Nor Iron Bars a Page

Appearance to the contrary, I do read contemporary writers. I say this not defensively, I hope, but simply because I understand how, reading this ongoing record of my reading life, or even in conversation, one might think otherwise. I even, if one were to look carefully, quote quite a few not-yet-dead authors right here, on this blog. It's true that in the past few years my reading has led me further from the scene than I ever anticipated, but this has had less to do with any disaffection with contemporary writers than with an inadequate formal education and my growing embarrassment at having reached an age at which I ought to have read so many things I hadn't, couldn't remember much of what I had, and realized that I ought to have a better grasp of what I did than I did. So many of the books I'd admired most, I hadn't read again since I was a boy. Shocking, that. When was the last time I'd read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? The Three Musketeers? The Life of Dr. Johnson? Anthony Trollope? Henry Green? George Orwell? I'm a bookseller. What I do every day, at least on good days, is recommend books, old and new. I realized that I was still making recommendations based on opinions I'd formed twenty and thirty years ago. Did I still think Henry James our greatest novelist? (I do.) Having reached, at least by all outward signs, an obvious maturity, I was a little abashed to think that I was still confidently expressing the opinions of a boy of twenty, opinions with which I was not sure a man in his forties would or should agree. I hadn't liked Austen before I was thirty, couldn't read Beckett until I was forty, so what of all the other books I'd once dismissed or misunderstood -- to say nothing of the books I'd loved? I am, in a humble way, as I said, in the book business. I read as much or more than most. I've never been shy of talk. Being afforded the opportunity to tell people about good books is one of the real pleasures in my life. The question then was, did I still endorse every literary judgement I'd made when I still had so much hair it had to be "styled?" Who knows what nonsense I might have been saying all these years? I feared, in short, being something of an old fraud, a callow critic of fifteen still, behind my gray beard.

That was how I would have justified myself anyway, had anyone asked me.

So I've read, and reread, this past decade or so, nearly all my old favorites. I've read at least some of what I hadn't by the authors of whom I'd always meant to read more. (It still amazes me, what I've yet to read -- how had I missed so much?) I won't dwell just now on all the books I've come to appreciate more for the years it took me to pick them up again, or on the books I've dropped, or reread without the pleasure I remembered. Were I to draw any obvious conclusion from the experience, it would have to be that not every book was meant to be read when I did, but that nearly as many ought not to have been tried again so late. But to step away for a moment at least from such personal banalities, allow me one more caution, no less lacking in originality, but perhaps better worth repeating here:

No book is worth reading a second time, through a second pair of glasses and in a strong light, just because it once required neither to think it wonderful.

Hardly the wisdom of a Solomon, I know. However, there is a corollary to this rule:

The books best remembered, unlike almost any other happy memory, are still there.

I recently heard the novelist Scott Spencer say something on the radio that has bugged me ever since. The thought was hardly original to him, but he said it with such authority, I wondered for a long while if I wasn't wrong in taking such exception to what he said. Spencer has taught creative writing nearly all his career and seems to have enjoyed doing it, though I can't myself imagine why anyone should. Be that as it may, he pointed out that very young writers, not having experienced much else, all but invariably write books about their families, and he implied at least, that most, however talented or bright, hadn't much very interesting yet to say about even that subject. Fair enough, perhaps. The argument could of course be made that Austen did much the same; write just about family and the narrow world she knew, as did the Brontes for that matter, just to draw big names from the air. Would anyone say they wrote any the worse for this? Surely Spencer didn't mean to say the subject was inherently dull, but rather that the writers he usually teaches are too inexperienced yet to write well about anything, even the little they know? Not the point I would dispute, just yet, so I'll come back to it. Spencer would know better what gets written in classrooms, and as he's paid to read it, I leave him to his fate. What Spencer then went on to say was that the best teaching experience he'd ever had was with the convicted felons he taught in a maximum security prison; thieves and murderers and rapists the lot. This was not because, he hastened to add, his exposure to these violent criminals contributed anything to the plots of his own novels, but because these men at least had some experience from which to draw as writers. It may seem a commonsensical idea, but I couldn't help thinking that the teacher had taken quite the wrong lesson from his experience. It bothered me.

I don't begrudge either the inmates or their teacher whatever good came of that class. I can see easily enough how exciting it must have been to teach men for whom words had come to matter so much in the absence of really having much of anything else. I can only imagine how wonderful it must be to give a book to a student and know he will read it, if for no other reason than for want of anything else to do but push-ups or make a shiv out of a toothbrush. And imagine the thrill of assigning a personal essay to a classroom full of tattoos that actually mean something!

But to take up the point I abandoned earlier, Jane Austen's novels would not, to my mind, have been much improved by the author having knocked over the local at gunpoint, or Charlotte Bronte's Villette have been made better by the introduction of a first-hand account of the finer points of identity theft. More realistically though, is Genet a better novelist than Gide for having been to prison? I'm pretty sure both would have found the comparison odious. Neither man's biography suggests a less than broad experience, to say the least, but I'm not sure either would have envied the other's history as grist for the mill. I've recently reread both of these great French writers for the first time since I was a teenager, and was surprised to find, on the one hand, how dated the former's style, and masochism, now seemed to me, and on the other, how contemporary, both in structure and philosophy, specially in The Counterfeiters, was dusty, dull ol' Andre Gide. Go figure. My point being, Scott Spencer's definition of experience and my own, and what kind of experience might best be used to make interesting reading, would seem to be very different.

I know I'm probably being a little unfair to Scott Spencer. I know he never said murderers make better novelists, or anything like that. But I would argue that what probably makes so much of what a creative writing teacher has to read so dull, and I don't doubt that it is, isn't what the students have yet to do, but how badly they've been taught to read and think and to write -- that, and teachers who suggest their students' writing might improve if they would just pistol-whip the clerk in the 7/11 once and spend a little quality time in the state pen, carefully reviewing their reading assignments. Must be a fairly common fantasy among teachers, students doing hard-time with The Grapes of Wrath.

I certainly don't remember having less to say at eighteen than I do now, do you? If anything, experience, at least my own, has taught me nothing much but that I shouldn't have said half of what I have. But what my reading and rereading has taught me, what good conversation, and better teachers than any I ever had in school have taught me, is how much better off I would have been, and how much better I would now be as a writer even of something such as this, if the teachers I did have had spent less time either encouraging me to "express" myself, or to write what I knew, and more time showing me all that I didn't yet but might know someday, and how I might, by reading.

I happen to know a couple of contemporaries, both of them excellent writers in their own right, who, like Scott Spencer, still earn their livings teaching creative writing in one form or another. We don't talk about their jobs much. They might well endorse Scott Spencer's theory of experience. They might not. I wouldn't presume to tell any of them how best to go about doing what they do. As I've already said, a complete mystery to me why anyone should want to do such a thing. I have however, on the rare occasions when my opinion has been solicited, suggested that someone, before they try to teach these youngsters how to write a short story, or an essay, let alone a novel, really ought to see to it that the wretched kids had read one or two. This always gets a good laugh, so I've probably said it too often already.

I remember reading and rereading The Golden Bowl, amazed that no one had ever thought to even suggest that English could be made to do such things, that the language of Henry James was my language -- put to better use than I might ever do, or am likely ever to do, but none the less, mine all the same. Henry James was a revelation to me. Still is. The first time I read him, I could no more understand what I was reading than why I kept on, but I did. What I did understand, perhaps instinctively -- certainly not because of anything I'd learned in a classroom, and certainly not anything I learned in a writing class where I never learned a damned thing -- was that James knew something I didn't and that I wanted to learn what I could from him, even with all the impatience and frustration of a boy reading a man. As I say, I've kept on.

That's why I'm glad of the chance to read and reread so much that isn't necessarily new, even to me. That, I've discovered, is what I missed most when I wasn't reading James, and Wharton, and Dickens, and Lamb; that sense of possibility in English, in my language, and in my own understanding, that can only really be had, I've found, for me at least, by reading, as it were, backwards. I don't think that it's what I have or haven't done, where I've been or how long I've lived, but what I've read that makes me want to read more, understand better, and yes, even write a little again, however badly. That's the only experience I recognize as necessary to the enterprise.

Of course, had I spent a little time in Walla Walla, I might have written a novel by now. The question would be though, would anyone, even the author, ever want to read the thing -- and more than once?