'Writers That Are Worth Anything Are Humorists'

Bertie Wooster has asked if he can purchase a gift for Jeeves while he is out, and the valet replies: “‘Well, sir, there has recently been published a new and authoritatively annotated edition of the works of the philosopher Spinoza. Since you are so generous, I would appreciate that very much.” This comes in the first chapter of Joy in the Morning, published by P.G. Wodehouse in 1947. I was reading it late the other night, alone in the front room, and I started giggling and my eyes watered. The dog looked concerned.

Ever since my nephew told me he had discovered Wodehouse and was going through his novels and stories like a guest at a party with an open bar, I’ve been reading Plum between more imposing volumes – including Spinoza, a thinker I discovered as a teenager thanks to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. (In another B&J confection, Carry On, Jeeves, Wodehouse has Jeeves say: “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) A reader tells me in a comment on Tuesday’s post that he is reading Wodehouse’s Something Fresh (1915):

“Every silly yet perfectly crafted page," he writes, "was a declaration of allegiance to something more enduring than even the greatest historical catastrophe -- the unexpected pleasure potential of just being alive. God bless the man – it’s a reminder I needed right now.”

An amusing scene with a clerk in a bookshop follows Jeeves’ request. While there, Bertie runs into Florence Craye, an intellectual woman to whom he was once engaged. “‘Bertie!’ she says, ‘This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’”

Bertie, our narrator, thinks: “‘It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.” Bertie tells Florence:

“‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’”

Is there a moral component here, a lesson for all good readers? I suppose so. Don’t lie. Admit your shortcomings. But all of that is irrelevant. We laugh because all of us, at least on occasion, are tempted to put on airs so we appear smarter or better educated than we are. In effect, to lie.

I’m reminded of something Nabokov told an interviewer: “All writers that are worth anything are humorists.” This seems obvious to some of us. Much of the best humor implies a nuanced understanding of the world, the ability to see comedy in tragedy and vice versa – the essence of literary accomplishment. The humorless are earnest and dull and leave little room for a good laugh or an insight into human nature. “I’m not P.G. Wodehouse,” Nabokov continues. “I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. “

[Nabokov’s 1962 interview with Phyllis Meras for the Providence Sunday Journal is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019).]

'All That Is Human Slips Away'

Varlam Shalamov (1907-82), who ought to know, opens a poem with this line: “Memory has veiled / much evil . . .” Shalamov survived almost eighteen years in the Gulag, in the Arctic region known as Kolyma. His final imprisonment, from 1937 to 1951, was imposed after he referred to Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin as “a classic Russian writer.” Don’t read his stories looking for inspirational tales of courage, perseverance and adversity overcome. He would laugh bitterly at such foolish naiveté. That he survived the Gulag, unlike at least 1.7 million others, may be impressive. That so physically and emotionally damaged a man could write so many stories, Chekhovian in their understated precision, is miraculous. Today, the seventy-second anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death, is an appropriate time to read Shalamov’s poem, as translated by Robert Chandler: 

“Memory has veiled

        much evil;

her long lies leave nothing

        to believe.

 

“There may be no cities

        or green gardens;

only fields of ice

        and salty oceans.

 

“The world may be pure snow,

        a starry road;

just northern forest

        in the mind of God.”

 

The Anglophone world is finally catching up with Shalamov’s accomplishment. Now we have Donald Rayfield’s versions of his Kolyma Stories (2018) and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories (2020), which I reviewed here and here. Their combined 1,200 pages include 145 stories. An English-language website devoted to Shalamov and his work has posted a remarkable document, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps” (trans. Dmitry Subbotin and Robert Denis). The piece is dated 1961, ten years after his release from Kolyma. Here is the first of his forty-six hard-earned observations: “The extraordinary fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings.”

 

Shalamov lived his final years in the Soviet Union in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease, but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.” Here is a poem by Shalamov from 1955, as translated by Chandler:

 

“All that is human slips away;

everything was mere husk.

All that is left, indivisible,

is birdsong and dusk.

 

“A sharp scent of warm mint,

the river’s far-off noise;

all equal, and equally light —

all my losses and joys.”

 

“Slowly, with its warm towel

the wind dries my face;

moths immolate themselves

in the campfire’s flames.”

 

[Chandler translates nineteen poems by Shalamov in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.]

'To Think, to Read, to Meditate, to React'

Often, I think of the late Adam Zagajewski urging young poets – and by extension, the rest of us -- to “read everything.” The suggestion is not dictatorial. The Pole even admits he is a “chaotic reader,” as most of us are. I’ve never been systematic about much of anything and inevitably there are embarrassing holes in my education. Call it the Autodidact Syndrome. When it comes to books, we never know in advance what will come in handy, which volume will help solve a problem we didn’t know we were asking. Here is Zagajewski the literary cheerleader: 

“Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry, sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t yet understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.”

 

Zagajewski’s enthusiasm is almost embarrassing but the juggernaut of aliteracy and the threat it poses to Western Civilization may already be irreversible. My friend Cynthia Haven published an interview with Zagajewski not long after his death in 2021 in which she reminds him of his “read everything” essay. He replies:   

 

“What can I say? I’m in favor of reading and taking into consideration past writers. But you know, I don’t know ancient Greek, my Latin almost doesn’t exist; I’m not one of those lofty professors who know everything and terrorize others with their perfect erudition. What’s important is to think, to read, to meditate, to react, to be imaginative. Sometimes a reduced reading list, if given strong attention, can be better than a classical education when pursued somewhat mechanically. Of course I want the past writers to persist but first of all I want thinking and being moved by intelligent texts to persist.”

 

Good advice. Don’t be intimidated by the vastness of the reading list. Choose a volume someone once mentioned he enjoyed or that had a strong emotional or intellectual impact on him. Say, the Life of Johnson, Richard Wilbur’s poems, Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, a novel by P.G. Wodehouse or Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Read it and see where it carries you.  

'Rosebuds Are Rare As a Day in June'

Fortune cookies no longer contain fortunes. Tucked inside the sugary shells are slips of paper printed with platitudes. I carry one such slip in my wallet, salvaged from a forgotten meal at least a decade ago: “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” Neither fortune nor platitude, the advice packs more writerly wisdom than The Elements of Style. The shift from fortune to platitude, however, is disappointing and hints at a certain weak-minded, authoritarian streak among fortune-cookie writers and perhaps in the larger culture as well. Some of us, encountering a cliché, ignore it and leave the room. 

Another reaction to platitudes is possible: amusement. It’s always funny when someone emits a cliché in the solemn tones used by Lincoln at Gettysburg. As in, “It is what it is,” a contemporary bit of nonsense. Tom Disch agrees in his poem “Dueling Platitudes”:

 

“Because it is an imperative voiced

in the accents of ancestors

            otherwise unremembered,

 

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

carries a proverbial force

            that makes us pay attention.

 

“Only the dead may address us as ‘ye.’

But where are these rosebuds?

Are they cheap as the hay

 

“We’re to make while the sun shines?

            What penalties and fines

 can we expect to pay

 

“If we’re caught in the act of gathering

someone else’s rosebuds?

             Ancestral voices disagree

 

“On these issues, and we must choose

our authorities carefully;

one false step and there is

 

“A piper to pay, and who knows how much

a piper requires

when the fat’s in the fire?

 

“Eat, drink, and be merry: okay,

but will you still love me

 when I'm old and gray?

 

“Which brings us to the Middle Way,

            another idea

old as those hills

 

“Where rosebuds are rare as a day

in June and pipers play

another tune

 

“Love’s old sweet song, maybe,

            or other golden oldies

from the age of the Golden Mean.

 

“Songs are seldom what they seem;

the sirens who charm us

may suddenly scream

 

“Rape!, and words can harm us

as brutally as sticks and stones.

It depends on our tone.

 

“A queen who tells us to eat cake

may be making

a big mistake,

 

But the same advice from our corner baker

is par for the course,

not grounds for divorce.

 

“All adages are relative; each

will have its season.

So dare to eat your peach,

My friend, but keep it within reason.”

 

I count at least fifteen clichés/platitudes in Disch’s sixteen stanzas, including those coined by Robert Herrick, James Russell Lowell and T.S. Eliot, which, of course, are low-hanging fruit.

 

[Disch’s poem was published in the Autumn 1986 issue of Grand Street and collected in About the Size of It (Anvil Press, 2007).]

'Take His Experience Along With Him'

We shouldn’t be surprised that bookish tastes change across time. They mature, just as some of us do. The books we choose to read and reread follow a path parallel to our experience and maturity. This isn’t to imply “progress.” It’s not as though all of us shed bad taste and move irrevocably toward good taste. Our needs change as we get older. What once amused and nourished us no longer does. Conversely, a few books remain prized across a lifetime. 

A reader tells me he’s offended that I no longer read Hart Crane. He suggests I might be doing this because Crane was gay. That’s a cheap and ridiculous accusation. Why do I continue reading Cavafy, Proust and Auden? Crane is not a “bad” poet. He is no longer a poet for me. Plenty of others read him for admirable and silly reasons. He is their writer and no longer mine. No one can dictate what gives us pleasure and sustenance.

 

I think of the writers who didn’t much interest me when I was thirty, though I thought of myself as a pretty sophisticated reader – among them, Louis MacNeice, Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen, Max Beerbohm, Henry Green. All are now in regular rotation. Who did I read passionately when young but can no longer abide? Kafka, James T. Farrell, Hemingway, Pound, Dreiser. Just listing these writers feels like an oblique form of autobiography, a mingling of nostalgia and regret. William Hazlitt writes in “On Reading Old Books”:

 

“A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years.”

'Shut Not Thy Purse-Strings'

Unlike his friends Coleridge, Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Hunt, who often made fools of themselves as a result, Charles Lamb had little interest in the momentous events of his day. About “Boney” – Napoleon Bonaparte – he wished only to know the dictator’s height, unlike Hazlitt, who published a four-volume biography of the diminutive Corsican. In a letter to his friend Thomas Manning on March 1, 1800, Lamb writes: “Public affairs – except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private – I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in.” This admirable sentiment would profit many of our contemporaries. It’s easily mistaken for self-centeredness, but nature’s busybodies, those preoccupied with politics and power, are the truly selfish. 

For Lamb, to be civic-minded was to care for one’s family, friends and strangers – to be a generous host. Though he was a lifelong bachelor, his instinct for family was fierce and he dedicated his life to caring for his matricidal sister, “Mad” Mary Lamb. He practiced charity and compassion as non-proselytizing virtues. In one of the Elia essays, “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,” he writes:

 

“Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the ‘seven small children,’ in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not.”

 

His compassion is instinctive, not ideological. Nor was it rooted in a sense of religious obligation, which in Lamb’s case was rudimentary. In a March 9, 1822, letter to his childhood friend Coleridge, Lamb displays a sophisticated appreciation of moral complexity when he writes:

 

“One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child – when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not mendicant, but thereabouts – a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me – the sum it was to her – the pleasure she had a right to expect that I – not the old impostor – should take in eating her cake – the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, I wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like – and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.”

 

Lamb recognizes that his younger self was “virtue-signaling,” performing a kindly act because it would make him look good. He was being what Joseph Epstein has called a “virtucrat.” He was among the wisest of foolish men.

'The Secret Hidden From Yourself'

Howard Nemerov was born on Leap Year Day in 1920 – February 29 -- meaning his birthday can be accurately observed only every fourth year – a nice metaphysical conundrum. This reminds me of a cousin who was bitter because she was born on Christmas Day and felt she was getting less attention and loot than she deserved. Let’s celebrate Nemerov today. 

We no longer expect poets to be intelligent and learned, to respect form and craft, or to have a sense of humor and little interest in politics. Nemerov inherited no Modernist fashion for obscurity. His poems are accessible in the sense that they don’t revel in self-indulgent opacity. He’s seldom pretentious and never condescends to the reader. Often his concerns are ours. He writes to us and for us, not other poets or fellow academics. Take “Runes” from New Poems (1960), with an epigraph from St. Augustine’s Confessions: “insanibam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter.” Roughly, “I was healthily insane and vitally dying.” Here is the first of Nemerov’s fifteen fifteen-line stanzas:

 

“This is about the stillness in moving things,

In running water, also in the sleep

Of winter seeds, where time to come has tensed

Itself, enciphering a script so fine

Only the hourglass can magnify it, only

The years unfold its sentence from the root.

I have considered such things often, but

I cannot say I have thought deeply of them:

That is my theme, of thought and the defeat

Of thought before its object, where it turns

As from a mirror, and returns to be

The thought of something and the thought of thought,

A trader doubly burdened, commercing

Out of one stillness and into another.”

 

Nemerov cherishes paradox, seeing it as somehow the nature of reality. Thisness is forever in flux. What exists today contains tomorrow. He gently hints at Aquinas’ understanding of potentia. Here is the poem’s final, meditative stanza:                                                                   

 

“To watch water, to watch running water,

Is to know a secret, seeing the twisted rope

Of runnels on the hillside, the small freshets

Leaping and limping down the tilted field

In April's light, the green, grave and opaque

Swirl in the millpond where the current slides

To be combed and carded silver at the fall;

It is a secret. Or it is not to know

The secret, but to have it in your keeping,

A locked box, Bluebeard’s room, the deathless thing

Which it is death to open. Knowing the secret,

Keeping the secret--herringbones of light

Ebbing on beaches, the huge artillery

 Of tides--it is not knowing, it is not keeping,

 But being the secret hidden from yourself.”

 

I would also like to plug Nemerov’s three novels, which seem to get little attention: The Melodramatists (1949), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954) and The Homecoming Game (1957). The last is especially good, and I say that as a sports-hater. In a February 18, 1957 letter to Nemerov, Vladimir Nabokov wrote of the novel: “It is full of true wit, and its structure—the intricate and satisfying interlacing of themes—is admirable.”

 

Montaigne was born on this date, February 28, in 1533. A Nemerov poem in Gnomes & Occasions (1973) shares a title with Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience”:

 

“Nature from life by piece and piece

Gently disparts us; power fails

Before desire does. It needs not sex

To illustrate what Montaigne saith.

But only what’s befallen X—

Now he no longer has his teeth

He can no longer bite his nails.”

 

Montaigne writes in the essay, as translated by Donald Frame:

 

“We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He must know how to use them together and blend them. And so must we do with good and evil, which are consubstantial with our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one element is no less necessary for it than the other. To try to kick against natural necessity is to imitate the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook a kicking match with his mule.”

 

[Washington University, where Nemerov taught for thirty-two years until his death in 1991, has announced the donation of 513 letters from the family of Nemerov’s lover, Joan Coale of Philadelphia, written between 1972 and 1990.]