There is no time to Pause

 Wendy Lesser continued to be a good companion to the end of Nothing Remains the Same. I'm very glad she finds no reason for the statue to come to life in The Winter's Tale and that that's she's not worried about it either. It's not yet clear that her enthusiasm for Paradise Lost and Huckleberry Finn will persuade me to return to those which would be re-readings because we read them, up to a point, at school. She has made a case for filling in some of the gaps in my earlier Ian McEwan and that might happen but I left off with some of his more inventive books recently and there are higher priorities, like what she says about Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady. I'm sure the Portsmouth Library Service can find me a copy of that but the biography of Balzac by Graham Robb has been commenced upon already on an afternoon when, honestly, it was all that there was left. I'm sure that is going to turn out to be as worldly as any of the many, many stories lifted from it as the prolific, corpulent maestro was wont to do. It's hard to credit in chapter 1 that at school he was regarded as lazy. That hardly seems fair but perhaps it is a misjudgement that teachers, employers, adults and practical types make of writers.

Yes, it might look like we are indolent and purposeless but the thinking needs to be done before the hard part, which is the writing. I found it difficult once to explain to an engineer, let's call him, why writers or artists were more important than those who built bridges. Bridges are fine, I said, but the engineers only need to build them so that the writers can go and see what's on the other side of the river so they can write about it.

Wendy ends with a chapter on Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock. I'm not always convinced that film is an art form comparable to literature unless it's French, very, very good, or Hitchcock and so I went through what DVD's I have and found that Vertigo wasn't one of them and, not being prepared to go through the rigmarole of signing up to the ITV hub to see Sheridan Smith's latest trauma in advance, it will be the life of Balzac for at least a week.

One sometimes needs the reassurance of something like the dedication of somebody as good as Wendy Lesser, on the dreariest of February Sunday afternoons, to be sure it is important to have spent so much of one's life reading stuff that other people have made up. One could be in danger of thinking it might not have been and perhaps even wishing one had been an engineer but she's a great help. I see there's at least one other book in her various back catalogue that might make it clearer yet, Why I Read. That should help enormously but I hope I don't entirely agree. 

There's much she says that one instinctively knows is right but there are things one is reluctant to take on trust. Thank heavens for that. Once literature is reduced to a list of right answers, it might as well be mathematics and the whole glorious, unending, sometimes maddening game will be over and the only precarious uncertainty left worth investing in will be horse racing.