Find Your Personal Landmarks at the Library

by Bill Peak

Do they still teach “the classics” these days? They certainly did in my time. And they were presented as faits accomplis, no questions asked. “These are the classics, you will read and remember them: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, Huckleberry Finn, Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter.”—the titles apparently handed down from on high. Occasionally a teacher would pitch 1984 or The Grapes of Wrath into the mix, as if to prove he or she had indeed survived into the twentieth century, but for the most part classical literature seemed to have thrived in the nineteenth century, and promptly expired at its conclusion.

But nothing is permanent in life, not even “the classics,” and from what little I know of current pedagogical fashion, most of the titles listed above probably figure in few syllabi these days (though I pray The Grapes of Wrath and 1984 still make the cut). Which is probably for the best. I’m sure the advent of “World Literature” has introduced any number of worthy novels to the canon that my little mid-twentieth century Kentucky school would never have heard of.

I will probably miss out on most of these new discoveries. I just don’t have the time or the inclination anymore to keep up with literature’s latest wunderkind. Which is not to say I don’t have my own personal list of classics, works that have opened my eyes not just to new ways of seeing, but, just as important, to the way life is actually lived.

Graham Swift won the Man Booker Prize in 1996 for Last Orders, but to my way of thinking, Wish You Were Here and Waterland, are his best books. These past few weeks, my wife recovering from surgery, I’ve found myself rereading Wish You Were Here. It is, in my opinion, a powerful, disquieting “classic.”

The story is told in the third-person singular, primarily from the point of view of its main character, Jack Luxton. The book opens with Jack sitting upstairs in his bedroom, awaiting the return of his wife Ellie. It is raining hard, a scattershot drumbeat on roof and windows. As Jack waits, he recalls important passages from his life. From time to time, he glances at the shotgun lying on the bed beside him.

Jack was raised in southwest England, on a farm that generations of Luxtons had called home. It was all he knew. There were his father and mother, his little brother Tom, and the dairy cows they milked twice daily. Life was simple, local. Everything had its time and place. Life had always been like this. Life, so far as he was concerned, would always be like this.

But then Jack’s mother died and Jack had to become a sort of mother to his little brother, whom he loved—though love was a word no longer spoken in that now motherless house.

But Jack, a large man, unsure of himself, a bit of a fumbler, still felt love, and some of it he felt for the little girl growing up on the farm next door, Ellie. And Ellie returned that love. In their teens, they began to meet secretly whenever Ellie’s father was away.

I have to admit, I have only a vague memory of the mad cow disease that struck England’s beef and dairy industries in 1996. I read about the outbreak in the papers, felt, I’m sure, a passing sympathy for the farmers affected, and then moved on. We learn of catastrophes every day now; spending too much time on each would leave us paralyzed.

But when the catastrophe strikes you …. Well, that’s another story altogether. And that’s what happens to Jack. Jack and his father and his little brother must watch as their livelihood, the cows they have known and cared for all their lives, cows that to all outward appearances remain perfectly healthy, are rounded up by government edict and “culled,” their carcasses set alight.

First his mother dies—his mother who held the family together, his mother who was the keeper of the family history and traditions—and then the cows that gave that history, those traditions, their meaning, are destroyed in a single seemingly senseless act of butchery. Well, it would take something out of you.

And, as it turns out, those deaths are just the first in a series of deaths Jack must face and try to bear. We all have our tragedies to contend with, no one escapes life unscarred, but for most of us, if we’re lucky, Providence punctuates the bad times with long spells of the good. But that is not true for everyone. And as we learn of the multiple sorrows and paltry joys of Jack Luxton’s life, that shotgun remains on the bed beside him.

Reading back over this column, reading the previous line, I find myself wondering why anyone would want to read this book. Why do I want to read, and reread, this book?

Would it help if I told you Swift’s writing is masterful? Would it help if I told you Jack and Ellie’s relationship—with all its human flaws and human tenderness—is as true to life as any I have ever read?

What do we want from classics? What makes a classic a classic? Do we want fairy tales, pie in the sky, or do we want life as it is actually lived, life as we have lived it?

I don’t know. I’m not sure. Certainly there are times when I want escape, when I want Jack Reacher to step into a scene and save the day; but when it comes down to real life, I find Jack Luxton’s clumsiness and uncertainty, his feelings of incompetence, closer to my own experience of life as it must be suffered—and as it must be enjoyed—every day.

So let’s leave it that, like Jack Luxton, I’m uncertain why Swift’s novel moves me so. All I know for sure is that reading Wish You Were Here always gives me, oddly enough, a sense of strength, the feeling that, if I have fears and loves in common with a man as basically good as Jack Luxton, then maybe there’s hope for me yet.