Beyond Analysis

Finding myself in the Kinokuniya bookshop at KLCC last night, I felt confident I wouldn’t be putting my hand in my pocket and troubling the cashiers, despite the tasty selection on offer. And tasty it certainly was, particularly in terms of one or two well-chosen displays. They seem to employ someone there who really knows what he or she is doing when it comes to book selection and the like. The shelves for Popular Science are much better in terms of their range than anything in the big flagship Kinokuniya in Singapore and they always have cunning displays around the Graphic Novel and Music sections. Last night there was an excellent table dedicated to Gothic Fiction that caught the eye and tempted the wallet in the same spot where several months ago they did an excellent job promoting Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, along with one or two of those of Fleming’s more recent acolytes. Yet despite all this I was confident that, given the length of my Books That Simply Must Be Read Before Moving On To Pastures New list, I would emerge unscathed on the wallet front.

It was the Poetry section that proved my undoing. Not that it’s a particularly great section – generally it doesn’t alter that much in terms of what’s on offer and the selection is sort of interesting but quirky. And it wasn’t actually a book of poems that did me in. No, as soon as I spotted the chunky Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid I sensed the game was up for me. In truth, I’d wanted to buy this back in England but it was simply the size of the thing in relation to our already over-stuffed cases that had held me back. I’d then made my mind up that, despite this being an inevitable purchase somewhere down the line, I’d put it on hold and seek for it in Singapore. However, I’d not looked too hard in the interim given, I suppose, my determination not to buy too much more to read until I’d made big in-roads on the aforementioned list. My determination actually held up for a good ten minutes after my initial sighting of the Letters, but the frightening idea that I might not come across any edition at all other than this one finally decided me.

The fact that the book was shrink-wrapped had assisted my pitiful resistance to a purchase to some degree. Back in England I’d had the chance to leaf through the tome and read a couple of letters and that was what had been responsible for the sheer inevitability of a purchase at some point in time. Hughes was obviously as fine a letter writer as he was as great a poet and once into a letter the sheer forward momentum of his ideas and presence made it impossible not to read on. In fact, the word ‘fine’ gives the wrong impression. There was nothing of the magisterial in literary terms about what I was reading. These were the living, engaging words of a friend, a companion in reading and thinking – but a companion of startling mastery.

And that leads me to what has been on my mind as a result of that first glance at the Letters and my reading of Neil Roberts’s book on Hughes at the end of December. There’s a point at which what might broadly be termed critical analysis gets in the way of what literature is about. The attempt to stand outside a writer’s work in a place of some kind of distanced judgment is misplaced and does damage to one’s reading. A truly responsive engaged reading, which is the only reading of any lasting kind of value, needs to be one that is spellbound, even as one recognises the key ingredients of the spell.

I’m looking forward to falling, or putting myself, under Hughes’s rugged spell again soon.