'Necessary for Civilizations'

“Let us sum up Literature as that which men read and continue to read for pleasure or to obtain that imaginative culture which is necessary for civilizations.”

When I was a kid, no one ever said such things to me, certainly not parents or teachers. “Imaginative culture,” in so many words, wasn’t an option. I wouldn’t have known what that meant. I liked to read, found it pleasurable and I never drew the conclusion that I was somehow bolstering the future of civilization.

“[Literature’s] general characteristic is that it is the product of a poetic, an imaginative, or even merely a quaintly observant mind.”

Again, “imaginative,” though I have a soft spot for “quaintly observant.” It brings to mind Gilbert White’s account of Selbourne’s natural world, or The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. It connotes the amateur spirit, work undertaken for the love of it.

“The immediate test for one’s self as to what is literature and what is not literature—biblia a-biblia as the Greeks used to call this last—is simply whether one does or doesn’t find a book readable. But if a book has found readers in great numbers for two thousand or five hundred or merely eighty or ninety years, you would be rash, even though you could not read it yourself, to declare that it was not literature—not, that is to say, a work of art.”

In the last week, in private emails, I have been asked by readers if they ought to read Joseph Conrad, Homer, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Anthony Powell, and if so, where to start. There is still a hunger out there for the consolation of books and what used to be known as “self-improvement.” I also read a Tweet by a woman demanding that we scour our bookshelves of “privilege.” Mostly that seemed to mean books written by white people. That would certainly narrow one’s options. As they say, everyone’s a [book] critic, even the illiterate.

“You may dislike Homer as much as this writer actually dislikes, say, Milton. But neither of us would be wise if we declared that either the Iliad or Paradise Lost were not literature. We should be unwise because it is foolish to set one’s private judgment up against the settled opinions of humanity for generation on generation, and because our tastes may change before the end of our lives.”

The writer of the Tweet mentioned above reminded me, of course, of the Säuberung (“cleansing”) declared by the Nazis in 1933, and the resulting burning of “un-German” books, but also the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan by the Taliban and of Palmyra by ISIL.

[The quoted passages are from Pages 10 and 11 of The March of Literature (1939) by Ford Madox Ford, the Dalkey Archive edition.]