Fiction as a means to grasp reality

“PEOPLE say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading,” quipped the Anglo-American aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith.

The warming thought at the heart of Edward Mendelson’s elegant new collection of essays, “The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life,” is that life and letters can be complementary rather than antagonistic undertakings.

All it takes to bind the two together is a wise and willing reader -- and Mendelson is both of those things. As a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, he’s also learned in cogent and unobtrusive ways, which lends his interpretations of these classic novels a crisp sort of authority. Mendelson is W.H. Auden’s literary executor and edited the exemplary edition of the poet’s complete works. As a writer, he’s probably best known for his magisterial two-volume biography, “Early Auden” and “Later Auden,” which deftly traced the poetry’s autobiographical roots.

In a way, that experience must have been a mirror image of the one that went into making this collection. As Auden once wrote in a letter to a friend: “For a poet like myself, an autobiography is redundant, since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem.” Mendelson’s task as Auden’s biographer, then, was to read the life into the work. In these new essays, he is suggesting that his readers join him in pulling life from the text.

The texts are drawn from seven great English novels, which Mendelson argues address the stages of everyday life in some particular way. Thus, he selects Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” for birth, Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” for childhood, Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” about maturation into adulthood, George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” for marriage and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse” and “Between the Acts” for personal love, parenthood and “the stage when life surrenders to the next generation,” respectively.

One of the reading life’s great pleasures is to reread in adulthood the books you think you know from adolescent or academic encounters. Unless you’ve recently done that with these novels -- in which case, lucky you -- the ideal way to enjoy these linked essays would be to read them in tandem with the books. Mendelson is an ideal companion in such a process for reasons this passage from his introduction suggests:

“Anyone, I think, who reads a novel for pleasure or instruction takes an interest both in the closed fictional world of that novel and in the ways the book provides models or examples of the kinds of life that a reader might or might not choose to live. Most novels of the past two centuries that are still worth reading were written to respond to both these interests. They were not written to be read objectively or dispassionately, as if by some nonhuman intelligence.... A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naive way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.”

If a reader detects a reproof here to all the various reductive “theories” in academic vogue in recent years, that’s exactly what the author intends.

So why are all the novels he considers by women?

As Mendelson puts it, the choice “has nothing to do with any fantasy that women have inherent depths of feeling that men do not, or that women have greater moral and emotional intelligence than men have, or that women have any other essential qualities denied to men.” Rather, the author argues that their common confrontation with discrimination gave each of these women writers, as writers, “a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes, and to defend those values by paying close attention to them in her writing, by insisting that those values matter to everyone and that everyone experiences them uniquely.”

It’s an enlightening -- even liberating -- frame of reference, and it frees Mendelson to make some rather bracing judgments, as in this appraisal of Emily Bronte, who “believed as strongly as did the Marquis de Sade that cruelty is inherent in nature, that it was one of the aspects of nature that human beings shared. But, unlike de Sade, she had no impulse to philosophize about the subject or to convince anyone else to share her point of view. De Sade is no more dangerous than a professor expounding transgressive ideas to a graduate seminar (which is one reason why de Sade has recently been in academic vogue); Emily Bronte is a more profoundly terrifying figure because she leaves behind the whole world of argument and discussion. If we don’t already understand the cruelty of nature, she sees no reason to tell us about it; nature is not something that can be taught, and it has no use or need for our understanding.”

The essays on Charlotte Bronte and on Eliot’s “Middlemarch” are similarly fine. The former contains what may be the only non-pedantic discussion of Neoplatonism you’ll ever read -- and a convincing one, at that. The latter makes a case for what Mendelson calls Eliot’s “sober maturity” and for the power of a book he says treats its nine characters’ passage from solitude to marriage “with the exact detail of a Dutch painting.”

When it comes to Woolf, however, it’s a bit hard not to feel that enthusiasm has trumped Mendelson’s own sobriety. He’s frank from the outset about his skepticism concerning literary modernism’s holy trinity of Yeats, Eliot and Joyce. Their preeminence is, Mendelson argues, the consequence of a mistaken preference for heroic archetypes as “more real than individuals.” Woolf, he writes, “thought more deeply about the moral and emotional aspects of personal life.”

Obsessed might be a more precise term.

Still, a serious reader has to come to grips with Mendelson’s contention that the Yeats-Eliot-Joyce cosmology conceals “a deeper prejudice, which is that the shape and complexity of a work is the test of its greatness, that a work of art need not be emotionally moving except to the degree that its structure and patterns inspire inarticulate awe.” Thus, the author proposes his own pantheon in which Woolf is assigned “the central place in modern fiction,” Auden in poetry and Beckett in drama.

That’s a great argument, but is it true that Molly Bloom’s monologue isn’t emotionally moving or that the feeling you have when you finish reading “The Dead” is inarticulate awe?

It’s a rare and fine book that inspires this kind of mental argument, and one of the splendid things about this one is that it reminds us that criticism of the sort Mendelson practices is one of the things that matter.