'Under the Shadow of a Wall of Books'

“I spend most of my time under the shadow of a wall of books, maybe 1,400 volumes, thick and thin. They are arranged for the most part in alphabetical order. Otherwise I could never find the one I need for a lecture or a class. It is not a ‘library’ (odious word when it has domestic connotations), and if it were it would not be a good library.”

Unlike Karl Shapiro, I’m not a teacher. My books are less organized than his, though I usually find what I want without much delay. In conversation, I occasionally refer to “my library” but more often to “my books.” I probably use my books – about 5,000 of them -- differently from Shapiro. I read and reread them, of course. But during the course of a day a line will pop into my head and I’ll want to confirm its accuracy. Or, as I’m writing a post or something else, I’ll going looking for a quote that remains elusive. Or I’ll just find a little comfort in reading something. Shapiro goes on:

“I have come to dislike the sight of books intensely but keep thousands of them out of habit, inertia, and a horror of empty bookcases. Books also serve the useful purpose if intimidating your neighbors and deadening sound. They also save on paint.”

I discovered Shapiro’s poetry when I was about thirteen, and fell for it hard. I loved his early work, particularly V-Letter and Other Poems, written while Shapiro was in the Army, stationed in New Guinea. He wrote about life in the military, though not about combat, but also embraced the American scene in such poems as “Buick” and "Pharmacy." His principal influence was Auden strained through a thoroughly American sensibility. In middle age he switched, condemning the tyranny of the Modernists, mainly Eliot and Pound, and embraced Whitman, Williams and, to a degree, the Beats. It was all a little unseemly and embarrassing, like a middle-aged man running off with a teenage girl. He wrote prose poems. He touted the unreadable Henry Miller. The passages quoted above come from the 120-page “A Malebolge of Fourteen Hundred Books” collected in his winningly titled To Abolish Children and Other Essays (Quadrangle, 1968). After his brief introduction, Shapiro analyzes his “library” alphabetically, from Aristotle to Yeats. “Malebolge” amounts to a fairly self-indulgent but occasionally interesting series of mini-essays on books and anything else that interests Shapiro. Here he is on Auden:

“The way I grew up with poetry—like Topsy—I had no tongue until Auden came along. I am not being witty or cute when I say that I did not understand Life magazine until I read Auden.”

In passing, he says Jacques Barzun “in his Tory phase is a great flop.” On Edward Dahlberg: “He is a very American writer because he is both a Stylist and a Believer.” On H.L. Mencken (like Shapiro, born in Baltimore): “It was from Mencken that I first learned how to shock the Squares.” Of Alexander Pope: “[I]t is many years since I have opened his well-wrought books. When I do I am startled by their kind of excellence, excellentia in vacuo, if that’s Latin.” On Pound, his bête noire: “All American writers of his generation are anti-semitic, anti-Negro, anti-Asiatic, and so forth.”

I love early Shapiro and occasional later work but too often he turns into the guy sitting at the end of the bar who spouts off at great length about any subject that itches his mind.

'Epigrams Must Be Curt'

One learns to love Walter Savage Landor. At first encounter he is not loveable. He is unpredictably cranky and has a Hazlitt-like temper. His diction is sometimes archaic. His love poems can be soupy and he was often foolish when it came to women. He presumes in the reader a wayward body of knowledge not suited to the twenty-first century. Gilbert Highet called him “the Greek Englishman,” meaning he was saturated with classical learning. But he is also sharp as Catullus, Martial and Swift are sharp – tart, concise, often memorable, as he is here:

“Pardon our enemies, we pray

Devoutly every Sabbath-day;

Ere the next morn we change our notes,

And blow them up or cut their throats.

Above us and below meanwhile

The Angels weep, the Devils smile.”

Landor was usually a realist when it came to human nature, perhaps because he understood his own capacity for ferocity and bile:

“Snap at me, Malice! snap; thy teeth are rotten

And hurt me not: all know thee misbegotten!

The cureless evil runs throughout thy race,

And from Cain downward thy descent we trace.”

His enthusiasms also were strong. Here he is on the author of Robinson Crusoe:

“Few will acknowledge what they owe

To persecuted, brave Defoe.

Achilles, in Homeric song,

May, or he may not, live so long

As Crusoe; few their strength had tried

Without so staunch and safe a guide.

What boy is there who never laid

Under his pillow, half afraid,

That precious volume, lest the morrow

For unlearnt lessons might bring sorrow?

But nobler lessons he has taught

Wide-awake scholars who fear’d naught:

A Rodney and a Nelson may

Without him not have won the day.”  

 And on Edward Gibbon:

   

“Gibbon has planted laurels long to bloom

Above the ruins of sepulchral Rome.

He sang no dirge, but mused upon the land

Where Freedom took his solitary stand.

To him Thucydides and Livius bow,

And Superstition veils her wrinkled brow.”

And Landor on his own favorite poetic form:

“Epigrams must be curt, nor seem

Tail-pieces to a poet’s dream.

If they should anywhere be found

Serious, or musical in sound

Turn into prose the two worst pages

And you will rank above the sages.”

Landor was born on this date, Jan. 30, in 1795, the same year as Keats, who died in 1821. Landor lived until 1864.

[I’m quoting from Poems, edited and introduced by Geoffrey Grigson and published by Centaur Press in 1964.]

'He Is the Quintessence of It'

The English novelist William Gerhardie, author of Futility (published the same year as Ulysses) and The Polyglots (the same year as No More Parades), was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. There’s no use pretending one ought to sing his praises in hopes of reviving the reputation of a neglected writer. There will never be a Gerhardie Renaissance, a la Herman Melville. His fiction is too unexpected and pigeon hole-defying. It teeters uneasily between pre-Modernist and Modernist, English and Russian. These are precisely the reasons some of us admire him.

“The sense of living is a several-fold experience consisting, as it were, of several layers of perception. We recognise life when we sense it. And the reason that so often we do not recognize life in the books that we read is, apart from any question of skill on the part of the writer, because one or more of the ‘layers’ of perception having been omitted by him, our sense of life is incomplete, impaired—not representative of life’s flavour as we know it.”

We know what he means. Books written to formula, on spec, as though composed by a committee of algorithms, may be entertaining, good for killing time (hideous phrase), but life as we know it is absent between the covers. Gerhardie here is being a Modernist in his thinking, almost a Cubist in all this talk of perceptual “layers.”

“Such writing, whatever its other merits, is less rich, if not less true. ‘Romantic’ fiction, therefore, expressing the smooth dreamy side of life divorced from most material reality; the so-called ‘realistic’ fiction employing real material facts with the smooth directness only possible in a romance, and, while ignoring the irrational dreamy side of life, flattering itself  naively on being ‘true to life’ and ‘realistic’; and, lastly, ‘introspective’ fiction, ‘top-heavy’  in so far as  the detail of its means tends to exceed its own artistic end, are each necessarily poorer, thinner than the balanced combination of their elements.”

So, “life in the books that we read” is a rare quantity, and not particularly desirable to many readers. Most of us purport to be respectfully laissez faire when it comes to the reading tastes of others. But that’s a challenge, especially when critics hail the arrival of stillborn crap, which includes most titles published during any given period.

“And it is this balance of the three elements that gives his work the life-like touch, removes him altogether from the musty flavour of tradition which attaches to the sedate profession of letters. When we read Chehov [sic] we somehow forget all literary associations. It is as if, forsaking our various professions, we stepped aside to get a better view of life. And then it seems as if all other men of letters who lived on literature had done no more than step aside henceforth to walk outside and beside life. Chehov is indeed more than life in the sense that he is the quintessence of it.”

In 1923, Gerhardie published Anton Chehov: A Critical Study, the first book in English devoted to the Russian. More than half a century later, V.S. Pritchett lauded Gerhardie’s monograph in his own Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free. Chekhov was born on this date, Jan. 29, in 1860. Go here to read 201 of his stories in the Constance Garnett translation.

'I Think About Books and Their Authors'

It’s good to have friends who know how to swap stories, an art I used to take for granted. Now it seems rare. The ritual has two parts. First, the ability to tell a good story, one that is more than a punchline. This requires a well-stocked memory and some gift for narrative – pacing, brevity, knowing what to leave out, and a knack for accents and other voices. Nothing’s worse than a story burdened with excessive detail. Second, the give and take of exchanging anecdotes. These swap sessions have an architecture and etiquette of their own. No one can dominate nor appear too eager to jump in with the next story.

On Sunday I visited Kaboom books here in Houston. After browsing for an hour I spent another hour at the counter chatting with the owner, John Dillman. The subjects were books, bookshops and their owners, with an emphasis on the eccentricity of book people. John has been in the business for more than forty years and, like me, has haunted bookshops since he was a kid. I told him about the time I was working as a clerk in a Cleveland bookstore and had Tiny Tim as a customer. He was in the market for old sheet music and agreed to autograph the wall before he left. John told me about a bookshop owner in New Orleans who fell down the steel staircase in his shop and suffered a compound fracture of the leg. He crawled back up the stairs to his apartment above the shop, fell into bed and died a few days later of the subsequent untreated infection. Not every story in a swap session is amusing, but a good storyteller knows when to vary the mood.

I bought three books in John’s shop, all of which I have read before. Henry Green’s Blindness (1926) was the first novel he wrote. This is the reissue from 1978. John mentioned he had read all of Green’s books except his rather peculiar memoir Pack My Bag (1940), which I recommended. I found a 1991 hardcover reissue of Evelyn Waugh’s second travel book, Remote People (1931), an account of his travels in East and West Africa. This prompted wonder at that extraordinary generation of English writes born around the first decade of the twentieth century. Along with Green and Waugh, there is Pritchett, Powell and Auden, and such lesser figures as Cyril Connolly and Orwell. Finally, I bought a pristine hardcover of Adam Zagajewski’s Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination (1995). In a brief essay titled “In the Library,” Zagajewski writes:

“I think about books and their authors. I am free.”         

'Babel Never Had a Chance'

“A blunt story – rather like one of his own.”

“Blunt” is a forensic word, modifying “object.” It describes a murder weapon, a pipe or hammer applied to the skull. It might also describe a personal manner, lacking tact or gentleness, as in a thug or brutish cop. A softer version suggests simple directness, an unwillingness to soften a message. In this case, the writer, V.S. Pritchett, is recounting the fate of Isaac Babel, who was executed, probably with a single bullet to the skull – blunt force – on this date, Jan. 27, in 1940. In “Five Minutes of Life” (The Complete Collected Essays, 1991), Pritchett continues:

“His works vanished; references to them were cut out of histories and criticism; his manuscripts and papers were either destroyed or, haphazard, lost. Not until 1964 was he rehabilitated and there was a public celebration of his genius."

Four or five years later I first encountered Babel’s stories thanks to Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962). The Irishman said, “the man who has influenced me most, I suppose, is really Isaac Babel.” A brash statement from a lineal descendent of the author of Dubliners. At sixteen, I had already outgrown the adolescent appeal of Hemingway, though Babel’s material sometimes overlapped the American’s, especially the violence. I read the Walter Morison translation of the Collected Stories, with the introduction by Lionel Trilling. There was bluntness, yes, but also a weird poetry, even in translation. “Guy de Maupassant” was mysteriously sexy, “The Story of My Dovecote” broke my heart and “The Sin of Jesus” is never far from my mind. That final story concludes: “‘There’s no forgiveness for you, Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘No forgiveness, and there never will be.’”

Today we have a Babel for our time: Boris Dralyuk’s Red Cavalry (2014) and Odessa Stories (2016), both published by Pushkin Press. These chaste-looking little white volumes are made for rereading and ease of transport, genuine pocket books. Boris' rendering of the final sentence of “The Story of the Dovecote”: “And so Kuzma led me to the tax inspector’s house, where my parents had found refuge from the pogrom.” Compare this to Morison’s choppy version: “And so with Kuzma I went to the house of the tax-inspector, where my parents, escaping the pogrom, had sought refuge.” Boris ends on that dreadful word pogrom.             

Jerome Charyn writes in Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel (2005): “Babel never had a chance. A zhid from Odessa who flourished for a little while, thanks to Gorky.” The same Gorky who denied Osip Mandelstam a pair of pants. Babel dedicated “The Story of the Dovecote” to Gorky.

'A Proliferation of Brilliant Detail'

“Since Chaucer was alive and hale,

No man hath walkt along our roads with step

So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue

So varied in discourse.”

After thinking about V.S. Pritchett on Thursday, I went back to one of his later essay collections, Lasting Impressions (1990), because it’s easier to hold than The Complete Collected Essays (1992), which, at 1,319 pages, tips the scale at four pounds plus. At random I picked an essay – “Pioneer,” which ostensibly started life in 1974 as a review of a Robert Browning biography. Those who have reviewed biographies know the hazards. One is reviewing two lives: The subject’s and the subject’s as rendered by the biographer. The review risks getting clogged with one or the other, and then there’s a race to see who gets bored first, the reviewer or the reader. Pritchett deftly handles the dilemma by choosing facts – I won’t use that hideous word “factoids” -- that illustrate his evolving theme:      

“At twenty, the young Browning proudly refused to clerk or go into the law and decided to live by writing epics of introspection, and the parents—living on £257 a year—submitted and supported him. They even raked up money to send him to Italy and Russia. He dressed with elegance and never left the house without white gloves: they were a lifelong obsession. Why? Unclean, unclean?”

Pritchett at this point avoids Freudian vaporing, though he skirts it: “At most Browning was displaying the histrionic vanity that Jung associates with introverts.” He lets us know Browning is an odd duck but doesn’t presume to sermonize or psychoanalyze. When Browning and his wife exchange love letters, Pritchett says they “seem to be trying to get into a future story by Henry James.” He’s the wittiest of critics. Even better, Pritchett, the great hungry consumer of novels, gets Browning:

“In short his gifts were those of the novelist or the poet of monologue. There is a proliferation of brilliant detail, so that the small things and psychological dilemmas become more dramatic than the main drama. He adopts the point of view of characters unlike himself, and this putting on of another’s voice and life depends on a certain bouncing abruptness and on an acute sense of the mind’s sensations.”

About that flirtation with Jung and his theory of introversion. Thanks to Micah Mattix’s Prufrock I read a poem on Friday by a writer new to me, James Valvis. In the author’s note that accompanies the poem he writes: “I have this theory writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun.”

The four lines quoted at the top are from Walter Savage Landor’s “To Robert Browning.”

'The Moment of the Aphorism'

A faulty memory is a blessing. Imagine having the sort of memory customarily called “photographic.” Think of recalling in perfect detail every joke loudly delivered in a crowded room that fell flat; every petty theft or faux pas; every lie, whopper or white; every untoward fantasy. Life would be self-inflicted torment, truly instant karma. Then again, recollections of the small and unimportant, especially if they are soothing or amusing, and come trailing a cloud of associated memories, can carry a blessing.

I was newly and only temporarily sober, and living in a small town in Ohio and working in a library when I read in The New York Review of Books an essay by V.S. Pritchett on a writer unknown to me, Gerald Brenan. The issue was dated Jan. 25, 1979, forty years ago today. Brenan was Pritchett’s longtime friend and both men loved Spain. The country had interested me since I first read Unamuno, years before. I had read and enjoyed Pritchett’s Marching Spain (1928) and The Spanish Temper (1954). Thanks to him I had read Fortunata and Jacinta (1886), a great novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. Pritchett remains one of my oldest and best teachers. How good it is to remember reading his review and eventually reading Brenan, including The Spanish Labyrinth (1950) and his study of St. John of the Cross (1973). Here is how Pritchett begins his review:

“There is a moment in the old age of a writer when he finds the prospect of one more long haul in prose intimidating and when he claims the right to make utterances. We grow tired of seeing our experience choked by the vegetation in our sentences. We opt for the pithy, the personal, and the unapologetic. For years we have had a crowd of random thoughts waiting on our doorstep, orphans or foundlings of the mind that we have not adopted: the moment of the aphorism, the epigram, the clinching quotation has come.”

'We Are Too Distracted, Too Hurried'

“The essay writer is the lay preacher upon that vague mass of doctrine which we dignify by the name of knowledge of life or human nature.”

That’s what I look for in an essayist. Call it learning tempered by experience, realism tempted by but never succumbing to lazy cynicism. No whining or proselytizing. Just a mature understanding of self and others, filtered through a sensibility that likes a good joke. The models are obvious: Montaigne, Johnson, Lamb, all of whom are cited by Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) in “The Essayists.” It was published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1881 and collected in Men, Books, and Mountains (ed. S.O.A. Ullmann, Hogarth Press, 1956). Stephen is most concerned with the English essayists, beginning with Bacon, but here he is on the French:

“A Frenchman can always season his wisdom with epigram, and coins his reflections into the form of detached pensées. But our language or our intellect is too blunt for such jewellery [sic] in words. We cannot match Pascal, or Rochefoucauld, or Vauvenargues, or Chamfort. Our modes of expression are lumbering, and seem to have been developed rather in the pulpit than in the rapid interchange of animated conversations.”

Stephen has qualified appreciation for Lamb and Hazlitt. The former is “inimitably graceful” but “always on the verge of affectation”; the latter, “a man of marked idiosyncrasy” who possesses “a certain acidity; a rather petulant putting forwards of little crotchets or personal dislikes.” These characterizations are accurate, but Lamb and Hazlitt in tandem are a self-correcting pair. Each moderates the weaknesses of the other.

Today, the essay is enervated, rarely well written and too often poisoned with politics. In short, boring. Yes, we have Joseph Epstein, Cynthia Ozick and Arthur Krystal, but we have lost Chesterton, Mencken, Liebling, Rebecca West and Hubert Butler. Stephen seemed to foresee this: “Essay-writing, thus understood, is as much one of the lost arts as good letter-writing or good talk. We are too distracted, too hurried.” The essay is the liveliest and most elastic of literary forms, and deserves to be reanimated.

'The Whole Secret of a Living Style'

It’s hard to imagine Thomas Hardy reading Tristram Shandy or Essays of Elia, but we have it on his own authority that he did, and voluntarily. In fact, he reread them: “Read again Addison, Macaulay, Newman, Sterne, De Foe, Lamb, Gibbon, Burke, Times Leaders, &c. in a study of style.” How many writers today would undertake a comparable regimen of self-education? Few would encounter such a collection of prose masters in the curriculum of most schools, even the toniest, and it’s a truism that we learn to write by reading. Instinctively, we analyze a writer’s style, word by word, hearing the rhythm, assessing the tone. When we’re young, we ape it and judge the results. A professor once told me that the riskiest of writers to copy was Sterne, and she was probably right, but we can still learn from his conversational prose. Hardy continues:

“Am more and more confirmed in an idea I have long held, as a matter of commonsense, long before I thought of an old aphorism bearing on the subject:  ‘Ars est celare artem.’ The whole secret of a living style and the difference between it and a dead style, lies in not having too much style—being—in fact, a little careless, or rather seeming to be, here and there.”

The Latin tag, of disputed origin, may be translated “the art is to conceal the art.” The first writer this brings to mind is Swift, whose style is deceptively plain and simple, and charged with energy. Writers whose prose is neon – bright but casting little usable light -- include Emerson and William H. Gass. The carelessness Hardy describes is an artful balancing act, one beyond the means of most writers. He quotes the opening and closing lines of Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder”:

“A sweet disorder in the dress . . .

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility:

Do more bewitch me, than when art

Is too precise in every part.”

Then he adds: “Otherwise your style is like worn half-pence—all the fresh images rounded off by rubbing, and no crispness or movement at all.” All of the text quoted above is from The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, which originally was published in 1928 and 1930 under the name of Hardy’s widow, Florence Emily Hardy, but in fact was written by the novelist-poet himself. I find Hardy’s fiction almost unreadable. His poems are masterful. Some of the prose in his “biography” is nearly as good as his verse.

'Vile; Mean; of Different and Unsuitable Parts'

Sometimes a word is so peculiar, comical-sounding, unlikely, mellifluous or specific in usage that we doubt its existence, look up the meaning, vow to use it in the future and promptly forget it. Such is linseywoolsey, two perfect trochees that sound like a proper name. I know I’ve encountered it before because I’ve read The Dunciad before, several times, but it still surprised me. Here it is in Book Three:

“Behold yon isle, by palmers, pilgrims trod,

Men bearded, bald, cowl’d, uncowl’d, shod, unshod,

Peel’d, patch’d, and piebald, linsey-woolsey brothers,

Grave mummers! sleeveless some, and shirtless others.

That once was Britain — happy!”

The OED doesn’t cite Pope but offers this primary definition: “a textile material, woven from a mixture of wool and flax; now, a dress material of coarse inferior wool, woven upon a cotton warp.” The etymology is straightforward if we know that linsey is, as the OED equivocates, “perhaps some coarse linen fabric.” A corresponding modern fabric-related word might be chintz. Not all neologisms are ugly. Linseywoolsey first showed up in the fifteenth century. One can imagine a farmer, weaver or merchant playing with – singing – linsey and wool, and out of sheer exuberance coining linseywoolsey. Pleased with himself, he sang it again, his children heard, they added a melody and additional words—Dirty Gerty, / Puffin ‘n’ Pie, etc. – and a new word is born.

By late in the sixteenth century linseywoolsey had mutated a figurative sense: “a strange medley in talk or action; confusion, nonsense.” Greene, Nashe, Shakespeare and Ford all used it, and – then it seems to have petered out. The last citation dates from 1694. No definition in the OED quite corresponds to Dr. Johnson’s in his Dictionary: “Made of linen and wool mixed. Vile; mean; of different and unsuitable parts.”

'Live Merrily and Trust to Good Letters'

“He never defended himself and he did very little complaining. He loved to quote Dr. Johnson, who said, ‘Live merrily and trust to good letters.’”

Excellent advice, though I’m unable to locate its source. Given that Janice Biala is quoting her former lover, Ford Madox Ford, who valued impressions over facts and memory over documentation, it’s hardly a surprise. It sounds like something Johnson might have said, though he indisputably did say, “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Biala’s brief memoir of Ford, written in 1961, is collected in The Presence of Ford Madox Ford: A Memorial Volume of Essays, Poems, and Memoirs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), edited by Sondra J. Stang. Biala writes:

“I cannot remember any time when Ford admitted defeat or gave in to despair. As far as he was concerned the artist’s life was the only one work living. You do what you like and take what you get for it and no complaints, and that is how he lived his life.”

How refreshing to read in our era of subsidies, grants and workshops. One recalls Kingsley Amis’s observation in Jake’s Thing (1978): “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the war, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.” Writing is a person alone in a room with the English language, to paraphrase John Berryman. Biala continues:

“It was rare when good letters brought him in an income equal that of a street cleaner—but then he boasted that every member of his family died poorer than he’d been when he was born. The most important thing about Ford was that he was an artist. He had infinite indulgence for anything human except cruelty and stupidity. He was himself intensely human in his faults as well as his virtues.”

[Biala (1903-2000) was a fine painter. Go here to see her “Portrait of a Writer (Ford Madox Ford),” painted in 1938, the year of Ford’s death.]

'An Exquisite Edge to the Razor'

“Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement. I remember a wash-ball that had a quality truly wonderful—it gave an exquisite edge to the razor.”

The other day I found myself singing the jingle that accompanied a commercial for Bryllcreem in 1965, the year I turned thirteen. I watched lustra of television when I was a kid and must have heard hundreds of such jingles over the years. What confounds me is why I remember so many of them and what triggers their periodic return. I feel no nostalgia for such spontaneous revivals of wasted time, nor do they possess camp appeal. Boomers are never so tedious as when they sentimentalize such things. I’ve always found memorization easy, and I suspect memory has no limit, unlike a measuring cup or a sonnet. Memory is elastic. But what I’m describing is involuntary memory. It helps, I suppose, that the words are set to music, which is why we can easily memorize songs and poems.  The fact that never in my life have I bought Bryllcreem or any of the other products entombed in the jingles in my memory is irrelevant. What I bought was the commercial.

The author of the observation at the top is Dr. Johnson. He is writing on this date, Jan. 20, in 1759, in The Idler #40. It’s remarkable that advertising was already worthy of attention from so fine a mind:

“The true pathos of advertisements must have sunk deep into the heart of every man that remembers the zeal shown by the seller of the anodyne necklace, for the ease and safety of poor teething infants, and the affection with which he warned every mother, that she would never forgive herself, if her infant should perish without a necklace.”

'For Every Peeping Fop to Jeer'

“Who that had wit would place it here,

For every peeping fop to jeer?”

The lines are from Swift’s “Verses Wrote in a Lady’s Ivory Table-Book.” The object in question is, the OED tells us, “a notebook.” Swift used the word in his Journal to Stella: “He thanked me for telling him, and immediately put his name in his table-book.” In Swift’s poem, the lady’s table-book is open for inspection, “Exposed to every coxcomb’s eyes, / But hid with caution from the wise.” Swift’s strategy is to mock the lady with her own words: “Here you may read (Dear Charming Saint) / Beneath (A new Receipt for Paint.)” That is, makeup. The lady may be beautiful, but her notebook reveals her as trivial-minded as an adolescent. To expand its meaning beyond Swift’s context, the couplet at the top might be applied to anyone who chooses to write in public without being able to write. Does such a person have “wit”?

In The English Spirit: Essays in History and Literature (1945), A.L. Rowse includes “Jonathan Swift.” He states the obvious – that Gulliver’s Travels is the only book by Swift that “the world has chosen.” For most readers, he remains a one-book author, which is a shame because Swift is brilliant throughout his work, in prose and verse. Once again, Rowse states what ought to be self-evident: “The poetry of Swift is, it would appear, an esoteric taste. There is hardly anyone who in our literary history, so far as I can call to mind, who had a liking for Swift’s poetry.” He names Yeats as an exception, and explains that the indifference to Swift’s verse may be explained by “the dominance of the romantic tradition in our literature.” This makes sense. If Shelley or Emerson is your idea of great poetry, you’re unlikely to appreciate “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Rowse makes an admirable defense of Swift:

“There is so much in his poetry that should appeal to  this age: the uncompromising intellectualism of his attitude to his experience, its essential hardness, realism, absence of illusions, its force, clarity and candour, its complete self-consciousness. There is no reason why his poetry should be an esoteric taste, except that the romantic tradition formed an idea of what poetry should be, an extremely rarefied and confined one, excluding much of our experience, and imposing that view upon the rich and natural variety of the subject matter of poetry.”

Things have changed somewhat, at least in the margins, though romanticism remains contagious. J.V. Cunningham and Louise Bogan, both of Irish descent, learned from Swift and wrote poems about him. He’s everywhere in Joyce and Beckett. Turner Cassity, master of the couplet, may be Swift reborn, and I detect the Irishman's ghost among the better contemporary writers of light verse, which is often quite dark.

'Less Subject to Being Overawed by Solemn Humbug'

“[I]f you read Mr. Beerbohm at his best you receive a certain stimulation and, if you follow him, you will be lead up to a point of view, which will enable you subsequently to be less subject to being overawed by solemn humbug.”

That’s as succinct a description of Max Beerbohm’s charm as I have encountered, though the source is somewhat unlikely. Ford Madox Ford was a deft writer of prose and a shrewd critic, but one wouldn’t expect the arch-Modernist to praise the arch-late-Victorian ironist, who was Ford’s senior by only sixteen months. Ford nominally reviews Beerbohm’s Seven Men and W.H. Hudson’s Birds in Town and Village in the November 6, 1919 issue of the Piccadilly Review (collected in Critical Essays, Carcanet, 2002). I say “nominally” because the review, titled “The Serious Books,” tells us almost nothing about the books in question. The “lede,” as the boys in the press room like to say, is buried. In the review’s four pages, Beerbohm is mentioned by name three times, and Seven Men not at all. Hudson gets the same treatment. Ford, I suspect, perhaps in homage to Beerbohm, is spoofing the form.    

Ford starts with and never quite recovers from a lengthy digression about his late friend Arthur Marwood who, in a few years, would serve as a model for Christopher Tietjens in the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28). Marwood maintained, he tells us, “that for any proper man there could only be four books in the English language that could be worth reading.” This is the sort of outrage I would lay down as a drunken undergraduate, just to watch the ears steam, though secretly I sort of believed what I was saying. “Two of these four he was dogmatic about”: Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and Ancient Law by Sir Henry James Sumner Maine. Now Ford gets to the theme expressed in his title:

“Gentlemen with no literary gifts, with no love of literature, and with no literary insight – though this tendency is mostly Teutonic – produce lives of Keats, Shelley, Browning, Crabbe, George Darley, Donne, in the hope of obtaining the fame that descends upon the erudite, of the rewards that are reserved for the persistently dull. These are the most pernicious of all writers of serious books – but there are an enormous number of others.”

Ford is just warming up. He’s already at the halfway point, and still no mention of Beerbohm or Hudson. Here’s the “nut graf,” to revert again to journalistic lingo:

“As written today, then, the Serious Book is generally Teutonic in its origin – that is to say, it is produced by gentlemen more distinguished for their industry than for their gifts, insight, or love of their subjects. That a serious book should possess form, imaginative insight, or interest for anyone not a specialist, would, generally speaking, be considered a very unsound proposition. To say that its writing should be distinguished by the quality of style, would be universally condemned.”

As to Beerbohm, Ford calls him “the last survivor of the English school of essayists,” which was certainly true as of 1919. To read Beerbohm is, he says, “to acquire little or no factual instruction,” and that, of course, is one of the reasons we read him.

'These Nameless Dilettanti'

Both amateur and professional ought to be words of commendation, and the distinction should not always be rooted in money. The former has been claimed by snobbery and is applied with contempt. The OED confirms that the word has come to be used “disparagingly” to describe a “dabbler, or superficial student or worker.” I prefer the word’s etymological sense – doing something out of love for it. In Chap. 4 of Robert Browning (1903), G.K. Chesterton writes of how Browning’s poems on painting – “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Pictor Ignotus” – “do not merely deal with painting; they smell of paint.” Browning was no painter but the art for him was not “a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops continually growing in a busy and exciting silence.” In short, Browning, when it came to painting, was an amateur:   

“The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.”

There’s nothing wrong with being paid for what one loves, so long as there is nothing wrong with doing it without financial recompense, out of love. Professional originally referred to a profession or vow made when one entered a holy order. Centuries later it became associated with payment, yet another “oddity of language.”  In Chap. 2 of his Autobiography, Chesterton again plays with the words. By profession, his father was a real estate agent, though he had considered becoming an artist when he was young. However, as hobbies he enjoyed painting, taking photographs and making stained-glass windows. His son writes: “On the whole, I am glad that he was never a professional artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career — his private career.”

As with amateur, professional has mutated over the centuries. Today, the OED recognizes a newer meaning as an adjective: “has or displays the skill, knowledge, experience, standards, or expertise of a professional; competent, efficient.” We say, “He’s a pro,” meaning he gets the job done. You can rely on him. The ideal is to be a professional amateur, or vice versa.

'I Have a Different Clock'

All of my sons when young went through a geology phase. I did too. My uncle was a house painter and he once had a job in the salt mine under Whiskey Island at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. He brought us fist-sized chunks of rock salt as specimens for our collection. Naturally we licked the samples like deer at the salt lick, and the chunks lost their edges and got smaller. (I can still taste them.) Another time, we visited relatives in western New York who lived on a farm. The pasture behind their house was dotted with chunks of limestone rich in fossils. We took home a bushel of them.

Why rocks? What’s the attraction? They’re common. You find them everywhere. At first, it’s a lazy hobby for the unambitious. There is the aesthetic angle – quartz and other crystals. I took my oldest son to gem and mineral shows and shops, and he fell for bismuth, a crystalline metal. Mica has its adherents, as do slate, pyrite and chalcedony. But something more essential is involved. Rocks feel permanent. They’re older than us, tougher and more enduring, evidence of an earlier, pre-human Earth. Rocks are indifferent. Deborah Warren suggests some of this in her poem “Pressure”:

       

“Put a little pressure and heat on rock,

give it time, and shale turns into slate.

It’s the same with calcium carbonate

slowly reinventing itself as chalk.

“Limestone’s in no hurry; it started to harden

during the Lower Jurassic into marble.

Graphite spends millennia on diamond:

“The luxury of eons.

At any rate,

slow or slower, they move in mineral time

with plenty of leisure for maturing late.

Nice for them. I have a different clock,

skin-shallow. Animals can’t afford to wait.”

Our timeline is brief and accelerated. In his poem “In Praise of Limestone,” Auden calls us “the inconstant ones.” We can’t compete with rocks, though even they are impermanent, if you think geologically.

'To Read an Honest-to-God Masterpiece'

I love the tartness of Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences: “When a writer has been brought to a halt by death, one kind of activity in him has to replace another: he can no longer cover more ground, like a tractor; he has to work upon us with a static persistence, like an electric drill.” Perhaps it’s her Irishness or her conviction that writing is best thought of as another species of work. Precision counts. So do dedication and a sort of ameliorated perfectionism. You can’t be sloppy or self-indulgent. That’s how people get hurt or disappointed, and you don’t want to hurt or disappoint your readers. The sentence quoted above is from Bowen’s 1936 review of Edward Crankshaw’s Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel, collected in her Collected Impressions (1950). Conrad had been dead for twelve years and his reputation was in danger of fading:

“[H]is books come under the shadow of mortality and, if they are to live, have to reinstate themselves with us. To live, they must be either classics or curiosities—and curiosities have not much life. Their particular, personal element tells, for a time, against them—possibly we are more estranged from the lately dead than we know—they have to stand on their general, major qualities. The entertainer has now to become a monument, outside our own variations of taste and fancy. If his books are to outlive him, we expect them to outlive us.”

Bowen isn’t afraid to state the obvious: “Only perversity or smallness of spirit could deny Conrad’s stature.”

I remembered Bowen’s review after Dana Gioia told me he is reading Nostromo, Conrad’s greatest novel, the one I most often reread: “I’ve been saving the book for years,” he says. “I’ve read everything else by Conrad. The novel is even better than I had hoped. It is so good to read an honest-to-God masterpiece.”

'O My Grand and Pitiful Age'

“In his free-and-easy way of dealing with historical figures, in the abrupt transitions and shifts of focus that show him to be quite unlike those awestruck devotees who turn the past into a sacred reliquary and life into the worship of things, there is the sense of measure we find in a son loving and respectful, yet natural and unconstrained in manner.”

A man in a Soviet prison camp writes of a poet who died thirty years earlier in a Soviet transit camp, a way station in the Gulag. Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) writes of Osip Mandelstam in A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Max Hayward, 1976). How could a Russian poet (or, arguably, any of us who remain conscious) not dwell in history? Not in the textbook sense but history as the medium in which he moved, like fish in water. “Mandelstam lived in history,” Sinyavsky writes, “as he breathed the air around him: it was a given quantity, a gift, part of the order of things, which can no more be left than it can be entered.” Sinyavsky’s words are a warning to all of us, most especially those who would treat the present as an autonomous region without veins and nerves linking it to the past. In the most reductive sense, the present does not exist, though we must be prepared to deal with it. Mandelstam writes:

“I’ll say this in a whisper, in draft,

because it’s early yet:

we have to pay

with experience and sweat

to learn the sky’s free play.

“And under purgatory’s temporal sky

we easily forget:

the dome of heaven

is a home

to praise forever, wherever.”

In fact, it was not early. In less than two years, sick, maddened and starving, Mandelstam would die in a camp near Vladivostok.  The poem is dated March 9, 1937. The translator is Robert Chandler, and you’ll find it in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. Some fifteen years earlier, Mandelstam already felt history closing in. This poem, also translated by Chandler, is “The Age”:

“Buds will swell just as in the past,

sprouts of green will spurt and rage,

but your backbone has been smashed,

O my grand and pitiful age.

And so, with a meaningless smile,

you glance back, cruel and weak,

like a beast once quick and agile,

at the prints of your own feet.”

Sinyavsky writes: “We usually think of history not as a living entity like ourselves, but as something fossilized and left behind, a matter for chronological tables and text-books. For Mandelstam history was real, and at once simple and complex like our own life – which was hence also historic in his eyes.”

'The Dangerous Company of Humans'

On Saturday I read a remarkable piece of journalism by Rebecca West, “A Day in Town,” published in The New Yorker on Jan. 25, 1941. The issue that also included a humor piece by S.J. Perelman, a poem by Louis MacNeice and a review of High Sierra starring Humphrey Bogart. I call it “journalism” but that’s misleading. West was doing “New Journalism” – that is, a species of literature, not hack work -- more than two decades before the slogan gained currency. She is unafraid to deploy her “I” but never lingers on it. Her focus is not inward. The five-page article is collected in The New Yorker Book of War Pieces (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), alongside fifteen dispatches by A.J. Liebling, who filed from England, North Africa and France. In her sole contribution, West covered the home front.

The Blitz raged over Britain from September 1940 to May 1941, killing some 43,000 British civilians. West’s story foregoes the big military picture. She never mentions Churchill or Hitler, and the U.S. is still on the sidelines and goes unmentioned. She has just returned from her country home to retrieve belongings from her flat in London and to deliver fresh vegetables to her sister. She begins with Pounce, her cat:

“The war has revealed cats as the pitiful things they are—intellectuals who cannot understand the written or spoken word. They suffer in air raids and the consequent migrations exactly as clever and sensitive people would suffer if they knew no history, had no previous warning of the nature of modern warfare, and could not be sure that those in whose house they lived, on whose generosity they were dependent, were not responsible for their miseries. Had Pounce found himself alone in the house and free, he would probably have run out into the woods and not returned to the dangerous company of humans.”

West had intended to shop at John Lewis’s but learns from a janitor in her building that the department store had been leveled the previous evening by a German bomb. The janitor says: “It’s gutted, gutted to the ground floor, and I nearly died of it.” The ministry where her husband works has been damaged in the same raid. “I suddenly learned,” he says, "what everybody supposed I knew: that Black, one of my colleagues whom I got on with best, an older man whom I liked and respected, with whom I had had a lot of pleasant talk, had been killed in the blast.”

West communicates not anger or grief but a sort of stoical sadness, an old-fashioned English toughness that may now be extinct. She discovers that the long, narrow Empire table in her dining room, undamaged by a direct hit, has come apart at every joint, the result of a bomb's shock waves. “Nothing had hit it, but it stood there like something dead and unspeakably mangled.” She concludes the article like this:

"Beyond the table, through the obscuring varnish on the window panes, I could see London, veiled by the smoke that was still rising from the ruins of John Lewis’s store.”  

At least three other great writers, Elizabeth Bowen, V.S. Pritchett and Henry Green, made literary use of the Blitz. Along with the New Yorker piece, West also published her masterwork, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in 1941.