Suzy Says

Love/hate for Friday, September 13, 2002
Literature

I feel lucky to have grown up surrounded by books – my father built bookshelves in every house we ever lived in, and they were still stacked on the floor – and with parents who restricted our TV watching. The result was that I could read when I was three, and we played outside in all weathers instead of staring at a TV or computer screen. I think if you grow up with a love of books and reading, and the worlds they contain, it never leaves you.

My father read to us every night, and also used to recite Shakespeare aloud as he cooked dinner. So I grew up with it and thus was unintimidated by the language and understood the in-jokes and subtext before I studied it in school, though I’m sorry to say that few books I studied in school withstood the excruciating tearing apart, with meanings read into them that the authors surely never intended. Personally, I think examining a book on the molecular level deprives it of its intrinsic joy and value. Isn’t it enough to realize that human nature has changed very little since Shakespeare’s day and enjoy that fact and his exploration of the psyche? If you dissect a bird to see how it flies, it never flies again.

Literature is something like pornography, in that it’s difficult to define, but each person is convinced they’ll recognize it when they see it. One person’s classic is another person’s minor writer, but isn’t all art, in all media, completely subjective?

Some of my favorite writers could be considered literature, or at a minimum, classic. Jane Austen, for one. I can’t remember who said it, but someone was once asked if he ever read novels. Without hesitation, he replied, “Yes. All six of them, every year.” This refers, of course, to Jane’s oeuvre, and I couldn’t agree with him more. Human nature has rarely been observed with such wit, humor, and accuracy.

Others include Anthony Trollope – especially his “Barchester” series; GB Shaw; Oscar Wilde; Edith Wharton; and Willa Cather. I return to their works over and over and rediscover the reasons I love them in the first place.

Somehow, “literature” always seems to belong to the past. I would hesitate to class more modern writers, such as Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger, and Richard Ford as literature, yet they have produced some of the most eloquent, brilliant, and moving prose I have ever read.

I leave the last word to Jane: “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”