Like
a long-dry alcoholic contemplating his return to drink, a writer wishing to
work has only two necessities to make it real – availability (of time and tools)
and desire. Except in rare cases of pathology, writer’s block is myth, as is
inspiration. Writing is work, like welding and cooking, and can be performed in
a spirit of exaltation, dutifulness or despair. With
sufficient dedication – that is, endless repetition – what looks like drudgery becomes
as regular as breathing, without ever losing the thrill of accomplishment.
“Since
writing has to be about something,
there is no good writing either in prose or verse which is not the answer to
some necessity, independent of both money and of other forms of recognition.”
And
yet how often we encounter writing precisely about nothing. There are poets (and politicians) who revel in their
disdain for about-ness. Meaning, they
say, the precise matching of word and thing, is illusion. No, it’s not, though
meaning doesn’t suffuse the air like mist. Or if it does, the writer’s task is
to condense it to make it potable. It’s work.
“An
actual preference for the best literature is probably not so common, nor so teachable,
as is sometimes alleged, but if one is so constituted as to feel such a
preference vividly, one is saved the trouble of reading an awful lot of books.
One moves habitually in distinguished company – company distinguished for what
it is and not for what is said about it. The company is, naturally,
overwhelmingly of the dead, as literature has been going on for a long time.”
That
“awful lot of books” includes, of course, most written by our contemporaries.
Among many readers and critics there exists the appalling provinciality of the
present. Some readers read only the new, a self-consuming literary genre fated
to quickly evaporate. I prefer Hazlitt’s approach: “If I have not read a book
before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed
yesterday or three hundred years ago.” For most of our contemporaries, Catullus
and Dryden are undeniably new.
“My
reading has been an indulgence, not a corvée.
For most of my life there has been enough I had
to know, without burdening my leisure with any programmatic reading, which is
not to say that one piece of reading has not often suggested another, nor that
there has not at all times been an involuntary connection between what I read
and what I wrote.”
On
occasion, I’ve read books because an editor thought I could usefully review
them. Without that enforced discipline, I would never have touched some of
these volumes (Dennis Johnson’s Tree of
Smoke, unreadable and self-indulgently long). I can only read, except for such brief
professional lapses, serendipitously, and for pleasure.
“The
most that is intended is that these essays might suggest, to a reader here and
there, that there should be some care for the literature of the past, outside
the precincts of academia, and some attempt to look at the products of our own time
in the light of the still readable work of the past—a procedure which can only
result in the rejection of all but a tiny fraction of the current morbidly
large output of verse, fiction and criticism.”
The
quoted passages above are drawn from C.H. Sisson’s preface to his In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers
(Carcanet, 1990). I’m grateful to have discovered Sisson, whose voice has
lately taken up residence in my head, like a literary conscience. He’s all coolness,
learning and good sense, and his prose is enviably punchy and concise. Here he
is on Whitman: “One can see that this loud, untidy writer demands a place
somewhere. He is a sinister portent of worse to come.” And again: “What a lout
the man is!” With approval, Sisson quotes Dr. Johnson’s assessment of Swift’s
poems:
“There
seldom occurs a hard-laboured expression or a redundant epithet; all his verse
exemplify his own definition of a good style, they consist of proper words in proper order.”
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