`His Infirmities Are Not Noxious to Society'

Dr. Johnson’s devotion to his mad friend Christopher Smart (1722-1771), the most idiosyncratic poet of his day, is well-known. Boswell reports him saying in 1765:

“‘Madness frequently discovers itself merely by unnecessary deviation from the usual mode of the world. My poor friend Smart shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place. Now although, rationally speaking, it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question.”

Smart had been confined to various asylums from 1757 to 1763. When they bothered with a diagnosis, contemporaries described the poet as suffering from “religious mania.” Boswell continues:

“Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, who was confined in a mad-house, he had, at another time, the following conversation with Dr [Charles] Burney: – Burney. `'How does poor Smart do, Sir; is he likely to recover?’ Johnson. `It seems as if his mind had ceased to struggle with the disease; for he grows fat upon it.’ Burney. `Perhaps, Sir, that may be from want of exercise.’ Johnson. `No, Sir; he has partly as much exercise as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the ale-house; but he was carried back again.’”

Johnson instinctively defends Smart’s “normalcy,” including his heavy drinking. Deviance from conventional behavior never bothered Johnson. He judged eccentricity by the harm it did. His tolerance was expansive and his house was a sanctuary into which he welcomed such outcasts as Francis Barber, Dr. Robert Levet and Anna Williams. Smart seems never to have harmed a soul. Johnson says:

“`I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities are not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.’”

I’ve just found something I hadn’t known before, a reference to an essay, “Some Thoughts on the English Language,” written by Smart and published in the monthly periodical Universal Visitor and Memorialist in January 1756. Nine months earlier, Johnson had published A Dictionary of the English Language. Smart likens the dictionary to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (completed in 1708, one year before Johnson’s birth) and the lexicographer to the architect, noting that both the book and Christopher Wren’s building should endure for all time. The author of “Jubilate Agno,” including the much-loved “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” says the Dictionary is “a monument of English philology” and “a work I look upon with equal pleasure and amazement, as I do upon St. Paul’s Cathedral; each the work of one man, each the work of an Englishman.”

`Unclear, Murky, if Not Somewhat Dubious'

Ours is an elegiac age. At The Weekly Standard read Joseph Epstein on “Whatever Happened to High Culture?”:

“Culture comprises connections and interconnections between past and present, and these in turn comprise the future of culture.

“Just now, though, the future of culture seems unclear, murky, if not somewhat dubious. One is hard pressed to think of great names in the realm of contemporary culture.”

`Skilled at Table Talk'

I’ve read and found interesting the table talk of Dr. Johnson, William Cowper, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers and Adolf Hitler (ed. H.R. Trevor-Roper, Oxford University Press, 1988). It’s an entertaining and minor literary genre, like limericks and clerihews, and defined by the OED as “the conversation of famous people or of intellectual circles, esp. as reproduced in literary form.” Unlike novels or poems, it’s a form exclusively dependent on the speaker’s other accomplishments. No one would bother to record your table talk, or mine, or, say, Joan Didion’s. A sizeable share of Boswell’s Life of Johnson qualifies as table talk, and Boswell defends its use in his first chapter:

“Of one thing I am certain, that, considering how highly the small portion which we have of the table-talk, and other anecdotes of our celebrated writers is valued, and how earnestly it is regretted that we have not more I am justified in preserving rather too many of Johnson’s sayings, than too few.”

Boswell need not have justified his generous transcriptions of Johnson’s conversation. A great man’s table talk is intrinsically absorbing and worthy of preservation. Even Goethe is almost interesting when conversing with Eckermann. Leave it to the late William F. Buckley to know the one-word synonym for a person gifted at table talk: deipnosophist. I found it in Buckley: The Right Word (ed. Samuel S. Vaughan, Random House, 1996). Vaughan includes a letter from a reader who thanks Buckley for his “ongoing flirtation with abstruse English words,” but wonders why he has never used deipnosophist. “How do you explain this lapse?” the reader asks, and Buckley replies: “The word defines someone `skilled at table talk.’ It is used rarely for the obviously reasons.” Meaning, presumably, that good table talk is a sparse commodity, which is certainly true, though Buckley is off a notch with his definition. Deipnosophist is rooted in the Greek words for “dinner” and “a master of his craft, clever or wise man” (as in the original meaning of sophist), but does refer specifically to a gifted chef or trencherman. Here is the OED definition:

“A master of the art of dining: taken from the title of the [fifteen-volume] Greek work of Athenæus, in which a number of learned men are represented as dining together and discussing subjects which range from the dishes before them to literary criticism and miscellaneous topics of every description.”

The most recent recorded usage dates from 1866. In “Swinburne’s Tragedies,” James Russell Lowell writes: “The eye is the only note-book of the true poet; but a patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious futility, hard to write and harder to read, with about as much nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists.” Who knew Lowell was a comedian?

[Also in Buckley: The Right Word, from the obituary he wrote for Vladimir Nabokov, published in the July 22, 1977 issue of National Review, recounting one of his annual get-togethers with the novelist: “He describes with a fluent synoptic virtuosity the literary scene, the political scene, inflation, bad French, cupiditous publishers, the exciting breakthrough in his son’s operatic career, and what am I working on now?” Elsewhere in the book, Buckley refers to Nabokov’s “philological radiance.”]

`A Sense of Deference'

“At one time or another he tells us nearly everything about himself: his height, his health, his education, funny things he has seen, a ghost-story he has just heard, the fact that he seldom dreams, &c. This gives The Essays an intensely real, vivid, individual style: we hear him talking, more to himself than to us. He begins where he likes, ends where he likes, and is content to come to no conclusion, or several, or half a one.” 

In most cases, the autobiographical impulse, unaccompanied by an interesting sensibility and writing skill, ought to be smothered in the cradle. In the case of Montaigne, he leaves us wanting more anecdotes, more confessions, more recherché allusions to his reading. It makes sense that the inventor and namer of the form – the personal essay -- ought to remain its chief practitioner after four and a half centuries. I thought of the description quoted above, from Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), while reading the travel essays collected in Marius Kociejowski’s Zoroaster’s Children (Biblioasis, 2015).  In particular, Highet’s final sentence suggests Kociejowski’s approach to writing an essay. 

Instead of the obligatory Prague travelogue, he gives us the archly titled “Christmas, with Kafka,” which begins with a manger scene in the Old Town Square. Two of the extras surrounding the Holy Family, a donkey and a llama, start a fight. “There was more laughter from the mocking circle that put me in mind of the lumpish figures in Brueghel’s Christ Falling Beneath the Cross, whose fleetingly warped faces were painted for all time.” What follows is digression within digression – the inevitable news of fighting in Bethlehem at Christmas, abandoning plans to follow “the Kafka trail,” attendance at Leoš Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen, an impromptu visit to Kafka’s grave in the New Jewish Cemetery, and difficulty leaving a stone on the plot. In the wrong hands this approach might quickly have turned tedious, the exhibitionism of a flighty mind, but Kociejowski’s touch is light. He isn’t out to impress us with his sensitivity or his devotion to Kafka. For his persona he chooses a bookish schlemiel. 

I want to leave you with a taste of Kociejowski’s prose, hoping you’ll search out Zoroaster’s Children and his other books.  I’m finding it easier to describe his work in the negative, stressing what it is not. When serious, he’s not strident. When learned, he’s not pedantic. When comic, he’s not childish. In his introduction to The Norton Book of Personal Essays (1996), another great essayist, Joseph Epstein writes, “Self-congratulation, or the imputation of virtue to oneself, is one of the great traps of the personal essay.” Again, Kociejowski passes the test. The collection’s final essay, “The Saddest Book I’ll Never Write,” is devoted to Syria, about which he has written several books, in the wake of the ongoing civil war. In part, it is a eulogy for a country, culture and friends Kociejowski loves. He writes: 

“I have been asked why there isn’t more of me in my writings about Syria and the answer, quite simply, is because there would be less of everything else. I believe, too, one’s character is impressed upon what one chooses to write about. One of the most important things with which one must travel is a sense of deference. Only then will there be natural sympathy with one’s subject.” 

Kociejowski’s carefully nuanced tone and my recollection of Montaigne brought to mind another great essayist. In 1983, Guy Davenport wrote the introduction to the North Point Press edition of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, later collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). In it he writes:

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”

`I Place Empathy Above Language'

“To those who desire to think the same way others think, who long to crush dissent and to be on the right side of history, real literature is an oddity, an affront, the relic of an incomprehensible past. It makes too many nonsensical demands. It serves no obvious practical purpose.”

And that, of course, is its glory and the reason some of us choose to spend our lives in the company of words and the phantoms they embody. With “real literature,” there is no self-improvement, no bankable payoff, no return on your investment. A good sentence is its own reward, for writer and reader, though aesthetes need not apply. The passage above comes from Lee Oser’s review of Glenn Arbery’s novel Bearings and Distances (Wiseblood, 2015), which I haven’t read but which Oser makes tempting. I cite it only as a way to introduce Zoroaster’s Children (Biblioasis, 2015), Marius Kociejowski’s collection of travel essays (and partner to The Pebble Chance: Feuilletons and Other Prose, published last year by Biblioasis). Don’t open the new book if you’re expecting a Baedeker, thrills ‘n’ chills, or pretty snapshots. Kociejowski is a writer, plain and simple, without an agenda unless writing well counts. He covers a lot of ground, much of it internal. In his introductory essay, “Some Places I’ve Been To,” he writes:

“I have been described, though not often, as a travel writer, an appellation that vaguely embarrasses me. A couple of books, which sit in the travel section of bookshops, have had the effect of making me into what I may not be. I do not have the means to be a traveler or to be able to just pick up and go. Also, I’m idle. Oblomov outstrips me. I’m not a tourist either. A tourist moves inside a bubble; a traveler forgoes the safety of that bubble. I am sufficiently enough of a coward to not go risking my hide, but then again.”

That’s a fair sample of Kociejowski’s voice – modest, quietly learned, almost boyish, allergic to earnestness. He practices the essay in the etymological sense, without foregone conclusions. Travel for Kociejowski is a metaphor for life – movement toward an uncertain and possibly non-existent destination, without a map or compass. The books that “had the effect of making me into what I may not be” are his splendid volumes devoted to Syria -- The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey (2004) and The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (2010). In the new book he travels to Aleppo and Prague, Toronto and Tunisia, and sometimes around his neighborhood in London.

For Kociejowski, his fellow humans are intriguing mysteries who follow their own itineraries. He doesn’t have a lot of theories about human behavior – certainly nothing political, economic or, God forbid, psychological. One can’t imagine Kociejowski sightseeing. More likely, he’s people-seeing. He says: “I travel more through people than I do through places.” And this, after revealing his monolingual limitations: “Empathy, I place empathy above language. A writer who lacks it is not one who greatly interests me.” He describes two walkers in his neighborhood who “walk because they have to. Staying put might destroy them.” A pathology-minded observer might diagnose them as – what? Autistic? Obsessive compulsive? Certainly they are people worthy of empathy: 

“There are people who travel the world over and never let in a thing or very little, whereas, if I may hazard a guess, the bearded man in the tuque, who never veers from his chosen path, and the man with the Brueghelesque face are two of the great explorers of our age.”

`The Movement All Against Him'

I have found a useful phrase, one that fits like a tailored suit: “the awkward squad.” Thanks to a post by Nige I discovered a good poet new to me, Jonathan Price, and an interesting collection of essays and reviews by P.J. Kavanagh, the English poet who died in August -- People and Places: A Selection 1975-1987 (Carcanet, 1988). In it is a piece about C.H. Sisson combining two reviews , “Orthodoxies,” that helps explain his awkward charm and some of the reasons I admire him:

“. . . mention of Englishness, which Sisson pre-eminently represents in all his writings, leads to another man, of the other party, a Regicide probably, described by his biographer[Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, 1982] as one of `God’s great awkward squad of unorthodox, dissident Englishmen’ – George Orwell. If you open Sisson’s The Avoidance of Literature at any point you could be in the literary and moral presence of Orwell. They both detest fuss, cant and any form of sloppy thinking. I do not mean that either imitated the other, I mean that both are of the English `awkward squad’ and show it in the same way.”

In the OED’s earliest citation, dating from 1796, Robert Burns is supposed to have said as he was dying, “John, don’t let the awkward squad fire over me.” I read that as a fear of “friendly fire.” Clearly the original sense was military. Brewer gives “recruits not yet fitted to take their place in the regimental line,” and Webster has “a group of inept recruits undergoing special drill.” Over time the phrase seems to have mutated into being a rough synonym for outsiders, freebooters, nonconformists – but not in the approved, fashionable sense. Members of the awkward squad plot their own course, indifferent to well-intentioned career advice. Another military word that comes to mind is “irregular” (OED: “a soldier not of the regular army”). In 1756, George Washington writes in a letter to Gov. Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia: “With this small company of Irregulars; with whom order, regularity, circumspection and vigilance were matters of derision and contempt, we set out.”

To group Orwell and Sisson with other members of the Awkward Squad — Swift, admired by both men, comes to mind, along with Dr. Johnson -- is oxymoronic but useful. Kavanagh says of Orwell and Sisson that for all their political and literary differences, “[it is] the similarity of tone that is striking.” Both strive for honesty and clarity, and neither is afraid to be contemptuous. Each is inelegant, unconcerned with assembling pretty sentences. Orwell’s work is wildly uneven, which shouldn’t surprise us about a hardworking journalist, and he is best-known for his poorest books. Nothing Sisson wrote, whether poetry or prose, is a waste of the reader’s time. Kavanagh writes:

“. . . Orwell went with the post-Regicide tide, albeit awkwardly, scourge of both far-Left and Right; he was recognizably a man of his time. To be the Royalist Sisson, concerned with the protection of older orthodoxies, because he considers them preferable to the new ones, is much more difficult and lonely. You feel that Orwell is sustained by his sense of belonging to a movement and Sisson has the movement all against him.”

`All Who Go On a Little Too Far'

“And so perhaps hath it happened unto the numbers, 7 and 9, which multiplied into themselves do make up Sixty three, commonly esteemed the great Climacterical of our lives.” 

Understand? Neither did I. Numerology has never seriously tempted me. The writer is Sir Thomas Browne in Book IV, Chap. XII of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths (1646), commonly known as Vulgar Errors. The origin of the great or grand climacteric, lending significance to the years calculated in multiples of seven, goes back to the Greeks, as do most things. Browne explains: 

“For the daies of men are usually cast up by Septenaries, and every seventh yeare conceived to carry some altering character with it, either in the temper of body, mind, or both. But among all other, three are most remarkable, that is 7 times 7 or forty nine, 9 times 9 or eighty one, and 7 times 9 or the year of Sixty three; which is conceived to carry with it the most considerable fatality, and consisting of both the other numbers was apprehended to comprise the vertue of either: is therefore expected and entertained with fear, and esteemed a favour of fate to pass it over. Which notwithstanding many suspect to be but a Panick terrour, and men to fear they justly know not what: and to speak indifferently, I find no satisfaction: nor any sufficiency in the received grounds to establish a rationall fear.” 

In other words, the sixty-third year of one’s life may bring a “considerable fatality,” a “Panick terror” or no “rationall fear” – in other words, it may prove to be like any other year. The OED renders the idea in modern English: “Any of certain supposedly critical years of human life, when a person was considered to be particularly liable to change in health or fortune . . . a year of life, often reckoned as the 63rd, supposed to be especially critical.” Of course, though I turn sixty-three today, I am entering my sixty-fourth year, so maybe the worst has passed, as it had for John Dryden (1631-1700). In the dedication to his translations of Virgil’s pastorals (1697), Dryden writes of the Roman poet: “He died at the Age of fifty two, and I began this Work in my great Clymacterique. But having perhaps a better constitution than my Author, I have wrong’d him less, considering my Circumstances, than those who have attempted him before, either in our own, or any Modern Language.” 

Surviving one’s climacteric may ameliorate the prickliness of one’s character, Dryden suggests, making one more understanding and empathetic (at least of great Roman poets). On Nov. 30, 1689, the year she turned sixty-three, Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696) wrote in a letter to her daughter, Madame de Grignan: 

“It appears to me that in spite of myself I have been dragged to this inevitable point where old age must be undergone. I see it there before me; I have reached it; and I should at least like so to arrange matters that I do not move on, that I do not travel farther along this path of infirmities, pains, losses of memory and disfigurement.  Their attack is at hand, and I hear a voice that says, `You must go along, whatever you may say; or if indeed you will not, then you must die,’ which is an extremity from which nature recoils. However, that is the fate of all who go on a little too far.” 

The words of a realist. One is not exempt from the human lot. You don’t like getting old? There’s always the alternative.

`The Gradual Abatement of Kindness'

From Guy Davenport’s eulogy for his friend Hugh Kenner: 

“I had the feeling that Hugh was a displaced member of Samuel Johnson’s circle (Pope was for him the poet for inexhaustible study). I have heard him anatomize a paragraph of Johnson’s, showing how its words consistently answered to their Latin derivations. I don’t know all that many people who have paragraphs of Johnson off by heart.”                                      

Some of us imagine ourselves “displaced members” of Johnson’s circle. We fancy the great man’s wit, ferocity, common sense and learning would rub off. How many of Kenner’s admirers, the Modernist Brigade, share his admiration for Johnson and Pope? How many share a taste for their comedy, rarified and otherwise? I read those eighteenth-century men first in college, with a professor who would crack up while reading The Dunciad aloud. That’s how I’ve read Pope ever since – as a colossal entertainer and one of the greatest poets in the language, one who makes Wordsworth read like a dry-as-dust drudge. 

I was reminded of Johnson’s “Life of Pope” while rereading Kenner’s The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968). It and The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett (1964) were illustrated by Davenport. Each dedicated his masterwork to the other, yet the friendship frayed at the end. I claim no insight into the causes, and Davenport was gentleman enough to write a gracious tribute for his friend of more than forty years. A passage in Johnson’s “Life of Pope” reminded me of their friendship’s end, though not in its specifics. Johnson writes of the quarrel between Addison and Pope after the latter published his translation of Homer: 

“The reputation of this great work failed of gaining him a patron; but it deprived him of a friend. Addison and he were now at the head of poetry and criticism; and both in such a state of elevation, that, like the two rivals in the Roman state, one could no longer bear an equal, nor the other a superior. Of the gradual abatement of kindness between friends, the beginning is often scarcely discernible by themselves, and the process is continued by petty provocations, and incivilities sometimes peevishly returned, and sometimes contemptuously neglected, which would escape all attention but that of pride, and drop from any memory but that of resentment. That the quarrel of those two wits should be minutely deduced, is not to be expected from a writer to whom, as Homer says, `nothing but rumour has reached, and who has no personal knowledge.’” 

Kenner died in November 2003, Davenport fourteen months later. Davenport avoids piety and platitudes. He honors Kenner the writer and teacher, and he might be writing of himself: 

“I have a feeling that most of Hugh’s prose is on two levels. The upper one is as clear and forthright as Hazlitt; the second one is Hugh talking to himself more intelligently than he is willing to share with a half-literate public. He spent years teaching illiterate students, and did not recognize a high degree of literacy in public print of any sort. Not even Bill Buckley escaped his censure. Only Christian charity allowed him to say a good word about my own.”

`A Warning for Our Time?'

Aleksander Wat (1900-1967), a poet who wrote middling avant-garde poems in Polish, also “spoke” one of the last century’s essential books (along with Solzhenitsyn’s, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s and Vasily Grossman’s): My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. As a young man Wat became a Communist. After fleeing the Nazis he was arrested by the Soviets and spent more than two years in various jails and prisons in Poland and the Soviet Union, and eventually was exiled to Kazakhstan. Wat, who was Jewish, converted to Catholicism. While recounting his confinement in the Lubyanka prison, he describes how prisoners were able to buy extra rations with money sent by friends and family. Instead of complaining about hunger, Wat says:

“I limited myself to onions, garlic, bread, and especially lump sugar. It’s a wonderful thing, lump sugar. I still have a weakness for it. Even in cafes I’ll catch myself, completely unconsciously, slipping some lump sugar into my pocket. I’m not a cheap person; it’s just that since Lubyanka I’ve loved lump sugar. Those lumps of sugar are beautiful. You have to admit they have a certain beauty. And you can see by their very form that they contain sweetness. They’re well constructed; there’s nothing superfluous about them. Those lumps of sugar were a delicacy for me, and here of course the beautiful and the useful were united – not as they are in constructivism, which I detest, but as they are in human life. A primeval unity. The naïve unity of the beautiful and the useful, the enormously useful. I was sparing with those lumps of sugar; I built up a reserve in case things became worse.”

How does one retain an aesthetic and spiritual capacity in the presence of organized terror? In one of the worst times and places in the world (1940-41, Stalin’s Moscow), Wat mingles gratitude, wonder and intellectual vitality, and belongs to that endangered species, complete human beings. In “Wat in the World”at The American Interest, Robert D. Kaplan reminds us of the great man’s witness. In one paragraph, Kaplan distills the twentieth-century life of a representative man:

“As a title, My Century is neither exaggerated nor self-referential. For Wat and his family did indeed live the life of the 20th century in all its horror. Wat’s family was Central European, and its history lay `at the borderline of Judaism, Catholicism, and atheism.’ Anti-Semitism is, in his telling, part of the permanent tapestry of Soviet prison life. Wat’s older brother perished at Treblinka, his younger brother at Auschwitz. Wat himself spent seven years during and after World War II in Soviet prisons, including the Lubyanka, and in exile in the deserts of Central Asia. He returned to public life in the Eastern Bloc in 1957, in the wake of de-Stalinization, and committed suicide in France a decade later.”

Stalin and Hitler hover among these lines like conjoined twins, not opposites but mirrored partners in atrocity. Kaplan’s larger point is that their descendants remain alive and well, if semi-dormant: “What if in describing the psychological attraction of Stalinist ideology, Wat is also providing a warning for our time? What if the response to sustained chaos will lead back, inversely, to the ideological intensities of the 20th century? I am not talking about new Hitlers and Stalins so much as about disease-variants of them.” He warns that we “may be ripe for the next batch of utopian ideologies.” As humans, we tend not to learn our lessons, a proclivity heightened by amnesia. Evil perseveres. The next psychopath with sufficient charm and a sufficiently compliant audience could be the one. No place is so deadly as utopia. For Wat, great art promises not immunity to evil but, in the words of Tomas Venclova in Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast (1996), “the most concentrated form of human solidarity, transcending the boundaries of space and time.” On Easter morning, while he is still in the Lubyanka, Wat overhears St. Matthew’s Passion on the radio, prompting a joyous digression:

“In Bach’s music I also hear an earthly joy, dignified, like Bach’s family life, where people eat and drink – and like to eat and drink – a sense of life, life lived with decorum. Bach is religious music, but in Bach’s work, even in the Passion, religion and faith are hemmed in by all sorts of doubts. Anyway, all our problems and troubles certainly are better expressed in music than in words.

“It seems to me that music, generally speaking, is the proper language for philosophy. I’m not talking about today’s scientific philosophy, logic, but what lies beyond logic, metaphysical philosophy . . . Schopenhauer’s definition of music as architecture in time. Metaphysical philosophical thought is speculation in the good sense of the word, not speculation occurring in space but in time. Logic is rather spatial, but traditional philosophy is temporal; music is a better language for human thought; it expresses what words cannot.”

Kaplan says of Wat, “however doubt-ridden and self-questioning, [he] refused to submit to pulverizing forces.” Geoffrey Hill has twice memorialized this imperfect, defiant writer and man. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), he writes:

“Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat."

And in A Treatise of Civil Power (2007) he includes “In Memoriam: Aleksander Wat”:

“O my brother, you have been well taken,

and by the writing hand most probably:

on photographs it looks to be the left,

the unlucky one. Do nothing to revive me.

“Surrealism prescient of the real;

the unendurable to be assigned

no further, voice or no voice; funérailles,

songs of reft joy upon another planet.”

Hill adapts the sentence “Do nothing to revive me” from the suicide note left by Wat. Venclova describes the final scene:

“On the evening of 29 July 1967, Wat said good night to Ola [his wife] as usual. After she left to go to her room, he put his last notebook on his bed and took forty sleeping pills. Before switching off the light he wrote: `For God’s sake. Do not save my life by any means. I should have already done what I do now.’”

[See the review of My Century by John Gross.]

`It's Impossible to Know Enough'

“Sadly, all words seem much the same to many people, like checkers, and they feel about them much as I do about Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: all sound like Winter.”

The English-born novelist Paul West, more youthful Mozart in spirit than aging Vivaldi, died Oct. 18 in Ithaca, N.Y., at age eighty-five. He published twenty-four novels, none since suffering a stroke in 2003 that left him severely aphasiac -- cruelest of fates for a word-drunk man. In the eighties and nineties I read his books as they appeared, enjoying their linguistic exuberance and learning (subjects included Lord Byron, the plot to assassinate Hitler, the O.K. Corral, John Milton and Jack the Ripper), even as I increasingly found them clever but empty. The best may have been Rat Man of Paris (1986). West’s blessing and curse was word-infatuation. He unapologetically wallowed in words to the detriment, on occasion, of sense and human interest. In his review of Guy Davenport’s first story collection, Tatlin! (1974), collected in Sheer Fiction (1987), West says “nothing relevant has gone unimplied, nothing irrelevant hasn’t been suavely shut out.” That’s generally true of Davenport’s work, seldom of West’s.

The passage at the top is from the preface to the only book by West I occasionally return to, The Secret Lives of Words (Harcourt, 2000). He selects five-hundred words, arranges them alphabetically and tells unpedantic stories, fashioning informal, idiosyncratic etymologies. Think of it as a scrapbook. He calls it “a grateful album, a personal sampling of history-laden words.” That’s the point: words for West are personal – the way they look and sound, the images and memories they evoke, the way we use them. Here is part of his entry for the innocent-sounding feisty:

“Middle English for `farting dog,’ going back to the obsolete English fist (fart) and Latin pedere (break wind). The expression `hoist with one’s own petard’ [Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV] has the same origin (in English, petard is a little bomb) . . . Feisty nowadays, of course, means either quarrelsome or vigorous, though one can almost see some kind of link between high energy and the breaking of wind.”

The OED clarifies with its entry for fist: “a breaking wind, a foul smell, stink. Obs.” The dictionary’s most recent citation, from 1664, is by Charles Cotton (Montaigne’s translator) in The Scarronides, or Virgil Travesties: “With that he whistled out most mainly, / You might have heard his Fist / From one side of the Skie to th’ t’ other.” The scatological theme continues in West’s unlikely gloss on lasagna:

“Literally, if you go back to the Athenian Greeks, chamberpot pasta, from their word lasanon, more delicately referred to as a night chair. Ever alert for the chance of crude humor, the Romans latched on to this word and, reserving it for large pots of all kinds, cooking and night relief, finessed it into lasanum, whence lasagna of the flat pasta and sausages and cheese and who knows what.”

Near the conclusion of his 1985 essay “In Defense of Purple Prose,” West writes: “We simply have to heed the presence of all our words and the chance of combining them in unprecedented and luminous ways. Prose is malleable, not ordained.” Not bad advice, but West never quite avoids overdoing things, turning tasteful amethyst to gaudy purple. He even uses “luminous,” a word that outside biology and optics is best avoided. But he’s right. English is admirably malleable, like modeling clay. It’s always changing and yet retains the shape we give it, at least for a moment. West reminds us that every sentence is a small act of sculpture. He writes in his preface to Secret Lives:

“It’s impossible to know enough, but even a smattering alters your response to a kitchen or a garden, not to mention a classic of literature.”

`Knives, Not Baubles'

The comic moralist, drunk and language cop Kingsley Amis died twenty years ago today, and that hardly seems possible, not while so many of his bêtes noires are still thriving. A crank, yes, especially in later years, but Amis was a rare funny crank, one morally attuned to our self-congratulatory idiocy.  Like his friend Philip Larkin, Amis earned a significant portion of his living from pointing out how truly wrong and foolish we are, while keeping us amused. Try it sometime. Either the humor or the moral acuity will tip the balance, leaving you unfunny or dishonest. In “Getting It Wrong” (1980), Amis takes on the ever-burgeoning incidence of malapropisms, the often comical and always unknowing use of the wrong word. He assembles a small anthology of such gaffes, both written and spoken, and some are real beauts. At the conclusion, he notes that the editor of the Concise Oxford Dictionary uses what are known as “usage labels” – for instance, joc. for jocular and vul. for vulgar. Amis proposes a common-sensical addition to the list of such labels, one certain to come in handy:

“What about `(illit.): illiterate, used only by those who have no wish to write accurately or vigourously’?  The principle could be extended. A dictionary records usage impartially, agreed, but whatever anybody says or does (here come some italics that don’t signal a malapropism) when consulted it is taken as prescriptive too by almost everybody who is not either a lexicographer or a linguist, and prescription is partiality. It seems harsh to deny guidance to the lonely and diminishing minority who may genuinely need and want it.”

Parse the precision of those sentences. It reminds one of Evelyn Waugh’s graceful way with words and lives up to Swift’s timeless formulation: “Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style” (“Letter to a Young Clergyman," 1720). Bad writing, for Amis, is symptomatic of muddled thinking, if not of something more worrisome. Under the heading “Writing: repetitions” in The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1998), Amis reminds us that using language correctly is not pedantic punishment but great good fun. He quotes Larkin “who said or wrote, as a memento to all literary persons, `No one will enjoy reading what you have not enjoyed writing.’ After all, it could only have been a Frenchman or Irishman who held the view that to write in the expectation of being enjoyed denoted a certain simplicity of mind.” Few writers are as consistently  enjoyable as Amis père. These words were published posthumously, but Amis was expressing comparable ideas as early as 1953, one year before he published his first novel, Lucky Jim (his best, along with Girl, 20). Here is the first stanza of “Wrong Words”:

“Half-shut, our eye dawdles down the page

Seeing the word love, the word death, the word life,

Rhyme-words of poets in a silver age:

Silver of the bauble, not of the knife.”

Clive James says of these lines: “Knives, not baubles, are what poems should be like: a very rigorous aesthetic, which Amis had begun holding to long before he got round to formulating it.”

`The Smell of the Old Book'

Most books are not pegged to being read at a specific time of day or year, or to a time of life. You can read Shakespeare’s sonnets and Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6” whenever you wish, without fear of boredom or cognitive dissonance, though some works are best complimented by careful attention paid to time and place. One of the first times I dined alone, with only a book (Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens) for a companion, was in a cheap Italian place in Toledo, Ohio, and it proved the perfect setting for the best novel I’ve ever read set during World War II. That was more than thirty-five years ago, and one of the reasons I have never reread Guard of Honor is fear of compromising that earlier multi-media event. Here is Sir John Betjeman writing in First and Last Loves (John Murray, 1952):

“Every winter I read The Task by William Cowper, and twice or thrice those wonderful books in it where he describes a Winter Evening, a Winter Morning and a Winter Walk at Noon. The frost blades of north Buckinghamshire, the snowed-over woodlands, the dog that gamboled in the snow, the bells and post horns, the cups of tea, melted, dead, silenced, evaporated for nearly two hundred years, come to life again.”  

Betjeman (1906-1984) is a poet and chronicler of English buildings and places who, I sense, has never successfully crossed the Atlantic, perhaps because he sounds so very English to American ears. He writes in a tone we might call enlightened nostalgia, and is honored with his statute in bronze in St. Pancras Station, a building he lobbied to save from demolition in the nineteen-sixties. I returned to Betjeman after reading a review by Nige of Ghastly Good Taste, or a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture (1933), which I also borrowed from the library but haven’t started reading. I agree with Betjeman that The Task is best read, as I once read Dickens, in winter, even in Houston. Consider this passage from, Book IV, “The Winter Evening”:

“Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in.”

With Collins and Smart, Cowper was one of the mad English poets of the eighteenth century. At least three times he tried to take his own life, and he spent years in various asylums. His faith and the writing of hymns were his refuge, as was the cozy winter world he depicts in The Task. You can see why Betjeman habitually read the poem during the cold months. He continues:

“Winter is the time for reading poetry and often I discover for myself some minor English poet, a country parson who on just such a night must have sat in his study and blown sand off lines like these, written in ink made of oak-gall:

“`Soon as eve closes, the loud-hooting owl

That loves the turbulent and frosty night

Perches aloft upon the rocking elm

And hallooes to the moon.'”

The author of those lines is a poet new to me, the Rev. James Hurdis (1763-1801), a vicar in West Sussex. The passage comes from “The Favourite Village,” published in 1800, the year of Cowper’s death. Of the poem, Betjeman says it contains “some of the most perfect descriptions of an English winter that were ever written in English. And you and I are probably the only people in England who are reading Hurdis. The smell of the old book is like a country church when first you open its door, the look of the pages is spacious like the age in which it was written and the broad margins isolate the poetry as Bishopstone [Hurdis’ birthplace] must then have been isolated among windy miles of sheep-nibbled downs.”

`The Final Act and Certain Curtain Call'

In a letter to Francine du Plessix Gray dated Sept. 6, 2000, Anthony Hecht thanks her for sending him a “thoughtful and eloquent memoir-cum-meditation on mortality” she has written (ed. Jonathan F.S. Post, The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, 2012). He notes that it arrived in the same mail as a new biography of St. Augustine, whom Gray mentions in her essay. The coincidence prompts Hecht, then seventy-seven, to respond with his own meditation on mortality:

“It seems to me as I approach my seventh-eighth year that I have been acquainted with death from very early in my life; and by acquainted I mean intimately acquainted. I no longer have much fear as regards my own death, though I dread the possibility of preliminary pains that may precede it. I am much more distressed by the thought of the misery my death will give to family. . .”

I’ve never read anything by Gray and don’t know if she ever published her essay, but Hecht’s mention of Augustine reminds me of a passage in Book IV of the Confessions (trans. E.B. Pusey). In 376 A.D., when he was a young man and not yet a Christian, Augustine had a friend his age whom had he “warped” to “superstitious and pernicious fables.” In other words, he encouraged him to be a pagan. When the friend became ill and “lay senseless in a death-sweat,” he was baptized without his knowledge. When the friend regains consciousness, Augustine “jests” with him about the involuntary baptism. But the friend is angry with Augustine and pleased to have been baptized. Augustine says he “shrunk from me, as from an enemy; and with a wonderful and sudden freedom bade me, as I would continue his friend, forbear such language to him.” Soon the friend is dead. Augustine writes:

“At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death. My native country was a torment to me, and my father’s house a strange unhappiness; and whatever I had shared with him, wanting him, became a distracting torture.  Mine eyes sought him every where, but he was not granted them; and I hated all places, for that they had not him; nor could they now tell me, `he is coming,’ as when he was alive and absent. I became a great riddle to myself, and I asked my soul, why she was so sad, and why she disquieted me sorely: but she knew not what to answer me.”

The language is plain and direct: “I became a great riddle to myself.” Augustine grieves more violently for his unnamed friend than for his father, and understands that his loss moved him closer to becoming a Christian.” It’s the complexity of the death, the guilt and shame Augustine associates with it, that make it so memorable, like a scene in Tolstoy (think of the monk in his cell, when visited by a woman, abruptly chopping off one of his fingers with an axe in “Father Sergius,” a story that shocked me when I first read it). Hecht concludes his letter to Gray: “No doubt after a certain age, the ambitions that sustain us in youth cease to play any role in our lives, and we have to fall back upon love. And when that is gone, we are truly bereft.” In “Death the Hypocrite” (Flight Among the Tombs, 1996), Hecht writes:

“You claim to loathe me, yet everything you prize

Brings you within the reach of my embrace.

I see right through you, though I have no eyes;

You fail to know me even face to face.

“Your kiss, your car, cocktail and cigarette,

Your lecheries in fancy and in fact,

Unkindnesses you manage to forget,

Are ritual prologue to the final act

“And certain curtain call.”

Hecht died on this date, Oct. 20, in 2004 at age eighty-one.

`He Had Uncommon Sentiments'

Many readers know Dr. Johnson’s Life of Savage (1744), if only for the scandalous reputation of his subject and the unlikelihood of Johnson having befriended and commemorated such a man. (They might also know Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage by Richard Holmes.) Even more know his Lives of the Poets (1779-81), or at least its “greatest hits” devoted to Milton, Dryden and Pope. Fewer know his Life of Sir Thomas Browne (1756), his biography of the author of Religio Medici, The Garden of Cyrus and other gems of English prose. Among writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited 775 times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian. Here is Johnson the lexicographer on Browne the writer: 

“His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must, however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction; and, in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express, in many words, that idea for which any language could supply a single term.” 

Johnson’s prose is many things but seldom exotically virtuosic. His sensibility is flexible and generous, and understands that Browne was not merely showing off or trying to mystify his readers. Browne lived a century before Johnson, in an age when English was less fixed and more absorbent. The language, in fact, may have attained a sort of stylistic pinnacle in the seventeenth century. Often Johnson is caricatured as a reactionary, linguistically and otherwise. Boswell, for instance, reports him saying of Laurence Sterne: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” But here is Johnson on Browne’s linguistic exuberance: 

“But his innovations are sometimes pleasing, and his temerities happy he has many verba ardentia, forcible expressions, which he would never have found, but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and flights which would never have been reached, but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling.” 

And yet Browne’s prose can be plain and direct, quintessentially English in another sense. Take the epigraph Conrad gave to his 1913 novel Chance, from Religio Medici: “Those that hold that all things are governed by fortune had not erred, had they not persisted there.” Browne was born on this date, Oct. 19, in 1605. He is one of those human curiosities who died on his birthday, in 1682. We trust he would have appreciated the rare convergence.

`The Extreme Vital, If Not Literary, Test'

“`Let me then see whether the books that during all that other life I praised and championed with my pen can here still hold me.’” 

By “all that other life” Ford Madox Ford means the pre-war years, pre-1914, or, more specifically, pre-1915, the year he enlisted in the British army at age forty-two and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment. He shipped to France in July 1916. At Rouen, Ford was attached to the 9^th Battalion in time for the Battle of the Somme, the fiercest engagement in British military history. Near the end of that month, Ford was blown into the air, “concussed,” from the force of a high explosive shell. For three weeks the novelist lost his memory, even forgetting his own name. Writing in 1924, in a piece for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine (collected in War Prose, ed. Max Saunders, Carcanet, 1999), that’s what Ford means by “here.” 

After he recovered, Ford tells us he had shipped to France from London a package containing “the books that I had always championed,” mostly fiction, including titles by Flaubert, Turgenev, Stephen Crane, W.H. Hudson, Maupassant, Anatole France, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Ford said the volumes “stood the extreme vital, if not literary, test to which I put them, so that the valley of the Somme and the highlands behind the [Ypres] Salient even now remain for me singularly tapestried over with other landscape and, at times, if I let my memory alone, I could not say whether at a given date I was not seeing Kensington Gardens, the scented east or the Potomac instead of Albert, the wood of Bécordel-Bécourt or the landscape that stretched below Kemmel Hill.” 

Even those of us without military experience, who have read and reread persistently for decades, will recognize Ford’s layered, “tapestried-over” blurring of bookish and real memories (today we would add movies and television). Parts of Ulysses are set in Bowling Green, Ohio, and several of Borges’ Buenos Aires stories in Paris. Our most amusing, consoling and tormenting capacity is memory. Ford’s memory is imprinted in particular with impressions from The Red Badge of Courage, What Maisie Knew, Youth and Heart of Darkness. About James' short novel he writes: 

“I had been detailed to march some men to the baths in Albert and, as this was a duty that took time I had taken What Maisie Knew with me in my pocket. The doubling of vision that resulted is one of the most bewildering of my memories.” 

He goes on to describe the effect the best fiction can have on us, the displacement elsewhere, the self-forgetting, the intense identification with another. “I wish I could put it more fuzzily than that,” Ford writes, "more with blurred edges because the memory does not come back very clearly, but more than anything with the memory of being in an awkward and embarrassing affair—the affair of Maisie’s parents.”

`To Cast Light; to Make Clear'

“Let us put it as an axiom that books are written for the Reader; that books should be written for the Reader: and for the Reader and for no one else.”

Common sense? Of course, but of an uncommon sort. On Friday a friend here in Houston told me she is reading Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience and finds it hilarious. An hour earlier, a reader in Michigan wrote to say:

“I’ve been reading mostly history books; and, every once in a while, I find a good science book written for non-specialists.  For fiction, I've been mostly rereading books that I remember with pleasure . . . Mostly I like what reads well for me, although I admit that the sensation is almost visceral, and sometimes hard to defend.  I try to not be a thoughtless reader, but I've reached the point where I’m not too inclined to analyze either my motives or my books.”

He added that a recent return to Raymond Carver’s stories was not a disappointment, and now he plans a rereading of Nostromo. The passage quoted at the top was written in 1924 by Ford Madox Ford and published in the transatlantic review, the short-lived journal he edited in Paris. In its twelve issues appeared work by Joyce (early excerpts from what would become Finnegans Wake), Hemingway, Stein, Hilda Doolittle and other stalwarts of High Modernism. Ford’s thoughts on “the Reader” appeared in the April issue as part of a series of essays collectively titled “Stocktaking: Toward a Revaluation of English Literature,” under the witty pseudonym “Daniel Chaucer.” The pieces are collected in Critical Essays (eds. Max Saunders and Richard Stang, Carcanet, 2002). So soon after 1922, the high water mark of Modernism, Ford’s next sentence comes as a surprise: “It will follow then as a corollary that the existence of a large class of Intelligentsia will be a calamity for Literature; as indeed it will be for all other activities in the world.” Three paragraphs later he adds, presciently:

“The quite natural tendency of the Intelligentsia is to make of literature as unconsumable a thing as may be, so that, acting as its High Priests, they may make mediocre livings and cement their authority over an unlettered world. It is an ambition like another but more harmful than most.”

Ford diagnoses the profound provinciality of the self-satisfied avant-garde, its writers and their champions, who have flourished in the subsequent century. That same year, 1924, his old friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad died and Ford published Some Do Not . . . , the first novel in Parade’s End, his masterpiece. Helen Pinkerton wrote me this week to say she had recently reread the tetralogy, which she called “a definitive treatment of the rigors, the moral issues, the passions, the hard experiences of men and women in the first of the great wars of the last century.” When I wrote back in agreement, Helen responded:

“Just some quick support to your judgment that the Tietjens novels surpass Joyce and Proust. I can’t read Joyce at all any more, and, as it happens, I am reading Proust (translated) right now, trying hard to see what all the fuss was about in the first part of the 20^th century. I think I know why there was a fuss, e.g. the pure concentration on the impressions of the youthful, sensitive mind in beautiful and expressive language. But, it is a limited world.  And I agree with you about Ford’s Parade’s End. Unforgettable and unrepeatable.”

Ford writes later in the essay from 1924: “The ambition of the writer as writer is to cast light; to make clear. His purpose is to make man, above all, clear to his fellow men: the purpose of the Intelligentsia is to suppress all such illuminations as do not conduce to rendering more attractive their own special class.”

`Mark How the Leaves Grow Sparsely Now'

“Of seasons of the year, the Autumn is most melancholy. Of peculiar times; old age, from which natural melancholy is almost an inseparable accident; but this artificial malady is more frequent in such as are of a middle age. Some assign forty years; Gariopontus, 30; Jubertus excepts neither young nor old from this adventitious.”

Even the experts can’t agree. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton intuited SAD (seasonal affective disorder, now called “depressive disorder with seasonal pattern,” without the nifty acronym) nearly four centuries before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) made it official. My emotional response to the turning of the seasons reverses Burton’s scheme (and the American Psychiatric Association’s). Autumn is the most bracing of seasons, spring the most – not sad, but discouraging. In fall, the air is cool, clear and dry. October is Poetry Month. Spring is muddy and too many Yahoos celebrate its coming. A friend in Kentucky who recently underwent cataract surgery might be describing the effect of autumn on vision: “Already the world is full of vibrant colors and sharply defined lines and angles that had become a memory.” The spring is muddy and the air blurry with rain and mist.

Without making it explicit, Burton hovers over a natural metaphor: Our lives are seasonal. If late middle age is autumnal, old age is winter, minus the seasonal turn into spring. C.H. Sisson makes the correspondence explicit in a sequence he wrote in his sixties titled “Autumn Poems” (Collected Poems, 1998). Here is the final Ovidian stanza:

“I am a tree: mark how the leaves grow

Sparsely now; here a bunch, there,

At the end of this thin twig, another

And the bark hardening, thickening. I am allowed

No respite from the wind, the long

Thorn trunk and branches stretching like a swan’s neck

In torment. And the hiss

My own malice makes of this wind

Gentle enough, in itself: I can imagine myself

As this tree but what consciousness

Should go with it—that,

Screeching neck, I am blind to.”

`Trying to Make Things Permanent'

Norm Sibum has introduced me to a Canadian poet I had never heard of before, John Newlove (1938-2003):

“I think one of the best poets here wrote very uneven verse, some of it quite awful, but that he was the only Canadian who didn't lose his head over the San Francisco influence, and the Black Mountaineers and so forth. That poet was John Newlove, and he stayed his own man, one of the very few, though he adopted a lot of that practice.”

In miniature, Norm recounts a representative writer of his time, one who resisted fashionable temptations and worked to remain independent, beyond the reach of orthodoxy, though not always successfully. Poets, renowned for romantic individuality, tend, often unknowingly, to move in herds. Newlove seems to have been a sort of self-imposed internal exile, almost in the old Soviet sense, as in the case of Nadezhda Mandelstam. My library has three of his collections: Black Night Window (1968), The Cave (1970) and The Night the Dog Smiled (1986).

One of Newlove’s titles conjures my experience of first love for a national literature; in this case, Russian: “Doukhobor” (from The Cave). The word is Russian for “spirit-wrestler,” and the OED defines it as “a member of a Russian religious sect which originated in the 18th century, many of whose members emigrated to Western Canada in the late nineteenth century after persistent persecution.” In 1899, some 6,000 members of the sect left Russia and settled on land granted them by the Canadian government in what is now Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Tolstoy turned over his royalties from his final novel, Resurrection (1899), and some of his stories, to the Doukhobors, to help in their resettlement. So did various Tolstoyans and Quakers. I think I first learned of them from Henri Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy. Newlove was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and grew up in various small towns in that province. The Doukhobors would have been local news for him, and he sympathizes with their status as outsiders, feared, distrusted and admired:

“. . . you, whose mind

“refused to slaughter, refused the blood,

you who will lie in your house, stiff as winter,

“dumb as an ox, unable to love,

while your women sob and offer the visitors tea?”

“Shakespeare’s Sonnets” is from The Night the Dog Smiled:

“I’m not interested in rainbows

But in the sky itself, the serene

Not the spectacular: the permanent.

“This is a business of trying to make things permanent,

Not ephemeral. What else to do?

We know we die, so chase notoriety too.

“All the couples of Shakespeare’s sonnets

make sense to me. It was another love

other than the Dark One he reached for.

“Us.”

Today, swearing allegiance to the permanent is almost seditious, and Newlove ups the ante by suggesting a poet’s business is “trying to make things permanent / Not ephemeral.” By implication, Shakespeare did just that, as common readers of the sonnets would agree. Newlove’s notion that Shakespeare wrote not for Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians, Derbyites or other codebreakers or conspiracy theorists, but for us, is thrilling and sane

`Bedside and Wastebasket'

The cart was the bland, buff-colored sort librarians push through the stacks, this one briefly abandoned in a quiet, carpeted corner of the library. On it was an allegorical object lesson in aesthetics. On one side, liberated from confinement in the special collections department, sat a chastely covered first edition of Ideas of Order, Wallace Stevens’ 1936 collection, his second. I lifted and held this Platonic ideal of “bookness,” thanks to Alfred Knopf, its publisher. I’ve never been able to appreciate Stevens as much as he deserves, but it was still a kick holding this austere volume. On the other side were stacked three recent volumes of American poetry, all paperbacks and all, a quick look assured me, not worthy of a second look. The tacky covers, fraudulently inflated blurbs and eccentric line breaks told me what I needed to know. Hastily judgmental? You bet.      

I thought of Nabokov. When Fyodor, ventriloquizing his creator, says in The Gift, “You see, the way I look at it, there are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him out entirely,” we ought to remember Koncheyev’s reply:  “With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.” Koncheyev’s counsel is sound, regardless of how badly we are tempted to second Fyodor’s judgment. How much time should we devote to looking for the good or passable in the lousy or mediocre? When has a reader fulfilled his obligation to a writer? I don’t expect an answer. I’m jealous of my time and prefer not to squander on the second-rate or worse. After a lifetime of concerted reading, I should be able to trust my judgment and not be beholding to fashion, whim or my own laziest failings.

A reader wrote me on Monday and asked if there are “any pop culture writers worth reading.” Pop vs. “literary,” high vs. low culture, is not the point. The important literary distinction is well written vs. poorly written. What I call “literary distinction” a poet friend who wrote me over the weekend calls, more simply, “poetry”: “It is my contention that the world we live in is a conspiracy dedicated to the expunging of all poetry from its core. How clever of it to enlist so many poets and novelists and arty types into this cause.”