[Richard Wakefield]

One of the mysteries of reading (and of criticism, which ought to be disciplined reading)is how a writer once considered essential can become almost unreadable. This is from "Walter Scott: Falling Out of the Canon," by Irving Howe. I'm not very interested in the question of Walter Scott, but I think Howe is right that our sense of how things ought to move is very different from that of earlier times. This probably has even more profound consequences for poetry than for prose.

"There is still another, and I think fundamental, reason for Scott's decline in literary standing. It may at first seem a narrowly literary reason, but it is actually rooted in the depths of history. Scott wrote as if not only he but all his readers enjoyed world enough and time. That narratives might be foreshortened, conversations clipped, and tempos hastened seems never to have occurred to him [...]. The clock does not check his imagination. Must every scene be painted to the last tint? Every byplay of minor figures rendered to the last turn of dialect? Every hero orate in swollen prose? I fancy the thought of Scott edited by Beckett."

One of my teachers used to reply, when asked what he taught, "Slow reading." He should have said that he tried to teach slow reading, since he was working in defiance of the great cultural forces that Howe claims have made us unable to read Scott.

[Tim Murphy]

Richard, perhaps the problem isn’t so much Scott’s failure to foreshorten his narratives, but Mr. Howe’s contemporary affliction: foreshortened attention. We still read Chaucer and Shakespeare, not to mention Virgil and Homer. But the preeminence of the short lyric over dramatic and epic verse in our time surely has much to do with Howe’s affliction.
Scott wrote thirty novels, which I haven’t read. The Oxford Companion credits him with establishing the historical novel AND the short story as serious literary genres and claims his influence on the development of the novel was “incalculable:” his pioneering use of rustic settings and regional speech was imitated by novelists from George Eliot to the Brontes to Thomas Hardy.

Born one year after Coleridge and one year before Wordsworth, it was perhaps his greater misfortune to be born twelve years after his countryman, Burns, whom he single-handedly elevated to the pantheon. Had he confined himself to the lyric, he might have rivaled Burns and surpassed those nearer contemporaries. When John Ballantyne, the publisher in which he was a general partner, failed, he was saddled with a debt of 114,000 pounds (roughly ten million of today’s dollars). He literally wrote himself to death and repaid every dime. My brush with bankruptcy (recorded in Set the Ploughshare Deep) involved only $5 million, and I was 17 years Scott’s junior. As Gloucester says in Lear: “I see it feelingly.”

Your posting sent me back to the ample selection of Scott’s verse in the Auden Pearson anthology. Let’s reflect on this portion of an exquisite song in Marmion:

Where shall the traitor rest,
He the deceiver,
Who could win maiden’s breast,
Ruin and leave her?
In the lost battle,
Borne down by the flying,
Where mingles war’s rattle
With groans of the dying.

Eleu loro, etc.,There shall he be lying.

Her wing shall the eagle flap
O’er the false-hearted;
His warm blood the wolf shall lap
Ere life be parted.
Shame and dishonor sit
By his grave ever;
Blessing shall hallow it,--
Never, O never!

Eleu loro, etc., Never, O never!

Our earliest vision of eagles and wolves despoiling the slain occurs when Wiglaf’s Herald foretells the doom of the Geats in Beowulf, yet this great antiquarian “makes it new.”
Finally here’s a lyric I learned at my grandmother’s knee.

Proud Maisie

Proud Maisie is in the wood
Walking so early;
Sweet Robin sits on the bush,
Singing so rarely.

“Tell me, thou bonny bird,
When shall I marry me?”—
“When six braw gentlemen
Kirkward shall carry ye.”

“Who makes the bridal bed,
Birdie, say truly?”—
“The gray-headed sexton
That delves the grave duly.

“The glow-worm o’er grave and stone
Shall light thee steady,
The owl from the steeple sing
‘Welcome, proud lady.’”

[Kate Benedict]

Ah, world enough and time to read a long-winded novel, full of speechifying, and laden with detail down to the last curtain fringe and freckle. I wonder who read Scott even in Scott's time? Who was the readership for another run-at-the-quill, Trollope?

I confess I don't know and never wondered until your post, Richard. Who had world enough and time, even then, for such works, before the era of the electric light offered more night hours for reading, and when most people owned only two books, the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. The idle rich, probably. Delicate ladies with nothing else to do except crochet.

Today, almost everyone is overextended. People have no time for tomes, and no inclination to read them. I'm afraid one of my boss's at Big Bank Inc. said it all when he told me one of his favorite novels was novelette The Bridges of Madison County. Why? Because you could read the whole thing on the plane ride between Calif. and NYC!

[Richard Wakefield]

Yes, it is certainly our own frantic pace that makes us such a poor audience for much of what was once popular. However, big books still sell, even old big books -- Dickens, for example. And as Tim points out, we can still find time for Shakespeare and a few others. Still, I think Howe is right that our limited attention span cuts us off from much of the literature of the past.
Now another angle on this: A critic is at least as hurried as any other reader, and usually more hurried, but a conscientious critic isn't likely to slam a book merely because it moves slowly. The general audience, on the other hand, won't hesitate to put it aside if it can't be read on a single plane flight. I recently reviewed a book-length poem on the Shackleton expedition of 1914, and I recommended it heartily even though I know that even the few people who buy any poetry at all are unlikely to want to read that much on events that obscure. Maybe this is one way that critics are more or less inherently out of step with their readers.
Richard

[Tim Murphy]

Kate and Rich,

You've failed conspicuously to make any comment on Proud Maisie or the Song from Marmion. Metrist me: These are revolutions in the ballad stanza; here the four foot compresses to three, and the three foot to two. These verses boggle the mind of a short line specialist, the swing and sway of their stresses working against the constraints of the line. Great Scott!

[Robert J. Clawson]

"... he told me one of his favorite novels was novelette The Bridges of Madison County. Why? Because you could read the whole thing on the plane ride between Calif. and NYC!"

On a flight to Austrailia, my son, Dan, read INFINITE JEST.

Bob

[robert mezey]

Richard, do you remember who wrote that poem
you mentioned, about Shackleton? (I've read
two prose books about that expedition, about
as thrilling a story as can be found outside
the Odyssey.)
Bob, I came on your letter (by accident!) a
couple of days ago. Yo!

[Richard Wakefield]

Bob, the book is titled "What the Ice Gets," the author is Melinda Mueller, the publisher Van West and Company (Seattle), the ISBN 0-9677021-1-9. It's a good read, with expressive variations in form for the voices of various characters, although maybe some slightly slack free verse. It is indeed a great story, and one well deserving of its own epic poem.
Richard

[Julie]

I was an extremely strange child in that my two favorite novels were Ivanhoe and The Scarlet Pimpernel. My third grade teacher gave me her copy of Ivanhoe after I borrowed it from her four times. I still have it.

So, I guess the answer to "who ever read Scott" would be: Julie.

Julie

[Gooddog]

What a sad end the reading public has come to if Scott is now considered to be too wordy to read. I, for one, am heartily tired of sitting down for a good read only to have to do the author's work by filling in the blanks left by his/her inability or unwillingness to describe the characters or the scene.

I find myself setting many books aside because they seem to be unfinished. There is a grand rush to the denouement that I fail to understand. Whatever happened to setting out a feast of words to take your reader to a different realm? Writers today seem to be presenting us with half-hour sit-coms, hour-long dramas and the occasional two-hour feature length novel. Heaven forbid that a writer exceeds the allotted 225 pages!

We may well live in a world that is turning at breakneck speed. All the more reason to take the time to immerse ourselves in the soothing waters of a well-thought out, thoroughly developed story. Why must it be read in an evening? Why can we no longer savor the joy of returning to our book and having the angst of our day washed away by skill of a Scott?

I, like Julie, discovered Scott at a tender age, long before I could pick at an author’s work. I wandered through his castles, sat in the stands at his tournaments and grew to love his characters as I came to know them. His vivid word pictures remain with me to this day, still brightening my sometimes mundane existence. I wonder how long some of his present day critics will be remembered?

Paulette and Quilt, the Amazing


[This message has been edited by Gooddog (edited March 13, 2001).]