'Authenticity is Not Coterminous with Seaminess'

A reader suggests that the collected works of Hubert Selby Jr. might “set [me] straight” when it comes to literature and the ways of the world. “You’re stuck in the classroom,” he tells this university drop-out (who returned after thirty years to get his long-deferred B.A. in English). He might be surprised to learn that I read much of Selby’s work when the Grove Press imprint still carried the imprimatur of bohemian transgressiveness. His first book, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), I read in high school. Selby couldn't write, not even on the remedial subject-verb-object level. He made Studs Lonigan sound like Isabel Archer. I wasn’t immune to the charms of literary slumming, and I served my time with Burroughs, Kerouac, Rechy & Co. But even then, in my late teens, I never confused them with literature. They were a late outbreak of the same readerly impulse that lead me in puberty to science fiction. Their books were one-dimensional and badly written; their morality, binary, with a twist: The bad was good and the good was bad. Later, I came to the same conclusion after a brief encounter with Bukowski. The target audience of such writers is the adolescent male. The same goes for Heinlein, Asimov and the sci-fi crowd.

Four years ago, Theodore Dalrymple reviewed Joseph Epstein’s Essays in Biography and A Literary Education in the Claremont Review of Books. He tells us Epstein, growing up in Chicago in 1950’s, was attracted to “its rather extensive seamy side”:

“This was natural enough in a young man who sought excitement as young men are apt to do, but Epstein matured and came to understand that authenticity is not coterminous with seaminess. A Bach cantata is no less authentic than a barroom brawl; and he grew out of his attraction to life at the bottom of the urban pond when, at university, he realized that there were finer things in life. He therefore never distilled his early experiences, remembered with fondness, into an anti-bourgeois ideology.”

Nicely put. “Authenticity is not coterminous with seaminess.” I wish I had written that.

'A Certain Organization of Normal Speech'

“The book is here for you to read.”

A librarian spoke this perfectly conventional little sentence to me Wednesday morning. The book in question was Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason (1947), which I’ve had an itch to read again since I recently reread “Circles of Perdition,” Whittaker Chambers’ review of it for Time magazine (collected in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism, ed. Terry Teachout, 1989). West’s volume is stored off-site in the Library Service Center. That morning I had requested it be delivered to the Fondren’s circulation desk.

I heard the librarian’s simple sentence as though it were the first line of a song, its eight little monosyllables composed in perfect iambic tetrameter. Think of the ninth line in Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty”: “One shade the more, one ray the less.” And then listen to yourself: English is heavily, naturally, unself-consciously iambic. Timothy Steele writes: “Because iambic rhythm suits English speech more naturally and flexibly than other rhythms, it has been the principal mode of English poetry from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (14th c.) to the present day.” I’m no poet but I pay attention to rhythm in written and spoken English. I suspect if we became self-conscious about speech rhythms, our conversation would quickly turn stilted and pretentious. We would all sound like bad Shakespearean actors. Of course, most people are most eloquent in speech when not trying to be eloquent. The poet and essayist C.H. Sisson often cited Charles Maurras: “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades.” These are the reasons most free verse plods along indifferently, like a clumsy dancer.

In 1983, two years before his death, J.V. Cunningham gave a lengthy interview to Timothy Steele, who in 1997 would edit The Poems of J.V. Cunningham. Their transcribed talk was published in 1985 in The Iowa Review. Cunningham, a master of rhythm, says:

“Now it is perfectly true that meter is artificial, if you mean by that that it is a matter of art. But so is speech. What you mean by meter is a certain organization of normal speech patterns, or, to put it more accurately, a selection of the admissible ones, in a particular system, out of the total number. I once published a lecture, pointing out that a good number of our phrases and sentences are perfect iambic octosyllables or decasyllables. There are all sorts of examples: ‘Some people do, some people don’t.’ Or, one I rather like: ‘We ought to be in Cleveland in an hour.’ But, even more, I remember a friend telling me about an unhappy love affair and a long-distance conversation he had, and this stuck in his mind: the woman said, ‘How often shall I see you in a lifetime?’ I didn’t point out to him then that part of the memorability of that was that it was an iambic pentameter, absolutely regular.”

'Whoop--He Can See'

In 1946, W.H. Auden edited a selection of Tennyson’s poems for the London publisher Phoenix House Limited. The book is best remembered for its introduction, in which Auden says Tennyson “had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet” but “was also undoubtedly the stupidest.” Auden probably never read Harold Pinter’s poetry, so we can forgive his error in judgment. Later in the introduction, Auden proposes something more interesting: the three ways in which poets write bad poetry:

“He may be bored or in a hurry and write work which is technically slipshod or carelessly expressed.”

“Secondly, by overlooking verbal and visual associations he may be unintentionally funny at a serious moment.”

“Thirdly, he may suffer from a corruption of his own consciousness and produce work the badness of which strikes the reader as intentional.”

Of the third sort of awfulness, Auden cites a stanza from a song sung by Margery in Act III, Scene 1 of Tennyson’s Becket:

“Kiss in the bower,

       Tit on the tree!

Bird mustn’t tell,

      Whoop—he can see.”

Of it and two other samples of comically lousy verse, Auden writes: “The faults . . . . could not be cured by literary criticism alone; they involve Tennyson’s personality.” Auden omits what would appear to be the most common reason for poets turning out crap: an absence of talent coupled with incurably bad taste.

[Auden’s “stupidest” crack quoted above comes in the middle of a paragraph in which Auden renders a memorable portrait of Tennyson: “He had a large, loose-limbed body, a swarthy complexion, a high, narrow forehead, and huge, bricklayer’s hands; in youth he looked like a gypsy; in age like a dirty old monk [recall that Auden was no Adonis]; he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.” As invective-cum-panegyric, this is unequalled in English. Auden’s selection from Tennyson’s vast corpus is excellent.]

'You Might Have Done Worse'

Apropos of nothing, I remembered a short story I fell for when I was twelve. I couldn’t recall the title but did remember the author’s name – Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Some will remember his novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), or William Wellman’s 1943 film version with Henry Fonda. A brief search turned up the story’s title: “The Portable Phonograph.”

Reading it again after all these years, I can see why it appealed to this adolescent. Being among the last men on earth is a common childhood fantasy, like being invisible, flying or shrinking to microscopic size. The heroic is built into the idea – a survivor in a cruel world. The film of On the Beach, episodes of The Twilight Zone, and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz had already familiarized me with the post-apocalyptic trope. In his first paragraph, Clark drops his only overt reference to the disaster: “These pits were such as might have been made by falling meteors, but they were not. They were the scars of gigantic bombs, their rawness already made a little natural by rain, seed and time.” I was also attracted to the idea of a man having four books in his possession in a world that is otherwise, apparently, bookless:  

“‘Shakespeare, the Bible, Moby Dick, The Divine Comedy,’ one of them said softly. ‘You might have done worse.’

“‘You will have a little soul left until you die,’ said another harshly. ‘That is more than is true of us. My brain becomes thick, like my hands.’ He held the big, battered hands, with their black nails, in the glow to be seen. ‘I want paper to write on,’ he said. ‘And there is none.’”

  

We learn the owner of the books, Dr. Jenkins, has just finished reading The Tempest aloud to his three guests. The scene – Jenkins and the others seated around a peat fire in a cave – has a ceremonial feel, as though the reader and his acolytes were performing a sacred rite. On the phonograph he plays a Debussy nocturne:

“In all the men except the musician, there occurred rapid sequences of tragically heightened recollections. He heard nothing but what was there. At the final, whispering disappearance, but moving quietly, so that the others would not hear him and look at him, he let his head fall back in agony as if it were drawn there by the hair, and clenched the fingers of one hand over his teeth.”

The men promptly leave the cave when the recording is finished. Jenkins promises to play Gershwin when they return in a week. He must preserve the needles and records, and play them infrequently. The final sentence, with its perceptible O. Henry click, I remembered clearly: “On the inside of the bed, next the wall, he could feel with his hand, the comfortable piece of lead pipe.” In other words, even humans who survived world cataclysm have failed to learn their lesson. Jenkins knows his guests might try to steal his music and books, and he is prepared to kill to stop them.

This is a pulpy, heavy-handed story, with frightful patches of overwriting, but sufficiently potent to stay with me for more than half a century. It reminds me why I stopped reading science fiction not long after I read Clark’s story. A little digging revealed a surprise. “The Portable Phonograph” was first published in the September 1941 issue of The Yale Review – three months before Pearl Harbor, four years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

'He Is a Different Being from Me'

“This morning I introduced the subject of the origin of evil.”

Men were made of sterner stuff in 1773. Even while vacationing in Scotland, Boswell and Johnson addressed weighty matters. Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) recounts their exchange on this date, Aug. 27:

“JOHNSON. ‘Moral evil is occasioned by free will, which implies choice between good and evil. With all the evil that there is, there is no man but would rather be a free agent, than a mere machine without the evil; and what is best for each individual, must be best for the whole. If a man would rather be the machine, I cannot argue with him. He is a different being from me.’”

Johnson’s reasoning is traditional but nuanced, not dogmatic. “A mere machine without the evil” is perhaps the ideal for advocates of social engineering, but repellant to Johnson and anyone else fond of his species. For Johnson, it’s essential to keep in mind that evil is a choice, albeit a very seductive one. No one is immune to its blandishments. Human nature is never binary: good or evil. The reality is spelled out by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The friends are in Forres, on the Moray coast in northern Scotland. Boswell replies to Johnson: “‘A man, as a machine, may have agreeable sensations; for instance, he may have pleasure in musick.’” Johnson disagrees:

“‘No, sir, he can not have pleasure in musick; at least no power of producing musick; for he who can produce musick may let it alone: he who can play upon a fiddle may break it: such a man is not a machine.’” Boswell, too often portrayed as an opportunist with a second-rate mind, concludes, reasonably:

“This reasoning satisfied me. It is certain, there cannot be a free agent, unless there is the power of being evil as well as good. We must take the inherent possibilities of things into consideration, in our reasonings or conjectures concerning the works of God.”

Later in the day, the men visit the home of a clergyman in Calder. Johnson, as usual, has his way with a Scotsman: “Dr. Johnson went up with Mr. Grant to the library, which consisted of a tolerable collection; but the Doctor thought it rather a lady’s library, with some Latin books in it by chance, than the library of a clergyman. It had only two of the Latin fathers, and one of the Greek fathers in Latin.”

'We Can Read Without Learning at All'

“What we mean by ‘education,’ that strange word, still has mostly to do with books, books we possess, keep.”

On Friday I read an essay in defense of autodidacticism by a retired history professor who read the Homeric epics at age seven. John W. Osborne concluded he was an autodidact while writing his doctoral dissertation on William Cobbett (1765-1835), the English journalist and author of Rural Rides who was much admired by those more recent autodidacts, A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. Osborne quotes Carlyle’s description of Cobbett as “the pattern John Bull of his century, strong as the rhinoceros, and with singular humanities and genialities shining through his thick skin.” This recalls Boswell’s account of Tom Davies saying Dr. Johnson “laughs like a rhinoceros.’”

The sentence quoted at the top is from Fr. James V. Schall’s essay “Liberal Education: ‘MissingMany Allusions,’” collected in Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading (Catholic University of America Press, 2013). Father Schall is a formidably learned man. His education is the result both of rigorously formal academic training and something very much like informal, self-driven autodidacticism. His essays are laced with frequent references to secular writers, Johnson and Boswell in particular, and his reading is broad and deep.

The obvious risk involved in adhering strictly to autodidacticism is waywardness. We require the friction of other minds to buff away self-generated roughness. Few of us can polish ourselves. We are likelier to grow cranky and conspiracy-minded, mistaking brainstorms for insight while rediscovering what the rest of the world already knows. Had I read only the books assigned in class, I would today be only nominally literate. Had I read only the books that confirmed the thoughts I already possessed, I would remain marginally illiterate. Osborne writes:

“For both Cobbett and myself, unscheduled reading made the child father to the man. It led to his career in journalism and to mine in academe. It was self-education rather than twelve years in a public school which allowed me to complete the college work that prepared me for graduate school. The mature Cobbett boasted that ‘books and literature have been my delight.’ His intensive personal reading helped to develop that direct, vigorous style of writing which still holds a reader’s attention. Knowledge imparted in classrooms -- what Ben Jonson called ‘schoolcraft’ -- would have smoothed our way early in life but might have cramped our individuality and led us along other paths.”

Fr. Schall reminds us of the thrills and risks of self-education: “We can read without learning at all. We can have read only one book, the Bible or Shakespeare, but read it well. We can read many things, none of which move our souls to attend to what is.”

'Much What It Had Been in the Past'

“Now and again Max [Beerbohm] interrupted the gentle flow of his thoughts to do a little reading. Not in such a way generally as to change the current of his meditations: like his preoccupations, his literary taste was much what it had been in the past.”

Some would find Beerbohm’s behavior appalling. God forbid one should read for pleasure and reliably find pleasure in the same books across a lifetime. Tastes change, of course, but once a reader has matured – that is, jettisoned any lingering desire to be fashionable – he reads strictly what he wants. Why waste time impressing others? By now you can smelt slag out of silver.

“New books, however, formed only a small part of Max’s reading. So far as fiction was concerned he stuck mainly to his nineteenth-century favourites: Meredith, Henry James, Trollope. To these he responded as freshly and discriminately as ever.”

You can quibble with specifics. Meredith is tough going. I’ll probably continue giving his books a severe letting alone. James is in heavy rotation. Trollope, less so. I find I want to read only his novels that I have already read – The Way We Live Now, especially. Odd.

“Max also projected an essay on Johnson. He had come deeply to revere and delight in his personality; and now thought Boswell’s Life the best book of any kind in the English language.”

A sensible conclusion. Most of life can be found there. A book can’t substitute for life, though Boswell comes close.

“This was partly because it was a biography. Much as Max enjoyed Harry Richmond and The Eustace Diamonds, he liked reading true stories even better: biographies, diaries, memoirs, especially if they were about periods and people that he himself remembered. It did not matter if they were not very good or about undistinguished characters: if they recalled the part for him Max read them with pleasure, and their title-pages and endpapers were scrawled all over with his comments.”

I hate books about or set in the future. Prognostication is tiresome.

[The quoted passages are drawn from pages 363-366 Lord David Cecil’s Max: A Biography (1964).]

'His Style Never Falters'

Gibbon taught us long ago that a writer’s best stuff is often tucked away in a footnote, where only the curious or pedantic will find it. Conventionally judged, footnotes are nothing more than bibliographic sanction, like a driver’s license, though certain writers treat them as opportunities to set booby traps, sometimes comic (see Joyce, Borges, and Philip Roth in Sabbath’s Theater). N. John Hall plants a good one on Page 60 in Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life (Yale University Press, 2002):

“The closest Max himself came to sound (very quietly) like the Sermon on the Mount was at a party given by the novelist G.B. Stern in 1931. She and he had disagreed about the character of a mutual acquaintance, and she, on saying goodbye to Max, apologized for her spirited defence of the man. Max told her, `No, if two people can’t agree about a third person whom they both know, the one who likes him is right, always.’”

Seldom are the proportions of irony and gentlemanliness so exquisitely balanced. Beerbohm’s tone is invariably hushed. He possesses the rare gift of being funny without offending, though a certain sort of reader will find his irony undetectable. Ours is a strident, anti-Beerbohmian age in which humor is not a rapier but a trench knife. Hall’s footnote is found in a chapter devoted to “Whistler’s Writing,” an essay in Yet Again (1909). It begins:

“No book-lover, I. Give me an uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures. The most tedious of them pleases me better than the best book. You see, I admit that some of them are tedious. I do not deem alien from myself nothing that is human: I discriminate my fellow-creatures according to their contents. And in that respect I am not more different in my way from the true humanitarian than from the true bibliophile in his.”        

Has a double-negative ever been so delicately deployed? Or the hoary chestnut from Terence so civilly refuted? And not a word in the passage is “true” or “sincere.” Beerbohm’s tone is light, like Lester Young’s, and he floats over the rhythm of his sentences. He has been mistakenly associated, through a coincidence of history, with the Decadents, with whom he shares nothing. When Beerbohm describes Whistler’s prose style in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” he touches on his own:

“His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence. . . . For his every effect he must rely wholly on the words that he chooses, and on the order in which he ranges them, and on his choice among the few hard-and-fast symbols of punctuation. He must so use those slender means that they shall express all that he himself can express through his voice and face and hands, or all that he would thus express if he were a good talker.”

Near the end of the essay, Beerbohm again quietly reveals something about his own gift: “An exquisite talent like Whistler’s, whether in painting or in writing, is always at its best on a small scale. On a large scale it strays and is distressed. [A shrewd and tactful assessment of his only novel, Zuleika Dobson.]”

Beerbohm was born on this date, Aug. 24, in 1872.

'Kneels at The Altar of Literature'

Herman Melville, neck and neck with Nabokov, is the most bookish and allusive of American writers. You can’t imagine Ahab without his forebear Lear. Once I recognized a silent allusion to “The Deserted Village” in one of Melville’s stories only because I had recently read Goldsmith’s poem. Those who have never read Goldsmith are missing very little in Melville’s story. Their enjoyment and understanding is not impaired, but for readers with a taste for such things, “Melville’s Marginalia Online” is a candy store. The elegantly designed site makes available a digital edition and online catalog of Melville’s private library, the books he owned and borrowed. It’s a wonderful place to get lost.

Back in 2013, I wrote about Melville’s father selling an abridged copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Seventeen years later, in 1847, his son purchased the same volume, signed by his father, from a dealer in New York City. The editor of “Melville’s Marginalia Online,” Steven Olsen-Smith of Boise State University, writes:

“Burton’s sophisticated prose, lush rhetorical excesses, digressive tendencies, innovative use of recondite information, and 19th-century standing as a favorite of the erudite and the intellectually curious, all point to artistic and philosophical inclinations that would soon begin to shape Melville’s own literary efforts and complicate his reputation and marketability as a writer.”

Melville owned a well-marked copy of the New Testament and Psalms, given to him by his paternal aunt in 1846 (five years before publication of Moby-Dick). Choose a page at random: Matthew 10:34, for instance: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

[Go here to read a 2013 post about William Giraldi’s essay on Melville, “who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.”]

'Death Could Not Kneel So'

In his diary on this date, Aug. 22, in 1665, Samuel Pepys, after his wife asks him to buy her a pearl necklace, walks to Greenwich and sees “a coffin with a dead body therein, dead of the plague, lying in an open close belonging to Coome farme, which was carried out last night, and the parish have not appointed any body to bury it; but only set a watch there day and night, that nobody should go thither or come thence, which is a most cruel thing: this disease making us more cruel to one another than if we are doggs.”

In 1665-66, bubonic plague killed some 100,000 Londoners, about a quarter of the city’s population. The vectors, unknown to seventeenth-century medicine, were fleas living on rats. Pepys was not the most sensitive of men, certainly in comparison to enlightened citizens of the 21^st century, but that makes his remark about cruelty even more memorable.

In 2015, Oxford University Press published an illustrated edition of Edmund Blunden’s memoir of World War I, Undertones of War, originally published in 1928. Even if you’ve already read an earlier edition, read this one for the photos, annotations, the selection of Blunden’s war poems and the introduction by the poet John Greening. Pepys’ diary entry reminded me of several passages in Undertones of War, in which dead bodies are treated like refuse. In Chap. XII, “Caesar Went into Winter Quarters,” Blunden writes:

“My own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell-hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled. One spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember.”

Even more haunting is this passage from later in the same chapter:

“Climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair.  Bodies, bodies and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground; the slimy road was soon only a mud track which passed a whitish tumulus of ruin with lurking entrances, some spikes that had been pine-trees, a bricked cellar or two, and died out. . . . The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood. Paths glistened weakly from tenable point to point.  Of the dead, one was conspicuous. He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was seen at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying. Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did.”

'Evolution of Desire'

My review of Cynthia Haven’s Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard has been published at The University Bookman.

'The Boulevardier and the Metaphysical'

In the Autumn 1962 issue of The Hudson Review, John Simon filled fourteen pages reviewing twenty-six new poetry collections, including X.J. Kennedy’s first volume, Nude Descending a Staircase. Simon’s verse chronicle carries the Horatian title “More Brass than Enduring.” Among those under review are the soon dead (Frost, Williams, Plath), the fraudulent (Norman Mailer, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch) and the masterful (Wilbur, Thom Gunn, Kennedy). The only names surviving in 2018 are Simon, ninety-three and still writing, and Kennedy, born on this date, Aug. 21, in 1929. Just last year, Kennedy published his most recent work, That Swing: Poems, 2008–2016, and he remains brassy and enduring.

Simon’s assessment of Kennedy’s work is mixed. It’s “lively” and “rousing”: “Mr. Kennedy is a curious cross between the boulevardier and the Metaphysical: he believes in the well-made, witty but significant, poem, donning its top hat and its Donne.” And then Simon says: “But when the wit fizzles or the elegance gets creased, things look sorry indeed.” He quotes the final stanza of “On a Child Who Lived One Minute” and describes it as “Kennedy at his best.” Here is the entire poem:

“Into a world where children shriek like suns

Sundered from other suns on their arrival,

She stared, and saw the waiting shape of evil,

But couldn’t take its meaning in at once,

So fresh her understanding, and so fragile.

“Her first breath drew a fragrance from the air

And put it back. However hard her agile

Heart danced, however full the surgeon’s satchel

Of healing stuff, a blackness tiptoed in her

And snuffed the only candle of her castle.

“Oh, let us do away with elegiac

Drivel! Who can restore a thing so brittle,

So new in any jingle? Still I marvel

That, making light of mountain loads of logic,

So much could stay a moment in so little.”

Kennedy writes something memorable about the unendurable, while commenting on poetry’s dubious capacity to do so. The poem always reminds me of Donald Justice’s “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” and Peter De Vries’ novel The Blood of the Lamb (1961). Happy 89th birthday, Mr. Kennedy.

'A Precondition for Reading Good Books'

The late Simon Leys led me to this encouraging insight from Schopenhauer (Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1970):

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

No reader starts out knowing this. My own early reading was omnivorous and indiscriminate. I had no standards and followed a self-generated curriculum. My stomach was strong, and I could swallow almost anything, even science fiction. Fortunately, that changed. Unfortunately, so has the world.

In a few weeks, my youngest son returns to his boarding school in Ontario. He’s a tenth-grader and has tested into senior A.P. English. That sounded good until an email arrived on Sunday informing him that before school begin he has a book to read. Previously, that book was an obvious choice, King Lear. Senior year is a little late to encounter that play for first time, but I understand the drift of things. The Canadian brain trust, however, has other ideas. David must read American War (2017), dystopian crap by Omar El Akkad. A précis suggests the novel is a string of trendy clichés – drones, state secession, a ban on fossil fuels, assassination. Patronizing young people, spoon-feeding them fashionable ideas, is never a good idea. At David’s age – fifteen – I would already have outgrown such condescending pap.

“The art of our necessities is strange,

That can make vile things precious.”

[In contrast, my middle son, in his first year at the U.S. Naval Academy, faces an interesting reading list in English III: The Iliad, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Macbeth and The Tempest, among other titles.]

'Death from Natural Causes'

A longtime reader who is an attorney living in Dallas periodically sends me vintage postcards, usually with hand-tinted scenes of life in Texas. The latest shows Main Street in downtown Houston. The street is clogged with 1940’s-era automobiles and the sidewalks are packed shoulder-to-shoulder with shoppers. Visible on the right is the S.H. Kress and Co. Building, built in 1913 and now on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Beyond it is the Woolworth building, torn down in 1980. The photo’s caption reads: “Houston – Fastest Growing City in the United States.” On the address side of the card is a capsule history of the city, which concludes: “Population 1940 census 387,000.” Houston's estimated population in 2016 was 2.3 million.

My reader’s handwritten messages tend to be gnomically witty. In this case, he quotes a sentence from Yale historian Laura Engelstein’s Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (2017): “Voroshilov, always close to Stalin, went on to a long career in Soviet military and political life, his major accomplishment being death from natural causes.” Anyone familiar with Stalin’s management style will get the joke. The person in question is Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (1881-1969), who outlived his former boss by sixteen years and was retained in power by Khrushchev. In 1950 he was named Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet. He was the definition of an apparatchik, less a military man than a dedicated bureaucrat and careerist. Every thuggish government relies on such people.

Twice Voroshilov was awarded the title “Hero of the Soviet Union.” In 1960 he received the Gold Star of “Hero of Socialist Labor.” General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev returned Voroshilov to the Central Party Committee. He died at age eighty-seven. The city of Lugansk was renamed Voroshilovgrad. Elsewhere in Russia in Flames, Engelstein writes that “there were no halcyon days of the Bolshevik Revolution. There was no primal moment of democratic purity that was later betrayed […] The Bolsheviks were ruthless and uncompromising from Day One.”

'He Was a Cure for Simple Minds'

“Though a sepulchral inscription is professedly a panegyrick, and, therefore, not confined to historical impartiality, yet it ought always to be written with regard to truth.”

Simple epitaphs are best, preferably composed in complete sentences that avoid sloganeering and inflated claims about the virtues of the departed. Name and dates will do, of course. If more is called for, keep it terse and true, like a J.V. Cunningham epigram. Dr. Johnson’s advice above, from “An Essay on Epitaphs” (1740), is a suitable style guide. V.S. Naipaul died last Saturday, and in his brief City Journal remembrance of the novelist, Theodore Dalrymple composes, in his final sentence, a fitting inscription:

“He was a cure for simple minds.”

A simple mind is already made up. Its thoughts are prefabricated. A simple mind is seldom confused. It already has the answers. Naipaul had none. He was a rare contemporary without ideology. His subject, distilled to essentials, was human nature. In 1990, Naipaul spoke at the Manhattan Institute. His lecture, “Our Universal Civilization,” was published the following year in City Journal. In it he writes:

“I have no unifying theory of things. To me, situations and people are always specific, always of themselves. That is why one travels and writes: to find out. To work in the other way would be to know the answers before one knew the problems; that is a recognized way of working, I know, especially if one is a political or religious or racial missionary. But I would have found it hard.”

'Thin Sewn with Profit or Delight'

Some writers are unreadable. We first try as teenagers. Decades pass. And then, out of guilt or cussedness, we resolve to read them again. We set aside a quiet moment, settle on the couch, adjust the lamp and seize up like an engine without oil. Sentences, words, syllables congeal into impassable sludge. We close the book and put it away until the next doomed session.

One such for this reader is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose name is still cavalierly coupled with Keats’. Shelley is the template for every subsequent narcissist who fancied himself a bard. No, poets are not “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” thank God, and I’ll take Johnny Mercer over Shelley when it comes to skylarks. A Marxist professor once tried to set me straight. He made the case for Percy the People’s Poet. No thanks. Shelley and his wife are still hacks and life is short. Charles Lamb agreed, with qualifications. On this date, Aug. 17, in 1824, more than two years after Shelley’s death, he writes in a letter to Benjamin Barton:

“I can no more understand Shelly than you can. His poetry is ‘thin sewn with profit or delight.’”

Lamb concedes that one of Shelley’s sonnets is “conceived and expressed with a witty delicacy,” but adds: “For his theories and nostrums they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend ’em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in ’em. But for the most part ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of ’em--Many are wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Sh----y.”

“Miching malice and mischief” is typical Lamb playfulness and fooling around. About “miching” I wasn’t certain. It’s an old word and the OED gives an alternate spelling, mitching, and a meaning that mutated over time: “Originally: pilfering (obsolete). In later use: skulking, lurking; playing truant. Formerly also (occasionally): pretending poverty (obsolete).” The Dictionary also notes that mitching is etymologically related to the more familiar mooching and mooch.

'The Honesty Which Is Part of His Difficulty'

“For every kind of experience there is a proper form.”

V.S. Naipaul’s observation in Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (2000) recalls the thinking of a very different sort of writer, Guy Davenport, who titled a 1987 essay collection Every Force Evolves a Form. In his foreword, Davenport explains that the phrase originates with Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. Then he elaborates: “A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.” For Naipaul, those forms were novels and nonfiction narratives that transcend mere reportage. The forces were colonialism’s legacy, the vagaries of history and human nature. If Naipaul had a homeland, it was the English language, not India, Trinidad or England. On Aug. 11, he died, six days before his eighty-sixth birthday.

There are writers whose prime years coincide with one’s awakening as a reader. I started reading Naipaul’s books as they were published beginning in the early nineteen-seventies. I had to catch up with A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) but read In a Free State (1971) when it came out, and the subsequent middle-period masterpieces, Guerillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979). Elsewhere in Reading & Writing, Naipaul describes the nineteenth-century novel as “an extraordinary tool”:

“It did what no other literary form—essay, poem, drama, history—could do. It gave industrial or industrializing or modern society a very clear idea of itself. It showed with immediacy what hadn’t been shown before; and it altered vision.”

Naipaul began writing novels as though that were still the case, as though the world and its literatures had not fractured in the twentieth century. By the time of The Enigma of Arrival (1987), his confidence was flagging. Was it a novel or autobiography? In Reading & Writing, he confesses that novels had begun to “distort the unaccommodating new reality” and “encourage a multitude of little narcissisms.”

The quality of Naipaul’s nonfiction remained high. My favorites are An Area of Darkness (1964), The Loss of El Dorado (1969) and Finding the Center: Two Narratives (1984). Also, the essay “Conrad’s Darkness”(The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad, 1980), in which he writes: “Conrad’s value to me is that he is someone who sixty or seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize even today. I feel this about no other writer of the century. His achievement derives from the honesty which is part of his difficulty, that ‘scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations.’”    

Naipaul was our Conrad, forever a grim outsider. The best introduction I know remains Joseph Epstein’s “A Cottage for Mr. Naipaul,” an essay that serves as both a review of The Enigma of Arrival and an overview of Naipaul’s work up to 1987:

“Whatever his appropriate political label, Naipaul is certainly a conservative by temperament. He has a love for order of an intensity that can be held only by a man repelled by the disorder to which he was born. Naipaul’s natural refinement comes through in all his writing—his hatred of crudity, his contempt for the blatant and the coarse. He has a keen, an almost excruciating sense of the perilousness of civilization. He cannot resist underscoring that nearby a golf course laid out in the administrative city of Yamoussoukro in the Ivory Coast crocodiles are kept and fed live chickens [a reference to “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro” in Finding the Center.]”

'Barbarous Epithets and Wilful Rhodomontade'

In his review of Bryan Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990), John Simon refers to Pale Fire as “that gargantuan rodomontade.” The verdict is unjust but memorable. Simon’s use of “rodomontade” may have been my first encounter with the word. I don’t recall looking it up in the dictionary, and I seem to have assumed it meant something vaguely contemptible like “extravaganza” or “stunt.” That’s not entirely mistaken, as the OED makes clear: “extravagant boasting or bragging; bravado; boastful or bombastic language.” Simon is echoing a common complaint against Nabokov: that he is show-off, a clever but cold fashioner of literary Fabergé eggs. It’s useful to remember that in Speak, Memory, Nabokov dismisses all Fabergé objects as “emblems of grotesque garishness.” Pale Fire, in fact, contains a plot rich in “human interest,” a quality Nabokov would have detested. In terms of mournful sadness, Hazel Shade’s suicide ranks with Catherine Sloper’s misuse by her father and her suitor in Washington Square and the death of Rudy Bloom as remembered by his father in Ulysses.

I came upon rodomontade again, with a slightly different spelling, in Hazlitt’s “On Familiar Style” (Table Talk, Essays on Men and Manners, 1822). He begins a paragraph with “It is as easy to write a gaudy style without ideas as it is to spread a pallet of showy colours or to smear in a flaunting transparency.” Hazlitt is condemning empty verbiage, filigree as a stand-in for content. He continues, singling out empty-headed theater critics: “Not a glimpse can you get of the merits or defects of the performers: they are hidden in a profusion of barbarous epithets and wilful rhodomontade.” Hazlitt’s target is not a rich, colorful prose style, as in Sir Thomas Browne and Nabokov (and, at his best, Hazlitt), but writers who substitute overwriting and verbal pyrotechnics for substance. Propose your own florid candidate but I nominate the late William H. Gass.

Not that lush prose is always a substitute for mature style. Nabokov has John Shade say in Pale Fire: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Kinbote asks: “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade replies: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.”

'Not to Have Lived Quite in Vain'

“I have more confidence in the dead than the living.”

With a few exceptions, I concur. Hazlitt is speaking of authors and books, and the superiority of older ones. A reader, Mark Marowitz, sent me a link to “The Hedonism of Reading Good Books,” in which E.J. Hutchinson looks at Hazlitt’s well-known “On Reading Old Books.” I have no doubt Hazlitt’s thesis was sincere and sound, but also that he was being true to his nature; that is, provocative. By celebrating old writers and snubbing the new, he was thumbing his nose at contemporaries, which is always a pleasant diversion.

Hutchinson’s reading of Hazlitt is sympathetic but not uncritical. “[T]he best old books,” he writes, “are both aesthetic masterpieces and good to think with.” Nicely phrased. Hazlitt differed violently with Burke’s understanding of the French Revolution but admired his writing extravagantly. Hutchinson writes:  

“He did not like Burke on politics but he respected him and saw him as a genius. ‘I took a particular pride and pleasure in [Burke’s Reflections], and read it to myself and others for months afterwards. I had reason for my prejudice in favour of this author. To understand an adversary is some praise: to admire him is more. I thought I did both: I knew I did one.’” That’s a quality found only among the best readers and critics. Hutchinson takes Hazlitt’s thinking on books a step further:

“What Hazlitt is really driving at, it seems to me, is the obligation of the thinking individual to form a personal canon of favorite authors and texts. Just as we differ as individuals, our personal canons will differ. But we should all nevertheless have one, and not take anyone else’s word for it. It is to be made, not borrowed. The reasons given are frankly somewhat epicurean: the pleasure of time well spent; the pleasure of memory; the pleasure of watching a master at work—and it bears repeating that we should include some masters whose ideas we do not like.”

Late Sunday night we returned from four days spent in Annapolis, Md., where my middle son is completing his Plebe Summer at the U.S. Naval Academy. On the trip I read two old(er) books for a second time -- Robert Liddell’s Elizabeth and Ivy (1986) and Rose Macaulay’s A Casual Commentary (1925) – and a new one for the first time: Roger Scruton’s Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2018). Two to one, old to new, is a respectable ratio. Scruton writes of Dr. Johnson that “he was and remains a towering intellectual presence in British national culture, an example of the rooted loyalty to ‘things by law established’ that has been, among so many Anglophone conservatives, their substitute for abstract argument. What Johnson believed he also exemplified, which was a firm moral sense combined with a robust eccentricity of manner and a deep respect for aesthetic values.”

Nice to be in the company of grownups, old and new.

We visited three bookstores in Annapolis. I found nothing but Michael got lucky: a Penguin Herodotus; a deeply discounted hardback, bilingual edition of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953); and a math text from Dover Books, Introduction to Analysis (1968) by Maxwell Rosenlicht. He’s taking a statistics class in the fall. Hazlitt writes:

“To have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain.”

'To Reveal My Bias at the Start'

William H. Pritchard in his review of The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett by Hilary Spurling (The Hudson Review, Summer 1985):

“To reveal my bias at the start, I would quite willingly forsake any future reading of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves or The Years in favor of any single novel by Compton-Burnett.”

Might as well add the rest of Woolf’s stillborn oeuvre.

'Making Fine Furniture or Making Fine Books'

Yvor Winters writing to the editor/publisher Harry Duncan in 1950:

“You seem to resent my Airedales especially. Why, in God's name, should you resent my enjoying the company of five of God’s most charming little creatures? Breeding and showing Airedales is a minor art; quite as much so as making fine furniture or making fine books. You may not realize this, but that is doubtless because of your ignorance of animals. I have two dogs on the place who are beautiful to watch in every movement and position and I have two others who are almost as fascinating; and the fifth is not bad. I would rather have these dogs than, say, masterpieces of furniture or silver -- as works of art they are quite as admirable and quite as serious and much more to my taste.”

Note that Winters evaluates and ranks even his beloved Airedales, as though they were beloved poems.  

[The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000.]

'A Handsome Contempt for Appearance'

Leigh Hunt in “Among My Books” (1823) writes of Charles Lamb’s library:

“It has also a handsome contempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls; — now a Chaucer at nine and two-pence; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings; now a Jeremy Taylor; a Spinoza; an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney; and the books are ‘neat as imported.’”

Lamb was a dedicated habitué of London’s book-stalls. My experience is confined to les bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris. The idea of books exposed to sunlight and rain makes me nervous. Lamb had no such misgivings. His celebration of London’s charms, in the letter he wrote to Thomas Manning on Nov. 28, 1800, includes the book-stalls:

“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of `Fire!’ and `Stop, thief!’ inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, `Jeremy Taylors,’ `Burtons on Melancholy,’ and `Religio Medicis’ on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”

Two months later, in another London fête, Lamb writes to Wordsworth, who has invited him to the country:

“With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes - London itself a pantomime and a masquerade - all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me.”

'A Gruff Kind of Tight Vibrato'

The tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb was born here in Houston one hundred years ago today, on Aug. 10, 1918. He started his professional career as lead tenor with the Milt Larkin band, and joined Lionel Hampton in 1942 after the departure of Illinois Jacquet. Hampton featured Cobb on “Flying Home No. 2.” In Texan Jazz (University of Texas Press, 1996), Dave Oliphant writes:

“In Arnett’s version of this hit tune, the tenorist employs a raspy tone, a gruff kind of tight vibrato that differs noticeably from Jacquet’s normally cleaner, more Lester Young-inspired sound.”

Listen to Cobb’s version of the hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” recorded live in 1978. On the same recording are Buddy Tate (born in Sherman, Texas) and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson (a Houston native). The playing epitomizes the bluesy, guttural, honking “Texas sound,” with Cobb occasionally venturing into Vinson’s alto range. Here is Cobb in 1960 performing “Black Velvet” with the Red Garland Trio. Oliphant says Cobb’s “raspy tenor voice” derives “directly from the blues tradition’s crying and pleading urgency.” Here is his “Smooth Sailin’” (1959). Cobb died in Houston on March 24, 1989, at the age of seventy.

[The Houston Chronicle has published a story about Cobb’s centenary.]