'Everyone Believes He or She Could Write a Book'

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and editors, and presumably readers, find interesting and important? Taste is notoriously transient. Most of it is rooted in fashion and peer pressure, what other folks like.

The July 14, 1956, issue of The Saturday Review, published seventy years ago, opens with the “Trade Winds” column of Bennett Cerf (1898-1971). As a kid, I knew him as a panelist on the quiz show What’s My Line? Later I learned he was cofounder of Random House, publisher of the Modern Library I relied on for my education. Cerf published Faulkner, John O’Hara and Whitaker Chambers’ Witness. We can blame him for publishing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Cerf’s column is feeble stuff: 

“Hard-pressed publishers have come up with a lucrative and relatively new gimmick in recent months: histories of great corporations, financed by the corporations themselves. The publishers usually supply the author, edit the text, and make a token distribution in bookstores after publication; the corporation buys between five and fifty thousand copies at a stipulated price, thus assuring the publisher a profit before he begins. . . There is nothing wrong with business of this sort—provided the public is let in on the essential details.”

 

Well, yes – and no. Next up is “The Literary Life at Seventy-Five” by a name new to me, William McFee (1881-1966), a prolific writer of sea stories. Judging by his article, McFee was a cultivated man with a sense of humor. He makes observations I have also  made:

 

“Writers are not highly regarded in America. I know this sounds odd, but it is true. Everyone uses a pen, and everyone believes he or she could write a book if there were only time. Recently I heard the expression, ‘I could write a book about that place.’ Another person, after reading a book about his own profession, said he could write a better book. The point is, each assumed as a matter of course he could write a book, but he would never claim to be able to carve a statue or compose music or paint a picture or design a building. Even if they do not offer to write a book they have a plot for a novel, which they present to a writer, free.”

 

Of all the book reviewers I recognize the names of William Peden, Edmund Fuller, Paul Arthur Schilpp and Meyer Levin. Of the writers under review, even fewer names. A pleasant surprise is the byline of Whitney Balliett, who would soon become a staff writer and jazz critic for The New Yorker. His piece is titled “Billie, Big Bill, and Jelly Roll” – that is, Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy and Jelly Roll Morton, all of whom had recently had their autobiographies published. Balliett is honest and never patronizing:

 

“Three quite different, though complementary, autobiographies have recently been published here and in England, and taken together, they provide an invaluable reflection of the Negro jazz musician. All three books are products of collaboration and as a result they vary as much in quality as content.”

 

Of the three, I remember Morton’s book being the most interesting. He was a raconteur, a one-time pimp, a storyteller and a brilliant composer. He had died sick and broke in 1941. Balliett’s verdict: “Morton gave the American Dream an awful pummeling before it cut him down.”

'Nothing So Much as Mincing Poetry'

While reading the history plays again I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember having encountered before. I love these choice little discoveries. My only disappointment is that such words are virtually unusable. They would be gibberish to most people, whether in writing or speech, and would end up sounding pretentious and incoherent. Here’s a passage from Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 3, Scene 1), in which Hotspur is complaining about Owen Glendower’s bloviation: 

“Sometime he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.”

 

Translation: “He talks too much.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary identifies skimble-skamble as an adjective meaning “wandering; wild,” but dismisses it as “cant.” The OED says it’s an adjective, noun and adverb and defines it in the first case as “confused, incoherent, nonsensical, rubbishy.” In other words, a highly useful word, with many applications, that won’t be used. The OED cites later uses by Lord Byron, John Ruskin and John Motley in The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Moldwarp, by the way, refers to Talpa europaea, the European mole. In the same act, Hotspur reacts to Glendower boasting that he “gave the tongue a helpful ornament,” while making fun of “mincing poetry”:

 

“I had rather be a kitten and cry ‘mew’

Than one of these same meter balladmongers.

I had rather hear a brazen can’stick turned,

Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,

And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,

Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.”

'Small But Real Pleasure to His Readers'

An amusing coda to Saturday’s post on major and minor writers: "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class in due course. By ‘minor’ I mean something like third-tier–not third-rate, now. What characterizes a third-rate writer is that he can’t write. Not that I would object to being a third-rater myself; many third-raters become fabulously rich, and in any case there’s something to be said for a man who can make millions by doing something he’s no good at.”

 

The writer is Barton Swaim, a columnist and book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. I recommend his book The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (2015), which manages to make contemporary American politics interesting. The passage quoted above is from Swaim’s “Literary Minority," a column published in 2009 in the Washington Examiner. Call Swaim a comic realist:

 

“The minor writer never gets rich, never achieves anything more than momentary fame, and nobody would call his works important. He has admirers, and he may write a highly regarded book now and again, but he is destined to be remembered, if at all, in the footnotes of monographs nobody reads.”

 

Unless your last name is Proust, to set out to achieve the status of “major writer” is a mug’s game, a delusion of Norman Mailer-esque proporations. In today’s literary culture, it’s a stone-cold impossibility. In Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013), Joseph Epstein writes to his friend Frederic Raphael praising the stories of the wonderful Francis Wyndham, an English writer hardly well-known, especially in the U.S.:

 

“Wyndham is, I suspect by deliberation, a minor writer. He wrote well, but was modest in his ambition, not very productive, content to give small but real pleasure to his readers – and, I assume, to himself. Nothing wrong with any of this. To give pleasure is a fine thing, n’est-ce pas? Some of the writers dearest to me – Max Beerbohm, Sydney Smith – are minor writers.”

'Their Worlds Are Closest to Ours'

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discusses “the difference between a major and a minor writer—which is not necessarily the difference between better and worse.” This theme preoccupies me. Recently I encountered yet another reviewer who dismisses the author in question as “minor,” which clearly he intends as a qualitative judgment meaning dull and just plain lousy. The designation comes off as snotty and critically lazy.

Auden clarifies things: “We can forget the bad writers. The minor artist, who can be idiosyncratic, keeps to one thing, does it well, and keeps on doing it—Thomas Campion, for example, A.E. Housman, and in music, Claude Debussy.” 

American literature seems especially rich in excellent minor poets (Yvor Winters, Henri Coulette, Turner Cassity, Kay Ryan), in part because we have so few major poets (Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot). As to classical music composers from any country, think of Erik Satie and Aaron Copland. Auden resumes:

 

“There are minor writers who can mean more to us than any major writer, because their worlds are closest to ours. Great books can be hard to read—in a sense, boring to read. Whom do I read with the utmost pleasure? Not Dante, to my mind the greatest of poets, but Ronald Firbank. The minor writer never risks failure [dubious]. When he discovers his particular style and vision, his artistic history is over [also dubious].”

 

Among the first-rate minor writers are Colette, Max Beerbohm, Walter de la Mare, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, J.V. Cunningham, Peter Taylor, Guy Davenport.  

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]

'The Everyday Dignity of Our Town'

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.” 

As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly before I turned thirteen. I’d been a reader all along, certainly more so than my family and kids I knew at school. But books were strictly entertainment, a natural alternative to television. But that year, after reading his obituary, I discovered T.S. Eliot. I have no idea why he so quickly meant so much to me, why I personalized him as though he were my uncle. Soon I discovered Updike, Kafka and, among other things, the poetry anthologies of Oscar Williams.

 

In one of them I found the poem “Scyros” by Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), fell for it, heavily, and proceeded to read everything by him I could find. At first I concentrated on the poems he wrote while serving with the Army in the Pacific. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), written while he was stationed in New Guinea. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year and he went on to serve as editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner. I lost interest in “Scyros” and came to admire the most characteristic portion of Shapiro’s body of work. I think of it as his “American Scene” verse, including “Buick,” “Pharmacy,” “Hospital,” “Haircut,” “Girls Working in Banks,” “Manhole Covers.”

 

Shapiro could be silly. He underwent a midlife hipster crisis. He praised Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams. He abandoned meter and rhyme and had good things to say about the Beats. His sole novel, Edsel, is unreadable.

 

Shapiro came to disappoint me, which is ridiculous. He gave us a handful of the best American poems and he helped initiate me into literature. Today, he appears to be virtually forgotten. The lines at the top of this post are from “Poet in Eclipse,” written by Louis D. Rubin Jr., published in the Fall 1991 issue of The Sewanee Review and dedicated to Shapiro. That’s nine years before Shapiro’s death. We all know that the literary industry is driven by fashion, which by definition is fickle and unfair. The entire first stanza of Rubin’s poem:

 

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter

About him at cocktail parties.

Critics do not debate his latest heresies.

The turncoat anthologists have dropped him

From the canon of those who matter.

There is apathy when his books come out.

It has been years since anyone asked him

Why modern poetry is so difficult.

His own clear translation of the everyday

Has long since given way

To more convolute and crepuscular

Enactments of postmodernist despair.

Elaborate candelabra now flare

Where he was once the Muse's bright day-star.”

 

In the third stanza, Rubin celebrates the “American Scene” poems:

 

“Still, there are those who see the lucence

Of what he wrote in much we now possess:

He found the language that could bring alive

The everyday dignity of our town,

Learned to make the astounding adjective

Infuse the colorless, neutral noun

And called into luminous elegance

What all had thought drab hitherto.

He claimed our untitled circumstance

For poetry, fixed its impress

Equally for high romance

As any ivied castle, campus, salon,

Requiring no prelate nor Helicon

Nor claim to privileged view.”

'Distance Only Cannot Change the Heart'

The digital age has enabled a new and more generous definition of friendship. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary component. It’s a truism that making new friends becomes more difficult with age, but at seventy-three I have more friends than at any time in my life. I’m not bragging. I still have friends I’ve known for more than sixty years but with the internet, distance is erased. Common interests, civility, a sense of humor, temperamental affinities – these become the criteria that shape a friendship, not sharing an office or riding the same bus to work.

 

On July 9, 1785, William Cowper was writing a letter to the Rev. John Newton. It’s typical Cowper – gossipy, affectionate, cranky and utterly devoted to his friend: “No man’s disapprobation would have hurt me more. Your favourable sentiments of my book [The Task] must consequently give me pleasure in the same proportion.” Originally, Cowper intended to write a poem to Newton. Instead, he wrote him a letter and redirected the poem to another friend, Joseph Hill, whom he had known since childhood. Hill was an attorney who served as the poet’s legal and financial adviser, even when Cowper attempted suicide and was committed to an asylum. “An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq.” begins like this:

 

“Dear Joseph,— five and twenty years ago—

Alas! how time escapes — ’tis even so!—

With frequent intercourse and always sweet

And always friendly we were wont to cheat

A tedious hour, — and now we never meet,

As some grave gentleman in Terence says,

(’Twas therefore much the same in ancient days,)

Good lack, we know not what to-morrow brings,—

Strange fluctuation of all human things!”

 

Cowper celebrates not merely his affection for Hill but the importance of friendship in general: “Changes will befall, and friends may part, / But distance only cannot change the heart.” He might be writing about friendships formed and sustained thanks to the internet. Cowper’s lines can be lachrymose and rigidly predictable but at his best he is piercingly human.

 

That a suicidally tormented man should have written letters and poems that are still readably charming, funny and moving after more than two centuries, defies the modern understanding of human personality. As poet and man, Cowper can’t be reduced to clinical categories for easy comprehension. Though depressed and reclusive, comfortable only among a small circle of friends and family, and then only in a rural setting, Cowper wrote letters that rival Keats’ as the finest in the language (that both poets suffered lends a plangent quality to everything they wrote, though that alone is not sufficient to explain their literary qualities). They carry philosophical and emotional freight lightly -- never a sermon or treatise, always a conversation. The English poet Norman Nicholson in 1951 published William Cowper, a study of the poet, in which he writes:

 

“His was a strange life and a strange personality; witty, and yet warped; warm-hearted, impulsive, and yet timid and reserved; sociable, and yet solitary; sympathetic, tolerant, understanding, and yet bigoted; gay and yet pathetic; endearing and lovable and yet never receiving all the love he needed. . . . Not even Chekov, carefully selecting significant trivia, could tell us more about his characters than Cowper tells about himself in a chance remark on a hat or cat, a chair or a hare. Strange as he was, most poets are strangers compared with him. His very oddness is so companionable that we can understand his freaks and foibles better than we can understand the normal actions of saner men.”

'The Blameless Life'

How pleasing to learn that friends, seemingly unknown to each other -- compartmentalized as friendships often are -- intersected before we knew either of them. Sixteen years ago today, the late D.G. Myers published on his Commonplace Blog thirteen epigrams written more than twenty-five years earlier. I had no idea David had written poetry. The publisher of the 1984 chapbook A Patch of Weeds was R.L. Barth. The poems suggested how much the two writers had in common, besides a tartly satirical voice and a taste for epigrams – Martial, J.V. Cunningham, Dr. Johnson, Robert Herrick. Here is David’s rendering of Martial’s 3.71: 

“I know, yes. How? I didn’t read your mind.

He’s sore between the legs and you, behind.”

 

And here is Bob’s version of the same poem, included in his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026):

 

“Naevolus, your boy’s ass is sore; your prick is too.

Although I am no seer, I know just what you do.”

 

Here is David’s “To J.V. Cunningham,” about the poet and scholar David studied under at Washington University in 1976:

 

“Take these, the work of quiet days,

In place of what I owe you—measured praise.

As you have made my mind your own device

To honor you I epigrammatize.”

 

And here is David’s “Dr. Johnson on the Death of His Mother” (Idler, 41):

 

“If you have tears, whoever you may be,

Enough to drop for mourners filing by,

Then let this train be your last cause for grief:

The last steps of an inoffensive life.”

 

David died of cancer on September 26, 2014 at age sixty-one. Johnson writes in the Idler essay cited by David:

 

"The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”