'But It Is the Least Fallible'

A reader about my age tells me he and his wife enjoy reading books aloud. Since the start of the pandemic they have read Moby-Dick, Great Expectations and a book I don’t know, E.L. Nesbit’s The Railway Children (“though written for young people, [it] is a beautifully composed prose ode to character”). Rick asked for read-aloud suggestions and I mentioned two novels by William Maxwell – Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). 

I don’t know what goes into choosing books suitable for non-silent, non-solitary reading. I’ve never even listened to a recorded book. I just picked two novels I like and periodically reread. In an essay titled “The Audible Reading of Poetry” (The Function of Criticism, 1957), Yvor Winters writes: “It is also important to read prose aloud, and to hear the prose when one reads it silently. Melville, Gibbon, or Samuel Johnson about equally will be lost on us if we do not so hear it.” I read almost everything, including what I’ve written, under my breath, silently except in my head.

 

I told Rick I’ve only once read a book aloud to an adult. About 20 years ago, I read The Great Gatsby to my wife, at her request. She hadn’t read the novel before. I had, and never much cared for it. Neither does she, it turns out. I remember being embarrassed reading aloud passages of inferior writing. I wanted to interrupt Fitzgerald and make fun of it. We never repeated the experiment.

 

I spent hundreds of hours reading to my sons. To the middle one, soon to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy, I read a bound, collected volume of a comic book I had read as a kid, Magnus, Robot Fighter, most of Roald Dahl, and the science and history books for young readers written by Peter Ackroyd. I miss those days.

 

I’m not certain of its precise pertinence but I remember a sentence in “Reading,” half of Auden’s prologue to The Dyer’s Hand (Random House, 1962): “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” Trust your taste, your readerly bent, but don’t be afraid to challenge it or the over-confident tastes of others.

[To Val Gunnarsson: I don’t have a copy of The Great Gatsby, so I’m unable to cite specific passages. What I recall after twenty years is a straining after “poetic” effects. In short, sometimes laughably purple prose.]