Does anyone want to be "well-read?"

"Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind," Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.

"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.

"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling? "Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados--or Trilling himself?"

I read through this list with dismay. I have read all but two of those writers, love some, and met five. Yet I know with a sinking feeling that Ozick asks the correct question. Who at this hour is reading them? Paul Goodman, whose books so deeply influenced and formed me? Edmund Wilson, a role model? James Farrell, whose naturalistic Studs Lonigan evoked a decade of Chicago life? Mailer, who boasted he had beaten all of his contemporaries?

How many of them have you read? Some, I suspect, but they belong to your past. Most of you will have read Ginsberg's "Howl," but how much more of his poetry? I have his collected poems on my shelf, but don't care to take them down. Whitman's poems, on the other hand, are at the side of my chair and I read one every morning. I have every one of Edmund Wilson's books, in the sublimely uniform Farrar Strauss & Giroux editions. Who cites him? Susan Sontag? Remembered for defining Camp.

The occasion for Ozick's sad litany was her review of the letters of Saul Bellow, the one figure among all those contemporaries she believes is still read and will endure. For the same magazine many years ago, James Atlas wrote an argument that the search for the Great American Novel can end, because Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is that book.

Yes, Saul Bellow is still read, and I am still reading him, and I confess I have no plans to return to any of the other authors on her list in whatever time I have remaining. I have, however, recently started reading The Ambassadors by Henry James for the third time. Soon I plan my third journey through Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, another author I believe will endure.

I have always read for pleasure. I once thought I might be a professor of English, and made it through one year of PhD study at the University of Chicago before recognizing that film criticism had captured me full time. I was not congenitally a good student, but I was influenced by my teachers as role models. In graduate school at Illinois I had one of the great Shakespeare scholars, G. Blakemore Evans, general editor of the Riverside Shakespeare. I'd read Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school, and then not another word until I entered his classroom. It was clear Evans knew Shakespeare and loved him. Visiting his office, so filled with musty volumes, I was captured by the romance of his occupation, started reading Shakespeare with a passion and never stopped--always using my worn-out Riverside edition, although I have three or four others.

I've written before about the mentor of my undergraduate years, Daniel Curley, he of the corduroy pants, Sears boots and rucksack. In English 101 he assigned us Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, James, Forster, Cather, Wharton, Joyce, Hemingway. I still read all of them. In 1960, he told us, 'What will last of Hemingway's work are the short stories and The Sun Also Rises.' Half a century later, I would say he was correct.

My first exposure to Henry James was the short story "The Real Thing." I thought no one had ever written sentences so obdurate and baffling. They had the fluency of a crossword puzzle. By the time I arrived at The Ambassadors, I was beginning to catch on. His sentences are a labyrinth of diffident but precise observation. In their construction is the creation of character; in their reluctance to boldly state something, we feel the reality of what goes unsaid.

Having read Great Expectations under some duress in high school, I went through seven years of college without ever encountering Dickens again. It was in about 1980 that I signed up for the Folio edition of Dickens, picked up Nicholas Nickleby, and was hooked. No one is more compulsively readable. But I had to come to that myself. Oddly, I started sooner on Trollope. "He is such a consolation," Curley told me one day in a London pub. "During the London Blitz, Trollope enjoyed an enormous popularity." Where should I start? I asked. "Oh, with the Barsetshire novels, I should say."

That's how I've done my reading: Haphazardly, by inclination. I consider myself well read, but there has been no plan. Reading Cynthia Ozick's article brought me up short: I realized I knew almost every writer she was referring to, and I realized they were no longer read. In deciding to begin this piece with the list of all the names in its second paragraph, I realized I would probably alienate many readers. I decided that was all right. This would only be of interest to those who knew a name or two.

All right, then. Bellow has lasted and may continue to last. Setting aside living writers, who is still read? I speak of considerable writers, not potboilers. Dickens, George Eliot, Austen and Trollope, and then some people get to Mrs. Gaskell. Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Kafka. Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal and Hugo. Poe. Mark Twain. James and Wharton. The big four Americans of the first half-century, Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. The smaller Americans, Chandler, Steinbeck, Hammett. John O'Hara? Not so much. Sinclair Lewis? Not at all. Nabokov. From Britain, Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Greene, Forster. Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, Wodehouse. From France, Georges Simenon endures and Camus hangs on. From South America, Borges and Marquez.

I do not mean to make a list. Many names and entire nations are missing. You will find those writers you enjoy, and value them. I have been in a little discussion recently about how readable Beckett's plays are. Every month or so someone pops up who has discovered Willa Cather and fallen under her vision. There are certain books that are milestones in my reading. I've been going through the 12 volumes of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time again. Later this year I will again pick up Paul Scott's The Raj Trilogy. On my shelf The Cairo Trilogy by Mahfouz is waiting.

There is no pattern. My only goal is to enjoy reading. I learn that he average American teenager spends 17 minutes a weekend in voluntary reading. Surely that statistic is wrong. Do they mean reading of "serious" novels? I would certainly count science fiction, graphic novels, vampires, Harry Potter, newspapers, magazines, blogs--anything. Just to read for yourself for pleasure is the point. Dickens will come later, Henry James perhaps never.

At the end of the day, some authors will endure and most, including some very good ones, will not. Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn't impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That's how you get pregnant. May you always be so.

Yes but you’re a literati type, most of your friends are probably also lit nerds. Most of my friends are SF/F and computer nerds, they don’t give a crap about Shakespeare. Throw out the English majors in the documentation department and I’m probably the only person in the room I’m in (of about 2 dozen) that’s voluntarily read Shakespeare. Constantly being performed doesn’t mean it has mass appeal, it’s a big world with a lot of people, even if just 1/2 of 1% give a crap about your stuff that’s still an audience of 30 million. That’s the fun of large numbers, you don’t really need mass appeal to find a “large” audience.

See I disagree with that statement. If it ain’t a good story I don’t want to read it, period, ever. Great language in the use of a bad story to me is wasted effort on the part of both the writer and the reader. The Great Gatsby is boring.

He’s the most popular writer in the world. However you define mass appeal he has more of it than any other writer. No most of my friends aren’t Lit nerds at all. Do your friends ever use these words in every day speech...

Advertising
Accused
Tomorrow
Fashionable.
Cater
Circumstancial.

All words coined by Shakespeare. Rather they are words that appear in his plays and there is no written record of them before his plays. He also invented the concept of character development.

Plot is a hanger on which literature is fastened upon.

No he isn’t. You’re confusing sales with popularity. Yes Shakespeare sells a lot, but he’s required reading for every high school kid in the English speaking world. To be popular people have to read your writing VOLUNTARILY, and out side of the lit nerd community basically nobody reads Shakespeare voluntarily. If most of your friends enjoyed the Shakespeare they had to read in high school then most of your friends are lit nerds.

Great he coined a bunch of words, what’s that have to do with the discussion. I didn’t say he wasn’t useful, or important, I said he wasn’t POPULAR that normal people do not voluntarily read his work.

Plot is the point of story. Literature is what lit nerds read and everybody else avoids after they get out of high school because most of it has no plot and is laden by insipid annoying “wow” language.

Popularity is being the most performed playwright in the world by far. The most adapted by far and the most quoted by far. Beethoven is more popular than Lady Gaga even though most people “on the street” voluntarily listen to the latter more than the former. Plot is an abstraction. It only comes out via language. Look at the opening sentence of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The language is the story. Does this not give you a chill down your spine?

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

Again look at the numbers. You don’t need to have mass appeal to have a large audience. And no, sadly, Lady Gaga is way more popular than Beethoven, for the exact same reasons that you are willfully ignoring. There’s a lot more that goes into it than “performances”. Actually the exact reason you listed as “even though” is why you’re 100% wrong on this front. The people on the street are the ones that decide what’s popular, and the people on the street listen to Gaga a lot and Beethoven never, Gaga is more popular.

Plot is story, it’s not an abstraction. Language is a tool to deliver plot.

And the first sentence of Finnegans Wake is typical stupid drunken Joycian garbage. No it doesn’t send a chill down my spine, it makes me ask “what the #$%^ is this idiot blathering on about”. The language is pointless authorial masturbation, flowery junk serving no purpose other than to be flowery junk. The only people that read that and like it are literati, the other 99.5% of the popular read it and go find something else to read.

Which writer is more popular than Shakespeare? Worldwide. (And no The Bible doesn’t count). According to the Index Translationum, Shakespeare is the third most translated writer in the world (after Agatha Christie and Jules Verne). His influence on the Western World obviously towers over Christie and Verne (as much as I like the latter).

Go somewhere in Asia or Africa to ask around - they don’t have a clue who Lady Gaga is but they probably know who Beethoven is. You’re confusing Mass Media saturation with popularity. In actuality, James Joyce is huge with the latter day inner-city ghetto. Gertrude Stein is big in the Barrio. (The last couple of sentences were jokes.)

King can poop on a piece of paper and sell 10 million copies, and all those purchases and reads are voluntary. Looks like your own data, apparently Christie and Verne are more popular than him too.

I’m not confusing anything. You’re confusing the meaning of the word popular:
regarded with favor, approval, or affection by people in general
of, pertaining to, or representing the people, especially the common people prevailing among the people generally

By your own admission the man on the street listens to more Gaga than Beethoven, that makes Gaga, according to the dictionary, more popular. You and I both know that more people chose to read Stephen King than Shakespeare, which again makes him more popular. Mass media saturation is the result of popularity, and sometimes makes popularity. Throw jokes if you want but out here in reality the stuff the people in ghettos are reading and listening to will probably have a bigger audience, ie be more popular, than most anything else just because there’s more of them than us. They are the people in general, the common people, what they regard with favor and approval, what pertains to and represents them IS popular by the very definition of the word.

In a generation no one will care about most of what has fleeting pop appeal now. Look at a best-seller list from the 1940s. Stuff like Lloyd C Douglas. Ever heard of him? Most of it is forgotten and out print (but Faulkner’s work from the time is still read).

Sure but so what? What gets carried over into the next generation has no effect on what’s popular NOW. You said Shakespeare IS the most popular, that’s not true. Yes 40 years from now Shakespeare will be more popular than anybody writing today, but he still probably won’t be more popular than the best sellers in 40 years, but that has no impact on who is most popular NOW, which was your statement.

A lot more people will recognize a quote from Shakespeare than any other work of fiction past or present. Even everyday people. A lot of more people will recognize the well known Beethoven pieces than Lady Gaga. You’re arguing a pretty silly assertion.

Recognition is NOT popularity, do I need to quote the dictionary to you again? You’re the one arguing a silly assertion, so silly in fact that you ALREADY PROVED IT WRONG. The classics ARE NOT more popular than the best sellers, maybe they should be in an ideal world, but this is reality and in reality more people will voluntarily listen to Gaga and read King today than can correctly SPELL Beethoven and Shakespeare. Why? Because Gaga and King are significantly more popular, that’s the simple truth and trying to say otherwise is an assertion so silly it’s frankly below your intellect. While I tend to disagree with everything you say, we are in completely different nerd camps after all, I respect you. If you keep trying to sell the foolishness that Shakespeare is now the most popular writer I will no longer be able to respect you. More lasting power than the current best sellers, yes; should be more popular, yes; is more interesting, yes; but is actually right now more popular, sorry that’s just plain dumb.

There is beautiful precise writing now too. I was an English lit student for years and read a lot of classics. So I enjoy books today either for their plots (I consider Rowlings a good plotster who can’t really write) or for their writing. A current genius in beautiful writing is the Australian writer who wrote The Book Thief. His words are delicious.

Shakespeare is generally reffered to as the most popular writer in the world. He has been for centuries. And more people will listen to and/or play Beethoven today than Lady Gaga. It’s really not a mystery. Add up all the music students in the world along with everyone who is a classical musician as a pro. Then add up all their audiences and amateur music lovers/players. Worldwide that’s a huge number and outranks Gaga’s multi-platinum status.

Jack Vance is just fantastic. Nobody writes dialogue like Vance. He stopped reading any speculative/sci-fi fiction about 60 years ago. He was there in mexico with Frank Herbert when Herbert came up with the idea that would become Dune; Vance thought the idea was so-so, and never read the book to this day, although Herbert was a good friend. I think the sci-fi aspects of Vance hid him from a lot of the literari who seem to only dig writing about self loathing people trapped in modern boring lives.

Here’s an hour long interview done with Vance last year (he’s in his early 90’s):

http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2010/06/08/aural-delights-no-140-kim-stanley-robinson-plus-jack-vance-interview-2/

For me it’s Jack Vance and the equally wonderful Gene Wolfe neck and neck, everybody else is somewhere behind those two.

Freegards

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