'Failed in Life and Love'

“Usually he took for his subjects those who failed in life and love. He wrote about the derelict and downtrodden, the old and bereft. Who wanted to read about successful alderman, anyway?”

As a newspaper reporter, “celebrities” never interested me, the politicians and captains of industry hungry for headlines. Too often they sought the “glamour” a reporter might supply them, even in the provincial pages of a smalltown newspaper in the Midwest. Smugness and entitlement are repellant. At the same time I resisted romanticizing the plight of the outsiders, the ready-made poignancy that comes with poverty and failure. It was impossible to avoid both types, of course. The best I could do was maintain an uneasy neutrality, sticking as close as possible to the facts, sorting them out and resisting the effortless clichés. 

The comment at the top is by Scott Donaldson in his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and I think it accounts for my love for the best of Robinson’s poems. He usually resists the romanticizing impulse, the easy route of making losers heroic. His emotional capacity is enormous but carefully regulated. He doesn’t gush. Take his sonnet “Reuben Bright” (The Children of the Night, 1897):

 

“Because he was a butcher and thereby

Did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;

For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.

 

“And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.”

 

In other hands, the conclusion might have been insufferably cheesy. The poem consists of two carefully structured sentences, loosely defined as before and after. The second flows so smoothly, in the simplest of language, that we think: Where is he going with this? A “Richard Cory”-like punchline would have been a cheap disappointment. Instead, Robinson gives us an entirely unexpected coda to a life. He makes a simple, obscure man noble in his grief.

 

Jules Renard and Robinson share similar sensibilities. Both stood on the outside, looking in. Both possessed healthy capacities for humor and irony. Neither was a rabble-rouser. Renard puts it like this in his journal on May 1, 1902: “Fame. A reputation is made with cement, mortar and liberal quantities of vulgarity.”

'Almost Great'

Henry Oliver poses an interesting question: “What should be on a list of almost Great Books?” Consider it less a critical exercise than a parlor game. Think of the books you have admired and enjoyed, and perhaps reread, that lie beyond the canonical borders, the Dante/Shakespeare/Tolstoy axis. Oliver considers his own list “personal and partial,” as it should be. Here’s my Top Ten (+ two), listed as the titles occurred to me: 

Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor (1851)

 

Whittaker Chambers: Witness (1952)

 

Anton Chekhov: Sakhalin Island (1895)

 

Charles Montagu Doughty: Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

 

A.J. Liebling: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962)

 

Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary Conversations (1824-29)

 

Ronald Knox: Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950)

 

The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024)

 

Guy Davenport: The Geography of the Imagination (1981)

 

Jonathan Swift: A Journal to Stella (1766)

 

Michael Oakeshott: Rationalism in Politics (1962)

 

James Boswell: The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

 

Walter de la Mare: Memoirs of a Midget (1921)

'An Unknown, Powerful, and Awful Truth'

“It is extraordinary how jargon intimidates; how prone we are to dismiss as irrelevant or dated that which comes unpackaged in the cellophane of current phraseology and images, and has nevertheless to represent those of a totally different era.” 

Another symptom of “presentism”: unwillingness to acquire at least a working knowledge of a new language by a writer from the past. “Acquire” is misleading. It’s not like learning Russian as an adult. “Adapt to” or “become comfortable with” are closer. A lazy reader will object to anything he is unable to instantaneously comprehend. More than fifty years ago one of my English professors complained that most of her students were unable to read anything written before Hemingway’s arrival. This came in the context of reading Tristram Shandy, which several classmates were complaining about.

 

The passage quoted above was written by the American poet Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003) in "The Masks of Walter de la Mare," published in the Fall 1978 issue of The Sewanee Review. I take her observation personally because for many years I ignored the work of de la Mare in poetry and prose largely because of the language and his interest in the mutedly uncanny. His sentences often seemed fey, fuzzy and whimsical. After all, he wrote for kids, didn’t he? I wanted hard, flinty language. Jacobsen concentrates on de la Mare’s stories, which I now acknowledge as among my favorites:

 

“What is De la Mare's primary -- and forever relevant -- premise?” she asks. “It is the premise of strangeness, and of its creature, the stranger. That stranger is the one who is suddenly caught peering at us as we pass in a dim room before an unexpected mirror.”

 

De la Mare treats strangeness realistically. That’s not a gratuitously cute paradox. His world is strange and his people are sensitive to it. It’s not like the gorefests in contemporary horror movies. I don't ever recall encountering overt violence in a de la Mare story. It’s a matter of atmosphere, of quietly puzzling, barely perceived events. Often the main character is more confused than frightened. His stories seldom feel like genre-based slumming. Jacobsen articulates this quality:

 

“De la Mare has essayed the difficult task of catching that strangeness, of examining it in its effects, of relating it to what we know and what we do not. He has done it in ghost stories (if something as ambiguous as the ghostly element in these tales can be so crudely classified); by a lovely and acid sort of fairy tale; but more often and more characteristically by his stories of those who dwell on the edge--that line which divides (or does not) reality and appearance, life and death, which he has taken for his precarious foothold.”

 

De la Mare’s language delicately delineates events our rational minds ignore or safely categorize as “odd” and then forget. Jacobsen writes:

 

“It is the truly vital, the greatly endowed with life, who are most acutely aware of death, as witness the graves, plumes, hearses, and skulls of the Elizabethans; and the bland timidity of the dreadful vocabulary tailored for Our Senior Citizens, with its Rest Homes, Golden Age Clubs, Loved Ones, and Memorial Parks. De la Mare's world -- far from being that of the sugar-spun pixies with which his nonreaders often tend to associate him [that was me] -- is one of a grim and terrifying beauty, mined by abysses, peopled with the sleepwalkers of a trustful materialism, the constant borderline of the assaults of an unknown, powerful, and awful truth.”

 

[See the late Jane Greer’s 2023 essay “‘A poet, dangerous and steep’: reintroducing Josephine Jacobsen.”]

'Enliven This Vale of Tears With a Little Fantasy'

I defy you to identify the writer being described: 

“[A]ll he really wanted to do in company was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it, to enrich and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy. The important questions of man’s relationship to God and man’s responsibility for the material and spiritual welfare of his fellow men could be left to private contemplation. The main purpose of human association was to share enjoyment of the world's absurdity.”

 

What an admirable testimonial. No, it’s not Mark Twain or P.G. Wodehouse. I’ll give you another clue: This is a son, also a writer, describing his father, and the son was himself a rather funny fellow. Both, but especially the father, were gifted writers of prose, the father one of the finest of the last century. One more sample:

 

“[He] was a small man--scarcely five foot six in his socks--and only a writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality.”

 

You’ve been reading Auberon Waugh in Will This Do?: The Memoirs of Auberon Waugh (1991) remembering Evelyn Waugh, his father, who seldom fails to make me feel good about life again if my thoughts have grown grim. There’s probably no prose in the world I admire more than his. For example, in his first and best travel book, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930), Waugh spends his first night in Paris in the Crillon, a comfortable but expensive hotel. Complaints about money – real or parodied -- are often funny. Next day, Waugh moves to a cheaper place: “My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls.”

 

Note the rhythm. The passage begins like a unpromisingly naturalistic travelogue and closes like a bear trap. Here’s the rest of the paragraph:

 

“The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through.”

 

One more sample of Waugh fils on Waugh père:

 

“The most welcome aspect of him, as a parent, was his lack of interest in his children, at any rate until they were much older and became fit subjects for gossip. So long as we were out of sight and sound, we could do whatever we wanted. In that sense, he was a permissive, even indulgent parent. At the age of nine or ten I announced that I was interested in chemistry--I never studied it at school, but neither of my parents would have known that--and wished to make some chemical experiments for Christmas. Papa thought this a capital idea, and asked for a list.

 

“Not many parents, I believe, would be prepared to give their sons of nine or ten bottles of concentrated sulphuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acid to play with unsupervised. Some will decide that this was a deliberate, Charles Addams-like plot to get rid of me, but my parents were similarly unconcerned about firearms, which presented a greater threat to everyone else. From my earliest years I stalked our 40 acres alone looking for small animals, or blasted away at targets around the house. Similarly, they were unconcerned about school rules and school reports, holding all authority in derision until the threat of expulsion brought with it the danger that children might be returned home.”

'By Other, Less Difficult, Media'

Prophecy is best left to the prophets. Writers are not a notably prescient bunch. Too often, like the rest of us, they see only what they hope for, not what the future holds. Consider the catastrophe-mongering of the late Paul Ehrlich. And yet, while hardly trying, a writer will sometimes stumble onto a keyhole into the future. Seventy years ago, Louis MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957):

 “When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?”

 

It reads like an elegy for poetry and literary culture. “Books in graveyards” recalls Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” with its “storied urn.” Traditionally, a book carved into a gravestone signified the Book of Life, awaiting review by the Heavenly Critic. Engines and epileptics “seize up,” frozen into inoperability. Ours is inarguably the age of “other, less difficult, media.” Critics have been calling our time “post-literate” at least since the Sixties. It’s a happy new reality for some (those who prefer their media “less difficult”), grievous for others (all who live by the word).

 

MacNeice pays poetry and the written word a splendid compliment. When the world is no longer “framed in words,” when the best eyes and ears of the past are no longer consulted, when we presume to confront the world in all our arrogant solitude, what remains?  A weirdly mutated world of “wingless birds.” Without words, grass is no longer “green” but something less.

 

In his 1935 essay “Poetry To-day” (Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, 1987), MacNeice had already addressed posterity, saying it “affects to put dead poets and movements in their place; to tell us their real significance and cancel out their irrelevances.” Such presumption is, he says, “tidy and saves thinking.” MacNeice rises to eloquent common sense:

 

“If we do our duty by the present moment, posterity can look after itself. To try to anticipate the future is to make the present past; whereas it should already be on our conscience that we have made the past past. We fail to appreciate a great poet like Horace because we don’t let him puzzle us.”

 

MacNeice failed to foresee his own death at age fifty-five a mere six years after “To Posterity.”

'The Present Is an Age of Talkers'

Austin Dobson in A Bookman’s Budget (1917) claims the longest sentence ever written in English can be found in William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age; Or Contemporary Portraits (1825), in the essay devoted to “Mr. Coleridge.” Dobson tells us: “Writing of Coleridge, he contrives to spin out a single sentence to one hundred and ten lines. It contains the word ‘and’ ninety-seven times, with only one semi-colon.” 

You can find this tour de force of bloviation about midway through the essay, with the paragraph beginning “Next, he was engaged with Hartley’s tribes of mind . . .” and concluding with the line quoted from Coleridge: “In Philarmonia’s undivided dale!” By my count that’s about 840 words. Hazlitt is usually a forceful writer. His sentences have the quality he most admired, gusto. I take this uncharacteristic monstrosity as a parody of Coleridge’s gaseous manner. Hazlitt begins his essay like this: “The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers,” and continues, “If Mr. Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer . . .”

 

Hazlitt is the poet-in-prose of resentment and humiliation, about which he wrote not theoretically but from unhappy experience. He was ridiculous about women and forever scrambling after money. His sentences glow with autobiographical heat. He even managed to alienate some of his closest friends. His readers appreciate his prickliness. Hazlitt’s indulgence in linguistic gigantism, of course, was surpassed with the coming of modernism. Consider Molly Bloom’s monologue and dozens of serpentine sentences in Proust.

'I Find Out How Little I Know'

Pessimism has its charms, chief among them being the reduced likelihood of disappointment. Even on the diminished scale of an individual life, utopia is toddler-level delusion. I still remember the cover of the April 1970 issue of Ramparts magazine, which proclaimed “Utopia Now!” I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and already knew this was dangerous nonsense. Here is a poem by the late American poet Kelly Cherry, “History” (Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems, 2007): 

“It is what, to tell the truth, you sometimes feel

That you have had enough of, though of course

You do not really mean that, since you recall

It well enough to know things could be worse

And probably are going to get that way

But still want a long and memorable life, which means

Having to learn more of it day by day,

The names and dates of all the kings and queens

And those less famous who ruled the territory

Known as your heart and now are gone, by one

Dark route or another, from the plot of your story.

But you write on, and are your own best Gibbon,

And read on, this monumental subject being

The decline and fall of almost everything.”

 

Personal history and the bigger history are natural analogues. Reviewing our lives, we fashion periods, epochs designated by the people in our life, jobs, illness or health, geography, happiness or misery. We flatter ourselves, understandably, fancying we are little Gibbons, assuming no one else knows us better than ourselves.

 

I remember learning some years ago that among Gibbon’s admirers was Iggy Pop, né James Newell Osterberg, Jr., leader of the proto-punk band The Stooges. In 1995, Pop published in Classics Ireland a brief essay titled “Caesar Lives,” in which he recounts his reading of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first in an abridged edition and later the full six volumes. Pop lists five benefits from reading Gibbon, the most admirable being, “I find out how little I know.” 

 

In Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (Ludovika University Press, 2025), Nicholas Tate acknowledges Pop’s essay and writes:

 

“It was not just the admiration that one hard-working artist had for a ‘guy’ who had ‘stuck with things’ or that the cameo illustration of Gibbon on the cover made him look like ‘a heavy dude’, but also the beauty of the language, the sense of being freed from the tyranny of the present, and the humbling revelation of ‘how little I know’. If Gibbon got it all wrong and is looking down from some other place, one can imagine the broad smile on the heavy dude’s chubby face – Gibbon was no prude – at the thought that two hundred years later his magnum opus was being read with great pleasure, to the accompaniment of drugs and whisky, around 4 a.m. in cheap motels somewhere in the American South.”

'Full of Assertions and Contradictions'

In 1995, R.L. Barth published a slender chapbook titled Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands. Included are twenty-three of Johnson’s poems prepared by ten poets including Turner Cassity, Timothy Steele, John Finlay and Barth himself. Steele’s translation is titled “Pater benigne” (“Kind Father”):

“Kind Father, always and supremely kind,

Relieve the guilt that weighs so on my mind

Grant me true contrition; may I lead

My life according to what You’ve decreed;

Direct with holy light my steps, my will,

Protect me, banish soul-corrupting ill.

To a sincere petitioner, release

The grace petitioned and the joys of peace

That, tranquil, he may trust You, who are free

Of Human error and anxiety.

Grant this which Christ, in dying, won for me.”

 

Seldom is piety so human. This most tormented of men asks not for carte blanche absolution but for “true contrition.” He understands that human pleas are so often conditional: “Just forgive me and I’ll never do it again.” Cassity’s translation is titled “Summe dator vitae” (“He is the Supreme Giver of Life”):

 

“Highest Giver of Life, Eternal King,

From Whom, link unto link, all causes flow,

Regard one whom both age and pain of age

Inform, whose life the end of life constricts.

Look on his useless days, his real regrets,

And punish, that You may forgive, Just Lord.”

 

Johnson was forever fearful of idleness, which he equated with madness. Boswell reports his friend saying: “Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” This is the man who gave us his Dictionary, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays, Rasselas, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and who edited Shakespeare. He was among the most learned men of his age, despite poverty, illness and the absence of a university degree. Yet he chronically feared idleness.

 

I recently discovered the English literary journalist Henry Oliver, whose website carries the Johnsonian title “The Common Reader.” On May 4 he posted an essay called “Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years.” Oliver understands Johnson was profoundly human, like us, only more so, and fully embraces his contradictions:

 

“Above all, this man was full of assertions and contradictions. He was so often an outsider who became an insider. About him, there are open questions of masochism and insurrection. He had no degree but became the foremost scholar of his times. He had no wife for much of his life, but wrote powerfully about marriage. He was so genuinely troubled by the thought that he might go insane, that he asked his friend Hester Thrale to lock him in his room all day (he performed mathematical calculations to keep himself occupied). He wrote his own prayers. He worried, more and more darkly as he aged, with an increasingly real terror, that he would go to hell.”

'Before the Clouds Darken the Horizon'

A longtime reader, a retired attorney in Philadelphia, writes: 

“[A]n intrusive suggestion for a blog post: what books MUST your readers read before reaching the end zone? Or what have they required themselves to read before the clouds darken the horizon? Also, anent the above, do your readers shape their day around their reading ? Quite simply, in what works do readers discover ‘Joy in the Morning’?”

 

The “MUST” part annoys me but I get the idea. Reading is strictly a laissez faire way of life. I always resent being told what I must read, though I’m wide open to interesting suggestions. I’d like to think that everyone will get around to reading Proust. I do keep a mental list of writers and books I intend someday to read. In no particular order:

 

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, William James’ Principles of Psychology, George Santayana’s The Last Puritan, Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, at least a couple of Anthony Trollope’s novels, Winston Churchill’s The River War.

 

Like other resolutions, this list is probably  a delusion, exposing my childish, deeply selfish strategies for reading. I’ve never had anything like Clifton Fadiman’s “Lifetime Reading Plan.” The way I read is so subjective, so curiously unpredictable even to me, that not reading any of these books will not surprise me. I’ve set out to read in their entirety, chronologically, the works of only two writers: Shakespeare and Melville. But I was young and had bottomless energy. By chance, also on Saturday, I happened on an interview with the poet Aaron Poochigian. Asked to name a book everyone ought to read, he replies:

 

“It’s thick, but I would recommend the English poet W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems. It’s like a Bible for living in our contemporary world. He turns the British idioms of his day into incantatory magic. He captures the Zeitgeists of the several ages he lived through. Still more, he was so clearly a good person. His conscience spoke loudly in him, and he refused to become desensitized to violence and other vices that recur in the human condition.”

 

Poochigian says Yeats’ The Tower had the biggest influence on him: “W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin are my heroes. Yeats is my god. When I assess the merits of my own work, I ask myself, ‘Is this poem good enough to be in Yeats’ Tower.’ He is my weathervane and lighting rod.”

 

He tells us he is rereading Shakespeare: “I started with the earliest plays, the ones about the Wars of the Roses. I have just finished Henry VI, Part III. It gives me great pleasure to see Shakespeare emerge as a genius as I make my way chronologically through his works.”

'The Worldly Wisdom of the Foolish Man'

 My ignorance often burns holes in my pride, turning self-congratulation into embarrassment. A reader asks for my opinion of the English poet Francis Quarles. Friday was the 434th anniversary of his baptism, meaning this younger contemporary of Shakespeare was likely born two or three days earlier. I remembered almost nothing about Quarles. Even a minor poet deserves better. 

I consulted a book Helen Pinkerton recommended to me long ago, Louis L. Martz’s The Meditative Poem: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse (1963). The volume complements Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1954). Helen encountered the latter book in the 1950s as a grad student. Quarles is best remembered for his Emblems (1634). Martz includes Emblem VII from Book 2:

 

“The world’s a Floore, whose swelling heapes retaine

The mingled wages of the Ploughmans toyle;

The world’s a Heape, whose yet unwinnowed graine

Is lodg’d with chaffe and buried in her soyle;

All things are mixt; theu usefull with the vaine;  

The good with bad; the noble with the vile;

The world’s an Ark, wherein things pure and grosse

Present their lossefull gaine, and gainfull losse,

Where ev’ry dram of Gold containes a pound of drosse.”

 

Martz notes that “Floore” is a threshing floor, “soyle” is dirty or waste matter and “Ark” refers to a chest or coffer. Emblem entered English from Latin in the fifteenth century and meant “a drawing or picture expressing a moral fable or allegory; a fable or allegory such as might be expressed pictorially.” The OED cites the first sentence of Quarles’ “To the Reader” in Emblems:

 

“An Emblem is but a silent parable: Let not the tender eye check, to see the allusion to our blessed SAVIOUR figured in these types. In holy Scripture he is sometimes called a Sower; sometimes a Fisher; sometimes a Physician; And why not presented so as well to the eye as to the ear? Before the knowledge of letters, God was known by hieroglyphics. And indeed what are the Heavens, the earth, nay, every creature, but Hieroglyphics and Emblems of his glory? I have no more to say; I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing. Farewell, Reader.”

 

The dedication and many of Quarles poems suggest a gracious, down-to-earth quality. His first readers would understand the harvesting of grain both as Biblical allegory and from a way of life rooted in agriculture. Each Emblem is a paraphrase from scripture. There’s little reaching after dazzling conceits. As Quarles says, “I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing,” and for once the sentiment is convincing. Martz includes six other selections from Emblems, including this:

 

“The worldly wisdom of the foolish man

Is like a Sive, that does alone retaine

The grosser substance of the worthlesse Bran;

But thou, my soule, let thy brave thoughts disdaine

So coarse a purchace: O, be thou a Fan

To purge the Chaffe, and keep the winnow’d Graine;

Make cleane thy thoughts, and dress thy mixt desires;

Thou art heav’ns Tasker, and thy GOD requires

The purest of thy Floore, as well as of thy fires.”

 

Thanks to the reader who asked about Quarles. In Martz’s anthology, he comes between George Herbert and John Milton, greater poets, but Quarles has his rewards. “I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing."

'All I Do Is Laugh at Ourselves'

I can’t listen to music while writing. For a break I might play the video of a song that had been nagging my memory. More often I’ll select a comedy clip – Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, Blazing Saddles, Jackie Mason, Jonathan Winters or, most often, Don Rickles. All, especially the latter two, pass the tear test. They have a gift for making me, while seated alone in my office, laugh until tears fall from my eyes. It says something about human nature that grief and comedy can make us cry.

Rickles was born one-hundred years ago today. His humor never gets old. He's called an insult comedian but that’s the least of it. He’s a truth-teller in the sense that he subverts politeness and other social niceties. He reminds us that clichés are lazy and empty. I tried to think of a literary analogue to Rickles. What writer most resembles him? I would suggest Stanley Elkin, whose novels are often crazed monologues. His verbal energy and relentless rudeness recall Rickles. Try reading a page of The Dick Gibson Show or The Franchiser aloud and imagine them coming out of Rickles’ mouth.    

 

Go here to watch a video of Rickles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972. The other guest, typical for Cavett, is the operatic soprano Beverly Sills, whom Rickles treats deferentially. Rickles reminds us that politeness and self-conscious displays of sensitivity -- we might call it “virtue signaling” --are not funny. They quickly become displays of vanity and snobbery. “All I do is laugh at ourselves,” Rickles tells Cavett. “I make fun of life.” Rickles was all show-biz and all the while mocking show-biz. There was nothing countercultural about him. I suspect hippies would not have approved. He was not George Carlin.

 

Rickles was born May 8, 1926, in Queens and died April 6, 2017, in Los Angeles at age ninety.

'The Finest Collection of Shabby Books'

Once I dropped a copy of Ian Frazier’s The Fish’s Eye into a bathtub full of water. While reading a paperback of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned, the spine snapped as I was marking a passage, turning it into two volumes. The same thing happened with my copy of Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues. The cover of my Webster’s Third, a gift from friends in 1973, detached, turning the fat dictionary into a paperback. My old copies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are held together with rubber bands. Once I left Edward Dahlberg’s Can These Bones Live on the ground after a picnic. By the time I realized it was missing and turned the car around to retrieve it, rain had swollen the book into a pulpy blob.

I try to soothe my conscience by recalling that Dr. Johnson was a serial book abuser. He routinely tore the covers off books to make them easier to read. Books were tools to be used, not trophies. He never reformed. I have, mostly. I strive to no longer be a clumsy vandal. I don’t even write in books. I keep notes in a notebook. I’m a reader, not a collector, but I’m mildly neurotic when it comes to treating books with finicky delicacy. Not Charles Lamb. Consider Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary entry for Jan. 10, 1824:

“I looked over Lamb’s library in part. He has the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of first-rate works of genius, but filthy copies, which a delicate man would really hesitate touching, is I think nowhere to be found. I borrowed several books.”

 

That final sentence, amusingly understated, articulates a true reader’s credo. In a pinch, a dirty, torn or otherwise unsightly book will be sufficient. In one of his Essays of Elia, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” Lamb confirms Robinson’s observations:

 

“Thomson’s Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day’s needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?”

 

Like Lamb, I enjoy reading copies of previously owned books – the inscription, underlinings, marginalia. A book is incomplete without readers. Their fleeting presence confirms one’s sense of gratitude and solidarity. In another essay, “Two Races of Men,” Lamb writes of the perils of lending books to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his friend since childhood. He condemns “borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes,” but reverses himself and writes of his friend, a compulsive writer of marginalia:

 

 “Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. -- he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury: enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his -- (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) -- in no very clerkly hand -- legible in my Daniel: in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands. ---- I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C.”

'The Cosiness of a Human Nest'

I’ve never consciously ranked coziness – the OED prefers cosiness -- high among the literary qualities I most admire in books and writers. Many of my favorite writers – Swift, for instance, and Larkin – are anything but cosy. Early uses of cosy date from the eighteenth century and all are positive, true to the earliest definition: “of a place: sheltered and thus warm.” The first negative – and, thus, comic -- use was reported in 1927, in a letter by Max Beerbohm, and defined, rather ambiguously, like this: “warmly intimate or friendly; sentimental; freq. in pejorative sense: complacent, smug, unadventurous, parochial.” 

In a remembrance of W.H. Auden published in 1975 and included in W.H. Auden: A Tribute, edited by Stephen Spender, Dr. Oliver Sacks writes: “. . . I asked Wystan how he experienced the world, whether he thought of it as being a very small or a very large place. ‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘Neither large nor small. Cosy, cosy . . . (and in an undertone) . . . like home.”

 

That’s close to my positive sense of the word. For a native Northerner it conjures winter – wind and snow outside, warmth and contentment inside, likely under a blanket, book in hand. Then the negative creeps in: complacent, disdainful of others who are less cozy. The latter connotation can even carry a political taint. I thought of coziness while reading an essay by Leigh Hunt, “My Books” (1823). The English essayists suggest coziness, Lamb more often than Hazlitt, and even Lamb’s sense of humor sometimes detracts from the mood. Hunt, a lesser writer, sustains the mood:

 

“Sitting, last winter, among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me,—to wit, a table of high-piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet,—I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books; how I loved them, too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them.”

 

There’s nothing hip or postmodern about Hunt. He wants to please his readers by sharing his sense of intimacy with books. Sacks would understand:

 

“Cosy, cosy – it was one of his favourite words, one of the words he most used when chatting. (He was dissatisfied by its coverage in the great OED, and thought of re-doing this, making an anthology of the cosy, giving the word its full and proper world-embracing power.) Whenever he said ‘cosy’ in his peculiar voice, it seemed to acquire a special richness of evocation and meaning. Once we saw a bird fly to its nest atop a sooty lamp-post in St Mark’s Place: ‘Look!,’ exclaimed Wystan. ‘It’s gone home to its nest. Think how cosy it must be in its nest!” For a moment I felt (I fancied I felt) exactly what the bird felt – cosy, protected, at home, in its nest. And Wystan’s apartment in the East Village, though squalid and cluttered and dilapidated and dirty, this too was cosy, wonderfully so: it had the cosiness of a human nest.”

'Loving the Past But Settled in the Living'

In 1994, the late Helen Pinkerton published Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook of twenty-seven poems about paintings, sculptures, pottery and photographs. Her publisher was the poet R.L. Barth. Helen’s ekphrastic poems are not art criticism or mere descriptions of subject matter. They are more fanciful than that and sometimes read like contemplative fables. Helen projects her imagination sympathetically into the works and their creators. One of my favorites in the series is about an artist unknown to me before first reading her poem some years ago: “On Gari Melchers’s ‘Writing’ (1905) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” Helen uses the first line (and the third line and the title) of Wallace Stevens’ “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” as the poem’s epigraph: 

“How often did she make such quiet, one wonders,

This woman writing at a covered table—

Full summer light warming the roseate hues,

Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.

A Wedgwood pier glass shows three Roman figures

In ritual dance—cool neoclassic Graces—

Beside a clay pot of geraniums.

Her taste eclectic—like our modern lives—

Loving the past but settled in the living,

 

“She seems meticulous—even, perhaps,

Like Edith Wharton, passionate for order,

Feeling, as she did, that in house and novel,

‘Order, the beauty even of Beauty is.’

Stevens, though you sought order in the sea

And grander heavens, the threat of nothingness

Unmanned you. Most women have no time for such,

For fate constrains them to immediate means,

The quiet art of keeping calm the house.”

 

When viewed for the first time, Melchers’ palette is stunning – “roseate hues, / Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.” Often, portraits of writers at work indoors are heavily shadowed, very serious and almost grim. Melchers’ painting is a sumptuous celebration of the writer and writing – and of painting. Outside, it’s summer. Indoors, facing the faceless woman are the Graces – the goddesses of beauty, grace and charm – the virtues of all good art. The quoted line is taken from Thomas Traherne’s “The Vision.”

 

Imagining the writing woman as Edith Wharton (whom Helen’s teacher, Yvor Winters, thought superior to Wharton’s friend Henry James) is inspired. I especially admire Helen’s knock at Wallace Stevens, who could be awfully fey when entering his philosophical mode. Call it noble feminism – or simply dismissing a clichéd notion about sexual roles. The poem’s first line – “How often did she make such quiet, one wonders” – suggests we may be witnessing not a routine event but a privileged moment. What she’s writing we’ll never know.

 

[You can find the poem in Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) and in A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016, (Wiseblood Books, 2016). Helen died on December 28, 2017, at age ninety.]

'Wisdom Is Heavy Stuff'

From a biochemist I learned a phrase new to me – “epigenetic switching.” It means changes in gene expression without corresponding changes in the DNA sequence. What struck me was the profusion of English words with the prefix epi-: epitaph, epilogue, epitome, epicenter, epithet, episode, epinephrine, epilepsy, epidermis, epithalamium, epiglottis, epicarp, epidemic, Silas Marner’s adopted daughter and my favorite, epigram. English is epically promiscuous. 

The root is the Greek epi meaning “upon, at, close upon (in space or time), on the occasion of, in addition.” “Epigram” is from ἐπίγραμμα (epigramma), “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. Their appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. They mean something and are about something, rare qualities in poetry today. Every syllable has its place. None is superfluous. Take “You Don’t Have to Be So Smart” from Edward Case’s posthumously published The Business Of The Dancer (2026):

 

“If you want a pound of wit

An epigram will fit.

Even an ounce of sense

Is weighty though not dense.

With minimal reflection

You may glass perfection.

A drop of thought’s enough.

Wisdom is heavy stuff.”

 

The late X.J. Kennedy was likewise a master of the form. “In writing epigrams, most poets gain control over their natural tendency to blab. Besides, an epigram permits them to get a gripe off their chests.” Kennedy is writing in “Gists, Piths, and Poison-Pills: The Art of the Epigram” (An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, 2002). As bloat proliferates, short forms look attractive as a corrective to congenital logorrhea. Kennedy published eleven epigrams in the April 1996 issue of Chronicles, including “For a Friend to Whom He’d Sent His Book”:

 

“I wish you’d say, ‘What hopeless trash, you twit,’

And not ‘look forward soon to reading it.’”

 

Another master of the epigram in English is J.V. Cunningham. Kennedy elsewhere says of him, “you had to respect a man of his sour integrity,” a quality almost unique among poets, at least since the death of Walter Savage Landor. Here is his “Epigram 23” from the sequence "Epigrams: A Journal" (The Judge is Fury, 1947): 

 

“Dark thoughts are my companions. I have wined

With lewdness and with crudeness, and I find

Love is my enemy, dispassionate hate

Is my redemption though it come too late,

Though I come to it with a broken head

In the cat-house of the dishevelled dead.”

A contemporary practitioner of the epigram is Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War R.L. Barth. Here is “De Bello,” collected in Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021):

 

“The troops deploy. Above, the stars

Wheel over mankind’s little wars.

If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.”

 

Barth’s Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026) will be published later this month. Bob has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century Roman poet Martial, as we know him – for more than forty years.

'I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also'

I acknowledge that William Cowper never rises to the first rank of poets but his Poems (1931) in the Everyman’s Library edition – complete and yet modestly sized in 428 pages – rests on the shelf closest to my desk, between volumes by Edwin Arlington Robinson and Walter de la Mare. I read him often. His complicated personality – intermittently mad and suicidal, yet devout and always amusing with friends, a lover of hares and other animals – makes him a character worthy of a novel by Jane Austen, who was among his devoted admirers. Here is Cowper on May 3, 1780, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton and making piety playful: 

“I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened, to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.”

 

Cowper’s metaphors often mingle playfulness and precision. A bauble is a plaything, a toy or trinket. Cowper finds in them an endorsement of his faith. Clearly, he is writing in the manic phase of his madness. On other occasions, guilt overwhelms him and God becomes a scourge. In the same letter he exults:

 

“I draw mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and dab-chicks [“grebes” in the U.S.]. I admire them myself, and Mrs. Unwin admires them, and her praise and my praise put together are fame enough for me. Oh! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a lovely prospect! My eyes drink the rivers as they flow. If every human being upon earth could think for one quarter of an hour as I have done for many years, there might, perhaps, be many miserable men among them, but not an unawakened one would be found from the arctic to the antarctic circle.”

 

And yet, the same man in his poem “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity” can write: “I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb am / Buried above ground.” Here is Cowper writing to another friend, the Rev. Robert Unwin, on Jan. 17, 1782:

“To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, and without seeming to displace a single syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.”

 

In a letter to Unwin, always his stalwart friend, written on April Fool’s Day in 1782, shortly after publishing his first volume of verse, Cowper thanks him for publicizing the collection: “I could not have found a better trumpeter.” When not insane, Cowper was the wittiest and most gracious of men. He never says “thank you” when a more baroque expression of gratitude is handy. Two sentences later, and extending the musical metaphor, Cowper writes:

 

“Methinks I see you with the long tube at your mouth, proclaiming to your numerous connections my poetical merits and at proper intervals levelling it at Olney, and pouring into my ear the welcome sound of their approbation. I need not encourage you to proceed, your breath will never fail in such a cause; and thus encouraged, I myself perhaps may proceed also, and when the versifying fit returns produce another volume.”