'They Journeyed, They Undertook Quests'

Growing up in Cleveland, I saw palm trees only in the movies. In color films they looked like décor stuck in place by set designers, glossy L.A. props. Only in silent pictures or early talkies did they appear truly alien. One of the ancillary pleasures of watching Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy, whose films were often shot on the workaday, pre-CGI streets of Los Angeles, was spying those starkly exotic-looking palms in black and white (along with billboards and interesting examples of SoCal architecture).

My oldest son sent me a link to a video meme making the rounds that plays on the idea of people having difficulty saying goodbye at the conclusion of Zoom meetings. The clip is drawn from one of Laurel and Hardy’s best films, Perfect Day (1929). That same son several years ago gave me as a Christmas gift Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection, a ten-disc set, so that evening I watched the entire film. It passed the Kurp Klassic Komedy test by triggering three out-loud laughs during a running time of nineteen minutes, forty-two seconds, with no one else in the room (smiles and tastefully noncommittal snorts don’t count). That’s nearly one audible laugh every six minutes, a rate exceeded only by W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934).

Back to palm trees: few sightings in Perfect Day. Wait for the scene in which Stan runs up the street and you’ll see several silhouetted along the horizon. (Wait also for the gouty father-in-law played by Edgar Kennedy to emit a sotto-voce “Oh, shit!” when his foot is slammed in the car door by Stan.) I found a marvelous archaeological dig dedicated to the film at Silent Locations. The proprietor, John Bengtson, tracks down the places in Los Angeles where Perfect Day was shot.  

Two things about Perfect Day impress me: 1.) the elegant simplicity of its premise and, related to that, 2.) the way it presages Samuel Beckett and his perennial themes. Beckett loved Laurel and Hardy and makes several references to them in his work (see Watt, Mercier and Camier). In Stan and Ollie we see Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, who also dress in bowlers and baggy pants. In Hugh Kenner’s words: “[O]ne of them marvelously incompetent, the other an ineffective man of the world devoted (some of the time) to his friend’s care” (A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973). They spend all of Perfect Day going nowhere. Kenner continues:

“They journeyed, they undertook quests, they had adventures; their friendship, tested by bouts of exasperation, was never really vulnerable; they seemed not to become older, nor wiser; and in perpetual nervous agitation. Laurel’s nerves occasionally protesting like a baby’s, Hardy soliciting a philosophic calm he could never find leisure to settle into, they coped. Neither was especially competent, but Hardy made a big man’s show of competence. Laurel was defeated by the most trifling requirement.”

Hardy always proceeds as though he knows what to do and how to do it. (I love the way he rakishly cocks his bowler like a cartoon Irishman looking for a fight.) It’s the way most of us would proceed if we had any idea what we were doing and how we were supposed to do it.

'To Entertain As Well As Illuminate'

“Here’s a thought: literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate. That puts most critics out of business on two fronts. So much of our exegesis reads like the minutes of a country club meeting in which we are all agreed on the value of this and that, so little of it chases the vitality literature itself is devoted to.”

Rousing words that I used to think were self-evident. You get the impression that most critics, academic and otherwise, are striving after tedium and succeeding. I’m thinking in particular of one longtime online book critic whose prose is irresistibly soporific. His writing is earnest, humorless and militantly postmodern. This guy has never expressed pleasure in any book he has read. His own writing is ahedonic, closer in texture and content to think-tank white papers than belles-lettres.

The author quoted at the top is David Mason, writing in The Hudson Review about two poet-critics, John Burnside and the late Clive James. He continues: “Readers easily offended by anything remotely transgressive ought to toughen up and face the world in all its bloodiness. No one has permission to do anything in this life, so you might as well see what you can see, say what you can say, and hopefully do so as beautifully as possible.”

Two of Mason’s word choices are central: “entertain” and “beautifully.” To entertain is to amuse or provide enjoyment. Admittedly, the capacity for entertainment is as vast and varied as humanity, spanning everything from translating Linear B to snuff films. A critic who entertains must love words. A lexically incompetent critic or one indifferent to his medium hardly inspires confidence in his critical judgment. And, of course, a good critic is often funny – conclusive evidence in some quarters that he can’t be taken seriously.

A good critic comes to the job with a sensibility and not a box of prefabricated opinions. He knows the territory. If he writes about books, he’s read most of the good ones and knows the lousy ones to avoid. He has the obligation when wrong to be interestingly wrong. I don’t go to critics to have my prejudices confirmed or refuted. I go to learn something I didn’t suspect and to be entertained in the process.

I don’t know Burnside’s books but for years I’ve been entertained (and educated) by James’ work in multiple genres. Like Joseph Epstein, he’s equally gifted at praising and dismissing. Near the conclusion of Latest Readings (2016), James writes: “’The critic should write to say not ‘look how much I’ve read’ but ‘look at this, it’s wonderful.’” Or awful.

'Find the Word for It, Wordsman'

By Dream Palace (1986), the title of his second collection of poems from a major publisher, Herbert Morris (1928-2001) means memory, his obsessive theme. The writer he most often recalls is not a poet but Henry James, the later, discursive James whose prose gives the impression of endlessly refining itself, rearticulating with greater precision what has already been articulated. In this, James replicates the workings of consciousness itself, as does Morris. Here is James in Chap. 2, “New York Revisited,” in The American Scene (1907), written on the return to his native land after a twenty-year absence:  

“My recovery of impressions, after a short interval, yet with their flush a little faded, may have been judged to involve itself with excursions of memory--memory directed to the antecedent time--reckless almost to extravagance. But I recall them to-day, none the less, for that value in them which ministered, at happy moments, to an artful evasion of the actual.”

And this is from the first poem in Dream Palace, “My Parents on Their Honeymoon: A Snapshot,” twenty-five, four-line stanzas of blank verse:

“My father, lying face up, takes the sun,

my mother, nowhere visible, of course,

since it is she who handles the box camera,

who, for the future (this is how we looked,

this, by implication, is who we were;

will it be far from 1921

to those others, years later, we become?),

must want this picture of him for herself,

“random, off-guard, unposed, relaxed, eyes closed,

My Young Husband in His Silk Sailing Shirt

with Narrow Stripes and Long Sleeves, and a Beanie

Signifying We Are About to Sail,

“though she may be unsure those words are apt,

doubtful her caption will do this scene justice,

unversed as to what cameras can do,

cannot do, what one should expect them to do . . .”

Herbert’s verse is difficult to excerpt. It’s like trying to dip a specific cup of water from a river. The passage just quoted is drawn from a single sentence that straddles seven stanzas, twenty-eight lines. He’s not an aphorist, not conventionally “quotable.” His diction is plain, never “poetic” and certainly not flowery.

I learned of Morris when Counterpoint published his final collection, What Was Lost, in 2000, the year before his death. On the cover is “Portland Place, London, 1906,” a photograph taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn. The first poem in the collection, “House of Words,” is narrated by Henry James shortly after Coburn had photographed him at Lamb House, in Rye. James included some of Coburn’s prints in the New York Edition of his work (“Portland Place” shows up in James’ masterpiece, The Golden Bowl), and it was the James connection that initially attracted me to Morris. The poet uncannily echoes James’ halting, endlessly qualified syntax as the Master questions the life he has dedicated to words in a nineteen-page dramatic monologue. It concludes:

“. . . a house nonetheless, a destination,

a house rising, imagine, word by word,

from words, one’s words, (find the word for it, wordsman;

say, if you can, what the years were, one’s life.)”

  

James and Morris, both late in life, merge like overlaid transparencies. I have heard from a publisher interested in assembling a collected edition of Morris’ poems. I would like to hear from anyone who knew Morris or knows his work who might help bring such a belated project to fruition. He seems to have shunned attention during his life. I have never seen a photograph of Morris. Perhaps, posthumously, we can give his work the attention it deserves.

'Not Their Most Edifying Method'

I had no first-hand dealings with Quakers until 1983 when I went to work for the newspaper in Richmond, Ind., the home of Earlham College, founded in 1847 by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). There I made friends with the late Clyde Johnson, the most hospitable person I have ever known. His house on College Avenue was always open, whether to junkies, operas buffs or newspaper reporters exiled to Indiana. The librarians at Earlham were always welcoming and granted me liberal lending privileges. All of my impressions of Quakers are positive – friendly, open, principled. Sarah Ruden is a Quaker.

Charles Lamb often poked harmless fun at his Quaker friend (Friend friend?) Bernard Barton. Lamb’s ribbing of the unfamiliar denomination reminds me of the Polish jokes I heard (and repeated) as a kid. Along with the joking, Lamb included a lot of encouragement. Here he is writing to Barton on July 25, 1829:

“’Tis useless to write poetry with no purchasers. ’Tis cold work Authorship without some thing to puff one into fashion. Could you not write something on Quakerism—for

Quakers to read—but nominally addrest to Non Quakers? explaining your dogmas—waiting on the Spirit—by the analogy of human calmness and patient waiting on the judgment? I scarcely know what I mean; but to make Non Quakers reconciled to your doctrines, by showing something like them in mere human operations—but I hardly understand myself, so let it pass for nothing.”

In Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950), Msgr. Ronald Knox devotes much space to George Fox and the early history of the Quakers, including this intriguing passage:

“[T]he great unsettlement of the times in which they lived, their persecutions, and the occurrence of the Plague and Fire in London, produced an atmosphere of catastrophe; and they were very free in the denunciations and woes which they uttered against persons or places. Their most startling, and not their most edifying method of foretelling judgements was to run through the streets completely naked.”

Knox is a master of finely calibrated irony.

'Stowed Out of Conscience'

Reading Auden sparked a memory. The poem is “Old People’s Home,” written in 1970 and included in Epistle for a Godson (1972), the last collection published during his lifetime. The premise is a familiar one and probably inevitable, given our demographics – visiting what I grew up calling “an old folks’ home” and today is known as “assisted living,” among other euphemisms. He goes to see an aging friend who remains lucid and able to care for herself, unlike “the terminally incompetent, as improvident, / unspeakable, impeccable as the plants / they parody.” Fifty years ago, the scene was new to Auden: “their generation / is the first to fade like this, not at home but assigned / to a numbered frequent ward, stowed out of conscience / as unpopular luggage.” As he rides home on the subway, he turns thoughtful and then a rather shocking thought occurs to him, as it might to us:

“Am I cold to wish for a speedy

painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays,

that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?”

  

My first thoughts were literary, a short story by Richard G. Stern, Updike’s first novel – both set in old folks’ homes. Then another thought showed up, one suffused with literature but rooted in life – and happier. As reporter I was assigned to interview the residents of a Jewish retirement home in Albany, N.Y., across the street from Washington Park. This was almost thirty years ago and most were recent arrivals from the former Soviet Union.

Fifteen or twenty men and women, several in wheelchairs, sat in a meeting room. I heard a mingling of Russian, Yiddish and English. Language and suspiciousness about a guy asking a lot of questions limited conversation. I was about ready to leave when I asked if anyone read the Russian classics. Most said yes and trotted out the canonical names – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov. I asked, “How about Babel?” and I heard murmurs and sighs and observed nodding heads and smiles. “How about Mandelstam?” The buzz grew louder. Old ladies squeezed my hands and some of them cried.

'A Soft Murmur on the Uninjured Ear'

“So long as a poet has left six lines which can be quoted by the orator in search of floral adornment, his memory is sufficiently honoured, and [William] Cowper, of course, has done far more than that.”

The author, Vivian Carter, deserves a hearty posthumous “thank you” for coining “floral adornment.” The year was 1906 and the practice of using tasty bites of poetry to lend savor to speeches, sermons and eulogies was already well established. As we all know, the ability to quote poetry certifies a speaker’s sophistication. The occasion, April 25 of that year, was the 106^th anniversary of Cowper’s death. Carter is writing in The Bystander (1903-40), a British tabloid magazine with a wonderfully inclusive subtitle: An Illustrated Weekly, Devoted to Travel, Literature, Art, the Drama, Progress, Locomotion. She (he? remember Vivian Stanshall? Jay Vivian Chambers?) continues:

“[H]e is one of the immortals, even had he not also given to the world a mass of very pleasant domestic verse, tender in sentiment and skillful in phrase.”

The vocabulary is a little creaky but the judgment is correct. I’ve been quietly lobbying for Cowper’s verse for years. Take this excerpt from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of his long poem The Task (1785):    

“’T is pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,

To peep at such a world; to see the stir   

Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;        

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates,          

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.”

Cowper was one of literature’s gregarious solitaires. He observed social distancing long before it became fashionable. A few years later, Hazlitt used the same phrase – “loop-holes of retreat” – in his essay “On Living to One’s Self”: “He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.”

After all, mingling in the fray can make you sick.

'Of Link-Boys Vile, and Watermen Obscene'

“There is in the world a certain class of mortals, known, and contentedly known, by the appellation of passionate men, who imagine themselves entitled by that distinction to be provoked on every slight occasion, and to vent their rage in vehement and fierce vociferations, in furious menaces and licentious reproaches.”

We know what Dr. Johnson means – that ever-growing population of men and women fueled by that renewable source of energy, anger. Anger comes with two faces. For the angry one it is addictive, a rush unlike any other. For the rest of us consigned to watching the snot fly, it’s a tiresome spectacle. In The Rambler essay published on this date, April 24, in 1750, Johnson continues:

“Their rage, indeed, for the most part, fumes away in outcries of injury, and protestations of vengeance, and seldom proceeds to actual violence, unless a drawer or linkboy falls in their way; but they interrupt the quiet of those that happen to be within the reach of their clamours, obstruct the course of conversation, and disturb the enjoyment of society.”

Johnson’s understanding of human psychology is acute. Anger amounts on most occasions to more noise than substance. But the amateurs among the “passionate men” choose their targets carefully, usually picking on “a drawer or linkboy,” someone weaker and less able to defend himself. Call them bullies. But what is a “linkboy”? I turned first to Johnson’s own Dictionary: “a boy that carries a torch to accommodate passengers with light.” The OED definition is nearly identical: “a boy employed to carry a link to light passengers along the streets.” And link? “A torch made of tow and pitch (? sometimes of wax or tallow), formerly much in use for lighting people along the streets.”

Linkboys are yet another occupation rendered obsolete by technology. In 1763, the City Corporation of London began lighting the streets with some 5,000 glass oil lamps. Gas lighting was introduced in 1811. Grosvenor Square, the last London street or square still lit by oil, was fitted for gas lighting in 1842. I find no mention of linkboys in Henry Mayhew’s four-volume London Labour and London Poor (1851). Perhaps the job was already extinct.

The OED cites Pepys, John Gay, Dickens and Thackeray (The Newcomes: “Link-boys with their torches lighted the beaux over the mud,” 1854-55). Swift gives us “Twenty watchmen to clear the way, with link-boys lighting them on each side.” In 1773, Johnson’s friend Sir Joshua Reynolds painted “Cupid As a Link Boy.” In The Dunciad, Pope includes a prayer to Cloacina, goddess of the sewers:

“Oft had the Goddess heard her servant’s call,

From her black grottos near the Temple-wall,

List’ning delighted to the jest unclean

Of link-boys vile, and watermen obscene;

Where as he fish’d her nether realms for Wit,

She oft had favour’d him, and favours yet.”

'So Dark a Night Will Never See the Day'

“A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them. The rhetorical and musical features of poetry are as intrinsic to a formal poem as its ostensible meaning, which may be little more than a coat hanger; the dazzling gown draped on that hanger may be made of quite other elements.”

Stephen Edgar could have modified “poem” with good or interesting. We’ve all read too many poems that amount to even less than what appears on the page. They are merely literal, like entries in a foreign-language phrase book. In fact, Edgar, an Australian poet, is introducing his translation from the Russian of a poem by Anna Akhmatova, “In Memoriam, July 19, 1914.” I have no Russian.  have read Akhmatova in various translations since the nineteen-seventies and feel as though her work still eludes me. As Edgar writes:

“Some poets have been served well by translation—Seferis and Holub come to mind—but others seem to lose a lot of their magic in the process, Akhmatova among them.”

Reading poetry in translation from a language one doesn’t know is an unavoidable act of faith – and doubt. Edgar’s right: I sense that I have an approximate understanding of Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, even some of Montale. In prose, the same is true of Tolstoy and Cervantes. But Pushkin, I suspect, will remain forever an exotic mystery. The case for Osip Mandelstam, in verse and prose, is stronger because I’ve been reading him and his wife for almost half a century, in many translations. Perhaps I’m mistaking hubris for understanding but the poems no longer feel utterly opaque. As an experiment, here is Peter Oram’s translation of Akhmatova’s “Voronezh,” dedicated to Mandelstam:

“All the town’s gripped in an icy fist.

Trees and walls and snow are set in glass.

I pick my timid way across the crystal.

Unsteadily the painted sledges pass.

Flocks of crows above St Peter’s, wheeling.

The dome amongst the poplars, green and pale in

subdued and dusty winter sunlight, and

echoes of ancient battles that come stealing

out across the proud, victorious land.

All of a sudden, overhead, the poplars

rattle, like glasses ringing in a toast,

as if a thousand guests were raising tumblers

to celebrate the marriage of their host.

“But in the exiled poet’s hideaway

the muse and terror fight their endless fight

throughout the night.

So dark a night will never see the day.”

I confess the poem seems flat and predictable to this reader. Perhaps this is because of what Edgar says about the “literal sense” of formal poems in translation. Voronezh is almost three hundred miles southeast of Moscow. The poem is dated 1936. From 1935 to 1937, Mandelstam was living in Voronezh with Nadezhda in internal exile. There he wrote the three Voronezh Notebooks. After returning to Moscow, Mandelstam was arrested a second time in May 1938 and sentenced to five years in the Gulag. He died in a Siberian transit camp in December 1938. A monument to him stands in Voronezh.

[Eight translations of Akhmatova's poems, including Oram’s, are collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, Penguin, 2015).]

'Curiosity, Tenderness, Kindness, Ecstasy'

Pleasure comes in many forms, from fleshy to mathematically abstract, but every great writer and even some of the merely good ones are pleasure-givers. Let’s limit the exemplars to prose and think of Rudyard Kipling and Isaac Bashevis Singer and the pleasures of sheer story telling. Or the musicality of Sir Thomas Browne and John Ruskin. Or the historical gravitas of Edward Gibbon and Raul Hilberg. Or the philosophical grace of Spinoza and Santayana. Or the comedy of Max Beerbohm and P.G. Wodehouse. When a writer combines elements of even a few of these virtues, one can only celebrate the gift of literacy. Such a writer is Vladimir Nabokov, for whom pleasure – creating it, appreciating it – is a moral obligation. In “Good Readers and Good Writers,” his introduction to Lectures on Literature (1980), he writes:

“It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure that is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass."

English professors, for all their personal hedonism, find little pleasure in books and reading. This wasn’t always the case. The first of Nabokov’s books I read, like so many other readers with similar mixed motives, was Lolita. It was a smudged paperback without covers. That was in 1969, the year he published Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and showed up on the cover of Time. In the fall of the following year, when I was a freshman, a professor put Pnin on the reading list. In the following spring, another prof assigned Invitation to a Beheading. On my own I was catching up with earlier Russian and English titles, and I received a copy of Transparent Things as a Christmas gift in 1972. Even his lesser efforts (The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!) never let me down. Always I find pleasure in his work. No other writer so formed the way I read. He wrote in his afterword to Lolita:

“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”

Is he speaking here as a reader or writer? Both, I suspect. Nabokov was born on this date, April 22, in St. Petersburg and died July 2, 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland, having lived in exile for fifty-eight years.

'Loved Old Things'

Last week I illustrated a post with a photograph taken by my youngest son of the Chekhov shelf in my library. A reader observes that I must be a very “neat and organized” person. I’m not. I admire neatness and organization, and find nothing to admire in their opposites, but I’m plagued by the sense that entropy is always getting the better of me. I find wisdom in the lines Borges tucks neatly within parentheses:

“(To arrange a Library is to practice,

in a quiet and modest way,

the art of criticism.)”

The shutdown is a good time to organize the messes on my shelves. Some, I admit, are satisfyingly arranged – perhaps an illustration of “the art of criticism,” as described by Borges. The Chekhov shelf is pristine. Here are the contents of another, less tidy shelf: Steven Millhauser, Hubert Butler, Shakespeare critic David P. Gontar, Robert Burton, Nirad Chaudhuri, Terry Teachout and Bill Barich. The only thing that orders such a hodgepodge is the pleasure I take in these writers. Call me neurotic but that’s not good enough.

The Borges poem is “June, 1968” (trans. Hoyt Rogers; ed. Alexander Coleman, Selected Poems, 1999). It hinges on the quintessentially Borgesian irony that Borges, director of Argentina’s National Library from 1955 to 1973, and author of “The Library of Babel,” was blind. His poem concludes:

“[I]n the afternoon that might be gold

he smiles at his curious fate

and feels that peculiar happiness

which comes from loved old things.”

Review of 'Sketches of the Criminal World'

My review of Sketches of the Criminal World by Varlam Shalamov has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2018, the LARB published my review of the earlier collection of Shalamov’s short fiction, Kolyma Stories. Both are translated by Donald Rayfield.

'A Small Knot of the Learned'

Even their admirers must admit that some writers are lost causes. We know in advance most readers will remain immune to their charms. To champion them with too much enthusiasm amounts to snobbery. I would never try to sell you Walter Savage Landor. A small party of explorers will discover and claim him on their own. Another is Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977), who started out in the Twenties as a writer of proletarian novels and transformed himself into a hectoring prophet with a fancy prose style:

“Unhouseled English is in the minds of a small knot of the learned. Thousands and thousands of words of good odor are sore decayed, and few have the bravery to re-edify them.”

This is from Chap. 18 of The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (1971), and it tells us at least two things about its writer: “I’m smart and you probably aren’t. I like obscure words learned from books you haven’t read.” If Dahlberg’s language could be run through a de-ego-fier, more readers might find him palatable. I've been reading him since the mid-seventies but expect no one to follow my lead. I sympathize with Dahlberg's love of archaic language, much of it not in use since Robert Burton was a pup, though his prose can read like a visit to the Word Museum. No writer was touchier or held a grudge longer. Dahlberg never made a friend who didn’t leave him feeling betrayed. The late Hilton Kramer reviewed Dahlberg’s Confessions on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and wrote:

“The Confessions is a highly personal form of baroque sermonizing, a collage of sacred texts, lacerating aphorisms, dour prophecies and pitiless ruminations on the follies of the human species. There are, to be sure, some prickly and even malicious reminiscences of well‐known writers in this book; but to read The Confessions primarily for its small quotient of gossip or history—one of the pleasures, after all, in reading memoirs—would be about as rewarding as reading The Ambassadors as a book of etiquette. It can be done, I suppose, but it is bound to be disappointing.”

Here’s a characteristic sample of Dahlberg’s prose from the chapter quoted above: “I address the wretched brethren of letters who dwell in hapless kinless rooms; give the indigents a lusty meal of similes savory as truffles or gorbellied tunnies hard by Cadiz. A simple phrase that has died in George Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois is a balsam for hurt souls in asphaltic coffin towns. The monosyllable, swad, will heal the wounds of an entire hour.”

Swad [OED]: “A country bumpkin; a clodhopper; a loutish or clownish fellow; a common term of abuse.”

Dahlberg’s best books remain Do These Bones Live (1941; rev. 1960, retitled Can These Bones Live) and his masterpiece, Because I Was Flesh (1964).

[Will someone please collect Hilton Kramer's uncollected reviews and essays, particularly those devoted to literature?]

'A Numb Soporifical Goodfornothingness'

“Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day mare—a whoreson lethargy, Falstaff calls it—an indisposition to do any thing, or to be any thing—a total deadness and distaste—a suspension of vitality—an indifference to locality—a numb soporifical goodfornothingness . . .”

No, I don’t. I’ve never known profound depression. I’ve lost friends to it. I know it has destroyed some fine writers. Through a happy serendipity of genetics, I suppose, I am immune – so far. Charles Lamb is writing to his Quaker friend Bernard Barton on Jan. 9, 1824, composing a five-hundred word tour de force in celebration of melancholia. He conflates two lines spoken by Falstaff in Act I,Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part II: “And I hear, moreover, his Highness is fall’n into same whoreson apoplexy,” he tells the Lord Chief Justice, and then adds: “This apoplexy, as I take it, is a kind of lethargy, please your lordship, a kind of sleeping in the blood, a tingling.” Lamb continues:

“I am flatter than a denial or a pancake— . . .—duller than a country stage when the actors are off it—a cypher—an O—I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest—I am weary of the world—Life is weary of me—My day is gone into Twilight and I don’t think it worth the expence of candles—my wick hath a thief in it, but I can’t muster courage to snuff it—I inhale suffocation—I can’t distinguish veal from mutton—nothing interests me—”

A friend asks if the COVID-19 shutdown “depresses” me? Has it taken an emotional toll? Not at all. I’m grateful for good health, loved ones nearby, books to read and time to write. Complaining would seem indecent with so many sick and dying.

'Provided Mind and Body Are Free'

We’ve grown accustomed to contemporary writers saying silly or repugnant things, whether endorsing dictators or championing ridiculous, self-flattering causes. Who looks to today’s writers for enlightenment or moral uplift? On Friday I happened on statements from half a century ago by two writers I grew up admiring. Neither sentiment surprised me. What I do find remarkable is how such utterly different writers could express such similar sentiments – sentiments that would be judged heretical in many quarters if voiced by writers today. First, Eric Hoffer, writing in an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times in 1968:     

“The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us.”

A year and a half later, Vladimir Nabokov was interviewed by Nurit Beretzky for the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv of Tel Aviv. She asked him about “the situation in the Middle East” and he replied:

“There exist several subjects in which I have expert knowledge: certain groups of butterflies, Pushkin, the art of chess problems, translation from and into English, Russian and French, word-play, novels, insomnia, and immortality. But among those subjects, politics is not represented. I can only reply to your question about the Near East in a very amateur way: I fervently favor total friendship between America and Israel and am emotionally inclined to take Israel’s side in all political matters.”

Nabokov’s support for Israel shouldn’t surprise us. His wife, Véra Slonim, was Jewish. His grandfather, Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, was minister of justice under Czar Alexander II, and supported Jewish rights. The novelist’s father, a liberal statesman and champion of Jewish legal equality, was Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. He condemned publication of the anti-Semitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, in which dozens of Jews were murdered.

In the interview quoted above, Nabokov also said: “I am ready to accept any regime – Socialistic, Royalistic, Janitorial, – provided mind and body are free.”

[The Nabokov interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (ed. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Knopf, 2019).]

'Literature Is at a Standstill'

“I’m at home now. Before Easter I spent two weeks in Ostroumov’s clinic coughing blood. The doctor diagnosed apical lesions in my lungs. I feel splendid.”

I haven’t visited a library since March 17, and I was getting itchy. I have a roomful of books but needed a transfusion, so I ordered old reliables -- the three Library of America volumes of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and the new Chekhov collection, Fifty-Two Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

The passage at the top is from a letter Chekhov wrote to the novelist Alexander Ertel on this date, April 17, in 1897. That same year he wrote “The Petcheneg” and “In the Cart” (both included in the Pevear/Volokhonsky collection), among other stories. Chekhov continues:

“There’s no news. Literature is at a standstill. A lot of tea and cheap wine is being consumed in editorial offices without much pleasure, for no other reason, apparently, than there’s nothing better to do. Tolstoy’s writing on art.”

Tolstoy had visited Chekhov at the clinic on March 28. Chekhov rejected two of the themes of Tolstoy’s soon-to-be-published What Is Art? Here they are, as paraphrased by Simon Karlinsky: 1.) “[T]he idea that in order to be good, moral and ‘infectious,’ a work of art has to be instantly comprehensible to an illiterate peasant or to a child.” 2.) “[T]he concomitant notion that all the arts and especially painting and music were going through a period of utter decline throughout the Western world at the end of the nineteenth century.” Chekhov writes to Ertel:

“His idea is not new; it’s been reiterated in various forms by clever old men in every century. Old men have always been inclined to think the end of the world is at hand and to assert that morals have fallen to the ne plus ultra, that art has grown shallow and threadbare, that people have grown weak, and so on and so forth.”

Beyond argument, Chekhov’s first criticism of Tolstoy’s screed is correct. In a few years the Bolsheviks would resurrect the simplistic notion with a different emphasis in the form of socialist realism. Art = childish agitprop, a tedious and repellent idea. About the decline of art Tolstoy was merely premature. That wouldn’t begin for perhaps another half-century. Consider this sample of the writers of fiction still at work in 1897: besides Tolstoy and Chekhov, Henry James, Kipling and Conrad. In the April issue of Commentary, Joseph Epstein writes about the ongoing enervation of fiction, its declines into anemic irrelevance:

“If you admire fiction and consider it at its best richer than philosophy and novelists as the true historians of the present, but, like me, find yourself easily resisting contemporary novels, the reason, I believe, is that recent novels no longer do many of the things that once made them so glorious. They want a certain weight, gravity, seriousness that has marked the best fiction over the centuries. They have turned away from telling grand stories issuing onto great themes. Some may admire the cleverness or the sensitivity of certain living novelists, but none seems as God-like in his or her omniscience and evocative power as the great Russian or Victorian or French or American novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Art, we know, is not on the same onward and upward progress curve as science and technology, but might it, in the novel, be demonstrably regressing?”

[The passages from Chekhov’s letter were translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973).]

'Brought to the Test of Real Life'

On this date, April 16, Easter Sunday in 1775. James Boswell attended services in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Afterwards he dined with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Williams. His account of the meal begins:

“I maintained that Horace was wrong in placing happiness in Nil admirari, for that I thought admiration one of the most agreeable of all our feelings; and I regretted that I had lost much of my disposition to admire, which people generally do as they advance in life.”

The Latin tag is from the opening lines of Horace’s Epistle I.6 and can be rendered as “to be surprised by nothing” or “to wonder at nothing.” Here is Alexander Pope’s version (1684), which is closer to Boswell’s understanding:

“Not to admire, as most are wont to do,

It is the only method that I know,

To make Men happy, and to keep ’em so.”

Unlike Boswell, my willingness to admire has grown with age. When young I was too proud and cynical to make room for admiration, as though it somehow diminished me to revere another. Today, the list of people I admire is long, beginning with Dr. Johnson, who was admired by Boswell above all men. To admire someone is not to judge them as flawless but to recognize their gifts in spite of their flaws. Boswell continues:

“JOHNSON. ‘Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration—judgement, to estimate things at their true value.’ I still insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgement, as love is more pleasing than friendship. The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne. JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir; admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgement and friendship like being enlivened. Waller has hit upon the same thought with you: but I don't believe you have borrowed from Waller. I wish you would enable yourself to borrow more.’”

Johnson alludes to Edmund Waller’s “To Amoret,” in particular these lines:

“Amoret! as sweet and good

As the most delicious food,

Which but tasted does impart

Life and gladness to the heart.”

The dinner conversation shifts. Boswell writes:

“He then took occasion to enlarge on the advantages of reading, and combated the idle superficial notion, that knowledge enough may be acquired in conversation. ‘The foundation (said he,) must be laid by reading. General principles must be had from books, which, however, must be brought to the test of real life. In conversation you never get a system. What is said upon a subject is to be gathered from a hundred people. The parts of a truth, which a man gets thus, are at such a distance from each other that he never attains to a full view.’”

Most good conversation is entertaining rather than educational. The ideal conversationalist embodies qualities seldom found in combination: broad learning and experience, a robust sense of humor, casual eloquence, wittiness and deference to others (no lecturing, please). And no earnest pedantry. Johnson puts it admirably: “General principles must be had from books, which, however, must be brought to the test of real life.”

[In his “Life of Waller” in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Johnson writes: “Among Waller’s little poems are some, which their excellency ought to secure from oblivion; as, ‘To Amoret,’ comparing the different modes of regard with which he looks on her and ‘Sacharissa,’ and the verses ‘On Love,’ that begin ‘Anger in hasty words or blows.’”]

'A Lexicon to Be Used By a Whale Author'

Sir Toby Belch is one of Shakespeare’s comic drunks, a vain, buffoonish glutton, distant cousin to the more enduring Sir John Falstaff. Sir Toby is milking the coffers of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, another Shakespearian lout. In Act II, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night, Sir Toby says:

“My ladys a Cataian, we are politicians, Malvolio’s a Peg-a-Ramsey, and ‘Three merry men be we.’ Am not I consanguineous? am I not of her blood? Tillyvally. Lady!” [Sings] ‘There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady!’”

Much delicious nonsense to unpack here but let’s focus on a single word: “Tillyvally.” In his edition of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson glosses the word as an “interjection of contempt.” In his Dictionary, Johnson cites the passage in Twelfth Night, another in Henry IV, Part 2, identifies the word as an adjective, offers an alternate spelling (tillyvalley) and gives this definition: “a word used formerly when any thing said was rejected as trifling or impertinent.” A polite modern equivalent: Fiddlesticks! Less polite: Bullshit!

    

The inevitable happened. Whenever I consult a dictionary, in particular Johnson’s or the OED, I’m detoured from whatever else I may have been doing and, unless I’m strong, there goes the rest of the afternoon. I browsed in Johnson among the T’s. Tachygraphy: “the art or practice of quick writing.”  Tántling: “one seized with hopes of pleasure unattainable.” Tatterdemalion: “a ragged fellow.” Thrapple: “the windpipe of any animal.” To threap: “a country word denoting to argue much or contend.” Titubation: “the act of stumbling.” Tripudiation: “act of dancing.” Tuel: “the anus.”

Reading the Dictionary, with its 42,773 words, prompts a sense of gratitude for the abundance of English. We are reassured that anything can be expressed. Ishmael concurred. Read his testimonial in Chap. 104, “The Fossil Whale,” in Moby-Dick:

    

“Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan -- to an ant or a flea -- such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.”

The first edition of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in London on this date, April 15, in 1755.

'On Matters Beyond One’s Knowledge'

At last, the word we have been waiting for: ultracrepidarian. In our post-everything era, we have officially entered the Age of Ultracrepidarianism. Thanks go to Dave Lull for the introduction. Here is the OED’s definition of the adjective form: “Going beyond one’s proper province; giving opinions on matters beyond one’s knowledge.” Even the humblest among us are guilty on occasion. It’s an annoying sin personified by a familiar figure: the guy at the end of the bar who knows everything. He defines himself by his opinions and his enthusiasm for imposing them on others. But he’s a piker compared to his co-opinionators armed with Twitter accounts.

In theory, Twitter is a marvelous tool, a handy way to share interesting things. Even without an account of my own I follow several Twitter sites kept by people with interesting minds. I’m reminded of what Guy Davenport writes in the introductory note to The Hunter Gracchus (1996): “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” I operate on the assumption that the least interesting thing I can know about you is your opinion of anything. Tell me what you know, what you've lived. Too often, opinions camouflage nullity. Hot air masks a vacuum. If you’re an immunologist, I may want to hear what you have to say about the complexities of COVID-19. Otherwise, keep a lid on it.

Go here to read a brief history of ultracrepidarian. The coiner, unsurprisingly, is William Hazlitt, one of literature’s deftest opinion-puncturers. The neologism shows up in his demolition of the now-forgotten literary journalist William Gifford: “You have been well called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic.” Hazlitt’s elegant dismissal of Gifford is bracing: “His slow, snail-paced, bed-rid habits of reasoning cannot keep up with the whirling, eccentric motion, the rapid, perhaps extravagant combinations of modern literature.”

Leigh Hunt took Hazlitt’s evisceration of Gifford to the next logical level and wrote “Ultra-Crepidarius. A Satire on William Gifford.” Dave has unearthed speculation that the ultimate source of ultracrepidarian is Charles Lamb, called by Hunt “one of the humblest as well as noblest spirits that exist.” Of course, it was Lamb who wrote of Wordsworth: “He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a mind to try it. It is clear, then, that nothing is wanting but the mind.”

'Spring Has Come, the Weather is Warm'

“A Work of Art,” a genuinely O. Henry-ish creation, is one of the more than sixty stories Chekhov published in 1886. A young man pays the doctor who has saved his life with an antique bronze candelabra featuring “two female figures in the costume of Eve and in attitudes for the description of which I have neither the courage nor the fitting temperament.” The doctor unloads this kitschy gem (poshlust!) on a lawyer, who gives it to an actor, who sells it to a dealer in antique brass, where the original grateful young man buys it and returns it to the doctor.  

Two years earlier, Chekhov had first coughed up blood, a symptom of the tuberculosis that would kill him twenty years later. That same year, 1884, he qualified as a doctor. In his stories, doctors are seldom portrayed heroically. Neither are they villains. Chekhov renders them about as noble and foolish as the rest of us. In effect, he says nothing, shakes his head and smiles.

On this date, April 13, in 1904, Chekhov is in Yalta and writes to his friend Boris Lazarevsky, a lawyer attached to the legal branch of the Imperial Russian Navy. The Russo-Japanese War is on and Lazarevsky is stationed in Vladivostok. He had complained about the prospect of staying in Siberia for another three years. Chekhov writes:

“Your long, sad letter reached me yesterday. After reading it, I sympathized with you with all my heart. I can only suppose you are no longer in need of my sympathy because spring has come, the weather is warm, and the famous harbor has been cleared of ice. When I was in Vladivostok [in 1890, on his return from Sakhalin Island], the weather was wonderfully warm even though it was October and there was a real live whale crossing the harbor and splashing with its huge tail.”

This is a genuinely Chekhovian creation that mingles encouragement for a friend (with a clandestine suggestion of exasperation) and wonder at the world. Chekhov is now forty-four and his pep talk is backed up by hard-won experience:

“When the war is over (and it soon will be) [the peace treaty was signed in September 1905], you’ll begin to take trips to surrounding areas . . . you’ll see a host of things that you’ve never before experienced and that you’ll remember to the end of your days, you’ll meet with so much joy and suffering that you won’t even notice that the three years which now so frighten you have flashed by.”

Chekhov finishes his letter by suggesting Lazarevsky write accounts of the war, “if there’s a bombardment or something,” and sell them to newspapers or the magazine Russian Thought, in which he published much of Sakhalin Island.

Chekhov would be dead three months later.

[I’ve linked to “A Work of Art” in the translation by Constance Garnett, who included it in Love and Other Stories, published in 1920. The passages from Chekhov’s letters were translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973).]