Nearly every day I write about things that are important, even life-enhancing or life-saving, that hold no interest for me and that I don’t deeply understand. Some would call this “alienation.” I call it “professionalism.” I’ve earned my living with words for almost half a century as newspaper reporter, editor and science writer, and experience has taught me to accept my limitations, including deep reserves of ignorance and indifference. Like many journalists and former journalists, I’m a generalist, knowing a little about everything, never everything about anything.
A reader complains that he
doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be
difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand –
repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an
overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different:
“He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know
everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”
The idea that every work
of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity,
is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once
addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in
its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in
wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts
is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is
no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in
the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”
Which is no defense of
writers who seek to write like cryptographers, who take self-aggrandizing
pleasure in obscurity or incoherence, and set themselves up as an elite priesthood.
I find Howard Nemerov’s reflections on the subject refreshing. In his 1959
lecture “The Swaying Form: A Problem in Poetry,” he writes:
“When people are impatient with a work of art they assert their feeling in this way: ‘What does it mean?’ Their tone of voice indicates that this is the most natural question in the world, the demand which they have the most immediate and God-given right to make. So their absolute condemnation and dismissal of a work of art is given in this way: ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything to me.’ Only in those plaintive last words does there appear a tiny and scarcely acknowledged doubt of the all-sufficiency of this idea of meaning -- that there may actually be meanings, which one does not personally possess.”
One approaches a poem or any
work of art with anticipation, yes, but also with humility and a lifetime of
reading and living experience. In another essay, “Poetry and Meaning,” Nemerov
writes: “[P]oetry is a way of getting something right in language, poetry is
language doing itself right.” Anything more precise than that, for writer or
reader, is probably presumptuous.
[March 1 would have been
Nemerov’s 102nd birthday. He died in 1991 at age seventy-one. The
two essays cited are collected in The Howard Nemerov Reader (University
of Missouri Press, 1991).]
2 comments:
Someone once told Faulkner that they sometimes found his writing difficult to understand, even after reading it two or three times. What should they do? Faulkner's answer: "Read it four times."
This is not as witty as it should be to me, perhaps, because at the moment I'm reading Henry James' The Sacred Fount. It's gotten a little easier now that I've realized that the narrator is stark raving mad.
Pale Fire was like that for me. Second time away to the races. Gaddis' The Recognitions remains a trial. I am sympathetic to the correspondent who found Hill difficult. Poor fellow just became a poster child for philistinism in Micah Mattix's Prufrock blog (where Mattix heaps much deserved praise on evidence anecdotal). Hill is the other end of Larkin about whom Hill was less than enthusiastic. Still, all of this is urging me back to another shot at Hill. "It's supposed to be good" does carry legitimate weight and aids the spirit of perseverance.
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