Last week I finished a Katherine Anne Porter novel and made G watch the movie with me. The moment the movie ended, I picked up another novel.
You should know: I may have an unhealthy relationship with novels. It may be a kind of mental illness. A fever. I do not know that this illness has a proper diagnosis, though I suspect it is related to addiction, various manias, and obsessive compulsion.
I am cheeky with the concept of mental illness: mental health and un-ness are social concepts. They reflect social values and conditions, and at the same time they are descriptions of something very real. They may describe a ‘problem’, but what is pathological in one context is a virtue in others. For starters, Joan of Arc: was she a saint or an epileptic? Maybe I’m insane. Maybe I’m a ‘lover of literature’. Tomato tomaato, I say.
We can look at my decades long love affair with Proust for an example of my weakness. Most human beings have never read him. The few who have done tend to come to it in some ‘literature’ course in college. A few of these already few may find, years later, that they still have the book but never actually finished it. The underlining stops in chapter three. (I have my father’s Swann’s Way, hardened by several decades on a shelf, yellowed, underlined up to page 40. It was my first.)
Proust, you see, is One Of Those Things. People know about him, but they don’t know him directly. Something Proustian might feature as an answer on Jeopardy. His face has been on postage stamps. People may not even know about the madeleine thing, but we’ve all heard some version of the way a taste can evoke an entire childhood. There is an in, chic crowd of physicists who cherish they way Proust spoke of space time. Proust is all sorts of apocryphal.
I though, being a wierdo, have four different sets of the seven novels, as well has several lost from their collection singles. I have boxed sets and used bookstore finds. I have half a dozen commentaries and I have coffee table art books and I have literary paraphernalia (ie, other authors who have written about Proust). I have a book on Proust and Paris. I have essays on Proust on Food. I have a book on being a flaneur and how to spend time well. There are Proustian things on mind and memory, perception and projection, homesexuality, love, Jewishness, The Novel, Modern Europe, and Modernity period. There are all sorts. I have all sorts.
I don’t know how many times I have read À la recherche du temps perdu in its monumental entirety. More than ten. Sometimes I’ve read all seven novels in order. Sometimes I read one of them independently. Sometimes, it has been a passage stolen away into the afternoon just for the memory: I read for the flood of scent, the bloom in the brain, like you might take out a photo album or old love letter, more to touch and lift to your nose than anything. Do people do that any more? Have photo albums? Love letters? Or do they scroll back through their Facebook memories and search their time line?
I am in a different chapter of my life every time I read him, and this has been one of the reasons put forward to read him. To experience Proust in love, or Proust on sex, or Proust on technology as a young person is different than to read him as an adult, and different again as an elder.
Interestingly, it is through the process of reading him again that I come to some understanding of that chapter in life; where I am, and who, and what matters. I am a different person now, I realize, lifting my eyes to the window and noticing it has begun to rain. Or that the night has passed. Or that it is still Winter. I realize that love is not what it was: how strange. Nor is ‘home’. Nor is memory. Literature helps us to know ourselves, I mean. That’s what they say. I’d argue no one but no one does it as delicately as Proust does.
He says it himself: “the essential book,” he says, “the one true book, is one that the great writer does not need to invent, in the current sense of the word, since it already exists in every one of us — he has only to translate it.” That is: a good book is a tool of both discovery and recovery. It is the abstraction of intimacy, and intimately changeable, which starts in on a changeability within ourselves. E.B. White suggested that reading possesses “a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.” And Susan Sontag, saint to my reckoning, writing to Jorge Luis Borges, said “Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you,” she continued, “that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects.”
Why I should need to be so horribly deep about it is up for debate: couldn’t I, like a normal reader, just slip through a beach read over spring break? Why can’t I have a single oh, I like her or oh, that is like my marriage or oh, my family was like that too? and go on with my life, perhaps to swim in the pool or eat a club sandwich? But I’m not like that. Never have been.
Literature, as James Baldwin points out, helps us survive: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”Wrapped up in our own ignorance and suffering, a book can reveal other worlds, incite compassion, and challenge our biases. Or it may be that a book gives us help in a world and society which lacks help, lacks love, is bare of courage. Critical thinking and imagination - both things culled by reading - are requisite to understanding a complicated world and coming to believe that there might still be hope, purpose, value. If not always happy endings.
Literature (art? maybe a different conversation. Maybe not.) beckons, soothes, deepens, it challenges us. It is wholly worthless and inarguably precious. Azar Nafisi, one of my favorite writers on books, says “Reading does not necessarily lead to direct political action, but it fosters a mindset that questions and doubts; that is not content with the establishment or the established. Fiction arouses our curiosity, and it is this curiosity, this restlessness, this desire to know that makes both writing and reading so dangerous.”
I think literature (art? maybe a different conversation. Maybe not.) is a primary teaching in embodiment. I claim intimacy enough with Proust to think he’d agree with me; all his writing on insomnia and chronic illness and the memory of flashing legs running is proof of this. Nothing brings up the fact that I have musculature, and eyes, and a stomach, so well as engrossment in a book. This goes back to childhood, when I compulsively read National Velvet every single night after going to bed. That reading was profoundly ritualized, and profoundly somatic. I needed to have a glass of milk on the bedside table. I would only take a sip between chapters, but I must be finished with the milk before I closed the book. It had to be that way. There was something particular about the tone of the lamp light and dark of the night against the window that I can remember even now, and the memory is less a sensation of nostalgia than one of overwhelming, hopeful, hungry love. I had to arrange the pillows in a particular way that supported my elbows and I laid on my back with my knees bent to prop the heavy book on my thighs. The reading was as much about the sensual experience of reading as it was about the story, which I’d read so many times I could hardly be said to be reading it. It was about the weight of the book, and the softness of the old pages, and the smell and heft of the paper. I believe I was in first grade.
As a teenager, run away and drop out, I discovered the weirdly sensual delight of reading a novel straight through. I mean straight through. I mean for the 15 or 12 or 36 hours that it took - avoiding other people entirely, refusing to answer knocks at the door or a ringing phone - generally not eating and sleeping until I absolutely had to. I know few pleasures like that of falling asleep when I physically cannot read any longer, only to wake and immediately begin reading again. The taste of an apple or a cold dish pulled directly from the fridge, no time for slicing or heating or cooking - are some of the most nourishing and tantalizing food choices I know. Oh what a lovely mere hunk of bread. No pack of cigarettes has ever been so lovely as one gone through to empty in the reading of a good book. No cup of coffee so good as the one drunk while standing turning pages over the kitchen counter.
My first reading of Lolita was like this. It came with me from the library to a boyfriends’s apartment in Minneapolis. He occasionally knocked on the bedroom door and asked if I was alright. I heard a party begin, wax, piddle, and disperse on the other side of the cheap pre-fab door as I desperately followed Humbert and Lo from one motel to the next, careening toward the inevitable. A few years later, I read the Brothers K in a two or three day stretch in Paris. There were a handful of jobs that I skipped showing up for because I was finishing some novel. Horrible to think, but I know The Bell Jar was one of these penty petulant reads and that it happened in a psyche ward. I also remember that this was one of the chief problems of psych wards: they take your shoelaces, and cigarettes, but they also refuse you books. How I managed to get Sylvia Plath in a place where your lunch tray may or may not have had cutlery is an interesting question. My current understanding of women’s madness and physical aversion to medical facilities starts to make a certain kind of sense. I understand how the thought of suicide arises, as she says, “coolly”. I know how grows in one, as she says, “like a tree or a flower”.
I mean honestly - several of the times I skipped class it wasn’t to smoke behind the playground or run off into town: it was to hide away somewhere and read. My delinquency is arty. What started what? Chicken? Eggs?
I have never, in my life, been able to disappear long enough to read Proust in that delicious way. I do not know that such a thing is possible. Unless you are terribly rich.
I - like plenty of folks - have fantasies of becoming a renunciate or going to live in the woods. Ah the dream of reading and scribbling for the rest of my life! I may have more info on what renunciate life actually entails than other folks: I’ve looked into it. More than once. Because I simply do not fit out here. It turns out you don’t get to spend your life reading novels. You have to chop vegetables or do laundry or teach. Once in the monastery, you work as mechanic or a plumber or a cook or a receptionist. And on top of that job, you have all sorts of religious obligations like prayer at four in the morning, seven in the morning, noon, six, sundown, and at night. Belief in god is not actually a requirement, interestingly.
No. Proust has always been a kind of secret affair, carried out over the course of weeks or months. I steal away for an evening. I stay up too late. I have lunch dates midweek. I miss my bus stop. I glance about warily.
I do remember showing up at the local bar one night in Chicago, and telling a friend I had just finished the final chapters. She was literary, too. She was quite possibly one of the only people in my life who could wear leather pants and look sexy. She had a dream of writing trash romance/sex novels, as a way of secretly allowing her time to write and read what she really wanted to read. Like Anais Nin, I said. She nodded. Of course it didn’t work out for Anais. I do not know if it ever worked out for my friend. I haven’t spoken to her in 25 years. But that night she put her elbow on the bar and her chin in her hand and swiveled to look at me when I announced I’d just finished. Really? she said, blinking, tipping her head around and gazing into my face like I was hiding something. She said I deserved a star or a trophy. Then she pivoted to the bartender and shouted for celebratory drinks. It’s not everyday! she said. We tended to drink over everything, after all, so that blurs or perhaps makes the point that that afternoon was in fact quite momentous. I remember closing the book but being reluctant to actually set it down. I remember peeing for a long time because I’d been holding it. The bathroom in our Chicago apartment was 1930s pink and had a cut glass doorknob. My hair was long and I had no wedding ring: just a cheap metal thing I once stole from the first husband’s pinky as we petted. We were, after all, only 18 years old.
I have memories of reading Proust in Chicago, but I also remember him connected with a diner in Cambridge Square (rolled cigarettes, grilled cheese sandwiches). Of course, in Paris (Beaujolais, chestnuts). And in New York (Bleeker Street.). And New York (Upper West Side). And New York (Brooklyn), New York (Brooklyn), New York (Brooklyn.) I also seem to remember a snowy night in a Vermont bed and breakfast. There was a with a fireplace. In the bedroom! I seem to remember this as cheaply available suite because no one else was there and I could have it for next to nothing, though I don’t remember why I was there in the first place. I ate scones in the morning, book in hand, brushing crumbs from the floral duvet.
When the pandemic began, I started Proust all over again. I didn’t start at the beginning. No. I went looking for a certain passage about Italian painting. The world was in lock down and I was stir crazy. Proust discusses art with such exquisite detail that I found myself lonely for his understanding. I wanted to read about art if I couldn’t see it out in the world. It was only after reading through several passages this way that I decided I would, in fact, begin again at the beginning. What better time to discover lost time than a phantom time of life interrupted? It’s not like I had anywhere else I could be.
This edacious way of reading is so closely related to my other dubious character traits - addiction, introversion, seasons of what could be called depression, my running away and finding a room of one’s own somewhere where I couldn’t be found and wouldn’t be disturbed - that I actually stopped reading in the first year of being sober. I couldn’t read, first of all. I didn’t have the brain cells for it. Second of all, like an old haunt or the proverbial people places and things that will ‘trigger’ an addict into dangerous nearness - words and literature tended to spark up feelings and thinking and a particular mode of thinking - floody, graphic, propulsive - that was dangerously close to a whole set of feelings and behaviors that ended me in jail cells or on a park bench mid morning without any pants.
When I came back to reading, a year and a half sober, my books all boxed in my sister’s attic, it felt like a return from exile. I was so enthusiastic I began at the beginning. With the A’s. Austen! Asimov. Isabel Allende. Dorothy Allison. Mariano Azeula. Louis Aragon. Oh oh Aeschylus.
I felt seen. I felt welcomed. I felt chatty and exuberant and safe.
For the fact of the matter is, dangerous as reading can be, it is also among the most salutary and edifying and character building traits human beings have. Reading as balm. As hope. As education.
As discipline.
Proust says this, too: “Reading, unlike conversation, consists for each of us in receiving the communication of another thought while remaining alone, or in other words, while continuing to bring into play the mental powers we have in solitude and which conversation immediately puts to flight; while remaining open to inspiration, the soul still hard at its fruitful labours upon itself.”
My Yoga Life (let’s just call it that, shall we? To signify the whole complex of several daily hours of physical things, the collateral diet and sleep and bathing and philosophical things, the financial things and relational things and commitment things, all of which have taken different forms and ratios throughout the years but has more or less resulted in a complete change of character and demanded a whole thing called ‘lifestyle’ of me) has provided a pretty lovely reading situation by now.
I practice in the morning and then I walk the dog. I work after that. I read midday - which is a kind of practice. It is ceremony and refuge and indulgence. And it is protected. I stop reading to work again for most of the afternoon, and then make dinner. I read before bed. So you see, my days are boring. When we travel, or when G is out of town, there is not much difference to my schedule, except that while traveling I explore rather than work. Half the joy of traveling is in the actual traveling: the waiting in an airport, the hours spent with white noise and a few miles between you and the Atlantic roiling below: you can read for hours at a stretch, with convenient anonymous bathrooms you’ll never have to clean and passable coffees. When G isn’t around, I don’t make dinner but eat standing in the kitchen, nose in a book.
It’s not terribly unlike a renunciate life, I suppose.
I mean, for the most part, Being A Yoga Teacher limited my capacity to read, in the same way being a retailer or a parent would, but with self reflective and experimental qualities. Working with limitations eventually provided a flourishing, scheduled, sane approach to getting things read. A balanced diet of inspiration. Restricted binging. Yes I will read ravenously, but I must still eat lunch and get up at five in the morning. I stopped being a read-all-night person but I became one who reads for several scheduled hours midday. I show up where and when I am supposed to, now, which I never did before.
I still am prone to resent working, or the way my investment in chant and practice and mentorship takes time, money, and energy away from what could be massive reading. But I’m realistic about it now. I understand things like choice and decision making, avoidance and fantasy. I’m a big girl who understands Real Life and can more or less tolerate it. All that is true and I still plow through several novels a week. Unless I’m reading one novel, three or four times through. I read more, anyway, than the ordinary person. The only folks who read like I do tend to be Academic, or themselves Literary. Unlike them, what I read tends to be whatever in the hell I want to read. I’m lucky. I know it.
In other words - like in all the other ways - my Yoga Life has helped me sort out my character and life and body to figure out what is the gift and what is the weakness. What I can do and what I can’t. How exactly my strengths also tend to make me miserable. I dabble in the arts of a soul at fruitful labor upon itsself. And I know full well that it is nothing short of nerdity.
So. When I talk about reading, I want you to take it all with a grain of salt. I want you to understand exactly what I mean - how much I mean - when I say sometimes I can get a little carried away.
I am currently a wee bit carried away.
When I am finishing a novel, I procrastinate it’s ending. Like you avoid saying goodbye. Until I can’t any longer. Then I have a moment of crash, of post-coitum tristesse, of hangover or loneliness or grief.
In the blowback of finishing Ship of Fools, after having written about Catholicism and Ash Wednesday and the complexity of wanting what other people have, after shifting into early spring which is a profound kind of lenten, detoxification, purification and cleansing for me, and after dozens of conversations about purification with students, what I happened to choose while blowing dust off of bindings was a English Novel on Purity and Betterment and Good Womanhood. I chose Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. To wit: Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage
I am, indeed, a glutton.
Clarissa is one of the longest novels in history - up there with the anvil like War and Peace, Ulysses, and Infinite Jest. Clarissa is said to be even more dull, more prolix, more cumbersome and difficult and no-one-has-actually-ever-read-that than any of them.
The copy I have is just over 500 pages long, abridged clean and light. I purchased it used from the Strand on Broadway, for four dollars and seventy five cents. There is a movie ticket stub from the Film Forum tucked between pages 423 and 424, which elicits thoughts of a boy who studied at Colombia who used to walk around Soho with me all night long. My copy is a Signet Classic Edition, which fits fatly but lightly on the flattened palm of one hand.
The original, published more than 250 years ago, weighs in at over 950,000 words and was initially published in seven volumes. I’ve seen copies that are heavy as a bag of groceries, things that challenge the laws of binding. There have been several abridged versions of the book, along with all sorts of interesting arguments about blow hardiness, abridgment, what is the points and what is important and what is simply going too far.
If if sheer volumonisty wasn’t enough, Richardson’s novel is moralizing. It sermonizes and sighs and balderdashes. The book is penitential making by way of the cautionary ‘be careful lest thou doest get raped’ variety. Early peaks of British Empire, duelish men with swords, pontificating about women.
Why am I doing this to myself? I thought, chapters into Moral Rectitude. I extended my leg because my knee was going numb. I hungry eyed a pile of crisp, new, unread books on the dresser: novels by a Korean American woman, an exiled Chinese man, and a French Pulitzer winner. It has been said - and I agree - that the reading outside the white male canon is so good that we simply shouldn’t waste our time with it any longer. Further said: compulsory reading of the white literary canon is just one more way white supremacy is expressed and sustained in schools.
I am fed up with men writing on women’s virtue, and Christian ideas about purity, and white misinterpretations of history.
And yet…
There was something there. The difficulty felt important.
Richardson’s novel is epistalotory - told through a series of letters between four main characters. Published in 1748, it tells a story of a young woman who wants to be virtuous, and perhaps even independent (read, unmarried and wealthy enough to live thus). Her newly rich family wants to marry her off ‘suitably’ (read: to further increase their own wealth). Our heroine Clarissa resists. In correspondence with a young man who offers to help her escape, Clarissa no more wants to marry him than she does want to ‘pain’ her family. But the villain Lovelace tricks her, and once he has her, he isolates her from her friends and family, traffics her to the other side of the country, and puts her up in a house of ill repute. She holds herself aloof, he manipulates and wearies and threatens and lies. As she grows both more hysterical and religious, he eventually resorts to drugging her. He rapes her and leaves her to die within a year.
The plot of Richardson’s novel can be summed up in a sentence, but the telling goes on for nearly a million words. Why? “If you were to read Richardson for the story,” wrote Samuel Johnson, “your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.” We are, if we’re actually doing this reading of Clarissa thing, quite comfortably in the realm of suicide not being hyperbolic. “You must read him for the sentiment,” Johnson insisted, “and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.”
But what sentiment? There is a draconian way to approach Clarissa. Those who have read it belong to an elite, a special, a belonging kind of club in which the sentiment itself comes down to celebration of difficulty. I did it! like.
But there is also an understanding of time, of the worthiness and spending of time, the consequence and sentiment of time, a question of how to possibly get through, in which some folks have read Clarissa over the course of 11 months, which is how long the novel’s plot actually lasts. If we are to believe anything about what Richardson himself said and wrote about the novel, this slow, correspondence like read hits on many of the things Richardson himself claims to have been aiming at in using letters - “real time” he called it. Real time is evocative of a particular, sensual, moral experience. Some folks have taken to reading each of the letters on the date they are given in the novel, resulting in a need to wait several days for an answer, or to be flooded on the days in which the letter writer sends several notes in a row. The result, is said to be extraordinary. I can’t speak to it personally. But it immediately calls to mind the bitter and compulsive and wretchedness of breakups, times I’ve been waiting for a phone call from a hospital or an email that held my fate. Indeed: you get the sentiment.
But again, what sentiment?
I confess: I knew the plot. You can get plot on a fly leaf, a mere paragraph. I apologize if I’ve spoiled something for you, but my argument here is that spoil doesn’t actually happen. It does not in the least matter if I tell you the ending. When you come to the end, the sensation of being gutted is…well…it’s devastating.
Denis Diderot wrote an elegy for Richardson. “By novel,” he said, “ we have until now understood a tissue of fantastic and frivolous events which presented a threat to the taste and morals of its readers. I should like another name to be found for the works of Richardson, which raise the spirit, touch the heart, are permeated with a love for what is good.”
“All Europe once wept for Clarissa”, wrote critic Leslie Fielder in 1957. He was criticizing fellow critic Ian Watt, whose Rise of the Novel gives Clarissa only passing mention. In other words, there is - or was, at some point in History - a bathos, a sorrow, a grief, a compassion brought about by the novel and Fielder lamented not talking about that as part of the history of all novels. But here is the rub: describing women’s oppression - and at such length! - veers toward the salacious and distastefully shocking. Is description truth telling or is it pornography? Is pornography - or a holy book, if you want - morally right or wrong? Do they have the power of influence, or character building, or edification, or revolt?
Is there, I wondered, some three hundred pages in, a tangent from Richardson to contemporary doom scroll?
Or is there a difference between wisdom and information, purposiveness and time killing?
If so, what?
Richardson himself felt the story was morally moving. He felt that by reading, we would have various revelations and realizations and emotions would surface that would, in the end, move us toward good behavior. I’ll leave that, for now.
We should realize “the novel” at the time was still not really a thing. Richardson was inventing it as he went along. This is also interesting if we consider the idea that folks these days don’t in fact read, the novel and the book are arguably on the way out. I am asking: what is, and what is the point of, a novel? Any of the novels? I’m also asking, what comes next? Do we lose? Is there, perhaps, something as moral and as pure and as moving coming?
Is there hope?
Within a short fifty years of Clarissa’s publication, critics tended to turn the characters and events of Richardson’s novel into a ‘mythos’. Clarissa has been examined in sociological terms, decoding bourgeois ideology into social, economic, and sexual mores. There are the attendant conversations about cultural historical savvy: can we find ourselves in this mirror? Are we any different? Do we blush? Are we not, ourselves, a Lovelace? Have we not all participated in the destruction of a Clarissa? What happens when we begin to treat people as property?
This pressing on the text for ‘meaning’ has also taken even more abstract, archetypal forms: Clarissa as Woman, Gardens as Privacy, Swords as Penetration and all things sexual as Death wishy.
In the later half of the 20th century, Clarissa erupted into something of a renaissance. There were take back the night like epiphanies: Clarissa stood for the downtrodden oppressed, resisting the corrupt and depleted nobility. On the other, rape itself was discussed in Nietzschian, victim blamey, analytical ways: Clarissa was claimed to have been asking for it, or at least subliminally to have wanted it and Lovelace was compared to Miltonian, compelling, anti-heroic bad boy who you’re actually kinda attracted to.
I will close now, because I’m a wee bit carried away. I am going to to write about letters next. And love. And economics, social mores, marriage, sadness, and sympathy.
I tell you though, that in reading, I positively blushed.