'We Have Reasons to Be Cheerful'

David Byrne has launched an online magazine titled, in defiance of the Zeitgeist, Reasons to be Cheerful. We should applaud him. There’s something admirably courageous or foolhardy about the effort. The magazine’s content focuses almost exclusively on problems and solutions that might be called social or political (though nonpartisan) – nuclear energy, urban traffic congestion, solar energy. I confess to not having read any of the stories to their conclusion, but that’s beside the point. I wouldn’t read such stories in any publication. What I have read in the magazine contains no whining, the lingua franca of our age. The obvious emphasis is on practical, evidence-based, non-ideologically-dependent solutions, an approach familiar to me because I work with engineers. Byrne deserves respect, if not always agreement. Rolling Stone quotes him as saying:

“Nothing changes when you’re numb. So, as a kind of remedy, and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news. Not schmaltzy, feel-good news, but stuff that reminded me, ‘Hey, there’s positive stuff going on! People are solving problems and it’s making a difference!’ I began telling others about what I’d found.”

Cheerful has a range of meanings in English. The OED, which dates the word’s earliest appearance to the fifteenth century, gives four:    

1.       “Conducive to happiness, contentment, or good spirits; cheering, comforting, uplifting; spec. (of colours, surroundings, etc.) bright and pleasant.”

2.      “Full of or expressing good spirits; light-hearted, happy, merry, glad. In later use frequently: spec. jovial or lively in appearance or behaviour.”

3.      “Of an event, period of time, etc.: characterized by happiness or good spirits.”

4.      “Ready, willing; ungrudging. Also: unapologetic, unabashed.”

At first, Byrne’s usage seemed closest to the first, most familiar definition. Now I think the fourth, with its spirit of can-do pragmatism, is closer. After all, Byrne and his bandmates made the apocalypse sound cheerful in “Nothing but Flowers”: “This was a Pizza Hut / Now it’s all covered with daisies.”

Cheerfulness isn’t necessarily the opposite of dwelling in the slough of despond. As Theodore Dalrymple reminds us: “I can inhabit gloom and live in joy.” Guy Davenport often closed his letters with “Cheers!” and Boswell recounts the time Dr. Johnson reunited with an old acquaintance, Oliver Edwards, who told him: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” The title of Byrne’s magazine is the same as the headline on a column Theodore Dalrymple published in the Spectator in 2003: “Reasons to be cheerful.” In it, Dalrymple writes:

“So long as the world is inexhaustibly interesting, we have reason to be cheerful.”

'Those Felicities of Notion and Word'

“The ideal bookcase would be that in which you could plunge a hand into in the dark and be sure of extracting something readable.”

I’ve proven that observation experimentally. Two years ago, after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, we lost power for four days. During the day I could sit on the couch by the big bay window and have enough light to read. The sky was overcast and the rain kept falling, so the lighting wasn’t generous. By late afternoon my eyes were straining. I remember reading The Poem on Nature, C.H. Sisson’s version of Lucretius, which has some convincing accounts of lousy weather. In the evening, if I wanted another book and all the flashlights were occupied or we had run out of batteries, I’d go into my library and “plunge a hand into the dark,” as Maurice Baring writes, confident I would find “something readable.” Then I would light a candle. In Baring’s sense my personal library is “ideal.” It contains no junk, no bestsellers or faddish tracts, nothing that would bore or embarrass me. I don’t even have to cull such things because I would never bring them into the house.    

The aperçu at the top is from Baring’s memoir The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), a book I have not read. I am browsing in Maurice Baring Restored (1970), a selection from his work made by Paul Horgan. At the back is a section called “Good Things,” which Horgan explains like this:

“Maurice Baring was fond of the small quotation which could give pleasure while standing apart from its context. As one who loved to hear ‘good things’ – those felicities of notion and word which outlast their casual utterance – he could also say them. It seems appropriate to include in this book a small anthology – he delighted, too, in making small anthologies of brief extracts – drawn from scattered sources throughout his whole range of work.”

Baring had a gift for aphorism. The one quoted above is somewhat compromised by the repetition of “in” and “into in.” The reader chokes. Normally, Baring is pithier and more graceful, as he is here in The Grey Stocking, a play from 1911: “Nothing is more nauseating than praise from people one dislikes.”

And this, from a letter to his friend Ethel Smyth on Sept. 2, 1922, in which he describes an experience I have had many times: “One of the greatest, the supreme pleasures in life, is, I think, to take up a book, saying to oneself, it is no use reading that now as I know and remember it too well, and then beginning it to find that you have forgotten so much of it that the second or third reading is better than the first.”

And from his novel C (1924): “Someone was playing the piano—playing Chopin with so much expression that he was scarcely audible.”

[My introduction to Baring was Joseph Epstein’s “Maurice Baring and the Good High-Brow,” published in The New Criterion in 1992. And go here to look at Baring’s travel library.]

'Beauty Matters'

Beauty is one of life’s supreme consolations, which is something I’ve known since I was a boy. On a lousy morning in Houston, when humidity drips and drivers are homicidal, I drive through a neighborhood in which the live oaks mingle their branches overhead and create a tunnel. Sunlight dapples the pavement and cars. One of the oaks has buckled a sidewalk with its roots, which spill over the curb like cooling lava. On one of the roots grows a brilliantly yellow fungus like a heap of scrambled eggs. People walk their dogs in the shaded heat. One is a magnificent Great Dane as beautifully sculpted as a thoroughbred. I’m listening to “Lester Leaps In.” Beauty is a refutation not only of ugliness but of self-pity, lazy bitterness and narrow-minded complaint. It reminds us that the world is bigger and better than we can understand. Sir Roger Scruton writes in “On Defending Beauty”:

           

“All I know is that a lot of people out there feel as I do. They agree with me that beauty matters, that desecration and nihilism are crimes, and that we should find the way to exalt our world and to endow it with a more than worldly significance.”

'The Delightful Agony of Arranging Them in Patterns'

Dr. Johnson writes in his preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755): “I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” Readers who dismiss Johnson’s prose as lacking poetry have ears of tin. His metaphors are precise and always rooted in reality, so common readers can get the point while admiring the wit. Anthony Burgess admired Johnson the wordsmith and cites him nine times, including the sentence quoted above, in The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961-1993 (ed. Will Carr, Carcanet, 2018).

Burgess was drunk on words. Along with more than thirty novels, he published two books on James Joyce, two on language and a biography of Shakespeare. He loved Joyce, Flann O’Brian and Nabokov. The one time I met him, in the year Stanley Kubrick released his film version of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess was a raconteur of words. He relished the music of language and took pleasure in American slang, while also praising Henry James. In The Ink Trade you can tell Burgess has been waiting years to deploy prized words: ambages (OED: “roundabout or indirect modes of speech”) and gulosity (“gluttony, greediness, voracity”). Some of us collect such words. I started doing so as a teenager, a practice I picked up from the teenage Hart Crane.

This can be overdone, of course. It can start to look like showing off one’s rarefied vocabulary. Consider the word-clotted novels of Alexander Theroux. The Johnson sentence is taken from “Why I Write,” a previously unpublished piece from 1985. Burgess writes:

“Real writers take seriously what writing is about—wrestling with words. Words are not inert counters like cloak-room tickets. They are living creatures which resent being treated as if they were knives, forks and spoons. You cannot take them out of a drawer, use them, then stow them away again. They are stubborn and they sometimes refuse to mean what the writer wants them to mean. It’s not merely a matter of the word itself—there’s also the delightful agony of arranging them in patterns, making music out of them.”

Burgess next paraphrases the Johnson line and adds:

“True, but we have to try to bring the sons of heaven down to earth, and only words can do this. Moreover, there’s an order of reality above things—the sphere of ideas. Ideas cannot exist until they are cast into the form of words. We human beings are intensely verbal creatures. Not many people realise this, but writers live with that awesome knowledge. They are the custodians of a primal human truth.”

'Looking at a Fuchsia Drenched with Rain'

English literature, more than most, overflows with modest, idiosyncratic talents. This may be related to England’s tolerance for eccentricity. The phrase I’m trying to avoid is “minor writer,” not a useful category. Rather, who pleases us and who does not? Who writes well and who does not? Is Max Beerbohm “minor”? Not when he consistently makes me envious. Is James Agate? Not when he writes in The Later Ego (Crown, 1951): “Then Tschaikowsky [sic] No. 5. Drenched with self-pity. But I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuchsia drenched with rain.” Nor, on many occasions, are Thomas Culpepper, William Cobbett, Pierce Egan, Sydney Smith, Walter Bagehot and Cyril Connolly. Nor is George Stuart Gordon, whose Companionable Books (1927) I recently wrote about. The friend who sent me the link to Gordon’s book wrote to me on Monday about Gordon’s “companions”:

“These books all have something in common. They are all happy books, written by happy people about happy things. Gordon must have been a very nice guy. Would have been nice to have taken a course from him.”

My friend, who is Jewish, adds about Saturday’s post:

“Don’t be too hard on Lamb for his Jewish problem. Joseph Epstein taught me how to overlook this and while not disregarding or excusing it, he understands the milieu and can forgive (a very Christian trait) an extraordinary writer.

“I can think of only one book written by a Christian from the nineteenth century back that is philo-Semitic, unless, maybe St. Augustine. Montaigne and Cervantes have Jewish ancestry and so they are excluded. Pascal is an interesting guy.”

Indeed, and so is George Eliot, who is unquestionably philo-Semitic, especially in her final novel, Daniel Deronda.

'Consuming Food and Obeying a Code of Manners'

“We breakfasted at Cullen. They set down dried haddocks broiled, along with our tea. I ate one; but Dr Johnson was disgusted by the sight of them, so they were removed.”

We were married in Nova Scotia in July 1998, at a place memorably called Murder Point, and honeymooned in Halifax, where I ate seafood at every meal, including breakfast, for the remainder of our stay. Such a cuisine is alien to most American palates but suited mine perfectly. I don’t eat cereal, pancakes or eggs. My first meal of the day is usually a banana. “Dried haddocks broiled,” as described by Boswell on this date, Aug. 26, in 1773, in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), sounds intriguing. How much Johnson’s disgust is related to his general contempt for anything Scottish is not known. In Croker’s 1831 edition of Boswell’s Life, Sir Walter Scott defended Scottish cuisine in a footnote to the passage quoted above:

“A protest may be entered on the part of most Scotsmen against the Doctor’s taste in this particular. A Finnon haddock dried over the smoke of the seaweed, and sprinkled with salt water during the process, acquires a relish of a very peculiar and delicate flavour, inimitable on any other coast than that of Aberdeenshire. Some of our Edinburgh philosophers tried to produce their equal in vain. I was one of a party at dinner where the philosophical haddocks were placed in competition with the genuine Finnon-fish. These were served round without distinguishing whence they came; but only one gentleman out of twelve present espoused the cause of philosophy.”

Some years ago I was in conversation with an anthropologist who noted that humans have more deeply rooted, even fanatical convictions about food than about any other subject, including sex. Such convictions are both cultural and personal in origin. Subsequent observation confirms this. In his essay “The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Guy Davenport writes:

“Eating is always at least two activities: consuming food and obeying a code of manners. And in the manners is concealed a program of taboos as rigid as Deuteronomy.”

'I Try to Spend Only the Interest on My Capital'

The National Review has invited thirty writers to celebrate “What We Love About America,” the cover story in its Sept. 9 issue. Baseball is a popular choice. So is Louis Armstrong. Joseph Epstein extols “Readers Who Have Surprised Me.” The tough part is choosing from such an embarrassment of American riches, our bountiful gifts to ourselves and the world. Here’s a further sample:

John Podhoretz, “Irving Berlin”:

“[Tin Pan Alley] is where this country’s greatest contribution (in my opinion) to world culture originated — the half century of ditties, almost all three to five minutes in length, that constitute what has come to be known as ‘the American Songbook.”

Terry Teachout, “Western Movies”:

“A country without such larger-than-life legends is a land without a soul. It says something sad about America that Hollywood doesn’t make many westerns nowadays. It says something hopeful that so many of us still love the ones we already have.”

Alexandra DeSanctis, “On Visiting Civil War Battlefields”:

“It is grim, perhaps, to tread the steps where both armies marched, to revisit a time when our nation was at war with itself. It is grimmer still to cherish these places where Americans killed one another, to preserve them with care, to mark them with stones and placards and statues for the men we lost. But it is good for us to remember what they did, and why they did it.”

If asked to select what I love about America, I would propose our supreme contribution to world literature, Henry James, an American who became a British citizen in 1915, in solidarity with Britain’s war effort, and died the following year. In 1907, James published The American Scene, an account of his return to the United States in 1904-05 after twenty years of living in Europe. Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order.” As you would expect, James’ report is complicated, not a simple whitewash or screed. In Chap II, “New York Revisited,” James writes of the nation’s relentless reinvention, the disposability of the human landscape:

“Where, in fact, is the point of inserting a mural tablet, at any legible height, in a building certain to be destroyed to make room for a sky-scraper? And from where, on the other hand, in a facade of fifty floors, does one `see’ the pious plate recording the honour attached to one of the apartments look down on a responsive people? We have but to ask the question to recognize our necessary failure to answer it as a supremely characteristic local note--a note in the light of which the great city is projected into its future as, practically, a huge, continuous fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of the ancient graces, those that strike us as having flourished just in proportion as the parts of life and the signs of character have not been lumped together, not been indistinguishably sunk in the common fund of mere economic convenience. So interesting, as object-lessons, may the developments of the American gregarious ideal become; so traceable, at every turn, to the restless analyst [that is, James himself] at least, are the heavy footprints, in the finer texture of life, of a great commercial democracy seeking to abound supremely in its own sense and having none to gainsay it.”

James flatters us with his convoluted later style, a style as complex and extravagant as the country he describes. Imagine such a book as written by Hemingway or Raymond Carver. Impossible. Here is Irving Howe in “Henry James and the American Scene” (Decline of the New, 1970):

“For all its baroque complications, it must be taken as a spoken style and, in a special way, a style of oratory. Not the oratory of the public speaker, which is utterly alien to James; but the oratory of a formidable and acknowledged literary man addressing a group of friends in a drawing room, speaking with rounded intricacy so as to give pleasure—for his are the kinds of friends that can take pleasure—in syntax as performance.”

James possesses the true American prodigality. He is industrious. Just as skyscrapers replace nineteenth-century apartment blocks, so James late in life revises his vast body of work for the New York Edition (a misbegotten effort). In a letter to his brother William on Oct. 29, 1888, James, at age forty-five, writes:

“One can read when one is middle-aged or old; but one can mingle in the world with fresh perceptions only when one is young. The great thing is to be saturated with something — that is, in one way or another, with life; and I chose the form of my saturation. Moreover you exaggerate the degree to which my writing takes it out of my mind, for I try to spend only the interest of my capital.”

'I Shall Steep My Exhaurient Mind'

I’ve not seen it previously suggested, nor is he a self-evident candidate for the position, but I suspect the ideal writer for our time and place, the one whose gifts we most sorely need, is Max Beerbohm. A close second is Charles Lamb, whose aberrant strain of anti-Semitism, despite his obvious virtues, disqualifies him. Third is Jonathan Swift, who was Irish.

Above all we could use a writer with a comic sense, a knack for thinking in nuanced shades of irony and without partisan loyalties. Any humorless brute can take a hammer to a problem. Our troubles call for a scalpel wielded with dispassionate precision. We need a writer-as-spectator, not a writer-as-yenta. Beerbohm declares in his essay “Servants” (And Even Now, 1921): “I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased—short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.” A wise man, and wise men pay attention. They watch and listen and file away what their senses tell them. You can’t do that if you’re too busy complaining about something or telling somebody what they should be doing. A passage in “Diminuendo”(The Works of Max Beerbohm, 1896) is a close as Beerbohm ever got to formulating a philosophy of life:

“I shall look forth from my window, the laburnum and the mountain-ash becoming mere silhouettes in the foreground of my vision. I shall look forth and, in my remoteness, appreciate the distant pageant of the world. Humanity will range itself in the column of my morning paper. No pulse of life will escape me. The strife of politics, the intriguing of courts, the wreck of great vessels, wars, dramas, earthquakes, national griefs or joys; the strange sequels to divorces, even, and the mysterious suicides of land-agents at Ipswich--in all such phenomena I shall steep my exhaurient mind.”

Beerbohm was born on this date, Aug. 24, in 1872, and died at age eighty-three in 1956.

'What They Called Table Books'

“Our fathers used to affect what they called table books—books in which they were wont to inscribe sentences and passages from their favourite authors.”

Some of us still do. It’s a pastime simplified by the coming of the digital age. I’m not always convinced I’ve read something until I’ve transcribed a choice passage or two. That’s the purpose of a commonplace book or “table book,” as George Saintsbury calls it in his introduction to A Calendar of Verse (1892). The practical reason for keeping such a sampler is future reference. Often I discover passages I know will come in handy. It also serves as an act of homage. When I copy a sentence by Johnson or Nabokov, I’m expressing in a small way my gratitude for a writer’s labor.

Saintsbury’s volume is a relic of another age. At 5.5 inches by 4.5 inches, the book is squarish and compact, with a beige cover and gilt lettering – a gift book. The publisher is Rivingtons of London. In his introduction, Saintsbury refers to his anthology as “this poetical ephemeris.” A different English poet is assigned to each of the twelve months: Shakespeare, Spenser, Coleridge, Herrick, Shelley, William Morris, Keats, Byron, Campion, Scott, Wordsworth and Milton, respectively. Of course, tastes change. Few of us read Morris or Scott. Shakespeare is inevitable. Herrick and Campion are inspired choices. The taste reflected is late-Victorian, pre-Modernist. No Donne or Herbert. The Byron selection is heavily weighted toward Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage; nothing from Don Juan.

      

Some of Saintsbury’s critical readings in the introduction are worthy of attention. He “gets” Coleridge: “No doubt it is right and proper that there should be complete editions of his poetical works; but to read those poetical works as a whole, and ‘straight on,’ must always be a task both ascetic and athletic. Except ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and a very few others, there is no piece of Coleridge’s which is good as a whole.” True but seldom acknowledged. Sadly, Coleridge the man is often more interesting than his work, and he was a junkie. Saintsbury notes his juxtaposition of Coleridge and Herrick in March and April:

“In passing from Coleridge to Herrick the change is perhaps greater and more remarkable than in any other pair of poets in any language, irrespective of date and style; or, rather, the change of date impresses itself almost to the neglect of the change of style. . . .I do not know why opium should be allowed a privilege which is denied to sack and Julia.”

'Only Fools and Flutterpates'

Like Yiddish, English is rich in words for the foolish and intellectually attenuated. This only makes sense, as linguistic supply always answers to worldly demand, and we can never have enough words for run-of-the-mill idiocy. I remember when the late critic Irving Howe described former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato as a “chowder-head,” a word he presumably borrowed from Moe Howard. And of course in The Bank Dick, Egbert Sousé (W.C. Fields) advises his prospective son-in-law, Og Oggilby (Grady Sutton): “Don’t be a luddy-duddy! Don’t be a mooncalf! Don’t be a jabbernowl! You’re not those, are you?” I have a friend who favors fuck-knuckle (Hyphen or one word? Please advise) and another who prefers the monosyllabic simp. A prosecuting attorney I knew in Indiana invariably called liberals “bed-wetters.”

Now I can add another word to my opprobrious collection: flutter-pate. You’ll find it in the first paragraph of Max Beerbohm’s “A Defence of Cosmetics”: “Indeed, indeed, there is charm in every period, and only fools and flutterpates do not seek reverently for what is charming in their own day.” The essay was first published in the first edition of The Yellow Book, in 1894, and collected in Beerbohm’s first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896), under the title “The Pervasion of Rouge.” The OED primly defines flutter-pate as “a flighty or light-headed person.” The only citation is Beerbohm’s, though it’s credited not to him but to The Yellow Book.

Flutter-pate is attractive because it doesn’t sound derogatory and most of those for whom it’s appropriate won’t know what it means.

'His Mind Will Thus Live On'

With ill health comes pain and inconvenience and a less noted unpleasantness, embarrassment. Sometimes it wears off.  For six months I’ve relied on a cane, not because I fancy myself a dandy but because I don’t want to fall down. At first I was self-conscious, especially when students would hold a door or ask if I needed help carrying my book bag. I’ve never enjoyed being conspicuous and don’t like preferential treatment. But that’s silly pride and now the cane is part of me, as reliable as an umbrella.

Edward Gibbon was less fortunate. I’ve just read “Decline and Fall of an Author,” an essay published in the journal Australian Doctor in 2006. The writer is Dr. Jim Leavesley, a retired GP and medical historian in Australia who describes two of Gibbon’s many ailments, gout and a massive hydrocele. The historian was notably obese and sedentary. In 1772, at the age of thirty-five, Gibbon developed what he called “a dignified disorder” – gout, which Leavesley describes as “a malady as widespread and significant to 18^th-century gentlemen as is coronary thrombosis in the 21st century.” In his Flesh in the Age of Reason (2003), Roy Porter writes:

“Gout, of course, is a story in itself, being the keynote malady of eighteenth-century gentlemen and men of letters, the lord of diseases and the disease of lords, one of those rare afflictions it was a positive ‘honour’ to acquire, it being a mark of good family and fine living.”

  

The attacks of gout, agonizingly painful, grew frequent and plagued Gibbon while he was writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There was no effective treatment for the disease. Gibbon treated it with Madeira. Despite the pain, he was proud of his gout. The condition that would eventually kill him was the hydrocele – a swelling of the scrotum caused by an accumulation of fluid around the testicles. He first noticed it at age twenty-four, while serving in the Hampshire militia. Porter writes:

“Gibbon was obviously ashamed about that particular protuberance. It grew bigger and bigger and, as contemporaries noted, he pretended to be unaware of it—though it drew attention to itself not only on account of its magnitude, but because it interfered with urination: he reeked and his presence became disagreeable.”

How humiliating and how human for this paragon of the Enlightenment and master of English prose. None of us is always rational. All of us conveniently delude ourselves. On Nov. 11, 1793, Gibbon wrote to Lord Sheffield: “Have you never observed through my inexpressibles a large prominency circa genitalia, which, as it was not at all painful and very little troublesome, I had strangely neglected for many years?”

Sheffield acted quickly and took Gibbon to see Dr. Henry Cline, a prominent surgeon. Leavesley writes: “He removed 4.5L of fluid on 14 November 1793, reducing the swelling by half. Two weeks later 3.4L were evacuated. Within a few days the hydrocele was painful, ulcerated and a fever set in. But on 13 January 1794, 6.8L were withdrawn, making a grand total of 14.7L.” For American readers, that's almost four gallons. Gibbon collapsed and died on Jan. 16, 1794. He was fifty-seven. Porter writes that Gibbon was “a man publicly happy to ignore his mortal coil. There is no immortal soul -- and no tears are lost over that. There remains nevertheless a hope of immortality through ‘literary fame.’ He would not go to heaven . . . But his books might last . . . His mind will thus live on."

A footnote: Some twenty years later, John Keats would attend lectures at Guy’s Hospital in London given by Dr. Cline.

'Interesting People are Interested People'

One of my literary articles of faith is that a good writer can take any subject, no matter how unlikely, and make it interesting. The essays of William Hazlitt and A.J. Liebling on boxing are some of my favorite reading and I have no interest in, and some major reservations regarding the “sweet science.” I can love Gulliver’s Travels while hating most fantasy and Michael Oakeshott’s essays while remaining allergic to politics and betting on horse races. I’ve even enjoyed reading Neville Cardus on cricket.

So it is with Roger Scruton’s little book On Hunting (St. Augustine’s Press, 1998). The closet I’ve gotten to hunting was collecting butterflies as a kid. Guns make me itchy and I feel a tad guilty eating meatloaf. Truly, without turning it into an ethical stance, I have no killer instinct, or at least no more than any reasonably civilized carnivore. But Scruton, while defending the fox hunt, a ritual utterly alien to Americans, is always thoughtful and entertainingly discursive. For instance:

“Thousand-page accounts of minor politicians are the greatest offence against literature—especially when written by the politicians themselves. Worst of all are those instant hagiographies of pop stars, business moguls and dead princesses—works which pruriently research each detail, and which, by being true to the facts, are false through and through in sentiment. Were biographers to confine themselves, like Plutarch and Aubrey, to twenty pages a time, they would understand their victims more completely.”

No argument here.  Elsewhere, Scruton suggests why an American reader might find his defense of English fox hunting so compelling:

“Just as there is nothing more boring than boredom, nothing more exciting than excitement, nothing more lovable than love or hateful than hatred, so is there nothing that arouses interest so much as interest. Interesting people are interested people, and an enthusiasm—be it as thankless as birdwatching or as bizarre as philately—marks out the enthusiast as a source of curious learning and a person with a mind that glows.”

“Interesting people are interested people.” Like any good writer, Scruton makes our passing observations, quickly disregarded, seem self-evident. Bores have inert – or, at the other extreme, madly hyperactive -- minds.  In his epilogue Scruton writes:

“Nostalgia is an unhealthy state of mind. But the study, love and emulation of the past are necessary to our self-understanding. All that has gone most wrong in our century has proceeded from a morbid obsession with the future—a belief in `new dawns’, `revolutionary transformations’, and resurrected nations on the march. The past, unlike the future, can be known, understood and adapted to our current uses. When we cast ourselves free from it, we are swept away by outside forces, adrift on the oceanic tide of happening. The future, which we cannot describe, begins to seem inevitable. This surrender to the unknown persists, despite all the crime and destruction that have been wrought in its name.”

Nostalgia for a past that never existed is an inevitable accompaniment to aging. Every “now” must be worse, more depraved than every “then.” Sometimes, of course, that is the case, but abject faith in the future is even more foolish and dangerous. When I think of the future I remember that Philip Larkin once described Lightnin’ Hopkins’ guitar playing as “vividly pessimistic.”

'The Plain Old-Fashioned Writer'

Willa Cather is the novelist I most thoroughly misunderstood when young and have most profoundly reevaluated with age. I read O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia – the so-called prairie trilogy – over the summer of 1971. I remember few details of my reactions, but I definitely pigeonholed her as a minor regionalist, cousin to Sherwood Anderson. After one year as an English major I had already learned to dismiss books by patronizingly mislabeling them. Not one professor mentioned her work, I’m certain.

Now she is central, and this has nothing to do with her sex. With Melville and James, Cather ranks not only as our finest native-born novelist (thus deferring the Nabokov-and-Singer question) but our finest writer, period. Even her minutiae are worthy of attention. Take the letter she wrote on this date, Aug. 19, in 1944. A Nebraska-born photographer with Life magazine, Jane Speiser, had proposed that she and Cather collaborate on a photo-and-text prairie project. Gently but resolutely, Cather turns her down:

“I take it for granted that you are very young and full of enthusiasm -- that is, when you have an idea, you take a run with it. That is the right mood for your age but you mustn't expect people of more experience to keep step with you.”

On one level, this is a routine business letter, one any prominent writer might compose. On another, Cather is protecting her literary turf and formulating her writerly credo:

“If there is anything that interests you in these books, it is not detailed description (when you examine them you will see that there is very little of that) but an individual feeling in the writer -- in other words a purely emotional thing. Now all the cameras in the world cannot take a picture of a feeling or a state of mind, can they?”

This is at once gracious and adamant. She knows she will disappoint Speiser but has no wish to hurt her feelings. Cather recounts the ways in which Nebraska is no longer, after thirty years and more, her Nebraska. (Within a few years, Wright Morris would be writing and photographing his Nebraska.) Savor her graciousness without rancor and her pride of authorship:

“Even color photography of the best kind could not do much. The feeling that you have and I have about the prairie country, I honestly believe, is incommunicable by any literal representation. There just for once the plain old-fashioned writer has it over the brilliant mechanical perfected process. (This doesn't always hold: your camera can thrill me (with mountains, processions and battle fields) but it can't make me know how it feels to be in a prairie country on a fine autumn day.)”

'Eli Swanson Stowed Away Two Whole Custard Pies'

Much of Saturday, when the temperature topped 97° F, we devoted to my youngest son’s Eagle Scout project at his former grade school. About twelve years ago I and a crew of other parents helped build an arboretum/garden, and it appeared that no one since then had maintained it. We picked up trash, pulled weeds, cut down vines, laid mulch and planted flowers. Another group painted the picket fence green and white (two coats). David raised a lot of money for the project and will have plenty left over to donate to the PTA.

Twenty-five neighbors (several of whom have kids in the school) and Scouts volunteered. Everyone dripped sweat. We didn’t have to assign jobs. People picked up tools and got busy. There was something old-fashioned and very American about the day. We dined on breakfast tacos in the morning and fried chicken and fruit salad at lunch. Boys turned the plentiful food into a competition, and I thought of the wonderful supper scene held after the barn raising in Willa Cather’s “The Bohemian Girl” (1912):

“The barn supper began at six o’clock and lasted for two hilarious hours. Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could eat two whole fried chickens, and he did. Eli Swanson stowed away two whole custard pies, and Nick Hermanson ate a chocolate layer cake to the last crumb. There was even a cooky contest among the children, and one thin, slablike Bohemian boy consumed sixteen and won the prize, a ginger-bread pig which Johanna Vavrika had carefully decorated with red candies and burnt sugar. Fritz Sweiheart, the German carpenter, won in the pickle contest, but he disappeared soon after supper and was not seen for the rest of the evening. Joe Vavrika said that Fritz could have managed the pickles all right, but he had sampled the demijohn in his buggy too often before sitting down to the table.”

'A Contentment with Things as They Are'

“A world without irony would have to be either an earthly paradise, where it could never arise for there would be nothing to provoke it, or else an earthly hell, where it was never allowed to show its face. Our world seems unlikely ever to become an earthly paradise.”

D.J. Enright (1920-2002) had little taste for politics, perhaps because his gift for the nuanced deployment of irony inoculated him against infection. In the passage above, drawn from The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (Oxford University Press, 1986), he implicitly dismisses the utopian impulse. One can’t imagine him campaigning for the cause du jour, which may be the reason he is nearly forgotten by people who ought to know better. The world, Enright suggests, doesn’t need our help.

The writer who most often came to mind while I was reading The Alluring Problem was not Swift (whom Enright examines) but Max Beerbohm (whom he doesn’t). One is seldom in doubt about the object of Swift’s satire. He may be savage but he’s not vague when proposing we dine on Irish babies, while Beerbohm’s touch is as soft as an Irish baby’s bottom.

Here’s a title Beerbohm would have loved: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. In its April 1920 issue, the American academic Harold Newcomb Hillebrand published an appreciative essay about him, drumming up American enthusiasm for the writer he calls “the most completely artistic of all the English literati.” Beerbohm, he writes, found the world “hopelessly unfathomable”:

“This not uncommon kind of skepticism may lead to indifference, to uncertainty, to impatience, to despair according to temperament; in Beerbohm it induces a contentment with things as they are and an impatience of the popular longing to improve them. One has the feeling that to him life is not much--pas grand’ chose; the expression is one of which he is fond. In the hurly-burly of life not much is of importance, and most of it is the stuff that dreams are made of, but it is none the less amusing, even fascinating, while it is being acted before us.”

Like Santayana, Enright and many sane men and women, Beerbohm was one of life’s happy spectators, with little or no wish to meddle. He possessed few of the illusions the rest of us cherish. Rather, he possessed life’s most valuable gift, “the comic view.”

'To Call Something Literature is to Start a Canon'

“Literature is always wider than the class of works which we call literary. Wherever a man has fairly set down the best that he knows about the thing he knows best, and in words that tell his meaning, there, always, will be literature.”

The writer is George Stuart Gordon (1881-1942), the British literary scholar, as quoted by his widow, Mary Campbell Gordon, in the preface to his posthumously published Letters of George S. Gordon (Oxford University Press, 1943). She cites no source, and I don’t find the passage among Gordon’s letters, but it seems worth remembering and contemplating. By Gordon’s definition, a deeply researched, well-organized field guide to the dragonflies of North America can be judged literature, as can a 271-word presidential address and collections of essays devoted to boxing, French cuisine and World War II combat. There’s more to literature than the academic straightjacket of novels, poems and plays.

I’m reminded of a working definition of literature formulated by my late friend David Myers: “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.” Such unscientific elasticity will bother some, though not those “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Literature is the work we value, regardless of the author or his intent. When we value something we wish to save it. As David writes:

“Literature is just the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on. (I call that the ‘canonical impulse.’ Canons are inseparable from literature. To call something literature is to start a canon.)”

[Leave it to Dave Lull to find the unfindable. The passage at the top is from Gordon’s Anglo-American Literary Relations (1943). Thanks, Dave.]

'It Puts Every Reader in a Good Humour'

A friend has sent me a link to George Stuart Gordon’s Companionable Books (1927), an old favorite and a model for how to write about the books we love. Gordon was an academic and scholar, the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1928 until his death in 1942, which makes his enthusiasm for good books notable. Today one can’t imagine a professor or college administrator writing such a book. Gordon’s taste is excellent, he has no wish to arbitrarily malign the great works of the past and he seems happily unburdened with politics. The essays were originally delivered as talks on the BBC in 1926. Though revised for print, they retain the informality and gusto of good conversation.     

The OED defines “companionable” as “sociable, friendly; pleasant or agreeable as company.” Let’s face it, we prefer the company of some books to some people. Good books have good manners and seldom disappoint us. Gordon writes in his preface, “There is a companionable quality in some books that skips the centuries, and I was reluctant that any one should miss it through mere timidity and misunderstanding.” He devotes a chapter each to Pepys’ Diary, Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, Tristram Shandy, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, William Cowper’s letters, Kinglake’s Eothen and “The Humour of Charles Lamb.” A sequel, More Companionable Books, was posthumously published in 1947. Here is Gordon on Pepys:

“The first thing we notice about the Diary is that it puts every reader in a good humour. For, in the first place, Pepys himself enjoys everything so much: his clothes, his house, his work, his jaunts, the respect people paid him, the pretty women he saw and the pretty women he kissed, the music he heard and the music he made, the theatre, his dinner parties, his books, and not least—indeed the condition of all the rest—his steadily increasing bank balance.”

And on Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“Though it suits all ages, it is a book, I fancy, best appreciated in the middle years, and by those who have had to fight for their experience, who have not found life easy, and who are still in the battle. Intelligence is not enough, even superior intelligence, as Macaulay proved.”

Gordon knows why we love certain books. He’s a mensch.

'Experience and Reflection, Set Down in Language'

Over the weekend I began reading a book I read for the first time in 1974. Apart from a generalized sense of having enjoyed and admired it, while retaining an uncertain grasp of the story, I might as well have been reading Allen Tate’s only novel, The Fathers (1938), for the first time. What do we mean when we say we “know” a book? If fiction, does it mean we remember the plot? The names of characters? If we dutifully read The Return of the Native in eighth grade, and that was more than half a century ago, can we honestly say we know Hardy’s novel? I can’t.

I’ve never thought of reading as an obligation. Nor have I ever made a list of books to read and proceeded to check them off. I like to learn things from what I read (as did Guy Davenport), but I don’t confuse reading with “self-improvement.” I don’t like to be lectured or preached at, in print or otherwise. When I read I don’t grow self-reflective and watch myself reading. That seems unhealthy. Good books, after all, are meant to foster self-forgetting. I favor books that use language in interesting ways. If I pause while reading, it’s to savor a passage or try to figure out one that confuses me. I’m a slow but relentless reader, not easily distracted if I’m enjoying myself. I’m a little ashamed to recall that I’ve spent a good portion of my life reading books I can no longer remember. I do remember reading the early novels of Thomas McGuane but I couldn’t tell you a thing about them.

There are exceptions. I’ve read Ulysses often enough, especially when young, to “know” it in vivid detail. I added another layer of annotation each time I read Joyce’s novel, a practice that no longer interests me. I know some novels by Henry James, Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov comparably well. Book memories blend promiscuously with life memories. A writer new to me, Alice Whaley, recently wrote in a publication new to me, The Oldie: 

“Accumulating circulations around the sun doesn’t make you wise. Experience and reflection does. Nothing can beat the real thing, but what is Literature, if not experience and reflection, set down in language?”

'My Guests Parade My New-Penned Ink'

On Monday the temperature hit 101° F again. The sky was cloudless and blue. Exposed skin tingled and you awaited the eruption of the next melanoma. Grass is turning brown. The lime tree is withering. Even the birds and squirrels seem oppressed. My youngest son is working as a lifeguard and swimming instructor at the YMCA, and his skin is almost the color of peanut butter. (Yes, he uses sunscreen. Spare me the lecture.) I found a dead luna moth on the driveway in front of my car. The abdomen was gone but the delicate wings remained intact. I’ve never seen so many anoles – green and brown lizards. Typically they hang vertically on walls, head down, a foot or so above the ground, awaiting prey. Today’s forecast is hotter still.

One of the first poems by Thomas Hardy I remember reading is “An August Midnight,” written in 1899 and collected in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901):

I

“A shaded lamp and a waving blind,

And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:

On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined --

A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;

While ’mid my page there idly stands

A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . .

II

“Thus meet we five, in this still place,

At this point of time, at this point in space.

--My guests parade my new-penned ink,

Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.

‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse. Yet why?

They know Earth-secrets that know not I.”

With age I’ve grown more respectful of life. I wouldn’t swat any of Hardy’s named creatures, though I have no compunction about squashing a mosquito or cockroach. “Longlegs” is a generic name, applied to several species, but I associate it with the daddy longlegs, the arachnids also known as harvestmen. Their smell is memorable. Dumbledore was at first a mystery. Its use is strictly British and the OED gives “a humble-bee or bumble-bee; also dialect a cockchafer.” In the U.S. I’ve never heard anything other than bumblebee. I like “guests.” The speaker seems undisturbed by creatures that might disgust or frighten others. Hardy’s ending is a disappointment. “Earth-secrets” is uncharacteristically sentimental and romantic. Did Karl Shapiro have Hardy’s poem in mind when he wrote his revisionist The Fly”?    

'Nice Brown Bread, Homely Sweet and Nutritive'

Another skill once thought mandatory, now nearing extinction: a gift for gratitude, a pleasing enthusiasm for saying thank you. Since they were first able to scrawl we expected our sons to write thank-you notes for gifts and favors received, especially as friends and family members are dispersed across the country. If you expect more gifts in the future, we reminded them, you’d better mind your manners today. Yes, even “thank you” can be mercenary. Second only to morals, manners lubricate life and keep things humming.

“You have overwhelmed me with your favours. I have received positively a little library from Baldwyn’s. I do not know how I have deserved such a bounty.”

Charles Lamb is writing to Sir Charles Abraham Elton, 6th Baronet (1778-1853), a soldier (who received his commission at age fifteen in the 48th Regiment of Foot), poet and translator. The letter is variously dated Aug. 17, 1821 (or 1824) and Aug. 12, 1829. The editor of Lamb’s letters, E.V. Lucas, tells us Elton had sent Lamb a selection of his own books, including Specimens of the Classical Poets in a chronological series from Homer to Tryphiodorus (1814), translated by Elton into English verse. Lamb is a master of thanksgiving, as is William Cowper in his letters. Lamb knew that the secret of charming gratitude is specificity, not a vague generality:

“We have been up to the ear in the classics ever since it came. I have been greatly pleased, but most, I think, with the Hesiod, — the Titan battle quite amused me. Gad, it was no child's play — and then the homely aphorisms at the end of the works — how adroitly you have turned them! Can he be the same Hesiod who did the Titans?”

Elton also included a volume of his own poetry, The Brothers and Other Poems (1820), of which Lamb writes: “I will say nothing of the tenderest parts in your own little volume, at the end of such a slatternly scribble as this, but indeed they cost us some tears.” And here is Lamb’s finest sentiment:

“But to read [Hesiod’s] Days and Works, is like eating nice brown bread, homely sweet and nutritive.”

'The True Shape of the Mind'

“Words should be brief / Lest action come to grief /And be disrupted.”

Some of us naturally associate brevity and concision with craftsmanship and seriousness of intent. Flab and the longueurs of self-expression suggest a shoddy indifference to readers and the business at hand. In a letter written on Dec. 11, 1962, Yvor Winters thanks his former student, Charles Gullans, for dedicating his first collection, Arrivals and Departures (University of Minnesota Press, 1962), to him (“magister ludi”). Winters also thanks him for “the poem addressed to me,” which I assume is “Herr Doktor Addresses His Students”:

“Come, let us teach

The virtue of plain speech

And plainer actions.

Enough of old distractions.

I’m sick of muddled thought

Which has slain kings

And kingdoms with confusion.

Its wars are always fought

To justify illusion

And hide the heart of things.

“Words should be brief

Lest action come to grief

And be disrupted.

Where manners are corrupted,

There language imitates

The public riot

In an excess of kind.

Each word delineates

The true shape of the mind

And the mind’s true disquiet.”

The poem is conspicuously Wintersian, and develops themes found in such poems as “On Teaching the Young” and “To a Young Writer.” Gullans condemns the imitative fallacy (“There language imitates / The public riot”), the customary rationalization for haphazard writing. Words are suffused with the sensibility deploying them. Ego is the enemy of good work. I sought out Gullans’ poem and Winters’ letter after reading James Matthew Wilson’s “The Half-Empty Auditorium”:

“I have noticed that very few poets enjoy sitting and reading other poets’ work. This is not because ‘most of the poetry in any age is bad,’ but because most poetry written and published today is produced within a body of conventions that guide poets in banal, opaque, nonsensical directions—directions that no one, save another poet looking for something to copy, would willingly follow. It is the hack work of the incompetent yet ambitious, a professional parlance with nothing amatory about it suitable for the amateur: but literature is for amateurs or it is for nothing.”

[The quoted letter can be found in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000).]