A Man's Perspective On The Pleasures of Reading Jane Austen.

Sitting down to read the opening pages of Jane Austen's Persuasion is like slipping into the cosiest of slippers, fresh soft new felt dressing gown, and sitting beside a glorious crackling fireplace in the dead hours of the dead months of deepest winter with an enormous mug of cinnamon hot chocolate.

If you, reader, have no experience yet of what is meant by the words "exquisite diction", you have only to turn to these pages and read them aloud to instantly drink in the liquid music of pure English tones. They are such pure tones that they flow past the ear with no sense of labor or effort, but with a complete ease which might deceive the uneducated listener as to their simplicity. But have no illusions! every word is placed precisely where it belongs, and no word is used without art, and any word is omitted with strategy.

Fall silent as you read slowly. Doff your hat; bow your heads. For we are in the presence of literary royalty in these first pages of Jane Austen's Persuasion.

PS - The movie of this book is by far the best Austen movie I've seen, fyi.

Henry James and His Path to Individuation in 'The American'

I just read Henry James' novel, "The American".

I was inspired to read it by the Great Books suggested novels list. I looked it up on Amazon and it sounded fun and easier to read than the later James novels, and so it was. The style is wonderful, humorous, and vibrant. The prose is luxuriant and jewels up into a bon mot every few pages.

It starts with Christopher Newman, a charming character with a kind of flexible moral fibre that can take almost any kind of shock - except those shocks entailed by the plot of the novel.

Newman is very much a free American, and so he is attracted to the bondage of old European values as his path to individuality and wholeness. His attraction to Madame De Cintre has all the hallmarks of a shadow attraction - the inner feminine draws Newman into contact with his vengefulness, hatred, bitterness, narrowness, and evil side - in other words, his shadow. The solitude and loneliness of Newman's character at the end of the novel can be read as a kind of belated adolescence in him - he finally has come to grips with his shadow side as represented by the Bellegarde family.

The Jungian typology is quite convenient for explaining James' novel, because he plays the opposites of European and American with an open hand about his mixed feelings for both sides of the Atlantic. The charged polarities of emotion represent a sort of gateway for the reader into the authorial consciousness itself, which for me is the deepest and most satisfying experience of reading Henry James.

(James is just a wonderful man - the experience of his living consciousness through the text is ineffable. I do not feel I know him yet, but I should want to, and I intend to read "Daisy Miller", "What Maisie Knew", "Turn of the Screw" and "Portrait of a Lady" to discover more about him.)

But back to "The American".

It is as if by externalizing his European-ness and American-ness, Henry James becomes something larger than both. The effort at becoming aware is tangible by the number of times James reverted to the material of the novel in his long career.

Henry James sought perhaps that intoxicating liberty from culture that came from transcending experiencing itself, and instead, it seems, fell into entrapment in the gravity well of Great Britain's culture. Anglophilic became British. Plain-spoken became ornate. The image of the American unconsciously became something more universal through Henry James' conscious rejection of American moeurs.

On John Steinbeck.

Either deadpan or straight-faced, Jonathon Yardley in the Washington Post writes:

"The only reason I can come up with for the high esteem in which Steinbeck is still held is his transparent sincerity. It has long been my pet theory that in the popular marketplace, readers instinctively distinguish between writers whose work draws on genuine feeling and those who rely on art or artifice, and that they reward the former while repudiating the latter. From Jacqueline Susann to Danielle Steel, from James Michener to James Patterson, readers have recognized the sincerity of feeling beneath the utter lack of literary merit, and have rewarded it accordingly."

Yardley links Steinbeck's sincerity with his popularity. This implies that insincerity - or more generously, irony, art, rhetoric and artifice - is the realm of great art. Certainly Steinbeck's novels are deeply felt and badly written, but forget the books for a second - Steinbeck himself is considerably more charming than his contemporaries like the preachy Sinclair Lewis.

John Steinbeck's writing interests me only insofar as I get up close and personal with the author. He fascinates. Steinbeck encapsulates the symbol of Pisces, the elusive fish of classical paganism. Divinely dodgy, sweetly two-faced, a successful loser, and an inspirational figure via the agency of his profound inadequacies as a writer - how can we fail to appreciate this man of paradox? I would do him.

The fact that John Steinbeck is assigned to school children is depressingly Leninist - which is to say it lacks even the redemption of bad taste. Who does not find Steinbeck's downtrodden poor folk boring - it's like 'Les Miserables' without Valjean, or Gogol without the jokes.

I am sure others find Steinbeck's books dull, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and they recognise the man behind the melodrama. Otherwise, assigning Steinbeck to school-children in order to increase class consciousness is, as the little darlings say, "completely douche".