'Personal Affections'

Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like that. In common with most snobberies, it seems arbitrary and silly. 

Much of my education started with the poetry anthologies edited by Oscar Williams (1899-1964). With a few exceptions – Shakespeare, Whitman, Kipling, et al. -- that’s where I first encountered the English-language poets, major and minor. I specifically remember reading Karl Shapiro’s “Scyros” in one of Williams’ collections while standing in James Books on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio. I bought the Washington Square Press paperback.    

 

Good anthologies are literary smorgasbords, an opportunity to sample many writers and develop taste. How else is a young reader to make up his mind, learn the tradition and sharpen his critical judgments?  He’ll encounter plenty of dreck, of course, but that’s inevitable. Bad poetry helps us identify and appreciate the good stuff.

 

T.S. Eliot devoted much of “What Is Minor Poetry?”, published in The Sewanee Review in 1946, to the subject of anthologies. The essay is collected in Vol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946 in the eight-volume Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (2021). I’ve been reacquainting myself with Eliot’s work, poetry and prose. He was an early and influential favorite, and is more than merely “democratic” when it comes to anthologies. He is clever and insightful and perhaps remembers his own early experience with them:

 

“The value of anthologies in introducing us to the work of the greatest poets, is soon over; and we do not go on reading anthologies for the selections from these poets, though they have to be there. The anthology also helps us to find out, whether there are not some lesser poets of whose work we should like to know more—poets who do not figure so conspicuously in any history of literature, who may not have influenced the course of literature, poets whose work is not necessary for any abstract scheme of literary education, but who may have a strong personal appeal to certain readers.”

 

The subsequent passage sounds deeply personal: “Indeed, I should be inclined to doubt the genuineness of the love of poetry of any reader who did not have one or more of these personal affections for the work of some poet of no great historical importance: I should suspect that the person who only liked the poets whom the history books agree to be the most important, was probably no more than a conscientious student, bringing very little of himself to his appreciations.”

 

I find Eliot’s sentiments here rather touching, and they come close to describing the evolution of a lifelong devotion to literature. I’m tempted to name some of the “minor” poets whom I often read again, though I’m afraid that might come off as condescending.

'Gleams Like a Warm Homestead Light'

Here is epigram 1.33 by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 38-102 A.D.), better known in English as Martial: 

“In private she mourns not the late-lamented;

If someone’s by, her tears leap forth on call.

Sorrow, my dear, is not so easily rented.

They are true tears that without witness fall.”

 

Martial’s epigrams read like a cross between a syllogism and one of La Rochefoucauld’s maximes. Like the latter, it packs a psychological or ethical punch. The essence of an epigram is brevity and torsion, like a spring tightly wound. Martial’s translator here from the Latin is J.V. Cunningham, himself a master epigrammist. Here is his version of 4.69:

 

“You serve the best wines always, my dear sir,

And yet they say your wines are not so good.

They say you are four times a widower.

They say . . . A drink? I don’t believe I would.”

 

In his edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1997), Timothy Steele includes nine of Martial’s epigrams translated by Cunningham. I returned to them while reading The Classics in Paraphrase: Ezra Pound and Modern Translators of Latin Poetry (1988) by the classicist Daniel M. Hooley. Despite more pages devoted to Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Hooley praises Cunningham’s versions of Martial as “nearly literal, minor perfections,” and adds:

 

“His original verse is conventional in all the old ways; regularity of meters and rhyme enjoy unusual modern prominence as do clarity and precision of diction. Paradox, ambiguity, symbol, and the rest do not wend their difficult way and conflicting courses through this verse. To the reader of modern verse weary of the struggle for orientation and certainty, Cunningham’s poetry gleams like a warm homestead light in a black Montana nightscape, visible for miles and welcome.”

 

Hooley notes that distinguishing the “disquieting differences” between reading Martial and reading Cunningham “may lead to interesting conclusions.” He cites what may be Martial’s best-known epigram, 1.32, as rendered by Cunningham:

 

“Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why?

Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

 

Hooley contrasts it with the more familiar version produced in the seventeenth century by Tom Brown about John Fell, dean at Christ Church, Oxford:

 

“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,

The reason why – I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”

 

Hooley writes: “Does Cunningham succeed in a way Brown cannot . . . In spite of the crude bluntness, one’s answer may be affirmative. For one thing, Cunningham’s  is demonstrably closer to a ‘translation’ than an ‘imitation’ (to revive for the moment that generally useless distinction). . . . Cunningham is very near Martial in several ways. His terse phrases mimic the compression of the Latin and allow him to keep to the single couplet . . . Cunningham’s rhymed pentameter couplet, weightier in effect than Brown’s easy tetrameter, is an appropriate analogue to the elegiac couplet.”

 

Epigram is from the Greek epigramma, “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something -- rare qualities in poetry today. In 2011, the late poet Helen Pinkerton, a friend of Cunningham’s and mine, and a fellow protégé of Yvor Winters, wrote to me:

 

“Epigrams are very hard to write well. Cunningham did so, because, I think, he worked so hard at it and wrote a great number. For many poets they are only a sideline. Also, as he notes somewhere, brevity was characteristic of his temperament and style from the beginning. No epics for him. I praised his work once to him when he was visiting us in Palo Alto and he responded quite self-deprecatingly that he hadn't written anything long or ‘major’ or words to that effect. Some critics (I can't recall who just now) have made an argument that his ‘To What Strangers What Welcome’ should be regarded as a unified sequence somewhat equivalent to a single poem. I find that hard to do. He really loved the Renaissance epigrammatists, More, George Buchanan, and John Owen, besides the Romans, and learned from them.” 

'An Ill-Assorted Collection'

A friend has broken up with her boyfriend and he is launching protracted salvos of nasty emails in her direction. As prose they are better than average. There have been no threats of violence and little profanity. The ex’s weapon of choice is a detailed critique of every aspect of her existence. We’ve all been dumped. It can be bruising but you get over it. This guy is performing an ongoing explication de texte not of a book but a human being. He has even taught me a new word: kludge. 

The OED describes it as “an arbitrary formation” and “jocular invention.” That is, it was coined by a specific person -- Jackson W. Granholm, an engineer with Boeing and General America Corp., in an article titled “How to Design a Kludge” in the February 1962 issue of Datamation. In Granholm’s words, quoted by the Dictionary, kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole” The OED adds, “especially in Computing, a machine, system, or program that has been improvised or ‘bodged’ together; a hastily improvised and poorly thought-out solution to a fault or ‘bug’.”

 

The Dictionary gives six citations, all from computing or electronics publications. It seems related to such phrases as “jury-rigged” or “jerry-built” – in other words, improvised, and probably badly. It’s a comically ugly word I would like to see a writer of light verse work into a poem. Think of the rhyming opportunities – budge, fudge, judge, nudge, sludge, smudge, trudge. And remember Dr. Johnson’s definition of lexicographer: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

[ADDENDUM, 10-13:

An old friend rises to the occasion:

"There once was a dandy named Fudge

Whose groin was an unsightly kludge.

'Is it really so foul?'

Asked his girl with a scowl,

So he undressed and said, 'you be the judge.'"]

'It Bubbles and Chuckles Along'

“Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.” 

A truth I had been waiting to hear for much of my life. Willful obscurity (which is not the same as complexity) is favored by writers contemptuous of readers. Avant-gardistes often fancy themselves superior to people who merely like reading books. The sentence above and the slender volume in which I found it -- On Philosophical Style (1954) – were my introduction to the American philosopher Brand Blanshard (1892-1987), which in turn introduced me to Dave Lull, who is more deeply read in Blanshard’s work.

 

In the July 4, 1953 issue of The Saturday Review, Blanshard wrote about H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, originally published in 1926. His review begins:

 

“The story is told that a friend of an old lady who was known as a great reader gave her a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary. Meeting her later, he asked what she thought of it. ‘Very instructive indeed,’ said she, ‘but I did seem to notice a trifling want of connection.’ That objection would veto all dictionaries I know as general reading matter—all, that is, except one.”

 

That would be Fowler’s, of course, and Blanshard tells us he read it sequentially, start to finish. Dictionaries, especially Johnson’s and the OED, are good, addictive reading. One entry leads to another and then the afternoon is shot. Blanshard explains some of Fowler’s charm:

 

“[I]t is not written like a dictionary at all, but like a letter. It bubbles and chuckles along as if it were so much wayward talk, indulging in little digs and naughtinesses, and breaking out into little ‘whoops of blessing’ as it goes. Yet none of this is really irrelevant. Fowler swam about so easily in linguistic learning and so delighted in it that it made him feel like cutting capers to get back into his element; he wrote on other things, but never with the ease and mastery he showed in discussing usage.”

 

I’m puzzled by writers who show little interest in their medium and remain indifferent to the stuff  they're working with. Subject matter is inert without the fizz of language. Polonius: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet: “Words, words, words.” Blanshard reminds us that language is fun:

 

“Did it ever occur to you that isle and island have no connection with each other etymologically? Are you under the illusion that that and which are to be used in the same way? See also his articles on Cannibalism, Love of the Long Word, Sturdy Indefensibles, Hyphens, and Wardour Street.”

 

Joseph Epstein is a contemporary admirer of Fowler:

 

“On usage nothing surpasses H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first published in 1926 and, mirabile dictu, a modest bestseller when it first appeared in America. Good writing is about more than mere correctness, yet without correctness no good writing is possible. Fowler everywhere offers specific instructions. He was what is known in the business as a prescriptivist, believing in standard English (rather than a descriptivist, who believes that popular use should set the standard), but he is never rule-bound, often technical, but never stuffy. On split infinitives, as on ending sentences with prepositions, his sensible line is to avoid both if possible, but always break both rules rather than write anything awkward.”

'The Soul of Reading!'

Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will digress out of sheer rambling confusion and indifference to his audience. My father was like that. We arrived at some destination and he would promptly relate the details of the journey, correcting himself along the way: “We turned left at the gas station and then . . . no, we turned right . . .” and so on. It was insufferable. 

Well-done digressiveness, circling back in the narrative to relate a tangentially linked bit of story – sometimes returning to the original thread, sometimes not -- is usually comic in effect. Digressions within digressions can proliferate. Almost by definition, digressions in fiction, as in jokes, are comical. This is characteristic of much Irish storytelling, as in Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien – a variation on the shaggy-dog story. Other gifted deployers of digression include Erasmus, Montaigne, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Swift and Melville. Perhaps the master of the device is Laurence Sterne, who was born in County Tipperary.

 

A reader tells me he has tried again – his third attempt -- and failed to read Tristram Shandy. “There’s no plot. Nothing happens,” he writes. “I know you like the book but he keeps digressing and it goes nowhere.” True, but that’s the idea. No one has so pointedly made a stalled, endlessly deferred narrative the object of his comedy. If you don’t get it, don’t feel bad. Some people are immune to certain approaches to humor. Tristram digressively celebrates his love of digressions in Book I, Chapter 20:

 

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer -- he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.”

'The Love of Reading Is Caught, Not Taught'

I’ve used “home library” to describe the accumulation of books in our house but it’s starting to sound a little pretentious. For now I’ll keep it at “books.” Nadya Williams titles her essay “Home Libraries Will Save Civilization,” which, I understand, is more reader-enticing than “Poorly Organized Stacks of Books Will Save What Remains of Western Civilization.” I sympathize with Williams’ thinking but suspect she’s working a little too hard to convince herself (and us) that she’s genuinely hopeful: 

“In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.”

 

My first reaction was to think of the “home libraries” I’ve seen that might as well be collections of Hummel figures or bowling trophies. In other words, junk books. Often, the response to this is, “Well, at least he’s reading something.” I find little comfort in that. And a growing number of the literate are aliterate. They read stop signs (usually) but not books. I disregard her concern for the “aesthetics” of home libraries. My only concern is convenience: Can I find the book I’m looking for?

 

Williams is more persuasive when she addresses the impact of reading on family. Kids who regularly see their parents reading are likelier to become readers themselves. No guarantees, but if books are readily available the kids have a fighting chance. Humans are complicated, and predicting their behavior is a mug’s game. My parents were not readers and we had few books in the house. Today is a good time to be an enthusiastic reader. Books bought or borrowed have never been more conveniently available. Williams writes:

 

“Be bold, fill your home with physical books—lots of them!—and see what happens. The results of this particular experiment are nearly guaranteed. But it also requires the parents to live the same bookish life that they would like to instill in their children—a life in which books are cherished companions and a delight to share with family and friends, rather than just that thing one does alone with much visceral suffering and only because of a school requirement.”

 

Based solely on my experience, I question her final thought. I’ve always been a solitary reader. Collective reading, like almost collective anything, would shut me down. About the accuracy of Williams’ closing sentence I have no doubts: “It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught.” Especially today. When it comes to making books readily available, perhaps within arm’s reach, I’m reminded of C.H. Sisson writing in “On Translating Dante,” the introduction to his version of The Divine Comedy (1980):

 

“[A]ll literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance.”

'Uneven, Irregular, and Multiform Movement'

“There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications.”

 

Driving while reading is discouraged. Once, in Bellevue, Wash., while stopped at a red light, I was intoxicated by the book propped against the wheel until a cop pulled up, rolled down his window and barked, “You gonna move?” I hadn't let the green light distract me. I apologized and moved.  

 

The Oxford English Dictionary includes an alternative definition of intoxication apart from the contemporary usage, one obsolete since the eighteenth century: “The action of corrupting a person morally or spiritually.” Yes, books have done that to me, too, on occasion, though not often since I left puberty. The current meaning, as defined by the OED -- “having lost control of one’s behaviour or mental faculties” -- also applies to books.

 

Logan Pearsall Smith’s best-known quip is “Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading,” so the sentence at the top comes as no surprise. You’ll find it in his essay on Montaigne (1918) in Reperusals and Re-Collections (1937). The rest of the opening paragraph goes like this:

 

“We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.”

 

Smith calls it a “youthful susceptibility” but I find that book-intoxication remains in remission into adulthood and periodically flares into recurrence. That’s what has happened to me since August when my brother died in hospice. A few days before his death we talked about Montaigne’s understanding of death. Smith defines Montaigne’s place among the world’s writers:

 

“[H]e did something which brought him into worse discredit. It was a strange, unheard-of, undignified thing to do, a thing that had never been done before, and indeed has never been done since with the same boldness. For Montaigne told the truth about himself, he threw off his clothes and took himself to pieces in public.”

 

Miraculously, the Frenchman seldom comes off as a tiresome narcissist. Rather, he's thinking about us while talking about himself. Smith continues:

 

“He did not indeed begin with this design; the amazing simplicity and interest of it dawned gradually upon him, and grew clearer and clearer as he proceeded. For this reason a beginner in Montaigne will do well to read the later essays first, for it is in these that he carries out his purpose with the completest frankness, turning his detached, disinterested mind on his own personality, and giving a long account, not of his actions, but of his essence and being.”

 

This is true. Think of those great, later essays, like “Of Some Verses of Virgil” and “Of Experience.” In “Three Kinds of Association,” written in this final phase, 1585-88 (he died in 1592), he writes:

 

“Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends to ourselves, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about. I say this now because I cannot easily shake off the importunity of my soul, which cannot ordinarily apply itself unless it becomes wrapped up in a thing, or be employed unless with tension and with its whole being.”

 

If read aloud in a blindfold test, this passage might be mistaken for the product of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century sensibility. He sounds like our contemporary. Later in the same essay he writes:

 

“[F]ew conversations hold my interest if devoid of vigor and effort. It is true that pleasantness and beauty satisfy and occupy me as much as weight and depth, or more. And inasmuch as I grow sleepy in any other sort of conversation, and lend it only the rind of my attention, it often happens in such abject and feeble sort of talk, small talk, that I make silly and stupid remarks and replies, ridiculous and unworthy of a child, or, still more awkwardly and impolitely, maintain an obstinate silence. I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.”

 

Few passages in all of literature remind me so immediately of myself. “Perhaps not only in his attitude towards truth,” Smith writes, “but in his attitude towards himself, Montaigne was a precursor. Perhaps here again he was ahead of his own time, ahead of our time also, since none of us would have the courage to imitate him.”

 

[All quotes from Montaigne are taken from The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame, 1957.]