'To Keep the Luggage as Light as Possible'

A pleasing generational reciprocity has been happening in my family. I’ve always made sure my sons could get their hands on any books they wanted. That meant frequent trips to libraries and bookstores, and wide-open borrowing privileges from the shelves at home. If they wanted a book, they could have it. As a kid I hated being told a book was “beyond your reading level.” I remember my middle son when he was about three years old repeatedly borrowing a volume from the public library in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Eurotunnel, a children’s book about the tunnel beneath the English Channel. When he had to return it, I would take him to the library the following day and he would run to the children’s room in the basement, to the place where Eurotunnel had been reshelved, and clutch it to his chest, almost weeping with relief.

That same son is now a third-year midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. On Wednesday he texted me to say he had just finished reading The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (2004; rev. ed. 2017) by Abraham Rabinovich. Michael called it “one of the best military history books I’ve ever read.” I trust his judgment and ordered it that same evening. It arrived on Saturday and I stayed up late reading it. Rabinovich possesses the journalist’s chief virtue: dogged research. He also writes well, without filigree or sermonizing, and knows how to keep the story moving along. I remember following the war closely, from Oct. 6 to 25, 1973, afraid it might mean the end of civilization in the Middle East and another triumph for the Soviet Union. The final cease-fire was called one day before I turned twenty-one.

It’s a relief to know I can rely on Michael’s literary judgment. I’m reminded of John Ruskin’s father in the 1830’s packing his son’s luggage for an overseas journey and including four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Idler and Rambler essays. In his weird and endearing memoir Praeterita (1886-89), Ruskin writes:

“On our foreign journeys, it being of course desirable to keep the luggage as light as possible, my father had judged that four little volumes of Johnson – the Idler and the Rambler – did, under names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, contain more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable a compass.”

My parents could read but didn’t. That may lie behind the satisfaction I feel from supplying my sons with books and being supplied in turn. Ruskin writes:

“. . . Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune. . .”

'The Anfractuosities of His Intellect and of His Temper'

A friend tells me his reading of Macaulay’s essay on Dr. Johnson, “as histrionic as it sounds, transformed me into a literary man, removing me from the indifferent world of a mere English major.” I envy him the experience. I had no such road-to-Damascus moment. I always enjoyed books and writing – it was that simple. My friend writes:

“It sounds corny, and melodramatic, but this essay had a visceral effect on me. I read it alone in a dorm room, one Friday night while rain beat down. All alone on a Friday night--no, I didn't have much of social life. I think for the first time I understood excellence in prose, that it wasn’t all the same, that men could work legerdemain with words, create art.”

The classic expression of reading’s centrality to one’s life is Guy Davenport’s essay “On Reading” in The Hunter Gracchus (1996). While still a boy Davenport learned: “And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.” Some adults never grasp this seemingly self-evident truth. And this: “It is a truism that reading educates. What it does most powerfully is introduce the world outside us, negating the obstructions of time and place.” Seasoned readers know the pleasures of self-forgetting through books. With it comes a sense of familiarity with others. Nothing human is alien to the well-read. My friend reread Macaulay’s essay the other night and enjoyed it all over again:

“At the beginning of the essay, I was much taken with this sentence, reveling in its construction: ‘In the child, the physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were plainly discernible; great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper.’”

Macaulay celebrates the gravitas of Johnson’s style by almost imitating it. The sentence begins with a thesis followed by series of elegantly balanced proofs. “The man knows how to write,” my friend says, almost unnecessarily. Here is the latter half of Macaulay’s final sentence in his Johnson essay:

“[O]ur intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man.”

Anfractuosity is a very Johnsonian word. From the Latin by way of the French, the adjective form is defined in his Dictionary as “winding; mazy; full of turnings and winding passages.” The OED reminds us the word can also refer to “the grooves or furrows separating the convolutions on the surface of the brain.”

'The Gale Engenders in the Eye'

“hurricane-lamp  n. a lamp so constructed that it will not be extinguished by violent wind.” [OED]

Laura, like Petrarch’s, never happened, at least here in Houston. Still skittish from Hurricane Harvey three years ago today, we fussed. We bought batteries, bottled water and “dry goods.” I spent an afternoon earlier this week clearing the backyard of potential projectiles – flowerpots, the gas grill, two Adirondack chairs and logs from the tree I sawed down earlier this month. Everything stowed in the garage. We placed a last-minute order for cat and dog food. By Wednesday, the suspense was dispensed. The storm was veering east. Louisiana would get the worst of it. I woke once early Thursday morning to the sound of – nothing. The sky stayed blue all day. Here is the title poem from Turner Cassity’s Hurricane Lamp (University of Chicago Press, 1986):

“In warm cut-glass the geometric fire:

Triangle the half or diamond the whole,

Unstable in the still the bright parts pair,

Vibrate, divide; as if to say the gale

“Engenders in the eye, and in the wind

Are lapses where the fire can tower high.

New smoker of a charcoal filter, mind

You do not burn your fingers as you try,

“Face lowered toward the bar, to suck the flame.

In vortices as calm, ineptness wrecks;

In proper lighters, in the wettest storm,

The hooded flint rolls sparks along the thumb.

“Here, have a match. Its height two hands protect.”

Were we relieved? Of course. Harvey flooded my car and left us without power for four days – no lights, no AC. One of the oaks in the front yard might have caved in the roof. But with relief, I confess, came a little spark of disappointment. There’s something rousing about enduring disaster safely.

'To Supplant Reason in Hasty Minds'

In Chap. 5 of “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,” Gulliver explains to his hosts the existence of a profession unknown among the intelligent horses: lawyers. They are, he says, “bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid.” Gulliver is indulging in the cheapest and easiest form of humor, the lawyer joke. In his poem “The Answer to ‘Paulus,’” Swift writes: “The lawyer is a common drudge, / To fight our cause before the judge.” But Gulliver goes on to make a more interesting point in his conversation with the Houyhnhnm:

“It is likewise to be observed, that this society has a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong; so that it will take thirty years to decide, whether the field left me by my ancestors for six generations belongs to me, or to a stranger three hundred miles off.”

Swift’s immediate target is lawyers but his aim is more inclusive. We might think of ours as the Age of Cant. Dr. Johnson’s use of the word as reported by Boswell remains the best-known: “My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. . . . You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly.” Cant is distinct from lying. It is empty language used to secure one’s place within a group. The Johnson/Boswell usage is cited in the OED under this definition: “phraseology taken up and used for fashion's sake, without being a genuine expression of sentiment.” Think how once honest, useful words – community, conversation, diversity – have been deflated of meaning and puffed up into badges of right thinking. The Dictionary also cites James Russell Lowell’s use of cant in My Study Windows (1886). Here is the larger context for the passage:  

“Enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,-- and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds.”

'He Seems to Be Merely Thinking His Notes'

Three pages from the close of Charm: The Elusive Enchantment, published in 2018, Joseph Epstein concedes that our era delivers “a paucity of charm.” In the subsequent two years, charm – Epstein says it contains “an element of delight beyond mere niceness” – has moved ever closer to extinction. There’s nothing charming about arson, vandalism, race hatred, theft and assault, or their endorsement by purportedly educated people.

To compensate for the charm deficit, Epstein suggests we look to the past – to Fred Astaire, for instance; to Harold Arlen, Philip Larkin, Duke Ellington, Max Beerbohm, Evelyn Waugh and Blossom Dearie. All reliable carriers of what Epstein calls, in a timely fashion, “the lovely charm virus.” Another name on his list is an inspired choice, though it may be unfamiliar to younger readers – the tenor saxophonist and occasional clarinetist Lester Young, known with fond respect by fellow musicians as Prez.

Watch “Jammin’ the Blues”(1944), a short film that opens with the camera focused on Young’s trademark porkpie hat. Young is joined by, among others, Harry “Sweets” Edison and “Big” Sid Catlett. If more charm is called for, move on to the Aladdin Sessions on Blue Note, recorded by Young between 1945 and 1947. Don’t worry about the finer points of musicology, especially if the music is new to you. Just get comfortable and listen. Whitney Balliett in Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000 (2000) writes of the Aladdin Sessions:

“Young doesn’t bother with stating the melody. He launches immediately into his improvisations, and they are such complete reworkings that sometimes it is impossible to tell what he is playing. He literally creates new and fascinating compositions out of the composer’s chords.”

Elsewhere, Balliett writes that Young “plays so softly he seems to be merely thinking his notes.” That’s charm.

Lester Young was born on this date, August 27, in 1909 in Woodville, Miss., and died in 1959 in New York City at age forty-nine.

'A Chance of Becoming a Bit Smarter'

Axios Press has sent me bound galleys of Joseph Epstein’s Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits, scheduled for publication in October. It is his seventeenth collection of essays and occasional pieces, and his fifth from Axios in eight years. The Menckenesque title gives it away. At age eighty-three, Epstein remains our most entertaining, wide-ranging, industrious, learned practitioner of both familiar and critical essays. In his hands, the distinction between the two forms is hardly worthy of notice. Like most of the best essayists, he is a utility player, broadly curious and  competent. His interest in books and his fellow humans has never dimmed. Sadly, Epstein, that most congenial of men, has come to look like what Ishmael calls, speaking of the Pequod’s crew, an “isolato.” The essay is nearly moribund, as Epstein suggests in his introduction:

“. . . I often feel that my kind of writing is coming at what might be the end of a long and distinguished line, one that begins with Plutarch, moves along to Montaigne, Joseph Addison, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, Thomas Macaulay, Max Beerbohm, and George Orwell – the line of the general, often biographical essay.”

The essay is the chummiest of forms. The writer invites you into his softly lit study, gestures for you to be seated and begins the conversation. His graciousness implies respect. You, among all readers, will appreciate what he has to say. He doesn’t rant or insult your values or intelligence, and would never presume to tell you what to think or do. He may have read more than you, and certainly writes better, but you are his valued companion, if not always his equal. As Hazlitt writes in “The Fight”:

“[W]e agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

Here is how Epstein begins “Milt Rosenberg” (2018):

  

“Five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday, from 1973 to 2012, Milton Rosenberg elevated AM radio and the cultural tone generally in Chicago. Milt Rosenberg died on January 9 at the age of 92. His two-hour talk show was nothing if not anomalous. A University of Chicago professor, his academic specialty was social psychology, though it seems strange to use the word ‘specialty’ in connection with Milt Rosenberg, who may have been the world’s greatest paid dilettante.”

Before reading Epstein’s essay, originally published in the late, lamented Weekly Standard, I had never heard of Rosenberg. Like Hazlitt on boxing, a subject about which I know little and have even less interest, Epstein on Rosenberg is compelling through sheer charm of voice. That final phrase, “the world’s greatest paid dilettante,” cinches it. A good writer can make any subject interesting – even tennis. “Big Bill Tilden” (2016) is a review of a recent biography of the tennis star undone by scandal. At least it begins as a review, but soon turns into a meditation on, among other things, fame, sexual waywardness, the fleetingness of athletic prowess, and biography itself. Apropos of that last point, Epstein writes in the Tilden piece: “Lives, at least those deserving of biographies, require interpretation. Sometimes even an incorrect interpretation is better  than no interpretation at all.”

That stands as a credo for one of Epstein’s strengths. A life is more than a collection of vital stats. What follows is a sampler of interpretations by Epstein of various lives, often intermingled with literary judgment, all drawn from essays collected in Gallimaufry.

On Proust: “Marcel Proust, who began life as a snob, soon became the great anatomist and equally great contemner of snobbery.”

On Vasily Grossman and an act of kindness he recounts in a story: “Only a certain kind of writer can bring such truth home to his readers through the vividly persuasive examples enacted by his characters—only a great writer, which is what Vasily Grossman was.”

On Joseph Roth and his great novel The Radetzky March: “No better introduction, for the student of literature or of history, is available for  an understanding of the Austro-Habsburg Empire than this splendid novel, written by a small Galician Jew, who came of age in its shadow, grieved over its demise, and owes to it his permanent place in the august, millennia-long enterprise known with a capital L as Literature.”  

Epstein speculates that one of the reasons the essay remains on life supports as a form is the ubiquity of what he politely calls “partisan political interests.” We might more precisely call the discourse du jour self-righteous and usually pissed-off demagoguery. The Manichaean impulse is not favorable to a literature of charm, wit, gentle irony and nuance. Epstein writes in the introduction:

“In so heatedly political an atmosphere as ours, one cannot avoid engaging with politics, at least not entirely. Still, as a man without a theory of government, or strong opinions on foreign policy, or much in the way of knowledge about economics, I continue to prefer to believe that I am only political enough to protect myself from the politics of others.”

A funny, apolitical essayist with a pleasing prose style, a weakness for the Master, Henry James, and a well-earned reputation for saying precisely what he thinks is unlikely to stir the masses in 2021, but as Epstein writes in one of his finest essays, “The Bookish Life” (2018):

     

“Reading may not be the same as conversation, but reading the right books, the best books, puts us in the company of men and women more intelligent than ourselves. Only by keeping company with those smarter than ourselves, in books or in persons, do we have a chance of becoming a bit smarter.”

'A Wodge of Once-Treasured Values'

One of the reasons we read is to learn new words and new uses for old ones. The process that started when I was four years old – deciphering marks on a page – will never be completed because deciphering is the simplest and least rewarding part of reading. Think of English as a vast collective undertaking, infinitely supple and forever mutating, and one into which we are born, effortlessly. It’s a gift. I remember the title of a paperback popular when I was a kid: 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, originally published in 1942. It’s still in print and has sold millions but that’s not what I’m talking about. The book’s premise is utilitarian, almost mercenary. The co-author, with Norman Lewis, was Wilfred Funk, heir to the dictionary dynasty. The book’s opening sentence suggests its premise: “Your boss has a bigger vocabulary than you have” -- a laughably false assertion. 

I’m thinking of something less marketable and more fulfilling. Take wodge, not a typo for wedge. I came across it in an essay by L.E. Sissman, “I’ll Never Go There Anymore” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975):

“[Y]ou will find a wodge of once-treasured values and illusions filling the trash barrel in the back of my car on the way to the dump. In their place I hope you will also find one new-minted curmudgeon, older, sadder, slightly wiser, and with, on the whole, a hell of a lot better idea of what to do with the rest of his life than he ever had before.”

The sad epilogue is that Sisson died the year after Innocent Bystander was published, killed by the Hodgkin’s disease first diagnosed in 1965. From the context, wodge is probably still cryptic. The OED labels it “British colloquial” and gives this definition: “a bulky mass; a chunk or lump; a wad of paper, banknotes, etc. Hence also: a huge amount, a lot.” Among the citations is one from a letter written by Ezra Pound and, from 2008, a usage in the Bath Chronicle: “The National Archive . . . has released a mighty wodge of documents chronicling sightings of so-called UFOs over the UK.”

Sissman’s theme is how aging empowers one to suffer fools less gladly: “If age is enfeebling (and it is), it’s also liberating in a curiously parallel way. Age frees you to contemn, to cut, to ignore, precisely because it deprives you of tolerance, stamina, bonhomie. At forty-five [!], one is no longer constrained to stand for hours at a party in the company of a notorious gasbag.”

And that includes gasbags with a pinched and endlessly recycled fund of words. Give me a wodge of words.

'The Early Stages of a Bad Sunburn'

“Fire is savage, and so, even after all these centuries, are we, at heart. Our civilisation is but as the aforesaid crust that encloses the old planetary flames. To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature. Nature is still ‘red in tooth and claw,’ though she has begun to make fine flourishes with tooth-brush and nail-scissors.”

The lead story on page one of the March 18, 1981 edition of The Bellevue Gazette is headlined in boldface “Inside an inferno,” with a pull-quote beneath it: “The sensation resembles the early stages of a bad sunburn.” The byline is mine and here is my lede: “Entering a house trailer on fire is like walking into a flaming Molotov cocktail.” No, it’s not. That’s a lousy metaphor and I was probably reaching after cheap drama. I was twenty-eight and had been working for two months as the city reporter for my first daily newspaper. Bellevue is in north central Ohio, about seventy miles west of Cleveland.

The Bellevue and Clyde firefighters had invited me to take part in a training exercise. In a field near Clyde (the boyhood home of Sherwood Anderson and the model for his Winesburg), they set fire to five abandoned house trailers and practiced firefighting techniques. I suited up and entered one of the burning trailers: “I donned fire gear: heavy jacket, gloves, mask, visored helmet and air tank. You feel like a beached scuba diver. The gear is outsized and bulky, and to compensate you develop a swaggering sort of Popeye walk.”

Like most children I had been a budding pyromaniac, burning model airplanes, yellow jackets’ hives and autumn leaves. Walking into a burning trailer was a boyhood dream come true: “There is no air. The atmosphere one is accustomed to breathing has been replaced with searing, pressurized smoke. To breathe without a mask is suicide. When ignited, the plastics which line our environment turned into volatile gas. In minutes, a home is turned into a gas chamber.”

I entered the trailer with a firefighter named Ken Rospert. At one point in the story, for no good reason I can think of, I switched from past tense to present: “Rospert set off a flare and tossed it on a mattress lying on the floor. Vision is already obscured with mask fog. The fire smolders and Rospert ignites another flare.” The feature story doesn’t much embarrass me except for that muddled inconsistency and the inaccurate lede. I remember being frightened for the first time at this point in the story:

“The heat grows in intensity. My ears tingle, even beneath the padded ear flaps in the helmet. The sensation resembles the early stages of a bad sunburn.”

I tasted smoke and started to gag. The mask wasn’t properly fitted to my face. My forehead felt as though it were burning, and a wave of flame rolled  along the ceiling. “The fire caught all at once, exploding like a liquid bomb. We both drop to the floor. [Again, note the arbitrary shifting of tense.]” I like this: “The only instinct is foreward [sic] motion – and deep, agitated breathing.” Another firefighter, a big guy I remember well, Denny Hay, pulled me out of the trailer. I was coughing and sputtering and when I turned around, I could see the trailer was, as they say, “fully engulfed.” That’s when three real firefighters entered the trailer, pulling a hose.

Then I went back to the office, wrote my story and processed the photos. The feature was published in the next day’s edition and won a prize in the UPI newspaper contest for Ohio.          

The quoted passage at the top is from one of my favorite Max Beerbohm essays, “The Fire” (Yet Again, 1909). At its best, Beerbohm’s prose is poetry without being falsely “poetic” – concise, nuanced, ironic, precise. Consider these lines from the second paragraph, in which Beerbohm wonders at how wonderous fire must have seemed when we first saw it as children:

 

“There are so many queer things in the world that we have no time to go on wondering at the queerness of the things we see habitually. It is not that these things are in themselves less queer than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been dimmed. We are lucky when by some chance we see again, for a fleeting moment, this thing or that as we saw it when it first came within our ken. We are in the habit of saying that 'first impressions are best,' and that we must approach every question 'with an open mind'; but we shirk the logical conclusion that we were wiser in our infancy than we are now.”

Beerbohm was born on this date, Aug. 24, in 1872.

'An August Might Be Mysterious'

“Summer attains its greatest dignity & power in August.”

I’m not sure I buy that, at least the dignity part. In Houston, August is the least congenial month. It fights you. You walk ten paces to your car and you’re sweating. Our lowest high this month has been 91°F.; the highest, 99°F. Left unspoken but on everyone’s mind is the looming threat of a hurricane. Three years ago on Aug. 26, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. My car flooded and we were without power for four days. A former colleague of my wife’s, her husband, teenage daughter and four cats moved into our second floor and lived with us for three and a half months. Their house was totaled.

It looks as though we’ve dodged Marco but Laura remains a worry. Our most plain-spoken and reliable weatherman, Eric Berger, wrote on Saturday about Laura: “[T]he models this afternoon are leaning ever-so-slightly toward Louisiana over Texas, but we’ve seen plenty of flip-flops so our confidence is quite low. If Laura were to come to Texas, we probably would begin to see its effects by Wednesday night or Thursday.”

August in childhood meant a growing sadness and anxiety you tried not to think about – the counterpart to tropical storms and hurricanes. School would resume two days after Labor Day. I liked many things about returning to the classroom but I liked summer more. The former meant regimentation and putting up with the dumb kids; the latter, freedom – to read, collect butterflies, swim, ride your bike, sleep as late as you wanted. The sentence quoted at the top was written by the painter Charles Burchfield in his journal on this date, Aug. 23, in 1926. He goes on:

“In this dignity & power exist simultaneously a sinister quality, and a deeply mystical one. On one hand in point of time, is the luxuriant beauty of full-growing things, on the other, the lucid romanticism of Autumn. An August might be mysterious, and has something terrifying about it – the black night following the hot misty white day, is broken by nervous flashes of heat lightning, dancing in the dark northern sky. Trees become huge black abstract masses.”

Look on the same page at Burchfield’s watercolor titled Stormy Sky in Late August. It suggests what we might face later this week.

'They Are Running as the Shameful Years Have Run'

Though I haven’t visited in more than five months, I’m told my office on campus remains conspicuously stark, as I left it. My decor of choice is Moderne Monastic. I don’t like clutter in my life or my prose. I have a desk, two chairs and a file cabinet. The only thing hanging on the walls is a cork bulletin board on which I have pinned photos of my sons and Louis Armstrong. My monochromatic desk – gray – holds two objects – the telephone and a Saint Barbara candle, which I have never lit. The latter is a gift from my former boss. She gave it to me in 2008, shortly before we made a misguided detour to Seattle, and returned it to me in 2011, when I came back to Houston and my old job.

   

Saint Barbara is the patron saint of tunnelers, miners, armorers, artillerymen, military engineers, gunsmiths and others who work with explosives. She is invoked against thunder and lightning and accidents involving gunpowder. On campus today, one can’t be too careful. Every sane person acknowledges a few superstitions – call them acts of faith -- albeit secretly. I had a cousin named Barbara who was born with Downs syndrome and died very young.

The lives of the saints always make interesting reading. Barbara was a third-century martyr, probably from Lebanon. Her feast day is December 4, observed as the date her father, Dioscorus, beheaded her. She is said to have died during the reign of the Roman Emperor Maximianus (or Maximian), perhaps in 267. I think of her again because I happened on a poem by G.K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of Saint Barbara.” It takes place in 1914, during the first Battle of the Marne. At the start of the poem, the Germans are advancing on Paris and their victory seems almost certain. A Breton gunner invokes the saint:

“Be at the bursting doors of doom, and in the dark deliver us,

Who loosen the last window on the sun of sudden death.”

And then the Allied guns drive back the Germans:

“The touch and the tornado; all our guns give tongue together,

St. Barbara for the gunnery and God defend the right –

They are stopped and gapped and battered as we blast away the weather,

Building window upon window to our lady of the light;

For the light is come on Liberty, her foes are falling, falling,

They are reeling, they are running as the shameful years have run.”

'But How Those Walls Moved'

I’ve intended for a long time to recommend Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, edited and translated by Madeline G. Levine in 1977, but lazily never got around to it. We’re now in the midst of an anniversary of sorts: the Polish underground resistance started the uprising on Aug. 1, and it ended on Oct. 2, 1944. Some sixteen thousand members of the Polish resistance were killed in the fighting, and between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly in mass executions.

Białoszewski (1922-83) was a Warsaw-born poet who studied Polish literature in an underground school during Nazi occupation. He was not a fighter but was shipped to a German work camp after the uprising and escaped a month later, returning to Warsaw. Like Zbigniew Herbert, Białoszewski published his first book of poems in 1956. His memoir was published in 1970. Its prose is anything but elegant. Białoszewski’s style is staccato and fragmented. He records details, not drama. He’s not slumming, however. His aim is not avant-garde incoherence. His memoir reads like a diary, the writing of which is forever being interrupted. He is interested in recording immediate experience, with little effort to revise, unify and smooth out the messiness. Here he describes the impact of a German bombing raid. The ellipses are Białoszewski’s:

“But how those walls moved . . . once, I’m watching them – and it seems they’re moving a meter back and forth. . . . and back . . . and forth . . . are we breaking into pieces? . . . No-o . . . they’re swinging . . . a little less, less and less, and they settle down . . . as they were before. I rubbed my eyes in amazement.”

The jagged, jerky effect of the prose recalls Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s. Patience is required. To fill in the bigger picture, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. In it, Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation, but even in the context of such cold calculation, Poland stands out:

“[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.”

Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between Sept. 1 and Oct. 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues:

“Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.”

In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”

'To Live on Understatement'

A reader more interested in electoral politics than I complains about the sheer noise level of contemporary life. People have repudiated the gift of modulation. Perhaps they have forgotten that when someone starts shouting the rest of us stop listening. To holler is to say, “I’m more interested in emoting than communicating anything of substance or interest.” Speak softly, rationally, clearly. That’s advice we give to toddlers. Even if your idea is stupid or otherwise repellent, at least give me the opportunity to understand it and reach my own conclusions. Make it more difficult for me to dismiss you as just another asshole. I’ve been rereading the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle observes:     

“The sincere man will diverge from the truth, if at all, in the direction of understatement rather than exaggeration; since this appears in better taste, as all excess is offensive.”

I understand this sounds quaint to modern ears. Perhaps it is, at least in part, a matter of temperament, what Michael Oakeshott calls a “disposition.” In his Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014) Oakeshott writes:

“The Chinese concealment of feeling and avoidance of excessive expression. Understatement. It is their social sense; it belongs to a truly social life.”

This dates from 1944, two decades before Mao's Cultural Revolution. A subsequent series of notebook observations is enlightening:

“The excesses of the French Revolution killed in some all enthusiasm for liberty.

“To be the one sober man in the party, not because of a love of sobriety but because everyone else is drunk.

“To live on understatement because one’s companion lives on superlatives.”

'Not a Good Bid at All'

“It was as if a lifetime of restraint were only the rind of a wicked impatience.”

Dr. Cahn is ninety-one. His wife, hospitalized with cancer, is eighty. Their son brings his father for a visit, perhaps the last. The old man was on the hospital’s staff for half a century and remembers none of it. The narrator of Richard Stern’s short (four-and-a-half-page) story, “Dr. Cahn’s Visit” (Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories, 2005), tells us “his mind had slipped its moorings years ago.” The sentence quoted at the top suggests how “the most gentlemanly of men” can turn into an unmannerly tyrant. The story is heartbreaking and occasionally amusing. The doctor is a dedicated bridge player who scrambles his words: “‘I need some clubs’ might mean ‘I’m hungry.’” The old lady, though younger, is dying. She refuses further chemotherapy:

“An unspoken decision had been made after a five-hour barium treatment which usurped the last of her strength. . . It had launched her last moments of eloquence, a frightening jeremiad about life dark beyond belief, nothing left, nothing right. It was the last complaint of an old champion of complaint, and after it, she’d made up her mind to go.”

The doctor has a lucid moment in the hospital room: “The old man’s pounding heart must have driven blood through the clogged vessels. There was no talk of trumps.” Then dementia lowers its curtain and memory dissolves. The story is as vivid a literary depiction of Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia as I know. At the story’s end, when the son asks Dr. Cahn if he is happy to have seen his wife, the old man replies: “Of course I’m happy. But it’s not a good day. It’s a very poor day. Not a good bid at all.”

We used to call it senility and kept it in the family. Now “Alzheimer’s” is the punch line to a thousand jokes. That suggests how fearful we are. Every song title and old friend’s face forgotten stabs us with fear. On this date, August 19, in 1985, Anthony Hecht writes in a letter to the poet J.D. McClatchy:

“At my age [sixty-three] my greatest fear seems not to be death itself, nor physical enfeeblement, but mental deterioration . . . But however much I try to console myself with the assertion that this anxiety is merely a hang-up of my own, every time I forget a name, or grope helplessly for a word that refuses to come, I think of Alzheimer’s disease, and imagine that I will shortly be disabled as a teacher, and will slip quickly into an ungainly dotage, a burden to everyone and to Helen [Hecht’s wife] especially.”  

For years we console ourselves with the certainty that we are still young, still healthy, still safe. It seems that all of us are immune until we no longer are. Hecht continues:

“The consequence of this fear  is that every time I write anything that indicates complexity as well as clarity of thought I rejoice (briefly) at what I take to be an index that my mind has not yet rotted away completely.”

[See The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, ed. Jonathan F.S. Post, 2013.]

'Beautiful Prose and Interesting Books'

A reader, a lifelong inhabitant of Manhattan, describes himself as “kind of provincial in a humorous way.” Coming from a man who appreciates Proust and Santayana, the admission is worth savoring. We’ve never met. He impresses me as a guy who takes books more seriously than many readers, certainly more than most academics and critics. When I offered him duplicate copies of volumes by Howard Nemerov and Helen Pinkerton, he replied, “I don't read much poetry, never could grasp it, frankly. I could never grasp philosophy, either.” I’m skeptical but Mark knows his mind. He adds, “Now on the other hand if copies of [Pinkerton’s] Crimson Confederates or Melville’s Confidence Men ever come your way, I would take them off your hands in a NY minute.” We’ve corresponded for several years but I knew little about him until Sunday. Mostly we wrote (I almost said “talked”) about books. He writes:

“Never had a career just kind of drifted through life. Always been poor, just never wanted money or things it could buy. Not a disciplined mind just a wandering imagination. I guess it would be easy to sum me up as a day dreamer. Books, bicycles and the dogs that I share my life and love with are the sum total of my possessions.”

In his essay “Ralph Eugene Meatyard” (The Geography of Imagination, 1981), Guy Davenport includes an anecdote about his friend, the Lexington, Ky. optometrist-turned-photographer:

“Gene’s extraordinary difference from any type sometimes puzzled people when they first met him. One evening the Montaigne scholar Marcel Gutwirth was in town, and he and Gene and I had a marvelous evening of talk while watching a new litter of kittens spring around the living room. When I walked Professor Gutwirth back to his hotel afterwards, he asked who this Monsieur Meatyard might be.

“’Oh, Gene’s wonderful,’ I said. He knows more about modern literature than anyone at the university, but he’s never read the Odyssey.’

“’But, ah!’ Marcel Gutwirth said. “What a reading the Odyssey will get when he get around to it.’”

I have no idea whether Mark has read Homer. If he does get around to the versions by Fitzgerald, Fagles, Lombardo or Logue – or maybe the Greek -- I look forward to hearing about it. Mark writes:

“Short stories for the most part are entertaining but don’t have much appeal to me. Funny that because Jews are story tellers. I enjoy Shalom Aleichem and Isaac Babel, Chekhov, Gogol and Kipling but it’s through novels that I learn the most. History, essays, letters, biography and memoirs, that kind of thing round out my palate. Beautiful prose and interesting books. It was through your blog that I discovered [Rose Macaulay’s] The Pleasure Of Ruins.”

'If You Ask Me the Cause of All This Modern Unrest'

Everyone’s a diagnostician. Everyone comes equipped with a pithy theory. Listen:

“It’s the result of Board School Education—”

“It’s the popular Press—"

“It’s the selfishness of the Working Classes—”

Or, the selfishness of the Wealthy Classes. The Elites. The Kids Today. All of those are popular. Take your pick.   

“It’s the Cinema—"

“It's the Jews—”

That one has come surging back of late. An oldie but a goodie.

“Paid Agitators!—” [a variation on “Outside Agitators,” once an explanation for the Civil Rights Movement]

“The decay of Faith—”

'The disintegration of Family Life—'

“’I put it down,’ I said, ‘to Sun-Spots. If you want to know,’ I went inexorably on, ‘if you ask me the cause of all this modern Unrest—’”

The quoted material is, in toto, a brief entry, “At the Club,” in Logan Pearsall Smith’s More Trivia (1921). Even a century ago there were things to complain about and solve with easily digested explanations. Smith (1865-1946) is best-known for writing: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Wise words. He also wrote: “What’s more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can’t hear what they say?” Minor writers are a major blessing.

[Smith’s four trivial collections are published in one volume, All Trivia (1933).]

'I See Flaws in Masterpieces'

Several nights ago I reread the title story in William Maxwell’s Over By the River (1977), a loose, largely plotless account of a young couple living in Manhattan with their two daughters. One of the minor pleasures of good fiction is the incidental detail, included by the writer not to make an editorial point or even to reveal character but simply as an acknowledgement of life’s bountiful randomness. John Cheever does this often, as does Tolstoy. Sometimes all I remember of a story after many years is one of these precious, insignificant details.

Early in the story, a police officer is posted at the corner of East End Avenue and Gracie Square. He keeps an eye on a junkie who seems to be casing a drug store. It’s between three and four in the morning. People are already walking their dogs in Carl Schurz Park. “Amazing,” the cop thinks. “Dreamlike.” The junkie disappears, then briefly reappears to steal a bicycle from an apartment building. We learn from the narrator he has done time in Rikers Island, Sing Sing, Auburn and Dannemora. He leaves with the bike, gone forever from imagination.

The cop watches a woman in a long red coat picking through a trash basket. He has seen her before: “She was harmless.” Here is the detail supplied by Maxwell that touched me: “When she found something useful or valuable, she stuffed it in her dirty canvas bag, the richer by a pair of sandals with a broken strap or a perfectly clean copy of Sartor Resartus.” Why Carlyle? I have no idea. The choice of title is amusing, unlikely and somehow appropriate, and I can’t tell you why. Later, while walking the family dog, the husband of the young couple finds the woman, apparently dead, lying on a stoop along East Avenue: “The red coat did not stir. Then he saw the canvas bag crammed with the fruit of her night’s scavenging, and backed down the steps.” Like the bicycle thief, the dead woman disappears.

Maxwell reliably delivers what he once called “the breath of life.” For much of his long life, besides being the fiction editor for The New Yorker, he was an industrious writer and reader. He is not a “writer’s writer” but a reader’s writer. The novel he devoted the most time to, The Chateau (1961), is a disappointment, but at least two of them are masterpieces – Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). In 1997, Maxwell published an essay, “Nearing Ninety,” in the New York Times Magazine:

“Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the 'Autobiographies' of William Butler Yeats. As it is, I read a great deal of the time. I am harder to please, though. I see flaws in masterpieces. Conrad indulging in rhetoric when he would do better to get on with it. I would read all day long and well into the night if there were no other claims on my time. Appointments with doctors, with the dentist. The monthly bank statement. Income tax returns. And because I don't want to turn into a monster, people.”

Maxwell was born on this date, Aug. 16, in 1908 and died on July 31, 2000.

'Let Us Seek Them There in the Shadows'

I bought my ticket and was prepared to fly to Cleveland for my fiftieth high-school reunion in September until the pandemic scuttled those plans. The committee of former classmates who organized the event maintain an updated list of those who planned to attend, and I looked forward to seeing many of them for the first time in half a century. That has been postponed for at least another year.

This week, the committee sent out another list --  “classmates whom we have unfortunately lost over the years.” At first I found the gesture morbid. But after reading the spread sheet of eighty-one names and the years of death, I think it was a thoughtful idea. It was a big class and most died in the last decade. I recognize fourteen names. I was close, or as close as an awkwardly backward adolescent can be, to several of them.

Ron Hegedus lived a few blocks away from me. We often walked home together. He was even goofier than me.

Dave Herene sat next to me in creative writing. He was the first person I knew who had a cornea transplant.  

Mario Lombardo – his was the first Italian family to move into our neighborhood. He always wore a clean white t-shirt to school. I remember talking to him at the graduation ceremony.

Linda Phillips – we were in a play together in grade school. Something about Switzerland, and I was a cheesemaker. One of many crushes.

Abigail Sheldon – smart and pretty. Her father, Linn Sheldon, was Barnaby, host of a television show in Cleveland for kids. He played Popeye cartoons. I grew up watching him.

Only one name on the list shocked me: Norm Kuhar. I knew him from kindergarten on, but he was like wallpaper -- always there but seldom noticed. In a neighborhood of dark-haired people, his hair was emphatically blond. His year of death: 1971, the year after we graduated.  What happened? Dope? Car crash? Vietnam? It’s Norm who makes me think of Donald Justice’s “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” (The Summer Anniversaries, 1960):

“We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,

Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;

If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,

Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands

In games whose very names we have forgotten.

Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.”

'The Situation Cries for Bathos, and Gets It'

I come to The Sugar-Cane: A Poem in Four Books (1764) by way of Msgr. Ronald Knox’s “A Neglected Poet (James Grainger),” collected in Literary Distractions (1958). No, I haven’t read the whole thing. I’m not convinced anyone could.

Grainger (1721-1766) was a Scottish physician who published a treatise in Latin on venereal disease, Accedunt Monita Syphilitica, in 1757. Two years later he settled on St. Kitts in the West Indies where he remained for the rest of his life. There he observed the cultivation, harvesting and processing of sugar cane. To dedicate a book-length poem to such a subject requires rare and probably pathological dedication. I’m reminded of the five-part series of articles E.J. Kahn devoted to corn, potatoes, wheat, rice and soybeans in The New Yorker. Interminable, unreadable, a virtual parody of the magazine’s self-indulgent manner by the nineteen-eighties. Grainger achieves an earnest, kitschy grandeur in dutifully Miltonic blank verse:

“Mosquitoes, sand-flies seek the sheltered roof,

And with fell rage the stranger-guest assail

Nor spare the sportive child; from their retreats

Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad.”

  

Knox mock-praises Grainger’s bathetic achievement: “[Bathos] demands a perfect craftsmanship in verse, no false rhymes, no missing caesuras, that bad taste, bad sentiment, bad imagination may find its just and inevitable expression. Bad verse you may find anywhere; bad poetry is of its essence a faux ménage (marriage of incompatibles)—verbal felicity married to mental imbecility.”

Bathos is tricky. It can be used for comic or raffish effect. Mark Twain deploys it winningly, as do Ring Lardner and A.J. Liebling. Here is the OED definition: “ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech.” If Grainger possessed a sense of humor, I’m unable to detect even trace elements. He is serious and methodical, like many lousy writers. That he took Virgil’s Georgics as his model merely sweetens the epical idiocy of The Sugar-Cane. Knox writes:

“[That] the subject of his choice is a process incurably pedestrian, the result of which can only be sugar or (at the best) rum: that while the Mantuan [Virgil] reaps corn Grainger hoes yams, while the Mantuan treads grapes Grainger must peel bananas; that local colour demands the superceding of the ash and the pine by the coconut; that machinery, which Grainger is far too conscientious to leave undescribed, does the greater part of the manufacture; that the human cries for labour involved is not that of jolly Apulian swains but that of negroes looted from the Gold Coast, whose presence has begun to need some explanation, even to the easy conscience of the eighteenth century. The situation cries for bathos, and gets it.”

Knox is among the wittiest of writers, a superb prose stylist. As his friend and biographer Evelyn Waugh once wrote to him: “Every word you have written and spoken has been pure light to me.”

'The Second-Hand Bookshop is Somehow Inessential'

Some dreams are best quashed. In hindsight they appear hopelessly misbegotten. In 1973 I was working for a restaurant in Bowling Green, Ohio, across the street from the state university campus. I was a cook and a BGSU dropout, and had invested a little money in the business (which still exists after almost half a century, run by one of the original owners). The wait staff included a husband-and-wife team, Phil and Robin Smith. Phil was a poet from New York City, and owned one of the largest collections of poetry volumes I had ever seen.

In late-night, dope-fueled “rap sessions” (yesterday’s defunct clichés come back so easily), we resolved to open a bookstore. We both had a little money. We even came up with a name for our dream shop – Omega Books, later abbreviated to O Books! We reviewed our cash reserves, visited available locations, smoked some more dope and dropped the idea. Neither of us possessed the least business sense. In fact, the idea was so ridiculous it arouses no romantic sense of nostalgia. For once, I acted commonsensically.

   

I’ve never been a book collector, merely a reader who likes hunting for books and acquiring the ones he finds most essential. Over the years I bought a few books strictly as investments – Thomas Wolfe, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac – knowing I could sell them quickly and make a tidy profit or trade them for books I actually wanted. A collector, in my understanding, buys books as investments or trophies. He may not even be much of a reader.

Almost half a century after the fact, the English writer Alexander Larman confirms the wisdom of dropping our bookstore idea. His assessment is realistically grim. In “The Demise of the Second-Hand Bookshop” he catalogs the “high rents, a lack of demand and a sense that, in 2020, the second-hand bookshop is somehow inessential,” and adds:

“Decades, even centuries, of history and tradition are disappearing because of market forces, and the pandemic that we are all suffering through has sped matters up. So, although I would offer two hearty cheers for the Oxfam bookshops, please try and visit your local book dealer, if you’re still lucky enough to have one. Otherwise, this most eccentric and likeable of trades shows every sign of being annihilated forever, save for the most rarefied of dealers, and this would be a great pity, especially if it were to take place more or less through carelessness, rather than design.”

Next, I will call John Dillman, owner of Kaboom Books here in Houston, and share a rather substantial wish list.

'The Sweetest Morsel of the Night'

I’m reading again some favorites among Keats’ letters, including this, written to his brothers George and Tom on Jan. 23-24, 1818. Keats had attended a private theatrical production – that is, nonprofessional – of George Colman’s five-act comedy John Bull, Or, The Englishman’s Fire-side (1803):

“The sweetest morsel of the night moreover was, that the musicians began pegging and fagging away—at an overture—never did you see faces more in earnest, three times did they play it over, dropping all kinds of corrections and still did not the curtain go up.”

Keats is no seraph. He has a healthy, mocking sense of humor. He makes fun of the musicians. I wasn’t sure about “pegging and fagging away.” The OED cites Keats’ use of pegging and defines his sense of peg as “to toil laboriously over a long period; to work or go at persistently.” Fag as an intransitive verb is virtually a synonym, defined as “to work hard (at something, esp. something tedious); to labour, toil.” We’ve all seen dutiful, under-gifted musicians, especially young ones, sawing away at their instruments. When Junior is pushed into performing by Mommy and Daddy, the result is simultaneously excruciating and laughable.

Keats is suffused with Shakespeare. At the start of the passage quoted above, he silently alludes to Falstaff in Henry IV, Part II: “Now comes in the sweetest morsel of the night, and we must hence, and leave it unpick’d.” Prince Hal is returning to court and has just departed. He wishes Falstaff a good night. When Falstaff next sees Hal, the prince will be king and will reject his old friend. Also, with dinner over, “sweetest morsel” implies the evening’s next pleasure, sex. Keats, of course, would have known all of this. The letter to his brothers also includes a sonnet, “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” It’s a middling poem by Keats’ standards but includes these lines: “. . . once more humbly assay / The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit. / Chief Poet!” He also wrote the sonnet in his facsimile edition of the First Folio.

Later that year, his brother George would sail to the United States and settle in Kentucky, where he remained for the rest of his life, and Tom would die of tuberculosis at age nineteen. The same disease would kill the poet three years later.