'A Careful Reading of the Present Volume'

In a file cabinet is a stack of old pocket-size address books, most of them dating from my years as a newspaper reporter. When I would go to work for another paper, usually in a new city, I would buy a new book and start accumulating new names, addresses and telephone numbers. Now they read like collections of obituaries. Many of my former contacts, personal and professional, are dead. In one of the address books I find the contact information for the novelist Williamu Gaddis (d. 1998), whom I met and interviewed several times. Here is the home number of the late George Smith (d. 2014), mayor in the early eighties of Bellevue, Ohio, and a notably nice guy. Arousing fewer pleasant memories are the phone numbers of several former girlfriends. 

“The plot, in spite of whatever virtues may accrue to it from the acid delineation of the characters and the vivid action pictures, is the weakest part of the work. It lacks coherence. It lacks stability.”

 

That’s how a literary critic might evaluate my moribund address books, as if they were some postmodern mutation of the novel. It’s how Robert Benchley reviewed the New York City telephone directory in “The Most Popular Book of the Month” (Of All Things, 1921). Benchley plays it straight, with hardly an exaggeration:

 

“There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know. This feeling is made poignant, to the point of becoming an obsession, by a careful reading of the present volume.”

 

Benchley was one of the first “grownup” writers I read, in such collections as Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949). Then I preferred him to such fellow New Yorker colleagues as Thurber, Perelman and Parker. In another piece from Of All Things, “The Scientific Scenario,” Benchley purports to find movies too “low-brow.” His solution:

 

“I would suggest as a book, from which a pretty little scenario might be made, ‘The Education of Henry Adams.’ This volume has had a remarkable success during the past year among the highly educated classes. Public library records show that more people have lied about having read it than any other book in a decade. It contains five hundred pages of mental masochism, in which the author tortures himself for not getting anywhere in his brain processes. He just simply can’t seem to get any further than the evolution of an elementary Dynamic Theory of History or a dilettante dabbling with a Law of Acceleration. And he came of a bright family, too.”

Of course, Benchley himself appeared in the movies, most memorably in “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928).

Benchley was born on this day, September 15, in 1889, and died in 1945 at age fifty-six.

'Ease Anguish With Your Voice'

“If you think that, well, all morality is simply prejudice and murder is fine,” says Gary Saul Morson in an interview, “you actually become a terrorist.” 

In 2023, Morson published one of the few essential books of the twenty-first century: Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press). In it he anatomizes Russia’s homegrown fashion for terror in the nineteenth century and the responses of the country’s greatest writers. In the interview he tells Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.:

 

“This is when the modern terrorist movement is born. I mean, by the end of the century, by the beginning of the next century, there were so many terrorists. It was a career that was inherited from parents to a child, including daughters who had become terrorists. It was a family tradition. There were thousands of them killing thousands of people, and it was considered, next to being a great writer, the most prestigious occupation in the world.”

 

I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was murdered. I don’t follow the news closely and have little interest in politics. Three things about his killing and its aftermath struck me: 1.) Kirk seemed like a reasonable fellow, a gentleman, not a thug, someone with whom you could disagree without being assaulted. 2.) He was murdered on a college campus. 3.) A friend sent me a video of young people celebrating the killing of a husband and father. Some were singing about it.

 

More than forty years ago, as a newspaper reporter, I sat in a jail cell with a man who had just been convicted, along with an accomplice, of kidnapping a barmaid, killing her in an Indiana cornfield and raping the corpse. The court had ruled he was sufficiently sane to stand trial. No sign of contrition. His reaction was typically grandiose. Like the young people in the video, he sang and expressed joy at what he had done. He had adopted the name of a cartoon character. This was the closest I had ever come to undiluted nihilism. I was stunned but fortunately had a professional job to do. I kept asking questions and taking notes. Who can argue, using logic and appeals to morality, with barbarism?

 

In Wonder Confronts Certainty, Morson writes of the Russian nihilists: “Terrorists, therefore, felt little or no compunction about killing dozens of innocent bystanders and they eventually engaged in random killing (throwing bombs into cafes).” In the last few days, as my country goes insane and many celebrate evil, I’ve taken some comfort in Mike Juster’s “Vigil”:

 

“Set all routines aside;

let hours leak to weeks.

Decide not to decide.

 

“Ease anguish with your voice;

speak, though you are unheard.

When sleep is deep, rejoice.

 

“Let go of Hell and Heaven.

Pray, play a cherished song,

forgive and be forgiven.”

'The Beautiful Light of Health'

Montaigne died in his château on September 13, 1592. He was fifty-nine and for the last fourteen years of his life he had endured the agony of kidney stones. I remember my father, a self-identified “tough guy,” moaning on the floor while passing a stone. Montaigne suffered but seldom complained. In the late essay “Of Experience,” he proposes an unlikely understanding of illness, one I hope to put into practice when it becomes necessary: 

“But is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens in our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic? Is there anything in this pain we suffer that can be said to counterbalance the pleasure of such sudden improvement? How much more beautiful health seems to me after the illness, when they are so near and contiguous that I can recognize them in each other’s presence in their proudest array, when they vie with each other, as if to oppose each other squarely!”

 

In the final week of his life, lying in his hospice bed, my brother could no longer speak and probably heard little of what we – me, his son, nurses, the occasional doctor – had to say. He made no sounds except low moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed to clean him and change his sheets. But before he entered that torpid state, we talked about Montaigne and his attitude to death. Ken accepted its approach as the inevitable end of the life he had lived. I’ve always admired the Frenchman but those end-of-life talks with my brother lifted him into secular sainthood. The theoretical had become the applied. Ken could be contrary and defiant but he seemed to accept Montaigne as a guide, someone to be trusted. Montaigne continues in “Of Experience”:

 

“Just as the Stoics say that vices are brought into the world usefully to give value to virtue and assist it, we can say, with better reason and less bold conjecture, that nature has lent us pain for the honor and service of pleasure and painlessness. When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure, how they are associated by a necessary link, so that they follow and engender each other in turn. And he called out that goodly Aesop should have taken from this consideration a subject fit for a fine fable.”

 

In his biography of Montaigne, his translator, Donald Frame, celebrates the sensibility of so heroic a writer: “Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”

'An Integral of Various Dissimilar Parts'

Dr. Johnson identifies nine meanings for composition in his Dictionary. The first -- “the act of forming an integral of various dissimilar parts” – recalls Aristotle’s notion that perceiving similarities among dissimilar things constitutes genius. A basic human drive is to find pattern in the seemingly random. Johnson’s sixth definition is the most succinct -- “written work” – and corresponds to my favorite subject in grade school: composition. That’s what they still called writing when I was a kid. I was a lazy student who excelled only at what interested him, and putting words together was always a kick, a way to organize my disorganized thoughts. Soon I discovered that often I didn’t understand something until I had written about it – a phenomenon that remains in place. Words are thoughts and sounds made real and sharable with others. 

Writing, of course, is complemented by reading. A writer – say, Jonathan Swift – impresses you with his precision and concision, the power he musters with words. You imitate him, plagiarize him, try out his voice and technical devices. With time, you absorb his lessons and customize them to meet your own needs. Occasionally, you reject him entirely and find a new teacher.  

 

A veteran fifth-grade teacher among my readers tells me her students, to put it bluntly, don’t read and can barely write. None find writing a pleasure, even at the level of storytelling and autobiography. It’s a familiar teacherly lament. I have no solutions. It may already be too late to fix things.

 

Eric Ormsby is a sensualist of sound, one of our finest poets and critics. In 2005, Canadian Notes & Queries dedicated an issue to Ormsby and included an interview with him, “Menageries of Vocables,” conducted by Robyn Sarah. It was later collected in her Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (2007). Ormsby is enviably articulate:

 

“I’d like to think that there’s no English word I couldn’t conceive of using in a poem somehow. And why not? The world is full of fantastic beings – why should our lexicon be any less so? But I have to admit too that this besottedness with words, this playing the ring master in menageries of vocables, can be a self-indulgence.”

 

That’s poetry. Ormsby’s prose is comparably accomplished. He chose it as a conscious act:

 

“Slowly I came to see, to my pleasure, that there were many things I could express in prose that would not have worked in poetry, and I began to enjoy writing prose enormously. . . [Y]ou fashion a different authorial voice when you write prose; you can be casual, digressive, a bit offhand or even genially banal – you can make various forms of small talk – all gambits that doom a poem.”

 

I’m speaking as a writer, one who learned the hard way that he can’t write poetry. Good prose of many sorts – reading it, writing it -- can be as intoxicating and fulfilling as verse. Ormsby says:

 

“[P]rose is connected in my mind with the world of affairs, with conversation and interchange, in a way that poetry isn’t – or at least not immediately so. . . . I can’t write the essay or review until I’ve mulled it over for a while, and I can’t actually put words to paper until I’ve thought of an opening sentence or, better, opening paragraph. Once I have that, the rest follows smoothly.”

'Indulgence in Pure Corn'

George Santayana is reduced to a single squib, frequently misquoted--“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”--from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-06). Herman Melville, of course, wrote “Call me Ishmael,” followed by some other stuff, and Andrew Marvell yearns for “world enough and time,” just like the rest of us. Literature comes in conveniently individual servings like the much-touted TV dinners of my youth. 

It's a left-handed tribute to a writer that he has composed a sentence or phrase detached from context and quoted by those who have never read his work and perhaps have never heard his name. The risk, of course, is misquotation, not to mention misunderstanding. Often the remembered passage is distorted when turned into an autonomous aphorism. Sometimes it’s sub-prime material, hardly worth quoting. Robert Conquest has a poem titled “Quando Dormitant” (“When They Sleep,” in Penultima, 2009), which begins:

 

“Among the century’s most quoted lines

Are some that don’t send shivers up our spines.

Either a good poet, briefly, has foresworn

His talent with indulgence in pure corn

Or, high-prestiged, demanding our respect

Slams down fool’s gold and dares us to object.

Examples that critic designates

Are Auden, Eliot, Lowell, Thomas, Yeats –”

 

Conquest then quotes well-known phrases from each poet and questions their worth. Auden, of course, famously and rather ridiculously wrote “We must love one another or die.” Conquest credits Auden with giving “it a questioning look, and then he withdrew it.” With T.S. Eliot, he finds “April is the cruellest month” rather dubious and proposes February as a more appropriate choice. Conquest cites Robert Lowell’s “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will,” the closing line from “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” only to dismiss it. He’s especially good on that silly warhorse by Dylan Thomas:

 

“‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’

--But if it’s good, acceptance should be right,

So perhaps he’d better have reserved his rage

For his discomforts at an earlier age.”

 With Yeats’ “Easter, 1916,” Conquest is especially damning:

 

“’A terrible beauty is born.’—shocked thought

With partisan rhetoric overwrought

--Not used when his own Free State lot

Had seventy-odd republicans shot.”

 

Ultimately, Conquest is forgiving, sort of. His final stanza:

 

“But still, the bards are far less to be blamed

Than those who’ve kept the public spotlight aimed

Askew.—So amnesty’s hereby proclaimed.”

 

Conquest is careful to mix legitimately great poets – Auden, Eliot, Yeats – with their inferiors – Lowell and Thomas.

 

[“Quando Dormitant” is also included in Conquest’s Collected Poems (Waywiser Press, 2020).]

'Tell Me About All You Read'

I prefer the prose of two excellent poets – John Keats, Marianne Moore – to their poetry. The former is author of the finest letters ever composed in English. Moore’s essays and reviews are teasing, taut, witty and shrewd, worthy of her master, Henry James. This judgment is eccentric but based on decades spent reading and weighing the work of both writers. I know what I return to most often.

 

One of the pleasures of Keats’ letters are his expressions of loyalty to and fondness for his family. I admire the big-brother affection and playfulness he always shows his little sister, Frances Mary “Fanny” Keats. She was born in 1803, eight years after her oldest brother, and died in 1889, sixty-eight years after him. Among the final sentences he ever wrote, shortly before his death in Rome in 1821, Keats refers to “my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost.” On July 4, 1818, while on a six-hundred-mile walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, the poet writes to fifteen-year-old Fanny: 

 

“I am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would I if it were not for being tired after my day’s walking, and ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a Hoop, without waking me.” 

 

Recall that Keats was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him in less than three years, and that had already killed his mother and would kill his brother Tom later that year. Yet he manages to keep his letter to Fanny loving and amusing. Keats had a comic gift, one we would hardly suspect if we read only his poetry. On this date, September 10, in 1817, he writes to Fanny: 

 

“We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that I know not whether you prefer the History of King Pepin to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—or Cinderella and her glass slipper to Moore’s Almanack. However in a few Letters I hope I shall be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure.” 

 

Keats wants to know what Fanny prefers to read, a question I recently asked my niece regarding her two-year-old daughter. “You must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week,” he writes, “and this transmitted to me every now and then will procure you full sheets of Writing from me pretty frequently.—This I feel as a necessity for we ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only, as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend.” 

 

My youngest son is flying today to Lima, Peru, to begin his two-year hitch with the Peace Corps. Last week he bought a Kindle and downloaded some sixty books, enough, he said, “so I don’t run out.” He asked if I had any suggestions and I kept it simple: the two greatest American novels, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

'What in Most Lives Would Be Pure Deficit'

“[M]y life has been far less roiled by external events than most lives. The death of those dear to me I have usually been able to take in stride, although the last dozen years have become heavier and gloomier with such loss and the loss of the familiar, comforting world of which they were components.” 

Loss and pain are inevitable, regardless of whatever virtues we may possess, a truth never suspected by children, so we persist in thinking the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. It’s complicated because our nature mingles the good and the bad. While in Cleveland I spoke with two women and a man whose lives were radically “roiled by external events,” unlike my own. The man was severely wounded in Vietnam. One of the women was raped decades ago and tears came to her eyes as she described the attack. All managed to simulate “ordinary life,” whatever that means. They married, had jobs, two had children, all dabbled with but none descended into drug and alcohol addiction. They paid their taxes, committed no significant crimes and persevered.    

 

The late American novelist Richard G. Stern wrote the passage at the top in his final book, Still on Call, published in 2010, three years before his death at age eighty-four. I have a soft spot for Stern. His fiction is thoroughly human. It sometimes reminds me of his friend’s, Saul Bellow. He is devoted to the ordinariness of an American life. In the piece quoted above, “How I Think I Got to Think the Way I Think,” Stern writes for me:

 

“I have never been a soldier, never been in prison, never lived in a city being bombed, never been longer than three days without electricity and plumbing, have never lived under tyranny – except during brief lecturing or tourist visits -- never been threatened by arrest because of my opinions, and never been restrained from expressing political sentiments . . .”

 

In short, a typical American life, like my own. Cause only for thankfulness. Another American writer who embodies a similar sense of realism and gratitude for life in America is the late John Updike. I read most of his books as they appeared, starting in the sixties. Today, his novels mean little to me but I frequently return to his poetry, essays and criticism. and a handful of his early short stories. This is taken from “Spirit of ’76,” collected in the posthumously published Endpoint and Other Poems (2009):

 

“Be with me, words, a little longer; you

have given me my quitclaim in the sun,

sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light

of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage

what in most lives would be pure deficit,

and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.”