'Anthologies of Miscellaneous Literary Passages'

What the sophisticated and cloddish alike dismiss as “trivia” is often the spice that keeps life’s banquet palatable. One revels in knowing G.K. Chesterton’s wife’s maiden name, the color of Franz Kafka’s eyes and the nature of Goldbach’s Conjecture. I’ll never earn a dime knowing these things and they will never grant me longevity or cure my arthritis but knowing them comforts me. When I begin to understand something I can place it in context and relate it to other bits of knowledge. Trivia may be interesting for its own sake, like finding a gold coin on an empty beach, but even a jury-rigged system of taxonomy permits us to fit it into our knowledge of the world and fend off chaos for another day. Guy Davenport once told an interviewer: 

“My range of interests may be accounted for by my being 75. It’s really a very narrow range. There ought to be a psychology that studies indifference, the ‘flat affect’ of non-response. Response is, beyond the usual culturally-trained and biological reactions to the things of the world, the result of education carried on by curiosity.”

 

Let’s consider a writer much admired by Davenport, the English clergyman, conversationalist and wit Sydney Smith (1771-1845). In 1804-06, Smith delivered a series of lectures at the Royal Institution later published as Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy. In it he writes: “Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.”

 

That stands as good, superficially perplexing advice. I haven’t read Smith’s lectures but I found Daniel George Bunting’s reference to them in Lonely Pleasures (Jonathan Cape, 1954). Writing under the pen name Daniel George (1890-1967) , he was an English poet, critic and industrious anthologist whom I learned of from yet another writer, Aaron James, in an essay devoted to him last year in The Lamp. James focuses on George’s 1938 anthology, All in a Maze, and puts it in context:

 

“Anthologies of miscellaneous literary passages experienced a kind of vogue in the middle decades of the twentieth century, stemming ultimately from the Renaissance traditions of the commonplace book or the florilegium; surviving commonplace books by writers such as Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden show that writers of the era still found it practically useful to compile short passages from other authors for their personal reference. In the age before Google, reference books of this sort were an essential aid to research in literature, with scholars relying on books of quotations, concordances, and thematically ordered collections of extracts to supplement their memories of a large body of literature.”

 

My university library has the two books by George mentioned above in its collection. Lonely Pleasures (a readily misunderstood title) comes with a parodic index, as explained by James:

 

“[A] collection of essays and book reviews, features a formidable mock index, a parody of scholarly precision (‘Acton, Lord, and atomic power, 255 . . . Adam, his eldest daughter’s hat exhibited, 85 . . . Eliot, T. S., his feet among those I have sat at, 14 . . . and the bottoms of his trousers, 257 . . .’) But to understand the point of the satire we must recall that, in the days before computers, the mock index of Lonely Pleasures would have been done by hand, and would have been just as time-consuming and painstaking to produce as the index of a scholarly work of history.”

 

George is a sort of quiet humorist who takes books seriously – a species long extinct. He seems to have read everything and is not the sort of pompous reader who arranges the books he reads like trophies on the mantel piece. I owe much of my education to anthologies, especially when I was young, and George enables me to carry on that tradition. In a piece from 1947 on Christmas books, collected in Lonely Pleasures, he writes:

 

“For as long as I can remember I can I have been given books for Christmas. Some I still treasure – a Barnaby Rudge presented to me when I was about nine, and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets when I was twelve. Johnson began, I remember, with the life of Cowley in which he referred to Dr. Sprat, ‘an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature’. At twelve I tended to confuse Dr. Sprat with his namesake who could eat no fat, and I am still not quite able to take him seriously. In any event I was probably too young for Johnson; the book remained unread for three years.”

'The Magic of Association'

I found a series of digital photographs my brother had sent me years ago. There was no context, not even people, just scenes from the yard outside the house where we lived as kids, mostly flowers and trees. The first was a closeup of lapis lazuli-blue morning glories growing up the wrought-iron railing my father had built on the front porch. That’s where I first sowed the seeds in the early sixties, training the vines up the railing, a tradition my brother later continued. I instantly found myself in memory back in 1962 or so, where I saw the pew-like wooden bench on the porch, the mailbox with the raiseable metal flag painted red, and the silver maples in the neighbor’s front yard – all long gone. This internal scene was almost spookily photographic.

I’m assuming the American poet James Russell Lowell (1819-91) is largely forgotten today, except perhaps for his work as an abolitionist and a line in “The Vision of Sir Launfal”: “What is so rare as a day in June?” In his day, Lowell was an influential critic, essayist and editor of The Atlantic Monthly. A collection of his prose, The Function of the Poet, was published posthumously in 1920. In the 1855 title essay Lowell writes:

 

“The square root of -x is nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day of childhood.”

 

The scent of Lowell’s flower sounds like Proust’s madeleine. The photo of a flower did the same thing for me.

'Willingness to Hear'

“When, in the course of a day, a man has read a newspaper, written a letter, and not wronged anyone, that is more than enough.”

 

Such modesty is often mocked as timidity or lack of ambition. It’s the rationalization of laziness or even cowardice, we’re told. As Americans, it’s our patriotic obligation to lead the “strenuous life.” I have my doubts. A Rooseveltian life – busting trusts and hunting elephants – no doubt has its rewards but not for all of us. In fact, many of the problems we read about in newspapers are caused by people being strenuous.

 

The passage above, written by Jules Renard in his journal on this date, November 15, in 1900, is not strictly autobiographical. Renard had a family and worked hard at writing. The individual he describes reminds me of Clyde Johnson, a man I knew in Richmond, Ind., when I worked for that city’s newspaper (1983-85). Clyde was a Quaker, the first of his faith I got to know fairly well. Clyde was hospitable. His house near Earlham College was always open, whether to junkies, operas buffs or newspaper reporters exiled to Indiana. Clyde was quiet. You knew that when he spoke, it was something thoughtful, deeply considered and utterly true. I don’t recall him ever getting angry, complaining or giving someone an order. He gave the impression of being quietly fearless.

 

Dr. Johnson in one of his Rambler essays describes Clyde Johnson as I knew him:

 

“The modest man is a companion of a yet lower rank, whose only power of giving pleasure is not to interrupt it. The modest man satisfies himself with peaceful silence, which all his companions are candid enough to consider as proceeding not from inability to speak, but willingness to hear.”

 

[The quoted passage at the top is drawn from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Civilization Is Memory'

If “civilization is memory,” as Hugh Kenner maintains in The Pound Era (1971), then amnesia risks abetting barbarism. He devotes the chapter titled “Privacies” to the first generation of Modernists, born in the 1880s – Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, et al. They came to maturity in the years immediately preceding the Great War. Here’s that chapter’s full final paragraph: “Their destiny should have been to people the Vortex. Instead it was to maintain continuity. Civilization is memory, and after 1918 effective memory was almost lost.” 

We laud the radical innovations of Eliot and Joyce (Modernism is virtually synonymous with a new way of going about literature) while forgetting the immersion of these men in Western culture. They had read everything and do not represent a break or a repudiation; rather, “continuity.” As Eliot puts it, personally and historically: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

 

Clive James dubs our new, proudly willful ignorance “cultural amnesia.” In the introduction to his 2007 book of that title, James writes: “If the humanism that makes civilization is to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.” We can’t blame the fashionable presentism of our present age on a world war. The causes are complicated but boil down to politics, technology and fallible human nature.

 

On Sunday I had a long telephone conversation with Donna Fricke, who was one of my English professors at Bowling Green State University more than half a century ago. Donna is eighty-two, retired and living in Maine. I was indifferent to most of my teachers but Donna introduced me to Tristram Shandy, Tobias Smollett, Boswell and Johnson, and Jonathan Swift’s poetry, among other things. I took several classes from her including “The Eighteenth-Century English Novel.” The reading list for that course included Don Quixote (seventeenth century, Spanish) and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (twentieth century, American). From Donna I learned that literature need not be academic, that reading is not segregated from life but coexistent with it, one of its essential components.

 

“It’s so good to have somebody I can talk about books with,” Donna said. “So many of the people I knew are dead.”

'Not Impressed by Bombast or Lofty Tone'

“One of the keenest pleasures of reading derives from being in the close company of someone more thoughtful than you but whose thoughts, owing to the courtesy of clarity, are handsomely accessible to you.”

I’m reading in a leisurely fashion the notebooks of Paul Valéry again, the beautiful five-volume set translated by various hands and published by Peter Lang between 2000 and 2010. For half a century, Valéry started his days by writing in notebooks, eventually filling more than 28,000 pages before his death in 1945. Though best known as a poet, Valéry judged his prose notebooks his “true oeuvre.”

The passage at the top, which I wish I had written, is from “The Intimate Abstraction of Paul Valéry,” Joseph Epstein’s 2003 review of the Cahiers/Notebooks. It’s his review’s penultimate sentence. Epstein identifies one of my principal reasons for reading and, by extension, what I look for in literature. Naturally, I seek the company of people, in books as in life, more intelligent, articulate and perspicacious than I. Plenty of writers, even some good ones, don’t meet those standards, which is never sufficient reason to not read them.

Epstein tempers his quest for thoughtfulness with a lovely phrase, “the courtesy of clarity.” Confused writing suggests confused thinking. If the sense is tangled, so is the thought. To write that way is discourteous, a show of contempt for the reader. The chief source of the pleasure we take in Valéry’s prose is its concision coupled with precision. Sometimes the level of abstraction at which he writes makes understanding difficult and prompts rereading several times. But his prose is never sloppy or confused.

From the second volume of Notebooks/Cahiers, a passage from 1917:

“Write for the ‘intelligent’ reader –

“For someone who is not impressed by bombast or lofty tone.

“For someone who will: either live your idea or destroy it or reject it – for someone to whom you give supreme power over your idea; and who has the power to skip over it , go beyond it, let it drop; and to think the opposite, and not believe it --, not go along with your intention.”

[Epstein’s review is collected in In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage (2007).]

'So Much for the Philosophy of Old Age'

On New Year’s Eve many years ago in Albany, N.Y., a friend and I attended a concert by a traditional Irish band in a church basement. It was part of a city-sponsored holiday festival. Most of the music was instrumental, performed on fiddle, tin whistle, flute, uilleann pipes and button accordion, and it inspired most of the dancers in the crowded room. We stayed for hours. As midnight approached, the music stopped and one of the musicians, a woman, stepped forward and recited several poems by William Butler Yeats. I’ve always favored the later Yeats, beginning with Responsibilities (1918), and including his masterpiece “Among School Children.” I remember she recited “When You Are Old”: 

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

“How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

 

“And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

 

I remember being at first disappointed. Yeats wrote the poem in 1891, supposedly after Maud Gonne rejected his marriage proposal. He published it the following year in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics. Since first reading Yeats as a kid, I had judged the poem sentimental. Hearing it aloud helped change my mind. Yeats mingles disappointment, hurt and a subtle anger. He wrote it the year he turned twenty-six and Gonne was twenty-five. I heard it read aloud while in my thirties and being "old and grey and full of sleep" seemed like a distant abstraction. Certain works evolve as we age. Critical judgments are not made of granite. Here is George Santayana writing to a friend on this date, November 15, in 1945:

 

“Senex ad senem de senectute scribo: yet we are much older than Cicero ever was and also much more recent, so that we have a double chance of being wiser, having more experience of life, individual and collective. And the charm I find in old age—for I was never happier than I am Now—comes of having learned to live in the moment, and thereby in eternity; and this means recovering a perpetual youth, since nothing can be fresher than each day as it dawns and changes.”

 

Santayana paraphrases a tag from Cicero’s De Amicitia: “An old man, I write to an old man about old age.” The philosopher is eighty-two. He continues:

 

“When we have no expectations, the actual is a continual free gift, but much more placidly accepted than it could be when we were children; for then the stage was full of trap doors and unimaginable transformations that kept us always alarmed, eager, and on the point of tears; whereas now we have wept our tears out, we know what can pop up of those trap doors, and what kind of shows those transformations can present; and we remember many of them with affection, and watch the new ones that still come with interest and good will, but without false claims for our own future.”

 

Next sentence: “So much for the philosophy of old age.”

'And Probably Permanently'

Even good writers require resuscitation. We can’t count on critics or publishers to keep them and their work alive. That’s the reader’s job. You and I can reanimate Edward Dahlberg and Janet Lewis simply by buying or borrowing their books, reading them and sharing our pleasure with other readers, who in turn may pass along the good news. Even in our aliterate age, someone’s still reading Chekhov and Proust. But less exalted names can always use a boost. Take the American poet L.E. Sissman (1928-76), dead from cancer at age forty-eight. 

I’ve been reading Sissman’s poems and essays for more than half a century but returning to them today is accompanied by memories of another among his admirers, my late friend D.G. Myers, dead from cancer in 2014. Go to A Commonplace Blog and find many references to Sissman, including here and here. It’s good to see another writer has remembered Sissman. “A Sort of Boston Adventure: Thinking About a Fine Poet, L.E. Sissman” was published by Peter LaSalle earlier this year in New England Review.

 

I admire LaSalle’s devotion to Sissman, the pleasure he still takes in familiar poems, but there’s a little too much LaSalle in his twenty-page essay/memoir. Read him for the scattered mentions of Sissman:

 

“In essence and overall, his work captures the character of a poet who remained outside the circles of the competitive and often backbitingly contained world of the Boston poetry scene at the time, a loner in the field . . .; the general opinion of Sissman as a person is stated well, I’d say, in a description by friend and admirer John Updike; just three telling words: ‘a decent man.’”

 

LaSalle quotes a poem from Sissman’s first book, Dying: An Introduction (1968). “A Disappearance in West Cedar Street” recounts a rundown apartment in Boston where he lived as a young man. Another resident, a painter named Shriner, has disappeared:

 

“Did absolutely nobody appear

When they interred his box in Potter’s Field

(I would have been there.) Did nobody yield

A summer hat, a winter thought, a tear?

 

“Or did he make it to New York? Did his

Ship dock at last at Fifty-seventh Street?

Did angels, agents, and collectors meet

His price for life? Is that where Shriner is?”

 

In the final stanza, the disappearance is left unexplained, yet another mystery of big city life:

 

“Grey curtains flutter. A tall smell of pork

Ascends the stairs. The landlady below

Tells me in broken English she don’t know.

Did Shriner die or make it to New York?”

 

I sense a comparable mystery about Sissman. Where did he go? Why isn’t he read as often as dozens of celebrated mediocrities?  I’m reminded of the column Sissman wrote after the death of W.H. Auden and published in the January 1974 issue of the Atlantic:

 

“The day after W. H. Auden’s unexpected and untimely death last fall, I was incensed to see a suggestion in the New York Times to the effect that the poet’s work might not outlive him. Now, I’m prejudiced in favor of Auden — as you will abundantly see in the course of this article—but I think that any objective and fair-minded critic would allow the likelihood that his work, in large part, will go on being read, and go on being influential, for many years to come. And probably permanently.”

 

[Find all of Sissman's poems in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978). A selection of his monthly essays in the Atlantic have been published in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the ’70s (1975).]