I’m with Gail on Finegan’s Wake. I didn’t get through much of The Artist as a Young Man, or the Dubliners, either. I guess I’m just not a Joyce man. I think his life—his wonderfully dedicated wife, his debilitating vision problems, the things he said to other writers, his thoughts on Yeats and the Irish problem, the Catholic Church, the fact that his wife won his heart initially because she enjoyed masturbating with him and was not shy about letting him know, his artistic relationships at Silvia Beach’s bookstore, and many other things— are much more interesting than his work..
Henry James after about 1905 is cumbersome as well (but nowhere near as bad as Joyce). His earlier stuff, the work he himself hated, like Washington Square was cleaner and more direct—and there was humor in it. But he began painting with a lighter brush with dense descriptive paragraphs, beating images to death, harking to the cheapest Victorian romances rather than the more concise writing which was gradually coming into vogue by WWI. And although I’m sure he found artistic pleasure in it, I find it verbose and his artistic ego takes over, like he selfishly taking you for a ride strictly for his pleasure, not the reader’s. It seems his public at the time agreed.
Shakespeare was always tough for me, but I refused to be defeated. There was no way this guy, who was lauded as possibly the best in the English language ever, could be as boring as I thought. It had to be me; I just wasn’t smart enough to get it—and that was unacceptable. I just figured I was too immature, too impatient. I mean, there were inescapable Shakespearean moments like in The Tempest:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, we are all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
I always thought that would be a great way to leave an all night party. It would look good on a tombstone as well.
And when Juliet imagines the death of Romeo while in her father’s orchard and the intensity of her love burns through the pages and scorches the hands of the reader:
“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
I mean this dude was good. No denying that. And after five hundred years, he could still get ‘em hot and squirming in their seats. But most of it, like most of the dialogue in the Tempest just put me to sleep.
Then I heard Lawrence Olivier on stage in New York. He sounded real, natural, like some British guy in a restaurant Central Park West telling a story, not like some bombastic opera singer without an orchestra. Olivier wasn’t reading Shakespeare as a poet, he talking in fulI sentences in a meter I could understand. So, I stopped reading Shakespeare in verse. I ignored the commas and stanzas and read him in my own rhythm, in whole sentences as in prose rather than poetry, and I began to get him, his mind, his humor, his beautiful acrobatics with the language. It was enormously satisfying. Only then could I appreciate the poet. Maybe someday I’ll be able to appreciate the later James works, too. Maybe. I doubt it.
In the same vein as Shakespeare, the Bible, in the English of the early 17th century just was too much. I’ve always appreciated it as an important cultural document, but recently its literary value is becoming apparent. Age, experience, and slowing down long enough to pay attention is the cause, I suppose.
