I pick up Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove for the first time in more than forty years, and one of his favorite words comes to mind: reverberations. The Dove was the first James I read, a school assignment either in the novel course for my major or in the required writing course that gave me course placement in my freshman year. In any case, I was either 19 or 20, and the pure writing itself was a revelation. I had read all of Thomas Wolfe and a substantial part of Joseph Conrad’s work before I arrive at school – in addition to some of the favored, if predictable ‘postwar’ writers from both wars. But James was like opening the door on the language. I’d felt some of that in Conrad – the pure love of the language essentially overpowering much of the story, at least for me. But James took it out into the next sphere – an essentially celestial music of pure language.
            Now I realize how much of the basic story I missed. Detail did not so much elude me as disintegrate into the rhythmic textures that in themselves constituted substantive masses and dimensions of the narrative. When at last the circle of narrative closed, I resented the basic realities of plot that demanded, not simply closure, but the narrowing field in which plot, narrative and character finally prevailed over language itself. I always thought it odd that James was not uncommonly classed among the ‘realists’ or even the ‘naturalists’. In my peculiar orientation, the narrative feature I saw most clearly was the recondite level of dialogue, the extraordinarily intuitive give and take, interlocutors seizing subtle implications – reverberations – instantly, and immediately returning equally complex and subtle rejoinders. I saw the power of his psychology, but I saw it primarily from that ‘inner’ perspective, the characterization in terms of verbal exchange.

            In any case, I was a slow reader. I had, not only an ineluctable desire, but an absolute need to hear the language. And I have a kind of dogged literalness – a strange combination for someone who presumes to be poet – but perhaps not. When I picked something up, I had to read it through. Undoubtedly I drove my professors crazy. I could not read 20 pages here and 60 pages there, so I was rarely in synch with the class. But I was perfectly willing to talk about what I had read, or parallel texts.
            But, as a consequence, I did almost no outside reading during school time. And the summers were given to the antidotes against heavy literature – Henry Miller, the early Hunter Thompson, recondite science fiction, transcripts of Lenny Bruce, and so forth. Because I had nearly a semester’s worth of placement, I was able to overload on literature courses. That, and the very nature of the teaching process – its essential alienation from the actualities of both writing and connoisseurship – left me in a blind haze after I had finished my undergraduate work. The two years that I spent discovering how much I detested not only standardized work schedules, but every type of desk job as well, and the year or two of belated psychedelic adventures, for the most part intervened between more or less uninterrupted continuums of dense reading.
            And the effect of The Dove was such that when I resumed reading, I began with Henry James. I probably read 60 percent of his work, at least in the novel. But I finally came to grief on The Golden Bowl. From that point until slightly more than a year ago, I doubt that I read more than a short story or two of his. And after reading perhaps a thousand or more novels by the classical ‘literary’ authors in the English language, I arrived at a ten or fifteen year period when I could no longer read the novel at all. A page or two, and I would begin to stifle – an almost physical sensation of gasping for breath in the hermetic atmosphere of some individual pretending to expand a private consciousness to frame the world.
            In terms of ‘fiction’, only Henry Miller remained on my shelves.

            I understand someone has written a book – a book that has received high notice – on how to write an e-mail. And undoubtedly, there is a need for such a book, when one hears of all the extraordinary misadventures that erupt from the casual stupidities which are possible in that intimate atmosphere, not only potentially publicly accessible, but also potentially global, in the old sense. But it seems to me that there is at least an equal need for a book on how to read an e-mail Perhaps a book would do it. But what the book would say, finally, is, ‘Get literate’. Getting literate is about reading and writing. But it’s not about reading the latest bestsellers, whose style – no matter how prestigious the list – is still simply glorified journalism. Even the self-styled serious literary writers are merely slightly more dense versions of the linear, self-evident narrative discourse required by the chop-shop editors produced by the contemporary publishing machine.
            When one listens to the language of literature – of the true literary history of our language – the narrowness of the present language and the present editorial insistence becomes obvious. And perhaps that is the issue. Many people learn to read without hearing. Not infrequently, I have encountered ‘brilliant’ linguists who apparently do not hear the languages they learn, so that one almost suspects a kind of tone-deaf handling of linguistic structures is a pre-requisite. I know that my own insistence on hearing seems to place me on a par with the dyslexic. And perhaps it is a form of dyslexia. But, if so, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
            But now, with children learning to write on a keyboard, and the visual nature of language becoming subservient to the peculiar immediacy, the peculiarly ephemeral quiddity of the screen – whether phone, pocket device, monitor or television – I have to wonder if that linguistic tone-deafness has not become indigenous in the population.
            Is hearing the language vocational? Do we have to be born with the predisposition? I would say, ‘Only poets seem to have it’. But that’s because I attended readings before hip-hop, when listening was still about substance and not texture or attitude.
            Is hearing a dying art?
            If we cannot hear, we cannot understand. And I would suggest at this point that my transactions with intellectuals, academics, media representatives and even publishers suggest that hearing is rapidly becoming obsolete. If we say two things in an e-mail, we get a response to one. And if we make a subtle point or subtle turn, we get a crass reply, a clear mark of misapprehension.

            I’ve started collecting, if not reading, novels again. In the thrift shops and book sales, I pick up copies of texts I might someday retry or explore. About a year and a half ago I picked up a paperback of early Henry James’ stories. The precise and objective psychology was already evident, as well as the intuitive plotting that eventuates in the perfectionism and mastery of the later James. The language is Jamesian, if not quite so self-assured.
            And so I began collecting James again, remembering that he was the one novelist whose world, as precious as it might sometimes seem, somehow never cloys, never crowds – a language as large, finally, as space itself.
            But the Dove proved elusive, until the latest spring sales.

            Now, as I reenter the book, I move on two levels simultaneously. Perhaps it was the duress of reading for college, as well as my reaction against it, and undoubtedly it was an ambivalent reflection of my budding literacy, but the narrative, as I said, resolved into masses and textures. Not quite Easter Island or Stonehenge, but near monoliths of simultaneously primitive forms and oddly distinctive features placed in an apparently appositive randomness that signifies, that somehow moves the narrative forward in a mysterious and unfathomable way. But, at the same time, the masses and textures somehow seemed light and delicate, as if the traceries within the textures, the actualities of story and character were more like patterns in mated display cloths, whose folds and drape and placement, finally, seemed more important than thread or print.
            Now, of course, I no longer need to read for the dire transition or turn, whether of plot or person – in the test-driven eye of the student reader. Nor do I fall solely into the consequent reactive recognition of grounding form, of masses with their webbed facings turning and receding, as if a pervasive series of resonances defined the romance. So the tracery emerges and becomes the linking actualities of the story. I still hear the long, low, sustained notes under the story, the peculiar shaping power of the narrative, as if outside the story line itself. But I now have time to recover the delicate turns and shading everywhere evident, the moments that perhaps slip by unnoticed and then gradually expand or suddenly, a few sentences on, reveal their pivotal influence.

            But, curiously, I no longer find the sentences inconceivably larger than myself. Perhaps I begin to reflect my own literacy.