`Of Some Writers'

Chekhov writes in his Notebooks:

“Of some writers each work taken separately is brilliant, but taken as a whole they are indefinite; of others each particular work represents nothing outstanding; but, for all that, taken as a whole they are distinct and brilliant.”

Neither of Chekhov’s categories is an unqualified dismissal. Both sorts of writers have their charms. I take “indefinite” to mean difficult to distinguish or remember in detail, as with the work of prolific writers like Turgenev and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In memory, without the text in hand, I have difficulty telling one story from another in A Sportman’s Notebook and A Crown of Feathers, though I’m left with pleasurable memories of both. The same is true of Dubliners, a vastly greater work, except I can recall “The Dead” in some detail. Not coincidentally, “The Dead” is vastly greater than the other stories in Joyce’s collection, and I’ve read it more often than the others.

How much do we remember of any work of literature? Judging by my current rereading of Shakespeare, very little in detail – some scenes and phrases or lines, the general arc of the story -- but seldom with strict accuracy. The way we remember books has something in common with our recollections of people. We think: “What a nice guy” or “What a jerk.” If we pursue memory further, we’re liable to refine the judgment and recall specifics: “He was always dependable, ready with an encouraging word” or “What a negative guy, always whining,” and so on. Cumulative judgments are based on first impressions and subsequent evidence that confirms, refutes or modifies them. All of this is humbling and causes me to wonder how many complacently cherished critical “opinions” would stand up to serious reevaluation – that is, to honest rereadings of the books in question. This is a Rashomon-like problem, but the varying accounts come not from discrete observers but from versions of ourselves separated in time. Rereading a book fondly recalled can be risky. We may find our fondness inexplicable -- or reassuring. I'm reminded of the opening paragraph of A.J. Liebling's "Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove" (collected in The Sweet Science):

"Part of the pleasure of going to a fight is reading the newspaper next morning to see what the sports writers think happened. This pleasure is prolonged, in the case of a big bout, by the fight films. You can go to them to see what did happen. What you eventually think you remember about the fight will be an amalgam of what you thought you saw there, what you read in the papers you saw, and what you saw in the films."

In Chekhov’s second category I place Sherwood Anderson. No single story even in his masterwork, Winesburg, Ohio, is itself a masterpiece, a label that might accurately apply to one of his later stories, “A Death in the Woods.” Anderson’s effects, in Winesburg, Ohio, are cumulative. None of his novels is an unqualified success, though there’s much to love in Windy McPherson’s Son and Poor White. Winesburg stories like “Hands” and “Paper Pills” are permanent features of my mental landscape. I feel as though I know their characters with greater intimacy than I do some people I see almost daily.