Reading Oscar Wilde's article "Tomb of Keats" very nearly brought me to tears, I miss Keats that much (I do miss him and the fact that I could never have met him does nothing to change that fact). But in a way it's actually consoling to read something written by a dead author about a previously dead author. I sometimes wax melancholy over the idea that all my favourite authors are dead, it seems to me that they all lived and wrote and died and then, years, decades, even centuries later, I was born to read and mourn them. But reading Wilde's "Tomb of Keats" put things in perspective. Here I see Wilde, who died long before I was born, mourning and appreciating Keats, who died long before Wilde was born. Seeing the progression of time and lives in this way, as a progression including myself and not as a series of events which I look back on, I don't feel quite so isolated in my appreciation of authors. Or at least I feel that others have felt this way before me and so have company in my isolation.
On Not Having Ever Read Robert Louis Stevenson's Letters
Surprising as it may seem, I have actually read very few of the published letters written by my favourite authors. When I was young my father had a shelf of the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and when I was about thirteen years old, Stevenson being one of my very favourite authors (which he still is, incidentally) I decided to start at one end of the shelf and read my way all the way through, however, I skipped the volume titled "Letters". I started reading it but decided to put it by and move on to the next volumes. It wasn't because I found the letters dry or uninteresting or because I was eager for the next adventure novel, quite on the contrary, they were fascinating. I skipped that volume because I felt I wasn't supposed to be reading these letters. I had the same sneaky, prying feeling I got when I snuck into my brother's room to play with his toys or when I read my father's email over his shoulder. So I tucked the volume at the end of the shelf and moved on to the essays, Stevenson's letters would wait until I was older.
But now I am older and my opinions on the matter haven't changed since, they've just be refined into something a bit more articulate. I looked into a volume of Stevenson's letters the other day and had that same prying feeling I had when I was thirteen. It wasn't just that I remembered the feeling from when I was young, it was the fact that Stevenson wrote these letters for certain of his friends and family and not for me which made it feel awkward to read them. It doesn't matter than Stevenson died a nearly century before I was born and that these letters had been published and sitting on library shelves for many years before I found them. And even if these letters contain brilliant insights into the mechanics of fiction or witty comments on a thousand different topics (and indeed, they do), I feel that if Stevenson had intended them for the general public he'd have written them into an essay instead of a personal letter.
The same is true of other authors' published letters; John Keats' love letters, for example. As much as I love Keats' writing and as much as I'd like to see more of it, and as much as I already know the contents of these letters (they can't possibly be that different from his poems) I cannot help but respect the fact that Keats wrote these for someone and that someone is not myself.
It seems I have a nice little moral block against snooping and time does nothing to change that. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson's private letters is, to me, the same as rumaging through someone's desk, it's just not something any respectable person should do.
Commentary on John Keats' Poetry
Much has been written about John Keats. No nuance of his poetry of event of his life has been left untouched by critics and biographers, it seems Keats has been reviewed and critiqued as many times as Shakespeare himself. However, if you actually read much of Keats you will see that his poetry, as with any truly good poetry, is thoroughly self-explanatory. Everything which is meant by the poem is somehow evident in the poem itself. A thing half hinted at in a poem is indeed a thing half hinted at and need not be brought into the full and garish light of editor's introductions and student's essays.
Here follows all the commentary on John Keats' poetry which ever needs to be written or said:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
During the last two centuries countless reams of paper have been filled with commentary and speculation on just exactly what Keats meant by those two lines alone. Is the meaning not obvious upon the very first reading? Beauty is truth. Truth is beauty. Nothing else is known or needs to be known.
Beauty = Truth
and that is all
A Bit of Circular Logic
Some time ago (the previous chapter here, actually) I wrote that all one need know of Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn, and in fact all one need know of all of Keats' work, is "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
It has since been brought to my attention that a great many people disagree with this interpretation on the grounds that Truth is not Beauty; they misunderstand what Keats meant by "Truth". They say that many true things are not in fact beautiful, and so Keats' line is either nonsense or else holds some other, hidden meaning.
By "Truth", Keats did not mean "things which truly exist" or "facts" or "reality" or "unpleasant things which happen to be true". Instead he meant Truth as an ideal; Truth as a thing itself; Truth as a noun and not as an adjective.
Truth, and not things which happen to contain truth or be qualified by truth, is Beauty (as a matter of fact, Keats uses the word "Beauty" in much the same way; he is speaking of Beauty itself, not things which are beautiful, yet for some reason people seem to understand Beauty and completely miss the point of Truth).
I could, if I was so inclined. bring a host of contemporary essays, philosophy and etymology to bear witness to the fact that during Keats' time the word "Truth" was used in this way, and that this is indeed what Keats meant when he used the word. but I am not so inclined. A mountain of evidence would only distract from my point, and that point is should be evident from the final two lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Deeper Meanings in Fiction
When I read, I read things just how they are. I try to see what the author meant and I enjoy a story as a story. A piece of fiction is either going to be a functional, believable, well-written and interesting story, or else it's going to be a jumbled, unrealistic, and boring bit of hack-work. If there is a deeper meaning, or a point, or a statement, it will be there because it has to be there for the story to work the way it does. Good fiction is never a political statement in disguise, but sometimes a piece of good fiction will end up making a political point because of the situations in which the characters find themselves. A character can end up in a legal mess, and because of the mess he's found himself in, the character can show the reader something about the legal system; but a character should never be forced into a legal mess simply because the author wants to say something about the legal system.
I've read stories that set out to make a point, and they almost always fail as stories, which makes their points fall flat. But stories which are merely stories can end up making very good points.
I like to read things instead of reading about things, and I consciously avoid reading essays, prefaces, articles, etc. about classic works which I haven't yet read, which means that I've never actually read anything abut Kafka or his stories. Because of this, I can read The Metamorphosis and think about just the story the way it's written and translated, and nothing gets in the way; no pre-conceived notions, no scholarly theories, just Kafka, a translator and me.
I read and re-read The Metamorphosis as a story, nothing more. I didn't highlight key phrases, I didn't submit a 3-5 paragraph essay on the state of post-modern society, I didn't read two-hundred flimsy, glossy text-book pages of opposing theories. Instead I read The Metamorphosis, twice. It's an interesting story, if a somewhat infuriating one. It's well-written (and well-translated, in the edition I read), it's well-constructed, the characters are clearly drawn. It's a good story about strange things, and if it leaves the reader feeling unsettled and pessimistic and morbid, that's because it's an unsettling, pessimistic and morbid tale.
To me, The Metamorphosis doesn't look like a statement disguised as fiction, it looks like a good story. It seems to me that if it makes a statement at all, it's not some great lofty thesis about the Human Condition which boils down to "life sucks, then you die".
If it makes a statement at all, it's about how humans treat and interact with animals. It's about why you should change your dog's water every day. Why you shouldn't just assume that your cat doesn't know when you're talking to him. Why you should make sure that the grasshopper you caught and put in a jar has the right food to eat.
