`No Want of Playthings and Avocations'

I listened with amusement as a youngish woman, healthy and prosperous judging from appearances, proudly complained about the tedium of her life. This was happening two days after Thanksgiving Day. Work was boring, her boyfriend and television were boring, Houston was boring and this damned party was the most boring in human history. She was an aficionado of life’s humdrum sameness, and without knowing it, I’m certain, Life, friends, is boring.echoed Henry in Dream Song #14: “Life, friends, is boring.” When young and drinking, this line was my mantra. Four lines later, Henry quotes his mother (whom we can reasonably assume is the formidable Mrs. Berryman): “`Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’” What a bourgeois drag, I thought. Too conventional to savor life’s tedium. Now I’m with Mom. In a letter to his friend the Rev. John Newton, on this date, Nov. 30, in 1783, William Cowper writes: “Let our station be as retired as it may, there is no want of playthings and avocations, nor much need to seek them, in this world of ours.” 

At age fifty-seven, after multiple suicide attempts and confinements, in semi-retirement at Olney but Buried above ground.still feeling himself “Buried above ground,” Cowper had plenty of excuses to complain of boredom and suffering.  Yet much of the rest of the letter is a burlesque of life in the “Antediluvian world,” pre-ark. Cowper is one of literature’s virtuoso riff-writers, starting with a theme and improvising a vivacissimo set piece. One understands the link of madness to comedy: 

“I will suppose myself born a thousand years before Noah was born or thought of. I rise with the sun; I worship; I prepare my breakfast; I swallow a bucket of goats’ milk, and a dozen good sizeable cakes. I fasten a new string to my bow, and my youngest boy, a lad of about thirty years of age, having played with my arrows till he has stripped off all the feathers, I find myself obliged to repair them. The morning is thus spent in preparing for the chace [sic], and it is become necessary that I should dine.” 

Cowper was a human rarity, impervious to boredom, thoroughly endowed with Inner Resources.

`A Blissful Eternity Would Not Suffice'

Robert Melançon’s For as Far as the Eye Can See (trans. Judith Cowan, Biblioasis, 2013) is a collection of 144 twelve-line almost-sonnets, meditative in tone, somber celebrations of appearances and their depths. More than once I thought of Ahab’s boast to Starbuck – “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks” – but in a minor key and without Ahab’s mad wish to the “smash the mask.” Melançon savors the real. The book’s French title, more evocative than the English, is Le Parades des Apparences: essai de poèmes réalistes (2004). Here is Cowan’s rendering of 36: 

“It all has to fit into twelve lines—a lesser sonnet—

all that’s depicted at every instant inside the cave

dug out by Plato for the chaining up of those 

“whom he deemed to be dupes of illusion. But in his

system’s sphere, the soul struggling to be free

had to swap for a stale whiteness, all pleasing things: 

“these wind-harrowed trees, the play of sun and shadow,

that pink-and-brown bird alighting on a wire.

 So I shall settle for the paradise of what I see: 

“I trace this rectangle of twelve lines and

make of it a window through which to observe

all that appears, and that happens once only.” 

The French title alerts us to the presence in this fallen world of “paradise,” which for Melançon is neither Eden nor a hedonist’s delight. His stance before creation is contemplative and sometimes worshipful. Often the speaker in his poems is seated at a window, admiring the view, weighing its implications. In 36, the poem itself is a window “through which to observe / all that appears.” Navel-gazers and professional malcontents need not apply. Borges, who observed that “Paradise is a library, not a garden,” shows up in Sonnet 85, in which Melançon renders a booklover’s paradise: 

“Here on this side are the call letters PA

for Latin, and over their the letters PQ

for Romance literature, which is to say                                 

“for paradise: so much prose and poetry

that a blissful eternity would not suffice

for us to read it all, from Lucretius and Horace 

“to Saint-Denys Garneau, Borges and Montale,

from Aulus Gellius to Joubert, to Cioran, to Léautaud.

One could just as well say Seneca, and Ponge, and Leopardi, 

“Petrarch, Pessoa, Montaigne . . . one recites these names

And those of Sbarbaro, Erasmus, or Martineau, giddy

At having inhaled the inexhaustible catalogue.” 

Most academic libraries use the Library of Congress call letters, not the Dewey Decimal System. The PA section includes Greek and Roman language and literature; PQ, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. 85 will elicit two possible reactions from readers: They will object to an eternity of tedium, or they will intuitively understand it and wish they could dwell in such heavenly fields. I’m grateful that on Melançon’s honor roll of authors are several who are most important to me. The poem reminded me of a passage by a writer utterly unlike Melançon, Sir John Betjeman, who I am reading attentively for the first time. In his blank-verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells (1960), he includes a reader’s reverie: 

“Untidy bookshops gave me such delight.

It was the smell of books, the plates in them,

Tooled leather, marbled paper, gilded edge,

The armorial book-plate of some country squire,

From whose tall library windows spread his park

On which this polished spine may once have looked,

From whose twin candlesticks may once have shone

Soft beams upon the spacious title-page.”

`Private Islands of Schizophrenic Bliss'

“Were it possible to escape from our duties to God and our neighbor into our private islands of schizophrenic bliss, very few of us, I fancy, would take with us any of the great works of world literature. Our libraries would consist, for the most part, of those books which, read in childhood, formed our personal vision of the public world. To these tattered, dog-eared volumes, however, most of us have in the course of our lives added one or two extra treasures.” 

Auden’s observation, I suspect, is intended more as provocation than critical diktat, but he’s more than half correct. The books that attract us when we are young, in particular those titles nominally intended for grownups, suggest our future bent as readers (and, perhaps, writers). This I’ve observed in my life and the lives of my three sons. The adult titles I read early I continue to read in some form – the Bible, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, biographies and stacks of field guides. From this I would deduce that as a boy I liked good stories and compilations of hard information, which remains true to this day. The passage quoted above is from Auden’s introduction to Slick but Not Streamlined: Poems and Short Pieces (Doubleday & Co., 1947), John Betjeman’s first book published in the United States. That same year, Auden dedicated The Age of Anxiety to Betjeman, a poet he admired extravagantly. Auden continues: 

“In my case Mr. Betjeman’s work belongs—so do the novels of Ronald Firbank and the Li’l Abner cartoons—to this tiny group of later additions to my original nursery library: he is privileged to stand beside Icelandic Legends, Machinery for Metalliferous Mines, Eric or Little by Little, Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor (Stanley Smith, M.A., D.Sc. H. M. Stationery Office. 3s6d net), Struwelpeter, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (the 1869 edition), The Edinburgh School of Surgery, Hymns Ancient and Modern (with tunes), and Dangers to Health, a Victorian treatise on plumbing with colored plates, which, incidentally, I lent to Mr. Betjeman twelve years ago and he has not yet returned."

This is Auden in High Camp mode (Firbank!), exuding a joyous mock-pedantry, and yet giving us an autobiography in miniature. His father was a physician, and Auden remained interested in medicine throughout his life. Hededicated his own The Age of Anxiety to his fellow poet. was born in York but with his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, as an infant. As a child he was fascinated by the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. One of his brothers became a geologist, and Auden’s poetry is studded with geological, mining and industrial references. Among his finest poems is “In Praise of Limestone.” In Forewords and Afterwords, his 1973 collections of essays and reviews, Auden writes: “I spent a great many of my waking hours in the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining.” His biographer Humphrey Carpenter writes:

“He took his landscape seriously, and asked his mother and other adults to procure for him textbooks with titles such as Machinery for Metalliferous Mines, maps, guidebooks, and photographs; and he persuaded them to take him down a real mine if ever there was a chance. He especially relished the technical vocabulary of mining, the names of mines and of the veins found in them, and the geological terms relating to mining.”

The interest in lead mining reveals something about Auden’s formative landscape, and also suggests a quality I value in any writer – scrupulous attention paid to the details of the real world. In A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970), Auden includes such geological headings as “Alps, The,” “Climber, An Amateur,” “Climber, A Professional,” “Eruptions,” “Landscape: Basalt” and “Landscape: Limestone.” In the poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” he writes:

“Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.”

Auden’s choice of headings for his commonplace book is vast and varied – “Anesthesia,” “Conception, The Immaculate,” “Homer and Seeing,” “Inverted Commas, Transformation by,” “Kilns,” “Madness,” “World, End of the” -- and suggests a joyous celebration of the world’s bounty. Marianne Moore wrote of Auden: “He is a notable instance of the poet whose scientific predilections do not make him less than a poet – who says to himself, I must know.” Edward Mendelson called Auden the first poet to feel at home in the 20th century. It’s quintessentially modern to embrace the outmoded, fragmented and abandoned, and to feel nostalgia for what is no longer modern, for “Tramlines and slagheaps.” In “Epithalamium,” written in 1965 for the wedding of his niece, Auden again indulges his breadth of interests, including the geological and biological:

“For we’re better built to last
than tigers, our skins
don’t leak like the ciliates’,
our ears can detect
quarter-tones, even our most
myopic have good enough
vision for courtship

“and how uncanny it is
we’re here to say so,
that life should have got to us
up through the City’s
destruction layers after
surviving the inhuman
Permian purges.”

In his foreword to A Certain World, after derogating literary biographies, Auden admits his commonplace book is “a sort of autobiography” and, in an interesting astronomical and geological metaphor, “a map of my planet” – presumably, his sensibility, his life. Around the same time, in August 1969, Auden was writing “Moon Landing,” about the Apollo 11 mission. It’s not a celebration of the voyage of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins:

“Homer’s heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
was excused the insult of having
his valor covered by television.”

But it is, four years before his death, another Auden affirmation of poetry and its consolations:

“Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.”

`A Nation Defined by and Consisting of Poets'

Bill Brandt (1904-1983) was a German-born English photographer who documented his adopted home for more than half a century. He was prolific, and specialized in photographing working-class subjects and nudes, but the volume that occupies me is Literary Britain (Cassell and Company, 1951). From the title I assumed it would contain photographs of mid-century writers, but few people of any era or occupation show up in Brandt’s pictures. Rather, he most often shoots building or landscapes associated with England’s great writers, starting with Chaucer and Langland, and running through W.H. Hudson, Rupert Brooke and Shaw, or with their work. The photos are black and white, and often heavily shadowed. The mood is elegiac and only indirectly celebrative. Brandt seems to be saying, “Look at what we once had.” For Kipling he photographs a darkened section of Hadrian’s Wall, little more than a long stretch of rubble. Accompanying the picture is an excerpt from Puck of Pook’s Hill, part of which reads: 

“A little curtain wall, no higher than a man’s neck, runs along the top of the thick wall, so that from a distance you see the helmets of the sentries sliding back and forth like beads. Thirty feet high is the Wall, and on the Picts’ side, the North, is a ditch, strewn with blades of old swords and spear-heads set in wood, and tyres of wheels joined by chains.” 

It’s typical of Kipling that he writes of the distant past in the present tense, an echo of Brandt’s photographic method. The Picts are an ancient pre-Celtic people who lived in what is now Scotland. The Romans first noted them in 297 A.D., when they and the Irish attacked Hadrian’s Wall, begun in 122 A.D. For Thomas Hardy, Brandt photographs cows grazing among the stones, standing and fallen, of Stonehenge, accompanied by a passage from Tess of the D’Urbervilles: 

“The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity and hesitation which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun stone beyond them.” 

One of the most striking of Brandt’s photographs, devoted to the Brontës, shows the churchyard at Haworth. In the background, obscured by trees, is the church and rectory, and in the foreground, as close as tiles on a floor, are horizontal grave stones. All are heavily inscribed but illegible in the photo. On the adjoining page is an excerpt from a letter Charlotte Brontë wrote to Ellen Nussey: 

“There have I sat on the low bedstead, my mind fixed on the window through which appeared no other landscape than a monotonous stretch of moorland, a grey church-tower rising from the centre of a church-yard so filled with graves that the rank weeds and coarse grass scarce had room to shoot up between the monuments.” 

The only conspicuous absences I note in Brandt’s pantheon are Defoe, Gibbon, Sterne, Hazlitt, Conrad and Beerbohm.  The one entry that moved me to reread the complete work it’s taken from accompanies a photograph of the old rectory at Somersby, where Tennyson was born in 1809. The passage is drawn from In Memoriam: CII. Here is the final stanza: 

“I turn to go: my feet are set
To leave the pleasant fields and farms;
They mix in one another's arms
To one pure image of regret.” 

Brandt’s book of photographs confirms my sense that England, for civilized men and woman, for those who cherish civilized virtues, is home. No other nation has spawned so much literary genius across such a span of centuries. Bryan Appleyard said as much several years ago in “Poetry and the English Imagination”: 

“Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words `We defy augury’. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.”

`One Never Writes Alone'

Norm Sibum suggested I read Montreal Before Spring (trans. Donald McGrath, Biblioasis, 2015) by the Quebec francophone poet Robert Melançon (b. 1947), whose voice is quiet, companionable and elegiac. He originally published L’Avant-printemps à Montréal in 1994. McGrath translates the revised edition published this year by Éditions du Noroît of Montreal. Norm told me: “It is worthy of attention.” Seldom have poems in translation so quickly won me over. Melançon addresses the reader like a trusted friend, without flattery. In the final lines of the book’s final poem, “Leave-Taking,” he writes:

“If you in turn have recognized yourself,

friend unknown to me, in a single verse,

my efforts were not wasted. Otherwise,

forget these pages that are nothing to you.” 

Melançon is a grateful poet, freely acknowledging his debts to precursors. More than most writers today, he recognizes himself as working in a literary tradition or, rather, traditions. Melançon draws generously on French- and English-language (and Spanish, and Greek) forebears and contemporaries, and is free of Canadian clannishness. In the poem quoted above, he includes a moving passage about his poetic debts: 

“One never writes alone. I’ve borrowed

from Baudelaire, Elizabeth Bishop,

from Borges, Cavafy and du Bellay,

from Saint-Denys Garneau, from Herrick, Grey [Thomas Gray?],

Johnston, Larkin, Jean-Aubert Loranger,

from Robert Marteau, Malherbe and Petrarch,

Jacques Réda, Virgil and Théophile,

And from others, too, whom I don’t forget,

Friends known and unknown, close and distant,

In whom I came to know myself while seeking

What meaning this adventure might assume,

This longing to persist in one’s being, which has

No explanation apart from the desire

To not wait quietly and leave

This dark world without uttering a peep.” 

With “One never writes alone,” Melançon brushes aside “Make-it-new” fetishism, the modern obsession with originality. A writer who repudiates the past, the lessons of those who honored the tradition before him, is the truest provincial. “Letter to George Johnston,” addressed to the English-language Canadian poet (1913-2004), is a fan letter to a friend and another example of Melançon’s solidarity with other “worthy” friends and fellow-poets. He apologizes for the quality of his English, asks for forgiveness from “the shades of Addison and Thoreau,” while trying to translate Johnston’s poems into French. To Johnston, “in whom Langland and Herrick live again,” he says: 

“I’m writing to tell you how much I admire

Your poetry, how fond I am of you,

In a letter in verse, in the manner

Of Pope, Boileau and du Bellay.” 

Poets are a jealous, inbred bunch, and any sign of generosity and collegiality deserves commendation. To use a word perhaps irredeemably debased in recent years, Melançon carries on a conversation with poets, poetry, Montreal, French and English, and most commendably with readers. In “The Reader,” Melançon writes of a woodcut (probably this one) by Félix Edouard Vallotton (1865-1925), the French-Swiss artist. The poem concludes: 

“The books alone emerge

out of the blackness poured

from a Japanese printmaker’s inkstand.

The man’s hand pulls out the book

In which he’ll soon lose himself

In the warmth of his lamp, the silence.”

`I Would Rattle His Pedestal'

“Decided to give William Carlos Williams one more chance out of simple Christian charity. Reread half a dozen of his doctor stories, and no, I can live very well without W.C.W. They are slapdash and carelessly wrought. I would rattle his pedestal.”

I would as well. Most writers today are overrated but few as extravagantly so as Williams. He reminds me of the musical illiterate who sits at the keyboard plinking, without a thought for others in the room. His influence has inspired thousands of tin ears to imitate his anorexic lines in poems and prose.

For me, the sentiment quoted above reads like an echo of a twenty-three-year-old conversation. It comes from Diary (Yale University Press, 2011) by Richard Selzer, the retired surgeon and professor at Yale. In 1992, I interviewed him by telephone when he published a memoir, Down from Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age. Troy, N.Y., where Selzer was born in 1928, is just up the Hudson River from Albany. I worked as a reporter for that city’s newspaper, and read the book as local history. Selzer’s father was a general practitioner in Troy. The only thing I remember from the memoir is Selzer’s description of the contents of the senior Dr. Selzer’s medical bag: worthless. The effectiveness of medical science in the first half of the twentieth century was more wishful than real.

A few weeks later, Selzer came to a small town outside Troy to give a reading from his new book. I got there early and we took a walk. I brought up the topic of doctor-writers – Keats, Sir William Osler, Chekhov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Walker Percy – and I recall two of his judgments. In brief: Sir Thomas Browne, good. William Carlos Williams, bad. At least on this matter we were copasetic.

I’m skimming Selzer’s Diary. Unless one is already smitten with the author, one reads diaries, journals and collections of letters in search of small dazzlements or points of irritation. With a middling writer, expectations are low. Selzer’s mind and prose are not that interesting, and like most published diaries, his is a vanity project. He is a little too impressed with his own insights, but does tell a good story about surgically removing Robert Penn Warren’s gallbladder and a stone from his bile duct in 1954.

`Discoveries that Demand Expression'

The only thing better than a prolific good writer, is a costive bad one. We should count our blessings for every time Norman Mailer didn’t publish a book. On the other hand, Evelyn Waugh turned out peerless prose at an industrial clip. One could easily spend a month reading nothing but Waugh without fear of the supply running dry. My current Waugh-binge has included Decline and Fall, Scoop, Put Out More Flags, his life of Ronald Knox and occasional dips into Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. That last collection, in which Waugh the novelist is joined by Waugh the scrambling freelance journalist and reviewer, reacquainted me with “Literary Style in England and America,” an essay he published in Books on Trial in 1955:

“Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash.”

Waugh is no Yellow Book aesthete. He thought James Joyce was insane, and in “Literary Style” says the Irishman was “possessed by style. His later work lost all faculty of communication, so intimate, allusive and idiosyncratic did it become, so obsessed by euphony and nuance” – as good an encapsulation of Finnegans Wake as I know. In contrast to the ingrown mutations of late Joyce, Waugh says the “necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.”

Lucidity in Waugh’s estimation doesn’t mean Dick-and-Jane flatness. Several years ago I tried to read a novel by the noir cult-favorite David Goodis. Every sentence seemed stamped out with the same subject-verb-object cookie cutter. Goodis plodded along in four-four like a drummer on the nod. Was he intelligible? Sure, but so is the phone book. Waugh clarifies:

“Henry James is the most lucid of writers, but not the simplest. The simplest statements in law and philosophy are usually those which, in application, require the greatest weight of commentary and provoke the longest debate. A great deal of what is most worth saying must always remain unintelligible to most readers. The test of lucidity is whether the statement can be read as meaning anything other than what it intends.”

Elegance has a dubious reputation among readers and critics. The just-the-facts crowd deems elegant writing effete, elitist and probably intended to conceal its absence of substance. Not Waugh:

“Elegance is the quality in a work of art which imparts direct pleasure; again not universal pleasure. There is a huge, envious world to whom elegance is positively offensive. English is incomparably the richest of languages, dead or living. One can devote one’s life to learning it and die without achieving mastery. No two words are identical in meaning, sound and connotation. The majority of English speakers muddle through with a minute vocabulary.”

About individuality, the third of his prerequisites for true style, Waugh is succinct: “It is the hand-writing, the tone of voice, that makes a work recognizable as being by a particular artist.” Most of Waugh’s prose readily meets that criterion. “Style,” he says, “is what makes a work memorable and unmistakable.” He cites Max Beerbohm and Ronald Knox as exemplars of style, saying, “[Knox’s] Enthusiasm should be recognized as the greatest work of literary art of the century,” a sentiment I wouldn’t get into a fight over. As to novelists with “intensely personal and beautiful styles,” Waugh names Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green. For some reason, while I admire and enjoy the others, I’ve always found Greene almost unreadable. Waugh concludes his essay like this, probably writing in an autobiographical mode:

“In youth high spirits carry one over a book or two. The world is full of discoveries that demand expression. Later a writer must face the choice of becoming an artist or a prophet. He can shut himself up at his desk and selfishly seek pleasure in the perfecting of his own skill or he can pace about, dictating dooms and exhortations on the topics of the day. The recluse at the desk has a bare chance of giving abiding pleasure to others; the publicist has none at all.”

`Who Without Reserve Can Dare'

“A kindling impulse seized the host
Inspired by heaven’s elastic air;
Their hearts outran their General's plan,
Though Grant commanded there--
Grant, who without reserve can dare;
And, `Well, go on and do your will,’
He said, and measured the mountain then:
So master-riders fling the rein--
But you must know your men.” 

This is Herman Melville on the hero of the day, Maj. General Ulysses S. Grant, in “Chattanooga (November 1863),” collected in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). The Battle of Chattanooga started on this date, Nov. 23, in 1863. Around 1:30 p.m., 14,000 Union troops advanced on six-hundred Confederate defenders, launching an engagement that lasted less than three days. Union casualties numbered 5,824; Confederate, 6,667, and probably higher. Grant decisively routed Gen. Braxton Bragg,  and Confederate morale was shaken. Read the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885) for an almost cinematic account of the battle: 

“I watched their progress with intense interest. The fire along the rebel line was terrific. Cannon and musket balls filled the air: but the damage done was in small proportion to the ammunition expended. The pursuit continued until the crest was reached, and soon our men were seen climbing over the Confederate barriers at different points in front of both Sheridan’s and Wood’s divisions.” 

Grant, no braggart, writes in a Dec. 5, 1863 letter to J. Russell Jones: “An Army never was whipped so badly as Bragg was. So far as any opposition the enemy could make I could have marched to Atlanta or any other place in the Confederacy. But I was obliged to rescue [Gen. Ambrose] Burnside.” 

In The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1997), Stanton Garner deduces that Melville met Grant the following year in Virginia. He cites a note the poet wrote to accompany “Chattanooga (November 1863),” in which he refers to an unnamed “visitor” discussing the battle with the Union commander: “General Grant, at Culpepper, a few weeks prior to crossing the Rapidan for the Wilderness, expressed to a visitor his impression of the impulse and the spectacle: Said he: `I never saw any thing like it:’ language which seems curiously undertoned, considering its application; but from the taciturn Commander it was equivalent to a superlative or hyperbole from the talkative.” Garner also quotes the brief memoir Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, wrote about her husband: “Herman went to Virginia with Allan [Melville’s brother] in April 1864 Visited  [sic] various battlefields & called on Gen. Grant.”                                                     

To a reader, it’s reassuring to know that two of America’s greatest writers should have met, however briefly or distractedly. In “The Armies of the Wilderness,” Melville writes of Grant: “Like a loaded mortar he is still: / Meekness and grimness meet in him-- / The silent General.”

`Not Only Important But Also Beautiful'

George Santayana was born in Madrid on Dec. 16, 1863. In November 1949, as his eighty-sixth birthday approached, a wealthy cousin of Mark Twain’s, Cyril Coniston

Clemens (1902-1999), wrote to the philosopher in Rome, saying he and his friends wished to send Santayana a birthday gift. The old man’s response is a model of gracious demurral followed by a change of heart and polite acceptance – all in less than three-hundred words. On this date, Nov. 22, in 1949, Santayana writes: 

“You and your friends are very kind to wish to celebrate my 86^th birthday by sending me something. I receive regularly parcels and of course money from America, but apart from cryptic modern poetry, or books by cranks, asking for a word of endorsement to figure on the dust-jacket of their first work, I receive little that is beautiful; nor have I any place in which to put any object of any value.” 

This was true. Santayana spent the final decade of his life living at the Convent of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, cared for by the Irish sisters. He lived with admirable simplicity, as his former student at Harvard, Wallace Stevens, noted: “The beds, the books, the chair, the moving nuns, / The candle as it evades the sight, these are / The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome.” Santayana shifts gears. He tells Clemens he almost ordered the first volume of a “monumental history of Thomas Jefferson" (probably Jefferson the Virginian, the first of six volumes by Dumas Malone), but changed his mind because his reading is “casual” -- Lucretius, Ovid, Catullus and a few other Romans. “But Latin poets are not the characteristic things to ask for from Missouri [Clemens lived in St. Louis].” So, Santayana reverses his earlier refusal of a gift and asks for the Jefferson volume because it “would certainly open a new scene to me that is not only important but also beautiful.” He adds: “Or send me anything small that you may prefer. I say small, because I have only one small room of my own; and even my books have overflowed into the adjoining public reception room.” 

Santayana closes with “grateful regards.” Epistolary elegance is rare (as are epistles, today). Accompanied by wit and gratitude, it is nearly nonexistent. And the spectacle of the Spaniard living in Italy who never became an American citizen accepting a book about Jefferson from a cousin of Mark Twain is satisfyingly all-American.

`The Rest Could Be Left Out'

Perhaps the model for today’s “public intellectual,” hard-wired to the Zeitgeist and hair-triggered with opinions, is H.G. Wells. He dabbled in utopia and eugenics, wrote science-fiction novels and once said of Joseph Stalin, with whom he shook hands in 1934 (the year of the start of the Great Purge, following the murder of Sergey Kirov): “I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest.” Wells believed in progress and World Government. I had read The Time Machine and his other “scientific romances” by the time I read John Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers” (1961). David Kern, Updike’s stand-in, is thirteen and has also read The Time Machine. David’s encounter with Wells’ The Outline of History, first published in two volumes in 1920, shocks him and sets off a crisis of faith:

“. . . before he could halt his eyes, David slipped into Wells’s account of Jesus. He had been an obscure political agitator, a kind of hobo, in a minor colony of the Roman Empire. By an accident impossible to reconstruct, he (the small h horrified David) survived his own crucifixion and presumably died a few weeks later. A religion was founded on the freakish incident. The credulous imagination of the times retrospectively assigned miracles and supernatural pretensions to Jesus; a myth grew, and then a church, whose theology at most points was in direct contradiction of the simple, rather communistic teachings of the Galilean.”

Updike nicely captures the condescension and contempt associated with the dull, earnest scientism of any era. I remembered the early Updike story while reading Broadcast Minds (Sheed & Ward, 1932) by Ronald Knox, the Roman Catholic priest, Bible translator and author of Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (1950). Knox took his title from the credence people put in the chief medium of his day, radio: “the habit of taking over, from self-constituted mentors, a ready-made, standardized philosophy of life, instead of constructing, with however imperfect materials, a philosophy of life for oneself.” In his chapter “The Omniscientists,” he anatomizes those who establish a pet thesis, withhold conflicting evidence, and then “serve up the whole to us as the best conclusions of modern research, disarming all opposition by appealing to the sacred name of science.” Among his targets are Wells, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Gerald Heard, the Harris, Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens of their day.

Knox traces the rise of “omniscience” in his day to the publication of The Outline of History. Wells, he says, is “a man who could turn his hand to anything, who, by his uncanny literary gift, could make any sort of improbability seem probable, in the manner of Jules Verne. Knox might be referring to Wells’ sci-fi novels and stories, or to almost anything he ever wrote. About his Outline of History he writes:

“But we had not pictured him as a historian. And then the book came out, and we realized that his treatment of his subject did not really need any knowledge of history, beyond the 1066 and All That standard; the rest could be left out.”

Conceding that Wells is “readable,” Knox adds: “It was a phantasia, history as Mr Wells wanted us to see it, with materials drawn from so wide a range of sources that, look where he would, he could always find some point of view, some opinion, which favoured his own thesis.”

`In the Tremor and Heat of Occurrence'

For four years in his twenties (and the twentieth century’s), V.S. Pritchett lived away from England, in France, Spain and Ireland, places he later called, collectively, “my university,” just as Ishmael and his creator said “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” That’s where he started writing, in 1923, for the Christian Science Monitor. Pritchett’s first book was Marching Spain (1928), based on his three-hundred-mile walk across that country. More than twenty years later he returned to Spain, and in 1954 published The Spanish Temper. This most English of twentieth-century writers came alive as a writer elsewhere. He had a reporter’s hearty appetite for gossip, landscape, history and conversation, coupled with a non-cloistered bookishness. I’ve known reporters who adopt Homage to Catalonia (1938) as their journalistic bible, but Orwell is necessarily sidetracked by politics and that hobbles the book. Pritchett’s is the volume I would hand to a young writer and urge him to read if he wished to learn about Spain or how to write about an alien place with sympathy tempered by skepticism. Here is Pritchett describing a walk in Madrid:

“It was on our way to the Prado that I saw an old man kneeling before the crucified Christ in one of the Jesuit churches., a figure splashed by blood specks and with raw wounds, gaping as they would upon the mortuary slab, the face torn by physical pain, the muscles and tendons stretched. One imagined that the sculptor must have copied a crucified model to be so inflexible an anatomist and that the thought of imagining the agony of Christ had been beyond him.”

Here we witness, in nonfiction, the fiction writer’s gift for imaginative projection into another. Pritchett dependably animates scenes that might otherwise be flat and static. On the following page, and in a slightly different key, he digresses into autobiography, and then into art, and then Spanish art -- Velázquez, El Greco, Goya-- and eventually into an anatomy of the Spanish temper – all without having yet entered the Prado. He begins:

“I am not an art critic, but since I live chiefly by the eye, I get more pleasure out of painting and sculpture than any other arts. I have a purely literary point of view; that is to say, when I see a picture  I find myself turning it into writing about human nature, habits of mind, the delight of the senses—all that is meant to me by `pride of life.’”

More than a mere self-indulgent confession, this serves as Pritchett’s natural transition into the genius of Spanish painting. Its masters, he says, “are not copyists from a still model [recall the sculpture and “crucified model” Pritchett imagined outside]; they are readers of nature.” On first acquaintance, we look at Velázquez’s portraits from the court of Philip IV, including the sublime Las Meninas (c. 1656), and we see “the infinitely patient copyist who never conveys more than the visual scene before him.” But with time,

“. . . we observe [Velázquez] is a painter of light, a critic of reflections. We see that he has caught the trance of human watchfulness, as if he had caught a few hard grains of time itself. Life is something pinned down by light and time. He has frozen a moment, yet we shall feel that it is a moment at its extreme point; that is, on the point of becoming another moment [a fiction writer’s gift]. If he is the most minute observer in the world, notice how his subjects are caught, themselves also minutely watching the world, with all the concentration the hard human ego is capable of. This is what living is to the human animal: it is to look. To look is to be.”

I last read The Spanish Temper about thirty-five years ago, but had no memory of this passage. Its profundity took me by surprise. One moment I’m reading what amounts to an exceptional travelogue, and the next I’m reading an essay in aesthetics and applied epistemology, and the author’s apologia for his life as a writer.

With Kipling, Pritchett is England’s foremost story writer, author of at least one masterpiece of a novel (Mr. Beluncle, 1951), and probably its finest critic of the last century. Of Goya he writes: “Once again: psychological realism is not psychological analysis or speculation after the event, but the observation of the event in the tremor and heat of occurrence.”

`The Most Coveted and Desirable Book in the World'

Years ago, probably in the late seventies, I read a profile of Dr. Oliver Sacks in one of the news weeklies in which the writer/neurologist said he enjoyed reading the Oxford English Dictionary. This was before I had read Sacks’ work but I already sensed a kinship with this friend of W.H. Auden, another OED devotee. I too spent hours wandering in James Murray’s precursor to the internet. Last summer I read his second memoir and final book, On the Move, not long before his death on Aug. 30 at age eighty-two. In it he describes taking the test, after drinking “four or five” pints of hard cider, for a scholarship to study anatomy at Oxford. Sacks wins it, and writes:

“Fifty pounds came with a Theodore Williams Prize—50 pounds! I’d never had so much money at once. This time I went not to The White Horse but to Blackwell’s Bookshop next door to the pub, and bought, for 44 pounds, the 12 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. For me, the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf now and then for bedtime reading.”

One hears a strain of braggadocio, perhaps some blustery exaggeration, but I like to think the story is true. Sacks clearly loved language, enjoyed playing with it and hearing its music. Unlike Auden, he seldom used arcane words except for some scientific jargon, which he would carefully translate into lay language. For Sacks, words, like knowledge, were a sensuous pleasure. Though his prose is not showy, he was a disciplined voluptuary of language, as every writer ought to be. I thought of Sacks and the OED when reading the Irish poet Richard Murphy’s “Bookcase for the Oxford English Dictionary” (New Selected Poems, 1989):

“All the words I need

Stored like seed in a pyramid

To bring back from the dead your living shade

Lie coffined in this thing of wood you made

Of solid pine mortised and glued

Not long before you died.

“Words you’ll never read

Are good for nothing but to spread

Your greater love of craft in word and deed,

A gift to make your friends’ desires succeed

While inwardly with pain you bled

To keep your own pain hid.”

A word lover is a logophile, not so old a word as one might guess, according to the OED. Its first citation dates from 1959, and all five are drawn from newspapers or magazines. This is from the October 1972 issue of Scientific American, probably from Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column: “Who except a numerologist or logophile would see the letters U, S, A symmetrically placed in LOUISIANA?”

`On the Crown of the Road, Out of the Gutters'

Some of us value bluffness in writing and speech, especially from doctors, cops and critics. Get to the point, don’t try to ingratiate yourself, don’t soft-soap, euphemize or curry favor, and hold the filigree, please. Listen to Charles P. Curtis Jr. in the opening words of his preface: “To begin with, this anthology is for the thinker, and not for the feeler, primarily for the extrovert thinker. Needless to say, it runs over into some of his introverted and intuition margins.”

With this voice I’m already sympathetic, though I knew in advance Curtis was a Harvard-educated lawyer. His dichotomies seem central to understanding human nature: thinker/feeler, extrovert/introvert. By “extrovert” he doesn’t mean “hail fellow well met” or Mr. Popularity. He means the public man or woman, the parent, child, spouse, worker and citizen, not the sensitive plant.  Curtis and his co-editor of The Practical Cogitator; or, The Thinker’s Anthology (1945), Ferris Greenslet, work hard to address grownups. One can’t imagine such an anthology being assembled today, when adults are routinely treated (and treat themselves) like slow-witted children, and yet twenty-four editions of the Cogitator were published between 1945 and 1985. Curtis says he took his title from The American Practical Navigator (1802), an encyclopedia of navigation written by Nathaniel Bowditch, suggesting the book was intended not as a collection of greeting-card sentiments but as a sort of instructional manual. In the preface, Curtis outlines his rules for inclusion in the book:

“Nothing purely inspirational, nothing sentimental. And yet nothing cynical. Nobility of thought keeps on the crown of the road, out of the gutters.”

When was the last time you saw “nobility” used in a non-ironical sense? And another refreshingly common-sensical rule:

“Treatise, textbook, letter, novel, speech, verse, anything is given equal welcome. As to verse, none for its own sake, none simply because it was beautiful. Verse has been treated simply as another, more elegant, more memorable form of speech.”

You can glean a sense of Curtis and Greenslet’s values by considering the writers they most often quote: Montaigne, Oliver W. Holmes Jr., William James, and Whitehead. They have an unfortunate fondness for Emerson (and John Dewey, and E.B. White), partially redressed by the presence of Johnson, Santayana, Unamuno and Chesterton. In their chapter devoted to reading they quote with approval Edward Gibbon’s essay “Abstract of My Readings; with Reflections”: “Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.” The editors quote a writer new to me, Guy Murchie. Despite their stated intention to include nothing “simply because it was beautiful,” Murchie’s two-page excerpt contains a list of names for the winds of the world. Here is a sample, pure poetry:

“. . . the brickfelder of southern Australia; the harmattan of North Africa; the belat, maloya, imbat, chubasco, bora, tramontane, leste, simoon, galerna, chocolatero, bize, crivetz, etesian, baguio, elephanta, sonora, ponente, papagayo, kaus, puelche, siffanto, solona, reshabar, purge, and others. . .”

That’s only half of Murchie’s catalog, but it suggests Curtis and Greenslet’s assumption that the world is a vast, well-stocked place, full of wonders and horrors (the volume was assembled during World War II), leaving us with no excuses for boredom. This is an ideal bedside or bathroom book, and Curtis himself makes excellent company. Here he is in his preface:

“We have tried to build a dry wall. If the reader finds that one of the stones has fallen out into the field, let him only take care not to stumble over it. The only cement is a few comments, from which the editors, looking over the reader’s shoulder, could not refrain.”

`It Takes Practice to Lose One's Way'

Robert D. Kaplan visited Tunisia and Sicily when young, and remains enamored. He calls them “places that drew me because of the books I read.” Lucky man, to act on such attractions when young. I knew in advance in 1985, when a newspaper job took me to Albany, N.Y., that I would track the posthumous traces of Herman Melville, from New York City, to Albany, to Lansingburgh, to Pittsfield, Mass., and back to New York City, but I’ve still never been to Lichfield, Recanati or Lwów. Kaplan continues in Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece (Random House, 2004):

“Some books show us a new world, others vindicate our own experience. Books can lead you astray, they can ruin you, they can deliver you from the strictures of your environment. Because some are so important one remembers perfectly the circumstances in which one found them, and read them.”

True, though I’ve never been ruined by a book, not even financially. Dedicated readers imprint memories on volumes. Today I couldn’t read Peter Matthiessen on a bet, but just seeing Far Tortuga on the library shelf brings back a pleasantly rainy afternoon at Kay’s Books in Cleveland forty years ago. I was supposed to be shelving but I sat on the dirty tile floor and read thirty or forty pages of the novel. A shameful but happy memory: reading Proust for the first time in the clubhouse of the miniature golf course where I worked while in college. Reading King Lear again reliably takes me back to Chambéry in summer. A reader’s truest autobiography might be a list of books read, including the ones he couldn’t finish. Kaplan continues:

“You don’t find the books that change your life by accident; nor by design. One finds them the way a ragpicker finds something useful in the garbage, or the way a hunter accidentally encounters his prey. The enterprise demands vigilance, says the philosopher Walter Benjamin: it takes practice to lose one’s way in a city in order to discover something important about it.”

I still enter a bookstore or library in a spirit of anticipation, seldom with specific titles in mind. The best catalog I know is serendipity. Murray Kempton quotes Louis Armstrong as saying, “There’s kicks everywhere," and I know from experience that can be true even of the crummiest Harlequin Romance-heavy yard sale. At a library sale I once found a battered first edition of On the Road, a book I detest, but I bought it for almost nothing and walked two blocks to a book dealer I knew, who ensured I could pay the rent that month. Kaplan recounts a cold crossing from Marseilles to Tunis, and remembers lines from Virgil’s Aeneid in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: “The sun went slanting round the mighty year, / And freezing winter came, roughing the sea / With northern gales . . .” Then he writes:

“With this journey, I acquired the habit of searching for books linked to the landscapes and seascapes through which I traveled. Reading became like surgery: a way of dissecting the surrounding landscape and my own motivations for being there.”

To broaden Kaplan’s point a little, we might think of our lives as landscapes requiring map and compass. Rather than “dissecting” I would suggest “reading” the landscape with the help of, among others, Dr. Johnson, Leopardi and Zbigniew Herbert.

`Like Applauding a Conjuring Trick'

Siegfried Sassoon was shot in the shoulder from behind by a German sniper on April 16, 1917, at Fontaine-les-Croisilles on the Hindenburg Line, during the Battle of Arras. One week earlier, Edward Thomas had been killed during the same engagement. Sassoon wrote a rather heavy-handed poem, “The General,” about the battle and his well-known letter of protest, “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration.”He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh and treated for shell shock. These events are well-known and in some quarters, had taken on a mythological significance. 

Forgotten Voices of the Great War (Lyons Press, 2004), edited by Max Arthur, collects transcripts of taped interviews with men who participated in the Great War. Most are obscure, not otherwise remembered by historians. The interviews are held by the Sound Archive of the Imperial War Museum. In his introduction, Sir Martin Gilbert says the book is “the First World War in the raw: its drama and cruelties, its moments of humour – some of it very black indeed – its drudgery, and its excitement.” For a blackly humorous anecdote about snipers, with an outcome radically different from Sassoon’s, here are the words of Corp. William Skipp, otherwise unidentified:

“We had a sniper’s post, which was just a sheet of metal two inches high and a foot wide—just a hole big enough to put an end of a rifle through. Well, we had two boys who were orphans, they’d been brought up together, joined up together and been all the way through together. They were standing in the trenches and one said, `What’s this, George, have a look through here,’ and he no sooner approached it than down he went with a bullet through his forehead. Now his friend was so flabbergasted he too had a look, and less than two minutes later he was down the trench with his friend.”

Corp. Clifford Lane, 1^st Battalion, Hertfordshire Regiment, suggests the sort of desperation and demoralization found about some of the troops: “The luckiest person in the war was the man who went out and the first day got a nice flesh wound that brought him home again. I’ve known men to be wounded three or four times soon after they’d got to France. They’d go in the front line, be wounded, come home, go out again, be wounded again within a few days – the finest thing that could happen to you.”

Not all of the interviewed vets were obscure. Among those contributing their voices was the poet, war memoirist and scholar Private Edmund Blunden, 11^th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment:

“One or two signalers and I had to walk in the open straight in front of the Germans, who were perhaps two or three miles off. But they could see us all right and they did some beautiful shooting, they made rinds round us. One of the lads, a tall handsome youth, said, `I never did see such shelling!’ It was exactly like applauding a conjuring trick, or something in the halls, or a piece of fast bowling in a test match. It struck me even then, what self-control. But he was really looking at a remarkable feat of skill on the part of some other human being, and I thought a lot of that.”

`The Sun Would Have Gone Out'

Prophets are always to be distrusted, often rightly, even when their prophecies prove accurate. In their own time, prophets and crackpots are indistinguishable. Both are obsessive, sometimes Ahab-like monomaniacs, and generally less than polite, well-groomed and telegenic. It’s their message that matters to them, not the niceties of delivery. In a letter to William F. Buckley dated Oct. 8, 1956 (Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961, 1969), Chambers writes: 

“The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.” 

No one wishes to be reminded of his vulnerability. Being good, honest and hard-working, let alone selfish and hedonistic, are no guarantee of protection. The late Robert Conquest, poet and historian, the great Jeremiah of Communism and its evils, writes in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2001): 

“The revolutionary believed it to be in the nature of things that dictatorship and terror are needed if the good of humanity is to be served, just as the Aztec priests believed themselves to be entirely justified in ripping the hearts out of thousands of victims, since had they not done so, the sun would have gone out, a far worse catastrophe for mankind. In either case, the means are acceptable, being inevitable. . .”