'Those Writers I Find Most Companionable'

“Our ideas of literary pleasures and narratives have in fact changed in the last 100 years or so. All the writing of the past century and the cinema and television have made us quicker. And the 19th-century English writers who now give me the most ‘novelistic’ pleasure—provide windows into human lives, encouraging reflection—are writers who in their own time would not have been thought of as novelists at all.” 

As I’m reading Dickens again, with pleasure and irritation, I wonder why novels that gave generations of our forebears so much pleasure and instruction are no longer much read by “amateur” readers, those who are not academics or critics. And why such novels – not clones or pastiches but novels written with a comparable degree of confidence and gusto -- are seldom being written today. I know the familiar explanations, from Modernism to the impact of mass media on attention spans. A reader wrote to me a few days ago:

 

“Quoting [Joseph] Epstein, you wrote in an excellent post last week that the work of the best writers bespeaks ‘joy in life.’  One can’t miss this quality in the short stories of William Maxwell, in which I'm currently immersed. Whatever calamities, misfortunes and disappointments Maxwell visits on his characters, his stories somehow convey an unmistakable sense of ‘the goodness of living’ (Maxwell’s words). I relish these stories. Though I've made only a small dent in Maxwell’s work so far, he has already taken his place among those writers I find most companionable. Thanks for urging him on me.”

 

The passage quoted at the top is from “Some Thoughts on Being a Writer,” the late V.S. Naipaul’s lecture on receiving the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1986. He says “quicker.” I would say less patient, less attentive, less willing to be seduced into self-forgetting.

 

Naipaul’s best stories – A House for Mister Biswas, In a Free State, Guerillas, A Bend in the River – are natural heirs of the tradition he recalls. We read them and think, “Ah, Dickens. Ah, Conrad.” Naipaul chides, without dismissing, Dickens, Trollope and Thackery. Of the last he writes: “I can feel how the need for narrative and plot sat on his shoulders like a burden.” Then he continues to the passage quoted above, followed by this:

 

“I am thinking of writers like Richard Jefferies, whose essays about farming people carry so much knowledge and experience that they often contain whole lives. Or William Hazlitt. Or Charles Lamb, concrete and tough and melancholy, not the gentle, wishy-washy essayist of legend. Or William Cobbett, the journalist and pamphleteer, dashing

about the countryside, and in his breakneck prose, and through his wild prejudices, giving the clearest pictures of the roads and the fields and the people and the inns and the food. All of these writers would have had their gifts diluted or corrupted by the novel form as it existed in their time. All of them, novelistic as they are in the pleasures they offer, found their own forms.”

 

These observations may reflect Naipaul’s own juggling of fiction and reporting. In 1987, the year after his lecture, he published a brilliant book, The Enigma of Arrival, that seems to blur fiction and autobiography. Naipaul is probably referring to it here:

 

“My aim was truth, truth to a particular experience, containing a definition of the writing self. Yet I was aware at the end of that book that the creative process remained as mysterious as ever.”

 

[Naipaul’s lecture was published in the May 1987 issue of Chronicles.]