AN ESSAY


   by W. H. Auden



A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
C. G. LIGHTENBERG

One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.
PAUL VAlÉRY


THE INTERESTS of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.

        In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

        To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators.

        We often derive much profit from reading a book in a different way from that which its author intended but only (once childhood is over) if we know that we are doing so. As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.

        One sign that a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. Vice versa, the proof that pornography has no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other way than as a sexual stimulus, to read it, say, as a psychological case history of the author’s sexual fantasies, one is bored to tears.

        Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously truer than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

        We cannot read an author for the first time in the same way that we read the latest book by an established author. In a new author, we tend to see either only his virtues or only his defects and, even if we do see both, we cannot see the relation between them. In the case of an established author, if we can still read him at all, we know that we cannot enjoy the virtues we admire in him without tolerating the defects we deplore. Moreover, our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character in our biography.






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