READING NOVELS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 126, 30 May 1935, Page 25

READING NOVELS

TASK FOJi THE YOUNG

WHERE WRITERS FAIL

If the reader has reached forty and it— as we politely assume—he has the normal capacity to retain impressions, then he can hardly deny that he has ceased to find in very many bestsellers, or even in novels which'have had a succes d'estime, anything capable of stirring in him that sense of a fresh and rewarding adventure which was once so common, writes Joseph Wood Krutch in the "Nation" (New York). "Of all the forms of imaginative literature the novel is the one which contains the largest amount of sheer information," says Mr. Krutch. "To a far greater extent poetry and even the drama presents the produces of a distillation, while the novel devotes more effort, to mere description. That is why it is so long and that it why; it is, pre-eminently, addressed to" youth.----"It does not, as the great poem does, deal with experiences too direct and too simple to need a context of experience, or assume whatever knowledge, of the ways of men may be necessary to comprehension. It describes men and manners, even the habits and traditions and conventions of particular societies. Both in the cant and in the more general sense of the phrase it imparts the .'facts of life.' For that reason its function is largely, and importantly, educational. QUOTA OP GOOD NOVELS. ; "Only experience itself is a better teacher of what we call 'knowledge of the world,' and the man who. has not. read his quota of good novels is a man of unusual experience, or unusual intuition if he does not remain, somehow callow by comparison with those who have participated vicariously but specifically and in detail in more kinds of lives than any man can have for him*' self. But for that .reason also it is the form from • which, as .time goes, on, one can learn less and less, since one has come to know more and more about the subject with which the novel deals. , .-. \ ■'■..- "Once every page taught something. Every incident was instructive, not because no other novel communicated the same fact or the same truth,-but simply because they were all as new to the reader as they were old. to human experience.: Only those incapable of learning can,.however, con-' tinue indefinitely to find in any except the supreme novels any large proportion of fresh instruction.. "One "discovers that more and more is familiar, that from any-given novel: one receives fewer and fewer fresh;im•pressions, - until finally the time has arrived when it no longer "pays tb~ search the whole haystack for the needle, •vyhich as likely as not is not even there. And when that time comes, the reader does one of two things: either he stops reading novels except on those rare occasions .when one not mainly repetitious'appears, or he settles :into-; the harmless and, -to some, : agreeable habit fof lulling\his spirit'^with'Hhe^iep^titiobWjpf familiar experiences. FINDING FACTS. "Some writers—and some critics— seem to feel' that' the" difficulty.'has: beeri eluded when the novel'has: beeir packed'"with facts"of a, sort which gain nothing from, fictionaiisation.?;:'Haying : no new ' things to say about human nature, the author puts' in What he knows about the-Napoleonic wars, the History of medical research, or the economic development' of New England: The result: may be informative in'its way, but what-you "have in such a book is not primarily a novel at all. The novel which imparts information of a sort -with'\yhich the' treatise or the history can 'adequately 'deal '■• is either bastard fiction, vulgarised exposition, or both. ■-■%.•; TV' ■•■''■■: ■-:; " 'FLctionaiisatiori'isa dreadful word whicti-signifies: a dreadful thing. The kind of information which a true novel gives, the kind of instruction which it succeeds in imparting, is a kind with which only.it can deal.' Its field is a field of observations and intuitions tdo i complicated, "too illusive, arid -too tenu-; ous to be reduced to downright statemerit, and capable of being communicated only in connection with concrete situations which suggest them. "The true novelist does, not translate his abstract conclusions into stories; for if he did he would have not a novel but a fable. The true novelist writes novels just because what he wants to say cannot, by him, at least, be dissociated from the story he has to tell. "It is a pity, no doubt,; that the. novel which the mature reader- can find not merely 'worth reading' but actually too valuable to miss should be as rare as it is. But the situation is not to be remedied by offering* him sugarcoated pills of history ov economics instead. There is, indeed, only one way in which critics, librarians,, editors, and the others interested in the welfare of fiction can 'possibly remedy it: ' Let them see to it that all novels are written by geniuses."