'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.