Reading Literary History

After I finally managed to post my first entry, I began to wonder why it took me so long plunge into the world of blog-writing. Of course, there is the fear of public exposure that I think most of us share, the anxiety dream we have of showing up for an important meeting in our underwear or not being able to find the appropriate classroom on our first day at a new school. I am aware that blogspot is a very public forum (at the same time, I also realize that the chances of large numbers of people actually reading this are laughably small). But I think there’s more to it than shyness or the social awkwardness of one who spends most of her time with books.

I’ve been reading a lot of literary histories that cover the first half of the 20th century, and I just feel so much more at home in the atmosphere they describe—one in which literature and what people were writing was of major concern. I can read for hours about who lived where in New York, or who knew who in Paris, and then construct a about how wonderful it would be to live the literary life—mornings writing, afternoons in the café, and nights in rapt conversations in bars and salon. But, after a little of that, I start questioning my own premise. For although it’s easy to quote statistics about how little most people read these days, or the failure of our education system to impart even the most basic literary knowledge to our youth, I can’t help thinking that these problems (if they are defined as such) are perennial, and not simply a product of our digitalized , 21st century lives.

Somehow, I have a feeling that it would be difficult to find an example of any historical time when the number of people who read and talk about, say contemporary poetry was more than a small percentage of the population. First of all, such a group would necessarily need to spend large amounts of time sitting around reading, and how do you pay for that?

This is made clear by reading memoirs from the aforementioned period in American literature (my favorite)--the years between the two world wars. Early expatriates, like Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein were living off of family money and their (wildly different) salons were well-established in Paris by the end of the World War I. Communication was slow, but manuscripts could still make it back to the tastemakers in New York, and there was plenty of cross-pollination between the two literary capitals. I have always been more attached to Paris, maybe because I read about it back in the early, formative years of my life, and maybe also because many of the leading players were women. I’m romanticizing, but it seems the perfect nexus in which to create literature.

Our own time sadly, does not. For me it’s impossible to imagine someone like Djuna Barnes working at Starbucks or Ernest Hemingway spending all day in front of a computer screen. (Many of the people involved did have to work for a living, of course. I just bought a biography of Janet Flanner, who wrote a column about Paris for the New Yorker.) It is well within the realm of possibility to imagine that you favorite pierced and tattooed barista, or that Financial District refugee is full of wild poetry, if only they had the time to immerse themselves.