'Bradley Even Called War a Calamity'

A reader in Dallas has sent me a small treasure: “Five-Star Schoolmaster” by A.J. Liebling.  Thank you, Jay. The two-part profile of General Omar Bradley (1893-1981) was published in the March 3 and 10, 1951 issues of The New Yorker, and recycled as Liebling’s introduction to Bradley’s memoir, A Soldier’s Story (1951). What my reader has given me is a reprint of the story published as a pamphlet by the magazine – white cover, New Yorker typeface, drawing of Bradley on the front.

Bradley was known as the “G.I.’s General,” often in contrast to General George Patton, whom he succeed as commander of the American II Corps in North Africa in April 1943. Liebling admired Bradley for just that reason. His profile opens with a description of Bradley’s first meeting with American and British war correspondents in Tunisia. Liebling writes:

“The General wore a tin hat—not buckled under the chin [as Patton wore his], probably because his reconnaissances sometimes took him into shelling and he didn’t want his head jerked off. He also wore a canvas field jacket, G.I. pants, and canvas leggings, thus qualifying as the least dressed-up commander of an American army in the field since Zachary Taylor, who wore a straw hat.”

That captures Liebling’s manner – attentive to detail, in possession of odds and ends of information, a muted comic voice. In 1951, Bradley was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior military commander since the start of the Korean War. Liebling’s description of Bradley in those roles will nicely confound those of the reflexively anti-military persuasion:

“’Military mind’ is a term as meaningless as ‘Jewish mentality’ or ‘feminine logic.’ Soldiers have all kinds of minds, just as they come in all shapes and sizes. What Bradley has, as it happens, is an antimilitaristic mind. He recently astonished a think-piece writer who, meeting him for the first time, asked him what he believed would happen if the Communists took over all of Europe and Asia. ‘We’d have to militarize the country completely for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years,’ the General said, ‘and that would be as bad as defeat.’ In a speech a year or so ago, Bradley even called war a calamity. Because he hates the prospect of a militaristic state, he is determined that we shall not be thrown back on the Western Hemisphere.”

Liebling shifts deftly back and forth from Europe in 1944-45, to Missouri (Bradley’s home state) in 1910, to West Point in 1915, to Washington and Korea in 1951. Technically, his profile of Bradley is a marvel. Like a first-rate reporter, he provides readers with lots of information concisely and almost delicately, but with confidence and brio. He never lays it on thick. Here are some Lieblingesque samples:

“Men went as fast and as far for him as they ever went for the rhetorical Bonaparte.”

“This reputation for sincerity even when it hurts makes General Bradley a star attraction as a witness before Congressional committees, which try to book him as often as the Copacabana books Joe E. Lewis.”

“Distinguished losers—like Ludendorff and Napoleon—accumulate legends and neuroses. Distinguished winners—like the Duke of Wellington, who had the answers to all the young Victoria’s questions, even how to clear the Crystal Place of sparrows (‘Sparrow hawks, Ma’am!’)—develop a self-assurance like a good heavyweight champion’s or an accomplished surgeon’s. This in the case of General Bradley takes the form of friendliness.”

“The paper he sees first in the mornings, while he is still at home, is not the Daily Racing Form, which is perhaps as well for his record of punctuality, because he likes to work out the probable winners from past performances when he has an opportunity.”

'Yes, I Was Beginning to Get the Picture'

“Mandelstam’s poems are splendid. They are the very essence of poetry. Perhaps even a little too much so. Sometimes I think that the poetry of the twentieth century, for all its brilliance, has less of the universal humanity and passion that imbues the great poetry of the nineteenth century.” 

Vasily Grossman was in Armenia for sad but understandable reasons. In October 1960 he had submitted the manuscript of his masterpiece, Life and Fate, to a Soviet literary journal. Four months later, KGB agents confiscated the typescript, carbon papers and even his typewriter ribbons. For the rest of his life – he died in 1964, having never seen his novel in print – he would say his book, not he, had been “arrested.”

Later in 1961, Grossman was commissioned to revise a literal translation of a 1,400-page Armenian war novel by Hrachya Kochar. He needed the money, took the job and spent two months in Armenia in 1961-62. In the introduction to An Armenian Sketchbook (trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, New York Review Books, 2013), Robert Chandler and Yuri Bit-Yunan suggest that giving Grossman the job may have been an attempt by Soviet officials “to buy [him] off, to compensate him—at least in financial terms—for the non-publication of Life and Fate.” He was already sick with the cancer that would kill him in two years. In Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Grossman’s sense of humor remains intact:

“After a while, I got used to being ignored. But there were still moments when I felt disheartened. I spent the whole of New Year’s Day in my hotel room—I would have been glad to receive a phone call even from a dog.”

Grossman asks Kochar, called “Martirosyan” in the book, what he knew about Mandelstam’s visit to Armenia in 1930. Kochar says he doesn’t remember him. “At my request, he phoned several poets from the older generation—none of them knew that Mandelstam had ever been in Armenia. Nor had they read his Armenian poems.”

In 1927, a Soviet publishing house had hired Mandelstam to revise and edit a Russian translation of a book by the Belgian novelist Charles de Coster. It was published the following year. The poet was accused of stealing credit after he was mistakenly identified on the title page as sole translator, not as editor. The press mounted a campaign against Mandelstam, who denied the charges, which further enflamed the attacks on him. He feared being banned from publishing. The campaign, increasingly infused with anti-Semitism, dragged on for more than a year.

Nikolai Bukharin interceded and had Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda sent to Armenia, a semi-autonomous appendage of the Soviet Union, as journalists. She writes in Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970): “M. owed [Bukharin] all the pleasant things in his life. His 1928 volume of poetry would never have come out without the active intervention of Bukharin. The journey to Armenia, our apartment and ration cards, contracts for future volumes – all this was arranged by Bukharin.” After a show trial, Bukharin was executed in 1938, nine months before Mandelstam died in a Siberian transit camp.

Mandelstam was to visit the new Soviet republic and write a glowing account of its worker’s paradise. Instead, in 1933 he published a sui generis travelogue, Journey to Armenia (trans. Clarence Brown, The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1986). In the introduction to his translation of Journey to Armenia, Clarence Brown emphasizes “. . . the offending passages (principally the folkloric ending, which must be one of the most unmistakably derogatory references to Stalin published in the Soviet Union in the 1930s),” adding, “no syllable of Mandelstam’s thereafter appeared in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.”

Grossman doesn’t reveal how much of this backstory he knew. He writes: “[T]here is an enchanting music in Mandelstam’s poems, and some are among the finest poems written in Russian since the death of Blok [in 1921]. . . . And although Mandelstam was unable to shoulder the entire great burden of the Russian poetic tradition, he is still a genuine and wonderful poet. There is an abyss between him  and those who only pretend to write poetry.” Grossman concludes that section of his Armenia book with typically oblique irony:

“And my acquaintances in Yerevan did not remember Mandelstam’s visit to Armenia. Yes, I was beginning to get the picture.”

Though separated by three decades, Grossman’s case uncannily echoes Mandelstam’s. Both men were hired to revise the translations of others. Both fled the Soviet Union for Armenia. Both wrote idiosyncratic travel books. Both were Jews.

'It Is Fine to See Anything Big Getting Started'

“He had a lot of favorite books, including the Oxford English Dictionary, which he read as if it were a novel, filled with wonders and suspense.”

Which might suggest the dictionary-reader would be a rococo prose stylist, a twentieth-century Sir Thomas Browne, and that would be mistaken. John McNulty’s style was at once plain and conversational, evolved from his work as a reporter and rewrite man for newspapers. His ear for American speech was flawless. If he reminds the reader of another writer it might be Damon Runyon or William Saroyan, though he’s less sentimental and flashy. Their turf overlapped. Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, called it “lowlife.”

There’s little drama in McNulty’s sketches for the magazine, and no politics. They are the opposite of “high concept.” McNulty (1895-1956) never condescends to the people he writes about, in part because he is one of them. He was a drinking man who played the horses, and doesn’t go slumming. He writes about bartenders, taxi drivers, fellow horse players and other habitués of Manhattan’s Third Avenue because that’s where he found a home. Many of his stories – rooted in real life but, I suspect, lightly fictionalized – are set in Costello’s, a bar patronized by New Yorker writers. It started as a speakeasy in 1929 before moving to the northeast corner of 44th Street and Third Avenue. It closed in 1973.

McNulty dates from the time when The New Yorker was still readable. His contemporaries at the magazine were A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. He is a lesser writer than either but his work recalls the old-fashioned journalism virtue he shared with them: an abiding interest in people as individuals, not types or spokesmen for demographic data sets. You can find his work in The World of John McNulty (Dolphin Books, 1961), with an introduction by his friend James Thurber (author of the passage quoted at the top), and This Place on Third Avenue (Counterpoint, 2001), with a memoir by his widow, Faith McNulty, who was also a New Yorker writer. One small example of how McNulty could take a flyweight premise and, through close listening and a refusal to get pretentious, turn it into a charming feuilleton-like essay, is “It’s a Morning City, Too.” It was published in The New Yorker on Jan. 24, 1953. You’ll find it in the first volume just mentioned. McNulty tells us it’s his habit to get up early and take a walk:

“[T]he doormen along the street say hello or good morning, as a rule, and are inclined to stop a minute and talk, the newsstand man in our neighborhood, on the East Side, around the Seventies, he is Maxie, who weighs a hundred and fourteen pounds and can work twenty hours at a stretch without blinking an eye, has time too say hello or tell a gag or two, fellows fixing the fruit and vegetables out on in front of the stores on Second Avenue have time to say hello, the policeman is apt to nod some kind of good morning, and there’s a feeling all around in the air as if the whole town, beginning with our neighborhood, was saying, ‘Let’s go, boys, a new day is starting in this town, let’s go.’ It is fine to see anything big getting started, and here, every morning, when a man is walking around, is the biggest city in the world getting started.”

Not your customary understanding of New York City. You sense how important friendliness and collegiality were to McNulty, whether on the street or in a saloon. He talks to everyone, beginning with the elevator operator in his building and continuing with Maxie and “a great big friendly Slovak man” named Dayler. He writes:

“It is always a marvel to me how all these thousands of little, two-by-four stores get by. . . . All these small stores look courageous starting each day, and they must make a buck here, a buck there, and keep going one way or another.”

Nothing human is alien to McNulty. He likes people without making a philosophy out of it. McNulty stops for a cup of coffee at Stevie’s, a bar and restaurant owned by a Slovak family. The son, Jerry, who is studying at NYU to become a doctor is behind the bar:

“So this morning, the way nobody can explain, the subject of the human liver came up, somebody mentioned it in front of the bar, and Jerry, very quietly and earnestly, gave a little talk on what he learned so far, in pre-med-school. About the human kidney. Interesting and informative. Everybody listened.”

Another excellent story, longer than most and based on the heart attack McNulty suffered in 1949 and his subsequent hospitalization, is “Bellevue Days.” Even there he makes friends with fellow patients and the nurses. Like a good reporter, he’s always looking at the world, not gazing inward. Thurber, who knew McNulty from the 1920s when they worked for rival newspapers in Columbus, Ohio, writes of his friend:

“A few years before he died he gave me his precious copy of Mencken’s The American Language, saying, ‘This is the book I love the most.’ Mencken once spoke to me, in the Algonquin lobby, in praise of McNulty and his handling of the people and the parlance of Third Avenue, and I remember how McNulty’s face lighted up when I told him about it.”

McNulty died on this date, July 29, in 1956, six months to the day after Mencken.

'No One's Laura'

“No one’s Laura”

Out of context, the grammar is ambiguous in the final line of Zbigniew Herbert’s "Mr. Cogito and Maria Rasputin--an Attempt at Contact" (trans. Alissa Valles, The Collected Poems 1956-1998, 2007). We know plenty of women named Laura, but Herbert is suggesting that the woman in his title, Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina (1898-1977), daughter of the odious Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869-1916), will never be celebrated by a poet as Petrarch celebrated his Laura in the Canzoniere. In translation, the poem is written in thirty-nine stanzas of lengths varying from one line to eight. It begins:

“Sunday

early afternoon

a hot day

“years ago

in far-off California --

“leafing through

The Voice of the Pacific

Mr. Cogito

received the news

of the death of Maria Rasputin

daughter of Rasputin the Terrible”

Herbert taught briefly at the University of California. He tells us “the short notice / on the last page / touched him personally / moved him profoundly,” and we sense the specter of Herbertian irony. Maria Rasputin’s father was a mystical grifter with inordinate influence over the family of Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the imperial Romanovs, especially Tsarina Alexandra. He was enlisted to heal their only son, Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia. Rasputin had been a stránnik, a holy wanderer, whom some, particularly women, found charismatic. In December 1916, a group of Russian noblemen, disturbed by his growing influence over Alexandra, assassinated Rasputin. You’ve probably heard some version of the story.

After the October Revolution, Maria fled the Soviet Union and spent most of the rest of her life wandering on three continents. Herbert writes: “at the time / when the usurper Vladimir Ilyich / wiped out the anointed Nicholas / Maria hid away / across an ocean / swapped willows / for palm trees.” She joined the circus and performed in Europe and the United States, sometimes in a routine with actors playing her father, the “mad monk,” and his killers. Again, Herbert: “she won fame / in the circus act / Dance with the Bear / or Siberian Wedding.” She appeared in a silent film, Jimmie the Jolly Sailor, and acted in vaudeville. She had two failed marriages and declined an offer to publish a fictitious autobiography which, according to Herbert, was to be titled Daughter of Lucifer. Here comes Herbert’s best line: “she showed more tact / than a certain Svetlana.” That would be Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva (1926-2011), Stalin’s youngest child and only daughter. Her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967), became a minor American bestseller. The KGB gave her the nickname Kukushka, meaning “cuckoo bird.” Maria published three memoirs, all defending her father’s reputation.

Maria’s obituary is accompanied by a photograph of her holding “a leather object,” “something between / a lady’s necessaire / and a mailman’s bag.” Herbert wonders what it might be: “—Petersburg nights / --a Tula samovar / --an Old Church Slavonic songbook / --a stolen silver soup ladle / with the tsarina’s monogram / --a tooth of Saint Cyril / --war and peace / --a pearl dried in herbs / --a lump of frozen earth / --an icon.” What piece of Russia does she carry with her for almost sixty years?

Maria spent her final years in Los Angeles, an American citizen living on Social Security. She is buried in Angelus Rosedale Cemetery: “what is she doing / in such an unsuitable place / reminiscent of some picnic / a happy holiday of the dead / or the pale pink / final round of a pastry competition.” Then: “No one’s Laura.”

 “Mr. Cogito and Maria Rasputin—an Attempt at Contact” is middling Herbert, but suggests his obsessive immersion in history and the barbed nature of his wit. He is a funny poet, not always solemn. Herbert, the Polish Petrarch, died on this date, July 28, in 1998 at age seventy-three.

'Our Nimble-Kneed Astaire'

How does the name of a Eurasian bird end up as a metaphor in working-class conversation in Cleveland? When my parents wished to mock someone who spoke endlessly and mindlessly, they might call him a magpie. It implied empty chatter, noise for its own sake. But why not a myna or parrot, birds they had actually seen? Years later I learned the magpie was renowned for collecting and hoarding shiny objects, which supplied a second useful  avian metaphor. (Think of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie.)  Off hand, I can’t recall another bird so generous with figures of speech. Mockingbird? Old crow? Eagle-eyed? Owlish? Pigeon-toed?

Magpies belong to the genus Pica, which supplies the latter half of the bird’s common name. Magpies are corvids, along with crows, ravens, rooks and jays, among others. These are smart birds. Magpies are among the few non-mammal species able to recognize their own reflection in mirrors. They are tastefully beautiful birds, elegant and classy, with a touch of the aristocratic. In the final lines of “Lord Mayor Magpie,” Eric Ormsby plays with that idea:

“. . . this debonair

line dancer in mid-air,

domino dapper

with morning-coat manners,

stiff tailed, caustic of caw,

parliamentary of demeanour,

our nimble-kneed Astaire

“who refuses all obeisance

to Lagerfeld or Wintour.

His black eye crackles, his attire is dour.

He favours classic all-occasion wear.”

Ormsby has often devoted poems to birds, though not in the Mary Oliver spirit of sensitivity and nature worship. He happily anthropomorphizes them, turning them into character studies. I once called him an “ornithological/Theophrastian maker of verses.”

'Described with Such Truth and Power'

“Genuine books are always marked with the author’s character and convey the cherished theories, however outlandish, from which he has drawn sustenance himself. It clearly pays to read as M. did: turning only to the best and passing over the bad and bogus.”

M. is Osip Mandelstam and the author of these observations is his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward, 1974). I know adults who take the Harry Potter books seriously and others who take John Ashbery’s books seriously – two reading cliques with, presumably, little overlap. What they have in common is a taste for trash, deeply unserious, time-wasting work certified as fashionable by critics and marketeers. As Mandelstam puts it:

“What about literature, one might ask, which is supposed to reflect the writer’s experience, his search for truth, or the road to it? But, unfortunately, books which really do this are few and far between, and most of the turbid trash that pours from the presses is counterfeit, churned out expressly to please the rulers or pander to the tastes of the masses.”

When I encounter the word turbid I think of a polluted, anaerobic stream. The OED’s second definition is useful in this context: “characterized by or producing confusion or obscurity of thought, feeling, etc.; mentally confused, perplexed, muddled; disturbed, troubled.” In other words, murkiness, the absence of clarity.

The idea of books as time-killers, numbing distractions, entries in a long list of entertainment options, is repellant and deeply ungrateful to the literary traditions we are fortunate to have inherited. Such thought stir as I read Vasily Grossman. I finished Stalingrad and now I’m reading An Armenian Sketchbook (trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, 2013) and The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry (trans. David Patterson, 2003), edited by Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg. As a Soviet war correspondent, Grossman said he read only one book, War and Peace, and he read it twice. In Stalingrad, Commissar Nikolay Krymov visits Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in advance of the Nazis, as did Grossman. He writes:

“Yasnaya Polyana was a living, suffering Russian home—one upon thousand of thousand such homes. With absolute clarity, Krymov saw in his mind Bald Hills [the Bolkonsky estate] and the old sick prince. The present merged with the past; today’s events were one with what Tolstoy described with such truth and power that it had become the supreme reality of a war that ran its course 130 years ago.”

'No News Here'

“No news here; that which I have is stolen, from others . . .”

Every writer, if he is honest, will find truth in such an admission. We pass along what others have thought, sometimes consciously, often in ignorance. There’s nothing shameful about this. At our best we are respectful borrowers and refiners. We concur, reluctantly or otherwise, with Kohelet. The sentence quoted above is from Burton’s “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. No writer has so forthrightly, or at such great length, acknowledged his indebtedness to others. He completes the sentence:

“. . . Dicitque mihi mea pagina fur es [My page cries out to me, you are a thief]. If that severe doom of Synesius be true, ‘it is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labours, than their clothes,’ what shall become of most writers? I hold up my hand at the bar among others, and am guilty of felony in this kind, habes confitentem reum [the defendant pleads guilty], I am content to be pressed with the rest. ’Tis most true, tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes [Many are possessed with an incurable itch for writing], and there is no end of writing of books, as the wiseman found of old.”

We write out of vanity, Burton reminds us, “in this scribbling age,” and who can argue with that? Who is moved by humility to write? Writing is presumption. Every man, “out of an itching humour,” he writes, “hath to show himself, desirous of fame and honour.”

The one book I have returned to consistently since the start of the lockdown, reading it not sequentially but as a form of bibliomancy, as divination, is Burton’s Anatomy. Few writers so seamlessly mingle learning, wisdom and humor:

“[Writers] lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. Ineruditi fures [unlettered thieves], &c. A fault that every writer finds, as I do now, and yet faulty themselves, trium literarum homines [men of three letters; i.e., fur, meaning “thief”] all thieves; they pilfer out of old writers to stuff up their new comments, scrape Ennius’ dunghills [Virgil is reputed to have been reading a volume by Quintus Ennius. Asked why, Virgil said he was “plucking pearls from Ennius’ dunghill”], and out of Democritus' pit, as I have done. By which means it comes to pass, that not only libraries and shops are full of our putrid papers, but every close-stool and jakes, Scribunt carmina quae legunt cacantes [They write books which people read while shitting].”

'Never to Have Been Inside a Shoe Factory'

Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) joined the Communist Party in 1933 after a visit to Hitler’s Germany and quit fourteen months later. Dahlberg was constitutionally unclubbable. Temperamentally, he makes Evelyn Waugh look like Dale Carnegie. Dahlberg was already the author of three proletarian novels which today read less like political screeds than expressions of deeply personal rage. Nothing pleased him. He treated women like dirt and disowned every friend he ever had.

But in rare moments, in parts of Do These Bones Live (1941; revised and retitled Can These Bones Live, 1960) and Because I Was Flesh (1964), Dahlberg could write beautifully. In 1971 he published The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg, in which he describes his experiences with the CPUSA before, during and after his membership. Often his observations sound applicable to the recent vogue for Marxism-Leninism:

“I could see no real distinction between Dostoevsky’s unfilial nihilist Stavrogin in The Possessed and the Stalinists who viewed the Old as the nemesis of the New.”

And this, which is remarkably prescient, perhaps because those attracted to criminally moronic strains of political extremism haven’t much changed in ninety years:

“The old traditional style of feeling, embedded in such words as morals, good, evil, honesty, kindness, pity, and principles, was now deemed sick symptoms and the cant shibboleths of the middle class. Gratitude was tabu or regarded as sycophancy.”

At the same time Stalin was demonizing (and killing) millions of kulaks, his American followers were dabbling in similar pathologies:

“The writers of the Left had fallen into a utopian oscitancy [OED: “drowsiness as evidenced by yawning; dullness; indolence, negligence, inattention”]—a sort of political nympholepsy had taken hold of the intelligentsia. We were in such a drowsy state of madness that we looked upon the proletariat as a sublime superhuman race. We were grieved and felt degraded because we were not the regal progeny of peasants, colliers, or sharecroppers. How unlucky it was not to have been a cotton picker, or never to have been inside a shoe factory or a laborer in a sweatshop.”

And this, about schooling the wayward elite:

“The general feeling among the Stalinist clerks was that the intellectuals were politically ill, and should purge themselves with lapis lazuli and a deep study of Stalin’s treatises, also the tracts of Bukharin, Radek and Plekhanov.”

Bukharin was arrested in 1937 and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. After a show trial he was executed in 1938. In 1937, Karl Radek was arrested and confessed to committing treason after two and a half months of interrogation. He was found guilty during the Second Moscow Trial and sentenced to ten years of penal labor. In 1939, he was beaten to death by other prisoners. After disagreements with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Georgi Plekhanov fled Russia after the October Revolution and died of tuberculosis in Finland on May 30, 1918.

'Until It’s Glorified in Rhyme'

I have just read Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad (New York Review Books, 2019), which leads me to the poetry of Boris Slutsky (1919-1986). Here is the co-translator (with his wife Elizabeth) of Grossman’s novel, Robert Chandler, in his introduction to the Slutsky selection in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Books, 2015):

“What nearly all his poems have in common is a focus on the specific and a wariness of dogma. Slutsky is a careful, modest explorer of human experience, closer to Chekhov or Vasily Grossman than to Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn. Slutsky did, in fact, know Grossman. During the late 1950s, when both were living in the same building, Slutsky regularly read his new poems aloud to Grossman or left him copies of poems he had recently typed out.”

To call Stalingrad a war novel is misleading. Yes, the Nazis advance on the city and the Soviet military and civilians defend it, but much space is devoted to domestic and work life – parents, spouses, children, lovers, coworkers, neighbors. Family is the heart of the novel. No one is unimportant to Grossman. Don’t pigeonhole his novel with The Naked and the Dead. Similarly, Slutsky writes no hymns to hydroelectric projects. His themes are preeminently human and close to home. Chandler writes in his introduction:

“Slutsky wrote about the war, about the Shoah, about various aspects of his Jewish heritage, about Stalin, about returnees from the camps, about other writers, about almost every aspect of everyday life.”

In “All Rules Are Incorrect” (early 1960s, trans. Stephen Capus) Slutsky is at once defiant and traditional:

“All rules are incorrect,

all laws remain perverse,

until they’re firmly set

in well-wrought lines of verse.

“An age or era will

be merely a stretch of time

without a meaning until

it’s glorified in rhyme.

“Until the poet’s ‘Yes!’,

entrusted by his pen

to print, awards success

to this or that – till then

“the jury will be out,

the verdict still in doubt.”

Chandler tells us Slutsky’s wife Tanya died in 1977. For three months afterwards he wrote “some of the finest poems of love and mourning in the Russian language; these have yet to receive due recognition.” He then fell into a “depressed silence” for his last nine years. Here is “Relearning Solitude,” (trans. Marat Grinberg and Judith Pulman):

“Just as I once learned one ancient tongue

enough to read its texts,

and I forgot the alphabet –

I’ve forgotten solitude.

This all must be recalled, recovered, and relearned.

I remember how once I met

a compiler of words

in the ancient tongue that I had learned

and lost.

Turned out, I knew two words: ‘heavens’ and ‘apple’.

I might have recalled the rest –

All beneath the heavens and beside the apples –

But the need wasn’t there.”

An untitled poem dated 1977 (trans. Robert Chandler):

“I had a bird in my hand

but my bird has flown.

I held a bird in my hand

but am now all alone.

“My small bird has left me

full of anger and rage;

my blue bird has left me

alone in a cage.”

And this, from the same year, also untitled and saddest of all (trans. G.S. Smith):

“Always busy, plagued by anxiety,

guilt-ridden, duty to be done—

husbands should be the first to die;

never the ones who are left alone.

“Wives should grow old slowly. Aim

for the four-score-and-twenty mark, even;

not every day, but from time to time

remembering their men.

“You should not have left the way

you did. That was wrong.

with a kind smile on your face

you should have lived on,

you should have lived long.

“Until their hair turns white—

for wives, that’s the way to wait,

“getting on with things around the home,

breaking the odd heart if they can,

and even (well, where’s the harm?)

toasting the memory of their old man.”

'Killing Turned Out to Be Supremely Easy'

From Zbigniew Herbert’s “Albigensians, Inquisitors and Troubadours” in The Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985):

“They are barefooted, armed with clubs and knives, dressed only in shirts and trousers, but their thirst for blood is inexhaustible. They manage to break into the town following the members of the careless expedition. Once inside, they spread terror;  the assault on the walls takes only a few hours. A crowd of survivors gathers in Saint-Nazaire Cathedral, and in the churches of La Madeleine and Sainte-Jude. The soldiery break down the doors and slaughter everyone: the new-born, women, cripples, elders, and priests celebrating mass. Bells toll for the dead. Extermination is total.”

On this date, July 22, in 1209, the people of Béziers, in the Languedoc region of southern France, were slaughtered in the first major engagement of the Albigensian Crusade. Earlier in the month, Pope Innocent III had called for a crusade against the Catharist heresy, also called Albigensianism after the city of Albi where the movement started. The army of soldiers and mercenaries was led by the Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud Amalric, who said, probably apocryphally, Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. This came in reply to being told there were faithful Catholics among the inhabitants of Béziers: “Kill them. For the Lord knows those that are His own.” The town was pillaged and burned. Herbert writes:

“Pierre de Vaux-de-Cernay, a Cistercian monk and chronicler of the expeditions against the Albigensians, wrote that in La Madeleine alone seven thousand were slaughtered, which probably is an exaggeration. Historians estimate, however, that some thirteen thousand ‘innocent’ people were killed in Béziers. What makes this figure even more terrifying is that inhabitants were put to the sword without discrimination.”

This was written by a Polish poet who was 15 in 1939 when the Soviets invaded Lwow, which later was captured by the Nazis, then re-captured by the Soviets. Herbert fought in the underground. He recounts the slaughter of the Cathars in the context of the Holocaust and the Soviet murder of millions. If there is any hope in Herbert’s essay, any sense that something of value survived, it’s in his mention of the three Albigensians who escape with “the remaining treasure, the holy books” – that is, with the gifts of civilization. This echoes three lines from the title poem in Herbert’s Report from the Besieged City (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1985) written after Wojciech Jaruzelski’s neo-Stalinist crackdown in December 1981. The hope is attenuated but real:

“and if the City falls and one man survives

he will carry the City inside him on the paths of exile

he will be the City”

In one of those strange convergences that echo through history, July 22 in 1942 was the start of the Grossaktion (“Great Action”) Warsaw, the Nazi code name for the deportation and murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Some 400,000 Jews had been packed into an area measuring 1.3 square miles. That summer more than a quarter-million of them were sent in cattle cars to the recently opened Treblinka death camp, fifty miles northeast of Warsaw.

Two years later, Vasily Grossman, Soviet war correspondent and future author of Life and Fate, was among the first journalists to visit the remains of Treblinka and collect eyewitness accounts. His article “The Hell of Treblinka” was published in the Soviet literary journal Znamya (Banner) in November 1944, and later entered as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials. Grossman writes:

“Killing turned out to be supremely easy—it does not entail any uncommon expenditure.

“It is possible to build five hundred such [gas] chambers in only a few days. This is no more difficult than constructing a five-story building.”

[“The Hell of Treblinka” is collected in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays; (trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova; New York Review Books, 2010).]

'Almost as Though One Were Inventing Them'

“[I]t's such a pleasure to write down splendid words--almost as though one were inventing them.”

A reader complains that I quote others too often and, sometimes, at too great a length. I consider quotation an act of courtesy, the least I can do. Great writers have said many things better and more memorably than I. It would be rude to elbow them aside and start bloviating on my own. Besides, the lineage of blogging, in my understanding, traces straight back to the commonplace book.

The line quoted above, for instance, was written by George Lyttleton (1883-1962), a longtime housemaster and English teacher at Eton. His correspondent is Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-1999), a publisher and editor best remembered for editing The Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). Hart-Davis had been Lyttleton’s student at Eton in 1925-26. They met again at a dinner party in 1955 and started a regular exchange of letters that continued until Lyttleton’s death in 1962. The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters was published in six volumes between 1978 and 1984. I read them about eight years ago.

Hart-Davis wrote the passage at the top when dismissing Lyttelton’s apology for the “tediously otiose” act of quoting Dr. Johnson. I’d be out of business if I couldn’t quote Johnson. That’s how the literary tradition works. Reading isn’t an obligatory, mechanical act, undertaken to earn a degree or impress the rubes. We read to live, to grow, to become ourselves. We’re not in this life alone. Here is Lyttleton, Hart-Davis’ senior by twenty-four years:

“Do you ever get things quite wrong? Because here is the perfect defense: `What is obvious is not always known, what is known is not always present. Sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance; slight avocations will seduce attention. And casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning.’ Isn’t it perfect? Johnson, of course.”

Lyttleton is quoting from the “Preface” to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its characteristically Johnsonian tone of mingled humility and audacity. Lyttleton's letters are laced with casual references to Johnson’s life and work. Johnson owned a piece of him, as great writers often do. His allusions are never stuffy or deployed in a show-off manner. They amount to the small talk of civilized men. In 1960, Hart-Davis suggests his former teacher reread The Bridge at San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder. Lyttleton replies to his former student: “I shall certainly read San Luis Rey again. I remember greatly liking it, and it is high time for a re-reading—on the whole life’s greatest pleasure” – a pleasure sealed when the re-reader quotes the memorable bits.

'A Homely Art'

In 1998, Guy Davenport published as a book Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature, originally delivered as the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1982. The subject is still-life painting. Recast as essays, the lectures are themselves an artfully arranged still life. He takes a conventional category and out of his learning, painter’s eye and sensitivity to kinships – cultural, aesthetic, philosophical -- assembles a web of associations that enable us to see it new. His prose, as always, is focused and digressive; his mind, fresh and nimble, the opposite of bored. Davenport writes:

“Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that will never bleach out; a homely art. From the artist’s point of view, it has always served as a contemplative form useful for working out ideas, color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem.”

Fine work done in a minor art is a major accomplishment. Think of Beerbohm’s essays or J.V. Cunningham’s epigrams. “Minor” should not be pejorative, merely a statement of scale. “One way of recognizing verities,” Davenport writes, “is to look at them as if you had never seen them before, to make an enigma of the familiar.”

That distills the charm and unlikely genius of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), the Italian painter who reclaimed the still life as a modernist and made it his own. I find only one reference to Morandi anywhere in Davenport’s work, in Eclogues: Eight Stories (1981), and it’s merely his last name. That’s a surprise. Davenport devoted an entire book to Balthus (The Balthus Notebook, 1989), a lesser artist. I would love to have heard what he had to say about Morandi, who was born 130 years ago on this date, July 20. His palette was narrow, his tonal choices subtle, his subjects – bowls, bottles, vases --- commonplace and endlessly recycled. Working with minimal means he became one of the great painters of the twentieth century. In Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979; included in 7 Greeks, New Directions, 1995), Davenport translates Heraclitus’ Fragment 40:

“The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”

[Naturally, Dave Lull found what I didn't. In Davenport’s Apples and Pears (1984): “After eighty years of bony French women in footbaths and Braque's mandolin and Picasso's guitar and Morandi's kitchen table and Klee's puppet theatre, we need a subject matter.” In The Balthus Notebook: “And Balthus is rich in hommages: a still life bows to Morandi, a hand holding a mirror to Utamaro, a cat to Hogarth.”]

'A Father Unto Thy Contemporaries'

I see it in my youngest son and remember it in myself – the demand for autonomy and the other privileges of adulthood, and the inability as yet to transcend who he is: a fairly mature seventeen-year-old. I can’t complain. He’s a good kid. On Friday he started his summer job stocking shelves and running the cash register at Walgreen’s. Compared to the savages lately in the news, including some significantly older than him, he’s a model of maturity.

At seventeen, the year I went away to college, I very much wanted to be a grownup but didn’t always know how to accomplish that. Many of my contemporaries had other ideas. The ages began to blur. Maturity was no longer judged a virtue. Adults wanted to act like children and adolescents. A frequently encountered type today is the childish man, clinging desperately to immaturity. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) seems to have anticipated this stunting of character in Part III, Section 8 of Christian Morals (written 1670s, published 1716):

“Confound not the distinctions of thy Life which Nature hath divided: that is, Youth, Adolescence, Manhood, and old Age, nor in these divided Periods, wherein thou art in a manner Four, conceive thy self but One. Let every division be happy in its proper Virtues . . .”

“Do as a Child but when thou art a Child, and ride not on a Reed at twenty. He who hath not taken leave of the follies of his Youth, and in his maturer state scarce got out of that division, disproportionately divideth his Days, crowds up the latter part of his Life, and leaves too narrow a corner for the Age of Wisdom, and so hath room to be a Man scarce longer than he hath been a Youth . . . anticipate the Virtues of Age, and live long without the infirmities of it . . . so may’st thou be coetaneous unto thy Elders, and a Father unto thy contemporaries.”

Coetaneous: a rare word with a simple meaning, straight from the Latin: “of the same age, equal in age” (OED). A good synonym with the same root is coeval.

'In Silence and Solitude, Without a Word'

My graphic abilities are stalled at the stick-figure level. I draw with the same proficiency I did at age six. Even my handwriting is rudimentary. After musicians, the class of artists I envy most are painters. A reader sent me a recent article about the American painter Richard Diebenkorn and his “Cityscape #1” (1963). I don’t have the language to explain my reactions to work at this level of accomplishment. I experience a pleasure that is simultaneously physical, emotional and analytic, at once soothing and energizing. Nothing else is quite like it. To call the painting “beautiful” seems feeble. I’ll let it go at that. Here is “Conversing with Paradise” (The Western Approaches, 1975), a poem Howard Nemerov dedicated to the painter Robert Jordan:

“To see the world the way a painter must,

Responsive to distances, alive to light,

To changes in the colors of the day,

His mind vibrating at every frequency

He finds before him, from wind waves in wheat

Through trees that turn their leaves before the storm,

To string-bag pattern of the pebbled waves

Over the shallows of the shelving cove

In high sunlight; and to the greater wave-

lengths of boulder and building, to the vast

Majestic measures of the mountain's poise;

“And from these modulations of the light

To take the elected moment, silence it

In oils and earths beneath the moving brush,

And varnish it and put it in a frame

To seal it off as privileged from time,

And hang it for a window on the wall,
A window giving on the ever-present past;

"How splendid it would be to be someone

Able to do these mortal miracles

In silence and solitude, without a word.”

All first-rate art is a “window giving on the ever-present past.” In his final lines, Nemerov expresses every writer’s envy of the visual artist’s gift. We’re stuck with words.