'I Have No Words to Tell Him How We Grieved'

Memory defies understanding. We know things we don’t remember knowing. On Wednesday I read “Fugitive Son,” a sonnet by A.M. Juster:

“The Japanese mourn children they abort.

In Shinto shrines they pick a figurine

To represent the life that they cut short.

They bow, then slide a folded note between

The sandalwood and jade as if a soul

That never loved a face could now forgive

Or any act of penance could control

Unwanted visits from a fugitive.

“I never picked a message I could send

Or bargained for forgiveness.  There was none.

Although I know my boy does not intend

More pain, he asks about the nameless son

We lost three months before he was conceived.

I have no words to tell him how we grieved.”

Comment would be an affront but Mike’s poem triggered a memory. More than thirty years ago, a reporter I worked with and his wife adopted an infant boy. My first son had been born months earlier and we were delighted together. Their son died from SIDS on Father’s Day. Only once before had I seen people shattered into numbness, and that was at the funeral of another little boy, in Indiana, who had been killed when run over by a tractor driven by his mother. Another memory followed, one I hadn't recalled in years. One morning in the early nineteen-sixties, I was swimming with my mother. We were dog-paddling near the middle of the lake when she told me she had had a miscarriage the year before I was born. The baby was a boy. She never mentioned it again.

'I Do Care Above All for Reality'

“I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

A fine excess not of adjectives or sentiments but of energy in a closed circuit. A poem or any written work without energy (Robert Creeley comes to mind) lies there on the page or screen, as inert as a dead thing. I think of “singularity” as a futile striving after novelty, which doesn’t exist. A good reader recognizes something in a good poem, dimly recalled, that makes intuitive sense. It feels as though you’ve been waiting all your life for precisely what the poem has to give you. Keats was writing a letter to his friend John Taylor on this date, Feb. 27, in 1818, and he calls his strictures “axioms,” as though he were Spinoza or a geometrician. What he describes are his own idiosyncratic ideals, which wouldn’t be realized until the following year, when he could write his great odes. Here is his second axiom:

“Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, seem natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.”

Keats could be describing “To Autumn,” as in these lines:

  

“While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.”

Keats was no sylph, despite his reputation. His eye is on the real, despite the periodic transcendental vaporings. He reminds me of a characteristically blunt assertion Rebecca West makes in one of her letters: “I do care above all for reality.” It’s not as though we have a choice in the matter.

'It Will Do Him No Good to Whine'

I’ve just learned that an old friend, Mike Matthews, died several years ago and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I met Mike in 1979 in Bryan, Ohio. He had just moved to town and was manager of a new drug store, and I was editor of the weekly newspaper in nearby Montpelier. Like me, Mike was a serious guy who had difficulty taking anything seriously. The Germans, naturally, have a word for such personalities: Witzelsucht (literally, “joking addiction”). That’s not quite accurate. We could be serious about ultimate things but the absurdity of daily life was fair game. It was Mike who taught me some choice examples of Navy slang. Thanks to him, cold cuts are forever “horse cock” and catsup is “sorority sauce,” though I’m rarely able to use such colorful language.

I learned about Mike’s death thanks to the internet and a friend in Ohio. In my experience, that’s how it’s done today. I have lived in five states, held a lot of jobs and known a lot of people, many of whom I remember with fondness. I expect to hear of more deaths, some that will evoke a twinge of regret, others that will leave me cold. News of my own death will fall mostly into the latter category. Most of us are just not that important. Beware of people who claim to grieve for every death. They likely grieve for none, or one. As Boswell recounted of Johnson:

  

“To my question, as to whether we might fortify our minds for the approach of death, he answered in a passion, ‘No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.’ He added, with an earnest look, ‘A man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine.’”

'Culture Is the Basis of All Life'

Andrei Sinyavsky – or was it Abram Tertz? – told an interviewer in 1978, seven years after his release from the Gulag and five after fleeing the Soviet Union for France: “I fear uniformity.” As we once thought every writer did. It was our obligation to rethink the world, weigh evidence, purge delusions, consult forebears, reject clichés of thought and language, and draw our own conclusions. Today, a kinder-gentler species of Zhdanovshchina prevails. Punishment for variance from orthodoxy can be swift, harsh and invariably ad hominem.

If you’re new to Sinyavsky, start with A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Kyril Fitzlyon, Max Hayward, 1976), based on the two letters per month he was permitted to write his wife from a Soviet forced-labor camp between March 1966 and June 1971. Starting in the late nineteen-fifties and writing under pseudonym he took from a legendary Russian-Jewish gangster, Abram Tertz, the non-Jewish Sinyavsky published Gogolian stories that flaunted the dreary strictures of socialist realism.

Next, try his heavily autobiographical novel Goodnight! (trans. Richard Lourie, 1989), in which he writes: “Life is what you do while waiting to write.” And he comments on his other self, Tertz, the gangster from Odessa reminiscent of Isaac Babel’s Benya Krik:

“I see him as if it were now, a robber, gambler, son of a bitch, hands in his trousers, moustache like a thread, in a cap flattened to his eyebrows, propelled by a light, rather shuffling gait, with tender interjections of an indecent character on his withered lips, his emaciated body honed in many years of polemics and stylistic contradictions. Intense, irrefutable. He’d slit your throat at the drop of a hat. He’ll steal. He’ll croak, but he won't betray you. A businesslike man. Capable of writing with a pen (on paper) -- with a pen, which in thieves’ language is a knife, dear children. In a word -- a knife.”

Also Strolls with Pushkin, along with the early work that got him in trouble: On Socialist Realism, The Trial Begins, The Makepeace Experiment and Fantastic Stories. Sinyavsky sounds almost overconfident in his 1978 interview:

“We must defend our independence. Very often the politically minded don't realise that culture is the basis of all life. Let's assume the Soviet Union sets about conquering the West. The West will stand firm precisely because of its cultural structure. Of course tanks can flatten all buildings and trees and forms. But the West will offer resistance not merely with the help of the atom bomb, one atom bomb against-the other; but will resist precisely because of its structure, that is to say, its culture.”

Sinyavsky’s faith in Western culture is at once flattering, touching and naïve. On all sides it crumbles from within. The enemy breached the walls a long time ago. In Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), Nadhezhda Mandelstam writes of an old man who had spent twenty years in the camps and exile, but had throughout “kept his loyalty to the victors,” with his “party card engraved on his heart”:

“It was the time of the Siniavski affair, and I asked him his view of it. The old man began to seethe with unfeigned indignation: Siniavski had ‘hidden behind a pseudonym.’ ‘Not like us Bolsheviks,’ he continued. ‘We went right up on the platform and said exactly what we thought.’ I laughed at him.’ ‘And you never lied, by any chance?’ I always did, you know—not that I ever went up on a platform, of course, but I lied and hid my real thoughts every day and every hour: in the classroom, in the lecture hall, at home, in the kitchen. . . . How could I do otherwise? One truthful word, and I would have got ten years’ forced labor, right there and then.”

About the old man, the poet’s widow goes on: “He was not simply an idiot, but a product of the times. The basic ideas which went into his makeup (one cannot use the word ‘personality’) have warped his mind, and his memory holds up a distorting mirror to past events and actions.”

Sinyavsky/Tertz died on this date, Feb. 25, in 1997, in Paris, at the age of seventy-one.

'Of or Pertaining to a Lake or Lakes'

I find that I first encountered the word lacustrine on Jan. 3, 1972, while reading Vladimir Nabokov’s fifth novel, Glory, as translated from Russian by the author and his son Dmitri. Our hero and a girl plan an outing to the countryside beyond the confines of Berlin: “[A]nd so, one marvelous, impeccably cloudless morning, Martin [Edelweiss] and Sonia were off for the lacustrine, reedy, piny outskirts of the city . . .”

The context was no help and it’s obvious my Latin was already threadbare. In the marginalia I left on Page 146, my nineteen-year-old self informs my sixty-six-year-old self that I consulted the OED and found this: “of or pertaining to a lake or lakes.” And I added, “like riparian.” For once, I’m not embarrassed by an annotation my younger self left in a book. More often it is something English major-fatuous like “foreshadowing” or “symbolism.”

One of the unanticipated pleasures of reading the same copy of a book read long ago is the occasional glimpse I get of that alien but familiar me. Lacustrine is precisely the word that would stop me again today. Now I think, what is the word’s Russian original? Or is it Nabokov showing off his scientific nomenclature? According to the OED, the word had a fifty-year vogue among scientists in the nineteenth century. The Dictionary cites the great Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (“I collected six species of lacustrine shells”) and the English biologist Thomas Huxley (“Lacustrine Delta: The alluvial tract formed by a river at its embouchure into a lake”). Both were champions of Darwin and embouchure reminds me of Louis Armstrong and his famous callous. The rest of the OED entry reads:

“Said esp. of plants and animals inhabiting lakes, and Geology of strata, etc., which originated by deposition at the bottom of lakes; also with reference to ‘lake-dwellings’ such as those of prehistoric Europe. lacustrine age, lacustrine period: the period when lake-dwellings were common.”

I remain convinced that a path beginning with one word, if followed, can circle the world.

'In Former Times It Was a Simple Place'

My earliest unambiguous memory of a public library is of dragging a heavy wooden stool across the floor so I could sit while scanning the lower shelves. The stool must have screeched on the linoleum – once a sin in the library’s monastic silence – but I don’t remember that. The remainder of the memory is fuzzy but I think I was looking for Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal (1948). A visit to the library came with a sense of hushed formality, not unlike entering a church. One didn’t holler or run. Hunting for books, browsing, collecting a stack, was a methodical business. One worked for the privilege of one’s pleasures.

That’s no longer the case. The central library in Houston is a noisy, dirty place heavily patronized by homeless people. Older books are routinely culled from the collection. I’ve seen volumes disappear, wiped from the shelves and the catalog overnight, while banks of computers are forever occupied. Volumes are readily available on open shelves that would once have been judged pornographic by reasonable people. Comic books and “graphic novels” occupy more shelf space than the 870’s and 880’s. J. P. Celia published “The County Library” in First Things:

“In former times it was a simple place,

Where one could read without a blushing face,

With thickly bound and edifying titles,

Like Noble Greeks, and red highlighted Bibles,

And Shakespeare (sans Andronicus), and Mark Twain,

Whose humor, though defiant, was humane.

“Today it’s more permissive, and diverse,

Though who’s to say it’s better, or it’s worse.

Now crammed beside the Good Book, mere shelves over,

Are bloody tales as chilling as October,

And novelettes as lurid as those scenes

Displayed in certain grownup magazines.”

To answer his implied question, we are. It’s worse.

'Belonging So Bleakly to To-day'

It’s reassuring when a writer one admires gratifyingly admires yet another writer one admires, however grudging the admiration. It lends the world a certain rightness or symmetry. But sometimes it sours and disappointment follows. Here is Rebecca West on meeting Max Beerbohm, c. 1930. First, his appearance:

“He presented himself at the party, looking extraordinarily like one of those little Chinese dragons which are made in the porcelain known as blanc de Chine. Like them he has a rounded forehead and eyes that press forward in their eagerness; and his small hands and feet have the neat compactness of paws.”

Access the tone. Is she mocking Beerbohm? Eagerness, as opposed to do dull lassitude, is certainly desirable in a man approaching sixty. And dragons suggests ferocity. But what about those paws? West continues:

“His white hair, which sweeps back in trim convolutions like one of these little dragon’s manes, his blue eyes, and his skin, which is as clear as a child’s, have the gloss of newly washed china. He is, moreover, obviously precious, and not of this world, though relevant to its admiration: a museum piece, if ever there was one.”

Perhaps West, a writer not yet forty, is aping Beerbohm’s style, his nuanced weave of ironies. “Precious” teeters nicely. And try parsing “not of this world, though relevant to its admiration.” We learn that Beerbohm does not like “literary ladies,” but the claim seems half-hearted. He shows no anger but the dinner party they are attending is clearly a trial:

      

“He was looking round with surprise, with distaste--and I perceived that his eye was lighting on members of my own sex, on members of my own profession. Yes! He confessed it, in his gentle courteous voice, which has about it something of a Chinese calm, he did not like literary ladies.”

Beerbohm was born in 1872; West, twenty years later. The difference shows. West says Beerbohm moves her to “lachrymosely remember the appearance of my mother and father.” What we have is the male/female divide, of course, but also a generational disparity. West is a modern woman who values independence. Beerbohm, West says, insists on making the past “his present.” West introduces him to her friend the writer G.B. (Gladys Bronwyn) Stern:

“With glowing eyes she sat down beside the author whom she admires perhaps more than any other of the living. His courtesy was perfect, his response to her adoration exquisitely gracious; yet the sense that he was not happy in this atmosphere made itself apparent. Impossible for his sensitive interlocutor not to feel guilt at being part of the atmosphere, at belonging so bleakly to to-day.”

West’s essay, “Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm,” written for the Bookman, is collected in Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (1931). How accurate is her reading of Beerbohm the man? Hard to say. He was no loutish bigot but very much a man of his time – this is, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. And writers as a tribe are notoriously suspicious of rivals. How sad that Beerbohm and West, two of the last century’s masters, couldn’t have sat down and had a quiet, mutually admiring chat.

'Wide and Casual Rather Than Scholarly'

Wednesday morning I spent almost two hours in a clean, well-lighted MRI tube. The radiologist had a sense of humor and wasn’t offended when, after about ninety minutes, I said that I felt trapped in an oversized, costive colon (not my precise wording). His reply: “No laxatives here, man.” The CT scan that followed was brief and uneventful. That morning I had brought with me a Montale collection to read in the waiting room but wasn’t permitted to bring it with me into the imaging contraption, so I emptied my head and almost fell asleep. Then I wished I had something to read and dealt with that irritation by “reading” the buff-colored lining of the tube. Tiny marks in or on the paint – chips or stains – suddenly demanded decrypting. Had they been left by the desperate clawing of a previous patient? My print-deprived brain devised a cheesy horror-movie plot. Then it was over.

Back home, I wanted to write something about W.H. Auden on this, his 112^th birthday, and pulled The Prolific and the Devourer off the shelf. Auden wrote it in 1939, soon after arriving in the U.S. He abandoned the book after the Nazi invasion of Poland and it was first published posthumously, in 1981. Between its pages I was surprised to find a clipping of a newspaper column I had written, dated January 17, 1989. It was about books. What a surprise. After my urge for something to read in the MRI tube, this paragraph seemed pertinent:

“I often wonder what people do who don’t know how to read. I don’t necessarily mean illiterates. I mean people who, technically, can make sense of the lexical array that surrounds us, but choose, instead, to watch television or God knows what else.”

I can still sign my name to that after thirty years. I browsed Auden’s aphorisms and reflections and was gratified to find this:

 “My father’s library not only taught me to read, but dictated my choice of reading. It was not the library of a literary man nor of a narrow specialist, but a heterogeneous collection of books on many subjects, and including very few novels. In consequence my reading has always been wide and casual rather than scholarly, and in the main non-literary.”

'Usable Only by the Unwary or Vulgar'

A professor I interviewed was bothered by a trend already condemned by many for more than a century: specialization. He seemed to think no one before him had ever noticed this tendency or treated it as a problem. It came up in the context of STEM vs. humanities. He said: “I think the drive toward specialization has reached a sort of crescendo.” His use of the musical term jarred me. I would have expected him to say “turning point,” “climax,” “high-water mark” or some other familiar cliché. Was he just being sloppy? Or was this a slightly pretentious misuse of a word that had attained the status of a full-fledged cliché and I had somehow missed it?

The OED, after the musical definition, gives a meaning it identifies as “colloq.”: “The peak of an increase in volume, force, or intensity; a climax.” Fitzgerald used it this way in Gatsby and Wodehouse in Uncle Fred in Springtime. Still, it doesn’t sound right in my inner ear. It sounds high-falutin’ and reaching, and might only be used ironically. Kingsley Amis agrees. He has a separate entry for crescendo in The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997):

“Once a musical term meaning ‘(passage played) with increasing volume’ and a derived figurative term meaning ‘progress toward a climax’. For many years now taken to be a fancy synonym for ‘climax’ as in ‘the gunfire reached a crescendo’ or ‘the chorus of vilification rose to a crescendo’ and rendered usable only by the unwary or vulgar. Outside a strictly musical context, that is.”

Amis’ ear for falsity, social striving and any hint of pretentiousness was reliably flawless.  

'But I Am Impenitent'

“How then was he happy? By the laws laid down for us by moralists and psychologists he should not have been. Man, they insist, is born to act and construct. If, under the baleful influence of sin or psychological maladjustment, he does neither, the results should surely have been frustration and discontent.”

I’m always heartened when a human being avoids the conceptual flypaper of “moralists and psychologists” – especially the latter. Like eels, we’re slippery. Free will and its happy offspring, eccentricity, are the glories of our species. Even being conventional can be eccentric in the proper hands. Predicting human behavior, our emotions in particular, is a mug’s game.

“In fact, however, people who visited Max during these years were struck by the air of serene gaiety which gleamed in his eyes and made itself softly heard in his laugh. Although he did not laugh quite so often as in his youth, he laughed more than most men of his age. The truth was that he was so exceptional a character the laws applicable to most men did not apply to him.”

Lord David Cecil is writing of Beerbohm in his 1964 biography of the essayist, who was born in 1872. These passages come two-thirds of the way through the book, beginning in the 1920s when Max moved to Rapallo. True, his best work was behind him but Max never fell half in love with easeful self-pity. He remained amused by the world, even in Mussolini’s Italy. That and superb prose are his gifts to humanity.

“What was true of him as a boy was true of him in middle life: he was at once older and younger than the average man of his years. . . . He had experienced enough new impressions to last him for life; he realized that new ones would merely disturb him.”

The necessity of raw experience, preferably manly experience – by Byron, for instance, and, at a more ridiculous level, Hemingway – has been codified as a prerequisite for being a writer, or a certain type of writer. Henry James, Emily Dickinson and Proust give the lie to that silliness. So does Beerbohm, as in the radio broadcast (Mainly on the Air, 1957) he made on Jan. 18, 1942:

“Perhaps you will blame me for having spent so much of my time in music halls, so frivolously, when I should have been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I am inclined to think, indeed I have always thought, that a young man who desires to know all that in all ages in all lands has been thought by the best minds, and wishes to make a synthesis of all those thoughts for the future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a very miserable old age.”

[The great Rebecca West said of Beerbohm’s wartime BBC broadcasts (which contrast nicely with Ezra Pound’s ravings): “I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth. Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.”]

'The Great Forgotten Virtue: Attention'

“It is not so much that we cannot sit still long enough to read–we can sit still with our phones, after all–but can we sit still to listen to one voice rather than ten thousand?”

The author, Tara Ann Thieke, asks a good question and the likely answer is not flattering. She echoes Pascal’s well-known notion that most problems originate in our inability to sit alone, quietly, in a room. By “one voice” she means a book (that a book may contain multiple voices is irrelevant to her point). I’ve never owned a smartphone so part of her question in my case is moot. Sitting down to read, however, is as routine and necessary for me as sitting down to dinner. Much online banter, as I have experienced it, is reactive if not combative. I read something, like or dislike it, and laud it or assault it, usually in ad hominem terms. Such acts are impulsive, not thoughtful. I’m not like that in daily life. Why would I choose to behave so childishly, and with so little respect for myself and others, in the digital world?   

Sunday morning I was sitting on the couch in our front room reading a collection of Max Beerbohm’s essays. The rain had stopped and through the bay window I could watch two fathers in the cul-de-sac playing catch with their sons. I’ve never played catch with anyone, including my father and my three sons, and no one seems the worse from my negligence. I’ve read and reread Beerbohm for many years and find that his essays have grown increasingly compatible with the person I have somehow become. In “Going Out for a Walk” he writes: “Walking for walking’s sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a thing as it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to it is that it stops the brain.” That is true for me as well, and the same might be said for playing catch. Beerbohm winningly refers to “walkmongers.”

Thieke’s real subject is bookstores and she lists thirty of the best, only one of which I have visited. I associate the best bookstores with good conversation, with the owner or fellow patrons, a pleasure grown increasingly rare. I also associate the best bookstores with the most essential of our inalienable rights: the right to be left alone. No high-pressure tactics, no hard sell, no clerks helpless without a computer. Just a man alone in a room, quietly looking at books, a solitary act that places us in the company of millions. Thieke writes:  

“A fine bookstore makes a home for the great forgotten virtue: attention. It is not subjected to the whim of stockholders and committees, eager to dump stock in favor of digital innovations. It is curated, but not minimalist. There is texture, there is age, there is the joy that comes of having known something for more than a season.”

[Thanks go to Mark Marowitz for alerting me to Thieke’s essay and many others.]

'To Be So Prodigal of Pity'

It’s an antiquarian taste, stalking rare words, those erased by neglect from the language. One can always hope for their resurrection under the assumption that if a word once existed and was used by even a lone writer, it corresponded to something in our world and filled some human need. Take marcescibility. I salvaged it from “A Club in Ruins,” an essay collected in Max Beerbohm’s Yet Again: “Sighing over the marcescibility of human happiness, I peered between the pillars into the excavated and chaotic hall.” From the context, what might it mean? Vanity? Impossibility? The adjective form is marcescible, which the OED defines as “liable to wither or fade.” The noun form has two citations, one from 1727, the other from Beerbohm. It’s rooted, not surprisingly, in a post-classical Latin word meaning “perishable, subject to fading or withering.” I think of the Japanese wabi-sabi, a notion at once metaphysical and aesthetic.

Beerbohm’s ruin is not ancient or alien but a product of his own time and place, making it peculiarly pertinent to people like ourselves who inhabit a world forever consuming itself. I recently learned that a drug store in a small Ohio city where I worked as a newspaper reporter has been demolished. I remember when it was built in 1981. The pharmacist was a member of the city council that I covered. Beerbohm writes:

“The ruins made, not by Time, but by the ruthless skill of Labour, the ruins of houses not old enough to be sacrosanct nor new enough to keep pace with the demands of a gasping and plethoric community–these are the ruins that move me to tears. No owls flutter in them. No trippers lunch in them. In no guide-book or leading-article will you find them mentioned. Their pathetic interiors gape to the sky and to the street, but nor gods nor men hold out a hand to save them. The patterns of bedroom wall-papers, (chosen with what care, after how long discussion! only a few short years or months ago) stare out their obvious, piteous appeal to us for mercy.”

When we are young, everything appears unchanging and eternal. A building, even the house we live in, is immortal, but only until it is unimaginably consumed by fire or the wrecking ball. Lately, on my nightly drive home from work, I’ve passed two houses that workmen have been preparing to move. It’s a prolonged and delicate procedure, and last week, after a month of preparation, one was hauled away. What surprised me was that neither home was particularly large, attractive or noteworthy for its design. Were the owners unable to part with the settings for their lives? Did memory outweigh architectural interest, cost be damned? Beerbohm neatly distanced himself from the London club and its unhappy fate:      

“You, readers, are free-born Englishmen. These clubs ‘come natural’ to you. You love them. To them you slip eagerly from your homes. As for me, poor alien, had I been a member of the club whose demolition has been my theme, I should have grieved for it not one whit the more bitterly. Indeed, my tears would have been a trifle less salt. It was my detachment that enabled me to be so prodigal of pity.”

'Let Us Read Only the Dead Men'

Another happy convergence: While reading G.K. Chesterton’s “History Versus the Historians” (Lunacy and Letters, 1958), I came upon this:

“Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.”

Let’s concede that Chesterton was a provocateur who couldn’t breathe without exhaling a pertinent paradox or two. But a visit to most any public library substantiates his claim. The 800 shelves are clogged not with poems and essays but commentaries, exegeses, explications and plain old criticism. Libraries ought to be pleasure domes of serendipity where readers – especially young readers – happen upon good books independently. Never underestimate the lasting power of self-discovery. It beats what a teacher or critic tells you every time. Were an alien anthropologist to visit one of our public libraries, he would assume that books were invented in, approximately, 2015. The past (including all of our culture’s best books) has been erased.

A friend who is about my age is reading Buddenbrooks, a novel I haven’t read in forty-eight years. He consumed the first one hundred pages or so in a single setting Thursday morning, and he’s having a good time.

“I was enthralled,” he writes, “the way I was when I was ten and read John R. Tunis’s book All-American. I think we sometimes forget the fun of getting lost in a book, the almost sublime feeling, immersed in words, so much so that the vastness of the universe shrinks to one man in a room with a book. Though it’s an illusion, one is to some degree outside of the machinations and strictures and melancholy tunes of Time.”

Serious readers know the feeling, one that can be repeated daily:

“Sure, I’ve read Mann’s book before, but as you say, the books we love are worth reading again and again. God knows how many times I’ve read Swann’s Way. Buddenbrooks affects me the way Anna Karenina does. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

The last book read (that is, reread) by William Maxwell (dead at ninety-one) and Simon Leys (dead at seventy-eight) was, sensibly enough, War and Peace.

'I Don't Know Where the Change Began'

The confluence of two events revived my interest in military and naval history and literature: the centenary of World War I and my middle son’s acceptance into the U.S. Naval Academy. The subjects were no longer strictly academic. I was of age but had missed Vietnam. How many wars later is it? Michael could be in the next one. The best history I have read was Andrew Roberts’ Elegy: The First Day on the Somme (2016). I read Edward Thomas, Ford Madox Ford, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and, more recently, Kipling. I knew he was a storyteller and poet of soldiering, of course, but hadn’t previously thought of him as a Great War poet. Here is “Ex-Clerk,” from the “Epitaphs of the War” sequence (The Years Between, 1919):

“Pity not! The Army gave

Freedom to a timid slave:

In which Freedom did he find

Strength of body, will, and mind:

By which strength he came to prove

Mirth, Companionship, and Love:

For which Love to Death he went:

In which Death he lies content.”

Typically, Kipling writes not about the collective but the individual soldier, and from the perspective of a trench or on a long march, not from a command post safely behind the lines. A sympathetic account of Kipling’s war poetry is found in Edward J. Erickson’s A Soldier’s Kipling: Poetry and the Profession of Arms (Pen and Sword Publishing, 2018). Erickson is a retired regular U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, in Sarajevo in 1995 and in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In his preface he writes, “When I grew up I joined the United States Army and I brought Kipling with me to every station I went to.” At the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Erickson taught a class called “Rudyard Kipling’s Small Wars.” To his credit he writes, “I question the idea that today’s world is more complex and more ambiguous for the people living in it than the world was for people living in past times.” Erickson doesn’t condescend to Kipling, the British Empire or the past. He looks at “The Return” (The Five Nations, 1903), including these lines from the first stanza:  

“I did no more than others did,

  I don’t know where the change began;  

I started as a average kid,  

  I finished as a thinkin’ man.”

The speaker is a veteran back in England after service in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). Erickson writes:

“We often think of veterans as elderly, but they begin as ‘kids’ and many return to civilian life as twenty-two year-old combat veterans. Teenage civilians finish school and move on to the profession of arms, making modern combat the province of the ‘everyman.’ Most veterans recognise that their experiences are not particularly unique but, in the end, somehow their worldview changed along the way, without them realizing what happened.”

'A Genius of the Purest Kind'

Of all the masters of English prose, we have the most to learn from Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh. From Beerbohm we can learn how to nuance irony, not lay it on thick with a putty knife. He can teach us how to be amusing without telling jokes or taking the lazy way and merely being outrageous. Waugh, whose best books are peppered with jokes and outrage, once described Beerbohm’s company as “blissikins.” Waugh was a dedicated craftsman of language, a gift rare even among poets. In his maturity he was no aesthete, but the beauty and hard exactitude of his words never cancelled each other out.

Waugh is best known for his hatreds but he could, when moved, be a celebrator (as he was with Ronald Knox and P.G. Wodehouse). A week after Beerbohm’s death on May 20, 1956, Waugh wrote a remembrance for the Sunday Times, “A Lesson in Manners,” describing their first meeting in 1929. It didn’t go well. Waugh was nervous and lost in the crowd that had come to welcome Max on one of his rare visits to London from his home in Italy. The following day, things got worse. He met Max in a club and the great caricaturist mistook Waugh for a painter. Later that day, Waugh received a letter of apology from Beerbohm:

“Good manners were not much respected in the late twenties; not at any rate in the particular rowdy little set which I mainly frequented. They were regarded as the low tricks of the ingratiating underdog, of the climber. The test of a young man’s worth was the insolence which he could carry off without mishap. Social outrages were the substance of our anecdotes. And here from a remote and much better world came the voice of courtesy. The lesson of the Master.”

In 1965, a year before his death, Waugh reviewed Lord David Cecil’s biography of Beerbohm and a collection of Beerbohm’s letters to Reggie Turner. “Beerbohm,” he writes, “was a genius of the purest kind. Some English writers, he said, were weight-lifters; others jugglers with golden balls. There were, he believed, rather too many weight-lifters – and today he would have to add contortionists, freaks and buffoons to the literary circus.”

[All of the quoted passages above are taken from The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (ed. Donat Gallagher, 1983).]    

  

Waugh describes a meeting with Beerbohm in the diary entry for May 18, 1947:

“We went to tea with Max Beerbohm who is in a little house near Stroud. A delicious little old dandy, very quick in mind still. He at once said, on learning of Mark Syke’s escapade, ‘Perhaps it is like the case of Mr. Bulitude and I am now entertaining Mark.’ A touch of Ronnie Knox and of Conrad and of Harold Acton. ‘The tongue has, correct me if I am wrong, seven follicles in adult life.’ Much of what he said would have been commonplace but for his exquisite delivery.”

That’s the art every first-rate actor and comedian masters. I think of Jack Benny – commonplaces delivered exquisitely. Waugh's diary entry for June 29, 1956 is cool and dry: “Early Mass. Then to Max Beerbohm’s funeral in St Paul’s. Ill attended. Lunched at Ritz with Teresa and Osbert Lancaster – raw steak.”

[Quoted diary passages are from The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (ed. Michael Davie, 1976).]

'To Slide Toward Another Possible World'

I resist any effort to proselytize me, whether in matters religious, political or literary, and so refuse to proselytize others. More than once I have declined to read a book I was told I “had to read.” To me, that feels like being ordered to love someone. It’s unnatural, and can’t be done. The closest I come to proselytizing is to share my enthusiasm for a book or writer, though even such gentle cheerleading is generally doomed to failure. How I wish people would read The Man Who Loved Children, Rasselas, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, The Noise of Time, Realms of Being, And Even Now, and Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. But that’s out of my hands.

I place Kim in the same category. Kipling’s novel is the most eminently rereadable book I know. I could pick it up any time and have another go, and I’m pleased to learn that the late Irving Howe shared my pleasure. Art, Politics, and Will (1977) is a collection of essays written in honor of Lionel Trilling, who had died in 1975. Howe’s contribution is “The Pleasures of Kim.” In his introduction, Howe reports that he and Trilling loved Kipling’s novel and maintained a friendly competition over who would be the first to write about it:

“Now that he is no longer here to read what I have written and then make one of his characteristic jokes, I can only hope his friends will share my feeling that to speak in praise of Kipling’s book is a way of recalling Lionel’s presence, the love he felt for this book, indeed, the love he felt for good and beautiful books.”

That’s the perfect way to “proselytize” for a book – and to remember a friend. I’ll resist the temptation to quote Howe’s essay at length and transcribe only this:

“Kim is at ease with the world, that unregenerate place which is the only one most of us know, and because at ease, it can allow itself to slide toward another possible world, one that some of us may yet come to know.”

'A Browner Shade the Evening of Life'

Most writers, even those we enjoy and admire, are fated to remain minor or disappear from memory if not always from the dustiest library shelves. This is an unhappy Darwinian truth. Literature is not a democracy, talent is not fame and good wishes count for nothing. For every Tennyson there are ten thousand Arthur O’Shaughnessys. Consider the case of the English poet Henry Austin Dobson (1840-1921). He studied to be a civil engineer, worked for the Board of Trade in London and turned himself into a poet adept at the triolet -- hardly a prescription for Parnassian immortality. That he titled his second collection of verse Proverbs in Porcelain probably didn’t help. By all accounts he was a good, conventional man who worked earnestly at his craft, and no one reads him.

I’m pleased to have found one book by Dobson that deserves to be remembered, at least briefly and by one reader: A Bookman’s Budget (Oxford University Press, 1917). The title grabbed me. In the preface, Dobson calls his little book a “desultory miscellany.” We might call it a commonplace book. Beware of his late-Victorian, high-caloric diction: “certain forgotten causeries,” “bookish versicles,” “a few original adversaria.” An interesting footnote: the book is dedicated to Arthur Waugh, father of Evelyn and Alec. Many of Dobson’s choice of selections are devoted to the theme of pending mortality (he died four years after the book was published). Dobson quotes a passage from Gibbon’s Memoirs of my Life and Writings:

“When I contemplate the common lot of mortality, I must acknowledge that I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life. The far greater part of the globe is overspread with barbarism or slavery: in the civilised world, the most numerous class is condemned to ignorance and poverty; and the double fortune of my birth in a free and enlightened country, in an honourable and wealthy family, is the lucky chance of an unit against millions. The general probability is about three to one, that a new-born infant will not live to complete his fiftieth year. I have now passed that age, and may fairly estimate the present value of my existence in the three-fold division of mind, body and estate.”

Dobson notes that Gibbon wrote this less than three years before his death at age fifty-six. Like the rest of us, Gibbon worked hard to be optimistic about longevity. In the late eighteenth century in England, life expectancy is estimated to have been about 40 years. Gibbon, notably plump, and sedentary in his habits, was already bucking the odds of his time. A few sentences later in his Memoir he writes:  

“The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. This day may possibly be my last: but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow about fifteen years.”

Gibbon then recalls a meeting he had with the French thinker Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (dead in 1757 at the age of ninety-nine):

“In private conversation, that great and amiable man added the weight of his own experience; and this autumnal felicity might be exemplified in the lives of Voltaire, Hume, and many other men of letters. I am far more inclined to embrace than to dispute this comfortable doctrine. I will not suppose any premature decay of the mind or body; but I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.”

'We Can Never Read the Bad Too Little'

Simon Leys was fond of quoting a passage from Schopenhauer devoted to what he called “the art of not reading”:

“It consists in our not taking up that which just happens to occupy the larger public at any time, such as political or literary pamphlets, novels, poems, and the like, which make such a stir . . .. On the contrary, we should bear in mind that whoever writes for fools always finds a large public; and we should devote the all too little time we have for reading exclusively to the works of the great minds of all nations and all ages . . . Only these really educate and instruct. We can never read the bad too little and the good too often.”

A self-evident truth, you’re saying to yourself. Life is short. We never have enough time for the important things. Of course we’ll read The City of God and put aside the latest James Patterson. My experience with reading has been a little different. Think of one’s intake of books across a lifetime as an inverted triangle. We start out indiscriminately, innocently, ignorant of literary history and with unformed critical standards. We are goatish omnivores. When young, only by reading bad books can we learn to identify good ones. My James Patterson at age twelve was Edgar Rice Burroughs, dead two years before I was born. And the Doc Savage series, published two decades before I arrived. I read them quickly, sometimes a book a day, and as quickly forgot them, bookish fast food. No regrets. I didn’t know any better, but the experience immunized me against the Patterson virus. I could never again be happy reading pulp.

Some will object: “Elitism! Snobbery!” I’ll admit to being a prig when young, reading some books (Sartre! Camus!) exclusively so I could say I had read them. That quickly turns tedious. Remember the inverted triangle: it narrows because you read not fewer books but better books. By the age of sixty-six, I’m mostly reading books I’ve already read, none of it pulp. In Simon Leys: Navigator Between Worlds (trans. Julie Rose, La Trobe University Press, 2017), Philippe Paquet writes:

“[H]e observed that ‘Waugh’s grace and dexterity with words’ revealed first ‘the primordial importance of style’ – for him. But, Leys qualified, Waugh nonetheless refuted the theory according to which, often, the success of a work does not depend on the ideas expressed in it. He reminded us that, for Waugh, ‘all literature implies moral standards and criticisms.’”

A lifetime of reading might be distilled like this: One learns to navigate between pure style on one shore and “moral standards and criticisms” on the other. Stick to the middle channel and avoid grounding on aesthetic shallows and didactic sandbars. The rest is smooth sailing.          

[The passage from Schopenhauer is taken from Parega and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays (1851), Chapter XXIV, “On Reading and Books.” Leys’ “Terror of Babel: Evelyn Waugh” is collected in The Hall of Uselessness (2013).] 

'I Read Histories of the Past and Live in Them'

After delivering one of his lectures, Michael Oakeshott was asked what he thought of England’s future in the European Union. The philosopher is said to have replied, “I don’t see that I am required to have an opinion on that.” Don’t mistake this for cowardice or absence of thought. The ego is an opinion-generating mechanism, one that calls into question the impossibility of perpetual motion. A man without opinions, or who is at least prudent about imposing them on the world, is well on his way to sainthood. In conversation, if I find myself sharing space with an industrious opinion-maker, especially if the topic du jour is politics, please don’t block my egress.

I thought of Oakeshott’s remark when I came across this observation in a letter Charles Lamb wrote to his friend Thomas Manning on March 1, 1800: “Public affairs—except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private,—I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in . . . I cannot make these present times present to me. I read histories of the past and live in them; although, to abstract sense, they are far less momentous than the noises which keep Europe awake.”

Charles Lamb, a foolish and profoundly wise little man, was born on this date, Feb. 10, in 1775.

'Watching the Shied Core'

Before reading The Whitsun Weddings years ago I was unaware shy can be used as a verb. When intransitive: “to throw a missile, esp. carelessly or by a jerk.” And when transitive: “to fling, throw, jerk, toss.” All the sources cited by the OED appear to be English, so perhaps the word has never successfully immigrated to the U.S. The etymology offered by the dictionary is unapologetically honest: “Of obscure origin.” It also seems stuck in time (Bentham, De Quincey, Thackeray), with the most recent citation dating from 1886. It took Larkin to salvage shy in “As Bad as a Mile”:

“Watching the shied core

Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,

Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

“Of failure spreading back up the arm

Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,

The apple unbitten in the palm.”

Larkin exceeds Beckett’s overused “fail better.” Like original sin, failure is built into human action. It’s a familiar Larkin theme, one he refutes by composing so concisely clever a poem out of such unpromising material – throwing refuse at the waste basket, something we do every day. He finished writing “As Bad as a Mile” on this date, Feb. 9, in 1960.

'Our Whole Life Is an Irish Sea'

In the portrait by Gilbert Jackson (1635), Robert Burton’s head appears pasted on top of someone else’s outsized body, an effect exaggerated by the ruffled collar. His hands are planted firmly on – what? The back of an upholstered chair? A pulpit? Between his hands is an open book. Scripture? His eyes are wide, his nose is long, and his expression is bright and not at all melancholy. He might be suppressing a laugh and he bears a notable resemblance to the late Anthony Hecht.     

Burton is author of the most inexhaustibly entertaining book in the language, the obvious choice of reading matter for marooned sailors. The first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it Is; with All the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes and Several Cures of It, published in 1621, contained 353,369 words. In each subsequent edition, Burton added more material. The sixth, published posthumously in 1651, with corrections and additions made before his death, The Anatomy contained 516,384 words. The book grew by accretion, like a galaxy. Burton’s prose, to use a word he favored, is anfractuous: “winding, sinuous, involved; roundabout, circuitous; spiral,” according to the OED, which cites Burton’s usage as the earliest in the language. His prose mirrors his mind, which was curious and accumulative. He loved catalogs and redundancy never bothered him. A characteristic passage begins, “Our whole life is an Irish sea, wherein there is nought to be expected but tempestuous storms and troublesome waves, and those infinite,” and continues:

“[W]e bangle away our best days, befool out our times, we lead a contentious, discontent, tumultuous, melancholy, miserable life; insomuch, that if we could foretell what was to come, and it put to our choice, we should rather refuse than accept of this painful life. In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another . . .”

It’s helpful to remember that Burton chose Democritus Junior as his persona, in homage to the Laughing Philosopher. When he is most flamboyant, laugh, because he probably is, melancholy or not. Anthony Powell’s use of Burton and his Anatomy in A Dance to the Music of Time is instructive. In 1977, several years after completing his twelve-novel cycle, Powell wrote in a piece for Radio Times collected in Miscellaneous Verdicts (1990):

“Burton’s importance, so it seems to me, is not in being proprietor of the Old Curiosity Shop, but as one of the first writers to grasp the innate oddness of human nature. He called this Melancholy, but what he meant really covered all behaviour. He was keenly aware of the manner in which personal existence can be put out of gear by some utterly trivial matter . . .”

We think of that as a modern insight, formulated by Proust or Freud, which is yet another example of our arrogant presentism. Where would the novel be without life’s way of being “put out of gear by some utterly trivial matter”? Think of Dickens, Svevo or Bellow. Burton, our ever instructive and amusing forebear, was born on this date, Feb. 8, in 1577, and died in 1640.