'Of the Mind or of Memory or Invention'

What’s to become of the mildly introverted, privacy-loving, non-aligned personality? He has no taste for soapboxing. Perhaps he doesn’t vote and likely has never joined a political party, a church or even a bowling league. He is happiest reading, enjoying the company of family and friends, and pondering (often mistaken for doing nothing). He has no social media presence and is the diametric opposite of an “influencer.” 

Such thoughts are prompted by Irwin Edman (1896-1954), a name unknown to me until Sunday when Isaac Waisberg sent me a link to Edman’s book Under Whatever Sky (1951).  Isaac is among the internet’s quiet benefactors and asks for nothing in return. His IWP Books publishes volumes long out of print, including titles by Desmond MacCarthy, Jacques Barzun and John Jay Chapman. Edman was a prolific writer and throughout his adult life taught philosophy at Columbia University. Under What Sky collects the columns or brief essays he wrote for The American Scholar, starting in 1945.

 

Edman takes the title of his volume from George Santayana, whose The Philosophy of Santayana (1936, enlarged 1953) he edited for the Modern Library. Like the Spaniard, Edman seems to have been one of nature’s spectators, happiest when observing, not joining the swelter. In his first column, “All Time, All Existence,” he writes:

 

“‘Under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy.’ Nothing could better express than this sentence of Santayana’s the ambition and the illusion of the philosophic mind, the aspiration to survey the scene of nature and of life with such candor and exactness that the prejudices of time, place, and temperament will vanish and that the thoughts one speaks will be the thoughts of Nature herself. I have no such illusion.”

 

Edman tells us he will try to attain “the philosophical ambition to see even contemporary things under the aspect of eternity.” He writes “familiar essays” and usually avoids academic sententiousness. In the column titled “Dial Tone,” he describes the reassurance he feels when hearing a dial tone on the telephone, “a pleasure in the recognition, a sense that all is well.” This he likens to the pleasure he sometimes takes in a book:

 

“I have long cherished the belief that in reading one has a similar experience. In the first page, sometimes in the first paragraph, of a writer whom one has never read before, one is aware, in the tone and cadence of the sentences themselves, that one has the dial tone, or, perhaps, that the connection has been made. There will doubtless be a good deal about the book that will be a disappointment: perhaps the tone will be lost or the connection broken. But what a thrill it is to come upon it, if for the moment only.”

 

In the final column, “Conclusion,” Edman refers to his essays as “meditations, these incidental causeries” [OED: “an informal piece of writing, typically humorous and published as a short essay or newspaper column”]. That’s about right. A column written by an academic philosopher today would likely be pretentious, jargon-ridden, vogueish, preoccupied with politics and unreadable by a person outside a university. Edman fashions himself an Everyman, a sort of mid-twentieth-century Montaigne with a hint of Santayana. In “Conclusion,” Edman speculates about the world in 1994 and reveals himself as something of a prophet:   

 

“We are by all the signs moving into an era of standardization, of suffocating order, not altogether caused by external threats of tyranny. Soon play of mind and freedom of imagination may be completely suspect. . . . and tolerance may come to be the sign not of a just but of an empty mind. Only such literary works may be permitted as teach a wholesome doctrine, such as equality or justice, dogmatically defined by government edict. Only such treatises may be permitted as communicate facts it is considered urgent and timely to know. The reflective essay may be forbidden by public opinion if not by law. The merely playful exercises of the mind or of memory or invention may be regarded as truancy from rational behavior. The book that is merely harmless may be judged by that time the most harmful of all.”

'I Shall Not Be Here When You Are Gone'

Some very bright people I know pay attention to dreams, taking them seriously and interpreting them the way they might interpret a poem written in their honor. When I worked half a century ago in a Cleveland bookstore, we sold little pamphlets of dream interpretation, mostly to black customers. The books decrypted dream imagery. The presence of a cat meant thus and such . . . A regular customer explained to me that some people relied on the books when they played the numbers. This was alien to me but I understood it as yet another manifestation of the human urge to make sense of the world. 

My tendency is to think of dreams as intriguing or banal little peeks into the unconscious, but essentially a random firing of electrons, unaccompanied by a definitive scholarly gloss. In other words, entertainment, like an interesting new television streaming service. The other night my brother, who died in 2024, showed up in one of my dreams. We were in the woods behind the house where we grew up. Recounting a dream can be deadly dull, I know, and this one was hardly more than a flickering image. We were going somewhere, not wandering aimlessly, and I was not aware that he was dead. In other words, there was a veneer of realism mingled with fantasy about this brief narrative.

 

I woke in a mood of wonder and sadness. The primal part of me wanted to be comforted, as though Ken had come for a visit and wished to reassure me – of what? The more stringently rational part of me said: “Nope.”

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson returned to his home in Maine from Harvard in July 1892, in time for his father’s death. The poet was twenty-two and would live until 1935. As his biographer Scott Donaldson writes, “EAR would never be entirely quit of his father’s ghost.” In 1921 he wrote a sonnet, “Why He Was There”:  

 

“Much as he left it when he went from us

Here was the room again where he had been

So long that something of him should be seen,

Or felt–and so it was. Incredulous,

I turned about, loath to be greeted thus,

And there he was in his old chair, serene

As ever, and as laconic and as lean

As when he lived, and as cadaverous.

 

“Calm as he was of old when we were young,

He sat there gazing at the pallid flame

Before him. ‘And how far will this go on?’

I thought. He felt the failure of my tongue,

And smiled: ‘I was not here until you came;

And I shall not be here when you are gone.’”

'Clear Away the Obligations in Your Life'

“In order to write, you clear away the obligations in your life. No visits, no meals outside, no fencing practice, no walks. Now you can work, produce something worthwhile. And, onto the wide gray sheet of the day, your mind projects – nothing.”

 

I wish I had logged the number of times someone I interviewed – cop, nurse, musician, plumber – prefaced his conversation with: “I could write a book . . .” I understand this is not a thought-out literary aspiration; rather, an endorsement of one’s experience, a declaration that one’s life has been interesting and worth recounting. Customarily, nothing gets written. I recall only one exception. I interviewed a professor of psychology who also worked as a dance instructor. He actually wrote and self-published a memoir, which I agreed to edit. Often, I wonder how many people ever read, cover to cover, that little book.

 

The passage above is an entry from Jules Renard’s journal dated March 15, 1905. In his commonsensical way, Renard understood how our will subverts our best intentions, how good we are at lying to ourselves. How else to get through life? I mean, if I’m willing to give up fencing practice, shouldn’t I be able to write like Montaigne? Renard concludes his journal entry:

 

“I abolished at a stroke so many things that were important to me: poetry, fencing, fishing, hunting, swimming. When will I abolish prose? And literature? And life itself?”

 

[The Renard passages are taken from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Now I Live Predominantly Through Them'

“Books are to most men, now-a-days, not so much a luxury as a necessity. A home that has not its own small, yet highly prized and well used, library, must be inhabited by either poverty, or what is almost as bad, inactive and uncultivated intellect.” 

The source is The Bibliomaniac, a periodical started in Providence, R.I., by the book dealer Sidney Rider in 1867. Rider was a New England idealist, a true believer in the vivifying power of words, though his journal lasted only three issues.  His thinking and his prose have a clarity and charm we can admire somewhat sadly from a distance, as though it belonged to some remote stage of human evolution. Rider goes on:

 

“The great advantage of education is that it trains the mind to think, gives the man something to say, and enables him to say it in the best and most forceful way. Such education is not derived wholly from books. Books are like guide-posts to direct the young mind into the right road. But it depends upon the youth himself, whether he shall find worthy or worthless things in the road which he takes. . . . Knowledge must be digested to be of much value in the work of real education.”

 

Rider is an American exponent of self-reliance but not so fierce an idealist as to equate books and reading with true education. That resides in the sensibility of the individual and takes many forms. It has little or nothing to do with schools attended, degrees conferred, honorifics accompanying names.  Long ago Guy Davenport warned that we inhabit “an age when a college degree is becoming a certificate of illiteracy.” Too many are intimidated or impressed by that parade of initials after a name.

 

In “A Kingdom of Books,” about the British town Hay-on-Wye, Theodore Dalrymple writes: “I am not a bibliophile but a bibliomaniac: I have always lived partly through books, and now I live predominantly through them.”

I’ll accept “bibliophile” though I’m more comfortable with the humble “reader.” I’ve never been at ease with “bibliomaniac.” There’s nothing romantically attractive about madness in any form. The OED defines bibliomania as “extreme enthusiasm or passion for collecting, owning, or reading books,” and notes that the word first showed up in English in the eighteenth century. Fine distinctions – collecting and owning books are not the same as reading them. After all, books can be arranged on a shelf like bowling trophies. I’ve known book-hoarders who are not readers. Is the mere presence of good books a comfort? I’m honest enough to say yes, but it’s not a sensation I take too seriously. What I like is the company of books I have absorbed, whose contents over time I have incorporated into whatever passes for my sensibility.

My old friend Bill Healy named his bookshop Bibliomania when he opened it in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1981. He has since moved the business online. I bought dozens of books from Bill and sold him even more when money was especially tight. Steven Millhauser once visited the shop, found my former copy of W. Jackson Bate’s biography of Dr. Johnson (thanks to my bookplate) and bought it. I once found a beat-up first edition of Kerouac’s On the Road at a library sale, walked down the block and sold it to Bill so I could pay the rent. A bibliomaniac likely would have kept it. Consider what C.H. Sisson writes in “On Translating Dante,” the introduction to his version of The Divine Comedy:

 

“[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.”

'How Does It Go From There?'

“A lot of people claim that it does no good to cram one’s head with facts, but I hope that this little essay has proved that facts may be very fascinating things if properly assembled.” 

Even as a young man I suspected pedantry would not make me popular with the ladies. But what else did I have to offer? I could recite the capitals of all the states and the names of all the U.S. presidents (in order) and counted myself a pretty charming guy. Try telling that to one of the forty-three girls on whom I had an unrequited crush.

 

Readers of mostly forgotten humorists may recognize the tone of the sentence quoted at the top. Robert Benchley’s literary M.O. was making asinine claims with a straight face, like a painfully sincere Boy Scout. Benchley (1889-1945) was among the first “grownup” writers I read as a boy, along with Thurber and Twain. S.J. Perelman came a little later. Above I quote from “Literary Notes,” written in 1935 and collected in Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949). The piece begins, like any squib in a magazine with literary pretensions:

 

“This being the centenary of the death of Mrs. Felicia Hemans, perhaps we ought to give a thought to the Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck, and possibly, if time remains, to the Breaking Waves Which Dashed High. Those who do not wish to join in this sport will find falcons and shuttlecocks in the Great Hall. Ask Enoch to give them to you.”

 

It’s not necessary to know that Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835) was a real English poet, and that the two lines cited by Benchley are taken from “Casabianca” and “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,” respectively. At least some of Benchley’s readers ninety years ago would have gotten the allusions but would they have found “Hemans” a perfect name for a poetess? Benchley continues:

 

“Everyone knows how Mrs. Heman's famous poem begins:

 

“The boy stood on the burning deck,

Whence all but him had fled;

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.

 

“The question is: How does it go from there? Darned if I know.

 

“How typical this slipshod knowledge of great literary works is! How often do we find ourselves able to recite the first four lines of a poem, and then unable to keep our eyes open any longer!”

 

No question, much of Benchley is dated. Some of his film work remains amusing. Take a look at “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928). Admittedly, my enjoyment of his writing is tinged with nostalgia because I first read him when very young. Try reading “Literary Notes” again, this time substituting, say, Adrienne Rich’s name for Mrs. Felicia Dorthea Hemans’, and see if he still has a point.

'Pretty Twinklings'

How to cheer up a friend without sounding like a sap? Too often pep talks come off fake, obligatory and patronizing, as though composed by AI. How to preserve the essential human touch, the fondness we feel for someone we care about, without being glib or laying it on too thick? I don’t know. Charles Lamb delivers a template for such an effort in the letter he wrote to his friend Robert Lloyd on November 13, 1798: “You say that ‘this World to you seems drain’d of all its sweets!’ At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar! but I am afraid you meant more.”

 All of us see only ugliness and waste on occasion, but there’s a class of people unwilling or unable to see anything else. I once worked for an editor who returned from his first visit to Montreal and complained about the scratchiness of the hotel towels. Lamb goes on:

 

“O Robert, I don’t know what you call sweet. Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness by turns.”

 

Citing examples of “sweetness” – the gratuitous blessings of the world – is strategically shrewd. Who could argue with such bounty? Plenty of people, you say? You’re right, of course. But specifics, rather than airy encouragement and appeals to another’s sense of logic, seem likelier to buoy a burdened spirit. Lamb continues:

 

“Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things. . . . You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall. . . . I assure you I find this world a very pretty place.”

 

Lamb earned the right to encourage a friend and have his words carry conviction. Three years earlier, he had spent six weeks in an asylum. In 1796 his sister Mary fatally stabbed their mother. For the rest of his life, Lamb, who never married, remained her legal guardian. Consider this passage from “New Year’s Eve” (1821) among his Essays of Elia:

 

“A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”

'Luck Is That Part of Art Practice Replaces'

Spontaneity is overrated, in art as in life. Children are spontaneous and their productions are unlikely to please anyone but their doting parents. (I recall little of my sons’ wit and wisdom from their youngest days. Bright, entertaining kids but hardly Shakespeare.) When Hollywood shows a writer in thrall to his Muse, they give us a convulsive flurry of keyboard hammering. Visually speaking, writing is a bore. They seldom show forehead-wringing, perpetual revising, staring at the wall, consulting the dictionary or chug-a-lugging vodka. 

There’s an irony here, familiar to all honest writers. To lend poetry or prose the impression of spontaneity is hard work, while a spew of words is likely to seem wordy, labored and clumsy. So much for “spontaneous bop prosody” and our inheritance from the Romantics (Keats worked slavishly). The late Clive James writes in Poetry Notebook (2016):

 

“There is a dangerous half-truth that has always haunted the practice and appreciation of the arts: too much technique will inhibit creativity. Despite constant evidence that too little technique will inhibit it worse, the idea never quite dies, because it is politically too attractive.”

 

Thus, Allen Ginsberg is a bore, Alexander Pope remains a thrill. A new literary journal, Portico, publishes a poem by Boris Dralyuk, “Dino Dozes,” prefaced by a note: “In old age Dean Martin ate dinner every Sunday night at the counter of the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard”:

 

“While Dino dozes Jerry pulls new faces.

Skinny’s backstage and mentions that the place is

crawling with scouts. They need their act to click,

so Jerry hones the fine points of his schtick.

Luck is that part of art practice replaces.

 

“But luck is Dino’s long suit. It embraces

his ease and swagger, looms like an oasis

before the average schmoes—they feel so slick

while Dino dozes.

 

“Next thing you know, he’s in the world’s good graces.

And then he’s not. These days Dino retraces

his groggy steps. One, two—ain’t that a kick?

All gone. Not that he cared for it to stick.

What ghosts may rise the Hamlet’s Scotch erases

while Dino dozes."

Boris crafts a conversational ease, anecdotal casualness, a good story between friends. It could have been slop, little more than Hollywood gossip. Clive James goes on: 

 

“The elementary truth that there are levels of imagination that a poet won’t reach unless formal restrictions force him to has largely been supplanted . . . by a more sophisticated (though far less intelligent) conviction that freedom of expression is more likely to be attained through letting the structure follow the impulse.”