'A Record of Whatever Intrigues Him'

I’ve always been a hoarder not of objects but words. I may be the least acquisitive person you’ll ever meet outside of a monastery, but how I accumulate language. As a teenager I read that a fellow Ohioan, the poet Hart Crane, kept lists of words he liked for future use in poems. That seemed like an inspired idea and I did the same – not for poems, which I will never be able to write, but to savor and use on other appropriate occasions. A fellow reporter and I while working for a newspaper in Indiana used to challenge each other to work arcane words into our copy. Once I described a county commissioner as “freaming” a comment. The OED defines the verb “fream” as “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar.” A frightened copy editor changed it to an anemic “said.” 

Later, without having ever heard of a commonplace book, I started saving whole passages from books, magazines and newspapers that amused me, were memorably well written or somehow suggested wisdom. All of this copying for years was strictly analog, transcribed into notebooks, until I and the rest of the world turned digital. Often, I realize, this salvage work is an end in itself. I have no index and rely on a slowly fraying memory. Preservation has become second nature. Howard Moss writes in “From a Notebook” (Whatever Is Moving, 1981):

 

“A commonplace book is a book in which someone keeps a record of whatever intrigues him – a passage found in a novel, a chance remark, a story snipped from a paper or a magazine. The entries can range from a recipe to an explanation of the universe. Being random and personal, a commonplace book has two major interests: the material itself, and a revelation of the person who selects it.”

 

Moss is writing about W.H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970), which is more of an anthology of passages the poet prized and arranged alphabetically by subject. It doesn’t feel like a source book for Auden’s poetry and prose. Moss calls it “a very good small anthology of prose style.” I’m a linguistic magpie, gathering shiny bits of language because they please me, aurally or intellectually.

'The Offendings of the Millions'

My youngest son this summer is working as an intern with a Houston law firm and one of the partners loaned him a copy of The Regional Vocabulary of Texas (University of Texas Press, 1962) by E. Bagby Atwood, whose foreword begins: 

“The present study deals with a vocabulary which, although still in use, is to a great extent obsolescent. Many regional words reflect an era of the not-too-distant past when most citizens were rural, or at least knew something of rural life.”

 

Atwood was a professor of linguistics and philology who taught at the University of Texas at Austin. For this native Northerner, his lists of words mingle the familiar with the exotic. For instance, lagniappe is a word I have never heard spoken and originally encountered years ago in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883):

 

"We picked up one excellent word – a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word – ‘Lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap . . . When a child or a servant buys something in a shop – or even the mayor or governor, for aught I know – he finishes the operation by saying, – ‘Give me something for lagniappe.’ The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root.”

 

I think of the phrase “baker’s dozen.” Atwood writes of the word: “There is no doubt that, as the major dictionaries state, lagniappe is a gallicized version of the Spanish la ñapa [a little extra] . . .”

 

Another word I’ve never heard someone use in conversation but knew from print is hant or haint, variations on haunt. Southerners use it as a noun meaning ghost and I think I first found it in one of Faulkner’s novels. I encountered some of Atwood’s words in dialogue from old Western movies. Draw, for instance, a noun meaning a dry creek bed or arroyo; hoosegow, meaning a jail, from the Spanish juzgado, a courthouse; tote used as a verb meaning to carry, and tow sack, meaning a “big burlap sack,” which reminds me of its usage as a related noun in Louisiana-born Tony Joe White’s song “Polk Salad Annie” (1968):

 

“Now, everyday ’fore supper time

She’ go down by the truck patch

And pick her a mess o’ Polk salad

And carry it home in a tote sack.”

 

Other novelties: mott, meaning “a clump of trees”’; shinnery (sounds like an Irish surname), “oak-covered land”; olla, from the Spanish, meaning a “large crock for water”; smearcase, from the German meaning “homemade curd cheese”; and cush-cush, “corn meal preparation.” I especially like shivaree, a “burlesque serenade . . . associated with re-marriage,” and mosquito hawk or snake doctor for “dragon fly.” Blinky means “beginning to turn sour (milk).”

 

Our language has grown increasingly homogenous since Bagby published his study. Television and the internet have flattened things out, culled regionalisms, made American English more universal, less colorful. He reminds us that language percolates from the bottom up, socially speaking. So much of the language Atwood documents is vivid and colorful to contemporary ears. As H.L. Mencken writes in The American Language (1919):    

 

“What are of more importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians. . . .The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up their objections.”

'Some Temperamental Undercurrent'

We squabble and seethe about it but our tastes in literature – and other realms, like food and music -- ultimately remain mysterious. It has taken me a lifetime to accept this realization. You are not a cretin for enjoying the work of Norman Mailer or Toni Morrison, though I find both writers repellant. Nor am I among the enlightened for loving Proust. Most attempts to analyze and defend our tastes quickly turn into snobbery and self-justification. So much online bookchat amounts to playground-style bickering. 

We’ve all endured the sort of book-bully who, when encountering a reader he decides holds unacceptable opinions, banishes him to the bookish Gulag instead of ignoring him. Literary spats are too often Manichean in nature and mirror contemporary politics. Reading and writing are important – in fact, central to my life and that of many others – but hardly worthy of threats of violence and other condemnations. Not long ago I wrote that I judged V.S. Pritchett the finest literary critic of the twentieth century – hardly an eccentric judgment. A reader told me I was stupid, probably illiterate and ought to be “slapped around” for uttering such a judgment. He was at least half-serious.

 

The American poet Howard Moss (1922-87) in “Notes on Fiction” (Minor Monuments, 1986) identifies an important and rarely recognized relation between writers and serious readers. Across a lifetime of reading, a handful of writers become trusted companions whose company we depend on. We give their books second and third readings. We confide in them and feel no need to defend them. Moss writes:

 

“Certain writers inspire affection in their readers that cannot be explained either by their work or by the facts of their lives. It proceeds from some temperamental undercurrent, some invisible connection between the writer and the reader that is more available to the senses and the emotions than to the mind. Bookish affections of this kind are deceptive and irrelevant, yet they truly exist. For me, Colette, Keats, and Chekhov inspire affection. Faulkner, Shelley, and Ibsen do not.”

 

Moss was poetry editor at The New Yorker for almost forty years. His examples, pro and con, match my own. I find his prose, mostly essays and reviews, superior even to his poetry. If we can generalize from his examples, his literary preferences suggest a fondness for a quieter, more subtle, less rabble-rousing voice, little Sturm und Drang. Faulkner, whom I lionized when young, now seems too loud, too insistent, too stylistically attention-seeking. Can I explain and defend this reaction? I won’t even try. Moss writes elsewhere in “Notes on Fiction”: “Chekhov’s stories tread the finest line between a newspaper account and a fairy tale. Inferior writers step over the line one way or the other.”

'In My Hands the Morning They Find Me'

Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless board-book given to an infant by optimistic relatives. I mean the real thing, with decryptable signs on the page. I can’t remember this pivotal event, though it would change my life and my understanding of the universe forever. A book becomes more than its merely physical nature and carries with it a world of thought and imagination. I must have been four or five, pre-kindergarten, when my mother taught me to read not with books but the newspaper. Think how miraculous it is that in less than two decades we can go from toddler illiteracy to a happy reading of Ulysses. Consider that the person likeliest to remember the first book he read is a recent illiterate who mastered the art while an adult and knows true gratitude. 

I know I favored singable poems (Stevenson), field guides to butterflies and wildflowers, and collections of brief biographies of the famous and heroic. I remember juvenile monographs devoted to Marie Curie and Davy Crockett. On the cover of the latter, Crockett is on the wall of the Alamo, swinging his rifle like a baseball bat at the Mexican army.  The first “grown-up” book I remember reading was The Wonderful O (1957) by James Thurber, a fellow Ohioan. If those are the first, what about the last? Robert Richman (1957-2021), former poetry editor of The New Criterion, poses that question in “The Last Book,” published in the Fall 1999 issue of The Paris Review:

 

“What will be the last book

I read? Woolf’s finest work,

the only one I shunned?

The Turgenev novel

everyone disdains?

End Game in Poetry,

a just-uncovered work

by Grandmaster Borges,

or Dinesen’s stories,

seeking for a fourth time

the mercy of my eyes?

What will be in my hands

the morning they find me?

A dog-eared Borzoi,

or sassy new Penguin?

A pockmarked Pantheon,

or pristine Random House?

And will the failed-poet

coroner claim foul play

and confiscate the thing?

Will the book then appear

in a dealer’s locked case,

scarred by marginalia

claimed to be authentic,

where I propose a brief

tying-up-of-ends-type

poem? Or will the last book

be the one that I wrote

and never could abide,

but could read that night

with kinder eyes, and whom

I turned slowly to greet

like a long-lost daughter?”

 

Richman died at age sixty-three – too young but old enough to begin thinking of last things – the last kiss, the last laugh, the last book read.

'Martyrs of a Future World Religion'

A longtime reader and fellow blogger shares with me a taste for aphoristic writing, prose that is concise, of course, but also dense with meaning and often packing a sting. Aphorisms can be marketed as such but often they appear as a functional part of a larger text. George Eliot is especially good at this, as is Joseph Conrad. Read Daniel Deronda or Nostromo with pithy declarations in mind and you can fill a modest-sized commonplace book. If you don’t like “aphorism,” think maxim, apothegm, proverb, adage, bromide or aperçu. 

Careful readers, as we get older, lose tolerance for clumsy, excess verbiage. Time is short. A well-crafted aphorism, a mere handful of words, contains more thought-matter than most novels. I choose “matter” purposely. A good aphorism seems to confirm Einstein’s notion that matter is energy. I think of aphorisms lying on the page, coiled to strike when released by the reader. They are not reasoned arguments.

 

Some people are offended by the casual stridency and truth-telling associated with aphoristic writing. Aphorisms are often a reproach to self-delusion and reveal a truth without compromise or qualification. An aphorism is the writerly opposite of popular political discourse, which aims to be “inclusive” and say nothing that might displease its intended audience. An aphorism respects the truth, not the reader. In his foreword to The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1962), W.H. Auden (a gifted aphorist himself) says an aphorism must “convince every reader that it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions.” My friend the late D.G. Myers loved the only aphorism I ever intentionally composed: “Politics has destroyed more writers than vodka.”

 

Elias Canetti (1905-94) is a deft coiner of aphorisms, even in his almost five-hundred-page masterwork, Crowds and Power (1960; trans. Carol Stewart, 1962). Last year, Fitscarraldo Editions published Canetti’s The Book Against Death (trans. Peter Filkins), a collection of short prose pieces, including aphorisms, addressing mortality. It’s a writer’s notebook, not an organized thesis. Canetti tends to favor the cryptic over the strictly moralistic. A few samples:

 

“The Earth as the Titanic. The last musician.”

 

“All of the dying are martyrs of a future world religion.”

 

“Death and love are always set side by side, but they only share one thing: parting.”

 

“What is more awful than to just go with one’s times? What is deadlier?”

 

In an earlier book, The Human Province (1972; trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 1978), Canetti makes an observation that will prompt admirers of aphoristic writing to nod their heads: “The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.”

'A New Past'

Robert Conquest writing thirty-one years ago: 

“Literature is the expression of our whole past, of our whole context in life and time – and not only ours. Anatole France said that the word pleurer (to cry, to weep) in French is different from the same sort of word in every other language, if only because of its use by Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse or other of the great French amoureuses. Every word carries the history of literature, the feel of the whole country. It follows then with us language is losing its edge for lack of proper education and because of constrictive doctrine. The art world is being penetrated by narrow dogmatism in the same way.”

 

Take Delmore Schwartz’s sonnet “The Beautiful American Word, Sure.” In the American context, the monosyllable connotes can-do optimism, endorsement, respect, a ready willingness to help. You say, “May I hold the door for you?” and I say, “Sure.” Call it shared etiquette or civic agreeability. It implies a degree of certainty in an uncertain world. “Can you loan me five bucks?” “Sure.” Words are more than sounds or signifiers. Each packs a history, “the feel of the whole country.”

 

Conquest was participating in a forum, “The Humanities, in Memoriam,” held in April 1994 at Stanford University, with the remarks published in Academic Questions. Other participants included Richard Wilbur, Czesław Miłosz and René Girard. True education was already dissolving. Our ability to communicate with others was eroding. The past had never seemed so remote. For some, it never existed. Dante and Henry James had become extinct species.

 

Conquest is the great chronicler of Soviet crimes. As a historian, he gave us accounts of a regime that lived by a “narrow dogmatism” that sought to erase the past in the name of creating a “worker’s paradise." In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Conquest writes:

 

“All in all, unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities. The accompanying falsifications took place, and on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, real statistics, disappeared into the realm of fantasy. History, including the history of the Communist Party, or rather especially the history of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons disappeared from the official record. A new past, as well as new present, was imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet population, as was, of course, admitted when truth emerged in the late 1980s.”

 

Conquest writes of our age in lines from his great polemical poem “Whenever”:

 

“An age of people who are concerned, or care,

With schemes that lead to slaughter everywhere.

 

“An age of warheads and the KGB,

An age of pinheads at the Ph.D.

 

“When churches pander to advanced regimes

Whose victims fill our nightmares with their screams,

 

Age that ignored the unavenged Ukraine

‘Imperialist Britain’ seething in its brain,

 

An age of art devised for instant shock

an age of aestheticians talking cock.”

 

Conquest was born on this date, July 15, in 1917 (soon after the July Days when the Bolsheviks were agitating in Petrograd, and three months before the October Revolution) and died in 2015 at age ninety-eight (twenty-four years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union).

 

[“Whenever” can be found in Conquest’s Collected Poems (ed. Elizabeth Conquest, Waywiser Press, 2020.]

'Essays in Flesh and Bone'

One of my friends is reliably cheerful. We should all have friends like him. His emails and telephone calls are never annoyingly cloying, in the sense that they knock me out of whatever self-centered snit I’m nursing. Without ever saying so, he reminds me that I have it pretty good, certainly better than most of the human race. He’s not obnoxious about his gregarious nature and never tries to impose it. That’s part of his charm. His good nature is contagious and has been for more than fifty years, since I first met him. I thought of him while again reading Montaigne’s “On Some Verses of Virgil”:

“My judgment keeps me indeed from kicking and grumbling against the discomforts that nature orders me to suffer, but not from feeling them. I, who have no other aim but to live and be merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one good year of pleasant and cheerful tranquillity. A somber, dull tranquillity is easy enough to find for me, but it puts me to sleep and stupefies me; I am not content with it. If there are any persons, any good company, in country or city, in France or elsewhere, residing or traveling, who like my humors and whose humors I like, they have only to whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone.”

That describes my friend more than me. I think of it as an aspiration, a sort of moral, emotional ideal. For him, it’s a gift. I need perpetual reminding. My favorite among all of Theodore Dalrymple’s thousands of essays and columns remains “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” published in the December 13, 2003, edition of The Spectator:

“I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”