'Among the Essential Text-Books of Our Schools'

A reader in North Dakota tells me he has acquired Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957) and asks for recommendations among them. Really, he can’t go wrong starting anywhere, and he already has his eyes on “Of Sleep,” “Of Books” and Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Almost randomly I would suggest “Of Idleness” (his shortest essay: one page) and “Of Cruelty.” A sample from “Idleness”: 

“Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds.”

 

Typical Montaigne: homely, readily understood metaphors and a sort of punchline bringing it all together. Here’s the next sentence, which amounts to common sense on minds: “Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.”

 

In 1934, the English literary critic F.L. Lucas (1894-1967) published in the journal Studies French and English an essay, “The Master-Essayist.” Lucas gives us a charming profile of the Frenchman:

 

“That a gaily self-indulgent old gentleman in Perigord once loved scratching his ears is and will be remembered where lives, by the thousand, of desperate industry and devoted idealism leave not a ripple on the inky waters of oblivion. Such is justice.”

 

Montaigne was the first to make the first-person singular a worthy subject, and he is seldom tedious, unlike Rousseau and a thousand imitators. Here is Lucas’ conclusion:

 

“Today Montaigne would rather have lived in a garret, alone with his own thoughts, than have earned his living in many of our occupations, or joined many of the movements of the modern world. After all, would he be wrong? If only we were wise, I believe that among the essential text-books of our schools, and of our schoolmasters, would be the Lives of Plutarch and the Essais of Montaigne.

 

[Find Lucas’ essay and many others in the “Articles” section of Isaac Waisberg’s essential IWP Books.)

'Pain an Evil'

I was seated in the waiting room of the physical therapy center with the rest of the human wreckage. Two men were seated to my right, speaking Spanish. Both were in street clothes with no obvious signs of injury or disease. To my left was a black man about my age, dressed all in black. He had a prosthetic right leg beneath the knee and was drinking a cup of coffee. He uses a walker to navigate. We chatted, indifferent stuff at first, before I asked him how he lost the leg. “Fuckin’ diabetes,” he said. He still occasionally feels his foot, the so-called “phantom limb” phenomenon. 

He goes to PT hoping to ease other pains – knees, hips, back. Edema is an ongoing problem. He spoke clinically, without complaint, and I appreciated his apparent absence of self-pity. When he stood, he groaned softly. It sounded familiar. He had noticed my cane and I told him about the arthritis. As he moved toward the PT room he said, “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” and laughed.

 

To read while waiting I brought along Santayana’s The Life of Reason, originally published in five volumes in 1905-06. I haven’t read it in years and I’m luxuriating in the prose. Can you think of another writer whose English prose is as fluent as Santayana’s? Perhaps Ruskin. Or Evelyn Waugh. No academic nonsense or stiffness, little jargon, philosophical or otherwise. In the first volume, Reason in Common Sense, in the chapter titled “First Steps and First Fluctuations,” he devotes an extended digression to the subject of pain:

 

“[T]o deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque affectation: it amounts to giving ‘good’ and ‘evil’ artificial definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. . . . A man who without necessity deprived any person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that sentence.”

'A Mission to the University Extension Scheme'

I have a typically human taste for taxonomy, classifying things, sorting them into categories. There’s comfort in order. A friend in Los Angeles shares my bent and proposes three classes of books as outlined by Oscar Wilde in his essay "To Read or Not to Read" (1886):

 

1. Books to read.

2. Books to reread

3. Books not to read at all

 

Makes sense. Most of us probably follow a similar scheme without having formalized it. Here are Wilde's entries in the first category: Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, the Duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, Theodor Mommsen and, “till we get a better one,” Grote’s History of Greece.

 

Little to argue with here, though I’ve not read Mandeville, Marco Polo and Grote. Here is the second category, the books to reread:

 

Plato and Keats. “In the sphere of poetry,” Wilde writes, “the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.” That’s a little vague but leaves plenty of room for nominations. I have an extensive list. In fact, it may be the second-largest category, topped only by the third, the books not to read at all:

 

“[James] Thomson’s Seasons, [Samuel] Rogers’s Italy[: A Poem], [William] Paley’s Evidences [of Christianity], all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay “On Liberty,” all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, [Bishop Joseph] Butler’s Analogy [of Religion], [Sir Alexander] Grant’s Aristotle, [David] Hume’s [History of] England, George Henry Lewes’s [Biographical] History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.”

 

So far, I’m safe from most of these titles, though I have read Thomson and a lot of Hume but not his History. I want to endorse that final phrase, which Wilde expands on here:

 

“The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching . . . But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.”

 

Such negative endorsements are unenforceable, of course. People are free to read any tripe they fancy. The best we can do is share our experience of books and trust that a few readers out there will follow the suggestion, read the book and conclude that we knew what we were talking about.

[A note to readers: the comments section at Anecdotal Evidence is reserved strictly for readers. I’ve had my say. If you have a question, send it to me via email: Patrick.kurp@gmail.com. Otherwise, I’m unable to reply.]

'All Sit in Sullen Silence and Await'

My middle son has a friend, a fellow Marine, who had questions about Russian literature. He asked about Andrei Platonov and Leonid Andreyev. I’ve never read the latter but told him what little I knew about the former. I recommended Vasily Grossman, and he said he intends to read Stalingrad. Previously, he had suggested Michael read The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, one of my favorite novels. This Marine, whom I have never met, has an interest in colonial Algeria and I was able to recommend Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977), which he subsequently read. 

This is one of the ancillary pleasures of reading good books. Suggestions, of course, are made to be ignored but occasionally one takes hold and one’s pleasure is doubled. I don’t remember anyone recommending a book to me when I was young. That probably contributed to me becoming a semi-secretive reader. I assumed no one was interested in the books I loved. That began to change at the university when I met a few students and faculty members who shared my enthusiasm. There’s an informal underground out there of adventurous readers, those who eschew bestsellers and often contemporary books and indulge in our inheritance.

 

D.A. Cooper is a poet who, I’m told, lives here in Houston. This is his poem, “To Read”:

 

“There are so many books to read; they fill

the shelves of libraries and stores across

the world, as well as every empty space

inside my house. The stacks grow year by year;

they rise like zombie corpses on my desk,

my couch, and all across the floor. Each begs

to sink its dusty claws into my brain.

I crack their spines, flip through their crumbling pages,

and try to pick which ones I’ll give new life.

There are too many books to read. I see

those volumes and I know I’ll never have

the time I need to finish even just

the ones I own. They cry out from my shelves—

collected poems and stories of the dead—

entreating me to resurrect their souls.

And that is just the famous literature.

Great forests have been razed so I could buy

large piles of science fiction, fantasy,

detective novels, politics, and physics.

Selections of the best known -ologies,

a sampling of the most loved -ographies,

and sprinkles of my favorite -osophies,

all sit in sullen silence and await

the hoped for yet unlikely future date

when I will find the time I need to read.”

 

Cooper describes an anxiety I once suffered from: too many books looming over my head. How would I ever be able to read all of them? With time, I turned that around. Now it’s reassuring to know such bounty awaits me. Even better, I know precisely which books I will soon reread.

'An Appreciation of Words Is So Rare'

Most forgotten writers are deservedly forgotten, of course. Writing talent is unfairly distributed among literary aspirants. Sincerity and hard work count for nothing if you have no gift or fail to develop what little you’re given. Agnes Repplier writes in “Words” (Essays in Idleness, 1897): 

“An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.”

 

During her long working life, Repplier (1855-1950) was a prolific essayist and writer of popular biographies who was able to support herself, her mother and sister with her work in a way unimaginable today. She was a serious Roman Catholic and remains in some ways a charmingly old-fashioned writer, bookish, leisurely and occasionally tart, at once genteel and not. A native of Philadelphia, Repplier lived there all her life. She never married, had no children and published more than one-thousand essays on a sprawling array of subjects. Like the best journalists, she was a generalist, no specialist, widely knowledgeable, curious, democratic in spirit, with an occasionally acerbic wit. I knew several like her, but few so industrious.

 

Repplier had a Victorian streak of fuddy-duddy-ism but redeems herself with the occasional shiv to the gut. In “Words,” she neatly renders Carlyle, a frustratingly uneven writer and man: “No man uses words more admirably, or abuses them more shamefully, than Carlyle. That he should delight in seeing his pages studded all over with such spikes as ‘mammonism,’ ‘flunkeyhood’ [Past and Present (1843): ‘All his flunkeyhood and horn-eyed dimness”], ‘nonentity,’ and ‘simulacrum,’ that he should repeat them again and again with unwearying self-content, is an enigma that defies solution, save on the simple presumption that they are designed, like other instruments of torture, to test the fortitude of the sufferer.” She revels in Carlyle’s phrase “little red-colored pulpy infants,” and describes it as “the art of a Dutch master who, on five inches of canvas, depicts for us with subdued vehemence the absolute realities of life.”

 

I like Repplier’s defiant spirit and scorn for the merely fashionable. Here she is on prose style: “The exquisite adjustment of a word to its significance, which was the instrument of Flaubert’s daily martyrdom and daily triumph; the generous sympathy of a word with its surroundings, which was the secret wrung by Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of language,--these are the twin perfections which constitute style, and substantiate genius.” Repplier could turn out a tour-de-force sentence like this from “Children, Past and Present” (Books and Men, 1899):

 

“To get up at five on freezing winter mornings; to sweep their own floors and make their own beds; to go two by two to the ‘children’s pump’ for a scanty wash; to eat no mouthful of food until nine o’clock; to live on an endless round of mutton, potatoes, and beer, none of them too plentiful or too good; to sleep in a dismal cell without chair or table; to improvise a candlestick out of paper; to be starved, frozen and flogged,--such was the daily life of the scions of England’s noblest families, of lads tenderly nurtured and sent from princely homes to win their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost.”

 

Repplier deserves rediscovery. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was proudly old-fashioned and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. Repplier at her best is piquant, witty and cant-free. She’s a fine model for essayists, a free-flowing aphorist and blessedly prolific.

'An Emotion I Must Have Been Inventing'

“I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it.” 

Rarely does someone speak so precisely for me. Boris Dralyuk is writing in “On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy.” Few states leave me as conflicted as nostalgia. Every day my thoughts turn to the past. It’s as involuntary as a heart attack. Is this associated with aging? Of course. Nostalgia is misunderstood as a wish to return to the past or at least flee from the present. That’s not my desire. In fact, nostalgia is made more piercingly bittersweet by the knowledge that you can’t return, that even the sweetest, most vivid memory is a dream.

 

In 1968, in a mall bookstore, I bought three Washington Square Press paperbacks in a series devoted to Great American Thinkers: John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen and George Santayana (75¢ each). The first two I quickly discarded. They had nothing for me and still don’t. I was learning from scratch and chose these books for no reasons I can solidly remember. The Santayana volume was written by Willard E. Arnett.

 

Now I’ve ordered a used copy and I'm rereading it. The first printing is dated March 1968. Thus far I’ve experienced two moments of nostalgic déjà vu: Arnett’s mention in the introduction of Santayana’s problematical American identity (he was born in Spain of Spanish parents and never became an American citizen), and the epigraph he places at the top of Chapter 9, “Art, Beauty, Meaning, and Value.” It’s from Reason in Art (volume IV of The Life of Reason, published in 1905): “. . . the effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.” It’s Santayana’s choice of “eternal” that thrills and bothers me.

 

As I read, I see that odd, under-socialized sixteen-year-old kid reading in his bedroom, in an otherwise nearly bookless house in the Cleveland suburbs. Santayana welcomed me to the literary life that year, as did Eric Hoffer and Bernard Malamud. Just writing their names, writers I’ve loved and reread for almost sixty years, floods me with warm nostalgia – the good stuff, not the delusional. I sympathize with that kid. He had no idea how fortunate he was and how he was changing his life forever. I’m still reading Santayana.

 

In his essay, Boris quotes two of my favorite American poets – Edwin Arlington Robinson and Donald Justice. Four years before his death in 2004, Justice conducted a lengthy interview with the English writer and scholar Philip Hoy, and in 2001 the edited interview was published as a book by Between the Lines. He spoke softly in an age when too many poets shrieked. The interview is thoughtful and nostalgic but never toothless. Here is an anecdote he recounts that comes close to defining the nature of nostalgia for some of us. It’s a memory of his 1982 return to Florida, the state where he was born, that sounds like the germ of a Justice poem:

 

“I have a distinct memory of walking out onto the golf course behind our house late one night, walking our dog, and standing there looking up at the moon as it flooded the fairway with light. Very nice. I felt touched by an emotion I must have been inventing.”

'To Mold Clay, Fashion Men From It'

Certain writers lay claim to a piece of geography. Think of Cavafy’s Alexandria and William Kennedy’s Albany. Outsiders may visit but the deed is ironclad. When I hear something in the news about the Caucasus, that often-contested band of mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, I think of Tolstoy. In 1851, he fled to the Caucasus to escape gambling debts and joined the Russian army. During the Crimean War he served as an artillery officer and took part in the Siege of Sevastopol. Tolstoy turned the experience into grist for literature in such works as the 1863 novel The Cossacks and the 1872 novella “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.” His finest use of the setting comes in one of his masterpieces, Hadji Murad (1904). 

The first-century Roman poet Martial got there long before Tolstoy. In his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books), R.L. Barth tells me the epigram “IX.45 is perhaps my favorite.” The poet addresses his friend Marcellinus, who is being sent to the Caucasus as part of the Roman army. For the next six-hundred years, Rome would battle for control of the region with the Sasanian Empire. IX.45:

 

“Marcellinus, when you set forth

To soldier in the frigid North

Beneath the Getic constellations,

Think how close those duty stations

Approach the famed Promethean rock

And fabled mountains! Taking stock

Of these—the hero’s confidants

Who heard his cries—you’ll say at once,

‘Prometheus was harder!’ Add:

‘Who had—and without going mad—

Endured such suffering was fit

To mold clay, fashion men from it.’”

 

Bob writes: “I think it’s an absolutely first-rate poem. I’ve been thinking about this since the other night when I reread Turner’s essay on Martial, where he pronounced it ‘one of the best poems in ancient literature.’ I’m sure that was not Turner being provocatively perverse. It really is a remarkable poem.”

 

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle was sent daily to eat his liver. Each night  it would grow back and the eagle would return the next day to feast on it yet again. Bob, writing as a poet, translator and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, tells me:

 

“Other than the coincidence of the landscape, I think at least part of the reason for alluding to the great suffering and endurance of Prometheus is to warn or prepare his young friend Marcellinus for what he can expect in his tour of duty. He was obviously someone about whom Martial cared deeply, devoting three poems to him. When Martial devotes multiple poems to friends, they are usually friends in Rome itself and more or less of his generation."