ABC of Reading Read online

  There are certain divisions and dissociations that I refrain from making because I do not think that, at my age, I should try to force the taste of a middle-aged man on the younger reader.

  Thank heaven there are books that one enjoys MOST before one is twenty-five, and that there are other books that one can STILL read at forty-five and still hope to be able to read in the sere and yellow.

  Realism, romanticism, men as they are seen, men as they are imagined or ‘dramatized’, men as they are quite simply known NOT to be….

  Consider the anecdote of Jack Dempsey. When Tunney was being touted as the educated boxer, a reporter approached Mr. Dempsey on the subject of literature. I think he mentioned Cashel Byron or some novel in which the ring appears. Dempsey wouldn’t have it: ‘Agh, it tain’t LIKE that.’

  The reporter observed that Dempsey had a lurid novel about a Russian Grand Duke. He suggested that if Dempsey had been a Grand Duke he might have found similar discrepancies in the portrayal of old Russian high life.

  Dempsey: ‘I never wuz a Grand Duke.’

  Perfectly sincere people say ‘you can’t teach literature’, and what they MEAN by that statement is probably true.

  You can quite distinctly teach a man to distinguish between one kind of a book and another.

  Certain verbal manifestations can be employed as measures, T squares, voltmeters, or can be used ‘for comparison’, and familiarity with them can indubitably enable a man to estimate writing in general, and the relative forces, energies and perfections or imperfections of books.

  You don’t furnish a house entirely with yard sticks and weighing machines.

  The authors and books I recommend in this introduction to the study of letters are to be considered AS measuring-rods and voltmeters.

  The books listed are books to have in mind, BEFORE you try to measure and evaluate other books. They are, most emphatically, NOT all the books worth reading.

  A great deal that you read, you simply need not ‘bother about’.

  On the other hand, you needn’t fall into the silly snobbism that has ruined whole shoals of fancy writers, polite essayists, refined young gents, members of literary cénacles und so weiter.

  DISSOCIATE

  ‘Man should be prouder of having invented the hammer and nail than of having created masterpieces of imitation.’ Hegel, quoted by Fernand Leger.

  ‘The intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.’

  Spinoza

  A GREAT deal of critical rancour has been wasted through a failure to distinguish between two totally different kinds of writing.

  A Books a man reads to develop his capacities: in order to know more and perceive more, and more quickly, than he did before he read them.

  and

  B Books that are intended and that serve as REPOSE, dope, opiates, mental beds.

  You don’t sleep on a hammer or lawn-mower, you don’t drive nails with a mattress. Why should people go on applying the SAME critical standards to writings as different in purpose and effect as a lawn-mower and a sofa cushion?

  . . . . .

  There is one technique for the mattress-maker and one for the builder of linotype machines. A technique of construction applies both to bedsteads and automobiles.

  The dirtiest book in our language is a quite astute manual telling people how to earn money by writing. The fact that it advocates the maximum possible intellectual degradation should not blind one to its constructive merits.

  Certain parts of the technique of narrative writing ARE common to Homer, Rudyard Kipling and to Mr. Kipling’s star disciple, the late Edgar Wallace.

  The only intelligent adverse criticism of my How to Read was not an attack on what was in it, but on what I had not been able to put there.

  One can’t get everything into forty-five pages. But even if I had had 450 at my disposal I should not have attempted a treatise on major form in the novel. I have not written a good novel. I have not written a novel. I don’t expect to write any novels and shall not tell anyone else how to do it until I have.

  If you want to study the novel, go, READ the best you can find. All that I know about it, I have learned by reading:

  Tom Jones, by Fielding.

  Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey by Sterne (and I don’t recommend anyone ELSE to try to do another Tristram Shandy).

  The novels of Jane Austen and Trollope.

  . . . . .

  [Note: If you compare the realism of Trollope’s novels with the realism of Robert McAlmon’s stories you will get a fair idea of what a good novelist means by ‘construction’. Trollope depicts a scene or a person, and you can clearly see how he ‘leads up to an effect’.]

  Continuing:

  The novels of Henry James, AND especially the prefaces to his collected edition; which are the one extant great treatise on novel writing in English.

  In French you can form a fairly good ideogram from:

  Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe.

  The first half of Stendhal’s Rouge et Noir and the first eighty pages of La Chartreuse de Parme.

  Madame Bovary, L’Éducation Sentimentale, Trois Contes, and the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet of FLAUBERT, with Goncourt’s preface to Germinie Lacerteux.

  After that you would do well to look at Madox Ford’s A Call.

  When you have read James’ prefaces and twenty of his other novels, you would do well to read The Sacred Fount.

  There for perhaps the first time since about 1300 a writer has been able to deal with a sort of content wherewith Cavalcanti had been ‘concerned’.

  You can get a very brilliant cross-light via Donne. I mean the differences and nuances between psychology in Guido, abstract philosophic statement in Guido, the blend in Donne, and again psychology in Henry James, and in all of them the underlying concept of FORM, the structure of the whole work, including its parts.

  . . . . .

  This is a long way from an A B C. In fact it opens the vista of post-graduate study.

  . . . . .

  N.B.

  Jealousy of vigorous-living men has perhaps led in all times to a deformation of criticism and a distorted glorification of the past. Motive does not concern us, but error does. Glorifiers of the past commonly err in their computations because they measure the work of a present DECADE against the best work of a past century or even of a whole group of centuries.

  Obviously one man or six men can’t produce as many metrical triumphs in five years or in twenty, as five hundred troubadours, with no cinema, no novels, no radio to distract ’em, produced between 1050 and 1300. And the same applies in all departments.

  The honest critic must be content to find a VERY LITTLE contemporary work worth serious attention; but he must also be ready to RECOGNIZE that little, and to demote work of the past when a new work surpasses it.

  DICHTEN = CONDENSARE1

  THIS chapter heading is Mr. Bunting’s discovery and his prime contribution to contemporary criticism, but the idea is far from new. It is as we have said ingrained in the very language of Germany, and it has magnificently FUNCTIONED, brilliantly functioned.

  Pisistratus found the Homeric texts in disorder, we don’t quite know what he did about it. The Bible is a compendium, people trimmed it to make it solid. It has gone on for ages, because it wasn’t allowed to overrun all the available parchment; a Japanese emperor whose name I have forgotten and whose name you needn’t remember, found that there were TOO MANY NOH PLAYS, he picked out 450 and the Noh stage LASTED from 1400 or whenever right down till the day the American navy intruded, and that didn’t stop it. Umewaka Minoru started again as soon as the revolution wore off. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are a compendium, not an epic like Homer’s; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are a compendium of all the good yarns Chaucer knew. The Tales have lasted through centuries while the long-winded mediaeval narratives went into museums.

  1 A Japanese student in America, on being asked the difference between pros
e and poetry, said: Poetry consists of gists and piths.

  SECTION TWO

  EXHIBITS

  THE ideal way to present the next section of this booklet would be to give the quotations WITHOUT any comment whatever. I am afraid that would be too revolutionary. By long and wearing experience I have learned that in the present imperfect state of the world, one MUST tell the reader. I made a very bad mistake in my INSTICATIONS, the book had a plan, I thought the reader would see it.

  In the present case I shall not tell the student everything. The most intelligent students, those who most want to LEARN, will however encompass that end, and endear themselves to the struggling author if they will read the EXHIBITS, and not look at my footnotes until they have at least tried to find out WHAT THE EXHIBIT IS, and to guess why I have printed it. For any reader of sufficient intelligence this should be as good a game as Torquemada’s cross-word abominations. I don’t expect it to become ever as popular, but in an ideal REPUBLIC it would.

  EXHIBIT

  Era gia l’ore che volge il disio

  Ai naviganti.

  Purgatorio VIII, I.

  Perch’ io non spero di tornar già mai

  Ballatetta in Toscana.

  Cavalcanti.

  S’ils n’ayment fors que pour l’argent

  On ne les ayme que pour l’heure.

  Villon.

  The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs.

  Yeats.

  Ne maeg werigmod wyrde widhstondan

  ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman

  for dhon domgeorne dreorigne oft

  in hyra breostcofan bindath faeste.

  The Wanderer.

  * * *

  Example of ideogrammic method used by E. P. in The Serious Artist in 1913 before having access to the Fenollosa papers.

  I was trying to indicate a difference between prose simplicity of statement, and an equal limpidity in poetry, where the perfectly simple verbal order is CHARGED with a much higher potential, an emotional potential.

  In that essay I also cited Stendhal’s: Poetry with its obligatory comparisons, the mythology the poet don’t believe in, his so-called dignity of style, à la Louis XIV, and all that trail of what they call poetic ornament, is vastly inferior to prose if you are trying to give a clear and exact idea of the ‘mouvements du cœur’; if you are trying to show what a man feels, you can only do it by clarity.

  That was the great turning. The great separation of the roads. After Stendhal saw that, and said it, the poetic bunk of the preceding centuries gave way to the new prose, the creation of Stendhal and Flaubert. Poetry then remained the inferior art until it caught up with the prose of these two writers, which it ultimately did quite largely on the basis of DICHTEN = CONDENSARE.

  That did NOT mean it was something more wafty and imbecile than prose, but something charged to a higher potential.

  EXHIBIT CHAUCER 1340-1400

  But Chaucer though he kan but lewedly1

  On metres, and on ryming craftily

  Hath seyd hem, in swich Englissh as he kan

  Of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man

  And if he have noght seyd him, leve2 brother,

  In o3 book, he hath seyd him in another

  For he hath toold of loveris up and doun

  Mo4 than Ovide made of mencioun

  In his Epistelles….

  In youthe he made5 of Ceys and Alcione

  1 unlearnedly 2 dear 3 o = one 4 Mo = more 5 wrote, made poetry

  * * *

  Chaucer’s self-criticism placed in the mouth of the Man of Lawe. He professes himself untaught in metre, meaning probably quantitative verse. Skilled in rhyme. The maker of a compendium comparable to Ovid. He follows a mediaeval custom and goes on to give a catalogue of his tales. Dido, Ariadne, Hero and Leander, Laodamia, etc.

  Sloth is the root of much bad opinion. It is at times difficult for the author to retain his speech within decorous bounds.

  I once heard a man, who has some standing as writer and whom Mr. Yeats was wont to defend, assert that Chaucer’s language wasn’t English, and that one ought not to use it as basis of discussion, ETC. Such was the depth of London in 1910.

  Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books for ever.

  As to the relative merits of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English opinion has been bamboozled for centuries by a love of the stage, the glamour of the theatre, the love of bombastic rhetoric and of sentimentalizing over actors and actresses; these, plus the national laziness and unwillingness to make the least effort, have completely obscured the values.

  People even read translations of Chaucer into a curious compost, which is not modern language but which uses a vocabulary comprehended of sapheads.

  Wat se thè kennath

  Chaucer had a deeper knowledge of life than Shakespeare.

  Let the reader contradict that after reading both authors, if he then chooses to do so.

  He had a wider knowledge of life, probably, he had at any rate a better chance.

  We can leave the question of the relative chances to their biographers. Let us look at the evidence.

  Chaucer wrote when reading was no disgrace. He had forty books, gathered probably at considerable trouble and expense. Shakespeare had at least six good ones. Chaucer cites his sources. There was no contemporary snobbism to inhibit this.

  BUT Shakespeare OWES quite as much to his reading as Chaucer does.

  Men do not understand BOOKS until they have had a certain amount of life. Or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. The prejudice against books has grown from observing the stupidity of men who have merely read books.

  Chaucer, beyond this, was a man with whom we could have discussed Fabre and Fraser; he had thought considerably about many things which Shakespeare has not very deeply considered.

  Chaucer really does comprehend the thought as well as the life of his time.

  The Wife of Bath’s theology is not a mere smear. Her attention to the meaning of terms is greater than we find in Lorenzo Medici’s imaginary dialogue with Ficino about platonism. This is, in Chaucer, the remains of the middle ages, when men took some care of their terminology.

  When she says:

  conseilling is nat comandement.

  she has a meaning in each of her terms.

  Chaucer wrote while England was still a part of Europe, There was one culture from Ferrara to Paris and it extended to England. Chaucer was the greatest poet of his day. He was more compendious than Dante.

  He participated in the same culture with Froissart and Boccaccio, the great humane culture that went into Rimini, that spoke Franco-Veneto, that is in the roundels of Froissart and in the doggerel of the Malatesta.

  In Shakespeare’s time England is already narrowing. Shakespeare as supreme lyric technician is indebted to the Italian song-books, but they are already an EXOTIC.

  Chaucer uses French art, the art of Provence, the verse art come from the troubadours. In his world there had lived both Guillaume de Poictiers and Scotus Erigena. But Chaucer was not a foreigner. It was HIS civilization.

  He made fun of the hrimm hramm ruff, the decadence of Anglo-Saxon alliteration, the verse written by those who had forgotten the WHY of the Anglo-Saxon bardic narration, and been too insular to learn French. True, Chaucer’s name is French and not English, his mind is the mind of Europe, not the mind of an annex or an outlying province.

  He is Le Grand Translateur. He had found a new language, he had it largely to himself, with the grand opportunity. Nothing spoiled, nothing worn out.

  Dante had had a similar opportunity, and taken it, with a look over his shoulder and a few Latin experiments. Chaucer felt his chance. The gulf between Chaucer and Gower can be measured by Gower’s hesitation, by his proved unwillingness to ‘take a chance’. He had a go at metrical exercises in all three of the cur
rent tongues: English, French and Latin. Books, used in the wrong way. The hunt for a subject, etc.

  He was the perfect type of English secondary writer, condemned recently but for all time by Henri Davray with his:

  ‘Ils cherchent des sentiments pour les accommoder à leur vocabulaire’.

  They hunt for sentiments to fit into their vocabulary.

  Chaucer and Shakespeare have both an insuperable courage in tackling any, but absolutely any, thing that arouses their interest.

  No one will ever gauge or measure English poetry until they know how much of it, how full a gamut of its qualities, is already THERE ON THE PAGE of Chaucer.

  Logopoeia, phanopoeia, melopoeia; the English technique of lyric and of narrative, and the full rich flow of his human contact.

  This last term has been degraded and demoted or narrowed down until it excludes all the more complicated, the less usual activities of human feeling and understanding. It is used almost as if it could refer only to low life.