'An Ill-Assorted Collection'

A friend has broken up with her boyfriend and he is launching protracted salvos of nasty emails in her direction. As prose they are better than average. There have been no threats of violence and little profanity. The ex’s weapon of choice is a detailed critique of every aspect of her existence. We’ve all been dumped. It can be bruising but you get over it. This guy is performing an ongoing explication de texte not of a book but a human being. He has even taught me a new word: kludge. 

The OED describes it as “an arbitrary formation” and “jocular invention.” That is, it was coined by a specific person -- Jackson W. Granholm, an engineer with Boeing and General America Corp., in an article titled “How to Design a Kludge” in the February 1962 issue of Datamation. In Granholm’s words, quoted by the Dictionary, kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole” The OED adds, “especially in Computing, a machine, system, or program that has been improvised or ‘bodged’ together; a hastily improvised and poorly thought-out solution to a fault or ‘bug’.”

 

The Dictionary gives six citations, all from computing or electronics publications. It seems related to such phrases as “jury-rigged” or “jerry-built” – in other words, improvised, and probably badly. It’s a comically ugly word I would like to see a writer of light verse work into a poem. Think of the rhyming opportunities – budge, fudge, judge, nudge, sludge, smudge, trudge. And remember Dr. Johnson’s definition of lexicographer: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

[ADDENDUM, 10-13:

An old friend rises to the occasion:

"There once was a dandy named Fudge

Whose groin was an unsightly kludge.

'Is it really so foul?'

Asked his girl with a scowl,

So he undressed and said, 'you be the judge.'"]

'It Bubbles and Chuckles Along'

“Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.” 

A truth I had been waiting to hear for much of my life. Willful obscurity (which is not the same as complexity) is favored by writers contemptuous of readers. Avant-gardistes often fancy themselves superior to people who merely like reading books. The sentence above and the slender volume in which I found it -- On Philosophical Style (1954) – were my introduction to the American philosopher Brand Blanshard (1892-1987), which in turn introduced me to Dave Lull, who is more deeply read in Blanshard’s work.

 

In the July 4, 1953 issue of The Saturday Review, Blanshard wrote about H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, originally published in 1926. His review begins:

 

“The story is told that a friend of an old lady who was known as a great reader gave her a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary. Meeting her later, he asked what she thought of it. ‘Very instructive indeed,’ said she, ‘but I did seem to notice a trifling want of connection.’ That objection would veto all dictionaries I know as general reading matter—all, that is, except one.”

 

That would be Fowler’s, of course, and Blanshard tells us he read it sequentially, start to finish. Dictionaries, especially Johnson’s and the OED, are good, addictive reading. One entry leads to another and then the afternoon is shot. Blanshard explains some of Fowler’s charm:

 

“[I]t is not written like a dictionary at all, but like a letter. It bubbles and chuckles along as if it were so much wayward talk, indulging in little digs and naughtinesses, and breaking out into little ‘whoops of blessing’ as it goes. Yet none of this is really irrelevant. Fowler swam about so easily in linguistic learning and so delighted in it that it made him feel like cutting capers to get back into his element; he wrote on other things, but never with the ease and mastery he showed in discussing usage.”

 

I’m puzzled by writers who show little interest in their medium and remain indifferent to the stuff  they're working with. Subject matter is inert without the fizz of language. Polonius: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet: “Words, words, words.” Blanshard reminds us that language is fun:

 

“Did it ever occur to you that isle and island have no connection with each other etymologically? Are you under the illusion that that and which are to be used in the same way? See also his articles on Cannibalism, Love of the Long Word, Sturdy Indefensibles, Hyphens, and Wardour Street.”

 

Joseph Epstein is a contemporary admirer of Fowler:

 

“On usage nothing surpasses H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first published in 1926 and, mirabile dictu, a modest bestseller when it first appeared in America. Good writing is about more than mere correctness, yet without correctness no good writing is possible. Fowler everywhere offers specific instructions. He was what is known in the business as a prescriptivist, believing in standard English (rather than a descriptivist, who believes that popular use should set the standard), but he is never rule-bound, often technical, but never stuffy. On split infinitives, as on ending sentences with prepositions, his sensible line is to avoid both if possible, but always break both rules rather than write anything awkward.”

'The Soul of Reading!'

Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will digress out of sheer rambling confusion and indifference to his audience. My father was like that. We arrived at some destination and he would promptly relate the details of the journey, correcting himself along the way: “We turned left at the gas station and then . . . no, we turned right . . .” and so on. It was insufferable. 

Well-done digressiveness, circling back in the narrative to relate a tangentially linked bit of story – sometimes returning to the original thread, sometimes not -- is usually comic in effect. Digressions within digressions can proliferate. Almost by definition, digressions in fiction, as in jokes, are comical. This is characteristic of much Irish storytelling, as in Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien – a variation on the shaggy-dog story. Other gifted deployers of digression include Erasmus, Montaigne, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Swift and Melville. Perhaps the master of the device is Laurence Sterne, who was born in County Tipperary.

 

A reader tells me he has tried again – his third attempt -- and failed to read Tristram Shandy. “There’s no plot. Nothing happens,” he writes. “I know you like the book but he keeps digressing and it goes nowhere.” True, but that’s the idea. No one has so pointedly made a stalled, endlessly deferred narrative the object of his comedy. If you don’t get it, don’t feel bad. Some people are immune to certain approaches to humor. Tristram digressively celebrates his love of digressions in Book I, Chapter 20:

 

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer -- he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.”

'The Love of Reading Is Caught, Not Taught'

I’ve used “home library” to describe the accumulation of books in our house but it’s starting to sound a little pretentious. For now I’ll keep it at “books.” Nadya Williams titles her essay “Home Libraries Will Save Civilization,” which, I understand, is more reader-enticing than “Poorly Organized Stacks of Books Will Save What Remains of Western Civilization.” I sympathize with Williams’ thinking but suspect she’s working a little too hard to convince herself (and us) that she’s genuinely hopeful: 

“In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.”

 

My first reaction was to think of the “home libraries” I’ve seen that might as well be collections of Hummel figures or bowling trophies. In other words, junk books. Often, the response to this is, “Well, at least he’s reading something.” I find little comfort in that. And a growing number of the literate are aliterate. They read stop signs (usually) but not books. I disregard her concern for the “aesthetics” of home libraries. My only concern is convenience: Can I find the book I’m looking for?

 

Williams is more persuasive when she addresses the impact of reading on family. Kids who regularly see their parents reading are likelier to become readers themselves. No guarantees, but if books are readily available the kids have a fighting chance. Humans are complicated, and predicting their behavior is a mug’s game. My parents were not readers and we had few books in the house. Today is a good time to be an enthusiastic reader. Books bought or borrowed have never been more conveniently available. Williams writes:

 

“Be bold, fill your home with physical books—lots of them!—and see what happens. The results of this particular experiment are nearly guaranteed. But it also requires the parents to live the same bookish life that they would like to instill in their children—a life in which books are cherished companions and a delight to share with family and friends, rather than just that thing one does alone with much visceral suffering and only because of a school requirement.”

 

Based solely on my experience, I question her final thought. I’ve always been a solitary reader. Collective reading, like almost collective anything, would shut me down. About the accuracy of Williams’ closing sentence I have no doubts: “It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught.” Especially today. When it comes to making books readily available, perhaps within arm’s reach, I’m reminded of C.H. Sisson writing in “On Translating Dante,” the introduction to his version of The Divine Comedy (1980):

 

“[A]ll literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance.”

'Uneven, Irregular, and Multiform Movement'

“There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications.”

 

Driving while reading is discouraged. Once, in Bellevue, Wash., while stopped at a red light, I was intoxicated by the book propped against the wheel until a cop pulled up, rolled down his window and barked, “You gonna move?” I hadn't let the green light distract me. I apologized and moved.  

 

The Oxford English Dictionary includes an alternative definition of intoxication apart from the contemporary usage, one obsolete since the eighteenth century: “The action of corrupting a person morally or spiritually.” Yes, books have done that to me, too, on occasion, though not often since I left puberty. The current meaning, as defined by the OED -- “having lost control of one’s behaviour or mental faculties” -- also applies to books.

 

Logan Pearsall Smith’s best-known quip is “Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading,” so the sentence at the top comes as no surprise. You’ll find it in his essay on Montaigne (1918) in Reperusals and Re-Collections (1937). The rest of the opening paragraph goes like this:

 

“We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.”

 

Smith calls it a “youthful susceptibility” but I find that book-intoxication remains in remission into adulthood and periodically flares into recurrence. That’s what has happened to me since August when my brother died in hospice. A few days before his death we talked about Montaigne’s understanding of death. Smith defines Montaigne’s place among the world’s writers:

 

“[H]e did something which brought him into worse discredit. It was a strange, unheard-of, undignified thing to do, a thing that had never been done before, and indeed has never been done since with the same boldness. For Montaigne told the truth about himself, he threw off his clothes and took himself to pieces in public.”

 

Miraculously, the Frenchman seldom comes off as a tiresome narcissist. Rather, he's thinking about us while talking about himself. Smith continues:

 

“He did not indeed begin with this design; the amazing simplicity and interest of it dawned gradually upon him, and grew clearer and clearer as he proceeded. For this reason a beginner in Montaigne will do well to read the later essays first, for it is in these that he carries out his purpose with the completest frankness, turning his detached, disinterested mind on his own personality, and giving a long account, not of his actions, but of his essence and being.”

 

This is true. Think of those great, later essays, like “Of Some Verses of Virgil” and “Of Experience.” In “Three Kinds of Association,” written in this final phase, 1585-88 (he died in 1592), he writes:

 

“Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends to ourselves, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about. I say this now because I cannot easily shake off the importunity of my soul, which cannot ordinarily apply itself unless it becomes wrapped up in a thing, or be employed unless with tension and with its whole being.”

 

If read aloud in a blindfold test, this passage might be mistaken for the product of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century sensibility. He sounds like our contemporary. Later in the same essay he writes:

 

“[F]ew conversations hold my interest if devoid of vigor and effort. It is true that pleasantness and beauty satisfy and occupy me as much as weight and depth, or more. And inasmuch as I grow sleepy in any other sort of conversation, and lend it only the rind of my attention, it often happens in such abject and feeble sort of talk, small talk, that I make silly and stupid remarks and replies, ridiculous and unworthy of a child, or, still more awkwardly and impolitely, maintain an obstinate silence. I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.”

 

Few passages in all of literature remind me so immediately of myself. “Perhaps not only in his attitude towards truth,” Smith writes, “but in his attitude towards himself, Montaigne was a precursor. Perhaps here again he was ahead of his own time, ahead of our time also, since none of us would have the courage to imitate him.”

 

[All quotes from Montaigne are taken from The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame, 1957.]

''In Prose, Plain as Pike, Pillory'

Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was an Irish poet of the generation after Yeats, the slightly older contemporary of Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh. In 1968 he published A Sermon on Swift and Other Poems, and the 117-line title poem appeared in The Massachusetts Review in 1970. Here’s a brief excerpt: 

“In prose, plain as pike, pillory,

In octosyllabic verse turning the two-way

Corner of rhyme, Swift wrote of privy matters

That have to be my text. The Lilliputian

March-by of the crack regiments saluting

On high the double pendulosity

Of Gulliver, glimpsed through a rent in his breeches;

The city square in admiration below. But who

Could blame the Queen when that almighty

Man hosed the private apartments of her palace,

Hissed down the flames of carelessness, leaving

The royal stables unfit for Houyhnhnms, or tell (in

A coarse aside) what the gigantic maidens

Of Brobdingnag did in their playfulness with

The tiny Lemuel when they put him astride

A pap, broader than the mizzen mast of his

Wrecked ship, or hid him in the tangle below." 

 

Clarke reminds us of three scenes from Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The first is set in Lilliput, where the emperor commands Gulliver to stand in a field with his legs wide apart while the army rides through the giant’s arch:

 

“His Majesty gave Orders, upon pain of Death, that every Soldier in his March should observe the strictest Decency with regard to my Person; which, however, could not prevent some of the younger Officers from turning up their Eyes as they passed under me. And, to confess the Truth, my Breeches were at that time in so ill a Condition, that they afforded some Opportunities for Laughter and Admiration.”

 

That may stand as my favorite phrase in Swift, the arch-coiner of memorable phrases: “Laughter and Admiration”—rooted, of course, in exhibitionism, voyeurism, and a joyous sense of smutty-mindedness. In a distinctly Irish phrase, worthy of Flann O’Brien, Clarke refers chastely to “double pendulosities.” Next, Gulliver is briefly a hero when he puts out the fire in the Lilliputian empress’ quarters:

 

“I had, the Evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious Wine called Glimigrim . . . which is very diuretic. By the luckiest Chance in the World, I had not discharged myself of any Part of it. The Heat I had contracted by coming very near the Flames, and by labouring to quench them, made the Wine begin to operate by Urine; which I voided in such a Quantity, and applied so well to the proper Places, that in three Minutes the Fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble Pile, which had cost so many Ages in erecting, preserved from Destruction.”

 

The empress, however, “conceiv[ed] the greatest abhorrence of what I had done,” leading to Gulliver’s eventual escape from Lilliput. Because of such raucous humor, Gulliver’s Travels must be among the most frequently bowdlerized of classics, and most readers probably have never read Gulliver’s description of the gigantic Brobdinagian maid who put Gulliver to use, also mentioned by Clarke:

 

“The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant frolicksome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples; with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular.”

 

Clarke is reminding us that Swift’s work shouldn’t be censored or confused with “dirty books.” His taste for bawdy and scatology is never prurient. It may be obscene but it’s never pornographic. Even so gifted a reader as Dr. Johnson failed to appreciate Swift’s peculiar genius:    

 

“The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas, from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust. The ideas of pleasure, even when criminal, may solicit the imagination; but what has disease, deformity, and filth, upon which the thoughts can be allured to dwell?”

'Sacrifice and Doom'

Scholars of Russian literature tell us the edition of Anton Chekhov’s letters published between 1944 and 1951 was heavily censored by Soviet editors, filled with ellipses that signify an excised word, phrase or sentence. Nothing surprising here. Censorship is an obligatory tool of every totalitarian regime, even when applied to their greatest writers. As Simon Karlinsky puts it: 

“There are cuts made for political and nationalistic considerations, as when Chekhov makes too much of life in Western Europe or fails to sound patriotic enough to suit the Stalinist censor.” Karlinsky goes on to identify another category of deletions: “There are cuts of passages that mention Jews, because the word he uses for ‘Jew’ is zhid. Though ugly and highly pejorative when used by a present-day anti-Semite, this happened to be the normal word for Jew in the South Russian dialect Chekhov grew up speaking. (When Chekhov does in fact wish  to use an anti-Jewish epithet, he chooses a different word, shmul, which was also carefully deleted.) Even a passage that compares newly hatched nightingale fledglings to naked Jewish children was not allowed to appear in print.”

 

In the Winter 1973-74 issue of European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, Chekhov’s future biographer Donald Rayfield reminds us in “What Did Jews Mean to Chekhov?” that the writer was born in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, more than seven-hundred miles south of Moscow. The city had “a cosmopolitan population of Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars and Moldavians” – and Russians. Rayfield writes: “The Jew was for Chekhov not an anthropological subject in himself or herself: he or she represented a more extreme example of human anguish, rootlessness or subjugation, which could provide the material for many more imaginary characters.”

 

Rayfield reviews Chekhov’s dealings with Jews in his writings and life, and tells us he “associated Jewishness in his work with sacrifice and doom.” Chekhov’s friendship with his editor Alexi Suvorin cooled and largely ended over the Dreyfus case and Suvorin’s growing anti-Semitism. In 1903, a year before Chekhov’s death, Solomon Rabinovich – better known as Sholom Aleichem – asked him to contribute a story to a collection he was editing to benefit victims of the pogrom in Kishinev. “Since Chekhov was not able to supply a new story,” Karlinsky writes, “Sholom Aleichem selected his earlier piece, ‘Difficult People,’ which was translated into Yiddish and included in the collection.”   

 

Jump forward almost almost seventy-five years. “Strangers” is a brief autobiographical piece by Irving Howe written in 1977 and included in his Selected Writings 1950-1990. Howe writes:

 

“I remember Isaac Rosenfeld, the most winning of all American Jewish writers, once explaining to me with comic solemnity that Chekhov had really written in Yiddish but Constance Garnett, trying to render him respectable, had falsified the record. Anyone with half an ear, said Rosenfeld, could catch the tunes of Yiddish sadness, absurdity, and humanism in Chekhov’s prose – and for a happy moment it almost seemed true.” 

 

[Karlinsky’s quotes are taken from Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973).]

'An Echo of a Song a Stranger Sang'

I’m reminded of my age only when someone holds a door open for me (That’s my job!) or performs some other courtesy. I was returning to my car from the university library, carrying a canvas tote bag of books, walking with the aid of my cane, as usual, when a young man asked if he could carry them for me. A complicated set of reactions: 1). That’s what a boy asks a girl. 2). Do I look like a cripple? 3). Thoughtfulness and good manners aren’t extinct after all.  

The essential image of ourselves we carry around with us doesn’t really age. We’re simultaneously twelve, forty-three and whatever age we happen to be at the moment. I’ve known too many who are preoccupied with getting older, an obsession now exploited by multiple industries. Dr. Johnson puts it like this in The Rambler on September 8, 1750:

 

 "To secure to the old that influence which they are willing to claim, and which might so much contribute to the improvement of the arts of life, it is absolutely necessary that they give themselves up to the duties of declining years, and contentedly resign to youth its levity, its pleasures, its frolics, and its fopperies. It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age and retain the playthings of childhood.”

 

Some regard youthfulness as their most valuable possession, and it evaporates. The notion of age as a sort of rapprochement with existence seems to be disappearing. Time to learn the pleasures of memory. Here is Dick Davis’ poem “Leaving the Fair”:

 

“Imagine that you’re at a raucous fair,

The kind you went to sixty years ago—

The beckoning booths, just pennies for a throw,

Loud barkers, louder hawkers everywhere,

Such promises of pleasure in the air . . .

A plunging carousel, a puppet show,

A tent for movies, Marilyn Monroe

Fixing the tumult with her glaucous stare.

 

“And now you walk away from all its noise,

The too bright colors busy in your mind

But less so since you’re leaving them behind

As if you knew they’re someone else’s toys.

That’s what old age is like . . . the whole shebang

An echo of a song a stranger sang.”

 

Davis turned seventy-nine last April. I turn seventy-two later this month.

 

[Davis’ poem is included in Love in Another Language (Carcanet, 2017).]

'One's Lucidity Is Shaken'

“This is beyond imagining: one’s lucidity is shaken. Difficult to think clearly.” 

As the horrors piled up, the twentieth century taught us to accept such expressions as useful and accurate, not hyperbole, though the events defied belief and understanding, and often still do. The slaughter seemed endless but contemporaries couldn’t believe it and some still deny it – Armenians, Jews, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians and others murdered by the millions on an industrial scale.

 

The Black Book of Polish Jewry was an early attempt to document the Holocaust. It was published in 1943 by the American Federation of Polish Jews and edited by Jacob Apenszlak and others. Among its sponsors were Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. Critics complained the report underestimates the true scale of the mass extermination. It estimates that the number of Polish Jews murdered by the fourth year of the war had exceeded 700,000.

 

Victor Serge was exiled in Mexico when he wrote the sentence quoted at the top. He was reading the Black Book and writing in his Notebooks 1936-1947 (trans. Richard Greeman and Mitchell Abidor, 2019) on November 12, 1944:

 

“Repeated a hundred times with technically organized variants of sadism and bestiality, the same tale of violence, insults, and finally of rationalized extermination in purpose-built factories. Counting Russian Jews, this must add up to three million murdered—at least: an entire people.”

 

I’ve had an interest in Serge (1890-1947) since the late Sixties when I found a remaindered copy of his 1931 novel Birth of Our Power (trans. Greeman, 1967) in, of all places, a hardware/lumber store. Serge’s political metamorphosis – anarchist, Bolshevik, anti-Stalin Left Oppositionist – mirrored that of millions, many of whom were murdered by Stalin and his goons.

 

Serge was close to Trotsky. Unlike him and many of his comrades, Serge died of natural causes. He remained a dedicated revolutionary and Marxist, though he seems to have had a conscience of sorts, a vestigial moral sense. And he could write, a rare gift among political extremists of any stripe. While in Mexico he observed: “Few people know that the so-called Soviet regime is totalitarian. And among those who are aware of this, many admire it for just this reason.”

 

Serge speculates on the operation and organization of the camps: “Probably all the personnel selected for the horrible tasks,” he writes, “are then killed themselves: either the agents become dangerous half madmen or the system plans in advance for the disappearance of such witnesses.” Clearly, he’s thinking of Stalin during the Great Purge murdering the Old Bolsheviks and other loyal communists. But unlike many on the Left, Serge is not naïve about human nature when describing the Nazi atrocities:

 

“In reality the system appealed to destructive instincts, to sadism, to the castration complex in choosing a few thousand brutes ready to do anything. It’s not difficult to find one hundred thousand out of sixty-five million inhabitants, and these hundred thousand are largely sufficient for all tasks.”

 

Serge could be describing ongoing events in the Middle East -- Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Jew-hating functionaries. There’s seldom a shortage of volunteers eager to perform such work. “No civilized man,” Serge writes, “is certain he won’t be either murdered or executed or killed by a rocket-propelled bomb.”

 

I wish more people would read the fiction of Tadeusz Borowski (1922-51), a non-Jewish Pole sent in 1943 first to Auschwitz-Birkenau, then to the sub-camp at Natzweiler-Struthof in Germany, and finally to Dachau. A collection of his stories was published in English in 1967, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (trans. Barbara Vedder). I read his stories as though they were a sacred text. I had never read anything so grim. A warning: events recounted in his stories are shockingly violent. Atrocities are performed casually by German guards and kapos among the prisoners, and Borowski narrates them in a voice almost clinical. There’s no melodrama.

 

Finally, in 2021, Yale University Press published a more complete edition, Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories (trans. Madeline G. Levine), with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). The earlier collection’s title story is here translated as “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas.” Its narrator works on the ramp beside the railroad tracks (as Borowski did), unloading the train cars filled with prisoners. At one point he pulls back from the scene and describes the larger context. In effect, he tries to make sense of the Holocaust and suggests it may continue without end:

 

“The transports grow into weeks, months, years. When the war ends, they will count up the incinerated. They will calculate a total of four and a half million. The bloodiest battle of the war, the greatest victory of united and unanimous Germany. Ein Reich, ein Volk,  ein Führer – and four crematoriums. . . . The Jews will burn, the Poles will burn, the Russians will burn . . . . The gas chambers will be improved, made more efficient, will be more cunningly disguised.”

 

Borowski survived the camps. Like Paul Celan, Jean Améry and Primo Levi he committed suicide. He was twenty-eight.

'In Constant Repair'

“In the streets I saw two men meet after a long separation, it was plain. They came forward with a little run and LEAPED at each other’s hands. You never saw such bright eyes as they both had. It put one in a good humour to see it.”

Yet again I’ve heard the small-minded slur that people whose contact is strictly digital cannot be considered genuine friends. If that were the case, woe is me, I’m a miserably friendless hermit. Those who say such things underestimate the human capacity for intimacy and trust. I think of Helene Hanff, Frank Doel and their epistolary friendship as documented in the former’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970) – and the 1987 film version with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. They never met yet it’s fair to call their friendship a love story.

Friendships begin and evolve though natural selection, regardless of environmental conditions. I prefer the company of people who are smart, not infatuated with themselves, at least a tad bookish and reliably able to make me laugh. Those friendships tend to survive and even reproduce. Whether the friend lives in Houston or Burkina Faso makes no difference. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s unlikely but enduring friendship with Henry James.

The passage at the top is from a letter Stevenson wrote to his friend Fanny Sitwell on October 4, 1873. Stevenson was young, not quite twenty-three, and a little infatuated with Sitwell, married and eleven years his senior. Unlike many of us, Stevenson had a positive gift for friendship. To some degree I think we choose as friends people who can entertain us. Who wants the company of dullards? Friendship is not a form of charity, nor is it passive. It requires maintenance. I don’t always follow Dr. Johnson’s advice to Boswell: “If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.” Every time I read that sentence, I tell myself: “I really should call So-and So.”

In Chapter 4 of Lay Morals (1889), Stevenson tells us “. . . no man is useless while he has a friend,” even if that friend is a scattering of electrons on a screen.

'There Are Many Real Things of Beauty Here'

A reader sent me a screed against beauty he had found online. The writer wasn’t advocating its opposite, ugliness, exactly, though his prose definitely leans in that direction. Only a graduate-school alumnus could come up with such silly ideas. Rather, he seemed to be saying that beauty is an impertinence, a distraction from the important things. You can guess what they are. 

I try to avoid generalizations because men and women are by nature complicated and even contradictory, and understanding is always contingent, but I’ve observed a correlation between the absence of an aesthetic sense and a severe humor deficit. Agreed: beauty is often sentimentalized. It isn’t all kitty cats and daisies (though those things are often beautiful). In fact, it’s one of life’s great consolations.

 

Days before his death my brother pointed to the window from his hospice bed. Outside was a black locust tree. We had one in our yard as kids. It was a sunny, breezy day in Cleveland and the window was open. The leaves of a locust are described by botanists as “pinnately compound” – pairs of leaflets arranged, fern-like, on a stem. The tree was fluttering in the breeze and Ken, who was almost beyond language, smiled and said: “Look at the tree!” It was one of the last things he ever said.

 

In the March 1948 issue of Horizon, the late William Jay Smith published a poem, “Independence Day,” with a memorable opening:

 

“Life is inadequate, but there are many real

Things of beauty here: the flower-peddler’s cart

Adrift like an island in the city streets,

The peddler’s mare, lifting her mighty hoof

Aware of all that beauty. And the slate

Where the schoolboy draws his forty-eight

States, ready to make room for the world.”

 

And then, in the second stanza: “There are real things of beauty; all / These things were yours.” And in the third: “There are real things of beauty / Here; and sorrow is our praise.”

'You Have to Read the Words'

“Tolstoy was so much better than any other writer who ever lived that you couldn’t even remotely compare anyone to him.” 

I first read War and Peace in the eighth grade in a paperback abridgement. I remember reading it in science class, half-heartedly hiding the book behind the girl who sat in front of me. The teacher, a basketball coach and thus not much of a teacher, got angry and loudly told me to put it away. I was reading it like a thriller, strictly for plot, so I resented the interruption. Like generations of previous male readers I had fallen in love with Natalya Ilyinichna Rostova -- Natasha. War and Peace had the intimidating reputation for being that big book, which was part of the reason I was reading it, as I would Ulysses a few years later. My late brother on his Blogger profile said of his favorite books: “I like ’em big.”  

 

I was falling for Russian literature – again, like generations of earlier readers. The swoon remains in effect. A part of me still thinks that every other literature – even Shakespeare and his contemporaries -- are secondary to the Russians, somehow not quite serious. Who can rival them for gravitas of sensibility? Shakespeare? Proust? No American, not even Melville or Henry James, comes close. Even as I name them, they seem somehow inadequate. Clarence Brown, translator and advocate for the Mandelstams in the West, edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (1985), a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In his introduction he says provocatively and correctly:

 

“I now look back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will prevent your sharing. These writers, after all, continue in our time the tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of the three supreme literatures of the world.”

 

In college I read the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of War and Peace, unabridged. Later came the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky version. It’s a novel that lastingly populates your imagination. A reader has written to ask if he should read War and Peace. Is it as good as its forbidding reputation suggests? The sentence quoted at the top is from an interview with Gary Saul Morson. Don’t be intimidated, I’ve told my reader. Morson is a thoughtful, prudent man, not given to hyperbole. See his discussion of War and Peace in his most recent book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russians on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press, 2023). Tolstoy’s people are Ur-humans; in short, us. Clive James writes in his review of the BBC’s film version of War and Peace:     

 

“Tolstoy’s greatest book is the way it is because he thought he was everybody. He had pretensions to philosophy – screen versions sensibly leave all that out – but his universality was not just intellectual, it was instinctive. No human feeling was unknown to him, but looking at the pictures can give you only some of that: you have to read the words.”

'Speak Knowledge Meagerly and Piteously'

“Montaigne is heavy going, it has to be said.” 

For once the commonsensical Jules Renard is wrong. There’s no context for the remark in his journal (October 1, 1898), so I take his words as given. Montaigne’s prose, at least in translation, seems clear and readily understood. The classical tags can slow you down but his essays often read with a modern clarity and verve. His sensibility is quick and curious, and he’s blessed with a spacious memory. One thought leads rapidly to the next and then to a remark by Plutarch or Seneca. His mind is a river. In a late essay, “Of Physiognomy,” he returns to his recurrent theme – preparations for our deaths:

 

“We trouble our life by concern about death, and death by concern about life.  One torments us, the other frightens us. It is not against death that we prepare ourselves; that is too momentary a thing. A quarter hour of suffering, without consequence, without harm, does not deserve any particular precepts. To tell the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations for death.”

 

The theme may be “heavy going” but not its expression. The prose is as clean and orderly as a syllogism. He next takes up the trial and death of Socrates. After quoting the philosopher at length he writes: “Besides, isn’t the method of arguing that Socrates uses here equally admirable in its simplicity and its vigor? Truly it is much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than it is to talk and live like Socrates. There lies the extreme degree of perfection and difficulty; art cannot reach it.”

 

Montaigne is unashamedly devoted to scrutinizing his “I.” Can you think of another writer who takes himself as his principal subject and yet is not a narcissist? Next he reflects on his own reliance on allusions, most often classical. This is one of those moments in Montaigne when we sense the presence of a living, breathing, fretting, pondering man sitting across the table from us and talking:

 

“Even so someone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other people’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them. Indeed I have yielded to public opinion in carrying these borrowed ornaments about on me. But I do not intend that they should cover and hide me; that is the opposite of my design, I who wish to make a show only of what is my own, and of what is naturally my own; and if I had taken my own advice I would at all hazards have spoken absolutely all alone. I load myself with these borrowings more and more heavily every day beyond my intention and my original form, following the fancy of the age and the exhortation of others. If it is unbecoming to me, as I believe it is, no matter; it may be useful to someone else.”

 

Here it seems that Montaigne speaks for me. We quote because someone else has already said it better. Montaigne’s proud humility is inspiring: “I speak ignorance pompously and opulently, and speak knowledge meagerly and piteously, the latter secondarily and accidentally, the former expressly and principally.”

 

A Howard Nemerov poem in Gnomes & Occasions (1973) shares a title with Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience”:

 

“Nature from life by piece and piece

Gently disparts us; power fails

Before desire does. It needs not sex

To illustrate what Montaigne saith.

But only what’s befallen X—

Now he no longer has his teeth

He can no longer bite his nails.”

 

Dispart is a rare word meaning "to separate" or "divide."

 

[The Renard sentence comes from his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020). The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]

'In a More Just World'

Our youngest son’s bedroom has lately turned into an overstuffed warehouse. Last year, as a junior at Rice, he lived off-campus in an apartment. This year he’s back in a dormitory so most of his “housewares” – clothing, dishes and utensils, tchotchkes – have been heaped in his room. Books were stacked on every horizontal surface. My job on Sunday was to organize them on the shelves. They reflected every era of David’s twenty-one years, from R.L. Stine to A Presocratics Reader. 

One book surprised me: a first edition, without a dustjacket, of The Just and the Unjust, James Gould Cozzens’ 1942 novel about a murder trial. David is in prelaw so finding the book among all the others makes sense. I rank it as Cozzens’ second-best novel after Guard of Honor (1948), though I haven't read Cozzens in years. Once a bestseller, his reputation has evaporated among critics and general readers. I won’t even try to rally the troops. Cozzens might as well have written in Linear B.  

 

Cozzens (1903-78) dedicated the novel to Edward G. Biester. Poking around online, I see that Biester was a lawyer who served as prosecutor and judge in Pennsylvania. He and Cozzens met during a trial in 1939 and became friends. Cozzens relied on him for legal accuracy. In his defense of Cozzens’ work, Joseph Epstein writes of The Just and the Unjust: “A very strong sense emerges of how the law in its daily operations works which I, for one, find fascinating.” The novel, as I recall it, has a documentary flavor without losing its narrative momentum.

 

Beneath the dedication, Cozzens adds a Latin tag, “Cuilibet in arte sua perito est credendum,” which he attributes to “Coke on Littleton, 125.” A rough translation: “Everyone must be trusted as an expert in their craft.” Coke I recognized as Sir Edward Coke (1551-1634), the English barrister, judge and legal scholar. The volume referred to is The Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628-44), one of the basic texts of common law.

 

Biester was likely “an expert in [his] craft,” as was Cozzens. As Epstein puts it: “In a more just world, James Gould Cozzens would be accorded a volume in the Library of America . . .”

'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers'

“All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche in literary history -- Henry Green’s Loving and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune's Maggot have both deservedly achieved this status through the persistence of a small band of admirers.” 

I understand the impulse but question it. It’s easy to get abusively idealistic. What’s the use of plumping for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa or the Goncourt Brothers if people no longer read or remain merely “voracious readers,” to use Nige’s phrase? That’s a question I’ve stopped asking myself after coming up with an answer that will satisfy no one, including me: We do it out of self-respect and, if you’ll pardon the expression, love. Some of us still love good books and sharing our enthusiasm with like-minded people. It feels like an obligation. The impulse is a good one, at least until we start getting resentful if no one is listening. Ours is the age of reduced literacy and a renewed enthusiasm for ”cancelling” the past. Sometimes it seems as though all writers are, to use Michael Holroyd’s word cited above, “unfashionable.”

 

Holroyd is the author of a two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey and four volumes devoted to the life of George Bernard Shaw. His essay “Out of Print” is published in the Spring 1970 issue of The American Scholar. Holroyd’s first book was a 1964 critical biography of Hugh Kingsmill, one of many forgotten English critics and anthologists. Six years later Holroyd published The Best of Hugh Kingsmill: Selections from his Writings. His introduction begins:

 

“Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of the opposition.”

 

In the essay, Holroyd’s tone is politely combative, but it’s no longer 1970 when a critic could still ask, “[W]hy doesn't someone start a library of autobiographies, from Benjamin Haydon to Edwin Muir and Gerald Brenan's A Life of One's Own? A country that neglects such books doesn't deserve to have them.” And, in effect, doesn’t have them.

 

[Holroyd’s essay serves as a sort of introduction to “Comments on Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years” in the same issue of The American Scholar. The editors ask fifty-three writers and critics to identify books deserving of rescue.]

'The Censure of Knaves and Fools'

“Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sense of gloomy wretchedness.” 

And that’s just from the introduction to his Life of Johnson. Anyone who dismisses James Boswell as a sort of idiot savant, “a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect,” as Macaulay famously wrote of him, is naïve about human nature. Boswell is describing Dr. Johnson’s father, Michael (1657-1731), an excellent bookman, a good father and a poor businessman in Lichfield.

 

I found the Boswell passage above in a most unexpected place: as the epigraph to David Mamet’s most recent book, Everywhere an Oink Oink (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which carries one of those fashionably long subtitles, presumably concocted by an editor: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood. I like Mamet’s prose. He’s a master of American Demotic. He’s funny, smart and uninhibited. I’ve never seen one of his plays on the stage but I enjoyed three movies he wrote and directed: House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1997).

 

I haven’t yet started reading the book but I wanted to see if Mamet develops the Boswellian or Johnsonian theme. In the index there is a single reference to to Johnson -- nine paragraphs of footnote on Page 174.The first begins “For the artist all criticism is devastating . . .”  Here’s part of the fourth:

 

“Samuel Johnson said the censure of knaves and fools is applause: a phrase rendered in the vernacular as ‘Fuck ’em all but six for pallbearers, and fuck them, too.’”

'The Important Medium''

I grew up in a place I’ve been told for most of my life should embarrass me. When I went to college and someone asked where I came from, invariably I said “Cleveland” not “Parma Heights,” a suburb on the West Side of that city. By age seventeen I was already sensitive to the snobbery of would-be sophisticates when it came to the suburbs.

Mine was not one of the swankier suburbs already associated in literature with John Cheever’s stories and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Our neighbors were working class and most were first- or second-generation Slavs. The only people I ever met who had gone to college were teachers and doctors. Some stereotypes held: the obsession with lawncare and washing the car every weekend in the summer. People were proud of what they had. My paternal grandfather and his three sons built our house after tearing down the cottage that had been their home until after World War II.

We had it good. The Fifties and Sixties were a prosperous time for many American families. My father was a union ironworker and on the side worked as an auxiliary police officer. My mother was a tax clerk for the city. We had plenty of problems but money wasn’t one of them. Our suburb, in retrospect, was a safe enclave. I don’t remember anyone worrying about crime.

These thoughts were prompted by a reader, one I hadn’t heard from before, who launched into an anti-suburb screed. He congratulated me for coming from “a real city,” not a “boring commuter haven.” Sorry, but Parma Heights was not a hip urban center. I remembered an essay written by the poet Phyllis McGinley in 1950, “Suburbia: Of Thee I Sing.” She celebrates her suburb, which she calls Spruce Manor:

“It is a commuters’ town, and the epitome of suburbia. By day, with the children pent in schools, it is a village of women. They trundle baskets at the A&P, they sit under driers at the hairdressers’, they sweep their porches and set out bulbs and stitch up slip covers.”

McGinley and her family lived in Larchmont, a suburb of New York City in Westchester County more affluent than Parma Heights. “Few of us expect to be wealthy or world-famous or divorced,” she writes. “What we do expect is to pay off the mortgage and send healthy children to good colleges.” Who could object to that? Snobs, of course, the insecure haute bourgeoisie.

McGinley (1905-78) is a poet erased from cultural memory. She called herself a “housewife poet,” without irony. Auden loved her and wrote an introduction to Times Three (1960), her collected poems that went through seven printings in six years. In “Suburbia: Of Thee I Sing,” she writes:

“I think that someday people will look back on our Spruce Manor way of life with nostalgia and respect. In a world of terrible extremes it will stand out as the important medium.”