'The Memory of Little Snapshots'

The late Adam Zagajewski distinguishes two sorts of memory. “One is intelligent,” he writes, “educated, not only able but eager to synthesize; this is the memory that sets forth large outlines, rational theses, vivid colors.” 

If I understand Zagajewski correctly, this is the sort of memory I often distrust. It prizes generalities over particulars, whereas some of us revel in the precious details, random and otherwise. By “synthesize” I think he means deducing theories from multiple acts of remembrance. Its devotees include would-be intellectuals, many politicians, Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs. The poet then defines the other sort of memory, the “humbler sister”:

 

“[T]he memory of little snapshots, fleeting instants, a single-use camera producing atoms of recollection, which are not only unsuitable for enlargement and standardization, but even take pride in their absolutely idiomatic nature. And it is this memory—small, quick, acute—that refuses death, will not agree to alter completely its system for archiving recollections. And thanks to this, it retains more life, more freshness in its flashes. It keeps repeating: remember, remember, remember . . . and after each ‘remember’ another slide from its vast repository lights up.”

 

In other words, foxes. As my late friend David Myers wrote, “A good part of being a hedgehog involves feeling superior to foxes.” Zagajewski is writing in an essay about his friend and poetic mentor Zbigniew Herbert, “Beginning to Remember” (A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2004). Herbert’s poems are rooted in what Zagajewski calls “slides,” recollections of particulars. Here’s how the younger poet concludes his essay, which he addresses to Herbert:

 

“I remember, and I’ll try to remember well and carefully, since I know that beginning to remember coincides over time with beginning to forget.”

 

I’ve read Zagajewski’s essay collection before but what interested me most this time were his observations on memory. So, here he is on Herbert:

 

“The hard, very hard life and the radiant clarity of the poetry; the contrast was striking. But Herbert never would have written – as William Styron did, for example – a confessional book on his depression. This choice was both personal and part of the cultural tradition he endorsed. He took classicism to mean: Don’t complain. This is precisely the point of his brief poem ‘Why the Classics.’ In the depths of despair he wrote another lovely poem, ‘Old Masters,’ in which he marvels at the anonymous restraint of the Italian Gothic painters. No, he couldn’t write ‘American-style,’ he couldn’t acknowledge his ‘problems,’ share his personal cares with his readers.”

'Its Subject Is Human Existence Itself'

The first novel for grownups I remember reading, while slowly giving up on Doc Savage and Edgar Rice Burroughs, was Robinson Crusoe, a book I reread every few years. There was a time when Defoe’s novel, like Gulliver’s Travels and Moby-Dick, was marketed as an adventure story for children, in editions boiled down and sanitized for impressionable audiences. That a novel published more than three centuries ago can still please an adult reader and remain a cultural referent even among people who have never opened the book is testimony to Defoe’s gift and to the enduring quality of novels as a form – a narrative of some length, usually in prose, that follows the fortunes of its characters. 

Among the themes of Joseph Epstein’s new book, The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books, 2023), is the impossibility of defining the novel with precision (Would our forebears, inveterate readers of Bunyan and Dickens, recognize Pale Fire as a novel? At Swim-Two-Birds? Malone Dies?), at the same time acknowledging its enduring appeal to writers and readers. Early in the book Epstein writes:

 

“Critics speak of novels of ideas, novels of character, psychological novels, historical novels, adventure novels—the novel can be all these things, but above all it is the book of life. More than any other literary form, the novel is best able to accommodate the messiness of detail that life presents.”

 

That's the heart of Epstein's pitch. His book is inviting, not ranting or dryly academic. Old Epstein hands will encounter familiar themes. Clive James once defined Theory as “that capitalized catch-all term which is meant to cover all  the various ways of studying the arts so as to make the students feel as smart as the artist.” None of that here. Epstein, the Last Man of Letters, has written a bittersweet love letter and eulogy. There’s a humility at the heart of his advocacy. He acknowledges that the future of the novel, as always, is uncertain. In an age hypnotized by the small screen, with attention spans measured in nanoseconds, with political stridency replacing humble attentiveness to the text, how many have a taste or time for novellas let alone three-deckers? At least that's their excuse. On the other hand, some of us can track our lives and establish a chronology using the first reading of certain novels and novelists as landmarks – Defoe to Swift, Our Mutual Friend to The Idiot, Joyce to Nabokov.

 

Epstein has never been a spendthrift with language. He has always tempered conversational fluency with concision. The prose in his new book has grown more aphoristic, and thus quotable, as though he wishes to pack as much knowledge and wit into the smallest of spaces. This lends an urgency to the book, as though he were saying: “Look. We don’t have a lot of time. Read this carefully.” This, for instance: “Great literature is about the role of destiny and moral conflict. The therapeutic culture is about individual happiness.” And here, two paragraphs later:

 

“For the true novelist, self-esteem and so much else in the therapeutic realm is tosh. Life is more complex than the analyses and panaceas of the therapist or the dream of future happiness of his patients. Fate, the great trickster, offers no couch for the resolution of life’s problems. Morality is richer than any fifty-minute session, even twelve years of such sessions, can hope to comprehend. Surely Proust, in this single sentence, came closer to the truth of human existence than all of therapeutic culture: ‘We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey which no one else can make for us, and no one can spare us.’”

 

Proust’s name shows up often in The Novel, Who Needs It?, as do Epstein’s other “novelists I have reread with pleasure” – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, Joseph Roth, Max Beerbohm, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh, Marguerite Yourcenar, V.S. Naipaul. No surprises there. While reading a collection of Tolstoy’s short works, including The Kreutzer Sonata, he writes:

 

“Tolstoy was, in my view, the greatest of novelists, perhaps the greatest writer of all time and among all genres. Every character he created comes alive, every novel and story he wrote stirs one’s imagination, making one want to read on to learn how things will come out for the people he has created.”

 

Try that with JR, The Tunnel or Women and Men. There’s more to fiction than sterile, self-obsessed experimentation and slumming among the sub-literary genres. Epstein’s new book is compact – 126  pages, plus bibliography and index – and easily read in an evening. It reminds seasoned readers why we have always found sustenance, not merely escape or "message," in fiction, and might encourage young readers to sample our vast and welcoming inheritance. Epstein writes:

 

“The knowledge provided by the best novels is knowledge that cannot be enumerated nor subjected to strict testing. Wider, less confined, deeper, its subject is human existence itself, in all its dense variousness and often humbling confusion.”

In the book's final sentence Epstein addresses the rather raffish question posed by his title. The Novel, Who Needs It?: "[T]he answer is that we all do, including even people who wouldn't think of reading novels--we all need it, and in this, the great age of distraction we may just need it more than ever before." As a friend told me she is doing, it's time to read A Dance to the Music of Time at least one more time. And Dead Souls. And Memoirs  of Hadrian. And so on.

'A Lone Gladiator in the Arena'

“One of the most powerful influences upon my thought when I was young was James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. If Samuel Johnson had been born in our time, he would have had the genius drugged out of him by the various pharmaceutical enemies of boyhood; he might be finger-painting with Einstein and Mozart in a group home or reformatory.”

 

I’m not certain what Anthony Esolen means by “young” but in my case I discovered the world that is Dr. Johnson at age seventeen, thanks to a freshman survey course in English Lit. Yes, a Norton anthology. That's when I read Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” some of the periodical essays and Boswell, and that’s all it took – lifelong devotion. Around the same time I fell for Sterne.

 

I’m again reading Esolen’s Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery, 2017). The passage quoted above is from the section in the first chapter titled “Clear Your Mind of Cant” (see Boswell, May 15, 1783). Esolen continues:

 

“But in the eighteenth century his peculiar sensitivity and his many obsessions made him more human, not less; more apt to perceive the motives and the feelings of others, because he had been so accustomed to confronting the darkest and the worst of his own self. Johnson was like a lone gladiator in the arena, said Boswell, standing up against the beasts when they came lunging from their cages.”

 

In his 1787 biography, Sir John Hawkins’ reports Johnson’s last known words were spoken to his friend the Italian teacher Francesco Sastres. When Sastres entered the room, Johnson reached out from his bed and said, Iam Moriturus – “I who am about to die.” W. Jackson Bate notes that the lifelong fighter may have been thinking of “the ancient Roman salutation of the dying gladiators to Caesar.” That is, Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant, as reported by Suetonius. Johnson’s dying was painful and protracted. His body was failing while his mind raged on. He read the Bible and translated Horace.

 

Johnson’s physique was large and powerful, yet his health was frequently compromised, starting with scrofula as an infant. All his life he feared losing his sanity. Boswell said his friend “felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible melancholia, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery.” Where’s the Prozac?  

 

Johnson’s final days mingled grotesquery with nobility. He suffered from general circulatory disease made evident six months earlier by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, accompanied by growing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. Retrospective diagnoses suggest he may have suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. In Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998), Lawrence Lipking describes the scene shortly before his death:

 

“Bloated with dropsy [edema], Johnson tries to discharge the water by stabbing his legs with a lancet and scissors until the bedclothes are covered with blood. He even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.”

'I Had to Go Out From Myself and Literature'

In 1966, when Zbigniew Herbert was asked to submit a poem to a symposium in Berlin, for subsequent publication in an anthology, he chose “Why the Classics” (trans. Peter Dale Scott and Czesław Miłosz), which concludes: 

“if art for its subject

will have a broken jar

a small broken soul

with a great self-pity

 

“what will remain after us

will it be lovers' weeping

in a small dirty hotel

when wall-paper dawns”

 

Herbert recalls Thucydides, who in 423 B.C. was an Athenian general during the Second Peloponnesian War. The Greek arrived too late to prevent the capture of Amphipolis by the Spartans, and later admitted his failure in his history of that war. In contrast, Herbert claims, more recent generals “whine on their knees before posterity” and blame others for their failures. In a brief commentary on the poem written in 1966 and included in his Collected Prose 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, Ecco, 2010), Herbert outlines the poem’s three-part structure in refreshingly explicit terms:

 

“In the first part, it speaks of an event taken from the work of a classical author. It is, as it were, a note on my reading. In the second part I transfer the event to contemporary times to elicit a tension, a clash, to reveal an essential difference in attitude and behavior. Finally the conclusion contains a conclusion or moral, and also transposes the problem from the sphere of history to the sphere of art.”

 

Herbert is crisp and matter-of-fact, not indulging in woozy mystification or self-congratulation, as we might expect in other poets. As to the “sphere of art,” he writes:

 

“You don’t have to be a great expert on contemporary literature to notice its characteristic feature—the eruption of despair and unbelief. All the fundamental values of European culture have been drawn into  question. Thousands of novels, plays, and epic poems speak of an inevitable annihilation, of life’s meaninglessness, the absurdity of human existence.”

 

Herbert tells us that what he “tried to attack in my poem” is the defeatist, inward-turning attitude, the “black  tone,” of so many writers (and generals). “Beyond the artist’s reach,” he writes, “a world unfolds—difficult, dark, but real. One should not lose the faith that it can be captured in words, that justice can be rendered it.” So much contemporary poetry and fiction has lost its nerve and collapsed into narcissism. Herbert continues, rather stirringly:

 

“Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a stylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn’t sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.”

'You Will Certainly Dishonor It'

According to a resolution passed by the United Nations in 2005, today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Israel it’s observed as Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day). In Poland, where the Germans built the Auschwitz concentration camp, the day is designated International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz where more than a million people had been murdered.

 

The Holocaust defies language and human understanding. Some still deny it ever happened (or endorse it). In Munich in 1973, I could find no one who would give me directions to Dachau. German speakers suddenly denied understanding English and walked away. Less than a year earlier, Palestinian terrorists had murdered eleven members of the Israeli Olympics team in Munich. Another American finally told me where I could wait for the bus that would take me to the camp.

 

On the bus were two American men, school teachers from Chicago who identified themselves as Jews. They were in a histrionically festive mood over their "transgressiveness." They had a Frisbee and announced to their fellow passengers they weren’t going to be sad at Dachau, and  intended to celebrate – what, I’m not certain. They liked the attention they were getting.

 

There were no guides at the camp, no formal tours. The sites of the former barracks were marked by gravel-filled rectangular outlines. I visited the crematorium and stared at the ovens. The teachers played with their Frisbee. I  remember thinking I didn’t know why I was there.

 

Too often, descriptions of life in the camps turn into well-intentioned kitsch. Better the method of Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews (1961; rev. 1985) – a scrupulous accounting of statistics, documenting what to the Germans was, after all, a bureaucratic business. We can be grateful for Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Paul Celan, Imre Kertész and at least one non-Jew, the Pole Tadeusz Borowski, who survived Auschwitz and Dachau. See his Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories (trans. Madeline G. Levine, Yale University Press, 2021).

 

Vasily Grossman did the impossible. As a war correspondent attached to the Red Army he wrote in 1944 one of the first journalistic accounts of a death camp, “The Hell of Treblinka” (included in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays, trans. Robert Chandler, 2010). Grossman’s masterpiece, one of the supreme achievements of twentieth-century fiction, is Life and Fate (trans. Robert Chandler, 1985). He takes the reader into a gas chamber. Sofya Osipovna Levinton is being transported by train to a Nazi death camp. She is a doctor without children of her own, and befriends a little boy on the train, David. At the camp, a German officer orders all doctors to step forward. Sofya Osipovna ignores the command and chooses to stay with David and the others, who are herded into a gas chamber:

 

“This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.

 

“'I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.

 

“That was her last thought.

 

“Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.”

 

The effect is devastating, especially when Grossman switches to the second-person plural and addresses his readers directly: Sofya Osipovna “felt pity for all of you.” Grossman writes not of the six million but of two, as Chekhov might have done. On Twitter on Thursday, Rabbi David Wolpe posted a pertinent twist on George Santayana:

 

“If you forget the past you might repeat it, but you will certainly dishonor it.”

[Not entirely unrelated: On January 27, 1940, on orders from Beria and Stalin, Isaac Babel was executed in Lubyanka Prison, Moscow.]

'Lost Things Still Rising Here'

“We were a foraging family, completely unaware of our passion for getting at things hard to find. I collected stamps, buttons, the cards that came with chewing gum, and other detritus, but these were private affairs with nothing of the authority of looking for Indian arrowheads.” 

I have little interest in American-Indian culture and none in accumulating more stuff of any sort, except books, but I understand Guy Davenport’s fondness for hunting after those artful bits of chert or flint. In my favorite among his essays, “Finding” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), he describes his family’s weekend outings “to look for Indian arrows,” as they called it. This was in southern South Carolina and northern Georgia, in the 1930s and 1940s.

Seventeen years ago, at the suggestion of a rock-collecting editor, we took the boys to Lake Livingston, seventy miles north of Houston, to hunt along the shore for petrified wood, pottery shards, spear points and arrowheads. We returned home with 15 pounds of rose quartz and lake-polished stones, and one prize – a honey-colored hide scraper about seven inches long made of chert. My wife keeps it in her jewelry box. It’s a beautiful piece of human cunning and a bittersweet reminder of the boys when they were little.

 

The trips to Lake Livingston revived memories of my own. In the mid-sixties we visited relatives of my mother who lived on a dairy farm near Olean, N.Y. In the pastures, among the cow patties, were loose chunks of fossil-bearing limestone. My brother and I filled a cardboard box with the remains of trilobites and ferns and hauled them back to Ohio. Centuries from now, geologists may ponder the migration of so much fossiliferous limestone to a creekbed in Northeastern Ohio, otherwise filled with sandstone. Now I have found a poem by Jared Carter, “After the Rain,” which begins:

 

“After the rain, it’s time to walk the field

again, near where the river bends. Each year

I come to look for what this place will yield –

lost things still rising here.”

 

“The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail,

a crop of arrowheads, but where or why

they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail,

dropped from an empty sky . . .”

 

In his essay, Davenport captures the heightened awareness that accompanies purposeful looking:

 

“What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things – earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem never to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of rabbit tobacco, beggar’s lice, lizards, the inevitable mute snake, always just leaving as you come upon him, hawks, buzzards, abandoned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plums.

 

“Thoreauvian, because these outings, I was to discover, were very like his daily walks, with a purpose that covered the whole enterprise but was not serious enough to make the walk a chore or a duty. Thoreau, too, was an Indian-arrowhead collector, if collector is the word. Once we had found our Indian things, we put them in a big box and rarely looked at them. Some men came from the Smithsonian and were given what they chose, and sometimes a scout troop borrowed some for a display at the county fair. Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.”

 

As Carter puts it in his poem: “The trick to finding them is not to be / too sure about what’s known.”

'A Rhapsody of Rags'

Despite ironclad evidence to the contrary, we expect consistency in our fellow humans (less so in ourselves). Such is our naïveté. We act surprised when people act foolishly, not like rational animals. Of course, that too is human. Predictability makes life easier. Someone said humans are the pattern-recognizing species. A man who laughs is happy. A man who doesn’t is miserable. Pause for a moment and review your family and friends with those ridiculous generalities in mind.  

The first thing to know about Robert Burton (1577-1640) is that he adopted the persona of “Democritus Junior,” after the “laughing philosopher” Democritus of Abdera (born c. 460 B.C.). The polymathic scholar of melancholy enjoyed himself, liked to laugh, was good company. Anthony à Wood, the seventeenth-century antiquary, wrote of Burton in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691-92):

 

“I have heard some of the ancients of [Christ Church] often say that his company was very merry, facete [facetious], and juvenile, and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dexterous interlarding his common discourses among them with verses from the poet or sentences from classical authors.”

 

The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621, revised five times during his life) is on the short list of the most inexhaustibly entertaining books in the language, written to be read across a lifetime. All the right people loved it – Johnson, Sterne, Lamb, Keats, Anthony Powell, et al. Burton himself described his Anatomy as “a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgement, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry . . .” No humorless drudge could have written such a sentence.

 

He was a heroic reader, a lifelong bachelor scholar. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in The Listener in 1977: “What did Burton read in his solitary study? As far as we can see, everything, absolutely everything: ancient classics, modern literature, Latin and Greek, French and English, philosophy, philology, history, politics, travel, mathematics, astronomy, medicine.”

 

Burton good-humoredly admitted his limitations, which sound to some of us like strengths. Among his faults he numbered “barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation.” In A Register and Chronicle Ecclesiastical and Civil, White Kennet (1660-1728), recounts my favorite anecdote of Burton:

 

“The author is said to have labored long in the Writing of this Book to suppress his own Melancholy, and yet did but improve it . . . . In an interval of vapours he could be extremely pleasant, and raise laughter in any Company. Yet I have heard that nothing at last could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford, and hearing the bargemen scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his sides and laugh most profusely.”

 

Burton died on this date, January 25, in 1640 at age sixty-two.

'A Treasure House of Humanism'

Thirty years ago I wrote a story for my newspaper about the construction of a “Peace Pagoda” in Grafton, N.Y., twenty miles northeast of Albany. The building was the inspiration of a Japanese-born Buddhist nun. The staff photographer who accompanied me was a Korean War veteran, a gifted but rather crusty fellow. (I once witnessed an argument he had with another Marine Corps veteran of that war about the proper operation of a flamethrower.) As we reached the entrance to the temple we were asked to remove our shoes before entering – a gesture of respect, I assumed. The photographer threw a tantrum and refused to take off his shoes. He hollered and stomped, and we left with only exterior shots of the building.

I remembered that rather embarrassing event while reading the Fifth Book, Chapter VI, of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors (1646):

“That the custom of feasting upon beds was in use among the Hebrews, many deduce from Ezekiel. Thou sattest upon a stately bed, and a table prepared before it. The custom of Discalceation or putting off their shoes at meals, is conceived to confirm the same; as by that means keeping their beds clean; and therefore they had a peculiar charge to eat the Passover with their shoes on; which Injunction were needless, if they used not to put them off.”

Discalceation: “The act of pulling off the shoes,” according to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. He quotes Browne’s passage. The OED gets a little more specific: “The action of taking off the shoes, esp. as a token of reverence or humility.” The Dictionary doesn’t cite Browne but adds this footnote: “In later use chiefly with reference to rituals associated with Freemasonry.” Forget that. Discalceation is a straight borrow from Latin but sounds at once fancy and formal, and deliciously exotic. It might be the name of a chemical reaction. I read Browne for precisely such unexpected little packages of linguistic joy. He coined hundreds of words. To Browne we owe narwhal, ossuary and patois. In Cultural Amnesia (2007), Clive James writes:

“Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) is one of those minor English prose writers whose reputations are always rediscovered in times of crisis, because they had a gift for rhythm that forecast the language of the future, and it is in times of crisis that the English language is most easily seen to be a treasure house of humanism.”

'Here Are Letters, All Yours'

I received a letter – a real letter, hand-written -- from a friend I haven’t see in almost fifty years. Ours was friendship, not romance, which, of course, can be tricky. She had read something I’d written and wanted to tell me she liked it. She remembered me “always talking about books” half a century ago. Our pasts live on in the memories of others and might turn out endearing, embarrassing or dangerous. Letters from others I knew long ago would likely be less forgiving. She briefed me on her life, job, husband and kids – the usual highlights of a mercifully happy life, and I did the same. 

A century ago today, in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov wrote this poem in Russian, “Pis’ma,” translated as “Letters” by Brian Boyd and the poet’s son, Dmitri Nabokov:  

 

“Here are letters, all yours (already on the folds

their traces of jerky pencil are fading). By day,

folded up, they sleep, amid dried flowers, in my

fragrant drawer, but at night they fly out,

semitransparent and weak, they glide

and flutter over me, like butterflies: one

I may catch in my fingers, and at the night blue

I look through it, and in it the stars shine through.”

 

A young man’s poem, of course. Nabokov was not yet twenty-four. Love letters. I remember writing every day over the summer to a girlfriend who lived elsewhere in Ohio. She did the same. I have trouble believing I was once so young. Nabokov’s poem may be addressed to the girl he calls “Tamara” in Speak, Memory. He had met her in 1916, two years before the Bolshevik Revolution and the start of his family’s exile. Some of the letters show up excerpted and edited in Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1925; trans. 1970). In Speak, Memory he writes:

 

“Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. I wish I had kept the whole of our correspondence that way.”

 

[The poem can be found in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (eds. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]

'Books Are to Read'

“We live in an awful time. Philosophy has abandoned us; religions offer despair or incompetent help; events rival the worst nightmares. The universities have shrunk what they used to be into two semesters of sophomore cultural survey (Homer to Racine, Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath).”

And that was written thirty-seven years ago. From this excerpt alone you would never guess that Guy Davenport was writing a compressed but thorough eye-witness report on the books and career of his friend Hugh Kenner. The title is an echo of Kenner’s masterwork: “The Kenner Era.” It appears in the December 31, 1985 issue of National Review, a magazine both men had written for starting more than twenty years earlier. After a brief review of Kenner’s work, Davenport continues:

“The nature of literature changed around 1910. Inside the great sonorities and humane fables of Henry James, Conrad, and Kipling there appeared radically inventive forms containing a wholly different subject matter. Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Finnegans Wake, Happy Days.”

Kenner’s academic turf, Davenport’s fondest reading matter. James, Conrad, Kipling – proto-Modernists. Yes, Kipling. Read his story “Wireless.” Elsewhere, Davenport writes, “What got Kipling a bad name among Liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.” Wait for the punch line:

“Each epoch has its major art. Ours is not that of Haydn, Mozart, and the Bachs, nor is it the age of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Poussin. Of our architecture all you have to note is that a culture that would build a glass skyscraper the windows of whose first floor must be washed by a human being on a plank suspended 49 stories by two ropes is a culture without a shred of humanity. Never mind that the building must breathe through a power house ten miles away. No, the genius of our time is in our literature.”

By “our time,” Davenport clearly does not mean 1985. Like Kenner, he views the world like a dragonfly – 360 degrees and in full color. Eighty percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision – the envy of any writer. Davenport means Modernism and its literary legacy. He continues:

“That is our voice. We are, as the world was once before in the Renaissance and before that in the welding of a world out of the ruins of Rome and barbarian hordes, a world incomprehensible to ourselves. We did not see that the twentieth century would revert to violence; every foresight promised exactly the opposite. We did not see that religion would turn into fanaticism, medicine into drug addiction, cities into jungles. We did not see, but our arts saw. They are our eyes and ears: as supplement, catalyst, or substitute.”

Davenport concludes:

“Books are to read; reading is a communal activity. The illiterate formed societies to have Dickens read to them; early movies had a public reader. Modernist literature requires a community reader, or critic. We are lucky to have many, no ten of whom quite add up to Hugh Kenner.”

'The Native Element, Naturally, is Omnipresent'

Ronald Blythe died last week at the age of one-hundred. He was an indelibly English writer much taken with rural life and the natural world, and can be seen as part of a motley English tradition that includes Gilbert White, John Clare, William Cobbett, Frances Kilvert, Richard Jefferies and Andrew Young. He will be best remembered for Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), a lightly fictionalized account of life in a Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966. Blythe based it on interviews he conducted with three generations of his neighbors in the villages of Charsfield and Debach.

That was my introduction to Blythe. Later I read The Age of Illusion (1963), a social history of England from the end of World War I to the start of World War II, an era chronicled in fiction by Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Henry Green. Later still I read England: The Four Seasons (1993). My favorite among his books is a collection of essays, Characters and Their Landscapes (1983). In his introduction, Blythe hints at the ambivalent persistence of nostalgia as a theme that runs through his work like chalk in the soil of Suffolk:

“The native element, naturally, is omnipresent [in his essays]. I still occasionally speculate what it can be like to live somewhere where the signposts are not all pointing to the towns and villages of childhood. It is not as if, as some writers have, I made a vow to stick to the home ground, for I never did, and have often thought that there could be benefits from giving it the slip for a decade or two.”

Not all of his subject matter is English and rural. “Death and Leo Tolstoy” deals with the Russian’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” “Love masters death,” Blythe writes, “at the penultimate hour in Tolstoy’s story.” (I'm not sure about that.) In an essay titled “Interpreting the Shades,” the centenarian writes: “I cannot remember a time which I did not feel history in solid and fairly reliable centennial terms.” Best of all is “My First Acquaintance with William Hazlitt,” a title borrowed from Hazlitt’s own “My First Acquaintance with Poets”:

“An impression persists of a man at odds with all and everything, someone to whom his friends had to offer an almost saintly response if they were not to get their heads bitten off. He was a bitter creature, a malcontent.”

All true, but Blythe understands that at least one friend remained loyal and went on loving Hazlitt thanks to his (not Hazlitt's) inveterate sense of humor:

“Among these was Charles Lamb, Hazlitt’s senior by only three and a half years, but in whose (much tried) relationship there was a stable, protective element suggesting a much older man. The great difference, in fact, between Lamb and Hazlitt was that the former seemed to have received the gift of perpetual early middle-age and the latter, with his moodiness, his iconoclasm, his physical energy, his hero-worship, his passionate love and his general recklessness, appeared to have been cursed with everlasting youth. To outgrow innocence – one’s initial reflexes to important matters – was for Hazlitt a sin.”

'Like Most Hollywood Entertainment'

I haven’t bothered tracking down the source but somewhere Franz Kafka notes that impatience is a form of laziness. When I first read that years ago it seemed self-evident yet had never occurred to me. My patience is most often tested not when reading but when listening to tedious, empty conversation – talk as mere social gesture, without substance, or talk as self-centered sermon or rant. 

I often wonder how much the decline in reading and the spread of aliteracy is associated with impatience or laziness. Movies, television, recorded music are essentially passive media, at least as consumed by most of us. A book, even genre junk, requires a little work. The effort put into reading Dante is quantitatively different from reading a Lee Child novel. Qualitatively, too. Child’s prose is made to be read quickly, without bumps to slow things down along the way. I wonder how often his books are read more than once by his fans. One spends a lifetime reading Dante. (The Robert Pinsky translation this time around, after Ciardi, Singleton and Sisson, and paying more attention to the Italian.)   

 

John Poch is a poet who teaches at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. I’ve read little of his work but found an interesting essay, “Patience in Poetry,” he published in the Sewanee Theological Review in 2013. I'm sorry to say I can’t find an online link. Poch writes:

 

“The appreciation of the great poets, T. S.. Eliot says, ‘is a lifetime’s task, because at every stage of maturing you are able to understand them better.’ For Eliot these poets were Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, and Virgil. Outside the task of taking on such expansive poets, any reader must take time to read a good poem. Unless lodged within the confines of a classroom, many will not set aside fifteen minutes for a poem.”

 

Today much poetry – and prose, for that matter – is designed for effortless consumption, to be spoon-fed like ice cream. Nothing can be done about that. I can’t convince anyone that Dante is worth the expenditure in time, energy, curiosity, learning and attentiveness he demands. I can’t tempt you with the rewards, which might sound too much like “Put some sugar on your broccoli.” Poch is very good on this:

 

“There are poems that we read in minutes. They are like most Hollywood entertainment. You witness them, perhaps have some small epiphany, and then you are done. You leave the page or the movie theater and move on to the next thing. But with a good film, you leave the theater reflecting on what just happened to you, how the characters, the plot, the cinematography, or even the costumes not only mirror but impinge upon your life, and this meditation continues well past the drive home and on through the next morning’s coffee.”

 

Poch’s ten-page essay is written as a set of linked digressions and is too rich for me to give you a fair taste. Along the way we encounter the Texas artist Robert Bruno, Colossians 1:10-11, Simone Weil, a meditation on “affliction,” Elizabeth Bishop, more Eliot, Yeats and an anecdote from Poch’s class in which a student asks, “Who’s to say if Dante or Shakespeare is better than anybody writing today?” The poet continues:

 

“With no verbal response from the other students, I replied as kindly as possible, ‘I’m to say. Any poet who has developed a sense of taste is to say.’”

'We Imagine Immortality for Them'

In the CD player was a disc my oldest son burned for me years ago, a compilation of some of the music I grew up listening to – Howlin’ Wolf, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt and a song I first heard only later, “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,” a twelve-bar short story performed by Blind Willie McTell (1898-1959) in 1940. The lyrics begin in the third person with Little Jesse the gambler – “Sinful guy, good hearted but had no soul” – dying in bed after being shot by the police. With the fifth verse, Jesse takes over narration: 

“Eight crapshooters to be my pallbearers

Let ’em be veiled down in black

I want nine men going to the graveyard, bubba

And eight men comin’ back”

 

It’s a tale of misery narrated with braggadocio:

 

“Send poker players to the graveyard

Dig my grave with the ace of spades

I want twelve polices in my funeral march

High sheriff playin’ blackjack, lead the parade”

 

I have a weakness for story songs and McTell’s is a good one. The association here is unlikely, I know, but listening again to “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues” reminded me of a late-twentieth-century Polish blues – Zbigniew Herbert’s “What Our Dead Do” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press, 1999). Jan tells the narrator he had a dream in which his father is in a coffin talking to his son as he walks beside the hearse. Jesse had called for eight pallbearers. Jan’s father, “six men in black livery / walk nicely at our sides.” The father tells him not to fuss, not to buy flowers or a gravestone, and reveals the location of hidden money and “cuff links with real pearls.” The poem concludes:

 

“this is how our dead

look after us

they warn us through dreams

bring back lost money

hunt for jobs

whisper the numbers of lottery tickets

or when they can’t do this

knock with their fingers on the windows

 

“and out of gratitude

we imagine immortality for them

snug as the burrow of a mouse”

 

[You may know Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” from 1983. And here’s an interesting juxtaposition of “St. James Infirmary” and “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues.”]

'My Reading Has Been Altogether Desultory'

My youngest son, a sophomore, is taking an English class in the postwar American novel. He’s a political science major hoping to study law, so the English class is more obligation than labor of love, though for me it would be a labor nearly without love. The students are assigned a mere four novels to read this semester, only one of which is worth reading – Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004). The rest, charitably described, is junk fiction. No Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison or Saul Bellow. No William Maxwell, Thomas Berger, Richard Yates, Eudora Welty, Charles Portis, Wright Morris, J.F. Powers or Peter De Vries. No attempt to be genuinely, in literary terms, “diverse.” No surprises, no challenges, no laughs. 

A few days after my son sent me his assigned list of titles, a reader informed me that my reading habits are “desultory” – an ambiguous adjective. Does it mean flighty, without attentiveness, lacking in systemization? Or wide-ranging, cover-the-waterfront and eclectic? A little of each, I suspect, and it’s always been the way I go about things. My reading has never followed anyone’s syllabus, not even my own. When I was a sophomore I took a class in the eighteenth-century English novel. The reading list for the semester included eight titles. Among them were two novels from neither the eighteenth century nor England – Don Quixote and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.

That’s my idea of a reading list and an influential model for my own reading method, which is no method at all. Among my allies in this non-endeavor is Joseph Epstein in his essay “Bookless in Gaza” (The Middle of My Tether, 1983):

 

“Part of the pleasure in reading is in the splendor of language properly deployed, but an even greater part comes from satisfying one’s curiosity. If lust has an intellectual equivalent, might it not be curiosity which is allowed free rein? Though few are the books I regret having read, much of my reading has been altogether desultory—and continues to be.”

 

Epstein goes on to catalog his to-be-read list – ten titles, including Gershom Scholem’s masterpiece, Sabbatai Sevi – and concludes:

 

“Separately these books represent many amusing and instructive hours; taken together they do not, as they say down at the gas station, make a whole hell of a lot of sense.”

'Be Rapt Clean Out of Ourselves'

There are ways to read books other than ecstatically. In fact, to read in expectation of ecstasy might kill the desire to read anything. How many books can ascend to that standard? We can read for pragmatic, how-to reasons -- learning to rebuild a carburetor or ensuring the souffle doesn’t collapse. Or to fill an empty hour, pass the class or  review a book. As Arthur Krystal puts it in “Kid Roberts and Me,” about reading a book he last read at age fourteen in 1961: “However you slice it, reading critically is a more solemn affair than reading ecstatically.” 

Ecstasy while reading takes place unexpectedly. In fact, surprise is a prerequisite: I first knew it in high school when first reading the opening lines of “The World”: “I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright.” I can’t describe my reaction to Henry Vaughan’s words except to say something ambushed me. I’ve read Vaughan’s work many times since and have never had a recurrence of so powerful an experience. I encountered “The World,” by the way, not in a poetry collection but in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951), adding to the sense of unexpectedness. Only two other writers have done this for me – Shakespeare and Traherne. In retrospect, reading their words felt like saying the magic words and – voila! These experiences came back while reading the opening sentence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “A Gossip on Romance”:

 

“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.”

 

A bit overdone but you get the idea. This is different from the ecstatic response I described earlier, less intense but still rare and gratifying, as when I read Nabokov or Beerbohm.

'The Expressive Virtuosity of a Master Writer'

A friend in Washington, D.C. last week visited that city’s Second Story Books and found a large collection of volumes about jazz for sale. They came from the library of the jazz writer W. Royal Stokes, who died in 2021. “Is there any particular jazz book you've been wanting to read?” my friend wrote, and I replied without having to think about it, “Whitney Balliett,” the longtime jazz writer for The New Yorker who has been one of the two or three most lasting influences on my writing and thinking. On Saturday a box holding three books arrived in the mail: 

The Otis Ferguson Reader (eds. Dorothy Chamberlain and Robert Wilson, December Press, 1982)

 

Balliett’s American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1986)

 

Balliett’s Barney, Bradley, and Max: 16 Portraits in Jazz (Oxford, 1989)

 

Ferguson (1907-43) is best known as a movie critic. See The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, published in 1971. He wrote about movies and jazz as a staff writer for The New Republic beginning in 1935. The Reader collects Ferguson’s writings on jazz, film, radio, theater and other subjects. After Pearl Harbor, Ferguson joined the Merchant Marine. On September 14, 1943, he was killed when a German bomb exploded on his ship anchored in the Gulf of Salerno. Included in the Reader is a previously unpublished piece titled “Louis Armstrong and ‘Shine’”:

 

“Art is most poorly served by those who, conscious that they have to make a living by talking about it, talk always with a dogmatic but uneasy impulse for what there is that could be talked. This little notice is not a talking-about; it is merely a transcription of the (personal) fact that I heard Louis Armstrong’s ‘Shine’ and was instantly moved by it, into a mixture of sadness, pride, and consciousness of other people outside myself; that I have heard it since a thousand times; and that it is still true and good, moving a person to sadness, pride, etc.”

 

The first essay collected in Barney, Bradley, and Max is “Fan,” devoted to Jean Bach. In 1958, the photographer Art Kane gathered fifty-seven jazz musicians, and took their group portrait, “A Great Day in Harlem,” for Esquire. The photo captures a narrow sliver of time when prominent musicians from several generations were still working. Seven months later, for instance, Lester Young was dead. In 1994, Bach released a documentary about the photo, also titled A Great Day in Harlem. Balliett describes Bach as a “pretty, witty, quick, indefatigable woman,” and writes:

 

“She is a Boswell, for, not widely known herself, she spends much of her time cosseting and studying the great and near-great, the famous and almost famous. She does this in two ways, both of which Boswell would have admired, for each smooths egos and stays vanity . . .”

 

Be sure to read Ted Gioia’s essay on Balliett, “The True Poet of Jazz”: “He retained the enthusiasm of a fan, but it was married to the expressive virtuosity of a master writer who could extract from his typewriter something akin to what others drew from their saxophones and trumpets. It was almost as if he were a jazz musician himself, but one who wrote essays for The New Yorker instead of soloing over ‘I Got Rhythm’ chords.”

'The Order of the Tranquil Night'

“Sometimes a phrase or a verse you’ve read a hundred times over with indifference stirs an extraordinary fervor in you.” 

While thinking on Friday about the first anniversary of Terry Teachout’s death and the inconceivable premature deaths of other friends, I imperfectly remembered lines from Nabokov’s title poem in Pale Fire: “Life Everlasting--based on a misprint! / I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint / And stop investigating my abyss?” It was that final word that had anchored the lines for me: abyss. A chilling thought, nonexistence. John Shade had used the word earlier in “Pale Fire”:   

 

“And finally there was the sleepless night

When I decided to explore and fight

The foul, the inadmissible abyss,

Devoting all my twisted life to this

One task. Today I’m sixty-one. Waxwings

Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.”

 

“Inadmissible.” Yes, that’s how it felt. A universe on two legs, talking, thinking, feeling – gone. Not missing or elsewhere – nonexistent. Yet Shade continues his research into life after death, prodded by the suicide of his daughter, Hazel Shade. The sentence quoted at the top is from Jean Guéhenno’s Diary of Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford University Press, 2014), translated by David Ball. It is the journal Guéhenno kept while living in Paris during the German occupation. The passage from October 25, 1942 continues: “That’s what happened to me yesterday when I read this hemistich by Lucretius: ‘. . . Noctes vigilare serenas.’” The Latin tag from De Rerum Natura means “to stay awake through clear nights.” Guéhenno continues:

 

“These words were enough to make me happy all evening. Those great, long, exalted nights you spend reading when you’re twenty [Guéhenno was fifty-two], on watch in the silence and the darkness with all the great order of stars around you, that hope, that expectation, that awareness . . . And the finest moment is when, with the help of a kind of tired drunkenness, it seems to you that the order of the tranquil night has become the actual order of your mind, the light in its rank among the lights.”

 

Guéhenno quotes Lucretius’ words again and adds: “And then the sirens howled out the air-raid warning.”

 

I’m reading Guéhenno’s diary thanks to Isaac Waisberg, who maintains a sort of digital commonplace book and a library of books in pdf format, including Theodor Haecker’s Journal in the Night.