'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.

'This Is Not What We Were Formerly Told'

“I have been young, and now am not too old” 

Edmund Blunden was nineteen years old when he joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in the spring of 1916. For the next two years he saw continuous action on the Western Front, survived the fighting at Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele, and was de-mobbed in February 1919, age twenty-two. It’s impossible for most of us to understand the lasting impact two years of sustained combat, including being gassed, would have on a young man from Yalding.

 

The line quoted at the top opens Blunden’s poem “Report on Experience” (Near and Far, 1929). Painful experience, we know, can age us prematurely. We’ve all known people – veterans and crime victims, among others – who seem oddly mature, even wise, because of what they have endured in life.  They’re the ones who survived, who weren’t broken. Blunden’s first stanza makes no overt reference to war:

 

“I have been young, and now am not too old;

And I have seen the righteous forsaken,

His health, his honour and his quality taken.

This is not what we were formerly told.”

 

That first line recalls the King speaking in Henry VI, Part 1, Act III, Scene 4: “When I was young, as yet I am not old.” Also, Psalm 37:25. Here is the remainder of the poem, with Blunden working hard to find some hope:

 

“I have seen a green country, useful to the race,

Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

Even the last rat and the last kestrel banished -

God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

 

“I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,

Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.

I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;

She turned to harlotry; - this I took to be new.

 

“Say what you will, our God sees how they run.

These disillusionments are His curious proving

That He loves humanity and will go on loving;

Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.”

 

The Allies suffered more than 22 million casualties, the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria), more than 15 million. The war ended on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, what we call Veterans Day in the U.S.

'Fugitives From the Law of Averages'

Eugene Sledge was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1923 and enlisted in the Marine Corps in December 1942. He served in the Pacific Theater as a mortarman, a stretcher bearer and, like all Marines, a rifleman. In postwar civilian life, Sledge earned a doctorate in biology from the University of Florida in 1960 and for thirty years taught at Alabama College. 

Sledge’s wife suggested he write an account of his combat experience during the war and encouraged him to submit it to a publisher. Sledge never thought of himself as an “author.” With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, was originally published by Presidio Press in 1981. With an introduction by Paul Fussell, the book was republished by Oxford University Press in 1990. Fussell writes:

 

“The book is devoid of the literary expediencies and suavities that may occasion skepticism or disgust in more artistically self-conscious war memoirs. Sledge is so little an author in the pejorative sense that his eye seems never to wander from his subject to contemplate the literary effect he’s creating. His style is like windowglass: you don’t pause to notice it—you look through it to the actuality it discloses. It is this honesty, simplicity, and modesty that give Sledge’s book its extraordinary power.”

 

With the Old Breed is the finest memoir I’ve read to come out of World War II. Sledge’s innate humility and his reverence for the men he served with lend the book an utterly convincing objectivity. He never tries too hard. There’s no grandstanding, no phony rah-rah patriotism. His loyalty is to his fellow Marines. His final chapter is titled “End of the Agony,” in which he writes:

 

“If this were a novel about war, or if I were a dramatic storyteller, I would find a romantic way to end this account while looking at that fine sunset off the cliffs at the southern end of Okinawa. But that wasn’t the reality of what we faced. Company K had one more nasty job to do.”

 

After the eighty-two-day Okinawa campaign, the men were ordered to bury the Japanese dead. They argued and defied orders but Sledge persuaded them to complete the burial detail. More than 7,600 men in the 1^st Marine Division were killed, wounded or went missing on Okinawa, plus more casualties among their replacements. The fighting on Peleliu had resulted in more than 6,500 casualties. “The few men like me,” Sledge writes, “who never got hit can claim with justification that we survived the abyss of war as fugitives from the law of averages.”

 

Today is the 250^th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps.

'I Cannot Distil a Review From This New Book Yet'

Think of the many writers to whom Desmond MacCarthy’s experience would seem to fit, and not fit: 

“It is curious: while I am reading Mr. [X] I feel wiser than I have ever felt before, but when I try to impart that wisdom to someone else I cannot lay my hands on anything transferable. It is as though I had been tipped in fairy gold.”

 

The passage is drawn from a seven-page review later collected in Criticism (1932). If you asked me to briefly impart the wisdom of, say, Aristotle or Dr. Johnson, I could do it, however haltingly and incompletely. How many writers are as elusive – not vague, not histrionically obscure -- as MacCarthy suggests? Paul Valéry comes to mind, among accomplished writers, and Paul Celan, but usually we think of such “untransferability” as a failure to respect the reader. Much of modern poetry is like that.

 

Nominally, MacCarthy is writing a review of George Santayana’s Soliloquies in England, published in 1922, annus mirabilis, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land. Santayana is a philosopher, yes, a thinker, but he is, first of all, a writer, one of the master stylists in the language, a true pleasure to read. He wrote not very good poetry but the best of his prose was poetic; that is, precise yet evocative, musically true, clear as an unclouded sky. That, I think, helps us understand MacCarthy’s experience. Santayana’s words are seldom strident and he is not dedicated to persuading us of anything. He was temperamentally removed from intellectual combat, one of nature’s true spectators. Take this from the “War Shrines” chapter in Soliloquies in England:

“Death is the background of life much as empty space is that of the stars; it is a deeper thing always lying behind, like the black sky behind the blue. In the realm of existence death is indeed nothing; only a word for something negative and merely notional—the fact that each life has limits in time and is absent beyond them. But in the realm of truth, as things are eternally, life is a little luminous meteor in an infinite abyss of nothingness, a rocket fired on a dark night; and to see life, and to value it, from the point of view of death is to see and to value it truly.”

 

This from a man who would characterize himself as an atheist and materialist. As usual, Santayana’s prose is richly metaphoric but precise. He often thinks in metaphors. MacCarthy’s review is an act of critical humility. Read slowly his admission:

 

“I am not going to review his new book, Soliloquies in England; I am going to live with it. It has been already for some weeks about my bed and about my path, but I cannot distil a review from this new book yet. Of course I can tell you what the book is about; it is about Dickens and death and friendship, the English character and the Latin mind, religion and the Greeks, modern philosophers and Mr. Santayana himself, and his critics, and the Church of Rome, and Spanish drama and the war and youth and imagination, and skylarks and myths and English architecture, and the English Church and the Comic Spirit, and Socrates and German philosophy, and Liberalism and snobbery and culture and sanctity and mysticism and manners and solitude and Queen Mab and liberty (classic and romantic), and the subliminal self and the unconscious Censor and the poet and carnivals and – this list does not exhaust all its topics. In my opinion Mr. Santayana is the greatest of living critics.”

 

[You can find MacCarthy’s Criticism at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]

'One Should Ask One’s Heart Three Questions'

“A man’s style is less rarely the man himself than what he supposes to be a somewhat flattering reflection of himself.  The monster has dominated the ingenious Frankenstein. And many writers become the slaves not only of their own manner but of their own matter too.” 

A meeting of two masters: Walter de la Mare is writing of Max Beerbohm in the January 1, 1913, issue of The Edinburgh Review. A charmed age. The start of the Great War is more than a year and a half away. De la Mare is reviewing eight books, four of which are by writers unknown to me. The others, besides Beerbohm (Christmas Garland), are Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson and Samuel Butler (his Note Books). Very much a nineteenth-century, pre-Modernist selection, as Beerbohm and de la Mare would remain. The review is fifteen pages long.

 

Christmas Garland is a collection of seventeen parodies of such writers as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy and Beerbohm’s bête noire, Rudyard Kipling (a rare writer he genuinely disliked). Parody is a niche taste, dependent as it is on the reader’s knowledge of the original.

 

“Parody,” de la Mare writes, “is the most trying and insidious form of criticism because it is at the same time the most personal and impersonal. It records a lucid intellect’s adventure among masterpieces. At its best it is a mimicry not so much of the genius of the author as of his own gradually acquired conception of it.”

 

There’s little rancor or hostility in Beerbohm’s parodies, except for the Kipling. Seasoned Jamesians will relish his pitch-perfect take on James’ late manner in the opening of “The Mote in the Middle Distance”:   

 

“It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it? The consciousness of dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to outline the figures on what she had called his ‘horizon,’ between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality somewhat intimidating.”

 

De la Mare describes Beerbohm’s parodic gift as “a legerdemain little short of uncanny.” The author of Memoirs of a Midget was a gentleman and a gentle soul. Of the Conrad parody, “The Feast,” de la Mare describes it as “farce, not comedy,” and writes:

 

“A kindly counsellor of youth once suggested that before expressing any sort of opinion on a fellow-creature one should ask one’s heart three questions: ‘Is what I am going to say kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?’ The second question was plain sailing: but which of the others, we wonder, set Max to work?”

'You Recognize It Later from the Ache of Memory'

“I think memory and imagination belong to the same rather mysterious world of human thought. It seems to me that someone without much imagination also has a poor memory. The child who imagines nothing while playing in the corridors of a castle will remember the castle only very vaguely.” 

I’ve just learned that an old friend has died from injuries she suffered in an automobile accident. She was a grade-school teacher, a charming, intelligent woman who never got over the death of her father when she was a little girl. Ours was a friendship that tingled with the proximity of romance. The tension was always there, both of us felt it – we could talk about such things – but never acted on it. Romance, we agreed, would have ruined a valuable friendship. My memories of her are memories that mingle what was and what might have been. Once we watched a documentary about Leon Theramin, inventor of the eponymous musical instrument used on the soundtrack of old horror movies and by the Beach Boys on “Good Vibrations.” That became “our song” and I still think of her when I hear it on the radio. The irony is, it’s a song and band I never much cared for but I remember the castle in vivid detail.

 

The passage at the top is taken from an interview Vladimir Nabokov gave to a reporter for Les Langues Moderne in 1967. He goes on: “There is something in the imagination that connects to memory, and vice versa. Memory could be said to be a sort of imagination concentrated on a certain point. . . . When you remember a thing, you never remember the thing itself, you remember the relation, the association of the thing with something else. And it’s the imagination that makes this link between things.” Memory, in other words, is not a passive recording of phenomena, though some mistake it for a camera. The imagination serves as editor of memory’s first draft.

 

“Being Happy” (Pity the Beautiful, 2012) by Dana Gioia recounts a variation on the friendship I describe. It’s probably more common and perhaps results in more unhappiness. The final stanza:

 

“Being happy is mostly like that. You don’t see it up close.

You recognize it later from the ache of memory.

And you can’t recapture it. You only get to choose

whether to remember or forget, whether to feel remorse

or nothing at all. Maybe it wasn’t really love.

But who can tell when nothing deeper ever came along?”

 

One can imagine Gioia’s poem recast as a short story. Sometimes I think he, like Edwin Arlington Robinson, is a fiction writer manqué. His narrative capacity is strong.

 

[The Nabokov interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]

'The First Test of Greatness for a Book'

Since the time change it gets dark earlier – always, ridiculously, a surprise – and I stepped outside after dinner for a brief walk in the neighborhood. The air in the evening in Houston is cooler and less oppressive, like an autumn day in the North. The moon was in its waning gibbous phase with a soft yellowish haze around it. Without thought I remembered the opening of Henry Vaughan’s “The World”: 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright . . .”

 

Long-time serious readers will recognize the phenomenon. You’re going about your quotidian business, not doing anything especially literary, and a line or phrase or scene from a book, often years-old, will bubble to the surface of the mind. Vaughn’s poem has always reminded me that the simplest commonplace things can be charged with wonder. The moon is a rock in the sky. The moon is a dazzling gift to any conscious soul who sees it. Joseph Bottum wrote on Twitter the other day:

 

“The first test of greatness for a book: Once read, it has the power to recur to the mind, unbidden. And the equivalent is true for any work of art, isn't it? Great art — once heard, once seen, once encountered — has the power to recur to the mind, unbidden.”

 

The neighborhood a few miles to our north turns semi-rural with vegetable gardens and chicken coops, no sidewalks and few streetlights. On the north-south street we occasionally see someone, usually a young woman, riding a horse. I’ve never ridden a horse and have never spent much time around them. Among the cars they look vulnerable and somehow noble, and I remember the scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov dreams of a peasant beating to death an old horse with an iron bar.

 

I shop at Wal-Mart only occasionally, to buy a new pair of blue jeans. I don’t like shopping anywhere but Wal-Mart manages to offend on multiple levels. Invariably, I remember Eric Ormsby’s “Microcosm” (Daybreak at the Straits and Other Poems, 2004), which concludes:

 

“There are double stars in the eyes of cyclonic

Spuds shoveled and spaded up. The dance

Of Shiva is a cobbled-soled affair –

Hobnails and flapping slippers on the disreputable stair.

Yggdrasils

Germinate on Wal-Mart windowsills.”

Being a reader turns memory into an obliging literary rolodex.