Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

by Wendy Lesser

  Montaigne’s seemingly personal observation doesn’t claim to be the last word on death—nothing could be that, after all—but the strength of this passage is nonetheless profound. Its charm and its astuteness both stem from the same curious tonal mixture of overt selfishness and secret companionableness. His own life, his own writing, may be particularly solitary, but in death we are all, finally, alone: that is why Montaigne, as a self-professed isolate, can serve as such an apt guide to this experience that none of us will ever fully have. Yet even to put it in this bald, imploring way is to subtract from the delicate irony with which he treats the untreatable. “This event is not one of our social engagements; it is a scene with one character.” How is it that he can suggest the idea of theater and in the same gesture take it away, so that all thoughts of audience, of pretense, of a public of any kind, are banished from that scene?

  * * *

  Death may lower the final curtain on life, but it does not necessarily have the same effect in literature. This is yet another version of the space between: that liminal space which, in literature alone, marks the uncertain borderline between the dead and the living. Unlike the people who surround us in our daily existence, the characters in a literary work can continue to speak their minds to us from beyond the grave. (We may imagine that we can similarly hear from our own beloved dead, in dreams or hallucinations or simple remembrances, but these are our minds speaking to us, not theirs.) A literary character can be both dead and conscious; both dead and perceptive; both dead and reflective. A dead author can be this too, but not quite in the same way. Reading Henry James, who died thirty-six years before I was born (only thirty-six, I am amazed to realize, given that I once considered it another era—but he and I are growing closer and closer as I grow older and he stands still), I hear a voice that continues to speak its mind to me, making jokes I still find funny and psychological observations I still assent to. But even I, besotted as I am with this author, understand that he wrote these sentences as a living person, basically the same kind of living person that I am now. Whereas for those of his characters who incline toward the supernatural—the narrator of “The Jolly Corner,” who returns to his long-ago home and meets his alternate self; the famous author in “The Private Life,” who carries on an active social life while his double sits writing in the upstairs study; the governess in The Turn of the Screw, who imagines her charges have been invaded by morally evil ghosts—the border between life and afterlife is much more permeable.

  This is actually less true of James than it is of certain other writers, because his best work deals with how those left behind feel about the departed, and not vice versa. He is essentially a chronicler of the regretful living and not the regretful dead. To attend closely to the latter, we need to turn to someone like Javier Marías, a Spanish writer whose “When I Was Mortal” (the title story of his first collection to appear in English) ably conveys this aspect of his fiction. The dead who watch the living, and long for them still, and wish to be back in that space where time passed, and mattered, and took its toll: this is the explicit subject of a few works by Marías and the implicit subject of many. “I often used to pretend I believed in ghosts,” the narrator of “When I Was Mortal” starts by telling us, “and I did so blithely, but now that I am myself a ghost, I understand why, traditionally, they are depicted as mournful creatures who stubbornly return to the places they knew when they were mortal. For they do return.” Javier Marías has a special feeling for these people who are no longer people; they preoccupy him, and he sympathizes with them to an unusual extent. This was apparent to me not only from his writing, but also on the one occasion I saw him speak at a public event. “Can you tell us something about the role of magicians, or seers, or tricksters, or ghosts in works of literature—specifically, your works of literature?” the onstage interlocutor asked him. “I choose ghosts,” Marías answered, in English that was expressively perfect but not quite idiomatic, before going on to articulate the connection, at least in his own mind, between authorship and the dead.

  Javier Marías is still very much alive, but something additional happens to such ghost-ridden works when their author himself dies. I used to listen to Thom Gunn read aloud his poem “Death’s Door,” in which he imagined how

  After their processing, the dead

  Sit down in groups and watch TV,

  In which they must be interested,

  For on it they see you and me.

  Something of Thom’s endearing wit steadily infused this dark poem, in which he imagined four of his friends—strangers in life, but dead in the same month—watching the black-and-white set together and gradually losing interest, until “snow blurs the picture” and they are “weaned from memory,” loosed into the timelessness of the archaic dead. And I can still hear Thom’s wit when I reread this poem to myself. But the voice in which it was conveyed is fading now, for he too has joined the dead and been swallowed up in that snow.

  Emily Dickinson’s voice has always had this quality of coming from beyond the grave—certainly for me, but perhaps even for her near-contemporaries, since so much of her work was only published after her death. “’Twas just this time, last year, I died,” she begins one poem, in a rather Rebecca-ish, Sunset Boulevard-ish vein (though it was Hollywood that stole from Dickinson, of course, not she who copied from them). “I died for Beauty—but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining Room—” is the start of another of her precociously posthumous poems. But the one I have always loved best opens with the line “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” and ends:

  I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

  What portion of me be

  Assignable—and then it was

  There interposed a Fly—

  With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

  Between the light—and me—

  And then the Windows failed—and then

  I could not see to see—

  It is the blueness of that fly’s buzz, its absolute rightness and specificity, that makes the verse so persuasive. She knows what she’s talking about, and the fly is the proof.

  As further evidence from the land of the non-living, let me call on another fly. This one appears in Ackerley’s My Father and Myself, when he is talking about the deathward decline of his mother. “Ending up as I am with animals and alcohol,” he says, in what is surely one of the great throwaway clauses of all time,

  one of her last friends, when she was losing her faculties, was a fly, which I never saw but which she talked about a good deal and also talked to. With large melancholy yellow eyes and long lashes it inhabited the bathroom; she made a little joke of it but was serious enough to take in crumbs of bread every morning to feed it, scattering them along the wooden rim of the bath as she lay in it …

  Ackerley never hints that his failure to see the fly might cast doubt on its existence; if anything, he suggests the opposite, describing its physical features in microscopic detail. This fly’s “large melancholy yellow eyes” make it as tangible as Dickinson’s blue buzzer—and who is to say, at this late date, how real or unreal either fly was? They reside permanently, now, in the same landscape as Henry James’s, Javier Marías’s, and Thom Gunn’s ghosts.

  The uncanny in literature is not a separate place, reserved for those who believe in the occult or the supernatural. It is there in every poem that joins us to an absent speaker, every novel that sets up a parallel between our world and its world, every essay that calls to us from the distant era of a now-dead author. That eerily bridgeable gap between the you and the me of a literary work is also a space between the living and the dead, the imagined and the real, the singular and the collective. Even the very word “space” is doing double duty here, for it points to something that is both there and not there: it is the placeholder that joins us in a sequence (like the single space between each of these words) and it is the severance, the emptiness, that keeps us apart. Like all such ambiguou
s connectors, it is invisible to the casual glance, but we would know instantly if it were to disappear, for in that case the sentence, the stanza, the entire literary structure, would disintegrate on the spot.

  THREE

  NOVELTY

  There is a certain kind of writer who seems to feel that unless he is breaking apart everything that came before him, composing something that in his own view is astonishingly new, he is not writing great literature. Though he is sincere in his wish to be a great writer (and in that sense might seem almost naive), his preferred mode of public address is sarcasm or heavy irony, both of which are meant to suggest his sophistication, his superiority to banal questions about reality, authenticity, and truth. He has no interest in accurately representing human behavior, partly because he has no interest in accuracy and partly because he has very little interest in other people; what concerns him most is the working of his own mind. He hates with a passion the realist novelists and formalist poets who came just before him, and he is convinced that only he, among all the writers who ever lived, is producing work that will matter to the future. In this respect, he evidently imagines a future filled with people who are nothing like him—people who will be content to rest with the innovations he has produced and will not feel obliged to stomp on their forebears.

  Writers like this have given novelty a bad name. They have led those who are wedded to old-fashioned notions of plot and character to conclude that innovations in style or structure are antagonistic to these older values, as if we could only have one of the two aspects—let us call them startling originality and enduring sympathetic gratification—so we have to choose between them. This obsessive clinging to the cherished ways of the past is almost as bad as its opposite. It is equally humorless, equally self-enclosed, and equally unlikely to lead to the production and enjoyment of great literature. I have no prescriptions for producing great works, but I have enjoyed a vast number of them, and from this outsider’s perspective I can pretty confidently say that what is entailed has an element of openness to it. Rigid rules of any kind will be of no use here. Nor will the overweening desire to achieve newness, on the one hand, or protect tradition, on the other, because both of those positions imply a goal that is separate from, and often detrimental to, the more intrinsic purpose of simply telling the truth as one sees it. I say “simply,” but it is not at all a simple matter. Literature that tells lies is not worth the paper it is written on, but a lie is not the same as a fantasy, an invention, an allegory, a myth, a dream. Fiction, drama, poetry, and even essays can be made up and also truthful.

  Usefully for my purposes, one of the works of literature which most strongly expresses this complicated view is also one of the most innovative in form. I am referring to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote—perhaps the most stylistically ambitious novel ever undertaken, in no small part because it was one of the first. What does it mean for an author to get inside his characters’ minds and relay their thoughts, rather than simply displaying their actions on a theatrical stage? What is a “narrator,” and how does he connect with the author of a work? How do the realities of fictional characters’ lives compare to the realities of readers’ lives, and where, if anywhere, do the two planes intersect? Does the book exist in its own time or in the time when you are reading it, and does that mean it exists in a different way for each new reader? Can the reader himself inhabit more than one era, time-traveling through books? Can the past, in this sense, be made to live again, and if so, can the nonexistent, purely fictional past also be brought to life? Are dead authors different from living ones, from a reader’s point of view? How do poetry, drama, history, and fiction overlap? What is novel about the novel?

  Cervantes was possibly the first person to ask most of these questions, and probably the first person to answer them—not flatly or pedantically, but with hints, suggestions, jokes, and intimations, through novelistic strategies that honored plot and character even as they worried about the existence of such things. There is no ancestor-stomping in Don Quixote, in part because the book had no immediate ancestors: it was sui generis, emerging from Cervantes’s brow like Athena from Zeus’s, whole and perfect.

  The tone is sardonic but also genial, at once sharp, critical, empathetic, and companionable. The hero—a devoted reader, just like us—is the most lovable madman imaginable. (Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin perhaps runs a close second, as he was intended to do, for Dostoyevsky, despite the astonishing innovations he brought to the novel, was no enemy of the past: he deeply admired Don Quixote, and consciously borrowed from it for The Idiot.) The plot is a higgledy-piggledy series of adventures, to which we might be tempted to apply the word “plotless” if the whole book didn’t so clearly and movingly lead up to its ending. That feeling which I mentioned in relation to Wolf Hall, of being summarily ejected from an enticing and richly detailed world, is Don Quixote’s feeling when he recovers his sanity at the end of the novel. It is also our feeling when we are finally forced to take leave of him.

  One of the many things Cervantes discovered was that he could repeatedly remind his readers that they were reading a book—could, in that sense, blatantly announce the fictionality of his fictional characters—and still get us to invest emotionally in these people and their story. There are apparently at least two sides to our minds in such cases: one which goes logically about its business, registering Sancho Panza’s jokes about typographical errors in previously published volumes of the knight’s adventures as patent admissions of the story’s fabrication; and another which takes Sancho, his master, and all the other characters at face value, allowing us to treat them as fellow humans, to laugh approvingly at Sancho’s earthy wisdom, to weep wholeheartedly at the Don’s death. We know the difference between reality and fiction (we are not, in that respect, as mad as Don Quixote), but that does not prevent us from feeling real emotions for these fictional characters. If anything, the fact that they sometimes comment on their own unreality makes them seem more real, as if they were capable of viewing their circumstances from the same perspective we do.

  Cervantes was not the first writer to discover this for himself. There are numerous examples of it in his near-contemporary Shakespeare. And if we go even further back, to the Middle English works of Geoffrey Chaucer, we can find an especially pure version of it—an easygoing, entirely comfortable readiness to acknowledge the related but different planes on which authors and characters dwell. To give but one example: Chaucer ends his extremely moving account of Troilus and Criseyde’s doomed love affair (a more sympathetic account, I would argue, than even Shakespeare’s version in Troilus and Cressida) with the words

  Go, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye …

  … And kis the steppes, where as thow seest pace

  Virgil, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace

  as if sending his poem out into the world in this literary-ancestor-acknowledging manner won’t endanger or contradict the felt reality of his tale. As indeed it does not. What you might think of as the Wizard of Oz syndrome, that moment when the great and powerful Oz reveals himself as the little man working the effects from behind the curtain, can apparently coexist quite nicely with our continuing belief in the magic that little man produces.

  Shakespeare is even braver than Chaucer in invoking this paradox, for he sometimes has his characters themselves deliver the envoi. At the end of The Tempest, when Prospero is renouncing the sorcery that has enabled him to rule his island throughout the play—the magical powers that have in essence brought the play into being—he comes forward in his final speech and asks us for our applause without in any way breaking character. Even more riskily, in Antony and Cleopatra, the doomed, captured Cleopatra, formerly the rebellious queen of Egypt and the proud mistress of Antony’s heart, deplores what she can already foresee as the result of her captivity: a future in which

  … quick comedians

  Extemporally will stage us, and present

  Our Alexandrian revels: Antony

  Shal
l be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

  Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

  I’ th’ posture of a whore.

  In Shakespeare’s own time, these lines would have been delivered by the boy actor playing the female part. In other words, this actor had to criticize his own squeaking delivery at the same time as he convinced the audience of the character’s palpable existence. And the character, through her lines, had to persuade us that this existence would in some ghostly form extend forever—allowing her as well as us to “see” this performance—even as its mortal version ended tragically, and at her own hands, less than two pages later in the script.

  Theater, the art form which gave us the very notion of “suspension of disbelief,” specializes in such moments of contradiction. Real humans, just like us, are standing bodily before us onstage, representing actions and emotions that cry out for our sympathy, our hatred, our anxiety, our laughter, our distress. We do not really forget that they are actors, just as we don’t forget that the sets they occupy bear little or no relationship to reality, or that the lines they speak have been written for them by someone else. All these factors, far from being detrimental by-products, are built into the effectiveness of the theatrical form. As audience members, we are indeed in a suspended state, where real emotions about non-real events can course through us. But what is being suspended is not, precisely, disbelief. Logic, evidence, empirical truth: these elements that make up scientific belief, or even juridical disbelief, do not enter into it. We are not, as audience members, being asked to weigh in on the innocence or guilt, truthfulness or falsity, worthiness or unworthiness of the people we see before us onstage—not, at any rate, in the same way we would have to make such judgments in a courtroom. Our relationship to stage actors and the characters they represent is both more remote and less antagonistic than that. Precisely because we are not a jury of their peers, we can do things for them, and they for us, that would not be possible in our normal reality. For the two- or three-hour duration of their performance, we give them life; and they, in turn, allow us to become pure vessels of feeling, afloat in a world that for the moment seems as real to us as one of our own dreams.