'An Accepter and Recorder of Things as They Are'

It has been a good week for the satisfaction of knowing that a book I recommended has been read and enjoyed. A reader in New York City tells me the title character of V.S. Pritchett’s 1951 novel Mr. Beluncle reminds her of her late father, a man she describes as “feckless.” And the book made her laugh. Pritchett was by temperament a literary sprinter, not a marathon man, and Mr. Beluncle is his only first-rate novel. His sensibility is adapted to short forms. Among English short-story writers, he is second only to Kipling, who also wrote a single great novel, Kim. Among twentieth-century English book critics and reviewers, he is supreme. 

Pritchett is one of the few writers whose work, even the minor stuff, I have tried to read in toto. His memoirs and travel books are worth pursuing, especially Marching Spain (1928) and The Spanish Temper (1954). I remember in 1979 reading Pritchett’s essay in The New York Review of Books on a writer unknown to me, his longtime friend Gerald Brenan. Both men loved Spain. The country has interested me since I first read Unamuno, and Pritchett and Brenan sustained my interest. Thanks to Pritchett I read Fortunata and Jacinta (1886), a great novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. How good it is to remember reading his review and eventually reading Brenan, including The Spanish Labyrinth (1950), South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village (1957) and and his study of St. John of the Cross (1973). Here is how Pritchett begins his Brenan review:

 

“There is a moment in the old age of a writer when he finds the prospect of one more long haul in prose intimidating and when he claims the right to make utterances. We grow tired of seeing our experience choked by the vegetation in our sentences. We opt for the pithy, the personal, and the unapologetic. For years we have had a crowd of random thoughts waiting on our doorstep, orphans or foundlings of the mind that we have not adopted: the moment of the aphorism, the epigram, the clinching quotation has come.”

 

Which reads like a near-definition of blogging. Like Pritchett, Brenan was a gifted portraitist. In his autobiography Personal Record (1975), Brenan devotes two pages to his friend, describing him as “the best company imaginable – alive to his fingertips, amusing, sagacious, always in good spirits and of course very intelligent.” He writes of Pritchett, making him sound like a variation on a writer he loved, Anton Chekhov:

 

“To meet he is the most friendly and genial of men. Though highly strung, one cannot imagine him ever being angry or impatient. No one has ever been snubbed by him, no one brushed off in a review. He is completely without bad feelings or malice. Then his conversation is very stimulating -- witty and full of fantasy yet also balanced and judicious. The hard struggle he had to survive in his early years caused him to mature early and it also rubbed off the rough corners so that he has no eccentricities, but is always sanity itself. One can sum him up as a man who keeps down to earth, a man without false hopes or illusions, an accepter and recorder of things as they are. Yet the imagery in his writings often betrays a half-buried sense for poetry.”

 

Long ago I added Pritchett to my rollcall of surrogate teachers, along with Joseph Epstein, Guy Davenport and Robert Alter.

'The Fundamental Truth of His Periodic Law”

My middle son is given to serial enthusiasms, what others call hobbies. He’s a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, now in training at Quantico, and spends his weekends rock climbing in Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This lends a pleasing symmetry to his life, as one of his longest, most intense obsessions as a boy was rock collecting. His collection is stored in a wooden cabinet in our garage. Rocks were followed by coins, carnivorous plants, the trombone, computers (he built his first at age eleven) and etymology, a pastime still thriving (we killed fifteen minutes last week talking about the word venery). 

Michael’s enthusiasm I recall most fondly was his effort, around age ten, to redesign the periodic table of elements. He respected Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who designed the original, but thought he could do better. I remember stacks of notebook paper covered with the familiar, variously colored boxes but arranged in unexpected shapes. I still have some of them. If I had to propose a common theme among Michael’s revised periodic tables and other interests, I would call them efforts to organize the world for human understanding. I think of him as a sort of amateur Linnaeus with interests beyond biology.

 

To celebrate the International Year of the Periodic Table in 2019 (the 150^th anniversary of Mendeleev’s creation), the American Chemical Society’s journal C&EN reprinted an article the late Dr. Oliver Sacks had published with them in 2003: “An Essay on Gallium,” which begins: “I don’t really have a favorite element—I love them all. But the first that pops into my mind, at least today, is gallium [Ga, atomic number 31].”

 

I can't say that I love plutonium (Pu, atomic number 94). Elsewhere, Sacks said his favorite element was bromine (Br, atomic number 35). He titled his 2001 memoir Uncle Tungsten [W, atomic number 94]: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. In the gallium article Sacks writes:

 

“Why gallium? Not a common element, not one likely to be lying around the house, but one I was introduced to quite early on, by my Uncle Tungsten (as we used to call my Uncle Dave, who owned a tungsten lightbulb factory).”

 

Sacks gets around to celebrating Mendeleev: “When I came to learn about the periodic table and its history, I was intrigued to learn that gallium was the first element to be predicted by Mendeleyev (he called it ‘eka-aluminum’), and how this prediction was vindicated, just six years later, helping to convince Mendeleyev’s critics of the fundamental truth of his periodic law.”

 

My favorite element is molybdenum (Mo, atomic number 42). My fondness has nothing to do with its chemical properties or its use in military armor, aircraft parts, electrical contacts and industrial motors. I just love saying that double iamb.

'Appetizing, Clear and Understandable'

This I found in an interview with the late novelist Richard G. Stern: “I prefer windows to mirrors. Not just for diversion, or something to study. I like new vocabularies, rhythms, ways of thinking, associations of every sort.” 

Stern (1928-2013) was seventy-one at the time and his literary arteries seem not to have been calcifying. That’s nearly my age and I appreciate the impromptu pep talk. It’s so tempting to slide, to get complacent and arrogant about what we think we already know. But neither do I think there’s anything necessarily magical about the new. The proportion of rubbish produced by humans remains roughly steady across the centuries. Most new novels have always been not worth reading. Talent is rare and genius (Tolstoy, Proust) is virtually nonexistent. And I still plan, as I have for decades, to read Lady Murasaki.

   

One of life’s most embarrassing phenomena is an old person forever striving desperately to be young and hip – guys my age with ponytails come to mind. “Act your age” has taken on a new sobering sense. About still writing at his age, Stern says:

 

“To make life both appetizing, clear and understandable, what could be a more beautiful thing to do? I’m sure every serious writer feels this way.”

 

[James Atlas’ interview with Stern was published in the Chicago Review in 1999.]

'Soothe the Soul and Nurture the Imagination'

“Among the lessons we’ve learned during these past few difficult years of pandemic, climate crisis and political discord is that beauty and nature matter more than ever, and that if our homes are to be sanctuaries from an often harsh outside world, then we should fill them with objects and art that soothe the soul and nurture the imagination.” 

A friend who owns several paintings by Wolf Kahn (1927-2020) sent me an article (quoted above) in which the author, Anthony Barzilay Freund, describes the intensity of his reactions to Kahn’s work. I agree: his colors are ravishing. His landscapes and buildings glow. I’m untrained in the visual arts and can’t write or even think about them in a sophisticated fashion. Why the work of certain painters – Kahn, Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, Richard Diebenkorn, to cite only Americans – stirs so powerful an emotion remains a mystery.

 

An aesthetic capacity is almost universal among humans and yet for the last century or more we have valorized ugliness in all the arts. Consider the skylines of our cities, the music of Albert Ayler and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the proud incoherencies of the Language Poets. In his essay “Uses of Painting Today,” published in the Summer 1969 issue of Dedalus, Kahn writes:  

 

“Paintings, we are told, must communicate. But, then, every thing communicates depending on the willingness of people to look or listen. An artist really has no responsibility to try to communicate. If no audience is readily at hand, he is forced to wait till the receptors have become more sensitive and alert. This cannot happen overnight. Only the most conventional work speaks to all on first sight. An audience needs exposure, familiarity, a period of sympathetic watchfulness, before it becomes tuned to respond to any challenging art.”

 

Rather than embodying beauty, painting and the other arts today seem almost exclusively dedicated to communicating something – often the artist’s wish to offend and provoke, and certainly to relate a “message” and celebrate himself. Kahn’s paintings celebrate painting and, by implication, the world.

'Buy Something Before You Get Socked in the Eye'

The indispensable Brad Bigelow of The Neglected Books Page has introduced me to a poet I had never known before, Margaret Fishback (1900-85). Like L.E. Sissman she worked in advertising and published in The New Yorker. Unlike Sissman, she wrote light verse almost exclusively and was commercially successful, at least briefly. 

From the university library I borrowed two of Fishback's books – her first, I Feel Better Now (1932), and her fifth, a first edition of Time for a Quick One (1940). The former is already in its sixth printing just two months after publication. On the end paper someone has written in pencil: “J.S. / 23^rd floor / Smith Young Tower.”  Tucked between pages 68 and 69 is a pink Houston streetcar ticket dated November 22, 1932 – almost  ninety-one years ago. Two boxes are punched: “Ten Cent Fare Paid” and “Cottage Grove.” The ticket left a brown, butterfly-shaped stain across the two pages. On the left is “Saleslady’s Spring Song”:

 

“Polka dot, polka dot, printed foulard,

Thirty-five inches is almost a yard.

If it were wider, a remnant would do;

Here’s the same print in a new shade of blue.

Wrap it about your anatomy. So. . . .

Youthful, distinctive! You’ll love it, I know.

Polka dot, polka dot, printed foulard,

Thirty-five inches is almost a yard.

(Make up your mind, will you, madam, and buy

Something before you get socked in the eye.)”

 

Like many of Fishback’s poems, this one is about women. There’s nothing patronizing about it, and the final couplet, with its tough-broad manner, might have been written by Dorothy Parker. Fishback’s verse is untouched by Modernism. She was writing in the Age of Light Verse, when even newspapers routinely published it. The poem on the right is “Time Out”:

 

“Impressive promises I do

Not make myself, nor ask of you,

For eagerness I prize above

All other requisites of love.

So never try to tell me when

You’ll want to be with me again.

Nor pledge your love for Saturday

While it is yet an hour away.

For even if you ever could

Be sure of Saturday, I would

Be loathe to lose that sweet suspense

Which dissipates indifference.

 

“So, darling, if you’d rather be

With someone else than here with me,

I’ll understand and sympathize

And stifle all my plaintive sighs.

And try to make you think I do

Not care too consistently for you.”

 

A more serious poem, about a woman playing the game of love. Yes, Fishback published in The New Yorker but also in Good Housekeeping, Redbook Magazine, Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar and Department Store Buyer. I’m guessing most of her readership was female. Time for a Quick One seems ripe with double-entendres, starting with its title, but they may all be innocent. Here is “Lip Service”:

 

“Women are wacky. Women are vain.

They’d rather be pretty than have a good brain.

They’d rather be minus their skirts and their slips,

Than ever be caught with rouge on their Lips.

The house might be burning right under their feet,

But still they’d not leave till their maps were complete.

Of wives, and career girls as well, this is true . . .

P.S. This admission applies to me too.”

'Provided That He Gives Us What We Can Enjoy'

A reader is enjoying Tristram Shandy and passing along choice selections from Sterne’s novel. This she gleaned from Book V, Chap. 32, spoken by Tristram’s father: 

“—Here is the glass for pedagogues, preceptors, tutors, governors, gerund-grinders, and bear-leaders, to view themselves in, in their true dimensions.--”

 

Let’s keep in mind what Sterne writes two paragraphs earlier: “Everything in this world, said my father, is big with jest,—and has wit in it, and instruction too,--if we can but find it out.”

 

Gerund-grinders I love. See the entry for it in Green’s Dictionary of Slang: “a schoolteacher, esp. a pedant; thus gerund-grinding, instruction in Latin grammar, pedantic instruction generally.” It’s unfair to single out Latin teachers. No subject is immune to dull instructors. I had two Latin teachers, both women, both demanding, both excellent. The subject was difficult but they were not.

 

My reader may be Sterne’s ideal reader. She’s blessed with brains, a sense of humor and “negative capability.” In Keats’ words, she is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason— . . .” She’s lapping up Sterne’s eccentricities without complaint. In this she reminds me of another reader, George Eliot, who read Tristram Shandy aloud to George Henry Lewes as she was preparing to write her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). In “Story-Telling,” a brief essay posthumously published in Essays and Leaves from a Notebook (1884), she writes:

 

“Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author’s idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy? The objections to Sterne’s wild way of telling ‘Tristram Shandy’ lie more solidly in the quality of the interrupting matter than in the fact of interruption. The dear public would do well to reflect that they are often bored from the want of flexibility in their own minds. They are like the topers of ‘one liquor.’”

'There Was No One There Anymore'

Jorge Luis Borges published his final story collection, Shakespeare’s Memory, in 1983, three years before his death. The first story in the volume is “August 25, 1983.” The narrator is Borges or at least one version of Borges. He enters a hotel and sees his own name signed in the register. In his room he meets himself:

 
“In the pitiless light, I came face to face with myself. There, in the narrow iron bed—older, withered, and very pale—lay I, on my back, my eyes turned up vacantly toward the high plaster moldings of the ceiling.”
 
The speaker, in effect, confronts a ghost of himself from the future. As usual with Borges, the tone is dry and matter-of-fact. No shivers, no melodrama. The premise and theme will be familiar to readers of his better-known story, “Borges and I,” which concludes: “I’m not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.” The old Borges tells the young Borges that “we are two yet we are one.” We coexist with other versions of ourselves. We contain multitudes, as one of Borges' favorites, Walt Whitman, put it.
 
I remember in the sixties when the Argentine writer was first being translated and discovered by English-speaking readers. He was marketed, on occasion, as a science fiction or fantasy writer, a sort of Philip K. Dick who could actually write. I’m told his Spanish is masterful. In English his prose is cool and precise, with few pyrotechnics. Borges reserved the pyrotechnics for his themes. Others, especially academics, treated him like a south-of-the-border postmodernist, which seriously underrates him. His stories often blur into essays and his essays into stories.
 
Think how tiresome the situation in “August 25, 1983” would read in the hands of a tacky conventional writer. Borges is above all a masterful storyteller, a descendent of Stevenson, Kipling and Chesterton.
 
Old Borges tell his younger self, “‘You will write our best poem—an elegy.’”
 
“‘On the death of . . .’ I began. I could not bring myself to say the name.”
 
“‘No. She will outlive you.’”    
 
Pure romance. And brave for a man already eighty-three years old. In the third-to-last paragraph, young Borges writes of his old self: “He stopped talking; I realized that he had died. In a way, I died with him—in grief I leaned over his pillow, but there was no one there anymore.”
 
Borges died on August 24, 1986.
 
[I’m using Andrew Hurley’s translation of “Veinticinco de agosto, 1983” in Collected Fictions (Viking, 1998).]

'Cursed with an Acute Literary Conscience'

Who among critics would begin a review with so seemingly inartistic a statement?: 

“Some writers have a dread of platitudes. I have not. What is a platitude but an expression of the wisdom of the ages, the synopsis of a theory that was long ago propounded, tested, established, never subverted?”

 

Lusting after originality and snubbing the truths of tradition have sabotaged the work of a million writers. Originality is a myth. It has all been done before. A writer’s job is to do it again, perhaps a little better. The author quoted above is Max Beerbohm, writing his final column as drama critic for London’s Saturday Review, published April 16, 1910. He had served in that role since 1898, succeeding George Bernard Shaw. In his first column Beerbohm had famously written: “I have none of that instinctive love for the theatre that is the first step towards good criticism of drama. I am not fond of the theatre.”

 

Call it a rare gift for being charming while contrary. Joseph Epstein has said Beerbohm’s admirers must possess “a strong penchant for irony, a skeptical turn of mind, and a sharp taste for comic incongruity.” I would add a fondness for precisely calibrated prose. Take Beerbohm’s subsequent sentences in that final column:

 

“Truth, of course, is a delicate and many-sided affair. For every platitude there is at least one other platitude to dilute and qualify it. Thus, when we speak of ourselves as ‘creatures of habit,’ let us not forget to throw in something about ‘the charm of novelty.’ And never let our love of novelty break us of our wholesome habit of platitudinizing.”

 

Few writers possess the stamina to produce a weekly theater review for twelve years. Fewer still turn out memorable prose while meeting the tyrannical demands of a deadline. Beerbohm’s friends thought he was squandering his gifts on mere journalism. He disagreed, writing:

 

“I believe that the obligation to write every week a fugitive article for a largish public is no bad thing for a writer inclined, as I was, to ‘preciosity.’ I believe that my way of writing became more chaste, through journalism, and stronger.”

 

Writing the theater reviews cured Beerbohm of his more Wildean preciousness. He became a substantial, confident, amusing writer and produced his finest essays in the post-Saturday Review years – in particular, those collected in And Even Now (1920). Back to that final review:

 

“Writing has always been uphill work to me, mainly because I am cursed with an acute literary conscience. To seem to write with ease and delight  is one of the duties which a writer owes to his readers, to his art. And to contrive that effect involves very great skill and care: it is a matter of technique, a matter of construction, partly, and partly of choice of words and cadences. . . . I may often have failed in my articles here, to disguise labour. But the effort to disguise it has always been loyally made.”

 

In Beerbohm I hear an echo of Dr. Johnson, as reported in Johnsonian Miscellanies (ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 1897): “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

 

Beerbohm was born on this date, August 24, in 1872 and died in 1956 at age eighty-three.

 

[The reviews quoted above are collected in Around Theatres (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953).]

'That Is My Ambition Here'

Does anyone still read “Invictus”? Is it part of any school’s curriculum? It was as late as 1965, when Miss Wagy had us memorize it in eighth-grade English. The poem is irresistible for recitation, whether privately in times of self-doubt or at the Kiwanis luncheon: “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.” Its defiant stance is rousing, which makes sense when you know that the poem’s author, William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis at age twelve and his left leg was amputated below the knee. Henley’s friend Robert Louis Stevenson admitted his one-legged character Long John Silver in Treasure Island was inspired by Henley. 

A first-time reader of “Invictus” might mistake it for a string of clichés. This is a common phenomenon among inexperienced readers. They read, for instance, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” encounter “The short and simple annals of the poor” and “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and conclude that Gray has strung together a bunch of tired adages we’ve already heard. In fact, Gray was the first to craft those memorable phrases. In a 1976 interview with The Transatlantic Review, the Irish novelist and short story writer William Trevor is asked about his characters’ use of clichés, and he replies:

 

“Clichés, after all, are a reflection of life. They are like fashion: not untrue in any way. They are facts and yet somebody will read one and say ‘Well, this is just a cliché.’ It’s not just a cliché. . . . It’s a cliché world we live in now.”

 

Consider the poetry anthology Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys Henley edited in 1891. “To set forth,” Henley writes in his preface, “as only art can, the beauty and the joy of living, the beauty and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion—to a cause, an ideal, a passion even—the dignity of resistance, the sacred quality of patriotism, that is my ambition here.”

 

I encountered five poets previously unknown to me, which is always a gift. Henley values not obscurity or exoticism but good, solid, pre-Modernist poems he judges important for boys to read – not afraid to be beautiful, joyous, patriotic – all the qualities identified by Henley in his preface. He’s not, like so many anthologists, out to collect the outré, regardless of quality. There’s plenty of verse here that is unreadable. But even some of the dated stuff bordering even in its own day on cliché is worth revisiting. Take “Is Life Worth Living?” (also the title of an 1896 volume by William James) written by Alfred Austin (1835-1913), which concludes: “He is dead already who doth not feel / Life is worth living still.”

 

Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849 and died in 1903 at age fifty-three.

'The Lack of Self-deception'

“There is a difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously, for its own sake.” 

A fine distinction, one often lost on us. Auden is describing Shakespeare’s Richard III and refers us to the great monologue that opens the play that bears his name. It always hooks me: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York . . .” It’s not just the metaphor. It’s the stately roll of the words, a cadence almost military. Next, Auden likens Richard’s unapologetic villainy to a more recent historical figure:

 

“Richard III’s monologue is not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939, in it’s utter lack of self-deception. The lack of self-deception is striking because most of us invent plausible reasons for doing something we know is wrong.”

 

Speaking at the New School for Social Research in New York City on October 16, 1946, Auden is referring to Hitler’s Obersalzberg speech made to his Wehrmacht commanders one week before he invaded Poland and started World War II. It was only seven years later -- recent history. In his speech Hitler announces his intentions:

 

“Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.”

 

Richard’s aim was not genocide or world conquest but raw power. The historical Richard reigned as king of England for two years. In his opening monologue, Shakespeare has him say:

 

“I am determined to prove a villain,

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the King

In deadly hate the one against the other . . .”

 

No pussyfooting, no sweet veneer of euphemism. He tells us what he intends to do, and soon he will do it, as did Hitler. The Battle of Bosworth, during which Richard was killed, was fought on this date, August 22, in 1485. It was the last major  battle of the Wars of the Roses, the civil war between the houses of Lancaster and York that lasted more than twenty years. The war’s casualties include some 105,000 men dead in the fighting, when England’s population totaled roughly three-million. Richard’s death at Bosworth ended the Plantagenet dynasty, the rulers of England since 1154.

 

[Auden’s remarks are collected in Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000). I grew up watching Olivier’s Richard III (1955), which seemed like a Western with peculiar costumes and too much talking.]

'A Line or Two Worth Keeping All Too Rare'

“He has never been much of a poet for opening magic casements -- ordinary dirty storm windows, rather.” 

That’s X.J. Kennedy on Kingsley Amis, clearly seeing his own reflection in that dirty window. Both are proof that the best writers of light verse or comic poetry are serious people, not Jerry Lewis clones. Their poems are moral in motivation – usually not moralistic – and suggest some failing in the world while seldom excluding themselves from the failure indictment. Theirs is a nimble balancing act. Kennedy has said he prefers “comic verse” to “light” and adds: “I like poems that are a mixture of laughter and sorrow.” Like Shakespeare.

 

Kennedy is the living poet I have been reading the longest. His first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase, was published in 1961 and I encountered him a few years later. How many contemporary writers can you name who have supplied pleasure and the strength to endure for almost sixty years? Take “On Being Accused of Wit,” from Dark Horses (1992):

 

“Not so. I’m witless. Often in despair

At long-worked botches I must throw away,

A line or two worth keeping all too rare.

Blind chance not wit entices words to stay

And recognizing luck is artifice

That comes unlearned. The rest is taking pride

In daily labor. This and only this.

On keyboards sweat alone makes fingers glide.

 

“Witless, that juggler rich in discipline

Who brought the Christchild all he had for gift,

Flat on his back with beatific grin

Keeping six slow-revolving balls aloft;

Witless, La Tour, that painter none too bright,

His draftsman’s compass waiting in the wings,

Measuring how a lantern stages light

Until a dark room overflows with rings.”

 

Kennedy’s gift is versatile. Gravity and wit, he proves, are compatible, as they were in Herbert and Donne. He published “The Poems of Wilmer Mills” in the Summer 2012 issue of The Sewanee Review. Mills had died a year earlier at age forty-one:

 

“Each one is like a coin of heavy gold,

Modest the denomination on its face,

Not meant to spend, a valuable to hold,

One that no common mintage can replace.”

 

Kennedy was born on this date, August 21, in 1929. Happy ninety-fourth, Joe.

'The Fragility of Happiness'

Christopher Carduff, books editor at the Wall Street Journal, asked me to review a new translation of a Russian novel due for publication in November. The proofs arrived on Thursday and I sent Chris an email letting him know I was already reading the book. The email bounced back with “out of office” on the subject line. I figured he was on vacation. Only on Friday did I learn from a friend that Chris had died last Monday at age sixty-six.

Between us, we had exchanged seven emails (not counting that last one), enough to suggest that this was an editor whose literary judgment I could trust. In my first note I complimented Chris on the two volumes of William Maxwell’s work he edited for the Library of America in 2008. He served as a contributing editor at the LoA from 2006 to 2017, before joining the Journal, whose weekend book section he turned into one of the best in the country. I could also have mentioned The Golden West (2005), Daniel Fuchs’ collection of Hollywood writings edited by Chris for David Godine. Fuchs was author in the 1930s of a wonderful trilogy of Brooklyn novels.  Here is Chris on my favorite among Maxwell’s novels:

“I love the loose-limbed, improvisatory feel of Time Will Darken It. With this book Maxwell was moving beyond personal history and trying to write a kind of social history of the small town he grew up in. It has the largest and most varied cast of any of his books, and it’s painted on a big canvas: it’s like a Midwestern Brueghel, or one of those Chinese scrolls with hundreds of figures, people high and low, young and old, at work and at play.”

In Maxwell’s early work, Chris says, we see him “discovering his signature subject matter—the fragility of happiness, dramatized against the details of small-town Midwestern family life in the early 20th century.”

You’ve got to love a reader/writer/editor who starts by saying he “loves” a book. I wish I had had a chance to work with Chris.

'An Ordinary Life Where Things Make Sense'

An old friend back in upstate New York and I were texting. We worked years ago as reporters for the same newspaper. She was married then to her second husband, who had multiple sclerosis and died slowly and horribly. When she had to  go out of town, I would stay with him and watch old movies – The Dirty Dozen and Shaft I remember. I never met her first husband, who died several years ago. The health problems of her third husband are getting more severe. Much of his life is organized around visits to the doctor. I met him once long ago and he seems like a good-hearted guy. Obviously, Kathy has been facing more challenges than seems humanly fair. That little itch I get when I feel powerless and can’t help someone is nagging again. 

Wilmer Mills was a fine poet who died in 2011 at age forty-one. He was a formalist, a thoughtful writer, not a whiner or hysteric. He was the kind of guy who could build his own house and earn a living as a farmer and carpenter, along with teaching and writing. What I’ve read about him reminds me of my middle son, the Marine, who also embodies competence. One of his poems is titled “Pop’s Happy Land and Truck Stop.” Mills focuses on a waitress who works there:

 

“Reality for her is like a story,

One that refuses to accept the past

And has no future, only now, today . . .”

 

What do I wish, futilely, for Kathy? Mills writes in another poem, “Crosswalk”:

 

“I want things I cannot have:

Assurance that my children never suffer;

An ordinary life where things make sense.”

'We Are So Lucky Having English'

“We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.” 

It’s fashionable in some quarters to distrust language, to be suspicious of its tricky, seductive ways. Personally, I like being seduced. I sleep soundly at night knowing the language I was born into is overflowing with synonyms. As native speakers it’s our job to gauge nuance and make the subtle distinctions, weighing sound and sense. I remember the time in 2006 when the Oxford English Dictionary logged its one-billionth word.

 

Consider the great gourmands (French!) of the language – Shakespeare, Browne, Joyce. Revel in Shakespeare’s linguistic cockiness, deploying some 31,534 different words in his plays and poems, more than six times the number used today by a typical, well-educated native speaker. He was so verbally spendthrift (Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII: “And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sigh,/That hurts by easing”), Shakespeare could afford to use some 14,376 words only once – more than appear in the entire King James Bible. The OED credits him with introducing roughly 3,000 words to the language – more than most of today’s college graduates will use in their entire life. One starts feeling patriotic about our native tongue.

 

The observation at the top is spoken by the late John Whitworth, the British poet who died in 2019 at age seventy-three. I wish I had come to his work earlier. He and R.S. Gwynn had good things to say about each other. His language is chewy and mouth-pleasing. Asked what poets he likes who have not influenced his work, Whitworth replies:

 

“Shakespeare. Browning. Wallace Stevens. Stevens is surprising. He surprises me, actually. Language, don’t you know. What language can do. We are so lucky having English. We might be stuck with French with a tiny Latinate vocabulary. Or Swedish, a language nobody else knows. English is like Ancient Greek, all the words, all those different ways of saying. . . . I used to teach English to foreigners and it is hard. We are lucky — English, Aussies, Americans, because it’s not hard for us. We’re ahead of the game.”

 

In Whitworth’s Gogolian-titled “Dead Souls,” published in First Things in 2014, he  writes:

 

“Alas poor ghosts, on whirring, westering wings,

Too late, too late--it cuts you like a knife--

Tedious in death as tedious in life,

They mourn the lost magnificence of things.”

 

His language is rich but not histrionically exotic. You might need to look up “westering,” though maybe not if you listen closely. Whitworth is an inveterately amusing poet, though his humor coexists with a linguistic grandeur, seldom overwritten, that recalls Shakespeare. The late Les Murray called Whitworth a “master of metrical whigmaleerie.” In his poems there’s a refusal to be sententious, which is not the same as not being serious. Here is Whitworth’s “Think of the Old,” published in the June 1990 issue of Encounter:

 

“Think of the old in their overfurnished rooms,

Nests of fretwork tables spelling disaster

To the teacups of occasional visitors,

Little lacquer mats and china cats, like the Egyptian tombs

With everything down to a toothbrush, as if

The afterlife were a long seaside visit.

So death is just another place to go

And the chalky body’s in training for a stiff.

To the young this is eerie. Their living spaces

Are all contingent. Anywhere I hang my hat

Is home. Possessions strewn, melamine bookshelves

Up on housebricks beckoning. A place is

For starting from. The old have had all that; they know

What happens to us is ourselves.”

'For Whom They Were Framed in Words'

Louis MacNeice is startlingly prescient in “To Posterity,” originally published in Visitations (1957): 

“When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?”

 

He speaks to us in our age of “other, less difficult, media.” MacNeice may have been thinking most immediately of such passive media as radio. For twenty-two years he wrote and produced programs for the BBC. In August 1963, while caving in Yorkshire to collect sound effects for broadcast, MacNeice became sick with bronchitis and viral pneumonia. He died on September 3 at age fifty-five.

 

MacNeice’s poem is one long question. He suggests that the absence of books, reading and speaking drains the world of vividness and meaning. When no longer “framed in words,” existence grows drab. Language is the human capacity that animates our understanding of the world. When mute, life becomes a very dull place. Go back to that first line, to “books in graveyards,” those unreadable stone ornaments shaped like books, the “Book of Life.”      

 

More than a century before MacNeice addressed posterity, Charles Lamb proposed a mirror-image reversal of the Irishman’s conceit. When an editor rejects one of his sonnets, Lamb declares to Bryan Waller Procter in an 1829 letter: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” Lamb habitually looked to the past for what was good and interesting while simultaneously making fun of himself for doing so, just as he poked fun at his oh-so-earnest friend Hazlitt for lionizing Napoleon and dabbling in radical chic. In the Elia essay “Oxford in the Vacation,” Lamb writes:

 

 “Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!”

'And Now We Shall Never, Never See Her Again'

Ian Donaldson begins his 2011 biography of Ben Jonson not with the poet’s birth nor even his death but with his interment in Westminster Abbey. Though a popular playwright during his lifetime, Jonson died in poverty and was buried vertically in order to consume less valuable real estate. The upright position of the body was confirmed three times in the nineteenth century, when his grave was opened during neighboring interments. In the driest of tones, Donaldson devotes six pages to the less-than-dignified fate of Jonson’s carcass. None of which should suggest Jonson was a scorned or forgotten man. His biographer writes: 

“Ben Jonson, ‘the most famous, accurate, and learned poet of our age,’ died on 16 August 1637 [and was buried the following day]. . . . It was the height of summer, and many of Jonson’s friends and admirers would have left the metropolis, yet the crowd that assembled at his house in Westminster to accompany the body to the Abbey included ‘all or the greatest part of the nobility and gentry then in town.’ Jonson’s death  was evidently seen as a major public event: the passing of the dominant literary figure of the age. Shakespeare’s death in April 1616 had been quite a different affair . . .”

 

Another, humbler death was recorded 215 years later on the same date, August 16, in 1862: Rose Malingre, the housekeeper for Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (Pages from the Goncourt Journal, trans. Robert Baldick, 1962), died that day:

 

“The two of us stood there in the drawing-room with the thought which the news of somebody’s death always inspires: ‘We shall never see her again!’ – a mechanical thought which recurs again and again.”

 

The Goncourts are not the most sensitive of witnesses, especially when women are involved. But their reaction is touching and true to the experience of having a loved one die. Malingre had served the brothers since they were boys:  

 

"It was this woman, this admirable nurse, whose hands our dying mother put into ours. She had the keys to everything she decided and did everything for us. For as long as we could remember we had made the same old jokes about her ugliness and her ungainly body, and for twenty-five years she had given us a kiss every night. She shared everything with us, our sorrows and our joys. Hers was one of those devotions which one hopes will be there to close one’s eyes when death comes.”

 

Their grief as recounted in the journal sounds convincing: “And now we shall never, never see her again,” and so on for another page.

 

The Goncourts started keeping their journal in 1851 and usually wrote in the first-person plural. Jules died in 1870 of syphilis at the age of forty and Edmond continued writing it until his death in 1896. The brothers, who also wrote novels, plays and social history, knew Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Daudet, Degas, Rodin and Zola, among other Parisian luminaries, and they also knew the city’s brothels and society balls. Their journal is history as a higher, wittier, more observant form of gossip. They were neurotic. They were proto-bloggers, with temperaments nasty and generous, goatish and cerebral. Their prose is alternately rambling and aphoristic. Their appetite for life and everything else – including words -- was bottomless. The most moving portion of the journal is the watch kept by Edmond over his younger brother as he died slowly and agonizingly of his venereal disease.

 

There is a coda of sorts. In the entry dated five days after Malingre’s death, the brothers learn things (from Jules’ mistress, a midwife) about their housekeeper that “astonish” them. She had lost two babies by the dairywoman’s son – one stillborn, the other dead after six months – and had turned to alcohol and sex, enticing lovers with cash stolen from Edmond and Jules. The Goncourts had never noticed any of this. They write on August 21:

 

“Poor woman! We forgive her. Indeed, seeing something of what she must have suffered at the hands of those working-class pimps, we pity her. We are filled with a deep commiseration for her, but also with a great bitterness at this astounding revelation. . . . Suspicion of the entire female sex has entered into our minds for the rest of our lives: a horror of the duplicity of woman’s soul, of her prodigious gift, her consummate genius for mendacity.”

'He Doesn't Want to Read'

In a comment on last Friday’s post, my friend John Dieffenbach asks about bibliophile: 

“Is that a ‘lover of books’ because they are books? A lover of reading books? A lover of reading certain books? What makes one bibliophile more of a bibliophile than another? Size of the library? Nature of the reading? Volume of the reading?”

 

I replied, in part: “‘Bibliophile’ is a word I would never use with a straight face. To me it feels pretentious.” If a precise word is required, I’m happy to settle for reader. I told John there’s something decadent-seeming about the notion of bibliophilia. One might as well be collecting, like the late Robert Gottlieb, plastic handbags. I told John of an ambitious book collector I know who has to rent a storage unit to hold the volumes he has accumulated. He admits he’s not much of a reader. He’s a hoarder. For example, he has amassed more books by and about Eugenio Montale than I possess but has read none of them.

 

The person who would seriously use bibliophile in writing or speech would likely say that a writer “pens” his books. It must sound classy to some ears. Max Beerbohm in “Whistler’s Writing” (Yet Again, 1909) nicely distinguishes readers from bibliophiles:  

 

“I do not deem alien from myself nothing that is human: I discriminate my fellow-creatures according to their contents. And in that respect I am not more different in my way from the true humanitarian than from the true bibliophile in his. To him the content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because they are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He doesn’t want to read.”