'Books Which Can Be Read Again and Again'

“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there is only about a ten-foot shelf of books which can be read again and again in later life . . .” 

More like eight and a half feet of slender, small-print editions, along the lines of Everyman’s Library. Excellence among human creations is rare; in literature, especially prose fiction, it can be measured by the micron on that mythical shelf. And don’t get me started on poetry.

 

The lawgiver here is Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82), a middling poet, essayist, journalist and literary raconteur. In the Sixties he published a series of brief essays called “Classics Revisited.” Among them was one devoted to Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy Parade’s End, published sequentially between 1924 and 1928. Rexroth defends the ability of readers to experience and find rewarding literature produced in other times and places – a rebuttal to presentism and academic sectarianism:

 

“Any cultivated person should be able to accept temporarily the cosmology and religion of Dante or Homer. The emotional attitudes and the responses to people and to the crises of life in most fiction come to seem childish as we ourselves experience the real thing. Books written far away and long ago in quite different cultures with different goods and goals in life, about people utterly unlike ourselves, may yet remain utterly convincing — The Tale of Genji, The Satyricon, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Burnt Njal, remain true to our understanding of the ways of man to man the more experienced we grow. Of only a few novels in the twentieth century is this true. Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is one of those books.”

 

For once, I agree heartily with Rexroth. Ford’s novel is one of those books you read and at the same time look forward to rereading. Of how many twentieth-century novels can that be said? Think of Conrad, Kipling, Cather, Proust, Joyce, Svevo, Lampedusa, Nabokov. It’s notable that Rexroth includes relatively few Americans on his list, some of whom are rather dubious – Prescott, Poe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Parkman, Stowe, Douglass, Twain, Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams. No American fiction from the twentieth century. That tends to confirm my impression that England produced more excellent, rereadable fiction in the last century than the United States – Ford, of course, and Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbar Pym, Kingsley Amis.

 

Assembling such lists is an entertaining parlor game, made to challenge and inform readers. It’s not a “canon” or literacy test. Snobs need not play. Rexroth concludes his Ford essay like this:

 

“The result is a little as though Burnt Njal had been rewritten by the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. There is the same deadly impetus, the inertia of doom, riding on hate, that drives through the greatest of the sagas. There is the same tireless weaving and reweaving of the tiniest threads of the consequences of grasping and malevolence, the chittering of the looms of corruption, that sickens the heart in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The reader of either novel, or the saga, emerges wrung dry. The difference in Ford’s book is compassion. The poetry is in the pity, as Wilfred Owen said of the same war."

 

[Rexroth wrote eighty-nine “Classics Revisited” essays for Saturday Review between 1965 and 1969. Sixty were reprinted as Classics Revisited (1968). The other twenty-nine were included in The Elastic Retort (1973). After his death, More Classics Revisited (1989), containing those twenty-nine essays plus other book reviews and introductions, was published. Rexroth wrote another essay on Ford.]