'There’s No Such Thing As a Synonym'

My favorite literary non-form may be commonplace books, those magpie collections unified only by the sensibilities of their hunter-gatherers. They are kept by industrious readers and serve as literary Wunderkammern, cabinets of bookish wonders that may reveal a reader’s truest autobiography. In his final years, the English poet and critic D.J. Enright published three of them: Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995), Play Resumed: A Journal (1999), and Injury Time: A Memoir (2003). On Monday I bought a copy of Interplay at Kaboom Books, and only when I returned home did I learn that today is the twenty-second anniversary of Enright’s death. These are charming books, the critic in his off-hours, and I suggest you try to find them. Enright quotes “The Refined Man” from Rudyard Kipling’s sequence “Epitaphs of the War,” written during World War I: 

“I was of delicate mind. I stepped aside for my needs,

    Disdaining the common office. I was seen from afar and killed . . .

How is this matter for mirth? Let each man be judged by his deeds.

    I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I willed.”

 

Followed by these comments: “Kipling’s ignoble, slightly comical occurrence—a soldier prefers not to urinate in company—issues in a weighty conclusion. So much packed into that last line, just one line. All that’s needed is a further line, speaking for those, less happy, who weren’t free to will the terms they would live on, and still paid a price.”

 

Enright is aware, of course, that Kipling’s son John was killed in the Battle of Loos in 1915.

 

Enright’s previous passage is a swipe at postmodernism (“must be terribly exhausting”). The next concerns Clarice Lispector’s Discovering the World, followed by thoughts on children and such films as The Exorcist, and then Henry James' What Maisie Knew. Enright has the kind of mind whose company I enjoy. Later he writes:

 

“There’s no such thing as a synonym. Which is why compilations of them are so splendidly serviceable: not merely helping you to find the right word but leading you toward the exact thought. As for ‘wrong’ words, a foolish but instructive parlour game is to rewrite Shakespeare with recourse to a thesaurus: ‘Be extinguished. Be extinguished, short-term source of illumination.’”

'Be Able to Call It a Poem'

A few poets are born into each generation. A measure of the rareness of their gift is the proliferation of wannabes who make poetic gestures, relish the title “poet” and write undistinguished prose. I was given an issue of American Poetry Review, a magazine I haven’t looked at in forty years. It contained not a single poem. Even the nominally prose feature was largely unreadable. I was reminded of the literary magazine, Lit Bits, I edited in high school.  

How good it is to discover a true poet, Jane Greer. I don’t know her work deeply. I’m relying on what I’ve read online, such as “Thirty Years’ Creeper War”:

 

“Into its roots I thrust my spade,

each spring, to kill it where it cloaks

and climbs my lovely house, and chokes

all other green things there arrayed.

With my bare hands I pull new shoots

before they batten and start to braid

themselves into a wild cascade.

I never manage to kill the roots.

 

“I lay thick fabric on the yard

to snuff the beast, but my crusade

founders: no earthly barricade

will work. Old errors—they die hard:

I planted this plague decades past,

so casually, and am now betrayed

by its propensity to last.

It’s not the worst choice I have made.”

 

Greer reminds me on occasion of Janet Lewis. Both might be described as “domestic” poets. They often write about homebound objects and events, like gardening and family, though that describes only the most superficial aspect of their poems, the “content.” Neither is a composer of “messages.” Their poems are made to be heard. They are constructions of sound. Greer recently spoke on the podcast “Let the Goat Go,” where she talks about some of the silliness I encountered in American Poetry Review:

 

“The irritant that I’m talking about is giving names to writing that doesn’t deserve those names or labels. Grandiose, pompous names. You’ll understand what I mean in a minute. Those words, grandiose and pompous, indicate dishonesty, pretending that something is what it’s not, or pretending that we are something that we’re not.”

 

She refers to non-sonnet sonnets, prose poems and so-called “erasure poems.” These are avant-garde fripperies, the sort of thing that’s been cranked out for more than a century and calls itself “edgy” or “transgressive.” The idea is to attract attention by being reflexively contradictory, like an unhappy adolescent. Some of Greer’s poems approach light verse, as in “Trending,” while “Like Feathers" is casually masterful:

 

“Like feathers, they drift in

from somewhere out-of-frame,

and none of them can name

where they have been.

 

“Too briefly do they stay

in-frame, falling, lifting,

lightly slanting, drifting

down and away,

 

“with perfect gravity,

into the waiting grave.

They love us but behave

so thoughtlessly.”

 

Let’s give thanks for Jane Greer, who writes like a grownup for grownups, in a spirit of common sense. On the podcast she says: “So a focus on language, the use of meter and rhyme, and the use of metaphor, these are base level features that differentiate poetry from prose. Maybe one of those features can be missing, but not all of them, and still be able to call it a poem.”

'The Future Spells Only Disaster'

Several weeks ago in a post I wrote about Robert Conquest I referred to “the essential books published in the twentieth century,” and listed some of the titles deserving a place in that category. Most, I wrote, “are not found in the traditionally defined literary categories; that is, novels, poetry, plays. They tend to be histories and memoirs, most related to communism.” A reader asked for specifics. Here’s a strictly personal list of books I have read, not intended to be definitive, and limited to one title per writer: 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

 

Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate

 

Aleksander Wat: My Century

 

Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory

 

Whitaker Chambers: Witness

Primo Levi: If This Is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz)

Czesław Miłosz: The Captive Mind

Eugenia Ginzburg: Journey into the Whirlwind

 

Tadeusz Borowski: Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories

 Zbigniew Herbert: Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems

Osip Mandelstam: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam

 

Armando Valladares: Against All Hope

 

Varlam Shalamov: Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories

 

Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon

 

Józef Czapski: Inhuman Land

 

I have not included volumes produced by historians, in favor of those from the category formerly known as belles-lettres. Most of these writers produced other books worth pursuing. Obviously, you would want to read Mandelstam’s poetry, his most essential work. Virtually everything Solzhenitsyn wrote is useful. There are totalitarian regimes – China, Vietnam – whose witnesses I have never read. Just to eliminate ambiguity, I’ll note that plenty of other “essential books” were written in the twentieth century, starting with one title – In Search of Lost Time. I’m dealing here with books written in response to a century of unprecedented barbarism. And the same abattoir remains in business in the twenty-first. Another reader made an excellent suggestion – Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which deals with neither Nazis nor communists.

 

In an exclusive category are the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both translated by Max Hayward. She was Osip’s widow. The poet died in one of Stalin’s camps on December 27, 1938. If I could mandate the reading of any writer on this makeshift list, it would be Nadezhda. Her voice is harsh, intelligent, defiant, uncompromising and occasionally even funny. Her first name in Russian means “hope,” an irony she often plays with. In a chapter titled “Major Forms” in Hope Abandoned she writes:

 

“In our conditions it is inadvisable to let one’s mind dwell on the future. The future spells only disaster and casts its shadow on the present; it poisons your life, grips you by the throat in paroxysms of terror, drains away your strength and your very life’s blood. It is fatal to start feeling afraid beforehand. . . . Even now, if I  were to start thinking about the future, I would sink into total lethargy—despite the fact the present is like paradise compared with the past. But, of course, on this large planet of ours ‘paradise’ is a relative concept. Some pampered people might take our paradise for nothing less than hell on earth. It all depends on what you compare it with and what you take as your base of comparison. Optimists like me start off the period before the Boss’s death [Stalin, 1953] until the Twentieth Congress [the much-touted “thaw” of 1956, following Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress].”

 

Nadezhda Mandelstam died on this date, December 29, in 1980, age eighty-one.

'All Is Not Dead'

Sadness nicely coexists with happiness this time of year. Christmas is over. Memories abound. We underestimate ourselves when it comes to emotional capacity. Only the insane know one emotion at a time, which is why bliss and clinical depression are rare states and why Joseph Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss” is among the more vapid legacies of the nineteen-eighties. Philip Larkin is the poet of middle-states. Often he’s libeled as “gloomy,” a judgment that ignores the wit, craft and subtlety of his poems. Take “January,” written in 1962 and unpublished until after his death: 

“A slight relax of air where cold was

And water trickles; dark ruinous light,

Scratched like an old film, above wet slate withdraws.

Shrinkage of snow shows cleaner than the net

Stiffened like ectoplasm in front windows.

 

“Shielded, what sorts of life are stirring yet:

Legs, lagged like drains, slippers soft as fungus,

The gas and grate, the old cold sour grey bed.

Some ajar face, corpse-stubbled, bends around

To see the sky over aerials --

Sky, absent paleness across which the gulls

Wing to the Corporation rubbish ground.

A slight relax of air. All is not dead.”

 

That’s as close to cheerleading as you’ll get from Larkin. This is gorgeous: “dark ruinous light, / Scratched like an old film.” He describes a phenomenon I looked forward to every year in the North, though usually in February: a one-day thaw, a pat on the head that said “All is not dead.” March, we knew, can turn into a monster. In the woods you could smell the earth again and skunk cabbage burned through the snow. Not in Houston, where the seasonal spectrum is narrow. The sun is still low, little higher than at the solstice, but the temperature hit 76°F on Friday. I watched a monarch butterfly in the front garden, which is still green and blooming.

'To Have Part of His Life to Himself'

“I am not obliged to do any more.” 

Retirement is my choice. For most of my life I assumed I would drop dead at the keyboard in my office, mid-sentence, but next week I retire. I have always enjoyed work, the sense of contributing something to an enterprise, no matter how paltry, mustering words for some utilitarian purpose and getting paid for it. In my case that amounted to five newspapers (three of them now defunct) and two universities. I like routine gently interrupted by the unexpected, which describes the career I have improvised. Reporting was the graduate school I never otherwise had. I’ve been fairly lucky with bosses. Only two stand out as sociopaths and one of them is dead. No grudges. No regrets. 

 

As a kid I once asked my mother what job could I get so they would pay me for reading books. When she stopped laughing at me she told me to grow up. So, now in retirement I’m reviewing books and sometimes even getting paid for it. Thanks to my wife we are financially secure.

 

The sentence at the top is Dr. Johnson speaking in the spring of 1766, age fifty-five, to Boswell and Goldsmith. As recounted by the former, he continues:

 

“No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to have part of his life to himself. If a soldier has fought a good many campaigns, he is not to be blamed, if he retires to ease and tranquility. A physician, who has practiced long in a great city, may be excused, if he retires to a small town, and takes less practice. Now, Sir, the good I can do by my conversation bears the same proportion to the good I can do by my writings, that the practice of a physician, retired to a small town, does to his practice in a great city.”

'The Whole Time Reading, Reading, Reading'

“I’m not doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really mind having the time to read. It’s more enjoyable than writing. I feel that if I could live another forty years and spend the whole time reading, reading, reading, and learning how to write with talent, that is to say succinctly, then in forty years’ time I would be able to blast everyone from such a big cannon that the heavens would tremble. But for now I am just as Lilliputian as all the rest.” 

Another reason to love Anton Chekhov. He is writing to his editor and friend Alexy Suvorin on April 8, 1889. He had already written “A Nasty  Story,” “A Dreary Story,” “The Steppe,” and “Kashtanka,” and would soon write “Gusev,” “The Duel” and “Ward No. 6.” What we might interpret as false modesty in most writers rings with genuine humility in Chekhov. He saw himself as a perpetual apprentice, always learning. He memorably states what I take as literary gospel: writers read. We’re all part of a grand, mutually instructive tradition. A writer who doesn’t read is like a piano player wearing mittens.

 

Christmas was bountiful, as usual. Among the bookish gifts, I was given subscriptions to The Claremont Review of Books and The Los Angeles Review of Book, and two books:

 

Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin  Frank and the new translation (by Charlotte Mandell) of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. Frank concludes his introduction:

 

“The critic’s sense of a book is always partial and provisional, but so long as it doesn’t set out to substitute an interpretation or explanation for the book itself – well, then it may provide a glimpse of both the book in action and the action of reading the book—that hoped-for moment of encounter.”

 

[The letter quoted at  the top can be found in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004), edited by Rosamund Bartlett and translated by Bartlett and Anthony Phillips.

''He Knew It Was All Wrong for the Season'

Once I listened to a guy who had decided to stop drinking while sitting alone in a diner eating his Christmas dinner, separated from his wife and children. He recalled the moment with good humor. What had depressed him was eating canned corn. He had grown up associating good food and plenty of it with the holiday. Canned corn was an unacceptable indignity. He soon stopped drinking. I think of him as a John Cheever character. 

It’s charitable to remember that Christmas is a goad to misery for many, drinkers or otherwise. It’s the contrast with the image of Christmas sold to us from childhood, the Dickensian good spirits and bonhomie, though Christmas is no longer a problem for me. It boils down to family. All my sons are here. There’s nothing to regret, nothing to change, nothing to be cynical about. I still read Dickens this time of year, the Christmas chapters in Pickwick Papers, but also John Cheever, and not just his 1949 story “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor.”Take a moment and read the opening words of his novel The Wapshot Scandal (1964):

 

“The snow began to fall into St. Botolphs at four-fifteen on Christmas Eve. Old Mr. Jowett, the stationmaster, carried his lantern out onto the platform and held it up into the air. The snowflakes shown like iron filings in the beam of his light, although there was really nothing there to touch. The fall of snow exhilarated and refreshed him and drew him – full-souled, it seemed – out of his carapace of worry and indigestion. The afternoon train was an hour late, and the snow (whose whiteness seems to be a part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere) came down with such open-handed velocity, such swiftness, that it looked as if the village had severed itself from its context on the planet and were pressing its roofs and steeples up into the air. The remains of a box kite hung from the telephone wire overhead – a reminder of the year’s versatility. ‘Oh, who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?’ Mr. Jowett sang loudly, although he knew that it was all wrong for the season, the day and dignity of a station agent, the steward of the town’s true and ancient boundary, its Gate of Hercules.”

 

The next paragraph is even better, but I’ll quote only the first two sentences:

 

“Going around the edge of the station he could see the lights of the Viaduct House, where at the moment a lonely traveling salesman was bending down to kiss a picture of a pretty girl in a mail-order catalogue. The kiss tasted faintly of ink.”

 

The narrator adds to the sense of collective sadness and wonder that hangs over the scene and much of the novel, especially when he briefly shifts into the first-person plural: “part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere.”

'Honest Before Anything Else'

A reader doesn’t understand how tastes in books and writers might evolve across a lifetime, how indifference might replace enthusiasm and love, indifference. He mentions Hart Crane, a poet I’m unlikely ever to reread. I swooned over The Bridge in high school, spurred on by our shared ties to Cleveland and alcohol. A friend and I mapped a route among the downtown bars that Crane may have visited, some of which still existed half a century ago, then undertook a pub crawl, toasting him along the way. Crane is not a bad poet. That’s not the point. His Library of America collection is on the shelf beside me. He just no longer writes for me. 

My poetic main man around that time was John Berryman. It’s not a stretch to say I was obsessed with him and his work, far more than Crane. I read and collected every biographical and critical scrap about him I could find, including the July 21, 1967 issue of Life magazine, which features a story about him and photos of the poet in Ireland. After his suicide in 1972 I bought his posthumous novel, Recovery (1973); his essay collection, The Freedom of the Poet (1976); Henry's Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972 (1977) and first editions of the poetry. Of the latter I’ve kept only The Dream Songs (1969), which brings together 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream His Rest (1968).

 

What changed? Alcohol had something to do with it, the romantic appeal of the tormented poète manqué. I genuinely admired Berryman’s gifts while overlooking how he abused them. Today I understand that much of the incoherence in the Dreams Songs is drunken self-indulgence. Like every alcoholic, Berryman was a walking or stumbling disaster, hurting and disappointing everyone he encountered, including himself. I stopped drinking in 1979 and slowly over those early years of sobriety, Berryman’s appeal faded.

 

The opposite of the Crane/Berryman syndrome is Louis MacNeice. I was indifferent to the Irishman when young, though devoted to his friend W.H. Auden and his countryman Yeats. What a mistake I made. Clive James, writing of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), calls it “an intoxicating cocktail of classical metres, conversational rhythms and reportorial detail.” In his introduction to it, MacNeice writes: “Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” MacNeice writes about us, common working people, in ways Berryman never approached:

 

“Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers,

              The workman gathers his tools

For the eight-hour day but after that the solace

              Of films or football pools

Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory

              Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,

The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking

              In the empty glass of stout.”

 

Whereas Berryman in the elegy for MacNeice, “Dream Song” 267, can’t forget himself long enough to rather feebly mourn the poet who died in 1963. “Can Louis die? Why, then it’s time to join him /again, for another round, the lovely man.”

'Still to Suruiue in My Immortall Song'

Many of the best things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of their disappearance. If fortunate, we learn this lesson early. Their transitoriness becomes part of their charm, whether a cat, a garden or a brother. We are grateful and enjoy them accordingly, knowing they and we will vanish, leaving only, perhaps, memories. Here is a sonnet by Michael Drayton written around 1619: 

“How many paltry, foolish, painted things,

That now in Coaches trouble eu’ry Street,

Shall be forgotten, whom no Poet sings,

Ere they be well wrap’d in their winding Sheet?

Where I to thee Eternitie shall giue,

When nothing else remayneth of these dayes,

And Queenes hereafter shall be glad to liue

Vpon the Almes of thy superfluous prayse;

Virgins and Matrons reading these my Rimes,

Shall be so much delighted with thy story,

That they shall grieve, they liu’d not in these Times,

To haue seene thee, their Sexes onely glory:

So shalt thou flye aboue the vulgar Throng,

Still to suruiue in my immortall Song.”

 

It’s a familiar trope in Horace and in English poetry. Drayton lauds his beloved, assuring her that his words and her memory will last. Other women -- “paltry, foolish, painted things” (I love that phrase) – will not be so honored and immortalized. Often in Drayton’s verse is an awareness of the world’s fleetingness. Things – people, objects, poems – are doomed to oblivion. Memory is a curse and blessing. While seducing his beloved with flattery, he flatters and seduces us, his readers.

 

Drayton’s major work is Poly-Olbion (1612), a poem of almost 15,000 lines written as survey of Great Britain’s geography and history composed in alexandrine couplets. As poetry, it’s often clunky, veering close to prose, but the subtitle suggests both its grandiosity and charm: A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests and other Parts of the Renowned Isle of Greate Britaine with intermixture of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same: Digested in a Poem.

 

Drayton catalogues the birds (“even the echoing Ayre / Seemes all compos’d of sounds.”), flowers, fish and trees of Great Britain, and damns the destruction of the natural world, especially the trees:

 

“Foreseeing, their decay each howre so fast came on,

Under the axes stroak, fetcht many a grievous grone,

When as the anviles weight, and hammers dreadfull sound,

Even rent the hollow Woods, and shook the queachy ground.”

 

Drayton observes that many trees have been cut down and burned to smelt iron:

 

“These yron times breed none, that minde posteritie,

Tis but in vaine to tell, what we before have been,

Or changes of the world, that we in time have seen;

When, not devising how to spend our wealth with waste,

We to the savage swine, let fall our larding mast.

But now, alas, our selves we have not to sustaine,

Nor can our tops suffice to shield our Roots from raine.”

 

Think of it as proto-environmentalism. Drayton was born a year before Shakespeare and died on December 23, 1631 at age sixty-eight.

'There Are No Millers Any More'

I’ve just learned of the suicide of a woman I knew casually a long time ago. Such news is always unsettling, as though a fundamental law of nature had been violated. Given what we know of the person, and it may be very little, we apply her circumstances to our own and conclude, “There had to be another way.” But there wasn’t. Such events remind us of our ignorance, our lack of insight into the lives of others, even those we think we know well. Thirteen year ago a friend drove to the top of a hospital parking garage and jumped – an act that seemed utterly antithetical to his nature, or what I had confidently concluded was his nature. I know the common explanations – depression, alcoholism, money troubles. That doesn’t help. 

In his poems, Edwin Arlington Robinson tends to obliquely hint at suicide, as in “Luke Havergal,” “The Growth of ‘Lorraine,’” and “The Man Against the Sky.” Only in his most famous poem, “Richard Cory,” does he bluntly describe it. In “How Annandale Went Out,” the cause of death is ambiguous, as was the death of his eldest brother, Dean, a doctor addicted to laudanum who may have purposely overdosed. In “The Mill” (The Three Taverns, 1920), Robinson reminds us that his earliest serious writing was prose fiction, and he remained a storyteller in verse: 

 

“The miller's wife had waited long,

The tea was cold, the fire was dead;

And there might yet be nothing wrong

‘There are no millers any more,’

Was all that she had heard him say;

And he had lingered at the door

So long that it seemed yesterday.

 

“Sick with a fear that had no form

She knew that she was there at last;

And in the mill there was a warm

And mealy fragrance of the past.

What else there was would only seem

To say again what he had meant;

And what was hanging from a beam

Would not have heeded where she went.

 

“And if she thought it followed her,

She may have reasoned in the dark

That one way of the few there were

Would hide her and would leave no mark:

Black water, smooth above the weir

Like starry velvet in the night,

Though ruffled once, would soon appear

The same as ever to the sight.”

 

As technology changes, as workers are unable to adapt to new circumstances and their skills are no longer needed, some disappear – a reality that seems remarkably pertinent today: “There are no millers any more.” Robinson was born on this date, December 22, in 1869 and died at age sixty-five in 1935.

'We Caught the Christmas Beetle'

I understand why people might be repelled by a poem titled “When We Were Kids.” A wallow in nostalgia can prove deadly. But the language in Clive James’ twelve stanzas cataloging an Australian childhood is exotic enough to interest this American reader, apart from their poetic worth (some of the rhymes are amusing). The occasional footnote would be helpful: 

“When we were kids we played at cock-a-lorum.

Gutter to gutter the boys ran harum-scarum.

The girls ran slower and their arms and legs looked funny.

You weren’t supposed to drink your school milk in the dunny."

 

The OED tells us cock-a-lorum is “a children’s game in which one set of players jumps on to the backs of another set of players, calling out ‘hi cockalorum, jig, jig, jig’.” And dunny is Australian slang for “a toilet; esp. an outside toilet, usually without plumbing; a privy, an outhouse.” In other words, a jakes.

 

I happened on the poem because a reader told me of the Christmas beetle, an insect indigenous to Australia that I had never heard of. After consulting some etymological sites I happened on James’ poem. Some of the thirty-five species, part of a larger group called “metallic beetles,” are peculiarly beautiful. Their wings reflect light and can render a mirror image. James writes:

 

“When we were kids we caught the Christmas beetle.

Its brittle wings were gold-green like the wattle.

Our mothers made bouquets from frangipani.

Hard to pronounce, a pink musk-stick cost a penny.”

 

Beauty of this sort, so beguiling and unexpected, inevitably raises the question: why? Our Darwinian assumptions suggest we look for the evolutionary advantages, though I’m convinced much of the beauty found in the natural world and elsewhere is purely gratuitous. Beauty is its own nonutilitarian reward. It’s there for us to enjoy. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson’s dinner on March 31, 1772 with General Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot exiled in London. The wide-ranging conversation settled on aesthetics:

 

“We then fell into a disquisition whether there is any beauty independent of utility. The General maintained there was not. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was; and he instanced a coffee cup which he held in his hand, the painting of which was of no real use, as the cup could hold the coffee equally well if plain; yet the painting was beautiful.”

 

To risk a rather silly rhyme, beauty is a gratuity, perhaps chief among life’s consolations. To be without an aesthetic sense is to be impoverished. The absence of such a sense and its impact on the moral life would make an interesting study and might help explain much human behavior.

'Why Not Get Out of This Rut?'

"Books offer what may be called a standing solution to the eternal and infernal Christmas-present problem.” 

Well, yes and no. I’m a graceless gift giver and receiver, especially when it comes to books. People like my middle son are inspired and have a knack for choosing appropriate gifts. He reliably picks titles previously unknown to me that prove readable. Examples from recent years include The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich and The Walls of Israel by Jean Lartéguy. Some friends and relatives assume that because I’m a reader, choosing the perfect title is a cinch. It’s not. I’m neurotically specific when it comes to the books I want. You’re not likely to find something at Barnes & Noble I might actually want to read or else I already have it.

 

In the passage quoted at the top, H.L. Mencken oversimplifies things. He’s writing in his Baltimore Evening Sun column for December 20, 1910. His examples suggest how radically times and tastes have changed in a mere 114 years:

 

“The same old books are bought and given year after year. Go into the bookstores and you will see huge pyramids of the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Fitzgerald’s Omar (in a score of gaudy and painful bindings), the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Motley’s ‘Rise of the Dutch Republic,’ Fenimore Cooper’s atrocious romances, the essays of Emerson, cheap reprints of Kipling’s earlier and uncopyrighted stories, Shakespeare in trashy near-leather, Wilkie Collins, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, De Maupassant, Dumas Pere, Sienkiewicz and Charles Garvice—stupid and silly ‘gift’ books innumerable.”

 

Still true but not a single title or author cited by Mencken will you find under this year’s Christmas trees with the possible exception of the unreadable Poe (“We are cured of Poe by 18”). That’s good news, except we’ve substituted our own predictable catalog of bestsellers and default “classics.”

 

“Such stuff,” Mencken writes, “is bought by the wagon load every Christmas. Very little of it, I fancy, is ever read. What civilized human being, in this year of grace 1910, actually enjoys Bulwer-Lytton?” I’ve never read him and like most of you I know only the much-parodied opening line from his 1830 novel Pierre: “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”

“Why not get out of this rut?” Mencken asks. “Why not break away from the hideous ‘presentation’ books, the ghastly ‘sets’ of soporific novels, the dull poetry, the childish books of travel, the plush-and-onyx editions de luxe which burden the book counters at this season?”

 

Amidst all the dreck, Mencken does suggest good stuff as well, including Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and titles by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.

'Bring on the Vitamines'

When I returned to college in 2002, thirty years after dropping out a year before graduating, I took a class in something called “psychological anthropology.” The teacher was personable and the class was a sort of catch basin of random learning. We could write about any stray hobbyhorse we chose. Because of her interest in the treatment of mental illness, I gave the teacher a VHS copy of Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies. In turn, she encouraged me to write about John Berryman and his Dream Songs because she found his alcoholism and its impact on his poetry interesting. 

One observation she made in class sticks with me: food inspires more myths, obsessions, weird ideas and eccentricities than any other part of our lives, even sex. I often think about that when I encounter one of my own unexamined prejudices. I don’t like red meat and most sweets apart from fruit. I find milk revolting. Three foods I hated as a kid – onions, mushrooms, spinach – I like today. Rationally, I can’t defend these things but that was my teacher’s point: they’re my aberrancies and I’m sticking with them.

 

Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was an American poet, novelist and anthologist who published more than 170 books, mostly mysteries and volumes for children. I’ve written about her before. In 1936 she published The Book of Humorous Verse. In the section called “Banter” she includes a poem, “Amazing Facts About Food,” by the prolific “Unknown.” It’s preceded by: “The Food Scientist tells us: ‘A deficiency of iron, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and the other mineral salts, colloids and vitamines of vegetable origin leads to numerous forms of physical disorder.’”:

 

“I yearn to bite on a Colloid

With phosphorus, iron and Beans;

I want to be filled with Calcium, grilled,

And Veg'table Vitamines!

 

“I yearn to bite on a Colloid

(Though I don't know what it means)

To line my inside with Potassium, fried,

And Veg'table Vitamines.

 

“I would sate my soul with spinach

And dandelion greens.

No eggs, nor ham, nor hard-boiled clam,

But Veg'table Vitamines.

 

“Hi, Waiter! Coddle the Colloids

With phosphorus, iron and Beans;

Though Mineral Salts may have some faults,

Bring on the Vitamines.”

Wells gives us an early satirical treatment of health food faddism. Related poems in her anthology include “If We Didn’t Have to Eat” by Nixon Waterman, “How to Eat Watermelons” by Frank Libby Stanton, and “Salad” by Sydney Smith.

'It's Uncanny. The Past Is Not Dead.'

 “The Ferryman’s Due,” my article about Andrew Rickard and his Obolus Press, is published in the January 2025 issue of The New Criterion:

“Rickard often encounters such passages, in which the author he is translating seems to speak for him. ‘It’s uncanny. The past is not dead,’ he says. ‘Even the obscure dead who preceded us are still alive through their words.’”

'Humour Is Reason Itself'

The saddest man I know wishes more than anything to be thought of as a comedian, a jokester, the reliably funny guy at the party. The sadness derives from his inability to say or do anything even modestly amusing. People will laugh aloud at something he says out of pity and an awkward sense of politeness. You can tell he’s trying to be funny because he always laughs at his own failed witticisms. He would never understand what Jules Renard writes in his journal on February 23, 1910, just three months before his death: 

“Humour: modesty and wit combined. It is the everyday clothing of the mind. I have formed a high opinion, moral and literary, of humour.”

 

Let’s define our terms when we say someone has “a good sense of humor.” The man I described above reminds me of the little boy who says “underwear” or “poopy” at the dinner table and waits for the grownups to crack up -- "Ain't he cute?" -- so let’s rule out compulsive giggling and joke-telling, and dirty words with nothing behind them but a pre-pubescent’s desire for attention. Max Beerbohm in his great essay “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920) identifies incongruity as “the mainspring of laughter.” Comedians have a tough job because we know in advance they want to make us laugh. Humor thrives on unexpectedness. Most of the funniest people I’ve known are soft-spoken, poker-faced and not clownishly desperate for laughs. Often they are introverted, mordant-minded or even depressed. A sense of humor is more than a social grace; it is a way of looking at the world, and may not always provoke raucous laughter. Renard goes on in the same journal entry:

 

“In short, humour is Reason itself. Man regulated and corrected. No definition of it ever satisfied me. Besides, everything is contained inside humor.”

 

Renard  suggests that a well-exercised sense of humor is a symptom of sanity. By implication, the earnest and humorless are nuts. Beerbohm wrote his essay after reading Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), a work which begins unpromisingly: “What does laughter mean?” A post-mortem on laughter is comparable to a light-hearted look at prostate surgery. Beerbohm confesses that Bergson, like Schopenhauer and William James, leaves him baffled. He instead endorses his own mature capacity for laughter, in contrast to his buttoned-up, youthful demeanor – what today we might call hip coolness. Laughter can be risky, especially in regard to pomposity and unearned self-regard, and nothing beats mockery for effectiveness in combatting earnestness.

 

Boswell in his Life recounts his great friend’s laughter: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’” Some seem embarrassed to laugh, and do so only when socially sanctioned by their betters. How human it is that grief and laughter both elicit tears.

 

[The Renard passages are drawn from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'On the Cello of Shared Grief'

With the deaths of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No thought for family or friends, or even other readers, merely one’s sense of personal betrayal. That’s how I felt seven years ago when Richard Wilbur died at age ninety-six, as though he hadn’t already given us more than we deserve. Then I had a chance to write publicly about Wilbur and his work, which might qualify as a form of that recent fashion for “grief counseling.” But that sounds melodramatic. 

Today I read Wilbur the way I read Edgar Bowers or Donald Justice -- on multiple levels, recalling earlier readings and misreadings, with that increasingly common sensation of another contemporary gone. We build a history with such writers. Poets at this level of achievement are absorbed into ourselves and become pieces of our sensibilities. There’s often a sense of déjà vu. Good poems are forever time-released and never give away everything. Included in the last collection Wilbur published during his lifetime, Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (2010), is “Psalm”:

 

“Give thanks for all things

On the plucked lute, and likewise

The harp of ten strings.

 

“Have the lifted horn

Greatly blare, and pronounce it

Good to have been born.

 

“Lend the breath of life

To the stops of the sweet flute

Or capering fife,

 

“And tell the deep drum

To make, at the right juncture,

Pandemonium.

 

“Then, in grave relief,

Praise too our sorrows on the

Cello of shared grief.”

'A Half-Buried Sense for Poetry'

It’s easy to mistake geniality for prevarication. So rare a quality seems suspicious or naively unprofessional, a mask worn to conceal the shark within, especially among literary types. Of course, critics are born to be severe, nobody’s pal. How many critics can you name whose virtues include friendliness on the page and off? First in line is V.S. Pritchett, whose longtime friend and fellow lover of Spain, Gerald Brenan, writes in one of his memoirs, A Personal Record, 1920–1972 (1975): 

“To me he is the most friendly and genial of men. Though highly strung, one cannot imagine him ever being angry or impatient. No one has ever been snubbed by him, no one brushed off in a review. He is completely without bad feelings or malice. Then his conversation is very stimulating -- witty and full of fantasy yet also balanced and judicious. The hard struggle he had to survive in his early years caused him to mature early and it also rubbed off the rough corners so that he has no eccentricities, but is always sanity itself. One can sum him up as a man who keeps down to earth, a man without false hopes or illusions, an accepter and recorder of things as they are. Yet the imagery in his writings often betrays a half-buried sense for poetry.”

 

Readers like myself who never met Pritchett but grew up reading his stories and reviews readily recognize him in Brenan’s snapshot. About Pritchett’s poetry, which among prose writers most often reminds me of Dickens’, try this:

 

“To those who are in danger of reacting too violently against the great botanists of our hidden flora, I recommend the cure offered by the works of Italo Svevo. He is laughter at last. Here Hamlet raises a smile, Oedipus is teased away from his fate . . .”

 

And of Ford Madox Ford’s finest works – The Good Soldier, the Fifth Queen trilogy and the Parade’s End tetralogy – he writes:

 

“They vindicate his happy yet tortured incapacity to go straight from a starting-point, for he had none. They put his lack of self-confidence, his shortness of spiritual breathe, his indolence, to use. They brought out and exploited with full resource the price he had to pay for his extraordinary cleverness: the emotion of anguish.”       

 

The American edition of Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991) is 1,321 pages long. With the 1,221-page Complete Collected Stories (1990), his novel Mr Beluncle (1951) and his memoirs (A Cab at the Door, 1968; Midnight Oil, 1971), they constitute the essential core of his writing. But the books on Spain, the biographies of Turgenev and Chekhov and other odds and ends are all worth pursuing. Like any good critic, Pritchett is a generous teacher who wishes to share with students what gives him pleasure. From him I first learned of the great Portuguese novelist José Maria de Eça de Queiroz and the Spaniard Benito Pérez Galdós. Pritchett closes his essay about the latter, “A Spanish Balzac,” with words that read like an epitaph of praise and perhaps his final judgment on his first literary love, the great nineteenth-century realistic novels: “The fact is that Galdós accepts human nature without resentment.”

 Pritchett was born on this date, December 17, in 1900, part of the generation of English writers that included Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell and Henry Green. He died on March 20, 1997 at age ninety-six.