Sep 202006
 

In a footnote in Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience, he has this to say of the ideal reader:

I am not [Saul Bellow’s] son, of course. What I am is his ideal reader. I am not my father’s ideal reader, however. His ideal reader, funnily enough, is Christopher Hitchens.

There is a theory to infer here, once we discard the prissy Platonism of the word “ideal.” A single ideal reader does not exist any more than a single soulmate. Still, some readers are better than others, and for the best of them the word will serve.

An ideal reader is a kindred spirit, not a doppelgänger. Hitch, the Trotskyite, and Kingsley, the Tory, are savage and bloody-minded in a way that Martin is not. Martin and Saul Bellow, on the other hand, both have a taste for wistful picaresque and a sense that even rotten bastards aren’t rotten all the way through. They treat phonies and frauds sensitively where neither Hitchens nor Kingsley would have the patience. (To see how Kingsley handles such people in his novels, read Hitchens on Mother Teresa or Bill Clinton.) It is no accident that The Adventures of Augie March is Martin’s favorite Bellow novel. Martin’s own best novel, Money, is a sort of picaresque itself: its moneyed yob, John Self, blunders and binges through America.

An ideal reader sometimes vastly surpasses his author — Poe’s ideal reader was Baudelaire. The other way around is impossible; understanding presupposes intelligence.

An ideal reader often writes about his author, but he is too near him, temperamentally, to play the judicious critic. He reads the author as the author would want to be read, not as others would want to read him.

The relationship can be, but is usually not, reciprocal. Edith Wharton’s ideal reader was certainly Henry James, although he had died by the time she wrote her best novel, The Age of Innocence; and Henry James’s ideal reader was very likely Edith Wharton.

Just as an author can have multiple ideal readers, so can a reader be ideal for multiple authors. My girlfriend is Quentin Crisp’s ideal reader; also Doug Kenney’s. You now know her better than her immediate family does.

Who is my ideal reader? I thought of Matt McIntosh, but no: he agrees with me too often, and the literary blather obviously bores him. My ideal reader, in an upset, is Conrad Roth, of the scholarly, whimsical, and criminally underrated Varieties of Unreligious Experience. He is literary but has mathematics as well, sympathetic but critical. (I am too poor a linguist to be Conrad’s ideal reader; he’s on his own.)

Whose ideal reader am I? In the world of actual books, I am of course Yvor Winters’ ideal reader. I have occasionally, unfairly, been regarded as a Winters epigone. (This is a Winters epigone.) Winters was a Thomist and a theist. He made more fuss about ranking poems than I do. His theory of free verse scansion differs entirely from mine. But we are both especially attuned to the conflict of the abstract and the particular, the subject of a large percentage of Winters’ favorite poems and an even larger percentage of his own verse. More to the point, we both regard “poetry-lovers” as the very people from whom poetry urgently needs to be rescued.

In the world of blogs, I am owned by Colby Cosh. This began to dawn on me one day, about the middle of last year, when I was contemplating a post about the great AC/DC — now, as ever, 100% irony-free! — only to discover that Cosh had already written it that morning. Several months later the realization was completed when I found myself linking to a few of his posts about hockey, a game I do not understand. His themes include, but are not limited to, the idiot innumeracy of journalists, bureaucratic idiocy, sportswriting idiocy, and idiocy all around. He is a shrewd literary critic, sometimes at my expense, when he cares to indulge. Our cats also look alike.

Who is your ideal reader? Whose ideal reader are you?

Update: Conrad Roth comments. I couldn’t have been a contender either. Megan McArdle comments. I report with embarrassment that I had to look up L.M. Montgomery.