'Do Read a Lot of Novels'

For the first time, my youngest son, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, recommended a book for me to read. It was a novel written by an American and published about a decade ago. I read little contemporary fiction but the book’s setting interested me and I felt that I owed my son an honest effort. 

I petered out after seventy pages. I felt guilty about it but the novel was long and my tolerance was short. It’s not a bad book. In fact the novelist is gifted. He writes well and obviously has done his homework. But I stopped caring about his people and their fate. The failure, I suspect, is mine, which is why I’m not identifying the novel or its author. I apologized to my son and asked him not to stop recommending the books he liked.

 

I turned nostalgic and remembered how, when young, I was a fiction-reading machine. When I discovered a writer I liked, I tended to exhaust his back catalogue. Melville comes to mind, and Nabokov. From that experience I learned that certain novels stuck with me and some were forgotten. This is not a universal critical statement but a personal expression of what is lastingly important to one reader. I might mention Death Comes for the Archbishop,  Nostromo, Zeno’s Conscience, Daniel Deronda, The Golden Bowl, Lolita, Parade’s End, The Assistant, Time Will Darken It, War and Peace, The Leopard, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Proust’s masterwork, among many others – all novels I have read at least twice and often many times. 

 

In his essay “Quixotism” (The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, 2013), Simon Leys recalls a philosopher he knew when young. Leys asked him to assemble “a list of basic readings.” Leys says he treasured this document and then lost it after many years. He has forgotten most of the books on the list but adds:

 

“What I still remember is the postscript the great philosopher had inscribed at the bottom of the page—I remember it vividly because, at the time, I did not understand it and it puzzled me. The postscript said (underlined), ‘Most important of all, don’t forget: do read a lot of novels.”

 

Leys says that as an “immature student,” this shocked him. “Somehow it did not sound serious enough,” he writes. “For, naively, we tend to confuse what is serious with what is deep.” He continues: “It took me a long time to appreciate the full wisdom of my philosopher’s advice. Now I frequently encounter echoes of it.”

 

Among those echoes for me is something Joseph Epstein writes in The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books, 2023):

 

“The knowledge provided by the best novels is knowledge that cannot be enumerated nor subjected to strict testing. Wider, less confined, deeper, its subject is human existence itself, in all its dense variousness and often humbling confusion.”

'Heed the Current of Your Stream'

In 1995, R.L. Barth published the chapbook Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands, with contributions by ten poets including Len Krisak who adapts Johnson’s “In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfieldiae diffuentem.” Krisak titles it “The River by the Mill of Stowe, In Lichfield, Where the Waters Flow”: 

“The river wanders still, and still as glass,

It passes through that boyhood’s grassy meadow where

My little limbs, with little skill, would flail the air

That settled on its pool. And there, held fast,

 

“I heard my father’s voice and learned to swim;

His words were soft and clear beneath the bending limbs

Of willows casting daylight shadows, hiding him

And me below the bright sun. Darkness dimmed

 

The secret place that father taught his son.

Now time has put an axe’s edge to all the trees,

And shade no longer lies there. Even distant eyes

Can see these naked waters barely run

 

“Their undeflected course beneath the air

Of Lichfield, making for the sea. Protected once

By leaf and branch, their channel moves them as it wants,

In openness, as if it did not care.

 

‘Dear Nisus, friend, now learn to do the same.

Ignore eternal age, with all its speed that cuts

Us from without, or wears us from within. Do what

You must, and heed the current of your stream.”

 

In Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems (2005), the late editor and translator Niall Rudd renders the title as “On the Stream at Stowe Mill, Lichfield,” referring to the city in Staffordshire, about 110 miles northwest of London, where Johnson was born in 1709. Here is Rudd’s prose trot:

 

“The river, still glassy, flows through the green meadows in which as a boy I so often bathed my young limbs. Here I would vainly thrash my arms, which got nowhere with their inexpert movements, while my father with his calm voice taught me to swim. The branches made a hiding place, and an overhanging tree covered the hidden waters in darkness even by day. Now the shadows of old have fallen victim to cruel axes; and the bathing place lies exposed to distant eyes. The water, however, unwearyingly continues on its course from year to year, and where it once flowed unseen it now still flows, though in the open. You too, Nisus, continue your daily course, indifferent to what swift time may bring in from the world outside, and what it may wear away.”

 

Judging from Rudd’s version, Johnson’s original is a fairly traditional meditation on memory, time’s bittersweet passing and lost youth. Rudd’s prose effort is useful but dull. “Cruel axes” seems overdone. The adjective is unnecessary. Preferable is Krisak’s “an axe’s edge.” The late David Ferry titled his version of the poem “The Lesson” (Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translation, 1999):

 

“The stream still flows through the meadow grass,

As clear as it was when I used to go in swimming,

Not good at it at all, while my father’s voice

Gently called out through the light of the shadowy glade,

Trying to help me learn. The branches hung down low

Over those waters made secret by their shadows.

My arms flailed in a childlike helpless way.

 

“And now the sharp blade of the axe of time

Has utterly cut away that tangle of shadows.

The naked waters are open to the sky now

And the stream still flows through the meadow grass.”

 

What Ferry writes is more transformation than translation, and a first-rate English poem. He jettisons “cruel axes” and replaces it with the superior “the sharp blade of the axe of time.” He dispenses with the obligatory Virgilian allusion and reverses the conventional duality of darkness and light. Here, the shadows are comforting, an emblem of Edenic childhood; light exposes memories and leaves everything vulnerable. Some form of “shadow” shows up three times.

 

But for “and,” Ferry’s poem starts and concludes with the same sentence – appropriate in a poem about the unending flow of a river, with the Heraclitean caveat that’s it’s not the same river. We know from anecdotal evidence that Johnson was, in fact, a powerful swimmer, and we know his father, Michael Johnson, had died in 1731, long before his son wrote the Latin poem.

Dr. Johnson was born in Lichfield on this date, September 18, in 1709 and died in London in 1784 at age seventy-five.

'Joy at a Word Because It Is Just What It Is'

I remember one afternoon as a boy while in the neighbor’s back yard falling in love with the word of. A common preposition suddenly seemed intriguing, like a pretty girl you’ve known all your life. English is dense with such small words, known early by most native speakers, that are notoriously difficult to define yet even more difficult to live without, assuming you wish to be reasonably articulate. The OED gives dozens of shades of meaning. The most familiar is probably this: “Of origin or source. Indicating the thing, place, or person from which or whom something originates, comes, or is acquired or sought.” 

However, it was the sound of of I swooned over. The spelling has nothing to do with its pronunciation. It ought to be pronounced like off but it rhymes with love and dove. The o is almost uh, a place holder when we’re looking for an answer. The f is a v. Mouth open, a tremor in the throat, then upper teeth on lower lip. It’s a reassuring sound, like a productive beehive or a barber working in the next room.

 

Isaac Waisburg of IWP Books has introduced me to a writer who would likely understand the seductiveness of words-as-sounds, abstracted from sense. C.E. Montague (1867-1928) was an English journalist who wrote novels and essays. Isaac has posted a book published two years after Montague's death, A Writer’s Notes on His Trade. The title of the first essay is taken from Hamlet: “Words, Words, Words.”   

 

“In youth you easily fall in love with words, written and spoken. You come, like other lovers, to feel an unreasoned sensuous thrill of joy at a word because it is just what it is – the sound of it and the look of it on a page – as a child’s mind thrills at the touch of fur because it is sleek and at that of a file because it is not. Apart from the interest of their use in any particular place, such words as ‘burnish,’ ‘crozier,’ ‘lustre,’ ‘beatitude,’ ‘dawn’ become enamouring objects, with glowing hearts of their own, like red wine or rubies.”

 

No two people will share identical lists of such words, and to some the proclivity is madness. I note that “enamouring” is good word and an effective way to characterize those stricken with word-love. Montague continues:

 

“A sculptor alone in his studio will fondly stroke a lump of unworked marble or bronze; he can doat on its qualities. A writer or a good reader will do much the same: his mind will finger single words and caress them, adoring the mellow fullness or granular hardness of their several sounds, the balance, undulation or trailing fall of their syllables, or the core of sunlike splendour in the broad, warm, central vowel of such a word as ‘auroral.’ Each word’s evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in.”

 

One needn’t be Alexander Theroux or the author of Finnegans Wake – or their readers – to appreciate the magic and music of language. It’s a gift. Polonius asks in Act II, Scene 2: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet replies: “Words, words, words.”

'Once Read, Always Known'

“He is almost as important to me as Shakespeare, and I think of him almost as the second most important writer in English, absurd as that might sound.” 

I am always surprised and gratified when someone expresses a conviction I thought was mine alone, as though my privacy had been wire-tapped with my approval. Literature is a public art, only fulfilled when writer and reader collaborate, yet our understanding of books, the way we claim some as our own and cherish them, is utterly subjective. Their status in our lives is a private preserve beyond mere opinion, fashion and criticism.

 

Henry Oliver is writing, of course, about Samuel Johnson. What other writer in English might be fitted into his formulation? For some, Keats or Dickens, I suppose. Perhaps Swift or Austen. Let it go at this: such devotion and identification is always rare. It’s more than “liking” a writer or being a “fan.” Oliver writes:

 

“As with the greatest poets, there are lines of Johnson’s that I have never forgotten, even though I never tried to remember them. He has the quality of the highest writing: once read, always known. He is known to me like a real person and I keep the images and ideas of him that I have accreted over the years with me wherever I go.”

 

What such writers share is a universal humanity that might be appreciated by any reader, combined with some personal quality – a moral stance, a way with words, learning out of the ordinary – that sounds a chord within us. They inspire the love and loyalty we might feel for flesh and blood. Oliver tells us Johnson thought books “ought to be useful to life.” But not in some reductively utilitarian sense:

 

“Thus,” Oliver writes, “his aphorisms: ‘Books without knowledge of life are useless; for what should books teach but the art of living?’ and ‘The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.’ These ideas stand bright and clear against all the great mass of critical and scholarly writing that has been produced in the English tradition since Johnson.”

 

I can no longer read my Penguin paperback edition of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) I was assigned by an English professor in 1971. The pages are brown and brittle, the spine is broken and the whole mess is held together with a rubber band. I keep it for sentimental reasons, as one of my entrées to Johnson’s work. The same professor introduced me to Boswell’s Life. Some years ago I acquired Vol. 16, Rasselas and Other Tales, in the “Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.” It’s a sturdy hard cover, built for rereading.

 

I love the exchange in Chap. 11, “Imlac’s Narrative (Continued)—a Hint of Pilgrimage.” Imlac tells the prince, “There is so much infelicity in the world, that scarce any man has leisure from his own distresses to estimate the comparative happiness of others.” He enumerates “the particular comforts of life” enjoyed by Europeans. Rasselas replies: “They are surely happy who have all these conveniences, of which I envy none so much as the facility with which separated friends interchange their thoughts.” Imlac gets the last word in the chapter: “The Europeans are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed,” which suggests the human condition has changed very little after three centuries.

 

Start anywhere with Johnson. You can hardly go wrong. I might suggest a selection of his periodical essays, especially The Rambler. Or his version of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Or browse in his Dictionary. “This is supposed to be an introduction to Johnson,” Oliver writes, “but you do not need a guide to his works, or a list of which order to read them in. You need to find your own way.

 

This Friday, September 18, we will observe Johnson’s 317^th birthday.

'An Invention of Hell'

“H-hour, 0800. Long jets of red flame mixed with thick black smoke rushed out of the muzzles of the huge battleships’ 16-inch guns with a noise like a thunderclap. The giant shells tore through the air toward the island, roaring like locomotives. 

“‘Boy, it must cost a fortune to fire them 16-inch babies,’ said a buddy near me.

 

“‘Screw the expense,’ growled another.”

 

It’s the morning of September 15, 1944, off the coast of Peleliu, an island in the Palau archipelago in the western Pacific, some five hundred miles east of the Philippines. Eugene Sledge (1923-2001) was a twenty-three-year-old mortarman, stretcher bearer and, like all Marines, a rifleman, from Alabama serving with the 1st Marine Division. The passage above opens Chapter Four, “Assault into Hell,” of With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), the finest World War II memoir I have read. Here Sledge describes the landing craft hitting the beach and his own awkward lurch ashore:

 

“At that instant a burst of machine-gun fire with white-hot tracers snapped through the air at eye level, almost grazing my face. I pulled my head back like a turtle, lost my balance, and fell awkwardly down onto the sand in a tangle of ammo bag, pack, helmet, carbine, gas mask, cartridge belt, and flopping canteens. ‘Get off the beach! Get off the beach!’ raced through my mind.”

 

Without straining after “fine prose,” With the Old Breed remains eminently quotable:

 

“To be under a barrage or prolonged shelling simply magnified all the terrible physical and emotional effects of one shell. To me, artillery was an invention of hell.”

 

“Through the haze I saw Marines stumble and pitch forward as they got hit. I then looked neither right nor left but just straight to my front. The farther we went, the worse it got.”

 

“To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn’t experienced it.”

 

A recurrent theme in the book is the impossibility of someone like myself, who never experienced combat, ever understanding it. He describes the savagery of the fighting with the Japanese and the esprit de corps among his fellow Marines. Sledge writes:

 

“To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”

 

The Battle of Peleliu would drag on until November 27. The 1^st Marine Division would suffer more than 6,500 casualties. Sledge was never wounded. The following year, in the final months of the war, he took part in the eighty-two-day Battle of Okinawa. His memoir was originally published by Presidio Press. With an introduction by Paul Fussell, the book was republished by Oxford University Press in 1990. Fussell writes:

 

“The book is devoid of the literary expediencies and suavities that may occasion skepticism or disgust in more artistically self-conscious war memoirs. Sledge is so little an author in the pejorative sense that his eye seems never to wander from his subject to contemplate the literary effect he’s creating. His style is like windowglass: you don’t pause to notice it—you look through it to the actuality it discloses. It is this honesty, simplicity, and modesty that give Sledge’s book its extraordinary power.”

 

Sledge’s innate humility and his reverence for the men he served with lend the book an utterly convincing objectivity. He recounts acts of heroism but no phony Hollywood-style heroics. He never tries too hard. There’s no grandstanding, no phony rah-rah patriotism. His loyalty is to his fellow Marines.

'Cynicism Is Such a Pall on the Arts'

While looking for nothing I found a genuine curiosity: an interview with Tom Wolfe focused on poetry. The interview was conducted in 2011, seven years before the novelist/journalist’s death at age eighty-eight. His favorite poem as a child, he tells Aaron Rench, was Honey Bear (1923) by Dixie Willson. He describes the poem as being written in “a rollicking kind of meter.” “I use a line from it in every book I write” he says. “There’s always a line from this poem.” If you’ve scanned Wolfe’s books and can verify this claim, please be in touch. 

More than many poets, Wolfe is alert to meter: “That rhythm, to me, just went right, as I was mentioning, right to the heart. There’s very little intervention by Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area of the left hemisphere. It just comes, streams, streams, because of the music.”

 

Wolfe goes on to describe other favorites, including Kipling, especially Barracks-Room Ballads (1890): “He was never forgiven for being for the Empire, instead of against it. He was never a poet laureate but he seemed to be because he found exoticism. He found beauty. He found adventure instead of, the only fashionable thing to do about the twenties was to condemn it, you know?”

 

Then Shelley, Byron, Keats (“I like those three better than Wordsworth. Wordsworth was okay in a pinch.”), Poe and Eliot. Wolfe was born more than twenty years before me but his tastes as a young reader overlap heavily with mine – especially Kipling and Eliot. Next comes a name I learned to appreciate only much later:

 

“P]oetry was invaded by, not only the forces of the deaf, but by cynicism. Cynicism is such a pall on the arts. I can remember taking a liking to Walter Savage Landor—a British poet—a little after the Romantic poets, a bit stately, you might say, but pretty good, pretty good stuff. I think I got interested in him in college.”

 

Landor is one of my heroes of prose and verse, a forgotten master: “What really stands out is that he wrote a poem about a clean, well-lighted, space which was a phrase that Hemingway picked up—a clean, well lighted place rather. It may be sheer coincidence.”

 

Wolfe moves on to Balzac and takes a surprisingly charitable view of The Grapes of Wrath. Talk of novels inspires these thoughts:

 

“I just think the salvation of modern poetry—God knows it needs saving—is narrative poetry, rhyming poetry, poetry with a strong meter. Internal rhymes, I think, work so well in poetry. As well as at the end of lines. It’s time for a form of epic poetry. Poetry today doesn’t dare celebrate anything, because that’s too uncynical. I mean you can’t have a ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ now. The charming aristocracy is just not going to put up with it.”

 

That’s Wole’s term for fashionable tastemakers: “the charming aristocracy.” He goes on to praise Vachel Lindsay and his barnburners and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Back to narrative:

 

“I honestly think that poets should think of reporting as part of their job. It’s not just that there’s something nice about verse, it’s that things happen in this world, particularly today, that the greatest poet in the world could never dream up. They are so bizarre. And they’re such rich material that it would improve any poet’s output. I mean even a subject like Paris Hilton.”

 

Aaron Poochigian, are you listening?

'That Spiritual Pepys'

In 1848, James Russll Lowell published the book-length poem A Fable for Critics. It’s the work of a cocky young man. Lowell was twenty-eight and he’s taking on some of the literary panjandrums of the age, many now long-forgotten. He is carving out his territory. Poe he famously describes as “three-fifths genius . . . and two-fifths sheer fudge.” The satire is mild, never savage (which is disappointing). Of Emerson, who remained his friend, he writes: 

“He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid

The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),

A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist

And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist;

All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got

To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what;

For though he builds glorious temples, ’tis odd

He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.”

 

Emerson was a supremely silly man. He had a minor gift for prose at the sentence level – he occasionally packs an essay into a sentence -- but nothing he wrote held together. In We Are Doomed (2009), John Derbyshire characterizes Emerson as “a key progenitor of modern smiley-face liberalism.” His understanding of human nature is dangerously, laughably naïve, the air-headed lunacy of a befuddled Unitarian. Without an understanding of evil, you understand little or nothing about our species. Emerson frequently cited Plotinus in his essays and poems and devoted an essay to “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic.”

 

 In “A Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of A Fable for Critics, Lowell tells us he is turning away from his mediocre contemporaries and embracing his precursors:

 

“With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get fou with O’Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o’er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne’s Jacob’s-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton’s version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before,—that marvel, a poet divine who can bore.”

 

Much to dismiss and embrace here. Montaigne is the only Frenchman on Lowell’s roll call. I’m not sure I can decrypt “a spiritual Pepys” but I like it. Perhaps he refers to the journal-like inclusiveness of the Essays, his attentiveness to the commonplace as well as the elevated. Montaigne easily ranks with George Herbert and Sir Thomas Browne in my pantheon. “Browne’s Jacob-ladder-like brain” is a beaut.

 

The essay “Of the Education of Children” is dedicated and addressed by Montaigne to Madame Diane de Foix, the Comtesse de Gurson, wife of Louis de Foix, Montaigne’s friend killed in the Battle of Montraveau in 1587. The countess is pregnant as Montaigne addresses her, and he blithely assumes she is carrying a son (“you are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male”). The confidence with which he lectures her on children and their education is breathtaking. Montaigne had married in 1565 and with Françoise de la Chassaigne he had a daughter. Four other children died in infancy. Here, in Donald Frame’s translation, is Montaigne:

 

“Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not ‘Athens,’ but ‘The world.’ He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.”

 

Throughout most of the essay, Montaigne’s advice is admirably broad-minded. He urges the countess to hire an accomplished tutor and expose the boy to the best of books and people. He particularly recommends Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus, and says “the first taste I had for books” came with reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Montaigne writes of himself as a young man:

 

“Meanwhile, for all that, my mind was not lacking in strong stirrings of its own, and certain and open-minded judgments about the things it understood; and it digested them alone, without communication. And, among other things, I really do believe that it would have been wholly incapable of submitting to force and violence.”

 

Montaigne was born 1533 and died on this date, September 13, in 1592 at age fifty-nine.

'My Best Consolation for the Future'

If pushed to choose my favorite literary form, I would reluctantly reject novels and aphorisms and settle on the essay which, in the right hands, can boast the generosity of the former and the pithy tartness of the latter. Essays are elastic and an essayist can confidently take on any subject if he possesses sufficient learning and experience because one of his shadow-subjects is himself. Don’t confuse that with straight autobiography. A good essayist melts into the matter at hand. Consider William Hazlitt’s “A Farewell to Essay-Writing,” dating from 1828, two years before his death. 

Hazlitt recalls a walk with Charles and Mary Lamb, admiring the “Claude Lorraine skies” and picking mushrooms “to throw into our hashed mutton at supper.” A pleasant memory, rather conventional, not life-changing. Hazlitt, for once, doesn’t inflate the importance of the recollection. He shares an observation known to many writers, if not always so well-articulated:

 

“It is in looking back to such scenes that I draw my best consolation for the future. Later impressions come and go, and serve to fill up the intervals; but these are my standing resource, my true classics. If I have had few real pleasures or advantages, my ideas, from their sinewy texture, have been to me in the nature of realities; and if I should not be able to add to the stock, I can live by husbanding the interest.”

 

Along with the qualities cited above, memory is essential to an essayist. There’s an elegiac quality to Hazlitt’s essay, apart from the title. We sense a man perhaps coming to terms with himself and giving up the life-long fight – not surrendering but accepting. Prose of this quality is rare and should be cherished. Hazlitt closes his essay with these words:

 

“As to my speculations, there is little to admire in them but my admiration of others; and whether they have an echo in time to come or not, I have learned to set a grateful value on the past, and am content to wind up the account of what is personal only to myself and the immediate circle of objects in which I have moved, with an act of easy oblivion,

 

“'And curtain-close such scene from every future view.'”

 

Hazlitt took that stand-alone line from William Collins’ “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1770). The essayist has been dead for almost two centuries. He could be a difficult man, stupid about women, who spent his final years writing a four-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. And his prose still moves us.

'Nothing More Important Than This Wound'

I’m skeptical of prophecy, weighing even the scriptural sort against the evidence and the suitability of the prophet. People tend to concur with those prophecies that confirm their a priori prejudices, but only retrospectively can we test the Jeremiah du jour’s predictions. 

In a letter to William F. Buckley dated Oct. 8, 1956, Whittaker Chambers writes: “The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.”

 

That’s what some of us finally and reluctantly began to learn twenty-five years ago today. Evil was not a theory or abstraction. There are people in the world who would happily kill us – not for anything we as individuals have done but because we stubbornly persist in our being. We are alive only because they haven’t yet managed to murder us. Chambers was the blackest of pessimists and his pessimism was rooted in his experience as a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. He understood the seductive power of nihilism. In his masterpiece Witness (1952) he writes:

 

“Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.”

 

[The Chambers letter is collected in Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969).]

'Like That Magician's Egg'

“The futurists claim that the book as we know it will disappear, like that magician’s egg, and that it will be replaced by ‘electronic data retrieval’ through our home computers. But I doubt that this will happen, at least to the extent predicted, because reading, as we know it, the eyes fastening on the printed page, is a sensual experience.” 

The latest grim-minded doomsayer? Countered by an old-fashioned romantic humanist? Sorry, no. This is Al Silverman (1926-2019), a sportswriter and CEO and chairman of the Book of the Month Club from 1972 to 1988. He’s writing in the Winter 1983 issue of the journal Daedalus, an issue titled “Reading: Old and New.” Silverman’s piece is titled “The Fragile Pleasure.” He goes on to quote Rilke, often a bad sign, though cynics will assure us Silverman is a charter member of the middlebrow majority.

 

The general tone of the contributors might be characterized as teeth-gritting optimism. No one wants to come out and say the United States is in danger of becoming a nation of aliterates and illiterates. This was long before smart phones, social media, contemporary English departments, the usual suspects. “Of course,” Silverman says, “no one needs a Gallup poll to know that we are not a nation of readers.” I joined the Book of the Month Club in junior-high school and bought such books as James Jones’ From Here to Eternity and Henri Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy.

 

My thinking is: individuals can change. The masses, never, or at such a glacial pace the change is discernable only retrospectively. I’ve never told people what to read. The best I can do is share my experience of reading good books. Preaching doesn’t work and is often presumptuous. My sons read, at least in part, because they have always seen us reading. Silverman takes an autobiographical approach:

 

“The reading experience was activated by people who cared -- in my case, my mother, my aunt, my third-grade teacher. Later, it was the writer -- certain writers -- who changed my perception of life. I was lucky in any case. The encouragement of reading in this country, which should be an urgent priority from the beginning of education, is mostly missing today. And so a small, elite corps of readers develops in this country, and the rest -- the illiterates, the aliterates -- get away from us, and are lost forever.”

 

I received no reading encouragement from family but I have often acted on the principle of contrariety – do the opposite of what those around you are doing (precisely the reason I have never smoked a cigarette.) Several teachers along the way encouraged reading, and by high school I was able to recommend titles (Nathanael West, I remember) to some of my teachers. Silverman was obviously an intelligent, thoughtful  guy who is torn in contradictory directions. Here is his conclusion:

 

“Readers, just like books, grow from strange soil, soil that sometimes is totally without nutrients. But something happens. The seed takes root. There is growth, and, once in a while, a small harvest. Even in this land of plenty, the fragile and enduring pleasure lives.”

'Inspiring, Exhilarating--Yes, Exalting'

“Until recently, I considered David Copperfield to be the best English-language novel I’d read. No longer. This side of Tolstoy, I know of no greater novel than Middlemarch. To think that one belongs to the same species as the genius who produced it is inspiring, exhilarating--yes, exalting.” 

I knew my friend had been reading Middlemarch for the first time and knowing his tastes and well-exercised experience as a reader, I expected him to appreciate the novel, but his reaction has almost revived my faith in humanity. He is no fly-by-night, fashion-driven reader. He loves fiction and reads it as more than mere entertainment or distraction. His email made my day: “exalting.”

 

In 1885, Henry James reviewed John Cross’ biography of Eliot, who had died five years earlier. James had famously written mixed reviews of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and judged Romola her finest accomplishment as a novelist, but here he concedes she was among his literary mentors:

 

“The great foundation, to begin with, was there—the magnificent mind, vigorous, luminous, and eminently sane. To her intellectual vigour, her immense facility, her exemption from cerebral lassitude, her letters and journals bear the most copious testimony. Her daily stint of arduous reading and writing was of the largest. Her ability, as one may express it in the most general way, was astonishing, and it belonged to every season of her long and fruitful career. Her passion for study encountered no impediment, but was able to make everything feed and support it. The extent and variety of her knowledge is by itself a résumé of an existence which triumphed wherever it wished. Add to this an immense special talent, which, as soon as it tries its wings, is found to be capable of the highest, longest flights, and brings back great material rewards. George Eliot of course had drawbacks and difficulties, physical infirmities, constant liabilities to headache, dyspepsia, and other illness, to deep depression, to despair about her work; but these jolts of the chariot were small in proportion to the impetus acquired, and were hardly greater than was necessary for reminding her of the secret of all ambitious workers in the field of art--that effort, effort, always effort, is the only key of success.”

'From the Front Line'

My review of Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin (New York Review Books, 2026) is published in the Fall issue of Portico.

'A Very Wild Extravagant Dream'

In his Spectator essay for January 15, 1712, Joseph Addison tells us he spent the day with friends, “an Assembly of Virtuosos,” one of whom describes “many curious Observations” regarding human anatomy. The conversation inspires in Addison “a very wild Extravagant Dream” in which he witnesses the dissection of a “Beau’s Head” and a “Coquet’s Heart.” Addison is writing in deep satirical mode, so you might anticipate where this is going.

A “Beau” in the eighteenth century, according to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, signified “a man of dress; a man whose great care is to deck his person.” We might say fop, dandy or clothes horse. For “coquette,” Johnson gives “a gay, airy girl; a girl who endeavours to attract notice.” Both are types still with us, of course.

Most of the essay concerns the Beau and a detailed and fanciful catalogue of his brain and its parts:

“There was a large Cavity on each side of the Head, which I must not omit. That on the right Side was filled with Fictions, Flatteries, and Falshoods, Vows, Promises, and Protestations; that on the left with Oaths and Imprecations. There issued out a Duct from each of these Cells, which ran into the Root of the Tongue, where both joined together, and passed forward in one common Duct to the Tip of it. We discovered several little Roads or Canals running from the Ear into the Brain, and took particular care to trace them out through their several Passages. One of them extended itself to a Bundle of Sonnets and little musical Instruments. Others ended in several Bladders which were filled either with Wind or Froth. But the latter Canal entered into a great Cavity of the Skull, from whence there went another Canal into the Tongue. This great Cavity was filled with a kind of Spongy Substance, which the French Anatomists call Galimatias, and the English, Nonsense.”

Johnson’s definition of gallimatias, from the French: “nonsense; talk without meaning.” Addison stresses the conventional humanity of the Beau, his averageness. He was no oddity or freak:

“As for the Skull, the Face, and indeed the whole outward Shape and Figure of the Head, we could not discover any Difference from what we observe in the Heads of other Men. We were informed, that the Person to whom this Head belonged, had passed for a Man above five and thirty Years; during which time he Eat and Drank like other People, dressed well, talked loud, laught frequently, and on particular Occasions had acquitted himself tolerably at a Ball or an Assembly; to which one of the Company added, that a certain Knot of Ladies took him for a Wit. He was cut off in the Flower of his Age by the Blow of a Paring-Shovel, having been surprized by an eminent Citizen, as he was tendring some Civilities to his Wife.”

If taken a little too seriously by a modern reader, Addison’s schtick is grotesque and probably offensive, but he’s no Swift whose savagery is often muted by a rational, reasonable, deadpan tone. He doesn't go that far. Both are two of the reasons I love the eighteenth century. Go here to read the sequel, Addison’s account of dissecting the Coquet’s heart.

'Art Is Slow and Long'

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser. Her review opens with an oddly contemporary-sounding observation: 

“Last year Archibald MacLeish resorted to scaring people over the radio, with air-raid noises and human screams in order to waken the population to ‘Fascist’ dangers.”

 

Sound familiar? If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been called a “fascist” . . . The word is rivalled only by “racist” when it comes to tediously meaningless slurs. Bogan describes MacLeish’s collection as “the history of the American people sold out by ‘the Aristocracy of politic selfishness,'” whatever that means. Talk about unpromising poetic material. Bogan gets to the point: “This poem is Mr. MacLeish’s saddest and most conglomerate attempt at ‘public speech’ to date.” Still, Bogan works to be fair:

 

“Bury his gifts though he may, Mr. MacLeish is a private, a lyric, poet through and through; it is somewhat of a loss that he did not allow himself to remain one. Evil conditions need a satirist to pin them down and flay them clean. Official poets are seldom satirists. A pity.”

 

Bogan describes Rukeyser, a poet who has never given me ten seconds of pleasure, as “interested in the state of society to the almost complete exclusion of any conscious ‘personal expression.’” After rereading Rukeyser’s book, Bogan says, “the suspicion arises that Miss Rukeyser is deficient in a sense of human life” – a not uncommon deficit among “activists.” “The day of chaste and noble proletarian myths should be about over,” Bogan writes “It has been recently proved that there is something hideously oversimplified in crude oppositions and blind idealism.” She concludes her review with a paragraph that recalls W.H. Auden and his near-contemporary condemnation of “a low dishonest decade”:

 

“The decade which outlawed from poetry personal emotion, individual insight, and straight looks into the flawed human heart now closes. It has been a queer time. And, from all current signs, patriotism and ‘public speech’ have still a long course to run. Art is slow and long, but there’s nothing brisker and more vocal than politics.”

 

[Bogan’s review can be found in her Selected Criticism (Noonday Press, 1955).]

'What Little Would Bear Keeping'

It was probably the first wildflower I learned to identify. (It always seemed important to know the names of things.) It grew, never densely, in the fields behind the house. It was taller than most grasses and weeds, spindly, with an oversized umbel (from the Latin umbella for “parasol”) that connects the numerous small white flowers to the stem, like the spokes of an umbrella. Another common name is wild carrot. Its scientific name is Daucus carota. We knew this intuitively because the plant smelled like carrots. The stems were tough, making the flowers difficult to pick. Queen Anne’s lace, though elegant, is not colorful or in any way exotic. It makes a nice emblem for rugged, homespun beauty. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem, “Portrait by a Neighbor,” which concludes: 

“Her lawn looks like a meadow,

   And if she mows the place

She leaves the clover standing

   And the Queen Anne’s lace!”

 

At The Sonneteer, Boris Dralyuk has published “Night in September,” dedicated to Millay, a sort of answer poem:

 

“A stem extends a frothy glass

    toward my face.

I recognize the brew at once

    as Queen Anne’s lace,

the pretty weed your neighbor moaned

    and groaned about—

the garden wild, the lawn unmowed.

    Here your words sprout

to mind with each belated blossom,

    dust-born rose;

beauty, you felt, was fierce, colossal

    at summer’s close—

when your mind turned to harvesting, to reaping

and laying by what little would bear keeping.”

 

Boris adds “Steepletop / Austerlitz, New York.” That’s the house Millay purchased in 1925. She lived there until her death in 1950. It’s in upstate New York, near the Massachusetts line. The setting and house are beautiful. I visited several times when living in the Capital District.

 

Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) was an Ohio-born artist who painted “Queen Anne’s Lace” in 1946. He wrote: “I never tire of drawing these exquisite flowers. From bud to full bloom, to its final closing into the cup-shaped seed baskets, the flower takes on infinitely varying shapes. Each year I find something new.”

 

I don’t remember another writer noticing the “cup-shaped seed baskets” of the Queen Anne’s lace at summer's end. They survive into winter and some remain at the top of stems even the following summer beside the next growth of blooms. Burchfield doesn’t mention the “tiny purple blemish” at the center of the flower, as observed by William Carlos Williams, but he does include it in the painting.

'They Were Just, and Clear'

“Style means the necessary word. The rest matters little.” 

I sometimes conduct an informal test on a piece of prose that either pleases me or somehow stylistically offends me. In either case, how does the writer achieve his effect? What can I learn from the successful sample? What would I change in the failed passage, if anything, that might improve it? Like many reader-writers, I’m an editor of other people's words.

 

John Ruskin tells us in his eccentric and beautifully written autobiography Praeterita (1885) that when he was a boy his father required him to pack four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s periodical essays in his baggage whenever the family traveled. Instead of complaining, Ruskin approves of the paternal stricture. He writes of Johnson:

 

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms.”

 

I wouldn’t change a thing, and not simply because I agree with Ruskin’s assessment. He identifies Johnson’s customary clarity. I can’t recall a single passage of purple prose in Johnson’s work. That’s not always the case with Ruskin, especially the earlier work, but here every word is in its proper place and “necessary,” to use the criterion mentioned at the top. His final sentence, in a move decidedly Johnsonian, broadens the observation to much of humanity. We all wish to see our precious opinions substantiated, truth be damned.

 

I recently reread Thomas Macaulay’s 1831 review of John Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Macaulay famously concluded it was “immoral” that so great a book should be authored by such “a great fool.” His judgment of Johnson’s prose is comparably misguided and, incidentally, overwritten:

 

“His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.”

 

Is it possible to be mistaken in one’s conclusions while still writing well? Of course. Macaulay is wrong on both counts. His prose becomes a parody of the charges he levies against Johnson. It might be stylistically improved by breaking the one long sentence into several shorter ones. “Big words wasted on little things” is embarrassing in this context.

 

[The passage quoted at the top is from a journal entry Jules Renard made on September 5, 1893. See his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Art Is Distinction: Process Is Not Being'

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.” 

Adagia are maxims, proverbs, the root of our current word, adage. It entered English from the Latin in the sixteenth century. In one of his pamphlets, Milton refers to “quips and snapping adagies.” Erasmus published the first edition of his Adagia in 1500. It contained some eight-hundred sayings. Later editions totaled more than 4,100 entries. Charles Gullans (1929-93) titled one of his poems, collected in Letter from Los Angeles (John Daniel and Co., 1990), “Adagia”:

 

"Stolid and literal, I take my stand.

Art is decision, not the chance, unplanned

Performance of a trivial vulgar act.

It is selection of the crucial fact.

Though brute particulars still litter sense,

Art’s the suppression of irrelevance.

Life is the constant pressure of the new,

But art, the final judgment of the true,

Measures resistance to inane distraction.

Art is the model of coherent action.

It is not my confusion or confession,

It’s not a gossip’s tale concerning me:

It is the meaning of my history.

It is constructed and can be construed

As proposition and as attitude.

Then art is structure: nothing can be said

Without the order in which it is read.

Art is technique, by which the masters say

That ends are realized in a métier.

Art is distinction: process is not being.

The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”

 

Gullans was composing an apologia for his practice of poetry. Some readers will recognize the spirit of Yvor Winters, with whom Gullans studied at Stanford. There are obvious swipes at so-called “Confessional” poetry and sloppy, sentimental free verse in general. In a 1954 letter to Gullans, Winters wrote:

 

“There are two views of the principles which I have taught you kids: (1) they are correct, in which case they are not my property but are universals and are in the public domain, for anybody to use who has the talent to use them; (2) they are wrong, in which case it is up to you to work out something better.”

 

Gullans dedicated his first collection, Arrivals & Departures (University of Minnesota Press, 1962) to Winters (“magister ludi”). The Bright Universe and Other Poems (Abattoir Editions, 1983) includes “In Memoriam: A.Y.W.,” dedicated to Winters’ widow, Janet Lewis:

 

“It is a smaller island now,

my Captain, that all sheets are set

to the constant gale that takes you,

bending like the pages of a book.

 

“Farewell, old Voyager, farewell

ever, aye, as your taut ship skims

the swift, dark torrent, ceaselessly

driven by your hard argument

 

“onwards through foam, to continents

unmapped, wherever shelved and shoaled,

whatever reefs guard the smooth, blue

passages to land, if rudder,

 

“sextant, star, and compass be true.”

 

Winters died in 1968. His given name was Arthur Yvor Winters. Go here to read eulogies for Gullans after his death, including those by friends and fellow poets R.L. Barth, Turner Cassity and Timothy Steele.

 

[The quoted letter can be found in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]