'More Recent Misjudgments'

“My past literary judgments sometimes embarrass me.” 

My friend, a man of roughly my age, has just reread Conrad’s Under Western Eyes after first reading it six years ago and finding it “failed to engage” him. Now he judges it “gripping--well plotted, suspenseful, psychologically acute, uncommonly intelligent, wise.” I share that judgment of Conrad’s later “political” novels, including The Secret Agent and especially Nostromo. My friend is not alone. I’m ashamed and somewhat baffled by my previous lapses in literary taste and judgment. My friend is not referring to our reactions when young and still bookishly feckless. “I was, in knowledge and experience,” he writes, “a different person then. I'm referring instead to more recent misjudgments, ones for which I don’t have the excuse of youth.”

 

When young I claimed to like a lot of dubious, ephemeral stuff, especially among contemporary writers – Alexander Theroux, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, John Barth and others. You see the pattern, heavily bent toward “experimental” post-modernists, often difficult to read, explicitly denying readers' traditional novelistic pleasures, often unabashedly boring. That’s a clue as to my youthful motivations. I was masquerading as a connoisseur of the avant-garde. The last thing I wanted to be known for was unhip, middlebrow tastes in books. What other reason could there be for reading Gaddis’ unreadable JR or McElroy’s Women and Men besides snobbery? Consuming such books was an act of bravado, a public proclamation that I was no philistine.

 

The reverse judgment was also true. Certain writers I didn’t dismiss but found lacking – what? Excitement? Critical endorsement? Formal challenges? Among them now are some of my favorite writers – Willa Cather, George Eliot, Ford Madox Ford. There were writers I ignored or was unaware of until recent years, and now admire and enjoy – Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Francis Wyndham, Ivy Compton-Burnett. I misjudged the overall career of Walter de la Mare, pigeonholing him as a children’s poet. Memoirs of a Midget is now among my favorite novels, as is Maurice Baring’s C. Some loves have remained unchanged since I was young – among Americans, Vladimir Nabokov, William Maxwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud and, of course, Henry James.

 

About the Conrad, my friend writes: “Beats me how I could have missed its excellence the first time around, let alone found it uninvolving. Must have been distracted.”