'Objects of Value or Virtue'

The only summer mornings we woke up and got dressed early was garbage collection day. We had to beat the trash men. This was long before recycling came into fashion. Everything went into the fluted metal trash cans. Larger objects were piled beside them. Once we found an oversized television set which we carried away in a wagon, hauled deep into the woods, lugged across the creek and up the hill and threw off a cliff for the pure delight of hearing a cathode ray tube explode. I marvel that some of that glass, metal and plastic are probably still in that creek bed after sixty years.

We claimed old magazines and assorted bric-à-brac. At the time – early-to-mid-sixties – I was reading my way through the collected oeuvre of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Once I found a machete-length butcher knife with a wooden handle. I painted the blade red and proudly carried my John Carter of Mars sword. I suspect kids today would be admonished not to do any of the things I’ve just described, though we were practicing our own version of recycling. Howard Nemerov precedes his poem “The Town Dump” with lines from Act III, Scene 2 of King Lear. Lear is on the heath during a storm. Kent leads him to a hovel for shelter and Lear says “The art of our necessities is strange, / That can make vile things precious.” That’s a nice gloss on our hobby as kids. Nemerov goes on to describe our weekly summer pastime:

 

“Objects of value or virtue,

However, are also to be picked up here,

Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat,

Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels

No one will skid on, apple cores that caused

Neither the fall of man nor a theory

Of gravitation. People do throw out

The family pearls by accident, sometimes,

Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques

To prowl this place by night, with flashlights . . .”

'Capricious and Leaking'

“[T]here is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before.”

The Irish critic Robert Lynd (1879-1949) is writing in the title essay of his 1921 collection The Pleasures of Ignorance. Naturally, I couldn’t remember which essay by Montaigne he cited but logically enough I found the passage in “Of Books”:

 

“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole . . .”

I had a similar experience recently when looking up something I had written on Anecdotal Evidence eighteen years ago. I quickly found it but in the same post I referred to another book I have no recollection of having read. The title and even the author’s name are blanks in memory. Lynd would understand:

“I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. I can read Hamlet itself and The Pickwick Papers as though they were the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of them fades between one reading and another.”

 Even serious readers and rereaders, at least those not cursed with photographic memories, must concede that we’re left with general impressions of books in memory, not transcripts. I’ve read Conrad’s Nostromo twice but just the other day I had to search a digital version to confirm the precise wording of a passage I incompletely remembered.

 

“With a bad memory,” Lynd writes, “one can go on reading Plutarch and The Arabian Nights all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable, will stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannot leap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool on the thorns. But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authors leap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enough behind.”

 

In On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple calls Lynd “a distinguished essayist” and says his work is “very un-strident in tone” for a man so heavily involved in Irish politics. Rather, his essays are “those of an amused, sceptical observer of the follies of mankind, as well as a recorder of the small pleasures of existence.”

 

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

'It Is to Live'

Literature is a hobby, and not. It is an academic discipline, and not. It is a diversion, a distraction, an escape. But some of us can’t imagine a well-lived life without it. There’s a lot of talk about books being good for us, making us better, more empathetic people, all of which may be true but that’s not why I read. If I were asked for a definitive explanation, I would be lost. In part it’s habit, the pure momentum of a lifetime spent reading, and I see no reason to stop. I know good books make me happy, even their proximity in the same room, which sounds vaguely fetishistic. They’re companionable, friend-like – but so is a cat. There’s consolation in books – but more in loved ones. Such metaphors seem to suggest we read to be in the company of other humans, even when we’re alone. 

Theodore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple premise – the books he has been reading and the thoughts they trigger. They are not collections of reviews and some of the books he reads are admittedly lousy. He’s fond of saying that every book has something of interest in it, something that can be thought about and cherished or dismissed. In the latest installment, Not for the Proud Man Apart (Mirabeau Press, 2026), Dalrymple writes:

 

“[O]ne of the pleasures of growing old – perhaps the pleasure of growing old – is that the association of ideas with what one reads, which is never quite logical, and certainly not voluntary, becomes richer.”

 

I stretch to imagine a life without reading. My understanding of the world would be threadbare. It’s perfectly possible to be virtuous, even saint-like, having never read a book, and it's likely that most of the world’s problems are caused by literate people.

 

For several months early in the century I read nothing but books by or about Henry James. I had returned to college to complete my B.A., having dropped out thirty years before. I was writing a senior thesis on James and his “poor sensitive gentlemen,” life’s spectators, too timid or passive to do other than live an unlived life. I began to notice the peculiar regularity with which benches appear in his novels and stories, often as a refuge for such characters.

 

Madame de Mauves in her eponymous story occupies a bench on the terrace at Saint-Germaine-en-Laye when she is introduced to Longmore. Frederick Winterbourne is seated on a bench outside the hotel at Vevey when he first meets Daisy Miller. Isabel Archer takes her place on a bench at Gardencourt during her final scene with Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady. For their only meeting outside her workplace, the unnamed heroine of “In the Cage” sits with Captain Everard on a park bench in London and announces her secret, unacknowledged devotion. Dencombe, the doomed, doubt-wracked novelist in “The Middle Years,” faints and comes under the care of Dr. Hugh while on a bench at the seaside. Stransom suffers his apparently fatal attack on a chapel bench in front of his altar at the conclusion of “The Altar of the Dead.” John Marcher twice takes his seat on a bench in “The Beast in the Jungle,” James’ greatest story.

 

It’s thesis fodder, I know, of no interest to anyone. But by reading James I became aware of the ways people use park benches – for lovers’ trysts, as a place for tired parents to watch their kids, as a public sanctuary for old people. I consulted Jane Jacobs on the importance of urban parks. I experienced no colossal epiphany. I just made life a little more interesting.

 

Henry Oliver writes about books with love and without grandiosity. In “Literature as Part of Life,” a recent essay at The Common Reader, he writes: “To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are.”

'The Sudden Erection of Your Small Dorsal Hairs'

The medical technician performing the echocardiogram asked me to lie on my side, not “dorsally.” I thought first of the triangular fin on the back of a porpoise. Then I thought of Nabokov’s 1966 interview with Alfred J. Appel, who asks, “Do you think literary criticism is at all purposeful, and if so, what kind of criticism would you point to?” He replies: 

“My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on ‘ideas.’ Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the ‘how’ above the ‘what’ but do not let it be confused with the ‘so what.’ Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.”

 

The reference to “small dorsal hairs” is characteristic of Nabokov’s imagination – physical, playful, precise. He was a lepidopterist. His remark  reminds me of the test for poetry A.E. Housman proposed in the Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge (Nabokov’s alma mater) in 1933, published as “The Name and Nature of Poetry”: “Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”

 

Such sensitivity and openness to a text is part of the “personal talent” Nabokov commends. He endorses in critics and other readers sensitivity mingled with attention to detail and independence of thought. So much criticism is written in lockstep with prevailing fashion. Janet Lewis, in a poem from 1930, “Lines to a Kitten” (Poems Old and New 1918-1978), describes her cat as a “morsel of suavity.” It sits on her knee and intently watches a fly six feet across the room:

 

“Only the great

And you, can dedicate

The attention so to one small thing.”

'A Collection of Good Books'

“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.”

Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statement or evidence of “interleckchul” (Flannery O’Connor’s spelling) status are comically pretentious. Aldous Huxley published his essay “If My Library Burned Tonight” in the November 1947 issue of House and Garden magazine (!). He posits a fire that destroys his library: “[A]s an emergency measure, in the first few weeks after our hypothetical fire, I shall buy myself only the most indispensable aids to mental health and security.”

Many of Huxley’s choices are admirably predictable: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, Dante. He doesn’t select obscure titles merely to show off – a common scam among bloggers and other readers. Nor does he sanctify even those he chooses: “There will be Wordsworth because he is one of the forces of nature, and this in spite of the fact that he could write worse than anybody and that, after Milton and Dante, he was probably the least sympathetic of the great poets.” Donne, Baudelaire, Yeats and Eliot follow.

Among novelists: Proust, Joyce, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens. A few debatable surprises: Stendahl, Choderlos de Laclos. Benjamin Constant, Fielding, Voltaire. Again, Huxley asserts winningly personal criticism: “. . . Swift, perennially comic and a misanthrope whose distaste for the human race finds in every successive year of our history new and ever more hideous justifications. As for Smollett – no; my sense of humor is not robust enough to rejoice unreservedly in syphilis and broken legs.” Trollope, yes; Goethe, Scott, Thackery, no. With Flaubert, a surprise: “Bouvard et Pecuchet, however, will be among the first books to be re-bought. . . . Compared with it, Swift’s Advice to Servants and Polite Conversation are mere Theocritean idylls.” D.H. Lawrence? Huxley, a hearty yea. Kurp, nay. His endorsement of Conrad is reluctant.

Next, essays and other forms of nonfiction. Montaigne and Pascal, of course. Bacon and Balthazar Gracian. A nice surprise is Huxley’s inclusion of Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, which he calls “the beautiful expression of that supernatural joy which is one of the fruits of the spirit.” Hume, Johnson, Coleridge (“only in his notebooks and his Aids to Reflection”), Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay (“who writes like a military band and is the best possible reading for a rainy afternoon”), Emerson (a stentorian Kurp “nay”), Bagehot, Saint-Beuve, Arnold, Ruskin, Schopenhauer. A polite and welcome partial-dismissal of Virginia Woolf follows. The letters of Keats and the Goncourt Journals.

Conspicuous omissions: Greek and Roman writers except for Homer, Sterne, Leopardi, Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, Henry James, Chekhov, Auden. Huxley closes with a line from a Matthew Arnold sonnet:

“‘What props, thou ask’st, in these bad days my mind?’ One of the answers to Arnold’s curiously unpronounceable question remains today what it has been ever since man first invented the art of writing: a collection of good books.”

[Thanks to Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books for alerting me to this essay. Isaac has published fifteen Huxley titles.]

'And He Disappeared'

On the morning of August 5, 1763, Dr. Johnson accompanied Boswell on the stage-coach that would carry him to the port of Harwich. Then twenty-two, Boswell would be taking the packet-boat to Utrecht in the Netherlands, where he would study law. The two men – Johnson was fifty-three – had met less than three months earlier. Johnson would never have children of his own but already he had developed a paternal devotion to his future biographer. He schooled Boswell the way he schools the rest of us: 

“Next day we got to Harwich, to dinner; and my passage in the packet-boat to Helvoetsluys being secured, and my baggage put on board, we dined at our inn by ourselves. I happened to say, it would be terrible if he should not find a speedy opportunity of returning to London, and be confined in so dull a place. Johnson. ‘Don’t, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. It would not be terrible, though I were to be detained some time here.’ The practice of using words of disproportionate magnitude, is, no doubt, too frequent every where . . .”

 

What follows may be my favorite scene in all of Boswell’s Life. I’m touched every time I read it. Boswell could be a whoring drunkard but here his reverence for Johnson overflows and his prose -- little words for big matters -- rises to the occasion:

 

“My revered friend walked down with me to the beach, where we embraced and parted with tenderness, and engaged to correspond by letters. I said, ‘I hope, Sir, you will not forget me in my absence.’ Johnson. ‘Nay, Sir, it is more likely you should forget me, than that I should forget you.’ As the vessel put out to sea, I kept my eyes upon him for a considerable time, while he remained rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner; and at last I perceived him walk back into the town, and he disappeared.”

'The Oxford Book of Depressing Verse'

“Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair.” 

I’ve never spent much time reading Aldous Huxley – Brave New World in junior-high school, Crome Yellow a little later, then, inevitably, The Doors of Perception, when it was a cult book for many of my generation. I remember almost nothing about any of them and recall his fiction as idea-driven, often a giveaway for a stillborn story. In On the Ivory Stages (Mirbeau, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple says of The Olive Tree and Other Essays (1936): “Huxley was a wonderful essayist: amusing, erudite and opinionated (who wants to read an essayist who is always fair and judicious?).”

 

Thanks to Dalrymple, I’ve been reading Huxley’s first collection, On the Margin: Notes and Essays (1923), and may re-evaluate at least a portion of his body of work. I had never suspected Huxley of having a sense of humor. The passage above is from the essay “How the Days Draw In!”:

 

“Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I hardly know. Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic.”

 

Amusing and timely. Even better, he plans to include in his anthology one of my favorite poets, championed by Yvor Winters and Thom Gunn: “A duly adequate amount of space, for example, will be allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke [1554-1628]. For dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing up against life and human destiny at the end of his ‘Mustapha’:

 

“Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,

Born under one law to another bound,

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws,

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

 

“Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?

Nature herself doth her own self deflower

To hate those errors she herself doth give....

If nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easy ways to good.”

 

Huxley adds: “Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville gloomily denounces them.” He then quotes an excerpt from Greville’s Alaham: A Tragedy. The next candidate for inclusion in Huxley’s anthology is a seventeenth-century Frenchman unknown to me, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, followed by these familiar lines:

 

“The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee:

Timor mortis conturbat me:—”

 

The Latin, “fear of death disturbs me,” is probably best known from “Lament for the Makers” by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1530).