Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wendy Lesser is the author of His Other Half: Men Looking at Women through Art; Pictures at an Execution; A Director Calls (Faber and Faber, UK, 97), a biography of Stephen Daldry; and The Amateur, an intellectual biography exploring the intersection of art and experience (Pantheon, 99). A winner of the Pen/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in 1997, Lesser was also editor of Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography.

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Nothing Remains the Same

Mariner Books

Excerpt

Reflections

It began, as things often do for me, with Henry James. I had nothing
new in the house to read (a recent spate of bad fiction having
destroyed my appetite for buying new books), so I searched my shelves
and idly chose The Portrait of a Lady, a book I hadn"t picked up in
twenty years. Rereading it turned out to be an astonishing experience.
I had first read this novel as an undergraduate, and had gone
through it again as a graduate student of English literature. Both
times I was too close in age to Isabel Archer to appreciate her
properly, and both times I read largely for the plot. The fact that I
already knew the plot the second time around did not deter me: at the
age of twenty-six, I still zoomed, suspense-driven, toward the final
pages, as if only the ending counted.
But in your forties the journey begins to matter more than
the arrival, and it is only in this frame of mind that you can do
justice to Henry James. (I say this now, but just watch me: I"ll be
contradicting myself from the old-age home, deploring my puerile
middle-aged delusions about James.) At forty-six, no longer in
competition with Isabel, I could find her as charming as her author
evidently did. Moreover, having had a life, with its own self-defined
shape and structure, I was more sympathetic with Isabel"s wish to
acquire one. As a young person, I only wanted her to marry the lord
and get it over with. Now I understood that nothing ends with such
choices—there are always additional choices to be made, if one"s life
is to remain interesting.
I cared less, this time through, about what decisions Isabel
made than about how and why she made them. And this, in turn, gave me
far more patience with the length and complexity of James"s
sentences. Once, perhaps, I had viewed them as pointlessly extended
or merely ornate; now they were useful keys to the pace and method of
Isabel"s subtly complicated mind—so that whereas I used to be tempted
to skip ahead, I now wanted to saunter through the commas, linger at
the semicolons, and take small contemplative breaks at the periods.
The book was much better than I had remembered it. More to the point,
I was a much better reader of it. Both pleasure and understanding
came more easily to me.
The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading
struck me with the force of a revelation. It meant that something old
wasn"t necessarily outdated, used up, or overly familiar. It offered
an escape route, however temporary, from problems that were both
personal and cultural—my own creeping middle age, the prevailing fin-
de-siècle tone of fashionable irony, and above all the speeded-up,
mechanized, money-obsessed existence that had somehow become our
collective daily life. Like many others before me (including, I noted
wryly, Henry James), I felt menaced by too-sudden change, as if
something I held dear were about to be taken away from me, or perhaps
had already been taken away when I wasn"t paying attention. I
felt . . . But I needn"t elaborate. You were there. You lived through
it too.
My own situation differed somewhat from the average, in that
I had purposely constructed for myself a life that was marginal to
and therefore shielded from the clamoring demands of the marketplace.
Well, "purposely" may not be the right word; in fact, one function of
this book will be to examine in some detail how little "purpose" one
can have, at fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, in imagining or
projecting a life. But let us say that, for whatever reason, I found
myself in the luxurious position of being able to reread. I had the
necessary background—that is, I had read a lot of books when I was
younger—and what"s more, I had the necessary time.
Time is a gift, but it can be a suspect one, especially in a
culture that values frenzy. When I began this book, almost everyone I
knew seemed to be busier than I was. I supported myself, contributed
my share to the upkeep of the household, and engaged in all the usual
wifely and motherly duties and pleasures. But still I had time left
to read. This was partly because I incorporated reading into my work
life (I run a quarterly literary magazine), and partly because I
worked very efficiently (I run my own quarterly literary magazine, so
there"s no busywork whatsoever: no meetings, no memos, no last-minute
commands from the higher-ups). I had constructed a life in which I
could be energetic but also lazy; I could rush, but I would never be
rushed. It was a perfect situation for someone who loved to read, but
it was also an oddball role, outside the mainstream—even the
mainstream of people who read and write for a living. How often have
you heard an editor or an academic or a journalist say, "Oh, I wish I
had the time to reread Anna Karenina!" (or Middlemarch, or
Huckleberry Finn, or whatever beloved book rises to the surface of
one"s memory)? Well, I thought, I have the time. I could reread on
behalf of all of us.
Of course, it never really turns out that way in practice.
Nothing demonstrates how personal reading is more clearly than
rereading does. The first time you read a book, you might imagine
that what you are getting out of it is precisely what the author put
into it. And you would be right, at least in part. There is some
element of every aesthetic experience, every human experience, that
is generalizable and communicable and belongs to all of us. If this
were not true, art would be pointless. The common ground of our
response is terrifically important. But there is also the individual
response, and that too is important. I get annoyed at literary
theorists who try to make us choose one over the other, as if either
reading is an objective experience, providing everyone with access to
the author"s intentions, or it is a subjective experience, revealing
to us only the thoughts in our own minds. Why? Why must it be one or
the other, when every sensible piece of evidence indicates that it is
both?
Rereading is certainly both, as I was to discover. You cannot
reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other
things, a mirror. Wherever you look in that novel or poem or essay,
you will find a little reflected face peering out at you—the face of
your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when
you first read the book. So the material that wells up out of this
rereading feels very private, very specific to you. But as you engage
in this rereading, you can sense that there are at least two readers,
the older one and the younger one. You know there are two of you
because you can feel them responding differently to the book.
Differently, but not entirely differently: there is a core of
experience shared by your two selves (perhaps there are even more
than two, if you include all the people you were in the years between
the two readings). And this awareness of the separate readers within
you makes you appreciate the essential constancy of the literary
work, even in the face of your own alterations over time—so that you
begin to realize how all...