'Evidence on Which a Life Depends'

I always find consolation in T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante” that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Put aside for the moment what it means to “understand” a poem. Too often reading poetry is mistaken for a branch of cryptography. Take Geoffrey Hill, dead at age eighty-four in 2016. I think of the last decades of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first centuries as the Age of Hill, poetically speaking. For density of sheer linguistic matter and quantity of business going on word by word, line by line, few poets rival Hill. His later work can be baffling to casual readers, but with patience and a touch of faith the beauty of his best work becomes evident. Take “The Peacock at Alderton,” collected in A Treatise of Civil Power (2007):

“Nothing to tell why I cannot write

in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this

latter acknowledgement: the self that counts

words to a line, accountable survivor

pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,

less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel

to Prospero’s own knowledge. In my room

a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt

to describe them, as if for evidence

on which a life depends. Except for the eyes

they are threadbare: the threads hanging

from some luminate tough weed in February.

But those eyes – like a Greek letter,

omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;

like a shaved cross-section of living tissue,

the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,

the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,

the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.

The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine

at the garden end, in blustery twilight

his fulgent cloak stark as a warlock’s cape,

the maharajah-bird that scavenges

close by the stone-troughed, stone terraced, stone-ensurfed

Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.” 

For the moment, no code to crack. Savor the sound: “some laminate tough weed in February,” “omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl,” “his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,” “stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed.” Language worthy of the peacock’s enchanting gaudiness. Shades of Hopkins, who wrote his own, rather more conventional peacock poem, “The Peacock’s Eye:

 

“Mark you how the peacock’s eye

Winks away its ring of green,

Barter’d for an azure dye,

And the piece that’s like a bean,

The pupil, plays its liquid jet

To win a look of violet.”

 

One more poem from the same volume, “In Memoriam: Aleksander Wat”:

 

“O my brother, you have been well taken,

and by the writing hand most probably:

on photographs it looks to be the left,

the unlucky one. Do nothing to revive me.

 

“Surrealism prescient of the real;

The unendurable to be assigned

No further, voice or no voice; funérailles,

Songs of reft joy upon another planet.”

 

Hill adds Wat (1900-67) to his roll call of poetic heroes, joining Milton and Ben Jonson (“my god,” Hill calls the latter). Wat was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets. Late in life, visiting California, he recorded lengthy conversations with his countryman and fellow poet, Czesław Miłosz. The transcripts were translated into English by Richard Lourie and published in 1988 as My Century. To my taste, Wat is a middling poet, a “futurist,” but his oral memoir is an essential document from the bloodiest century in history. Hill has resurrected Wat before. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), he writes:

 

“Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat.”

 

To quote another authority among Hill’s enthusiasms, here are the final sentences of Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) or, to cite the full title, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; Showing That it Is Not Lawful For Any Power on Earth to Compel in Matters of Religion:

 

“Pomp and ostentation of reading is admired among the vulgar, but doubtless, in matters of religion, he is learnedest who is plainest. The brevity I use, not exceeding a small manual, will not therefore, I suppose, be thought the less considerable, unless with them, perhaps, who think that great books only can determine great matters. I rather choose the common rule, not to make much ado where less may serve, which in controversies, and those especially of religion, would make them less tedious, and by consequence read oftener by many more, and with more benefit.”

'You Are Never Out of Business'

“I prefer reading books—those I should have read when younger, those that might awaken me to things I should have known long ago—and rereading those I failed to read carefully enough the first time round.”

I hear in Joseph Epstein’s bookish declaration an echo of Logan Pearsall Smith’s well-known admission: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Non-readers, a growing constituency, are likely baffled by such thoughts. Books for them are associated with tedium, snobbery and coerced classroom assignments. Who can blame them for not wanting to read To Kill a Mockingbird?  I have no grand theories about reading and not reading. I don’t know how to explain such divergent sensibilities – though lousy teachers have something to do with it -- nor do I wish to harangue others into reading Tristram Shandy. I came from a family of non-readers. Nothing human ought to surprise us.

 

Epstein will turn eighty-nine on Friday, January 9. His recent essay in The Free Press is titled “I Want to Die with a Book in my Hands.” I’m seventy-three and share the sentiment. Epstein has often noted his fondness for aphoristic writing, prose that is pithy, dense with thought, often equipped with a barb. Here he is on reading at an advanced age after a lifetime of reading:

 

“My sense is that one reads differently in old age than when younger. For one thing, some writers who once seemed vital, central, indispensable, no longer seem so. For another, with one’s time before departing the planet limited, one tends to have less patience. Then, too, after a lifetime of living, one’s experience has widened; and with any luck it has also deepened, and so one has a different perspective on the things one reads or has read, often holding them to a higher standard.”

 

I can endorse all of that. Like Epstein, I have read Proust’s masterpiece twice and am contemplating a third reading. Why take on its 1.2 million words yet again? I read Remembrance of Things Past the first time at age eighteen, one summer while managing a miniature golf course. The afternoons were quiet and I could read, nearly uninterrupted, in the clubhouse. When a revised edition in three volumes was published a decade later, I read it again. No one remembers every authorial move even in a short story. What I retain from Proust’s 3,200 pages is a general outline, a sort of novelistic road map of the narrative’s plan, plus isolated incidents and a recollection of occasional intense pleasure. I seem to have lost little or nothing of my attention span – a plague in portions of the population. Also, like Epstein, I’m inclined to reread books “I failed to read carefully enough the first time round,” as he puts it. It’s a cliché to say I’m not the man I was at eighteen or thirty. In a very real sense, I’ll be reading the novel for the first time.

Vladimir Nabokov speaks for me and perhaps for Epstein: “To be a real reader, you have to reread a book. The first time, the book is new. It may be strange. Actually, it is only the second reading that matters.” And the third.

 

Like Epstein, vast categories of books remain No Man’s Land for this reader – contemporary fiction, most politics, mysteries and thrillers of any vintage, science fiction, self-help, celebrity memoirs, etc. Such reading is one more symptom of our age’s pervasive presentism. The present, after all, is a provincial backwater. As Epstein puts it:

 

“Fortunately, one can live quite well on the literary culture of the past. I find myself rereading, among others, George Eliot and Willa Cather, Shakespeare and Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal. A nice thing about the reading life is you are never out of business.”

 

Happy birthday, Joe.

'To Find Joy in the Everyday, in Life Itself'

“Everyday life is miraculous because it subjects the violent impulses to itself. The Essays of Montaigne are the revelation of the miracle of ordinary life.”

 

Much mischief is the product of dissatisfaction, of men and women looking for purpose, novelty or distraction in life and deciding they have not found it. Only extremity, an impulsive grab after an illusion, seems like an appropriate response to so imperfect a world. We’re spoiled. It’s always easier to complain and rebel than to give thanks for what we already have. The writer quoted above, sounding very much like Michael Oakeshott, is Ann Hartle, a Montaigne scholar teaching at Emory University, in her essay “Montaigne’s Radical Conservatism.” I have never encountered a utopian delusion in all of Montaigne’s thought. In an early essay not cited by Hartle, “Of a Saying of Caesar’s,” he writes:

 

“Everything, no matter what it is, that falls within our knowledge and enjoyment, we find unsatisfactory; and we go gaping after things to come and unknown, inasmuch as things present do not satiate us. Not, in my opinion, that they do not have the wherewithal to satiate us, but that we seize them with a sick and disordered grasp.”

 

And here is Hartle’s gloss on such thinking:

 

“Generosity is openness to human diversity and trust in the goodness of ordinary men. The conservative possesses and enjoys the good that is society. That is, he enjoys what we already have. One of the most delightful features of the Essays is the way in which Montaigne is always astonished at the familiar, ordinary, and common things. The most common human actions are miracles to him. This is the hallmark of the conservative character: to find joy in the everyday, in life itself.”

 

The spirit of such conservatism, which Oakeshott would identify as a “disposition” rather than a set of political provisions, has grown rare. In his Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014), Oakeshott writes:

 

“We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'To Settle Upon Its Most Inspired Bit'

John Updike’s finest work of fiction, the short story “The Happiest I’ve Been,” was published in The New Yorker on this date, January 3, in 1959. I started reading Updike in the mid-sixties, following most of his work, including his novels, until his death in 2009. Today, I value him most as a poet, critic and short-story writer. Of his novels, which sustained his reputation during his lifetime, I might reread the first, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), which he later acknowledged was written as a sort of response to Henry Green’s Concluding (1948). 

Updike was twenty-five when he wrote “The Happiest I’ve Been,” later collected in The Same Door. The Updike-like narrator, John Nordham, is nineteen years old, on the cusp of scary, sobering adulthood. Describing a New Year's Eve party among friends from high school, in a small Pennsylvania town in 1952, he says: “I had the impression then that people only drank to stop being unhappy, and I nearly always felt at least fairly happy” an observation that would come to characterize Updike throughout his life. Regardless of your understanding of his work, Updike remained a consistently happy man, not given to fashionable despair.

 

Of all Updike’s stories, this is my favorite, the most emotionally powerful, mingling memory, comedy, sadness and his peerless eye for American detail. It’s the best rendering I know of the retrospective character of happiness, our dawning awareness of it after it passes. For most of us, happiness is a momentary state, not perpetual. As Nordholm drives west across Pennsylvania, in the company of his friend Neil Hovey, he tells us he will never see again after they arrive in Chicago. Read the story’s conclusion with its title in mind:

 

"There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a vast trip: many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility -- you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element -- and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state -- as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me."

 

In the January 6, 1973 issue of The Saturday Review, Vladimir Nabokov published a brief essay, “Inspiration.” In it he mentions the glut of fiction anthologies shipped to him by publishers eager for the master’s blessing in the form of a fulsome blurb. Naturally, most of the fiction was dreck but, Nabokov says, “almost in each of them there are at least two or three first-rate stories.” He took to grading stories (“an A, or a C, or a D-minus”), much as he had the term papers of Cornell undergrads:

 

“Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage -- or one of the passages – in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.”

 

Of “The Happiest I’ve Been,” Nabokov writes:

 

“‘The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.’ I like so many of Updike’s stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”

'I Wish I Knew More About . . .'

I once worked with a middle-aged man who, when quantum physics came up in a story I was writing, showed me a video clip from a super-hero movie that was intended to demonstrate his mastery of the subject. I had to be careful. He was my boss and was histrionically touchy about anything that might challenge his knowledge of the world. Externally, I nodded my head and expressed my gratitude for his generosity in sharing his research into post-Max Planck developments in quantum theory. I couldn’t muster any anger, just a little irritation for wasting my time. Internally, I felt sorry for the son of a bitch. Poverty of imagination is sadly dispiriting. What must it feel like to be so ignorant and not suspect it? 

My metaphor for life has always been a school. I’m alive in order to know things, with the understanding that I will never know everything I wish to know. My teachers are both some of the people I have encountered in real life (foremost among them, a literature teacher in college and Guy Davenport) and their precursors in the past, via books. In “A Lament for the Printed Word” in the January issue of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple writes:

 

“We are made for endeavour of one kind or another, and since the struggle for raw existence is in effect over, we are obliged to find the most meaningful endeavour we can. Instinctively, I feel that the pursuit of knowledge and understanding for its own sake is about as meaningful an endeavour as can be found.”

 

As usual, Dalrymple covers a lot of ground in a brief space. The essay begins with a sad acknowledgment of the growing tide of aliteracy. “Even students who have elected to study literature at university,” he writes, “so one hears, are unable to read a long novel, or find it onerous to do so, even the requirement to do so being a cause for complaint.” Then comes an even sadder acknowledgement, that erudition is “fleeting,” The most erudite people he has known are dead. “Where is their learning now?” he asks, and gets to the point:

 

“One has a natural tendency to suppose that one’s own tastes are best: that, for example, a taste for reading is morally and intellectually virtuous, in a way that most other activities are not. Is this mere snobbery, or does it have some basis in reality?”

 

Good questions, ones I’ve often asked myself. Am I as deluded as my former boss? Perhaps, which is not sufficient reason to stop reading and take up super-hero movies. Dalrymple continues:

 

“Even if it does not have such a basis, it is too late for me to change my now ingrained tastes. One of my few regrets on leaving this world will be that I have not read all that I would like to have read. Notwithstanding the decline of reading, and the lowering of academic standards, I still find, when I visit a good bookshop, that there is much, too much, being written that I wish I had time to read. I wish I knew more about marsupials, Barbary pirates, the philosophy of Spinoza, the history of Sicily, Japanese art, and so forth; and if I now know much more than I did when I was born, I shall still die infinitely ignorant.”

 

Serious readers will understand. He reminds me of a passage in the essay William Maxwell wrote, “Nearing 90,” as a very old man:

 

“Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke. One might as well be –.”

'My Mind Was Not Free From Perturbation'

Dr. Johnson writes in his diary on January 1, 1774: “This year has past with so little improvement, that I doubt whether I have not [rather] impaired than encreased my Learning.” 

It’s customary, of course, to make resolutions this time of year -- to lose weight or stop drinking or swearing. Such resolutions assuage our guilt and postpone doing anything about it. It's yet another stratagem to deceive ourselves and feel good about it. Johnson offers a list of conventional resolutions – “to read the Gospels before Easter,” “to rise at eight,” “to be temperate in Food” – but there’s no mention of a resolution “encreas[ing] his Learning.”

  

At age sixty-four Johnson had already published his Dictionary, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays, Rasselas and A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. He was among the most learned men of his age, despite poverty, illness and the absence of a university degree. He even dabbled in chemistry. Johnson advised Susannah Thrale in a letter that because “all truth is valuable" she should take advantage of “all opportunities of knowledge that offer themselves,” including looking through a telescope and if visiting “a chymist’s laboratory; if you see a manufactorer at work, remark his operations.”

 

Johnson makes no grandiose resolutions. “To this omission some external causes have contributed,” he writes. “In the Winter I was distressed by a cough, in the Summer an Inflammation fell upon my useful eye from which it has not yet, I fear, recovered. In the Autumn I took a journey to the Hebrides, but my mind was not free from perturbation. Yet the chief cause of my deficiency has been a life immethodical, and unsettled, which breaks all purposes, confounds and suppresses memory, and perhaps leaves too much leisure to imagination.” Johnson’s familiar lament – overcoming a propensity for sloth and idleness, utterly at odds with his actual accomplishments.

 

Anthony Hecht associated Johnson with W.H. Auden.  In “Paralipomena to The Hidden Law” (Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry, 2003), he notes Auden’s “remarkable resemblance” to Johnson. Both writers had poor eyesight and held cleanliness in “utter disregard.” Both favored, in the words of Johnson biographer W. Jackson Bate, “the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.”

 

Quoting Bate again, Hecht says Auden and Johnson shared a “lifelong conviction – against which another part of him was forever afterwards to protest – that indolence is an open invitation to mental distress and even disintegration, and that to pull ourselves together, through the force of attention and the discipline of work, is within our power.” The poets shared a belief that “effort in daily habits – such as rising early – was necessary to ‘reclaim imagination’ and keep it on an even keel.” In the vernacular, both were workaholics, least unhappy when most engaged in work. We know from experience that concentrated work, mental or physical, is a tonic and relaxant, and idleness is corrosive of well-being.

 

Hecht notes that both Johnson and Auden were largely indifferent to their surroundings. “In addition, Bate wrote, Johnson ‘was able to distinguish between “loving” and “being loved” and to value the first without demanding equal payment through the latter,’ while Auden wrote, ‘If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.’” Continuing with Bate’s observations, Hecht writes: “Both men were determined, if at all possible, ‘to be pleased’ with their circumstances and with their fellow human beings, as a reproval of their own ‘impatience and quickness to irritability or despair.’” Johnson and Auden maintained, in Bate’s words, that “the ‘main of life’ consists of `little things’; that happiness or misery is to be found in the accumulation of ‘petty’ and ‘domestic’ details, not in ‘large’ ambitions, which are inevitably self-defeating and turn to ashes in the mouth. ‘Sands make the mountain,’ [Johnson] would quote from Edward Young.”

 

Both were courteous and respectful of others – rare qualities among artists of all types. Again quoting Bate, Hecht writes: “Both firmly believed that fortitude ‘is not to be found primarily in meeting rare and great occasions. And this was true not only of fortitude but of all the other virtues, including “good nature.” The real test is what we do in our daily life, and happiness – such happiness as exists – lies primarily in what we can do with the daily texture of our lives.’” Both, in short, were thoroughgoing gentlemen of the middle class, religiously observant, and believed in regular habits even as they failed to live up to them. Near the conclusion of his “New Year Letter” (1940), Auden notes the folly of confusing good intentions with real change:

 

“But wishes are not horses, this

Annus is not mirabilis;

Day breaks upon the world we know

Of war and wastefulness and woe;

Ashamed civilians come to grief

In brotherhoods without belief,

Whose good intentions cannot cure

The actual evils they endure,

Nor smooth their practical career,

Nor bring the far horizon near.”

'To Have Something to Say'

“It might be too much to say that no one who cannot write prose should be allowed to write verse, but certainly no one should be admitted to any of those myriad courses which purport to teach the writing of verse, until he has read at least one book each of Swift and Defoe and can write a page which is not too utterly disgraceful by their standards.”

When writing prose, the supreme virtue is most often clarity, a quality embodied in the writings of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). Apprentice writers still learning the trade can challenge themselves to write as precisely and plainly as these masters. Begin with this assumption: I want you to understand something. I don’t want to confuse you, nor do I want to be misunderstood. Too many words, too few words, poorly chosen words – all can result in a chaos of sense. As Swift put its “A Letter to a Young Clergyman,” written in 1719: “Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.” Once the basics are incorporated, you can write as eloquently as you wish. Think of the first step as erecting a scaffolding of sense, so individual style can then flourish. Consider this from the sermon “On Brotherly Love” preached by Swift in 1717:  

 

“I shall mention but one ill consequence more, which attends our want of brotherly love; that it hath put an end to all hospitality and friendship, all good correspondence and commerce between mankind. There are indeed such things as leagues and confederacies among those of the same party; but surely God never intended that men should be so limited in the choice of their friends: However, so it is in town and country, in every parish and street; the pastor is divided from his flock, the father from his son, and the house often divided against itself. Men’s very natures are soured, and their passions inflamed, when they meet in party clubs, and spend their time in nothing else but railing at the opposite side; thus every man alive among us is encompassed with a million of enemies of his own country, among which his oldest acquaintance and friends, and kindred themselves, are often of the number; neither can people of different parties mix together without constraint, suspicion, or jealousy, watching every word they speak, for fear of giving offence, or else falling into rudeness and reproaches, and so leaving themselves open to the malice and corruption of informers, who were never more numerous or expert in their trade.”

 

Swift might be describing our own fractious time. That final sentence is 112 words long, punctuated twice by semi-colons and beautifully organized for sense. It ought to leave no one confused, no one uncertain of its meaning.

 

Defoe is best known, of course, for Robinson Crusoe (1719) and perhaps for A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Moll Flanders (1722). These are brilliant, entertaining proto-novels but Defoe was also a prolific polemicist who seemed adept at taking on almost any subject, for which he paid a price. He was pilloried and served time in prison for seditious libel.  Here is a passage from a pamphlet, “A Vindication of the Press,” published in 1718:

 

“First, it may be Objected that the numerous Writings tend more to confound the Reader, than to inform him; to this I answer, that it is impossible there can be many Writings produced, but there must be some valuable Informations communicated, easy to be Collected by a judicious Reader; tho’ there may be a great deal superfluous, and notwithstanding it is a considerable Charge to purchase a useful Library, (the greatest Grievance) yet we had better be at that Expence, than to have no Books publish’d, and consequently no Discoveries; the same Reason may be given where Books in the Law, Physick, &c. are imperfect in some Part, and tend to the misleading Persons; for of two Evils the old Maxim is, always chuse the least. The only Objection that I do not take upon me to Defend, is, that against Lewd and obscene Poetry in general; (for sometimes the very great Wit may make it excuseable) which in my Opinion will admit of but a slender Apology in its Defence.”

 

Like Swift, Defoe composes lengthy sentences, stitched together with many commas and semi-colons, that never drift into incoherence. The spelling and some of the syntax are dated but the pamphleteer’s sense is clear.

 

The passage at the top is taken from C.H. Sisson’s essay “Poetry and Sincerity.” As a deft master of poetry and prose, his observations are steeled with experience and common sense. He writes:

 

“The first necessity is to have something to say, but even this will be present only as an impending cloud, and to assert its necessity is to make an ex post facto analysis. The moment announces itself by words conveying a rhythm or, it may be, by a rhythm conveying a few words.”

 

[Sisson’s “Poetry and Sincerity” was published in the Times Literary Supplement on September 12, 1980, and collected in Anglican Essays (1983), In Two Minds (1990) and A C.H. Sisson Reader (2014).]