'Full of the Little Obscurities'

“A man may profess to understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife.” 

Anecdotal Evidence attracts an admirably knowledgeable set of readers, largely proud amateurs like its author. As best I can judge, most academics are strangers to the blogosphere in general and this blog in particular. That’s not a complaint. I assume most of my readers, like me, are interested in books, not posturing or theorizing about them, or turning them into political fables. They seek, to varying degrees, wisdom and pleasure, as all grownup readers do. They accept that authors understand more than their critics, even when they understand little or nothing. Part of the pleasure of being alive is relishing the mysteries surrounding us.

 

The sentence at the top is characteristic of its author -- shrewd, a tad cynical, definitely more comic than sententious. A seasoned reader might deduce his identity but not who he is writing about. Here he describes the manner of that writer:

 

“[He] always shows us a picture that is full of the little obscurities, the uncertainties of outline, the mysterious shadings-off, that we see in the real world around us. He does not pretend to the traditional omniscience of the novelist. He is not forever translating the unknowable in motive and act into ready formula . . .”

 

No cheating. Who is writing about whom on June 20, 1916?

[As impatient readers already know, that is H.L. Mencken writing about Joseph Conrad.]

'Let Them at Any Rate Be Your Acquaintances'

“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.” 

An interesting gauge of human sensibility, a sort of litmus test to assess personality and values, might be to place your subject in a large, well-stocked library (or bookstore), wire him for blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance, brain activity, etc., and monitor his reactions, followed by a questionnaire to be completed by the subject: Are you frightened? Do you wish to run away? Do you feel bliss? Boredom? Reverence?

 

The reverent one quoted above is Winston Churchill in “Hobbies,” one of twenty-three essays collected in Thoughts and Adventures (Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1932). This is the man who, while stationed in India from 1896 to 1898 read all 4,000 pages of Gibbon during his daily leisure time, followed by Gibbon’s autobiography, Macaulay’s six-volume History of England, the Lays of Ancient Rome, Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and volumes by Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin and Adam Smith, among others. Such heroic reading seems like preparation for the eventual forty-three books in seventy-two volumes Churchill would write, making him a rare deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.

 

Today we can’t imagine a world leader -- or even an English major -- who reads and writes on such a Victorian scale. Churchill confirms the truth of an observation made by Dr. Johnson, as recounted by Boswell: “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Churchill continues in the essay, describing his own reactions to a library visit:

 

“‘A few books,’ which was Lord [John] Morley’s definition of anything under five thousand, may give a sense of comfort and even of complacency. But a day in a library, even of modest dimensions, quickly dispels these illusory sensations. As you browse about, taking down book after book from the shelves and contemplating the vast, infinitely-varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved, pride, even in its most innocent forms, is chased from the heart by feelings of awe not untinged with sadness. As one surveys the mighty array of sages, saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers whose treasures one will never be able to admire—still less enjoy—the brief tenure of our existence here dominates mind and spirit.”

 

Churchill convinces us he is a genuine bookman. We’ve all been taken in by frauds who brag of having read libraries, or at least the fashionable titles of the day – a deception especially common among politicians. But Churchill has the dedicated reader’s understanding that reading is deeply idiosyncratic, as individual as DNA, a reflection of who we truly are not who we wish the world to think we are:

 

“‘What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”

'The Spirit of Urbanity Incarnate'

Last week Nige wrote about a book previously unknown to me: The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rev. 1922) by Holbrook Jackson. I’ve read only Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and browsed in some of his other book-related titles. I bought the Anatomy in 1998 from a used bookstore near the University of Chicago and soon gave up annotating because too many pages hold memorable aphorisms or allusions that demand to be followed. Not that my pleasure was unmixed. Jackson (1874-1948) cultivates a cloyingly tweedy persona, a variation on the unworldly English eccentric. He’s fond of archaisms. He often writes in a pastiche of seventeenth-century prose, aping Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, as he acknowledges. 

The Eighteen Nineties is a better-written, more focused and disciplined work, devoted to an era Jackson lived through as a young man. The Nineties in literature tends to be treated as a homogenous period when dandyism and an occasional taste for decadence ruled. Jackson makes clear that Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Francis Thompson, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and early Wells and Conrad, among others, are a diversified bunch, no monolith. He writes:

 

“The use of strange words and bizarre images was but another outcome of the prevalent desire to astonish. At no period in English history had the obvious and the commonplace been in such disrepute. The age felt it was complex and sought to interpret its complexities, not by simplicity . . .”

 

Jackson dedicates his book to Max Beerbohm and devotes Chap. VII, “The Incomparable Max,” to him. At his best, Beerbohm is sui generis, a master ironist and writer of prose, unlike any of the other writers Jackson looks at. His masterpieces are the essays he produced after the Nineties, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially those collected in And Even Now (1920). Jackson writes:

 

“First and foremost, he represents a point of view. And, secondly, that point of view is in no sense a novelty in a civilised society. Every age has had its representative of a similar attitude towards life, in one a Horace, in another a Joseph Addison and, again, a Charles Lamb. In our age it is Max Beerbohm. He is the spirit of urbanity incarnate; he is town. He is civilisation hugging itself with whimsical appreciation for a conservative end.”

 

Jackson gets Beerbohm and places him in the history of the essay: “It does not matter what he writes about: his subjects interest because he is interesting. A good essayist justifies any subject, and Max Beerbohm as an essayist is next in succession to Charles Lamb. His essays, and these are his greatest works, are genial invitations to discuss Max, and you discuss him all the more readily and with fuller relish because they are not too explicit; indeed, he is often quite prim.”

 

Beerbohm is never strident or dogmatic. That would be vulgar and one can’t imagine him ever being vulgar. He respects his readers too much. The literal-minded and humorless need not bother reading him:

 

“[H]e pays you a delicate compliment by leaving you something to tell yourself; the end of his ellipsis, as in all the great essayists, is yourself. He is quite frank with you, and properly genial; but he is too fastidious to rush into friendship with his readers. They must deserve friendship first. He does not gush.”

 

The essay, that most formless of forms, is my favorite, providing a voice for those of us who can’t write fiction or poetry. No one does it better than Beerbohm.

 

“The real Max Beerbohm is, I fancy, an essayist pure and simple, the essay being the inevitable medium for the expression of his urbane and civilised genius. There are, he has told us, a few people in England who are interested in repose as an art. He is, undoubtedly, one of them. But he is also interested in the art of the essay, and his essays are exquisite contributions to that rare art. In them you see revealed the complete Max, interpreting deftly, by means of wit and humour, imagination and scholarship, that ‘uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures,’ to use his own words, which he admits preferable to books, and which, doubtless, he prefers better than any other view in life.”

'It Pulls the Reader In'

I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains the Western world and beyond – our languages, values and literary forms, and who we are, whether or not we have read them. 

My first Dante was John Ciardi’s Inferno, assigned, remarkably, by our English teacher in tenth grade. This was an American public high school in 1967, when things were already falling apart. On our own, several of us read and discussed the other two-thirds of Ciardi’s Divine Comedy. I’ve since read the Dante translations by Longfellow, Christopher Singleton, Robert and Jean Hollander, Clive James and, most devotedly of late, C.H. Sisson’s blank-verse version. In his review of Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, the American poet Andrew Frisardi notes the poem's continued popularity among common readers and translators: “Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be. . . . Dante's poem is many things, but first of all it is a gripping read. It pulls the reader in with its lively language and rhythms.” That has been my experience.

 

In a post from December 2009, I described my middle son’s first acquaintance with Dante. He’s now twenty-four, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and is visiting Italy with his younger brother for the first time. On Monday in Florence they toured the Dante Museum: 

 

 

I know from my life and from my son’s that literary interests can enter dormant periods, all the while evolving and storing energy for future returns. About a decade ago I first read Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy, published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante. In his introduction, “On Translating Dante,” Sisson writes:

 

“. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”

 

Dante seems eternally housed in our memory and imagination. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath or the fight between Achilles and Hector.

 

Frisardi is a translator of Italian poetry, including Dante’s Vita Nova and the first fully annotated translation of his Convivio. In his 2020 poetry collection, The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press), Frisardi includes a beautiful Dantean sonnet originally a part of Vita Nova:

 

“You pilgrims walking by oblivious,

Your minds, it seems, on something not at hand,

Can you have come from such a distant land—

The way you look suggests as much to us—

That you’re not weeping, even as you pass

Right through the suffering city, like that band

Of people who, it seems, don’t understand

A thing about the measure of its loss?

 

“If you’ll just stop, because you want to hear

About it all—so says my sighing heart—

Your eyes will fill with tears before you leave.

For she who blessed the city is nowhere

In sight: what words about her we impart

Have force enough to make a stranger grieve.”

 

Frisardi adds a note: “Dante places this sonnet in the penultimate episode of his prosimetrum the Vita Nova, where not long after Beatrice’s death he sees pilgrims passing through Florence on the way to Rome. ‘She who blessed the city’ translates lowercase beatrice, which means she who blesses.’”

[Photos by David Kurp.]

'Idiot Hopefulness or Fathomless Exasperation'

When my oldest son was about seven and already a movie enthusiast, we drove up to the Crandall Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. to watch Laurel and Hardy movies. I’d seen a notice in the paper. A film collector brought his own projector and a box of 16mm reels and set up in one of the meeting rooms. About a dozen people showed up, most very old or very young. For four hours we watched “County Hospital,” “Big Business,” “Double Whoopee,” “Our Wife,” “The Music Box,” “Way Out West” and other films with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I’m certain I have never sustained laughter for that long. Of course, laughter has a social component, and I was merely joining my son and the rest of the all-male audience. This is one of my most cherished memories. Josh and I still love Laurel and Hardy. 

It seems fitting that Arthur Stanley Jefferson was born on Bloomsday, fourteen years before that joyous event first took place on June 16, 1904. He entered the world in his grandparents’ house in Ulverston, Lancashire. Describing an early photo of the pair, Hugh Kenner refers to their “stares of idiot hopefulness or fathomless exasperation that constituted their public critique of the universe.” Kenner was reviewing The Films of Laurel and Hardy by William K. Everson in the November 14, 1967, issue of The National Review. Kenner, the scholar of Modernism, adept of Joyce, Pound and Beckett, continues with the photograph:

 

“Bathed in the nearly horizontal light of early morning, the boys look fresh: the day is all before them. Creation has sprung forth anew, pianos once more unwrecked, cars undemolished, hats unbattered, suits unrumpled. Ollie lounges against a Ford that looks spry as a grasshopper, his bulk so poised as to seem weightless, feet nonchalantly crossed. Stan’s hands are clasped in ecstasy. They bend toward each other in communion. Soundless laughter convulses them; their closed eyes savor some invisible bit of business . . .”

 

Kenner carefully evaluates the films, acknowledging that some were dross but others “classic,” flawless” and even “perfect.” “Big Business” (1929) he calls their masterpiece. In it, the boys are door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen. Kenner closes his review:

 

“Their comedy, more than any other in cinema, theologized, so to speak, the common experience that if you hammer nails you are apt to strike your thumb. The theology, being false, is comic only in being belied: each film upheld it dogmatically; it was all their films that belied it.”

 

In a November 7, 1967, letter to Kenner, Guy Davenport praises the review and writes:

 

“A joy; your essay on Stan and Ollie. Arthur Stanley Jefferson. And Oliver Norvell Hardy, of Milledgeville, Ga. (where Flannery O’Connor wrote her novels), descendent of Nelson’s Hardy. One would love to sic a genealogist onto the matter, and come up with a kinship between Tom and Stan Jefferson.”

 

[The quoted letter can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint, 2018).]

'It Brought Us This Far'

Self-knowledge is fine but some things are best left unexamined. “Why do you read so many books?” a reader asks. His assumption, never directly articulated, is that reading is compensation for the absence of something far more important. I suppose people have been facing such suspicions at least since Freud’s arrival on the scene. Busybodies flatter themselves by uncovering previously unsuspected motives in others. Think of it as amateur psychology practiced as a self-congratulating hobby.

One of my favorites among Clive James’ books is Late Readings, published in 2015, four years before his death from cancer. “Late” is redolent of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” James writes about the books he knows will be among the last he ever reads, including those by Joseph Conrad, Dr. Johnson, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning – all superb choices. A line in his introduction comes to mind: “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” That almost sounds like a pep talk. If something has worked for more than six decades, reliably supplying pleasure and learning, why stop now? James continues:

“Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.”

'I’ve Been Setting the Table for the Dead'

“Sometimes the what takes over so much that the how disappears. I think poetry works best when these are indistinguishable, when they keep such good balance that you don't feel you're being preached to or grasping at the abstract.” 

Back in the early 1990s I had a chance to meet Robert Creeley. A friend was a graduate student in English, and he and his doctoral adviser were meeting the poet for coffee. I was invited but I couldn’t come up with a good reason to meet Creeley. “Celebrities” had lost their attraction years before. As a reporter I occasionally had to interview a writer whose work didn’t interest me. I knew how to enter that professional mode, but why waste my time and his? Creeley’s poems had always seemed anorexic, pale and underfed, barely holding on to life – scrawnier versions of William Carlos Williams’ poems. In a word, boring.

 

The passage quoted at the top is spoken by the Dominican-born American poet Rhina P. Espaillat in a 2015 interview. She identifies precisely the reason so much contemporary poetry is unreadably dull. The what dominates, as in strident adolescent diary entries – or poems. The how gets ignored into non-existence. Creeley’s lines are instantly forgettable. They don’t register as they grasp at the abstract.  Contrast his work with “Workshop,” a poem by Espaillat:

 

“‘Where have you been,’ says my old friend the poet,

‘and what have you been doing?’ The question

weighs and measures me like an unpaid bill,

hangs in the air, waiting for some remittance.

 

“Well, I’ve been coring apples, layering them

in raisins and brown sugar; I’ve been finding

what's always lost, mending and brushing,

pruning houseplants, remembering birthdays.

 

“The wisdom of others thunders past me

like sonic booming; what I know of the world

fits easily in the palm of one hand

and lies quietly there, like a child’s cheek.

 

“Spoon-fed to me each evening, history

puts on my children’s faces, because they

are the one alphabet all of me reads.

I’ve been setting the table for the dead,

 

“rehearsing the absence of the living,

seasoning age with names for the unborn.

I’ve been putting a life together, like

supper, like a poem, with what I have.”

 

Plenty of content there -- “history / puts on my children’s faces” – accompanied by plenty of how. Is it a “domestic” poem, an account of caring for family? The most important of jobs. “I’ve been setting the table for the dead.” Espaillat continues in her interview:

 

“Many poets today have been confused into believing that adherence to forms is for minor works. William Carlos Williams ‘blessed’ us with that idea: that if you’re really a grown-up poet you throw out the sonnets. I think he did us a great disservice.”