Every Reader His Own Novelist

by WILSON FOLLETT

1

CIVILIZED man is competently defined as the reading animal; but that definition, like many another, only unwraps one outer layer of a mystery, leaving it the more mysterious. The obvious residual problem is a competent definition of reading itself. And that is a question so formidable that it is almost universally answered by overlooking it.

The latter-day system of brain teasing called semantics is an ostensible effort to extricate the rock-bottom facts from the superficial conventions of the reading process. But the semantic approach has its own elaborate technique of begging the question. It will teach you as a basic commonplace that a word gets its meaning, not from logic or its etymology or the dictionary, not even from usage, but from its immediate context; but your semanticist quails like any other academician at the point of telling you the whole truth about what the immediate context of a word is.

What we evidently need is a Higher Semantics, not only covering the way a sentence, a page, a book, a whole library gets its meaning from the context, but also laying it down as the law of laws that the principal part of any context is necessarily the individual reader—his prejudices and preoccupations, the way his mind works, the frame of mind he happens to be in, the person he can’t help being.

For what readers read, like what doers do, is chiefly what they are. We discover in printed pages, as in human beings, what we have it in us to look for, what we can refer the most readily to our own current or accumulated experience or to our momentary needs. Upon all that stands written we impose ourselves. Perusal intent enough to deserve the name is nearly as much an act of authorship as the author’s act of composition; and any author, if he could see exactly how his pearls look in the setting another intelligence is bound to give them, would have to admit that they have undergone a pretty wonderful sea-change, if indeed he did not cry out that they have merely been trampled by swine. Individuals being as various and inconstant as they are, it seems rather a marvel that two readers’ minds ever overlap far enough to reach even a crude working agreement on what a given piece of reading contains; or, for that matter, that one reader can agree with himself on the same point at two different times.

This would appear to be a sobering, perhaps even a frightening, reflection to two special practitioners in words: the literary critic, who is supposed to divine the ways in which a book is the same for all men at all times, and the socalled creative writer, who is supposed to command a magic of making all men the same for his book. Patently, these are conscious or unconscious votaries of the impossible — it perhaps makes little difference which.

For my part, I do not expect ever to come upon a more vivid disclosure of the reading animal in his true inwardness than I used to experience with some frequency in the presence of one who, as a reader, might be summed up as Everyman in excelsis. He was, as it happened, a writer too; an American writer who, since his lamentably early death, is sorely missed by more and, I dare say, better readers than will ever notice the disappearance of some now making a much louder noise in the world. I am referring to Thomas Beer, who wrote The Mauve Decade, a life of Stephen Crane, some slightly rarefied novels that no great multitude ever discovered, and dozens of Saturday Evening Post stories that not a few still read and many more recall with delight.

2

Over the production of his writing, even the parts of it that he considered trivial and transient, Tom Beer travailed, agonized, and generally tormented himself. He would keep his publisher hopefully announcing a next book season after season until it had become legendary long before anyone was to set eyes on a scrap of its manuscript. Whether, at any given time, a scrap existed was a toss-up, for until the final sustained rush of composition the process consisted of grinding out a few pages with inordinate pain and toil and then, with a gusto approaching bloodthirst, tearing up a whole block of chapters that it would cost desperate months to replace.

But Tom Beer’s conversation — especially when lubricated with the appreciable quantities of alcohol he insisted upon sharing with any companion of the moment — was another matter. It knew no such groping despairs. In a stolid monotone so quiet that no one but a stenographer would have appreciated its rapidity, without a gesture or a facial expression and almost without a pause, he would talk pure effortless literature for six, seven, eight hours at a stretch.

During some years I happened to be with him rather frequently in the combined capacities of a friend, a willing ear, and the sharer of one consuming literary interest. The evenings that I spent with him would begin before dusk in the Yale Club lounge or bar in Manhattan and end in his Yonkers living room after midnight, and all that any one of them would have needed to yield half of a new volume at least as fascinating as The Mauve Decade was the addition of the stenographer aforesaid — any passably nimble stenographer who could punctuate.

Now, what was chiefly remarkable about Tom Beer’s steady, remorseless oral output of felicity and wit was that no single turn of it ever purported to be his. All that he said was ostensible reporting of others, the great and the insignificant, the famous and the obscure, the living and the dead. His utterances were transfigured gossip. He was solely a purveyor of what (according to him) others had done, said, and written — especially written.

For his best, most fertile vein of all was the casual and rapid digest of sundry books and tales. The books seemed to have become part of him; he quoted from them verbatim by whole paragraphs. The tales, he conveyed as he rehearsed them in brief, were those rare ones that had saved him from dying of thirst in the alkali desert of modern fiction. His implication about his own talents throughout was that they were those of a dictaphone plus a somewhat exigent selective sense of what would be worth playing back. Considered as pure feats of memory his performances were, as they say in Hollywood, terrific.

Alas or hosanna, according to what one deems gain or loss, his performances were a good deal more terrific than any feat of memory. I caught my first substantial clew on a day when Beer undertook — in connection, as always, with something else — to give me a casual account of his first-published novel, The Fair Rewards. His modest assumption was, quite characteristically, that I either hadn’t read it at all or had read it as just another novel and promptly wiped it off my mental slate. Now, I knew The Fair Rewards pretty well, or thought I did; but if the novel I knew was, in theme, treatment, scope, or any of its implications, the one its author now described, then I was the world’s worst reader and a downright literary imbecile.

Naturally loath to accept so drastic a judgment offhand, I dug up The Fair Rewards and promptly reread it with microscopic care. There was no doubt about it: Tom had vividly described to me some novel he thought he had written, or wished he had written, or had originally intended to write, — possibly the novel he had torn up piecemeal in the course of evolving what was eventually published, — but certainly not The Fair Rewards as it was and is. There was simply no palpable connection, no handle or toe-hold for recognition. He might as well have delivered me a vivid synopsis of Madame Bovary with solemn assurances that he was commemorating Diana of the Crossways.

That curious experience set me to looking up various of his oral citations from favorite books and authors. Sometimes the authors, so far as I could find, had never existed. Sometimes they existed, but not the books from which he had quoted. If both author and book were actual, the passage I sought wasn’t, except as a figment of Thomas Beer’s strange mental necessities. It gradually dawned upon me that he was constantly re-creating the history and content, the whole range and substance, of literature to suit himself as a reader. Never from beginning to end, once I had begun to detect the pattern, did I catch Thomas Beer telling a story that I could run down or quoting a passage that I could verify by the book. All that ostensible reporting was, in truth, a calm orgy of invention.

The mystery, an abiding one, is the extent to which it can have been consciously so. For he was not trying to be funny; he was not showing off, unless it is showing off to be oneself without a mask; he was not indulging himself in any sort of esoteric practical joke. Obviously he did not at any time feel inventive. He was simply telling everything the way it had to be for nourishment of his personal taste. He could not help applying to everything the principle of Voltaire’s aphorism to the effect that God, if He did not exist, would have to be invented.

The ultimate test case, so far as I was concerned, occurred when Beer told me in rapid succession five magnificent stories by Viola Roseboro’, whose much reprinted “Aaron Westcott’s Funeral” is probably her best remembered if not her best performance. He gave their titles — all strikingly odd ones, as most of his own were —and named their places of original publication with the precision of a bibliographer. I could unearth neither any one of the five nor a record or evidence of one. Finally, goaded by intolerable chagrin that anyone should enjoy that casual access to masterpieces hidden from the commonalty, I posted over to Brooklyn and threw myself on Miss Roseboro’s mercy. She was kind enough to the inquiring stranger— did he not murmur that he was a friend of Tom Beer? — but she knew nothing of the stories and was steadfast in her guarantee that she was not their author. She had a vague, remote feeling that she had read one of the five very long ago, and her impression was that it must be among the printed works of Mrs. Edith Wharton.

It wasn’t.

3

No one, I trust, will construe the foregoing as a mere attempt to make Thomas Beer out a fantastic person. The point is solely that he possessed in its purest essence, in an extension to its own logical extreme, a trait that all of us share in our less brilliant degrees — a trait as inalienable as the shape of anyone’s cranium or the color of his eyes.

There are the facts of literature, and there are the facts of human nature, and of course the second set of facts is the very shape and organization of the universe in which the first set achieves any real meaning that it can be said to have. What a piece of reading means can be nothing other than what it means to somebody.

Accordingly, one would expect that that vast academic enterprise, the study of what people read or ought to read, would always accompany and depend upon the study of what the people are who do the reading. In actual fact the two studies are kept in separate and airtight lockers, and the professional consideration of literature takes place in a nearly perfect vacuum. The human nature that seems to interest littérateurs is just the human nature in books and the writers of them — that found in the characters of fiction and in its authors.

As for the readers, they are assumed to be, for practical purposes, all the same reader. Any such assumption is a flight of fancy as wild as the wildest extravagances of the most shameless romancer, and it ought to do away forever with the popular delusion that the academic mind runs to poverty of imagination. Patently, any two readers of a book are the same reader in about the sense that two sharers of a dinner are the same diner.

The attempt to consider a piece of literature as a thing-in-itself is doubtless prompted by the need for simplification, the wish to isolate a study within metes and bounds that the student can follow as we follow surveyors’ lines. To start from the premise that a piece of writing, if it is to be anything at all, has to be communication from one person to one person, that the profitable study of it is the study of an interaction, and that a book is not a book except by virtue of what it does to the single reader and he to it — that approach strikes the professor and the critic as committing them to a study beset by monstrous, by literally impossible difficulties and complexities.

In terror of these and by way of keeping their feet on the ground, they recoil from the complexities of the art that literature is to the simplicities of the science that it isn’t. So recoiling, they get the simplicity that they require; but it is the simplicity of a lie. They have created a subject that lends itself to orderly recitation in classrooms, but it defies by denying all the disorderly realities.

One of the disorderly realities is that no work of the imagination ever conceived is quite good enough in itself to give the reader a reward commensurate with the trouble it puts him to, to say nothing of the trouble it put the author to. The reader gets his reward by giving the work something of himself, — which is what reading is, — and he can’t very well give, on the mere recommendation of supposed experts, something that he hasn’t and isn’t.

It is, by the way, surpassing strange that neither the mentor nor his student appears ever to notice what a fascist attitude of mind is theirs, what a totalitarian and corporative state they are proposing to make of the world of letters. To ignore the individual differences of readers, to uphold the conception of the book as an engine for imposing one man’s ideas and values on the indistinguishable and regimented multitude of its readers — is not that to exalt in the sphere of literature the very autocracy that we resist to the death in the spheres of politics and economics? To test literature by its power to make all sorts and conditions of men as one man for its particular purpose, as if people existed to be conditioned by books and were to be considered simply as so many equivalent units of obedient attention — that is a strict, parallel to the heresy that man exists for the state and must behave as but one volitionless cell of its body.

Now, as soon as we make a candid endeavor to put the aforesaid facts of human nature together with the facts of literature, as soon as we stand off and make the most rudimentary examination of ourselves as readers, it becomes evident that all reading (except that done for pure factual utility, which is not under discussion) is a search for the story that has never yet been told and perhaps never can be. What we perpetually crave and even yearn for is a magic that cannot possibly be in printed pages. Reading is inherently a prayer for this magical fulfillment of our private, our secret needs; and if the prayer is to be answered, it must be answered, like our other prayers, by ourselves.

We answer it by an application of the will-tobelieve— an overwhelming predisposition to find in books the closest possible approach to what we want, what we need, what we are; that is, the closest approach the author will permit us to find. If he has made it feasible for me to discover my own interests in his pages, if I can make his intentions and judgments overlap my own so far as to be readily confused with them, I praise him for his remarkable insight into human nature. He has given us, I say, an admirable book; that is, one that I admire. If his writing is so intractably clear that it will not lend itself to this self-flattering confusion, if as I search in and between his lines for my own meanings I can find only his, then he leaves me cold. Literally, he leaves me alone; and of course I return the compliment, assuring myself and possibly others that he is a sterile and negligible writer.

Incidentally, is not this very difference at the bottom of our general modern offishness toward what we call the classics?

4

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was steadfast in the belief that every man has at least one good novel in him. He might have gone farther and maintained that every reader has in him all the good, bad, or indifferent novels he will ever require. He does not have to undertake the disillusion and toil of writing them for himself: he need only read his own demands into the variety of novels that others have written for him. This is the mere reader’s equivalent of authorship. The originality of writers is often remarked upon, that of readers seldom; but the second is often much more remarkable than the first, and comparatively few printed works of the imagination, produced at whatever cost in strain, exhaustion, and burned-out tissue, are more wonderful than what the common reader makes of them without half trying.

For a small proof we have but to look at two book reviews of the same book, written independently by reviewers equally conscientious and thoughtful. A few physical facts, a handful of proper names, will betray what there is little else to suggest: that they are talking about the same text. An even more direct proof is to look at any one review of a book of which you have already formed your own impression.

Critics and teachers harp on the universality of certain established works that have accumulated a history of being all things to all men. Classic instances are Hamlet and Faust — plays long so drenched and dyed with what articulate readers, famous actors, and potent editors have made them mean to themselves that it is now all but impossible to read or to see them, whether in the artificial academic sense of experiencing what is actually in the text or in Tom’s, Dick’s, and Harry’s sense of using the text as a mirror for the ego.

Better examples are some universal works so modern that the encyclopedia of comment has not yet had time to substitute itself for the actual reading experience—War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Egoist, The Dynasts, Nostromo, Growth of the Soil, Memoirs of a Midget, Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses. Their universality is supposed to be attested by the fact that each of them has as many interpretations as interpreters.

What that fact manifestly establishes, for anyone who gives it a moment’s sensible reflection, is the infinite variety of man the reading animal. And most of his differing opinions differ, not marginally, but basically and centrally. How could they not? The center of any reader’s opinion of anything is perforce the center of his own universe, not of Shakespeare’s or Tolstoy’s or Thomas Mann’s.

It is perhaps worth while to note that several of the masterpieces named — not all of which are even masterpieces to everyone who has pondered them — illustrate the immense practical value to literature of a quality supposed by classicists to be completely deplorable: that is, obscurity. The more ambiguous and inscrutable the author’s intention, the more pliantly the work consents to be wrested toward whatever anyone wants it to mean. The object that looms through fog will take on, for different beholders, the outline of anything they are expecting to see, from hawk to handsaw.

5

As readers, then, all of us are Thomas Beers to the extent that all make their reading yield what they have to have for personal sustenance. The process is not unlike plant growth. A vegetable filters from the variously charged soil the elements that will nourish it, and ignores those that will not; it is organized for just that selectiveness. A free and healthy literature has in it all the elements the human vegetable needs, but — he supplies his own metabolism.

And it is one of the beneficent democratic provisions of nature that in respect to metabolism all of us are about equal. The imaginative, the brilliant, the versatile, the Tom Beers and the Hippolyte Taines, certainly contrive, as a by-product of their reading, to give more happiness than those we call the dull; but there is nothing whatever to suggest that they contrive to get more. If inward gratification be the measure — and what other measure can there be? — the stodgiest sentimentalist or wishful thinker of us all is quite as well off as they. Every reader extracts from his reading what he must have to be saved. (Cf. the brutal but accurate medical aphorism, “The sleep you need is the sleep you get.”) If not always by the single book, then by the year and the decade and the lifetime we make our reading yield what we individually require. If it were not so, we should just cease to read.

And here we do well to stick a pin through one of those cardinal facts that most of us habitually ignore as if we were in a deliberate conspiracy of silence about them: to wit, the fact that at a certain stage of maturity most normally growing persons do in effect just cease to read.

Custodians of literary culture are plaintive because general reading tends more and more to be crowded out of our leisure hours. They charge the fact to the recent multiplication of effortless competing forms of pastime—the movies, the radio, professional sports, or mere aimless whizzing from here to there. Some of the deplorers find a silver lining in the wartime restrictions upon travel, and comfort themselves with visions of the American gadabout rediscovering under compulsion the forgotten delights of the long evening at home, the fireside armchair, and the good book. Most of us so far accept their point of view as to feel a little shamefaced when we have to admit that we don’t find time for the reading we used to do. We make a feeble virtue of looking down upon ourselves as cultural backsliders, and we toy with good resolutions concerning some not too definite future of leisure for all the solid reading we now leave undone.

With all deference to the custodians, I submit that this undone, this never-to-be-done reading is not so much something to be ashamed of as simply an evidence that we grow up. Not the variety and the easy accessibility of other entertainment cheat us out of the reading we once did, but just the fact that we are older. Long before the radio, the movies, or the motorcar, it was generally recognized that omnivorous reading is for the young. Generations of students have been advised: “Read now while you can; read widely, read everything; for the reading we cannot manage before we are twenty-five is the reading we shall never get around to.” The tacit assumption behind this counsel is that in later life we mostly find ourselves too busy for desirable reading; but of course no one is ever too busy for what he sincerely believes to be of the first importance. The plain fact is that, with every year after thirty, reading dwindles in relative importance. We outgrow it.

And the man who does not outgrow it, the man who remains at forty or sixty what Lowell called “a reading-machine, always wound up and going,” invariably strikes most of us as a case of arrested development. When we praise, as all do, the well-read man, we implicitly mean that a vast amount of reading is a meritorious thing, not to be doing, but to have done. Who ever thinks of the indefatigable professional reviewer as a well-read man, though he sample everything published and turn up with some convulsive new excitement every other week-end? On the contrary, we regard him as a literary dram-drinker with a brain permanently fuddled by overstimulation. Being well-read is an affair of the sound digestion, not of the voracious appetite.

We might take judiciously into the account, too, the fact that most of the reading of fiction done by mature persons is not reading at all by the canons of the literary critic and aesthete, the young person, or the imaginative writer himself. Here is a concentrated personal drama of implacable power with singular intensity, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It is a novelist’s novel by virtue of significant form. But does the ordinary adult American read it for any reason that a self-respecting writer could conceivably bless?

No, he reads it for its tenable explanation, the first he has ever found, of the fantastically mysterious behavior of the defendants in the Moscow sabotage trials that led to Stalin’s purge of the surviving Old Bolsheviks; in short, mere historical facts, the higher journalism’s Inside Information. Similarly, he skims most historical fiction for its popularization of history, the local-color novel for its disclosure of forms of living remote from his own, the novel of pert society for the current modes of behavior and patter — all of them, in one way or another, for the news behind the news.

When we are young, innocent, and credulous we are humbly grateful to the novelist for making available to us, as it then seems, so many of the results of experience with so little of the pain of acquiring them. For the world of the young is inevitably the most blank at just the pages that in the world of fiction are the best filled. But as we age, it slowly dawns upon us that we have undergone the pain of experience anyhow, precisely as if it had never been written about or read of. All those inspired anticipations in print are now mere allusive reminiscences. What was a sun is now a minor planet, shining with the reflected light of our own experience. What we have lived seems, somehow, not to require some stranger’s corroboration in a hundred thousand words.

Youth grows and educates itself toward reality by contorting figments into the pattern of its own admirations and hungers. When we grow up it seems a poor and trivial fulfillment to impress our own image upon anything so fluid as the works of fancy. It is, in truth, rather like the satisfaction children take in the mere power to browbeat an echo. The adult powers know themselves unused except as we can stamp something of our own purposes upon a medium that will hold the stamp — intractable reality itself. That we must do to have lived, or die trying. Perhaps it is our misfortune, perhaps it is civilization’s, that most of us have to grow up from the deliberately cultivated illusions of immaturity to the dynamic, the sometimes lethal cross-purposes that culminate in a world such as that in which we are now struggling to survive. But certain it is that we are made that way.