`A Great Professional'

“You often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky that nobody ever said such a thing, but that it’s just the sort of thing people would say if they could – is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality.”

Monday night I suffered a rare bout of sleeplessness. I finished reading one book and floated around several others, dog-paddling, but nothing grabbed me and I wasn’t ready to go back to bed. Sometimes, when fatigue or endorphins have lulled my critical faculties, and pleasure outweighs the Strictures of Art, I think Rudyard Kipling is the greatest storywriter who ever lived. No other holds me as strongly now, well into middle age, as he did when I was a boy. Then it was The Jungle Book and Just So Stories. Now it’s likelier to be Kim or something from The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Randall Jarrell in 1961 and still the best one-volume selection. That’s what I reached for early Tuesday morning.

The pleasure begins with Jarrell’s introduction, “On Preparing to Read Kipling,” from which I quoted above. As a critic Jarrell is best remembered for savage and very funny dismissals of mediocre, trumped-up writers, but he also performed valuable reclamation work. His essays on Whitman, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Christina Stead, among others, helped salvage them from misunderstanding or obscurity. One of the books I prize most in my library is a 1965 edition of Stead’s 1940 novel The Man Who Loved Children, complete with the introduction Jarrell wrote shortly before his death.

Jarrell claimed he reread Kim yearly. In his introductory essay, he tries to revive Kipling’s critical reputation (probably impossible in so politically blinkered an era) through sheer exuberance. He shares his love and assumes it will prove contagious. That hasn’t happened but Jarrell joins an impressive list of Kipling admirers among writers, including Henry and William James, T.S. Eliot. Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Borges, Kingsley Amis and Guy Davenport. Here’s Jarrell:

“Kipling is neither a Chekhov nor a Shakespeare, but he is far closer to both than to the clothing-store-dummy-with-the-solar-topee we have agreed to call Kipling. Kipling, like it or not, admit it or not, was a great genius; and a great professional, one of the most skillful writers who has ever existed – one of the writers who has used English best, one of the writers who most often has made other writers exclaim, in the queer tone they use for the exclamation: `Well, I’ve got to admit it really is written.’”

And this lovely bit of whimsy:

“If I had to pick one writer to invent a conversation between an animal, a god, and a machine, it would be Kipling. To discover what, if they ever said, what the dumb would say – this takes real imagination; and this imagination of what isn’t is the extension of a real knowledge of what is, the knowledge of a consummate observer who took no notes, except of names and dates…Knowing what the peoples, animals, plants, weathers of the world look like, sound like, smell like, was Kipling’s métier, and so was knowing the words that could make someone else know.”

So, which stories did I choose to reread, hoping they would ease my passage to sleep? First, “The Man Who Would Be King,” for its own familiar pleasures and for John Huston’s wonderful film version, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Then “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” that sad retelling of Kipling’s youth and the trauma of losing his native India. Finally, one of the great stories in the language, “Wireless.” Guy Davenport wrote ingeniously of it in Objects on a Table. I’ll tease you with a single Davenport sentence: “Trust Kipling to have seen in wireless telegraphy the art of Keats.”

Trust Kipling, too, to make for restful, absorbing reading. I closed the book not out of boredom but satisfaction, and soon fell asleep. Only hours after waking did I discover Tuesday was the 143rd anniversary of Kipling’s birth in Bombay.

`One is Not Compelled to Choose Sides'

When Daniel Fuchs’ trio of novels from Auden’s “low dishonest decade” – Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), Low Company (1937) – was reprinted in one volume in 1961, the poet Howard Moss reviewed it in The New Yorker. Moss had served as the magazine’s poetry editor since 1950, and the following year he would publish The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust, still one of the best books about the French master. Besides Proust, Moss’ tastes in fiction ran to Henry James, Chekhov and Elizabeth Bowen. He might not be expected to write enthusiastically about a virtually forgotten novelist-turned-Hollywood-screenwriter whose fictional bailiwick was the Brooklyn of poor Jews during the Great Depression, but here is the final paragraph of Moss’ review, “Homage to the Thirties,” collected in Writing Against Time (1969):

“Fuchs, who has been writing for the movies since the early forties, is that rare bird, a writer both witty and loving. He is free of malice at one end of the spectrum and free of sentimentality at the other. At a time when no one had a viewpoint and everyone took a stand, Fuchs was talented and intelligent enough to be an exception. His three novels, buried in the thirties, rise up in the sixties and shine.”

This comes at the end of 12 pages of close, sympathetic but not uncritical reading. Moss describes Low Company, the most accomplished of the three novels, as “admirable but imperfect” (like some human beings, certainly some of Fuchs’). Only once does Moss refer, even obliquely, to another writer or book (Jay Gatsby, to little effect) – a standard reviewer’s gambit, as in “reminiscent of middle-period James.” There’s good reason for this: Fuchs is legitimately, without straining, unlike any other writer of fiction. Bellow comes to mind occasionally – his big shot characters like Einhorn or Cantabile – but Bellow wasn’t yet Bellow in 1937. What I admire in Moss – a formal, rather fussy poet – is his critical elasticity. He’s almost omnivorous, able to enjoy, admire and articulate his enjoyment and admiration for works as various as The Third Policeman, Ship of Fools, The Golden Bowl and Homage to Blenholt.

I remembered Moss and his Fuchs review as D.G. Myers and I exchanged posts and e-mails over his “Best American Fiction, 1968–1998” list at Amazon.com. Both of us, I think, share some of Moss’ capacity for ignoring the tribalism and exclusivity endemic to the world of books. We generally evaluate works and writers on their merits, not their pedigree. And we respect each other’s quirks of taste. David includes a Philip K. Dick title on his list and I find Dick head-achingly unreadable. I suggested the inclusion of two books by Peter Taylor – for my money, one of the half-dozen best story writers we’ve produced. For David he is a “minor writer.”
More to the point, David includes two historical novels (The Killer Angels, Black Robe), a Jules Verne-style adventure (The Balloonist) and an avant-garde satire (Mulligan Stew), not to mention the Dick title that inspired the movie Blade Runner. My suggestions are probably more homogeneous than David’s, but no list that includes Berger, Cheever, Singer and Welty can be described as monolithic. I’ve stated this theme before – the reader’s right to be independent and even inconsistent with his affections. In a post from more than two years ago I wrote:

“In art, fortunately, one is not compelled to choose sides, one poet at the expense of another. Milosz and Larkin are not mutually exclusive loves. Aesthetic love is promiscuous without being unfaithful. I feel no compulsion to be rigorously consistent in matters of artistic taste. I can love Proust and Raymond Chandler, Schoenberg and Johnny Cash. Only in that sense, I think, is art democratic.”

And I haven’t even mentioned how one’s tastes evolve over a lifetime devoted to reading. There was a time when I adored Gilbert Sorrentino’s novels, particularly Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Aberration of Starlight – and Mulligan Stew. What happened? Life and its demands. I grew up.

`Not a Mini-Canon'

D.G. Myers at A Commonplace Blog has quickly and quietly established himself as the best and most readable literary critic in the blogosphere. Most litbloggers, including the proprietor of Anecdotal Evidence, are not critics and most critics who are litbloggers are not readable. In little more than two months Myers has become one of the few essential writers in the neighborhood. The accomplishment is especially noteworthy because Myers is an academic – he’s professor of English at Texas A&M University -- which customarily excludes a writer from the realm of readability.

On the day after Christmas, Myers linked to a list he posted at Amazon.com: “Best American fiction: 1968-1998.” One normally ignores such things as the parlor games of the pretentious but this list is different: Myers is deeply read in American fiction, his taste is excellent and he doesn’t pimp, pose or play politics. His choices ignore genres and schools, and emphasize literary worth. Some of his inclusions are surprising and probably intentionally provocative. Here he outlines his criteria and explains the 1998 cutoff:

“It’s a good rule not to read a novel before ten years have passed and the novelty has worn off. Here are the best American books of fiction from the post-Vietnam period, excluding `meta-fictionists’ like Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo, and displaying a clear preference for novels (in Larkin’s phrase) about ordinary people doing ordinary things.”

To his credit, after leaving out the “meta-fictionists” (That’s fodder for another list: isn’t DeLillo the most overrated living American writer?), Myers felt no obligation to include a token Updike or Cormac McCarthy (Scratch DeLillo – it’s definitely McCarthy). No Barth, Barthleme, Coover, Gass, Mailer, Vonnegut, Heller, Robert Stone, David Foster Wallace or, God forbid, Toni Morrison or Joyce Carol Oates. Despite the growing attention paid to female writers during Myers’ 30-year period, he rightly excludes books written by women except O’Connor’s (and she died in 1964) and Welty’s (her best stories were written long before 1968). It was a fallow period for American women writers, except for three I note below. We produced few writers of either sex during this period comparable to, say, Penelope Fitzgerald.

Seven books on Myers’ list I haven’t read – those by Shaara, Harris, Buechner, Moore, Eugenides, Buckley and Ha Jin. Of the others I would argue against inclusion of Dick, Doctorow, Sorrentino, Toole, Auster, Carver and Johnson. His single most inspired choice is Ron Hansen’s wonderful Mariette in Ecstasy and his foremost act of justice is finding a spot for J.F. Powers’ Wheat That Springeth Green. Here are my suggestions for inclusion:

Thomas Berger
Vital Parts (1971)
The Feud (1983)

John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

Guy Davenport
Da Vinci’s Bicycle (1979)

Leonard Gardner
Fat City (1969)

Shirley Hazzard
The Transit of Venus (1980)

Steven Millhauser
Edwin Mulhouse (1972)

Vladimir Nabokov
Ada (1969)
Transparent Things (1972)

Cynthia Ozick
The Puttermesser Papers (1997)

Marilynne Robinson
Housekeeping (1980)

Thomas Rogers
The Confessions of a Child of the Century (1972)

Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater (1995)

Isaac Bashevis Singer
A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1973)

Mark Smith
The Death of the Detective (1974)

Richard G. Stern
Natural Shocks (1978)

Peter Taylor
The Collected Stories (1969)
The Old Forest (1985)

Eudora Welty
Losing Battles (1970)

Theodore Weesner
The Car Thief (1972)

I would note that three titles on Myers’ list were published in 1971 and four on mine in 1972. That was a good time to be young and reading. Myers urges us to accept his list “for what it is—a list of recommendations in an online bookstore and not a mini-canon of American fiction for the period.” Such efforts are, by definition, idiosyncratic and do not signify declarations of war. They are useful for spreading the news of good books others may not have read, for prodding a return to old favorites, and for reminding us that even the best books are sometimes forgotten.

`To Glorify Things Just Because They Are'

The cusp of the new year is ripe for inventorying the old and counting one’s blessings. Nothing is so easy as displacing gratitude and substituting discontent, so an occasion, even one fixed arbitrarily by the calendar, is welcome. Time to say with relief: Once again, I didn’t get what I deserved. Instead: health, new friendships, deepened old ones, books new and old, Shakespeare and Chekhov, a new city in a new state with new trees and birds. I’d like to echo Czeslaw Milosz’s “Blacksmith Shop”:

“It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.”

No gratitude, no equilibrium. A life of unsatisfied demand ensures misery. The point is central to religion as even I, a non-believer, understand it. Theodore Dalrymple would agree. In “What the New Atheists Don’t See” (collected in Not With a Bang But a Whimper – a Christmas gift, thank you) he writes:

“If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.”

`To Confirm Prejudice'

Of Adolf Hitler’s reading habits after he arrived in Munich in 1913, his biographer Ian Kershaw writes:

“Reading for Hitler, as in Vienna, was not for enlightenment or learning, but to confirm prejudice.”

Of course that sounds reprehensible but perhaps we shouldn’t risk injury hurrying to congratulate ourselves. Don’t we thrill when a writer substantiates what we already believe, particularly when it’s something we’d prefer remained secret? One perfectly respectable reason for reading is to vicariously try on unpleasant or unfamiliar sentiments. That doesn’t make us embryonic Hitlers. A good reader reads broadly and deeply enough to anticipate and examine thoughts that challenge or violate his own convictions. And how often, when we read, are we motivated by a genuine quest for “enlightenment or learning?” Kershaw continues:

“Most of it was probably done in cafes, where Hitler could continue his habit of devouring the newspapers available to customers. This is where he kept abreast of political developments, and where, at the slightest provocation, he could flare up and treat anyone in proximity to his fiercely held views on whatever preoccupied him at the time.”

In other words, along with the evil he radiated like a stench, Hitler was a familiar type – the crank, the tiresome sort of proto-sociopath who makes a lot of noise in bar rooms and chat rooms. “At the slightest provocation” is the critical phrase. All of us ride hobbyhorses but many of us know they’re hobbyhorses and recognize when it’s time to climb out of the saddle. The perpetually single-minded wear ideas like spiked vests and jack boots. They are humorless and boring, of course, and sometimes dangerous. Eric Hoffer built his writing career on anatomizing the type. In 1950, shortly before publishing his first book, The True Believer, he wrote:

“Perhaps people throw themselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting.”

This is from “Sparks: Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook,” published in Harper’s in July 2005. And go here to read what I wrote about Hoffer and the power of one book in his life.

`Distillations of the Lessons of Common Human Experience'

The blessings flowed, embarrassingly so – food, clothing and, of course, books. Among the highlights – the Library of America editions of William Maxwell’s Early Novels and Stories and Later Novels and Stories, Steven Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter, Marilynne Robinson’s Home and Theodore Dalrymple’s Not With a Bang But a Whimper. The last is a collection of Dalrymple’s essays from City Journal, most of which I have already read but I’m old-fashioned enough to find comfort reading them again between hard covers. Included is my favorite among Dalrymple's essays, “What Makes Dr. Johnson Great?” – still the best introduction I know, short of Boswell, to the Good Doctor. Here’s a happy refresher:

“Some people might (and did) find Johnson sententious. His precepts roll through our minds like thunder through hills and valleys—but do they have more meaning than thunder has? They often appear obvious, but they are obvious not because they are clichés or truisms or things that everyone knows and has always known, nor are they like the sermons of a jobbing clergyman who goes through the motions of extolling virtue and condemning sin because it is his job to do so. Johnson’s precepts are obvious because they are distillations of the lessons of common human experience, and, once expressed, they are impossible to deny.”

Also on Christmas I met and spoke with an 80-year-old man who was a friend of Jesse Owens for 35 years. I told him I know nothing about track and field or any other sport but I know something about history and was aware of what happened in Berlin in 1936. He said:

“The thing you don’t know about Jesse Owens is that he was a regular guy, a good human being. Everybody respected him and he earned that respect.”

`A Certain Dim Religious Light'

Being outdoors on Christmas Eve felt like being indoors, only colder. The sky was a dim gray ceiling. Fat flakes fell and heaped on the branches of the Alaska cedar. The aggregate weight compacted the tree into an isosceles triangle. The boys built a crenellated wall of ice and snow along the driveway. Furious shopping raged a mile from our neighborhood, I’m certain, but snow absorbed the din. My favorite sentence about snow comes from the notebook Gerard Manley Hopkins was keeping on Dec. 12, 1872:

“Ground sheeted with taut tattered streaks of crisp gritty snow.”

Who else would modify “snow” with “taut tattered?” Wednesday’s snow was moist, not crisp, ideal for packing. I remember the animal joy we took in hiding beneath a bridge along Pearl Road with a pile of hard snowballs, waiting for trucks to pass. The goal was to hit the side of the trailers hard enough to produce a satisfying thwock! and then dive out of sight below the bridge. In his journal for Dec. 17, 1851, Thoreau described this sort of snow:

“The pitch pine woods on the right of the Corner road. A piercing cold afternoon, wading in the snow. R. Rice was going to Sudbury to put his bees in the cellar for fear they would freeze. He had a small hive; not enough to keep each other warm. The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches, their low branches rising at a small angle and meeting each other. A certain dim religious light comes through this roof of pine leaves and snow. It is a somber twilight, yet in some places the sun streams in, producing the strongest contrasts of light and shade.”

Thoreau turns outdoors into indoors with “A certain dim religious light.” A pitch pine woods is the sort of church he might attend.

`An Archive in Every Village'

I shoveled snow from a neighbor’s driveway on Tuesday and cleared a path to the rack of mailboxes that serves 10 families along our section of street. Sometimes I enjoy mindless work, like washing dishes. It gives me an opportunity not for thinking but not-thinking. The mental blankness is restful. Our neighbor is 78 and shares her house with a revolving collection of offspring, offspring’s offspring and others who constitute family. Someone’s always working on a car in front of her house. In the summer, she plants corn and gladioli in her front yard. A Cadillac with four flat tires is parked beside her house.

Ms. Johnson is black and was born in Houston. She moved to Seattle as a young woman. Her late husband worked for Boeing – “A good job for a black man in those days,” she says. Ms. Johnson has lived in this neighborhood for almost 33 years, longer than anyone else still around. She remembers the occupants of each house, even renters like us. If she doesn’t remember or never knew their names, she comes up with a colorful Homeric epithet: “The loud Russians.” “Nice folks, the Chinese couple. Very clean.” “They were quiet ones. Even the children.” At this point history, gossip and the oral tradition converge. Her tone is dispassionate even when she’s snippy. By temperament she’s a chronicler, a keeper of the trivial and less trivial, and most of it will be lost when she’s gone. Of course, I wonder what she calls us.

I just read Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970, the newest book by R.F. Foster, the Irish historian and biographer of Yeats. He’s a great admirer of the Irish essayist Hubert Butler (1900-1991), one of the sanest voices of the last century. Like J.F. Powers and Daniel Fuchs, he’s a writer whose readership and reputation have never been commensurate with his achievement. His admirers, little islands of devotion, hoard his work like rations in wartime. Foster writes of Butler:

“In his very last piece of published writing, in 1990, he turned to the question of ecumenicism and remarked: `what is likely to unite us is not the spectacle of a pope embracing a patriarch or a heretical archbishop or the return of St. Andrew’s skull to Petras or some holy keepsake from Byzantium to Rome. We have to venture out from the well-kept museum of symbols on to the junk-heap of cast-off clothes, broken crockery and maggoty corpses which is history.’”

That suggests the flavor of Butler’s pungent thinking and prose. Foster’s mention was enough to send me back to Independent Spirit, the selection of essays published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996. In “Beside the Nore,” written in 1984, I found the passage I remembered while speaking with Ms. Johnson:

“I have always believed that local history is more important than national history. There should be an archive in every village, where stories such as the old man told me are recorded. Where life is fully and consciously lived in our neighbourhood, we are cushioned a little from the impact of the great far-off events which should be of only marginal concern to us.”

A Yuletide Salmagundi

Things I saw and heard three days before Christmas:

The Salvation Army bell-ringer in front of the grocery whistling “That’s Amore.” For that I gave him a dollar.

A foil-wrapped box of chocolates strewn about our ice-covered street. Two crows tossed aside the paper wrappers and pecked at the frozen candies.

My barber, a native of Thailand, booked for a Christmas visit to Las Vegas, where it snowed this week. “Don’t they think of the tourists?” she asked.

My car stuck on the ice across from the barber shop. One of the two men who helped me push it, a native of Rumania, took the tire chains off his car and put them on mine. He had no gloves and his hands turned ham-colored as his 13-year-old daughter stood by and watched. When I shook them they were icy (for which he apologized), and he said, “Enjoy the rest of your Merry Christmas.”

Nige’s fine seasonal post on Monday which included Geoffrey Hill’s “Offertorium: December 2002” from Without Title. Nige rightly calls it “a lovely, even consoling December poem.” The next poem in the collection is “Epiphany in Hurcott,” a somber, oblique, wintry observance of Epiphany, January 6, which my Irish grandmother called “Little Christmas.” Our Ukrainian neighbors celebrated their Christmas that day. Here is Hill’s poem:

“Profoundly silent January shows up
clamant with colour, greening in fine rain,
luminous malachite of twig-thicket and bole
brightest at sundown.

“On hedge-banks and small rubbed bluffs the red earth,
dampened to umber, tints the valley sides.
Holly cliffs glitter like cut anthracite.
The lake, reflective, floats, brimfull, its tawny sky.”

Clamant following “Profoundly silent” is typical Hill wordsmithing. It means noisy or clamorous, from the Latin clamare, “to cry out.” “Clamant with colour” is Hillian synesthesia. Read the poem aloud and give your mouth a Christmas present.

`The Habits of a Lifetime'

Dr. Johnson was a gourmand or libertine of the written word. In Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, Jeffrey Meyers (like his precursors, Boswell and Bate) often uses gustatory or sexual metaphors or situations to describe Johnson’s hunger/lust for books. Here’s a typical passage:

“Johnson, who used Turks to represent extreme fanaticism or sexual license, said that when sleepless in bed he read like a Turk. He devoured books with deadly seriousness, in the same way that he devoured food. He’d often keep a book on his lap while dining, a habit that Boswell cheekily compared to a dog holding a bone in its paws while chewing on scraps. Most of Sam’s boyhood reading was serendipitous rather than systematic, and he often made interesting discoveries. One day, when he thought Natty had hidden some apples behind a large folio on a high shelf, he climbed up to look for them and instead found a volume of Petrarch’s poems. Having heard that Petrarch was a Renaissance restorer of classical learning, he immediately sat down and read the book.”

I understand Johnson’s hunger. My sons and I share it. They, too, read with books in their laps or propped on the table, during meals, though we discourage this when company comes. Not everyone understands. People who don’t read or read only for utilitarian ends – say, stop signs – are baffling. In an e-mail Jared Carter, a poet living in Indianapolis, writes “I think the time of books draws to a close. I have a lighthearted poem about this…which only partially masks my deeper sorrow.” Here is Carter’s poem, “Saying Goodbye”:

“The time came when Words had to leave,
to go on to the next place. Words decided
to go visit Books, in order to say goodbye.
Everyone else – Images, Colors, Sounds –
had already gone ahead. Words inquired
at the desk, and was told that most days
Books would be sitting in a wheel-chair,
on a glassed-in porch, looking at the trees.
The room was down a narrow hallway.
Words had brought a half-pint of bourbon.
He found two plastic cups, poured a shot
for each of them, and sat down on a bench
not far from where Books was gazing out.
Books turned and saw that he was there.
He said nothing but took the offered cup.
For a moment they held their cups high,
then tossed down the shots. `Thanks,’
Books said, with a smile. `I needed that.’
He waved toward the trees. `Squirrels.
I like the way they chase about. Graceful.’
Words nodded. They watched for a while.
Near the crown of an oak, two fox squirrels
careered along the narrow limbs, shaking
the leaves. Books laughed. `I like trees, too.
Always have. I imagine they’ll do better now,
once I’m finally gone.’ `Don’t talk that way,’
Words said. `You’ll always be here. Besides,
you’re about to enter your greatest period.
Unparalleled. Timeless. Museum quality.
That’s what they’ll say about your best work.’
Books turned back to the squirrels again.
After a minute or two he spoke up. `They say
you’ve got a new place.’ `Yes.’ `Well,
that’s good. I’m glad to hear it. Listen,
any time now they’re going to come in here
and make me take some awful medicine.
Give me another shot of whisky, OK?’
He held out the cup, and Words poured
another shot. Books nodded and took a sip.
`Thanks. Now you’d better be on your way.’
Words got up. He clasped Books’s free hand.
`Go on,’ Books said. `Get out of here.
It’s time. You take care of yourself, OK?’
Words nodded, and left the room. Outside,
the squirrels had disappeared. High up,
where they had been scampering about,
a myriad of leaves still moved in the wind.”

I was not surprised that Carter’s poem made me laugh but was surprised that I found it so touching and sad. In reply I wrote to the poet:

“You say `I think the time of books draws to a close’ with some confidence, but I can’t make up my mind about that idea. A serious interest in books has always been a minority taste. By nature I’m an anti-utopian and pretty grim-minded, but I think a lively underground of readers and writers has a chance of flourishing with the aid of the Internet. We’re only just beginning to learn what it will look like – perhaps we’re forging some of the `rules’ right now. I’m not a technologically adept person and I’m a natural-born skeptic, but I also know I’ve made some excellent friends thanks to the blog. It’s not the same as sitting around the dining room table shooting the shit but it’s gratifying and I’ve learned a hell of a lot. I wouldn’t have predicted this a decade ago.”

Rereading my reply, I’m embarrassed by the quasi-optimism but I’ll stand by it. A professor and reading researcher at a university in Connecticut wrote several months ago asking if she could quote something I’d written about children and books. We exchanged a few notes and my thoughts boiled down to something simple: Kids generally do what they see the adults in their lives doing. Values are acquired, in part, from watching the actions of others. If you read, your kids are likelier to read. It beats nagging, threats and platitudes. Meyers writes in the paragraph preceding the one quoted above:

“Sam was bred a bookseller and never forgot his trade. Later in life he picked up a book in Lichfield and saw that he had bound it himself [his father, Michael Johnson, was an improvident book dealer in Lichfield]. But he disliked serving in the shop, and when people complained that he remained absorbed in his books instead of serving them, he loftily replied `that to supersede the pleasures of reading, by the attentions of traffic, was a task he could never master.’ He had no intention of changing the habits of a lifetime to satisfy the whims of customers.”

`A Class of More or Less Felicitous Moments'

Jeffrey Meyers in Samuel Johnson: The Struggle likens his subject to one of his countrymen:

“Johnson’s character, conversation and writing had a great deal in common with another great Englishman, Winston Churchill, equally courageous and eager for experience. Both were plagued by the `Black Dog’ of depression, which they inherited from their fathers, first experienced when young and struggled with throughout their lives. Both ate and drank to excess, and cried frequently and abundantly. They tried to keep themselves feverishly busy, exhausted their friends and did not go to bed till the early hours of the morning. They were brilliant talkers, especially adept at cruel but witty insults, and came up with memorable lines in almost every conversation.”

The anemic epithet “happy” applies to neither man. Imagine what a feel-good therapist would make of their complicated lives and sensibilities, and what Johnson and Churchill would make of a therapist and his condescension and naiveté. They knew happiness as a life’s project is folly. It’s too evanescent, too inimical to our grasping natures, ever to be a steady state. It seems to happen in spite of us, a fluke or stroke of grace. In The Harmony of Nature and Spirit, Irving Singer, a professor of philosophy at MIT and Santayana scholar, argues that human happiness by nature is elusive:

“Though it may exist for months or years, happiness is a class of more or less felicitous moments. Even the happiest person is not happy all day and night or while asleep. However constantly they recur, the successive occasions of happiness can never make an unbroken chain. They are not unitary in the way that a meaningful pursuit is, even when its being meaningful makes us happy as a result of that meaningfulness.”

Meyers on occasion falls into the trap of judging happiness a moral accomplishment. His description of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations (1785) as “one of the saddest books of the century” is misguided. Johnson was a serious Christian given to scrupulosity sometimes verging on self-torment. He seldom pleased himself. Meyers, like many moderns, deems this a species of masochism, while Johnson and his contemporaries would feel nothing but scorn for the shibboleth of “self-esteem.” For Johnson, as for the Hebrews and Greeks in their different ways, virtue was happiness. In The Rambler No. 87 he wrote:

“Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.”

Not likely, as Johnson had more reason than most to know.

`The American Champion of the Inner Life'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along a rare pairing of gifted minds -- Robert D. Richardson's review of the eighth and final volume of George Santayana's letters. Richardson, of course, has given us excellent intellectual biographies of Thoreau, Emerson and William James. Here's a sample:

"Santayana is the American champion of the inner life, the life of reason. He believed that religion -- by which he meant `feeling attracted to the Church, feeling its historic and moral authority, and yet seeing that its doctrine is not true' -- in its `humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.' Grace abounded in his own life. And when he died just short of 90, his friend and disciple Daniel Cory read Santayana's poem `The Poet's Testament' at the funeral: `I give back to the earth what the earth gave / All to the furrow, nothing to the grave.'"

And there's more good news: Richardson's new book, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, will be published in February.

`Enchain the Heart by Irresistible Interest'

Finishing a biography of a person about whom one knew almost nothing – Benjamin Disraeli by Adam Kirsch – only to begin another about a person whose life and work one knows in some detail – Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers – illustrates why we remain so deeply interested in the lives of others, and why good biographies are important. Disraeli was little more than a name in a museum to me, once punningly revived by the title of a Cream album. I started reading the book for two reasons: The author, at age 32, is a dauntingly accomplished poet and critic whose wonderful first book of poems, The Thousand Wells, was published when he was 26. Secondly, the volume is part of Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series, which has already given us the superb Maimonides by Sherwin Nuland and Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein.

Without Kirsch’s imprimatur I probably wouldn’t have picked it up, as I haven’t read such earlier entries in the Jewish Encounters series as lives of King David, Emma Lazarus, Marc Chagall and Barney Ross. I’m not interested. But Kirsch reanimates Disraeli as a novelist, prime minister, Victorian and especially as a Jew. Within the constraints of a brief life, Kirsch has organized his book around the theme of Jewishness in an anti-Semitic time and place. Disraeli masterfully juggled identities, eventually becoming a trusted favorite of Queen Victoria. His life reads like a mirrors-within-mirrors plot devised by Philip Roth in one of his novels from the nineteen-eighties (or Operation Shylock). Kirsch gracefully works an immense amount of information into a small space (258 pages, counting a chronology and other extras). He kept me compellingly interested in a man about whom I was largely ignorant and prompted me to shift Daniel Deronda to the soon-to-reread bin.

I’ve only just started Meyers’ biography, mere months after reading Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson. Both are timed to meet the tercentenary of the Good Doctor’s birth, next September 18. According to his publisher, Meyers has put out 20 previous biographies of personalities as various as Wyndham Lewis, W. Somerset Maughm and Humphrey Bogart. I’ve read none of them and my expectations of such a writing machine are not excessive. After reading only the introduction I remain noncommittal:

“[Johnson] also had a compassionate heart and a heroic capacity for suffering. He endured constant pain, long years of profound depression and two decades of failure. Ford Madox Ford called him `the most tragic of all our major literary figures.’”

Nice touch from Fordie, and Meyers clearly knows and sympathizes with his man, but his prose thus far is never more than serviceable and I’ve learned nothing new. But there’s comfort in being in Johnson’s company, watching the familiar outlines sketched yet again. Part of the challenge posed by Johnson for a biographer is that he was himself a masterful writer of lives and the subject of the greatest biographies in the language – Boswell’s and W. Jackson Bate’s. Meyers is humble and proud enough to use for his epigraph a well-known passage from The Rambler No. 60:

“No species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition.”

`Famished for Wonder'

My first thought on learning of the demise of The New York Sun was: Now where will Eric Ormsby publish his book reviews? One reassuring answer is the new English publication Counterpoint. In the January 2009 edition Ormsby writes glowingly of Penguin's delicious-sounding new translation of The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Here's a sample from Ormsby:

"The work poses a final puzzle. How can it be that such vivid tales lull us to sleep? In several, the great Harun al-Rashid, fifth caliph in the Abbasid line, finds himself troubled by insomnia and when all else fails, he calls for a story. Perhaps the answer lies in the tales' odd but pleasing combination of unrestrained fantasy and shrewd common sense. The stories, however improbable or grotesque, are underpinned by the homeliest of morals: the good prevail and the wicked are overthrown. The prince is restored to his realm and the merchant recovers his lost fortune. The tales satisfy imaginations famished for wonder. But even more importantly, they stand like fabulous cities against the encroachments of the dark."

`Its Purpose Is to Cover'

The scene looked so benign, so Currier-and-Ivesy. The snow was frothy and white like the head on a newly drawn beer. The kids were bundled, the sleds in the trunk. Someone had recommended a good hill in a city park three miles away. After four or five blocks I realized I hadn’t seen a car, only trudging pedestrians. The streets, with six inches already on the ground, had not been plowed, salted or sanded. The thermometer on the dashboard said 32 degrees -- the treacherous zone between frozen and not quite frozen. On a steep hill, with the kids in the back seat, I couldn’t stop the Olds and ended up swerving sideways into a subdivision entrance, the air stinking of burned rubber. Two miles took 20 minutes but I made it home, sweaty and shaken. The kids were laughing, having another grand school-less day.

At home I found a gracious note from Jared Carter, a poet living in Indianapolis. I didn’t know his work but we swapped exchanged stories about Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, places where both of us have lived or at least visited often enough to know pretty well. Go here to visit his web site, where I found an appropriate poem, “Snow,” first published in Poetry in 1999:

“At every hand there are moments we
cannot quite grasp or understand. Free

“to decide, to interpret, we watch rain
streaking down the window, the drain

“emptying, leaves blown by a cold wind.
At least we sense a continuity in

“such falling away. But not with snow.
It is forgetfulness, what does not know,

“has nothing to remember in the first place.
Its purpose is to cover, to leave no trace

“of anything. Whatever was there before —
the worn broom leaned against the door

“and almost buried now, the pile of brick,
the bushel basket filling up with thick,

“gathering whiteness, half sunk in a drift —
all these things are lost in the slow sift

“of the snow's falling. Now someone asks
if you can remember—such a simple task —

“the time before you were born. Of course
you cannot, nor can I. Snow is the horse

“that would never dream of running away,
that plods on, pulling the empty sleigh

“while the tracks behind it fill, and soon
everything is smooth again. No moon,

“no stars, to guide your way. No light.
Climb up, get in. Be drawn into the night.”

Carter’s snow is an implacable force, absorbing everything, like death. I thought of Conrad Aiken’s once ubiquitous story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”: “Its purpose is to cover, to leave no trace/of anything.” After five snowless years, I’d forgotten that.

`This Persistent Internal Hum'

Nige asks, “What is wrong with us?” and one murmurs in reply, “Where to begin?” We’ve grown professionalized – a bureaucrat’s dream. I was asked, straight-faced, without condescension, “Do you have a certificate to write about books?” Paradoxically, we’re subjected more and more to the ministrations of the amateurish. Not in the etymological sense, of work lovingly performed, but in the coarsened modern sense of careless, slipshod, indifferent, disconnected, unreliable. Who works out of love today? Some nurses and clergy, I’m certain. Not so many doctors, teachers, welders, poets. My brother does. He’s one of the happier people I know and has never written a resume or consulted a career counselor. What he does is nearly who he is, which makes him a pleasant anomaly.

When I read Nige’s post I thought at once not of a pundit or sociologist but of Cynthia Ozick, a novelist. Nige, I know, is a reader of novels – Nabokov, Bellow, William Maxwell, Shirley Hazzard, Penelope Fitzgerald. In her essay “The Din in the Head,” Ozick argues that the precious quality of “innerness,” the self’s sovereignty, can still be found in a reader’s engagement with works of fiction, what she calls “the inward life of letters.” In contrast to the “din” of digital diversions, Ozick would have us cultivate innerness, (not to be confused with narcissism), the unique “din” each of us hears in his or her consciousness – “the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing.” She writes:

“But innerness – this persistent internal hum – is more than lamentation and desire. It is the quiver of intuition that catches experience and draws it close, to be examined, interpreted, judged. Innerness is discernment; penetration; imagination; self-knowledge. The inner life is the enemy of crowds, because the life of crowds snuffs the mind's murmurings. Mind is many-threaded, mazy, meandering, while every crowd turns out to be a machine – a collectivity of parts united as to purpose.”

Ozick celebrates “the utterly free precincts of the novel.” Not that readers are nice and non-readers bad. “Is the literary novel, like the personal essay, in danger of obsolescence?” she asks. Of course it is, as always, and shelves sag under the burden of lousy literary novels and personal essays, but Ozick cites her master, The Master, Henry James:

“It [the novel] can do simply everything, and that is its strength and its life. Its plasticity, its elasticity is infinite.”

Ozick quotes descriptions of rooms, including wallpaper, in Turgenev and Woolf. Their real subject, she says, is “incorporeal, intuitional, deeply interior.” Hardly a realm or sensibility amenable to Nige’s “age of incompetence.” To read deeply, with empathy and discernment, is no guarantee of civility – just look around the blogosphere. But there’s nothing utopian in what Ozick proposes. She offers no solution or cure. Her tone is elegiac, not hopeless :

“The din in our heads, that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread – where, in an age of machines addressing crowds, and crowds mad for machines, can it be found? In the art of the novel; in the novel’s infinity of plasticity and elasticity; in a flap of imaginary wallpaper. And nowhere else.”

In response to Nige’s (and our) complaint -- “Perhaps when the going gets so ridiculously good as it has been for the developed world this past half century, skills and common sense wither away, as there is no pressing need for them -- whatever we do, however stupidly we behave, we'll be all right.” – I would urge Marianne Moore’s trinity of virtues: “humility, concentration, and gusto.” That last was a favorite of Hazlitt’s, too.

`Foiling More Pretentious Emotion'

Stories about Christmas invite a reassuring formula: The main character must lose all, repent and – now chastened and forgiven -- regain everything. Think of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a primordial fantasy some of us furtively hope is true. How refreshing, then, to read a Christmas story that ignores the formula and proceeds on the assumption that life during the holidays is just as grimly comic as it is the rest of the year. I’m speaking of “At Christmas Time,” one of Chekhov’s last stories, published in 1900.

Vasilisa is illiterate. She hasn’t seen her daughter Yefimya in four years, since the girl married and moved to Petersburg with her husband. Christmas has come and Vasilisa hires Yegor, the brother of the innkeeper’s wife, to write a letter to Yefimya for a fee of 15 kopecks. Yegor addresses the letter to her husband, Andrey Hrisanfitch, a porter at a “hydropathic establishment.” Vasilisa can think of nothing to say so Yegor begins writing nonsense, confident she won’t be able to read it. The next morning Vasilisa and her elderly husband travel eight or nine miles to mail the letter.

In the Constance Garnett translation, the story is only eight pages long, though Chekhov divides it into two numbered sections. Mailing the letter is the end of part one. The second opens on New Year’s Day at Dr. B.O. Mozelweiser’s hydropathic establishment. The porter, Andrey Hrisanfitch, welcomes a dotty general who has come for his water treatment. The letter arrives. The porter opens it and gives it to his wife who is busy taking care of their three children. She reads the beginning of the letter and begins crying:

“Andrey Hrisanfitch, hearing this, recalled that his wife had on three or four occasions given him letters and asked him to send them to the country, but some important business had always prevented him; he had not sent them, and the letters somehow got lost.”

Yefimya resumes reading but hears her husband’s footsteps approaching:

“She was very much frightened of him -- oh, how frightened of him! She trembled and was reduced to terror by the sound of his steps, by the look in his eyes, and dared not utter a word in his presence.”

The dotty general returns and for the second time asks Andrey Hrisanfitch what’s behind a closed door in the clinic. The porter answers, in the story’s final words, “Charcot douche, your Excellency!” For a partial explanation, go here to read a 1901 textbook entry devoted to this dubious health regimen.

In the hands of another writer, this brief story could have been turned into a sermon on the evils of domestic abuse – The Color Purple dressed up in ushanka and valenki. Instead, Chekhov gives us greasy mendacity by the letter’s writer, Yegory, and its brutal addressee, Andrey Hrisanfitch, compounded by fear and ignorance. Throughout, the story is laced with comedy – the letter’s nonsensical contents, the bumbling general, the porter’s sycophancy.

“At Christmas Time” is one of only two stories Chekhov published in 1900, the other being an undisputed masterpiece, the novella-length “In the Ravine.” In his final three and a half years he wrote only two additional stories – “The Bishop” (1901) and “Betrothed” (1903) – and devoted most of his time to the theater. After more than a century, “At Christmas Time” remains an uneasy mixture of misery and humor, one Chekhov often employed. His reasons were mostly temperamental – that’s how he saw the world – but this strategy also acts as a buffer against sentimentality and other unearned effects.

Philip Larkin wrote of Barbara Pym: “Amusement is constantly foiling more pretentious emotion.”

`To Pay Back the Audience'

Monday morning I was reminded why I never listen to so-called “talk radio.” Scanning the dial I heard an announcer say “They `F-word’ you up, your mum and dad.” His tone was haughty, disdainful and over-emphatic, like a teenager who thinks he has caught his parents in a lie. The euphemism was sillier and more salacious than fuck could ever be. He was apparently outraged that a school district had included Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” in its curriculum. It’s reassuring to know people can still get upset over a poem, though what bothered this guy was not the “F-word” but the “disrespect” the poem showed for “the family as an institution.” I got the idea he thought Larkin was a “hip-hop artist.” After long absence, enjoy it again:

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

“But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

“Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”

An hour later, on my way home from a round of errands, the announcer on a jazz station said he was about to play “the greatest Christmas recording ever.” I was expecting yet another dose of irony but it was Louis Armstrong’s reading of “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which its author, Clement Clarke Moore, titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” The poem was anonymously published on Dec. 23, 1823, in The Sentinel, a newspaper in Troy, N.Y. Years ago, while working as a reporter in nearby Albany, I wrote a story about Moore’s Troy connection and was permitted to hold a copy of the now-185-year-old newspaper in which the poem appeared, in the collection of the Troy Public Library. Armstrong begins:

“This is Louis Satchmo Armstrong talkin’ to all the kids all over the world at Christmastime.”

Go here for the entire recording and wait for Armstrong’s laughter after he says “a bowlful of jelly.” No recording has made me so happy in a long time. Here’s what Larkin wrote about Armstrong after his death in 1971:

“Armstrong was an artist of world stature, an American Negro slum child who spoke to the heart of Greenlander and Japanese alike. At the same time he was a humble, hard-working man who night after night set out to do no more than `please the people,’ to earn his fee, to pay back the audience for coming.”

`A Joy to Read'

J.F. Powers was among the finest American fiction writers of the last century and will always remain in jeopardy of a total eclipse of reputation. Any effort to commend his work is laudable. Christopher J. Scalia notes that "the purity of Powers's prose, his wonderful turns of phrase and observations, make the stories a joy to read." Read his entire piece at InsideCatholic.com.

`The Grand Old Poem Called Winter'

“That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine.”

Saturday afternoon and the cookie dough was ready and rolled on the counter. We awaited the arrival of my brother-in-law and nephew to begin baking Christmas cookies. I stepped outside to stuff trash in the bin and spied a tiny object drifting across my periphery. I assumed it was a moth but only a remarkable insect could flit about in such temperatures. A snowflake! The first we’ve seen since spending four years of contrition in Houston, a year-round outdoor schvitz. Cold hands and feet have never felt so good. My kids wanted to collect snow in plastic bags and preserve it in the freezer. The invocation above is from Thoreau’s journal for Dec. 7, 1856. A few sentences later he writes:

“The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. It was summer, and now again it is winter. Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it. So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. What a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes. It is solid beauty. It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains. The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended.”

Sunday we woke to unambiguous winter. Every horizontal surface not made of concrete was fleeced with snow and ice: 29 degrees Fahrenheit. By 6:30 a.m. the kids were running around the front yard in pajamas and boots, reveling in snow worship. I heard a muted clacking sound in the back yard – frozen magnolia leaves moving in the wind. Juncos and crows poked at the brown grass like shoppers at a flea market. I tried raking the last of the leaves in the backyard but they peeled off the ground in frozen sheets. Our Neolithic forebears might have built shelters with them, or wore them as vests. Thoreau saw something else in them – beauty and life. One day earlier, on Dec. 6, he wrote:

“How every one of these leaves that are blown about the snow-crust or lie neglected beneath, soon to turn to mould! Not merely a matted mass of fibres like a sheet of paper, but a perfect organism and system in itself, so that no mortal has ever yet discerned or explored its beauty.”

`No Ambition to Overleap Mortality'

Manny Dubinsky is 78, retired after half a century in the scrap-metal business, a widower three years. He’s lonely, angry for no reason he can name, not bookish but a reader:

“Dubinsky had always been a reader. Thank God for that. He began using the Evanston library, where he took out two or three books a week, mostly on current history and especially on the war – his war, World War II. He was also a sucker for books on Winston Churchill, the greatest man, he thought, of the twentieth century.”

At the library he meets Olivia Hampton, 72, widowed nine years. She’s black, he’s Jewish and no one seems to mind. They meet for lunch. What they have in common is bafflement with the world. Both yearn for the comfort and familiarity of the past but remain thoughtful enough to know it’s a frustrating, futile longing. Olivia says:

“I think the only penalty you pay for a good marriage is that you never really get over its coming to an end. I still get up some mornings disappointed that Charley isn’t next to me.”

In “Dubinsky on the Loose,” Joseph Epstein leaves the conclusion open-ended so it reads convincingly: “He braked gently and wondered how many days he was required to wait before calling her for dinner.” Many stories in Fabulous Small Jews (2003) are about widows and widowers, mostly elderly Jews in Chicago learning to adapt to a world they no longer recognize. Dubinsky vows to cease “delivering little lectures on the superiority of the past to the present.” Often Epstein’s people reminded me of L.E. Sissman’s line: “My thirst for the past is easy to appease.” His stories usually end with a qualified acceptance by the protagonist that the future will not resemble what he expected. First, he must allow another person to enter his life with some degree of intimacy, fondness and trust – girlfriend, neighbor, grandson.

In “Moe,” Morris Bernstein is a widower whose son is “a phony and a royal putz.” After he suffers a minor heart attack, a young cardiologist advises Moe to undergo bypass surgery. He declines, in part, because “he didn’t feel like changing the way he lived.” All of us can understand this. At age 67, Moe declines an invitation from the digital age:

“He did have a VCR, which he used occasionally to record a Bears game when he was going to be out of the house. When he first got it, he rented movies, mostly the old ones he had grown up with, the Bogarts and Fred Astaires, William Powells and James Cagneys and Spencer Tracys, but he soon lost interest. [Olivia Hampton vows, “`I don’t ever want to see another movie I haven’t already seen before – maybe thirty years before.’”] Television news and the Cubs and Bears and Bulls gave him all the entertainment he needed.”

It’s Moe’s nine-year-old grandson – neurotic, nerdish, unhappy, wracked with allergies, already seeing a psychotherapist -- who moves him to love and live. He takes the kid under his wing and promises to teach him to play handball. He also calls the cardiologist and agrees to have the bypass performed, though Moe still finds the doctor’s manner “smarmy.” Moe hangs up the phone and we get Epstein’s final paragraph:

“A good deal less than certain himself, Bernstein hung up and stepped around the corner into Manny’s Delicatessen, where he ate a four-inch-high pastrami sandwich on a Kaiser roll, a potato latke the size of a cake dish [by this point I was salivating], and a heaping serving of rice pudding, all washed down by two cups of black coffee. Sure, O.K., all right, let them cut out his whole heart. But if they thought they could change Moe Bernstein, they had another thing coming.”

Manny, Moe and the others in Fabulous Small Jews remind me of no one so much as the men (and women) Shirley Robin Letwin anatomizes in The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (1982). Letwin was a political philosopher not a literary critic but her book ranks with the best ever written about a novelist – an endlessly edifying work, as Samuel Johnson is morally edifying. In her final paragraph, Letwin describes the moves Epstein’s “gentlemen” make from estrangement to purpose. She begins:

“In a world of people who think only of getting and spending, who are trying to wipe the slate clean or tie up everything in large, neat, sharp-cornered parcels, who feel obliged to rebel in order to go their own way, or think of peace as the achievement of repression, who confuse authority with power and deference with slavishness, who shudder at the dappled diversity of the human world, the gentleman will not feel at home.”

Letwin concludes:

“[The gentleman] has firm convictions about what is good and true, for which he will fight, without forgetting that nothing in nature prevents other men from questioning his verities and that he himself cannot keep hold of them without support from others to keep him aware of what he has overlooked or distorted. But whatever disagreement he encounters, however uncongenial he may find his neighbors or his fortune, he will always be thoroughly at home in the human world because he can enjoy its absurdities and has no ambition to overleap mortality.”

Epstein’s peculiar title, by the way, comes from Karl Shapiro’s “Hospital”:

“This is the Oxford of all sicknesses.
Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews
And actresses whose legs were always news.”

`Each Breath You Take is Breathtaking'

Thinking about death while gratefully immersed in life doesn’t feel like morbidity. Each day is a memento mori that spikes the sweetness. An anonymous reader derides recent posts about L.E. Sissman’s poems, and the poems themselves, as “depresing” [sic] and “real downers” before moving on to stronger stuff. The thought of death remains powerful medicine. In his second book, Scattered Returns (1969), here’s Sissman’s opening lines to “A Deathplace”:

“Very few people know where they will die,
But I do: in a brick-faced hospital,
Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,
Into three parts…”

Sissman had been diagnosed with Hodgkins disease in 1965. His comedy is grim and clear-eyed. Was this “therapeutic” for Sissman? Would he have written differently if cancer had not ambushed him at 37 and killed him at 48? It seems almost indecent to ask. As a reader and fellow human, I’m grateful for his cancer poems and death poems, and find consolation in the hope I will conduct myself with comparable grace.

The poet was an accomplished prose writer and wrote a column, “Innocent Bystander” (think of that title, its onion layers of irony, in the context of Sissman’s life), for The Atlantic Monthly. Some were collected in 1975 as Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s. (Go here.) The column from January 1975 is titled “Extreme Mercy” and amounts to a love song for nurses (a sentiment that mirrors my hospital experiences). Here’s the final paragraph:

“It could be said, in a way, that these nurses, to their extreme mercy to their morituri, make their patients -- me included -- want to live for them, want to make them right in their high, unfeigned, audacious hopes for us.”

By this time Sissman could no longer write poetry. He died 14 months later. Does a dying man, even the strongest, most stoical and realistic, look for hope wherever he can find it? Do we? The poet Samuel Menashe, now 83, was born more than two years before Sissman. In 2005, Christopher Ricks edited his New and Selected Poems, published on the occasion of Menashe’s 80th birthday, and some of us discovered a major poet in our midst. Their styles are radically different but I like to think Sissman would have enjoyed “What to Expect,” among others:

“At death’s door
The end in sight
Is life, not death
Each breath you take
Is breathtaking

“Save your breath
Does not apply –
You must die.”

Chekhov and `Nothing Else'

With death-like inevitability, bloggers and others drag out “Best of” lists for the dwindling year. Back in June I announced my nominee but I’m flexible and have changed my mind. The best book of 2008 was certainly Sakhalin Island, published by Anton Chekhov in 1895. No other book I’ve read this year stays so vivid in memory and comes to mind so often, as it did again on Thursday when I read an interview with Theodore Dalrymple. Like Chekhov he is both a writer and doctor:

“I am always worried about predicting decline and fall, because men of my age seem constitutionally liable to do so. Nevertheless, there certainly does seem a thinning out of our culture, and a terrible narrowing of horizons. Here is just one very small example: a friend of mine who teaches Cambridge medical students — the elite of the elite — tells me that in many years he has met about three who have heard of Chekhov. The tragedy is that, when he tells them to read some, they love it; in other words, our educational system has deliberately failed to inculcate an interest in literature in them, though they are more than capable of developing one, and indeed are probably avid for something of the kind. This has not come about accidentally; it is the result of an ideology that has insinuated itself into power.”

To be literate and not know Chekhov is willful impoverishment of spirit, like not knowing Shakespeare or Keats. Since reading Sakhalin Island in September, I see and hear him everywhere, whether by name or in situations that strike me as implicitly “Chekhovian” – that is, ones in which sadness and comedy inextricably mingle. I picked up a book last week because it included “Torpid Smoke,” a story Nabokov wrote in 1935, and scored a bonus with Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939), who knew Chekhov as a student in Moscow and became a leading Russian Impressionist painter.

Korovin wrote a brief memoir, “My Encounters with Chekhov,” published in English in 1973 (translated by Tatiana Kusubova) and included in The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972, edited by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel Jr. The scene is a Moscow hotel room in 1883. The players are Korovin, Chekhov (studying for his final exam to become a doctor) and other students. The dialogue could have been transcribed this morning on a college campus in the United States:

“The students were different from Anton Pavlovich. They loved to argue, and they were in some peculiar way opposed to just about everything.

“`If you have no convictions,’ said one student turning to Chekhov, `you can’t be a writer.’
“No one can say, `I have no convictions,’ said another. `I can’t understand how anyone could not have convictions.’

“`I have no convictions,’ replied Chekhov.

“`You claim to be a man without convictions, but how can you write a work of literature without any ideology? Don’t you have an ideology?’

“`I have no ideology and no convictions,’ answered Chekhov.

“These students had an odd way of arguing. They were apparently displeased with Anton Pavlovich. It was clear that they could not fit him into the didactic turn of their outlook or into their moralizing ideology. They wanted to guide, to instruct, to lead, and to influence. They knew everything. They understood everything. And Anton Pavlovich was plainly bored by it all.

“`Who needs your stories? Where do they lead? They don’t oppose anything. They contain no ideas. The Russian Bulletin, say, would have no use for you. Your stories are entertaining and nothing else.’

“`Nothing else,’ answered Anton Pavlovich.”

Already, at age 23, Chekhov evinces a Bartleby-like insouciance: “Nothing else.” I also came across Memories and Portraits by Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1933. Bunin met Chekhov in Moscow in 1895 and saw him often in the remaining nine years of Chekhov’s life. He describes a charming, funny, hard-working writer who was gentle, proud, lonely, self-deprecating and fond of practical jokes. Bunin writes (as translated by Vera Traill and Robin Chancellor):

“Even in everyday life, he used words with precision and economy. He valued words very highly. He could not bear pompous, false, bookish words. His own speech was beautiful – fresh, clear and to the point. In his way of talking one never heard the writer; he seldom used similes or epithets, and when he did they were usually quite commonplace; he never flaunted or relished a well-chosen word. `Big’ words he loathed. A book of memoirs about him contains a noteworthy passage: `I once complained to Anton Pavlovich: “What am I to do? I am consumed by self-analysis.” And he replied: “You ought to drink less vodka.””

I urge you to read my year’s best book -- Sakhalin Island, translated by Brian Reeve, in the elegant, annotated paperback edition published by Oneworld Classics ($17 US, £9.99 UK).

`Let It Be Me'

For the sheer gratuitous pleasure of it, go here. Thanks to Joshua Kurp.

`Nowhere Is All Around Us'

How thrilling and brave that a poet who had cancer for 11 years and died of the disease at age 48 should begin a poem with the phrase “Life is so long…” and that it should be published posthumously in his Collected Poems. No one has written so unromantically and with such wit about the certainty of a foreshortened life as L.E. Sissman. Never “inspirational” in the banal sense – no cheerleading or related fraudulence -- his humor and mastery of craft inspire admiration. Here is “Spring Song,” written in the spring of 1972, four years before Sissman’s death:

“Life is so long the passage of the seasons
Blurs like a carrousel before the static
Eyes of the onlooker who, rising fifty,
Grows slow and oaklike, dying in his fashion
Of imperceptible progress to the autumn,
While grasses spring in unison from the meadows
Full-blown in seconds, lilacs bloom and blacken
In minutes, apple blossoms shuck their petals
And grow green fruit in hours, ashes open
Fistfuls of leaflets, whose light-green veins darken
To forest green, lighten to tones of copper,
And fall down in a day to usher winter
Into his complex of spare silver branches,
His winter palace, in a growing silence.
I hate, as agent for my slowly failing
Senses, my withering sinews, drying juices,
And hardening heart, these hasty evidences
Of what I’ll come to in the coming season
Of reckoning, when all the green will vanish
From expectation, all anticipation
Of folly to be rectified tomorrow
Will perish, and a leafless log of body
Will be cast on the wood fire in December.”

“I hate” is a rare locution in Sissman. In some poets, its vulgarity signals an end to reading the poem; in Sissman, we listen harder. He was not by nature a hater and explicit emoting was never his way. The poem’s time-lapse conceit – watching the human life cycle reflected in the speeded-up comings and goings of the seasons – could have been mawkish (“Sunrise, sunset...”). With his title, is Sissman nodding to Mendelssohn? With his first word, is he lobbing a rejoinder at Berryman’s “Dream Song 14” and its famous opening line: “Life, friends, is boring.” That’s more fancy than scholarship, based on an idiosyncratic map of American poetry, but it’s hard to imagine Sissman bored. His poems glitter with what Peter Davison calls a “wide-ranging engagement with the world around him” – too rare a poetic quality.

Wanting to know the dying words of loved ones and those we admire is understandable. We hope they represent a summation or distillation we can learn from, suspecting their wisdom confers immunity. Thoreau is supposed to have murmured “moose” and “Indian” at the end, so even in death we suspect he was preoccupied with the things he loved in life. Reading Sissman’s poems is like that. We grant death’s inevitability, but how does it feel to know its arrival is imminent? What can it teach us? In another late poem, “Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite,” Sissman writes:

“Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,
A vacuum waiting for a rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us into Erewhon.”

This is more abstract – anyone’s death, but coolly chronicled, without bravado or cowering. Such knowledge changes a man. He can deny it or he can accept the precious fragility and live his life accordingly, as he sees fit. At the end of the poem, home again, another reprieve, the speaker notices leaves (as in “Spring Song”) – “sportive maple leaves” – skittering across the driveway. He imagines Clotho the spinner and the other Fates preparing to “send me to befriend the winter leaves.” Boswell reports in his Life of Johnson:

“To my question, as to whether we might fortify our minds for the approach of death, he answered in a passion, `No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.’ He added, with an earnest look, `A man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine.’”

`People Who Vindicate the Species'

On Sunday I remembered the Pearl Harbor survivors I’ve interviewed, already old men by the time of those earlier anniversaries, the 40th and 50th. For each, the Japanese attack was the vortex around which they forever navigated. Everything in their lives – marriage, children, jobs – was calibrated against what happened in Hawaii when they were young. With one exception, what I remember is their ordinariness. They were my father’s age, with the values and prejudices of working-class Americans who lived through the Great Depression, the war and the unprecedented prosperity of the postwar years. Both of my parents had brothers at Pearl Harbor.

The exception was Babe, a retired barber and mail carrier. He was compact like a jockey and tightly coiled. Babe was ordinary but for his anger. It fueled him and he worked it like an artist – 50 years on and longer. “Japs” was inevitably preceded by a profanity. In his car he kept reams of ticket-sized paper slips printed with “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and a thesaurus of obscenities. He placed them under the wiper blades of Japanese-built automobiles, which by the early nineties were ubiquitous. I drove a Toyota and always parked down the block. His best friend, another Italian kid, had enlisted in the army the same day as Babe and was killed at Pearl Harbor. Babe detested Frank Sinatra, a fellow Italian but a “draft dodger.” He chastised fellow survivors for insufficient reverence. I met his wife briefly but she was a cipher. They never had children.

Normally, angry people are tiresome but for some reason I liked Babe, enjoyed his company (he was an excellent storyteller) and wrote about him three times for two newspapers. Each time, despite my ethical objections, he mailed me a five-dollar bill after the story or column appeared. In his own crabbed way, he was generous and funny. About 10 years ago I read his obituary and waited a few weeks before calling his wife to offer condolences. She hung up on me.

After that I wrote about Babe for the last time, in the newspaper column I described here. A reader of that October post, Philip Walling, wrote to say it reminded him of a poem by Louis MacNeice, “The Kingdom.” I’ve read MacNeice only spottily and this poem, written during World War II, was new to me. It’s a hymn to democracy and decency that celebrates “the Kingdom of individuals.” Many lines remind me of Babe and other Pearl Harbor survivors I’ve known:

“…these are humble
And proud at once, working within their limits
And yet transcending them. These are the people
who vindicate the species. And they are many. For go,
Go wherever you choose, among tidy villas or terrible
Docks, dumps and pitheads, or through the spangled moors
Or along the vibrant narrow intestines of great ships
Or into those countries of which we know very little –
Everywhere you will discover the men of the Kingdom
Loyal by intuition, born to attack, and innocent.”

`Dense Swatches of Nothingness'

L.E. Sissman is a difficult poet to quote briefly while trying to respect the formal integrity of his lines. He was not often aphoristic, and his poems often possessed the narrative drive of short stories, complete with dialogue. His form of choice was the poetic sequence, linked lyrics carefully numbered, dated and datelined. In his second book, Scattered Returns (1969), the second section, “A War Requiem,” is arranged in five movements with 32 subsections – 23 pages in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman. The poem’s scheme is a 40-year sampler of American life starting with the Great Depression, thematically bracketed by World War I and Vietnam. The scaffolding of “A War Requiem” is the life of L.E. Sissman, born in Detroit on New Year’s Day 1928.

Given the title, the poem’s autobiographical content and date of composition (it was first published May 3, 1969, in The New Yorker), you might expect narcissism or a political screed, the sort of thing hundreds of poets turn out by the yard. We get instead thumbnail portraits of representative Americans, witty wordplay, the sweep of history and dozens of stories – like a cosmopolitan Winesburg, Ohio or Cheever in a minor key. The poem is metrically formal but loose-limbed enough to contain hundreds of scraps of Americana.

Sissman is not a nature poet but his vignettes of the natural world are vivid and unromanticized. (Perhaps he is a nature poet.) I reread “A War Requiem” over the weekend when I noticed a late-autumn landscape two blocks from our house – blue-gray fog, a leafless bush with pointillist berries, mud. I had to look for the poem but the scene reminded me of the start of “A Marriage, 1958,” Section 21 of “A War Requiem”:

“November russets flush the last of green
Out of its summer coverts; mist and frost
Condense and crystallize on lignified
Black twigs; red berries shrivel; a sad light
Undistances horizons, setting dense
Swatches of nothingness beyond the fence
In non-objective umber.”

The poem’s fifth and final section, V., is a single lyric, the 32nd, titled “Twelfth Night, 1969.” Here, Sissman’s equation of World and National History, and individual history, is beautifully modulated. Here’s the poem’s finale:

“Snowbound on Twelfth Night, in the interact
Of winter, in the white from green to green,
I warm myself in isolation. In
The aura of the fire of applewood
With its faint scent of McIntoshes, in
The disappearing act of the low sun,
A marginally yellow medallion
Behind the white snow sky, under the in-
Undation of sharp snowdrifts like the fins
Of sharks astride our windowsills, I hide
Out in my hideout from the memory
Of our unlovely recent history,
And those fresh divisions just gone west.
A sharp sound brings me back: perhaps a tree
Cleft by the cold, but likelier the crack
Of a gun down at Devens. Snow begins
To lance against the window, and I see,
By luck, a leisurely and murderous
Shadow detach itself with a marine
Grace from an apple tree. A snowy owl,
Cinereous, nearly invisible,
Planes down its glide path to surprise a vole.”

Cinereous is perfect. It means ash-gray or resembling ashes, and echoes with “sin.” How many Vietnam poems address the subject with such tact and delicacy without bathetically insulting the war and the deaths of so many? Another section of the poem is titled “Thirty Thousand gone, 1968.” Most such poems were cartoons without nuance, and now are long forgotten. “A War Requiem” is one of the great poems of the era.

The editor of the posthumously published Hello, Darkness, his friend the late Peter Davison, notes that Sissman, an advertizing man by profession, started earning recognition as a poet in the late nineteen-sixties after he had been diagnosed with cancer and around the time of his 40th birthday. But the recognition was not universal and even thoughtful readers of American poetry are ignorant of Sissman’s work. Davison writes in his preface:

“Some fellow-poets praised his accomplishments, but the moral terrorists who dominated the poetry business of the time withheld their accolades.”

Many of the same terrorists and their poetic progeny live on. Sissman died in 1976, age 48.

`The Only Possible Basis for Literary Endurance'

Fifty years ago Hugh Kenner published his fifth book, Gnomon: Essays in Contemporary Literature, and seldom has a collection of book reviews – usually the Kleenex of the literary arts – remained so prescient and worthy of repeated rereading. I say “prescient” because most of Kenner’s subjects were the great “International Modernists,” as he called them – Joyce, Yeats, Ford, Lewis, Pound, Eliot – whom he was able to call “contemporary.” The latter two were alive in 1958 and all had contentiously disputed reputations. Kenner helped solidify and bolster those reputations, as he did Samuel Beckett’s – the only major focus of Kenner’s scholarship not addressed in Gnomon, and that’s because he didn’t meet Beckett until 1958.

A gnomon is the portion of a sundial that casts a shadow, from the Greek by way of Latin for “indicator,” “one who discerns,” “that which reveals,” “judge.” It shares roots with Gnostic. In his foreword Kenner relates the story of Emperor Yao sending astronomers to the four corners of his kingdom “to watch the shadows of their gnomons and so, in fixing the seasons, regulate the conduct of the new epoch by the swing of the sun and stars.” Kenner suggests critics follow the example of the emperor and his astronomers, and that they return to the roots of criticism in exegesis: “The test of exegesis is that it enlightens.” The volume’s title page carries an epigraph from one of Pound’s Rock-Drill Cantos (1955):

“…study with the mind of a grandson
And watch the time like a hawk.”

Studying, watching: The critic’s job, and any good reader’s. Kenner remains the only critic I know whose prose is always excellent and worthy of emulation (one might say gnomic), and who always teaches me something, whether a fact or a lesson. I wished to observe the golden anniversary of Gnomon in the only meaningful fashion – reading it again – but I’m also rereading Ford Madox Ford’s Great War tetralogy Parade’s End. When, in 1950 (11 years after Ford’s death), it was published for the first time in a single volume, Kenner reviewed it. His essay, “Remember That I Remembered,” is the best short piece I’ve read on Ford and his masterpiece. Here’s Kenner in his gnomic mode:

“The artist who can actually get down on paper something not himself – some scheme of values of which he partakes – so that the record will not waver with time or assume grotesque perspectives as viewpoints alter and framing interests vanish, has achieved the only possible basis for artistic truth and the only possible basis for literary endurance.”

And to return to Kenner’s emphasis on the act of studying, watching:

“Ford’s constant concern is to record and anatomize, not to wallow.”

And:

“It would be worth most novelists’ while to spend some years of study and emulation on the procedures and felicities of Parade’s End.”

`Always Subordinate to the Arts'

“Recently, in London, V.S. Pritchett said to me that he liked to read books, almost any books. I said to myself (not to him) that given his retentive memory and agile intelligence, the sheer love of reading, of reading what one dislikes, or even detests, is the first requisite of the literary critic. I have read certain poems, some of them quite long, hundreds of times; I have never been able to finish The Ring and the Book; I don’t think I shall read Paradise Lost again. I once read Middle English fairly well, but I could not get beyond the first hundred lines of Piers Ploughman.”

This is Allen Tate in “The Unliteral Imagination; Or, I, too, Dislike It,” a 1964 essay with a title borrowed, as the author acknowledges, from Marianne Moore’s “Poetry.” I sympathize with both men. Like Pritchett, I’m always reading but unlike him finding it increasingly difficult to read what I dislike or detest (which severely compromises my knowledge of contemporary writing). In Tate’s scheme and to no one’s surprise, I will never be a literary critic. I don’t possess the requisite analytical skills or trencherman’s appetite for the job. I’m constitutionally incapable of proselytizing. My idea of a first-rate literary critic is Hugh Kenner or Guy Davenport, Dr. Johnson or Randall Jarrell, Eliot or Christopher Ricks. I don’t care about the reading habits of others except when they can introduce me to a book I like. I recognize and honor a canon based on merit and tradition, not fashion or accessibility. I could sign my name to the final two sentences in Tate’s paragraph. A few pages later he writes:

“Is it not absurd to say one loves poetry? To say that is to say that one loves all poetry – as indiscriminate a love as the love of all women. Yet it is reasonable to prefer all women to horses. I prefer all bad poems to all good sociological tracts.”

I didn’t name this blog cavalierly, and took my inspiration from Dr. Johnson, as quoted by Boswell in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

These are my priorities, over-simplified: First, life; then, books (or any work of art); only then, the critic. I can’t see it any other way. The rest is egotism, and I don’t take myself that seriously. I can’t afford to: I know the terrain too well. Bloggers often call themselves “critics” rather than essayists, bookworms, dilettantes or fans because it sounds more grownup and professional, and suggests power. My blog is an ongoing collection of small essays inspired by the great practitioners of that form. I write about books because my life has been full of them. Had I been a plumber or priest this blog would, no doubt, look very different, but I’m stuck with this life and so are the indulgent readers of Anecdotal Evidence. Frank Wilson linked to an essay by Jacques Barzun, “A Little Matter of Sense,” published in The New York Times in 1987. Barzun says what I’ve been trying to say but with more critical acuity:

“Criticism is not an art; it is not a science; it has no method and no theory. It is a craft with varying maxims and devices; a difficult craft, but always subordinate to the arts. That is why it must vary as they have varied. The critic is properly a servant, of the public and of the artist, both. He removes barriers to understanding and enjoyment, a task that can be performed in many different modes. Or rather, I should say that there are several kinds of criticism but only one mode - the indicative mode. The critic always points, with his finger on the diagnostic spot.

“Good criticism is rare and it comes in many shapes, from annotation to dialogue and from poem to epigram, including the essay and the anecdote along the way. We must welcome it and read it in whatever form it takes. The essential is that the critic should speak in what I have termed the indicative mode and should address the common reader.”

`A Mixture of Light and Shade'

“I wish that I had written The Great Gatsby. I wish that I had written `In the Ravine’ and `Ward No. 6.’ I wish that I had written The House in Paris. I wish that I had written A Sportsman’s Notebook. But the novelist works with what life has given him. It was no small gift that I was allowed to lead my boyhood in a small town in Illinois where the elm trees cast a mixture of light and shade over the pavements. And also that, at a fairly early age, I was made aware of the fragility of human happiness.”

These words were uttered by the man who did write Time Will Darken It and So Long, See You Tomorrow, in 1995 when William Maxwell received the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was 86. The award was presented by another master from The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, who was born two and a half weeks before Maxwell. Both would be dead in little more than five years. Maxwell’s touching words, bespeaking humility and love, come from his three-paragraph acceptance speech, the final work included in Later Novels and Stories. It joins Early Novels and Stories, published earlier this year by the Library of America.

I know my wife has already ordered both volumes for me for Christmas but I couldn’t resist taking the new volume from the library. I’m happy my time and place overlapped with Maxwell’s. I come close to thinking, when so much fiction bores or repels me, contemporary fiction in particular, that Maxwell was our greatest novelist. I can’t defend that critically or rationally, and thoughts of Melville, James, Cather, Faulkner and Bellow rush to my higher thought centers, but the part inside where language and emotion share space knows otherwise. In 1998, the late Anthony Hecht gave a book-length interview to the English writer/editor Philip Hoy. Which novelists among his contemporaries, Hoy asked, gave him the greatest pleasure? Hecht answered:

“I would list Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov.”

The choice of those names confirms my impression that Hecht was a profoundly civilized man. Also read Hecht’s essay on Time Will Darken It, collected in A William Maxwell Portrait and surely among the last things the poet, who died in 2004, ever wrote.

More good news: The Library of America has announced it will publish The Sweet Science and Other Writings, its second collection of work by A.J. Liebling, in March. Included will be The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals and The Press. For a taste of these funny, beautifully written books, savor this passage from the third volume on that list:

“People in the Jollity Building neighborhood like to be thought of as characters. `He is a real character,’ they say, with respect, of any fascinatingly repulsive acquaintance.”

`Novelties Consonant With Recorded Reality'

In his review of the latest books by some of our least gifted and most popular poets, William Logan, always lethal with a parenthetical shiv, lets this pass between brackets: “(all description is an act of imagination only partly tethered to the world, if tethered at all).” In context, Logan is eviscerating the already eviscerated poems of Mary Oliver, but his offhand aside doesn’t feel offhand. Rather, he’s making a useful distinction between inspiration and dull literalism. Consider this sentence from a novella:

“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.”

“Gassy” is a novel modifier of “air.” A lesser writer might have settled for smoky, smoggy, stinking, fume-filled or polluted. None works. “Gassy” carries a suggestion of the human body – its smells and discomforts. “Leaden spokes of sunlight”: We’ve often seen sunlight shining in spokes, when refraction breaks the uniform spill into luminous shafts. But “leaden?” It can’t refer to color, a dull or shining gray. It must imply oppressive weight – another suggestion of discomfort. And why not simply “sawdust?” Footprints hint at absence, a deserted space like a de Chirico palazzo. In one sentence, uptown Broadway, always dense with humanity, is rendered inhospitable, alien and utterly true to the scene. In his next sentence the writer gives us this:

“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.”

We go from emptiness to a Whitman-like throng. Three pages from the conclusion of Seize the Day, Saul Bellow’s effect is jarring but right. The first sentence is shadowed by Joyce, from whom he learned to use unexpected but suggestively “realistic” adjectives. From Dickens he took the trick of physiognomy-as-character. As in an antiquated theory of criminal identification, his people often look like what they are: “in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence.” In a documentary sense, none of this is photographically faithful.

Bellow’s description is “only partly tethered to the world, if tethered at all,” and is more vivid and poetic than Mary Oliver’s desiccated lines. Bellow, like any great writer, gives readers a new set of lenses, a way to look at the world with heightened acuity. Broadway will never look the same, nor city air, sunlight and sawdust on a sidewalk. He fulfills what Jacques Barzun observes in his review of Donald M. Frame’s translation of The Complete Works of Montaigne:

“The more independent and imaginative a writer is, the more in retrospect he is likely to find his novelties consonant with recorded reality.”

`Some Austerity and Wintry Negativity'

In his chapter on saintliness in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes:

“Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive -- and instinctive it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the arduous.”

The Teddy Roosevelt of philosophy and advocate of the strenuous life, James sounds a familiar theme in an unlikely context. Like his brother Henry, William labored prodigiously. Both were social creatures, charming company, but neither could have settled into a life of leisure. We can argue that both brothers worked their way into sanity. James follows the passage above with some unhelpful psychologizing but returns to form in the following paragraph:

“Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word `yes’ forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some `no! no!’ must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power.”

This remains true after more than a century but I wonder if it’s true for fewer numbers of people. The best work is a balance of difficulty and ease – resistant accomplishment, we might call it – but the taste for that sort of sweaty satisfaction may be disappearing. If work is too simple, we’re bored and dissatisfied and grow cynical and tend to misbehave. If the work exceeds our abilities, something similar happens. We grow bitter with someone -- the boss, ourselves, the world. I’ve mostly learned to balance these things. Since leaving my fulltime job in May I’ve subsisted on a trickle of freelance writing. Without my wife’s hard work and generous salary, I couldn’t support myself let alone a family. In July I filed a magazine story that carried with it two superlatives – most difficult and most lucrative, and that was most pleasing.

These thoughts came while rereading “To Please a Shadow,” my favorite memoir of one poet by another. Joseph Brodsky writes with love and respect for his mentor, W.H. Auden. Brodsky left the Soviet Union in 1972 and sought out Auden shortly before the latter’s death the following year. In 1977, Brodsky resolved to write poems, essays and translations in English. Already a master in his native Russian, he chose to do what surely amounts to one of humanity’s rarest and most difficult human accomplishments. What’s most intriguing is his reason for doing so. Conrad, he says, jumped languages out of necessity; Nabokov, for “burning ambition”; Beckett, “for the sake of greater estrangement.” Brodsky says he began writing in English because:

“My sole purpose then, as it is now, was to find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I consider the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan Hugh Auden.”

He adds:

“To put it differently, unable to return the full amount of what has been given, one tries to pay back at least in the same coin.”

I don’t recall Brodsky writing anywhere about Samuel Johnson but I sense, as men and writers, they shared deep affinities (as did Auden). The Russian would have approved of what the Englishman wrote in The Adventurer No. 111(Nov. 27, 1753):

“To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility."