'Plain in Thy Neatness'

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediately nullified by his own incompetence. Why take the word of a critic who can’t write? This was a matter of fundamental things like noun-verb agreement, spelling and the refusal to resist a cliché. 

There’s nothing new about this, of course. In the issue of The Tatler published on September 28, 1710, Jonathan Swift sets up his essay with a letter he received complaining of “the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style.” Swift, of course, is the letter’s author, as he is of the letter excerpt included by the first fictional correspondent – a parody of illiterate prose, followed by this commentary:   

 

“[T]hese are the beauties introduced to supply the want of wit, sense, humour, and learning, which formerly were looked upon as qualifications for a writer. If a man of wit, who died forty years ago, were to rise from the grave on purpose, how would he be able to read this letter?”

 

I often have similar thoughts: How would Swift react to a comparable contemporary bit of gobbledygook? Or, more recently, Yvor Winters or Michael Oakeshott, masters of prose clarity? Swift's letter continues: 

 

"I should be glad to see you the instrument of introducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life, which the politer ages always aimed at in their building and dress, (simplex munditiis) as well as their productions of wit. It is manifest, that all new, affected modes of speech, whether borrowed from the Court, the Town, or the theatre, are the first perishing parts in any language, and, as I could prove by many hundred instances, have been so in ours.”

 

Simplex munditiis, “elegant in simplicity,” is a Horatian tag used by Ben Jonson as the title of a poem:

 

“Still to be neat, still to be drest,

As you were going to a feast;

Still to be powder'd, still perfumed:

Lady, it is to be presumed,

Though art's hid causes are not found,

All is not sweet, all is not sound.

 

“Give me a look, give me a face

That makes simplicity a grace;

Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:

Such sweet neglect more taketh me

Than all th' adulteries of art;

They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.”

 

It’s also the title of a poem by Yvor Winters: 

 

“The goat nips yellow blossoms

shaken loose from rain—

with neck extended

lifts a twitching flower

high into wet air. Hard

humility the lot of man

to crouch beside

this creature in the dusk

and hold the mind clear;

to turn the sod,

to face the sod beside his door,

to wound it as his own flesh.

In the spring the blossoms

drown the air with joy,

the heart with sorrow.

One must think of this

in quiet. One must

bow his head and take

with roughened hands

sweet milk at dusk,

the classic gift of earth.”

 

Around 1930, Winters famously changed his poetic style. This poem dates from that period. We might call it late early Winters or early late Winters. The title is from Horace’s Ode I, 5, rendered by Milton as “Plain in thy neatness.”

 

Winters’ poems are sometimes autobiographical but not in the banal sense. The poet kept and milked goats and raised and showed Airedales. For so formidably intellectual a man, he had an earthiness about him. He was drawn to the elemental, in language and life, suggested by the intermingling in his poem of joy and sorrow. Here is my favorite line, the most evocative, implying the fear of madness or “The Brink of Darkness” (the title of his only published fiction): “One must think of this / in quiet.” The bowing of the head while milking, leaning against the goat’s flank, suggests prayer and “Hard / humility.”

'Books Consoled Me When I Was a Child'

It’s a commonplace to say you can read a serious reader’s autobiography on his bookshelves. For some of us you can say the same of the libraries we’ve patronized across a lifetime. Last year I wrote about the first in that multi-state chain, when the public library in Parma Heights, Ohio, on the West Side of Cleveland, was slated for demolition. My brother and I were there in 1963 when the building was dedicated and now its replacement is open for business. 

The old building was notably ugly, with its “Space Age” design, and the new one isn’t much better. What do we expect of modern architecture? Still, I admit to feeling a bit sentimental about the place where I first discovered Tom Disch, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain and John Updike. I’ll get over it. It’s less for the titles I read in the building than the feeling of sanctuary I always sensed there. It was a serious place without the distractions and anxieties of home and school. I’m reminded of Philip Larkin in “Church Going”: “A serious house on serious earth it is.”

 

In his 1994 collection The Color Wheel, Timothy Steele include two poems about libraries. In the first, “Homage to a Carnegie Library,” he writes:

 

“Companionable room,

In that early darkness

You stood in promise

Of a sunnier time.”

 

“Companionable” is precisely chosen. That’s how I have always thought of the important books in my life: as companions, sometimes closer to me than many of their two-legged counterparts. This is from “The Library”:

 

“Yet books consoled me when I was a child,

And seeing words and software joined and sync-ed,

Even philosophers might be beguiled.

And if I relish verses nimbly linked,

Here flowing, there concluded with a twist,

It was a Greek librarian-archivist

Who had an odd pedantic inspiration

Make prose and poems textually distinct

And first gave metric units lineation.”

'There Were the Late'

The most casually intelligent person I have ever known was D.G. Myers, who died on this date, September 26, in 2014. I prize intelligence but it’s not a virtue that can be valued in isolation. We’ve all known very bright people who are insufferable, who insist on reminding you of their brilliance and behave like intellectual bullies. No question, David was opinionated and loved a good argument but he also appreciated and embodied what Timothy Steele called “reasoned self-forgetfulness.” It was never about his precious ego. Here is Steele’s poem, “Dedication,” dedicated to his friend the poet-novelist Vikram Seth: 

“We enter life and thus inherit

The kingdom of the human voice.

The Word is Word because we share it.

Wonder encourages our choice

To sort out life’s conflicting data,

To come to terms with its traumata,

To shape ourselves to nothing less

Than reasoned self-forgetfulness.

For years we've traded rhyme and measure,

And if our poems are books today,

It is in hopes that others may

Take from them solace, sense, or pleasure,

Though years pass with their wonted speed

And though the times we shared recede.”

 

What David and I traded were not “rhyme and measure” but ideas, books, insights, encouragement and mutual respect. For six years, except on shabbat (David was an Orthodox Jew), we exchanged emails almost daily and occasionally telephone calls. We met only once in person, here in Houston in 2012, in a Mexican restaurant, and the talk never stopped. We covered the conversational waterfront – kids, wives, jobs, Jews, cancer, students, the professoriat, Stanley Elkin, J.V. Cunningham, Irving Howe, David Horowitz, Marilynne Robinson, L.E. Sissman, Toni Morrison’s pathetic prose, Las Vegas and the fate of the codex. We laughed so loud diners at nearby tables had the nerve to stare at us. When we parted, David quoted Yvor Winters at me -- “Write little; do it well.”

 

In 2009, David posted the notes he kept during a class with J.V. Cunningham in 1976 at Washington University. Among them was “How difficult it is to write in praise!” David wasn’t shy about chastising the dishonest, inept and just plain stupid and boring among writers, politicians, et al., but he was also an expert bestower of praise. He loved Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Lewis, Charles Portis, Henry James, Whittaker Chambers, Saul Bellow, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, Michael Oakeshott, Isaac Bashevis Singer, L.E. Sissman, Peter DeVries and Philip Roth, among many others.

 

It’s not an exercise in cheesy rhetoric to say I miss David every day. We had each other’s back. I’ve never had so brief, immediate and deep a friendship. All of us have an obligation to remember our significant dead and share that memory with others. As old Artur Sammler says in one of David’s favorite novels: “Wherever you looked, or tried to look, there were the late. It took some getting used to.”

[The Steele poem can be found in Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986).]

'A Reader Who Is Moved to Emulation'

“My first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired. In a symposium at Smith College, Saul Bellow said something that describes it to perfection. He said, ‘A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.’” 

I’ve learned that not every writer is a reader. That seems remarkable, though nothing in the human realm should still surprise me. Writing starts as blunt self-expression. As a little kid I wrote about things I liked -- the animals and plants in the fields and woods behind our house. I never had a strong impulse to be a complainer or junior-grade satirist. A fellow reporter once hacked the computer of an editor, now dead, a crude bully and deeply unpleasant man, and found a document titled something like “Things I Hate.” What followed was a list of grievances, mundane things like traffic and yogurt, that he might address in a column.

 

That leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: why write? At its most primal, the urge recalls the kid who carves his name into his desktop or spray paints it on the wall. It’s a declaration of existence. No one is born with the wish to write novels or poems (or blogs). That comes later, when we learn our impulse to write can be channeled into existing forms. At the top, William Maxwell is speaking in his 1982 interview with the Paris Review. For my money, Maxwell is on the short list of the finest American novelists.

 

“What I wrote when I was very young had some of the characteristic qualities of every writer I had any feeling for. It takes a while before that admiration sinks back and becomes unconscious. The writers stay with you for the rest of your life. But at least they don’t intrude and become visible to the reader.”

 

By the time I was writing as a teenager, I was reading and emulating (sometimes almost plagiarizing) Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Eric Hoffer, Vladimir Nabokov. I was copying but at least I was copying the best, except for a brief sojourn with Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel. In the interview, Maxwell goes on to recall a man he spoke with who knew Willa Cather:

 

“’I said, ‘Whatever made her a writer, do you suppose?’ and he said, ‘Why, what makes anyone a writer—deprivation, of course.’ And then he begged my pardon. But I do think its deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.”

 

Maxwell lost his mother in the 1918 influenza epidemic when he was ten years old. Shadows of this event cast shadows on many of his books. I experienced no comparable trauma as a child but perhaps deprivation is a subtler thing than we imagine.

'A Dark Vanessa With Crimson Band'

The first stanza of C.H. Sisson’s “The Red Admiral” (Exactions, 1980): 

“The wings tremble, it is the red admiral

Ecstatically against the garden wall;

September is his enjoyment, but he does not know it,

Name it, or refer to it at all.”

 

When I was collecting butterflies as a boy, the Red Admiral was my favorite after the mourning cloak. The beauty of each is less gaudy, more complex than many other species. I always thought the orangish-red pattern on the wings resembled the outline of a gaping human mouth or a partially erased circle. The species was described by Linnaeus in 1758 and is known to lepidopterists as Vanessa atalanta. It is widely distributed among the world’s temperate zones. Sisson, no scientist, is right. Butterflies are often most active in late summer – a sort of lepidopteran last hurrah -- but I have seen no red admirals in our garden this year, only monarchs and various fritillaries and swallowtails.

 

In his marvelous The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband, 2025), Nigel Andrew describes the surprising origin of the butterfly’s Latin name:

 

“Vanessa is a name that sounds as if it has been around for ever – the kind of name that might be found in Latin love poetry – but it was in fact invented by the poet and satirist Jonathan Swift as a pet name for Esther Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate young woman, twenty-two years his junior, who was the object of his obsessive love for seventeen years, until he moved on to another Esther (Esther Johnson, nicknamed Stella).”

 

Swift arrived at “Vanessa” by conflating the “Van” of “Vanhomrigh” with “Esse,” a pet form of Esther. Soon after Swift published his poem "Cadenus and Vanesa" (written 1713; published 1726), the Danish naturalist Fabricius named the butterfly’s genus Vanessa. Nige tells us “Atalanta” was a figure in Greek mythology, “a formidable virgin huntress and athlete who was notably reluctant to marry." Handel titled his 1736 pastoral opera Atalanta.

 

Nabokov took to calling the butterfly Red Admirable “(Admiral, in vulgar parlance).” No other species shows up so often in the lepidopterist/novelist’s work. In his novel Pale Fire, in the poem that gives the novel its name, the poet John Shade, likens his wife, Sybil, to the butterfly:

 

“Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,

My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest

My Admirable butterfly!”

 

In the poem’s final lines, Shade is looking for his wife moments before his death:

 

“A dark Vanessa with crimson band

Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

And through the flowing shade and ebbing light

A man, unheedful of the butterfly -

Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by

Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.” 

 

Nige notes that Nabokov believed “Admiral” was a corruption of “Admirable,” but the opposite is likely true: “‘Admiral’ was the earliest recorded name,” he writes, “‘Admirable’ a later version that gained little currency except with those who, reasonably enough, liked the sound of it.” I never encountered “Admirable” until reading Nabokov.

 

Here is the final stanza of Sisson’s poem:

 

“Its fingers lighter than spiders, the red admiral

Considers, as I do, with little movement;

With little of anything that is meant:

But let the meaning go, movement is all.”

'What I Wanted to Get Into My Writing'

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007): 

“[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie.”

 

Genuine influence is difficult to gauge in any writer, and probably in the other arts. Copying, a watered-down form of plagiarism, is easy to see. If you read Cormac McCarthy, you’re reading refried Faulkner. That’s not a crime but it’s also not interesting. So, what can any writer learn from music and musicians? James is right to concentrate on rhythm, the way a sentence moves without being too obvious about it. You take the material at hand (your subject, what you want to say) and align it with the rhythm in your head. This is subtle and covert and most readers will never notice – precisely the reaction you want. If I were to say that Lester Young influenced the way I write – his soulful evanescence coupled with unwavering forward motion -- you would rightly have no idea what I was talking about.

 

The Beats sometimes claimed to adopt jazz rhythms in their poems and prose. I’ve read anthologies of “jazz poetry” which include not a single readable poem. Jazz became another hipster excuse for laziness and self-indulgence.

 

Today is the centenary of the birth of John Coltrane – hard to believe, considering he died at age thirty-nine (as did Flannery O’Connor and Martin Luther King Jr.). Coltrane was a brilliant player who attracts acolytes (often for extra-musical reasons) and vehement detractors. There’s a Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco, and I once discovered a similar place of worship in Portland, Oregon. Thirty years ago, in a break between sets, I listened to a trumpet player ranting about Coltrane, accusing him of single-handedly ruining jazz, whatever that means.

 

In a literary context, the most prominent Coltrane critic is Phillip Larkin. In the first column he wrote as the jazz writer for the Daily Telegraph, in 1961, the poet describes Coltrane’s sound on tenor or soprano saxophone as “a thin, keening noise, sometimes sour as an oboe, at times expiring in an upper-register squeak, possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness.” Admit it, Coltrane lovers (among whom I sometimes number myself): that’s funny and at least occasionally true. The vast body of Coltrane’s recordings must be listened to with an honest, discerning, commonsensical ear.

 

Clive James devoted an essay, “On Larkin’s Wit,” to the poet’s jazz writing, much of it regarding his evolving critical measure of Coltrane’s music. After quoting a passage written following Coltrane’s death in 1967, James writes: “It should be remembered, if this sounds like a grave being danced on, that Larkin’s was virtually the sole dissenting critical voice. Coltrane died in triumph and Larkin had every right to think at the time that to express any doubts about the stature of the deceased genius was to whistle against the wind.” 

 

The recording I listen to most often is the collection of ballads, Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane, recorded in 1963. On it, Hartman sings my favorite version of Billy Strayhorn’s notoriously difficult “Lush Life.” The album is the only recording we have of Coltrane accompanying a singer, and it remains endlessly listenable.

 

[Larkin’s jazz columns, which often address Coltrane, are collected in All What Jazz (1970; rev. 1985). James' “On Larkin’s Wit” is collected in Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin (Picador, 2019).]

'The Sign of Memory and the Sign of Ecstasy'

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023): 

“[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experience that might be called ‘pre-reading,’ when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.”

 

Brombert’s example in his own reading life is Baudelaire. As a boy growing up in Paris, attending the lycée, he walked the city streets as an unknowing flâneur, predisposing himself to loving the great poet long before embracing the author of Les Fleur du Mal. I understand the process but in my case it was less linear and immediate, more halting and delayed. I shed various bookish enthusiasms along the way before settling on the “receptivity” to the writers who possesses me today.

 

With the passing of adolescence I adopted some of the American realists, of varying talents and readability – Dreiser, Sinclair, Dos Passos, Farrell, Anderson, even Steinbeck. That didn’t last long. Next came Modernism – Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Proust – some of whom I still admire and read. After that, the evolution of taste became more diffuse. Post-modernists and various non-aligned figures made their appearances, but my loves and distastes became, after many decades, more settled and defensible – and eclectic, the product of a life spent reading widely.

 

I’m not a literary determinist but I know my mind by this time in my life. My current inner library is not made of bronze and discards are still possible, as are new books and writers, but I’m pleased by what is important to me.

 

So, why do I read what I read? I have no ironclad theories. The unflattering answer is habit. Pure momentum. Without the books I love I don’t know what I would do with my time not devoted to family, work and their corollaries like grocery shopping and laundry. I love movies but for me they amount to a poor substitute for books. They don’t deliver what I demand of serious reading. I’m willing to settle for less with movies.  A good action flick easily keeps me occupied for ninety minutes. I expect more of books. In his essay “Young Poets, Please Read Everything” (A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2004), the late Adam Zagajewski, a formidably well-read poet, writes:

 

“[O]ur reading takes place chiefly beneath two signs: the sign of memory and the sign of ecstasy. We read for memory (for knowledge, education) because we are curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened. This is what we call tradition--or history.

 

“We also read for ecstasy. Why? Just because. Because books contain not only wisdom and well-ordered information but also a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanist drunkenness. This is especially true of (some) poetry.”