'The Writer Got It Right'

Kaboom Books has reopened three days a week and the owner, John Dillman, greeted us at the door with a squirt gun loaded with hand sanitizer. We brought our own masks but John was passing them out too. He has a new pandemic-driven rule: If you handle a book and decide not to buy it, don’t reshelf it but put it in one of the baskets placed around the shop.

My youngest son came with a list and quickly found some of what he wanted: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Down and Out in Paris and London. I trusted in serendipity and, as usual, wasn’t disappointed. My first find, in the fiction section, was a book I learned about just few years ago and read in a library copy: Eugenio Montale’s The Butterfly of Dinard (University Press of Kentucky, 1971), translated by G. Singh. In his preface, Montale refers to its contents as “short stories – culs de lampe.”

Next, Karl Shapiro’s Essay on Rime with Trial of a Poet (University of Michigan Press, 2003). The first title is a 2072-line blank-verse meditation on modern poetry, written in 1944 while Shapiro was serving in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific. He had no access to a library. The tone is polemical, mock-scholarly and often comic: “Suspect the novelist the title of whose book / Is lifted from a sermon or a play.” There go Hemingway and Faulkner, both of whom were alive when Shapiro published his book in 1945. Trial of a Poet was inspired by Shapiro’s service on the jury that awarded the crackpot and anti-Semite Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize: “What will our children’s children say / About our art-monsters in future years . . .” 

D.J. Enright’s Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995), the first of three grab bag volumes the English poet assembled late in life. Here’s a sample:       

“One pleasure in reading almost anything: focusing on a word or sentence and asking oneself how one would have put it. Gratifying if one’s rephrasing seems an improvement. Pleasing if, seeing why it is how it is, one concludes that the writer got it right, righter than one would have oneself.”