'Beginning to Smell Gamey'

 “I have always found the atmosphere of Twelfth Night a bit whiffy.” 

That hasn’t been my experience. I think of Twelfth Night as second- or third-tier Shakespeare, enjoyable, often linguistically interesting, occasionally amusing but a universe away from Lear. The judgment above is Auden’s in “Music in Shakespeare” (The Dyer’s Hand, 1962). In his Lectures on Shakespeare (2000), Auden writes: “The society in Twelfth Night is beginning to smell gamey.”

 

Auden seems fixated on stink. The OED tells us whiffy means “having an unpleasant smell” and cites Auden’s usage, as well as Melville’s in Mardi: “A pithy, whiffy sentence or two.” Think of our synonyms for foul-smelling: stinky, mephitic, funky, malodorous, reeking, rank, smelly, fetid, frowsty. Odoriferous originally meant pleasant-smelling but has evolved to mean “strong-smelling; odorous.”

 

More than thirty years ago I wrote a newspaper feature story about jobs in which workers had to deal with foul odors, including garbage collectors. This was before emptying trash bins had been automated. I rode midsummer on the back of a truck with the crew and noticed that a steady stream of fluid leaked from under the compactor compartment at the rear onto the pavement. In my story I described it as “noisome brown juice,” and the copy editor loved that.

    

Joyce in Ulysses reminds us of the interrelatedness of taste and smell: “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

 

Yiddish, predictably, has the most evocative adjective for a bad smell: farshtunken. And I see there's even a Farshtunken Sandwich: three kinds of herring and raw red onion on a buttered bagel.

'Letting Loose His Outlandishness'

Some of us know Thomas Manning (1772-1840) second-handedly, by way of Charles Lamb. The better informed know him as a pioneering sinologist who, in 1811, became the first European to enter Lhasa, Tibet, where he met the 9th Dalai Lama, a six-year-old boy. He had studied Chinese and medicine in Paris, and lived in China from 1807 to 1817. He is said to have known fifteen languages. He interviewed Napoleon on St. Helena. Lamb had met Manning at Cambridge in 1799. His first letter to his new friend, dated December 1 of that year, begins: “The particular kindness, even up to a degree of attachment, which I have experienced from you, seems to claim some distinct acknowledgment on my part.” In Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb (Yale University Press, 2022), Eric G. Wilson writes: 

“Lamb would have evolved his bizarre wit on his own, but Manning evoked a comic energy from Lamb that he wasn’t aware he possessed. Over the next twenty years, Lamb intensified this vigor until it condensed into the essays of Elia. Lamb’s letters to Manning are test runs for his mature style, in some cases serving as first drafts for Elian essays.”

 

Imagine if Manning had been a humorless, dry-as-dust academic. What might have become of Elia? The most entertainingly eccentric of essayists and letter-writers, Lamb had a gift for attracting comparably entertaining and eccentric friends. Wilson describes the tone of that first letter to Manning as “demure, Lamb doesn’t feel comfortable letting loose his outlandishness.”

 

Manning makes a cameo appearance in Lamb’s Elia essay “The Old and New Schoolmaster": “My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second.” At Cambridge, Manning served as a tutor in mathematics. He shows up again in “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” in which Manning is anonymously identified as the translator of a Chinese text:

 

“Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day.”

 

Lamb and Manning hit it off – not always the case with eccentrics, who often find the eccentricity of others intolerable. Wilson writes: “Fashion and irreverence weren’t the only things Manning shared with Lamb. He also had dark features, a taste for the odd, a love of drink, and a penchant for quirky wordplay.” Humor tends not to travel well, in time or space. Lamb’s sense of comedy and pure silliness has a modern feel. It’s often compatible with what we find funny. Lamb and Manning were fortunate to have found each other.

 

I would love to read a detailed biography of Manning. No dry pedant, he could easily keep up with Lamb at his silliest. Here’s a sample from the letter Lamb wrote to Manning on May 28, 1819: “Mrs. Gold is well, but proves `uncoined,’ as the lovers about Wheathamstead would say.” In his reply, Manning tops him:

 

“I took all your letter very kindly, except the word uncoined—as you & I have barred punnin, I could not tell at first what to make of it—I’m afraid it will not pass current. I thought at first you alluded to her not being in a Family way. The phraze was familiar in Dryden’s time—’stampt an image.’ But what interest could you or I take in that? She’s not likely to produce young Napoleons, I suppose: Then I exchanged that for another idea — but still unfavorably.  Just as the circulating medium of my brain was at a standstill, & I feared I must let it aLoan . . . Nothing in this life, as you justly observe, is without alloy — not even uncoin’d Gold—but let’s change the note.”

'And Keep What I Expect to Reread'

“[M]y library is as unsystematic as my mind, an assemblage of old favorites to which I return repeatedly in search of pleasure and/or edification.”

 

The neurotic part of my brain, roughly 53.2 percent of it, is nagged by the unsystematic arrangement of my books. Certain writers are appropriately clustered – all of Boswell and Johnson, all of Guy Davenport, Chekhov and Joseph Epstein --  and share shelves accordingly. But from my desk I can count thirteen books about World War II on five scattered shelves. Joseph Conrad is shelved not with Henry James and Ford Madox Ford but Polish literature. It comes down to finite shelf space. The number of volumes is again inching closer to three thousand. Books stacked horizontally are starting to obscure those standing upright, but at least I’m not yet piling them on the floor, he said, rationalizing.

The good news is I’m seldom unable to find the book I’m looking for. This corresponds to another useless knack I possess. When I read a passage in a book I want to mark or transcribe for future use and I’m too lazy to get a pencil, I have the idiot-savant-like ability to remember the page number and where on the page the passage is located -- a rare gift granting me no known evolutionary advantage.

 

At the top, the late Terry Teachout is replying to a request from National Review to describe his “personal library” – a phrase he objects to, as I do. “I buy what I expect to enjoy,” he writes, “and keep what I expect to reread, and that’s the size of it.” If I possess only one book by a given author, not counting the Bible, it likely means that writer is not a favorite and I would happily give it away to an appropriate reader. I’m an aspiring, never-realized completist.

 

Another writer, Richard Brookhiser, notes that “the Brookhiser Decimal System depends on memory.” As does the Kurp counterpart. Joseph Epstein has twice culled his library for reasons of space. “Each time, like the detached tail of the iguana,” he writes, “it grew back.” I hope none of this comes off as bragging. I’ve never measured myself by what I own nor tormented myself with what I don’t own. Except for books, I’m not acquisitive and don’t covet bright shiny things. As Peter J. Travers puts it:

 

“A library is a humbling place, speaking caution through its record of perfidy and foolish presumption. It also is a place of hope, reminding us that we can learn, if we would.” 

'Browsing Alongside the Antiquarians'

“In the bookshop, all was calm. You might have been far away, in some much older city, browsing alongside the antiquarians. The pace was intent and unhurried as the customers meandered among the works of Henry James and Rex Stout and Françoise Mallet-Joris and Ivan Turgenev and Agatha Christie and the rest, more and more names turning up in front of my eyes as I stood looking.” 

That was in 1963, on Forty-Eighth Steet near Sixth Avenue in New York City. I was in Kaboom Books on Houston Avenue in Houston in 2022. After almost sixty years, the mood was similar – “intent and unhurried,” the way pre-digital public libraries used to be. Almost crowded, everyone masked, much choreography and applied etiquette in the narrow aisles between shelves. I had even weighed volumes by James and Turgenev.

 

Irish-born Maeve Brennan (1917-1993), a protégé of William Maxwell, is best remembered as a writer of short stories for The New Yorker. In the sixties, in the persona of “the long-winded lady,” Brennan wrote feuilletons for the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” department. A selection was published under the title The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (1969; rev. 1998). She was one of my models when I did street reporting and column-writing for newspapers. Go out cold, preferably on foot, and keep your eyes and ears open. If something looks topically important, ignore it. Talk to people and listen. Leave your precious hypotheses in the office. Forget muckraking. Nothing’s more interesting than most of our fellow humans.

 

Along with the Brennan collection I bought Osip Mandelstam’s The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks (trans. Richard and Elizabeth McKane, Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and Javier Marias’ essay collection, the Nabokovian-titled Between Eternities and Other Writings (Margaret Jull Costa, Vintage Books, 2017).

A toddler with long blonde hair followed me through the bookshop, peeking around corners and giggling when I pretended to be frightened. When I met his father I said, “That kid’s bold,” and he replied, “He doesn’t take shit from anyone.”

'By Kicking, If Necessary'

As a freshman I came to philosophy cold, after a brief fling in high school with existentialism and unguided detours into Spinoza and George Santayana. My thinking was a muddle of fashion and myopic autodidacticism. In our introduction to philosophy class we read the obvious stuff – Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant – which helped clear some of the fog. Another name on the reading list, once I had read excerpts from his Three Dialogues, came off as a joke: Bishop Berkeley. Subjective idealism is the sheerest blarney, yet another Irish cock-and-bull story. I had already encountered the word “solipsism” in a biography of Tolstoy, so I recognized it when I saw it. The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of Berkeley’s adolescent theory – he called it “immaterialism” -- is recounted by Boswell on August 6, 1763: 

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus.'"

 

QED. What more to say? In the first stanza of “Epistemology” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950), Richard Wilbur endorses Johnson’s reasoning:

 

“Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.”

 

Tom Disch performs a similar service, without naming Johnson, in “What to Accept” (Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems, 1989):

 

“The fact of mountains. The actuality

Of any stone — by kicking, if necessary.

The need to ignore stupid people,

While restraining one's natural impulse

To murder them. The change from your dollar,

Be it no more than a penny,

For without a pretense of universal penury

There can be no honor between rich and poor.

Love, unconditionally, or until proven false.

The inevitability of cancer and/or

Heart disease. The dialogue as written,

Once you've taken the role. Failure,

Gracefully. Any hospitality

You're willing to return. The air

Each city offers you to breathe.

The latest hit. Assistance.

All accidents. The end.”

'A Throb of Pleasure in His Heart'

“So, in a sense, you’re always writing for the future. It’s just that, when you do get older, the . . . future seems nearer. (Laughter) So, ideally, I would like to write for an audience who know the same things I do, and in fact, who have shared the same experiences I've had. (Laughter) That’s impossible; you can’t multiply yourself . . .” 

Ah, but you can. Like most other humans, writers are Heraclitean by nature, ever in flux. In the space of a sentence we can be two or three people. We may try hard to be single, to maintain the illusion of unity, but it’s a ruse. Think of novelists and poets who happily inhabit dozens of autonomous beings. Think of the salesmen who recalibrate with every customer who walks through the front door. We’re always more complicated than most of us understand. I’m no longer the guy who drank his morning coffee.      

 

The speaker above is the poet Donald Justice in a 1979 interview. Justice says he writes for the future. When an editor had rejected one of his sonnets, Charles Lamb declared to Bryan Waller Procter in an 1829 letter: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” Both are correct, depending on the time of day. When I was in college, a lot of bloviation focused on the myth of the Ideal Reader. I recognized this as just another academic con job. Readers are real and we can’t presume to understand them or aim to please them. The best we can hope for is pleasing ourselves and serendipitously pleasing a few others. When Milton addresses his Muse in Paradise Lost, his stand-in for the Holy Spirit, he pleads: “Still govern thou my song / Urania! and fit audience find, though few.”

 

I started Anecdotal Evidence sixteen years ago, on February 5, 2006. No focus group was consulted and I had little idea of audience beyond the hunch that some people still like to read good books. I’m no critic but I wanted to share my enthusiasm for books, reading, writers and writing – things I already liked thinking and talking about. I’m pleased and proud that the first words posted on this blog were lines from William Hazlitt’s essay “The Fight”:

 

“. . . we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

 

When I look at the blog list to the left I see the names and websites of five people we’ve lost since this blog started – most recently, Terry Teachout. I’ve been blessed with some excellent readers.

'But We’re Living in a Backward Age'

“[Y]ou’ve probably noticed that I’m interested in details. Not themes, not big ideas, not messages, but details. Some readers only care about the story, some are more interested in structure and the overall shape of a literary work, I myself pay attention to details: descriptions, images, metaphors, motifs, some subtle gestures or moments of things left unsaid . . .” 

You are forgiven if you mistook the author of these thoughts for Vladimir Nabokov. After all, one of his students at Cornell quoted the author of Pale Fire as saying, “Caress the detail, the divine detail,” and Nabokov once told an interviewer: “In high art and pure science detail is everything. Only myopia condones the blurry generalizations of ignorance.”

 

No, the author is Di Nguyen, proprietor of the little white attic, a rare strictly literary blog. She has enthusiasm, good sense, little or no pretentiousness, and a hearty, old-fashioned appetite for literature. On Wednesday she wrote a post about “what I look for when reading, what I value and consider important in literature.” Nguyen carefully delineates her values. She’s no aesthete – “style isn’t everything.” Neither is she a message-monger. She’s no genuflecting admirer of, say, William H. Gass, the Ronald Firbank of our age – solemn silliness – but neither is she an adept of agitprop. I get the sense that a growing number of readers – and teachers, and critics – equate quality in literature with “stuff I agree with.” Nguyen cautions:

 

“I don’t enjoy style and language and wordplay just for the sake of style and language and wordplay; I don’t love metaphors just for the sake of metaphors; to some readers, style alone brings pleasure, style is all, but I’m more interested in what it conveys.”

 

In the hands of a first-rate writer, there’s no contradiction or even tension between style and substance. Try to imagine Moby-Dick as written by Hemingway, who also wrote a book about an ocean-dwelling organism. Nguyen goes on to give us a deliciously gratuitous defenestration of Joyce Carol Oates and Elfriede Jelinek (whoever that is).

 

Like generations of common readers, Nguyen is dedicated to characters in fiction, “characters who are full of contradictions.” She writes: “That’s why my favourite novelist is Tolstoy, as he can inhabit his characters’ minds and depict the minute changes in their consciousness better than anyone else.” Readers who have fallen for Natasha Rostov will understand. Nguyen endorses reading-as-self-forgetting and is refreshingly commonsensical when it comes to another recent vogue in reading:

 

“Questions about identity don’t interest me. I don’t read in order to find myself in books (don’t I have enough of myself in my non-reading time?), and don’t need characters to be the same sex, race, nationality, or whatever in order to relate to them. Nor do I necessarily relate to characters who supposedly belong to the same group—this shouldn’t have to be said, but we’re living in a backward age. I’m also not a fan of the Strong Female Character trope, which is tedious and has been done to death.”

 

I’m not one to handicap writers as though they were thoroughbreds. It can be amusing to rank them, if the pastime is treated with the seriousness of a parlor game and not as scripture. Nguyen writes: “I place Shakespeare and Tolstoy at the top, above everyone else.” I probably do too, though the rivals come relentlessly to mind: Proust, Henry James, Chekhov, Conrad, Sterne . . . It’s important to remember there is no progress in art, only multiple lines of individual evolution. Dante is more accomplished and sophisticated than anyone published in the twelve most recent issues of Poetry. How good it is to see mature discernment in a young writer:

 

“I love writers who say yes to life, to borrow Joseph Epstein’s phrase; writers who give me glimpses of beauty when I don’t find it in life [and even when I do – P.K.]. I love writers who see people as complex individuals, not just types or members of a group or products of their environment.”

'But It Is the Least Fallible'

A reader about my age tells me he and his wife enjoy reading books aloud. Since the start of the pandemic they have read Moby-Dick, Great Expectations and a book I don’t know, E.L. Nesbit’s The Railway Children (“though written for young people, [it] is a beautifully composed prose ode to character”). Rick asked for read-aloud suggestions and I mentioned two novels by William Maxwell – Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). 

I don’t know what goes into choosing books suitable for non-silent, non-solitary reading. I’ve never even listened to a recorded book. I just picked two novels I like and periodically reread. In an essay titled “The Audible Reading of Poetry” (The Function of Criticism, 1957), Yvor Winters writes: “It is also important to read prose aloud, and to hear the prose when one reads it silently. Melville, Gibbon, or Samuel Johnson about equally will be lost on us if we do not so hear it.” I read almost everything, including what I’ve written, under my breath, silently except in my head.

 

I told Rick I’ve only once read a book aloud to an adult. About 20 years ago, I read The Great Gatsby to my wife, at her request. She hadn’t read the novel before. I had, and never much cared for it. Neither does she, it turns out. I remember being embarrassed reading aloud passages of inferior writing. I wanted to interrupt Fitzgerald and make fun of it. We never repeated the experiment.

 

I spent hundreds of hours reading to my sons. To the middle one, soon to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy, I read a bound, collected volume of a comic book I had read as a kid, Magnus, Robot Fighter, most of Roald Dahl, and the science and history books for young readers written by Peter Ackroyd. I miss those days.

 

I’m not certain of its precise pertinence but I remember a sentence in “Reading,” half of Auden’s prologue to The Dyer’s Hand (Random House, 1962): “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” Trust your taste, your readerly bent, but don’t be afraid to challenge it or the over-confident tastes of others.

[To Val Gunnarsson: I don’t have a copy of The Great Gatsby, so I’m unable to cite specific passages. What I recall after twenty years is a straining after “poetic” effects. In short, sometimes laughably purple prose.]

'Number Them All and Remember Them'

Tom Disch writes in the only novel marketed as science fiction I have ever found readable (that is, rereadable), Camp Concentration (1968): 

“The Muse descends—characteristically assuming the mortal guise of an attack of diarrhea, abetted by headache. Auden observes somewhere (in the ‘Letter to Lord Byron’?) how often a poet’s finer flights are due/rumpty-tumpty-tumpty to the flu.”

 

The writer of this journal entry is Louis Sacchetti, a poet and conscientious objector. He is held in a military prison and being injected with a form of syphilis meant to accelerate the intelligence of prisoners. The goal is to use the disease-boosted geniuses as weapons while slowly killing them. True to 1968, the president of the United States is Robert McNamara. Most of this information is delivered obliquely, sometimes unintentionally, by way of Sacchetti’s journal. Despite the unlikely premise, Disch writes with a minimum of melodrama. His prose is witty, precise and allusive. The reference to Auden’s poem is correct. In the ninth stanza of “Letter to Lord Byron,” he writes:

 

“Professor Housman was I think the first

    To say in print how very stimulating

The little ills by which mankind is cursed,

    The colds, the aches, the pains are to creating;

    Indeed one hardly goes too far in stating

That many a flawless lyric may be due

Not to a lover’s broken heart, but ’flu.”

 

He even makes fun of Auden’s concluding rhyme. There’s a subtle linkage buried here: Disch, like Auden and Housman, was gay. I missed that when I first read the novel more than half a century ago. Today, Disch – born February 2, 1940 -- would have been eighty-two years old. The loss is ours. He would have made a grand old man – irascible, enormously funny, a dedicated enemy of cant. He took no sides in politics, never played favorites. A death-obsessed poet, Disch took his own life on July 4, 2008. That fact still stuns me, just as his vehement anti-religion stance still bores and offends me. Among poets, his closest kin is probably Turner Cassity, who was also erudite, non-confessional, formally gifted, very funny and gay. For sad amusement, read Disch’s website, Endzone, with a final entry made two days before his death. See the prose entry for April 22, 2008, for a taste of Dischian whimsy shaded with melancholy. He titles it “Leaves of Our Time”:

 

“Leaves blown across the lawns of foreclosed homes; leaves on forest floors, moldering delectably; leaves pressed between the pages of a book, which so have learned, a little, to think; leaves still shocked by the summer’s departure, still clinging to their high aeries and in denial; leaves that had promised themselves to take up yoga or ballroom dancing when they had the chance, and now they have the chance; leaves that fell young, half-eaten by caterpillars, and vain about the holes they have to show for that ordeal; leaves in Missouri so unlike the leaves in Illinois but not ashamed; leaves that were never seen by any human, having been hidden, as though in a harem, by other leaves; leaves gathered in the burrows of chipmunks and witness to their love; leaves dissolving into mulch by the margin of the road. Number them all and remember them.”

 

There’s something playfully prayer-like about that passage. Disch was a master of the list and catalogue, a man of perfervid appetites. He reveled in the world’s bounty. In “The Dot on the i,” the first poem in his last book, About the Size of It (Anvil, 2007), Disch refers to the realm he has entered as “the democracy of dust.” The poem is at once mordant and exalting:

 

“When it comes to the sense

Of beauty we are all Pythagoreans,

Transfixed upon the ineffable and inexplicable

Significance of a number; for instance

(Or especially?), i, the square root of minus-one.”

'This Vast Sea of Words'

Dr. Johnson is writing to his friend Thomas Warton on this date, February 1, in 1755: 

“I now begin to see land. After having wandered . . . in this vast sea of words. What reception I shall meet with on the shore, I know not; whether the sound of bells, and acclamations of the people, which Ariosto talks of in his last Canto, or a general murmur of dislike, I know not . . .”

 

Johnson’s “vast sea of words” -- his Dictionary of the English Language – would be published two months later, on April 15, with 42,773 entries. He had worked on it for nine years and later described his labors as a mingling of “anxious diligence” and “persevering activity.” Johnson was assisted by six amanuenses. He would read a book and mark the words he wished to cite. Then he passed it along to his assistants. The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum describes the rest of the procedure:

 

“They would then copy the underlined word on to a sheet of paper that had been folded into quarto sections and divided by a pencil line into two columns. On the far left of the margin, they wrote the main word and underneath, they wrote the definition/example from the book with a large enough gap above and below, so that Johnson could later add his own definitions, explanations and etymologies. Having done this, the amanuensis would strike through the letter in the margin to show that that word has already been copied.”

 

All done by hand, in an analog world of poor lighting, ink and quill pens. In his “Plan of an English  Dictionary (1747), Johnson writes: “The great labour is yet to come, the labour of interpreting these words and phrases with brevity, fullness and perspicuity.” His more comical definitions – oats: “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people” -- have been quoted too often, whether out of derision or cheap laughs.

 

I choose to celebrate Johnson’s Dictionary as an overflowing anthology of English prose and verse. Johnson had his favorites when looking for citations – Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope – and one could acquire a first-rate education by simply reading the quotations and pursuing the original sources. Robert Browning would claim he read the two folio volumes of the Dictionary in order to “qualify” as a writer. Here is John Wain’s description of Johnson’s use of quotations, which he judges “one of the glories of the Dictionary”:  

 

“To begin with, the idea of illustrating – and, by implication, enforcing – definition and usage by citing authorities was Johnson’s most important original contribution to lexicography, and would have remained so even if he had made a mess of the selection. In fact, he made a brilliant success of it. The Dictionary is one long fascinating anthology. He consciously chose the quotations not only to illustrate the words but to convey valuable thoughts or interesting information.”

 

Johnson’s Dictionary, like its great successor, the Oxford English Dictionary (the first volume of which – A to Ant – was published on this date, February 1, in 1884), is cause for celebration  by all English-speakers, especially writers.

'Lost the Skill to Please'

Auberon Waugh (1939-2001) seems to have barely survived the voyage across the Atlantic. Even his surname (he was the eldest son of Evelyn) didn’t help. Perhaps because he was best known in England as a journalist, and journalism is eminently perishable and doesn’t travel well, awareness among American readers is minimal. I’ve read A Scribbler in Soho: A Celebration of Auberon Waugh (2019) and his autobiography, Will This Do? (1991), and I’ve always been touched by the simple, true verdict he passed on his father after the novelist’s death in 1966: “[H]e was the funniest man of his generation.” Now that’s filial piety. 

In 1972, “Bron” Waugh published his fifth and final novel, A Bed of Flowers. Nige has read it and on Saturday wrote: “It is Shakespeare's pastoral comedy reimagined as a hippie idyll, in all its sweetness and absurdity.” After half a century it’s about time I read it too. The novel is long out of print but I’ve put the library’s copy on hold. As Nige says, it’s unlikely a new edition will be published, “especially in these woke times.”

 

Nige’s post moved me to look around online and see what is available. In the September 1987 issue of Chronicles he published “Doggerel in a Good Cause’:

 

“As editor of the Literary Review, I am afraid I have formed rather a low opinion of the nation's poets. Every week 20 or 30 offerings arrive through the post, and I often glance at them before handing them over to the magazine's saintly, long-suffering poetry editor. With amazingly few exceptions, these ‘poems’ are prosaic, confused, derivative, usually hard to follow, and often quite unambiguously meaningless. The general atmosphere is one of gloom, which would not matter if there were any compensating originality of perception or joy in the use of words. But the prevailing spirit of dullness and selfabsorption produces no emotion stronger than boredom.”

 

Sounds familiar. The dreariness Waugh detects has only grown drearier in the last thirty-five years, as has the linkage between safely bien pensant sentiments and the wish to express them in prose camouflaged as poetry. Waugh perceives the “vague equation of obscurity with cleverness, of self-absorption with art, of triviality with elegance,” and continues:

 

“The modern poet for a long time accepted that few people would want to read him and saw this as a tribute to his own superiority. Now, in the post-Modernist age, he would dearly like to be read but has lost the skill to please.”

'Prose Answers Every Common End'

People no longer write letters, we are told. Digital convenience has turned handwritten or typed notes into quaint relics from another world. Do you remember the thrill of finding a personal letter in the mailbox? About sixty years ago I was a pen pal with a girl  in New South Wales. It seemed miraculous that I could exchange a ten-year-old’s banalities with someone in Australia, a place as real to me as Lilliput. In the late nineteen-sixties, after a friend and I went to hear Dr. Benjamin Spock speak on Public Square in Cleveland, our picture and names appeared on the front page of the newspaper. A few days later, I received a handwritten letter on ruled paper telling me, among other things, to “go back to Sweden,” a place I had never visited. It left me thrilled and scared. 

No longer will we be able to enjoy new volumes of letters like those left us by Charles Lamb, Lord Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson and Flannery O’Connor. We read them for their biographical content, of course, but also for the conversational zest of the prose – letters as literature. Just this week I received a letter from a longtime reader, one whose name I didn’t recognize. He has posted comments on Anecdotal Evidence but always under a pseudonym. “I knew you, of all people,” he writes, “would enjoy getting a ‘fan letter’ the old-fashioned way.” He is correct.

 

Another master of the epistolary art is William Cowper (1731-1800), the often-mad English poet. In “A Poetical Epistle To Lady Austen” (1781) he writes:

 

“Dear Anna, — Between friend and friend,

Prose answers every common end;

Serves, in a plain and homely way,

To express the occurrence of the day;

Our health, the weather, and the news,

What walks we take, what books we choose,

And all the floating thoughts we find

Upon the surface of the mind.”

 

That’s as charming and civilized a description of letter writing between friends as I know. In The Peace of the Augustans: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment (1916), George Saintsbury is equally charming in his description of Cowper’s gifts as a letter writer:

 

“If his range of subject is somewhat small-beerish it is the freshest and most refreshing, the most delicately tasted, and the most enlivening if not stimulating small beer that ever came from honest malt and hops and pure water. You cannot dislike anything in Cowper, and it must, again, be a very peculiar and unenviable person who despises anything in him.”

'The Strange Swoon of Reading'

“In the house where I grew up, I used to wake before anyone else so that I’d have the early morning hours to read books before going to school.”

That time of day has always been jealously protected. Sleep was bracketed by books. I fell asleep reading and woke to reading. I’m not the sort of dreamer whose conscious life seeps much into his dreams, the way it happens in movies. Reading is too private and autonomous to enter the subconscious. I’ve never dreamed about the contents of books, but the bookstore in Cleveland where I worked almost half a century ago periodically makes an appearance.

 

When I was a high-school junior, a young English teacher loaned me a textbook of short stories, most of which I hadn't yet read. A few years earlier she had used it in a class at Kent State University. One morning I woke and read, for the first time, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I had never before read a story that hit me with the vivid violence of a movie. It shook me and I carried the small trauma of it through the school day.

 

Around the same time I was reading for the first time The Adventures of Augie March. For a budding writer already given to overwriting, Bellow’s prose was a liberating rush. And then one morning I encountered a description of Augie riding the rails, trying to get back to Chicago, in Chap. 9:

 

“So I climbed to the roof. It was a high-backed cattle car topped with broad red planks. Ahead the slow bell was turning over and over, and I was in plenty of company, the rough-looking crowd of non-paying passengers the Nickel Plate was carrying. I felt the movement of the stock against the boards and sat in the beast smell. Until Cleveland, with the great yards and overbuilt hills and fume, chaff and grit flying at your face.”

 

This was like spying a picture of my face in an old book. Augie – that is, Bellow -- saw my hometown and described it briefly and accurately (“great yards and overbuilt hills”: The Flats). I felt some inarticulate insight into the linkage between the real and the fictional. That energized me for the balance of the school day.

 

In the passage quoted at the top, W.S. Di Piero recounts his boyhood reading in “Out of Notebooks,” collected in Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures (1996). He continues: “Reading was a blissful, auroral time; school was dutiful and hollow,” and  he refers to “the strange swoon of reading.” That sensation has never gone away.

'A Person Characterized As Being Small'

Who remembers Thomas Sprat (1635-1713)? Any aging English majors out there? Some of us know him only from the brief biography included by Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). 

While looking for something else in Johnson’s Dictionary, I encountered an unfamiliar word, philologer. He defines it as “one whose chief study is language; a grammarian; a critic” – that is, a good portion of Johnson’s own job description. He includes citations from Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Boyle, and then Sprat’s: “The best philologers say, that the original word does not only signify domestick, as opposed to foreign, but also private, as opposed to common.” You’ll find that sentence in Sprat’s “A Sermon Preached at the Anniversary Meeting of the Sons of Clergy-men in the Church of St. Mary-le-Bo” (1678).

 

Johnson devotes perhaps 150 words in his biography to Sprat’s work as a poet. The rest largely covers his clerical and political life. Sprat edited Abraham Cowley’s work and wrote his biography, and Johnson closes his biography of Sprat with these words:.  

 

“My business is only with his poems. He considered Cowley as a model; and supposed that, as he was imitated, perfection was approached. Nothing, therefore, but Pindarick liberty was to be expected. There is in his few productions no want of such conceits as he thought excellent; and of those our judgment may be settled by the first that appears in his praise of Cromwell, where he says, that Cromwell’s ‘fame, like man, will grow white as it grows old.’”

 

If not for Johnson, it’s likely I would never have learned of Sprat – a reminder of the fate of most poets. His surname is a mildly cruel joke. A sprat is a small fish. It is used figuratively to refer to a young boy or, the OED tells us, “a person characterized as being small, weak, or insignificant. Frequently used dismissively or as a term of contempt.” I seem to remember W.C. Fields spitting out “Sprat!” in one of his films.

'The Arithmetic of Compassion'

In the ninth stanza of “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper,” Zbigniew Herbert writes: 

“they don’t speak to the imagination

there are too many of them

the numeral zero at the end

changes them into an abstraction”

 

Herbert refers to the death of 120 soldiers in an unnamed war – by twentieth-century standards, journalistically insignificant, hardly worth a mention and only below the fold. The translators from the Polish are John and Bogdana Carpenter (Mr. Cogito, 1993). In her translation in The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 (2007), Alissa Valles changes one word:

 

“they don’t speak to the imagination

there are too many of them

the numeral zero on the end

turns them into an abstraction”

 

As usual, Herbert writes with cool irony, never breaking character, refusing the temptation to sentimentalize or preach. His poem shares journalism’s proclaimed objectivity but not its trivializing or sentimentality. The poem’s closing lines sound distinctly – that is, ironically – academic, as though posed as a classroom assignment. Readers naïve about human nature should be cautious: they might be triggered. The Carpenters’ version:

 

“a subject for meditation:

the arithmetic of compassion”

 

And Valles’:

 

“a theme for further reflection:

the arithmetic of compassion”

 

The poem this time reminds me of the grim quip usually attributed to Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” I’ve quoted it as such myself. The words fit our understanding of the man and his thugs. The Quote Investigator is skeptical. Interestingly, the line has also been (mis-)attributed to Adolf Eichmann.

 

Robert Conquest attributes a corollary sentiment to Stalin: “Death solves all problems; no man, no problem.” Again, provenance uncertain. In The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968; rev. 1990), Conquest writes: “We get a figure of 20 million dead [directly on Stalin's orders, not counting war dead], which is almost certainly too low and might require an increase of 50 percent or so.” Few deny that Stalin, his precursors and successors killed a lot of innocent people. Our distance from them in time and space makes it easy to reduce their deaths to entries on a spread sheet, while a murder down the block is a “tragedy”: “the arithmetic of compassion.”

'Specializing in Omniscience'

After Terry Teachout’s death I remembered Richard Brookhiser had written about him briefly in Right Time, Right Place (2009), his memoir of life with William F. Buckley at the National Review. During the first Reagan administration, young conservative writers flocked to the magazine, including Terry. Buckley was an energetic cultivator of young writing talent. Brookhiser had published his first article in NR (a cover story) in 1970 when he was fifteen. He went fulltime in 1977 and by age twenty-three was a senior editor. He writes: 

“[Terry] came to us from the real world of work, writing music criticism for the Kansas City Star while he clerked in a bank and played jazz bass on the side. He began reviewing books for us, specializing in omniscience.”

 

That’s a great line, right on the money. Brookhiser continues: “In one letter to Bill [Buckley], Terry fretted over some liberal tripe that had run in his paper. Bill quoted the line in a column, which caused the Star to rebuke Terry; Bill, characteristically, rebuked the Star (I handled the correspondence).” Terry moved to New York City in 1985 and began writing for National Review and other publications. Brookhiser continues:

 

“Terry was a little reserved, a little anxious, bursting with attention, eager to show how much he knew. None of us ever needed persuading of that; the proof was always on the page.”

 

Not a bad epitaph. Brookhiser is a smart, conversational writer of prose. On the book’s final page, he includes the toast he made to Buckley at a dinner shortly before his mentor’s death in 2008. He quotes a poem I’m always a sucker for, Yeats’ “Beautiful Lofty Things,” and prefaces the toast with this:

 

“The limitation of writers is to experience the world through words; the vanity of writers is to be always playing with words to capture the world, and their own experience.”

 

I can no longer find the email but I remember writing to Terry, probably in 2009, about what I was reading at the time, including Ronald Knox and Josef Pieper. He approved in his reply and said something like the following: “I can’t tell you how many times I have failed to understand something until I had written about it.” I was stunned that someone understood an experience I thought was mine alone.

 [On Jan. 13, the day of Terry’s death, Brookhiser posted a brief tribute to his friend in National Review.]

[In 2007, when Anecdotal Evidence was barely seventeen months old, I was floored to read Terry praising me as a “regional critic” in the Wall Street Journal.]

'He Is a Rammy Fulsome Fellow'

“He is a rammy fulsome fellow, a goblin faced fellow, he smells, he stinks, et caepas simul alliumque ructat [he reeks of onion and garlic].” 

The object of the slander is that figure familiar to readers of English literature at least since Chaucer, the cuckhold. Robert Burton (1577-1640) looks at the faithless wife and often oblivious husband from all sides. In one passage he seems to find excuses for the wife’s behavior, as when the husband has a “goatish complexion”: “[S]i quando ad thalamum [should he approach the nuptial couch], how like a dizzard [OED: "foolish fellow, idiot, blockhead"], a fool, an ass, he looks, how like a clown he behaves himself! she will not come near him by her own good will, but wholly rejects him, as Venus did her fuliginous Vulcan at last.”

 

Rammy in the sentence at the top means “rank, pungent, rammish,” from ram, the presumably malodorous male sheep. What I love most about Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, followed by five additional editions during Burton’s lifetime, each larger than the one before), is the bounty of his language, his love of catalogues, the way he revels in sumptuous redundancy.   

 

To give the book its full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is. With all the Kindes, Cavses, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Severall Cures of It. Considering its size – roughly 500,000 words in modern editions, often published in three volumes – and Burton’s chronically digressive narrative style, it’s a simple book to navigate.  It’s systematically organized into partitions, sections, members and subsections. Many editions come with a subject index. Thus, the passages quoted above can be found in Partition 3, Section 3, Member 1, Subsection 2. See “Jealousy” under “Cure of Love-Melancholy.”

 

Another reason for loving the Anatomy is Burton’s understanding of human nature. Nothing surprises him about our behavior. All of us are subject, at least periodically, to bouts of madness and moral lapses. He has a Theophrastian gift for illustrating moral types. You can read potions of the Anatomy as early incarnations of the self-help treatise. I say these things to soothe intimidated readers. Be patient. Read slowly. Keep the Oxford English Dictionary handy. Milton, Dr. Johnson, Sterne, Lamb, Keats and Melville, among others, read him with pleasure and the concentration of Talmudic scholars. The Anatomy is the ultimate example of what Max Beerbohm called the “dippable-into” book.

 

Burton died on this date, January 25, in 1640 at age sixty-two.

'Hard, Condensed, and Durable'

“Minor art needs to be hard, condensed, and durable.”

Louise Bogan is probably describing her own poetry, among other things. Her productivity was never Wordsworthian or Tennysonian – that is, bloated with inferior work. In the best writers, the ones we prize as life companions, ruthlessness trumps self-indulgence, though even Shakespeare nods. Bogan’s poetry fits into a slender volume flensed of flab.

 

She is writing on this date, January 24, in 1936, to her old friend Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969), future translator of Garcia Lorca, Virgil and Ovid. Mention of the Spanish poet is significant. Seven months after Bogan’s letter, Garcia Lorca would be murdered by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, Humphries published his translation of The Poet in New York. Humphries was a fellow traveler, reflexively sympathetic to Leftist causes even in the year Stalin’s show trials begin. In 1939, Bogan would reply to a literary questionnaire: “Political convictions: NONE.”  Humphries has apparently asked Bogan about her politics as fighting looms in Spain:

 

“I suppose any political regime that includes dictatorship is something for a writer anywhere to worry about. I don’t think he should give as much worriment to the possible political set-up as he does to his writing. The less capacity for scattered worrying that a writer possesses, the better. Great artists in any field haven’t been great worriers. Minor artists ought to worry about their work, for worry is only valuable  when it goes toward making something hard, condensed , and durable. Minor art needs to be hard, condensed, and durable.”

 

An unfashionable stance: writers ought to mind their own business. They are granted no more and often fewer exalted insights into politics than plumbers or proctologists. To the degree they play dress-up as pundits or rabble-rousers, they neglect the literary qualities of their work, assuming there was any there to begin with. George Orwell writes best when he leaves politics alone – a handful of good essays, usually on literary topics. Bogan gets further worked up in her letter and points out the obvious similarities between Hitler and Stalin:

 

“The Fascists burn the books, and the Communists bar the heterodox, and what difference is there between the two? I must say I would just as soon die on the barricades for Mozart’s music as not: if someone walked in this minute and said, Louise, if you don’t go out and get shot, they’ll take Mozart’s music and throw it down the drain, I’d put my hat right on and go outside and take it. But the thought of spending years moping along with a lot of other writers, defying anti-cultural forces: No. For culture isn’t saved that way. Nothing is saved that way. And a lot of precious life is wasted that way. I’m an individualist, as you can easily see.”

 

[You can find Bogan’s letter in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005).]

'The Crux Is the Balance and Control'

“It is only the very young who think the vogue of the moment eternal.” 

I know this to be the case because that was my unexamined, self-centered assumption. Thoughts, whims, fashions, impulses, precious opinions, ideologies – all subject to entropy and repudiation, and that’s a good thing. To think at forty the way we did at twelve is pathology – if acted on, even criminal. Not to mature is to wither as a human being.

 

Late in life, Robert Conquest wrote a memoir, Two Muses, unfinished at the time of his death at age ninety-eight in 2015. His widow and posthumous editor, Elizabeth Conquest, has given me permission to quote from the still-unpublished manuscript. The observation above comes from the chapters Conquest devotes to his friends Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. A protracted vogue among critics of all ages has been to savage both men not for what they wrote but for their personal lives. Conquest is not defensive about his friends nor does he whitewash their behavior. The chapter begins:

 

“It’s time I should say of Kingsley Amis not simply that he was a better poet, and better critic of poetry, than most—and a fair, though tough controversialist, whether over Pound or Guevara—but more personally, for most of the years I knew him, he was the most enjoyable company ever.”

 

Testimony any of us would be proud to receive. Conquest, the chronicler of Soviet crimes, had known Amis since 1952 and Larkin since 1955. Amis’s poetry is still underappreciated. Except for a handful of his best novels – Lucky Jim, Girl, 20, Ending Up – it’s his verse I most admire and most often reread. Conquest writes:

 

“Kingsley was a skilled versifier and, like many other poets, in the obscene and disruptive forms too. . . . Need it be added that this sort of activity is the purest, if not highest, creation? No considerations of money or publication apply. It is truly art for its own sake, taking up time which might otherwise have gone into the next novel. But it may also be thought of as the expression of that superfluity of energy on which a main body of work must subsist.”

 

One is tempted to go on quoting generously. It’s a shame the memoir will likely never be published. Liddie Conquest assures me she has tried. Her husband, we sense, knows he has nothing to lose in writing his memoirs. He can speak candidly of his dead friends and their critics (I’m tempted to write “enemies”). Of Amis’ work he says:

 

“One finds in them, rather, the mâle gaîté, si triste et si profonde which Musset saw in Molière. In our literature, it has always been the serio-comic writer who has had the resources really to face the lower depths. Like many men of great vitality, Amis was much opposed to death.”

 

This is not an old man celebrating himself and singing himself. Conquest’s default mode is acute, often comic observation. As ever, he is a realist without a drop of moony idealism, but he never hesitates to defend Larkin from the self-righteous onslaught of critics and readers. Dismissing the virtue-signaling rot about Larkin’s taste for pornography, Conquest writes:

 

“The poetry alone, in fact, refutes the biographical dissections. It can be seen as the formal statement on oath of his priorities; and also, as the bringing together into unity and coherence the disparate and contradictory elements in his character.”

 

The critics of Amis and Larkin often seem naïve, unacquainted with the complicated, contradictory nature of being a human being. Only a psychopath can be reduced to a single, undiluted essence, and even that defies understanding:

 

“Nowadays it is often held that the internal furies and fads are the essential and overwhelming part of a personality. On the contrary, the crux is the balance and control that, except in cases of near-insanity, imposes itself on, and disciplines, the lower drives, and creates a balance found—in Philip—in poems and personal relaxations. As John Bayley put it of Housman, a certain kind of poet ‘has a duty not to be happy. But for such a poet this can be happiness by other means, deprivation a way of getting in touch. . . becoming himself, his own personality’ Or, to put it another way, in his poetry, Larkin pulled himself together, mediated his tensions into a harmony, which in the most essential way was himself.”

 

By now we accept that that Larkin, with Richard Wilbur, was the last great poet in English. Here is a posthumously published poem, not among his finest, written by Larkin in January 1960. He knew himself, yes, but he also knew us:

 

“None of the books have time

To say how selfless feels,

They make it sound a superior way

Of getting what you want. It isn't at all.

 

“Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital

In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.

Selfishness is like listening to good jazz

With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.”

 

In a letter to Monica Jones in 1967, Larkin writes: “I think it is funny the way my idea of happiness is to be listening, part-drunk, to jazz.”

[As to my reader's comment, we can only hope.]