'Is There Another Life?'

Such an opening for a letter to a friend: “The time has not yet come for a pleasant Letter from me.” By the time he writes to his friend Charles Brown on Sept. 30, 1820, Keats had been infected for nearly half his life with the bacillus that would kill him. He is twenty-four and his best poetry has already been written. He has started his final journey, to Rome: “I have many more Letters to write and I bless my stars that I have begun, for time seems to press,--this may be my best opportunity.” In this letter Keats mingles self-pity, frustration at leaving Fanny Brawne, defiance and resolution. I’ve always thought there was something mad, though understandable, about the journey to Rome with Joseph Severn. He asks, rhetorically, sadly:

“Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?”

Such questions are no longer academic. The former medical student, the young man who observed post mortems performed on cadavers, asks in vain for hope. Life has never been so precious. Less than five months later he was dead.

'Man's Pleasure, His Purest Delight'

“One must know how to make oneself appear ridiculous, and not only in the eyes of others but also in one’s own eyes.”

That line has spared me a lot of lasting embarrassment, the kind that still makes your face hot after forty years. There’s a higher sense in some of the ridiculous things we say and do. Miguel de Unamuno is writing of his countryman Don Quixote and the helmet – or barber’s basin. We can almost find a strain of nobility in our ridiculousness: “For it was by making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved immortality.” I underwent a medical procedure Friday morning that, had I witnessed it as a third-person observer, I would have found simultaneously disturbing and hilarious. That’s how I tried to look at it in the first-person. Perspective is everything.

One of the books in my possession longest is Anthony Kerrigan’s 1972 translation of Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. It’s a rare book that grows proportionally with us. We will get out of it precisely what it is calibrated to deliver, depending on how much we’ve grown. Unamuno can be embarrassingly wise:

“. . . man’s highest pleasure consists in achieving and intensifying consciousness; not so much the pleasure of knowing, but that of learning. In knowing something we tend to forget it, to make the knowing of it unconscious, so to say. Man’s pleasure, his purest delight, is allied to the act of learning, of becoming aware of acquiring differentiated knowledge.

Unamuno was born on this date, Sept. 29, in 1863, and died on Dec. 31, 1936.

'Rocks, Moss, Stonecrop, Iron, Merd'

English is rich in words that can mean the opposite of what they appear to mean and even seem self-contradictory. Linguists know them as auto-antonyms. Some of the better-known examples are cleaved, dust and oversight. But the word I just encountered, stonecrop, is more poetically suggestive. It sounds like a biblical curse. Erudite gardeners will recognize it as the name of a flower, or rather a large group of flowers, members of the genus Sedum. Yet the word implies a harvest of rocks or barren, unproductive land suitable only for growing stones.

In A Retrospect of Flowers (Jonathan Cape, 1950), the Scottish poet Andrew Young (1885-1971) pokes fun at Dr. Johnson for defining stonecrop in his Dictionary as “a sort of herb.” Johnson was no botanist but neither was he a fool. In Chap. 10 of Rasselas he observes that a poet “does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest.” Rather, he is “to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind; and must neglect the minuter discriminations.” The general supersedes the particular. Science and modern literary taste judge otherwise but for Johnson a flower was a flower, and a poet gets no credit for minute description.

The OED confirms a simple etymology: stone + crop = stonecrop. In Old English: stáncrop. It first show s up about a thousand years ago. Most of the dictionary’s citations are drawn from dictionaries, herbals and early botanical texts. A brief search disclosed that John Clare left a fragmentary poem beginning: “The stonecrop that in summer comes.” Best of all is Eliot’s use in “Gerontion”:

“The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.”

See the OED on merd: “dung, excrement; a piece of excrement, a turd.”

'He Evades the Present, He Mocks the Future'

In the doctor’s waiting room an elderly couple sat across from me. They looked at ease in each other’s company, holding hands and sitting close as though a single being. The man, with a black cane leaning against his leg, was reading a Louis L’Amour paperback turning brown with age. I would guess he had read it many times before. L’Amour published eighty-nine novels and fourteen story collections, and his readership was devoted. I knew a guy in Indiana who read L’Amour’s oeuvre in constant rotation, the way some people read from Genesis to Revelation and start over again.

The eight or ten others in the room were looking at their phones, staring at nothing or murmuring in Spanish. Most appeared healthy, without visible symptoms, except one man who was pale and gaunt. While I waited to see the doctor I was reading the 1910 Everyman’s Library edition of Hazlitt’s Lectures on English Poets & The Spirit of the Age. The bookplate at the front identified it yet another volume formerly owned by Edgar Odell Lovett (1871-1957), the first president of Rice University, and now part of the Fondren Library’s circulating collection. Over the years I have read dozens of books once a part of Lovett’s personal library. He was a mathematician, not an English major, and by all accounts a well-read, broadly learned man. I wonder about the reading habits of today’s college presidents.

I have always favored Hazlitt for his prose style, especially in his non-critical essays – “The Fight” and “The Indian Jugglers.” Of late, I’ve paid more attention to him as a critic. His analysis is not typically cerebral or academic, as we think of it. He makes no claims to being “scientific.” He can be hot-headed, and seems to have read books with his entire being. He is not infallible in his judgments. Like many of the best critics – Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Yvor Winters – when Hazlitt is wrong, he is often interestingly wrong.

The final essay in The Spirit of the Age is “Elia, And Geoffrey Crayon” – that is, Charles Lamb and Washington Irving. The latter is of little interest but Lamb, Hazlitt’s friend, is pure pleasure. Hazlitt gets him:

      

“Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.”

Lamb is indelibly sui generis, and Hazlitt, a very different sort of writer and man, approves. I thought of the old man contentedly reading his Louis L’Amour when I read this assessment by Hazlitt:

“He has no grand swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no passing topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain. He evades the present, he mocks the future. His affections revert to, and settle on the past . . .”

'In Place of What I Owe You'

In American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring (Liveright, 2018), William Giraldi recalls when David Myers in Commentary detected in his first novel, Busy Monsters (2011), “a Catholic program in the very plinths and joists of the novel’s architecture.” I remember David’s excitement over Giraldi’s book, expressed to me privately even before his review was published. He liked the style – funny, brawny, Melvillean in a twenty-first-century register– and he liked what he perceived as its Roman Catholic core. Giraldi himself doesn’t see it, but that was neither here nor there. David was an enthusiast in his loves and hates, especially in matters of books, religion (he was an Orthodox Jew) and family. He was tepid about nothing. His excitability was tempered only by his analytical bent. Anyone can spout critical axioms. David bolstered them with propositions and corollaries, like Spinoza in his Ethics.

For six years, few days passed – except Shabbat – when David and I failed to exchange thoughts, book recommendations, quotations, jokes, gripes and gossip. The only book he ever warned me to avoid (because I wouldn’t understand it) was Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. The only writer I recommended to him whom he hadn’t yet read was the essayist and sinologist Simon Leys. We shared bookish loves: Daniel Deronda, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, L.E. Sissman, The Return of Martin Guerre, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Morte D’Urban and dozens more. I didn’t share David’s goatish appetite for contemporary fiction. I remember his excitement when I introduced him to the paintings of Simon Dinnerstein. He had a way of making you feel good about loving what he loved. He was bullheaded, combative and contemptuous of gratuitous stupidity. He expressed some of what I owe him in an epigram he wrote for one of his former teachers, J.V. Cunningham:

“Take these, the work of quiet days,

In place of what I owe you—measured praise.

As you have made my mind your own device

To honor you I epigrammatize.”

Today is David’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of the day he died in 2014. Remember him, or meet him for the first time, by reading The Commonplace Blog.

[With Dave Lull's help I found this post from more than nine years ago on David's blog. You'll see Anecdotal Evidence on the screen, surrounded by some of the books we prized. I think it was his way of welcoming me into good company.] 

'Your Grief Shall Be Matured to Veneration'

The gift of consolation grows in importance as we age. Losses accumulate with accelerating frequency. We know more people who have died, and more of their survivors. To console those who have lost a loved one requires more than the will to be nice or admired for our thoughtfulness. Tact is essential, and no presumption that we know how the bereaved feels or ought to be feeling.

A Scotsman, James Elphinston (1721-1809), was a friend of Dr. Johnson’s. His translations are used as epigraphs for thirty-six of Johnson’s Rambler essays in the revised, corrected edition of 1752. According to Boswell, Johnson judged Elphinstone “a worthy man” – high praise. On this date, Sept. 25, in 1750, Johnson begins a letter he is writing to Elphinstone, whose mother has recently died:

“You have, as I find by every kind of evidence, lost an excellent mother; and I hope you will not think me incapable of partaking of your grief.”

Johnson’s own mother was still alive and would die at age ninety in 1759, when he was forty-nine. He wrote The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia in a week in order to pay for the funeral expenses. Johnson urges Elphinstone to shun self-indulgence and emulate his mother virtues:    

“The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation. The greatest benefit which one friend can confer upon another, is to guard, and excite, and elevate his virtues.”

Watch how Johnson paces his letter. He waits until nearly finished before suggesting a course to action – not to relieve grief but to perpetuate his mother’s memory:  

“There is one expedient by which you may, in some degree, continue her presence. If you write down minutely what you remember of her from your earliest years, you will read it with great pleasure, and receive from it many hints of soothing recollection, when time shall remove her yet farther from you, and your grief shall be matured to veneration.”

The meaning of the word “consolation” is forever changed by Geoffrey Hill’s usage in stanza CXLVIII of The Triumph of Love (1998):

“So – Croker, Macsikker, O’Shem – I ask you

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad

and angry consolation. What is

the poem? What figures? Say,

a sad and angry consolation. That’s

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry

consolation."

'Blunt-Force Monosyllables'

“And finally I love its mood or tone. Not without reservation: being so evenly lit, it gives off little sense of brooding, mystery, or weirdness, and it lacks the expressive contrast and coiled power of English, with its blunt-force monosyllables.”

Ben Downing celebrates his efforts to master Italian in middle age in “That Soft Bastard Latin,” published in the Winter 2016 issue of The Threepenny Review. He takes his title from stanza XLIV of Byron’s “Beppo: A Venetian Story”: “I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, / Which melts like kisses from a female mouth . . .” I have little Italian but was pleased to find Downing’s glancing homage, in the passage quoted above, to the punchiness of English. Our beautiful language packs power into small packages. Some of our best profanity is monosyllabic, as is some of our best poetry. The first example I think of is Pope’s heavily monosyllabic “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”:

“Oh let me live my own! and die so too!

(‘To live and die is all I have to do:’)

Maintain a poet’s dignity and ease,

And see what friends, and read what books I please.”

More stunt than first-rate poetry, though impressive nonetheless, is Chidiock Tichborne’s “Elegy,” written entirely in one-syllable words while he awaited execution in the Tower of London in 1586: “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, / My feast of joy is but a dish of pain . . .” His contemporary, Shakespeare, reveled in monosyllables. I haven’t counted but many of the sonnets begin with sentences written strictly with one-syllable words, as in XXXV: “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.” And here is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Clerks” from his first collection, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896):

“I did not think that I should find them there

When I came back again; but there they stood,

As in the days they dreamed of when young blood

Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.

Be sure, they met me with an ancient air,—

And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood

About them; but the men were just as good,

And just as human as they ever were.

And you that ache so much to be sublime,

And you that feed yourselves with your descent,

What comes of all your visions and your fears?

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,

Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,

Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.”

I count 15 multi-syllabic words among the sonnet’s 112 words, and the effect isn’t halting or stutter-like. If you and I were told to express ourselves strictly with one-syllable words, we might be temporarily hobbled but we could do it. On the positive side, we might be less attracted to bombast. On the other, singing would be more difficult. Shit.

'Emotional Compendiousness'

“Certain books remain forever bound up with the circumstances in which we read them, and a persistent few of these seem to shadow and punctuate our lives according to the inscrutable rules of coincidence; for me, one such is Middlemarch.”

Ben Downing had me by the first comma. The rest of the sentence is a gift. I know him as coeditor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review and author of the poetry collection The Calligraphy Shop (2003) and the biography Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross (2013). I’ve read his essays and reviews for years, but only this week discovered “The Water of March,” published in 2002 in the Southwest Review (thank you, Jstor). In five pages, Downing mingles memoir, travel writing and criticism, and moves literature from the classroom and into the heart of our life where it belongs.

Downing first read Eliot’s novel in the nineteen-nineties on a visit to Brazil. He chose a hefty Victorian volume, in part, because it “would keep me from the hideous eventuality of on-the-road booklessness.” We all know that anxiety. In addition, he figured Middlemarch would “prove to be a piquant contrast to all things Brazilian.” He turned reading the novel into an exalted ritual, which I also understand.

Downing’s mind is alert to correspondences, echoes and covert threads of meaning. His title comes from one of my favorite songs, one I linked to on this blog many years ago, “Águas de Março” (“Water of March”), as performed by Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim. He begins reading Middlemarch on March 15 – the middle of March. He mentions such linkages not out of pretentious symbol-mongering but because he finds pleasure in “the inscrutable rules of coincidence.” Search out the essay and expect to be entertained and to have your faith in the power of a good book restored:

“How many of our red-letter days arrive out of nowhere, unlooked for and unbidden! The counterpoint of reading and talk; of firm English prose and careless Portuguese banter; of Middlemarch and Minas Gerais—all this, played out against the rolling, pastoral landscape, left me, when after dark I finally got to Caxambu, fairly tingling with exhilaration.”

The essay only gets better after that, deeper and more somber: “Such extremity of feeling is in tune with the emotional compendiousness of the novel itself.”

'Attentive and Repeated Perusals'

As a boy I was most attracted to reference books, in the broadest sense. I liked dictionaries, atlases, thesauruses, field guides and almanacs. I liked information collected, collated and convenient, and still do. I think this is related to my lifelong fondness for good anthologies. Such books are the autodidact’s friend, the map and compass needed when entering terra incognita. There’s comfort in densely, intelligently packed information. The Anatomy of Melancholy has been one of my favorite books since I discovered it as a college freshman. I can dip in anytime, to any page, and learn something. In his wonderful essay “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996), Guy Davenport writes: “And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.”

This week I picked up The Practical Cogitator; or, The Thinker’s Anthology (1945), edited by Charles P. Curtis Jr. and Ferris Greenslet, again. I wanted something to read while eating my lunch at my desk. In his preface, Curtis glosses his title: “To begin with, this anthology is for the thinker, and not for the feeler, primarily for the extrovert thinker. Needless to say, it runs over into some of his introverted and intuitive margins.” And he means it. Among his rules of selection:

“Nothing that is not worth re-reading. Some things can be chewed over almost indefinitely. Pieces that are tough enough, juicy enough to chew. Some that are scarcely worth reading only once.”

Early in the book, almost as an endorsement of their project, Curtis and Greenslet include a passage from the letter Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds on Feb. 19, 1818. Here’s an excerpt:

“I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner - Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale - But when will it do so? Never - When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all ‘the two-and-thirty Palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of concentration, what delicious diligent Indolence!”

Keats precisely captures the pleasure of reading when he oxymoronically couples “concentration” with “delicious diligent Indolence.” Based on my experience, there is no contradiction. Later, Curtis and Greenslet quote Edward Gibbon’s “Abstract of My Readings”: “Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to what our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.” The passage, as printed, is deceptive. Gibbon’s two sentences, as he wrote them, are separated by two paragraphs. A subsequent passage from the same essay is pertinent:

“But what ought we to read? Each individual must answer this question for himself, agreeably to the object of his studies. The only general precept that I would venture to give, is that of Pliny, ‘to read much, rather than many things’; to make a careful selection of the best works, and to render them familiar to us by attentive and repeated perusals.”

'It Is Simply Not Helpful'

Why Do I Write? is a slender volume published in 1948 by Percival Marshall of London. It collects an exchange of letters, each a digressive essay, among Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, on the writer’s presumed responsibility to “society,” whatever that means. As Pritchett writes in his preface, “What a horrible word ‘society’ is.” Though written seventy years ago, Pritchett’s words, in one of his letters to Bowen, seem particularly pertinent:

“I do not write for the reader, for people, for society. I write for myself, for my own self-regarding pleasure, trying to excel and always failing of the excellence I desire. If no one ever read me, would I write? Perhaps not; but I would not be able to stop writing in my head.”

Pritchett speaks for every honest writer. High-mindedness doesn’t suit us. Watch your back (and your wallet) when a writer proclaims his dedication to the cause du jour. We pride ourselves on independence of thought, but most of us are as free-thinking as a nest of fire ants. Writers ought to be no more engagé than pipefitters, who probably know more about politics anyway. Pritchett begins his preface like this:

“If we are asked what, from the social point of view, writers are for, one answer seems to be that they exist to show the inconvenience of human nature; just as from the private point of view, they enlarge human nature's knowledge of itself. But do we ask more of writers in a time like the present? Ought they not, perhaps, be putting their shoulders to some wheel or other? And which one? After all (the cliché runs) ‘this is a time of crisis, this is an age of revolution, transition, despair.’ . . . The cliché is not necessarily untrue because it is conventional; it is simply not helpful.”

'Or Not Untrue and Not Unkind'

“. . . we should

Not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good.”

Stevie Smith’s faith was a wavering thing. She paid her religion the highest compliment by thinking about it often, agonizing and vacillating from faith, to doubt, to bleak unbelief and back. The lines above are from “I Was so Full . . .” (Selected Poems, 1962).  The poem’s first two stanzas parody God’s summoning commands in the first chapter of Genesis:

“I was so full of love and joy

There was not enough people to love,

So I said: Let there be God,

Then there was God above.

“I was so full of anger and hate

To be hated was not enough people,

So I said: Let there be a Devil to hate,

Then down below was the Devil.

“These persons have worked very much in my mind

And by being not true, have made me unkind,

So now I say: Away with them, away; we should

Not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good.

“Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.”

Smith’s narrator blasphemes, ridiculously. God and the Devil are “persons” but are not “true.” Her closing lines apply acutely to politics and ethics. If our values are nonsense, our judgment is already compromised. Behavior rooted in “fairy stories” is unlikely to accomplish much of value. Can one be “good” when holding patently ridiculous beliefs? On occasion, probably. Over the long haul, probably not. In Philip Larkin’s 1962 review of Selected Poems (Required Writing, 1984), he characterized Smith’s voice as “fausse-naïve,” called her an “almost unclassifiable writer” and famously concluded: “Her poems speak with the authority of sadness.” Clearly, Larkin hears Smith and responds sympathetically. He sees through her silliness to something more essential. Two years later he published The Whitsun Weddings, including “Talking in Bed”:

“Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

Lying together there goes back so far,

An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest

Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.”

Smith writes:

“These persons have worked very much in my mind

And by being not true, have made me unkind.”

Larkin writes:

“It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.”

Smith was born on this date, Sept. 20, in 1902, and died on March 7, 1971 at age sixty-eight.

'I'd Arrived in a Rather Special Place'

Nige reports a bumper crop of conkers this year, and I wondered what he was talking about. It seems to be another word that never crossed the Atlantic. My American-made spell-check software doesn’t recognize it. I know conk (Pierce Egan’s Boxiana: “Spring however conked his opponent, when they closed”) and “conked out,” as in exhausted to the point of losing consciousness. And when I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1969, I learned that conk refers to the painful chemical hair-straightening procedure some black people underwent (“my first really big step toward self-degradation,” Malcolm calls it). From context, I understood that Nige is referring to horse-chestnuts, but the folklore and etymology eluded me. Coined by English boys, the word began as a homonym of “conquers,” according to the OED:

“A boys’ game, played originally with snail-shells but now with horse-chestnuts, in which each boy has a chestnut on a string which he alternately strikes against that of his opponent and holds to be struck until one of the two is broken.”

The Dictionary cites a reference Robert Southey makes in his remembrance of schooldays in the 1780’s in Corston: “One very odd amusement, which I never saw or heard of elsewhere, was greatly in vogue at this school. It was performed with snail shells, by placing them against each other, point to point, and pressing till the one was broken in, or sometimes both. This was called conquering . . . A great conqueror was prodigiously prized and coveted.”

In Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969), Iona and Peter Opie make conkers sound like a ritual deeply rooted in the culture of English children:

“For a brief spell in early autumn this game is as much a part of the English scene as garden bonfires, and hounds cubbing at break of day. The boys are out searching for conkers, throwing sticks and stones up into the chestnut trees (the best conkers are believed to be at the top of the tree) and, with or without permission, invading people’s gardens. They meet with little opposition. The youthful pleasure of prising a mahogany-smooth chestnut from its prickly casing is not easily forgotten; and when a vicar wrote to The Times complaining about the depredations of small enthusiasts, readers’ sentiment was clearly against him.”

Compare the Opies’ account with Nige’s:

“It was at just this time of year that I first arrived, at the age of nine, in the suburban demiparadise I still call home. After the first day of school, I joined a gang of boys heading straight to the park to climb trees and harvest conkers. We had to throw sticks – there was nothing like this year’s easy largesse – but that only made it more fun. I looked around me at the park, lit by a mellow September sun, and knew I'd arrived in a rather special place.”

I note that the fun police are as vigilant in England as they are in the U.S. See “School bans ‘nut allergy’ conkers.”

'With a Pious Abstraction'

“It was Johnson’s custom to observe certain days with a pious abstraction; viz. New-year’s-day, the day of his wife’s death, Good Friday, Easter-day, and his own birth-day.”

We passively endure such days, if we recognize them at all. For Dr. Johnson, all were sacred, demanding to be solemnly and privately observed with prayer and meditation. Today his spiritual regimen might be diagnosed as symptomatic of depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. The observation quoted above is from Boswell, who goes on to cite Johnson’s diary entry from this date, Sept. 18, in 1764. It was his birthday. He was turning fifty-five and had another twenty years to live:

“He this year says:—‘I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving; having, from the earliest time almost that I can remember, been forming schemes of a better life. I have done nothing. The need of doing, therefore, is pressing, since the time of doing is short. O GOD, grant me to resolve aright, and to keep my resolutions, for JESUS CHRIST’S sake. Amen.’”

Johnson was forever resolving and failing to remain resolved. This makes him hopelessly human, like us. He fumbled through life, reproached himself and fumbled again, lending his genius credence. We don’t feel intimidated when listening to him. His failings are ours. Later in the same diary entry, in a ritual repeated throughout his life, Johnson spells out a list of commands himself. Among them:

“To read the Scriptures. In hope in the original Languages. Six hundred and forty verses every Sunday will nearly comprise the Scriptures in a year.

“To read good books. To study Theology.

“To drive out vain scruples.”

The editors of Diaries, Prayers, and Annals (Yale University Press, 1958) note that Johnson’s Scriptural reading plan is “not in itself formidable.” A year earlier on Easter he had read the 879 verses in the Gospel of St. John. We don’t know if Johnson stuck to the plan. Most of the following year was devoted to work on his edition of Shakespeare. Otherwise, he published only two reviews – by his customary standards, an idle year. What impresses me about these diary entries are Johnson’s efforts to sacralize daily living. Anything might provide fodder for spiritual observance. Charles Lamb is a very different sort of writer and man, but I hear a distant echo of Johnson’s commitment in Lamb’s “Grace Before Meat,” one of the Elia essays:

“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts -- a grace before Milton -- a grace before Shakespeare -- a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?”  

'The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers'

The Houston Public Library held a book sale Saturday morning at a nearby middle school. I arrived without expectations and thus left without disappointment, untempted by a single title. Strictly bestsellers, textbooks and library rejects. While I was looking at the fiction carts, an Asian kid, about thirteen, was standing next to me. He was seriously examining a boxed edition of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, and I felt a moral obligation to steer him away from a decision I’m certain he would have lived to regret. I picked up a hardcover of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer and suggested he read it instead of the Mansfield. My meddling didn’t seem to alarm him, and a man I judged to be his father looked on. After much perusing of both volumes, the boy reshelved the Mansfield, kept the Malamud and thanked me. His father smiled and nodded. I may have changed a life.

I ran into John Dillman, the owner of Kaboom Books, which is just a few blocks from the school. He noted that the sale was doubly depressing: there was little worth buying (he took home three volumes) and the library was gutting its collection yet again. I must have been feeling a lingering case of post-traumatic book disappointment because on Sunday I felt the urge to visit John’s bookstore, and my decision proved therapeutic. I found a copy of V.S. Pritchett’s first book, Marching Spain (1927), which I have never read. Next, the Akadine Press reprint of Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939), my favorite among his travel books (if it's not Labels, published in 1930, or Remote People, in 1931). And two titles by Rebecca West: A Train of Powder (1955) and a first edition of The Court and the Castle (1957). I’ve read the former, not the latter. West entered my pantheon years ago with Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941).

John and I had our usual rambling conversation. It started with one of his favorite novels, Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (1940) -- he has the first edition of the English translation priced at $350 -- and shifted into Svevo, Lampedusa, Calvino, Levi and Elsa Morante. I asked if he was related to the actor Bradford Dillman, who died last January and turns out to have been his cousin. We moved on to Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and the latter’s work in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, followed by a discussion of the word “milquetoast” and, for some reason, the history of barbed wire and its use by the Italians during World War I.

'A Good Night for Mothing'

Friday morning around 6:45, on the sidewalk outside the entrance to the building where my office is located, was an exquisitely beautiful moth, so colored and finely grained I might have mistaken it for a small wooden ornament, polished and painted like a broach or toy. I went inside and asked a colleague, Doni Soward, to photograph it:

It was a tersa sphinx moth (Xylophanes tersa), a nectar-feeder several hundred yards from the nearest flower, nearing death, presumably attracted by the lobby lights shining through the glass doors. I remembered the beautiful final paragraph of Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947), which loops delicately back to the novel’s opening paragraph:

“Across the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the slanting black trunk of a poplar. The shredded ray of a streetlamp brought out a bright green section of wet box hedge. I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.”

Nabokov tells us an editor questioned whether “mothing” was a typo for “nothing.” It was not. Otherwise, the novel would have had a most un-Nabokovian finish.

'Vessels of Very Limited Content'

I haven’t shaken the notion that Robert Louis Stevenson was a writer of children’s books. I read Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a boy, around the time I first read Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, though I’ve never thought of the latter as books written for kids. Perhaps it’s a matter of marketing or of Defoe and Swift’s essential seriousness. Neither thought he was writing for children. I’ve tried several times to read Stevenson’s other work, including his letters. I hated none of it and don’t recall boredom, but somehow Stevenson never took. I question my judgment because Henry James befriended him, admired his work and called him “an indispensable light.” James and Stevenson started as mutually admiring correspondents. They met at Bournemouth in 1885. Two years later, Stevenson left England for the last time, and in 1894 he was dead at age forty-four.

I’ve made another effort to work up enthusiasm for Stevenson. At least in the abstract, my favorite literary form is the essay, so I returned to a little brown volume published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1911, Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing, and read “Books Which Have Influenced Me” (1887). For Stevenson – not surprisingly for a novelist – most influential are works of fiction:

“They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.  To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.”

Stevenson’s experiences echo my own and his observations are remarkably similar to something Joseph Epstein writes in “A Literary Education: On Being Well-Versed in Literature” (A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014):

“. . . if any inkling about the way the world works and the manner in which human nature is constituted were to be remotely available to me during my stay on the planet, I should have the best chance of discovering it through literature, and perhaps chiefly through the novel. The endless details set out in novels, the thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works—these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.”

Stevenson offers Shakespeare perfunctory praise, but how do you say anything original about your debt to him? About “works of art,” Stevenson writes, “little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature.” He rightly describes Montaigne’s Essays as “a book not easily outlived,” and the list continues: the New Testament, Leaves of Grass, Herbert Spencer (!), The Story of Goethe’s Life by George Henry Lewes (Mr. George Eliot), Martial, Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth and George Meredith. As an afterthought he adds Hazlitt, Thoreau and William Penn’s aphorisms.

Like any true reader, Stevenson’s tastes are varied and inconsistent, and offer other true readers plenty to argue about. His conclusion is humble and humbling:

“. . . after all, we are vessels of a very limited content.  Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind.  A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not written.”

'Verbal Felicity is the Fruit of Ardor'

“Now is there such a thing, I would like to ask, as intrinsic attraction that can surmount indifference to technique? I doubt it. Rigor here is essential, and not the mortuary kind, but the studious kind, can be our salvation.”

Without peeking, what’s your best guess as to who wrote these sentences? Henry James? Makes sense. Rhythmically paced, tricky syntax, a little finicky. Guy Davenport? “Not the mortuary kind” sounds like him. Clearly we’re dealing with a writer given to precision, wit and attention to musicality – prose written like poetry without turning “poetic” in the purple sense. Does this, from the next paragraph, help?: “I want to talk about words, and about how one can hold people’s attention.” The author in question is the poet Marianne Moore, one of my favorite writers of prose, whose acknowledged model was James. Elsewhere in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986) she refers to “the geometrically precise snow-flake forms of Henry James,” and I assume Moore is admiring James’ prose exactitude and elegance.

The quoted passage at the top is from Moore’s contribution to Harvard Summer School Conference on the Defense of Poetry (1951). The previous year, Moore had attended the event alongside, among others, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. Her title is written in mock-eighteenth-century style: “Impact, Moral and Technical; Independence Versus Exhibitionism; and Concerning Contagion.” She talks about her current project, translating La Fontaine’s fables (to be published in 1954), and translation in general, and then ruminates on something Peter Viereck had said:

“I have a very special fondness for writing that is obscure, that does not quite succeed, because of the author’s intuitive restraint. All that I can say is that one must be as clear as one’s natural reticence allows one to be.”

Moore is cunningly reticent while commenting on her own reticence, and perhaps James’. “Terseness,” she writes, “and that simultaneous double meaning of the pun have been irresistible to writers always.” A customary quilt of quotes follows: Robert Bridges, Stendhal, Katherine Anne Porter, Paul Valéry, Auden, Shaw. And then she concludes: “My observations cannot be regularized, but I might summarize them by saying that I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.”

'Grazing Idly in a Literary Pasture'

For no good reason I’ve read very little by Donald Hall, who died recently at age eighty-nine. Partly out of guilt I resolved to read at least one of his books. Almost at random I took Principal Products of Portugal: Prose Pieces (1995) from the library shelf, because I liked the title’s non sequitur. He explains his choice of title like this:

“. . . code for things miscellaneous, unrelated, boring, and probably educational. The title should please not only for its prodigious procession of p’s but for its metrical Longfellowship, bringing back memories of ‘This is the forest primeval, the mur- ’—and rote recitation standing in the third grade doing the multiplication tables, 7s maybe, or maybe the principal products of Portugal.”

This is a man who ought to have run a blog. The thought is confirmed by a number of Hall’s essays, which usually avoid academic mummification on one side and folksy jolly-good-fellowism on the other. Hall’s voice is casual and conversational but he never whispers the lousy writer’s lament: Love me. Love me. Take “Long Live the Dead,” originally published in that well-known scholarly journal the Boston Globe. From the title you would never guess it was devoted to Hall’s love of Edward Gibbon. He starts with this:

“Really, disinterested reading—reading by whim or chance, without conscious purpose—contributes most to a writer’s interest. Grazing idly in a literary pasture, we discover manners of language alien to our habit, which allow us new invention. If we stick to what we already know, we stick to what we already do.”

As an undergraduate, Hall had tried to read Gibbon, he says, “but I never took him in.” In late middle age he tried again, and everything was different: “I took him in whole, headlong, in an ecstasy of disinterested reading. I read nothing for months but Gibbon, poleaxed by rhythms, by syntax that branched like a maple, by irony administered through sentence structure.” Hall’s experience with Gibbon resembles my own. I tried when young, succeeded at age forty-seven. Now I periodically revisit, using the notes I took as a guide. Hall and I share another late-life revelation:

“Reading Gibbon I discovered the pleasure of reading two books at once. While I studied the decline and fall of Rome, I also attended to the mind of the later eighteenth century.”

And, of course, as is always the case when rereading, another book is added to the stack, for you will recall scraps of your previous readings, and the sort of person you were. Every book in the hands of a thoughtful reader is a palimpsest. Hall says Gibbon sent him back to the Greek and Roman historians, and then to Hume, Macaulay (“whose gorgeous prose expends itself in sentimental pursuit”) and Henry Adams. Perhaps history is an old person’s preserve after all. Hall credits Gibbon with “drawing my attention to neglected possibilities of language, especially long controlled sentences in which syntax (enforcing its own drumbeat or rhythmic dance) provides or enables judgment. And Gibbon encouraged me to depart from the imitation of common speech. . . . The tone of a vocabulary establishes a vocabulary of tone.”

I enjoy reading what a poet has to say about prose. We like to assume his awareness of language and its potentials and limitations is informed, perhaps privileged. Not always the case, of course, but here’s something Hall writes in another essay in Principal Products of Portugal, devoted to Henry Adams:

“Among the great historians, Henry Adams’s style does not call attention to itself so much as the styles of Gibbon, Macaulay, and Parkman—not to mention (as I suppose) Tacitus or Thucydides. But it is no glass of water.”

'Within the Bounds of Your Beliefs'

Anthologies have always served as the private tutors I never had. A good anthology is suffused with its editor’s virtues and peccadillos, both of which are valuable. Comprehensive and yet personalized, it includes material you would expect alongside surprises. Every anthology I’ve ever read had something wrong with it, some galling omission, and I’ve come to think of that as a virtue. It makes you appreciate what you’ve already read and often sends you back to it with a renewed sense of gratitude.

In the case of Mark van Doren, who edited The Oxford Book of American Prose in 1932, his most blatant failure is leaving out Ulysses Grant, whose Personal Memoirs are written in the plain style by a former soldier who valued precision and concision. After Lincoln, he is the finest writer who ever served as U.S. president (I’m not forgetting the Founders). Van Doren includes Lincoln’s well-known letter to Grant written on July 13, 1863, with its magnanimous closing sentence: “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”

Among his laudable and unsurprising choices are three chapters from Moby-Dick, one from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, one from Henry Adams’ History of the United States, and one from Henry James’ The American Scene. The last is the chapter devoted to Charleston, S.C., in which James asks, in some of the grandest prose written by an American:

“How can everything so have gone that the only ‘Southern’ book of any distinction published for many a year is The Souls of Black Folk, by that most accomplished of members of the negro race, Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois? Had the only focus of life then been Slavery?--from the point onward that Slavery had reached a quarter of a century before the War, so that with the extinction of that interest none other of any sort was left.”

In his preface, van Doren tells us he purposely included no selections from writers born in the twentieth century. He includes passages from Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), George Santayana’s Reason in Society (1905) and Mencken’s Prejudices series. There’s no Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald but you’ll find Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Ring Lardner’s “I Can’t Breathe.” The names of several contributors were new to me. Most interesting is Edgar Watson Howe (1853-1937), an Indiana-born journalist who edited a magazine, E.W. Howe’s Monthly. Van Doren includes a selection of aphorisms excerpted from Ventures in Common Sense (1919), with an introduction by Mencken. Howe writes like a slightly anemic Mencken:

“No man may write interestingly and keep within the bounds of your beliefs. He must occasionally go so far as to pleasantly shock you, and cause the uncomfortable feeling that a good man cannot follow him all the way. The author who aims to write nothing offensive to anyone presently writes only hymns and leaflets explaining the Sunday school lesson; and then only children read him; and they read him because they will be scolded if they do not.”

Well, yes, but Mencken wrote it more colorfully. Van Doren’s anthology is about prose, not poseurs.