`A Hundred Familiar Objects Which No Longer Exist'

In his Life of Johnson, Boswell reproduces a letter Johnson wrote to him on Sept. 1, 1777, during a visit to his hometown of Lichfield. Characteristically, Johnson is philosophical about his return:

“Life admits not of delays; when pleasure can be had, it is fit to catch it: Every hour takes away part of the things that please us, and perhaps part of our disposition to be pleased. When I came to Lichfield, I found my old friend Harry Jackson dead. It was a loss, and a loss not to be repaired, as he was one of the companions of my childhood. I hope we may long continue to gain friends; but the friends which merit or usefulness can procure us, are not able to supply the place of old acquaintance, with whom the days of youth may be retraced, and those images revived which gave the earliest delight. If you and I live to be much older, we shall take great delight in talking over the Hebridean Journey.”

More than a century later, in 1882, Mark Twain spent two months revisiting the Mississippi River and his birthplace on its banks, Hannibal, Mo., in preparation for writing Life on the Mississippi. In Chapter LIII, “My Boyhood’s Home,” Twain describes an experience similar to Johnson’s:

“It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and no as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed Holiday’s Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. I said, `Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.’

“The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again – convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced me to say, `I see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.’”

Each time I return to the house where I grew up, now occupied by my brother and his family, a piece of me is surprised and angered that 1962 has passed. Who are these strangers inhabiting the houses of my childhood neighbors? What happened to the towering silver maple that stood by the end of our driveway, and the fence of 4-by-4s my father built along two sides of our lot? And the plum tree outside the backdoor that attracted so many wasps in the late summer when its fruit fell to the ground? And the portulaca along the driveway, that it was my job to harvest for seeds each fall? And where are Richard “Bimbo” Opalka, Johnny and Karen Pirko, and the Krotine brothers? Gone, like the “hundred familiar objects which no longer exist” that Twain describes, yet more real in memory than a photograph.

`Innumerable Prejudices'

Samuel Johnson writes in The Rambler, No. 21 (May 29, 1750):

“We are blinded in examining our own labours by innumerable prejudices. Our juvenile compositions please us, because they bring to our minds the remembrance of youth; our later performances we are ready to esteem, because we are unwilling to think that we made no improvement; what flows easily from the pen charms us, because we read with pleasure that which flatters our opinion of our own powers; what was composed with great struggles of the mind we do not easily reject, because we cannot bear that so much labour should be fruitless. But the reader has none of these prepossessions, and wonders that the authour is so unlike himself, without considering that the same soil will, with different culture, afford different products.”

Writing is an intensely private business performed in public. Its peculiar, bifold nature leaves us susceptible to all the traps set by our self-centeredness: rationalization, over-sensitivity, blindness, resentment and general self-puffery.

On Wednesday, I wrote a post about A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell, in which I referred to his 12-novel cycle as a “roman a fleuve,” which is accurate but not pertinent to the point I was trying to make. I was thinking “roman a clef” but writing “roman a fleuve.” My knee-jerk excuses, which “flatter my opinion of my powers,” as Johnson would say, include holiday bustle, tiredness, bad French and impatience (note that Kafka diagnosed impatience as a form of laziness). All are accurate and none is satisfactory. It was simple carelessness, and a thoughtful, sharp-eyed reader caught my mistake. In his/her anonymous comment, he/she writes, more articulately than I:

“Roman a fleuve or roman a clef? I believe DMOT could be considered pretty indisputably a fleuve, less so a clef, which is your point I think. Famous characters such as Bernard Montgomery are acknowledged with little attempt at masking (I think Monty’s name is actually used, for one); does this illegitimate DMOT as a roman a clef? Can friends and acquaintances of the author be considered significant enough models to make their fictional counterparts a clef, e.g. Widmerpool, even if they have minor notoriety in the public sphere? Such a reduction leads pretty easily to absurdity, with any novel that mixes in the author’s experience being a potential “roman a clef,” which is as you say an uninteresting approach to DMOT.”

What impresses and pleases me about the comment is the writer’s civility, his/her devotion to understanding and appreciation, not pointing out an error to make himself look good. I detect no swagger of self-triumph, so typical of much online discourse. Many e-mails and comments sent to my blog and others sound petulant and scolding, like my younger sons when they win at Chutes and Ladders. This is criticism that educates. I hope, Mr./Ms. Anonymous, you will write again

`Formulaic Redundancy'

I remember three dreams from childhood, all bad, and the scariest involved a telephone. I was drifting down the stairs of our house, from the second floor where our bedrooms were to the short hallway leading to the living room and kitchen. I turned the corner into the kitchen, and on the left was the telephone, a heavy black rotary-dial model, as most of them were in the nineteen-fifties. At the center of the dial was a white paper disc printed with our phone number and covered with transparent plastic. In my dream, the disc was replaced by an unblinking but living eye, like the one atop the pyramid on a dollar bill. The dream was silent, and that, combined with the sensation of drifting toward the eyeball telephone was horrifying.

I remembered this dream unexpectedly while reading Kafka: The Decisive Years, by Reiner Stach. The book is laced with interesting digressions, including one on early telephone use, and on Kafka’s aversion to the device – an aversion I’ve always shared. I think of the telephone not as a means of communion, but a way to maintain distance, giving and receiving cold information without revealing much about one’s self. It’s protective and secure, and was even more so in the days before caller-ID. Here’s Stach:

“Kafka, who always sought closeness, preferred the slow and challenging medium of the exchange of letters, but he was reluctant to use the telephone, particularly with women, although this medium offers to a greater degree the illusion of physical presence The formulaic redundancy of many telephone conversations today proves Kafka right: neither speed nor directness of a medium automatically creates intimacy. The casual use of the telephone is a cultural development of recent vintage. . . . Telephones force us to respond, without necessarily knowing who is on the line, whenever the telephone rings, and there is no recourse if the other party suddenly hangs up.”

Fortunately, the other party has no recourse if we hang up. Kafka would be appalled by the faux intimacy of e-mail and instant-messaging, and the false sense of community some prophets of technology have claimed for them. The telephone still feels like a big, disembodied eye – or ear – that I have reluctantly permitted to enter my house.

`Purple Patch'

Thanks to Rus Bowden, via Frank Wilson, for letting us know about “Purple Patch,” a literary feature in the Daily Times of Pakistan, based in Lahore. If I understand it correctly, “Purple Patch” is a venue for literature in the broadest sense, publishing brief essays by contemporary writers, including Andrew Delbanco, Melville’s most recent biographer, but also older work by W. Somerset Maughm and, most intriguingly, Samuel Johnson. This past Saturday, the Daily Times ran an excerpt on poetry from The History of Rasselas, the Prince of Abyssinia.

Who can imagine an American newspaper publishing an extended passage from Rasselas, even though it long ago entered the public domain and would cost nothing to reprint? Imagine the possibilities: Montaigne, Swift, Thoreau and Henry James – in the newspaper! Most American papers routinely squander newsprint on horoscopes, bridge columns and mediocre comic strips. Why not something more wholesome?

I’m not surprised that Pakistani editors picked Rasselas, which Johnson wrote and published in 1759. As W. Jackson Bate notes in his great life of Johnson:

“Its appeal was almost immediate. Within the next generation the book was being read – and has continued to be read – in every part of the English-speaking world. It has been estimated that an English or American edition has appeared almost every year since it was first published.”

And here is Bate’s explanation for the book’s sustained popularity:

“….the main reason Rasselas quickly became – and remains – the classic it is, though the time he devoted to it was so short (less than the time devoted to any other classic in the history of literature, for which we know the actual timetable, except the `great odes’ of Keats), is that here we have distilled, in this brief, richly brooding story, so much of the total character of mind – the power of subsuming, the sweep and readiness of intellect, the appealing humanity, the general style and tone – of one of the most refreshingly practical of reflective natures ever to write about human experience.”

Lucky Lahore readers!

`Literature is Not Always Like Life'

On Tuesday, with the gift cards I received for Christmas from my brother- and sister-in-law, I bought the four-volume edition of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, published in paperback by the University of Chicago Press. I never thought I would own Powell’s great 12-novel cycle, originally published between 1951 and 1976. It seemed too expensive, too extravagant, not the sort of gift I’m likely to lavish on myself. I’ve read the entire series twice, in 1980 and in 1999, and it’s one of those rare books that is so true and compelling, so inevitable in its fictional solidity, that it induces dread as you approach its conclusion and homesickness once you have finished reading it, and for years afterwards.

Critics of Powell’s novel tend to focus obsessively on the supposed living models for his characters, reducing his majestic architecture to a tiresome roman a clef. James Atlas followed a similarly reductive strategy in his biography of Saul Bellow. Knowing who Widmerpool “really” was contributes nothing to our pleasure or understanding. American readers shouldn’t be discouraged by the novel’s bulk or its intransigently English character. A Dance should be read as great comedy, regardless of the reader’s nationality, not as a transcription of English social history. In his essay “Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information,” James Wood dismisses the conventional wisdom among reviewers that Wolfe’s characters resemble Dickens’ in their vividness and grotesquerie. He writes:

“Literature is not always like life. Why should it be? Sometimes the real itself is not always realistic, because it is incredible . . . . What is good `documentation,’ good reporting, may be lousy literature. And there is another way, of course, in which the heavy documentation of detail is not necessarily realistic: it is not through documentation that most of us absorb or present or remember detail. We do not boil in a fever of petits faits vrais; we shiver in the cool temperature of particulars.”

Wood’s judgment is shrewd and elegantly phrased, and is helpfully apropos of Powell’s fiction. Powell is not a journalist out to pin his generation in a specimen drawer.

A Dance holds manifold pleasures for well-read readers, including the quietly unobtrusive theme of Robert Burton (1577-1640) and his Anatomy of Melancholy. Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, writes a book about Burton, just as Powell himself wrote one about Burton’s younger contemporary, John Aubrey (1629-1695). At the conclusion of the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Powell has Jenkins write:

“For some reason one of Robert Burton’s torrential passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind:

“`I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, firs, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honors conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.’”

One more paragraph, narrated by Jenkins, remains at the close of A Dance, but you must have read the preceding 12 volumes to hear the no-longer-secret melodies and all the themes resolved. That’s what I plan to do again this year.

`Natural Inducements to Jollity and Conversation'

As always, I received more gifts for Christmas than I deserve. Chief among them was having my three my sons under my roof for the first time in too long. My wife gave me the long-coveted four-volume Grove Centenary Edition of Samuel Beckett, the three-CD Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, by Tom Waits, and the usual wasabi peanutss, jalapeno pistachios, hot sauce and clothes. My oldest son gave me a book about Bob Dylan and a three-CD set of Sun Studio recordings.

From my sister- and brother-in-law I got Borders gift cards, and my wife’s parents gave me two first editions I had admired on their shelves when we visited them in Fredericksburg, Va., last summer: Thurber Country (1953), by James Thurber, and The Tents of Wickedness (1959), by Peter DeVries. In a pleasing coincidence, the latter is dedicated “To James and Helen Thurber.” It also carries a wonderful epigraph from a letter Sydney Smith wrote to Bishop Blomfield:

“You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.”

Random Christmas Day reading in Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays uncovered this fitting observation in No. 80, from Dec. 22, 1750:

“Winter brings natural inducements to jollity and conversation. Differences, we know, are never so effectually laid asleep, as by some common calamity: An enemy unites all to whom he threatens danger. The rigour of winter brings generally to the same fire-side those, who, by the opposition of inclinations, or difference of employment, moved in various directions through the other parts of the year; and when they have met, and find it their mutual interest to remain together, they endear each other by mutual compliances, and often wish for the continuance of the social season, with all its bleakness and all its severities.”

Only a native Northerner like Johnson could express gratitude for the social effects of winter. Christmas in Houston was chilly and damp, with fallen leaves turning to impasto in the driveway. A Texas winter possesses the worst aspects of spring and fall and none of their charms. This comes from the same Johnson essay:

“The nakedness and asperity of the wintry world always fills the beholder with pensive and profound astonishment; as the variety of the scene is lessened, its grandeur is increased; and the mind is swelled at once by the mingled ideas of the present and the past, of the beauties which have vanished from the eyes, and the waste and desolation that are now before them.”

`Something Has Been Beheld for the First Time'

My oldest son arrived Saturday from New York City, having already resolved a crisis familiar to every uncommonly common reader. He had almost finished reading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but left it in his dorm room in Manhattan. In the airport terminal in Newark he soothed his panic by buying two paperbacks, both novels by Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit and A Tale of Two Cities. Say what you will of Philip Roth’s hometown, its airport services the needs of desperate readers.

Among other things, I’m reading After-Thought, a collection of reviews and essays published in 1962 by Elizabeth Bowen. She has much to say about our complex relations with fiction. In “Truth and Fiction,” based on three unscripted talks she gave on the BBC in 1956, Bowen writes:

“The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.”

Every common-sensical reader knows this, though many literary theorists do not. Good fiction – even some lousy fiction – has a way of displacing real life, making room for itself in our memories, imaginations and sensibilities. My son, now 19, is not the first man to have fallen in love with Natasha Rostova while reading War and Peace. Of course, his happiness when Natasha and Pierre Bezukhov are, at last, married, is mingled with jealousy. I suppose this is not very sophisticated (except on Tolstoy’s part), but it’s certainly human. Bowen understands:

“A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had. And like all experiences, it is added to by the power of different kinds of people, in different times, to feel and to comment and to explain.”

I read less fiction today than I did when I was younger, and much of what I read is a novel or story I have already read two, or three, or six times. Contemporary fiction, at least in the United States, holds little attraction. I remember reading only three new novels in 2006, all of which I reviewed for newspapers – The Prisoner of Guantanamo, by Dan Fesperman (pulp rubbish); The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers (dull, pretentious); and Everyman, by the aforementioned Philip Roth (a small masterpiece).

Fiction writers in the United States have suffered a failure of talent, obviously, but also a failure of nerve. Glibness, superficial cleverness and lazy irony have replaced “adding to experience,” as Bowen might put it. Novelists have internalized the instant gratification spawned and encouraged by television, much of the Internet, dumbed-down education and the resulting marginal literacy. How many of us, without classroom pressure, still read “Ward No. 6,” The Spoils of Poynton and Nostromo? And without such experience, can we still call ourselves educated – in books and life? Can we aspire to such things as Bowen describes in another essay from After-Thought, “The Roving Eye,” which concerns how fiction writers choose subject matter:

“Unsuspected meaning in everything shines out; yet, we have the familiar re-sheathed in mystery. Nothing is negative; nothing is commonplace. For it is not that the roving eye, in its course, has been tracing for us the linaments of a fresh reality? Something has been beheld for the first time.”

`The Myrth of the Honest'

Little is known with certainty about the English writer of Nicholas Breton (1554?-1626), a contemporary of Shakespeare. In its mingling of piety, sentimentality and verbosity, much of his poetry is unreadable. The rest is tired pastoral verse (“The Arbour of Amorous Devices” is misleadingly titled). In the year of his death, however, Breton published a little prose marvel, Fantastickes, chronicling the months of the year, the holidays and the cycle of seasons. His word-drunk account of Christmas is both earthy and devout in a typically Elizabethan manner, and is worth quoting at length:

“It is now Christmas, and not a Cup of drinke must passe without a Carroll, the Beasts, Fowle and Fish, come to a generall execution, and the Corne is ground to dust for the Bakehouse, and the Pastry: Cards and Dice purge many a purse, . . . now good cheere and welcome, and God be with you, and I thanke you: and against the new yeere, provide for the presents: the Lord of Mis-rule is no meane man for his time, and the ghests of the high Table must lacke no Wine: the lusty bloods must looke about them like men, and piping the dauncing puts away much melancholy: stolne Venison is sweet, and a fat Coney is worth money: . . . a good fire heats all the house, and a full Almes-basket makes the Beggars Prayers: the Maskers and Mummers make the merry sport: . . . Swearers and Swaggerers are sent away to the Ale-house, and unruly Wenches goe in danger of Judgement: Musicians now make their Instruments speake out, and a good song is worth the hearing. In summe, it is holy time, a duty in Christians, for the remembrance of Christ, and custome among friends, for the maintenance of good fellowship: in briefe, I thus conclude of it: I hold it a memory of the Heavens Love, and the worlds peace, the myrth of the honest, and the meeting of the friendly.”

`Highly Improved By Labour and Manure'

Like all good readers I read selfishly, alert for images of myself, whether flattering or otherwise. Six years ago this week, I began reading Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in the three-volume Penguin Classics edition, edited by David Womersley. I finished on Feb. 12, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, having read little else in the interim. That was a harsh winter, even by upstate New York standards, and now I associate Gibbon’s glorious prose with deep snow, low skies and cold feet. Afterwards, as a reward, I read Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life, weighing in at a sylph-like 237 pages. Here’s one of many pleasing passages:

“I am endowed with a cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, and a natural disposition to repose rather than to action: some mischievous appetites and habits have perhaps been corrected by philosophy or time. The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigour from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure, and I am not sensible of any decay of the mental faculties. The original soil has been highly improved by labour and manure; but it may be questioned whether some flowers of fancy, some grateful errors, have not been eradicated with the weeds of prejudice.”

The “manure” reference is apt.

The Other Dickens Christmas

My favorite Christmas story by Charles Dickens is not the obvious one but rather Chapter XXVIII of The Pickwick Papers, titled "A good-humoured Christmas chapter, containing an account of a wedding, and some other sports beside: which although in their way, even as good customs as marriage itself, are not quite so religiously kept up in these degenerate times." Here's the opening of the chapter:

"As brisk as bees, if not altogether as light as fairies, did the four Pickwickians assemble on the morning of the twenty-second day of December, in the year of grace in which these, their faithfully-recorded adventures, were undertaken and accomplished. Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness; the old year was preparing, like an ancient philosopher, to call his friends around him, and amidst the sound of feasting and revelry to pass gently and calmly away. Gay and merry was the time, and gay and merry were at least four of the numerous hearts that were gladdened by its coming.

"And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual good-will, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight, and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blest and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!

"We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped have grown cold; the eyes we sought have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!"

Variations On a Meme

The best and worst thoughts are ancient, self-replicating and probably impossible to eradicate. Hitler was novel only in the degree to which he successfully implemented old ideas. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wishes he were Hitler, and in this desire he is derivative, ridiculous and dangerous. To ignore his blather – his “meme,” in fashionable parlance -- because it is odious and irrational is to risk collusion with murder.

Fortunately, worthy thoughts also spawn offspring. It’s possible to trace variations in human insight across history, benign alleles of the intellect that help us understand our incomplete understanding of the truth. Our capacity for self-delusion, for instance, remains bottomless. It’s not language or the opposable thumb that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species but our bottomless capacity for lying to ourselves. Here are some variations of that meme:

On Feb. 16, 1751, in The Rambler, No. 96, Samuel Johnson wrote:

"Truth is, indeed, not often welcome for its own sake; it is generally unpleasing, because contrary to our wishes and opposite to our practice; and, as our attention naturally follows our interest, we hear unwillingly what we are afraid to know, and soon forget what we have no inclination to impress upon our memories."

On Sept. 6, 1955, Flannery O’Connor wrote to “A” (Elizabeth Hester):

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”

And Theodore Dalrymple wrote in “Discovering LaRochefoucauld” (The New Criterion, April 2001):

“When you have seen and heard, as I have on many occasions, a man in the last stages cirrhosis of the liver, with a bottle of and a glass in his hand, strenuously deny—as he has denied for twenty years past—that a drop of the stuff has ever passed his lips, with all appearances of meaning what he says and innocence and outraged honor when disbelieved, you do not lightly underestimate the powers of human self-deception.”

`Solitary and Farouche'

In my university library I found a slender volume with a candy-stripe cover titled Why Do I Write? published in 1948 by Percival Marshall of London. Those were drably austere days in England, Orwell’s life-model for Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it must have been pleasant to visit a shop and hold a book that resembled a box of candy. It collects an exchange of letters among Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, on the writer’s presumed responsibility to “society,” whatever that might mean. I was born missing the gene that permits one to enjoy the work of Graham Greene, so his books to me always read like potboilers with pretensions, though I know some fine human beings who admire them. Pritchett, as story writer and essayist, was unmatched, a Dickens with a better mind and better editing. Bowen is Henry James. She warms the most to her subject because she ignores it and writes about what she pleases. To Pritchett she says:

“Perhaps one emotional reason why one may write is the need to work off, out of the system, the sense of being solitary and farouche. Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships: they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nice people, but not writers. If I feel irked and uneasy when asked about the nature of my (as a writer) relation to society, this is because I am being asked about the nature of something that does not, as far as I know, exist. My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without – a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society. Why should people come and ask me what the nature of this relation is? It seems to me that it is the other people, the readers, who should know.”

Have contrariness and independence of thought ever been expressed so elegantly? She reminds me of that Marianne Moore poem that ends “your thorns are the best part of you.” No one, fortunately, even in the United States, is obligated to be happy. One remains suspicious of happiness. It implies a certain slightness of character, a definite lack, and among writers it can prove crippling, like diabetes.

In addition, you won’t hear “farouche” at the bowling alley. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “Sullen, shy and repellent in manner,” and cites its use by Lord Byron in 1814: “It is too farouche; but . . . my satires are not very playful.”

Another gem from Bowen, one page earlier in the same letter, on the sort of environment best for writers:

“…you don’t think it possible that things these days might almost be too propitious? And that to let this propitiousness invade us mayn’t make for a lowering of internal pressure? We must have something to push against. Oh well, one need not worry: we always shall have.”

So much for public funding of the arts.

`Bookish Affections'

Howard Moss was a poet, and poetry editor of The New Yorker for almost 40 years, until his death in 1987. It disappoints me that I’m indifferent to his poetry, which I find flat and finicky except for the odd line (“The clarity of alcohol gave repose”), but his critical prose is another matter. Moss had superb taste, especially in fiction. The extent of his criticism is small, and he devotes himself to a correspondingly small number of writers, but it’s clear he spent a lifetime thinking about them – Keats, Henry James, Chekhov, Proust, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Bishop. He was blessedly free of theories and Theory. He loved literature. I sense Moss has evaporated from literary consciousness. His sensibility was too strictly literary to interest many readers today.

His only book-length critical work was The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust, the first book about Proust I ever read, after reading À la recherche du temps perdu for the first time in the summer of 1972. Mostly, he wrote short pieces about his favorites when a biography or new edition came along, or remembrances of those who died, and these pieces were periodically collected in volumes that often recycled material from earlier volumes – Writing Against Time (1969), Whatever Is Moving (1981), and Minor Monuments (1986) – so there’s much overlap but much worth reading. For instance:

“The truest changes in art are not changes of technique but of sensibility. And so the real pioneers are rarely recognized as such. They are too subtle to make good copy. Examples: Henry Green and Elizabeth Bishop.”

Moss is one of those rare critics with whom I feel some affinity of temperament and taste. We often think alike, a sensation both creepy and reassuring:

“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. [He’s right on every count].”

Here’s the opening of his Elizabeth Bowen memorial:

“She was rare. A large-boned, red-haired beauty with a face of such distinction that the only comparable one in recent history is Virginia Woolf’s. What they said when they met remains unknown. Their few meetings in A Writer’s Diary are unilluminating. Perhaps they never discussed writing.”

Moss introduced me to Bowen, and to the books of hers I love most – The Death of the Heart and Bowen’s Court. Here’s Moss on Bowen’s wit:

“Her amazing vocabulary was partly the result, I think, of her conquering her stutter. She seemed to know synonyms for every word in English. Her celebrated command of language may have begun as an effort to circumvent it, and her wit, in part, derived from the successes and the failures thereof. Example: She and I and a mutual friend were driving to dinner. She was supposed to have gone to the country the previous weekend. It turned out she hadn’t. The friend asked why. She said, `I didn’t go because my hostess was suffering from . . . from . . .’ We waited patiently for the disease to be named. Finally, she said, `from . . . from . . . personal mistrust.’”

Like James, Moss turns gossip into literature. I admire his refreshing willingness to admit the limitations of critical and biographical understanding:

“Putting a coherent Whitman together is an exercise in conjecture; the more insistent the claim the more suspicious its truth.”

Moss, as you see, had a fine gift for aphorism:

“Two things are equally boring in art: a lack of skill and too much of it.”

“People who love animals once loved people.”

We need writers and critics like Moss. Think of them as a benign, reliable dating service, matching readers with compatible writers. Guy Davenport is my foremost example, though my list also includes Hugh Kenner, Christopher Ricks, George Steiner (when I was much younger and more impressionable) and James Wood.

`The Last Thump'

In the Postscript he added to Beckett’s Dying Words, after Samuel Beckett’s death on Dec. 22, 1989, Christopher Ricks wrote:

“In my mid-fifties, everything proves to have happened three times longer ago than I first think (a death, a book, a trial), whereas yesterday it was but twice as long ago.”

Ricks links his incomprehension, if not surprise, at Beckett’s passing to Philip Larkin’s death four years earlier. Of death, Larkin had written: “Most things may never happen: this one will.” At 54, I’m sharing Rick’s sense of time distortion. Seventeen years ago this Friday, while the world watched the slow-motion collapse of the Soviet Empire, Beckett died in Paris. One day earlier, Nicolae Ceauşescu had addressed a crowd in Bucharest. The dictator looked baffled as his once cowed subjects, emboldened by the events roiling across Eastern Europe, booed him – unthinkable just days earlier.

On Christmas, after a perfunctory trial, a Rumanian army officer performed the execution of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, with a machine gun. The unshaven, disheveled dictator, looking more than ever like one of Beckett’s old men, sang the Internationale before the bullets ripped into him – a true believer to the end. Mrs. Ceauşescu reportedly screamed for everyone to go to hell, perhaps because she feared being lonely.

Vaclav Havel, to whom Beckett had dedicated Catastrophe (1982) – a play about a dictator – became the first president of democratic Czechoslovakia one week after Beckett’s death. Beckett’s final prose published during his life, “Stirrings Still,” concludes: “Oh all to end.” And Ricks ends Beckett’s Dying Words like this:

“`He was a man of the greatest reticence, but with nothing to conceal; a man of intensely “private life”, but wholly transparent.’ – T.S. Eliot on Spinoza and, incidentally, on himself. Beckett, I suppose, was such another. He was, though, a writer of the greatest reticence but with everything to reveal. Heartfelt. To the last. Not to the last trump (in which he blessedly did not believe), but to the last thump.”

“The last thump” is a reference to a passage in Beckett’s How It Is, which Ricks, in elegant symmetry, had quoted on page three of Beckett’s Last Words:

“thump on skull no point in post mortems and then what then what we’ll try and see last words cut thrust a few words DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT no disappearance of Pim end of part two leaving only part three and last one can’t go on one goes on as before can one ever stop put a stop that’s more like it on can’t go on one can’t stop put a stop”

`Vaporous and Sentimental'

On Sunday, under duress, I found myself in the company of people who mistake being nice for being good. The former is easy and accompanied by self-congratulation; the latter, difficult and often accompanied by regret. I was expected to share with them certain social and political assumptions—some of which I do, though I’ll be damned if I’d let them know it -- and to approve of their collective efforts to convince themselves they are virtuous and happy. The smugness of the militantly nice! To make matters worse, many were doctors and lawyers. I thought of Flannery O’Connor, who said modern religious feeling had become “if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.” And I remembered this from her story “The Enduring Chill”:

“When people think they are smart - even when they are smart - there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see things straight, and with Asbury, the trouble was that in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament. She did not know where he had got it from because his father, who was a lawyer and businessman and farmer and politician all rolled into one, had certainly had his feet on the ground; and she had certainly always had hers on it. She had managed after he died to get the two of them through college and beyond; but she had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.”

Talk-Radio

I haven’t listened to talk-radio in 35 years but I remember its seductiveness, the sense that you alone, late at night in a darkened room, are plugged into something momentous, your whims and gripes beamed into the black void, what Tom Waits called “the dark warm narcotic American night.” Every man an autodidact, every man his oracle – UFO enthusiasts, John Birchers, flat-Earthers, apostles of Marcus Garvey and George Lincoln Rockwell. Nineteen-sixties talk-radio had a lot in common with blogging, though it usually had better manners.

Three works devoted to talk-radio come to mind. Stanley Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show, maybe the funniest book in the language, was published in 1971, and comes closest to my memories. Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly,” from the 1982 album of the same title, captures the taste of populist paranoia I remember:

“I'm Lester the Nightfly
Hello, Baton Rouge.
Won't you turn your radio down,
Respect the seven-second delay we use.
So you say there's a race
Of men in the trees.
You're for tough legislation.
Thanks for calling,
I wait all night for calls like these.”

The most recent is Irving Feldman’s poem “Interrupted Prayers,” included in The Life and Letters (1994). Of the three works I’ve cited, Feldman’s is the most profound and moving, a fragmented conversation between the talk-show host, Larry, and his caller, “Don in Cleveland.” It’s a long poem, running five and a half pages in Collected Poems: 1954-2004, and appears not to be available online, but here’s the opening:

“The sun goes, So long, so long, see you around.
And zone by zone by zone across America
the all-night coast-to-coast ghost café light up.
Millions of dots of darkness – the loners,
The losers, the half-alive – twitch awake
under the cold electronic coverlet,
and tune in their radios’ cracked insomnia.
A static craziness scratches and buzzes
Inside the glowing tombstones of talk
-- some crossed wires’ hodgepodge dialogue,
or Morse and remorse of garbled maydays
of prayers shot down by Heaven’s deaf ear.
Heaven itself is crashing tonight.
The signal breaks up, it fades. Silence.
Then static, then chatter. Then silence. And still
-- poor peeves and griefs, poor spirits – from all
the alien area codes we phone in
Our cries . . .”

`No One Steals Books'

For Christmas last year my wife gave me the new, annotated edition of Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder (1907-1980), originally published in 1975. Wilder was an impossible-to-pigeonhole composer who blithely ignored attempts by critics and listeners to demarcate the jazz, pop and classical idioms. For years, I’ve kept a cassette in my glove compartment of the octets Wilder started composing and recording in the late nineteen-thirties, with titles like this: “It’s Silk, Feel It,” “Jack, This Is My Husband,” “Neurotic Goldfish,” “The Amorous Poltergeist” and “Sea Fugue, Mama.” In 1946, Frank Sinatra, of all people, conducted an album of Wilder’s compositions, and they remained lifelong friends. Wilder composed many songs for Mabel Mercer, including the bittersweet and lovely “Have You Ever Crossed Over to Sneden's?” and his best-known standard is probably “I’ll Be Around.” Whitney Balliett christened Wilder the “President of the Derriere Garde.”

As his song titles suggest, Wilder possessed a gift for words second only to his musical gift. His American Popular Song, 1900-1950, published in 1972, is a masterpiece of learning, love and invective. In Letters I Never Mailed, Wilder invented a literary genre. The book’s subtitle is suggestive, because Wilder in fact is composing a veiled autobiography in the form of letters, many to correspondents he left unidentified in the original edition. The annotated edition, published by the University of Rochester Press and edited by David Demsey, reveals the identities of most of the correspondents, including Aaron Copland, anthropologist Robert Ardrey, Civil War historian Bruce Catton, Eric Hoffer, Montgomery Clift, Thornton Wilder, Graham Greene, Benny Goodman, Harold Arlen, Balliett, Marian McPartland, and many others less well known and sometimes fictitious.

In his literary tastes, as in everything else, Wilder was eccentric. Desmond Stone writes in his biography Alec Wilder in Spite of Himself:

“Music was Wilder’s bedrock, but literature was also integral to his life. `I’m better fed by a well-written book than by an extra dividend (though I own no stock). I am better fed by Dylan Thomas than by the products of General Motors (I don’t own a car).’ When the New Heritage Dictionary was published in 1969, he bought copies for all his close friends. He wanted to open up the world for those he loved. Books were his constant companions. Although he would countenance only hard covers in the beginning, he broke down later and began to buy the paperbacks he had once abhorred. They were easier to carry. Hard cover or soft, he only wished that more people would do more reading. He once said sadly to [a friend], `Don’t bother to lock the car, there are only books in it, and no one steals books.’”

Among Wilder’s favorite writers, according to Stone, were James Thurber, Lawrence Durrell, Albert Murray, P.G. Wodehouse and Georges Simenon. Stone adds: “It sometimes seemed that he admired craftsmanship more than genius.” He dismissed as boring such books and writers as Moby-Dick, War and Peace, most of Dickens and James, Kafka, Kierkegaard and “quite a lot of Shakespeare.” Stone writes:

“For the most part, Wilder kept his distance from academe and from the books and music that no well-educated person could supposedly survive without. Sometimes, he was playing the role of the heretic, something he always enjoyed doing. In music and literature both, he refused to do any genuflecting.”

I sympathize. I know which books I enjoy and admire, and usually why I enjoy and admire them, but it’s always fun to play the clodhopper among the sophisticates. Besides, can a man who loves P.G. Wodehouse be deemed anything less than well read and civilized? Wilder prized John Cheever and Peter De Vries, and composed letters to both in Letter I Never Mailed. To Cheever he wrote:

“Thank you very, very much for those permanent people in my life and memory, the Wapshots. Their slam-bang eccentricity, their devil-take-the-hindmost insistence on their way reminds me of the Wilder side of my family, though Aunt Emma’s collecting and then gold-plating olive pits isn’t on a par with Honoria’s sitting there drinking and waiting for death.”

This is from a letter to De Vries:

“I seem to pester you, don’t I, for each new book. It’s only because I need your irresistible, wry and resigned wit, your precise and explosive commentary on suburban society and the general malaise of the middle class.”

In her Foreword to the new edition of Letters, Marian McPartland writes of her old friend:

“Emotionally, Alex was very complex. He made wild swings from an almost childlike gaiety to deep depression. The word `curmudgeon’ might have been invented for him. When he was in one of those low moods, it was as if a mistral were blowing.”

I spent an hour with McPartland on a summer afternoon in 1997. We sat in a club in Schenectady, N.Y., while the piano was being tuned. Her manner was patrician with a plebian touch. Tears came to her eyes only when I asked about Alec Wilder.

`All This Looks Easy But Really It Is Extraordinary'

The first poem by Stevie Smith I remember reading, “Up and Down,” appeared in her first collection, A Good Time Was Had By All, published in 1937. Around the time of Smith’s death in 1971, I found it harmlessly tucked away in some anthology of 20th-century English verse. Anthologies have a way of domesticating poems, turning them into defanged creatures in a literary zoo. But Smith’s poem, with its nursery rhymes and rhythms, sabotaged the editor’s would-be embalming:

“Up and down the street they go
Tapping tapping to and fro
What they see I do not know

“Up and down the streets they hurry
Push and rush and jerk and worry
Full of ineffectual flurry

Up and down the street they run
From morning to the set of sun
I shall be glad when they have done

I shall be glad when there’s an end
Of all the noise that doth offend
My soul. Still Night, don cloak, descend.”

That pair of spondees in the middle of the final line fall like clods of earth on a coffin lid. Smith’s art is subversive – not of politics or morals but of literary expectations. A diminutive woman, she knowingly donned a girlish costume (in life, in work) that was eccentric in an acceptably British manner. How liberating that must have been, setting her free to be a seriously silly poet. Consider “Pretty,” a poem from the sixties:

“Why is the word pretty so underrated?
In November the leaf is pretty when it falls
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks

“He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,
The prey escapes with an underwater flash
But not for long, the great fish has him now
The pike is a fish who always has his prey

“And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty
His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils
As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between
The land and water. Not `torn,’ he does not mind.

“The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty
The lake water below him rustles with ice
There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist
All this is pretty, it could not be prettier.

“Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes
It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough,
Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier
A field in the evening, tilting up.

“The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late
The sky is lighter than the hill field
All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary
Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty.

“And it is careless, and that is always pretty
This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless,
As Nature is always careless and indifferent
Who sees, who steps, means nothing, and this is pretty.

“So a person can come along like a thief – pretty! –
Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel,
Lick the icicle broken from the bank
And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.

“Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you’ll be able
Very soon not even to cry pretty
And so be delivered entirely from humanity
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.”

After many readings, I still find it breathtaking. That a poem about death (as most of hers poems are, the best ones) achieves its chilling effects by endlessly and comically repeating an insipid adjective is remarkable. “All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary,” indeed. Also, see Robert Enders’ Stevie, with Glenda Jackson as Smith, the best movie ever about a writer. After all, writing is notoriously uncinematic subject (writer, keyboard).

`I Believe'

For Christmas 1969, when I was a high school senior, I received A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, as a gift from my parents. I had asked for it, and only now does it seem like an unusual request. I was not Jewish, my family was not bookish, and my father was mildly anti-Semitic (by “mildly,” I mean I don’t recall him attending any conferences on Holocaust denial). I have no idea what my parents made of the book, my desire to read it, or the fact that their oldest son was interested in such things. The poem that I remember most tenaciously from the Howe-Greenberg anthology is “I Believe,” by Aaron Zeitlin (1889-1973), who was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States in 1939, the year World War II started.

“I Believe” is translated into English by Robert Friend. The poem is a Jewish credo, an angry renunciation of other gods, composed in 11 irregularly rhymed stanzas. It’s the first stanza that has stayed with me, and that helped spark my sustained interest in Spinoza:

“Should I believe in Spinoza’s geometric god?
A god that cannot change its own creation,
That snared by its own law must suffer its own rod,
A pitiful slave to its of situation;
A god without horror or miracle,
A god coldly heretical,
a distant relative
who won’t acknowledge me as his relation;
who is incapable
of making it his concern
whether I die or live,
or burn
in every fire until
the final generation;
a god, a bookkeeper, to whom my cry
will not reach when I die;
a god with ciphers for his seraphim.
Rather than in him,
I’d willingly believe in Satan and damnation.”

Even as a callow and rather vulgar atheist, I was impressed by the ferocity of Zeitlin’s rejection of a 300-year-old philosopher and his notion of God. And that, of course, made Spinoza even more attractive to my 17-year-old understanding. Soon, I bought the two-volume edition of Spinoza’s work published by Dover, and read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s great story “The Spinoza of Market Street.” I thought of Zeitlin and his angry poem again this week while reading Hilary Putnam’s oddly belated review in the New York Observer of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, by Rebecca Goldstein. Last June, I devoted three consecutive posts to the book, which I’m convinced is one of the best published in 2006. Putnam seems to agree:

“Betraying Spinoza is beautifully crafted. What seem like separate issues – Spinoza’s pioneering advocacy of complete freedom of thought in religious matters; the turmoil in the Jewish community; the fateful events in Amsterdam in the closing years of Spinoza’s life; the philosophical developments of the 17th century; Spinoza’s idea of a philosophical religion utterly purged of all anthropomorphism, even to the extent of denying that God is a “person” in any sense—come together as if by themselves (the sure sign of a fine artist!) to answer my puzzle: how to understand Spinoza the human being, a man for whom reason itself was a kind of salvation.”

I appreciate Putnam pointing out the beauty of the book’s architecture, and also this admission, particularly as it comes from a respected philosopher:

“His philosophy attempts to answer the great three-word question -- How to live? -- in a way that includes saying what the ideal life would be and what the place of man in the cosmos is, and not just rules for conduct. And I do not believe that one can understand what a philosopher who proposes to answer that three-word question really means if one doesn’t understand the philosopher as a fellow man (even if Spinoza would have thought that the latter sort of understanding is irrelevant).”

The book is personal in the best sense: It chronicles Goldstein’s almost 40-year relationship with Spinoza, while also explicating the man and his thought. Here’s her stirring final paragraph:

“The world has been transformed (though not enough) by a long and complicated chain of causes and effects that reaches back to Spinoza’s lonely choice to think out the world for himself.”

`That's What He Lives For'

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a link to a 1986 interview with Thomas Bernhard at the punningly named Sign and Sight. Present in the interview, as in his fiction, is Bernhard’s gift for the unexpected. His mind, contrarian by nature, impish by whim, appears to have operated without templates of convention. His books are grim (albeit hilariously so), therefore we expect his conversation, his outlook, to be correspondingly grim. Enjoy the spectacle of Thomas Bernhard on the virtues of fun:

“Everything fails in the end, everything ends in the graveyard. There's nothing you can do about it. Death claims them all and that's the end of it. Most people give in to death at 17 or 18. The young people of today are running into the arms of death at age 12, and they're dead at 14. Then there are solitary fighters who struggle on until 80 or 90, then they die too, but at least they had a longer life. And because life is pleasant and fun, their fun lasts longer. Those who die early have less fun, and you can feel sorry for them. Because they haven't really got to know life, because life also means a long life, with all of its awfulness.”

On the one had: “…everything ends in the graveyard.” On the other, six sentences later: “…life is pleasant and fun.” I don’t find this inconsistent – or ironic – though I find it human. We are bifurcated, and Bernhard feeds on that bifurcation. The same division shows up when the interviewer, Werner Wogerbauer, says to Bernhard, “Your characters and you yourself often say they don't care about anything, which sounds like total entropy, universal indifference of everyone towards everything,” and he replies:

“Not at all, you want to do something good, you take pleasure in what you do, like a pianist, he has to start somewhere too, he tries three notes, then he masters twenty, and eventually he knows them all, and then he spends the rest of his life perfecting them. And that's his great pleasure, that's what he lives for. And what some do with notes, I do with words. Simple as that. I'm not really interested in anything else. Because getting to know the world happens anyway, by living in it, as soon as you walk out the door you're confronted with the world directly. With the whole world. With up and down, back and front, ugliness and beauty, perfectly normal. There's no need to want this. It happens of its own accord. And if you never leave the house, the process is the same.”

That’s as humanly apt an explanation for writing as I know. It reminds me of something William H. Gass wrote in “Rilke and the Requiem,” collected in A Temple of Texts:

“Most poets fail…because they bewail their state instead of describing it; they evaluate their feelings instead of forming them; and although they believe their joys and sorrows should be known, they are unable or unwilling to transform their consciousness into an adequate poetic language, they fail to make of their poem ‘a thing’ that can sit in the world as fat and steamy as a teapot…”

Compared to words, life is distracting. Compared to life, words are demanding. I speak almost daily with engineers, people for whom algorithms are oxygen and for whom arranging units of sound and information in meaningful patterns ought to be an amusing diversion. Instead, few of them relish the challenge of artfully arranging words – like the mediocre poets Gass indicts. Three-quarters of the engineers I interview, when words prove inadequate, resort to drawing diagrams or graphs. I think of Bernhard, Gass and others as engineers of language, solving problems they set for themselves, building elegant structures and connections, savoring the notes.

Gould

Is there a particular fondness among German-language writers for the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould? Is it rooted in Gould’s reverence for Bach, Beethoven and Schoenberg? Granted, two writers is hardly a movement, but as a newspaper editor I worked for once said, “Two is a trend.”

My first and better known example is Thomas Bernard, the Austrian whose novel Der Untergeher, about a fictionalized version of Gould, was published in 1983, the year after the nonfictional Gould’s death. The title translates literally as The Under-goer, but it was published in English in 1991 as The Loser. Two friends of Gould, one based on Ludwig Wittgenstein, give up the piano after hearing the Canadian virtuoso. The Wittgenstein figure commits suicide. The other, the narrator, attempts to write a conventional monograph about the pianist but instead produces the novel we are reading, which ranks among Bernhard’s best.

The second Gould-related work I found while reading The Faber Book of 20th-Century German Poems, published last year and edited by poet-translator Michael Hofmann. Included is a poem by Hauke Huckstadt, born in 1969, five years after Gould retired from public performance -- “Theme on a Variation,” with the subtitle “(Goldberg variation 25, recorded NYC, April/May 1981).” Gould’s first studio recording, in 1955, was Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It was also one of his last recordings, made in the months cited by Huckstadt. The translation is by Hofmann:

“Gould sits on his stump of a stool,
in front of his Yamaha piano, and hums…
The position of head and hands
reminiscent of a toy-maker,
re-arranging the furniture in a doll’s house,
shutting the windows after him.
April, the icebergs drifting past,
The room perceptibly brightened by them.
Over the silver dado rail
on the horizon, the picture of him
in the pose of an Eskimo
at the start of an expedition.
The walls so thin, you can hear birdsong,
clink of china, telephone conversations,
a train so very long that the level crossings
are simultaneously down in A and B.”

Huckstadt’s final lines seem to refer to the “contrapuntal” radio shows Gould produced for the Canadian Broadcasting System, in which multiple recorded voices are played simultaneously. Cryptically, in the 1975 CBC film Radio as Music, Gould said:

“If you examine any of the really contrapuntal scenes in my radio pieces, you'll find that every line stacks up against the line opposite, and either contradicts it or supplements it, but uses, in any case, the same basic terminology – a set of numbers, similar or identical terms, or whatever.”

One of his radio shows was titled “The Idea of North,” and the Eskimo reference in Huckstadt’s poem seems to refer to this. Mostly, the poem leaves me confused. It starts with the documented specifics of Gould's eccentric life – the loyalty to Yahama, his sawed-off stool, and his resulting unusual playing posture. But the balance of the poem and the significance of the inverted title remain opaque. No other biographical data about Huckstadt appears in the Hofmann anthology, and I found nothing about him online. I love Gould as a pianist and find him intriguing as a person. I understand that his appeal to me, in part, is romantic, in the 19th-century sense – his intensity, single-mindedness, and indifference to conventional standards of success and failure. Kevin Bazzana’s Wondrous Strange: the Life and Art of Glenn Gould is one of the best biographies of recent years, but it doesn’t help crack the code.

So, Huckstadt’s poem baffles me. Can any readers help me make sense of it?

`A Small Tale, Generally of Love'

In his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson famously defined a novel as “a small tale, generally of love,” and for his day he was not mistaken. Though Johnson knew Don Quixote, Clarissa and Tom Jones – inarguably novels, to our way of thinking – he deemed most of the lengthy prose narratives of his day “romances,” and rightly so. They were slight, evanescent things, of dubious worth and now forgotten. We would dismiss them as genre fiction – the Harlequin romances of the 18th century. The novel as we know it, viewed through the prism of realism (as that slippery notion has shifted over the last two and a half centuries), existed only embryonically. It’s strange and exciting to consider that a literary form is not a given, any more than a species is preordained, and that it could have evolved in very different directions. Johnson had doubts about realistic fiction, finding it morally dubious. He preferred the essay. His most novel-like invention – Rasselas – more closely resembles an allegory, and what a beautiful piece of work it is. I remember the first time I read it, 35 years ago, and I was scoring so many memorable sentences that I gave up my pen because I was underlining more lines than not. And that’s part of my point, I suppose: The long history of the novel is an elusive cabinet of wonders, from Rasselas to Tristram Shandy -- any damned thing novelists wish to make of it, and readers are willing to accept.

Such thoughts occurred to me as I’ve been rereading Letty Fox: Her Luck, one of my favorites among Christina Stead’s novels. Each of her books is so different from the others, in effect she recapitulates much of the novel’s history. Her masterpiece remains The Man Who Loved Children but Letty Fox, her 1946 novel set in New York City, has been reissued by New York Review Books Classics. I’ll suggest the special flavor of her novel by quoting its first and last sentences:

“One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad.”

Letty is forever flinging and rushing, as the novel’s final sentence confirms:

“I have a freight, I cast off, the journey has begun.”

A lovely, affirming, open-ended way to end a novel – by not ending it. Saul Bellow, who thought Stead was “really marvelous” and deserved a Nobel Prize, similarly constructed The Adventures of Augie March. It seems a novel can bee as big and sloppy and life-grabbing as Letty Fox (or Augie) and still be a great work of art. The form is infinitely elastic, and we merely ask that it be interesting. Tim Parks, the English novelist (I have read his Judge Savage, which is very good), contributes an admiring introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Letty Fox:

“If every form of narrative representation is essentially a convention, a pact between writer and reader as to how experience can be talked about, then it is only natural that the finest authors should be uneasy with some aspect of that convention, eager to bend it closer to the grain of their own lives. What Stead most resisted in traditional narrative was and easy formulation of shape and direction, any neatness, `the neatly groomed little boy in sailor collar,’ she called it, speaking disparagingly of the fiction the publishers liked most. In contrast, the exuberance and manic extension of the world that she depicts in Letty Fox denies any possibility of order. The work is rich and capricious, its descriptions dense, vital and highly particularized; its only overall drift is that of Letty’s growing up.”

Any literary form that can comfortably contain Letty Fox, Correction, The Belly of Paris, Albert Angelo, Scoop, The Age of Innocence and Auto-de-Fe is worthy of our devotion, despite Dr, Johnson’s well-intended misdiagnosis.

Get Up and Do It Again

I recognize my capacity for self-delusion, but that solves nothing. Knowledge, despite the platitude, is no guarantee of power. Without a gift for tarting up the awful so it appears merely mediocre, how do we muster the will to continue? Habit, I suppose, which Beckett defined as “the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.” We do the next thing that needs to be done, that we have done before to some degree of failure, and trust momentum will keep us moving. After a night’s sleep, a respite from truth, we set the whole tricky, Rube Goldberg contraption into motion again. In his book-length interview with Philip Hoy, Anthony Hecht addressed this question, specifically in regard to poetry, though I suspect it applies to other sorts of writing and other endeavors:

“One of the great satisfactions of writing poetry consists in the absolute and indispensable conviction, while one is writing, that one is working at one’s very best. To think otherwise is deeply discouraging, and virtually intolerable. But to feel one is working at one’s best is to call into question the fact that one felt this way about each and every poem one had written in the past, not all of them still regarded with pride or satisfaction, and some of them, alas, now disappointing if not humiliating. This does not bear much dwelling upon.”

`Odd and Oddly Familiar'

A reader reports she has discovered the joys of Henry Green, by way of Eudora Welty’s essay “Henry Green: Novelist of the Imagination,” collected in The Eye of the Story. She’s reading his masterpiece, Loving, and says, “I'm not quite far enough yet to say for certain, but I strongly suspect that Loving will turn out to be a watershed moment in my reading history.” I know what she means. Green, without trying, writes as though he belonged to another species. He is helplessly sui generis, and I suspect he puts off many readers with his oddness. How absurd that some critics have tried to domesticate him by calling Green’s novels “proletarian.” He works from within the world he creates, which looks something like ours but is not identical. You could never deduce the existence of such a world before reading Green’s renderings of it. Tonight, if you have a dream that is not cartoonish and that you’re tempted to describe as “realistic,” whatever that means, it might resemble a Henry Green novel. As Welty puts it:

“Different as they are from one another, all Henry Green’s novels are likely on first impact to seem at once odd and oddly familiar. One reason must be that they touch, as they always do, uncommonly close to the quick of experience. Another reason may be that when after moving you as they do they come to an end, they do not (I think) release you, like the more orthodox novels and like the greatest novels.”

This is shrewd and honest evaluation. Welty dispels any suggestion of hyperbole the reader thinks he detects. No, Green is not James or Proust, but once he casts his spell you no longer inhabit the same world. Your expectations – of books, of the world – are left benignly and lastingly off-kilter. That’s why some of us feel so jealously protective of Green. We want to proselytize but we also want to hoard him, protect him from the unworthy, though I suspect the unworthy are indifferent. Walter Benjamin, an incisive reader when not in one of his political moods, wrote in his essay “The Storyteller”:

“A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares his companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader….In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace.”

This is not the case for most novels or novelists, and in the final sentence Benjamin goes too far and ruins the metaphor. As readers, we destroy nothing, though our jealousy and hunger can be fierce. In Green’s company, even our solitude is no longer truly solitary.

`War Breeds Only War'

“As there was no compulsion towards a conflict which, in despite of the apparent bitterness of parties, took so long to engage and needed so much assiduous blowing to fan the flame, so no right was vindicated by its ragged end. The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in [….] history of meaningless conflict. The overwhelming majority [….], the overwhelming majority [….] wanted no war; powerless and voiceless, there was no need even to persuade them that they did. The decision was made without thought of them. Yet of those who, one by one, let themselves be drawn into the conflict, few were irresponsible and nearly all were genuinely anxious for an ultimate and better peace. Almost all [….] were actuated rather by fear than by lust of conquest or passion of faith. They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not since, that war breeds only war.”

From The Thirty Years War, by C.V. Wedgwood.

“There is no guarantee for success in Iraq. The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire. Saddam Hussein has been removed from power and the Iraqi people have a democratically elected government that is broadly representative of Iraq’s population, yet the government is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing basic security, or delivering essential services. The level of violence is high and growing. There is great suffering, and the daily lives of many Iraqis show little or no improvement. Pessimism is pervasive.”

From The Iraq Study Group Report, James A. Baker, III, and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs.

Dame Veronica Wedgwood’s great history of the war that ravaged Europe from 1618 to 1648 was published on the eve of World War II, in 1939, by Yale University Press. The editorial ellipses in the final paragraph from her book, quoted above, represent, in order, these words: “European,” “in Europe,” “in Germany,” and “—one excepts the King of Sweden --.” As the epigraph to her book, Wedgwood chose these lines from Measure for Measure, spoken by Isabella:

“…but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.”

Salvaged from Obscurity

When a reader suggested I write about New York Review Books Classics and their republication of more than 100 forgotten, neglected, under-rated, out-of-print books, I was surprised to see I have already acquired 22 titles in the series, which I believe started in 1999. The project is the book publishing arm of The New York Review of Books, and the reprints are uniformly attractive and relatively inexpensive, and usually in paperback. I’m writing about them now because I see NYRB Classics has launched a blog, A Different Stripe, which I trust will soon shed its breathless tone and offer more in the way of substance. I’d like to hear how books are nominated for inclusion in the series. Who suggests titles? How many people read the books before they are approved or rejected? Which books have been rejected? Which title has sold the most copies?

The first title I purchased was Peasants and Other Stories, a Chekhov collection, originally published in 1956, with translations by Constance Garnett and an introduction by Edmund Wilson. I found it in a bookstore in Albany, N.Y., probably in 1999, before I was even aware of the NYRB series. I’ll buy almost any Chekhov but what caught my eye was the book’s design, which has since been changed. It had a stark, functional look to it, printed mostly in gray and red and in my hand it had a pleasant heft. Wilson’s selection is uninspired, because his intention was to highlight the “socially conscious” Chekhov, and I already have Garnett’s “complete” Chekhov, as republished by the Ecco Press. NYRB has subsequently republished Wilson’s To the Finland Station and Memoirs of Hecate County, reminding us of how dreary and confoundingly influential a writer Wilson was for decades.

Another impulsive purchase I made was The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton, one of my favorite books, with a new and useless introduction by William H. Gass. I already had the three-volume Everyman edition, but I couldn’t resist, even though so hefty a book bound as a one-volume paperback is almost impossible to read without snapping the spine. And even though it’s absurdly overpriced at $22.95, its saving grace is the picture on the cover – a skull and hourglass from “Vanitas,” a painting by Philippe de Champaigne.

My favorites among the NYRB Classics I own, books I cherish, rely upon and will probably reread, are The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, by Nirad C. Chaudhuri; A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor; Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman; Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; The Stories of J.F. Powers; American Humor, by Constance Rourke; Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, by Gershom Scholem; Letty Fox, by Christina Stead; Jakob von Gunten and Selected Stories, by Robert Walser; My Century, by Aleksander Wat; The Thirty Years War, by C.V. Wedgwood; Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig.

I can quibble about the inclusion of some titles – books by J.R. Ackerley and Jean Genet, for instance. Overall, NYRB performs a public service, salvaging books that might otherwise evaporate from literate consciousness.

`The Complexity of What Lies Before Our Eyes'

The most reliable gauge of compulsive readability – the book compels me to stay up later than I wish, despite knowing I will suffer a bad case of concrete-headedness in the morning – proved its usefulness again Monday night, when I stayed up until midnight reading and rereading Michael Frayn’s Constructions. I say “rereading” because the book’s form – 309 concise, aphoristic statements, none longer than three or four paragraphs – encourages the reader frequently to reexamine the sentences and paragraphs he has just read, not because they are confusing but because their elegant concision masks such compacted depths of thought. Frayn’s method is redolent of two thinkers he cites – Pascal and Wittgenstein – and I would suggest J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words as a possible cousin twice removed. The book defies genre – philosophy, criticism, notebook, aperçus, pensées, covert memoir? Doubtless, academic philosophers would dismiss it as amateurish maundering, too well written and amusing to be taken seriously. In other words, it’s great fun for the common reader, starting with statement No. 1:

“The complexity of the universe is beyond expression in any possible notation.

“Lift up your eyes. Not even what you see before you can ever be fully expressed.

Close your eyes. Not even what you see now.”

Frayn common sensically assumes that any common sensical reader can be trusted to rely upon the evidence of his senses. Thus, he is a writer we can learn to trust, though I know Frayn only by reputation and have never read his work before. He is an English playwright and novelist best known for his 1998 drama Copenhagen, about the 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. I learned about Constructions from the redoubtable Brad Bigelow at the Neglected Books Page, who provides an excerpt, commentary and other tools for enjoying Constructions. I was fortunate: The library at the university where I work had a copy of the book, published in1974 by Wildwood House, of London. It’s a blandly ugly piece of bookmaking, the cover printed in a shade of gray-beige I associate with stairwells in a parking garage, and the pages already brown along the edges. The book was last checked out in 1982, and I don’t think the book has ever been published in the United States.

Frayn covers a lot of ground and, as you would except of a playwright, devotes much time and energy to the treacherous nature of language and the tendency of humans to miscommunicate, intentionally or otherwise. But I see the book’s principal concern as aesthetics, with emphasis on literature in the broadest sense. Here’s No. 206:

“The central tradition of literature is not description or historical narrative but storytelling; the creation of a fictitious world. Even where the old stories were about actual events and personages they were embodied in fictions, in parallels with the real world rather than representations of it. The factual possibilities of literature are a late departure. Looking at (say) the Old Testament, you might come to feel that fiction isn’t an extension of fact, but that fact is a special case of fiction.”

And No. 207:

“The great pleasure of fiction is that it is fiction – another world, set among the world we know, often overlapping with it, often aping it, but essentially not it. We read ourselves and our world in it. Its evocativeness consists in this: that we detect a sense of familiarity in its strangeness. Just as a familiar smell in unfamiliar surroundings can suddenly evoke with great intensity a whole world we took for granted when it was before our eyes.”

Frayn’s analysis is bracingly hope-filled and generous. There’s no slumming in fashionable nihilism. He’s profligate with insights, digressing on photography as art, the importance of metaphor in ordinary language, the “mythology” of vulgarized science – all rendered without philosophical jargon, in plain language rooted in the commonalities of everyday life. Here’s a Wittgensteinian example from the novelist’s desk, No. 258:

“Someone asks me what colour eyes a character in one of my novels has; I never mentioned it in the book.

“A moment’s thought, and I supply an answer. What did my moment’s thought consist of? Remembering, inventing, deciding, or deducing? Not exactly any of these; not exactly all combined.”

Frayn is the temperamental opposite of a solipsist. He revels in the otherness and haecceity of the world. No. 262:

“If we had no experience of a world external to us, we should have no experience of ourselves, either. Our relationship with the world is that intimate!”

Indeed. And in Frayn’s understanding, that’s good news for writers. No. 308:

“And the glory of writing is it dependence upon the world – the necessity it puts us in of coming back again and again to confront the complexity of what lies before our eyes.”

My university library already has a copy of Frayn’s latest book, The Human Touch, a sequel of sorts to Constructions, though much longer and less aphoristic. It’s an English edition from Faber and Faber, and won’t be published in the U.S. until 2007, but my university often acquires overseas editions. It looks promising.

Homage to Robert Walser

In memory of Robert Walser, who died 50 years ago on Christmas Day, Golden Rule Jones has undertaken a shamefully belated act of homage on behalf of the English-speaking world by translating from the German, with a friend, Carl Seelig’s Wanderungen mit Robert Walser. Walser spent more than 20 years of his life in mental hospitals. Seelig was an admirer and eventually the guardian of the great Swiss writer, and visited him once or twice a year from 1936 until Walser’s death. Seelig accompanied Walser on long walks in the mountains surrounding his sanitarium at Herisau. By 1936, Walser had stopped writing but Seelig worked to keep his friend’s work in print. Seelig’s book, published the year after Walser’s death, chronicles his visits, but so far as I can tell this intriguing and valuable sounding book has never been translated into English.

Here’s an excerpt from GRJ’s translation of the first chapter of Seelig’s memoir, describing his first meeting with Walser, on July 26, 1936:

“From an adjoining building came the esteemed 58-year old poet, accompanied by the warden. I was struck by his childlike expression, red-flushed cheeks, blue eyes, and trim, golden mustache. He was already turning gray at the temple. His well-worn collar and necktie were set somewhat crookedly, his teeth not in the best condition. When Dr. Hinrichsen wanted him to button the top button of his vest, Robert rebelled: `No! The top button must remain open!’ He spoke in a melodious Barndutsch, as he had no doubt spoken in his youth in Biel.”

GRJ also links to desolate photographs of Walser’s body, dead from a heart attack, supine in a field of snow. The image of this strange, brilliant man locked up in a mental asylum in neutral Switzerland, no longer writing, while Hitler’s madness raged across Europe, is a depressingly apt emblem of the 20th century. As his translator, the poet-critic Christopher Middleton said, “It was only when he was forcibly transferred to Herisau in Appenzell, in 1933 [the year Hitler came to power], that he gave up, or switched, one might say, from being an incalculable alien to being an official lunatic.” And it was to Seelig that Walser famously said, “I am not here to write, but to be mad.” Guy Davenport writes in “The Artist as Critic”:

“This renunciation of writing by so gifted a genius is one of the tragedies of our time, to be put beside the loss of Walter Benjamin, Mandelstam, Khlebnikov, and Federico Garcia Lorca. And yet we have just learned that Walser did not entirely quit. His friend Carl Seelig, who has left us an account of Walser’s time in the asylum (recording his conversations on walks with him), discovered that Walser had written, in a tiny hand, on the back of calendars and scrap paper elegant and fanciful little paragraphs, which have been published as the Micrographia of Robert Walser.”

In the same essay, collected in Every Force Evolves a Form, Davenport credits Walser’s Jacob von Gunten with being the source of ideas more famously elaborated on by Kafka, Thomas Mann and Hesse. Among Walser’s other admirable admirers were Walter Benjamin and Robert Musil. Davenport describes Jacob von Gunten as “about being a servant, about monotony, about the enslavement of time by money,” and describes Walser as “the Paul Klee of writing.” Here’s the final paragraph of Walser’s sketch from 1917, “Poets,” translated by Middleton:

“Every true poet likes dust, for it is in the dust, and in the most enchanting oblivion, that, as we all know, precisely the greatest poets like to lie, the classics, that is, whose fate is like that of old bottles of wine, which, to be sure, are drawn, only on particularly suitable occasions, out from under the dust and so exalted to a place of honor.”

Well done, Sam. Many thanks.

Thinking in Prose

Two sorts of prose give me the most sublime pleasure: the concise and aphoristic, and the elegantly discursive. I thought of this Sunday while rereading Guy Davenport’s translations of Heraclitus – a perfect example of the first category, and by that I refer to both the axioms of Herakleitos, as Davenport transliterates the philosopher’s name, and Davenport’s own prose. Such sentences are experience or thought distilled to dynamic essence. There’s no padding, no fat. The result is at once dense and light, like good bread or a well-made omelet. A useful aphorism anticipates its own repudiation. It is sturdy, timeless, self-protective, cocky. It dares you to disagree. Here are several Heraclitus fragments as rendered by Davenport:

“Eyes are better informers than ears.”

“Change alone is unchanging.”

“It must be seen clearly that war is the natural state of man. Justice is contention. Through contention all things come to be.”

“If everything were smoke, all perception would be by smell.”

The last sample is so evocative, so impacted with thought and observation, it anticipates Darwin in 10 words and by 1,800 years. Of Heraclitus’ best-known utterance, Davenport writes in his introduction:

“In Fragment 69 I have departed from literalness and accepted the elegant paraphrase of Novalis, `Character is fate.’ The Greek says that ethos is man’s daimon: the moral climate of a man’s cultural complex (strictly, his psychological weather) is what we mean when we say daimon, or guardian angel. As the daimons inspire and guide, character is the cooperation between psyche and daimon. The daimon has foresight, the psyche is blind and timebound. A thousand things happen to us daily which we sidestep or so not even notice. We follow the events which we are characteristically predisposed to cooperate with, designing what happens to us: character is fate.”

Reading such prose with care and attentiveness – a life’s work -- is a lasting education.

The elegantly discursive mode I associate with the rambling, digressive, improvisatory, leisurely, conversational strategies of Montaigne, Sterne, Hazlitt and Proust. Less conspicuously crafted than the aphoristic mode, such prose is more difficult to write well, because it invites self-indulgence. It is not long-winded or arbitrary. It is not “spontaneous Bop prosody,” as Allen Ginsberg idiotically phrased it. Here is Hazlitt in his essay “On Reason and Imagination”:

“I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even wore than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea. There are those (even among philosophers) who, deeming that all truth is contained within certain outlines and common topics, if you proceed to add colour or relief from individuality, protest against the use of rhetoric as an illogical thing; and if you drop a hint of pleasure or pain as ever entering into `this breathing world,’ raise a prodigious outcry against all appeals to the passions.”

You can't change or elide a syllable in that passage, though Heraclitus might have made the same point in six or seven words. Hazlitt is no blowhard, and nothing he writes is puff. His medium, as surely as Heraclitus’, is his message. Some writers, of course, straddle both modes – Thoreau, for instance, and Beckett. The best prose is a way of thinking and is its own reward.

Journal-ists

My oldest son and I often exchange guilty musical pleasures – songs we enjoy but are usually too ashamed to confess (“If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, is not my most shameful choice). Books can be similarly ranked, and near the top of that list is a work that for more than 30 years has given me inordinate pleasure: the journal kept by the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. In French, the work is published in 22 volumes. In 1962, Robert Baldick edited and translated a one-volume selection, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, recently returned to print by New York Review Books. I have the original Oxford University Press edition, given to me in 1975 by a friend with a deep absorption in 19th-century French literature and culture.

The Goncourts started keeping their journal in 1851, and usually wrote it in the first-person plural. Jules died in 1870 at the age of 40, and Edmond continued writing it until his death in 1896. The brothers, who also wrote novels, plays and social history, knew Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Daudet, Degas, Rodin and Zola, among other Parisian luminaries, and they also knew the city’s brothels and society balls. Their journal is history as a higher, wittier, more observant form of gossip. They were neurotic. They were proto-bloggers, with temperaments nasty and generous, goatish and cerebral. Their prose is alternately rambling and aphoristic. Their appetites for life and everything else – including words -- were bottomless. The most moving portion of the journal is the watch kept by Edmond over his younger brother as he died slowly and agonizingly of syphilis. Here is a brief selection of favorite passages:

Feb. 25, 1860: “Moliere is the accession of the bourgeoisie, a solemn affirmation of the soul of the Thirds Estate. He is the inauguration of common sense and practical reasoning, the end of chivalry and poetry in everything. Woman, love, all the gallant and noble follies of life, are reduced in him to the mean yardstick of home and dowry. Everything spontaneous and impulsive is condemned and corrected. Corneille is the last herald of the aristocracy; Moliere is the first poet of the middles classes.”

Dec. 7, 1860: “As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.”

July 30, 1861: “The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.”

Dec. 6, 1862: “[Flaubert] is full of paradoxes which, like his vanity, have something provincial about them. They are coarse, heavy, clumsy, laboured, and graceless. He has a dirty wit. On the subject of love, which he often talks about, he has all manner of complicated, fanciful theories, affected theories designed to impress. At bottom, there is a great deal of the rhetor and the sophist in him. He is at once coarse and precious in his obscenity.”

July 23, 1864: “A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.”

May 22, 1865: “There is now only one consuming interest left in our life, the passion for the study of living reality. Apart from that there is nothing but boredom and emptiness. Admittedly we have galvanized history into reality, and done so with a truer truthfulness than other historians. But now the truth that is dead no longer holds any interest for us. We are like a man accustomed to drawing from a wax dummy who has suddenly been presented with a living model, or rather life itself with its entrails warm and active, its guts palpitating.”

“Jan. 2, 1867: A sign of the times: there are no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the embankments. France was the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat and waste a little time between sales. Nowadays books are bought standing. A request for a book and the naming of the price: that is the sort of transaction to which the all-devouring activity of modern trade has reduced bookselling, which used to be a matter for dawdling, idling, and chatty, friendly browsing.”

The Goncourts lived enviably thoughtful, engaged, bookish lives. They knew Paris as Dickens knew London, Joyce knew Dublin and Bellow knew Chicago. Their Paris – Walter Benjamin called it “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” -- was small enough for the brothers to have known almost everyone, and they were observant and dedicated enough to leave us an immense album of prose daguerreotypes.

Same Old Story

I know a young man who laments the absence of a love in his life. Verily, there is nothing new under the son. Let us turn to the Goncourts, Edmond and Jules, and their journal entry for March 5, 1858:

“It is all very strange. We see love everywhere, in books, on the stage, in other people’s lives. Everybody talks about it all the time. It is something which seems to be extremely important and extremely absorbing. Yet here we are, both of us perfectly healthy, fit for service in affairs of the heart, rich enough to wear clean socks and buy a bouquet of flowers, and with our noses more or less in the middle of our faces – and hanged if we can remember ever having been in love for more than a week at a time.”

`Beautiful Things are Rare'

I have a friend who, like me, is a former newspaper reporter and now a science writer. He is a passionate rationalist, but then Bob is passionate about everything and without tolerance for any sort of fraud. He is a nonbeliever, as I am, but with less empathy for the religious impulse. I accept the pull of the transcendent and its deep human attraction. Bob does not, yet his favorite poem, unrivalled by any other, remains T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. After long acquaintance (more than 40 years), it has come to seem like the great poem of the miserable 20th century, even to me. Thanks to Dave Lull, by way of Frank Wilson at Books, Inq., I read Eric Ormsby’s much-too-short “T.S. Eliot’s Subway Metaphysics” in Wednesday’s New York Sun. Frank echoes my feelings:

“This [is] quite a piece. Amazing that it should appear in a newspaper. Sad that such pieces don't appear more often in newspapers (though finding people to write them wouldn't be easy).” Ormsby mentions that his preference is for the slender, pocket-size Harvest Books edition, now carrying a $9 price tag. I, too, have the Harvest Books paperback, but I bought mine in 1971. The price: $1.35. Here’s Ormsby:

“….Four Quartets deals with merciless honesty in every section with the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of writing well. Because `words move … only in time,’ they are continually eluding our attempts to use them. No sooner have we written them than they appear inadequate; the pattern has changed, the words no longer correspond: `And so each venture/ is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / with shabby equipment always deteriorating/in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.’ After the exquisite lyric which begins, `What is the late November doing/ with the disturbance of the spring?’ he comments dryly, `That was a way of putting it — not very satisfactory.’ But he also offers advice that's valid for every writer who should use

“`The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together.’”

Strunk and White, move over. “The formal word precise but not pedantic” has been my not-always-lived-up-to mantra as a writer for years. And Frank is right: It’s a miracle that criticism – any writing, really -- of this order should appear in a newspaper. Ormsby’s writing, as always, is learned and discerning, yet personal and enthusiastic, composed with love. Apropos only of reading Eliot again, consider this well-known passage from Murder in the Cathedral:

“You think me reckless, desperate and mad.
You argue by results, as this world does,
To settle if an act be good or bad.
You defer to the fact. For every life and every act
Consequence of good and evil can be shown.
And as in time results of many deeds are blended
So good and evil in the end become confounded.”

These lines live up to the diffident/ostentatious, old/new, etc. balance proposed by Eliot above. I thought of them the other night, even before reading Ormsby’s piece, while reading this passage in “Some Reflections on Religious Art,” an appendix to Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism:

“Evil is by nature easy. Because good is a wholeness, whereas evil is a deficiency, and because evil does not act through itself but through the good it preys upon, it takes but a small amount of good to succeed greatly in evil, whereas it takes a great amount of good to succeed but a little in good.”

Elsewhere in the same book, Maritain writes: “Beautiful things are rare.”