'A Jewish Kind of Feeling of the World'

Isaac Bashevis Singer, speaking with an interviewer in 1983:

“I really don’t believe that a writer can have a programme. Many have; they say, ‘I’m writing about alienation’, or whatever they call it. I don’t have this programme. I have a story to tell and I sit down to tell the story, believing that if the story will be told in the right way, some truth or even generalisation may come out of it. In other words, I’m not one of those modern writers who are trying to write, with the power of literature, a better world. Not that I wouldn’t like to do it, but I don’t think it is in the power of literature.”

 

Singer defends fiction as pure storytelling. There are other ways to go about it, of course, including propaganda and pyrotechnics of form, but those strategies are rarely accomplished with grace or with the reader’s pleasure in mind. Storytelling as explained by Singer is at once primitive and sophisticated. It’s appeal is elemental: What happens next? We’re forever making up stories as a way to amuse ourselves and make sense of our lives. Why not at least occasionally turn it over to someone gifted at narrative, whether George Eliot or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa? No need to drag “realism” into it. Nabokov was a great storyteller. Singer continues:

 

“I would say that there are limits to the power of literature -- the socialists knew that a cheap brochure can bring more action than a great work. So, because this is not in our power, we should not really waste our time to do the impossible, because if you try so very hard to change history with a powerful novel, history will not be changed but the novel will be changed: it will become very bad.”

 

The first work by Singer I read, in some forgotten anthology, was his story “Gimpel the Fool” (1945; trans. Saul Bellow, 1953). I was hooked. His story "The Spinoza of Market Street" sparked my enduring interest in that philosopher. Those years were a time of triumph for Jewish-American writers. With Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Daniel Fuchs and Philip Roth, among others, Singer helped form my tastes in literature. One can’t conceive of postwar American fiction without the contributions of Jewish writers. Singer’s interviewer is the late Joseph Sherman who in 1997 would translate into English Singer’s great novel Shadows on the Hudson (1957). Today, with the growth of aliteracy and illiteracy, coupled with the spread of anti-Semitism, one hopes, against the odds, for a second renaissance. Singer more than forty years ago remained defiantly hopeful:

 

“I have this feeling, although there’s no evidence for it, that the Jew is going to last as long as humanity. I just believe. I cannot see a world without Jews. There will always be those that have a Jewish kind of feeling of the world, which is a part of humanity and is going to stay so.”

 

Singer was born on this date (perhaps), November 21, in 1903, and died at age eighty-seven in 1991.

 

[The interview with Singer was published in the May 1984 issue of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory.]

'The Energy in Things Shone Through Their Shapes'

Some fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic: 

“I envied those past ages of the world

When, as I thought, the energy in things

Shone through their shapes, when sun and moon no less

Than tree or stone or star or human face

Were seen but as fantastic japanese

Lanterns are seen, sullen or gay colors

And lines revealing the light that they conceal.”

 

We can read “the energy in things” as scientists do, I suppose, or mystics. Howard Nemerov weighs both understandings in “The Loon’s Cry.” He yearns for order in a fashion characteristic of the twentieth century. He can be neither devoutly religious nor vulgarly atheistic. He experiences no sense of conviction, unless uncertainty can be conviction. What animating principle orders the world? In a poem from a decade later, “Figures of Thought,” Nemerov sees patterns everywhere:

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame—

 

“How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship-that is the beautiful

In nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

“It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

 

Nemerov longs for pattern, some “little law,” but it remains elusive. Some choose to believe out of desperation and mundane impatience. Not the poet. Here, again, from “The Loon’s Cry”:  

 

“I simplified still more, and thought that now

We’d traded all those mysteries in for things,

For essences in things, not understood—

Reality in things! and now we saw

Reality exhausted all their truth.”

 

I first heard the cry of a loon more than thirty years ago at Pyramid Lake in the Adirondacks. It sounded mournful at first, like the call of a louder, more self-pitying dove. But then you hear a cry that might be the sound of a child being tortured. It’s bewitching after a while, once we stop anthropomorphizing. But the chill doesn’t go away, especially when heard in the middle of the night in your cabin on the shore. After hearing the loon’s “laughter of desolation,” Nemerov writes:

 

“A savage cry, now that the moon went up

And the sun down--yet when I heard him cry

Again, his voice seemed emptied of that sense

Or any other, and Adam I became,

Hearing the first loon cry in paradise.”

'How It Sounds When Read Out Loud'

Our eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Clymer, had us open the textbook to a poem written seventy-five years earlier and picked students to read aloud each of its four, eight-line stanzas. She suggested we pay attention to who is speaking, as the poem is written as a dialogue among soldiers. I wasn’t chosen to read but instantly memorized the final lines of the stanzas, all the same but for a word or two. I also added another four syllables (two iambs) of my own, and to this day that’s how I recite it (silently, in my head): “An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever [at five o’clock] in the mornin’.” 

The poem is Kipling’s, of course, written in 1890 and published in Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). I walked home from school singing lines from the poem, along with lines from Dylan and the Beatles. I didn’t yet understand it but knew intuitively that the primary quality of poetry is not its content but rhythm, the beat. Nige has published in Slightly Foxed a remembrance of a time not terribly long ago when students and their parents, regardless of class or education, might read and commit to memory lines from favorite poems. Even non-prodigies like me could recite John Greenleaf Whittier and William Ernest Henley (I still know “Invictus” by heart). Nige writes:

 

“. . . I still believe that learning ‘by heart’ is an excellent way of really getting to know a poem, to know it, as it were, from the inside – and the same goes for reading aloud. The musicality of a poem, how it sounds when read out loud as well as in the head, is essential to its nature, and both learning by heart and reading aloud can open up a poem to us more effectively than just reading it on the page. And yet it seems that both are now largely things of the past.”

 

Nige touchingly recalls his father’s copy of Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys, edited by Henley and published in 1891. The final two poems in that anthology are Kipling’s: “A Ballad of East and West” and “The Flag of England.” Granted, one generation’s soul-stirring inspiration may be another’s doggerel, and vice versa, but no one reads Ezra Pound or Charles Olson for pleasure. Millions read Chesterton for that reason. With the coming of High Modernism, for all its beauties and achievements, we lost an older tradition of popular poetry – published in newspapers and magazines, memorized voluntarily, read and recited for pleasure and appreciated by non-academics.

 

Nige mentions Kingsley Amis’ The Faber Popular Reciter, the 1978 anthology of, in the words of Amis’ introduction, “poems that sound well and go well when spoken in a declamatory style, a style very far indeed removed from any of those to be found at that (alas!) characteristically twentieth-century occasion, the poetry recital, with all its exhibitionism and sheer bad art.”

'A Landscape in One Word!'

“When, in the course of a day, a man has read a newspaper, written a letter, and not wronged anyone, that is more than enough.”

Enough for what? Probably to have established a minimum standard of decency and contentment. Jules Renard (1864-1910) is no stuffy moralist. There’s always something relaxed about his understanding of the world. He professes no ideology. He has not so much hates as irritations, people and situations that irk him, and irksome is not the same as detestable. Renard adds a tincture of irony to every observation. I love his journal because his persona is Everyman – well-read but not pedantic, a little cranky but with a personality leavened by the inability to take himself entirely seriously.  

It has just occurred to me that Renard brings to mind his contemporary Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), the Viennese miniaturist championed by Karl Kraus and Robert Musil. In 2005, Archipelago Books published Telegrams of the Soul, a selection of his prose translated by Peter Wortsman. Clive James says Altenberg could craft “a world view in two sentences.” His pieces are always brief, a mélange of essay, fiction, aphorism and feuilleton. I know of nothing quite like them in English. Here’s one of his elusive exercises in self-definition from “Autobiography”:

“I’d like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul-stirring experience on a single page, a landscape in one word! Present arms, artist, aim, bull’s-eye! Basta. And above all: Listen to yourself. Lend an ear to the voices within. Don’t be shy with yourself. Don’t let yourself be scared off by unfamiliar sounds. As long as they’re your own! Have the courage of your own nakedness.”

Like Renard, Altenberg could never have comfortably fit into any organization, whether a newspaper's editorial board or a political party. Both men were anarchists sans theory. Clive James described Altenberg as “everybody’s favourite scrounger, saloon barfly and no-hoper” and “a Falstaffian scholar gypsy.” Renard was no drinker but James is close to capturing his peculiar charm.

I've always liked the idea of feuilletons, brief essays, columns or sketches without airs. The word is French (from feuillet, the leaf of a book) but I associate it with German-language writers – Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, Joseph Roth. "Little things in life,” Altenberg writes, “supplant the ‘great events.’ That is their value if you can fathom it!” Unpolluted by politics, gracefully learned but without an axe to grind, often comic but never merely whimsical, the feuilleton is perhaps too delicate a species to be successfully transplanted to the too, too earnest New World. [The Renard passage at the top is dated November 18, 1900. You’ll find it in Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

[To “psychic24”: It would be presumptuous of me to tell you what to read at Anecdotal Evidence. I prefer uncaged, free-range readers. Nabokov called the Wake a “cold pudding.”]

'Well Educated and Glad of the Fact'

“[A] literary man or woman is someone who is not only steeped in literature but has made this immersion into literature part of his or her own life, so that the experience of books has been integral with the experience of life and therefore strongly influences his or her general point of view.”

That’s a true and generous definition, one that distinguishes the literary man or woman from the book collector and the devoted reader of science fiction or thrillers. There’s nothing wrong with those related bookish species, and they may overlap with the literary types as defined by Joseph Epstein above. The distinction is not rooted in snobbery; rather, it’s a matter of the centrality of books – books judged serious by generations of readers – in one’s life. I have difficulty separating what I’ve learned from books from what experience  has taught me. This suggests I look at life as an opportunity to learn something useful, lasting and profound, and that would in general be correct. I won’t waste time picking apart what Montaigne taught me and what I acquired from being a father or a newspaper reporter. I think of them as different parts of a single curriculum.

The Epstein passage is drawn from his introduction to Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life (1993), one of the three Epstein collections I bought on Saturday from Kaboom Books. The others are With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays (1995) and Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999). That brings to twenty-five the number of Epstein titles on my shelves. I didn’t realize until I was back home and seated at my desk that all three volumes had been signed by Epstein.

I especially value Pertinent Players because of the writers he takes on, including Italo Svevo, William Hazlitt, Henry James, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maurice Baring. This impulse, this taste in writers, partially defines that increasingly rare literary man or woman. We want to know what gifted readers have made of our favorite writers. Epstein quotes with approval from Baring’s "High-Brows and Low-Brows" (Lost Lectures: Or, the Fruits of Experience, 1932):

“I mean by the good high-brow the man who is well educated and glad of the fact without thrusting it down other people's throats, who, without being ashamed of his knowledge, his intellectual or artistic superiority, or his gifts and aptitudes, does not use them as a rod to beat others with, and does not think that because he is the fortunate possessor of certain rare gifts or talents, he is therefore a better or a more useful man: such is the good high-brow. . . . My point is that the more of these there are the better for the nation, the better for all of us. When there shall be no more of them, it will mean the extinction of our civilisation.”

'Unless It From Enjoyment Spring!'

“He is the supreme poet of childhood. He is at play all his life.” 

Had I read this out of context I might have assumed the writer described was Walter de la Mare, whose poetry I ignored for too long because teachers and critics told me he wrote solely for children. (Something similar happened with Kipling and Stevenson.) The late Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969) and The View in Winter (1979), is writing of a poet I never encountered in school and rarely encounter at all except among church people: Thomas Traherne (1636-1674). The neglect recalls his disappearance from literature for two centuries, until two of his manuscripts were discovered in a London bookstall late in the nineteenth century. The work was at first mistaken for Henry Vaughan’s. A major poet and prose writer was reborn. Like me, Blythe is especially taken with Traherne’s most substantial work of prose, Centuries of Meditation. Blythe writes: “It contains all creation and everything given and possessed in love.” Traherne recounts his boyhood doubts, an experience known to millions over the centuries:

 

“Once I remember (I think I was about 4 years old when) I thus reasoned with myself, sitting in a little obscure room in my father's poor house: If there be a God, certainly He must be infinite in Goodness: and that I was prompted to, by a real whispering instinct of Nature. And if He be infinite in Goodness, and a perfect Being in Wisdom and Love, certainly He must do most glorious things, and give us infinite riches; how comes it to pass therefore that I am so poor? Of so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts? I thought I could not believe Him a God to me, unless all His power were employed to glorify me. I knew not then my Soul, or Body; nor did I think of the Heavens and the Earth, the rivers and the stars, the sun or the seas: all those were lost, and absent from me. But when I found them made out of nothing for me, then I had a God indeed, whom I could praise, and rejoice in.”

  

In a letter to Arthur Greeves in 1941, C.S. Lewis called Centuries of Meditation “almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English.” It’s certainly on the short list. Readers need not be devout or even observant Christians to cherish the book. Blythe notes that one of Traherne’s favorite verbs is “to enjoy.” See his poem “Of Contentment”:   

 

“Contentment is a sleepy thing

If it in Death alone must die;

A quiet Mind is worse than Poverty,

Unless it from Enjoyment spring!”

 

Traherne died at age thirty-eight from smallpox.

 

[Blythe’s brief essay, “Good to Be Alive: Thomas Traherne,” is collected in Writer’s Day-Book (Trent Editions, 2006).]

'Intensely Cultivated and Painstakingly Honest'

In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections (1955), Marianne Moore writes as good an apologia for her manner of writing, among others, as I’ve ever encountered:

“Silence is more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one’s admiration and one is tempted to write about it; if it is in a language other than one’s own, perhaps to translate it – or try to; one feels that what holds one’s attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait – a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false, to which the following pages attempt to testify.”

 

In The Journal of John Cardan (1961), J.V. Cunningham echoes and almost sounds like Moore: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.” Moore is the great pleasure-giver among the high-Modernists. She virtually patented the interpolation of quotations from other writers, often unidentified. In a January 18, 1925 letter to Moore, Yvor Winters praises the “intensity, perfections, & originality of your work, &, what is more astounding yet, the mass of uniformly achieved work & the almost complete absence of anything not achieved, impresses me more every time I think of it or look at it.” Though more expansive than Cunningham's, Moore’s poems share with his a dedication to concision and precision. You’ll find little or no unsightly adipose tissue in their poems or prose.

 

In 1925, Winters reviewed Moore’s second collection, the presciently titled Observations, in Poetry. In the review, “Holiday and Day of Wrath,” he quotes five lines from her poem “A Graveyard” and writes:

 

“The poignancy, the connotative power, of such a passage should need no comment. The emotion is not ‘worked up’: there is no plea for sympathy, no covert attention to the audience, but the essential emotion remains, complete, profound, self-sufficient, bony, like that of Donne or Emily Dickinson. The balance of the entire poem is as perfect as the balance of any one of its lines.”

 

Those accustomed to Winters’ occasional ferocity as a critic may be surprised by the general tenor of his review and by what he writes of Moore’s poem “Black Earth”: “[T]he sound effects are as tremendous and incessant as thunder, and it is not an empty thunder; the verses are as packed with thought as with sound.”

 

Winters says of Moore’s style that it is “at once intensely cultivated and painstakingly honest, never fails to charm me, and whose mastery of phrase and cadence overwhelms me. It is a privilege to be able to write of one of whose genius one feels so sure.” In 1961, Moore returned the compliment. Her contribution to a special issue of the journal Sequoia dedicated to Winters was the poem “Yvor Winters--,” in which the title was the start of the poem’s first line:

 

“something of a badger-Diogenes—

we are indebted technically; and

attached personally, those of us who know him;

are proud of his hostility to falsity;

of his verse reduced to essence;

of a tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.

He does not hesitate to call others foolish,

and we do not shrink from imputations

of folly—of annoying a man to whom

compliments may be uncongenial;

--wise to be foolish when a sense of indebtedness

is too strong to suppress.”

 

Moore was born on this date, November 15, in 1887 and died in 1972 at age eighty-four.

[For the Winters letter see The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. For his review of Moore’s collection see Yvor Winters: Uncollected Essays and Reviews (1973), edited by Francis Murphy and published by Swallow Press.]