M. is Osip
Mandelstam and the author of these observations is his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam
(Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward, 1974). I know adults who take the Harry
Potter books seriously and others who take John Ashbery’s books seriously – two
reading cliques with, presumably, little overlap. What they have in common is a
taste for trash, deeply unserious, time-wasting work certified as fashionable by
critics and marketeers. As Mandelstam puts it:
“What about
literature, one might ask, which is supposed to reflect the writer’s
experience, his search for truth, or the road to it? But, unfortunately, books which
really do this are few and far between, and most of the turbid trash that pours
from the presses is counterfeit, churned out expressly to please the rulers or
pander to the tastes of the masses.”
When I encounter the word turbid I think of a
polluted, anaerobic stream. The OED’s
second definition is useful in this context: “characterized by or producing confusion or
obscurity of thought, feeling, etc.; mentally confused, perplexed, muddled;
disturbed, troubled.” In other words, murkiness, the absence of clarity.
The idea of
books as time-killers, numbing distractions, entries in a long list of
entertainment options, is repellant and deeply ungrateful to the literary traditions
we are fortunate to have inherited. Such thought stir as I read Vasily Grossman.
I finished Stalingrad and now I’m reading An Armenian Sketchbook
(trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, 2013) and The Complete Black Book of
Russian Jewry (trans. David Patterson, 2003), edited by Grossman and Ilya
Ehrenburg. As a Soviet war correspondent, Grossman said he read only one book, War
and Peace, and he read it twice. In Stalingrad, Commissar
Nikolay Krymov visits
Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in advance of the Nazis, as did Grossman. He
writes:
“Yasnaya
Polyana was a living, suffering Russian home—one upon thousand of thousand such
homes. With absolute clarity, Krymov saw in his mind Bald Hills [the
Bolkonsky estate] and the old sick
prince. The present merged with the past; today’s events were one with what
Tolstoy described with such truth and power that it had become the supreme
reality of a war that ran its course 130 years ago.”
Sometimes, so-called "trash" can be used to relax the mind from more serious reading. "Man lives not by masterpieces alone," as Terry Teachout likes to say.
ReplyDeleteAuden loved Tolkien and detective stories, both dismissed by Edmund Wilson as trash. You can disagree with Auden's choices but you can't label him an unserious reader or thinker, unless you think he proved himself so when he said that we need pure entertainment just as we need sleep.
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