'From the Front Line'

My review of Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin (New York Review Books, 2026) is published in the Fall issue of Portico.

'A Very Wild Extravagant Dream'

In his Spectator essay for January 15, 1712, Joseph Addison tells us he spent the day with friends, “an Assembly of Virtuosos,” one of whom describes “many curious Observations” regarding human anatomy. The conversation inspires in Addison “a very wild Extravagant Dream” in which he witnesses the dissection of a “Beau’s Head” and a “Coquet’s Heart.” Addison is writing in deep satirical mode, so you might anticipate where this is going.

A “Beau” in the eighteenth century, according to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, signified “a man of dress; a man whose great care is to deck his person.” We might say fop, dandy or clothes horse. For “coquette,” Johnson gives “a gay, airy girl; a girl who endeavours to attract notice.” Both are types still with us, of course.

Most of the essay concerns the Beau and a detailed and fanciful catalogue of his brain and its parts:

“There was a large Cavity on each side of the Head, which I must not omit. That on the right Side was filled with Fictions, Flatteries, and Falshoods, Vows, Promises, and Protestations; that on the left with Oaths and Imprecations. There issued out a Duct from each of these Cells, which ran into the Root of the Tongue, where both joined together, and passed forward in one common Duct to the Tip of it. We discovered several little Roads or Canals running from the Ear into the Brain, and took particular care to trace them out through their several Passages. One of them extended itself to a Bundle of Sonnets and little musical Instruments. Others ended in several Bladders which were filled either with Wind or Froth. But the latter Canal entered into a great Cavity of the Skull, from whence there went another Canal into the Tongue. This great Cavity was filled with a kind of Spongy Substance, which the French Anatomists call Galimatias, and the English, Nonsense.”

Johnson’s definition of gallimatias, from the French: “nonsense; talk without meaning.” Addison stresses the conventional humanity of the Beau, his averageness. He was no oddity or freak:

“As for the Skull, the Face, and indeed the whole outward Shape and Figure of the Head, we could not discover any Difference from what we observe in the Heads of other Men. We were informed, that the Person to whom this Head belonged, had passed for a Man above five and thirty Years; during which time he Eat and Drank like other People, dressed well, talked loud, laught frequently, and on particular Occasions had acquitted himself tolerably at a Ball or an Assembly; to which one of the Company added, that a certain Knot of Ladies took him for a Wit. He was cut off in the Flower of his Age by the Blow of a Paring-Shovel, having been surprized by an eminent Citizen, as he was tendring some Civilities to his Wife.”

If taken a little too seriously by a modern reader, Addison’s schtick is grotesque and probably offensive, but he’s no Swift whose savagery is often muted by a rational, reasonable, deadpan tone. He doesn't go that far. Both are two of the reasons I love the eighteenth century. Go here to read the sequel, Addison’s account of dissecting the Coquet’s heart.

'Art Is Slow and Long'

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser. Her review opens with an oddly contemporary-sounding observation: 

“Last year Archibald MacLeish resorted to scaring people over the radio, with air-raid noises and human screams in order to waken the population to ‘Fascist’ dangers.”

 

Sound familiar? If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been called a “fascist” . . . The word is rivalled only by “racist” when it comes to tediously meaningless slurs. Bogan describes MacLeish’s collection as “the history of the American people sold out by ‘the Aristocracy of politic selfishness,'” whatever that means. Talk about unpromising poetic material. Bogan gets to the point: “This poem is Mr. MacLeish’s saddest and most conglomerate attempt at ‘public speech’ to date.” Still, Bogan works to be fair:

 

“Bury his gifts though he may, Mr. MacLeish is a private, a lyric, poet through and through; it is somewhat of a loss that he did not allow himself to remain one. Evil conditions need a satirist to pin them down and flay them clean. Official poets are seldom satirists. A pity.”

 

Bogan describes Rukeyser, a poet who has never given me ten seconds of pleasure, as “interested in the state of society to the almost complete exclusion of any conscious ‘personal expression.’” After rereading Rukeyser’s book, Bogan says, “the suspicion arises that Miss Rukeyser is deficient in a sense of human life” – a not uncommon deficit among “activists.” “The day of chaste and noble proletarian myths should be about over,” Bogan writes “It has been recently proved that there is something hideously oversimplified in crude oppositions and blind idealism.” She concludes her review with a paragraph that recalls W.H. Auden and his near-contemporary condemnation of “a low dishonest decade”:

 

“The decade which outlawed from poetry personal emotion, individual insight, and straight looks into the flawed human heart now closes. It has been a queer time. And, from all current signs, patriotism and ‘public speech’ have still a long course to run. Art is slow and long, but there’s nothing brisker and more vocal than politics.”

 

[Bogan’s review can be found in her Selected Criticism (Noonday Press, 1955).]

'What Little Would Bear Keeping'

It was probably the first wildflower I learned to identify. (It always seemed important to know the names of things.) It grew, never densely, in the fields behind the house. It was taller than most grasses and weeds, spindly, with an oversized umbel (from the Latin umbella for “parasol”) that connects the numerous small white flowers to the stem, like the spokes of an umbrella. Another common name is wild carrot. Its scientific name is Daucus carota. We knew this intuitively because the plant smelled like carrots. The stems were tough, making the flowers difficult to pick. Queen Anne’s lace, though elegant, is not colorful or in any way exotic. It makes a nice emblem for rugged, homespun beauty. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem, “Portrait by a Neighbor,” which concludes: 

“Her lawn looks like a meadow,

   And if she mows the place

She leaves the clover standing

   And the Queen Anne’s lace!”

 

At The Sonneteer, Boris Dralyuk has published “Night in September,” dedicated to Millay, a sort of answer poem:

 

“A stem extends a frothy glass

    toward my face.

I recognize the brew at once

    as Queen Anne’s lace,

the pretty weed your neighbor moaned

    and groaned about—

the garden wild, the lawn unmowed.

    Here your words sprout

to mind with each belated blossom,

    dust-born rose;

beauty, you felt, was fierce, colossal

    at summer’s close—

when your mind turned to harvesting, to reaping

and laying by what little would bear keeping.”

 

Boris adds “Steepletop / Austerlitz, New York.” That’s the house Millay purchased in 1925. She lived there until her death in 1950. It’s in upstate New York, near the Massachusetts line. The setting and house are beautiful. I visited several times when living in the Capital District.

 

Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) was an Ohio-born artist who painted “Queen Anne’s Lace” in 1946. He wrote: “I never tire of drawing these exquisite flowers. From bud to full bloom, to its final closing into the cup-shaped seed baskets, the flower takes on infinitely varying shapes. Each year I find something new.”

 

I don’t remember another writer noticing the “cup-shaped seed baskets” of the Queen Anne’s lace at summer's end. They survive into winter and some remain at the top of stems even the following summer beside the next growth of blooms. Burchfield doesn’t mention the “tiny purple blemish” at the center of the flower, as observed by William Carlos Williams, but he does include it in the painting.

'They Were Just, and Clear'

“Style means the necessary word. The rest matters little.” 

I sometimes conduct an informal test on a piece of prose that either pleases me or somehow stylistically offends me. In either case, how does the writer achieve his effect? What can I learn from the successful sample? What would I change in the failed passage, if anything, that might improve it? Like many reader-writers, I’m an editor of other people's words.

 

John Ruskin tells us in his eccentric and beautifully written autobiography Praeterita (1885) that when he was a boy his father required him to pack four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s periodical essays in his baggage whenever the family traveled. Instead of complaining, Ruskin approves of the paternal stricture. He writes of Johnson:

 

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms.”

 

I wouldn’t change a thing, and not simply because I agree with Ruskin’s assessment. He identifies Johnson’s customary clarity. I can’t recall a single passage of purple prose in Johnson’s work. That’s not always the case with Ruskin, especially the earlier work, but here every word is in its proper place and “necessary,” to use the criterion mentioned at the top. His final sentence, in a move decidedly Johnsonian, broadens the observation to much of humanity. We all wish to see our precious opinions substantiated, truth be damned.

 

I recently reread Thomas Macaulay’s 1831 review of John Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Macaulay famously concluded it was “immoral” that so great a book should be authored by such “a great fool.” His judgment of Johnson’s prose is comparably misguided and, incidentally, overwritten:

 

“His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.”

 

Is it possible to be mistaken in one’s conclusions while still writing well? Of course. Macaulay is wrong on both counts. His prose becomes a parody of the charges he levies against Johnson. It might be stylistically improved by breaking the one long sentence into several shorter ones. “Big words wasted on little things” is embarrassing in this context.

 

[The passage quoted at the top is from a journal entry Jules Renard made on September 5, 1893. See his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Art Is Distinction: Process Is Not Being'

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.” 

Adagia are maxims, proverbs, the root of our current word, adage. It entered English from the Latin in the sixteenth century. In one of his pamphlets, Milton refers to “quips and snapping adagies.” Erasmus published the first edition of his Adagia in 1500. It contained some eight-hundred sayings. Later editions totaled more than 4,100 entries. Charles Gullans (1929-93) titled one of his poems, collected in Letter from Los Angeles (John Daniel and Co., 1990), “Adagia”:

 

"Stolid and literal, I take my stand.

Art is decision, not the chance, unplanned

Performance of a trivial vulgar act.

It is selection of the crucial fact.

Though brute particulars still litter sense,

Art’s the suppression of irrelevance.

Life is the constant pressure of the new,

But art, the final judgment of the true,

Measures resistance to inane distraction.

Art is the model of coherent action.

It is not my confusion or confession,

It’s not a gossip’s tale concerning me:

It is the meaning of my history.

It is constructed and can be construed

As proposition and as attitude.

Then art is structure: nothing can be said

Without the order in which it is read.

Art is technique, by which the masters say

That ends are realized in a métier.

Art is distinction: process is not being.

The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”

 

Gullans was composing an apologia for his practice of poetry. Some readers will recognize the spirit of Yvor Winters, with whom Gullans studied at Stanford. There are obvious swipes at so-called “Confessional” poetry and sloppy, sentimental free verse in general. In a 1954 letter to Gullans, Winters wrote:

 

“There are two views of the principles which I have taught you kids: (1) they are correct, in which case they are not my property but are universals and are in the public domain, for anybody to use who has the talent to use them; (2) they are wrong, in which case it is up to you to work out something better.”

 

Gullans dedicated his first collection, Arrivals & Departures (University of Minnesota Press, 1962) to Winters (“magister ludi”). The Bright Universe and Other Poems (Abattoir Editions, 1983) includes “In Memoriam: A.Y.W.,” dedicated to Winters’ widow, Janet Lewis:

 

“It is a smaller island now,

my Captain, that all sheets are set

to the constant gale that takes you,

bending like the pages of a book.

 

“Farewell, old Voyager, farewell

ever, aye, as your taut ship skims

the swift, dark torrent, ceaselessly

driven by your hard argument

 

“onwards through foam, to continents

unmapped, wherever shelved and shoaled,

whatever reefs guard the smooth, blue

passages to land, if rudder,

 

“sextant, star, and compass be true.”

 

Winters died in 1968. His given name was Arthur Yvor Winters. Go here to read eulogies for Gullans after his death, including those by friends and fellow poets R.L. Barth, Turner Cassity and Timothy Steele.

 

[The quoted letter can be found in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]

'Robinson Crusoe Is a Gentleman'

“This day proving wet, we should have passed our time very uncomfortably, had we not found in the house two chests of books, which we eagerly ransacked.” 

Some time in the mid-sixties I was home alone on a rainy day. It was a summer afternoon. Self-conscious adolescent boredom was nagging me. I didn’t want to watch television. What would have been on? Game shows? Soap operas? I looked at the bookcase in my room, uncertain what to read or even if I wanted to read. For some reason I chose Robinson Crusoe, which I had already read at least once. I laid on my bed and read most of Defoe’s novel that afternoon. Even at the time I was surprised that the story sustained me, that it so thoroughly held my attention and enabled me to forget my boredom. It remains among the books I have most often read.

 

Dr. Johnson famously said: “Was there ever any thing written by mere men that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” (The opposite of what he said of Paradise Lost: “None ever wished it longer.”)

 

The enduring appeal of Defoe’s masterpiece, first published in 1719, is rooted in a common fantasy: If I were marooned on a desert island, how would I survive and what sort of world would I create? You can see how this would appeal to a bored adolescent. Robinson Crusoe remains essentially an excellent adventure story for boys and girls of any age. Like an earlier hero, Odysseus, Crusoe is cunning, courageous and resourceful – the image of ourselves we entertain in reveries. He is also frightened and despairing – precisely our true selves, at least on occasion. I most admire Crusoe’s competence and self-reliance. He gets things done. The best gloss on the story I know comes from an unlikely source – Shirley Robin Letwin’s The Gentleman in Trollope (1982):

 

“What defines a gentleman is a way of being in any circumstances. Even alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe is a gentleman. He reveals a gentleman’s attitude to his plight in his unfailing respect for the humanity of himself and all men; his ability to appreciate the treasures of civilization; his efforts to refashion them for new circumstance; his readiness to build new skills on old; his learning to recognize and repent for his sins; his determination to give his days an orderly shape, to reconcile himself to his misfortune and endow his life with what grace and contentment he can manage.”

 

The passage quoted at the top is taken from the September 3, 1773 entry in James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).

'My Taste Is Rather Boringly Conventional'

Readers often ask interesting questions. One wrote on Tuesday to say he enjoyed the “great variety” of writers and books I write about at Anecdotal Evidence. “I don’t see a consistent theme or genre or even a nationality,” he says. “Nothing you would choose to blog about would surprise me.” That’s reassuring. I like variety and don’t like to repeat myself too often. Then he asks questions I’ve never asked myself: “How would you define your taste? What do all the books and writers you like have in common?” My immediate, honest, unrehearsed answer: You got me. 

I’ve never looked for a grand unifying theory of anything. (One of the reasons I’ve lost most of my earlier interest in Coleridge.)  I have a tolerance for inconsistency in writers and humans in general, but I also have prejudices that I can’t defend critically. I try to avoid bald-face snobbery, though it creeps in. And these prejudices have changed over time, which seems to me a natural progression. Taste, like other aspects of maturity, evolves. Once I liked science fiction. Now I don’t. Once I loved Thomas Pynchon’s novels. Now I don’t. That doesn’t imply that I think readers of sci-fi or Gravity’s Rainbow are cretins. What I’m describing is growing up. Human personality is dynamic and protean. It’s always changing yet remaining identifiably the same – us.

 

If I had to give a one-sentence definition of my taste in literature, I would say it has to be well-written. I understand how nebulous and subjective a quality that is. I don’t like sloppy indifference to style. Neither do I like the flowery stuff, style as mere gingerbread. My idea of a great stylist in prose is Max Beerbohm. In poetry, J.V. Cunningham. Two utterly different sorts of writers.

 

Joseph Epstein published the essay “Such Good Taste” in the Spring 1993 issue of The American Scholar and collected it in With My Trousers Rolled (1995). As usual, Epstein is sensible and often speaks for me:

 

“That one’s taste is best revealed by one’s enthusiasms seems very intelligent, too, except that I am not at all sure I can define my taste by my own enthusiasms. I not only have a fairly strong inconsistency, in my view a happy inconsistency, of taste--I am one of those people who can watch a professional football game in the afternoon and then go off to a chamber music concert in the evening--but in so many realms my taste is rather boringly conventional.”

 

My bent exactly, except I detest sports. (See what I mean?) I suggest my reader seek out Epstein’s essay. Yes, he speaks for me except when he doesn’t. Humor is notoriously personal. Don Rickles cracks me up, leaves me helpless and tear-stained. Not so for many others. As you would expect, Epstein is good on humor:

 

“Nor does my taste always seem coherent. Take humor. I find Henny Youngman very funny. But I also love Max Beerbohm, who, among other knockout remarks, once, considering Freud, said: 'They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses.' W. C. Fields can also do the job for me. I am not above caving in at slapstick: a Buster Keaton walk into a wall, say, or an Oliver Hardy fall through a floor. But then I also think Henry James a very funny man.”