I recently received my first issue of Slightly Foxed, a handsome little print journal from the not-so-United-Kingdom (https://foxedquarterly.com/). Its intent is to introduce readers to “books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.” It comprises 16 essays describing and appreciating books remembered from childhood, bestowed by old friends or relations, or stumbled upon serendipitously. They range from publication in the 19th to the 21st century. Most are not by authors I recognized by name. The editors note half of them are out of print, but offer to help locate second-hand copies. Almost none of them are available in my large metropolitan library system (and I’ve reserved the ones that are). It’s a quirky, personal, assortment of beloved books.
What struck me was a refrain that appeared in several of the essays, something I had been thinking about since reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s thoughtful “takedown” of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multi-volume opus, My Struggle. Mendelsohn observes that Knausgaard “is always telling you about his feelings… but precisely because the feelings are reported rather than evoked, they belong only to the author; between him and his characters – ‘I’ and ‘they’ again – there is no room for ‘you,’ the audience.” (“I, Knausgaard,” in Ecstasy and Terror, NYRB, 2019, p. 293) This described perfectly why my own struggle with reading Knausgaard went down in defeat.
In the first Foxed essay, writer Daisy Hay recalls being enchanted by a memoir by actor Joyce Grenfell, and commenting that “Joyce takes her reader into her confidence, so that you feel she is talking just to you.” Six pages later, in Henry Jeffreys’s appreciation of Roald Dahl, he remarks on Dahl’s “uncanny ability to talk directly to his reader.” And Simon Callow prefaces his memoir On Being an Actor by saying that the book will have served its purpose if people outside the theatre world read it and think, “Oh, that’s what it’s like….” Readers get this. Even Holden Caulfield got it when he says that what “knocks him out” about a book is when you wish “the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” I feel like that about Ursula LeGuin, Penelope Lively, and Daniel Mendelsohn. I don’t think Charles Dickens would take my calls.
It doesn’t mean that the author’s experience or sensibilities or ideas are the same as yours, but that they somehow make you feel that they’ve just been waiting to tell their story to you. There is also a smug, cozy satisfaction when you discover a writer or a book you claim for your very own, that no one else “gets” like you do, and in fact you almost resent it when they try. It’s a sort of love, after all – from infatuation to possessiveness. It’s the books that made us feel understood, respected, and recognized that we come to love.
Writers should not forget this. If they (we) do, then writing is an exercise in personal catharsis or performance, audience be damned. Perhaps, we tell ourselves, we are writing for people not born yet, people who someday will get it and pronounce us geniuses ahead of our time. But, as Holden Caulfield continues: “That doesn’t happen much, though.” “I” and “they” need to remember to leave room for “you.” Thanks, Slightly Foxed, for reminding me.