Words Are My Matter Read online

  “There is no Beauty which hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion,” Francis Bacon said, which may or may not be wholly true, but which is a useful idea. Our house had a great deal of strangeness in it.

  Does anybody play Sardines any more? For Sardines, you have to have a large house, quite a lot of people, and darkness. One person is It. Everybody but It waits noisily in one room, long enough for It to find a hiding place somewhere else—under a bed, in the broom closet, in the bathtub, anywhere It pleases. Then the lights go off, and separately, in silence, everyone hunts for It. When you find It, you say nothing: you simply join It in the hiding place. If that’s a broom closet there may be room for quite a few; if it’s under a bed, there are problems. One by one other hunters find the site, and squash themselves into the sardine can, and suffocate giggles, and try not to move, until at last the final hunter finds them and they all burst free at once. It’s a good game. Our house, with its endless nooks and corners, was a perfect Sardines house.

  That would be a benevolent side of its largeness, darkness, and unexpected spaces. Another aspect was revealed to anybody staying alone in it at night.

  The first of our family to do so was a cousin of mine who spent the night there before my father and mother moved in. He tried to sleep in the big bedroom at the top of the stairs. He leapt up because he quite clearly heard somebody coming up the stairs, step after step. He went to the top landing to challenge the intruder, but he could not see anybody at all. He went back to bed. More people climbed the stairs. People walked across the floor of the room towards him, creak, creak, and still he could not see them. He ended up sleeping out on one of the balconies with the door shut, hoping the people would stay inside the house.

  Redwood floors have a kind of delayed resilience; compressed by a footfall, they snap back . . . after a while . . . hours perhaps. Once you understand the phenomenon, it is more or less endurable. As an adolescent I rather liked to hang over the deep well of the staircase and listen to the invisible people ascending it, or later, to lie in my small room and listen to myself walking around up in the attic, the floor repeating every step I had taken there that afternoon.

  But when I was a young child, the explanations were not very helpful to me. I slept then in the big bedroom at the top of the stairs; and the house, deep in the night, was scary. It was limitlessly large and deeply dark. There was room in it for many and mysterious beings. I had night terrors for years after seeing King Kong at age six, but could handle them pretty well, so long as I knew people were in the house. The first time I was ever left alone in it, I went into a slow panic. I tried to be brave, but little by little the shadows and the creakings were too much for me. My older brothers were just across the street, and when I leaned from a window and wailed aloud, they came at once and were most comforting and remorseful. I wept apologetically, feeling very foolish. Why was I afraid of my own dear house? How could it have become so strange to me?

  It had a strangeness in it; that is, I think, the truth.

  Beauty is a very difficult word: I have already complained about not being able to approach it straight on. People don’t use the word as freely as they used to, and many artists—painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, poets—reject it entirely; they deny that there is any common standard by which to judge it; they diminish it to mean prettiness and so righteously despise it; or they deliberately abandon it for truth, or self-expression, or edginess, or other values they prize more highly.

  I don’t pretend to be able to argue with such refusals of beauty when I can’t even offer a generally acceptable definition of the word. But I think it behooves artists to consider what the word means to them, no matter what it means to others. How do they interpret the aesthetic component of what they do, its importance, its weight? What, besides that component, makes it appropriate to call their work art? What, besides the search to make something beautiful, makes an artist? There are perhaps as many answers to those questions now as there are artists, and nothing gives me the right to ask them of others; but I do feel the obligation to ask them of myself, and answer as honestly as I can.

  Novelists probably talk less than any other kind of artist about beauty, because the word is seldom used to describe what they make. As a novelist, however, I have always found it an important word in thinking about my work, and in describing that of other novelists. For instance, Pride and Prejudice is, to me, an absolutely beautiful work of art. If exquisite accuracy of language, perfection of proportion, of gait, of rhythm, in the service of powerful intelligence and insight and strong moral feeling, forming a complete and vital whole—if that isn’t beautiful, what is? If that makes sense to you, you may be willing to let me use the word beauty in describing novels of very different kinds, such as Little Dorrit, War and Peace, To the Lighthouse, or The Lord of the Rings, or to think of novels which you’d be willing to call beautiful.

  Now, if Pride and Prejudice were a house, I think it would be a nobly proportioned, delightfully livable, not very large English house of the eighteenth century.

  I don’t know what novel our Maybeck house could be compared to, but it would contain darkness and radiant light; its beauty would arise from honest, bold, inventive construction, from geniality and generosity of spirit and mind, and would also have elements of fantasy and strangeness.

  Writing this, I wonder if much of my understanding of what a novel ought to be was taught to me, ultimately, by living in that house. If so, perhaps all my life I have been trying to rebuild it around me out of words.

  Staying Awake

  Published in Harper’s in February 2008, and reprinted in The Wild Girls

  (PM Press, 2011). In a time of super-accelerated technological change, how fast references get dated and universal assumptions become ridiculous! I was tempted to update this piece, but didn’t. A text speaks to the time in which it was written, but it may also speak usefully to later times by revealing changes, continuities, and our inability to predict anything other than, as Benjamin said, death and taxes.

  Some people lament the disappearance of the spotted owl from our forests, others sport bumper stickers boasting that they eat fried spotted owls. It appears that books, too, are a threatened species, and reactions to that news are similarly various. In 2002 a National Endowment for the Arts survey announced, with considerable hand-wringing, that fewer than half of adult Americans polled said they had read a work of literature that year. (Strangely, the NEA excluded nonfiction from “literature,” so that you could have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Voyage of the Beagle, Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, and the entire Letters and Diaries of Virginia Woolf and yet be counted as not having read anything of literary value.) In 2004 an NEA poll revealed that 43 percent of Americans polled hadn’t read a book all year, and last November, in its report “To Read or Not to Read,” the NEA lamented the decline of reading, warning that non-readers do less well in the job market and are less useful citizens in general. This moved Motoko Rich of the New York Times to write a Sunday feature in which she inquired of various bookish people why anyone should read at all. The Associated Press ran their own poll and announced last September that 27 percent of their respondents had spent the year bookless, a better figure than the NEA’s, but the tone of the AP piece was remarkable for its complacency. Quoting a project manager for a telecommunications company in Dallas who said, “I just get sleepy when I read,” the AP correspondent, Alan Fram, commented, “a habit with which millions of Americans doubtless can identify.”

  Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

  For most of human history, most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator
between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time—these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the (male) ruling class.

  Literacy very gradually filtered downward, becoming less sacred as it became less secret, less directly potent as it became more popular. The Romans ended up letting slaves, women, and such rabble read and write, but they got their comeuppance from the religion-based society that succeeded them. In the Dark Ages, a Christian priest could read at least a little, but most laymen didn’t, and many women couldn’t—not only didn’t but couldn’t: reading was considered an inappropriate activity for women, as in some Muslim societies today.

  In Europe, one can perceive through the Middle Ages a slow broadening of the light of the written word, which brightens into the Renaissance, and shines out with Gutenberg. Then, before you know it, slaves are reading, and revolutions are made with pieces of paper called Declarations of this and that, and schoolmarms replace gunslingers all across the Wild West, and people are mobbing the steamer delivering the latest installment of a new novel to New York, crying, “Is Little Nell dead? Is she dead?”

  I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950—call it the century of the book—the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. Teaching from first grade up centered on “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it, but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.

  To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old was rather awesome. Such texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected to read in high school up to the 1960s, lead one to believe that Americans really wanted their children not only to be able to read, but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it.

  Literacy was not only the front door to any kind of individual economic advancement and class status, it was an important social activity. The shared experience of books was a genuine bond. A person reading seems to be cut off from everything around them, almost as much as the person shouting banalities into a cellphone as they ram their car into your car—that’s the private aspect of reading. But there is a large public element, too, which consists in what you and others have read.

  As people these days can maintain nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversation by talking about who murdered whom on the latest hit TV police procedural or mafia show, so strangers on the train or coworkers on the job in 1840 could talk perfectly unaffectedly together about The Old Curiosity Shop and whether poor Little Nell was going to cop it. Since public school education was strong on poetry and various literary classics, a lot of people would recognize and enjoy a reference to Tennyson, or Scott, or Shakespeare—shared properties, a social meeting ground. A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of a Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not having read it.

  The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere PR, because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

  If we brought books over from England by ship these days, crowds would have swarmed on the docks of New York to greet the final volume of Harry Potter, crying, “Did she kill him? Is he dead?” The Potter boom was a genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars, and the whole subculture of popular music, which offers adolescents and young adults both an exclusive in-group and a shared social experience.

  Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then, the stupidity of the contemporary corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

  Moneymaking entities controlled by obscenely rich executives and their anonymous accountants have acquired most previously independent publishing houses with the notion of making quick money by selling works of art and information. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that such people get sleepy when they read. Within the corporate whales are many luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house—editors and such anachronisms, people who read wide awake. Some of them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers. Some of them have their eyes so wide open they can even proofread. But it doesn’t do them much good. For years now, most editors have had to waste most of their time on an unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting.

  In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them—or occasionally, for the top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.

  And not only profit, but growth. If there are stockholders, their holdings must increase yearly, daily, hourly. The AP article ascribed “listless” or “flat” book sales to the limited opportunity for expansion. But until the corporate takeovers, publishers did not expect expansion; they were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, “flatly.” How can you make book sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline?

  Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore’s Dilemma how you do it with corn. When you’ve grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand, you create unreasonable demands—artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of corn by-products to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the process. And you can’t stop these processes, because if you did profits might become “listless,” even “flat.”

  This system has worked only too well for corn, and indeed throughout American agriculture and manufacturing, which is why we increasingly eat junk and make junk while wondering why tomatoes in Europe taste like tomatoes and foreign cars are well engineered.

  You can cover Iowa border to border with Corn #2, but with books, you run into problems. Standardization of the product and its production can take you only so far, because there is some intellectual content to even the most brainless book. People will buy interchangeable bestsellers, formula thrillers, romances, mysteries, pop biographies, and hot-topic books up to a point, but their product loyalty is defective. A book has to be read, it takes time, effort—you have to be awake to do it. And so you want some reward. The loyal fans bought Death at One O’Clock and Death at Two O’Clock . . . yet all of a sudden they won’t buy Death at Eleven O’Clock even though it follows exactly the same surefire formula as all the others. The readers got bored. What is a good growth-capitalist publisher to do? Where can he be safe?

  He can find some safety in exploiting the social function of literature. That includes the educational, of course—schoolbooks and college texts, favorite prey of corporations—as well as the bestsellers and popular books of fiction and nonfiction that provide a common current topic and a bond among people at work and in book clubs. Beyond that, I think corporat
ions have been foolish to look for safety or reliable growth in publishing.

  Even during what I have called the century of the book, when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren’t there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don’t know how many, because we didn’t have polls to worry us about it.

  If people make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their jobs, or because other media aren’t readily available or they aren’t much interested in them—or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentages induces a moralizing tone: it is bad that we don’t read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?

  I like knowing that a hard-bitten Wyoming cowboy carried a copy of Ivanhoe in his saddlebag for thirty years, and that the mill girls of New England had Browning Societies. There are readers like that still. Our schools are no longer serving them (or anybody else) well, on the whole; yet some kids come out of even the worst schools clutching a book to their heart.

  Of course books are now only one of the “entertainment media,” but when it comes to delivering actual pleasure, they’re not a minor one. Look at the competition. Governmental hostility has been emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from web surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.