“If a literate person seems inferior to an illiterate, this means that the quality of experience he is gaining from his reading is inferior to that which a peasant gains talking to his father or his neighbors. The remedy is not to stop him reading but to persuade him to read better books.”
Books have always consumed a significant portion of my time, finances and thought-life. I don’t know how I occupied myself in my four pre-literate years, nor do I know what people do who don’t or can’t read books. Given the centrality of printed matter to my life, however, I rarely speak of it. I’ve learned that talk of books ensures sidelong glances and the end of conversations, and I no longer expect otherwise. My hobbyhorse is not the world’s, and to insist otherwise would be self-centered in the extreme.
The sentences cited above, from an essay W.H. Auden published in The New York Times Book Review in 1951, both interest and repel me. I have no difficulty accepting the notion of “inferior” people. One trips over them walking down the sidewalk. (See Theodore Dalrymple’s latest “Global Warning.”) My problem starts with Auden’s assumption that books are necessarily a source of self-improvement, that one who reads “good books” is somehow superior to those who don’t. My experience denies this. I’ve known people who are more thoughtful, interesting and amusing for having been ambitious readers, but none who has grown in moral stature, myself included. Likewise, I’ve known charming and companionable non-readers. Who am I to push Proust on them?
My other objection is to Auden’s suggestion that we ought to persuade people to read better books, and that doing so will act on them like a sermon or vitamins. I don’t have a proselytizing bone in my body, and don’t think most books have an uplifting impact on most people. Reading good books begins with a hunger for pleasure, not moral renewal. One of my favorite stories about books bringing people together, sealing a pre-existent kinship, is found in Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling, by Raymond Sokolov, who interviewed Joseph Mitchell, Liebling’s closest friend and longtime colleague at The New Yorker. They met in 1934 while working as reporters for the World-Telegram, a long-defunct newspaper in New York City. According to Mitchell, George Borrow and other mutually loved writers brought them together:
“[Borrow] was a forerunner of Joe’s and my interest in what they called lowlife at The New Yorker. Joe was surprised I knew Borrow. We found a mutual bond in other writers concerned with lowlife – Villon, Rabelais, Sterne, Dostoevsky. And we became fast friends. We used to gorge on oysters in the Washington Market.”
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2 comments:
"This traverse may the poorest take" .
ED has a very "democratic" and quotidian view of books. I often think of this poem by her as the 19
century view of reading. You can also see the influence of Keats's view of reading("On First Looking into Chapman 's Homer") on Dickinson. Keats was also F.S. Fitzgerald's favorite poet.
Emily Dickinson (1830–86).
THERE is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take 5
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
"At the same time, as literary critics are too little aware, a love of literature is often roused and for the first years nourished not by the good books, but by the bad." - from Virginia Woolf's "Gothic Romance" in Granite and Rainbow.
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