The one reliable

In The New Statesman, an Oxford college head reminds us the best companion is always a book:

Literature ought to be the most accessible of disciplines. Yes, it will help with your in-depth understanding of the character of Levin in Anna Karenina if you know a little bit about the history of the emancipation of the serfs, but “public understanding” of the novel’s core matter – getting married, getting bored, falling in love with someone else, committing adultery – is within the grasp of any literate grown-up human being. In the late 20th century, however, there was a sustained assault from within the profession of literary studies on the very idea of common humanity and (Virginia Woolf’s phrase) the “common reader”. If a student said, “Yes, I know that Anna Karenina is a fictional creation but I understand how she must have felt and this understanding helps me to understand myself,” they would be told, “It is an error to treat a literary character as anything other than a rhetorical or linguistic or formal or historical or social or gendered construct; all literary texts are racked with fissures, gaps and self-contradictions, and all authors are locked within the ideological frameworks of their age; that is what it is our business to unpack, critique and deconstruct.” And the student would become rather miserable, lose their love of books and go off to do a postgraduate law conversion course.

Over the past few weeks I have been reading four enormously enjoyable books about the pleasure of reading. The richest of them is Curiosity by Alberto Manguel, a Canadian writer, editor, translator and critic who “would rather define himself as a reader”. The other three are collections of essays, by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann; James Wood, resident literary critic at the New Yorker; and Clive James, the “memoirist, poet, translator, critic and broadcaster”. It is striking that none of them has made it their profession to teach literature at a university (though Hofmann and Wood supplement their earnings with visiting faculty positions). It is even more striking that the kinds of things they say would never (well, hardly ever) be said by a professor in a department of English: “art is the nearest thing to life” (Wood, quoting George Eliot); “This transmigration of souls is literature’s modest miracle” (Manguel on how “if we recognise ourselves in Cordelia today, we may call Goneril our sister tomorrow, and end up, in days to come, kindred spirits with Lear, a foolish, fond old man”); “Ted Hughes is at least arguably the greatest English poet since Shakespeare” (Hofmann); “Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it” (James, on reading and rereading in the knowledge that he is in the endgame of a life of reading).

These are books about how books help us to be thoughtful, feeling human beings. They are works of empathy even as the spirit of criticism shines through them, provokingly in Hofmann, very subtly in Wood, sometimes flashily but always sincerely in James. “Books have been useful to me,” wrote Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century, “less for instruction than as training.” “That,” writes Manguel, whose book is really a series of interlocking essays inspired by Montaigne – divagating, spiralling dizzily through world literature but always circling back to Dante’s Divine Comedy– “has been precisely my case.” Manguel writes of his “friendship” with Montaigne, dating it back to his adolescence: “his Essays have since been for me a kind of autobiography, as I keep finding in his comments my own preoccupations and experiences translated into luminous prose”. I would say the same of my relationship with William Hazlitt, the English Montaigne, but as a professor of English literature I will be considered mildly heretical in saying anything so personal.

Montaigne himself wrote a wonderful essay suggesting that the three best things in life are friendship, sex and reading, and the best of the three is reading. Your friend may die, your sexual partner may betray you, but literature is always there. He did, however, concede, “Reading has its disadvantages – they are weighty ones: it exercises the soul, but during that time the body remains inactive and grows earth-bound and sad.” As a young man, Montaigne would have added riding as a fourth great pleasure, but his love of physical exercise was curtailed by a near-fatal accident involving a runaway horse. An article in the Psychiatric Times in 2012 suggested that it was a combination of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that made him retreat to his library and devote the rest of his life to books. It is probably not a good idea to spend quite as much time with books as Montaigne did. If I have a criticism of the four lovely writers in whom I have been immersing myself, it is that they all seem a little library-bound. My digestion of their nourishing words has been assisted by frequent excursions to the tennis court, rather as Hazlitt read and wrote best after a game of fives, or enriched his friendships through brisk walks accompanied by book-talk.

Conversation is the key: the problem with “academic” literary analysis is that too often it sounds like talking at the reader or, worse, talking down to him or her. And the style is all too frequently that of the monologue. But the experience of reading the classics is a genuine dialogue with the dead. For Manguel, Dante and Montaigne are living presences. As is Conrad for Clive James (he made me think: “Yes, I must go back to Conrad, haven’t read him for years and years”). When James is dead he will live on through his books. Similarly, although I have never met Michael Hofmann, I feel, thanks toWhere Have You Been? (which, admittedly, is not a great deal more than a collection of book reviews), as if I have had a conversation with an enthusiastic friend who has told me what I should read next. It will, if you want to know, be the Canadian poet Karen Solie, whom he describes as “the one by whom the language lives”.