'I Make Little Choice at Table'

Food seems to have replaced religion and art as a source of consolation and purpose in the lives of many people. I know some who photograph most of their meals and share the pictures. I’m reminded of Tom Waits in his spoken introduction to “Eggs and Sausage”: “I was always, uh, kinda one who’d like to consider myself kind of a pioneer of the palate, a restauranteur, if you will.” 

There’s a trace of snobbery in this pose, of course, as the photographed meals often look elaborate, expensive and unidentifiable, the sort of thing you would never prepare for yourself. It wouldn’t occur to me to photograph my peanut butter sandwich or tonight’s red beans and rice. I’m far from ascetic but I’ve never wished to fetishize food. It doesn’t somehow represent me. Like everyone I have likes and dislikes but that’s not important. Foodie is an ugly word and concept, uncomfortably close to gourmand and glutton.

 

In his final days, my brother and I talked a lot about Montaigne. In hospice he stopped talking around the same time he stopped eating. I’m reading the Frenchman's essay “Of Experience” again and like his approach to food: “I make little choice at table, and attack the first and nearest thing, and I change reluctantly from one flavor to another. I dislike a crowd of dishes and courses as much as any other crowd. I am easily satisfied with few dishes.”

 

I knew an anthropologist who said casually, in conversation, that people have more hangups and crackpot ideas about food than they do about any other subject, including sex. They also tend to be more dogmatic. Take the recent vogue for protein. Such are the concerns of the citizens of a wealthy nation who know precisely where the next meal is coming from. Montaigne continues in “Of Experience”:

 

“There are some who act like patient sufferers if they do without beef and ham amid partridges. They have a good time; that is the daintiness of the dainty; it is the taste of a soft existence that is cloyed with the ordinary and accustomed things, by which luxury beguiles the tedium of wealth [Seneca]. Not to make good cheer with what another savors, to take particular care of what you eat and drink, is the essence of this vice.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'This Does Not Flatter Us'

“Ah, pitiful / The twisted memories of an ancient fool / And sweet the silence of a young man dead!”

There’s a tendency to romanticize, sometimes extravagantly, the gifted young who die early. Think of Chatterton, Keats and Wilfred Owen. Granted longer lives, what might they have accomplished? Ironically, with Keats, there’s probably less reason to mourn, given the brilliance of his sonnets, odes and letters. He died at twenty-five and the quality of much of his work exceeds that of most poets who survive into their dotage. The lines quoted above were written by Edward Shanks (1892-1953) in his poem “The Dead Poet” (Poems, 1916) about his friend Rupert Brooke. Shanks went on to work as a literary journalist and university lecturer, and wrote books about Shaw, Kipling and Poe.   

 

I learned of Shanks from Theodore Dalrymple’s book chronicle Not for Ambition or Bread (Mirabeau Press, 2025). Shanks served in France with the British Army during the Great War but was invalided out in 1915 and never saw combat. “The Dead Poet” begins:

 

“When I grow old they’ll come to me and say:

Did you then know him in that distant day?

Did you speak with him, touch his hand, observe

The proud eyes’ fire, soft voice and light lips’ curve?

And I shall answer: This man was my friend;

Call to my memory, add, improve, amend

And count up all the meetings that we had

And note his good and touch upon his bad.”

 

Brooke (b. 1887) graduated from Cambridge in 1909. After the start of the Great War, he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. In February 1915, he sailed to the Dardanelles in preparation for the Gallipoli campaign. He contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite and died on April 23, age twenty-seven. Brooke was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Dalrymple writes: "Shanks almost makes Brooke’s early death seem like a benefit received—it sealed his reputation for ever—but foolish as it may seem, one knows what he, Shanks, means.” Here are the closing lines of “The Dead Poet”: “Whose limbs shall never waste, eyes never fall, / And whose clear brain shall not be dimmed at all.” And Dalrymple’s gloss on them:

 

“How extraordinarily romantic, written at a time when 20,000 young men or more were being mown down daily before or not long after their age of majority! It’s absurd, or wrong, or totally irrational, but yet we know what Shanks means and are moved by it. We tend to remember people as they last were, just before they died, not as they once were. This does not flatter us, those of us who live to be old.”

'Varied, Inconsistent and Unpredictable'

Thedore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple, blog-like premise: he writes about the books he has been reading. What might be an exercise in self-indulgent tedium in the wrong hands is a sort of brain scan of an intelligent man’s sensibility as he reads. Dalrymple is well-read, widely traveled, witty and endlessly curious. His prose is notable for its clarity. As a retired prison doctor, he knows intimately a stratum of life most of us will never know. His sympathies are broad. Among his chief interests are medicine and crime. He makes an excellent companion and articulates his bookish reactions conversationally. He’s more storyteller than critic. 

His latest book chronicle, The Strut and Trade of Charms (Mirabeau Press, 2025), takes its title from “In My Craft and Sullen Art” by Dylan Thomas. In a brief note preceding the text he tells us the only purpose such books have is “to please myself  in the hope of pleasing a few others, and perhaps to demonstrate that human life is so infinitely varied, inconsistent and unpredictable that no mere theory could explain it or catch it in the coarse mesh of its net.” Dalrymple is no theoretician and isn’t afraid to say when he doesn’t understand something he encounters.  

 

Most of the books and writers he reads were previously unknown to him and to me, though he does read Robert Graves and Vernon Scannell. One of the most intriguing-sounding titles is Classic Descriptions of Disease (1932), written by the American physician Ralph H. Major (1884-1970). Both of us use the third edition from 1945. The book is almost seven-hundred pages long and weighs 3.25 pounds, according to the bathroom scale. Dalrymple describes it as “a compendium of classic, usually first or early, descriptions of disease, combined with brief biographical notes on their authors.” Most of the entries are written by physicians but a few are the work of such literary figures as Martial, Thucydides, Boccaccio and Pliny the Elder. Take tetanus. The first source cited by Major is Hippocrates (c. 460 BC-c. 370 BC), who writes:

 

“The master of a large ship mashed the index finger of his right hand with the anchor. Seven days later a somewhat foul discharge appeared; then trouble with his tongue--he complained he could not speak properly. The presence of tetanus was diagnosed, his jaws became pressed together, his teeth were locked, then symptoms appeared in his neck: on the third day opisthotonos [uncontrolled flexing of muscles in the neck and back] appeared with sweating. Six days after the diagnosis was made he died.”

 

I’m reminded of John Thoreau Jr., Henry’s brother. On New Year’s Day in 1842, he nicked the tip of his left-hand ring finger while stropping his razor – a minor wound we would wash and bandage. Eight days later it had become “mortified,” meaning the tissue had turned black and necrotic. On the morning of January 9, John’s jaw stiffened and by that evening he suffered the convulsions associated with lockjaw. A Boston doctor examined John and concluded he could do nothing for him. No one could have until the vaccine for tetanus was developed in 1924. John, 27, died on January 11 in the arms of his helpless brother.

 

The disease is caused by the bacteria Clostridium tetani, commonly found in soil and dust. The incidence of the disease in the century since the vaccine was introduced has dropped by ninety-five percent. Dalrymple writes of the Major volume:

 

“Such had been the rapid progress of medical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that many of the entries must have seemed rather more recent or contemporary in 1932 than they do now.”

'The Self-Appointed Guardian of English Literature'

One is always in danger of being perceived as a fuddy-duddy. Speak admiringly of rhyme in poetry or elegant prose in fiction and risk being called a reactionary (which I was just yesterday) or an old fart (which happened last week). Stevie Smith diagnoses the type in “Souvenir de Monsieur Poop” in her second collection, Tender Only to One (1938). Her poem begins: 

“I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature,

I believe tremendously in the significance of age;

I believe that a writer is wise at 50,

Ten years wiser at 60, at 70 a sage.”

 

Smith wrote that the year she turned thirty-six. Age has little to do with such things. There are youthful prodigies and late bloomers among writers and readers. It’s not a matter of combatting the prevailing critical and popular fashions. It’s more a matter of articulating one’s standards for work new or old that compels us to reread it.   

 

“But then I am an old fogey.

I always write more in sorrow than in anger.

I am, after all, devoted to Shakespeare, Milton,

And, coming to our own times,

Of course

Housman.”

 

There are worlds of hard-won irony in those lines. Later in the poem Smith writes: “(When I say that I am an old fogey, I am, of course, joking.)”

'The Worst of Bores'

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life. Universities are infested with people who take themselves very seriously. Couple that with arcane academic specialties, undergrown senses of humor and advanced political thinking and you have an epidemic of tedium. Exceptions? Of course. I know some very bright, conversationally gifted people on campus as well. Theodore Dalrymple diagnoses the bore with precision: 

“Of course, the true bore, like the true eccentric, doesn’t know or even suspect that that is what he is. The eccentric does strange things because to him they are the most natural things in the world to do. The true bore doesn’t know that he is boring others because what he says is so very interesting to himself, which is why at dinner parties my wife sometimes has to kick me under the table.”

 

In Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life (2002), N. John Hall tells us the essayist read the transcript of a radio broadcast, “The Road to Happiness,” by that well-known, high-minded bore Bertrand Russell: “Russell is a bore; but he is a bright bore, which is the worst of bores.”

'A Veritable Swiss Army Knife of a Book'

One needn’t be a literary populist, jettisoning all critical values, to understand that especially when young we read certain books for the pure escapist bliss of it. In my case, before and during puberty, that meant fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells and, best of all, Jules Verne. Putting aside the will to impose arbitrary genres on books, what these writers guaranteed this young reader was adventure. Around the same time I was first reading Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) for similar reasons. Boys, certainly, and, presumably, at least some girls, enjoy tales of adventure -- of survival, courage and resourcefulness. Kafka comes later. 

A reader of Anecdotal Evidence, Thomas Parker, teaches fourth grade in Los Angeles and recently read Verne’s The Mysterious Island (L'Île mystérieuse, 1875). I remember my mother taking me to a matinee of the film version of the novel, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen and a score by Bernard Herrmann, in 1961. Naturally, I remember most vividly the giant crab scene. Around the same time I read the Classics Illustrated comicbook adaptation of the novel, and within a year or two the novel itself. Thomas’ review of Verne’s book, “A Boy Scout’s Handbook: The Mysterious Island,” is published on the Black Gate website and is one of the most entertaining things I’ve read online in a while.He writes with enthusiasm without a hint of sub-literary slumming:

“As for books, I recently read something that would definitely make the real desert island cut — Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. It’s a veritable Swiss army knife of a book, full of useful hints and practical advice, whether you want to lower the level of a lake, make nitroglycerin, cook a capybara or construct a seaworthy, two-hundred-ton ship from scratch. It’s a book no Boy Scout should leave home without.”

 

I had forgotten that the novel and movie begin in the United States during the Civil War. That would have been a further inducement to this young reader/viewer, as 1961 was the centenary of the war’s beginning and I was obsessed with it. All the characters are Americans, which I had also forgotten. Like Odysseus, the survivors, led by Cyrus Smith, embody mêtis, what we would characterize as cunning intelligence. They even construct a ship and christen it the Bonadventure. (Edmund Blunden’s 1922 travel journal is titled Bonadventure, after the ship he sailed on.) Thomas acknowledges (as every reader should, though some will not) that The Mysterious Island was written 150 years ago and its author may not have shared our enlightened moral values. Thomas’ conclusion is worth quoting at length:

 

“[T]he thing that most marks The Mysterious Island as an artifact from someplace far, far away is an attitude and an assumption — every page shines with an optimism and unalloyed faith in reason (and faith in faith, too — the colonists frequently offer up thanks to their Creator) that have become increasingly alien in this decidedly non-Vernian far future that we’ve wound up living in. When was the last time you read a six-hundred-page book without a single cynical word in it?

 

“More than the complete harmony and lack of conflict between the men (there are no personal problems on Lincoln Island — all problems there are mechanical), more than the island being presented as a delightful puzzle to solve or an enormous toy box to open, more even than the total lack of the female sex (that not one of these supposedly grown men sees as a problem or even notices!), it’s this fresh, optimistic view of the world (call it naivete if you will) that marks The Mysterious Island as fundamentally a boy’s book. That doesn’t mean it’s valueless, though, even for non-adolescents.

 

“Verne’s sunny view of the world and of our place in it may not be strictly realistic, but it is undeniably pleasant, and even inspiring and possibly useful. We’re all shipwrecked somewhere, aren’t we, and when you find yourself cold and wet and shivering on the beach, you can curl up and cry and start dying of exposure or starvation… or you can inventory what you’ve got in your pockets, survey the landscape, and get to work. In fiction or in life, it’s not a bad philosophy, and there are worse tools to have in your box than L’Île mystérieuse.

 

“So just ask yourself — WWJVD? (What would Jules Verne do?) The sooner you get that telegraph built the better.”

 

How pleasant to read an account of a reviewer enjoying himself while reading a book. Some of us still remember those days and don’t condescend to our younger selves.

'Responsibility to the Accurate Word'

Working in newsrooms for twenty-five years taught me to buffer against distractions. Newsrooms are noisy places – police scanners, televisions and radios, often acrimonious arguments between editors and reporters. You have interviews to conduct and deadlines to meet. To demand silence would probably get you canned so you learn a little discipline, seldom a bad thing. Shifting to universities, where I worked as a science writer for almost twenty years, felt like retiring to a monastery. I always had an office of my own – a monastic cell with a door I could close when not wishing to be bothered. Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) writes in a 1982 essay: “We all need silence -- both external and interior -- in order to find out what we truly think.” 

Hazzard isn’t peddling New Age bromides. My experience suggests interior silence is even more important than the external sort, and harder to come by. Some minds are like Act II, Scene 2 of King Lear – much commotion, little repose. That was me when young. No wonder I got little work done. Writers are unlikely hybrids of selflessness and selfishness, and tend to learn things slowly, if at all. One year earlier, Hazzard had published her masterpiece, Transit of Venus (1980), a rare twentieth-century novel written by, for and about adults. She continues:

 

“The attempt to touch truth through a work of imagination requires an inner center of privacy and solitude. . . . I have come more and more to value the view of Ortega y Gasset that ‘without a certain margin of tranquility, truth succumbs.’ However passionate the writer's material, some distance and detachment are needed before the concept can be realized. In our time, the writer can expect little or nothing in the way of silence, privacy or removal from the deafening clamor of ‘communications,’ with all its disturbing and superfluous information.”

 

Even truer than it was forty-four years ago. Hazzard quotes from Ortega’s The Dehumanization of Art (1925): “In the world today, gentlemen, a great thing is dying—it is truth. Without a certain margin of tranquility, truth succumbs.”

 

One would take Hazzard less seriously if she weren’t so accomplished a writer. She probably sounds old-fashioned to some readers. She concludes:

 

“There is at least one immense truth which we can still adhere to and make central to our lives -- responsibility to the accurate word. It is through literature that the word has been preserved and nourished, and it is in literature that we find the candor and refreshment of truth. In the words of Jean Cocteau, the good and rightful tears of the reader are drawn simultaneously by an emotion evoked through literature, and by the experience of seeing a word in place.”

 

[Hazzard’s essay is collected in We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays, 2016.]