Days of reading: Letters between Wystan Curnow and Allan Smith

Abstract

Written by Wystan Curnow: Early in May last year I suggested to Allan Smith that we get together and have a talk about reading. Allan’s email reply included a rundown on what he had been reading recently and why, but ended: “I really don’t think I’ll have much to offer your thinking about the next R.[eading] R.[oom] issue, but I’ll enjoy talking with you, Wystan.” I was however so intrigued by Allan’s rundown that I disregarded his conclusion. In any case, even before we met for lunch further email exchanges established points of coincidence among our current interests, notably and unexpectedly the works of John Ruskin, and seemed to persuade us both a joint writing venture would be worth our whiles. We’ve have borrowed our title from a selection of Marcel Proust’s writing partly because of the long essay on Ruskin it contains but mainly because it describes the way reading is represented in our exchange: as, that is, the core vocational (not vacational) activity of two art critics, whose avid reading shapes their writing and vice versa. Reading is less a subject here—we’ve read about and reflected on it for sure—than a compelling preoccupation whose specific necessities these letters serve, we hope, to demonstrate more than define.