A time for resolutions
In the forthcoming volume of his Smoking Diaries (not out till April, but I’ve been reading a proof copy) my old friend Simon Gray makes a brave admission. Well, he makes a number of these, but this particular one struck me. ‘I haven’t read him [Henry James] for years. I don’t believe I have the powers of concentration any more, at least for the late ones, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors.’ ‘Something in that’ was my immediate response, though actually I haven’t read The Ambassadors since I was 17, and persuaded myself, though frequently bored, that it was a masterpiece. Now all I remember is Strether’s advice ‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to’; and this only because I have seen it quoted. Interesting advice, good even, though it all depends on what you mean by ‘living’. Some might say that James himself didn’t do much of it; others that he didn’t need to, outwardly, living so intensely in mind and imagination. But that is matter for another day. Where was I? Ah yes, powers of concentration . . .
They do slacken as you get older, partly no doubt because of a loss of intellectual vitality, partly because they have been corrupted by too much easy reading, especially of newspapers. This leads you to skip and skim. It becomes more difficult to read at the pace that an author demands, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, instead of taking in whole paragraphs at a gulp. This applies especially to poetry. I find I can read this now only by mouthing the words, as the ancients did.
It’s easy to excuse yourself, to remember that Scott recommended ‘the laudable practice of skipping’ and that Dr Johnson incredulously, perhaps scornfully, asked Boswell, ‘Sir, do you read books through?’ Clearly he often didn’t do so himself, years of hack-writing in Grub Street having taught him the craft of gutting a book. Yet, as his edition of Shakespeare makes clear, he was also capable of being a close and attentive reader, such as we might all wish to be.
Better (perhaps) to skip than be bored, even though, according to Nietzsche, only the higher animals have the ability to be bored. In his Diary of a Bad Year J. M. Coetzee’s narrator remarks, ‘I read the work of other writers, read the passages of dense description they have with care and labour composed with the purpose of evoking imaginary spectacles before the inner eye, and my heart sinks.’ Here, however, it may not be a question of flagging concentration, though in youth, one suspects, he might have read these passages more attentively, despite adding, ‘The truth is, I have never taken much pleasure in the visible world, and don’t feel with much conviction the urge to recreate it in words.’ Fair enough, each to each, but the absence of the ability to feel that pleasure cuts the speaker off from a deal of literature.
We all know of books we have always intended to read and of people who have reserved particular authors for their old age, only to find the desire to read them, or the ability to respond, has evaporated. In Maugham’s Cakes and Ale the narrator looks round the books in the elderly, distinguished author’s study and wryly suspects ‘that nowadays if Driffield read anything at all it was the Gardener’s Chronicle or the Shipping Gazette, of which I saw a bundle on a table.’ How to keep on going, how to continue to take an interest in things: these are questions that we are all faced with as the shadows lengthen. Easy to conclude that it doesn’t matter. Yet, for anyone who has spent much of his life, and many of its happiest hours, reading, the discovery that one can no longer be bothered with the classics must be painful. The answer is fortunately obvious. Just as the muscles of the body have to be kept active if they are not to atrophy, so too with the mind. So: set oneself a task: one classic novel a month, perhaps, or one Shakespeare play or long poem. If not positively rejuvenating, this may at least keep senility at bay. Reading, for instance, Anthony Powell’s late Journals, one finds him continuously and admirably returning to Shakespeare in a spirit of enquiry and with critical acumen well into his late eighties.
That said, journals and diaries offer happy and easy reading for those of us who fear our powers of concentration are weakening. You flit here and there, dip into this week or that one, unconcerned that you may have lost the thread of the argument, for there is neither thread nor argument, merely random jottings and wayward, if interesting, reflections. Which is of course why Simon Gray’s diaries are so addictive for readers; also, I would guess, for the author.
Allan Massie
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