'He Is Some Twentie Sev’rall Men at Least'

Whitman “contained multitudes,” of course, while George Herbert says of a man: “He is some twentie sev’rall men at least / Each sev’rall houre.” What sounds self-dramatizing in the American simply acknowledges our inconstancy, our fickle nature, in Herbert’s poem “Giddinesse.” In his time, giddiness, the OED tells us, meant “thoughtless folly, flightiness; fickleness, instability.” One of the lessons of aging is coming to accept that our precious “self” is plural. We mutate across a lifetime, of course, but sometimes hourly. By nature we are fluid and often contradictory. Herbert sent me back to Montaigne who in his essay “Of the inconsistency of our action” writes:

“We are all patchwork and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

 

Sounding very contemporary, Montaigne concludes: “[A] sound intellect will refuse to judge men simply by their outward actions; we must probe the inside and discover what springs set men in motion. But since this is an arduous and hazardous undertaking, I wish fewer people would meddle with it.”

 

Herbert, born sixty years after the French essayist, writes:

 

“Now he will fight it out, and to the warres;

                      Now eat his bread in peace,

And snudge in quiet: now he scorns increase;

                      Now all day spares.”

 

Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines snudge as “to lie idle, close, or snug.” Herbert adds: “O what a sight were Man, if his attires / Did alter with his minde . . .”

 

[I have used Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1958).]

'Aesthetically They Are Still Delightful'

“Early Ellington records are like vintage cars. They are not as he or anyone else would make them nowadays, but historically they are still important and aesthetically they are still delightful.” 

Let's not confine Philip Larkin’s conclusion exclusively to Duke Ellington’s early recordings or even to jazz in general. Good work remains good even when long out of fashion, and mature taste is broad and elastic. Some of us still enjoy reading Walter Savage Landor and listening to Debussy. Imagine being able to appreciate only books composed in the last decade, a fate that skirts illiteracy. Now listen to Ellington’s 1928 recording of “The Blues With a Feeling,” featuring Johnny Hodges, and I challenge you not enjoy it or insist it’s merely a museum piece. Then try “Clarinet Lament” (1936), with what Larkin describes as “[Barney] Bigard’s perfect Basin Street chorus.” The poet writes:

 

“No one wants [Ellington] to repeat the past. No one, equally, would ever want to lose sight of such of it as this set represents.”  

 

Larkin’s review of The Ellington Era, 1927-1940, Vol. 1 was published in the Daily Telegraph on December 14, 1963. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. on this date, April 29, in 1899, one week after Vladimir Nabokov in St. Petersburg, Russia. A memorable month for American culture.

 

[Larkin’s Daily Telegraph reviews are collected in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1971 (1970; rev. 1985).]

'A Poet's Hope'

Erica Light is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and Melville scholar. We exchange emails several times each year, usually devoted to what we are reading. This week she reported reading some of the writers and books I’ve mentioned recently at Anecdotal Evidence – Maurice Baring, Chekhov, Joseph Epstein. She was interested enough in a poet I wrote about on March 21, James Hayford (1913-93), to request his collected poems, Star in the Shed Window, 1933-88 (New England Press, 1989), through interlibrary loan. “Hayford’s title poem grabbed me,” Erica writes, “because I so often have looked out a certain window on a summer night and seen the constellation Orion out there in the ‘universal deep.’” Here is that poem, written in 1936: 

“Coming into the shed without a light,

I saw the window blue with the outside night,

And in an upper pane a star to keep

My silhouetted sawhorse and my ax:

Observatories in the merest shacks

Open upon the universal deep.”

 

Erica says: “Hayford’s book came in perfect, unread condition (w/o dust jacket); the crisp date due slip stamped only with the date I had requested to borrow it, ‘MAR 21 2024.’. Wonder if I am the first to do so.” That seems likely. Hayford was a protégé of Robert Frost, and their sort of meditative, well-crafted poetry is certainly out of favor. A perfunctory search online turned up more bits of information about Hayford, including a site at Amherst College. There I found this poem:

 

“A poet’s hope: to be,

like some valley cheese,

local, but prized elsewhere.”

 

Now, like Erica, I’ve ordered Star in the Shed Window through interlibrary loan.

'An Old Man or Young Man Mad About Literature'

Sometimes an eccentric judgment – one that reflects the critic’s discernment, not merely his wish to provoke and attract attention – proves useful to the common reader. Take a sentence from Ford Madox Ford's final book, The March of Literature (1939): “The modern English language has never—or, at any rate, until the beginning of the present century—been a very good vehicle for prose.” 

Ridiculous, you might say, and I wouldn’t argue. Ford tries to clarify his meaning:

 

“To put it roughly, we might say that the great periods and cadences of the seventeenth century had, by the eighteenth, deteriorated into a sort of mechanical rhythm and that by the nineteenth century, in the avoidance of the sort of pomposity and the dry rhythm of the eighteenth century, the language became so timid and indefinite that it was impossible to use it for making any definite statement.”

 

As to the eighteenth (sticking strictly to English writers): Swift, Johnson, Gibbon, Sterne. And the nineteenth: Hazlitt, Carlyle, Darwin, George Eliot. For Ford, only in the 1890s when he was a young writer and befriending some of the writers he favors – Henry James, Joseph Conrad & Co. -- did English prose, in effect, mature. Ford is formulating a retrospective defense of Modernism. “It is to be remembered,” he writes, “that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.”

 

I’ve often pondered this sentence and remain conflicted. I love good prose of many sorts, and that’s the point. There is no universal template for good non-poetic writing. No one would confuse the prose in The American Scene (Henry James) with Evelyn Waugh's in Labels (Evelyn Waugh). The trouble comes with Ford’s middle clause, “no more dependence on its contents.” Taken literally, it suggests that pretty words about nothing amount to something. Ford may be restating what one of his masters, Flaubert, said in a letter written ninety years earlier to his mistress Louise Colet (trans. Francis Steegmuller): “What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to  write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external . . .” Ford never wrote such a book. His novels are thick with particularities. He goes on:

 

“Between the death of Swift in 1745 . . . and, say, the day of writers like Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement, almost no imaginative prose masterpieces saw the light and English prose exhibited almost none of that sort of super-light that marks the writing of Sir Thomas Browne, of [Izaak] Walton, of [1^st Earl of] Clarendon, or even of Pepys.”

 

Here is where Ford gets truly eccentric: “English, as we have said, is rather short in the item of great novels. It would, then, be almost a minor literature were it not for the prose writers whom we have been citing. They, it will be observed are none of them novelists. And, indeed, it was not until comparatively lately that the English novelist paid any attention whatever to his prose.”

 

Nonsense. In addition to some of the writers cited above, we can add Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Austen, Thackeray, Trollope. No, these were not “exquisite” writers of fiction – none was a Ronald Firbank or William H. Gass -- but all employed styles appropriate to their “content.” Ford concedes that Dickens “could be styled, for fugitive passages, a really great prose writer,” but none of them wrote like Flaubert. Ford writes:

 

“[T]he moment one becomes an impassioned student of letters—an old man or young man mad about literature—one perceives that English literature has one very great glory, a glory that of itself would suffice to let it be classed as a major literature . . . and that is the great series of works of which we have here been treating [Clarendon, the Scottish naturalist Thomas Edwards, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, et al.]. They recount incidents, habits of mind, or of insects or of birds, theories, memories. And the passion with which these records are made revealing the great, liberal personalities of the writers, makes them become under the almost unconscious pen great works of art.”

 

This is where “eccentric” becomes “useful.” Ford reminds us of forgotten writers and genres. The novel has so effectively dominated literature since the eighteenth century, it’s good to be reminded of alternative genres and forms, especially nonfiction. Ford suggests Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco, Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, George Borrow’s Bible in Spain, W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land that England Lost, Walton’s Complete Angler, Browne’s Urne-Burial and Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne – all charming books, some of them masterpieces. Ford describes them as “deathless.”

 

[The Ford passages can be found in Book II, Part 1, Chapter Four of The March of Literature (1939).]

'The First to Climb a Mountain Because It Is There'

On this date in 1336, just for the hell of it, Francesco Petrarca (we know him as Petrarch), his brother Gherardo and two servants climbed to the 6,263-foot summit of Mount Ventoux in Provence. Morris Bishop, Vladimir Nabokov’s closest friend at Cornell, writes in Petrarch and His World (1963): 

“The decision was far more original than it would appear today. There is no clear record that anyone ever climbed a mountain for pleasure or mere curiosity from the time of King Philip of Macedon to that of Petrarch. . . . [He] remains the first recorded Alpinist, the first to climb a mountain because it is there.”

 

How wonderful that we can identify the first recreational mountain climber, and that he is a great poet and scholar, one of the enduring figures of the Italian Renaissance. In a letter to his friend and confessor, the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, Petrarch later wrote: “My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate which determines the affairs of men.” Petrarch here sounds remarkably like our contemporary, someone moved not by necessity but a spirit of adventure.

 

Petrarch had read in Livy’s History of Rome that King Philip of Macedon climbed Mount Hemus in present-day Bulgaria because he wished to know if the Black Sea and the Adriatic were both visible from the peak. Bishop writes of Petrarch’s letter: “It also expresses for the first time that mountain-awe which has become a commonplace of human feeling, as of literature.” Whether or not Petrarch was the first mountain climber is unimportant. It’s his willingness to act on the itch of curiosity that endears him to me, coupled with the discipline of an eighteen-hour journey up and down the mountain. I’m not certain Petrarch experienced a Keats-like “mountain-awe,” a suspiciously Romantic-sounding rapture for a man to feel in the fourteenth century.

 

He was a man of his time. While at the summit of Mount Ventoux, Petrarch read a pocket-sized edition of St. Augustine’s Confessions, a gift from Dionigi, to whom he writes:

 

“Where I fixed my eyes first, it was written: ‘And men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars - and desert themselves.’ [Confessions, x.8.15] I was stunned, I confess. I bade my brother, who wanted to hear more, not to molest me, and closed the book, angry with myself that I still admired earthly things.”

 

Bishop’s gloss is modern and secular: “In the rarefaction of the upper air his heightened sensibility stirred him to egotistic examination of his own state. In a devout mind such thought can only be religious. Most religion is egotistic.”

 

I encourage readers to look into Bishop (as well as Petrarch), who wrote biographies of Cabeza de Vaca, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Ronsard, and much light verse. You can understand why that coupling of qualities – scholarship and a lively sense of humor – would attract Nabokov. I found Bishop’s column, “Literature for the Mass and Literature for the Elite,” in the February 1959 issue of something called The South-Central Bulletin of the Modern Language Association. In it he writes:

 

“I ask of literature that it tell me something I did not know and that I want to know; or that it reveal meanings, especially beautiful meanings, in familiar experience. I have little time to waste on books that are good for you but not for me.

 

“And so I report that [James Gould] Cozzens’ By Love Possessed was, for me, an illuminating, rewarding, nourishing book. But Cozzens is a mass-writer. Per contra, I take an eminent elite-writer, Ezra Pound. By every test I have learned to apply, Pound, in his Cantos is a pretentious, phony idiot, who has nothing to tell me that I want to listen to.”

'One Is Always at Home in One’s Past'

I will quote the writer who has given me more pleasure – “aesthetic bliss” he called it – than any other and whose birthday we observed earlier this week: “One is always at home in one’s past.” That might serve as a gloss on his autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which he writes at the end of Chapter III: 

“I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summery warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

 

“One is always at home in one’s past” is taken from an interview Nabokov gave The Observer in 1976, a year before his death. But it also appears, with the identical wording, in Chapter V of Speak, Memory. Vyra was Nabokov’s family estate, fifty miles south of St. Petersburg, soon to be seized and looted by the Bolsheviks. We needn’t be Russian aristocrats to appreciate the poignance of Nabokov’s memory. In the same interview, Nabokov is asked, “Does this suggest you dislike facing the future or contemplating the present?” He answers:

 

“What we perceive as the present is the bright crest of an evergrowing past and what we call the future is a looming abstraction ever coming into concrete appearance. I love and revere the present. As to the past, my dealings with it are more complex, ranging as they do from delicious gropings to blind angry fumblings.”

 

[The Nabokov interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]

'Living Through Radical Change'

Ten years ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael: 

“I have myself long ago put aside any thought about writing an autobiography. . . . When I became, almost without conscious decision, a bookish and a scribbling man, the larger sense of adventure went out of my life, and I was henceforth almost entirely spectatorial in my interests, even in my passions.”

 

Fortunately, Epstein was not under oath when he made his avowal. At age eighty-seven, he has a right to change his mind. The result is Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life (Simon and Schuster, 2024), a brief, charming autobiography that is at the same time an account of the cultural changes, many of them unpleasant, that have occurred during his lifetime. Longtime Epsteinologists will already know the broad outlines of his life (“an American, Chicago born”). Here the average Joe, the homme moyen sensual, is an erudite witness to the dissolution of the West’s cultural values, while remaining true to the book’s title, frequently expressing gratitude for the gifts that the culture has given him. In his introduction he writes:

 

“The underlying theme of my autobiography is living through radical change: from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status (I have grand-nieces and -nephews I have never met and am unlikely ever to meet), from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel versus print . . .”

 

Epstein recounts some of the tantrums he inspired, including his politically motivated ousting from The American Scholar, which he edited from 1975 to 1997, and the Wall Street Journal column he wrote in 2020, poking fun at the incoming first lady using the title “Dr.,” though she was neither M.D. nor dentist – the usual academic pomposity. But he also recounts growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Chicago in the twentieth century, blessed with excellent parents. These passages recall some of the episodes in Meyer Levin’s Chicago novel The Old Bunch (1937) and Daniel Fuchs’ Brooklyn novels. Epstein was no child prodigy and his example suggests that the best education is a self-education. He describes teaching at Northwestern for twenty-eight years, his divorce, raising four children single-handedly, a successful second marriage and the death of a son from a drug overdose. Epstein doesn’t linger on the death and expresses no self-pity but the loss subtly colors much of what follows. In 2024, how many Americans can say they’ve never known a drug casualty?

 

Of particular interest to this reader is Epstein’s account of aging. He’s my senior by more than a decade, so I read this part of his book as a scouting report. His interests, he says, are “narrowing” but adds, “Writing still gives me great pleasure.” He remains prolific and praises by name many of his editors. His health is good. He misses friends, including Hilton Kramer, John Gross and Edward Shils. He has lost interest in travel. “What to many people would seem a dull life, mine,” he writes, “I find calmly satisfying.” 

 

Epstein was fortunate to find his true calling early – writing. It suits his temperament. He is the opposite of an “activist,” which accounts for his fondness for such writers as George Santayana and Max Beerbohm. On his final page he writes:

 

“My own role in life has been largely spectatorial [there’s that word again]. I have spent most of my years on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, entertained by the mad swirl of the circus put on by humanity, trying to figure out what is and what is not important in life. I have, from time to time, put down the glass of wine and, in essays, reviews, short stories, written up my findings. Chief among them is that the world, for all its faults, flaws, faux pas, remains an amusing place.”   

 

Along with his autobiography, Simon and Schuster has also published Epstein’s Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays.

 

[The note to Raphael can be found in Where Were We?: the Conversation Continues (St. Augustine’s Press, 2017).]

'Bright Books! the Perspectives to Our Weak Sights'

April is the kindest and cruelest month. 

Think of the births: George Herbert (April 3, 1593), Shakespeare (April 23, 1564), Henry Vaughan (April 17, 1621), Daniel Defoe (April 24, 1731), Edward Gibbon (April 27, 1737), William Hazlitt (April 10, 1778), Anthony Trollope (April 24, 1815), Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821), Henry James (April 15, 1843), Constantine Cavafy (April 17, 1863), Walter de la Mare (April 25, 1873), Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899), Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906), C.H. Sisson, (April 22, 1914), Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914).

 

And then the deaths: Shakespeare (April 23, 1616), Miguel de Cervantes (April 23, 1616), Henry Vaughan (April 23, 1695), William Cowper (April 25, 1800), William Wordsworth (April 23, 1850), Mark Twain (April 10, 1910), Edwin Arlington Robinson (April 6, 1935), A.E. Housman (April 30, 1936), Willa Cather (April 24, 1947), Flann O’Brien (April 1, 1966), Evelyn Waugh (April 10, 1966), Basil Bunting (April 17, 1985), Ralph Ellison (April 16, 1994), Thom Gunn (April 25, 2004), Saul Bellow (April 5, 2005), Muriel Spark (April 13, 2006).

 

“Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,

The clear projections of discerning lights,

Burning and shining thoughts, man’s posthume day . . .”

 

That’s Henry Vaughan, who was born and died in April, in his poem “To His Books.” Vaughan mentions no writers by name but suggests he has culled his library down to the essential volumes: “But you were all choice flow’rs, all set and drest / By old sage florists, who well knew the best.” In another poem, “On Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library, the Author Being Then in Oxford,” he returns to the familiar trope of authors remaining alive through their books:

 

“They are not dead, but full of blood again;

I mean the sense, and ev’ry line a vein.

Triumph not o'er their dust; whoever looks

In here, shall find their brains all in their books.”

 

My favorite among Vaughan’s poems remains the first one I read more than half a century ago. “The World” begins:

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

       All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

       Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

       And all her train were hurl’d.”

 

I happened on it by way of another book, Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). Mystics often lose us with their inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language so they resort to yawping (Whitman), the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be describing a picnic in the park with the folks. His tone is matter-of-fact, methodical, almost journalistic. He does this with impressive regularity, especially in his opening lines, as in “They Are All Gone Into the World of Light!” and “I Walk’d the Other Day.” The effect is of a gifted storyteller who hooks us with his first words. To be convincing, wonder must be made to sound familiar.

 

Give thanks for the kindness. National Poetry Month does little to ease the cruelty.

'Give Him the Darkest Inch Your Shelf Allows'

Its 1,498 pages tip the scales at 3.2 pounds: Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, originally published in 1929. At Kaboom Books I bought the twelfth printing, from 1959. The dustjacket is a little frayed around the edges but the book is otherwise sturdy. It collects the nineteen volumes of verse published by Robinson. 

Sometimes a book is an artifact salvaged from a midden – not the text but its provenance. On the front end  paper is a bookplate from a prior owner, Rabbi Victor Emanuel Reichert. It shows an oil lamp, two lines of Hebrew script, two Stars of David and a tag from Milton: “He that would hope to write well . . . ought himself to be a true poem, that is a composition and pattern of the best and most honorable things.” The page is signed by Reichert, who adds “Ripton, Vermont” and “August 5, 1960.” How this spirit-rich volume ended up in a Houston bookstore, I have no idea.

A brief online search reveals that Reichert (1897-1990) served as rabbi of the Rockdale Avenue Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1938 to 1962 and was a longtime friend of Robert Frost. In 1946 Reichert invited Frost to deliver a sermon, and in 1960 he helped secure Frost an honorary doctorate at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Reichert was awarded honorary doctorates from Middlebury College and the University of Cincinnati, where he served as professor of Biblical literature. A death announcement in a 1991 issue of the Middlebury College magazine describes Reichert as “a spiritual leader of profoundly ecumenical temperament.”

 

Tucked into the book is Reichert’s membership card in the Poetry Society of Vermont, “Dues paid to 10/1/66,” and signed by the treasurer, E. W. Wilcox. With it are two folded pages of typescript. One contains five paragraphs of Robinson biography from Famous Poems and the Little-Known Stories Behind Them (Robert Lewis Woods, 1961). The other is signed by Betty Sander and is a brief thank-you note addressed to Reichert, including: “Ginny Cope tells me Robinson was your favorite before your wife introduced you to Robert Frost. I have never read any of Robinson’s poems, that I can remember, except Mr. Flood’s Party. . . .”

 

Throughout the volume are notes, underlinings and annotations. In 1946, Reichert published Job: Hebrew Text and English Translation. Of particular interest to Reichert in Robinson’s poem are scriptural allusions, including several from the New Testament. On Page 1,328, he marks some lines in Section I of the book-length poem Amaranth (1934): “. . . ‘Since our young friend has pause / And faltered on the wrong road to Damascus, / Having seen too much light, we’ll drink to him, / And to ourselves, and to our new friend Fargo.’” Reichert writes “Paul + Damascus.” Five pages later he identifies a reference to the Good Samaritan.

 

Complicating the book’s history is an inscription on the back end paper, in red ink and a different handwriting: “Meg Chase ‘Islander’ Sept. 24^th, 1965 / A grand introduction to Mr. Robinson.” Left unmarked is Robinson’s early sonnet, “George Crabbe,” including these lines:

 

“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.”

'A Twitter of Inconsequent Vitality'

This week I will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after forty-four years on the faculty. He came to the university straight from earning his Ph.D. He’s neither flashy nor hungry for publicity, and I was surprised he agreed to speak with me. He has a reputation for hard work and dependability – not qualities valued as highly as you might think. He seems to ignore academic politics and is widely if quietly respected, even by his colleagues and the administration. Selfless dedication to the job often goes ignored, as Louis MacNeice suggests in “Hidden Ice” (The Earth Compels, 1938), which begins: 

“There are few songs for domesticity

For routine work, money-making or scholarship

Though these are apt for eulogy or tragedy.

 

“And I would praise our adaptability

Who can spend years and years in offices and beds

Every morning twirling the napkin ring,

A twitter of inconsequent vitality.”

 

The theme of unrecognized service, of blindly coming to expect gifts, must have been on MacNeice’s mind at the time. The next poem in The Earth Compels is “Taken for Granted.” The opening stanza:

 

“Taken for granted

    The household orbit in childhood

The punctual sound of the gong

    The round of domestic service.”

'We Find It Hard to Read Great Books at All'

A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s. I like Vonnegut. A lot of the stuff before that is like a foreign language to me.” I’m reminded of an English professor who told me more than half a century ago that most of her students couldn’t read anything pre-Hemingway. She was the teacher who introduced me to Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote and A Tale of a Tub. My reader is neither bragging nor lamenting. He seems to sense he is missing something – yet another mutation of presentism -- but unlikely to do anything about it. I encouraged him to try some older books and suggested a few titles. I’m not optimistic and it’s not my job to scold.

F.L. Lucas (1894-1967) was an English literary critic probably best known for Style (1955). In the nineteen-thirties, he was an early critic of appeasement with Hitler’s Germany, warning in 1933 that it shouldn’t be permitted to rearm. In 1939 he published Journal Under the Terror, 1938, a diary of the events leading up to the invasion of Poland and the start of the war, along with personal matters including literary reflections. He eviscerates Chamberlain. He reads Froissart and Shakespeare and follows the news. Not just Germany but the show trials in the Soviet Union and the civil war in Spain. On May 8 he writes: “Walked (lest I catch Carlyle’s dyspepsia).” Later in May he writes (and this is what brings to mind my young reader):

  

“And we find it hard to read great books at all; easy to read books or articles about them—neat little reflections of them and on them in the pocket-mirror of some bright contemporary mind. Alice forsakes Wonderland for the Looking-Glass; and our decadence tends to live like the Emperor Domitian, in a gallery of mirrors, catching flies.”

 

To put his distrust of Germany in context, it’s helpful to know Lucas was a veteran of the Great War. He volunteered in October 1914 and served in France in 1915-17 as a lieutenant in the 7th Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment. He was at the Somme starting in August 1915 and was wounded by shrapnel in May 1916. He returned to the front in January 1917 and was gassed on March 4. In all, Lucas was hospitalized for seventeen months. He finished the war in the Intelligence Corps, questioning German prisoners of war. The past is ever-present – yet another reason to read the “great books,” a phrase I normally avoid but here I’m quoting Lucas.

 

Lucas’ Journal is a sort of prose counterpart to Autumn Journal (1939), the book-length poem Louis MacNeice wrote between August and December 1938, in the year of the Anschluss, the annexation of the Sudetenland, Munich, Kristallnacht. To quote Lucas again:

 

“But above all I think I write , not so much for popularity (I am little likely ever to have it) as for les âmes amies. Life and reading have brought me curious and amusing things that it is natural to wish to share. And one does not know what is in one’s own head (or knows it only untidily), until one has put it down on paper. ‘Writing makes an exact man.’”

'The Things That Pass'

Among the books and magazines for sale in our neighborhood library I found the Winter 1985 issue of The American Scholar, which I bought for a quarter. Joseph Epstein was still the editor. On Page 97 is a poem, “Old Man Sitting in a Shopping Mall,” by a writer whose name was unfamiliar to me, David Bergman: 

“When I was young I gave my love

 to what I thought was permanent:

 God, Beauty or Eternal Truth.

 But now the things that pass take hold

 of my affections, and I'm lost

 in you, my dear, who even now

 are turning into someone else.”

 

In my experience, it’s rare to be taken by surprise by a previously unknown piece of writing, unaccompanied by context, and for it to give immediate pleasure. What struck me was Bergman’s ability to condense a life, or at least what was most important in it, into seven lines. The person in the poem moves from a Keatsian faith in the permanent things  -- “all ye need to know” – to an acceptance of transitoriness. The things that mutate and fade – almost everything – now stir his affection. A lucky old man sitting in that shopping mall -- an appropriately mundane American scene.

 

The forty-year-old credit line in The American Scholar says Bergman “teaches English at Towson State University. His forthcoming volume Cracking the Code won the George Elliston Prize.” A cursory search reveals he was born in 1950 and is still around, is gay and Jewish, and has Parkinson’s disease. In a 2016 Kenyon Review interview, Bergman says:

 

“I have been thinking for a while about the kinds of pleasures that have gone out of style in poetry, including gorgeousness and whimsy. I read poems because they give me pleasure but I think we increasingly teach poems and literature as social documents.”

'And Here the Nothingness Shows Through'

I watched an old favorite, Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 short Me and My Pal. It’s Oliver’s wedding day and his best man, Stanley, gives him a jigsaw puzzle as a wedding gift. Oliver dismisses it at first as “childish balderdash” and promptly gets hooked putting it together along with, eventually, a taxi driver, Ollie’s butler, a telegram delivery boy and, of course, Stanley. Oliver’s father-in-law-to-be, Peter Cucumber, played by the great Jimmy Finlayson, shows up, as do the cops. Mayhem ensues. 

Jigsaw puzzles encourage that sort of obsessiveness. I remember this with our sons. We always gave them a puzzle for Christmas (two-thousand pieces in the later days), and there went the rest of the holiday. At the risk of pushing it too far, puzzles are convenient metaphors for life itself. We’re always looking for the missing piece, blah, blah, blah. Stanley finds it in the end but it’s too late. The wedding’s off, the visitors are on their way to jail and Oliver throws Stanley out the door.   

 

Samuel Beckett loved Laurel and Hardy. In them we can see Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, also in bowlers and baggy pants. They make cameo appearances in Watt and Mercier and Camier. In Hugh Kenner’s words: “one of them marvelously incompetent, the other an ineffective man of the world devoted (some of the time) to his friend’s care” (A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973). Kenner goes on:

 

“They journeyed, they undertook quests, they had adventures; their friendship, tested by bouts of exasperation, was never really vulnerable; they seemed not to become older, nor wiser; and in perpetual nervous agitation. Laurel’s nerves occasionally protesting like a baby’s, Hardy soliciting a philosophic calm he could never find leisure to settle into, they coped. Neither was especially competent, but Hardy made a big man’s show of competence. Laurel was defeated by the most trifling requirement.”

 

In “Jigsaw Puzzle” (Olives, 2012), A.E. Stallings basically recounts the plot of Me and My Pal and turns puzzle-making into philosophy:   

 

“First, the four corners,

Then the flat edges.

Assemble the lost borders,

Walk the dizzy ledges,

 

“Hoard one color—try

To make it all connected—

The water and the deep sky

And the sky reflected.

 

“Absences align

And lock shapes into place,

And random forms combine

To make a tree, a face.

 

“Slowly you restore

The fractured world and start

To recreate an afternoon before

It fell apart:

 

“Here is summer, here is blue,

Here two lovers kissing,

And here the nothingness shows through

Where one piece is missing.”

'As Sensitive As Anyone Else'

“In common with James Jones, Gina Berriault knows that ill-educated or inarticulate people are as sensitive as anyone else. She renders their speech with a fine and subtle ear for the shy or strident inaccuracies, for the bewilderment of missed points and for the dim, sad rhythms of clichés; but when she takes us into the silence of their minds, their thoughts and feelings come out in prose as graceful, as venturesome and precise as she can make it.” 

That’s Richard Yates (1926-92), author of the novels Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, in “The Achievement of Gina Berriault,” published in Ploughshares in 1979. Yates was a pitiless anatomist of human fallibility. The revival of interest in his novels and stories, thanks in part to the 2008 film version of Revolutionary Road, seems to have faded. Berriault (1926-99), who was especially gifted at writing short stories, seems to have faded even more.

 

Yates’ point is an interesting one. When portraying poorly educated, lower-class or simply inarticulate characters, writers will often treat them condescendingly and even make fun of them (as do others, of course). This seems not only unfair but a lazy indulgence in clichés. I’m reminded of the author’s note to McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), in which Joseph Mitchell, the nonfiction writer for The New Yorker, complains about journalists referring to “the little people”: “I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are.”

 

Consider Ryabovitch, a young officer in Chekhov’s story “The Kiss” (1887) who must attend a party hosted by his commander, a lieutenant-general. He is self-conscious and uncomfortable: “While some of his comrades assumed a serious expression, while others wore forced smiles, his face, his lynx-like whiskers, and spectacles seemed to say: ‘I am the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade!’  who attends a party.” Instead of joining a dance, he invites two other officers to play billiards. In modern terms, Ryabovitch is a hopelessly backward nerd.

 

Unexpectedly, a woman embraces Ryabovitch and kisses him. She realizes she has mistaken him for someone else and both shriek. “He quite forgot,” Chekhov writes, “that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an ‘undistinguished appearance’ (that was how his appearance had been described by some ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard). When [General] Von Rabbek’s wife happened to pass by him, he gave her such a broad and friendly smile that she stood still and looked at him inquiringly.

 

“‘I like your house immensely!’ he said, setting his spectacles straight.”

 

There’s humor here, as usual in Chekhov’s depictions of even the saddest of human beings, but Ryabovitch is not turned into an easy punching bag. We’re amused, in part, because we understand his social incompetence. It’s possible he has never before been kissed by a woman. He remains obsessed with the memory, and the following day, while mildly drunk, works up the courage to share his experience with several other officers. They seem uninterested. Near the end of the story, Chekhov writes:

 

“And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and colourless. . . .”

 

Sadly mild comedy, characteristically Chekhovian. Other writers treat dim, inarticulate characters differently. Yates suggests James Jones, whose enlisted men in From Here to Eternity are often unable to express their bafflement with the world. So too in the fiction of Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell, among others. Continuing his description of Berriault’s treatment of inarticulate characters, Yates writes:

 

“That’s a rare ability, and reflects a rare degree of insight. It may well be one of the most valuable skills a writer can learn -- which makes it disappointing to discover, time and again, how few of the most celebrated novelists have bothered to learn it at all.”

 

[The Constance Garnett translation of “The Kiss” is collected in The Party and Other Stories (1917); Ecco Press, 1984.]

'The Most Intense Enthusiasm for Good Literature'

I was reading an interview with X.J. Kennedy when this remark touched me unexpectedly: “He was, of all the people I ever met, the one who had the most intense enthusiasm for good literature.” Spoken by another, this might amount to glibly rendered bullshit, the sort of thing junior faculty say about their seniors on the tenure committee. Kennedy is referring to Randall Jarrell, whom he knew when both taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I can apply Kennedy’s tribute to three people I’ve known, and only two were academics. 

Jarrell’s poetry means little to me but his sole novel, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954), and a handful of his celebratory reviews, especially those devoted to Kipling, Christina Stead, Marianne Moore, Walter de la Mare and A.E. Housman, constitute a piece of my critical infrastructure. Jarrell likewise understood that mockery is the most potent negative criticism. Laughter hurts more than rational argument, and no critic is funnier. Consider his dismissal of the nearly unreadable Stephen Spender:

 

“It isn’t Mr. Spender but a small, simple -- determinedly simple -- part of Mr. Spender that writes the poems; the poet is a lot smarter man than his style allows him to seem. (If he were as soft and sincere and sentimental as most of his poems make him out to be, the rabbits would have eaten him for lettuce, long ago.)”

 

Back to Kennedy’s characterization of Jarrell. On July 24, 1965, less than three months before his death, Jarrell published “Speaking of Books,” ostensibly a list of suggestions for summer reading in The New York Times Book Review. In fact, it’s a distillation of a lifetime engagement with books. Read with the knowledge of Jarrell’s imminent death, it’s a poignant human document but we shouldn’t allow poignancy to diminish its worth as a paean to passionate reading:

 

“May I finish by recommending . . . some books for summer reading? Giradoux's Electra; Bemelman’s Hotel Splendide; Kim; Saint-Simon’s Memoirs; Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South; the new edition of A.L. Kroeber's textbook of anthropology, and Ralph Linton’s The Study of Man; Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches; Colette’s Julie de Carneilhan and The Last of Cheri; Pirandello’s Henry IV; Freud’s Collected Papers; Peter Taylor’s The Widows of Thornton; Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; Goethe’s aphorisms; Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’; Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Letters to Robert Bridges; Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge, and Chekhov’s plays, stories, letters -- anything.”

 

I can hear the serious readers out there assessing Jarrell’s list: “Read that. Hated that. Didn’t read that. Want to read that. Would never read that.” I’ve read roughly half the titles. I can take Jarrell’s list seriously because I know how seriously he read good books, not what’s fashionable or carries the imprimatur of a bien pensant critic. The only bookish things that leave me more indifferent than “best-of” lists are the winners of literary awards. But I enjoy reading lists like Jarrell’s. I want to know a serious reader’s favorite books, the ones he would suggest to other serious readers, the ones he rereads himself. I like the variety of his choices. How many poet’s today, assembling a comparable list, would recommend so few poets? I love Saint Simon, Colette and Taylor. Kim. And Chekhov, of course – “anything.”

  

I might add Parade’s End, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm, Zeno’s Conscience, Memoirs of a Midget, Arabia Deserta, Imaginary Conversations, Memoirs of Hadrian, London Labour and the London Poor, Barbarian in the Garden, The American Scene, Pale Fire, The Lives of the Eminent Poets, The Leopard, Isaac Babel’s stories, Daniel Deronda, “Master and Man,” Between Meals, Life and Fate. Tristram Shandy, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs,  J.V. Cunningham’s and William Hazlitt’s Essays . . .

'Stimulated to Vigour and Activity'

When John Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler and Idler essays. In his peculiar memoir Praeterita (1885), Ruskin tells us “had it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have taken Johnson for my model of English,” and continues: 

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms . . .”

 

Who can imagine the father of an adolescent boy today packing Johnson with his toothbrush and underwear. Even I wouldn’t have done that but it makes sense for an evangelical family of the Victorian era. Johnson’s work might pass as secular scripture. And I agree that most of us can learn from the clarity and forcefulness of his prose.  

 

Three years after his final Rambler essay was published in 1755, Johnson resumed writing periodical essays in The Idler on April 15, 1758. Boswell tells us his friend wrote some of The Idler essays “as hastily as an ordinary letter.” John Wain in his biography of Johnson says they are “lighter and less ambitious” than The Rambler, which doesn’t seem quite accurate, but he adds: “The firm moral purpose is as evident as it always was, but there is more sense of holiday and fun.” In his first Idler, Johnson writes: “Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler.” This is written by the man who had already published “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” his Dictionary and the Rambler and Adventurer essays, among much else.

 

I would distinguish idleness from laziness, though I do recognize a lazy streak in myself. The only antidote is more work, sometimes accomplished only through an act of will. Idleness can be a virtue, especially when contrasted with manic busyness. I like Johnson’s summation:  

 

“The Idler, though sluggish, is yet alive, and may sometimes be stimulated to vigour and activity. He may descend into profoundness, or tower into sublimity; for the diligence of an Idler is rapid and impetuous, as ponderous bodies forced into velocity move with violence proportionate to their weight.”