'Rarer than Trumpeter Swans'

In 1971 I was still consuming contemporary fiction at a vigorous clip while trying to catch up with the literature of the past. My timing was good. Some of the masters were still around and still writing, often near their peak – Nabokov, Bellow and Thomas Berger, in particular. We didn’t know it then but the postwar boom in American literature was slowly losing steam. Malamud, Welty and Ellison had already done their best work and Roth was writing some of his worst. Still, I thought I was keeping up with things and generally knew the field.

On Sunday, while looking for something else, I came across a review written by L.E. Sissman for the New York Times and published on Halloween 1971 (five days after my nineteenth birthday). The book in question was the novel What Happens Next? by Gilbert Rogin. I can say with certainty I don’t remember having ever seen Rogin’s name before. He’s a blank in my experience. And yet, Sissman opens his review audaciously:

“I think Gilbert Rogin has written a great novel, the first new one I’ve run across in quite some time. Which is as it should be; great novels, almost by definition, should be rarer than trumpeter swans.”

I admire Sissman enormously as a poet and reviewer/essayist, but I’m skeptical. I’ve put Rogin’s novel on hold at the library. My expectations are almost nonexistent. We’ve all oversold books on occasion. Time smooths things out. Rogin died two years ago without me ever knowing who he was. I don’t know how this happened. Sometimes we have no idea just how ignorant we are.

'At Once Unjust and Absurd'

I’m proud to have at least once been mistaken for a Jew. This happened more than a decade ago. The particulars are fuzzy and I don’t care to look it up but something I had written spurred a reader to carry on at great length about my “pro-Jew” propensities and my love of Israel. So far, so good. Both accusations are correct. Then he used a phrase like “Jews like you,” and he was off and running. I had been reclassified and it felt good.

The internet is a sewer. We all know that. The basest human urges, emboldened by anonymity, thrive here like mushrooms in a damp basement. I’m accustomed to stupid, vicious and narcissistic comments and emails. You don’t respond to them, you don’t argue. You hit “delete.”  

So, I’m not naïve or uninformed. I could spend hours talking to you about the Dreyfus case, George Lincoln Rockwell or the murderous, fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A Jewish reader of this blog put it together for me on Friday when he wrote: “What’s happening in this country, Patrick? The Democrats have abandoned the Jews.  A perfect storm of right-wing, left-wing and Muslim anti-Semitism is brewing.” He was reacting to the “newly minted superstar freshman anti-Semite” in Congress, as described by John Podhoretz. It shouldn’t surprise us that such libels are mouthed openly by politicians, from the Left or the Right, and that their colleagues, without shame, defend them. No one expects intelligence or moral rectitude out of politicians. Frederic Raphael writes in the provocatively titled The Necessity of Anti-Semitism (Carcanet, 1997):

“Anti-Semitism is not a serious issue because certain people are, or used to be, excluded from golf clubs. In more solemn form, however, it belongs to a persistent way of conceiving of the world, and even of imaging the universe, which is at once unjust and absurd. What then is to be done? Anti-Semitism cannot be banned and yet, it seems, it would be grotesque not to challenge it. It is grotesque and it can be challenged, but not by proscription. Neither the virtues of the Jews nor the barbarities of their persecutors will render anti-Semitism unthinkable or even, to perverted minds, delectable.”

Raphael adds: “We need not scan the stars to divine why men are shits, bullies, murderers and thieves.” That’s human nature. But it’s also within our nature to defy such idiocy and hatred. We can refuse to accept it. John Berryman wrote a little-read short story titled “The Imaginary Jew.” The title character begins as an innocent, puzzled by the casual anti-Semitism of his university classmates. After a late-night political argument in Union Square, during which he is accused of being a Jew (“Are you cut?”), this non-Jew, in an act of imaginative solidarity, accepts his “Jewish” identity. Here is the story’s final paragraph:

“In the days following, as my resentment died, I saw that I had not been a victim altogether unjustly. My persecutors were right: I was a Jew. The imaginary Jew I was was as real as the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, is a real Jew. Every murderer strikes the mirror, the lash of the torturer falls on the mirror and cuts the real image, and the real and the imaginary blood flow down together.”

'I Myself Therein am Nearest to Myself'

In his review of Van Gogh’s collected correspondence, “Calm Even in the Catastrophe” (Forewords and Afterwords, Faber and Faber, 1973), W.H. Auden makes a wise observation about the now forgotten art of writing a letter: 

“The great masters of letter-writing as an art have probably been more concerned with entertaining their friends than disclosing their innermost thoughts and feelings; their epistolary style is characterized by speed, high spirits, wit, and fantasy.”

The best letter writers – Cowper, Keats, Byron, Stevenson, O’Connor – regularly conform to Auden’s epistolary prescription. Cowper can be cloying about his mental distress and his occasional religious mania but he also entertains his correspondents (and us) with the adventures of his pet hares. Cowper’s capacity for sheer silliness is the primary reason some of us still read him, but the master of that gift for absurdity – and it’s a peculiarly modern gift, one we’re attuned to thanks to movies and television – is Charles Lamb. Take the letter he wrote to his childhood friend Coleridge on this date, March 9, in 1822:

“It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well--they are interesting creatures at a certain age--what a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling --and brain sauce--did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly with no Oedipean avulsion? Was the crackling the

colour of the ripe pomegranate?”

There are readers, I’m certain, who find Lamb’s brand of comedy irritating and unambiguously unfunny. They have my pity. With Lamb (and, in the next century, Max Beerbohm) I feel a linguistic temperamental affinity that might explain my appreciation for his sense of humor. He knows when to lay it on thick and when to pull back, as in the following passage from the letter to Coleridge:       

“To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teals, wigeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese--your tame villatic things--Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere--where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity--there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself.”

There’s a coda of sorts to this letter. In September 1822, Lamb published “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” in London Magazine, and a year later included it in Essays of Elia.

'She Began to Hate Stories'

What is your reaction to this title?: “How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales.” I thought it might be one of the late Oliver Sacks’ lesser-known case studies or a close-up look at addiction and family dynamics, but it’s something humbler and more interesting, a fairy tale. Or a fairy tale about fairy tales, if you want to get all meta- about it. Without dabbling in morphology or Freudian voodoo, and thus stifling all possible pleasure, I enjoy reading fairy tales. They are plot stripped to basics, pure narrative, and often profoundly weird. Nabokov claimed “great novels are above all great fairy tales,” and he was right. Think of Robinson Crusoe or The Portrait of a Lady.

I’m browsing in Russian Fairy Tales (Pantheon Books, 1945), translated by Aleksandr Afanas’ev. “How a Husband . . .” is only two-thirds of a page long. The first sentence seduces us into the story: “There was once an innkeeper whose wife loved fairy tales above all else and accepted as lodgers only those who could tell stories.” We sense a variation on Scheherazade is coming. “Of course the husband suffered loss because of this, and he wondered how he could wean his wife away from fairy tales.”

An old man shows up at the inn on a cold winter night. The innkeeper warns him of his wife’s rule: “The old man saw he had no choice; he was almost frozen to death. He said: ‘I can tell stories.’ ‘And you can tell them for a long time?’ ‘All night.’” And so, for the first time, we see a hint of cunning in the husband. He warns his wife she cannot interrupt or argue with the storyteller. If she does, the stories will cease. The old man begins:

“‘An owl flew by a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water. An owl flew into a garden, sat on a tree truck, and drank some water.”

He repeats the same sentence, like a Russian Gertrude Stein, the wife throws a tantrum, and the old man says: “Why do you interrupt me? I told you not to argue with me! That was only the beginning; it was going to change later.’” You can see where this is going. The husband upbraids his wife, perhaps for the first time, and reverts to Russian peasant form: “And he thrashed her and thrashed her, so that she began to hate stories and from that time on forswore listening to them.”   

There’s a postmodern moral in there somewhere, assuming such a thing exists.

'It Is As Natural to Read Books Many Times'

I was looking online for something Jacques Barzun had written about the pleasures of riding on trains when I found “Recommended Summer Reading,” a feature published in the Summer 1958 issue of The American Scholar. If I saw such a headline in a journal or newspaper today, I would promptly turn the page, assuming that the recommendations would be lying, inbred puffery and simple bad taste. Barzun’s presence kept me reading, and we learn that he, in turn, has been reading a foundational American work, a new edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

“The volume sent me back to Lincoln’s writings at large, which I never tire of dipping into: he is probably the greatest stylist America has yet produced, and I read his slightest note with awe and despair, for each is a gloss upon the Necessary Word, besides being a peep-hole into one of the strangest and finest minds of the nineteenth century.”

Non-readers and readers impervious to literary grace will be surprised to learn that one of our presidents was a writer of the first rank, as was another, Ulysses Grant. Of course, two years later, Barzun published his brief monograph, “Lincoln the Literary Genius,” in which he writes:

“[H]is style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook which colors every act of the writer’s and tells us how he rated life. Only let his choice of words, the rhythm and shape of his utterances, linger in the ear, and you begin to feel as he did – hence to discern unplumbed depths in the quiet intent of a conscious artist.”

By this point, I gave up on Barzun on trains, at least temporarily, and kept reading. Joseph Wood Krutch rightly recommends Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond. Saunders Redding, a name new to me, likes Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape, an excellent bedside book. But the real payoff came with a brief but dense burst of bookish recommendations by Randall Jarrell. He was a mediocre poet, a world-class reader and one of our best critics. He begins: “Everyone hears an opera, looks at a picture, over and over and over; it is as natural to read books many times. Most of my list are books I've read again during the last year.” A true reader, as Nabokov said, is a re-reader. Among the new books Jarrell has read are titles by Sybille Bedford, Peter Taylor, Philip Larkin and Nabokov (Pnin). The rereading tally begins:

“I’ve recently read again and would like to recommend: Saint-Simon’s Memoirs; the first half of D. H. Lawrence’s Complete Short Stories -- some are as good as any short stories in English; Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the best and most endearing of books of criticism; Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a  wonderful prose book by the greatest of modern poets; Verga’s stories and his House by the Medlar Tree; Leskov’s ‘The Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District’ and ‘The Amazon’; Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems; Sir Kenneth Clark’s books on landscape, the nude, and Piero della Francesca . . .,” and so on.

It’s an admirably inspired list. One can quibble about Lawrence’s presence but Jarrell is an industrial-strength consumer of books, whose motive is love and pleasure. He recommends Turgenev’s greatest story, “A Lear of the Steppes,” and, of course, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. He closes, and wins our hearts: “I continually reread Chekhov and Remembrance of Things Past -- and anyone who loves Proust will certainly love Jean Santeuil, the letters, and Contre Saint-Beuve.”

I never did find Barzun on trains, though I think what I wanted may be in God’s Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love, Spiced with a Few Harsh Words (1954), which I don’t have a copy of at the moment and probably ought to reread.

'The Writers and the Great Amateurs'

“If I am to learn anything about English--and this is my passion and despair--I can only do so by going to the Masters of that glorious language. Seeing how a word is used in a line by Dekker or Swift is a replenishing experience.”

Just last week I was reading something by Swift in which I learned a new word, clarified an old one and closed the book replenished. Writers don’t read like other people. Our pleasure is at the same time on-the-job training. Years ago Bob Dylan said he couldn’t sing eight bars without referring to Charley Patton or Hank Williams. It’s the same with writers. Who can write anything worthwhile without a subconscious or wide-awake nod to – who? Our free-lance, unpaid, unofficial tutors. Reading their books is like auditing a class. No good writer works in a vacuum.

The writer quoted at the top is Edward Dahlberg, one of my teachers but one who must be heeded skeptically and measured against common sense. In the Winter 1964 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the editors published almost one-hundred pages of answers to a questionnaire they sent to dozens of writers and scholars. In their introduction to “The Classics and the Man of Letters” they write: “These answers show once again--what only classicists have ever doubted--how much the classics and classical  studies owe, and will go on owing, to the writers and the great amateurs. Lector, intende: laetaberis.” Here’s a sampling of the responses:

Guy Davenport: “Real continuity is metamorphic. The molds grow and in growing change. To say that there is a continuity from Greece and Rome to the United States is to say that there is an obvious continuity to all history, and our strain is particularly closed and neat. I cannot think of an example of my or my neighbors’ life that cannot, sometimes with a little strained ingenuity, be traced to the classical world. The world simply isn’t that old.”

Marianne Moore: “Vanity of pedagogy is fatal. Enjoyment has to be achieved or study is useless.”

Anthony Powell: “I had a ‘classical education’ (not much Greek) and do not think I write a line without semi-consciously forming a Latin prose sentence in the first instance.”

Frederic Raphael: “One of the main problems of the prose writer--apart from just trying to do good work, which is tough enough--is to find a language for himself. I find myself more and drawn to a kind of precision which exact words give (T. E. Hulme influenced me here, with his talk of precision being poetry) and so one tries to get a word to do as much work as possible, studies echoes and so on.”

And Dahlberg again: “A good teacher is an awakener; he must also be a patient Buddha, giving his pupils the Rig-Veda or the Bhagavad-Gita one week, and should either fail to rouse somniferous flesh, he can offer them Hazlitt’s essays on the English comic writers or Goncharov’s Oblomov.”

A sad note: after fifty-five years, almost every writer on the list whose name I recognize is dead.

'The Annoying Hiatus'

The best-known and least interesting portion of A.J. Liebling’s sprawling body of work for The New Yorker is “The Wayward Pressman,” the occasional column of newspaper criticism he wrote between 1945 and his death in 1963. No one loved and hated newspapers as much as Liebling. His appetite for them was another expression of his gluttony. As a newspaper reporter, I shared his insatiability for several decades, then lost interest. Liebling never did.

I’ve read all of Liebling, some of it many times (Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris), but the lede to his press column in the March 28, 1953 issue of The New Yorker, “Death on the One Hand,” may be his finest single sentence:

“Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.”

Liebling treats the Soviet despot with the same condescending contempt with which he treated press barons (publishers don’t have deadlines to meet; reporters do, every day). Like any good journalist, Liebling was a cynic with a clandestinely sentimental heart. He could love newspapers while hating editors and publishers. His lede continues:

“This posed a problem for newspaper editors, who had to decide whether to use their prepared obituary notices and shoot the works generally on Wednesday, March 4, the day Tass, the Russian new agency, announced that the premier had suffered a brain hemorrhage, which even to the most casual reader looked like the end, or to wait until he officially expired, by which time the story might have lost the charm of intimacy.”

Newspapers routinely prepare stock obits of prominent people. When he or she dies, all the “B matter” is ready and you slap a fresh lede on the top. Outsiders may find the practice a little ghoulish but it saves time. In Stalin’s case, Soviet officials were afraid to announce the dictator’s death prematurely, and they were worried about the subsequent power struggles that would inevitably take place. Liebling captures the confusion in Moscow and in the U.S.:

“The annoying hiatus that the old Bolshevik permitted to intervene between his syncope and his demise put a strain on even the ruggedest professional seers, who had to start explaining the significance before he actually died and then keep on inventing exegeses until he was in his tomb. Altogether, their ordeal lasted a full week, but they stood it better than their readers.”  

Stalin, we now know, died on this date, March 5, in 1953, and not soon enough.

'The Feeling of His Irrevocable Loss'

In nineteenth-century Russian fiction, people seem to get sick more often than in other literatures. Dostoevsky’s Kirilov and Turgenev’s Bazarov are consumptives, and Ivan Ilyich is fatally ill with a nameless malady. The sole physician of the group, Chekhov, commonly treated those infected with tuberculosis, typhoid and typhus, the scourges of the nineteenth century. Typhus is caused by bacteria spread by fleas and lice, and reliable treatments with antibiotics were not available for another seventy years. Among his patients were family friends, the three Ianova sisters and their mother. In 1885, typhus killed one of the girls and her mother. In 1887, Chekhov published “Typhus” (The Party and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, 1917), a story in which the titular disease is mentioned only two times – “spotted typhus” – and only on the final page. If we already know Chekhov’s work, the opening of the story leads us to expect social comedy:

“A young lieutenant called Klimov was travelling from Petersburg to Moscow in a smoking carriage of the mail train. Opposite him was sitting an elderly man with a shaven face like a sea captain’s, by all appearances a well-to-do Finn or Swede.”

The Finn is a boor and a bore with “a broad idiotic grin” who “continually puffed at his stinking pipe.” In the next sentence we’re told Klimov “for some reason did not feel well.” Dr. Chekhov reels off the symptoms:

“[Klimov’s] mouth felt dry and sticky; there was a heavy fog in his brain; his thoughts seemed to be straying, not only within his head, but outside his skull, among the seats and the people that were shrouded in the darkness of night. Through the mist in his brain, as through a dream, he heard the murmur of voices, the rumble of wheels, the slamming of doors.”

“Heavy fog” and “mist” suggest Chekhov may have known that “typhus” is rooted in the Greek tûphos meaning “hazy.” Perhaps Russian writers find disease useful because it permits them to explore alternate states of consciousness. As Klimov grows feverish, reality accelerates and seems to melt and flow like wax on a stove. His senses are hyperacute and yet nothing makes sense. At home he is greeted by his aunt and his sister Katya. He collapses in bed and “when he recovered consciousness he found himself in bed, undressed.” The doctor is there, and his orderly, Pavel. He is weak but his fever has broken:

“His chest and stomach heaved with delicious, happy, tickling laughter. His whole body from head to foot was overcome by a sensation of infinite happiness and joy in life, such as the first man must have felt when he was created and first saw the world. Klimov felt a passionate desire for movement, people, talk.”

His aunt appears and Klimov asks to see his sister. Here, the story turns more conventional, as though written by a grimmer-minded O. Henry. The aunt tells him Katya contracted typhus from him and was buried two days earlier. The story’s final line reads: “And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life and the feeling of his irrevocable loss.” "Typhus" reads as though Chekhov had taken a step or two into twentieth-century fiction, into the mind itself, and then retreated. It was only 1886, he was twenty-sex years old and he hadn’t yet written his best fiction.

'A Family of Serene Clouds in Miniature'

“Quiet tumult.” The words are Clive James’ in an interview. The man has been dying in public for a long time but he’s still worth listening to. He describes the composition of a new poem, “The River in the Sky”: “What I wanted was a tumult, and I hope that’s what I got: a quiet tumult, like the light on the harbor, or the snow leopard diving down the cliff.”

I can’t recall ever using tumult in writing or conversation, and one seldom encounters it. Tumultuous, yes, but usually as a cliché in journalism, a lazy way to describe an era (“those tumultuous Sixties”). It’s a good word to avoid. Tumult echoes in my inner ear with tummler and tumble, which help ameliorate any residual pretentiousness. It sounds like a broken-backed, stitched-together word, a fading trochee. It has its uses. One thinks of the Boar’s Head scene in Henry IV, Part II, in which Mistress Quickly observes: “Here’s a goodly tumult!”

Back to “quiet tumult”: James is playing with a near-oxymoron, but the unexpected pairing makes sense. We think of tumults as noisy affairs, like mob scenes or mosh pits. But disturb an ants’ nest with the tip of your cane and what do you have? Or watch the play of sunlight on the ground as filtered through the leaves of a breeze-tossed tree. A passage of prose or verse might also be a quiet tumult. Consider our foremost painter in prose, Vladimir Nabobov, in Speak, Memory:   

“I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.”

'It Is the Human Glory which Antecedes All Others'

It’s a word that sounds like what it means, or at least one of the things it means: frippery. Before I looked it up, I assumed it meant triviality, a thing or act of little consequence. That’s almost right. I encountered the word in Jonathan Swift’s “A Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage”:

“If you are in company with men of learning, though they happen to discourse of arts and sciences out of your compass, yet you will gather more advantage by listening to them, than from all the nonsense and frippery of your own sex . . . .”

Swift’s point is debatable but you can understand my impression of frippery. The OED outlines a splendid history of the word. It starts in France, of course, and beginning in the sixteenth century the word in English means “old clothes; cast-off garments.”  This mutates into “finery in dress, esp. tawdry finery.” That sounds like “shabby-genteel,” a quality I find admirable, like any attempt to honestly bolster one’s sagging self-respect. By the nineteenth century, frippery could be applied to “a showily-dressed person” or “articles of small value; trifles.” Swift’s usage is closest to this meaning: “empty display, esp. in speech or literary composition; showy talk; ostentation.” That’s pretty much what I had in mind. In modern demotic American English, bullshit.

English is remarkable in the way it takes a word and clones it promiscuously. Here are subsequent usages: “a place where cast-off clothes are sold,” “a stand or horse for dresses, etc.; a wardrobe,” “trade or traffic in cast-off clothes,” “tawdry style; frivolity.” The Dictionary’s final entry is an adjective, “fripperied over,” meaning “showily tricked out.”

English gives us enormous freedom of expression, while demanding that we treat it with respect. We can articulate almost anything, if we work at it. How exhilarating it is to play with words while communicating with others. It’s almost like making music. Anthony Burgess, a composer and great lexical performer, writes in Language Made Plain (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965):    

“[L]anguage survives everything—corruption, misuse, ignorance, ineptitude. Linking man to man in the dark, it brought man out of the dark. It is the human glory which antecedes all others. It merits not only our homage but our constant and intelligent study.”

'A Zealous Reader Is Required'

If you’re in need of bedside (or bathroom, I suppose) reading, the sort of book Max Beerbohm called “dippable-into,” a volume to be opened and closed and opened again, casually, let me suggest an unlikely title: The Hasidic Anthology, Tales and Teachings of the Hasidim. It was published by the Bloch Publishing Co. (“The Jewish Book Concern”) in 1935, on the cusp of the Holocaust, which lends its contents poignancy. The second subtitle is impressive, worthy of Robert Burton: The Parables, Folk-Tales, Fables, Aphorisms, Epigrams, Sayings, Anecdotes, Proverbs, and Exegetical Interpretations of the Hasidic Masters and Disciples; Their Lore and Wisdom.” So too are the editor’s credits: “Translated from the Hebrew, Yiddish, and German, Selected, Compiled and Arranged by Louis I. Newman.”

Newman (1893-1972) was a Reform rabbi and a champion of Revisionist Zionism. His co-editor was Samuel Spitz. The book will remind some readers of Martin Buber’s Tales of Hasidim collections, though Newman’s excerpts are generally briefer than Buber’s, seldom longer than half a page. What’s striking is the amount of practical, commonsensical wisdom found in Hasidic lore. Here’s an example, from the section titled “Self-Knowledge”:

“A man of piety complained to the Besht [better known as the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism], saying: ‘I have labored hard and long in the service of the Lord, and yet I have received no improvement. I am still an ordinary and ignorant person.’

“The Besht answered: ‘You have gained the realization that you are ordinary and ignorant, and this in itself is a worthy accomplishment.’”

That seems to be the ultimate lesson of any worthy spiritual tradition. This is from the “Modesty” section of Newman’s anthology: “A Hasid asked the Gerer Rabbi why he still visits the Kotzker Rabbi though he himself is more renowned. The Rabbi replied: ‘As long as a man finds that there is someone from whom he can learn, he should not teach others.’”

And from “Books”: “Rabbi Bunam said: ‘One who devotes himself to the study of the Torah but neglects the service of the Lord, is like a book-case filled with good books. The book-case stands by itself and the books stand by themselves, entirely without connection. A zealous reader is required.’”

'I Have No Words to Tell Him How We Grieved'

Memory defies understanding. We know things we don’t remember knowing. On Wednesday I read “Fugitive Son,” a sonnet by A.M. Juster:

“The Japanese mourn children they abort.

In Shinto shrines they pick a figurine

To represent the life that they cut short.

They bow, then slide a folded note between

The sandalwood and jade as if a soul

That never loved a face could now forgive

Or any act of penance could control

Unwanted visits from a fugitive.

“I never picked a message I could send

Or bargained for forgiveness.  There was none.

Although I know my boy does not intend

More pain, he asks about the nameless son

We lost three months before he was conceived.

I have no words to tell him how we grieved.”

Comment would be an affront but Mike’s poem triggered a memory. More than thirty years ago, a reporter I worked with and his wife adopted an infant boy. My first son had been born months earlier and we were delighted together. Their son died from SIDS on Father’s Day. Only once before had I seen people shattered into numbness, and that was at the funeral of another little boy, in Indiana, who had been killed when run over by a tractor driven by his mother. Another memory followed, one I hadn't recalled in years. One morning in the early nineteen-sixties, I was swimming with my mother. We were dog-paddling near the middle of the lake when she told me she had had a miscarriage the year before I was born. The baby was a boy. She never mentioned it again.

'I Do Care Above All for Reality'

“I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

A fine excess not of adjectives or sentiments but of energy in a closed circuit. A poem or any written work without energy (Robert Creeley comes to mind) lies there on the page or screen, as inert as a dead thing. I think of “singularity” as a futile striving after novelty, which doesn’t exist. A good reader recognizes something in a good poem, dimly recalled, that makes intuitive sense. It feels as though you’ve been waiting all your life for precisely what the poem has to give you. Keats was writing a letter to his friend John Taylor on this date, Feb. 27, in 1818, and he calls his strictures “axioms,” as though he were Spinoza or a geometrician. What he describes are his own idiosyncratic ideals, which wouldn’t be realized until the following year, when he could write his great odes. Here is his second axiom:

“Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, seem natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.”

Keats could be describing “To Autumn,” as in these lines:

  

“While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.”

Keats was no sylph, despite his reputation. His eye is on the real, despite the periodic transcendental vaporings. He reminds me of a characteristically blunt assertion Rebecca West makes in one of her letters: “I do care above all for reality.” It’s not as though we have a choice in the matter.

'It Will Do Him No Good to Whine'

I’ve just learned that an old friend, Mike Matthews, died several years ago and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I met Mike in 1979 in Bryan, Ohio. He had just moved to town and was manager of a new drug store, and I was editor of the weekly newspaper in nearby Montpelier. Like me, Mike was a serious guy who had difficulty taking anything seriously. The Germans, naturally, have a word for such personalities: Witzelsucht (literally, “joking addiction”). That’s not quite accurate. We could be serious about ultimate things but the absurdity of daily life was fair game. It was Mike who taught me some choice examples of Navy slang. Thanks to him, cold cuts are forever “horse cock” and catsup is “sorority sauce,” though I’m rarely able to use such colorful language.

I learned about Mike’s death thanks to the internet and a friend in Ohio. In my experience, that’s how it’s done today. I have lived in five states, held a lot of jobs and known a lot of people, many of whom I remember with fondness. I expect to hear of more deaths, some that will evoke a twinge of regret, others that will leave me cold. News of my own death will fall mostly into the latter category. Most of us are just not that important. Beware of people who claim to grieve for every death. They likely grieve for none, or one. As Boswell recounted of Johnson:

  

“To my question, as to whether we might fortify our minds for the approach of death, he answered in a passion, ‘No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.’ He added, with an earnest look, ‘A man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine.’”

'Culture Is the Basis of All Life'

Andrei Sinyavsky – or was it Abram Tertz? – told an interviewer in 1978, seven years after his release from the Gulag and five after fleeing the Soviet Union for France: “I fear uniformity.” As we once thought every writer did. It was our obligation to rethink the world, weigh evidence, purge delusions, consult forebears, reject clichés of thought and language, and draw our own conclusions. Today, a kinder-gentler species of Zhdanovshchina prevails. Punishment for variance from orthodoxy can be swift, harsh and invariably ad hominem.

If you’re new to Sinyavsky, start with A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Kyril Fitzlyon, Max Hayward, 1976), based on the two letters per month he was permitted to write his wife from a Soviet forced-labor camp between March 1966 and June 1971. Starting in the late nineteen-fifties and writing under pseudonym he took from a legendary Russian-Jewish gangster, Abram Tertz, the non-Jewish Sinyavsky published Gogolian stories that flaunted the dreary strictures of socialist realism.

Next, try his heavily autobiographical novel Goodnight! (trans. Richard Lourie, 1989), in which he writes: “Life is what you do while waiting to write.” And he comments on his other self, Tertz, the gangster from Odessa reminiscent of Isaac Babel’s Benya Krik:

“I see him as if it were now, a robber, gambler, son of a bitch, hands in his trousers, moustache like a thread, in a cap flattened to his eyebrows, propelled by a light, rather shuffling gait, with tender interjections of an indecent character on his withered lips, his emaciated body honed in many years of polemics and stylistic contradictions. Intense, irrefutable. He’d slit your throat at the drop of a hat. He’ll steal. He’ll croak, but he won't betray you. A businesslike man. Capable of writing with a pen (on paper) -- with a pen, which in thieves’ language is a knife, dear children. In a word -- a knife.”

Also Strolls with Pushkin, along with the early work that got him in trouble: On Socialist Realism, The Trial Begins, The Makepeace Experiment and Fantastic Stories. Sinyavsky sounds almost overconfident in his 1978 interview:

“We must defend our independence. Very often the politically minded don't realise that culture is the basis of all life. Let's assume the Soviet Union sets about conquering the West. The West will stand firm precisely because of its cultural structure. Of course tanks can flatten all buildings and trees and forms. But the West will offer resistance not merely with the help of the atom bomb, one atom bomb against-the other; but will resist precisely because of its structure, that is to say, its culture.”

Sinyavsky’s faith in Western culture is at once flattering, touching and naïve. On all sides it crumbles from within. The enemy breached the walls a long time ago. In Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), Nadhezhda Mandelstam writes of an old man who had spent twenty years in the camps and exile, but had throughout “kept his loyalty to the victors,” with his “party card engraved on his heart”:

“It was the time of the Siniavski affair, and I asked him his view of it. The old man began to seethe with unfeigned indignation: Siniavski had ‘hidden behind a pseudonym.’ ‘Not like us Bolsheviks,’ he continued. ‘We went right up on the platform and said exactly what we thought.’ I laughed at him.’ ‘And you never lied, by any chance?’ I always did, you know—not that I ever went up on a platform, of course, but I lied and hid my real thoughts every day and every hour: in the classroom, in the lecture hall, at home, in the kitchen. . . . How could I do otherwise? One truthful word, and I would have got ten years’ forced labor, right there and then.”

About the old man, the poet’s widow goes on: “He was not simply an idiot, but a product of the times. The basic ideas which went into his makeup (one cannot use the word ‘personality’) have warped his mind, and his memory holds up a distorting mirror to past events and actions.”

Sinyavsky/Tertz died on this date, Feb. 25, in 1997, in Paris, at the age of seventy-one.

'Of or Pertaining to a Lake or Lakes'

I find that I first encountered the word lacustrine on Jan. 3, 1972, while reading Vladimir Nabokov’s fifth novel, Glory, as translated from Russian by the author and his son Dmitri. Our hero and a girl plan an outing to the countryside beyond the confines of Berlin: “[A]nd so, one marvelous, impeccably cloudless morning, Martin [Edelweiss] and Sonia were off for the lacustrine, reedy, piny outskirts of the city . . .”

The context was no help and it’s obvious my Latin was already threadbare. In the marginalia I left on Page 146, my nineteen-year-old self informs my sixty-six-year-old self that I consulted the OED and found this: “of or pertaining to a lake or lakes.” And I added, “like riparian.” For once, I’m not embarrassed by an annotation my younger self left in a book. More often it is something English major-fatuous like “foreshadowing” or “symbolism.”

One of the unanticipated pleasures of reading the same copy of a book read long ago is the occasional glimpse I get of that alien but familiar me. Lacustrine is precisely the word that would stop me again today. Now I think, what is the word’s Russian original? Or is it Nabokov showing off his scientific nomenclature? According to the OED, the word had a fifty-year vogue among scientists in the nineteenth century. The Dictionary cites the great Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (“I collected six species of lacustrine shells”) and the English biologist Thomas Huxley (“Lacustrine Delta: The alluvial tract formed by a river at its embouchure into a lake”). Both were champions of Darwin and embouchure reminds me of Louis Armstrong and his famous callous. The rest of the OED entry reads:

“Said esp. of plants and animals inhabiting lakes, and Geology of strata, etc., which originated by deposition at the bottom of lakes; also with reference to ‘lake-dwellings’ such as those of prehistoric Europe. lacustrine age, lacustrine period: the period when lake-dwellings were common.”

I remain convinced that a path beginning with one word, if followed, can circle the world.

'In Former Times It Was a Simple Place'

My earliest unambiguous memory of a public library is of dragging a heavy wooden stool across the floor so I could sit while scanning the lower shelves. The stool must have screeched on the linoleum – once a sin in the library’s monastic silence – but I don’t remember that. The remainder of the memory is fuzzy but I think I was looking for Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal (1948). A visit to the library came with a sense of hushed formality, not unlike entering a church. One didn’t holler or run. Hunting for books, browsing, collecting a stack, was a methodical business. One worked for the privilege of one’s pleasures.

That’s no longer the case. The central library in Houston is a noisy, dirty place heavily patronized by homeless people. Older books are routinely culled from the collection. I’ve seen volumes disappear, wiped from the shelves and the catalog overnight, while banks of computers are forever occupied. Volumes are readily available on open shelves that would once have been judged pornographic by reasonable people. Comic books and “graphic novels” occupy more shelf space than the 870’s and 880’s. J. P. Celia published “The County Library” in First Things:

“In former times it was a simple place,

Where one could read without a blushing face,

With thickly bound and edifying titles,

Like Noble Greeks, and red highlighted Bibles,

And Shakespeare (sans Andronicus), and Mark Twain,

Whose humor, though defiant, was humane.

“Today it’s more permissive, and diverse,

Though who’s to say it’s better, or it’s worse.

Now crammed beside the Good Book, mere shelves over,

Are bloody tales as chilling as October,

And novelettes as lurid as those scenes

Displayed in certain grownup magazines.”

To answer his implied question, we are. It’s worse.

'Belonging So Bleakly to To-day'

It’s reassuring when a writer one admires gratifyingly admires yet another writer one admires, however grudging the admiration. It lends the world a certain rightness or symmetry. But sometimes it sours and disappointment follows. Here is Rebecca West on meeting Max Beerbohm, c. 1930. First, his appearance:

“He presented himself at the party, looking extraordinarily like one of those little Chinese dragons which are made in the porcelain known as blanc de Chine. Like them he has a rounded forehead and eyes that press forward in their eagerness; and his small hands and feet have the neat compactness of paws.”

Access the tone. Is she mocking Beerbohm? Eagerness, as opposed to do dull lassitude, is certainly desirable in a man approaching sixty. And dragons suggests ferocity. But what about those paws? West continues:

“His white hair, which sweeps back in trim convolutions like one of these little dragon’s manes, his blue eyes, and his skin, which is as clear as a child’s, have the gloss of newly washed china. He is, moreover, obviously precious, and not of this world, though relevant to its admiration: a museum piece, if ever there was one.”

Perhaps West, a writer not yet forty, is aping Beerbohm’s style, his nuanced weave of ironies. “Precious” teeters nicely. And try parsing “not of this world, though relevant to its admiration.” We learn that Beerbohm does not like “literary ladies,” but the claim seems half-hearted. He shows no anger but the dinner party they are attending is clearly a trial:

      

“He was looking round with surprise, with distaste--and I perceived that his eye was lighting on members of my own sex, on members of my own profession. Yes! He confessed it, in his gentle courteous voice, which has about it something of a Chinese calm, he did not like literary ladies.”

Beerbohm was born in 1872; West, twenty years later. The difference shows. West says Beerbohm moves her to “lachrymosely remember the appearance of my mother and father.” What we have is the male/female divide, of course, but also a generational disparity. West is a modern woman who values independence. Beerbohm, West says, insists on making the past “his present.” West introduces him to her friend the writer G.B. (Gladys Bronwyn) Stern:

“With glowing eyes she sat down beside the author whom she admires perhaps more than any other of the living. His courtesy was perfect, his response to her adoration exquisitely gracious; yet the sense that he was not happy in this atmosphere made itself apparent. Impossible for his sensitive interlocutor not to feel guilt at being part of the atmosphere, at belonging so bleakly to to-day.”

West’s essay, “Notes on the Effect of Women Writers on Mr. Max Beerbohm,” written for the Bookman, is collected in Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (1931). How accurate is her reading of Beerbohm the man? Hard to say. He was no loutish bigot but very much a man of his time – this is, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. And writers as a tribe are notoriously suspicious of rivals. How sad that Beerbohm and West, two of the last century’s masters, couldn’t have sat down and had a quiet, mutually admiring chat.

'Wide and Casual Rather Than Scholarly'

Wednesday morning I spent almost two hours in a clean, well-lighted MRI tube. The radiologist had a sense of humor and wasn’t offended when, after about ninety minutes, I said that I felt trapped in an oversized, costive colon (not my precise wording). His reply: “No laxatives here, man.” The CT scan that followed was brief and uneventful. That morning I had brought with me a Montale collection to read in the waiting room but wasn’t permitted to bring it with me into the imaging contraption, so I emptied my head and almost fell asleep. Then I wished I had something to read and dealt with that irritation by “reading” the buff-colored lining of the tube. Tiny marks in or on the paint – chips or stains – suddenly demanded decrypting. Had they been left by the desperate clawing of a previous patient? My print-deprived brain devised a cheesy horror-movie plot. Then it was over.

Back home, I wanted to write something about W.H. Auden on this, his 112^th birthday, and pulled The Prolific and the Devourer off the shelf. Auden wrote it in 1939, soon after arriving in the U.S. He abandoned the book after the Nazi invasion of Poland and it was first published posthumously, in 1981. Between its pages I was surprised to find a clipping of a newspaper column I had written, dated January 17, 1989. It was about books. What a surprise. After my urge for something to read in the MRI tube, this paragraph seemed pertinent:

“I often wonder what people do who don’t know how to read. I don’t necessarily mean illiterates. I mean people who, technically, can make sense of the lexical array that surrounds us, but choose, instead, to watch television or God knows what else.”

I can still sign my name to that after thirty years. I browsed Auden’s aphorisms and reflections and was gratified to find this:

 “My father’s library not only taught me to read, but dictated my choice of reading. It was not the library of a literary man nor of a narrow specialist, but a heterogeneous collection of books on many subjects, and including very few novels. In consequence my reading has always been wide and casual rather than scholarly, and in the main non-literary.”

'Usable Only by the Unwary or Vulgar'

A professor I interviewed was bothered by a trend already condemned by many for more than a century: specialization. He seemed to think no one before him had ever noticed this tendency or treated it as a problem. It came up in the context of STEM vs. humanities. He said: “I think the drive toward specialization has reached a sort of crescendo.” His use of the musical term jarred me. I would have expected him to say “turning point,” “climax,” “high-water mark” or some other familiar cliché. Was he just being sloppy? Or was this a slightly pretentious misuse of a word that had attained the status of a full-fledged cliché and I had somehow missed it?

The OED, after the musical definition, gives a meaning it identifies as “colloq.”: “The peak of an increase in volume, force, or intensity; a climax.” Fitzgerald used it this way in Gatsby and Wodehouse in Uncle Fred in Springtime. Still, it doesn’t sound right in my inner ear. It sounds high-falutin’ and reaching, and might only be used ironically. Kingsley Amis agrees. He has a separate entry for crescendo in The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997):

“Once a musical term meaning ‘(passage played) with increasing volume’ and a derived figurative term meaning ‘progress toward a climax’. For many years now taken to be a fancy synonym for ‘climax’ as in ‘the gunfire reached a crescendo’ or ‘the chorus of vilification rose to a crescendo’ and rendered usable only by the unwary or vulgar. Outside a strictly musical context, that is.”

Amis’ ear for falsity, social striving and any hint of pretentiousness was reliably flawless.