'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).]

'Professional Seers-Off'

“I am not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most difficult things in the world, and probably seems so to you, too.” 

It does. Saying goodbye, when not a relief, can be a tongue-tied torment. Some people, of course, we’re glad to be rid of – bores, assorted angry cranks and narcissists – but not so friends or loved ones. The pressure to not merely experience but express sadness at their departure can feel overwhelming. That’s just how some of us are built. We’re not among those annoyingly sincere and healthy-minded folks whose emotional lives are placid as a mountain lake in the spring. We stutter.

 

Max Beerbohm is writing above in his essay “Seeing People Off,” collected in his 1909 essay collection Yet Again. In it he conjures a novel profession, one that sounds very twenty-first-century – “professional seers-off.” He watches as a familiar face in a train station says goodbye to a young woman, whom he assumes is the man’s daughter. It turns out his one-time acquaintance, an actor, works for a service called the Anglo-American Social Bureau:

 

“He explained to me that of the thousands of Americans who annually pass through England there are many hundreds who have no English friends. In the old days they used to bring letters of introduction. But the English are so inhospitable that these letters are hardly worth the paper they are written on. ‘Thus,’ said Le Ros, ‘the A.A.S.B. supplies a long-felt want. Americans are a sociable people, and most of them have plenty of money to spend. The A.A.S.B. supplies them with English friends. Fifty per cent. of the fees is paid over to the friends. The other fifty is retained by the A.A.S.B. I am not, alas, a director. If I were, I should be a very rich man indeed. I am only an employe. But even so I do very well. I am one of the seers-off.’”

 

Today, such a service would probably have a website and app. My wife, you see, flies to Santiago, Chile, on Friday for a two-week visit to Patagonia. She’ll be roughing it—camping, hiking, horseback riding. She was born in Peru but has never visited this part of South America. My knowledge of the region is largely limited to In Patagonia (1977), in which Bruce Chatwin writes: “In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally.” My wife is a strong, hearty, self-reliant woman who loves adventure and whose Spanish is fluent. She will have the experience of a lifetime, I’m certain. Beerbohm has the actor tell him:

 

“‘You can’t express your feelings. In other words, you can’t act. At any rate,’ he added kindly, ‘not in a railway station. ‘Teach me!’ I cried. He looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘the seeing-off season is practically over. Yes, I'll give you a course. I have a good many pupils on hand already; but yes,’ he said, consulting an ornate note-book, ‘I could give you an hour on Tuesdays and Fridays.’”

'The Great Writers Are My Teachers'

An old friend asks if I remember reading Homer Price (1943) by Robert McCloskey. The library in Pearl Road Elementary School was a cramped classroom on the second floor. A girl named Beth Ann Daniels and I had a friendly competition to read all of the books in the school’s small collection. The librarian kept a record and Beth Ann won. We both loved Homer Price (I remember where it was shelved), especially the story about the out-of-control doughnut machine. 

Decades ago I wrote a newspaper column about another book from the school library I read repeatedly. All I remembered was the story, not the title or author. I described the plot -- an Indian boy in the upper Great Lakes carves a canoe out of wood, releases it in Lake Superior, and the toy floats to the Atlantic Ocean. I asked readers to identify it. In the next week or so, in those pre-Internet, pre-email days, I received almost 100 letters (paper, ink, envelope, stamp) and numerous calls at the office telling me the book I sought was Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling C. Holling, published in 1941. I bought a copy and introduced it to my oldest son, though it never captured his imagination as it had mine. Here's a paragraph from that column written almost forty years ago:

 

"Today, the great writers are my teachers. I can’t imagine living my life without the wisdom left by Chekhov, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Shakespeare, Thoreau and Whitman."

 

We’ve always made sure our sons could get their hands on any books they wanted. That meant frequent trips to libraries and bookstores, and wide-open borrowing privileges from the shelves at home. As a kid I hated being told a book was “beyond your reading level.” I remember my middle son (now a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps), when he was about three years old, repeatedly borrowing a volume from the public library in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Eurotunnel, a children’s book about the tunnel beneath the English Channel. After he had to return it, I would take him to the library the following day and he would run to the children’s room in the basement, to the place where Eurotunnel had been reshelved, and clutch it to his chest, almost weeping with relief.

 

Little has changed, except some of my tastes in reading. If we look long enough, and are willing occasionally to ask for help, we find the books we need.