'My Past Where No One Knows Me'

Dana Gioia speaks for me, though he has another sort of reunion in mind: 

“This is my past where no one knows me.

These are my friends whom I can’t name—

Here in a field where no one chose me,

The faces older, the voices the same.”

 

Our fifty-fifth high-school reunion was held at the Cleveland Yachting Club, about as alien an environment as I can imagine. The guard at the front gate asked if I knew where to go. Had I been there before? “I didn’t come from a yachting family,” I explained. I entered a dining room full of strangers, “my friends whom I can’t name,” some of whom were classmates for thirteen years. Slowly I started recognizing a few people, or at least figured out who they were by reading name tags. Youth and old age are like foreign countries often suspending diplomatic relations.

 

The person I most hoped would attend walked in. I wrote about Lynn Kilbane four years ago after our previous reunion. She has retired after forty-five years as a registered nurse and lives in Cincinnati. We resumed that earlier conversation, and Lynn answered questions that had puzzled me for decades. A guy I had known since kindergarten, Norm Kuhar, died in 1974, just four years after we graduated. Vietnam, drugs, cancer? Lynn told me he committed suicide. Louise Koch died in 1972 of an undiagnosed blood disease. These are people whose images I carry in memory. I would recognize them, or at least their younger selves, if they walked in the room. From Lynn, after sixty-four years, I got a second kiss.

 

“Must I at last solve my confusion,

Or is confusion all I can feel?”

'Take Its Rise from Mutual Pleasure'

It’s a comfort to know people who know you. Cleveland has become a semi-ghost town. My brother, parents, teachers, most friends and former co-workers are dead. My niece and nephew are here and so are two of my oldest friends, the artists Gary and Laura Dumm. Gary and I met in 1975 while working as clerks at the late, lamented Kay’s Books. He was then on the cusp of working with Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) on his autobiographical comic book American Splendor (“From Off the Streets of Cleveland”), later adapted as a movie. I thought of Housman: “And friends abroad must bear in mind / Friends at home they leave behind.” That’s what I was doing. 

On Friday my nephew and I visited the Dumms at their home on the West Side of Cleveland. For five hours we talked without once uttering the president’s name – surely a triumph of maturity and good taste. No talk at all of politics or sports, the most common and tedious conversational fodder. Our talk mingled reminiscences, gossip and plain old storytelling. Conversation ceased only when Abe and I had to meet his girlfriend for dinner. Gary, Laura and I confirmed Dr. Johnson’s observation: “The friendship which is to be practised or expected by common mortals, must take its rise from mutual pleasure, and must end when the power ceases of delighting each other.” No end in sight.

'He Knew Nothing Special But Himself'

A longtime reader in England writes: 

“I thought of you the other day. I was reading Trent’s Last Case published in 1913 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. A description of one of the main characters reads:

 

“‘His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of professors and devotees of research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favourite author was Montaigne.’”

 

There’s not much about me that’s austere, nor am I at home among most academics,  but otherwise the passage is flattering. Montaigne is certainly on my short list of favorites. He’s the man who taught us how to write about the self and its place in the world without merely self-advertising. The self becomes a stand-in for the rest of humanity. The universal is rooted in the particular.

 

On Thursday my nephew and I visited Loganberry Books, the last remaining bookstore in Cleveland worthy of serious readers. I asked a clerk, a woman of roughly my age, where I could find the essay section (the sprawling floor plan requires a map). She explained that the closest section to what I probably wanted was called “Narrative Nonfiction.” There I found too much popular junk – Joan Didion, Mary Oliver, David Sedaris, et al. I refined my question and asked if they had a section corresponding to what used to be called belles-lettres. “Sadly, no,” she said, with what seemed like genuine regret. Then she led me to “Lit. Crit.,” where I found One Person and Another: On Writers and Writing (Baskerville Publishers, 1993) by the late American novelist Richard Stern. In an essay titled “Inside Narcissus,” Stern writes: “There is one maker who is driven to narcissism by his occupation. This is the writer,” which inevitably leads him to Montaigne:

 

“Centuries before Augustine, Horace praised his satiric predecessor Lucilius for laying out his whole life ‘as if it were painted on a votive tablet.’ It was, though, not till the late sixteenth century that a writer claimed that he wrote because he knew nothing special but himself. Montaigne puzzled over his self-assignment. ‘Is it reasonable,’ he asked, ‘that I, so fond of privacy in actual life, should aspire to publicity in the knowledge of me?’ He decided that this contradiction, like all others, was integral to his enterprise, which was revealing all of himself (mon être universel), or at least as much as decorum or caution allowed. ‘I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak.”

'To Solemnize the Marriage Contract'

My nephew and I spent the morning going through a plastic storage box filled with photos, documents, newspaper clippings and other oddments Abe inherited from my brother after his death last year. What did we find? 

My mother’s 1920 birth certificate (“Legitimate?” “Yes”).

 

The naturalization certificate of my paternal grandfather, Charles Kurpiewski, a Polish immigrant, dated September 17, 1920.

My mother’s autograph book. An entry dated December 7, 1939 (two years to the day before Pearl Harbor), signed by Marion Kolorrics, addressed “Dear Edyth [sic]”:

 

“Love is to the human heart,

What sunshine is to flowers,

But friendship is the truest thing,

In this cold world of ours.”                 

My parents’ marriage license (“to solemnize the Marriage Contract between the persons aforesaid”) signed by Probate Judge Nelson J. Brewer on September 19, 1950.

 

A booklet titled “The Marriage Service” signed by the Rev. Elmer G. Wiest of Trinity Evangelical and Reformed Church on W. 25th Street in Cleveland on September 16, 1950.

 

An album of photos taken on my parents’ wedding day. My mother was thirty-one, my father was thirty and still had hair. They look impossibly young. A picture of my mother’s four brothers, all in tuxes, looks like an outtake from The Godfather. A photo of my Uncle Virgil toasting with a bottle of whiskey and my Uncle Richard with a tankard of beer.

 

A photo of me, my parents and brother seated around a table at the Coach House in Strongsville, Ohio (“Family Style Dining”), on March 10, 1968 – my mother’s forty-eighth birthday. My father, typically, is scowling.

 

Back in my room I reread Delmore Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Me in junior high school, c. 1965:

'In Hopper Light'

I knew “Cracker Barrel” as a brand of cheddar cheese my mother sometimes bought when we were kids. The recent brouhaha over “branding” informed me it’s also the name of a chain of restaurants, one of which shares a parking lot with the motel on the West Side of Cleveland where I’m staying. I’d eaten nothing since leaving Houston early Tuesday morning and was feeling hungry, not picky. 

Eating alone in a restaurant always feels a little awkward – and extravagant. It’s a kid’s dream, an experience you want to milk. You can order what you want and as much as you want. The menu at Cracker Barrel isn’t afraid of a little cholesterol, though I was prudent – meatloaf, fried okra, cole slaw, biscuits. Normally I’m a tofu-and-hummus kind of guy, but I was feeling not only hungry but very American.

 

My waiter looked to be about twelve and was desperate to please. I had to reassure him several times that the food was filling and good. He almost begged me to order dessert, which I never eat. Then he handed me a check for fifty-seven dollars and change. Wrong table. I thought he was about to perform seppuku. Then he handed me the right check: under ten bucks. I left a fiver under my plate and remembered John Updike’s “The Grief of Cafeterias”:

 

“Everyone sitting alone with a sorrow,

overcoats on. The ceiling was stamped

of tin and painted over and over.

The walls are newer, and never matched.

SALISBURY STEAK SPECIAL $1.65.

Afterwhiffs of Art Deco chrome,

and the space is as if the space

of the old grand railroad terminals

has been cut up, boxcarred out, and reused.

SOUP SALAD & SANDWICH $1.29

Nobody much here. The happiness

of that at least—of vacancy, mopped.

Behind cased food, in Hopper light,

The servers attend to each other forever.”

'He Thought of Little Things'

Timing is crucial in one’s reading life. Several people have advised readers to take on Proust’s masterwork only after their fortieth birthday. I first read it months before my eighteenth in the old C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation. Was much of it lost on me? Of course. I was callow and naïve, enthusiastic but ignorant. That’s part of the reason I read it again a decade later as I approached thirty. It was like reading a different novel and the experience convinced me of the obligation to reread the books that matter most to us. Now I retain in memory enough of Proust to return periodically to favorite passages. In 1999, I left a rose on his grave in Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but I fantasize about reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu a third time. Proust is a rewarding obligation, like Shakespeare and Chekhov. 

Around the time I first read Proust I also discovered the work of a far less significant writer, Sherwood Anderson. He charmed me then though I can no longer read his mushy prose. He is, I suspect, a young person's writer, unlike Proust. He was a fellow Ohio native and lived for a spell in Cleveland, my hometown. I bought a beat-up copy of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a Viking Compass Book, from the long-defunct Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue in downtown Cleveland, where I would go to work as a clerk several years later. That city block, which I will visit next week while visiting Cleveland, is yet another space charged with memories. A stray line from John Lennon comes to mind: “All these places had their moments . . .” In them, space and time intersect. One of the blessings and curses of life is memory. I’ve just remembered waiting at a bus stop downtown after visiting Kay’s and thinking I would write a collection of short stories titled Clevelanders, in homage to Joyce’s Dubliners. Naturally, it was never written.

 

Here are the final words of “Departure,” the final story in Winesburg, Ohio: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.” Anderson based the fictional town of Winesburg on his childhood home, Clyde, seven miles northwest of Bellevue in north central Ohio. I moved to Bellevue in January 1981, about a week before President Reagan’s inauguration, and went to work as a reporter for The Gazette. I was twenty-eight and this was my first daily newspaper. Previously I had worked as the editor of the weekly paper in Montpelier, Ohio, about two hours to the west, near the Indiana and Michigan lines.  

 

The Gazette closed in 2016 after almost 149 years in business. Its owner, Civitas Media, switched to twice-a-week publication in 2015 but couldn’t keep the paper afloat. Its circulation was about 1,000, after peaking at 4,300 in the late nineteen-seventies, just before I got there. Civitas Media also owned and closed The Clyde Enterprise.

 

George Willard, the character leaving Winesburg on a westbound train in the passage quoted at the top, was also a newspaper reporter. Like him, I remember incidentals, small things, like meeting Pat Boone, and the smell of Aramis, the “men’s fragrance” our publisher seemed to apply with a paint brush, the city manager coming to work one winter on skis. George’s memories are folksier than mine:

 

“He thought of little things—Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father’s hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.”

'Praise Cannot Be Totally Denied'

“[William] Somervile has tried many modes of poetry; and though perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that ‘he writes very well for a gentleman.’”

 

The well-read reader new to Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works (1779-81), the product of six years of Johnsonian labor, can be forgiven his confusion. Who is this gentleman, Somerville? Who is the endearingly named Thomas Tickell? And where among the fifty-two biographical/critical sketches included by Johnson are Spenser and Donne? No poet writing before the Restoration appears in Johnson’s final masterpiece, and none who were still alive (no Cowper, no Chatterton). He tells us he wrote the Lives “in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily; unwilling to work and working with vigour and haste.”

 

The work was commissioned as a publishers’ venture. Basically, Johnson accepted the list of approved subjects chosen by a group of booksellers from roughly the century preceding what we know as the Age of Johnson. That leaves Johnson’s savage, amusing, mistaken, shrewd, sentimental, baffling profiles of Milton, Pope, Dryden, Swift and dozens of more obscure figures. Johnson’s book, in other words, cannot be read as an efficiently arranged survey of English verse in the manner of a Norton anthology. No, we read it for Johnson, his loves and aversions, his insights into poets as men. We’re intrigued by what Johnson chooses to include. They make for good reading, their unique mingling of critical judgments and gossip. Take one example drawn from the seven paragraphs devoted to Somerville:

 

“His great work is his Chase [1735], which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse, of which, however, his two first lines give a bad specimen. [‘The Chase I sing, hounds, and their various breed, / And no less various use. O thou, great Prince!’] To this poem praise cannot be totally denied.  He is allowed by sportsmen to write with great intelligence of his subject, which is the first requisite to excellence; and though it is impossible to interest the common readers of verse in the dangers or pleasures of the chase, he has done all that transition and variety could easily effect; and has with great propriety enlarged his plan by the modes of hunting used in other countries.”

 

For a reader without interest in hunting or its celebration in verse, The Chase is resistant to comfortable reading. Poetic conventions of the time make it read as though written in an unfamiliar dialect of English:

 

“Awed, by the threatening whip, the furious hounds

Around her bay; or, at their master’s foot,

Each happy favourite courts his kind applause,

With humble adulation cowering low.

All now is joy. With cheeks full-blown they wind

Her solemn dirge, while the loud-opening pack

The concert swell, and hills and dales return

The sadly-pleasing sounds. Thus the poor hare,

A puny, dastard animal! but versed

In subtle wiles, diverts the youthful train.”

 

Somerville was born on this date, September 2, in 1675, and died in 1742 at age sixty-six.

At the Bookstore

I work hard to resist sentimental impulses and indulgence in nostalgia. Ours is a sentimental age, and at the same time an angry, unforgiving one. A strain of sentimentality especially prevalent among the aging is a rueful, self-pitying lament for what no longer exists. This might include manners, linguistic turns, obsolete technologies, movies “when they were still good.” The world we grow up in tends to become the only world, indelibly pressed into our sensibilities. Deviation from the template is second-best at best. I’m sympathetic but understand how tiresome this sounds to younger people. Part of maturing is accepting that which seems shoddy or meretricious, a falling off from previous perfection. 

My niece’s daughter turns two this week. Hannah tells me she loves to “read,” so when I arrive in Cleveland on Wednesday I want to make a birthday present of books. I’m giving her the copy of David Wiesner’s Tuesday (1991), a wordless picture book loved sequentially by all three of my sons, and read – or, rather, spontaneously narrated -- a thousand times by me. Most of the dust jacket is missing – evidence of its popularity.

 

I wanted to include a couple of new books. I haven’t set foot in one of the retail chain bookstores in many years. Books represent the only sort of shopping I’ve ever enjoyed. So I entered a Barnes and Nobles located just a few miles away, with the customary sense of anticipation I feel whenever entering a book collection. I phrase it that way because I get a similar tingle when entering a library. I’m always hopeful when it comes to books.

 

I would estimate that fifty percent of the visible stock didn’t qualify as “book” or even “reading material.” I’m not naïve. I’ve shopped at Barnes and Noble before. I remember in Albany, N.Y., in the early nineties, when a B&N opened just blocks away from a Borders (R.I.P.). If one store didn’t have what I wanted, I would drive to the other. On Sunday, the Barnes and Noble recalled an unholy merger of grade-school classroom and tourist trap – coffee mugs, tote bags, stuffed animals and other toys. Merchandise.

 

I rode the escalator to the second floor where the children’s book section is located. A clerk was standing at the computer, entering data for the heaps of board books stacked on her counter. I asked where I could find books by writers – favorites of my sons decades ago -- whose names I had written down. All were unfamiliar to her. She never made eye contact. As I read the names, she entered them into the digital catalogue. Nothing showed up. I thanked her and explored the shelves myself, and eventually found two books I thought a little girl I don’t know very well might enjoy. I felt the way I feel when leaving a shoe store.

'Our Own Heaven-Created Palimpsest'

I first encountered the word palimpsest more than half a century ago in Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds and found it immediately useful. Here’s the OED’s strict, non-figurative definition: 

“A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.”

 

In other words, a much-edited text with revisions superimposed on earlier versions – a text layered like an archaeological dig. I think of Marcel Proust’s manuscripts. More central to my thinking is the figurative use of palimpsest as a metaphor for memory. In a literal sense, I carry around mental maps of every place in five states where I have lived. The earliest date from my childhood in suburban Cleveland. In that immediate turf I can get around just fine but in subsequent decades, freeways have been constructed and buildings and other landmarks have been torn down. Trees have sprouted and others cut down. I know from previous visits that Cleveland is half-charted territory, and I can’t always trust my memory of the geography.  When I visit next week for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, I’ll rely on my niece and nephew as navigators.

 

I haven’t lived in Cleveland and environs since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983. I'm flying there Wednesday. It’s prudent to recall that memory is a function of the imagination. Cops know this when they interview witnesses to crimes. The mind fills in the blanks, consciously or otherwise. It pays to be skeptical of our memories, no matter how fond we are of them. Also, the unconscious is timeless. It’s still 1961 in there, and 1998. Thomas De Quincey understood. He first published in Blackwood’s Magazine an essay that became part of Suspiria de Profundis, a collection left unfinished at the time of his death in 1859 but intended as a sequel to his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

 

“What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader, is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying among the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies.”

'In Praise of Half-Forgotten Books'

Sometimes all it takes for me to pull a book off the shelf is a provocative or otherwise interesting title. While retrieving a collection of William H. Pritchard’s reviews in the university library I noticed a nearby slender volume titled In Praise of the Half-Forgotten and Other Ruminations. My first thought: what a fine epitaph could be made of that, and I too am one of nature’s ruminators. The author is George Brandon Saul (1901-86). The book was published by Bucknell University Press in 1976. I know little about Saul except that he taught English for many years at the University of Connecticut and often wrote about Yeats and other Irish writers. 

The book title attracts me because “half-forgotten” books attract me. Of course, most books today are on the way to being fully forgotten. A writer’s reputation, a nebulous thing at best, is often manufactured by marketers, publicists and malleable critics; not the true critics, the only ones who matter, serious readers. Saul says he hopes his books “may help plug a few holes in literary history.” His title essay consists of brief reviews – he calls them “critical brevities” – of six poets, only one of whom I’ve ever heard of – Dubose Hayward (author of the 1925 novel Porgy, the source of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess).

 

Saul devotes essays to the criticism of James Stephens, the poetry of A.E, Coppard, English metrics, the poems of Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, A.E. Housman, and Stevenson and Henley as lyricists. Many fine writers but none critically or academically fashionable, except perhaps Housman for extra-literary reasons. I’m especially pleased that Saul includes “Autumn Nights: The Prose of Alexander Smith.” If remembered at all, Smith (1830-67), a Scot, is remembered as a poet but he excels as an essayist. The book to find is Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (1863). Like his mentors Montaigne and Charles Lamb, Smith may be an egotist, yes, but a benign egotist, as contradictory as that sounds. His work starts with self but extends outward to absorb the bigger, more interesting world. Egotism is not the same as narcissism. Among Smith’s essays is “On the Writing of Essays,” with observations readily applicable to blogs:

 

“The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with.”

 

For further confirmation of Smith’s naturalness and literary sophistication as an essayist, read this from “A Shelf in My Bookcase” on the virtues of Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “It is quite impossible to over-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your existence.”

 

Saul tells about half the story when he describes Smith as “a lover of simplicity and quiet, of gentleness and village gossip, of books and meditation in still gardens.”

'Impossible Not to Be Entertained'

“In those days when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of holyday ramblers, I have been a visitor there. Though a boy, I was not altogether insensible of the misery of the poor captives, nor destitute of feeling for them.” 

The English poet William Cowper, a veteran of multiple suicide attempts and confinements in asylums, describes a common eighteenth-century recreation: viewing the “antics” of the insane for entertainment in Bedlam. He’s writing to his friend the Rev. William Newton on July 19, 1784:

 

“But the madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so.”

 

I’m skeptical of any claims of moral progress, though by the late twentieth century touring the nut house seems to have been curtailed  as an entertainment option. Of course, today we have “reality television,” professional sports and the drug-addled and schizophrenic homeless on the street. A man could earn a respectable living by corralling such people in an updated version of the carnival sideshow.

 

As a kid, the closest I came to such spectacle was the Cuyahoga County Fair in Berea, Ohio. Some time in the early sixties my brother and I were seduced into viewing the Giant Rat of Sumatra, behind walls of painted canvas. The barker’s pitch I still remember: “'Live, livin’ and breathin'.” All I recall seeing is a fat rat in a pit filled with saw dust. As a bonus we viewed an enormously tall, skinny man dressed in cowboy duds and a tiny woman seated beside him. I think of her when I reread Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget. I recall an overwhelming sense of sadness – people living narrow, blighted lives. The sadness has its origin in the understanding that in the future I might join them.

'The Death of Discourse'

As a boy I was often told I spoke too loudly. It makes sense, as I came from a family of yellers. It’s an annoying habit, usually inappropriate, one I associate with self-centeredness. I made a conscious effort to lower the volume, a rare instance of successfully stifling an obnoxious personal habit. As a reporter I learned the value of modulating speech -- when to keep it soft and intimate, when to speak louder and more forcefully, depending on your audience. The latter usually applied to people holding public office. I tried to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice. 

I’ve heard from several readers about the dearth of good, intelligent conversation in their lives. One woman complains of “every conversation turning into a scolding or shouting match.” I’ve seen the same thing, of course. I’ve always associated hollering and hair-trigger anger with what used to be called “poor breeding.” That is, people who never had elders who could teach them basic etiquette. I’m not sure that’s the case any longer.   

 

Back in 2011, Commentary asked forty-one people this question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?” Among the respondents was one of my favorite poets and critics, Eric Ormsby. He chooses an appropriate passage from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and writes:

 

“But it isn’t the obvious dangers that America faces—terrorist attack, fiscal collapse—that most get me down but something humbler, less catastrophic, and yet more insidious. I think of it as the death of discourse. Nowadays, even among friends, a dissenting opinion is met not with rebuttal or debate but with stony silence or Whitman’s ‘melodramatic screamings.’ The purpose of conversation on any serious topic is no longer a ‘mass of badinage’ but an occasion for sniffing out ‘deviant’ views and affixing labels.”

 

Ormsby recounts that even when his family agued, “we were reconciled in mutual affection.” Wise words. A person is not his or her opinions. You don’t have to respect a stupid or offensive opinion but you do have to respect the person speaking it – at least for a little while. Good conversation is one of life's supreme pleasures. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson saying: “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”

'Seldom Softened By Any Appearance of Gaiety'

In his critical works, Samuel Johnson respected tradition if not reputation or even physical appearance. He could be eloquently brutish and write of Jonathan Swift: 

“The person of Swift had not many recommendations. He had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter.”

 

Today we would frown on mocking a writer’s looks. It would be judged “insensitive.” I associate Johnson’s description of Swift with one of the late John Simon’s more amusing assaults on Barbra Streisand: “Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun. Though she has good eyes and a nice complexion, the rest of her is a veritable anthology of disaster areas. Her speaking voice seems to have graduated with top honors from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Yentaism.” That Streisand is a mediocre singer/actress endowed with a surfeit of self-esteem eases potential offense. The difference between Johson’s judgment and Simon’s being that the former mingles admiration with distaste:

 

“It was from the time when [Swift] first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have ever since been making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established.”

 

R.L. Barth has translated Martial’s epigram XI.99. As a satirist, Martial was no respecter of persons:

 

“Whenever you stand up, I see your gown

Treat you indecently, flat let you down.

You pluck it with your left hand then your right—

You’re positively groaning!—it’s held tight

In the Cyanean straits of your huge butt.

What’s my advice? Don’t sit. Don’t stand. That’s what.”

 

Bob wrote to me on his approach to translation: “Translation can be a vexing problem if you let it be--or even if you don’t. For me, all that matters is that the translated poem makes a good English poem (or why bother) and that it stays as close to the original as this or that translator is able to keep it. However, I'm willing to vary, add, substitute, if it works for the poem and doesn’t violate the spirit of the original. I may not be as good a poet as Martial, but I’m pretty much his equal as a smart-ass, which helps my translations.”

'And Aesthetics My Primary Value'

The Louisiana poet Gail White published three poems in Peacock Journal, all freighted with serious thought and all skirting the charms of light verse. White avoids the failings of pretentiousness and mere silliness. Consider “Resemblances”: 

“Somewhere along the primrose path

That led to my seventies,

I lost the blithe agility

Of the young springbok’s knees,

 

“The swift gait of the wildebeest

Running with its herd,

And the keen eye of the crouching cat

Under the nesting bird,

 

“Retaining only the stoic love

Of the elephant for its kin

And the fierce desire of the salmon

For the stream it was nurtured in.”

 

Chronicling the losses and infirmities of aging can turn readily into a wallow in self-pity, which is ridiculous if you consider the alternative. Unspoiled youth is incompatible with longevity, and adults accept those inevitabilities with dignity and “stoic love.” White’s twelve-line, one-sentence poem reminds us that mortality is universal, what we share with the rest of the Earth’s fauna. We’re in the same boat (Noah’s ark) as nematodes and capybaras. White adds a prose statement to her poems:

 

“Aquinas, who had a gift for concise definition, once said that ‘We call that beautiful which pleases the eye.’ It’s hard to improve on the simplicity of that. Pleasing the eye, which includes reading, has always been my goal, and aesthetics my primary value. From this comes a love of art museums, travel, living next to running water, poetry, the Victorian novel, and cats. (Few things please the eye as much as a good cat). It might have been more noble if my highest value had been unconditional love, but if I’m honest, I admit I’m stuck with beauty.”

 

Not a bad place to be stuck. Beauty is one of the things that makes life worth enduring. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953) – one of my favorite books -- Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime: “Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.” It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences:

 

“Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”

 

Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (trans. T.C. O’Brien): “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”

'I Would If Possible Imitate a Tree'

Yet another hero of autodidacticism is Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the English physicist and chemist who discovered electromagnetic induction, which eventually led to development of inductors and transformers, and such devices as electric motors and generators. True to the practice of rigorous self-education, Faraday was also a first-rate writer, with a gift for clarity and vividness. He had little formal education and starting at age fourteen, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and bookseller.

 

Faraday was then employed as a chemical assistant in the Royal Institution in London, where he worked with the great chemist Humphry Davy. He went on to discover benzene and carbon tetrachloride, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularized the use of such words as anode, cathode, electrode and ion.

 

In 1818, Faraday and four friends organized what we would call a self-help writing group, and much of what they produced is collected in Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (2008). Faraday sought naturalness in his writing, and blamed the practice of what English teachers today call “topic sentences” for his early awkwardness:

 

“[It] introduces a dryness and stiffness into the style of the piece composed by it for the parts come together like bricks one flat on the other [. . .] I would if possible imitate a tree in its progression from roots to a trunk to branches trees & twigs where every alteration is made with so much ease & yet effect that though the manner is constantly varied the effect is precise and determined.”

 

I recommend Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle, which started as a series of six lectures for young people in 1848 on the chemistry and physics of flames and was published in 1861: “There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy,” Faraday writes, “than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”

 

He suggests we look first at the brightest part of the flame. Writers, like scientists, are rewarded by close observation:

 

“Why, there I get these black particles, which already you have seen many times evolved from the flame, and which I am now about to evolve in a different way. I will take this candle and clear away the gutterage, which occurs by reason of the currents of air; and if I now arrange a glass tube so as just to dip into this luminous part . . . you see the result. In place of having the same white vapour that you had before, you will now have a black vapour. There it goes, as black as ink. It is certainly very different from the white vapour; and when we put a light to it, we shall find that it does not burn, but that it puts the light out.”

 

Faraday’s exercise is simple and easily repeatable even by young people, and certainly by non-chemists. Note Faraday’s conversational prose:

 

“Well, these particles, as I said before, are just the smoke of the candle; and this brings to mind that old employment which Dean Swift recommended to servants for their amusement, namely, writing on the ceiling of a room with a candle.”

In “Directions to Servants” (1798), Jonathan Swift had written: “Write your own name, and your sweet-heart’s, with the smoak of a candle, on the roof of the kitchen, or the servants hall, to Shew your learning.” Faraday goes on:

 

“But what is that black substance? Why, it is the same carbon which exists in the candle. How comes it out of the candle? It evidently existed in the candle, or else we should not have had it here. And now I want you to follow me in this explanation. You would hardly think that all those substances which fly about London, in the form of soots and blacks, are the very beauty and life of the flame, and which are burned in it as those iron filings were burned here. Here is a piece of wire gauze, which will not let the flame go through it; and I think you will see, almost immediately, that when I bring it low enough to touch that part of the flame which is otherwise so bright, that it quells and quenches it at once, and allows a volume of smoke to rise up.”

 

A self-educated man, Faraday encourages the ongoing self-education of his audience by encouraging close examination of commonplace phenomena.

 

Faraday died on this date, August 25, in 1867, at age seventy-five.

'We Talked About Philip Larkin'

Two of the three copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson I own were gifts from my brother. He loved garage sales and thrift shops and had no shame about looking for second-hand bargains. He liked the English expression “jumble sale.” Ken wasn’t cheap but never seemed to have enough money. My final loan to him he never repaid before his death on August 24, 2024. I’m not bitter about that. In fact, I now find it endearing. It is quintessential Ken, one more confirmation of his personality. I’m glad he felt he could ask. 

There was a lengthy spell when we stopped talking. Friends tell me this is hardly unusual between siblings, though it never felt comfortable. His daughter Hannah in 2005 (she was then about ten) wrote me a letter saying that both of us ought to grow up. Besides, she wanted to meet her uncle. Ken didn’t fly so I made an annual trip to Cleveland to visit him and his family. A family friend, Rumanian-born Giorgiana Lascu, always known as "George," posted a nice remembrance of my brother:

 

“Dinner always at 5:30, which nobody ever missed for the good conversation, we never talked about our feelings, but we talked about Philip Larkin or smack to each-other or about the news, or whatever people were reading. Everyone was always reading something. Sometimes dinner was followed by a lively drum circle, conducted on the table top. We were always welcome, though feeding two extra girls during a recession must have been hard.”

 

The first Boswell Ken gave me was the boxed, three-volume Heritage Press edition from 1963. I remember lugging it through the airport in my suitcase along with other books I had purchased in Cleveland. The other copy is a heavy, one-volume, leather-bound brick of a book. It’s an American reprint of the English edition edited by John Croker in 1831, the one Macaulay famously savaged. It’s an extravagantly ugly book, printed in blindness-inducing small print, and if anyone other than my brother had given it to me, I would have unloaded it long ago. Ken also gave me two hardcover volumes of Boswell’s journals -- yard-sale treasures.

 

Sadness mingles with a diffuse sense of guilt and the pleasures of memory. Every day I think of something I want to tell Ken that would make him laugh or at least snort. Death resolves little or nothing. Johnson writes in his Rambler essay on September 22, 1750:

 

"When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."

'Essayists, Like Poets, Are Born and Not Made'

“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne’s own.”

If pressed to name my favorite literary form I would choose the essay, the form without a strict form, seemingly designed for free spirits with brains and emotional depth – “a knowledge of men and of books,” as W.E. Henley puts it above. The most unlikely things can be successful essays – reviews, memoirs, scientific papers, recipes, fiction. The best ones have a point, even an argument or lesson, but never hector or harangue the reader. An essayist confides. Without condescending, he puts his arm around your shoulder and talks softly, turning you into the sole member of his audience, a person worthy of his trust.

 

Sure, Montaigne started it all (except for Plutarch and Seneca), but the English came to perfect it – Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson, Chesterton, Beerbohm and the rest. William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) will never be a member of that front rank. He was a poet, lauded in his day, and will always be remembered for a poem my eighth-grade English teacher had us memorize sixty years ago: "Invictus." It’s a natural for recitation, up there with Kipling.

 

The passage at the top is taken from Henley’s “Essays and Essayists” collected in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1892).He writes:

 

“Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function ‘to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.’ He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable.”

 

Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849. His friend Stevenson, who based the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883) on the one-legged Henley, wrote him a letter from Nebraska on August 23, 1879 -- the poet's thirtieth birthday. Stevenson writes a brief, impromptu essay from Willa Cather's (b. 1873) future turf:

 

“I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae.”

'We Have the Long List of Autodidacts'

Robert Penn Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975): 

“The will to change: this is one of the most precious heritages of American democracy. We have the story of the young Washington, who studied surveying and could, by the exercise of his skill, buy ‘Bullskin plantation,’ his first one, at the age of sixteen. Thus far he had merely changed his condition. But he had the will to change himself as well, and with the same furious energy, he studied the Roman Stoics that he might achieve the admirable character he desired.”

 

This is part of the folklore I grew up with, like the story of young Washington and his cherry tree. I don’t consciously remember learning any of this. The lives and thought of the early presidents were like holy writ, to be studied and emulated. The first book I wrote as a kid was a collection of presidential biographies (through Kennedy), each one-page long, handwritten on lined paper, happily cribbed from encyclopedias. Perhaps this accounts for my enduring sense of patriotism, a devotion to the American ideals, despite all our all-too-human errors. Warren continues:

 

“So we have the long list of autodidacts, including Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Dreiser — men who, with all their failings and complications, willed a change deeper than that of an objective condition. We admire those autodidacts, but the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”

 

All too true, even half a century ago. The embodiment of the autodidactic approach to life for me is Eric Hoffer (1902-83). He started as a migrant worker in the West, worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco and wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), an essential guide to the world we inhabit today. I first encountered him at age fifteen. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, and moved on to his books. My father was an ironworker and high-school dropout; my mother, a tax clerk. No one in my family had gone to college. I felt an immediate personal identification with Hoffer. He was my first model of autodidacticism, proof that my education was up to me.

 

I’m reading Daniel J. Flynn’s Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011). Flynn devotes a chapter to Hoffer, calling him “the definitional autodidact.” He wrote prose that got “straight to the point. Efficient and crisp. Hoffer’s words stood out against the opaque, verbose, circuitous style that increasingly characterized the prose of intellectuals. If readers found his style original it was because they had never come across French writers—Pascal, Montaigne, Renan, de la Rochefoucauld—whom he imitated.”

 

Hoffer was part of the reason I wanted to write and why I became a newspaper reporter. He was no snob. He seemed from the start like the kind of guy I could talk to.

'A Kind of Good Humoured Growl'

We like a neat and predictable understanding of our fellows. No surprises. An honest man never lies and an angry man is never forgiving -- convictions rooted in naïveté about human nature, which is willful and contradictory. Few of us even understand our own motives. Here is James Boswell writing of his friend in May 1775: 

“I passed many hours with him on the 17th, of which I find all my memorial is, ‘much laughing.’ It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularity and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily. We may suppose, that the high relish of a state so different from his habitual gloom, produced more than ordinary exertions of that distinguishing faculty of man, which has puzzled philosophers so much to explain.”

 

I can hear the chorus of amateur psychologists: “bipolar.” After all, every human complexity can be “solved” and even “cured.” There’s plenty of precedent for funny men living in “perpetual gloom.” S.J. Perelman nominates himself in everything he ever wrote, including the Marx Brothers scripts. Think of Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce. To paraphrase a very funny and serious man, Kingsley Amis, the opposite of funny is not serious but unfunny. Take this untitled epigram by X.J. Kennedy:

 

“Have I ‘matured’ at last? My blood congeals.

 Have I so soon discarded my ideals?”

 

The humor is in the adolescent defiance of the couplet and the reader's recognition of himself in its lines. And another one, “A Farting Babbler,” also from the Fall 1992 issue of The Classical Outlook:

 

“His gaseous anus, though it give offense,

 Comes closer than his mouth to making sense.”

 

We all know the type, which despite conventional wisdom is not limited to politicians. Fill in the blank. One more, about the incestuous world of writers, especially poets:

 

“Swap got a wildly favorable review

Written, of course, by some kiss-ass he knew

To whose last work he’d suckled up in turn.

Better to marry, said St. Paul, than burn.”

 

Happy birthday, Joe. Kennedy, our funniest serious poet, turns ninety-six today. Boswell continues the passage above from his Life of Johnson like this: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’”