'Merely the joy of writing'

A rare and winning combination: a serious person who seldom takes himself seriously. He keeps his ego a little off to the side, muffled, away from the business at hand. It never disappears. It grows dormant, like some cases of tuberculosis. Jules Renard is such a man and writer, an aphorist and wit with the soul of a peasant. Often, he thinks like a farmer – practical, focused, unsentimental – while writing like a satirist. Here is Renard in his Journal, bargaining with fate on October 17, 1899: “Of all that we write, posterity will retain a page, at best. I would prefer to choose the page myself.” 

Renard writing as a commonsensical critic, September 6, 1902: “A great poet need only employ the traditional forms. We can leave it to lesser poets to worry themselves with making reckless gestures.”

 

More writerly common sense, November 27, 1895: “Keep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no excuse for boring people.”

 

A lesson for “cancel culture, August 1896: “We always confound the man and the artist, merely because chance has brought them together in the same body. La Fontaine wrote immoral letters to his womenfolk, which does not prevent us from admiring him. It is quite simple: Verlaine had the genius of a god, and the soul of a pig. Those who were close to him must have suffered. It was their own fault! – they made the mistake of being there.”

 

Renard sounding like the premise of a story by Maupassant, September 29, 1897: “Some men give the impression of having married solely to prevent their wives from marrying other men.”

 

On why some of us become writers, May 9, 1898: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.”

 

Renard was born on this date, February 22, in 1864 and died of arteriosclerosis in 1910 at age forty-six. With Montaigne and Proust, he is the French writer I most rely on.

 

[All quoted passages are from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Even Belles Lettres Legitimate As Prayer'

In the “Prologue” to his 1962 prose collection The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden borrows a conceit from Lewis Carroll and divides all writers – “except the supreme masters who transcend all systems of classification” – into Alices and Mabels. In Alice in Wonderland, the title character, pondering her identity, says “. . . I’m sure I can’t be Mabel for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little. Beside she’s she and I’m I.” The categorization recalls Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Foxes and Hedgehogs. Of course, all of humanity can also be divided into those who divide all of humanity into two categories and those who don’t. 

Leading the list of Auden’s Alices is Montaigne, followed by the names of eight other writers, including Andrew Marvell, Jane Austen and Paul Valéry. Like Alice, Montaigne knew “all sorts of things” – he is among the most learned of writers -- even while asking “Que sais-je?”: “What do I know?” Montaigne begins his longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1576), with these words:

 

“In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and that all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.”

 

Montaigne distills skepticism, which isn’t the same as nihilism or know-it-all-ism. It’s closer to the absence of naiveté, credulity and mental laziness, coupled with an open mind and curiosity. Montaigne was a benign skeptic and a Roman Catholic who lived through the French Wars of Religion. Auden wrote “Montaigne” in 1940, the year France fell to the Germans.

 

“Outside his library window he could see

A gentle landscape terrified of grammar,

Cities where lisping was compulsory,

And provinces where it was death to stammer.

 

“The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took

This donnish undersexed conservative

To start a revolution and to give

The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.

 

“When devils drive the reasonable wild,

They strip their adult century so bare,

Love must be re-grown from the sensual child,

 

‘To doubt becomes a way of definition,

Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer,

And laziness a movement of contrition.”

 

“Death to stammer” is no exaggeration. In the sixteenth century, speech defects were often equated with possession by the devil. The final stanza is a writer’s credo. Auden was born on this day in 1907. He shares a birthday with my youngest son, David, who turns twenty-two today.  

 

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

'Poetry Is an Art'

Most bores are not aware they are boring. It’s not always their fault and the impulse to tell them they are boring, though understandable, is almost always a waste of time. You can’t make people interesting who value their humorlessness, bad taste and stridency. 

I woke the other morning internally singing these words, perhaps left over from a dream: ‘’I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright.” I still thrill at these lines, some fifty years after I first encountered them in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). They are the opening to Henry Vaughan’s “The World” (c. 1650). It’s the casualness of “the other night” coupled with Vaughan’s glimpse of eternity that rouses and delights me. Mystics often resort to inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language, so they yawp, the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be recounting this morning’s breakfast. His tone is calm, methodical, almost journalistic, the meter regular and yet conversational.

 

These are lessons lost on most contemporary poets. Their verse is prose and thus defies memorization, unlike Vaughan’s, whose poem I never set out to memorize but did. In a recent review of a volume by Jonathan Chaves, the poet Catharine Savage Brosman writes:

 

“To say that poetry in America now, though honored by public budgetary support and widely heralded, is largely superficial and ephemeral is not unfair. . . . Like other rhetorical performances, a poetic flash in the pan, a pleasing act of verbal prestidigitation, a strident accusation of injustice, a cry on the rooftops for change may attract admiration and assent; they are not in themselves good poetry. Poetry is an art.”

 

To intentionally write badly and impose it on others is the definition of artistic narcissism and, incidentally, tedium. Many have convinced themselves they are writing poetry. Trying to argue them out of their delusion is a waste of time. The effort would require them to rehabilitate their sensibilities, and that’s a lot of work. They want the leftover Romantic “prestige” associated with being a poet without the learning, discipline and dedication required. Brosman again:

 

“Nearly empty of sense, solipsistic, without appealing use of language, much contemporary writing called poetry is imitative, facile, accusatory. Of course, bad poetry has always been around. But new means of disseminating it, wealth to underwrite and popularize it, and the general degradation of culture have made a difference.”

 

In another recent essay, “Poetry and Western Civilization,” Brosman writes: “Poetry belongs to those enterprises which examine and preserve the past, while sifting and shaping facts to create understanding, so that human beings may know themselves and comprehend their destiny better.”

'This, Books Can Do . . .'

At age ten I attended the grand opening of the new public library in Parma Heights, Ohio, within easy walking distance of our house. Next door was Yorktown Lanes, the bowling alley dedicated two years earlier. Across the road was the municipal swimming pool where my mother had been giving swimming lessons since 1957, and next to it was the miniature golf course (“putt-putt”) that I would manage for three summers beginning in 1970. Nearby were the municipal tennis courts. This concentration of recreation today strikes me as remarkable. No wonder my generation was spoiled rotten. 

Now the city is demolishing the old library and building a new one nearby, where the ice rink and indoor soccer field once stood. Some good-natured dissenters have protested the razing but top-down progress is tough to reverse. The old library’s design is notably ugly. We knew that even in 1963, but it was the “Space Age” and the building was said to resemble a flying saucer. Inside, none of the rooms were quadrilaterals. All were shaped roughly like slices of pie. At the center were the circulation desk and shelves of periodicals. That’s where I first read Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American.

 

Within the next few years I would, without guidance or much of a critical sense, discover literature in that library. I borrowed Kafka’s The Castle, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, Tom Disch’s Camp Concentration, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Steve Allen’s The Funny Men, T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950, Kipling’s Kim and Fletcher Pratt’s The Civil War. I permit myself to get nostalgic about those self-guided literary explorations. They started a way of life that remains in place today. I still wander among library shelves, trusting in intuition. The old building was tacky and is probably better off knocked down and hauled away. Of course, most contemporary architecture is a scandal and I have little trust in the aesthetic qualities of the new library. The unfairly forgotten George Crabbe writes in The Library (1781):

 

“But what strange art, what magic can dispose

The troubled mind to change its native woes?

Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see

Others more wretched, more undone than we?

This, Books can do; — nor this alone; they give

New views to life, and teach us how to live;

They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,

Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:

Their aid they yield to all: they never shun

The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone:

Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud,

They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;

Nor tell to various people various things,

But show to subjects, what they show to kings.”

 

The tone is elevated and the iambic pentameter a little plodding but Crabbe is on to something: “Their aid they yield to all . . .”

'A State of Vagary, Doubt and Indecision'

There’s a tidy part of me that wants things resolved, whether a lawsuit or a differential equation. No sloppy inconsistencies, no denouements hanging by a thread. I used to love IRS Form 1040EZ: subtract one number from another, sign your name and wait for the refund. I had a logic professor who told us, “Don’t confuse philosophy with real life.” Adam Zagajewski concludes his poem “An Ode to Plurality” with these words: “a poem grows / on contradiction but it can’t cover it.” That may be true for poems, but humans are infinitely more complicated. Some of us can thrive on the tension; others are paralyzed or broken. 

A reader asks for my thoughts on Keats’ notion of “negativity capability.” I’ve often thought his renowned letter to his brothers on December 21, 1817 expresses less a literary theory than a reflection on his sensibility and perhaps ours:

 

“[I]t struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

 

The passage is customarily read as embracing poetic openness and rejecting closed systems of thought. The writer, in a sense, is all potential, at least while writing. He projects himself into the sensibilities of others. His imagination is sympathetic. He is not theory-driven. Not for him the “egotistic sublime.”

 

Keats suggests we keep our minds elastic and limber. Don’t assume the first thought or the twenty-seventh is best, though it may be. In his 1978 essay “Spare Time,” V.S. Pritchett refers in passing to negative capability. For a writer, any thought or experience, any book read, may come in handy, even those we’ve forgotten. “A writer,” says Pritchett, “must have the capacity to become passive and lost in doubt in order to be open to new suggestions. He must alternate between clocking in and clocking out.” In his final paragraph, Pritchett writes:

 

“I find that reading Russian novelists, mainly of the nineteenth century, is good for my ‘negative capability’ – a state, incidentally, that means a state of vagary, doubt and indecision as well as self-annulment.”

 

I think of Louise MacNeice’s “Snow,” its reminder that “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.” The poem suggests we accept “The drunkenness of things being various.”

'Illumination of the Past'

Despite the repellant spectacle of Allen Ginsburg, poetry as a career is not a guarantee of fame and fortune. One of our finest recent poets, Herbert Morris, is forgotten and was hardly remembered even during his life. He published six collections between 1978 and 2000 and died at age seventy-three in 2001. Only now have I stumbled on a review by J.P. White of Morris’ fourth book, Dream Palace, published in the December 1986 issue of Poetry. I wouldn’t discover Morris for another fourteen years when his final book, What Was Lost, was published. He favored dramatic or interior monologues. White begins his review by suggesting an interesting possible lineage for Morris’ blank verse: 

“Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy took its motto from Epictetus: ‘It is not action, but opinions about actions, which disturb men’; and so began the first novel to interpret the invisible life of the mind. Herbert Morris -- an unusually gifted master of the inner monologue -- works in a tradition created more by novelists like Sterne, James, Proust, Joyce, and Herman Broch.”

 

The distinctive quality of Morris’ poetry is difficult to convey in brief quotations. He’s not an aphorist, not conventionally “quotable” because most of his poems are densely woven monologues. As White writes, “The long, talky lines capture the shifting, disjointed flow of the free-associating mind as it works over memory.” This is from “House of Words” (What Was Lost) in which the speaker is an aging Henry James,  delivering a nineteen-page, 657-line monologue:

 

“I, finder of refuge, maker of refuge,

in words. Whose life, indeed, was spun of words,

spun and respun, spun once more, then respun,

a life which has itself become a refuge

(words, in a world bordered by blood, on one side,

by the tumult of passion on the other);

the thinness, yes, the thinness of one’s life:

what has one built if not a house of words?”

 

White refers to Morris’ “memory narratives of the finest order keenly imagined and confidently played out.” His recurrent theme is memory, whether of the historical or personal past. He often writes about old photographs and their power to evoke memories. Morris imaginatively reanimates them, probing their meaning. White writes:

 

“Morris’s illumination of the past acquires the accent of prophecy, and his fluid style, which often takes twenty to thirty lines to complete a thought, is especially drawn to moments frozen in time through photographs. These static frames permit him to inhabit the inner imaginative life of outward appearance.”

 

Memories are frequently heartbreaking. In his eleven-page “Boardwalk” (Dream Palace), Morris searches an old photograph of his family, focusing on his doomed brother’s shoes, looking for clues: “. . . the way he holds himself may have to do / with having come to learn—how can I say this?-- / what it will be to die, and to die young.” White writes: “Memory connects split moments and the accretion of nuances, and it’s the only tool that provides insight into the spiritual reality waiting to be transformed within us.”

 

Morris' poems recall Dr. Johnson writing in the February 17, 1759 edition of The Idler:

 

“He remembers many calamities incurred by folly, many opportunities lost by negligence. The shades of the dead rise up before him; and he laments the companions of his youth, the partners of his amusements, the assistants of his labours, whom the hand of death has snatched away.”

'There Is Still So Much I Do Not Know'

I have encountered the neologism “egowriting” used to describe -- with approval -- such genres as memoirs, diaries, journals, letters, blog posts, commonplace books, notebooks and essays--almost anything. In other words, a broad collection of forms in which the author and his self are often the focus. It’s a cloyingly repellant name and a complicated literary category that might even be stretched to include some forms of fiction and poetry. 

I have an ambiguous relationship with the first-person singular. When I started Anecdotal Evidence nineteen years ago, I intended it to be more like literary criticism but soon discovered I’m not a critic nor does most criticism interest me. Thus, the motto: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” My model more closely resembled the classic English essay, à la Hazlitt, Lamb and Beerbohm, a mingling of the bookish and the familiar. Books are life for a dedicated reader, or at least a big chunk of it, not a segregated category. I have no interest in John Berryman-like confession, the minutia of self-display. Often, I still feel a tingle of uncertainty when I deploy an “I,” and sometimes while revising prune them away.    

 

Lately, I have come to look forward to the essays of Peter Hitchens in The Lamp magazine. He does what I strive to do. His latest is “All Shall Wax Old,” subtitled “On the Past.” He begins with a Chestertonian premise: sorting old clothes. He recalls an anecdote from his schoolboy days and then the task of sorting his father’s possessions after his death:

 

“There is still so much I do not know, which is why I urge everyone to get to know their parents while they can, and to ask, without restraint, about their lives. As it is, I came out of a mystery, and in this life I will never solve it.”

 

One memory unfolds into another. None is lingered over self-regardingly. He reflects on his relationships with his own children. Hitchens’ touch is serious but light. There’s no self-flagellation or self-aggrandizement, no wallowing in guilt or self-congratulation:

 

“How do you recover when you have failed to set a good example, or set a bad one? How much attention was I paying during those crucial times? Who wants power over others? Not I. The only power worth having in the world is the power to stop those others from interfering too much in your life.”

 

Hear, hear. In the U.S., the most important of rights is not included in our precious Bill of Rights. It is, of course, the right to be left alone, not to be controlled or manipulated. Hitchens cites a novel by Michael Frayn I have not read and concludes his essay – which began with sorting old clothes – like this: “Heavens, how sad it is to contemplate all those days of mighty trivia. If I think about it too much, I can hardly breathe.”

 

Starting with the mundane, Hitchens finishes gracefully with the profound.