''This Saves Us From Being Oppressed'

“It will be remembered that the brilliant and informal genius of Montaigne had perceived that our most certain knowledge is what we know about ourselves, and had made of this a philosophy of introspection.” 

Typically, Michael Oakeshott consigns this interesting observation to a footnote, in his introduction to the edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan he published in 1946. The footnote is linked to this sentence: “[Hobbes] begins with sensation; and he begins there, not because there is no deceit or crookedness in the utterances of the senses, but because the fact of our having sensations seems to him the only thing of which we can be indubitably certain.” Oakeshott never devoted an entire essay to Montaigne but his presence shadows his work like a tutelary spirit. In his essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1956; Rationalism in Politics, 1962) he writes:

 

“This conversation is not only the greatest but also the most hardly sustained of all accomplishments of mankind. Men have never been wanting who have had this understanding of human activity and intercourse, but few have embraced it without reserve and without misgiving, and on this account it is proper to mention the most notable of those who have done so: Montaigne.”

 

Like many of the finest essayists, Montaigne gives the impression of writing about himself but always addressing the individual reader, not the crowd. Montaigne confides. He leads us over to the corner, puts his arm around our shoulders and talks to us, softly. He seldom grows shrill or domineering. It’s a foreign-sounding voice to moderns because we’ve grown accustomed to being harangued, whether in politics, religion or literary criticism. Some of us stop listening when it becomes clear the speaker wants to impress us with his brilliance and persuade us with the force of his arguments. And that’s what he wants – argument, often ad hominem, almost always tedious. Montaigne wants to clarify his thought and share it with us. In some ways, he is the most “interactive” of writers, expecting us to at least ponder his thinking the way we would an intelligent friend’s.

 

In an entry dated 1955 in his Notebooks, 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014), Oakeshott writes: “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.” Oakeshott turned a youthful fifty-four that year. In 1964 he wrote:

 

“All great works of art have a touch of lightness, happiness, almost inconsequence, & this saves us from being oppressed & having to turn away from them.”

'Having Actually Pleased Intelligent Children'

When leafing through a poetry anthology, I tend to go first to the poems and poets previously unknown to me. Sometimes my ignorance is retroactively rewarded: “These poems are awful.” Only occasionally do I discover a cloistered gem. 

Coventry Patmore (1823-96) I know more for his unlikely name than his work. In 1884 he published The Children’s Garland from the Best Poets, and many of the contents are new to me. The book went through twelve editions by 1895. The Fondren Library copy I borrowed is inscribed “Archibald Dickson—1888” – a name that sounds like a character in one of E.A. Robinson’s poems. Patmore writes rather audaciously in his preface:

 

“This volume will, I hope, be found to contain nearly all the genuine poetry in our language fitted to please children,—of and from the age at which they have usually learned to read,—in common with grown people. A collection on this plan has, I believe, never before been made, although the value of the principle seems clear.”

 

Clearly, the Victorians set high expectations for their children (Patmore had six). The poet with the most poems anthologized – sixteen -- is Wordsworth. Cowper gets ten; Southey, seven; Tennyson, six. The overall selection is slanted toward the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, Swift’s “Baucis and Philemon” is judged wholesome and thus is included, though not “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Among the Tennyson poems chosen by Patmore is “The Brook,” which I hadn’t read in many years. The opening line, “I come from haunts of coot and hern,” brought back to mind James Thurber’s cartoon. Patmore in his preface describes his criteria of inclusion:

“The test applied, in every instance, in the work of selection, has been that of having actually pleased intelligent children; and my object has been to make a book which shall be to them no more nor less than a book of equally good poetry is to intelligent grown persons. The charm of such a book to the latter class of readers is rather increased than lessened by the surmised existence in it of an unknown amount of power, meaning and beauty, beyond that which is at once to be seen; and children will not like this volume the less because, though containing little or nothing which will not at once please and amuse them, it also contains much, the full excellence of which they may not as yet be able to understand.”

That final line would seem to echo T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante”: “[G]enuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

'Pride of Reading Is a Terrible Thing'

One of life’s modest pleasures is happening on a previously unknown writer and finding his work interesting if not exactly excellent or “major.” To appreciate such discoveries, a reader must stifle his instinctive sense of literary snobbery or at least defer it for a decent period of time. Let’s remember that Herman Melville was largely forgotten for thirty years after his death until resuscitated in the twentieth century by readers and critics. Time is cruel and the only critics who count are readers. 

I’m thinking now of the American teacher, editor and essayist Frank Moore Colby (1865-1925). His name meant nothing to me until last week when a reader sent a link to his 1904 collection Imaginary Obligations.  The first essay in the collection, “Books We Haven’t Read,” illuminates the plight of “minor” writers like Colby, ignored and forgotten in favor of the merely fashionable. Colby formulates a memorable description of common literary snobbery:

 

“Pride of reading is a terrible thing. There are certain literary sets in which the book is an instrument of tyranny. If you have not read it you are made to feel unspeakably abject, for the book you have not read is always the one book in the world that you should have read. It is the sole test of literary insight, good taste and mental worth. To confess that you have not read it is to expose yourself as an illiterate person. It is like admitting that you have never eaten with a fork.”

 

Colby’s prose is witty, clean and plain-spoken. No theory or ego-driven obfuscation. Any intelligent reader will find him accessible. His voice is like a friend’s who has good taste. I was delighted to see Colby refer to the final book Charles Darwin published in his life, the delightful Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (1881):

 

“We need all the comfort we can get. Small literary ambitions trip up many of us every day. Many a man lives beyond his literary income from an absurd kind of book pride. Why should we not own up like Darwin--change the subject to earthworms if they interest us more? There was more ‘literary merit’ in what he said of earthworms than in what most of us say about belles-lettres. It is not the topic that gives the literary quality.”

 

That final sentence in particular is a treasure. I’ve just finished rereading Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers. Most people read it, I assume, for his recounting of what he invariably calls the “Hiss Case,” and for that alone the book is obligatory reading. But Chambers also gives us a memorable conversion story, a love story, a history of Soviet Communism in the U.S. and a lengthy digression on small-scale dairy farming. The last is not a subject of significant interest to this reader but remains a delight to read. A good writer can make almost any subject interesting. Consider A.J. Liebling on boxing, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes, Ronald Knox on detective stories, Guy Davenport on Balthus. Colby closes his essay with this passage:

 

“And if the only thing a multitude of books have done for a man is to enable him to mention them and quote them and appear to be in the ‘literary swim,’ he is no fit person for the company of honest authors. He does not belong in Arcadia at all, but behind the counter in a retail bookshop, where there is a good business reason for plaguing other people about the books they haven't read. By these and kindred reflections we may console ourselves in part for our deficiencies and ward off the temptation of the sham.”

'Singularly Modest and Deferential'

The first Union officer to die in the Civil War was twenty-four-year old Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth. He was killed while removing a Confederate flag from the roof of an Alexandria, Va. inn on May 24, 1861, a month after the start of the war and one day after Virginia ratified its secession from the Union by referendum.

The owner of the inn was James W. Jackson, who had raised a large Confederate flag observed by President Lincoln and his Cabinet with field glasses from Washington, D.C. Ellsworth and his men climbed to the roof and cut down the flag. While carrying it down the stairs of the inn, Ellsworth was ambushed by Jackson, who killed him with a shotgun blast. Another Union soldier, Private Francis E. Brownell, shot Jackson in the face with his rifle and bayonetted him. For this he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Ellsworth was a friend of Abraham Lincoln. In 1860 he had moved to Springfield, Ill., to study law with the future president and work on his campaign. On May 25, 1861, Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to his parents, Ephraim D. and Phoebe Ellsworth. It begins:

“In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful appearance, a boy only, his power to command men, was surpassingly great. This power, combined with a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew.”

This recalls Jacques Barzun’s gloss on Lincoln as a literary artist:

“[H]is style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook which colors every act of the writer’s and tells us how he rated life. Only let his choice of words, the rhythm and shape of his utterances, linger in the ear, and you begin to feel as he did – hence to discern unplumbed depths in the quiet intent of a conscious artist.”

We need periodic reminders that Lincoln is among the great American prose stylists.  Barzun might almost be speaking of a poet, which Lincoln was, under the sway of Lord Byron, as a young man. He could be swooningly romantic and as funny as Byron in Don Juan. It shouldn’t surprise us, though it does, that some of our finest presidents were excellent writers – Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt -- and so was one of the worst: Ulysses S. Grant. Barzun draws an implicit comparison between artists and statesmen:

“The artist contrives means and marshals forces that the beholder takes for granted and that the bungler never discovers for himself. The artist is always scheming to conquer his material and his audience. When we speak of his craft, we mean quite literally that he is crafty.”

If you have ever tried to write a letter of condolence to someone who has suffered the death of a relative or friend, you know it can be agony. You wish to sound sincere but at the same time avoid hackneyed language. You want to express legitimate emotion but not turn sentimental or focus the letter on yourself. I can remember several such letters I have written that still shame me. It’s an art few of us will ever master. Savor the rest of Lincoln’s letter to the Ellsworths: 

 “And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two years ago; yet through the latter half of the intervening period, it was as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit. To me, he appeared to have no indulgences or pastimes; and I never heard him utter a profane, or an intemperate word. What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. The honors he labored for so laudably, and, in the sad end, so gallantly gave his life, he meant for them, no less than for himself.

“In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early fallen child. May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power. Sincerely your friend in a common affliction -

“A. LINCOLN”

[Try to find a copy of Barzun’s “Lincoln the Literary Genius” (1960), collected in A Jacques Barzun Reader (2001).]

'Dubious Enterprises Flourish Here'

I remember standing in front of a wire rack in James Books, leafing through one of Oscar Williams’ poetry anthologies, and reading Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) for the first time. I was twelve or thirteen. The bookstore was on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio, about a two-mile bike ride from where we lived. The owner was Lennie James, who was tall, had pale red hair, wore wire-rimmed glasses and an unbuttoned dress shirt over his t-shirt. He looked like an off-duty accountant. Mr. James sold books and was a bookie, forever in trouble with the cops, which added an exotic tartness to our visits to his shop. He talked from the side of his mouth like a Hollywood tough guy. It was rumored that he sold pornographic magazines in a back room but we never saw that. There, on the cusp of puberty, I first discovered English-language poetry, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and Samuel Beckett.

What attracted me to Shapiro was the attention he paid to the commonplace American Scene, what Henry James called in his book of the same title “the hungry, triumphant actual.” He wrote about car wrecks, drugstores, Buicks, getting a haircut, honkytonks, Thomas Jefferson and a waitress, as well as combat in the South Pacific. What better way to discover America and American poetry? In the title poem of his 1978 collection, Adult Bookstore, Shapiro writes:

 

“Dubious enterprises flourish here,

The massage parlor, the adult bookstore.”

 

It concludes:

 

“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is sold forever to the single stag

Who takes it home in a brown paper bag.”

 

In 1984, when, as a newspaper reporter I accompanied police officers on their raid of an adult bookstore in Richmond, Ind., naturally I thought of Shapiro and his poem.

'The Subtle Layerings of Spice and Tang'

For a non-singer, the best time to sing, because the body and mind are already occupied with familiar rhythms, is not in the shower but while cooking. Song eases the tedium of chopping and stirring. Cooking for this cook is not a reverie but a job. It’s not like in the commercials where cooks move like dancers on ecstasy. I took over most food preparation in the house at age twelve when my mother got her first job since she got married, and I'm still at it. 

Macaroni and cheese – frequently in rotation – begins with mincing an onion to sauté. Recently, I found myself chopping to the rhythm of the Mission Impossible theme. Danny Kaye’s “Wonderful Copenhagen” accompanied stirring the cheese sauce and I did the dishes, for no reason I can think of, to the Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” None of this was programmed in advance. Songs bubble to the surface as in a nice thick roux. Everyone knows that work and song go together. In the Autumn 2021 issue of The Hudson Review, David Livewell published “Cooking with Ella”:

 

“She cooks to Ella’s soaring, playful voice.

The bright, three-minute songs have changed and lifted

her mood. The speakers rattle the kitchen cabinets.

She whisks the eggs to ‘Paper Moon.’ She measures

a snowy cup of flour while the singer drops

a yellow basket. ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ is crammed

in a thrown pinch of salt. When the singer scats,

the chef delights and hums, all language flung

away like scraps in garbage bags. Who needs

mere words when voice becomes another horn

with swells and climbs and trills and tightrope walks,

taking a solo to peaks so few have scaled?

She slaps an unseen bass. Her slippers tap.

Her apron flutters like a red stage curtain.

She dips her spoon in all that stews and sizzles

between the notes and works into a sauce.

A savory aroma twirls and spins

with ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy.’ It’s a wonder a wineglass

doesn’t shatter from the high notes ringing out.

And ‘Lady Be Good’ transforms into a mantra

for the artistry inspiring her cuisine,

the subtle layerings of spice and tang,

balsamic glazes, reductions, splashes of wine.

She wields her blade, is dicing vegetables

to Ella’s comic ‘Mack the Knife’ with all

its spontaneity and laughs, the Satchmo

impersonations cutting through the steam

when the words get flubbed. No onion tears

will dampen this frivolity, this sound

of a big band crammed in the back of a house.

Her metal spoons lay drumrolls on the pans

like a high-hat ending the show with a flurry.”

I’ll add “The Man That Got Away” from A Star Is Born (1954), with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

'Child, Man and Old Crone'

“Old age does not exist. At least, we do not suffer continuously from being old; like the trees, we have, each year, an attack of old age. We lose our leaves, our good humour, our zest for life; then they come back again.” 

That sounds about right – getting old as an exercise in ever-renewing autumn (until it’s not renewed). As my seventy-third birthday approaches, I don’t feel my age, whatever that may mean, all the time. Pain, yes. The occasional mid-afternoon sag in energy. More thought-life devoted to the past. I suspect some people wait all their lives for the “golden years” so they have an excuse to behave badly and get away with it. My contemporaries constitute the Complaining Generation, whining about something or other, all of it tedious and socially sanctioned by their fellows.

 

The passage at the top is taken from Jules Renard’s journal, dated October 10, 1905, when he was forty-one. I think of Renard having a peasant’s common sense. He’s no dreamer, no utopian. Had he been born a few years later in Russia, Stalin would have had him rubbed out as a kulak. Usually, when Renard complains, it is properly muted by wit. He’s a nineteenth-century French ironist who never tells a joke.  

 

The American novelist and poet Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was one of those indefatigable writing machines whose productivity was probably pathological. She produced some 170 books, mostly mysteries, including sixty-one in the Fleming Stone Detective series. She also edited at least nine poetry anthologies, including A Satire Anthology (1920). Among its themes is old age. “Lines by an Old Fogy” was written by the always-prolific Anonymous:

 

“I’m thankful that the sun and moon

Are both hung up so high,

That no presumptuous hand can stretch

And pull them from the sky.

If they were not, I have no doubt

But some reforming ass

Would recommend to take them down

And light the world with gas.”

 

Call it the conservative impulse (leave things be) or mere crankiness. It’s all in the delivery. “Too Late!” by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow is preceded by the French proverb “Ah! si la jeunesse savait,—si la vieillesse pouvait!” (basically, “If youth only knew, if old age could”). From the second of six stanzas:

 

While we send for the napkins, the soup gets cold;

While the bonnet is trimming, the face grows old;

When we’ve matched our buttons, the pattern is sold,

And everything comes too late—too late!”

 

Renard echoes his theme in the journal entry from October 10, 1907: “Every day I am by turns child, man and old crone.” We are forever multiple and ourselves.

 

[The Renard quotes come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]