'Words Massive With the Increment of Years'

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that low and servile fear, which bows only to present power and upstart authority.” 

The first classical writer I can remember reading was, unsurprisingly, Homer, in a children’s edition. The Odyssey was treated as an adventure story – which it is -- not unlike Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe – though watered down, cleaned up, made palatable to a twentieth-century neophyte reader raised on cartoons. A few years later I would read Lattimore’s and Fitzgerald’s translations.

 

William Hazlitt’s passage quoted above, from “On Classical Education” (1815), likely sounds grandiose to contemporary readers. I was a lazy student of Latin and never studied Greek. My understanding of Homer and other Greek and Roman writers has been filtered through centuries of subsequent readers. In the case of Homer, I’m lining up behind Alexander Pope, James Joyce and Christopher Logue. All testified through their examples that “there is something really great and excellent in the world.” They suggest that literature is not a game preserve. It is open to all of us. No need to pass a test or pay a membership fee. If you can ignore his snobbery, Hazlitt is good on the pretensions associated with literature and education in general:

 

“Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men, and which degenerates into obstinate prejudice or petulant fickleness of opinion, according to the natural sluggishness or activity of their minds.”

 

One needn’t be an autodidact to hold “obstinate prejudice[s].” I rank myself among those “persons without [formal] education.” David Leightty is an attorney and poet in Louisville, Ky. “The Classics” is from Knowing That Most Things Break (David Robert Books, 2023):

 

“The centuries’ accumulated store

Of reverent study bides in these dense books—

Dense with millennia. In lifting these

The hand lifts time itself. Who were those men?

No telling. Legend vested them obscures;

The gist of long tradition shifts their mien.

So too their works. A reading bends beneath

Words massive with the increment of years.”

'The Conjunction of Dreaming and Ruling'

Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society” (1764), including: 

“How small of all that human hearts endure

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity we make or find.”

 

Five years later Johnson told Boswell in conversation: “Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” We can safely nod our heads in agreement. In the eighteenth century in Great Britain, such sentiments could prove seditious and be punished accordingly. History has substantiated Johnson’s observations. Governments and their enthusiastic or coerced citizens created the abattoir that was the twentieth century and have continued the tradition into the twenty-first.

 

A reader complains about the absence of politics at Anecdotal Evidence and I thank him for noticing. It’s not a compelling subject. Busybodies with big ideas, unafraid to impose them on others, are dangerous. In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Robert Conquest -- poet and historian, Jeremiah of Communism and its evils – writes:

 

“[I]t is no part of its culture that a government elected by a bare majority, or even by a fairly large majority, is thereby empowered to totally reconstruct the social and political order by sacrificing the minority. That great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that for some people government is ‘an instrument of passion; the art of politics

is to inflame and direct desire.’ For others, which is to say, in general, for those who have a traditional regard for the unity and continuity of a culture, the business of government is something different: ‘to restrain, to deflate, to pacify, and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down,’ on the grounds that, as Oakeshott puts it, ‘the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.’”

 

Conquest is quoting Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962; rev. 1991). Elsewhere in his book Conquest writes:

 

“The revolutionary believed it to be in the nature of things that dictatorship and terror are needed if the good of humanity is to be served, just as the Aztec priests believed themselves to be entirely justified in ripping the hearts out of thousands of victims, since had they not done so, the sun would have gone out, a far worse catastrophe for mankind. In either case, the means are acceptable, being inevitable. . .”

"Meaning One Thing at a Time'

A reader asks if I remember diagramming sentences. In math I was competent and uninspired but almost anything with words constituted play time. In short, I loved diagramming sentences. I think Mrs. Whistler, my sixth-grade teacher, enjoyed calling on me to take a sentence apart on the blackboard and reassemble it in a manner almost mathematical – probably my first insight into logic. She appreciated the pleasure I took in diagramming, a pleasure not shared by most of my classmates. Whenever Hollywood gives us a professor furiously solving equations on the blackboard, I’m back in Pearl Road Elementary School.

For those unfamiliar with the practice, diagramming meant making grammar visible, pictorially displaying the parts of a sentence and relating them to each other using connecting lines. Subject-verb-object was no longer drily theoretical but as vivid as arithmetic. It was like furniture bought at Ikea: “some assembly required.” To this day I think of a sentence as an assembly of parts. Anyone can put them together but what is the optimal combination?

Clive James in Cultural Amnesia (2007) introduced me to Pedro Henriquez Ureña, the great Dominican philologist. “It is always encouraging to hear what you know by instinct,” James writes, “resoundingly formulated by an authoritative figure, so that you can draw upon the memory for a lifetime.” Most of us grow up thinking we understand the language into which we were born. And we do, but how does it work? How do we recognize confusing or ambiguous language? How can it be corrected? How do we recognize lies and incoherence when expressed in seemingly straightforward language? Grammar is more than academic. It’s an ever-present gift, often under threat, to be cherished and preserved. Here is the conclusion to James’ essay:

“Writers don’t read just for the story: they read for the way the story is written, and the way the sentences are put together is the information that sticks. It helps, however, to have been taught in the first place what a sentence is: something that conveys information only by the rules it keeps. Grammar is a mechanism for meaning one thing at a time. Without it, you can’t even manage to be deliberately ambiguous, although to be ambiguous by accident is a result all too easily attained.”

'Old Age Had Been Foreseen'

Deciding which of Chekhov’s more than five-hundred stories is the finest is a happily futile task. He is a reader’s pipe dream: a great writer who was prolific (though he died at age forty-four). My sentimental favorite is “My Life” (1896), a novella written during his Melikhovo period. Misail Poloznev is a young nobleman who resolves to become a member of the proletariat, though not out of revolutionary zeal. He rejects the life he inherited but without self-dramatization. His motives are private, not histrionic, and everyone, even his father, mocks him and fails to understand Misail’s choice. By the end he has lost the woman he loves and made his sister’s life difficult, but we admire him. His life has been lonely and difficult but he has achieved integrity and a certain moral eminence. I remembered Chekhov’s story when reading Len Krisak’s similarly titled “A Life,” published in Pulse Beat Poetry Journal: 

“The streets, albeit not with gold, were paved,

The path both broad and even; wide the way

And easy, with no uniform to don.

By almost nothing was he put upon.

Old age had been foreseen, and so he saved,

The modicum matched with its rainy day.

The sheets were clean, as were the neat clothes worn

From bawling babe, to teen, to man, and on.

Few were the oaths required to be sworn,

And almost nothing had been sacrificed,

Or found worthwhile, or worth the dying for.

As to the depredations brought by war,

None had been undergone. All things sufficed,

Since almost nothing crucial had been needed.

Yes, easy, broad, and even, he conceded,

Though through it all, what all of it had meant

He couldn’t say. No, not in any event.”

 

In seventeen lines, Krisak encapsulates a life, as Chekhov does in “My Life” (and many other stories). That life is conventional, unremarkable, perhaps blameless. But the character described suspects he has missed something: “almost nothing had been sacrificed.” There’s no mention of youthful dreams, whether accomplished or lost. By the end he has not understood what it was all about. An unhappier character than Misail, his life was not hurtful or destructive but disappointing. We find similar narratives in Tolstoy, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Richard Yates. Chekhov wrote in another story, “The Lady with the Little Dog”:

 

“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.”

'A Continent of Dulness and Futility'

Most serious readers, I suspect, have enthusiasms they recognize as virtually indefensible. It would never occur to me, for instance, to mount a solemn defense of Charles Montagu Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), or urge readers to take on the book. His prose is too eccentric to attract and hold even the most patient and persevering of readers. Even I can’t stomach his poetry, though Guy Davenport urged The Dawn in Britain (1906) on me. In the same category I would put the fiction of Henry Green (by the way, an admirer of Doughty’s) and even the later novels and The American Scene of Henry James. 

Another such outcast dear to me is Walter Savage Landor, especially his epigrams and his major prose work, Imaginary Conversations (1824-29). I can think of few writers less congenial to twenty-first-century readers. I enjoy him and mostly keep my mouth shut. Now I’ve happened on Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1890) by W.E. Henley, author of the sturdiest of warhorses, “Invictus.” Henley describes his collection as “a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism,” but he has occasionally provocative things to say about dozens of writers, including Landor:

 

“To the many, Landor has always been more or less unapproachable, and has always seemed more or less shadowy and unreal.  To begin with, he wrote for himself and a few others, and principally for himself.  Then, he wrote waywardly and unequally as well as selfishly; he published pretty much at random; the bulk of his work is large; and the majority has passed him by for writers more accessible and work less freakish and more comprehensible.”

 

 No argument here. No one at my university mentioned Landor. I had to discover him myself, years later. He was a great blank in the middle of the nineteenth century. Curiosity drove me; Landor’s sensibility kept me coming back. Henley is witty in his distaste for Landor, and I feel no urge to fight back. Of the work he writes   

 

“[I]t is peopled chiefly with abstractions: bearing noble and suggestive names but all surprisingly alike in stature and feature, all more or less incapable of sustained emotion and even of logical argument, all inordinately addicted to superb generalities and a kind of monumental skittishness, all expressing themselves in a style whose principal characteristic is a magnificent monotony, and all apparently the outcome of a theory that to be wayward is to be creative, that human interest is a matter of apophthegms and oracular sentences, and that axiomatic and dramatic are identical qualities and convertible terms.”

 

He’s not entirely wrong. If I don’t sound like a cheerleader it’s because I acknowledge that Landor is, as they say, “an acquired taste” – like snails or Scotch. And Henley writes well. He tells us some readers judge Landor “a continent of dulness and futility.” That’s very good. In the second of his two paragraphs, Henley writes of Landor’s drama, which I have never read:

 

“To many there is nothing Greek about his dramatic work except the absence of stage directions; and to these that quality of ‘Landorian abruptness’ which seems to Mr. Sidney Colvin to excuse so many of its shortcomings is identical with a certain sort of what in men of lesser mould is called stupidity.”

'He Took to Learning for It Own Sake'

Almost half a century ago, in a small town in Northwestern Ohio, I knew a man who read Joseph Conrad the way some people read their Bible – out of love, not obligation. He was not otherwise a literary man. He was about seventy, a lifelong bachelor who retired from a big insurance company a few years earlier and had lived in a succession of small Ohio towns, surrounded by vast fields of corn, soybeans and sugar beets. I was editor of the town's weekly newspaper and visited him at home to interview him about some unliterary matter I no longer remember, and saw on a table in his living room the twenty-four-volume Canterbury edition of Conrad’s Complete Works. 

He told me he was never much of a reader but had discovered Conrad as a teenager and recognized his sole literary affinity. He claimed to have read little else besides the great Pole. I had a copy of Ian Watt’s recently published Conrad in the Nineteenth Century and offered to loan it to him but he wasn’t interested. He had no curiosity about the ancillary literature, biography and critical works. He impressed me as a quietly happy man. He was delighted when I told him Nostromo was my favorite Conrad title. He may have been the purest reader I have ever met. Years later I interviewed an aspiring novelist in residence at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. On the wall above the desk in his cabin he kept a framed photograph of Conrad, so I told him about the reader back in Ohio and he told me the Polish novelist was “like a god.”

 

I thought of these men while reading a 1985 interview with V.S. Pritchett (1900-97), the finest British book critic and short-story writer of the last century. He recalls his Uncle Arthur, a carpenter, never wealthy or formally educated:

 

“[O]ne other thing which has never ceased to surprise me, he had read that extraordinary psychological classic of the 17th century, [Robert] Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which is the most extraordinary book of classical learning about neurosis and all that sort of thing, primitive psychology, early psychology. And he used to read this with absolute delight, with great pleasure — how much he understood I don’t know.”

 

Pritchett remembered his Dickensian Uncle Arthur in the first volume of his memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968):

 

“A passion for education seized him. He took to learning for its own sake, and not in order to rise in the world. He belonged – I now see – to the dying race of craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last he found it: he taught himself to read by using Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He reveled in it. ‘Look it up in Burton, lad,’ he’d say when I was older. ‘What’s old Burton say?’ He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument. And he would add, from his own experience, a favorite sentence: “Circumstances alter cases.’”

 

This is a rare and convincing testimonial to the power of reading. Something similar happened to Eric Hoffer when he discovered Montaigne’s essays. I’ve read thousands of books since I learned to read almost seventy years ago and that, certainly, has had a cumulative impact on my life – all that time I could have spent bowling or playing video games -- but I can’t identify a single volume or writer that possessed such transformational power. Books have populated my interior landscape, overhauled my imagination, buffered me against loneliness and despair, kept me amused, honed my critical faculties – but in what sense are such things life-changing? In the aggregate, they mean something; in isolation, little or nothing. That I can recall much Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot is a great comfort because it leaves me no excuse for boredom, but, of course, I can also pull up lyrics to pop songs and commercial jingles from 1961. So what? But sometimes I suspect we live among savants.

'Farewell the Castle in the Air'

I came late to Louis MacNeice – preoccupied as I was, like many before me, with his friend W.H. Auden – and have tried to make up for my tardiness by reading him closely and often. In 1937 he tramped around the Hebrides, like Johnson and Boswell, with the intention of writing a travel book. The result, I Crossed the Minch, is loosely organized and a little disappointing. There’s something forced about the narrative, as though MacNeice sensed he couldn't rival the brilliance of his poetry and, incidentally, had to justify his publisher’s advance.

The Minch is the strait northwest of Scotland that separates the mainland from the Outer Hebrides. This is ripe subject matter. The best travel writers – Charles Doughty, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert – don’t produce dutiful, passive transcripts of experience. Often they are on a quest for knowledge or enlightenment. They mingle history and close observation. They are autobiographical in the sense that Montaigne’s essays are autobiographical.

MacNeice occasionally crosses the paths described in Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell’s A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Like his predecessors, MacNeice is democratically erudite. Along the way he alludes to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donald Duck, the Powys brothers, cricket, Sunlight Soap, Charles Laughton’s role as Rembrandt and much Irish, Scottish and English history. He works in passages written as verse and inserts others parodying the styles of Walter Pater, D.H. Lawrence, Yeats and Hemingway (“He put his hands in his pockets and opened the door with his knee. He went out into the rain. The rain was raining.”) MacNeice has a sense of humor. He writes:

“After lunch I walked up to Arnabost and took the road to the left, leaving it at Grishipol (which means Pig Steading) to visit the house where Dr. Johnson stayed. The house is beautifully situated by the sea—of grey stone, with no roof, but the three broad chimneys remain. It is not a big house and is full of weeds and dung. In holes in the wall there are pigeons’ nests, which contained baby pigeons covered with yellow down. If it had been Shelley who stayed here, how people would gush about this place.”

Shelley is likely the most irritating poet in the language, at least before the birth of Sharon Olds, and it’s nice to see MacNeice take a shot at the narcissistic twit. He shares Auden’s northern temperament. A subdued melancholy in his work is muted by a gift for celebration (not unlike Auden and Johnson – especially the latter). He is a genial man comfortable in solitude. His humor can be somber in the Irish fashion. In this passage from late in I Crossed the Minch, I admire the way MacNeice simulates one’s progression from callow to seasoned while retaining the sense of improvised Irish gusto:

“When I was nineteen and twenty I was very excited if I walked up a road. Because, like a character in G.K. Chesterton, I expected some adventure round the corner. But now I realize that, contrary to adolescent expectations, adventures are not things which happen at random. The globe-trotter, the flaneur, the wandering dilettante of sensations, these are not the people who get adventures. An adventure must be important to the adventurer. You cannot collect them with scissors and a pot of paste. You must work for them. They must be related to your work and come to you in the course of it. Farewell the castle in the air which never saw hod or trowel.”