'Objects of Value or Virtue'

The only summer mornings we woke up and got dressed early was garbage collection day. We had to beat the trash men. This was long before recycling came into fashion. Everything went into the fluted metal trash cans. Larger objects were piled beside them. Once we found an oversized television set which we carried away in a wagon, hauled deep into the woods, lugged across the creek and up the hill and threw off a cliff for the pure delight of hearing a cathode ray tube explode. I marvel that some of that glass, metal and plastic are probably still in that creek bed after sixty years.

We claimed old magazines and assorted bric-à-brac. At the time – early-to-mid-sixties – I was reading my way through the collected oeuvre of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Once I found a machete-length butcher knife with a wooden handle. I painted the blade red and proudly carried my John Carter of Mars sword. I suspect kids today would be admonished not to do any of the things I’ve just described, though we were practicing our own version of recycling. Howard Nemerov precedes his poem “The Town Dump” with lines from Act III, Scene 2 of King Lear. Lear is on the heath during the storm. Kent leads him to a hovel for shelter and Lear says “The art of our necessities is strange, / That can make vile things precious.” That’s a nice gloss on our hobby as kids. Nemerov goes on to describe our weekly summer pastime:

 

“Objects of value or virtue,

However, are also to be picked up here,

Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat,

Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels

No one will skid on, apple cores that caused

Neither the fall of man nor a theory

Of gravitation. People do throw out

The family pearls by accident, sometimes,

Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques

To prowl this place by night, with flashlights . . .”

'Capricious and Leaking'

“[T]here is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before.”

The Irish critic Robert Lynd (1879-1949) is writing in the title essay of his 1921 collection The Pleasures of Ignorance. Naturally, I couldn’t remember which essay by Montaigne he cited but logically enough I found the passage in “Of Books”:

 

“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole . . .”

I had a similar experience recently when looking up something I had written on Anecdotal Evidence eighteen years ago. I quickly found it but in the same post I referred to another book I have no recollection of having read. The title and even the author’s name are blanks in memory. Lynd would understand:

“I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. I can read Hamlet itself and The Pickwick Papers as though they were the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of them fades between one reading and another.”

 Even serious readers and rereaders, at least those not cursed with photographic memories, must concede that we’re left with general impressions of books in memory, not transcripts. I’ve read Conrad’s Nostromo twice but just the other day I had to search a digital version to confirm the precise wording of a passage I incompletely remembered.

 

“With a bad memory,” Lynd writes, “one can go on reading Plutarch and The Arabian Nights all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable, will stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannot leap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool on the thorns. But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authors leap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enough behind.”

 

In On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple calls Lynd “a distinguished essayist” and says his work is “very un-strident in tone” for a man so heavily involved in Irish politics. Rather, his essays are “those of an amused, sceptical observer of the follies of mankind, as well as a recorder of the small pleasures of existence.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'It Is to Live'

Literature is a hobby, and not. It is an academic discipline, and not. It is a diversion, a distraction, an escape. But some of us can’t imagine a well-lived life without it. There’s a lot of talk about books being good for us, making us better, more empathetic people, all of which may be true but that’s not why I read. If I were asked for a definitive explanation, I would be lost. In part it’s habit, the pure momentum of a lifetime spent reading, and I see no reason to stop. I know good books make me happy, even their proximity in the same room, which sounds vaguely fetishistic. They’re companionable, friend-like – but so is a cat. There’s consolation in books – but more in loved ones. Such metaphors seem to suggest we read to be in the company of other humans, even when we’re alone. 

Theodore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple premise – the books he has been reading and the thoughts they trigger. They are not collections of reviews and some of the books he reads are admittedly lousy. He’s fond of saying that every book has something of interest in it, something that can be thought about and cherished or dismissed. In the latest installment, Not for the Proud Man Apart (Mirabeau Press, 2026), Dalrymple writes:

 

“[O]ne of the pleasures of growing old – perhaps the pleasure of growing old – is that the association of ideas with what one reads, which is never quite logical, and certainly not voluntary, becomes richer.”

 

I stretch to imagine a life without reading. My understanding of the world would be threadbare. It’s perfectly possible to be virtuous, even saint-like, having never read a book, and it's likely that most of the world’s problems are caused by literate people.

 

For several months early in the century I read nothing but books by or about Henry James. I had returned to college to complete my B.A., having dropped out thirty years before. I was writing a senior thesis on James and his “poor sensitive gentlemen,” life’s spectators, too timid or passive to do other than live an unlived life. I began to notice the peculiar regularity with which benches appear in his novels and stories, often as a refuge for such characters.

 

Madame de Mauves in her eponymous story occupies a bench on the terrace at Saint-Germaine-en-Laye when she is introduced to Longmore. Frederick Winterbourne is seated on a bench outside the hotel at Vevey when he first meets Daisy Miller. Isabel Archer takes her place on a bench at Gardencourt during her final scene with Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady. For their only meeting outside her workplace, the unnamed heroine of “In the Cage” sits with Captain Everard on a park bench in London and announces her secret, unacknowledged devotion. Dencombe, the doomed, doubt-wracked novelist in “The Middle Years,” faints and comes under the care of Dr. Hugh while on a bench at the seaside. Stransom suffers his apparently fatal attack on a chapel bench in front of his altar at the conclusion of “The Altar of the Dead.” John Marcher twice takes his seat on a bench in “The Beast in the Jungle,” James’ greatest story.

 

It’s thesis fodder, I know, of no interest to anyone. But by reading James I became aware of the ways people use park benches – for lovers’ trysts, as a place for tired parents to watch their kids, as a public sanctuary for old people. I consulted Jane Jacobs on the importance of urban parks. I experienced no colossal epiphany. I just made life a little more interesting.

 

Henry Oliver writes about books with love and without grandiosity. In “Literature as Part of Life,” a recent essay at The Common Reader, he writes: “To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are.”

'The Sudden Erection of Your Small Dorsal Hairs'

The medical technician performing the echocardiogram asked me to lie on my side, not “dorsally.” I thought first of the triangular fin on the back of a porpoise. Then I thought of Nabokov’s 1966 interview with Alfred J. Appel, who asks, “Do you think literary criticism is at all purposeful, and if so, what kind of criticism would you point to?” He replies: 

“My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on ‘ideas.’ Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the ‘how’ above the ‘what’ but do not let it be confused with the ‘so what.’ Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.”

 

The reference to “small dorsal hairs” is characteristic of Nabokov’s imagination – physical, playful, precise. He was a lepidopterist. His remark  reminds me of the test for poetry A.E. Housman proposed in the Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge (Nabokov’s alma mater) in 1933, published as “The Name and Nature of Poetry”: “Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”

 

Such sensitivity and openness to a text is part of the “personal talent” Nabokov commends. He endorses in critics and other readers sensitivity mingled with attention to detail and independence of thought. So much criticism is written in lockstep with prevailing fashion. Janet Lewis, in a poem from 1930, “Lines to a Kitten” (Poems Old and New 1918-1978), describes her cat as a “morsel of suavity.” It sits on her knee and intently watches a fly six feet across the room:

 

“Only the great

And you, can dedicate

The attention so to one small thing.”

'A Collection of Good Books'

“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.”

Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statement or evidence of “interleckchul” (Flannery O’Connor’s spelling) status are comically pretentious. Aldous Huxley published his essay “If My Library Burned Tonight” in the November 1947 issue of House and Garden magazine (!). He posits a fire that destroys his library: “[A]s an emergency measure, in the first few weeks after our hypothetical fire, I shall buy myself only the most indispensable aids to mental health and security.”

Many of Huxley’s choices are admirably predictable: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, Dante. He doesn’t select obscure titles merely to show off – a common scam among bloggers and other readers. Nor does he sanctify even those he chooses: “There will be Wordsworth because he is one of the forces of nature, and this in spite of the fact that he could write worse than anybody and that, after Milton and Dante, he was probably the least sympathetic of the great poets.” Donne, Baudelaire, Yeats and Eliot follow.

Among novelists: Proust, Joyce, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens. A few debatable surprises: Stendahl, Choderlos de Laclos. Benjamin Constant, Fielding, Voltaire. Again, Huxley asserts winningly personal criticism: “. . . Swift, perennially comic and a misanthrope whose distaste for the human race finds in every successive year of our history new and ever more hideous justifications. As for Smollett – no; my sense of humor is not robust enough to rejoice unreservedly in syphilis and broken legs.” Trollope, yes; Goethe, Scott, Thackery, no. With Flaubert, a surprise: “Bouvard et Pecuchet, however, will be among the first books to be re-bought. . . . Compared with it, Swift’s Advice to Servants and Polite Conversation are mere Theocritean idylls.” D.H. Lawrence? Huxley, a hearty yea. Kurp, nay. His endorsement of Conrad is reluctant.

Next, essays and other forms of nonfiction. Montaigne and Pascal, of course. Bacon and Balthazar Gracian. A nice surprise is Huxley’s inclusion of Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, which he calls “the beautiful expression of that supernatural joy which is one of the fruits of the spirit.” Hume, Johnson, Coleridge (“only in his notebooks and his Aids to Reflection”), Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay (“who writes like a military band and is the best possible reading for a rainy afternoon”), Emerson (a stentorian Kurp “nay”), Bagehot, Saint-Beuve, Arnold, Ruskin, Schopenhauer. A polite and welcome partial-dismissal of Virginia Woolf follows. The letters of Keats and the Goncourt Journals.

Conspicuous omissions: Greek and Roman writers except for Homer, Sterne, Leopardi, Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, Henry James, Chekhov, Auden. Huxley closes with a line from a Matthew Arnold sonnet:

“‘What props, thou ask’st, in these bad days my mind?’ One of the answers to Arnold’s curiously unpronounceable question remains today what it has been ever since man first invented the art of writing: a collection of good books.”

[Thanks to Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books for alerting me to this essay. Isaac has published fifteen Huxley titles.]

'And He Disappeared'

On the morning of August 5, 1763, Dr. Johnson accompanied Boswell on the stage-coach that would carry him to the port of Harwich. Then twenty-two, Boswell would be taking the packet-boat to Utrecht in the Netherlands, where he would study law. The two men – Johnson was fifty-three – had met less than three months earlier. Johnson would never have children of his own but already he had developed a paternal devotion to his future biographer. He schooled Boswell the way he schools the rest of us: 

“Next day we got to Harwich, to dinner; and my passage in the packet-boat to Helvoetsluys being secured, and my baggage put on board, we dined at our inn by ourselves. I happened to say, it would be terrible if he should not find a speedy opportunity of returning to London, and be confined in so dull a place. Johnson. ‘Don’t, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. It would not be terrible, though I were to be detained some time here.’ The practice of using words of disproportionate magnitude, is, no doubt, too frequent every where . . .”

 

What follows may be my favorite scene in all of Boswell’s Life. I’m touched every time I read it. Boswell could be a whoring drunkard but here his reverence for Johnson overflows and his prose -- little words for big matters -- rises to the occasion:

 

“My revered friend walked down with me to the beach, where we embraced and parted with tenderness, and engaged to correspond by letters. I said, ‘I hope, Sir, you will not forget me in my absence.’ Johnson. ‘Nay, Sir, it is more likely you should forget me, than that I should forget you.’ As the vessel put out to sea, I kept my eyes upon him for a considerable time, while he remained rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner; and at last I perceived him walk back into the town, and he disappeared.”

'The Oxford Book of Depressing Verse'

“Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair.” 

I’ve never spent much time reading Aldous Huxley – Brave New World in junior-high school, Crome Yellow a little later, then, inevitably, The Doors of Perception, when it was a cult book for many of my generation. I remember almost nothing about any of them and recall his fiction as idea-driven, often a giveaway for a stillborn story. In On the Ivory Stages (Mirbeau, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple says of The Olive Tree and Other Essays (1936): “Huxley was a wonderful essayist: amusing, erudite and opinionated (who wants to read an essayist who is always fair and judicious?).”

 

Thanks to Dalrymple, I’ve been reading Huxley’s first collection, On the Margin: Notes and Essays (1923), and may re-evaluate at least a portion of his body of work. I had never suspected Huxley of having a sense of humor. The passage above is from the essay “How the Days Draw In!”:

 

“Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I hardly know. Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic.”

 

Amusing and timely. Even better, he plans to include in his anthology one of my favorite poets, championed by Yvor Winters and Thom Gunn: “A duly adequate amount of space, for example, will be allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke [1554-1628]. For dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing up against life and human destiny at the end of his ‘Mustapha’:

 

“Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,

Born under one law to another bound,

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws,

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

 

“Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?

Nature herself doth her own self deflower

To hate those errors she herself doth give....

If nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easy ways to good.”

 

Huxley adds: “Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville gloomily denounces them.” He then quotes an excerpt from Greville’s Alaham: A Tragedy. The next candidate for inclusion in Huxley’s anthology is a seventeenth-century Frenchman unknown to me, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, followed by these familiar lines:

 

“The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee:

Timor mortis conturbat me:—”

 

The Latin, “fear of death disturbs me,” is probably best known from “Lament for the Makers” by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1530).

'You Want to Be Immortal? Disappear.'

What has disappeared? Ambrose Bierce, Weldon Kees, Jimmy Hoffa. Aristotle’s second book of Poetics, three-decker novels, rhupunts. Typewriters, payphones, civility. In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940; trans. James E. Irby, 1961), Jorge Luis Borges describes a fanciful world of radically subjective idealism, as premised by Bishop Berkeley. “Things become duplicated in Tlön,” he writes; “they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.” The Louisiana poet Gail White in “The Fascination of What Disappears” examines our preoccupation with the vanished: 

“There must be something in us that accounts

for this endless fascination with Amelia

Earhart, the Titanic, or George Mallory                                                         

on Everest. Perhaps we still believe

that we might find out more about what happened:

islanders on a solitary shelf

of land, brought up on stories of a woman

who fell from the sky in a silver bird, became

their queen (or else perhaps was eaten,

but they saved the shoes). We dream of finding one

more cache of jewelry from the Titanic,

or Mallory’s frozen corpse, long overlooked.

Why write a hundred sonnets every year?

You want to be immortal? Disappear.”

 

There’s a poignance built into disappearance. Perhaps at several removes it reminds us of our mortality.

'It Shows Unmistakably What You Are'

Too often style is judged filigree applied after the house is built. It’s cosmetic, inessential to the building’s structural integrity. Can a poor or indifferent stylist be judged a good or great writer? An obvious test-case is Theodore Dreiser. His Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are powerful stories clumsily told. I can’t imagine rereading either novel but scenes stick with me after decades, which can’t be said about hundreds of other novels I’ve read. 

“Not to detect a man’s style,” Michael Oakeshott writes, “is to have missed three-quarters of his actions and utterances; and not to have acquired a style is to have shut oneself off from the ability to convey any but the crudest meanings.”

 

I’m reminded of journalists I’ve known, and many pulp writers, for whom words seem like an annoyance. They have to be arranged in some sort of order, but what an impertinence. A reader is almost tempted to judge the morals of so crude a writer. It feels like a defect of character.

 

Then there’s the writer who is all style, without discernable substance. One thinks of William H. Gass. The Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie writes in Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931): “A writer’s style is the measure of his personality, and cannot be acquired consciously. It shows unmistakably what you are: gives you away for what you are.” Some stylists – Jonathan Swift comes to mind -- can be recognized from a single sentence in a blindfold test.  

 

[The Oakeshott passage comes from “Learning and Teaching” (The Voice of Liberal Learning, 1989).]

'All He'd Read and Learned'

Eccentricity in books is a tricky quality. It can be charming and inspire lifelong devotion. Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book I discovered in my freshman year. I redundantly keep three copies on the shelves nearest my desk. Tristram Shandy is another endlessly readable eccentricity. Among the less successful are Ronald Firbank’s novels, which I have tried hard to love for many years but always find tedious. Daniel Mark Epstein has written a poem, "A Dream," about acquiring a copy of the most eccentric and readable work of literary – not criticism, not scholarship, perhaps love letter – I know, Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature (1938): 

“Someone learned of my collector’s interest

In the finer points of this autographed edition,

The March of Literature: From Confucius’

Day to Our Own. I read it first at twenty-one,

Then passed it on to one friend, then another,

Several copies lost and found in bookstores

Now abandoned to the online trade.

I wanted a clean one with the author’s name

Written in his graceful hand, a book he’d held

As he held the pen that wrote the heavy book

That sums up all he’d read and learned

In a lifelong lover’s quarrel with literature,

As much as any man could ever know

In one life of four thousand years of books

In ten languages, works he knew by heart.”

 

I read it at nineteen or twenty after reading for the first time The Good Soldier for a class.  In his introduction to The March of Literature, Ford describes himself as “an old man mad about writing,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.” In a volume of more than eight-hundred pages you expect lapses, omissions and misguided judgments. I find it easy to forgive Ford, for reasons obvious in the sampler that follows:

 

A third of the way through the book, in the middle of a digression on the English border ballads, Ford inserts a three-page digression-within-a-digression based on his Great War experience: “The writer happens to have been present at what you might call a poplar recension of folksong during several weeks in the fall of 1916. His regiment having spent a disproportionate time in the trenches during the First Battle of the Somme, it was given a long fatigue to do at a long distance from the trenches, so that they might at once rest their weary bones and get some exercise.”

 

Here Ford writes of his friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad’s short story “Youth”: “The language is again so low-keyed, so of the vernacular, so just, so fluid that when you read you have again no sense of reading.”

 

Here is Ford’s moving tribute to Dr. Johnson, a man with whom he must have felt substantial literary and personal kinship: “But ten years’ rest and the getting into his head of a conversational rhythm and a vocabulary comprehensible to most of the cultivated men of his day had on Johnson the effect of evolving a style that was at once sufficiently learned to save his face and sufficiently actual to let us read his Lives of the Poets with pleasure even in these anti-Latinistic days. It is a work that, had there been no Boswell, must have been a resounding monument to this great man. As it is, it stands almost forgotten like an Aztec temple lost in South American [sic] undergrowths. It is a great pity.”

 

Ford nicely characterizes the best of eighteenth-century English prose: “In Gibbon we come upon a figure very different in timber from any of the other eighteenth century littérateurs, save only Richardson – and Johnson, if you can persuade yourself to think of him as a writer and not merely as a dancing bear, growling numbers in and out.”

 

Ford suggests we look at works of literature on both the macro and micro scales, comparing the latter to music: “It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.” Ford then quotes a passage about storks, of all things, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the paragraph here marked with the number three. Ford writes: “And I am prepared to leave it to the taste of my readers who may decide each for himself whether a passage of flawless prose gains or loses when the subject treated is one of universal interest.”

 

The March of Literature is no dry textbook. It’s inimitably Ford’s work, as eccentrically personal as DNA. It ought to be academic but reads like inspired conversation.

'This Small Piece of Eden'

It was April or early May and the snow was going or gone. A low wall of fieldstones surrounded the cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y. – one of those artfully assembled walls that last for centuries in the Northeast. Jack Flavin writes of them in his poem “In a Country Cemetery”: 

“The patient art (that conceals art) of the country

mason who built this wall is a silent rebuke

to some of the monuments, the wilde enormities, it contains.

The granite courses are set into the bank

along a slight declivity, and the rings

for chaining and winching the stone from the quarry uproad

by sledge and ox are still set in the tops.”

In the cemetery I visited more than thirty years ago, the epitaphs on the earliest markers had been erased by time and acid rain, and some were tilted by the freeze-buckled earth. The lambs carved on the stones of children were worn headless. The grass, mostly red and white clover, hadn’t yet been mowed and was thick with phlox. Birds sang and the air was fresh. Life felt bountiful in the presence of so many dead. Flavin uses a passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydrotaphia: Urne-Buriall (1658) as the epigraph to his poem: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. A small flame sufficeth.” Flavin concludes:

“At the wall’s end, the road dwindles in perspective

and takes an ess turn to follow the river’s

meandering. Across the road, wild roses,

phlox and cinquefoil are in their June abundance.

My dog sits beside me, tranquil and regardant

on the cool stone, as we listen to the colloquy

of birds, considering this small piece of Eden.”

I seek out cemeteries; in particular, the remote, rural, often untended sort, though a sprawling urban cemetery, vast enough to have neighborhoods and thoroughfares, offers pleasures of another sort. As Theordore Dalrymple wrote in his essay with a title borrowed from Dylan Thomas, “Death Shall Have No Dominon”: “. . . cemeteries are for me like bookshops; I find it difficult to resist the temptation to enter them and linger awhile.”

'The Dead Are Speaking'

On July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued Order No. 00447, signed by Stalin and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, which mandated the round-up of “ex-kulaks” and other “anti-Soviet elements,” including former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. Local police officials competed to exceed the official quotas. This was the formal start of “The Great Terror,” as identified by Robert Conquest. By November 1938, roughly 1.3 million had been arrested, of whom at least 700,000 were executed. The rest were sent to the Gulag. What can be stated with reasonable confidence is that Stalin eventually murdered as many as 60 million people. 

The statistics leave one numb and uncomprehending. The recent vogue for socialism and like-minded tyrannies in the U.S. recalls an observation in the second volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), one of the essential books of the last century: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. The Russian poet Lev Ozerov (1914-96) writes in a 1962 poem translated by Robert Chandler:

 

“The dead are speaking. Without full stops.

Or commas. And almost without words.

From camps. From isolation cells.

From buildings as they blaze.

The dead are speaking. A letter. A will.

Diaries. Exercise books from school.

On rough pages of uneven brick—

the cursive of a hurrying hand.

With slivers of tin on a bed-board,

with shards of glass on a wall

or a thin stream of blood on a barrack floor,

life signed off as best it could.”

 

[Ozerov’s poem is collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, 2015.]

'The Herb of Memory'

“In time we bow / To the necessity and claim profound / Returns in memory.”

The spice cupboard was a disorganized mess. Looking for tarragon turned into an expedition. I wiped the shelf where seasonings had spilled and what did I smell? Cloves. Then it was 1961 and I was greeting my maternal grandmother at the front door. Her fur coat was cold. With the hug I reached for her purse of black patent leather and she let it slip from her shoulder. I opened it and inside was the usual pack of Cloves gum. I took a stick and gave another to my brother. Neither of us was ever much of a gum-chewer but the ritual had to be observed.

 

This memory of a memory was inspired by Suzanne Doyle’s poem “My Grandmother’s Visit.” Like her, I was fond of my grandmother, a rare gentle spirit in our family. Memory, of course, has a dual nature. How happy I am to see her again so vividly, if briefly, but then she’s gone. My grandmother shared birth and death years with Marianne Moore – 1887-1972 – and resembled her, an old-fashioned American beauty. Reading Moore is another reliable memory-trigger, as in these lines from her poem “Rosemary”:

 

“The herb of memory,

imitating the blue robe of Mary,

is not too legendary

 

“to flower both as symbol and as pungency.”

'The Soul of a Journey Is Liberty'

Zbigniew Herbert begins his 1966 essay “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy” with these words:

“When a moment comes that my body will have only enough strength to fix the pillow under the head, I will have no choice but write a large piece of work, that is a book and not a collection of drafts, which will be titled: Introduction to the theory of journey.”

 

Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime. For Herbert, permission to travel from Poland to Western Europe starting in the late nineteen-fifties became a form of cultural pilgrimage. He learned to resist Poland’s present by studying the West’s past. Here is the first stanza of his poem “Journey” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter):

 

“If you set out on a journey let it be long

 a wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly

 so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes but by touch

 so you can confront the world with your whole skin”

 

Like Montaigne, Herbert was gifted with restlessness and curiosity, essential qualities for an ambitious traveler or writer. As a result, he is one of the last century’s essential poets and “travel writers” – a dubious category, given the amount of junk published in the travel genre. His essay collection The Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) documents those early travels outside Poland. Herbert was always history-minded. Travel beyond the Communist Bloc was escape from an ugly, tedious, oppressive present into a rich past populated with painters and poets. He was an erudite traveler in space and time.

 

In the essay quoted above, Herbert is writing of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, the Frenchman’s account of his wanderings through Germany, Switzerland and Italy between June 1580 and November 1581. He sought relief from the pain of kidney stones and visited numerous spas with mineral baths. Herbert writes of him: “Montaigne was more sensitive to the odd, the ingenious, the technically innovative, than to things of beauty. He doesn’t omit to mention a single curiosity he encounters. . . . He listens. He listens to everyone and everything.” Remarkable how the qualities of the best travelers and the best writers are nearly identical.

 

Herbert visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England, Italy, France again and back to Poland. His budget was tight but Herbert was no hedonistic tourist. Nor was he a stuffy academic or critic. The resulting essays chronicle a self-guided tour of Western culture by a man temporarily liberated from the bleak, vulgar constraints of Soviet-era Poland. Unlike Montaigne, Herbert revels in the inherited art and architecture of Europe.

 

Herbert begins his essay “Lascaux” (Barbarian in the Garden) with a spirited, unexpected digression: “Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. Truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles.” This is a man temporarily freed from the grim, gray strictures of post-Stalinist Poland. He devotes the next two paragraphs to an entertaining account of truffle history and gastronomy. Herbert suggests that we “not envy Monsieur Montaigne, in whose undercarriage the sand [of kidney stones] sang somniferously, monotonously, and long.”

 

Herbert died on July 28, 1998 at age seventy-three.

 

[The Montaigne essay is found in The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, Ecco, 2010).]

 

[ADDENDUM: I was later reminded of William Hazlitt’s essay “On Going a Journey”: “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters . . .”]

'The Deference We Pay to Harsh Choice'

“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuance and ambiguity.”

 

The poet and Islamic scholar Eric Ormsby is a voluptuary of language. He revels in words like a kid does ice cream. Ormsby took part in a parlor game, “One Word,” sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Simple: pick a favorite word. In his poetry and essays, Ormsby’s vocabulary is often lush. In his review of Recollected Poems, he celebrates the Canadian poet Daryl Hine’s assault on linguistic anemia:

 

“Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as ‘amphisbaenic’ or ‘labarum’ or ‘ithyphallic’ will send them ‘scurrying’ to their dictionaries (why do they always ‘scurry’ or even ‘scuttle’? A new word, rightly used, should be an occasion for festive processions).”

And yet Ormsby celebrates a humbler favorite word, one that every English-speaker knows: or. “[It] stands like a squat bouncer,” he writes, “at the revolving door of the disjunction. It bears the yoke of alternatives—'to be or not to be’—with all the robust orotundity of an ox.”

 

The OED offer up twenty principal meanings for or, starting with the first and most familiar, which entered the language in the twelfth century: “in general use, coordinating noun phrases, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, verbs, and clauses.” Ormsby notes of a twentieth-century adaptation of the word: “it serves ‘the Boolean function of a variable,’ whatever that may mean.” Don’t get me started on Boolean math. For Ormsby, words are meant for mastication. He chews them and relishes the flavor:

 

“It’s pleasure to enunciate an or. The broad o demands a certain preparatory embouchure which alerts the lips and musters the mouth. It has, as I said before, a sturdy orotundity: it is ore rotundo (as Horace puts it), a syllable spoken ‘with round mouth.’ The vowel can expand; it muses, ponders, hovers before closing on the r, most diffident of American consonants. In a Mediterranean mouth, of course, that r positively clatters like an angry castanet when prolonged for dramatic effect: o-r-r-r-r-r! We refrain from such oratorical flourishes. Our r is the deference we pay to harsh choice; it bridles its brash o in exculpatory velvet.”

 

I’m reminded of the interview Vladimir Nabokov gave in 1965 and later collected in Strong Opinions (1973). The interviewer asked for the proper pronunciation of his surname. Nabokov replied:

 

“Englishmen say Nab okov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo -kov. A heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker.’ My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle ‘o’ of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your own choice now. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer -- rhyming with ‘redeemer’ -- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).”

'Sour of Temper; Peevish; Sullen'

Jules Renard writes in his journal on July 26, 1899: “More than once I have tried being morose for a whole day. I have not succeeded. Not even that!” Renard enjoys presenting himself as a nebbish, a bungler who fails at everything. It’s a useful persona that induces sympathy in the reader and mutes egotism, permitting him to announce his buoyancy of personality while not overtly bragging. 

Dr. Johnson defines morose as “sour of temper; peevish; sullen.” In my personal lexicon, the word connotes a largely self-adopted behavior, a strategy for dealing with life, especially other people, rather than a philosophical stance or a deeper matter of temperament. In his novel Christopher Homm (1965), C.H. Sisson writes: “Even to Dad Christopher's courtship was of some use, as an exercise for morosity.” We can all think of the morose types we’ve known resembling Homm’s father. They seem not so much depressed as defensively carrying a shield of cynicism. In small doses, with a little wit and a minimum of bitterness, morosity can be amusing.

 

I knew a guy in high school who seldom spoke but you wouldn’t call him quiet. When he did speak, you expected him to say something dismissive of the faint possibility that something in the world might please him. He didn’t seem depressed, exactly, but distant, inhabiting an interior realm. Last year I saw him again at our fifty-fifth high-school reunion. He was standing by himself so I approached, shook his hand and started a conversation. He was the same guy with the same personality. He seemed surprised I remembered his name. I learned he was a lawyer, had never married and little else. I stuck around, even though it was work, marveling at the continuity of personality across more than half a century.   

 

The OED offer a secondary definition of morose, used in theology: “of a thought or feeling: wrongly or sinfully prolonged or dwelt upon. Now rare.”

 

[The Renard quote come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'It Can Be Exalting'

“Do you ever feel that you spend too much time with books?” 

The answer true to the spirit of the age would be to respond in the positive and ’fess up to the years wasted, money lost, opportunities missed, relationships scuttled, life in general squandered. That would earn me sympathetic murmurs and pats on the shoulder from my fellow addicts, gathered here in a church basement. (“I can quit anytime I want.”) But that’s not the case. I have no regrets for devoting a hefty proportion of my life between the pages of books, especially when I think of popular alternatives.

 

The question was posed by a friend, a retired attorney who is my age and as well-read as anyone currently in my life. “Apart from my family,” he writes, “especially my grandkids, my life in retirement is taken up mostly by reading.” What else is a septuagenarian to do besides, in my case, writing? The driver of my reading is only secondarily a hunger for ideas. Rather, it’s a hunger for words. My friend writes:

 

“This didn't come about unpremeditatedly. I've long planned to devote my retirement to catching up on the reading I was unable to accomplish during my working years. My family aside, nothing gives me more pleasure these days than book reading. It entertains, it informs, it illuminates; with the best books, it can be exalting.”

 

He’s currently exalting with George Eliot, reading for the first time the greatest of all English novels, Middlemarch. For me, the pleasure of discovering and reading good books for the first time has been somewhat displaced by rereading them. Most of the books I read today, especially fiction, are second or third runs. One of the ancillary pleasures of this practice is re-encountering my younger selves, gauging how different the book has grown with age.

 

“It takes me out of myself and the messed-up world,” my friend writes. “And unlike family life, it's stress-free. (I avoid like Cyclospora-carrying lettuce anxiety-provoking books about politics and current affairs.) Yet despite all this, the idea sometimes comes to me that my retirement, like my stock portfolio, needs diversification, that I spend too much of it between the covers of a book. So far, I've resisted the idea successfully.”

'The Most Chimerical of Hopes'

“Feeling admiration for someone is a privilege that becomes a calamity when the person we admire dies.” 

With age, such calamities proliferate. We start accumulating meaningful deaths. I don’t recall many, except JFK’s, having much impact on me when I was a kid. One measure of maturity may be periodically adding to the list of those we admire, whose departure leaves us grieving. Someone too cool or sophisticated to have heroes, and thus never to feel their loss, has missed one of life’s rare privileges. The words above were written by the Spanish novelist Javier Marias in the Winter 2020 issue of The Threepenny Review. In “The Distant Dead (1994)” (trans. Margaret Jull Costa) he writes:

 

“As if it were not enough to have those closest to us die—a list that grows longer with the passing years—there’s the additional sadness of losing people we’ve never seen, with whom we’ve never talked or shared a joke, and whom we cannot, therefore, miss. And yet when we learn that such people have ceased to exist, or have gone over to the other side, we feel somehow more alone, bereft.”

 

Last week I watched a video of jazz pianist/composer Thelonious Monk dancing during a solo by his saxophonist Charlie Rouse. Monk was not performing. One senses he was deep in the music, moving to it, perhaps unable to remain still. I’ve watched the video several times since and I remembered learning of Monk’s death in 1982 in the New York Times while waiting for a flight in the airport in Cleveland. My brother and I started listening to his music in the mid-Sixties. Several nights ago I had a dream in which Monk danced on a stage, solo this time. Marias writes:  

 

“Having felt somehow accompanied by their activities and by their very existence, we inevitably experience their death as something that has happened to us, as an almost personal drama. It’s not the same as when a friend dies, because those we merely admired from afar were never part of our daily life; it’s more like the death of someone we could always count on in absentia and from whom we could occasionally expect to receive pleasant news in the form of movies or recordings or books.”

 

Marias mentions two deaths I experienced the way he describes – Vladimir Nabokov and the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Nabokov’s I recently recounted. Gould was another enthusiasm my brother and I shared as kids. He died the same year as Monk. I was subbing for my editor at the newspaper when news of Gould’s death came across the teletype. Both artists remain essential figures in my personal pantheon. Marias acknowledges that Gould stopped performing in public in 1964:

 

“There was therefore not the slightest chance that I would ever see or hear him play live, and yet the news of his death somehow deprived me of a great hope; and as we all know, the most chimerical of hopes, precisely because they are chimerical, are always those we hold most dear.”

 

Marias died at age seventy on September 11, 2022.

'The Last Patch of Irretrievable Light'

I sensed in Jane Greer, even through the unreliable conduit of the internet, an ebullient spirit utterly unlike myself, which is why I felt an immediate attraction to her and her excellent poetry. On New Year’s Eve 2024, Jane wrote to me: “Do come to North Dakota! It’s beautiful—7 months out of the year.” She enjoyed laughing. She must have been a fine hostess. She saw the good in people that I sometimes miss and had a gift for inspiring friendship. When she encouraged you, you knew she meant it. She was no softie. She had a tart sense of humor and had a lot of fun mocking contemporary poetry. In the November 1985 issue of Chronicles, Jane wrote in a review of a selection of Stevie Smith’s poems:

“Now, it’s true that every second slim little poetry volume on the ‘market’ today carries, zipped up snug in its jacket, a blurb by some other famous or infamous poet who claims that this new poet possesses a ‘tremendous sense of voice.’ In this usage, voice means . . . well, I'm not sure. I would challenge all such jacket-quoted literati to identify other, unsigned poems by their proteges from a pile of similar—and equally insignificant—others. It should be worth a hefty grant if they can do it.”

Wednesday was the first anniversary of Jane’s death at age seventy-two. The truest way to honor a dead writer is to read her work and keep it alive. Jane sent me signed copies of her most recent books, both published by Lambing Press: Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know It is Falling Away (2022). Here is the final poem in the latter collection, “Gravel”:

 

“My prayers drop to the ground like so much gravel,

salting the path on which it seems I travel.

Who made the path before me? Others praying.

Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh I hear them saying.”

 

The Hebrew word means “holy,” as in Isaiah 6:3: “And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” In her earlier volume, Jane included “Heartwounding Woods,” set in October, the true Poetry Month:

 

“Do you recall the late-afternoon light

oblique in October woods, the slanting gold

carelessly cast, mottling the secret ground?

The smoke of dreams surrendered or attained

hung in the air, and loss and discontent

grew in the still-green dappled undergrowth.

Do you remember, deep in the pungent leaves

as you sat in stippled shade with half-closed eyes

and there moved across your face and toward the night

the last patch of irretrievable light?”

'Words Massive With the Increment of Years'

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that low and servile fear, which bows only to present power and upstart authority.” 

The first classical writer I can remember reading was, unsurprisingly, Homer, in a children’s edition. The Odyssey was treated as an adventure story – which it is -- not unlike Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe – though watered down, cleaned up, made palatable to a twentieth-century neophyte reader raised on cartoons. A few years later I would read Lattimore’s and Fitzgerald’s translations.

 

William Hazlitt’s passage quoted above, from “On Classical Education” (1815), likely sounds grandiose to contemporary readers. I was a lazy student of Latin and never studied Greek. My understanding of Homer and other Greek and Roman writers has been filtered through centuries of subsequent readers. In the case of Homer, I’m lining up behind Alexander Pope, James Joyce and Christopher Logue. All testified through their examples that “there is something really great and excellent in the world.” They suggest that literature is not a game preserve. It is open to all of us. No need to pass a test or pay a membership fee. If you can ignore his snobbery, Hazlitt is good on the pretensions associated with literature and education in general:

 

“Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men, and which degenerates into obstinate prejudice or petulant fickleness of opinion, according to the natural sluggishness or activity of their minds.”

 

One needn’t be an autodidact to hold “obstinate prejudice[s].” I rank myself among those “persons without [formal] education.” David Leightty is an attorney and poet in Louisville, Ky. “The Classics” is from Knowing That Most Things Break (David Robert Books, 2023):

 

“The centuries’ accumulated store

Of reverent study bides in these dense books—

Dense with millennia. In lifting these

The hand lifts time itself. Who were those men?

No telling. Legend vested them obscures;

The gist of long tradition shifts their mien.

So too their works. A reading bends beneath

Words massive with the increment of years.”