'A Small Number of Books That Are Something More'

I find it helpful to think of literature not as an academic exercise or a dialectical matter of statement, counterstatement and truth pinned in a glass case like a dead butterfly, but as one man’s experience of life shared with us, total strangers. As humans we are akin to each other. We implicitly endorse the old saw, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto – “I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me.” We are less students than open-minded companions, eagerly trying to make sense of the ever-shifting but very real world. Great writers are like us, only more so. Works of genius are not solitary but inclusive. Arbitrary identities – racial, sexual, ethnic, linguistic, whatever – are merely distracting. 

“We think of Montaigne as the begetter of the English secular sensibility at its most acute, and we trace his influence on Shakespeare and Bacon and Locke; but we must not forget that his great popularity in seventeenth-century England also helped to form the peculiarly English tradition of sweet-tempered spirituality.”

 

What a pleasing phrase: “sweet-tempered spirituality.” The American poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82) is writing of Montaigne, who endured the savagery of the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-century France, an era that reminds us of nothing so much as our own twentieth and twenty-first centuries And yet Rexroth suggests a strain of English writing that includes George Herbert and Thomas Traherne, though I find no formal confirmation that these writers knew of Montaigne's essys. Rexroth continues:

 

“Hooker, Browne, Jeremy Taylor, even William Law and the Quaker Barclay learned from Montaigne to respond with an amiability new to the Christian Church to the old questions that burned men alive — the older, and newer, answer that turns away wrath.”

 

“Turns away wrath” – another nice touch. I seldom read Rexroth though I’m grateful for Kenneth Knabb’s Bureau of Public Secrets and its extensive Rexroth archive. I had filed him away in a drawer labeled “Beatnik-Lite,” which is probably unfair but reading is a Darwinian enterprise that winnows out the weak, and even a hearty reader has finite patience and time. Rexroth’s poetry still seems trifling, too voluble and slack, too sentimental, too in thrall to Pound and his Cathay translations, but the literary essays, especially Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited, are admirably enthusiastic and personal, though sometimes garrulous – rather like Montaigne himself.

 

Rexroth had lived a long time with most of the books he writes about. He was not a dabbler. As critic or literary journalist, Rexroth is sometimes old-fashioned, sometimes bohemian, sometimes both simultaneously, but it’s safe to say he was more deeply read than most of his countercultural admirers. He’s no Kerouac, who often sounds illiterate. Rexroth’s literary essays entered the world as journalism, not scholarship, and were published first in such periodicals as Saturday Review, The Nation and the San Francisco Examiner. In his Introduction to Classics Revisited (1968) he writes:

 

“Men have been writing for over five thousand years and have piled up a vast mass of imaginative literature. Some of it is just writing that happens to have lasted physically. There are, however, a small number of books that are something more. They are the basic documents in the history of the imagination; they overflow all definitions of classicism and, at the same time, share the most simply defined characteristics.”

 

The significant phrase is “a small number of books that are something more.” Rexroth is writing on the eve of the ascension of institutional nihilism, when scorning the supreme accomplishments of humanity would become fashionable. His unspoken opponent is not today’s tenured radical but yesterday’s conventional illiterate, though the two are easily confused. He writes of his French predecessor:

 

“Montaigne, writing of the most gruesome subjects, radiates an active joy. His scruples are those of the chemical laboratory, never of the couch or confessional. The dilemmas that create the tensions in Marcus Aurelius are met by Montaigne with the simplest possible solutions of ethical activism, the commonplace relations of a country gentleman with common people, with Henri IV or the woodcutter on the estate."