`The Dream of the Toads Rang Through the Elms'

The coo of a dove signifies quiet, gentleness and peace, a sort of avian lullaby. “Loud doves” ought to be a contradiction in terms, but that’s the sound that wakes us most mornings. Dozens of them perched in neighborhood pines and oaks ostinato away like melodic clichés of hippie contentment and good will. They resume before sunset, but then they’re accompanied this time of year by a bass drone, the toad chorus, as wavering and steady as a didgeridoo. I fancy the toads having a battle of the bands with the doves. Here’s an entry from Thoreau’s journal, dated Oct. 26, 1853, that I once thought contained a typo: 

“I well remember the time this year when I first heard the dream of the toads. I was laying out house-lots on Little River in Haverhill. We had had some raw, cold and wet weather. But this day was remarkably warm and pleasant, and I had thrown off my outside coat. I was going home to dinner, past a shallow pool, which was green with springing grass, and where a new house was about being erected, when it occurred to me that I heard the dream of the toad. It rang through and filled all the air, though I had not heard it once. And I turned my companion’s attention to it, but he did not appear to perceive it as a new sound in the air. Loud and prevailing as it is, most men do not notice it at all. It is to them, perchance, a sort of simmering or seething of all nature. That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it.” 

I’ve underlined the word in question. A misprint for drone? Guy Davenport asked the same question in a letter written on Aug. 29, 1997 (Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 2007): 

“In Thoreau’s journal the other evening I found the strange phrase `the dreaming of the toads’—and was mystified until I tracked down an archaic meaning of dream meaning music or `a joyful noise.’ Perhaps the ancestor of drone. Now I’d like to know how so old a meaning survived for Thoreau to know it.” 

That's a very old meaning from the Old English, says the OED. Most citations date from the thirteenth century and a few are older. This meaning, as a noun, is judged “obsolete": “The sound of a musical instrument or singing voice; music, minstrelsy, melody; singing, a song. Also: noise, din; clamour, lamentation; voice, speech.” So, too, the verb: “To make a joyful noise, rejoice; to sing or make music.” 

We know Thoreau read Anglo-Saxon poetry at Harvard, though it seems not to have been of particular interest. The unlikely multiple meanings of dream would have amused Thoreau, however, as would the scriptural echo.

`Life's Loveliest Grace'

Already at age twenty-seven, Michael Oakeshott, like any serious person, is contemplating death. This is from September 1928 (Notebooks, 1922-86, Imprint-Academic, 2014): 

“Show how the whole of our life & activity & achievement is just an attempt to master death. All religion, all philosophy, learning, science, business, poetry, literature, art,--everything we do or think or make. Love, the family, communities, the state.” 

A familiar thought, youthfully grandiose but free of morbidity. This is death coolly considered, death as the driver of human accomplishment, death in life. It is peculiarly optimistic. What does it mean to “master” death? Forestall, transcend, understand? Later the same month, Oakeshott restates the thought in more personal terms: 

“I want to consider, to write about, life from the standpoint of death. Death is the greatest, the all-pervading fact of life; if we can understand death, all our questions about life are answered already. Here then, in these meditations upon mortality & upon death, is all that I have come to think about life & living.” 

This, too, is optimistic. Oakeshott is reading John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a prose work published in 1624, from which he takes the notion that death was created not by God but by sinful man. Oakeshott is not a conventional believer but respects the Christian understanding of death: 

“Death is the creation of life—of sin. When there is no sin, death has no sting. And where there is no `mortality,’ there is no sin. But, somehow, death must be defeated, abolished without abolishing the moral world. And that is what Christianity offered—an abolition of death which did not entail the abolition of an ordered life [always a preoccupation of Oakeshott’s].” 

Oakeshott associates an “ordered life” with living up to one’s responsibilities, which he further associates with honesty and labor freely undertaken. He writes: “To assume complete responsibility for one’s life is itself a life work—enough to occupy a man’s whole energy & ingenuity. A man may engage upon all kinds of work besides this, but it will never be more than a mere by-product of his life. It breeds, also, a kind of superior attitude to life [Oakeshott is reading, of all things, D.H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock].” 

The theme of death and life, the pull of each on the other, continues to preoccupy him, and he writes with preternatural maturity: “No experience is perfect & complete: to know this & to understand it, to accept this as life’s loveliest grace is to have understood & to have accepted, & to have overcome death.” In response, I thought of a lesser-known poem by Philip Larkin, “Continuing to Live,” written when he was just four years older than Oakeshott. Larkin harbors no hope of understanding death or life: 

“And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
      But to confess,

“On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
      And that one dying.”

`The Fundamental Sine Qua Non of Complete Living'

In the first volume of the three-volume Journals of Arnold Bennett (Cassell and Co. Ltd., 1932), in the entry dated Oct. 15, 1896, the novelist notes publication of a new edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by Augustine Birrell. The book’s appearance, Bennett says, “reminds me once again that I have read but little of that work.” Surprising, but not disillusioningly so. Bennett projects a bluff, man-of-the-world manner. No aesthete, he. He’s a hardworking pro, in the business to earn a living, and never pretends otherwise. His best novels, long out of fashion -- The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923) -- are devoted to representing life in the industrial Five Towns, the Staffordshire Potteries, and in London. Bennett (1867-1931) lived much of his life in France, served in the British Ministry of Information as director of propaganda for that country during World War I, and was widely read in French literature. He had the distinction of being condescended to by Virginia Woolf and having an omelet named after him – accomplishments worthy of inclusion in anyone’s epitaph. He was no drooling Philistine and never went to university as student or teacher. The journal entry continues: 

“Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old, man, who has read steadily that which he ought to have read sixteen hours a day, from early infancy.” 

The question, comical even in 1896, sounds ponderously ironical today. One can’t imagine it being asked with serious intent in 2014. Failure to read as a “social sin?” The reverse is more likely, even among the chattering classes. Bennett goes on: “I cannot recall a single author of whom I have read everything -- even of Jane Austen.” He admits not having read “large tracts” of some thirty prominent English writers, including Shakespeare, Spenser, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Sterne, Johnson, Lamb, Wordsworth, Tennyson and George Eliot. He adds, wryly, “A list of the masterpieces I have not read would fill a volume…With only one author can I call myself familiar, Jane Austen. With Keats and Stevenson I have an acquaintance. So far of English. Of foreign authors I am familiar with de Maupassant and the de Goncourts. I have yet to finish Don Quixote!” 

An extraordinary admission by a major writer, but one uttered neither in shame nor reverse snobbery. Only in the subsequent paragraph does Bennett squirm a little, as though taking Virginia Woolf seriously: 

“Nevertheless I cannot accuse myself of default. I have been extremely fond of reading since I was 20, and since I was 20 I have read practically nothing (save professionally as a literary critic) but what was `right.’ My leisure has been moderate, my desire strong and steady, my taste in selection certainly above the average, and yet in ten years I seem scarcely to have made an impression upon the intolerable multitude of volumes which `everyone is supposed to have read.’” 

We hear this mea culpa often among readers, those for whom books are trophies, not what the critic Kenneth Burke called them: “equipment for living.” In a curious little volume he published in 1908, Literary Taste: How to Form It -- a sort of Miss Manners guide for strivers after an air of bookishness -- Bennett is still concerned with the status conferred by reading. After admitting that “literary taste thus serves two purposes: as a certificate of correct culture and as a private pastime,” Bennett adds: 

“People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilized mankind. Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living.”

`Chiefly Used for Carrying Fruit, Vegetables'

On the desk in my boss’ office sat a shallow, oval-shaped basket made of curved wooden strips. In it were eggplants and tomatoes, arranged with artful negligence as though by a still-life painter. “Help yourself,” she said, but I wanted to know about the basket, fashioned from contrasting bands of pale willow and darker sweet chestnut. “It’s a trug, ”she said, and I thought she said “drug,” which didn’t quite make sense. Her husband was born in England. During a visit to Sussex some years ago, they visited a shop where trugs are manufactured by hand, and she bought two of them. What impressed me was the use of so blunt a word, new to me, for so lovely an object. In trug I hear echoes of something old and buried underground, perhaps became of dug and jug. (And my boss’ surname is Lugg.) 

The OED suggests trug may be a variant of trough, as in horse-trough. The first definition is “an old local measure for wheat, equal to two-thirds of a bushel.” Second, and also related, is “a shallow wooden tray or pan to hold milk; also, a tray or hod for mortar; also…a wooden coal-box.” Finally, here it is: “a shallow oblong basket made of wooden strips with a handle from side to side, chiefly used for carrying fruit, vegetables, and the like; also trug-basket.” The earliest citation from the Athenaeum in 1862: “A trug-basket,..a vessel..almost peculiar to the county of Sussex. Some such trugs were sent to the Great Exhibition of 1851.” Kipling, who lived in Sussex in the final decades of his life, uses the word memorably in the last book he wrote, Something of Myself, published a year after his death, in 1937. He describes a bricklayer’s gift for locating underground water with a divining rod or dowsing stick: “when he held one fork of the hazel Y and I the other, the thing bowed itself against all the grip of my hand over an unfailing supply.” He goes on, and seems to confirm my otherwise mysterious association of trug with an archaeological dig: 

“Then, out of the woods that know everything and tell nothing, came two dark and mysterious Primitives. They had heard. They would sink that well, for they had the `gift.’ Their tools were an enormous wooden trug, a portable windlass whose handles were curved, and smooth as ox-horns, and a short-handled hoe. They made a ring of brickwork on the bare ground and, with their hands at first, grubbed out the dirt beneath it. As the ring sank they heightened it, course by course, grubbing out with the hoe, till the shaft, true as a rifle-barrel, was deep enough to call for their Father of Trugs, which one brother down below would fill, and the other haul up on the magic windlass. When we stopped, at twenty-five feet, we had found a Jacobean tobacco-pipe, a worn Cromwellian latten spoon and, at the bottom of all, the bronze cheek of a Roman horse-bit.” 

Trug has two other apparently unrelated  meanings: prostitute or trull, and catamite. The latter word was made famous by Anthony Burgess in the first sentence of his 1980 novel Earthly Powers: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” And in German, trug means, among other things, “swindle” or “deception.” Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is connected.

`An Affair of Quiet Words'

How an essay gets written: A visit to Brad Bigelow at The Neglected Books Page turned up a writer new to me. I don’t normally read thrillers but something about The Major (1964) by David Hughes sounded interesting. My university library has a copy. Among the other books by Hughes in its collection is J.B. Priestley: An Informal Study of His Work (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), and I borrowed it as well. Long ago I read several books by Priestley (1894-1984), including Literature and Western Man (1960) and The Image Men (1968), and the alignment of Hughes, Hart-Davis and Priestley seemed promising. My hunch paid off in the third chapter of Hughes’ monograph, “An Essayist and Critic.” Describing Priestley at Cambridge in 1922, he writes: 

“…to write an essay for pleasure was unthinkable. It was a dead form, reminding one curiously of a time-wasting grace of the leisured classes in writing, rather like dressing for dinner alone or spending an hour at the mirror enjoying an immaculate shave. These are not, as they may seem, idle analogies; for it is in such timeless moments, when hands are thoughtlessly occupied in some habitual exercise like dressing or shaving, that the minute germ of an idea which is blown up into an essay arrives in the writer’s mind.” 

One admires the casual authority of Hughes’ voice, his historical sense and his gift for phrase-making – “a time-wasting grace of the leisured classes.” Of all literary forms, the essay is my favorite. It’s also the most under-utilized, in part because of its vulnerably hybrid nature. An essay can start as a book review, a biography, a childhood memory or a lesson in geography, but it can also invite didacticism, always toxic to readerly enjoyment. Orwell, for instance, is at his best when writing about “Boys’ Weeklies” or postcards, not politics. Hughes continues:

 

 “But today we no longer have access to the state of mind in which such useless but diverting conceptions appear in the unanchored intelligence [another nice phrase]. Our conceptions must be vast or hasty or topical; to ride the storm of the uneasy mind we are in, an idea must be sensational, it must walk on the water or fly faster than sound. A poet manqué does not write essays: he joins the staff of an advertising agency, where one word is an expensive item, or he talks about the films he is going to make.” 

The best essays mingle leisureliness and concision. They seem to lope when, in fact, they pirouette. The strictly topical can be death to an essay, though a light touch helps. So does a sense of humor. Good essays, even the most impersonal, are suffused with the essayist’s sensibility. No one else could have written them. See if you recognize the accuracy of Hughes’s next observation: 

“A good talker, delivering a monologue, can be an essayist; he is in tune with himself, but he need not be in touch with his audience. A poet, however privately his bright words seem to flow, is always addressing a god or a muse, something outside himself [ah, the good old days]. An essayist, however, need only talk to himself, though like a conversationalist he is stimulated by the waiting laughter, the ready applause.” 

At this point in his digression, Hughes hasn’t mentioned Priestley, his ostensible subject, for almost two pages. Now he places him, though not by name, in a literary continuum: 

“Certainly the finest essayists in English have always been egocentric. Hazlitt was unshakeable in his opinions; Lamb often gives the impression that he did not particularly wish to hear what others had to say to him. The substance of his essays, after all, was gathered chiefly from when his mind was youthfully open and receptive, and they were written when  he was caged within a fussy, cantankerous middle-age. Chesterton, too, was a man firmly entrenched in his views. These are among the essayists of genius.” 

I quibble with Hughes’ assessment of Lamb. “Cantankerous” isn’t right, and he misses the always-shifting relations of “Charles” and “Elia,” but the three essayists he names represent the peak of the form, if we add Max Beerbohm, George Orwell and V.S. Pritchett. Americans, in general, haven’t excelled in the form, with a few exceptions, most of them recent – H.L. Mencken, Joseph Epstein, Guy Davenport, Cynthia Ozick (and Marilynne Robinson, on occasion, in her less political moods). Blogs hold much promise for reviving and sustaining the essay tradition, but few bloggers possess the necessary chops. Most prefer to wallow in the strictly personal and topical, and seem unable or unwilling to work sub specie aeternitatis. Hughes takes the long view: 

“Always, until now, it was possible for a man of letters to parcel his idle reflections into neat essays and sell them to a periodical. But now they must go to waste or be imagined in a different form. The pressures of our time are too unrelaxing for the essay, which is an affair of quiet words, easily deafened by the urgencies of the present.”

`The Hidden Traces of That Life'

“This is a sort of Zibaldone: a written chaos.” 

This is Michael Oakeshott in 1967 likening his Notebooks, 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014) to Giacomo Leopardi’s prose masterwork, Zibaldone, published in its entirety in English for the first time last year. The Italian title is customarily translated “hodge-podge” or “miscellany,” though “grab bag” or “gallimaufry” might lend an appropriately vernacular touch to what is, after all, a vast gathering of fragments. Both books are collections of thoughts accumulated across time and unified only by the writer’s sensibility. It’s a form that encourages aphorism. Other works in the same formless form are Fernando Pessoa’s irresistibly rereadable The Book of Disquiet, Paul Valéry’s Cahiers/Notebooks and Don Colacho’s aphorisms. 

Oakeshott (1901-1990) was an English political philosopher, not normally a calling I follow with much enthusiasm, but he was also a first-rate writer of prose, author of an essay that clarifies my thinking, “On Being Conservative” (Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962): “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” In other words, uncommon common sense. Oakeshott devotes much attention to such formal philosophers as Plato, Aristotle and Spinoza, but the notebooks include many entries devoted to his romantic life and his reading. He was a devoted reader of fiction, and among his favorite novelists were Cervantes, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Henry James and Conrad. Judging by his notebooks, Oakeshott wasn’t much of a gossip. 

Thus far, I’ve only browsed the Notebooks, which is perhaps the most satisfactory way for a non-specialist, someone frightfully ignorant of political theory, to read them. This is a book to live with and grow slowly to know and depend on. Here’s a sample from a single page (519) late in the book, from notes Oakeshott made in 1967. The first passage echoes Oliver Edwards’ memorable remark to Dr. Johnson, as reported by Boswell: “I too have tried to be a philosopher, but happiness keeps breaking in.” And then this: “Love touched her, but found her without courage.” (Think of Anna Karenina.) Next, Oakeshott transcribes a quotation, possibly by Eugène Delacroix (according to O’Sullivan): “Only this morning when I got up I said to myself, where are the good old days when I was unhappy.” Oakeshott comments: “Ah, those dear vanished days when I was so unhappy.” (Oakeshott, we learn, had the driest of wits.) Next, Oakeshott visits pop culture: “When pop music provides anything half as good as Ronald Burge’s `Take a look at Ireland’ [unidentified by O’Sullivan]…The indescribable vulgarity of `Sergeant Pepper.’” Then a terse statement that might serve as Oakeshott’s apologia: “In everything he had his own way of doing it.” Oakeshott then quotes the first two lines of Henry Howard’s poem to Sir Thomas Wyatt, inscribed on Wyatt’s memorial in the Wykeham chapel of Sherborne Abbey: 

“Wyat [sic] resteth here, that

Quick could never rest” 

The most thoughtful and well-written review I have read of Leopardi’s Zibaldone was Adam Kirsch’s in the New Republic. Here’s how it begins, and the words apply with equal justice to Oakeshott’s Notebooks, the work of a political philosopher: 

“Ours is an age of exposure and self-exposure. Only what happens in public, we tend to believe, is really real; and it becomes more real the more people see it happen. This way of thinking is, among other things, hostile to literature. For literary experience begins in privacy, in the mind of the writer, and it is consummated in privacy, in the mind of the reader. Books are printed and sold, and reviewed, only in order to facilitate this kind of invisible intimacy. It follows that it is always impossible to say with certainty just where the genuine literary and intellectual life of any period is taking place, at least until it is over. Only later, sometimes much later, do the hidden traces of that life begin to surface.”

`One Human Being's Sojourn on Earth'

I give books to people I like. Don’t mistake this for generosity. First I gauge their tastes and the importance of books in their lives. They needn’t be obsessives but I’m on the lookout for people not in search of a “good read” (the OED says otherwise, but read is not a noun in my book). I reduce the prerequisites for a gift book to two: 1.) I’ve read it, perhaps several times, and it remains important to me. It found a home in my sensibility. 2.) The recipient is ready to receive such a book. I haven’t yet met a twelve-year-old ready for Pascal’s Pensées. In recent months I’ve given readers Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm, a paperback collection of Thomas Wyatt’s poems, Yvor Winters’ In Defense of Reason, Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags and A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science. All you can conclude from this is that I know some interesting people. 

When I say my motive is not generosity, I mean it’s profoundly selfish. The more people who read good books, the more interesting conversations I’m likely to have and the less likely I am to hear people talking about Dan Brown, Malcolm Gladwell and Gabriel Josipovici. The only criticism that really matters is one reader talking intently to another. I think of the Irish poet Bernard O'Donoghue’s “Going without Saying” (Gunpowder, 1995): 

“It is a great pity we don’t know

When the dead are going to die

So that, over a last companionable

Drink, we could tell them

How much we liked them. 

“Happy the man who, dying, can

Place his hand on his heart and say:

`At least I didn’t neglect to tell

The thrush how beautifully she sings.’” 

I try to emulate O’Donoghue’s dying man. Tell someone how important a book has been to you. At least tell them how beautifully the writer sings. I’m no utopian. Books don’t make people good. Lots of terrible and mediocre people read (and write). Books aren’t medicine. They fix nothing. Good books ask little and repay us with enjoyment and endurance.  In the March issue of Harper’s, Arthur Krystal takes on the seemingly exhausted subject of the canon in “What is Literature?”  He writes, “The canon may be gone, but the idea of the canon persists,” and that’s exactly the point. Seasoned readers, committed readers know first-hand the power of books. Krystal is so audacious as to answer the question posed by his title: 

“That’s what literature is about, isn’t it? — a record of one human being’s sojourn on earth, proffered in verse or prose that artfully weaves together knowledge of the past with a heightened awareness of the present in ever new verbal configurations. The rest isn’t silence, but it isn’t literature either.”

`Instead, They Can Be Entertained'

“Maybe some of us are wired backward and respond paradoxically to stimuli. Maybe what we think is orange is blue. But I for one have always laughed in the presence of the dismal. Not a rueful laugh but with fresh relish. I cannot tire of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet or Larkin’s night terrors. They are voluptuaries of the bed of aridity.” 

Some of us giggle at futility, as when a stranger expends enormous sums of energy, money and time trying to accomplish the ridiculous. We find the spectacle of sports amusing, the waxing of expensive automobiles, hair colored or worn in cornrows or Mohawks, or the careful choice of a toupee. Of course, futility at this point bleeds into pretentiousness, philistinism and pointless extravagance, and we speculate as to where aesthetics ends and ethics begins. We can be terrible, yes, but also quite silly. We are voluptuaries of aridity and vanity. 

The aphoristically minded writer above is the poet Kay Ryan in “Specks,” a prose piece she published last year in Poetry. Another symptom of Ryan’s backward wiring is the unpredictability of her tastes. Who else has paired Pessoa and Larkin, two great poets kidnapped by the academy and held for ransom? She adds Frost, Stevie Smith, Dickinson and William Bronk to the mix, and we know we’re in the presence of a rare reading sensibility. From Larkin she reads “Reference Back” (written in 1955, collected in The Whitsun Weddings, 1964). The poet’s mother overhears him playing “Riverside Blues” by King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band (including Armstrong), recorded a year after Larkin’s birth, and she finds the song “pretty.” Part of the pleasure of reading “Reference Back” and most of  Larkin’s best poems is seeing what new species of futility life brings him this time and how he learns to live with it, or not. Ryan writes: 

“I always want to laugh at the perfection of these setups. We know this desperate stuckness well from his other poems. There could almost be a Chinese character, one single figure that would mean in all its pent-up intensity, `Larkin’s fix.’ He’s always in Larkin’s fix.” 

What she writes later about Stevie Smith (much admired by Larkin) applies equally to Larkin and other writers at once desperately human, like their readers, and idiosyncratic: 

“The reader of Stevie Smith can never for an instant forget that she is looking through the cock eyes of Stevie Smith. Everything that transpires does so in Stevie Smith’s universe, which is not one’s own. Meaning, none of the sufferings hurt and none of the pronouncements crowd the mind. Instead, they can be entertained; we can examine them as if they were toys although they are not.” 

The best writers, those who constitute good reliable company, mingle common humanity with unprecedented oddness. But not too odd, for that would make them too dismal, too arid, too futile.

`He Laughed, Remembering'

A fierce midday rain last week left shoals of pine needles and dirt on the driveway and knocked small branches and hard green cones off the loblollies. The crape myrtle in the backyard was already heavy with pinkish-red blossoms and the rain snapped off a branch and left it hanging like an oversized bouquet. In the grass beside it was a possum, seriously dead judging by the flies that swarmed on his face. He was curled into a circle with the tip of his hairless tail on his head, and his upper lip was drawn back, exposing perfect little teeth. I lifted him by the tail, wrapped him in a plastic bag and dumped him in the trash bin. Whether his death had anything to do with the rain and the broken crape myrtle, I’ll never know. Here is Joshua Mehigan’s “The Bowl” (Accepting the Disaster, 2014): 

“For weeks, the heavy white ceramic bowl

he left out back lay tilted to one side.

But then one morning it had been put right.

Was it the possum, called down late at night

By hunger from some bony treetop? No.

The possum only ever tipped it over.

But when a small bird perched to drink from it,

He laughed, remembering all night long the rain

Dashing across the gutters and the roof.

The bowl was full. The rain had righted it.” 

We guess so much and know so little. We’re surrounded by mundane mysteries, not to mention grand ones. Inductive reasoning is useful but not infallible. That the subject of Mehigan’s poem laughed at his conclusion is promising. He knows he doesn’t know everything.

`A Book Among Books, Almost'

Finally, thanks to Micah Mattix at Prufrock, I have seen Borges’ “Library of Babel” and it’s as grand as I had always imagined. To my surprise, it was in Cincinnati and was razed in 1955 to make way on Vine Street for a parking garage and office building. Three visages graced the entrance like tutelary spirits – Shakespeare, Milton and Benjamin Franklin. Take a look at the thirteenth photo from the top – hats off, no computers, people seated at tables reading big fat books – a preview of paradise. 

Collected in the late Dennis O’Driscoll’s The Outnumbered Poet: Critical and Autobiographical Essays (Gallery Books, 2013) is the 2005 essay “The Library of Adventure.” O’Driscoll starts with an epigraph by Randall Jarrell: “I rarely feel happier than when I am in a library – very rarely feel more soothed and calm and secure; and there in the soft gloom of the stacks, I feel very much in my element—a book among books, almost.” [from an unpublished talk to librarians excerpted by Stephen Burt in Randall Jarrell and His Age (2002).] O’Driscoll was born in 1954 in Thurles, ninety miles southwest of Dublin. The town had no bookshops, and O’Driscoll’s family had no television, record player or musical instruments. He started reading early and soon sucked the town library dry: “At some point in my childhood I began to ruefully realize that one book a day…would make only a small dent in the stock of the local library. I therefore resolved to double the dose and increase my intake to two books a day, as though I needed a book for each of my avaricious eyes.” With Jarrell, O’Driscoll associates books and libraries with contentment, security and abiding happiness: 

“Sorrowings notwithstanding, the obliviousness that is a synonym for happiness (we are never more contented in life than when we are out of it) triumphs regularly in childhood like the happy endings of the stories. Reading acts as a literate means of achieving pre-literate states of primary contentment and wholeness; insofar, that is, as one can actually speak of happiness except retrospectively.”

`Though He May Lose His Soul in the Process'

In his review of Garry Wills’ first book, Chesterton: Man and Mask (1961), Evelyn Waugh, writing in the National Review, says “it is a grave reproach to suppose that [Chesterton’s] work needs elucidation. A writer who cannot make his meaning clear to his own generation and their immediate successors is a bad writer.” Waugh suggests Chesterton would have been displeased by Wills’ book having started as a doctoral thesis, and goes on to rebuke trendy obscurity, incoherence masking as profundity and the elucidation industry. “Chesterton, of all men of our times,” he writes, “wrote especially for the common man, repeating in clear language his simple, valuable messages.” The notion of an exegetical class would have horrified and amused Waugh. Do we really need books titled Understanding Tony Kushner, Understanding Rita Dove and Understanding Neil Simon? These are writers who neither require nor deserve understanding. 

Waugh next takes on Wills’ style, calling it “not uniformly bad.” Just the other day on the radio I heard a dancer describing some avant-garde twaddle she was performing as “existential.” Here is Waugh on Wills’ prose: “the jargon of the lecture room keeps slipping in – `existential,’ `dialectic,’ `normative,’ `experiential,’ `complementarity’ – in a way which would have set the teeth on edge in the head of the old journalist.” The same old ugly words used by the inarticulate to impress the pretentious. Waugh takes on Wills’ title, with its implication of “an attempt at exposure”: 

“It has become commonly accepted nowadays that any man’s idiosyncrasies of appearance or manner are a disguise deliberately adopted to conceal some fear or vice. Persona is one of the cant terms of modern criticism, and modern critics regard it as their function to strip their subject of its protective mask [more exegesis]. They should take note of Max Beerbohm’s Happy Hypocrite. The mask, the style, is the man.” 

While handling Wills rather daintily, Waugh expresses qualified admiration for Chesterton, and not merely as a coreligionist. He asks of Chesterton’s prolific output: “How much was it the product of nervous restlessness and sloth? For profusion can be slothful [one thinks of Dr. Johnson].” Here’s how Waugh describes the service performed by Wills in his monograph: 

“There used (and I daresay there still is) to be a company of ladies at the Hollywood film studios whose task it was to tell stories to the directors and producers who lacked the aptitude of reading. They used to peruse all the literature of their time, contemporary and classic, and spin a comprehensive yarn to the assembled company. Now and then they would strike a spark from those flinty imaginations and a voice would proclaim: `That’s for me. Go buy it.’” 

But he adds, “It is hard to conceive that Mr Wills’s exegesis will greatly illumine the general reader.” Thoughtfully, Waugh performs that service in lieu of Wills, and succinctly limns the relation of writer to man: 

“[Chesterton] was a lovable and much loved man abounding in charity and humility. Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice—all the odious qualities—which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew, his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement.” 

And that is why Waugh’s artistic achievement is so much greater even than Chesterton’s. 

[The review of the Wills volume is collected in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, 1984.]

`But for a Certain Surprisingness'

Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti cites a shrewd insight by C.S. Lewis in his 1947 essay “Of Stories” (Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, 1967): 

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he `has read’ them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?” 

We all know readers who treat books, even great books, like one-night stands. Close the covers and it’s time to move on. This makes sense, of course, if one is reading trash. Who rereads Stephen King or Donald Barthelme, which begs another question: Who reads Stephen King or Donald Barthelme? No, a “literary man,” in Lewis’ estimation, pledges his troth to the best books, making him a sort of serial monogamist, though seasoned readers are well known for being generous with their loyalties. Two sentences later, Lewis says excitement “must disappear” from subsequent readings, and here I think he’s mistaken. As a reader and a human being, with deepening maturity and a fallible memory, I change between readings. The man reading Macbeth today is not the book-drunk thirteen-year-old who read it for the first time, nor the eighteen-year-old English major, and so forth. Good books grow at least as fast as we do, often faster. Lewis writes: “You cannot, except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened,” but then clarifies his meaning: “The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness.” 

Lewis is writing of stories, of plots with suspense and narrative pull. Once we know the captain and crew of the Pequod go down with the ship, and only one “did survive the wreck,” do we put away Moby-Dick and never return? A first reading is a rehearsal; the show is the rest of your life with the book. Nabokov in Lectures on Literature (1980) put it like this: “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Here’s an example: A book I keep in almost constant rotation is The Anatomy of Melancholy. By its rambling, learned, frequently rewritten, ever-expanded, stuff-it-all-in nature, Burton’s treatise is built for rereading. Straight through, I’ve read it three times. More often I dip into it  bibliomanically, for amusement and morale-boosting. For a first-time reader intimidated by the bulk of the Anatomy and its Latin-infused prose, I suggest the slender Burton on Melancholy (Hesperus Press, 2013), a 108-page selection edited by Nicholas Robins. He uses the 1927 edition edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, with all the Latin translated. For a book ostensibly about the madness of those afflicted with “black bile,” Robins writes in his introduction, “there is nothing insane about the voice that carries us through [the author’s] long journey—nothing saner or more reasonable; more personable or personal.” 

Lewis concludes “On Stories” like this: “In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at least either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think it is sometimes done—or very, very nearly done—in stories. I believe the effort to be well worth making.” 

Pleasingly, Burton reports that some sportsmen take Lewis’ metaphor quite literally and find relief from melancholy in fowling and capturing birds in nets. In a section titled “Exercise Rectified of Body and Mind,” he writes: 

“Fowling is more troublesome, but all out as delightsome to some sorts of men, be it with guns, lime, nets, glades, gins, strings, baits, pitfalls, pipes, calls, stalking-horses, setting-dogs, decoy-ducks, &c., or otherwise. Some much delight to take larks with day-nets, small birds with chaff-nets, plovers, partridge, herons, snipe, &c.”

`I Know Every Book of Mine By Its Scent'

I guessed citrus, faint but discernable. The librarian concurred but narrowed her guess to orange. Perhaps, but I noted a hint of lemon, though not so strong as furniture polish; more attenuated, like the scent of a lemon cake baking two rooms away. She was almost ready to agree when she renewed her argument in another direction: “Have you ever smelled a tea rose?” I thanked her again for fetching the book, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), a first edition in a library binding, accompanied by a fragrance that turned an old favorite into a multi-sensory experience. I’ll note one sentence in the collection’s title story. The main character, Dr. Nahum Fischelson, hears the calls of vendors in the Warsaw streets, including this: “`Gold, gold, gold,’ a woman who dealt in rotten oranges shrieked.” 

A new book smells like a new refrigerator. That is, it doesn’t. A book’s scent is earned, and old books tend to smell musty or dusty, like the passage of time itself at the human scale. In 2009, a team of chemists analyzed old-book fragrance and concluded: “The aroma of an old book is familiar to every user of a traditional library. A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness, this unmistakable smell is as much part of the book as its contents.” This sounds suspiciously like the more pretentious reaches of wine-speak (“steely minerality”), but the chemists say the scent originates in “several hundred identified volatile and semivolatile organic compounds (VOCs) off-gassing from paper and the object in general.” I must work “off-gassing” into conversation soon. 

The non-VOC scent most often encountered in library books is tobacco, sometimes accompanied by a spill of ash. The effect on a non-smoking, book-loving reader is sickening. Old books smell good to those of us at home in their company. Non-readers, no doubt, would be offended. On his first visit to the Bodleian, Charles Lamb reports: “I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.” Lamb’s “moth-scented” coinage sounds scriptural. In 1801, while reading Duns Scotus, Coleridge declares in a letter to Southey, “I am burning Locke, Hume, & Hobbes under his Nose -- they stink worse than Feathers or Assafoetida [sic].” Whether Coleridge refers to the philosophers or their books remains uncertain, though I prefer the approach of a lesser writer, George Gissing, who has the title character in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), a semi-fictional version of himself, boast: 

“”…I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years – never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the Great Cambridge Shakespeare—it has an odour which carries me back yet further in life.” 

Ants, who communicate by emitting and reading smells, would understand. Imagine a vast catalogue of bookish scents: “Ah, yes, I smell the Burton. The McLean edition, 1826. Two volumes.”

`The Suddeness of It! Bang!'

As compelling an opening as I know for any essay: 

“Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my weak imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he asked a question, and received an answer.” 

Who could stop reading after this teasingly cryptic paragraph? Who, we yearn to know, is this insubstantial wraith? We mean not only his name and place of residence but his significance. Why is he worthy of our attention? What was his question and who answered him? If I tell you this paragraph and the subsequent essay are quietly suffused with a delicious sense of irony, that would almost give it away. The author is the most nimble of ironists, Max Beerbohm, in “A Clergyman,” written in 1918 and published in his finest collection, And Even Now (1920). 

Beerbohm refers to an exchange recorded by Boswell on April 7, 1778, at the home of Mrs. Thrale. Sir John Pringle had asked Boswell to ask Johnson “what were the best English sermons for style.” Boswell pitches names and Johnson takes a swing at them. This exchange follows: “BOSWELL: What I want to know is, what sermons afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence. JOHNSON: We have no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for anything; if you mean that kind of eloquence. A CLERGYMAN, whose name I do not recollect: Were not Dodd’s sermons addressed to the passions? JOHNSON: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.” Beerbohm follows with this sentence, given its own punchy paragraph: 

“The suddenness of it! Bang!—and the rabbit that had popped from its burrow was no more.” 

The clergyman evaporates not only from Boswell’s Life but from history, from whatever metaphysical realm a person inhabits when he shows up namelessly in a book. He is one of many insubstantial, often anonymous, possibly fictional personages who haunt literary tradition. Another is “a person on business from Porlock,” the hapless fellow who supposedly interrupts Coleridge while he is composing “Kubla Khan” in a dream. Describing the event in the third person, Coleridge writes that “though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” 

The story has always sounded fishy to me. As a witness, Coleridge, one of literary history’s certified bloviators, is about as reliable as any junkie. I’ve always assumed his inspiration flagged. He was blocked, stuck with a not-bad but forever incomplete fragment of a poem, and came up with a story to explain his fizzling out. Stevie Smith agreed: “the truth is I think he was already stuck / With Kubla Khan.” 

Beerbohm’s essay is pure fabulation. By speculating on the clergyman’s identity and spinning increasingly outrageous theories to explain his question and Johnson’s dismissive answer, Beerbohm has good clean fun at the expense of enthusiastically imaginative readers, teachers, critics. He concludes: 

“`A CLERGYMAN’” never held up his head or smiled again after the brief encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline. Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall’s almond trees he was no more. I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.”

`Accepting the Disaster'

My review of Accepting the Disaster by Joshua Mehigan appears in issue #36 of The Quarterly Conversation.

`And We Drink, Alas, Prose'

In “Paysage de Crépuscule,” the last piece he wrote for The New Yorker before his death in the final days of 1963, A.J. Liebling played Boswell to the occasionally Johnsonian James A. Macdonald, aka Colonel John R. Stingo, the New York horseracing writer for the National Enquirer (yes, that National Enquirer). In 1953, Liebling had published an entire book, The Honest Rainmaker, dedicated to the Runyonesque character he called “my favorite writer.” Rather than Boswell/Johnson, perhaps a more suggestive literary cognate is Charles Lamb/Elia; for, though a certified citizen of the United States of America, Stingo is at least half Liebling and most of the other half, hung on the skeleton of an historical personage, is the Platonic ideal of Raffishness. “Paysage de Crépuscule” (“The Twilight Landscape”) is a sad and funny retrospective by a dying man who wrote better than almost anyone and found immense pleasure in prose – his own and other writers’. Liebling writes: 

“As Colonel John R. Stingo, for thirty years he wrote a column called `Yea Verily’ for a Sundays-only paper called the New York Enquirer and its successor, the National Enquirer, which bills itself as `The World’s Liveliest Newspaper,’ in order, no doubt, to avoid confusion with the Chicago Tribune, which is the World’s Greatest Newspaper. He received no direct emolument for what he wrote, although he is in my opinion the best curve-ball writer since Anatomy Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, making the prose of his contemporaries look shabby and unfurnished.” 

Which, of course, is precisely what Liebling did, mingling sports metaphors and allusions to his great seventeenth-century prose forebears. Liebling is our truest rebuke to those who judge that prose best which is most utilitarian. The above was prompted by a piece published in the New York Times on Sunday, “Poetry: Who Needs It?,” in which poet-critic William Logan writes: 

“The way we live now is not poetic. We live prose, we breathe prose, and we drink, alas, prose. There is prose that does us no great harm, and that may even, in small doses, prove medicinal, the way snake oil cured everything by curing nothing. But to live continually in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose is to become deaf to what language can do.” 

I won’t argue this point by point. Logan is mostly correct. Our age is linguistically dull because it’s linguistically indifferent. Most of our poetry is indifferent prose, and much “literary” prose is merely bad poetry. But prose need not be prosaic. The best of it is energized and energizing, suffused with thought and feeling, as concisely precise as a chromosome. Good prose doesn’t have to be as gleefully rococo as Liebling’s often is. It can be as plain and acidic as Swift’s or J.V. Cunningham’s. In a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker, Liebling formulates the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse: “The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.” 

[“Paysage de Crépuscule,” published in The New Yorker on Jan. 11, 1964, is collected in Liebling at The New Yorker: Uncollected Essays (University of New Mexico Press, 1994).]

`The Sources of His Literary Powers Are So Mysterious'

“Vladimir Nabokov hadn’t it in him to write an uninteresting sentence.” 

True of Nabokov and true of the author of that sentence, Joseph Epstein, who writes of Speak, Memory, surely among the most beautiful and moving books (and titles) in the language. I thought immediately of another writer, this one notoriously cloddish and ham-fisted but undeniably powerful, one singled out for scorn by Nabokov and for praise by Epstein – Theodore Dreiser. I remember reading “The Mystery of Theodore Dreiser” in the November 1986 issue of The New Criterion, in which Epstein promptly addresses the infelicity of Dreiser’s prose. In his third sentence he writes that the author of Sister Carrie had “an aluminum ear (one down from tin), an unfailing penchant for the purple, an oafish wit, and the literary tact and lightness of touch of a rhinoceros.” He goes on and – be prepared -- his claim will offend aesthetes and the engagé alike: 

“He may not always have been able to write a careful sentence or a well-shaped paragraph, but this did not stand in the way of his turning out powerful novels. To put my cards on the table early in the game, let me say that Theodore Dreiser, in my opinion, is America’s greatest novelist.” 

I remember being shocked on first reading this (the essay is collected in Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives, 1991). I had read most of Dreiser seriously and sympathetically in my teens, and later reread Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy. But the prose increasingly got in the way. Years later, I knew a Henry James scholar who reread Sister Carrie and was embarrassed to admit how moving she found the book, in particular Hurstwood’s sad decline. I’m often tempted to return to that novel, but I suspect I’ve been spoiled by a taste for good prose. In the subsequent sentences, Epstein does his best to buck up my fortitude: 

“Herman Melville may have written the greatest single American novel, Henry James plumped deeper into the subtleties of human motivation, Mark Twain written more lyrically about this country, but Theodore Dreiser, that clod, bumbler, yokel, creep, wrote the novels that tell more in the way of elemental truth about American life and character, and tell it in a consistently persuasive and powerful manner, than those of any other American writer before or since his time.” 

How many readers or critics can you name who celebrate, with comparable enthusiasm, Nabokov and Dreiser? Epstein is a reader first, then a critic – an important distinction, I think. As a reader he is non-programmatic, non-systematic, without theory, guided by taste and experience. His reading sensibility is big, elastic and generous, without ever being wishy-washy. Consistency is not always a virtue. In Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013), Epstein writes to Frederic Raphael: 

“Yet with his wretched prose, his stupid ideas, his entirely unappealing personality, Dreiser wrote some of the most powerful American novels going: partly because he was on to great themes – the hunger of the underdog, the struggle against the loaded dice of destiny, the drama of ambition – and partly because the sources of his literary power are so mysterious.”

`Indubitably I Should Miss Them'

“I understand the need to keep such work close. It comes not only from the desire to reread or study or gain inspiration, but – at least for me – also from a talismanic impulse.” 

“Talismanic” is not a word with much application to my life, or so I thought. Despite a touch of OCD (counting telephone poles, cracks in the sidewalk – harmless hobbies), I’m largely free of superstition. Books are different. I concluded long ago that I’m happiest and most at ease in their company, even if they’re not mine and I’m not reading them. I enter libraries and bookstores with a sense of anticipation: What am I going to find? As a newspaper reporter I interviewed people in their homes and was often surprised and saddened by the absence of books, even Bibles or bestsellers, though I came from a largely bookless family. What can people be doing with their time? 

The sentence quoted above is from “The Top Shelf: On Books I Need Beside Me,” an essay by the poet Floyd Skloot collected in Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir (Terrace Books, 2014). Skloot refers to a piece PhilipLarkin wrote in 1972 as part of a program for the Antiquarian Book Fair, and later collected in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. In it, Larkin, a university librarian by profession, denies being a book lover or collector, instead characterizing himself as “a compulsive reader” (the “C” in OCD). Skloot refers to this passage in Larkin’s brief blurb; in particular, the catalog of necessary poets: 

“Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen. True, I reach to the right more often than to the left, but the twelve are there as exemplars. All in all, therefore, I should miss my books. I like to think I could do without them -- I like to think I could do without anything -- but indubitably I should miss them.” 

A talisman is a charm or amulet possessing magical powers. It’s a stretch, but that’s not a bad description of a book. As infants, all my sons were attracted to them as interesting physical objects, the way the pages riffled (and tore), the way a brick-shaped object can mutate into a figurative bird. But that’s stage magic aimed at occupants of the cheap seats, at least until we learn to read and begin, some of us, to read to live. Skloot shares with us his top shelf, “a never-changing core group” of six poets – Frost, Eliot, Bishop, Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Larkin. An auxiliary member is his friend and former teacher, the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. On deck are Roethke, Williams, Lowell, Sexton and John Montague. 

Skloot’s “exemplars” remind me that talismans are highly idiosyncratic, customized for one’s sensibility and often non-transferrable. All are of the twentieth century. All wrote in English. Thomas, Roethke and Sexton seem as untalismanic as I can imagine poets being – but that’s why they’re on Skloot’s list and not mine. Magic is private. My talismanic short list includes Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Larkin’s Complete Poems, Montaigne, The Geography of the Imagination, Shakespeare and Gulliver’s Travels. Only Larkin straddles both, though I love Eliot. 

The funhouse reflection of Skloot’s “Top Shelf” in Revertigo is “The Bottom Shelf: On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read.” His taste in novels he’s unable to finish reading is exquisite – Sophie’s Choice, Doctor Zhivago, The Magic Mountain, The Sunlight Dialogues and Jay Cantor’s Great Neck, among others. Only about Humboldt’s Gift, a novel I reread every few years, do we part company. I would dismiss Skloot’s “failures” as just that – failed novels, but his reaction is more thoughtful: 

“In the presence of certain material, whether subject matter or style or emphasis or structure, I read with a combination of eagerness and avidity, of need and hope, that defines essential aspects of my essential self. I’m a reader, I’ve discovered, for whom the stakes can be absurdly high, and who – however experienced and trained and knowledgeable – is vulnerable to almost inexplicable passions and responses to the books that get most deeply under my skin.”