'The Excitement of a Holiday'

“Halloween afternoon; a small town; most of the store windows decorated with gravestones, witches, devils, and ghosts. Childish drawing. A little girl dressed as a rabbit being led across the street by her mother. A little boy in his mother’s skirts and shoes, his face smeared with her lipstick, leaning against a lamppost. The excitement of a holiday.” 

Halloween was the third of the Big Three holidays when I was a kid, judged by the intensity of our anticipation and greed. In order: Christmas, Birthday, Halloween, with St. Valentine’s Day a distant fourth (for the candy, not love). One year my parents went to a costume party. My mother rented a rabbit costume. My father wore his old Ike jacket, holstered .45 and fake beard, and went as Fidel Castro.

 

“After dark, children approaching lighted doors. A trick or treat. At ten or eleven a cold rain established itself firmly.”

 

We were home long before that. An old lady down the block dropped pennies in our sacks. A man two blocks away gave out small promotional loaves of Wonder Bread. No one worried about needles in candy bars or Seconal capsules handed out like jellybeans. One year, some older kid dropped a firecracker into a friend’s trick-or-treat bag, blowing out the bottom and spewing candy on the sidewalk.

 

“[The rain] fell on the quick and the dead and the unborn. What a profound pleasure I took in hearing it fall. How clearly I saw the complexity of the ground where it fell; dry leaves, curved leaves, hair moss and partridgeberry.”

 

The quoted passages are from a 1952 entry in The Journals of John Cheever (1991). In his story “Artemis, the Honest Well-Digger” (published in the January 1972 issue of Playboy), the title character writes in a letter to a woman in the Soviet Union:

 

“Tonight is Halloween. I don’t suppose you have that is Russia. It is the night when the dead are supposed to arise, although they don’t, of course, but children wander around the streets disguised as ghosts and skeletons and devils and you give them candy and pennies. Please come to my country and marry me.”

'He Becomes Part of Your Soul'

A longtime reader last week sent me a Kaboom Books gift certificate for my birthday and I spent it Saturday on Thomas North’s (1535-1604) translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Shakespeare used this translation from the Greek by way of the French, first published in 1580, as a source for some of his Roman plays (Coriolanus, for instance). I found the handsome two-volume boxed set published in 1941 by The Heritage Press. This is the version I read many years ago:

 

In 1983, Guy Davenport wrote the introduction to a North Point Press reissue of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, later collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). In that essay he writes: “It has been said of Montaigne, and can be said of Plutarch, that in reading him we read ourselves.”

 

That’s my lingering impression, based on a decades-old reading. It may say something about the nature of thoughtfully written biography. Humans are innately interested in other humans. Knowing them, we come to know ourselves in small ways, assuming we are attentive, reflective readers. Clearly, Plutarch made a lasting impression on Davenport. In the same essay he writes:

 

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”

 

Davenport likewise revised accepted literary history: “Plutarch invented the essay, and wrote seventy-eight of them; Montaigne invented its name in French and English.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defined essay as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” Which, in the cases of Plutarch, Montaigne, Johnson and Davenport is not derogatory.

 

John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Kentucky-born author of Blood Horses and Pulphead, was an admirer of Davenport and wrote about him in passing several times. In 2012, in an interview he gave to Hotel Metal Bridge, the literary magazine at the University of Pittsburgh, Sullivan marveled that some people presume they can write without first being “compulsive readers”:

 

“That said, how do you get to be a better reader? I asked Guy Davenport this question one time, because talking to him could really make a person despair; he just knew so much, he’d read so much in many languages, but not in a pedantic or scholastic way, in a really passionate way. He gave me what I thought was very solid advice, which was: first of all, start reading and don’t stop. The other thing is to follow your interest. He said there ought to be a phrase, ‘falling into interest,’ to go with falling in love.

 

“Follow your interest; follow the writers who energize you, not the ones who exert a sense of obligation on you. The books that do the one or the other will change, as time gone on. The landscape shifts. Don’t adhere to systems unless that feels good.”

Sullivan might have been talking about my generous reader and other followers of Anecdotal Evidence, Davenport’s bookish offspring, reading what stirs, sometimes unaccountably, their interest. Sullivan adds:

 

“If you follow your interest, you’ll be adding to the store of things, examples, that make up your ideas. Read Plutarch because a list you read said he was important, and what if you get asked about him at a party, he’ll wash off. Read Plutarch because you’ve fallen in interest with him—because you’ve followed his successors back to him or his influences forward, or because you need him now to understand better some other writer whose work you love, however it happens, maybe a book of his falls open to a page and you’re fixed—in those ways he becomes part of your soul.”

'Let Us Do Away With Elegiac Drivel!'

Call it coincidence, if you must. It’s certainly not a theme I was looking for. Formerly a guilty pleasure, Walter de la Mare now is a pleasure without qualification. I’ve shed my sophistication and surrendered to his voice. On Friday, in a borrowed library copy of Poems (1906), a title – “Autumn” -- caught my eye. I wasn’t expecting verse about the death of a child or, perhaps, childhood:

 

“There is wind where the rose was;

Cold rain where sweet grass was;

And clouds like sheep

Stream o'er the steep

Grey skies where the lark was.

 

“Nought gold where your hair was;

Nought warm where your hand was;

But phantom, forlorn,

Beneath the thorn,

Your ghost where your face was.

 

“Sad winds where your voice was;

Tears, tears where my heart was;

And ever with me,

Child, ever with me,

Silence where hope was.”

 

De la Mare is often pigeonholed as a writer of verse for children, and he was – but much more. Inevitably I was reminded of a former newspaper colleague and his wife. Their infant son died on Father’s Day more than thirty years ago. I’ve never attended so sad a ceremony. It moved me to reread Peter Dr Vries’ greatest novel, The Blood of the Lamb (1961).

 

On the same day I was reading de la Mare, I read X.J. Kennedy’s first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), yet again. I remembered “Little Elegy,” with the dedication “for a child who skipped rope”:

 

“Here lies resting, out of breath,

Out of turns, Elizabeth

Whose quicksilver toes not quite

Cleared the whirring edge of night.

 

“Earth whose circles round us skim

Till they catch the lightest limb,

Shelter now Elizabeth

And for her sake trip up Death.”

 

But I had forgotten “On a Child Who Lived One Minute”:

 

“Into a world where children shriek like suns

sundered from other suns on their arrival,

she stared, and saw the waiting shape of evil,

but could not take its meaning in at once,

so fresh her understanding and so fragile.

 

“Her first breath drew a fragrance from the air

and put it back. However hard her agile

heart danced, however full the surgeon’s satchel

of healing stuff, a blackness tiptoed in her

and snuffed the only candle of her castle.

 

“Oh, let us do away with elegiac

drivel! Who can restore a thing so brittle,

so new in any jingle? Still I marvel

that, making light of mountainloads of logic,

so much could stay a moment in so little. 

'Swift Is Playing a Double Game Here'

Lemuel Gulliver has settled happily in the Land of the Houyhnhnms after his encounter with the Yahoos, “brute[s] in human form” and one of Swift’s gifts to the language. The OED defines Yahoo in the modern sense as “a person lacking cultivation or sensibility, a philistine; a lout; a hooligan.” Gulliver tells us he has “settled my little economy to my own heart's content.” The Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, have given him a room of his own, “about six yards from the house,” like a stable. His material needs are met by his “master”: “I enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy.” What follows is a grand catalogue worthy of Robert Burton: 

“I had no occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping, to procure the favour of any great man, or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire: here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders, or followers, of party and faction; no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no pride, vanity, or affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing-masters.”

 

A reader might wonder, aren’t the Houyhnhnms the good guys, unlike the brutish Yahoos? Aren’t they rational? Isn’t their society well-ordered? Isn’t Gulliver happy among them? Don’t they practice eugenics for the betterment of their race? As Hugh Kenner reminds us in The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968): “[When Gulliver] finally sails away from Houyhnhnmland, Swift in a flight of imagination worthy of the proprietors of Buchenwald has him make the sails of his boat out of Yahoo skin: young and fresh Yahoo, because the old ones’ skins are too tough.” To rub it in, Kenner adds parenthetically, “(Swift is playing a double game here, as so often, but let it pass.)”

 

Swift said he wrote Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it.” It is a vexing book, one irreducible to simplistic “lessons.” For centuries it has been marketed to children, with varying degrees of Bowdlerization, as a rollicking tale of adventure with giants and talking animals. The figure to watch is not the Yahoo or Houyhnhnm but Gulliver, the Yahoo-like Houyhnhnm or Houyhnhnm-like Yahoo.

 

Swift published Gulliver’s Travels on this date, October 28, in 1726.

 

[See Guy Davenport’s drawing of Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms on the cover of the first edition of The Counterfeiters.]  

'In Mutual Benevolence and Intimacy'

Dr. Johnson announced a lifelong theme when, at age sixteen, he wrote “An Ode on Friendship,” which begins: “Friendship, peculiar gift of heav’n, / The noble mind’s delight and pride, / To men and angels only giv’n, / To all the lower world deny’d.” This suggests there’s nothing casual about friendship. It’s a privileged, dignified state: “When virtues kindred virtues meet.” We take friendship (and everything else) more casually: “You know, I like to be around the guy. He’s funny.” We think of it as fondness and compatibility short of romance, though one can certainly befriend a lover. The more you try to define and taxonomize degrees of friendship, the slipperier it becomes. 

Johnson’s first major work, “Life of Mr Richard Savage” (1744), is largely the chronicle of a friendship. In his Dictionary (1755), he formulates six definitions of friend, the first being “one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy: opposed to foe or enemy.” A quarter-century later, on October 27, 1750, dedicated a Rambler essay to the subject. This is thirteen years before he met Boswell and initiated the best-known, most documented friendship in history. As usual, Johnson is a realist:

 

“So many qualities are indeed requisite to the possibility of friendship, and so many accidents must concur to its rise and continuance, that the greatest part of mankind content themselves without it, and supply its place as they can, with interest and dependence [sic].”

 

That final, qualifying phrase I take to mean something like superficial commonality and necessity, respectively. In the first case, the attraction may be soccer or The Sopranos, but it seldom goes deeper. In the latter, one becomes dependent on the aid of another. Such a relationship is likely benevolent, rooted in compassion and a good heart, but it isn’t necessarily friendship. Because of geography, many of my friendships are remote, dependent on email, texts and the telephone. I’ve lived in five states and not in Ohio, my birthplace, since 1983. My closest friend in Houston and I share some “interests” in the Johnsonian sense, mostly kids and music. But he’s not a reader. He’s an enthusiastic surfer and fisherman. I’m neither. And yet we converse almost daily, we make each other laugh and we are reliable. Friendship is multiform and remains another baffling thing humans do. More realism from Johnson’s Rambler essay:

 

“He cannot properly be chosen for a friend, whose kindness is exhaled by his own warmth, or frozen by the first blast of slander; he cannot be a useful counsellor, who will hear no opinion but his own; he will not much invite confidence whose principal maxim is to suspect; nor can the candour and frankness of that man be much esteemed, who spreads his arms to humankind, and makes every man, without distinction, a denizen of his bosom.”

'And We Fly Away'

V.S. Pritchett begins his second volume of memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), like this: 

“This is the year of my seventieth birthday, a fact that bewilders me. I find it hard to believe. I understand now the look of affront I often saw in my father’s face after this age and that I see in the faces of my contemporaries. We are affronted because, whatever we may feel, time has turned us into curiosities in some secondhand shop. We are haunted by the suspicion that the prayers we did not know we were making have been only too blatantly answered.”

 

I came of age during the Great Youth Ascendency. To be young was to be righteous. Remember the old saw about not trusting anyone over 30? I had my own variation: I would never live to see 30, so you could trust me. Thank to genes, Quinapril, friends and blind luck, I’m still around. We took so much for granted, our rightness and immortality above all. Now my smug generation routinely embarrasses me. So many have never grown up. We say silly things not out of decrepitude but a desire to sound hip and – what? Young. Of course we’re affronted. At seventy I can honestly say with Joseph Epstein:

 

“That I shall arrive at seventy without ever having golfed is one of the facts of my biography to date of which I am most proud.”

 

Romanticizing age is no better than doing the same with youth. Let’s skip the self-serving sentimentality and deal with human beings, not demographics. As a kid I preferred the company of adults, the smart, funny ones, not the unctuous type who pretended to tolerate us. So many kids seemed, well, childish. Now most of the adults do. A favorite American idiom: When someone asks, “How ya doing?” we reply, “Can’t complain,” and sometimes add, “Nobody listens anyway.” I don’t have a single interesting complaint. I’m fortunate to have a good wife and three sons who seldom bore me, remain as healthy and strong as Brahma bulls, and have never asked for bail money. Suddenly, Psalms 90:10 no longer seems theoretical:

 

 “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

'Onomatopoeia Is a Fiction'

All of us subscribe to nonsense, especially when we’re young and it’s delivered by certified authorities. No one is sufficiently skeptical or sophisticated to be always immune to such blather. We’d like to think of maturing as a steady process of shedding such illusions, except that we have known too many old fools sitting alongside the young ones. 

In eighth grade our English teacher assured us that Shelley wrote the first line of “Ode to the West Wind” the way he did – “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being” – because all those initial w’s sounded like the titular breeze. We swallowed whole the self-evident reality of onomatopoeia. Jacques Barzun set me straight: “I do not believe a word of it. Onomatopoeia is a fiction.”

 

When his essay “Onoma-Onomato-Onomatwaddle” was published in the Autumn 1990 issue of The Kenyon Review, I hadn’t given much thought to onomatopoeia in years. It had always seemed more like a novelty than anything important or interesting about poetry and language in general. Often, as in Shelley’s case, it amounted to little more than gratuitous alliteration.

 

Barzun came to his conclusion when a Japanese friend told him the most beautiful word in English was cellardoor. “It was not beautiful to me and I wondered where its evocative power lay for the Japanese,” he writes. “Was it because they find l and r difficult to pronounce and the word thus acquires remoteness and enchantment?” Barzun learned his friend had never seen a cellardoor. He suspects “its charmless-ness to speakers of English lay simply in its meaning.” Barzun sensibly concludes: “The magic, color, music of the words said to be onomatopoetic in poetry is due primarily to their meaning.”  

 

Most of Barzun’s essay is devoted to French verse, but his argument remains the same. Because of its stronger, more numerous consonants, he speculates, the Germanic languages may have more opportunities to produce genuine onomatopoeias – “because the sounds of nature have an edge which the vowels that predominate in French cannot approximate.” He concludes: “But until further notice I shall believe that English can show only one true onomatopoeia, and that one not intended: it is the word adenoidal [OED: ‘having a monotonous and constricted nasal quality.’]”

 

Ten years ago on this date, October 24, 2012, Barzun died at age 104. He was among the sanest, most orderly minded of writers.

 

[Barzun’s article was excerpted from An Essay on French Verse: For Readers of English Poetry (1991) and collected in The Jacques Barzun Reader (2002).]

'To Honor Every Side of His Subject'

How rare for a critic to write as well or better than the writers he criticizes. Writing badly while presuming to criticize another is an act of self-cancellation. If what you choose to write is stupid, pretentious or tedious, how can we rely on you to judge the work of others? Good criticism is itself a form of literature, and thus open to criticism. Russell Fraser begins his essay “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets” like this: “Dr. Johnson is our greatest critic but often wrong, not least when he knows himself right.” That’s what’s known among newspaper reporters as a “good lede” – provocative, probably correct and yet arguable as to specifics. 

Fraser’s subject is Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), devoted to the life and work of fifty-two poets active in the century between Cowley and Gray. The collection is endlessly rereadable and I read it less for Johnson’s judgments – though they are often shrewd and sometimes outrageous, I’ve already made up my mind about most of these poets – than for the charm of Johnson’s prose, his zesty anecdotes and the reminder that lesser-known writers are still worthy of attention.

 

An English professor my sophomore year had us select one life and write about it. I chose Dryden because the same professor had introduced us to his work and I liked it. Here is the passage I concentrated on and still find extraordinary:

 

“Next to argument, his delight was in wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and excentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense.”

 

Read in isolation, its subject might be mistaken for a much later writer, perhaps Hölderlin or Rimbaud. In the same brief life, Johnson formulates a handy gauge for deciding which books work and which move us to put them aside without completing:

 

“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”

 

A good critic is a catalyst fostering a sort of chemical reaction between reader and writer. I still read Dryden fairly regularly, in part, thanks to Johnson. Fraser reminds us that the book’s principal attraction is Johnson, not his ostensible subjects. Fraser writes: “Most of all Johnson wrote to drive away demons.” And: “Like everyone else he has his hobbyhorses.” And here is Fraser on Johnson on Swift:

 

“This mingling of praise and blame lets us see how the style is the man, lucid and balanced, one phrase matching another so nicely as almost to cancel the other out. Johnson's is a style magnanimous with his wanting, like Shakespeare, like Henry James, to honor every side of his subject.”

 

[Last week I referred to an essay Fraser had written about his friend Edgar Bowers.]

'Nothing Is Waste That Makes a Memory'

The ragtime pianist-composer Eubie Blake claimed to have lived until he was one-hundred years old. Like his musical junior, Louis Armstrong, Blake was creative when it came to his date of birth. He maintained he was born in Baltimore on February 7, 1883. In fact, when Blake died on February 12, 1983, in Brooklyn, days after a celebration of his centenary, he was a mere ninety-six. But who would quibble with the composer of “I’m Just Wild About Harry”?

 

No one disputes Ned Rorem’s stats. He was born in Richmond, Indiana, on October 23, 1923, meaning he turns ninety-nine today, making him a centenarian-elect. There’s an odd convergence between Rorem and jazz. Six months before his birth, on April 5, 1923, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band entered the Gennett Records studio in Richmond and recorded “Chimes Blues,” which includes Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo. Other musicians who recorded at Gennett when Rorem was an infant and toddler include Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

 

I know Rorem best not as a composer but as a diarist – one of the best to practice and publish in that beguilingly egocentric form without form. Rorem writes in The Paris Diary & The New York Diary 1951-1961 (published separately, 1966 and 1967; one-volume edition, 1998):

 

“How many thousands have I spent on perfume and alcohol, cigarettes and Turkish baths, disappointing trips and third-class movies; how many months in silent bars or parks, expecting, in a chair with a book not reading, or waiting in line, waiting in line? Who will tell me it’s a loss when I know life must be for pleasure? The parks were balanced by museums, the baths by oceans, bars by composition, and the dreaming chair by books finished. Nothing is waste that makes a memory.”

 

[Go here to hear Blake performing one of his best-known compositions, “Memories of You,” followed by versions from Earl Hines and Charles Mingus.]

'We’ll Have to Do Some Ourselves'

“[T]here are never enough books of the kind one likes . . .” 

We’re driven by a sense of cultural obligation to read certain books: “I must have a go at the Waverley novels.” We might even feel compelled to go slumming: “Dashiell Hammett was a commie but . . .” Guilt, too, is an effective motivator: “Where’s my never-opened copy of Proust?” And don't forget plain old gut-bucket snobbery: “I really must tell the boys at the bowling alley about Sylvia Plath.”

 

In his 1975 Paris Review interview, Kingsley Amis is asked if having grown up as an only child had an impact on him becoming a writer.”[W]riting for me,” he replies, “is to a large extent self-entertainment, and the only child is driven to do that.” His answer seems commonsensical, even for those of us with siblings. The notion of the canon has been fashionably discredited but every serious reader carries around his own canon of essential books. Classics, yes, with the inevitable Shakespeare and Tolstoy, but don't leave out the idiosyncratic standards like Nabokov, Liebling, J.V. Cunningham and Guy Davenport. That vital core requires no critical defense. It can’t be challenged. It’s what remains when snobbery and even taste are left on the shelf. Those are the sorts of books Amis is talking about, and they would include his own Lucky Jim. He continues in the interview:     

 

“And as for reading, well of course I got a lot done, Again, totally heterogeneous material—what we would now call very bad literature: the boys’ comics of those days—which were, of course, compared with today’s comics, positively Flaubertian in their style and Dickensian in their character portrayal—all the way up through hardbound books of adventure stories and such, and taking in real writers like Dickens himself, Shakespeare and so on, in much the same sort of spirit. I think it’s very important to read widely and in a wide spectrum of merit and ambition on the part of the writer.”

 

Across a lifetime, reading is a continuum. True readers are motivated by a selfish quest for pleasure, which can mean many things and almost certainly will evolve with time. No one starts or continues reading because it’s an onerous waste of time. The linkage of reading and writing is intimate and obvious to some of us, including Amis:

 

“I read somewhere recently somebody saying, ‘When I want to read a book, I write one.’ I think that’s very good. It puts its finger on it, because there are never enough books of the kind one likes: one adds to the stock for one’s own entertainment.”

 

In a 1968 interview with Book World, Amis said: “You could probably isolate certain common qualities in the writers I like best—wit, energy, a way of saying something with style and economy. This is really why I started writing; I wrote Lucky Jim because I wished that I hadn’t finished reading all the books like it. I’d read all of Waugh and Powell and said, ‘Where’s more? We’ll have to do some ourselves.’”

 

Amis died on this date, October 22, in 1995 at age seventy-three.

 

[The transcripts of both interviews can be found in Conversations with Kingsley Amis (ed. Thomas DiPietro, University Press of Mississippi, 2009.)]

'In the Pure Style of Grave Intelligence'

The most important service some of us can perform, especially for young readers, is simply mentioning the names of books and writers we revere and then attesting to their worth. More readers have credited me with introducing them to the novels of William Maxwell than any other. A.J. Liebling probably comes in second and Guy Davenport a distant third. 

Most schools today are profoundly provincial places, unlikely to expose students even to well-known writers who have thus far earned the literary equivalent of nihil obstat. Nor do most teachers and parents read ambitiously. Public libraries have been deeply culling their collections, reducing the chances of discovery among the shelves. Such serendipity is the soul of a library, and how when young I happened on writers as various as Franz Kafka and John Updike.

 

In 1978, David Levin published “Yvor Winters at Stanford” in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Levin joined the English department in 1952, when Winters reigned as the intimidating éminence grise, and taught there for nineteen years. Levin arrived while finishing his doctoral thesis devoted to four American historians -- Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. At their first meeting, during a reception for new faculty members, Winters asked him, “Which one was the best?” Levin describes the ensuing conversation:

 

“I had thought very little about ranking them. They were all interesting, all valuable; what did I care about comparative judgments? I finally brought out my answer, the standard opinion: ‘I suppose Parkman was the best historian.’

 

“‘Parkman’s the worst,’ Winters replied, biting down on his pipe; ‘Motley’s the best.’ His eyes told me that he took some comic pleasure in expressing that unconventional judgment, but I knew, too, that he meant it.”

 

As a young instructor, Levin was shaken but not deterred from getting to know Winters, learning to gauge his literary judgments and ultimately respect him:

 

“Years later I saw in this first literary conversation an epitome of the most exemplary service that Winters' criticism and his personal conduct performed for me and many others. He not only provoked me to think seriously about value but repeatedly showed me the value in writers I had neglected or underestimated.”

 

Some bluntly broadcast evaluations are nothing but hot air and testosterone. Academia in my experience overflows with such behavior, most of it sheer flatulence. Levin says of Winters: “In the 15 years of our association [Winters died in January 1968], I never heard him praise a literary work in which I failed to find genuine excellence.”

 

Included in Poems in Memory of Yvor Winters on the Centenary of his Birth (edited and published by R.L. Barth, 2000), is a sonnet written by Levin, “To a Moral Navigator, Observed on His Way to Class,” written “For Yvor Winters”:

 

“Solemn as Queequeg, porting an old harpoon,

You march in sunshine, stepping forth to teach

Young navigators how to haul, to reach

The mystery of Melville, whale, typhoon.

You have not flung your quadrant at the moon,

Or thrown away your pipe, or scorned the beach,

Or, with some captains of demonic speech,

Followed dumb feeling to a blind lagoon.

 

“Yet reason must be brought to your defense.

You reach a faith too brave for dogmatists.

Unable to receive the Holy Ghost,

And knowing what your unbelief has cost,

You use dead reckoning, and meet white mists

In the pure style of grave intelligence.”

 

Levin likens Winters to Queequeg, the master harpooner, not mad Ahab. In “The Quadrant,” Chapter 118 of Moby-Dick, Ahab curses the navigational instrument and smashes it on the deck, vowing to navigate the Pequod with “the level ship's compass, and the level dead reckoning, by log and by line” -- typical self-destructive bravado. Instead, Winters shares with Queequeg “the pure style of grave intelligence.” And yes, Winters did bring a harpoon to class when teaching Moby-Dick.

[To Baceseras: Some writers have been banished from the curriculum. Others, for now, have been granted dispensation, which can be abruptly revoked.]  

'I Fit You Like a Glove'

“[D]eath is much more complicated than simply the last event of life. Death is actually interwoven into life at many levels. It has influenced what we are as a species. In many ways, we depend on death for our very existence. In fact, death has shaped most of the aspects of our life . . .” 

A preoccupation with death may signal a morbid narcissism – or its opposite. Some worship death, weaponizing it. A custodian I know told me about Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte -- a benign personification of death. When Spinoza concluded that a free man “thinks least of all of death,” he too placed death at the center of life. Try not thinking about death when you’re told to keep your happy thoughts focused only on life. Listen to Death speak in Anthony Hecht's “Death the Hypocrite”:

 

“You know me, friend, as Faustus, Baudelaire,

Boredom, Self-Hatred, and, still more, Self-Love.

Hypocrite lecteur, mon sembable, mon frere,

Acknowledge me. I fit you like a glove.”

 

The first section of Hecht’s Flight Among the Tombs (1996), “The Presumptions of Death,” consists of twenty-two monologues delivered by Death personified, accompanied by Leonard Baskin’s wood engravings. Death speaks as Punchinello, a carnival barker, a whore, a scholar and a Mexican revolutionary, among other roles. “Death the Film Director” closes with these lines:

 

“This film has a large cast,

A huge cast; countless, you might almost say;

And for them all, for everyone one of them,

I have designed, with supreme artfulness,

What could be called an inevitable plot.”

 

The final letter in Hecht's Selected Letters, dated August 10, 2004, is addressed to Eleanor Cook. He writes: “I have, I regret to say, some distressing news to impart. I have been diagnosed with cancer [. . .] and it has taken me and my wife completely by surprise. In fact, I had been taking notes for an essay I would like to write. . . . But I will have to put that aside for the present.”

 

Hecht died two months later, on October 20, at age eighty-one.

 

[The passage quoted at the top is from an entertaining and revelatory book, The Biology of Death: How Dying Shapes Cells, Organisms and Populations (Oxford University Press, 2021), by Gary C. Howard. The letter to Cook can be found in The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (ed. Jonathan F.S. Post, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.)]

'The Dean Had Too Much Satyr in His Vein'

 “Vain humankind! Fantastic race! / Thy various follies who can trace?”

Given his temperament, Jonathan Swift could never have run out of things to write about. If not England’s mistreatment of his native Ireland, he always had what Gibbon called “the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The couplet above -- think of it as Swift Lite -- is from his longest and one of his finest poems, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (written 1731-32, published 1739). The poem is preceded by a La Rochefoucauld Maxim in Swift’s translation:  

 

“In the Adversity of our best Friends, we find something that doth not displease us.”

 

A species within the genus Schadenfreude: “. . . when you sink, I seem the higher.” All of us can be petty, envious and nasty, whether broadcasting it or keeping it to ourselves. Some make a career of it. It comes out as gossip, backstabbing or in active revenge-fueled plotting. This sort of thing I try to keep to myself. I make a learned-the-hard-way distinction between internal fulmination and its external expression, though it doesn’t stop me from secretly envying those without such scruples.

 

Swift’s poem is a slippery thing, its tone and points of view forever shifting. Is he extolling himself at the expense of others in his faux-post mortem or is he indicted along with the rest of us? Parts of “Verses” are written in the third person, which gives him distance. The narrator, who is and is not Swift, works a zoom lens, enlarging and diminishing his focus. Swift is aware that excessive self-castigation can be as prideful as boasting of moral superiority. Remember what Boswell reports Dr. Johnson saying: “All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the reproach of falsehood.” Near the poem’s conclusion, see what the third person gives him the freedom to say:

 

“Perhaps I may allow, the Dean

Had too much Satyr in his Vein;

And seem’d determin’d not to starve it,

Because no Age could more deserve it.

Yet, Malice never was his Aim;

He lash’d the Vice but spar’d the Name.

No Individual could resent,

Where Thousands equally were meant.

His Satyr points at no Defect,

But what all Mortals may correct;

For he abhorr’d that senseless Tribe,

Who call it Humour when they jibe:

He spar’d a Hump or crooked Nose,

Whose Owners set not up for Beaux.

True genuine Dulness mov’d his Pity,

Unless it offer’d to be witty.

Those, who their Ignorance confess’d,

He ne’er offended with a Jest;

But laugh’d to hear an Idiot quote,

A Verse from Horace, learn’d by Rote.”

 

Swift died for real on this date, October 19, in 1745 at age seventy-seven. 

'Humbling His Pride By Trying to Write Well'

Out of the blue a reader asks for “the best poem ever written by Edgar Bowers.” He has never read Bowers but noted my love of his work. Yvor Winters, Bowers’ teacher at Stanford, insisted we read poems not poets, as few poets are on every occasion worth reading, though Bowers comes close. His Collected Poems (1997) brings together four earlier collections and twenty-four new poems and is 168 pages long. Asking another to select the “best” makes my reader sound dilettantish and lazy but I’m naïve enough to think Bowers may charm him into further exploring the work. 

Bowers’ early poems are written in the “plain style” practiced by such seventeenth-century English poets as Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville, and championed by Winters. They are terse and padding-free. Even so intelligent and shrewd a reader as the late Helen Pinkerton once confessed to me she still found the work in his first collection, The Form of Loss (1956), difficult. But she never stopped reading.

 

Some readers will find him off-puttingly cool and rational. They’ll hear no howls or barbaric yawps. Not that Bowers is emotionless. The passion is contained, modulated and held in its proper place by form. Try “Autumn Shade” from his second collection, The Astronomers (1965). A memory of his Army service in Europe during and after World War II shows up in the sixth stanza:

 

“Snow and then rain. The roads are wet. A car

Slips and strains in the mire, and I remember

Driving in France: weapons-carriers and jeeps;

Our clothes and bodies stiffened by mud; our minds

Diverted from fear. We labor. Overhead,

A plane, Berlin or Frankfurt, now New York.

The car pulls clear. My neighbor smiles. He is old.

Was this our wisdom, simply, in a chance,

In danger, to be mastered by a task,

Like groping round a chair, through a door, to bed?”

 

Bowers’ later work relaxed. He mastered blank verse and became nearly conversational. I don’t know about “best” but perhaps my favorite Bowers poem is the title poem in For Louis Pasteur (1990). More memories of war as well as teaching. I always find moving the final section, in which he names the heroes whose birthdays he observes every year:

 

“I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium

Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence

Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies,

Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight,

Teaching his daughter to use a microscope

And musing through a wonder—sacred passion,

Practice and metaphysic all the same.

And, each year, honor three births: Valéry,

Humbling his pride by trying to write well,

Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention

Repeatedly outside the reach of pride,

And him whose mark I witness as a trust.

Others he saves but could not save himself—

Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates—the spirit

Fastened by love upon the human cross.”

 

Perhaps I’m underestimating my reader. He may be ready for poetry unlike any being written today. See if you and he can find Russell Fraser’s memoir of Bowers, “His Little Book and All the Rest,” published in the January 2008 issue of The Yale Review. He recalls his early encounters with Bowers’ work: “When I read Bowers first, I missed the far-winding horns. Verbal music is not beyond him, only written in a minor key, but he was not the Romantic poet a young man’s ear is  tuned for.”

 

And this, tersely expressing the way some of us read: “All our criticism, if any good, comes partly from the viscera. Some sickle it over with a cast of dispassionate thought; not Edgar . . .”

'Write Little; Do It Well'

“I am a student of literature, not an anthropologist, and I have better ways of spending the few years remaining to me.” 

What can we conclude about the person who said this? He is a serious reader who has drawn conclusions about literature that are never casual or driven by fashion. Despite being an academic he is witty, not flippant, and has little interest in flattering writers and readers. He’s probably not teaching today. His species may be extinct. Hearing his voice is like listening to a wax-cylinder recording on a gramophone. We still listen to King Oliver, so why not read Yvor Winters?

 

Today, he is perhaps the least fashionable poet and critic of comparable stature in American writing. Winters published his essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” in the Autumn 1956 issue of The Hudson Review and collected it, revised and shortened, in The Function of Criticism (1957). Near its conclusion he writes: “[A]s most intelligent critics and even novelists are aware, the novel in our time is almost dead.” That’s Winters being Winters. Readers with long memories will detect an irony here. Frequent post-mortems have been conducted on the novel. A hefty anthology of such death certificates could be assembled. But within five years of Winters’ verdict, before and after, Nabokov published Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire, and also at work were Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Cheever, just to name the obvious American exceptions to Winters’ declaration.

 

In his poetry and prose, Winters is often at his best as an agent provocateur. He challenges the complacent assumptions of readers and critics. His “Problems” essay is complicated and addresses many issues I won’t mention, though the final paragraph may be more pertinent today than when it was first published:

 

“The most damnable fact about most novelists, I suppose, is their simple lack of intelligence: the fact that they seem to consider themselves professional writers and hence justified in being amateur intellectuals. They do not find it necessary to think like mature men and women or to study the history of thought; they do not find it necessary to master the art of prose.”

 

Like many others, I’ve stopped caring about contemporary fiction, with few exceptions. Whimsy, pretentiousness, aliteracy, didacticism and poverty of imagination have largely killed storytelling.  I could never have foreseen such a sad reality. When young, I was an omnivorous reader of the day’s novels and stories. Much of it hasn’t worn well but I have no regrets. Winters’ paragraph continues:

 

“And these remarks are equally true, so far as my experience goes, of those novelists who write primarily for profit, and who boast of being able to ‘tell a good story,’ and of those who are fiddling with outmoded experimental procedures in the interests of originality and who are sometimes praised in the quarterlies. In fact the history of the novel is littered with the remains of genius sacrificed to ignorance and haste.”

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900, and died in 1968 at age sixty-seven. In “To a Young Writer” he writes:

 

“Write little; do it well.

Your knowledge will be such,

At last, as to dispel

What moves you overmuch.’