Booking It: Artful

Ali Smith’s unusual new novel Artful, published in 2012 by Penguin Books, begins with a poem, a Child Ballad from the early fifteenth century: “The wind doth blow today, my love, / And a few small drops of rain; / I never had but one true-love, / In cold grave she was lain. / I’ll do as much for my true-love / As any young man may; / I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave / For twelvemonth and a day.”

Then Smith’s writing begins, carrying the poem right into the present narration: “The twelvemonth and a day being up, I was still at a loss. If anything I was more at a loss.”

This beginning is indicative of the book as a whole, which blends art into life into art, again and again. The novel — or whatever we choose to call it, as it isn’t quite a novel, and isn’t quite anything else either — began as four lectures for the Weidenfeld Vising Professorship in European Comparative Literature at Saint Anne’s College in Oxford: “On time,” “On form,” “On edge” and “On offer and on reflection”. The lectures draw from literature as a massive, global whole, tying Charlie Chaplin to Flaubert to W. G. Sebald, and Edwin Morgan (a contemporary poet) to Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens and Horace. The lectures tumble from one eloquent thought to the thought to the next, and always remain — at least in my experience — one step ahead of the reader, so you feel like you’re always almost grasping the meaning but always just missing it.

But the narrator of the novel seems to find, as she rifles through these lectures, that grasping the meaning is not the point. The point is the elusiveness, the in-between spaces that literature dances along — not here, not there, between the lower classes and the upper, between the physical page and the wild imagination, between the dead and the living. And there is a potential to defy time in literature, and also to preserve it; there is a selfishness and an act of giving and also a potential for redemption, in reading and in writing. And so much more, of course, that goes beyond what I could describe.
The narrator of the book is not an expert of literature. She (or he — we are never quite sure) is a biologist, reading through the lectures on the desk of her husband (or wife) who was an expert in literature, and who has died. The writing of these narrated segments is like a conversation; so vividly real, and also sometimes so strikingly beautiful. We learn very little about the two characters, except for short moments of their current and remembered days, and then the insights into how they see trees, and how they read books — which speaks so deeply to their characters, and to (I think) the nature of life and loss itself, that we do not want anything else.

In my sophomore year at Middlebury, I remember sitting in a senior thesis carrel that I’d stolen in the upper mezzanine, furiously speed-reading Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which is, I have to admit, a very difficult book, and feeling utterly lost. I went to Professor Stephen Donadio’s office in Hesselgrave House, which is lined with shelves of books on nearly all the walls, and asked if he could just maybe tell me what was important in the book, what I should look for, because I was a little sophomore and didn’t understand. He told me that there is no answer, and that I should never to let anyone try to answer that question for me.

I should pay attention to whatever it was that struck me at this reading, he said, and years later, I would come back to the book and find that different pieces of it would now speak to me, and the book would be new again, and that is how we should read. We should read personally, I guess. We should let the book speak to us directly. That advice has always stuck with me.

There were times reading Artful, when I felt that maybe I wasn’t smart enough to understand it. But I don’t think Ali Smith meant for any of her readers to put all the pieces logically together. The character that the book is named after, the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, is a character who eludes us. When Dickens lists off the fate of all the characters at the end of his novel, Smith’s narrator notes, he never mentions the Artful: “it’s like the Dodger’s not just given the story the slip, but given Dickens the slip too”.

That is the beauty of great literature, of course. It can’t quite be pinned down. And somehow, still, at each reading, it speaks straight to us, and it opens up a window for us to see the world, at least for a little while, in a new light. Smith’s novel touched me in this way. Reading it this week was like a beautiful culmination to my four years of studying stories at Middlebury — hopefully a beautiful beginning to a whole life of studying stories too.