'We Must Have Within Us That Spirit of Quiet'

“I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one; and as I don’t like excitement I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, round-about way. I am all for a quiet life. That is a deplorable confession, I suppose.” 

Some of us thrive on adrenaline, the rush of current events, melodramatic entanglements and a Wagnerian soundtrack. Others by nature are spectators, content to watch and listen and let others carry on as they wish. I rank myself among the latter. When young, I would have found such an identification shameful. Life is meant to be swashbuckling. One embodies a “can-do,” “change-the-world” spirit. A life spent pondering is not worth enduring. These are a young man’s delusions.

 

The tone of muted irony in the passage quoted above is the give-away. Max Beerbohm was constitutionally incapable of being strident. The words are drawn from his September 18, 1942, broadcast on the BBC, “Advertisements,” collected in Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957). The worst of the Blitz in London was over and the V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks would come in the future. Having returned to England from Italy at the start of the war, Beerbohm broadcast talks and readings on the BBC. After Churchill, this neo-Victorian was the nation’s most popular broadcaster, with millions of listeners.  Of his radio talks Rebecca West wrote: “I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth. Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.”

 

The sensibility described by Beerbohm is today dismissed as apathy, an indifference to the world. Rather, it suggests an acceptance of one’s limitations. What can one realistically accomplish? Little beyond our tiny concentric world. Many of our troubles today are encapsulated in a single word: “activist,” and not only in the political sense. Useful synonyms include “busybody” and “scold.” The best we can hope for is a revision in our own behavior, a little more kindness and tolerance. Writers work best when they accept their limits and leave the world-changing to others. Michael Oakeshott wrote in a 1922 notebook: “To produce great literature we must have within us that spirit of quiet, that ‘central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.’" Oakeshott quotes Wordsworth's “The Excursion.”

 

In his biography of Beerbohm, N. John Hall writes of the essayist/broadcaster: “His tone is fatherly, or rather grandfatherly; he champions the good old days. Occasionally he can sound a bit of a crank, an old man lamenting change and new machinery. But even when he is complaining, his mood is soft, modest; and so he gets away with it.”

 

[The Oakeshott passage is taken from Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014).]

'With You in Shame or Fame They Dwell'

Among the more conventionally rousing poems Herman Melville collected in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is “The Victor of Antietam,” a celebration of Union Gen. George B. McClellan. Here is the seventh of its eight stanzas: 

“Your medalled soldiers love you well,

        McClellan:

Name your name, their true hearts swell;

With you they shook dread Stonewall’s spell,

With you they braved the blended yell

Of rebel and maligner fell;

With you in shame or fame they dwell,

        McClellan:

Antietam-braves a brave can tell.”

 

President Lincoln was less enthusiastic. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation five days after the Battle of Antietam, fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, and six weeks later removed McClellan, an emancipation opponent, from his command. McClellan’s forces had halted Gen. Robert E. Lee’s first attempted incursion into the North at a horrifying cost. Antietam remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 23,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing. All of the dead, Union and Confederate, were Americans. Only in death is there reconciliation. Melville fervently supported the Union cause, but melancholy permeates his Civil War poems.

 

In March 1986 I was driving from Washington, D.C., where I had visited a friend, to my home in upstate New York, when I decided to visit the battlefield at Antietam. It was late afternoon, the sun was already setting, and my car was the only one parked in the visitors’ lot. The only other person present was a park ranger in uniform, complete with campaign hat. I explained my interest and he offered to take me on an abbreviated tour of the battlefield, including the “Bloody Angle” or "Bloody Lane," a sunken road where four hours of intense combat resulted in 5,600 casualties. The ranger’s commentary was conversational, not canned or academic. He knew the history and explained it to me clearly. The ranger was black.

 

Visitors often note the quiet of battlefields, what Allen C. Guelzo in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), calls “the silent witness of places like Gettysburg,” whether Omaha Beach or Antietam. Chatter seems indecent but conscious memory remains a sacred obligation. The ranger’s tone was respectful.

 

I inherited my copy of Battle-Pieces from my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and scholar of Melville and the Civil War. Here’s something Helen, author of Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s (Archon Books, 1987) and Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2009), wrote to me in an email in 2011:

 

“Melville’s mind I found almost endlessly fascinating, and reading about the period made it even more so. Today, we think we have political problems. We should try dealing with an issue of the magnitude of slavery. Melville grew intellectually enormously in pondering the problem. He also grew into a philosophical pessimist about human nature and a political conservative, which the current PC Melvillians refuse to recognize.”

 

By coincidence, today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, in observance of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signing the document in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were ratified in the wake of the Civil War.              

 

[Among the wounded at Antietam was Sgt. Oliver Hardy, who enlisted at age nineteen in the 16th Georgia Infantry and took part in sixteen engagements. His son, also named Oliver Hardy, was born in 1892 and in 1927 would team up with Stan Laurel.]

'He Never Reached the Equanimity of Age'

A useful way to categorize writers is the degree to which they write like and for adolescents, as not fully mature adults. I’m extrapolating from an exchange of comments and emails I had last week with Rabbi David Wolpe. I had written something disparaging about Dylan Thomas and his well-known villanelle. The rabbi replied: “To be fair to Thomas[,] raging was the attitude of a young man and since he never lived to be an old one, having drunk himself early into the grave, he never reached the equanimity of age.” 

All true, though I told him he was more forgiving than I and sent him a link to Catherine Davis’ villanelle “After a Time,” which may be her response to Thomas’ poem. The rabbi admired Davis' poem and added:

 

“I feel like there is a whole category of fundamentally adolescent writers -- Vonnegut, Salinger, certainly Kerouac, Thomas, (a little bit [Milan] Kundera though above those) but Thomas does have the excuse of never seeing full adulthood.”

 

This instantly made sense and helped me understand the enduring appeal of certain writers whose reputations and popularity exceed their accomplishments. Vonnegut always seemed to be a “YA” writer – a slight, shallow, occasionally amusing storyteller, never outgrowing the demands of his chosen genre, science fiction. I do enjoy the film version of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, a comedy with pretensions to being an “antiwar manifesto.” It’s no surprise that Vonnegut came to prominence in the sixties, with the triumphant rise of literature-as-propaganda, neo-romanticism and juvenilia. We might think of him as the anti-George Eliot. Kerouac, like other seriously alcoholic writers, is unreadable. His prose reeks of vodka.

 

One is reminded of the embarrassingly bad and popular Richard Brautigan. American literature seems especially rich in such writers. Other once-revered names sharing at least some of these qualities are Jack London, Carl Sandburg, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway (apart from the brilliance of his early short stories), Charles Bukowski, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck. Alcoholism may have a role in their willful immaturity. It takes American writers a long time to grow up, and some never succeed.

'A Careful Reading of the Present Volume'

In a file cabinet is a stack of old pocket-size address books, most of them dating from my years as a newspaper reporter. When I would go to work for another paper, usually in a new city, I would buy a new book and start accumulating new names, addresses and telephone numbers. Now they read like collections of obituaries. Many of my former contacts, personal and professional, are dead. In one of the address books I find the contact information for the novelist Williamu Gaddis (d. 1998), whom I met and interviewed several times. Here is the home number of the late George Smith (d. 2014), mayor in the early eighties of Bellevue, Ohio, and a notably nice guy. Arousing fewer pleasant memories are the phone numbers of several former girlfriends. 

“The plot, in spite of whatever virtues may accrue to it from the acid delineation of the characters and the vivid action pictures, is the weakest part of the work. It lacks coherence. It lacks stability.”

 

That’s how a literary critic might evaluate my moribund address books, as if they were some postmodern mutation of the novel. It’s how Robert Benchley reviewed the New York City telephone directory in “The Most Popular Book of the Month” (Of All Things, 1921). Benchley plays it straight, with hardly an exaggeration:

 

“There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know. This feeling is made poignant, to the point of becoming an obsession, by a careful reading of the present volume.”

 

Benchley was one of the first “grownup” writers I read, in such collections as Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949). Then I preferred him to such fellow New Yorker colleagues as Thurber, Perelman and Parker. In another piece from Of All Things, “The Scientific Scenario,” Benchley purports to find movies too “low-brow.” His solution:

 

“I would suggest as a book, from which a pretty little scenario might be made, ‘The Education of Henry Adams.’ This volume has had a remarkable success during the past year among the highly educated classes. Public library records show that more people have lied about having read it than any other book in a decade. It contains five hundred pages of mental masochism, in which the author tortures himself for not getting anywhere in his brain processes. He just simply can’t seem to get any further than the evolution of an elementary Dynamic Theory of History or a dilettante dabbling with a Law of Acceleration. And he came of a bright family, too.”

Of course, Benchley himself appeared in the movies, most memorably in “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928).

Benchley was born on this day, September 15, in 1889, and died in 1945 at age fifty-six.

'Ease Anguish With Your Voice'

“If you think that, well, all morality is simply prejudice and murder is fine,” says Gary Saul Morson in an interview, “you actually become a terrorist.” 

In 2023, Morson published one of the few essential books of the twenty-first century: Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press). In it he anatomizes Russia’s homegrown fashion for terror in the nineteenth century and the responses of the country’s greatest writers. In the interview he tells Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.:

 

“This is when the modern terrorist movement is born. I mean, by the end of the century, by the beginning of the next century, there were so many terrorists. It was a career that was inherited from parents to a child, including daughters who had become terrorists. It was a family tradition. There were thousands of them killing thousands of people, and it was considered, next to being a great writer, the most prestigious occupation in the world.”

 

I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was murdered. I don’t follow the news closely and have little interest in politics. Three things about his killing and its aftermath struck me: 1.) Kirk seemed like a reasonable fellow, a gentleman, not a thug, someone with whom you could disagree without being assaulted. 2.) He was murdered on a college campus. 3.) A friend sent me a video of young people celebrating the killing of a husband and father. Some were singing about it.

 

More than forty years ago, as a newspaper reporter, I sat in a jail cell with a man who had just been convicted, along with an accomplice, of kidnapping a barmaid, killing her in an Indiana cornfield and raping the corpse. The court had ruled he was sufficiently sane to stand trial. No sign of contrition. His reaction was typically grandiose. Like the young people in the video, he sang and expressed joy at what he had done. He had adopted the name of a cartoon character. This was the closest I had ever come to undiluted nihilism. I was stunned but fortunately had a professional job to do. I kept asking questions and taking notes. Who can argue, using logic and appeals to morality, with barbarism?

 

In Wonder Confronts Certainty, Morson writes of the Russian nihilists: “Terrorists, therefore, felt little or no compunction about killing dozens of innocent bystanders and they eventually engaged in random killing (throwing bombs into cafes).” In the last few days, as my country goes insane and many celebrate evil, I’ve taken some comfort in Mike Juster’s “Vigil”:

 

“Set all routines aside;

let hours leak to weeks.

Decide not to decide.

 

“Ease anguish with your voice;

speak, though you are unheard.

When sleep is deep, rejoice.

 

“Let go of Hell and Heaven.

Pray, play a cherished song,

forgive and be forgiven.”

'The Beautiful Light of Health'

Montaigne died in his château on September 13, 1592. He was fifty-nine and for the last fourteen years of his life he had endured the agony of kidney stones. I remember my father, a self-identified “tough guy,” moaning on the floor while passing a stone. Montaigne suffered but seldom complained. In the late essay “Of Experience,” he proposes an unlikely understanding of illness, one I hope to put into practice when it becomes necessary: 

“But is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens in our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic? Is there anything in this pain we suffer that can be said to counterbalance the pleasure of such sudden improvement? How much more beautiful health seems to me after the illness, when they are so near and contiguous that I can recognize them in each other’s presence in their proudest array, when they vie with each other, as if to oppose each other squarely!”

 

In the final week of his life, lying in his hospice bed, my brother could no longer speak and probably heard little of what we – me, his son, nurses, the occasional doctor – had to say. He made no sounds except low moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed to clean him and change his sheets. But before he entered that torpid state, we talked about Montaigne and his attitude to death. Ken accepted its approach as the inevitable end of the life he had lived. I’ve always admired the Frenchman but those end-of-life talks with my brother lifted him into secular sainthood. The theoretical had become the applied. Ken could be contrary and defiant but he seemed to accept Montaigne as a guide, someone to be trusted. Montaigne continues in “Of Experience”:

 

“Just as the Stoics say that vices are brought into the world usefully to give value to virtue and assist it, we can say, with better reason and less bold conjecture, that nature has lent us pain for the honor and service of pleasure and painlessness. When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure, how they are associated by a necessary link, so that they follow and engender each other in turn. And he called out that goodly Aesop should have taken from this consideration a subject fit for a fine fable.”

 

In his biography of Montaigne, his translator, Donald Frame, celebrates the sensibility of so heroic a writer: “Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”

'An Integral of Various Dissimilar Parts'

Dr. Johnson identifies nine meanings for composition in his Dictionary. The first -- “the act of forming an integral of various dissimilar parts” – recalls Aristotle’s notion that perceiving similarities among dissimilar things constitutes genius. A basic human drive is to find pattern in the seemingly random. Johnson’s sixth definition is the most succinct -- “written work” – and corresponds to my favorite subject in grade school: composition. That’s what they still called writing when I was a kid. I was a lazy student who excelled only at what interested him, and putting words together was always a kick, a way to organize my disorganized thoughts. Soon I discovered that often I didn’t understand something until I had written about it – a phenomenon that remains in place. Words are thoughts and sounds made real and sharable with others. 

Writing, of course, is complemented by reading. A writer – say, Jonathan Swift – impresses you with his precision and concision, the power he musters with words. You imitate him, plagiarize him, try out his voice and technical devices. With time, you absorb his lessons and customize them to meet your own needs. Occasionally, you reject him entirely and find a new teacher.  

 

A veteran fifth-grade teacher among my readers tells me her students, to put it bluntly, don’t read and can barely write. None find writing a pleasure, even at the level of storytelling and autobiography. It’s a familiar teacherly lament. I have no solutions. It may already be too late to fix things.

 

Eric Ormsby is a sensualist of sound, one of our finest poets and critics. In 2005, Canadian Notes & Queries dedicated an issue to Ormsby and included an interview with him, “Menageries of Vocables,” conducted by Robyn Sarah. It was later collected in her Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (2007). Ormsby is enviably articulate:

 

“I’d like to think that there’s no English word I couldn’t conceive of using in a poem somehow. And why not? The world is full of fantastic beings – why should our lexicon be any less so? But I have to admit too that this besottedness with words, this playing the ring master in menageries of vocables, can be a self-indulgence.”

 

That’s poetry. Ormsby’s prose is comparably accomplished. He chose it as a conscious act:

 

“Slowly I came to see, to my pleasure, that there were many things I could express in prose that would not have worked in poetry, and I began to enjoy writing prose enormously. . . [Y]ou fashion a different authorial voice when you write prose; you can be casual, digressive, a bit offhand or even genially banal – you can make various forms of small talk – all gambits that doom a poem.”

 

I’m speaking as a writer, one who learned the hard way that he can’t write poetry. Good prose of many sorts – reading it, writing it -- can be as intoxicating and fulfilling as verse. Ormsby says:

 

“[P]rose is connected in my mind with the world of affairs, with conversation and interchange, in a way that poetry isn’t – or at least not immediately so. . . . I can’t write the essay or review until I’ve mulled it over for a while, and I can’t actually put words to paper until I’ve thought of an opening sentence or, better, opening paragraph. Once I have that, the rest follows smoothly.”