'In the Middle of a Seismic Cultural Change'

Brooke Allen’s preface to Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading (Tivoli Books, 2025) will read to some like a eulogy delivered by a clinically depressed cleric: “The authors I’ve covered in this collection, though all were famous in the very recent past, are figures that will probably disappear in the post-literate society if they have not done so already.” 

It’s time to accept that aliteracy and illiteracy are no longer looming threats. They have already arrived and are thriving. As a critic, Allen is a realist not a deluded cheerleader. Nor does she scold us or applaud her own readerly accomplishments (she seems to have read everything). She holds no illusions about rallying the troops or turning the non-reading tide. It’s simply a reality. Her collection includes reviews of books, many first published in The New Criterion and The Hudson Review, by and about Oscar Wilde, Anthony Powell, Eudora Welty and John Updike, among others – figures we could have assumed until recently most bookishly educated people would have read or at least recognized by name. Her tone is not mournful or hectoring but matter of fact:

 

“We are in the middle of a seismic cultural change, as transformative as that which followed the appearance of the printing press half a millennium ago. And just as that invention turned the Western world into a literate society, we are now transitioning into a post-literate one. Despite universal public education, thirty percent of American adults read at the level of a ten-year-old. Which is not to say that the other seventy percent read at an adult level; many of them are not much more advanced, and a significant portion are functionally illiterate.”

 

In her reviews, Allen carries on dutifully, evaluating books with insight, skeptical intelligence and obvious pleasure. Her approach is never academic or pseudo-populist. She doesn’t write about certified masterpieces, books by Nabokov or the James Brothers, but often about writers once described as “middlebrow” who might today pass for “highbrow” – W. Somerset Maugham, Ogden Nash, Lord Berners, Sybille Bedford. Here she is reviewing a three-volume biography of the English poet John Betjeman:

 

“The obsession of academic critics with differentiating ‘major’ writers from ‘minor’ ones, and summarily dismissing the latter, serves the interest of no one but their fellow-academics and actively harms not only those authors they deem minor, but also that large majority of the public who reads novels and poems purely for pleasure, with no scholarly or careerist motives.”

 

This illustrates Allen’s unpretentious, non-academic approach to reading and reviewing. She positions herself as the latest incarnation of Dr. Johnson’s “common reader,” and continues:

 

“Within the academy, ‘major,’ at least since the heyday of Eliot and Pound, has tended to mean ‘difficult’ —possibly because difficulty supposes a need for expert interpretation and therefore justifies the existence of professional explicators. Kipling and Trollope, for example, so popular during the Victorian era as to have become an integral part of England’s cultural fabric, are not only ignored in modern universities but actively denigrated.”

Snobbery by professors of literature, of course, is part of the reason literature has turned into a harmless pastime, on a par with collecting beer cans or cultivating bonsai trees. Allen has a knack for reviewing writers who might otherwise be ignored as “non-literary,” who work in forms other than the usual novels and poetry. Eric Newby, for instance, the wonderful English travel writer, author of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). Allen notes that Newby went to work for his father as a young man and never attended university:

 

“Perhaps it is this background that accounts for his steadfast refusal to lapse into the occasional mandarin riffs that Waugh, Fermor, and Wilfred Thesiger indulged in, and even occasionally [Peter] Fleming.”

 

Even books formerly deemed scandalous are largely forgotten. Take Samuel Butler and his posthumously published The Way of All Flesh (1903), once read by adolescents (including this one) as a sort of declaration of independence and defiance. Allen tells us “it would be hard to exaggerate the influence it once exerted over entire generations of angry young men and women.” Readers of this blog have told me they still read The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Allen concludes her review:

 

“The Way of All Flesh is indisputably his masterpiece. In this hugely entertaining novel Butler said many things that were at that time unsayable and even unthinkable. And in spite of the revolutionary social changes that have occurred over the last hundred years and more, a great deal of what he said is still unsayable, and still needs saying.”

 

The late Irish poet and critic Dennis O’Driscoll in 2005 published an essay, “The Library of Adventure”(The Outnumbered Poet: Critical and Autobiographical Essays, Gallery Books, 2013), that reads like an exultant celebration of reading by a boy from rural Ireland. O’Driscoll already was acknowledging the lingering demise of pleasure-driven reading, though his tone is more joyous than Allen’s. He writes, in words I think Allen would endorse:

 

“It is difficult to state precisely why reading is so essential. It is impossible to disentangle the linguistic pleasures from the moral insights, the wisdom from the knowledge, the cadence from the characterization. . . . The nearest adult experience I know to being a child, eagerly turning pages in the kitchen while my mother—hands gloved in a dishcloth—takes from the oven a sugar-dusted apple pie that is sweating cinnamon through its pores, is being a slow reader of a great book, entering a zone of timelessness. I suspect that it is only in such a state that we are detached enough from the attachments of the everyday to gain access to those profound truths and poignant yearnings that are the ultimate goal of serious readers and the richest reward a writer can bestow.”

 

[O’Driscoll, a marvelous poet, died on this date, December 24, in 2012 at age fifty-eight.]  

'Only Two Loop-holes Then I Might Behold'

I’ve been quietly lobbying for William Cowper’s verse for many years. Born in 1731, spanning the Augustan and Romantic eras, he’s among England’s “mad poets,” a periodic depressive, a deeply religious writer of hymns and an occasional unsuccessful suicide. He would seem to be an utterly benign, though self-tormenting fellow. Take this excerpt from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of his long poem The Task (1785): 

“’T is pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,

To peep at such a world; to see the stir  

Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;       

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates,         

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.”

 

The OED credits Cowper with the phrase “loopholes of retreat,” later used by, among others, George Meredith in The Egotist, another book no one reads today: “Dim as the loophole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it gathered light.” Today we think of a loophole as a sort of escape clause, a way to avoid an obligation, especially in the legal sense. For Cowper, it's a way to view the world, an aperture. Among his other qualities, Cowper is the poet of spectatorship, of diffidence expressed as a willingness to observe the world, not plunge into its swelter. Cowper was a high-strung man, affectionate and loyal as a friend but plagued by madness. He hardly recognized civic affairs and remained blithely immune to politics. His passions were poetry and religion, not troublemaking. Later I would discover Cowper’s phrase in a bravura passage in William Hazlitt’s essay “On Living to One’s Self” (1821):

 

“What I mean by living to one’s-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it. It is such a life as a pure spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might take in the affairs of men: calm, contemplative, passive, distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamed of by them. He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.”

 

Advice Hazlitt applied to the world but not necessarily to himself. He was never a “silent spectator.” He had a streak of meddlesomeness and finished his career with a four-volume biography of Napoleon that no one reads today. I favor writers who at least try to write most impersonally when addressing personal matters. One of the attractions of blogging is the qualified anonymity it permits. Words matter, not our precious “personality.” Except for the bit about “pure spirit” – no one I know – Hazlitt describes a writer’s ideal of spectatorship

 

“Loop-holes” in Hazlitt suggests a means of observing the world. Even earlier, “loop-holes” shows up in a 1619 sonnet by Michael Drayton:

 

“There’s nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste,

That in my days I may not see thee old,

That where those two clear sparkling eyes are placed

Only two loop-holes then I might behold;

That lovely, arched, ivory, polished brow

Defaced with wrinkles that I might but see;

Thy dainty hair, so curl’d and crisped now,

Like grizzled moss upon some aged tree;

Thy cheek, now flush with roses, sunk and lean;

Thy lips with age as any wafer thin;

Thy pearly teeth out of thy head so clean,

That, when thou feed’st, thy nose shall touch thy chin.

    These lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee,

    Then would I make thee read but to despite thee.”

 

Drayton is a close contemporary of Shakespeare. Scholars have suggested his work might have been better known if he hadn’t been overshadowed by the author of King Lear. Both wrote sonnet cycles, a popular form at the time. Drayton’s sonnet ponders the effects of aging on his loved one, its inevitable ravages. Through the poet's own “loop-holes” he observes its sad workings. Born in 1563, Drayton died on this date, December 23, in 1631 at age sixty-eight.

[The Irish writer Brian Lynch published his novel about Cowper, The Winner of Sorrow, in 2005, and Dalkey Archive brought it out in the U.S. in 2009. It’s among the finest novels of our still-young century.]

'A Distant Dissonance, Treble-cleft'

“Night-train noises, muffled and low, / nights when the Northern Limited left.”

I first read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) in the summer after graduating from high school, and remained under its spell long after I accepted Anderson’s limitations as a writer. More than a decade later I was hired as a reporter for the newspaper in Bellevue, a town in North Central Ohio six miles east of Clyde along Route 20. Clyde was home to Anderson as a boy and served as his model for Winesburg.

 

The dominant business in Clyde and the region was and remains the Whirlpool Corp., the largest washing machine factory in the world. In 2003, the state put up a historical marker commemorating Anderson’s gift of immortality to the town, where he lived from 1884 to 1895. During my years in Bellevue (1981-83), the only public nod to Anderson I remember was the Winesburg Inn. Bellevue was a railroad hub and after a while you stopped hearing the train whistles and the low rumble of the engines. In “Tandy,” one of the stories collected in Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson writes:

 

“It was late evening and darkness lay over the town and over the railroad that ran along the foot of a little incline before the hotel. Somewhere in the distance, off to the west, there was a prolonged blast from the whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that had been sleeping in the roadway arose and barked.”

 

A recurrent character in the stories is George Willard, a young newspaper reporter who leaves Winesburg on a westbound train. Here are the final words of “Departure,” the final story in Anderson’s collection: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”

 

I remembered Anderson and his stories when reading Maryann Corbett’s “Lament for the Midnight Train.” Its opening lines are quoted at the top. Few sounds are as lonesome-sounding as a train whistle late at night. Corbett writes:

 

“Midnights, we’d hear its strange chord blow,

a distant dissonance, treble-cleft.

Languid in summer, dulled in snow,

it spoke to me calmly: Trust and rest.

The night world works on a steady clock.”

'The Exotic is Everywhere'

A pink violet is growing in the front yard, not planted by us but likely the offspring of a seed carried by the wind. For a native Northerner, its existence, including the color, is unlikely and utterly un-Christmas-like, though it brings to mind candy. When I sent a friend in Schenectady, N.Y., a photo of the flower she wrote: “That’s amazing. I’m jealous.” She’s already tired of this season’s snowfall. 

I happened to be reading Amy Clampitt, whose poems can sometimes be a little too rich for my blood but in “Nothing Stays Put” she writes: “The strange and wonderful are too much with us.” Her observation works on several levels. If we accept that wonder is our inheritance, we start to experience it everywhere: a violet growing outdoors five days before Christmas? On a more mundane level, the world has been thoroughly globalized. Anything might be anywhere. My youngest son, a Peace Corps volunteer, bought a bag of Doritos in Caraz, a town in West Central Peru with a population of some 14,000. Clampitt writes: “The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us / before there is a yen or a need for it.” And this, at the poem’s conclusion:

 

“Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.

All that we know, that we’re

made of, is motion.”

'With Such Beauty'

The common word I can least imagine my father ever uttering, at least as supplied by his threadbare lexicon and in the presence of family, is beauty. Not that he was without a rudimentary aesthetic sense. He once made me a bookcase welded out of slender iron rods, crowned with the letter “K” in a circle above the top shelf. From a sheet of steel he cut out a piece shaped like a Scottish terrier, stenciled our street address on it and posted it in front of the house. It’s still there, though new owners moved in long ago. By trade he was an ironworker and welder and worked in metal. Everything he made was heavier than it needed to be. 

His ruling aesthetic, if he had one, was practicality. The things he made were functional and they lasted. He would never have associated beauty with something as inert as a sonnet or sonata. None of this is intended as criticism of my father. He responded to life with what he was given and had no capacity for or interest in theory. The scarlet leaves of a maple in the fall might have struck him as “pretty,” but that was of little consequence and probably gave him little pleasure.

 

B.H. Fairchild (b. 1942) has a poem, “Beauty” (The Art of the Lathe, 1998), which begins with the speaker and his wife in Florence, looking at Donatello's David in the Bargello Museum. He thinks “how very far we are now from the machine shop / and the dry fields of Kansas.” Fairchild meditates on beauty and masculinity and memory, and his poem reads, in part, like a joint autobiography of my father and me. It concludes:

 

“. . . and we walk

to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen

along the casement, and looking out, we see the city

blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings

taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way

the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her,

would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty.”

'It Has a Kind of Toughness'

Asked why wit was so characteristic of British writing, at least as of 1998, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald replied: 

“Wit means self-concealment, meiosis, self-deprecation, a recognition that things are too desperate to be comic but not serious enough to be tragic, a successful attempt to make language (and silence) take charge of the situation, and all these are British habits.”

 

Sometimes you want to be blunt, whether or not you are British. You want to eliminate any lingering hint of ambiguity in what you wish to say. Your purpose is to dismiss or even hurt the object of your displeasure. You have no wish to be understanding or empathetic. You already understand. Your target hasn’t earned an imaginative projection into tolerance. You don’t even try to be tactful. Nazis and Hamas don’t deserve your sensitive insights.

 

But most of a morally healthy person’s emotional life is not consumed with such hatred. Most of us are not the world’s policemen. To conduct our time on earth as though we were surrounded daily by felons in need of chastisement is childish, tiresome and self-defeating. We risk becoming what we abhor. Fitzgerald’s definition of wit, that elusive quality some of us recognize and appreciate when we see it, suggests we maintain a distance between ourselves and our petulant inner child. It is the deft deployment of language. “Self-concealment,” for instance, suggests maintaining a cool distance, not indulging in easy emotional gratification, deploying a scalpel rather than a bazooka.

 

Meiosis is the rhetorical device with which we intensify by minimizing. We understate and make something smaller and less important than it actually is. Again, another step in self-concealment. This is why one of Dr. Johnson’s definitions of wit is “imagination; quickness of fancy.” Think of the wittiest writers in the language – Alexander Pope, Evelyn Waugh, Fitzgerald herself, et al.

 

In his essay on Andrew Marvell, T.S. Eliot says of wit: “It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of experience; and it is confused with cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience.”

 

Truly cynical wit soon grows tiresome and ineffective. Think of true wit as muted mockery. The sting it packs may be time-delayed but it will last.

'What Mattered Most to Him Was Writing'

A friend wrote first thing Wednesday morning telling me Norman Podhoretz had died at age ninety-five. It was like hearing the last sequoia had fallen. “I read him religiously for 50 years,” my friend added. My observance of Podhoretz’s work was more secular but at least as long-lived. He was among the earliest critics I read as a teenager, along with Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. He helped take reviewing and criticism out of the graduate seminar and put it into the magazines of the day, and into the lives of common readers, where they belong. Among his teachers were Trilling and F.R. Leavis, and the seriousness with which they treated books rubbed off on their apt pupil.

Podhoretz wrote for Commentary and served as its editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995. His son John Podhoretz, the current editor-in-chief of Commentary, writes on the magazine’s website a brief remembrance of his father:

 

“What you really need to know is that what mattered most to him was writing. Great writing. Good writing. Clear writing. Honest writing. He was the most literate man I have ever known, possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the written word in our time and in times past, who found true moral, intellectual, and aesthetic purpose in the act of reading and deciphering and comprehending. And he was himself a prose stylist of magnificence. There is no other word for it, and anyone who says otherwise is judging him not by his sentences but by views he held they do not like. That was a sin against honesty he never committed. There were many writers whose views he abhorred, but whose gifts he would absolutely acknowledge and ruefully refuse to deny.”

  

Consider his review of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Subterraneans, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” published in the Spring 1958 issue of The Partisan Review. Podhoretz points out the author’s “simple inability to say anything in words.” He writes of Kerouac’s style, his much-vaunted, nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody,” in these self-indulgent messes masquerading as novels:

 

“Strictly speaking, spontaneity is a quality of feeling, not of writing. . . . It isn’t the right words he wants (even if he knows what they might be), but the first words, or at any rate the words that most obviously announce themselves as deriving from emotion rather than cerebration, as coming from ‘life’ rather than ‘literature,’ from the guts rather than the brain. (The brain, remember, is the angel of death.)”

 

And this:

 

“Solipsism is precisely what characterizes Kerouac’s novels. [They] are so patently autobiographical in content that they become almost impossible to discuss as novels; if spontaneity were indeed a matter of destroying the distinction between life and literature, these books would unquestionably be It.”

 

Podhoretz’s politics were commonsensical: he loved America, he loved Israel and hated terror and totalitarianism. He was indifferent to or actively opposed the political fashions of the nineteen-sixties, the Hate-America-First bandwagon. He started as a boilerplate liberal and slowly grew up politically, in public. I regret only that he hadn't written more about literature, though he was always right about murderous Muslims.

 

Take this from a review Podhoretz wrote of a novel in 1953: “He is trying to put blood into contemporary fiction and break through the hidebound conventions of the well-made novel. This is a herculean job that will have to be done if we are to have a living literature at all.” Sounds like Emerson welcoming Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

This is from Podhoretz’s review of Saul Bellow’s The Adventure of Augie March in the October 1953 issue of Commentary. Podhoretz was no gusher. The very next line in the review sounds the traditional Podhoretz note: “But our sympathy with Mr. Bellow’s ambition and our admiration for his pioneering spirit should not lead us to confuse the high intention with the realization.” Always cautious, always qualifying his judgment, which is a critic’s obligation.

 

As a young reader I was intoxicated by Bellow’s word-geysers. He was the educated man’s Thomas Wolfe. Podhoretz goes on:

 

“But the feeling conveyed by Mr. Bellow’s exuberance is an overwhelming impulse to get in as many adjectives and details as possible, regardless of considerations of rhythm, modulation, or, for that matter, meaning. Like Milton in Paradise Lost, who was trying to do the near impossible too, Mr. Bellow seems frightened of letting up; a moment’s relaxation might give the game away. The result is that we are far more aware of the words than the objects, of Mr. Bellow than of the world—which is the reverse of how he would like us to respond. His language lacks the suction to draw us into its stream.”

 

It took guts to write and publish this, especially in Commentary. Here are the review’s final sentences: “Mr. Bellow has the very genuine distinction of giving us a sense of what a real American idiom might look like. It is no disgrace to have failed in a pioneer attempt.”