'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.]

'We Must Examine and Fix What Ignorance Is'

A thoughtful, well-read reader has taught me a new and useful word: agnoiology. It’s a straight borrow from the Greek word for “ignorance” and means, according to the OED, “the study of the nature of ignorance or of what it is impossible to know.” It entered English in 1854, coined by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808-64). In the Age of AI it seems important to know this word, which first appears in Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysics: 

“We must examine and fix what ignorance is—what we are, and can be, ignorant of. And thus we are thrown upon an entirely new research, constituting an intermediate section of philosophy, which we term the agnoiology or theory of ignorance.”

 

Colloquially, people call others “ignorant” when they disagree with them or find them unsophisticated. It’s a handy word in the arsenal of snobbery. More formally, ignorance is the absence of knowledge. I am ignorant of the rules governing football and irregular French verbs. In theory, I could learn both bodies of knowledge but have no desire to do so. I’m content with my ignorance. Ferrier distinguishes the “unknowable” from the “unknown.”

 

In her 1899 monograph on Ferrier, published in the “Famous Scots Series,” Elizabeth Haldane quotes the philosopher stressing “the use, indeed the absolute necessity, of a true doctrine of ignorance.” Haldane writes:

 

“There are, Ferrier says, two sorts of so-called ignorance: one of these is incidental to some minds, but not to all—an ignorance of defect, he puts it — just as we might be said to be ignorant of a language we had never learned. But the other ignorance (not, properly speaking, ignorance at all) is incident to all intelligence by its very nature, and is no defect or imperfection. The law of ignorance hence is that ‘we can be ignorant only of what can be known,’ or ‘the knowable is alone the ignorable.’”

 

If I understand Ferrier’s epistemology correctly, ignorance ought to be an inducement to humility. Not only is there much we don’t know, but even more we can’t know. Listen to commonplace conversations and notice how often people make categorial statements concerning things they know nothing about. We all do it on occasion. Some make a career of it. Ignorance, in the conventional sense, is a goad to learning. Remember Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision” in Report From the Besieged City and Other Poems (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1983):

 

“ignorance about those who have disappeared

undermines the reality of the world”

'More Recent Misjudgments'

“My past literary judgments sometimes embarrass me.” 

My friend, a man of roughly my age, has just reread Conrad’s Under Western Eyes after first reading it six years ago and finding it “failed to engage” him. Now he judges it “gripping--well plotted, suspenseful, psychologically acute, uncommonly intelligent, wise.” I share that judgment of Conrad’s later “political” novels, including The Secret Agent and especially Nostromo. My friend is not alone. I’m ashamed and somewhat baffled by my previous lapses in literary taste and judgment. My friend is not referring to our reactions when young and still bookishly feckless. “I was, in knowledge and experience,” he writes, “a different person then. I'm referring instead to more recent misjudgments, ones for which I don’t have the excuse of youth.”

 

When young I claimed to like a lot of dubious, ephemeral stuff, especially among contemporary writers – Alexander Theroux, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, John Barth and others. You see the pattern, heavily bent toward “experimental” post-modernists, often difficult to read, explicitly denying readers' traditional novelistic pleasures, often unabashedly boring. That’s a clue as to my youthful motivations. I was masquerading as a connoisseur of the avant-garde. The last thing I wanted to be known for was unhip, middlebrow tastes in books. What other reason could there be for reading Gaddis’ unreadable JR or McElroy’s Women and Men besides snobbery? Consuming such books was an act of bravado, a public proclamation that I was no philistine.

 

The reverse judgment was also true. Certain writers I didn’t dismiss but found lacking – what? Excitement? Critical endorsement? Formal challenges? Among them now are some of my favorite writers – Willa Cather, George Eliot, Ford Madox Ford. There were writers I ignored or was unaware of until recent years, and now admire and enjoy – Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Francis Wyndham, Ivy Compton-Burnett. I misjudged the overall career of Walter de la Mare, pigeonholing him as a children’s poet. Memoirs of a Midget is now among my favorite novels, as is Maurice Baring’s C. Some loves have remained unchanged since I was young – among Americans, Vladimir Nabokov, William Maxwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud and, of course, Henry James.

 

About the Conrad, my friend writes: “Beats me how I could have missed its excellence the first time around, let alone found it uninvolving. Must have been distracted.”

'Evidence on Which a Life Depends'

I always find consolation in T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante” that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Put aside for the moment what it means to “understand” a poem. Too often reading poetry is mistaken for a branch of cryptography. Take Geoffrey Hill, dead at age eighty-four in 2016. I think of the last decades of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first centuries as the Age of Hill, poetically speaking. For density of sheer linguistic matter and quantity of business going on word by word, line by line, few poets rival Hill. His later work can be baffling to casual readers, but with patience and a touch of faith the beauty of his best work becomes evident. Take “The Peacock at Alderton,” collected in A Treatise of Civil Power (2007):

“Nothing to tell why I cannot write

in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this

latter acknowledgement: the self that counts

words to a line, accountable survivor

pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,

less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel

to Prospero’s own knowledge. In my room

a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt

to describe them, as if for evidence

on which a life depends. Except for the eyes

they are threadbare: the threads hanging

from some luminate tough weed in February.

But those eyes – like a Greek letter,

omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;

like a shaved cross-section of living tissue,

the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,

the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,

the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.

The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine

at the garden end, in blustery twilight

his fulgent cloak stark as a warlock’s cape,

the maharajah-bird that scavenges

close by the stone-troughed, stone terraced, stone-ensurfed

Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.” 

For the moment, no code to crack. Savor the sound: “some laminate tough weed in February,” “omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl,” “his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,” “stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed.” Language worthy of the peacock’s enchanting gaudiness. Shades of Hopkins, who wrote his own, rather more conventional peacock poem, “The Peacock’s Eye:

 

“Mark you how the peacock’s eye

Winks away its ring of green,

Barter’d for an azure dye,

And the piece that’s like a bean,

The pupil, plays its liquid jet

To win a look of violet.”

 

One more poem from the same volume, “In Memoriam: Aleksander Wat”:

 

“O my brother, you have been well taken,

and by the writing hand most probably:

on photographs it looks to be the left,

the unlucky one. Do nothing to revive me.

 

“Surrealism prescient of the real;

The unendurable to be assigned

No further, voice or no voice; funérailles,

Songs of reft joy upon another planet.”

 

Hill adds Wat (1900-67) to his roll call of poetic heroes, joining Milton and Ben Jonson (“my god,” Hill calls the latter). Wat was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets. Late in life, visiting California, he recorded lengthy conversations with his countryman and fellow poet, Czesław Miłosz. The transcripts were translated into English by Richard Lourie and published in 1988 as My Century. To my taste, Wat is a middling poet, a “futurist,” but his oral memoir is an essential document from the bloodiest century in history. Hill has resurrected Wat before. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), he writes:

 

“Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat.”

 

To quote another authority among Hill’s enthusiasms, here are the final sentences of Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) or, to cite the full title, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; Showing That it Is Not Lawful For Any Power on Earth to Compel in Matters of Religion:

 

“Pomp and ostentation of reading is admired among the vulgar, but doubtless, in matters of religion, he is learnedest who is plainest. The brevity I use, not exceeding a small manual, will not therefore, I suppose, be thought the less considerable, unless with them, perhaps, who think that great books only can determine great matters. I rather choose the common rule, not to make much ado where less may serve, which in controversies, and those especially of religion, would make them less tedious, and by consequence read oftener by many more, and with more benefit.”

'You Are Never Out of Business'

“I prefer reading books—those I should have read when younger, those that might awaken me to things I should have known long ago—and rereading those I failed to read carefully enough the first time round.”

I hear in Joseph Epstein’s bookish declaration an echo of Logan Pearsall Smith’s well-known admission: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Non-readers, a growing constituency, are likely baffled by such thoughts. Books for them are associated with tedium, snobbery and coerced classroom assignments. Who can blame them for not wanting to read To Kill a Mockingbird?  I have no grand theories about reading and not reading. I don’t know how to explain such divergent sensibilities – though lousy teachers have something to do with it -- nor do I wish to harangue others into reading Tristram Shandy. I came from a family of non-readers. Nothing human ought to surprise us.

 

Epstein will turn eighty-nine on Friday, January 9. His recent essay in The Free Press is titled “I Want to Die with a Book in my Hands.” I’m seventy-three and share the sentiment. Epstein has often noted his fondness for aphoristic writing, prose that is pithy, dense with thought, often equipped with a barb. Here he is on reading at an advanced age after a lifetime of reading:

 

“My sense is that one reads differently in old age than when younger. For one thing, some writers who once seemed vital, central, indispensable, no longer seem so. For another, with one’s time before departing the planet limited, one tends to have less patience. Then, too, after a lifetime of living, one’s experience has widened; and with any luck it has also deepened, and so one has a different perspective on the things one reads or has read, often holding them to a higher standard.”

 

I can endorse all of that. Like Epstein, I have read Proust’s masterpiece twice and am contemplating a third reading. Why take on its 1.2 million words yet again? I read Remembrance of Things Past the first time at age eighteen, one summer while managing a miniature golf course. The afternoons were quiet and I could read, nearly uninterrupted, in the clubhouse. When a revised edition in three volumes was published a decade later, I read it again. No one remembers every authorial move even in a short story. What I retain from Proust’s 3,200 pages is a general outline, a sort of novelistic road map of the narrative’s plan, plus isolated incidents and a recollection of occasional intense pleasure. I seem to have lost little or nothing of my attention span – a plague in portions of the population. Also, like Epstein, I’m inclined to reread books “I failed to read carefully enough the first time round,” as he puts it. It’s a cliché to say I’m not the man I was at eighteen or thirty. In a very real sense, I’ll be reading the novel for the first time.

Vladimir Nabokov speaks for me and perhaps for Epstein: “To be a real reader, you have to reread a book. The first time, the book is new. It may be strange. Actually, it is only the second reading that matters.” And the third.

 

Like Epstein, vast categories of books remain No Man’s Land for this reader – contemporary fiction, most politics, mysteries and thrillers of any vintage, science fiction, self-help, celebrity memoirs, etc. Such reading is one more symptom of our age’s pervasive presentism. The present, after all, is a provincial backwater. As Epstein puts it:

 

“Fortunately, one can live quite well on the literary culture of the past. I find myself rereading, among others, George Eliot and Willa Cather, Shakespeare and Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal. A nice thing about the reading life is you are never out of business.”

 

Happy birthday, Joe.

'To Find Joy in the Everyday, in Life Itself'

“Everyday life is miraculous because it subjects the violent impulses to itself. The Essays of Montaigne are the revelation of the miracle of ordinary life.”

 

Much mischief is the product of dissatisfaction, of men and women looking for purpose, novelty or distraction in life and deciding they have not found it. Only extremity, an impulsive grab after an illusion, seems like an appropriate response to so imperfect a world. We’re spoiled. It’s always easier to complain and rebel than to give thanks for what we already have. The writer quoted above, sounding very much like Michael Oakeshott, is Ann Hartle, a Montaigne scholar teaching at Emory University, in her essay “Montaigne’s Radical Conservatism.” I have never encountered a utopian delusion in all of Montaigne’s thought. In an early essay not cited by Hartle, “Of a Saying of Caesar’s,” he writes:

 

“Everything, no matter what it is, that falls within our knowledge and enjoyment, we find unsatisfactory; and we go gaping after things to come and unknown, inasmuch as things present do not satiate us. Not, in my opinion, that they do not have the wherewithal to satiate us, but that we seize them with a sick and disordered grasp.”

 

And here is Hartle’s gloss on such thinking:

 

“Generosity is openness to human diversity and trust in the goodness of ordinary men. The conservative possesses and enjoys the good that is society. That is, he enjoys what we already have. One of the most delightful features of the Essays is the way in which Montaigne is always astonished at the familiar, ordinary, and common things. The most common human actions are miracles to him. This is the hallmark of the conservative character: to find joy in the everyday, in life itself.”

 

The spirit of such conservatism, which Oakeshott would identify as a “disposition” rather than a set of political provisions, has grown rare. In his Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014), Oakeshott writes:

 

“We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”

 

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