'To Badness I Always Turned with Relief'

I’m no critic and have never claimed to be one, despite what a reader alleges. In general, literary criticism is boring. Few critics can write respectably, and the parasitic nature of the enterprise has always made me uneasy. Criticism is seldom autonomous, though there are exceptions. We read Johnson, Hazlitt and their heirs not because they tell us who we ought to read, but for the pleasure their thoughts and prose give us. Otherwise, criticism tends to be either ingrown bloviating or a gussied-up version of Consumer Reports. The idea of a reader who can’t write and has no taste telling us what is worth reading is amusing but hardly worthy of refutation.

I’m pleased to learn that Max Beerbohm shared a version of my thinking on the subject. In 1942, he wrote a brief “prefatory letter” for Alan Dent’s collection of theater reviews, Preludes and Studies. Dent was a Scottish critic, secretary to James Agate (whom Jacques Barzun called “the Supreme Diarist”) and friend of Beerbohm’s. Unlike Dent, Beerbohm tells us, he never cultivated “the art of modesty”:

“You never push yourself forward. You merge yourself in your theme. You wish that your reader shall share your pleasure in good work that you admire, and shall incidentally learn from you just why it is admirable. My own wish was that the reader should admire me. And it served me right that, so far as I am aware, he didn't.”

   

Beerbohm is having some fun. His weapons-grade sense of irony enables him to be at once gracious, self-deprecating and vain. Then he turns “modest”:

“The only excuse I can find for myself is that I was never, in the true sense, a critic; never an enlightening judge of excellence. I knew what was good, but I was apt to be puzzled as to the constituents of its goodness, and was a foggy eulogist. Badness is easy game, and to badness I always turned with relief. Badness is auspicious to the shower-off. Its only drawback is that it isn’t worth writing about.”

Beerbohm reveals a trade secret: writing a pan is more fun than a plaudit. It’s easier to be funny. “But I find no depreciations included in your book,” he writes, “and am glad of this absence -- though I have no doubt that you are as good a depreciator as I deemed myself.”

'Three Gaudy and Gorgeous Years'

As a newspaper reporter in Ohio, Indiana and upstate New York, part of my job was to cover public meetings. I’ve spent thousands of hours, notebook in hand, trying to stay awake during city and town council meetings, school board meetings, recreation board meetings, and the subcommittee meetings of all of the above. I reached the nadir in a small Ohio city where I covered the monthly assemblies of the Ditch Maintenance Board. I never knew there was so much I didn’t want to know about ditches.

American journalism has given us several of our finest writers; preeminently, A.J. Liebling and H.L. Mencken. Presumably, both men, at some point early in their careers, had to cover their equivalent of the Ditch Maintenance Board. On this date, Feb. 28, in 1901, the Baltimore Morning Herald published Mencken’s account of the city’s most recent Water Board meeting (waterboarding now has other connotations). Mencken was twenty years old and had worked for the Morning Herald, his first newspaper, since the previous year. He would stay there until 1906, when he joined the Sun. The story proves he could perform the mundane tasks expected of a reporter. His prose is clean, if not as witty as his subsequent work, and he manages to spice up his lede while still playing it fairly straight:

“Water Engineer Alfred M. Quick, whose part in the criticism of the municipal subways recently subjected him to a vigorous ‘roast’ at the hands of Subway Engineer Phelps, has evidently become something of a ‘roaster’ himself.”    

Mencken is in his element – the human comedy. Bureaucrats amused him. He performs the well-known reporter’s dodge of transcribing the board’s financial report at length. Half the story is lifted wholesale. Column inches must be filled somehow. Mencken enjoys it when one pack of civic functionaries denigrates another: “In the annual report of the water board, submitted to the mayor yesterday, half of the sentences are burning ‘knocks’ at the board’s predecessors in office. The latter are charged with all sorts of lapses and blunders from extravagance to loose bookkeeping.”

Mencken treasured his apprentice years. In 1898 he had taken a writing class with Cosmopolitan University, an early correspondence school. That was his only formal training in journalism and his only enrollment in higher education. (An interesting book could be written about the accomplished men and women, especially writers, who never went to college or never earned a degree.) In 1927, Mencken published in the Baltimore Evening Sun a retrospective account of his early years as a newspaper reporter. It begins:

“Looking back over a dull life, mainly devoted to futilities, I can discern three gaudy and gorgeous years. They were my first three years as a newspaper reporter in Baltimore, and when they closed I was still short of twenty-two. I recall them more and more brightly as I grow older, and take greater delight in the recalling. Perhaps the imagination of a decaying man has begun to gild them. But gilded or not, they remain superb, and it is inconceivable that I’ll ever see their like again. It is the fate of man, I believe, to be wholly happy only once in his life. Well, I had my turn while I was still fully alive, and could enjoy every moment.”

Few writers wrote so convincingly and amusingly as Mencken about the pleasures and satisfactions of life.

'Lay Out the Matter Truly As It Is'

“His favourite rhetorical technique is congeries, the piling-up of words.”

In “My Mistress Melancholy,” Mary Ann Lund chooses a seldom-used word to describe Robert Burton’s style in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Congeries is most often used disparagingly. The OED defines it as “a collection of things merely massed or heaped together.” The adverb betrays the negative connotation. At the sentence and paragraph level this is accurate. A new thought or allusion may follow any other. Burton possessed a marvelously associative mind, not to be confused with the slop-bucket approach of such later writers as Thomas Wolfe or Jack Kerouac.

But on the larger scales, the Anatomy is arranged in partitions, sections, members and subsections. Superficially, it sometimes resembles Spinoza’s Ethics, the full Latin title of which is Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrate [Demonstrated in Geometrical Order]. But Burton’s book is not organized as a sustained argument in the modern sense. The books it most resembles are Tristram Shandy and Moby-Dick, works into which their authors could have crammed anything. Burton’s was a playful, well-stocked mind. He revised and expanded his Anatomy five times in the seventeen years following the first edition. His subject is what we call depression but his spirit can be impish. He anatomizes melancholy, in part, to immunize or cure himself, just as the narrator of Laurence Sterne’s novel (and the tubercular author himself) keeps writing in order to defer death. Lund writes:    

“Melancholy as ‘the character of mortality’ is an endlessly varied, proliferating disease, and Burton’s attempt to chart it is propelled by his curiosity – not always in a straight line. As an antidote to inactivity, the curiosity he displays and encourages among his readers becomes the best hope against melancholy. The Anatomy’s final words are to keep going: ‘be not solitary, be not idle’.”

Burton even articulates a timely reminder of what it means to be a writer, in a passage remarkably plain-spoken and free of allusions:

“He that will freely speak and write, must be for ever no subject, under no prince or law, but lay out the matter truly as it is, not caring what any can, will, like or dislike.”

'Never Resist a Call of Nature'

The library cart was stacked with books and topped with a handwritten sign bearing every bibliophile’s favorite word: “FREE.” Most were discarded art books with blurry, out-of-register color plates, along with paperbacks in French, though one title briefly held my attention – The Gourd Book (1979) by Charles Bixler Heiser. These were books donated to the university library but judged unworthy of absorption into the collection.

Lying horizontally on the cart’s bottom shelf was a fat, older-looking volume with a scuffed leather cover. One of its 808 pages fell out when I opened the book, which turned out to be a nineteenth-century bestseller: Dr. Chase’s Third Last and Complete Receipt Book and Household Physician or Practical Knowledge for the People (1887). The author is Dr. A.W. (Alvin Wood) Chase (1817-1885), a native of upstate New York and a graduate of the Eclectic Institute of Cincinnati (which sounds as though it had been invented by the late Charles Portis).

Chase was not exactly a quack. At the time, medical accreditation was fluid. Patients were less impressed by the medical degrees hanging on the wall, patent medicines flourished and malpractice insurance was unheard of. Receipt in Chase’s title refers not to an authentication of purchase but, in the words of the OED: “a statement of the ingredients and procedure necessary for making a medicinal preparation, a prescription. . . . a remedy or cure.” The word is closely related to the modern recipe, and the book, indeed, contains many instructions for preparing food. When doctors were scarce and people lived in remote parts of the country, a book like Chase’s might save a life or preserve a limb – or claim both. In his preface, Chase writes:

“As I was once traveling through Illinois, a gentleman, just before we reached the crossing of the Mississippi at Burlington, approached me, and said, ‘Isn’t this Dr. Chase, the author of Chase’s Receipt Book?’ (referring to my first) to which I replied, ‘Yes, sir,’ when he remarked: ‘I thought I recognized you from the frontpiece in your book;’ and added, ‘We read it more than the Bible,’ etc. To which I remonstrated and begged to suggest that he instruct his family from that time forward to read the Bible most, inasmuch as eternity was of infinitely more importance than this life.”

Chase’s book is a grab-all, a loosely organized compendium of remedies, theories and platitudes – and a lot of fun to read. Under the heading “LIFE LENGTHENED—Sensible Rules for,” he makes fifteen suggestions, including: “Cultivate an equable temper; many have fallen dead in a fit of passion” and “Never resist a call of nature, for a single moment.” In his entry for gonorrhea, Chase assures us the disease is caused by “impure cohabitation.” For a remedy he prescribes a “cooling purgative” consisting of “compound powder of jalap, with cream of tartar, or a full cathartic dose of any medicine one is in the habit of using as a cathartic.”   

An earlier reader clipped articles from newspapers and slipped them between the pages of Chase’s book. All are brown and brittle. The only one dated is from 1929. Its headline reads: “Quinine is best remedy for influenza or grip.” Another headed “Tested Recipes” includes instructions for making fried apple sauce, apple whip, and fried bacon and apples. There’s a recipe for Southern Spoon Bread and tips on the “Wise Way to Cook Rice.” The final text is equally helpful: “Celery can come out of the luxury class if all of the bunch is used. The green ends and leaves may be used to good advantage in soup.”

For a sample of Chase’s folksy, earnest prose, see his entry for the preparation of minced-meat pies, which concludes with these “remarks,” as he calls them:

“Some people will have brandy or wine in their mince pies, let such put in 1 cup of brandy, or 2 cups of wine, into the above amount. It is each one’s privilege to suit themselves, or the demand of the majority, or the head of the house, as the case may be. What is not baked up when made, pack nicely in jars and cover well with cloths and a plate with a light weight upon it, or other cover, not adding the apples only as used, and the meat keeps better without.”

Sounds like a recipe for botulism.

'The Human Mortals Want Their Winter Cheer'

Nige notes that his part of England is enduring a “relentlessly soggy February.” So is Houston. No thunder storms but much Seattle-style saturation. I saw cars abandoned in flooded stretches of road on the way to work Monday morning. Everything drips. Like Nige, I noticed a butterfly last week during a brief sunny respite. It was a Monarch – a species reputed to occasionally have a nine-month lifespan -- flitting about the flowerless side of our house. That evening turned cold and rainy, and the butterfly’s survival seems uncertain. To his weather report, past and present, Nige appends a passage from Act II, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania is speaking:

“The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,

And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.

The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable.”

In short, lots of rain has fallen. Shakespeare is less interested in precipitation than in its effects. “Murrain flock” means a dead herd. Murrain has a cluster of related meanings, including (according to the OED): “Any virulent infectious disease of cattle or other livestock, such as anthrax, rinderpest, or babesiosis (redwater fever).” Rotting livestock meant economic hardship and disease. The word came to be synonymous with plague and pestilence.

In previous readings, I lazily took “nine men’s morris” to be some variation on the traditional English morris dance. Rather, it’s a board game with two players, “each with a number (usually nine) of pebbles, wood or metal discs, pegs, or pins.” The OED cites Shakespeare’s use. The origin of morris is described as “uncertain” but my earlier assumption may not have been entirely wrong: “perhaps with reference to a supposed resemblance between the counters on the board and patterns made by Morris dancers.” Titiana’s subsequent lines are not quoted by Nige:

“The human mortals want their winter cheer;

No night is now with hymn or carol blessed.

Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,

Pale in her anger washes all the air

That rheumatic diseases do abound.”

“Governess of floods” refers to the tides on Earth caused by the moon’s gravitational pull. Titiana gives us a picture of post-Christmas winter in the northern latitudes, though unlikely to be taking place in Greece, the play’s nominal setting. Tis not the season to be jolly. When I lived in upstate New York, I could always expect a late-February thaw, lasting perhaps a day or two, followed by snow and freezing temperatures. If you were in the woods you could smell the earth for the first time since the previous spring. In Houston, catkins are falling from the oaks – an early sign of the season turning. Scholars tell us the rains in England were notably heavy in May, June and July 1594, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written in 1595-96.

'The Topography of Its Blots and Dog’s-ears'

It has happened again. I loaned a book and it came back not destroyed but damaged. An old-fashioned word comes to mind: sullied. In this case, soiled, scuffed and with a page dog-eared. The reading quality is not impaired, though it’s not a book I’m likely to read again. I’m mildly neurotic about the treatment of books, even lousy or mediocre ones. I’m not likely to buy a book that has been underlined, highlighted, coffee-stained or annotated. Is this fetishism? More like sentimentality, I suppose.

Several walls in our university library are decorated with hangings made of stacks of books painted on the spines. I’ve checked: all the books so vandalized are Grishams, Haileys and the like – bestsellers of yesteryear. The loss to literature is negligible. Still, it rankles. Who would deface a book? We know Dr. Johnson did but he can be forgiven. I’m not yet prepared to say I won’t again loan books. Perhaps I should just make them gifts. Or demand collateral against possible damage: two Nabokovs for one Henry James. In 1802, Lamb sends Coleridge a Milton – a gift, not a loan -- and writes:

“[I]t is pleasanter to eat one’s own peas out of one’s own garden, than to buy by the peck at Covent Garden; and a book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at teas with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum.”

'Perforated by Light from Another Sphere'

Good writers tend to elicit good writing after their deaths. The eulogistic impulse is elemental. It’s also deeply selfish, at least at first. We begin with a sense of loss and the unfairness of things and turn them into an expression of gratitude. A productive life well lived reminds us that we can always do better, work harder, be less selfish and more generous. The dead go on teaching us, as do the living. Take Mark Dooley writing about his friend Sir Roger Scruton, who died Jan. 12 at age seventy-five:

“In everything he wrote, his principal aim was to show that through love and art, religion, music, hunting and wine, we see and experience something which science can’t explain, but which is no less real for all of that. Think, for example, of a smiling child.  Science explains the smile in a purely mechanical sense, whereas we understand it as something quite different.  It is a revelation of innocence, beauty and love – a revelation of the free person that is mingled with her flesh.”

A professor of religious studies at my university invited me to dinner Friday evening, along with three of his current and former students. I had never met any of them and they knew me only through Anecdotal Evidence. “Religious studies” may sound stuffy but dinner was not. The conversational tone was closer to profane than sacred. We talked without interruption for six hours about everything, including Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, homeopathy, Willa Cather, Apocalypse Now, enemas, Jaroslav Pelikan, UFO’s, Max Beerbohm, bestiality and a campus scandal I had known nothing about. I was comfortable enough to break out a couple of my dirtiest jokes. They were comfortable enough to talk about their religious practices. Not once was the name “Trump” uttered. Academics tend to be a self-involved and tedious lot. We had none of that. Dooley writes of his dead friend:

“When we lovingly behold another person, or when we contemplate an artwork, listen to music or marvel at a beautiful building, we experience something that transcends its material constraints.  That ‘something’ is not separable from the material or biological order which contains it.  But every time we gaze into the eyes of a loved one, or whenever we savour our favourite symphony or pray at a beautiful shrine, we encounter ‘personality and freedom’ shining forth from what is ‘contingent, dependent and commonplace’.  We see the fabric of the world perforated by light from another sphere.  In this point of intersection of the timeless with time, we catch glimpses of the transcendental and receive intimations of the infinite.”

'On the Whole They Are a Malicious Lot'

I first learned of Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), the American-born English essayist and critic, through his correspondence with Henry James. Later I read his best-known work, All Trivia (1933), which collects four earlier volumes published between 1902 and 1933 and includes this announcement across from the copyright page:

“These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that sub-order of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, and the gentle Chimpanzee.”

To speak of “best-known” in regard to anything Smith ever wrote recalls Dr. Johnson’s observation that a second marriage is “a triumph of hope over experience.” In our day, Smith and other “minor” (a patronizing word that shouldn’t be used qualitatively) writers of the past are stubbornly unfashionable, not forgotten but unknown, like those cold little planets said to be lurking beyond the orbit of Pluto. There’s a poignancy in their fate. They worked hard and often honorably. They can still give us pleasure if we make the effort to recover them. Of course, all writers are fated to slip into oblivion – if they are fortunate, only after they are dead.

Smith was a clever man not averse to truth tempered by silliness. In the volume cited above he writes: “Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.” Every reader unburdened with naiveté nods in agreement. Smith won my heart with what is probably his best-known line, found in the same book: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Clearly, we’re dealing with a man whose values are in order.

You may have noticed that Smith tends to write aphoristically, in small bursts of amusement and wisdom. In Reperusals and Re-collections (1937), Smith includes “English Aphorists,” an essay originally published as the introduction to a volume he edited, A Treasury of English Aphorisms (1928). He gives the French their due and loosely defines aphorisms as “fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination.” Anyone writing in short forms aspires to write aphoristically, to pack much into little, to charge the fewest words with the most energy. Smith suggests that the best aphorisms are the opposite of inspirational: “[D]isenchantment, the ever-accumulating stores of wise disillusion and worldly wisdom, are the aspects of life which, it would seem, the aphorism is best fitted to express.” They are, he says, “apt to be somewhat fulsome if they are too sweetly flavoured.”

Smith traces the family tree of great English aphorists: Bacon, John Selden, George Savile (Marquis of Halifax), Lord Chesterfield, Dr. Johnson (“the greatest of English aphorists”), Blake, Hazlitt and, sad to say, Emerson (“perhaps the last great aphorist who has written in English”). He includes a few names he judges “minor,” such as Ben Jonson and Jeremy Taylor, and he calls Swift’s aphorisms “admirable in their sardonic terseness.” Of Pope he writes: “Men in those days wore rapiers, and he carried his into literature and unsheathed it, too.” Two occasional aphorists he neglects are Lamb and Landor, but did introduce me to Charles Caleb Colton (1777-1832), who in 1820 published the charmingly titled Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words, addressed to those who think. At the conclusion of his essay Smith writes of aphorists:

“On the whole they are a malicious lot; their object is not to extricate man from the mire of his condition, but rather to roll him more deeply in it. So much do they enjoy fishing in muddy waters, that they are not unwilling to pursue their sport even in their own bosoms.”

'A Stunning Display of Concinnity and Elegance'

W.H. Auden writes in “Reading” (The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, 1962):

“Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously ‘truer’ than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.”

Seasoned readers will detect Auden's distinctive tone, even without proper context. He is authoritative, not pushy. He makes distinctions without being academically pedantic. He skirts provocation without quite surrendering to it. He defies you to take him seriously, and I do. Auden is the smart kid in class who gets away with outsmarting the teacher and even making him feel flattered.

Auden was famously word-besotted, as all poets should be. He enthusiastically cribbed from the Oxford English Dictionary, mining for rare, antiquated, interesting-sounding words. Auden had left Oxford with a third-class degree in 1928, the year the completed dictionary was published in ten volumes. It became his lifelong companion. In the title poem of Epistle to a Godson (1972), he writes: “to give a stunning / display of concinnity and elegance / is the least we can do, and its dominant / mood should be that of a Carnival.”

Concinnity is a serendipitous find for any writer. The OED defines it as “beauty of style produced by a skilful connection of words and clauses; hence, more generally, studied beauty, elegance, neatness of literary or artistic style, etc.” Among the dictionary’s citations is a splendid usage from Edward Dowden’s Studies in Literature, 1789-1877 (1878): “But [Walter Savage] Landor’s humor at its best, when truest to his genius, appears a gayer part of the perfect order of things; he shows himself at times as great a master as [Joseph] Addison of concinnity in the playful.” The same might be said of Auden.

By the way, in his biography of Auden, Humphrey Carpenter noted that Auden, during his final stay in Austria, would seat himself at dinner on a volume of the OED – “as if (a friend observed) he was a child not quite big enough for the nursery furniture.”

The poet was born on this date, Feb. 21, in 1907.

'Deceptive Birdlime, Baleful Happiness, False Joy'

Catalogs and lists in poetry and prose generally come in two inflections -- celebratory and comic – but the writer's intent can be murky or intentionally ambiguous. In an 1818 letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, Keats writes: “[B]y the by you may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county.” The poet revels in meteorological misery. Robert Burton, a great favorite of Keats’ and another reveler, packed thousands of lists into The Anatomy of Melancholy, sometimes starting one before completing the one he’s already working on:

“To see sub exuviis leonis onagrum, a filthy loathsome carcass, a Gorgon’s head puffed up by parasites, assume this unto himself, glorious titles, in worth an infant, a Cuman ass, a painted sepulchre, an Egyptian temple? To see a withered face, a diseased, deformed, cankered complexion, a rotten carcass, a viperous mind, and Epicurean soul set out with orient pearls, jewels, diadems, perfumes, curious elaborate works, as proud of his clothes as a child of his new coats [and so on for another sixty-one words and three catalogs for the rest of the paragraph].”

Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) was a leader of the Italian humanist awakening in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. He served as chancellor of the Florentine Republic and was author of On the World and Religious Life (pub. c. 1381; trans. Tina Marshall, 2014). Books in the I Tatti Renaissance Library series, published by Harvard University Press, are beautiful to look at, hold and read. English translation on the right faces the Latin original on the left. Before I started reading this volume I had never heard of Salutati. He too is a master of the literary catalog two centuries before Burton.

The book was written for a friend of Salutati’s, Niccolò Lapi of Uzzano, a lawyer who left secular life to enter the Camaldulensian monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence. Lapi asked him to write a treatise supporting his decision and encouraging him to persevere in his monastic rigors. In his introduction to the volume, Ronald G. Witt notes that the medieval strain in Salutati’s thought sometimes verges on the Manichean, as in this epical list:

“The world, then, is the most unwholesome hold of turpitude, deceptive birdlime, baleful happiness, false joy, empty exultation, a threshing floor of tribulations, a pit of miseries, shipwreck of virtues, kindling for evils, incitement to crime, a blind journey, a rugged path, a ravine of plots, a horrible prison, a stage of iniquities, an arena of labors, a theater of disgraces, a spectacle of wrongs, a horrible precipice, a house of anxieties, a turbid sea, a vale of calamities, the home of hardships, the mirror of vanities, the corruption of minds, the snare of souls, the parent of death, the inferno of the living, and a pile of transient things.”

Many items on the list remind me of unlikely but sorely needed collective nouns, as in “a threshing floor of tribulations.” Here is one more sample of Salutati’s list-making: “The world is indeed a factory of vices. . . . Here are committed acts of pleasurable fornication, deflowering debauchery, violent rapes, acts of incest corrupting reverence for blood ties, adulteries that plot against the nuptial bed, sacrilegious pollution of women dedicated to God, wicked sexual intercourse with contrived sterility, and whatever the monstrous poison of sex excites in us.”

'A Great Deal of Hesitation and Gurgitation'

“Delightful company – you had to wait – worth it – very literary – enormous vocabulary – great manner, as in books – never smiles – rather appalled by life – cloistral . . . priest – fine eyes – magnificent head -- . . . strong voice – holding table.”

Who is being described and who is the describer? Our writer’s subject is clearly complex, a rare case, at once intimidating and charming. “Rather appalled by life”: Sounds like Dr. Johnson. In a blindfold test that would be my guess. The telegraphese is taken from a notebook left by Max Beerbohm and quoted by Lord David Cecil in his biography, Max (1964). He is describing Henry James, his favorite among the novelists of his time. He especially admired The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl.

I’ve never thought of James’ vocabulary as being notably large. He uses words in formal and eccentric ways, striving for precision, clarifying along the way, inventing adverbs as he needs them. The OED cites his use of preparatively in the preface to the New York Edition of The Wings of the Dove: “Preparatively and, as it were, yearningly, one began, in the event, with the outer ring, approaching the centre thus by narrowing circumvallations.” Today, the word is most often used in chemistry.

One wonders how James’ manner, in prose and conversation, would go over today. His style might be thought of as anti-Twitter. His goal was the systematic unfolding of consciousness, ceaselessly auto-corrected articulation. What wonderful company he would have made. Beerbohm continues: 

“Henry James took a tragic view of everyone, throwing up his hands and closing his eyes to shut out the awful vision. Rocking his chair and talking with tremendous emphasis . . . His talk had great authority . . .  there was a great deal of hesitation and gurgitation before he came out with anything: but it was all the more impressive, for the preparatory rumble.”

'I Have Little Theories About It'

One of the unforeseen benefits of reading many books across a lifetime while trying to remain open to their potential charms is discovering new “favorites.” Some writers we stick with for life. In my case that would include Swift, Dr. Johnson, Henry James and Chekhov. I have loved them all, without flagging, since our first encounters. Reading them is like a happy marriage. With others it’s more of a crush or adolescent infatuation. I’m smitten but eventually turn fickle and unfaithful. I won’t take their calls, and I cross the street when I see them approach. Prominent on that lengthy list are Thoreau, Camus, Kafka and Whitman. No regrets but keep your distance, please.

Since starting Anecdotal Evidence fourteen years ago, a small number of writers, all of whom I had read before, have entered that exclusive, until-death-do-us-part category. Certainly Yvor Winters. And C.H. Sisson. And Max Beerbohm. What this unlikely trio have in common is my initial and longtime misunderstanding. I misread them and thought of them as something they are not. This is especially true of the way I read Beerbohm. I resist calling him “Max,” as many admirers do, just as Miles Davis will always be “Davis” to me, not the overly familiar “Miles,” as though he were my brother-in-law. Beerbohm was a lightweight comedian, I thought, and a Dandy, a sort of watered-down Oscar Wilde.

Recently, I reread S.N. Behrman’s Conversation with Max (1960), which was excerpted in The New Yorker. That’s when it occurred to me that in reading books by and about Beerbohm I was seeking his company, as though he were an especially old and trusted friend. I sought his voice, the reliably straight-faced irony of his wit. His humor and mine have increasingly overlapped. I wasn’t ready for him when I was younger, any more than I was ready for Proust. My taste in comedy back then was more raw and raucous. There’s nothing Swiftian about Beerbohm. His is a gentler spirit than Swift’s, though he should not be mistaken for a feel-good Pollyanna. One of the few writers he genuinely detested was Kipling. The Beerbohmian irony is that I rank Kipling above almost every other short story writer and I love Kim. Seasoned readers are complicated people.

Now I’ve been slowly reading the two volumes of Beerbohm’s collected theater criticism, Around Theatres (William Heinemann, 1924). In 1898, at age twenty-five, Beerbohm succeeded George Bernard Shaw as the drama critic for the English Saturday Review. Shaw’s designation of Beerbohm as “the incomparable Max” stuck and became a cliché. He titled his first column “Why I Ought Not to Have Become a Dramatic Critic,” in which he writes:

“Frankly, I have none of that instinctive love for the theatre which is the first step towards good criticism of drama. I am not fond of the theatre. Dramatic art interests and moves me less than any of the other arts. I am happy among pictures, and, being a constant intruder into studios, have learnt enough to know that I know nothing whatever about painting—knowledge which, had I taken to what is called ‘art-criticism,’ would have set me head-and-shoulders above the great majority of my colleagues. Of music I have a genuine, though quite unenlightened, love. Literature I love best of all, and I have some knowledge of its technicalities. I can talk intelligently about it. I have little theories about it. But in drama I take, unfortunately, neither emotional nor intellectual pleasure.”

I’m no critic but that’s a critical credo I could sign my name to.

'The Vast, but Most Agreeable, History of Human Folly'

"Some of the greatest lovers of letters who have ever lived—Dr. Johnson, for example, and Thomas de Quincey and Carlyle—have cared no more for first editions than I do for Brussels sprouts.”

I know the value of a dollar as well as any man. As a boy I simultaneously had three paper routes. I got my first real job – in a car wash – when I was twelve. During a brief spell of unemployment in the early nineties, I took on any freelance work I could find – writing news items for a hospital, proofreading the libretto of an opera based on the life of Christopher Columbus, editing the memoirs of a dancer-turned-sociologist. My tastes are neither extravagant nor ascetic. I’m neither miser nor spendthrift, but I’ve never looked on books as an investment. The minds of some people are algorithms for monetizing the contents of the world.

A reader has written me twice, urging me to calculate the value of my personal library. “It sounds like you’re sitting on a fortune. You must have a lot of first editions,” he writes. “Maybe you could make enough money to retire.” That pitch was supposed to sound attractive. A few people have gotten wealthy writing books, and a few more from selling them, but I’ve never thought of all these volumes, some of which I’ve owned for sixty years, as liquid assets. I once paid $1.50 for a beaten-up first edition of On the Road that I found at a library sale, and promptly sold it for a sum many times that amount to a dealer I knew. I detest Kerouac, others adore him, my decision was obvious.  

The passage quoted at the top is from Augustine Birrell’s “First Editions” (In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays, 1905). Sentimentally, I do care for some first editions, in particular those inscribed by writers I admire – Steven Millhauser, Helen Pinkerton, Terry Teachout, J.V. Cunningham, Eric Ormsby, et. al. – though I’m not fond of Brussels sprouts. Birrell is coolly rational. He suggests we “never convert a taste into a trade,” and writes:

“The whole thing is but a hobby—but a paragraph in one chapter of the vast, but most agreeable, history of human folly.”

'The Fort Stood on High Ground'

If your job is to write a description of a complicated event – say, a church wedding or the manufacture of biofuel from rapeseed oil – you might learn some useful lessons by reading Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885). The general was a master of clean, uncluttered, plain-style American prose and he had a gift for writing straightforward, compelling narrative. You’ll find no self-indulgent Victorian flourishes in Grant. He has a story to tell and can’t be bothered to dawdle on filigree. It’s no wonder writers as different as Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein admired his style, though we wish the latter had learned a few lessons from him. Take Chap. XXII, in which Grant describes the events leading up to the capture of Fort Donelson on this date, Feb. 16, in 1862:

“The fort stood on high ground, some of it as much as a hundred feet above the Cumberland [River]. Strong protection to the heavy guns in the water batteries had been obtained by cutting away places for them in the bluff. To the west there was a line of rifle pits some two miles back from the river at the farthest point. . . .. The ground inside and outside of this intrenched line was very broken and generally wooded. The trees outside of the rifle-pits had been cut down for a considerable way out, and had been felled so that their tops lay outwards from the intrenchments. The limbs had been trimmed and pointed, and thus formed an abatis in front of the greater part of the line.”

Not an exotic or overreachingly poetic word in the passage. “Abatis” had been in use since the eighteenth century in a military context: “a defensive barricade or entanglement constructed using sharpened stakes or felled trees positioned with their branches pointing towards the enemy to delay or repel attackers [OED].” Grant’s description is almost photographic without being tedious or pedantic. He keeps his readers in mind.

The commanding officer at Fort Donelson is Confederate Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. Grant knew him for three years at West Point and during the war in Mexico. He meets with Buckner, whose men are badly outnumbered, to discuss terms of surrender. Read Grant’s account of his meeting with Buckner. It reminds us that Americans were fighting Americans, that the combatants were often classmates, neighbors or brothers:

“In the course of our conversation, which was very friendly, he said to me that if he had been in command I would not have got up to Donelson as easily as I did. I told him that if he had been in command I should not have tried in the way I did: I had invested their lines with a smaller force than they had to defend them, and at the same time had sent a brigade full 5,000 strong, around by water; I had relied very much upon their commander to allow me to come safely up to the outside of their works. I asked General Buckner about what force he had to surrender. He replied that he could not tell with any degree of accuracy; that all the sick and weak had been sent to Nashville . . .”

'Time, That Sedulous Artist'

The names of former classmates on the spread sheet fall into three categories: 1.) Those I remember clearly, often by appearance, an anecdote or some quality of character. 2.) Those I remember only as names, like half-forgotten fragments of lyric. 3.) Those forever null, less forgotten than never known in the first place. It was a big class.

Fifty years ago this June I graduated from high school. Even then I wasn’t particularly impressed with the accomplishment, though my father was a high-school dropout. Now some enterprising classmates have organized a reunion at a supper club in Cleveland on September 12, and I bought my ticket. Ninety others, classmates and spouses, have thus far done likewise. I’ve been warned that reunions can be difficult, even unpleasant. Tedium is a hazard. I have no taste for nostalgia, especially of the Boomer variety. I do, however, have memories that have had half a century to harden (or fade). Visiting the past can be like touring a museum in which some of the paintings have been mislabeled and others have been removed from public view. Aligning memory with reality is jarring. I find comfort in what Max Beerbohm writes in “Lytton Strachey” (Mainly on the Air, Heinemann, 1957):

“[There is] a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared — all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There's nothing to be done about it — nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

'His Wisdom, His Sense, His Pathos, His Indignation'

“I think there are few writers who write well by nature.”

There’s a voice and sentiment that grab your attention and hold on to it. The only way the sentence could be improved is to drop “I think.” Before we proceed to the next one we pause and tally those few exceptions the author grants us. Shakespeare? Of course. Tolstoy? Proust? That may exhaust the list. How many writers have been born with the gift but lost it to fickleness or vodka? We’ll never know. And how many – surely a much larger category – were born without it but through reading and disciplined application learned to write well? A substantial minority. Good writing is rare and there are shelvesful of it only because it has been incrementally produced for such a long time.     

Coming to W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) late in the game has been a revelation. I bought the conventional wisdom that he was a lightweight, a Conrad wannabe, an earlier generation’s “beach reading,” whatever that means. I still haven’t read much of his fiction but his essays and assorted nonfiction are – well, well-written. If he was a journeyman, he was a first-class, highly industrious journeyman.

The sentence at the top is drawn from “After Reading Burke” in The Vagrant Mood: Six Essays, published in 1953. Maugham begins by celebrating another writer he admires, William Hazlitt – “amusing, bitter, keen-witted, violent, sympathetic, unjust, generous” – who in turn admired Edmund Burke. Hazlitt’s praise moves Maugham to read Burke for the first time since he was young, as he explains:

“English is a difficult language to write, and few authors have written it consistently with accuracy and distinction. The best way of learning to do this is to study the great masters of the past.”

And this:

“The language of literature maintains its vitality by absorbing the current speech of the people; this gives it colour, vividness and actuality; but if it is to avoid shapelessness and incoherence it must be founded on, and determined by, the standards of the period when English prose attained the highest degree of perfection of which it seems capable.”

For Maugham, that largely means the eighteenth century – Dryden, Addison, Johnson, Gibbon and Burke. He listens to prose with rare concentration. He hears the careful and rousing musicality of Burke’s sentences, and attributes it to his close reading of Johnson, his fellow member of The Club:

“[T]he special character of Burke’s settled manner must be ascribed to the robust and irresistible example of Dr. Johnson. I think it was from him that Burke learnt the value of a long intricate sentence, the potent force of polysyllabic words, the rhetorical effect of balance and the epigrammatic elegance of antithesis. He avoided Johnson’s faults

(small faults to those who like myself have a peculiar fondness for Johnson’s style) by virtue of his affluent and impetuous fancy and his practice of public speaking.”

Remember that Johnson praised “the affluence of [Burke’s] conversation.” Maugham goes on in his thirty-three-page essay to review Burke’s career and offers a fairly technical analysis of his language, with an emphasis on Burke’s deft deployment of antithesis: “Its purpose is by the balance of words to accentuate the balance of thought, and when it serves merely to tickle the ear it is tiresome.” And his use of long sentences: “It gives you room to develop your meaning, opportunity to constitute your cadence and material to achieve your climax. Its disadvantages are that it may be diffuse, flaccid, crabbed or inapprehensible.” In his conclusion, Maugham suggests we read Burke’s “Letter to a Noble Lord” (1796), and says of it:

“It is the finest piece of invective in the English language and so short that it can be read in an hour. It offers in its brief compass a survey of all Burke’s dazzling gifts, his formal as well as his conversational style, his gift for epigram and for irony, his wisdom, his sense, his pathos, his indignation and his nobility.”

'A Heap of Peasant Caps in a Corner'

“You will arrive in Europe к шапочному разбору (a term based on the шапки [caps] which people разбираться i.e. sort out, when leaving church in Russia—a heap of peasant caps in a corner, that sort of thing. We use the term in the sense of ‘pour la curée’ [for the priest], ‘to the end of the show’), otherwise I would probably not let you go.”

The passage reads like a preview of Nabokov’s trilingual punning and other wordplay in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). He is writing a letter to his sometime-friend Edmund Wilson on this date, Feb, 13, in 1945. Translated from Nabokovese, he means the end of the war in Europe is imminent. The New Yorker was sending Wilson to Europe. He would remain there for five months, writing articles for the magazine that would eventually be collected in Europe Without Baedeker (1947). He was no war correspondent. Most memorable in the book and in his posthumously published The Forties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (1984) are his accounts of meetings with Evelyn Waugh and George Santayana.

In February 1945, however, the German surrender was three months in the future. Coincidentally, on the evening of Feb. 13, seventy-five years ago today, when Nabokov was writing his letter, the Allied firebombing raids on Dresden destroyed the “Florence of the Elbe” and killed some 135,000 people, mostly civilians. Two days earlier, on Feb. 11, the Yalta Conference (where the Soviet agent Alger Hiss was an American negotiator) had concluded, resulting in Stalin having his way with Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Unlike Roosevelt and Churchill – and Wilson – Nabokov was not naïve about Stalin and his intentions, nor willing to look the other way. More than two years earlier, on Dec. 10, 1943, Nabokov had written in a letter to Wilson regarding the Teheran Conference:

“I think some of the details of the Teheran meeting are delightful, for instance: ‘Stalin talked freely to his guests through an interpreter,’ or ‘Stalin raised his glass and looked soberly around.’ Judging by the photographs it is quite obvious that this is not the real Stalin, but one of his many duplicates—a stroke of genius on the part of the Soviets. I am not even sure this tussaudesque figure is real at all since the so-called interpreter, a Mr. Pavlovsk (?), who appears in all the pictures as a kind of Puppenmeister [puppeteer], is obviously the man responsible for the uniformed doll’s movements. Note the crease of the false Joe’s trousers in exhibit No. 3. Only wax figures have that kind of trouser leg. I am thinking of writing a full account of the business, because it was really beautifully ingenious—especially when the dummy circulated and jerkily drank 34 toasts. Mr. Pavlovsk is a great conjuror.”

And so was Nabokov. His farcical treatment of Stalin in Teheran recalls the novelist’s Invitation to a Beheading (1938; trans. 1959) and, even more, Bend Sinister (1947), which he had started writing in 1942.

[The letters quoted above are from Dear Bunny/Dear Volodya: the Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971 (University of California Press, 2001).]

'Master Writers Often Teach How to See'

The unexpected intersection of two writers, particularly when at least one of them expresses admiration for the other, is always a pleasure, rather like learning that one friend has befriended another. I was browsing in Walker Evans, a catalogue published in 2017 in conjunction with exhibitions of the photographer’s work at the Centre National d’Art et de Culture George Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The editor is Clément Chéroux, the senior curator of photography at the latter museum. Evans (1903-1975) is a great American artist, far greater than the better-known James Agee, the writer with whom he collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

Among the essays included in the catalog is “‘I’m a Writer Too,’ The Texts of Walker Evans” by Anne Bertrand. In it, without elaborating, Bertrand mentions Walker’s “joy” in reading Proust, Joyce, Henry James and Nabokov. She gives no source, but adds: “[A]nd while we know that he read Céline, writing, perhaps even more than literature, was his second passion, his violon d’Ingres . . . and his secret garden, so little did he speak about this subject (about which no one asked him). Perhaps it was one of those intimate things that this complex man never wanted to talk about.”

A brief search disclosed a posthumously published essay by Evans, “Photography,” in the Winter 1978 issue of The Massachusetts Review.  Evans notes that “photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts. It will have--on occasion, and in effect--qualities of eloquence, wit, grace, and economy; style, of course; structure and coherence; paradox and play and oxymoron.” Like any good sample of poetry or prose, including work by the four fiction writers cited above by Bertrand.

“If photography tends to the literary, conversely certain writers are noticeably photographic from time to time--for instance James, and Joyce, and particularly Nabokov. Here is Nabokov: ‘. . . Vasili Ivanovich would look at the configurations of some entirely insignificant objects--a smear on the platform, a cherry stone, a cigarette butt--and would say to himself that never, never would he remember these three little things here in that particular interrelation, this pattern, which he could now see with such deathless precision . . .’ Nabokov might be describing a photograph in a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Master writers often teach how to see; master painters sometimes teach us what to see.”

The quoted passage is from “Cloud, Castle, Lake”, translated from the Russian by Nabokov and published in The Atlantic in 1941.

'Or Does It Come in Like Honey?'

On this date, February 11, in 1961, Philip Larkin published his first jazz review for The Daily Telegraph. The Beats postured when it came to jazz. They heard unhinged improvisation, not the years of disciplined woodshedding that preceded it and permitted musicians to improvise – to compose in real time -- and often make it look effortless. Larkin was no slumming hipster. Like his pal Kingsley Amis, he came to jazz early, with a sort of cultish enthusiasm, and remained faithful to the giants he loved as a boy and young man, especially Armstrong and Bechet.

  

His writing on jazz is as pithy and memorable as his poetry. His standards are just as high. When Ben Webster accompanies Art Tatum on Rodger and Hart’s “Have You Met Miss Jones?” Larkin, sounding like Whitney Balliett (a critic he admired), says the tenor player is “breathing out melodies with accomplished negligence.” Jimmy Rushing's "invigorating" voice is like "pouring sunshine." Armstrong was “the Shakespeare of jazz.” Here Larkin distills what jazz means to him:

“Men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz and tell where it may still be found.”

Larkin’s jazz writing for the Telegraph is collected in All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1971 (1971), of which Clive James rightly claimed “no wittier book of criticism has ever been written.” Note that James does not say “jazz criticism.” In his combative introduction to the book, Larkin mourns the impact Modernism had on all the arts (Pound, Picasso, Parker), “not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it.” I read Larkin’s jazz writing not as inerrant gospel. A good critic, even when he’s wrong, is interestingly wrong. His misjudgments, as much as his righteous hosannas, can teach us something. I like my critics ardent and knowledgeable. And a critic should always write well. Who would trust the judgment of a critic who can’t write? More of Larkin’s music writing is collected in Jazz Writings: Essays and Reviews 1940-1984 (2004). Looking back on his decade of music reviews for the Telegraph, Larkin writes:

“I tried in writing them to be fair and conscientious, and there were many times when I substituted ‘challenging’ for ‘insolent,’ ‘adventurous’ for ‘excruciating,’ and ‘colourful’ for ‘viciously absurd’ in a thoroughly professional manner. Although my critical principle has been Eddie Condon’s ‘As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?’ I've generally remembered that mine was not the only ear in the world. Above all, I hope they suggest I love jazz.”

'One Who Plays a Good Knife and Fork'

I’ve always prized the word trencherman and admired those who have honestly earned the title. A trencherman should not be confused with a glutton or gourmand, nor is he necessarily a connoisseur or “pioneer of the palate,” to use Tom Waits’ expression. He is an enthusiastic and appreciative feeder. The OED offers a nice turn of phrase as part of its definition: “one who plays a good knife and fork.” The Dictionary notes the noun often comes modified by “good, stout [or] valiant.” In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice says of Benedick: “He is a very valiaunt trencher man, he hath an excellent stomacke.” Contemporary puritans will frown on the notion of trenchermen. Food is sustenance ingested reluctantly, never a pleasure.   

Chief among literary trenchermen is Charles Lamb. Even his surname is an item on a menu. Among the best-loved of his Essays of Elia is “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig.” In his letters, Lamb is forever celebrating his most recent meal or anticipating the next one. Someone had sent his childhood friend Coleridge a pig, and Lamb got the credit for it. Lamb writes on March 9, 1822:

“It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well, --they are interesting creatures at a certain age; what a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling--and brain sauce--did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Oedipean avulsion [OED: “the action of pulling off, plucking out, or tearing away”]? Was the crackling the color of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no cursed complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire?”

I don’t even eat pork (“brain sauce”? “eyes”?) but Lamb’s description got me salivating, as did his prose. Few writers can do that. Given the circumstances of his life (sister murdering mother, his stays in the nut house), Lamb’s gift for joie de vivre and comedy are miraculous. He is fond of lists and catalogs, suggesting his pleasure in the world’s beneficent bounty:

    

“To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teals, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese,--your tame villatic [OED: “rural, rustic”] things,--Welsh mutton collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself.”

Lamb was born on this date, Feb. 10, in 1775.