'A Discussian of General Ideas'

A friend who is not a dedicated reader but has more common sense and worldly knowhow than I’ve ever possessed tells me he plans to reread Animal Farm and 1984. Neither have I read since junior-high school, probably the ideal time for such books, which are among the most overrated in our tradition. I don’t read fiction for “ideas.” In fact, ideas are preferably absent or minimal in novels and short stories, which are not allegories. For another example consider Uncle Tom’s Cabin – part melodrama, part sermon and all unreadable as literature, though its importance in history is undeniable. 

I read fiction for its “literary” qualities, which are admittedly difficult to define. As a stylist, Orwell is one-dimensional and ham-fisted. He is a propagandist. Fiction like his is too often judged by whether the reader agrees with the ideas contained in the text. Admittedly, Orwell wrote a handful of good essays, including those devoted to Dickens and Kipling.

 

Nabokov famously dismissed “Orwell’s clichés.” When a new edition of the second novel he wrote in English, Bend Sinister (1947),was reissued in 1963, Nabokov wrote in his introduction: “There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction.”

 

My friend reading Orwell noticed a post I had written recently about Turner Cassity and his first collection, Steeplejacks in Babel (1966). Something about my judgment of the book moved him to order a copy and he is enjoying the wittiest of American poets. I appreciate the total unexpectedness of his choice.

'An Air of Baffled Absence'

R.L. Barth has sent a new epigram, “Baffled,” not overtly related to the Vietnam War: 

“I see these hands on the deck railing, but

Whose are they? Have they any meaning? What?”

 

Some readers will understand. The familiar can become strange with age. That’s not always a bad thing. It’s one way the mind renews the world, keeping it interesting. As another Kentucky poet besides Bob puts it: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.” Perhaps bafflement can be passive or active, accepted or resisted. I like the OED’s definition of baffled: “confounded, discomfited, checked or foiled.” That makes it sound like a fight.

 

In his biography of Philip Larkin, James Booth refers to “The Old Fools,” completed in 1973 when the poet was not yet fifty years old, as “his great Ode to Senility,” at once grim, harsh and funny: “An air of baffled absence, trying to be there / Yet being here.”

'More Interesting to Me Than the Future'

“The past has always been more interesting to me than the future, just as I have found pessimists more amusing than optimists and failures more attractive than successes. I do not say that my preferences are based upon universal principles or that everyone should share them; in any case I should not want to live in a world of mental clones of myself, even if it were possible. I merely describe my own preferences as they happen to be.” 

What Theodore Dalrymple describes is neither an ironclad law of existence, a wallow in sentimentality nor an affliction of the elderly. It’s common sense, a recognition of reality. The future is fiction. It is the home turf of utopians and other schemers, whose visions have the solidity of steam; that is, hot air. The past is where we come from. It made us. As a corollary to Ecclesiastes 1:9, C.H. Sisson writes in his essay “Natural History”: “It  is an absurdity to try to be original. You might as well try to be beautiful or intelligent.”

John Talbot and Victoria Moul have edited the first book devoted to Sisson (1914-2003), the English poet, critic, translator and civil servant: C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). I discovered Sisson more than a decade ago, having never heard of him before. Few recent significant writers have been so thoroughly ignored and forgotten, and Sisson revels in his unfashionableness. The Talbot/Moul volume consists largely of essays by academics, which is important, but I commend Sisson to common readers. If you judge Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) the major poet of our age, Sisson is your man. They were mutual admirers. Hanna Crawforth’s contribution to the Sisson volume is titled “‘Magnificent Anachronism’: Sisson in the Seventeenth Century.” She describes Sisson as “a profoundly unfashionable poet” and says he cultivated a “position on the periphery of English twentieth-century poetic tradition.”  

 

Sisson’s backward-facing sensibility is suggested by his prolific body of work as a translator of Heine, Catullus, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Horace, La Fontaine, Racine, Du Bellay and others. His Dante has become my Dante. Consider what he writes in “On Translating Dante,” the introduction to his version of The Divine Comedy:

 

“[A]ll literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance.”

 

Sisson’s understanding of reading and books resembles my own. Without system or plan, we're guided by unpremeditated whim and happy serendipity, “the drift of our interests at the time.” The writers he cites – French, German, Roman and English, respectively – represent the national and linguistic tributaries leading to the River Sisson. Were I assembling a similar list, I would have to leave out the German and add the Russian and a few Americans.

 

Here is an early poem by Sisson with a Dantean title, “In a Dark Wood,” appended by him to the beginning of his excellent and largely unknown novel Peter Homm (1965):    

 

“Now I am forty I must lick my bruises

 What has been suffered cannot be repaired

 I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses

 A sickening garbage that could not be shared.

 

 “My errors have been written in my senses

 My body is a record of the mind

 My touch is crusted with my past defences

 Because my wit was dull my eye grows blind.

 

 “There is no credit in a long defection

 And defect and defection are the same

 I have no person fit for resurrection

 Destroy then rather my half-eaten frame

 

 “But that you will not do, for that were pardon

 The bodies that you pardon you replace

 And that you keep for those whom you will harden

 To suffer in the hard rule of your Grace.

 

 “Christians on earth may have their bodies mended

 By premonition of a heavenly state

 But I, by grosser flesh from Grace defended,

 Can never see, never communicate.”

 

And here is a healthy dose of realism, Sisson’s “The Commonplace” (Exactions, 1980):

 

“A commonplace is good for nothing now

Yet that is how the world goes, all the same:

Nothing is what you had when you set out,

And nothing you will have when you go home.”

'He Could Take Part in This Savouring of the World'

One of the ways biologists distinguish the animate from the inanimate, and the dead, is motility. Life moves independently, under its own power. Stasis suggests the end of life. Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime. For Zbigniew Herbert, permission to travel to Western Europe starting in the late nineteen-fifties became a form of cultural pilgrimage. He learned to resist Poland’s present by studying the West’s past. Here is the first stanza of Herbert’s “Journey” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter):

 

“If you set out on a journey let it be long

 a wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly

 so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes but by touch

 so you can confront the world with your whole skin”

 

Life as a journey must be among the oldest of extant metaphors, probably universal. Herbert suggests not tourism but cultural immersion and sustenance -- reading and visiting museums as a form of travel. Here is the poem's seventh and final stanza:

 

“So if it is to be a journey let it be long

 a true journey from which you do not return

 the repetition of the world elementary journey

 conservation with elements question without answer

 a pact forced after struggle

 great reconciliation”

 

Herbert is one of the last century’s essential poets and “travel writers.” The Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) documents those early travels outside Poland. Herbert was always history-minded. Travel beyond the Communist bloc was escape from an ugly, tedious, oppressive present into a rich past populated with painters and poets. He was an erudite traveler in space and time. He writes:

 

“The Judeo-Greek-Roman tradition really interests me. I cannot study Persian or Indian cultures, which for sure are great too. I was born and raised in this culture and would like to maintain – as much as my small abilities, strength and talent allow – these ties that once were connecting Poland with Ferrara, Prague, Bologna, Heidelberg or Oxford.”

 

In Barbarian in the Garden, Herbert is almost giddy with the history that suffuses everything he sees. My comparable experience has been numerous visits to Civil War battlefields – Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. Such places are haunted. The ideal experience combines physical presence with a deep grounding in the literature. Herbert’s biographer, Andrzej Franaszek (still untranslated into English), says in an interview:

 

“He wrote beautifully not only about delight, but also, for instance, about immersing into the new city on  the first day of [his] stay[,] drinking in every detail and exploring what the colours of this city are, what materials it is built of, what the smell of the air is like, how people behave, in front of which shops or bakeries they gather. He was naturally a person travelling to museums, making pilgrimages to paintings by Rembrandt or Vermeer, but he also noticed the tangible, material, physical world. He could describe this, he could take part in this savouring of the world. And naturally, trivially, I would say, this enriched his writing about art.”

 

Herbert died at age seventy-three on this date, July 27, in 1998.

'Flow, Like Waters After Summer Show’rs'

“As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation; one says, ‘It is very fine weather,’ and the other says, ‘Yes;’—one blows his nose, and the other rubs his eye-brows; (by the way, this is very much in Homer’s manner;) such seems to be the case between you and me.” 

All of us recognize that uncomfortable moment when conversation flags and two brains feel empty. This is not the same as an imbalance between speakers, one of whom is a bore. The job of the other then becomes sneaking away while trying to minimize discourtesy. We excuse the silence when friends talk, knowing it will resume.

 

William Cowper is writing a letter on July 27, 1780 to his friend the Rev. William Unwin. They met when Unwin was an undergraduate in theology at Cambridge and Cowper lodged with Unwin’s parents at nearby Huntingdon. When the father died in 1767, the widow, her daughter and Cowper moved to Olney at the invitation of the Rev. John Newton, the evangelical preacher. Cowper had already attempted suicide three times and been confined to an asylum. His mental state was never secure and without friends he likely would have succeeded in eventually taking his life.

 

Cowper conceived of conversation as a form of fellowship. He would agree with Hazlitt: “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.” Today, it’s too often reduced to mummery, a recitation of mutually approved opinions, a tiresome ritual. There’s no surprises and nothing is learned. Real conversation is less like a sermon than a Lester Young improvisation. Cowper writes in his poem “Conversation” (1781):   

 

“ . . . souls that carry on a blest exchange

Of joys they meet with in their heav’nly range,

And with a fearless confidence make known

The sorrows sympathy esteems its own,

Daily derive encreasing light and force

From such communion in their pleasant course,

Feel less the journey’s roughness and its length,

Meet their opposers with united strength,

And one in heart, in int’rest and design,

Gird up each other to the race divine.

But Conversation, chuse what theme we may,

And chiefly when religion leads the way,

Should flow, like waters after summer show’rs,

Not as if raised by mere mechanic powers.”

'Painstakingly Logical and Precise'

A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right: 

“In the course of a reading life, one often stumbles on excellent prose writers never before encountered; such discoveries, however, are less likely in poetry. First-rate poetry is a more manageable quantity. Unlike with prose, it is possible to read all, or virtually all, of the decent verse in the language.”

 

Perhaps it’s because poetry is somehow more vulnerable than prose, its form more essential to its nature. For attentive readers, bad verse immediately announces its wretchedness, whether from narcissism or a tin ear. The ability to write first-rate poetry is among the rarest of gifts.

 

The first virtue a reader finds in prose is clarity, which is not the same as Dick-and-Jane simplicity. It means no muddle, no ambiguity where none is intended. The writer knows what he wishes to say and says it without fumbling. One recalls Jonathan Swift’s diktat in “A Letter to a Young Clergyman” (1720): “Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style,” but adds:

 

“Professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meanings to those who are not of their tribe: a common farmer shall make you understand in three words, that his foot is out of joint, or his collar-bone broken, wherein a surgeon, after a hundred terms of art, if you are not a scholar, shall leave you to seek. It is frequently the same case in law, physic, and even many of the meaner arts.”

 

There’s no all-purpose template for prose, whether workmanlike or excellent. One thinks of Edward Gibbon, William Hazlitt, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell, all masters of their craft, none of whom could be mistaken for the others. My friend Douglas Dalrymple, proprietor of the Loose Canon blog, recently wrote of his namesake, Theodore Dalrymple:

 

“Not only is his adopted surname my actual surname, and his natural conservatism cousin to my own – and not only is he worth admiring as perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose – but the man loves dogs.”

 

That too is good prose. The author of the passage at the top is the poet-critic David Yezzi, writing of another in his essay “The Seriousness of Yvor Winters.” It’s easy to quibble with Winters’ more eccentric judgments, some of which may have been issued as provocations, always a useful device in upsetting unexamined critical assumptions. Winters’ prose, like his poems, is masterful – forthright and plainspoken. In reference to “the greatest poems of the plain style,” Yezzi writes of Winters and his final book, Forms of Discovery (1967):

 

“Such poems, for Winters, are good because they display themes ‘broad, simple, and obvious, even tending toward the proverbial, but usually a theme of some importance; a feeling restrained to the minimum required by the subject; a rhetoric restrained to a similar minimum’ as opposed to the Petrarchan use of ‘rhetoric for its own sake.’ The argument of the poem is painstakingly logical and precise. The rhythm is restrained in its careful adherence to the metrical norm, a heavily stopped line, and a strong caesura.”

'To Be Made Out of Emotions, Colors, Life Itself'

“[Robert Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else was disturbing the quiet little cemetery of English literature.”

 

That’s David Pryce-Jones writing in Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime (Encounter Books, 2020), his collection of anecdotes of writers who gave him inscribed copies of their books. Pryce-Jones reflects on Conquest (1917-2015), the poet and historian who signed his 1968 history of Stalin’s purges, The Great Terror. He writes: 

 

“The question with Bob is whether he was a poet who happened to be a Sovietologist or a Sovietologist who happened to be a poet. I tend to think the former, because poetry answered to his view of making whatever there is to be made out of emotions, colors, life itself.” 

 

In 2009, already in his nineties, Conquest published Penultimata, a collection of new poems. Among them is “Last Hours,” nine stanzas of three lines each. Pryce Jones quotes the poem’s final stanza, which he says “best expresses the let’s-get-on-with-it Bob that I knew and liked”: 

 

“Dead in the water, the day is done

There’s nothing new under the sun,

 Still less when it’s gone down.” 

 

Has there ever been a less grim, more serious poet and historian? One reads Conquest and feels reassured that life is good, so let’s enjoy it. I feel the same way about Larkin and Amis – congenitally funny writers who are deeply serious. No sense in being gloomy or pretentious. I’ve been rereading some of Conquest’s books, including The Abomination of Moab (1979). The title essay is a demolition of the bad poetry translations that became fashionable in the twentieth century – Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Lowell and others. Of Zukofsky’s ridiculous Catullus translation, Conquest writes:

 

“Now, on its merits, Zukofsky's stuff is obviously not worth bothering about. We might pass on, merely hoping—and it is no more than a hope—that no one will find a way of being sillier still. But it is after all significant, in the mere fact that some allegedly expert voices have been raised in its favour. That this is the case about something so ostentatiously, so uncompromisingly awful, already tells us a good deal about the general standards now prevailing.” 

 

Conquest is reliably invigorating to read. Pryce-Jones tells us he knew Conquest from 1963. The latter was foreign editor of the Spectator, and he was its literary editor. He and Conquest shared a commonsensical moral sense:

  

“Communism was to the 20th century what sorcery had been to the Middle Ages. The claim of the foundational doctrine of Marxism to be a science was pure witchcraft. Something known as the dialectic was said to be the key to progress, but nobody could make sense of this figment. The state was supposed to wither away, leaving us all to look after ourselves as though back in the Garden of Eden, yet in the starkest of contradictions the Communist state granted itself ever more total power over the individual in every aspect of daily life. The organizing principle of class became a sentence of death, exile, or dispossession for tens of millions of men and women defined as bourgeois, capitalist, kulak, or whatever could be profitably exploited.”

'A Noble Unconsciousness Is in Him'

A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s correct. “I think people are too cynical to have heroes today,” she continues. “They’re embarrassed to say someone is a hero. Nobody’s good enough. Everybody wants to look for failure and weakness.” Again, correct. A kind of corrosive skepticism is taken for sophistication. It’s self-promotion masking as fashionable cynicism. 

Many people I admire but heroes are distinguished by their indifference to approval or disapproval. They don’t make up their minds by reading reviews or waiting for poll results. They don’t play to the audience, which rules out politicians. Their values are solid and coherent but not autocratic. They possess a sort of courageous commitment to honesty, while being human and thus susceptible to self-delusion. A hero would be embarrassed to be called a hero. Without thinking deeply about it, my pantheon: Jonathan Swift, Yvor Winters, Whittaker Chamber, Simon Leys, the Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila (known as Don Colacho).

 

Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) includes the lecture “The Hero as Man of Letters,” in which Carlyle lauds the absence of fuss in Dr. Johnson, the indifference to impressing his fellows and polishing his image. Making the world better is too often the slogan of those who would destroy it. Johnson had no interest in utopia-building. Carlyle writes:

 

“Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his ‘sincerity.’ He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere, — of his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or ‘scholar’ as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live — without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him.”

 

With his fears of idleness and madness, Johnson often self-prescribed work as the cure. That too seems a characteristic common to heroes. Carlyle calls the attitude “rude stubborn self-help,” and we are its beneficiaries: “Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. . . . There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.”

 

[See Matthew Pheneger’s essay “Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the ‘Authentic Reactionary.’”]

'O Deliquescence of Our Quartz-like Loves!'

A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. It entered English in the eighteenth century and its original context was strictly scientific: deliquescence occurs when a substance absorbs moisture from the air and becomes a liquid solution. Salts, for instance, are readily deliquescent. Figuratively, it came to mean, the OED tells us, “dissolving, disappearing, or melting away . . . Frequently humorous.” The Dictionary tells us Sydney Smith used it in a letter: “Striding over the stiles to Church, with a second-rate wife—dusty and deliquescent—and four parochial children.”

We can all think of poets who would find a place for deliquescent and its related forms – Wallace Stevens, Turner Cassity, Richard Wilbur, among others. A brief search uncovered it in Eric Ormsby’s  “Six Sonnets on Sex and Death” (Daybreak at the Straits, 2004). Here are the final lines of the fifth sonnet:

 

“Mortality was frisky in the lines

of telephones where drowsy mourning doves

felt final conversations in their claws

transmitted in designer valentines.

 

“O deliquescence of our quartz-like loves!

His heartbeat hovered in two grimy paws.”

 

I also happened on the word in Louise Bogan’s review of Finnegans Wake in the May 6, 1939 issue of The New Yorker. Comparing the novel to Ulysses, she writes:

 

“Finnegans Wake takes up this technical skill as it existed at the end of Ulysses and further elaborates it. Then Joyce’s mastery of structure and his musician’s feeling for form and rhythmic subtlety are here in a more advanced—as well as a more deliquescent—state of development.”

 

[Bogan’s review is collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]

'Every Departure Destroys a Class of Sympathies'

As a boy I was spared most deaths. I've read of people who lose parents, siblings and close friends when young, and wonder how they adapt to unprecedented loss. They have nothing to compare it to. The death that hit me hardest was President Kennedy’s, a month after my eleventh birthday. He wasn’t much of a president but a touch of horror lingers, as does the sense that everything changed after Dallas. 

With age the losses accumulate and they are no longer abstract, as though I were reading history. Last month, in our neighborhood newspaper, I saw that a doctor who had treated me five years ago was dead. He had a military bearing and was strictly no-bullshit. I liked him. He was my age and died horribly of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. What is it like for a doctor to die slowly and painfully, while knowing exactly what was happening to him? Here is Charles Lamb on March 20, 1822 writing to William Wordsworth:

 

“Deaths overset one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died, within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies.”

 

A world dies with every person. September 26 will be the tenth anniversary of D.G. Myers’ death. It was no surprise but still a hard shock. We knew each other for only six years but talked like lifelong friends. Terry Teachout died on January 13, 2022. I knew him for almost twenty years, though I met him and David only once. Everyday I think of something that I wish I could tell them. Lamb continues:

 

“One never hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence,--thus one distributes oneself about; and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve; I want individuals. . . . The going-away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them, as there was a common link. A, B, and C make a party. A dies. B not only loses A, but all A's part in C. C loses A's part in B, and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.”

'He Signs His Name in Sparks'

By trade my father was an ironworker for the City of Cleveland’s Municipal Light, always called “Muny Light." At home he was a welder, specializing in wrought-iron railings. His aesthetic sense could be summarized in a single word: big. Or heavy. Everything he built was oversized. Steel and iron were always preferable to aluminum or wood. When I was collecting butterflies he built a display case for me out of galvanized sheet metal, large enough to hold perhaps forty pinned specimens. It must have weighed fifty pounds. 

In the garage he had the equipment for both oxyacetylene and arc welding. The latter drew enough electricity to melt iron and dim all the lights in the house. That’s how we knew what kind of work he was doing. His body was covered with small wounds from the sparks. They would bleed, leaving red dots on the bed sheets. His work clothes were perforated with tiny holes. I never learned to weld. Not being handy, always feeling awkward with tools, was my passive protest.

 

Len Krisak is better known as a translator, especially of Latin verse and Rilke, but he’s a fine  poet in his own right. I happened on “Welder,” originally published in the March 2000 issue of The English Journal:

 

“This spear of light ignites a blade whose flame

 Is so intense the night relents around

 It: this is what he cuts the junker’s frame

 With, slicing through the steel that marks the ground

 With one gigantic X. He signs his name

 In sparks right on the spot, a dotted line

 So hot that specks of fire spit upon

 The darkness, arcing out. Their spite designs

 The black surround, and then . . . his torch is gone.

 As for the dying-down acetylene,

 The oxygen whose bottled force goes dead,

 This welder wrenches shut the one that’s green

 And throttles down the other that was red.

 His visor up, he walks away, unseen.”

'It's on the Russian Level'

“I’m not a great reader of fiction. I read through all of Jane Austen with pleasure. I read through George Eliot at school, but I was too young to appreciate her then. But about a year ago I read Middlemarch. Most marvellous book. Best thing in nineteenth-century English fiction, I think. It’s on the Russian level. I’m a great admirer of the Russian writers.” 

The speaker is the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in a 1969 interview, “Portrait of a Man Reading,” originally published in the Washington Post ‘Book World.’” His literary tastes are varied and interesting – Thomas Browne, Edward Gibbon, Charles Doughty – and he says in the same interview, “Books to read should have a tincture of literature and philosophy,” as opposed to “potboiler history . . . by multiple hands.”

 

What impressed me was Trevor-Roper saying Eliot worked “on the Russian level.” Some of us fell for Russian literature and “the Russian soul” early and never entirely recovered. Not that the “Russian level” is a monolith. Trevor-Roper says, “I would put Turgenev at the top of all novelists,” which seems rather unlikely given the existence of Tolstoy. It’s the pairing of Eliot (whose Daniel Deronda I would couple with Trevor-Roper’s choice of Middlemarch) with the Russians that reminded me of Gary Saul Morson’s similar understanding of what he calls “the prosaic novels.” By that he means novels that regard “a good life is one lived well moment to moment,” with plots that “typically concern the hero’s or the heroine’s growing ability to appreciate the world immediately around them.” He writes:

 

“Beginning with Jane Austen, prosaic authors include Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and some lesser twentieth-century writers, such as Barbara Pym.”

 

A seemingly odd grouping but Morson has identified a strain of “realism” – that troublesome term – that was never dominant but also never merely latent. The approach is not crudely naturalistic. I think Joyce could be included, for Dubliners and Ulysses, along with much of Proust. Such writers create worlds recognized by readers, who often return to such books many times across a lifetime. Morson adds:

 

“Some prosaic authors leave their prosaic philosophy implicit, but the three greatest—Eliot, Tolstoy, and Chekhov—propound it explicitly and profoundly. The epilogue to Middlemarch, for instance, observes that the heroine, Dorothea, did not accomplish any famous deeds. That is no cause for regret, however, because the best people, on whom we all depend. Are those we usually overlook.”

 

 Morson then quotes the well-known closing lines of Middlemarch:

      

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. . . . But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

 

[Trevor-Roper’s interview is collected in Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Historian (I.B. Tauris, 2016). Morson’s observations can be found in Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press, 2023).]

'Thus Massive Was the Vessel, Built in Vain'

Gee-whiz technology soon grows obsolete and quaint. On this date in 1934, the USS Macon, a U.S. Navy airship – blimp, dirigible, Zeppelin – successfully tracked the heavy cruiser USS Houston as it carried President Franklin Roosevelt on a secret voyage from Annapolis, Md., to Portland, Ore., by way of Hawaii. The Macon, designed as a scout aircraft, carried five biplanes, one of which delivered mail and newspapers to the president. Seven months later, the Macon encountered a storm off Big Sur and crashed. Two men died, sixty-four were rescued. In response, Yvor Winters wrote “An Elegy” -- “For the U.S.N. Dirigible, Macon.” Here are two of the poem’s seven stanzas: 

“Who will believe this thing in time to come?

I was a witness. I beheld the age

That seized upon a planet’s heritage

Of steel and oil, the mind’s viaticum:

 

“Crowded the world with strong ingenious things,

Used the provision it could not replace,

To leave but Cretan myths, a sandy trace

Through the last stone age, for the pastoral kings.”

 

Without preaching, Winters suggests the airship was an act of hubris, what we might think of as a squandering of natural resources, “a planet’s heritage / Of steel and oil.” What a concept: Yvor Winters, environmentalist.

 

A year earlier, on April 4. 1933, the Macon’s sister airship, the USS Akron, crashed  off the coast of New Jersey. Seventy-three of its seventy-six crewmen were killed. Winters’ wife, Janet Lewis, also wrote a poem, “The Hangar at Sunnyvale: 1937,” about airships and their risks:

 

“Level the marshes, far and low the hills.

The useless structure, firm on the ample sills,

Rises incredible to state again:

Thus massive was the vessel, built in vain. “

 

I foresee a doctoral thesis: “Airships and the Stanford School.” Winters’ former student, Turner Cassity, revived the theme. The entire July 1970 issue of Poetry was devoted to “The Airship Boys in Africa,” a narrative poem in twelve sections about a 1917 German airship expedition to South West Africa. Included in his first collection, Watchboy, What of the Night? (1966), is Cassity’s “The Afterlives of Count Zeppelin,” which begins:

 

“Inflated, yet elliptical, of epic size,

What great Teutonic riddle hangs there in the skies?”

'A Kind of Masochism Afoot in Modern Aesthetics'

“Is there a kind of masochism afoot in modern aesthetics whereby the leaden and the dull acquire significance simply because the beaten spirit would seem to claim more seriousness than a more robust struggle with the exigencies of things?” 

This elegantly crafted question, at once aesthetic and moral, is posed by Guy Davenport. I often trip over previously unread, uncollected work by him, some of it more than half a century old. In the Spring 1970 issue of The Hudson Review, Davenport published “C’est Magnifique Mais Ce N’est Pas Daguerre,” a review of eight works of fiction ranging stylistically from Joyce Carol Oates to Robert Coover. The title is a witty play on French Gen. Pierre Bosquet’s comment on the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (“It is magnificent, but it is not war”).

 

The passage at the top comes from the section of the review devoted to the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, which Davenport calls “as dreary, dragging, and dull a novel as the human mind is capable of writing.” I can second that judgment. If one is to read Gombrowicz, stick to the Diaries. Davenport is adept at summary dismissals. He describes The Bamboo Bed by William Eastlake as “tushery end to end.”

 

In the context of Richard Brautigan (whose work in my recollection was read by the same people who took Kahlil Gibran seriously), Davenport writes: “Most of what’s printed in our time is either spiel or bilge.” Yet he’s rather gentle with Brautigan and his once-popular brand of Hippie Lit., and devotes more space to him than to the other writers under review.

 

Davenport is sympathetic to Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants, a story collection much trumpeted by the young English faculty members I knew as an undergraduate. Davenport outlines the postmodern fiction of that time:

 

“The movement in which Mr. Coover can be located would seem to include John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse), Louis Zukofsky (Ferdinand), Donald Barthelme (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts), Kenneth Gangemi (Olt), and Richard Brautigan. What these share is a sense that fiction is not so much reality’s mirror as its fluoroscope, and that mimesis can tolerate an almost infinite amount of hyperbole.”

 

How well I remember that tiresome dead-end school of fictional bric-a-brac. Briefly, I read them all enthusiastically, until I started growing up and developed a more honest critical sense. A nice irony: I interviewed Robert Coover in 1992 when he was in town to give a reading and hand out awards. He’s a gentleman and I enjoyed our conversation, but when I mentioned that I had visited Guy Davenport and corresponded with him, Coover said, “You mean the essay guy?” He didn’t think much of Davenport’s work.

 

I’ve  saved the best for last. Davenport reviews Oates’ fourth novel, Them (I won't leave the “t” pretentiously lower-case), an early entry in her campaign of inflicting sub-Dreiserian pulp on the reading public. Oates focuses “doggedly on the miserable greyness of life” (not to mention the miserable grayness of her prose). Davenport writes:

“The artist achieves his sincerity by embracing his art rather than his subject. We live in an age capable of accommodating the most strenuous sincerity [that great unacknowledged enemy of art]: the novelist can, like Andy Warhol, record reality and transcribe it unedited. Faced with such efficiency in the naturalistic arts, our mind keeps going back to the fact that Defoe did not even interview Alexander Selkirk in order to write Robinson Crusoe.”

'An Enormous Yes'

“The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.” 

My ideal setting for listening to music is my eleven-year-old Nissan. When I play a CD, I listen and never treat it as background. I hate the idea of music as ambient filler, a second atmosphere. My youngest son plays music while writing and studying. I could never do that. Whether because it’s very good or very bad, the music would be a distraction. I can no longer listen to the radio in the car – blather and more distraction. My playlist of late has been mostly old favorites, comfort sounds like comfort food -- Mavis Staples, Bill Evans, Chopin, Louis Armstrong.

 

Recently I was listening to a compilation album of Armstrong tracks that includes “Dallas Blues,” recorded with his orchestra two weeks before the Wall Street crash in 1929. I remembered it was Philip Larkin’s first selection on the BBC’s “Desert Island Discs,” broadcast on July 17, 1976. The transcript of Larkin’s conversation on the air is collected in Further Requirements (Faber and Faber, 2001):

 

“I suppose any jazz lover has to decide which Louis Armstrong record he is taking, because there are so many and Louis is such a combined Chaucer and Shakespeare of jazz. I’ve chosen ‘Dallas Blues’ from 1929 because I’ve been playing it for about forty years and never got tired of it. It is a blues, and Armstrong plays it in a beautiful warm and relaxed way that he doesn’t always achieve on his later more showmanship sides.”

 

The passage at the top is from Clive James’ review of Larkin’s Collected Poems, published in the July 17, 1989 issue of The New Yorker. James might be describing the blues: “It made misery beautiful.” Each of the three jazz numbers on Larkin's playlist – the others are by Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday -- is a blues. I think of Larkin on “Desert Island Discs” as playing the role of an applied critic. As a jazz critic, Larkin could be a sternly blinkered judge. He’s famously dismissive of  bop and subsequent forms of the music, but a good critic can be essential even when he’s wrong. James in his review goes on to observe:

 

“One of Larkin’s few even halfway carefree poems is ‘For Sidney Bechet,” from The Whitsun Weddings. Yet the impact that Larkin said Bechet made on him was exactly the impact that Larkin made of on readers coming to him for the first time:

 

“’On me your voice falls as they say love should,

Like an enormous yes.’”

 

Listen to Bechet’s gorgeous 1944 recording of "Blue Horizon." The song was performed at Larkin’s memorial service in 1985 at Westminster Abbey.

 

[James’ assorted reviews of Larkin’s work are collected in Somewhere Becoming Rain (Picador, 2019).]

Arthur Krystal

My review of two books by Arthur Krystal -- A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now and Some Unfinished Chaos: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald – is published in Ron Slate’s On the Seawall. 

'By Studying Little Things'

“He advised me to keep a journal of my life, fair and undisguised.” 

So did my high-school English teacher two centuries later. Boswell took Dr. Johnson’s advice and later mined the resulting journal when assembling his Life of Johnson (1791). Much of Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763 (1950), one of thirteen eventual volumes, is self-exhortation, a wayward young man urging himself, usually unsuccessfully, to reform. In that July 16, 1763 passage (two months after first meeting Johnson), Boswell writes:

 

“I have considered that promiscuous concubinage is certainly wrong. It is contributing one’s share towards bringing confusion and misery into society; and it is a transgression of the laws of the Almighty Creator, who has ordained marriage for the mutual comfort of the sexes and the procreation and right educating of children.”

 

Boswell, like so many of us, was long on self-reproach and noble resolutions and short on genuine moral reformation. We know physicians treated him for venereal disease at least seventeen times (as documented in his journals). Remarkably, he lived to age fifty-five despite suffering malaria, chronic foot infections, gonorrhea (often contracted in the Blue Periwig, a brothel in The Strand, London), depression (possibly manic, known generically as "The Melancholia") and prolonged heavy drinking (whether or not he was clinically alcoholic, it couldn’t have helped the depression). He added another addiction, gambling, lost heavily and exacerbated his melancholia, all the while putting off literary work and mending his ways. That he completed his Life of Johnson and made it the greatest of all biographies is miraculous, a tribute to human tenacity. Boswell adds, regarding Johnson’s advice to keep a journal:

 

 “He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me infinite satisfaction when the ideas were faded from my remembrance. I told him that I had done so ever since I left Scotland. He said he was very happy that I pursued so good a plan. And now, O my journal! Art thou not highly dignified? Shalt thou not flourish tenfold? No former solicitations or censures could tempt me to lay thee aside; and now is there any argument which can outweight [sic] the sanction of Mr. Samuel Johnson?”

 

Early in 1968 my English teacher gave me advice that echoed Johnson’s to Boswell, but at age fifteen I was lazy and uninspired, and barely kept it going for several months. I remember writing about Walt Whitman, Eric Hoffer and Bernard Malamud.  Adolescents are supposed to be natural-born chroniclers of their own angst. I wasn’t though I dutifully wrote something every day. I remember a god-awful Whitman-esque poem I wrote after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4. Boswell continues:

 

“He said indeed that I should keep it private, and that I might surely have a friend who would burn it in case of my death. For my own part, I have at present such an affection for this my journal that it shocks me to think of burning it. . . . I told Mr. Johnson that I put down all sorts of little incidents in it. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’”