'A Mission to the University Extension Scheme'

I have a typically human taste for taxonomy, classifying things, sorting them into categories. There’s comfort in order. A friend in Los Angeles shares my bent and proposes three classes of books:

 

1. Books to read.

2. Books to reread

3. Books not to read at all

 

Makes sense. Most of us probably follow a similar scheme without having formalized it. Here are my friend’s entries in the first category: Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, the Duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, Theodor Mommsen and, “till we get a better one,” Grote’s History of Greece.

 

Little to argue with here, though I’ve not read Mandeville, Marco Polo and Grote. Here is the second category, the books to reread:

 

Plato and Keats. “In the sphere of poetry,” he writes, “the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.” That’s a little vague but leaves plenty of room for nominations. I have an extensive list. In fact, it may be the second-largest category, topped only by the third, the books not to read at all:

 

“[James] Thomson’s Seasons, [Samuel] Rogers’s Italy[: A Poem], [William] Paley’s Evidences [of Christianity], all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay “On Liberty,” all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, [Bishop Joseph] Butler’s Analogy [of Religion], [Sir Alexander] Grant’s Aristotle, [David] Hume’s [History of] England, George Henry Lewes’s [Biographical] History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.”

 

So far, I’m safe from most of these titles, though I have read Thomson and a lot of Hume but not his History. I want to endorse that final phrase, which my friend expands on here:

 

“The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching . . . But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.”

 

Such negative endorsements are unenforceable, of course. People are free to read any tripe they fancy. The best we can do is share our experience of books and trust that a few readers out there will follow the suggestion, read the book and conclude that we knew what we were talking about.

[A note to readers: the comments section at Anecdotal Evidence is reserved strictly for readers. I’ve had my say. If you have a question, send it to me via email: Patrick.kurp@gmail.com. Otherwise, I’m unable to reply.]

'All Sit in Sullen Silence and Await'

My middle son has a friend, a fellow Marine, who had questions about Russian literature. He asked about Andrei Platonov and Leonid Andreyev. I’ve never read the latter but told him what little I knew about the former. I recommended Vasily Grossman, and he said he intends to read Stalingrad. Previously, he had suggested Michael read The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, one of my favorite novels. This Marine, whom I have never met, has an interest in colonial Algeria and I was able to recommend Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977), which he subsequently read. 

This is one of the ancillary pleasures of reading good books. Suggestions, of course, are made to be ignored but occasionally one takes hold and one’s pleasure is doubled. I don’t remember anyone recommending a book to me when I was young. That probably contributed to me becoming a semi-secretive reader. I assumed no one was interested in the books I loved. That began to change at the university when I met a few students and faculty members who shared my enthusiasm. There’s an informal underground out there of adventurous readers, those who eschew bestsellers and often contemporary books and indulge in our inheritance.

 

D.A. Cooper is a poet who, I’m told, lives here in Houston. This is his poem, “To Read”:

 

“There are so many books to read; they fill

the shelves of libraries and stores across

the world, as well as every empty space

inside my house. The stacks grow year by year;

they rise like zombie corpses on my desk,

my couch, and all across the floor. Each begs

to sink its dusty claws into my brain.

I crack their spines, flip through their crumbling pages,

and try to pick which ones I’ll give new life.

There are too many books to read. I see

those volumes and I know I’ll never have

the time I need to finish even just

the ones I own. They cry out from my shelves—

collected poems and stories of the dead—

entreating me to resurrect their souls.

And that is just the famous literature.

Great forests have been razed so I could buy

large piles of science fiction, fantasy,

detective novels, politics, and physics.

Selections of the best known -ologies,

a sampling of the most loved -ographies,

and sprinkles of my favorite -osophies,

all sit in sullen silence and await

the hoped for yet unlikely future date

when I will find the time I need to read.”

 

Cooper describes an anxiety I once suffered from: too many books looming over my head. How would I ever be able to read all of them? With time, I turned that around. Now it’s reassuring to know such bounty awaits me. Even better, I know precisely which books I will soon reread.

'An Appreciation of Words Is So Rare'

Most forgotten writers are deservedly forgotten, of course. Writing talent is unfairly distributed among literary aspirants. Sincerity and hard work count for nothing if you have no gift or fail to develop what little you’re given. Agnes Repplier writes in “Words” (Essays in Idleness, 1897): 

“An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.”

 

During her long working life, Repplier (1855-1950) was a prolific essayist and writer of popular biographies who was able to support herself, her mother and sister with her work in a way unimaginable today. She was a serious Roman Catholic and remains in some ways a charmingly old-fashioned writer, bookish, leisurely and occasionally tart, at once genteel and not. A native of Philadelphia, Repplier lived there all her life. She never married, had no children and published more than one-thousand essays on a sprawling array of subjects. Like the best journalists, she was a generalist, no specialist, widely knowledgeable, curious, democratic in spirit, with an occasionally acerbic wit. I knew several like her, but few so industrious.

 

Repplier had a Victorian streak of fuddy-duddy-ism but redeems herself with the occasional shiv to the gut. In “Words,” she neatly renders Carlyle, a frustratingly uneven writer and man: “No man uses words more admirably, or abuses them more shamefully, than Carlyle. That he should delight in seeing his pages studded all over with such spikes as ‘mammonism,’ ‘flunkeyhood’ [Past and Present (1843): ‘All his flunkeyhood and horn-eyed dimness”], ‘nonentity,’ and ‘simulacrum,’ that he should repeat them again and again with unwearying self-content, is an enigma that defies solution, save on the simple presumption that they are designed, like other instruments of torture, to test the fortitude of the sufferer.” She revels in Carlyle’s phrase “little red-colored pulpy infants,” and describes it as “the art of a Dutch master who, on five inches of canvas, depicts for us with subdued vehemence the absolute realities of life.”

 

I like Repplier’s defiant spirit and scorn for the merely fashionable. Here she is on prose style: “The exquisite adjustment of a word to its significance, which was the instrument of Flaubert’s daily martyrdom and daily triumph; the generous sympathy of a word with its surroundings, which was the secret wrung by Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of language,--these are the twin perfections which constitute style, and substantiate genius.” Repplier could turn out a tour-de-force sentence like this from “Children, Past and Present” (Books and Men, 1899):

 

“To get up at five on freezing winter mornings; to sweep their own floors and make their own beds; to go two by two to the ‘children’s pump’ for a scanty wash; to eat no mouthful of food until nine o’clock; to live on an endless round of mutton, potatoes, and beer, none of them too plentiful or too good; to sleep in a dismal cell without chair or table; to improvise a candlestick out of paper; to be starved, frozen and flogged,--such was the daily life of the scions of England’s noblest families, of lads tenderly nurtured and sent from princely homes to win their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost.”

 

Repplier deserves rediscovery. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was proudly old-fashioned and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. Repplier at her best is piquant, witty and cant-free. She’s a fine model for essayists, a free-flowing aphorist and blessedly prolific.

'An Emotion I Must Have Been Inventing'

“I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it.” 

Rarely does someone speak so precisely for me. Boris Dralyuk is writing in “On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy.” Few states leave me as conflicted as nostalgia. Every day my thoughts turn to the past. It’s as involuntary as a heart attack. Is this associated with aging? Of course. Nostalgia is misunderstood as a wish to return to the past or at least flee from the present. That’s not my desire. In fact, nostalgia is made more piercingly bittersweet by the knowledge that you can’t return, that even the sweetest, most vivid memory is a dream.

 

In 1968, in a mall bookstore, I bought three Washington Square Press paperbacks in a series devoted to Great American Thinkers: John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen and George Santayana (75¢ each). The first two I quickly discarded. They had nothing for me and still don’t. I was learning from scratch and chose these books for no reasons I can solidly remember. The Santayana volume was written by Willard E. Arnett.

 

Now I’ve ordered a used copy and I'm rereading it. The first printing is dated March 1968. Thus far I’ve experienced two moments of nostalgic déjà vu: Arnett’s mention in the introduction of Santayana’s problematical American identity (he was born in Spain of Spanish parents and never became an American citizen), and the epigraph he places at the top of Chapter 9, “Art, Beauty, Meaning, and Value.” It’s from Reason in Art (volume IV of The Life of Reason, published in 1905): “. . . the effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.” It’s Santayana’s choice of “eternal” that thrills and bothers me.

 

As I read, I see that odd, under-socialized sixteen-year-old kid reading in his bedroom, in an otherwise nearly bookless house in the Cleveland suburbs. Santayana welcomed me to the literary life that year, as did Eric Hoffer and Bernard Malamud. Just writing their names, writers I’ve loved and reread for almost sixty years, floods me with warm nostalgia – the good stuff, not the delusional. I sympathize with that kid. He had no idea how fortunate he was and how he was changing his life forever. I’m still reading Santayana.

 

In his essay, Boris quotes two of my favorite American poets – Edwin Arlington Robinson and Donald Justice. Four years before his death in 2004, Justice conducted a lengthy interview with the English writer and scholar Philip Hoy, and in 2001 the edited interview was published as a book by Between the Lines. He spoke softly in an age when too many poets shrieked. The interview is thoughtful and nostalgic but never toothless. Here is an anecdote he recounts that comes close to defining the nature of nostalgia for some of us. It’s a memory of his 1982 return to Florida, the state where he was born, that sounds like the germ of a Justice poem:

 

“I have a distinct memory of walking out onto the golf course behind our house late one night, walking our dog, and standing there looking up at the moon as it flooded the fairway with light. Very nice. I felt touched by an emotion I must have been inventing.”

'To Mold Clay, Fashion Men From It'

Certain writers lay claim to a piece of geography. Think of Cavafy’s Alexandria and William Kennedy’s Albany. Outsiders may visit but the deed is ironclad. When I hear something in the news about the Caucasus, that often-contested band of mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, I think of Tolstoy. In 1851, he fled to the Caucasus to escape gambling debts and joined the Russian army. During the Crimean War he served as an artillery officer and took part in the Siege of Sevastopol. Tolstoy turned the experience into grist for literature in such works as the 1863 novel The Cossacks and the 1872 novella “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.” His finest use of the setting comes in one of his masterpieces, Hadji Murad (1904). 

The first-century Roman poet Martial got there long before Tolstoy. In his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books), R.L. Barth tells me the epigram “IX.45 is perhaps my favorite.” The poet addresses his friend Marcellinus, who is being sent to the Caucasus as part of the Roman army. For the next six-hundred years, Rome would battle for control of the region with the Sasanian Empire. IX.45:

 

“Marcellinus, when you set forth

To soldier in the frigid North

Beneath the Getic constellations,

Think how close those duty stations

Approach the famed Promethean rock

And fabled mountains! Taking stock

Of these—the hero’s confidants

Who heard his cries—you’ll say at once,

‘Prometheus was harder!’ Add:

‘Who had—and without going mad—

Endured such suffering was fit

To mold clay, fashion men from it.’”

 

Bob writes: “I think it’s an absolutely first-rate poem. I’ve been thinking about this since the other night when I reread Turner’s essay on Martial, where he pronounced it ‘one of the best poems in ancient literature.’ I’m sure that was not Turner being provocatively perverse. It really is a remarkable poem.”

 

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle was sent daily to eat his liver. Each night  it would grow back and the eagle would return the next day to feast on it yet again. Bob, writing as a poet, translator and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, tells me:

 

“Other than the coincidence of the landscape, I think at least part of the reason for alluding to the great suffering and endurance of Prometheus is to warn or prepare his young friend Marcellinus for what he can expect in his tour of duty. He was obviously someone about whom Martial cared deeply, devoting three poems to him. When Martial devotes multiple poems to friends, they are usually friends in Rome itself and more or less of his generation."

'An After-Hope to Please'

Several readers have quibbled with the late Oscar Mandel’s assertion that “literature exists to make men happy.” Oscar celebrates the “pleasure-giving capacity” of books, as I quoted him writing in Thursday’s post. I knew such statements would provoke certain categories of readers. Many confuse pleasure derived from reading with titillation, escape or distraction, something like the marketing pitch for so-called “beach books,” what my father would have called “a stupid waste of time.” Rudyard Kipling said in his lecture to students, "The Uses of Reading" (1912): 

“There is, or there was, an idea that reading in itself is a virtuous and holy deed. I can’t quite agree with this, because it seems to me that the mere fact of a man’s being fond of reading proves nothing one way or the other. He may be constitutionally lazy; or he may be overstrained, and so take refuge in a book to rest himself. He may be full of curiosity and wonder about the life on which he is just entering; and for that reason may plunge into any and every book he can lay hands on, in order to get information about things that are puzzling him, or frightening him, or interesting him.”

 

I understand a priggish suspicion of pure pleasure and pleasure-seeking. Unregulated hedonism is no solid foundation for a life well-lived. Pleasure is complicated. I find varying sorts and degrees of pleasure in books as miscellaneous as Ecclesiastes, Montaigne, Spinoza’s Ethics, Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories, Yeats’ poems and the Parker novels of Donald Westlake. Perhaps a redefinition of pleasure is called for. Walter de la Mare writes in his essay “A Book of Words” (Pleasures and Speculations, 1940):

 

“[O]ne is tempted — though it might be dangerous — to maintain that the best books in the world were written chiefly for pleasure and with an after-hope to please.”

'A Way of Reading the World'

“Poetry gives us a way of reading the world. Through its cadences, through its different ways of simultaneously conveying reason and feeling and the human senses, poetry makes it possible for people to express thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” 

Almost a decade has passed since the death of Geoffrey Hill. The Age of Hill is over, assuming it ever started. He was the dominant English poet after the deaths of Auden and Larkin. He died June 30, 2016, at age eighty-four. For his final twenty years, a prolific time for Hill, I read him expectantly, waiting for his next volume. He was never a member of the Mary Oliver School of Poetry Niceness and possessed an Old Testament ferocity.  The words above were spoken by his widow, Alice Goodman, a librettist and Anglican priest, months after her husband’s death. She writes:

 

“‘How does this line sound?’ ‘Have a look at this,’ we said to each other over and over again. We played with words. We argued accents and stresses, and the dovetailed enjambments of line-breaks. We scribbled on paper napkins at the dinner table. ‘You can’t do that!’ ‘Why can’t I?’ ‘It doesn’t work.’ ‘Oh, that’s lovely. I wish I’d written that.’ ‘If you’re going to write in bed, please use a pencil.’”

 

I return periodically to all of his books but find The Triumph of Love (1998) most rewarding. An excerpt from CXLVIII:

 

                                                            “I ask you:  

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.  

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad  

and angry consolation. What is  

the poem? What figures? Say,  

a sad and angry consolation. That’s  

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry  

consolation.”

 

Collected in Without Title (2006) is an elegy—perhaps Hill’s defining mode—“Offertorium: December 2002”:

 

“For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard

admonitory sparse berries, atrorubent

stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light:

 

“for late distortions lodged by first mistakes;

for all departing, as our selves, from time;

for random justice held with things half-known,

 

“with restitution if things come to that.” 

 

An elegy—for the departing year, for the self and its failings—and a prayer of thanks in a time of darkness. The yew berry is toxic and medicinal. “Atrorubent” means dark red. Darkness mingles with light. “Claustral” is cloistered, with a suggestion of monasticism (and of Dickinson: “There’s a certain slant of light / On winter afternoons”). The poem comes as close to conventional consolation as Hill ever gets, and the descent of the conclusion into the colloquial is typical of Hill. The rare appearance of the demotic in his poetry usually signifies the comic, however mirthless it may seem. In 2009 I reviewed Hill’s Selected Poems for the now-defunct Quarterly Conversation and concluded:

 

“Hill is not for the faint-of-heart. His rudeness is often savage, and he is seldom afraid to skirt absurdity. He once wrote: ‘An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.’”