`Imaginary Gains'

Recommended reading lists are always suspect and tend to carry, like Swiss chard, an implied good-for-you-but-taste-bad warning. My seven-year-old is blithely cavalier about the lists of AR (Advanced Reader) books issued by the school district. Among the movie and television adaptations and tracts devoted to politically correct social-engineering (Heather Has Two Mommies) are a few compellingly readable titles. In Michael’s case, these include books about geology and Greek mythology, as well as the Collected Works of J.K. Rowling. Despite the best efforts of educators, some kids manage to love to read.

Like many of the recently dead, Wright Morris (1910-1998) has been sadly forgotten but his novels – especially The Huge Season, The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree – stand among the glories of postwar American fiction. He was also a masterful photographer and a pioneer in creating “photo-texts” – The Inhabitants, The Home Place, God’s Country and My People. I’ve just read a volume new to me, About Fiction, published by Morris in 1975. He was not a systematic literary thinker, and much of his criticism is rooted in his own practice of fiction writing. It’s impressionistic, funny, a little sentimental and without reverence for literary shibboleths. Included is “A Reader’s Sampler,” an eclectic assortment of 21 works (all but one are fiction) from the 20th century. He never claims these are the best or most important books:

“There should be something old, and something new, for readers of various tastes and persuasions. The titles have in common the stamp of good writing they will share with knowledgeable readers. Here and there, meeting at random, a book and its reader make connection, and for the life of that bond there is more life to be lived, more life to be cherished, as well as to be lost. The losses are real, but great fiction assures us imaginary gains.”

Here’s Morris’ list:

Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
“The Dead,” James Joyce
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
The Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo
In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway
Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel
“Red Leaves,” William Faulkner
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee/Walker Evans
The Wife of Martin Guerre, Janet Lewis
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
The Fall, Albert Camus
I’m Not Stiller, Max Frisch
A Hall of Mirrors, Robert Stone

An odd mix of the predictable (Fitzgerald), awful (Lawrence, Camus, Stone), unknown (Lewis), and wonderfully inspired (Rilke, Svevo, Babel, Bowen). I would never warn a young reader away from this list. If we read only books carrying someone else’s nihil obstat, we hobble our own critical evolution and fail to grant ourselves the right to evolve, through experimentation, our own tastes and critical sense. I can't argue against the presence of The Great Gatsby on the list but it’s a book I have tried hard for years, without success, to enjoy. On Morris’ list you’ll find no Henry James, Willa Cather, Proust, Kafka, Nabokov, Beckett, Henry Green or Bellow, as you would on mine, but his brief assessments make even Dreiser sound sympathetic to an inexperienced reader:

“In the modern craft sweepstakes Dreiser is a bungler, a writer sometimes so bad his rhetoric seems campy, but his heavy hand does not long conceal his knowledge of people and what it is that corrupts them. He knows about life, and that is what the fiction writer should know the most about.”

I can see steam rising from the sophisticates’ camp but Morris, as both fiction writer and critic, possesses a true craftsman’s balance of technique and feeling. Here he is on Joyce:

“Young men are drawn to write of older men, as they are lured by a life they have not yet experienced, and `The Dead’ is Joyce’s anticipation of the losses an older Joyce must suffer. In this tale there is so little of the formidable technician, the detached, satirical, clinical observer, that readers familiar with Joyce’s reputation may wonder if this is the same author.”

Not all readings lists are created equal.

`A Witch's Ride'

At age 14, the first fiction writer I consciously imitated was Bernard Malamud. I had just read The Fixer (1966) and brazenly named one of my protagonists Yakov Bok after the novel’s title character. A friend who read my story after reading Malamud’s bestselling novel made fun of the pointless plagiarism. There was plenty more to make fun of. I was a goyische teenager in mid-sixties suburban Cleveland writing stories set in a 19th-century Russian shtetl. The memory is embarrassing but I have no regrets. It was through either The Fixer or Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Spinoza of Market Street,” which I first read around the same time, that I first learned of Baruch de Spinoza. Bok’s reading of The Ethics contributes to his moral evolution, his movement from passivity to action. Asked if he read Spinoza because the philosopher was a Jew, Bok answers:

“No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book -- they don’t exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek, and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man. That's in a manner of speaking, of course, because I've changed little since my youth.”

Bok starts out isolated but reminds himself Spinoza “was out to make a free man out of himself…by thinking things through and connecting everything up.” Today, I prefer The Assistant (1957) and Malamud’s stories to The Fixer, but I thought about it when I read a poem by Willis Barnstone, “Spinoza in the Dutch Ghetto,” in his collection Life Watch:

“Smoking his pipe he takes a beer with friends
at a close eating place, or back at home
and shop he grinds the glass to make his end
meet needs. Lean life. Then drops down to a dome
of Latin thought and pen. Why ask for more?
He trades his work with Leibnitz who is keen
as calculus to open every door
and wheel him into Germany to teach
and make him known. The lens grinder has seen
that greater world only in spheres that reach
the end of mind, and all mind plus all sphere
is God for him, a take that by itself
could set his life on fire. Baruch is not
a scrapper but all peace, all sky, no fear.
A Spanish Jew safe on his Lowlands shelf,
a bird on the North Sea, floating in thought.”

Spinoza too often is portrayed as bodiless, abstracted into pure mind, so I like the idea of him smoking a pipe and drinking beer with friends. I take “make his end” to be a play on words, for the glass dust from lens-grinding probably contributed to his death at age 44. In his note to “Spinoza in the Dutch Ghetto,” Barstone writes:

“Though close to mathematical Descartes whom he translated, he does not split mind and body which for him are distinct qualities of a single substance he calls God or nature. God is nature in its fullness, suggesting, perhaps by coincidence, the gnostic pleroma (fullness) that represents the gnostic deity.”

Books, like the Internet, are a limitless landscape of links. To add two more to the chain, here are sonnets about Spinoza written by Jorge Luis Borges and translated by Barnstone. First, “Baruch Spinoza”:

“A haze of gold, the Occident lights up
The window. Now, the assiduous manuscript
Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.
Someone is building God in a dark cup.
A man engenders God. He is a Jew.
With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;
Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in
A river, is borne off by waters to
Its end. No matter. The magician moved
Carves out his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he's begun
To construct God, using the word. No one
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.”

And “Spinoza”:

“Here in the twilight the translucent hands
Of the Jew polishing the crystal glass.
The dying afternoon is cold with bands
Of fear. Each day the afternoons all pass
The same. The hands and space of hyacinth
Paling in the confines of the ghetto walls
Barely exists for the quiet man who stalls
There, dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth.
Fame doesn’t trouble him (that reflection of
Dreams in the dream of another mirror), nor love,
The timid love women. Gone the bars,
He’s free, from metaphor and myth, to sit
Polishing a stubborn lens: the infinite
Map of the One who now is all His Stars.”

ADDENDUM: Buce at Underbelly responds to this post:

“I'm a few years older than you, but I suspect I read The Fixer on the same day--I was down with the flu, sprawled out on the faux-leather couch. It's one of those things I started & thought--oh man, I am not going to enjoy this--but could not let go. The passage about how he came to Spinoza is one that I pretty much committed to memory without trying, because it was there.

“Agreed about the stories. It's partly via Malamud that I came to the view that the most satisfying stories are not the solos but those that come together as a kind of mosaic. Malamud is one of the best examples; Mavis Gallant is another. Faulkner kinda, although with Faulkner even the novels are part of a mosaic. Chekov I suppose except he is so universal he becomes a mosaic of everything."

`Them's the Jockies for Me!'

The least important thing I can know about you are your opinions du jour (before they ossify, opinions are as fog in the noonday sun). This passage, dated June 1827, is from Coleridge’s Table Talk:

“Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with: `Them’s the jockies for me!’ I wished [Dr. Johan Gaspar] Spurzheim could have examined the fellow’s head.”

The joke is on Coleridge, a typhoon of raging opinions. His dinner companion’s silence was probably involuntary. Coleridge, likely stoked on claret and laudanum, could have out-talked Fidel Castro and, like El Jefe, had opinions on every subject. There’s a strange algebra at work here, one with applications beyond Coleridge. An inverse ratio exists between knowledge on one side, and vehemence and duration of expression on the other. The less our certainty, the louder and longer we opine. Coleridge appears to have no awareness of his vanity. So long as the man nods his head – approval? bafflement? politeness? Coleridge-induced catatonia? – the poet judges him intelligent. Only when the guest shifts his enthusiasm to apple dumplings does Coleridge deem him a moron.

Spurzheim (1776-1832) was an early proponent of phrenology, the pseudo-science of reading character in the size and shape of the head (Whitman was an enthusiast). I admire the dining partner’s gustatory opinion (nothing could be more heartfelt) and that colorfully peculiar word “jockies.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites Coleridge’s usage and defines “jockey” in this context as “fellow, lad, chap.” Of course, Coleridge was a tireless prevaricator, and we have no way of knowing whether the apple-dumpling man existed. I thought of him while reading Bryan Appleyard’s excellent post “On Opinion,” including:

“Certainly a large number of people I know seems to define themselves through opinions and to judge others by theirs. I am incapable of doing this, which is, I'm afraid, a very disabling condition. I console myself that it is the times that are at fault, not me.”

Presumably, the human impulse to opine aggressively is immemorial, and it’s only the proliferation of new media that makes it seem so unrelenting. Most comments on most blogs come in two basic forms: “I agree!” or “I disagree!” Could anything be more tiresome or less useful? It’s the latest manifestation of human self-importance, of course, but it also represents a degraded understanding of democracy. The right of free expression has devolved into the obligation of free expression. Online editions of newspapers, in their drive to attract readers, encourage comments on every story, review and editorial. Predictably, the loudest, shrillest, least informed voices prevail. As Appleyard says:

“We don't call the view of a stupid fifteen-year-old something different from the opinion of a wise sixty-year-old. I suppose 'opinion' is just a way of pretending there is more solidity to the people we meet than there actually is.”

As to solidity, remember Coleridge’s dinner guest: “Them’s the jockies for me!” That’s solid.

`Impassioned Commemoration'

My brother is the keeper of family history. He has lived in Cleveland all of his life and stayed in at least occasional touch with people I haven’t seen in 40 years, the dead and the living. He also inherited boxes of photos, birthday cards, newspaper clippings and other documents essential to understanding a family for whom mystery, rumor and willful ignorance were a way of life. My cousin Denise has contacted my Aunt Nancy regarding our maternal grandmother, Jewel McBride Hayes Kelly, who died in 1972 at the age of 84 and was that rarity among my relatives – a tolerably decent person.

This Irish convolution is starting to sound like the plot of a William Kennedy novel, but a Hayes/Kurp powwow is planned to pool information. I won’t be able to attend but I’m sympathetic to the cause because family seems more important today than it did in the past, and the reason is unapologetically selfish. The image I carry of my Aunt Nancy, who has survived her husband and his five siblings (including my mother), is four or five decades out of date. She’s eternally young in memory, much younger than I am today, and this misalignment of images induces a sense of temporal vertigo, knowing that an old woman has taken the place of my pretty, youthful aunt.

The writer who best charts this region – that is, the eternally elusive past – was Nabokov, especially in Speak, Memory. Toward the end of Chapter 8 he refers to “the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.” The entire passage, in which he recreates an Edenic childhood picnic, is masterful, as when he notes that such memories are “exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return.”

Samuel Menashe, in “The Living End,” seems to understand, but his understanding is tinged, as it often is, with regret:

“Before long the end
Of the beginning
Begins to bend
To the beginning
Of the end you live
With some misgivings
About what you did.”

`The Reserve'

My review of The Reserve, by Russell Banks, appears today in the Houston Chronicle.

`Real Places of Interest and Value'

Finally I’m reading On Eloquence, by Denis Donoghue, after several readers urged me to do so. To start with the obvious, Donoghue writes eloquently, with style, wit, clarity, great learning and passionate engagement. As an academic with a gift for words, for whom language is a pleasure and a burden, he is an endangered species. I’ve read only 50 pages, but already I hear echoes of regret:

“It has occurred to me, during the past several years as a teacher of English, Irish, and American literature at New York University, that the qualities of writing I care about are increasingly hard to expound: aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, `how to do things with words.’ It has become harder to persuade students that these are real places of interest and value in a poem, a play, a novel, or an essay in the New Yorker.”

With more sadness than anger, Donoghue bemoans the extra-literary approach to literature now dominant in universities. He offers “Conrad versus Chinua Achebe – was Conrad complicit with Imperialism?” as an imaginary but all-too-typical and silly subject for literary discussion. He writes:

“These and many similar topics are in high standing in departments of English, but I am not much interested in them, because they lead me away from the literature I care for toward serious issues that are treated well enough by political commentators in books and magazines.”

Donoghue laments the corrosive effects of trendy politics on literary studies. Not even Shakespeare is immune to such bastardization. “What are the ideological implications of King Lear?” Donoghue asks, only to reply:

“But a better question is: how did Shakespeare turn `the quality of nothing’ into King Lear? How did he write the play, and what are the marks of it? These are questions in aesthetics, which point `to a value present beyond any appropriation of it by current utilitarian ideas.’ [quoting Geoffrey Hartman’s Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars] How has Shakespeare worded the play? Further questions I take pleasure in: how does William H. Gass compose a sentence; how did Guy Davenport make a paragraph; how did Yeats find that particular way of writing `No Second Troy’; how did Calvino construct Invisible Cities?”

Along with writing well, Donoghue possesses the critic’s other requisite gift: superb literary taste.

`The Sanctuary of a Naked Soul'

Blaise Pascal arrived in the mail twice on Thursday. Eric Ormsby’s latest book, Ghazali: The Revival of Islam, came, at last, from Amazon.com. Ormsby is a poet, of course, and a fine critic, but also a scholar of Islam. Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī (1058-1111) was a Persian theologian and philosopher. In his preface, Ormsby writes:

“For the breadth, subtlety and influence of his work, Ghazali deserves to be counted among the great figures in intellectual history, worthy to be ranked with Augustine and Maimonides, Pascal and Kierkegaard.”

High praise, indeed, especially for a thinker about whom I know almost nothing. Pascal’s second appearance comes in a more unlikely form – the winter issue of Scope Quarterly, the magazine of my alma mater, Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The editors publish a regular feature, “Ad Lib,” in which they ask people associated with Skidmore to address an idea. This quarter’s subject is dread, and most of the responses are ridiculous. The head baseball coach dreads snow storms in the spring, telling a player he hasn’t made the team, and visiting the dentist. But Mary Crone Odekon, an associate professor of physics, gives a more thoughtful answer and cites Pascal’s best known sentence:

“There’s a fine line between dread and mystery, and cosmology and astronomy straddle that line. Vast empty space, infinities, black holes, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, even asteroids are dreadful, as well as beautiful, to think about. One of my favorite descriptions of this dread is from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, including his famous line `The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.’”

Pascal (1623-1662) was a mathematician and scientist as well as a philosopher and theologian. One shouldn’t be surprised by a physicist knowing something of his work, though I am, nevertheless. I talk with engineers and scientists almost daily, and few have read much outside their academic speciality – an unfortunate lapse especially with a writer like Pascal, who is credited with devising such technologies as the first calculator, public bus service, syringe and wrist watch. In his practicality and inventiveness, he reminds us of Benjamin Franklin. Mostly, we value him as a thinker whose mathematical rigor is coupled with a profound spirituality. Unamuno writes:

“A reading of Pascal, and especially of the Pensées, is not an invitation to study a philosophy, but to know a man and enter the sanctuary of a naked soul.”

I have the copy of The Pensées I first read almost 40 years ago – the green-and-white Penguin edition, first published by J.M. Cohen in 1961. It’s beaten-up, over-annotated and turning brown but when I think of Pascal it’s this edition’s typeface and wording that come to mind. Mostly, I admire Pascal’s humility and sense of proportion:

“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”

How sad to know that Pascal died before his 40th birthday. His last words were “May God never abandon me.” In his sonnet “John Berryman 1,” Robert Lowell writes: “how gaily they gallop/to catch the ebb – Herbert, Thoreau, Pascal,/born to die with the enlarged hearts of athletes at forty…”

`Great Unavoidable Work'

Pardon his fractured grammar but an anonymous reader asks: “If called upon to list five contemporary poets to read whom would you choose?”

My answer would have been different 10 years ago, before the deaths of Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, R.S. Thomas, Edgar Bowers, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice and Thom Gunn. If the reader means “necessary” poets, those who have produced, in Geoffrey Hill’s words, “great/unavoidable work,” the list is sadly brief. First, of course, is Hill. Ours, I believe, will be remembered as the Age of Hill, just as much of the 20th century was the age of Yeats, Eliot, Stevens and Auden.

Who else is necessary? Christopher Logue, for his eccentric, far-from-literal adaptations of Homer’s Iliad. Eric Ormsby, an American who lived for decades in Canada and now resides in England. Kay Ryan, certainly, our pithiest, funniest poet. Who would you propose as the fifth name on this hardly definitive list? Who am I forgetting? Fred Chappell, perhaps. David Ferry, best known as a translator of Horace and Virgil, comes to mind. Here is his “Of Rhyme,” from Of No Country I Know:

“The task is the discovering of a rhyme
Whose consequence is just though unforeknown
Either in its completion having been
Prepared for though in secret all the time

“Or in the way each step of the way brings in
To play with one another in the game
Considerations hitherto unknown,
New differences discovering the same.

“The discovering is an ordering in time
Such that one seems to chance upon one’s own
Birth name strangely engraved upon a stone
In consequence of the completion of the rhyme.”

To borrow Ferry’s phrase, the poets I’ve named share a gift for “ordering in time” – a useful way to think of poetry and all accomplished art. I’m reminded of what the late jazz saxophonist Nick Brignola, an encyclopedia of jazz humor, used to say: “So many drummers, so little time.”

`Boys'

How jarring, in the middle of a Chekhov story, to read the word California, as though Proust had casually name-dropped Schenectady. It comes in “Boys,” a story from 1887. At Christmas, Volodya Korolyov and his friend Lentilov return home from school. Chekhov doesn’t give their ages but they seem on the cusp of puberty, 12 or 13. Volodya’s three sisters notice he is strangely quiet:

“All the time they were at tea he only once addressed his sisters, and then he said something so strange. He pointed to the samovar and said:

“`In California they don't drink tea, but gin.’”

While the family makes Christmas decorations, Volodya and Lentilov sit in the corner whispering, poring over an atlas:

“`First to Perm . . .’ Lentilov said, in an undertone, `from there to Tiumen, then Tomsk . . . then . . . then . . . Kamchatka. There the Samoyedes take one over Behring’s Straits in boats . . . . And then we are in America. . . . There are lots of furry animals there. . . .’

“`And California?’ asked Volodya.

“`California is lower down. . . . We've only to get to America and California is not far off. . . . And one can get a living by hunting and plunder.’”

Lentilov, described by Chekhov in troll-like, unhygienic terms, suddenly asks Volodya’s sisters if they have read Mayne Reid, the Irish-American writer of adventure novels. Mayne (1818-1883) was a protégé of Poe, who described him as “a colossal but most picturesque liar. He fibs on a surprising scale but with the finish of an artist, and that is why I listen to him attentively.” In Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells us that as a boy he especially admired Mayne’s The Headless Horseman, “which had given him a vision of the prairies and the great open spaces and the overarching sky” – an early picture of Nabokov’s future adopted home. Books have inflamed the boys, as they did Don Quixote and Emma Bovary. They plot an escape to California. When Lentilov asks Katya if she has read Mayne’s books, she replies:

“`No, I haven't. . . . I say, can you skate?’

“Absorbed in his own reflections, Lentilov made no reply to this question; he simply puffed out his cheeks, and gave a long sigh as though he were very hot. He looked up at Katya once more and said:

“`When a herd of bisons stampedes across the prairie the earth trembles, and the frightened mustangs kick and neigh.’

“He smiled impressively and added:

“`And the Indians attack the trains, too. But worst of all are the mosquitoes and the termites.’

“`Why, what's that?’

“`They're something like ants, but with wings. They bite fearfully. Do you know who I am?’

“`Mr. Lentilov.’

“`No, I am Montehomo, the Hawk's Claw, Chief of the Ever Victorious.’”

No, Lentilov is the Russian granddaddy of every Star Trek obsessive. Chekhov paints the quintessential nerd a century before the type was widely recognized in the United States. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “nerd” dates to a remarkably early 1951, in Newsweek: “In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd.” The OED definition perfectly suits Lentilov:

“An insignificant, foolish, or socially inept person; a person who is boringly conventional or studious. Now also: spec. a person who pursues an unfashionable or highly technical interest with obsessive or exclusive dedication.”

Reid Mayne’s novels were Lentilov’s Dungeons and Dragons, Dr. Who and The Matrix. The OED describes the etymology of nerd as “uncertain and disputed,” but offers an intriguingly boyish explanation: “…nerd, a fictional animal in the children's story If I ran the Zoo (1950) by ‘Dr. Seuss’, depicted as a small, unkempt, humanoid creature with a large head and a comically disapproving expression.” Chekhov, on Lentilov’s first appearance, describes him as “another small person,” and writes:

“He was, in fact, distinctly ugly, and if he had not been wearing the school uniform, he might have been taken for the son of a cook. He seemed morose, did not speak, and never once smiled.”

The boys make their break for California but are stopped by the police as they go from shop to shop, trying to buy gunpowder. Lentilov, who “looked morose and haughty to the end,” is dragged away by his mother. But before he goes, “he took Katya's book and wrote in it as a souvenir: `Montehomo, the Hawk's Claw, Chief of the Ever Victorious.'"

`A Stiff Turn-the-Eye-Inward Old Man'

One night last week on the way home from work I stopped at the branch library near our house to pick up the books I had reserved. The branch closes at 6 p.m., and I made it with a few minutes to spare. Among the titles I claimed was Planet Earth: Poems New and Selected, by the Canadian poet P.K. Page. The volume is edited by Eric Ormsby, who in his foreword ranks Page higher than Elizabeth Bishop. That’s part of the reason I wanted to reread Page’s poems. I respect Ormsby’s judgments and it bothers me that I’ve found so little to engage me in Page’s work. What am I missing?

I chatted with a librarian and she was shutting off the lights when I stepped outside. Sunset is around 5:50 p.m. The west glowed pale yellow and my car and those around it and much of the surrounding blacktop were covered with a boisterous, just-arrived convention of crows, my favorite bird. Crows gather in roosts at sunset. Explanations are various, including protection in numbers and exchanging food-foraging information. I thought of this one as an especially noisy cocktail party. The birds weren’t planning to sleep on my Oldsmobile; merely chat, as I had with the librarian, before settling in for the night. There were hundreds of crows in the parking lot and perched on nearby roofs and power lines. The best count I could make of birds on my car was 27. I had to count fast because other library patrons were complaining about the noise and the presumed befoulment of their cars. I looked and found no shit on mine. The crows grudgingly flew from my car and I thought of the playground scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Later that night I settled in, as I presumed the crows had, and opened Page’s book at random to page 50, where I found “The Crow”:

“By the wave rising, by the wave breaking
high to low;
by the wave riding the air, sweeping the high air low
in a white foam, in a suds,
there
like a churchwarden, like a stiff
turn-the-eye-inward old man
in a cutaway, in the mist
stands
the crow.”

Some people get all cosmic about such coincidences. I draw no conclusions and try to enjoy them as life’s little gifts of enhancement. First, I had the book; then, the crows; then, the convergence of crows and poem. Thanks.

`Ah, Bitter Chill It Was!'

My boss and her husband spend weekends and holidays on their farm, about 90 minutes northwest of Houston, where they raise cows, bulls, pecans and snakes. Their house in the city is a convenience, more a motel than a homestead. Their heart is in the country. She wrote me Sunday evening about a late-night walk in the Texas winter:

“The frost was starting to set and it was still and clear. The moon was very bright, so there weren't many stars to be seen. Nature compensated, though, because the moonlight was reflected in the frost. It was magical. I walked for several minutes, breathing in the cold air (cold for me!), then turned in feeling lucky to have experienced this. Then this morning I took the dogs out around 8. The frost was a heavy one and the ground was almost as white as snow. Again, there was the twinkling of the sunlight on the frost. There's a different quality to sound, too, when everything's covered with a thick coat of frost.”

Winter stirs the poetic impulse. I cherish northern memories of late-night walks in deep winter, when the ground is stone and each step is a crunch and a crack, and the wind is a muted roar. Ann adds:

“I felt so inadequate trying to put words to the effect in both the light and the dark and I thought to myself, some poet has seen this and written something that's worthy of it.”

First I thought of Coleridge and his “secret ministry of frost” in “Frost at Midnight.” Then of Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes.” By happy happenstance, Sunday, Jan. 20, was St. Agnes’ Eve.:

“St. Agnes’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feather, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold….”

We might consider Thoreau the poet of winter if he hadn’t also documented the other seasons with comparable precision. Here’s a journal entry from Jan. 11, 1884:

“The north side of all stubble, weeds, and trees, and the whole forest is covered with a hoar frost a quarter to a half inch deep. It is easily shaken off. The air is still full of mist. No snow has fallen, but, as it were, the vapor has been caught by the trees like a cobweb. The trees are bright hoary forms, the ghosts of trees. In fact, the warm breath of the earth is frozen on its beard.”

And this, from Jan. 8, 1852:

“I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow—perhaps ten inches deep—has got a dead leaf in it, though none is to be seen on the snow around.”

And I think of a phrase from John Shade’s poem “Pale Fire” in Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “the svelte/Stilettos of a frozen stillicide.” And of a late, lovely poem by Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End,” which begins:

“Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.”

Come to think of it, Ann didn’t need any help. This is awfully good:

“The moon was very bright, so there weren't many stars to be seen. Nature compensated, though, because the moonlight was reflected in the frost.”

`Responsible and Eloquent'

A writer/editor in New York City writes to me in an e-mail:

“Instead of resolutions for the new year, I've chosen a few key words I hope will influence my life in the coming fifty-two weeks. They are: responsibility, eloquence, frugality, discernment. I hope that the writing I produce this year is both responsible and eloquent; I hope to maintain a sustainable lifestyle, to not live beyond my means; and I hope to more wisely choose how I choose to spend my time, and with whom. It seems wiser at this point to give myself broad directives than specific, and therefore potentially unattainable, goals.”

I’m impressed by any man, especially one so young, with the prudence to resist the self-sabotaging allure of pre-doomed resolutions. Grand revolutions of body and mind are as like to succeed as comparably emphatic revolutions in the body politic. We change incrementally, if at all. Dr. Johnson understood our endlessly renewed capacity for self-delusion. This he published on Oct. 21, 1758, in No. 27 of The Idler:

"There is nothing which we estimate so fallaciously as the force of our own resolutions, nor any fallacy which we so unwillingly and tardily detect. He that has resolved a thousand times, and a thousand times deserted his own purpose, yet suffers no abatement of his confidence, but still believes himself his own master; and able, by innate vigour of soul, to press forward to his end, through all the obstructions that inconveniences or delights can put in his way."

The four virtues my young friend has settled on are wisely chosen. I wasn’t capable of such mature thinking at his age, almost 30 years ago. Of eloquence I remain cautious. Writers must be on guard against self-seduction. Nothing is easier than to be eloquent with nothing to say. Perhaps he has chosen, however, the perfect countervailing virtue, discernment, which implies the ability to make critical distinctions. Like the early mechanical clocks, with their verge-and-foliot design, we work most efficiently when we can both move and stay balanced.

When Brian’s e-mail arrived, I had on my desk a photocopy of Zbigniew Herbert’s acceptance speech for the Ingersoll Foundation’s 1995 T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing. I keep it in the drawer of my night table and read it periodically, for Herbert was a man given to balance in his thinking and work, if not always in life. The Greeks were his constant, though never uncritically so:

“Every year, I undertake an imaginary journey to Greece, in order to experience pure joy and to drink from the sources of our civilization. The Acropolis and the Greek temples in Sicily, lonesome columns, and the Epidaurus theater: these are perhaps the greatest concentrations of beauty in the world. I repeat to myself that beauty is a vehicle for passion and virtue, and this thought offer peace. Yet an evening spent in one’s library over the volumes detailing Greek history may fill one with horror and demolish the comfortable thought of past perfection. Sophocles, Socrates, and Plato witnessed events that seem carbon copies of present-day tribal wars, so deftly served up in newspapers.”

`Our Hearts Expect Happiness'

The first short stories written during my lifetime I can remember reading were John Updike’s, the early pieces from The Same Door (1959) and Pigeon Feathers (1962). Not coincidentally they remain my favorites from his half-century and more of work, and I’ve always preferred his short fiction to the novels. In the foreword he wrote for The Early Stories: 1953-1975, published in 2003, Updike characterizes his Depression-born generation and says:

“But when has happiness ever been the subject of fiction? The pursuit of it is just that – a pursuit. Death and its adjutants tax each transaction. What is possessed is devalued by what is coveted. Discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear – these are the worthy, inevitable subjects. Yet our hearts expect happiness, an underlying norm, `the fountain-light of all our day’ in Wordsworth’s words.”

This seems morally and aesthetically wise. Can you think of a significant -- or even insignificant -- work of fiction dedicated to happiness? Neither can I. A kneejerk explanation is that happiness is not essentially an interesting state of being. It's best defined negatively, by what it is not. It tends to be monochromatic, with fewer nuances than the Technicolor palette of unhappiness and sorrow. And happiness is evanescent. It seems appreciable only in contrast to what surrounds it -- depression, numbness, anger, discontent, anomie, churlishness. It dissolves when I become aware of it, as though self-consciousness were a corrosive. We experience a happy minute, an hour, never a month. It seems to be an occasional byproduct of right living, of living in balance. And to seek happiness assures its elusiveness. Like grief, its arrival is unexpected.

Updike was 25 when he wrote "The Happiest I've Been," later collected in The Same Door. The Updike-like narrator is 20. Describing a New Year's Eve party among friends from high school, in a small Pennsylvania town in 1952, he says: "I had the impression then that people only drank to stop being unhappy, and I nearly always felt at least fairly happy."

Of all Updike's stories this is my favorite, the most emotionally powerful, mingling memory, comedy, sadness and his peerless eye for American detail. It's the best rendering I know of the retrospective character of happiness, our dawning awareness of it after it passes. As John Nordholm drives west across Pennsylvania, in the company of his friend Neil Hovey, whom he has already told us he will never see again after they arrive in Chicago. Read the story's conclusion with its title in mind:

"There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a vast trip: many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility -- you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element -- and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state -- as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me."

`Sad Books for Humorous People'

I reread “The Lady with the Dog,” one of Chekhov’s triumphs, with the words of Vladimir Nabokov, in Lectures on Russian Literature, in mind:

“Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness. There exist writers that sound like something between a titter and a yawn – many of these are professional humorists, for instance. There are others that are something between a chuckle and a sob – Dickens was one of these. There is also that dreadful kind of humor that is consciously introduced by an author in order to give a purely technical relief after a good tragic scene – but this is a trick remote from true literature. Chekhov’s humor belonged to none of these types; it was purely Chekhovian. Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.”

Chekhov’s story begins with Gurov, a chronically unfaithful married man with children in Moscow, approaching yet another conquest in Yalta, the Crimean resort on the Black Sea. Anna Sergeievna, too, is married and bored. They become lovers and the unexpected happens – they fall, impossibly, in love. By the final scene, he notices his hair is turning gray. Here’s the conclusion, in Constance Garnett’s translation:

“And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”

Their hopes mingle ridiculousness and pathos. The tone, even the vocabulary, is plain, without flourishes. One false move and the story would spill into burlesque or maudlin cliché. Here’s Nabokov again:

“…Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, as tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud.”

Chekhov’s effects are heightened by what Nabokov calls “a faintly iridescent verbal haziness.” Nabokov, the plumiest of prose stylists, lauds Chekhov for the precision of his drabness. Where else in literature do we find a comparable coexistence, in Nabokov’s words, of “funny and sad at the same time?” Occasionally in Nabokov himself – think of the final reunion between Humbert and Lolita, the Hazel Shade scenes in Pale Fire and the story “Signs and Symbols.” So, too, in Beckett, who kept “all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray.” Sorrow and comedy merge in the halting eloquence of “First Love,” written in French in 1946, translated into English in 1970:

“Love brings out the worst in man and no error. But what kind of love was this, exactly? Love-passion? Somehow I think not. That’s the priapic one, is it not? Or is this a different variety? There are so many, are there not? All equally if not more delicious, are they not? Platonic love, for example, there’s another just occurs to me. It’s disinterested. Perhaps I loved her with a platonic love? But somehow I think not. Would I have been tracing her name in old cow-shit if my love had been pure and disinterested?”

`Like the Punchline to a Joke'

A friend knocked on my office door and said I might appreciate the story she wanted to tell. Recently she read War and Peace for the first time, in the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohonsky. Like any thoughtful reader, she asked herself afterwards, “Now what?” So she read Anna Karenina. Then she consulted Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov’s posthumously published review of his homeland’s 19th-century writers. In the lecture devoted to Anna Karenina, Melissa was surprised to encounter the name of her former landlady in Ames, Iowa, where she attended Iowa State University. Here’s the pertinent passage:

“Tolstoy stood for the natural life. Nature, alias God, had decreed that the human female should experience more pain in childbirth than, say, a porcupine or a whale. Therefore Tolstoy was violently opposed to the elimination of this pain.

“In Look magazine, a poor relation of Life, of April 8, 1952, there is a series of photos under the heading, `I Photographed My Baby’s Birth.’ A singularly unattractive baby smirks in a corner of the page. Says the caption: Clicking her own camera as she lies on the delivery table, Mrs. A.H. Heusinkveld, a photography writer (whatever that is) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, records (says the caption) these extraordinary views of the birth of her first baby – from the early labor pains to the baby’s first cry.

“What does she take in the way of pictures? For instance: `Husband [wearing a handpainted philistine tie, with a dejected expression on his simple face] visits wife in the midst of her pains,’ or `Mrs. Heusinkveld shoots Sister Mary who sprays patient with disinfectants.’

“Tolstoy would have violently objected to all this.”

The kitchiness, of course, is funny but what would Nabokov (and Tolstoy) have made of women videotaping childbirth and posting it online? Or half-dressed pregnant celebrities posing for magazine covers? Nabokov obviously relished the vulgarity of documenting intimate moments and publishing the photos in a national magazine – yet another instance of poshlust, the Russian word he defined as “smug philistinism” and “not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” [See his Gogol and the essay “Philistines and Philistinism,” appended to Lectures on Russian Literature.] What’s different 56 years later is that Mrs. Heusinkveld today would congratulate herself on her candor and courage in transgressing oppressive standards of morality and taste, and a sizeable cadre of voices would second her self-praise. Today, vulgar narcissism is rationalized as virtue. Not to broadcast the birth of one’s child is so bourgeois, so 20th-century.

My friend is a tough-minded Iowan, alert to poshlust in all its shadings. She didn’t meet Mrs. Heusinkveld until almost 30 years after the Look magazine incident. Her son, the boy whose birth she photographed, worked as a handyman on his mother’s rental properties. “She was mean, too, the kind of person who thinks she’s so good and liberal-minded but really she’s mean,” my friend said, confirming all my assumptions.

More important than all of this is that Melissa loved Tolstoy’s great novels, and the love surprised her. “War and Peace is like the punchline to a joke – long and difficult. You wouldn’t think anybody would enjoy it,” she said.

The night before, I had read an essay new to me by Marilynne Robinson, “When I Was a Child,” included in The Brick Reader (edited by Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje). The first paragraph seems apropos:

“When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.”

`A Near Spiritual Hunger'

My friend’s widowed mother is in her nineties and lives by herself in Connecticut. Like my friend she is a lifelong inveterate reader and has in recent decades devised a highly focused reading plan. She reads, or rather rereads, the work of Jane Austen, Henry James and Marcel Proust (in French) in perpetual rotation. Her husband was an academic, and so is her son, but she is a dedicated amateur, one who reads out of love and joy. I thought of her while reading My Mentor, a memoir of William Maxwell by Alec Wilkinson, who writes:

“Reading was a near spiritual hunger with him, and he spent the last few years of his life reading hours a day, going back over the books he had loved.”

Knowing this, one wonders how and why people, young and old, spend their days watching television or surfing the more worthless regions of the Internet. Self-respect and a sense of gratitude call us to higher things. Time squandered is an affront to creation, and which promises us more: The American Scene or American Idol? Health and wealth permitting, I foresee old age as the period when I will finally get serious about reading, when I will at last read The Tale of Genji and return gratefully to Gibbon. Edward Hirsch reports Maxwell (who died in 2000, age 91) saying:

“I once said to Joe Mitchell that the only part about dying that I minded was that when you are dead you can’t read Tolstoy.”

Or Chekhov, Shakespeare or Joyce. Or William Maxwell.

The Distillation of Facts

Eric Ormsby and Adam Kirsch are already writing for the New York Sun, and now the newspaper has added Theodore Dalrymple to its first-rate stable of reviewers. Here’s a choice digression from his review of the 614-page Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, by George Makari:

“Here, as an aside, I make a plea for thin rather than for fat books, at least for the general reader. (I accept the value of fat books as repositories.) There is more intellect in the distillation than in the accumulation of facts; for facts, unlike men, are not created equal. We busy human beings need guidance as to their importance and significance; and there are, after all, very few subjects of such intrinsic importance that we need to know every last detail about them.”

Dalrymple is a master of concision, of saying much with modest means.

`What a Queer Spot for a Bookshop!'

Some years ago I saw Steven Millhauser in the public library in the city where both of us lived. I mentioned I was rereading The Old Wives’ Tale, the only one of Arnold Bennett’s many novels I had read but one I recalled with pleasure. Steven grimaced and made it clear he had no use for Bennett. I was surprised. His fiction is certifiably “post-realist” but his tastes are admirably broad. I’ve heard him praise Trollope, Zola and Maupassant, and while I was writing a lengthy paper on Henry James he encouraged me to read “Madame de Mauves.” I finished rereading The Old Wives Tale, enjoying it again, but never pursued Bennett’s 29 other novels.

On Jan. 5, the “Five Best” feature in the Wall Street Journal was assembled by Edward Mendelson, a literature professor at Columbia University and the literary executor of W.H. Auden’s estate. Mendelson selected five works that “explore marriage with uncommon clarity,” and among them he included Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923). The only other book on the list I have read is Theodor Fontane’s incomparable Effi Briest, made into a great film in 1974 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Monday evening I started reading one novel but lost interest after four chapters. I put it aside and opened Riceyman Steps. It was already late and I read only 40 pages, but I’m enjoying myself. Henry Earlforward is a bookseller in the Clerkenwell district of London. His shop is located on the title steps, modeled by Bennett on Granville Place, now called Gwynne Place. The area is rundown but not yet a slum. Here’s how Bennett describes the book shop:

“The King’s Cross Road window held only cheap editions, in their paper jackets, of popular modern novels, such as those of Ethel M. Dell, Charles Garvice, Zane Grey, Florence Barclay, Nat Gould, and Gene Stratton Porter. The side-window was set out with old books, first editions, illustrated editions, and complete library editions in calf or morocco of renowned and serious writers, whose works, indispensable to the collections of self-respecting book-gentlemen (as distinguished from bookmen), have passed through decades of criticism into the impregnable paradise of eternal esteem. The side-window was bound to attract the attention of collectors and bibliomaniacs. It seemed strangely, even fatally, out of place in that dingy and sordid neighbourhood where existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter, where the familiar and beloved landmarks were public-houses, and where the immense majority of the population read nothing but sporting prognostications and results and, on Sunday mornings, accounts of bloody crimes and juicy sexual irregularities.”

You would never know, reading Bennett’s prose, that Ulysses had been published the previous year. He’s wordy and graceless but possesses a modest gift for detail (“sporting prognostications”) and gentle satire (“as distinguished from bookmen”). Of his six authors of “popular modern novels” I recognize only Zane Grey (Riders of the Purple Sage). Grey and Porter were Americans, the others English. They were the Danielle Steeles and John Greshams of their day, and Bennett’s casual assessment of journalism, circa 1919, remains pertinent. And the mention of “bibliomaniacs” reminds me of another bookshop, Bibliomania, owned by my old friend Bill Healey in Schenectady, N.Y. Bennett continues:

“To the secret race of collectors always ravenously desiring to get something for much less than its real value, the window in Riceyman Steps was irresistible. And all manner of people, including book collectors, passed along King’s Cross Road in the course of a day. And all the collectors upon catching sight of the shop exclaimed in their hearts: `What a queer spot for a bookshop! Bargains. . . .’”

Bookshops have always been magnets for the pretentious and those wishing to appear as something they are not. Even 85 years ago they were ripe for satire. Here’s an exchange between Earlforward and one of his customers, “a short, carefully-dressed man, dapper and alert”:

“`I suppose you haven’t got such a thing as a Shakspere [sic] in stock, I mean a pretty good one?’

“`What sort of Shakspere [sic]? I’ve got a number of Shaksperes [sic].’

“`Well, I don’t quite know. . . . I’ve been thinking for a long time I ought to have a Shakspere [sic].’

“`Illustrated?’ asked the bookseller, who had now accurately summed up his client as one who might know something of the world, but who was a simpleton in regard to books.’

“`I really haven’t thought.’ The customer gave a slight, good-humoured snigger. `I suppose it would be nice to have pictures to look at.’”

This sort of thing goes on for another three pages, until we learn the customer’s true identity and purpose. Then Bennett reveals something about the character of Earlforward:

“`Afraid your books outside are getting a bit wet,’ he cried from the doorway.

“`Thank you. Thank you,’ said the bookseller mildly and unperturbed, thinking: `He must be a managing and interfering kind of man. Can’t I run my own business?’

“Some booksellers kept waterproof covers for their outside display, but this one did not. He had found in practice that a few drops of rain did no harm to low-priced volumes.”

Those panjandrums of Modernism, Ezra Pound (in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”) and Virginia Woolf (in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”), effectively derailed Bennett’s reputation for right-thinking readers. The loss is ours. He is a greater, more sophisticated artist than his second-hand reputation implies. Consider the following review of Sturge Moore’s Art and Life, written by Bennett in 1910 and collected in The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett (1968, edited by Samuel Hynes):

“His value is that he would make the English artist a conscious artist. He does, without once stating it, bring out in the most startling way the contrast between, for example, the English artist and the Continental artist. Read the correspondence of Dickens and Thackeray, and then read the correspondence of Flaubert, and you will see. The latter was continually preoccupied with his craft, the two former scarcely ever – and never in an intelligent fashion. I have been preaching on this theme for years, but I am not aware that anybody has been listening. I was going to say that I was sick of preaching about it, but I am not. I shall continue. . . .”

`The Fragility of Happiness'

I’ve recommended several novels to my boss, as well as the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and thus far my job is not in jeopardy. She has enjoyed Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald; Loving, by Henry Green; and Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson. On her own she found, with my endorsement, John Updike’s Of the Farm and Stanley Elkin’s Mrs. Ted Bliss. Last week, on a whim, I suggested one of my favorite works of fiction, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), by William Maxwell, a quiet, heartbreaking American master.

The Library of America has just published his Early Novels and Stories, which includes Bright Center of Heaven, They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, Time Will Darken It (his other undoubted masterpiece) and a selection of stories. Let’s count this as a down payment on redemption after the LoA’s publication in recent years of such trash as Paul Bowles, H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Fourteen months ago I suggested Maxwell’s induction into the same club as Henry James and Willa Cather. The LoA imprimatur coincides nicely with the centenary of Maxwell’s birth, in Lincoln, Ill., on Aug. 16, 1908. He died in 2000, two weeks short of his 92nd birthday. In the fall, the LoA will publish Later Novels and Stories.

In an interview, the editor of the LoA’s Maxwell volumes, Christopher Carduff, rightly identifies the novelist’s principle concern as “the fragility of happiness.” It’s a theme he shares with the writer he most resembles, Anton Chekhov (with a dollop of Washington Square-era Henry James). Carduff confirms this:

“He admired and emulated the Joyce of `The Dead’ but, as an artist and technician, had no use for the Joyce of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. He also had no use for Pound or Stein or Faulkner. He did love Virginia Woolf, but not for her `modernism.’ He loved her for the same reasons that he loved Chekhov and Turgenev, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Bowen, and Bonnard and Vuillard: because she rendered, with great fidelity and artistry, the texture of middle-class family life, and the interactions, both large and small, between men, women, and children within a family. Maxwell wasn’t so much a great modernist as he was a great domestic realist, perhaps the greatest American fiction has yet produced.”

These are grand claims readers can substantiate by reading the novels and stories. I remember discovering Maxwell on my own in the nineteen-seventies and wondering why he wasn’t better known and widely acknowledged as our Chekhov. At the time, I knew no one who had read his work or even recognized his name. Maxwell was for 40 years a fiction editor of The New Yorker, and in that capacity he edited, among others, Cheever, Nabokov, J.F. Powers, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Peter Taylor, Updike and Welty. One of his favorites was Frank O’Connor, the pen name of the Irish story writer Michael O’Donovan. In 1996, Knopf published a volume of the Maxwell-O’Connor letters, The Happiness of Getting it Down Right. The title comes from an essay Maxwell wrote about O’Connor after his death in 1966:

“He did not go in for being an important writer, though he was one; or an important anything. Writing was what mattered to him. The fascination of it. The difficulties. The happiness of getting it down right.”

Obviously, this is Maxwell’s modestly oblique self-revelation. The letters also confirm the Chekhov connection. In 1964, Maxwell wrote to O’Connor’s wife, Harriet, when the couple lived in Dublin, trying to locate Chekhov’s stories as they had been translated by Constance Garnett:

“Does Michael ever haunt second hand book shops? Are there any to haunt? There virtually aren’t any here, any more. And I have been trying to complete my Chekhov. Will youse [sic] keep your eyes open for Vol. IV (The Party, etc.); V (The Wife, etc.); VII (The Bishop, etc.); X (The Horse Stealers); and XII (The Cook’s Wedding, etc.)?”

The postscript to The Happiness of Getting It Down Right includes letters Maxwell and O’Connor’s widow exchanged after the Irish writer’s death. The widow, it seems, gave Maxwell her husband’s Chekhov collections, and his expression of gratitude can make you weep:

“I have been looking at, reading, and thinking about Michael’s volumes of Chekhov. So lived with – turned down corners, turned down sides of the page, coffee stains, whiskey stains, and perhaps tears. It is almost as if you had given me his bathrobe and slippers. I know I don’t deserve to have them, but I will try to deserve to have them.”

Between 1983 and 1987, Ecco Press issued, in 15 paperback volumes, Garnett’s translations of Chekhov’s stories. Each came with a blurb on the back cover, amounting to a miniature essay by a contemporary writer, including Welty, Richard Howard, and Cynthia Ozick. Maxwell supplied the blurb for Vol. X, The Horse-Stealers, one of the volumes he asked O’Connor to scout for:

“It seems to be part of the human condition that a wall of glass separates one life from another. For Chekhov it did not exist. Though no Church has seen fit to canonize him, he was nevertheless a saint. The greatest of his stories are, no matter how many times reread, always an experience that strikes deep into the soul and produces an alteration there. The reader who has lived through `Ward No. 6’ knows forever after that his own sanity is provisional. As for those masterpieces, `The Lady with the Dog,’ `The Horse-Stealers,’ `Sleepy,’ `Gooseberries,’ `About Love,’ `In the Ravine,’ – where else do you see so clearly the difference between light and dark, or how dark darkness can be.”

`I Can't Imagine Life Sans Books'

W.H. Auden wrote the following in 1939, near the start of World War II. It was part of a longer, abandoned work published posthumously as The Prolific and the Devourer:

“My father’s library not only taught me to read, but dictated my choice of reading. It was not the library of a literary man nor of a narrow specialist, but a heterogeneous collection of books on many subjects, and including very few novels. In consequence my reading has always been wide and casual rather than scholarly, and in the main non-literary.”

The father was George Augustus Auden, a physician and scion of a family his son described elsewhere as “phlegmatic, earnest, rather slow, inclined to be miserly, and endowed with excellent health.” We’re relying on Auden’s memory and sense of filial piety, of course, but his father's library, for all its obvious limitations, sounds like excellent preparation for the poet who would write "In Praise of Limestone." It also defines his eccentric book predilections for life. Judging by his collected reviews and essays, Auden was happiest reading poetry, science and theology. He shared a century with Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner and Beckett but makes little mention of them. The novelist on whom Auden dotes most enthusiastically is Trollope, and his favorite thinker is Kierkegaard. As a reader, he found what he needed, as all of us do.

I happened upon a column I wrote in January 1989 for the newspaper I worked for in upstate New York. It carries the headline, written by a copy editor, "I can't imagine life sans books." My oldest son, now 20 and a junior in college, was then 17 months old. The occasion was a new, much-touted literacy project in New York. I mentioned the importance books already played in my son's young life, and compared it to the relative absence of books in my parents' house. A friend working on his master's degree in social work had recently used me as a case study, and I cited his findings:

"My friend discerned that as a child I gravitated to literature as an antidote to a miserable home life. Books were solace. They were funny and suspenseful and fed my already active fantasy life. After the usual children's books, I consumed shelves of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. I collected all of Edgar Rice Burroughs, hardcover and paperback. I wallowed for years in science fiction, at the same time discovering Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre and Kafka."

In the column I mentioned a book I read repeatedly as a kid. All I remembered, oddly, was the story -- no author or title. I described the plot -- an Indian boy in the upper Great Lakes carves a canoe, releases it in Lake Superior, and the toy boat floats to the Atlantic Ocean -- and asked readers to identify it. In the next week or so, in those pre-Internet, pre-email days, I received almost 100 letters (paper, ink, envelope) and innumerable calls at the office telling me the book I sought was Paddle-to-the-Sea, by Holling C. Holling, published in 1941. I bought a copy and introduced it to my son, though it never captured his imagination as it had mine. Here's the third-from-last paragraph in that column written 19 year ago:

"Today, the great writers are my teachers. I can't imagine living my life without the wisdom left by Chekhov, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Shakespeare, Thoreau and Whitman."

Nothing has changed. If we look long enough, and are willing occasionally to ask for help, we find the books we need.

`I Look Upon Fine Phrases Like a Lover'

On alternate nights before going to sleep, the friend of a friend, a retired English professor, reads one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or a letter by Keats. This impresses me as a sensible regimen. Some readers, reaching for a mystery, might object: “But I don’t want to think before I go to sleep. I want to relax and escape. I want to stop thinking.” Fair enough, but engagement with a literary text, especially a work we know intimately but also know we can never exhaust, is another species of relaxation. The quality Keats and Shakespeare share, besides genius, is an essential strangeness. By this I don’t mean eccentricity. They say things in a manner different from other writers, and in a manner that continues to resonate even after long acquaintance. Their language is simultaneously precise and suggestive. They find expression for thoughts we never suspected were possible. Take the best-known sonnet, No. 73:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

What always impresses me is how quietly Shakespeare narrows time, starting with a year and tightening the focus until only ashes remain. The sadness is almost overwhelming, a sense heightened, not diminished, by its proximity to self-pity. A quarter-turn in the wrong direction and it would all melt into bathos. And why “black night?” Why is that not redundant, inserted merely to fill out the meter, but instead so frightening and final? We have a life distilled in 14 lines – perhaps two lives. This confirms the rightness of Keats addressing Shakespeare, in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” as “Chief Poet!” On Nov. 22, 1817, Keats writes to J.H. Reynolds:

“One of the three books I have with me is Shakespear’s [sic] Poems: I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets – they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits – Is this to be borne? Hark ye!”

The letters are peppered with Shakespeare. On Aug. 14, 1819, he wrote to Benjamin Bailey:

“I am convinced more and more every day that….a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World – Shakspeare [sic] and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me – I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover….”

With your permission, Professor, I will adopt your reading plan.

`Harness Jades and Girdle Jaspers'

Most of what little I know about classical Chinese poetry I trace to a slender Penguin paperback I first read about 40 years ago: Poems of the Late T’ang, translated and edited by the late Welsh Sinologist A.C. Graham. [A brief digressive question: How much of my literary education do I owe to Penguins?] Soon I read the translations of Waley, Pound, Rexroth and others, but Graham’s tone of cool wistfulness is the one that has stuck, the one that sounds, rightly or wrongly, “Chinese” in my inner ear. Let’s be grateful to New York Review Books for returning Graham’s 1965 anthology to print. His annotations are spare and useful, and never attempt to usurp the poems. Included is Graham’s essay, “The Translation of Chinese Poetry,” which modestly begins:

“The art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915), Arthur Waley’s One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), and Amy Lowell’s Fir Flower Tablets (1921). Except for Waley, the unique instance of a sinologist who is also a poet, its best practitioners have always been poets or amateurs working on the draft versions of others.”

The T’ang Dynasty dates from 618 to 907 A.D. Graham’s choice of poems by Tu Fu, Meng Chiao, Han Yu, Lu T’ung, Li Ho, Tu Mu and Li Shang-yin is small but delicately selected. Here is “A Withered Tree,” by Han Yu (768-824 A.D.):

“Not a twig or a leaf on the old tree,
Wind and frost harm it no more.
A man could pass through the hole in its belly,
Ants crawl searching under its peeling bark.
Its only lodger, the toadstool which dies in a morning,
The birds no longer visit in the twilight.
But its wood can still spark tinder.
It does not care yet to be only the void at its heart.”

This is precise description worthy of a naturalist like Thoreau, but Graham adds in a note: “The `void at it heart’ is both the hollow inside of the tree and the Buddhist ideal of the mind freed from the illusion of a material body.”

And this, by Tu Mu, is “Pien River Blocked by Ice”:

“For a thousand miles along the river, when the ice begins to close,
Harness jades and girdle jaspers tinkle at the jagged edge.
The drift of life’s no different from the water under the ice
Hurrying Eastward day and night while no one notices.”

I especially like the sound of “Harness jades and girdle jaspers.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “jasper” as “a kind of precious stone,” more specifically “an opaque cryptocrystalline variety of quartz, of various colours, usually red, yellow, or brown, due mostly to the admixture of iron oxide.” Its etymology may have influenced Graham’s choice of a word a most recent OED citation dating from 1868: Spanish and Italian, by way of Latin, Greek, Herbrew, Assyrian, Persian and Arabic. Poems of the Late T’ang is full of small linguistic treats. As an epigraph, Graham uses a lovely passage from Wei T’ai:

“Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an after-taste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the feet and the hands waving in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits!”

In a nutshell, and with infinite variations, this distils Imagism and its Russian cousin, the Acmeism of Mandelstam and Akhmatova.

`Ninth-Rate Philosophy'

“Academic literary study seems these days to be ninth-rate philosophy, or drunken verbiage without the alcohol. I’d rather listen to my local pub bore than to a paper entitled ‘Open Ended: Poetic Closure and the Digital Interface.’”

The voice is unmistakable: Theodore Dalrymple, in his latest “Global Warning” essay in The Spectator. He pleasingly echoes one of his precursors, George Orwell, in the 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”:

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

`Self-Critical Rather Than Self-Satisfied'

I once interviewed a self-described “humor educator.” He arrived at my newspaper wearing a suit, tie and red clown nose. Throughout our hour-long talk in a conference room, the nose remained in place. “Laughter is therapeutic,” he reminded me several times. He was earnest and never funny, except inadvertently, and laughed very loudly.

I thought of this fellow the other night as I was reading a novel I’m reviewing. The novelist makes no attempt to be intentionally funny. In fact, humor of the basest sort – fart jokes, that sort of thing – might redeem the dreary proceedings. His story has an italicized, literal-minded quality borrowed, I think, from Hollywood, where several of his earlier books have been turned into films. I thought of my “humor educator” because he, like every character in the novel (including the narrator), showed signs of what the American Psychological Association calls histrionic personality disorder. That my clown-nosed interviewee was a psychologist, I suppose, proves something.

How are we to respond, as critics and readers, to so misguided a book? Not an evil, stupid or even inept book, just blindly, humorlessly wrong-headed. The novelist in question is known for his devotion to “progressive” causes but, for once, it’s not preachy politics that make the book so dull. Rather, it reminds me of The Best Years of Our Lives, the William Wyler film that won eight Oscars in 1947. Who would bad-mouth a movie in which a real-life disabled Army vet, Harold Russell, plays a Navy vet who lost both hands during World War II? When Russell’s character, Homer Parrish, smashes a window with his prosthetic hooks, I cringed and giggled, and still cringe and giggle remembering it. Manny Farber called it “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz.”

I resent Wyler heavy-handedly, so to speak, manipulating my emotional responses, and feel the same way about the novelist in question. Merely to criticize well-intentioned sincerity, however, seems a little too easy, especially when one has done it so often before. It can’t be good for us as critics or people to repeatedly feel superior to such stuff, pitying the slobs who enjoy reading it while congratulating our own enlightened tastes.

In his Paris Review interview, Geoffrey Hill said, “The first obligation for any real critic is to be self-critical rather than self-satisfied.” Actually, I think that’s the first obligation for any human being, but I’m uncertain what this means in practice for a critic.

`Of Some Writers'

Chekhov writes in his Notebooks:

“Of some writers each work taken separately is brilliant, but taken as a whole they are indefinite; of others each particular work represents nothing outstanding; but, for all that, taken as a whole they are distinct and brilliant.”

Neither of Chekhov’s categories is an unqualified dismissal. Both sorts of writers have their charms. I take “indefinite” to mean difficult to distinguish or remember in detail, as with the work of prolific writers like Turgenev and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In memory, without the text in hand, I have difficulty telling one story from another in A Sportman’s Notebook and A Crown of Feathers, though I’m left with pleasurable memories of both. The same is true of Dubliners, a vastly greater work, except I can recall “The Dead” in some detail. Not coincidentally, “The Dead” is vastly greater than the other stories in Joyce’s collection, and I’ve read it more often than the others.

How much do we remember of any work of literature? Judging by my current rereading of Shakespeare, very little in detail – some scenes and phrases or lines, the general arc of the story -- but seldom with strict accuracy. The way we remember books has something in common with our recollections of people. We think: “What a nice guy” or “What a jerk.” If we pursue memory further, we’re liable to refine the judgment and recall specifics: “He was always dependable, ready with an encouraging word” or “What a negative guy, always whining,” and so on. Cumulative judgments are based on first impressions and subsequent evidence that confirms, refutes or modifies them. All of this is humbling and causes me to wonder how many complacently cherished critical “opinions” would stand up to serious reevaluation – that is, to honest rereadings of the books in question. This is a Rashomon-like problem, but the varying accounts come not from discrete observers but from versions of ourselves separated in time. Rereading a book fondly recalled can be risky. We may find our fondness inexplicable -- or reassuring. I'm reminded of the opening paragraph of A.J. Liebling's "Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove" (collected in The Sweet Science):

"Part of the pleasure of going to a fight is reading the newspaper next morning to see what the sports writers think happened. This pleasure is prolonged, in the case of a big bout, by the fight films. You can go to them to see what did happen. What you eventually think you remember about the fight will be an amalgam of what you thought you saw there, what you read in the papers you saw, and what you saw in the films."

In Chekhov’s second category I place Sherwood Anderson. No single story even in his masterwork, Winesburg, Ohio, is itself a masterpiece, a label that might accurately apply to one of his later stories, “A Death in the Woods.” Anderson’s effects, in Winesburg, Ohio, are cumulative. None of his novels is an unqualified success, though there’s much to love in Windy McPherson’s Son and Poor White. Winesburg stories like “Hands” and “Paper Pills” are permanent features of my mental landscape. I feel as though I know their characters with greater intimacy than I do some people I see almost daily.

`A Kind of Judgment Day'

A good critic’s foremost prerequisite is the ability to write well. With every ill-written sentence, critics sabotage whatever middling authority they possess. Why trust the judgment of writers unable to join language to thought and feeling with precision, wit and style? Why waste time on lousy prose in the first place, except as a lesson in what to avoid?

The binding of In My Good Books remains an impressively vivid shade of Delft blue, given that Chatto & Windus published it in 1942. The pages have turned buff, not brown, and the judgments they contain have likewise weathered well:

“We turn to literature not only for respite, relaxation or escape from the boredom of reality and the gnaw of suffering, but to get away from uncertainty. And certainty is in the past. There, so it seems to us, things have been settled. There we can see a whole picture. For to see something whole becomes a necessity to people like ourselves whose world has fallen to pieces. Perhaps, we think, the certainty of the past will help our minds to substantiate a faith in the kind of certainty we hope for in the future.”

“People like ourselves” refers specifically to the common readers of England, civilians under Nazi attack, but V.S. Pritchett addresses all who inhabit a world under siege. So much criticism, from newspaper book reviews to academic door stops, attempts to usurp the provinces of philosophy, sociology and political science. We welcome Pritchett’s common-sense reminder of literature’s proper domain: humanity. Often I read reviews and litblogs whose authors give the impression of disliking their fellow humans, and we can already hear them going after Pritchett’s “there…things have been settled,” blithely ignoring his strategic “so it seems to us.” Pritchett’s tone, here and elsewhere, is measured and mature, never snotty or condescending. He’s not showing off but nevertheless impresses us with his reliable assessments, comprehensive reading and animated prose. He relies on sound judgment, not theory.

In My Good Books collects 25 essays (they are more substantial than most reviews) first published in the New Statesman and Nation. All are devoted to writers of the past, with Hardy and Synge the most recent. In his preface, quoted above, Pritchett describes himself as “bookish but uneducated.” He means he never attended a university. Born in 1900, he was apprenticed at 15 in the London leather trade. His mother was illiterate. His father, limned memorably in one of Pritchett’s novels (Mr. Beluncle) and a memoir (A Cab at the Door), was a comically unsuccessful businessman. Pritchett, among the best-read men of the age, a model for book critics, whose short stories are the best written by an Englishman since Kipling, would not be admitted to a creative writing program today and he probably, poor fellow, never read Blanchot. He was a professional amateur who weighed books against life and other books. Whitney Balliett ranked him, with A.J. Liebling, among his “non-musical heroes.” In the preface, Pritchett notes how printers, publishers, bookshops, libraries and readers suffered during the Blitz:

“The wise reader is one who prepares himself for the awful moment, a kind of Judgment Day, when only he and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together; when he will, so to speak, be stranded in the highest society.”

He’s no nostalgist wallowing in the after glow. He is shrewd about books and men, past and the present:

“The past is not serene. It is turbulent, upside down and unfinished. When we look into the lives of the authors of the great wise (or unwise) books, when we glance at the erratic outline of their times, we find that those men and those times were as uncertain as we are, and the picture they saw was by no means complete to their eyes. They lived – our hackneyed phrase is repeated throughout the history of literature – in `a period of transition.’ Every one of them had one foot in the old, the other in the new.”

In My Good Books includes pieces on, among others, Gibbon, Constant, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Peacock and Dostoevsky. On the last, as with his other subjects, Pritchett pays us the compliment of familiarity:

“I have been reading Dostoevski again: The Possessed. You know the sensation. You are sitting by the fire reflecting that one of the things which reconciles you to life, even at its most tragic, is the low clear daily monotone of its voice. Suddenly comes a knock at the door, there are cries. A man has been murdered at a house down the street. Dostoevski again.”

And he does something else: He makes a persuasive case for rereading a writer I don't much care for.

`I Mind My Belly Very Studiously'

Finicky eaters and those who claim they forget to eat are never to be trusted. Absent from their bodies, they are a danger to themselves and others. They scorn pleasure, health, common sense and the call of their animal natures. They are vain, niggling and hard. Such fastidiousness at the table amounts to a minor obsession in the thought of Samuel Johnson. Boswell reports him saying:

“Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.”

And his friend Hester Lynch Piozzi, in her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, records a similar thought:

“A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of any thing than he does of his dinner; and if he cannot get that well dressed, he should be suspected of inaccuracy in other things.”

This weekend I watched The Godfather again, for perhaps the 20th time since my father and I saw it at the Yorktown Theater, in Cleveland, in March 1972. Food, its preparation and consumption, runs like a leitmotif through the movie, and Coppola/Puzo give the ultimate word on the subject to reliable, ample-bellied Clemenza:

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

John Berryman, R.I.P

John Berryman ended his life 36 years ago, on Jan. 7, 1972. In “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” he wrote:

“Caretaker! take care, for we run in straits.
Daily, by night, we walk naked to storm,
some threat of wholesale loss, to ruinous fear.
Gift us with long cloaks & adrenalin.”

`Articulate Creatures'

It took more than a month but the mailman on Saturday delivered Time's Covenant: Selected Poems, by Eric Ormsby, two weeks earlier than Amazon.ca had promised. I won’t rehash the details but I’m pleased to own a book that has already set up shop in the sustenance and pleasure districts of my mind. As Ormsby writes of a similar reading experience in “Time’s Covenant (2006)”, “The Psalms had colonized my own brain-pan/Eons before.”

His work is rich and calorie-filled in an age of poetry-as-ricecake, and calls us to celebrate the supreme human gift -- language. With few exceptions, the work likeliest to attract us and sustain the attraction is actively written. Great writers are never passive amanuenses, holding buckets and catching what pours from the stream of consciousness. Music and thought shape words. Bill Bryson, in his just-published Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, writes:

“It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work -- every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career -- is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.”

Bryson’s brief biography is based on the few unassailable facts we have about Shakespeare’s life. Speculation is blessedly sparse and judicious. What that leaves us is a portrait of a hardworking playwright, a professional rooted in a competitive, unforgiving world. Bryson musters the evidence that Shakespeare wrote with admirable speed, like any pro. For these reasons, the sustained splendor of his words seems even more miraculous. In his essay “Poetry as Isotope” (collected in Facsimiles of Time), Ormsby might be writing about Shakespeare when he revels in our linguistic legacy:

“With all the misuses and the perversions of language to which our tongues are prone, it is still a privilege to be a creature in whose mouth language has grown, and an honor to give utterance in these puffs of air which assume coherence and significance in a receiving ear; to partake of shared speech and discourse and conversation and colloquy. So much so that at times, almost overwhelmed by the sense of this privilege and its signal strangeness, we could imagine that all the bronze and granite columns we raise up to our pride mean less in the end than these momentary monuments of sense we erect not only when we read or write or recite poetry but also when we converse or teach or simply speak. Maybe it is just in the evanescence of our words, in their transient intricacies, that our ultimate dignity as articulate creatures resides.”

`Hard to Set in Motion'

I wake incrementally, as though surprised by morning and uncertain how to proceed. I emulate a friend who slept, undrugged, through a Los Angeles earthquake, only to find mirrors cracked and lamps knocked over in his hotel room when he finally woke. Each morning mirrors my life -- slow to start, late to bloom, a plodder not a sprinter, though the body outdistances mind and mood. Caffeine and sunshine infusions ease some of the daily grimness. Here’s what Alec Guinness says in A Positively Final Appearance (and it was – he died one year after its publication, in 2000, age 86):

“For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised – listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays. This morning, in spite of the promise of a bright cloudless day, I woke curmudgeonly and disapproving of the world and most of its inhabitants. Montaigne pulled me up sharply: `What we call wisdom is the moroseness of our humours and our distaste of things as they are now … Age sets more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces.’ I don’t care about the facial blemishes but the wriggly, acid convolutions of the brain must be smoothed away somehow. Two or three days in a Benedictine monastery might do the trick.”

I’ll take Haydn under advisement. A saner choice, certainly, than Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose passing in December belatedly brightened an otherwise drab year. The composer will be remembered for describing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as “the biggest work of art there has ever been.” Not surprisingly, he died of heart failure.

Montaigne’s essays already sit on my night stand, beside the lamp, alarm clock and other useful books. Guinness quotes from “On Vanity,” an inspired choice. Montaigne seems to have shared our slowness to rouse. Later in the essay he writes:

“I am hard to set in motion; but once under way, I go as far as anyone wants. I balk as much at little undertakings as at great ones, and at getting equipped for a day’s trip and a visit to a neighbor as for a real journey.”

`Shakespeare Can Take Care of Himself'

One expects actors, particularly those of the genus Movie Star, to be without eloquence, wit or literary gift. They are like the rest of us, only prettier, and the abundance or absence of acting ability has no bearing on their general lack of charm. Consider Marlon Brando and Sylvester Stallone, respectively. That the late Alec Guinness was thoughtful, courtly and bookish, an attentive reader of Montaigne and Shakespeare, a serious Roman Catholic, and author of three fine memoirs (as well as being my favorite actor) would surely surprise the average Star Wars fan. Of those films and his role as Obi-Wan Kenobe, Guinness writes in A Positively Final Appearance (1999):

“A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned.”

I pulled down A Positively Final Appearance (his other autobiographical volumes are Blessings in Disguise, 1985, and My Name Escapes Me, 1996) because I have been lingering with Hamlet, and I remembered that Guinness, at 22, had played the role of Osric in John Gielgud’s 1936 production. I wondered what the actor might contribute to my understanding and enjoyment. In 1938 he played the prince in an Old Vic production directed by Tyrone Guthrie. The actors performed in modern dress, smoked cigarettes and sipped cocktails -- an annoying gimmick of which Guinness partially approves:

“All these decades later I wish we had been much more daring. The most memorable visual effect in the production was the use of umbrellas in the graveyard scene, which caused adverse comment from those who had never experienced the melancholy of a damp funeral. Now I think that in a production presented in contemporary clothes there could be justification for the insertion of a line or two of current English when the need was felt.”

Guinness goes on to amend the “very like a whale” exchange between Hamlet and Polonius -- “Perchance it is a UFO.” “My Lord, it is a UFO.” -- and adds:

“The thing that worries me about cleverly fooling around with Shakespeare is the false impression likely to be made on the young seeing the plays for the first time….Shakespeare can take care of himself, however jaggedly spoken, but I have doubts about the lesser great.”

I’m reminded of Samuel Beckett’s insistence that his plays be produced without changes to text or staging. This has always seemed reasonable. I associate “modernizing” with vulgar hubris, actors and directors wishing to supplant the playwright’s genius with cheap novelty, thus drawing attention to themselves. Later in the memoir, Guinness remembers the first Hamlet he saw, in Haymarket in 1931, with Godfrey Tearle as the prince:

“His superb voice somehow reminded me of very dark Christmas pudding with a dollop of brandy butter….[The production] was a gloomy affair set in drab curtains and dressed stiffly in what were meant to be stylized tenth-century costumes. They say that the first Hamlet you see is the one that leaves the greatest impression and that you love it for the rest of your life. That wasn’t my experience with Godfrey’s.”

Guinness repeatedly surprises the reader with insights and enthusiasms. He casually mentions that a friend has given him RS. Thomas’ 1995 collection No Truce with the Furies. He copies out “Raptor” “with the intention of learning it. Small hope with my fading memory. Standing on the balcony in my nightshirt the opening lines did come back to me, however.

“`You have made God small,
Setting him astride
A pipette or a retort
Studying the bubbles,’

“then it all escaped me.”

Here’s the rest of the poem:

“absorbed in an experiment
that will come to nothing.

“I think of him rather
as an enormous owl
abroad in the shadows,
brushing me sometimes
with his wing so the blood
in my veins freezes, able

“to find his way from one
soul to another because
he can see in the dark.
I have heard him crooning
to himself, so that almost
I could believe in angels,

“those feathered overtones
in love’s rafters, I have heard
him scream, too, fastening
his talons in his great
adversary, or in some lesser
denizen, maybe, like you or me.”

In the same notebook in which he had copied Thomas’ poem, Guinness finds a favorite line from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: “We behold him but asquint upon reflex or shadow.” How many professors of English can you name, let alone actors, who have read Thomas and Browne? And just to remind you that the man who played Henry Holland in The Lavender Hill Mob, Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers and everyone in Kind Hearts and Coronets, was supernally funny, I offer this:

“With the exception of The Way of All Flesh, which I could never get on with, I have had a lifelong fondness and admiration for Samuel Butler – or at any rate since The Notebooks and Erewhon came my way when I was about twenty. Who could not love and respect a man who could write: `The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.’ (I am tempted to add, `The first two diminish with age and only the last is rigid.’)”

`They Observe Faraway Worlds'

In Shakespeare, as in life, I’m surrounded by conclusions I fail to draw. I’ve read Hamlet 20 or 25 times, I suppose -- most recently, last week -- but never noticed Claudius is a drunk until Michael Pennington pointed it out in Hamlet: A User’s Guide. This insight proves more useful than endless maunderings about image patterns and gender politics. Perhaps because of his theatrical background, Pennington sees the characters more intensely than those of us bound largely by the text. When Pennington reads the words Hamlet speaks to his mother (a very creepy speech, by the way):

“Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed…”

he suggests that “bloat” may be an unflattering exaggeration (and a sexual innuendo?), “though he probably shouldn’t be too skinny either; skinny kings don’t inspire confidence.” I’m reminded of the Monty Python bit in which they have a contest to select a suitable nickname for the citizens of Belgium. Third Place: Phlegms. Second Place: Sprouts. And the winner: “Fat Greasy Belgian Bastards.” Pennington writes:

“Alcohol is important to Claudius. He is a man who has murdered to get what he has and prospered without apparent effort: but in fact he is running very fast to keep still, his brain ever more active as he is sucked by his coat-tails into retribution. How does he sustain himself? I think he is a progressive alcoholic who draws creative energy from his habit at the outset; but he is weak over a long distance…”

These words seem especially pertinent as I recently contacted an old acquaintance I haven’t seen in almost 35 years. He was the closet I had to the quintessential “drinking buddy.” We drank together daily, at work, at home and in between, especially in John’s white, destroyer-class Thunderbird, and otherwise had nothing in common. Another old acquaintance told me John recently moved to Houston. I sent him an e-mail, he responded, and we had a long talk on the phone last weekend. John works as a supervisor in a steel plant, and still drinks the rest of the day. I’m amazed and appalled by his stamina. Next year he’ll turn 60. I told him I gave up booze a long time ago, and when I suggested we get together some time for dinner, he was forthright: “Most people change. I don’t change. I’m the same guy you used to know.” It’s not in me to condemn John. His explanation sounded at once apologetic and defiant, and I understand that. So did Zbigniew Herbert in a prose poem, “Drunkards,” as translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter:

“Drunkards are people who drink at one gulp, bottoms up. But they make a face, because at the bottom they see themselves again. Through the neck of the bottle they observe faraway worlds. If they had stronger heads and more taste, they would be astronomers.”

I see in John the drunk as house divided, the grimace of recognition pinpointed by Herbert, that familiar mingling of resignation, grandiosity, defiance and self-reproach -- in short, my own image in a funhouse mirror. Even Claudius is not entirely undeserving of our sympathy. Pennington says he demonstrates “provisional humanity,” though Hamlet calls him a “treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.” Again, Pennington:

“The poison in the cup and the poison on the untipped sword: how were they ever going to get away with it? It is a piece of recklessness, an addict’s fantasy of short-term gratification.”