Free Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books by Wendy Lesser

imagined four of his friends—strangers in life, but dead in the same month—watching the black-and-white set together and gradually losing interest, until “snow blurs the picture” and they are “weaned from memory,” loosed into the timelessness of the archaic dead. And I can still hear Thom’s wit when I reread this poem to myself. But the voice in which it was conveyed is fading now, for he too has joined the dead and been swallowed up in that snow.
    Emily Dickinson’s voice has always had this quality of coming from beyond the grave—certainly for me, but perhaps even for her near-contemporaries, since so much of her work was only published after her death. “’Twas just this time, last year, I died,” she begins one poem, in a rather Rebecca -ish, Sunset Boulevard -ish vein (though it was Hollywood that stole from Dickinson, of course, not she who copied from them). “I died for Beauty—but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining Room—” is the start of another of her precociously posthumous poems. But the one I have always loved best opens with the line “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” and ends:

    I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
    What portion of me be
    Assignable—and then it was
    There interposed a Fly—

    With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
    Between the light—and me—
    And then the Windows failed—and then
    I could not see to see—

    It is the blueness of that fly’s buzz, its absolute rightness and specificity, that makes the verse so persuasive. She knows what she’s talking about, and the fly is the proof.
    As further evidence from the land of the non-living, let me call on another fly. This one appears in Ackerley’s My Father and Myself , when he is talking about the deathward decline of his mother. “Ending up as I am with animals and alcohol,” he says, in what is surely one of the great throwaway clauses of all time,

    one of her last friends, when she was losing her faculties, was a fly, which I never saw but which she talked about a good deal and also talked to. With large melancholy yellow eyes and long lashes it inhabited the bathroom; she made a little joke of it but was serious enough to take in crumbs of bread every morning to feed it, scattering them along the wooden rim of the bath as she lay in it …

    Ackerley never hints that his failure to see the fly might cast doubt on its existence; if anything, he suggests the opposite, describing its physical features in microscopic detail. This fly’s “large melancholy yellow eyes” make it as tangible as Dickinson’s blue buzzer—and who is to say, at this late date, how real or unreal either fly was? They reside permanently, now, in the same landscape as Henry James’s, Javier Marías’s, and Thom Gunn’s ghosts.
    The uncanny in literature is not a separate place, reserved for those who believe in the occult or the supernatural. It is there in every poem that joins us to an absent speaker, every novel that sets up a parallel between our world and its world, every essay that calls to us from the distant era of a now-dead author. That eerily bridgeable gap between the you and the me of a literary work is also a space between the living and the dead, the imagined and the real, the singular and the collective. Even the very word “space” is doing double duty here, for it points to something that is both there and not there: it is the placeholder that joins us in a sequence (like the single space between each of these words) and it is the severance, the emptiness, that keeps us apart. Like all such ambiguous connectors, it is invisible to the casual glance, but we would know instantly if it were to disappear, for in that case the sentence, the stanza, the entire literary structure, would disintegrate on the spot.

 
    THREE
    NOVELTY
    There is a certain kind of writer who seems to feel that unless he is breaking apart everything that came before him,