'Aberrations of Homo Sap and Homo Sapiens'

One lives in dread of close encounters with bores, who constitute not a species but a genus. Many have evolved cunning modes of camouflage enabling them to approach their prey closely before pouncing. We have the sports bore. He will ask what you thought of the Big Game. When you reply that you have never been interested in sports he proceeds to proselytize for the sublime delights of basketball or golf. And the rock bore: “Clapton? Not a blues bone in his body.” I had an editor who started every lunch in the newspaper cafeteria with the same prologue: “I don’t watch much television, but . . .”, and went on to synopsize the previous night’s sitcom in detail. Political bores, of course, reproduce like cockroaches.

 

The supreme taxonomist of bores was Myles na gCopaleen (né Brian Ó Nualláin, né Brian O'Nolan, dba Flann O'Brien) in his Irish Times column “Cruiskeen Lawn.” See his chapter titled “Bores” in The Best of Myles (Walker and Co., 1968), including this: “I come back to this problem because I have since encountered a pretty bad specimen. He is a monster to be avoided like the pledge, a colossal imposition who will make you very angry and cause your heart to beat like a sludge-hammer (stet). I refer to The Man Who Does His Own Carpentry and Talks About It.” Myles details the behavior of this mutant and concludes: “This man also makes all his own coffins. The bought ones aren’t a job, he avers.”

 

Even the most experienced field biologist can be fooled. You think you have identified another specimen of Odiosis hominem by its behavior – solitary, furtive, humorless, earnest – but find yourself pleasantly mistaken, in the company of an interesting fellow, one who mimics the appearance of a bore, perhaps out of shyness. In a letter Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson on Nov. 24, 1942, he describes some “aberrations of Homo sap and Homo sapiens” he collected during his recent travel. He gives Wilson six brief character sketches that remind us of Nabokov’s Gogolian gift for portraiture, his eye for physical attributes that reveal something of a subject’s character. His description of a “celebrated Negro scholar and activist” turns out to be W.E.B. DuBois. The most interesting encounter is with a man in shirtsleeves one evening in his hotel in Valdosta, Ga. The man invites him into his room for a night-cap:

 

“He had evidently been bored to death and was now making much out of my skimpy company. Began telling me, with copious details, all about his sugar business in Florida, his reasons for coming to Valdosta (to hire colored labor) and lots of extravagant particularities about his factory. My whole body felt like one big yawn.”

 

Waiting for a polite opportunity to leave, Nabokov reached into his pocket for matches and accidentally drops a small pillbox he uses for capturing moths. The other man picks it up and says, “might be mine: I use these for collecting moths.” Nabokov writes:

 

“He turned out to be an entomologist who had at one time been in touch with the Am. Mus. Nat. History, where I had worked. I did not look at my watch any more.”          

 

I remember a passage in John Shade’s “Pale Fire”:

 

“Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.”

 

[For the complete letter see Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971; (ed. Simon Karlinsky, 2001).]

'The Worst of Bores'

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life. Universities are infested with people who take themselves very seriously. Couple that with arcane academic specialties, undergrown senses of humor and advanced political thinking and you have an epidemic of tedium. Exceptions? Of course. I know some very bright, conversationally gifted people on campus as well. Theodore Dalrymple diagnoses the bore with precision: 

“Of course, the true bore, like the true eccentric, doesn’t know or even suspect that that is what he is. The eccentric does strange things because to him they are the most natural things in the world to do. The true bore doesn’t know that he is boring others because what he says is so very interesting to himself, which is why at dinner parties my wife sometimes has to kick me under the table.”

 

In Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life (2002), N. John Hall tells us the essayist read the transcript of a radio broadcast, “The Road to Happiness,” by that well-known, high-minded bore Bertrand Russell: “Russell is a bore; but he is a bright bore, which is the worst of bores.”

`But One Idea'

Since moving to Houston almost three years ago, when I still thought of Texas as the Land of Beef, I have met more vegetarians than at any time in my life. My boss, the neighbors across the street, a librarian, one of my wife’s friends at work, and lately our 6-year-old son have given up meat – in my boss’ case and the neighbors’, for more than 30 years. Their motives are various, involving some mingling of ethics and health. In the mid-seventies I tried vegetarianism for a year or so until a plate of meatballs undid my resolve, so for me it’s a way of life that makes sense even if I’m not willing to adopt it as my own.

While reading William Hazlitt over the weekend, his collection Table-Talk, I came upon “On People with One Idea,” an essay distilled in its title and opening sentence:

“There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject.”

We all know bores, strident button-holers who pin you to the conversational mat with details of their pet enthusiasms. In junior-high school, I had a classmate who committed the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack to memory and who happily inflicted “If I Were a Rich Man” on innocent bystanders. The true object of Hazlitt’s scorn is not the bore but that sub-class of bores who bore you while trying to convert you to their cause, whether political, religious, culinary or otherwise. Here’s Hazlitt:

“People of the character here spoken of, that is, who tease you to death with some one idea, generally differ in their favourite notion from the rest of the world; and indeed it is the love of distinction which is mostly at the bottom of this peculiarity. Thus, one person is remarkable for living on a vegetable diet, and never fails to entertain you all dinner-time with an invective against animal food. One of this self-denying class, who adds to the primitive simplicity of this sort of food the recommendation of having it in a raw state, lamenting the death of a patient whom he had augered to be in a good way as a convert to his system, at last accounted for his disappointment in a whisper -- `But she ate meat privately, depend upon it.’”

Hazlitt pinpoints the chief motivator of all proselytizing, vegetarian or otherwise – self-righteousness. Proselytizers cannot abide waywardness. Difference is an affront, proof of unworthiness. Proselytizers are morally compelled to set you straight, compounding righteousness with bullying – for many, an irresistibly heady cocktail of emotions. In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James devotes a chapter to Hazlitt, including this digression on prose style I can’t resist quoting:

“Rhythm is never effortless. To achieve it, you must start rewriting in your head and then continue rewriting on the page. The hallmark of a seductive style is to extend natural speech rhythm over the distance of a complex sentence.”

On the subject of bores and proselytizers, however, see James’ chapter on Adolf Hitler. Along with all his other more obvious deformations of character, Hitler must have made for hellishly tedious company. In a digression on Hitler’s obsession with architecture, James writes:

“He had no sense of proportion in any of his ostensibly civilized enthusiasms. His interests lacked the human element, so they could never have amounted to a true humanism.”

To announce the obvious, I’m not equating vegetarians with Hitler, even though Hitler was a sometime vegetarian (but so were Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer). My point is that the bore spectrum is broad and varied, from the bullying vegan to the perpetrator of the Holocaust. The mind is bottomless and elastic, able to contain almost anything we feed it. Having only one idea is not a good idea.

`Are You All Ready to Feel Bad?'

Drunks are afflicted with a disorder of the self. It’s never rightly proportioned, being too big or too small. You might argue this is true of all humans, drunks or not, and I would answer, yes, drunks are like everyone else -- only more so. They are difficult to ignore even when not drinking. A drunk’s ego, like nature, abhors a vacuum. He fills it with charm or vitriol or murderous rage. A drunk is never content merely to be.

My brother found videos of John Berryman talking and reading. I’ve heard recordings of him reading Dream Songs, but had never seen him on film, and the experience, for a reader who has known and loved his work for 40 years, is sad and disturbing. Clearly, he is drunk but not incoherently so, and probably he’s convinced he’s perfectly sober. His gestures and speech are histrionic. He over-enunciates in order not to slur. He lectures when he might as easily converse.

The film was shot for the BBC in Dublin in 1967, when he was as much a celebrity as a poet can be. During the same visit he spent four days in the company of the journalist Jane Howard, who wrote a story about him, “Whiskey & Ink,” for Life magazine. The interview is with A. Alvarez, the English poet and critic who championed Berryman’s work. In the first video, Berryman talks about Anna Karenina and his biography of Stephen Crane. At one point he says, “Things so ghastly that you cannot respond to them directly,” then reads “Dream Song 14”:

“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) `Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

“Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

“who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.”

In the other video, Berryman sounds a bit drunker as he reads “Dream Song 29”:

“There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

“And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

“But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.”

His reading is agonizingly slow. You wait for him to – what? Collapse, weep (as he almost does on “weeping”), scream? The “thing” that sits on Henry/John’s heart is the suicide of Berryman’s father when the poet was 12. The membrane between Berryman and Henry, if it ever genuinely existed, seems to have dissolved. His reading is masterful but almost too painful to watch, like Lear’s lines after Cordelia’s death. But Berryman’s humor, in this case very black wit, as always, burns through. In his introduction to Henry’s Fate (1977), the posthumous collection of previously unpublished Dream Songs and other poems, John Haffenden quotes Berryman’s introduction to a reading of “Dream Songs” at Harvard in 1966:

“Prepare to weep, ladies and gentlemen. Saul Bellow and I almost kill ourselves laughing about the Dream Songs and various chapters in his novels, but other people feel bad. Are you all ready to feel bad?”

'Georgeade as a Summer Drink'

While looking for something else I blundered on an Anglo-American writer and cartoonist new to me whose name and one-time popularity long ago evaporated: Oliver Herford (1860-1935), author, co-author and illustrator of more than sixty books for adults and children. There was a time when a modestly gifted writer with a sense of humor, a bush-league Oscar Wilde, could earn a respectable living writing for the magazines of his day and publishing the occasional volume. The secret of the trade, apart from having a ready wit and not taking oneself too seriously, was balancing the universal and timeless with the merely topical. Gags about the Second Boer War will inevitably have a short shelf life. The foremost example of this extinct species, who transcended the merely journalistic, is Max Beerbohm. 

In 1906, Herford published A Little Book of Bores, thus addressing a subject that remains forever pertinent. Bores reproduce at an alarming rate and often mutate into superficially new forms, but they are forever with us. Herford, who also provided the illustrations, documents them alphabetically. “H is a Humorist glum . . .,” he writes:

 

“. . . Why sits he so silent and dumb?

He’s concocting some Gay

Impromptu to say

When the Opportune Moment shall come.”

 

Here he takes on a subject still sensitive in certain quarters, the brat:

   

“T is a Terrible Tot

Who says things he’d much better not.

A child of that age

Should be kept in a cage,

And fed—if at all—through a slot.”

 

The illustrations in An Alphabet of Celebrities (1899) are better than the verses, though Herford works in a reference to Dr. Johnson:

 

“J is for Johnson, who only says ‘Pish!’

To Jonah, who tells him his tale of a fish.”

 

And in Confessions of a Caricaturist (1917), Herford proves himself a better artist than writer. Some of his choices are unlikely: Arnold Bennett (treated as the Joyce Carol Oates of his day), Guglielmo Marconi and Dante. For sheer exhilarating silliness, “George Ade” is tops:

 

“Somehow I always like to think

Of Georgeade as a Summer Drink,

Sparkling and cool, with just a Tang

Of Pleasant Effervescent Slang;

A Wholesome Tonic, without question,

And Cure for Moral Indigestion.

In Summer-time, beneath the shade,

We find Refreshment in Georgeade.

And 'mid the Scorching City's roar

We drink him up and call for more.

I often wonder what the ‘Trade’

Buys half so precious as Georgeade.”

'As Life Runs On, the Road Grows Strange'

“I value myself upon this, that there is nothing of the old man in my conversation. I am now sixty-eight, and I have no more of it than at twenty-eight.”

 

The conversation of men and women grows tiresome with age, a ceaseless recycling of complaints, regrets, pointless stories and self-importance. That’s the conventional view and there’s evidence to back it up. We’ve all known old people who rattle on too long, forcing us to invent plausible excuses for leaving the room. But let’s be honest: youth is no guarantee of scintillating conversation. I meet a lot of students and only rarely does one of them speak knowledgeably, articulately and with wit. Too often their conversation turns into a ritualized pas de deux of awesome’s and cool’s. Let’s be honest again: many old bores were once young and middle-aged bores. Senescence isn’t always the explanation.

 

One of history’s imposing talkers is Dr. Johnson, who delivered the passage quoted above on April 30, 1778, as recounted by Boswell. The Life of Johnson is a quilt of the old man’s conversations. It’s significant that Johnson would choose, among his many gifts, to brag of his conversational prowess. One of life’s sweetest pleasures, conversation in our day has dried up and blown away. The causes are many but loss of civility and a general absence of cultural knowledge must be chief among them. I turn sixty-eight today and hope there is “nothing of the old man in my conversation,” if that implies earnest, self-centered, repetitive dullness.

 

I used to brag that I wouldn’t live to see thirty, and I was well on the way to fulfilling that prophecy. No one is more surprised than I that I have reached this age and remain reasonably intact. I’ve never known what it meant to feel one’s age, even when young. I live with more pain than before but that doesn’t seem pertinent. Mentally I feel more alive. I saw my primary-care doctor recently and we talked about aging. She’s thirty-five, roughly half my age. What do I like about getting old? she asked. A new equanimity, I told her. I have a better notion of what is important and what is irrelevant. And what do I most dislike? The death of friends and acquaintances with whom I would like to resume conversations. An epigram by James Russell Lowell, “Sixty-Eighth Birthday” (1889), speaks for me:

“As life runs on, the road grows strange 

With faces new, and near the end

The milestones into headstones change,

’Neath every one a friend.”

'Old Landor's Bones Are Laid'

On Tuesday I wrote about Walter Savage Landor, his poems and especially Imaginary Conversations, a collection of 174 dialogues, mostly of historical and literary figures, published in five volumes between 1824 and 1829. I keep a mental list of books I admire and enjoy that seem to go largely unread by others, and periodically urge them on readers – Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. The toughest sell is likely Landor (1775-1864). For reasons of style, subject matter and length (ironic, considering his mastery of the epigram), most readers are immune to his charms. Here’s how one reader replied to Tuesday’s post: 

“I read one volume of Imaginary Conversations, having had it urged upon me by this blog. I wish I'd known in advance about R. Brimley Johnson’s Aphorisms. There's good stuff in Landor, but you have to go through a lot to get it.”

 

No argument here. Imaginary Conversations is one of those books that teaches us how to read it, and not everyone learns. You pace yourself and adapt to Landor’s rhythms. His language can feel stilted and is seldom colloquial in a contemporary sense. You can’t read his dialogues the way you might read a collection of short stories. Landor has his longueurs, as the boys say down at the bowling alley.

 

I was surprised in 2014 when Oxford University Press published Adam Roberts’ Landor’s Cleanness: A Study of Walter Savage Landor. It’s hard to think of a major writer in the English tradition less fashionable. Roberts devotes his final chapter to Imaginary Conversations, and sympathizes with my reader quoted above:

 

“What is it that contaminates the poised and controlled masterpieces known collectively as Landor’s Imaginary Conversations? In a word it is boredom. The exquisiteness, appositeness, and almost sensual pleasure of the prose is as often spoken by a bore as by a master.”

 

Roberts speaks our language. He understands readers who find mostly tedium in Landor’s dialogues. But note that he describes some of Landor’s speakers, not  the author himself, as bores:

 

“One way of defining a bore would be: a person who doesn’t see that what interests him does not interest you. Or perhaps, more precisely: a person who assumes thoughtlessly that you will also be fascinated by what fascinates him.”

  

We’re all familiar with bores and have devised strategies over the years for dealing with them, whether nodding and smiling, telling them to shut up or running out the door, depending on the species. Roberts tells us the “currency” of the dialogues in Imaginary Conversations is “prolixity.” He quotes Landor telling Robert Browning, “with a sort of crashing honesty, the format gave him ‘more room’ than poetry. The reader’s heart may not leap up to hear this.”

 

As my reader suggested above, modern readers might favor a prudently chosen, intelligently abridged edition of Imaginary Conversations. I wonder if any of the dialogues have ever been adapted for the stage. Perhaps such thoughts confirm the reactions of modern readers: Why bother? Aren’t the dialogues mere curiosities, remnants of another literary age when, in Roberts’ words, conversation was “well[-]constructed and harmonious,” and prose wasn’t that far away from conversation? Landor writes in “Southey and Porson”: “I would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this: that . . . that they first read and examine the contents of the book; a thing greatly more useful in criticism than is thought.”

 

[Here is the first stanza of Yvor Winters’ “Anacreontic”: “Peace! There is peace at last. / Deep in the Tuscan shade, / Swathed in the Grecian past, / Old Landor’s bones are laid.”]

  

[Wurmbrand asks: “But what are some others on your mental list?” The American Scene by Henry James, Maurice Baring’s 1924 novel C,  the jazz writings of Whitney Balliett, Stevie Smith’s three novels, the short stories of Peter Taylor, V.S. Pritchett’s 1951 novel Mr. Beluncle, anything by Yvor Winters and his wife, Janet Lewis.]

'He Was Dull in a New Way'

“A dull country magistrate gave Johnson a long tedious account of his exercising his criminal jurisdiction, the result of which was his having sentenced four convicts to transportation. Johnson, in an agony of impatience to get rid of such a companion, exclaimed, ‘I heartily wish, Sir, that I were a fifth.’” 

Recently I endured the company of a descendant of Dr. Johnson’s tiresome judge, a person for whom storytelling was an excuse for holding his listeners hostage and torturing them. He reminded me of my father who, whenever we visited someone, on arrival promptly recited details of the route we had taken, including street names, landmarks and weather conditions. This abuse, endured throughout childhood, left me with a burning intolerance for bores, especially conversational bores. I wanted desperately to be a grownup so I wouldn’t have to be polite to such dullards.

 

Elsewhere in Boswell, Johnson says of Thomas Sheridan: “Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature."

 

And another anecdote recounted by Boswell: “He attacked [the poet Thomas] Gray, calling him ‘a dull fellow.’ Boswell: ‘I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’ Johnson: ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.’”

 

Johnson never uses the words we would apply to such people – bore, boring, boredom. Bore appears in his Dictionary as “the hole made by boring,” as in carpentry. His words are dull and dullness. The OED tells us the modern sense of the noun bore showed up in the nineteenth century and cites Benjamin Disraeli: “The true bore is that man who thinks the world is only interested in one subject, because he, himself, can only comprehend one.”

'Professional Seers-Off'

“I am not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most difficult things in the world, and probably seems so to you, too.” 

It does. Saying goodbye, when not a relief, can be a tongue-tied torment. Some people, of course, we’re glad to be rid of – bores, assorted angry cranks and narcissists – but not so friends or loved ones. The pressure to not merely experience but express sadness at their departure can feel overwhelming. That’s just how some of us are built. We’re not among those annoyingly sincere and healthy-minded folks whose emotional lives are placid as a mountain lake in the spring. We stutter.

 

Max Beerbohm is writing above in his essay “Seeing People Off,” collected in his 1909 essay collection Yet Again. In it he conjures a novel profession, one that sounds very twenty-first-century – “professional seers-off.” He watches as a familiar face in a train station says goodbye to a young woman, whom he assumes is the man’s daughter. It turns out his one-time acquaintance, an actor, works for a service called the Anglo-American Social Bureau:

 

“He explained to me that of the thousands of Americans who annually pass through England there are many hundreds who have no English friends. In the old days they used to bring letters of introduction. But the English are so inhospitable that these letters are hardly worth the paper they are written on. ‘Thus,’ said Le Ros, ‘the A.A.S.B. supplies a long-felt want. Americans are a sociable people, and most of them have plenty of money to spend. The A.A.S.B. supplies them with English friends. Fifty per cent. of the fees is paid over to the friends. The other fifty is retained by the A.A.S.B. I am not, alas, a director. If I were, I should be a very rich man indeed. I am only an employe. But even so I do very well. I am one of the seers-off.’”

 

Today, such a service would probably have a website and app. My wife, you see, flies to Santiago, Chile, on Friday for a two-week visit to Patagonia. She’ll be roughing it—camping, hiking, horseback riding. She was born in Peru but has never visited this part of South America. My knowledge of the region is largely limited to In Patagonia (1977), in which Bruce Chatwin writes: “In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally.” My wife is a strong, hearty, self-reliant woman who loves adventure and whose Spanish is fluent. She will have the experience of a lifetime, I’m certain. Beerbohm has the actor tell him:

 

“‘You can’t express your feelings. In other words, you can’t act. At any rate,’ he added kindly, ‘not in a railway station. ‘Teach me!’ I cried. He looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘the seeing-off season is practically over. Yes, I'll give you a course. I have a good many pupils on hand already; but yes,’ he said, consulting an ornate note-book, ‘I could give you an hour on Tuesdays and Fridays.’”

'Make the Best of a Bad Job'

I mentioned Agnes Repplier in Friday’s post and an old friend, a former newspaper colleague who lives in Philadelphia, writes: 

“She owned the building where I now live. I have a small condo in this red-brick three-story building, which was built during the Jackson Administration. From the tall windows in my living room I look out onto the 19th Century. Repplier died here in 1950 at the age of 95. A one-horse stable stood at the back of the building.”

 

Like me, Tim is alive to the dead, sensing traces of their passage. It’s a comfort to know we share a world with our admirable forebears, that they have left vestiges for us to appreciate and learn from. Sometimes the dead are more interesting and companionable than the merely living. Tim writes:

 

“She was born the year that Leaves of Grass was published [1855], and I’ve read that she befriended Whitman in his later years when he was living in Camden, N.J., just across the river from Philadelphia. She brought him to some literary functions, and I’ve wondered if she ever brought him here. She also persuaded Henry James to visit Philadelphia, and I wonder if a visit to Clinton Street was part of his stay too.”

 

Like many good writers, Repplier is effectively forgotten. For seventy years she worked industriously as a literary journalist, producing hundreds of essays for such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal and The North American Review, and for various Roman Catholic publications. Like Chekhov, she supported her family (mother, sister) with her writing. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was a serious Catholic, proudly old-fashioned and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. In “Consolations of the Conservative” (The Atlantic, December 1919), Repplier sounds like Michael Oakeshott:

 

“If belief in the perfectibility of man — and not of man only, but of governments — is the inspiration of liberalism, of radicalism, of the spirit that calls clamorously for change, and that has requisitioned the words reform and progression, sympathy with man and with his work, with the beautiful and imperfect things he has made of the checkered centuries, is the keynote of conservatism. The temperamental conservative is a type vulnerable to ridicule, yet not more innately ridiculous than his neighbors. He has been carelessly defined as a man who is cautious because he has a good income, and content because he is well placed; who is thick-headed because he lacks vision, and close-hearted because he is deaf to the moaning wind which is the cry of unhappy humanity asking justice from a world which has never known how to be just.”

 

“Consolations” was collected in what may be her finest collection, the nicely titled Points of Friction (1920). The essay “The Cheerful Clan” opens with a sentence that shows Repplier has the gift for fashioning “a good lede,” at once amusing, provocative and thematically relevant: “Now that the Great War is a thing of the past, there is no longer any need to be cheerful.” She goes on to describe “popular optimism” as “the apotheosis of superficiality,” and then gets down to business:

 

“Things are as they are, and no amount of self-deception makes them otherwise. The friend who is incapable of depression depresses us as surely as the friend who is incapable of boredom bores us. Somewhere in our hearts is a strong, though dimly understood, desire to face realities, and to measure consequences, to have done with the fatigue of pretending. It is not optimism to enjoy the view when one is treed by a bull; it is philosophy. The optimist would say that being treed was a valuable experience. The disciple of gladness would say it was a pleasurable sensation. The Christian Scientist would say there was no bull, though remaining–if he were wise–on the tree-top. The philosopher would make the best of a bad job, and seek what compensation he could find.”

 

As I suggested earlier, “It’s a comfort to know we share a world with our admirable forebears . . .”

[Dave Lull reminds me that Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitized three Repplier titles: A Happy Half-Century (1908), Counter-Currents (1916) and Points of Friction (1920).]

'Poetry Is an Art'

Most bores are not aware they are boring. It’s not always their fault and the impulse to tell them they are boring, though understandable, is almost always a waste of time. You can’t make people interesting who value their humorlessness, bad taste and stridency. 

I woke the other morning internally singing these words, perhaps left over from a dream: ‘’I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright.” I still thrill at these lines, some fifty years after I first encountered them in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). They are the opening to Henry Vaughan’s “The World” (c. 1650). It’s the casualness of “the other night” coupled with Vaughan’s glimpse of eternity that rouses and delights me. Mystics often resort to inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language, so they yawp, the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be recounting this morning’s breakfast. His tone is calm, methodical, almost journalistic, the meter regular and yet conversational.

 

These are lessons lost on most contemporary poets. Their verse is prose and thus defies memorization, unlike Vaughan’s, whose poem I never set out to memorize but did. In a recent review of a volume by Jonathan Chaves, the poet Catharine Savage Brosman writes:

 

“To say that poetry in America now, though honored by public budgetary support and widely heralded, is largely superficial and ephemeral is not unfair. . . . Like other rhetorical performances, a poetic flash in the pan, a pleasing act of verbal prestidigitation, a strident accusation of injustice, a cry on the rooftops for change may attract admiration and assent; they are not in themselves good poetry. Poetry is an art.”

 

To intentionally write badly and impose it on others is the definition of artistic narcissism and, incidentally, tedium. Many have convinced themselves they are writing poetry. Trying to argue them out of their delusion is a waste of time. The effort would require them to rehabilitate their sensibilities, and that’s a lot of work. They want the leftover Romantic “prestige” associated with being a poet without the learning, discipline and dedication required. Brosman again:

 

“Nearly empty of sense, solipsistic, without appealing use of language, much contemporary writing called poetry is imitative, facile, accusatory. Of course, bad poetry has always been around. But new means of disseminating it, wealth to underwrite and popularize it, and the general degradation of culture have made a difference.”

 

In another recent essay, “Poetry and Western Civilization,” Brosman writes: “Poetry belongs to those enterprises which examine and preserve the past, while sifting and shaping facts to create understanding, so that human beings may know themselves and comprehend their destiny better.”

`The Night-Owl Test'

“How many poets qualify under the night-owl test? When everyone else has gone to bed, how many poets compete successfully with a new recording of the Tchaikovsky B flat minor as accompaniment to the final Scotch?”

If the role of literature were merely social – political, book-clubbable, whatever -- it would long ago have withered away. The true test calls for one reader alone in a room with one book, so honesty has a fighting chance. What do we read when no one is watching, when no one is left to impress? Public announcements of reading tastes and accomplishments are always suspect. Even in a post-literate age, books carry cachet, and readers are no different from fishermen when it comes to boasting. The test Kingsley Amis proposes above, of course, is self-regulated. Why bother lying to yourself? Amis replies:

“In my case, the answer to this question (a more searching and serious one than anything involving hierarchies of merit) is—remarkably few: Housman, parts of Graves, Betjeman, the early Tennyson, the Macaulay of `Horatius’, the early R.S. Thomas, and Philip Larkin.”

Amis’ “night-owl” category is utterly subjective and inarguable, not subject to peer review. We know what bores us (though such books might impress the naïve) and what moves us to stay up too late on a work night (though it might offend sophisticates). Amis describes what the writers on his list have in common: “The quality they share is immediacy, density, strength in a sense analogous to that in which the Scotch is strong.” To his list of “night-owl” prerequisites I would add humor and linguistic interest. Flat-footed writing will never do. Amis’ home-administered litmus test of reading appears in his review of Larkin’s High Windows in the Observer in 1974 (collected in The Amis Collection, Hutchinson, 1990).

My list would start with Larkin. All the ingredients are there: black wit, insight into human folly, technical perfection, often a good story.  Housman, yes. E.A. Robinson, J.V. Cunningham, Swift, Richard Wilbur. More than sustenance, call them poetic comfort food, conveniently located on the shelf.

'He Says Something I Think I Can Endorse'

In late 1937, Nabokov is working to finish the greatest of his Russian novels, Dar (The Gift). Earlier in the year he and his family had moved from Berlin to Paris, where he retranslated and partially rewrote Kamera obskura (1933). Retitled Laughter in the Dark, it would become, in April 1938, the first of Nabokov’s novels published in the United States. Bobbs-Merrill, the publisher, sent him a publicity questionnaire. Asked to name his “personal dislikes,” Nabokov replies:

“Books with a Message. Studs. Dictators. East Wind. Oysters. Wireless sets; voluble conversation about same.”

 

The first item is classic Nabokov, a familiar irritant but a good reminder in an age when agitprop is confused with literature. “Studs”? Lonigan? Terkel? A sexually accomplished male? An uncastrated horse? A shirt accessory? Probably the last.

 

“Dictators”? Who doesn’t hate them? Who is too frightened to say so? “East Wind” I don’t know. A reference to destructiveness, rooted in Greek mythology? Or Stalin? I like oysters though I knew a woman who called them “snot on the half-shell.” Radio, of course, is almost dead. A shame.

 

Twenty-five years later, Nabokov would assemble another list of dislikes and put into the mouth of a fictional character. This comes from “Pale Fire,” the poem by John Shade that gives Nabokov’s 1962 novel its title:

 

“Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.”

 

In a 1962 BBC interview, Nabokov claimed Shade’s tastes as his own: “It is also true that some of my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade in Pale Fire, the poet. He does borrow some of my own opinions. There is one passage in his poem, which is part of the book, where he says something I think I can endorse. [Nabokov then cites the passage quoted above.]”

 

In another question, Nabokov is asked about “clubs, fraternities, organizations, etc.” He answers, reasonably: “I dislike clubs, I hate organizations, and I loathe fraternities.”

 

As a writer, Nabokov is by nature a celebrator – of art, consciousness, freedom, memory, love. All of us carry around a mental hit list of life’s aversions. Some of us learn not to dwell on them in too adolescent a fashion.

[The Nabokov questionnaire is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]

'A Little Shallow Learning Lightly Carried'

“A little shallow learning lightly carried goes a long way, at least with the young; my genial pose seems to have worked yet again.”

It’s reassuring to know a reputation for broad reading still carries cachet in certain quarters. A reader asks for a list of books I would recommend to someone who hopes to “become a more educated person.” He earned a degree in political science twelve years ago but, in his words, “I feel as though my formal education left something out.” While applauding the drive for self-improvement, I’m not convinced a list of books will accomplish that goal. I’ve always resented such lists. To this day I reflexively ignore anyone who tells me I must read something, especially if it’s for my own good.   

Let’s not even get into what it means to be “educated.” Specialization has fractured learning. I work daily with scientists, engineers, mathematicians and their students, and even the freshmen know more about Bayesian probability and protein folding than I ever will. Few of them, it’s probably redundant to point out, have read Rasselas or The Golden Bowl, or feel any compelling reason to do so. Are they “uneducated”?

The sentence quoted at the top is from “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan” (Once More Around the Block, 1987). Epstein takes his title from Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan (1960), a book revised three times during its author’s lifetime as The New Lifetime Reading Plan. It’s a peculiar document, a relict from another age and rather depressing. On the list of prescribed books you’ll find Braudel but no Gibbon, Boswell but no Johnson, Blake but no Keats, Hawthorne but no Cather, Garcia Marquez but no Naipaul. Now I’m starting to sound school-marmish. Let me break it to my young reader gently: Reading a lot of books doesn’t make you a better person and it probably won’t make you much smarter. We all know well-read jerks and dolts. Epstein writes:

“Once you start talking about the delights of reading, funny things happen. Some years ago, discovering that a fairly bookish friend had never read any of the books of Isaac Bashevis Singer, I said to him, in what I thought was complete sincerity: ‘You’re lucky, really. I envy you all the pleasures in store for you.’ He looked at me strangely. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I never realized how damned condescending you can be when you put your mind to it.’”

A life of reading, in my experience, fends off tedium. Everything becomes food for thought. Even chronic bores become interesting if you have devoted some thought to why some people strive to be boring.

'They Are There, Silent and Waiting'

“[Stefan] Zweig had always treasured the refuge of reading. His parents remembered him locking himself inside his room with a book to escape the disturbance of their socially active family life.” 

Doesn’t every kid? I suppose not. One mustn’t generalize from the particulars of one’s life, though I remember most of my parents’ friends as voluble, condescending bores. Once the obligatory niceties were out of the way, I headed for my room and resumed reading. In The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (Other Books, 2014), George Prochnik describes Zweig using books as “ballast that will keep him from washing away.” I quibble with Prochnik’s use of “escape.” In the previous sentence, refuge is more appropriate. When fleeing Hitler, Zweig sought refuge in the U.S., among other places. Escape, escapist, escapism – all connote failure, laziness, weakness, even cowardice. A refuge is a place of safety, as Brazil was supposed to have been at the end of Zweig’s life. There, Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942. Prochnik continues:

 

“It’s no wonder that in the Americas Zweig turned more than ever to what remained of his library as an antidote to the tumult of the era . . . And yet there were books.”

 

Can non-readers -- whether illiterates, alliterates or readers exclusively of junk -- know what access to books means to a civilized man or woman? One’s life is rooted in them. They form a sustaining continuum and make us contemporaneous with our forebears. Bookless, one is without sustenance. Zweig hated the New York portion of his exile, yet Prochnik writes:

 

“Zweig’s thrill at being given free run of the university library is touching. 'I can take as many books home as I want and go to the shelfs myself,’ he informed [his wife’s] family in England. ‘Books are better company than humans just now and I have had to do without them for a long time,’ he exclaimed in another letter.”

 

Nabokov, after emigrating to the U.S. in 1940, expressed similar delight in the freedom of American libraries. “The pain of being separated from books,” Prochnik writes, “is a recurrent motif among the émigré authors . . . . No one reverts to the problem of separation anxiety from books so insistently as Zweig. His pining for their presence reflected the way books served him both as sensual objects that could be held and stroked and as vehicles of sublimation—physical entities that mediated between this world and a higher realm.”

 

That gets perilously close to an unholy melding of mysticism and fetishism, but one understands. Prochnik quotes from a brief 1937 essay, “Thanks to Books,” written by Zweig while still in Austria, translated into English by Harry Zohn and published in the February 8, 1958 issue of The Saturday Review.      

 

“They are there, waiting and silent. They neither urge, nor call, nor press their claims. Mutely they are ranged along the wall. They seem to be asleep and yet from each one a name looks at you like an open eye. If you direct your glances their way or move your hands over them, they do not call out to you in supplication, nor do they obtrude

themselves upon you. They make no demands. They wait until you are receptive to them; only then do they open up.”

`A Tough Alpine Plant'

“The rest of my education was acquired haphazard in a public library. It was a very good library, run by an Englishman who took his work seriously; yet, in spite of that, and in spite of the fact that I became a public librarian myself, public libraries seem to me terrible places with a degrading air of institutionalism and of pseudo-professionalism.”

I’ve known people too uppity to use a public library. Patronizing one would imply they couldn't afford to buy their own books, and there’s something so common about reading volumes already manhandled by others. But I’ve never been squeamish. If libraries issued degrees like universities, my name would trail a dozen sets of initials. That’s where my true education took place, “haphazard” or otherwise, certainly not in classrooms or lecture halls. The writer cited above is Frank O’Connor (1903-1966), born Michael O’Donovan in Cork, Ireland, whose stories I first read in a volume borrowed from the central library on Superior Avenue in Cleveland. The passage is drawn from a slender book, hardly more than a pamphlet, Towards an Appreciation of Literature, published in 1945 by the Metropolitan Publishing Co., 32 Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin.

O’Connor was born into real poverty. He represents a human type I admire – the self-driven, self-educated man or woman, often without a university education, who reads, studies and learns for the love of it, as naturally as some people pick up golf or a second language (examples: Dr. Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Louis Armstrong). In our age, when everyone goes to college, few are educated. O’Connor describes “your true auto-didact” as “a tough Alpine plant, and though not very beautiful in himself, [he] is guaranteed to grow almost anywhere with the minimum of attention.” Of course, O’Connor is projecting his own life story, and he goes on to describe teaching himself to read German and, in the meantime, reading all of Goethe in English. Of course, in his “simple optimism,” and without guidance, an autodidact risks missing the contexts and the nuances of what he reads. O’Connor says “I had left school before we got so far as long division, and I was twenty before I found out what the simplest grammatical terms meant.” His explanation for that Irish boy’s infatuation with literature is true to my experience:

“I came to literature as I fancy a great many people come to it, because they need companionship, and a wider and more civilized form of life than they can find in the world about them, all the more since that world is being more and more steadily drained of whatever beauty it had; but the city of literature is just as big and complicated as any other capital, and a man can be just as lonely there. It has its sharks and bores, its snobbish quarters and stews, and a great many quiet suburbs where all sorts of obscure and attractive people live.”

When he gets to the particulars, O’Connor recounts the writers who formed him, including Austen, Turgenev, Trollope and Chekhov. “For me, and I think for most of my generation,” he writes, “the experience of literature came through the study of the 19th-century novel, and our views of literature are largely coloured and limited by that particular approach.” Serious readers would agree with him that “the 19th-century novel still seems to me incomparably the greatest of the modern arts, the art in which the modern world has expressed itself most completely.”

Like any work by an intelligent autodidact, O’Connor’s little survey is pleasingly wayward and argumentative. He ranks Boswell higher than Johnson (a not indefensible argument, though I can’t agree). He rightly lauds Shakespeare, Swift and Saint-Simon. He mentions few Americans, and Melville and Henry James not at all. O’Connor says of literature, in his final paragraph, that it is “communication, and while it lifts the burden of solitude and puts us in contact with other minds, it puts us in contact with their doubts and fears as well as their pleasures and hopes.”

Last Tuesday, May 10, was the fiftieth anniversary of O’Connor’s death.

`Attention to the Minutiae of Life and Manners'

A capsule job description for any writer worthy of being read: “Such was his attention to the minutiae of life and manners.” Avoid the heady stuff that invites pomposity. Stick to life as lived, not life as cerebrated. Ford writes about Christopher Tietjens, not geopolitics. The Golden Bowl recounts human selfishness and deceit, not the capitalist patriarchy. Larkin articulated it in his defense of Barbara Pym and her novels:

“I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in the little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ‘big’ experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour.”

The source of the sentence quoted at the top is James Boswell, speaking of Dr. Johnson on this date, Sept. 22, in 1777. As usual, Boswell is baiting his friend, this time regarding a Mrs. Macaulay. Elsewhere in the Life, Johnson dismisses her as “a great republican,” a defender of “the levelling doctrine,” like one of today’s “inequality” obsessives. Johnson resists Boswell’s efforts to instigate a debate between him and Macaulay, and says, prudently, “. . . no man has a right to engage two people in a dispute by which their passions may be inflamed, and they may part with bitter resentment against each other.”

Johnson goes on to complain of a mutual acquaintance who “keeps a bad table.” We all know the type – chintzy when it comes to supplying guests with food and drink. Sensibly, Johnson says, “`every body loves to have things which please the palate put in their way, without trouble or preparation.’ Such was his attention to the minutiae of life and manners.”

Johnson continues in what Coleridge called his “bow wow manner,” but clearly he is having a good, provocative time. Unlike bores, Johnson is enjoying what a musician might call modulating his dynamics. He can speak out of genuine anger, and then slip into an ironic, self-amusing register his opponent is likely not to recognize. After all, eviscerating cranks is one of the supreme pleasures society affords us, whether or not they appreciate it. Boswell notes of his friend: “Johnson seemed to be more uniformly social, cheerful, and alert, than I had almost ever seen him. He was prompt on great occasions and on small.” In keeping with his “bow wow manner,” Johnson enters into an amusing debate over the ideal shape of a bulldog. He even throws in a stereotypically Latinate Johnsonian word and promptly translates it into plain English: “TENUITY— the thin part.” Unexpectedly, Boswell offers a moving apologia for his devotion to Johnson, “the minutiae of life and manners,” and his project:

“I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost. Though a small particular may appear trifling to some, it will be relished by others; while every little spark adds something to the general blaze: and to please the true, candid, warm admirers of Johnson, and in any degree increase the splendour of his reputation, I bid defiance to the shafts of ridicule, or even of malignity.”

`A Mixture of Light and Shade'

“I wish that I had written The Great Gatsby. I wish that I had written `In the Ravine’ and `Ward No. 6.’ I wish that I had written The House in Paris. I wish that I had written A Sportsman’s Notebook. But the novelist works with what life has given him. It was no small gift that I was allowed to lead my boyhood in a small town in Illinois where the elm trees cast a mixture of light and shade over the pavements. And also that, at a fairly early age, I was made aware of the fragility of human happiness.”

These words were uttered by the man who did write Time Will Darken It and So Long, See You Tomorrow, in 1995 when William Maxwell received the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was 86. The award was presented by another master from The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, who was born two and a half weeks before Maxwell. Both would be dead in little more than five years. Maxwell’s touching words, bespeaking humility and love, come from his three-paragraph acceptance speech, the final work included in Later Novels and Stories. It joins Early Novels and Stories, published earlier this year by the Library of America.

I know my wife has already ordered both volumes for me for Christmas but I couldn’t resist taking the new volume from the library. I’m happy my time and place overlapped with Maxwell’s. I come close to thinking, when so much fiction bores or repels me, contemporary fiction in particular, that Maxwell was our greatest novelist. I can’t defend that critically or rationally, and thoughts of Melville, James, Cather, Faulkner and Bellow rush to my higher thought centers, but the part inside where language and emotion share space knows otherwise. In 1998, the late Anthony Hecht gave a book-length interview to the English writer/editor Philip Hoy. Which novelists among his contemporaries, Hoy asked, gave him the greatest pleasure? Hecht answered:

“I would list Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov.”

The choice of those names confirms my impression that Hecht was a profoundly civilized man. Also read Hecht’s essay on Time Will Darken It, collected in A William Maxwell Portrait and surely among the last things the poet, who died in 2004, ever wrote.

More good news: The Library of America has announced it will publish The Sweet Science and Other Writings, its second collection of work by A.J. Liebling, in March. Included will be The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals and The Press. For a taste of these funny, beautifully written books, savor this passage from the third volume on that list:

“People in the Jollity Building neighborhood like to be thought of as characters. `He is a real character,’ they say, with respect, of any fascinatingly repulsive acquaintance.”

'The Best Dinner-party'

In a July 15, 1924 letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., then an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Harold Laski writes: 

“I have had an amusing time with [August] Birrell on the best dinner-party to consist only of people in fiction and limited to ten.”

 

As parlor games go, this isn’t bad. Even critics identify good guys and bad guys, charmers and bores, when reading fiction or watching a movie. That may not be sophisticated but it is healthy and human. Birrell (1850-1933) was a British lawyer, politician and literary critic who specialized in appreciation. In an earlier letter, Laski describes Birrell as “a great joy and full of real learning taken with the right leisurely feeling.” Laski continues:

 

“We agreed that Pickwick should head the table and Elizabeth Bennet sit at the bottom. The other guests would be Florizel of Bohemia, Colonel Newcome, Diana of the Crossways, Becky Sharp, Shirley, Dr. Thorne, Barry Lyndon and Manon Lescaut.”

 

The authors, respectively, are Dickens, Austen, Stevenson, Thackeray, Meredith, Thackeray again, Charlotte Brontë, Trollope, Thackeray a third time, and Prévost. A Victorian focus representing the grand age of the novel. The outlier is Manon Lescaut – eighteenth-century and French. No Russians, no Americans. Laski asks Holmes: “Can you better that list taking into account the variety of temper and experience to be fitted in?”

 

In his July 23 reply, Holmes makes no attempt to "better that list," and writes, “At your imaginary dinner who is Br. or Dr. Thorne?” No reply from Laski.

 

One immediately begins assembling a guest list. The first is obvious: Natasha Rostova. You’ve already fallen in love with her. The eponymous heroes of Daniel Deronda, Nostromo and Invisible Man. Valentine Wannop of Parade’s End, without her husband. Misail Poloznev of Chekhov’s My Life (for what he learns). Perhaps Leopold Bloom but definitely not Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Biswas. David Bendiner in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Certificate. Robinson Crusoe after he returns to England and takes a shower. Isabel Archer. One looks not necessarily for “good” people but people who have lived, and the experience wasn’t wasted on them. They have something to say worth listening to.

 

Readers, have at it.

 

[All quotations are drawn from the first volume of the two-volume Holmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe and published by Harvard University Press in 1953.]