'Child, Man and Old Crone'

“Old age does not exist. At least, we do not suffer continuously from being old; like the trees, we have, each year, an attack of old age. We lose our leaves, our good humour, our zest for life; then they come back again.” 

That sounds about right – getting old as an exercise in ever-renewing autumn (until it’s not renewed). As my seventy-third birthday approaches, I don’t feel my age, whatever that may mean, all the time. Pain, yes. The occasional mid-afternoon sag in energy. More thought-life devoted to the past. I suspect some people wait all their lives for the “golden years” so they have an excuse to behave badly and get away with it. My contemporaries constitute the Complaining Generation, whining about something or other, all of it tedious and socially sanctioned by their fellows.

 

The passage at the top is taken from Jules Renard’s journal, dated October 10, 1905, when he was forty-one. I think of Renard having a peasant’s common sense. He’s no dreamer, no utopian. Had he been born a few years later in Russia, Stalin would have had him rubbed out as a kulak. Usually, when Renard complains, it is properly muted by wit. He’s a nineteenth-century French ironist who never tells a joke.  

 

The American novelist and poet Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was one of those indefatigable writing machines whose productivity was probably pathological. She produced some 170 books, mostly mysteries, including sixty-one in the Fleming Stone Detective series. She also edited at least nine poetry anthologies, including A Satire Anthology (1920). Among its themes is old age. “Lines by an Old Fogy” was written by the always-prolific Anonymous:

 

“I’m thankful that the sun and moon

Are both hung up so high,

That no presumptuous hand can stretch

And pull them from the sky.

If they were not, I have no doubt

But some reforming ass

Would recommend to take them down

And light the world with gas.”

 

Call it the conservative impulse (leave things be) or mere crankiness. It’s all in the delivery. “Too Late!” by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow is preceded by the French proverb “Ah! si la jeunesse savait,—si la vieillesse pouvait!” (basically, “If youth only knew, if old age could”). From the second of six stanzas:

 

While we send for the napkins, the soup gets cold;

While the bonnet is trimming, the face grows old;

When we’ve matched our buttons, the pattern is sold,

And everything comes too late—too late!”

 

Renard echoes his theme in the journal entry from October 10, 1907: “Every day I am by turns child, man and old crone.” We are forever multiple and ourselves.

 

[The Renard quotes come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'May His Books Swarm Again When Selected'

A reader has passed along a poem she says reminds her of me. I haven’t read David Livewell’s work before. Based on “Telling the Books” he seems like a thoughtful writer, not one to shriek or preach. His poem is preceded by an epigraph from William Longgood’s The Queen Must Die and Other Affairs of Bees and Men (1985): 

“Bees were considered members of the family; if a beekeeper died, a black ribbon was attached to his hives, an ancient custom known as ‘telling the bees.’” The poem was first published in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Hudson Review:

 

“Mourners would ‘tell the bees’ and drape the hive

When a beekeeper died.

The news ensured the insects stayed alive

And honey flowed inside.

 

“Who told his books? In sly self-portraiture,

The colored spines in crates

Depict his buzzing mind and eye the door,

His name on their bookplates.

 

“He’d read for hours and let the lamplight rouse

Each poet’s lyric throat.

No loneliness when, night by night, he’d browse

The lasting lines they wrote.

 

“May his books swarm again when selected

To join another’s tomes,

And his own sweet lines be resurrected

From hidden honeycombs.”

 

The poem speaks to a faintly nagging anxiety: What will happen to all these books after my death? Talk about self-centered. The problem is that I tend to mythologize this long-collected library (earliest volume, a Bible, acquired in 1961) as a single organism rather than a hive of individuals. To break it up, to have books claimed by family and friends, some sold to a book dealer and others trucked to the library for donation, feels like a violation – not of me but of the books. Of course, I’ll be past caring but in my sentimental imagination, my books are my autobiography. So, what’s the ideal outcome? That one of my sons claims the collection, keeps it intact, and reads it as I have read it. “May his books swarm again when selected / To join another’s tomes . . .” Fat chance. Even I recognize myself as a peculiar sort of reader, whose bibliophilic trait is probably recessive. Walter de la Mare closes his poem “Books” with these lines:

 

“Abiding joy is theirs; rich solitude,

Where mortal cares a while no more intrude

[. . .]

Yet every word is void of life and light

Until the soul within transfigures it—

Then sighs, for rapture, wildly pines to see

Who wakes this music, under what strange tree—

And pines in vain; for it is Poetry.”

'The Ones I Never Had the Time to Read'

In the right company it might spark an amusing diversion over dinner: what thirteen books would you take with you if marooned on a desert island? It’s a harmless parlor game reminiscent of adolescent boys arguing over who among them could withstand torture without betraying secrets. The risk, of course, is people showing off by naming volumes they think will make them sound “intellectual.” You know, like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – books they brandish for purposes of self-inflation with no intention of actually reading them. The same thing happens when politicians are asked what books they’ve been reading: “Oh, just À la recherche du temps perdu. In French.” 

In the September 1982 issue of The English Journal, the editors asked twenty-seven high school and college instructors that question. The feature is titled “Our Readers Write” and subtitled “A Baker’s Dozen Books I Would Take with Me If I Were Banished to a Desert Island.” The respondents are not celebrity faculty members, prominent writers or critics. I don’t recognize a single name on the list, and that’s a good thing. Why not just ask working stiffs in the classroom, people who actually teach children?

 

You can tell the question was asked more than forty years ago. Respondents name some of Literature’s Greatest Hits, and those names appear on multiple lists -- Shakespeare, Moby-Dick, Montaigne, Dickens, Tolstoy. More teachers than I would have expected name Maugham. Many list then-current or recent writers – John McPhee, Marilyn Hong Kingston and Eliot Wigginton for his I Wish I Could Buy My Son a Wild Raccoon (1976). Wigginton was founder of the Foxfire Project. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to child molestation.  

 

Alleen Nilsen of Arizona State University names, along with Shakespeare and Boswell, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (and Human Male), along with “my grandparents’ journals (mimeographed by the family), [and] a recent year’s bound volume of the National Enquirer.” She adds: “These are not necessarily the books I know and love. They’re the ones I never had the time to read.” One inspired teacher names the Rev. Francis Kilvert’s Diary. Another, Henry Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, along with Walt Kelly’s Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo and one of my favorite novels, Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant. Some masochist names John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy. And Jane Christensen of the National Council of Teachers of English selects Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Oddly, no one mentions Dante's Commedia.

 

For my list, I would suggest a book I’m now rereading – Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers -- and another American autobiography that was hurt into existence by communism, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Then the Unamuno title mentioned above. Shakespeare, Montaigne and Boswell, of course. The King James Bible and Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. I don’t think I would include much fiction. Perhaps Tristram Shandy and something by Conrad or George Eliot. Something familiar but dense, thick with life and thought. Something built to last on those long, lonely nights on the island.

'The Right to Live As a Natural Right'

Saul Bellow in To Jerusalem and Back (1976):

“What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot. This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a decent regime. No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.”

The book's closing sentence:

"But the eagerness to kill for political ends--or to justify killing for such ends--is as keen now as it ever was."

'One More Way in Which the Earth is Heating Up'

What do people do who don’t read, and by “read” I mean read books? How do they occupy their time? How do they come to understand the past which, as Faulkner reminded us, is never really past? I understand that those who work long hours – say, emergency room nurses – have little time for leisure activities. They go home to sleep or watch a little television before climbing into bed. Look at human history and it’s obvious that serious, self-motivated reading has always been a minority taste, even with the growth of literacy in recent centuries in the West. My concern here is not snobbish. I take nothing away from a person who hasn’t read Proust. Neither have most of the professors I know.

Such questions are hardly original with me. I ask because of a student I met on Monday at the Rice University library. He was at the next terminal, waiting for a key to one of the study rooms upstairs. I had on hold the just-arrived novel by the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade (1910-82), Sons and Daughters, and was checking it out, along with several other books. Grade’s novel is Victorian-sized, almost seven-hundred pages, roughly the length of Bleak House, and the student asked if I planned to read it. “Yes, he’s a great writer,” I said, and he asked how long it would take me. 

We stepped away from the circulation desk and I explained that I couldn’t say with certainty because I usually read several books simultaneously, alternating texts as the spirit moves me. “Probably a couple of weeks,” I said, and he replied that it would take him months. I asked how long since he had read a book not assigned by a prof (he’s a mechanical engineering major). He couldn’t remember and I could see he felt sheepish. I wished him well and we parted.

 

I had recently read an essay, “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society,” by James Marriott, whose work I don’t otherwise know. “The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution,” he writes, which I wish I had told that student in the library, because “the world” includes mechanical engineering. I won’t rehash Marriott’s reasoning. He blames the obvious suspect, the smartphone and other electronic devices, for the forty-percent plummet in leisure reading in the U.S. in the last twenty years. Marriott writes:

 

“This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.”

 

I understand: people don’t want to listen to a lot of doomsaying. I don’t envy my sons the world they are likely to inherit. In the introduction to Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, (2009), his biography of Isaac Rosenfeld, Steven J. Zipperstein writes:

 

“Few who write today, few who live amid books that they read so that they might write better, can overlook the assault on reading at the heart of contemporary culture – with its emphasis on the visual, its distrust of intellection, which itself is, arguably, among the more powerful legacies of the last century. Never, it seems, has the role of the writer felt so at odds with what is around us – despite superb writing that seems to speak to fewer and fewer. Other writers have in the past, of course, feared that theirs were times when the fate of literacy was at risk and such concerns have proven unfounded, off-kilter. No matter: now this sense of uncertainty feels warranted. For those, like myself, who early on found coherence in the world around us mostly through books, the uncertainty surrounding their fate today, their increasing marginality, feels ominous, one more way in which the earth is heating up right under our feet.”

'He Often Said Just Nothing At All'

“Whenever I could, I used to draw him out on literary subjects, for it seemed a waste of opportunity to talk to him about spinach, or cigarettes, or beer.” 

My strategy with well-known writers, even those I admired, was different from Frederika Beatty’s. I never presumed an intimacy, literary or otherwise, that had no reason to exist. I kept it mostly businesslike with Steven Millhauser, William Gaddis and Robert Coover. They were not my friends. They had agreed, reluctantly or otherwise, to answer my questions. My interview with Coover in a motel room in suburban Albany, N.Y. surprised me by turning into a pleasant conversation. The same thing happened with Guy Davenport when I visited him at his home in Lexington, Ky., though we had already been exchanging letters and I had reviewed his book on Balthus, and he claimed to approve of my judgments.

 

I find little information about Frederika Beatty, but her remembrance of Edwin Arlington Robinson –"Edwin Arlington Robinson as I Knew Him" -- was published in 1944 in the South Atlantic Quarterly. She published at least one book, William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount (1897). In his biography of Robinson, Scott Donaldson mentions Beatty only once in passing. He tells us they met at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where Robinson had a residency every year from 1911 until his death in 1935. The anecdote:

 

“Frederika Beatty, another young writer at MacDowell, told Robinson one morning that she was sleeping in the room once occupied by a famous and beautiful lyric poet whose wraith had visited her during the night. ‘How did she manifest her presence?’ EAR asked, in all apparent seriousness.

 

“‘I felt a chill go through me,’” Beatty answered.

 

“‘No,’ Robinson said at once, ‘wrong temperature.’”

 

Beatty’s brief memoir is a collection of anecdotes about the poet, not a critical piece. I read it and enjoyed it because of my admiration for Robinson’s work, especially the early, shorter poems. Beatty confirms my impressions of Robinson the man, a quintessential New Englander:

 

“Two traits of Mr. Robinson’s I like particularly to think of, besides his dry humor—his integrity and his kindness. Mr. Robinson was absolutely honest, both with other people and with himself. This is shown in his poetry; it is shown in every contact anyone had with him. His honesty apparently made him independent. Being unwilling to say more than he meant, he often said just nothing at all.”

 

Robinson is on my short list of the greatest American poets, with Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Winters, Wilbur and a few others. Beatty concludes her piece:

  

“The last morning of my stay at the Colony, in September, when I was returning to New York, I went over to tell Mr. Robinson good-by. Again it was breakfast, and I sat a while with him. I told him that I was really no writer, that I had come to the Colony to finish a particular book, and that it was almost done. Then I told him that I might have to develop into a writer after all, for I hated not to come back to the Colony.

 

“‘You write another book,’ he said slowly, ‘and come back.’”

 

“Those were the last words he ever said to me, for he died the following April.”

'Your Heart's Beat an Allusion'

Most of us are closet animists at heart. Motility defines life and everything is moving when our back is turned. I arranged vast armies on the floor in my childhood bedroom. Most were American GIs, c. 1945, supplemented by tanks and one crouching soldier with a flamethrower on his back (I bought him from a kid down the street), but the tactics were Napoleonic. When it was time for dinner and I was absent from the bedroom, I remained confident the fighting raged on without me. When I returned, I noticed subtle movements among the assembled armies. I was not Gen. Patton and I trusted my men to carry on bravely. 

In “The Secret Life of Books” (Corrupted Treasures, 1995), the Australian poet Stephen Edgar stipulates in his poem’s first line that books cannot move but nevertheless pulse with life. They are living things more alive than many humans we know. Consider their impact on dedicated readers. From them we have learned that the sea is snotgreen, beauty is pied and the mind is best cleared of cant. Ambition is vaulting; desperation, quiet; fruitfulness, mellow. If books change the world, they do so incrementally, word by word, one reader at a time, not on the barricades but in a chair. Edgar concludes his poem:

 

“They have you. In the end they have written you,

By the intrusion

Of their account of the world, so when

You come to think, to tell, to do,

You’re caught between

Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.”

'That Pleasing and Often Rewarding Genre'

Nige, proprietor of Nigeness, seems to have read my mind. Recently he discerned a possible “sign of the long overdue blog renaissance, when people finally come to their senses, abandon the delusive charms of Facebook, Instagram and X, and return to the blogosphere, natural home of that pleasing and often rewarding genre, the informal short-form essay? I doubt it, but a man can dream . . .” 

A dream I share. Almost twenty years ago I started Anecdotal Evidence rather nebulously. It was aimless and without a thesis (it still has none). Perhaps a digital commonplace book? I knew what I didn’t want it to be: a bully pulpit, a crackpot whiner’s platform or a manifesto. I knew I was writing for adults, not children of any age. Fundamentally, I wanted to share my reading with anyone who might be interested. Already, that was a modest goal. Few read books today, and if they do they’re drawn from contemporary works, genre writing, celebrity memoirs, self-help – books of no interest and a very short shelf life. The past is a much bigger, generally more interesting place than the present. Writers have a moral obligation to write well if they’re doing it publicly. To write poorly is insulting to readers. If you must, do it at home in a notebook and don’t inflict it on others. The whole point is the quality of the prose you impose on readers.

 

Aleksey Nikolayevich Pleshcheyev (1825-93) was a Russian radical poet and editor who would not be remembered today, at least among English-language readers, had he not exchanged letters with Anton Chekhov. He was among the least comprehending of Chekhov’s readers. Pleshcheyev was a “progressive,” the sort of dolt who reduces a work of literature to a digestible message. And yet, Pleshcheyev in 1888 published Chekhov’s “The Steppe,” the story that announced his literary debut. They remained friends until Pleshcheyev’s death. Perhaps his most critical role in Chekhov’s life was inspiringly negative, moving him to write some of his finest letters and articulate his writerly credo. In an October 4, 1888, letter, Chekhov writes:

 

“The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all of their forms . . . Pharisaism, dullwittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations. I see them in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no particular predilection for policemen, butchers, scientists, writers or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist.”

 

Consider how eccentric Chekhov’s stance must have seemed late in the nineteenth century in Russia, and how it remains so today in much of the West. Pleshcheyev was, in effect, a precursor to many users of Facebook, Instagram and X, to quote Nige. Tweets, etc., tend to be impulses, not clearly written, carefully reasoned observations. Their attraction is their brevity, which appeals to the lazy, their disregard of spelling and grammar, and the potential for anonymity.

 

In Chekhov the Man (1900), Kornei Chukovsky calls this letter “a gauntlet flung in the face of an entire age, a rebellion against everything it held sacred.” Five days after the letter cited above, Chekhov wrote another one to Pleshcheyev, less well known, after sending him the story “The Name-Day Party.” He writes:

 

“What is suspicious in the story is my attempt at balancing off the pluses with the minuses. But it’s not conservatism I’m balancing off with liberalism—they’re not at the heart of the matter, as far as I’m concerned—it’s the lies of my heroes with their truths.  . . . You once told me that my stories lack an element of protest, that they have neither sympathies nor antipathies. But doesn’t the story protest against lying from start to finish? Isn’t that an ideology? It isn’t? Well, I guess that means either I don’t know how to bite or I’m a flea.”

 

Start with Nigeness and begin a walking tour of the blogosphere. Much of it is a waste of electrons, of course, but there are some interesting people out there with the proper combination of brains, humility, audacity and writing ability.

 

[The quoted passages are from Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973), translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky.]