`A Triumph About Failure'

“When you take away prizes and the business of publishing, writing lives or dies by those two solitary figures – the writer alone with his work and the reader alone with the book.”

This is the late John McGahern, and in his words I hear the stringent Irish gift, or curse, for reducing existence to essentials -- a welcome antidote to conventional wisdom, which romanticizes writing or judges it a viable career option, like selling RVs. McGahern’s words recall John Berryman’s one-sentence distillation of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.”

His remarks come from an interview he gave RTÉ Radio 1, in Ireland, in 2000, and later collected in Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy, published by Lilliput Press. In answer to Murphy’s preceding question, McGahern says:

“Writing is an instinct. I’d say that I write to see. [A neat inversion of Conrad, who said his purpose in writing “is, above all, to make you see.”] I suspect that unless there’s a sense of excitement and discovery for the writer, the reader will not have much sense of excitement or discovery either.”

McGahern’s stories are matchless for their time, neither self-consciously artsy-fartsy nor glib and commercial. Their language is artfully compressed, realistic but never abjectly so. Every story writer worth his or her salt is eventually compared to Chekhov, and in McGahern’s case the comparison is apt, though the Irishman’s language is more poetic than the Russian’s. Both succeeded, against odds, in getting “human feelings right.” Here’s more from McGahern’s interview:

“All I know about the process of writing or the experience of writing is that it doesn’t feel like self-expression. What you think you’re going to say always changes when it gets down on the page. One is trying to be true to the original experience, but seldom by the time it’s finished has it anything to do with the way you imagined it in the first place. It changes through working with language. There’s a great deal of confusion about the material and writing. The material doesn’t matter; it’s how the writer handles the material that matters. You could get a book that’s a triumph about failure or you could have a boring book about success.”

His observations, to my satisfaction, resolve the rancorous misunderstandings over the relation between content and form. Compressed to a single, Hollywood-style, high-concept sentence, even Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Ulysses, novels with adultery as a major theme, sound unreadably banal. McGahern again:

“I think that the basic grammar of writing is very simple. I see the image at its heart, and that can be a piece of thistledown, a wedding ring, or a banana skin. Part of the writer’s function is to pick out the images that sharpen and dramatize and bring the scene to life. The rhythm is the emotional binding of the images. Especially in novel-writing the rhythm is very close to tact in manners – when to be silent, when to speak. Paragraphs and punctuation are part of that. The novel is the most social of all the art forms. The short story is much more closely linked to the poem and drama than to the novel. After the rhythm and the image, the final shape that you give a book – and naturally that’s most difficult in a novel – is closely linked to the material or the content and the way it is seen. In that sense, I think that shape and content are indivisible.”

Such a lovely, pitch-perfect image – “the rhythm is very close to tact in manners – when to be silent, when to speak.” He might also have likened rhythm to dynamics in music – piano or forte. The American master of such modulation in prose fiction, of course, is William Maxwell. Another was John Williams, whose Stoner was much-loved by McGahern. From him, a final comment, one that aptly recalls the work of all the writers I have mentioned – McGahern, Chekhov, Maxwell, Williams:

“All good writing is suggestion, because, in a way, it’s completed by the reader. All bad writing is very close to statement. That is why opinions don’t have much place in writing.”

`With Wonder and Gratitude'

To be illiterate or to learn to read and leave the gift dormant are, respectively, a curse and a crime. A mind without words lives among ruins. My 7-year-old objects to bedtime because it robs him of reading time, and the next morning he wakes early to resume reading. He sits curled on the couch for hours, moving only to turn pages or adjust his glasses, lost in a book. I look at him and, for once, see a flattering reflection of myself.

Last weekend I took the boys to the neighborhood branch library. Michael has read the first six Harry Potter books and wanted the seventh, but was unable to find it on the shelves. He asked a librarian, seated at his desk playing a computer game, where he could find the final volume. Sourly, the gnomish fellow said, “How old are you?” Michael told him and the librarian swiveled in his seat, pointed toward the children’s section and said, “Maybe you can find something over there.” I moved in, repeated Michael’s question in a voice several octaves lower, and the guy silently stood up, led us to the shelf holding multiple copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and handed one to Michael. Fear is an excellent quality in a public servant.

Who remembers Andrei Sinyavsky, known as Abram Tertz? The great Russian writer and dissident, author of Fantastic Stories and Goodnight!, died in Paris in 1997. My sense is that Western readers, if they ever knew Sinvavsky, have forgotten him. He spent 1966 to 1971 in Soviet forced labor camps for the “anti-Soviet activity” of his fictional characters – a crime Sinyavsky’s master, Nikolai Gogol, might have posited. Out of his time in the Gulag, Sinyavsky fashioned a book, A Voice from the Chorus, based on letters he wrote his wife. It’s my favorite among Sinyavsky’s works, a ragbag of observations, yearnings and overheard dialogue that achieves a peculiar unity-in-fragmentation. In a passage from 1966, he writes:

“I have no time to read books, but think of them constantly, with wonder and gratitude. And never cease marveling at a book’s capacity to absorb and then conjure up on demand a whole world for you to see.

“In childhood a book resembled a folding screen. A heap of animals and plants would suddenly pop out at you from behind dreary grey covers and when you shut it, everything vanished again. A book has something of the `magic cap,’ or the `magic table-cloth.’”

The translators, Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward, add a footnote to the phrases in quotes:

“The reference is to Russian fairy-tales in which he who dons a magic cap becomes invisible and where a magic table-cloth becomes instantly laid with plates, cutlery and food.”

The librarian, with his computer game and rococo beard, has never known the conjuror’s tricks latent in a worthwhile book. Neither did the apparatchiks who locked up Sinyavsky for his fictional seditions. Already, my son does.

Soaps

In her later years, after suffering a stroke at age 74, my maternal grandmother closely followed soap operas on afternoon television. She called them her “stories,” which makes sense because I don’t recall her ever reading a book or newspaper. Nothing else held her attention so absolutely. From my 10-year-old’s perspective, the shows blurred into one long convoluted narrative defined by an endlessly repeated scene: People standing in a living room hollering at each other, rather like life in my house or an Edward Albee play. As a kid I couldn’t imagine anything drearier – watching people behave like my family, but better dressed.

I spoke with an undergraduate who is taking a class devoted to the history of soap operas, including their purported roots in Roman comedy, and is writing a paper on how soaps portrayed “empowered” women. She is bright and well-spoken, and treated the academic recognition of television with a predictably breezy sense of irony, today’s universal solvent. I wanted to avoid sounding stricken with end-of-civilization gloom, so I let her do most of the talking. Modern life trumps satire.

In “Facing Reality,” an essay collected in The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson takes on what she calls “this collective fiction, this Reality,” “this work of grim and minor imagination which somehow or other got itself acknowledged as The Great Truth and The Voice of Our Time because of rather than despite its obvious thinness and fraudulence.” She addresses this widely recognized but rarely acknowledged phenomenon from the perspective of a creator of “real” fiction. Robinson’s discussion of religion in the essay came to mind while listening to the student and her soap operas:

“Where did religion go? I know I risk being unfair in characterizing television religion, because I have not paid much attention to it. But it seems to me more television than religion by a good margin. It is adept at exciting minor emotions and at stimulating viewer loyalty. It bears about the same relation to religion All My Children bears to King Lear. I can see how someone stuck at home might prefer it to golf. There is no snobbery in saying things differ by the measure of their courage and their honesty and their largeness of spirit, and that the difference is profoundly one of value. Television has not taken over the expression of religious sensibility, any more than vendors of souvenir Eiffel Towers have deprived Paris of a monument.”

Let’s first praise the pungency of Robinson’s prose, her humor (“minor emotions,” “might prefer it to golf”), and the bracing clarity of her thought. I invite you to read the entire essay, and all The Death of Adam, but for now note the scale Robinson holds in her hands: On one side, King Lear; on the other, All My Children. The student I spoke with knows which way the scale tips. So do her professor and classmates. So do the producers, writers and actors who make soap operas. But this “Reality,” as Robinson calls it, “this work of grim and minor imagination,” in collusion with our soothing sense of irony, says otherwise. In her essay’s final, forgiving, unexpected sentence, Robinson writes:

“And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.”

`Difficult, Up to a Point"

I read several impenetrable poems online over the weekend. I bothered only because a writer I respect spoke well of them. They were written by a living American poet and have a shiny, brittle veneer. The syntax is straightforward, even dull, as is the vocabulary. There’s nothing surreal about them but they seem unyielding and inert, like chunks of polished steel. They sit on the page, or the screen, and give nothing, including pleasure, which caused me to give up trying to fathom whatever depths they might possess. Obscurity, I think, must come with a reward.

In other words, I’m not opposed, on principle, to obscure or difficult poetry. If you can exhaust a poem after one reading, it’s not much of a poem, and some of the most difficult poems in the language, written by Donne, Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill, are among my favorites. I’m only speculating here, but perhaps poetry, even extremely difficult poetry, must possess a strategy of reciprocity, an implied contract between writer and reader. I, as reader, agree to focus time and attention on a poem, bring to it my education and experience, whatever intellectual and emotional gifts I possess, and in turn I receive – what? Pleasure, which I know covers a lot of ground, but in my case includes musically interesting language (even prose offers this, though not often enough), a sense of resonance, of meaning and significance just beyond my immediate comprehension. The first pleasure must be the words in my mouth, even before I understand them. Poet-critics as various as T.S. Eliot, Basil Bunting and Eric Ormsby have said similar things.

I remembered an essay, “Benign Obscurity,” published in The New Criterion in 1997 by the late Donald Justice, and included in his prose collection Oblivion. He begins with a qualified defense of obscure poetry:

“I hope I will not be seen as joining the very popular revolt against reason and good sense if I suggest that there is in fact something to be said for obscurity in some of its simpler forms. It can at the very least be a sign of the presence of something hidden, of something perhaps too difficult to express easily, or even, for some tastes, a sort of code for the seemingly spontaneous or inspired.”

Justice is having some gentlemanly good fun here -- “obscurity in some of its simpler forms” – but he’s also making a serious point. If a poet wishes to be read and appreciated beyond a minute cadre of exegetes, he or she aims for a balance somewhere between incoherence and the phone book. Developing this theme, with the same quietly satirical voice, Justice writes:

“Whether the uncertainty lies with you or with the poet, or in what ratio the blame is to be apportioned, would vary from case to case. I must suppose that most poets, even if they do not make it their constant aim to say everything with the utmost clarity, do not go much out of their way on purpose to prevent understanding. It would be only the self-consciously experimental poet who would do this, and for that reason we may leave the experimental poet out of our study. For I like to think that all the best poets are capable of thinking, and thinking straight, and probably intend to do so most of the time, although they do not always manage to stick to the plan.”

I’m not sure if the poet whose work left me flummoxed over the weekend can rightly be called “self-consciously experimental.” It’s a little late in the Modernist/postmodernist game to be making such distinctions. Is John Ashbery “self-consciously experimental” or merely boring? Can an experiment go on for 50 or 100 years and still be called “experimental?” Justice continues:

“I am one of those who like poetry that is difficult, up to a point. It engages more of the whole man; I am bound to it by more ties of association.”

That may sound suspiciously subjective and even philistine to avant-gardists and proponents of ironclad theories, but I assume many readers intuitively understand what Justice is talking about, and I think it’s another way of formulating the “contract” mentioned earlier. Justice calls it “benign obscurity.” Read his reading of Hopkins’ difficult yet wonderfully readable “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” to appreciate his approach. Despite its density and weird music, the poem is compelling because, he argues, “there may be as much theology in it as there is human feeling, but what comes across is the human feeling.” To further substantiate his point, Justice cites the work of a much plainer poet, E.A. Robinson, some of whose work he calls “neither simply straightforward nor impenetrable.”

One thing seems certain: Willful obscurity, difficulty that originates in a desire merely to confound readers, that masks emptiness and swells the poet’s sense of self-importance, goes unread, or unreread, and turns to dust or random electrons.

`Reinventing Everything'

We celebrated our five-year-old’s birthday in the park on Sunday. Among the guests was a sculptor from Los Angeles. I’ve never visited L.A. nor had I ever met the sculptor, though I feel as though I know his city through books and films. He’s an Oregon native and hopes to live there again, and said he always feels like a guest in L.A., not a fully certified resident. We agreed L.A. did not begin as a Spanish mission in the 16th century but was created in the 20th century by Raymond Chandler, with assistance from Nathanael West and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. We also agreed that only in this era could a non-native resident of Houston speak authoritatively with a non-native resident of Los Angeles about their respective cities, neither of which either of them likes. This sense of dislocation, of being abstracted from one’s surroundings, is peculiar to our time. To preserve equilibrium we improvise roots and keep our domestic arrangements lightweight and portable.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984, speaking of dislocation) was a Russian literary critic who above all writers esteemed Laurence Sterne and one of Sterne’s chief disciples, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. I’m reading Shklovsky’s final work, Energy of Delusion (1981), published in English last year for the first time by the estimable Dalkey Archive Press. The title comes from a letter Tolstoy wrote to his friend N. Strakhov in April 1878. Strakhov had complained about the difficulty of his work, and Tolstoy commiserated:

“I know this feeling very well – even now, I have been experiencing it lately, everything seems to be ready for writing – for fulfilling my earthly duty, what’s missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I’m lacking the energy of delusion; and earthly, spontaneous energy that’s impossible to invent. And it’s impossible to begin without it.”

The sculptor from L.A. works in wood. He spoke modestly of his work, saying he buys plywood at the hardware store, cuts it into desired shapes and paints it. Some is abstract, some representational, but he lit up with contempt when describing the work of “conceptual sculptors.” I said that sounded oxymoronic, and he said I was being polite. He liked Tolstoy’s notion of the “energy of delusion.” He said the only irrational element in art he recognizes is the will to make it, that his sculpture is without utility but it enables him to feel a connection with those who enjoy it and with the artists of the past he admires and from whom he has learned. Shklovsky writes:

“The writer, the great writer, is working with words created long before him, with instances and images that were created centuries ago, yet he is free – because he is reinventing everything.”

He also writes:

“I’m not writing a biography, that is, I don’t have to accompany the carriage full of treasures as an infantry man. And I’m not writing a manual for young fiction writers about how to open or close their prose works. Life will teach them that. Step accidentally on your untied shoelace, fall down and you’ll understand a thing or two about the theory of literature.”

`My Path is Serpentine'

Most days, I can feel at home in two places -- among books, in a library or shop, and walking in woods and fields. In these settings I know equilibrium, which should not be confused with anything so grand as happiness, contentment or security. Among books and in the outdoors I’m competent because I’m called on only to be myself, so capacity balances demand, and I can enjoy my own company. Elsewhere – say, among unpleasant people or too much noise – I’m too distracted. I never try to read outdoors, however, because my pleasure, rather than doubling, is cancelled. Charles Lamb calls outdoor reading “a strain of abstraction beyond my reach.” In “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” he writes:

“I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it.”

I took my youngest son to his friend’s fourth birthday party on Saturday, held in an assembly-line fun factory, a sort of indoor amusement park with pizza, cake and inflatable playground equipment whose pumps drone like wasps in a coffee can. From experience I knew to bring a book – in this case, Energy of Delusion, Viktor Shklovsky ‘s deliciously digressive study of Tolstoy and anything else that attracted his attention. Seated on a bench in a corner I enjoyed a few pages and fended off urgings to join an all-male conversation (sports, automobiles), until a professor of American history I know showed up and joined me. I recently edited a portion of her book on the failed railroad strikes of 1886. We talked and I quickly forgot Shlovsky. I never expected such a rescue. Here, too, in easy conversation, I found a home. Later, I read this sentence in Shklovsky:

"My path is serpentine, and the books that I read -- vary."

`Sciential Apples'

No writer has occupied more of my time and thought in recent months than Charles Lamb, whom I first read, indifferently, more than 35 years ago. The memory is dim but I think I found Lamb too quaint to be compelling for a young reader already seduced by Joyce and Beckett. Lamb was sold as a humorist, Robert Benchley’s English cousin, with the whispered implication that his essays were amusing but fly-weight trifles. Oxymoronically, his Essays of Elia (1823) are seriously charming or charmingly serious, and written in some of the most freely associative prose you’ll ever enjoy. He fools earnest readers. Consider this aside in “All Fool’s Day,” an essay consisting of nothing but asides:

“The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.”

This is dancing, cavorting, punning prose: “a palpable hallucination.” Lamb helped turn English prose into a flexible, discursive medium, responsive to the shifts and digressions of consciousness. A professor once warned a student that his fiction was abjectly derivative of Laurence Sterne’s, and that imitating Tristram Shandy was a fatal undertaking. The same holds for Lamb’s essays, though we can always find inspiration in his bottomless, self-replenishing sense of invention.

Lamb identified himself with a patchwork tradition of English writers, especially Browne and Burton, but I hear echoes of another master, Montaigne, even in the passage cited above which lightly carries a burden of moral insight and self-knowledge worthy of the French master. Lamb, like Montaigne, invented a new way of looking at the self, especially with the freedom granted by his adopted persona, Elia. One of Lamb’s biographers, the literary journalist E.V. Lucas, in 1934, the centenary of the essayist’s death, published a curious little tribute, At the Shrine of St. Charles. In a chapter titled “The Evolution of Whimsicality,” Lucas writes:

“Lamb’s great discovery was that he himself was better worth laying bare than obscuring: that his memories, his impressions, his loyalties, his dislikes, his doubts, his beliefs, his prejudices, his enthusiasms, in short, everything that was his, were suitable material for literature. Pope said that the proper study of mankind was man; Lamb amended this to – the proper study of man is himself. If you know yourself and have confidence in your moods and general sagacity, a record is worth making.”

Of course, without the qualifications Lucas adds in the final sentence – confidence and sagacity – you’re left with narcissism, the lingua franca of the blogosphere and most contemporary memoirs. Lucas continues:

“Before Elia, no one writing for print had assumed that his own impressions of life, grave and gay, were a sufficient or even suitable subject. Such self-analytical authors as there had been had selected and garnished according to the canons of taste of their time. Lamb came naturally to his task and fondled and displayed his ego with all the ecstasy of a collector exhibiting bric-à-brac or first editions; and ever since then, acting upon his sanction, others have been doing it. But what has at the moment the most interest to me is that part of Lamb’s legacy which embodies his freakish humour; it was his willingness to be naturally funny that has benefited so many heirs. I should say that his principal service to other writers lay in giving them, by his example, encouragement to be their age (as the American slang has it), to mix their comic fancies with their serious thoughts as they are mixed in real life.”

This, about the man who referred to a Quaker meeting as a “Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod!” Who said of roast pig: “Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate—princeps obsoniorum.” And who wrote of a library:

“It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”

Most prose sounds anemic after reading Lamb’s iron-rich sentences. I prescribe a wholesome diet of roast pig, sciential apples and Lamb.

`Traces of the Past are Unstable'

I had business in the university library archives on Thursday and talked to two men photographing maps and sketches of the campus dated 1910, two years before the school opened. The land was flat and marshy, a malarial swamp. On one of the maps, a creek is drawn in blue pencil and marks the western edge of what became the campus. There’s no creek there today, not even a ditch, and an archivist suggested it may run underground.

In 1689, Matsuo Bashō, age 45, left Edo on a 156-day journey, mostly on foot, to the north of Japan. The poet wrote his prose masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the journey, and in it he writes:

“Of places made famous in the poetry since long ago, many are still handed down to us in verse. But mountains crumble, rivers change course, roadways are altered, stones are buried in the earth, trees grow old and are replaced by saplings: time goes by and the world shifts, and the traces of the past are unstable.”

David, my youngest son, turned five on Thursday.

`Good Tires, Gas Hog'

My day started with the sickening bump-and-flop of a flat tire as I backed out of the driveway. From the dealer who sold me the tire in November I learned I was on the 92nd day of a 90-day warranty. Kids late to school, two hours late for work, I pondered the romance of the automobile. Why do Americans, men in particular, grow misty remembering the cars they’ve owned? My cars have always owned me. And why do people name them?

Tom Waits is a master of American vernacular. “The Pontiac,” from Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, is less a song than a spoken riff recorded to sound like found Americana. Here’s the Youtube video, which inexplicably ends mid-word after one minute, but it gives some sense of Waits’ feel for American speech rhythms. The speaker chronicles the cars he’s owned with a bittersweet passion some men reserve for former girlfriends. Here are the complete lyrics as transcribed in the Orphans box. Much is lost without Waits’ voice, his hoots and histrionic emphases, but this is how I’ve heard a thousand American men talks about cars.

“Well, let's see we had the Fairlane
And then the u-joints went out on that
And the bushings, then your Mother
Wanted to trade it in on the Tornado, so
We got the Tornado -- god I hated
The color of that sonufa bitch, and the dog
Destroyed the upholstery on the Ford, boy,
That was long before you were born. We
Called it the Yellow Bird -- two-door, three on the tree
Tight little mother threw a rod
Sold it to Jacobs for a hundred dollars
Now the special four-holer you've never
Seen body panels line up like that
Overhead cam dual exhaust, hell I had, see…I had
Four Buicks -- loved em all. Now your Uncle Emmett
Well he drives the Thunderbird now, it used to
Belong to your Aunt Evelyn -- she ruined
It -- drove it to Indiana with no gear oil
That was the end of that! Sold that Caddy
To your Mom, your mom loved that Caddy
Independent rear suspension landau top
Good tires, gas hog. Swear it had the
Power to repair itself.
I love the Olds, Dan Steel used to
Give em to me at a discount – show
Room models then there was the Pontiac
God I loved that Pontiac, well it was kind
Of an oxblood god but it handled so
Beautifully. Yeah I miss that car
That was a long time ago.”

This recitation and its faux-solemnity remind me most of Flann O’Brien’s parodies in At Swim-Two-Birds of the Cuchulain saga and his defense of Ulster against Connacht’s army. Another American writer half in love with the homegrown was Karl Shapiro who, in "Buick," playfully links automobiles and women. Read the whole thing here, but first taste this sample:

“But how alien you are from the booming belts of your birth and the smoke
Where you turned on the stinging lathes of Detroit and Lansing at night
And shrieked at the torch in your secret parts and the amorous tests,
But now with your eyes that enter the future of roads you forget;
You are all instinct with your phosphorous glow and your streaking hair.”

Shapiro also wrote “Auto Wreck” but seems to have been a General Motors man, and in the nineteen-sixties he wrote “Cadillac.” This passage picks up the sexualization-of-steel theme:

“If only I could put my arm around you,
If only I could look you in the eye,
I would tell you a grave joke about turtles’ eggs,
But there are always your ostrich plumes,
The hydrangeas drooping between your breasts.
I am afraid of your prosthetic wrists,
The mason jars of your white corpuscles.”

Back on the road with a new tire, I felt neither aroused nor nostalgic, just cranky and a little poorer. There’s a song on Orphans, “Fannin Street,” set here in Houston, that hints at my state of mind after another automotive debacle. Here’s the first verse and chorus:

“There's a crooked street in Houston town
It’s a well worn path I've traveled down
Now there's ruin in my name
I wish I’d never got off the train
I wished I'd listened to the words you said

“Don't go down to Fannin Street
Don't go down to Fannin Street
Don't go down to Fannin Street
You'll be lost and never found
You can never turn around
Don't go down to Fannin Street”

`No Boiled-Down Canon of Anything'

We hope to feature video interviews with researchers and students on the school web site, so on Tuesday I attended a two-hour “crash course” in video production. The instructor, born during the second Reagan administration, had a less-than-decisive grasp of certain technical matters, among other things. In response to a question about, I believe, XLR mic inputs, he replied, “That part of the book is not a pleasure to read at all.” His honesty and critical acumen floored me: Haven’t we all felt that way, even in the middle of a book we might otherwise enjoy?

No doubt a computer engineer somewhere is working on a self-editing book: Input your dislikes and preferences – smut or no smut, short words or long, funny and/or gloomy – and software removes all passages “not a pleasure to read at all.” Imagine Moby-Dick without the boring stuff about whales, and King Lear rid of that tiresome old man.

An old-fashioned school of thought maintains that a text is sacred, that we must take the good with the less good, and so forth. A typical exponent of this sentiment is Charles Lamb, in “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” from Essays of Elia:

“I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

“In this catalogue of books which are no books—biblia a-biblia—I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which `no gentleman’s library should be without:’ the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley’s Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.”

Is this open-mindedness or does it represent biblio-gluttony, an unhealthy appetite for the written word? A possible answer lies in another book I have been enjoying – Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, by Joel Smith, published in conjunction with the Steinberg show running through Feb. 24 at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. When Steinberg resolved to like a book, his liking was anything but casual. In 1986-87, the artist crafted “Library,” a wooden table and shelves holding blocks of wood embellished with titles, author names and illustrations. Smith writes:

“The selection of titles adds up to no boiled-down canon of anything, except Steinberg’s idiosyncrasy. [As any self-respecting personal library should.] One sees, in cross-section, the gentle chaos of a lifetime’s book-gathering – library as biography.

“Some of Steinberg’s perpetual rereads are here (Tolstoy, Herzen, Flaubert, Saint-Simon), along with traces of his youth (Dostoevsky and Verne in Romanian translation, Kipling and London in Italian, the 1939 Larousse), cherished offbeat classics (Norman Douglas’ Old Calabria, Aleksandr Kuprin’s prostitution expose The Pit, Richard Hughes’ In Hazard), some books by real-life friends (Aldo Buzzi, Ennio Flaiano), and a few fetish-objects, such as the thin local telephone directories Steinberg brought home from his travels.”

Elsewhere, Buzzi has described his old friend as “an artist…who drew instead of writing.” Smith thoughtfully records the 53 titles in Steinberg’s wooden catalogue, including Buber, Chekhov’s “Peasants,” Celine, a Creole grammar, Robinson Crusoe, Gogol’s “Nose,” Ovid’s Tristia, Stendhal, Svevo’s Las Coscienza di Zeno, Tacitus – and a slender volume with “Nabokov” on the spine. Steinberg and Nabokov, fellow exiles, remained friends for 30 years, until the Russian’s death in 1977. In 1947, according to the chronology appended to Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, Smith writes:

“Nabokov will become a friend, and Steinberg will reread his study Nikolai Gogol (1944) countless times, treating it as a guide to the labyrinthine twists of his own imagination.”

Dalrymple on Ballard

In the winter issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple gives the works of J.G. Ballard a splendid rereading, one that may or may not please Ballard. Here’s a sample:

“When I briefly served as a kind of vulgarity correspondent for a British newspaper—it sent me anywhere the British gathered to behave badly—I discovered to my surprise that the middle classes behaved in crowds with the same menacing disinhibition as their supposed social and educational inferiors. They swore and screamed abuse and made fascistic gestures and urinated in the street with the same abandon that they attributed to the proletarians. It was Ballard who first spotted that the bourgeoisie wanted to proletarianize itself without losing its economic privileges or political power.”

Writing for Antiquity

Yesterday’s mention of Virginia Woolf’s mentions of Charles Lamb sent me back to The Charles Lamb Day Book, a small volume of pleasing heft compiled by E.V. Lucas and published in London by Metheun & Co. in 1925. Lucas (1868-1938) was an impressively hardworking and prolific English writer, best known today for his writings on cricket, who also produced a biography of Lamb. In his brief preface to the Day Book, Lucas writes:

“Lamb belonged externally very little to his own time. He cared nothing for politics or public events, although he was not sorry when the death of a royal personage gave him a holiday. He preferred, as he put it, to `write for antiquity.’”

Lucas, in three sentences, succeeds in making Lamb even more attractive than I already knew him to be. The book consists of excerpts from all of Lamb’s work, not just the well-known letters and Essays of Elia. Most selections have no overt connection with the date Lucas assigns them. Here, from an 1810 letter to Coleridge, is May 7:

“A book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum.”

This is merely common sense to any uncommon common reader. I know my black-covered Random House edition of Ulysses as well as I know my sons’ faces. I ordered it 41 years ago from the Book of the Month Club, and it’s the copy I used when I read the novel the first three or four times. It’s almost unintelligibly annotated, with taped-in notecards for additional marginalia. The cover is tattered, like a battle flag (the early readings were like that). Without flipping I can find the page where “Moses Herzog” made his debut in 1922, when Saul Bellow was not yet seven years old. You know a long-familiar book the way you know the neighborhood you grew up in. April 6 brings two passages, both from “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.” First:

“Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

“A newspaper, read out, is intolerable.”

And this:

“I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts. I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”

In most writers, whimsy is wretchedly cute, like a woman talking baby-talk. One questions the adulthood of such writers. Lamb, like Sterne on most occasions, perfected a carefully calibrated tone of inspired silliness. He was a master of “almost.” His prose is almost self-indulgent, almost incoherent, but his internal gyroscope usually kept it in balance. Nothing requires more control than appearing out of control, with perfect grace, though Lamb mastered other voices. Consider the May 28 passage, taken from “Popular Fallacies”:

“The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor mother and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman, -- before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it never prattles.”

Lamb was gifted with natural empathy. His experience of family saw to that. Unlike many who write of the poor, Lamb betrays no trace of self-congratulation for the compassion he feels, and thus no condescension. His prose, as always, is filled with particulars (“of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes”), and that lends it a power and vividness lacking in much “do-gooder” writing, where the real emphasis is on the writer, not the subject.

As this is a leap year, I checked to see if Lucas included an entry for Feb. 29. He did, with a proviso that is better, in its Lamb-like mock-seriousness, than the selection. Here is the former: “(To be read only once in four years)”. And the latter, from an 1804 letter to Wordsworth: “Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded.”

Lamb was likewise a shrewd critic. The following excerpt, from Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, is dated July 6. It sounds highly applicable to much contemporary, feel-good agitprop:

“A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of man, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iterately inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us all is hypocritical meekness, A reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd or unnatural) is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble of copying it from originals within his own breast.”

Please hunt for The Charles Lamb Day Book, an utterly charming book long out of print. It’s no substitute for the essays but offers a taste of their delights and some idea of Lamb’s range and versatility. It’s compact enough for pocket or purse and, for lovers of good sense and good prose it’s almost “inspirational.” Here’s a final sample, for Aug. 11, taken from an 1809 letter to Coleridge. I might serve as one of many appropriate mottos for Anecdotal Evidence:

“I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the old things.”

`It Should Give Pleasure'

In November 1922, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf published in the Times Literary Supplement a review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920, a five-volume collection edited by Ernest Rhys. I suspect many of the writers anthologized by Rhys would remain ciphers to most contemporary readers, myself included, but his collection possessed the unexpected virtue of rousing Woolf to write this paragraph

“Of all forms of literature…the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with it first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.”

I am newly impressed with Woolf’s common sense and spirit of fun – not qualities I formerly associated with her. “Pleasure,” for the common reader, is always the premiere virtue in essays or any other writing. In another essay (“Illness – An Unexploited Mine,” 1926) she wins my heart by enthusiastically quoting Charles Lamb:

“We dip in Lamb’s Letters (some prose writers are to be read as poets) and find, `I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inch-meal just now. But the snake is vital.’”

In the course of knocking Samuel Johnson’s reputation down a few pegs [in “Saint Samuel of Fleet Street,” 1925], she gives Lamb’s a boost:

“[Johnson] was pompous and sententious and Latin. It took all Lamb’s genius to liberate English prose from the thrall.”

One gauge of an essayist’s worth: We “receive pleasure,” as Woolf says above, even when she’s wrong. One the three qualities she assigns to Johnson, only “Latin” is accurate with any regularity. But Lamb, and his friend William Hazlitt, liberated English prose, and the English essay, in ways that remain unappreciated. No essayist, for my money gives more pure pleasure than Lamb, and I say that while loving Johnson.

Let’s agree that pleasure comes in many forms, even in the seemingly unified sensibility of one reader. Today, I may wish only to read an essay by Edward Abbey. Nothing else will do. Tomorrow, something within may summon William H. Gass, John Muir, Seneca or Max Beerbohm. All give me pleasure – of various intensities, appealing to various capacities. Only the common reader, autonomous and free, can render a verdict of pleasure or its absence. In Woolf I detect for the first time, with all allowances for the difference in gender, the verdict she passed on Samuel Johnson:

“…the coarse, moody, rough-tempered man, who possesses, by virtue perhaps of his coarseness and his moodiness, the peculiar sympathy, the majestic tolerance, the broad humour, which, when he has been in his grave a century and a half, still makes the cabmen think of him on a wet night in the Strand.”

`Some Rickety and Ramshackle Fabric'

I’ve had to learn how to read Virginia Woolf – not the novels, which I suspect I will never appreciate, but her essays. I unfairly held the tedium of the fiction against her nonfiction, which was small-minded and foolish. There’s much about Woolf I continue to find unattractive -- her snobbery and exaggerated self-regard -- but in the best of her essays she self-consciously extends the tradition of Montaigne, Johnson and Hazlitt.

Other writers, those to whom she is sympathetically disposed, bring out the best in Woolf. Friday night, after trying to watch a movie that long ago lost what little charm it once possessed (Shaft, if you must know), I opened The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol. IV: 1925-1928, published in 1994 by her own Hogarth Press, and happened upon this, from 1925:

“Like the ripening of strawberries, the swelling of apples, and all other natural processes, new editions of Dickens – cheap, pleasant-looking, well printed – are born into the world and call for no more notice than the season’s plums and strawberries, save when by some chance the emergence of one of these masterpieces in its fresh, green binding, suggests an odd and overwhelming enterprise – that one should read David Copperfield for the second time.”

Journalists make a fetish of writing effective “leads” (or “ledes,” to use trade argot) – that is, the opening sentence or several sentences of a story, column or review. Some writers who pride themselves on crafting dazzling leads routinely abandon the subsequent story, leaving what resembles the set-up of a joke without a punchline, or vice versa. Woolf writes wonderful leads, like the one above, without neglecting the rest of the essay. Here’s another, from 1924, titled “Joseph Conrad”:

“Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke English with a strong foreign accent.”

Woolf affectingly reminds us how exotic Conrad, surely among the supreme English novelists, has always remained, and how unlike Thackery or Wells his novels have always read. At its best I love Conrad’s prose, which was so dear to Faulkner. Of it V.S. Naipual wrote: “And there are the aphorisms. They run right through Conrad’s work, and their tone never varies. It is the same wise man who seems to be speaking.” Conrad taught us to expect wisdom when we read Nostromo or Heart of Darkness, and he seldom disappoints. Woolf singles out the earlier work – Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the `Narcissus’ – for emphatic praise. Here’s another gem from Woolf, from 1926 -- the lead from her review of a new edition of George Eliot’s letters:

“George Eliot lies flattened under the tomb that Mr Cross built over her, to all appearances completely dead. No writer of equal vitality as a writer so entirely lacks vitality as a human being. Yet when the solemnity of the tomb is violated, when her letters are broken into fragments and presented in a volume of modest size, they reflect a character full of variety and full of conflict – qualities that sort ill with the calm composure of death.”

I see veiled glints of self-identification in Woolf’s sentences. Cross was Eliot’s second husband, 20 years her junior. Woolf’s repetition of “tomb” echoes the final sentence of Middlemarch. Included in this fourth volume of her essays are the contents of The Common Reader. In the two-paragraph title essay, Woolf acknowledges her debt to Samuel Johnson, from whom she borrowed her title and thesis. Here, in its entirety, is “The Common Reader,” including it generous lead:

“There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s `Life of Gray’ which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. `…I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’ It defines their qualities; it defines their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

“The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.”

`The Afterlife of Things'

I’m surprised to find myself enjoying books written by an academic sociologist, a specialist in criminology, Richard Quinney. His earlier volumes carry uninviting titles like The Social Reality of Crime and Criminal Justice in America. Now 73, Quinney has turned in his later years to a radically different sort of book, a hybrid of photographs and text somewhat reminiscent of Wright Morris’ pioneering “photo-texts.” Quinney is a lesser writer and photographer than Morris but his purpose is admirable: to document the farm in Wisconsin on which his family lived for four generations. His great-grandparents fled Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s and settled in Walworth County, in southeast Wisconsin, where they built the house in which Quinney was born. By chronicling the local and particular he illuminates a larger gone world – the small, family-owned farm.

Quinney has published six “borderland” books, as he calls them, most written since his retirement from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill. It should be noted that NIU, on Valentine’s Day, was the scene of yet another campus shooting. A gunman killed six people, wounded 16 and ended his own life. I was reading Of Time and Place: A Farm in Wisconsin on the day of the killings.

Quinney’s books resemble genealogical scrapbooks. The past is precious and the author feels an obligation to preserve it. In Of Time and Place: A Farm in Wisconsin (2006), he writes: “I am haunted by the mysteries of time and place. Fortunate I am to have my camera to see into the afterlife of things.” His photographs the contents of barns and stables, kitchens and attics, and in their black-and-white plainness, they hint at this “haunted” quality. I also have Borderland: A Midwest Journal, published by the University of Wisconsin Press (2001). Quinney is best when he sticks to particulars and resists his proclivity for vapid philosophizing: “Earth and sky are joined; I become one with the universe.” In Borderland he ranges beyond Wisconsin, photographically documenting other places he has visited – Amsterdam, Paris, New York City – but he always returns to native turf.

For a sociologist, Quinney has good taste in writers. He dotes on Thoreau, another connoisseur of the local:

“This summer I think especially about Thoreau’s visit to the Midwest. Just a few miles north of where I live, Thoreau passed on a train speeding from Chicago to a station near the Mississippi on the Illinois and Wisconsin border. Each time I drive north to the farm and cross the tracks on Annie Glidden Road, I think of Thoreau sitting in the coach car and looking out of the window at a countryside far from his native New England home. On an early summer morning in 1861, he returned home on these tracks for the last summer of his life.”

Thoreau had tuberculosis, the scourge of 19th-century artists. A doctor suggested he go to the West Indies, France or even the Mississippi Valley. True to his contrarian nature Thoreau decided on Minnesota. He travel 3,500 miles, mostly by rail, the longest journey of his life. He left Concord on May 11, 1861, and returned July 10, cutting his planned excursion by a month. Quinney conjectures, convincingly, that Thoreau knew he was dying and wanted to do so at home, on his own piece of “borderland.” Thoreau died May 6, 1862, in Concord.

Quinney effectively cites Matsuo Bashō, Baudelaire, Hamlin Garland, Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Beckett and Aldo Leopold – an odd gathering in a book dedicated to the upper Midwest. Best of all, on Page 119 he reproduces a photo titled “Still Life, Rolfe Road”: arranged on a white mantelpiece, against a white wall are a small framed photo, a figurine that appears to be Chinese, a porcelain vase, a glass vase with snapdragons (two petals fallen), and a glass or crystal clock with the hands at 11:37. Across from the classically arranged photo is this passage:

“A month saved again by ordinariness. The mundane world filled with the wonder of daily living. A life lived and a life preserved. My benediction for the month is from the epilogue of Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with Bridle: `O holy ritual of everydayness, without you time is empty like a falsified inventory that corresponds to no real objects.’”

`Write as Simply as You Can'

An exchange of e-mails with Bryan Appleyard set me to thinking again about “Fordie” -- Ford Madox Ford, a writer for whom I feel immense fondness. James Joyce was a greater writer, one of the greatest, but I admire him more than I love him. What I feel for Ford corresponds to “avuncular,” but from the nephew’s perspective (does a single-word synonym exist?). He wrote with the fluency of an angel, collaborated on fiction with Joseph Conrad, edited with genius and rare generosity, served in World War I (he joined the British Army at age 43), was a notoriously unreliable storyteller (I refuse to call him a “liar”) and hopelessly successful (and unsuccessful) with women. The Fifth Queen, The Good Soldier and the Parade’s End tetralogy are glories of modern fiction and accessible to common readers. Ford never wrote for the academy.

An ambitious editor might assemble a hefty and useful anthology of Ford’s insights into writing, books and reading. He wrote about these matters from experience: Ford published more than 80 books, the first (The Brown Owl) in 1891, the last (The March of Literature) in 1939, the year of his death. In 1929 he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad. Such surveys are customarily dull affairs but Ford is almost never dull, and his text is salted with such practical notions as this:

“You must therefore write as simply as you can – with the extreme of the simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that spring at your throat. But why subjects appeal to you you have no means of knowing. The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing that is open to your native genius – the only thing as to which you can say: `I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me!’ You must never, after that, say: `I write like this because I want to,’ but you must say: `I write like this because I hope it is what the unspoiled reader likes!’”

Without being flashy about it, Ford had a gift for deploying unexpectedly effective words. Here, it is “unspoiled,” which possesses at least two meanings, both pertinent: not rotting and not pampered. Here’s what Ford wrote on the subject in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance:

“We used to say that a passage of good style began with a fresh, usual [Note: not “unusual”] word, and continued with fresh, usual words to the end: there was nothing more to it. When we felt that we had really got hold of the reader, with a great deal of caution we would introduce a word not common to a very limited vernacular, but that only very occasionally. Very occasionally indeed: practically never. Yet it is in that way that a language grows and keeps alive. People get tired of hearing the same words over and over again … [Ford’s ellipsis] It is again a matter for compromise.”

Conrad and Ford met in 1898, and collaborated on The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924) -- not the finest work by either writer. Ford also took dictation from Conrad on at least six other works, including Nostromo, and may have contributed a chapter to that novel, Conrad’s greatest. In 1924, the year of Conrad’s death, Ford published Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, an exceedingly eccentric book. The narrative consists of brief passages arranged without obvious connective tissue. The fragments sometimes follow logically one to another. More often, they float impressionistically in ether. Here’s more Ford on Conrad, writing as the literary offspring of Flaubert:

“We used to say: the first lesson that an author has to learn is that of humility. Blessed are the humble because they do not get between the reader’s legs. Before everything the author must learn to suppress himself: he must learn that the first thing he has to consider is his story and the last thing that he has to consider is his story, and in between that he will consider his story.”

And one more from Joseph Conrad. The abundant sense of confidence in his medium expressed in this passage is touching:

“We agreed that the novel is absolutely the only vehicle for the thought of our day. With the novel you can do anything; you can inquire into every department of life, you can explore every department of the world of thought. The one thing that you can not do is to propagandise, as author, for any cause. You must not, as author, utter any views: above all you must not fake any events. You must not, however humanitarian you may be, over-elaborate the fear felt by a coursed rabbit.”

Waxing Roth

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along a typically funny, acerbic, sometimes cryptic interview in Der Spiegel with Philip Roth, who turns 75 next month. He announces a new novel, Indignation, set for publication in October. Asked what he reads, Roth replies:

"The old masters. I reread Conrad and Turgenev and Hemingway and Faulkner -- which is great fun to do now. I rarely read contemporary fiction but I do read non-fiction."

And this on the American president:

"He was too horrendous to be forgotten. There will be an awful lot written about this. And there's a lot to be written about the war. There's a lot to be written about what he did with Reaganism, since he went much further than Reagan. So he won't be forgotten. Someone has said he's the worst American president we've ever had. I think that's true."

`The Senses Bathed in Revelation'

In A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson, Thomas Gardner devotes chapters to Marilynne Robinson, Charles Wright, Susan Howe and Jorie Graham, and includes interviews with each. The latter three don’t interest me but Robinson is a rare contemporary writer who identifies herself with the great foundational American tradition of the 19th century – Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman. In part because of this self-conscious linkage, her fiction and essays are deeper and more metaphorically rich than virtually anything else written today. Her books are serious (not humorless) at a time when most are trivial, vulgar or trendy. Her prose is graceful and indelibly American. In his essay on Robinson, Gardner quotes a brief essay, “Hum Inside the Skull,” the author of Housekeeping, Mother Country, The Death of Adam and Gilead published in 1984 in the New York Times Book Review:

“Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which [the 19th-century writers cited above] fasten on problems of language, or consciousness -- bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience . . . always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. I think they must have believed everything can be apprehended truly when seen in the light of an esthetic understanding appropriate to itself, whence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things. I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation -- true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies.”

The question of the break in American culture after the anni mirabiles of the 1840s and the 1850s nags me. In Gardner’s interview with Robinson, she speaks of “a rupture in the conversation of this culture.” She says, “All sorts of things that were brought up in the early conversation were dropped without being resolved.” When Gardner asks her to elaborate she says, “Well, for me the germinal issue is the issue of perception and metaphor,” and continues:

“In a certain way I’ve spent a lot of years trying to figure out what it was – trying to restore the larger context that made them turn to metaphor so consistently with the assumption that they would be able to make meaning of the highest order from the lyrical. It’s not ornamental. Their metaphorical writing is never ornamental. In fact, it draws attention to itself in order either to rupture the illusion that it has created because of the intrinsic beauty of making a good metaphor, or it draws attention to itself by awkwardness or improbability, as Emily Dickinson does so often. There was something in the intellectual culture that was yielding use of language and use of perception at very high levels of sophistication. It had to do with what, I suppose, one has to describe as the individualism of the culture, in the sense that the individual sensorium was assumed to be a sort of sacred place and to be a sufficient revelation of whatever there was to be understood. At a certain point, the culture turned to talking in terms that were much closer to sociology than to metaphysics.”

Then Gardner asks, “And so metaphor dropped out?” and Robinson answers, “It ceased to be exploratory.”

This is intriguing and oddly hopeful, ripe for rediscovery. What Robinson describes is the internalization of Protestantism by a generation of American writers, all of whom took for granted the confident autonomy of their individual voices. They were strong, self-trusting witnesses. Robinson cites a later, lesser American writer, Frank Norris, whose use of metaphor is a form of allegory. “There’s an element of didacticism,” she says. Why did the conversation stop? Secularization. The growing influence of science and technology. The waning of confident individualism with the rise of cities, corporations and big government. The decline in reverence for language with the growing availability of literacy, education and books. In American Procession, Alfred Kazin writes of Dickinson:

“Least of all did she believe that the human soul was needed to complete the universe. Saturated in a theological tradition that still provided the language for everyday experience, she made this tradition her daily resource. Religion was the background of her life, but her quest for a living God was often humorous. She must have recognized herself (in addition to her other troubles) as a reluctant skeptic ahead of her time. She was the first modern writer to come out of New England.”

Few poets are so surprising, even after long acquaintance, as Dickinson. She uses unexpected words in unexpected ways. Her poems are strange, fierce and direct. With her eccentric dashes and without histrionics, she hurls words at readers:

“Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
Then crouch within the door –
Red – is the Fire’s common tint –
But when the vivid Ore
Has vanquished Flame’s conditions,
It quivers from the Forge
Without a color, but the light
Of unanointed Blaze.”

Robinson says of Dickinson: “She is always talking about change in states of consciousness,” and cites this poem:

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
Than Sense was breaking through –

“And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –

“And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

“As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

“And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –"

Robinson, clearly floored by the poem, says:

“One of the things that I think is so wonderful about this kind of consciousness I’ve been talking about is that it values everything … She talks about things that are conventional in the sense that they are emblematic also – they are deeply significant human behaviors.”

Noting Dickinson implies that “all the Heavens” are directed at one ear – one person, you or me – Robinson says, “She’s very Melvillean, only more so perhaps, in the sense that she’s perfectly willing to embrace the implications of this vision of reality, in terms of the fact that it exposes human solitude to the vastest available order of being. And that’s the thrill of it in a way, the beauty of it, and the terror of it also.”

Robinson always brings it back to language, the gift these writers had for turning metaphor into a mode of knowledge – a lesson for all of us, I think, in an age of timid minimalism and fire-both-barrels maximalism. “She’s not writing about herself in any sense. She’s writing about the universal mystery of metaphor and perception,” Robinson says, and Kazin writes:

“Emily Dickinson, no romantic about an existence that was as endlessly various as it was difficult, was fascinated by words as starting points. Words were not transcriptions of experience; they often invented it. Words were roles.”

"The Enemy is Words, Words, Words'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along a link to this interview with the great poet Samuel Menashe at Nextbook. Here's a sample:

"The enemy is words, words, words. I struggle—it’s a kind of perfectionism. I’ll work on a poem the whole summer, and by the end, it will have three lines less. I’ll even take out words from poems that have already appeared in books. Somebody once met me at a party and when I sent him a poem, he couldn’t believe the contrast between my voluble talking—or being articulate if you want to put it more nicely—and the voice of my poetry."

`Gibbon's History and To-night's Evening Paper'

I’ve never taken Gore Vidal seriously -- his fiction is awful, his politics childish and petulant -- but he wrote at least one sentence I remember with a twinge in that portion of my consciousness reserved for unpleasant self-knowledge:

“After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater.”

That’s the first line of the foreword Vidal wrote for The Impossible H.L. Mencken, an anthology edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers in 1991. I spent more than 20 years working as a reporter, and several more freelancing for newspapers, and can think of too many former co-workers, writers and editors, for whom Vidal’s snotty observation is an accurate diagnosis. They subscribed to a form of reverse pride about the quality of their writing. Somehow, with a boundless capacity for rationalization, they deemed good writing effete, pretentious, even sexually dubious.

A city editor I knew wrote crime novels on the side. A friend once described him as the only man he had ever met who could swagger while seated. His character was unpleasant but his fiction was worse. Reporters photocopied choice passages – ill-written, misogynistic – and passed them around for the sake of outrage and laughs. He detested stylishness and wit in news writing; indeed, in any sort of writing. He claimed John O’Hara was the greatest American writer.

Frank Wilson’s recent retirement as book review editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer sparked these thoughts. In my first e-mail to Frank after hearing the news, I described newspapers as “bruising” places to work. Yet, despite mediocrity and institutional chowder-headedness, good work, even superb work, gets done. To a significant degree, I learned to write by writing for newspapers – the importance of concision, accuracy and deadlines – and I’m not alone in this deferred adult education.

I think of Mencken, of course, and A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Whitney Balliett, Murray Kempton – all bona fide journalists, all with newspaper experience, all among the finest American writers. Some will cite an alternative list of journalist/writers -- Stephen Crane, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer – but they are at best second-rate. The only exceptions, and they must be heavily qualified, are Whitman and Twain. Literature and journalism are not mutually exclusive but are rarely found linked in an individual (Frank Wilson is a first-rate poet). I found an unexpected ally for such views in T.S. Eliot. In 1931, he wrote a fond memoir of Charles Whibley (1859-1930), an English literary journalist who helped promote Eliot’s early career and also wrote admiringly of Mussolini. Here’s what Eliot writes in Charles Whibley:

“The distinction between `journalism’ and `literature’ is quite futile, unless we are drawing such violent contrast as that between Gibbon’s History and to-night’s evening paper; and such a contrast itself is too violent to have meaning. You cannot, that is, draw any useful distinction between journalism and literature merely in a scale of literary values, as a difference between the well written and the supremely well written: a second-rate novel is not journalism, but it is certainly not literature.”

This is refreshingly common-sensical and demystifying. Literature is not magically different from journalism. The difference is one of kind, not degree. Eliot put it more elegantly:

“Literary style is sometimes assigned almost magical properties, or is credited with being a mysterious preservative for subject-matter which no longer interests. This is far from being absolutely true. Style alone cannot preserve; only good style in conjunction with permanently interesting content can preserve. All other preservation, such as that of Swift’s or Defoe’s journalism, is due to a happy accident.”

`Where Love and Need are One'

With no interruption in service, Frank Wilson, newly retired but hardly retiring book review editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, has entered his professional afterlife, at least the blogging portion of it, with Books Inq.: The Epilogue. We can’t say welcome back because he never left, and this is good news for loyal readers. In a Monday post titled “Colleagues,” Frank writes:

“If you can manage [to] find a way of earning a living that you like, you've got a good chunk of the personal happiness issue resolved, and an absolutely essential factor in that is your colleagues.”

Robert Frost was an “isolato,” to borrow Melville’s coinage (Moby-Dick, Chapter XXVII: “They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.”) and probably never acknowledged the existence of “colleagues,” but I thought of Frost when I read Frank’s characteristically generous sentence. Specifically, I remembered the final stanza of “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”

Frank appears to be one of those rare people for whom “love and need are one.” I, too, have known this state, but fleetingly, and I’m grateful for that much. To find the best words and arrange them in the best order, without surplus or deficit, is to “play for mortal stakes.”

`The Suspect Corpse'

Thanks to Dave Lull for alerting me to a new poem by Les Murray, "The Suspect Corpse," in the Feb. 15 issue of Commonweal:

"The dead man lay, nibbled, between
dark carriages of a rocky river,

"a curled load of himself, in cheap
clothes crusted in dried water.

"Noisy awe, nose-crimped, sent us up the
gorge to jail, in case we were hoaxing.

"Following us back down next morning
forensics mentioned his wish bone

"but never could pry any
names from between his teeth,

"not his own, nor who had lashed
his ankles, or put boulders in his clothes.

"After three months, he could only
generalize, and had started smiling."

Here are the the typically vivid images Murray assigns the physical world -- "a curled load of himself," "cheap/clothes crusted in dried water." The poem reminded me of the scene in Deliverance when they find the body of Drew (played by Ronny Cox).

`Write with Gusto'

More than 20 collections of passages from Thoreau’s journal have been published since Francis Allen and Bradford Torrey put out their standard 14-volume edition in 1906, 42 years after Thoreau’s death. Some have been selected thematically – birds, the natural world, the year 1851. Yale University Press has just published I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer, who in 2004 edited an annotated Walden. At almost 500 pages, his journal selection is generous and, though he announces no thematic emphasis, his edition seems to concentrate more on Thoreau the writer and naturalist, not the political thinker and Yankee crank.

Cramer’s annotations are prudently brief and generally non-insulting to the common reader (no “A. Lincoln, 16th president”), often linking a passage to others in the journal or elsewhere in Thoreau’s work. I’m in the minority who, if forced to choose, would read the journal over Walden and certainly over A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, though I love both. I like the wildness of the journal, Thoreau’s unrelenting experimentation with ideas and language, his deployment of the vernacular – a proto-blog, if you will.

My loyalty is to Thoreau the writer, and writing (with its partner. reading) is among the themes he revisits regularly for 25 years. Here are some selections on the subject from Cramer’s edition, starting with this from Sept. 2, 1851:

“We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”

That passage always energizes me and focuses my attention – “that our speech may be vascular.” It reminds me of Thoreau’s great contemporary, Whitman, but also of Les Murray, the Australian poet I’ve been reading of late. To read Thoreau as a cool customer, a repressed bachelor, is to seriously misunderstand him. Like Murray, he writes, at his best, with his entire being, mind, body and spirit. Take this, from Nov. 1, 1851:

“First of all a man must see, before he can say. Statements are made but partially. Things are said with reference to certain conventions or existing institutions, not absolutely. A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythology or universal significance. Say it and have done with it. Express it without expressing yourself.”

And this, from Feb. 10, 1852 (156 years ago Sunday):

“Write while the heat is in you. When the farmer burns a hole in his yoke, he carries the hot iron quickly from the fire to the wood, for every moment it is less effectual to penetrate (pierce) it. It must be used instantly, or it is useless. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

Taken literally, this is wrong-headed. The heat of the moment too often burns away the capacity for critical judgment. But again, I like Thoreau’s physical metaphors for writing. And here, on March 18, 1861, less than 14 months before his death, he echoes a similar thought of Melville’s:

“You can’t read any genuine history – as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede – without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man, -- on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of other, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.”

In Chapter CIV of Moby-Dick (1851), Melville wrote: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

`They Don't Talk Human Language'

We spent the afternoon chopping, sawing and digging. After years of laziness and indecision, we cleared vines and brush from the side of the house, including a bougainvillea covered with long woody thorns -- insidiously Dantean flora. I sawed it down, Sylvia dug up the dense ball of roots. The resulting scratches make my hands, arms and ass (don’t ask) look like a road map to nowhere. We filled 15 large trash bags with biomass, with another heap yet to bag.

Before I commenced sawing, I saw something in the tangled branches of the bougainvillea -- a three-foot garter snake, thumb-thick at his thickest, perched horizontally, about face-high, among the thorns. Before picking him up to show the boys, I stared, nose-to-nose, into his eyes, wondering, as always, what animals perceive when they sense our presence – probably heat patterns in the case of a snake. If I had to anthropomorphize his reaction, I’d call it clinical and unalarmed. I pulled him from the bush and he shit on my jeans – green-and-white, mayonnaise-like stuff with a stink I remember from childhood.

Les Murray is one the great chroniclers or animators of the natural world. His strengths are hawk-like acuity of vision, empathy for non-human species and his gift for doing anything with language. In 1992 he published an extraordinary volume, Translations from the Natural World. Many of the poems are not about animals so much as by them. The poems are told from the animal’s point of view without descending into bathos. I can think of fiction narrated by animals, by James Agee, John Hawkes and John Berger, and all of it is embarrassingly awful. Here, in contrast, are lines from Murray‘s “Two Dogs”:

“Enchantment creek under bank pollen, are the stiff scents he makes,
hot grass rolling and rabbit-dig but only saliva chickweed.
Road pizza clay bird, hers answer him, rot-spiced good.”

The dogs, as dogs do, speak in smells. Murray gives us a blunt sensory inventory of the canine world, pushing his language to the point where it resembles so-called Language Poetry, minus the nihilism and incoherence. Murray’s biographer, Peter F. Alexander, reproduces a portion of a 1990 letter the poet wrote while writing the animal poems:

“It successively touches the lives of many animals, birds, even plants and insects and fish, sometimes giving a sense of their life from the outside, more often by pretending to translate their `speech’ -- living things do all talk, I say, but they don’t talk human language, or always speak with their mouth. I’m trying to be neither Walt Disney nor Ted Hughes, and enjoying the constraints: no hands, no colour vision if they’re mammals…not much metaphor or sense of time, no consequences, no mercy, but no vindictiveness either.”

Here is “The Snake’s Heat Organ”:

“Earth after sun is slow burn
An eye scales darken.
Water’s no burn.
Smaller sunlives all dim slowly
to predawn invisibility
but self-digesters constantly glow-burn.
Their blood-coals fleet
glimmering as I spin
lightly over textures.
Passenger of my passage
I reach round upright leaf-burners, I
reach and follow under rock balances,
I gather at the drinking margin.
Across the nothing there
an ardency
is lapping blank, which segments serially up
beneath the coruscating braincakes
into the body,
three skin-sheddings’ length of no-burn negatively
coiled in a guttering chamber:
a fox,
it is pedaling off now,
a scintillating melon,
gamboge in its hull
round a dark seed center
And hungry as the sun.”

The other writer so gifted with empathy for animals, able to project himself into their being, is Thoreau. He envies other species. In his journal, on April 16, 1852, he gives an extended description of his encounter with the first woodchuck of the season. He follows the creature across a field and sits down next to him. Read the entire passage, but here‘s a Murray-like sample:

“I sat down by his side within a foot. I talked to him quasi forest lingo, baby talk, at any rate in a conciliatory tone, and thought that I had some influence on him. He gritted his teeth less.”

`Rude Canticles'

Normally the blinds on the window above my desk at home are closed. The alcove where I work is lined with shelves and I don’t want sunlight bleaching the books. Occasionally I open or raise the blinds and look into a densely leafed shrub favored by hummingbirds late in the summer. The window faces west and the effect on a sunny day, late in the afternoon, leaves fluttering, dappled with sunlight, is a welcome entertainment, especially when house sparrows perch in the shrub. I told my kids the window is “nature’s television,” but they didn’t buy it.

To say house sparrows – Passer domesticus (the first scientific name for a bird I learned) – “perch” is misleading. They are never still, which accounts, in part, for their biological success. Old World birds, they are native to Northern Europe and Asia. They arrived in North America in 1852, fittingly, on the steamship Europa. According to Ted R. Anderson in Biology of the Ubiquitous House Sparrow (Oxford University Press, 2006), they now inhabit every continent but Antarctica. Anderson notes their arrival in Australia in 1863 (again, purposely introduced by humans) and South America in 1872 or 1873. They are the most common bird, except possibly for chickens, on the planet. Sparrows vibrate. They remain in constant motion, as individuals and as a species.

Moving slowly, leaning across my desk, I can put my face against the glass and stand eye-to-eye with the birds. Up close, they appear twitchy and anxious, ruled by a tyrannical metabolism, and resemble addicts in withdrawal. Their eyes are forever swiveling and refocusing. Anthony Hecht writes in “House Sparrows,” a poem rooted in close observation:

“They are given to nervous flight, the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste of the exiled.”

Hecht likens their seeming frailty – in fact, they are tough customers – to the skeletal survivors of civil war and genocide. Of course, survival implies strength of some sort, and dumb luck. Their energy is part of their adaptability. Hecht again:

“Yet here they are, these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful, full of the grace
Of cheerfulness, who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of `Summers, Summers, Summers.’”

Cheerfulness and “wild confidence” are admirable qualities in any species, man or bird. For Hecht, house sparrows are more than survivors, which implies mere continuity of existence. Rather, they exult in their being. Life’s a party, and they celebrate in their birdy fashion. Here, after more than 400 pages of detailed avian biology, are the final lines of Anderson’s text:

“As I watch live television news from Baghdad, Gaza, Jerusalem, or Kosovo and hear sparrows chirping in the background, I sometimes wonder what opinion, if any, the house sparrow has about the havoc wreaked by its human host.”

`But They Die'

Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Peter F. Alexander’s biography of the Australian poet, is an education. I’ve admired Murray’s poems since first reading them 25 years ago, especially his audacious sense of language, so expansive and brave compared to the anemic wordstock of contemporary American poetry. You sense no linguistic diffidence, no acknowledgement of limitation. His poetic confidence is staggering. To this degree, at least, his enterprise is Shakespearean.

What I knew of Murray’s life and the culture that formed him was sketchy and inadequate. It’s good to learn, for instance, that Murray’s Scottish ancestors settled in Australia in the mid-19th century, and that Sir James Augustus Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was the poet’s fifth cousin “many times removed,” as Alexander notes. Even educated Americans know embarrassingly little about Australia and its writers – in my case, Christina Stead, Patrick White, David Stove, Clive James, Gwen Harwood, Murray and a few others.

After reading of Murray’s childhood in New South Wales, I’m unable to think of another noteworthy poet -- perhaps John Clare -- born into such unrelieved poverty and hardship. Much of the blame goes to his paternal grandfather, a despotic alcoholic. One month before the poet’s birth in 1938, he ordered Cecil Murray, the father-to-be, to fell a large tallowwood tree on the family farm. Cecil declined, saying the tree was “dozy” (OED: “Of timber or fruit: In a state of incipient decay”) and dangerous. Cecil’s brother, Archie (“who knew little about bush work,” Alexander tells us), took over the job. The falling tree struck another, snapping the treetop and killing Archie. Father and son blamed each other for his death, but the father (the poet’s grandfather) had his revenge (this family drama, too, is Shakespearean): He charged his son exorbitant rent, refused to help Cecil and his family financially or repair the hovel in which they lived. Here is Alexander’s description of Murray’s childhood house:

“It was of `slab construction,’ meaning that its walls were of thick pit-sawn slabs of wood, often cedar in the early days, set vertically, covered with a roof of shingles, later corrugated iron, and having a floor of stamped earth covered with linoleum or (later) with wooden planks. The shingles leaked, and the slabs of the walls shrank as they aged, leaving cracks that admitted the wind at all seasons in spite of battens nailed over them, and that darkened with blown rain. There exists a photograph of Cecil in the door of this shack, and behind him sunlight streaks through the generous gaps in the walls.”

Murray’s mother died when he was 12. When his grandfather died, Cecil, still a tenant farmer, was dispossessed of the family land. He died in 1995, age 85. His son wrote an elegy, “The Last Hellos,” which begins, heartbreakingly:

“Don’t die, Dad –
but they die.”

Murray came from Scottish Presbyterian stock but converted to Catholicism as a young man – a fact central to his character and work but one that bothers easily offended readers. Murray concludes “The Last Hellos” with a pithy rebuke to Richard Dawkins and other vulgar atheists:

“Snobs mind us off religion
nowadays, if they can.
Fuck thém. I wish you God.”

Note the colloquially correct accent on “thém.” Alexander says: “Poems like this, and the great sequence on his mother, made it clear that in the poetry of human grief he had no modern peer.”

Murray’s work reminds us that literature is, among other things, a repository of wisdom. From the words of great and fallible men and women, we learn to be human and how, on occasion, to transcend mere humanity. Like Murray and his poetry, this is a deeply unfashionable notion. Arthur Krystal, in an essay titled “What Do You Know?” (collected in Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature), observes:

“Whenever I go back to Montaigne, Robert Burton, and Samuel Johnson, it occurs to me that they know more than I do now, despite my knowing them.”

Add Murray’s name to the list, and Shakespeare’s.

Sensibility, Not Technique

I’ve been hop scotching among Chekhov’s stories, and an observation by one his admirers, Howard Moss, pursues me:

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

Moss was a poet and longtime poetry editor of The New Yorker. His reviews and essays are “occasional” in the best sense, and have a charming, unsystematic, thrown-away quality. He’s never cloying but Moss pays his readers the compliment of confiding in us. His taste is nearly perfect and he is by nature a shrewd celebrator – ever a dwindling species.

The passage above is drawn from a sampler titled “From a Notebook,” collected in Whatever is Moving. Both Green and Bishop admired Chekhov extravagantly. The work of both is new and different, but not eccentrically so – like Chekhov’s. Both bring novel ways of seeing and feeling into literature. Neither was a self-declared revolutionary nor were they perceived as such by their contemporaries. Both had respectable reputations, often rooted in misunderstanding, during their working lives, and both were taken for granted as reliable talent, off-center talents, but their influence was time-released and largely posthumous. Both rank among the major writers of the last century, a notion that would have surprised them. And most of these observations apply to Chekhov. Here’s how he begins his next-to-last story, “The Bishop,” written in 1902, two years before his death:

“The evening service was being celebrated on the eve of Palm Sunday in the Old Petrovsky Convent. When they began distributing the palm it was close upon ten o'clock, the candles were burning dimly, the wicks wanted snuffing; it was all in a sort of mist. In the twilight of the church the crowd seemed heaving like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for the last three days, it seemed that all the faces -- old and young, men's and women's -- were alike, that everyone who came up for the palm had the same expression in his eyes. In the mist he could not see the doors; the crowd kept moving and looked as though there were no end to it.”

Inconspicuously, clinical third-person observation morphs into the workings of an individual mind. Inner experience merges with the world it takes in and riffs upon. We are on the cusp of literary stream of consciousness (a phrase coined 12 years earlier by William James in The Principles of Psychology). Likening worshipers to a heaving sea is new, surprising and appropriate to a sick man who will die within a week – Holy Week. He vision is hallucinatory. Here is the next paragraph:

“How stifling, how hot it was! How long the service went on! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was laboured and rapid, his throat was parched, his shoulders ached with weariness, his legs were trembling. And it disturbed him unpleasantly when a religious maniac uttered occasional shrieks in the gallery. And then all of a sudden, as though in a dream or delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though his own mother Marya Timofyevna, whom he had not seen for nine years, or some old woman just like his mother, came up to him out of the crowd, and, after taking a palm branch from him, walked away looking at him all the while good-humouredly with a kind, joyful smile until she was lost in the crowd. And for some reason tears flowed down his face. There was peace in his heart, everything was well, yet he kept gazing fixedly towards the left choir, where the prayers were being read, where in the dusk of evening you could not recognize anyone, and -- wept. Tears glistened on his face and on his beard. Here someone close at hand was weeping, then someone else farther away, then others and still others, and little by little the church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later, within five minutes, the nuns' choir was singing; no one was weeping and everything was as before.”

How different this is from the conventions of earlier 19th-century fiction. How might Dickens or Turgenev have treated this scene? Chekhov blurs inner and outer, comic and tragic. His most successful characters are the opposite of cartoons or Dickensian caricatures. The bishop is revealed as weak, frightened, baffled by life and death, and utterly human. In a review of Ronald Hingley’s biography of Chekhov, Moss calls the Russian “the man who invented a way of revealing everything about character through the seeming miracle of making character inarticulate.”

Remember, too, that a dying man (Chekhov) is writing about a dying man (Bishop Pytor). After the bishop’s death, Chekhov concludes his story like this:

“A month later a new suffragan bishop was appointed, and no one thought anything more of Bishop Pyotr, and afterwards he was completely forgotten. And only the dead man's old mother, who is living to-day with her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, when she goes out at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the pasture, begins talking of her children and her grandchildren, and says that she had a son a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed. . . .

“And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.”

This, in Moss’ terms, represents a sensibility new to literature: “The moral complexity of the stories and plays stems from this undercurrent of ambiguous sympathy, this withholding of judgment.” Elsewhere, Moss describes Jane Austen as “a wild-eyed experimentalist.” On this basis, might we not construct a new canon dedicated to writers who bring original sensibilities to literature?