`All the Little Circumstances of His Life'

Momentous events can begin in obscurity, even in idle fantasy or in a private notebook, and unfold in anonymity. Their importance can be appreciated only in retrospect, with the knowledge granted by time and fate. On May 16, 1763, Boswell met Johnson in Thomas Davies’ Bookshop in Russell Street, Covent Garden. Boswell was 22; Johnson, 53. Boswell recorded the seemingly trivial meeting in his journal, and subsequently recorded events in the ripening friendship.

Boswell’s first mention of his plan to become Johnson’s biographer occurred on this date, March 31, in 1772. It’s as though he had to formally announce his intentions to himself before revealing them to his subject. Boswell writes:

“I have a constant plan to write the life of Mr. Johnson. I have not told him of it yet; nor do I know if I should tell him. I said that if it was not troublesome and presuming too much I would beg of him to tell me all the little circumstances of his life, what schools he attended, when he came to Oxford, when he came to London, etc. etc. He did not disapprove of my curiosity as to these particulars, but said, `They’ll come out by degrees.’”

The world’s greatest biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., was published in 1791, seven years after Johnson’s death.

`His Piquant Blend of Lyricism and Discontent'

I first identified the species Sensitivo hominis in high school when a histrionically soulful classmate chose to recite E.E. Cummings’  “in Just- / spring” and all the girls swooned. This guy was an operator. He brought his guitar on a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art and sang and strummed “I’ve Just Seen a Face” while we ate lunch on the lawn. At the time I was a dedicated Yeats-and-Eliot man, and had already decided that Cummings’ poems were reliable emetics, but the recitation sealed it and soured my appreciation of spring (or rather, the sappy celebration of the season) for decades. Spring seemed custom-made of sentimental boilerplate. Philip Larkin helped me recover with “Spring” (The Less Deceived, 1955):

“Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,

Their children finger the awakened grass,

Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,

And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass,

Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,

The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,

Threading my pursed-up way across the park,

An indigestible sterility.

“Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,

Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,

Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter;

“And those she has least use for see her best,

Their paths grown craven and circuitous,

Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.”

Larkin, “an indigestible sterility,” was twenty-seven when he wrote this poem in May 1950. One admires his singular, anti-Romantic notion of spring – not rejection, exactly. After all, he tells us, spring is “of all seasons most gratuitous.” Jean Hartley, who with her husband published The Less Deceived, wrote a readable memoir, Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me (Carcanet, 1989). In a talk she gave in 2000, “Philip Larkin and Me, or You: The Democratic Appeal of His Poetry,” Hartley says “Spring” was one of the first Larkin poems she read, along with “Dry-Point” and "Toads." She writes of “Spring”:

“I'd read lots of odes to Spring in my time but none that contained his piquant blend of lyricism and discontent. How often had I not felt that nature was doing its beautiful best but that my mood or circumstances simply didn’t match it? All of us must, at some time have felt out of harmony with nature. The line `And those she has least use for see her best’ acknowledges the paradox that if one's life were on a par with all that Spring represents, Spring would not be noticeable except as an accompaniment to one's own blossoming.”

`It Will Be Hard to Live With Us'

Knowing my affinity for the eighteenth century, especially in England, a reader has reminded me of something Randall Jarrell wrote, though I’m unable to pinpoint the original source. The excerpt is quoted in No Other Book: Selected Essays (ed. Brad Leithauser, 1999):

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”

For “hard” I would substitute “impossible,” and the phrase I won’t use is “The Enlightenment.” Swift, Pope, Gibbon and Johnson were no more enlightened than Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas; merely geniuses of a different sort. There is no moral or artistic progress, as there is in science and medicine. From the twentieth century we learned the hard way that the quest for utopia leads inevitably to mass murder. That’s the nature of our species. Gibbon understood: “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

Rousseau is a particularly unsavory character, and his name is now happily linked in my mind to a passage in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). I think of the events described by O’Brien as an act of applied literary criticism.  The novel’s narrator and some of his friends are leaving a Dublin pub when:

“. . . a small man in black fell in with us and tapping me often about the chest, talked to me earnestly on the subject of Rousseau, a member of the French nation. He was animated, his pale features striking in the starlight and his voice going up and falling in the lilt of his argumentum.

“I did not understand his talk and was personally unacquainted with him. But Kelly was taking in all he said, for he stood near him, his taller head inclined in an attitude of close attention. Kelly then made a low noise and opened his mouth and covered the small man from shoulder to knee with a coating of unpleasant buff-coloured puke. Many other things happened on that night now imperfectly recorded in my memory but that incident is still very clear to me in my mind. Afterwards the small man was some distance from us in the lane, shaking his divested coat and rubbing it along the wall. He is a little man that the name of Rousseau will always recall to me.”

`Vivid Expressions of an Intuitive Judgment'

Some critical judgments by reputable critics defy comprehension. Leslie Stephen finds The Rambler essays “unreadable.” In “Dr. Johnson’s Writings,” a chapter in his four-volume Hours in the Library (1874-79), he writes: “How could a man of real power write such unendurable stuff?” He calls Johnson’s prose style “Johnsonese,” and it’s not intended as a compliment. After noting that Johnson’s favorite book was The Anatomy of Melancholy, Stephen adds:

“The pedantry of the older school did not repel him; the weighty thought rightly attracted him; and the more complex structure of sentence was perhaps a pleasant contrast to an ear saturated with the Gallicised neatness of Addison and Pope. Unluckily, the secret of the old majestic cadence was hopelessly lost. Johnson, though spiritually akin to the giants, was the firmest ally and subject of the dwarfish dynasty which supplanted them.”

Nonsense, of course, but one still reads Stephen and respects him. His own style, on occasion, can sound remarkably modern and un-Victorian (he was the father, after all, of the genuinely unreadable Virginia Woolf). He calls Lives of the Poets “the most readable of Johnson's performances,” and says of Johnson’s conversation:

“The merit of his best sayings is not that they compress an argument into a phrase, but that they are vivid expressions of an intuitive judgment. In other words, they are always humorous rather than witty. He holds his own belief with so vigorous a grasp that all argumentative devices for loosening it seem to be thrown away.”

Stephen prefers Johnson’s conversation to his written work. Boswell’s Johnson has always been known to more readers than the great man’s books. That’s a shame but understandable. The narrative that Boswell frames is irresistible – in Hollywood terms, good man overcomes odds to triumph. We love Johnson because he is like us, only more so. He’s a hero we can imagine being. But his books – the periodical essays, the best of his poems, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets – can change your life. His life and works are interleaved to an unusual and moving degree.      

On this date, March 28, in 1762, Johnson wrote a prayer in his notebook. His wife, Elizabeth Johnson, known as Tetty, had died ten years earlier and he still mourned her. By this time, Johnson had already published his Dictionary; “The Vanity of Human Wishes”; the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays; and Rasselas. He begins his prayer conventionally enough: “God grant that I may from this day,” followed by such requests as “Return to my studies” and “Live temperately.” Then Johnson adds:    

“O God, Giver and Preserver of all life, by whose power I was created, and by whose providence I am sustained, look down upon me [with] tenderness and mercy, grant that I may not have been created to be finally destroyed, that I may not be preserved to add wickedness to wickedness; but may so repent me of my sins, and so order my life to come, that when I shall be called hence like the wife whom Thou hast taken from me, I may dye in peace and in thy favour, and be received into thine everlasting kingdom through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ thine only Son our Lord and Saviour. Amen.”

`I Am Certain of Further Happiness'

For some, it’s money in the bank or a case of Glenfiddich, but I’m with Jules Renard: “When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.” No matter how grim life grows, I’m assured of a little solace with a shelf of good books. I’m not certain if Renard refers exclusively to those he has not yet read. Topping that list for me is Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, a book I’ve been meaning to read for more than forty years. And Lord Byron’s Don Juan, which I’ve read only in excerpts. But the real treasure lies in the books I’ve already read.  What a sense of contentment comes with the knowledge I can read Gibbon again, late-period James, Christina Stead’s novels and St. Augustine. Renard sets the precedent: “I no longer, or hardly ever, read new books. I only enjoy rereading.”

For now I’m reading books from both categories. Among the new, Montaigne: A Life by Philippe Desan (trans. Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal, Princeton University Press, 2017). And among the old, Leslie Stephen’s Hours in the Library (1874-79).

Renard (1864-1910) is one of literature’s nonpareils, a genuine human novelty. The lines quoted above are from The Journal of Jules Renard (ed. and trans. By Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964). He survived a difficult childhood but has a way of reducing life to essentials and making it sound amusing if not terribly exciting. Elsewhere in his Journal he writes:

“I live like an old man. I read the papers a little, a few pieces out of books. I set down a few notes, I keep warm and, often, I nap.”

Renard was forty-six when he died of arteriosclerosis.

`The Most Enlightening Guide'

In America Comes of Middle Age: Columns 1950-1962 (Little, Brown and Co., 1963), Murray Kempton includes a piece titled “Castro’s Cuba Today,” dated Feb. 21, 1960. Thirteen months earlier, the Communists had taken over the country. In Havana, Kempton meets a young Communist poet who asks him to help with some lines in English he wishes to insert into a new poem. A sample: “Do you hearing me, Mr. North American . . .” And: “I am a new man.” Kempton comments: “What could be sadder than to think of yourself as a new man when the first words you write are a Spanish translation of Jack Kerouac, whom you have never read and yet to whom you are bound by a sort of telepathy of the demi-talented?”

Kempton, unlike many American observers in the early days of Castro’s reign, admits his ignorance of Cuba, past and present. Then he says something interesting that I would like to believe is true:

“I have no hope of understanding Cuba. The only way to understand a country is to read its novels; I should not suppose there is such a thing as a Cuban novel.”

The final phrase is not fair, though it may have been when Kempton was writing. The Cuban novelists I read long ago are José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy. All did much of their work after the Communist takeover and none is memorable. To varying degrees they have been lumped together as part of the multi-national Boom in Latin-American writing and the blight of so-called magical realism.

What interests me is Kempton’s other observation: “The only way to understand a country is to read its novels.” Is this just another empty phrase tossed out by a journalist or would-be intellectual? With adjustments for time and place, it carries some respectable weight. Most of what little I know of nineteenth-century Portugal I owe to the novels of José Maria de Eça de Queiroz; and of nineteenth-century Spain, Benito Pérez Galdós. And so on from Balzac and Melville through Musil, Joseph Roth and V.S. Naipaul. Almost thirty years after the Cuban column, in “As the World Turns,” published in New York Newsday on Dec. 10, 1989 (annus mirabilis) and collected in Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (1994), Kempton writes:

“The most enlightening guide I have found to Central America is not the product of a social scientist’s research but Nostromo, the novel Joseph Conrad published in 1904 when his direct experience with the neighborhood was nearly thirty years past and had never extended beyond a tarrying or so in ports when he had sailed as a schooner deck officer in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Kempton continues, narrowing his vision:

“Yet, here as nowhere in the reports of embassies and the monographs of researchers, is the El Salvador of last week where, in Conrad’s words,`the cruelty of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people.’”

And concludes:

“We must look to the novelist if we hope to understand. His is the matter of fact. Social science and intelligence reports are the mere poor stuff of an unadorned imagination.”

`A Half-Finished or Half-Ruined Fragment'

“There are few great books or great men that do not sadden us by a sense of incompleteness. The writer, we feel, is better than his work. His full power only reveals itself by flashes. There are blemishes in his design, due to mere oversight or indolence; his energy has flagged, or he has alloyed his pure gold to please the mob; or some burst of wayward passion has disturbed the fair proportions of his work, and the man himself is a half-finished or half-ruined fragment.”

The sentiment is utterly unfair, of course, and probably inevitable. Writers are pathologically inconsistent, as are readers. Even Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus. But when a writer we love writes badly, we question our love. Have I been hoodwinked? Played for a fool? Some of us will withdraw our devotion like jilted lovers. We wall off the writer in question as though he were a Superfund site, but his existence nags like a guilty conscience. Obviously, this applies only to dedicated readers, true partners, not the beneficiaries of one-night stands. They walk away guilt-free.

Or we can be mature about it and accept that writers are fallible in a peculiarly public way. We can value the first-rate and resign ourselves to the rest. It’s not personal. I would suggest that any writer who has given us a moment’s pleasure, who opens an unsuspected window, makes us laugh or turns a memorable phrase deserves some measure of gratitude. I remember the first time I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in 1969. Then I read a critic who dismissed Ellison as a one-book has-been. I was outraged on behalf of the novelist, and remain convinced his novel is among the half-dozen best written by an American.

The author cited above is Leslie Stephen in his three-volume Hours in a Library (1874-79). His subject is William Hazlitt, a man and writer virtually custom-built for enthralling and disappointing readers. As a man, Hazlitt was a sputtering wreck. He was an idiot about women. He never had a friend he didn’t sooner or later alienate and offend. His politics were adolescent, he idolized Rousseau and squandered his final years writing a three-volume biography of Napoleon. Stephen notes the essayist’s capacity for “caustic scorn.” But he wrote essays with gusto and his prose is the most vivid in English since Browne’s. Stephen writes:  

“Hazlitt harps a good deal upon one string; but that string vibrates forcibly. His best passages are generally an accumulation of short, pithy sentences, shaped in strong feeling, and coloured by picturesque association; but repeating, rather than corroborating, each other. The last blow goes home, but each falls on the same place. He varies the phrase more than the thought; and sometimes he becomes obscure, because he is so absorbed in his own feelings that he forgets the very existence of strangers who require explanation. Read through Hazlitt, and this monotony becomes a little tiresome; but dip into him at intervals, and you will often be astonished that so vigorous a writer has not left some more enduring monument of his remarkable powers.”

Which, of course he has. Read “The Fight” again, an essay much esteemed by Stephen, though he is offended by boxing:

“. . . we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

`Culture Is Continuity with the Past'

The cover story in the March 20 issue of The Weekly Standard is “The Cultured Life,” in which Joseph Epstein writes:

“Does all this talk of high culture have a ring of snobbery? If so, I have badly misrepresented it. There is nothing snobbish about seeking out the best that has been thought and said. What it is, as noted earlier, is elitist, a word in our egalitarian age in even worse odor, perhaps, than snobbery.”

With predictable regularity I receive comments and emails in which readers deploy one or both of the damning adjectives cited by Epstein – snobbish and elitist. As Epstein makes clear, the words are not synonyms. All of us are snobs, pro or con, about something, whether spaghetti carbonara or Ellington’s Sacred Concerts. Pure democrats of taste are unicorns. Elitist cultural values today are rare and best kept prudently unexpressed. Culture makes demands of time and cognitive effort, and fewer than ever are up to the task. But it never occurs to some of us to bemoan the odious labor of reading, gazing and listening. The works of high culture call us to attention, and their strictures can be difficult, flattering and sweet. Recently, an anonymous reader wanted to know how I could “endure” the prose and verse of Yvor Winters. With great pleasure, I said. What others choose to read is none of my business. A big part of my job is sharing my pleasures.   

Those who haven’t read Tennyson or Proust but are intimidated by the prospect of doing so (public schools get most of the credit for this dereliction) are another story. I empathize with some of them. In my job as science writer for the engineering school of a university, I speak daily with engineers, scientists and mathematicians. I’m always out of my league. I have a B.A. in English (earned when I was fifty), a degree that has become the ready-made punchline of a joke, but I don’t accuse the STEM-types of snobbery or elitism. I read what I can about their research and ask a lot of humbling questions. It’s called continuing education. Epstein continues:  

“Cultural elitists, as do connoisseurs generally, like only the best and seek it out. But how do they determine what is best? From tradition, from the tastes of their culturally elitist forebears, from their own refined aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities. Along with Longinus, they identify as high culture those works of art and intellect that elevate the soul, stay in the memory, and appeal across different cultures. Elitist the cultural ideal certainly is, but with the difference, as noted by Matthew Arnold, that it is open to anyone who wishes to make the effort to attain that ideal.”

No one willing to do the mandatory work is excluded. In this sense, nothing is so democratic as high culture. (I watch a lot of crap movies but never fool myself about their worth. Innocent escape is perfectly acceptable but not as an exclusive diet.) As usual, Epstein makes numerous, seemingly self-evident observations that would never have occurred to me. Please read all of “The Cultured Life,” but here is an Epstein Sampler:

“Culture is continuity with the past: A cultureless person knows only about, and lives exclusively in, the present. Few things are as pleasing—thrilling, really—as reading a classical author and discovering that he has had thoughts and emotions akin to your own. So I have felt, at times, reading Horace, Montaigne, William Hazlitt, and others who departed the planet centuries before my entrance upon it.”

“My candidate for the most cultured American novelist of the past century is Willa Cather.”

“Poetry, once central to high culture, has become degraded to an intramural sport. Although the audience for poetry in America was never large, today even that audience has diminished, and the only people who seem to read contemporary poetry are those who write it or write about it.”

“High culture, even though it often traveled under the banner of the avant-garde, was always about tradition. A cultured person has a standard, a recollection, through literature and history and philosophy—if not necessarily through personal experience—of greatness. Without such a recollection, rising above mediocrity is difficult, if not impossible.”

`With Bigger Windows'

As some readers get older, the attraction of minor writers grows on them. We know the majors and return to some with undiminished pleasure, but do I really want to read Kafka, Camus, Hemingway or Dostoevsky again? (All four have an adolescent appeal. None is quite adult.) Minor writers, previously unknown or unfairly ignored, are a gift to seasoned readers. And who’s to say they’re minor? Melville once was minor. Who would give up on Max Beerbohm because he’s not John Galsworthy?

I first learned of Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) some years ago in the letters of Henry James. He seemed somehow insubstantial, an impression reinforced by my now-jettisoned prejudice that a writer had to produce a novel, preferably several, to be taken seriously. An American who lived most of his life in England, Smith seemed to know everybody, including Henry James, George Santayana and Bernard Berenson, and I had the impression he was a dabbler, an annoying wannabe like George Plimpton. Much later I read All Trivia (1933), Smith’s compendium of four earlier collections of anecdotes, aphorisms and one-liners, and was charmed. These are from the fourth, Last Words:

“The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.”

“When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at least real conversation begins, and life is delicious.”

“What with its crude awakenings can youth know of the rich returns of awareness to elderly people from their afternoon naps; of their ironic thoughts and long retrospections, and the sweetness they taste of not being dead?”

Now I’m reading Reperusals and Re-Collections, a gathering of essays Smith published in 1937, loosely unified by the theme of rereading favorite writers. Among Smith’s reacquaintances are Jane Austen, Proust, Jeremy Taylor, Walter Pater, Donne and Madame de Sévigné. In the first essay, “Montaigne,” he writes:

“There are readers and I am one of them whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.”

Long-time serious readers will recognize the sentiment, a close analog of certain romantic attachments. When young, I felt compelled to proselytize for my “intoxications.” I’ve given that up as futile and often irritating. Today, I’m likelier to mention the book or author, and then leave it to the readers. The adventurous, driven ones are rare. Smith identifies the continuities in our reading loyalties, increasingly precious as we grow older:  

“There is something reassuring, too (at least, I find it so), in these renewals of former admirations. We all endeavour, as Spinoza says, to persist in our own being; and that endeavour is, he adds, the very essence of our existence. When, therefore, we find that what delighted us once can still delight us: that though the objects of our admiration may be intermittent, yet they move in fixed orbits, and their return is certain, these reappearances will suggest that we have after all maintained something of our own integrity; that a sort of system lies beneath the apparent variability of our interests; that there is, so to speak, a continuity within ourselves, a core of meaning which has not disintegrated with the years.”

Smith suggests there is self-knowledge to be found in an examination of our reading histories. A lovely speculation follows:

“And if we find, when we read again one of our classics -- say Virgil for instance -- that we like it better than ever, the experience may suggest an even more pleasing conjecture. Psychologists tell us that fullness of life is the goal of everything that lives, that the impulse towards completeness, towards ripeness and self-realization, is the most compelling of all motives. These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever : that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process ; that the observatory or palace it has edified for its habitation, though always falling out of repair in places, one wing collapsing after another, is yet being always rebuilt on a more consistent plan, and with bigger windows.”

`Do Not Differ About Trifles'

“Opposites often attract each other but the attraction seldom lasts if the full extent of the opposition is ignored. It is as neighbours, full of ineradicable prejudices, that we must love each other, not as fortuitously `separated brethren.’”

Hubert Butler’s “Divided Loyalties” (Independent Spirit: Essays, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996) is characteristically pithy and commonsensical. Utopians with little experience of human nature will fault it as cynical, a dark slander on humanity. The rest of us hope its optimism is justified. Butler is writing in 1984, deep in the Irish quagmire, and I was reading him on Tuesday when I learned of Martin McGuinness’ death.

Ignoring differences proves as delusory and dangerous as exaggerating them, so Butler’s choice of “neighbours” is shrewd. He might have said “family” or “friends,” but was never naïve. Think of your neighbors, the ones you like and trust, who collect your mail when you’re out of town; the ones you cordially detest, who are loud or dirty; and those about whom your feelings are neutral because you’re hardly aware of their existence. By nature, neighbors are heterogeneous, even when they share an economic niche. Neighbors make demographics seem trivial. Even the most solitary among us make arrangements with neighbors.

The Rev. John Taylor was Dr. Johnson’s friend from childhood, outlived him and read the service at Johnson’s funeral. He was also known to be disputatious. In a letter dated July 31, 1756, Johnson congratulates him for resolving differences with a neighbor, and tells him:

“. . . to have one’s neighbour one’s enemy is uncomfortable in the country where good neighbourhood is all the pleasure that is to be had. Therefore now you are on good terms with your Neighbours do not differ about trifles.”

`Young People Should Be Careful in Their Reading'

“The most common form of diversion is reading. In that vast and varied field millions find their mental comfort. Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”

Ah, the good old days, when we sat around perusing Proust and amusing our fellows with choice couplets from The Dunciad. Pardon the cynicism. The author quoted above is Winston Churchill (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1953), and I endorse the spirit of his observation if not the historical specifics. Thanks to Terry Teachout I discovered the source of this passage, Painting as a Pastime (1950), originally published as an essay in Amid These Storms (1932; the English edition is blandly titled Thoughts and Adventures). In a 2009 column for the Wall Street Journal, Terry called the slender volume “one of his wittiest and most insightful pieces of writing.” In it, Churchill stresses the importance of a “public man” cultivating “a hobby and new forms of interest.” The object is “the avoidance of worry and mental overstrain.” For Churchill this primarily meant painting, a pursuit he began at age forty. In the book he devotes a three-page digression to the virtues of reading:

“`What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, `Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another.”

That was more my style when young. There was a romance about books, a sentimental liking for their look and smell – and surely for the impression book-“fondling” left on the opposite sex: “He’s so sensitive.” Churchill warns us against “read[ing] too many good books when quite young”:

“It is a great pity to read a book too soon in life. The first impression is the one that counts; and if it is a slight one, it may be all that can be hoped for. A later and second perusal may recoil from a surface already hardened by premature contact. Young people should be careful in their reading, as old people in eating their food.”

Advice I never followed. The food analogy is apt: I was an omnivore. How else does one learn to winnow out lousy books. A better metaphor: inoculation. One must ingest a few bad books in order to develop immunity. Churchill gives another caution:

“But reading and book-love in all their forms suffer from one serious defect: they are too nearly akin to the ordinary daily round of the brain-worker to give that element of change and contrast essential to real relief. To restore psychic equilibrium we should call into use those parts of the mind which direct both eye and hand. Many men have found great advantage in practicing a handicraft for pleasure. Joinery, chemistry, book-binding, even brick-laying—if one were interested in them and skilful at them—would give a real relief to the over-tired brain.”

No brick-laying for this reader. Churchill gets perilously close to the crackpot idea of reading (or any hobby) as therapy. Reading is an end in itself, pure pleasure, solace, communion. 

`A Hunter Without a Blank in His Magazine'

“I should like to think that a writer just celebrates being alive. I shall be sorry to die, but the notion of seeing life celebrated from day to day is so wonderful that I can’t see the point of believing anything else.”

Any guesses as to the identity of the speaker? A rare character, surely. No gender or nationality clues apparent. Kvetching, not celebrating, is all the fashion, and only two sorts of writers speak or write this way: Those who work for greeting-card companies and those who are strong, gifted and confident. In this case, the latter, and spoken by a man in his mid-eighties. V.S. Pritchett loved being a writer, and often reminds us that we too should love the privilege.

On my shelves are five Pritchett volumes. Three are modest in bulk: His best novel, Mr. Beluncle (1951); The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev, (1977); Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (1988). The other two are behemoths of industriousness: Complete Collected Stories (1990) and Complete Collected Essays (1991) – more than 2,500 pages of a life’s work. Among English writers, only Kipling wrote a greater number of great stories, though not by many. Of Kipling, Pritchett writes self-revealingly:

“Kipling is not one of those short-story writers who settle on a mere aspect of a subject, a mood, an emotion or a life. He takes the whole subject and reduces it, in form, to the dramatic skeleton.”

Pritchett is especially good on writers of short stories, a species distinct in most cases from novelists, closer to poets. Read his essays on Leskov, Kipling, Chekhov, Babel, Sholom Aleichem and Flannery O’Connor. Here he is on Maupassant, another prolific writer who, I suspect, goes largely unread today:

“When, as a young man, Maupassant sat in the talkative company of writers and was asked why he was silent, he used to say, `I am learning my trade’; and that is what the hostile criticism of his work comes down to in the end. That he learned, and some better writers never have. He is one of the dead-sure geniuses, a hunter without a blank in his magazine.”

His prose is vivid and flecked with unexpected metaphors and word choices, but without the exhibitionism of lesser, more pretentious writers. In his fiction, he is the anti-Updike. He makes the throwaway memorable, without tarting it up. This is from a 1967 story, “A Debt of Honor”: “He had been a bland little dark-haired pastry-fed fellow from the North when they had first gone off together, her fur coat sticking to the frost inside the window of the night train. What a winter that was!”

Has any writer in the history of the language ever described a character as “pastry-fed”? And don’t we know precisely what Pritchett means?

 V.S. Pritchett died twenty years ago today, on March 20, 1997, at the age of ninety-six.

`Of Uncertain Etymology and Meaning'

More than ever I encounter unfamiliar words I’m unable to decrypt from context or etymology. Perhaps it means I’m reading more, or I’m finally accepting the depths of my ignorance, and it does give me the opportunity to revisit the dictionary. I’m not alone in finding “alamite” a mystery, according to The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2016) by Peter Gilliver. Even Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, the dictionary’s first editor, judged the word’s meaning “entirely unknown,” but included it anyway because it was found in a 1458 will left by Sir Thomas Chaworth of Nottinghamshire. In a description of cushions he was leaving to his offspring, Chaworth writes: “Hengyng for ye halle and parlor of tapisserwerk, and alle the kuchyns of tappisserwerk with alamitez.”

It looks like a passage pulled at random from Finnegans Wake but Gilliver tells us “tappisserwerk” means tapestry, though my spell-check software helpfully suggests “patisserie,” which served to make me hungry. The OED entry, with no definition, part of speech, etymology or suggested pronunciation, is a marvel of epistemological legerdemains: “Origin unknown. From the context, apparently denoting something connected with a cushion.” The entry adds “Obs. rare.” Gilliver seems to admire Murray’s completism. I’m reminded of Borges’“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Gilliver writes:

“Other such entries followed, including aquile, battleage, capoche, and many more. (In later entries it became more usual to be explicit, with a note such as `Of uncertain etymology and meaning.’) Some of these words are well-known cruxes in the interpretation of Shakespeare and other writers; in other cases the original source is little-known.”

The entry for “aquile” is even sparser than alamite’s. As to meaning: “Derivation and meaning unknown. Dr. Morris suggests: To demand, ask, or obtain?” At least the source, Pearl, from the late fourteenth century, is well-known: “Of þe lombe I haue þe aquylde For a syȝt þer of þurȝ gret fauor.”

“Battleage”: suggests a martial meaning, but the OED is refreshingly honest: “Of uncertain etymology and meaning.” It’s a noun, and the dictionary offers a 1526 citation: “Grindeing of Wheate, Messurage, Carridge, and Battleage of Wheat, Bread, and Meale.” Again, Im hungry.

When I saw “capoche,” I envisioned the unholy union of Al Capone, the author of In Cold Blood and poché. After the boilerplate “Obs. Rare” and “meaning uncertain,” the OED adds: “Johnson suggests ‘perhaps to strip off the hood,’ and refers us to capouch (“a hood or cowl”) and “a sportive use of caboche,” which means “to cut off the head of (a deer) close behind the horns.” I’m no longer hungry.

`The Type That Is Droll and Endearing'

Call it groundless sentimentality. I do, even as I embrace it. It’s like the knitted shamrock my mother pinned to my shirt each St. Patrick’s Day. When I reached a certain age I would take it off it before hitting the sidewalk. By then I sensed it was a demeaningly empty gesture, like lowering your head and remaining silent while everyone else in the room is praying, and I was a stiff-necked prig. For years, each St. Patrick’s Day, I have read something by or about an Irishman. It used to be Yeats, Joyce or Beckett. And then Swift, Hubert Butler or Flann O’Brien (thank you, Jay). Now I range about, breaking the pattern while maintaining it.

This year it was Dublin: A Portrait (Harper & Row, 1967), an oversize album of photos by Evelyn Hofer, with text by V.S. Pritchett. Earlier they had collaborated on London Perceived (1962) and New York Proclaimed (1965). Hilton Kramer observed that Hofer practiced a “very classic art -- flawless in its eye for form, tireless in its ability to `become saturated,’ as Pasternak said, in its subjects.” Hofer remains, as photographers should, out of her pictures. Her interest is the real, not the self. My favorite photo in Dublin is probably “Gravediggers, Glasnevin.” On a related theme, Hofer will also show you Joyce’s death mask.

In most such books, the text is an afterthought, filler, but Pritchett’s prose rivals Hofer’s photos for memorability. Here he welcomes you to the book:

“Dublin as it is; Dublin as it was. I must declare my interest. It is very personal. If I were to write an account of my education the city of Dublin would have to appear as one of my schoolmasters, a shabby, taunting, careless, half-laughing, reactionary.”

Pritchett is master of the modulated adjective array. He strings them like a necklace of different colored stones. He recalls Dickens’ vividness of language and characterization, without the cartoonish bent. See how he backs into a description of Oliver Goldsmith:

“Goldsmith’s case is even more interesting, if far less dramatic and effective, than Swift’s, in what it reveals of the Anglo-Irish mind of the time. `There he is, the poor fellow,’ the old fraud of a guide used to say, donkeys’ years ago, his eyes watering and his testy voice going soft, when taking one to look at the array of busts in Trinity College Library. He would stop for half a tear before Goldsmith’s innocent and comic face. A disastrous undergraduate, ugly, with a pointed nose—loving to dress up in gaudy clothes, incoherent in talk, over-fond of cards, reckless with money, but good at playing the flute, a sweet singer of Irish ballads and a wit when he wrote. Goldsmith is the type of all that is droll and endearing.”

Reading Pritchett, one often stops and says: I wish I had written that. Late in the book he writes: “Dubliners are still shocked by the wickedness of England and go there for a holiday from virtue.”

`But His Mind Was Not In It'

“When Keats was dresser almost every wound was or quickly became a foul-smelling, festering sore, the dressing of which had to be frequently changed, often more than once a day.”

A dresser was a surgeon’s assistant whose job it was to dress and bandage wounds. Long before Semmelweis, Pasteur and Lister – that is, from 1811 to 1815 -- John Keats apprenticed at Guy’s Hospital in London. Keats was fifteen when he went to work for the surgeon Thomas Hammond. Sir William Hale-White explains in Keats as Doctor and Patient (Oxford University Press, 1938):

“In those days a medical student was apprenticed for four or five years to a practicing doctor to whom a fee was paid. The apprentice was provided with board and lodging, he helped the doctor in his work, he picked up what knowledge he could, he compounded pills and other medicines, he drew teeth, he vaccinated and he bled patients.”

Hale-White (1857-1949) had an advantage denied most biographers and literary scholars.  He was a doctor, and was appointed assistant physician at Guy’s Hospital in 1886, promoted to physician in 1890 and consulting physician in 1917. Hale-White walked the same wards as Keats, a century later. In ninety-six pages he details Keats’ training as a physician, his abandonment of that calling to write poetry, his tuberculosis, failure of diagnosis and treatment, and death at age twenty-five. Hale-White’s prose, in its clarity, precision and absence of embellishment, gives evidence of his medical training on every page. Dismissing the notion that Keats was sickly from youth and showed signs of being the “consumptive type,” Hale-White writes:

“We may safely picture Keats as having had good health in boyhood and youth. He was very good looking, had beautiful eyes and hair, he walked well, fought well [he trained as a boxer], and could work hard. [Keats’ friend] Cowden Clarke says he was active, athletic, and enduringly strong . . . He was generous, loyal and affectionate, particularly fond of his sister and brothers, sometimes quick-tempered, and especially he became indignant at injustice.”

Hale-White’s medical diagnosis, substantiated by later scholarship, sweeps away two centuries of myth-making:

“He caught consumption almost certainly from [his brother] Tom, with whom he lived for months before it killed Tom in December 1818. From this date until February 1820 Keats occasionally complained of not feeling well—he did not bathe for this reason. Whether this was owing to tubercle bacilli in his lungs, or to some other cause, we do not know; the tubercular disease of his lungs first showed itself on the 3^rd of February 1820 when, fourteen months after Tom’s death, he coughed up blood. The disease then progressed in Keats in the usual way until it killed him in February 1821.”

One admires a doctor or writer who acknowledges the limits of what he knows and sticks to demonstrable facts. Keats was never formally diagnosed with tuberculosis because, in a sense, it didn’t exist. The bacillus that causes the disease was not identified until 1882 by the German physician Robert Koch, and a fairly reliable immunization was not developed until 1906. The treatment was not widely accepted until after World War II.

Hale-White sounds angry when he describes the treatment the poet received – frequent bleeding, malnutrition, indoor confinement. Doctors went on treating him (and millions of others) when they had no idea what they were doing: “They had no thermometers with which to see if the patient was feverish, no microscopes with which to investigate the expectoration, and no X-rays with which to examine the chest visually. They were like extremely short-sighted people trying to grope about without glasses.”

Hale-White partially forgives the doctors of Keats’ day:

“They suffered from the additional disadvantage that their instruction had been the traditional teaching stretching back for centuries, hence they bled and starved their patients. This teaching was founded upon doctrines which had proceeded from the imagination, and as these were wrong, the treatment was wrong. It is the old, old story that mankind will not be content with saying we do not know. Rather than do this they imagine.”

Little has changed, of course. Among the things Hale-White admits he cannot understand are why Keats so readily gave up medicine and why medicine plays so small a role in his poetry. He cites lines 221-226 from “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” written shortly after Keats left Guy’s Hospital:

“The breezes were ethereal, and pure,   

And crept through half closed lattices to cure  

The languid sick; it cool’d their fever’d sleep,  

And soothed them into slumbers full and deep.          

Soon they awoke clear eyed: nor burnt with thirsting

Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting.”

The passage “suggests he was describing what he must often have seen in fevered patients.” Perhaps, but other poets who never studied medicine could have drafted those lines. In his closing paragraph, Hale-White is more convincing:

“It is clear that his medical studies influenced his writing so little as to be negligible. This is remarkable, for, although he had for five years out of his short life studied medicine and had been in daily contact with possible medical subjects for writing, he did not use them. His native industry made him work hard at medicine but his mind was not in it.”

`To Be Sheltered from Many of the Griefs of Age'

“There are certain books, differing widely the one from the other, that are almost universally beloved and before which criticism suspends itself. They are innocent without being contemptible; virtuous without being of an insupportable puritan-hypocrisy; admirably conceived without formal perfection. And, without being amongst the great masterpieces, they are necessary to a world that would be poorer without them.”

I’m fairly certain no book is “universally beloved.” In fact, some of the books that once approached that description – The Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Huckleberry Finn – are widely if not universally detested, or at least ignored, but that’s rooted in mere fashion, not love or critical rigor. What Ford Madox Ford is getting at in The March of Literature (1938) is the category of books fixed by every serious reader one notch below the Homer-Dante-Shakespeare axis. It’s a private and autonomous realm, though it overlaps with the equally private realms of other readers. The first book with a home in this reader’s bookish sanctuary is Kipling’s Kim.  I’ve read it every few years for the last half-century in the spirit Randall Jarrell said he read it: “at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love.” That’s the point: selfish, undefendable, non-canon-minded pleasure.

What else? Robinson Crusoe. O. Henry’s stories. Rasselas. The Man Who Loved Children, much loved by Jarrell. The Man Who Was Thursday. As for nonfiction, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. A.J. Liebling, especially Between Meals. Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Beerbohm’s essays. Santayana’s The Realms of Being. All are books, once read, made for rereading. No two such lists will be identical. Ford’s has nothing in common with mine – Hardy’s stories, The Scarlet Letter (a book I enthusiastically detest), Paul et Virginie, Manon Lescaut, some Trollope and more. He writes:

“Such a list is the moss that we rolling stones gather as we pass through life. It will be thicker in our youths; indeed our lives will be rich according as it was thick or thin then, for to have the young mind plentifully stored with books of that type is to be sheltered from many of the griefs of age. From the masterpieces one gains strength, assurance, composure. From these others one is enriched by the memories of the days when one first read them. One renews, with those remembrances, one’s youth.”

This leads Ford to Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), a novel I have never read that moves Ford to remember “halcyon days he passed when the world was better.” That’s how I remember the first time I read Proust. 

`The Risible Faculties'

One might write a fat volume of literary corrections. The point would be to rescue writers from mistaken reputations. Think of John Keats the Seraph and Henry David Thoreau the Do-Gooder. In reality, Keats was a “tough monkey” in the complimentary sense, as Fatso calls Maggio in From Here to Eternity, and Thoreau lauded the psychopath John Brown, burned down a 300-acre woodland and cordially condescended to his fellow Americans – a nasty piece of work who could sometimes write like an angel. Perhaps the most complicatedly misapprehended writer is Jonathan Swift. On the one hand, he is judged a writer of children’s books. You know, giants, little people, talking animals. On the other, he is a Freudian text-book case of “excremental vision.” George Saintsbury writes of Swift:

“It is a commonplace that children, not mere infants, read Gulliver without any sense, without any suspicion of it being other than a `funny’ book. It is not a commonplace, but it is true that it is perfectly possible for any critic who is vieux routier [an old hand] to dismiss or skim over the undermeaning and take the thing as no more than fairly sharp satire.”

The observation comes from The Peace of the Augustans (1916), which carries a marvelous subtitle -- A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment – neatly capturing my understanding of that century. Saintsbury argues that Swift as a writer in no way contradicts his bucolic subtitle:

“Compare Swift’s actual works . . . with those of other hypochondriacs or whatever you want to call them. Besides his actual misanthropy—his actual misozoia—to coin a more accurate word if it does not exist, Byron’s is mere mountebank’s mummery; Shelley’s, though real, is faint and fitful; Leopardi’s and James Thomson the Second’s suggestive, not indeed of any affectation, but certainly of the `stool to be melancholy upon’—of the fashions of their respective times and of certain accidents of life and fortune.”

Swift’s prose is a model of elegant clarity. He documents the anarchic in an orderly fashion. Saintsbury detects no “moaning or raving” in his work and writes: “. . . Swift is always quiet; and though the association of quietness and peace is sometimes deceptive, there can be very little doubt that it is in more than one sense real.”

It should be pointed out that Saintsbury (1845-1933) himself is seldom quiet. He was a gourmand of the written work (and of food and, especially, wine). His prose is nervous, fulsome and digressive. He is forever coining neologisms, waxing alliteratively, piling on adjectives, borrowing words and phrases from one of the seven languages he spoke, relishing slang, mustering comparisons from his vast reading and composing remarkably long sentences that usually come to a happy resolution. Here’s an example:

“But if Gulliver, with all its terrific truths of satire and its disfigurements of unnecessary nastiness, is, for size and quality, the chief actual divertissement among Swift’s works, there is no lack elsewhere of rest and refreshment which, as such rest and refreshment seldom does, will afford as much satisfaction to the pure intellect as to the risible faculties.”

To his everlasting credit, Saintsbury loves my favorite among Swift’s works, which he calls “the immortal, the unique, the inexhaustible, and marvellous Journal to Stella. Here, almost for the first time, there is not the mere perfection of Art, though the greatest artist could have done nothing finer; but a spontaneous overflow of nature, only unconsciously conditioned by the irrepressible artistic genius of the writer.”

That’s a little rich, I know, but deeply satisfying. Later, Saintsbury confides that Journal to Stella may be “the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography.”