I’ve been musing about degrees of difficulty in literature. How hard is too hard, how easy to easy, where should a writer aim?

Reading levels can be assigned to any written matter, not just children’s. Most popular novels, we’re told, “are written at the 7th grade reading levels,” which may explain my aversion to them. Too easy reading doesn’t ignite my intellect: I get bored, restless, grumpy. Reading that’s too taxing also puts me out of sorts. I maintain that Finnegans Wake and Ezra Pound’s Cantos are bad books, notwithstanding brilliant patches. Reading should not feel like trudging. Paragraphs should flow, pages should want to turn. Give me prose or verse to pause over, reread twice or thrice, but spare me utterances that arrest me, forcing me to post bail.

Writers we enjoy, like the best chefs, magically intuit our palates. They may serve different fare to different audiences. Bad writers, like boring talkers, seem not to notice our reactions as they blather on, taking our attention for granted. It rankles feeling ignored.

Unable to predict your tastes, I write to suit my own, hoping yours and mine coincide. This may sound laughably obvious, but execution is tricky, because my own taste is fickle, finicky. My word appetite varies no less than my food appetite, depending on mood, weather, time of day, who knows what. Sometimes I need cheering up, sometimes tamping down. Sometimes I’m up for vanilla prose, sometimes asparagus.

Recently I’ve been rereading my production over the last three years. Occasionally I delight in the acquaintance of this guy, but more often I flee the puling fathead. What made me think these words would ingratiate or amuse? It’s like suddenly realizing you’ve got B.O. (When did I last say B.O.?) I flush from frustration and embarrassment. Yuk!

Beginning writers may have no idea they stink. They thrill to their every word like infants to their toes. I remember reading aloud a composition to my tenth-grade class; my piece’s portentous periods pleased me prodigiously. Notwithstanding my theme’s solemnity, the class start giggling, then doubling over with hilarity. Behind me our teacher, whom I loved, was pretending to shovel shit out the window.

My beef with modernity is they often made their words too difficult for any but adepts. The same thing happened in concert music and the visual arts: pleasing and familiar were displaced by harsh and obscure. More and more the artist class was segregated into an esoteric priesthood, which forsook beguiling to scald and scold.

Much beauty was produced by moderns – don’t get me wrong – but the degree of difficulty frightened off many, shrinking the potential audience for new work. Exclusivity paved the path to extinction. Who these days reads poetry, except to pass exams?

I’m not preaching here or promulgating. Art’s evolution, like humanity’s, is inexorable, beyond any individual’s control. Folks make the best they can, then posterity ruthlessly selects what to preserve. Which contemporaries would have bet on Thoreau, Emily Dickinson or Melville to win the survival sweepstakes, who died mostly unpublished? Survive a century, you’re a wunderkind, survive three and you’re rare as a solar eclipse. Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are millennial accidents. All, sooner or later, will greet the dust. I wouldn’t be surprised if literate entertainment vanished altogether, KO’d by Tik-Tok. Reading and writing take training, practice – why bother if you can enjoy a show?

Some folks, who recognize good writing, can read bad writing without objection, if they enjoy the story. Not me. I’m as particular with words as Henry is with treats. If they’re not delicious, I’d sooner starve.