'What People Said and Did and Wore and Ate'

Occasionally one encounters two writers, each unknown to the other, expressing sentiments similar but varied enough to define their differences. There’s no question of influence or plagiarism. The first is C.H. Sisson, the English poet/critic/translator, explaining his tastes in reading at the start of his eighth decade. The interview appears in PN Review 39, as part of a 1984 Festschrift celebrating Sisson’s seventieth birthday: 

“I like books of observation, memoirs, letters, anything that tells how people actually lived. Truth is certainly better than fiction, if you can get a bit of it.”

 

The other is William Maxwell, the American novelist, in his note introducing The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (1989), who says he didn’t review fiction for The New Yorker, where he served as fiction editor for forty years. That would have been a "busman's holiday":

 

“[D]iaries, memoirs, published correspondence, biography and autobiography . . . do not spring from prestidigitation or require a long apprenticeship. They tell what happened—what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.”

 

In his introduction to the 1997 edition of The Outermost Dream, Maxwell writes: “[S]tyle is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.” He often used the expression “breath of life” to describe the quality he most often looked for in books. Perhaps the common motivator here is age. I recognize this in myself – a hunger for the raw matter of life one finds in diaries, letters and other literary forms that are not forms. It’s their casualness, spontaneity, inadvertence and off-the-cuff observation that sometimes makes more formal, polished work so intriguing. I remember one of my philosophy professors saying if he could choose between a previously unknown dialogue of Plato’s and a transcript of conversation on an Athens street in the fourth century B.C., he would choose the latter.

 

I’ve been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters, part of my long-delayed discovery of that writer. Here he is on July 24, 1879, writing to Edmund Gosse:

 

“But who wrote the review of my book? whoever he was, he cannot write; he is humane, but a duffer; I could weep when I think of him; for surely to be virtuous and incompetent is a hard lot. I should prefer to be a bold pirate, the gay sailor-boy of immorality, and a publisher at once.”