H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 3 6There are certain obvious ways in which the idea of literature as
self- expression is flawed, not least when it is taken too literally.
Shakespeare, as far as we know, was never marooned on a magical
island, but The Tempest has an authentic ring to it even so. Even if
he did spend time eating coconuts and knocking a raft together, it
would not necessarily have made his last work a finer play. The
novelist Lawrence Durrell spent some time in Alexandria, but
some readers of his Alexandria Quartet would rather he had not.
When Shakespeare writes of his lover in his sonnets, it may be that
he never had a lover at all. No doubt it made a difference to him
whether he had or not, but it does not make a difference to us.
One should not make a fetish of personal experience. Aspiring
writers are sometimes advised to draw on their own experience,
but how could they not? They can only write of what they are
aware of, and awareness is as much part of one’s experience as a tap
on the skull. Sophocles writes out of his own experience in Oedipus
the King, though it is unlikely that he was a blind, exiled, incestuous
parricide. You can have experience of gluttony without being a
glutton yourself. You can grasp the concept of gluttony, discuss the
idea with others, read tales of gluttons exploding all over the walls
after devouring one pork pie too many and so on. There is no
reason why a celibate could not come up with a more sensitive
portrayal of human sexuality than a thrice- married roué.
A writer may not experience anything beyond the experience of
the act of writing. Perhaps the agonised feelings he records are
entirely fictional. He may never have had a tortoise called John
Henry Newman, or have wandered dazed and bleeding around the
alleyways of Tangiers. Or perhaps he staggers bleeding around
Tangiers every three days, but writes about it in so unconvincing a
way that we suspect he does not. There is not much point in trying