`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.