'An Old, Tried, and Valued Friend'

Most of the books I read today I have read before, whether last year or half a century ago. So too, many of the books I purchase are old acquaintances. Sometimes the copy I already have is literally falling apart, or I might want to replace a frayed paperback with a sturdy hard cover. I almost agree with William Hazlitt: “There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.” On Thursday I bought four volumes I already own, all hardbacks, at Kaboom Books here in Houston. 

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both translated by Max Hayward, I read when the latter volume was first published, and several times in later years. I judge them among the essential books of the last century. Mandelstam (1899-1980) was an acidic truth-teller, no respecter of the despotism that had murdered her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. She was notoriously tough, cynical and defiant. My old copy of the latter volume (almost seven-hundred pages) has split into four pieces along the spine and is held together with a rubber band. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda writes:

 

“We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.”

 

Osip had been arrested in May 1938, sentenced to five years in correction camps for “counter-revolutionary activities” three months later, and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938.

 

I found good, clean, unmarked copies of Rebecca West’s A Train of Powder (1955) and The New Meaning of Treason (1964), rare examples of first-rate journalism-as-literature. West’s novels are disappointing but the nonfiction is excellent, especially her coverage of the Nuremberg trials and the trial of the English traitor William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw. Collected in the first volume is “Opera in Greenville,” originally published in The New Yorker. West covers a 1947 lynching trial in South Carolina. Unlike many other writers of her time, she understood the tricky, devious ways of evil. She was seldom naive:

 

“There could be no more pathetic scene than these taxi-drivers and their wives, the deprived children of difficult history, who were rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger. For an hour or two, the trial had built up in them that sense of law which is as necessary to man as bread and water and a roof. They had known killing for what it is: a hideousness that begets hideousness. They had seen that the most generous impulse, not subjected to the law, may engender a shameful deed.”

 

All of the words I have quoted from Mandelstam and West I have read before and even recall. Hazlitt explains the enticement of familiar books:

 

“When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. When the entertainment is altogether new, I sit down to it as I should to a strange dish, -- turn and pick out a bit here and there, and am in doubt what to think of the composition. There is a want of confidence and security to second appetite. New-fangled books are also made-dishes in this respect, that they are generally little else than hashes and rifaccimenti [OED: “a new version or remodelling of a literary or artistic work; a reworking”] of what has been served up entire and in a more natural state at other times. Besides, in thus turning to a well-known author, there is not only an assurance that my time will not be thrown away, or my palate nauseated with the most insipid or vilest trash, -- but I shake hands with, and look an old, tried, and valued friend in the face, -- compare notes, and chat the hours away.”

'It’s Mainly Because of Thanksgiving'

For many years the theme of our Thanksgiving Day has been Ben Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” which begins: 

“Tonight, grave sir, both my poore house, and I

Doe equally desire your companie:

Not that we thinke us worthy such a guest,

But that your worth will dignifie our feast . . .”

 

In earlier years, the menu would be Américain Classique: roast turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn casserole, dinner rolls, etc. – an embarrassingly bountiful spread. Guests would include family, neighbors and the unexpected. This year the fare will be more modest, probably salmon, rice and broccoli. No, it’s not poverty or some misguided concession to health. My middle son arrived Wednesday evening from Fort Meade. He’s a vegetarian and a Marine, and we’ll be dining alone. My wife doesn’t return to Houston from Chile until Friday. Jonson’s poem is an invitation, a welcome to my readers: Come, join us, help yourself, enjoy the feast. He concludes the poem with these words:

 

“No simple word

That shall be utter’d at our mirthfull board

Shall make us sad next morning: or affright

The libertie, that wee’ll enjoy to-night.”

 

Of all Thanksgiving poems, my favorite is Anthony Hecht’s “The Transparent Man” (The Transparent Man, 1990), a dramatic monologue spoken by a thirty-year-old woman hospitalized with leukemia. Each year, when I reread it, I think: I wish I could have known her, a fictional character. She recognizes the impact her fatal illness has on others and doesn’t wish to burden them.

 

“. . . I feel

A little conspicuous and in the way.

It’s mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these mothers

And wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully

And feel they should break up their box of chocolates

For a donation, or hand me a chunk of fruitcake.

What they don’t understand and never guess

Is that it’s better for me without a family;

It’s a great blessing. Though I mean no harm.”

 

“Donation” gently, politely camouflages scorn, and that last sentence is heartbreaking. She thinks of the difficulty her illness causes her father, who doesn’t visit. Is she making excuses for him? Hecht leaves it unresolved. His nameless speaker, in what might be mistaken for self-pity, redefines gratitude:

 

“I care about fewer things; I’m more selective.

It’s got so I can’t even bring myself

To read through any of your books these days.

It’s partly weariness, and partly the fact

That I seem not to care much about the endings,

How things work out, or whether they even do.”

'A False Tooth, or a Rhinoplastic Nose'

“People who get their wisdom out of books are like those who have got their knowledge of a country from the descriptions of travellers. Truth that has been picked up from books only sticks to us like an artificial limb, or a false tooth, or a rhinoplastic nose; the truth we have acquired by our own thinking is like the natural member.” 

Well, yes and no. Reliance solely on books for one’s moral/intellectual/emotional education is risky, as is any form of autodidacticism (though a strain of it is often invaluable). Today, in our aliterate age, of course, there’s little danger of that happening. Books complement experience, and vice versa. Writers document life so we don’t necessarily have to. The tension between books and life is part of growing up and one of several ways we learn things, including wisdom.

 

The speaker above is John Morley (1838-1923), a Liberal statesman, biographer and close friend of William Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The passage is drawn from a lecture, “Aphorisms,” delivered to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on November 11, 1887. Morley devotes much of his talk to French and German aphorists (La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Pascal, et al.; Schopenhauer, Lichtenberg, Goethe). Also, the ancients:

 

“Horace's Epistles are a mine of genial, friendly, humane observation. Then there is none of the ancient moralists to whom the modern, from Montaigne, Charron, Ralegh, Bacon, downwards, owe more than to Seneca. Seneca has no spark of the kindly warmth of Horace; he has not the animation of Plutarch; he abounds too much in the artificial and extravagant paradoxes of the Stoics.”

 

His writing is orderly and uncluttered, but Morley is no aphorist, though his prose is occasionally aphoristic. Take this: “[W]hat is called Stupidity springs not at all from mere want of Understanding, but from the fact that the free use of a man’s understanding is hindered by some definite vice: Frivolity, Envy, Dissipation, Covetousness, all these darling vices of fallen man,—these are at the bottom of what we name Stupidity. This is true enough, but it is not so much to the point as the saying of a highly judicious aphorist of my own acquaintance, that ‘Excessive anger against human stupidity, is itself one of the most provoking of all forms of that stupidity.’”

 

To write aphoristically it is necessary to first think aphoristically, peeling away the dross, cliched and overly emphatic. There are other effective ways to write, but concisely always improves things. A contemporary aphorist, Theodore Dalrymple, in his book of aphorisms, Midnight Maxims (Mirabeau, 2021), writes: “Not everything can be said in a few words, but nothing can always be said in many words.”

'Year Chases Year, Decay Pursues Decay'

Nominally a translation from the Latin of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is an autonomous poem in English, endlessly rereadable and fortifying for readers. Dr. Johnson completed his greatest poem on this date, November 25, in 1748, and sold the copyright to the English bookseller Robert Dodsley for fifteen guineas. At the age of thirty-nine, he was assembling his Dictionary (eventually published in 1755), and in little more than four months would publish the first of his 207 Rambler essays. 

Johnson told his friend George Steevens that he wrote the first seventy lines of “Vanity” “in the course of one morning,” having already composed them in his mind. In his 1977 biography of Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate writes: ‘That so concentrated a poem could be written with such speed indicates how much a part of the inner life it expresses.” In other words, Johnson was not so much composing as transcribing. Bate continues:

 

“The result is a poem that (as was once said of Burke) dazzles the strong and educated intellect far more than the feeble, and sways intelligent and cultivated readers as a demagogue.”

 

As a consideration of human nature, “Vanity” is realistically harsh and humbling. As a portrait of us it is unflattering. Reading it again with an open mind, one repeatedly comes to passages that confirm our moral conclusions about ourselves and others. We can trace the lineage of the poem to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling Johnson’s central lifelong theme. In his Dictionary, he defines vanity as “emptiness, arrogance, falsehood.” For vain he gives “fruitless, meanly proud, idle.” Asked for a synonym today, many would respond with “egotism,” “self-centeredness,” “pride.” Only the last avoids the modern clinical taint and retains the older, moral/spiritual sense.

 

“Year chases Year, Decay pursues Decay,

Still drops some Joy from with’ring Life away;  

New Forms arise, and diff’rent Views engage,   

Superfluous lags the Vet’ran on the Stage,

Till pitying Nature signs the last Release,           

And bids afflicted Worth retire to Peace.”

'Incipient Opportunity'

My sons are living in Westchester County, Maryland and Peru. All are employed and self-reliant and have successfully enacted a young man’s timeless ritual: leaving home. I left home at seventeen, never to return except for brief visits. I haven’t lived in Cleveland, my birthplace, since 1977 or Ohio since 1983. The contrast with my late brother is striking. He lived within a ten-mile radius his entire life.  Then I think of my paternal grandfather, born in Poland in 1896, shipping early in the new century to the U.S., naturalized as an American citizen in 1920, working for more than thirty years as an ironworker in Cleveland. 

Conversely, I know men, some in early middle age, who still live in their parents’ homes, often in the basement or boyhood bedroom. I can’t imagine doing that. No doubt there are legitimate economic or medical explanations in some cases but I would have felt humiliated, a failure. As a kid, what I most wanted was to be a grownup, independent and self-reliant. 

 

On this date, November 24, in 1965, Philip Larkin, as a break from working on one of his masterpieces, “High Windows,” completed the poem “How Distant”:

 

“How distant, the departure of young men

Down valleys, or watching

The green shore past the salt-white cordage

Rising and falling.

 

“Cattlemen, or carpenters, or keen

Simply to get away

From married villages before morning,

Melodeons play

 

“On tiny decks past fraying cliffs of water

Or late at night

Sweet under the differently-swung stars,

When the chance sight

 

“Of a girl doing her laundry in the steerage

Ramifies endlessly.

This is being young,

Assumption of the startled century

 

“Like new store clothes,

The huge decisions printed out by feet

Inventing where they tread,

The random windows conjuring a street.”

 

In the English context, young men throughout the century left villages and farms to seek work in the cities. The migration took place all over the industrialized world—getting away from the “married villages.” This hints at muted autobiography from the eternal bachelor Larkin. As Larkin’s biographer James Booth puts it, “incipient opportunity.”

'Good for More Than One of Us That He Was Here'

Edwin Arlington Robinson was nineteen in 1890 when he met Emma Shepherd, who was four years his senior. Like a million other men, he was smitten and naïve, hopeless in the ways of courtship and romance. Shepherd was a renowned beauty, sensitive and thoughtful. Robinson wrote in “The Night Before” (The Torrent and the Night Before, 1896):

 

“I loved that woman, —

Not for her face, but for something fairer,

Something diviner, I thought, than beauty:

I loved the spirit — the human something

That seemed to chime with my own condition,

And make soul-music when we were together . . .”

 

Interesting precursor to what became known in the sixties as “soul music.” Shepherd and the poet became close friends and remained so, even after she married Robinson’s brother Herman, who became an alcoholic and estranged from Shepherd and their children. He died from tuberculosis, impoverished, in 1909. Shepherd believed Robinson wrote “Richard Cory” about his brother.

 

Robinson is one of the masters of the sonnet. Among his finest is “A Man in Our Town” (Dionysus in Doubt, 1925):

“We pitied him as one too much at ease

With Nemesis and impending indigence;

We sought him always in extremities;

And while ways more like ours had more to please

Our common code than his improvidence,

There lurked alive in our experience

His homely genius for emergencies.

 

 “He was not one for men to marvel at,

And yet there was another neighborhood

When he was gone, and many a thrifty tear.

There was an increase in a man like that;

And though he be forgotten, it was good

For more than one of us that he was here.”

 

In his notes to The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999), Robert Mezey tells us Shepherd and her daughter Ruth, after the poet’s death in 1935, put together a commentary on the poems. As best I can tell, this document has never been published, though Mezey had access to the manuscript. He quotes Shepherd, who describes the sonnet as a “beautiful tribute to his brother Dean. Even after he was so completely subjected to the fetters of opium that he no longer practiced his profession, or operated his drug store, he was called back to the Savings Bank to help balance their accounts, and called to the medical emergencies of neighbors.”

 

The poet’s eldest brother, Dean, was a pharmacist who became a morphine addict and took his own life with an overdose in 1899. Shepherd’s autobiographical understanding is no doubt accurate but there’s more to the sonnet than that. All of us have known people like “the man in our town,” confounding mixtures of good and evil, virtues and selfishness, loveable and heartbreaking.

'But O the Heavy Change, Now Thou Art Gone'

No public event has shaken me so lastingly as the assassination of President Kennedy. I’m not speaking sentimentally, mourning the glory that was Camelot. JFK was a mediocre president, at best, and not a good man. 

I had turned eleven a month before his murder. The killing taught me that everyone was vulnerable, even the most powerful and protected man in the world. I don’t mean that in the personal sense. I haven’t spent the last sixty-two years trembling with paranoia. I’m talking about history. No one is immune to its machinations. Few things last.

 

The way I learned of the assassination seems significant. Ron Ornsby and I were in the same sixth-grade class and had walked to our Safety Patrol post, carrying our flags and wearing Sam Browne belts. A driver stopped to tell us the president had been shot. Soon after, another driver stopped to say Kennedy had been touring a nut house in Texas when one of the nuts shot him. How odd that a surreally attenuated rumor should ring with poetic truth. When I walked in the back door at home, I could see the silhouette of my mother crying in front of the television. For the next three days we were forbidden to play outside and spent most of the time watching the news from Dallas and Washington, D.C. In memory, it’s all in black and white.

 

R.L. Barth has written a new sequence of poems, “Aspects of Vietnam,” with an epigraph from The Great Gatsby: “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The first poem in the series, “The Fall of Camelot,” also has an epigraph: “Beware angering the goddess”:

 

“Did you anticipate the fallout, John,

When Diem and Nhu were murdered in Saigon?

In Dallas almost three weeks later, Jack,

Nemesis tracked you down and paid you back.”

 

Twenty years ago I interviewed a computer scientist at Rice University who was dying of cancer and, coincidentally, was named Kennedy. Once handsome and quite the lady’s man, he was now a baggy suit on a rack of bones. He had been an undergraduate at Rice, and on the day of the president’s assassination he was seated in an English literature class when news of the killing was announced. The professor had been lecturing on Milton. Unlike other professors, he didn’t cancel his class and, instead, read “Lycidas” aloud to his students. More than forty years later, the computer scientist recited for me, from memory:      

 

“But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone and never must return!”

 

He had tears in his eyes as he spoke the words, and three months later he was dead.