'They Are Wary of My Plain-speaking'

A reader alerts me to a parlor game proposed by The Guardian in 2017: Which books do I wish my younger self had read? Julian Barnes suggests volumes devoted to “the true nature of war, empire and race,” which sounds a bit like retrospective virtue-signaling. William Boyd’s choice has the genuine virtue of novelty: Nabokov’s second novel, King, Queen, Knave (1928; trans. 1968). Most of the other titles suggested are negligible, not unlike the answers politicians give when asked to name their favorite books. 

In general, I wish I had read less fiction (especially contemporary fiction) and more history and biography. Also, fewer fashionable titles du jour. Instead of wasting my time with Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse and Eldridge Cleaver, I should have been reading Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968), supplemented with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). I don’t regret having read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which admitted me to an American world I didn’t know existed. To call oneself naïve when young is almost redundant. Like many young and inexperienced people, I indulged a childish and deeply intolerant utopian streak, at least in private. I never threw a Molotov cocktail.

 

Among poets, I wish I had read Yvor Winters, who would have saved me a lot of foolishness, boredom and embarrassment. The same goes for Jules Renard, who could have taught me the value of unclubability. On this date, January 31, in 1898, he writes in his Journal:

 

“My independence has its price. I tell people I have a horror of banquets and grand dinners: consequently I am not invited to them. I am invited separately, out of consideration. Otherwise I might put my foot in it. They are wary of my plain-speaking.

 

“Invited alone, I can have things my way, and the meal is soon over. Soup, two dishes, no choices, and a desert. I am kept sober. I am here for the conversation. Quick, clear the table! Let us go into the salon for coffee and get down to some talk.”

 

[See Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Originality, Learning, Acuteness, Terseness of Style'

Samuel Johnson: “Coxcombs and blockheads always have been, and always will be, innovators; some in dress, some in polity, some in language.” 

John Horne Tooke: “I wonder whether they invented the choice appellations you have just repeated.”

 

Johnson: “No, sir! Indignant wise men invented them.”

 

It sounds like a high-toned vaudeville routine, with Johnson’s crankiness exaggerated for humorous effect. We can thank Walter Savage Landor for the comic touch, though not all of his 174 Imaginary Conversations are amusing. If Landor has a contemporary reputation, it’s for being at least as hotheaded as William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle. He published his major prose work in five volumes between 1824 and 1829, with a sixth volume added later. Tooke (1736-1812) was an English politician and amateur philologist. Most of his conversation with Johnson is devoted to the latter subject:

 

Johnson: “There are faults committed by pedants for the mere purpose of defending them.”

 

Tooke: “Writers far removed from pedantry use expressions which, if we reflect on them, excite our wonder.”

 

Johnson: “Better those than vulgarisms.”

 

In the conversation between Archdeacon Julius Hare and himself, Landor says, “Poetry was always my amusement; prose, my study and business.’” During his life, Landor was better known for his poems, and he remains the leading epigrammist in the language between Ben Jonson and J.V. Cunningham. In 1849, on the occasion of his seventy-fourth birthday, Landor wrote his own epitaph, later titled “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher”:

 

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art;

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”  

 

Reading Imaginary Conversations almost a decade ago was a landmark in my life. It reminds me of several books I love but would never try to foist on other readers – Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, for instance, and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. They are simply too eccentric, too unlike what contemporary readers expect of a book, for many to find them even palatable let alone bookishly seductive. The appropriate readers will find their way to such books. Consider what so seasoned a reader of Imaginary Conversations as Hazlitt wrote in his review: 

 

“This work is as remarkable an instance as we have lately met with of the strength and weakness of the human intellect. It displays considerable originality, learning, acuteness, terseness of style, and force of invective — but it is spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter want of temper, of self-knowledge, and decorum.”

 

Landor was born on this date, January 30, in 1775 and died in 1864 at age eighty-nine.

 

[A very silly adaptation of Landor’s fictional conversations between historical figures was Steve Allen’s television series Meeting of Minds (1977-81), in which Theodore Roosevelt, Cleopatra, Thomas Paine and St. Thomas Aquinas sat around a table and chatted.]

 

[Robert Graves in the second paragraph of Goodbye to All That (1929) writes: “Swinburne, by the way, when a very young man, had gone to Walter Savage Landor, then a very old man, and been given the poet’s blessing he asked for; and Landor when a child had been patted on the head by Dr Samuel Johnson; and Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne for scrofula, the King’s evil . . .”]

'The Prejudice Against Humor?'

“What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic? Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of life is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not.” 

I don’t have the professional standing to do anything about it but would like to see the American Psychiatric Association, when next revising its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, include pathological humorlessness among its entries. The nature of the syndrome, its etiology and potential treatments are alarmingly under-researched despite the rapid spread of the disorder among the populace. I would also propose that clinicians devote intense scrutiny to the symbiotic relation between humorlessness and politics, another poorly researched malady.

 

The diagnostician quoted at the top is Dr. H.L. Mencken, who was fond of referring to one of our less distinguished presidents as Dr. Harding. The passage is from a section of Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918) titled “The Burden of Humor.” Mencken is best discovered when the reader is young, before one notices his periodic anti-Semitism and unhealthy preoccupation with Friedrich Nietzsche. Much of his prose carries an electric charge and he is reliably funny. He tends to be least interesting when he is least amusing.

 

“No,” Mencken continues, “there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and nonsense, humor and respectability, despite the skittish tendency to assume that there is. But, why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact of life lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness?”

 

Mencken’s answer to his question is another one of his problems, especially for more mature readers. Like Thoreau, another American writer who could craft interesting prose, he dismisses the masses as cretinous drones: “the average man is far too stupid to make a joke.” Another name for Mencken’s failing here is snobbery. Mencken doesn’t always make it easy for a reader. His humor and vitality are bracing, until he says something that bypasses humor on the way to outrageousness. Of the average man, Mencken writes, “[I]t is not often that he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condone frivolity in a sage.”

 

Mencken here reminds me of another prolific journalist-turned-author who had a problem with Jews, G.K. Chesterton. In “On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity” (Heretics, 1905), the Englishman notes that the opposite of “funny” is not “serious” but “not funny”:

 

“[M]en are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics. But all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are the oldest jokes in the world--being married; being hanged.”

 

Mencken died on this date, January 29, in 1956 at age seventy-five. “Lincoln, had there been no Civil War,” he writes, “might have survived in history chiefly as the father of the American smutty story—the only original art-form that America has yet contributed to literature.”

'Buttonhole Strangers on the Street'

Dedicated readers have to be optimists. When we return to a book already read and enjoyed, often decades later, we’re acting on faith, trusting that we and it remain compatible. That’s not always the case, of course. My younger self is not a reliable critic. For too long I was an omnivore, reading books I wouldn’t open on a bet today and plowing through them, sometimes without a lick of pleasure. I think of that as guilt reading, something I no longer do, just as I no longer feel obligated to finish every book I start. 

As a kid I loved Studs Lonigan. Farrell’s trilogy seemed like “real life” when I was thirteen, and that was something I looked for in novels. I knew guys like Studs and his buddies. I tried reading it again last year in the Library of America edition and gave up after twenty or thirty pages. Farrell didn’t write a “bad” novel. The failing is mine. There was no sense of rediscovery or even nostalgia. We had grown apart.

 

Our leap of faith must be even more strenuous when it comes to reading new books. If the writer is previously unfamiliar to us, it’s a crap shoot, though even a familiar author can disappoint us. New books must compete with the old ones for our attention. I’m jealous of my time devoted to reading, and don’t like to squander it on the mediocre or just plain lousy. Knowing I can always read Joseph Conrad again is reassuring.

 

In his essay “The Bowl of Diogenes” (Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, 2009), William Logan writes:

 

“A critic is, nonetheless, the most optimistic man alive, living in perpetual hope, like a Latter-day Saint. No matter how many times he is disappointed, he opens each new book with an untarnished sense of possibility. If, amid the dust heaps of mediocrity, he does find a few books rich and strange, such is the essential generosity of this peculiar craft that his first impulse is to call everyone he knows and to buttonhole strangers on the street.”

 

That goes for for civilians -- that is, common readers -- as well as critics.

'But, Take It From This Famous Pote [sic]'

Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books has published his latest anthology of Horace translations, this time a generous 417 versions of Ode 1.5, the “Ode to Pyrrha,” dating from 1621 to 2007. The one I’m familiar with is John Milton’s, described by the poet as “rendered almost word for word without Rhyme according to the Latin Measure.” Scrolling through Isaac’s table of contents and pausing occasionally to sample an entry, I recognized an unexpected name: Morrie Ryskind (1895-1985), not exactly a well-known classicist. 

With George S. Kaufman, Ryskind co-wrote the stage version of Animal Crackers (1928) and the screenplays for four Marx Brothers movies: Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), A Night at the Opera (1935) and Room Service (1938). His theatrical collaborators included George and Ira Gershwin, and Irving Berlin. When Ryskind married in 1929, Groucho was his best man. In 1921, he had a volume of light verse, Unaccustomed As I Am, published by Knopf. It collects fourteen of his adaptations of Horatian odes, including Isaac’s selection, here titled “Horace the Wise”:

 

“Oh, Pyrrha, tell me who’s the guy,

The boob, the simp you’ve got a date with?

(Well I recall what time ’twas I

You’d tête-à-tête with!)

 

“I saw him in the barber’s chair:

His face perfumed with scented water,

And oil upon his shoes and hair –

Dressed for the slaughter!

 

“I do not know this kid whose goat

You’ve got by saying you adore him.

But, take it from this famous pote,

I’m sorry for him!

 

“The fates deal kindly with the lad!

This crush of his – how he will rue it!

He’ll call you everything that’s Bad –

Ain’t I been through it?”

 

I like the tough-guy diction – “the boob, the simp” -- and the use of “tête-à-tête” as a verb. “Pote,” I assume, is the way Ryskind thinks the semi-cretinous would pronounce “poet,” though the OED informs us that pote has seven meanings, none from later than 1694. His poem dates from early in the Golden Age of Light Verse. The quality of Ryskind’s light verse is spotty. Here is the first poem in his collection, “Opening Chorus”:

 

“A triolet’s a pretty thing

To open up a vol. with.

Oh, who can blame me if I sing,

A triolet’s a pretty thing!

With it a frail may cop a king —

It's good to make a moll with!

A triolet’s a pretty thing

To open up a vol. with!”

 

Frail as a noun takes me back to Dashiell Hammett and George Raft movies. See the OED: “Chiefly U.S. Usually depreciative. A sexually promiscuous woman; (also) a prostitute; a mistress. Later also: a girl or woman, esp. considered sexually. Now chiefly historical and likely to be regarded as offensive.” Italics in the original.

'They Fluttered Around Like Blue Snowflakes'

As a former newspaper reporter I regularly read three hard-copy newspapers: The Leader, a neighborhood weekly here in Houston; the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal; and County Highway. That’s down from thirty years ago when I read seven or eight papers every day (like a reporter: quickly, scanning for items of professional or personal interest). I don’t read newspapers online and haven’t read the New York Times much in several decades. 

County Highway started publishing last year and I subscribed from the start. It’s a print-only magazine in the form of a broadsheet newspaper that doesn’t stain your fingers with ink and arrives in the mail four times a year. Its slogan, “America’s Only Newspaper,” is provocative and almost true. You can’t read it online and the editors make no attempt to be timely. They’re not in the breaking-news business. Rather, they specialize in American idiosyncrasy, usually without being cute about it. There’s often an element of nostalgia in their story selection but it seldom descends into patronizing folksiness, and you’ll find no progressive self-aggrandizement. It’s not Yankee magazine or The Nation, and I read most of most issues.

 

The fourth issue of County Highway arrived this week with two stories involving writers on the front page. One, by co-founder and editor-at-large Walter Kirn, is about a chemically enhanced talk he once gave on Hemingway. The other, by Robert Michael Pyle, is devoted to Nabokov – not a subject I expected to see on the front page of a newspaper. Pyle, like Nabokov, is a lepidopterist. I know him best as co-editor with Brian Boyd of Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), with new translations by the novelist’s son Dmitri. It’s a grand book (820 pages), excellent for bedtime reading, and includes lists assembled by Pyle of all the butterflies described by Nabokov and those named after him.

 

Pyle makes a case for Nabokov’s standing as a lepidopterist, which isn’t news to the novelist’s longtime admirers. Pyle doesn’t spare the Linnean nomenclature and detail. He recounts Nabokov's study in the early 1950s of the Karner Blue butterfly, named for a village in suburban Albany, N.Y. As a reporter for the Albany newspaper, I often wrote about the insect’s habitat, the Albany Pine Bush, and visited the butterflies named by Nabokov -- Lycaeides melissa samuelis – flitting among the blue lupines. Pyle quotes a favorite passage from Pnin (1957):

 

“A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

 

Two-thirds of a page in County Highway is given over to Philippe Halsman’s photo of Nabokov “lepping” in Switzerland in 1966, while at work on Ada (1969). Pyle closes with an extended account of Nabokov’s hunt for butterflies in the mountains of Colorado in 1951. In a letter written to Edmund Wilson that September, he describes hiking to 10,000 feet and seeing the village of Telluride below: “[A]ll you hear are the voices of children playing in the streets – delightful!” Nabokov was then working on Lolita, and the sounds of children rising from the valley is transformed into Humbert Humbert’s “climacteric,” as Pyle calls it, the novel’s fifth-to-last paragraph:

 

“Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”

 

Finally, Humbert “acknowledges the enormity of his crime, the nature of his monstrosity,” as Pyle phrases it. Of that passage he writes: “This paragraph is the most heartbreaking thing I’ve read, and ties only with Darwin’s final paragraph in The Origin of Species as the most beautiful and affecting passage I know in the language.”

 

A stylistic tic that lends County Highway a pleasingly old-fashioned look is the use of multiple decks of headlines over articles. Pyle’s Nabokov piece has five in various sizes and fonts, starting with a boldface “NABOKOV’S BUTTERFLIES” and concluding with “He wrote great novels, too.” Pyle is a fine lepidopterist and not a bad critic.

 

[Concerning the conjunction of Hemingway and Nabokov on the front page of County Highway, the latter once said of the former: “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”]

'Passions and Perturbations of the Mind'

In his Dictionary (1755), Dr. Johnson illustrates fifteen words with citations from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): addle, colly, costard, doter, to filch, to fleer, giddyheaded, griper, hotspur, to macerate, muckhill, mutter, oligarchy, quacksalver and squalor. By my count, seven of them would likely be understood, at least in part and making allowances for evolving meanings, by a contemporary English-language reader -- eight, if we acknowledge Shakespeare’s use of “Hotspur.” My spelling software fails to recognize only four of them. 

Boswell famously reports Johnson saying the Anatomy was “the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise,” and it remains inexhaustibly entertaining, an education between two covers. Take squalor, a word that always reminds me of the subtitle of Flann O’Brien’s fourth novel, The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (1961). Once you start quoting Burton, it’s difficult to stop. His prose in endlessly amusing, intentionally and otherwise. Here is the larger context for the sentence Johnson cites for squalor, found in the section of the Anatomy titled “Poverty and Want” (as causes of melancholy):

 

“[L]ike those people that dwell in the Alps, chimney-sweepers, jakes-farmers, dirt-daubers, vagrant rogues, they labour hard some, and yet cannot get clothes to put on, or bread to eat. For what can filthy poverty give else, but beggary, fulsome nastiness, squalor, content [OED: “having one’s desires bounded by what one has (though that may be less than one could have wished”]); drudgery, labour, ugliness, hunger and thirst . . . fleas and lice . . . rags for his raiment, and a stone for his pillow . . . he sits in a broken pitcher, or on a block for a chair . . . he drinks water, and lives on wort leaves, pulse [OED: “edible seeds of leguminous plants cultivated for food], like a hog, or scraps like a dog . . . as we poor men live now-a-days, who will not take our life to be infelicity, misery, and madness?”

 

In the section of the Anatomy devoted to cures for what Burton call “head-melancholy,” here is Burton’s other use of squalor:

 

“ . . . to avoid all passions and perturbations of the mind. Let him not be alone or idle (in any kind of melancholy), but still accompanied with such friends and familiars he most affects, neatly dressed, washed, and combed, according to his ability at least, in clean sweet linen, spruce, handsome, decent, and good apparel; for nothing sooner dejects a man than want, squalor, and nastiness, foul, or old clothes out of fashion.”

 

In the context of so unpleasant a subject as squalor, Burton manages to express empathetic compassion, with a suggestion of moral outrage, for those living in poverty, a sentiment Johnson would share. Burton died on this date, January 25, in 1640 at age seventy-two.

'The Role Is a Role Worth Perfecting'

“The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that there is nothing the free man thinks of less than he does of death. But that sort of free man is no more than a dead man; he is free only from life’s wellspring, lacking in love, a slave to his freedom. The thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come afterwards constitutes the very heartbeat of my consciousness.” 

Thanks to Isaac Bashevis Singer I first encountered Spinoza in high school. I even wrote a short story about a misguided student trying to translate the Ethics without knowing much Latin. No passage in that difficult masterwork has inspired more thought among non-scholarly readers than Part 4 (“Of Human Bondage”), Proposition 67: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.”

 

The passage at the top is from the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), known as the “Sage of Salamanca,” who describes the Ethics as “a desperate elegiac poem.” I thought of him when reading “A Day in Salamanca” by the American poet Radcliffe Squires (1917-93). The poem was published in the Spring 1971 issue of The Sewanee Review and collected in Gardens of the World (1981):

 

“Across the square

The late sun angles down through arches

In golden cones against the violet

Shop windows. At a near table

A beautiful priest smiles at his expensive

Dessert; at another table, students, old-looking in

Their dark suits, talk erotically of revolution.

Then priest and students turn toward me with

The squint of conspirators

While a boy, leaning into the slanted sunlight

As though it were wind, comes slowly

Across the immense square, tacking into the light,

Until he stands at my table.

His big wrists glow six inches

Beyond the scarecrow sleeves,

As he holds a sparrow toward me

And chants: ‘Which shall it be, freedom

Or blood-sacrifice?’

 

“The bird peers

 From the noose of thumb and forefinger

 Tightening to show the way of sacrifice.

 I laugh. The boy scowls, his lips

 Curl back from wet teeth. He pushes nearer.

 A windowless smell of cooking oil comes

 From his clothes, but beneath that, faintly,

 The neutral perfume of all humanity, the smell

 (I think) of wheat fields motionless in sunlight.

I lean back, shrug, and say he does not have

The courage to kill a bird. The insult brings

The moment we have all waited for. The priest

Titters, the students freeze. The boy’s face,

Pressing nearer, blots out the square with

Its false sunset, whispering, ‘Libertad o sacrificio?’

And I drop the coin on the enameled table.

The bird spurts away like breath, but not far.

On a window ledge it waits, trying us

With one eye and then the other,

And when the boy whistles it comes to his hand.

From under his jacket he takes the small

Cage filigreed from pale clean wood,

Moorish bower where the bird enters

Like a spoiled princess.

 

“The priest and the students, bored now, turn away,

 But the boy and I smile at each other,

 Not decently nor gratefully, but with a certain love.

 Each day now for a week I have bought

 This same bird’s life from this same boy

 At this same table.

 

“Why not?

The century being the century it is,

The role is a role worth perfecting.”

 

I have no way of knowing if Squires was thinking of Unamuno while writing his poem, but the presence of the tittering priest, echoes of the Spanish Civil War, the boy’s act of deadly extortion and the speaker's complicity suggest his specter hovers over it. The final three lines serve as a post mortem of the twentieth century and a moral justification of paying to save another. The poem’s clarity suggests Mediterranean light. I wish I had encountered Squires and his poems long ago. What a poet.

 

[Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (Princeton, 1972) is translated by Anthony Kerrigan. The Ethics passage is from A Spinoza Reader, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, 1994). Go here to hear a reading of Squires’ poem.]

'Larkin Was a Larrikin'

At age ten or so I had a pen pal, a girl from New South Wales, Australia. We both wrote in pencil on lined paper, and we met through our respective newspapers in Cleveland and Sydney. The correspondence lasted for a year or so and I don’t remember what either of us ever said to the other except that I once asked if she had a duck-billed platypus. I don’t remember her answer. As a letter writer she was more prolific and prompt, and my handwriting was sloppier. I was already lazy, a dedicated lout, so it soon petered out. I do remember she occasionally used Australian dialect words that stood out like Serbo-Croatian to this monolingual American. 

So does Damian Balassone, an Australian poet who exploits his country’s dialect in “Larkin Was a Larrikin” in the Summer/Fall 2023 issue of Light:

 

“Larkin was a larrikin;

Larkin was a toad.

He liked to take his lady friends

to Cemetery Road

and share a pot of English tea,

way back in nineteen sixty-three.

 

“Larkin was a larrikin;

Larkin was a hoot.

He boogied with librarians

behind the library chute.

He shimmied like a giant squid,

he did not mean to, but he did.”

 

Philip Larkin’s admirers will enjoy the allusions to his poems. Larrikin sounds like the poet’s surname stuttered. Its place of origin is the West Midlands of England but the word took root in Australia. There’s even a book titled Larrikins: A History. The OED gives four definitions, one of which, if stretched a bit, fits Larkin: “a mischievous or boisterous person; one characterized by good-natured irreverence and a disregard for convention.” In addition to exotic words, Australia is the land that gave us Christina Stead, Les Murray, Clive James, Stephen Edgar and Men at Work.

 

[The same issue of Light includes poems by A.M. Juster, A.E. Stallings and Gail White.]

'Very Quietly, an Aside'

Reporters and their editors have always fetishized what’s known in the trade as the lede – the opening sentence or paragraph of a news story. The idea is to quickly grab the reader’s attention and, with luck, hold on to it. Subtlety is discouraged in journalism. There’s much competition among reporters to craft clever, catchy ledes. Some are paralyzed and unable to proceed with the rest of the story until they have come up with a good one. 

In 1985 I was hired by the Hearst-owned, now long-defunct Knickerbocker News, the p.m. paper in Albany, N.Y., to cover the cops-and-courts beat. One of the first stories I wrote was based on an interview with Sharon Komlos, an advocate for crime victims. The lede: “Sharon Komlos’ eyes are bright and blue and plastic.” In 1980, Komlos had been abducted, raped and shot in the head. The bullet left her blind and she wore prosthetic eyes. My editors loved it, played it as the banner story on A-1, and assured me I would survive my probation. In retrospect, it’s a little embarrassing, too cute for the subject matter.

 

Much attention is paid to the ledes of novels – “Call me Ishmael,” et al. – but I hadn’t thought much about the opening lines of poems. Howard Moss did, in the first in a series of columns he wrote for The American Poetry Review, in 1978:

 

“In my case, the first line of a poem is crucial and is usually the given thing that comes out of the blue without conscious maneuvering, when the mind is released from the habitual. Most often it comes when I am in motion, when no fixed mooring allows habit to keep from consciousness what the imagination may be evoking. I mean ‘motion’ literally: in subways, taxis, cars, buses, trains, planes, ships and in dreams, for I take dreams to be forms of transportation.”

 

Moss doesn’t fetishize the ledes of poems. In fact, he seems to shun the showy, self-regarding sort of lede:

 

“What does a first line do? It can seem to do nothing, be deceptive, like the beginnings of novels that are quiet, that do not arrest the attention very much, in which the lulling voice lures the reader on with a children's story told to a tea table, very quietly, an aside.”

 

[Howard Moss was born on this date, January 22, in 1922 and died in 1987 at age sixty-five after serving as poetry editor of The New Yorker for almost forty years. Also born on January 22 were Walter Raleigh (1552), Francis Bacon (1561), John Donne (1573) and Lord Byron (1788).]

'Books in the Running Brooks'

One of my favorite literary analogies:

“The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.”

 

The word awful has been debased, like its cousin awesome. Dr. Johnson in his “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765) uses the adjective to mean “filled with a feeling of awe, dread, or deep reverence,” in one of eighteen definitions given by the OED. Gardens are beautiful, a pleasure to work in and contemplate, but a forest, untended, is disorderly and bountiful, defying the human urge to impose pattern. Looked at closely, however, a forest is not chaos. It can be frightening (think of the fairy tales set in forests) but its parts from the naturalist’s point of view fit together and complement each other -- an ecosystem. Think of Dante’s forest at the start of the Inferno, in C.H. Sisson’s translation: “Half way along the road we have to go, / I found myself obscured in a great forest, / Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.” Johnson continues with a new analogy, taking on those critics, often French, who find Shakespeare too wild and non-Aristotelian:

 

“Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished unto brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.”

 

I’m reading As You Like It again. It’s not a favorite but the language, as always, is a delight. The word forest appears twenty-three times in the play, more than in any other. Duke Senior in Act II, Scene 1 says: “Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?” and in the same speech he exalts:

 

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”

'I See Only Their Marvelous Works'

“How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works.” 

A reader reprimands me for dismissing Ezra Pound from serious consideration. “We can’t imagine modernism without him,” he writes. True, and I wish I could always find it easy to demarcate a writer’s work from the stupid and repellent things he said. Often I can but I'm inconsistent.

 

I still read and admire, for instance, Charles Lamb and George Santayana, both of whom were on occasion anti-Semitic. At an even higher level of accomplishment, I can say the same of T.S. Eliot. On the other hand I’ll never again read Pablo Neruda, a communist who was awarded the Lenin Prize for Peace by the Soviet Union in 1953, though it helps that I never cared for his flatulent  poetry so I find him easy to dismiss. Others are more difficult -- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example. He wrote the novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), a precursor of the black-humor school, but also the rabidly anti-Semitic Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937).

 

The passage at the top is from the Notebook of Anton Chekhov (trans. S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, 1921). Of course, Chekhov had his own problems with anti-Semites. He formed a seventeen-year friendship with Alexy Suvorin, publisher of the influential St. Petersburg newspaper New Times, who championed Chekhov’s work while attacking Alfred Dreyfus and his leading defender, Emile Zola. Suvorin was a reactionary and anti-Semite while Chekhov remained an ardent Dreyfusard and, in the context of late-nineteenth-century Russia, a liberal.

 

On February 6, 1898, Chekhov wrote a letter from Nice to Suvorin. His understanding of and compassion for conflicted human nature is unrivalled, but the friendship was strained by the Dreyfus Affair. Chekhov writes:

 

“It is quite clear to me what lies behind Zola’s stance. The main thing is that he is acting honestly, by which I mean his judgements are based not on the chimeras of others but on what he has seen for himself. It is, of course, possible to be both sincere and wrong, but the errors of the sincere do less harm than the consequences of the deliberately insincere, the prejudiced or the politically calculating. Even if Dreyfus is guilty, Zola is still right, because the writer’s task is not to accuse or pursue, but to defend even the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment. The question will be asked: what about politics, or the interests of the state? But great writers and artists should have nothing to do with politics except insofar as they themselves need protection from it.”

 

Dreyfus was finally pardoned in 1899 after spending four and a half years on Devil’s Island. He petitioned for a retrial and on July 12, 1906 his verdict was formally annulled. Zola had died in 1902, Chekhov in 1904. Suvorin would die in 1912. Dreyfus lived until 1935.

 

[The letter is collected in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (Penguin, 2004), edited by Rosamund Bartlett and translated by Barlett and Anthony Phillips.]

'Companionable Room'

I had a minor problem with the university library’s catalog. When I requested two books stored off-site in the Library Service Center I got this message: “No items can fulfill the submitted request.” That made no sense and I couldn’t figure out a way around the roadblock, so I wrote a librarian I’ve known for years. It was a glitch I didn’t understand, she ordered the books and they will be waiting for me when I visit the library on Saturday. I know my way around libraries and seldom require assistance, but yet again I’m grateful not just for access to millions of books but for librarians – at their best, culture’s caretakers. 

Timothy Steele is a poet and a scholar dependent on libraries. In “The Library” (The Color Wheel, 1994) he asks, “Cultural oasis? / Few would object to its conserving aims.” In a non-political sense, a library is conservative. Steele writes of “all the ancient libraries whose collections / Have vanished in a massive wordless void,” and adds:

 

“The consolation? Some things were preserved,

Technology reduces now what’s lost,

And learning, as it’s presently deployed,

Is safe from any partial holocaust.”

 

Ours is increasingly an alliterate age. Many non-readers no longer respect books, and some are actively hostile. Books pose an irritating reproach. Have we reached an Eloi/Morlock moment? Not quite but Wells’ oversimplified future seems at least possible if not inevitable. Some of us can still take comfort in another Steele poem, “Homage to a Carnegie Library” (also from The Color Wheel):

 

“Companionable room,

In that early darkness

You stood in promise

Of a sunnier time.”

 

Books remain a civilizing presence – a “cultural oasis.” In one of his critical books, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), Steele includes poetry among the prerequisites of a good, sustainable life:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future, and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share these qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

'He Treated Us Like Adults'

I grew up thinking writers – poets, certainly – were not quite real. None lived in my neighborhood. I never saw writers on television. My parents never talked about them, as they might actors and politicians, who also were unreal. Without thinking too deeply about it, I put writers in the same metaphysical category as Spinoza’s God and non-differential equations. 

I met my first flesh-and-blood writer, Max Ellison (1914-85), when he came to my high school in suburban Cleveland and conformed to my Whitmanesque image of what a poet should look and act like. He had just published his first collection, The Underbark (1969). I bought a hardcover copy ($2.50) and he signed it for me. That too was a first, though the book is long gone. Ellison would later be named the poet laureate of Michigan. I was a Roethke enthusiast and had recently read Allan Seager’s The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (1968). Folksy and bearded, Ellison assured me that Roethke, another Michigan native, was overrated. I asked him about Buber and Tillich, writers important to Roethke late in his life, but Ellison knew nothing about them. Disappointment mingled with the thrill of meeting my first real poet.

 

In the title essay in Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination (trans. Lillian Vallee, 1995), Adam Zagajewski writes:

 

“[I]t was Zbigniew Herbert who came to our school. Professor M. introduced him in his typical sweet-sour fashion. He said that there were two Herberts—one who lived in Poznan and the other who had come to our school—although one can’t be altogether sure, because in modern poetry everything was possible. But Herbert did not need Professor M.’s help at all. He read fragments of Barbarian in the Garden and a few poems. He treated us like adults, which was flattering.”

 

Zagajewski says Herbert was the “first real poet I had listened to.” He read his poem “Biology Teacher,” which includes these lines: “in the second year of the war / our biology teacher was killed / by history’s schoolyard bullies.” The poem is taken from Alissa Valles’ translation of Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998 (Ecco, 2007).

'Sodding Good and Touching Was the Poem'

Kingsley Amis’ daughter Sally was born on January 17, 1954, two days after her father published his first and finest novel, Lucky Jim. Three days later, Philip Larkin completed “Born Yesterday” (The Less Deceived, 1955) and dedicated it to the little girl: 

“Tightly-folded bud,

I have wished you something

None of the others would:

Not the usual stuff

About being beautiful,

Or running off a spring

Of innocence and love --

They will all wish you that,

And should it prove possible,

Well, you’re a lucky girl.

 

“But if it shouldn't, then

May you be ordinary;

Have, like other women,

An average of talents:

Not ugly, not good-looking,

Nothing uncustomary

To pull you off your balance,

That, unworkable itself,

Stops all the rest from working.

In fact, may you be dull --

If that is what a skilled,

Vigilant, flexible,

Unemphasised, enthralled

Catching of happiness is called.”

Some parents, I’m sure, would be offended if a friend wished their newborn daughter ordinariness, as though that were a demeaning curse. Our impulse is to herald every new baby as a potential super-hero. One expects Larkin to keep things in a minor key. He wishes Sally something rarer: the heavily qualified happiness that often eluded him. In replying to Larkin’s gift, Amis wrote to his friend: “Sodding good and touching was the poem, moving me a great deal as poem and as friendship-assertion. I think it’s about the nicest thing anyone could do for any new-born child.” Larkin’s wish is true to his sensibility, less cynical than pragmatic. When Faber & Faber let the novels of Barbara Pym go out of print, Larkin wrote the publisher a generous letter of protest: 

 

“I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in the little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ‘big’ experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour.”

 

Today would have been Sally Amis’ seventieth birthday. The sad coda to her story is that she died five years after her father, in 2000, at age forty-six, at least in part as the result of alcoholism, a very ordinary death.

 

[The Amis letter to Larkin is included in The Letters of Kingsley Amis (ed. Zachary Leader, 2000).]