'Robinson Crusoe Is a Gentleman'

“This day proving wet, we should have passed our time very uncomfortably, had we not found in the house two chests of books, which we eagerly ransacked.” 

Some time in the mid-sixties I was home alone on a rainy day. It was a summer afternoon. Self-conscious adolescent boredom was nagging me. I didn’t want to watch television. What would have been on? Game shows? Soap operas? I looked at the bookcase in my room, uncertain what to read or even if I wanted to read. For some reason I chose Robinson Crusoe, which I had already read at least once. I laid on my bed and read most of Defoe’s novel that afternoon. Even at the time I was surprised that the story sustained me, that it so thoroughly held my attention and enabled me to forget my boredom. It remains among the books I have most often read.

 

Dr. Johnson famously said: “Was there ever any thing written by mere men that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” (The opposite of what he said of Paradise Lost: “None ever wished it longer.”)

 

The enduring appeal of Defoe’s masterpiece, first published in 1719, is rooted in a common fantasy: If I were marooned on a desert island, how would I survive and what sort of world would I create? You can see how this would appeal to a bored adolescent. Robinson Crusoe remains essentially an excellent adventure story for boys and girls of any age. Like an earlier hero, Odysseus, Crusoe is cunning, courageous and resourceful – the image of ourselves we entertain in reveries. He is also frightened and despairing – precisely our true selves, at least on occasion. I most admire Crusoe’s competence and self-reliance. He gets things done. The best gloss on the story I know comes from an unlikely source – Shirley Robin Letwin’s The Gentleman in Trollope (1982):

 

“What defines a gentleman is a way of being in any circumstances. Even alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe is a gentleman. He reveals a gentleman’s attitude to his plight in his unfailing respect for the humanity of himself and all men; his ability to appreciate the treasures of civilization; his efforts to refashion them for new circumstance; his readiness to build new skills on old; his learning to recognize and repent for his sins; his determination to give his days an orderly shape, to reconcile himself to his misfortune and endow his life with what grace and contentment he can manage.”

 

The passage quoted at the top is taken from the September 3, 1773 entry in James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).

'My Taste Is Rather Boringly Conventional'

Readers often ask interesting questions. One wrote on Tuesday to say he enjoyed the “great variety” of writers and books I write about at Anecdotal Evidence. “I don’t see a consistent theme or genre or even a nationality,” he says. “Nothing you would choose to blog about would surprise me.” That’s reassuring. I like variety and don’t like to repeat myself too often. Then he asks questions I’ve never asked myself: “How would you define your taste? What do all the books and writers you like have in common?” My immediate, honest, unrehearsed answer: You got me. 

I’ve never looked for a grand unifying theory of anything. (One of the reasons I’ve lost most of my earlier interest in Coleridge.)  I have a tolerance for inconsistency in writers and humans in general, but I also have prejudices that I can’t defend critically. I try to avoid bald-face snobbery, though it creeps in. And these prejudices have changed over time, which seems to me a natural progression. Taste, like other aspects of maturity, evolves. Once I liked science fiction. Now I don’t. Once I loved Thomas Pynchon’s novels. Now I don’t. That doesn’t imply that I think readers of sci-fi or Gravity’s Rainbow are cretins. What I’m describing is growing up. Human personality is dynamic and protean. It’s always changing yet remaining identifiably the same – us.

 

If I had to give a one-sentence definition of my taste in literature, I would say it has to be well-written. I understand how nebulous and subjective a quality that is. I don’t like sloppy indifference to style. Neither do I like the flowery stuff, style as mere gingerbread. My idea of a great stylist in prose is Max Beerbohm. In poetry, J.V. Cunningham. Two utterly different sorts of writers.

 

Joseph Epstein published the essay “Such Good Taste” in the Spring 1993 issue of The American Scholar and collected it in With My Trousers Rolled (1995). As usual, Epstein is sensible and often speaks for me:

 

“That one’s taste is best revealed by one’s enthusiasms seems very intelligent, too, except that I am not at all sure I can define my taste by my own enthusiasms. I not only have a fairly strong inconsistency, in my view a happy inconsistency, of taste--I am one of those people who can watch a professional football game in the afternoon and then go off to a chamber music concert in the evening--but in so many realms my taste is rather boringly conventional.”

 

My bent exactly, except I detest sports. (See what I mean?) I suggest my reader seek out Epstein’s essay. Yes, he speaks for me except when he doesn’t. Humor is notoriously personal. Don Rickles cracks me up, leaves me helpless and tear-stained. Not so for many others. As you would expect, Epstein is good on humor:

 

“Nor does my taste always seem coherent. Take humor. I find Henny Youngman very funny. But I also love Max Beerbohm, who, among other knockout remarks, once, considering Freud, said: 'They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses.' W. C. Fields can also do the job for me. I am not above caving in at slapstick: a Buster Keaton walk into a wall, say, or an Oliver Hardy fall through a floor. But then I also think Henry James a very funny man.”

'On the Plains of Poland'

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans invaded Poland from the west nine days later, on September 1, 1939. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. 

In one of those curious historical coincidences, on September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, then working as a writer-editor for Time magazine, met with assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle at his home in Washington, D.C. Chambers revealed his own background as part of the Soviet spy network, which included officials within the Roosevelt administration. He named names: Alger Hiss, among others. Berle was skeptical. He reported Chambers’ revelations to the president, who dismissed them. Berle then shared what he had heard with the FBI, who interviewed Chambers in March 1940, and again in 1942 and 1945. The FBI took no action. In Witness (1952), called by Hilton Kramer "one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American -- and one of the best written, too," Chambers describes what happened next:

 

“I had had to hurry from my office at Time magazine to the airport to catch the six o’clock flight for Washington. I fastened my safety belt, chewed my gum, lay back and closed my eyes. The great plane took off into the serene evening sky of September 2, 1939.

 

“On the plains of Poland, at the same moment, a new day was awakening the Polish nation to terror and insane distress as cavalry tried to turn back, with lance and rifle, a new force in the history of war and men—the German Panzer divisions.

 

“In Moscow, a few days before, Stalin, with a tigerish grin, and a more reserved Ribbentrop, had signed the pact that made Nazism and Communism allies. By the same scratch of the pen, Stalin had unloosed upon mankind, for the second time in two decades, the horror of world war."

    

Chambers had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union from 1932 until 1938, when he broke with communism. On August 3, 1948, Chambers testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He described the spy network at work in the late 1930s, including Hiss’ role. Though the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, in his second trial Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms in federal prison and eventually served three and a half years.

 

For further context, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation. Poland stands out:

 

“[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.”

 

Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between September 1 and October 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues:

 

“Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.”

 

In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”

'How Very Like a Red, Red Rose'

The stuff starts as white powder at the bottom of a one-gallon plastic jug. Add lukewarm water to the line, shake vigorously. Add a thoughtfully included “flavor packet” – lemon-lime, my favorite – to make it “palatable.” Chill. Drink eight ounces every fifteen minutes until the jug is empty. The label calls it “Gavilyte-G Solution 4000ML.” Catchy. Included on the list of possible side effects:

“Very bad headache. Throwing up blood or throw up that looks like coffee grounds. Black, tarry [!], or bloody stools. Bleeding from rectum or rectal pain. This drug may cause you to be dehydrated or have electrolyte problems. Rarely, this may be severe or deadly.”

 

And I volunteered for this. The label says, “No REFILLS.” Barbara Loots in “Colonoscopy: A Love Poem” (Windshift, Kelsay Books, 2018) finds something to celebrate in this most humbling of medical procedures. With apologies to Robert Burns:

 

“My love is like a red, red rose.

I know because I’ve seen

the photographs inside of him

projected on a screen:

 

“the petal-like appearance of

his proximal transverse,

his mid-ascending colon

like a rose’s opening purse,

 

“appendiceal orifice,

a bud not yet unfurled —

Oh, what a pleasing garden is

my true love’s inner world!

 

“How very like a red, red rose

his clean and healthy gut.

I love my laddie all the more

since looking up his butt.”

'How Magnificent the Language!'

Fifty-one years ago I was working as a clerk in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, perhaps the best job I ever had though my six-day-a-week paycheck never topped the double digits. One of the stockrooms in the basement was situated under the bar adjacent to the bookstore – the Domino Lounge. You could hear patrons talking and dancing, the juke box, running water and flushing toilets. Here was kept the overstock of such paperback imprints as Noonday, Vintage and Signet. I see from the date I wrote on the front endpaper that on August 30, 1975 I purchased The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, edited by Norman J. Endicott as part of the Anchor Seventeenth-Century Series. Along with Rasselas, Pascal’s Pensées and Ulysses, it is the most heavily annotated and underlined volume I own. 

I pulled down the Browne collection recently after rereading Dr. Oliver Sacks’ essay “On Libraries.” He recalls his love of the Queens College library at Oxford:

 

“[I]t was in the stacks that I found and fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne—his Religio Medici, his Hydrotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut-and-thrust of Swift—all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions.”

 

He’s right: “how magnificent the language!” One would be a fool to imitate Browne’s deliciously lush English but Sacks is right to think of Swift as a sort of prose antidote to Browne. Sacks continues:

 

“While I had grown up on the nineteenth-century works that my parents favored, it was the catacombs of the Queen’s library that introduced me to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature—Johnson, Hume, Pope, and Dryden. All of these books were freely available, not in some special, locked-away rare books enclave, but just sitting on the shelves, as they had done (I imagined) since their original publication. It was in the vaults of the Queen’s College that I really gained a sense of history, and of my own language.”

 

The same effect for me resulted not from a single place but from many libraries and bookstores, across several decades.

 

Sacks died on August 30, 2015 at age eighty-two.

'Our Whole Life Is an Irish Sea'

Because of something I wrote, an old friend tells me he is reading at last, in his seventies, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton’s prose compendium of marvels. There’s a category of books with little in common except their uncommon eccentricity – Montaigne, Browne, Sterne, Boswell, Landor and Doughty wrote them too. They’re not for everyone, not even every ambitious reader, but for some sensibilities, those that relish a lifetime of autodidactically acquired knowledge, they stand among the great rewards of the reading life. Burton is scholarly but never blandly academic. After four centuries, a person could build a respectable education around The Anatomy. 

It was fifty-six years ago next month, as a university freshman, that I discovered Burton on the library shelf. I don’t know what attracted me to this fat volume dense with interpolated quotations, many in Latin. I don’t think I had ever heard its title or author’s name. Soon I had to buy a copy of my own. It's the Platonic ideal of a family of books Max Beerbohm dubbed “Bedside books. Dippable-into.” Pick them up at any idle moment and enjoy.

 

We know the book grew by accretion, like a coral reef or a galaxy. The first edition contained 353,369 words.  In each subsequent edition, Burton added more material. The sixth, published posthumously in 1651, with corrections and additions made before his death, contained 516,384 words. Burton’s prose, to use a word he favored, is anfractuous: “winding, sinuous, involved; roundabout, circuitous; spiral,” according to the OED, which cites Burton’s usage as the earliest in the language. His prose mirrors his mind, which was curious and accumulative. He loved catalogs and redundancy never bothered him. A characteristic passage begins, “Our whole life is an Irish sea, wherein there is nought to be expected but tempestuous storms and troublesome waves, and those infinite,” and continues:

 

“[W]e bangle away our best days, befool out our times, we lead a contentious, discontent, tumultuous, melancholy, miserable life; insomuch, that if we could foretell what was to come, and it put to our choice, we should rather refuse than accept of this painful life. In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another . . .”

 

I quote at length to give you a taste of the way Burton’s brain works. It’s helpful to remember that he chose Democritus Junior as his persona in homage to the Laughing Philosopher. Mike, enjoy Burton’s grab-bag of gifts.

'Consulting Other Understandings'

Dr. Johnson in The Adventurer on August 28, 1753:

“. . . I shall, therefore, venture to inculcate to my ingenious contemporaries, the necessity of reading, the fitness of consulting other understandings than their own, and of considering the sentiments and opinions of those who, however neglected in the present age, had in their own times, and many of them a long time afterwards, such reputation for knowledge and acuteness as will scarcely ever be attained by those that despise them.”

 

Not all our forebears were idiots or barbarians. This will come as news to those trained in detesting Western civilization, one byproduct of which is mass literacy. Johnson is writing at a time when printing was becoming widely available. Books and newspapers flourished. Even then there were naysayers. Johnson writes:

 

“An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.”

 

Johnson uses “lumber” in the earlier sense of “useless or cumbrous material” (OED). As Alexander Pope writes in “An Essay on Criticism” (1711): “The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, / With loads of learned lumber in his head.” For a sense of how Johnson, even as a young man, used books, see W. Jackson Bate’s biography:

 

“Balked by the school procedure from reading either for substance or even for style in any genuine sense, his immense curiosity found outlet in independent dipping into books and skimming them. And his habit of instantly ‘relating’ one thing to another, which Mrs. Thrale rightly thought one of the secrets of his mental superiority, enabled him to get a point quickly, to see its ramifications, and to anchor it to a growing corpus of general thought that was imaginatively and fertilely alive.”

 

Only by reading can we learn from the past – “other understandings” -- and avoid the folly of “presentism” and blinkered self-reliance. In his essay “On the Death and Consolations of Reading,” Theodore Dalrymple reminds us that the equation Reading many books = Moral enlightenment is false and dangerous:

 

“But are books necessary to moral development? We may dismiss their sufficiency in this regard straight away; no one would expect the person who had read 100 books to be necessarily twice as good, or even only slightly better, than someone who has read 50. Indeed, reading the wrong books can probably make you worse than you would otherwise have been; nor does it follow from the fact that books can make you worse that they must also be able to make you better. It is easier to corrupt than to correct.”