I would guess that most of the rich people who were conned out of millions by Bernard Madoff are not great readers, and if they read they read for reassurance and entertainment. I saw some of them on the news, complaining that they were ‘taken in’ by this very rich and charming man who gave away fortunes to good causes. Before all else, though, they were victims of their mental sloth. They thought they could go through life without learning how big fortunes are really made or that charm and friendliness are the striking characteristics of crooks. They would have also known that crooks swindle mainly their own kind – because they find it easiest to obtain the trust of people of the same colour, the same religion, the same nationality or the same political beliefs.

Madoff’s victims could have learned all this if they had read Balzac instead of Dan Brown or Danielle Steel. Comfort reading can be very expensive. But of course it is difficult to persuade the ignorant to learn anything, for the most striking characteristic of the ignorant is the unshakable conviction that they already know everything worth knowing. Their fate illustrates how vital to our wellbeing it is to understand human nature and the world.

Writing this I am certain I am not alone, nor are those who are reading this. We share at least one vital ambition: the ambition to think for ourselves, to ‘think outside the box’, not to be slaves to fashionable falsehoods. This is one of the reasons we need to read the classics: we have to be able to look at life and our own experiences from different perspectives, not just from the dominant perspective of our own time. When we read Shakespeare, Swift, Kleist or any of the other greats, we are already thinking outside the box. And switching from one point of view to another we are able to see our experiences – and our times – in the round and have a better chance to interpret them to our benefit. And as we do this, we are improving our thinking skills. The brain needs exercise as much as any other part of the body. When we read ‘a man came into the room’, we have to imagine the man, the room and everything in it. When we see a man come into the room in a film we do not need to imagine anything, our brains are being spoon-fed. And for all the talk about the supremacy of the visual arts, they are inferior to reading in keeping our brains in shape. Crossword puzzles do not quite do this. They make us think but they do not simultaneously engage our imagination and our emotions. Nothing on earth does this – without thwarting our reason – except great literature and classical music.

The difficulty of finding our way to contemporary literary works which are similarly invigorating and enjoyable is that the ruling managers of literature, the élite of the profession – editors and critics – are very much like other professional élites. However critical of the system, and contemporary falsehoods, when the chips are down, they are defenders of the status quo. The opportunistic hunger for power, riches, or simply the pressing need to make a living, the desire to help friends or thwart enemies seem to have greater sway over most of them than the love of truth or the common good. It is most easily seen by looking at the fate of great writers of the past.

How could a writer like Stendhal remain unknown to most Frenchmen of his own time? Or to put it in another way, how could it have been possible for Stendhal’s contemporaries to celebrate in any great number The Charterhouse of Parma? The hero of this novel (the best, according to Proust) is a churchman and eventually an archbishop who is also one of the greatest lovers in literature. Stendhal modelled Fabrizio del Dongo on Alessandro Farnese, who became not only a bishop but a Pope, and endowed him with the sensibility of a genius – his own. Fabrizio starts a religious revival in Parma with his passionate sermons which he preaches for the sole purpose of bringing his great love, now married to someone else, to come and hear him, and once she becomes his mistress he gives up preaching. Clearly a novel about a sacrilegious and adulterous archbishop who is portrayed not as a sinner but as a brilliant and decent man who simply disregards absurd rules could not be comfortably praised by French critics of the 1840s. As Stendhal wrote about the few reviews of The Red and the Black: ‘If I had a great many of them, I would be a baron and an academician. But what use are one or two handfuls? They are not enough to light the kitchen stove.’ Stendhal’s work may have been lost for us forever if Balzac had not rescued it from oblivion a year-and-a-half after its publication with a long review, itself a masterpiece, which he wrote ‘in admiration compelled by conscience’ in his own short-lived magazine, the Revue parisienne.

There are always men of integrity, but the general state of criticism has not improved. The New York Review of Books is one of the leading liberal, progressive literary journals in America, probably the foremost opinion-maker about literature in the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet it promoted to greatness, bestsellerdom and prizes a novel as absurdly wrong about human nature and slavery as Styron’s Nat Turner. Incredibly, it praised an outright fascist novel by Rezzori whose wife had a lovely welcoming villa near Florence visited by many of the New York and London literati travelling in that art-rich part of the world. In literature, as in all other walks of life, it matters a lot whom you know.

*

The immense power of literary criticism – its power to determine what the majority of the reading public will read and thus which writers will live well and which ones will stay poor, its power to make the difference between fame and obscurity for a writer – has nothing to do with the quality of the criticism but is based on the fact that most readers hate to be alone in their opinions and judgments. It requires moral courage to say ‘this is rubbish’, even though everybody is saying that it is high art, or ‘I loved this book; it’s a great book; I don’t care if all the critics in the world panned it’. It is much nicer to feel that one shares the opinion of the ‘experts’, the reviewers of highly regarded newspapers and magazines.

Yet this lovely feeling of having the same opinion as the most advanced thinkers and experts is less and less justified. The chief reason for this is the out-of-control expansion of printing and thus the expansion of criticism. Thousands of new novels are published every year, and these require a growing number of reviewers, which means a lowering of standards in every field, so that most published novels are written by people who cannot write and most reviews are written by people who cannot read.

Then there are the tens of thousands of non-fiction books published every year, most of which are inferior versions of some excellent out-of-print book on the same subject. Great works are constantly allowed to go out of print to make room for new rubbish. Balzac’s literary essays, which belong among the most profound pages of literary criticism ever written, have been out of print in English for a century, while academic charlatans like the late Jacques Derrida published a steady stream of books full of worthless theories and deliberately incomprehensible jargon which for decades cluttered the desks of editors, the shelves of bookshops and the brains of the students who had to read them.

What editor or critic, even the most discerning and incorruptible, could sift through the tens of thousands of new books and pick out the ones which are really worthwhile? The structures of publishing and bookselling demand an avalanche of new titles every year – every month! – and even the best literary editors and critics are not as good as they could be; they are in too much of a hurry, constantly pressed by the next task, by the next batch of books landing on their desks. Expediency, as much as conformism, accounts for the insincere sameness of most books as well as the reviews written about them; to do anything well simply takes too much time. As Balzac said: ‘To invent anything is to die a slow death, to copy is to live!’

This is from his short story Pierre Grassou, and what he says there about the expansion of the Salon in the Louvre in 1817 is worth quoting too:

Formerly, by offering only the best works of art, the Salon conferred the greatest honour on the creations displayed there. From among the two hundred paintings that were chosen, the public made a further choice: a garland was bestowed by unknown hands upon a masterpiece. There used to be passionate arguments about a canvas, and the insults heaped on Delacroix or Ingres served their fame no less than the praises and fanaticism of their supporters. Today neither the crowd nor the critics will get excited about the products of this bazaar. Today they have to make the choice which the examining jury used to make before the exhibition, and their attention flags at the task… Before 1817 the paintings accepted never occupied more space than the first two rows of the Gallery where the Old Masters are, but that year they occupied the whole of the Gallery, to the great surprise of the public. Historical, genre, easel, landscape, flowers, animals, watercolours – these seven specialities together could not produce more than twenty paintings worth a second look by the public, who cannot give their attention to a greater number of works. As the number of artists went on increasing, the selection committee ought to have become more and more difficult to please. But once the Salon overflowed into the main Gallery, everything was lost. Instead of a tournament, you have a riot; instead of a selection, you have a totality. What happens? The great artist loses out. Not only because he gets lost in the crowd, but because those vile mediocrities who are supposed to elect superior individuals in every social class … naturally elect each other and wage implacable war against the real artists.

Is this not equally true of literature and criticism today? How else could some living novelists who come to mind (every reader of this piece will have his own list) have acquired the status of great artists? People who have never read a line of Cervantes or Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis, or even masters of the recent past such as Italo Svevo, are constantly bamboozled to read new sensations in the belief that they are improving themselves with great literature, and at the end of their reading are left without a single profound impression, without a single illumination! It seems self- evident that if publishers in every country would agree to print no more than a hundred novels a year and no more than a couple of hundred non- fiction works, both books and reviews would be of a higher standard and fewer good books would get lost. Today a writer finds it relatively easy to get his book published, but even if it is a masterpiece it can be easily overlooked among the thousands of books which should not have seen the light of day at all. I do not see how millions of e-books could make it easier to access worthwhile reading.

Most useless books are written by academic charlatans and forced on students, robbing them of the time they would need to read and re-read great writers. They torture their brains with sociology and political science – without learning anything that matters – instead of reading War and Peace, Lucien Leuwen and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where the real revelations about society, politics and history are to be found. Books on literature are full of critical theories and jargon or exult over the misjudgements of a Tolstoy, a Shakespeare, the oddities and human flaws of a Gogol, and so on. Thus students learn how much cleverer their mediocre professors are than the greatest minds of western civilisation.

Derrida’s preposterous books are still the best known examples of this sort of academic impertinence. Only an occasional sentence made any sense at all – and that sense is the argument that it does not matter what a writer means, it is for us to invent the meaning of a literary text. Derrida calls this theory ‘deconstruction’, which is, after all, a synonym for destruction. No literature grows anywhere near these people; at least very little of it gets acknowledged. Their vanity and dilettantism take offence at true art, which brings to life flesh-and-blood human beings; and if they talk up a writer, it is likely to be a mediocrity at their own level. (All honour to the teachers to whom these remarks do not apply, but they know best that they are in a minority struggling against impossible odds.)

Some years ago a student from Oxford came to see me in London: she was just taking her degree in English literature. She mentioned a book and I asked her how she had enjoyed it. Drawing herself up, she said proudly: ‘I don’t read to enjoy, I read to evaluate!’ I am afraid she is typical of the sort of literary experts higher education produces: they love books as spoiled rich children love servants, because they feel superior to them.

In America practically the only genuine reviews are published in papers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the San Jose Mercury News, the Sacramento Bee or the Hilton Head Island Packet – that is, in provincial journals where they are written by working journalists who cover everything from books to weddings, or by outsiders – lawyers, housewives, computer programmers, doctors – who do not make their living in the literary marketplace and are not involved in literary politics. Since they have nothing to lose or to gain, they can report their true feelings and thoughts about a book. Literature, like war and politics, is too important to be left to the professionals. But then again most readers in small places ignore their good local reviewers and only buy books that are praised by New York. It should be the other way around.

I used to think that America was a special case, but then I happened to be in Italy when Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was published, and the blatant promotion in the guise of literary criticism would have put New York to shame. The manufactured success of this unreadable novel combines the evil influences of money and academic insolence, which have deluded credulous people into believing that literature is what professors can do: mentioning little-known facts, quoting from obscure documents, meandering on about everything and nothing, mixing incomprehensible sentences with platitudes. This book was welcomed by the Italian media like the Second Coming of Christ. Newspapers published ecstatic reviews – and not just one but several in succession – by big Italian names on their front pages, and all the colour supplements had cover stories on Eco, who was appearing on television day and night.

Living in Viareggio at the time, I walked on the seafront promenade one day and was transfixed by the spectacle of hundreds of people standing in line waiting to get into a bookshop. A sight to gladden a writer’s heart; I joined the queue and eventually got in. People were pouring into this seaside outpost of civilisation and, like sheep who had been miraculously taught to say four words, they were all asking for Il pendolo di Foucault. And who could blame them? It was The Book that every radio and television station, every newspaper and magazine was paying frenzied homage to. These poor people, many of whom came from the villages up in the hills behind us, had never realised that a mere book could be so important!

I was particularly struck by a shy young couple who seemed to be paying their first visit to a bookshop. While they were waiting for a new crate of The Book to be unpacked, I started talking to them, and I invited them to look at the other books. It was a well-stocked shop with most of the treasures of Italian and world literature on its shelves. Since they had read none of them, as far as I could gather, I tried to interest them in The Decameron, The Legends of St. Francis (great tales), Italian Chronicles, Droll Stories, the short stories of Cervantes, Maupassant, Mark Twain, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, A Sentimental Journey, Epitaph of a Small Winner, Il Giorno della civetta, Gli indifferenti and Felix Krull – books which even someone who had never read a book in his life could enjoy. I managed to keep the young couple fascinated for about ten minutes with my broken Italian, showing them all these wonders, then left them to make up their own minds. I saw them later leaving the shop with a copy of Il pendolo di Foucault.

I am sure that the critics, journalists, editors and producers who worked up that monumental fuss about an unreadable book have never reflected on their base betrayal of the cause of literacy. I often think of that young couple. After fifty pages at the most they must have decided that books were not really for them, and gone back to watching television for the rest of their lives.