'In a More Just World'

Our youngest son’s bedroom has lately turned into an overstuffed warehouse. Last year, as a junior at Rice, he lived off-campus in an apartment. This year he’s back in a dormitory so most of his “housewares” – clothing, dishes and utensils, tchotchkes – have been heaped in his room. Books were stacked on every horizontal surface. My job on Sunday was to organize them on the shelves. They reflected every era of David’s twenty-one years, from R.L. Stine to A Presocratics Reader. 

One book surprised me: a first edition, without a dustjacket, of The Just and the Unjust, James Gould Cozzens’ 1942 novel about a murder trial. David is in prelaw so finding the book among all the others makes sense. I rank it as Cozzens’ second-best novel after Guard of Honor (1948), though I haven't read Cozzens in years. Once a bestseller, his reputation has evaporated among critics and general readers. I won’t even try to rally the troops. Cozzens might as well have written in Linear B.  

 

Cozzens (1903-78) dedicated the novel to Edward G. Biester. Poking around online, I see that Biester was a lawyer who served as prosecutor and judge in Pennsylvania. He and Cozzens met during a trial in 1939 and became friends. Cozzens relied on him for legal accuracy. In his defense of Cozzens’ work, Joseph Epstein writes of The Just and the Unjust: “A very strong sense emerges of how the law in its daily operations works which I, for one, find fascinating.” The novel, as I recall it, has a documentary flavor without losing its narrative momentum.

 

Beneath the dedication, Cozzens adds a Latin tag, “Cuilibet in arte sua perito est credendum,” which he attributes to “Coke on Littleton, 125.” A rough translation: “Everyone must be trusted as an expert in their craft.” Coke I recognized as Sir Edward Coke (1551-1634), the English barrister, judge and legal scholar. The volume referred to is The Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628-44), one of the basic texts of common law.

 

Biester was likely “an expert in [his] craft,” as was Cozzens. As Epstein puts it: “In a more just world, James Gould Cozzens would be accorded a volume in the Library of America . . .”

'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers'

“All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche in literary history -- Henry Green’s Loving and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune's Maggot have both deservedly achieved this status through the persistence of a small band of admirers.” 

I understand the impulse but question it. It’s easy to get abusively idealistic. What’s the use of plumping for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa or the Goncourt Brothers if people no longer read or remain merely “voracious readers,” to use Nige’s phrase? That’s a question I’ve stopped asking myself after coming up with an answer that will satisfy no one, including me: We do it out of self-respect and, if you’ll pardon the expression, love. Some of us still love good books and sharing our enthusiasm with like-minded people. It feels like an obligation. The impulse is a good one, at least until we start getting resentful if no one is listening. Ours is the age of reduced literacy and a renewed enthusiasm for ”cancelling” the past. Sometimes it seems as though all writers are, to use Michael Holroyd’s word cited above, “unfashionable.”

 

Holroyd is the author of a two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey and four volumes devoted to the life of George Bernard Shaw. His essay “Out of Print” is published in the Spring 1970 issue of The American Scholar. Holroyd’s first book was a 1964 critical biography of Hugh Kingsmill, one of many forgotten English critics and anthologists. Six years later Holroyd published The Best of Hugh Kingsmill: Selections from his Writings. His introduction begins:

 

“Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of the opposition.”

 

In the essay, Holroyd’s tone is politely combative, but it’s no longer 1970 when a critic could still ask, “[W]hy doesn't someone start a library of autobiographies, from Benjamin Haydon to Edwin Muir and Gerald Brenan's A Life of One's Own? A country that neglects such books doesn't deserve to have them.” And, in effect, doesn’t have them.

 

[Holroyd’s essay serves as a sort of introduction to “Comments on Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years” in the same issue of The American Scholar. The editors ask fifty-three writers and critics to identify books deserving of rescue.]

'The Censure of Knaves and Fools'

“Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sense of gloomy wretchedness.” 

And that’s just from the introduction to his Life of Johnson. Anyone who dismisses James Boswell as a sort of idiot savant, “a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect,” as Macaulay famously wrote of him, is naïve about human nature. Boswell is describing Dr. Johnson’s father, Michael (1657-1731), an excellent bookman, a good father and a poor businessman in Lichfield.

 

I found the Boswell passage above in a most unexpected place: as the epigraph to David Mamet’s most recent book, Everywhere an Oink Oink (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which carries one of those fashionably long subtitles, presumably concocted by an editor: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood. I like Mamet’s prose. He’s a master of American Demotic. He’s funny, smart and uninhibited. I’ve never seen one of his plays on the stage but I enjoyed three movies he wrote and directed: House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1997).

 

I haven’t yet started reading the book but I wanted to see if Mamet develops the Boswellian or Johnsonian theme. In the index there is a single reference to to Johnson -- nine paragraphs of footnote on Page 174.The first begins “For the artist all criticism is devastating . . .”  Here’s part of the fourth:

 

“Samuel Johnson said the censure of knaves and fools is applause: a phrase rendered in the vernacular as ‘Fuck ’em all but six for pallbearers, and fuck them, too.’”

'The Important Medium''

I grew up in a place I’ve been told for most of my life should embarrass me. When I went to college and someone asked where I came from, invariably I said “Cleveland” not “Parma Heights,” a suburb on the West Side of that city. By age seventeen I was already sensitive to the snobbery of would-be sophisticates when it came to the suburbs.

Mine was not one of the swankier suburbs already associated in literature with John Cheever’s stories and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Our neighbors were working class and most were first- or second-generation Slavs. The only people I ever met who had gone to college were teachers and doctors. Some stereotypes held: the obsession with lawncare and washing the car every weekend in the summer. People were proud of what they had. My paternal grandfather and his three sons built our house after tearing down the cottage that had been their home until after World War II.

We had it good. The Fifties and Sixties were a prosperous time for many American families. My father was a union ironworker and on the side worked as an auxiliary police officer. My mother was a tax clerk for the city. We had plenty of problems but money wasn’t one of them. Our suburb, in retrospect, was a safe enclave. I don’t remember anyone worrying about crime.

These thoughts were prompted by a reader, one I hadn’t heard from before, who launched into an anti-suburb screed. He congratulated me for coming from “a real city,” not a “boring commuter haven.” Sorry, but Parma Heights was not a hip urban center. I remembered an essay written by the poet Phyllis McGinley in 1950, “Suburbia: Of Thee I Sing.” She celebrates her suburb, which she calls Spruce Manor:

“It is a commuters’ town, and the epitome of suburbia. By day, with the children pent in schools, it is a village of women. They trundle baskets at the A&P, they sit under driers at the hairdressers’, they sweep their porches and set out bulbs and stitch up slip covers.”

McGinley and her family lived in Larchmont, a suburb of New York City in Westchester County more affluent than Parma Heights. “Few of us expect to be wealthy or world-famous or divorced,” she writes. “What we do expect is to pay off the mortgage and send healthy children to good colleges.” Who could object to that? Snobs, of course, the insecure haute bourgeoisie.

McGinley (1905-78) is a poet erased from cultural memory. She called herself a “housewife poet,” without irony. Auden loved her and wrote an introduction to Times Three (1960), her collected poems that went through seven printings in six years. In “Suburbia: Of Thee I Sing,” she writes:

“I think that someday people will look back on our Spruce Manor way of life with nostalgia and respect. In a world of terrible extremes it will stand out as the important medium.”

'An Immense Special Talent'

D.G. Myers and I met in person only once, in March 2012, when David came to Houston to see his oncologist. We had lunch in a Mexican restaurant and talked for hours, then I drove him to the hospital. He gave me the Library of America’s collection of Henry James’ writings on American and English authors, including his review of J.W. Cross’ 1885 biography of George Eliot. James writes of the novelist:

“Her daily stint of arduous reading and writing was of the largest. Her ability, as one may express it in the most general way, was astonishing, and it belonged to every season of her long and fruitful career. Her passion for study encountered no impediment, but was able to make everything feed and support it. The extent and variety of her knowledge is by itself the measure of a capacity which triumphed wherever it wished. Add to this an immense special talent which, as soon as it tries its wings, is found to be adequate to the highest, longest flights and brings back great material rewards.”

 

Shift the pronouns and James could be writing about David, except for the reference to Eliot’s “long” career. David died ten years ago today, on September 26, 2014, at age sixty-two. We met virtually when David started A Commonplace Blog in 2008 and remained in touch via email and telephone almost daily, except on shabbat (David was an orthodox Jew), until his death from metastatic prostate cancer.

 

We shared many bookish loves – the poetry of L.E. Sissman, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, Michael Oakeshott’s philosophical essays, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm, J.V. Cunningham, Lolita, the novels of Peter De Vries, Janet Lewis, A.J. Liebling on boxing . . . I often wish David was around so I could hear his reaction to the Hamas atrocities, the writings of Gary Saul Morson, Boris Dralyuk’s translations of Isaac Babel, the poetry of A.M. Juster, the revival of anti-Semitism . . . David loved a good fight.      

 

We weren’t always in agreement. He loved sports and the literature of sports, especially baseball and football. As a kid I realized there was nothing more boring. He could write admiringly of Philip K. Dick, who never wrote an interesting sentence. I enjoy the Parker novels of Donald Westlake (dba Richard Stark) and David thought they were trash. His opinions never intimidated me; only that he was usually more articulate in expressing them than I was. David always insisted I was a critic, a charge I still deny. I don’t possess a fraction of his analytical skills but he was good at making you feel more intelligent than you truly are.

 

David loved quoting Yvor Winters: “Write little; do it well.” The literary blogosphere has never recovered from David’s death. It’s a poorer, less amusing, less well-written place.

'My Soul, Beyond Distant Death"

More than any secular writer I can think of, Vladimir Nabokov hints at the existence of an afterlife. He never preaches and makes no theological assertions. His frequent use of the word “paradise” is often ambiguous, blurring its mundane, metaphorical meaning – an earthly place of happiness and gratification -- with the more traditional notion of a Judeo-Christian heaven. 

Some critics of Pale Fire have suggested that Hazel Shade, who has committed suicide, is the author of the novel’s eponymous poem, not John Shade, her father. Consider the latter's interest in the poem’s I.P.H. – the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter. Think of the ghostly, acrostic-making author in the short story “The Vane Sisters” and of the unreal reality (a word Nabokov said we should never use without quotations marks) in the novels Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister. Nabokov writes in his lecture “The Art of Literature and Common Sense”:

 

“That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.”

 

My favorite use of paradise in his work is a casual aside found in “Mademoiselle O,” the memoir/story about his Swiss/French governess that Nabokov wrote and published in French in 1939. He later translated and revised the story and incorporated it into his autobiography, Speak, Memory:

 

“I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.”    

 

Nabokov wrote “In Paradise” in Russian on this date, September 25, in 1927, and published it the following year in the émigré newspaper Rul' (“Rudder”), founded by his father in Berlin. This is his translation:

 

“My soul, beyond distant death

your image I see like this:

a provincial naturalist,

an eccentric lost in paradise.

 

“There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers,

a semi-pavonian creature.

Poke at it curiously

with your green umbrella,

 

“speculating how, first of all,

you will write a paper on it

then — But there are no learned journals,

nor any readers in paradise!

 

“And there you stand, not yet believing

your wordless woe.

About that blue somnolent animal

whom will you tell, whom?

 

“Where is the world and the labeled roses,

the museum and the stuffed birds?

And you look and look through your tears

at those unnamable wings.”

 

[“The Art of Literature and Common Sense” is collected in Lectures on Literature (ed. Fredson Bowers, 1980).]

'A Whole Hog Barbecu'd!'

I was surprised to see that Alexander Pope was familiar with the most popular cuisine served in Texas: barbecue. You’ll find his reference in “The Second Satire in the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased”:

“Oldfield, with more than Harpy throat endu’d,

Cries, ‘send me, Gods! a whole Hog barbecu’d!’”

 

In a note to the poem, Pope writes of Oldfield that “this eminent glutton ran through a fortune of fifteen hundred pounds a year in the simple luxury of good eating.” In Texas, barbecue is a religion. I am not observant though I’ve witnessed heated arguments over what constitutes the proper preparation of barbecue, Texas style.  The magazine Texas Monthly has a barbecue editor. The word is a borrowing from the Spanish barbacoa and in the late seventeenth century originally referred in English to the framework or grill holding meat over a fire. In his dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines barbecue as both a noun and a verb:

 

“A term used in the West-Indies for dressing a hog whole; which, being split to the backbone, is laid flat upon a large gridiron, raised about two foot above a charcoal fire, with which it is surrounded.”

 

The couplets that follow Pope’s reference to barbecue are worthy of his scatologically minded friend Jonathan Swift:

 

“O blast it, South-winds! till a stench exhale

Rank as the ripeness of a rabbit’s tail.

By what criterion do you eat, d’ ye think,

If this is prized for sweetness, that for stink?

When the tired glutton labours thro’ a treat,

He finds no relish in the sweetest meat.”

'Grounded in the Deep Tradition of English Poesy'

When I’m told someone, somewhere has started a new poetry journal, a little piece of me dies. Just what we’ve been waiting for: more precious self-revelations, strident politics and lineated prose. Nice to know the world can still surprise us. An Australian, Clarence Caddell, has published the first issue of The Borough: A Journal of Poetry, and it seems to be written by and for grownups. He takes its title from George Crabbe’s wonderful, largely forgotten poem “The Borough” (1810) and quotes its opening lines: 

“‘Describe the Borough’—though our idle tribe

May love description, can we so describe,

That you shall fairly streets and buildings trace,

And all that gives distinction to a place?”

 

Caddell then quotes Edwin Arlington Robinson’s sonnet “George Crabbe”:

 

“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.”

 

Among Caddell’s “manifesto-ish statements” is this: “The Borough is grounded in the deep tradition of English poesy; that is, the one going back to Chaucer and beyond, not the one that started with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and which seems likely to destroy all meaningful literary culture.” You know already you’re not wasting your time.

I’m familiar with some of the poets here – among them, the Americans Maryann Corbett, Aaron Poochigian, Marly Youmans and James Matthew Wilson, and the great Australian Stephen Edgar (read his “Late Brahms”). What does it mean that I find the rare word eschaton in two poems by different poets. Here is A.Z. Foreman’s “Portrait of Alexander German (Russian author turned Romani poet)”:

 

“The past was over. Its last sovereign died

gunned in the chest, the children bayonetted

by sulfurous powers that kept this man indebted

for kindness to those history-mortified

 nomads he loved. Their language, blazed state pride,

nursed his ear. Brass bands in the fresh time’s breeze

seemed heralds to the eschaton of peace

so his verse could lie honestly. He tried

 to speak them civic, mindless how the slow

boils dribbled in the twisting smile of Fate,

how Freedom gaped and simpered from the snow,

 and how Equality would fail a state

maimed on its own myth to an altered throne

that bayonet and gun had made their own.” 

 

And Youmans’ “Jenetta, Blessed”:

 

“A ruined loveliness,

An eschaton of blight,

Reminder that to bless

Is to take flight

 

“From what is merely seen

To revelation’s truth:

No longer laughing queen

Of hearts, you’re ruth

 

“And harrow to men now,

Your essence pulled inside

And wordless, yet somehow

“You still abide,

 

“Your riddling self a thing

Composed of flame and years

And silences that bring

The gift of tears.”

 

As Caddell writes in his introduction:

 

“We don’t mind a bit of personal confession, meditative epiphany or everyday mysticism, but we do acknowledge that other modes are possible and often desirable.”

'The World Has Always Seemed to Me So Various'

I dropped out of university after my junior year in 1973 and didn’t return to campus to complete my B.A. in English until 2003. The lack of a degree never got in the way of working for almost a quarter-century as a newspaper reporter. I suspect a degree in most non-STEM professions is redundant. After earning my long-deferred degree, and in a state of mental exhilaration, I contemplated going after a Ph.D. I was fifty years old. Every faculty member I consulted at Skidmore College, including the novelist Steven Millhauser, told me it would be a waste of time. I was briefly disappointed but they were right.  

In one of his essays Guy Davenport observed that Americans are the first people in history to possess documented proof of their illiteracy: Just ask them to produce a college degree. He wrote that in the seventies, when the trivialization of higher education was well underway but not yet complete. I have no regrets though occasionally I wish I had become a welder after high school – a real job, one that contributes.

 

A reader has asked whether she should return to college after dropping out several years ago. She’s still young, not yet thirty. Advice is dangerous stuff. If taken and the outcome is unhappy, the advice-giver has set himself up for resentment and blame. Rather, I urged my reader to examine her motives and expectations. She’s smart and better-read than most of her contemporaries, so a typical college curriculum could crush her. I shared Dr. Johnson’s advice to Boswell: “to have as many books about [. . .] as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon which I had a desire for instruction at the time.”

 

In a 2011 essay on the nature of evil Theodore Dalrymple describes his reading strategy, and in it I recognize my own:

 

“Often I read more than one book at a time. When I tire of one I fly to another. This is because the world has always seemed to me so various and so interesting in all its aspects that I have not been able to confine my mind to a single subject or object for very long; therefore I am not, never have been, and never will be the scholar of anything. My mind is magpie-like, attracted by what shines for a moment; I try to persuade myself that this quality of superficiality has its compensations, in breadth of interest, for example.”

 

Dalrymple’s approach suggests that my reader, regardless of her decision, will never have reason to ever again be bored or rudderless.

'I Suppose Age Brings Context'

An old friend and former blogger in England has been reading Anthony Hecht and detects what he calls “a very faint ghost of Hart Crane at times.” It’s not a connection I have ever made but I recognize a certain lushness of diction in both of them. 

“[I]t's a similar sense of being suddenly hooked & exalted by the sound of the lines,” he writes, “though he's much more concrete, deliberate, intellectual, than Crane. Crane is kind of the adolescent version of Hecht, I love them both but am unsure how my love of HC will stand up to a re-reading.”

 

Mine hasn’t. As a high-school student I was initially drawn to Crane’s work because we shared a Cleveland, Ohio connection. He is fundamentally a young person’s poet – a young person with a taste for sometimes overripe language. A poet friend and I in the Seventies turned a pub crawl into a pilgrimage, drinking at Crane’s favorite watering holes in downtown Cleveland. Our tour guide was a biography of Crane. Today, his work no longer interests me, which is not the same as saying he is a lousy poet. He is for others to enjoy. People often like and dislike writers for extra-literary reasons, including fashion and a desire not to be considered unsophisticated. My friend writes:

 

“Unlike you, I never really turn against old literary loves, but I have cooled against some books I loved in my youth; I suppose age brings context, it's as if a little treasure I once contemplated in a small chamber is now set in the middle of a vast dark hall, and long shadows fall about it: it seems okay, fine for what it is, but that’s all.”

 

Well put. It’s true: I have often shed once-passionate devotions to writers, books and genres. I had a brief but all-consuming infatuation with science fiction, Doc Savage and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs around the ages of twelve and thirteen. To me, that sounds age-appropriate. A little later came my crush on Thomas Wolfe, especially Look Homeward, Angel. I went so far as memorizing him: “Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?” That’s a pure distillation of adolescent angst. Plus, I hadn’t yet shed a taste for overwriting.

 

I’m convinced that the works of certain writers are best appreciated by readers at certain ages. I first read Proust at age twenty – twenty years too soon. A handful of writers I have read early and often, and they have aged proportionally with me – Bunyan, Swift, Defoe. Then I think of the Crane-like good writers I’m unlikely to read ever again, starting with James Joyce, which leaves me feeling a little wistful but with good memories.

 

My English friend adds: “Incidentally, in German Hecht means pike (the fish). Were I a poet, I would write a poem called ‘The Pike and the Crane,’ but I lack that gift.”

'Old Landor's Bones Are Laid'

On Tuesday I wrote about Walter Savage Landor, his poems and especially Imaginary Conversations, a collection of 174 dialogues, mostly of historical and literary figures, published in five volumes between 1824 and 1829. I keep a mental list of books I admire and enjoy that seem to go largely unread by others, and periodically urge them on readers – Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. The toughest sell is likely Landor (1775-1864). For reasons of style, subject matter and length (ironic, considering his mastery of the epigram), most readers are immune to his charms. Here’s how one reader replied to Tuesday’s post: 

“I read one volume of Imaginary Conversations, having had it urged upon me by this blog. I wish I'd known in advance about R. Brimley Johnson’s Aphorisms. There's good stuff in Landor, but you have to go through a lot to get it.”

 

No argument here. Imaginary Conversations is one of those books that teaches us how to read it, and not everyone learns. You pace yourself and adapt to Landor’s rhythms. His language can feel stilted and is seldom colloquial in a contemporary sense. You can’t read his dialogues the way you might read a collection of short stories. Landor has his longueurs, as the boys say down at the bowling alley.

 

I was surprised in 2014 when Oxford University Press published Adam Roberts’ Landor’s Cleanness: A Study of Walter Savage Landor. It’s hard to think of a major writer in the English tradition less fashionable. Roberts devotes his final chapter to Imaginary Conversations, and sympathizes with my reader quoted above:

 

“What is it that contaminates the poised and controlled masterpieces known collectively as Landor’s Imaginary Conversations? In a word it is boredom. The exquisiteness, appositeness, and almost sensual pleasure of the prose is as often spoken by a bore as by a master.”

 

Roberts speaks our language. He understands readers who find mostly tedium in Landor’s dialogues. But note that he describes some of Landor’s speakers, not  the author himself, as bores:

 

“One way of defining a bore would be: a person who doesn’t see that what interests him does not interest you. Or perhaps, more precisely: a person who assumes thoughtlessly that you will also be fascinated by what fascinates him.”

  

We’re all familiar with bores and have devised strategies over the years for dealing with them, whether nodding and smiling, telling them to shut up or running out the door, depending on the species. Roberts tells us the “currency” of the dialogues in Imaginary Conversations is “prolixity.” He quotes Landor telling Robert Browning, “with a sort of crashing honesty, the format gave him ‘more room’ than poetry. The reader’s heart may not leap up to hear this.”

 

As my reader suggested above, modern readers might favor a prudently chosen, intelligently abridged edition of Imaginary Conversations. I wonder if any of the dialogues have ever been adapted for the stage. Perhaps such thoughts confirm the reactions of modern readers: Why bother? Aren’t the dialogues mere curiosities, remnants of another literary age when, in Roberts’ words, conversation was “well[-]constructed and harmonious,” and prose wasn’t that far away from conversation? Landor writes in “Southey and Porson”: “I would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this: that . . . that they first read and examine the contents of the book; a thing greatly more useful in criticism than is thought.”

 

[Here is the first stanza of Yvor Winters’ “Anacreontic”: “Peace! There is peace at last. / Deep in the Tuscan shade, / Swathed in the Grecian past, / Old Landor’s bones are laid.”]

  

[Wurmbrand asks: “But what are some others on your mental list?” The American Scene by Henry James, Maurice Baring’s 1924 novel C,  the jazz writings of Whitney Balliett, Stevie Smith’s three novels, the short stories of Peter Taylor, V.S. Pritchett’s 1951 novel Mr. Beluncle, anything by Yvor Winters and his wife, Janet Lewis.]

'Very Close to the Caliber of Mark Twain'

I found a 2001 interview with Shelby Foote in The American Enterprise. The author of the three volumes of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974) was asked by Bill Kauffman about the scarcity of politicians who are today capable of formulating their own coherent let alone eloquent sentences. Foote replied: 

“Lincoln’s speeches were mostly by himself, but the ‘better angels of our nature’ was [soon-to-be Lincoln’s secretary of state William H.] Seward. I said Lincoln was a political genius; he’s other kinds of geniuses, too. He’s a writer very close to the caliber of Mark Twain.” 

We’ve grown so accustomed to politicians being inarticulate bumblers, unable to craft their own speeches and equally unable to speak the words written for them by others, that the notion of a Twain-class American president sounds like one of Lincoln’s tall tales. I’ve started brief, one-way arguments with the simple statement that Lincoln belongs on the short list of the greatest American writers. The late poet Helen Pinkerton in 2013 asked me in an email: “How did this country ever manage to produce that man?” It’s not a question of “literary” versus “non-literary.”  

The day I found the Foote interview I took home from the library Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020) by Ward Farnsworth, who begins his preface with these simple declarative sentences, thus bolstering the theme of his book: “Abraham Lincoln wrote more beautifully and memorably than anyone in public life does now. So did Winston Churchill; so did Edmund Burke; so did many others, none of whom sound quite alike but all of whom achieved an eloquence that seems foreign to our times. What did they know that we don’t?”  

Farnsworth offers a partial answer to his question: “[W]riters of lasting stature still make the best teachers.” We read and reread the masters to learn how to write, speak and think. In sixth grade, Mrs. Whistler had us memorize the 267 words of the Gettysburg Address. (Sixty years later, I pity her having to listen to us stammer.) Not only the words but their rhythms are still with me. Lincoln delivered his brief speech at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. Characteristically, he mingles humility and audacity when he says, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here . . .”  

Speaking almost a quarter-century ago, Foote said in the interview: “I have found that children are no longer required to memorize the Gettysburg Address in school, and that dismays me to think of young people wandering around without those rhythms in their brain. Memory work is frowned on now in schools: that’s crazy.”  

Memorization is the core of education. The words of Lincoln, Churchill, Burke and others are a compass and a consolation. In Reading with Lincoln (2007), Robert Bray concludes that Lincoln, born on the American frontier in 1809, read Bunyan, Burns, Byron, Cowper, Defoe, Euclid, Gibbon, Gray, Poe, Pope and much Shakespeare (nine Englishmen, one American and a Greek). Bray writes:  

“From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself.” 

Farnsworth includes the text of the Gettysburg Address in his anthology and looks at Lincoln’s use of Saxon-derived and Latinate words. He writes:  

“The beauty and power of Lincoln’s wording lies not in a relentless use of Saxon words but in the movement between earthy language and airier words and phrases that elevate. . . . The Saxon words create feeling and convey simplicity and sincerity. They hit home. The Latinate words evoke thought and connect the images to concepts and ideals. The sound and tone of each balances the sound and tone of the other.”

'But Johnson Fought Back'

Epigraphs to books are often superfluous. They can come off as cute or pretentious. They add little or nothing to the manner in which we read the book and often amount to our author showing off, touting his own vast reading or giving himself an unearned endorsement. The most appropriate and helpful epigraph in my experience is the one Nabokov appends to Pale Fire. 

Another wise choice of epigraphs are those used by John Wain in his Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1974). The first is from Johnson’s own History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759): “Few can attain this man’s knowledge, and few practice his virtues; but all may suffer his calamity.”

 

The speaker is Prince Imlac, who has listened to the Astronomer describe his ability to control the movements of the sun and regulate the light and heat reaching the Earth. Imlac realizes the Astronomer, who wishes to pass on his powers to the prince before he dies, is brilliant but quite mad. Imlac’s female companions laugh at the Astronomer’s delusions and the prince rebukes them:

 

“‘Ladies,’ said Imlac, ‘to mock the heaviest of human afflictions is neither charitable nor wise. Few can attain this man’s knowledge and few practise his virtues, but all may suffer his calamity. Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.’”

 

Wain’s second epigraph is from a very un-Johnsonian book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

 

“He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say,” [said the Mock Turtle].

 

“So he did, so he did,” [said the Gryphon].

 

Personally, I observe a long-standing prohibition against quoting Lewis Carroll, except in the context of logic or matrix algebra, but Wain’s point is a good one. Johnson was indeed one of those rare human beings who not only taught “Laughing and Grief” (a punning take on Latin and Greek), but in whom they coexisted and drove his thinking and emotions. In Johnson, the demarcation between thought and feeling is nearly nonexistent. In this, he is a representative member of the species Homo sapiens. Johnson is just like us, only more so.

 

Psychologists have diagnosed Johnson as being afflicted with an amusingly named disorder, dementophobia – fear of madness. That's his "calamity." Wain in his biography comments on Johnson’s “mental and emotional troubles, and the steps he took to fight against them”:

 

“[H]e never imagined that we were to be reasoned out of subjective states of mind. When melancholy lays siege, repel it with the methods that work best, not with those that sound most impressive. Where you cannot win, it is no disgrace to run away – such was his constant advice, to himself and others . . .”

 

One of Johnson’s favorite prescriptions for melancholy was also favored by Robert Burton: get and keep busy. Serious work has a way of inducing self-forgetfulness. One needs to remain vigilant against idleness, forever a temptation and a sort of gateway drug to insanity. Wain writes:

 

“But Johnson fought back. His periods of gloom and exhaustion, his terrifying anxieties, rose now and then to a point of crisis at which he was unfit for work or for company, useless to himself and others. Whenever they were at a lower intensity he fought them off, and with a variety of weapons. He prayed; he wrestled with doubt; he studied; he shifted huge loads of  work. And, whenever he got the chance, he talked.”

 

Johnson was born on September 18, 1709 and died in 1784 at age seventy-five.

'So Many Delicate Aphorisms of Human Nature'

“We should hesitate to name any writings which would afford so large and so various a selection of detached passages complete in themselves. . . . We should be at a loss to name the writer of English prose who is his superior, or, setting Shakespeare aside, the writer of English who has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature.” 

Who is James Russell Lowell describing? Ben Jonson? Dr. Johnson? Swift? Once you become aware of the potential for aphoristic prose, that melding of terseness with density of meaning, you find it in unlikely places, even in long-form writers like George Eliot and Tolstoy, as Gary Saul Morson reminds us. We might think of an aphorism as the prose counterpart to an epigram, that other form mastered by Walter Savage Landor, the writer Lowell describes.

 

R. Brimley Johnson uses the passage quoted above as the epigraph to Aphorisms, the collection of Landor’s maxims he edited in 1896. Of all the books I’ve proselytized for over the years, Imaginary Conversations is the one with fewest converts. Landor published his 174 dialogues in five volumes (with a sixth volume added later) between 1824 and 1829, and most of Johnson’s selections are taken from that work.

 

This, for instance, is drawn from “Southey and Porson”: “Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are: the turbid look most profound.”

 

“Pericles and Aspasia”: “There are writings which must lie long upon the straw before they mellow to the taste; and there are summer fruits which cannot abide the keeping.”

 

“Hare and Landor”: “But prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.”

 

“Southey and Porson”: “Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful.”

 

“Alfieri and Salomon”: “Humour is wit appertaining to character, and indulges in breadth of drollery rather than in play and brilliancy of point. Wit vibrates and spurts; humour springs up exuberantly, as from a fountain, and runs on.”

 

And  note this exchange between Dr. Johnson and John Horne Tooke (1736-1812), the English politician and philologist:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Landor is one of literature’s irascible old men, along with Thomas Carlyle, but he can’t be written off as merely an ill-tempered crank. 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.”

 

Landor died on September 17, 1864 at age eighty-nine.

[R. Brimley Jonson (1867-1932) was an English critic and editor. He quotes Lowell’s essay on Landor collected in Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891). I see that Johnson published a book provocatively titled Moral Poison in Modern Fiction (1922).]

'One of the Disadvantages of Wine'

An offhand recounting of a conversation with Dr. Johnson: 

“He has great virtue, in not drinking wine or any fermented liquor, because, as he acknowledged to us, he could not do it in moderation. Lady M’Leod would hardly believe him, and said, ‘I am sure, sir, you would not carry it too far.’ JOHNSON. ‘Nay, madam, it carried me. I took the opportunity of a long illness to leave it off. It was then prescribed to me not to drink wine; and having broken off the habit, I have never returned to it.’”

 

Boswell dates the exchange to September 16, 1773 in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785). The friends are on a three-month journey through the highlands and the western islands of Scotland. They are visiting the home of Lady MacLeod on the island of Raasay. Johnson is sick with a cold and agrees to “drink a little brandy when he was going to bed.”

 

I first read Boswell on Johnson in 1971 at the suggestion of one of my English professors. I was hooked and started a life-long practice of reading and rereading most of what both men had written and much of what had been written about them. In the context of eighteenth-century England, alcohol is a sort of one-word punch line, a joke. Think of Tom Jones, Richard Savage, Smollett’s novels, Hogarth and, of course, Boswell himself. But I never considered that Johnson may have had a problem with alcohol until 1981, when I read Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers by Donald Newlove (1928-2021), who writes:

 

“Great writing about alcohol is an ocean without shoreline and I have a thick notebook of excerpts from world literature to attest to it, a sheaf of quotations to help me keep sober. One of the most stirring recoveries from excessive drinking was made by Dr. Samuel Johnson two centuries ago.”

 

Newlove, a recovering alcoholic, assembles a small anthology of Johnson’s wisdom-from-experience regarding alcohol, drawn largely from Boswell. You’ll notice the absence of sermonizing:

 

“Sir, I have no objection to a man's drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.”

 

“Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.”

 

“Boswell: ‘I think, Sir, you once said to me, that not to drink wine was a great deduction from life.’ Johnson: ‘It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do not say a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in being rational.’”

 

“This is one of the disadvantages of wine. It makes a man mistake words for thoughts.”

 

It’s testimony to Johnson’s moral stature that most of us remember him as a pillar of sobriety, in every sense, not as a dissolute sot. I’ve never  encountered a single description of Johnson drunk.

 

I’m sorry to learn that Newlove has died. I read when they were first published his novels Leo & Theodore (1972) and The Drunks (1974), the story of alcoholic Siamese-twin jazz musicians. The books were better than that description suggests, and very funny. In 1978 Newlove revised them into a single paperback titled Sweet Adversity. His fiction was important to me when I was drinking and in my early years of sobriety. Consider Newlove an amusing and bittersweet alternative to Malcolm Lowry. 

'The Fruit of My Studies'

I’ve been invited to join an online book club and have politely declined. I even like some of the readers who already belong, but by nature I’m not a joiner of anything. As soon as an arrangement among friendly individuals becomes formalized – by that I mean, organized, with times and dates, rules and dues – I’m gone. Especially when it comes to books, I go it alone. A book club sounds too much like a Kaffeeklatsch, with schmoozing and small talk.

Around the time I got the invitation, a reader and I starting swapping favorite passages from Montaigne’s Essays. It started spontaneously and has no rules. It started when we exchanged thoughts about the death of siblings. He emailed this from “Of Experience,” Montaigne's final essay:

 

“Death mingles and fuses with our life throughout. Decline anticipates death’s hour and intrudes even into the course of our progress. I have portraits of myself at twenty-five and thirty-five; I compare them with one of the present: how irrevocably it is no longer myself! How much farther is my present picture from them than from that of my death!”

 

I replied with this from “That Our Happiness Must Not Be Judged Until After Our Death”:

 

“I leave it to death to test the fruit of my studies. We shall see then whether my reasonings come from my mouth or from my heart.”