The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

“Neither does one of Keats’s poems,” I said, “or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The odour of a rose doesn’t come to anything—bring one anywhere. It would be hard to tell what one really gets out of the taste of roast beef. The sound of the surf on the Atlantic doesn’t come to anything, but hundreds of people travel a long way and live in one-windowed rooms and rock in somebody else’s bedroom rocker, to hear it, year after year. Millions of dollars are spent in Europe to look at pictures, but if a man can tell what it is he gets out of a picture in so many words there is something very wrong with the picture.”

The P. G. S. of M. gave an impatient wave of his hand. (To be strictly accurate, he gave it in the middle of the last paragraph, just before we came to the Atlantic. The rest is Congressional Record.) And after he had given the impatient wave of his hand he looked hurt. I accordingly drew him out. He was still brooding on that novel. He didn’t approve of the heroine.

“What was the matter?” I said; “dying in the last chapter?” (It is one of those novels in which the heroine takes the liberty of dying, in a mere paragraph, at the end, and in what always has seemed and always will, to some people, a rather unsatisfactory and unfinished manner.)

“The moral and spiritual issues of a book ought to be—well, things are all mixed up. She dies indefinitely.”

“Most women do,” I said. I asked him how many funerals of women—wives and mothers—he had been to in the course of his life where he could sit down and really think that they had died to the point—the way they do in novels. I didn’t see why people should be required by critics and other authorities, to die to the point in a book more than anywhere else. It is this shallow, reckless way that readers have of wanting to have everything pleasant and appropriate when people die in novels which makes writing a novel nowadays as much as a man’s reputation is worth.

The P. G. S. of M. explained that it wasn’t exactly the way she died but it was the way everything was left—left to the imagination.

I said I was sorry for any human being who had lived in a world like this who didn’t leave a good deal to the imagination when he died. The dullest, most uninteresting man that any one can ever know becomes interesting in his death. One walks softly down the years of his life, peering through them. One cannot help loving him a little—stealthily. One goes out a little way with him on his long journey—feels bound in with him at last—actually bound in with him (it is like a promise) for ever. The more one knows about people’s lives in this world, the more indefinitely, the more irrelevantly,—sometimes almost comically, or as a kind of an aside, or a bit of repartee,—they end them. Suddenly, sometimes while we laugh or look, they turn upon us, fling their souls upon the invisible, and are gone. It is like a last wistful haunting pleasantry—death is—from some of us, a kind of bravado in it—as one would say, “Oh, well, dying is really after all—having been allowed one look at a world like this—a small matter.”

It is true that most people in most novels, never having been born, do not really need to die—that is, if they are logical,—and they might as well die to the point or as the reader likes as in any other way, but if there is one sign rather than another that a novel belongs to the first class, it is that the novelist claims all the privileges of the stage of the world in it. He refuses to write a little parlour of a book and he sees that his people die the way they live, leaving as much left over to the imagination as they know how.

That there are many reasons for the habit of reading for results, as it is called, goes without saying. It also goes without saying—that is, no one is saying very much about it—that the habit of reading for results, such as it is, has taken such a grim hold on the modern American mind that the greatest result of all in reading, the result in a book that cannot be spoken in it, or even out of it, is being unanimously missed.

The fact seems to need to be emphasised that the novel which gives itself to one to be breathed and lived, the novel which leaves a man with something that he must finish himself, with something he must do and be, is the one which “gets a man somewhere” most of all. It is the one which ends the most definitely and practically.