Discovering the unread: Reflections on classic literature, beginning and endings

Writers can spring surprises when it comes to what they haven’t read. Take Paul Auster, the American novelist who died last week at 77. In an interview a few years ago, he revealed he had only belatedly read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Compounding his late engagement was that the latter was the favourite of his wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt. Even worse for him, Auster discovered Woolf’s novel to be one of the most beautiful he’d read, a masterpiece. 

Readers will be familiar with the varied phenomena at work here. Whether gathered in separate piles of actual books (“treeware”), or listed and stored on e-readers, or simply dreamt about or feared, readers are constantly in pursuit of, and pursued by, the classics.

We ought to read them; we want to; we will. Next summer, or winter, when time indoors lends a circumstantial hand. Or next year. And so the pile grows, to be added to deathbed regrets.

Given the old maxim that we should begin every activity in the manner we wish to continue, this postponing and procrastinating is mysterious, even incomprehensible. Imagine if, like their readers, all books set off with a bang and then fizzled out. 

Which brings us to beginnings and endings, the proper bookends of books. It’s become standard, formulaic even, to nominate the best opening and closing lines of novels and other works.

Frequently listed as tops is Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, with its rhythmic, progressive, locomotive-like opening sentence that begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …”

Looking at that again, one can imagine it being applied to the season of incredulity that is the upcoming South African general election. 

Politics, after all, “is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles”, according to the journalist and daredevil wit Ambrose Bierce, whose The Devil’s Dictionary is a wordly-wise raconteur’s guide to, and final word on, human venality and banality, duplicity and moral cowardice. 

At 71, Bierce saddled his horse and crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, to cover Zapata’s revolution. He was never seen again and is possibly the most famous “disappeared” journalist of the early 20th century.

But Bierce’s wit and caustic realism live on in The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, with new entries and additional definitions discovered by Bierce enthusiast Ernest Jerome Hopkins, a journalist turned journalism professor. 

Another Bierce definition of politics will be all too familiar to South Africans: “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” 

Bierce’s witticisms give the kernel of ideas that novelists and short-story writers develop into longer forms. Leo Tolstoy’s single-sentence opening to Anna Karenina is like the opening chord of a Mozart symphony, setting the tone, declaring the subject and grabbing the listener by the ear. 

“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Freighted with meaning and atmosphere and bristling with connotations — what more can a writer or reader expect from 15 words? No wonder then that Steven Spielberg, as a producer, insisted that prospective filmmakers pitch their ideas to him in 15 words.

Setting up anticipation by seeming to deny the possibility of anything to look forward to is the opposite stratagem to the Tolstoy opening above. Take these deceptive, almost deceitful, opening lines from EM Forster’s A Passage to India.

“Except for the Marabar Caves — and they are twenty miles off — the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely.”

Superficial reactions would deem this a place one would not wish to stop at, even as — or perhaps especially as — a reader. Yet it is here, in apparently the most unprepossessing of circumstances, that Forster is to deliver his astonishing essay on what we nowadays term settler-colonialism.

An examination of imperialism and the relationship between Indians and the British, and a sympathetic and informed portrayal of the temperamental differences between them, A Passage to India has a remarkable, almost chilling, prescience too. (It was published in 1924, almost a quarter of a century before India’s partition and independence.) 

On its very last page, Dr Aziz shouts: “India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one! Hurrah! Hurrah for India! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

For a while, that declamation was upheld in reality but, today, what was Aziz’s dream for India has been adulterated by the extreme right-wing Hinduism — “Hinduism” would be more accurate — of the sectarian and bigoted regime of Narendra Modi.

In this age of high secularism, in which religion and spirituality are regarded by a large proportion of humankind as the equivalent of believing the Earth is flat, religion as the keynote of a work might deter some readers. In the case of the family memoir A River Runs Through It, readers would be abandoning one of English prose’s masterpieces. 

Norman Maclean’s opening paragraph runs: 

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of the great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favourite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

Maclean’s prose is in that finest of American traditions, crisp, clear and bracing. It’s a register readers find in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tif fany’s and In Cold Blood (actually, in anything the great stylist Capote wrote) and in his lifelong friend and literary partner Harper Lee and her magnificent novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Maclean shares the laconic and humorous features of Tif fany’s and Mockingbird, but he brings riffs of the deadpan, unavoidable given the Presbyterian current that flows so strongly through the story. 

As a professor of English at one of the great colleges, the University of Chicago, Maclean knew exactly what he was doing, and he took almost his lifetime to polish the 104 pages that make up his memoir.

As with To the Lighthouse, all one can say to those who have not read it is to urge that they do. Read Maclean! Ignore the film made by Robert Redford based on the book, even though it is one of the better literary adaptations around. (And Brad Pitt is not all that bad as Maclean’s brother Paul.)

What awaits is the most precisely faceted prose, the Wordsworthian ideal of emotion recollected in tranquillity, and the literary gold of a life told with integrity, compassion and understanding, though Maclean confesses himself ultimately lacking in healing comprehension. 

“Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them,” he writes.

Let us leave the last words to him too, the final two paragraphs of one of the great classic books.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

“I am haunted by waters.”