'I Know No Pleasure Like That of Books'

All I ask is that a book be well-written and teach me something – two conditions admittedly rather vague and subjective. This is no critical credo and I’m not proposing conditions others should follow. I’m reacting to a second reading of a book I first read more than twenty years ago and found interesting: The Book of Disquiet (trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin, 2003) by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese poet famous for turning out poems by a cast of heteronyms. 

Pessoa’s book might be likened to Giacomo Leopardi’s much superior prose masterwork, Zibaldone, published in its entirety in English for the first time in 2013. The Italian title is customarily translated “hodge-podge” or “miscellany,” though “grab bag” or “gallimaufry” might lend an appropriately vernacular touch to what is, after all, a vast gathering of fragments. The same applies to The Book of Disquiet. Both are characteristically modern in being unified only by each author’s sensibility. They are books so elastic and seductive that you can open them anywhere, read a passage at random and lose yourself for hours.

 

Pessoa, however, is too often guilty of intellectual cuteness. He sometimes comes off like an overweening graduate student showing off for his adviser. He’s overly fond of paradoxes and likes to formulate contrarieties that we know he doesn’t believe, only to vex the reader. Consider this:

 

“To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.”

 

The first sentence is inarguable. The second is true but of dubious importance. The third is nonsense. Now try this:

 

“I know no pleasure like that of books, and I read very little. Books are introductions to dreams, and no introductions are necessary for one who freely and naturally enters into conversation with them. I’ve never been able to lose myself in a book; as I’m reading, the commentary of my intellect or imagination has always hindered the narrative flow. After a few minutes it’s I who am writing, and what I write is nowhere to be found.”

 

Here the sagacity and nonsense are mixed. The final sentence is pure show-off pretentiousness. One more:

 

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.”

 

No, to write is to remember. Writing and reading are the opposite of slumber, though both can enable self-forgetting. Now I realize my first sentence above is a variation on what Dr. Johnson wrote in his review of Soame Jenyns’ A Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1756): “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

 

Pessoa is still occasionally able to rouse my enthusiasm, as when he writes of my favorite Dickens novel: “One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)”

'The Long Habit of Living'

“Perfect weather. And to think that on such a day people are still dying!” 

Sometimes I suspect the human imagination is by nature Gothic, though histrionic may be a better description. We like to dramatize things. Death is supposed to occur in the shadows, away from the reassuring touch of sunlight. Thunder cracks, rain fills the streets, tall trees fall.

 

The day my brother died in a Cleveland hospice was beautifully sunny, about 80 degrees, no rain, low humidity, a perfect day in August near the shore of Lake Erie. I had opened the curtains so the afternoon sunlight could fall on Ken. He had been unconscious for several days but he would have enjoyed it. I’ve just seen a characteristic photo of my brother – almost smiling, head cocked ironically, Old Testament-looking -- posted by our friend Gary Dumm.

 

The passage at the top is the April 20, 1909 entry in Jules Renard’s Journal. His tone, like Ken’s, is essentially comic but also a little cranky. Renard’s other entry that day: “My faithfulness as a husband, a comical thing, which adds to my literary reputation.”

 

Mostly for the sheer pleasure of his prose I’m reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial  (1658) again:

  

“If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer conformity into it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying; when avarice makes us the sport of death, when even David grew politickly cruel, and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age.”

 

[The Renard passages are from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'A Beautiful and Consoling Thought'

The only speeding ticket I have ever received was issued by a police officer in Bellevue, Wa., about fifteen years ago. He clocked me doing thirty-five on a street with a posted speed limit of twenty-five mph. It’s almost embarrassing, so pitiful an infraction. I was careless, not in a hurry. I’m virtually religious about obeying the speed limit. As a reporter, I once rode in a police cruiser in Indiana with a sheriff’s deputy who was chasing a hit-and-run driver. I peered over her shoulder and the speedometer seemed to read about 130 mph. She later confirmed her top speed was 133 mph. She caught the guy and I nearly soiled myself. Any residual fantasy about imitating James Dean had vanished. 

On April 19, 1936, Max Beerbohm broadcast a BBC radio talk titled “Speed.” He begins with an anecdote about the poet W.E. Henley (1849-1903), who was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis at age twelve and his left leg was amputated below the knee. Last year at my fifty-fifth high school reunion, I spoke with my eighth-grade English teacher and thanked her for having us memorize “Invictus.” Together we recited “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.”

 

Beerbohm recounts the one-legged Henley’s love of riding in a fast car: “At last Henley went swinging over hill and dale. The Mercédes was for him a glorious revelation, an apocalypse. His Muse vibrantly responded . . .”

 

Beerbohm sees speed infecting every aspect of life, even dining: “They certainly eat much faster; insomuch that if I am invited to meet some of them at luncheon or dinner I find at each course that I have only just begun when they have all finished; and when I reach my home I ask, ‘Are there any biscuits?’” And he goofs on mock-outrage, always an amusing spectacle:

 

“We are constantly told by the Press that we must be ‘traffic-conscious’. But there is really no need to tell us we must be so. How could we be otherwise? How not be concussion-apprehensive, annihilation-evasive, and similar compound words? When the children of this generation, brought up in fear, shall have become adult, what sort of nervous ailments will their progeny have, one wonders? Many of the present children won't grow up at all. Very old people and very young people form the majority of those who are annually slaughtered upon our roads.”

 

My old speeding ticket, though deserved, now seems absurd. Beerbohm consoles me by noting the Earth rotates at a rate of between 1,037 and 1,670 mph. The essayist puts it at 1,110 mph, and concludes:

 

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed a beautiful and a consoling thought—a thought for you to sleep on, to dream of. Sleep well. Dream beautifully. In fact—Good Night.”

 

[“Speed” is collected in Mainly on the Air (Heinemann, 1946; rev. 1957).]

'Congealed Violence'

"If architecture is frozen music (and I think it is), then fortifications are congealed violence. That is to say they are the best sort of violence, silent, thoughtful, passive, only to be unleashed by an aggressive enemy. I rather like them. They are, in a way, a form of just war. There is much to be learned from them.” 

In “A Piffling Show,” a blog post on The Lamp website, Peter Hitchens uses Goethe’s well-known description of architecture to recall his own childhood fascination with “Palmerston’s Follies,” the Victorian-era fortifications built near his home in Portsmouth, England. “[T]he fear they embodied,” he writes, “and the strength of the power they were built to resist, were thrilling.”

 

Boys love “playing army,” a harmless opportunity to run around and bloodlessly defeat the enemy – in my younger years, Germans and “Japs.” Children inherit the mythology of their fathers’ wars. In suburban Cleveland, we had no military fortifications. No one, I assume, thought Parma Heights worth defending. A former chicken coop belonging to my long-dead paternal grandmother stood down the hill behind our house. It was always known as “the shanty,” and we used it as a sort of Alamo – one set of boys outside throwing rocks, crabapples and Osage oranges (“monkey balls”) and another inside, trying not to get brained.

 

Hitchens’ essay reminded me of August 1963. While on a family vacation, my brother and I visited Gettysburg a month after the battle’s centenary with one goal in mind: to locate Devil’s Den, famously photographed by Timothy O’Sullivan with a dead Confederate sniper and his rifle conveniently lying in front of a stone wall – what passed for a fortification. We had seen the photograph, known as “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,” in a magazine, probably National Geographic. I was almost eleven, Ken was eight. Nothing else mattered, not even the scene of Pickett’s charge, as recalled by William Faulkner in Intruder in the Dust: “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863 . . .” Of course, we were staunch Union sympathizers.

 

We searched all afternoon in the August heat for that scene without success. We looked for that wall of stones between two boulders. We were disappointed but not as seriously as we would have been had we known that the photo was staged by O’Sullivan. The same corpse was photographed at several sites around the battlefield. The rifle is not one used by sharpshooters and it appears in photographs taken at other locations. Scholars debate the identity of the dead soldier but he remains anonymous.

'His Passage Paid Home Free'

Late in 2024 I was browsing in old issues of The American Scholar from the era when Joseph Epstein was the editor. In the Winter 1986 issue I found a poem by Edward Case titled “As Grammarians”:

 

“This life which is a sentence

Is also a declaration.

We make the sense of it

In our own terms.

As grammarians

We assert our meaning,

In what we decline,

In what we affirm,

In the conjugation of love,

In the predicates

And imperatives

And ambiguities

Of prosaic choice

We essay briefly

To define ourselves

Before the stop.”

 

Why had I never heard of Case? Long before 1986, free verse had taken over like an alien species of weed and virtually snuffed out the formal natives. Case’s poem was witty – a series of near-puns playing off, Elizabethan-style, the implications of “grammar.” And yet there was nothing archaic about the language and nothing slangy. Not a syllable is out of place. No filler and nothing to excess. It left me wanting to read more by this guy. Why had I never heard of Case? Here is the tagline accompanying the poem:

   

“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”

 

I was shocked and saddened. Case had never published a collection of his poetry “Before the stop.” I found a scattering of his other poems, several as accomplished as “As Grammarians.” So I wrote about him, hoping to read more of his work and learn what had happened to this gifted unknown poet. I soon heard from James Case, the late poet’s son, a recently retired architect living in New Jersey. “He was one of the most gifted people I’ve ever known,” he wrote. We subsequently spoke many times and exchanged emails as he resolved to publish that “collection of recent work.”

 

In a resolute act of filial devotion, James has worked for the last year and a half editing, introducing, annotating, designing and publishing The Business Of The Dancer (Kaseowitz Publishing, 2026).  Full disclosure: I proof-read the book several times at James’ request and tried to answer his questions when I felt competent to do so. It’s very much, however, a one-man job. In his introduction to the collection of seventy-five poems, James writes:

 

“Edward Case’s poetry is formal, often employing rhyme and meter. The poems are efficient, with no excess. While accessible, they exhibit nuanced complexity, with words often bearing multiple meanings. The tone is philosophical, with observations on life, mortality, politics, love, nature, and the nature of things. Serious but not without wit, the poems are the work of a well-read, broad intellect.”

 

Edward Case, born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, had been reviewing books since the nineteen-fifties. At the same time he was a businessman, owning a company that manufactured gasket pumps. He held ten patents. He befriended Hilton Kramer. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal and National Review and exchanged letters with the English novelist Joyce Cary. After Cary’s death in 1957, Case published an essay about his work in the Spring 1959 issue of Modern Age, in which he wrote:

 

“And then he died, and after the obituaries were written the makers of literary opinion continued to write about lesser artists, and there was no sign to indicate that anyone understood that one of the greatest creators in the history of the novel had finished his work.”

 

Case died of leukemia on July 10, 1985, at age sixty-two. Here is a brief sampler of poems from The Business Of The Dancer beginning with the early “Now I Have Died a Little”:

 

“Now I have died a little.

I am a little old.

Though not for coffin ready,

Nor stone-weighed cold.

Now I have died a little,

And my dying is this:

What I cannot do, I see,

And what I shall miss.”

 

“Hasidim”:

 

“To be closer

They keep their distance.

As shadows defining light

They wear black space formally,

Like the discreet livery

Of proud servants:

Black hats, the plane width of distance

And black coats the hiding lengths

In which they stoop.

They stare inward

Like blind astronomers.

Beneath the effacing beards

Countenance is immaterial.

Hair, pious, templed,

Argues intricately

For the guarded head

Covered against the glittering, temporal,

Perilous dust.

Beauty, which is of things, is dark.

The fire which sustains the world

Hides in a spark.”

 

“Minor Poet” (reminiscent of Samuel Menashe’s work):

 

“Saved by a line

Before he sank

Into the nameless sea:

His sentence stayed,

His passage paid

Home free.”

 

And here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“The pearly throat of that peacock age was torn

In summer and its shriek yet grows, screaming

Unheard in all our days and deeds, like static

From a falling star, unseeming as the dust

Of space, yet crying murder as it bleeds.

So the voiceless moon imparting gravity

To frivolous tides roils the world unseen

But never hides its light nor ever slows.

 

“Slain then the nightingale and the steed,

The garden wall then fallen, the enchanted

Wood a tiring room for weary death

And summer’s lawn sown to widows’ weed.

For winter came in August killing fruit and seed.

In that broken season forever died the rose.”

 

[The Business Of The Dancer is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org.] 

'Rest and Have Ease'

William Wordsworth in anyone’s book is a major poet but I seldom read him any longer because I find much of his work dull as dishwater. There was a time when that sentiment could have consigned me to non-personhood in certain literary circles. His contemporary Walter Savage Landor is rightly judged a minor poet but I return with pleasure to his epigrams. Am I confused? Cutely paradoxical? Can we make such distinctions? The American poet Robert B. Shaw addresses these questions in “The Puzzle of Minor Poetry”: 

“Like many others, over the years I have been often bemused, and sometimes rankled, by the terms ‘minor poet’ and ‘minor poetry.’ The adjective ‘minor’ seems at once vague and peremptory. Vague: The suggestion is that such poetry is called minor because something is wrong with it, but since there are many ways in which poems can go wrong, this is not helpfully descriptive. Peremptory: The implication is that such poetry will not repay our expenditure of time and attention like the work of a major poet will—and yet anyone who reads poetry with more than cursory attention can attest that this is not the case.”

 

Shaw’s honesty is refreshing. He confirms my experience. I first encountered many, perhaps most, of the poets I enjoy and admire (and many whom I learned to ignore) in anthologies. Shaw argues the case for a writer whose work I hardly know, Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962), judging him a good minor poet, worthy of the reader’s attention:

 

“He is known exclusively for the handful of his poems that for much of the twentieth century appeared in anthologies. He is undoubtedly a minor poet, yet his work is more complex than his ‘anthology poems’ would suggest.”

 

A genre of essays I especially appreciate are those dedicated to obscure, neglected or utterly forgotten writers. Alexander Smith (1830-67), the Scottish essayist, is a good example. So are American essayist Agnes Repplier (1855-1950) and American poet Catherine Davis (1924-2002). No one would canonize these writers but to ignore them is foolish and to deny oneself honest pleasure. Too often, “major status” is the work of marketing or fashion, not a critical sense.

 

To put alongside Shaw’s Hodgson I would propose another minor English poet, Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940). His poems are wispy, often nostalgic and reminiscent of Walter de la Mare’s. Here is “In the Street of Lost Time” (The Unknown Goddess, 1925):

 

“Rest and have ease;

here are no more voyages;

fold, fold your narrow, pale hands;

and under the veil of night lie,

 

“as I have seen you

Lie in your deep hair;

but patiently now that new loves,

new days have gone their ways.”

'I Shall at Least Discover the Coast'

 Knuff, looby, lubber, clotpoll, chucklehead, chuff, bedpresser, fopdoodle, pricklouse, pickthank, jackalent, dandiprant, jobbernowl, mooncalf, et al. 

English, like Yiddish, is blessedly rich in insults, nouns applied to those we deem dangerously (or pitifully) stupid, lazy or inept. Few such words endure for long. My spell-check software fails to recognize seven of the fourteen words cited above. Invective seems less imaginative and entertaining today, relying as it does on a small cache of predictable monosyllables. W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick (1940), in the role of Egbert Sousé (“Sousé – accent grave over the ‘e’”), uses some of the words above carrying the Johnsonian imprimatur when giving advice to his future son-in-law, Og Oggilby (“Sounds like a bubble in a bathtub”): “Don’t be a luddy-duddy! Don’t be a mooncalf! Don’t be a jabbernowl! You’re not those, are you?”

 

Johnson scholar Jack Lynch tells us 663 dictionaries of English already existed when Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language on April 15, 1755, despite its mistaken reputation as the first in the language. What distinguishes Johnson’s Dictionary from others is its comprehensiveness, the vast number of citations (turning the book into an anthology of English literature), and the nine years of labor a single man put into creating it. Johnson is stereotyped as a finicky, moralizing prude, yet we find in his Dictionary such impolite words as fart (“wind from behind”) and turd (“excrement”). Boswell reports Johnson saying: “The difference between coarse and refined abuse is as the difference between being bruised by a club, and wounded by a poisoned arrow.”

 

Johnson defines 41,712 words. That first edition was published in two folio-sized volumes, each containing more than 1,100 pages and weighing more than twenty pounds. For this reader, language is the chief glory of the human species. That’s why I think of Johnson’s Dictionary not as an old reference book but as a celebration and a grandly ambitious undertaking. Johnson writes in “The Plan of an English Dictionary” (1747), addressed to Lord Chesterfield:

   

“When I survey the plan which I have laid before you, I cannot, my Lord, but confess, that I am frighted at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Cæsar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.”

 

Half a century ago I read in Time magazine that Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose Awakenings (1973) I had already read, would read the Oxford English Dictionary while in bed at night. The anecdote charmed me because I too read dictionaries, though not at that time the OED. We’ve learned since his death in 2015 that Sacks may have embellished some of his stories. I can’t say. But here is what he wrote in On the Move: A Life (2015):

     

“I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I went not to the White Horse but to Blackwell’s bookshop (next door to the pub) and bought, for £44, the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, for me the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf, now and then, for bedtime reading.”