Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

by Wendy Lesser

  Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

  What has been cut out is not just the connective words (a comfort that serves in a whirlwind, may those who never hung there) or even letters (so that the arcanely poetic “ne’er” here has a radical, rejuvenated, bridge-chopped-off function). The fulcrum of it all, the platform from which speech emerges, has itself been eliminated. That steep or deep what? Where, in all this nothingness, can one locate that exclamatory Here? Yet despite the radical excisions, the voice is stronger than ever. Its rhymes are insistent to the point of comedy (though certainly no one is laughing here), and there is a tenderness in that appositive command—“creep, / Wretch, under a comfort…”—that brings a distinctly human note to this otherwise stark landscape. This is a voice that is continuing to speak even though no one is listening. And one senses that the person being addressed has changed by the end of the sonnet: no longer God or Mary, the presumed listener is now that wretch who can only find comfort in the thought of death. Hopkins may be speaking to himself here—must be speaking to himself, or we wouldn’t feel so much agony emanating from the poem—but the poor, abandoned creature he is addressing is also his reader. This is our problem too, even if we don’t know it yet. We are the other character brought to life by such a poem.

  * * *

  At its root, almost all lyric poetry is a conversation between a speaker and a listener—a one-sided conversation, to be sure, but still a dialogue of sorts, in which the feelings and expectations of the silent partner are taken into account. Generally the “I” is the poet and the “you” is the reader, but in some poems these pronouns represent fictional characters, as they might in a novel or a short story. Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” for instance, is very like a brief epistolary novel. Its “I” is a young wife writing to her husband when he is away, expressing her longing for his return and recalling the history of their marriage. “At fourteen I married My Lord you,” Pound has her say, in his purposely stilted translation of Li Po’s classical Chinese masterpiece. The stiltedness is no doubt meant to suggest the cultural distance between her and us (we who are the hidden, unspoken “you” of this poem, just as her husband is the explicit, spoken one), but it also conveys the shyness of a child bride in an arranged marriage who has come to feel more love than she ever expected to. And she takes pleasure in the fact that her husband is in love with her, too: “You dragged your feet when you went out,” she recalls about the beginning of his trip. The emotion she expresses in this letter is both intense and suppressed; more is implied than is stated directly, and that too intensifies the feeling, or at least our response to it.

  If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

  Please let me know beforehand,

  And I will come out to meet you

  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

  she says at the end of her letter, and it is the longing expressed in the line breaks and word rhythms, as much as her explicit willingness to move toward him, that signals to us how powerfully she misses him.

  Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is based on an equally fictional premise, but in this case the “I” is a wife-murdering duke and the “you” a visiting emissary from a potential new father-in-law. Nothing could be further in tone from the Pound. The obliqueness is there, yes, but it is of the villainously mustache-twirling, heavily ironic variety, and the suppressed emotion is not love but rage, or vanity, or petty annoyance. This poem is a scene from a play rather than an epistolary novel: the two characters occupy the same well-furnished set, sitting in a room of the duke’s palace before a portrait of his late wife as he elaborates on his grievances and his solution to them.

  Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

  The dropping of the daylight in the West,

  The bough of cherries some officious fool

  Broke in the orchard for her …

  … as if she ranked

  My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

  With anybody’s gift …

  … Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

  Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

  Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

  Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

  As if alive. Will’t please you rise?…

  The humor of this poem—and it has a great deal of Ripley-like humor, though also, as in Highsmith, a significant aura of threat—lies primarily in our wondering how the silent visitor is taking all this. Does he understand what the duke is telling him, and will this awareness prevent the marriage between “The Count your master’s … fair daughter” and the emissary’s garrulous host? Does the duke even care that this might be the result of his sly confession, or is he too proud (or too crazy) to realize that his words could have this effect? The brief drama is over before we get any answers to questions like these. All the pleasure of the piece lies in the unfolding of the duke’s outrageous personality. He is the real character here; the duchess, though she claims the title and most of the poem, remains constricted by the unreliable narrator who describes her, and the “you,” however courteously addressed, is merely a cipher, a prop used to evoke the story.

  The second-person pronoun of a poem is always, by definition, a less substantial person than the first. Even when the characters are not fictional—or perhaps especially in that case—the “I” is the person best known to the poet, most readily seen from the inside, most fully understood. (Though I do not want to suggest that “seen from the inside” and “fully understood” necessarily go together: sometimes, as in a stream-of-consciousness rendering of a character’s thoughts, or a mad killer’s perspective at the beginning of a murder mystery, to be thrust inside is precisely not to understand.) The poet’s “I” is likely to be less distinct from the poet’s real-life self than the first-person narrator of most novels; it is more like the “I” of an essayist, though it is not exactly that either. Except in the cases where the setting is explicitly fictional, as in the Pound and Browning poems, we tend to assume that the poet is speaking to us directly. And this in turn means that the “you” is meant to be us, even if the poet—because she is either long dead, or far away, or a recluse, or simply a complete stranger to us—cannot possibly have any idea who we really are. The poem works because she seems to know us, seems to have forged some kind of real connection with us.

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you—Nobody—too?

  Then there’s a pair of us!

  Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

  Emily Dickinson’s rendering of the poet-reader situation is perhaps the sharpest and wittiest imaginable. Yes, we are nobody to each other, we who meet only on the page. But that very invisibility makes “a pair of us”: in that sense, we are joined together (on the page if nowhere else) to the exclusion of all the rest. Dickinson’s “Don’t tell!” has a special force, coming as it does from a poet who largely renounced publication in her lifetime—but of course the silent “you” of any poem is not in much of a position to tell, so this plea is also a joke between us.

  The dreamlike power of Dickinson’s voice—she is there, right inside us, and if she is a bit cracked, then so are we—is unlike anything else in poetry. But something of that boundary-crossing, that wish to overcome the gap between first-person speaker and second-person listener, appears even in poets who took a far more public stance. It is there in the work of Walt Whitman (who managed to be both cracked and public), and it is there even in the seemingly platitudinous but secretly dark verse of Robert Frost. His excessively anthologized “Birches” begins with the observations of the poet himself (“When I see birches bend to left and right”), but has moved by the fifth line to an actual, other second-person viewer (“Often you must have seen them”) and then, a few lines later, to a generic “you” who merges self and others, the speaker and everyone else (“Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You’d think the inner d
ome of heaven had fallen”). A much weirder version of this grammatical shift occurs in his little poem “The Pasture,” which starts:

  I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

  I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

  (And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

  I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

  This may sound coy at first reading, but the more you read the poem (which contains only one more stanza, also ending with the same three-word refrain), the more you come to believe in that “You come too” as a serious offer. A writer-farmer of my acquaintance, a man who first encountered this poem as a teenager, often thinks of those lines as he walks out into his own pastures—sees himself as somehow accepting that invitation. How strange and yet how natural it seems, the fact that Frost, long dead, has now become an intangible “I,” while the once-ghostly “you” has turned into a solid person moving through space. No matter: there’s still a pair of them.

  * * *

  These two characters, “you” and “I,” also inhabit the world of nonfiction literature. Our tendency is to take them at face value there—to believe, for example, that the essayistic, reportorial, journalistic narrator is the real thing in a way that the voice of a poem or the protagonist of a novel is not. But the reverse could well be the case. As Janet Malcolm has pointed out, “In a work of nonfiction we never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.” In other words, the author of imaginative literature presumably knows everything there is to know about her characters (or, if she does not, then who is to contradict her, for no one at any rate knows more). But with essays or journalism or autobiography, much necessarily remains unknown to the author, who is essentially constructing characters out of what he can grab as reality flings it past him. The fictional character is herself; the essayistic character is only a Platonic shadow, flickeringly cast upon the page, of a reality that fully exists elsewhere. And nowhere is this more true than in the case of the essayist’s “I.”

  The doubt that the nonfiction writer instills in us is central to his enterprise. He makes us depend on that friendly fellow who engagingly tells us his life story or recounts an interesting set of events or observations, and then he undercuts that dependence by making us suspicious of his veracity. This suspicion is not an unfortunate by-product of his effort; it needs to be there for the nonfiction piece to work. If the author neglects to alert us to a sense of his own unreliability, we may discover it on our own, bringing the whole house of cards down in one swift blow. (This is what happens, I think, in the first-person accounts of extremely narcissistic writers like Emma Goldman and Anaïs Nin, who believe too strongly in their own perspectives. Because they are incapable of doubting themselves, we do the doubting for them, and it ends by ruining their books.) But the balancing act required of such an author is a delicate one, for the suspicions can’t be so strong as to undercut our dependence. We need to recognize doubt, but then we must somehow be encouraged to take the leap of faith that gets us to the other side of this chasm. If we end up in the abyss, the nonfiction writer has failed; if we remain stolidly on the safe side of the broken bridge, he has also failed. He needs to get us across, but with full foreknowledge of the dangers involved. It is both a trick and not a trick.

  J. R. Ackerley, one of the most appealing nonfiction writers of the twentieth century, wrote in the brief foreword to My Father and Myself:

  The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the method of ploughing to and fro over my father’s life and my own, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the plough turned.

  By confessing this at the beginning, Ackerley both hands us our doubts and assuages them. Would we have noticed the problem on our own? Perhaps not. But now we are convinced that despite his desire to tell us a good tale, his willingness to tinker with history to keep us engaged, this author is bent on conveying the truth to us.

  The confession need not be explicit to be effective. In Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life, the main thing we learn about the youthful Toby is what a liar he is. He lies to protect himself from his brutal stepfather, Dwight, but he also lies repeatedly to various other authority figures, like schoolteachers and police officers. What is to keep us from feeling that he is lying to us as well? Nothing—especially since there seems to be an insuperable gap between the boy this story is about, this terrible student who can’t even graduate from a public high school, and the man who is constructing the elegant, persuasive sentences that tell us the story of the boy he once was. That is the gap Wolff must get us to leap over if we are to believe he is telling us the truth. Some of us may do it unconsciously, and that is fine. If you give this book to a thirteen-year-old boy, especially one who has had a troubling stepfather, he will take it into his room and not emerge until he has finished it. He does not care about authorial doubt; he cares only, for the moment, about the great, well-told story. But as one reads and rereads the book over the years (and as future generations read it, detached from its original context), it will become apparent that the story would not succeed without strenuously demanding of us that leap of faith.

  In my own life, the nonfiction author who has most powerfully persuaded me both to believe him and to doubt him is George Orwell. When I first read the essays, I was like that thirteen-year-old boy: I was smitten, and I believed every word. Later, I came to feel that Orwell was lying to me—that he was relying too heavily on something like Ackerley’s capitalized “Art,” that he was constructing a self which bore no relation to any real person called George Orwell or even Eric Blair. (The fact that he had adopted a pseudonym was part of the evidence against him, in my most accusatory phase.) Only lately have I come to see that the doubt is a necessary part of the belief, and that Orwell need no more be the “I” of his sentences than I need to be the “you” in order for the sentences to carry their ethical weight. In fact, Orwell’s “you” is his “I.” To the extent I imagined myself spoken to personally by him, I was mistaken. If we merged on the page (as Emily Dickinson and her imagined reader did), it was not because he became me, but because he insisted that I transform myself into him. This was not at all bad for me. I tend in any case to have an excessive sense of self, and it was good for me to be changed, even if only temporarily, into a grumpy, clear-eyed British socialist of the 1930s. It may have been a rhetorical device, but it was a device that I still believe is grounded in certain truths—the ones about class and identity and moral obligation, for example, that Orwell points out so tellingly in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he observes how “humiliating” it can be to watch coal miners at work:

  It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an “intellectual” and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants—all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

  I may resist that “you” (as in other phases of my life I have resisted the casually homophobic insult to the “Nancy” poets, or the sentimental characterization of “superior persons” versus “poor drudges”), but the resistance is essential to Orwell’s method. It is part of what will make these beautifully paced sentences
continue to ring true even after there are no more coal miners left in the world.

  If the second-person pronoun is a central character in Orwell’s essays, it is one that is nearly absent from Montaigne’s. This has much to do with their very different aims. Orwell, who was self-consciously refining the essay form for use as a publicly deployable weapon, was focused on the presence of an audience. Montaigne, who was inventing the essay essentially from whole cloth as a way of exploring his own personality and his own ideas, wrote for nobody but himself—or, if he wrote for anyone else, it was for a dead best friend who would never read his words. The world of Montaigne’s essays is a severely enclosed one, and it can seem airless in comparison to Orwell’s. It is not an easy place in which to spend time; its only character (aside from a host of distant and long-dead authors from whom Montaigne is constantly quoting) is that sole and perennial “I.” But this limitation is not a shortcoming. It gives Montaigne the capacity to speak about things that Orwell and other conversational authors could not. Death, for instance, as he does here, in the late essay “On vanity”:

  Not from fear but from cunning, I want to go to earth like a rabbit and steal off as I pass away. It is not my intention to test or to display my constancy during that action. For whom would it be? Then all my right to reputation and all my concern for it will be at an end. I am satisfied with a death which will withdraw into itself, a calm and lonely one, entirely my own, in keeping with my life—retiring and private … I have enough to do without having to console others; enough thoughts in my mind without fresh ones evoked by my surroundings; enough to think about without drawing on others. This event is not one of our social engagements; it is a scene with one character.