'The Silly, Trivial Things You Did When Young'

“Of course, you live life forward and think about it backwards.” 

I’ve spent the last month or so thinking about the summer of 1973, when I visited Europe for the first time. This retrospective was prompted by my youngest son, who graduated in May from Rice University and the following day flew to Bangkok. He and friends have visited ten countries, from Cambodia to Turkey to Croatia. He’ll fly from Italy today and return to the U.S. on Wednesday. I spent most of my summer fifty-two years ago in France, usually in Paris or the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, with brief side trips to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium.

 

I was twenty and my son is twenty-two and far more mature and sophisticated than I was. Much was lost on me, less on him. In a pleasing piece of symmetry, he’s reading my old copy of Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which I carried around Europe and read for the first time that summer along with Spinoza’s Ethics. The headlines on French newspapers were dominated by Watergate and the marital shenanigans of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In that less globalized world, the only Anglophone songs I remember hearing were Paul Simon’s “Love Me Like a Rock” and George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” Everywhere I saw posters for Pink Floyd’s tour. Airline hijackings by terrorists were fashionable and for the first time I saw policemen in airports carrying machine guns. I ate snails for the first and last time, and horsemeat, once.

 

One of the pleasures of having children is sifting through the aspects of personality they share with you and those they lack. I’m not looking for a clone. On the whole, my sons are jumbles of me, my wife and qualities out of left field, and I find that surprisingly gratifying. None possesses my severest failings. The observation at the top is taken from an interview the American poet Howard Nemerov gave The Massachusetts Review in 1981. Nemerov continues:

 

“You might spend a lot of time in embarrassment about the silly, trivial things you did when young, that you didn't know you were doing silly trivial things when you were old too. You know, there is a beautiful place in Proust where the painter Elstir talks to Marcel about this. Marcel has just discovered that this great master must have been the silly young man who was referred to at parties, and Elstir, instead of turning away and refusing ever to see him again, sets him down and gives him a little talk about growing up and about how it’s only nonentities who have nothing to be ashamed of in their past, how you have to overcome what you were before, and it’s only, he says, in this way that something a little above the common life of the atelier is achieved.”

'Needlessly Limited Accommodation'

That certain mediocre books are judged “classics,” at least by teachers and librarians desperate to stock their shelves, fill bulletin boards and placate administrators, is well-known and nobody says much about it. I’m uncertain what mysterious collective formulates this canon and stamps it nihil obstat, ensuring that young minds won’t be sullied by its contents. Books on the list are usually distinguished by the conspicuous presence of a “message” that can be easily extracted from the text like a rotten tooth.

I’m thinking of such titles as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath and Animal Farm, not to mention the plague of “YA” novels. The emphasis on a work’s message certainly makes it easier to teach. No need to deal with those pesky, elusive literary qualities. Consider the long-term impact this has on readers. Reading becomes a sort of forensic exercise. A formulaic “good book” confirms the values you already hold. 

No one is suggesting that your average fifth-grader should be reading Ulysses (though prodigies do exist). Please, never discourage a curious or precocious child from reading. His or her classmates (and teachers, sometimes) will take care of that. Ambitious readers learn to go underground and communicate with others like them. Marriages and lifelong friendships have grown out of such relations. One of my favorite literary essay collections is Pleasures and Speculations (1940) by Walter de la Mare. In his introduction, de la Mare suggests a moderating approach when choosing a book to read:

 

“No reviewer, no common reader, no lover of books, however, is likely to spend his days solely in the consumption of masterpieces. They are in the nature of touchstones, and talismans, and the miraculous; and a diet restricted to them may be the supreme ideal. Yet there is much to be said for what falls short of this elevated standard, and even far short. The ‘hundred best books’ — when there may be only ninety and nine! Perfection may prove a sort of stubborn mental pemmican for otherwise admirable digestions and an extreme fastidiousness an ivory tower, with needlessly limited accommodation.”

 

Why not suggest de la Mare’s own Memoirs of a Midget, or one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels? Or Robinson Crusoe. Dickens. Books cherished by generations of common readers, people who read almost exclusively for pleasure.

'With Purple Prose and a Bad Actor’s Gestures'

On April 9, 1778, Johnson and Boswell dined at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds, where Edward Gibbon and David Garrick, among others, were also present. The subject of translations, including Pope’s Homer, emerged. “We must try its effect as an English poem,” Johnson said, “that is the way to judge of the merit of a translation. Translations are, in general, for people who cannot read the original.” Meaning most of us. 

Boswell recalled “the vulgar saying, that Pope’s Homer was not a good representation of the original,” to which Johnson replied: “Sir, it is the greatest work of the kind that has ever been produced.” Boswell then gives himself the best lines: “The truth is, it is impossible perfectly to translate poetry. In a different language it may be the same tune, but it has not the same tone. Homer plays it on a bassoon; Pope on a flagelet [a recorder-like flute].”

 

Garrick notes James Elphinston’s translations of Martial are “the most extraordinary,” though his judgment is not flattering. “He consulted me upon it, who am a little of an epigrammatist myself, you know,” Garrick said. “I told him freely, ‘You don’t seem to have that turn.’ I asked him if he was serious; and finding he was, I advised him against publishing. Why, his translation is more difficult to understand than the original.” Johnson concurs: “Sir, you have done what I had not courage to do. But he did not ask my advice, and I did not force it upon him, to make him angry with me.”

 

We are fortunate as R.L. Barth has, in Garrick’s words, “that turn.” He is our most gifted epigrammist and has returned to translating Martial’s epigrams. Here is II.30:

 

“Old friend, I ask a loan from you today.

Your money bags are bursting, but you say,

‘You’ll get rich taking up the law.’ Quite nice:

I ask for money, Caius, not advice.”

 

And VI.19:

 

“Come on, Posthumus, when I paid my fee,

I thought I hired a lawyer who would sue

The neighbor who absconded with three goats.

There’s no assault or rape, no battery.

Simple? Just prove it to the judge? Oh, no,

With purple prose and a bad actor’s gestures,

You rant of Cannae, the Mithridatic war,

Those lying, frenzied Carthaginians,

Sulla, and Marius. Come on, Posthumus,

Just tell the judge about my stolen goats.”

'Between Virgil and Young People Engrossed in Rock'

In a 2009 interview with a publication in Barcelona, Spain, Adam Zagajewski is asked a question about political correctness, euphemisms and other debasements of language. He replies:

“There is the harsher side of existence -- disease and death -- and the loftier reasons for poetry. In all writing, there is a clear tension between the ‘higher’ world, so to speak, and everyday life. The former is part of the world of dreams and ideals, while the latter describes the more terrible or laughable aspects of the human condition. If you keep to one side or the other, you'll be called a hypocrite.”

Poets are not the only ones dealing with such tension. How do we, culture’s civilians, balance ideals, the wisdom we have derived from literature, philosophy and religion, and the growing horror of life in the twenty-first century. We’re privileged in the U.S., relatively safe and prosperous unlike residents of, say, Ukraine or Sudan. We’ve experienced nothing like the Poles who were serially raped by the Germans and Russians. That history is behind Zagajewski’s comment made elsewhere that his friend Zbigniew Herbert’s poems are “like a suitcase upholstered in soft satin; but the suitcase holds instruments of torture.”

Zagajewski’s characteristic tone in poetry and prose is a gently skeptical irony. His style is plain-spoken (at least in translation) but learned and often wryly amusing. Among American readers he is often mistaken for a “nice guy,” a safely inoffensive fellow. He’s seldom strident and is not by nature a dogmatist of any school. He is Roman Catholic down to the chromosome level but never a preacher. Consider this ingenious metaphor from the Barcelona interview:

“An elevated style, which is devoid of a sense of humour and full of indulgence for our ridiculous, cruel and imperfect world, would be similar to the quarries of Carrara in Tuscany, from where all the marble has been extracted and there is only whiteness left."

That’s the danger, coming off as superior, safely above the concerns of mere mortals. Such a tone is not exclusive to left or right. It might be called haughty, snobbish, cold. Zagajewski continues:

“An elevated style comes from a constant conversation between two spheres: the spiritual sphere, the guardians and creators of which are the dead, and on the other hand, that of the eternal present, our path, our unique instant, the box of time that we have to live in. The elevated style acts as an intermediary between the spirits of the past, between Virgil and young people engrossed in rock, who slide around on skateboards on the narrow pavements of western cities. The honest writer must combine the ugliness of life with ‘the beauty it possesses in his work.’”

“Fire” (trans. Renata Gorczynski, Tremor, 1985):

“Probably I am an ordinary middle-class

believer in individual rights, the word

‘freedom’ is simple to me, it doesn’t mean

the freedom of any class in particular.

Politically naive, with an average

education (brief moments of clear vision

are its main nourishment), I remember

the blazing appeal of that fire which parches

the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns

books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing

those songs and I know how great it is

to run with others; later, by myself,

with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard

the lie’s ironic voice and the choir screaming

and when I touched my head I could feel

the arched skull of my country, its hard edge.”

 

The exchange with the Spaniard concludes with the interviewer asking a fairly fatuous question: “To what extent should poets have firm and clear opinions about contemporary problems?” Zagajewski replies: “They must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don't think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.”

 

Zagajewski would have turned eighty today. He was born in Lwów a month after the conclusion of the war in Europe and died at age seventy-five in Kraków on March 21, 2021.

'Full of the Little Obscurities'

“A man may profess to understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife.” 

Anecdotal Evidence attracts an admirably knowledgeable set of readers, largely proud amateurs like its author. As best I can judge, most academics are strangers to the blogosphere in general and this blog in particular. That’s not a complaint. I assume most of my readers, like me, are interested in books, not posturing or theorizing about them, or turning them into political fables. They seek, to varying degrees, wisdom and pleasure, as all grownup readers do. They accept that authors understand more than their critics, even when they understand little or nothing. Part of the pleasure of being alive is relishing the mysteries surrounding us.

 

The sentence at the top is characteristic of its author -- shrewd, a tad cynical, definitely more comic than sententious. A seasoned reader might deduce his identity but not who he is writing about. Here he describes the manner of that writer:

 

“[He] always shows us a picture that is full of the little obscurities, the uncertainties of outline, the mysterious shadings-off, that we see in the real world around us. He does not pretend to the traditional omniscience of the novelist. He is not forever translating the unknowable in motive and act into ready formula . . .”

 

No cheating. Who is writing about whom on June 20, 1916?

[As impatient readers already know, that is H.L. Mencken writing about Joseph Conrad.]

'Let Them at Any Rate Be Your Acquaintances'

“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.” 

An interesting gauge of human sensibility, a sort of litmus test to assess personality and values, might be to place your subject in a large, well-stocked library (or bookstore), wire him for blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance, brain activity, etc., and monitor his reactions, followed by a questionnaire to be completed by the subject: Are you frightened? Do you wish to run away? Do you feel bliss? Boredom? Reverence?

 

The reverent one quoted above is Winston Churchill in “Hobbies,” one of twenty-three essays collected in Thoughts and Adventures (Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1932). This is the man who, while stationed in India from 1896 to 1898 read all 4,000 pages of Gibbon during his daily leisure time, followed by Gibbon’s autobiography, Macaulay’s six-volume History of England, the Lays of Ancient Rome, Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and volumes by Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin and Adam Smith, among others. Such heroic reading seems like preparation for the eventual forty-three books in seventy-two volumes Churchill would write, making him a rare deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.

 

Today we can’t imagine a world leader -- or even an English major -- who reads and writes on such a Victorian scale. Churchill confirms the truth of an observation made by Dr. Johnson, as recounted by Boswell: “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Churchill continues in the essay, describing his own reactions to a library visit:

 

“‘A few books,’ which was Lord [John] Morley’s definition of anything under five thousand, may give a sense of comfort and even of complacency. But a day in a library, even of modest dimensions, quickly dispels these illusory sensations. As you browse about, taking down book after book from the shelves and contemplating the vast, infinitely-varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved, pride, even in its most innocent forms, is chased from the heart by feelings of awe not untinged with sadness. As one surveys the mighty array of sages, saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers whose treasures one will never be able to admire—still less enjoy—the brief tenure of our existence here dominates mind and spirit.”

 

Churchill convinces us he is a genuine bookman. We’ve all been taken in by frauds who brag of having read libraries, or at least the fashionable titles of the day – a deception especially common among politicians. But Churchill has the dedicated reader’s understanding that reading is deeply idiosyncratic, as individual as DNA, a reflection of who we truly are not who we wish the world to think we are:

 

“‘What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”

'The Spirit of Urbanity Incarnate'

Last week Nige wrote about a book previously unknown to me: The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rev. 1922) by Holbrook Jackson. I’ve read only Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and browsed in some of his other book-related titles. I bought the Anatomy in 1998 from a used bookstore near the University of Chicago and soon gave up annotating because too many pages hold memorable aphorisms or allusions that demand to be followed. Not that my pleasure was unmixed. Jackson (1874-1948) cultivates a cloyingly tweedy persona, a variation on the unworldly English eccentric. He’s fond of archaisms. He often writes in a pastiche of seventeenth-century prose, aping Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, as he acknowledges. 

The Eighteen Nineties is a better-written, more focused and disciplined work, devoted to an era Jackson lived through as a young man. The Nineties in literature tends to be treated as a homogenous period when dandyism and an occasional taste for decadence ruled. Jackson makes clear that Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Francis Thompson, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and early Wells and Conrad, among others, are a diversified bunch, no monolith. He writes:

 

“The use of strange words and bizarre images was but another outcome of the prevalent desire to astonish. At no period in English history had the obvious and the commonplace been in such disrepute. The age felt it was complex and sought to interpret its complexities, not by simplicity . . .”

 

Jackson dedicates his book to Max Beerbohm and devotes Chap. VII, “The Incomparable Max,” to him. At his best, Beerbohm is sui generis, a master ironist and writer of prose, unlike any of the other writers Jackson looks at. His masterpieces are the essays he produced after the Nineties, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially those collected in And Even Now (1920). Jackson writes:

 

“First and foremost, he represents a point of view. And, secondly, that point of view is in no sense a novelty in a civilised society. Every age has had its representative of a similar attitude towards life, in one a Horace, in another a Joseph Addison and, again, a Charles Lamb. In our age it is Max Beerbohm. He is the spirit of urbanity incarnate; he is town. He is civilisation hugging itself with whimsical appreciation for a conservative end.”

 

Jackson gets Beerbohm and places him in the history of the essay: “It does not matter what he writes about: his subjects interest because he is interesting. A good essayist justifies any subject, and Max Beerbohm as an essayist is next in succession to Charles Lamb. His essays, and these are his greatest works, are genial invitations to discuss Max, and you discuss him all the more readily and with fuller relish because they are not too explicit; indeed, he is often quite prim.”

 

Beerbohm is never strident or dogmatic. That would be vulgar and one can’t imagine him ever being vulgar. He respects his readers too much. The literal-minded and humorless need not bother reading him:

 

“[H]e pays you a delicate compliment by leaving you something to tell yourself; the end of his ellipsis, as in all the great essayists, is yourself. He is quite frank with you, and properly genial; but he is too fastidious to rush into friendship with his readers. They must deserve friendship first. He does not gush.”

 

The essay, that most formless of forms, is my favorite, providing a voice for those of us who can’t write fiction or poetry. No one does it better than Beerbohm.

 

“The real Max Beerbohm is, I fancy, an essayist pure and simple, the essay being the inevitable medium for the expression of his urbane and civilised genius. There are, he has told us, a few people in England who are interested in repose as an art. He is, undoubtedly, one of them. But he is also interested in the art of the essay, and his essays are exquisite contributions to that rare art. In them you see revealed the complete Max, interpreting deftly, by means of wit and humour, imagination and scholarship, that ‘uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures,’ to use his own words, which he admits preferable to books, and which, doubtless, he prefers better than any other view in life.”