'Then ’twas the Roman, Now ’tis I'

“Contempt for the past is an inbuilt feature of modernity, its preoccupation with change and the future, its determination to be new and different, its deep intolerance (in President Obama’s revealing words) of those who stand ‘against the tide of history’.” 

I’ve written before about Nicholas Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. Now I have a copy of the book and have finished reading it. For those of us who read, who value the great books of our precursors, it serves as a tonic, a reminder of what the culture has lost but also what individuals can preserve. The sentence cited above is taken from near the conclusion of the book, the section despairingly titled “For the First Time in History, the Past is ‘Dead and Silent.’”  

 

A quality that distinguishes our age from earlier periods is this drive to extinguish the past. A theme I have often addressed at Anecdotal Evidence is the impossibility of originality. Even those most vehemently stricken with “presentism” are nothing new. Without a million anonymous forebears, they would not exist, nor would we. I’m not convinced it’s possible to write good prose or poetry without reference to some earlier work, consciously or otherwise. Guy Davenport once put it to me more bluntly: every book is a reply to an already existing volume. Tate continues:

 

“The last half-century, with its identity politics and the increasing dominance of a left liberal pensée unique, has further intensified this attitude towards the past as a result of the West’s self-flagellation over its historical record in relation to its former colonial subjects, women, sexual minorities, and other minority groups. Although this has helpfully revised the historical record, it has left us with an image of the past as the site of oppression, discrimination, and trauma and encouraged the idea that one studies or teaches about the past mainly to wag one’s finger at it for the disgraceful ways in which it failed to conform to current liberal values.”

 

Believers in such creeds are characterized by naïveté about human nature. As Evelyn Waugh put it in Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939): “Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.” At the same time, they fail to appreciate what is best about our species. One of the authors of Tate’s seven books is Edward Gibbon. In Vol. I, Chap. 3, “Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire, in the Age of the Antonines” in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he writes: “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Gibbon is describing the reign of Antoninus Pius, emperor of Rome from 138 to 161. He was the adoptive son of Hadrian and in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, who succeeded him as co-emperors. The irony of Gibbon’s bleakly clear-eyed view of human history is that it comes in the context of his praise for Antoninus, one of the “Five Good Emperors.” Here is the context:

 

“Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Humanity is infinitely more complex than the simple-minded deniers of history would have it. Here are Gibbon’s subsequent sentences: “In private life, he was an amiable, as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed, with moderation, the conveniencies of his fortune, and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.”

 

A.E. Housman died ninety years ago today, on April 30, 1936, at age seventy-seven. The poet, of course, was also a classical scholar who edited Juvenal, Lucan and Propertius, and was famous for his five-volume critical edition of the minor Roman poet Manilius’ Astronomicon. Here is Housman’s Poem XXXI from A Shropshire Lad (1896), “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble”: “Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.”

'You Delude Yourself'

A reader has sent me yet another lengthy screed about the State of the World and it leaves me as ignorant as I was before reading most of it. I know little about politics and nothing about economics, and I can’t muster the grit to change that situation. The writer seems like a bright, certainly well-educated guy but overly dependent on jury-rigging a grand unified theory of everything, rather like Coleridge in his gaseous phase. I defer to Dr. Johnson in The Rambler for July 9, 1751:

 

“Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind.”

 

Johnson, ever the no-nonsense realist. One of his admirers, Flannery O’Connor, writes on October 26, 1963, my eleventh birthday, to her friend “A.” (Elizabeth “Betty” Hester):

 

“Who do you think you understand? If anybody, you delude yourself. I love a lot of people, understand none of them. This is not perfect love but as much as a finite creature can be capable of.”

 

Systemic lupus erythematosus killed O’Connor nine months later, at the age of thirty-nine. You can find the complete letter in The Habit of Being (ed. Sally Fitzgerald, 1979). O’Connor serves as a literary palate cleanser. Like Johnson, she abhorred nonsense and intellectual pretentiousness.

'A Snapshot Rather Than a Film'

Theodore Dalrymple sees more in the novels of Agatha Christie than I ever could. Of course, I have not read even a sentence of Christie’s prose. I’ve seen several film adaptations of her books but the only one I remember in any detail and with any pleasure is René Clair’s And Then There Were None (1945), mostly because of Barry Fitzgerald. In “Agatha Christie & the Metaphysics of Murder,” Dalrymple conducts an interesting experiment:

“My method would be to take every passage of possible social, psychological, or philosophical interest and deal with it in succession, and decide whether, taken at the end, they amounted to a Weltanschauung, a worldview. This method would not show any development in the author’s ideas, of course: it would be a snapshot rather than a film.”

 

This is not the way I have ever read a novel. Dalrymple, a retired physician, is conducting a literary post-mortem. Not that I have a systematic strategy. I read intuitively, trusting the author’s gifts for plot, character and language will keep me alert and amused – until he doesn’t. Ideas matter less to me than story and people. In my experience, ideas often leave novels stillborn. I don’t recall many of Tolstoy’s thoughts on Napoleon and history but Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova might as well be in the next room.

 

From Christie’s more than eighty novels Dalrymple picks one of the Miss Marple titles, They Do It With Mirrors (1952), which permits him to comment on class, poverty (genteel and otherwise), bohemianism (“Their unconventionality was parasitic on the existence of convention”) and snobbery. See his digression on Occam’s razor. He writes:

“What, then, has replaced gentility in social prestige? There is an obvious answer: money. The advantage of money as the conferrer of prestige is that it is easily measurable and ranked. The person with the most money has the most prestige, all the way down to the person with the least. . . . Where money is the measure of all things, manners and tastes are likely to be less refined than in a society in which social hierarchy unrelated to money persists.”

 

Dalrymple contrasts English and American schools of mystery writing, Christie with Raymond Chandler. The latter I have read and enjoyed in toto but I’m otherwise ignorant of most crime writing. Dalrymple is always lively when he takes on a literary topic. He makes Christie, the bestselling novelist in history, an interesting case but not interesting enough to move me to read her books.

'Of the Mind As Well As the Heart'

“[T]he main furnishings of the cottage were Oakeshott’s books. He had disposed of most of those he considered merely informative and retained a consummately civilized library.” 

Inevitably I asked, “Is my library ‘consummately civilized’?” What does that mean? No junk, no bestsellers, I suppose, though some volumes that are “merely informative” – dictionaries and other reference books. Emphasis on the obvious essentials – Dante, Montaigne, Melville, et al. Books that, in their absence, might diminish the respectability of the remaining volumes. Nothing to be ashamed of. A lifetime’s accumulation of books that made us who we are – that is, reasonably civilized readers.  

 

Josiah Lee Auspitz’s “Michael Oakeshott: 1901-1990” was published in the Summer 1991 issue of The American Scholar. The philosopher had died on December 19, 1990, and Auspitz had attended the funeral in Dorset. The essay begins with an account of that event and goes on to examine Oakeshott’s thought. The passage above continues:

 

“In his later years he took to giving away some of his more cherished volumes, but still there remained shelves upon shelves testifying to years of enjoyment of history and fiction, philosophy and poetry, memoirs and essays, and pleasant hours of browsing in used-book stores. In his last year, he reread the works of one of his favorite Americans, Willa Cather.”

 

I read Oakeshott as a literary writer with an excellent prose style, not a quality often associated with philosophers, professors of political science or academics in general. He is a rare writer able to make even politics interesting, mostly because he isn’t writing strictly about politics. There’s a bigger, more interesting dimension to his work, a literary resonance. The reader is struck by the simplicity and lack of pretension in Oakeshott’s home, as described by Auspitz, and in his work. Such clarity is rare among writers in general. Auspitz writes:

 

“Though a gracefully bookish man, Oakeshott, as a philosopher, put little trust in the printed word. ‘A philosopher is not, as such, a scholar; and philosophy, more often than not, has foundered in learning. There is no book which is indispensable for the study of philosophy. And to speak of a philosopher as ignorant is to commit an ignoratio elenchi [“ignoring refutation” – an irrelevant conclusion]; an historian or a scientist may be ignorant, philosophers merely stupid.”

 

One concludes from reading Auspitz’s profile – and from reading his work -- that Oakeshott was a gentleman of thought: “[W]hen it came to suggesting an apt title, he was like a wise old herbalist dispensing time-tested remedies. If one were working on a problem, he had just the volume to advance one's thinking. If one were going on a trip, he would present the perfect travel memoir of that place. As a houseguest, he would rummage around for hours in used-book stores until he found just the right volumes to leave as a present for each member of the host family.”

 

At the conclusion of his final visit to see Oakeshott, Auspitz writes: “He also put in my hands Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, a memoir of Maine that he joined Willa Cather in admiring. Its words about hospitality applied to Oakeshott as well:

 

“‘Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift, which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest’s pleasure,-- that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten. Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading, and my hostess the golden gift. Sympathy is of the mind as well as the heart.’”

 

[Auspitz also wrote about Oakeshott here.]

'Living in a Ghost Story'

As usual when I visit Kaboom Books I leave with a stack of books I have already read. I’m a reader, not a collector. To find by serendipity a previously unknown book worth reading (which means reading at least twice) is rare in my experience. For many, a book is like a Kleenex – use it once and dispose of it. When I buy one, new or used, I’m virtually guaranteed to read it again. Saturday’s haul: 

Elias Canetti: The Human Province (1973; trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Seabury Press, 1978).

 

Elias Canetti: Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes 1954-1971 (1994; trans John Hargraves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

 

I’ve been reading Canetti since my freshman year when I stumbled on his novel Auto-da-Fé (1935) in the library stacks. I have spent the subsequent half-century urging people to read his work, without much success. The same goes for my other purchase: Undertones of War (1929) by the English poet Edmund Blunden. This is the first American edition of his Great War memoir, published by Doubleday, Doran & Co. The dust jacket has fallen apart and someone tucked it into the book. The spine is sturdy and the pages have turned only slightly yellow. It’s a good reading copy of what I judge the finest of all World War I memoirs.

 

By all accounts, Blunden was a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy man, who would name two of his children, John and Clare, after the mad poet John Clare. He saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918 and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. In November 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”

 

While paying for the books, the owner of Kaboom, John Dillman, suggested I read Poilu: the World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 (1978).

'You Not There'

Must condolences, words of consolation, be as sweet and gentle as words of endearment? Do people want to be assured that the pain of grief and loss will go away, some day? I don’t have an answer. When a friend loses a loved one and I buy the inevitable sympathy card, I mouth the usual sentiments and never feel I’ve said quite the right thing. I become inarticulate. Too often, I feel self-centered, writing out of obligation, repeating the same old words, covering my ass so I’m not accused of thoughtlessness or indifference. Walter de la Mare in “Away” (Memory and Other Poems, 1938) suggests another way to look at the dilemma: 

“There is no sorrow

Time heals never;

No loss, betrayal,

Beyond repair.

Balm for the soul, then,

Though grave shall sever

Lover from loved

And all they share;

See the sweet sun shines

The shower is over,

Flowers preen their beauty,

The day how fair!

Brood not too closely

On love, on duty;

Friends long forgotten

May wait you where

Life with death

Brings all to an issue;

None will long mourn for you,

Pray for you, miss you,

Your place left vacant,

You not there.”

 

Bleak, comforting words. Think of the passing of grief following your death and mine – a blessing to survivors, easing their pain. My brother would have turned seventy-one today. I remembered “Flowers preen their beauty” while watching hummingbirds collecting nectar in the garden.

'Particular Persons and Situations'

Edwin Arlington Robinson is likely to remain a one-poem poet for most readers, assuming he is read at all. Of course, one poem is more than most poets are remembered for. Simon and Garfunkel didn’t help when they recast “Richard Cory” as a strident diatribe about envy and class bitterness: “With political connections to spread his wealth around.” That line and most of the rest of the song don’t appear in Robinson’s poem.  I’m unable to find any evidence of political sentiments in Robinson’s work.

The writer whose work comes to mind when I read “Richard Cory” is Robinson’s contemporary, O. Henry. The poet was deeper and more sophisticated but started out writing fiction before turning to poetry. He even came up with a potential title for his stories, if they were ever published: Scattered Lives. Like a fiction writer, Robinson focuses in his poetry on characters. He was fond of narrative. The final line in “Richard Cory” clicks like a trick ending in one of O. Henry’s weaker stories. I like poems that tell a story, and some of Robinson’s are in a league with Kipling’s short stories. If Robinson writes in the first person, it’s in the voice of a character. No revelations of the poet’s sensitivity. In an 1894 letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, Robinson writes:

 

“There is more in every person’s soul than we think. Even the happy mortals we term ordinary or commonplace act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to believe in the light of our prejudices.”

 

In his biography of Robinson, Scott Donaldson tells us “Richard Cory” was probably inspired, at least in part, by a suicide in the poet’s hometown of Gardiner, Maine. He quotes an April 24, 1897 letter to Smith: “Frank Anne blew his bowels out with a shot-gun. That was hell.” And in a letter that year to his friend Edith Brower he wrote: “I’ve written a nice little thing called ‘Richard Cory.’ . . . There isn’t any idealism in it, but there’s lots of something else—humanity, maybe. I opine that it will go.” And it has. Donaldson writes: “Its popularity became a source of annoyance to Robinson while he lived and has probably done his reputation harm.”

 

It was the first Robinson poem I encountered and the only one read as a classroom assignment. In his 1948 monograph on Robinson, Yvor Winters describes the poem as “a superficially neat portrait of the elegant man of mystery” that “builds up to a very cheap surprise ending.” As to Robinson’s larger accomplishment, Winters writes:

 

“[Nearly] all of Robinson’s best poems appear to deal with particular persons and situations; in these poems his examination is careful and intelligent, his method is analytic, and his style is mainly very distinguished. . . . he became on certain occasions one of the most remarkable poets in our language.”