In public,
David Myers always defended me and what I had written, even when privately he
poked holes in my slack reasoning. A typical email would begin: “Good post but
you’re wrong about [fill in the blank].
Have you ever read what [ditto] had
to say about [ditto]?” Usually I hadn’t, and that meant I had to read the
volume in question. Friendship brings with it obligations.
I once asked
him what he thought of Franz Rosenzweig, whose The Star of Redemption (1921) I was having trouble reading. His
first reaction was to tell me I would never understand it, that I was too
ignorant of Jewish thought and history, and I couldn’t argue with that. Then he
paused and asked where I was in the book. He pulled his copy off the shelf (we
were on the telephone) and worked me through a couple of paragraphs. I finished
reading the book a week later. He performed the same service a few years later
when I was trying to read Wesley Trimpi’s Muses
of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity (Princeton
University Press, 1983). In David the teaching impulse was strong, sometimes
dominant.
Farkakte? Yiddish, of course. Non-Jews of my age learned
this all-purpose adjective on television from Jack E. Leonard and Mel Brooks. According
to the Jewish Publication Society’s Dictionary,
farkakte means “lousy, messed up,
ridiculous,” but its etymology suggests something stronger: “past participle of
פֿאַרקאַקן farkakn ‘(vulgar) to shit on.’” I always insisted I was not a critic,
merely a reader and writer, and David always disagreed.
As we get
older, our gift for new friendships grows attenuated. We’re less indulgent and
more set in our ways. Our patience with silliness and selfishness is frayed.
Dr. Johnson observes in The Rambler #64:
“So many qualities are indeed requisite to the possibility of friendship, and so
many accidents must concur to its rise and its continuance, that the greatest
part of mankind content themselves without it, and supply its place as they
can, with interest and dependence.” My friendship with David was immediate and
strong, though being his friend could be hard work. Our temperaments diverged.
He couldn’t resist a good fight. I live to avoid them. His mind was analytical.
Mine is metaphorical. But we complemented each other.
Ten years
ago David and I organized the Arnoldian-titled symposium, “The Function of Book
Blogging at the Present Time,” in which we asked twelve book bloggers to
reflect on their form. The results were gentlemanly. No one indulged in what we
called “the sometimes vicious nature of the beast[. . .]--the ad hominem
attacks.” It would be different today. Blogging, like the bigger culture, is a
once-good neighborhood gone bad. Fewer bloggers read or write well. Too many
voices have grown angry and coarse. There’s no reason to be discouraged,
however, because a serious writer doesn’t care what others are doing, though I
wish David were still around to fight the ignorant armies. In his “Summing up”
of the symposium, he writes:
“A true
disagreement obliges a literary critic to rethink his conclusions, to reexamine
his premises, to doublecheck his logic, to scour for further evidence, to
remain open to correction or even the possibility of being proved wrong.”
D.G. Myers
died five years ago today, on Sept. 26, 2014, and that hardly seems possible.
You’ll find much of his legacy at A Commonplace Blog.
1 comment:
He left a quiet, yet profound mark on many through his blogging and reviewing. Well, not always so quiet. But I miss very much his intelligence and generosity.
Post a Comment