'Picture the World Without Her in It'

Out of the blue a poet sent me a pdf of his latest collection and, out of politeness, not gratitude, I thanked him. The guy can’t write. Or rather, he can produce unlineated, remarkably banal prose. Someone, somewhere, told him he was a poet, likely a teacher or another “poet,” and he believed it. To that degree, it’s not his fault. He was born into a literary culture without respect for the discipline of craft and commonsensical intelligence. 

It’s sinking in that poet Jane Greer is dead. I thought of her while trying to read the pdf described above. I’m not on Twitter but I almost daily read her tweets because she was so funny and seemed to delight in things without being an attention-seeking idiot about it. From 1981 to 1992 she served as founding editor of Plains Poetry Journal, which I regret not having known at the time. For a taste of Jane’s spunk, see this opening to her review of collections by two of our best, X.J. Kennedy and R.S. Gwynn, published in the October 1987 issue of Chronicles:

 

“American poetry has for the past few decades been going through what can only be called an adolescence, discarding rules and conventions simply because they existed. Poetry and all the arts go through a healthy siege of anarchy every so often, but this was more like terrorism than a revolution; these revolutionaries, unlike the Romantics, had no idea of what to substitute for what they’d destroyed. Instead, they simply wrote, spilling their guts down the pages of fashionable and underground journals in two-word-wide, uncapitalized entrails of self-obsession.”

 

An evergreen doing double-duty after almost forty years. Good poetry does many things but chief among them ought to be reliably producing pleasure, ever striving after what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss.” I didn’t know Jane well. I’ll repeat myself: she was funny, a quality I crave like oxygen, and like many funny people she was serious about the important things. See the tribute to Jane put together by her peers, fellow poets, in New Verse Review, including one of her poems published in an earlier issue of that journal:

 

“In none of her other ages had she noted

her age or its burden and bounty of expectations.

The future was as flexible as the past,

and, in between, moments like unstrung pearls

strewn across velvet grieved and gladdened her

and always astonished her with their perfection.

There was no nothingness: there was only being.

 

“Slowly she wakes from what had seemed a dream

to realize that this is her final age—

of indeterminate length and quality.

Things are ending, or have ended, or will end.

The pearls are strung with care, it is quite clear.

There is no nothingness—but she can almost,

some days, picture the world without her in it.”

'His Own Discriminating Piety'

I was an early subscriber to Grand Street, the magazine founded in 1981 by Ben Sonnenberg. What surprises me now is how many of its essays, reviews and stories I remember in some detail: Gary Giddins’ “This Guy Wouldn’t Give You the Parsley Off His Fish,” about Jack Benny; Murray Kempton on Roy Cohn; Steven Millhauser’s essay “The Fascination of the Miniature”; Terence Kilmartin on translating Proust; Chrisopher Ricks on Thomas Love Beddoes. A writer I discovered by way of his essays in Grand Street was Henry Gifford (1913-2003), who taught for thirty years at the University of Bristol. For the magazine he wrote about Tolstoy, Khodasevich, Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Seferis and Cavafy, and Eugenio Montale.

In a memorial for Gifford published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, Christopher Rick wrote of his friend: “His death at the age of ninety brought home what a true piety is, in contemplation of his supple stamina and of his own discriminating piety towards the literary geniuses whose presences he owned: Tolstoy and Seferis, Pasternak and Samuel Johnson, Dante and T. S. Eliot.” Gifford’s literary interests were the opposite of narrowly provincial or academic. He loved good books and writers of any nationality.

In the Winter 1983 issue of Grand Street, Gifford published “Nabokov’s Voice,” a review of the three posthumously published collections of lectures the novelist delivered at Wellesley and Cornell: Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981) and Lectures on Don Quixote (1982). Gifford likens their “verve” to Dickens and writes: “This teacher was an artist, in love with his subject, and at least half in love with America.” Like his subject, Gifford is never dry or humorless:

“‘Literature,’ he told the class when he felt at his happiest, dealing with Dickens after a respectful but somewhat constrained attendance upon Jane Austen, ‘literature is not about something: it is the thing itself, the quiddity. Without the masterpiece, literature does not exist.’ He might have added, without the masterpiece the ‘fluid pudding’ of life might come to be what food was to poor Harriet Martineau, whose sense of taste had been atrophied.”

One is tempted to quote Gifford at length. He’s a natural-born celebrator and his prose is pithy, witty and often tart. A sampler:

“The aesthetic and the moral go hand in hand in these lectures--that is to say, what he feels to be artistically right has a supreme moral truth.”

On the surprising delight Nabokov takes in Don Quixote: “It was not on the face of it a novel that one would have expected Nabokov to take to his heart. That he did, with the perfect mixture of enjoyment and aloofness required from the ‘major reader,’ proves once again that the conjuror, the supreme exhibitor and exhibitionist, had without any question a heart.”

“I have compared his manner with that of Dickens, who liked to be known as ‘The Inimitable.’ Nabokov too plays up to the full of his natural bent as a master of genial monologue who never fails to interest; and if his prejudiced and rude dismissals are quarrelsome, he yet shows, as Keats would say, a kind of ‘grace in his quarrel.’” 

The marvelous Keats tag is from an 1819 letter the poet wrote to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgianna: “Though a quarrel in the Streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel.”

'I Make Little Choice at Table'

Food seems to have replaced religion and art as a source of consolation and purpose in the lives of many people. I know some who photograph most of their meals and share the pictures. I’m reminded of Tom Waits in his spoken introduction to “Eggs and Sausage”: “I was always, uh, kinda one who’d like to consider myself kind of a pioneer of the palate, a restauranteur, if you will.” 

There’s a trace of snobbery in this pose, of course, as the photographed meals often look elaborate, expensive and unidentifiable, the sort of thing you would never prepare for yourself. It wouldn’t occur to me to photograph my peanut butter sandwich or tonight’s red beans and rice. I’m far from ascetic but I’ve never wished to fetishize food. It doesn’t somehow represent me. Like everyone I have likes and dislikes but that’s not important. Foodie is an ugly word and concept, uncomfortably close to gourmand and glutton.

 

In his final days, my brother and I talked a lot about Montaigne. In hospice he stopped talking around the same time he stopped eating. I’m reading the Frenchman's essay “Of Experience” again and like his approach to food: “I make little choice at table, and attack the first and nearest thing, and I change reluctantly from one flavor to another. I dislike a crowd of dishes and courses as much as any other crowd. I am easily satisfied with few dishes.”

 

I knew an anthropologist who said casually, in conversation, that people have more hangups and crackpot ideas about food than they do about any other subject, including sex. They also tend to be more dogmatic. Take the recent vogue for protein. Such are the concerns of the citizens of a wealthy nation who know precisely where the next meal is coming from. Montaigne continues in “Of Experience”:

 

“There are some who act like patient sufferers if they do without beef and ham amid partridges. They have a good time; that is the daintiness of the dainty; it is the taste of a soft existence that is cloyed with the ordinary and accustomed things, by which luxury beguiles the tedium of wealth [Seneca]. Not to make good cheer with what another savors, to take particular care of what you eat and drink, is the essence of this vice.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'This Does Not Flatter Us'

“Ah, pitiful / The twisted memories of an ancient fool / And sweet the silence of a young man dead!”

There’s a tendency to romanticize, sometimes extravagantly, the gifted young who die early. Think of Chatterton, Keats and Wilfred Owen. Granted longer lives, what might they have accomplished? Ironically, with Keats, there’s probably less reason to mourn, given the brilliance of his sonnets, odes and letters. He died at twenty-five and the quality of much of his work exceeds that of most poets who survive into their dotage. The lines quoted above were written by Edward Shanks (1892-1953) in his poem “The Dead Poet” (Poems, 1916) about his friend Rupert Brooke. Shanks went on to work as a literary journalist and university lecturer, and wrote books about Shaw, Kipling and Poe.   

 

I learned of Shanks from Theodore Dalrymple’s book chronicle Not for Ambition or Bread (Mirabeau Press, 2025). Shanks served in France with the British Army during the Great War but was invalided out in 1915 and never saw combat. “The Dead Poet” begins:

 

“When I grow old they’ll come to me and say:

Did you then know him in that distant day?

Did you speak with him, touch his hand, observe

The proud eyes’ fire, soft voice and light lips’ curve?

And I shall answer: This man was my friend;

Call to my memory, add, improve, amend

And count up all the meetings that we had

And note his good and touch upon his bad.”

 

Brooke (b. 1887) graduated from Cambridge in 1909. After the start of the Great War, he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. In February 1915, he sailed to the Dardanelles in preparation for the Gallipoli campaign. He contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite and died on April 23, age twenty-seven. Brooke was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Dalrymple writes: "Shanks almost makes Brooke’s early death seem like a benefit received—it sealed his reputation for ever—but foolish as it may seem, one knows what he, Shanks, means.” Here are the closing lines of “The Dead Poet”: “Whose limbs shall never waste, eyes never fall, / And whose clear brain shall not be dimmed at all.” And Dalrymple’s gloss on them:

 

“How extraordinarily romantic, written at a time when 20,000 young men or more were being mown down daily before or not long after their age of majority! It’s absurd, or wrong, or totally irrational, but yet we know what Shanks means and are moved by it. We tend to remember people as they last were, just before they died, not as they once were. This does not flatter us, those of us who live to be old.”

'Varied, Inconsistent and Unpredictable'

Thedore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple, blog-like premise: he writes about the books he has been reading. What might be an exercise in self-indulgent tedium in the wrong hands is a sort of brain scan of an intelligent man’s sensibility as he reads. Dalrymple is well-read, widely traveled, witty and endlessly curious. His prose is notable for its clarity. As a retired prison doctor, he knows intimately a stratum of life most of us will never know. His sympathies are broad. Among his chief interests are medicine and crime. He makes an excellent companion and articulates his bookish reactions conversationally. He’s more storyteller than critic. 

His latest book chronicle, The Strut and Trade of Charms (Mirabeau Press, 2025), takes its title from “In My Craft and Sullen Art” by Dylan Thomas. In a brief note preceding the text he tells us the only purpose such books have is “to please myself  in the hope of pleasing a few others, and perhaps to demonstrate that human life is so infinitely varied, inconsistent and unpredictable that no mere theory could explain it or catch it in the coarse mesh of its net.” Dalrymple is no theoretician and isn’t afraid to say when he doesn’t understand something he encounters.  

 

Most of the books and writers he reads were previously unknown to him and to me, though he does read Robert Graves and Vernon Scannell. One of the most intriguing-sounding titles is Classic Descriptions of Disease (1932), written by the American physician Ralph H. Major (1884-1970). Both of us use the third edition from 1945. The book is almost seven-hundred pages long and weighs 3.25 pounds, according to the bathroom scale. Dalrymple describes it as “a compendium of classic, usually first or early, descriptions of disease, combined with brief biographical notes on their authors.” Most of the entries are written by physicians but a few are the work of such literary figures as Martial, Thucydides, Boccaccio and Pliny the Elder. Take tetanus. The first source cited by Major is Hippocrates (c. 460 BC-c. 370 BC), who writes:

 

“The master of a large ship mashed the index finger of his right hand with the anchor. Seven days later a somewhat foul discharge appeared; then trouble with his tongue--he complained he could not speak properly. The presence of tetanus was diagnosed, his jaws became pressed together, his teeth were locked, then symptoms appeared in his neck: on the third day opisthotonos [uncontrolled flexing of muscles in the neck and back] appeared with sweating. Six days after the diagnosis was made he died.”

 

I’m reminded of John Thoreau Jr., Henry’s brother. On New Year’s Day in 1842, he nicked the tip of his left-hand ring finger while stropping his razor – a minor wound we would wash and bandage. Eight days later it had become “mortified,” meaning the tissue had turned black and necrotic. On the morning of January 9, John’s jaw stiffened and by that evening he suffered the convulsions associated with lockjaw. A Boston doctor examined John and concluded he could do nothing for him. No one could have until the vaccine for tetanus was developed in 1924. John, 27, died on January 11 in the arms of his helpless brother.

 

The disease is caused by the bacteria Clostridium tetani, commonly found in soil and dust. The incidence of the disease in the century since the vaccine was introduced has dropped by ninety-five percent. Dalrymple writes of the Major volume:

 

“Such had been the rapid progress of medical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that many of the entries must have seemed rather more recent or contemporary in 1932 than they do now.”

'The Self-Appointed Guardian of English Literature'

One is always in danger of being perceived as a fuddy-duddy. Speak admiringly of rhyme in poetry or elegant prose in fiction and risk being called a reactionary (which I was just yesterday) or an old fart (which happened last week). Stevie Smith diagnoses the type in “Souvenir de Monsieur Poop” in her second collection, Tender Only to One (1938). Her poem begins: 

“I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature,

I believe tremendously in the significance of age;

I believe that a writer is wise at 50,

Ten years wiser at 60, at 70 a sage.”

 

Smith wrote that the year she turned thirty-six. Age has little to do with such things. There are youthful prodigies and late bloomers among writers and readers. It’s not a matter of combatting the prevailing critical and popular fashions. It’s more a matter of articulating one’s standards for work new or old that compels us to reread it.   

 

“But then I am an old fogey.

I always write more in sorrow than in anger.

I am, after all, devoted to Shakespeare, Milton,

And, coming to our own times,

Of course

Housman.”

 

There are worlds of hard-won irony in those lines. Later in the poem Smith writes: “(When I say that I am an old fogey, I am, of course, joking.)”

'The Worst of Bores'

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life. Universities are infested with people who take themselves very seriously. Couple that with arcane academic specialties, undergrown senses of humor and advanced political thinking and you have an epidemic of tedium. Exceptions? Of course. I know some very bright, conversationally gifted people on campus as well. Theodore Dalrymple diagnoses the bore with precision: 

“Of course, the true bore, like the true eccentric, doesn’t know or even suspect that that is what he is. The eccentric does strange things because to him they are the most natural things in the world to do. The true bore doesn’t know that he is boring others because what he says is so very interesting to himself, which is why at dinner parties my wife sometimes has to kick me under the table.”

 

In Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life (2002), N. John Hall tells us the essayist read the transcript of a radio broadcast, “The Road to Happiness,” by that well-known, high-minded bore Bertrand Russell: “Russell is a bore; but he is a bright bore, which is the worst of bores.”