'Some Temperamental Undercurrent'

We squabble and seethe about it but our tastes in literature – and other realms, like food and music -- ultimately remain mysterious. It has taken me a lifetime to accept this realization. You are not a cretin for enjoying the work of Norman Mailer or Toni Morrison, though I find both writers repellant. Nor am I among the enlightened for loving Proust. Most attempts to analyze and defend our tastes quickly turn into snobbery and self-justification. So much online bookchat amounts to playground-style bickering. 

We’ve all endured the sort of book-bully who, when encountering a reader he decides holds unacceptable opinions, banishes him to the bookish Gulag instead of ignoring him. Literary spats are too often Manichean in nature and mirror contemporary politics. Reading and writing are important – in fact, central to my life and that of many others – but hardly worthy of threats of violence and other condemnations. Not long ago I wrote that I judged V.S. Pritchett the finest literary critic of the twentieth century – hardly an eccentric judgment. A reader told me I was stupid, probably illiterate and ought to be “slapped around” for uttering such a judgment. He was at least half-serious.

 

The American poet Howard Moss (1922-87) in “Notes on Fiction” (Minor Monuments, 1986) identifies an important and rarely recognized relation between writers and serious readers. Across a lifetime of reading, a handful of writers become trusted companions whose company we depend on. We give their books second and third readings. We confide in them and feel no need to defend them. Moss writes:

 

“Certain writers inspire affection in their readers that cannot be explained either by their work or by the facts of their lives. It proceeds from some temperamental undercurrent, some invisible connection between the writer and the reader that is more available to the senses and the emotions than to the mind. Bookish affections of this kind are deceptive and irrelevant, yet they truly exist. For me, Colette, Keats, and Chekhov inspire affection. Faulkner, Shelley, and Ibsen do not.”

 

Moss was poetry editor at The New Yorker for almost forty years. His examples, pro and con, match my own. I find his prose, mostly essays and reviews, superior even to his poetry. If we can generalize from his examples, his literary preferences suggest a fondness for a quieter, more subtle, less rabble-rousing voice, little Sturm und Drang. Faulkner, whom I lionized when young, now seems too loud, too insistent, too stylistically attention-seeking. Can I explain and defend this reaction? I won’t even try. Moss writes elsewhere in “Notes on Fiction”: “Chekhov’s stories tread the finest line between a newspaper account and a fairy tale. Inferior writers step over the line one way or the other.”