`How Camellias Are Grown'

“Marianne was intensely interested in the techniques of things -- how camellias are grown; how the quartz prisms work in crystal clocks; how the pangolin can close up his ear, nose, and eye apertures and walk on the outside edges of his hands `and save the claws/for digging’; how to drive a car; how the best pitchers throw a baseball; how to make a figurehead for her nephew’s sailboat. The exact way in which anything was done, or made, or functioned, was poetry to her.”

That’s Elizabeth Bishop on her friend Marianne Moore. It shows, of course, in Moore’s poetry, and I felt the same impulse as we spent a second day exploring Portland: How do the keepers of a Zen garden make and maintain those designs in the gravel? How do you play cricket and can Americans hope to learn the rules (we watched a group of young Indian men playing)? How does an ice machine work? How do you keep the cabbage crisp in a grilled pastrami Reuben?

In our wanderings we noticed the storefront Church of Elvis, Virginia Woof Dog Daycare, Elephant Deli, Voodoo Doughnuts and a faded but still legible sign painted on the side of a building advertising De Sotos (Chrysler stopped making them in 1961). We finally found the Portland Japanese Garden, which is green, quiet and sublimely beautiful. Koi fish, weirdly bionic-looking creatures, swim in the ponds. My 8-year-old pointed at them, licked his lips and asked, “Did you bring the tartar sauce?"

We returned to Powell’s and triumphed again: a used copy of Eugenio Montale’s The Second Life of Art and the new translation, by Brian Reeve, of Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island (1895), his account of the Russian penal colony in Siberia. It’s Chekhov’s longest work and among his least read. We can thank the English publisher Oneworld Classics for bringing it back into print. Here’s how Chekhov begins the book:

“`Why is it so cold in this Siberia of yours?’

“`Cos that’s the way God wants it!’ replies the coach driver.

“Yes, it’s May now, and by this time in European Russia, the woods are turning green and the nightingales are pouring out their song, while in the south the acacia and lilac have been in blossom for ages already, yet here, along the road from Tyumen to Tomsk, the earth is brown, the forests are bare, there is dull ice on the lakes, and snow still lying on the shores and in the gullies.”

Chekhov’s minor key, familiar from the stories and plays, suffuses even his putative journalism. Saturday morning in a Portland city park, I listened to a young couple argue loudly in Russian. They stood face to face, shaking their fists like Lenin, and over and over he called her “Blyadischa!” In a letter she wrote in 1964 to Anne Stevenson, Bishop writes:

“…someone I have read & read since I have been in Brazil, is Chekhov. If only more artists could be that good as well as good artists. He makes most of them look like pigs -- and yet he sacrificed nothing to his art, either. I feel I could die happy if I could write one story -- or poem -- about Brazil one third as good as `Peasants.’”

`Goodness and Intelligence'

Elberry today posts a fine tribute to his countryman, Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels, including a video interview with the Good Doctor. Elberry calls him “one of my favourite living authors,” a judgment with which I happily concur. Here’s Elberry:

“He doesn’t look like i’d imagined at all. i like the bubbly enthusiasm and slight volatility of manner, which don’t come across in his generally grave, forceful prose. i had a joyful month reading his considerable corpus of on-line essays here and here and here and here. Significantly, his prose reveals goodness and intelligence, where, alas, most left-wing writers just come across as hateful, dishonest, self-righteous, hysterical, and very much the kind of people who would have gladly joined the NKVD, to purge the State of questionable elements, i.e. anyone who disagrees with them.”

`The City is a Machine'

After our first meal in Portland, Ore. -- cheeseburgers, chicken and fries al fresco -- we took a train to the Japanese garden, which we couldn’t find, and another to Powell’s, “The City of Books.” Like most cities, the bookstore is crowded, expensive and filled with wonders. The kids chose “graphic novels” -- that is, overpriced comic books. My wife found a novel and a guide to Baja California, where we’ll be spending a week in February. I’m happy too: The Brooklyn Novels of Daniel Fuchs, recently reissued by Black Sparrow Books, and the Dalkey Archive edition of Nothing by Henry Green. Let’s give thanks for small presses: Fuchs and Green, among my favorite novelists, are back in print.

Another gem: Caught, also by Henry Green, originally published in 1943, but I found a Berkley Medallion paperback from 1960. The brown pages smell reassuringly musty but the real prize is the cover: A sultry, disheveled blonde, apparently unclothed, lies under the covers, arms crossed behind her head. She looks stage left, yearningly. Superimposed over her image and the entire front cover is a fishing net. Get it? Caught? The cover is pure pulp and so is the accompanying tagline: “A Novel of People Enmeshed in the Passions of Wartime London.” I hope Green got to see it. By 1960 he had already published his last novel, but would live another 13 unhappy years. The cover price is 50 cents. I paid seven times that and would gladly have paid more.

My wife has taken the kids down to the over-chlorinated hotel pool. Then we’ll walk a few blocks to Portland’s Chinatown for dinner. This is the first any of us has set foot in Oregon. Based on a cursory walk and two train rides, a lot of people are still smoking cigarettes in Portland. The good news is that many of the city’s older building remain intact -- brick work, pressed tin, cast iron. Our hotel opened in 1912. We saw street musicians playing trumpet, amplified blues harp, guitar and banjo. It feels like a compact city densely filled with sensory pleasures. L.E. Sissman included an essay titled “Lost Cities” in his nonfiction collection Innocent Bystander. A native of Detroit and longtime resident of New York City and Boston, he seems to know Portland:

“The fact is, of course, that the city is a machine for compressing both people and experience, for multiplying and heightening sensations (in both senses), for speeding and amplifying the impact of life on the individual. Since flesh and blood can withstand only so many stimuli, threats, and shocks without losing their coherence, the city-as-happening has, with the advance of both tension and technology, become simply too much for us: too much life, too much death to imagine or deal with, day after day.”

`A Clearing in the Forest'

Of the writers I care most about who have died during my reading life (Faulkner doesn’t count – I was 9), the one I miss most, because he probably still had the most to give had he been granted a reprieve, was the poet L.E. Sissman. Beckett was 83; Bellow, 89; Guy Davenport, 77; Nabokov, 78. Sissman was 48 when cancer killed him in 1976. He had published, in the words of his friend John Updike, four volumes of “witty, elegiac, densely actual, airily effortless, often moving and usually blank verse,” and one collection of essays and reviews, Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s. Most of the reviews are drawn from The New Yorker, and the columns from The Atlantic Monthly. It sits on my virtual “Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf,” to borrow the title of one of my favorites among Sissman’s columns:

“A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.”

As reader and writer, Sissman had an old-fashioned regard for one of Samuel Johnson’s commandments: "The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it." Enjoyment and endurance mingle in lives worth living, and in books worth rereading, and many of the writers on Sissman’s “Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf” reflect this dual purpose: “…I can return,” he writes, “not as a pilgrim but as a familiar, almost a friend” to the poems of Dryden, Swift, Gay, D’Urfey, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. My immediate reaction is admiration for a poet or reader with sensibility elastic enough to cherish both Swift and Keats. He goes on:

“Among the Victorians my closest poetic acquaintances are strange bedfellows: Gilbert and Hopkins. In the twentieth century, I reread most or all of Eliot, really il miglior fabbro, most of Auden, especially the “Songs and Musical Pieces,” some of them among the greatest lyrics in the language; most of Cummings, most of Stevens, most of Ransom, much of Hart Crane, much of Robert Lowell, all of Philip Larkin, that Midlands existentialist.”

That’s a list about fifty percent in variance from my own but admirable nevertheless. I would leave out Cummings (bless the upper-case “c”), Ransom and Lowell, and substitute Bunting, Berryman, R.S. Thomas and Hill, but I’m pleased Sissman accepted Larkin in toto. He goes on to include books devoted to his non-literary interests – automobiles, trains and military history. Such a bookshelf, after all, is idiosyncratic and beyond challenge, like the contents of one’s suitcase for a cruise around the world. Who am I to say Sissman shouldn’t pack Henry Manney’s collected automotive columns from Road & Track?

Sissman is on my shelf because he makes excellent company. He’s smart, stoical, observant, cheerful, well-read, funny and free of self-pity. In his introduction, Updike likens Sissman distantly to Montaigne. The passage is worth quoting at length, and I hope it stirs you to seek out Innocent Bystander (1975) and Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978):

“A sensible, decent man: that is the voice. His poetry is both more tender and more cruel than his prose ever is; his audience, we feel, has shifted in his mind, from the unshockable empyrean audience, the single fierce inner attendant, to whom a poet addresses himself – has shifted to a congeries (another of his pet words) of fallible, woundable, only slightly educable mortals. From Montaigne on, this is the voice of the essayist, this voice inviting us onto the shared ground of a middling sensuality, a middling understanding, a voice that, if it raves, raves never against us, but against a perfidious other, some stronghold as closed to our innocence as Mamma Leone’s kitchen or Richard Nixon’s White House.”

`Life is Not Like That'

“I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called `big’ experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness & even humour, that is in fact what the critics wd call the moral tone of the book.”

Philip Larkin might have been writing about fictional characters as diverse as Misail Poloznev, Lambert Strether, Leopold Bloom, Henny Pollit and Tommy Wilhelm. He was, in fact, trying to convince an editor to publish the novels of Barbara Pym, who had gone 14 years without seeing a book into print. Larkin’s advocacy, echoed by Lord David Cecil, resulted in the publication of Quartet in Autumn (1977) and Pym’s literary resurrection. What interests me, beyond Larkin’s loyalty and generosity to a friend, is his taste in books.

Larkin delighted in thumbing his nose at academics, fashionable critics and tastemakers in general. This most bookish of men, a librarian, reveled in rubbing their noses in his ersatz and not-so-ersatz philistinism. No clan is more snobbish or pack-minded than self-styled litterateurs, and Larkin happily baited them. In a 1979 interview, when asked what he enjoyed reading, Larkin answered:

“I read everything except philosophy, theology, economics, sociology, science, or anything to do with the wonders of nature, anything to do with technology – have I said politics? I’m trying to think of all the Dewey decimal classes. In point of fact I virtually read only novels, or something pretty undemanding in the non-fiction line, which might be a biography. I read almost no poetry.”

How much of this is an act is debatable, but it’s certainly refreshing and preferable to readers fawning over the latest “experimental” stillbirth. Elizabeth Bishop reports a similar honesty and taste in her friend Marianne Moore:

“Sometimes we went to movies together, to Kon-Tiki twice, I recall. I never attempted to lure her to any dramatic or `artistic’ films. Since Dr. and Mrs. Sibley Watson were her dearest friends, she must have seen his early experimental films, such as Lot in Sodom. I heard the sad story of two young men, however, who when they discovered that she had never seen Eisenstein’s Potemkin insisted on taking her. There was a short before Potemkin, a Walt Disney film; this was when the Disney films still had charm and humor. After the movie they went to tea and Marianne talked at length and in detail about the ingenuity of the Disney film, and nothing more. Finally they asked her what she had thought of Potemkin. Her opinion was brief but conclusive: `Life,’ she said, `is not like that.’”

Anyone who has sat through Eisenstein’s dreary melodrama, particularly in the company of a montage-mad professor of film studies, will quietly thrill to Moore’s plain-spoken verdict. No, life is not like that, though generations of cinematic sophisticates have convinced themselves otherwise. Later in “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore,” Bishop reports Moore’s admiration for “spontaneity” and “gusto,” qualities sorely lacking in Eisenstein and much other oversold art.

`An Afterglow, an Aura, a Faint Fragrance'

Nige’s willingness to admit how little he remembers of the books he has read comes as refreshing news in the ego-swollen blogosphere. Only the idiot savants among us remember every word, and one wonders how many words they’ve actually enjoyed. Feats of monstrous recall usually are cause for embarrassment. Once, over the formaggio e frutta course, I witnessed an English professor spurt Dante at great length in the original. At least that’s what he said it was, and we were too appalled and ignorant to doubt him or return to the Gorgonzola.

To know one good book well – say, The Anatomy of Melancholy – would be sufficient accomplishment for a lifetime. What I retain from most is a glow of pleasure or its opposite -- irritation mingled with nausea and guilt. The one book from which I preserve much quantifiable information – nuggets of fact and words once new to my vocabulary -- is Ulysses. Joyce taught me the meaning of omphalos, parallax, pyx, Basta!, K.M.R.I.A., beef to the heels and agenbite of inwit. Not to mention “Mrkgnao!” He boasted that Dublin, c. 1904, could be rebuilt from the information he had squirreled away in Ulysses. Nige notes:

“I know I must have read large numbers of books that I don't even remember reading - occasionally I find myself reading one, and realise I'm actually rereading...”

In what epistemological category do the books we have read but no longer remember reside? They hover among our dreams – once vivid, now gone. And how pleasant it would be to rediscover such a book and find it has mysteriously transformed into a masterpiece. Nige again:

“What I like to think is that the better ones (of the books I do at least remember reading) have left some beneficial trace at a level somewhere just below the conscious, retrievable memory - an afterglow, an aura, a faint fragrance... Or maybe I'm deluding myself?”

I suspect not. Some of those déjà vu-like will-o-the-wisps that whisper through consciousness – might they be traces of books read and imperfectly forgotten? The failing is not always ours when it comes to their evaporation. Some are written to guarantee oblivion, and that’s merciful. In her diary on July 1, 1939, the wonderful novelist Dawn Powell mentions reading aloud to her 17-year-old retarded son:

“I read a chapter of David Copperfield a day to him, explaining points of conduct, geography, history, character, ethics, etc., and it seems a means of awakening him to realities. Dickens read aloud shows how far afield we moderns have gone from duty to readers. The reading mind is a12-year old mind just like the movie mind. It requires a gentle introduction to its story, characters slowly and definitely introduced with major physical descriptions since no movie was anticipated; noises, backgrounds, voices, all clarified since no radio version was planned. If authors continued to pander to every sense, as the old writers did, instead of pandering to their own egos, books would still be greater than radio or movies.”

While writing this, Dave Lull informed me he had purchased a copy of Guy Davenport’s Twelve Stories, a selection from his eight earlier volumes of fiction. I told Dave I hadn’t read it and didn’t own it because I own all the previous collections (19 of Davenport’s books are on my shelf, several of which I remember quite well). He mentioned it included a brief postscript which I expressed interest in reading. Within minutes Dave sent a link and I found a pertinent sentence:

“It is not wise to look too hard at what’s going on when we read and write, for in both we are dithering around on the boundary between the demonstrable world and the inviolably private world of our minds.”

`From Another Place'

Out walking in the city where I lived in upstate New York, I passed an alley in which light flared from an open door at the rear of a building. It was an evening in autumn, cool and clear, when objects appear more vivid than usual. I investigated and found a glassblower at work in his shop. He answered questions and permitted me to watch as he pulled molten glass like taffy and fashioned a set of vases. His motions were small and precise, like any conscientious artist, like a carpenter, cook or writer.

William Maxwell agreed to an interview with the Paris Review in 1981, not long after publishing his final and finest novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow. Readers know his prose is graceful, precise and transparent, and so was his conversation as elicited by his friend and interviewer, Brendan Gill. Here’s Maxwell talking about writing, revising and biding one’s time in a manner that reminds me of that glassblower 10 years ago:

“There’s something in the Four Quartets about language that doesn’t disintegrate. That’s what I try to do – write sentences that won’t be like sand castles. I’ve gotten to the point where I seem to recognize a good sentence when I’ve written it on the typewriter. Often it’s surrounded by junk. So I’m extremely careful. If a good sentence occurs in an otherwise boring paragraph, I cut it out, rubber-cement it to a sheet of typewriter paper, and put it in a folder. It’s just like catching fish in a creek. I pull out a sentence and slip a line through the gills and put it on a chain and am very careful not to mislay it. Sometimes I try that sentence in ten different places until finally it finds the place where it will stay – where the surrounding sentences attach themselves to it and it becomes part of them. In the end what I write is almost entirely made up of those sentences, which is why what I write now is so short. They come out one by one, and sometimes in dubious company. Those sentences that are really valuable are mysterious – perhaps they come from another place, the way lyric poetry comes from another place.”

At 73, Maxwell possessed the least tangible and most important of artistic virtues – patience. Somewhere, Kafka said impatience is a form of laziness. If so, the great artists and even the less great are Job-like in their willingness to actively, creatively wait. The Eliot passage Maxwell was probably alluding to, from the “East Coker” section of Four Quartets, is worth quoting at length:

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres –
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

“A different kind of failure” is reminiscent of Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Of course, Maxwell may have been thinking of this passage from “Little Gidding”:

“And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.”

“Exact without vulgarity.” “Precise but not pedantic.” As Maxwell says: “Those sentences that are really valuable are mysterious.” If writing were easy and predictable it wouldn’t be half so satisfying or worth waiting for. Last week, on Aug. 16, we observed the centenary of Maxwell’s birth.

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull contributed this from Eric Hoffer: "If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences."

My Romance

Almost 30 years ago I went to work for my first daily, said to be the second-smallest in Ohio, with a staff of four – editor, city reporter (me), sports editor and society editor. The last was a woman about my age who when not chronicling chicken dinners wrote pseudonymous romance novels. At a publication party Elsa gave us copies of her latest paperback inscribed on the title page in gold ink. I remembered her novel on Saturday while scanning the fiction shelves in a used-book store.

My practice is to keep an eclectic mental list of writers – Henry Green, Eugenio Montale, A.J. Liebling, Samuel Johnson – whose work I always look for though I already own some of their books. After recently rereading Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) I added Stevie Smith to the list because I’ve never read her subsequent novels – Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949). And there they were, two slender mass-market paperbacks with broken spines – literally “pocket books,” as they used to be known. Both have pictures of Glenda Jackson in the title role from Stevie, the wonderful 1978 film about the poet. The color scheme is gold and forest green, like tacky Christmas cards. I can’t remember seeing a major writer treated to uglier book designs. After greeting me, the clerk – shaved head, hideous glasses, three days of beard – gave the novels and their attached 55-year-old male customer a double take. Presumably, Pinnacle Books hoped to cash in on the movie and entice the romance market. Over the Frontier, at 282 pages, was originally priced at $3.50; The Holiday, at 184 pages, was $2.75. I paid a buck apiece.

I started reading The Holiday in the park Sunday morning, hoping the other parents wouldn’t stare. Smith’s novel is a variation on Elsa’s romance genre, but grimmer, funnier and better written. Much of the narrative is carried by dialogue, much of which is witty and hip, at least by the standards of post-war England, and I suspect an American reader misses much. The narrator, Celia, is another version of Pompey Casmilus, the voice in Smith’s two earlier novels – in other words, a version of Smith (all live in a north London suburb with an elderly aunt, and hold clerical jobs). Celia works for the Ministry in the wake of World War II with her cousin, also named Casmilus but this time male. Only humor – Smith’s, most of the character’s – relieves their tedium and unhappiness. All of her people are talkers – they love stories, telling them and listening – and after 50 pages or so, it already seems like the cheeriest novel about unhappiness I’ve ever read. Here’s Celia talking to an English soldier returned from Asia:

“These travellers’ tales lift the dark mood, I love to hear the travellers’ tales and the tales of the soldiers who come home. I asked the soldier what had happened to the animals in the jungles of Burma, for this was a thing that I wished to know: Well, what happened to the jungle animals in all the fighting and scurrying of the armies, well, did the animals flee, did they clear out, the animals and reptiles, did they quit, did they move off to another jungle? `Oh, no,’ said the young soldier, `the animals stayed, they were another worry, just something more for us to have. The tigers used to bite our men and they used to eat the Japanese, and the crocs used to nab a chap every now and then, and the monkeys were very mischievous. But the tigers were the worst, they were the limit.’ My soldier from the wars returning said: `Crumbs, what with the Japs, the jungle, the animals and the Beds [from Bedfordshire] and Herts [Hertfordshire] (that was his regiment), crumbs, it was indeed a circus.’”

This gives a taste of Smith’s fluid gift for narrative and also suggests the veiled political theme of war’s end and the subsequent dissolution of the British Empire. There’s much talk of Palestine, Africa and India (little, it seems, has changed), but to call Smith a “political” writer, as some critics have argued, is ridiculous. Her voluble people contend with loneliness and the seeming impossibility of love. Their lives are quirky and small, not world-historical. In the words of an English contemporary of Smith’s, they are learning, in the wake of war, “to be at home in this commonplace world.”

`Stuff and Nonsense'

Out of brute curiosity I’ve been reading and looking at A.B. Frost: An Anthology, a collection of proto-comics that predate by a decade Richard F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, usually judged the first comic strip. I had never heard Frost’s name before last week though I recognized his scratchy, Ur-American style, reminiscent of E.W. Kemble’s in the first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Frost was born the year Moby-Dick was published and died one year after The Jazz Singer.

In 2003, Fantagraphics published an omnibus volume bringing together Stuff and Nonsense (1884), The Bull Calf and Other Tales (1892) and Carlo (1913). Artistically, Carlo is Frost’s triumph, especially the long sequence in which two oafs tie tin cans to Carlo’s tail and the mutt careens across the landscape. In one panel, a startled draft horse wearing blinders has run through a loaded clothes line, and Frost turns him into a noble Pegasus.

Frost is best when wordless. The Stuff portion of Stuff and Nonsense is without captions, but Nonsense is a collection of illustrated limericks, the lowest of poetic forms except for the first-person sensitive lyric. No one, I’m afraid, comes from Nantucket: There’s no smut in Frost’s limericks. Without exception, the drawing outshines the poeticizing. In one picture a Gabby Hayes-like salt sits fishing on a dock. In the next, we see only his feet upright in the water. Here’s the accompanying limerick:

“There was an old codger who said,
`Quite enough of the hard life I’ve led.
As it’s nearly high tide
I’ll commit suicide.
I’ll be far better off when I’m dead.”

As I read Frost’s poems, another limerick came into focus. I, who daily forget passwords for online accounts and the names of my neighbors, remembered a topical limerick I wrote more than 40 years ago. I even remember the trouble I had settling on appropriate punctuation. Here, from memory, it is, c. early 1967:

“There once was a man named Rand
Whose intelligence deserved a hand.
He thought he cured cancer,
They gave him the answer:
The court, the vaccine they had banned.”

The obscure topicality calls for footnotes. In 1966, a businessman in Cleveland, James Rand, claimed to have developed a cancer vaccine from animal blood and human cancer cells. The Food and Drug Administration asked for a restraining order against Rand’s vaccine and in February 1967 the U.S. District Court in Cleveland banned its manufacture and distribution.

What I remember are newspaper photos of cancer patients and supporters picketing the federal courthouse. What I don’t remember is why I wrote the damn thing. It was set in Cleveland, my hometown, and the story was broken by a reporter at the Plain Dealer, so it was local news, but why did I find it compelling enough to write about? And why did I remember it, down to the finicky punctuation, like a Dylan lyric from the same era? Memory is capricious, yes, but cruel.

Gorging on Oysters

“If a literate person seems inferior to an illiterate, this means that the quality of experience he is gaining from his reading is inferior to that which a peasant gains talking to his father or his neighbors. The remedy is not to stop him reading but to persuade him to read better books.”

Books have always consumed a significant portion of my time, finances and thought-life. I don’t know how I occupied myself in my four pre-literate years, nor do I know what people do who don’t or can’t read books. Given the centrality of printed matter to my life, however, I rarely speak of it. I’ve learned that talk of books ensures sidelong glances and the end of conversations, and I no longer expect otherwise. My hobbyhorse is not the world’s, and to insist otherwise would be self-centered in the extreme.

The sentences cited above, from an essay W.H. Auden published in The New York Times Book Review in 1951, both interest and repel me. I have no difficulty accepting the notion of “inferior” people. One trips over them walking down the sidewalk. (See Theodore Dalrymple’s latest “Global Warning.”) My problem starts with Auden’s assumption that books are necessarily a source of self-improvement, that one who reads “good books” is somehow superior to those who don’t. My experience denies this. I’ve known people who are more thoughtful, interesting and amusing for having been ambitious readers, but none who has grown in moral stature, myself included. Likewise, I’ve known charming and companionable non-readers. Who am I to push Proust on them?

My other objection is to Auden’s suggestion that we ought to persuade people to read better books, and that doing so will act on them like a sermon or vitamins. I don’t have a proselytizing bone in my body, and don’t think most books have an uplifting impact on most people. Reading good books begins with a hunger for pleasure, not moral renewal. One of my favorite stories about books bringing people together, sealing a pre-existent kinship, is found in Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling, by Raymond Sokolov, who interviewed Joseph Mitchell, Liebling’s closest friend and longtime colleague at The New Yorker. They met in 1934 while working as reporters for the World-Telegram, a long-defunct newspaper in New York City. According to Mitchell, George Borrow and other mutually loved writers brought them together:

“[Borrow] was a forerunner of Joe’s and my interest in what they called lowlife at The New Yorker. Joe was surprised I knew Borrow. We found a mutual bond in other writers concerned with lowlife – Villon, Rabelais, Sterne, Dostoevsky. And we became fast friends. We used to gorge on oysters in the Washington Market.”

`Pills to Purge Melancholy'

“What she really knew about was books.”

Lucky woman. That would seem the perfect prerequisite for a poet. That, and really knowing about her fellow human beings, which she did. The subject here is Stevie Smith; her critic, Clive James, reviewing a biography of Smith in The New Yorker in 1987. James acknowledges her difficult personality but never mistakes Smith’s faux-naïve persona, the little-school-girl routine or the way she toyed with nursery rhymes and fairy tales for bumbling or slumming:

“She strove industriously to make it look as if she didn’t quite know what she was doing. She knew exactly. Her poetry has the vivid appeal of the Douanier Roussau’s pictures or Mussorgsky’s music, but where they lacked schooling she only pretended to lack it. Closer analogies would be with Picasso painting clowns or Stravinsky writing ballets. She knew everything about how poetry had sounded in the past, and could assemble echoes with the assurance of any other modern artist.”

Yes, she knew about books. Rereading her Collected Poems, I often hear her “assemble echoes” – from pastiche to unannounced quotation – of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Blake and Eliot. Smith, though autodidactically learned, had a horror of pedantry, stuffiness and showing off. Somewhere Jonathan Williams declares his love for two misunderstood, undervalued poets – Smith (whom he befriended and photographed) and J.V. Cunningham – who between them define the possibilities of allusive, accessible verse. Here’s Smith, in one of her many variations on the theme of death:

“Why do I think of Death as a friend?
It is because he is a scatterer
He scatters the human frame
The nerviness and the great pain
Throws it on the fresh fresh air
And now it is nowhere
Only sweet Death does this
Sweet Death, Kind Death,
Of all the gods you are best.”

I hear Keats -- “Ode to a Nightingale,” of course -- but also the sonnet that begins “Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell”:

“Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser -- Death is Life's high meed.”

Now we’re in Beckett country. I’ve finished rereading Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper and realize again why I love fiction in which the artifice of a particular voice predominates, as in Sterne and Beckett – all, oddly, death-haunted writers and all very funny. James writes of Smith:

“Her poems, if they were pills to purge melancholy, did not work for her. The best of them, however, work like charms for everyone else.”

For instance:

“Some are born to peace and joy
And some are born to sorrow
But only for a day as we
Shall not be here tomorrow.”

James concludes, beautifully, that “when she is in form she can deconstruct literature in the only way that counts – by constructing something that feels as if it had just flown together, except you can’t take it apart.”

`A Dicey Business'

“The ability to respond to prose and poetry hasn’t entirely disappeared, but it has been dulled. This is a dicey business to discuss. There are many people who still depend on novels and poems for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation, and they tend to dismiss someone who feels differently. Clearly, I’m either depressed or I just don’t get it. Thing is, I’m not on meds, and since I believe that I do `get’ Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Larkin, and Auden, I also believe that I’m able to appreciate what novelists and poets are doing today. And yet very little strikes my fancy. I can’t prove it, but I think the fault lies in the literary firmament and not in me.”

No, I didn’t write that though I wish I had. That’s the essayist Arthur Krystal speaking with Wyatt Mason on the latter’s increasingly essential Harper’s blog. I discovered Krystal earlier this year, wrote about him here and mentioned him here. He doesn’t strike me as a professional curmudgeon or reactionary poseur. In fact his instinct is to celebrate literary accomplishment but he finds little worth celebrating. This is said in sadness, not self-satisfied Schadenfreude.

Certain readers, of course, will resent Krystal’s unhappy conclusion. Nearly all the chatter in the literary blogosphere is devoted to contemporary writers and writing, though I’m not sure why. Most human creation in any age is mediocre or worse, though admittedly our era seems among the poorer. Why not read Laurence Sterne or Theodor Fontane rather than Denis Johnson? It only makes sense. We can trot out the usual suspects – competition from other media, university-endorsed illiteracy, the sway of fashionable ideologies – but an enterprising, discriminating reader will naturally turn to the past, where the action is. In “Closing the Books: A Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story,” from Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature (2002), Krystal writes:

“What happened to the capacity to feel the possibilities in books? To answer this, I have to summon up the way books used to make me feel, and when I consider the eagerness with which I set out to read everything I could, and how a peculiar book like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood once made me whistle in amazement, it seems to me that a necessary component of the literary life is a certain romantic attachment to life itself. But life is not very romantic these days. I’m not sure it ever was, but at least in the days before the media transformed the nature of existence by devaluing the idea of privacy, a writer’s imaginative powers and a reader’s imaginative responses were shaped by a real sense of possibility. The greater world, being further removed from the ordinary individual, required an imaginative leap to bring it home. And when the imagination succeeded through print or pigment, one felt the jolt, the power of art to transfigure one’s life.”

I still feel that literary jolt, though less often than I did at 20, and that’s probably as it should be. I don’t watch television, read newspapers or even much online. I’m busy and jealous of my time, and books reliably provide the optimum ratio of jolts per media-minute consumed. I like Krystal’s assertion that “a necessary component of the literary life is a certain romantic attachment to life itself.” That’s a prescription for mental health. In Krystal and other writers quietly working at the margins lies our hope for a sustained literary culture. It won’t come from the universities or bohemia. Rather, it will come from a reconnection with the past, a connection severed by politics, ignorance and arrogance. Krystal writes in “Closing the Books”:

“Here is the crux, absurdly simple: once you have made the acquaintance of truly interesting minds, minds such as Montaigne’s, Shakepeare’s, Goethe’s, Swift’s, Diderot’s, Nietzsche’s, Mallarmé’s, Dostoevsky’s, Wilde’s – even if you disagree with some of their ideas, and even if you detect signs of ingrained cultural bias – what do the novels and poems of today have to offer other than implicit commentary on their antecedents? Another way of saying this is: the best is the enemy of the good, and once you have become acquainted with the former, why bother with the rest?”

Not to give the wrong impression, Krystal, like many good readers, is also very funny. He tells Mason:

“Reading Auden on Dostoevsky, or Trilling on Henry James, and then reading Lacan on Poe, or Derrida on Baudelaire, is the difference between visiting Florence on a fine Spring day and being stuck on a bus in Bosnia Herzegovina in the dead of winter -- without a coat -- with nothing to eat, etc. The point is not that I stopped appreciating criticism, I simply stopped reading turgid, self-important, aggressively abstruse criticism.”

`To Point a Moral, or Adorn a Tale'

Often one hears echoes in a text, real or imaginary, intentional or unconscious. Even writers who tout their originality are nothing without the past. The mind moves along grooves prepared long ago by forbears, and the best writers embrace their grooviness, so to speak. While rereading the first of Stevie Smith’s three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), I came across this paragraph on page 39 of the New Directions edition (printed, alarmingly, on yellow paper):

“For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.”

Do you hear it, the echo? Smith’s narrator, the office secretary Pompey Casmilus, weaves into her monologue an allusion to Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1748), his transformation of Juvenal’s 10th Satire, lines 219-222:

“His Fall was destin'd to a barren Strand,
A petty Fortress, and a dubious Hand;
He left the Name, at which the World grew pale,
To point a Moral, or adorn a Tale.”

The “he” is Charles XII of Sweden, whose vanity and megalomania led to military defeat, the end of the Swedish Empire and his death. Johnson reduces his name to a moralistic platitude, a punchline. W. Jackson Bate devotes a chapter to “The Vanity of Human Wishes” in his life of Johnson, and says :

“…Johnson makes clear the inevitable self-deception by which human beings are led astray. We see objects through the fog of our own passions, and chase or fly distorted images that lack reality -- `fancied ills’ or `airy good.’ We substitute a hot pursuit of fame or wealth as unconscious proxies for what, without knowing it, we really seek.”

This comes close to one of Smith’s themes, if not her style or tone. Hitler’s Germany casts a shadow across Novel on Yellow Paper, while Pompey’s friends and co-workers pursue their “unconscious proxies.” Death, Smith’s ultimate theme, hovers in a mist of high-spirited language. She hints, never hammers. Novel on Yellow Paper is a late-Modernist caprice, a celebration of Pompey’s voice. When Smith published her first novel, Samuel Beckett was working on Murphy:

“She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.”

At the time, Beckett was also researching a play about the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Mrs. Thrale. Only fragments of the abandoned work have been published, under the title “Human Wishes.”

`This is an Age When There Are Too Many Words'

Almost unknowingly I found myself collecting observations by writers I admire about the role of the critic. My motivation for this harmless hobby is a lingering sense of guilt. When younger, I read many critics and reviewers, looking for suggestions on books to pursue and avoid. I sought out the New York Times Book Review, not always easy to do in Ohio in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies. Rather touchingly, I came to trust certain critical brand names but in my innocence I was often easily awed.

Decades later, I read little criticism and can’t remember the last time I even saw a copy of the Times Book Review. What changed is a growing confidence in my taste and judgment, coupled with the slow realization that most literary culture has devolved into trivia and tedium. Fashion and reputation no longer impress, and I feel no compulsion to “keep up.” I read what I like and like much of what I read; if I don’t, I stop reading. The latest addition to my growing collection of critical mini-manifestos is by the wonderful English poet Stevie Smith (1902-1971). It’s her conclusion to “Statement on Criticism,” written in 1958 and collected in Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (1981):

“Attention, impartiality, disrespect of persons – these are the legal virtues of judgement (learning the judge must have, or he would not be where he is). To these add the critic’s virtues of judgement – knowledge of life, art, books and people (that is already a good deal) and a gift for writing well. Enough, I think. Enough to ask and a good deal more – you glum ones will say – than you will usually find.”

It sounds so common-sensical, who could argue with her? Today, of course, “knowledge of life, art, books and people,” not to mention “a gift for writing well,” are prerequisites so audacious, for critics and writers generally, as to be radical. Smith is a writer one trusts. She is reliably funny, grim and unsentimental. One of her best poems, “Silence,” adds something to this talk of criticism, writing and other forms of “attention”:

“Why do people abuse so much our busy age?
They can withdraw into themselves and not rage
It is better to do this and live in one’s own kingdom
Than by raging add to the rage of our busy time.

“This is an age when there are too many words,
Silent, silent, silent the water lie
And the beautiful grass lies silent and this is beautiful,
Why can men then not withdraw and be silent and happy?

“It is better to see the grass than write about it
Better to see the water than write a water-song,
Yet both may be painted and a person be happy in the painting,
Can it be that the tongue is cursed, to go so wrong?”

Buce's Book Fair

Buce over at Underbelly invited friends to contribute to his summer Book Fair. He asked us to suggest a book “you'd like to encourage folks to read -- along with a brief review or précis.” My contribution was The Journals of Henry David Thoreau.

`Fighting Against the Future'

I owe my discovery of Evelyn Waugh to the poet L.E. Sissman who, in the March 1972 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, lauded Put Out More Flags:

“I hope you will give yourself the pleasure of reading in-between the often- promising but unfulfilling novels being published now -- this triumphant, ordered, perhaps triumphant because ordered, exemplar of the art of fiction. If I'm not mistaken, Put Out More Flags is the greatest of Evelyn Waugh's great novels. As such, it deserves to be revived and reread as long as we read English.”

I was 19, a college sophomore, and Waugh had died just six years earlier, but he remained only a name, usually cited as a precursor of the Black Humorists of the fifties and sixties. I was majoring in English and had already taken a class in the modern English novel (Joyce Cary! Anthony Burgess!) but, I suspect for extra-literary reasons, Waugh was not part of the curriculum (nor were Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Ford Madox Ford and Henry Green). It took a poet to introduce me to one of the funniest, most elegant prose stylists of the last century. I didn’t know it then but Sissman had already written “Elegy: Evelyn Waugh,” included in Scattered Returns (1969):

“Ah, comic officer and gentleman,
Kneeling on stone and falling through the air
In R.M. battledress, sitting a horse,
Marrying gentry, getting a divorce,
Rushing the Season up to Town, and then
Reclusing it in Zomerzet again,
Rising above your station, taking train
From it to the interior of the brain,
Sending up slyly your establishers,
Turning the world off with a click, a curse
From your stark armory of bolted words,
Mimicking to the life, the death, the fools
Through whose void headpieces Britannia rules
Her residue, impersonating an
Irascible, irrational old man
Full of black humors and still darker flights
Beyond aphotic shore on jetty nights
To madness real or bogus, telling all
To a confessor in a grated stall
And stepping shriven, bent, and arrogant
From holy mutter into worldly cant,
Embracing traces of the English past
In all their fossil arbitrariness,
Embodying Highgate’s mezzo sentiment
And Mayfair’s sopranino ton, and yet,
As well, the ground bass of Commercial Street,
You wrote us, first and last, in permanent
Ink and perduring words, a testament
Of how it was in our uneven years:
Laughter in bed, our long index of fears,
Bad manners, time killed callously, a war
Always impending, love abandoned for
Short-term investments, and at long terms’ end
Aloneness’ monolith on every hand.

“Ironic officer and gentleman,
We say goodbye with a slight tear perhaps
Ironic in intent also, although
As clear and serious at heart as you.”

All of this returned as I was reading David Lebedoff’s The One Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh. Its premise is clever and risky: Examine the lives and works of these close contemporaries, superficially opposites but, as the title suggests, kindred spirits. Lebedoff is both audacious and modest. In just over 200 pages, he sketches their biographies, works and thinking, with an emphasis on differences and commonalities, culminating with the latter. I think he succeeds, and his chief success is in concision, thoroughness and plainness of style. He makes no grand prose gestures, which would surely betray the lessons of Orwell and Waugh.

Orwell has always been a problem for me. In high school, less than 20 years after his death, I was assigned to read both Animal Farm and 1984 – irritatingly bad books, as books, not tracts of worthy ideas. I came to admire Orwell the essayist but not Orwell the fiction writer, because of my longtime, cranky dislike of allegory and any fiction driven by idea at the expense of language and character. Animal Farm and 1984 are not mature fiction but screeds written by the village scold. They stink of fantasy and science fiction, backward, idea-driven forms.

After carefully marshalling the evidence and not ignoring the counter-evidence, Lebedoff, near the finish of his book, brings Orwell and Waugh together, having demonstrated how they are “the same man”:

“What they had most in common was a hatred of moral relativism. They both believed that morality is absolute, though they defined and applied it differently. But each believed with all his heart, brain, and soul that there were such things as moral right and moral wrong, and that these were not subject to changes in fashion. Moral relativism was, in fact, the gravest of sins. Everything else they believed in common flowed from this basic perception.

Even their seemingly opposite lives were dedicated to the same cause: fighting against the future. They both saw clearly that what was coming would be worse than what was now, understanding that the dictators of their own time were harbingers of a world unlinked to faith or tradition or common sense or decency.”

With his book Lebedoff performs the ultimate gift one writer can give another: He sends us back to books. Nicely for the purposes of symmetry, Sissman also wrote a poem about the other half of Lebedoff’s duo. “Dear George Orwell, 1950-1965” from his first collection, Dying: An Introduction (1968). It should be noted that Orwell died in 1950:

“”Dear George Orwell,
I never said farewell.
There was too much going on:
Crabgrass in the lawn
And guests to entertain,
Light bantering with pain
(But wait till later on),
Love nightly come and gone.
But always in the chinks
Of my time (or the bank’s),
I read your books again.
In Schrafft’s or on the run
To my demanding clients,
I read you in the silence
Of the spell you spun.
My dearest Englishman,
My stubborn unmet friend,
Who waited for the end
In perfect pain and love
And walked to his own grave
With a warm wink and wave
To all; who would not pull
The trigger on the bull
Elephant, and who,
Seeing his foe undo
His pants across the lines,
Did not blow out his brains;
Who served the Hôtel X
As law man, slept in spikes
With tramps, in Rowton Houses
With pavement artists, boozers,
Boys, insomniacs;
Who spat on shams and hacks,
Lived in a raddled flat
Passing trains hooted at,
And died for what we are.
Farewell, Eric Blair.”

`Slam-Bang Eccentricity'

Alec Wilder’s admiration for Eric Hoffer shouldn’t have surprised me. The composer, like the longshoreman, was a legitimate eccentric, living away from the center, unmindful of fashion, working at what pleased him at his own pace and according to his own rules. Neither had time for self-regarding nonconformity. As Hoffer writes in Reflections on the Human Condition (1973):

“Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.”

On Saturday, we walked through the crowds at Pike Place Market in Seattle, and I was struck by the similarity in appearance and deportment of street performers, vendors and pedestrians; the desperate urge, indicative of desperate emptiness, to be uniformly different. In jeans and polo shirt I felt pleasantly overdressed. People mindful of their work give little thought to “expressing” their “individuality.” In Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life (1975), Wilder included a fan letter to Hoffer:

“I hesitate to write to you because of, simply, awe. I have read all your published works, but unfortunately missed your broadcasts. It is typical of our tawdry era that you are not as widely acclaimed as you should be. Obviously your wisdom does not meet with the intellectual approval of the dogmatic, academic, scientific mind, nor with the attention and concentrated consideration required by the average reader to absorb your wisdom and incisive intelligence.

“Your clarity, directness, essential simplicity, your wisdom, your constant quest for truth, your quotableness, profound respect for Montaigne, all serve to make you one of the few great and passionate minds I have ever encountered.

“I keep an eye out always for any new book of yours but have failed to find one in the past few years. I sincerely trust that this doesn’t mean you are too ill or too despondent to write. Perhaps, on the other hand, you have said all you wish or need to say. It has been a great, truly great, contribution and I humbly thank you.”

Wilder was a gentleman, as was Hoffer. I’m touched by his gesture of fellowship with another original American mind. On the page following the Hoffer letter, Wilder writes to another original, John Cheever:

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

`Few or No Bluish Animals'

Except for the obvious primate infestation, mammals are sparse in our neighborhood. We have cats, dogs, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits, and some fool probably keeps a ferret. Joining their company recently was Rattus rattus, the common roof rat or black rat, though the one I saw was pale gray shading to brown, and nowhere near the roof. I rounded the corner behind the house and there he was, on the ground near the tall plastic bins holding trash, yard waste and recyclables. He stopped, stood rather formally on his hind legs like Stuart Little, studied me a moment and disappeared beneath the magnolia. His appearance was homely and harmless like a stuffed animal, and I felt no revulsion.

As a rule, mammals are a drab bunch. No scarlet tanagers, poison dart frogs or red admirals (“red admirables,” to Nabokov) among them. Thoreau in his journal for Feb. 21, 1855, observes, four years before the publication of On the Origin of Species:

“How plain, wholesome, and earthy are the colors of quadrupeds generally! The commonest I should say is the tawny or various shades of brown, answering to the russet which is the prevailing color of the earth’s surface, perhaps, and to the yellow of sands beneath. The darker brown mingled with this answers to the darker-colored soil of the surface. The white of the polar bear, ermine weasel, etc., answers to the snow; the spots of the pards, perchance, to the earth spotted with flowers or tinted leaves of autumn; the black, perhaps, to night, and muddy bottoms and dark waters. There are few or no bluish animals.”

In fact, blue is not uncommon among fish, birds, amphibians, butterflies and other insects, though rare at Thoreau’s northern latitude. I like his use of “answers,” a verb that partakes of Transcendentalism and Darwin. Her biographer, Elizabeth Frank, says Louise Bogan based one of her poems, “Variation on a Sentence,” on this journal entry by Thoreau, in 1936:

“Of white and tawny, black as ink,
Yellow, and undefined, and pink,
And piebald, there are droves I think.

“(Buff kine in herd, gray whales in pod,
Brown woodchucks, colored like the sod,
All creatures from the hand of God.)

“And many of a hellish hue;
But, for some reason hard to view,
Earth’s bluish animals are few.”

Am I alone in finding “bluish,” so close to “blush,” a funny word? Bogan’s final poetry collection was titled The Blue Estuaries (1968). Frank writes of Bogan:

“For years she had found pleasure and solace in Thoreau’s prose and observations. Passages in which Thoreau charted heat and cold, shadows and tints, patterns and configuration, sounds and rhythms found their way into her notebooks. The infinite variation of his firm, flexible sentences, his rich, yet common English vocabulary, all seemed endlessly inventive and alive to her. And the man’s life – his loneliness and ecstasies – moved her, sometimes, to tears. She found joy in simply copying his words down, writing once next to a cluster of transcription: `spent a whole Sunday afternoon transcribing these extracts. The sound of the sea: alternate cloud & light. Peace. Happiness.’”

`The Inexhaustable Current'

Memory frays but Seize the Day (1956) I’m certain was the first Saul Bellow title I bought and read – a used Viking Compass paperback from Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, where years later I worked as a clerk. I loved the novel for its conmen, New York grit and Dickensian verve, and it still spells city life for me:

“On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence – I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed…”

This might have been Whitman on a Manhattan omnibus, a paragraph stricken from Specimen Days. In How Fiction Works, James Wood devotes almost three pages to a four-sentence, throwaway passage from Seize the Day:

“A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well.”

Wood rightly calls these 44 words “gorgeous, musical,” and in the syntax I hear a distant echo of Bellow’s dear friend John Berryman. That was enough to prompt my seventh or 12th reading of Seize the Day. It also sent me back to New York Proclaimed, the city profile V.S. Pritchett published in 1965, accompanied by Evelyn Hofer’s vivid photographs and packaged like the old Life magazine. Text and pictures capture a vanished city, A.J. Liebling’s city, close in time to Seize the Day and the Manhattan scenes in Herzog (1964). Here’s what I remembered reading:

“The real life of New York – and what rumors one hears of it: of the street of eonists [cross-dressers], of the street of cake-eating old Viennese who look like archduchesses, of the drug haunts, of strange dentists, familiar doctors, men playing the market, of Saul Bellow’s hero in Seize the Day. This novel catches something permanent in the modern city: the womb life that a man will live between his room in the apartment hotel and the restaurant below, between the restaurant and the newsstand in the foyer, between the newsstand and the ice-water jar, between the ice-water and the telephone call to a divorced wife, up and down, across and back, as if he were and automaton, and expression of something human in only a generalized way, a consumer, or item. Saul Bellow has caught the plain neuter quality of personal relationships and the bizarre fantasy life going on in the faceless human heads. Yes, seizing the day is the spur of those millions who live on Manhattan’s shelves.”

`Not Creative in a Big Way'

S.N. Behrman, the writer for The New Yorker who befriended Max Beerbohm for the last four years of the Englishman’s life, reports in Portrait of Max:

“Max’s attitude toward bigness was essential to his own view of himself as an artist. He had a severely topiary intelligence; he knew where he could go and where he couldn’t go, what he could do and what he couldn’t do. `I am not creative in a big way,’ he said to me that day. `I haven’t any powerful invention; I used up all I had. What I really am is an essayist.’”

I admire Beerbohm’s modesty here, though in fact it isn’t modesty, as least in any self-disparaging sense. Beerbohm had passed his 80th birthday when he spoke. His best work – say, And Even Now and Seven Men – was 30 or 40 years behind him, and he knew it. Beerbohm was speaking retrospectively, sparing us the spectacle of an old man pathetically inflating his past, though personally I would rather reread “Enoch Soames” than a dainty plucked from the oeuvre of Cormac McCarthy, who surely is “creative in a big way.”

Two phrases struck me, one Behrman’s, the other Beerbohm’s. “Severely topiary intelligence” is curious and precise. “Topiary” means what you think: “of, relating to, or being the practice or art of training, cutting, and trimming trees or shrubs into odd or ornamental shapes.” In other words, Beerbohm’s art is minor, which is not the same as unimportant, uninteresting or unamusing. It’s the adverb – “severely” – that pins the description to its subject. Secondly: “What I really am is an essayist.” How much mischievous wisdom and irony can be packed into seven words? Beerbohm was one of the last century’s wittiest practitioners of the essay. Behrman tells us Charles Lamb numbered among Beerbohm’s “great enthusiasms,” and it shows.

I bring this up because I think Beerbohm had the makings of a fine blogger: He was witty, well read, wrote elegant prose and possessed a judicious sense of tone and balance. He was a natural storyteller who only rarely excelled at fiction. It’s too late for Max (he died in 1956) but not for us. He’s pertinent to bloggers because the best among them are essayists manqué. We can learn from his humility and wit (a rare combination), as in Beerbohm’s description of his friend the painter James McNeill Whistler:

“An exquisite talent like Whistler’s, whether in painting or in writing, is always at its best on a small scale. On a large scale it strays and is distressed….For no man who can finely grasp a big theme can play exquisitely round a little one.”

`A Puff of Palpability'

Late in Steven Millhauser’s 1999 novella Enchanted Night, a storefront mannequin comes to life and with her human admirer wanders a Connecticut town in the moonlight:

“Hand in hand she walks with him along the railroad embankment, past telephone poles with aluminum numerals screwed into the wood, past milkweed pods, past storebacks and garbage cans.”

Near the beginning of Emile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873), Florent Quenu, newly returned to Paris after escaping unjust imprisonment on Devil’s Island, walks through a charcuterie and admires a window display:

“There were vast quantities of rich, succulent things, things that melted in the mouth. Down below, quite close to the window, jars of rillettes [“potted meat, made from pork or goose”] were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some boned hams, nicely rounded, golden with breadcrumbs, and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Then came the larger dishes – stuffed Strasbourg tongues, with their red varnished look, the colour of blood next to the pallor of the sausages and pigs’ trotters; strings of black pudding coiled like harmless snakes; andouilles [“sausage made of chitterlings”] piled up in twos and bursting with health; saucissons in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; pies, hot from the oven, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great cuts of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as crystallized sugar.” [notes by Bryan Nelson, translator of the 2007 Oxford University Press edition]

Both passages revel in specificity of detail. When I read Millhauser’s book for review nine years ago, I remember my delight at his mention of the “aluminum numerals screwed into the wood” -- humble objects, a detail in the American landscape I have seen all my life and vaguely wondered about but never investigated. Millhauser, a fabulist, has the eye of a documentarian.

Zola’s Homeric catalog of meats (Nelson refers to his “epic type of realism”) is sufficiently detailed to stimulate the reader’s nausea or salivary glands, depending on his palate. One marvels at the loving care (“golden with breadcrumbs,” “bursting with health”) he lavishes on cuts of meat scorned by culinary sophisticates. Nelson in his introduction notes that Zola’s quasi-scientific naturalism becomes “a kind of surnaturalism, as he infuses the material world with anthropomorphic life, magnifying reality and giving it a hyperbolic, hallucinatory quality.” In other words, Zola’s realism is sometimes surreal and Millhauser’s fantasy is rooted in close observation of the real world. Millhauser, who has spoken to me of his admiration for Zola, is usually more economical than the Frenchman in his deployment of details, though in Portrait of a Romantic (1977) he spends pages doting on old children’s games and toys.

These passages came to mind as I was reading the chapter titled “Detail” in James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Wood’s is a lover’s eye and his beloved is fiction and its power to seduce us into a convincing alternative reality. He attributes much of fiction’s seductive force to the growing centrality of observed detail for novelists since Flaubert. Here’s Wood:

“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice – to notice the way my mother, say, often wipes her lips just before kissing me; the drilling sound of a London cab when its diesel engine is flabbily idling; the way old leather jackets have white lines in them like the striations of fat in pieces of meat; the way fresh snow `creaks’ underfoot; the way a baby’s arms are so fat that they seem ties with string (ah, the others are mine but that last example is from Tolstoy!).”

This is typical of Wood. He’s never stuffy, and often prudently personal. His prose, logical, suffused with intelligence and frequently aphoristic, is focused on the human urge. In this, Wood is reminiscent of V.S. Pritchett. Both wrote fiction while writing about it. Wood continues:

“I confess to an ambivalence about detail in fiction. I relish it, consume it, ponder it. Hardly a day goes by in which I don’t remind myself of Bellow’s description [in Seize the Day] of Mr. Rappaport’s cigar: `the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency.’ But I choke on too much detail, and find that a distinctively post-Flaubertian tradition fetishizes it…”

We know what he means, and Updike at his ripest comes first to mind. Too often there’s something cloyingly self-congratulatory about a novelist parading the acuity of his vision: “Aren’t I sharp-eyed and clever to have noticed this previously unnoticed detail?”

Wood is an important critic because he reminds us that reading good fiction remains one of life’s chief pleasures, one the theorists and apologists for genre fiction haven’t yet curdled for some of us. He takes it seriously but not earnestly. His touchstones, familiar to longtime readers, are here – Bellow, Joyce, Chekhov, Henry Green, Henry James (he’s very good on What Maisie Knew), Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. For a writer (and reader) who famously lost his faith, Wood is touchingly devoted to creation and it’s rendering in fiction. After citing Duns Scotus’ notion of “thisness” (haecceitas) and Hopkins’ adaptation of it, Wood applies the idea to fiction:

“By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.”

And Wood is exhilaratingly contemptuous of attempts to stuff the meat of fiction into ill-fitting casings:

“The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as `a novelistic character.’ There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat [he doesn’t take E.M. Forester too seriously, calling Aspects of the Novel “imprecise”], some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.”

`Humor, Imagination, and Manners'

Criticism like politics is demeaned by practitioners who turn it into a self-righteous and humorless substitute for religion. The drift toward anger and absolutism is particularly evident in the blogosphere, where differences of opinion are treated like treason and comments are challenges to a duel. At least one prominent litblogger appears to have two passions – unreadable books and murderous Muslims – and about both has strenuous, often vulgarly worded opinions. What ought to be a celebration of some of humanity’s supreme pleasure-giving activities – writing and reading – turns into another pretext for petulance.

A critic must write well, care about books and possess good taste and good sense. If his prose is slipshod or dull, if ideology means more to him than style, if he claims to admire bad or mediocre books, he loses the thoughtful reader’s respect. And while celebration makes for the best criticism, negative reviews in the right hands can be turned into the mirror-image of celebration, and usually offer more opportunities for laughs. An unlikely source has something to say on this matter. In 1931, under the rubric “The Constant Reader” in The New Yorker, Dorothy Parker reviewed Theodore Dreiser’s memoir, Dawn. The review is acidly funny and closes with a silly Parker couplet:

“Theodore Dreiser
Should ought to write nicer.”

But what Parker writes on the preceding page is worthy of consideration by any writer, in particular a book critic, and not only when his subject is a ducks-in-a-barrel target like Dreiser:

“I wouldn’t for the world go around making fetishes; yet I am unable to feel that a writer can be complete without humor. And I don’t mean by that, and you know it perfectly well, the creation or the appreciation of things comic. I mean that the possession of a sense of humor entails the sense of selection, the civilized fear of going too far. A little humor leavens the lump, surely, but it does more than that. It keeps you, from your respect for the humor of others, from making a dull jackass of yourself. Humor, imagination, and manners are pretty fairly interchangeably woven.”

I should confess I intended to write about James Wood’s How Fiction Works, which I started reading on Monday and am enjoying very much, but I was ambushed by a digression.

`Like Mercy'

At my suggestion, my former boss at Rice University has been moving through the collected works of Shirley Hazzard – first The Transit of Venus, then The Great Fire, now Greene on Capri: A Memoir. The last recounts Hazzard’s impressions of Graham Greene, whom she and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, met in the late nineteen-sixties while on holiday on Capri. Poetry brought them together -- Robert Browning’s. Ann writes:

“I just read a passage that I thought you'd appreciate. In it, Graham Greene has asked her how she remembers so many poems (he had a similar capacity). She said it mostly happened by itself, she would sometimes read something once, then twice if it moved her, and then would repeat it to herself, not to memorize it, but because she liked it.

“He said that as he grew older, he found that he rarely recalled lines of new poets, even if he liked their work. He said, `I don't think one is so accessible to poems that come after one's own era.’

“She said, `Sensations aroused by poetry are in any case private, intuitive, unaccountable. In the past, poetry had been a presence that cut across the generations and the classes. One never knew where it would turn up. Like mercy.’"

Perhaps Ann ought to start a blog of her own.

`Bites Out of American History'

As always when I return to Cleveland my brother and I sifted through boxes of family photographs mixed with old newspapers and greeting cards, all stored in cardboard boxes. That they survive at all is miraculous, given three or four generations of incompetence and sloth. What is more frustrating than photographs of intriguing faces, elegantly framed but unidentified and undated, and thus anonymous? We may be looking at a lineal forebear but probably we’ll never know. My brother plans to meet with a cousin and our surviving aunt – the last person, at age 78, with any hope of giving names to some of the ghosts – to work out a Kurp/Hayes/McBride/Kelly archive. The inevitable has happened: What once seemed tiresome (pictures of dead people) has become precious, some of it even salacious.

Speaking of photograph, I recommended to my brother the work of Michael Lesy, still best known for his first book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). I don’t know if he pursued the suggestion but I’ve returned to Lesy’s work, in particular Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. For me, his books move in and out of focus. Just when I think I understand what he’s getting at with his vast collections of vintage photographs, I lose that understanding and another takes its place. He’s not a merchant of nostalgia, though he could be if he chose to market himself differently. Rather, he’s a scholar of images without the footnotes, and his subject is the United States in the age of photography. In a 2003 interview Lesy says:

“I had an agenda. I wanted to take bites out of American history in a steady way. I wanted to talk about the United States, decade by decade by decade.”

This is an admirable goal but Lesy surpasses it. The pictures in Dreamland are drawn from the work of photographer William Henry Jackson who, in 1898, with a wealthy man from Detroit, William Livingstone, formed the Detroit Publishing Company. After acquiring the rights to a Swiss color photolithographic process, they produced more than 7 million images a year – especially color postcards but also panoramas and slides. Jackson and his stable of photographers seem to have visited every state and photographed every social class, from high society to former slaves.

On the cover of Dreamland is “Cliff House, San Francisco,” a splendid photograph of a mansion built by a millionaire and one-time San Francisco mayor Adolph Sutro. Cliff House has had five lives. The eight-story dwelling in the picture went up in 1896, survived the earthquake a decade later and burned down in 1907. In the foreground, 13 overdressed children and a woman run in the waves and along the beach. Offshore, craggy rocks, the sort that remind us of human or canine profiles, obscure a portion of the horizon. Waves crash against other rocks below the house and foam splashes almost to Cliff House’s third floor. Like a proud, soon-to-be-humbled emblem of Manifest Destiny, the beautiful house withstands the pounding of the western ocean.

All photographs are personal. They capture evanescence as it disappears, and that’s the secret of their mournful charm. With the photographer at Cliff House we face north. To the west, our left, is the Pacific. To the east, our right, the gravity of the American continent outweighs it. For a few nights during the 11-year incarnation of Cliff House, an American guest from England visited behind us, some 500 miles to the south, in San Diego. Henry James was nearing the end of his year-long tour of his homeland after 20 years in Europe. When I see the Cliff House photo, I think of James, a 19th-century man who wrote his finest books in the 20th century, including The American Scene (1906).

The late Donald Justice loved James and was attuned to the sad fragility of the past. He wrote “American Scenes (1904-1905)” about James’ late return to the United States from Lamb House, his home in Rye, East Sussex. In the last of its four sections, James is staying in the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego. Here is “Epilogue: Coronado Beach, California”:

“In a hotel by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster,
Only a sort of freshness being lost –
Or should he go on calling it Innocence?
The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;
Wall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense
Novel in all this waiting to be done,
But not, not – sadly enough – by him. His talents,
Such as they may be, want an older theme,
One rather more civilized than this, on balance,
For him now always the consoling dream
Is just the mild dear light of Lamb House falling
Beautifully down the pages of his calling.”

`Make Them Endure, Give Them Space'

On the final page of Italo Calvino’s lovely poem of a fiction, Invisible Cities, Marco Polo speaks his final words to Kublai Khan:

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Dedicated readers will remember this conclusion, I suppose, and ponder its implications. What moves me is Polo’s matter-of-factness. The great Venetian traveler and storyteller speaks casually of “the inferno where we live every day.” It’s neither a tabloid headline nor a paraphrase of Sartre’s vulgar “Hell is other people.” Polo’s first strategy for escaping perdition is unsatisfactory, rooted as it is in bad faith. At best, denial works only tentatively.

The second requires us to dwell in “negative capability,” defined by Keats as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” How do we identify those who “are not inferno?” Polo never says but suggests we will somehow know, and I think we do. But how to “make them endure, give them space?” In William Weaver’s translation from the Italian, Polo pointedly does not say, “Join them. Learn from them. Make common cause with them.”

How to make another endure? And how does it relate to giving them “space?” It occurs to me that Polo might be speaking of parents and their responsibility for children. We supply them with food and medicine, encouragement and moral examples, the bounty of emotions and intellect, to strengthen their chances of endurance in this infernal world. By giving them space “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” they fail or succeed, and endure.

`Special Writers'

Joseph Epstein has identified and named a much-needed literary niche:

“There are major writers and minor writers, and somewhere in between there is, or at least ought to be, another category known as `special writers.’ Special writers are those we react to in a special, usually quite personal way, for we feel a kinship between their imaginations and our own. A.J. Liebling was a special writer for a great many people. I, for one, have missed his prose more than that of any other writer who has died in my lifetime.”

This comes from “The Minnesota Fats of American Prose: A.J. Liebling,” published in Book World in 1971 and collected in Epstein’s Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (1985). It’s significant that Epstein singles out for praise Liebling’s prose, for too often he is judged by journalistic standards. That is, he is admired for writing about food, France, boxing, Southern politics, the press or World War II. None of these categories would matter if Liebling had merely been a journalist, a plodder who crafted drab sentences. It’s his combination of elegant, witty prose and diversely raffish subjects that makes Liebling, in the sense defined by Epstein, a special writer.

I assembled my own list of special writers, a list that by definition is idiosyncratic and, to some degree, beyond criticism. I certainly have no interest in rationalizing or defending it. In a sense, special writers are the major writers for at least one reader. Here’s my spontaneously generated list, arranged alphabetically to discourage any suspicion of ranking by degrees of “specialness”: Sherwood Anderson, Whitney Balliett, Thomas Berger, Aldo Buzzi, Raymond Chandler, Theodore Dalrymple, Guy Davenport, Manny Farber, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Green, B.S. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Joseph Mitchell, Flann O’Brien, S.J. Perelman, J.F. Powers, V.S. Pritchett and Richard Yates, among others.

All are writers who consume significant space on my shelves and whose books I often own in multiple copies for reasons of generosity or greed. When I visit a deeply stocked bookstore I look for their work. All reliably deliver pleasure of various sorts. I note with curiosity that about half of them are known best for working in forms other than the novel, the medium that still dominates literary thinking, at least in the United States, which brings me back to Liebling. In 1994 the University of New Mexico Press brought out Liebling at The New Yorker: Uncollected Essays, edited by James Barbour and Fred Warner. In his introduction Warner writes:

“There are few places in the literary pantheon for the writer who does not chiefly write poems, plays, stories, and novels. One reads that W.H. Auden admired M.F.K. Fisher, but one hears also that most of her work is just about food and travel, and that her lean, supple prose ought to have embraced real writing….So where does one put Liebling and his compatriots at The New Yorker – Joseph Mitchell, S.N. Behrman, Philip Hamburger, Wolcott Gibbs, Janet Flanner, and many more? Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley receive, from time to time, a bit of notoriety, but one wonders if anyone actually reads their wonderful work.”

Thanks to Epstein, we can put some of them in what is, for dedicated common readers (the truest of all critics, after all), the supreme category: special writers.

`We Brush Past the Fine'

“One Sunday in 1943 I was hitchhiking through Ohio; it was my last week end before sailing overseas with the army. I remember with an undiminished sense of exhilaration a journey I took along a side road that led to Clyde, [Sherwood] Anderson’s home town and model for Winesburg. As I should have anticipated, Clyde looked much like other American small towns and the few of its people with whom I talked were not particularly interested in Sherwood Anderson. But my pilgrimage nonetheless gave me a sense of satisfaction I could hardly have explained.”

So writes Irving Howe in his second book, Sherwood Anderson (1951). His first, by the way, was a life of Walter Reuther. Like me, Howe had read Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as an adolescent and, again like me, remained under its spell long after he had accepted Anderson’s limitations as a writer. A New York City native, Howe was 23 and bound for Alaska when he made his pilgrimage. I was 28, born in Cleveland (about 60 miles to the east) and had been hired as a reporter for the newspaper in Bellevue, a town six miles east of Clyde along Route 20.

The dominant business in Clyde and the region was and remains the Whirlpool Corp., the largest washing machine factory in the world. In 2003, the state put up a historical marker commemorating Anderson’s gift of immortality to the town, where he lived from 1884 to 1895. During my years in Bellevue (1981-1983), the only public nod to Anderson I remember was the Winesburg Inn. It seems no longer to exist though a cursory online search turned up the Winesburg Bar-B-Q. In a note appended to the 1966 reissue of Sherwood Anderson, Howe writes:

“Sherwood Anderson was a minor writer, though in a few crucial instances he did first-rate, perhaps even major, work. He was a minor writer, yet one who ought to be of special interest to Americans, for in his stories he evoked aspects of our experience – those feelings of loneliness, yearning, and muted love – which lie buried beneath the surface of our culture.”

I returned to Howe because I’ve been reading Sherwood Anderson: Early Writings (1989), a collection of his work as an advertising agency copywriter, edited by Ray Lewis White. This is probably the first time I have ever voluntarily read advertising copy and enjoyed it. Anderson entered the business at the age of 24 in 1900, working for the Woman’s Home Companion in Chicago. After a few months he moved to the Frank B. White Co., an advertising agency that catered to American farmers and their families. Anderson’s work appeared in such national publications as Country Gentleman, Farm and Fireside, and American Agriculturist.
Anderson’s prose is clean, plain and conversational, as it should have been, and occasionally glints with suggestions of his mature fiction. This, published in Agricultural Advertising in 1903, comes from a piece titled “About Country Roads”:

“You can imagine a fellow who spends his days in offices and his nights in all sorts of hotels looking forward with no little pleasure to a day on a country road among the farmers who buy the things he helps to advertise. When that fellow is fortunate enough to have for companion a man who understands the country and is full of love of it and when these two start off at sunrise down a road that follows the winding course of the Mississippi and no more to carry than a stout stick for the chance of knocking down nuts from the trees along the road; when all of these things work out in this manner, I say, one fellow is rather bound to have a good day ahead of him.”

Particularly interesting to readers of Winesburg, Ohio is a series of 10 “Business Types” Anderson wrote in 1904. They read like the work of a Midwestern, early-20th-century Theophrastus, with titles like “The Man of Affairs,” “The Good Fellow” and “The Discouraged Man.” Consider the opening of “The Good Fellow”:

“He is probably a fat man and it is sure he sleeps at night. He doesn’t always give you a contract and many, many times he sends you away without even a promise, but there is something more than contracts and promises in this advertising business, and sometimes an hour spent with the good fellow will net you a dozen contracts in other places. The real good fellow, like the real poet, is born, not made. His the pleasant, ringing laugh, his the cheerful belief in other men’s honesty and good intent. Peace be to him and may his lines forever fall in pleasant places.”

Now read the opening of the second story in Winesburg, Ohio, “Paper Pills,” written about 14 years later:

“He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long before the time during which we will know his, he was a doctor and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died.”

In both passages, Anderson’s vision is inclusive, not fragmented. He sees and describes the totality of lives. “Paper Pills,” at four and a half pages, is the shortest story in Anderson’s collection. It’s sad, funny and deeply erotic, with a gothic hint probably suggested to Anderson by his reading of Freud. Doctor Reefy, though not his doomed, much younger wife, is someone we suspect we have known. His eccentricity has an inevitability about it. He embodies the “loneliness, yearning, and muted love” noted by Howe. This is one of several occasions when Anderson suffuses his words with the grace of a major writer, prompting Howe to caution:

“But in our mania for the grand, we brush past the fine.”

`Unplumbed Depths'

I know a guy in upstate New York who collects Dave Brubeck. He owns hundreds of recordings in every format, legitimate and bootleg, foreign and domestic, plus recordings by musicians associated with Brubeck, in particular Paul Desmond. He’s not a musician or jazz scholar, just a listener, though musicologists have come to him with questions about dates and sidemen.

Dan is married, lives in the country and has held the same job for decades, and most of the people who know him have no idea he’s a recognized Brubeck maven unless they share his interest in jazz. I knew his wife first because I worked with her, and learned of her husband’s devotion casually, in conversation. Dan is no pedant or proselytizer, and that makes him excellent company. By nature I’m a generalist, like a lot of journalists and other writers, and tend to respect people like Dan who burrow into a single enthusiasm over time and become, on some modest scale, experts. In comparison, I’m a dabbler, with interests that are broader than they are deep.

I’ve been rereading American Splendor, the Cleveland-based comic by Harvey Pekar, and came across a strip from 1999 that reminded me of Dan. It’s titled “Unplumbed Depths” and the artist is Gary Dumm. Harvey catches a bus for home. It’s Friday afternoon and he’s the only passenger. After a few blocks, the driver asks Harvey if he’d mind an unplanned stop along the way: “I wanna look at one of those trees.”

He gets out, pulls down a branch, studies the leaves and returns to the bus. Harvey asks what he was doing and the driver says, “I was trying to see if that was a red oak or a pin oak. It’s hard to tell the difference.” And, “Red oaks have seven-pointed leaves. Pin oaks have five: Two sticking out on both sides and one in the middle.”

Harvey is surprised and asks the driver if he’s “inta studying botany.” “Well, you know, sometimes you’ll be walking along with someone and they’ll want to know – what kind of tree is that – an oak or a maple?” Harvey replies:

“Wow, I never knew that about you. I think that’s great that people are inta somethin’ b’sides the score of yesterday’s baseball game.” In the final panel, the bus is pulling away and, in a typical Pekar decrescendo, Harvey says in a cartoon bubble coming out of a window, “I mean…not that I got anything against baseball.”

Meeting people like Dan and the bus driver is always a gift, even if you don’t share their enthusiasms I’m guessing they’re happier than the rest of us, or at least better buffered against tedium and time.

`An Awareness of the Sacred'

We are forever lectured to respect “diversity” and remain open-minded in the face of difference, but it’s likewise reassuring to know we occasionally resonate with kinship. My brother and I come from the same place but have followed variant, sometimes parallel trajectories. To a surprising degree, my assumptions are his: “And what I assume you shall assume.” We share a rare temperamental compatibility, at least most of the time.

Often I feel the same about Theodore Dalrymple, at least as I know him in print, and this is particularly true of his essay in the August edition of the New English Review, “Of Death and Transfiguration.” He starts with observations on the Internet and the ease with which it permits relationships, both rewarding and irksome, and quietly turns to a meditation on mortality, the human body and the sacred. Each sentence reads like a digression, yet the whole coheres, and the reader is reminded that he is in the company of an adult who has learned something from his experience:

“We have to live as if some things were sacred, for if we do not we become savages, or rather beings without limits. We cannot (or at least ought not) to condone necrophilia, for example, merely because no one is harmed by it, because the body on which it is practised is inanimate and has neither interests nor wishes, and is therefore not the kind of being that can give or withhold consent.

“The precise boundaries of the sacred are always disputable, but we cannot do without an awareness of the sacred, even when we know that sacredness is not a natural quality, that it is not just ‘there’ in the way that natural qualities such as weight and density are, that it does not inhere as a natural quality of anything, that it is imposed upon the world by us in a way that other qualities are not. And that is part of the reason why a purely scientific attitude to life is both undesirable and impossible.”

Dalrymple cites Samuel Johnson several times in his essay – another elective affinity – and he reminded me of a conversation Boswell reported:

“I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. Johnson: "There is nothing, Sir, too little for a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”

`A Slow-Moving Tapestry'

Forty-five years ago the woods behind my brother's house was a field where we scratched out a baseball diamond and our parents and their friends had clambakes and pitched horseshoes. Nature is patient and inexorable. Oak, ash and maple saplings grew tall and obscured the sunlight. The grasses and wildflowers died and the field's borders shrunk. Where I once knew every rock, dogwood and patch of milkweed and forget-me-nots, I get disoriented. My decades-old map is worthless. Most baffling of all -- personally, not ecologically -- is the arrival of white-tail deer, here in suburban Cleveland.

Monday evening, returning from a walk in the woods with my 8-year-old, I stood 10 yards from two does and two fawns as they moved through the trees, grazing on the sparse grasses and shrubs. My brother tells me a neighbor's dog was gored not long ago by a buck. As a kid, the largest wild mammals I saw here were raccoons. Our neighbor, an elderly German woman, killed one with a shovel.

I've been rereading my brother's copy of Dorothy Herrmann's S.J. Perelman: A Life. I sense Perelman's reputation has been eclipsed and that young readers may not recognize his name. He was a witty, acerbic writer who wrote for the Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers) and was long associated with The New Yorker. Hermann quotes from a piece Perelman published in the New York Times on Dec. 3, 1970, not long after he moved, briefly, to England. In "Farewell to Bucks," he describes life on his farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania:

"They used to come over the brow of the hill every evening at 6:40 during the Huntley-Brinkley broadcast in a slow-moving tapestry: First a doe, sniffing the air for possible danger to the two fawns following her, then a half-grown step-brother and finally the antlered sire, all nibbling intently as they made their way toward the salt block down the western slope of our farm. Once in a while, when the volume of our TV set crackled with the bark of guns in Vietnam or the snarl of jet, the deer would lift their heads and listen, but most of the time they were too busy feeding to notice.

"How many thousands of years they and their ancestors had followed that particular track was problematical. Certainly long before the big stone barn had been raised on the ridge and equipped with hex signs to ward off spells or the cattle, these original inhabitants of the land -- and the pheasants, groundhogs, squirrels, moles and all the other rightful owners of the place -- had been quietly going about their business of balancing the ecology...."