'Put Yourself in Your Reader's Place'

No need to dispense with writers rendered neutral by the passing of years. It happens naturally. Time discards what no longer seems interesting or useful. One of my poetic heroes at age fifteen was Hart Crane, in part because like me he was born and raised in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Like him, I was word-drunk (and drunk). Today Crane’s poetry seems a little silly and overripe. That’s not the same as calling him a “bad poet,” à la Charles Olson. I just find little pleasure in reading his work. Time has a tendency to sift away the dross.

The process works in the opposite direction. When I was young the brief, strictly metric poems of A.E. Housman seemed insubstantial and dull. They read like the work of an indifferent lyricist, or so I thought in my adolescent oblivion. Asked by an interviewer to name the poet from whom she learned the most, Wendy Cope replied: “A.E.Housman; his poems are short, accessible and moving.” She left out subtle and emotionally powerful. Few poems move me as strongly as a handful of his poems. On December 14, 1894, Houman writes to his brother Laurence, who was considering the publication of some verse:

 

“What makes many of your poems more obscure than they need be is that you do not put yourself in the reader’s place and consider how, and at what stage, that man of sorrows is to find out what it is all about. You are behind the scenes and know all the data; but he only knows what you tell him. . . . How soon do you imagine your victim will find out that you are talking about horses? Not until the thirteenth of these long lines, unless he is such a prodigy of intelligence and good will as I am: there you mention ‘hoofs’, and he has to read the thirteen lines over again. ‘Flank’ in line six is not enough: Swinburne’s women have flanks.”

 

Housman could be savage in his judgments of poetry but with his brother he is gentle and amusing, without blunting his critical reading. To “put yourself in the reader’s place” is just good manners, not philistinism.

'Yet Still He Fills Affection’s Eye'

"So many have died before us, that our deaths can supply but few materials for a poet . . . after so many . . . funeral dirges he must be highly favored by nature or by fortune who says anything not said before."' 

How to avoid lazy plagiarism or greeting-card sentimentality when remembering the dead? We are obligated to remember and elegize them but all the appropriate words and sentiments seem to have been used. Consider newspaper obituaries, composed in AI-like language, a soulless recitation of dates and survivors. The best you can hope for is that the name of the deceased is properly spelled. Half a century ago the first thing I wrote as a newspaper reporter was an obituary, a narrowly defined form in a smalltown paper. I felt guilty reducing an old farmer to a filled-in template. He deserved better.

 

Above, Dr. Johnson is writing in his “Life of Dryden,” conscious that elegies were cranked out on an industrial scale in the eighteenth century. Poets aped Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and John Milton’s “Lycidas.” In his “Life of Savage” Johnson had written: “He knew that the track of elegy had been so long beaten, that it was impossible to travel in it without treading in the footsteps of those who had gone before him.” Somehow, Johnson overcame the challenge when writing about his friend Dr. Robert Levet, one of life’s lost souls.

 

Johnson had met Levet in 1746, thus beginning another of his unlikely friendships (Levet was laconic; Johnson, effusive and conversation-loving). Boswell described him as “an obscure practitioner of physick among the lower people.” In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate writes of Levet:

 

“Since his return [from France], he had developed a wide practice among the London poor, walking long distances every day, from Houndsditch, near one end of the city, to Marylebone, at the other, ministering to them for a small fee, or, if they could not afford that, for anything they felt they could give him. Often this was no more than a drink of gin or brandy. Rather than go away unrewarded — though he never demanded payment — Levet would quietly swallow the drink, though he really did not want it; and he would occasionally end up drunk (‘Perhaps the only man,’ said Johnson, ‘who ever became intoxicated through motives of prudence’).”

 

Levet died at age seventy-seven of a heart attack in Johnson’s house on January 17, 1782, and the poet soon wrote one of his finest poems, “On the Death of Mr. Levet.” Here are the second and third stanzas:

 

“Well tried through many a varying year,

See Levet to the grave descend,    

Officious, innocent, sincere,         

Of every friendless name the friend.

 

Yet still he fills affection’s eye,      

  Obscurely wise and coarsely kind,

Nor, letter’d Arrogance, deny       

  Thy praise to merit unrefined.”

 

Bate notes its “calm Horatian style” and writes: “If it is a lament for this dutiful, awkward, and conscientious man, it is also a lament for life — for common humanity, and for the effort that human beings try to make, in this strange purgatory of our lives, to fulfill moral values and ideals.” 

 

Johnson himself was seventy-two and would die in less than three years, on December 13, 1784. Boswell tells us Johnson was visited at the end by “a Miss Morris, daughter to a particular friend of his.” Her identity remains a mystery. Johnson’s last days mingled the grotesque and the noble. He suffered from general circulatory disease, made evident six months earlier by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, accompanied by growing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. In Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998), Lawrence Lipking describes the scene shortly before his death: 

 

“Bloated with dropsy [edema], Johnson tries to discharge the water by stabbing his legs with a lancet and scissors until the bedclothes are covered with blood. He even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.” 

 

Miss Morris told Frank Barber, Johnson’s servant, that she must see him. “[T]he girl, too anxious to wait outside in case he came out with a refusal,” John Wain tells us in his biography (1974), “followed at his heels and stood there while Frank explained what she wanted. Johnson’s almost helpless body turned over in the bed; he looked at her and spoke, ‘God bless you, my dear.’ They were his last words. 

 

“At about seven o’clock that evening, Frank and Elizabeth Desmoulins were sitting in Johnson’s room when his breathing ceased, quietly and with no disturbance. It was some minutes before they realized that he had died.”

'He Loved What He Was Doing'

"Looking back as well as I can at my character during my school life, the only qualities which at this period promised well for the future, were, that I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.” 

Charles Darwin reflecting on his childhood reminds me of my middle son, now twenty-four and a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, who underwent a successive wave of enthusiasms as a boy – geodes, carnivorous plants, coins, quadratic equations, chemistry (he revised Mendeleev’s periodic table), Dante and computers, among other things. Each fancy prompted research and study. Nearly everything seemed eventually to interest him, a quality he retains. Such a relief and a blessing for his parents. We have known so many slugs among children – dull, incurious, lazy.  

 

Darwin (1809-82) wrote his Autobiography for his children in 1876, and it was posthumously published by his son Francis Darwin in 1887. An unexpurgated edition came out in 1958. Darwin belongs with those other industriously prolific Victorians – Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, Macaulay, George Eliot, Browning and others. Though nominally a scientist, Darwin was often a gifted writer of prose. His most influential works – On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871) -- remain enjoyably readable today. I marked this passage during an earlier reading of the Autobiography:

 

“[A]nd if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

 

One hears preached with increasing regularity the naïve notion that literature is “good for us,” like spinach. It probably can’t hurt but it’s not therapeutic. Focused attention paid to any subject, whether Euclid or Laurence Sterne, can only sharpen our wits. Darwin recalls:

 

“[W]ith respect to diversified tastes, independently of science, I was fond of reading various books, and I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays of Shakespeare, generally in an old window in the thick walls of the school. I read also other poetry, such as Thomson’s ‘Seasons,’ and the recently published poems of Byron and Scott. I mention this because later in life I wholly lost, to my great regret, all pleasure from poetry of any kind, including Shakespeare.”

 

That’s a familiar and unfortunate complaint, one I have thus far avoided. Darwin’s mature reactions to poetry seem exaggerated or nearly pathological. There’s something sad about Darwin’s loss of interest in the writers who moved him as a boy and young man:

 

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. . . . But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. . . . On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.”

 

Reviewing John Bowlby’s biographyof Darwin in 1991, Guy Davenport writes: “He loved what he was doing, and he did it out of pure curiosity.”

'The Most Corrupt Writer Who Ever Lived'

If I were to ask you to name a “corrupt” writer, who comes to mind first? Consider the adjective. From the Latin and French, the original fourteenth-century English borrowing, according to the OED, meant “putrid, rotten or rotting; infected or defiled by that which causes decay.” In other words, a biochemical process, a dissolution of living tissue. The word mutated into its more familiar figurative sense almost immediately: “debased in character; infected with evil; depraved; perverted; evil, wicked.” Thus, it becomes a common modifier of politicians and political behavior, as in “corrupt Congressman.” 

As to corrupt writers, the description applies to those who do not necessarily write ineptly or have little fondness for linguistic felicity. Rather, it suggests dishonesty and an advocacy of stupid, vulgar, self-indulgent or hateful ideas. Lots of candidates come to mind, of course. My first nominee is Norman Mailer. It must be difficult for young people to comprehend how embarrassingly awful Mailer’s thinking and prose could be (Marilyn, anyone? Ancient Evenings? Tough Guys Don’t Dance?), and how seriously he was taken by critics and readers. I remember reading The Naked and the Dead as a teenager and wondering what all the fuss was about. I had already read U.S.A. by Dos Passos, and Mailer was clearly manipulating some of the same narrative devices as his predecessor. A tone of strident preaching and dangerously elevated levels of machismo were already discernable.

 

Michael Oakeshott suggests an even more consequential example of writerly corruption in a 1967 entry in his Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014):

 

“Karl Marx is a remarkable writer. No other can turn possible truths into superstitions so rapidly & so conclusively. Every truth that came to him he turned into a falsehood. He is, possibly, the most corrupt writer who ever lived. It is not, therefore, surprising that he became the apostle of the illiterate masses of the world – by ‘illiterate’ I mean those who can accept nothing but what has been endowed with the quality of superstition.”

 

For the unconvinced I suggest reading the three-volume history of Marxist philosophy, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (1976; trans. P.S. Falla, 1978) by Leszek Kolakowski, who describes Marxism as “the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” Later in his Notebooks Oakeshott writes:

 

“It was not Marx who portended the new, deadly uniformity; it was Francis Bacon & St Simon, the Faustian progenitors of a world where everything is organized. The world where law has ceased to be lore.”

 

Oakeshott was born on this date, December 11, in 1901, and died in 1990 at age eighty-nine. 

'The Only Information I am Seriously Interested In'

I’ve met three or four people who might accurately be described, even by others, as extremely “well-informed.” Most were journalists, whose jobs depend on keeping up with things, a virtue I have never possessed. These were men who had not only absorbed vast quantities of information – and that’s all “news” ever is – but were able to access it, articulate its essence and render an analysis instantaneously. An admission that they might have to “look up” something would have embarrassed them. 

Knowing stuff was a moral obligation for them, though what they knew tended to be current and thus tinged with provinciality. The present, after all, is a historical backwater. These men were smart and could readily think on their feet but had little historical knowledge of anything that had happened before, to be tactful, 1914. A winningly cynical editor I knew referred generically to such an exhaustive and exhausting approach to journalism as “a five-part series on the economy of Bulgaria” – and this was pre-1989.

 

In the Winter 1995 issue of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein, then the journal’s editor, published the essay “An Extremely Well-informed SOB,” in which he shares my sense of ignorance. Epstein, of course, is a notably well-read man:

 

“Given all this reading--maybe it adds up to four or five hours a day--you might think me an extremely well-informed SOB. Funny, but I don’t in the least feel well-informed. If anything, I feel less and less informed as the years go by. Once upon a time, and not so long ago as all that, one could posit what an educated man or woman ought to know: what languages, what historical narratives, what works of philosophy, literature, music, and art.”

 

I once suggested to a young reporter during Desert Storm that if he wanted insight into the first Iraqi war he ought to read Homer’s Iliad. Naturally, he thought I was kidding. Everyone has a right to a hobby, whether collecting scrimshaw or baseball cards. Following the news is a benign hobby at least until it becomes fodder for argument. Seldom voiced is the notion that obsessively following current events is a form of egotism (not that dissenters from this camp are paragons of humility). Epstein continues:

 

“What, really, is the point of being well-informed? Perhaps the first answer to that question is that it relieves one of the embarrassment of seeming ignorant. Having information, knowing the score, the true gen (as Hemingway called it), the real lowdown, brings a thrill of its own special kind. Not only does it separate one from the ignoranti--cognoscenti 48, ignoranti 0--but it gives one the feeling that one is living the life of one's time.”

 

Some of us prefer living the life of Dr. Johnson’s or Emily Dickinson's time. Epstein offers a convincing explanation for why people want to amass reams of stuff that will soon be irrelevant and forgotten: “I suppose one of the reasons for being well-informed on everything is so that one can have an opinion on everything. The culture seems very opinionated just now.” And that was thirty years ago, an era that seems from our vantage almost humble and blissfully uninformed. Perhaps it comes down to knowing how to distinguish the important from the trivial – a gift that seems increasingly rare. Here is Epstein’s conclusion:

 

“With the information revolution closing in, I ask myself whether it isn’t possible to live deeper down, at some more genuine, less superficial level of life than that promised by an endless flow of still more and then yet again even more information. It has taken me a good while to understand this, but it turns out that the only information I am seriously interested in is that about the human heart, and this I cannot find any easy way to access, not even with the best of modems, fiber-optic cable, or digital technology. Pity, though, to have to miss out on another revolution.”

 

[Epstein’s essay is collected in Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999).]

'Nor a Single Thing That Belongs to Us'

“The atmosphere in Lwów, in November, December . . . A city that had lost its beauty, a city besieged by fear.” 

The Polish poet Aleksander Wat is speaking with his friend Czesław Miłosz in a series of interviews later published as My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (trans. Richard Lourie, 1988), recalling the days before the start of World War II.

 

“Did you know Lwów before the war? Lwów was one of the loveliest Polish cities in the sense that it was a merry city. Not so much the people, but the city itself. Very colorful, very exotic, it had none of the grayness of Warsaw, or even Poznań. Its exoticism made it a very European city.”

 

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin had agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazis invaded Poland from the west nine days later. 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. Lwów is located in East Galicia, now part of Ukraine.

 

“Lwów was a bit more like the Vienna of operetta, the Vienna of joie de vivre. Like some of the Italian cities. Not all of them though—some Italian cities are dismal as well. Lwów was like Marseilles. Well, the Soviets had barely arrived, and all at once everything was covered in mud (of course, it was fall), dirty, gray, shabby. People began cringing and slinking down the streets. Right away, people started wearing ragged clothes, obviously they were afraid to be seen in their better clothes.”

 

Depending on its most recent conqueror, Lwów has been known as Lviv (the current designation), Lvov, Lemberg, Lwihorod and Leopolis. When Zbigniew Herbert was born there in 1924, it was part of the Second Polish Republic. Other natives include Emanuel Ax, Martin Buber, Stanisław Lem, Leopold Staff and Simon Wiesenthal.

 

Three days ago, on December 6, the Russians launched a massive drone and missile strike on Ukraine’s power generation infrastructure. This followed a similar attack on November 28-29. Power was interrupted in Lviv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Odessa, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv. In “Mr Cogito Considers a Return to His Native Town” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter) Herbert writes:

 

“If I went back there

I would probably not find

A single shadow of my old home

Nor the trees of childhood

Nor a cross with an iron plaque

A bench on which I murmured incantations

Nor a single thing that belongs to us.”

'A Certain Self-Knowledge'

For the sheer pleasure of it, here is a freely translated excerpt from the English poet-critic C.H. Sisson’s version of Horace’s Epistle II.3, “Ars Poetica,” published in 1974: 

“The man who can actually tell when a verse is lifeless

Will know when it doesn’t sound right; he will point to stragglers,

And equally put his pen through elaboration;

He will even force you to give up your favourite obscurities,

Tell you what isn’t clear and what has got to be changed,

Like Dr. Johnson himself. There will be no nonsense

About it not being worth causing trouble for trifles.

Trifles like that amount in the end to disaster,

Derisory writing and meaning misunderstood.”

 

Sisson’s translation is cantankerous, amusing and very un-Nabokovian. It is also among the most valuable sources of writerly know-how published during my lifetime. The work consists of a ten-page overview titled “The Ars Poetica in English Literature,” the 467-line translation and twelve pages of notes. There’s nothing stuffy about any of it:

 

“One may recommend the use of Johnson’s dictionary, as an ordinary working tool, to the apprentice writer—an expression which includes all writers worth their salt.”

 

This practical advice from the notes to lines 40-78, in which Horace (via Sisson) commends the use of new coinages, saying that “new-made words can flower, if they come from good roots.” The pun is tartly precise. He adds that neologisms should “not be allowed to run wild.”  Characteristically, Sisson urges tradition-minded novelty, moving forward while ever looking back:

 

“For why should the reader

Allow to Sterne what he will refuse to Joyce?

And why should I not add something, however little,

To the language which Chaucer and Shakespeare made more pointed?”

 

Among writers, masters are few. Most of us remain apprentices, a few are promoted to journeyman but the learning and hard work never cease. There is no graduation. Even the more gifted among us remain perpetual beginners. Implicit in apprenticeship is knowledge handed down. We study under those who excelled before us even if they died, like Horace, two millennia ago, or Johnson, more than two centuries ago. Of course, there are no guarantees. Perseverance doesn’t necessarily forgo failure. Here is Johnson’s definition of apprentice: “One that is bound by covenant, to serve another man of trade, upon condition that the tradesman shall, in the mean time, endeavor to instruct him in his art.” And here is Sisson in his notes to Horace:

 

“Find what you can write about and you have solved your problem. Of course the aspiring writer has to face the possibility that the answer may be, Nothing. At any rate the beginning, as the continuation, of literary capacity involves a certain self-knowledge. Nothing is further from it, therefore, than the intoxications of publicity and reputation.”

 

I recommend Horace: Poet on a Volcano by Peter Stothard (Yale University Press, 2025) and Horace in English: Poets in Translation (Penguin, 1996), edited by R.S. Carne-Ross and Kenneth Haynes. Quintas Horatius Flaccus was born on this date, December 8, in 65 B.C. and died in 8 B.C. at age fifty-six.