Books, The Literary, The Grandeur of Reading

 I knew I would not be fashionable when I decided to try again to write fiction - too old, too Midwestern, Reading Christian Lorentzen's Literature Without Literature made me feel even less fashionable.

It is strange to hear of a subject needing to be restored to the discipline that claims to study it. But it’s characteristic of an age when literary discourse is in flight from the literary, in favor of the personal, the political, or, more often, the consumerist and careerist, in favor of thinking about systems instead of individuals, which is to say writers. At the conjuncture of these tendencies is another set of institutions perpetually said to be in crisis – because of the public’s failure to read enough books; because of questionable business decisions; because of the threat of new technologies to books themselves; or simply because of the rising costs of paper – that is, the publishing industry.

What made me think would be an essay on the vagaries of a writing career:

In the autumn of 1948, H.L. Mencken visited Hergesheimer at his home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, between Atlantic City and Cape May. He found his friend drinking mug after mug of beer, suffering from an eye infection, and full of complaints about Knopf, which had let his books go out of print. ‘In theory, he has been at work on his autobiography, but in fact he has done nothing,’ Mencken wrote in his diary. ‘He has written nothing fit to print in more than ten years. It is a dreadful finish indeed.’ Hergesheimer died in 1954, and was buried on the South Jersey Shore. A friend of mine who hails from nearby and read a couple of Hergesheimer’s novels after coming across his name in one of Mencken’s books assures me that there’s a plaque by the beach, on a pleasant street with an ice-cream parlor and a mini-golf course, that bears the name of Hergesheimer. Such is the nature of most American literary immortality.

only for it to become an argument for reading and the virtues of writing:

Pleasure is why we read literature, but the pleasures literature delivers are complex and not easily described, defined, or fixed in time and place. As Guillory writes, the pleasures of literature are often only gained at the expense of pains: the initial pain of learning to read, the pain of understanding difficult books, the pain of grasping the literary history from which books emerge, the pain of looking at something we can’t yet comprehend though we know we could, the pain of examining the nature of our own pleasure. Perhaps it’s these pains that turn our eyes away from the pleasures of literature to the disenchanted explanations of political economy, to the suspicions of paranoid reading, to the preening pondering about what the books we enjoy say about us rather than what they say to us.

Life is lonely, painful, and punishing. On behalf of the freelance book reviewer/London litmag office/Downtown Manhattan scene superorganism that speaks through me, I assert that reading and writing are best done in perfect solitude; that sometimes what you read and what you write should be kept a secret; that when you’re by yourself popularity doesn’t matter, nor does money, nor does fame, nor does status; that when you are a teenager and you have shut yourself into a room to read Kafka for the first time, your parents and your little sister should stop knocking on the door because you are turning into something else, something they will never understand.

Writing has kept my depression at bay. I do fear what will happen if I stop. No, I do not have a felicitous style. Nor do I have any idea if anyone is interested in what I have to say about the world in which I live. Publishing seems highly unlikely. Having one reader will be enough.

sch 7/21