`Ordeal Succeeding Ordeal'

Forty years ago in Cleveland a friend and aspiring poet (one with whom I made a Hart Crane-inspired pub crawl of the city) was reading the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella with devotion. Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928, and now is eighty-five years old. My friend was reading and imitating his most recent collections, Nightwalker (1968) and Notes From the Land of the Dead (1972). I read over his shoulder, so to speak, but Kinsella left me cold. His poems are often fragmentary and highly compressed, like misbegotten aphorisms or traces of language on shards of pottery or papyrus. The mythic material feels undigested and portentous. Meaning is forced to do the work of sound in such lines: “The Hag. Squatting on the water, / her muzzle staring up at nothing.”

My friend gave up writing poetry years ago, so far as I know. Last I heard, he and his wife were making woodcrafts in northernmost Maine, where they homesteaded in 1977. Partly out of a wish to rekindle fond memories, I’ve tried to read Kinsella’s Collected Poems 1956-1994 (Oxford University Press, 1996). To say I’m disappointed is not quite correct because my expectations were minimal and exploratory. I’ve discovered a few pleasant fragments. In “Phoenix Park” from Nightwalker, a poem about leaving, I find this in the third section: 

“Love, it is certain, continues till we fail,

Whenever (with your forgiveness) that may be

--At any time, now, totally, ordeal

Succeeding ordeal till we find some death, 

“Hoarding bitterness, or refusing the cup;

Then the vivifying eye clouds, and the thin

Mathematic tissues loosen, and the cup

Thickens, and order dull and dies in love’s death
And melts away in a hungerless no dream.” 

That phrase – “ordeal / Succeeding ordeal till we find some death” – is memorable, and reminded me of another writer, also Irish.  In 1985, Kinsella published a brief book-length poem, a pamphlet in his Peppercanister series (thirteen pages in the Collected Poems), Her Vertical Smile. It concludes with two three-line stanzas titled “Coda.” Here is the second, referring to an orchestra conductor: 

“I lift my

baton and my

trousers fall.” 

This confirms the earlier echo: Beckett, the final scene in Waiting for Godot: 

VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.

ESTRAGON: What?

VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.
ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my trousers?
VLADIMIR: Pull ON your trousers.

ESTRAGON: (realizing his trousers are down). True.

He pulls up his trousers.

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.

They do not move.      

[Go here and advance to 2:48, then go back and watch the whole thing.]

`Anything to Do with That Old Blusterer'

On April 6, 1775, James Boswell, true to his customary mode of operation as a budding biographer, baited his friend Samuel Johnson, then sixty-six years old, hoping to prod the old bear into eloquence. As usual, it worked. Boswell raises the question of whether English judges in India “might with propriety engage in trade.” Johnson argues that they can, and moves on to question when a judge is a judge, or when a member of any profession acts in that role. “A Judge may be a farmer, but he is not to geld his own pigs,” he says. “No, Sir, there is no profession to which a man gives a very great proportion of his time.” Warming to the subject, Johnson, already author of the Dictionary, the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Rasselas, and his great critical monument to Shakespeare, among other works, turns to his own trade, writing, and says: 

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.” 

Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon put that passage at the head of their introduction to Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge University Press, 2013, obscenely priced at $90), a detailed accounting of the 750 books in the Irishman’s library at the time of his death in 1989. Beckett had already given away many books to friends and scholars. In the section devoted to Johnson in the chapter “Literature in English,” Van Hulle and Nixon write: 

“It comes perhaps as no surprise to find that the largest number of books in Beckett’s library is dedicated to the work of Samuel Johnson. Throughout his life, Beckett read Johnson intensely, at times even obsessively, especially in the years 1937-40 when he filled three notebooks with material that was to enable the theatre piece Human Wishes.” 

Beckett was introduced to Johnson as a student at Trinity College Dublin. By the end of his life, more than a dozen books by and about Johnson remained in his personal library. Van Hulle and Nixon tell us Beckett was “fascinated” with Johnson’s famous letter on patronage to Lord Chesterfield, quoted it throughout his life and went so far as to translate it into German. He owned the first volume of the Yale edition of Johnson’s work, Diaries, Prayers, Annals (1958). In 1959 he writes to his friend Barbara Bray: “I accept with gratitude the Yale Johnson if it’s not too expensive, I find it hard to resist anything to do with that old blusterer, especially his last years.” The following year he read Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh’s edition of Johnson on Shakespeare, and later still Walter Jackson Bate’s great biography of Johnson (1977). 

Thus far I’ve only skimmed Samuel Beckett’s Library, reading the sections most immediately of interest. The authors report finding Saul Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), among Beckett’s books. Unexpectedly, they quote a 1953 letter in which Beckett calls The Catcher in the Rye the “best thing I’ve read for years,” and another from 1972 in which he calls Slaughterhouse-Five “a remarkable book.” As the epigraph to Samuel Beckett’s Library, Van Hulle and Nixon append a sentence from a letter Beckett wrote to his friend Thomas MacGreevy on March 25, 1936: “I have been reading wildly all over the place.”

`The Indulgences of Fools and Mediocrities'

Today, Front Porch Republic launches “One Thousand Words,” brief lives of figures, “some obscure, some not.” The inaugural entry by the poet and scholar James Matthew Wilson is devoted to Yvor Winters. Wilson writes: 

“The discipline of writing and reading verse provides a model for the exploration of the form of reality. It alerts us to the limitations and just perceptions necessary for living in accord with our natures and the moral order of the universe. In its halls, there is no place for the indulgences of mediocrities and fools.”

`Brightening As They Fail'

A young poet whose work I admire wrote to me on Wednesday: “I've been allocating more time to reading poets thoroughly, and read Mary Jo Salter more or less in full this winter; she has an astounding ear and gift for arranging details into a compelling structure.  Not a profound poet, or maybe I should say she's a `novelistic’ poet rather than a philosophical one, but I haven't devoured poetry the way I have hers in years.” My reading of Salter has been desultory at best, and when I discovered that today, Aug. 15, is her fifty-ninth birthday, I borrowed A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) from the library. Among her new poems I found “Lunar Eclipse,” written “in memory of Anthony Hecht,” who died Oct. 20, 2004. The eclipse described by Salter occurred a week later, on Oct. 27-28. Go here for an explanation of the geometry of a lunar eclipse. 

During the eclipse, Salter says, she goes outside with pencil and notebook, “out to the moonstruck driveway, / knowing you’d be there.” In a total eclipse, the entire moon passes through the Earth’s umbral shadow and turns a vivid, Mars-like red. Her account of the eclipse merges with the great poet’s passing:  “I watched the giant fail-- / a dimming, a diminution, / among the attendant stars.” Hecht, she says, was called a “dark poet”: “Your last poems were in keeping / with that judgment; gave a world / where `no joy goes unwept.’” The quote is from “Motes,” Hecht’s final poem, written in iambic trimeter, published posthumously in The New Yorker on Nov. 1, 2004, and still uncollected. Salter misses the return of the moon (“a luminary’s comeback”) because of a “sudden / cloud” which becomes “a blanket pulled / over the vanquished head / of one on his deathbed--.” I think of Coleridge in his original 1798 version of “Frost at Midnight,” in which the poet takes his infant son Hartley outside to see “the quiet moon.” But even more I think of Hecht’s “The Darkness and the Light are Both Alike to Thee,” a title borrowed from Psalms 139:12. The poem is collected in his final book of poems, The Darkness and the Light (2001): 

“Like trailing silks, the light

Hangs in the olive trees

As the pale wine of day

Drains to its very lees:

Huge presences of gray

Rise up, and then it’s night. 

“Distantly lights go on.

Scattered like fallen sparks

Bedded in peat, they seem

Set in the plushest darks

Until a timid gleam

Of matins turns them wan, 

“Like the elderly and frail

Who’ve lasted through the night,

Cold brows and silent lips,

For whom the rising light

Entails their own eclipse,

Brightening as they fail.”

`An Endless Series of Expeditions'

I knew Joe Queenan from several columns I read years ago in the Wall Street Journal. I remember them as smart and funny, though I can’t recall the subject matter, and superior to anything written by Dave Barry, a columnist he superficially resembles. A reader recently suggested I try Queenan’s latest title, One for the Books (Viking, 2012), a memoir of sorts, devoted to a lifetime of obsessive reading. On page 4, Queenan tells us: “I have read somewhere between six thousand and seven thousand books in my life.” Is this bragging? Perhaps, but Queenan was born in 1950, two years before me, and that sounds like a reasonable estimate for someone of our age devoted to the printed word and not an alumnus of Evelyn Wood. On the subject of speed-reading he writes: 

“I do not speed-read books; it seems to defeat the purpose of the exercise, which is for the experience to be leisurely and pleasant.” 

That’s a good sign – reading as an activity driven by pleasure (granted, a highly elastic quality), not obligation or exhibitionism. He writes and I concur: “I hate having books rammed down my throat. This may explain why I never liked school: I still cannot understand how one human being could ask another human being to read Look Homeward, Angel and then expect to remain on speaking terms.”  That veers close to Dave Barry country but possesses the virtue of being independent-minded and true. This sounds almost like a universal reader’s apologia: 

“And I know why I read so obsessively: I read because I want to be somewhere else. Yes, this is a reasonably satisfactory world we are living in, this society in particular, but the world conjured up by books is a better one. This is especially true if you are poor or missing vital appendages.” 

Queenan, there, is almost subverting his gift. The final sentence, especially the final phrase, almost undoes what he has just written. His most irritating tic is a weakness for the easy joke accompanied by a knowing wink, a Dave Barry-like reflex intended to let the reader know he, the writer, knows it’s a weak gag but, hyuk hyuk, ain’t it funny that he knows it and writes it anyway? Well, no, it’s not, but Queenan, to his credit, occasionally foregoes the wise crack and wanders into sublimity: 

“Certain things are perfect the way they are and need no improvement. The sky, the Pacific Ocean, procreation, and the Goldberg Variations all fit this bill, and so do books. Books are sublime, but books are also visceral. They are physically appealing, emotionally evocative objects that constitute a perfect delivery system. Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.” 

This turns into a defense of codex over Kindle, but I also admire his vision of perfection as imperfectly perceived by a human being. Queenan is no reactionary but a pragmatist of reading. He knows what works for him and feels only impatience with fashions, whether in literary genres or “delivery systems.” Here, again, he speaks for many of us: 

“The confraternity of serious readers is united by a conviction that literature is an endless series of expeditions, some planned, some unplanned, all elating. None of us is doing this just to show off. Books do not always take us where we want to go, but they always take us places someone would want to go. Avid book readers are people who are at some level dissatisfied with reality.”

`Cheap and Vulgar'

Without peeking, tell me who made this abject mea culpa: “I have drank tea and coffee and made myself cheap and vulgar.” 

If only that were all it took, though my standards for depravity have evolved over the decades. The last time I felt cheap and vulgar it involved pepperoni pizza and too many episodes of The Walking Dead. I went thirty-nine hours without food in preparation for a certain medical procedure Monday morning, twenty-nine hours without coffee, and thirteen without liquids. The need for food was less fierce than for caffeine, which was starting to look like a sacrament. The wretch quoted above is Thoreau in his journal for Aug. 13, 1854:

“I remember only with a pang the past spring and summer thus far. I have not been an early riser. Society seems to have invaded and overrun me. I have drank tea and coffee and made myself cheap and vulgar. My days have been all noontides, without sacred mornings and evenings. I desire to rise early henceforth, to associate with those whose influence is elevating, to have such dreams and waking thoughts that my diet may not be indifferent to me.” 

My diet has never been a matter indifference to me. Boswell reports Johnson saying: "Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else."

`A Natty Peace'

I’ve only just started reading Ben Downing’s biography of a person I had never heard of, Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), but already I’m smitten: 

“…[Ross] went about her business matter-of-factly. All the same, she was a sort of accidental pioneer. Where the vision of bliss pursued by the [Tuscan expatriate] colony had been about passive absorption, ours today involves action and effort; we tend to aspire to a kind of rugged self-reliance. So too for Janet, who took more pleasure from doing things herself than from having them done for her. In her participatory enthusiasm, her preference for the rural, her esteem for the peasantry and its traditions, and the fact that she wrote about all this—she was the first to do so—she was a prototypical figure.” 

One mark of a good biography is feeling disappointment at not being able to meet its subject (Ross was born in 1842 and died in 1927). One page after the quote above and this reader’s infatuation is complete: 

“Though intelligent and learned, especially for an autodidact, she was by no means brilliant. She had little imagination or inner life, and she made no towering contribution to humanity [praise the Lord!]. Yet her life was singular…Now we might call her a node or hub, and so she was—but on a grand scale, her spokes radiating across the map.” 

Downing is co-editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and I’ve waited for a book from him since I read (and bought) his first, The Calligraphy Shop (Zoo Press, 2003), a collection of poems. He’s one of our best reviewers. Go to his website and enjoy wandering about. In particular, read his remembrance of his friend Tom Disch. After you find a copy of The Calligraphy Shop, turn to page 3 and read “On First Looking into Bate’s Life of Johnson.” For now, here’s the fourth of the poem’s four sections, addressed to Dr. Johnson:

“Professor Bate has served you faithfully
despite being an American.
As you once ambered others, he has spun
A grease-stained halo round your memory,

“embalming you in neither the debauched
fluids of the ordinary Joe
nor the priggish ether of the hagio.
Half slob, half saint: your corpulence was lodged

“between the rock of faith and the hard spot
of being merely human – a Gordian knot
which you, no Alexander, couldn’t cut,
yet worked and worried in such intricate,

“persevering, poignantly futile ways
that your greatness beggars his. Epitome
of Adamites, the ur-Dr. J,
your frazzled life here finds a natty peace.”

`At an Awful Cost'

An acquaintance has announced she wishes to quit her job, sell her house and chattel, everything but her car and clothes, and head west to “find herself” – ominous words. She’s almost fifty, divorced, without children, a bright woman smitten with “spirituality,” which she associates with incense, earnestness and obeying what her “true self” tells her. I like her and wish her well but keep my opinions to myself for fear of not being sufficiently “affirmative.” I don’t mean to sound patronizing but I worry when otherwise sound, middle-class people express an interest in finding themselves. Such discontent is fashionable and even socially sanctioned, and has a way of devolving into destructive self-indulgence. Theodore Dalrymple warns:  

“As I tell my patients, much to their surprise — for it is not a fashionable view — it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself.” 

Precisely. The last thing most of us should be thinking about is ourselves. The self-directed and self-seeking are a nasty lot. A.M. Juster has an epigrammatic couplet titled “Your Midlife Crisis”: 

“You found yourself—but at an awful cost.

We liked you better when you were lost.”

`A Glowing and Coloured Human Home'

It’s the mundane unexpectedness of Rooms by the Sea that holds our attention. We think, briefly, of Magritte, his taste for unlikely juxtapositions, but there’s something vulgar about his paintings, cheap and suggestive of junior high school, as surrealist bric-à-brac usually is. Edward Hopper captures something more ordinary and valuable - the wondrous in the everyday. In Rooms by the Sea (1951), the clean, orderly interior adjoins without boundary the sea. Elsewhere, Hopper paints an unpeopled room (Sun in an Empty Room, 1963) and a house around which grows grass without boundary to the foundation (Cape Cod Evening, 1939). But Rooms by the Sea is more concentrated in its impact. The pure geometry of sunlight on the walls, so neat and reassuring, contrasts with the lapping sea. One feels vulnerable. 

We know from Gail Levin’s biography of the painter that Hopper originally sketched in steps outside the door, but eliminated them and made the sea the horizon. The biographer writes: “Edward wrote to Frank Rehn: `I have finished a canvas am hoping to get another before we leave here.’ At the bottom of the letter, Jo [Hopper’s wife] added a note: `A queer one—could be called the Jumping Off Place—we can’t count on that one ever being sold…’” Jo Hopper seems to be hinting at the scene as a veiled invitation to suicide. Anna Lewis pulls the focus back a notch to observe an observer of the painting in “On Seeing Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea”: 

“Between inside and out, a cool, gray wall.

A polygon of light through open door.

A settee, red. A carpet, green. The hall,

a yellow passage not to sandy shore

but hard to some blue sea, below. That’s all.

No action here. Just color, shape, and light.

No saints in gold-leaf haloes to adore.

But, as you almost pass it, left to right,

I see you pause before its either/or:

the calm suspension, here, right now, of white

as light through cool, gray rooms conducts its fall;

or, there, beyond, a square of blue, the sight

of lustrous sky and ocean. Still, you stall.

You stand before the brink, its unseen height.” 

Her line precisely describes my understanding of the painting: “I see you pause before its either/or” – order/chaos, security/jeopardy, life/death. In a very different spirit, G.K. Chesterton might be describing Rooms by the Sea and other Hopper canvases in his essay “The Artistic Sense” (The Coloured Lands, 1938). He’s riding on a train that passes through a tunnel and emerges to the sight of houses along the track: 

“Sometimes the grey facade is broken by the lighted windows of a house, almost overhanging the railway-line; and for an instant we look deep into a domestic interior; chamber within chamber of a glowing and coloured human home. That is the way in which objects ought to be seen; separate; illuminated; and above all, contrasted against blank night or bare walls; as indeed these living creations do stand eternally contrasted with the colourless chaos out of which they came.”

`A Merry-Go-Round, Not a View to a Death'

Just as we prefer our friends to be friends, for that cozy sense of closing the circle, so are we reassured when the writers we admire agree to admire one another. Henry James disapproving of Edith Wharton, or vice versa, would violate the natural order of things and prompt us to reexamine our judgment. Here is Philip Larkin in 1984 reviewing The Middle of My Tether, a collection of essays by Joseph Epstein: 

“Epstein is a great deal more sophisticated than they [English essayists “in the Addisonian line of succession”] were, and a great deal more readable. His subjects are tossed up, turned round, stuck with quotations, abandoned and returned to, playfully inverted, and finally set back on their feet, as is the reader, a little breathless but quite unharmed. But it is essentially a merry-go-round, not a view to a death.” [Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, 2001] 

We hear the distinctive Larkin critical voice – tart, witty, obliquely dissenting from fashionable literary tastes – in the service of capturing Epstein’s manner. There is, in other words, a complimentary resonance, a cozy closing of the circle. The writer has discovered a temperamental affinity in his subject. His reaction is not nepotistic bootlicking but – what? A sense of confirmation that one is not alone or deluded? Relief at finding a kindred spirit? All of the above and more? 

Nine years later, after Larkin’s death, Epstein reviewed Andrew Motion’s     Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. He notes that Larkin composed “a small number of perfect poems” and credits him with evolving a poetic manner readers immediately identify as “Larkinesque.” He goes on to write as fine an encomium as I know to any poet: 

“Through self-mockery, comic derision, a fine firm control of language, a nicely subdued sense of lyricism, and an impressive talent for facing awkward and unpleasant facts, Larkin took poetry away from the academics and brought it back within the grasp of the intelligent ordinary reader who looks to poetry for insight, delight, and even consolation.” [“Mr. Larkin Gets a Life,” Life Sentences: Literary Essays, 1997] 

In 1988, in “Who Killed Poetry?” -- his famously contentious and accurate essay published in Commentary – Epstein quotes Larkin with approval and cites him (along with Elizabeth Bishop and L.E. Sissman) as among the rare recent poets whose work he admires and enjoys. And earlier this year, in advance of the annually observed death watch of National Poetry Month, Epstein writes, in more qualified terms: 

“Philip Larkin, who may not have been a major poet, at least created some memorable but not necessarily newspaper-publishable lines and phrases: `They [you-know-what] you up, your mum and dad.’” 

In his 1961 review of Charles Delaunay's life of Django Reinhardt [Jazz Writing: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, 2004], which carries the Johnsonian title “Lives of the Poets,” Larkin pushes aside poets and other writers to make way for jazz musicians, our rightful representatives: 

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

Larkin, too, made a memorable contribution to the “unique emotional language of our age." He was born on this date, Aug. 9, in 1922, in Coventry, and died in 1985 at age sixty-three in Kingston upon Hull.

`Condensed Portraits'

I knew “Kit-Kat” only as the name of a candy bar before reading Theodore Dalrymple’s “Gossamer Wings,” in which he reads a collection of Edmund Gosse’s essays, Critical Kit-Kats (1896), and meditates on such shibboleths of contemporary culture as sincerity and originality. I’ve read precisely two books by Gosse, including Father and Son, which Dalrymple mentions, and find little of interest in Critical Kit-Kats beyond its title. Gosse is a master of passive-voice circumlocution, saying little at great length. In this, his prose resembles that of many bloggers. Here he is in his preface, apologizing for the book you presumably are about to read: 

“If it should be suggested that these little studies leave much unsaid [though not enough] and are far from exhausting the qualities of their subjects [though not their readers], I can but put myself, which admitting the charge to the full, under the protection of the most genial of all great men of letters [followed by an obligatory quotation, in French, from Lafontaine]…” 

Earlier in his preface, Gosse defines “Kit-Kat” as “this modest form of portraiture, which emphasizes the head, yet does not quite exclude the hand of the sitter,” and says he “ventured to borrow from the graphic art this title for my little volume, since these are condensed portraits, each less than half-length, and each accommodated to suit limited leisure and a crowded space.” The Oxford English Dictionary is remarkably unhelpful with the first meaning of “kit-kat,” giving us “the game of tip-cat,” with citations from the seventeenth and nineteenth century. Things get more interesting with the second, starting with the Kit Kat Club: “a club of Whig politicians and men of letters founded in the reign of James II [1685-1688].” Read the etymology and the word starts making sense: “Kit (= Christopher) Cat or Catling, the keeper of the pie-house in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar, where the club originally met.” 

Then we get to Gosse’s sense of kit-kat: “with size, portrait, etc.: A particular size of portrait, less than half-length, but including the hands.” A footnote explains: “Said to have been so called because the dining-room of the club at Barn Elms was hung with portraits of the members and was too low for half-size portraits.” The dictionary cites a figurative usage in an 1822 letter by Coleridge: “I destroyed the Kit-cat or bust at least of the letter I had meant to have sent you.” Gosse’s intention to write “condensed portraits” is admirable. In an age when biographies have grown morbidly obese, the concisely written brief life is always welcome. Among contemporaries, Joseph Epstein is master of the form. See his Essays in Biography (2012), or his full-length but still svelte studies, Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide (2006) and Fred Astaire (2008).

`Not Melancholy, But Dreamy'

“to content oneself with little, to hope for no attention

from the great; to scale one’s plans to what is manageable.” 

No, not the expectations of a book blogger. In fact, these lines number among the prerequisites of happiness according to Christophe Plantin (1514-1589), the French-born humanist, poet, printer and publisher. Chief among his accomplishments was publication in 1572 of the Polyglot Bible, which collected Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic texts in eight large folio volumes. Plantin’s descendants remained in business as printers and publishers in Antwerp under the Plantin name until 1867. Mike Gilleland, as usual, was here before me and posted another translation of Plantin’s poem. Here is the French text of “Le bonheur de ce monde.” 

Karl Kirchwey liked the sonnet enough to translate it and lend its title to his 2007 collection The Happiness of This World: Poems and Prose (G.P. Putnam’s Sons). After thirteen lines of ingredients for happiness, Kirchwey concludes: “this is to wait at home for death comfortably.” Plantin’s Gallic stoicism echoes his younger contemporary, Montaigne (1533-1592). Much plagued, like most of us, with thoughts of death, the essayist writes in “That to philosophize is to learn to die” (trans. Donald Frame): “He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.” Five sentences later, Montaigne makes one of his breathtaking reversals, a declaration of mortal honesty: 

“I am by nature not melancholy, but dreamy. Since my earliest days, there is nothing with which I have occupied my mind more than images of death.”

`Something to Cling To, Just in Case'

Somewhere I read that Donald Justice was an enthusiastic moviegoer and that his favorite actors were Cary Grant and John Wayne, a pairing I sympathize with (I might choose Alec Guinness and Wayne, or Fred Astaire and Humphrey Bogart) and that suggests something about the nature of his poetry. In his poems, Justice is at once a nostalgist, a suave habitué of memory and twilight, and deeply suspicious of such impulses. Similar tensions suffuse the work of Justice’s contemporaries Anthony Hecht and Edgar Bowers. Crudely put, Justice is sensitive and tough, elegant and roughhewn. The result is not confused, hypocritical or wishy-washy but emotionally and morally layered, making Justice what Auden called Henry James, “Master of nuance and scruple.” In the third of the three sections of “Variations on a Theme from James” (The Summer Anniversaries, 1960), Justice writes: 

“Such art has nature in her kind

That in the shaping of a hill

She will take care to leave behind

Some few abutments here and there,

Something to cling to, just in case.

A taste more finical and nice

Would comb out kink and curl alike.

But O ye barbers at your trade,

What more beguiles us? Your  coiffures?

Or gold come waterfalling down?” 

As the epigraph to his poem, Justice appends “large, loose, baggy monsters,” from James’ preface to Vol. 7, The Tragic Muse, in the New York Edition of his work: 

“There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as [Thackeray’s] The Newcomes has life, as [Alexandre Dumas’] Les trois mousquetaires, as Tolstoi’s Peace and war, have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are ‘superior to art’; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us.” 

The demands of art and life forever conflict, and some artists never reconcile them. Pure naturalism and pure aestheticism will never do. Unlike James, I think Tolstoy in War and Peace crafts a novel that is undeniably large but neither loose nor baggy. Elsewhere, Justice writes feelingly of War and Peace, of its well-remembered small moments rendered in unornamented language. In his 1988 essay “The Prose Sublime,” Justice says: 

 “…the reaction to prose as to poetry proves in experience to be much the same, a sort of transport, a frisson, a thrilled recognition, which, `flashing forth at the right moment,’ as Longinus has it, `scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt.’” 

Justice died on this date, Aug. 6, in 2004, at age seventy-eight. Aug. 6 is also my oldest son’s birthday. Today he turns twenty-six and his birth to me is as vivid and strange as his wedding last month to Nadia Chaudhury, my daughter-in-law. For Joshua, here are lines from Justice’s “Men at Forty” (Night Light, 1967): 

“And deep in mirrors

They rediscover

The face of the boy as he practices tying

His father's tie there in secret 

“And the face of that father,

Still warm with the mystery of lather.

They are more fathers than sons themselves now.”

`The Dim Wilderness of Theory'

“The first artists, in any line, are doubtless not those whose general ideas about their art are most often on their lips—those who most abound in precept, apology, and formula, and can best tell us the reasons and the philosophy of things.” 

That’s Henry James writing about Guy de Maupassant in Partial Portraits (1894). You can already see where he’s going. In the vernacular, we might distill James’ thesis as: Shut up and write. Is anything so tiresome as a writer indulging publically in literary self-analysis, always a species of showmanship and narcissism? We recognize the “first artists,” James says, by “their energetic practice, the constancy with which they apply their principles, and the serenity with which they leave us to hunt for their secret in the illustration, the concrete example.” In other words, don’t tell me; show me. James, of course, was the exception who proved the rule – a great critic and an even greater writer of fiction. But genius is always the exception. 

In a junior high school literature textbook I read “The Necklace” (the warhorse Nabokov makes fun of in Ada) and liked it, the way a child likes the efficient cleverness of a spring-driven windup toy, and the way I still like O. Henry’s and Kipling’s stories – pure narrative pleasure. I found a paperback anthology of Maupassant’s stories edited and introduced by Francis Steegmuller (where would my education be without the paperback revolution?). I remember reading “Boule de Suif” and thinking it was pretty hot stuff. Here are some of James’ apercus inspired by his reading of Maupassant: 

“…there is many a creator of living figures whose friends, however full of faith in his inspiration, will do well to pray for him when he sallies forth into the dim wilderness of theory.” 

“…the philosopher in his composition is perceptibly inferior to the story-teller.” 

“…as a commentator, M. de Maupassant is slightly common, while as an artist he is wonderfully rare.” 

“Nothing can exceed the masculine firmness, the quiet force of his own style, in which every phrase is a close sequence, every epithet a paying piece, and the ground is completely cleared of the vague, the ready-made and the second-best. Less than anyone to-day does he beat the air; more than any one does he hit out from the shoulder.” 

Maupassant was born on this date, Aug. 5, in 1850, and died in 1893 of syphilis after three botched suicide attempts, age forty-two. He spent the last eighteen months of his life in an insane asylum.

`I've Found My White Whale'

“`What I feel about Herman Melville is almost a filial admiration,’ he said. `Herman Melville is my father, my grandfather, and my older brother—which means that aside from the unbounded admiration I have for him there is also respect. If someone asked me what I would have liked to have been in life, I would answer without hesitation: ‘Herman Melville’; and to have lived a hundred years ago and write like he did.’” 

A Frenchman spoke these words, not an American, and Jean-Pierre Grumbach took his filial devotion to the author of Moby-Dick seriously enough in the nineteen-thirties, before he had directed a single film, to change his name to Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973). I’ve recently watched three of his films for the first time -- Bob le flambeur (1955), Le doulos (1961) and Le samouraï (1967). All are wonderful, especially the first, and all are fondly saturated in American culture. Bob the Gambler drives a Packard convertible through the postwar streets of Paris and wears a trench coat like Bogart’s. The nightclub combo in several scenes is racially integrated and plays jazz. The entire film is Melville’s hommage to Scarface (Hawks’, not De Palma’s), Little Caesar, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, The Asphalt Jungle and other American gangster films of the thirties and forties. Melville himself makes a cameo appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), in which Jean-Paul Belmondo makes an overt hommage to Bogart. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (The Immediate Experience, 1962), Robert Warshow (who died in 1955, the year Bob le flambeur was released) writes: 

“In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects `Americanism’ itself.” 

And yet, the gangster film is a uniquely American contribution to world culture, like Westerns, the Marx Brothers, jazz and Moby-Dick. The passage in which Melville speaks of his namesake is from a remembrance of the Frenchman by the American filmmaker Eric Breitbart, who met the director in 1964 as a student at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, the film school in Paris. He writes: 

“I considered it quite possible that Melville identified himself with Captain Ahab as well as with his creator, and asked him if he too was searching for a white whale. He thought for a moment then answered that indeed he was, and for him it was the United States. `When I am in a rented car, driving along a highway in the West or the South, I’m a happy man. At that moment I don’t need anything else. My emotions are contained. I’ve found my white whale.’ I didn’t recognize it then, but I do now—the terrible sadness of a man who feels himself most complete when he is absolutely alone.”

[Later I found this in Melville on Melville (1971). Rui Nogueira asks Melville why he changed his name and the director answers: "Through pure admiration and a desire to identify myself with an author, an artist, who meant more to me than any other." Puzzlingly, Melville adds this: "I discovered Melville, long before Jean Giono's translation of Moby-Dick, by reading in English Pierre: or the Ambiguities, a book which left its mark on me for ever."]

`Freedom For Me Is a Strict Frame'

Not a conventionally handsome man, A.J. Liebling was nevertheless photogenic. Pear-shaped, bald, with a dented head and severe-looking steel-rimmed glasses, his appearance was interesting -- comic, sad and impish, a clerk out of Dickens. He looked like his prose, at once exacting and extravagant. My favorite photograph of Liebling is the portrait shot in New York City in 1960 by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Liebling is alone, seated in what might be a private home or well-appointed hotel. The chair to his right is empty. Behind him is an empty couch, potted ferns, a small table with an ashtray and glass, and another table covered with an ice bucket and bottles. A party seems to be underway but Cartier-Bresson has shot Liebling in solitude, looking wryly grim. The glass in his right hand is empty and his bent left arm is wedged awkwardly between chair and chest – a fat man’s gesture. 

In a 1971 interview, Cartier-Bresson said: “Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible. Maybe I’m classical. The French are like that. Photography as I conceive it, well, it’s a drawing — immediate sketch done with intuition and you can’t correct it. If you have to correct it, it’s the next picture. But life is very fluid. Well, sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, `Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.’ Life is once, forever.” 

Liebling, the most convivial of men, was likewise a depressive. Cartier-Bresson captures some of the writer’s human complexity. One of the few indisputably great photographers, confrère to Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson died on this date, Aug. 3, in 2004, at age ninety-five.

`Against the Spleen!'

Picador has lately reissued paperback editions of four novels by the English writer, polemicist and suicide B.S. Johnson -- Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966), House Mother Normal (1971) and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) – and a new 480-page hardcover, Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson. This year is a double anniversary of sorts. Johnson was born eighty years ago and ended his life forty years ago. He was a youthful enthusiasm of mine. I discovered his earliest books in the university library a year or two before his death and proselytized for them for years afterward without a single convert. Today, it’s easy to understand why, but I was young and militant. 

There’s a class of writer, often Irish but not exclusively, deeply suspicious of the novel, literature, even language itself, who simultaneously write and subvert what they’ve written. Think of Swift, Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien and, at a less lofty perch, the fittingly initialed (for Bryan Stanley) B.S. Johnson. “Experimental” and “avant-garde,"in most cases, mean pretentious and boring, but the Irish crew at their best remain connected to something approximating the real, human world. They are cerebral, yes, but not merely cerebral. Most importantly, all are extravagantly funny. Johnson’s besetting sin is that he blunts his comic sense with angry earnestness. As a young man he trained as an accountant, and it shows (though his funniest book, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, is rooted in double-entry bookkeeping). Too often he compromises his jokes with didacticism. See Jonathan Coe’s fine biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004), for the particulars. 

The differences between Johnson and Sterne are illuminating. Johnson is deadly serious about the challenge posed by translating human experience into that feeblest and most intoxicating of human creations, language. For Sterne, it was an opportunity to revel in nonsense (though Sterne is never nonsensical).  Johnson’s most explicitly Sternean book is his final one, published posthumously,See the Old Lady Decently (1975).  Late in the novel, Johnson begins an argument among hypothetical readers of his novel, one of whom says: “– What, does the fellow know what he is about?” And another answers: “– Competing with Sterne, indeed!” Contrast Johnson and his fumbles after humor with this grand, indefatigably digressive, one-sentence set-piece on humor from Book 4, Chapter 22, of Tristram Shandy: 

“Albeit, gentle reader, I have lusted earnestly, and endeavoured carefully (according to the measure of such a slender skill as God has vouchsafed me, and as convenient leisure from other occasions of needful profit and healthful pastime have permitted) that these little books which I here put into thy hands, might stand instead of many bigger books—yet have I carried myself towards thee in such fanciful guise of careless disport, that right sore am I ashamed now to intreat thy lenity seriously—in beseeching thee to believe it of me, that in the story of my father and his christian-names—I have no thoughts of treading upon Francis the First—nor in the affair of the nose—upon Francis the Ninth—nor in the character of my uncle Toby—of characterizing the militiating spirits of my country—the wound upon his groin, is a wound to every comparison of that kind—nor by Trim—that I meant the duke of Ormond—or that my book is wrote against predestination, or free-will, or taxes—If ’tis wrote against any thing,—'tis wrote, an' please your worships, against the spleen! in order, by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the intercostal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gall-bladder, liver, and sweet-bread of his majesty's subjects, with all the inimicitious passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums.” 

Read in context, the passage is both riotously funny and makes perfect sense, a combination Johnson was seldom able to achieve.

`We Expand to Its Bulk'

The reader in Dallas who recently emailed a nice passage from Edward Seidensticker’s Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (1983) has followed up by sending me a copy of the book, which I’m now reading. In a subsequent email he writes: 

“I find I can become interested in almost anything -- Liebling on boxing comes to mind -- if it’s the subject of a well-written book or essay. Not to suggest that Japan wouldn’t otherwise be interesting, but presentation is always important.  I hope you find it enjoyable.” 

I do, and I enthusiastically agree with my friend’s judgment of what makes a book readable. Some subjects are irresistible. I would read almost anything written about, say, Louis Armstrong, ferns, etymology and Samuel Johnson. On the other hand, almost the only subjects I can’t imagine reading about, regardless of how well written the article or book, are economics, finance, monetary policy and banking – brittle, lifeless, soul-sucking matters. I read a lot of Marx when young, disproving my point, but I still haven’t read Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes or Friedrich Hayek. 

The Liebling volume is a perfect example of great writing about an unpromising subject. Likewise, I have no interest in gambling but occasionally reread A. Alvarez’s wonderful The Biggest Game in Town (1983). I knew little about César Franck and his music but I’m enjoying César Franck: His Life and Times (2012) by R.J. Stove. Uruguay is a vast emptiness in my knowledge of the world, but I wish more novels by Juan Carlos Onetti would be translated into English (find La vida breve, 1950; trans. as A Brief Life, 1976).

Which brings to mind Herman Melville, born on this date, Aug. 1, in 1819. What subject could be less attractive than whaling, a savage business? In Chapter CIV of Moby-Dick (1851), “The Fossil-Whale,” Melville writes: 

“Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” 

Ishmael was born too soon to read Brendan Lehane’s The Compleat Flea (1969).