'He Writes to Give Me Pleasure'

A reader is angry and complains that the poems of Geoffrey Hill are “too difficult” to read, and he seems to be taking this as a personal affront, as though the late poet wrote verse designed to frustrate his efforts to read it. Hill’s response to this familiar complaint was admirably simple and illuminating:

 

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work.”

 

I suggested to my reader that the solution is simple: don’t read Geoffrey Hill. Move on. Try William Carlos Williams. Burton gives the classic author’s rejoinder in The Anatomy of Melancholy: “I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else. I do not much esteem thy censure.”

 

Some writing is worth the effort necessary to appreciate it. A century ago many readers were baffled by Ulysses. Today, almost anyone reasonably schooled in English could read Joyce’s novel. Some are able to write accessibly without patronizing readers. In Portraits (Oxford, 1931), the British literary critic Desmond McCarthy writes:

 

“I often read [Robert Louis] Stevenson. One reason why I turn to him is that he writes to give me pleasure. How few modern authors do! They write to do us good, to expose us, to scold us, to teach us, to express their contempt for us, to exhibit their own indomitable minds; few write to entertain and delight us.”  

 

One legacy of literary modernism is authorial snobbery and condescension.