AND ANOTHER THING
Don't worry about the chain gang of great writers clanking into oblivion
PAUL JOHNSON
Members of the chattering classes, asked recently to nominate their 'novel of the 20th century', answered, by a large majority, Proust's A la Recherche. That made me suspicious. How many of them, I won- dered, had actually read the thing through, in its entirety. My guess is: none. It is one of those masterpieces that people do not actu- ally read from start to finish. I have digested quite large chunks of it, many times, in both French and English, but I would never claim to have read it. The only person I know who I'm absolutely certain has read it all is Der- went May, the ornithological correspondent of the Times, because his little book on Proust, by far the best, gives the one con- vincing analysis of the work's structure.
I am very suspicious about reading claims. So was that inveterate reader Dr Johnson. He asked one know-all sarcastically, 'Do you, sir, read a book through?' He was himself a skilled and majestical skipper, or gutter, of books. I learnt to read 67 years ago and have been hard at it ever since, but I am often appalled to think of what I have not read. I have, for instance, three different editions of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and have poked about in all three, in places, often. But I would not claim to have read it. Who has? Not long ago I hugely enjoyed Graham Robb's excellent life of Victor Hugo, which inspired me to turn again to Les Miserables and Les Travailleurs de la mer — I have long possessed a complete set of Hugo's novels. But the attempt soon ground to a juddering halt. It is probably true that quite a few peo- ple have ploughed all the way through War and Peace, but they constitute only a small proportion of those who make the claim. 1 have given it up many times in weariness and disgust at its false philosophy of history. About 1960, ashamed that I had never been able to finish a novel by Sir Walter Scott, I took the opportunity to buy a magnificent 92-volume edition, superbly leather-bound, of his Complete Works, thinking the hefty sum involved (£30 — a lot in those days) would positively compel me to get my money's worth by reading one or two. Alas, those splendid tomes, though cutting a brave figure on my shelves, have remained undis- turbed. Poor Sir Walter! He takes such a long time to come to any sort of point. And that brings me to Henry James. I have read The Aspem Papers, based on Claire Clare- mont, with delight, and one or two other of his shorter tales. But those thick, hefty tomes, on which he laboured too long and with such delightful agonies — The Ambas- sadors and so on — I have found insupport- able after a few pages. Yet it is not for lack of interest in James. I have at least a dozen well-thumbed and much relished books about him. I love his Letters and Notebooks. Reading about him led me on to his friend Edith Wharton, and I now possess, and have read, half a dozen books about her too, though I cannot stomach any of her novels.
Does that imply frivolity on my part — a vulgar, gossip-column interest in the per- sonality rather than in the actual works of literature? Recently I read with relish an excellent short book on James Joyce by Edna O'Brien. But can I read Ulysses? When I was a schoolboy I was shown the supposedly bawdy bit at the end and found it baffling. The rest of the enormous text swam incomprehensibly before my eyes. It is a huge bore, one of the great, shocking, overrated classical bores of all ages, the source of more fraudulent eulogies, per- haps, than any other work of fiction. When people (excluding, of course, slave labourers from the Eng.Lit.Crit. salt-mines) say they have read it, I don't believe them. As for Finnegans Wake, I would sooner plough through the Yellow Pages, which contain more nuggets of interest. Yet I do not doubt Joyce's talent, even genius of a sort. Dublin- ers must be one of the finest collections of short stories ever assembled — I have read some of them scores of times — and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I find a master- piece, not least because the youthful ago- nies described so brilliantly therein paral- leled some of my own. Joyce was a great writer, and his disastrous decision to embark on experimental prose was one of the literary tragedies of the last century. But hush! That is treason.
More and more, I find writers interesting but their works a labour. I read with delight Richard Holmes's two volumes on Coleridge. But the Bibliographia Literaria, the poet's own account of his progress, is, I find, something to be dipped into rather than swallowed whole. Byron, too, is a poet to be read about, rather than read. I have recently bought and read two hefty Byron biographies, by Phyllis Grosskurth and Benita Eisler, as well as David Crane's life of Trelawny, Lord Byron's Jackal, with prof- it and enjoyment. But it is many years since I reperused a single canto of Don Juan. I read and love Byron's letters, and still more his occasional diaries, in their 11 splendid volumes. They are the real thing, not craft and fancy. Why should life have more charms than art? Why, last week, was I reading a day-by-day account of Keats's voyage to Italy, and his last weeks, with tears in my eyes, while Endymion leaves me cold? Yet so it is. Thomas Hood's Letters I find poignant, but his verses stir me not. I have been enjoying the Letters of Wilkie Collins, published not long ago in two vol- umes — something of a man of mystery, eh? — but have no desire to turn again to The Moonstone or The Woman in White. Again, I found George Eliot's Journals, published for the first time in 1998, fasci- nating. But, Almighty God, spare me another reading of Daniel Deronda, which I studied from duty while writing my A History of the Jews. As for Romola, it is what the authors of the Bill of Rights termed 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Yet the woman could write! I love Tales from Clerical Life and shall doubtless read it again soon.
In a lifetime of promiscuous reading, I have learnt two sensible rules. First, never be ashamed to dip and pass on. I have applied this, with profit, to Dante, for instance, to Chateaubriand's magnificent but inter- minable Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, to Thucy- dides, to Cervantes and to Herman Melville. One dip never prevents other dips later. A lot of 'great' books, indigestible if forced on you but salutary in spoonfuls, fall into this category, Clarendon being one example, Bishop Burnet and Horace Walpole two oth- ers. I have bookcases full of them: the com- plete works of Mark Twain, which I got cheap in photo-reproduction, and the whole of Robert Louis Stevenson, including his marvellous letters. Carlyle, Bagehot, Ruskin, Mill and Nathaniel Hawthorne can be simi- larly relied on for a refreshing plunge from time to time. My second rule is: don't worry if you find great books dull. Most of them are. Tastes change, genius evaporates with the years, talent moulders and rubs off, the dingy metal beneath the gloss begins to show. I see the chain gang of neglected great writers clanking away into oblivion — Cicero and Livy, Boccaccio and Rabelais, Voltaire and Schiller, Zola, Kafka, Thomas Mann and I am unmoved by their cries. There will never be a shortage of new writers and old favourites. So I pick up Emma for the 20th time, and read on.
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