At Large and At Small (10 page)

But should we forget the whale? That is, if Melville
did push Lizzie down the stairs, should the stock of
Moby-Dick
experience a parallel plummet? In similar fashion, we now know that Byron committed incest and pedophilia, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were anti-Semites, and Philip Larkin was a more democratic sort of bigot (he hated almost everybody). Should their poetry be permanently tainted by their character deficiencies?

These questions seem
to me to be intertwined with the question of whether we should read great books for their literary merit or for the purpose of self-building, and to provide a compelling argument for doing both. Those who believe that the purpose of literature is primarily moral are going to run into trouble if the book they’ve been using as a guide to living turns out to have been written by someone who beat his
wife. I’m sure it mattered to James Stockdale that Epictetus was an exemplary man—that he is said to have lived by choice in a small hut furnished with only a pallet and a lamp, that he adopted a child who would otherwise have been left to die. It would have been acutely disturbing to find out, for example, that Epictetus had abused that child.

Unsurprisingly, it is the self-builders who tend
to place a great deal of emphasis on biography and who vote to expel someone from the canon if he or she turns out to have been an unsavory character. But if you believe, as I do, that great literature can be written by bad people, then your library can remain intact, no matter how much respect you lose for the authors as individuals.

Some readers feel that the life is irrelevant and
only
the
work counts. A friend schooled in the New Criticism
recently wrote me: “As a critic I was trained to ignore the biography of the author. We figured he knew what he was doing; it was our job to figure it out. To slide into biographical details was to admit a lack of critical perception. Let the work stand for the man.” I disagree. For instance, if you know that Melville was a terrible husband,
you may be able to make more sense of the sealed-off, seabound world of
Moby-Dick
, where everybody was male, even the whale. And even if there are no themes in the work that resonate with the life, great writers are not machines that produce, out of nothingness, a series of words that happen to be more perfect than other people’s words; they are flawed mortals, often imprudent and uncivil, who
are so large (that’s what greatness
is
: size) that every part of them deserves to be understood.

S
hould a book be demoted if its plot fails to meet standards of behavior that have changed since it was written?

I once read a letter to
The New York Times Book Review
in which Sharon Uemura Ronholt of Stockton, California, berated Richard Jenkyns for his review of Robert Fagles’s translation of
the
Odyssey
. She wrote, “Nowhere in his review does Mr. Jenkyns draw critical attention to the fact that Homer’s world is that of a quintessential male fantasy and may not meet with universal approbation: Homer’s hero commits adultery with various gorgeous, high-class women, and the construction of the plot (his desire to depart for ‘home’) legitimizes his callous abandonment of his ever-changing
women lovers.” Ms.
Ronholt therefore concluded that it was naïve and, as she termed it, “pretheoretical” to accept the
Odyssey
as “a ‘timeless’ Great Book.”

Sharon Uemura Ronholt put her finger on the paradox that women, or indeed anyone who is currently better off than he or she would have been in another century or another place, will always feel when reading works from other times or cultures.
But she didn’t see it as a paradox, a word that suggests ambivalence. She saw it as an unambiguous black mark against the
Odyssey
.

Whenever I read Homer, I see ample evidence that women were treated abominably in ancient Greece, and I am very thankful that I live now and not then. In fact, I would rather pay a visit to Procrustes than marry any of Homer’s heroes. Fortunately, none of them is
asking me. The invitation Homer offers me is a far broader one: to enter a world that was very different from ours, but that in its own “pre theoretical” way possessed nobility and beauty. If I had to step into a polling booth and vote on Homer’s sexual politics, I’d pull the no lever strenuously. I am therefore very glad that the
Odyssey
is a poem, not a referendum.

I would guess that Ms. Ronholt
doesn’t much like
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, either. If you’re on the cultural right these days, you’re supposed to think it’s a masterpiece—the book from which, as Ernest Hemingway said, all modern American literature has come. (Of course, if you were on the cultural right a century ago, you would probably have disliked the book and considered its author—a muckraker who had uncovered
political
corruption in San Francisco and would later denounce King Leopold’s regime in the Congo—an untrustworthy radical. A month after publication,
Huckleberry Finn
was banished from the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, on the ground that it was “trash and suitable only for the slums.”)

If you’re on the cultural left today, you’re supposed to think that
Huckleberry Finn
should be
expunged from the reading lists of America’s high schools, partly because it contains the word
nigger
and partly because nineteenth-century progressives don’t sound like late-twentieth-century progressives. In a controversial 1996 article in
Harper’s
called “Say It Ain’t So, Huck,” Jane Smiley wrote that she was “stunned” by the idea “that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel.”
According to Smiley, one of the book’s disqualifying flaws is Huck’s decision to take Jim down the Mississippi River instead of across it to Illinois. She sees this as a moral failure on Huck’s part, and therefore on Mark Twain’s part as well.

“So Jane Smiley would have crossed the Mississippi to the free state of Illinois with her Jim and freed him without delay,” responded a reader named Anson
J. Cameron. (Mr. Cameron hails from Port Melbourne, Australia, and may thus be above the American fray.)

And if she kept her description of the river and the Southern sky to a minimum and the dialogue to just a few mutterings from her Huck about how many slaveholders’ houses he was set to raze, she could probably free Jim inside of a page. Now, supposing she could keep writing (and
Huck could
keep rowing) at this pace, she might invent and free upwards of three hundred slaves in the course of her Huck Finn, whereas Twain, farting around with humor and other such distractions, only got around to freeing one.

I’m with Mr. Cameron. I’m very grateful that Huck Finn and Mark Twain were so inefficient and unethical that they didn’t manage to wind up their book on page 54, a few paragraphs
after the raft sets off down the river. (And that Homer didn’t send Odysseus straight home.)

W
hat should you do when a work’s language excludes you?
If the very words leave you on the sidelines—because, for instance, they are addressed to men and you are a woman—should you stick out your tongue and say, “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I reject you, too”?

Consider, for example, “The
American Scholar,” the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa oration that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered on August 31, 1837, in the Brattle Street Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He spoke for an hour and a quarter on the necessity of emancipating America’s intellectual tradition from “the sere remains of foreign harvests.” The audience included Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana,
Edward Everett Hale, and plenty of famous people who had only two names. Not everyone was impressed. Hale wrote in his diary that Emerson was “half-crazy” and that his speech was “not very good and very transcendental.” But
Lowell called the event “a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration,” and Holmes later referred to the oration as “our Intellectual
Declaration of Independence.” When Thomas Carlyle was sent a copy, he wrote to Emerson, “I could have
wept
to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling thro’ my heart; I said to my wife ‘There, woman!’ She read; and returned and charges me to return for answer, ‘that there had been nothing met with like it since Schiller went silent.’ My brave Emerson!”

The day I learned I was
to edit
The American Scholar
, a journal that takes its name from that very speech, I ran to my bookcase, pulled out a volume of my brave Emerson, and opened it to his Phi Beta Kappa oration. I expected, like Carlyle, to hear a clear high melody tingling thro’ my heart. Instead, I read the following sentence: “In the right state [the scholar] is
Man Thinking
.” This is the most famous line in the
essay; it was used as
The American Scholar’s
epigraph until 1976. The first time I read it, I had skated over the phrase, assuming that “Man” was one of those capacious linguistic tents that had once had room for everybody, the way
horsemanship
included horsewomanship and
mankind
included womankind.

On this reading, however, I could see that Emerson really meant
Man
Thinking. Later in his speech
he specifically distinguished the scholar from the “protected class” of “children and women”; they lived under a different tent. So what lesson was I to draw? Even though Emerson supported women’s property rights and
counted Margaret Fuller and Harriet Martineau among his friends and didn’t complain when his wife served leg of lamb twenty days in a row, was I nonetheless compelled to write him
off as a wicked misogynist and cast him from my bookshelf? No.

But if I left him on my shelf, did that mean I was forever excluded from the Emersonian fellowship, forced to press my nose against the glass of American intellectual life, as if the Man Thinking Club were a beer-swilling fraternity that invited me on the premises only on Saturday night? No.

One of the convenient things about literature
is that, despite copyrights—which in Emerson’s case expired long ago—a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. The greater the work, the wider the ownership, which is why there are such things as criticism, revisionism, and Ph.D. dissertations. I will not ask the sage of Concord to rewrite his oration. He will forever retain the right to speak his own words and to mean what he
wished to mean, not what I would wish him to mean. But I will retain the right to recast Man Thinking in
my
mind as Curious People Thinking, because time has passed, and the tent has grown larger.

As we wrangle with these canonic questions, it may be useful to remember that this is not the first Culture War. In seventeenth-century France, Boileau and La Fontaine exchanged a notorious series of
barbs with Fontenelle and Perrault in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,
a dispute over which was superior, classical or modern literature. The “Ancients” argued that Greece and Rome provided the only worthy literary models; the “Moderns” argued that if Descartes had improved on ancient science, his literary contemporaries might improve on ancient poetry. The quarrel spread across the Channel
to England, where Sir William Temple took up the ancient cause, William Wotton took up the modern cause, and Jonathan Swift satirized them both in
A Full and True Account of the
BATTEL
Fought last
FRIDAY
, Between the
Antient
and the
Modern
BOOKS
in St. JAMES’s
LIBRARY
.

“The present quarrel,” wrote Swift, “is so inflamed by the warm heads of either faction, and the pretensions
somewhere or other
so exorbitant, as not to admit the least overtures of accommodation. This quarrel first began (as I have heard it affirmed by an old dweller in the neighbourhood) about a small spot of ground, lying and being upon one of the two tops of the hill Parnassus.” The higher Parnassian summit was occupied by the Ancients, the lower by the Moderns. The Moderns, deciding that the Ancient peak was blocking
their view, suggested that their neighbors either decamp to a lower altitude or permit the Moderns to carry over a few shovels and “level the said hill as low as they shall think it convenient.” The Ancients declined; the Moderns were indignant; and a war broke out in which

whole rivulets of ink have been exhausted, and the virulence of both parties enormously augmented. Now, it must here be
understood that ink is the great missive weapon in
all battles of the learned, which, conveyed through a sort of engine called a quill, infinite numbers of these are darted at the enemy by the valiant on each side, with equal skill and violence, as if it were an engagement of porcupines.

According to Swift, the Parnassian turf battle produced a series of quarrelsome books, “known to the world
under several names, as
disputes
,
arguments
,
rejoinders
,
brief considerations
,
answers
,
replies
,
remarks
,
reflections
,
objections
,
confutations
,” which, when admitted to libraries, soon found themselves continuing the fray, this time over the more general question of merit. The conflict was bloody but spectacularly incompetent. Aristotle aimed an arrow at Bacon but instead shot Descartes in the
eye; Cowley dropped his shield and was sliced in half by Pindar. Swift never revealed which side won: for could anything but a stalemate result from demanding that the world’s readers choose A or B, not A and B, or A, B, C, and Z? That binary view of culture was just as reductive in 1697 as it is now, when the battle between the Ancients and Moderns is still raging (except that Aristotle and Bacon
now find themselves fighting on the same side and being commanded to take potshots at Virginia Woolf).

The rivulets of ink still flow, and the battlefields of the Culture Wars are still strewn with corpses. “Anger and fury,” observed Swift, “though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind.” The anger is real, but I believe that our wars, like Swift’s,
are a fiction: a theoretical—or, as Sharon Uemura
Ronholt would put it, a “posttheoretical”—construct that would appall many of the writers over whose words the armies of the left and the right are trading grapeshot.