'The Greeks Knew What They Were Talking About'

Age is dreaded for the supposedly inevitable loss of memory. We lose the past and dwell in a timeless, featureless present as blank as a movieless movie screen in a theater. Contemporaries grow tedious when they forget who recorded “One Toke Over the Line” in 1970 and interpret their forgetfulness as a symptom of impending idiocy. (How interesting that memory is associated with and perhaps identical to the essential self.)  I don’t recall my parents or their friends ever fretting about such things, and suspect it is yet another era-specific indication of narcissism. 

Clara Claiborne Park (1923-2010) was a marvelous writer, a long-time teacher at Williams College who wrote movingly about her autistic daughter. She was also an essayist and reviewer, and I remember reading “The Mother of the Muses: In Praise of Memory” in the Winter 1981 issue of The American Scholar. Park reminds us:

 

“To call on the Muses is a way of talking about what are, if not actual presences, still realities which poets take utterly seriously--as must any of us who have found words taking shape in our heads, and wondered where on earth (on earth?) they were coming from.”

 

In modern parlance, the Muses represent Inspiration or Creativity – that mysterious human capacity familiar to every honest writer and other artists. Where did that good idea come from? Park also reminds us of the Muses’ pedigree:

 

“And the Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory. It is my antique conviction that the Greeks knew what they were talking about--that to make the Muses the daughters of Memory is to express a fundamental perception of the way in which Creativity operates.”

 

Park asks a good question and supplies us with a homely answer (Park is nothing if not pragmatic and matter-of-fact):

 

“Well, what can they do for us, on the rare occasions when we ask their assistance? How do we remember the number of days in the months? ‘Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November,’ the rhymes and strong fourfold beat combining to give us instant recall of needed facts we otherwise would have to figure out on our knuckles?”

 

And this:

 

“Schliemann went where he went and dug where he dug because the Muses told him to, and but for their testimony the gold of Mycenae, and the shaft graves, and the burned city of Troy VII would still be underground.”

 

Some of my sentences come automatically, and I sense they’re drawn from a higher brain function. Call it rationalism, not unlike solving a differential equation. But others, often the more interesting ones (to me, if not the reader) are mysterious. They seem to appear ab nihilo, from nowhere, like a magician pulling a coin from my ear. I recommend reading all of Park’s essay. After more than forty years I remembered how good it was and how much it moved me. Here is the conclusion to Park’s essay, a marvelous coda to her thinking:

   

“The mind is the greatest of computers, and it works its marvels best when well stored- with facts: names, dates, places, events, sequences--and also with language: words, phrases, sentences, the tongues of men and of angels. Perhaps language is the most important of all. We all notice the contraction in the range of reference of the young. But facts can be looked up, that's true, and if we get a grant, our servants can do that for us. What’s harder to acquire—in adulthood hard indeed--is that intimacy with language, that sense for different ways of using it, which grows naturally when we carry Shakespeare and the Bible, Jefferson and Lincoln, Eliot and Yeats, Edward Lear and P. G. Wodehouse in our heads. In our heads or, better, in another part of the body, there where we ‘learn by heart’--there in the unconscious, where the Muses sing to us darkling, and all the richness of what we know and value can come together in unexpected, unheard-of combinations. Memory is not the enemy of Inspiration, or of thought either. Today, as always, it is the essential prerequisite of both.”

 

[See this cover version of “One Toke Over the Line.”]

'Never to Gain an Advantage'

The closest I came to having a genuine argument with my late friend D.G. Myers, as brilliant a literary critic and scholar as I have known, was over his insistence that I too was a critic. I’ve never thought of myself that way, even though I’ve written hundreds of book reviews. My analytical skills are modest. I read for pleasure, which includes learning things. Like any practiced reader, I know what I like and what I dislike, and generally prefer to write about the likes. I am, in short, a writer who chooses to write about books, which is not the same things as being a critic. I don’t work for Consumer Reports. Theodore Dalrymple describes me by way of Montaigne in “Montaigne’s Humanity”: 

“Not being a systematic thinker, Montaigne offers only philosophical hints or suggestions. His mind is allusive rather than analytic; we find in him thoughts that prefigure later developments but nothing that resembles a doctrine more than a general attitude.”

 

That’s me. I have attitudes, general stances toward books and other things, but no doctrines, unless a preference for good prose is a doctrine. Being called a critic irritates me because I believe the least interesting thing I can know about you is your opinion of anything. Too many people have turned themselves into opinion-factories, and not just when it comes to politics. I’d rather hear what you know, what interests you, your “general attitude.” Critics are a very small and parasitic part of literature, nearly an after-thought. When I hear someone gearing up to set me straight, I’m tempted to turn off my hearing aids.

 

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) rediscovered Montaigne in Petrópolis, Brazil, of all places, finding a “dusty old copy” of the Essais in the basement of the bungalow where he and his wife lived after fleeing the Nazis. His own library, like much else, had been lost in Hitler’s Europe. Zweig’s monograph Montaigne (trans. Will Stone, Pushkin Press, 2015) was not published (in German) until 1960, and Stone’s translation is the first into English. His introduction is excellent. He tells us Montaigne was “the crutch that Zweig, with waning fortitude, reached for over that final winter, as any prospect of a future in which a scrap of magnanimity might be salvaged seemed lost to a brutalizing present.”

 

The parallels with our own day can’t be ignored. The times are just as savage, but fewer people can read. What’s most moving about this brief monograph is the centrality of books in the lives of Montaigne and Zweig, and the effort to sustain civilization. Zweig does not write as a critic but as a literary brother. One reads a muted elegy between his sentences:

 

“His relationship with books is like everything else, for here too he guards his freedom. With them too he knows no obligation to duty. He wants to read and learn, but only so far as he can savour the experience. As a young man he had read, he states, ‘ostentatiously’, merely to show off his knowledge; later, to acquire a measure of wisdom, and now only for pleasure, never to gain an advantage.”

'To the Learning of Some Art or Science'

A young reader finds himself attracted to and intimidated by the prospect of reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton (1577-1640). I sympathize with his contradictory impulses. The book is vast and densely laced with passages from dozens of writers, ancient to seventeenth century. Burton in his prose loves synonyms and expansive catalogs. He is never minimalist. He is not a man with a twenty-first-century sensibility. Perhaps the writer he most resembles is another polymath, Montaigne, or Sir Thomas Browne. 

Modern editions translate Burton's Latin and other languages. I discovered his book as an undergraduate and read it on my own over a summer. No professor ever told me about the Anatomy. I was already following my brother’s practice at the time – letting one book lead me to the next, whether cited by the author or linked chronologically or by subject. This affirms Burton’s notion that all literature is one, not unlike Borges’ conceit in the prologue to “Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain” (1962):

 

“Each in his own way imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an infinite library, because anything infinite is somewhat uncomfortable and puzzling, but as a library fit for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would allow for the pleasure of rereading, the serene and faithful pleasure of the classics, or the gratifying shock of revelation and of the foreseen.”

 

To read Burton is to visit and consume a library. I have not read his book sequentially, cover to cover, in more than half a century but it is eminently what Max Beerbohm called one of the “bedside books. Dippable-into.” Three editions sit on my shelves and periodically I read a favorite passage or randomly dip in as an act of bibliomancy, usually in the three-volume Everyman's Library edition. Burton himself encourages a prospective reader:

 

“Amongst those exercises, or recreations of the mind within doors, there is none so general, so aptly to be applied to all sorts of men, so fit and proper to expel idleness and melancholy, as that of study. . . . Who is not earnestly affected with a passionate speech, well penned, an elegant poem, or some pleasant bewitching discourse? . . . To most kind of men it is an extraordinary delight to study. For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts, and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader? In arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, painting. . . . in mechanics and their mysteries, military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening, planting. . . . in music, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, philology, in policy, heraldry, genealogy, chronology. . . . What so sure, what so pleasant?”

 

It's nearly impossible to excerpt briefly Burton’s prose. Sentences go on for pages. The best strategy is probably to read a given section per day. Burton arranges his book into partitions, sections, subsections and members. Reading Burton can be therapeutic in a manner advocated by the author himself. The passage above continues:

 

“Whosoever he is therefore that is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits, and for want of employment knows not how to spend his time, or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than this of study, to compose himself to the learning of some art or science.”

 

George Saintsbury, a critic and scholar as learned as Burton, writes in Vol. 4 of A History of English Literature (1920):

 

“Only by reading him in the proper sense, and that with diligence, can his great learning, his singular wit and fancy, and the general view of life and of things belonging to life, which informs and converts to a whole his learning, his wit, and his fancy alike, be properly conceived. For reading either continuous or desultory, either grave or gay, at all times of life and in all moods of temper, there are few authors who stand the test of practice so well as the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.”

'The Unique Emotional Language of Our Age'

On learning of certain deaths we’re left feeling momentarily desolate. This holds even for people we have never met and know only through their works or by reputation. I felt that way when Louis Armstrong died. He was always there, always reassuring, and then he was gone. Some shoring in life, a piece of its foundation, is removed. With time, the desolation fades, only to return as a pang when we remember the dead. 

I learned Philip Larkin had succumbed to “the anaesthetic from which none come round” the old-fashioned way: I read it in the newspaper. I had an office with a banging radiator in the Albany County Courthouse when I worked as court reporter for the long-defunct Knickerbocker News. I bought the New York Times from the newsstand in the lobby and read his obituary (p. B-12!), which described the poet as “a reclusive librarian.”

 

I feel no desire to defend him against stupid slurs. Larkin comes to seem like an ally in life. His gift is almost always manifest. He gets slandered as cranky and sour, but how many cranks can write like this, from “Reference Back”?:

 

“Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.”

 

Larkin’s death widened the distance between us and the tradition, receding in time, of Auden, Hardy, Housman and Wordsworth. When a voice of plainspoken eloquence is silenced, frauds grow emboldened. Larkin’s leaving leaves us more vulnerable to the calculating and their naïve followers. In his 1961 review of Charles Delaunay's life of Django Reinhardt (Jazz Writing: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, 2004], which carries the Johnsonian title “Lives of the Poets,” Larkin pushes aside poets and other writers to make way for jazz musicians as our rightful representatives:

 

“In a way it has been the jazzman who in this century had led ‘the life of the Artist.’ At a time when the established arts are generally accepted and subsidised with unenthusiastic reverence, he has had to suffer from prejudice or neglect in order to get the unique emotional language of our age recognised.”

 

Larkin, the least fatuous of poets, likewise made a memorable contribution to the “unique emotional language of our age.” We all recognize Larkinesque moments. Larkin died forty years ago, on December 2, 1985, at age sixty-three.

'But to Divert a Fierce Banditti'

The English poet William Cowper (1731-1800) suffered his first attack of mental illness – today we would likely call it profound depression – at age thirty-two. Before then, while studying law in the Temple, Cowper dined every Thursday with friends at the Nonsense Club. He and a fellow clerk, Edward Thurlow – the future Lord Chancellor – spent their time “constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle,” he wrote in a letter to his cousin Lady Hesketh. He published a series of light, occasionally whimsical essays, and then in 1763, made his first suicide attempt and was confined to St. Alban’s madhouse. He suffered three additional such attacks. In “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” Cowper would write: “I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb am / Buried above ground.”

 

An old friend has been diagnosed with depression and was recently hospitalized following a suicide attempt. I’m not naïve but I was surprised. He’s a reliably funny guy, smart, thoughtful and talented. His illness appeared in middle age and is not associated with drugs, alcohol or some life trauma. By his account, it came on quickly and powerfully, like an ambush.

 

Cowper tended to blame himself for his illness, treating it moralistically as a judgment from God. My friend has the advantage of pharmaceutical treatment for his condition, therapy and support from family and friends. Poor Cowper had little of that. Consider these lines from “An Epistle to Robert Lloyd, Esq.”

 

“But to divert a fierce banditti

(Sworn foes to ev’ry thing that’s witty),

That, with a black infernal train,

Make cruel inroads in my brain,

And daily threaten to drive thence

My little garrison of sense:

The fierce banditti, which I mean,

Are gloomy thoughts led on by Spleen.” 

'One Feels the Benefit Afterwards'

A reader asks a science-fictiony question: “Who is your idea of the Ideal Writer? Either a real writer from the past or a list of characteristics that describes the Ideal Writer.” It’s a silly question, probably related to the “Desert Island Books” gambit, and almost irresistible, though any informed answer would have to be heavily qualified. 

The obvious response is Shakespeare, as universal a writer as one can imagine. Or Dante. Or Tolstoy. Or Proust. You see the dilemma. How to define “ideal”? What balance of stylish flair, moral heft and gravitas qualifies? Something that entertains (in the broadest sense, not just escapism -- Dickens, for instance, or Shakespeare, for that matter) and educates. Such thoughts remind us how ephemeral most writing is, though one of the great consolations of literature is its vastness and variety. Something for everyone. Think how our tastes change across time. Let me make an admittedly whimsical nomination.

 

I happen to be reading Siegfried Sassoon Letters to Max Beerbohm: With a Few Answers (Faber and Faber, 1986). Sassoon (1886-1967) was an English poet, memoirist and veteran of the Great War. He was Beerbohm’s junior by eighteen years. Let me evade my reader’s question about ideals (always a dubious undertaking) and quote an entry from Sassoon’s April 1930 diary:

 

“Conversing with Max, everything turns to entertainment and delectable humour and evocation of the past. . . . Not a thousandth part can be recorded. But I feel that these talks with Max permanently enrich my mind, and no doubt much of it will recur spontaneously in future memories; he is like travelling abroad – one feels the benefit afterwards.”

'Leaning Through Silence to a Dead Man’s Mind'

Sometimes a sliver of poetry or prose, a single line or phrase, attracts our attention by glowing, as though surrounded by darkness. Take these words from “Edward Fitzgerald” (The Covenant, 1984) by Dick Davis: “Leaning through silence to a dead man’s mind.” 

Fitzgerald (1809-83), of course, is the English poet best known for his translation from the Persian of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (1859). I remember in junior high school having a gift booklet of the poem and sitting in study hall memorizing stanza XI:

 

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

 A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

 And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

 

Or here, from Fitzgerald’s first edition, the version I learned:

 

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

 

That’s how I learned the meaning of the archaic “enow.” Davis is the leading contemporary translator from the Persian, and his poem is an act of communion with and gratitude for his poetic forebear. Beyond that immediate significance, the phrase noted above stands as a metaphor for any reader encountering a writer from the past. When we read a book, we erase its inertness and reanimate the text. We gain admission to his mind. Davis also wrote an essay about Fitzgerald and his translation:

 

“The first, anonymous, and very small (250 copies) edition of the Rubaiyat appeared in 1859; though unnoticed initially, within a few years it had achieved fame among Victorian writers and artists (Rossetti, Browning, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Meredith and Ruskin were early admirers [ . . .] Subsequent editions appeared in 1868, 1872 and 1879, each involving changes, including the addition and dropping of stanzas and the rewriting of various phrases. A posthumous edition, prepared from FitzGerald's own marked up copy of the fourth edition, was published in 1889.”

 

Here is Davis’ complete poem:

 

“East Anglia, a century ago:

I see Fitgerald bow

To Attar’s Conference

As I do now

 

“Leaning through silence to a dead man’s mind,

A stranger’s pilgrimage

(As in the book we read)

To a blank page –

 

“An immanence, remote, but quickened by

An old, ill scholar’s breath:

I see you wrest this life

From brother death.”