What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

As Francis reached the end of his third sonnet, Mary Sheldrake, who had immediately thrilled to the poem, reflected as she had before, that poetry, not the novel, was literature’s indispensable form. The spoken or written poem was as old as literature, perhaps as old as speech, with roots in song, in the rhythms of daily life and the body’s pulse, in the hunger to catch the passing moment and to glorify love. It was not a generous concession she was making, but an uneasy one. Poetry, it was said, was the senior service. She had sat with novelists on onstage panels and contributed to the usual extravagant claims for her art, but it was the poets who made the book of life. The novel was the froth of recent centuries. It had developed to meet the needs of intelligent, privileged women excluded from formal education and meaningful work. Indeed, ‘work’ was the word Jane Austen and others used to describe womanly hours of incessant and pointless embroidery as they chatted about their neighbours. And so, Mary insisted, the novel grew into the paradigm of higher gossip. Love, marriage, adultery, contested wills – the stuff of neighbourly fascination. It took modernism to shake the novel up (Mary had no regard for Tolstoy or George Eliot) and offer it higher aspirations and bolder claims.