What I Love There

On Literary Subjectivity

What I Love There: On Literary Subjectivity

In Brian Dillon’s essay ‘Sensibility as Structure’, he reveals the back pages of his forty-five notebooks - stretching back some twenty-five years - contain many sentences he scribbled down in admiration, by writers such as John Ruskin, DH Lawrence and Walters Pater and Benjamin. Admitting sheepishly that these authors are mostly ‘dismayingly male’, he also states he finds it hard to paraphrase, or even formally express, why he chose to write down one sentence rather than another, equally striking sentence, or how to say, ‘because this must be the word, what I love there’.

It’s a question I ask often myself when reading for pleasure, or assessing my students’ work, or, just lately (wearing my other hat as a publisher) going through the 1,500 submissions to my fledgling small press, Conduit Books. Well, what do I love there? In all honesty, the question is more frequently, what don’t I love there? This seems easier to answer. Sloppy thinking. Pretensiousness. Imprecise language. Incoherence. A tin ear. Outright incompetence. Cliché. And that deal-breaker: the talent to create irritation or a sense of boredom in the reader. Putting aside reading for pleasure (which axiomatically states you are not being irritated or bored), it’s surprising how few unpublished writers can pen a compelling, beautifully structured sentence, let alone paragraph. What made them think a potential reader would fork over their twenty bucks for that? Do they imagine people pay to be bored, confused, annoyed? If precipitating literary pleasure is the supreme value, then surely they should be aiming to provide it all times. No?

Of course, a writer doesn’t have to be a ‘stylist’ (a phrase which always puts me in mind of an author holding a pair of crimping tongs in one hand, scissors in the other) to provide literary pleasure or pin the reader to the page. Take Austen, for example. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife. Whole undergrad dissertations have undoubtedly been written about this famous opening line, arguing over its relative merits, but for me it hits the mark every time I read it. Was there ever a better first sentence to a novel? One that sets out situation, voice and character in a single elegant statement? Woolf said Austen was the hardest writer to ‘catch in the act of greatness’, but the first line of Pride and Prejudice proves her wrong. The brilliance of this unshowy sentence (whose alliteration in ‘want of a wife’ points tantalisingly towards ‘style’ without quite achieving it) is down to its bluntness. There’s a strong opinion here that begs one to differ with it, to argue with it belligerently. It’s the thought that is elegant and stimulating, rather than the syntax or word choice. An adherent of Pynchon or post-modern tricksiness might find themselves yawning at Austen, and this is only correct. She’s not for them, and no amount of bonnets or BBC heritage porn will ever convince them otherwise. Jeanette Winterson, in her essay ‘Art Objects’, suggests ‘it is impossible to legislate taste, and if it were possible, it would be repugnant’. Beyond what can be empirically tested (the imprecision, the tin ear, et cetera), there is mere subjectivity, which, like Larkin’s ‘deep blue air’, is nothing, and is nowhere and is endless.

What Dillon doesn’t take account of is that we can easily fall out of love. Reading an author, or a novel, for the first time that we respond strongly to (cerebrally, emotionally, aesthetically) can feel very much like falling in love. The sense of upheaval is exciting, sometimes even terrifying. It breaks down our preconceived notions, makes us see ourselves and our place in the world afresh. But love alters over the years. While I’m sure I will always love Austen (and it took many tries until I finally found Mansfield Park in order to fully commit), I’m not so sure about other writers. Sometimes I pass their long-neglected spines on my shelves and have to resist the urge to go back and sample them again. Might they have been, as TS Eliot says of Shelley, merely companions of youth? Would I cringe at their sentences if I read them again, just as one might shudder to revisit an old love affair without the rose-coloured spectacles? There are favourite novels I haven’t read since I was a teenager. The Bell Jar. The Catcher in the Rye. Les Enfants Terribles. If I went back to them, would I find them pretentious, jejune, unreadable? Hanif Kureishi said the worst thing you could do is re-read On the Road again at the age of 37. And if we do find we’ve fallen out of love with those early literary paramours, can we take the concomitant feeling of faithlessness? And would it merely say more about our limitations as consumers of art rather than the art itself?

For most of my students, the benchmark of whether they fall in love with a work of literature is if they can ‘relate’ to it. Only if it speaks to their own experience can they admit it to their hearts. I often suggest that they should go to fiction for the opposite reasons: that it opens up new fields of experience, new worlds, new cultures. But I fear the damage has been done by the online world of liking posts on platforms that mirror their own opinions back to them, of groupthink and cultural narrowmindedness.

Suggesting that my students should leave their comfort zones is not the same as the notion that the difficult or challenging is somehow good for them; that it’s more virtuous or nutritious than the familiar, or that it’s somehow character building. If they find nothing stimulating in the new and the strange maybe it’s legitimate to say it’s just bad art. Perhaps it’s not saying anything about their failure to comprehend or enjoy. It might be the art that’s at fault. It might be the case that the work commits the ultimate sin of failing to communicate

What’s always fruitful, during my seminar on the novel, is to go back every year and find new things to love in passages I feared might have evaporated into invisibility due to their over-familiarity. The opening of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, for instance, with its ‘large, proud, rose-coloured hotel’ where the action of the novel is to take place, and the ‘deferential palms’ which cool its ‘flushed facade’. Or Virginia Woolf’s evocation of Pointz Hall in Between the Acts, with its glass case containing ‘a watch which had stopped a bullet on the fields of Waterloo’. Or, to choose two (as yet) non-canonical writers, Eley Williams’ description of a letter K like ‘the point of an arrow smacking into a trunk’ in her story ‘The Alphabet’; or Sally Rooney’s unforgettable evocation, in Conversations with Friends’ great dinner party scene, of a disappointed glance ‘which contracted and fell like a piece of wire spring’.

All of which reminds me that returning to the familiar will always provide more than enough to love there, and that some literary love affairs have the potential to last forever.