'Failed in Life and Love'

“Usually he took for his subjects those who failed in life and love. He wrote about the derelict and downtrodden, the old and bereft. Who wanted to read about successful alderman, anyway?”

As a newspaper reporter, “celebrities” never interested me, the politicians and captains of industry hungry for headlines. Too often they sought the “glamour” a reporter might supply them, even in the provincial pages of a smalltown newspaper in the Midwest. Smugness and entitlement are repellant. At the same time I resisted romanticizing the plight of the outsiders, the ready-made poignancy that comes with poverty and failure. It was impossible to avoid both types, of course. The best I could do was maintain an uneasy neutrality, sticking as close as possible to the facts, sorting them out and resisting the effortless clichés. 

The comment at the top is by Scott Donaldson in his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and I think it accounts for my love for the best of Robinson’s poems. He usually resists the romanticizing impulse, the easy route of making losers heroic. His emotional capacity is enormous but carefully regulated. He doesn’t gush. Take his sonnet “Reuben Bright” (The Children of the Night, 1897):

 

“Because he was a butcher and thereby

Did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;

For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.

 

“And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.”

 

In other hands, the conclusion might have been insufferably cheesy. The poem consists of two carefully structured sentences, loosely defined as before and after. The second flows so smoothly, in the simplest of language, that we think: Where is he going with this? A “Richard Cory”-like punchline would have been a cheap disappointment. Instead, Robinson gives us an entirely unexpected coda to a life. He makes a simple, obscure man noble in his grief.

 

Jules Renard and Robinson share similar sensibilities. Both stood on the outside, looking in. Both possessed healthy capacities for humor and irony. Neither was a rabble-rouser. Renard puts it like this in his journal on May 1, 1902: “Fame. A reputation is made with cement, mortar and liberal quantities of vulgarity.”

'Almost Great'

Henry Oliver poses an interesting question: “What should be on a list of almost Great Books?” Consider it less a critical exercise than a parlor game. Think of the books you have admired and enjoyed, and perhaps reread, that lie beyond the canonical borders, the Dante/Shakespeare/Tolstoy axis. Oliver considers his own list “personal and partial,” as it should be. Here’s my Top Ten (+ two), listed as the titles occurred to me: 

Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor (1851)

 

Whittaker Chambers: Witness (1952)

 

Anton Chekhov: Sakhalin Island (1895)

 

Charles Montagu Doughty: Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

 

A.J. Liebling: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962)

 

Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary Conversations (1824-29)

 

Ronald Knox: Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950)

 

The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024)

 

Guy Davenport: The Geography of the Imagination (1981)

 

Jonathan Swift: A Journal to Stella (1766)

 

Michael Oakeshott: Rationalism in Politics (1962)

 

James Boswell: The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

 

Walter de la Mare: Memoirs of a Midget (1921)

'An Unknown, Powerful, and Awful Truth'

“It is extraordinary how jargon intimidates; how prone we are to dismiss as irrelevant or dated that which comes unpackaged in the cellophane of current phraseology and images, and has nevertheless to represent those of a totally different era.” 

Another symptom of “presentism”: unwillingness to acquire at least a working knowledge of a new language by a writer from the past. “Acquire” is misleading. It’s not like learning Russian as an adult. “Adapt to” or “become comfortable with” are closer. A lazy reader will object to anything he is unable to instantaneously comprehend. More than fifty years ago one of my English professors complained that most of her students were unable to read anything written before Hemingway’s arrival. This came in the context of reading Tristram Shandy, which several classmates were complaining about.

 

The passage quoted above was written by the American poet Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003) in "The Masks of Walter de la Mare," published in the Fall 1978 issue of The Sewanee Review. I take her observation personally because for many years I ignored the work of de la Mare in poetry and prose largely because of the language and his interest in the mutedly uncanny. His sentences often seemed fey, fuzzy and whimsical. After all, he wrote for kids, didn’t he? I wanted hard, flinty language. Jacobsen concentrates on de la Mare’s stories, which I now acknowledge as among my favorites:

 

“What is De la Mare's primary -- and forever relevant -- premise?” she asks. “It is the premise of strangeness, and of its creature, the stranger. That stranger is the one who is suddenly caught peering at us as we pass in a dim room before an unexpected mirror.”

 

De la Mare treats strangeness realistically. That’s not a gratuitously cute paradox. His world is strange and his people are sensitive to it. It’s not like the gorefests in contemporary horror movies. I don't ever recall encountering overt violence in a de la Mare story. It’s a matter of atmosphere, of quietly puzzling, barely perceived events. Often the main character is more confused than frightened. His stories seldom feel like genre-based slumming. Jacobsen articulates this quality:

 

“De la Mare has essayed the difficult task of catching that strangeness, of examining it in its effects, of relating it to what we know and what we do not. He has done it in ghost stories (if something as ambiguous as the ghostly element in these tales can be so crudely classified); by a lovely and acid sort of fairy tale; but more often and more characteristically by his stories of those who dwell on the edge--that line which divides (or does not) reality and appearance, life and death, which he has taken for his precarious foothold.”

 

De la Mare’s language delicately delineates events our rational minds ignore or safely categorize as “odd” and then forget. Jacobsen writes:

 

“It is the truly vital, the greatly endowed with life, who are most acutely aware of death, as witness the graves, plumes, hearses, and skulls of the Elizabethans; and the bland timidity of the dreadful vocabulary tailored for Our Senior Citizens, with its Rest Homes, Golden Age Clubs, Loved Ones, and Memorial Parks. De la Mare's world -- far from being that of the sugar-spun pixies with which his nonreaders often tend to associate him [that was me] -- is one of a grim and terrifying beauty, mined by abysses, peopled with the sleepwalkers of a trustful materialism, the constant borderline of the assaults of an unknown, powerful, and awful truth.”

 

[See the late Jane Greer’s 2023 essay “‘A poet, dangerous and steep’: reintroducing Josephine Jacobsen.”]

'Enliven This Vale of Tears With a Little Fantasy'

I defy you to identify the writer being described: 

“[A]ll he really wanted to do in company was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it, to enrich and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy. The important questions of man’s relationship to God and man’s responsibility for the material and spiritual welfare of his fellow men could be left to private contemplation. The main purpose of human association was to share enjoyment of the world's absurdity.”

 

What an admirable testimonial. No, it’s not Mark Twain or P.G. Wodehouse. I’ll give you another clue: This is a son, also a writer, describing his father, and the son was himself a rather funny fellow. Both, but especially the father, were gifted writers of prose, the father one of the finest of the last century. One more sample:

 

“[He] was a small man--scarcely five foot six in his socks--and only a writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality.”

 

You’ve been reading Auberon Waugh in Will This Do?: The Memoirs of Auberon Waugh (1991) remembering Evelyn Waugh, his father, who seldom fails to make me feel good about life again if my thoughts have grown grim. There’s probably no prose in the world I admire more than his. For example, in his first and best travel book, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930), Waugh spends his first night in Paris in the Crillon, a comfortable but expensive hotel. Complaints about money – real or parodied -- are often funny. Next day, Waugh moves to a cheaper place: “My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls.”

 

Note the rhythm. The passage begins like a unpromisingly naturalistic travelogue and closes like a bear trap. Here’s the rest of the paragraph:

 

“The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through.”

 

One more sample of Waugh fils on Waugh père:

 

“The most welcome aspect of him, as a parent, was his lack of interest in his children, at any rate until they were much older and became fit subjects for gossip. So long as we were out of sight and sound, we could do whatever we wanted. In that sense, he was a permissive, even indulgent parent. At the age of nine or ten I announced that I was interested in chemistry--I never studied it at school, but neither of my parents would have known that--and wished to make some chemical experiments for Christmas. Papa thought this a capital idea, and asked for a list.

 

“Not many parents, I believe, would be prepared to give their sons of nine or ten bottles of concentrated sulphuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acid to play with unsupervised. Some will decide that this was a deliberate, Charles Addams-like plot to get rid of me, but my parents were similarly unconcerned about firearms, which presented a greater threat to everyone else. From my earliest years I stalked our 40 acres alone looking for small animals, or blasted away at targets around the house. Similarly, they were unconcerned about school rules and school reports, holding all authority in derision until the threat of expulsion brought with it the danger that children might be returned home.”

'By Other, Less Difficult, Media'

Prophecy is best left to the prophets. Writers are not a notably prescient bunch. Too often, like the rest of us, they see only what they hope for, not what the future holds. Consider the catastrophe-mongering of the late Paul Ehrlich. And yet, while hardly trying, a writer will sometimes stumble onto a keyhole into the future. Seventy years ago, Louis MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957):

 “When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?”

 

It reads like an elegy for poetry and literary culture. “Books in graveyards” recalls Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” with its “storied urn.” Traditionally, a book carved into a gravestone signified the Book of Life, awaiting review by the Heavenly Critic. Engines and epileptics “seize up,” frozen into inoperability. Ours is inarguably the age of “other, less difficult, media.” Critics have been calling our time “post-literate” at least since the Sixties. It’s a happy new reality for some (those who prefer their media “less difficult”), grievous for others (all who live by the word).

 

MacNeice pays poetry and the written word a splendid compliment. When the world is no longer “framed in words,” when the best eyes and ears of the past are no longer consulted, when we presume to confront the world in all our arrogant solitude, what remains?  A weirdly mutated world of “wingless birds.” Without words, grass is no longer “green” but something less.

 

In his 1935 essay “Poetry To-day” (Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, 1987), MacNeice had already addressed posterity, saying it “affects to put dead poets and movements in their place; to tell us their real significance and cancel out their irrelevances.” Such presumption is, he says, “tidy and saves thinking.” MacNeice rises to eloquent common sense:

 

“If we do our duty by the present moment, posterity can look after itself. To try to anticipate the future is to make the present past; whereas it should already be on our conscience that we have made the past past. We fail to appreciate a great poet like Horace because we don’t let him puzzle us.”

 

MacNeice failed to foresee his own death at age fifty-five a mere six years after “To Posterity.”

'The Present Is an Age of Talkers'

Austin Dobson in A Bookman’s Budget (1917) claims the longest sentence ever written in English can be found in William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age; Or Contemporary Portraits (1825), in the essay devoted to “Mr. Coleridge.” Dobson tells us: “Writing of Coleridge, he contrives to spin out a single sentence to one hundred and ten lines. It contains the word ‘and’ ninety-seven times, with only one semi-colon.” 

You can find this tour de force of bloviation about midway through the essay, with the paragraph beginning “Next, he was engaged with Hartley’s tribes of mind . . .” and concluding with the line quoted from Coleridge: “In Philarmonia’s undivided dale!” By my count that’s about 840 words. Hazlitt is usually a forceful writer. His sentences have the quality he most admired, gusto. I take this uncharacteristic monstrosity as a parody of Coleridge’s gaseous manner. Hazlitt begins his essay like this: “The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers,” and continues, “If Mr. Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer . . .”

 

Hazlitt is the poet-in-prose of resentment and humiliation, about which he wrote not theoretically but from unhappy experience. He was ridiculous about women and forever scrambling after money. His sentences glow with autobiographical heat. He even managed to alienate some of his closest friends. His readers appreciate his prickliness. Hazlitt’s indulgence in linguistic gigantism, of course, was surpassed with the coming of modernism. Consider Molly Bloom’s monologue and dozens of serpentine sentences in Proust.

'I Find Out How Little I Know'

Pessimism has its charms, chief among them being the reduced likelihood of disappointment. Even on the diminished scale of an individual life, utopia is toddler-level delusion. I still remember the cover of the April 1970 issue of Ramparts magazine, which proclaimed “Utopia Now!” I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and already knew this was dangerous nonsense. Here is a poem by the late American poet Kelly Cherry, “History” (Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems, 2007): 

“It is what, to tell the truth, you sometimes feel

That you have had enough of, though of course

You do not really mean that, since you recall

It well enough to know things could be worse

And probably are going to get that way

But still want a long and memorable life, which means

Having to learn more of it day by day,

The names and dates of all the kings and queens

And those less famous who ruled the territory

Known as your heart and now are gone, by one

Dark route or another, from the plot of your story.

But you write on, and are your own best Gibbon,

And read on, this monumental subject being

The decline and fall of almost everything.”

 

Personal history and the bigger history are natural analogues. Reviewing our lives, we fashion periods, epochs designated by the people in our life, jobs, illness or health, geography, happiness or misery. We flatter ourselves, understandably, fancying we are little Gibbons, assuming no one else knows us better than ourselves.

 

I remember learning some years ago that among Gibbon’s admirers was Iggy Pop, né James Newell Osterberg, Jr., leader of the proto-punk band The Stooges. In 1995, Pop published in Classics Ireland a brief essay titled “Caesar Lives,” in which he recounts his reading of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first in an abridged edition and later the full six volumes. Pop lists five benefits from reading Gibbon, the most admirable being, “I find out how little I know.” 

 

In Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (Ludovika University Press, 2025), Nicholas Tate acknowledges Pop’s essay and writes:

 

“It was not just the admiration that one hard-working artist had for a ‘guy’ who had ‘stuck with things’ or that the cameo illustration of Gibbon on the cover made him look like ‘a heavy dude’, but also the beauty of the language, the sense of being freed from the tyranny of the present, and the humbling revelation of ‘how little I know’. If Gibbon got it all wrong and is looking down from some other place, one can imagine the broad smile on the heavy dude’s chubby face – Gibbon was no prude – at the thought that two hundred years later his magnum opus was being read with great pleasure, to the accompaniment of drugs and whisky, around 4 a.m. in cheap motels somewhere in the American South.”