The question was simply, "What was the hardest book you've read?"
Didn't want to be any more particular than that, though nearly everyone I asked asked me to be. A book they'd finished? A book they'd liked, or disliked? Not the point. What I wanted was not so much the titles as the explanations, and those were quite interesting, I thought. When I formulated the question, I hadn't even been thinking about contemporary fiction, for instance, or politics, or violence. I asked coworkers at the bookstore mostly, and a couple of social media friends. Hardly a scientific survey, but then not a very objective question.
Doesn't really need saying, but what's difficult is different, not just from book to book and reader to reader -- though I must say I smiled in recognition more often than not -- but from one experience of a particular book to the next, if there's been more than one. That was something of a happy surprise to me too; how many of us either have made or still intend to make another go at these books. Something in the nature of the serious reader, I suppose, and we all of us are that had the conversation, that even our worst experiences in reading weren't seen as having been wasted. But then, I've said that wrong, haven't I? No one said that what was hard was worst, not one. Moreover, nearly everyone assigned the difficulty not to the text but to reader, though all with some qualifications; to do with age and experience, or other commitments and distractions, and most often, simply time.
I found the whole discussion very reassuring.
I was prompted to this question by reading George Herbert. I'll get back to him, but to tell the thing in the right order, I should start not with him, but with my last vacation, back in October. Every year I go home to Pennsylvania to see the old people. Every year I use the trip as an excuse to buy used paperbacks, something I otherwise almost never do. I always take too many books, naturally. The ones I read in those two weeks, I leave behind, along with anything I might not have much liked. Roughly once a year then, I enjoy buying books I don't intend to keep: mystery novels, light comedies, neglected classics, at least one or two familiar things I mean to reread. It's all ridiculously ambitious and, as there are no consequences to failing, and it's such a negligible financial investment, it's all a bit of a fantasy, really. (Though I must say, I've actually been able to get a fair bit of reading done as my parents have aged and there's nobody much else to be entertained of an evening but ourselves. Early to bed with a book seems the perfect height of indulgence to me nowadays. I needn't even review any of my reading here afterwards, unless I've a mind to. Vacation, you see.)
This year, in addition to the Christies and the Kawabata I never got to and the Orwell essays I barely touched, and for reasons I can not explain, I also picked up the anthology pictured above. Not my period, you understand, The Seventeenth Century, at least, not before now. The book, edited by one Evert Mordecai Clark, was part of a series, and any of the three books after this, The Eighteenth Century, The Romantics, or The Victorians, had I come across one of those, would have been a much likelier choice. I know those last two specially well now, and have at least some experience of the earlier. But before that? Shakespeare, of course, and a bit of Jonson, and then? Mind the gap. I can only think, in the absence of something more familiar, I wanted some poetry, and this one, with both poetry and prose and at roughly six hundred pages, seemed to fit my impulse. Anyway, I bought it. Then I kept reading it.
And I've kept it, the paperback anthology, because it is that good. The early essayists were a revelation and favorites, naturally, from John Earle (1601 - 1665) to Thomas Fuller (1608 - 1661). For the most part, they are just this side of sermons but of such simplicity and good nature as to never feel the drag of preaching. In fact, all the prose of every description, from history to natural science and letters, all of it has a warmth and immediacy I would never have anticipated in what I can't help but think of as a very formal period. Lovely surprise.
It's the poets who dominate though, naturally enough in a book I actually selected for poetry. I was, if anything however, even more resistant to reading some of these for that same reason: piety. Well, I was right about that, but I was also a fool.
It was all to do with Milton, I should think. I never have taken to Milton. His "Paradise" has always been among my very hard books and I've never yet made it. In my mind, he stood not just well above his times, but for them, so I hadn't had much of a look around him before. Like the shadow of some magnificent, coldly intimidating cathedral cast across the whole of Stuart and Puritan England, was that great poem.
But I'd missed out on Robert Herrick ( 1591 - 1674.) He became something of a preoccupation after I got home from my trip. Twenty pages in this book of his Hesperides and we were old friends. I had to buy a proper Oxford edition, and read right through it. He has all the charm and good humor of what I can't help but think of as a slightly older, Tudor England, and nearly none of the Puritan in him. He's eminently likable, like Henry Vaughan (1622 - 1695); musical and no stranger to a good meal or a pretty girl, from the sound of him. For me now, they represent all I'd missed out on, thinking the 17th a century of black-clad churchmen.
But then, there's George Herbert, and George Herbert is hard. Herrick was a clergyman no less than Herbert, but Herbert is harder. Herbert is one of God's great poets, and I don't much care to read about God, specially Herbert's rather bloody-minded Christ. It seems Herbert was a very nice, devout and even dear sort of person, but far from even the unwitting sensualists one so often finds for instance among the Renaissance Saints. His is a very pure, rather strict observance, no less solemn in his way than Milton. Not my kind of fellow. And yet. I am now every evening with George Herbert. It's not wrong, wanting to read poets with whom we feel some personal sympathy. More so even than the great writers of prose, I find the poets I want tend to be the poets with whom I agree. That's not enough of itself, of course. (If it were, I should probably enjoy a great deal more contemporary poetry, and enjoy it more than I do, as it seems mostly these days to be written by perfectly nice people: liberal academics, lesbian amateur gardeners and cute straight boys with thick glasses. Sounds like a lovely dinner party -- vegetarian, of course.) I can read quite conservative, even reactionary historians and philosophers, satirists and journalists, even novelists and disagree without finding their books disagreeable. Poetry is different. Poetry is emotional for me, nearly always, and I need some affinity beyond whatever admiration I might feel for the technical accomplishments of the poem. Not such a bad rule of thumb for reading; to want to like what's read and who wrote it.
But then George Herbert undoes all that. I like him. Beyond the mind-blowing invention and proficiency of his poetry -- and there have been damned few poets in English more capable, I should think -- there is an altogether captivating goodness to him. I've never entirely taken to Donne, for instance, although I recognize him to have been a very great poet, and a greater one than Herbert certainly. I suspect there is always something of the pulpit to everything Donne ever did, or at the very least the lectern, which may explain his extraordinary popularity in these later days with academics. A brilliant mind, exercised by large ideas, but always for me in full vestments, approached only at Mass, or for instruction. Herbert visits. It may be a disservice to Herbert to see him so, as he is far from a cozy kind of visitant; there's cold comfort for me in his Good News. But where Donne seems humble before his God and elsewhere from sensibility of his place in the greater scheme of things, Herbert seems quite genuine in not just his faith but in his forgiving nature. Like Montaigne, Herbert's chief subject is himself; his soul, his struggle, his sin, his hope of Heaven, his redeemer; Jesus Christ. I suppose it's the difference between great sacred music and a simple hymn. It may explain Herbert's apparent popularity with composers, funnily enough.
"O what a cunning guest
Is this same grief! within my heart I made"
That, from his "Confession," and taken something out of context, defines for me what's most troubling for me in reading so good a Christian. I can't but be a little impatient with a world view that generates from griefs more grief, almost as a means to savor solace the more when it's found. Not, of course how Christians would see it, certainly not what Herbert meant.
"Sweeten at length this bitter bowl,
Which thou hast pour'd into my soul"
Or, not to be too glib, just avoid the damned soup. But Herbert isn't always moaning, he sings:
"Blest be the God of love,
Who gave me eyes and light, and power this day,
Both to be busy, and to play."
"O raise me then! poor bees, that work all day,
Sting my delay,
Who have a work, as well as they,
And much, much more."
And he talks, and talks very well:
"He that is weary let him sit.
My soul would stir
And trade in courtesies and wit,
Quitting the fur
To cold complexions needing it."
And he's a friend:
"That I shall mind what you impart,
Look you may put it very near my heart."
And, oh my, but he can write, as here an echo of Shakespeare shows:
"Oh, what a thing is man! how far from power,
From settled peace and rest!
He is some twenty sev'ral men at least
Each sev'ral hour."*
Having just a Pocket Poets edition in which to read further so far, I am being sparing of the whole still, until I can find a nice, big book, complete. Meanwhile, here again in someone I have found, a genius unknown to me and a friend now, thanks again to one little paperback book, copyright 1929, my edition printed in 1957. Even more the point, here then is what I will freely admit is for me a hard read; religious poetry, and yet, having made the venture, I've found such rewards!
I worry a bit that difficult literature, as a category of reading, has too much become the exclusive undertaking of the student and too little the leisure study of the common reader. I worry that we mistake too often now the merely ugly for the complex or the profound. I've been asked again, just this past week if i ever "read anything easy." Please. I worry that we so seldom read anything else. Nothing wrong with reading a mystery novel. I'm reading one now. Why wouldn't I? Should I not also challenge myself? Look in an old book not quite in my usual line? Pick up a writer unlike myself in important ways; like religion, philosophy, expertise, formal interest, rather than congratulate myself, as we are all now so inclined to do, as if it meant anything, for reading something by someone who happens to be from somewhere else, or who looks unlike me, but who writes and thinks no differently, and sometimes no better than I might?
We need to read, now and then, what's difficult for us, for what's good often is, but more than that we need to read what is better than what we might read otherwise and just because we choose to know no better and remember nothing of what we owe the past.
But then I ask a question, all but at random to a dozen people -- admittedly a dozen literate, clever people -- and I find we all of try. We blame ourselves when we fail as well, often as not. Not wrong, I think. Certainly the Right Reverend George Herbert, bless 'im, might approve. He would certainly sympathize.
*A note on these excerpts: form mattered very much to Herbert -- he invented some -- and so the limitations of this space deform his lines unforgivably, so do seek out a proper book to see them as he put them right.
