'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.”