'The Right Things in the Right Order'

“But surely the stories of Chekhov or the paintings of de Chirico move us not only because they are so well done, but because in each case the artist has arranged exactly the right things in the right order. The choice of subject matter has been at least half of the achievement. Of course, if the rendering were less accomplished, its inaccuracies would distract us or stand between us and what was going on; but the aptness of the rendering alone could never explain the mysterious hold those words in the dark have over us.” 

This passage can be found rather unexpectedly in the middle of Edmund White’s review of  Selected Poems by Howard Moss, published in 1974 in Poetry. It would seem commonsensical – a book, despite the pretensions of the avant-garde, must have content, substance of interest to the reader – but we’ve all endured books that are empty, that we are forgetting as we read them. If we remember anything, it’s a fog of tedium. I’m reminded of Ishmael’s aphorism in Chapter 104 of Moby-Dick, “The Fossil Whale”: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” White goes on:

 

“The best critical taste of our day is so impatient with gushy talk about what a writer ‘means,’ about what he is ‘trying to say,’ that we sometimes ignore what in fact he is saying, as though subject matter were no point of interest at all . . .”

 

White then tops himself by quoting, of all people, T.S. Eliot, in his 1933 essay “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism”:

 

“The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for the house-dog.”