'Intensely and Permanently Interested in Literature'

Another request for a reading list from a young reader. Any reply will be incomplete and risk discouraging aspiring literati. The only infallible inducement to literature is personal pleasure, a notoriously subjective criterion. I love Gibbon and Doughty, and you may find them appallingly tedious. I favor the time-tested and rely on books carrying the seal of approval from generations of readers, and your interests may be strictly contemporary. It’s not dismissive to tell a young reader: jump in anywhere. Like Borges, I assume that one book is potentially all books. That is, gamble a little, select a book that sounds interesting and see where it leads. There’s no shame in closing a book if it disappoints. 

In 1909, the English novelist Arnold Bennett published Literary Taste: How to Form It, a sort of self-help guide to English literature. Bennett includes a list of several hundred recommended books, arranged chronologically and giving their prices as of 1909. This is not a snob’s list (though it includes Gibbon and Doughty), and at least a third of the books I have never read. Bennett’s opening sentences:

 

“At the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path. Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment, by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves finally fit as members of a correct society. . . . This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste.”

 

Neither Bennett nor I wish to impose a “canon” on anyone. We merely know some of the books that have given us pleasure and perhaps taught us something. We’re small-d democrats. We’re not here to lecture, especially to young readers. Bennett is honest about the potential audience for reading the best books:

 

"A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive for any ethical reason. It does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would not kill it. It survives because it is a source of pleasure, and because the passionate few can no more neglect it than a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read ‘the right things’ because they are right.”

 

So much for fashion.

'We Must Be Continually Striving to Live'

A reader asks what I hope to accomplish in retirement. I’m not one for making grand plans or resolutions. No golf and little travel. It’s more likely I’ll continue what I’m already doing – writing, reading, family matters – just more of it. More Montaigne, J.V. Cunningham, Shakespeare, Rebecca West. Luke O’Sullivan writes in his introduction to Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014): 

“What [Montaigne] had to offer, he believed, was not a consistent set of arguments with which to answer problems of the human condition, but (like Aristotle) a feeling for balance and an ability to live without the need for certainty. Moreover, he had a sense of his own integrity; late in life, Oakeshott made a note of Montaigne’s remark that ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.’”

 

The Montaigne quote is from the essay “Of Solitude,” written around 1572, and it seems applicable to late-life retirement. The previous year Montaigne had retired from public life to the Château de Montaigne. In its tower he kept his books and found the privacy he needed to write his essays. Like Montaigne, I’m no hermit but I need quiet and a moderate amount of solitude to get done what I want to do. I understand some retirees get bored and start drinking and preparing themselves for a premature death. They have never learned “how to belong to oneself.” In his Notebooks, Oakeshott writes:

 

“We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”

 

Montaigne echoes Oakeshott in his essay “Of Physiognomy” (c. 1585-88):

 

“[D]eath is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an end unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct, and suffer itself. Among the many other duties comprised in this general and principal chapter on knowing how to live is this article on knowing how to die; and it is one of the lightest, if our fear did not give it weight.”

'Unceasingly Amused According to My Taste'

Certain writers inspire profound ambivalence. We admire them for something – often style – and they let us down by writing something stupid, dull or otherwise offensive. It’s easier dealing strictly with good guys (Chekhov, for instance) and bad guys (like Louis-Ferdinand Céline). Among the bothersome I think first of Thoreau, whose prose is frequently superb until his snobbery and general contempt for his fellow humans get the better of him. 

Another is H.L. Mencken. For some of us, he is a prose phase we live through. His style can be addictive, particularly when you’re young and impressionable. As a rookie newspaper reporter, I remember aping his prose almost to the point of plagiarism. Still, his anti-Semitism rankles. Such a foolish prejudice for so intelligent a man. And his repeated denunciation of his fellow Americans for their purported idiocy grows quickly tiresome. Yet Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes (in his letters) and Mencken.

 

In 1941, the marvelous, doomed critic Otis Ferguson reviewed Newspaper Days, the second of Mencken’s three memoirs. He wrote in The New Republic: “I would call Mencken a peculiarly American article, not only for his labors in establishing the language and the mildly ribald history of the press; but for the place he stands in, as a force for a certain liberation when we were only beginning to wake up, as a healthy explosion on the whole field of letters, as an exact and original writer and a man whose intolerant courage was at the service of others at a time when it did much good in clearing the air.”

 

In prose, Mencken is pure energy. Reading him at his best – the memoirs, The American Language (1919), a hundred or more essays – is a rejuvenating experience. In “On Being an American” (Prejudice: Third Series, 1922), Mencken concedes his agreement with many critics of the United States and asks:

 

“Well, then, why am I still here? Why am I so complacent (perhaps even to the point of offensiveness), so free from bile, so little fretting and indignant, so curiously happy? Why did I answer only with a few academic 'Hear, Hears' when Henry James, Ezra Pound, Harold Stearns and the emigrés of Greenwich Village issued their successive calls to the corn-fed intelligentsia to flee the shambles, escape to fairer lands, throw off the curse forever? The answer, of course, is to be sought in the nature of happiness, which tempts to metaphysics. But let me keep upon the ground. To me, at least (and I can only follow my own nose) happiness presents itself in an aspect that is tripartite. To be happy (reducing the thing to its elementals) I must be:

 

“a. Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.

 

“b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men.

 

“c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste.”

 

This is classic Mencken, effortlessly muting the outrageous by making it sound so reasonable. Among the cruelest of ironies are his final years. Never stricken with writer’s block, always a reliable geyser of prose, Mencken suffered a stroke on the evening of November 23, 1948 at his stenographer’s house in Baltimore.  He was sixty-eight and would live for another eight years, severely impaired. “All he could do now,” Terry Teachout tells us in his biography of Mencken, “was sign his name, scrawl an occasional one-sentence note full of misspelled words, and recognize the names of people he knew when he saw them in the paper, though he had trouble remembering them otherwise.” This most facile of writers, almost pathologically prolific, was silenced. Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956.

 

[The Ferguson review is collected in The Otis Ferguson Reader (December Press, 1982). Terry’s biography is The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002).]

'A Certain Saving Humor'

“Except for a certain saving humor, I should indeed have been a full monster.” 

One definition of a friend is someone with whom you can share any joke or other comic effort without fear of offending him. It may not be funny – the only pertinent criterion for judging humorousness – but it’s not hateful (a word thrown around promiscuously these days). Friends understand us. They don’t necessarily approve but neither do they throw a tantrum, get uppity and admonish us.

 

The line at the top is by the poet Louise Bogan, writing a letter on January 28, 1954, to another poet, May Sarton. Bogan struggled with severe depression for more than forty years and was hospitalized for it several times. Bogan is one of our finest American poets, and that she was able to write so well under such conditions is heroic. The book to read is Elizabeth Frank’s biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1986).

 

What most interests me about Bogan’s sentence is “a certain saving humor.” Never known as a humorist, Bogan was highly intelligent, thoughtful and witty. With close friends she could be herself. Bogan seems to be confirming a theory I’ve pondered for most of my life – that a well-exercised sense of humor is often symptomatic of mental health, if not always sanity.

 

I’ve been reading X.J. Kennedy again, including “More Foolish Things Remind Me of You,” published in the July/August 2006 “Humor Issue” of Poetry. It’s a laugh-out-loud poem (This is a test!), especially these lines: “Lines sliced to little bits by deconstruction, / Loose gobs of fat removed by liposuction.”

 

You may have noticed the subtitle: “With apologies to Eric Maschwitz.” He was the lyricist for the 1935 standard “These Foolish Things” under the pseudonym “Holt Marvell.” I suggest listening to at least one of these recordings of the song before reading Kenney’s parody, so you get the melody in your head: Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra.

'Poems Can Be True in Different Ways'

Something seems to be stirring out there. I’m too cautious and cynical to proclaim a renaissance in formalist poetry but the prognosis is promising. Clarence Caddell, an Australian, has published the second issue of The Borough: A Journal of Poetry. I wrote about the first issue in September. Just last week I wrote about the third issue of New Verse Review.

 

Especially gratifying is seeing five poems by R.L. Barth in The Borough. Bob is a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam who served as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. He is the finest American poet to have served in that war – not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. His work is composed in the plain style, practiced by writers from Ben Jonson to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham. Here is Bob’s anti-sentimental “Letters from Home”:

 

“I never understood

Why others couldn’t wait

For letters when what good

Came from news three-weeks late?

 

“Came from an alien world

Of proms and family meals?

Took mind from war, unfurled

No memory that heals

 

“But carelessness that kills?

The truth is that you’re here

On mountains or foothills

Where life, not home, is dear.”

 

And here is “Flying Home,” subtitled March 1969, also from The Borough:

 

“Weapons surrendered to the armory,

My separation papers well in hand,

I look at the dark porthole, where I see

Myself in civvies, ill-prepared to land.”

 

Another good poet collected in The Borough is Vivian Smith, a retired teacher in Australia who turns eighty-two this year. As with Barth, note the emotional realism, the pared-down though conversational style, and the anti-sentimental tone. Here is Smith’s “Birthday”:

 

“Born in the year that Hitler came to power,

I don’t do face book, blog or tweet,

I’ve never owned a mobile phone,

kind of old-school, dressed to disappear,

 

“and yet surprise, surprise, I’m still alive

with poems waiting to be written down

like sign writing scribbled on the sky,

half-erased, already vanishing.

 

“I like my life, the humdrum tasks.

I never hungered for the hippie trail.

Indifferent to fashion, I survive.

Poems can be true in different ways.

 

“I write them down, I do not hold my breath.

I don’t just sit around, waiting for my death.”

 

On Friday, Bob sent me a new poem not published in The Borough. Of it he writes: “Here's a poem about a subject I've been thinking about for fifty-five years. Like [J.V. Cunningham], I am a renegade Catholic; but, as JVC certainly knew, being a renegade doesn't mean you leave the training behind.” Here is “A Soldier-Poet Courts Controversy”:

 

“‘Your unchecked rages and so forth are clearly

Manifestations of PTSD.’

An all-encompassing excuse, for sure,

To which I give a blunt response: bull shit.

Agnostically, call them . . . character flaws;

But Catholics know the Seven Deadly Sins

Down in the depths of their iniquity,

And strictly hold themselves accountable.”

'Happiness Could Be Impartial for Once'

Robert Chandler has rescued, through translation, much of Russian literature for the Anglophone world – Pushkin, Andrey Plantonov, Teffi, Lev Ozerov and Vasily Grossman, among others. Most of Chandler’s own prose I've read has been in the form of brief introductions and notes. Several years ago he alerted me to a piece about Rudyard Kipling’s poetry he had published in Granta, and I wrote about it. Now I find two other essays published in the same journal – one on Grossman, the other one devoted to an English poet previously unknown to me: “Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger,” by Randall Swingler. Chandler assures us the book contains Swingler’s “best work,” much of it devoted to his experiences as a British soldier during World War II. 

One of the most gratifying pleasures I know as a reader is learning of a writer new to me and finding him worthy of attention. The passages quoted by Robert look more than promising. My university library has only one book by Swingler in its collection: The God in the Cave. It’s a twenty-three-page poetry collection published in 1950 by Alan Swallow of Denver (publisher of Yvor Winters), and I’ve put a hold on it. Through interlibrary loan I will request a copy of The Years of Anger. My only hesitancy is that Swingler was a communist, an affiliation not associated with the writing of first-rate poetry. Robert quotes the central stanza of “The Day the War Ended”:

 

“There is a moment when contradictions cross,

A split of a moment when history twirls on one toe

Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal

And happiness could be impartial for once.”

'What My Mind Thinks My Pen Writes'

Some books, including several of the best, defy conventional literary formulas and genres. Consider Moby-Dick. Is it a novel in the same inarguable sense as Middlemarch, another very big book? What about Tristram Shandy, with its endlessly deferred plot, digressions within digressions and passages “borrowed” from other writers and interpolated into Sterne’s text? Its oddness has stymied many readers, even Dr. Johnson. Montaigne’s Essays are wayward works having little in common with contemporary essayists claiming decent from the Frenchman. (Joan Didion, anyone?) What these works share, apart from eccentricity and vast learning, is elasticity. Anything, any subject or narrative whim, might have been stuffed into their already bursting forms. 

The grandfather of such oddities is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, with five subsequent editions, each longer than its predecessor, brought out during Burton’s lifetime. I remember discovering Burton as a freshman in the university library, and thinking I could read it for the rest of my life, which has proven true. It’s a wisdom book chock full of knowledge, much of it outdated but still fascinating. Gary Saul Morson calls it “a kind of patchwork interesting both as a reference work and as a special kind of creation all its own.” Burton stitches together other men’s words into a quilt of quotations, and defends his method, saying he was

 

“. . . enforced, as a bear doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it into form, as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was first written, quicquid in buccum venit (whatever came uppermost) in an extemporean style, as I do comply all others, effudi quicquid dictavit genius meus (I poured out whatever came into my mind) out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak. . . . idem calamo quod in mente (what my mind thinks my pen writes).”

 

Burton’s method shouldn’t be confused with such literary cul de sacs as “automatic writing” or Jack Kerouac’s nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody.” While following a trail of associations spawned in a remarkable memory, Burton resembles a jazz musician who simultaneously improvises and follows a theme. In The Words of Others: From Quotation to Culture (Yale University Press, 2011), Morson writes: “The Anatomy is like life, unrehearsed, and life is like the Anatomy, a first draft.”  

 

Burton died on this day, January 25, in 1640 at age sixty-two. Less than twenty percent of the population of Elizabethan England lived past the age of sixty. One qualified as “old” at fifty. Shakespeare, Burton’s close contemporary, died at fifty-two.

'Cure Death With the Rub of a Dock Leaf'

The Irish poet Michael Longley died on Wednesday at the age of eighty-five. I’ve read him sparsely but recall a devotion to the natural world and to World War I, in which his father fought. Here is “Glossary” (The Candlelight Master, 2020):

 

“I meet my father in the glossary

Who carried me on his shoulders, a leg

Over each, hockerty-cockerty, who

Would spend ages poking the kitchen fire,

An old soldier remembering the trenches

And telling me what he saw in the embers,

Battlefields, bomb craters, firelight visions:

A widden-dremer, yes, that’s my father.”

 

Longley adds some notes: hockerty-cockerty is to be “seated with one’s legs astride another’s shoulders”; widden-dremer is “one who sees visions in the firelight.” From the same volume is “Ors,” named for the French cemetery in which Wilfred Owen is buried. The English poet was killed a week before the Armistice while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal:

 

I

“I am standing on the canal bank at Ors

Willing Wilfred Owen to make it across

To the other side where his parents wait.

He and his men are constructing pontoons.

The German sniper doesn’t know his poetry.

 

II

“My daughter Rebecca lives in twenty-four

Saint Bernard’s Crescent opposite the home

Wilfred visited for “perfect little dinners”

And “extraordinary fellowship in all the arts.”

I can hear him on his way to Steinthals.

 

III

“Last year I read my own poems at Craiglockhart

And eavesdropped on Robert, Siegfried, Wilfred

Whispering about poetry down the corridors.

If Wilfred can concentrate a little longer,

He might just make it to the other bank.”

 

This is “Poetry” (The Weather in Japan, 2000):

 

“When he was billeted in a ruined house in Arras

And found a hole in the wall beside his bed

And, rummaging inside, his hand rested on Keats

By Edward Thomas, did Edmund Blunden unearth

A volume which ‘the tall, Shelley-like figure’

Gathering up for the last time his latherbrush,

Razor, towel, comb, cardigan, cap comforter,

Water bottle, socks, gas mask, great coat, rifle

And bayonet, hurrying out of the same building

To join his men and march into battle, left

Behind him like a gift, the author's own copy?

When Thomas Hardy died his widow gave Blunden

As a memento of many visits to Max Gate

His treasured copy of Edward Thomas’s Poems.”

 

Longley’s wife Edna has edited two editions of Edward Thomas’ poems and one of his prose. Here is “Edward Thomas’s Poem” from Longley’s Snow Water (2004):

 

I

“I couldn’t make out the miniscule handwriting

In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled

Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped

His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem.”

 

II

“From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s

Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left

Fidgeting among the fallen branches,

Then all the birds of the Western Front.”

 

III

“The nature poet turned into a war poet as if

He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.” 

'The Lonely Funeral of Your Speech'

Francis Bacon’s death might have been scripted by Monty Python. It’s certainly the most unlikely in the history of English literature, at least as reported by the not-always-reliable John Aubrey. It’s absurd but if true it helps beatify the author of The Advancement of Learning (1605) as a martyred saint in the cause of science. In his Brief Lives, Aubrey tells us his source was Thomas Hobbes: 

“[H]is lordship’s death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the aire in a coach . . . towards High-gate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman’s howse at the bottome of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my lord did help to doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his lodgings . . . but went to the earle of Arundell’s house at High-gate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 dayes, as I remember he told me, he dyed of suffocation.”

 

In other words, pneumonia, contracted from a snow-stuffed chicken and exacerbated by sleeping in a wet bed. Exenterate means to remove entrails, to eviscerate or disembowel. Bacon died at age sixty-five on April 9, 1626. He had been a close friend of George Herbert. In his biography of Herbert, John Drury reproduces the six-line elegy Herbert wrote in Latin for Bacon, with Drury's own translation of “On the Death of Francis, Viscount St Albans”:

 

“While you groan under the weight of a long, slow illness,

And life hangs on with a wavering, wasting foot,

I understand at last what prudent Fate willed:

Certainly you could only die in April,

So that here Flora with her tears, there Philomena with her plaintive cries,

Might lead the lonely funeral of your speech.”

 

In his two-page gloss on the poem, Drury writes of the final two lines: “Bacon had to hang on so that he could die in April, that wonderful month of flowers and birdsong for a keen gardener like him.” Of the poem as a whole he adds: “Herbert’s elegy for his old friend breathes tender personal affection.”

 

It was Bacon who wrote in his essay “Of Studies”: “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

 

[See John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014).]

'Lawn As White As Driven Snow'

Houston’s terrain is geometrically flat, which is why most houses have no basements. From the warmth of my living room I watched a neighborhood kid try to defy gravity, seated on a plastic sled in the middle of the ice-covered street, holding the reins and achieving minimal locomotion with leg-and-butt power. This went on for thirty minutes. Native Texans have little understanding of snow, ice, a low temperature of 23°F and inertia. A native Northerner can feel quite pleased with himself.

 

In Ohio, we took sledding seriously. It was an all-day affair. Plenty of steep hills were available, one of which ended in a rock-filled creek. The trick was to steer to the right at the last moment to avoid what’s known as an “Ethan Frome.” In preparation for sledding, we had hauled buckets of creek water up the hill and poured them on the incline. The water froze and minimized inertia.

 

Slowly over the decades The Winter’s Tale has become one of my favorites among the plays, largely for the late, dense language Shakespeare had achieved. These lines are from Autoclytus’ song in Act IV, Scene 4:

 

“Lawn as white as driven snow,

Cypress black as e’er was crow,

Gloves as sweet as damask roses,

Masks for faces and for noses,

Bugle bracelet, necklace amber,

Perfume for a lady’s chamber,

Golden coifs and stomachers

For my lads to give their dears,

Pins and poking-sticks of steel,

What maids lack from head to heel . . .”

 

The kid gave up sledding and built a three-tier, one-armed snowman in the circle at the end of our cul de sac, and next to it a section of wall made with snow bricks. The flag says “STH Eagles,” referring to the Saint Thomas High School Eagles. The snow is laced with leaves and sticks, a side effect of having to work with shallow snow. I remember that offending my aesthetic sense when I was a kid.

 

'The Task of Doing Nothing Much at All'

I’ve always thought of goofing off as one of the American fine arts, up there with western movies and jazz. In high school, I worked summers and weekends in an aluminum casting plant owned by a friend of my father. The work was hot and dirty, and we sometimes worked twelve-hour shifts. I was generously paid, all cash and off the books. Most of my co-workers were a few years older than me and all were Puerto Rican. They spoke more English than I spoke Spanish, but we all spoke fluent goofing off. 

When the boss called a break, we went outside, walked down the alley and around the corner, and sat on overturned fifty-five-gallon drums, where one of the other guys lit up a joint and shared it. Now I think of Whitman: “I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.” We also goofed off less formally, one at a time, with the others acting as lookouts, either outside or in the filthy men’s room.

 

From that experience I learned the therapeutic importance of goofing off. Call it idling, lollygagging, malingering. The point was to maximize down time, stop working but not look like you might not go back to work for a couple of hours. Remain conscious and alert for the approach of the boss. We were living exemplars of the German philosopher Josef Pieper’s refutation of what he called “total work,” though none of us, I’m sure, yet knew Pieper or his book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948; trans., 1952 and 1998).

 

So, it’s not strictly an American pastime. In his poem “Fashion Statement” (Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Collected Verse 2008–2011, 2012) Clive James remembers his undergraduate years at the University of Sydney, Australia:

 

“. . . young men with no business. How it fills

My mind with longing now, the memory

Of lurking off with endless energy

 

“To read the poets – seldom on the course –

To write a poem – never quite resolved –

To be removed from Manning House by force –

It was where the women were – to be involved

Completely – never fear what might befall –

In the task of doing nothing much at all.”

'Influential Works That Are Almost Never Read'

John Ruskin would have a difficult time of it in what passes for literary culture today. First, he was phenomenally prolific, even by Victorian standards, and how many people would read all five volumes of Modern Painters or the idea-rich sprawl of Fors Clavigera? Second, Ruskin doesn’t conform to modern fashions in morality. He would be “cancelled” by the censorious and self-righteous. His marriage was unorthodox and unhappy. He fell in love with a ten-year-old girl. In the second volume of his Ruskin biography, Tim Hilton puts in bluntly: “He was a paedophile” -- by all accounts, unconsummated. This makes him a brilliant writer, a master of prose, who we are unable to read without soiling our delicate sensibilities. If we were truly to censor every writer of the past who offended us, literature would amount to a stack of pamphlets. And we could no longer read Ruskin’s Praeterita, one of the great memoirs in the language. 

In his review of Hilton’s biography, Guy Davenport writes of Ruskin’s vast and eccentric Fors Clavigera, his proto-blog:

 

“The book still belongs to the distinguished list of worthy and influential works that are almost never read even by those interested in literature and ideas: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, Horace Traubel’s Conversations with Walt Whitman in Camden, Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and the Bible.”

 

And Davenport sums up the force of nature that was Ruskin:

 

“Most of the problems Ruskin addressed are ours as well. The century that began in the year of his death saw the most terrible wars in all of recorded history; and cruelty, without shame or pity, has gone on disgracing humanity. For fifty years Ruskin tried to show us how to live and how to praise.”

 

Ruskin died on this date, January 20, in 1900 at age eighty.

[Davenport’s Ruskin essay, first published in Harper’s in 2000, is collected in The Death of Picasso (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).]

'I Love the Universe Because It’s Made of Stories'

The third issue of New Verse Review has just been published, and I take it all back: poetry is not dead. The journal is crowded with work by good poets familiar – Jane Greer, Jared Carter, Ernest Hilbert, Amit Majmudar, Alfred Nicol – and previously unknown, like Daniel Patrick Sheehan. Good to see two Aaron Poochigian poems, including “Not Atoms”: 

“When, strolling through the Village, I discover

“one lonesome shoe, a jeweled but dogless collar,

the crushed rose of a hitman or a lover,

barf like an offering, a half-burnt dollar,

'Scream' masks holding traffic-light-top vigil,

 loose lab rats among the morning glories

 or Elmo trapped inside a witch’s sigil,

 

“I love the universe because it’s made of stories.”

I’m reminded of another "list" or catalog poem, a sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges, “Things,” (Selected Poems, 2000) translated by Stephen Kessler:

 

“My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,

The obedient lock, the belated notes

The few days left to me will not find time

To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,

A book and crushed in its pages the withered

Violet, monument to an afternoon

Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,

The mirror in the west where a red sunrise

Blazes its illusion. How many things,

Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,

Serve us like slaves who never say a word,

Blind and so mysteriously reserved.

They will endure beyond our vanishing;

And they will never know that we have gone.”

 

Poochigian and Borges remind us of the world’s bounty, including good poems. The founding editor of New Verse Review, Steve Knepper, keeps all three issues available and free.

'That Gravity Stayed Him Somehow'

In the second volume of his Johnsonian Miscellanies (Clarendon Press, 1897), George Birkbeck Hill collects anecdotes from the writer and clergyman Thomas Campbell, including this:

“Talking of suicide, Boswell took up the defence for argument’s sake, and the Doctor said that some cases were more excusable than others, but if it were excusable, it should be the last resource; ‘for instance,’ says he, ‘if a man is distressed in circumstances . . .  he ought to fly his country.’ ‘How can he fly,’ says Boswell, ‘if he has wife and children?’ ‘What Sir,’ says the Doctor, shaking his head as if to promote the fermentation of his wit, ‘doth not a man fly from his wife and children if he murders himself?'’”

The glibness of Johnson’s response surprises me. Boswell reports a similar conversation in his Life, on April 21, 1773:

“We talked of the melancholy end of a gentleman who had destroyed himself. JOHNSON: ‘It was owing to imaginary difficulties in his affairs, which, had he talked with any friend, would soon have vanished.’ BOSWELL: ‘Do you think, Sir, that all who commit suicide are mad?’ JOHNSON: ‘Sir, they are often not universally disordered in their intellects, but one passion presses so upon them, that they yield to it, and commit suicide, as a passionate man will stab another.’ He added, ‘I have often thought, that after a man has taken the resolution to kill himself, it is not courage in him to do any thing, however desperate, because he has nothing to fear.’”

The most severely emotional wreckage I have ever seen was suffered by the families of two suicides. In neither case did the survivors suspect so profound a despair. All were shocked. Both families fractured – divorce, psychiatry, medication, crime, alcoholism. Ben Downing published “Suicides” in The Yale Review in 2013:

“I’ve known a few. Found one, in fact.

Surprising there aren’t more,

 

“when you stop to think of it.

I mean, it’s not hard to do,

 

“really, if one is intent,

and we are an impulsive species –

 

“what’s more natural than at some moment of great pain

to just say ‘Screw it’ and duck out?

 

“And yet it would seem that most of the time

there’s something holding us to life,

 

“a kind of gravity that stills or thwarts

all but the most determined.

 

“The one I found, he talked of it.

I didn’t try to dissuade him –

 

“he had his reasons.

But that gravity stayed him somehow,

 

“kept him in place through wave after wave of temptation,

until, quite suddenly, it didn’t.”

 

Downing discovered the body of his friend Tom Disch after the poet and science-fiction writer killed himself with a handgun on July 4, 2008.

'A Great or Wonderful Thing'

“Too greedy of Magnalities, we are apt to make but favourable experiments concerning welcome Truths.”

Sir Thomas Browne in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), also known as Vulgar Errors, dismisses such notions as the existence of unicorns and the impact of garlic on magnetism. In the sentence above, from Book 2, Chapter III, he rejects the misuse of logic we know as confirmation bias – seeking evidence confirming our hypothesis while ignoring contrary evidence. It’s a common human failing, a reminder that some of us substantiate our prejudices by treating truth like Play-Doh, a malleable substance. Thus, newspapers still publish horoscopes.

 

Browne’s most interesting choice of words is “Magnalities,” which he apparently coined.  Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines it as “a great thing; something above the common rate,” and the OED is even terser: “a great or wonderful thing.”

 

In Chapter III of Browne’s Garden of Cyrus (1658), two centuries before Darwin, he asks why some plants produce prodigious quantities of seeds or other modes of reproduction: “The exiguity and smallnesse of some Seeds extending to large productions is one of the Magnalities of nature, somewhat illustrating the work of the Creation, and vast production from nothing.”

 

With no knowledge of genetics or evolutionary adaptation, Browne concedes his ignorance and accepts that creation is “a great or wonderful thing.” After the glories of his prose, what I most admire about Browne is his questioning nature, the way he mingles science, skepticism and faith. He is not “scientific” by twenty-first-century standards – no experiments with repeatable findings are involved -- but neither is he uncritically credulous. He applies reason to some of his day’s more farfetched notions, something we don’t always do.

'They Require No Mortar'

“He is one of those writers for whom, if you care at all, you care immensely.”

This reader started in puberty as a serial monogamist, wedded briefly but intensely to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and turned in time into a guiltless polygamist. In junior-high school, sick at home with the flu, I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories. Fever fed pleasure. I’ve tried several times to recapture that bliss but the thrill is gone. Falling for a writer while an adolescent of any age is infatuation and like that first crush it will never come again. Literary promiscuity arrives only with maturity. The rapture of devotion to a single writer exclusively, with that degree of intensity, can never be replicated.

 

Above, Desmond MacCarthy is describing Walter Savage Landor, a writer I discovered in midlife and care for immensely. “His prose,” MacCarthy writes, “apart from its content, gives me more pleasure than that of almost any other writer. The Landorian period is built up of chiseled statements, without conjunctions or transitions; the blocks, as [English literary critic] Sidney Colvin pointed out, are so hard and well-cut that they require no mortar.”

 

I share MacCarthy’s taste for Landor, one of those eccentrically wayward writers who will never earn a broad audience, turned out periodically by the English. Others who inspire similar loyalty include Henry Mayhew, Charles Doughty, Henry Green and MacCarthy himself. I would never proselytize such writers to other readers. They write for a small number and must be discovered independently. MacCarthy continues in excellent prose:

 

“Great splendour in emphasis and great composure in tone are the characteristics of this prose; and when the reader’s mood is one in which contemplation is a state of recognition rather than of wonder; when his imagination does not hunger after either realism or mystery, but is content to rest in what is presented to it with perfect clarity and dignity, then he will not complain that Landor’s pathos does not always move, that his invective does not often kill, that the famous characters in his [Imaginary] Conversations have little individuality, and that Landor himself is a man of thoughts rather than a thinking man.”

 

[You can find MacCarthy’s essay on Landor in Memories (1953) at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]