Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (14 page)

And yet Lawrence was by no means giving away the whole store. As you can tell from his tone, he very much relied on his own version of authority. He was emphatic almost to the point of hysteria. He was convinced that when he wrote, he was writing the truth—and this conviction applied at least as much to matters of opinion and fiction as it did to fact. (Actually, it applied nearly exclusively to those more debatable areas: in the few cases where Lawrence wrote about factual matters, such as the look of the Sardinian landscape, his tone was much less aggressive.) Ranting and railing are Lawrence’s default mode, and this is true equally of the essays and the fictional works—though it is somewhat less true of the stories, and rarely true of the poems, which is why some people who can’t bear the novels can still appreciate his poetry.

A lot of people can’t bear the novels, and this has been true since they first began appearing in the early twentieth century. Time has not dulled their capacity to irritate. I still can’t stomach
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, and
The Plumed Serpent
sends me into a rage, when it does not send me into fits of disbelieving giggles. But I know of no book more true than
Sons and Lovers
. I would stake my life on its truths about mothers and their sons, young women and their lovers; I
have
staked my life on them, at key moments of emotional crisis or existential despair.

There are many opinions floating around in
Sons and Lovers
, and only some of them belong to the author. The characters have very strong views about their lives, and about their desire to interfere with other lives, and about their desperation to get away from such interference, whether instigated by themselves or others. These people are bundles of conflicting emotions, with the conflicts running both between and within individuals. The sight of them trying to disentangle themselves reminds one of those demonic hand toys that capture your fingers and won’t let them go, so that the harder you try to pull away, the more tightly you are gripped. The feelings in
Sons and Lovers
are alive, and they are alive
now
; they reignite every time you or I or anyone else reads the book.

You might be tempted to say, well, yes, that’s what happens when an author knows enough to leave his characters alone and lets them develop into credible people, unintruded on by his manipulations, wishes, and commands. But the thing is, Lawrence
doesn’t
leave his characters alone. He persecutes them, harasses them, invades them. He is forever chivvying them along and nipping at their heels. His animus against Walter Morel (the poor dumb brute of a miner who sires the novel’s main character, the blatantly autobiographical Paul Morel) is so powerful that we end up resisting it. If Lawrence is going to gang up against his own character in this way, we feel morally obliged to take that character’s side. Was Lawrence completely out of control here? Did he hate his own father so much he just couldn’t help himself? But wait—never trust the artist, trust the tale. David Herbert Lawrence the person may have had it in for his father, but the novel
Sons and Lovers
knows enough to allow for our sympathy for Walter Morel. The book wouldn’t work without it. So even as the author is ostensibly browbeating us with his opinions, he is also giving us the freedom to choose, to believe him or not, to side with whichever character we feel like siding with. That is the true sign of the writer’s authority.

*   *   *

I have been making so many broad assertions that my readers may well feel their credulity exhausted. So perhaps now would be a good time to introduce a few specific illustrations, a few examples of how authority seems to me to exist in particular passages.

A writer’s own special kind of authority may pervade every sentence in her work, but it is often most noticeable at the very beginning, where we are deciding whether or not to trust that voice, whether or not to enter that world into which we are being invited. If one were to compile a list of persuasive openings, one might start with
Pride and Prejudice
’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.” But that would be unfair. Jane Austen is beyond competition: she carries so much authority in her quietly confident voice that she can afford to mock even the idea of authority, at least as it might be manifested in “universally acknowledged” truths. So if we want to compare different levels of authority, we’d do best to leave her out of it, just as for the moment we’ll leave out all the rest of the nineteenth-century novelists—for their strength has already been tested by time, and it will be hard to find any who do
not
seem to write with more authority than our contemporaries.

Let us look instead at a twentieth-century opening that is almost as self-confident as Jane Austen’s, though in place of her apparent straightforwardness and simplicity, it substitutes convolution and opacity. This is not an objection in itself. Many wonderful novelists—Dickens, Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust, to list just the obvious—can write sentences that go on for half a page, unfurling their clauses and delaying their central points in a positively Germanic fashion. Complexity is not at all the same thing as artificiality or self-promotion, and simplicity of structure or language is not the only form of authority. Here, then, is the opening sentence of William Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom!
:

From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

Faulkner’s prose leaves us breathless—literally so, in the way it forces us to exhale when its largely unpunctuated length is read out loud, and metaphorically too, in the degree to which it impresses without trying to. This single sentence invites us inside a particular place and time, introduces us to a couple of characters, and hints at their history, all the while using language that, if they could write, might have come from the characters themselves. The novel it introduces will clearly be requiring a great deal of us. This confiding, challenging voice presumes that, among other things, we will be able to focus our attention on small visual details, keep track of the complex strands of intertwined stories, recognize the undying effects of the past, both distant and recent, on the present, and appreciate the sound of a nearly musical language. We are deep into Faulkner territory here, that strange place which is an amalgam of external and internal, a community of unspoken thoughts and hidden reservations, a shared history that also belongs to each person alone. No one else has ever written quite like this, but one doesn’t sense that this is because Faulkner is
trying
to be different. The language just reflects the way his mind works; he is simply (though it is a simplicity filled with difficulty and extenuation) putting down what he sees, what he imagines. The wisdom, if there is wisdom here—and I think there is a great deal—is lightly worn. Its pertinence to the wider world, to
our
world, is disguised as the minute observation of a particular society that Faulkner knew as well as Jane Austen knew hers.

A novel’s opening lines don’t have to be specific, and they don’t have to be concrete—though if they are, the author will have an easier time winning us over. But an author who is willing to take risks can get away with almost anything, if he has enough intelligence and uses it with serious moral intent. Take this opening of a relatively recent J. M. Coetzee novel,
Elizabeth Costello
, whose first chapter is titled “Realism”: “There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.” This is a bit like Chaucer’s “Go, litel bok,” or Shakespeare’s imagined actor “boying” Cleopatra in the posture of a whore. Bravely, recklessly, Coetzee is reminding us at the very beginning of his fiction that he is just making everything up, creating a world out of nothing, getting us from our “there” to his “here.” But the fiction in which he does this is a novel about a fiction writer named Elizabeth Costello, so the problem outlined in these initial sentences—the problem of how to bridge the gap from our world to the realistic novel’s world, and make that bridge sustain the weight of our potential disbelief—is both his problem and his main character’s. Are these opening sentences his views, or hers? We are not required to choose.

Right from the start, the authority of the author is being questioned, just as it was in Austen’s opening sally. And yet the effect in Coetzee is one of grave seriousness rather than, or perhaps in addition to, wit. That the seriousness will not weigh us down is signaled by the conversational tone of the abstract discussion: the short, direct clauses and sentences, the reliance on what sounds like common sense (“People solve such problems every day”). Both Coetzee and his Costello are aware that the solutions are not easy, if you are a novelist. They both feel the threat of failure. But they are repeatedly willing to try. And part of what enables them to keep on trying is the sense that other people in their line of work have faced—and solved, and then had to solve all over again, every time anew—the problem of how to get started.

*   *   *

There is no progress in the world of letters, as there is, say, in science or manufacturing. As the centuries pass, we do not get better or smarter at reading, and the authors among us do not get better at writing. Things come and go, make sense to us or not, depending on our particular state of mind, and we change our minds over the course of a lifetime. The whole culture can change its mind, too, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that a work of literature gets dated forever. On the contrary, a book from 1814 can make sense to someone in 2014 in a way that it did not, perhaps, make sense to that person’s great-grandmother in 1914. It is all a matter of what we believe, what we feel, coming into contact with the convictions and emotions expressed in the novel or poem or play.

In this respect—in its lack of progress—literature is similar to human life, individually and in the aggregate. In my own reading experience, I’ve found no one who recognized this more clearly than Alexander Herzen. What is encouraging about him is that he was able to hold in his mind two seemingly conflicting ideas: that there is no destined progress in our lives, and that it is nonetheless worth struggling for principles we believe in (such as the innate value of an individual life, or the need for equality and justice, or the importance of art). Here’s how he put it in
My Past and Thoughts
, in a section where he was criticizing “the idol of
progress
” and its proponents:

Is it not simpler to grasp that man lives not for the
fulfilment of his destiny
, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born; and he was born
for
(however bad a word that is) … for the present, which does not at all prevent his either receiving a heritage from the past or leaving something in his will. To idealists this seems humiliating and coarse: they will take absolutely no account of the fact that the great significance of us men […] consists in just this: that while we are alive, until the knot held together by us has been resolved into its elements,
we are for all that ourselves
, and not dolls destined to suffer progress.

And the same is true, it seems to me, of works of literature. They exist in and for themselves, without a purpose, without a destiny, without any intent to build upon each other into something larger. This does not mean that they have no connection to their ancestors and descendants—they do, just as we do, and the web of history holds them all together just as it holds us (at least in retrospect, which is how we generally view history). We can be individuals and still exist in relation to the collective life of our kind, just as books can. For us to be firmly lodged in the present, our own present, doesn’t mean we have no awareness of the past or the future. It’s just that this train of events is not necessarily going anywhere.

There is something liberating in this notion, once you get over the frightening sense of being untethered from certainty and destination. If you resolve to meet each work of literature one-to-one, reaching across from your own perspective to
its
own perspective, you will find that certain problems, certain dilemmas, simply drop away. There is no question of the present’s superiority to the past, but nor is there any issue of the past’s superiority to us. We are all equals, meeting as if on level ground. If anyone is able to brandish superior knowledge at the other, it is by virtue of having gained it in her own lifetime, in her own way—not because she happens to come from a more knowledgeable time. The knowledge, in any case, is only useful to the extent it is capable of being transmitted, so the reader, as receiver, becomes as important in this transaction as the author who transmits.

We can have many chances to receive: it is not all or nothing with books, as it is with a live performance or an actual event in history. You can go back to the book at different times in your life (as I went back to
War and Peace
) and receive what it has to offer you at that point, which may be neither more nor less in quantity than what you received before, but will almost certainly be different in kind. This is not progress; it may not even be accumulation, since your earlier impression may be replaced by a later one; but it will nonetheless be a kind of truth. “Truth lives from day to day,” as Lawrence said, and the one you grasp on the fly is the only one there is, as far as literature goes—as far as any art goes. Such truths will not be susceptible to proof, but if there is to be no progress, and if each encounter with a literary work matters purely for its own sake, then the absence of proof doesn’t really matter. The work speaks to you or it does not. That is all you can finally say.