ABC of Reading Page 6

  After which I suppose one should recommend Miss Jane Austen. And that makes almost the list, i.e.:

  The list of things safe to read an hour before you start writing, as distinct from the books a non-writing reader can peruse for enjoyment.

  But aren’t there well-written books and poems in English? There indubitably are.

  But can anyone estimate Donne’s best poems save in relation to Cavalcanti?

  I do not believe it.

  There was a period when the English lyric quality, the juncture of words and melody was very high. But to gauge that height, a knowledge of Provence is extremely useful.

  If you want to write satiric couplets, or ‘iambic couplets’, you indubitably can learn a good deal from Pope and Crabbe.

  Wordsworth got rid of a lot of trimmings, but there are vast stretches of deadness in his writing. Artists are the antennae of the race. Wordsworth vibrates to a very limited range of stimuli, and he was not conscious of the full problem of writing.

  The problem of sentence structure was undeniably discussed during several centuries.

  ‘A carpenter can put boards together, but a good carpenter would know seasoned wood from green.’

  The mere questions of constructing and assembling clauses, of parsing and grammar are not enough. Such study ended in a game of oratory, now parodied in detective stories when they give the learned counsel’s summing-up.

  The development after these structural exercises occurred chiefly in France: Stendhal, Flaubert.

  An attempt to set down things as they are, to find the word that corresponds to the thing, the statement that portrays, and presents, instead of making a comment, however brilliant, or an epigram.

  Flaubert is the archetype. The Brothers Goncourt codified and theorized and preached Flaubert’s practice. Flaubert never stopped experimenting. Before he had finished he called his Salammbo ‘cette vieille toquade’, or old charade in fancy clothes. Laforgue parodied this phrase of Flaubert, in a sublime divertissement, a play, in the best sense, of words and of images.

  Maupassant put the system into high gear, accelerated it, lightened it, and all subsequent short-story writers, Kipling, etc., have learned from Maupassant.

  If a reader wants the dilutation, if he is content NOT to go to the fountain-head, he can indubitably find a fair competence in short-story writing in current publications. E.g. the current Criterion publishes a story showing what seem to be traces of Hemingway, and one doesn’t even know they are Hemingway at first hand.

  THE FIRST PHASE of anyone’s writing always shows them doing something ‘like’ something they have heard or read.

  The majority of writers never pass that stage.

  In London as late as 1914 the majority of poetasters still resented the idea that poetry was an art, they thought you ought to do it without any analysis, it was still expected to ‘pour forth’.

  The usual game of quibbling over half truth, starts just here. The best work probably does pour forth, but it does so AFTER the use of the medium has become ‘second nature’, the writer need no more think about EVERY DETAIL, than Tilden needs to think about the position of every muscle in every stroke of his tennis. The force, the draw, etc., follow the main intention, without damage to the unity of the act.

  The student having studied geometry and physics or chemistry knows that in one you begin with simple forms, in another with simple substances.

  The analogous method in literature is to take the author, poem or tale where a given quality exists in its purest form or its highest degree.

  The key invention, the first case or first available illustration.

  Contemporary book-keeping uses a ‘loose-leaf’ system to keep the active part of a business separate from its archives. That doesn’t mean that accounts of new customers are kept apart from accounts of old customers, but that the business still in being is not loaded up with accounts of business that no longer functions.

  You can’t cut off books written in 1934 from those written in 1920 or 1932 or 1832, at least you can’t derive much advantage from a merely chronological category, though chronological relation may be important. If not that post hoc means propter hoc, at any rate the composition of books written in 1830 can’t be due to those written in 1933, though the value of old work is constantly affected by the value of the new.

  This is true not only of single works but of whole categories. Max Ernst’s designs send a great deal of psychological novel writing into the discard. The cinema supersedes a great deal of second-rate narrative, and a great deal of theatre.

  A film form may perfectly well be a better form (intellectually) than a stage form.

  A film may make better use of 60 per cent of all narrative dramatic material. Each case can be decided on its own merits.

  In all cases one test will be, ‘could this material have been made more efficient in some other medium?’

  This statement is simply an extension of the 1914 Vorticist manifesto.

  A distinguished novelist complained that no directions for major form were given in How to Read.

  In apology: It is a waste of time to listen to people talking of things they have not understood sufficiently to perform.

  You can study part of the art of novel construction in the novels of Trollope.

  You can learn something of a great writer’s attitude toward the art of the novel in the prefaces of Henry James’ collected edition.

  Had I written a dozen good novels I might presume to add something.

  The Goncourts’ preface to Germinie Lacerteux gives the most succinct statement of the views of the nineteenth-century realists. It is the declaration of the rights of men trying to record ‘L’histoire morale contemporaine’, the history of contemporary moral disposition, the history of the estimation of values in contemporary behaviour.

  In an introductory work like the present, you are not being asked to decide what theories are correct, but to what degree different writers have been efficient in expressing their thought.

  LIBERTY

  ONE liberty of the text-book (as a form of writing) is that it permits refrain, repetition.

  But, teacher, mustn’t we read … Wordsworth?

  Yes, my children, you can and may read anything you like. But instead of having me or anyone else tell you what is on the page, you should look for yourselves.

  Does Mr. Wordsworth sometimes use words that express nothing in particular?

  Mr. Swinburne is famed or infamed for having used a great many which express nothing but ‘colour’ or ‘splendour’. It has been said that he used the same adjectives to describe a woman and a sunset.

  EXERCISE

  IT would be a very good exercise to take parallel passages of these two poets, the first so very famous, and the second one so very much decried at the present time, and see how many useless words each uses, how many which contribute nothing, how many which contribute nothing very definite.

  A similar exercise could be performed on Swinburne and Milton.

  XlXth Century

  COMING nearer our own times, the student who can read French is invited to verify my suspicion that the technique in Gautier’s early work Albertus is about as good as that of the best English verse in the 1890’s. The English of that period added little to the sum of knowledge in poetic practice.

  To understand what was invented after 1830 I recommend:

  Théophile Gautier Emaux et Camées, Corbière, Rimbaud, Laforgue.

  To see how a man could write a single line or a brief paragraph of verse.

  In England Robert Browning refreshed the form of monologue or dramatic monologue or ‘Persona’, the ancestry of which goes back at least to Ovid’s Heroides which are imaginary letters in verse, and to Theocritus, and is thence lost in antiquity.

  STUDY

  FRENCH very brief narrative poems of this period, in the authors listed.

  Gautier, Corbière, Rimbaud, Laforgue.

  Characters presented: Brown
ing.

  How much of Walt Whitman is well written?

  If you were compiling an anthology of English what better poets could you find than:

  Chaucer.

  Gavin Douglas 12 Bukes of Aeneidos.

  Golding’s Metamorphoses translated from Ovid.

  Marlowe (Amores), passages of his plays.

  Shakespeare (Histories, and the lyrics as technical masterwork).

  Donne: The Ecstasy.

  Song writers: Herrick, Campion, Waller, Dorset, Rochester.

  Writers in narrative couplet: Pope, Crabbe.

  Pick out the dozen best old ballads.

  Pick out the twenty-five best lyrics written between 1500 and 1700 from any of the available anthologies.

  Try to find a poem of Byron or Poe without seven serious defects.

  Try to find out why the Fitzgerald Rubaiyat has gone into so many editions after having lain unnoticed until Rossetti found a pile of remaindered copies on a second-hand bookstall.

  Did the ‘90’s’ add anything to English poetry, or did they merely prune Swinburne? and borrow a little from the French symbolistes?

  What was there to the Celtic movement?

  Apart from, let us say, the influence of Irish ballad rhythm on Yeats’ metric?

  In no case should the student from now on be TOLD that such and such things are facts about a given body of poetry or about a given poem.

  The questions in this exercise do not demand the same answer from any two pupils. They are not asked in order to drag out plain yes and no answers.

  Why isn’t Walter Savage Landor more read?

  Did he write poetry as well as Robert Browning?

  How much of his poetry is good?

  Has England ever produced an all-round man of letters of equal stature?

  If you are trying to find a summary of the conscience of a given century, where would you go to find it?

  In early periods you might well seek it in the poetry.

  For the centuries after the renaissance you might perhaps have to find it in the prose?

  If so, that would mean that prose of those times was in some way more efficient than the poetry?

  You have, probably all of you, your favourite writers.

  What would happen to you if you started writing immediately after you had been reading

  A,

  B,

  or C?

  Do they use a dialect? and would you ‘catch it’?

  If you wanted to say something they hadn’t said, or something of a different kind, would their manner of writing make your statement more accurate?

  more interesting?

  . . . . .

  Do you know why you like ….. A

  B

  C

  (pupil can fill the blanks in at his own discretion).

  Do you in any way distinguish between writers whom you ‘like’ and those whom you ‘respect’?

  Why, and how?

  PERCEPTION

  ‘ARTISTS are the antennae of the race.’

  Can you be interested in the writings of men whose general perceptions are below the average?

  . . . . .

  I am afraid that even here the answer is not a straight ‘No’.

  There is a much more delicate question:

  Can you be

  interested in the work of a man who is blind to 80 per cent of the spectrum? to 30 per cent of the spectrum?

  Here the answer is, curiously enough, yes IF … if his perceptions are hypernormal in any part of the spectrum he can be of very great use as a writer-----

  though perhaps

  not of very great ‘weight’. This is where the so-called crack-brained genius comes in. The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the public.

  A graver issue needs biological analogy: artists are the antennae; an animal that neglects the warnings of its perceptions needs very great powers of resistance if it is to survive.

  Your finer senses are protected, the eye by bone socket, etc.

  A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives.

  There is probably no use in telling this to people who can’t see it without being told.

  Artists and poets undoubtedly get excited and ‘over-excited’ about things long before the general public.

  Before deciding whether a man is a fool or a good artist, it would be well to ask, not only: ‘is he excited unduly’, but: ‘does he see something we don’t?’

  Is his curious behaviour due to his feeling an oncoming earthquake, or smelling a forest fire which we do not yet feel or smell?

  Barometers, wind-gauges, cannot be used as engines.

  THE INSTRUCTOR

  I The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognizes his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.

  France may possibly have acquired the intellectual leadership of Europe when their academic period was cut down to forty minutes.

  I also have lectured. The lecturer’s first problem is to have enough words to fill forty or sixty minutes. The professor is paid for his time, his results are almost impossible to estimate.

  The man who really knows can tell all that is transmissible in a very few words. The economic problem of the teacher (of violin or of language or of anything else) is how to string it out so as to be paid for more lessons.

  Be as honest as you like, but the danger is there even when one knows it. I have felt the chill even in this brief booklet. In pure good will, but because one must make a rough estimate, the publishers sent me a contract: 40,000 to 50,000 words. I may run over it, but it introduces a ‘factor’, a component of error, a distraction from the true problem:

  What is the simplest possible statement?

  . . . . .

  II No teacher has ever failed from ignorance.

  That is empiric professional knowledge.

  Teachers fail because they cannot ‘handle the class’.

  Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

  . . . . .

  III You can prove nothing by analogy. The analogy is either range-finding or fumble. Written down as a lurch toward proof, or at worst elaborated in that aim, it leads mainly to useless argument, BUT a man whose wit teems with analogies will often ‘twig’ that something is wrong long before he knows why.

  Aristotle had something of this sort in mind when he wrote ‘apt use of metaphor indicating a swift perception of relations’.

  A dozen rough analogies may flash before the quick mind, as so many rough tests which eliminate grossly unfit matter or structure.

  It is only after long experience that most men are able to define a thing in terms of its own genus, painting as painting, writing as writing. You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem.

  . . . . .

  I mistrust the man who starts with forty-nine variants before stating three or four principles. He may be a very serious character, he may be on his way to a fourth or fifth principle that will in the long run be useful or revolutionary, but I suspect that he is still in the middle of his problem, and not ready to offer an answer.

  The inexperienced teacher, fearing his own ignorance, is afraid to admit it. Perhaps that courage only comes when one knows to what extent ignorance is almost universal. Attempts to camouflage it are simply a waste, in the long run, of time.

  If the teacher is slow of wit, he may well be terrified by students whose minds move more quickly than his own, but he would be better advised to use the lively pupil for scout work, to exploit the quicker eye or subtler ear as look-out or listening post.

  The best musician I know admitted that his sense of precise audition was intermittent. But he put it in the form ‘moi aussi’, after I had made my own confession.

  When you get to the serious consideration of
any work of art, our faculties or memories or perceptions are all too ‘spotty’ to permit anything save mutual curiosity.

  There is no man who knows so much about, let us say, a passage between lines 100 to 200 of the sixth book of the Odyssey that he can’t learn something by re-reading it WITH his students, not merely TO his students. If he knows Guido’s Donna Mi Prega as well as I now know it, meaning microscopically, he can still get a new light by some cross-reference, by some relation between the thing he has examined and re-examined, and some other fine work, similar or dissimilar.

  I believe the ideal teacher would approach any masterpiece that he was presenting to his class almost as if he had never seen it before.

  TASTES

  THERE is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.