'Tell Me About All You Read'

I prefer the prose of two excellent poets – John Keats, Marianne Moore – to their poetry. The former is author of the finest letters ever composed in English. Moore’s essays and reviews are teasing, taut, witty and shrewd, worthy of her master, Henry James. This judgment is eccentric but based on decades spent reading and weighing the work of both writers. I know what I return to most often.

 

One of the pleasures of Keats’ letters are his expressions of loyalty to and fondness for his family. I admire the big-brother affection and playfulness he always shows his little sister, Frances Mary “Fanny” Keats. She was born in 1803, eight years after her oldest brother, and died in 1889, sixty-eight years after him. Among the final sentences he ever wrote, shortly before his death in Rome in 1821, Keats refers to “my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost.” On July 4, 1818, while on a six-hundred-mile walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, the poet writes to fifteen-year-old Fanny: 

 

“I am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would I if it were not for being tired after my day’s walking, and ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a Hoop, without waking me.” 

 

Recall that Keats was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him in less than three years, and that had already killed his mother and would kill his brother Tom later that year. Yet he manages to keep his letter to Fanny loving and amusing. Keats had a comic gift, one we would hardly suspect if we read only his poetry. On this date, September 10, in 1817, he writes to Fanny: 

 

“We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that I know not whether you prefer the History of King Pepin to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—or Cinderella and her glass slipper to Moore’s Almanack. However in a few Letters I hope I shall be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure.” 

 

Keats wants to know what Fanny prefers to read, a question I recently asked my niece regarding her two-year-old daughter. “You must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week,” he writes, “and this transmitted to me every now and then will procure you full sheets of Writing from me pretty frequently.—This I feel as a necessity for we ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only, as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend.” 

 

My youngest son is flying today to Lima, Peru, to begin his two-year hitch with the Peace Corps. Last week he bought a Kindle and downloaded some sixty books, enough, he said, “so I don’t run out.” He asked if I had any suggestions and I kept it simple: the two greatest American novels, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.