Rachel Eisendrath, a scholar of English Renaissance poetry, is a great admirer of Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral novel, Arcadia. It’s a difficult book to love, she concedes in her book Gallery of Clouds. It’s unfinished, for one thing — he was toiling on a revision that ended in mid-paragraph before he died of gangrene in 1586. It’s also, at least as Eisendrath describes it, interminable, suffused with florid language and constant recursions that test the patience of most modern readers. “He is constantly inserting, digressing, wandering, qualifying, and in a thousand ways forestalling the end,” she writes.
But while Gallery of Clouds isn’t a defense of Arcadia per se, Eisendrath wants to lobby for its sensibility — for Sidney’s ambitious if impossible goal of creating a literary world that is complete unto itself, distinct from reality. The thickets of Sidney’s prose, rather than being off-putting, are intended to be consistently inviting, to pull us into a separate universe. Just about all fiction, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the David Baldacci paperback at the CVS checkout, participates in that dream. But Sidney stretches the point, representing a time when a book could be, in Eisendrath’s words, “sometimes a little boring — in a luxuriant way.”
The structure and form of Clouds at once evokes and contradicts Sidney’s mission. Made up of brief fragments and stray observations, Eisendrath’s book is designed for contemporary attention spans. Immersion is important to its theme but not its form: “No unity has been lost because there never was any unity.” It freely shifts from Sidney to Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsday circle to Montaigne to Renaissance painting to childhood remembrances. But the structure has the same goal as the one she ascribes to Sidney — to question what draws us into a book and keeps us there.
In Sidney’s time, literary ambition had serious consequences among the aristocracy that raised him; it made you part of a binary whose opposite was productivity and public esteem. Sidney was chastised for his writing by his mentor Hubert Languet in a letter: “You must consider your condition in life, how soon you will have to tear yourself from your literary leisure, and therefore the short time which you still have should be devoted entirely to such things as are most essential.” Sidney was banished from Queen Elizabeth’s court after questioning her marriage; job one in everyone’s else’s eyes was his getting back into her good graces. But Sidney, for his part, wrote.
And wrote, and wrote. Arcadia runs to more than 800 pages, and he also produced poetry, plays, and commentaries during his exile. Arcadia, like other pastoral romances, is built around an “and-then” structure designed to keep a plot moving, if little else. Our current fixation on theme and message in a work of fiction would seem as senseless to Sidney as the Elizabethan notion of writing as not-work would seem today to the average literary person. “Romance wanders instead of, as epic does, building toward an end that is presented as fated and inevitable,” Eisendrath writes. “Therefore, romance has to regenerate its momentum over and over.”
But though Arcadia is a work out of time, the dream it represents — the possibility of abandoning this world for a wholly literary one — hasn’t died. We cling to it, Eisendrath writes, as a “secret inner chamber,” sometimes to a fault. Eisendrath writes about Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Leonard Woolf visiting the home of a descendant of Sidney on June 14, 1940, the day the Nazis took Paris. In his journal, Leonard Woolf was struck by the disconnect between the world-historical turmoil and the carapace the descendant had constructed around himself. “History had broken into the fantasy house of literature, into the fantasy of aristocracy,” Eisendrath writes. Part of the dream of immersion means recognizing that it is just a dream, always destined to end.
But in highlighting that tension, Eisendrath makes us recognize how much of our reading lives puts us in a conflicted state, even if we’re not listed in Burke’s Peerage. Reading is a paradoxical act: We read to escape, but escape is impossible. Fiction “never lieth,” Sidney wrote, because it never presumed to tell the truth. Yet we crave the fiction that fiction promises. If we can’t wholly inhabit fiction, Eisendrath asks, how do we live with it? “How do the pressures of the present shape the contours of our inner life?” she writes:
“The need to maintain a state of readiness for apparent insanity, or for lying, or irony, or flirtation, or intimidation, or for playing the fool (and playing the fool so long and so well that we may convince even ourselves that we are a fool) keeps us out of our dream worlds but also, perhaps, creates the space for them — even when our only awareness of such worlds is of where we are forbidden to go. What would a literary criticism look like that could somehow take cognizance of such conditions of mental life?”
Presumably it would look something like Gallery of Clouds, which engages with that question but suggests that it can be looked at only from oblique angles. Eisendrath’s book operates between the imaginary — the book freely shifts registers, and opens with Eisendrath picturing herself dying and meeting Virginia Woolf — and the real, rooted in Eisendrath’s scholarship. The book is belletristic because it’s so elegantly written, rich with digressions and pockets of dry wit. (“A brief history of prose style,” starts one section, alert to the absurdity of the task.) But being belletristic here is to a purpose, to evoke the same sensibility that challenged and inspired Sidney. Here we can be patient, meander, look curiously at the fragments of an immersive literary life that Eisendrath uses to illustrate her book: Montaigne’s marginalia, the notes people leave in their books, the literary letters we receive.
We can do all this, Eisendrath suggests, but only for a time. Gallery of Clouds is brief, an extended essay, really; it acknowledges we’ll have to move on to other things in our lives. Pastoral romance, on the other hand, most directly evokes napping, Eisendrath writes. She’s joking, but the joke is rooted in the fact that Sidney’s labors appeal to something that’s appealing yet impossible — a good long rest from the world. We have to be alert and get back to work eventually. But so long as we possess the urge to resist our wakefulness, fiction endures.
[Published by New York Review Books on May 11, 2021, 160 pages, $19.95 hardcover]