How I learned to love literary criticism.

What makes secondary literature worth reading for the common reader?

When I asked Zena Hitz this question in our recent interview (do listen, she’s full of good things), Zena took her public position of “zero”. Obviously, I do not agree. How could this blog exist if I did? But I don’t think Zena and I disagree as much as it might appear. This essay is an account of what makes secondary literature worthwhile for me. (You might also enjoy

Isaac Kolding

on this topic.)

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When I was at school, I knew a boy who always seemed to have read literary criticism about the books and poems he knew, and so always had clever opinions. I didn’t realise he was reading that stuff, and when a friend told me that he did, his facility for having opinions was explained. He seemed less able to work to his own conclusions and I did not follow his example, though he was a better student than I was.

For a long time, I thought literary criticism was a waste of time. Some of it could be excellent. Christopher Ricks was always my ideal of a critic: someone who did not have extra-literary ideas, but who explained the workings of the poem. Ricks pays close attention to the meaning of words, the logic of thoughts, and the rhetoric of expression. He is, in some senses, a mechanical critic. I was never much of a New Critic—all those supposed fallacies are themselves fallacious, not, in fact, being logically necessary conclusions—but I was a close reader. John Carey’s book on Donne was one of my favourites. These two critics look carefully, but they aren’t scared of history, biography, or common sense.

As an undergraduate, I was under the spell of Harold Bloom, for better and for worse, because I agreed with him about political criticism: everything I saw that was Freudian, feminist, Marxist, or whatever else, was more interested in those ideas than in literature. Many of the people I knew at university who were interested in those ideas would profess to love literature (and could quote it and did in fact feel strongly and so on) but everything was about those political ideas for them. There seemed to be no such thing as literature, only literature as part of a larger political discourse. They simply couldn’t talk about a poem without soon arriving at the same conclusion. It was all a prelude to the real interest.

And yet, I kept meeting people who had not read Descartes, or Plato, or the Gospels, or what you will. These ideas were either drawn from a narrow list of philosophical works or they were draw from secondary works. I had avoided Virginia Woolf for these reasons until a teacher told me Mrs Dalloway was actually a good novel. (A woman teacher, obviously.) And so it was! Later on, I discovered she was the best critic of the twentieth century. Calling her a feminist is like calling Milton a religious poet or Dickens a working-class novelist. True, important, but nothing like the whole truth.

When I started reading New Historicism and other such works, I felt I was right. Unliterary! Political! And so boring I thought my head would roll off! I was luckier than I knew, though, because I was in fact receiving a fairly traditional education at university, and was told to read wonderful books like Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy as well as newer, more Theoretical, less “accessible” works. And I decided I didn’t care very much how compliant I was with Theory. I was there to study the canon and that was am acceptable thing to do, so I did, and damn the rest of it. Contra mundum was my motto. I read Hillis Miller on Dickens and I just didn’t care very much. I wanted Dickens!

Obviously, I had neither the temperament nor the conscientiousness required for academic life, and I went on my way, still chewing through the canon like a caterpillar. I got up early before work to read, covering subjects of which I felt ignorant. The early mornings of my twenties before work were spent with Hume’s Essays, Mises’ Human Action, the works of Lytton Strachey, biographies of John Adams and Edward VII, and with the many novels and poems I hadn’t read yet. I read the Life of Johnson in fits and starts, carrying the book around the country at times. I read Shakespeare on my commute, as well as the lives of the Prime Ministers (some of them).

And I slowly realised that literary criticism wasn’t something to be despised. Who did I love more than the essayists, the biographers, the interpreters? Not just Ricks and Carey (The Force of Poetry and The Intellectuals and the Masses particularly) but all those wonderful Longman editions of the poets, full of careful scholarship from which I had learned so much. It became clear to me that a lifetime of reading the canon would necessitate reading secondary literature. I learned so much from the essays of Michael Hoffmann and Clive James, not least what other books to read. I found Jonathan Bate deeply illuminating about Shakespeare. I began to yearn for a library where I could find the more expensive books.

Books like How Fiction Works or The Artful Dickens are hugely useful. Critics that stick closely to the what and the how of writing—not interpreting, but expositing—make us into better readers. They are like the friend or spouse at an art gallery drawing out attention to the living quality of fabric or the verisimilitude of a wrinkle in a portrait. I have always loved biography, believing with Johnson that it is one of the most enjoyable forms of literature, but I was becoming a reader of criticism too.