'A Few Good Sentences'

Much of my working life was spent among writers indifferent to the precision, clarity and stylishness of what they wrote. They flung words on the page (or screen) the way a bored child throws mud at the wall to see what sticks. They were abetted by editors concerned only with meeting deadlines and avoiding libel. These practices permitted a sort of reverse snobbery to thrive in the newsroom. A concern with writing good prose – not fancy, not “poetic,” just clear, accurate and cliché-free -- was judged effete. I haven’t worked fulltime as a journalist in more than twenty years, but all of this came back to me when I found this sentence on the Eric Hoffer Book Award site: 

“If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.”

 

No source is given but it sounds like Hoffer (1902-83). I credit him with inspiring me to become a newspaper reporter and learn to write clearly. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped them and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, beginning with his first and most influential, The True Believer (1951). What moved me and still moves me were Hoffer’s commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, his pro-Israel sentiments and his working-class origins. Not that I could necessarily have identified any of those qualities when I was sixteen.

 

I no longer read newspapers but I see the same indifference to good writing and simple clarity online. Clarity in prose implies clarity of thought. If I don’t understand something, if I’m confused or just plain ignorant, I can orient myself by writing about it. The simple act of arranging words sensibly contributes to understanding. If it doesn’t, I should probably keep my mouth shut until it does.   

 

The “longshoreman philosopher” had a brief notoriety in the late 1960s. He worked on the docks in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He never went to college. He credited a volume of Montaigne’s essays, found in a second-hand bookstore, with inspiring him to write. This is what appealed to me about Hoffer. I was the first in my family to go to college. My father and his brothers were ironworkers. All of my mother’s brothers were housepainters. I had no models for being a writer, a lover of ideas, an intellectual – a term Hoffer detested. But a working-class guy who read Montaigne and Tolstoy and formulated his thoughts in memorable words made sense to me and he still does.

'Time, We Both Know, Will Decay You'

An old friend, just months older than me, is taking longevity hard. We’re not that old – he just turned seventy-four, I’m still seventy-three – but he frets about decrepitude, pain and death. I remind him there’s an alternative to a long life but he sniffs away such a reminder as impertinent: “Not funny!” 

W.H. Auden wrote “Talking to Myself” (Epistle to a Godson, 1972) in April 1971, when my friend and I were freshmen roommates at the university. Auden dedicates the poem to his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks and addresses it to himself or rather his body, in the second person. The poet (b. 1907) would die just two years later but a lifetime of Benzedrine, alcohol and tobacco was already taking its toll. In the seventh of the poem’s fifteen stanzas, Auden writes:

 

“Seldom have You been a bother. For many years

You were, I admit, a martyr to horn-colic

(it did no good to tell You – But I’m not in love!):

How stoutly, though, You’ve repelled all germ invasions,

But never chastised my tantrums with a megrim.”

 

Auden was a devoted reader of the Oxford English Dictionary. Horn-colic is antiquated slang for an involuntary erection and megrim is an obsolete term for a migraine, the subject of Sacks’ first book. In 2015, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Sacks published in The New York Times “My Own Life,” in which he wrote:

 

“My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

 

Sacks would die on August 30, 2015, at age eighty-two. Here is the final stanza of Auden’s poem:

 

“Time, we both know, will decay You, and already

I’m scared of our divorce: I’ve seen some horrid ones.

Remember: when Le bon Dieu says to You Leave him!,

Please, please, for His sake and mine, pay no attention

To my piteous Don’ts, but bugger off quickly.”

'An Absurd Depravity'

While reading Sir Thomas Browne again it occurred to me that an epidemic of envy seems to be loose in the land. Envy is an emotion I like to joke about, sort of. I’ll see a photo of someone’s bookshelves – old university press editions, multi-volume sets, no paperbacks – and I’ll experience a rush of another of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust, followed immediately by the more temperate, longer lasting, easier to ignore sin, Envy. I can say I covet the books and give the craving a silent ha-ha, thus pretending I’m getting myself off the hook. But I really want those damn books. I encountered this in Browne’s “A Letter to a Friend” (written in 1665, published posthumously in 1690): 

“Let Age, not Envy, draw Wrinkles on thy Cheeks: be content to be envied, but envy not, Emulation may be plausible, and Indignation allowable; but admit no Treaty with that Passion which no Circumstance can make good. A Displacency at the good of others, because they enjoy it, altho we do not want it, is an absurd Depravity, sticking fast unto humane Nature from its primitive Corruption . . .”

 

Again: “which no Circumstance can make good.” Politics today seems driven overwhelmingly by envy. People want what others have, whether or not they worked for them or otherwise deserve to possess them. Envy has displaced gratitude for what is already ours. I see no cure, no moral foodstuff to ease the hunger. It seems irredeemably human, like the rest of the Deadly Sins. Joseph Epstein concludes his monograph Envy (Oxford University Press, 2003) like this:

 

“If theological thinking is unavailable to you, if the very notion of ‘sin,' original or unoriginal, as damning simply makes no sense to you, I would invite you instead to consider envy less as a sin than as very poor mental hygiene. It blocks our clarity, both about oneself and the people one envies, and it ends by giving one a poor opinion of oneself. No one can see clearly anything he or she envies. Envy clouds thought, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart—reasons enough to fight free of it with all one’s mental strength.”

'Bearing His Hard and Chambered Hurt'

Nearly forty years ago I drove to Beaversprite, a nature reserve near Dolgeville in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, to interview the caretaker. The founder, known for taming beavers and permitting some to live in her house, had recently died and the fate of the sanctuary was uncertain. I spent much of the day speaking with the caretaker and tramping around the grounds, and late in the afternoon started the drive back to Albany. 

On the way, at a dip in the road, I watched the driver ahead of me swerve abruptly to the right. He hit something, a dark object, and it spun off into the roadside grass. He drove away and out of curiosity I pulled over to investigate. In the grass was a mud turtle, already heading for the muddy ditch paralleling the road. I picked him up and found only a scuff on the right rear portion of his shell. He seemed otherwise unharmed. The malevolent driver had aimed and missed, delivering a glancing blow with his tire. I set the turtle back in the grass, aiming him at the ditch, and off he went.

 

If I were to have an animal guide, according to Native American custom, it would be a turtle. I admire their patient gift for momentum. They keep moving slowly and with focus, like me. They are nature’s implacable Stoics. Only death – perhaps delivered by an automobile tire – slows them down. I can’t imagine ever wanting to kill a turtle. In “The Mud Turtle,” Howard Nemerov writes:

 

“. . . there is no help for him

As he makes it to his feet again

And drags away to the meadows edge.

We see the tall grass open and wave

Around him, it closes, he is gone

Over the hill toward another water,

Bearing his hard and chambered hurt

Down, down, down, beneath the water,

Beneath the earth beneath. He takes

A secret wound out of the world.”

 

[Go here to read a selection of turtle stories solicited by Levi Stahl, including one I submitted about a memorable encounter with a snapping turtle.]

'The Heart, Ravaged, Grieves'

Few of us knew of the American poet Catherine Breese Davis (1924-2002). She was a lost soul, little more than a rumor among readers. Her academic pedigree was impeccable. Among her teachers were Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, J.V.  Cunningham, Yvor Winters and Donald Justice, but her life was a private torment. There was nothing poetically romantic about her suffering. Her father went to prison for armed robbery when she was an infant and she never saw him again. Her mother was a police-blotter monster. Davis suffered a mild case of cerebral palsy, misdiagnosed as polio. When her mother discovered Davis was a lesbian, she threw her out of the house and never saw her again. She suffered from mental illness, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s disease, and she was a brilliant poet. 

The book to get is Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press, 2015). Before its publication, Davis as a poet and woman hardly existed. As of 3:24 a.m. (CST) today, summer has arrived, and in the past I celebrated its coming with childhood memories of blue skies and blissful freedom. School was over for three months and we could swim, collect butterflies, play Army and read what we wanted. Davis has a poem, “The Summer Leaves,” in which the title is the start of the poem’s first line:

 

“nothing unscathed. Desires,

once tender stalks, grow brittle;

the first and clear-eyed dew

that clung thereto

expires.

 

“The summer leaves—the trees’

dense growth—that, dying little

by little, turn red, brown,

go down and down

and these

 

“still leaves long winds will shake

and put me on my mettle—

here, rusted as dead blood,

there, bright, my good—

both make

 

“the most of light. And then,

as, torn, the leaves resettle,

and the heart, ravaged, grieves,

the summer leaves

again.”

 

At first, “leaves” is a verb. In the second stanza it's a noun. This is no celebration of picnics on the beach. Inherent in summer’s arrival is its departure. Along the way, “the heart, ravaged, grieves.” The source of such suffering is never specified. Some souls cannot ignore the hurt at the heart of existence. In an essay included in the collection mentioned above, the late Helen Pinkerton, who knew Davis and tried for years to get her work published, writes:

 

“Much of her best poetry deals with the theme of loss – that is, it concerns itself with evil in the older sense of privation of being and, hence, with experiences that range from the perception of death to the awareness of personal shortcomings. She deals with loss almost as a metaphysical absolute.”

 

As Helen notes, Davis is a rigorously formal poet with a “faultless command of the traditional iambic line.” She doesn’t gush in free verse. Her poems, though often hinting at the most difficult emotions, do so with exacting discipline.

'Can Essays Still Be Written in Our Time?'

Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books introduced me to the work of Erwin Chargaff three years ago. Chargaff was a German-born biochemist who fled Hitler, became an American citizen and did pioneering work with DNA. He was an old-fashioned humanist, broadly read in Western literature. 

Isaac publishes three of Chargaff’s books of more general interest than genetics. Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections (1986) is a collection of thirty-three brief essays about such topics as “Genetic Engineering,” “Death” and “Sex Life of Grammar.” Chargaff had a sense of humor. Montaigne’s name appears as a leitmotif throughout the essays. In his preface Chargaff writes:

 

“Montaigne, the greatest master of latitudinal thinking, roamed widely, if not always profoundly: there was virtually nothing that could not serve him as a hook on which to hang his thoughts, his reminiscences and remarks. His Essays have been greatly admired for nearly four hundred years; whether they still are read widely I do not know.”

 

“Latitudinal thinking” I take to mean open-minded, broadly ranging thought, non-specializing, perhaps more intuitive than rigidly logical – a useful approach for an essayist. In the chapter titled “Amateurs,” Chargaff writes:

 

“Whatever went into [Montaigne’s Essays] had to pass through the prism of one character, one temperament; it is the self of Montaigne that remains the only element of order in that vast collection of memories, experiences, quotations.”

 

That’s an accurate description, one that still defies common sense. It sounds like a recipe for narcissistic drivel, one man talking obsessively about his precious self. Yet the Essays is among the most readable, wise and entertaining books in our tradition. In “Quintessence,” Chargaff tells us “a good essay is the quintessence of good prose" and goes on to rightly identify Montaigne as the progenitor of essays in multiple languages and cultures. In English he starts with the obvious – Bacon, Addison, Steele – and continues:

 

“. . . Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson with his Rambler, Charles Lamb and his contemporary, one of the greatest of all essayists, William Hazlitt. The tradition continues: Sydney Smith and De Quincey, Carlyle, Macaulay and the Edinburgh Review, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Bagehot, Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, and in our days Virginia Woolf and George Orwell.”

 

You can quibble with some of the names but it’s bracing to see someone whose first language was not English celebrate the tradition we effortlessly inherited. Charaff is amusingly pessimistic:

 

“Can essays still be written in our time? I believe they can; they may, in fact, be the only literary form that is not yet worn and exhausted. But are they still being read? Is the kind of reading in which I spent my life still possible? I must confess, I do not know the answer. In the midst of the most murderous century known to history, seers, drunk with visions of a future that I shall be glad to leave to them, have proclaimed the end of the book. It would be interesting to see what else will come to an end.”

 

Chargaff died on this date, June 20, in 2002 age ninety-six.

'I Should Have Read Nothing But Good Books'

“Every book I read is a not altogether negligible portion of my lifetime reading. Why did I not follow a careful program? Why did I give free reign to my curiosity? Why did I allow myself to engage in those wild sprees of desultory and promiscuous reading? Why did I not limit myself strictly to good books?” 

I’ve asked myself similar questions. I am the least systematic of readers. The only writers I have ever read sequentially, first work to last, in order, are Shakespeare and Melville. I’m no scholar. I haven’t even read all of Henry James.

 

The passage at the top is from the essay “On Reading Books: A Barbarian's Cogitations” by Alexander Gerschenkron, published in the Summer 1978 issue of The American Scholar. Gerschenkron (1904-78) was an American economic historian born in Odesa, Ukraine. He kept a reading list, logging all the titles he read, something I have never done. On his website, Art Garfunkel keeps a list of every book he has read since 1968, a practice that never tempted me. Much of what he read was rubbish. After admitting much of his reading was strictly professional, including books for review, Gerschenkron writes:

 

“But surely, when it comes to the vast area of literary art, there at least I should have read nothing but good books -- provided, of course, that I knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meal from the bran. I suppose I should have known. I certainly do now. I have reliable yardsticks that I daresay will not satisfy the literary expert who looks for fine and subtle distinctions. But an economist, a barbarian by definition, an average reader of belles lettres, can do with three simple criteria: A good book must be (1) interesting, (2) memorable, and (3) rereadable.”

 

Excellent criteria, recalling Nabokov's. Most of the lousy books I read came in my younger years. My tastes were still amorphous, my critical faculties weak or nonexistent. Also, if I started reading a book, I had to finish it – a practice I now see as masochistic. I would never recommend a book to someone because I thought it would be “good for him,” like broccoli. Gerschenkron is good on memorability:  

 

“By and large, memory can be relied upon to retain what is worth retaining. A book that evaporates without leaving a trace may be safely considered poor, even though it may have engaged one's interest as long as one kept turning its pages.”

 

There’s an interesting metaphysical category: the books we have read, perhaps devoting days to the task, which leave not a trace in our consciousness. They probably number in the hundreds, but we’ll never know. I admire Gerschenkron and sense in him a kindred spirit:

 

“Well-remembered books are also eminently rereadable. I have read War and Peace at least fifteen times, and it is still as rereadable as ever. I do not think it contains a paragraph that appears unfamiliar to me as I come across it. Yet on every perusal I never fail to discover something new in this inexhaustible store of observations, insights, ideas, and images that the previous readings have failed to reveal -- to say nothing of the infinite pleasure of drifting again along the stream of that language, so simple and so beautiful, so true to the Horatian ideal of simplex munditiis. A book like this is rereadable senz altro, and at least twice I began rereading War and Peace at once, starting again after having read the last page.”