MODERN LITERATURE
15
Joyce and Proust and Kafka, with Lawrence, Mann, and Gide."
Eventually the course fell to me to give. I approached it
with an uneasiness which has not diminished with the passage
of time-it has, I think, even increased. It arises, this uneasiness,
from my personal relation with the works that form the sub–
stance of the course. Almost all of them have been involved with
me for a long time-I invert the natural order not out of lack
of modesty but taking the cue of W. H. Auden's remark that a
real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by
Ulysses
and by
Remembrance of Things Past
and by
The Castle
for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these
books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and
they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me
and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such
that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has
ever been so shockingly personal as ours-it asks every question
that is forbidden in polite society. It asks us if we are content
with our marriages, with our family lives, with our professional
lives, with our friends. It is all very well for me to describe my
course in the college catalogue as "paying particular attention to
the role of the writer as a critic of his culture"-this is sheer
evasion: the questions asked by our literature are not about our
culture but ourselves. It asks us
if
we are content with ourselves,
if
we are saved or damned-more than with anything else, our
literature is concerned with salvation. No literature has even been
so intensely spiritual as ours. I do not venture to call it religious,
but certainly it has the special intensity of concern with the spirit–
ual life which Hegel noted when he spoke of the great modern
phenomenon of the secularization of spirituality.
I do not know how other teachers deal with this extravagant
personal force of modern literature, but for me it makes diffi–
culty. Nowadays the teaching of literature inclines to a consider–
able technicality, but when the teacher has said all that can be
said about formal matters, about verse-patterns, metrics, prose
conventions, irony, tension, etc., he must confront the necessity of
