''There is Nothing Easier Than to Destroy a Book'

 This blog has been around for more than twenty years and I could easily devote the next twenty to replying to the complaints I often receive. Some are deserved. I appreciate readers who correct errors of fact, point out typos and suggest alternatives to stylistic infelicities or misused words. Such replies to posts are encouraged, especially if they are given politely and respectfully. Less helpful are ad hominem attacks (Racist! Sexist! Fascist!) and complaints rooted in fashionable politics. This week I got a doozy. A reader – a male – complained I have seldom devoted posts to female writers. “You seem to really hate women,” he wrote. This will come as a surprise to my wife, former bosses and colleagues, and female friends. 

I write with regularity (I have no quota system) about some of my favorite writers – Rebecca West, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, Janet Lewis, Marguerite Yourcenar, George Eliot, Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Pinkerton, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Kay Ryan. And then there’s a writer for whom love and admiration seem almost inadequate – Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980), widow of the great murdered poet Osip Mandelstam. She was tough, smart and resourceful. She has stayed with me, in memory and in moral inheritance, for more than half a century. Her two volumes of memoirs document the persecution and final destruction of her husband by Stalin and his goons and the final forty-two years of her own harassed and impoverished life in the Soviet Union.

 

Here is a passage from her first autobiographical volume, Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970), lines retained since I first read the book in 1974: “To think that we could have had an ordinary life with its bickering, broken hearts and divorce suits! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn’t we have given for such ordinary heartbreaks!”

 

The human craving for immunity to life’s unpleasantness is blind and eternal, while the gratitude we owe for our “ordinary heartbreaks” is bottomless. And another: “The coming of a new book into [her husband’s] life was like a first encounter with someone destined to be a friend.” That passage is from Chapter 49 of Hope Against Hope, “The Reader of One Book,” which begins like this:

 

“In his youth M. always carefully weighed his words—it was only later that he tended toward levity. In 1919, when he was still very young, he once told me that there was no need at all to have a lot of books, and that it was best to read one book all one’s life. ‘Do you mean the Bible?’ I asked. ‘Why not?’ he replied.”

 

Nadezhda thinks of the “splendid graybeards of the East who read the Koran throughout their lives.” She says of Osip, “I could scarcely picture my light-hearted companion as one of them.” Knowing what was soon to come in the Soviet Union, it’s poignantly difficult to think of Mandelstam as ever having been “light-hearted.” She goes on: “A real poet is always recognized immediately—by his enemies as well as by his well-wishers. It seems inevitable that a poet should arouse enmity.”

 

Mandelstam refers not to poetasters masquerading as agents provocateurs, anti-bourgeois poseurs and “activists,” but the real thing, dedicated writers. The two breeds are instantly distinguishable on the page. Nadezhda writes:

 

“M. never tried to commit what he read to memory, but rather to check it against his own experience, always testing it in the light of his own basic idea—the one which must underlie any real personality. It is reading of the passive type, which has always made it possible to propagate predigested ideas, to instill into the popular mind slick, commonplace notions. Reading of this kind does not stimulate thought, but has an effect similar to hypnosis—though it must be said that the modern age has even more powerful means for dominating people’s minds.”

 

The manner of reading Mandelstam describes, weighing what one reads against one’s experience of life, seems commonsensical but in fact is rare almost to the point of being exotic. Her volumes, in addition to chronicling one of literature’s great love stories (many of Osip’s poems once existed only in Nadezhda’s devoted memory), are, as Clive James writes of her in Cultural Amnesia (2007), “key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us.”

 

In the second volume, Hope Abandoned (trans. Hayward, 1974), Mandelstam goes on writing as an acidic truth-teller, no respecter of the despotism that had murdered her husband. She writes:

 

“We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.”

 

Mandelstam abominates any naively rosy understanding of human nature: “Everything we have been through here was the result of succumbing to the temptations of our era—to which no one is immune who has still to be struck down by the disease of putting his faith in force and retribution. Vengeance and envy are the prime motives of human behavior.”

 

Mandelstam may be the most bitterly ironic writer (and she is a writer, not merely a documentarian) since Swift. Her narrative is unrelenting, and she leaves us—her oh-so-fortunate Western readers -- feeling like callow teenagers: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. Read the final paragraph of Chap. 41 of Hope Abandoned, “The Years of Silence,” in full:

 

“This book, which I have now nearly finished, may never see the light of day. There is nothing easier than to destroy a book, unless it already circulates in samizdat or has found it ways into print (as used to happen to books in the Gutenberg period of Russian history). But even if it is destroyed, it may, perhaps, not have been entirely in vain. Before being consigned to the flames, it will be read by those whose expert task it is to destroy books, to eradicate words, to stamp out thought. They will understand none of it, but perhaps somewhere in the recesses of their strange minds the idea will stick that this crazy old woman fears nothing and despises force. It will be something if they understand that much. The thought of it will be like a little pinch of salt to sprinkle on their privileged rations, or a garnishing to whet their appetite for that other literature designed to edify and instruct people of their kind, functionaries to whom nothing matters, neither life, nor man, nor the earth, nor anything—dimmed by their breath—that lights our way. Heaven help them. But will they really succeed in their task of universal destruction?”

'I Have Known His Voice Quaver'

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I would have been more impressionable, or later, when I would have been less ready to learn. So he came at just the right time for me.”

 

Good teachers are exceedingly rare, which we’re not supposed to admit, but the same goes for students. It’s a matter of temperament and, as Thom Gunn suggests above, timing. By my count I had five excellent teachers in the formal sense, and dozens of lousy or indifferent ones. The good ones made it clear they had expectations of me. Since then, I’ve known several people I’ve informally adopted as teachers, beginning with Guy Davenport.

 

Gunn’s portrait of Winters is taken from a lecture he gave in 1977 at Lake Forest College in Illinois. The recovered transcript, titled “An Apprenticeship,” was first published in the Winter issue of The Threepenny Review in 2022.

 

In 1954, Gunn had graduated from Cambridge, published his first poetry collection, Fighting Terms, and came to the United States to study with Winters at Stanford. I’m always touched by Winters’ thoughtfulness and hospitality. He met Gunn at the train station, invited him home for dinner and made sure he had a place to stay. More from Gunn about Winters:

 

“Winters emphasized that poetry has to engage the whole self. He saw it as the prime art-form, into which one concentrated as much of one’s experience and intelligence and emotion as possible.”

 

“We were brought to feel a direct continuity between ourselves and other practicers of the art, like Corbière, Williams, the American Indian poets, and George Herbert.”

 

“There were two compelling things about Winters. One was his great personal warmth, his charm and good humor. The other was that he had a deeper love of poetry than I have ever come across in anybody else. I have known his voice quaver almost into tears while reading a poem to which he was especially attached.

 

“The love was behind his increasingly strict conception of what a poem should and should not be. It seemed to him an insult to the poem that it should be used as a gymnasium for the ego. Poetry was an instrument for exploring the truth of things, as far as human beings can explore it, and it can do so with a greater verbal exactitude than even good prose can manage. Large generalized feelings (as in Whitman, whom he abhorred) were out, and rhetoric was the beginning of falsification.”

 

Gunn offers an alternative to stereotyped notions of Winters as a reactionary crank. Years after being his student Gunn would write “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” which concludes:

 

“Though night is always close, complete negation  

Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,  

Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,  

Still it is right to know the force of death,  

And, as you do, persistent, tough in will,  

Raise from the excellent the better still.” 

'Fullness For the Time That Was to Come'

Donald Justice on Edwin Arlington Robinson: 

“Robinson’s techniques were more or less the same as those of his contemporaries, the meters strict always, so strict and even jingly at times as to suggest light verse. Only—and this makes all the difference—the pieties are not quite in place . . .” 

After two hundred fifty years, America has produced a handful of world-class poets, and many good ones. Robinson I rank as the greatest to emerge between Dickinson and Eliot. His only rival among close contemporaries is Robert Frost. A reader has accused me of exaggerating Robinson’s importance. I’m reminded of Virginia Woolf’s assessment of Middlemarch: “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The same can be said of Robinson. Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Roethke, for instance, write essentially for children and the childish.

 

By “pieties” Justice means the Emersonian bromides and sentimentalities, often religious or warmed-over Romantic in nature, that have dominated so much American verse. That slippery term “realist” applies to Robinson largely because he is seldom naïve about human nature. Neither is he exaggeratedly cynical on most occasions. Robinson’s instincts overlap with the fiction writer’s. Take “Isaac and Archibald” (Captain Craig and Other Poems, 1902). Robinson was a great story teller, among his other gifts. In this poem he encourages the reader to inhabit at least four characters – those named in the title, the narrator and the narrator’s younger self. This complex arrangement of sympathetic ties mirrors our life and the way we preserve it and transform it in memory:

 

“’Look at me, my boy,

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after him, try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

Just as I was to-day. Think of the place

Where we are sitting now, and think of me—

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald.’—The words come back

Almost as Isaac must have uttered them,

And there comes with them a dry memory

Of something in my throat that would not move.”

 

When read aloud the passage sounds almost unbearably plangent – Isaac speaking of himself in the third person, as though already dead, urging the narrator to remember; the narrator’s act of remembrance as a man of the boy he was; the boy’s tacit sense that Isaac’s words are important and deserve to be remembered. And then our narrator remembers his time alone with Archibald and the old man’s warning that echoes Henry James’ Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

 

“I’m in the shadow, but I don’t forget

The light, my boy,—the light behind the stars.

Remember that: remember that I said it;

And when the time that you think far away

Shall come for you to say it—say it, boy;

Let there be no confusion or distrust

In you, no snarling of a life half lived,

Nor any cursing over broken things

That your complaint has been the ruin of.

Live to see clearly and the light will come

To you, and as you need it.”

 

There’s another line, almost a throwaway, that makes me look at myself and the boy I was and at my own sons: “And all was as it should be. I was young.” Robinson encourages this sense of mutual vision, of being the see-er and the seen, the remembered and the one who remembers. Isaac and Archibald are at once foolish old men and heroes out of Homer, “the loved and well-forgotten.” The nameless boy remembers that summer moment under the apple tree and his vision of the anticipated future:

 

                                                            “I felt

Within the mightiness of the white sun

That smote the land around us and wrought out

A fragrance from the trees, a vital warmth

And fullness for the time that was to come,

And a glory for the world beyond the forest.”

 

That a poem about a boy and two old men should kindle powerful emotions in a reader is no surprise. When not trivial or pyrotechnical, when the poet subsumes himself in words, a poem can be as humbly potent as a memory.

'The Oxford of All Sicknesses'

I spent much of Monday in the hospital for “tests” involving various bodily fluids – one more reminder that the human body is profoundly ridiculous. In two weeks I’m scheduled for surgery. The text for the day was Karl Shapiro’s “Hospital,” one of seven poems he published in the July 1941 issue of Poetry. Five months later the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would enter World War II and Shapiro (1913-2000) would write the poems he is best remember for while serving in the Army in the South Pacific. “Hospital” is written by a twenty-eight-year-old poet very much under the sway, like so many young poets at the time, of W.H. Auden: 

“Inside or out, the key is pain. It holds

The florist to your pink medicinal rose,

The nickname to the corpse. One wipes it from

Blue German blades or drops it down the drain.

The novelist with a red tube up his nose

 Gingerly pets it. Nurse can turn it off.

 

“This is the Oxford of all sicknesses.

Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews

And actresses whose legs were always news.

In this black room the painter lost his sight,

The crippled dancer here put down her shoes,

And the scholar's memory broke, like an old clock.”

 

Joseph Epstein borrowed the title of his 2003 short story collection, Fabulous Small Jews, from the poem. Shapiro was one of my favorite poets when I was a teenager.

'Chekhov Saved Me But Also Ruined Me'

Recently I woke from a dream adapted from Nostromo and directed by Joseph Conrad. Something about Martin Decoud in the lifeboat, weighted down with silver ingots. The dream, typically, was fragmentary and out of focus. This is only the second time I can remember having a dream lifted from a work of fiction. The other involved Leopold Bloom embracing Rudy, his dead infant son. Do I find profound significance in these nighttime theatricals? That both involve death? Not really. They tell me that fiction, like one’s "real" life, is raw material for the subconscious, and perhaps that I know these novels nearly as well as my own life. There’s a touch of pride in knowing Conrad and Joyce are among the greatest writers, longtime favorites, and that Joyce Carol Oates hasn’t infected my subconscious. 

In her latest post at The Little White Attic, “My Personal Library,” Di Nguyen examines the books she owns – a common practice among serious readers -- and writes:

 

“Sometimes I try to find some pattern behind the writers who speak the most to me, but can’t find any. I like both sane writers (Jane Austen, Chekhov, Tolstoy) and mad writers (Emily Bronte, Melville, Akutagawa); both warm writers (Chekhov, Molière, Dickens) and cold writers (Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark). I think I like writers preoccupied with the subject of death, but Jane Austen leaves it offstage. I think I like writers with a sense of humour, but does Tolstoy make anyone laugh? (Maybe twice in War and Peace). I think I like writers who see some goodness and nobility in humanity and don’t just depict us all as base and bestial, but why do I like Flannery O’Connor?”

 

These are the sort of questions I ask myself. Like Di, I see no pattern. This says something about me but also about the great library of fiction, the way it reflects, after sufficient reading, the infinite complexity of human beings, our capacity for humility and love, duplicity and evil, our essentially contradictory nature. Di writes:

 

“[D]uring that difficult period of my life, I found solace in Chekhov and found myself moving away from Austen—she didn’t write about the subjects that were preoccupying me. But now looking back, I can’t help wondering if I was making a mess of things because I absorbed Chekhov’s pessimism and accepted that human relationships were messy and my life was over and there’s no happiness on earth. I was going through volumes and volumes of Chekhov—how many stories did I read? Chekhov saved me but also ruined me.”

 

In a letter to his sister, shortly before committing suicide, Martin Decoud writes: “[A]ll this is life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.”

'The Summer Has Begun to Pass Away'

 Anton Chekhov wrote nothing in the summer of 1888 but thought about writing a novel. He stayed at the villa of his editor and friend Aleksi Suvorin in Feodosia, in Crimea on the Black Sea. He was leading a “vile, lotus-eating life,” as he says in a letter to his family written July 23-24: 

“The days pass in an endlessly replete stream, the cup of life overflows . . . Lounging about on the beach, Chartreuse, punch, fireworks, bathing, good cheer at supper, trips, songs – all such pleasures make the days go by so quickly that you hardly notice them; time flies while the drowsy head nods off to the sound of the waves and refuses to get down to work.”

 

Despite his inactivity, earlier that year he had written “The Steppe.” Soon he would write “A Dreary Story” and “Gusev.” The novel was never written but Chekhov was on the cusp of his greatest period.

 

Every year as Northerners we are surprised by summer’s passing, as though it were a fluke. We go on sensing within us the cycle of the seasons. Saturday morning here in Houston the temperature dipped to sixty-one degrees, the first time that cool this season. It felt almost chilly but I left my jacket at home. Howard Nemerov published “Summer’s Elegy” in The Blue Swallows (1967):

 

“Day after day, day after still day,

The summer has begun to pass away.

Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,

And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.

The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,

And the meadowlark’s house is cut down.

 

“The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,

The swallows sit in rows along the wires.

Berry and grape appear among the flowers

Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,

And cricket now begins to hum the hours

Remaining to the passion’s slow procession

Down from the high place and the golden session

Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous,

Now frames the long and solemn afternoons

Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.

We reach the place unripe, and made to know

As with a sudden knowledge that we go

Away forever, all hope of return

Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-

ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound

Of apples dropping on the dry ground”

 

That year, 1967, I was almost fifteen and I accompanied my father when he installed the wrought-iron railing and fence he had made for a wealthy family in Bratenahl, a tiny village northeast of Cleveland on Lake Erie. The lady was friendly and served us lunch. She invited me afterwards into the backyard which was almost filled with a small apple orchard. She gave me a burlap sack and said I could fill it with apples. I had picked crabapples before. They were wormy and indigestible, and we used them in apple fights. Picking large, unblemished apples was a novelty and is forever associated with the passing of summer and the arrival of autumn: “the terminal sound / Of apples dropping on the dry ground.”

'These Remarks Are Heretical'

Like Edward Gibbon, Yvor Winters tucks some of his best stuff into footnotes. Take this provocation from “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,” published in the Summer 1955 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (Swallow Press, 1957): 

“At this point, I would like to interject one word of warning to the professors. Poets are not fools (I mean good poets); they are capable of perceiving in their early twenties facts which professors may or may not manage to perceive in their sixties or seventies. I am not trying to be insulting (the technical term, I think, is ‘arrogant’); I am trying rather to state an important truth which is overlooked for the greater part in the academic world. There is likely to be over long periods what one might call an underground or unpublicized, tradition of the best writing, which one can discover only if one has the perception to trace the tradition from poem to poem. I am fully aware that these remarks are heretical.”

 

Winters’ essay is a review of three academic volumes including English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C. S. Lewis. The footnote was added to the book and doesn’t appear in the journal article. As always, Winters focuses his attention on individual poems not individual poets. He uses the occasion to celebrate the “plain style” of poetry, as he does in his poem “Time and the Garden”:

 

“I would expand to greatness. No one hears,

And I am still retarded in duress!

And this is like that other restlessness

To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,

One which the tougher poets have discerned—

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,

Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,

And spaced by many years, each line an act

Through which few labor, which no men retract.”

 

The plain style is the most exclusive in the history of English literature, shunned by or unknown to most contemporary poets. A convenient example is the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature who, strictly speaking, is not a poet at all but an assembler of au courant bric-a-brac. Readers of Winters’ final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), will recognize the poems Winters names, including George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” Henry Vaughan’s “To His Books” and Fulke Greville’s “The world that all containes.”

 

The footnote quoted above has proved prophetic. Most of our best poets are part of an “underground.” Not in the self-congratulatory, politicized Sixties sense but apart from the big publishers and name-brand critics. They often rely on Twitter, Substack, various blogs, small publishers and self-publication. Winters closes his review like this:

 

“[O]ne reads and reads and reads, and one does one’s best to remember. It is a messy business, any way one takes it; but it is also fascinating.” 

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900 and died in 1968 (annus horribilis) at age sixty-seven.