'Like the Clothes He Wears'

“There must be in prose many passages capable of producing a particular kind of aesthetic reaction more commonly identified with poetry.” 

For some of us, this is self-evident. Dull, clumsy, tin-eared prose is at least as painful and offensive as its counterpart in poetry. Some prose writers are simply incompetent. They’re like backward children fumbling with Play-Doh. Others dismiss attention paid to crafting prose as being merely effete. I found this particularly true among journalists. Just throw words against the wall and see what sticks.

 

The passage above by the poet Donald Justice is from his essay “The Prose Sublime.” He adds a witty subtitle: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” Justice published it in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1988 and collected it in A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). He continues:

“[T]he reaction to prose as to poetry proves in experience to be much the same, a sort of transport, a frisson, a thrilled recognition, which, ‘flashing forth at the right moment,’ as Longinus has it, ‘scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt.’”

 

Justice explicitly dismisses “purple prose” and the “self-consciously experimental”; namely, Gertrude Stein and Finnegans Wake. Histrionic prose is self-indulgent and attention-seeking. It forgoes clarity – the writer’s obligation to the reader – and substitutes showing off. When I think of an example of what Justice is advocating, I think of the poet J.V. Cunningham, who is also a masterful writer of prose. Take “The Journal of John Cardan” (1961), collected in The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024). His prose is unsentimental and written with laser-like focus:

 

“So we save ourselves from the sentimental death of the hearts, and at the same time protect ourselves from engrossment in our wayward wishes. For a man must live divided against himself: only the selfishly insane can integrate experience to the heart’s desire, and only the emotionally sterile would not wish to.”

 

And this: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.”

I remembered Justice’s essay when rereading Henry Green’s “Apologia,” his 1941 reading of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), collected in Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green. Justice explicitly dismisses Doughty, along with Water Pater, as producing “prose that aims to be poetical.” Here, I disagree with Justice on the virtues of Doughty’s prose. It is unusual and eccentric but utterly convincing in context. Green writes:

 

“A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality. But what a man is, also makes the way he writes as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance which is, essentially, a side of his character. There are fashions in underwear, for the most part unconscious in that we are not particularly aware of how we dress. . . . [W]ith Doughty the man’s integrity is such that he writes on his own, if the dates were not available it would be hard to say when.”

'The Few Feet of Books in My Library Case'

For more than thirty years, George Hamlin Fitch (1852-1925) wrote a weekly column for the Sunday book page of the San Francisco Chronicle. I know little else about him except that in 1911 he published the charmingly titled Comfort Found in Good Old Books, which comes with this dedication: 

“TO THE MEMORY

OF MY SON HAROLD,

MY BEST CRITIC, MY OTHER

SELF, WHOSE DEATH HAS

TAKEN THE LIGHT

OUT OF MY

LIFE.”

I make no great claims for Fitch’s gifts as a writer and critic but the baldness of his grief and the absence of self-pity stunned me. “These short essays on the best old books in the world,” he writes in his introduction, “were inspired by the sudden death of an only son, without whom I had not thought life worth living. To tide me over the first weeks of bitter grief I plunged into this work of reviewing the great books from the Bible to the works of the eighteenth-century writers.” I understand the notion of books-as-solace and admire Fitch for his love of books and his son.

 

Nothing on Fitch’s list of books and writers will surprise the reader. His chapter on Dr. Johnson is largely devoted to Boswell’s biography ("one of the great books of the world”) and Fitch is rather dismissive of Johnson’s accomplishments as a writer. Of his versions of Juvenal he writes: “These are not great poetry. The verse is of the style which Pope produced, but which the modern taste rejects because of its artificial form.” He claims modern readers of Johnson only need to read the Lives of the Poets, the prayers and the letter to Lord Chesterfield. He makes little mention of the periodical essays.

 

Fitch is very much the reader’s advocate and makes allowances for individual tastes. In his chapter on St. Augustine’s Confessions he writes: “If a book is recommended to you and you cannot enjoy it after conscientious effort, then it is plain that the book does not appeal to you or that you are not ready for it. The classic that you may not be able to read this year may become the greatest book in the world to you in another year, when you have passed through some hard experience that has matured your mind or awakened some dormant faculties that call out for employment.” No argument here. I like Fitch’s emphasis on “hard experience” maturing a reader's sensibilities.

 

Fitch is forever striving to accommodate readers of varying tastes, education levels and gifts. In his chapter titled “How to Get the Best Out of Books,” he tells us anyone who “understands English and who has an ordinary vocabulary” can read and enjoy the books on his list. He writes:

 

“[I]n this age of the limited railroad train, the telephone, the automobile and the aeroplane, it is well occasionally to be reminded that Shakespeare and the writers of the Bible knew as much about human nature as we know today, and that their philosophy was far saner and simpler than ours, and far better to use as a basis in making life worth living.”

 

In particular, read Fitch’s prefatory remarks about his son’s death and the power of the greatest books: “When the first shock had passed came the review of what was left of life to me. Most of the things which I had valued highly for the sake of my son now had little or no worth for me; but to take up again the old round of work, without the vivid, joyous presence of a companion dearer than life itself, one must have some great compensations; and the chief of these compensations lay in the few feet of books in my library case—in those old favorites of all ages that can still beguile me, though my head is bowed in the dust with grief and my heart is as sore as an open wound touched by a careless hand.”

'Never Without the Company of Books'

Edmund Blunden’s personal library of some 10,000 volumes is now in the collection at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. The university purchased the books in the nineteen-eighties from the poet’s third wife, Claire Blunden.

Blunden (1896-1974) served for almost two years on the Western Front, took part in the engagements at Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. He is best known for his Great War poetry and prose but was also a prolific critic who devoted books to Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Edward Gibbon, Keats, Thomas Hardy and Shelley, among others. Blunden was instrumental in restoring the critical reputations of William Collins, Lamb and John Clare. Heavily represented in the Ohio University collection are signed volumes by his friends, including Robert Bridges, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon. In his essay “Bringing Them Home” (The Mind’s Eye, 1934), Blunden writes:

 

“I cannot profess to be a genuine collector of books, I know nothing of positive bibliography; small books, I call octavos, and large ones quartos. Folios I seldom carry home, out of a growing sympathy with my weary body. But so far as my preferences in size and weight are satisfied, I am a willing rescuer of books.”

 

Blunden distinguishes a reader (like himself, like me) from a collector. The latter may be perfectly respectable but is just as likely to be a book-snob, showing off trophies on a shelf or a cynic, acquiring books as “investments.” Blunden’s biographer, Barry Webb, devotes a chapter to “Book Collecting” and says the poet was “never without the company of books.” Webb writes:

 

“He collected for two reasons: to build up a ‘working’ library and to rescue volumes he felt others would ignore. He believed that an adequate library of English literature could be established without paying more than sixpence a volume in 1920 – a price he allowed to increase to two shillings and sixpence in 1930 and ten shillings in 1950 – and by this means he created a library of 10,000 volumes by 1965.”

 

I’ve known collectors who never part with books, regardless of their literary value. Theirs is a warehouse aesthetic. The volume of their volumes is a source of pride, and any dreck will do if it fills out the shelves. Hoarders are not collectors and usually are not even readers. The largest personal library I’ve ever seen was also the most comprehensive, tastefully selected and well-used. It was, in Blunden’s sense, a “working library,” not a vanity project to impress visitors. With the owner’s death, the collection has been dispersed. To his credit, Blunden was not a packrat or dilettante but read and reread what he accumulated. In “Bringing Them Home” he writes:

 

“The resourcefulness of those who have made books through the centuries often makes me forget the serious business of reading, and a book comes home simply because it took my eye in some way. Later on, I endeavour to square accounts by examining the author’s share, and in this way I have made the acquaintance of far too many hands.”

 

Here is Blunden’s poem “In a Library” from Choice or Chance (1934):

 

“A curious remedy for present cares,

And yet as near a good one as I know;

It is to scan the cares of long ago,

Which these brown bindings lodge.

In black print glares

The Elizabethan preacher, heaping shame

On that ubiquitous gay hell, the stage;

And here’s another full of scriptural rage

Against high Rome. Fie, parson, be more tame.

This critic gnashes his laborious teeth

At that, whose subtlety seems no such matter;

This merchant bodes our economic death,

The envoy hastens with his hard-won chatter;

Age hacks at youth, youth paints the old town red—

And in the margin Doomsday rears his head.”

'Picture the World Without Her in It'

Out of the blue a poet sent me a pdf of his latest collection and, out of politeness, not gratitude, I thanked him. The guy can’t write. Or rather, he can produce unlineated, remarkably banal prose. Someone, somewhere, told him he was a poet, likely a teacher or another “poet,” and he believed it. To that degree, it’s not his fault. He was born into a literary culture without respect for the discipline of craft and commonsensical intelligence. 

It’s sinking in that poet Jane Greer is dead. I thought of her while trying to read the pdf described above. I’m not on Twitter but I almost daily read her tweets because she was so funny and seemed to delight in things without being an attention-seeking idiot about it. From 1981 to 1992 she served as founding editor of Plains Poetry Journal, which I regret not having known at the time. For a taste of Jane’s spunk, see this opening to her review of collections by two of our best, X.J. Kennedy and R.S. Gwynn, published in the October 1987 issue of Chronicles:

 

“American poetry has for the past few decades been going through what can only be called an adolescence, discarding rules and conventions simply because they existed. Poetry and all the arts go through a healthy siege of anarchy every so often, but this was more like terrorism than a revolution; these revolutionaries, unlike the Romantics, had no idea of what to substitute for what they’d destroyed. Instead, they simply wrote, spilling their guts down the pages of fashionable and underground journals in two-word-wide, uncapitalized entrails of self-obsession.”

 

An evergreen doing double-duty after almost forty years. Good poetry does many things but chief among them ought to be reliably producing pleasure, ever striving after what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss.” I didn’t know Jane well. I’ll repeat myself: she was funny, a quality I crave like oxygen, and like many funny people she was serious about the important things. See the tribute to Jane put together by her peers, fellow poets, in New Verse Review, including one of her poems published in an earlier issue of that journal:

 

“In none of her other ages had she noted

her age or its burden and bounty of expectations.

The future was as flexible as the past,

and, in between, moments like unstrung pearls

strewn across velvet grieved and gladdened her

and always astonished her with their perfection.

There was no nothingness: there was only being.

 

“Slowly she wakes from what had seemed a dream

to realize that this is her final age—

of indeterminate length and quality.

Things are ending, or have ended, or will end.

The pearls are strung with care, it is quite clear.

There is no nothingness—but she can almost,

some days, picture the world without her in it.”

'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.”

'I Make Little Choice at Table'

Food seems to have replaced religion and art as a source of consolation and purpose in the lives of many people. I know some who photograph most of their meals and share the pictures. I’m reminded of Tom Waits in his spoken introduction to “Eggs and Sausage”: “I was always, uh, kinda one who’d like to consider myself kind of a pioneer of the palate, a restauranteur, if you will.” 

There’s a trace of snobbery in this pose, of course, as the photographed meals often look elaborate, expensive and unidentifiable, the sort of thing you would never prepare for yourself. It wouldn’t occur to me to photograph my peanut butter sandwich or tonight’s red beans and rice. I’m far from ascetic but I’ve never wished to fetishize food. It doesn’t somehow represent me. Like everyone I have likes and dislikes but that’s not important. Foodie is an ugly word and concept, uncomfortably close to gourmand and glutton.

 

In his final days, my brother and I talked a lot about Montaigne. In hospice he stopped talking around the same time he stopped eating. I’m reading the Frenchman's essay “Of Experience” again and like his approach to food: “I make little choice at table, and attack the first and nearest thing, and I change reluctantly from one flavor to another. I dislike a crowd of dishes and courses as much as any other crowd. I am easily satisfied with few dishes.”

 

I knew an anthropologist who said casually, in conversation, that people have more hangups and crackpot ideas about food than they do about any other subject, including sex. They also tend to be more dogmatic. Take the recent vogue for protein. Such are the concerns of the citizens of a wealthy nation who know precisely where the next meal is coming from. Montaigne continues in “Of Experience”:

 

“There are some who act like patient sufferers if they do without beef and ham amid partridges. They have a good time; that is the daintiness of the dainty; it is the taste of a soft existence that is cloyed with the ordinary and accustomed things, by which luxury beguiles the tedium of wealth [Seneca]. Not to make good cheer with what another savors, to take particular care of what you eat and drink, is the essence of this vice.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'This Does Not Flatter Us'

“Ah, pitiful / The twisted memories of an ancient fool / And sweet the silence of a young man dead!”

There’s a tendency to romanticize, sometimes extravagantly, the gifted young who die early. Think of Chatterton, Keats and Wilfred Owen. Granted longer lives, what might they have accomplished? Ironically, with Keats, there’s probably less reason to mourn, given the brilliance of his sonnets, odes and letters. He died at twenty-five and the quality of much of his work exceeds that of most poets who survive into their dotage. The lines quoted above were written by Edward Shanks (1892-1953) in his poem “The Dead Poet” (Poems, 1916) about his friend Rupert Brooke. Shanks went on to work as a literary journalist and university lecturer, and wrote books about Shaw, Kipling and Poe.   

 

I learned of Shanks from Theodore Dalrymple’s book chronicle Not for Ambition or Bread (Mirabeau Press, 2025). Shanks served in France with the British Army during the Great War but was invalided out in 1915 and never saw combat. “The Dead Poet” begins:

 

“When I grow old they’ll come to me and say:

Did you then know him in that distant day?

Did you speak with him, touch his hand, observe

The proud eyes’ fire, soft voice and light lips’ curve?

And I shall answer: This man was my friend;

Call to my memory, add, improve, amend

And count up all the meetings that we had

And note his good and touch upon his bad.”

 

Brooke (b. 1887) graduated from Cambridge in 1909. After the start of the Great War, he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. In February 1915, he sailed to the Dardanelles in preparation for the Gallipoli campaign. He contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite and died on April 23, age twenty-seven. Brooke was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Dalrymple writes: "Shanks almost makes Brooke’s early death seem like a benefit received—it sealed his reputation for ever—but foolish as it may seem, one knows what he, Shanks, means.” Here are the closing lines of “The Dead Poet”: “Whose limbs shall never waste, eyes never fall, / And whose clear brain shall not be dimmed at all.” And Dalrymple’s gloss on them:

 

“How extraordinarily romantic, written at a time when 20,000 young men or more were being mown down daily before or not long after their age of majority! It’s absurd, or wrong, or totally irrational, but yet we know what Shanks means and are moved by it. We tend to remember people as they last were, just before they died, not as they once were. This does not flatter us, those of us who live to be old.”