'The Picture That Imprisons It'

Memory is adhesive. Sub-memories adhere to it like lint on a suit. Take The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius’ 1654 painting. I first saw it in 1974 when it served as the cover image for Osip Mandelstam’s Selected Poems, published by Macmillan and translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. When New York Review Books reprinted the collection in 2004, they retained the painting on the cover. I wrote about it twelve years ago. In A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), Laurence Sterne devotes three chapters to a caged starling that reminds me of Fabritius’ goldfinch each time I read the novel. In “The Nonheroic Subject,” an essay in Still Life with a Bridle (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1991), Zbigniew Herbert addresses the Golden Age of Dutch painting, the seventeenth century. Without mentioning Fabritius he writes of that time and place:

“[T]here is no division in their art between what is great and what is small, what is important and unimportant, elevated and ordinary. They painted apples and the portraits of fabric shopkeepers, pewter plates and tulips, with such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison.”

The painting of a bird chained to a shelf has a power beyond its humble subject. Now I discover the English novelist Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) collected the essay “Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius” in Reads (1989). The paperback edition published by Cardinal (yet another bird) includes Fabritius’ painting on the cover. The only book by Brophy I have read is Prancing Novelist (1973), her critical biography of Ronald Firbank. Her essays are pleasantly wayward and contrarian. She seems to have had little respect for “house style,” bless her. The essay begins: “The small painting of a goldfinch by Carel Fabritius is one of the world’s memorable pictures: simple in the extreme yet deeply enigmatic.” She asks an art-historical question: “Is the picture a portrait?” and answers in a non-art-historical manner:

“The question, to which I think the answer is almost certainly ‘Yes!,’ is no whimsy. I was for some years on terms of talk-and-touch friendship with several wild and free urban pigeons. I learned what I imagine better-versed humans have always known: out of dozens of the same species you recognise the birds you are acquainted with exactly as you recognise your human acquaintances in a crowded room – by the individual cast of their faces.”

All true for those who pay attention, but hardly typical art criticism. I like it when a writer does something unconventional – e.g., talking to pigeons – but doesn’t make a big deal out of it and shifts the focus away from herself. Brophy was what we would today call an animal rights advocate. Such people range in temperament from the compassionately thoughtful to the clinically insane. Brophy once described herself as “seared by the cruelty and injustice humans inflict on their fellow animals.” In her Goldfinch essay, Brophy gives a brief history of bird enslavement. It seems like a genuinely nasty and unrewarding practice. She speculates interestingly and learnedly on the purpose of the painting, its functions and meaning, which are too complicated to briefly explain here but involve the amusement and instruction of an orphan boy. Do read the essay. For Brophy, Fabritius is a sort hero. She concludes:

“Masterly painter, schoolmaster, abused bird and instructed boy are all dead. The image abides, posing mechanistic puzzles, which one can try to answer by logical conjecture, and presenting the insoluble and almost unbearable enigma of the existence, once, of a captive bird and the existence, now, of the image of the bird looking out from the picture that imprisons it.”

'Reminding Me How Art Should Astound'

I wouldn’t say art is obligated to astound us, though much of the best art does, of course, in the same sense that an adept magician astounds us. I’m a sucker for good magic and good writing. I like the sensation of being dazzled by skill. Dante astounds. So does another Italian, Slydini. Astound is a pleasurable verb. OED: “to shock with alarm, surprise, or wonder; to strike with amazement.” (Shock and strike are violent verbs, not always pleasant.)  Astound suggests something marvelous in the etymological sense, and may even obligate us to feel envy: “I couldn’t do that.” Two poems astounded me. The first, by Matthew Arnold, I found thanks to Mike Juster:

“Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,

Of what we say we feel – below the stream,

As light, of what we think we feel – there flows

With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,

The central stream of what we feel indeed.”

In five unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, Arnold glosses human nature. Some will hear a prescient echo of Freud but Arnold knew what Sophocles knew, that we are self-deceiving mysteries. Our vaunted self-knowledge is a flattering myth. I was astounded a second time on Monday by “Divertimento,” a poem by Aaron Poochigian, a master of verbal dynamics. In a single poem he comes up with “Bronze-age Now,” “looky-here wind turbine” and “just, like, freaking wow.”  This is a guy at home in his language. He revels in it, even while describing that thoroughly unlovable feature of the American landscape, the wind farm. Here’s the conclusion of Poochigian’s poem:

    

“Bravissimo for the kinetic sculpture

dangling upward from a snag of earth

while juggling, with acquiescent rapture,

three arms’ worth

“of gale-force wind. Oh yeah, I wanna be

that gleam with crazy feelers going round.

Thank you, Ohio, for reminding me

how Art should astound.”

This is English you want to chew and savor. It’s artful but not arty. No cheap poeticisms. Poochigian talks about his appetite for words in an interview at Able Muse:

  

“I push myself to be Shakespearean in my vocabulary—not just to know a lot of words from different registers and provenances but to use them, too, in making twenty-first-century art. Before the Modernists, poets were not supposed to mix registers within a single work, and whole categories of words were considered ‘unpoetic.’ Then came the great break-down of barriers, for better and worse, and here we are. I do consciously mix, within a single poem, words that traditionally shouldn’t go together. I do it for shock value, yes, but also to achieve some specific aesthetic end.”

'Apple is Tragic'

A good apple is a meal, but good apples are rare. I lived for three years in the state of Washington and never once encountered an apple that wasn’t pulpy and bland. One of the things I miss most about upstate New York, where I lived for almost twenty years, is apple picking. The migrant pickers there are predominantly Jamaican. In 2003, our final autumn in the Northeast, at an orchard near Schuylerville, the pickers had a reggae band and played for customers. That was the day I discovered a variety of apple that has assumed legendary proportions in memory because I’ve never again seen it: the Kendall. The closest is the Honeycrisp, which is delicious but overpriced. I’m resigned to the market reality that good apples, like good tomatoes, will remain elusive.

The website American Life in Poetry, curated by Ted Kooser, has posted a poem by the Ohio poet Cathryn Essinger, “Summer Apples,” which begins memorably: “I planted an apple tree in memory / of my mother, who is not gone . . .” From there it trails away into sentimentality, but in his introduction Kooser remembers a much better poem, “The Crossed Apple” by Louise Bogan. She describes an unlikely hybrid, a potent myth:

“This apple’s from a tree yet unbeholden,

Where two kinds meet,

“So that this side is red without a dapple,

And this side’s hue

Is clear and snowy. It's a lovely apple.

It is for you.”

Yes, a good apple tastes good but it’s also ripe with associations, not all of them Judeo-Christian. Guy Davenport titled a 1984 story collection Apples and Pears. In “Shaker Light,” an essay in The Hunter Gracchus (1996), he writes: “Apple is the symbol of the Fall, pear of Redemption. Apple is the world, pear heaven. Apple is tragic.”

'No, No, My Girl, It Won't Do'

Read the passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson for this date, July 28, in 1763, for a strong suggestion of the sort of man he was. These unlikely friends had first met in Tom Davies’ bookshop at Covent Garden two months earlier. Johnson was fifty-three and author of the Dictionary and the Rambler and Idler essays; Boswell, twenty-two and a fledgling lawyer. He was keeping a diary and his life of dissolution was already well under way. The men met for supper that evening at the Turk’s Head coffee house on Gerrard Street in Soho, soon to be the meeting place for Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith and the other members of The Club. Boswell reports Johnson’s opening salvo:

“‘Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves. His excellence is strong sense; for his humour, though very well, is not remarkably good. I doubt whether The Tale of a Tub be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his usual manner.”

In his “Life of Swift” in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), Johnson would resume this theme of dubious authorship: “That Swift was its author, though it be universally believed, was never owned by himself, nor very well proved by any evidence.” His view of The Tale of a Tub had darkened in the subsequent decade: “[O]f this book charity may be persuaded to think that it might be written by a man of a peculiar character without ill intention; but it is certainly of dangerous example.” We can always admire a critic when he’s wrong, so long as he is interestingly wrong.

Johnson moved on to James Thomson (1700-48), author of The Seasons, and his evaluation is indulgent: “Thomson, I think, had as much of the poet about him as most writers. Every thing appeared to him through the medium of his favourite pursuit. He could not have viewed those two candles burning but with a poetical eye.”

Next up, the Christian piety of Hugo Grotius and Sir Isaac Newton, the latter of whom “set out an infidel, and came to be a very firm believer.” Boswell offers no transitions between topics (they are irrelevant, after all, in the best conversations). Johnson suggests Boswell “perambulate” Spain: “I love the University of Salamancha” (where more than a century later, Unamuno would serve as professor of Greek and Classics, and later as rector). Johnson says of Boswell’s friend Samuel Derrick (“The King of Bath”): “Had he not been a writer, he must have been sweeping the crossings in the streets, and asking halfpence from every body that past.” Finally, Boswell gives us a glimpse of Johnson’s compassionate understanding of human nature:

“As we walked along the Strand to-night, arm in arm, a woman of the town accosted us, in the usual enticing manner. ‘No, no, my girl, (said Johnson) it won’t do.’ He, however, did not treat her with harshness, and we talked of the wretched life of such women; and agreed, that much more misery than happiness, upon the whole, is produced by illicit commerce between the sexes.”

'One of the Literary Vices of the Time'

Nothing is easier than ranking literary works according to some unstated and entirely subjective set of standards. This accounts for the profusion of book lists. Let’s be clear: such lists sometimes have merit and often are entertaining. I read them not so much because the list-maker carries authority with me, but because I hope to learn of a previously unknown title worth reading. Often, however, one suspects book lists are fraudulent, assembled by people who haven’t read the books in question but wish to appear formidably (or fashionably) bookish. A similar motive drives politicians when reporters ask them to name their favorite books. It’s reassuring to know that in some quarters a reputation for reading books still carries snobbish cachet.

My late friend David Myers was fond of making lists. Occasionally I even helped him. It was a lark, a way to share enthusiasms, not an exercise in canon-building. David and I bickered over some titles. At my urging he removed something by Philip K. Dick, who couldn’t write an interesting sentence with a pistol to his head. David also posted a list he was cocky enough to title “Greatest Novel Ever.” Among the fifty books on the list are four I still haven’t read even after they received David’s imprimatur. A list is not a mandate. David makes that clear when formulating his criteria: “These are my favorites—the best-written, the most provoking and memorable, the titles I am likeliest to reread when stuck between books.”

These thoughts came while I was looking up something in C.H. Sisson’s English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971). Sisson quotes from a letter Thomas Hardy sent in 1914 to an editor at the New York Times:

“In answer to your question of which is the best short poem I have read in the English language I can only say that I fail to see how there can be a ‘best’ poem, long or short; that is, one best in all circumstances. This attempt to appraise by comparison is, if you will allow me to say so, one of the literary vices of the time, only a little above the inquiry who is the biggest poet, novelist or prizefighter, although not quite so low down as that deepest deep of literary valuation, ‘who is the biggest seller.’”

Sisson describes Hardy’s pithy refusal as a “short critical masterpiece.”

'A Terrific Old Softie'

“Say the words Samuel Johnson’s London and we conjure an image of England’s first great age of liberty, and enlightenment, and all-round fun.”

So writes Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and leader of its Conservative Party. I have no stake in British politics (or American, for that matter), but a man who can revel in Dr. Johnson and associate him with the spirit of fun (that is, of the eighteenth century) may have a reasonable chance to at least be entertaining. Perhaps he will also revive the line of PMs (Disraeli, Churchill, Thatcher)‎ who could write with memorable flair. Johnson devotes a chapter to the other Johnson in Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World (Harper Press, 2011).

Johnson’s Johnson is a study in self-projection. Johnson I is what Johnson II hopes he will become – courageous, outspoken, defiantly independent, compassionate, witty and pugnacious. He is “the great harrumphing voice of political incorrectness, a literary John Bull, whose views today would be considered outré to the point of unacceptability.” Johnson idealizes Johnson’s bluntness and willingness to insult the conspicuously stupid and intellectually or morally crude. “For all their famous hypocrisy,” Johnson II writes, “the British also love a person who seems honest about his pleasures, however vulgar.” Can you think of an American politician willing to write like this, assuming he could? But after all, “Beneath the veneer of blustering intellectual intolerance, he was, in fact, a terrific old softie.” We would like to assume that every literate person has read Johnson I. It appears Johnson II actually has, and thought about what he read:

“Who reads Rasselas, his allegorical yarn about a prince of Abyssinia? He wrote one play, a tragedy called Irene, in which the heroine was garrotted on stage in the final act, provoking such howls of merriment that it folded after nine days. TS Eliot argued that he should be ranked among the major English poets, and yet there cannot be an A-level student who studies ‘London’ or ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’. His essays were hailed as masterpieces then and ever since, and yet they are exactly the kind of volumes that council libraries are selling off for 10p or sending to landfill. As for his poems in Latin and Greek, I expect their audience in modern literary London is exactly nil.”

'I Have Escaped a Lot of Grief'

I credit Eric Hoffer with moving me to become, after a protracted wayward delay, a newspaper reporter. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped them and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, in particular his first, The True Believer. What moved me, and still move me, were Hoffer’s commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, and his working-class origins. Not that I could have identified any of those qualities when I was sixteen. Apart from my teachers, I knew no one who had gone to college. Degrees still mean nothing to me. Hoffer seemed like a guy I could talk to. He was a longshoreman. My father was an ironworker, my mother a tax clerk. Hoffer never intimidated me. He was my model autodidact and I envied his independence. In his biography, Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (2013), Tom Bethell quotes his man as saying:  

“I have escaped a lot of grief by not being able to take myself seriously. It has never occurred to me that I had to have a philosophy; that I was face to face with ‘the silence of the universe,’ that I had a duty to defend or denounce, etc. What I wanted was to think things through, to know the reason of things. I loathed Hitler and Stalin and Lenin and raged at the brazen hypocrisies of Communism.”

People who take themselves seriously, who think their wishes are important, end up causing most of the problems in the world. I’m reminded of that character in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party -- a psychiatrist, of all things -- who says:

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

This dovetails nicely with another Hoffer observation reported by Bethell: “A deadly seriousness emanates from all other forms of life. The yell of pain and of fear man has in common with the beasts, but he alone smiles and laughs.”

Hoffer was born on this date, July 25, in 1898, and died May 21, 1983.

'Laughter and Humility Can Then Go Together'

The Winter-Spring 1942 issue of The Mark Twain Quarterly is dedicated to a most un-Twain-like writer, George Santayana, who was celebrating his seventy-eighth birthday.

If we were to liken him to an American novelist, it might be more productive to consider Henry James. As Santayana’s biographer, John McCormick, writes: “He was not elusive but fastidious, one whose distinctions were subtle but wonderfully available.” And yet, Santayana joined the International Mark Twain Society in 1927 and it awarded him the Mark Twain Medal for his sole novel, The Last Puritan (1936). The Santayana issue includes an aphorism written by the philosopher for the Society’s Greeting Book, one that Twain might have approved of: “One of the best fruits of reason is to perceive how irrational we are: laughter and humility can then go together.”

Among the other contributions to the issue is “Santayana at Harvard: 1882-1912” by Shohig Terzian, who compiled a bibliography of Santayana’s work included in The Philosophy of George Santayana (ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, 1940). Terzian shows another side of Santayana, who was renowned for his emotional and philosophical detachment:

“Undoubtedly his daring idea of fellowship between the faculty and students led to some difficulty. At one time, he devoted his Thursday evenings to a poetry organization which held meetings in his rooms; readings by members were followed by heated discussions -- and beer drinking! The principle underlying these informal gatherings of fun and friendship was contrary to the traditional idea which separated faculty and students into two distinct categories.”

Another essay is “The Essential Santayana” by G. W. Howgate who, in 1938, published a book-length study of the philosopher, George Santayana. Howgate is quotable, and his Santayana sounds almost like Max Beerbohm:

“The very structure of his style, crisp, aphoristic, urbane, is that of a man gifted in witty remark and humorous observation. A love of paradox is the possession of those, like Santayana who see and enjoy the incongruity in life.”

And this: “There have always been firm loyalties in Santayana concealed from those who see him only as an ironic spectator or a charming dilettante. In fact, the irony has grown with age.”

And one more: “Although he has chosen to be detached or ironic in his writings rather than sentimental, although he has hidden his feelings with something of the stoicism of his admired Englishman, there is a deal of tenderness and pity in Santayana. He has told us there are scenes in King Lear, in Dickens, and in Proust he must skip, and he has always felt that tragedy is too real and too unlovely a thing for literary treatment unless transformed, as with the Greeks, into poetic beauty.”

The Mark Twain Quarterly was edited by Cyril Coniston Clemens (1902-1999), the third cousin twice removed of Mark Twain. Clemens wrote to Santayana proposing a book to honor the philosopher’s upcoming birthday. On this date, July 24, in 1941, Santayana replied:

“I am sure nobody wants to contribute to such a book and nobody wants to read it. Why should you employ your undoubted abilities in order to get the unwilling to write and the unwilling to buy, if not to read? Put it off at least until my death or until my 80th birthday, when perhaps the air will be purer.”

Santayana lived another ten years.

'They Love a Jest That Is Their Own'

Patrick Delany (1686-1768) was an eloquent Irish clergyman, renowned for his sermons in an age when sermons were judged popular literature, and a close friend of Swift, who called him “the most eminent preacher we have.” In her biography, Jonathan Swift (1998), Victoria Glendinning reminds us that those who dish it out ought to be prepared to take it – their own medicine, that is:

“Political satire at the expense of governments or institutions is one thing. Personal invective is another. Swift was an expert at both. He himself did not take kindly to being the butt of the wit or satire of others. Early in his close friendship with Dr. Patrick Delany, Delany made some sally at Swift’s expense, and laughed loudly at his own wit.”

As Glendenning puts it, Delany was “reproved by Swift in verse.” In 1718, Swift wrote “To Mr. Delany,” which includes these lines:

“If what you said I wish unspoke,

Twill not suffice it was a joke:

Reproach not, though in jest, a friend

For those defects he cannot mend;

His lineage, calling, shape, or sense,

If nam’d with scorn, gives just offence.”

According to Pat Rogers, editor of Swift's Complete Poems (1983), "To Mr. Delany" concerns the "rules of raillery" (Swift's phrase -- consider it in the context of Twitter), which he believed Thomas Sheridan, their mutual friend, had violated. An earlier couplet is worth considering: “Talents for conversation fit / Are humour, breeding, sense, and wit.” Doesn’t that remain true today? Swift distinguishes humor and wit in traditional eighteenth-century fashion: “Our conversation to refine, / Humour and wit must both combine.” Swift might be accused of hypocrisy when he reprimands Sheridan for his satirical jabs. But Swift was big enough to remain his friend and wise enough to grudgingly admire his chutzpah:  

“When jests are carried on too far,

And the loud laugh begins the war,

You keep your countenance for shame,

Yet still you think your friend to blame:

For, though men cry they love a jest,

’Tis but when others stand the test;

And (would you have their meaning known)

They love a jest that is their own.”

'He Never Took People Casually'

Happy serendipity is finding a book you never knew existed, devoted to a previously unknown subject. At Kaboom Books I was browsing in the Books on Books section and found a slender, turquoise-colored paperback with the title on the spine all in upper-case lettering: FRANCESCO ALFREDO GIUSEPPE SCIOSCIA. On the cover is a drawing of a triangle-shaped tree and words that might appear on a gravestone:

“Born January 31, 1922, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Died July 10, 1993, New York, New York”

I had no idea who Scioscia was but wondered if he was related to the Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989). No, he was one of twelve siblings born to Italian immigrants in the United States. He served in the Army before becoming a sales executive at what is now HarperCollins, and was proprietor of riverrun bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. The book is a collection of tributes from family, friends and colleagues, a Festschrift published in 1996 for a man who seems to have been universally loved, one of humanity’s genuine nice guys. John Dillman, the owner of Kaboom, who has been selling books for almost half a century, first in New Orleans, now in Houston, said he hadn’t heard of Scioscia either. In her introduction, Scioscia’s widow, Mary, makes it clear her husband was a reader, a lover of books, not merely a retailer:

“We’d been on a George Eliot binge during our last year together. We read Adam Bede and Middlemarch and were 300 pages into Daniel Deronda when Frank had to be taken by ambulance to St. John’s Hospital. He finished the remaining 600 pages in the hospital while attached to various machines, and kept apologizing for getting ahead of me. The Vicar of Wakefield was the last book he read. He found it so amusing that he read parts aloud to our son, Charlie, when he went to visit his father at New York University Hospital three days before he died.”

Dana Gioia recalls walking into Scioscia’s bookstore in the late nineteen-seventies: “When Frank saw me shopping the poetry section, he started up a conversation [A rare event in my experience. If a book dealer engages in conversation, it’s usually the customer who initiates it.], and I knew almost at once that we would become friends—not casual acquaintances, not literary chums, but genuine and abiding friends.” Gioia inventories his friend’s “many gifts –his charm, his intelligence, his humor, and his unfailing good will,” adding: “What seemed so special about him was mysterious totality, the tangible presence of a soul so deep and generous, and yet so sharp and playful.”

Fran Manushkin, the children’s book writer and an early reader of Anecdotal Evidence, recalls casually mentioning to Scioscia that she had recently discovered the work of Willa Cather: “The next day, when I came to work, I found three Knopf hardcovers of Willa Cather’s novel on my desk. They were early printings with beautiful green-cloth covers. Gazing at them I felt as if a kindly providence had heard my wish and fulfilled it.

“I picked up the phone and called Frank to thank him. He sounded pleased but diffident, as if his generosity was not at all remarkable. Even though I saw Frank rarely, his attitude toward me and others can only be described as an I-Thou experience. He never took people casually.”

[Also at Kaboom I found a 1952 second edition of Henry Green’s “interim autobiography,” Pack My Bag, published by Hogarth Press, and a paperback of Timothy Steele’s Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986).]

'There Was a Best Way of Saying Anything'

In his essay on Robert Louis Stevenson in Literary Distractions (1958), Msgr. Ronald Knox addresses an interesting phenomenon: our literary tastes as they ripen and wither across the decades. Knox rightly describes Stevenson as that rarest of writers, “the companion of a lifetime; you pick up the habit in childhood, and you must be in your second childhood before you depart from it.” Writing in 1949 when he was sixty-one, Knox says: “Of all modern authors, I find [Stevenson] most surely re-readable.” In my case I would substitute Swift and Defoe, two writers I still read and love almost sixty years after I first encountered them. My devotion to Stevenson has been less faithful, and today I prefer his essays to his fiction.

An adolescent who reads science fiction should be lauded; an adult who does so should seek professional help. It’s a childish genre written by and for the immature. It’s a phase many of us experience on the cusp of puberty -- age-appropriate but soon outgrown naturally when we put away childish things. Like Swift, Defoe and Melville, Stevenson has been marketed as a writer of children’s books. They are, I would argue, so long as we acknowledge that each matures as we mature. Re-reading will not exhaust them. Knox offers a slightly different understanding:

“[C]orrosion as well as erosion affects our literary loyalties; the mere lapse of time, the slowing down of life’s pulses, can breed infidelity. I do not mean simply that we outgrow our calf love for this author or that; a Pater or a Swinburne. I mean that the masterpieces we still admire no longer have the power to thrill us; use has staled them, and our worship, however sincere, has grown mechanical. We acknowledge their merit, we recommend them to others, but for ourselves the charm has vanished; perhaps years hence, perhaps never to be recaptured.”

That precisely describes my relationship with several writers, starting with James Joyce. I was an acolyte when young, a true believer. Most often I’ve read Ulysses, probably four or five times, and that seems to be enough. It no longer has the power to thrill, as Knox says, and I think I’ve solved most of its puzzles. Once I hacked my way through Finnegans Wake, but never again. The only Joyce I can foresee reading one more time is Dubliners. Perhaps Joyce is a true YA (young adult) writer. I acknowledge his merit, of course, but “the charm has vanished.” And yet I expect to read Proust again. Back to Knox on Stevenson:

“[F]or Stevenson writing was not merely putting down marks on a piece of paper, to arouse impressions in the mind. He was a man who delighted in the sound of speech, and the written word was but the score of a musical composition; there must be no sentence which was not worthy of being read aloud. Prose was not, any more than verse, merely a question of balancing your sentences right, of selecting the precise word that did justice to your meaning, of avoiding the clumsy and the cacophonous. It had its own moods and cadences; the old distinction between prose as saying the right thing in the right way and poetry as saying the best thing in the best way was a blunder. There was a best way of saying anything, in prose as in poetry.”

'Nor Cast One Longing Lingering Look Behind'

Msgr. Ronald Knox begins his essay “Birmingham Revisited,” collected in Literary Distractions (1958), like this:

“It is alleged by a friend of my family that I used to suffer from insomnia at the age of four; and that when she asked me how I managed to occupy my time at night I answered ‘I lie awake and think of the past.’”

Knox, a Roman Catholic priest and son of an Anglican bishop, is one of the last century’s unacknowledged masters of English prose. Like Max Beerbohm, Knox calibrates his words until they attain the precise edge of irony he seeks. The passage above arouses in this reader pensive amusement with a hint of sadness. The notion of a four-year-old even having a past to contemplate is funny – and poignant. We’ve all known boys and girls who carry the gravitas of old men and women. They seem to inhabit two ages and have access to precocious wisdom.

Nige has been visiting cemeteries and reading Thomas Gray, the poet I thought of when reading Knox’s essay. Knock “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” if you wish; call it sentimental, pious or sententious, but the poem has touched millions of people, most of whom have not been poets or critics but thoughtful, private, non-aligned readers who value music and consolation. This stanza recalls the four-year-old Knox:     

“For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?”

Nige speaks for generations of Gray’s readers: “[Y]ou wonder how many poets of the twentieth century had such appeal, convincing the reader that his lines reflect the things the reader has always him(her)self felt – Kipling of course, and later Betjeman, none of the modernists except maybe sometimes Eliot . . . maybe sometimes Auden and Yeats, even Larkin once in a while? But the century produced nothing with such strong and enduring appeal as Gray’s Elegy. Or did it?”

'Hell of Course Will Have a Library'

“The act of reading—office memos, newspaper articles on trade and monetary policy, and bureaucratic bumpf apart—should if possible never be separable from pleasure.”

A reader asks why I so often link reading and pleasure. He admits that for him reading is often a chore, an occasional obligation that sometimes can’t be avoided. He speculates that the origin of his distaste for books is rooted in family and education. His parents didn’t read, books were largely absent from his childhood home, and reading was a form of punishment in school. My history is similar but I chose another response to indifference and occasional contempt. I’m contrary by nature, a personality bent I accepted when very young. My parents smoke? I’ve never once put a cigarette in my mouth. They can but don’t read? I’ll spend the rest of my life with books.   

So, why is reading a pleasure? I’ve never in any organized fashion analyzed it. It’s an unexpectedly complex question because the pleasures of reading are many. I like narrative, the charms of pure story. I love language artfully deployed. There’s no better way to meet an interesting sensibility than to read a good book, one that lends life an interesting texture. Readers aren’t “better people” than non-readers but they often (not always) make better company. In my experience, non-readers tend to be dull and mulish. Their worlds are small. I know a middle-aged man who hasn’t read a book since high school, if then. His idea of pleasure is watching Marvel super-hero movies, and they supply the only cultural references I’ve heard him make. The give and take of conversation is beyond him. His company is tedious, and part of me pities him.     

 

The passage quoted at the top is from “The Bookish Life,” an essay Joseph Epstein published last year in First Things. He’s not proselytizing, thank God, for books or reading. That doesn’t work. Rather, he’s celebrating them. He even revels in the pleasures of slow reading. Like me, he never enrolled in the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program:    

“In the risky generalization department, slow readers tend to be better readers—more careful, more critical, more thoughtful. I myself rarely read more than twenty-five or thirty pages of a serious book in a single sitting. Reading a novel by Thomas Mann, a short story by Chekhov, a historical work by Theodor Mommsen, essays by Max Beerbohm, why would I wish to rush through them? Savoring them seems more sensible. After all, you never know when you will pass this way again.”

Savoring, by definition, implies a pleasure-driven activity. How good to find pleasure in an activity that carries no risk apart from asthenopia. Epstein writes:

“[T]he next life, which, I like to think, will surely provide a well-stocked library. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure I want any part of it. Hell of course will have a library, but one stocked exclusively with science fiction, six-hundred-odd page novels by men whose first name is Jonathan, and books extolling the 1960s.”

  

[As an old-fashioned man of letters, Epstein has made a career rooted in the love of books. The theme runs through many of his essays and reviews. See “The Pleasures of Reading,” collected in Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (1989).]

'Trundle Me Round the Town'

Females are a rare breed in my family. My father had two brothers, no sisters. My mother, five brothers, no sisters. I have a brother and no sisters, three sons and no daughters. Even my dog and cat are male. More than the average man, my understanding of women and girls is theoretical not empirical, sometimes embarrassingly so. I wanted sisters and daughters but the Y chromosome had its way.

One of the reasons I value Keats’ letters even more than most of his poetry is the big-brother affection and playfulness he always shows his sister, Frances Mary “Fanny” Keats. She was born in 1803, eight years after her oldest brother, and died in 1889, sixty-eight years after him. On July 4, 1818, while on a six-hundred-mile walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, the poet writes to fifteen-year-old Fanny:

“I am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would I if it were not for being tired after my day’s walking, and ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a Hoop, without waking me.”

Recall that Keats was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him in less than three years, and that had already killed his mother and would kill his brother Tom later that year. Yet he manages to keep his letter to Fanny loving and amusing. Keats had a comic gift, one we would hardly suspect if we read only his poetry. He continues in his letter:

“Then I get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like Larks to me — A Batch of Bread I make no more ado with than a sheet of parliament; and I can eat a Bull’s head as easily as I used to do Bull’s eyes. I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily as a Pen’orth of Lady’s fingers. Ah dear I must soon be contented with an acre or two of oaten cake a hogshead of Milk and a Clothes-basket of Eggs morning noon and night when I get among the Highlanders.”

Keats loved food. It appears often in his poems and letters – yet another fact that scuttles the image of Keats as a hypersensitive wraith. During the same Scottish journey he writes to his dying brother Tom that “we dined yesterday on dirty bacon, dirtier eggs and dirtiest potatoes with a slice of salmon.”  On Aug. 6, 1818, he writes to Mrs. James Wylie, his brother George’s mother-in-law, that he’s eating oat-cakes and drinking whiskey:

“Sometimes, when I am rather tired, I lean rather languishingly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down from her palfrey [OED: “a horse for ordinary riding (as distinct from a warhorse); esp. a small saddle horse for a woman”] in passing, approach me, with—her saddle-bags, and give me—a dozen or two capital roast beef sandwiches.”

In 1826, Fanny Keats married a Spaniard, Valentin Maria Llanos y Gutiérrez, who had admired the poet’s work and visited him in Rome three days before his death. Fanny and her husband left England in 1833 and never returned. From 1861 to 1864, they lived in Italy, where she befriended Joseph Severn, who had accompanied Keats on his final journey to Italy and was with him when he died in Rome.

'Cranks Live by Theory, Not by Pure Desire'

We may look back on this era as the Age of the Crank. We’re forever congratulating ourselves for having such a swell system of education, but crackpot theories proliferate.

We honor experts so long as they confirm our pet theories. On every imaginable subject, people are earnest and eager to share their earnestness. Irony? There’s plenty of that, too, but not when it comes to someone’s obsession du jour. Interestingly the OED speculates that, though the origin of crank is uncertain, it may derive from the adjective cranky, “of capricious or wayward temper, difficult to please; cross-tempered, awkward; ‘cross.’” Cranks tend to embody those qualities and few are burdened with a sense of humor.

The Dictionary’s definition of crank is carefully euphemistic: “a person with a mental twist; one who is apt to take up eccentric notions or impracticable projects; esp. one who is enthusiastically possessed by a particular crotchet or hobby; an eccentric, a monomaniac.” Those final two synonyms, at least by connotation, are distinctly different. True eccentrics are England’s gift to the world. I associate tolerance for eccentricity, benign individual difference, with democratic societies. Eccentrics, I think, are not popular with pure-bred cranks. Monomaniacs, as the word suggests, are more strictly pathological. They are angry, joyless and potentially dangerous. You can’t have a conversation with a monomaniac. Among Hitler’s less malign qualities was monomania.      

In A Casual Commentary (1925) Rose Macaulay devotes a brief essay to the subject of cranks. She shrewdly observes that “unsatisfied desire appears to be the essence of crankism.” I’m reminded of the Progressive Labor Party. At anti-Vietnam War rallies, its members dressed like door-to-door missionaries, in short-sleeve white shirts and narrow black ties. They were quiet and never smiled, and the rowdier elements left them alone. They were Maoists, the most dangerous of cranks.  “Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire,” Macaulay writes, suggesting a handy way to diagnose them. They possess a “lack of proportion, the obsession with one desire or one principle to the minimising or exclusion of others; exaggeration, in fact.” Given life circumstances and one’s waning tolerance for the ridiculous, all of us are potential recruits to crankism.

'A Looking-Glass, Distorting but Powerful'

“What turns me off in reading is writing that doesn’t respect the need for appealing sound, writing that’s too plain, that doesn’t surprise me.”

But the solution isn’t to tart up the language. “Appealing sound” – call it musicality, with an emphasis on rhythm, bolstered by concision and precision – isn’t cosmetic. William Gass had an alliteration tic, the simplest of poetic effects to manufacture. No one seems to have noticed how easily his prose can be mistaken for Thomas Wolfe’s. You can tell when a writer comes up with a particularly choice purple patch and is self-huggingly proud of himself. The passage quoted at the top is from an interview with Maryann Corbett, a poet, though she doesn’t specify prose or verse.

I have nothing against plain language, which I would distinguish from language that is flat, clunky, vague or generally tin-eared. I’m reminded of a contemporary critic who champions Gass and similar writers, and whose prose reads like cold oatmeal. Daniel Defoe mastered the plain style in prose and Yvor Winters in verse. Over the weekend I read From a View to a Death (1933), in which Anthony Powell uses the plain style with comic intent. Here is the novel’s opening:

“They drove uncertainly along the avenue that led to the house, through the bars of light that fell between the tree-trunks and made the shadows of the lime-trees strike obliquely across the gravel. The navy-blue car was built high off the ground and the name on its bonnet recalled a bankrupt, forgotten firm of motor-makers. Inside, the car was done up in a material like grey corduroy, with folding seats in unexpected places, constructed liberally to accommodate some Edwardian Swiss Family Robinson. This was a period piece. An exhibit. The brakes had ceased to work long since. On the wall in front, immediately behind the chauffeur’s neck, which was goose-flesh in spite of the heat, there was a German silver vase for flowers, and below it a looking-glass, distorting but powerful.”

I like soft-spoken, seemingly matter-of-fact prose that smuggles in implications, never cracks a knowing smile and lays off the lilting alliteratives.

'Sin City Takes Its Ease'

I first saw Texas in May 2004, and as we made our descent, even before the plane landed, I had to jettison an illusion, or call it a stereotype. Houston is not a John Ford desert, as I expected, but one of the greenest American cities, dense with oaks and pines. Texas suffers under two sets of preconceived notions: it is both Southern and Western, with emphasis on the former. It was one of the eleven Confederate states. Transplanted Northerners have a lot of prejudices to flush from their system. In any other country Texas would be five or six countries, a veritable Yugoslavia.

In my experience, the next illusion to be discarded was my misunderstanding of what Turner Cassity describes in his poem “Across the River and into the Sleaze” (The Destructive Element, 1998). There’s sleaze aplenty here. On that first ride from the airport I saw, on the frontage roads along the interstates, numerous dealers in what is still called “adult entertainment.” I expected Texas to be a Baptist republic. Parts of it are but not Houston. Rawness and squalor coexist here with gentility, rectitude and even middle-American blandness. Houston, an inexhaustibly interesting place, has no zoning laws. A funeral parlor adjoins a gas station which adjoins a storefront church and an ice house, with a taqueria-on-wheels parked out front. Cassity, a native of Mississippi and longtime resident of Georgia, opens his poem with these lines:

“Across the river, or the county line,

Or just outside the city limits, or—

Juarez and Matamoros—out of reach

In Mexico, Sin City takes its ease:

A mockery of planned communities,

the city beautiful, greenbelts, Our Town,

Park cities, biosphere, the Habitat.

It is the triumph of the frontage road,

An ozone hole its bright Tiepolo.

Before we damn it as unnatural

We might do well to bear in mind asphalt

Is just as natural as grass. They both

Come up out of the ground.”

Cassity writes in full contrarian mode. He never met a pious P.C. truism he didn’t detest and wish to violate. He continues:

“And as for vice . . .

It was a garden where the Fall took place.

The double serpent of the Interstate

Hangs high his lighted fruits on either side;

Their promise without season of a flesh

Always renewed. If ripeness is not all

It’s more of it than greenness, and so too

Is rot. The porn-shop fronts are shining scales;

The two hides glitter at the outer edge. . .”

'I Will Complain, Yet Praise'

We all know, and try to avoid, that growing population that speaks exclusively in one of two modes: order-giving or complaining. They are toddlers costumed as grownups. Like young children, they can be at once charming and tediously annoying. Even their praise is complaint in disguise. Their world is an unsatisfactory place. Just ask them. “Complaint quickly tires, however elegant or however just,” Dr. Johnson writes in The Rambler #73. Just as my hangnail is more important than your cancer, so does my complaint outweigh yours on the cosmic scales of unfairness.

Not that complaint ought to be banished. You might even suggest that I am complaining about complaint. It is, however, merely one violin in the orchestra. We and the world are more complicated than that. Like the world, we are heterogenous. In Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014), John Drury contrasts Herbert’s “Bitter-sweet” with Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “Its lower key matches the maturity of its acceptance: its ‘yes’ to life. Herbert settles for life’s ambivalence . . .”:    

“Ah my deare angrie Lord,

Since Thou dost love, yet strike;

Cast down, yet help afford;

Sure I will do the like.

                                   

“I will complain, yet praise;

I will bewail, approve:

And all my sowre-sweet dayes

I will lament, and love.”

The world is more than binary, and so are we.

'On Fitting Language to His Thought'

J.V. Cunningham died on March 30, 1985 at age seventy-three. A few years earlier, Guy Davenport had written that Cunningham’s poems were “as well made as wristwatches,” though unsympathetic critics, always interested in sounding fashionably up-to-date, characterized them as anachronistic. C.H. Sisson once wrote in an autobiographical essay that “for about a year (circa 1932) I must have been contemporary.” Something comparable might be said about Cunningham, though the date in question might has been 1620 or 1820. As a poet, Cunningham was contemporaneous with Ben Jonson and Walter Savage Landor, and absolutely modern.

In its Autumn 1985 issue, the Chicago Review published “A Tribute to J.V. Cunningham,” with contributions from six poets. All are worth reading, which means having access to Jstor or a university library. Here are excerpts from each.

Robert Pinsky, “The Poetry of J.V. Cunningham”: “Because they are funny, immediately accessible, and patently masterful in execution, the epigrams that fall into this category -- incisive, witty, judicatory -- seem effective ways to introduce people who are not yet Cunningham-addicts to his work. I have often quoted them to friends for that purpose; but having done that, one worries that the new reader, whether through wavering attention or prejudice, may think that Cunningham is merely a funny man, the author of a kind of light verse [hardly the severest criticism imaginable].”

W.S. Di Piero, “Four Notions”: “It’s difficult to sound generous when describing Cunningham’s poetic gifts. A plain style. A puritan discipline for worrying the consequences of pleasure. A Roman Catholic terror of (and attraction for) the Absolute. Brevity. An austere speech whose power lies in impassioned denials. Definition by exclusion. Brevity. A belief that practice proceeds from definition, so that no definition, no outline of figure, gets redrawn or revised in the process of composition.”

Thom Gunn, “J.V.C.”:

“He concentrated, as he ought,

On fitting language to his thought

And getting all the rhymes correct,

Thus exercising intellect

In such a space, in such a fashion,

He concentrated into passion.”

Raymond Oliver, “Epigrams on Mortality” (“in homage to J. V. Cunningham”):

“1. From Youth to Age”

“We stay the same,

Yet not - as an arc,

Cast from a main

Of water, starts

Compact and small,

Then peaks, then down

Scattering falls

Unshaped to the ground.”

“2. To JVC”

“You saw me last ‘too long ago,’ you wrote;

‘Perhaps we'll meet again.’ We didn’t. Now

You are a text to read, its final note

Resonant in my mind. Death won--but how?

You’d caught him in your lines. But he, inane,

Deaf to your words--the beautiful, the true

Will not confront the mind, only the brain.

Death was no worthy adversary for you.”

Alan Shapiro, “The Early Seventies and J.V. Cunningham”: “After an interminable silence in which I contemplated some alternative career, Cunningham held my poem up and said in that low, almost whispering voice of his, ‘This is nothing more than spilled ink,’ and proceeded to the next poem.”

Kenneth Fields, “Barbed Wire: A Tribute to J.V. Cunningham”: “A modern, a man of his own time and experience who insists on the novelty of his own statements, Cunningham himself has best characterized his independent classicism: ‘The only new poetic style since 1930 has been, for good or ill, my own.”

I still hope the Library of America gets serious and finally publishes a volume devoted to the Stanford School of Poets – Yvor Winters, Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, Janet Lewis, Helen Pinkerton and the others.