Experience Of Reading

Philip Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134911998
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1991. This book is written with the intent to reach serious readers in and outside a university through joint mental contact with serious writers of the present and the past. To get whatever there is to be got out of this book, a reader should also read or have read (at least) Bernard Malamud's A New Life, Saul Bellow's Herzog and Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, so that we can work together.

1
THE REALITY OF READING

READING: WHAT IS GOING ON?

A young literary man, old enough to criticize, considered the case of his father, a minister:

After being tossed about from congregation to congregation in the heats of the Unitarian controversy, and squabbles about the American war, he had been relegated to an obscure village, where he was to spend the last thirty years of his life, far from the only converse that he loved, the talk about disputed texts of Scripture, and the cause of civil and religious liberty.¹

He looked at how his father now spent his days, towards the end of his life. What was the old man up to?

Here he passed his days, repining, but resigned, in the study of the Bible, and the perusal of the Commentators—huge folios, not easily got through, one of which would outlast a winter! Why did he pore on these from morn to night (with the exception of a walk in the fields or a turn in the garden to gather broccoli-plants or kidney beans of his own rearing, with no small degree of pride and pleasure)?

‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, p. 505

A diminished patriarch is reading, day in and day out, in the Holy Fathers. ‘A father’, cries Saul Bellow’s Herzog at the terrible childhood memory of his own father weeping, ‘A sacred being, a king.’ The king is nearly dead. ‘Why did he pore on these folios from morn to night?’ The son knows full well why. My father is reading his disappointed life away, dozing and dozy amidst his old religious books:

Here were no ‘figures nor no fantasies’—neither poetry nor philosophy—nothing to dazzle, nothing to excite modern curiosity; but to his lacklustre eyes there appeared within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the patriarchal wanderings, with palm-trees hovering in the horizon, and processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there was Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes, types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets; there were discussions (dull enough) on the age of Methuselah, a mighty speculation! there were outlines, rude guesses at the shape of Noah’s Ark and of the riches of Solomon’s Temple; questions as to the date of the creation, predictions of the end of all things; the great lapses of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it was in a slumber ill-exchanged for all the sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father’s life was comparatively a dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come.

p. 506

‘Nothing to excite modern curiosity’, ‘the last fading thinness of the understanding’, a soul (itself ‘ponderous, unwieldy, neglected’) in slumber. The old man is as battered as his books. But still, pressed down and worn, there were for those old shortsighted eyes ‘glimpses, glimmering notions’. The son saw something of what even the turning of a single page revealed to the father: for it was as if the Book were still the World, with the globe itself turning and its history unfolding at the very movement of ‘the voluminous leaf, as it turned over’.

The son feels ambivalent, and that is appropriate. To him this is an old man’s fantasy, but he also knows that this fantasy is his father’s imaginative reality, higher to him than the highest secular thought. It was but ‘a dream’ yet a dream ‘of infinity and eternity’. And this ambivalence is right for two reasons. First, ambivalence is appropriate to the old man’s case: who would (and Who may) willingly wake him from his aged dreams? And second, being in two minds seems the well-nigh natural product of a son’s critical relation to an old man who is also still his father.

For the son thought he saw through his own father. He felt the satisfaction as well as the pain of being no longer merely subordinate to an immediately preceding reality. But what are such sons then to do with their own adulthood, their own inner freedom and detachment? Reading, writing, growing-up, trying to re-understand the past you have come out of in search of the future you are going into—these seem part of the project for such people who want to try to make and re-make lives of their own. For better or worse, or both, to this son, literature had replaced the religion of his father—and this may stand as an image for a tendency in our own time.

The book you are now reading is, accordingly, about reading and its relation to living. It is also about young and old, about realism and imagination in art, and about the religious and the secular. It is, moreover, a book troubled in all these areas by paradoxes and by ambivalences, first thoughts struggling with second thoughts, the fathering notions and the reappraisals of the son. And my biggest uncertainty, unsurprisingly enough, concerns what is really ‘real’ in this life and the relation of literary fictions to that supposed reality. For is this a foolish thing to have aimed for: that I have wanted books to help me make a real life of my own?

The son we have been looking at is the Romantic man of letters, William Hazlitt. The passage above is only an incidental moment in an essay which deals with the more ‘modern’ concerns of the secularized son—poetry and philosophy. For the essay describes Hazlitt’s first meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge—incongruously, in his father’s own house. Yet one of the chance beauties of the thing is that, in an essay ostensibly on Coleridge, Hazlitt found himself suddenly turning back to write about his father instead. Without perhaps realizing it, Hazlitt was finally drawing, in words, the very portrait he had attempted when his ambition was to be not a writer but a painter—the portrait of his own father.

One of my first attempts was a picture of my father, who was then in a green old age, with strong-marked features, and scarred with the smallpox. I drew it with a broad light crossing the face, looking down, with spectacles on, reading. The book was Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, in a fine old binding, with Gribelin’s etchings. My father would as lieve it had been any other book; but for him to read was to be content, was ‘riches fineless’. The sketch promised well; and I set to work to finish it, determined to spare no time or pains. My father was willing to sit as long as I pleased; for there is a natural desire in the mind of man to sit for one’s picture, to be the object of continued attention, to have one’s likeness multiplied; and besides his satisfaction in the picture, he had some pride in the artist, though he would rather I should have written a sermon than painted like Rembrandt or like Raphael.²

Again the ambivalence feels right. Hazlitt’s may be the apparently objective philosophic eye here (‘there is a natural desire in the mind of man’), but from whom did William Hazlitt derive his love of reading? In turn, moreover, the father sees the boy whom he has in a sense partly created now re-creating the father, in paint, in words. That is how art is important in a life: it can turn things round, it can turn things back, minutely calculating the precise degree of relation between past and present, between writer and subject-matter. But still the father, as proud of his son the painter as of himself the subject of a portrait, would have been ambivalent on his side too—only half-pleased, even if the son had been another Rembrandt. ‘The sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals’—that was best and first.

Yet when I recall Hazlitt’s short pen-portrait of his scholarfather reading in Hebrew, language of patriarchs, I still do think of Rembrandt’s portraits—of his own mother reading the Bible, of ageing scholars in their lofty rooms, of the old man in the armchair or the apostle Paul at his desk. Never is Hazlitt so close to Rembrandt as when he writes of the father who would have doubted the achievement. We stare at Rembrandt’s portraits: at the faces of the old in the dark, reading and thinking, their fingers following page or worrying brow—as though to make us try to feel out what is going on in the mind behind the painted exterior.

Most of all, then, this book is about what goes on, in that near dark, when we read.

*

What is going on inside the old man? asked Hazlitt. And what, we may also add, is going on inside this young one?

The last page was read…. Then, in order to give the tumult, too long unleashed within me to be able to calm itself, other movements to govern, I would get up, I would start walking alongside my bed, my eyes still fixed on some point one would in vain have looked for in the room or outside, for it was situated at a soul’s distance only, one of those distances which are not measured in meters and leagues like the others, and which is, besides, impossible to confuse with them when one looks at the ‘distant’ eyes of those who are thinking ‘about something else’. Then what? This book, was it nothing but that?³

Even temporarily, something real goes on somewhere in the act of reading. What is extraordinary here is the experience of a physically agitating but essentially non-physical dimension of reality. The agitated youth is not looking at something physical and yet, whatever it is that has been set off in him by reading, he has to react physically, as if somehow to walk it off. It is as though the mind can hardly bear the pure experience of the thoughts within itself.

Question: What is it that is not entirely physical and yet has a physical effect?
Answer: A book. A book, not just as words on pages, but as something coming out of one mind and re-entering the thoughts and feelings of another, as if that book were a substantial reality.

The youth we have been looking at is the young Marcel Proust: ‘my eyes still fixed on some point one would in vain have looked for in the room or outside…the “distant” eyes of those who are thinking “about something else”.’ Although it might seem to be an odd thing to say, an observer would thus have to report that Proust’s eyes were thinking: that is to say, looking outside only in order to steady something inside him which could not literally be seen, even by himself, and yet something which also seemed too real and uncontainable a vision within to be externally subsumed.

Proust describes a similar bursting experience in later years: a poet, gazing at a tree for an hour, seems to be simultaneously looking into himself to see what it is that the manifestation of the mere tree stands for, that it should thus be a sudden and temporary holding-place for his power—

once these manifestations appear, and grow stronger, and stand out strongly against the background of his mind, they aspire to come out from him, for whatever is to endure aspires to come out from whatever is fragile, decrepit and may perish this very evening or be no longer capable of giving birth to it…. When [the manifestation] is aspiring thus to spill itself, see how the poet walks: he is afraid of spilling it before he has the receptacle of words into which to pour it.⁴

Get it out before it is lost or merged! But we have just seen how in his youth the frustrated non-poet, though poet-to-be, walks and spills: ‘in order to give the tumult other movements to govern, I would start walking alongside my bed.’ Head in a book, the boy could hardly bear to be interrupted by the grown-ups around him, for fear of spilling his vision:

She thought she had to say: ‘You’re not comfortable like that; what if I brought you a table?’ And just to answer: ‘No, thank you’, you had to stop short and bring back from afar your voice which from within your lips was repeating noiselessly, hurriedly, all the words your eyes had read; you had to stop it, make it be heard, and, in order to say properly: ‘No, thank you’, give it an appearance of ordinary life, the intonation of an answer, which it had lost.

On Reading Ruskin, pp. 100–1

It is as if he has been in a different world, a more real dimension of being, ‘from afar’. But when he has finished the book and returned to ‘ordinary life’, he feels even worse than when he was interrupted in the reading of it, for he is left saying to himself,

Then what? This book, was it nothing but that?

He is left like that because he never re-transmitted the verbal messages into something that could thwart their fleetingness.

This present book is itself concerned with just that worry about the use of books—what to do with them after you have read them and are left in the so-called real world again, uncertain of the place of the power your reading has awoken. Young Proust finds himself with a book he has now simply finished, a book whose ‘fate in the world, we understood now…was not at all, as we believed, to contain the universe and destiny, but to occupy a very narrow place in the library’ (On Reading Ruskin, p. 110). Like Hazlitt’s father, Proust thought he was reading a book which contained the world; but the book becomes turned inside-out again in the end, back into the world which contains so many books in so many libraries. What is the real size of books then, in proportion to that subject-matter within them which also exists outside them? It is as if the act of reading, once finished, were paradoxically seen as incomplete. ‘Then what?’

But the thought that reading is an incomplete act may not be a derogation of its status so much as a recognition of reading’s own internal challenge to go on, making its power less temporary and more complete. If only that young reader could have found the equivalent of physical release, not in just walking about, but in putting the experience of the reality of reading into words. The young boy walked about, his eyes fixed on some invisible point, the distant eyes of one thinking about something else. What point? What distance? Where? Won’t its place of existence perish that very evening?

One young man, however, did get such an experience of reading down on paper, as though reading pushed for something more from readers in order to complete it, calling for an equivalent to ‘message received’.

Thomas De Quincey describes what it was like for him on first reading Wordsworth’s ‘There was a boy’:⁵

he describes a mountain boy planting himself at twilight on the margin of some solitary bay of Windermere, and provoking the owls to a contest with himself, by ‘mimic hootings’ blown through his hands…. Afterwards, the poem goes on to describe the boy as waiting, amidst ‘the pauses of his skill’, for the answer of the birds—waiting with intensity of expectation—and then, at length, when, after waiting to no purpose, his attention began to relax—that is, in other words, under the giving way of one exclusive direction of his senses, began suddenly to allow an admission to other objects—then, in that instant, the scene actually before him, the visible scene, would enter unawares—

‘With all its solemn imagery’—

The complex scenery was—What?

‘Was carried far into his heart,
And all its pomp, and that uncertain heav’n received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.’

This very expression, ‘far’, by which space and its infinities are attributed to the human heart, and to its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation.⁶

‘The “distant” eyes.’ Your inner voice ‘from afar’ repeating noiselessly all the words your eyes had read. At that moment the word ‘far’ not only penetrates De Quincey’s imagination but actually creates his consciousness of the real existence of that interior dimension. ‘Space and its infinities attributed to the human heart.’ And with that word ‘far’ which now seems so much more than a word and is become a mental thing. De Quincey can barely tell the difference between what is in front of his eyes, as Wordsworth’s experience, and what is behind his forehead as his own imagination. Both are ‘carried far into his heart’ at the same time.

When words and books become real in that way, it feels as De Quincey says, like a revelation.

*

A revelation: say for a moment, with possible objections suspended, that reading—mere reading albeit at its most intense—is in fact that big a thing. If it is, how can we break out of the normalization that implies that reading is just a son of vicariously small, passively pleasurable, second-rate activity? Even the young Proust can only describe what is going on inside him negatively, via a baffled view from outside, while De Quincey cannot get much farther than the revelatory word of his poet. Neither quite writes out of the interior realm which their reading discloses to them—even when reading’s breakthrough seems to have been the very making available to them of that inner realm. Throughout this book I shall be asking: how can reading complete itself within a human life? What happens to its effect?

But let me start the questioning with this thought-experiment: what if reading were really as big as the following—taken from a work of science fiction—but we didn’t normally realize it? I will quote at length to set the imagined scene, which comes from Olaf Stapledon’s Last Men in London. What if this is what serious reading is really like:

Our work demands that the mind shall be isolated from the contemporary huma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Reality of Reading
• 2 The Cart and the Horse (I)
• 3 The Cart and the Horse (II)
• 4 Ancient and Modern (I)
• 5 Ancient and Modern (II)
• 6 ‘Effective English’
• Afterword
• Notes