'That Spiritual Pepys'

In 1848, James Russll Lowell published the book-length poem A Fable for Critics. It’s the work of a cocky young man. Lowell was twenty-eight and he’s taking on some of the literary panjandrums of the age, many now long-forgotten. He is carving out his territory. Poe he famously describes as “three-fifths genius . . . and two-fifths sheer fudge.” The satire is mild, never savage (which is disappointing). Of Emerson, who remained his friend, he writes: 

“He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid

The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),

A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist

And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist;

All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got

To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what;

For though he builds glorious temples, ’tis odd

He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.”

 

Emerson was a supremely silly man. He had a minor gift for prose at the sentence level – he occasionally packs an essay into a sentence -- but nothing he wrote held together. In We Are Doomed (2009), John Derbyshire characterizes Emerson as “a key progenitor of modern smiley-face liberalism.” His understanding of human nature is dangerously, laughably naïve, the air-headed lunacy of a befuddled Unitarian. Without an understanding of evil, you understand little or nothing about our species. Emerson frequently cited Plotinus in his essays and poems and devoted an essay to “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic.”

 

 In “A Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of A Fable for Critics, Lowell tells us he is turning away from his mediocre contemporaries and embracing his precursors:

 

“With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get fou with O’Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o’er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne’s Jacob’s-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton’s version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before,—that marvel, a poet divine who can bore.”

 

Much to dismiss and embrace here. Montaigne is the only Frenchman on Lowell’s roll call. I’m not sure I can decrypt “a spiritual Pepys” but I like it. Perhaps he refers to the journal-like inclusiveness of the Essays, his attentiveness to the commonplace as well as the elevated. Montaigne easily ranks with George Herbert and Sir Thomas Browne in my pantheon. “Browne’s Jacob-ladder-like brain” is a beaut.

 

The essay “Of the Education of Children” is dedicated and addressed by Montaigne to Madame Diane de Foix, the Comtesse de Gurson, wife of Louis de Foix, Montaigne’s friend killed in the Battle of Montraveau in 1587. The countess is pregnant as Montaigne addresses her, and he blithely assumes she is carrying a son (“you are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male”). The confidence with which he lectures her on children and their education is breathtaking. Montaigne had married in 1565 and with Françoise de la Chassaigne he had a daughter. Four other children died in infancy. Here, in Donald Frame’s translation, is Montaigne:

 

“Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not ‘Athens,’ but ‘The world.’ He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.”

 

Throughout most of the essay, Montaigne’s advice is admirably broad-minded. He urges the countess to hire an accomplished tutor and expose the boy to the best of books and people. He particularly recommends Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus, and says “the first taste I had for books” came with reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Montaigne writes of himself as a young man:

 

“Meanwhile, for all that, my mind was not lacking in strong stirrings of its own, and certain and open-minded judgments about the things it understood; and it digested them alone, without communication. And, among other things, I really do believe that it would have been wholly incapable of submitting to force and violence.”

 

Montaigne was born 1533 and died on this date, September 13, in 1592 at age fifty-nine.

'My Best Consolation for the Future'

If pushed to choose my favorite literary form, I would reluctantly reject novels and aphorisms and settle on the essay which, in the right hands, can boast the generosity of the former and the pithy tartness of the latter. Essays are elastic and an essayist can confidently take on any subject if he possesses sufficient learning and experience because one of his shadow-subjects is himself. Don’t confuse that with straight autobiography. A good essayist melts into the matter at hand. Consider William Hazlitt’s “A Farewell to Essay-Writing,” dating from 1828, two years before his death. 

Hazlitt recalls a walk with Charles and Mary Lamb, admiring the “Claude Lorraine skies” and picking mushrooms “to throw into our hashed mutton at supper.” A pleasant memory, rather conventional, not life-changing. Hazlitt, for once, doesn’t inflate the importance of the recollection. He shares an observation known to many writers, if not always so well-articulated:

 

“It is in looking back to such scenes that I draw my best consolation for the future. Later impressions come and go, and serve to fill up the intervals; but these are my standing resource, my true classics. If I have had few real pleasures or advantages, my ideas, from their sinewy texture, have been to me in the nature of realities; and if I should not be able to add to the stock, I can live by husbanding the interest.”

 

Along with the qualities cited above, memory is essential to an essayist. There’s an elegiac quality to Hazlitt’s essay, apart from the title. We sense a man perhaps coming to terms with himself and giving up the life-long fight – not surrendering but accepting. Prose of this quality is rare and should be cherished. Hazlitt closes his essay with these words:

 

“As to my speculations, there is little to admire in them but my admiration of others; and whether they have an echo in time to come or not, I have learned to set a grateful value on the past, and am content to wind up the account of what is personal only to myself and the immediate circle of objects in which I have moved, with an act of easy oblivion,

 

“'And curtain-close such scene from every future view.'”

 

Hazlitt took that stand-alone line from William Collins’ “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1770). The essayist has been dead for almost two centuries. He could be a difficult man, stupid about women, who spent his final years writing a four-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. And his prose still moves us.

'Nothing More Important Than This Wound'

I’m skeptical of prophecy, weighing even the scriptural sort against the evidence and the suitability of the prophet. People tend to concur with those prophecies that confirm their a priori prejudices, but only retrospectively can we test the Jeremiah du jour’s predictions. 

In a letter to William F. Buckley dated Oct. 8, 1956, Whittaker Chambers writes: “The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.”

 

That’s what some of us finally and reluctantly began to learn twenty-five years ago today. Evil was not a theory or abstraction. There are people in the world who would happily kill us – not for anything we as individuals have done but because we stubbornly persist in our being. We are alive only because they haven’t yet managed to murder us. Chambers was the blackest of pessimists and his pessimism was rooted in his experience as a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. He understood the seductive power of nihilism. In his masterpiece Witness (1952) he writes:

 

“Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.”

 

[The Chambers letter is collected in Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969).]

'Like That Magician's Egg'

“The futurists claim that the book as we know it will disappear, like that magician’s egg, and that it will be replaced by ‘electronic data retrieval’ through our home computers. But I doubt that this will happen, at least to the extent predicted, because reading, as we know it, the eyes fastening on the printed page, is a sensual experience.” 

The latest grim-minded doomsayer? Countered by an old-fashioned romantic humanist? Sorry, no. This is Al Silverman (1926-2019), a sportswriter and CEO and chairman of the Book of the Month Club from 1972 to 1988. He’s writing in the Winter 1983 issue of the journal Daedalus, an issue titled “Reading: Old and New.” Silverman’s piece is titled “The Fragile Pleasure.” He goes on to quote Rilke, often a bad sign, though cynics will assure us Silverman is a charter member of the middlebrow majority.

 

The general tone of the contributors might be characterized as teeth-gritting optimism. No one wants to come out and say the United States is in danger of becoming a nation of aliterates and illiterates. This was long before smart phones, social media, contemporary English departments, the usual suspects. “Of course,” Silverman says, “no one needs a Gallup poll to know that we are not a nation of readers.” I joined the Book of the Month Club in junior-high school and bought such books as James Jones’ From Here to Eternity and Henri Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy.

 

My thinking is: individuals can change. The masses, never, or at such a glacial pace the change is discernable only retrospectively. I’ve never told people what to read. The best I can do is share my experience of reading good books. Preaching doesn’t work and is often presumptuous. My sons read, at least in part, because they have always seen us reading. Silverman takes an autobiographical approach:

 

“The reading experience was activated by people who cared -- in my case, my mother, my aunt, my third-grade teacher. Later, it was the writer -- certain writers -- who changed my perception of life. I was lucky in any case. The encouragement of reading in this country, which should be an urgent priority from the beginning of education, is mostly missing today. And so a small, elite corps of readers develops in this country, and the rest -- the illiterates, the aliterates -- get away from us, and are lost forever.”

 

I received no reading encouragement from family but I have often acted on the principle of contrariety – do the opposite of what those around you are doing (precisely the reason I have never smoked a cigarette.) Several teachers along the way encouraged reading, and by high school I was able to recommend titles (Nathanael West, I remember) to some of my teachers. Silverman was obviously an intelligent, thoughtful  guy who is torn in contradictory directions. Here is his conclusion:

 

“Readers, just like books, grow from strange soil, soil that sometimes is totally without nutrients. But something happens. The seed takes root. There is growth, and, once in a while, a small harvest. Even in this land of plenty, the fragile and enduring pleasure lives.”

'Inspiring, Exhilarating--Yes, Exalting'

“Until recently, I considered David Copperfield to be the best English-language novel I’d read. No longer. This side of Tolstoy, I know of no greater novel than Middlemarch. To think that one belongs to the same species as the genius who produced it is inspiring, exhilarating--yes, exalting.” 

I knew my friend had been reading Middlemarch for the first time and knowing his tastes and well-exercised experience as a reader, I expected him to appreciate the novel, but his reaction has almost revived my faith in humanity. He is no fly-by-night, fashion-driven reader. He loves fiction and reads it as more than mere entertainment or distraction. His email made my day: “exalting.”

 

In 1885, Henry James reviewed John Cross’ biography of Eliot, who had died five years earlier. James had famously written mixed reviews of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and judged Romola her finest accomplishment as a novelist, but here he concedes she was among his literary mentors:

 

“The great foundation, to begin with, was there—the magnificent mind, vigorous, luminous, and eminently sane. To her intellectual vigour, her immense facility, her exemption from cerebral lassitude, her letters and journals bear the most copious testimony. Her daily stint of arduous reading and writing was of the largest. Her ability, as one may express it in the most general way, was astonishing, and it belonged to every season of her long and fruitful career. Her passion for study encountered no impediment, but was able to make everything feed and support it. The extent and variety of her knowledge is by itself a résumé of an existence which triumphed wherever it wished. Add to this an immense special talent, which, as soon as it tries its wings, is found to be capable of the highest, longest flights, and brings back great material rewards. George Eliot of course had drawbacks and difficulties, physical infirmities, constant liabilities to headache, dyspepsia, and other illness, to deep depression, to despair about her work; but these jolts of the chariot were small in proportion to the impetus acquired, and were hardly greater than was necessary for reminding her of the secret of all ambitious workers in the field of art--that effort, effort, always effort, is the only key of success.”

'From the Front Line'

My review of Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin (New York Review Books, 2026) is published in the Fall issue of Portico.

'A Very Wild Extravagant Dream'

In his Spectator essay for January 15, 1712, Joseph Addison tells us he spent the day with friends, “an Assembly of Virtuosos,” one of whom describes “many curious Observations” regarding human anatomy. The conversation inspires in Addison “a very wild Extravagant Dream” in which he witnesses the dissection of a “Beau’s Head” and a “Coquet’s Heart.” Addison is writing in deep satirical mode, so you might anticipate where this is going.

A “Beau” in the eighteenth century, according to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, signified “a man of dress; a man whose great care is to deck his person.” We might say fop, dandy or clothes horse. For “coquette,” Johnson gives “a gay, airy girl; a girl who endeavours to attract notice.” Both are types still with us, of course.

Most of the essay concerns the Beau and a detailed and fanciful catalogue of his brain and its parts:

“There was a large Cavity on each side of the Head, which I must not omit. That on the right Side was filled with Fictions, Flatteries, and Falshoods, Vows, Promises, and Protestations; that on the left with Oaths and Imprecations. There issued out a Duct from each of these Cells, which ran into the Root of the Tongue, where both joined together, and passed forward in one common Duct to the Tip of it. We discovered several little Roads or Canals running from the Ear into the Brain, and took particular care to trace them out through their several Passages. One of them extended itself to a Bundle of Sonnets and little musical Instruments. Others ended in several Bladders which were filled either with Wind or Froth. But the latter Canal entered into a great Cavity of the Skull, from whence there went another Canal into the Tongue. This great Cavity was filled with a kind of Spongy Substance, which the French Anatomists call Galimatias, and the English, Nonsense.”

Johnson’s definition of gallimatias, from the French: “nonsense; talk without meaning.” Addison stresses the conventional humanity of the Beau, his averageness. He was no oddity or freak:

“As for the Skull, the Face, and indeed the whole outward Shape and Figure of the Head, we could not discover any Difference from what we observe in the Heads of other Men. We were informed, that the Person to whom this Head belonged, had passed for a Man above five and thirty Years; during which time he Eat and Drank like other People, dressed well, talked loud, laught frequently, and on particular Occasions had acquitted himself tolerably at a Ball or an Assembly; to which one of the Company added, that a certain Knot of Ladies took him for a Wit. He was cut off in the Flower of his Age by the Blow of a Paring-Shovel, having been surprized by an eminent Citizen, as he was tendring some Civilities to his Wife.”

If taken a little too seriously by a modern reader, Addison’s schtick is grotesque and probably offensive, but he’s no Swift whose savagery is often muted by a rational, reasonable, deadpan tone. He doesn't go that far. Both are two of the reasons I love the eighteenth century. Go here to read the sequel, Addison’s account of dissecting the Coquet’s heart.

'Art Is Slow and Long'

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser. Her review opens with an oddly contemporary-sounding observation: 

“Last year Archibald MacLeish resorted to scaring people over the radio, with air-raid noises and human screams in order to waken the population to ‘Fascist’ dangers.”

 

Sound familiar? If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been called a “fascist” . . . The word is rivalled only by “racist” when it comes to tediously meaningless slurs. Bogan describes MacLeish’s collection as “the history of the American people sold out by ‘the Aristocracy of politic selfishness,'” whatever that means. Talk about unpromising poetic material. Bogan gets to the point: “This poem is Mr. MacLeish’s saddest and most conglomerate attempt at ‘public speech’ to date.” Still, Bogan works to be fair:

 

“Bury his gifts though he may, Mr. MacLeish is a private, a lyric, poet through and through; it is somewhat of a loss that he did not allow himself to remain one. Evil conditions need a satirist to pin them down and flay them clean. Official poets are seldom satirists. A pity.”

 

Bogan describes Rukeyser, a poet who has never given me ten seconds of pleasure, as “interested in the state of society to the almost complete exclusion of any conscious ‘personal expression.’” After rereading Rukeyser’s book, Bogan says, “the suspicion arises that Miss Rukeyser is deficient in a sense of human life” – a not uncommon deficit among “activists.” “The day of chaste and noble proletarian myths should be about over,” Bogan writes “It has been recently proved that there is something hideously oversimplified in crude oppositions and blind idealism.” She concludes her review with a paragraph that recalls W.H. Auden and his near-contemporary condemnation of “a low dishonest decade”:

 

“The decade which outlawed from poetry personal emotion, individual insight, and straight looks into the flawed human heart now closes. It has been a queer time. And, from all current signs, patriotism and ‘public speech’ have still a long course to run. Art is slow and long, but there’s nothing brisker and more vocal than politics.”

 

[Bogan’s review can be found in her Selected Criticism (Noonday Press, 1955).]