'Superintending What He Cannot Regulate'

In my family we can’t get away from the “Y” chromosome. Having children is known as “going to the Y.” I have three sons, no daughters, and my brother, who died last summer, was my sole sibling. My mother had five brothers, no sisters. My father, two brothers, no sisters, etc. Little girls and by extension, women, remain mysteries to me, even more so than they are to most men. I envy my friends with daughters, though I’m not complaining. My sons are healthy, smart, seldom boring, often funny and have never been arrested. 

Today is Michael’s twenty-fifth birthday. He is my middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, a cyber officer stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He is a walking balance of left and right brain. His interests include mathematics, etymology, history, rock climbing and literature. We can keep up with most of each other’s conversations. About Michael I have few worries and no regrets. Talking with other parents, I know how fortunate I am.

 

Dr. Johnson had no children of his own but was devoted to his stepdaughter, Lucy Porter, the daughter of Johnson’s wife, Elizabeth Jervis Porter Johnson (1689-1752), known as Tetty. Lucy was born in 1715, six years after Johnson, lived in Lichfield with his mother and served in her shop. She died in 1786, two years after her stepfather. Johnson had always assumed a fond, fatherly role with Lucy, who became one of his most frequent correspondents. For this most stoical of men, the death of loved ones was always shattering. In his 1974 biography of Johnson, John Wain notes his emotional state after his mother’s death in January 1759:

 

“His letters to Lucy Porter are pitiful; he leans on her, begs for her help and comfort, asks that she shall stay on in the house and let the little business go on as it can, and is content to leave all the details to her and take her word for everything. ‘You will forgive me if I am not yet so composed as to give any directions about anything. But you are wiser and better than I and I shall be pleased with all that you shall do.’”

 

Lucy was his close contemporary, a mature woman, which is not the same as raising a child from birth. The love is real but less blood-deep. Johnson suggests this in his Rambler essay from November 13, 1750:

 

"It may be doubted, whether the pleasure of seeing children ripening into strength be not overbalanced by the pain of seeing some fall in the blossom, and others blasted in their growth; some shaken down by storms, some tainted with cankers, and some shriveled in the shade; and whether he that extends his care beyond himself does not multiply his anxieties more than his pleasures, and weary himself to no purpose, by superintending what he cannot regulate."

 

Johnson intuitively understood a parent’s vulnerabilities and limits. Michael has never fallen, been blasted, shaken, tainted or shriveled. Still, one worries, quietly.

'The Fun Which Is Ebullient All Over Yours'

A pun is best delivered without announcing itself as a pun. Those ungifted at wordplay tend to underline, boldface and italicize their every attempt at a pun, most of which are already feeble. Thus, the pun’s bad reputation and the ensuing groans. In contrast I love a good, subtle, almost anonymous pun, which ought to detonate like a boobie-trap. The resulting intellectual burst of recognition is pure satisfaction. English is amenable to punning because our language is forever gravid, draws from so many sources and tends to be overrun with synonyms and homonyms. The OED defines pun precisely and without a nod to the comic: 

“The use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words.”

 

But of a specific kind. Charles Lamb tended to take a shotgun approach to punning, assuming at least one of the pellets will hit its target. Take this passage he wrote in a letter replying to one from his friend John Bates Dibdin on June 30, 1826:

 

“Am I to answer all this? why ’tis as long as those to the Ephesians and Galatians put together—I have counted the words for curiosity. But then Paul has nothing like the fun which is ebullient all over yours. I don’t remember a good thing (good like yours) from the 1st Romans to the last of the Hebrews. I remember but one Pun in all the Evangely, and that was made by his and our master: Thou art Peter (that is Doctor Rock) and upon this rock will I build &c.; which sanctifies Punning with me against all gainsayers. I never knew an enemy to puns, who was not an ill-natured man.”

 

Lamb’s bilingual pun is based on Matthew 16:18: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It was a favorite of another master-pungent, James Joyce.

'The Ledge Itself Invents the Leap'

Good hearts try to talk us out of phobias. After all, people are naïve about the powers of rationalism: “Explain it, and it goes away.” As a kid I fell for that, almost literally, when I tried to muscle my way with sheer will power past the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland, formerly the second-tallest building in North America. It was the only time in my life when I fainted -- only briefly, but a friend caught me and pushed me into a doorway. With age I’ve added to tall buildings a cluster of new but related irrational fears – large open spaces (indoors or out), being a passenger in a speeding vehicle, escalators. All have in common a spatial component, the feeling of a free-form fall into space. I have a recurrent dream of being suspended upside-down by a rope hanging from a horizontal flagpole at the top of a skyscraper. Jonathan Swift had similar terrors and scholars have retrospectively diagnosed him with Meniere's disease. 

No doubt talk therapy and/or pharmaceuticals could ease the distress, but it’s a little late for that. Besides, I’ve crafted a lifetime of avoiding certain situations and venues. I just don’t go there anymore and the loss is minimal. Perhaps this is why I feel safe and confident with words – no danger of dropping into the abyss, metaphysical or otherwise.

 

A.E. Stallings has a poem, “Fear of Happiness” (This Afterlife: Selected Poems, 2022), that nicely diagnoses my condition:

 

“Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:

As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator

I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,

Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,

Though someone always said I’d be all right—

Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad

(The nothing rising underfoot). Then later

The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,

Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,

The merest thought of airplanes. You can call

It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;

But it isn’t the unfathomable fall

That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,

It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.”

 

I can imagine simply standing by an open window in one of those obscenely tall buildings in Dubai and I get shaky. Hold it, and I sweat. The power of imagination.

'The Seminal Crime of the 20th Century'

Some years ago I happened on an account of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination that read like a coroner’s report. The author described in minute medical detail what happened after John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger – the blood, bone fragments, tissue damage in the president’s brain. I had known since I was a kid the events leading to his death that night in Ford’s Theater, but this second-by-second forensic narrative still shocked me. I felt I was learning of the murder for the first time, as though my earlier knowledge were little more than a sketchy impression, a rumor. 

Robert D. Kaplan is a rare writer who makes international relations and geopolitics interesting. He writes tight, intelligent prose that is never gassy or dull. His approach to world affairs is shrewd, unapologetically pessimistic and carefully documented but at the same time literary. The first chapter of his latest book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (Random House, 2025), is devoted to the doomed Weimar Republic, and Kaplan begins with a look at two novels – Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (1939) and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). As his thesis develops, he adopts various literary figures as guides, scaffolding to structure his story, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Much of the material is familiar to me but when he describes, in a single paragraph, the murder of the czar and his family by the Bolsheviks early on the morning of July 17, 1918, I felt as though I were encountering those events for the first time:

 

“The seminal crime of the 20^th century, which given the various regimes to come in Russia, carried over with its second- and third-order effects into the 21^st century, was the murder of Nicholas II’s family, including all the children, in July 1918 in Ekaterinburg, probably ordered by Lenin himself. If you could deliberately kill children at point-blank range with guns and bayonets, well then, you could kill millions.”

 

Dead were Czar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children: Olga, 22; Tatiana, 21; Maria, 19; Anastasia, 17; and Alexei, 13. Murdered with them were court physician Eugene Botkin, lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova, footman Alexei Trupp and chief cook Ivan Kharitonov. The bodies were transported to the Koptyaki forest, stripped of their clothing, mutilated with grenades and acid to prevent identification, and buried.

 

Kaplan is no sentimental defender of the czar and his dynasty. “Czar Nicholas II,” he writes, “was stupid, indecisive, and self-destructive. He had no judgment. But as much as Nicholas retreated into a reactionary past—even as Russian society was experiencing the painful birth pangs of modernization—there could simply be no Russia without the monarchy. Alas, Nicholas was understandably hated as much as his family was necessary: this is the signal tragedy that Solzhenitsyn captures in these novels.”

 

The slaughter of the Romanovs was “seminal” because as a group and often as individuals, the Bolsheviks were and are serial killers, even of children. The roll call: Holodomor, Great Purge and millions of others dead, most of them anonymous, many of them children, and the killing goes on. 

 

[Watch a video of Anatol Shmelev, the Robert Conquest Curator for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, recounting the murder of the Romanovs.]

'Susceptible to Education'

I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class neighborhood who had “gone to college,” as the common phrase had it. In my experience, that status was confined to doctors and teachers. My father was a high-school dropout. Higher education seemed like a gift reserved for the anointed, whether by wealth or genius. Naturally this inspired a strain of suspicion and resentment.

After high school, I applied, without assistance, to two universities – Harvard and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. My naiveté was stunning. The state school accepted me and after three years I dropped out. It was probably my generation that first came to believe everyone should go to college. I no longer think that’s the case, especially because a university degree no longer signifies a true education. I’ve known too many degree-holding alliterates and even border-line illiterates. Robert Conquest chooses his words carefully in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999): “Not all young, or old, people are susceptible to education.”

Conquest’s analysis of education is interesting. His formal schooling at Oxford was excellent and he became a gifted historian, poet, novelist and all-around man of letters – a rare breed today. He bolsters his argument with allusions to Edward Gibbon and Marcus Aurelius. Some young people are, Conquest writes, “more or less uneducable. Others have had a good education by the time they are eighteen, or even younger, but have neither the desire nor the bent for ‘higher’ education.” This confirms my observation that some of the brightest, most well-read people I’ve known are degreeless.

“For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all," Conquest writes, "as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds -- except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.”

It’s always a pleasure to meet and talk with an autodidact, a self-directed learner, as opposed to a formally educated pedant or drone. Often the former is motivated by love of learning; the latter by status, money, fashion, indifference. Of the amateur class, Conquest writes:

“No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.”

'The Neglected By-ways'

Thomas Parker is a longtime reader and frequent commenter on this blog. On Monday’s post he recalled a passage he thought may have been the work of George Saintsbury. Unable to track it down for attribution, he quoted from uncertain memory: “Nothing pains me more than the contempt with which people treat second-rate writers -- as if there were room in life for only the first-rate.” 

Dave Lull tells me the writer in question may have been not Saintsbury but a comparably situated critic in French literature, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who has little standing in literary circles today, at least in the English-speaking world. Dave identified this sentence, though not the source, as Saint-Beuve’s: “Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.”

 

Clive James devotes a chapter to Saint-Beuve in Cultural Amnesia (2007). Dave quotes James, in part: “The student should be slow to join in the denigration. Sainte-Beuve really was the greatest literary critic of his time, even though he sometimes gave too much praise to mediocrity, and not enough to genius.” I would distinguish “second-rate” status from “mediocrity,” though James continues: “Sainte-Beuve certainly had a gift for slighting the gifted while rabbiting on endlessly in praise of mediocrities.”

 

No writer is minor while we are paying attention to his work, enjoying it, admiring it, sharing it with other readers. Every serious reader agrees that Swift and Tolstoy are major writers – “first-rate” – whom we are obligated to read if we wish to be fully literate. That’s easy. But what about their contemporaries; say, Matthew Prior and Nikolai Leskov? Who would wish to miss the latter’s novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”? “Second-rate” is better than “thirteenth-rate,” and even thirteenth may be worth pursuing.

 

In her life of Siegfried Sassoon, Journey from the Trenches, Jean Moorcroft Wilson says Sassoon shared with his friend Edmund Blunden an interest in “the neglected by-ways, a taste which reflected their literary interests as a whole. Though both had a proper respect for the major writers of the past, it was the minor figures who intrigued them.”

 

“Minor,” I suspect, is not a qualitative term, precisely. It ought to be used carefully, with discretion and due respect. After all there’s a class of writers judged unimportant by the usual standards, by the usual people – minor (such a patronizing word), un-engagé, witty rather than weighty, blithely indifferent to literary fashion and significance. The English seem to specialize in this species. Think of Sydney Smith, Walter Savage Landor, Maurice Baring, Saki, Walter de la Mare, Lord Berners and Henry “Chips” Channon. The unlikely alpha male of the bunch, the major English minor writer is, of course, Max Beerbohm. Among his friends was another, the New Jersey-born British essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith, a writer whose resistance to pigeon-holing and portentousness defines him. All of these writers are entertaining, sometimes even wise. I would read any of them before I would the latest, much-heralded tour de force.

'The Kitchen Perpetually Crowded with Savages'

Jonathan Swift often stayed at Quilca, the country home of his friend the Rev. Thomas Sheridan (1687-1738) in County Cavan, Ireland. There he wrote portions of Gulliver’s Travels. Not surprisingly, Swift was an inspired kvetcher. There’s a long tradition of English writers complaining about accommodations. Think of Smollett, Carlyle and Waugh. Three-hundred years ago today, Swift wrote a letter to Sheridan containing three poems inspired by his stays at Quilca. Here is “The Plagues of a Country Life”: 

“A companion with news,

A great want of shoes;

Eat lean meat, or choose;

A church without pews.

Our horses astray,

No straw, oats or hay;

December in May,

Our boys run away,

All servants at play.”

 

By Swiftian standards, pretty mild. No scatological substrate. In the body of the letter he writes: “The ladies room smokes; the rain drops from the skies into the kitchen; our servants eat and drink like the devil, and pray for rain, which entertains them at cards and sleep; which are much lighter than spades, sledges and crows.” Another traditional complaint -- the laziness and unreliability of servants. He might also be describing the poverty typical of rural Ireland in the eighteenth century. Swift says the “maxim” of the servants is:

 

“Eat like a Turk,

Sleep like a dormouse;

Be last at work,

At victuals foremost.”

 

Swift worked hard to feel gratitude for rural, in “The Blessings of a Country Life”:

 

“Far from our debtors,

No Dublin letters,

Not seen by our betters.”

 

One year earlier, Swift has written a brief prose piece titled “The Blunders, Deficiencies, Distresses,and Misfortunes of Quilca.” It’s a list of complaints. I especially like this one: “The kitchen perpetually crowded with savages.”