`More or Less a Substitute for Nail-Biting'

Without comment, an unknown reader suggested I read Chapter 13 of An Autobiographical Novel (1966, the year Capote published his own “non-fiction novel”) by Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), a once popular Beat fellow traveler, prolific follower of fashion and arrested adolescent read largely by others of his kind. Think Thomas Wolfe with brains. My reader’s suggestion struck me as unlikely enough to follow. I knew only that Doubleday appended Novel to the title to forestall libel suits. In Chapter 13, the narrator is still a teenager and living in Chicago, which means Rexroth has already devoted 110 pages to the life of a child. This is unforgivable unless you are Marcel Proust or Anne Frank. I almost gave up after three or four pages, until I came upon this:  

“. . . somewhere around my twelfth year I acquired the questionable accomplishment of being able to read absolutely anything.  Perhaps this is a vice or neurosis, the symptom of some serious lack in real life. Maybe, but I still have it.”

The polite word for Rexroth is “garrulous.” He reminds me of Henry Miller, another self-besotted teller of tall tales. He loves the sound of his own voice, and one is forever assaying the veracity of his words, Novel or no Novel. But what impressed me was that I acquired a similar “vice or neurosis” around the same age, and had never heard anyone else self-diagnosis the malady. I’ve been in partial remission since my mid-twenties. Today, I’m eager to not read many of the books I encounter, and have no compunction about closing volumes prematurely. But back then I was an omnivore and largely uncritical, guilt-ridden when I failed to finish reading a book. I no longer regret this, because it’s an efficient way to develop and hone critical standards and skills – through application, not theory. Then Rexroth makes a curious observation:

“This omnivorous appetite for reading things in sets and subjects [he has just described reading books of science and psychoanalysis] stood me in good stead, because it meant I got most of the world’s important fiction out of the way in adolescence where it belongs. I would take the Constance Garnett Chekhov, Turgenev, or Dostoevsky, the Archer Ibsen (a dreadful translation), the New York Edition of Henry James, or the mail-order sets of Joseph Conrad and Jack London, start with Volume I, and read straight through. I’m not proud of this. It seems to me now to be more or less a substitute for nail-biting.”

Why would one wish to get fiction “out of the way in adolescence where it belongs?” That’s a serious undervaluing of novels and stories. Not all fiction is science fiction. Most of the fiction I read today I’ve read many times before (including James, Chekhov and Conrad). One reading is never sufficient with a good book, fiction or otherwise. Rexroth starts sounding like a compulsive womanizer or competitive eater trying to break the hot dog-swallowing record. The notion of a book deepening across time, maturing with its reader, seems utterly alien to him. In his next sentences, Rexroth gives us a clue as to his real motivation:

“However, it purged me of a taste for nondescript fiction and indiscriminate light reading. I have read very little fiction except detective stories and science fiction since. A few years later, when I began to frequent bohemia, I discovered that I was marvelously well equipped for impressive name-dropping and deep critical analysis of the Russian masters in perfect studio-party style.”

There’s Rexroth’s big secret: chicks dig Goncharov. If you require further insight into Rexroth’s sensibility, try this:

“When I meet friends today who teach American literature and who are capable of long articles in PMLA, or even whole courses, on the moral problems of James Fenimore Cooper, I always feel like I’m being kidded. American fiction, even Hawthorne, even Melville, to this day seems to me to be absolute trash.”

`A Stream of Commonality Must Be Found'

“He’d rather speak impersonally: `I’m always trying—as in poems—to say things that are true for everybody insofar as I can.’”

David Ferry’s bluffness here, a mingling of Johnsonian modesty and Johnsonian authority, is refreshing. Perhaps he’s merely being modest during an interview, though Ferry has never impressed me as a know-it-all channeling the Voice of Mankind – an occupational hazard among poets. In fact, I think he’s being rather old-fashioned, respecting both truth and human commonality. Rather than indulge in identity politics and speak for some favored demographic group, or simply shoot off his mouth, Ferry would probably agree with Johnson in his “Life of Dryden,” who defined poetry as “the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” Human truths are knowable and oblige us to express them. As I’ve noted before, Ferry returns to Johnson with some regularity, having long ago internalized his words. In “That Evening at Dinner” (Of No Country I Know, 1999) he writes:  

In one of the books Dr. Johnson told the story:

`In the scale of being, wherever it begins,

Or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep;

Infinite vacuities. . .For surely,

Nothing can so disturb the passions, or

Perplex the intellects of man so much,

As the disruption of this union with

Visible nature, separation from all

That has delighted or engaged him, a change

Not only of the place but of the manner

Of his being, an entrance into a state

Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps

A state he has not faculties to know.'”

Some of the passage is drawn from Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyn’s A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1759), and the balance from one of his most acute essays, The Rambler #78 (1750). In the latter Johnson articulates a truth few of us would argue with: “Events, of which we confess the importance, excite little sensibility, unless they affect us more nearly than as sharers in the common interest of mankind; that desire which every man feels of being remembered and lamented, is often mortified when we remark how little concern is caused by the eternal departure even of those who have passed their lives with publick honours, and been distinguished by extraordinary performances. It is not possible to be regarded with tenderness except by a few.”

One of my favorite poems by C.H. Sisson is the ninth section of a sequence titled “Tristia” (Collected Poems, 1998). Sisson’s sensibility is grimmer than Ferry’s, though his dark skepticism is invigorating:

“Speech cannot be betrayed, for speech betrays,

And what we say reveals the men we are.

But, once come to a land where no-one is,

We long for conversation, and a voice

Which answers what we say when we succeed

In saying for a moment that which is.

O careless world, which covers what is there

With what it hopes, or what best cheats and pays,

But speech with others needs another tongue.

For a to speak to b, and b to a,

A stream of commonalty must be found,

Rippling at times, at times in even flow,

And yet it turns to Lethe in the end.”

Sisson doesn’t shy away from saying things that are, in Ferry’s words, “true for everybody.” He’s free with the first-person plural: “We long for conversation.” And he declares a truth-seeker’s imperative, as Johnson would: “A stream of commonalty must be found.” And then oblivion.

`How Strange and Unpredictable Life Is!'

I can date with unlikely accuracy the first and last time I read Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”: this time of year, early in the seventh grade, in 1964. It was in our English Lit textbook along with such war horses as O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Last Leaf,” Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country.” I stood at a bookish, man-child cusp, still reading science fiction but dabbling in Kafka and Camus. It was all a brave new world, this literary culture – a tarted-up way of saying “fashion” or “orthodoxy of opinion.” I didn’t yet know I wasn’t supposed to enjoy such things, but I was already cowed by critics and ripe for snobbery.

Just published is The Necklace and Other Stories (W.W. Norton), unnecessarily subtitled Maupassant for Modern Times (can one imagine a Maupassant for Bronze Age Times?), translated by Sandra Smith. Do you remember the story? Nabokov makes fun of it in Ada, and has Mlle. Larivière write an Anti-terra version of Maupassant’s story titled “La Rivière de Diamants.” I wasn’t prepared to dislike and, eventually, feel sorry for Madame Mathilde Loisel (and her heroically forebearing husband). The opening line in Smith’s version reads like the first sentence of a fairy tale (that most moralistic of forms): “She was one of those pretty, charming young women born into a working-class family, as if by some error of fate.” She might be Emma Bovary’s déclassé cousin. The story is virtually all plot, which is probably why sophisticates are offended. It’s a story, compulsively readable, a morality tale, and there isn’t a lot to say about it. Annotations are redundant. Maupassant concludes the story’s penultimate section like this:

“What would have happened if she hadn’t lost that necklace? Who knows? Who can know? How strange and unpredictable life is!”

“How little it takes to make or break us!”

That line – “How strange and unpredictable life is!” – might serve as a thumbnail précis of every good story ever written, from Homer to Naipaul.  When reading Maupassant, we look to our own experience of life for a gloss, not a critic or reference book. We lose a lot by getting too sophisticated for our britches. Next I’ll read “Boule de Suif,” in which Smith amusingly translates the title character’s name as “Butterball.” And I haven’t read any O. Henry stories in two years, though I’m not ready for “The Man without a Country.”

`Their Courage, Their Disinterestedness'

A reader has alerted me to an English-language website dedicated to Zbigniew Herbert. You’ll find translations of his work, and poems written in homage of Herbert. The effort is worthy of praise, especially if the site introduces new readers to one of the last century’s leading poets, but the writing, though heartfelt, is middling at best (I can’t judge the quality of the translations).

This is yet another reminder that sincerity and good intentions have nothing to do with good writing. An artist’s earnestness counts for nothing and, in fact, may compromise the quality of his work. Massive herds of poets are sincere in their expression – think: Mary Oliver or Philip Levine – but remain incapable of writing an interesting poem. Herbert implicitly favors detachment, discipline, aesthetic distance, even coldness and harshness, virtues manifest in his best poems. There are places where the moral and aesthetic at least touch if not merge. The writer’s job is not to please or seduce his readers. In a dialogue between two voices, A. and B., titled “Conversation on Writing Poetry” (The Collected Prose 1948-1998, 2010), he has his stand in, B., say:

“Talent is a valuable thing, but it goes to waste without character. What do I mean without character? I mean without a conscious moral attitude toward reality, without a stubborn, uncompromising borderline between what is good and what is evil. For that reason writers are valued not only for their skill but for being uncompromising, for their courage, their disinterestedness—which are extra-aesthetic qualities.”

`The Secret Handshake'

“To hell with the humanities. The future of literature is in the hands of non-specialists.”

This typically provocative pronouncement, grim and rousing, rises from the well-tended grave of David Myers, whose yahrzeit we observe today. The words come from an email he sent me in January 2014, eight months before his death. I had written to tell him I was reviewing David Middleton’s latest collection, The Fiddler of Driskill Hill, and quoted these lines: “Such moments of eternity-in-time / Confirm the Maker in each maker’s rhyme.” David replied: “Middleton is a mentsh” – high praise from D.G. Myers.

Some people leave without a trace. Others seem to take a piece of you with them. The world felt like a safer, more interesting place with David around. When I say “safer,” I mean that in a very immediate way. David’s analytic and argumentative skills were phenomenal. He was a natural-born critic, an agent provocateur in the guise of an English professor. He deftly defended values and judgments I could only mumble about. While I prefer to ignore stupidity and ad hominem attacks, or laugh at them, David moved in like George Foreman, swinging. (I owe the use of the boxing metaphor to David, who admired the men who practiced the sport.)

Back to the “non-specialists”: David was one of nature’s democrats when it came to books, writers and readers – sometimes to a fault. His appetite for fiction, even contemporary fiction, was goatish, though he also wrote: “It’s a good rule not to read a novel before ten years have passed and the novelty has worn off.” I think he could read anything, a capacity I lost more than forty years ago. Initials after your name meant nothing, and if you expressed a Comintern-approved literary or political sentiment, it painted a bull’s eye on your back. The “professionalization” of literary studies for David marked a turning point in civilization, and not a happy one. In 2009, when we collaborated on a list of the “Best American Fiction, 1968–1998” (entirely David’s idea; I just handed him a list of books he hadn’t already named), it provoked the inevitable shit-storm of protest, occasionally laced with anti-Semitism, from the marginally literate and politically aggrieved. I just sat back, watched David and his opponents in the pit, and waited for the fur to fly.

As his friends know, David could be difficult. He was touchy, hot-headed and easily wounded. It lent his apologies substance. Only at the end was he at a loss for words. He loved quoting Yvor Winters: “Write little; do it well.” The bookish precincts of the blogosphere have never recovered from David’s death. It’s a poorer, less amusing, less learned place. Fewer writers than ever “do it well.” In his own terms, David was a fox. In “The Fox’s Apology,” perhaps my favorite among all of his posts at The Commonplace Blog, he wrote of us, his fellow foxes:

   

“These are writers united not by doctrine or ideological commitment, but by an ambition to copiousness and eloquence—and the secret handshake that passes between those who have spent a life among books. They are proud to be foxes. They don’t avoid hedgehogs; they just don’t want to be one. They are happy knowing many small tricks. Or, rather, such knowledge brings them great happiness.” 

The Shulchan Arukh observes, “One should not grieve too much for the dead, and whoever grieves excessively is really grieving for someone else.” As one of David’s foxes wrote more than three centuries ago: “Farewell, too little and too lately known.”

`Their Conversation Has Grandeur'

“I have a little Attic cup dating from the fifth century B.C.E. sitting beside me. It holds paper clips, but every once in a while I `come to’ and a frisson runs down my spine as I think, `2,450 years back and perhaps a little Athenian kid was drinking his milk from this.’ Mere antiquity has its peculiar charms to which the dispositional conservative is perhaps particularly sensitive.”

I resist the urge to fetishize objects I own, to lend them a significance and worth exceeding their functional and aesthetic qualities, but sympathize with Eva Brann’s attachment to the little Greek cup. Anything that inspires such a “frisson” of connection with the past, whether historical or personal, is to be cherished. That tingle reaffirms the sense that we are the products of everything that preceded us. To think otherwise is to sit smugly in a provincial little backwater called Now.

Brann, now eighty-six, is a long-serving tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., born to a Jewish family in Berlin that sought refuge in the United States (another of the many gifts Hitler gave us). Trained at Yale as an archeologist, she is in fact a polymath at home with Heraclitus, Abraham Lincoln and Marilynne Robinson. The passage above is from her essay “Reflections on Imaginative Conservatism,” first published online and now collected in Then & Now: The World’s Center and the Soul’s Demesne (Paul Dry Books, 2015). The passage above continues:

“But all in all the glory of the tradition–a tradition primarily in books–as I’ve tried to lay it out, is not in its pastness but in its presence. These books speak directly and rousingly to me and my friends, known and unknown; moreover, they are in dialogue with each other, on either side of their temporal position. To their predecessors they respond by acceptance and/or rejection; to their successors they attempt to project their influence. And as its individual speakers have greatness, so their conversation has grandeur.”

Seldom have I seen my understanding of how literature works -- how writers and readers, writers and writers, and readers and readers, collaborate, converse and shift positions across time -- articulated so precisely. And don’t assume you know what Brann means by “conservative.” She is not much concerned with “politics” in the customarily banal, touchy, strident sense. Her thinking nicely complements Michael Oakeshott’s “On Being Conservative.” Compare her “conservatism is a temperamental disposition” to Oakeshott’s “conservative disposition.” Brann writes:

  

“Let me put `political’ conservatism aside for a–long–moment. Later I’ll want to show why an `imaginative’ conservative might be all over the political map, as occasion arises: right, center, left–reactionary (disgustedly oppositional), moderate (prudently dithering), and radical (exuberantly reformist).”

Her key sentence for this reader is this: “These books speak directly and rousingly to me and my friends, known and unknown . . .” She leaves their titles unnamed but surely they would include the subject of Brann’s first essay in Then & Now, The Histories of Herodotus. Earlier this week I started reading the translation by Tom Holland published in 2013 by Penguin Classics. Brann begins her essay like this: “You would have to be pretty flat-souled not to be enchanted by Herodotus’s `history’. . .” As this suggests, she challenges the endurance of a commonplace book keeper. Enjoy the aphoristic pleasures of her prose:

“All the things we care about have, or so I think, a root to be understood, reflected on, replanted. (Thomas Aquinas, for example, speaks of radix gratiae, habitus, peccati, virtutis, rationis, `the root of grace, disposition, sin, virtue, reason.’)”

“. . .the ignorance of academic philosophy permits the bliss of occasional insight.”

“The agnosticism in which I have faith begins with a strong sense of human finitude–not others’ but my own, a strong sense that I have no access to the bounds of my own existence, no credible news of that `undiscov’d country from whose bourn/No traveler returns.’”

“So what if some oaf subjects me to anti-Semitism? Let’s not make a federal case of it. I want the law to protect my person from harm, not my soul from insult.”

James Madison she describes as “the most imaginative conservative statesmen I know of, imaginative in envisioning very specifically how things actually work on earth, conservative in devising an edgily innervating stability.” She follows this up with an endorsement of level-headed, non-theoretical, Madisonian populism – something to offend every crackpot, Left or Right:

“The populism that seems to me to suit us is a friendly fellow-feeling based on sheer liking of our common public ways: the matter-of-fact courteous helpfulness of our casual encounters; the ready wit of our linguistic companionableness, the well-worn high-jinx of our gestures; the commonsensical unegalitarian sense of equality, meaning the deep sense that sub specie aeternitatis, seen from the height of heaven, as it were, we are indeed all equal, of an equal creation, but that, on the plateau of earth, we are quite unequally, or better, incommensurably, gifted; the consequent understanding that we are endowed from above with certain rights regarding our existence, but that seen on the shared level of earth we are all mysteries to each other and so, ipso facto, entitled to respect for our individual souls.”

`All Communications Cut'

In the heady days of Solidarność, I experienced an unexpected sense of solidarity with Poland, especially with its writers, and read dozens of books – history, nineteenth-century novels, Stanisław Lem – I might otherwise never have touched. I am genetically apolitical but was stirred in a way I had never been stirred by events in my own country. I felt something akin to patriotism, and for a nation that wasn’t mine. My paternal grandparents were born in Poland, but I never knew them. There was nothing Polish about my upbringing beyond kielbasa and polkas.

Among the books I read was A Warsaw Diary 1978-1981 (trans. Richard Lourie, 1983) by Kazimierz Brandys (1916-2000) and, later, his Paris, New York: 1982-1984 (trans. Barbara Krzywicki-Herburt, 1988). Most of the first volume predates Solidarity. I remember little of either book but Brandys’ mordant humor and bookishness, and the grinding grayness of life in the Soviet Bloc. The books confirmed my sense that Communists distrust happiness and wish to eradicate it, along with those who are happy. In the first entry in the first volume, dated October 1978, Brandys is reading the memoirs of Johanna Schopenhauer, the philosopher’s mother, who was born in Gdańsk, birthplace of Solidarity in 1980. Then he reads a book about the great pessimist by a Polish scholar, and writes:

“Even the reading of a book has a fate of its own. I read the mother’s memoirs to calm myself, to tear free of myself and the spirits molesting me. To prolong the healing effect of her narrative’s pleasant flow, which had already enticed me and drawn me in, I hit upon the son. And then, all of a sudden, the son pierced me straight through by pointing a finger at the source of my shameful defeats, escape from which I had sought in his mother’s memoirs.”

Then Brandys paraphrases Schopenhauer’s message to him: Your distress is not caused by “biological anxiety” but by “a lack of belief in Providence.” And this: “There is nothing in you to protect you against despair and the thought of death.” This exchange with a dead German philosopher is funny and somehow very Polish (and probably Jewish). He tells Schopenhauer: “What you foresaw a hundred years ago is the stuff of journalism today. The sense of meaninglessness and despair, the loss of inward identity, doubt, and the ignorance of the Essence of Things have become part of our normal consciousness.” This reminds me of nothing so much as Moses Herzog writing his mad letters to Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adlai Stevenson. After four pages of dialogue with Schopenhauer, Brandys concludes: “He failed to take the changing nature of life into account.”

Brandys is a middling writer. Early in his career he was a sort of literary apparatchik, cranking out socialist realist widgets, though he quit the Communist Party in protest in 1966. He is no Zbigniew Herbert but his sensibility sometimes rises to the occasion. Of Aleksander Wat’s essential memoir My Century he says: “This is an oral text, a voice turned into writing, and for that reason it unintentionally acquired the naturalness of a macabre tale told under a linden tree, an intellectual nobleman’s stories about his adventures in Turkish captivity [the reference is to a story by Henryk Sienkiewicz].” He is overly fond of Dostoevsky. Here is his final entry in A Warsaw Diary, datelined “New York, December 13, 1982”:

“News that martial law has been declared in Poland. All communications cut.”

`One Who Sells Small Wares'

On those sadly rare occasions when I happen upon the word haberdasher, I think of Harry S Truman. As a boy I was mildly obsessed with the American presidents, and the first book I wrote was a collection of their potted biographies, concluding with our then-president, John F. Kennedy. I knew from my researches that when Truman returned from World War I, he and an army buddy opened Truman & Jacobson, a haberdashery in Kansas City that remained in business for almost three years. Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines haberdasher as “one who sells small wares; a pedlar.” Over the centuries the word’s meaning evolved, and in the U.S. by Truman’s time it came to mean a dealer in men’s clothing. In my young mind, the sound of the peculiar word (from the Anglo-Norman) was swanky, implying fancy duds, the sort of clothing the men in my family never wore.

From a story at the BBC by Fiona Macdonald I learned of a book new to me – the wittily titled A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) by Francis Grose. Judging by an engraving, Grose was a man of Falstaffian girth who lived up to his surname. His form and demeanor recall Robert Morley’s and Zero Mostel’s. Dictionaries and other reference books with pretensions to comprehensiveness make the best reading, and I was fortunate to find that my library has a facsimile edition of Grose’s dictionary published by the Scolar Press in 1968.

But to get back to haberdasher: Grose doesn’t collect that word but does give us the marvelous haberdasher of pronouns, which he defines as “a schoolmaster, or usher.” The OED reminds us that in Grose’s day, a haberdasher was “a dealer in small articles appertaining to dress, as thread, tape, ribbons, etc.” It took wit to redirect the word from trifles of dress to trifles of grammar – folk cheekiness. Present is a hint of condescension, a patronizing suggestion that a teacher is peddling sundries. Usher reinforces the theme but may require a gloss. The OED gives an earlier meaning now judged rare: “an assistant to a schoolmaster or head-teacher; an under-master, assistant-master.” This brings to mind the “Etymology” Melville places before the main text of Moby-Dick, a prologue he attributes to a “Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School”:

“The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.”

Grose’s dictionary confirms my hunch that you can start anywhere in English, select any word, and with sufficient time, attentiveness and imagination, you can end up anywhere. Our language is at least as big as our world. Take words from a single page in Grose’s book, and let them carry you away:

wooden ruff: “the pillory”

wooden habeas: “a coffin”

wood pecker: “a bystander, who bets whilst another plays”

woman of the town: “a prostitute”

woolbird: “a sheep”

woolley crown: “a soft headed fellow”

And my favorite:

word pecker: “a punster, one who plays upon words”

`Accommodate His Knowledge to the Purposes of Life'

Celebrate the birthday of Michael Faraday (b. Sept. 22, 1791) by recalling the man who in addition to discovering electromagnetic induction (making the electric motor possible, among other things) and benzene, gracing the language with cathode, electrode and ion, and lending his name to the “farad” (a unit of electrical capacitance), found time to organize a self-improvement “essay-circle” in Regency London. His accomplishments are more remarkable when we know Faraday was the unschooled son of a poor blacksmith who was apprenticed for seven years, beginning at age fourteen, to George Ribeau, a bookbinder and book dealer in London. In The Electric Life of Michael Faraday (2006), Alan Hirshfeld describes Ribeau’s shop as the future physicist/chemist’s “library, classroom, and laboratory.” One recalls the childhood of Samuel Johnson, the largely self-taught son of a provincial book dealer, who took a lively interest in chemistry.

Literally an autodidact, Faraday was what Americans used to call a self-starter, a go-getter, driven by curiosity and intellectual ambition – a sort of scientific Horatio Alger. As a boy he read Improvement of the Mind (1674) by the hymnist Sir Isaac Watts, and told a friend it taught him how to think. He never went to university. Instead, Faraday attended lectures by the great chemist Humphry Davy of the Royal Institution and Royal Society, and John Tatum, a silversmith and founder of the City Philosophical Society. Inspired by Davy, Faraday in 1812 set up his own electrochemical laboratory, and the following year Davy hired him as a chemical assistant at the Royal Institution. Around the same time, Faraday and friend, Benjamin Abbott, commenced another self-improvement project. Wishing to correct his weaknesses in “composition, clarity, and grammar,” he and Abbott exchanged weekly letters. “Epistolary writing is one cure for these deficiencies,” he wrote. In 1818, with three friends, Faraday organized his essay-writing club. The enterprise is entertainingly documented in Michael Faraday’s `Mental Exercises’: An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (Liverpool University Press, 2008), edited by Alice Jenkins.

The circle lasted for almost a year – a laudable accomplishment for a group of industrious young men. The members exchanged monthly essays on mutually agreed upon themes, most of them familiar to us from their contemporaries Lamb, Coleridge and Hazlitt -- “On the Pleasures and the Uses of the Imagination,” “On the Early Introduction of Females to Society,” “On Tradesmen.” Jenkins includes in her volume all of the essays produced by the members, and tabulates the literary allusions incorporated by the young men into their essays. The work most often cited by Faraday is the Bible, followed by Dr. Johnson, especially Boswell’s Life and The Rambler. Jenkins describes him as “an enthusiastic reader of Johnson,” and adds: “Faraday’s personal relish for Johnson—and for Addison and Pope—grounds his literary taste in classicism, though he was also very fond of contemporary writers, including Byron and Thomas Moore.” Jenkins includes a portion of The Rambler #137, published on July 9, 1751, a particular favorite of Faraday’s. In it, Johnson writes:

“`Books,’ says Bacon, `can never teach the use of books.’ The student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice, and accommodate his knowledge to the purposes of life.”

[See the late Dr. Oliver Sacks’ Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Childhood (2001) for an account of his boyhood infatuation with Humphry Davy (“one of my particular heroes”) and Michael Faraday. See also Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle (1861), one of the finest books of popular science ever written by a scientist: “There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”]

`Let Such Naiveté Be Praised'

Beware the reader (or writer) you have never heard from before who, in his first sentence, announces his academic pedigree and in his second tells you what’s wrong with what you have been reading, how you write about it and how he can remedy the situation. Exhibit A: the avant-garde devotee. To his credit, he has mastered the rudiments of subject-verb-object. His sentences, while not stylish or memorable, are coherent and rather earnest, so I got the message: Don’t read Proust. Don’t read Henry James. Don’t read Virginia Woolf (not a problem). Read Kathy Acker, Joseph McElroy and some Frenchman I have never heard of before (the usual suspects), among others. Sorry, but my tolerance for unreadable twaddle evaporated decades ago, not long after the last time I tried reading Acker. Pleasure and wisdom are my reading mantra. On this date, Sept. 21, in 1751, in The Rambler #154, Dr. Johnson offers this advice to writers who wish to be read, not studied, worshipped or held in stupefied awe: 

“He that reveals too much, or promises too little; he that never irritates the intellectual appetite, or that immediately satiates it, equally defeats his own purpose. It is necessary to the pleasure of the reader, that the events should not be anticipated, and how then can his attention be invited, but by grandeur of expression?” 

“Grandeur” might be a little overstated for our purposes. Johnson is suggesting a writer not pander to readers, either through willful obscurity or patronizing predictability. The cult of pretentiousness is alive and well. If a writer can be readily understood, if he has no interest in mystifying his readers, he must be a philistine, a soft-headed bourgeois. My favorite among Zbigniew Herbert’s essays is “The Price of Art” in Still Life with a Bridle (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1991). After considering Painter in His Workshop by Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685), Herbert writes: 

“The old masters – all of them without exception – could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.”

“Let such naiveté be praised.”

`It's the Aura, I Think'

Like her admirer Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith started out thinking of herself foremost as a novelist, and only latterly a poet. If I were a critic I would now lay out all the reasons you might wish to track down her novels (only the first remains in print) -- Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949) – read them, reread them, and pass them on to the intrepid readers in your life who presumably already know her poetry and recognize it as some of the finest English verse of the twentieth century. I’ve met hardly anyone who has read Smith’s fiction, and most know only a handful or her poems. Let me instead entice you with a sampler of sweets from the novels. First, from Novel on Yellow Paper, a passage that tells us something about Smith’s modus operandi, and does it with a wry Johnsonian echo:

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

And here, the concluding lines of Over the Frontier, the least satisfactory of Smith’s novels:

“The thought and desire upon death is no salve for my mood, is but a cipher, an ignis fatuus, a foolish gesture, a child’s scream of pain. Not-self-violence upon the flesh, not a natural death, has promise of release. Power and cruelty are the strength of our life, and in its weakness only is there the sweetness of love.”

And here, a characteristic passage of breathless ingenuity, from The Holiday:

“Lopez has this method, she has a quick ear and a wonderful gift for mimicry. She will for instance overhear a remark in the street. It is rather like the competition for the best overheard remark, like the woman in the all-in wrestling match who said, Proper ape, ain’t he? or the Chekhov play remark, Makes you worry doesn’t it? or the bus remark, A little further along, dearie, I could never abide a warm seat, it’s the aura, I think. And for a competition it is all right. But in writing, though it is very good in Lopez’s writing, it is not always so good, because it is so often something that gets an effect of significance, that is without significance.”

It occurs to me that Smith’s novels, in their sparkling idiosyncrasy, are an acquired taste, not for everyone, rather like Henry Green’s or Ivy Compton-Burnett’s. She skirts whimsicality. If you told me you didn’t like them, I would reply, “I’m not surprised. My feelings are not hurt,” and I would make no effort to proselytize for them, then I might suggest you try her poetry again, and then drop the matter. Smith was born on this date, Sept. 20, in 1902, and died on March 7, 1971, at age sixty-eight.

`If We Lose the Ruins Nothing Will Be Left'

“Ruin is always over-stated; it is part of the ruin-drama staged perpetually in the human imagination, half of whose desire is to build up, while the other half smashes and levels to the earth.” 

I suspect Rose Macaulay didn’t have in mind the purposeful destruction of millennia-old ruins, their re-ruination. A temple or market endures the attritions of time. Its fragments are discovered, unearthed, studied and preserved only to be more thoroughly and lastingly pulverized by the latest barbarians, a human tribe that never deserts us. After all, the urge to enact Macaulay’s “ruin-drama” is indelibly human: we build, we destroy, though some take more pleasure in the latter than the former. 

A small number of treasured books are grab bags of learning, autodidactically organized according to their authors’ sensibilities. One such is Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins (1953), written in the immediate wake of the world’s unprecedented ruin-making. A novelist, not an archeologist or historian, she describes herself as a “pleasurist,” a devotee of “this strange human reaction to decay.” About the Syrian city of Palmyra, sadly in the news of late, she writes: 

“A more showy and exciting pleasure, indeed one of the most showy and exciting ruin-pleasures in the world, has, for several centuries, been Palmyra, that ancient Arab settlement in the Syrian desert.” 

Macaulay covers some of the same ground as my friend Marius Kociejowski, a Canadian-born poet who lives in London and recently presented an oral essay, "Palmyra Told Its Own Story," for the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. Marius has written two books about Syria -- The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool (2004) and The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (2011) – and edited an anthology, Syria: Through Writers’ Eyes (2006). All are “travel books” that transcend the banalities of the category. Marius is interested less in ideas than in human beings, and he writes beautifully. With ancient places, levels of time can induce a sense of temporal vertigo. Here is Macaulay more than sixty years ago writing about an unimaginably old and human place, and I would love to hear Marius’ reaction to her words: 

“What we see to-day, the fabulous golden-ochre colonnades, the Temple of the Sun with its pillared court, the great field of ruins like a garden of broken daffodils lying within the long low shattered line of Justinian’s wall, is Syrian Graeco-Roman of the more florid period, and has excited, perhaps, a more startled ecstasy in beholders than almost any other of the world's wrecked cities.” 

In the West, as we observe from an uncertainly safe distance the destruction of our civilization’s cultural inheritance, inevitably we think of Rome’s protracted fall, hastened by an earlier pack of barbarians. For the purposes of historical orientation, here is Edward Gibbon (vol. 1, chap. 11, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) on Palmyra’s earlier fate: 

“Amid the barren deserts of Arabia a few cultivated spots rise like islands out of the sandy ocean. Even the name of Tadmor, or Palmyra, by its signification in the Syriac as well as in the Latin language, denoted the multitude of palm-trees which afforded shade and verdure to that temperate region. The air was pure, and the soil, watered by some invaluable springs, was capable of producing fruits as well as corn. A place possessed of such singular advantages, and situated at a convenient distance between the Gulf of Persia and the Mediterranean, was soon frequented by the caravans which conveyed to the nations of Europe a considerable part of the rich commodities of India. Palmyra insensibly increased into an opulent and independent city, and, connecting the Roman and the Parthian monarchies by the mutual benefits of commerce, was suffered to observe an humble neutrality, till at length, after the victories of Trajan, the little republic sunk into the bosom of Rome, and flourished more than one hundred and fifty years in the subordinate though honourable rank of a colony. It was during that peaceful period, if we may judge from a few remaining inscriptions, that the wealthy Palmyrenians constructed those temples, palaces, and porticos of Grecian architecture, whose ruins, scattered over an extent of several miles, have deserved the curiosity of our travellers. The elevation of Odenathus and Zenobia appeared to reflect new splendour on their country, and Palmyra, for a while, stood forth the rival of Rome; but the competition was fatal, and ages of prosperity were sacrificed to a moment of glory.” 

Implicitly, Macaulay, Kociejowski and Gibbon urge upon us the long view. The “rival of Rome” has been conquered, forgotten, recovered, celebrated, conquered again and perhaps destroyed. Zbigniew Herbert – as a Pole, ideally situated to witness the depredations of history -- writes in “Report from the Besieged City” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1982): 

“all we have left is the place the attachment to the place

we still rule over the ruins of temples spectres of gardens and houses
if we lose the ruins nothing will be left”

`Of Truths Previously Unrevealed'

“Reading generally presents the possibility of the pleasures of plot, of style, of form, none of which need be gainsaid. But at the highest level it also holds out the prospect of wisdom, of truths previously unrevealed. Do many people still read—as I do--looking for secrets, for hitherto hidden keys that will open too-long-locked doors?”

Pleasure and wisdom – the reasons we read. Too heavy an emphasis on either and the text is compromised, the reader’s welfare forgotten. The observation above is drawn from Joseph Epstein’s “Monsieur Proust's Masterwork” (In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage, 2007), in which he notes Proust’s aphoristic gift, his “analytic aspect”: “Perhaps more than any modern writer, Proust invites reading not merely for his story but for the power of his analysis—for, not to put too fine a point on it, his wisdom.” Like Shakespeare, Proust is a rare writer in whom the aesthetic and moral merge, a quality they share with the Wisdom Books of the Hebrew Bible -- the Book of Job, Psalms, the Book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. This is the portion of the Bible probably most admired by secular readers. Epstein is quick to emphasize that Proust is not a didactic writer, one with a ham-fisted “message.” He continues from the passage above:

“It seems almost impossible to read Proust without this motive. His very style, the aphoristic shading into the philosophical, seems to invite it. Yet the trick here is not to come to him looking for answers to specific questions. (`I have an answer, I have an answer,’ calls out the Yeshiva boy, in the streets of his shtetl. `Does anybody have a question?’) The trick is to have long in mind the questions for which Proust supplies the answers without himself even considering them questions.”

A writer's job is to write well, whatever that may mean. Call it style, the literariness of a book – that is his proper preoccupation. Without it, he is merely another scold, a crackpot riding his favorite hobbyhorse. Wisdom is delivered most effectively through the back door. In William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007), Robert D. Richardson writes of his subject: “For all his grand accomplishments in canonical fields of learning, James’s best is often in his unorthodox, half-blind, unpredictable lunges at the great question of how to live, and in this his work sits on the same shelf with Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson.” One could scratch Emerson from the list without contesting Richardson’s point: Some writers become teachers without portfolio, sharing not knowledge, information, or “data” but insight, soundness of judgment, or wisdom, an important distinction. William Cowper writes in The Task: “Knowledge and Wisdom, far from being one, / Have oft-times no connexion, Knowledge dwells / in heads replete with thoughts of other men, / Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.”

Across a lifetime, readers assemble an informal personal library of Wisdom Books, sacred and secular, whose authors often write aphoristically, distilling what they have learned into maxims or apothegms. In Samuel Johnson: A Biography (2008), Peter Martin off-handedly gives us a tour of his shelves: “The best way to get the measure of Johnson is to read him. I have often thought that if I were stranded on a desert island, in addition to the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare I would wish to have with me a complete run of Johnson’s moral essays, especially those from the Rambler – almost 450 of them in all.” One might add “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Rasselas and Lives of the English Poets. Johnson wrote with the confident assumption that he had access to wisdom (not that he was wise; Johnson, no saint, is the opposite of a braggart) and wished to share it. Cowper, his contemporary, writes in The Task: “Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much, / Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.” In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written nine months before Johnson’s death, Cowper says:

“I am very much the biographer's humble admirer. His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expression, secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion, upon all occasions where it is erroneous; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time, with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judgement.”

[Epstein mentions a small, bilingual volume edited and translated by Justin O’Brien and published in 1948, twenty-six years after the novelist’s death—The Maxims of Marcel Proust (Columbia University Press). O’Brien extracts 428 brief passages, sometimes single sentences, from À la recherche du temps perdu. Their acuity is heightened, not diminished, by removal from the fictional context. (Epstein says they give Proust's novel its "allure as wisdom literature.") Of the seven-volume, 4,116-page novel, O’Brien writes, rather amusingly: “Proust is not generally considered pithy.” He adds: “Here Proust is witty, sly, cynical, profound, poetic by turns—and almost always pithy.” I acquired The Maxims in the nineteen-seventies, between my first and second readings of the novel. Among other novelists whose work might be fruitfully excavated for comparable volumes, only George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad come to mind.]

`These Wet Pieces of Evidence'

“Writing is a cheerful activity. You can cheerfully write that you’re going to kill yourself.”

Cheerfulness implies satisfaction, equanimity, the absence of self-pity, and a sense of accomplishment even if the job remains undone. It is not an emotional utopia. One can be cheerful in the midst of trouble, gloom and suffering. Recall Boswell’s account of Johnson meeting his former schoolmate Oliver Edwards, who says: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Writing is cheerful because one volunteers to cavort with words. Think of Hazlitt’s favorite word: gusto. An adroitly phrased sentence freighted with bad news can soothe the soul. In “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” Theodore Dalrymple puts it neatly:

“Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory: I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that is potentially of literary use, my first thought is ‘How best can I describe this?’ I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation.”

The passage at the top is by the French writer Georges Perros (1923-1978) in Paper Collage: Selected Aphorisms and Short Prose (Seagull Books, 2015). He resumes his thought:

“Writing can only aim for an ellipse, a poem or the illusion of efficiency. Language is an ocean of words. As for me, either I drown in it or, when the tide goes out, I look around, walking on what’s left behind. Holes, puddles. Fragmentary writing means these puddles, these marine remnants, these shells, these wet pieces of evidence. My attentiveness dries them off.”

Perros might be describing the care and feeding of a blog. Such independence for the writer is new to the world. That we choose too often not to celebrate but to whine is our problem, one we too often impose on the world. Perros’ maritime metaphor is perfect: To net an appropriate cliché, the world is his oyster. Writers are doubly blessed, trolling for “wet pieces of evidence” and fitting them to the proper words. Think of the dark-minded writers -- Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Thomas Bernhard, among others -- who worked cheerfully. In his final letter to his sister, written as he was about to die from cancer, Guy Davenport said, “”I hope you’re as happy as I am.”

[I heard about Paper Collage from this review by Ron Slate.]

`My Humble Songs to the Next Tyrant'

“In a time of increasing deterioration and degradation of everyday life, the sovereign sarcasm of his verses helped me at times to endure the ubiquity of the dictator. I knew the poem by heart and repeated it to myself with sadistic determination, carefully measuring out the poison the poet had distilled so masterfully.”

You need a program to identify the dictator du jour. They reproduce faster than E. coli. The one in question is the late Nicolae Ceaușescu of Rumania, who had the graciousness to die by firing squad with his charming wife Elena. The writer is Norman Manea (b. 1936), who left his native Rumania in 1988, one year before Ceaușescu, and settled in the United States. The passage comes from his essay “On Clowns” in The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (Yale University Press, 2012). The poem he refers to is “The Poet” by Eugenio Montale, as translated by Ghan Shyam Singh in It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook (New Directions, 1980):

“Only a short thread is left me

but I hope I’ll be able to dedicate

my humble songs to the next tyrant.

He won’t ask me to cut my veins

as Nero asked Lucan. He will want

spontaneous praise gushing from a grateful

heart and will have it in abundance.

All the same I shall be able to leave

a lasting trace. In poetry

what matters is not the content

but the form.”

“The Poet” defies Montale’s early and lasting reputation as a hermeticist. It was written in the nineteen-seventies, half a century after his first collection, Ossi di sepia. The tone is satirical, reminiscent of another poet who knew something about tyrants, Zbigniew Herbert. History forced Montale and Herbert to act politically without being political. In 1938, Montale lost his library job after refusing to join the Fascist party. Manea writes of the poem’s opening lines: “I wasn’t alone in sensing that only a short thread was left me: over the years, the tyrant had worn us down, insinuating himself into our daily nightmares, and I knew that even if I managed to save myself, I would be scarred forever by the toxins of this macabre period of my life.” Manea says he would whisper the final lines: “That was the only way I could enjoy the exaltation with which art proclaims its fundamental truth, parodying it at the same time.”

My timing was fortuitous. I was reading Manea’s essays on Monday, the day Ceaușescu’s “court poet,” Corneliu Vadim Tudor, died: “He wrote disparaging articles about Jews, Hungarians, Roma and liberal-minded Romanians. He was a lawmaker in the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014. He denied the Holocaust took place in Romania in a 2012 television interview.”

But even Tudor was not without redeeming qualities: “Tudor wrote more than one dozen books and was also known for his flamboyant style of dressing, wit, ready insults and love of stray dogs.”

`Our Social Comforts Drop Away'

“Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine,  

  As on we toil from day to day,   

By sudden blasts or slow decline

  Our social comforts drop away.”

I was indifferent to Johnson’s “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,” while appreciating the poet’s compassion for one of life’s lost souls. Johnson had met Levet in 1746, thus beginning another of his unlikely friendships (Levet was laconic; Johnson, effusive and conversation-loving). Boswell described him as “an obscure practitioner of physick among the lower people.” In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate writes of Levet:

“Since his return [from France], he had developed a wide practice among the London poor, walking long distances every day, from Houndsditch, near one end of the city, to Marylebone, at the other, ministering to them for a small fee, or, if they could not afford that, for anything they felt they could give him. Often this was no more than a drink of gin or brandy. Rather than go away unrewarded — though he never demanded payment — Levet would quietly swallow the drink, though he really did not want it; and he would occasionally end up drunk (`Perhaps the only man,’ said Johnson, `who ever became intoxicated through motives of prudence’).”

Levet died at age seventy-seven of a heart attack in Johnson’s home on Jan. 17, 1782, and Johnson soon wrote the poem. Bate notes its “calm Horatian style,” and observes: “If it is a lament for this dutiful, awkward, and conscientious man, it is also a lament for life — for common humanity, and for the effort that human beings try to make, in this strange purgatory of our lives, to fulfill moral values and ideals.” Johnson himself was seventy-two and would be dead in less than three years. Only as I have gotten older has “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” become essential, even more than the poem I have always judged his finest, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” In eight stanzas he packs much of what he has learned from a life of concentrated feeling and thought. There’s no padding to fill out the lines, no straining after sentiment. In our age of regimented medicine, think of Levet’s style of care: “No summons mock’d by chill delay, / No petty gain disdain’d by pride, / The modest wants of ev’ry day / The toil of ev’ry day supplied.”

Thanks to a suggestion from Micah Mattix, I started reading Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves (Bloomsbury, 2015), a biography by David Ellis of the late American philosopher best known for debunking the fantasies of Freud and his followers. Ellis begins his book by quoting the opening lines of the Levet elegy (by “the ever-cheerful Samuel Johnson”), and follows with this:

“As a realist as well as a pessimist, Johnson knew that when we lose someone we care about, as he had, we tend to focus not on what the person concerned might have felt about losing his or her life (a difficult if not impossible enterprise), but on the difference that loss makes to us: the diminutions in our `social comforts.’”

[Simon Critchley remembers Frank Cioffi.]

`The Larger View of His Subject's Grandeur'

A three-way pleasure: a gifted biographer writes about the greatest of all biographies, which in turn is devoted to the man who pioneered the form in English. That is, Joseph Epstein on James Boswell on Samuel Johnson. Regardless of his chosen form – stories, essays, book-length lives or anatomies – Epstein sooner or later gets around to biography, which prompts a thought: Perhaps all imaginative writing, everything short of computer manuals, is biography. Our species is obsessively interested in others of our kind, whether in the form of gossip (the subject of an Epstein volume) or Daniel Deronda. Why is this the case? Here is a possible partial explanation: When reading the life of another, we remain alert to what we share with him and how we differ. An analogous process is underway during the exploratory phase of a friendship or even romantic love. We recognize the essential humanity and mundane commonalities, while acknowledging the alien qualities that define every individual. Learning about another is a reliable way to learn about ourselves.                                                            

This seems especially true of Dr. Johnson, a genius who is like everyone else only more so. He is human to the nth degree, a representative human, whereas Shakespeare and Dante might as well be science fiction, defying everything we know about ourselves. Here is Epstein on the Life of Johnson: “Boswell set out to write a full portrait of the great man in all his weaknesses, failings, faults and oddities, of which Johnson offered a rich smorgasbord. He did so, however, only against the larger view of his subject’s grandeur.” In other words, the warts-and-all approach is not an end in itself. It doesn’t aim at bringing down the mighty. Johnson’s depression and occasional ferociousness heighten our respect for his accomplishments, his compassion, learning, generosity and sense of humor. Boswell isn’t trading in sensationalism; he is celebrating the potential possessed by every man and woman to transcend mere inheritance and environment. 

One hears the familiar complaint that we learn nothing about the work of a writer by reading his biography. I can’t argue with that, in most cases. I learn nothing useful about A Dance to the Music of Time if I treat it as a roman à clef and decrypt the identities of Powell’s real-life models for his characters. But then again, I’ve never read the biography of a writer in order to better appreciate or understand what he has written. Rather, I’m naturally interested in learning about a sensibility capable of creating books that earned my attention for a day, a week or a month, just as I would want to know more about anyone else who gave me a splendid gift.

`Dying Is Nothing'

Until nearly the end he was writing, and for this we love him and his work even more. Italo Svevo, né Ettore Schmitz, like his best-known creation, Zeno Cosini, was a good-hearted and well-intentioned procrastinator who saw the comic potential in procrastination, a late-bloomer who burst like a garden into flower. Like Chekhov (and unlike his English teacher and friend, James Joyce), he is one of the rare lovable practitioners of literature. If I were permitted to pack only one volume when shipped to Devil’s Island, it might be Zeno’s Conscience. After almost twenty years of writerly silence, Svevo self-published his novel in 1923 at age sixty-one. As a young man, Eugenio Montale met Svevo and his family, and was the first critic in Italy to champion his work. In “Italo Svevo in the Centenary of His Birth” (The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays, 1982), written in 1961, Montale says: “By now, he has entered the small number of our necessary writers.”

In September 1928, Svevo and his wife Livia set out for the Alpine spa at Bormio where he had taken the “cure” for smoking several years earlier. Among other things, Zeno’s Conscience is the great modern epic of smoking and Zeno’s futile attempts to stop. In Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966), P.N. Furbank writes:

“During their stay at Bormio Svevo was writing continuously, and one day, from the next room, Livia heard him exclaim: `After all, I can die, can’t I? I have known what it is to be happy.’ On the day they were ready to leave for home he was still in the middle of writing when Livia called him to say the car was waiting.”

Accompanied by their grandchild, Paolo, they were driven away by their chauffeur. On Sept. 12, during a heavy rain, when their car was crossing a bridge near Motta di Livenza, the driver lost control of the vehicle and it crashed into a tree. Svevo was the only one who seemed seriously injured. The late William Weaver writes in the introduction to his 2001 translation of Zeno’s Conscience:

“Svevo had a broken leg, some cuts and bruises, but he was also suffering from severe shock; the doctor quickly realized that the injured man was dying. Letizia [Svevo’s daughter] and her husband arrived the next morning [Sept. 13]. At a certain point one of his visitors was smoking, and Svevo asked him for a cigarette. It was refused. Svevo replied: `That really would have been the last cigarette.’ He died that afternoon at half past two.” Furbank reports that when Svevo saw his wife crying, he told her: “Don’t cry. Dying is nothing.”

[See Joseph Epstein on Svevo here and here.]

`To Confound, Bewilder, Nonplus'

My days as a substitute copy editor were brief and widely spaced. I liked the job for short spells because I’m tidy by nature and find satisfaction in cleaning up a mess. Needless words are offensive, like cream in coffee or catsup on scrambled eggs. In a file cabinet I found an issue of the newspaper I was working for in 1982, when I was subbing on the copy desk. The headline in question, of course, is unsigned, but I remember writing it. On the front of the second section we ran a column of briefs devoted to regional news. In this case, two guys in a nearby town broke into an appliance store and loaded their truck with televisions and microwave ovens. They also triggered a silent alarm and the cops stopped them a couple of blocks away. My headline: “Fleeing felons flummoxed.” 

The OED defines flummox as to “bring to confusion; to ‘do for’, cause to fail; to confound, bewilder, nonplus,” and says the word is “probably of English dialectal origin,” possibly from flummocks, “to maul, mangle.” The dictionary adds that flummox “seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily.” It also contains a nice echo of lummox, a useful description of most felons. The earliest usage cited by the OED is from 1837, when Dickens used it in Chapter 33 of The Pickwick Papers: “And my ’pinion is, Sammy, that if your governor don’t prove a alleybi, he’ll be what the Italians call reg’larly flummoxed, and that’s all about it.” Another source credits Dickens with coining the word, but that remains unconfirmed. 

Seeing my headline again after all these years was gratifying. No doubt I’m the only person in the world who can confirm authorship -- just another mute offering. A few years later, at a different newspaper in a different state, I was again subbing on the copy desk. A car collided with a truck pulling a loaded horse trailer. No one, human or equine, was killed but some of both received minor injuries. My sub-head: “Horses in stable condition.”

`What Degree of Evil'

Dr. Johnson speaking on Sept. 11, 1773, as reported by James Boswell in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785): 

“`A country is in a bad state which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose. Now destroying the authority of the chiefs set the people loose. It did not pretend to bring any positive good, but only to cure some evil; and I am not well enough acquainted with the country to know what degree of evil the heritable jurisdictions occasioned.’”