Patrick Kurp, as an aside:
As an adolescent, that’s how I first encountered Kafka and Dostoevsky, writers once important to me. The method isn’t foolproof. Sometimes we choose dull or stupid books, or books that aren’t right for us. Perhaps we are not the ideal reader. Kafka and Dostoevsky are no longer right for me but others prize them.
Kurp often mentions writers that he once liked but now despises, for example Hart Crane is now simply too wild to countenance. Kurp is now too sober and austere for such juvenile oupourings, I guess (ho ho ho).
I thought back over my decades and realised I simply don’t outgrow things. I spent my entire teens reading Fantasy books and while I transitioned to Serious Literature when I was 20, I occasionally re-read e.g. Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance series, or David Eddings’ Belgariad, and just last year I re-read Douglas Hill’s Keill Randor books with great pleasure. I no longer seek out new Fantasy books, as every attempt (barring Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) has ended badly, but every few years I like to revisit the pleasures of my youth.
There are Serious Writers I fell out of love with, for example William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac but even here my literary judgement hasn’t changed that much; I esteemed Burroughs & Kerouac because, aged 20, they were two of the first non-Fantasy authors I encountered, and they seemed like a portal to adulthood.
I thought they were cool the way a 14-year-old thinks smoking makes him a man. My literary judgement, however, was more neutral. I found Naked Lunch and Queer amusing & comical, the rest of Burroughs’ books pretty much hit & miss, and Kerouac’s works enjoyable but slight. I thought that Allen Ginsberg was mostly shit, ‘Howl’ and one or two other poems being enjoyable rhetorical bombast at best, the rest of his work being utter dreck. Even as the whole Beat image – drugs, alcohol, criminality – has long since ceased to allure, I dare say my literary judgement wouldn’t have changed that much over the last 15+ years, that is, I would probably still enjoy some of Kerouac & Burroughs.
I was wondering if there was something wrong with me, since Kurp seems to have outgrown and come to despise almost everything he’s ever read. Am I weird, for still liking T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, Proust and Thomas Mann, after two decades?
My nature seems fairly constant in spite of much surface change: where I despise people I used to pal about with, it’s not that either of us have changed that much; it’s more that where I was once willing to tolerate a fair amount of bombast, finger-stabbing hectoring, sneers, cowardice, etc., because I thought well no one’s perfect, now I’m just too old and impatient to tolerate what Joe Biden would call malarkey.
Twenty and more years ago, there were books I read because they seemed like the sort of things I should be reading, but if I didn’t like them I didn’t like them and that was that. I didn’t find Colin Wilson’s The Outsider all that interesting, or Sartre, even though I wanted to. By contrast, there were books which took me wholly & pleasantly by surprise: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Thomas Bernhard’s Holzfällen, Kafka’s Zuräu Aphorisms, Beckett’s Trilogy, Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel & Stella. I suppose reading habits are as various as people, which is one reason I rarely recommend books – apart, of course, from the fact that nobody reads books anymore.
Remainders 