'My Sneaking Preference'

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly caustic sensibility:

 

“So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions.”

 

I’m reminded of the silly ritual of politicians naming their favorite or most influential books. We don’t, of course, believe a word of it. Some years ago, when Hillary Clinton named Little Women and said, “Like many women of my generation who read this novel growing up, I really felt like I lived in Jo’s family. This book was one of the first literary explorations of how women balance the demands of their daily lives, from raising families to pursuing outside goals. The book was written more than a century ago, but its message resonates today,” we’re left with the certainty that she has never read Alcott’s book or read it only at the command of her handlers’ playbook. Her husband named Marcus Aurelius (who wrote in Book VII of the Meditations: “Be thou erect, or be made erect.”)

 

Repplier’s essay was published in the July 1889 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which also includes work by Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett. I’m not certain any book has ever “hindered” me but I can think of several that I read only under duress – namely, textbooks and Norton anthologies. I’m a great believer in independent reading guided only by curiosity and respect for literary tradition. My seventh-grade English textbook (1964-65), I remember, might have been published in 1889. It was heavy with sub-literary Americana: Edward Evertt Hale’s “The Man Without a Country” and too many poems by William Cullen Bryant. In college I resented the warehousing of literature represented by the Norton behemoths. Repplier respects those readers who “are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have not found it so easily attainable.”

 

Still pervasive among Americans is a neo-Puritanical impulse to read, or at least claim to read, books of “self-improvement,” pleasure be damned. Repplier writes of a preachy-sounding children’s novel previously unknown to me, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89) by Thomas Day. “Altogether,” she writes, “Sandford and Merton affected me the wrong way; and, for the first time, my soul revolted from the pretentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to the malign influence of that tale that I owe my sneaking preference for the drones and butterflies of earth.” Repplier then launches into a delightful apologia of inarguable common sense:

 

“I do not now believe that all men are born equal; I do not love universal suffrage; I mistrust all popular agitators, all intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, all self-styled friends of the people. I cannot even sympathize with the noble theory that every man and woman should do their share of the world’s work; I would gladly shirk my own if I could. And this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its responsibilities is due to the subtle poison instilled into my youthful mind by the too strenuous counter-teaching of Sandford and Merton.”

'Yielding to the Change Assigned'

I think of Edwin Arlington Robinson as an autumnal poet, just as certain others are vernal. Even when the ostensible subject is elsewhere, the fall shows up in his work as setting or mood. His was a sensibility sensitive to time’s passage, endings, sundown, the imminence of winter and death. But he’s seldom morbid or maudlin. The title character in “Mr.Flood’s Party” says to himself one night: “‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon / Again, and we may not have many more . . .’” 

On October 5, 1893, at age twenty-three, in a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, before he had written the poetry we remember him for, Robinson writes: “It is a warm and magnificent day after a long cold rain, and I naturally think of the spot where the ashes of our old fires, with a few shrivelled corn-husks, are all there is to tell of the many jolly symposiums we held there only few weeks ago. It beats the devil how time creeps away with those skinny shanks of his.”

 

October, of course, is the true Poetry Month, not the imposter April. The month’s poetic bounty is humbling. Apart from the excellence of most, it would be difficult to generalize about the nature of these October poets. Cummings’ work has a spring-like character, though Keats is an autumn man. Robinson was born in December, which further discredits astrological typecasting. Here is his sonnet “The Sheaves,” which always reminds me of the old gospel hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves”:

 

“Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,

Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;

And as by some vast magic undivined

The world was turning slowly into gold.

Like nothing that was ever bought or sold

It waited there, the body and the mind;

And with a mighty meaning of a kind

That tells the more the more it is not told.

 

“So in a land where all days are not fair,

Fair days went on till on another day

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,

Shining and still, but not for long to stay—

As if a thousand girls with golden hair

Might rise from where they slept and go away.”

'The Independence of Her Spacious Mind'

The finest tribute to one writer by another I’ve read of late is John Lukacs’ “Agnes Repplier, Writer and Essayist.” Repplier (1855-1950) published perhaps one-thousand essays during a writing career of seventy years. Lukacs unabashedly admires her and her work and convinces me that Repplier may be the most unjustly forgotten of American writers. His thirty-six-page essay generously quotes her work (she’s eminently quotable, as is Lukacs) and serves as an excellent introduction to so strong-willed and idiosyncratic a writer. She’s an excellent antidote to such earlier nineteenth-century Americans as the pallid Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lukacs writes: 

“She read everything; indeed, what she reread would be sufficient unto a department of English in our colleges now. One of the most attractive features of her writing is its unpredictability: neither frivolous nor impulsive, it sprang from the independence of her spacious mind.”

 

Repplier was able to support herself, her mother and sister with her writing in a way unimaginable today. She was a serious Roman Catholic and remains in some ways a charmingly old-fashioned writer, bookish, leisurely and occasionally tart, at once genteel and not. A native of Philadelphia, Repplier lived there all her life. She never married, had no children and published work on a sprawling array of subjects. Like the best journalists, she was a generalist, no specialist, widely knowledgeable, curious, democratic in spirit, with an occasionally acerbic wit. I’ve known several like her, few so industrious. Lukacs writes:

 

“‘Stupidity,’ she wrote wisely, ‘is not the prerogative of any one class or creed.’ She knew that most stupidity is not the result of neuro-cerebral incompetence but that it is self-induced and willful. ‘What the world asks now are state reforms and social reforms—in other words, the reformation of our neighbors. What the Gospel asks, and had always asked, is the reformation of ourselves—a harassing and importunate demand.”

 

In her essay on “Leisure” (Essays in Idleness, 1897), Repplier writes: “And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who, taking his life in his two hands, disposed of it as he thought fit, with no restless self-accusations on the score of indolence. In the world and of the world, yet always able to meet and greet the happy solitude of Gascony; toiling with no thought of toil, but rather ‘to entertain my spirit as it best pleased,’ this man wrought out of time a coin which passes current over the reading world.”

 

Repplier deserves rediscovery. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was proudly old-fashioned, autodidactic and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. Repplier at her best is piquant, witty and cant-free. She’s a fine model for essayists, a free-flowing aphorist and blessedly prolific

 

Her books are difficult to find, though Gutenberg has digitized eighteen of them. In 2009, Lukacs published a selection of her work, American Austen: The Forgotten Writings of Agnes Repplier (ISI Books).

 

[Lukacs’ essay is collected in Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, a Reader (ISI Books, 2005). It originally appeared in Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines 1900-1950 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980).]

'Knowledge, Real Lasting Felt Knowledge'

A reader asks why I so often write about poetry but am not a poet myself. “Have you ever written poems?” he asks. “Do you write them secretly and keep them to yourself?” I wrote a lot of it around age sixteen, like many delusional, love-struck teenagers. I’m glad I disposed of that stuff a lifetime ago. I was no Rimbaud. I had a brief relapse about twenty years ago under the cover of “light verse.” It too was embarrassing junk. Like most poets, I have no gift for it. I have always assumed a capacity for writing good verse is almost as rare as first-class musical composition and performance, mathematics and chess. 

So, why do I so often write about it? Because I admire and learn from language used well, with wit and precision, whether poetry or prose. It gives me pleasure. When I read and then write about, say, John Dryden or J.V. Cunningham, it deepens my enjoyment and, I hope, spurs others to share my pleasure. In his essay “Where Poems Come From,” a review of Stanley Burnshaw’s The Seamless Web (1970), Guy Davenport writes:

 

“It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.”

 

[Davenport’s essay is collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981).]

`A Random Light Meandering'

I knew a computer science professor who now works, I think, for Google. He was an interesting fellow who defied many CS stereotypes. He read books outside his field, for instance, and spoke in complete sentences. Ten or twelve years ago as I was walking across the engineering quadrangle toward the parking lot, I noticed him kneeling on the sidewalk outside the mechanical engineering building. He seemed to be looking at something in the grass. As I approached, I saw he was studying a fire-ant mound. He said two words: “Brownian motion.” 

The phenomenon is named for a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, who, in 1827, was the first to describe the random fluctuations of pollen particles suspended in a fluid. Strictly speaking, swarming ants are displaying Brownian motion only in a metaphorical sense, but the prof’s observation has stuck with me and I remember it whenever I see a swarm of ants or bees. I remembered it also when reading Howard Nemerov’s “The Crossing” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

 

“I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

 

“Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

 

“The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.”

 

In his 1965 prose work, Journal of the Fictive Life, Nemerov writes: “Like many poets, I read a good deal of science, and like most of the poets who do, I do not read it for the sake of science but rather for the sake of metaphor.” Nemerov took an intelligent amateur’s interest in science and mathematics. Consider his “Figures of Thought” (1978):

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into  death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame–

 

“How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship—that is the beautiful

In nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

“It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

'A Frangible and Transparent Failure'

The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Across its roughly eight-hundred lines the speaker gives the impression of fleeing something left unstated – not a scandal or crime but his unsatisfactory self. In the sixth and final section he writes: “Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say, / I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life, / A frangible and transparent failure.” The Italian can be translated: “I made a complete mess of it.” This indulgence in self-disgust continues: 

“My efforts at their best are negatives:

A poor attempt not to hurt anyone,

A goal which, in the very nature of things,

Is ludicrous because impossible.

Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes

Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses,

Ducts and arterial sluices of my body . . .”

 

Here, Hecht makes an inspired transition:

 

“. . . As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote:

‘Sweepings from Butcher Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,

Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,

Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.’”

 

Those are the concluding lines of “A Description of a City Shower,” a pastoral parody and my favorite among all of Swift’s poems, first published in The Tatler in October 1710. Pat Rogers in his edition of The Complete Poems (Yale University Press, 1983) tells us it was also Swift’s favorite. The final three rhyming lines are inspired. An early edition of the poem was subtitled an “imitation of Virgil’s Georg[ics].” Nearly as good as the passage quoted by Hecht are the lines leading up to them:

 

“Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,

And bear their trophies with them as they go:   

Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell   

What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.

They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,    

From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,   

And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge,

Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.”

'A Book's Power to Make You Think'

“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”

The most ebullient and unpretentious book about the reading life I know is Clive James’ Latest Readings, published four years before his death in 2019. James had already been diagnosed with B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia and other ailments and the book is laced with references to his failing health and imminent mortality but remains largely free of self-pity. It sometimes feels as though reading is keeping James alive, the way the narrator of Tristram Shandy (and, perhaps, its author) convinces himself that writing will forestall his death.

The sentence above is quoted from the introduction. In my own life the incidence of doctor visits and various medical tests has accelerated in recent months, and I’m facing three or four surgeries but nothing so dire as cancer. A reader asks an always-pertinent question: “What are you reading now?” Along with rereading Latest Readings:

A manuscript by R.L. Barth tentatively titled War Seems Sweet: Selected & Recent Vietnam War Poems

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul (2026) by Caroline Moorehead

Fall issue of The Jewish Review of Books

Captain Beefheart: The Biography (2002) by Mike Barnes

Browsing in an old favorite, Selections from the Writing of Walter Savage Landor (ed. Sidney Colvin, 1882)

Elsewhere in his introduction, James writes: “Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. You can practically sense that power when you pick the book up.”