Raymond Chandler is making me depressed this afternoon. Not because Chandler has a knack for hitting a nerve (“On the way out I had another look at the face in the mirror. I looked as if I had made up my mind to drive off a cliff”). I’m depressed because I am currently rereading The Little Sister in The Library of America edition. And one of the most important people behind The Library of America died at the end of August. Richard Poirier was one of the great slow readers of the twentieth century. I suspect outside of Americanist and New York circles Poirier is a bit less well known, but Renaissance scholars, you really should read him: a very large portion of Renaissance Self-Fashioning is wholesale theft of Poirier’s The Performing Self.

Anyway, if I can never say goodbye to Michael Jackson, I can never say goodbye to Richard Poirier either. Part of the reason is that anyone trying to take a technique initially developed to read the high canon and use it to read pretty much anything is inevitably operating in the wake of Poirier’s “Learning from The Beatles.” And rereading chapter three of his The Renewal of Literature (“Venerable Complications: Literature, Technology, People,” a sort of Emersonian version of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) made me realize that, really, I’m just continually bungling what other people, especially Poirier, have said and said better than I ever could: “Literature makes the strongest possible claims on my attention because more than any other form of art or expression it demonstrates what can be made, what can be done with something shared by everyone, used by everyone in the daily conduct of life, and something besides which carries most subtly and yet measurably within itself, its vocabulary and syntax the governing assumptions of a society’s social, political, and economic fragments. Works of music, dance, filmmaking—any of these may be more enjoyable or affecting than a given work of Literature and may also, of course, exhibit comparable operation of genius. But none depends for its principle or essential resource on materials that it must share in an utterly gregarious way with the society at large and with its history” (133-134). Literature, and especially the close reading of it, was for Poirier the most democratic of arts, and despite his learning and brilliance there is never a hint of elitism when he reads. The paragraph ends with a jab at Fredric Jameson that I don’t think I quite agree with but which is, nevertheless, hilarious and brilliant: “Despite its own affiliations with Technology, and perhaps because it feels guilty about them, Literature tells us not that we are in ‘the prison house of language’ but that we are on parole” (134).

Still, the primary reason I can never say goodbye to Poirier is because I never really knew him well enough to say hello, so saying goodbye would seem to be presumptuous. When I was in grad school at Rutgers, I spent four or five years working as the advertising manager for Raritan, the journal Poirier founded in 1981. Poirier retired just before I started working there, and almost never came into the office (strangely preferring Manhattan to New Brunswick). The few times I did see him, I don’t think he knew who I was entirely; we also spoke on the phone a few times (“It’s Dick,” he’d say, redundantly, because his voice was as indistinguishable as Louis Armstrong’s). My longest interaction came one day when he was back in town to give the blankty blank lecture, and it was really cute because he was a little nervous about it. Raritan is located in a house, and the second floor is (or was) more or less open plan. On one half of the floor was Poirier’s office; in the middle was a conference table (usually full of boxes of copies of Poirier’s books—yes, I took one of each); and at the other end was the office of Tom Edwards, who was Poirier’s pal and co-conspirator and who taught 18th century. Edwards had also retired a few years before (I was lucky to take one of the last grad courses he taught, in which he made us write one page close readings every week which he, in turn, close read), and so I had Edwards’ office—that’s where I typed (on a typewriter; the entire operation at Raritan had a sort of 1958 feel about it) the letters to publishers seeing if they wanted to advertise a book in the journal. My big interaction with Poirier came that day of the blankty blank lecture, when I was up there flipping through a publisher’s catalog looking for books on Emerson. Poirier came in and said, politely enough, “would you mind?” He wanted to practice his talk, and he wanted me to leave. The interaction did not feel like a dismissal; it felt like someone who was taking his blankty blank lecture, his reading, with the utmost seriousness and attention and care. That’s why he was a little nervous: because reading closely and explaining things clearly always mattered. So I left.

In short, though I was never a Poirier student, I was, as just about everyone at Rutgers was, a fan and an admirer (“Only Dick can make Emerson interesting!” Bridget Lyons once declaimed, and she is right, as she always is). But how much I was, and am, an admirer, or just a thief, is something I keep finding out.

So what does all this have to do with a slog about slow reading, you wonder? After Edwards retired, he left pretty much everything in his office—all his books, all his course notes (humbling in their detail, even for works he’d taught a thousand times), the offer for the first job he ever got at UC Riverside (it was a telegram!). And among the books was a copy of In Defense of Reading, a 1962 collection of essays edited by Poirier and his teacher and model Rueben Brower. The essays are all by people associated in one way or another with Brower’s famous close reading course, the same course that Poirier brought with him to Rutgers (at Harvard it was called Hum 6; at Rutgers English 219). Anyone who thinks “close reading” is something old fashioned or inherently conservative or not hip ought to have a look: the people with essays in the book include Paul de Man, William Pritchard, Neil Hertz, Anne Ferry, Stephen Orgel, Paul Alpers, Paul Bertram, Tom Edwards and Poirier, and the essays, collectively, forecast most of the good things that happened in English departments for the next thirty years, from smart historicism to reader response to deconstruction to the things in between (Poirier himself reflected on the course in an essay in Raritan). Whenever anyone asks me for interesting statements about what, exactly, close reading is or could be, I invariably mention *In Defense of Reading*—so it’s not as if I had forgotten its existence. But I had forgotten, or somehow not forgotten, that Brower’s piece is the description of the introductory course in close reading: what sort of assignments to write, what you think you’re trying to get students to do, why you begin with poems before moving on to longer works, what a “life-long reader” may or may not amount to, what exactly the point of a literature course is at all. I remember reading that essay when, as a grad student, I lucked out and was assigned to teach a section of 219—a course somewhat changed by then, but not that changed. And after reading the essays in In Defense of Reading I didn’t want to change anything—I probably would have even used their anthology, Beginning with Poems, if I’d been able to.

Since he obviously didn’t care what happened to the books he left in his office, I filched Edwards’ copy of Beginning with Poems, along with his copy of Dubliners and the Houghton Mifflin anthologies of English literature from the 1950s (very enlightening) and a few other books. But I stupidly, stupidly, stupidly didn’t steal his copy of In Defense of Reading. So when I saw the news that Poirier had died and was googling around looking for whatever info I could get, I found myself back at In Defense of Reading in his list of publications and tried to look it up on google books. Alas, you can’t quite read everything on the internet—all you get are snippets. So I went to the library here to look at it again (interestingly enough, the main library of the University Toronto does not have a copy. I had to go to one of the college libraries: maybe that tells you something). It was then that I discovered, or remembered, or succumbed to Fate: Brower’s essay, the model for so much of Poirier’s own work, is called “Reading in Slow Motion,” and it describes “a method that might be described as ‘slow motion,’ by slowing down the process of reading to observe what is happening, in order to attend very closely to the words, their uses, and their meanings” (4).

Slog, 1962.