'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.”

'The Aesthetic Blush'

One of my favorite essays was written about prose by a poet. No paradox there. Apart from the strictures of meter and rhyme, there’s no good reason prose can’t be composed as musically and concisely as poetry. Years ago, Dave Lull sent me a link to Donald Justice’s “The Prose Sublime,” first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1988 and collected in A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). It’s an essay I periodically reread, in part because Justice cites the occasional excellence of the prose of Sherwood Anderson, an early enthusiasm of mine. I also like that he explicitly rejects “purple prose,” the flowery stuff soft-headed writers think is poetic. One quality of good prose is that it adheres, like lichen to a rock, to precise thought. 

I want to point out the witty subtitle Justice gives his essay: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” Justice is suggesting that our expectations of prose are modest or even nonexistent compared to poetry. Prose is deemed utilitarian, a purposeful avoidance of frills. It means business. Poetry is lightweight and frivolous. But one of our deepest sources of joy is language excellently deployed, regardless of the form. “The reaction to prose as to poetry,” Justice writes, “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.”

 

 Some of our best writers of prose were poets. I’ll cite only Yvor Winters, Louise Bogan and J.V. Cunningham. Take this from Cunningham’s “The Journal of John Cardan” (1961), collected in The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024). Note the absence of gushing and the tight 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.”

 

Justice’s subtitle reminds me of Guy Davenport’s Objects on a Table (1998), subtitled Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature. In his study of still-life painting, he refers to his four lectures as a “disarray of perceptions and conjunctions in which the unlikelihood of harmony vies with the promise of coherence.” This, incidentally, nicely describes Davenport’s customary artistic strategy (in essays, stories, poems and paintings). We might call his a unifying imagination. He doesn’t fall for the modern temptation to see chaos everywhere – nor does Justice. Davenport juxtaposes disparate objects, words and images, and finds in them a humble, reassuring, sometimes poignant balance. Sensibilities like Davenport’s and Justice’s don’t settle for lazy, passive nihilism. Here’s how Justice closes his essay:

 

“[C]onnections, if any, remain unstated, likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the aesthetic blush.”

'Everyone Believes He or She Could Write a Book'

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and editors, and presumably readers, find interesting and important? Taste is notoriously transient. Most of it is rooted in fashion and peer pressure, what other folks like.

The July 14, 1956, issue of The Saturday Review, published seventy years ago, opens with the “Trade Winds” column of Bennett Cerf (1898-1971). As a kid, I knew him as a panelist on the quiz show What’s My Line? Later I learned he was cofounder of Random House, publisher of the Modern Library I relied on for my education. Cerf published Faulkner, John O’Hara and Whitaker Chambers’ Witness. We can blame him for publishing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Cerf’s column is feeble stuff: 

“Hard-pressed publishers have come up with a lucrative and relatively new gimmick in recent months: histories of great corporations, financed by the corporations themselves. The publishers usually supply the author, edit the text, and make a token distribution in bookstores after publication; the corporation buys between five and fifty thousand copies at a stipulated price, thus assuring the publisher a profit before he begins. . . There is nothing wrong with business of this sort—provided the public is let in on the essential details.”

 

Well, yes – and no. Next up is “The Literary Life at Seventy-Five” by a name new to me, William McFee (1881-1966), a prolific writer of sea stories. Judging by his article, McFee was a cultivated man with a sense of humor. He makes observations similar to those I have made:

 

“Writers are not highly regarded in America. I know this sounds odd, but it is true. Everyone uses a pen, and everyone believes he or she could write a book if there were only time. Recently I heard the expression, ‘I could write a book about that place.’ Another person, after reading a book about his own profession, said he could write a better book. The point is, each assumed as a matter of course he could write a book, but he would never claim to be able to carve a statue or compose music or paint a picture or design a building. Even if they do not offer to write a book they have a plot for a novel, which they present to a writer, free.”

 

Of all the book reviewers I recognize the names of William Peden, Edmund Fuller, Paul Arthur Schilpp and Meyer Levin. Of the writers under review, even fewer names. A pleasant surprise is the byline of Whitney Balliett, who would soon become a staff writer and jazz critic for The New Yorker. His piece is titled “Billie, Big Bill, and Jelly Roll” – that is, Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy and Jelly Roll Morton, all of whom had recently had their autobiographies published. Balliett is honest and never patronizing:

 

“Three quite different, though complementary, autobiographies have recently been published here and in England, and taken together, they provide an invaluable reflection of the Negro jazz musician. All three books are products of collaboration and as a result they vary as much in quality as content.”

 

Of the three, I remember Morton’s book being the most interesting. He was a raconteur, a one-time pimp, a storyteller and a brilliant composer. He had died sick and broke in 1941. Balliett’s verdict: “Morton gave the American Dream an awful pummeling before it cut him down.”

'Nothing So Much as Mincing Poetry'

While reading the history plays again I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember having encountered before. I love these choice little discoveries. My only disappointment is that such words are virtually unusable. They would be gibberish to most people, whether in writing or speech, and would end up sounding pretentious and incoherent. Here’s a passage from Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 3, Scene 1), in which Hotspur is complaining about Owen Glendower’s bloviation: 

“Sometime he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.”

 

Translation: “He talks too much.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary identifies skimble-skamble as an adjective meaning “wandering; wild,” but dismisses it as “cant.” The OED says it’s an adjective, noun and adverb and defines it in the first case as “confused, incoherent, nonsensical, rubbishy.” In other words, a highly useful word, with many applications, that won’t be used. The OED cites later uses by Lord Byron, John Ruskin and John Motley in The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Moldwarp, by the way, refers to Talpa europaea, the European mole. In the same act, Hotspur reacts to Glendower boasting that he “gave the tongue a helpful ornament,” while making fun of “mincing poetry”:

 

“I had rather be a kitten and cry ‘mew’

Than one of these same meter balladmongers.

I had rather hear a brazen can’stick turned,

Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,

And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,

Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.”

'Small But Real Pleasure to His Readers'

An amusing coda to Saturday’s post on major and minor writers: "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class in due course. By ‘minor’ I mean something like third-tier–not third-rate, now. What characterizes a third-rate writer is that he can’t write. Not that I would object to being a third-rater myself; many third-raters become fabulously rich, and in any case there’s something to be said for a man who can make millions by doing something he’s no good at.”

 

The writer is Barton Swaim, a columnist and book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. I recommend his book The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (2015), which manages to make contemporary American politics interesting. The passage quoted above is from Swaim’s “Literary Minority," a column published in 2009 in the Washington Examiner. Call Swaim a comic realist:

 

“The minor writer never gets rich, never achieves anything more than momentary fame, and nobody would call his works important. He has admirers, and he may write a highly regarded book now and again, but he is destined to be remembered, if at all, in the footnotes of monographs nobody reads.”

 

Unless your last name is Proust, to set out to achieve the status of “major writer” is a mug’s game, a delusion of Norman Mailer-esque proporations. In today’s literary culture, it’s a stone-cold impossibility. In Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013), Joseph Epstein writes to his friend Frederic Raphael praising the stories of the wonderful Francis Wyndham, an English writer hardly well-known, especially in the U.S.:

 

“Wyndham is, I suspect by deliberation, a minor writer. He wrote well, but was modest in his ambition, not very productive, content to give small but real pleasure to his readers – and, I assume, to himself. Nothing wrong with any of this. To give pleasure is a fine thing, n’est-ce pas? Some of the writers dearest to me – Max Beerbohm, Sydney Smith – are minor writers.”

'Their Worlds Are Closest to Ours'

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discusses “the difference between a major and a minor writer—which is not necessarily the difference between better and worse.” This theme preoccupies me. Recently I encountered yet another reviewer who dismisses the author in question as “minor,” which clearly he intends as a qualitative judgment meaning dull and just plain lousy. The designation comes off as snotty and critically lazy.

Auden clarifies things: “We can forget the bad writers. The minor artist, who can be idiosyncratic, keeps to one thing, does it well, and keeps on doing it—Thomas Campion, for example, A.E. Housman, and in music, Claude Debussy.” 

American literature seems especially rich in excellent minor poets (Yvor Winters, Henri Coulette, Turner Cassity, Kay Ryan), in part because we have so few major poets (Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot). As to classical music composers from any country, think of Erik Satie and Aaron Copland. Auden resumes:

 

“There are minor writers who can mean more to us than any major writer, because their worlds are closest to ours. Great books can be hard to read—in a sense, boring to read. Whom do I read with the utmost pleasure? Not Dante, to my mind the greatest of poets, but Ronald Firbank. The minor writer never risks failure [dubious]. When he discovers his particular style and vision, his artistic history is over [also dubious].”

 

Among the first-rate minor writers are Colette, Max Beerbohm, Walter de la Mare, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, J.V. Cunningham, Peter Taylor, Guy Davenport.  

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]