'What Mattered Most to Him Was Writing'

A friend wrote first thing Wednesday morning telling me Norman Podhoretz had died at age ninety-five. It was like hearing the last sequoia had fallen. “I read him religiously for 50 years,” my friend added. My observance of Podhoretz’s work was more secular but at least as long-lived. He was among the earliest critics I read as a teenager, along with Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. He helped take reviewing and criticism out of the graduate seminar and put it into the magazines of the day, and into the lives of common readers, where they belong. Among his teachers were Trilling and F.R. Leavis, and the seriousness with which they treated books rubbed off on their apt pupil.

Podhoretz wrote for Commentary and served as its editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995. His son John Podhoretz, the current editor-in-chief of Commentary, writes on the magazine’s website a brief remembrance of his father:

 

“What you really need to know is that what mattered most to him was writing. Great writing. Good writing. Clear writing. Honest writing. He was the most literate man I have ever known, possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the written word in our time and in times past, who found true moral, intellectual, and aesthetic purpose in the act of reading and deciphering and comprehending. And he was himself a prose stylist of magnificence. There is no other word for it, and anyone who says otherwise is judging him not by his sentences but by views he held they do not like. That was a sin against honesty he never committed. There were many writers whose views he abhorred, but whose gifts he would absolutely acknowledge and ruefully refuse to deny.”

  

Consider his review of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Subterraneans, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” published in the Spring 1958 issue of The Partisan Review.  Podhoretz points out the author’s “simple inability to say anything in words.” He writes of Kerouac’s style, his much-vaunted, nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody,” in these self-indulgent messes masquerading as novels:

 

“Strictly speaking, spontaneity is a quality of feeling, not of writing. . . . It isn’t the right words he wants (even if he knows what they might be), but the first words, or at any rate the words that most obviously announce themselves as deriving from emotion rather than cerebration, as coming from ‘life’ rather than ‘literature,’ from the guts rather than the brain. (The brain, remember, is the angel of death.)”

 

And this:

 

“Solipsism is precisely what characterizes Kerouac’s novels. [They] are so patently autobiographical in content that they become almost impossible to discuss as novels; if spontaneity were indeed a matter of destroying the distinction between life and literature, these books would be unquestionability be It.”

 

Podhoretz’s politics were commonsensical: he loved America, he loved Israel and hated terror and totalitarianism. He was indifferent to or actively opposed the political fashions of the nineteen-sixties, the Hate-America-First bandwagon. He started as a boilerplate liberal and slowly grew up politically, in public. I regret only he hadn't written more about literature, though he was always right about murderous Muslims.

 

Take this from a review Podhoretz wrote of a novel in 1953: “He is trying to put blood into contemporary fiction and break through the hidebound conventions of the well-made novel. This is a herculean job that will have to be done if we are to have a living literature at all.” Sounds like Emerson welcoming Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

This is from Podhoretz’s review of Saul Bellow’s The Adventure of Augie March in the October 1953 issue of Commentary. Podhoretz was no gusher. The very next line in the review sounds the traditional Podhoretz note: “But our sympathy with Mr. Bellow’s ambition and our admiration for his pioneering spirit should not lead us to confuse the high intention with the realization.” Always cautious, always qualifying his judgment, which is a critic’s obligation.

 

As a young reader I was intoxicated by Bellow’s word-geysers. He was the educated man’s Thomas Wolfe. Podhoretz goes on:

 

“But the feeling conveyed by Mr. Bellow’s exuberance is an overwhelming impulse to get in as many adjectives and details as possible, regardless of considerations of rhythm, modulation, or, for that matter, meaning. Like Milton in Paradise Lost, who was trying to do the near impossible too, Mr. Bellow seems frightened of letting up; a moment’s relaxation might give the game away. The result is that we are far more aware of the words than the objects, of Mr. Bellow than of the world—which is the reverse of how he would like us to respond. His language lacks the suction to draw us into its stream.”

 

It took guts to write and publish this, especially in Commentary. Here are the review’s final sentences: “Mr. Bellow has the very genuine distinction of giving us a sense of what a real American idiom might look like. It is no disgrace to have failed in a pioneer attempt.”

'The Habit of Reading Something More Lasting'

“It is in order to help the young who are entering on careers, and those of all ages who desire to extend those delights and spiritual developments of their lives, that I have written the book called The March of Literature.” 

Ford Madox Ford is Modernism’s great publicist and raconteur, an enthusiast forever boosting books and writers from across the millennia. He has little of his confrère Ezra Pound’s stridency and bullying, and none of his anti-Semitism. Like Anton Chekhov, Ford is one of literature’s blessed ones, almost saintly in his service to letters and fellow writers, though a highly fallible man. In the introduction to the last of his more than eighty books, The March of Literature (1938), he describes himself as “an old man mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.”

The passage at the top is taken from the transcript of a radio talk, “The Commercial Value of Literature,” broadcast by Ford on NBC on October 14, 1938, eight months before his death. The March of Literature is not an encyclopedia or any sort of reference work but a biased, idiosyncratic, highly entertaining encomium, published on the cusp of World War II, for the books that had sustained Ford since childhood:

 

“It is not for nothing that the growing barbarism of the world has synchronized with the decay of the art of reading. Reading is probably at a lower ebb at this moment than it has ever been in this world. The reading, that is to say, of such literature as is in fact literature, and not the merest escape from immediate personal problems. Heaven forbid that you should take me as recommending you to become exaggeratedly highbrow!”

 

That’s typical of Ford – expressing a seemingly mandarin taste in the language of the common man. Nearly eighty years ago, and serious reading is already in jeopardy. At this point in his radio talk, Ford adopts a preacherly tone:

 

“The favorite reading of today, after the sports columns of the newspapers, is that of detective or mystery stories. And there is nothing whatever against the reading of mystery stories when you need another relaxation on account of the fatigues of the life of today. But to obtain the spiritual and material benefits of which we have hitherto been talking, it is necessary that you should make the habit of reading something more lasting. Do not believe that the great classics have anything of the repulsive or the super-highbrow about them!”

 

I might have written this during a minor spell of crankiness. Converts are few but I do hear from the occasional renegade or oddball, someone who reads, say, Swift or Conrad, perhaps on a whim. Or Ford’s own fiction, The Good Soldier (1915) or the World War I tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28).

 

“[E]veryone has a right to his own tastes. If you do not like the philosophy of Dante, bathe in the lighthearted pococurantism [OED: “indifference, carelessness, nonchalance”] of Shakespeare’s comedies, or the irony of Swift’s Gulliver, or the greathearted sympathies of Dickens for the poor and distressed, or find fascination from the mental refinements of the greatest of all American writers, Henry James, or the verbal felicities and exactitudes of Miss Katherine Anne Porter, or Mrs. Virginia Woolf, and the respective schools of all such writers.”

 

Ford was born on this date, December 17, in 1873, and died in 1939 at age sixty-five.

'The Complex and Indwelling Emotion'

In a conversation with a well-read friend I had a disturbing realization: my love of American literature is rather constricted. I feel almost treasonous admitting this. It has nothing to do with politics. I remain a patriot, a lover of the Constitution, but my admiration for the classics of the American canon, dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is small. Henry James, above all. Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Cather, Eliot, Frost, a few others. I’m not sure why it took me so long to reach this conclusion. So many of the American writers I read enthusiastically when very young mean little or nothing to me today – Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Stephen Crane, et al. 

The corollary question: Where does my loyalty lie? I hardly have to contemplate an answer: English literature. I think of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson and George Eliot as mine and it has nothing to do with citizenship. My first loyalty is to the language. In terms of national literatures, Russian comes next, then probably Italian. I can’t tell you how shocking these admissions are to me. Without giving it much thought, I have unself-consciously practiced what used to be called “comparative literature.” National origin has never meant much to me – with books or people.

 

My friend and I were talking about Edwin Arlington Robinson when these thoughts came to me. He remains one of my favorite American poets. I liked his work when young. Now I prize it. Constance Rourke writes in American Humor: A Study in the National Character (1931):

 

“Character had always been the great American subject—character enwrapped in legend, from the Yankee of the fables and the fabulous Crockett to the novels of Henry James. Character is of course Robinson’s great subject . . .”

 

In this, Robinson is almost novelistic. We can read him for his stories, most rooted in revelations of character. When we think of Robinson we think of his people: “Luke Havergal,” “Aaron Stark,” “Isaac and Archibald,” “Bewick Finzer” and the rest. Rourke goes on:

 

“His main concern has been with those elements of the mind which have made an almost continuous American preoccupation. For a poet he is singularly unengaged by the outer world: the look of his people, like his touches of landscape or other effects of setting, is drawn in a few brief, intense passages: his genuine subject is fantasy, the evocation, the obsession, the complex and indwelling emotion. He has placed the psychological narrative within the realm of poetry in a new and modern sense, and is an heir of both Hawthorne and Henry James . . .”

 

Take this poem about the English poet “Thomas Hood” (1799-1845) from Robinson’s second collection, The Children of the Night (1897):

 

“The man who cloaked his bitterness within

This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,

God never gave to look with common eyes

Upon a world of anguish and of sin:

His brother was the branded man of Lynn;

And there are woven with his jollities

The nameless and eternal tragedies

That render hope and hopelessness akin.

 

“We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel

A still chord sorrow-swept,—a weird unrest

And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,

As if the very ghost of mirth were dead—

As if the joys of time to dream had fled,

Or sailed away with Ines to the West.”     

'Something to Be Found Out'

If I had the right to design a friend, someone to possess all the qualities I most value in a companion, my first ingredient might be curiosity, an unapologetic interest in the world, in particular his fellow humans. I sense that many of our problems are caused by people afflicted with boredom coupled with pseudo-sophistication. Nothing impresses them, nothing rouses their interest or admiration. To feel something, they resort to anger. The chief motive for anger is that rush of power it lends an otherwise sluggishly indifferent person. Perhaps an unacknowledged component in curiosity is humility, an admission that we don’t know everything. Here is Desmond MacCarthy on Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy: 

“He was at any rate born with the most reliable prophylactic against tedium – consuming curiosity. This is the passion after all that the Universe is most obviously fitted to satisfy. His curiosity was not scientific in method; but one trait he had in common with men of science, he could be happy correlating phenomena.”

 

MacCarthy suggests that we have evolved to be curious, that our world is there for our “amusement” – perhaps the wrong word. “Understanding” might be preferable, or even “wonder” or “delight.” We are at home in precisely the right universe for us. No need to feel alienated. If we’re fortunate, we meet two or three people in a lifetime whose sensibilities are driven by curiosity for its own sake. It is its own reward. Such minds are forever sparking.

 

Don’t confuse them with the social frauds who try to flatter you with feigned attention – the tilted head, the focused gaze, the empty questions indifferently posed. The absence of respectful curiosity kills conversation. Curiosity is not nosiness. The person I’ve met who most essentially embodies the virtue of curiosity is Guy Davenport, who once wrote, “Curiosity, I'm convinced, is intelligence.” The man I spent several hours with was tirelessly curious and a tireless provoker of curiosity in others. There was never a lapse in conversation, even with me, a stranger he would never meet again. He once said in an interview:

 

“My range of interests may be accounted for by my being 75.  It's really a very narrow range. There ought to be a psychology that studies indifference, the ‘flat affect’ of non-response. Response is, beyond the usual culturally-trained and biological reactions to the things of the world, the result of education carried on by curiosity.”

 

The late Richard Wilbur delivered the commencement address at Lawrence University in 1960. Weigh his observations with the state of American curiosity in the twenty-first century:

   

“Still another virtue of the educated person is curiosity: the feeling that there is something to be found out, and that one perhaps can find it. There’s no need to say why curiosity is a good thing; and the quantity of research, discovery, and invention reported every year would indicate that we are still a vigorously curious nation.”

 

Wilbur mentions an unnamed Italian novelist who had recently visited the U.S.: “[H]e felt that the American intellectual class has lost the habit of adventurous general reading. . . . I'm afraid it's true that our educated people in general have ceased to have that breadth of curiosity which we remember in the Franklins, the Jeffersons, the John Quincy Adamses -- the great readers, lookers and tinkerers of an earlier America.”

 

And that was sixty-five years ago. Wilbur adds: “Too many of us have conceded the butterfly to the lepidopterist.”

 

[MacCarthy’s essay on Burton is collected in Portraits (1931), available at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]

'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, Housman 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.”