'There Was a Best Way of Saying Anything'

In his essay on Robert Louis Stevenson in Literary Distractions (1958), Msgr. Ronald Knox addresses an interesting phenomenon: our literary tastes as they ripen and wither across the decades. Knox rightly describes Stevenson as that rarest of writers, “the companion of a lifetime; you pick up the habit in childhood, and you must be in your second childhood before you depart from it.” Writing in 1949 when he was sixty-one, Knox says: “Of all modern authors, I find [Stevenson] most surely re-readable.” In my case I would substitute Swift and Defoe, two writers I still read and love almost sixty years after I first encountered them. My devotion to Stevenson has been less faithful, and today I prefer his essays to his fiction.

An adolescent who reads science fiction should be lauded; an adult who does so should seek professional help. It’s a childish genre written by and for the immature. It’s a phase many of us experience on the cusp of puberty -- age-appropriate but soon outgrown naturally when we put away childish things. Like Swift, Defoe and Melville, Stevenson has been marketed as a writer of children’s books. They are, I would argue, so long as we acknowledge that each matures as we mature. Re-reading will not exhaust them. Knox offers a slightly different understanding:

“[C]orrosion as well as erosion affects our literary loyalties; the mere lapse of time, the slowing down of life’s pulses, can breed infidelity. I do not mean simply that we outgrow our calf love for this author or that; a Pater or a Swinburne. I mean that the masterpieces we still admire no longer have the power to thrill us; use has staled them, and our worship, however sincere, has grown mechanical. We acknowledge their merit, we recommend them to others, but for ourselves the charm has vanished; perhaps years hence, perhaps never to be recaptured.”

That precisely describes my relationship with several writers, starting with James Joyce. I was an acolyte when young, a true believer. Most often I’ve read Ulysses, probably four or five times, and that seems to be enough. It no longer has the power to thrill, as Knox says, and I think I’ve solved most of its puzzles. Once I hacked my way through Finnegans Wake, but never again. The only Joyce I can foresee reading one more time is Dubliners. Perhaps Joyce is a true YA (young adult) writer. I acknowledge his merit, of course, but “the charm has vanished.” And yet I expect to read Proust again. Back to Knox on Stevenson:

“[F]or Stevenson writing was not merely putting down marks on a piece of paper, to arouse impressions in the mind. He was a man who delighted in the sound of speech, and the written word was but the score of a musical composition; there must be no sentence which was not worthy of being read aloud. Prose was not, any more than verse, merely a question of balancing your sentences right, of selecting the precise word that did justice to your meaning, of avoiding the clumsy and the cacophonous. It had its own moods and cadences; the old distinction between prose as saying the right thing in the right way and poetry as saying the best thing in the best way was a blunder. There was a best way of saying anything, in prose as in poetry.”