“Let us then 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.”
What Ford Madox Ford means
by reading for pleasure needs no explanation. Either you do or you don’t. One-hundred-forty
characters is too onerous for some, while those who understand why Ford
capitalizes Literature will keep piling books on the nightstand. In The
March of Literature (1939), the last of the more than eighty books he
published during his lifetime, Ford describes himself as “an old man mad about
writing” – and reading, he might have added. Later in the first chapter he
writes:
“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. 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.”
On Wednesday I had dinner
with a longtime reader, an attorney from Dallas, and resumed a briefly
interrupted conversation. We’ve corresponded for more than fifteen years and
met once before. We talked about Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Ronald Knox and A.J. Liebling,
among other things. He has even read The Honest Rainmaker. We wondered
why the most boring subjects – politics, sports – are also the most popular. My
youngest son, a freshman at Rice University, recently finished writing a paper
about the shield of Achilles, and we talked about it and W.H. Auden’s poem of that title.
Perhaps this is some of what
Ford means by “that imaginative culture which is necessary for civilizations”:
two old men sitting in a Mexican restaurant, talking about books they have read
and loved and read again and pondered in silence and pondered again in conversation.
Ford was born on this
date, December 17, in 1873, and died June 26, 1939.
2 comments:
Two thoughts:
1. It's 280 characters now, not 140.
2. It's amazing that Ford had published - not just written, but *had published* - more than 80 books in his lifetime, and yet he is almost completely forgotten today. Fame (and/or influence) is fleeting, and all that.
Your inspirational commentary on literature referencing Ford Madox Ford reminded me of one of my favorite novels, The Good Soldier. Ford's unreliable narrator demonstrates just one of the reasons for continuing to read all kinds of literature of the ages.
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