'What Is Literature and What Is Not Literature'

“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.