'His Own Discriminating Piety'

I was an early subscriber to Grand Street, the magazine founded in 1981 by Ben Sonnenberg. What surprises me now is how many of its essays, reviews and stories I remember in some detail: Gary Giddins’ “This Guy Wouldn’t Give You the Parsley Off His Fish,” about Jack Benny; Murray Kempton on Roy Cohn; Steven Millhauser’s essay “The Fascination of the Miniature”; Terence Kilmartin on translating Proust; Chrisopher Ricks on Thomas Love Beddoes. A writer I discovered by way of his essays in Grand Street was Henry Gifford (1913-2003), who taught for thirty years at the University of Bristol. For the magazine he wrote about Tolstoy, Khodasevich, Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Seferis and Cavafy, and Eugenio Montale.

In a memorial for Gifford published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, Christopher Rick wrote of his friend: “His death at the age of ninety brought home what a true piety is, in contemplation of his supple stamina and of his own discriminating piety towards the literary geniuses whose presences he owned: Tolstoy and Seferis, Pasternak and Samuel Johnson, Dante and T. S. Eliot.” Gifford’s literary interests were the opposite of narrowly provincial or academic. He loved good books and writers of any nationality.

In the Winter 1983 issue of Grand Street, Gifford published “Nabokov’s Voice,” a review of the three posthumously published collections of lectures the novelist delivered at Wellesley and Cornell: Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981) and Lectures on Don Quixote (1982). Gifford likens their “verve” to Dickens and writes: “This teacher was an artist, in love with his subject, and at least half in love with America.” Like his subject, Gifford is never dry or humorless:

“‘Literature,’ he told the class when he felt at his happiest, dealing with Dickens after a respectful but somewhat constrained attendance upon Jane Austen, ‘literature is not about something: it is the thing itself, the quiddity. Without the masterpiece, literature does not exist.’ He might have added, without the masterpiece the ‘fluid pudding’ of life might come to be what food was to poor Harriet Martineau, whose sense of taste had been atrophied.”

One is tempted to quote Gifford at length. He’s a natural-born celebrator and his prose is pithy, witty and often tart. A sampler:

“The aesthetic and the moral go hand in hand in these lectures--that is to say, what he feels to be artistically right has a supreme moral truth.”

On the surprising delight Nabokov takes in Don Quixote: “It was not on the face of it a novel that one would have expected Nabokov to take to his heart. That he did, with the perfect mixture of enjoyment and aloofness required from the ‘major reader,’ proves once again that the conjuror, the supreme exhibitor and exhibitionist, had without any question a heart.”

“I have compared his manner with that of Dickens, who liked to be known as ‘The Inimitable.’ Nabokov too plays up to the full of his natural bent as a master of genial monologue who never fails to interest; and if his prejudiced and rude dismissals are quarrelsome, he yet shows, as Keats would say, a kind of ‘grace in his quarrel.’” 

The marvelous Keats tag is from an 1819 letter the poet wrote to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgianna: “Though a quarrel in the Streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel.”