`Hasty, Inaccurate, and Superficial'

Acknowledging that someone we dislike or find distasteful has done something worthy of our admiration and deserves our gratitude is always an unpleasant experience. I double up with a similar moral cramp when a person I don’t respect compliments me. Internally, I’m thinking, “Who are YOU to praise ME?” This amounts to a working definition of self-centered touchiness.

Tuesday morning, seated in my dentist’s waiting room, I found myself agreeing with Virginia Woolf and even finding in her words an explanation for what I am trying to do with this blog. On a whim I had pulled The Common Reader from the shelf before leaving home. It’s the 1948 American edition, combining the first and second series of Woolf’s literary essays in a single volume. I made a vague resolution to read “Swift’s Journal to Stella” while waiting for the hygienist to floss my teeth until the gums bleed.

I have never cared for Woolf’s fiction. I have tried, since at least 1971, when a professor of 18th-century English literature, a lover of Swift and Sterne (Which wag said they should have swapped names?), rather surprisingly recommended her to me. At that time, my literary gods were Joyce, Beckett, Borges and Nabokov at their most radical and self-reflexive. Beside them, Woolf seemed like very thin porridge, and she still does. She had a gift for pretty phrases, but her manner seemed – and seems – effete, self-regarding and beside-the-point. She said silly, snobbish things about Joyce and Ulysses.

What ambushed me in The Common Reader, before I could get to the Swift essay, was Woolf’s page-and-a-half, two-paragraph introduction, which I can’t remember having read in many years. She acknowledges the source of her title as Johnson, and proceeds to make good, solid sense:

“There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s `Life of Gray’ which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. `…I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’ It defines their qualities; it defines their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

“The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.”

I have no illusions about distributing poetical honours, except the most personal sort. Pleasure, long habituated and always certain, is my motivation when I read. Anecdotal Evidence is a vehicle for sharing pleasure with others. I feel grateful for the arrival of the blog – its utility, low maintenance and accessibility – and for my life having intersected with its existence. “Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial?” You bet, like my assessment of Virginia Woolf. An essay, in the original, raw, Montaignan sense, was an attempt, a try, a shot in the dark, and the best blogs, the ones I depend on for pleasure and insight, are modeled on essays, not rants or reviews. So are mine.

Thank you, finally, Virginia Woolf.