'To You the Sad Account I Bring'

There’s more to autumn than John Keats. I know two seasoned readers who name “To Autumn” as their favorite poem of all time, and why not? Keats’ poem is ravishing but retrospective. Autumn is a time of bounty, of “ripeness to the core.” The harvest is in. His autumn is the culmination of summer, summer in a minor key. Two of his poetic forebears turned in the other direction. For them, autumn was winter’s rehearsal. Take this:  

“The verdant leaves that play’d on high,

And wanton’d on the western breeze,

Now trod in dust neglected lie,

As Boreas strips the bending trees.”

That’s from Dr. Johnson’s “Autumn. An Ode.” Wanton as a verb is good, a little gift that has fled the language. On Thursday, while my son and I were walking the battlefield here in Fredericksburg, another Boreas was pushing vast drifts of oak and beech leaves across the path like advancing armies. Johnson’s autumn is more literal than Keats’, and more metaphorical. Those of us who grew up in zones with four distinct seasons have internalized the natural calendar. It’s hard to separate the metaphor from the tilt of Earth’s axis. Some of us inhabit the autumn of our years. Here is some seasonal morale-boosting from Jonathan Swift’s “Fontinella To Florinda”:

“To you the sad account I bring,

Life’s autumn has no second spring.”

We can count on Swift to supply a splash of cold water and we can be autumnally grateful for that too. Swift was born on this date, Nov. 30, in 1667.

'The Seasoning without the Roast'

I never thought it would be possible to admire a man who earlier in his career hosted a television show, but then Clive James – dead at age eighty -- lived to upend many snobberies. As an American reader I came to him late, perhaps twenty years ago, and thought of him strictly as a writer, first as a reviewer and essayist, later as a poet. So prolific a polymath, of course, is always suspect. One is tempted to diagnose Joyce Carol Oates Syndrome, but James remained essentially a journalist, with a journalist’s readiness to take on any subject and turn it quickly into readable column inches. He was the sort of critic I like because I seldom thought of him as a critic. He was an essayist. He was amusing, learned, a bit of a raconteur, often more entertaining than the book or movie he was writing about. Critics, after all, usually can't write and tend to take themselves too seriously. James didn't, though he took the job seriously. His gift was fluency coupled with a formidable memory.

At least one of his books, Cultural Amnesia (2007), will endure. In it, James assembles digressive portraits of more than a hundred figures, heroes and villains, from Hitler to Louis Armstrong. He turns his entry on Eugenio Montale into a meditation on memory and reading. The former, James stresses, is always unreliable. And that is James’ point:

“Without the capacity to forget, we would not be able to go back to something we love with the delicious twin certainties that it will yield a familiar quality, and still be new all over again.”

He might have Cultural Memory in mind. At his best, James was an enthusiast who enjoyed sharing his enthusiasms, without the pretentiousness we associate with so much contemporary writing. Later in the Montale essay he writes:

“In any kind of bad art, it is when the gift is gone that the experiment really does take over – the eternally cold experiment that promises to make gold out of lead, and bricks without straw. Leaving coldness aside (and we should leave it aside, because barren artistic experimentation can also be done in a white-hot frenzy), it might be useful to mention that Montale, in another essay, came up with the perfect term for a work of art that had no other subject except its own technique. He called it the seasoning without the roast.”

'Twenty Other Occasions'

“It’s mainly because of Thanksgiving.”

Perhaps it’s age but I’ve grown intolerant of complaining. It seems impertinent. The world is a vast, complicated, never fully revealed gift made up of smaller, daily gifts. The speaker in Anthony Hecht’s “The Transparent Man,” dying of leukemia, expresses it well as she studies the “dense, clustered woodland” visible through her hospital window:

“It’s become a sort of complex, ultimate puzzle

And keeps me fascinated.”

A ready gauge of good company is immunity to boredom. When someone complains of tedium, excuse yourself and head for the door. Your soul is about to be sucked out of you. I’m with John Berryman’s mother: one relies on “Inner Resources.” Life, friends, is not boring. Charles Lamb was not the sanest of men but he understood the primacy of giving thanks:

“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace before Milton — a grace before Shakspeare [sic]— a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?”

'The Midpoint Between Washington and Richmond'

“Fredericksburg stood at the midpoint between Washington and Richmond and straddled the main road between them.”

On Tuesday, as we approached Baltimore-Washington International, we saw the Appalachians shading from oxblood to dull brown. From that altitude, the landscape looks gently ravaged as though ripped by a beast and now partially healed. One can see isolated settlements without visible roads among the hollows. A wind farm is built along a series of ridges. Strip mining has left deforested pits among the trees. We drove south from Baltimore, mostly on I-95, through Washington, past the Pentagon, roughly following the route McClellan’s Army of the Potomac took in 1862.

“Inevitably, the war would have an impact on the city.”

We’re in Fredericksburg, Va., to celebrate Thanksgiving with my father-in-law. It’s his first holiday season as a widower. Up the hill, a few hundred yards from where I’m sitting, along Lee Drive, are three Confederate cannons with the barrels plugged. The city’s fate was sealed on Sept. 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day of the war. Almost 25, 500 Americans were killed or wounded at Antietam Creek, not all that far from here in Maryland, and McClellan failed to pursue the rebels as they crossed the Potomac back into Virginia.

“The city nestled on the fall line of the Rappahonnock [River] and retained a quaint charm when newly constructed railroads diverted trade and development to Washington and Richmond.”

My father-in-law’s neighborhood is dense with trees, predominantly black and red oaks. His yard is thickly littered with red leaves. Holly trees throughout the woods are heavy with red berries. The battle raged from December 11 to 15. The Union army suffered 12,653 casualties; the Confederates, 5,377. When my middle son, in his second year at the U.S. Naval Academy, arrives by train from Annapolis today, we plan to tramp the battlefield, beginning at Marye’s Heights.

[All of the quoted material is taken from The Fredericksburg Campaign (Louisiana State University Press, 2006) by Francis Augustin O'Reilly.]

'I Knew at Least One Hare that Had a Friend'

From Book III, “The Garden,” of William Cowper’s The Task (1785):

“How various his employments, whom the world

Calls idle, and who justly in return

Esteems that busy world an idler, too!

Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen,

Delightful industry enjoyed at home,

And nature in her cultivated trim

Dressed to his taste, inviting him abroad—

Can he want occupation who has these?”

Of course not. If friends, reading, puttering about in the garden and writing constitute idleness, I wish more of us were idle. It might keep us out of trouble. Cowper is writing out of hard experience. By the time he published The Task, he had already attempted suicide several times and been committed to an insane asylum. And yet, when in his right mind, Cowper was the sweetest of souls. He doted on his friends, wrote some of the finest letters in the language, composed hymns and adopted any animal seeking shelter. In the passage preceding the one quoted above, Cowper condemns hunting, “Detested sport, / That owes its pleasures to another’s pain, / That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks / Of harmless nature.” There’s nothing harmless about nature but we know what he means.

Cowper kept as pets three hares, Puss, Bess and Tiney. He was given them by a neighboring child who had become bored with them. He wrote a poem when Tiney died at the age of nine. When Cowper fed bread to his dog Marquis, he also fed Puss, who lived to the age of twelve. In The Task he writes of Puss:

“One sheltered hare

Has never heard the sanguinary yell

Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.

Innocent partner of my peaceful home,

Whom ten long years’ experience of my care

Has made at last familiar, she has lost

Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,

Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine.”

Some animal lovers are given to virtue-signaling, wishing to advertise their compassion and sensitivity. One never detects this in Cowper. He could never have lived in London among the crowds and social demands. In Olney he found respite. When Cowper writes of hares and other animals, one senses his identification with these creatures:

    

“Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand

That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor

At evening, and at night retire secure

To thy straw-couch, and slumber unalarmed;

For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged

All that is human in me to protect

Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.

If I survive thee I will dig thy grave,

And when I place thee in it, sighing say,

I knew at least one hare that had a friend.”

Cowper was born on this date, Nov. 26, in 1731. The Irish poet Brian Lynch published a wonderful novel about Cowper, The Winner of Sorrow (Dalkey Archive Press, 2009).

'Hence the Beauty of Our Finest Monuments'

Nigel Andrew of Nigeness is an Old Guard blogger who most often writes when something charms him. He has aversions, as does any sensible person, but they remain secondary. Of more importance are the things he loves – music, painting, family, Nabokov, butterflies, cravats. He is strictly amateur in the etymological sense and confirms the notion that in order to be interesting, one must remain interested. Only the terminally dull have no outside (as opposed to inside) interests.

Nige has published his first book, The Mother of Beauty (Thorntree Press, 2019), devoted to English church monuments. Don’t mistake it for a field guide or academic tract. Its genre is mixed. Nige undertakes a sort of pilgrimage into England’s past, and churches are the stations he visits along the way. The journey is as much spiritual as art-historical. Throughout the book Nige cites a haunting phrase from Coleridge’s Anima Poetae: “the spiritual, Platonic old England . . .” It’s a tag Geoffrey Hill uses as an epigraph to “An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England.”

Early in the book, Nige and his Derbyshire cousin visit Winkburn, a village in Nottinghamshire. There they find a church, St. John of Jerusalem, “a curious mix of Norman and seventeenth-century,” off the tourist path, “deeply hidden among [the] dense evergreenery.” Nige quotes the opening lines of another poem by Hill, “The Distant Fury of Battle”:

“Grass resurrects to mask, to strangle,

Words glossed on stone, lopped stone-angel;

But the dead maintain their ground . . .”

Inside are two monuments representing the Burnells, the family that for nine generations occupied the manor at Winkburn. Nige hears stories of a nearby “holy well,” which, he writes, “leads us yet deeper into history, and beyond the reach of history . . .” He continues:

“Places like Winkburn belong to that deep England – I call it Platonic England . . . that still lives on, silent, almost unpeopled, lost in a half-waking dream, barely registering on the world, even on the country. As much an essence as a place, this is an England no one but a church crawler or a very determined walker would think to visit, and invariably we happen upon it by chance, and know it when we find it.”

The Mother of Beauty, among its other identities, serves as an informal anthology of English literature, especially poetry. Along the way we meet Shakespeare, Webster, Sir Thomas Browne, Donne, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Tennyson, Ruskin and Betjeman, among others, as well as the words of anonymous folk poets engraved on monuments and gravestones. Nige devotes an entire chapter to Thomas Gray and his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” But the poet who presides over The Mother of Beauty is Philip Larkin. The book’s opening lines are the opening lines of “Church Going”:

“Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.”

Nige describes the poem as “a pungent compound of abashed self-consciousness, reverence, bewilderment and awe.” His final chapter considers Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” and its much-misunderstood closing line, “What will survive of us is love,” which inspires a marvelous and very personal three-page meditation on love, faith, memory and what it means to be human. Nige surprised me by taking his final lines from a song by Leonard Cohen.

I’m reminded of what Nige’s friend Bryan Appleyard wrote in 2007: “Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England.” Perhaps it’s presumptuous of an American even to contemplate the question of Englishness, but as Americans our inheritance is English, from our language and Constitution to much of what is best in our literature. Three American poets make cameo appearances in Nige’s book – Dickinson, Stevens (the book’s title) and Wilbur. The closest an American might come to undertaking a comparable pilgrimage on native ground would be to visit our Civil War battlefield sites, especially Gettysburg.

No book published in 2019 has so moved me. It starts as one thing and mutates by way of digressions into many other things. Nige's prose is splendid. In his second-to-last paragraph he writes:

“Our lives are little, our time is brief, we are but lightly here – a stroll around any long-established graveyard will bring these facts home – and yet our lives are also of infinite significance. Hence the urge to memorialize them, hence the beauty of our finest monuments.”

'Little Hope of Return to Kindness or Decency'

“To begin with, irritability and bad manners are on the increase everywhere.”

Boilerplate sentiment applicable to any age. Ease of communications makes ours seem more barbarous than most. Thuggishness often remains dormant until germinated by the seductive warmth of the internet. Self-righteousness + anonymity = boorish behavior. It requires no effort, miles from your target, to speak or act on impulse, especially when you judge your opinions as self-evidently correct and beyond challenge. The author of the passage at the top may surprise you: George Orwell writes in his “As I Please” column in the Tribune on this date, Nov. 24, in 1944. He begins:

“There have been innumerable complaints lately about the rudeness of shopkeepers. People say, I think with truth, that shopkeepers appear to take a sadistic pleasure in telling you that they don’t stock the thing you ask for.”

Naturally, I thought of this. Orwell attributes some of the outbreak of rudeness in England to the war, and no doubt he is correct, in part. By war’s end, some 43,000 civilians in Britain had been killed in German bombing and rocket attacks. The first of the 1,500 V-2 rockets that eventually would hit England, mostly London, had landed just two months before Orwell’s column was published. Civilians lived in dread. Orwell blunts his argument by dragging in the depredations of “capitalist society,” as though good manners flourish only under the benign influence of socialism. Two centuries earlier, in The Rambler #55, Dr. Johnson reminds us of an essential human truth:        

“When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.”

'Affluent Plenty and Literary Ease'

“We are in a pickle.”

I know the phrase but was surprised to see Charles Lamb using it. He is writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on this date, Nov. 23, in 1810. Like unrefrigerated potato salad, colloquialisms tend to be quickly perishable. What is cornier than yesterday’s slang? How did you react the last time you heard someone say “groovy” without irony?

The earliest use of pickle in the idiomatic sense, according to the OED, dates from 1562, when John Heywood wrote in his Proverbs and Epigrams: “Time is tickell / Chaunce is fickell / Man is brickell / Freilties pickell / Poudreth mickell /Seasonyng lickell.” Subsequent users include Shakespeare, Fielding, Stevenson and Hart Crane. The Dictionary defines it as “a (usually disagreeable) condition or situation; a plight, a predicament.” Back to Lamb:

“We are in a pickle. Mary [Lamb’s sister] from her affectation of physiognomy has hired a stupid big country wench who looked honest, as she thought, and has been doing her work some days but without eating—eats no butter nor meat, but prefers cheese with her tea for breakfast—and now it comes out that she was ill when she came with lifting her mother about (who is now with God) when she was dying, and with riding up from Norfolk 4 days and nights in the waggon.”

If you know Lamb, you know this will not turn into a heartfelt account of suffering and perhaps death. No, the ailing maid is pretext for having some fun:

   

“She got advice yesterday and took something which has made her bring up a quart of blood, and she now lies, a dead weight upon our humanity, in her bed, incapable of getting up, refusing to go into an hospital, having no body in town but a poor asthmatic dying Uncle, whose son lately married a drab who tills his house, and there is no where she can go, and she seems to have made up her mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed.—O God! O God!—for the little wheelbarrow which trundled the Hunchback from door to door to try the various charities of different professions of Mankind!”

As Lamb wrote in an 1815 letter to Robert Southey: “Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” Don’t mistake Lamb’s jocularity for cruelty or indifference to suffering. He had a horror of reflexive sentimentality. I suspect he was equipped with less buffering than some of us. Rather than weep he joked. He would have made excellent company, depending on your tolerance for unregulated hilarity. Lamb goes on:

“Here’s her Uncle just crawled up, he is far liker Death than He. O the Parish, the Parish, the hospital, the infirmary, the charnel house, these are places meet for such guests, not our quiet mansion where nothing but affluent plenty and literary ease should abound.”

'The Capacity for a Sort of Luminous Brooding'

A reader scratches his head and asks: “How can you possibly like both Tristram Shandy and George Eliot? That makes no sense.” Spoken like a true graduate student. When younger I asked similar questions. Consistency seemed important. Without quite realizing it, I was looking for a rigorous and universal set of criteria to judge all books. I also assumed literary quality was binary -- good or bad – and that I should be prepared to defend my choice of reading matter. In my late teens and early twenties, omnivorousness never bothered me. There was no pattern to my reading, unless pleasure is a pattern. Then I grew self-conscious and defensive. I wanted the approval of some imaginary über-critic, but with maturity comes indifference to most judgment.

My reader’s choice of examples – Sterne, Eliot – is prescient. This Saturday, Nov. 24, is Sterne’s 306^th birthday. And Eliot was born two-hundred years ago today, on Nov. 22, in 1819. To be human is to be contradictory at the genetic level. I feel no urge to reconcile my tastes, whether Beerbohm and Oakeshott or Nabokov and Richard Yates. I remember Henry James describing George Eliot’s “deep, strenuous, much-considering mind of which the leading mark is the capacity for a sort of luminous brooding” – a writer’s ideal and a reader’s.

'That Queer Monster, the Artist'

“I still find my consciousness interesting – under cultivation of the interest.”

There’s no mistaking the author of that mot. I remember reading The Ambassadors (1903) again when preparing my senior thesis and noticing that consciousness appears at least once in each of its twelve chapters. James owns that word or co-owns it with his brother William. The sentence is drawn from a wonderful letter James wrote his old friend Henry Adams on March 21, 1914. James is a month from turning seventy-one; Adams, already seventy-six. James will be dead in less than two years, Adams in four. War looms. James is replying to a characteristically gloomy letter from Adams, now lost. We can guess at its bleakness from a letter Adams wrote the following day to Elizabeth Cameron:

“I’ve read Henry James' last bundle of memories [Notes of a Son and Brother] which have reduced me to a pulp. Why did we live? Was that all? Why was I not born in Central Africa and died young. Poor Henry James thinks it all real, I believe, and actually still lives in that dreary, stuffy Newport and Cambridge, with papa James and Charles Norton – and me!”

In his reply to Adams’ lost letter, James assumes the role of morale officer – in his own Jamesian way. He wants to buoy up his friend, lift his melancholy spirit. One senses affection mingled with head-shaking exasperation. James refers to the “unmitigated blackness” expressed by Adams and writes:

“Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss — if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there’s no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to — or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving— and apparently capable of continuing to do so.”

One hears a distant echo of Lambert Strether’s pep talk to Little Bilham. James endorses the persistence of memory and the impulse – the necessity – to make art. Next comes the sentence quoted at the top, followed by this:

“Cultivate it with me, dear Henry — that’s what I hoped to make you do — to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don’t know that I can tell you, but I don’t challenge or quarrel with it — I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions — as many as possible — and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It’s, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.”

'It Is Best to Know as Little as Possible'

One seemingly reliable authority attributes the proverb to Madame De Staël. Others leave it inconclusively at “The French have a proverb . . . .” Yet another strains credulity and credits Evelyn Waugh. I first heard it from a New Age cultist in the early nineteen-eighties: “To know all is to forgive all.” My source was a patchouli-scented fossil of 1967 who delivered the platitude with withering smugness. I was supposed to be grateful just to share space with Aristotle.

I like proverbs and their lineal descendants, aphorisms, maxims and apothegms. Much in little is always artful. But the “to-know-all” tag is soggy reasoning, a cliché worthy of Emerson. The Hitler option comes to mind: If I knew everything about Hitler I would forgive him. Impossible. Besides, I have no interest in understanding or forgiving Hitler. I’m happy that he failed and that he’s dead and that’s the end of it. He’s hardly the only person who will never be forgiven.

Ivy Compton-Burnett was another dissenter from the proverb’s purported wisdom. In her 1937 novel Daughters and Sons, she has Miss Marcon say: “But families can seldom be explained, and they make better gossip without any explanation. To know all is to forgive all, and that would spoil everything.” Think how dull life would be if we forgave everyone.

Two decades later, in A Heritage and Its History (1959), Compton-Burnett, ever the realist, is still dispensing with the sentimental tripe:

“‘Ah, to know all is to forgive all,’ said Rhoda.

The butler, Deakin, replies:

“‘I confess I have not found it so, my lady. To forgive, it is best to know as little as possible.’”

[It seems Nige has also been reading Ivy Compton-Burnett again.]

'They Are a Wicked Pair'

“At 2.15 I joined the Hills at Miss Jourdain’s and Miss Compton-Burnett’s where they were lunching. A great occasion.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) is a novelist easy to overestimate and easier to dismiss, and I try to navigate a sensible middle course. She has already spawned a “cult,” one much taken with the purported campiness of her twenty novels. Cultists too often liken her to Ronald Firbank, whose campy novels I find un-rereadable. That’s not how I read Compton-Burnett. She’s a moralist with low regard for human beings. Where other see dysfunction, especially in families, she sees petty wickedness and cruelty. She makes no excuses for her little monsters, and a reader either laughs and admires the adroitness of her dialogue-heavy novels, or gives up in boredom and disgust. She is not for readers seeking uplift.

A reader, knowing my enjoyment of Compton-Burnett’s work, has sent a passage from Diaries, 1942-1954 (2006) by James Lees-Milne (1908-97), the English architectural historian best known for his gossipy diary. The first person mentioned in the passage above is Margaret Jourdain (1876-1951), who wrote on English furniture and interior decoration, and was Compton-Burnett’s longtime companion. Lees-Milne continues:    

“Margaret Jourdain is patently jealous of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom she keeps unapproachable except through herself. The two have lived together for years and are never parted. They are an Edwardian and remarkably acidulated pair. The coiffures of both look like wigs.”

Thus far, you would expect Lees-Milne to remain catty. He surprises us:

“Miss C.-B., whom I consider to be the greatest living English novelist, is upright, starchy and forthright. There is a bubbling undercurrent of humour in every observation that she makes, and she makes a good many, apparently hackneyed and usually sharp, in a rapid, choppy, rather old-fashioned upper-middle-class manner, clipping her breathless words. She enunciates clearly and faultlessly, saying slightly shocking things in a matter-of-fact tone, following up her sentences with a lot of ‘dontcherknows,’ and then smiling perceptibly. She has a low, breasty chuckle. She has not unpleasing, sharp features, and her profile is almost beautiful. But she is not the kind of woman who cares tuppence for appearances, and wears a simple, unremarkable black dress which she smoothes down with long fingers.”

I knew of Lees-Milne but have never read his diaries or the rest of his prolific body of work, but based on this passage I may try the diary. “Upright, starchy and forthright” is good and “a low, breasty chuckle” is even better. A quick online search revealed another observation of Compton-Burnett by Lees-Milne, this one from Ancestral Voices, 1942-3 (1975), the first published volume of his diary:

“Ivy Compton-Burnett ate half a pot of raspberry jam, and I was shocked to see her surreptitiously wipe her sticky fingers upon the cover of my sofa. Both she and Margaret ate like horses. This time Miss C.-B. talks a great deal more than Margaret. Her description of the Poetry Reading and Lady Gerald Wellesley's [drunken] antics was very funny. They are a wicked pair.”

'You May Find Something of Almost Everything'

“Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion because other people did hold it.”

The first half of this observation neatly describes adolescents of any age. Some of us grow up and if we pay even minimal attention to what’s in front of us, life has a way of turning us into independent realists. Self-seeking can slip away. Outrageousness loses its allure and our opinions and those of most others become unworthy of notice. My generation – the so-called Boomers – often embarrass me. (I think of William Hazlitt as a premature Baby Boomer with a magnificent prose style.)

On Friday we were talking to our son who is a second-year midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. He noted that people his age tend to blame Baby Boomers for all the nation’s troubles, and I can’t argue except to note that subsequent generations have carried on our pioneering work. Our most lasting legacy is the legitimization of unashamed, undisguised, much aggrieved self-centeredness – thus, Hazlitt the Boomer.

The second half of the passage from George Saintsbury’s article on Hazlitt in Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 (1895) characterizes people for whom fashion holds no charm. They see no advantage in joining the herd for the sake of affability, convenience or peer-approval. Granted, there’s a price to be paid for independence. It can be hard work but you’ll have no trouble sleeping at night. After his qualifications, Saintsbury defends Hazlitt:

“In most writers, in all save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other (generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything, except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can be found in prose may be found at times in his.”

'This Concatenation of Events'

Sophisticates condescend to slapstick comedy and pretend not to find it amusing. It’s beneath them. Face it: life would be less bearable without Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy – and Samuel Beckett, who is prominent among their admirers. Consider the showdown between Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty in Lolita, or the war between Dolf Beeler and the Bullards in Thomas Berger’s The Feud. William Cowper, the drollest of madmen, savored life’s slapstick. In a letter he wrote on this date, Nov. 17, in 1783 to his friend the Rev. John Newton, Cowper describes a scene worthy of Monty Python:

“[The son of Molly Boswell] had stolen some iron-work, the property of Griggs, the butcher. Being convicted, he was ordered to be whipped, which operation he underwent at the cart's tail, from the stone-house to the high arch and back again. He seemed to show great fortitude, but it was all an imposition upon the public. The beadle, who performed it, had filled his left hand with red ochre, through which after every stroke he drew the lash of his whip, leaving the appearance of a wound upon the skin, but in reality not hurting him at all.”

There’s the set-up: a thief and his soft-hearted punisher. That the latter is a minor church functionary makes what happens next even better:

“This being perceived by Mr. Constable H——, who followed the beadle, he applied his cane, without any such management or precaution, to the shoulders of the too merciful executioner. The scene immediately became more interesting. The beadle could by no means be prevailed upon to strike hard, which provoked the constable to strike harder; and this double flogging continued, till a lass of Silver-end, pitying the pitiful beadle thus suffering under the hands of the pitiless constable, joined the procession, and placing herself immediately behind the latter seized him by his capillary club, and pulling him backwards by the same, slapped his face with a most Amazonian fury.”

Cowper’s pacing is superb. And that’s often the secret of comic writing – doling out the information at the appropriate rate, sometimes with understatement (“it was all an imposition”), something hyperbolically (“a most Amazonian fury”). Cowper ties it all up neatly:

“This concatenation of events has taken up more of my paper than I intended it should, but I could not forbear to inform you how the beadle thrashed the thief, the constable the beadle, and the lady the constable, and how the thief was the only person concerned who suffered nothing.”

'How Shall I Spell the Name of Each Cossacque?'

As a sophomore I took a class called “The Russian Novel in Translation.” By that point I didn’t even care about graduating. I would drop out after my junior year and earn my B.A. thirty years later. All I wanted was an excuse to read books. If the books were good I attended class religiously. If not, I went somewhere else to read. You can guess the novels we were assigned, all from the nineteenth century, many of Tolstoyan/Dostoevskian dimensions.

One day, a young woman seated in front of me had a tantrum about Russian names -- their length and unpronouncability, all those patronymics (-ovich, -evich and –ich) and diminutives (Volodya, Fyedya, Vanya). “Why can’t they just have regular names like everybody else?” she asked. Not to mention in the mysteries of Russian-to-English transliteration, where you can get Чехов spelled Chekhov, Čechov, Čehov, Tchekhov, Tschechow and Tchekoff. Lord Byron shared some of my classmate’s frustration but turned it not into whining but comedy. In Section XIV of Canto the Seventh of Don Juan he writes:

“The Russians now were ready to attack:

     But oh, ye goddesses of war and glory!

How shall I spell the name of each Cossacque

     Who were immortal, could one tell their story?

Alas! what to their memory can lack?

     Achilles’ self was not more grim and gory

Than thousands of this new and polish’d nation,

Whose names want nothing but -- pronunciation.”

Imagine Tolstoy’s 1863 novel The Cossacques or Isaac Babel riding with Budyonny’s Cossacques. Too French. Byron continues in Sections XV, XVI and XVII, and works in some good scatological gags:

“Still I’ll record a few, if but to increase

     Our euphony: there was Strongenoff, and Strokonoff,

Meknop, Serge Lwow, Arséniew of modern Greece,

     And Tschitsshakoff, and Roguenoff, and Chokenoff,

And others of twelve consonants apiece;

     And more might be found out, if I could poke enough

Into gazettes; but Fame (capricious strumpet),

It seems, has got an ear as well as trumpet,

“And cannot tune those discords of narration,

     Which may be names at Moscow, into rhyme;

Yet there were several worth commemoration,

     As e’er was virgin of a nuptial chime;

Soft words, too, fitted for the peroration

     Of Londonderry drawling against time,

Ending in ‘ischskin,’ ‘ousckin,’ ‘iffskchy," ‘ouski’:

Of whom we can insert but Rousamouski,

"Scherematoff and Chrematoff, Koklophti,

     Koclobski, Kourakin, and Mouskin Pouskin,

All proper men of weapons, as e’er scoff’d high

     Against a foe, or ran a sabre through skin:

Little cared they for Mahomet or Mufti,

     Unless to make their kettle-drums a new skin

Out of their hides, if parchment had grown dear,

And no more handy substitute been near.”

[A musical reader passed this along.]

'It Must Be Constantly Reproduced'

“The tendency of every age is to bury as many classics as it revives. If unable to discover our own urgent meanings in a creation of the past, we hope to find ample redress in its competitive neighbors. A masterpiece cannot be produced once and for all; it must be constantly reproduced. Its first author is a man. Its later ones--time, social time, history.”

And readers – non-aligned, obsessive, sometimes entertainingly eccentric readers. Reading has become a species of eccentricity and, in some quarters, reading the books of the past is judged aberrant behavior. The author of the passage above and its original place of publication come as a surprise: Philip Rahv, a critic and longtime co-editor of Partisan Review, a literary magazine that had started as an organ of the Communist Party USA. Rahv and his co-editor, William Phillips, relaunched the journal in 1937 in the wake of Stalin’s Great Purge and Soviet double-dealing in the Spanish Civil War.

The passage at the top was first published in 1938 in the Partisan Review as the opening paragraph of “Dostoevski and Politics: Notes on The Possessed,” which was included in Rahv’s first essay collection, Image and Idea (1949). I was surprised because, though I haven’t read Rahv in many years, I think of him as a rather crude critic (Exhibit A: “Paleface and Redskin”), too often preoccupied with politics, though I do remember his devotion to Henry James. The paragraph is thoughtful, measured and very nearly a linked string of aphorisms. The third sentence brings Moby-Dick to mind immediately.

Reading is selfish in several senses. We all have our reasons. We all, at some point, accept our pleasures and aggravations. But reading has a social dimension. By that I mean, the purest act of criticism is reading a book, enjoying it and sharing that enjoyment with another likely reader. In short, intelligent proselytizing in conversation or print. It will probably come to nothing. But sometimes lives are changed by modest gestures. I learned about The Anatomy of Melancholy and The Wife of Martin Guerre by talking to friends.

'In Praises Sauced with Lies'

One of my favorite characters in all of Shakespeare has no name and does little but speak. The impression he leaves on the reader is entirely a matter of words. In Act II, Scene 2 of Coriolanus he is identified only as “Second Officer.” He praises the title character, who is not present, not in verse but in prose:

“He hath deserved worthily of his country: and his ascent is not by such easy degrees as those who, having been supple and courteous to the people, bonneted, without any further deed to have them at all into their estimation and report: he hath so planted his honours in their eyes, and his actions in their hearts, that for their tongues to be silent, and not confess so much, were a kind of ingrateful injury; to report otherwise, were a malice, that, giving itself the lie, would pluck reproof and rebuke from every ear that heard it.”

It’s typical of Shakespeare to put so beautiful an encomium into the mouth of a character who is nearly anonymous and neither patrician nor hero. Of course, Coriolanus, by the standards of Hamlet and Lear, is relatively tight-lipped, though we remember his nastiest lines: “You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate / As reek o’th’rotten fens . . . I banish you!” Coriolanus is proud, disdainful and bitter, a gifted soldier but a self-hobbled politician. In modern parlance, he lacks “people skills.” When the army commander Cominius praises him and his men cheer, Coriolanus replies:

“No more, I say! For that I have not wash’d

My nose that bled, or foil’d some debile wretch.—

Which, without note, here’s many else have done,—

You shout me forth

In acclamations hyperbolical;

As if I loved my little should be dieted

In praises sauced with lies.”

Simply as language, apart from any dramatic impact, this is ravishing. Perhaps out of sheer politeness, perhaps hoping to curry favor, certainly in the spirit of competitive metaphor-making, Cominius replies:

“Too modest are you;

More cruel to your good report than grateful

To us that give you truly: by your patience,

If ’gainst yourself you be incensed, we’ll put you,

Like one that means his proper harm, in manacles,

Then reason safely with you.”

I would advise new or reluctant readers of Shakespeare to simply let the language flow over them. Don’t fret first time around over philosophy, history or even plot, if you find it confusing. In Pale Fire, with a title borrowed from Timon of Athens, Nabokov has John Shade say: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Crazy Kinbote asks: “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?” Shade replies: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.”

'As Fascinating As a Revival or a Hanging'.

Laughter has no conscience. You can suppress it, blow your nose and leave the room but the internal convulsion remains. The comic impulse, at least in some of us, is overwhelming, more powerful even than weeping. It seems significant that seen from a distance, laughing can be indistinguishable from crying. So I offer no apology for getting yet another laugh or two out of H.L. Mencken’s “The Sahara of the Bozart,” first published on this date, Nov. 13, in 1917, in the New York Evening Mail, and collected in Prejudices, Second Series (1920). Its publication riled up many Southerners, including one classically minded critic who called Mencken a “modern Attila.” The essay is breathtakingly unfair and breathtakingly funny. Its unfairness seems beside the point:

“[The] civil war actually finished off nearly all the civilized folk in the South and thus left the country to the poor white trash, whose descendants now run it. The war, of course, was not a complete massacre; it didn’t kill them all. But those first-rate Southerners who actually survived were bankrupt, broken in spirit and unable to get along under the new dispensation, and so they came North.”

Until 2004, I was a lifelong Northerner. Observance of the Civil War centennial started when I was eight years old, and it turned me into a rabid Union patriot. I grew up watching The Beverly Hillbillies. I was never immune to Northern prejudice. My Southern stereotypes usually contained a nanoparticle of truth, much embellished by laziness, inexperience and popular culture.

Mencken’s essay was published on the cusp of the Southern literary renaissance. Think of Faulkner, Tate, Ransom (whose poems I’m reading again), Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren; and later, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor and Guy Davenport. Not all of these writers have worn well but the sheer number of them, all worthy of at least passing attention, is striking, though it probably wouldn’t impress Mencken. He writes:

“In such an atmosphere, it must be obvious, the arts cannot flourish. The philistinism of the emancipated poor white is not only indifferent to them; it is positively antagonistic to them. That philistinism regards human life, not as an agreeable adventure, but as a mere trial of rectitude.”

One of the first clichés I had to jettison when moving south was that Texas was a Western state – an assumption based, logically, on all the Westerns I had seen. Not so. It was part of the Confederacy. It seceded, and some would say it never truly rejoined the Union. It’s a Southern city with Southern folkways.

I wondered if Mencken had ever visited Texas, and located a photograph of him in Houston in 1928, here to cover the Democratic National Convention. Of the four men in the picture (including Will Rogers), Mencken is the only one not smiling. The nominees were Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president and Arkansas Sen. Joseph T. Robinson for vice president. It was the first convention held in the South by either party since the Civil War. That November, Herbert Hoover trounced Smith by more than six million votes.

Mencken had written during the 1924 Democratic convention in New York City: “A national convention is as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, ugly, stupid and tedious, to be sure, and yet there suddenly comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”

'Stands Up for Freedom and Elasticity'

“Comedy is the salt of civilization, its critical voice.”

I have been reading Henri Troyat’s Divided Soul: The Life of Gogol (trans. Nancy Amphoux, 1973). I love his biography of Tolstoy which I read when I was sixteen and again several years ago. Gogol is a radically different sort of writer from Tolstoy, almost a different species. (Please: There is no such thing as a “typical Russian writer.”) As an adjective, I take Gogolian to mean something like gallows humor, absurd but not light and frothy -- morbid, in the comic sense. It’s humor that levels human vanity. Troyat quotes a letter Gogol wrote to his friend Mikhail Pogodin in 1833: “I have always been infatuated with comedy,” which will surprise readers who understand Dead Souls as merely a naturalistic or even satirical portrait of provincial Russia in the nineteenth century.

“The comic spirit is forgiving, stands up for freedom and elasticity, and counters the corrosive power of evil by refusing to acknowledge its claim to dominance over he human spirit. Its real enemy is custom drained of significance; it is the ability of life to assert its claims no matter what social forms dictate.”

The two quoted passages are from Guy Davenport’s essay devoted to Eudora Welty, “That Faire Field of Enna,” in The Geography of the Imagination (1981). Davenport's use of "salt" in connection with comedy is interesting and suggestive. One OED definition is “that which gives life or pungency to discourse or written composition; poignancy of expression; pungent wit.”