I do not read much for pleasure these days: a splendid but frightful book on the Holocaust or a bunch of pretentious ones by a Norwegian Nazi I am reviewing for Harper’s, frightful in a different sense. I miss the leisure that let me read just for fun, not to critique, or pronounce, or even to put on a list, but simply to savor. I do, from time to time, pick up old friends who never disappoint but will promise me a page or two of pleasure between art and ordinary life, like Rose Macaulay‘s Pleasure of Ruins. I know it will be a good book because I have read in it often, but she immediately tells me something by removing “The” from her title. I am sure it was never there. But the difference is present nevertheless, and so is the absence of the plural. Not “The Pleasure of Ruins” and not “Pleasures of Ruins.”
Macaulay does everything well, but scarcely does one of her pages pass than she has quoted from another and let those words fall into her own concoction like just the right addition to the dish. This quality – to let her work make way for another writer’s beauty – she manifests as early as page one. She has mentioned that among the pleasures of ruins must be some vindictive ones. I still remember the kid in kindergarten who kicked over my house of blocks, and his glee at my distress and his accomplishment. In the sentence and the quotation that follows she reveals her own love of lists, but I also have to marvel at the lovely dance of ideas, of past time elevating the present, that takes place upon the floor of her prose. Hear how she makes way for Second Isaiah:
The vengeance of the Lord, the fall of the proud, the desolation of the rich and powerful: but, beyond all these, surely a profound, passionate, poetic pleasure in ruin as such. Out come the screech-owls, the dragons, the satyrs, the bitterns, the serpents, the jackals, the bats, even the moles, all the familiar creatures of ruin that haunt demolished cities and blooming fancy; the vineyards are trodden down and laid waste, the briars and thorns spring up, houses, now great and fair, shall stand desolate, the Lord shall hiss for flies from Egypt and bees from Assyria, and they shall come and stay. As for Babylon… “wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there, and the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come… Thy pomp is brought down to the graves, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground… I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water: and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts.”
In this book the best minds speak to the best minds. Sorry. In this book better minds speak to one another. I overhear them, as I listen in to all the books I love. They have the secret (it is probably for a cookie) and I mean to pry it out of them. [I already know what it is. It is the music.]
More from A Year in Reading
I suppose I could be accused of a conflict of interest, since my employer is the American publisher of Dance, but Powell's novel has been my favorite book since long before I worked there, and I'm always excited to see it finding new readers.
Unforgettable characters, real insight into people, and humor manages to be both subtle and laugh-out-loud hilarious. What more can a reader ask for? I have to actively prevent myself from rereading it every winter.
I'm not familiar with Powell, but I disagree that Proust is not funny. There is real mordant wit in the way he captures – and skewers – many of his characters.
I agree with Lee. I haven't read Powell (though you've certainly made me want to), but Proust can be laugh-out-loud funny — I've been reading him to my wife in the evenings, and that was one of our big surprises. We expected psychological insight, but not yuks.
I have to agree with those who say Proust is funny. I recently was discussing with a friend how the scene at the end of The Guermantes Way where Swann reveals his impending death almost made me cry when I reread it recently; what's more amazing is that it also made me laugh. Now that's an achivement.
I too have always admired those Powell spines!