'Any Desire Ever to Read at All'

Somehow, good books still get written and published. For readers who are willing to search, treasure can be salvaged from the landfill that is contemporary literature, even poetry. Here are ten books published in 2018 worth finding, reading and rereading:

Questioning Minds: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport, edited by Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint.

Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov, translated by Donald Rayfield, NYRB Classics.

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings, Harper/HarperCollins.

The Ideal of Culture: Essays by Joseph Epstein, Axios.

Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk, Columbia University Press.

Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven, Michigan State University Press.

The Hanging God by James Matthew Wilson, Angelico Press.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition by Roger Scruton, All Points Books.

Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts, Viking.

The Elegies of Maximianus, translated by A.M. Juster, University of Pennsylvania Press.

I’m always tempted to agree with William Hazlitt: “I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.” Taken literally, Hazlitt’s declaration would be dishonest and self-punishing, as the titles above suggest. I note only two works of fiction on the list, both from the distant past. Of course, most of my reading this year has been from that remote yet ever-present era. I spent days reading and rereading the work of Turner Cassity and Charles Gullans. Among my “twenty or thirty volumes” were Chekhov, Shakespeare, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, Gibbon, Lamb, Sisson, Swift, Larkin, Dr. Johnson, the Bible and Henry James. Most of our true contemporaries died years ago.

'To Remind People What It Means to Be Human'

The most exclusive class of writers are those against whom we measure not only other writers but reality itself. Their work is a gauge of truth, and we think first of Dante, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. I’ll let the reader extend his own list, except to add an additional name: Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam. More than the widow of a poet murdered by Stalin, she was, in Guy Davenport’s plain and precise formulation, “a very great writer.” She was a witness and had nothing to lose. Perhaps the most famous words she wrote are found in Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970): “If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.” In Chap. 41, “The Years of Silence,” in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974) she writes:

“. . . [My] conviction that killers are impervious to any kind of argument or persuasion: debate with them is pointless and nothing whatsoever has any effect on them. Words and ideas do not penetrate to their minds, but fill them with repulsion and fear—this indeed is our only weapon. Yet the killers are only strong when they are supported and admired for their exploits by ordinary people, as we have seen in the first half of our century. Ordinary people, whether the inert and conservative masses, or the rampaging mobs of a popular revolution—brought to a white heat of fury by the brutishness of former rulers intent on preserving the status quo—are won over only initially by new modes of explaining the world.”

Later in the same paragraph she writes:

“It was not a ‘cult of personality’ we had here, as the newspapers tell us, but a cult of force—even though, in the end, force itself is nothing but an absurdity, a farce, a ludicrous manifestation of impotence. Eventually we are left with only naked terror before the powers of evil. All that matters now is to overcome this terror, to fight for every human soul, to remind people what it means to be human, to show them that nobody has ever yet been saved by thirty pieces of silver.”

When Mandelstam died on Dec. 29, 1980 – forty-two years and two days after her husband died in a Siberian transit camp -- the KGB confiscated her body to prevent the Orthodox funeral she had requested. Only after protests by Russian artists was she permitted a decent burial.

'This Full-Peopled World'

I have been blessed with sons who seldom bore me. Since they were toddlers we have encouraged them to speak their minds, even to adults, and to be unafraid of being articulate. I seldom hear children speaking thoughtfully, in complete grammatical sentences in which the word “like” does not appear. Of course, such behavior is learned at home, encouraged by parents whose speech is a lazy patois of vulgarity and cliché. It’s always a pleasure to meet someone who speaks well. With my sons I can talk about books and music, history and mathematics, and expect to learn something from the exchange. This came to mind when I read a tweet by Terry Teachout that proves Twitter is not entirely a swamp of idiocy and self-righteousness: “Love, art, and work: these are the three great consolations.” Naturally, I was reminded of insights formulated two and a half centuries ago by Dr. Johnson. In The Rambler #69 he writes: 

“Nothing seems to have been more universally dreaded by the ancients than orbity, or want of children; and, indeed, to a man who has survived all the companions of his youth, all who have participated his pleasures and his cares, have been engaged in the same events, and filled their minds with the same conceptions, this full-peopled world is a dismal solitude.”

“Orbity” may be unfamiliar. It’s rooted in the Latin orbitās, meaning bereavement or childlessness. The OED, which cites Johnson’s usage, defines “orbity” as “a bereavement, esp. the loss of a child; the state or condition of being bereaved. Also (esp. in later use): childlessness.” It’s useful to remember that Johnson had no children. He would have made an interesting father or grandfather. Children usually are spoken of and to with condescension or sentimentality. And yet, they are the great consolation in an unhappy world. Johnson continues his thought:

“He stands forlorn and silent, neglected or insulted, in the midst of multitudes, animated with hopes which he cannot share, and employed in business which he is no longer able to forward or retard; nor can he find any to whom his life or death are of importance, unless he has secured some domestic gratifications, some tender employments, and endeared himself to some whose interest and gratitude may unite them to him.”

'Lines That Give You Gooseflesh'

“The stars in his firmament were Yeats, Eliot and Wallace Stevens . . .,” and yet he wrote like none of them, at least so far as this reader can see. Byron Rogers refers to the Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas in The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas (Aurum, 2006). Rogers completes his sentence: “. . . but his favourite English poets [were] Shakespeare and Blake,” and then quotes Thomas: “They are capable of lines that give you gooseflesh.” Dedicated readers know the feeling. You read a line, a passage, sometimes merely a phrase, and an involuntary tingle rises up the spine and shimmers in the shoulders and skull. For me, the sensation is more closely associated with music, as in the opening phrase in Armstrong's "West End Blues," Bechet's "Blue Horizon" and Miles Davis’ "Boplicity” from the Birth of the Cool sessions. This suggests that what produces gooseflesh in poetry is, at least in part, the product of rhythm. Rogers tells us that Thomas’ first example was “Pah, it smells of mortality,” from Act IV, Scene 6 of King Lear. Thomas is conflating lines. Lear says:

“There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the

sulphurous pit,

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie,

fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet,

good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination:

there’s money for thee.”

Gloucester replies, “O, let me kiss that hand!” and Lear says, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.” I won’t quibble with Thomas’ memory. The lines as he remembers them and as Shakespeare wrote them pass the gooseflesh test. The second example Byron quotes from Thomas is “He is at dinner. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.” The source is Hamlet,Act 4, Scene 3. Again, there’s a slight and forgivable slip of memory. Claudius asks where Polonius is. Hamlet replies, “At supper.” Claudius expresses surprise, and Hamlet tells him:

  

 “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain

convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your

worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all

creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for

maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but

variable service, two dishes, but to one table:

that’s the end.”

Both passages cited by Thomas as giving him gooseflesh deal with death in the rawest terms. I carry around with me less ghoulish lines from Coleridge, Housman, Allen Tate, Henry Vaughan, Basil Bunting, Yvor Winters and Emily Dickinson that produce a similar effect.

'A Philanthropic Intent'

On occasion, we are grateful for fulsome, flowery overwriting:

“When the discourse grew tiresome, and some loquacious Coryphaeus of common-place who had yet to learn silence in the probationary school of Pythagoras, and whose imagination was too scanty for his vocabulary, with self-satisfied effrontery, was monotonously mouthing, he would play the ‘logical contradictory,’ or ‘matter-of-lie man’ with some grotesque locution, transparent solecism or incongruous theory . . .”

And so on, for another sixty-four words before the period permits the reader to breathe again. This is what happens when the apprentice imitates the master before he has mastered the medium. The author is the antiquarian George Daniel (1789-1864), and his subject in Love’s Last Labour Not Lost (1863) is Charles Lamb. To his credit, Daniel gets Lamb right. On the most solemn occasion, some pun or deflationary jest is on Lamb’s tongue. In person, this might have grown tiresome with time, especially if Lamb was deeper than usual in his cups. But most often, in his letters and Essays of Elia, Lamb is the great comic writer of England’s Romantic era, the polar opposite of humorless Wordsworth who was, nevertheless, a somewhat baffled friend of Lamb. Here, chosen at random from the third volume of The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb (ed. E.V. Lucas, 1935) is part of a letter written on Feb. 27, 1829 to Henry Crabb Robinson. Lucas tells us Robinson had mailed Lamb a copy of Richardson’s steroidal novel Pamela in the mistaken belief that Lamb had loaned it to him:  

“Expectation was alert on the receit [sic] of your strange-shaped present, while yet undisclosed from its fusc [dark brown] envelope. Some said, ’tis a viol da Gamba, others pronounced it a fiddle. I myself hoped it a Liquer [sic] case pregnant with Eau de Vie and such odd Nectar. When midwifed into daylight, the gossips were at a loss to pronounce upon its species. Most took it for a marrow spoon, an apple scoop, a banker’s guinea shovel. At length its true scope appeared, its drift--to save the back-bone of my sister stooping to scuttles. A philanthropic intent, borrowed no doubt from some of the Colliers. . . Two Pamelas in a house is too much without two Mr. B.’s to reward ’em.”

Think of Lamb’s collected letters as an accessible, less pretentious edition of Finnegans Wake. Lamb died on this date, Dec. 27, in 1834.

'Consent to Be Dazzled'

Another Christmas rich in books, among other things. From my wife:

Portraits Without Frames (New York Review Books, 2018) by Lev Ozerov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk.

Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia 1941-1942 (New York Review Books, 2018) by Józef Czapski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Almost Nothing: The 20^th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski (New York Review Books, 2018) by Eric Karpeles.

From my middle son:

The Origins of the Irish (Thames & Hudson, 2013) by J.P. Mallory.

From my sister-in-law:

Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018) by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk.

And from my daughter-in-law:

God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (Random House, 2018) by Lawrence Wright.

No one planned it, but the books reflect my convergent heritages: Polish, Irish (my wife also gave me Van Morrison's latest CD, The Prophet Speaks), Texan. In his introduction to Almost Nothing, Karpeles quotes a passage from the great title essay in Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle: Essays and Apocryphas (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press, 1991), in which the Polish poet “describes an encounter with an enigmatic work of art”:

“I understood immediately, though it is hard to explain rationally, something very important had happened; something far more important than an accidental encounter. . . .How to describe the inner state? A suddenly awakened intense curiosity, sharp concentration with sense alarmed, hope for an adventure and consent to be dazzled. I experienced an almost physical sensation as if some one called me, summoned me.”

Herbert dedicates his essay to Czapski.

'Exact as Any Christmas Tree'

Age has erased some Christmases but so has alcohol. “Erased” isn’t quite right because some of those Christmases were never inscribed in memory in the first place, and will remain forever lacunae in the manuscript. In my experience, alcohol is a corrosive. Besides memory it can dissolve jobs, bank accounts, friendships and marriages. Forty years ago this week, I was reading Robert Penn Warren Selected Poems: 1923-1976. One revealing image sticks: “Gold like a half-slice of orange / Fished from a stiff Old-Fashioned.” My drink was 100-proof vodka, neat, though there was nothing neat about my life. I went to my first meeting three days after Christmas, on the cusp of a new year and a new life. Read Turner Cassity’s “Page from a Bar Guide” (Hurricane Lamp, 1986), a poem Suzanne Doyle describes as “his paean to gin”:

“In glassy ice, erect

And formal and exact

As any Christmas tree,

The juniper, esprit

Inviolate and form

Confined, has prisms. Norm,

Freak, diagram, its spines

Convert the sleet to tines.

“And, blue of ice on blue

Of berry, fast accrue

The cedar flavors, taste

Of freeze. They do not haste,

Our days of Gibsons, roses,

But they come, whose spruce

Is in glass still. November’s

June; the gin remembers.”

I never drank a Gibson in my life, unlike the father in John Cheever’s "Reunion." I was reading that forty years ago too. His Stories was published that year.

'The Delicious Scent of Christmas'

The body of Aldo Buzzi’s work available in English translation, three slender volumes, is admirably slight: Journey to the Land of Flies and Others Travels (trans. Ann Goldstein, Random House, 1996); A Weakness for Almost Everything (trans. Ann Goldstein, Steerforth Press, 1999); and The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets (trans. Guido Waldman, Bloomsbury, 2005). Buzzi is a minor writer whose work possesses a major quotient of that nebulous virtue, charm. In his latest book, Charm: The Elusive Enchantment, Joseph Epstein concedes the futility of defining that titular quality, which never stops him from trying. For instance:

“Charm often carries an amiable, an admirable detachment. The charming person seems to have an amused—and amusing—coin de vantage, or angle on things. A glass of wine in his hand, a touch aloof, but never off-puttingly so he steps in to make a casual but telling observation, offers a witty remark, formulates rather better than anyone else what is really on everyone else’s mind.”

For Epstein, the writer who stands as a “superior model of charm” is Max Beerbohm. It might be useful for readers new to Buzzi to think of him as the Italian Beerbohm. The comparison is not precise. Beerbohm lived for decades in Rapallo but remained indelibly English. Like Beerbohm, Buzzi is the opposite of emphatic. His prose is buoyant and pleasing, like a Lester Young solo – thus, the opposite of an Albert Ayler solo. Included in The Perfect Egg is a brief piece (all of Buzzi’s pieces are brief) titled “Spekulatius,” which refers to the spiced shortcrust biscuits or cookies baked around Christmas in Germany and Austria. Typically, Buzzi includes the recipe, but the most amusing part of his mini-essay is devoted to his effort to describe a Platonic ideal of Christmas. It begins:

“These are biscuits to be hung by a golden thread from the Christmas tree—which is not a plastic object but a dwarf fir that actually smells like a fir. The firs sold to us at Christmas are normally quite odourless, of no more use than a rose without fragrance. It is, after all, the smell of the tree which, together with the aroma of the things hung on it (apples, tangerines, biscuits, nougat, chocolates) and the wax candles, provides the delicious scent of Christmas, which nobody forgets who has smelt it as a child.”

I never smelled any such thing as a child, though in imagination the fragrance is powerful, almost intoxicating. I recall the year my brother and I decorated the Christmas tree with hotdog buns, and no one noticed, which was both thrilling and disappointing. Buzzi continues with very specific directions for attaining his vision of a charmingly non-Dickensian Christmas:

“Dressing the tree is a job for the adults of the household. The children ought to see it once it is ready, with all the candles lit, as a magical apparition. The apples serve a particular function: with their weight they pull down the branches, which tend to rise too high; these therefore are put on first, to spread out and balance the tree. The tangerines follow, possibly with their leaves, and then the other things. Finally (after midnight) the coloured glass balls and the silver (not aluminum) tinsel are added, and the careful business of dressing the tree is completed with the star of Bethlehem placed on the very top.”

Such a Christmas tree I have never seen. Twelve Christmases ago we replaced fresh-cut trees with a collapsible plastic model, and the holiday has never been the same. Buzzi, momentarily, helps me remember a Christmas I never knew:

“The candles, besides giving out their magical golden light, warm the pine needles on the adjacent branches and contribute to producing the Christmas fragrance. Nowadays they are more often than not replaced by multi-coloured electric bulbs which light up and go out with the obsessive rhythm of a neon sign that filters through the half-closed blinds of hotel rooms in crime movies.”

Have a very merry non-neo-noirish Christmas.

'And I Know Not Where He Is Laid'

On this date, Dec. 23, in 1916, Rudyard Kipling published a Christmas poem, “A Nativity,” in the Daily Telegraph, but that’s a small part of the story. John Kipling was the poet’s only son. He was killed on Sept. 27, 1915, in the Battle of Loos. The British suffered more than 59,000 casualties in that thirteen-day slaughter. Less than six weeks earlier, John had turned eighteen. When Kipling wrote the poem, and in fact for the rest of his life (he died in 1936), the whereabouts of his son’s body remained unknown. Thus, the unfathomable poignance of these lines:

“‘Is it well with the child, is it well?’

     The waiting mother prayed.

‘For I know not how he fell,

     And I know not where he is laid.’”

In 1992, researchers identified the younger Kipling’s grave in St. Mary’s ADS (Advanced Dressing Station) Cemetery in Haisnes. The finding was challenged but in 2015, following an internal review, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission confirmed that the body of the unidentified Irish Guard found in 1919 and buried at St. Mary’s was Second Lt. John Kipling.

Compare how Kipling treats his son's death with a poem like Edward Hirsch’s unseemly Gabriel: A Poem (2014). In “He the Compeller,” an essay by Turner Cassity collected in Politics and Poetic Value (University of Chicago Press, 1987), edited by Robert von Hallberg, Cassity writes:

“. . . Kipling became a political poet because he preferred writing in the second or third person to writing in the first person. In the 834 pages of the collected poems there is exactly one lyric written in propria persona, and that is the final one [“The Appeal”] . . . . The poems give delight frequently, but they also raise disquiet. To read them (as to read Crabbe) is to suspect that meditation and the first person have rather paupered English poetry. The hermetic lyric of personal emotion and its sloppier successor, the psychological self-search, account for an appalling percentage of all verse.”

'Deliberately Set Out to Stalk Material for Poems?'

“If your message to the world is Thou Fool you are not going to be the most popular poet around, especially if you say it in meter. Thou Fool is in fact a perfect iamb. No, it is not a spondee. If a lifetime of writing in meter has taught me anything it is that spondees do not exist. One always comes down on one side or the other, as rarely in life. I may be unfashionable, but no more unfashionable than I was forty years ago.”

Here is a poet who knew beyond reasoning and doubt that writing a good poem without meter is almost humanly impossible. The few obvious exceptions are rare as albinos in nature. See his “Carpenters” (Steeplejacks in Babel, 1973) for a meter-minded poem notable for concision and for its uncharacteristic, overtly Christian subject matter. Near the conclusion of his 106-page memoir (dated Aug. 5, 1988), previously written about here and here, Turner Cassity turns at last to his own hard-earned craft:

“The English lyric is too relentlessly first person and too relentlessly centered on the internal.  . . . The possibility that poetry might deal with settings and characters as well as drama or fiction is alien. For those who wish to put the emotion or the act or the image directly on the page—an impossibility; ink is all one can put on the page—the very word medium must be offensive, as it denotes something that intervenes. I find a demanding medium liberating rather than otherwise. The more secure the technique the wider range of subjects I am prepared to deal with. Few poems I read, however, have a subject.”

What they have is award-winning gush. Without scaffolding, the structure collapse into rubble. No one cares what flies off the top of his head. Few have sufficiently interesting minds. Cassity defers to prose to make his point: “Flaubert wanted to write about nothing. Poets do. But Un coeur simple is not about nothing. It is about the passage of time.” Cassity aims high, citing the finest thing Flaubert ever wrote. His poems are about buildings, music, places, and most frequently not history but events in history. One can’t imagine a poet less interested in theory, grand generalizations or, most tediously, “poetics.” When a poet starts carrying on about “poetics,” run screaming from the room: Bore Alert. Cassity explains:

“You will learn more about America by sitting two hours in the cocktail lounge of any Holiday Inn than by reading all of De Tocqueville, and you will have a more enjoyable learning experience. Do I deliberately set out to stalk material for poems? Yes, of course. Inner space exists to be supplied. Familiar as I am with human treachery, I certainly would not depend on the deeps of my psyche to fuel what I hope will be a sixty-year career. Its very delight would be to fail you when you most needed it. All the psyche can dependably do is act as a pilot light. Arranging fuel for the main blaze is a logistic problem like any other.”

As the epigraph to his 1991 collection Between the Chains, Cassity uses this brief exchange from Ivy Compton-Burnett’s The Mighty and Their Fall (1961):

“We are too used to the idea of work to realise its meaning,” said Hugo. “I had early suspicions of it, and dare to act on them.”

“What a comment on life,” said Lavinia, “that to be out of work is held to be sad and wrong.”

“Satan lies in wait for idle hands,” said Selina.

“But only Satan, Grandma. And he is hardly seen as a model of behaviour.”

'I Belonged to the Compton-Burnett Cult Myself'

“Southern men did not create their gun culture for reasons of machismo. If you had asked my father or grandfather why they hunted they would have given the same answer. ‘To eat quail, you fool. Why else?’”

A refreshing gust of realism brought to an “issue” customarily chewed on by gasbags of all stripes. Turner Cassity can be counted on to be simultaneously contrary and illuminating. Except for his time in the U.S. Army, during but not in the police action in Korea, Cassity most likely never discharged a firearm in his life. Neither hunter nor survivalist, he was a poet and librarian, not notably gun-crazy occupations. He was also an independent thinker, a subspecies threatened with extinction. Cassity was immune to clichés and conventional sentiment. He must have been as entertaining in conversation as he was in poetry and prose, an unlikely hybrid of Dr. Johnson and Oscar Wilde. He continues:

“They would also have been the first to say that handgun control will not accomplish much. The cemeteries are full of people who were blown away with shotguns, but the motive was more often greed than masculinity. Machismo is a notion they would have hooted at. Something for Hispanics to become exercised over, like guitar music, or the face of Jesus on a tortilla. If there were no other way to obtain quail I should myself be out in the forest blasting away, as frightening as, with my myopia, that thought is.”

More evidence of unbenighted wit from the manuscript I wrote about in Thursday’s post. Cassity is more interested in truth than in pleasingly lockstep conformity of opinion. This is the poet who writes in “An Attempt to Explain Anorexia Nervosa to Lillian Russell” (Between the Chains, 1991):

“There is no remedy. It first reveals

Itself in an insatiable desire to

Purchase women's magazines. It strikes

High-fashion models, who at least die rich.”

Here is Cassity, once a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford, on the books of childhood:

“It is traditional in literary autobiography to enumerate one’s childhood reading. I am surprised that writers are so willing to tip their hands, but as I have already tipped mine I might as well come out and say that I chose books for their illustrations. I read the first two books of Paradise Lost, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, exactly as one would read any other science fiction. You will guess who the artist was [Gustave Doré]. Even he could not get me through The Divine Comedy, though he managed to make London poverty more interesting than ever Dickens did. At this moment I would not read David Copperfield if you went macho and held a shotgun to my head.”

Cassity, displaying good taste, has good things to say, usually in passing, about Kipling, E.A. Robinson, H. Rider Haggard, Nostromo, From Here to Eternity (the novel) and silent movies. His mother and grandmother accompanied silent films on piano in Mississippi theaters. Cassity is an enthusiastic ad hoc critic of architecture, especially theaters. Here he is on being stationed in Puerto Rico:

“Culture at Tortuguero had been ongoing. In the seclusion of the net I read Buddenbrooks, Resurrection, War and Peace, The Possessed, and all of Proust. My reading list will convey to you the amount of time we had on our hands. I gave up on Ulysses. Dublin is just not as interesting as Lübeck. Dublin is not as interesting as Arecibo.”

And here he describes his success as a librarian working in South Africa:

“Ladies left the tennis courts and swimming pools to storm our doors. I can report that both Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch were popular, and that Ivy Compton-Burnett was a positive cult. I belonged to the Compton-Burnett cult myself, and still do. The Mandelbaum Gate suggests that Miss Spark could deal lethally with Johannesburg, but to do it full justice would require Dame Ivy.”

Without citing the source, Cassity then quotes an interview with Compton-Burnett: “I believe it would go ill with many of us, if we were faced by a strong temptation, and I suspect that with some of us it does go ill. . . Isolation and leisure put nothing into people. But they give what is there, full play. They allow it to grow according to itself, and this may be strongly in certain directions.”

'Let Them Have Gravel'

“How does one become what one is? Not, surely, by way of childhood, in spite of what genetics, psychology, and economics may suggest. I find it difficult to believe that experienced adults can regard childhood as sufficiently interesting to describe as happy or unhappy, The temptation for me is to deal with it as Mrs. Wharton dealt with divorce (hers; not others’)—to treat it as something hardly worthy of mention.”

Is any bore more boring than the bore who recalls endlessly and in detail the purported delights or torments of his or her (in my experience, most often his) younger years? I know, there are “foodies,” reciters of sitcom plots, aficionados of PowerPoint, sports fans with photographic memories, and transcribers of medical woes, but the bore who confuses childish and childlike, and treats casual conversations as impromptu psychiatric sessions, has earned eternal perdition. The man who wrote the passage quoted above, the opening sentences in his apparently unpublished memoir, possesses perfect pitch for temps perdu. In his second paragraph, he continues:

“I did the things most small boys do, but I suspect I found them less satisfying than most small boys do. If you ask what was lacking all I can say is that Forest, Mississippi, population 2500, had no architecture as I understood architecture from futuristic comics and the covers of Popular Mechanics. Nor was the landscape in any way satisfactory. To an eye conditioned by the other planets of the airbrush, the low hills and the forests of second-growth pine appeared featureless. I may add they do still. Scenery begins at Shreveport.”

If you’re going to write about the raptures and desolations of childhood, be amusing about it, as Turner Cassity (1929-2009) can’t help but be. Like his poetry, Cassity’s prose is tart, campy, learned, precise and very funny, filled with details about a Mississippi sawmill and life in apartheid-era South Africa. There’s no morbid introspection. He’s forever looking outward at the bigger, more interesting world, one amenable to the workings of the imagination. The Kentucky poet and publisher R.L. Barth is Cassity’s literary executor, and Bob has loaned me the typescript of the 106-page autobiographical essay Cassity wrote in 1988 for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Here is Cassity’s third paragraph:

“Fortunately, there were gravel pits in the area, and these were settings of more appeal, having the glamour of deserts without their alarming distances, and the mystery of caverns without the darkness and the claustrophobia. My contemporaries and I would have thought it an absolute failure of imagination to play in a park, let alone a playground. As a matter of principle I vote against bond issues for the construction of these instruments of regimentation. Let them have gravel.”

Cassity must have been that rarest of creatures, an interesting child. I intend to write more about his memoir. Bob also gave me the copy of Cassity’s 1991 collection Between the Chains (University of Chicago Press) inscribed to the poet’s mother, Dorothy Cassity, of Ridgeland, Miss. In a poem included in the collection, “Fin de Siècle,” he writes:

“The way of presentism is to whore the past

For passions of the moment. That is pestilence

Also.”

'It Prevents a Man from Being Merely Modern'

“The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern.”

The sentiment is familiar. At the risk of oversimplification, we can reduce it to the colloquial: Old books are better than new books. If we frame it as a syllogism, few can argue with that statement:

Good books have always been rare and lousy books have always been common.

The past is a much bigger place than the present, so more books were published in the past.

Ergo, more good books were published in the past than in the present.

The passage quoted at the top is from G.K. Chesterton’s “On Reading,” published posthumously in The Common Man (Sheed and Ward, 1950). He further defines his terms: “To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns.” In short, the present is a provincial backwater, and not a very interesting or important place. The analogy with hats or any article of clothing is useful and precise. Imagine the childish passivity of wearing only clothing that has received the nihil obstat of the fashion commissars.     

Like Chesterton, Guy Davenport published an essay titled “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus: And Other Papers on Literature and Art, 1996). He describes his dealings with an illiterate man in Kentucky and the “horror of his predicament.” Davenport expresses gratitude for “being able, regularly, to get out of myself completely, to be somewhere else, among other minds, and return (by laying my book aside) renewed and refreshed.” He adds:

“For the real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility, quite literally to give oneself over to Henry James or Conrad or Ausonius, to Yuri Olyesha, Bashō, and Plutarch.”

'Only an Idiot Will Take a Critic's Word'

Breathlessly, a reader writes to tell me Rudyard Kipling was a racist and that no enlightened person would be caught reading him. I almost envy the simplicity of his understanding. I refer him to Guy Davenport’s comment in “Journal I” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996): “What got Kipling a bad name among Liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.” I suspect my reader could not have reached the ridiculousness of his conclusion on his own. Few of us could. He most likely learned it from a teacher.  In another essay from the same collection, “On Reading,” Davenport elaborates:

“I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself.”

Politics will always undo good sense and pleasure. A reader who fails to enjoy Kim or “Mary Postgate” will find little in life to enjoy.

'Its Extreme Quietness and Apparent Calm'

A reader who hasn’t yet read The Anatomy of Melancholy has sent a passage from Robert Burton’s cabinet of wonders that pleases him enough to consider giving the entire work a try:

“What I have said of servitude, I again say of imprisonment, we are all prisoners. What is our life but a prison? We are all imprisoned in an island. The world itself to some men is a prison, our narrow seas as so many ditches, and when they have compassed the globe of the earth, they would fain go see what is done in the moon.”

Some readers will be reminded of passages in Spinoza and Blake. Others, already familiar with Burton’s prose, will be impressed by the relative simplicity and straightforwardness of the quoted sentences. No Latin tags, no lengthy catalogs of nouns or adjectives, no astrological lore. In The History of English Prose Rhythm (1912), George Saintsbury acknowledges centuries of baffled readers when he refers to “all who have read Burton (and how are they to be half commiserated and half envied who have not!)” Burton, he notes, “heaps quotation upon original writing, and dovetails translation into quotation, and piles up lists of semi-synonyms on casually occurring words.” All true, and Burton’s language is certainly the opposite of Twitter-speak or text-talk. Burton is word-mad in the best possible sense. And he loves his accumulated lore. In A Short History of English Literature, Saintsbury distills for some of us the charm of reading Burton, and what he shares with some of his gifted near-contemporaries:

“In Burton it shows itself not so much in the sense of the unattainable infinity of passion which we find in Donne, of the high feeling of mystery and altitudo that we find in Browne, as in a sort of quiet but intense taedium vitae—a wandering of the soul from Dan to Beersheba through all employments, desires, pleasures, and a finding them barren except for study, of which in turn the taedium is not altogether obscurely hinted. And it is almost unnecessary to add that in Burton, as in all the greatest men, except Milton, of the entire period from 1580 to 1660, there is a very strong dash of humour—humour of a peculiar meditative sort, remote alike from grinning and from gnashing of teeth, though very slightly sardonic in its extreme quietness and apparent calm.”

'Capital Kitchen-Reading'

Charles Lamb’s old friend from the India House, Walter Wilson, was preparing his Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (1830), and had written Lamb asking for any material he might have regarding the author of Robinson Crusoe. In a letter written on this date, Dec. 16, in 1822, Lamb replies that he has only “two or three novels and the ‘Plague History’” – that is, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which in fact is a novel written to resemble a documentary history.  

“I would say that in the appearance of truth in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The Author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather Autobiographies), but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it.”

When he cared to be, Lamb is an acute critic of literature. He understands Defoe better than many readers: “Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot

choose but believe them. It is like reading evidence given in a court of justice.” Even when writing ad hoc criticism, his approach is idiosyncratic, though less purely whimsical and fun-loving than in many of his letters and essays:

“His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain & homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes; but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly

adapted to the lower conditions of readers: hence it is an especial favorite with seafaring men, poor boys, servant-maids &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy, from their deep interest, to find a shelf in the Libraries of the wealthiest and the

most learned.”

One of the most reliable bedside browse-fests is George Saintsbury’s A Short History of English Literature (1898), in which he describes Lamb as “more nearly unique than any other English writer outside the great poets.” High praise, though English literature is dense with such oddball characters of genius. Think of Browne, Burton, Swift, Sterne and Landor. Again, Saintsbury on Lamb:

“It is, however, improbable that he would have been much more than a curiosity of literature—one of those not so very rare figures who make us say, ‘What a pity this man never found his way!’—or that at best his real worth would have been known only from his letters, which are numerous and charming, if the establishment of the London Magazine, followed as it was by his retirement from his clerkship on a pension, had not elicited from him the famous Essays of Elia.”

Probably true, but the letters, after Keats’, remain the best-written and most entertaining in English literature.

'I Have Never Known That I Thought It'

“She remains the most rewarding writer of her time, the writer of the best English, a classic writer.”

No one will guess who is being described in this blurb-like testimonial. Even those who have read the writer in question will be stumped. I have no intention of defending its accuracy but suspect Cicely Greig, writing in Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir (Garnstone Press, 1972), is on to something. Compton-Burnett’s rivals for that title are sparse, the most prominent being Evelyn Waugh.

Greig was Compton-Burnett’s typist and friend for the last twenty-three years of her life. In her monograph she mixes memoir and criticism, and pays close attention to the way Compton-Burnett arranges words on the page:

“Her sentences have the authentic music of a sentence from Cicero, they are cast in his mould, that perfect balance of synthesis and antithesis, comparison and contrast that Lyly, centuries later, was to turn into a game called Euphuism. Cicero’s music is delightful wherever his influence lingers.”

Greig confirms that Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), though never a classicist, studied Greek and Latin at Royal Holloway College, now part of the University of London. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) orated in elaborately paced periodic sentences that often remain unresolved until the final phrase. The style is not “modern” and certainly not colloquial – we might think of it as “Churchillian,” -- but in Compton-Burnett’s hands it becomes pleasingly elastic and well suited to her novels which are written largely in dialogue. In defining “Ciceronian,” Greig cites a passage from the preface to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary: “I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules. Wherever I turned my view there was perplexity to be disentangled and confusion to be regulated.”

And I would cite this, from Johnson’s Adventurer#78, published on this date, Dec. 15, in 1750: “Yet it seems to be the condition of our present state, that pain should be more fixed and permanent than pleasure. Uneasiness gives way by slow degrees, and is long before it quits its possession of the sensory; but all our gratifications are volatile, vagrant, and easily dissipated.”

Greig juxtaposes her Johnson selection with the opening sentence in Compton-Burnett’s novel Brother and Sisters (1929), pointing out its “authentic music”: “Andrew Stace was accustomed to say, that no man had ever despised him, and no man had ever broken him in.” Less convincingly, Greig claims to hear Compton-Burnett in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Compton-Burnett, citing a well-known exchange in Henry IV, Part 1:

“GLENDOWER:

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR:

Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?”

Compton-Burnett’s novels are cold, grim, dark and very funny. She never flatters the human race. You can understand why Turner Cassity loved them. Last night I read for the first time her slender second novel, Pastors and Masters (1925), set in a boys’ prep school. The headmaster is seventy-year-old Nicholas Herrick, who says of patience and its opposite: “The one is a condensed form of the other. Patience contains more impatience than anything else, as I judge.”

His half-sister Emily agrees: “How profound you are, Nicholas! I have always thought that. Though I have never known that I thought it. Think how it is with everything; how tolerance, for example, is only condensed intolerance, and how it holds more intolerance than anything else. It is just a case for intolerance to be kept in. And think how religion holds more dislike of religion than anything else! . . . I think that good is bad condensed, and holds more bad than anything else.”

Greig says of Compton-Burnett’s use of language: “A novelist who refuses to write in the idiom of her day appeals inevitably to a minority.” A happy minority.

'A Lazy and Philistine Fathead'

“Rather than read a book, I read a writer.”

That has been my M.O. since early adolescence, when I read and collected Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Doc Savage novels. This wasn’t strategy or academic dedication; merely greed. Whenever I have found a writer I liked, I have tried to read as much of him as I can get my hands on. Call it bibliogluttony. I am still pleasure-driven as a reader. After leaving childish things behind I did this with Kafka, Joyce and Faulkner, and mostly got them out of my system, but I’ve also done it with Melville, James and Nabokov, writers I continue to love and read again. The author of the statement quoted at the top is Paul Theroux in an essay titled “My Life as a Reader” (Figures in a Landscape, 2018). I’ve skimmed through one of Theroux’s books, the trendily titled The Tao of Travel (2010), but I’ve read none of his novels, travel books or even his memoir of V.S. Naipaul. But I enjoy heterogeneous collections of a writers’ work, gatherings of reviews, essays and introductions. For the writer, they pay the bills; for readers, they occasionally contain small serendipitous rewards. In the same essay, Theroux writes:

“I blame English teachers, who make a virtue of skimming from one author to another, believing this to be the best initiation in the humanities. It is actually an error in judgment and a sort of dilettantism. My method of reading is the opposite. When I find a writer I enjoy, I make his or her writing a personal project.”

Theroux mentions a few of the writers he has consumed whole, most of whom are obvious: James, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Trollope and Turgenev. But he has done the same with another group he calls “outside the canon”: Ford Madox Ford, Nathanael West, Anthony Burgess, Djuna, Nadine Gordimer, Elias Canetti, Borges and Jean Rhys. My immediate readerly reaction is: Ford? Borges? Great choices. Djuna Barnes? Nadine Gordimer? You’re kidding, right? One more confirmation that tastes in reading are predictably idiosyncratic. Theroux says he once mentioned his approach to reading to the head of a university English department:

“He said, ‘That’s all right for you, but we don’t have as much free time as you civilians.’ Tact prevented me from telling him he had a salary, which I lacked, and that he was a lazy and philistine fathead.”

'Like Tuning-Down the Glare of a Volcano'

My favorite story writer after Chekhov is Kipling. He’s the one writer I’ve read without interruption since I was first able to read. For intelligent selections from so prolific an author I recommend The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling (1961), edited by Randall Jarrell, and Collected Stories (1994), the Everyman’s edition edited by Robert Gottlieb. In between other things I’ve been reading his stories again (last night, “The Bridge-Builders”), so I was pleased to see Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti has posted selections from “The Uses of Reading,” a 1912 lecture collected in A Book of Words (1928). Kipling’s conclusion is admirable:

“. . . [O]ver and above all the help we can get from our ordinary training, association with our betters, and our very limited experience, we can pick up from Literature a few general and fundament ideas as to how the great game of life has been played by the best players.”

Normally I avoid sports metaphors (and sports) but here Kipling confirms my understanding of literature. It ought to humble us. We know so little compared to Horace, Swift and Proust, the best players. In another lecture, “Fiction,” delivered by Kipling to the Royal Literary Society in 1926, he sounds like Chesterton in his paradoxical mode: “Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till someone had told a story.” And Kipling honors a forebear:

“A man of overwhelming intellect and power goes scourged through life between the dread of insanity and the wrath of his own soul warring with a brutal age. He exhausts mind, heart, and brain in that battle: he consumes himself, and perishes in utter desolation. Out of all his agony remains one little book, his dreadful testament against his fellow-kind, which to-day serves as a pleasant tale for the young under the title of Gulliver’s Travels. That, and a faint recollection of some baby-talk in some love-letters [A Journal to Stella], is as much as the world has chosen to retain of Jonathan Swift, Master of Irony. Think of it! It is like tuning-down the glare of a volcano to light a child to bed!”