Saturday, May 16, 2020

'I’m an Every-Word Reader'

“You may wonder why I’m such a slow reader. I’m an every-word reader. And if I come on a good sentence I may say it aloud several times, hoping the noise will stick in my head. It seldom does.”

That’s James Laughlin, founder and longtime publisher of New Directions, in a letter to Guy Davenport written on this date, May 16, in 1992. Five months later, Davenport replies: “I’m an every-word reader, too. And slow. . . .”

An informal poll I’ve conducted over the years suggests, counterintuitively, that most prolific readers are, indeed, slow readers. As a class, we are most likely to be motivated in our reading by pleasure, and who doesn’t wish to prolong pleasure? Like Laughlin and Davenport, I see no virtue or advantage in speed reading. George Saintsbury referred to “slow savoring,” suggesting that one should read the way one eats, which means not shoveling it in.

I’ve started reading Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) again. The first time was almost thirty years ago, after Guy Davenport urged me to read it when I visited him at his home in Lexington, Ky., in June 1990. If ever there was prose composed to enforce slow reading it is Doughty’s. Davenport described it as “the most consistently interesting [prose style] that I know.”

Admittedly, we read some things quickly, or skim or reflexively discard them before reading – newspapers, advertising, all texts using hegemony with a straight face, most online prose, anything written by or ghosted for a university president. Joseph Epstein in “The Bookish Life” speaks for the world’s slow readers:   

“In the risky generalization department, slow readers tend to be better readers—more careful, more critical, more thoughtful. I myself rarely read more than twenty-five or thirty pages of a serious book in a single sitting. Reading a novel by Thomas Mann, a short story by Chekhov, a historical work by Theodor Mommsen, essays by Max Beerbohm, why would I wish to rush through them? Savoring them seems more sensible. After all, you never know when you will pass this way again.”

[The letters quoted at the top can be found in Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.]

2 comments:

Tim Guirl said...

Every reader has his own way of reading. In addition to reading a book in hand, I've come to appreciate e-readers for a number of reasons: for starters, I can more easily mount a device on my stationary bike to read while following my cardiologist's heart exercise advice; as my eyes tire toward evening, I can change from a normal- to a large-print view; e-readers are readily portable. I also enjoy audio books, when read by a skilled reader. This, too, has its advantages when out for a stroll or driving the car (I gave up reading at stop lights as too dangerous).

www.British-intelligence.co.uk said...

Shirley Hazzard's novel 'The Transit of Venus' was case in point. One read slowly - 5 pages at a sitting - because one didn't want it to end. It is like fine whiskey.