'Books That Are As Altars Where We Kneel'

“Perhaps you would like to know what I have been reading since I last wrote you.” 

That’s not an overture you can safely make to just anyone. It can prove to be an effective  conversation-killer. I’m happy to hear what some friends and my middle son are reading because I know their taste in books is good (that is, similar to mine). They’re sturdy, exploratory readers who don’t stick to a single narrow genre or subject. I trust their judgments and often read what they have recommended.

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson is writing to his friend George W. Latham on March 31, 1894. The future poet is twenty-four and had been forced the previous year to drop out of Harvard after the death of his father. It’s the letter of a young man from the provinces – Gardiner, Maine. He’s smart and still unformed, and dreams of becoming a writer. His reading is fairly ambitious:    

 

“I fear I have been using my eyes a little too much, but somehow I cannot keep away from the book-shelves in my room. You may judge for yourself whether this list is too long for a man with my infirmity: Daudet: Jack, Tartarin de Tarascon; De Musset: Pierre et Camille, Croisilles, On ne sauraita penser de tout, and some of his poems; Prévost: Manon Lescaut; Milton: Samson Agonistes; Swinburne: Atalanta in Calydon; Cowper: The Task, Book I.”

 

A sophomore’s list, though not sophomoric. Cowper’s presence is no surprise. He’s the one writer named by Robinson in whom I see the affinity. Cowper writes in The Task (1785): “Books are not seldom talismans and spells.” He's contrasting meditation and books, and favors the former. Here’s the larger context:

 

“Knowledge dwells

In heads replete with thoughts of other men;

Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,

The mere materials with which wisdom builds,

Till smooth’d and squared and fitted to its place,

Does but encumber whom it seems t’enrich.

Knowledge is proud that he has learn’d so much;

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

Books are not seldom talismans and spells

By which the magic art of shrewder wits

Holds an unthinking multitude enthrall’d.”

 

Robinson would go on to write several poems about writers he admired, including Verlaine, Zola and Thomas Hood. The best is the sonnet “George Crabbe,” devoted to Jane Austen’s favorite poet:

 

“Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,

Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,

But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still

With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.

In spite of all fine science disavows,

Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill

There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,

Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.

 

“Whether or not we read him, we can feel

From time to time the vigor of his name

Against us like a finger for the shame

And emptiness of what our souls reveal

In books that are as altars where we kneel

To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.”

'Down With the Serious and Sincere Reader'

“What is the importance of sincerity in literature,” asks Theodore Dalrymple in These Spindrift Pages (Mirabeau Press, 2023), “(assuming that it can be gauged with anything like accuracy)?”

 

Sincerity is no virtue. Art, after all, is a lie that tells the truth. Even sociopaths can be sincere. No talent required. In literature it’s usually camouflage for mediocrity. When all else fails – imagination, precise observation, learning, memorable language – be sincere. Was the librarian-poet Philip Larkin being sincere when he wrote that “Books are a load of crap”? Was Max Beerbohm when he said “to die of laughter—that, too, seems to me a great euthanasia”? And what of Jonathan Swift’s sincerity when he noted that Irish babies are “a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout”? Dalrymple is just getting warmed up:

“[S]incerity in the service of something abominable is frightening, and makes the abominable all the more abominable. I think in particular of the writer and soi-disant philosopher, Ayn Rand, who oozed monomaniac sincerity like a secretion and who, mysteriously to me (given her deeply unattractive character) became the leader of a powerful cult. Her fiction is wooden, humourless, simplistic and interminable. She must have been one of the very few modern authors to have written an apology for rape; and her philosophy, with its worship of size, power and ruthlessness, is repellent. But she was sincere all right.”

 

One remembers Whittaker Chambers’ famous evisceration of Rand and her stillborn novel Atlas Shrugged in “Big Sister Is Watching You”: “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”

 

Back to sincerity in literature: In his note to line 172 in the poem “Pale Fire” in his novel of the same name, Nabokov has the mad Charles Kinbote quote the poet John Shade, who is criticizing the less imaginative among his students: “I am also in the habit of lowering a student’s mark catastrophically if he uses ‘simple’ and ‘sincere’ in a commendatory sense. . . . When I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool.”

 

In a 1962 interview with Jacob Bronowski, Nabokov echoed his fictional poet: “Another special aversion of mine is the epithet ‘sincere.’ How can a conjuror be serious or sincere—and a good artist is always a conjuror. . . . Down with the serious and sincere reader. After all, not all readers are children who ask if the story is true.”

 

Let’s leave sincerity to the authors of greeting cards and ransom notes.

 

[The Bronowski interview can be found in Nabokov’s Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (Knopf, 2019).] 

'Archers, and Slingers, Cataphracts and Spears'

It’s a seldom-encountered word, rooted in Greek, that sounds wrong on the tongue: cataphract. It echoes cataract. The OED defines it as “a soldier in full armour.” Other sources specify cavalrymen, and even the horses sometimes wore armor. I can’t remember when I learned the word but it came back recently while I was watching Chimes at Midnight (1965) again. Orson Welles is director and screenwriter, and plays Sir John Falstaff. 

Welles stitches together scenes from both parts of Henry IV with others from Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V, and excerpts from Shakespeare’s source for the history plays, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. The centerpiece of the film is Welles’ 10-minute staging of the Battle of Shrewsbury. It was fought July 21, 1403, in what is now Shropshire, with Henry IV and his men facing a rebel army led by Henry “Hotspur” Percy, from Northumberland. In Shakespeare it’s the climax of Henry IV, Part 1. The battle scenes are chaotic and noisy – the crash of armor and swords, men and horses screaming. One thinks of Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

 

Welles in armor is almost spherical. His Falstaff hides in the shrubs through most of the fighting. If the armored men and horses look imposing – half-man, half-machine – Falstaff looks ridiculous, like a corpulent bathysphere. The men in armor appear hobbled under all the weight. I may have first encountered cataphract in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (lines 1615-1619): 

“Immediately

Was Samson as a public servant brought,

In thir state Livery clad; before him Pipes

And Timbrels, on each side went armed guards,

Both horse and foot before him and behind

Archers, and Slingers, Cataphracts and Spears.”

 

But Welles’ Battle of Shrewsbury brought to mind another recounting of medieval warfare, this one from Briggflatts, published by Basil Bunting in 1966, the year after Chimes at Midnight premiered. It describes the death of Eric Bloodaxe at Stainmore in 954:

 

“Loaded with mail of linked lies,

what weapon can the kind lift to fight

when chance-met enemies employ sly

sword and shoulder-piercing pike,

pressed into the mire,

trampled and hewn till a knife

-- in whose hand? – severs tight

neck cords? Axe rusts. Spine

picked bare by raven, agile

maggots devour the slack side

and inert brain, never wise . . .”

 

The other poet Welles’s battle scene brought to mind was Christopher Logue in War Music, his version of Homer’s Iliad:

 

“Impacted battle. Dust above a herd.

Trachea, source of tears, sliced clean.

Deckle-edged wounds: ‘Poor Jataphect, to know,’ knocked clean

Out of his armour like a half-set jelly

‘Your eyes to be still open yet not see,’ or see

By an abandoned chariot a dog

With something like your forearm in its mouth;

A face split off,

Sent skimming lidlike through the crunch

Still smiling, but its pupils dots on dice:

Bodies so intermixed

The tremor of their impact keeps the dead

Upright with the mass.”

'I Found My Subject Matter Early On'

“Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to every thing. It is much easier to steal one hundred pounds than to get it by labour or any other way.” 

That’s Boswell quoting Dr. Johnson in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). The friends had visited the highlands and western islands of Scotland in 1773. Johnson published his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland two years later. The passage above comes from the September 17 entry in Boswell’s Journal. That day’s conversation begins with the subject of cunning.

 

“Cunning,” says Johnson, “has effect from the credulity of others, rather than from the abilities of those who are cunning. It requires no extraordinary talents to lie and deceive.”

 

Not always true, I’m afraid. Cunning that works is an art. Consider the confidence man, the politician. Of course they depend on the credulousness of their victims, but their patter has to be convincing and delivered with a straight face. The conversation turns to the notion that “great abilities” are required to be ambitiously wicked. Johnson says:

 

“It requires great abilities to have the POWER of being very wicked; but not to BE very wicked. A man who has the power, which great abilities procure him, may use it well or ill; and it requires more abilities to use it well, than to use it ill. Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to every thing.”

 

Johnson clarifies his point by adding: “Consider only what act of wickedness requires great abilities to commit it, when once the person who is to do it has the power; for THERE is the distinction. It requires great abilities to conquer an army, but none to massacre it after it is conquered.”

 

Johnson’s point, that power is a necessary precondition for wicked actions, informs everything from the Holocaust to street crime. Anyone can think about robbing someone. Willingness to brandish a switchblade makes it real. I remembered Johnson’s thoughts while reading an interview with Turner Cassity published in the Spring 1996 issue of The Chattahoochee Review. At the end he says:

 

“I found my subject matter early on: the wickedness of the world. Inexhaustible, I might add.”

 

In “Do Not Judge by Appearance. Or Do” (Hurricane Lamp, 1986), Turner writes:

 

“Will it always be their perception that,

Bold, safety wears the garb of violence?

Or will they learn in these too guarded streets

That pretty is as pretty does, but evil

May in fact be just as evil looks?”

'And Starts to Be Happy'

Yet another reader scolds me for my devotion to Philip Larkin and what he calls his “doctrine of misery.” Larkin’s only doctrine was that after the loneliness and despair of a life imperfectly lived, beauty remains. That’s the writer’s job – finding beauty in the materials given him by life. Unhappiness is no excuse for ugliness. I’m not alone in often finding Larkin a tough-minded morale-booster. Realism about human nature is always bracing. He never leaves gloom in the mind of this reader. With Auden, Richard Wilbur and a few others, Larkin seems to me among the last unignoreable voices in English-language poetry. In 1973, Clive James wrote in his review of Donald Davie's Thomas Hardy and British Poetry: 

“[Davie] cannot or will not see that Larkin’s grimness of spirit is not by itself the issue. The issue concerns the gratitude we feel for such grimness of spirit producing such a beauty of utterance.”

 

Which would you rather read?: Someone gushing “It’s a joy to be alive!” or Larkin’s “Coming” (The Less Deceived, 1955):

 

“On longer evenings,

Light, chill and yellow,

Bathes the serene

Foreheads of houses.

A thrush sings,

Laurel-surrounded

In the deep bare garden,

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,

It will be spring soon —

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.”

 

By Larkin’s standards, “Coming” is a giddy cry of exaltation. James Booth in his biography of Larkin calls it “one of his most serenely beautiful poems.” The poet's phrasing and word choice is unexpected and precise (in most poets, a rare combination): “Its fresh-peeled voice / Astonishing the brickwork.” So too, “forgotten boredom,” seemingly an oxymoron. Thanks to Larkin we can learn to value flickering spots of happiness. Someone said there are no happy lifetimes, only happy moments.

 

[The Clive James review can be found in his final book, Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin (Picador, 2019).]

'You Smile Upon Your Friend To-day'

One of his friends described Dr. Percy Withers (1867-1945), an English physician and failed poet, as having a “relish for human nature,” an observation confirmed by the varied assortment of writers he befriended, including Max Beerbohm, Charles Doughty, Robert Bridges, Walter de la Mare, William Butler Yeats, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon and E.M. Forster. Most remarkably, he made friends with the famously reserved A.E. Housman, who even permitted Withers to photograph him. That portrait appears in A Buried Life: Personal Recollections of A.E. Housman, the memoir Withers published in 1940. In 1936, shortly after Housman’s death, Withers published a brief remembrance of the poet in New Statesman and Nation, and reprinted in the July 1 issue of The Living Age. In it he writes: 

“The depths and complexities of Housman’s character were almost impenetrably obscured by his reticence, and still more perhaps by his determined habit of self-suppression.”

 

No mention is made of Housman’s homosexuality. Withers was likely unaware of it. The poet, he observes, “could never be garrulous,” the “easy and traditional exchanges of personalities seemed impossible to him.” Withers describes Housman the critic:

 

“What was and what was not poetry he decided simply, and I should say with the nearest possible approach to infallibility, by the physical response, or none, in the throat, the spinal cord, or the pit of the stomach, and the last the supreme oracle. Once when he had used the term in conversation, he was asked, ‘What is the solar plexus?’ A doctor present was hastening the Faculty’s definition, when Housman whipped in with the rejoinder: ‘It is what my poetry comes from.’”

 

This recalls Housman’s well-known declaration in the 1933 Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge, “The Name and Nature of Poetry”: “Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual,” followed by this description of his test for poetry:

 

“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’”

 

Withers recalls a conversation with Housman:

 

“We were discussing friendship, when, after a jibe at my fecundity in this kind, he told me he had numbered but three friends in his whole life, and added with a note of exultation how more comfortably he could die now that he had seen the last of them put to rest.” 

 

LVII in A Shropshire Lad (1896):

 

“You smile upon your friend to-day,

To-day his ills are over;

You hearken to the lover’s say,

And happy is the lover.

 

“’Tis late to hearken, late to smile,

But better late than never:

I shall have lived a little while

Before I die for ever.”

 

Housman was born on this date, March 26, in 1859 and died on April 30, 1936 at age seventy-seven.

'However Self-important We May Have Been in Life'

Thank God for professional discipline (and a well-exercised sense of humor) or one would soon be unemployed. The virtues of repression – stifling one’s precious impulses – are no longer fashionable, I know, but that’s how I hold on to my job. More than most professionals, academics exude self-esteem. They are walking, talking public-relations firms for themselves. Joseph Epstein learned this lesson the hard way several years ago (though I suspect he already knew it). 

As a writer/editor for a university, I read the copy produced by professors and they read and edit what I write about them. Certain stylistic proclivities are nearly universal. All nouns, as in German, are capitalized, especially job titles, regardless of context. Every adjective is preceded by an adverb. The most popular adverb is “very” – a word my high-school English teacher taught me to banish because it is empty of meaning. All accomplishments are described in the superlative. The most highly prized quality of prose is fulsomeness. And so on.   

 

Critics might judge my complaints sour grapes, and I’ve considered that. Professors have Ph.D.’s. I don’t. They make more money, have larger offices and labs, and generally dress better and have better haircuts. However you gauge “prestige,” they have more. None of that irks me. I’m already paid more than I’m worth. I make many times more money than my father, who was an ironworker. In other words, he had a marketable trade. I’m eminently expendable. All of that is just fine with me.  

 

A reader on Friday, after reading that day’s post on Theodore Dalrymple, sent me an essay Dalrymple wrote in 2007, "Comfort for Failures," for the British Medical Journal. It begins:

 

“Triumphant success—in others, I hasten to add; I've never experienced it myself—intimidates me and makes me feel stupid. Why am I not similarly successful, though quite intelligent enough to be so? I suppose it boils down to character, or what these days is called personality.”

 

I don’t share Dalrymple’s sense of intimidation when in the company of the nominally successful. If anything, it amuses me. And I do enjoy conversations with some members of the faculty, especially those who are older, securely tenured and have interests beyond the narrow range of their research. We can talk about normal things like family and books. Dalrymple gets more interesting when he turns to a literary interest:

 

“It is because success is so intimidating, I imagine, that I find the poetry of Philip Larkin so appealing. It exudes a reassuring hopelessness, and brings solace to us failures, who after all are in the immense majority. Dissolution and death are our fates, however self-important we may have been in life. What, in the end, can we hope for or expect, other than ‘Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines’”?

 

I have never understood readers who find Larkin “depressing.” His poems are too smart, too beautiful, often too funny, too revealing of human nature to be depressing.

'This Gossiping Must Be Drawn to a Close'

On the back cover of Theodore Dalrymple’s most recent book, These Spindrift Pages (Mirabeau Press, 2023), is printed an italicized sentence: “Much of mankind’s boredom derives from its inability to find satisfaction in a shelf of books.” A variation, of course, on Pascal’s old chestnut. Open the book and on the first page, in his second paragraph, Dalrymple writes: 

“Pascal said that much of the trouble of mankind came from the inability of people to be at peace alone in a room. Much of its boredom (an underestimated mischief-maker) derives from the inability to find satisfaction in a shelf of books.”

 

Dalrymple tells us the book started with a “beautiful and expensive” notebook his wife gave him as a gift. He began filling it with thoughts on (not reviews of) the books he was reading: “[H]aving lead a fairly active life, I have for some years lived mainly through books, which I read in dialectical relationship, as it were, with my accumulated experience.”

 

That pretty well describes my relations with reading. In biological terms, life and books are not parasitic but mutually sustaining – symbiotic in the facultative sense. That is, I could go on living without books and they would get along just fine without me, though my life would be poorer. Dalrymple says that “any moderately sized library has within it enough to provide more than sufficient interest for a hundred lifetimes.”

 

Think about Robinson Crusoe and the desert island parlor game – what do you salvage if marooned? In this case, which books would sustain you? Few of the books detailed in Dalrymple’s volume are “classics.” He knows his Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson but much of the reading list is devoted to medicine and crime. Dalrymple is a retired physician who worked in an English prison and was often called to testify in court. Like every good essayist, Dalrymple is a generalist. He knows a little about everything, is an expert on nothing and is blessed with a reliable memory. He reminds me of an essay and book by the Scottish poet Alexander Smith: “A Shelf in My Bookcase” in Dreamthorp (1863). Smith writes:

 

“On a certain shelf in the bookcase which stands in the room in which I am at present sitting—bookcase surmounted by a white Dante, looking out with blind, majestic eyes—are collected a number of volumes which look somewhat the worse for wear. . . . These favourite volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books have I singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men. I am on easy terms with them, and feel that they are no higher than my heart.”

 

Near the end he says: “There is many another book on my shelf on which I might dilate, but this gossiping must be drawn to a close.” Same here. Let me leap from Dalrymple to Smith to Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), who puts it playfully in Chap. 4, “The Bookcase,” in The Noise of Time (trans. Clarence Brown, p. 77, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1965):

 

“The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of the spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. And as for books which were not included in that first bookcase— they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled.”

'Create Quietly Remarkable Wares'

“The cooking, woodcutting, and reading were equal elements of an integral life. We wanted books to have the passion and texture of clear-eyed originality. The notion of a book as a holiday from reality or touted ‘good read’ didn’t do much for us. We wanted to encounter something that would move and surprise us.” 

As a commendation, “good read” has never held much attraction, any more than “beach book” does. It’s marketing talk, aimed at selling books as analgesics, which is perfectly acceptable if you’re in the market for aspirin. I’m reminded of the customers at the book store where I worked in the 70’s who clutched scraps of paper covered with long lists of numbers. They shopped for Harlequin romances by number, not title or author, because the former were generic and the latter pseudonymous. Some of us want more. Baron Wormser,  a poet in Maine, is writing in the January 2017 issue of Sarmatian Review, an essay titled “The Polish Poets.” He goes on:

 

“When I started to read the Polish poets -- especially Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska – in translation, I felt, ‘Ah, this is what I have been waiting for. This is it.’ ‘It’ meant the depth of history grounded in individual art so scrupulous it could take the measure of the monstrosities of the twentieth century.”

 

I shared some of Wormser’s sense of arrival when I discovered the Polish Big Three, Herbert long before Miłosz and Szymborska. I recognized what he calls their “deliberate, nervy joy.” My paternal grandparents left Poland for the U.S. early in the twentieth century. Our neighborhood was almost uniformly Slavic so I can remember when the first Italian family moved in. I grew up hearing those Eastern European languages and heavily accented English. More idealistically, I felt the tug of a nation, Poland, forever conquered and divvied up by its neighbors, never deemed worthy of autonomy. I feel a similar admiration, for similar reasons, for Israel. As Wormser writes of Poland’s history:  

 

“Geography is fate, and though it wasn’t a seat many people would have chosen, it was a remarkable one if a person wished to be disabused––admittedly an uncommon predilection. Opinion and dogma, to say nothing of fear and loathing, are much more vivifying and distracting. To the participant shouting at a Nazi rally or the timeserver who has made his or her peace with the gray grief of communism, the attentiveness, honesty, and various splinters of renunciation that are bound to lodge in a lucid soul seem matters of an arcane and hopeless conscience. The beauty of the poets was that a conscience can be both compelling and piquant as it testifies to how imagination can set up shop in the dreariest and most indifferent of circumstances and create quietly remarkable wares.”

 

“Compelling and piquant” sums up Herbert’s attraction. His world is Western civilization and his poems often have a classical edge. He namedrops Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza. Best of all, he possesses what Seamus Heaney called Herbert’s “worldly irony.” That quality is indelible in his voice, even in translation. There’s a distance, a slyness, a withheld judgment coupled with Jeremiah-like prickliness. Here’s how he addresses Poland’s former Soviet masters in “The Power of Taste”:

“It didn’t require great character at all

our refusal disagreement and resistance

we had a shred of necessary courage

but fundamentally it was a matter of taste”

 

Of this poem Heaney writes: “There’s no reason why a poet shouldn’t be upfront and explicit in a poem about any political position or issue. [Perhaps, Seamus, perhaps.] All that’s required is that the position or issue should suffer some little bit of a sea change. A poem like . . . ‘The Power of Taste’ is a case in point. It is explicitly against the Soviet way of life and language, yet its rhetorical stance keeps it equidistant from rant and whimper.”

 

Wormser notes how seldom he encounters the word “conscience” in connection with contemporary American poetry. Not so with the Poles who, somehow, managed to remain un-self-righteous. Here are the lines from “The  Power of Taste” immediately following the ones quoted above: “Yes taste / in which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience.” Wormser writes:

 

 “One of the startling traits of the Polish poets was how un-sanctimonious they were. They invited no awed hushes as they entered the precincts of art. They did not preen themselves or proffer a false, winning heartiness. They rejected cleverness out of hand. Rather, they evinced various degrees of the confusion and bemusement that are natural to human beings but that poems, in reaching for some imagist aperçu, frequently swept aside."

 

[The Heaney quotes are from Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (ed. Dennis O’Driscoll, 2008).]

'Their Story is One of Unrelieved Horror'

“With music of flutes and scent of roses, and plenty of sweetmeats and amber wine, and not a cloud in the sky, we can just support the cruel burden of existence. In a word, we are civilized.” 

No creampuff wrote this. The author is Max Beerbohm, reviewing a production of King Lear staged at the Haymarket Theatre in London. His review was published in the September 18, 1909 issue of The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. Beerbohm’s larger point is that a play as bleak as King Lear is a tough sell with audiences seeking whimsy, affirmation and a happy ending. The passage above is preceded by these lines:

 

“Tragedy is not popular; and the most horribly tragic of all Shakespeare’s plays has been, in recent times, the  least popular. In the lusty Tudor days, before ‘nerves’ had been heard of, men were able to revel in the gloomiest exhibitions. They were not afraid of the dark. We are. They liked to have their blood curdled. We have no blood to spare for that process, thank you. Thunder and lightning, barren heaths cowering under starless skies, exile and despair, the breaking heart, the tottering reason, treachery most foul, death sudden or lingering, seemed to the Elizabethan very jolly indeed.”

 

He might be describing our world, in contrast to that of our forebears’. Last year, Ted Gioia noted our lack of a tragic sense:

 

“The essence of tragedy as a narrative device is that you’ve created your own mess (perhaps without realizing it), and now you face the consequences. The digital age, with its technocratic and plutocratic optimism, is incapable of grasping this view of human frailty.”

 

He could be referring to Lear and those among us who fail to recognize that we create most of our own troubles. Gioia goes on to cite Lear and other dramas: “The great tragedies (Macbeth, Oedipus, King Lear, etc.) aren’t much different from the leading news stories today—we simply haven’t been taught to see the connections.”

 

Beerbohm was theater critic for the Saturday Review from 1898, when he succeeded George Bernard Shaw, until 1910. This was the first staging of Lear he had ever seen.

Hazlitt judged Lear the best of all Shakespeare’s plays, “the one in which he was the most in earnest.” Dr. Johnson wrote: “There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity.” Auden famously called it “unstageable.” Beerbohm criticizes some of the sets and acting, but seems almost overwhelmed by the play itself:

 

“Whereas Hamlet and Macbeth are both of them modern and ‘sympathetic’ persons, in King Lear all the characters except Cordelia, the good and thee bad alike, are savages; and their story is one of unrelieved horror.”

'The Price for Biting Wit'

The best conversations are unscripted and without agenda. As to content, they start from zero. Both parties spark and connect like neurons firing in the brain. No dead zones, no echoing silences. I spent almost two hours Monday afternoon talking by telephone with the poet/translator Mike Juster, dba A.M. Juster, aka Michael Astrue. The talk was non-stop and would defy glib summary. We talked about cities, music, kids, bad restaurants and books, and didn’t neglect gossip. Here are three of Mike’s poems, arranged in reverse chronological order, to give you a taste of his wit. 

From the November 2011 issue of First Things, a poem about one of my childhood mentors, Don Herbert (1917-2007), “Farewell, Mr. Wizard”:

 

“I conjure NBC in black-and-white.

You drop dry ice in water; fog is rising.

You sell us Celsius and Fahrenheit.

 

“I lose you in a cloud of advertising--

Winston, Esso, Zenith, Mr. Clean,

those thirty-second breaks for Ovaltine--

then smile at Bunsen burners and balloons,

more ropes and pulleys. You are mesmerizing

as familiar things become surprising.

I dream of robots, rayguns, Mars and moons,

and know that someday Chevrolets will fly.

 

“POOF! Static. I can't make your show go on.

Space shuttles fall; the pumps are running dry.

Jihadists shop for warheads . . . Godspeed, Don.”

 

From the November 2008 issue of First Things, “A Stern Warning to Canada”:

 

“If you want peace,

withdraw your geese.”

 

And this, from the Winter 2004 issue of Light Quarterly, to add to my makeshift anthology of poems about Swift: “After 277 years, another birthday poem for Esther Johnson, a long-term houseguest of the Reverend Jonathan Swift”:

 

“Let’s overlook your death; it’s time

To bless your birth with one more rhyme

And pray the Dean’s unyielding spirit

Is lurking near so he can hear it.

I pay his debt with gratitude

Because I know that brackish mood

Which is the price for biting wit.

You made two opposites a fit

And smuggled joy into his life

Although you never were a wife

And never worked a day for pay.

The scholars fuss with what to say

Because they do not sense their blindness

In matters shaped by human kindness,

But, Stella, on this day I praise

Your loyal and enduring ways--

And chuckle when the critics squirm.

With confidence I can affirm

That since you entered Heaven’s walls,

No angel wrings its wings or calls

Your gentle interventions odd

When Swift is thundering at God.”

'The Periganglionic Spaces of His Grey Cortex'

“With half an hour’s reading in bed every night as a steady practice, the busiest man can get a fair education before the plasma sets in the periganglionic spaces of his grey cortex.” 

I don’t associate reading with self-improvement and have never subscribed to the eat-your-broccoli-it’s-good-for-you school of thought when it comes to books. Reading, especially serious reading of worthwhile books, is its own reward. If you want to ensure your kids remain lifelong aliterates, order them to read, turn it into an obligation and leach all the pleasure from what ought to be one of life’s chief consolations.

 

The sentence quoted at the top is spoken by Dr. William Osler (1849-1919) in Dr. Harvey Cushing’s biography of his former teacher, The Life of Sir William Osler (Oxford University Press, 1925). The thought is preceded by this context provided by Cushing, an eminent neurosurgeon:

 

“He emphasized the importance of reading as a part of post-graduate study. . . . The average non-reading doctor might play a good game of golf or of bridge, but professionally he was a lost soul. The driven or tired practitioner might plead that he could not find the time to read.”

 

Osler (1849-1919) is one of those fascinating men who turned a non-literary profession into literature, and was himself an inveterate reader, antiquarian and bibliophile. Among his favorite writers were Montaigne, Shakespeare, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Swift, Coleridge, Keats and Lamb. He wrote nearly as often about books as medicine. I’m not qualified to judge whether this statement by Osler, also from Cushing’s book, is true:

 

“Books are tools, doctors are craftsmen, and so truly as one can measure the development of any particular handicraft by the variety and complexity of its tools, so have we no better means of judging the intelligence of a profession than by its general collection of books. A physician who does not use books and journals, who does not need a library, who does not read one or two of the best weeklies and monthlies, soon sinks to the level of the cross-counter prescriber, and not alone in practice, but in those mercenary feelings and habits which characterize a trade.”

 

I once had a Syrian-born cardiologist who enjoyed talking about Shakespeare's work, including Othello’s final speech: “that in Aleppo once . . .”

 

The Canadian historian Michael Bliss in his William Osler: A Life in Medicine (1999) tells us Osler treated William and Henry James, Walt Whitman, and James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. He socialized with Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, was partly responsible for getting Gertrude Stein kicked out of Johns Hopkins University (bless him), and even shows up in Finnegans Wake: “The ogry Osler will oxmaul us all.”

 

In 1892, Osler published The Principles and Practice of Medicine, a 1,050-page medical textbook he wrote single-handedly. It remained the standard text for more than 40 years and stayed in print until 2001. Even in a textbook his bibliomania was evident. Bliss writes: “He mentioned historical figures ranging from Hippocrates, Mephibosheth, and Sir Thomas Browne, through Montaigne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Coleridge, and Swift.”

 

Osler adored Tristram Shandy and in a paper devoted to birth injuries he included a footnote that “directed readers to the ravages of Dr Slop’s forceps . .  .” In addition, Bliss reports: “At times he admitted to whistling that he might not weep, like Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy.” The biographer quotes this from one of Osler’s letters: “How I should have liked to get drunk with Charles Lamb.”

 

About that quote at the top: Osler refers to the brain and the motor neurons of the autonomic nervous system, located in the spinal cord and brainstem. He’s talking about loss of brain function, dementia, what used to be called senility.

[A reader in the comment section refer to Dr. Richard Selzer, whom I wrote about here.]

'You Become My Boredom and My Failure'

The title sounds like a joke told by the never-married Philip Larkin: “To My Wife.” A grim joke, perhaps based on his parents’ marriage. The husband self-pityingly regrets what he has given up. He sounds like a young man who resents no longer being able to play the field, but otherwise the poem feels like the work of a man at least middle-aged and no longer a newlywed: 

“Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan

The future was, in which temptingly spread

All that elaborative nature can.

Matchless potential! but unlimited

Only so long as I elected nothing;

Simply to choose stopped all ways up but one,

And sent the tease-birds from the bushes flapping.

No future now. I and you now, alone.

 

“So for your face I have exchanged all faces,

For your few properties bargained the brisk

Baggage, the mask-and-magic-man's regalia.

Now you become my boredom and my failure,

Another way of suffering, a risk,

A heavier-than-air hypostasis.”

 

Obviously there are good biological reasons for marrying young. (Larkin never had children.) But how many of us are sufficiently mature when young to marry? What do we know at that age about life, about devotion and sacrifice? I’ve known prodigies of maturity, people young only in the trivial chronological sense, but they’re rare and memorable. The rest of us too often choose and rue our choice. “The mask-and-magic-man’s regalia” sounds mockingly like Yeats and a life dedicated to poetry. And what does our unhappy husband get instead: “my boredom and my failure.”

 

Larkin completed “To My Wife” on this date, March 19, in 1951. He chose not to include the sonnet in XX Poems (privately printed in 1951), and it was published only posthumously, in 1988. Larkin hadn’t yet matured as a poet. He was twenty-eight. Soon he would be writing “Church Going,” “I Remember, I Remember,” and “Mr. Bleaney.”