'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.]