Admiration of form: Reflections on poetry and the novel

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1995 by Williams, C K

Some of my best friends are novelists.

The "but," the "however," the slightly negative tang of repressed prejudice insinuated in that locution are intentional, though not any of its implied condescension. I don't intend this to be a polemic against the novel, nor do I wish to set up an adversarial relation between poetry and the novel. The novel has enough enemies, and it would be foolish for a poet not to realize that the novel's detractors are usually also those to whom poetry, or any other fruit of the imagination, has little value. What I do intend is to question the overwhelmingly predominant position the novel and its narrative relations, film and television, occupy in contemporary experience. If I mean to suggest anything, it would have to do with the possible reestablishment in our aesthetic consciousness of some of the more formal modes of literary experience, of poetry in particular; I want to propose that as a culture we reacquire the custom of reading poetry as a complement to our currently exclusive and possibly disabling immersion in novelistic ways of experiencing and understanding ourselves.

Some of my best friends are novelists. There's a unique pleasure in going through the fictions of someone whose life you know well. Reading becomes an intimate exercise of affection. Beholding your friend weaving characters out of his or her imagination, hearing voices you've never heard being generated out of voices you know, glimpsing how these characters and voices mingle with those of your friend, sometimes illuminating them, sometimes hinting at satisfactions or regrets you never suspected: all this is a very privileged way of being informed about another human being, and about yourself, your own assumptions and illusions.

Recently, though, I've noticed that reading novels not written by my friends is no longer as important a part of my life as it used to be. Although there are exceptions, books which for one reason or another seem to bring something essential to our tradition, I find that I rarely seem to have time to read novels, or, with those which come to me so strongly recommended that I feel compelled to make the time, I'm impatient as I read, often a little inattentive, easily distracted.

I've been puzzled by this. I've thought sometimes that perhaps I've let my envy of the novelists get too strong a hold on me. After all, poets do have reasons to be jealous when we contemplate novelists' much larger audiences and much fatter royalty checks. But I've come to feel there's something more significant in my disaffection from the novel.

Like most people in our culture, I have to recognize that novels have been an essential part of my literary and moral education. As Lionel Trilling put it: "...My conception of what is interesting and problematical in life, of what reality consists in and what makes for illusion, of what must be held and what let go, was derived primarily from novelists..." And novels have also been involved in a very vivid way in my own biography. How forget sitting up all night for the first time with a novel--Lord Jim--and rubbing my eyes in the exotic Conradian dawn? Or that bleak, desperate February when I read all of Dostoevsky I could find in English, and fell asleep every night over one of his books, so that my dreams became an amalgam of his fictions and my anguish, the shapes of his characters' trials fusing with mine; I spent hours and then days as Rashkolnikov, and then, to my relief, was no longer him, although he had been incorporated into me in a way I knew was important.

But now, I find I come to the novel less and less often. I used to fancy that someday when I'd retired a little from the world and had all the time in the world, I'd finally get around to reading all the novels I'd missed, the Austen's and the Eliot's and the Richardson's, besides all the contemporaries who'd seemed to be worth reading but who I'd never gotten around to. Lately, though, I've begun to realize that even if I ever did arrive at that dream of an endlessly expansible reading time, I'd probably re-read, as I already do, Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, Herbert and Donne and Keats and Yeats and Lowell and Bishop and Rilke, besides all my contemporaries who are fascinating and wonderful poets.

There are times, of course, when I don't seem to be able to read poetry, either. When this happens, my first thought is usually to put it down to fatigue: reading poetry requires an energy that sometimes can be daunting. But this can't be the reason I don't then turn to a novel. The narrative of the novel used to serve me as a distraction from tiredness, even from indolence: I could always pick up a novel, sink happily into that comforting story-telling, and feel as though I was invested in some sort of virtuous activity.

The human mind seems to have an all but insatiable hunger for narrative. From the bedtime stories of our child, to our reflexive attachment to our daily papers, to our mindless consumption of the worst trash on television, we're driven by what seems to be a relentless compulsion to consume narrative discourse. How much of our lives we spend offering narrative to one another. Although to be called a gossip in our culture is a serious insult, in fact we are all gossips to one extent or another. Real gossips are those whose narrative need is more pathological than ours; what's most annoying about them isn't that they talk too much, but that they listen too well: they devour narrative so voraciously that we find ourselves recounting stories to them we had no wish to, as though their swollen narrative attentiveness in itself could overcome our resolution to keep secrets.