'I Hold It Towards You'

Only once as an adult have I worn a costume on Halloween. Even as a kid I relied on the minimalist (cheap) approach: Army guy (Ike jacket, holstered .45) or Emmet Kelly-style hobo (burnt cork, bindle on a stick). In the nineties I was dating a woman who worked as a registered nurse at the V.A. hospital. One of her friends invited us to a Halloween party/costume contest. Not wanting to spend any money on a costume, I had my girlfriend borrow a white lab coat, stethoscope and latex gloves from the hospital. I carried a can of Crisco, went as a proctologist, won first prize and didn’t have to spend a dime.

Just following family tradition. More than thirty years earlier, my parents went to a Halloween costume party. My mother rented a full-body rabbit costume, complete with reinforced ears and bushy tail, and my father wouldn’t stop complaining about the rental cost. He wore his old Ike jacket (the one I would wear in another year), holstered .45 (a real one) and a fake beard made of cotton gauze and shoe polish. He took the topical approach and went as Fidel Castro.

There’s more to Halloween than Halloween. Let’s remember John Keats, doctor and poet, born October 31, 1795, and dead at age twenty-five. In December 1819, Keats scrawled some of his final lines on the manuscript of another poem. They wouldn’t be published for eighty years:

“This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.”

 

One thinks of that line from “The Fall of Hyperion”: “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.”

'And the Memory I Started At—'

“My memory is the best guardian of my past.” 

That’s Nabokov, speaking with a defiant certainty almost arrogant. His boast is self-protective. He was remembering his paradisial life in pre-Soviet Russia and wished to preserve it from the predations of the Bolsheviks, for whom even the past could be destroyed. Memory – of bliss, of horror -- is sacred. We dwell in the past as certainly as we do in the present, and more so than in the future. Think of Robert Browning in “Memorabilia” (1855):

 

“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you?

And did you speak to him again?

How strange it seems, and new!

 

“But you were living before that,

And you are living after,

And the memory I started at—

My starting moves your laughter!

 

“I crossed a moor, with a name of its own

And a certain use in the world no doubt,

Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone

’Mid the blank miles round about:

 

“For there I picked up on the heather

And there I put inside my breast

A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—

Well, I forget the rest.”

 

Browning was age nine when Shelley died in 1822. Browning’s stand-in spoke with a man who met the older poet. The linkage in memory [Shelleyàstand-inàspeaker (Browning)] causes him to “start,” a reaction the storyteller finds amusing. Kinship is no respecter of bloodlines. Linkage to nominal strangers, those with a distant genotype, can prove more vital than mere phenotype. Who wouldn’t wish to prune one’s family tree? Here's one of my pleasing sets of elective affinities:

 

I shook hands with Guy Davenport, who shook hands with Ezra Pound, who shook hands with Henry James, who shook hands with George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert. Davenport also shook the hand of Samuel Beckett, who had shaken the hand of James Joyce, who had shaken the hand of Italo Svevo, who shook the hand of Eugenio Montale. Likewise, I shook hands with William H. Gass who shook hands with many worthies; foremost among them, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

 

And here's a pleasingly closed loop: I shook hands with Steven Millhauser, who shook hands with Lionel Trilling, who shook hands with Whitaker Chambers, who shook hands with Louis Zukofsky, who shook hands with Davenport, who shook hands with me (many sub-loops could be traced, leading us to Auden, Barzun and Bellow, among others). I’m tempted to start another such chain of affinity beginning with my introduction to Ralph Ellison but that’s enough phantom associations for now.

 

[Nabokov was speaking with an Italian journalist, Claudio Gorlier of Corriere della Sera, on October 30, 1969. The interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]

'Level with Life'

I suspect it’s no longer fashionable to have heroes, except perhaps for those chosen from among athletes. Too many kids are inoculated early with hip cynicism, a lazy nihilism ingested with mother’s milk. Every reputed hero has something wrong with him, at least when judged by the day’s ever-shifting standards. That’s obvious to anyone with the most glancing familiarity with human nature. Given our species’ record, it’s remarkable anyone might be reasonably judged a hero.

As a kid I claimed the predictable American heroes — Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain – all reinforced by biopics recycled on television: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, Henry Fonda), Young Tom Edison (1940, Mickey Rooney), The Adventures of Mark Twain (Fredric March, 1944). A little later, Louis Armstrong. What do they have in common? Overcoming adversity, applied talent, a quality that used to be called “grit.” I was never interested in sports and never had much use for politics, so my pool of potential heroes has always been narrower than it is for many Americans. 

As an adult, my heroes have always been writers. Lincoln, Twain and Armstrong, of course, all were writers. I’ve been thinking about how one claims a hero. At least in my case, it’s not a conscious search. I’ve always been skeptical of the “great man” theory of history. One doesn’t necessarily look among the popular or famous. It’s a combination of who they are and what they create that in some way resonates with me. I admire many writers but that doesn’t automatically make them hero material. My near-hero category includes an odd assortment – Rebecca West, Michael Oakeshott, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Conquest, J.V. Cunningham, Antonin Scalia. All, indisputably, had grit. I think of another old-fashioned quality – orneriness.

 

As of today, my small, personal pantheon includes Dr. Johnson, Yvor Winters and Whittaker Chambers. By today’s standards, they are unlikely heroes. None was photogenic or by second nature “charming.” You wouldn’t invite them to a cocktail party. All were serious men, tempered by a ready sense of humor. They all would have made solid friends and good company.

 

In his “Preface to Shakespeare,” Johnson writes: “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life.” That may be the secret to having a hero. They embody qualities we have in modest quantities. We sense a kinship in sensibilities. To admit you have heroes is to suggest they possess something you don’t, that you perhaps envy them – an admission intolerable to our swollen sense of self-importance. With age ought to come some measure of “down-sizing,” accepting one’s self more realistically and acknowledging that we’re pretty much stuck with who we are. Now I have heroes, all gifted, all flawed, all admired more deeply for their flaws because the essence of heroism is overcoming them.

'Simply Leaving Me Flat Cold'

It’s a common enough human event: one reader enjoys a book and recommends it enthusiastically to another reader. Long before Twitter and book clubs, people were doing this sort of thing. It’s a casually generous act, wishing to share pleasure with another. 

When this happens I like to report back to the reader making the suggestion – whether I read the book and if I liked it. A reader I hadn’t previously known recommended a novel published several years ago. I seldom read contemporary fiction but it sounded potentially interesting, so I borrowed a copy from the library. I read the first eight pages and put it down – not for me. I’m jealous of my reading time. When young, I could plow through anything. It was a matter of honor to finish every book I started reading. No more. In this case I was tempted to close the book after two pages. The narrative voice was childish and strident, not someone with whom I would choose to spend my time. I thought I was being tolerant by finishing eight pages.

 

I told my reader of my experience with the book, thanked him for thinking of me and urged him to keep the suggestions coming. He replied by calling me a snob and, inevitably, a fascist, among other things. He asked how I could read James Joyce but not Novelist X. He seemed to be getting angrier as he continued writing his email. It took him four sentences before he deployed his first obscenity. Not the ideal way to nurture trust in a fellow reader.

 

I thought of something Philip Larkin had written. In 1957, The London Magazine sent a list of questions to Larkin and eight other writers. Their responses were published in the magazine’s May issue. Larkin’s, titled “The Writer in His Age,” begins:

 

“My only criticism of a writer today, or any other day, is that he writes (as I think) badly, and that means a great many things much more certainly than it means ‘non-engagement’; being boring, for instance, or hackneyed, pretentious, forced, superficial, or – the commonest -- simply leaving me flat cold. Therefore, if I find a novel or poem the reverse of all these things – gripping, original, honest, and so on – I shall be much too grateful to take up a quarrel with its author or over motives of material.”

 

The novel I tried to read possessed all the qualities identified by Larkin – “boring,” etc. I held up my end of the bargain. The novelist and my reader did not.

 

[“The Writer in His Age” is collected in Larkin’s Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews (Faber and Faber, 2001).]

'A Far More Agreeable Venture'

My youngest son called on Sunday to wish me a happy birthday. He’s in Peru with the Peace Corps, living with a family near Lima. After talking with me he planned to do his laundry, washing his clothes by hand and hanging them outside on a makeshift line, a process that takes about two and a half hours. Few lower-middle-class Peruvians have washing machines and dryers. Earlier, David had sent me a photo of what looked like a long spiral of pasta in a bottle of yellow liquid. It was a parasitic worm excreted by another volunteer and preserved in formaldehyde. The young woman had probably consumed unwashed produce. Tap water is unsafe. Volunteers learn to drink only bottled water, brewed tea or alcohol. Quotidian acts done effortlessly in the U.S.A. often require more planning and an extra step or two to accomplish in Latin America. David is young, healthy, strong, appreciative of his life in Peru and grateful for what he has here in the States. He is a good reminder: we’re damned privileged. 

“[I]f there is anything certain in history it is the fact that the average man of today finds life a far more agreeable adventure than the average man of any other age. He works less and he has more pleasure. He lives longer, and he is happier and cleaner and more of a man while he lives.”

 

That’s H.L. Mencken, writing on this date, October 27, in 1910. Mencken is refuting what he calls “empty pessimism.” One-hundred fifteen years ago, Mencken is reminding us how good we have it as Americans. In fact, we’ve never had it so good. Critics of his day complained that Americans were being exhausted by the pace and intensity of life. He writes:

 

“No fallacy, indeed, is in better credit at the moment than the fallacy that human life is growing more fatiguing every year. Upon it depends all of the latter-day nonsense about neurasthenia, hysteria, nervous prostration and other such terrible diseases. It is assumed, as a matter of course, that civilization is reducing the human race to a frazzle, and there are even persons who advocate a frank return to barbarism as the only means of preventing the extinction of the genus [H]omo.”

 

We still hear such rubbish. “All nervous disorders, great and little,” Mencken writes, “are far less prevalent today than they ever were before. Hysteria, once an almost universal plague, is now rare. All save a few maladies are decreasing rapidly. The death rate is falling every year. The average man of today lives fully five years longer than the average man of but two generations ago.”

Plenty of neurotics and solipsists out there, but most suffer from disorders of their own choosing. Mencken goes on:  

 

“But men have ceased to read, to meditate, to live the larger life. Balderdash! The common man of the eighteenth century didn’t read Homer and Milton. Instead, he read the newsletters on weekdays and Baxter’s Saint’s Rest on Sunday.”

'No Impediment to Doing Whatever One Will'

Someone wrote that The Leopard (1958) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is the world’s greatest novel not written by a Russian, and I wouldn’t argue too heartily with that judgment. It’s the story of Don Fabrizio Corbèra, Prince of Salina, the last of his noble line. It’s 1860 and Garibaldi’s armies have invaded Sicily. The Risorgimento is underway and a way of life is passing, as is Don Fabrizio’s life:

 

“In the growing dark he tried to count how much time he had really lived. His brain could not cope with the simple calculation any more; three months, three weeks, a total of six months, six by eight, eighty-four . . . forty-eight thousand . . . √840,000. He summed up. ‘I’m seventy-three years old, and all in all I may have lived, really lived, a total of two . . . three at the most.’ And the pains, the boredom, how long had they been? Useless to try and make himself count those; the whole of the rest; seventy years.”

 

Lampedusa is the patron saint of late-bloomers. He began writing The Leopard in his late fifties, died in 1957 at age sixty, and his sole novel was posthumously published a year later. Today is my seventy-third birthday and I’m pleased not to share Don Fabrizio’s sense of doom and defeat, but grateful to Lampedusa for the implied peptalk. Unlike Don Fabizio, I have three sons, all of whom are interesting people and, though still young, well established in life. I have never felt defeated and refuse to live up to someone’s stereotyped notion of who I ought to be. Horace Walpole writes to George Montagu of their friend Madame du Deffand on September 7, 1769:

 

“Feeling in herself no difference between the spirits of twenty-three and seventy-three, she thinks there is no impediment to doing whatever one will but the want of eyesight. If she had that, I am persuaded no consideration would prevent her making me a visit at Strawberry Hill. She makes songs, sings them, remembers all that ever were made; and, having lived from the most agreeable to the most reasoning age, has all that was amiable in the last, all that is sensible in this, without the vanity of the former, or the pedant impertinence of the latter. I have heard her dispute with all sorts of people, on all sorts of subjects, and never knew her in the wrong. She humbles the learned, sets right their disciples, and finds conversation for every body.”

 

A reader recently expressed surprise that I still post daily after almost twenty years. I told him it was mere momentum. Walpole continues:

 

“Death or diseases bar every portal through which we mean to pass; and, though we may escape them and reach the last chamber, what a wild adventurer is he that centres his hopes at the end of such an avenue! I am contented with the beggars of the threshold, and never propose going on, but as the gates open of themselves.” 

'But I Had to Keep Going'

The Polish poet Aleksander Wat (1900-67) was arrested, yet again, in 1940 by the NKVD and moved from prison to prison, first in Lwów, then in Kyiv, a city he describes as “bucolic” compared to previous confinements. Wat impresses me as an “ebullient pessimist,” a phrase the late Terry Teachout applied to himself. The more common species of pessimist is the crank smitten by his own gloominess. He is spiritually lazy, easy on himself and unforgiving of the world, an adept at Schadenfreude. He’s a disappointed lover who turns rebarbative and has learned that he can get a lot of attention by raining on picnics. 

That’s foreign to Wat’s nature. At his most disheartened he invariably experiences an epiphany, a sort of restorative enlightenment. Born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism. Wat is never naïve. He knows the epiphany won’t last but for the moment he experiences relief. In his understanding of the modern world, he sometimes reminds me of the more melancholic Whittaker Chambers who wrote in an October 8, 1956, letter to William F. Buckley:

 

“The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.”

 

Wat can accept Chambers’ premise without fatally despairing. He arrives in Kyiv in a prison train and is shuttled around the city in a Black Maria.  Between 1918 and 1920, Kyiv had changed hands sixteen times. In 1934, it became the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The Germans occupied it from 1941 to 1943. In 1941, Babi Yar. Wat continues:

 

 “Golden autumn. Everything quiet and deserted. When a human form flitted past, it would be dark, indeterminate. The hands on the clock had stopped for good or had been broken off. The clatter and rumble of our vehicle was accompanied by dead silence. We must have passed some trees, but I didn’t notice them; birds must have been chirping, but I didn’t hear them.”

 

The landscape and broken clock recall a surrealist painting, an unlikely celebration of Keatsian autumn:

 

“A broad lawn, in the center of which was an enormous, branching, bird-filled tree. ‘Tree, tree, tree,’ I repeated aloud as if I had just learned the word until finally my escort, who was used to my being silent, as required by regulations, began looking at my lips in amazement. The leaves had curled into golden scrolls under and around the tree. Had I been able to stop and lie down under the maple tree, to listen to its million leaves rustling and the birds singing in that beautiful October twilight, then all my exhaustion, all the sweat and nightmares of Zamarstynov [site of an NKVD prison in Lwów] would have fallen away from me. But I had to keep going.”

 

In that final sentence, Wat sounds like Beckett’s Unnamable: “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”

[All passages by Wat are taken from My Century (trans. Richard Lourie, 1988). The Chambers excerpt comes from Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969).]

'When You Desperately Need Other People'

I was the designated driver for the wedding in Connecticut. It was 1991. One of my passengers was a fellow reporter at the newspaper in Albany, N.Y. The other was a friend of the bride and groom who made me think of Alexander Pope. The name of his diagnosis I don’t remember but he was very small and used an undersized wheelchair. I drove a sedan and lifted him into the passenger's seat, adjusted his seatbelt and stowed his chair in the trunk. 

Along the way we stopped at a diner so he could use the bathroom. I lifted him from the car, carried him inside and seated him on the toilet. I was strong but had never carried an adult male – he was about my age – in so intimate a manner. (My son at the time was almost four, and roughly the same size.) He was utterly unembarrassed and I tried to take my emotional cues from him, which helped. We repeated the routine at the church and then at the church hall where the wedding reception was held, and at the same diner on the return trip. At the reception, I remember talking to him about the American historian Francis Parkman, whom he was reading at the time.

 

For decades I’ve been reading Dr. Bert Keizer in The Threepenny Review. He’s a Dutch physician and author of Dancing with Mr. D: Notes on Life and Death (1996). Here is a passage from a 2023 column, “On Loss,” that reminded me of Connecticut. Keizer describes one of his patients:

 

“With the help of a sliding-board and a rope from the ceiling, she still managed to get from her bed into the wheelchair without help. And in that way she could use the toilet too, without having to be ‘hoisted across like a sack of potatoes.’  But when she turned eighty, she lost this last straw of independence and wanted her life to end. People who walk around, who wash and brush themselves when they feel like it, board a train or a plane without giving it a thought, even pee and poo without having to ask anyone to place them on the seat, and who moreover wipe their behind in their own fashion—such people do not realize what a terrible thing it is when you desperately need other people all of the time to help you perform these tasks.”

 

No wonder we have so many writers who were doctors – Keats, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Oliver Sacks, among others. The job descriptions overlap. Both specialize in human beings.

'Like This Little Patch of Yellow Wall'

Robert Mezey includes in his edition of The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999) a section titled “Robinson Speaking,” which he describes as “various comments on life and the art of poetry. . . from letters and the memoirs of friends.” Sources are not otherwise identified. Most surprising is a passage from Proust’s The Captive, the 1927 English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff of La Prisonnière (1923), the fifth novel in the seven-volume sequence Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time): 

“All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.”

 

The painting is Vermeer’s View of Delft (c. 1660). Bergotte, a writer much admired by the narrator, is dying but a critic’s mention of a detail in Vermeer’s painting moves him to leave his sickbed and view the cityscape. Bergotte tells us he already knew the painting but did not remember the “patch of yellow wall.” Bergott grows dizzy and says (not quoted by Robinson): “‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’” 

 

And here is Robinson’s comment: “That comes nearer to being one hundred per cent true than anything I have heard in a long time.” I had no idea Robinson read Proust. Scott Donaldson never mentions it in his 2007 biography of Robinson. Robinson’s approval suggests he has reached an understanding that mingled grimness and equanimity in regard to his poetry and life. Can anyone identify the source of Robinson’s observation?

'Very Little a Truly Moral Voice Can Say'

No one knew where Dachau was or how to get there. My companion spoke good German. Mine was threadbare but enthusiastic. We would stop a likely looking person on the street in Munich and ask for directions. Suddenly they lost the power of speech in any language and moved along. The same with waiters in cafes. This was the summer of 1973, less than a year after eleven Israeli athletes had been slaughtered at the city’s Olympic Village by Palestinian terrorists. Finally, we asked the right person, an American, who told us where to meet the bus that would take us to the concentration camp, just eleven miles away. Early the next morning, we and a dozen other tourists met at the bus stop. 

Among our fellow passengers were two schoolteachers from Chicago, both gay. One carried a Frisbee and told the rest of us to expect no solemnity out of them. They were going to Dachau to have a little fun and not be coerced into hypocritical reverence. They told us they were Jewish. I, like the rest of the passengers, kept my mouth shut. I felt angry, powerless, embarrassed as an American, a reader of history, a human being.

 

At the camp, the pair from Chicago played Frisbee and laughed. We saw the foundations of the barracks where prisoners were kept and the crematorium. It was a beautiful summer day, blue skies and sunshine, and we walked around the place where at least 40,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered. The normalcy of the day and our historical awareness could not be reconciled. The universe seemed out of whack, as in one of those inexplicable dreams in which you no longer recognize the face of someone you’ve known all your life. Mark Kurlansky published "Visiting Auschwitz" in Partisan Review (Vol. LXI, No. 2) in 1994. He writes:

 

“The place remains incomprehensible and its questions as unanswerable as those of Job. . . . The problem is that there is very little a truly moral voice can say.”

 

And this:

 

“Auschwitz shows things that are beyond commentary – human hair, the eyeglass frames, the piles of toothbrushes, an unremarkable-looking oven, like a bread oven, gallows where prisoners were hanged and walls where they were shot and laboratories where they were worked on. Somehow families drift through this. Many of the visitors weep. Others look stunned. Some look like bored tourists shuffling from exhibit to exhibit, taking snapshots to mark each spot.”

'It Was a Mild, Clammy Evening . . .'

The marvelously named Edmund Arnold Greening Lamborn (1877-1950) is yet another writer whose existence I never suspected until I stumbled upon a book he edited in 1928: Present-Day Prose. If the title and year of publication suggest Joyce and Eliot, forget it. Though he does include William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence among the Modernists, Lamborn’s anthology is largely retrospective. Typical of the titles of his own books are The Story of Architecture in Oxford Stone (1912) and Towns and Town-Planning, Ancient & Modern (1923). He was on the margins of the English literary world and in Who’s Who in Oxfordshire (1936) claimed to be “educated by Books, Buildings and the Companionship of Wild Animals.” In the anthology he includes pieces by Beerbohm, Conrad and Chesterton, along with a dozen writers unknown to me. 

The gem is “The Automatic Machine” by Walter de la Mare, a short story I had never read. It’s less than three pages long and barely qualifies as an anecdote. What impresses me is the brevity and near-plotlessness of the story, coupled with de la Mare’s gift for suggesting something mysterious without making it explicit. In his poetry and fiction he’s a master of mood-setting and subtle, almost nonexistent menace. The narrator enters a taproom where two other patrons are already seated:

 

“It was a mild, clammy evening; and the swing-door of the taproom stood wide open,” the story begins. “The brass-oil lamp suspended from the rafter had not yet been lit. A small misty drizzle was drifting between the lime-washed walls and the overarching trees on the further side of the lane; and from my stool at the counter I could commune, as often as I felt inclined, with the wild white eye of the Blue Boar which fleered in at the window from the hanging sign.”

 

The other patrons are “a smallish man with an unusually high crown to his head, and something engagingly monkey-like in his face; and a barrel-shaped person who sat humped up on a stool between us in an old shooting-jacket and leather leggings, his small eyes set close together on either side a red nose.”

 

In the corner is an “automatic machine.” De la Mare is never explicit but the machine seems to combine elements of an anachronistic videogame and a peepshow. “It was a machine of an unusual kind,” he writes, “since it gave its patronisers nothing tangible for their penny—not even their ladylove on a slip of cardboard, or a clinging jet of perfume.”

You insert a penny and one of two figures appears: if you lose, “a hump-backed mommet in a rusty-black cowl”; if you win, “a nymph attired in skirts of pink muslin” who “danced a brief but impassioned pas seul.” The enticement seems sexual, though de la Mare withholds anything so blunt.

 

“[I]f the nymph responded to your penny, you were invited to slip yet another coin into another slot—but before you could count ten. This galvanised the young lady into a giddy pursuit of the numbskull in the black hood—a pursuit, however, which ended merely in the retirement of them both behind the scenes.”

 

With minimal means and beautiful prose, de la Mare creates a dream-like memory that will last. Very traditional storytelling and vivid prose, stripped to the essentials.  

'Trained Not to Argue But to Look'

Finally, a readable article in The New York Review of Books. That hasn’t happened at least since the death of V.S. Pritchett in 1997. Wyatt Mason portrays Guy Davenport as an industrious correspondent in "An Epistolary Critic." “[A]s I came to learn, and was not surprised to learn," Mason writes, "Davenport would reply to anyone who wrote him,” including me. Mason tells us of the Davenport collection at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center:

 

“Between 1944 and his death at age seventy-seven, Davenport amassed . . . more than 2,300 correspondents. They amount to what the Ransom Center calls, hyperbolically but not unjustifiably, ‘a twentieth-century publisher’s rolodex.’”

 

This suggests Guy was a small-d democrat, a virtuoso of what Michael Oakeshott calls conversation, “in which the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing.”

 

I had a small but highly valued acquaintance with Guy. I interviewed him by telephone in 1988 for a profile I was writing of Paul Metcalf, a writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville who lived in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Metcalf’s best book, Genoa, appeared in 1965 and received two reviews – one by Guy, the other by William H. Gass. Both loved it. In our first conversation, after I identified myself as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., Davenport mentioned he had been reading Francis Parkman’s description of the Indian massacre at Schenectady. What was the city like today? I would come to learn that Guy, in private life as in his writing, was endlessly curious and generous with his learning – a natural-born teacher in the old-fashioned sense.

 

I quickly wrote him a fan letter and Guy as quickly replied – correcting my spelling of Edgar “Allen” Poe and a sloppy reference I had made to Goethe. Coming from Guy, what in another professor might come across as bullying pedantry felt like knowledge shared. I knew he wasn’t scoring cheap points or putting me in my place. He wanted me to know some of what he knew, and this communion of knowledge, not merely with his students at the University of Kentucky, gave him immense, quiet pleasure. 

 

We corresponded sporadically for several years, and I am even more grateful for this exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he exchanged letters. In June 1990, a friend and I took an open-ended trip across the Midwest, starting from upstate New York. We camped outside Lexington, Ky., and the next morning I visited Guy at his home at 621 Sayre Ave. He was pleased with a review I had written of his latest book, A Balthus Notebook. In a letter he had already told me, “You probably make it out to be a better book than it actually is; I’m not complaining.” Pro forma modesty? I'm not sure.

At his home we spoke of Montaigne and Robert Burton. He showed me a painting he had recently made of Gertrude Stein. I felt privileged to be in the artist’s studio for a private showing. Davenport wrote me (he was a master of flattery you hoped was true): “You paid more attention to my paintings than five other people together. Most folks look the other way, and change the subject.” I told him that the night before, while doing laundry at the campground, I had been reading the hefty, black Library of America edition of Walt Whitman. A teenage boy approached, asked to see the book, I obliged, and the kid said, “We have a book, too, you know – The Book of Mormon.” Guy laughed until he wept. 

 

On February 3, 1990, Guy wrote to me, after I sent him an obituary/column I had written following Samuel Beckett’s death: “Thanks for the Beckett obit. Good touch, the [Vaclav] Havel [to whom Beckett dedicated his play Catastrophe (1984)]. I imagine George Bush could not identify Sam even as a writer, much less as our greatest since Joyce. (is it known that GB has ever read a book?)” 

 

I had been reading Guy, at first in such journals as The Hudson Review, since the 1970s. I remember the delight I experienced in 1981 when by chance I saw a brand-new copy of Guy’s The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press) in the window of a lesbian bookstore in Manhattan. Nine years later, Guy would sign my copy of the essay collection along with Apples and Pears (North Point Press, 1984), a collection of stories. Mason glosses Guy’s intent in all of  his work: 

 

“Geography provides an education in the same good-humored voice as the letters, refined for the varied subjects of the essays, all of which, despite their variety, can be said to be about the same thing: finding. Davenport’s essays are a set of paths that lead us to places we haven’t been. All it took, he said, was an open eye. ‘I was never trained to argue,’ Davenport told me. ‘I only observe.’ But observation requires curiosity, and one of the remarkable features of Davenport’s essays—which overwhelmingly explicate ‘difficult’ modernist texts by Joyce and Pound, though they are no less interested in Welty, Joyce Kilmer, and Tarzan—is how his writing moves the reader into darknesses in their knowledge that yield to illumination. A text is revealed to be a cave into which an intelligence has descended, by torchlight, to make marks that, once discovered, will require some work to see: an inversion of Plato’s gloomy allegory.” 

 

An illustration of Oakeshott’s point that two people engaged in conversation “may differ without disagreeing”: Guy’s devotion to writers I find repellant, such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. It didn’t seem to matter that our thinking so radically differed. I am even more grateful for our exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he corresponded. At his home in Lexington he told me of his delight when he learned that Franz Kafka’s eyes were blue. 

 

As a gift I brought him a duplicate copy of Steven Millhauser’s latest story collection, The Barnum Museum (Poseidon Press, 1990). Subsequently I sent him my review, which he thanked me for in a July 7 note. His letter dated July 20, 1990, must have been in response to me congratulating him on winning the MacArthur Fellowship: “Thanks! As for who’s responsible, at least three have claimed credit so far. Many committees chew through the lists, I believe.” 

 

And a concluding suggestion: “Why don’t you do a survey of contemporary writers, in the manner of Hazlitt (and parallel to Ved Mehta’s ‘Fly and the Fly Bottle’)? JC Oates writing three books at once, Paul [Metcalf] in his little house. That is, subvert the worn-out interview format and go for the writer as human. ALL observation.” 

 

Mason distills an essential part of Guy’s method: “Trained not to argue but to look.” Which is much of the reason Guy, in person and in print, was almost never boring – a rare quality in my experience.

'A Natural and Grave Distinction of Air'

In the Imaginary Conversation he stages between John Milton and Andrew Marvell, Walter Savage Landor has the latter say:

“Good prose, to say nothing of the original thoughts it conveys, may be infinitely varied in modulation. It is only an extension of metres, an amplification of harmonies, of which even the best and most varied poetry admits but few. Comprehending at once the prose and poetry of Milton, we could prove, before ‘fit audience,’ that he is incomparably the greatest master of harmony that ever lived.”

Ours is an age when tin-eared poets, not to mention prose writers, know little or nothing of “an extension of metres,” One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s wisecrack: “George Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.” The best prose is harmonically and rhythmically arranged like a musical score, but without drawing attention to itself. It’s subtle and seductive. A heavy, self-conscious string of iambs or a virus-like proliferation of alliteration (a practice often judged “poetic”) ought to provoke laughter.

Sidney Colvin (1845-1927) is best remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, but he also contributed two volumes to the English Men of Letters series – one devoted to Keats (1887), the other to Landor (1881). Landor’s epigrams are the best written in English between Ben Jonson and J.V. Cunningham, but Colvin, unlike many readers, favors Landor’s prose style:

“There was not the simplest thing but received in his manner of saying it a charm of sound as well as a natural and grave distinction of air; there was not the most stupendous in the saying of which he ever allowed himself to lose moderation or control. His passion never hurries him, in prose, into the regular beats or equidistant accents of verse; he accumulates clause upon clause of towering eloquence, but in the last clause never fails to plant his period composedly and gracefully on its feet. His perfect instinct for the rhythms and harmonies of prose reveals itself as fully in three lines as in a hundred.”

The comparison with music is inevitable, In prose, Landor almost never fails to resolve a passage and harmonize at least two themes simultaneously. As an example, Colvin offers this passage:

“A bell warbles the more mellifluously in the air when the sound of the stroke is over, and when another swims out from underneath it, and pants upon the element that gave it birth.”

According to my ears, that passage comes off as a little overripe. I prefer this sample made by Colvin, with Landor’s second-nature use of classical references:

“There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.”

Let’s give Colvin the last word on Landor: 

“[H]armony and rhythm are only the superficial beauties of a prose style. Style itself, in the full meaning of the word, depends upon something deeper and more inward. Style means the instinctive rule, the innate principle of selection and control, by which an artist shapes and regulates every expression of his mind. Landor was in English prose an artist comparable with the highest in their respective spheres; with Milton in English verse, or with Handel in music."

'An Ironist of the Contemplative Life'

Of the many ways to write badly, among the most annoying is the would-be imitator of Sir Thomas Browne or Walter Pater using a self-consciously exotic, often antiquated vocabulary, coupled with an archness of tone. I find the practice especially common among older, non-academic, usually male writers. (Academics wield their own unreadable argot.) An example of this creaky antiquarianism I recently encountered in a blog post: the repeated use of maiden to mean young woman. I think the author, a man, wished to sound – how? Old-fashioned, chivalric, grandfatherly? He ended up sounding arch and vain. He wanted to be “a real character,” a lovingly mild eccentric, but sounds patronizing of women and more generally of his readers. At least for this reader, such writing tends to call attention to itself and away from whatever the author thinks he wishes to say. 

Potentially, any word that ever showed up in English, even the hoariest Old English fossil, might be used by a contemporary writer. Everything depends on intent, intended audience and appropriateness of tone. Caution is always urged. Vocabulary and syntax are as unique as DNA. Simple and direct is usually the wisest way to proceed. True style can’t be forced or applied from the outside like a fresh coat of paint. It comes from within, the place where sensibility meets the world.

 

The American-born British essayist Logan Pearsall Smith addresses the issue in A Few Practical Suggestions (1920), a tract written by him for the Society for Pure English, founded by Smith, Robert Bridges and others in 1913. Referring to old-fashioned words like maiden, Smith writes:

 

“There is one curious means by which the life of these words may be lengthened and by which, possibly, they may regain a current and colloquial use. They can be still used humorously and as it were in quotation marks; words like pelf, maiden, lad, damsel, and many others are sometimes used in this way, which at any rate keeps them from falling into the limbo of silence. Whether any of them have by this means renewed their life would be an interesting subject of inquiry; it is said that at Eton the good old word usher, used first only for humorous effect, has now found its way back into the common and colloquial speech of the school.”

 

Smith assumes a writer is an independent spirit, as liberal and liberating as the First Amendment, choosing words that accomplish his purpose with a fine ear and good taste. He knows some writers have little gift for evaluating the appropriateness of language. They throw words like a baker slamming dough. Smith is no snob. He knows language varies among social classes (more in his day than ours):

 

“We owe, for instance, words like lilt and outcome to Carlyle; croon, eerie, gloaming have become familiar to us from Burns’s poems, and Sir Walter Scott added a large number of vivid local terms both to our written and our spoken language. In the great enrichment of the vocabulary of the romantic movement by means of words like murk, gloaming, glamour, gruesome, eerie, eldritch, uncanny, warlock, wraith—all of which were dialect or local words, we find a good example of the expressive power of dialect speech, and see how a standard language can be enriched by the use of popular sources.”

 

The object is vividness and precision.

 

Smith was born on this date, October 18, in 1865, and died in 1946 at age eighty. Shortly after his death, his friend Desmond MacCarthy wrote a brief remembrance of Smith, later collected in Memories (1953), republished by Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books:

 

“[T]his mandarin of the art of letters incidentally became a moralist, this devotee of detachment an ironist of the contemplative life. He observed others with all the excited interest of a gossip, but he brought to our tea-tables and dinner-tables something of the solitude of the thinker.”

 

Of course, be sure to enjoy Smith’s best-known work, Trivia.

'Give Me a Land of Boughs in Leaf'

We live on a cul-de-sac where the houses were built in the early sixties, in a Houston neighborhood called Oak Forest. The dominant trees are water oak and live oak. We have two of the former in the front yard along with a loblolly pine. All are at least sixty years old and eighty feet tall, and keep the yard supplied year-round with biomass, whether leaves, needles, cones, acorns, branches or bark. 

Shortly before his death in hospice last year, my brother and I talked about the centrality of trees to our memories and imaginations. We were never sentimental tree-huggers but grew up in an older suburb and our lot adjoined a twenty-acre wooded tract owned by the City of Cleveland. We remembered the elms that shaded our backyard before Dutch elm disease killed them in the late fifties. Ken and I recalled the plum tree that grew behind the house, the bees and wasps attracted to the fallen fruit, and the copse of ash trees behind the neighbors’ garage where each summer I captured cecropia moths. We remembered where the plot of poplars ended and the locust trees took over. And the tulip trees, with the straightest of trunks and no low branches, and the red oak where I captured mourning cloak butterflies, and the aromatic sassafras saplings. This is the botanical map we carried around in our heads.

 

A.E. Housman is not conventionally judged a “nature poet,” but an unexpected number of his poems express implicit pleasure in trees, hedgerows and green pastures. He celebrates an older, greener England, as in the first stanza of “VIII” from More Poems:

 

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,

A land of trees that stand;

Where trees are fallen, there is grief;

I love no leafless land.”

 

One of my favorite lines in all of T.S. Eliot’s work is found in “Burnt Norton,” the first section of Four Quartets. Eliot’s context is spiritual but I’m reminded of childhood, when ascending tress was an integral feature of our summers:

 

“Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.”

''This Saves Us From Being Oppressed'

“It will be remembered that the brilliant and informal genius of Montaigne had perceived that our most certain knowledge is what we know about ourselves, and had made of this a philosophy of introspection.” 

Typically, Michael Oakeshott consigns this interesting observation to a footnote, in his introduction to the edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan he published in 1946. The footnote is linked to this sentence: “[Hobbes] begins with sensation; and he begins there, not because there is no deceit or crookedness in the utterances of the senses, but because the fact of our having sensations seems to him the only thing of which we can be indubitably certain.” Oakeshott never devoted an entire essay to Montaigne but his presence shadows his work like a tutelary spirit. In his essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1956; Rationalism in Politics, 1962) he writes:

 

“This conversation is not only the greatest but also the most hardly sustained of all accomplishments of mankind. Men have never been wanting who have had this understanding of human activity and intercourse, but few have embraced it without reserve and without misgiving, and on this account it is proper to mention the most notable of those who have done so: Montaigne.”

 

Like many of the finest essayists, Montaigne gives the impression of writing about himself but always addressing the individual reader, not the crowd. Montaigne confides. He leads us over to the corner, puts his arm around our shoulders and talks to us, softly. He seldom grows shrill or domineering. It’s a foreign-sounding voice to moderns because we’ve grown accustomed to being harangued, whether in politics, religion or literary criticism. Some of us stop listening when it becomes clear the speaker wants to impress us with his brilliance and persuade us with the force of his arguments. And that’s what he wants – argument, often ad hominem, almost always tedious. Montaigne wants to clarify his thought and share it with us. In some ways, he is the most “interactive” of writers, expecting us to at least ponder his thinking the way we would an intelligent friend’s.

 

In an entry dated 1955 in his Notebooks, 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014), Oakeshott writes: “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.” Oakeshott turned a youthful fifty-four that year. In 1964 he wrote:

 

“All great works of art have a touch of lightness, happiness, almost inconsequence, & this saves us from being oppressed & having to turn away from them.”

'Having Actually Pleased Intelligent Children'

When leafing through a poetry anthology, I tend to go first to the poems and poets previously unknown to me. Sometimes my ignorance is retroactively rewarded: “These poems are awful.” Only occasionally do I discover a cloistered gem. 

Coventry Patmore (1823-96) I know more for his unlikely name than his work. In 1884 he published The Children’s Garland from the Best Poets, and many of the contents are new to me. The book went through twelve editions by 1895. The Fondren Library copy I borrowed is inscribed “Archibald Dickson—1888” – a name that sounds like a character in one of E.A. Robinson’s poems. Patmore writes rather audaciously in his preface:

 

“This volume will, I hope, be found to contain nearly all the genuine poetry in our language fitted to please children,—of and from the age at which they have usually learned to read,—in common with grown people. A collection on this plan has, I believe, never before been made, although the value of the principle seems clear.”

 

Clearly, the Victorians set high expectations for their children (Patmore had six). The poet with the most poems anthologized – sixteen -- is Wordsworth. Cowper gets ten; Southey, seven; Tennyson, six. The overall selection is slanted toward the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, Swift’s “Baucis and Philemon” is judged wholesome and thus is included, though not “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Among the Tennyson poems chosen by Patmore is “The Brook,” which I hadn’t read in many years. The opening line, “I come from haunts of coot and hern,” brought back to mind James Thurber’s cartoon. Patmore in his preface describes his criteria of inclusion:

“The test applied, in every instance, in the work of selection, has been that of having actually pleased intelligent children; and my object has been to make a book which shall be to them no more nor less than a book of equally good poetry is to intelligent grown persons. The charm of such a book to the latter class of readers is rather increased than lessened by the surmised existence in it of an unknown amount of power, meaning and beauty, beyond that which is at once to be seen; and children will not like this volume the less because, though containing little or nothing which will not at once please and amuse them, it also contains much, the full excellence of which they may not as yet be able to understand.”

That final line would seem to echo T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante”: “[G]enuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

'Pride of Reading Is a Terrible Thing'

One of life’s modest pleasures is happening on a previously unknown writer and finding his work interesting if not exactly excellent or “major.” To appreciate such discoveries, a reader must stifle his instinctive sense of literary snobbery or at least defer it for a decent period of time. Let’s remember that Herman Melville was largely forgotten for thirty years after his death until resuscitated in the twentieth century by readers and critics. Time is cruel and the only critics who count are readers. 

I’m thinking now of the American teacher, editor and essayist Frank Moore Colby (1865-1925). His name meant nothing to me until last week when a reader sent a link to his 1904 collection Imaginary Obligations.  The first essay in the collection, “Books We Haven’t Read,” illuminates the plight of “minor” writers like Colby, ignored and forgotten in favor of the merely fashionable. Colby formulates a memorable description of common literary snobbery:

 

“Pride of reading is a terrible thing. There are certain literary sets in which the book is an instrument of tyranny. If you have not read it you are made to feel unspeakably abject, for the book you have not read is always the one book in the world that you should have read. It is the sole test of literary insight, good taste and mental worth. To confess that you have not read it is to expose yourself as an illiterate person. It is like admitting that you have never eaten with a fork.”

 

Colby’s prose is witty, clean and plain-spoken. No theory or ego-driven obfuscation. Any intelligent reader will find him accessible. His voice is like a friend’s who has good taste. I was delighted to see Colby refer to the final book Charles Darwin published in his life, the delightful Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (1881):

 

“We need all the comfort we can get. Small literary ambitions trip up many of us every day. Many a man lives beyond his literary income from an absurd kind of book pride. Why should we not own up like Darwin--change the subject to earthworms if they interest us more? There was more ‘literary merit’ in what he said of earthworms than in what most of us say about belles-lettres. It is not the topic that gives the literary quality.”

 

That final sentence in particular is a treasure. I’ve just finished rereading Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers. Most people read it, I assume, for his recounting of what he invariably calls the “Hiss Case,” and for that alone the book is obligatory reading. But Chambers also gives us a memorable conversion story, a love story, a history of Soviet Communism in the U.S. and a lengthy digression on small-scale dairy farming. The last is not a subject of significant interest to this reader but remains a delight to read. A good writer can make almost any subject interesting. Consider A.J. Liebling on boxing, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes, Ronald Knox on detective stories, Guy Davenport on Balthus. Colby closes his essay with this passage:

 

“And if the only thing a multitude of books have done for a man is to enable him to mention them and quote them and appear to be in the ‘literary swim,’ he is no fit person for the company of honest authors. He does not belong in Arcadia at all, but behind the counter in a retail bookshop, where there is a good business reason for plaguing other people about the books they haven't read. By these and kindred reflections we may console ourselves in part for our deficiencies and ward off the temptation of the sham.”