`He Would Have Received You With All Kindness'

Some writers are part of one’s mental furniture, as solid and dependable as a couch. Others, though fondly recalled, hardly amount to cobwebs on the ceiling, fragile filaments of association with scant content. Such is Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855), an English poet with a nickname worthy of a Mafioso. Nige sits on Rogers’ bench in London and reconjures for me this “poet and conversationalist”:

“Rogers was one of those figures who loom very large in their time, less for what they have written but for their conversation – Rogers’ was sharp, fluent and witty, by all accounts – and their prodigious abilities as mixers. He moved in the highest circles, both literary and social – the kind of man who knew everybody and was invited everywhere.”

Perhaps I read Rogers, or about him, in school, but the memory evaporated like morning dew. Guy Davenport reanimated him for me, as he did so many writers, speaking of him with affection, like an old if not terribly consequential friend. I had noted parenthetical mentions of “Breakfast” in his essays, and asked Davenport about him in 1990 when I visited his home in Lexington, Ky. He recalled Rogers with the fondness we reserve for benign but essentially silly aunts and uncles. In the title essay of The Geography of the Imagination (1980), Davenport writes:

“Shelley had put Petra in a poem as soon as Burckhardt discovered it: it is one of the places the wandering youth visits in Alastor; the others are taken from Volney’s Les Ruines (1791), which had also inspired Queen Mab and The Daemon of the World. [John William] Burgon, stealing half a line from Samuel Rogers’ Italy, makes Petra `half as old as time,’ for creation was still an event dated 4004 B.C.”

In “Travel Reconsidered” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996) Davenport notes:

“Swiss and French travelers made ruins fashionable and invented Shelley. Wordsworth invented the Alps and taught us that waterfalls are grand. Byron organized these new feelings about travel into so many romantic thrills (`Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’ 1812) and Samuel `Breakfast’ Rogers organized them (in his poem `Italy,’ 1822) for the less strenuous.”

And in “Horace and Walt in Camden" (The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing, 2003), Davenport writes:

“Goethe’s Johann Peter Eckermann, Samuel Johnson’s Boswell, Ben Jonson’s Laird of Hawthornden: to all of these interlocutors we are grateful for leaving a record. There are people remembered only for their talk: the infinitely witty Sydney Smith, the champion gossip Samuel `Breakfast’ Rogers; and, to a substantial degree, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Oscar Wilde.”

Rogers was a friend to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Tennyson and the Duke of Wellington, and best friend to the comparably well-nicknamed Richard “Conversation” Sharp. Charles Lamb wrote a sonnet to him. Dickens dedicated Master Humphrey's Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop to Rogers, who boasted that he had entertained three American presidents in his home – John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore – as well as Daniel Webster, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Hershel Parker in Herman Melville: A Biography 1819-1851 (1996) reports that the American novelist

“…arose early on [Dec. 20, 1849] to accept the honor of breakfasting alone with Samuel Rogers, whom he found a `remarkable looking old man truly,’ and whose paintings he found superb. Rogers paid him the high compliment of inviting him back to meet some ladies on Sunday.”

My edition of Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856) was published in 1953 by the University of Kansas Press. It begins like this, in the manner of Uncle Toby:

“I was taught by my mother, from my earliest infancy, to be tenderly kind towards the meanest living thing; and, however people may laugh, I sometimes very carefully put a stray gnat or wasp out at the window.—My friend Lord Holland, though a kind-hearted man, does not mind killing flies and wasps; he says, `I have no feeling for insects.’”

The book is full of such tidbits, toothsome if not always filling. (It might be noted that Davenport put out bowls of sugar water to attract bees and wasps, and spare them the fly-swatter.) Rogers is reported saying:

“My friend [William] Maltby and I, when we were very young men, had a strong desire to see Dr. Johnson; and we determined to call upon him and introduce ourselves. We accordingly proceeded to his house in Bolt Court; and I had my hand on the knocker, when our courage failed us, and we retreated. Many years afterwards, I mentioned this circumstance to Boswell, who said, `What a pity that you did not go boldly in! he would have received you with all kindness.’”

Here is a sample of Rogers’ gift for economical storytelling:

“One night, after dining at Kensington Palace, I was sitting in the carriage, waiting for Sir Henry Englefield to accompany me to town, when a sentinel, at about twenty yards distance from me, was struck dead by a flash of lightning. I never beheld anything like that flash : it was a body of flame, in the centre of which were quivering zigzag fires, such as artists put into the hand of Jupiter; and, after being visible for a moment, it seemed to explode. I immediately returned to the hall of the Palace, where I found the servants standing in terror, with their faces against the wall.”

Rogers acquired his nickname for the breakfast gatherings (though he might also have been justly named “Dinner”) he hosted at his house in St. James’s Place – thus, Table-Talk. Go here to see “Samuel Rogers at his Breakfast Table,” an engraving by Charles Mottram in the Tate.

'The Accounts of Eminent Men'

“I always distrust the accounts of eminent men by their contemporaries. None of us has any reason to slander Homer or Julius Caesar; but we find it very difficult to divest ourselves of prejudices when we are writing about persons with whom we have been acquainted.” 

Further confirmation of a statement I heard long ago, though I can no longer remember from whom: “Propinquity breeds special relationships.” Whether good or bad, it should be added. It cuts both ways. Homer is reduced to his epics. We know nothing about him, not even if he existed. But I can think of several writers I have met and interviewed from whom I would hide if they were to knock on my front door.

 

The observer quoted above is Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855), the English banker and poet who earned his nickname by hosting social breakfasts at his home in St. James Place, attended by such luminaries as Macaulay and Sydney Smith. Rogers’ preferred medium was conversation (laced heavily with the social grease of gossip). A year after his death, his nephew published Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, based on his uncle’s notebooks, from which the passage at the top is drawn.

 

Rogers befriended Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Tennyson and the Duke of Wellington, and was best friend to the comparably well-nicknamed Richard “Conversation” Sharp. Charles Lamb dedicated a sonnet to him. Dickens dedicated Master Humphrey's Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop to Rogers, who boasted that he had entertained three American presidents in his home – John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore – as well as Daniel Webster, Washington Irving, Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper.

 

Years ago, Guy Davenport, not some dutiful English Lit prof, introduced me to Rogers, which suggests that most worthwhile educations are pursued autodidactically, away from the syllabus. In a letter to Hugh Kenner on December 26, 1964, Davenport recommends that his friend read Rogers’ Table-Talk:

 

“And then find a lazy afternoon and enjoy it. . . . The book defines a civilization now utterly lost. Anecdotes of [Charles James] Fox, [Richard Brinsley] Sheridan, [Jack Horne] Tooke—that gang: all as polished and direct as a sabre.”

 

Here’s a sample of Rogers’ gift for concise, amusing, revealing anecdote (and for impressive namedropping):

 

“While Rousseau was lodging in Chiswick Terrace, [Richard] Fitzpatrick called upon him one day, and had not been long in the room when David Hume entered. Rousseau had lost a favourite dog; and Hume, having exerted himself to recover it, now brought it back to its master, who thanked him with expressions of the most fervent gratitude, and shed tears of joy over the animal.” 

 

Nice to know Rousseau was capable of gratitude, at least when it came to dogs.

 

[The Davenport letter can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint, 2018).]

'Hail, Memory, Hail!'

Beyond a certain age, frayed memory becomes a consistently worrisome theme among contemporaries. (How unfortunate that we don’t forget to talk about it.) Forgetting the name of the group that recorded “My Boyfriend’s Back” in 1963 becomes an ironclad diagnosis of incipient idiocy. We are a self-involved generation. Time to gorge, I'm told, on antioxidants. I wrote to an English friend, a poet who is close to my age: “I've noticed I've been making small mistakes with greater frequency of late -- forgetting names, not noticing typos, etc.” He replied:

 

“Well, if you are deteriorating mentally so am I, the most frightening thing of all my forgetting how to spell words. I also have what I call Small Word Blindness. I either forget to put them in or I don’t notice their absence. My proof-reading has never been good in any case.”

 

I’ve always had a reliable memory. Remembering things, especially dates, came easily. It’s reassuring to remember there’s nothing new about anxiety over memory loss. Listen to the poet Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, 1856):

 

“[Samuel] Boddington had a wretchedly bad memory; and, in order to improve it, he attended [Gregorvon] Feinaigle’s lectures on the Art of Memory. Soon after, some-body asked Boddington the name of the lecturer and, for his life, he could not recollect it. — When I was asked if I had attended the said lectures on the Art of Memory, I replied, ‘No, I wished to learn the Art of Forgetting.’”

 

Like most writers (like most human beings), Rogers has been largely forgotten. He was a witty fellow, good company, known for the breakfasts he held in his London home, attended by such luminaries as Scott, Byron and Turner. During his lifetime, Rogers’ best-known work was probably The Pleasures of Memory, with Other Poems (1802). At it’s heart, the long poem is a celebration of nostalgia:

 

“Hail, Memory, hail! in thy exhaustless mine

From age to age unnumber’d treasures shine!”

 

Rogers was born on this date, July 30, in 1763 and died in 1855 at age ninety-two.

'He Would Have Received You With All Kindness'

Decades as a newspaper reporter turned this introvert into a professional extrovert. Shyness and reticence on the job in that business are liabilities. You learn to be at ease when approaching strangers and asking impertinent questions. Most are at first suspicious, some disturbingly hostile. People naturally don’t want to be bothered. A reporter learns the art of the interview, from charm and flattery to soft intimidation. Inevitably, some will slam the door. Others you can seduce but, as in love, you have to take your time. Getting close to the celebrated and powerful can be frightening, sometimes out of personal vanity. You don’t want to irritate or bore someone you admire. 

Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855) was a minor English poet and tireless gossip who spanned literary generations and movements, survived into the age of Dickens and Victoria, and yet was old enough to have muffed an opportunity to meet Dr. Johnson. He recounts the story in Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856; my edition was published in 1953 by the University of Kansas Press):

 

“My friend [William] Maltby and I, when we were very young men, had a strong desire to see Dr. Johnson; and we determined to call upon him and introduce ourselves. We accordingly proceeded to his house in Bolt Court; and I had my hand on the knocker, when our courage failed us, and we retreated. Many years afterwards, I mentioned this circumstance to Boswell, who said, ‘What a pity that you did not go boldly in! he would have received you with all kindness.’”

 

True, no doubt, but Johnson’s reputation was ferocious. Rogers’ friend Coleridge referred to Johnson’s “bow wow manner.” If Rogers arrived at Bolt Court when he was, say, twenty years old, Johnson would have been seventy-four and within a year of his death. A young man’s timidity is understandable.

  

Rogers goes on to say in his Table-Talk: “Dr. Johnson said to an acquaintance of mine, ‘My other works are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.’ The world now thinks differently.” I’m not sure what he means. Johnson’s periodical essays (The Rambler series in particular), along with his Dictionary, Rasselas and Lives of the Poets, are his enduring works. In his 1977 biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate quotes Rogers quoting Johnson’s remark and writes:

 

“But he was really thinking of the best of them (though there are many good ones), for the series is naturally uneven. As he said in the final essay, the periodical writer who condemns himself twice a week to ‘compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task an attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed . . . a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease.’ It is not always easy to find a subject  quickly, twice a week, to change it in time if the topic proves barren, or to correct and revise before the deadline.”

`Read an Old One'

A reader last week sent me a photograph of the front of a bookshop, the Addyman Annexe in Hay-on-Wye, the fabled “National Book Town of Wales” adjacent to the border with England. A banner hanging below the shop window carries a wise saying attributed to Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855): “When a new book is published, read an old one.” My reader rightly notes: “The sentiment expressed in the attached photo may appeal to you.” Another picture of the shop shows a comparably sagacious sentiment: “Kindles are banned from the Kingdom of Hay.” I’ve tried unsuccessfully to identify the source of the Rogers line (are you there, Dave?), though in Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (ed. the Rev. Alexander Dyce, 1887) I found a sort of playful corollary: “A man who attempts to read all the new publications must often do as a flea does—skip.” 

The obsession with the new and fashionable is puzzling. The present is a small, provincial, generally backward place as compared to the past, which is vast, generous and filled with the promise of adventure. Who would choose to read Douglas Brinkley or Howard Zinn if Plutarch and Henry Adams are sitting handily on the shelf? Who would choose John Ashbery over Fulke Greville? Foucault over Pascal? Lacan over Burton? My hands are full keeping up with the past. Why fret over the self-consuming present? C.S. Lewis diagnosed the ailment as “this mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones,” and offered this practical advice: 

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should read at least one old one to every three new ones.” 

A contemporary of Rogers, William Hazlitt, now a certified author of old books, writes in the same spirit:  

“If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.”

`Guides in the World, Companions in Retreat!'

Less than two months before his death, David Myers posted as a comment on Anecdotal Evidence twelve lines from a poem by Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855), “Epistle to a Friend”: 

“Selected shelves shall claim thy studious hours;

There shall thy ranging mind be fed on flowers!

There, while the shaded lamp's mild lustre streams,

Read antient books, or woo inspiring dreams;

And, when a sage's bust arrests thee there,

Pause, and his features with his thoughts compare.

—Ah, most that Art my grateful rapture calls,

Which breathes a soul into the silent walls;

Which gathers round the Wise of every Tongue,

All on whose words departed nations hung;

Still prompt to charm with many a converse sweet;

Guides in the world, companions in retreat!” 

Only now have I read the entire poem, published by Rogers in 1798 and dedicated to his friend Richard “Conversation” Sharp, and it reads like a posthumous message of indeterminate meaning. David was anti-Romantic and largely unsentimental. Last February, after a grim report from his oncologist (“The doc gives me 18 months, 24 if I’m lucky” – he had seven), he wrote to me: “Prayers, at this point, are probably useless. Financial advice for my kids--that's what I need now!” In his verse letter to Sharp, Rogers is describing what we would call the good life, drawing up a prescription for happiness. In his prose preface to the poem, in which he acknowledges Horace, Pope and Boileau as models, Rogers writes: 

“It is the design of this Epistle to illustrate the virtue of True Taste; and to shew how little she requires to secure, not only the comforts, but even the elegancies of life. True Taste is an excellent Economist. She confines her choice to few objects, and delights in producing great effects by small means…” 

David was contemptuous of taste as a serious arbiter of literary matters. He was after something less likely to shift on a whim. Everyone has opinions (the least important and most tedious things we can know about each other), and most are trifling expressions of vanity. I like the image in the second line of Rogers’ poem quoted above – books as flowers on the “selected shelves.” This hints at ἀνθολογία, “a collection of flowers,” our notion of an anthology. Even better is the final line, Rogers’ metaphors for the books we keep on those shelves, the volumes that sustain us: “Guides in the world, companions in retreat!” David probably would have approved of that much.

`Makes No Promises of Any Sort'

On this date, March 14, in 1752, Johnson published The Rambler #207, the final entry in that two-year sequence of periodical essays and a moral/literary apologia after the fact. In his life of Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate puts it in a Johnsonian manner – that is, bluntly: “The Rambler essays were written, he says, partly as a `relief’ from his work on the Dictionary and partly because he needed the money. But he also intended the work as a serious moral effort.” In Rambler #207, Johnson meditates on the job he has just completed, but also on the vanity and tribulations of writers and, by extension, of all men and women. So dense is the essay in feeling and thought, and so aphoristic has his prose become, we are tempted to underline most of the text. Johnson is quoted by Samuel Rogers as saying, “My other works are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.” I think of several much-neglected writers of my acquaintance when reading this passage: 

“I have no design to gratify pride by submission, or malice by lamentation; nor think it reasonable to complain of neglect from those whose regard I never solicited. If I have not been distinguished by the distributors of literary honours, I have seldom descended to the arts by which favour is obtained. I have seen the meteors of fashions rise and fall, without any attempt to add a moment to their duration. I have never complied with temporary curiosity, nor enabled my readers to discuss the topick of the day. . .” 

Almost boasting, Johnson assesses his own worth as a writer: 

“Whatever shall be the final sentence of mankind, I have at least endeavoured to deserve their kindness. I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations. Something, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence.” 

Purely by coincidence I have been reading for the first time the English poet Vernon Scannell (1922-2007), a contemporary and friend of Philip Larkin. In “The Larkin Room” (The Time for Fires, 1992), Scannell plays off the poem’s epigraph he takes from the Times Literary Supplement: “A Larkin Room is to be established at the University Library.” Instead of the customary mausoleum for a writer, Scannell imagines a room that genuinely reflects the sensibility of its honoree. Close readers of Larkin will know that included in the “fiction, mainly light” found in the Larkin Room is Barbara Pym (“Sly female wit”) and Dick Francis (“rough stuff from the chaps / Who write of race-courses and crooks”). It’s the final stanza (and its muted allusion to “Aubade”), with its suggestion of Larkin’s independence of mind in a time of literary regimentation, his melancholia, modest material needs, mordant humor and indifference to fashion, that most remind me of Johnson: 

“The curtains, faded like a slattern’s skirts,

Conspire to keep the daylight out;

They almost meet, not quite, for one is too short,

Permits thin gleam of sunlight in to flirt

With dancing dust-motes’ prickly rout,

But makes no promises of any sort.”

`Skilled at Table Talk'

I’ve read and found interesting the table talk of Dr. Johnson, William Cowper, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers and Adolf Hitler (ed. H.R. Trevor-Roper, Oxford University Press, 1988). It’s an entertaining and minor literary genre, like limericks and clerihews, and defined by the OED as “the conversation of famous people or of intellectual circles, esp. as reproduced in literary form.” Unlike novels or poems, it’s a form exclusively dependent on the speaker’s other accomplishments. No one would bother to record your table talk, or mine, or, say, Joan Didion’s. A sizeable share of Boswell’s Life of Johnson qualifies as table talk, and Boswell defends its use in his first chapter:

“Of one thing I am certain, that, considering how highly the small portion which we have of the table-talk, and other anecdotes of our celebrated writers is valued, and how earnestly it is regretted that we have not more I am justified in preserving rather too many of Johnson’s sayings, than too few.”

Boswell need not have justified his generous transcriptions of Johnson’s conversation. A great man’s table talk is intrinsically absorbing and worthy of preservation. Even Goethe is almost interesting when conversing with Eckermann. Leave it to the late William F. Buckley to know the one-word synonym for a person gifted at table talk: deipnosophist. I found it in Buckley: The Right Word (ed. Samuel S. Vaughan, Random House, 1996). Vaughan includes a letter from a reader who thanks Buckley for his “ongoing flirtation with abstruse English words,” but wonders why he has never used deipnosophist. “How do you explain this lapse?” the reader asks, and Buckley replies: “The word defines someone `skilled at table talk.’ It is used rarely for the obviously reasons.” Meaning, presumably, that good table talk is a sparse commodity, which is certainly true, though Buckley is off a notch with his definition. Deipnosophist is rooted in the Greek words for “dinner” and “a master of his craft, clever or wise man” (as in the original meaning of sophist), but does refer specifically to a gifted chef or trencherman. Here is the OED definition:

“A master of the art of dining: taken from the title of the [fifteen-volume] Greek work of Athenæus, in which a number of learned men are represented as dining together and discussing subjects which range from the dishes before them to literary criticism and miscellaneous topics of every description.”

The most recent recorded usage dates from 1866. In “Swinburne’s Tragedies,” James Russell Lowell writes: “The eye is the only note-book of the true poet; but a patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious futility, hard to write and harder to read, with about as much nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists.” Who knew Lowell was a comedian?

[Also in Buckley: The Right Word, from the obituary he wrote for Vladimir Nabokov, published in the July 22, 1977 issue of National Review, recounting one of his annual get-togethers with the novelist: “He describes with a fluent synoptic virtuosity the literary scene, the political scene, inflation, bad French, cupiditous publishers, the exciting breakthrough in his son’s operatic career, and what am I working on now?” Elsewhere in the book, Buckley refers to Nabokov’s “philological radiance.”]

`Fresh Grace and More Powerful Attractions'

“My other works are wine and water, but my Rambler is pure wine.”

So Johnson told his friend Samuel Rogers. His estimation must have been bolstered by one of the few recorded remarks left by his wife, Elizabeth “Tetty” Porter, who died in 1752: “I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this.”

Many agree. The two-hundred eight Rambler essays were published on Tuesdays and Saturdays, from 1750 to 1752. It’s remarkable to consider that one of the prose monuments of the language, a document that might rightly be sent into outer space to represent our species, started life as a periodical written to deadlines. W. Jackson Bate writes in his life of Johnson:

“Certainly the Rambler essays were written more rapidly and with less leisure to outline, consider, or improve them than the works of any other major moralist. Many were written without even being read over once by him before they were printed.”

I’ve started a nightly regimen of rereading two or three Rambler essays, in sequence, before going to sleep. I’ve always favored closing the day with familiar texts, not as a soporific but an inducement to thought. I like to think before sleep. On rare occasions, what I’ve read appears in a dream (it happened last week when I found myself walking with cloistered monks in robes after reading Aquinas). More often, I wake with the previous night’s reading, at least a phrase or image, percolating in my consciousness.

Friday morning I woke to this passage from Rambler #3 (March 27, 1750):

"The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them; either to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more powerful attractions, to spread such flowers over the regions through which the intellect has already made its progress, as may tempt it to return, and take a second view of things hastily passed over, or negligently regarded."

The Rambler essays are a bountiful garden of "such flowers.”

[Go here to read The Rambler 1-54; here for 55-112; here for 171-208.]

`Evanescent Brilliancy and Tremulous Imbecility'

In Lectures on the English Poets, William Hazlitt begins his evisceration of Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers and his poem “The Pleasures of Memory” (1792) rather delicately. He calls him “a very lady-like poet.” Given the female poets of the day and Hazlitt’s chronic idiocy when it came to women, that’s mild. He’s just warming up:

“He is an elegant, but feeble writer. He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is full of enigmas with no meaning to them; is studiously inverted, and scrupulously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly because no particular line, or syllable of them reads like prose.”  

Whenever I read a memorably savage takedown by a critic, I automatically think of the contemporary writers to whom it applies. The two sentences quoted serve as a rubber-stamp review for thousands of recent volumes. As described by Hazlitt, Rogers is the template for today’s poets. But Hazlitt isn’t finished. Poetry like Rogers’ is “a tortuous, tottering, wriggling, fidgety translation of every thing from the vulgar tongue, into all the tantalizing, teasing, tripping, lisping mimminie-pimminie of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction.”

Let’s pause for a moment to savor “mimminie-pimminie.” As a noun, two citations show up in the Oxford English Dictionary, both by Hazlitt, including the one just quoted. Clearly, Hazlitt had happened upon a useful word. The OED defines it as “finicky or affected writing; verbosity, prolixity,” and calls it an “alteration” of the adjective “niminy-piminy,” and suggests it might derive from “mim”: “reserved or restrained in manner or behaviour, esp. in a contrived or priggish way; affectedly modest, demure.” It also calls the word “imitative of affected speech,” and I find myself wanting to sound the word sniffily through my nose when I say it aloud. Hazlitt has more on his mind:

“You have nothing like truth of nature or simplicity of expression. The fastidious and languid reader is never shocked by meeting, from the rarest chance in the world, with a single homely phrase or intelligible idea. You cannot see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for the finery, the picture for the varnish. The whole is refined, and frittered away into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancy and tremulous imbecility.”

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to watch a writer having so good a time.

`A Curious Remedy for Present Cares'

“I cannot profess to be a genuine collector of books, I know nothing of positive bibliography; small books, I call octavos, and large ones quartos. Folios I seldom carry home, out of a growing sympathy with my weary body. But so far as my preferences in size and weight are satisfied, I am a willing rescuer of books.”

This is Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) in his essay “Bringing Them Home” (The Mind’s Eye, 1934), writing in a tone of disingenuously attractive modesty. In his biography of the poet, Barry Webb devotes a chapter to “Book Collecting,” and says Blunden “was never without the company of books.” Webb reports he “sought solace” in Charles Lamb and Paul Verlaine in the trenches during the Great War. He was a bibliophile and reader, identities that don’t always overlap, never a book-snob. Nor was he greedy. He routinely shipped review copies to a Japanese friend and culled unwanted volumes from his collection. Book rescue was a critically altruistic impulse in Blunden, who was instrumental in restoring or maintaining the critical reputations of William Collins, Lamb, John Clare and others. Webb writes:

“He collected for two reasons: to build up a `working’ library and to rescue volumes he felt others would ignore. He believed that an adequate library of English literature could be established without paying more than sixpence a volume in 1920 – a price he allowed to increase to two shillings and sixpence in 1930 and ten shillings in 1950 – and by this means he created a library of 10,000 volumes by 1965.”

I’ve known collectors who never part with books, regardless of their literary value. Theirs is a warehouse aesthetic. The volume of their volumes is a source of pride, and any dreck will do if it fills out the shelves. Hoarders are not collectors. The largest personal library I’ve ever seen was also the most comprehensive, tastefully selected and well-used. It was, in Blunden’s sense, a “working library,” not a vanity project to impress visitors. From the owner I borrowed and came to value books by Tacitus, Thomas Traherne, Madison Jones, Sergey Aksakov, Nikolai Leskov, Thomas Kinsella, Konstantin Paustovsky, Sherwood Anderson, V.S. Pritchett and Edward Dahlberg.

Webb dutifully logs the contents of Blunden’s “working library” – 39 Chaucer volumes, 200 Shakespeare, 50 Milton, 40 Dryden, 70 Pope, 75 Swift, 90 Johnson, 150 Coleridge, and so on. Also, the “`rescued’ minor poets,” hardly known by modern readers – eight editions of Charles Churchill, seventeen of Samuel Rogers, twenty-eight of Christopher Smart, twenty-five of William Collins, ten of Francis Quarles, eighteen of William Barnes, twenty of Edward Young.

Blunden also collected books for their bindings and typography – an admiration I share, though I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a volume solely for its design. He acquired Lamb’s Milton and Byron’s copy of The Rolliad, copiously annotated most of his books (in pencil), and left inscriptions in books owned by other people, often without telling them. His existence, in short, was thoroughly bookish – not a bad thing in a man so gentle and good-natured. His friend, the formidably well-read Rupert Hart Davis, called Blunden “the most accomplished book-hunter I have ever known.” To his credit, Blunden was not a packrat or dilettante, but read and reread what he collected. In “Bringing Them Home” he writes:

“The resourcefulness of those who have made books through the centuries often makes me forget the serious business of reading, and a book comes home simply because it took my eye in some way. Later on, I endeavour to square accounts by examining the author’s share, and in this way I have made the acquaintance of far too many hands.”

Blunden’s personal library remains intact at Ohio University. This is his poem “In a Library” (Choice or Chance, 1934):

“A curious remedy for present cares,
And yet as near a good one as I know;
It is to scan the cares of long ago,
Which these brown bindings lodge.
In black print glares
The Elizabethan preacher, heaping shame
On that ubiquitous gay hell, the stage;
And here’s another full of scriptural rage
Against high Rome. Fie, parson, be more tame.
This critic gnashes his laborious teeth
At that, whose subtlety seems no such matter;
This merchant bodes our economic death,
The envoy hastens with his hard-won chatter;
Age hacks at youth, youth paints the old town red—
And in the margin Doomsday rears his head.”

'A Mission to the University Extension Scheme'

I have a typically human taste for taxonomy, classifying things, sorting them into categories. There’s comfort in order. A friend in Los Angeles shares my bent and proposes three classes of books as outlined by Oscar Wilde in his essay "To Read or Not to Read" (1886):

 

1. Books to read.

2. Books to reread

3. Books not to read at all

 

Makes sense. Most of us probably follow a similar scheme without having formalized it. Here are Wilde's entries in the first category: Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, the Duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, Theodor Mommsen and, “till we get a better one,” Grote’s History of Greece.

 

Little to argue with here, though I’ve not read Mandeville, Marco Polo and Grote. Here is the second category, the books to reread:

 

Plato and Keats. “In the sphere of poetry,” Wilde writes, “the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.” That’s a little vague but leaves plenty of room for nominations. I have an extensive list. In fact, it may be the second-largest category, topped only by the third, the books not to read at all:

 

“[James] Thomson’s Seasons, [Samuel] Rogers’s Italy[: A Poem], [William] Paley’s Evidences [of Christianity], all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay “On Liberty,” all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, [Bishop Joseph] Butler’s Analogy [of Religion], [Sir Alexander] Grant’s Aristotle, [David] Hume’s [History of] England, George Henry Lewes’s [Biographical] History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.”

 

So far, I’m safe from most of these titles, though I have read Thomson and a lot of Hume but not his History. I want to endorse that final phrase, which Wilde expands on here:

 

“The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching . . . But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.”

 

Such negative endorsements are unenforceable, of course. People are free to read any tripe they fancy. The best we can do is share our experience of books and trust that a few readers out there will follow the suggestion, read the book and conclude that we knew what we were talking about.

[A note to readers: the comments section at Anecdotal Evidence is reserved strictly for readers. I’ve had my say. If you have a question, send it to me via email: Patrick.kurp@gmail.com. Otherwise, I’m unable to reply.]

`The Butcher Began His Work'

By the time of Anthony Hecht’s death on this date in 2004, the year had already been an unforgiving one for our better poets. On April 25 we lost Thom Gunn; Aug. 6, Donald Justice; Aug. 14, Czesław Miłosz. A few months later, Guy Davenport and Saul Bellow joined them – a grim time, still the first half of a decade that had also claimed Edgar Bowers, William Maxwell, W.G. Sebald, R.S. Thomas, Penelope Fitzgerald, C.H. Sisson and D.J. Enright. For Hecht, a poet of poise and elegance, death was never an abstraction. He witnessed it first-hand as an infantryman in Europe during World War II, and as a member of the 97^th division he helped liberate the death camp at Flossenbürg. Two weeks earlier, on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been hanged there. Hecht was assigned to interview the French prisoners, and decades later recalled: “The place, the suffering, the prisoners' accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.” Here, from Hecht’s final collection of poems, The Darkness and the Light (2001), is “The Hanging Gardens of Tyburn”: 

“Mysteriously fed by the dying breath

Of felons, by the foul odor that melts

Down from their bodies hanging on the gallows,

The rank, limp flesh, the soft, pendulous guilts, 

“This solitary plant takes root at night,

Its tiny charnel blossoms the pale blue

Of Pluto’s ice pavilions; being dried,

Powdered and mixed with the cold morning dew 

“From the left hand of an executed man,

It confers untroubled sleep, and can prevent

Prenatal malformations if applied

To a woman’s swelling body, except in Lent. 

“Take care to clip only the little blossoms,

For the plant, uprooted, utters a cry of pain

So highly pitched as both to break the eardrum

And render the would-be harvester insane.” 

In a note to the poem, Hecht cites the ancient folk belief that mandrake, used as an opiate and love potion, grew under gallows from the dripping semen of hanged men. Donne memorably alludes to the plant and its folklore, and Shakespeare refers twice to mandrake (Romeo and Juliet: “Shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth”) and twice to mandragora, another of its common names. Hecht gives his poem a comically grotesque title, starting with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and combining it with Tyburn, the village in Middlesex, now part of London, where hangings were performed for six-hundred years starting late in the twelfth century.  Executions were holidays attended by thousands. Among those hanged at Tyburn – posthumously, after his body was disinterred from Westminster Abbey – was Oliver Cromwell. Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers, in Recollections of the Table-Talk (1856), recalls a pitiful scene: 

“I recollect seeing a whole cartload of young girls, in dresses of various colours, on their way to be executed at Tyburn. They had all been condemned, on one indictment, for having been concerned in (that is, perhaps, for having been spectators of) the burning of some houses during Lord George Gordon’s riots. It was quite horrible,--Greville was present at one of the trials consequent on those riots, and heard several boys sentenced, to their own amazement, to be hanged. `Never,’ said Greville with great naïveté, `did I see boys cry so.’” 

Hangings at Tyburn were abolished in 1783 and moved behind the walls of Newgate Prison. Samuel Johnson, one year before his death, objected to the sequestering of executions. Boswell reports him saying: 

“The age is running mad after innovation; and all the business of the world is to be done in a new way. Men are to be hanged in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation…it is not an improvement; they object, that the old method drew together too many spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it.” 

Between 1535 and 1681, one-hundred five Roman Catholic martyrs were executed at Tyburn. Among them was the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion, who was hanged, drawn and quartered with two other priests on Dec. 1, 1581. In Edmund Campion (1935), Evelyn Waugh writes: 

“The scene at Tyburn was tumultuous. Sir Thomas More had stepped out into the summer sunshine, to meet death quietly and politely at a single stroke of the axe. Every circumstance of Campion’s execution was vile and gross.” 

And this: 

“The cart was driven from under him, the eager crowd swayed forward, and Campion was left hanging, until, unconscious, perhaps already dead, he was cut down and the butcher began his work.”

'He Always Said What He Thought'

Like every red-blooded reader, I love a gratuitously bloody-minded critical assault, the sort of thing Randall Jarrell turned into an art and William Logan has further refined. It’s no coincidence that both men are often very funny in their criticism. If more critics were honest, we would have more such demolitions to savor. Most poets in any era are mediocre, if not worse, and yet the versifying fraternity goes on praising dreck, usually in hopes of circle-jerk reciprocity. In William Hazlitt, Jarrell and Logan had a worthy ancestor specializing in critical honesty and “savage indignation”: 

“It is a tortuous, tottering, wriggling, fidgetty translation of every thing from the vulgar tongue, into all the tantalizing, teasing, tripping, lisping mimminee-pimminee of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction. You have nothing like truth of nature or simplicity of expression.”

 

This is from Lecture VIII, “On the Living Poets,” from Lectures on the English Poets (1818). It is so enthusiastically overheated, I laughed out loud yet again. Hazlitt didn’t know the meaning of temperate. His target here is Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855) and his poem “The Pleasures of Memory” (1792). Here’s a sample, so you understand what Hazlitt is getting at:

 

“And, while the coot her jet-wing lov’d to lave,

Rock’d on the bosom of the sleepless wave;

The eagle rush’d from Skiddaw’s purple crest,

A cloud still brooding o’er her giant-nest.”

 

I haven’t read a good coot poem in a coon’s age. You may, like me, have tripped over “mimminee-pimminee,” also spelled “miminy-piminy” and “niminy-piminy.” It was a favorite term of critical opprobrium for Hazlitt, and I find he used it at least three other times. As a noun, the OED defines it as “finicky or affected writing; verbosity, prolixity,” and cites Hazlitt twice. Perhaps there’s a genetic predisposition to using the word. The great essayist’s grandson, the critic William Carew Hazlitt, wrote in Offspring of Thought in Solitude: Modern Essays (1884):

 

“There was no Niminy-pimininess about [Samuel] Johnson. He was a moralist of the most active and thorough-going stamp. If he did not always think what he felt, he always said what he thought.”

`A Deep Moan of Shame'

David Myers borrows from Tim Davis the notion of “reading skeletons,” defined by Myers as “the books and writers you will never confess to: those that cause, not merely embarrassment, but a deep moan of shame.” Not since late adolescence have I wasted much time on unmitigated, shame-inducing trash. Science fiction, Tolkien, pulp novels of any genre, Margaret Mitchell, Edgar Rice Burroughs – all target children of all ages, and I read them as a child. Discerningly ambitious readers begin as omnivores, hungrier than they are discriminating. Reading such stuff as kids gives them immunity against it as adults. It can't satisfy a grownup sensibility.

Myers mentions The Day of the Jackal, a Frederick Forsyth novel I’ve never read (I’m not sure I’ve ever read a “thriller,” unless Chandler and Westlake count) though I periodically watch the Fred Zinneman film version (1973), mostly for Michael Lonsdale’s Inspector Lebel and Cyril Cusack’s gunsmith. No one will mistake it for Tokyo Story, but trash in film form, though emetic as a book, sometimes proves palatable.

Myers cites the shame he feels for having once read a novel by Tom Robbins – probably the writer I have never read who has most often been urged upon me by people who know nothing about literature. He also mentions Robert Pirsig’s pretentious little bestseller. It was mildly readable at the time – 1974? – but even then I knew it was, in effect, a one-night stand. There’s no shame in that. We must read junk to recognize it and flush it from our systems, like a toxin that carries its own enema.

A good reader possesses intestinal fortitude and little capacity for regret. I often read books that will never be mistaken for literature – in recent weeks, a biography of Charles Addams, histories of Chinese calligraphy (my 9-year-old’s current enthusiasm) and Tin Pan Alley, a field guide to butterflies of the Pacific Northwest. I go to them not for the pleasures Nabokov and Samuel Johnson offer – elegance and incisiveness of language and thought -- but for the pleasure of new information.

The Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas was a deeply self-centered, unpleasant fellow though one of the last century’s great poets, as Byron Roger’s The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas confirms. Rogers quotes the poet’s son, Gwydion Thomas, as saying:

“Why didn’t he read more? He had this extraordinary Stalinist approach, there were all these books he just wouldn’t read. And if something got a review, that ruled it out altogether. Yet he’d trawl Pwllheli public library looking for things to read, and his choices were very odd, books about penguins and whales. I used to drop little bundles of books outside his room, then he’d read them, and when I went back to university my mother would say she’d found him crawling up the stairs to fish books out of my room. I gave him the mediaeval history Montaillou, he was very fond of that.”

Filial resentment aside, Thomas’ account of his father’s reading habits is, on balance, largely admirable. Penguins and whales are among the most fashionable and least interesting species, but I too often read about fauna. “Stalinist” is harsh and Thomas is not specific about titles and authors, but all of us carry around conscious and unconscious lists of books we wouldn’t read (or reread) on a bet. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s book is superb.

`Subtraction of Interchangeables'

Dead friends leave us an unforeseen bequest, an almost inexhaustible trust fund of memories and associations. If the friend was bookish, his spirit may dwell in any book we open. If his sensibility was sufficiently large and elastic, almost anything releases remembrance. Charles Lamb writes in a letter to William Wordsworth on March 20, 1822: 

“Two or three have died within this last two twelvemths., and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other—the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won’t do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies.” 

True, but every departure likewise activates an endless spool of private home movies, a process replicated the longer we live. I conjured David Myers a dozen times this week -- while reading Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers and R.L. Barth, listening to Jimmy Rushing and watching the film of The Day of the Jackal. The little spark says: “David would get kick out of this,” followed by the dull thump of reality. Louis MacNeice writes in “Tam Cari Capitis” (the title is borrowed from Horace): 

“That the world will never be quite—what a cliché—the same again

Is what we only learn by the event

When a friend dies out on us and is not there

To share the periphery of a remembered scent

“Or leave his thumb-print on a shared ideal.” 

MacNeice’s choice of scent is shrewd, a nod to the memory-provoking potency of the olfactory. Memory, at least when vivid and new, is specific, not generic. I don’t remember “David-ness.” I remember the time we realized Jackal was a movie both of us liked immensely. Lamb continues in his letter to Wordsworth: 

“There’s Capt. Burney gone!—what fun has whist now? what matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you? One never hears any thing, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence. Thus one distributes oneself about—and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won’t serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer points and I want so many answering needles. The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.’s part in C. C. loses A.’s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.” 

And that’s why we have an obligation to remember. Forgetting is an ungrateful slur.