'Seven Books'

“Decline and Fall is still worth reading, not just for historiographical, literary, and psychological reasons, but also for what we still learn from it about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire through the eyes of a highly talented person who spent long years reading and thinking about it.”

Nicholas Tate refers not to Evelyn Waugh’s first novel but to Edward Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). Tate is the stubborn sort of reader who sees no reason why we shouldn’t read the books that nourished our forebears, who kept them in print for centuries.

 

Last month I wrote about a friend who is reading Gibbon’s masterwork for the first time, and he has sent along an interim report on the experience. “I’m reading the book in the [David] Wormsley edition, as you suggested,” he writes. “I’m going about it systematically and reading 10 pages or so every evening, after dinner. I’m taking notes and looking up a lot of information on the internet as I’m reading. I look forward to this time every day.” Precisely the sort of news I like to hear.

 

I stumbled on a pdf of Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. I know nothing about Tate but I suspect there’s a story behind his choice of that imprint. I’ve only skimmed portions of the book but already I admire his resolve and scholarship. Here are the other books he devotes chapters to:

 

On Duties (44 B.C.), Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

Parallel Lives (early second century A.D.), Plutarch

 

The Consolations of Philosophy (524-525 A.D.), Boethius

 

Le Morte Darthur (1469-70), Thomas Malory

 

The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), John Bunyan

 

Waverley (1814), Walter Scott

 

Nothing exotic or arguably obscure. The only volume I’ve not read is Malory’s, mostly because I’ve never had much interest in the Arthurian legends. To his credit, Tate several times refers to Theodore Dalrymple’s These Spindrift Pages (Mirabeau, 2023), which he refers to as “a book about the thoughts that spring from looking through the books in the author’s library, reminisces about second-hand bookshops and books he has bought with traces of their previous owners.” Tate is never scolding or snobbish. He loves these books, of course, but more importantly he knows our ancestors did as well. Their endorsement speaks to us. I plan to read Seven Books in its entirety. In a chapter titled “Why the ‘Great Unread’?” Tate writes:

 

“We have also moved away from a society with an educated class associated with the fostering of a ‘high culture’, and permeated by the Aristotelian idea that the superior life is the life of thought, to one that Mario Vargas Llosa has described as a ‘civilisation of spectacle’, in which cultural objects are assumed to be ephemeral (como el popcorn), exist solely for purposes of entertainment and are evaluated in terms of their financial success, and in which the old notion of cultural hierarchies has largely been lost.”

 

[Tate refers to Vargas Llosa’s La civilización del espectáculo (2012).]

'Ignorance, Madam, Pure Ignorance'

Like any reasonably honest but not too honest person, I hate making mistakes in print. It’s embarrassing and sloppy, often implying a lazy contempt for readers and the truth. 

While covering the corruption trial of a city official in Indiana more than forty years ago, I got something significantly wrong. The story was played on the front page and was avidly read by a lot of readers. Complaints and demands for retraction and correction flooded in. So did accusations that I had done it on purpose to slander the accused. I had to write a fairly lengthy correction and apology, which the editors had “lawyered” (a common verb among journalists), and it was published in the next day’s editions. I felt face-burningly embarrassed for a long time.

 

I recently misdated a literary event in a blog post. It was a silly, careless slip (actually, a mathematical error) which I have since corrected. By now I ought to be accustomed to the ferocity of online fault-finding, especially when the matter is trivial. An anonymous reader noticed my goof and delivered a strident sermon on my idiocy, followed by several other overheated emails. I encourage readers who detect legitimate errors to inform me immediately. A blog is strictly an amateur operation when it comes to quality assurance. I want to get it right, so readers’ help is always appreciated.

 

I’m reminded of a passage in The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, published in six volumes between 1978 and 1984. George Lyttleton (1883-1962) was a longtime housemaster and English teacher at Eton. Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-99) was a publisher and editor probably best remembered for editing the Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). Hart-Davis had been Lyttleton’s student at Eton in 1925-26. The men met again at a dinner party in 1955 and started a regular correspondence that continued until Lyttleton’s death in 1962. Here is Lyttleton, in a passage that reminds me of my mistake and my perturbed reader:

 

“Do you ever get things quite wrong? Because here is the perfect defense: ‘What is obvious is not always known, what is known is not always present. Sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance; slight avocations will seduce attention. And casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning.’ Isn’t it perfect? Johnson, of course.”

 

Lyttleton is quoting from the “Preface” to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its characteristic tone of mingled humility and audacity. Lyttleton’s letters are peppered with casual references to Johnson’s life and work. In this context, such allusions are never stuffy or deployed in a show-off manner. They amount to the small talk of civilized men.

 

Johnson himself was not immune to error. In the first edition of his Dictionary he defined pastern as “the knee of a horse.” In fact, that definition refers to the fetlock. Boswell tells us that some years later, when a woman asked why he had made such a careless error, Johnson replied, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”

'Amused Sympathetic Affection'

“He was not at all put off by the spectacle of human imperfection.”

 

That’s what keeps us amused, right? As a species we’re an inconsistent mess. We’re angry when we don’t get our way and when we get it we’re disappointed. That’s the engine that drives human affairs, our rapacious vanity and intolerance. Above, Lord David Cecil is writing of his friend the critic Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952) in the preface to the latter’s posthumously published Humanities (1954).

 

I happened to be reading MacCarthy (an old-fashioned lover of books, prose and ideas) again when someone sent me a compilation video of various young Americans calling, in unambiguous language, for the murder of their fellow imperfect humans (a redundancy) – that is, people with whom they disagree. It was shocking to see such lip-smacking relish for homicide. They reminded me of the nihilists in late-nineteenth-century Russia, when murder became fashionable and members of the middle class and students endorsed and practiced killing. As Gary Saul Morson, the historian of that time and place, puts it in Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023):

 

“For those addicted to the thrill of danger and the intensity of the moment, familiar violence soon becomes routine and ceases to have the desired effect. As with addictive drugs, larger and larger doses are needed. The war on boredom grows boring; repeated violence soon seems almost peaceful; and the struggle against everydayness turns into an everyday affair that one must struggle against.”

 

Times change. Human nature doesn't. Good writers are more scarce and less valued. Cecil goes on to describe MacCarthy as a grownup blessed with a sense of humility:

 

“The worried, undignified animal called man, bustling about with his unwieldy bundle of inconsistent hopes and fears, virtues and weaknesses, stirred in him the amused sympathetic affection of one who feels himself akin to him and, therefore, has no reason to look on him with dislike or contempt. Or even disrespect: there was nothing of the sentimental cynic about Desmond MacCarthy.”

 

Consider how MacCarthy treats Sydney Smith (1771-1845), Anglican minister, advocate for Roman Catholic rights and one of the greatest wits in the English tradition. MacCarthy finds much to admire and much to dismiss in Smith:

 

“Like many of the great wits, like Voltaire himself, he was a champion of bourgeois sense and rational philistinism. Like Voltaire he was intensely social and only lived intensely when he was busy or in company; like the greater man he was an admirable friend. He could hardly have been more benevolent, but he was also kinder than that prophet of eighteenth century bourgeois morality. It did not make him chuckle to give pain, though he loved a scrap. He was good-natured – in fact an English Voltaire. Not such a good writer – Heavens no! But still he could say with truth, 'I never wrote anything very dull in my life.'”

 

[Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has republished Humanities and five other titles by MacCarthy.]

'Look for the Ridiculous in Everything'

“Thirty years old today, and all around me I feel the waters of melancholy recede.

“Thirty years old! Now I’m convinced I shall not escape death.”

 

Two statements written by the same man on the same day and, according to popular understanding, utterly contradictory. Awareness of our mortality makes us pensive if not clinically depressed. But that doesn’t take into account the roughhewn, commonsensical genius of Jules Renard. He is writing in his Journal on February 22, 1894, with a peasant’s pragmatism and the gift of dry irony. He has just turned age thirty and two-thirds of his life has already passed; though, of course, he doesn't know that. On February 22, 1904, he writes:

 

“Forty years old! For the sage, death is perhaps merely the passage from one day to the next. He dies as others turn forty.”

 

Renard here is cagier. Does he deem himself a sage? He seems never have taken himself too seriously – a rare and essential virtue. He never whines. Here, just two years later:

 

“Forty-two years old. What have I done? Next to nothing, and now I do nothing at all.

 

“I have less talent, money health, fewer readers, fewer friends, but more resignation.

 

“Death appears to me as a wide lake that I am approaching, whose outlines I begin to make out.

 

“Am I any better a person? Not much. I have less energy to do wrong.”

 

A minor sinner’s self-assessment. Not bad enough to be evil nor good enough to be a saint. Pride in both directions kept within uneasy boundaries. The entry for February 22, 1908:

 

“Forty-four is when you begin to give up hope of doubling before quitting.

 

“I feel old, but would not wish to be younger by as much as five minutes.”

 

Signs of genuine, hard-earned maturity. The opposite of Yeats and his monkey glands or the male Boomer with a gray ponytail and Grateful Dead tattoos. Finally, the Journal entry from February 22, 1910:

 

“Forty-six today. How much longer do I have? Until the autumn?”  

 

He didn’t make it. Renard was born on February 22, 1864, and died on May 22, 1910, of arteriosclerosis – a condition readily treatable today -- at age forty-six. As he wrote in his Journal on February 17, 1890, “Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.”

 

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

'Whence Comes That Small Continuous Silence?'

“Whence comes that small continuous silence / Haunting the livelong day?—” 

We might think of Walter de la Mare as the poetic opposite of more clamorous poets like Ezra Pound. De la Mare hints, whispers, evokes without naming. The lines above are taken from his six-line poem “Swallows Flown” (Memory and Other Poems, 1938). The birds in the title are not mentioned in the body of the poem, which seems appropriate in a verse about absence:

 

“Whence comes that small continuous silence

Haunting the livelong day?—

This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

Once ravished my heart away?

As if a loved one, too little valued,

Had vanished—could not stay?”

 

All of us live with absence, whether the result of death, geographical change or the dissolution of friendship. Remove the title and who or what would you conclude is being described in de la Mare’s poem? It’s a sort of Rorschach test for the reader. I might think of our dog, who died this week, or my brother.

 

Swallows arrive in de la Mare’s England in the spring and move on early in the autumn. A little reading suggests the sounds they produce change as the seasons change. Early on we would hear courtship songs followed by the chattering of the newly hatched brood. As they fledge, the sounds diminish and then the swallows leave.

 

I’m reminded of William Maxwell’s 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows, structured around another absence -- the death in the 1918 flu epidemic of the main character’s mother. Bunny is eight, Maxwell was ten when his mother died in the same epidemic. Maxwell takes his title from Yeats’ “Coole Park, 1929” and uses six lines from the third stanza as his novel’s epigraph:   

 

“They came like swallows and like swallows went,

And yet a woman’s powerful character

Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;

And half a dozen in formation there,

That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,

Found certainty upon the dreaming air . . .”

'May the Days Be Worthy of Your Wonder'

The young couple across the cul-de-sac from us have just had their third child, a son this time. The neighborhood has always been rich in children. When we moved in fourteen years ago, sixteen kids lived here in the street’s nine houses. Twelve of them were boys. Now there are seventeen kids, even with our three sons living in Maryland, Peru and Westchester County. None of the current crop appears to be a delinquent. They’re noisy, of course, and forever riding bicycles and scooters. One kid even has an e-bike. I had forgotten that children always run if they have a choice in the matter, and yelling is the language they speak. 

We hear the fertility rate in the United States – the number of children born to women of childbearing years – reached a record low in 2024 and dropped even lower last year. I don’t claim to understand the economics or sociology of this trend. It just seems sad. Children are difficult and exhausting but they make everything worthwhile. When you have a child, you’re forced to relinquish your fiercely held self-centeredness and live for another being. You have something you would gladly give up your own life to keep safe.

 

Yvor Winters and his wife, the poet/novelist Janet Lewis, had a son and a daughter. Winters concludes his poem “A Prayer for My Son” with these lines:

 

“Eternal Spirit, you

Who guided Socrates,

Pity this small and new

Bright soul on hands and knees.”

 

Daniel Mark Epstein published another blessing poem, “Caesarean,” in the Winter 1998 issue of The American Scholar. Note the final three lines:

 

“Startled from ancient sleep in a dark house

By crashing walls, harsh torches, strangers

Dragging him naked through his mother's blood,

No hero would stand up to the invaders

With such intrinsic dignity as you showed

This morning, the first day of your life.

At the shock of air you cried out loud

In sight of a new world and a world lost.

Then you were quiet, curious, engrossed,

Blue eyes half-open bearing a ripple of light

From that primordial ocean cast asunder.

May your vision never weary of the sight

Of this strange country and our stranger ways;

And may the days be worthy of your wonder.” 

'Mere Gall Is No Better Than Mere Sugar'

“The attendants at literary tea-parties are not, as a rule, readers of books. Reviews of books are more to their taste.”

In my younger years I was an occasional attendee at such gatherings, though most were less tea-parties than beer-and-a-bump soirées. Sometimes a writer was present. I remember Jerzy Kosinski and Anthony Burgess out-drinking everyone and remaining at least technically conscious. But Max Beerbohm identifies the essential quality of such shindigs: book chat, ass-kissing, and more talk of publishers, agents and critics than of actual books. I outgrew my taste for literary stargazing pretty quickly.

Beerbohm is reviewing Maxim Gorki’s play “The Lower Depths” in the December 5, 1903 issue of the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. Russian literature was in vogue at this time in English society. Constance Garnett was translating Tolstoy, Goncharov, Turgenev and Chekhov, among others. Before taking on the Gorki production, Beerbohm indicts the fashionable crowd:

“Last week I wrote harshly about the English people’s contempt for the things of the mind. But I think I prefer that stolid contempt to the gushing superficial curiosity evinced in certain little private circles. The attitude which may be called ‘the literary tea-party attitude’ seems to me of all attitudes the most dreadful.”

Beerbohm’s experience is true to my own. He recalls “those brief and frantic little conversations into which the guests at literary tea-parties plunge as though they had something worth saying and as though there were something worth hearing” I remember. The rage du jour was Gorki. When young I read his strident stories and plays and remember mercifully little about them. So it is with Beerbohm and his demolition of “The Lower Depths”:

“There must be some kind of artistic unity—unity either of story or of idea. There must be a story, though it need not be stuck to like grim death; or there must be, with similar reservation, an idea. Gorki has neither asset. . . . Enough that he gives us, honestly and fearlessly, ‘a slice of life’? Enough, certainly, if he did anything of the kind. But he doesn’t. ‘The Lower Depths’ is no ‘slice.’ It is chunks, hunks, shreds and gobbets, clawed off anyhow, chucked at us anyhow.”

Beerbohm’s indictment remains pertinent, for ours is an age in which propaganda often supplants the artistically rendered in any form. He dismisses the imitative fallacy:

“We are not at all squeamish. But we demand of the playwright who deals with ugly things, just as we demand of the playwright who deals with pretty things, something more than the sight of his subject-matter. Mere gall is no better than mere sugar. It is worse. Mere sugar is not disgusting. Nor is gall disgusting if it be rightly prepared. In other words, horrible subject-matter ceases to be horrible when it is treated by a fine artist.”

I think first of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Gorky later became one of Stalin’s toadies. In a note to his edition of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973) Simon Karlinsky writes:

“Gorky’s anti-intellectualism became more pronounced in subsequent years. One of its ugliest manifestations is described in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, in which we find Gorky using his august position in the post-revolutionary literary life to deprive the freezing and starved poet Osip Mandelstam of the pair of trousers he needed to survive through the winter. ‘The trousers themselves were a small matter,’ wrote Mandelstam’s widow, ‘but they spoke eloquently of Gorky’s hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him.'”

Elsewhere in Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam reports that when informed of the poet Nikolay Gumilyov’s pending execution in 1921, Gorky did nothing. With Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilyov was founder of the poetic movement called Acmeism. In 1932, Gorky was decorated with the Order of Lenin, as were, later, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, Enver Hoxha, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela, Nikita Khrushchev and Stalin.