Book by Book (16 page)

The receptive critic, by contrast, presumes that the work under review is the measure. He tries to avoid preconceptions and instead make himself open to the book's argument or its particular magic. If such a critic finds a novel boring or strange or mystifying, he more often than not assumes that he has failed to understand it. Rather than pass summary judgment, this unassertive but sensitive reader prefers to present an author's work accurately and sympathetically, employing his own artistry, sometimes considerable, in the service of the book.

Of course, most practicing critics mix these two approaches, sometimes uneasily, hoping to balance argument with information, razzle-dazzle with reverence, all the while trying to avoid the pitfalls of both. The strong critic sometimes grows tendentious, supercilious, or holier-than-thou, and actually might be happier as an op-ed columnist. In his turn, the gentler critic can seem to possess no standards at all, to be one of those people who likes everything; he may even relax into a carpet-slippers-and-port literary essayist, dreamily relating the adventures of his sensitive soul among the masterpieces.

I have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.—Somerset Maugham

One never forgives a work of art that is general and vague. —Steven Millhauser

He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts. —Arthur Schopenhauer

I have been told that when the late Sir Edward Marsh, composing his memoir of Rupert Brooke, wrote “Rupert left Rugby in a blaze of glory,” the poet's mother, a lady of firm character, changed “a blaze of glory” to “July.”—EL. Lucas

Every great story. . . must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. —Willa Cather

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. —Edward Gibbon

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.—Arthur Miller

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. —Wallace Stevens

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself. —Leslie Stephen

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. —Anton Chekhov

Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity —Italo Calvino (the traits in writing that he most admired)

Treachery, unrequited love, bereavement, toothache, bad food, poverty, etc. must count for nothing the moment one picks up one's notebook.—W. H. Auden

Caress the details, the divine details.... What color was the bottle containing the arsenic with which Emma Bovary poisoned herself?—Vladimir Nabokov

It is reported that when Pericles spoke, the people said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, the people said, “Let us march.”

“We like,” said Thoreau, “that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.” Yes, but literature also needs ornamentation and dazzle, a touch of the idiosyncratic and gonzo. Certainly Shaker plainness is best for most writing, but sometimes it's nice to get all dressed up and strut your stuff. Make it new and strange and musical and fun.

Examples of such flamboyance? Read the the prose of Robert Burton, Jeremy Taylor, and Edward Gibbon; the poetry of John Webster, Milton, and Wallace Stevens; the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green, John Updike, W. M. Spackman,
William Gaddis; the essays of Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Edward Dahlberg, and William Gass; and the early journalism of Hunter Thompson. These writers' diction aims to astonish and seduce. Here Nicholson Baker, in his novel
Room Temperature
, defends old-fashioned punctuation:

Such hybrids—of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too—might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subder subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms—and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able ... to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weight was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.

William Gass even more exuberantly calls for colorful language at the conclusion of his novella
Willie Master's Lonesome Wife:

Let us have a language worthy of our world, a democratic style where rich and well-born nouns can roister with some sluttish verb yet find themselves content and uncomplained of. We want a diction which contains the quaint, the rare, the technical, the obsolete, the old, the lent, the nonce, the local slang and argot of the street, in neighborly confinement. Our tone should suit our time: uncommon quiet dashed with common thunder. It should be young and quick and sweet and dangerous as we are. Experimental and
expansive—venturesome enough to make the chemist envy and the physicist catch up—it will give new glasses to new eyes, and put those plots and patterns down we find our modern lot in. Metaphor must be its god now gods are metaphors.

And here is a one-sentence marvel from Henry Green's
Concluding:
“At this instant, like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it, the sun came through for a moment, and lit the azaleas on either side before fog, redescending, blanketed these off again, as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window, to shut behind them a blonde princess undressing.”

One may find similarly poetic rhythms even in writers thought to be as bluff and hearty as Rudyard Kipling: “She liked men and women, and she spoke of them—of kinglets she had known in the past, of her own youth and beauty, of the depredations of leopards and the eccentricities of Asiatic love”
(Kim).

But no one excels Thomas Browne in baroque splendor, especially in “Urn Burial”: “There is therfore some other hand that twines the thread of life than that of nature; wee are not onley ignorant in Antipathies and occult qualities, our ends are as obscure as our beginnings; the line of our dayes is drawne by night, and the various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible; wherein though wee confesse our ignorance, I am sure wee do not erre, if wee say, it is the hand of God.”

The beauty of words, the sound and fall of sentences, a writer's distinctive voice rising from the page—these, in the end, provide the greatest and most lasting pleasures of a reading life.

Now on the field Ulysses stands alone, The Greeks all fled, the Trojans pouring on; But stands collected in himself and whole . . .

— ALEXANDER POPE

Philosophy, wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?” At some point, nearly everyone agonizes over questions like: What kind of life will bring happiness or, at least, a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction? When faced with a moral dilemma—should I refuse to fight in an
unjust war? should I be unfaithful to my spouse with this attractive and willing stranger?—how does one decide what to do? Are there ways to judge rightly the conflicting claims of duty and desire?

Most of the ancient Greek thinkers believed that one should aspire to a life of reason, and that
ataraxia
, a tranquil indifference to the world's vicissitudes, was the state of mind most worth cultivating. And yet it's hard not to wonder if untroubled serenity is really appropriate for human beings. Isn't there a point when too much self-mastery leads to a drying up of the inner self and the springs of sympathy? The early philosopher Heracleitus found strife to lie at the heart of all things; indeed, many people often feel most alive, most fulfilled, when they violate the dictates of conscience or even the promptings of their own self-interest. At least some of the time, guys want to be bad and women want to feel naughty. Perhaps a complete life should honor occasional acts of utter foolishness; otherwise, as Goya's nightmarish picture warns, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”

In his first book,
The Birth of Tragedy
, Nietzsche argued that much of ancient culture actually grew out of a tension between Dionysiac passion and Apollonian reason; E. R. Dodds, in his classic
The Greeks and the Irrational
, further probed the place of madness, myth, and religious belief among the early Hellenes. Now, we have adopted something of a middle course. “The Greeks,” concludes the contemporary classicist James Davidson, “imposed few rules from outside, but felt a civic responsibility to manage all appetites, to train themselves to deal with them, without trying to conquer them absolutely.” This seems about right, especially as Freud would certainly add that an overzealous sense of duty results
mainly in neurosis. We can never wholly suppress our desires— they are part of who we are—and so we should work with (or around) them: We are, after all, only human, all too human.

Besides the Epicureans, who actually believed in mild, reasonable pleasures, and the sterner Stoics, there was a third major philosophical strain among the Greeks: the Skeptics. Even in summary, they seem particularly attractive to the paranoid contemporary sensibility. Xeniades of Corinth said that nothing at all is true. Anaxarchus compared everything he saw to stage-paintings, that is, illusions. Can you sound more jadedly postmodern than that? Etymologically, a skeptic is an “inquirer” or “searcher,” one who feels that the truth can be sought but never quite found. No fanatics in these ranks, then, and no true believers. The effects of this philosophy of noncommitted inquiry were really felt centuries later, when early modern thinkers again argued for intellectual tolerance and suspicion of all dogma. This liberal ideal has probably been most vividly expressed by the mid twentieth-century philosopher and essayist Isaiah Berlin.

As a thinker Isaiah Berlin espoused a liberalism that he dubbed “deeply and uniquely English,” but one which anybody of any nationality might usefully adopt. In “The Three Strands in My Life,” Berlin argues “that decent respect for others and the toleration of dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission; that liberty may be incompatible with, and better than, too
much efficiency; that pluralism and untidiness are, to those who value freedom, better than the rigorous imposition of all embracing systems, no matter how rational and disinterested.” As is clear by now, these are my own views too.

Throughout his writing Berlin repeatedly warns against system builders, monistic theorists, all those who claim to know how we should live. He himself spoke up for “negative liberty”—leaving men and women alone to act essentially as they wished. But reformers and zealots typically insist on “positive liberty,” that people should be free to choose not what they want but what is “rational.” Of course, if the working class, say, acts “irrationally,” the ignorant proles obviously need to be guided and reeducated by supposedly wiser, far-seeing guardians.

Berlin will have none of such managerialism, which at heart denies people their right to moral sovereignty. Rather than abstractions and theories, he stresses “the revealed preferences of ordinary men and women.” In particular, Berlin recognized that our inner natures aren't unified and our desires aren't always clear even to ourselves; we are in fact interior battlefields of contradictory impulses. We need to accept our dividedness, just as a good society is one that allows for differences, conflict, and opposition.

In particular, we need “less Messianic ardour, more enlightened scepticism, more toleration of idiosyncrasies.” Better to live with irreconcilable desires and incompatible values than to succumb to the meretricious allure of some fanatical, unitary vision. As the great philosopher Immanuel Kant observed, in a phrase that Berlin made his own watchword: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

Surprisingly, the Bible itself may be interpreted as a subtle endorsement for independence of mind. Consider the relationship of God to man in the Old Testament. Even though its books were composed at different times by various writers, one still finds that they depict a distant past when the Lord made himself known to his chosen people directly. He ambles around the garden with Adam and Eve, chats to Moses up on Sinai, engages in a bit of roughhousing with Jacob. Gradually, however, God's appearances become less frequent; miracles become smaller and more personal in scale; kings and prophets are set up as divine representatives. In the late book of Esther, the Lord isn't even mentioned by name. Yahweh has hidden his face.