Close reading

My analogy for close reading, rather than the examples of “riding a bicycle or playing an instrument” quoted in Christy Edwall’s review of John Guillory’s On Close Reading (January 3), is wine-tasting. It’s esoteric, sounds pretentious and is far removed from most students’ experience, but it requires developing a memory of a multitude of experiences and a vocabulary for describing and assessing them. And at all costs: avoid pretentiousness.

Practical Criticism papers were common in some A- level syllabuses until the reforms of Curriculum 2000, when it was deemed too subjective (as we were informed at a heads of English departments meeting by a spokesperson for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority). Ironically, it was retained for the more demanding Advanced Extension Award, introduced to stretch the ablest. Until last year Oxford was using its English Literature Admissions Test as an admissions filter and Cambridge was still using its version.

Is close reading teachable? Yes. At a local academy where I have been mentoring applicants for Oxbridge since retiring, I devote a weekly lesson for about nine months to introducing them to seminal texts from the sixteenth century to the present, and urge them to buy David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, encouraging them to perceive fine details of stress, rhythm, structure, tone, point of view, with constant attention to the associations and sense of words.

Teaching texts for A level can be a form of ventriloquism. Teaching close reading is not. Wider knowledge, references to critics or other works are not credited. What is credited is the wisdom and insight accumulated as a result of wider reading and reflection, rather than learning to hit “assessment objectives”.

A-level teaching often fails to incorporate this approach to the preparation of texts. All the students I have taught have achieved interviews; six of the nine gained places; one was pooled. The challenge for teaching is to show teachers how close reading can be successful in helping students to form independent judgements and, above all, to think.

Keith Barron
Beckenham

When I published The Secret Artist: A close reading of Sigmund Freud (2000), the aim of that close reading (in German) was to combat assumptions about Freud that readily became cultural and political tokens, heatedly exchanged often by those who had not read him. It was indeed, as Christy Edwall put it in her review of John Guillory’s book, “a small private resistance to wide-scale industrialization and automation” – though probably not as your reviewer meant it.

The greatest philosopher-cum-literary critic to offer that resistance in my time – though he wasn’t an influence – was Jacques Derrida, whose close reading was not only of texts, but of entire reputations. He offered micro-critiques that unsettled the conventional readings that we all are guilty of dealing in. His aim was to show that many cases of evaluation were in fact undecidable. He wanted his own work to stay that way too. That was why it was written in a way almost impossible to pin down or quote from usefully. His critics found him irritating and at worst subversive of the established humanities, which he probably was. But his point was to question cultural transmission while still admiring and loving what he read.

I can imagine such an attitude – such close reading – might stimulate many young minds today, though it might not help them with interviews and passing exams.

Lesley Chamberlain
London N6

Georges Simenon

In her review of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the twentieth-century novel (January 3), Michèle Roberts notes the absence of Georges Simenon from the “compendious” survey. “It would be interesting to know what Franks makes of him”, she writes. Although Simenon is mentioned only once in Frank’s book, we can guess that he has a pretty high opinion of him. As editorial director of New York Review Books, Frank published, by my count, eight of Simenon’s romans durs – psychological novels of high literary merit.

Roberts appears to prefer his romans policiers – “forensically sharp” explorations of power, crime and corruption. One can argue whether the romans durs or romans policiers have a stronger standing in the life of the twentieth-century novel, but surely all fans of the peripatetic Belgian writer will welcome Roberts’s report that “Simenon is newly being given his due”.

Micah Morrison
Rego Park NY

Leibniz

I enjoyed reading Steven Nadler’s review of two recent biographies of Leibniz (January 10). Bertrand Russell always laid claim to discovering the importance of Leibniz’s unpublished works. He admired the German’s intellect, but not his character. In his History of Western Philosophy he wrote: “Leibniz was somewhat mean about money. When any young lady at the court of Hanover married, he used to give her what he called a ‘wedding present’, consisting of useful maxims, ending up with the advice not to give up washing now that she had secured a husband. History does not record whether the brides were grateful”. As for Leibniz’s view that “ours is the best of all possible worlds”, Russell relished F. H. Bradley’s riposte, “and everything in it is a necessary evil”.

Sam Milne
Claygate, Surrey

Slavery reparations

Daniel Butt’s review of Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations now! by Michael Banner (January 10) leaves two topics unaddressed. First, what about Britain’s role in planting chattel slavery in its colonies from New England to the Carolina coast? Slavery became so deeply embedded that decades of political compromise failed to uproot it, and only the scourge of civil war could extirpate what Britain had planted: “until”, as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”. The thirteen United States were no less former colonies than were island states in the Caribbean. Does Britain owe a debt to today’s American descendants of the hapless victims of its slave trade?

Second, what reparations might be due from present-day African states whose predecessor tribes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seized other tribesmen in war or by kidnapping, and trafficked their human commodity to British and other European slave traders at the coast? These may be intractable questions, but Professor Butt’s net of “principles of compensation and restitution between nations” – in the words of the subtitle of his own book – could be cast more broadly.

James Connelly
Falmouth MA

London, 1984

In her review of Stephen Brooke’s London, 1984 (In Brief, January 10), Emily Baughan notes the existence of a “third London” alienated from both the Thatcherite model, perhaps best exemplified by the development of what became known as Docklands, and the emergence of Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council (GLC) as a sort of super grant-making body. This raises the issue of the extent to which Londoners have ever identified with the prevailing local government structures, a problem that has existed since the establishment of the GLC’s predecessor, the London County Council (LCC), in 1889. Although the creation in 1900 of twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs provided more “localism”, it also set up a tension between the two tiers of London local government that persists to this day – see, for example, current resistance to the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone scheme into the outer London areas. The London Government Act 1963 abolished the LCC and established the GLC, extending the remit of the new authority far beyond the core of the metropolis, absorbing (amid considerable resentment) chunks of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent and Surrey, and the whole of Middlesex. Meanwhile, the various boroughs within the GLC’s area were amalgamated to create what planners considered to be more viable administrative units. These successor boroughs, often with manufactured names, and cutting across traditional boundaries and local loyalties, struggled to create a sense of shared identity.

John Sheldrake
Southend-on-Sea, Essex

Paul Valéry

David Evans’s review of the Collected Verse of Paul Valéry, translated by Paul Ryan (January 3), stated that “the last complete anthology of Valéry in English appeared in 1971, translated by David Paul”, and hence that Ryan’s was “overdue and very welcome”. There have been no “complete” collections of Valéry’s poetry in English translation since that distant date, but in 2020 an extensive collection was published, The Idea of Perfection: The poetry and prose of Paul Valéry – A bilingual edition, translated by the American poet Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This major edition could hardly be said to have been below the radar, having secured a number of prominent reviews in the US and the UK. Surely Evans should at least have mentioned Rudavsky-Brody’s work or, even better, compared some of these justifiably praised translations with those of Ryan, as the most visible modern versions. This would undoubtedly have enriched an already fascinating piece.

Will Stone
Yoxford, Suffolk

Ghost writers

John Maddicott (Letters, January 10) puts forward Sheridan Le Fanu as a writer recommended by M. R. James. Another James also puts in a good word for Le Fanu: Henry. In “The Liar” (1888), the narrator, Oliver Lyon, stays at a country house called Stayes, where the proprietors “do him very well”. Among the books provided “was the customary novel of Mr. Le Fanu for the bedside, the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight”. Interestingly, this story appears immediately after The Turn of the Screw in Volume Twelve of the New York Edition of James’s works. Appropriately, the Liar in the story, Colonel Capadose, tells Lyon a made-up tale about a ghost in the house, but when Lyon quizzes the proprietor on the subject, he says: “We do our best, but they’re difficult to raise. I don’t think they like the hot-water pipes”. Lyon concludes, after exploring a dark passage with a “wavering candle”: “There might be apparitions or other uncanny thing and there mightn’t”. The question of the existence of non-existence of ghosts has haunted criticism of The Turn of the Screw for years.

Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford

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