Updike reminds us what it's like to be twenty

A month ago, Patrick Kurp, on his Anecdotal Evidence blog, mentioned in passing a John Updike story, "The Happiest I've Been," first published in the New Yorker in 1959. Patrick described the story as,

the best fictional treatment I know of the exhilarating free-fall between high school and college, adolescence and faux-adulthood.

We all have those writers whom we've simply failed to read, not through distaste or deliberate choice, but simply because, as Hussain Haddawy put it in the introduction to his translation of some of the Arabian Nights stories, "There are other fair creatures in the world." Updike has long been one of mine, wholly unread--though in recent years I've been edging closer: I read Nicholson Baker's U and I, and sentence after sentence that he quoted impressed me, as did his--and other writers'--tales of Updike's courtesy and kindness, the notes he would send to young writers whose work he appreciated, the professionalism with which he seemed to approach his work. For all that I enjoy reading about the Byrons of the world, my heart (to say nothing of my admiration) is with those artists who evince kindness and courtesy.

Patrick's praise was enough. I sought out "The Happiest I've Been"--and if all you want to know is whether Patrick is right, you can stop reading here: the first thing I did after reading it was make two copies to send to friends. It's that good, full of sharp observations expressed in sentences whose every word seems diligently labored over, glowing with a sense that it was chosen through deliberation aiming at perfection rather than the logorrhea of chance.

The story, told in the first person, relates a night-long party in the narrator's hometown, a party to which he's taken unexpectedly by a friend with whom he's supposed to be sharing a ride to Chicago a few days before the end of the Christmas break of his freshman year of college. He only learns of the party after he's been loaded into the car, and, "In everything that followed there was this sense of my being picked up and carried somewhere."

That's a feeling that will be familiar, I suspect, to anyone who was fortunate enough to ease into their twenties largely in the company of others who were doing the same--and a feeling that most of us rarely re-encounter in later years. What Updike does brilliantly is to show us all the ever-varying vantage points we had on those moments: enjoyment and abandon, uncertainty and isolation, confusion and anticipation. "The party was the party I had been going to all my life," the narrator notes: a girl cries and dances at the same time; three former athletes, "still . . . with that well-coordinated looseness, a look of dangling on strings," crash the party, then disappear silently into the basement; the host plays the same jazz record over and over and over, deliberately soaking in melancholy.

When the host's parents return home, the narrator realizes that they, too, see the same party they've always seen: "It was a pleasant joke to see in their smiles that, however corrupt and unwinking we felt, to them we looked young and sleepy: Larry's friends." But the few months that the narrator has been away have been enough to make him feel estranged. At one point he wanders off and buries himself for a while in the first book he finds, the second volume of Henry Esmond; at another, the sight of a pile of shoes discarded by the girls at the party brings unexpected emotion:

Sitting alone and ignored in a great armchair, I experienced within a warm keen dishevelment, as if there were real tears in my eyes. Had things been less unchanged, they would have seemed less tragic. But the girls who had stepped out of these shoes were, with few exceptions, the ones who had attended my life's party. The alterations were so small: a haircut, an engagement ring, a tendency toward plumpness more frankly confessed. While they wheeled above me I sometimes caught from their faces an unfamiliar glint, off of a hardness I did not remember, as if beneath their skins these girls were growing more dense. The brutality added to the features of the boys I knew seemed a more willed effect, more desired and so less grievous.

These are the people he knew, but he no longer knows them; he wonders "at the easy social life that evidently existed among my friends at three-thirty in the morning." And later, his sense of being out of time and place, focused on one person and one relationship, reaches an acuity that verges on cruelty:

So I talked to Margaret about Larry, and she responded, showing really quite an acute sense of him. To me, considering the personality of a childhood friend so seriously, as if overnight he had become a factor in the world, seemed absurd; I couldn't even deeply believe that in her world he mattered much. Larry Schuman, in little more than a year, had become nothing to me.

That's the moment that Updike recreates so well in this story and carries through to a perfect ending: the time when we've worked enough slack into our family ties to feel free and the ties to old friends--stripped of the circumstances that catalyzed them--have atrophied to the point of inexplicability, yet the claims of our future have not yet been made. At twenty, on the right night in the right circumstances, we are as close to being free as we ever will be--and, briefly, it can seem like the best possible way to live.

Virginia Woolf the essayist

Many's the reader who has been put off by Virginia Woolf's fiction. Her style--in one sense like a looser, more deliberately experimental Henry James--is simultaneously occluded and jumbled, James's reticence and obsessive circumspection replaced with a sort of jumble-sale approach to consciousness that relies on the reader to pluck from a flowing stream the burning brand that will show forth the point. Patrick Kurp--not one to pull punches--has called her fiction "effete, self-regarding, and beside the point." Cyril Connolly called her characters,

lifeless anatomical slices, conceived in all the same mood, unreal creatures of genteel despair.

Anthony Powell, in his journals, called The Waves "twaddle," writing that it had

all the artificiality of a Compton-Burnett background, without any of the wit, willingness to grapple with real human problems, general grasp of novel-writing material

Having filled that side of the balance to overflowing, I will put on the positive side of the ledger merely my own appreciation of Woolf's fiction, which, exercising the host's prerogative, I will deem sufficient. Like the aforementioned Henry James, she is not for every day, but there are times--when one is feeling introspective, quiet, uncertain, even slightly fuddled, say---when no one else will do.

What is odd (and what is, ridiculously deep into this post, the point) is that her voice in her essays is utterly different, so straightforward, clear, and declarative--a point that even her detractors would, I suspect, have to concede. (As, to his credit, Patrick Kurp has graciously done.) Woolf's essays, the majority of which, it seems, were written as book reviews, and thus to some extent in the moment and on deadline, are remarkable for their clarity and authority. Woolf displays a quality that I greatly prize--perhaps to my peril--in an essayist: an ability to make a declarative aesthetic statement about a writer that one can't help but nod along to, even if somewhere in the mother board of one's brain the logic circuits are screaming.

Take this passage, from a piece on De Quincey from the September 16th issue of the Times Literary Supplement:

A prose writer may dream dreams and see visions, but they cannot be allowed to lie scattered, single, solitary upon the page. So spaced out they die. For prose has neither the intensity nor the self-sufficiency of poetry. It rises slowly off the ground; it must be connected on this side and on that. There must be some medium in which its ardours and ecstasies can float without incongruity, from which they receive support and impetus.

To which the attentive reader finds himself insisting upon exception after exception . . . but only on reflection, for at first blush--and in some sense forever--Woolf is right and pithily apt there.

Or this, less questionable, on Jane Austen:

She knew exactly what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources.

Lest I simply go on forever drawing out examples of Woolf's acuity, I'll turn to my old favorite Thomas Hardy and declare him the home stretch of this post. Woolf writes:

Some writers are born conscious of everything; others are unconscious of many things Some, like Henry James and Flaubert, are able not merely to make the best use of the spoil their gifts bring in, but control their genius in the act of creation; they are aware of all the possibilities of every situation, and are never taken by surprise. The unconscious writers, on the other hand, like Dickens and Scott, seem suddenly and without their own consent to be lifted up and swept onwards. The wave sinks and they cannot say what has happened or why. Among them--it is the source of his strength and of his weakness--we must place Hardy. His own word, "moments of vision," exactly describes those passages of astonishing beauty and force which are to be found in every book that he wrote.

Having been primed to question Woolf's assertions, I expect you found plenty at least to raise an eyebrow at in that passage. (Dickens unconscious of his effects? Really?) At the same time, however, I think Woolf is basically right; the more one learns about Hardy, specifically, the more his successes begin to seem like the product of an alchemy that was likely unfathomable even to him.

To close, I can't resist sharing a passage from Woolf's diary about her first meeting with Hardy (outside, that is, her natal crib, as Hardy was acquainted with her father), collected in the indispensable Thomas Hardy Remembered:

There was not a trace anywhere of deference to editors, or respect for rank, an extreme simplicity: What impressed me was his freedom, ease, & vitality. He seemed very "Great Victorian" doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) & setting no great stock by literature; but immensely interested in facts; incidents; & and somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining & and creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; & living in imagination.

Hardy signed a copy of Life's Little Ironies for Woolf . . . though he spelled her name "Wolff," "wh. I daresay had given him some anxiety."

"We have had a good solid winter."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The lovely 70-plus-degreeness of the day, as unseasonal in its own way as the snow that fell two weeks ago, has reduced my brain to a froth, incapable of putting together a proper post. Instead, I offer some unconnected quotes from recent reading, in hopes of distracting you until such time as my brains have become accustomed to the absence of cold.

1 First, from Jill Lepore's look at the strange history of marriage advice, "Fixed," in the March 29th issue of the New Yorker:

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

That's as succinct and convincing an argument for history as I've ever encountered. It could serve as a epigraph, for example, to the series of podcasts on the American Civil War by David Blight that I just finished listening to (and, as I've said before, highly recommend). It's particularly well suited to that war because the lessons we've drawn from it and the disavowals we've made have been very different in the North and the South since almost the moment the fighting stopped. And thus the path forward has never been quite so clear as we might wish it to be.

2 In the wonderful piece on Jonathan Swift's poetry that he wrote for me at the Quarterly Conversation, Patrick Kurp quoted from the introduction to Victoria Glendinning's 1998 biography of Swift:

He is extremely “nice” in the eighteenth-century sense. He is not always “nice” in our sense of lovable and pleasant. He is a disturbing person. He provokes admiration and fear and pity. All I can assure you is that in keeping company with Jonathan Swift you are not wasting your time.

Could there be a better way to introduce a subject--and a biographer--than such a clear-eyed appraisal? It offers instant assurance that your companion on this trip will be perceptive and truthful, and that, in addition, she can write. As someone whose natural tendency is to string clause upon clause, giving a sentence its leash until it pulls up, panting and confused, of its own worn-out accord, I admire the blunt punch of Glendinning's style, both in that passage and throughout the biography.

And if you've not read Patrick's article, you definitely should do so: it's smart and funny and, because it's about Swift, beastly and foul as well.

3 Finally, in honor of the weather that's so addled me, I return to the new New York Review of Books edition of Thoreau's journals, a book that belongs on every bedside. March 31, 1852 found Thoreau less lucky than we Chicagoans: it was "a cold, raw day with alternating hail-like snow and rain." But his mind roved on to spring nonetheless:

Perchance as we grow old we cease to spring with the spring, and we are indifferent to the succession of years, and they go by without epoch as months. Woe be to us when we cease to form new resolutions on the opening of a new year!

Thoreau had sins, no doubt, and awkwardnesses and failings, as we all do, but indifference, like inattention, was never of their number.

The next day he wrote,

We have had a good solid winter, which has put the previous summer far behind us; intense cold, deep and lasting snow, tense winter sky. It is a good experience to have gone through with.

Indeed. And now it's time for baseball.

The Lambs of London

A post by Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence last week about Peter Ackroyd's novel The Lambs of London (2004) reminded me that I had a copy of that book, unread, on my shelves, purchased several years ago when all I knew of Charles and Mary Lamb was their Tales from Shakespeare. Patrick's post gives a good sense of the pleasures of this slim novel (and you can also turn to him for praise of Charles Lamb's essays, which I plan to dive into this winter); since he's covered that ground, I'll merely share a few aspects that struck me.

Though Ackroyd dwells far less than I would have expected on the sad circumstances of the Lambs' shared life, he does give clear pictures of both Charles's alcoholism--

He had a strange relationship with his drunken self; he considered him to be an unhappy and unfortunate acquaintance to whom he had become accustomed. He would neither defend him nor apologise for him. He would merely recognise his existence.

--and Mary's bouts of insanity. Without overdoing things, Ackroyd suggests that Mary's troubles, if not caused by the cramped life forced on her by Georgian propriety, were at the very least exacerbated by it: while Charles spends his evenings out with friends, Mary stays at home, awaiting the talks they'll have on his return. When she does leave the house, it takes courage; she "decides to venture" into their street. She has barely been out of their neighborhood; a trip across the Thames affords her "a rare moment of discovery." When Charles challenges her about having been out one evening, she whirls on him,

"When you see me in this house I am sleep-walking. I have no real--no genuine--life here at all. Why do you think I long for you to come home each evening? When you are not wretchedly drunk, of course. . . . Whom do I see? Whom do I talk to? Whose propriety is it that I should be pressed to death? Whose convention is it that I am already lying in the family grave?"

By contrast, Charles's life as a young cleark for the East India Company is full of company, wit, charm, and sociability; his companions are sketched quickly but convincingly, my favorite being Alfred Jowett, who was

practical, hard-headed and a little mercenary. He divided his salary by the length of the working year, and had calculated that he earned five pence and three farthings every working hour. He had a written table inside his desk and, whenever he managed to idle away one of those hours, he added that sum to his running profit.

When comparing the lives and ambits of the siblings, it is hard not to think of the James family, of Alice stuck at home while her brothers escaped; in the century that separated them from the Lambs, the situation had improved, but not nearly enough.

Unexpectedly, though Ackroyd centers the story on the tragedy of the Lambs--when Mary, in a fit, killed her mother--he drives his plot with a story of forgery, introducing a young bookseller named William Henry Ireland, who briefly wowed literary England with the slowly doled out discovery of a cache of Shakespeare's papers, including, ultimately, a whole lost play, Vortigern. When his deception is finally undone, he apologetically explains,

I acted out of innocent delight and sheer intoxication with my gifts.

--while his success, however temporary, was rooted in a similar delight: people wanted to believe in the forgeries, wanted to believe that they had not seen the last of Shakespeare.

All of which reminded me of a passage from an interview of D. Graham Burnett conducted with historian Anthony Grafton in the Spring 2009 issue of Cabinet. Speaking of forgery, Grafton says,

[I]n many cases it was the forgers who took on the most ambitious projects of historical recovery. They were the ones who were trying to make the past live again, to animate, to resurrect the lost worlds. They had to steep themselves in these worlds enough that they could actually inhabit them creatively. . . . [I]n many cases there is a sense that these sorts of forgeries are not an effort to falsify the past, but in fact to rescue it. The truly passionate historical forger of the Renaissance was often saying something like, "I really know what was going on back then. I know how this tradition in antiquity worked. I know what the record ought to show, and if it's not there in our crappy manuscripts, well then, dammit, I'm going to put it there!"

And what else is a historical novelist doing but that? History may not have retained any extended account of Charles Lamb's table talk, or of his quiet tenderness towards his sister, or her private worries, but we have Peter Ackroyd, master forger, to fill in the gaps.

"To perhaps overgeneralize, book reviews are declarative statements; blog posts are questions."

A weekend of traveling has left me with no time to do any blogging today beyond posting a link to my contribution to the symposium on book blogging that Patrick Kurp and D. G. Myers have conducted over the past ten days.

There's little in my take on the form that will surprise any longtime readers of this blog, but it was certainly fun to have an excuse to think directly about what I hope I'm accomplishing here day after day. The other contributions--links to all of which are to be found low down in the left sidebar of D. G. Meyers's Commonplace Blog--offer plenty of pleasures: at a minimum, you should check out those of Mark Athitakis, who contributed the quote I used as this post's headline, and Patrick Kurp, who draws on poet David Ferry to remind us that "writing / Is a way of being happy."

Send in the clowns. The sympathetic, empathetic clowns.

Last week, the Millions published a very good interview conducted by Annie K. Yoder with Phillip Lopate about his recent book on Susan Sontag, Notes on Sontag. The whole interview is worth reading--as is the review of Lopate's book published recently by the Quarterly Conversation--but the following description by Lopate of Sontag's failings as a novelist really stood out:

Sontag felt the big game was fiction. And that’s where you win the Nobel Prize. You don’t win it for writing essays. That’s understandable and that would’ve been great had she been a great fiction writer. Some people can do both, but she lacked a deep sympathy for other people—which is okay if you’re a critic because you don’t have to be that empathetic if you’re a critic, you just have to know what you think about something. And she lacked, for the most part, a sense of humor. It’s hard to be a great novelist without those two things.

That seems almost perfectly accurate. Lopate doesn't rule out the possibility of a great novelist who is essentially humorless (thus leaving us room for most of Thomas Hardy's great works) or unsympathetic (Dostoevsky, perhaps? I'm ready to be corrected here.)--he simply says that it's very hard; and it's true that nearly all my favorite novelists (such as Anthony Powell, Proust, Dickens, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, J. F. Powers, to take the first ones that come to mind) have both qualities in spades.

In Tuesday's post on Anthony Powell, I discussed a feature of friendship that Powell understands as well as any writer I know, the pleasure we take in sharing anecdotes and discoveries with particular friends whom we know will appreciate them, and my reaction to this passage serves as a nice illustration: the moment I read it, I knew I had to send it to Patrick Kurp, as it sounded like lines he might have written himself. He replied,

In the passage you quote, he’s dead right about Sontag and novelists in general. Immediately I tried to find exceptions among great novelists. Tolstoy had a vestigial sense of humor and it’s not central to his vision, but it’s there. Rather than a “deep sympathy for other people,” I might substitute deep interest (though never contempt). James and Faulkner possessed both (by my reading, both are comic writers). So did Sterne, Melville, Dickens, Eliot, Bellow, on and on.

Later in our exchange, Patrick, never one to mince words, wrote, "I have no use for Woolf." Woolf would certainly fall into the humorless category, and while I have to break with Patrick (and thus to some extent with Lopate) here--To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway remain marvels in my view--he is in agreement with our shared favorite, Powell, who disliked Woolf's novels intensely, writing in his journal, for example, that The Waves is "twaddle," having

all the artificiality of a Compton-Burnett background, without any of the wit, willingness to grapple with real human problems, general grasp of novel-writing material.

Elsewhere he writes that Woolf is "so infinitely to be preferred in Diaries and Letters to novels."

Us Woolf fans might argue that Powell was far from Woolf's ideal reader--but no one would argue that he didn't know comedy, and in his infinitely re-readable notebook, among many other thoughts on writing, he astutely noted,

In a novel there is always the risk of something unserious being too serious.

As, I think we can agree, in life itself.

Desert Library Books?

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Being not much of a joiner, I generally fail to participate in online memes and list-making, but one that was passed on by Terry Teachout and CAAF of About Last Night earlier this week was impossible to resist:

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Below is the list I came up with; I've added a link to those about which I've written before on this blog.

Anthony Powell/A Dance to the Music of Time
Jorge Luis Borges/Labyrinths
Italo Calvino/Invisible Cities
Haruki Murakami/Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Wendell Berry/A Place on Earth
Homer/The Odyssey
Herman Melville/Moby-Dick
Roberto Bolaño/The Savage Detectives
James Gould Cozzens/Guard of Honor
Leo Tolstoy/Anna Karenina
James Boswell/Life of Johnson
Thomas Hardy/Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Raymond Chandler/The Long Goodbye
Marcel Proust/In Search of Lost Time
Sarah Orne Jewett/The Country of the Pointed Firs

Some that nearly made the cut, and on a different day might have done so:

Iris Murdoch/The Nice and the Good
Evelyn Waugh/A Handful of Dust
P. G. Wodehouse/Summer Lightning
Charles Dickens/Our Mutual Friend
Rebecca West/The Fountain Overflows
Claire Tomalin/Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
John Crowley/Aegypt
F. Scott Fitzgerald/The Great Gatsby
Juan Rulfo/Pedro Paramo

I don't know that my list, even in its expanded version, tells you much about me; perhaps merely that my taste, though definitely biased towards the English, is fairly catholic, varying wildly depending on mood and circumstance.

Do take a look at CAAF's list (with which I have no titles in common) and Terry's list (with which I share three), both of which feature books worth recalling. Other lists worth checking out that I've come across so far are those of Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence (who eschews the term "meme," choosing instead the more pleasant and apt "literary parlor game"), who shares my fondness for Boswell and reminds me that Joseph Mitchell really ought to have found a place, and D. G. Myers, with whose list mine overlaps not a whit--though the titles I've read on his list are nonetheless favorites, which makes me think I ought to investigate the rest as well.

And yours, dear reader?

"Coleridge was to prove a dangerous companion for the high-strung."

Though I pick up literary biographies because I'm interested in their subject, as I read them I often find myself more drawn to the glimpse they afford of the other writers in the subject's orbit--his friends, enemies, and/or collaborators, who together make up the literary life and conversation of an era. When that era is late Georgian and Regency England, the pleasures afforded by the peripheral figures are almost unparalleled: having set to reading about Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, or Coleridge, we find ourselves learning along the way about such writers as Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey, and William Hazlitt, all interesting in their own right.

In Adam Sisman's book on Wordsworth and Coleridge, the most striking peripheral figure--aside perhaps from Dorothy Wordsworth, who is nearly a primary subject in her own right--is unquestionably Charles Lamb. These days, Lamb is little known compared to the era's stars--I surprised a guide on a walking tour of London a few years ago by being familiar with him when we stopped at his memorial on Gilspur Street. He's best remembered for the Tales from Shakespeare (1807) that he wrote with his sister Mary, which served as my first encounter with Shakespeare many years ago; if he's known beyond that, it's for the tragic circumstances of his life, which saw him having to care for Mary after she stabbed their mother to death and attacked their father in a psychotic fit.

But Lamb's other work--primarily essays--does have its fans, including Peter Ackroyd (who wrote a novel about Charles and Mary a couple of years ago) and Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence, who for the past couple of years has been urging people to seek out Lamb, describing his essays as

seriously charming or charmingly serious, and written in some of the most freely associative prose you’ll ever enjoy.

Elsewhere, Kurp has written that Lamb,

like Sterne on most occasions, perfected a carefully calibrated tone of inspired silliness. He was a master of “almost.” His prose is almost self-indulgent, almost incoherent, but his internal gyroscope usually kept it in balance. Nothing requires more control than appearing out of control, with perfect grace, though Lamb mastered other voices.

That jibes with the impression one gets from Sisman's account, which quotes freely from Lamb's letters to Coleridge, whom he once described as

the only correspondent and I might add the only friend I have in the world. . . . I have never met with any one, who could or can compensate me for the loss of your society--I have no one to talk all these matters about to.

Lamb even unexpectedly calls to mind the genial strangeness of Robert Walser when he describes a period that he spent "very agreeably" in an asylum following a breakdown, after which, Sisman notes, he explained to Coleridge that, though he had "got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one," he remembered those six weeks

with a gloomy kind of Envy. For while it lasted I had many many hours of pure happiness. Dream not Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad. All now seems to me vapid; comparatively so.

In those letters to Coleridge, he also demonstrates another facet of his talent that Patrick has noted, a facility as a critic, giving Coleridge the needed advice to

Cultivate simplicity . . . or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.

Patrick's testimony--and carefully chosen quotations--had already convinced me that Lamb was worth seeking out, but, as with so many worthy pursuits in life, that intention had fallen by the wayside; Sisman's account has reminded me to act on it, and I expect I'll have lines from Lamb to share in the coming months.

"A dedicated reader of Lamb," Patrick writes, "grows to love him as a friend." The list of writers about whom even a devoted reader can feel that way is short, cherished, and very personal, but I trust Patrick's opinion enough to harbor hopes that Lamb will be of its number by year's end.

"The dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality."

Despite having never read any of Samuel Richardson's monumental novels, I have recently gotten into the habit of taking note when I come across valued authors delivering themselves of opinions of the man and his work. It's the least I can do for my friend Maggie, who valiantly slogged through the 1,630 pages of Richardson's Clarissa (1748) when I gave it to her for Christmas a couple of years ago--and retained the energy and goodwill to report on the book's pleasures and pains. ("I would not say that I didn't enjoy the book, but there is so, so much of it.") It seems only fair that, having followed Clarissa through her near-endless travails, Maggie should feel she has company, should be able to see herself as part of a centuries-long chorus of voices of those who've done the same--a survivors' support group, say.

So yesterday I as I was reading William Hazlitt's pleasantly meandering essay "On Reading Old Books" (1821), to which I'd been directed by Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence, I was pleased to encounter some strong praise for Richardson. Hazlitt writes,

I consider myself a thorough adept in Richardson. I like the longest of his novels best, and think no part of them tedious; nor should I ask to have anything better to do than to read them from beginning to end, to take them up when I chose, and lay them down when I was tired, in some old family mansion in the country, till every word and syllable relating to the bright Clarissa, the Divine Clementina, the beautiful Pamela, "with every trick and line of their sweet favour," were once more "graven in my heart's table."

Now, Maggie, surely that makes you feel that you could have done better by the bright Clarissa? Perhaps you should re-read her story, attempting to approach it this time in a more generous frame of mind?

Strong as is Hazlitt's praise for Richardson, it pales next to his words for Edmund Burke later in the essay. Burke's conservatisim was anathema to Hazlitt, but in some ways that made his appreciation of Burke's mind and writing even more powerful:

To understand an adversary is some praise: to admire him is more. . . . For the first time I ever cast my eyes on anything of Burke's . . . I said to myself, "this is true eloquence: this is a man pouring out his mind on paper." All other styles seemed to me pedantic and impertinent. Dr. Johnson's was walking on stilts; and even Junius's (who was at that time a favourite with me) with all his terseness, shrunk up into little antithetic points and well-trimmed sentences. But Burke's style was forked and playful as the lightening, crested like the serpent. He delivered plain things on plain ground; but when he rose, there was no end of his flights and circumgyrations.

But even the finest of prose styles can only go so far if the reader disagrees with the argument they decorate, and Hazlitt has fun reminding the reader of that:

I did not care for his doctrines. I was then and am still, proof against their contagion. . . . I conceived, too, that he might be wrong in his main argument, and yet deliver fifty truths in arriving at a false conclusion.

Hazlitt's essay--which he opens with the bald statement,

I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.

--has not only caused me to reopen my volume of Burke, but has also inspired in me a general spate of re-reading, sending me back yesterday to Penelope Fitzgerald's light and lovely Gate of Angels and today to Moby-Dick . . . and all the while my favorite book to re-read, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, maintains its perpetual beck. We'll see if I'm strong enough to resist and instead pluck something from the stacks of the unread instead.