'As an Artisan Uses a Tool with Precision'

One of the disadvantages of a long reading life is the inevitable fraying of memory. If I prized a book on first reading enough to read it again, I’m likelier to have remembered it in some detail. If not, it leaves a fading impression or perhaps none at all. A theoretical   question: To what metaphysical category do we assign books we have read that are entirely lost to memory? Title, author, contents – oblivion. That must be a very crowded realm of nonexistence.

I do remember reading Boccaccio’s Decameron the same summer I first read Proust. That was 1971, when I was eighteen and managing a city-owned miniature golf course. I sat in the clubhouse and read – a Dell paperback with a cover price of 95 cents. Sorry to say, I found it dull and a trial to finish, and as a result I remember almost nothing about it. I might as well not have read it. In light of COVID-19, a wavelet of attention is being paid to The Decameron and its Florentine refugees from the Black Death. I have nothing to contribute but I figured Ford Madox Ford probably would, and he doesn’t disappoint in his final book, The March of Literature (1938). Describing himself as “an old man mad about writing,” Ford contrasts Boccaccio (1313-1375) with his slightly younger contemporary Jean Froissart (1337-1405) and his Chronicles. Of Froissart he says “his prose is the prose of a real prose writer. It is a medium that, like all great prose writers, he completely commands and uses as an artisan uses a tool with precision.” Ford makes some allowance for the older writer:

“Boccaccio, on the other hand is, in every line of his prose, a poet using an unfamiliar medium with the feebleness of approach of a man trying to use a stock-whip with too long a thong.” Then Ford drops the qualifications:

“[T]hat famous work is of a tiresome and gross dullness without any literary quality at all. We may suppose that its emergence from the flood of works consigned to oblivion is due simply to the fact that a considerable proportion of humanity starves for want of essential information of a certain sort. It fulfills, therefore, a felt want, but the want is not a literary one.”

I can’t speak to Ford’s judgment. He might be ridiculously wrong. The March of Literature is an idiosyncratic review of literature by an old man who devoted his life to it. But it’s good to be reminded that literature ought to be judged by literary standards.

[In my copy of The March of Literature I found a bookmark from the Fondren Library. It’s a laminated yellow rectangle with a variation of the Rice owl printed above a sentence: “When in doubt, go to the library.” I haven’t been in the library – any library – in more than three weeks and I’m feeling it. I’ve been spoiled.]