'Dazzled by His Imagination, His Literary Culture'

My middle son, a plebe at the U.S. Naval Academy, has managed to discover, along with boxing, chemistry, calculus, Old English, seamanship and women, the wonder of Jorge Luis Borges. When he was home for three days at Thanksgiving, I gave him some of my Borges collections and suggested the obvious gems: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Library of Babel,” “Funes the Memorious,” “The Aleph” and others. I remember reading Labyrinths (1962) in high school and feeling as though I had discovered another universe. Reading Nabokov around the same time was a comparable experience. Borges offered some of the virtues claimed for science fiction without the pulpy vulgarity and lousy writing. Even in English translation, his prose is a delight. Take this from “The Aleph”:

“I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.)”    

Borges’ accomplishments as a writer are matched by his glory as a reader. He seems to have read everything and remembered it. He is a voluptuary of the book. He writes in 1927 essay, “Literary Pleasure” (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, On Writing, 2010):

“Our indolence speaks of classical books, eternal books. If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world. Your favorite books, reader, are like the rough drafts of that book without a final reading.”

Two women I work with, natives of Argentina, told me that Borges was a standard part of the curriculum in their schools when they were growing up. Neither is a literary person or ambitious reader, but both expressed national pride when I mentioned my son’s recent discovery of Borges and my longtime love of his work. In Sabers and Utopia: Visions of Latin America (trans. Anna Kushner, 2018), Mario Vargas Llosa writes in “Repugnant Laudatory Farce”:   

“In reality, great talents are not ‘produced’ by their countries, and, as such, Borges is not an Argentine ‘product.’ He came out of an almost indiscernible alliance of ideas, images, poems, novels, essays, philosophic and theological systems, coming from many languages and cultures, from the stimulating atmosphere of a family, a group of friends and acquaintances, but, mainly, from a disposition or personal gift, a unique and exclusive one, for dreaming, fantasizing, assimilating great literary creations and ordering Spanish words into phrases, pages, and books of extraordinary precision and unusual beauty. And for this reason, like Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, and so many other eminent creators, Borges belongs not to Argentina but rather to all who read him and are dazzled by his imagination, his literary culture, his elegance, his irony, and his magnificent way of using our language, imposing on it the exactitude of English and the intelligence of French without losing the wild vigor of the Castilian.”

'Whose Books Are Honoured Friends'

“Various as are the kinds of books, so various are the uses to which we put them. There are those who read to kill time, as a refuge—oh, shame! shame!—from themselves.”

The explanation points are a bit much, but we get the idea. On a cross-country bus trip, there’s nothing wrong with using even a lousy book to at least severely wound time. That’s not so much a refuge from self as from tedium. Reading can be strictly utilitarian. There may be nobler uses for books, but at least our bus rider isn’t playing a video game.   

“There are those who read because some work is in fashion, and it were bad taste not to be able to talk of it.”

This is a species of reader with whom I have little personal experience. A new book has to be outstanding, something special, for me to read it – Joseph Epstein, say, or one of the books I’m reading now, Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. Fashion has nothing to do with it. I assume any recent book is worthless until tested. Hazlitt and Lamb are with me on this.

“There are those who read in order to give the public the benefit of their judgement—those mysterious men, the critics.”

Good critics are rare. Few can write well, so why should we trust them to evaluate writing? We’re in a brackish literary backwater at the moment. T.S. Eliot’s notion that the function of criticism is “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste” is truer than ever.

“There are those who read indiscriminately with morbid wideness of taste, as the savage devours earth.”

I read that way as a kid. I don’t regret having been an omnivore. How else do you develop good taste and critical standards except by reading good books and bad ones, and learning to distinguish them?

“Lastly, there are those who read little, but with discernment; whose books are honoured friends—‘the souls who have made their souls wiser.’”

Can’t we read many books “but with discernment”? Of course we can. Since I was young I’ve treated books anthropomorphically. The best remain loyal friends. They don’t let you down. The quote beginning 'the souls,' sorry to say, is from Emerson.

The quoted passages above are from a paragraph in Alfred Ainger’s essay “Books and Their Uses,” collected in Lectures and Essays, Vol. 2 (Macmillan and Co., 1905).

'The Various Vicissitudes of Human Life'

The book I have most heavily annotated, underlined and otherwise vandalized – even more than Ulysses – is the Penguin paperback edition of Dr. Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) I bought for an English literature class in 1971. The spine broke long ago, and the two-volumes-in-one is held together with a rubber band. Though unreadable, I keep it for sentimental reasons – as a book I love and as my introduction to Johnson’s work. Thanks to the same professor, I first read Boswell’s Life, and my life was changed.

I’ve been reading Lives of the Novelists (1825) by Walter Scott, whom I know solely as a historical novelist. As a kid I read the best-known of his Waverley Novels, Ivanhoe (1820). Hugely popular in his day, I suspect only a few academics read him much today, though Guy Davenport was a great admirer. Along with Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Scott includes a chapter devoted to Johnson, including his only novel, Rasselas. Scott, as a Scot, had reason to ignore or dismiss Johnson, who famously goofed on his countrymen: “What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?” But Scott admired him supremely among English writers and perhaps among Englishmen:

“When we consider the rank which Dr. Johnson held, not only in literature, but in society, we cannot help figuring him to ourselves as the benevolent giant of some fairy tale, whose kindnesses and courtesies are still mingled with a part of the rugged ferocity imputed to the fabulous sons of Anak; or rather, perhaps, like a Roman Dictator, fetched from his farm, whose wisdom and heroism still relished of his rustic occupation.”

Scott was the prolific author of three-decker novels, but he adores Rasselas, which is shorter than some of the chapters in his books. “It was composed in solitude and sorrow,” Scott writes, “and the melancholy cast of feeling which it exhibits, sufficiently evinces the temper of the author's mind.” At the age of fifty, Johnson wrote the book in a one-week fit of inspiration and labor to pay for his mother’s funeral. Scott writes:

“The work can scarce be termed a narrative, being in a great measure void of incident; it is rather a set of moral dialogues on the various vicissitudes of human life, its follies, its fears, its hopes, its wishes, and the disappointment in which all terminate. The style is in Johnson's best manner; enriched and rendered sonorous by the triads and quaternions which he so much loved, and balanced with an art which perhaps he derived from the learned Sir Thomas Brown[e].”

In 1756, Johnson published his life of Browne. Perhaps there was influence. Both men, Browne and Johnson, were masters of prose, but Browne is more lush and flamboyant a writer. Johnson’s prose in Rasselas is more plain-spoken and aphoristic (the reason I underlined so much of it).  As Imlac, Johnson’s stand-in, says: “A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.” That’s all of Johnson in nine words.

'In Large Measure Both Wit and Imagination'

“After ten years’ war with perpetual success, to tell us it is yet impossible to have a good peace, is very surprising, and seems so different from what has ever happened in the world before, that a man of any party may be allowed suspecting that we have either been ill used, or have not made the most of our victories, and might therefore desire to know where the difficulty lay.”

The author is Jonathan Swift. The source is one of his lesser-known works, The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War, published on this date, Nov. 27, in 1711. Swift’s subject is the War of Spanish Succession, which claimed between 400,000 and 1.25 million lives. Britain was at war with France from 1689 to 1697, and again from 1702 until 1714. Hostilities were triggered by the death of Charles II, who left no children and was the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. In 1711, Lord Bolingbroke initiated secret peace negotiations with the French, with a draft agreement to end the fighting signed Sept. 27. The Whigs opposed the treaty with the slogan “No Peace without Spain.” The Peace of Utrecht incrementally ended the war between 1713 and 1715.

Given the war’s remoteness, complexity and seeming triviality, Swift’s propaganda – not always a dirty word – is remarkably engaging to read. He castigates the Dutch, the Austrians, the Whigs and John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, whom Swift is credited with having helped bring down. Swift is a rare writer who is nearly always a pleasure to read, regardless of subject, principally because of the clarity of his prose. The passage quoted above might have been written circa 1971, about another country and another war. This is no simple screed. It courteously but pointedly demands an explanation and is leavened with the lightest touch of irony. One senses the pressing weight of history delicately deployed. Swift’s reasonableness itself is a threat. “Let’s give these people the benefit of the doubt,” our writer suggests, “but not for long.”

In Literature and Western Man (1960), J.B. Priestley calls Swift a “mutilated genius.” We understand what he means. It’s more complicated than that, but will do for a critical epithet. “He had one of the most formidable intellects of the age,” Priestley writes, “he had perhaps the best plain prose style in all English literature; he had in large measure both wit and imagination.” No argument. At this point, Priestley repeats the standard misguided critical consensus:

“But much of his best work, his pamphlets and topical satires, recedes and dwindles with the political conflicts and intrigues of the time, from which he retired, bitterly disappointed, because his party service did not even bring him the bishopric he expected. If he had devoted himself entirely to literature, especially during the years when his genius was at its height, he would undoubtedly have become one of the greatest figures of the century in European literature.”

Which he was, of course. Like many critics and readers, Priestley defines literature narrowly, by academic and marketing category. There’s more to literature than fiction, drama and poetry. As the late David Myers usefully put it: “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.” Here is Swift’s sentence in The Conduct of the Allies immediately following the one cited at the top:

“Then it is natural to inquire into our present condition; how long we shall be able to go on at this rate; what the consequences may be upon the present and future ages; and whether a peace, without that impracticable point which some people do so much insist on, be really ruinous in it self, or equally so with the continuance of the war.”

'The Stable Yields a Stercoraceous Heap'

“The stable yields a stercoraceous heap

Impregnated with quick fermenting salts,

And potent to resist the freezing blast.”

Euphemism has its worthy uses. When deployed by politicians, we rightly dismiss it as dishonest, hypocritical masking of awkward truths. Here, William Cowper, in Book III, “The Garden,” of The Task (1785), is merely being polite, protecting the delicate sensibilities of his eighteenth-century readers (not that Swift would have done likewise). Readers of the entire poem, even those unschooled in Latin (stercus: “dung”), would know by context what Cowper meant by “a stercoraceous heap.” The OED, which cites Cowper’s usage, shares his delicacy and defines the word as “consisting of, containing, or pertaining to fæces.” In the vernacular, shitty.

The dictionary’s first citation is from John Arbuthnot’s extravagantly titled An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments, and the Choice of Them, According to the Different Constitutions of Human Bodies: “A putrid stercoraceous Taste and Odour.” Next comes a passage from Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s A Practical Treatise of Husbandry (trans. John Mills, 1759) that echoes Cowper’s usage: “The stercoraceous salts of the dung.” The most recent and distasteful citation is taken from John Syer Bristowe’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Medicine (1876): “This discharge of ‘stercoraceous’ matter by the mouth is due . . . to the fact that [etc.].” This reads like a variation on a scene in Gravity’s Rainbow. The dictionary offers two additional definitions: “Of vomiting: Consisting of fæces, fæcal” and, from entomology, “Of certain beetles, flies, etc.: Frequenting or feeding on dung.” In short, a dung beetle. Read the balance of Cowper’s passage to see how the keeper of this English Augean stable methodically deals with the “agglomerated pile.”

'The Full Range and Scale of Our Ignorance'

Never underestimate the importance of ignorance, the unacknowledged driver of civilization. Ignorance is more than an absence. It is a powerful goad to knowledge. A decade or so ago, a prominent English blogger referred to me in print as an “ignorant cunt,” a title I humbly accept. Consider what the British philosopher Bryan Magee, now eighty-eight years old, says in Ultimate Questions (Princeton University Press, 2016):

“The resistance we feel against allowing the extent of the unknown into our view of reality gives us a powerful drive to piece together a complete picture out of what we do know, or can know. But alas, the human situation is as if we were given some but not all of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and left to make a complete picture of them.”

As a teenager as was I briefly enthralled by Karl Shapiro’s 1960 essay collection In Defense of Ignorance, in part because of the provocative title. While I still respect much of Shapiro’s early poetry, I outgrew his enthusiasms, exemplars of ignorance – Blake, Whitman, Lawrence, Henry Miller. That is, the Romantics and their heirs. In other words, yet another “complete picture,” and a rather confused one. Near the conclusion of his brief volume Magee writes:

“It is easier to accept the security of a faith, either in the existence of unknowable entities or in their non-existence, than it is to confront the full range and scale of our ignorance and live with that. This last is what more than anything I would like to do – that, and perhaps to push back the frontiers of ignorance, as the philosophers I have named [Locke, Hume, Kant, Shopenhauer] did in such fruitful ways.”

I’m not certain about all of this. I find faith remarkably challenging, a perpetual tug-of-war between certainty and doubt, knowledge and ignorance. What I find attractive and useful in Magee’s thinking is his championing of our ignorance and its uses. It should never leave us passive. With each question, with each tentative, tested answer, we gain a sliver of knowledge. Ignorance is best confronted with a mingling of humility and defiance. Magee is a self-defined agnostic, in a sense that is neither resigned nor defeatist:

“What I find myself wanting to press home more than anything else is that the only honest way to live and think is the fullest possible acknowledgement of our ignorance and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith, whether positive or negative, and without any other evasions or self-indulgences.”

A thoughtful faith isn’t a matter of “ducking out.” It’s not an evasion or a deception but a useful way to address our profound and very human ignorance.

'A State Between Gaiety and Unconcern'

“Good-humour may be defined a habit of being pleased; a constant and perennial softness of manner, easiness of approach, and suavity of disposition . . .”

Common sense, no? Consider the opposite of the virtue described here by Dr. Johnson in The Rambler #72, published on this date, Nov. 25, in 1750: perpetual displeasure, a harsh manner, walled-in defensiveness and crudity of disposition. In short, a brute, regardless of education, class or income. When I think of “good-humour” (and not the guy who drives the ice-cream truck), a former newspaper colleague comes to mind. A lifelong bachelor fifteen years my senior, he worked as a copy editor, but by calling he was a jazz drummer. When young, he met his heroes, Armstrong and Ellington. We once went to see Elvin Jones performing in a small club. Decades earlier, my friend had taken photographs of the drummer in concert and preserved the negatives. He had the photos printed and presented them to Jones, a formidably muscled musician. Jones locked my friend in a bear hug, lifted him off the ground and kissed him on the cheek. Rather than being startled by such a forceful show of gratitude, he was mutedly, quietly ecstatic. It was as though a long-deferred objective had been not only attained but received with gratitude more pleasing than money. Johnson writes:

“Good-humour is a state between gaiety and unconcern; the act or emanation of a mind at leisure to regard the gratification of another.”

'Freedom from Opinion'

Those with fervently held opinions tend to be convinced of their importance, though some of us understand that opinions are as disposable as Kleenex. Please, don’t tell me your opinion. Tell me what you know, assuming you know anything and that it holds some interest. On Thanksgiving Day, a reader begging for a fight dismissed that day’s post as “a waste of time about a bad poet.” It’s a mistake to engage with people who have no interest in reasoning and exchanging thoughts. Every parent of young children knows this. It’s never about the content of such comments but the dense atmosphere of self-centeredness pushing on them from the inside. The pathologically opinionated are overflowing with what Charles Gullans in “Research” (Letter from Los Angeles, 1990) calls “terrors of trivia.” Angry tedium, like pressurized gas, must be released. Theodore Dalrymple is writing about the ridiculous, soft-headed resurgence of witchcraft (he calls it the “selfie of the soul”) but he speaks for many of us:

“Thanks to so-called social media, we have lost one of the most cherished freedoms of all, namely that of freedom from opinion.”

'Thank You Very Kindly for This Visit'

Life is sustained by the little rituals, secular or otherwise. On the Fourth of July I listen to Charles Ives’ symphonies. Around Christmas I read the holiday chapters in Pickwick Papers (I can no longer stomach A Christmas Carol but can’t forget “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”). February 2 brings not groundhogs but favorite pages from Ulysses, and around Labor Day I read John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” I’ve done these things for so long, readerly anticipation is built into the turn of the seasons. On Thanksgiving Day I return to one of my favorite poems, “The Transparent Man” by Anthony Hecht, which begins:

“I’m mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Curtis,

And thank you very kindly for this visit—

Especially now when all the others here

Are having holiday visitors, and I feel

A little conspicuous and in the way.

It’s mainly because of Thanksgiving.”

The speaker is a hospitalized young woman dying of leukemia. Hecht’s dramatic monologue is written in perfectly paced blank verse, and remains true to conversational American English throughout. Humility, the queen of virtues, is difficult for writers to render without sounding sententious. I once had a disagreement with a friend over Dostoevsky’s success in creating Prince Myshkin. I didn’t buy it for a minute. I do buy Hecht’s woman, a thoughtful, attentive person, sensitive to the feelings and reactions of others, attuned to beauty and complexity. She sees like a poet the correspondences that grace the world. I think of her as a courteous Midwesterner. She looks out the window at the winter trees:

“One by one,

They stand there like magnificent enlargements

Of the vascular system of the human brain.

I see them there like huge discarnate minds,

Lost in their meditative silences.

The trunks, branches and twigs compose the vessels

That feed and nourish vast immortal thoughts.”

The reader’s sense of helpless sadness is goaded by the young woman’s attractiveness. We think, I hope I could match her poise and intelligence, mortally sick in a hospital bed. No self-pity, no bitterness, no anger at fate. Only polite, wistful thanksgiving:   

“So I hope that you won’t think me plain ungrateful

For not selecting one of your fine books,

And I take it very kindly that you came

And sat here and let me rattle on this way.”

'I Love a Fool'

Almost a century ago, J.B. Priestley had the idea of organizing an anthology around the comic characters abundant in English literature. Fools and Philosophers: A Gallery of Comic Figures from English Literature (John Lane, 1925) is heavy on Shakespeare and Dickens, and how could it not be? From what other national literature could such a collection be made? German? Please. In his preface, Priestley emphasizes that he has selected “suitable passages rather than representative characters.” He apologizes for leaving out excerpts from Goldsmith, Thackeray and Trollope, “because there did not seem to me any single passage sufficiently revealing or sufficiently absurd in itself that I could select to represent them.” In contrast, in Shakespeare and Dickens, “absurdity blossoms to perfection in single passages.”

Priestley’s first four selections feature set-pieces with Falstaff, as in this exchange of eloquent vitriol from History of Henry IV, Part I, Act II, Scene 4:

Prince Hal: “I’ll be no longer guilty of this sin; this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh,—”

Falstaff: “’Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like thee! You tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bowcase; you vile standing-tuck,—”

So much English humor is rooted in the bounty of the language. Take this exchange from the second chapter of Pickwick Papers (not included by Priestley) between Alfred Jingle and Mr. Pickwick, who share a coach ride:

“Heads, heads--take care of your heads!” cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. “Terrible place-- dangerous work--other day--five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round—mother’s head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir?--fine place--little window--somebody else’s head off there, eh, sir?--he didn't keep a sharp look-out enough either--eh, Sir, eh?”

“I am ruminating,” said Mr. Pickwick, “on the strange mutability of human affairs.”

“Ah! I see--in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, Sir?”

“An observer of human nature, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get. Poet, Sir?”

“My friend Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“So have I,” said the stranger. “Epic poem--ten thousand lines --revolution of July--composed it on the spot--Mars by day, Apollo by night--bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.”

You can see how Dickens (and John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor) gets his cartoonish characters and extravagant language from Tobias Smollett. Priestley includes selections from his epistolary novel Humphrey Clinker, including a letter from Tabitha Bramble to Dr. Lewis. Don’t worry about the absence of context:

“Give me leaf to tell you, methinks you mought employ your talons better, than to encourage servants to pillage their masters. I find by Gwyllim, that Villiams has got my skin; for which he is an impotent rascal. He has not only got my skin, but, moreover, my butter-milk to fatten his pigs; and, I suppose, the next thing he gets, will be my pad to carry his daughter to church and fair: Roger gets this, and Roger gets that; but I’d have you to know, I won’t be rogered at this rate by any ragmatical fellow in the kingdom—,” and so on.

Priestley published his anthology too early to include comic tour de forces by Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Kingsley Amis. For some reason he omits Wodehouse who, by 1925, had already conceived Psmith, the Blandings Castle series, and Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. It should be noted that Priestley chooses for his book’s epigraph a tag from Charles Lamb’s “All Fool’s Day”: “I will confess a Truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool—”

'The Grim Tracery of November'

“It was late in the autumn and in the day almost evening; with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading into a heartless prettiness of grey, that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November.”

Who wrote this? Word choice is a clue, especially tracery, borrowed from architecture. Read it superficially – skim it – and you might mistake the passage for prose poetry, the adolescent gush of adjectives cavalierly linked by sense. The first time I saw my name in print was in a junior high school literary magazine. My contribution was a prose petit four titled “November.” It was composed during my mercifully brief infatuation with Thomas Wolfe. The only specific I remember is comparing the color of the sky to pewter, and being exceedingly pleased with the metaphor.

A more revealing clue to the passage’s authorship is the halting cadence, pausing to clarify meaning. Some writers lay down thick slabs of reality-prose, as hard and final as concrete. Others, like our man above, let us in on the process, generously sharing the cliché-resisting process of articulation.

        

The author is Henry James. The source is Chap 1, “New England: An Autumn Impression,” in The American Scene (1907). There’s no work of American nonfiction I love so much. It’s made for revisiting, like a lakeside week in the Adirondacks, a summer vacation spot. November recurs in Chap. VIII, “Concord and Salem,” where James revisits his past and the nation’s:

“I remember indeed putting it to myself on the November Sunday morning, tepid and bright and perfect for its use, through which I walked from the station under the constant archway of the elms, as yet but indulgently thinned: would one know, for one's self, what had formerly been the matter here, if one hadn’t happened to be able to get round behind, in the past, as it were, and more or less understand?”

'And Made Himself a Jest to the Bystander'

Global-warming true believers and other enthusiasts of Big Ideas were satisfyingly disposed of more than two centuries ago by William Cowper:

“Discoverers of truth are generally sober, modest, and humble; and if their discoveries are less valued by mankind than they deserve to be, can bear the disappointment with patience and equality of temper. But hasty reasoners and confident asserters are generally wedded to an hypothesis, and transported with joy at their fancied acquisitions, are impatient under contradiction, and grow wild at the thoughts of a refutation.”

Cowper is writing a letter to his friend the Rev. John Newton on this date, Nov. 19, in 1781. His context has nothing to do with politicized science. Rather, it’s a more obscure crackpot theory propounded by Martin Madan (1726-1790) in Thelyphthora, or A Treatise on Female Ruin (1780). In short, though a staunch Methodist, Madan was advocating polygamy. Cowper, his first cousin, published an anonymous refutation, “Anti-Thelyphthora.” In his wonderful 2005 novel about Cowper, The Winner of Sorrow, Bryan Lynch touches on this controversy. Cowper almost pities Madan: “Never was an air-built castle more completely demolished than his is likely to be.”

Once they have fabricated or adopted a hypothesis, people will defend it against logical argument and all contradictory evidence. The truth value of what they believe becomes less important than vilifying dissenters. Dogma must be defended. Cowper writes:

“Surely the poor lunatic who uses his blanket for a robe, and imagines that a few straws stuck whimsically through his hair are a royal diadem, is not more to be pitied, perhaps less, than the profound reasoner who turns over shelves of folios with infinite industry and toil, and at the end of all his labour finds that he has grasped a shadow, and made himself a jest to the bystander.”

'Time, That Sedulous Artist'

I don’t have a problem. I can stop any time I want. Sometimes I get lucky and I’d be a fool to pass up such a deal. On Saturday, for instance, I visited Kaboom Books. I enjoy chatting with John Dillman, the owner. We talked about cats, Edward Hoagland, Africa and blindness. John claims to dislike cats but a fat tabby, a neighborhood nomad, was asleep on his counter.

I made the rounds of his shop, scouting for the usual suspects – Chekhov, Sisson, Ford, Montale, Epstein, Stead, Mandelstam, Santayana, Liebling, Yourcenar, Davenport. I found a first edition of Liebling’s Mink and Red Herring, but it’s priced at $70 and I already have a hardcover reprint. On a bottom shelf I spied Me Again: Uncollected Writing of Stevie Smith (1981). Sure, I’ve read it before, and this copy is beat-up and brown, but Smith is irresistible, and for five bucks it’s a steal. Some find Smith too cloyingly cute. I find her brave, funny and wise when it comes to her favorite subject, death. Penelope Fitzgerald agreed when she reviewed the posthumously published volume in 1981:

“Eccentricity can go very well with sincerity, and, in Stevie’s case, with shrewdness. She calculated the effect of her collection of queer hats and sticks, her face ‘pale as sand’, pale as her white stockings, and also, I think, of her apparent obsession with death.”

More gold: Mainly on the Air, a Max Beerbohm collection, mostly of radio talks, first published in 1946. This is the enlarged edition from 1957, hardcover, for twelve dollars. Facing the title page is a photo by Cecil Beaton of a still dapper Beerbohm. Judging from the “Gelato” sign in the background, he’s sitting on a wall in Rapallo. The volume concludes with a lecture Beerbohm delivered in 1943 on the odious man and writer Lytton Strachey, whom he knew and about whom he has reservations. The piece is filled with splendid passages:

“It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey’s, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, electing and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There’s nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

How could I resist? I can stop any time I want.

'One of Those Time-Warped Bunkers That's All Dark Wood and Bile'

In the last twenty-four hours I’ve succumbed to temptation and ordered four books from three online dealers, one in Indiana, another in Ohio and, of course, Amazon. In a week or so I expect two titles by Charles Gullans to be arriving from the Midwest – Arrivals & Departures (1962) and Letter from Los Angeles (1990). Landing even sooner in my mailbox will be Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (2018) by Józef Czapski and the latest by Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. There’s no theme expressed here except one reader’s wayward tastes. I’m grateful for the availability, ease of purchase, reasonable pricing and speed of delivery but plagued by a guilty sense of nostalgia. My mental model for buying books is still closer to what Orwell describes in “Bookshop Memories” (1936) than to my computer and a credit card.

Several essay contributors to Henry Hitchings’ Browse: The World in Bookshops (2016) share my conflicted sense of paradise lost. Second-hand bookstores are where I learned the value and thrill of serendipity. Enter with a reasonably open mind and a suppressed sense of expectation and leave, perhaps, with treasure. Most of my schooling was conducted in downtown Cleveland. Get off the bus at Public Square and enter Schroeder’s in the 1893 Cuyahoga Building. On sale were magazines and new paperbacks, including a good stock of Random House Vintage Books. That’s where I first bought The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Schroeder’s closed in 1979 after seventy-one years, and the building was torn down in 1982 to make way for the BP American Building, which Jacobs would have hated.

Next stop, after visiting the main Cleveland Public Library on Superior Avenue, was Kay’s Books on Prospect at East 6^th. This was heaven, three floors of bookish clutter housed in a former Chinese restaurant. Thirteen years ago I wrote about Kay’s, where I worked in 1975, and that post still attracts the occasional comment from a former patron or employee. I have dreams set in Kay’s, usually in the damp basement, and mourn the bargains I resisted for financial reasons. Like the other clerks I worked six days a week and cleared less than $100 after taxes. That’s where I first bought and read Mark Smith’s The Death of the Detective (1974), a novel I recall with guilty pleasure.      

After Kay’s came Publix Books, a classier joint all together, opened by Bob and Ann Levine in 1936. The books I recall buying there bring a blush of shame to my cheeks – Emerson’s journals and novels by John Hawkes and Michel Butor. The mood was hushed and the prices were pretty steep for a high school/college student, but the Levines gave off an old-fashioned sense of respect for learning and books, and Bob usually wore a bowtie.

I’ve read Hitchings’ two books devoted to Dr. Johnson, and trust that he’s a legitimate bookman. He opens his introduction to Browse with a series of vignettes of bookshop memories. One, from 2004, is especially amusing and describes an exchange with a clerk in a shop on Charing Cross Road – “One of those time-warped bunkers that’s all dark wood and bile.” On sale is a sixth edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, published a year after his death. Hitchings asks its price and the clerk tells him he couldn’t afford it. “And then he says,” Hitchings writes, “that my big overcoat makes me look like a shoplifter and I’d better shove off or he’ll call the police.” That’s the personal touch I miss.

'But First and Foremost, He was Human'

Some years ago I was seeing a Syrian-born cardiologist whose parents were still in Damascus as the country’s civil war was warming up. In this context, “civil war” is a journalistic euphemism for industrial-scale slaughter. I’d never met a doctor quite like him. Seemingly unconcerned with the pressure of waiting patients, he sat across from me in the examination room and talked, and only briefly about my coronary concerns. We started with his country’s fate, Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’ath Party. At some point I mentioned the allusion in Othello to Aleppo, which is when I learned my doctor was a serious amateur Shakespearean. He regularly attended productions of the plays and – this is the part that impressed me – periodically rereads them. We swapped tags and lingered on Macbeth, the briefest of the tragedies and second-bloodiest of the plays. Less than a year later he moved to another hospital, outside my insurance plan, and I haven’t seen him since and have no idea what has happened to his parents. I thought of him again while reading Theodore Dalrymple’s “A Letter to an Aspiring Doctor”:

“A doctor should be an educated man in a broader sense than just medicine, albeit that, with so much to learn and keep up with, this is increasingly difficult. You should read at least a little philosophy, some of the history of medicine, and as much literature as possible. If there is one author I would recommend to you, it is Chekhov, himself a doctor. He managed to reconcile tolerance, understanding, humor, compassion, anger at injustice, and maintenance of high personal moral standards without permitting any of them to distort his character.”

With a few edits, Dalrymple (Dr. Anthony Daniels) could be writing to and about any of us, doctors or otherwise. He is working in the Johnsonian moral tradition:

“Whatever your inner state of turmoil when confronted by the immense showcase of human folly or unpleasantness, you must retain your outer equanimity, which does not come naturally and at first will take a mental toll on you. But habit will become character, and eventually you will learn to accept people as they are—even if they don’t deserve it.”

Dalrymple’s citing of Chekhov is fitting. If writers were to have a patron saint, I would nominate the Russian physician. The other contender for the title was also a doctor dead too young from tuberculosis: John Keats. Included in Memories of Chekhov (trans., ed. Peter Sekirin, McFarland and Co., 2011) is a remembrance of Chekhov by Odessa-born Dr. Grigory Rossolimo, who met Chekhov at Moscow University in 1879, when both were first-year medical students and Chekhov was already writing stories. Rossolimo writes: “After his graduation from medical school, he did not quit medicine, but worked as a country doctor. He treated his patients with great care and softness; he was a doctor, but first and foremost, he was human.”

'The Promise of One, and the First Fruits'

“Books of common-place are the amusements of literature.”

A quaint notion today, I suppose. How many readers are sufficiently moved by a passage in the book they are reading to transcribe it for future use or “amusement”? Starting in high school I kept a commonplace book in a large double-entry accounting ledger. Into it I pasted articles and columns clipped from newspapers and magazines, and copied quotations from books that struck me as interesting, amusing or memorable. I wish I had kept it but I’ve always travelled light and tend to discard such things. It would constitute a piece of legitimate autobiography, of interest to me and no one else. At the time, I had no idea what a commonplace book was, and to this day I usually read with pen in hand.

The quotation above is the first sentence in the preface to a curious old volume, The American Common-place Book of Prose, edited by the Rev. G.B. (George Barrell) Cheever (1807-1890) and published in 1828 by Russell, Shattuck and Co. of Boston. Cheever was a theologian, pastor of the Church of the Puritans in New York City and a well-known abolitionist. I borrowed the first edition from the Fondren Library, and I’m surprised they keep it in the circulating collection. The leather cover is attached to what remains of the spine by two leather straps, and the entire book is kept in a folding box of stiff paper and Velcro. Bits of leather and paper flake off as I turn the pages. The front endpaper is inscribed in pencil by Alex Lamm or Samm, and the sub-title is A Collection of Eloquent and Interesting Extracts from the Writings of American Authors. The book last circulated in 1952. Cheever continues in his preface:

“It is pleasant to have at one’s side a well-selected volume, to which he may turn for mental recreation, when the fatigue of preceding exertion has rendered him unequal to intellectual effort. It is pleasant, also, to have before us the eloquent passages of our favourite authors, so that we may occasionally awaken and prolong the delightful sensations with which we at first perused them.”

Keep in mind the publication date, 1828, before Twain, Melville and Dickinson. Irving and Cooper were in print and are included by Cheever. Hawthorne published Fanshawe anonymously that year. Abraham Lincoln was guiding a flatboat down the Mississippi. The American publishing event of the year was Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. Except for the Founding Fathers, few of the writers included by Cheever are familiar to me. Most of the selections, though written by Americans, could have been composed by their English contemporaries. Except for an emphasis on liberty and self-government, a distinctly American voice is rarely heard. Cheever prints an anonymous piece published in the American Quarterly Review which he titles “Neglect of Foreign Literature in America.” Our literary taste, the author says, is parochial, “not sufficiently expansive.” What follows is a prose poem in celebration of “rejoic[ing] in every exhibition of genius.” Near the end he takes an Emersonian detour:

“We cannot as yet be said to have a national literature; but we already have the promise of one, and the first fruits. As the literary character of the country is developed, it should resemble our political institutions in liberality, and welcome excellence from every quarter of the world.”

'He Would Set His Hands to His Sides and Laugh Most Profusely'

For three years I wrote a weekly column for a newspaper in upstate New York, in addition to working as a features writer and occasional jazz and book critic. I borrowed the column’s title from Joyce: “Here Comes Everybody.” The point was to write only about people who were not and would never be newsworthy. In the condescending phrases heard in editorial meetings, “the little people,” “human interest.” I wrote about a guy who played musical saw, collectors of sand and leper-colony money, and a busking, out-of-work jazz drummer who performed on the sidewalk in front of city hall. My motive was reverse-snobbery. I didn’t want to write about the mayor or captains of industry, politics or business. That stuff always bored me, so I resolved to balance our coverage.

When hard up for a story, I would visit one of the locks along the Mohawk River, now part of the Barge Canal, a remnant of the original Erie Canal opened in 1825. I would watch pleasure craft raised and lowered in the locks, some from as far away as Florida. The process took long enough that I could carry on conversations with the captain and passengers. The locks were also favored by fishermen, who proved reliably thoughtful, contemplative and rowdy, confirming Ishmael’s observation in “Loomings,” the first chapter in Moby-Dick: “Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” (The first American edition of Melville’s book was published on this date, Nov. 14, in 1851.)

These memories returned when I came across a passage from A Register and Chronicle Ecclesiastical and Civil by White Kennet (1660-1728), who is writing of Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

“The author is said to have labored long in the Writing of this Book to suppress his own Melancholy, and yet did but improve it . . . . In an interval of vapours he could be extremely pleasant, and raise laughter in any Company. Yet I have heard that nothing at last could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford, and hearing the bargemen scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his sides and laugh most profusely. Yet in his college and chamber so mute and mopish that he was suspected to be felo de se.”

Literally, the Latin translates as “felon of himself” and refers to a suicide. In early English common law, a person who kills himself is a criminal. John Aubrey in his Brief Lives wrote of Burton: “Memorandum. Mr. Robert Hooke of Gresham College told me that he lay in the chamber in Christ Church that was Mr. Burton's, of whom 'tis whispered that, non obstante all his astrologie and his booke of Melanchollie, he ended his dayes in that chamber by hanging him selfe.” Though charming, as Aubrey often is, he’s wrong. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

“There was a rumour that he hanged himself in order to conform with his own astrological calculations about his date of death, but this was a story told about other astrologers, and had it been true he would not have been buried in the cathedral at all.”

Knowing that he laughed at the salty talk of Elizabethan bargemen confirms my love of Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy. Paraphrasing Pliny, Burton observed: “Our whole course of life is but matter of laughter.”

'You May Extract Honey from Everything'

On Monday I looked at x-rays of myself from the lumbar region north and saw for the first time the effects of scoliosis, stenosis and osteoarthritis. My spine bends to the east like a snake (I thought of Pope’s "a wounded snake [that] drags its slow length along" in Essay on Criticism), and the discs and vertebrae are alternately black and white and resemble three octaves on the keyboard, with a few keys missing. No surgery, for the moment. Steroid shots, anti-inflammatory medication and swimming therapy. I’m fortunate, but any encounter with health-care professionals leaves me discouraged. I go numb.

Afterward, I needed a pep talk and Charles Lamb came to the rescue. On this date, Nov. 13, in 1798, he writes to his friend Robert Lloyd: “You said that ‘this World to you seemed drain’d of all its sweets!’ At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar! but I am afraid you meant more.” Lamb, a morale officer of genius, is just getting warmed up:

“O Robert, I don’t know what you call sweet. Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and the moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness by turns. Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things.”

I’ll append the prose of Ford Madox Ford, a good job, seeing my sons again at Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lester Young’s Kansas City sessions, a wife who is starting to understand me, coffee first thing in the morning and the verse of John Dryden. Lamb adds: “You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall.”

'The Accuracies of My Impressions'

“I was in a house in French Flanders when three shells passed clean through the roof and burst in the houses beyond. You would have said that not one of those houses could have stood through the night; yet they were there next morning and in one of them, the maire [mayor], a dentist and a brave fellow, was extracting a tooth, with the plaster of the ceilings inches deep on the floors. And they are there yet; or they were at the Armistice.”

The very definition of a “war story,” in the mythological sense. Did such an intrepid dentist even exist? Hard to say when the chronicler is Ford Madox Ford. We naturally resent liars, but I’m usually charmed by Ford’s embellishments. The passage above is from one of Ford’s eighty published volumes, A Mirror to France (Albert and Charles Boni, 1926). If not a literal transcription of what took place in a French village during the Great War, the story is true to Ford’s devotion to France and Frenchmen.

C.H. Sisson said Ford had “a congenital preoccupation with good writing,” a rare affliction, and at the end of his life, in The March of Literature (1938), Ford described himself as “an old man mad about writing.” In “Ford Madox Ford: Saltavit et Placuit” (The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays, 1978), Sisson says of that volume:

“The madness is shown in the way the historian limits himself to books he has found attractive ‘because if I lead my reader up to unreadable books I risk giving him a distaste for all literature.' There is a profound modesty in that. Ford recognized the duty of giving pleasure. It is not the least of duties. Ford’s great corpus of writing is an abundant fulfillment of it, only awaiting exploration by those who have a taste for literature.”

Like most readers, my first Ford was The Good Soldier, a novel assigned in a modern British fiction class. That same year, 1971, I read The Saddest Story, Arthur Mizener’s   newly published biography of Ford, and then I read his masterpiece, Parade’s End. That was it for some years. Only later did I begin exploring the memoirs, critical works and other novels. You have to work to find his books. Few are in print and some were never published in the United States. A good library helps. I recommend The Soul of London (1905), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), The Rash Act (1933), It Was the Nightingale (1933) Provence (1935) and, of course, The March of Literature (1938). My new half-serious resolution is to read everything he published, even the early fairy tales and Pre-Raphaelite creampuffs.

In one of his many purported memoirs, Return to Yesterday (1932) – the one Ford first edition I own – he shuffles truth/fiction in the dedicatory introduction, in a typically Fordian fashion:

“So this is a novel: a story mirroring such pursuits. If that pursuit is indeed hypocrisy in this book—but this book is all that homage paid to virtue by one who errs. Where it seemed expedient to me I have altered episodes that I have witnessed but I have been careful never to distort the character of the episode. The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions. If you want factual accuracies you must go to . . . But no, no, don’t go to anyone, stay with me!”

'Speak of It Never; Think of It Always'

A Man Could Stand Up--, the third novel in the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28), renders the day the Armistice was signed not as unambiguous celebration, though Ford dutifully reports the fireworks and the roaring crowds in London. He also documents moments of shell-shocked silence among his characters. Valentine Wannop, a school teacher and the love interest of Christopher Tietjens, a veteran of the Western Front, has left a celebratory mob on the evening of Nov. 11, 1918:

“Coming into the square was like being suddenly dead, it was so silent and so still to one so lately jostled by the innumerable crowd and deafened by unceasing shouts. The shouting had continued for so long that it had assumed the appearance of being a solid and unvarying thing, like life. So the silence appeared like Death; and now she had death in her heart.”

 In 1915 at age forty-two, Ford had enlisted in the Welch Regiment. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle, he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by the explosion of a German shell, suffered memory and hearing loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated. In September 1916, Ford wrote to Joseph Conrad (ed. Richard M. Ludwig, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 1965):

“Emotions again: I saw two men and three mules (the first time I saw a casualty) killed by one shell. A piece the size of a pair of corsets went clear thro’ one man, the other just fell—the mules hardly any visible mark. These things gave me no emotion at all—they seemed obvious; rather as it wd. be.”

Ford was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid. For the rest of the war he was stationed in England, training troops. Ford was promoted to lieutenant and then to captain, and in 1918 held the temporary rank of brevet major. On Armistice Day, Ford was still in North Yorkshire. He was discharged on Jan. 7, 1919.

Valentine reunites with Tietjens at last, despite war and the plotting of others in their lives. The novel ends with a poignantly graceless dance: “They were prancing. The whole world round them was yelling and prancing round. They were the centre of unending roaring circles.” The final passage – with Tietjens, the battered Tory gentleman, as an elephant – ends mid-sentence, inconclusively: “On an elephant. A dear meal-sack elephant. She was setting out on . . .” One of the great non-concluding conclusions in modern literature.

I suggest interested readers find War Prose (Carcanet, 1999), edited by Max Saunders, author of a two-volume biography of Ford. It collects reminiscences, fiction, prefaces and miscellaneous material Ford wrote during and after the war. The final selection, from a previously unpublished manuscript in the archive at Cornell, was written in 1929.  Ford describes a commemorative tablet on a column in Notre-Dame de Paris.

“And that, as far as I know, is the only memorial in Paris, which is in the heart of France, to all those million who died and to all the labours and heart searching of the six or seven million of the rest of us who did not die but suffered ‘for the most part in France.’”

Ford says it is “good that that memorial should be obscure and little and pretty and mostly ignored. Because, if it were an immense, vainglorious mass of stone, it would be less a symbol of the better world that those deaths and those unchronicled heart-searchings and sufferings have given us.”

Finally, Ford quotes Léon Michel Gambetta (1838-82), who led the defense of France against Prussia in 1870: “N’en parlez jamais; pensez y toujours.” [“Speak of it never; think of it always.”]