'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.

'I Think We Forget Too Easily'

Two of my stories were published on Page One of The Bellevue Gazette on December 7, 1981. The banner carries the headline “Proposal drafted for sheriff services,” accompanied by a photo I had taken of the mayor at his desk with the safety-service director standing beside him.

The other story, played on the lower left, has one headline, “Bellevue survivor remembers Pearl Harbor,” with a another beneath it printed in larger type: “They did their job well,” and a photo I took of a man in late middle age standing by pictures and framed medals hanging on a wall. The lede:

“Bellevue’s Thomas Stark was pressing a suit of whites, preparing to go ashore on liberty, when the first Japanese bombs were landing.”

Stark was the first Pearl Harbor survivor I met and interviewed. I no longer remember how I found him. Bellevue is a small town in north central Ohio. The population in 2020 was about 8,200. Bellevue was a railroad hub earlier in the century. An outfielder for the Chicago Cubs was born there. The town historian was my barber.

Stark was twenty-one when the Japanese attacked, a Second-Class Quartermaster serving on the USS Pelias, a submarine tender. He had joined the Navy in November 1936, not long after graduating from Bellevue Senior High School. He was up at 7 that morning and expected to spend the day in Oahu. “Which I didn’t quite make,” he told me. The Pelias was docked about a mile from Battleship Row. The first bomb fell at 7:55 a.m. and within two or three minutes the Pelias crew was at its battle stations. It was armed with two five-inch guns and an assortment of .30- and .45-caliber machine guns. The Pelias crew and a submarine crew got credit for downing one Japanese plane. “Our anti-aircraft guns were pitiful, obsolete,” Stark said. “They were worthless against their high-altitude bombers.”

Several men aboard the Pelias were wounded but none was killed. The all-clear sounded at 9:45. On a motor launch from the battleship USS California, Stark served as the signalman for a rescue party that ventured over to the USS West Virginia. There’s a famous photograph of the burning ship. In the background of the grainy picture, the crippled giant billows thick, black smoke. In the foreground, a motor launch is dwarfed by the sheer bulk of the ship. Discernable as a white smudge on the bow of the motor launch is a sailor reaching over the side of the boat, pulling another sailor from the water. “That’s me,” Stark said.

Stark remained stationed at Pearl Harbor until April 1942. He stayed in the Navy until 1946 and served the rest of the war in the Pacific, finishing at Iwo Jima. Stark’s wartime animosity against the Japanese had faded. “You can’t hold a grudge forever,” he said. “You can’t hold it against them for doing their duty.” Stark revisited Pearl Harbor in 1976. He was a member of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and wore its ring on his right hand. Around a blue sapphire, representing the blue skies of Hawaii, was the group’s motto: “Remember Pearl Harbor – Keep America Alert.” He told me: “I think we forget too easily.”

Stark died in Bellevue in 1988 at age sixty-nine.

'Quaffs, crams, and guttles'

A new word discovered while reading John Dryden’s translation of the Sixth Satire of the Roman poet Persius: 

“He sprinkles pepper with a sparing hand.

His jolly brother, opposite in sense,

Laughs at his thrift; and, lavish of expence,

Quaffs, crams, and guttles, in his own defence.”

 

Guttle is defined by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary as “to feed luxuriously; to gormandise. A low word.” The OED is a little less dismissive. As an intransitive verb it gives “to eat voraciously; to gormandize.” In the transitive form: “to devour or swallow greedily.” The dictionary also includes guttlesome and guttler. For the latter it cites Robert Browning in “Fust and His Friends: An Epilogue” (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, 1887):

 

“’Tis said, in debauchery’s guild

Admitted prime guttler and guzzler — O swine! –

To honor thy headship, those tosspots so swille

That out of their table there sprouted a vine . . .”

 

The OED offers an uncertain etymology in gut, a word borrowed from German meaning, in English, “a particular portion of the lower alimentary canal between the pylorus and the anus.” In modern demotic English, an ample belly.

 

Just the other day I witnessed an unashamed public act of guttling. I stopped for a cup of coffee at a convenience store where I saw a man, large and middle-aged, seated at a table and cramming an entire breakfast sandwich into his mouth, like some kind of frat stunt. I feared choking, and mentally reviewed my Heimlich technique, but he chewed away, suggesting he had a lot of practice. He swallowed the first sandwich and was unwrapping the second when I left. He reminded me of a snake eating an improbably large snack. Of course, snakes have no intermaxillary bone, unlike most humans, and can readily swallow a mere breakfast sandwich.

'The Greeks Knew What They Were Talking About'

Age is dreaded for the supposedly inevitable loss of memory. We lose the past and dwell in a timeless, featureless present as blank as a movieless movie screen in a theater. Contemporaries grow tedious when they forget who recorded “One Toke Over the Line” in 1970 and interpret their forgetfulness as a symptom of impending idiocy. (How interesting that memory is associated with and perhaps identical to the essential self.)  I don’t recall my parents or their friends ever fretting about such things, and suspect it is yet another era-specific indication of narcissism. 

Clara Claiborne Park (1923-2010) was a marvelous writer, a long-time teacher at Williams College who wrote movingly about her autistic daughter. She was also an essayist and reviewer, and I remember reading “The Mother of the Muses: In Praise of Memory” in the Winter 1981 issue of The American Scholar. Park reminds us:

 

“To call on the Muses is a way of talking about what are, if not actual presences, still realities which poets take utterly seriously--as must any of us who have found words taking shape in our heads, and wondered where on earth (on earth?) they were coming from.”

 

In modern parlance, the Muses represent Inspiration or Creativity – that mysterious human capacity familiar to every honest writer and other artists. Where did that good idea come from? Park also reminds us of the Muses’ pedigree:

 

“And the Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory. It is my antique conviction that the Greeks knew what they were talking about--that to make the Muses the daughters of Memory is to express a fundamental perception of the way in which Creativity operates.”

 

Park asks a good question and supplies us with a homely answer (Park is nothing if not pragmatic and matter-of-fact):

 

“Well, what can they do for us, on the rare occasions when we ask their assistance? How do we remember the number of days in the months? ‘Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November,’ the rhymes and strong fourfold beat combining to give us instant recall of needed facts we otherwise would have to figure out on our knuckles?”

 

And this:

 

“Schliemann went where he went and dug where he dug because the Muses told him to, and but for their testimony the gold of Mycenae, and the shaft graves, and the burned city of Troy VII would still be underground.”

 

Some of my sentences come automatically, and I sense they’re drawn from a higher brain function. Call it rationalism, not unlike solving a differential equation. But others, often the more interesting ones (to me, if not the reader) are mysterious. They seem to appear ab nihilo, from nowhere, like a magician pulling a coin from my ear. I recommend reading all of Park’s essay. After more than forty years I remembered how good it was and how much it moved me. Here is the conclusion to Park’s essay, a marvelous coda to her thinking:

   

“The mind is the greatest of computers, and it works its marvels best when well stored- with facts: names, dates, places, events, sequences--and also with language: words, phrases, sentences, the tongues of men and of angels. Perhaps language is the most important of all. We all notice the contraction in the range of reference of the young. But facts can be looked up, that's true, and if we get a grant, our servants can do that for us. What’s harder to acquire—in adulthood hard indeed--is that intimacy with language, that sense for different ways of using it, which grows naturally when we carry Shakespeare and the Bible, Jefferson and Lincoln, Eliot and Yeats, Edward Lear and P. G. Wodehouse in our heads. In our heads or, better, in another part of the body, there where we ‘learn by heart’--there in the unconscious, where the Muses sing to us darkling, and all the richness of what we know and value can come together in unexpected, unheard-of combinations. Memory is not the enemy of Inspiration, or of thought either. Today, as always, it is the essential prerequisite of both.”

 

[See this cover version of “One Toke Over the Line.”]

'Never to Gain an Advantage'

The closest I came to having a genuine argument with my late friend D.G. Myers, as brilliant a literary critic and scholar as I have known, was over his insistence that I too was a critic. I’ve never thought of myself that way, even though I’ve written hundreds of book reviews. My analytical skills are modest. I read for pleasure, which includes learning things. Like any practiced reader, I know what I like and what I dislike, and generally prefer to write about the likes. I am, in short, a writer who chooses to write about books, which is not the same things as being a critic. I don’t work for Consumer Reports. Theodore Dalrymple describes me by way of Montaigne in “Montaigne’s Humanity”: 

“Not being a systematic thinker, Montaigne offers only philosophical hints or suggestions. His mind is allusive rather than analytic; we find in him thoughts that prefigure later developments but nothing that resembles a doctrine more than a general attitude.”

 

That’s me. I have attitudes, general stances toward books and other things, but no doctrines, unless a preference for good prose is a doctrine. Being called a critic irritates me because I believe the least interesting thing I can know about you is your opinion of anything. Too many people have turned themselves into opinion-factories, and not just when it comes to politics. I’d rather hear what you know, what interests you, your “general attitude.” Critics are a very small and parasitic part of literature, nearly an after-thought. When I hear someone gearing up to set me straight, I’m tempted to turn off my hearing aids.

 

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) rediscovered Montaigne in Petrópolis, Brazil, of all places, finding a “dusty old copy” of the Essais in the basement of the bungalow where he and his wife lived after fleeing the Nazis. His own library, like much else, had been lost in Hitler’s Europe. Zweig’s monograph Montaigne (trans. Will Stone, Pushkin Press, 2015) was not published (in German) until 1960, and Stone’s translation is the first into English. His introduction is excellent. He tells us Montaigne was “the crutch that Zweig, with waning fortitude, reached for over that final winter, as any prospect of a future in which a scrap of magnanimity might be salvaged seemed lost to a brutalizing present.”

 

The parallels with our own day can’t be ignored. The times are just as savage, but fewer people can read. What’s most moving about this brief monograph is the centrality of books in the lives of Montaigne and Zweig, and the effort to sustain civilization. Zweig does not write as a critic but as a literary brother. One reads a muted elegy between his sentences:

 

“His relationship with books is like everything else, for here too he guards his freedom. With them too he knows no obligation to duty. He wants to read and learn, but only so far as he can savour the experience. As a young man he had read, he states, ‘ostentatiously’, merely to show off his knowledge; later, to acquire a measure of wisdom, and now only for pleasure, never to gain an advantage.”

'To the Learning of Some Art or Science'

A young reader finds himself attracted to and intimidated by the prospect of reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton (1577-1640). I sympathize with his contradictory impulses. The book is vast and densely laced with passages from dozens of writers, ancient to seventeenth century. Burton in his prose loves synonyms and expansive catalogs. He is never minimalist. He is not a man with a twenty-first-century sensibility. Perhaps the writer he most resembles is another polymath, Montaigne, or Sir Thomas Browne. 

Modern editions translate Burton's Latin and other languages. I discovered his book as an undergraduate and read it on my own over a summer. No professor ever told me about the Anatomy. I was already following my brother’s practice at the time – letting one book lead me to the next, whether cited by the author or linked chronologically or by subject. This affirms Burton’s notion that all literature is one, not unlike Borges’ conceit in the prologue to “Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain” (1962):

 

“Each in his own way imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an infinite library, because anything infinite is somewhat uncomfortable and puzzling, but as a library fit for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would allow for the pleasure of rereading, the serene and faithful pleasure of the classics, or the gratifying shock of revelation and of the foreseen.”

 

To read Burton is to visit and consume a library. I have not read his book sequentially, cover to cover, in more than half a century but it is eminently what Max Beerbohm called one of the “bedside books. Dippable-into.” Three editions sit on my shelves and periodically I read a favorite passage or randomly dip in as an act of bibliomancy, usually in the three-volume Everyman's Library edition. Burton himself encourages a prospective reader:

 

“Amongst those exercises, or recreations of the mind within doors, there is none so general, so aptly to be applied to all sorts of men, so fit and proper to expel idleness and melancholy, as that of study. . . . Who is not earnestly affected with a passionate speech, well penned, an elegant poem, or some pleasant bewitching discourse? . . . To most kind of men it is an extraordinary delight to study. For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts, and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader? In arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, painting. . . . in mechanics and their mysteries, military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening, planting. . . . in music, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, philology, in policy, heraldry, genealogy, chronology. . . . What so sure, what so pleasant?”

 

It's nearly impossible to excerpt briefly Burton’s prose. Sentences go on for pages. The best strategy is probably to read a given section per day. Burton arranges his book into partitions, sections, subsections and members. Reading Burton can be therapeutic in a manner advocated by the author himself. The passage above continues:

 

“Whosoever he is therefore that is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits, and for want of employment knows not how to spend his time, or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than this of study, to compose himself to the learning of some art or science.”

 

George Saintsbury, a critic and scholar as learned as Burton, writes in Vol. 4 of A History of English Literature (1920):

 

“Only by reading him in the proper sense, and that with diligence, can his great learning, his singular wit and fancy, and the general view of life and of things belonging to life, which informs and converts to a whole his learning, his wit, and his fancy alike, be properly conceived. For reading either continuous or desultory, either grave or gay, at all times of life and in all moods of temper, there are few authors who stand the test of practice so well as the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.”

'The Unique Emotional Language of Our Age'

On learning of certain deaths we’re left feeling momentarily desolate. This holds even for people we have never met and know only through their works or by reputation. I felt that way when Louis Armstrong died. He was always there, always reassuring, and then he was gone. Some shoring in life, a piece of its foundation, is removed. With time, the desolation fades, only to return as a pang when we remember the dead. 

I learned Philip Larkin had succumbed to “the anaesthetic from which none come round” the old-fashioned way: I read it in the newspaper. I had an office with a banging radiator in the Albany County Courthouse when I worked as court reporter for the long-defunct Knickerbocker News. I bought the New York Times from the newsstand in the lobby and read his obituary (p. B-12!), which described the poet as “a reclusive librarian.”

 

I feel no desire to defend him against stupid slurs. Larkin comes to seem like an ally in life. His gift is almost always manifest. He gets slandered as cranky and sour, but how many cranks can write like this, from “Reference Back”?:

 

“Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.”

 

Larkin’s death widened the distance between us and the tradition, receding in time, of Auden, Hardy, Housman and Wordsworth. When a voice of plainspoken eloquence is silenced, frauds grow emboldened. Larkin’s leaving leaves us more vulnerable to the calculating and their naïve followers. In his 1961 review of Charles Delaunay's life of Django Reinhardt (Jazz Writing: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, 2004], which carries the Johnsonian title “Lives of the Poets,” Larkin pushes aside poets and other writers to make way for jazz musicians as our rightful representatives:

 

“In a way it has been the jazzman who in this century had led ‘the life of the Artist.’ At a time when the established arts are generally accepted and subsidised with unenthusiastic reverence, he has had to suffer from prejudice or neglect in order to get the unique emotional language of our age recognised.”

 

Larkin, the least fatuous of poets, likewise made a memorable contribution to the “unique emotional language of our age.” We all recognize Larkinesque moments. Larkin died forty years ago, on December 2, 1985, at age sixty-three.