'Pure Farce Covers a Far Greater Field of History'

In a 1951 letter to Bernard Berenson collected in Letters from Oxford (2006), the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper writes: 

“I, unlike you, prefer my books to be long (though this may be a sign of laziness: it spares one the mental effort of repeated choice); and I am now re-reading, for the nth time, that greatest of all historians, as I continually find myself declaring,--Gibbon. What a splendid writer he is! If only historians could write like him now! How has the art of footnotes altogether perished and the gift of irony disappeared!”

 

A friend is reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) for the first time. He’s gifted with a vigorous sense of humor, curiosity and brains, and is having a grand time. Gibbon’s footnotes are virtually a genre apart, often quoted and appreciated for their humor or snark. He was famously critical of religion and in a footnote he writes of St. Augustine and The City of God:

 

“Augustin composed the two-and-twenty books of de Civitate Dei in the space of thirteen years, A. D. 413-426 . . . . His learning is too often borrowed, and his arguments are too often his own, but the whole work claims the merit of a magnificent design, vigorously, and not unskillfully, executed."

 

Probably the best known of Gibbon’s footnotes is this, of Emperor Gordian the Younger:

 

“Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.

“By each of his concubines, the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.”

I suppose no one reads Gibbon’s six volumes for a crash course in Roman history, though an inspired editor might easily excerpt a book-length assortment of Plutarch-style character studies. He’s simply compulsively readable. Trevor-Roper continues in his letter to Berenson:

 

“I took a volume of Gibbon to Greece and read it on Mount Hymettus and the island of Crete; I read it furtively even at I Tatti, where 40,000 other volumes clamoured insistently around me to be read: and I cannot stop reading him even now.”

 

In a letter to Berenson written four months earlier, Trevor-Roper proves himself as wise as he is well-read:

 

“I used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes: I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx.”

Trevor-Roper died on this date, January 26, in 2003 at age eighty-nine.

'To Seize the Greatness Not Yet Fairly Earned'

One of the pleasures of living in Houston for a native Northerner is witnessing the panic that ensues when temperatures drop and snow or freezing rain are forecast. People mob the stores, stockpiling bottled water and toilet paper. Businesses and even public libraries close prematurely. Lines at gas stations snake around the block, sparking memories of the Carter administration.

I’m careful about voicing nostalgia for snow. I know Texans who saw snow for the first time last year and remain traumatized by the memory, though about an inch fell and most of it had melted by the afternoon.

 

Meanwhile, our thoughts are elsewhere. We’re planning to build a garden in the backyard and have ordered native plants and even an olive tree. We want to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, who already visit the garden in front of the house. We’ll till new plots and put in tomatoes, beans, basil and flowers. Gardens mingle artifice and nature, with the best maintaining an uncertain balance. I don’t mind weeds among the herbs. The text for today’s sermon is “Time and the Garden” by Yvor Winters, which begins:

 

“The spring has darkened with activity.

The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:

Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,

Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.

These will advance in their due series, space

The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.”

 

Planning a garden encourages one to think beyond the moment. There’s a pleasant sense of anticipation.

 

“I long to crowd the little garden, gain

Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small

And taste it in a moment, time and all!

These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years,

I would expand to greatness.”

 

For Winters, a garden is at once real and metaphoric. Poets, too, even the greatest, mature with time and dedication:

 

“And this is like that other restlessness

To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,

One which the tougher poets have discerned—

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,

Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,

And spaced by many years, each line an act

Through which few labor, which no men retract.”

 

Winters died on this day, January 25, in 1968 at age sixty-seven.

'Enjoying a Fine Day, a Joke, a Meal?'

“[W]e learn to know human nature better through knowing him so well, and if we can acquire his habit of self-observation we too can enrich our lives.” 

About whom is Desmond MacCarthy writing? A respectable answer might be Shakespeare, given his all-inclusiveness, his panoptical view of the species. Little that’s human was ever alien to him. Tolstoy and Proust also come to mind. Few others. Comprehensive vision is usually denied even to the most gifted among us.

 

MacCarthy’s pronouncement seems to contain at least the threat of a paradox. For most of us, self-observation is license to commit solipsism, to grow obsessed with our precious little selves. As Theodore Dalrymple puts it: “I sometimes astonish my patients by telling them that it is far more important that they should be able to lose themselves than that they should be able to find themselves. For it is only in losing oneself that one does find oneself.” MacCarthy is writing about the man who introduced the “I” to literature and made it at least semi-respectable: Montaigne.

 

The passage at the top is taken from a brief piece titled “A Critic’s Day-Book” collected in MacCarthy’s Criticism (1932). Lately I’ve taken to reading Montaigne every day in the Donald Frame translation; sometimes a full essay, often an excerpt. I’ve tried to see the commonsensical wisdom of my sixteenth-century forebear. One result is to de-academisize the Frenchman, to take him out of the classroom and the academic journals and seat him in the chair beside me, to do him the honor of treating him like a human being, an entertaining companion. Here is MacCarthy again:

 

“Since fortune is fickle and many things may come between a man and his desire, it is wise to make the most of those resources which good fortune cannot increase and only the worst calamities destroy. This is the lesson of Montaigne. Have not even the stricken sometimes marvelled to find themselves enjoying a fine day, a joke, a meal? There is comfort in this. Why dwell only on the humiliation in it? We may smile ironically with Montaigne at human nature, its ‘flexibility and diversity,’ but unless we learn from him to smile also gratefully, we have not caught his message.”

 

I feel like giving Montaigne a job reference. You know: hard worker, takes the initiative, never complains, etc. Here is Donald Frame in his 1965 biography of Montaigne:

 

“I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an  ‘escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.”

 

[You can find Criticism and five other titles by Desmond MacCarthy at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]

'Nothing Is Promised'

“Nothing is promised. That is the bargain.” 

In a high-school creative writing class, our teacher required us to write every day in a journal. I kept mine in my regular loose-leaf school binder. Periodically we turned them in and Miss Murphy, mostly so she knew we were dutifully completing the assignment, would collect them, read our daily passages and occasionally comment. She must have been a paragon of tact, reading all that teenage maundering.

 

I burned the journal long ago but I remember intentionally not treating it with the banality of a diary. Once I included a short story I had written based on something in The Fixer by Bernard Malmud. I commented on current affairs (1968 offered plenty of grist). I wrote a poem about Jan Palach and one about Martin Luther King Jr. after his assassination. I remember commenting on passages from Eric Hoffer’s newspaper column and I wrote the lyrics to a song based on Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”

 

The lasting impact of this assignment, which stretched across my junior and senior years, was to get me in the habit of writing every day. I resisted the gravitational pull of solipsism and wouldn't let the desire to produce a daily masterpiece leave me paralyzed. This apprenticeship came in handy a few years later when I got my first job as a newspaper reporter. Editors don’t want to hear about your lack of inspiration. I already had a built-in sense of deadline.

 

I thought of these things while reading Robin Saikia’s poem “Larkin’s Typewriter.” Mike Juster introduced me to a poet previously unknown to me. Saikia describes the fallow period Larkin experienced in the final years of his life:

 

“Dawn breaks on the workhorse Olivetti.

What secrets can its sworn-at ribbon tell

Of muse-deserted years? The kettle clicks,

The curtains lift on Hull, unchanged, unlit.

A bicycle ticks cooling in the hall.

 

“He trusts the desk, the hour, the body’s drag

Toward duty. Poems come, or do not come.

One learns to keep one’s temper with the void,

To praise the silence for its accuracy.

 

“Outside, the trains rehearse departures.

Inside, the page resists, as it should.

Nothing is promised. That is the bargain.

Still, something like truth gets hammered out.

By lunchtime, even doubt has earned its keep.”

 

In his 2014 biography of Larkin, James Booth writes:

“His life was a success. . . . On the personal level he knew that he had the love and respect of those around him. His day-to-day life was packed with affections and epiphanies. And he gained the profoundest satisfaction from writing his poetry. He was, nevertheless, haunted by failure. . . . Towards the end, after his poetic inspiration had died, his despairing moods became more frequent. He told Andrew Motion: ‘I used to believe that I should perfect the work and life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.’”

'I Shall Load Up the Shelves Again

Half a century ago, in the Winter 1976 issue of The American Scholar, the journal’s editor Joseph Epstein published an essay (under his usual pseudonym, Aristedes) titled “The Opinionated Librarian.” It’s a feast for serious readers, an account of trying “to trim down my personal library.” Book lovers will share his resolve to cull volumes and the near-impossibility of doing so. “Although I did not know it when I first set out to do this,” Epstein writes, “I was engaged in a task of the most intimate literary criticism.” The operative word here is “intimate.” The dedicated, book-besotted reader understands that our relations with books often rival in tenderness and loyalty our relations with human beings. 

My middle son noticed when he visited at Thanksgiving that hundreds of books are stacked horizontally on shelves already densely filled with vertical volumes. That’s a sure symptom of overstocking and the imminent need for culling. Long ago, because of limited shelf space, I could no longer arrange all my volumes according to author or subject. I’m mildly neurotic about that, so the fact that one heap includes books by Thom Gunn, Otis Ferguson, Christina Campo, Whitney Balliett, Paul Klee and Heimito von Doderer is like an itch I can’t quite reach. Here is Epstein describing a highly specialized species of literary criticism:

 

“Trimming down a library in this way makes me wish I owned certain books I do not in fact own--if only for the delight of getting rid of them. The novels of Harrison Salisbury, if I owned them in the first place, would, I should imagine, be easily jettisoned. Books about show business, about politics in Latin America, about auto racing; books with titles that begin The Death of ... or The Politics of ...; books on new forms of psychotherapy, on urban renewal, on arms control--shelves and shelves of these, if only I owned them, could go without a quiver of hesitation on my part.”

 

I share Epstein’s sense of imaginary pleasure. How I would enjoy ridding my shelves of John Steinbeck, Stephen King, Mary Oliver, Lee Child and any title that has appeared on the New York Times bestseller lists in the last, say, forty years.

 

The books I retain represent a form of autobiography. Attached to most volumes are memories of times and places when read and reread. I think of my books as a covert C.V., one that would hold no interest for a prospective employer.

 

Fiction is easy. Most ages poorly. “Fiction is my next big cut,” Epstein writes, “especially contemporary fiction of very recent years. Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov, though I do not adore their work, may stay. The work of their imitators, or workers in the same vineyards--Barthelme, Barth, Gardner, and the rest--I have come to consider English department teaching aids, and no longer read them. They go.”

 

What fiction do I retain? The usual suspects: Sterne, George Eliot, Conrad, Henry James, Chekhov and Tolstoy, Proust, Nabokov, Italo Svevo, Henry Green, Janet Lewis, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa  Evelyn Waugh, Ralph Ellison, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Anthony Powell, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a scattering of others. Most of what I hold on to are books I might reasonably expect to reread or at least consult. Philosophers? Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, William James, Wittgenstein, a few others. What odds and ends? Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson, Guy Davenport, Edward Gibbon, Whittaker Chambers, Nadezhda Mandelstam and her husband, Beerbohm, Rebecca West, J.V. Cunningham, Zbigniew Herbert, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, Theodore Dalrymple, Montaigne, Geoffrey Hill, Auden, MacNeice . . .

 

“Having cleaned out these shelves,” Epstein writes, “and disposed of several of the superfluous books in my library, I feel a bit like Henry James, who, having shaved off his beard and prepared to enter upon his major phase, remarked that he felt ‘forty and clean and light.’ An illusory feeling for me, of course, not only because I am most distinctly not Henry James, but because the likelihood is great that in no time at all I shall load up the shelves again.”

 

[The Epstein essay is collected in Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life (1979).]

'Being But a Dream'

In “Cockaigne: A Dream,” published in The New Yorker on January 21, 1974, L.E. Sissman describes the mental city he composed of pieces borrowed from the real cities he had known: 

“Coming around the corner of the dream

City I’ve lived in nights since I was ten –

Amalgamated of a lost New York,

A dead Detroit, a trussed and mummified

Skylineless Boston with a hint thrown in

Of Philadelphia and London in

An early age, all folded into a

Receipt (or a lost pawn slip) for a place

That tasted of a human sweetness, laced

With grandeur and improbability –”

 

As a suburban kid, my imaginary city was composed largely of the New York City I knew from television and movies, compounded of Abstract Expressionism, gangsters and tenements, very hip and foreign, where men wore hats and went to Yankees’ games. It was an ethnic place, a stew of languages and races. Later, I would find echoes of it in A.J. Liebling’s journalism and Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep.

 

Starting at age twelve I could ride the bus by myself to downtown Cleveland, getting off at Public Square and hitting all the bookstores. With a friend I once went to a magic shop high up in one of the office buildings. I would eat lunch in a diner on Prospect Avenue across from Kay’s Books where I got a job a few years later. One December I stood at the corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue and watched the Christmas parade. Across the street was a Bond’s men’s clothing store and on the roof was a billboard for a brand of coffee – Chock Full o’ Nuts? – with a giant, steaming coffee mug. I haven’t lived in Cleveland since 1977, so these memories remain precious but, I’m sure, heavily edited by time, as are the places themselves. They feel like those artificial New York City impressions I manufactured more than sixty years ago.

 

Max Beerbohm had lived in Rapallo, Italy, since 1910, until he and his wife returned to England before the start of World War II. The first radio broadcast he made for the BBC, on December 29, 1935, is titled “London Revisited”:

 

“London has been cosmopolitanised, democratised, commercialised, mechanised, standardised, vulgarised, so extensively that one’s pride in showing it to a foreigner is changed to a wholesome humility. One feels rather as Virgil may have felt in showing Hell to Dante.”

 

When Beerbohm collected for publication his BBC broadcasts he asked, “What civilized person in these days [1946] (unless he has a passion for such things as science or sociology), isn’t nostalgic?” Nostalgia for what no longer exists, uncomplicated by disappointment or bitterness, is always a temptation. I can reduce my nostalgia-tinged distaste for what has happened to Cleveland to a single fact: Higbee’s department store, downtown on Public Square, where I was taken each December to visit Santa Claus and his local sidekick, Mr. Jing-a-Ling, is now home to the Jack Cleveland Casino. “It is a bright, cheerful, salubrious Hell, certainly,” Beerbohm writes of latter-day London. “But still—to my mind—Hell. In some ways a better place, I readily concede, than it was in my day, and in days before mine.” Sissman closes his dream-poem with these lines:

 

“And I awaken at twelve-fifty-five

A.M., according to the bedside clock,

On February 14^th of this year,

Elated, desolate it could not spell

Me any longer, being but a dream,

Its only evidence being my tears

Of joy or of the other, I can’t tell.”

 

[The Sissman poem is included in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978). A transcript of Beerbohm’s London broadcast is collected in Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957).]

'Like the Clothes He Wears'

“There must be in prose many passages capable of producing a particular kind of aesthetic reaction more commonly identified with poetry.” 

For some of us, this is self-evident. Dull, clumsy, tin-eared prose is at least as painful and offensive as its counterpart in poetry. Some prose writers are simply incompetent. They’re like backward children fumbling with Play-Doh. Others dismiss attention paid to crafting prose as being merely effete. I found this particularly true among journalists. Just throw words against the wall and see what sticks.

 

The passage above by the poet Donald Justice is from his essay “The Prose Sublime.” He adds a witty subtitle: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” Justice published it in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1988 and collected it in A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). He continues:

“[T]he reaction to prose as to poetry proves in experience to be much the same, a sort of transport, a frisson, a thrilled recognition, which, ‘flashing forth at the right moment,’ as Longinus has it, ‘scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt.’”

 

Justice explicitly dismisses “purple prose” and the “self-consciously experimental”; namely, Gertrude Stein and Finnegans Wake. Histrionic prose is self-indulgent and attention-seeking. It forgoes clarity – the writer’s obligation to the reader – and substitutes showing off. When I think of an example of what Justice is advocating, I think of the poet J.V. Cunningham, who is also a masterful writer of prose. Take “The Journal of John Cardan” (1961), collected in The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024). His prose is unsentimental and written with laser-like focus:

 

“So we save ourselves from the sentimental death of the hearts, and at the same time protect ourselves from engrossment in our wayward wishes. For a man must live divided against himself: only the selfishly insane can integrate experience to the heart’s desire, and only the emotionally sterile would not wish to.”

 

And this: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.”

I remembered Justice’s essay when rereading Henry Green’s “Apologia,” his 1941 reading of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), collected in Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green. Justice explicitly dismisses Doughty, along with Water Pater, as producing “prose that aims to be poetical.” Here, I disagree with Justice on the virtues of Doughty’s prose. It is unusual and eccentric but utterly convincing in context. Green writes:

 

“A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality. But what a man is, also makes the way he writes as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance which is, essentially, a side of his character. There are fashions in underwear, for the most part unconscious in that we are not particularly aware of how we dress. . . . [W]ith Doughty the man’s integrity is such that he writes on his own, if the dates were not available it would be hard to say when.”