There’s a very long article in the upcoming New Yorker by Nathan Heller. It explores in-depth the possible reasons for the decline in people studying English Literature. It’s thoughtful and nuanced and I enjoyed skipping paragraphs before zeroing in again. You can do that when you majored in English. You don’t feel guilty, afterwards.
There are some incisive quotes. Although even the quotes are so long, they’re hard to include in a piece like this. Mr. Heller, I realized, needs a better editor and a clearer sense of why he’s writing.
I can tell you in a few words why I write. Because it’s what I most enjoy doing. It’s what I’m best at. Because it will keep me interested until the day I die. Even if I am penniless, homeless, and mentally ill. Even if nobody important ever publishes another word I have to say. I’ll be reading. I’ll be writing. You can’t say that for most other things you can study at university. You sure as hell can’t say it for chartered accountancy. You only get one go, in life. You know?
So, I studied English. If you’re reading this and trying to decide what to study, I’d recommend English. It might make it very difficult for you to settle for a boring life afterwards. But if you want a boring life, in the first place, then my sense is you wouldn’t be thinking about this subject. You’d be thinking about “crypto”.
My dad came from quite humble beginnings in the North of England. He was the first of his family to go to university and studied civil engineering. The idea was that with such a degree, he’d be more likely to find a job. He didn’t hate it, exactly. But my dad told me often that he wished he had studied English Literature like my mum did. That he was often struck by how he would meet brilliant people in his profession who couldn’t write. He used to read me poetry when I was a boy and when I got older, I decided to be brave on his behalf.
I still have the book of poems he used to read to me. It’s called Comic Verse and contains a lot of cheeky poems by English writers. They’re the opposite of boring. They made me see the challenging parts of life in a different light. Hee, hee, hee.
I grew up in a crap town in South London called Croydon. To go to university to major in English Literature was, even in 1998, a brave choice. Many of my compatriots were studying subjects more likely to lead them into jobs. One of my best mates from that period is a dentist now. The others are a lawyer, a property guy, an ombudsman, a stock trader, a banker, and so on. I don’t begrudge any of them their chosen professions but I’m also glad I spent the last two decades getting lost. Studying literature threw away my map. Those subsequent years have been far more rewarding than I would have expected when I graduated. I’ve often woken up worrying about the way forward, but you can’t find it if it’s already laid out for you. That’s not how life works.
My parents read lines of the poet T.S. Eliot to each other when they got married. I can imagine their parents looking on and thinking their children were mad. But it’s the reaching in a move like that that I’ve always loved about literature. Shakespeare. Salman Rushdie. Virginia Woolf. Zadie Smith. Charles Dickens. Martin Amis. Chinua Achebe. These are people who marveled at the incongruity of the world around them and wrote about it anyway. When we read what they wrote, we get a head start.
Boy, do we need one. The way I see it, the world is pretty f____d up, right now. If we’re going to figure out a way forward, we’re going to need to think big. I do understand why anybody in their late teens might feel despair. I felt it in my late teens, too. But that’s what literature has wrestled with for generations. Even Hamlet was a mixed-up kid. We need to explore such writing more now than we did even when I studied it. I’m not saying it holds easy answers. I’m saying there are no such things as easy answers to how to live your life. Not if you’re intent on making the most of it. But those are the stakes. They always have been. I think it’s a shame to waste any time pretending otherwise.
