'Having Such an Enjoyable Time All the Time'

I keep happening on books and poems I think my late brother might have enjoyed. Ken was not a dedicated reader but his tastes tended to be fierce and impulsive. He once sent an overheated email urging me to read this new writer he had discovered. This guy was good and funny and seemed to have few illusions, and that was how my brother fancied himself: Samuel Beckett. The book was How It Is (1961; trans. 1964), which I had first read around 1974. I would never have told him that. I was always pleased when he found, on his own, a book that excited him. 

He read a lot of art history, with for many years a tight focus on Albrecht Dürer, his favorite painter. We both loved Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (1972). I remember him reading a biography of Paul Robeson. One of the few poets I know he read closely was Zbigniew Herbert, whom he considered a humorist. He once told me he had been reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson for the first time, at age fifty-four, and said, “There’s this nice edition, and you talk about it a lot and so do some of the people on your blog, so I thought it was just time to read it.” Ken was partial to The Facts on File Visual Dictionary (1986) and reference books in general. The last book I’m certain he read or at least looked at was one his son brought to him in the hospital: Cleveland Calamities, a history of disasters in our native city.

 

I wish I had suggested Ken read Stevie Smith. He would have “got” Smith, I think, as many do not. The humor, especially about death, coupled with her drawings, would have amused him. Of course, everyone loves “Not Waving but Drowning” (1957) but Ken would have appreciated “The Death Sentence” from Harold’s Leap (1950):

"Cold as No Plea,

 Yet wild with all negation,

 Weeping I come

 To my heart's destination,

 To my last bed

 Between th’ unhallowed boards –

The Law allows it

 And the Court awards.”

 

In “What Poems Are Made Of,” an essay collected in Me Again: Uncollected Writings (1982), Smith writes: “Why are so many of my poems about death, if I am having such an enjoyable time all the time?"