of the tail of the right thing. Isn’t the right thing to make Fleda simply work upon Mrs. Gereth, but work in an interesting way?

  And here, with his metaphor of the “tail,” he suggests how he is being led by something outside himself, is merely following an idea that has been thrust upon him with that nearly audible “click of perception.” Is this process internal or external, character-driven or plot-driven? The question makes no sense, because the two are inseparable.

  * * *

  Still, I would have to say that for me character is always at the forefront. I cannot enjoy even a plain old mystery if the people (the detectives and the killers, but especially the detectives) do not on some level strike me as persuasive. And in this view I am supported, it turns out, by that grandmaster of plotting, Wilkie Collins. “It may be possible, in novel-writing,” he wrote in the 1861 preface to his wildly popular thriller The Woman in White, “to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can effectively be told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers, is a narrative which interests them about men and women—for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves.”

  To be persuasive, a character need not necessarily adhere to the rules of humdrum reality. Nor need she be a fully shaped human figure with descriptive qualities attached. Sometimes, as in a poem, she can simply be a voice. But what she does need to have, if she is to persuade us of her reality, is a plausible relationship to her own context. That context resides in the content of the work of literature (its situation, its setting, its plot), but also in its form, by which I mean its language, its diction, its mode of address. So there are at least two kinds of surrounding environment: the one the character perceives, because she exists there as a real person, and another of which she generally remains oblivious, because it defines her as a fictional character. Both collaborate to shape her personality and our response to it.

  Every character springs from and belongs to his own specific world, and though he may be successfully relocated from that context (as Hamlet, for instance, is relocated to an existential-absurdist performance in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), he will not be the same character in the new setting, even if he is still given his old lines. Because the tendrils that hold him to his original work are at once so delicate and so firmly wound, it doesn’t really make sense to distinguish a character from the other literary elements—situation, language, event, other characters—that surround and create him. Yet writers and readers have always made precisely this distinction. Perhaps we insist on it because we ourselves, as selves, feel separate from and independent of all the multitudinous factors that have gone into our own making and continue to influence our actions. To the extent that we believe ourselves to be autonomous individuals in the world, we tend, or at least wish, to grant the same autonomy to literary characters.

  Some characters certainly seem more autonomous than others. Memorability, that repeated capacity to leap out of the general mist of our past reading and take center stage in our minds, is often but not always the sign of a great literary character. The characters that stick with us for weeks and months and even years after we close the book tend to be larger or at least more exaggerated than life, but they are also lifelike: they come back to us, in part, because we are reminded of them by the people we meet as we go through the rest of our lives. It’s not so much that we encounter these characters in the flesh as that we encounter their memorable qualities tr
ansferred onto living people, sometimes including ourselves.

  This is especially true of Dickens’s characters, and it is the minor characters in Dickens, the ones that re-enact their distinctive habits over and over again, who tend to be most memorable in this way. The figure I recall most often from David Copperfield (and it is a novel filled with ghoulishly memorable characters: Mr. Micawber, Mr. Murdstone, Steerforth) is the eminently creepy Uriah Heep, who oozes oily fake-helpfulness and disgusting false humility even as he ushers his kind, oblivious employer into the poorhouse. If the other characters come back to me once a year or so, Uriah Heep recurs ten times as often. Nobody in life is exactly like Uriah Heep, of course, but there are many who share at least some of his irritating qualities. And such is Dickens’s power that when I meet these Heepish people, I can somehow imagine them rubbing their clammy hands together and calling themselves “’umble” even if that is something they would never do.

  We recognize Uriah Heep by the way he expresses himself, but even characters without language can be memorably embodied in words. In literature as in life, the nonverbal or the preverbal can be powerful and moving figures with their own particular points of view. Anyone who has ever owned a dog, and many who have not, will consider the dog Bendicò a central character in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s marvelous novel The Leopard. His master, the Prince, certainly does; and so, it seems, did his author. In a postscript to a letter Lampedusa wrote about his only novel, belatedly added to the outside of the envelope, he scribbled, “N.B.: the dog Bendicò is a vitally important character and practically the key to the novel.” Even without this scribbled note, we would sense this, for it is the stuffed carcass of the long-dead dog, tossed away onto the dustheap, that ends this sad, funny, feelingly ironic novel about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy.

  The ten-month-old baby whose point of view is briefly taken by the narrator of The Old Wives’ Tale is another case in point. Though he is a much more temporary figure than Bendicò (in that he is only a wordless baby for a relatively short time: like most of us, he soon grows out of it), he is quite notable during the brief moment when Arnold Bennett captures him, lying on a soft woolen shawl laid over his parents’ hearthrug. “For ten months,” Bennett tells us, “he had never spent a day without making experiments on this shifting universe in which he alone remained firm and stationary. The experiments were chiefly conducted out of idle amusement, but he was serious on the subject of food. Lately the behavior of the universe in regard to his food had somewhat perplexed him, had indeed annoyed him.”

  In other words, he is being weaned. Only a single page of this long novel is devoted to the baby’s viewpoint, but in it we see the hearth fire, the family dog, and the surrounding giant adults from his exhilarating, strangely philosophical, endlessly wondering perspective, before Bennett returns us to the mundane life of his parents. This single page is the one that has most strongly stayed with me through all my many decades of reading and rereading this book. Yet it was only on my last reading that I realized this baby eventually grows up to be the character who could be Arnold Bennett’s own jaundiced self-portrait—a skeptical, cosmopolitan young man who fails to be sufficiently interested in the lives of the two women who are at the heart of the book, his mother and his aunt. But even if this is indeed an autobiographical character (and of that we can never be sure), Bennett did not use the faculty of memory to create that baby on the hearthrug. One can’t, after all, remember one’s own ten-month-old existence in detail, and this version of the experience is largely projection and imagination. That is as it should be, for the passage feels interior even as it proclaims with its language that it is not.

  Lampedusa’s Bendicò and Bennett’s baby (to which one could add the anthropomorphic tumbleweed in Andrei Platonov’s astonishing story “Soul”) are novelties: great novelties, irreplaceable novelties, but not what we normally think of when we think of literary characters. They show what certain authors can do even with seemingly unpromising character material; they chasten us in regard to our usual presumptions about psychological complexity. And they make us realize, once again, how closely a fictional character is tied to whatever surrounds him—how much is needed, in the way of scenery, action, and interaction with others, to bring even a single tiny character to life.

  * * *

  Or to kill him off. When Henry James refers to plots that “pretend to interest us only in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle,” he is alluding, I take it, to mystery and thriller plots. In his own time, that would have meant the mysteries of Wilkie Collins and, somewhat later, Arthur Conan Doyle; by the early twentieth century, he might have had access to John Buchan’s brilliant thrillers, which began to appear just before James died. But it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that we received a flood of masterpieces in this vein, culminating in works such as those of Eric Ambler and Patricia Highsmith (to give just two examples—and very different examples at that, since one writer belongs firmly to the espionage-thriller camp, while the other specializes in the domestic murder mystery). Sentence by sentence, a novel like A Coffin for Dimitrios or Ripley Under Ground is as good as almost any book written during that time, and I venture to say we will be reading these novels for as long as people read John Updike or Toni Morrison.

  In fact, there are certain things that thrillers can do better than serious novels. What these are will depend partly on the country of origin and the historical period, but in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in America and Western Europe, one of those things is definitely politics. When the serious novel of today attempts to cover subjects like terrorism, global warming, international financial shenanigans, civil unrest, and government corruption, the political side of the novel tends to feel like a superimposition pasted onto the “real” theme of a psychologically realistic interior life. In such novels, the parts about the characters’ love affairs or family conflicts or tense work environments ring absolutely true, because that is what contemporary authors of naturalistic fiction have trained themselves to think about. But when they extend themselves into the larger political arena, the novels tend to go off the rails: the violent deaths and conspiratorial plots feel slightly cartoonish, especially when set beside the slowly accumulating, carefully investigated psychological portraits of the main characters.

  In contrast, the novel that sets out to be a pure thriller takes as its starting point the violence or corruption of the political world. Such a novel has characters—in Ambler’s case, for instance, they can be quite amusing and sympathetic characters, in an ironic, low-key way—but these characters do not exist primarily to display to us their personal, private, domestic inner lives. Instead, they function as players in the international scene: sometimes by mistake, to be sure, when an erroneous identification or a misunderstood message catches them up in the intrigue, but more often because they have worked in some capacity that connects them to the political world, as journalist or spy or government official of some kind. And this experience means that when violent deaths and mortal threats impinge on their lives, the events mesh naturally with their personalities. It is not just that they are equipped to deal with such things, but that they are practically expecting to deal with them, which means that we in turn, as readers, have this expectation as well. Instead of feeling tacked on in a well-intentioned but finally unsuccessful way, the political aspects of thriller novels feel integral to the plots. And if they are “good enough” thrillers—that is, works that satisfy a fairly high standard of literary style, as many do, despite or perhaps even because of their plainspokenness—we can read them with a kind of interest that is comparable to, though very different from, the interest we might bring to more purely psychological novels.

  All novels are premised on a certain degree of suspense: we keep reading because we want to find out how things turn out. In mystery novels, it’s just that the contract with the reader is slightly more explicit. By the end of the book, we are assured, we will
not only know everything of importance, but we will also be able to renounce any future concern about the fates of the characters involved. According to this contract, there will be no plotlines left dangling—as there so notably are, for instance, in the last sentence of Henry James’s The Bostonians, where he says of his heroine’s emotional tears: “It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these are not the last she was destined to shed.” The marriage for which we have on some level been hoping throughout the novel, though in a somewhat mixed and perhaps skeptical way, has arrived to seal the plot of The Bostonians, but it turns out that this is only the beginning of another plot, one that we won’t be around to witness. James’s novels often end this way. A decision has been reached, an option has been closed off; the plot is, in that sense, terminated. But since life always offers more decisions, more options, we know that something else is going to happen to these characters after we leave them, and what that will be, we cannot really guess. Even when the authorial voice seems willing to prophesy, we can’t fully trust it. After all, from whose point of view is Verena Tarrant’s marriage to the ambitious, impoverished, irrepressible Basil Ransom considered “so far from brilliant”? Whose anxieties are expressed in the politely reticent “it is to be feared”—Verena’s, about her own potential happiness, or society’s, about her choice of husband? How strongly can we take the word “destined” when it comes to us couched in such ironic, particular, socially placed and therefore nonauthoritative language? In this final sentence, is James speaking to us in his own person, or as the ventriloquist of the society he’s somewhat mockingly representing? There are no firm answers to questions like these, and to answer “Both” is simply to beg them.