'An Interzone Between Prose and Poetry'

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ imminent death (he would die in 2019). The poet taught himself French by reading Proust and a dictionary across many decades. Proust and his masterwork were essential to my education as well. I first read the Scott-Moncrieff translation, Remembrance of Things Past, over the summer of 1971 while managing a miniature golf course – a silly setting Proust would have appreciated. Ten years later, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, I read Terence Kilmartin’s newly revised edition of In Search of Lost Time. While reading Proust I remember thinking all the rest of literature was somehow second-rate, even Shakespeare. That left me feeling rather guilty and somehow disloyal. In his postscript James writes: 

“Proust was a very clever man, and had nothing to do with his day except observe, study and write. His powers of observation were as acute as Dante’s, Shakespeare’s or Goethe’s, but we might say the same of Lucretius, or of Homer when he registered in a set of syllables the quivering of a bowstring: when Conrad said that the writer’s aim was ‘above all, to make you see’, he forgot to say that the ability to observe is the writer’s first qualification.”

 

That’s what I remember: Proust’s powers of concentration, the way he could observe a scene and analyze it for many pages without being tedious. James takes up one of his favorite themes: the relationship of prose to poetry:

 

“Perhaps it merely blurs categories to say that the expression of a thought in prose can have a poetry of its own, but in fact poets have always been attracted to the mere sound of phrases lying loose. Tell a poet that Kepler, with his newly improved refracting telescope, observed SN 1604 in Serpentarius and you might get no reaction. But tell the same poet that Kepler studied the geometry of lunar shadows and he might make a note, because the phrase sounds good. There is an interzone between prose and poetry: a porous border where the discursive expression of a thought is rhythmic or resonant enough to take off on its own and enter the area where words and phrases, seemingly in search of one another, combine into a meaning beyond analysis.”

 

The accompanying poems are not merely discursive. James often returns to his illness and mortality. In the section titled, after Prospero, “I’ll Drown My Books,” James writes:

 

“And soon

All that I love will leave me, as I go

First into silence, then the fire, and then

The harbour water, in which there will be

At last no room to breathe, no time to think:

No time to think even of you, Marcel.”

 

If you have ever contemplated reading Proust but have been daunted by its length or reputation, let me recommend Gate of Lilacs as an excellent orexigenic – an appetite stimulant. I’m taking a dose of it myself for a third reading.

'An Art of Measured Speech'

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let it rot or be torn down from within. It’s easier to criticize, say, Aristotle or Shakespeare, if you haven’t read them and incorporated the way they look at the world into your life. 

I’m thinking of writers like James Joyce, who could hardly make a move without evoking Aquinas or Flaubert, or George Santayana, who wrote with Democritus and Spinoza at his shoulder. At the conclusion of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), his three-hundred-page historical and aesthetic defense of formal verse and review of free verse, Timothy Steele writes:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share in those qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

 

Steele is no stiff-necked reactionary. One page earlier he writes:

 

“The poetry of the past can elevate and console us. But it cannot do this as fully and richly as poetry of the present. Only the poetry of the present speaks of our life and time. And though the poetry of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson can connect us with the past, only the poetry of our time can connect us with the future and give us the indispensable hope that something that we say will matter to our descendants and will enable them to live more intelligently and happily than otherwise they might. Only the poetry of our time can offer the prospect that, after we and those we love have returned to dust, some reader somewhere will be moved by lines that bear witness to us and will commit our words to heart and mind that we may live again.”

'Give One Thing More, a Gratefull Heart'

I spent Thursday morning in the hospital having a nuclear stress test performed. It’s a painless, time-consuming procedure made pleasant by the nurses and techs who worked on me. By my count they represented five countries of origin, not including my cardiologist, who is from India. My blood pressure has been distressingly low and the doctor urged me to use more salt after I’ve spent a lifetime hearing the opposite advice. He also fetched a can of Coke, the high-test stuff, something I haven’t drunk since I was a kid. He thought the caffeine would help, considering I had been fasting and didn’t consume my usual two cups of coffee first thing in the morning. 

To pass the time and fortify my heart (the purpose of the test was to clear me for multiple surgeries) I brought along the pocket-size Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Poems of George Herbert, Such a companionable poet. See “Gratefulnesse,” which begins:

 

“Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,

Give one thing more, a gratefull heart.

See how thy beggar works on thee

                                              By art.”

'I’m Still Alive; the Gods May Be Confused'

I don’t remember old people complaining about being old when I was a kid. It might have been joked about in passing but I recall little indulgence in self-pity. My maternal step-grandfather was a joker who loved his beer and, after retiring as a house painter, volunteered as a school crossing guard. He was one of the funniest people I knew when growing up. He was not a blood relative but we called him Uncle Kelly. When he talked about serving in the Army during World War I, he recalled having a turnip fight with other doughboys in some French field. The same went for my mother’s mother. In 1962, at age seventy-four, she suffered a stroke that left her left side paralyzed. She lived with us for several months. No complaining. She was a gentle soul, rare in my family. 

Now it’s common to hear my contemporaries, men and women, bitch about having reached their seventies. At the same time they want to extend their longevity, seemingly forever. I sense a generational shift toward self- centeredness, less acceptance of aging and its accompanying losses and gains. Catharine Savage Brosman was born in 1934 and is still writing. Last year in the Alabama Literary Review she published “The Body’s Past Its Prime”

 

“My youth was orderly, and I was green,

reserved, and bent on cultivating mind—

thank God; my figure, habits all were lean,

my appetites appropriate, refined.

 

“Time was abundant. One did not misspend

it, though; for ‘recreation,’ there were rules,

for play and married love, the proper end

of girlhood. Those ignoring them were fools.

 

“I’m still alive; the gods may be confused.

Or I. And now I’m squandering my old age—

these added years a favor, but unused,

my superannuated charms offstage,

 

“while there’s no need for prudence; no one cares

or notices; all conduct is the same,

all preferences; no one says affairs

or trysts. One’s liver is, perhaps, to blame

 

“for caution; any other pretext, trite.

Today, though, someone texts me from Saigon.

(He worked there once.) He’s thinking of me. Might

he come to see me? As in antiphon,

 

“I answered, ‘Yes! Of course!’ My old heart raced.

Conditions set, however; I can’t yield

too much. His company won’t go to waste;

yet I am wary. Let’s define the field.

 

“The body’s past its prime, eyes faulty, skin

discolored, muscles slack. No shorts, sarong;

no negligee for hours of yang and yin,

sweet commerce, book talk. It cannot last long.”

 

The tone is wistful, not complaining. There’s sadness, yes. Some things we’ll never recover, but that has always been the case. “I’m still alive; the gods may be confused.”

'Distress With Which We Cannot Sympathise'

I recently learned that an acquaintance had lost his job and my reflexive reaction was to laugh. The people I was with were offended. How could I be amused by another person’s misfortune? Easy, I thought but didn’t say. Our newly jobless friend had been earning an enormous annual salary, more than I made in my three or four best years. But that wasn’t what triggered my laughter. Rather, it was his spendthrift ways. He’s the sort of guy who will penny-pinch and complain about the small, essential expenses and spend extravagantly on wine and resort vacations. He’s always griping about money. My laughter was karmic. I laughed because I sensed he was getting his just comeuppance. Happy ending? He quickly got another lucrative job. 

In his lecture “On Wit and Humour” (1818), William Hazlitt roots laughter in incongruity, “the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another.” The unexpected makes us laugh. The simplest, flattest most commonplace statement or action can spur laughter if we are not anticipating it. My big-spender acquaintance overnight became unemployed. That’s funny. Hazlitt writes:

 

“[A] rich source of the ludicrous is distress with which we cannot sympathise from its absurdity or insignificance. Women laugh at their lovers. We laugh at a damned author, in spite of our teeth, and though he may be our friend. ‘There is something in the misfortunes of our best friends that pleases us.’”

 

Hazlitt is quoting a universal truth formulated by Francois de La Rochefoucauld in his Réflexions ou Maximes Morales (1665). Laughter is more than jolliness or good humor. It can be subversive of politeness, respectability, even conventional morality. Dr. Johnson writes on May 26, 1759 in The Idler: “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Laughter can explode like a bomb of bad manners. “Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression,” Johnson writes. “The jest which is expected is already destroyed.” Hazlitt was a brilliant prose stylist, one of the finest in English, but not a particularly funny guy.

'My Sneaking Preference'

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly caustic sensibility:

 

“So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions.”

 

I’m reminded of the silly ritual of politicians naming their favorite or most influential books. We don’t, of course, believe a word of it. Some years ago, when Hillary Clinton named Little Women and said, “Like many women of my generation who read this novel growing up, I really felt like I lived in Jo’s family. This book was one of the first literary explorations of how women balance the demands of their daily lives, from raising families to pursuing outside goals. The book was written more than a century ago, but its message resonates today,” we’re left with the certainty that she has never read Alcott’s book or read it only at the command of her handlers’ playbook. Her husband named Marcus Aurelius (who wrote in Book VII of the Meditations: “Be thou erect, or be made erect.”)

 

Repplier’s essay was published in the July 1889 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which also includes work by Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett. I’m not certain any book has ever “hindered” me but I can think of several that I read only under duress – namely, textbooks and Norton anthologies. I’m a great believer in independent reading guided only by curiosity and respect for literary tradition. My seventh-grade English textbook (1964-65), I remember, might have been published in 1889. It was heavy with sub-literary Americana: Edward Evertt Hale’s “The Man Without a Country” and too many poems by William Cullen Bryant. In college I resented the warehousing of literature represented by the Norton behemoths. Repplier respects those readers who “are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have not found it so easily attainable.”

 

Still pervasive among Americans is a neo-Puritanical impulse to read, or at least claim to read, books of “self-improvement,” pleasure be damned. Repplier writes of a preachy-sounding children’s novel previously unknown to me, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89) by Thomas Day. “Altogether,” she writes, “Sandford and Merton affected me the wrong way; and, for the first time, my soul revolted from the pretentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to the malign influence of that tale that I owe my sneaking preference for the drones and butterflies of earth.” Repplier then launches into a delightful apologia of inarguable common sense:

 

“I do not now believe that all men are born equal; I do not love universal suffrage; I mistrust all popular agitators, all intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, all self-styled friends of the people. I cannot even sympathize with the noble theory that every man and woman should do their share of the world’s work; I would gladly shirk my own if I could. And this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its responsibilities is due to the subtle poison instilled into my youthful mind by the too strenuous counter-teaching of Sandford and Merton.”

'Yielding to the Change Assigned'

I think of Edwin Arlington Robinson as an autumnal poet, just as certain others are vernal. Even when the ostensible subject is elsewhere, the fall shows up in his work as setting or mood. His was a sensibility sensitive to time’s passage, endings, sundown, the imminence of winter and death. But he’s seldom morbid or maudlin. The title character in “Mr.Flood’s Party” says to himself one night: “‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon / Again, and we may not have many more . . .’” 

On October 5, 1893, at age twenty-three, in a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, before he had written the poetry we remember him for, Robinson writes: “It is a warm and magnificent day after a long cold rain, and I naturally think of the spot where the ashes of our old fires, with a few shrivelled corn-husks, are all there is to tell of the many jolly symposiums we held there only few weeks ago. It beats the devil how time creeps away with those skinny shanks of his.”

 

October, of course, is the true Poetry Month, not the imposter April. The month’s poetic bounty is humbling. Apart from the excellence of most, it would be difficult to generalize about the nature of these October poets. Cummings’ work has a spring-like character, though Keats is an autumn man. Robinson was born in December, which further discredits astrological typecasting. Here is his sonnet “The Sheaves,” which always reminds me of the old gospel hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves”:

 

“Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,

Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;

And as by some vast magic undivined

The world was turning slowly into gold.

Like nothing that was ever bought or sold

It waited there, the body and the mind;

And with a mighty meaning of a kind

That tells the more the more it is not told.

 

“So in a land where all days are not fair,

Fair days went on till on another day

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,

Shining and still, but not for long to stay—

As if a thousand girls with golden hair

Might rise from where they slept and go away.”

'The Independence of Her Spacious Mind'

The finest tribute to one writer by another I’ve read of late is John Lukacs’ “Agnes Repplier, Writer and Essayist.” Repplier (1855-1950) published perhaps one-thousand essays during a writing career of seventy years. Lukacs unabashedly admires her and her work and convinces me that Repplier may be the most unjustly forgotten of American writers. His thirty-six-page essay generously quotes her work (she’s eminently quotable, as is Lukacs) and serves as an excellent introduction to so strong-willed and idiosyncratic a writer. She’s an excellent antidote to such earlier nineteenth-century Americans as the pallid Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lukacs writes: 

“She read everything; indeed, what she reread would be sufficient unto a department of English in our colleges now. One of the most attractive features of her writing is its unpredictability: neither frivolous nor impulsive, it sprang from the independence of her spacious mind.”

 

Repplier was able to support herself, her mother and sister with her writing in a way unimaginable today. She was a serious Roman Catholic and remains in some ways a charmingly old-fashioned writer, bookish, leisurely and occasionally tart, at once genteel and not. A native of Philadelphia, Repplier lived there all her life. She never married, had no children and published work on a sprawling array of subjects. Like the best journalists, she was a generalist, no specialist, widely knowledgeable, curious, democratic in spirit, with an occasionally acerbic wit. I’ve known several like her, few so industrious. Lukacs writes:

 

“‘Stupidity,’ she wrote wisely, ‘is not the prerogative of any one class or creed.’ She knew that most stupidity is not the result of neuro-cerebral incompetence but that it is self-induced and willful. ‘What the world asks now are state reforms and social reforms—in other words, the reformation of our neighbors. What the Gospel asks, and had always asked, is the reformation of ourselves—a harassing and importunate demand.”

 

In her essay on “Leisure” (Essays in Idleness, 1897), Repplier writes: “And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who, taking his life in his two hands, disposed of it as he thought fit, with no restless self-accusations on the score of indolence. In the world and of the world, yet always able to meet and greet the happy solitude of Gascony; toiling with no thought of toil, but rather ‘to entertain my spirit as it best pleased,’ this man wrought out of time a coin which passes current over the reading world.”

 

Repplier deserves rediscovery. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was proudly old-fashioned, autodidactic and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. Repplier at her best is piquant, witty and cant-free. She’s a fine model for essayists, a free-flowing aphorist and blessedly prolific

 

Her books are difficult to find, though Gutenberg has digitized eighteen of them. In 2009, Lukacs published a selection of her work, American Austen: The Forgotten Writings of Agnes Repplier (ISI Books).

 

[Lukacs’ essay is collected in Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, a Reader (ISI Books, 2005). It originally appeared in Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines 1900-1950 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980).]

'Knowledge, Real Lasting Felt Knowledge'

A reader asks why I so often write about poetry but am not a poet myself. “Have you ever written poems?” he asks. “Do you write them secretly and keep them to yourself?” I wrote a lot of it around age sixteen, like many delusional, love-struck teenagers. I’m glad I disposed of that stuff a lifetime ago. I was no Rimbaud. I had a brief relapse about twenty years ago under the cover of “light verse.” It too was embarrassing junk. Like most poets, I have no gift for it. I have always assumed a capacity for writing good verse is almost as rare as first-class musical composition and performance, mathematics and chess. 

So, why do I so often write about it? Because I admire and learn from language used well, with wit and precision, whether poetry or prose. It gives me pleasure. When I read and then write about, say, John Dryden or J.V. Cunningham, it deepens my enjoyment and, I hope, spurs others to share my pleasure. In his essay “Where Poems Come From,” a review of Stanley Burnshaw’s The Seamless Web (1970), Guy Davenport writes:

 

“It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.”

 

[Davenport’s essay is collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981).]

'An Art of Measured Speech'

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let it rot or be torn down from within. It’s easier to criticize, say, Aristotle or Shakespeare, if you haven’t read them and incorporated the way they look at the world into your life. 

I’m thinking of writers like James Joyce, who could hardly make a move without evoking Aquinas or Flaubert, or George Santayana, who wrote with Democritus and Spinoza at his shoulder. At the conclusion of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), his three-hundred-page historical and aesthetic defense of formal verse, Timothy Steele writes:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share in those qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

 

Steele is no stiff-necked reactionary. One page earlier he writes:

 

“The poetry of the past can elevate and console us. But it cannot do this as fully and richly as poetry of the present. Only the poetry of the present speaks of our life and time. And though the poetry of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson can connect us with the past, only the poetry of our time can connect us with the future and give us the indispensable hope that something that we say will matter to our descendants and will enable them to live more intelligently and happily than otherwise they might. Only the poetry of our time can offer the prospect that, after we and those we love have returned to dust, some reader somewhere will be moved by lines that bear witness to us and will commit our words to heart and mind that we may live again.”

`A Random Light Meandering'

I knew a computer science professor who now works, I think, for Google. He was an interesting fellow who defied many CS stereotypes. He read books outside his field, for instance, and spoke in complete sentences. Ten or twelve years ago as I was walking across the engineering quadrangle toward the parking lot, I noticed him kneeling on the sidewalk outside the mechanical engineering building. He seemed to be looking at something in the grass. As I approached, I saw he was studying a fire-ant mound. He said two words: “Brownian motion.” 

The phenomenon is named for a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, who, in 1827, was the first to describe the random fluctuations of pollen particles suspended in a fluid. Strictly speaking, swarming ants are displaying Brownian motion only in a metaphorical sense, but the prof’s observation has stuck with me and I remember it whenever I see a swarm of ants or bees. I remembered it also when reading Howard Nemerov’s “The Crossing” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

 

“I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

 

“Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

 

“The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.”

 

In his 1965 prose work, Journal of the Fictive Life, Nemerov writes: “Like many poets, I read a good deal of science, and like most of the poets who do, I do not read it for the sake of science but rather for the sake of metaphor.” Nemerov took an intelligent amateur’s interest in science and mathematics. Consider his “Figures of Thought” (1978):

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into  death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame–

 

“How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship—that is the beautiful

In nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

“It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

'A Frangible and Transparent Failure'

The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Across its roughly eight-hundred lines the speaker gives the impression of fleeing something left unstated – not a scandal or crime but his unsatisfactory self. In the sixth and final section he writes: “Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say, / I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life, / A frangible and transparent failure.” The Italian can be translated: “I made a complete mess of it.” This indulgence in self-disgust continues: 

“My efforts at their best are negatives:

A poor attempt not to hurt anyone,

A goal which, in the very nature of things,

Is ludicrous because impossible.

Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes

Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses,

Ducts and arterial sluices of my body . . .”

 

Here, Hecht makes an inspired transition:

 

“. . . As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote:

‘Sweepings from Butcher Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,

Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,

Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.’”

 

Those are the concluding lines of “A Description of a City Shower,” a pastoral parody and my favorite among all of Swift’s poems, first published in The Tatler in October 1710. Pat Rogers in his edition of The Complete Poems (Yale University Press, 1983) tells us it was also Swift’s favorite. The final three rhyming lines are inspired. An early edition of the poem was subtitled an “imitation of Virgil’s Georg[ics].” Nearly as good as the passage quoted by Hecht are the lines leading up to them:

 

“Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,

And bear their trophies with them as they go:   

Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell   

What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.

They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,    

From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,   

And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge,

Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.”

'A Book's Power to Make You Think'

“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”

The most ebullient and unpretentious book about the reading life I know is Clive James’ Latest Readings, published four years before his death in 2019. James had already been diagnosed with B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia and other ailments and the book is laced with references to his failing health and imminent mortality but remains largely free of self-pity. It sometimes feels as though reading is keeping James alive, the way the narrator of Tristram Shandy (and, perhaps, its author) convinces himself that writing will forestall his death.

The sentence above is quoted from the introduction. In my own life the incidence of doctor visits and various medical tests has accelerated in recent months, and I’m facing three or four surgeries but nothing so dire as cancer. A reader asks an always-pertinent question: “What are you reading now?” Along with rereading Latest Readings:

A manuscript by R.L. Barth tentatively titled War Seems Sweet: Selected & Recent Vietnam War Poems

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul (2026) by Caroline Moorehead

Fall issue of The Jewish Review of Books

Captain Beefheart: The Biography (2002) by Mike Barnes

Browsing in an old favorite, Selections from the Writing of Walter Savage Landor (ed. Sidney Colvin, 1882)

Elsewhere in his introduction, James writes: “Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. You can practically sense that power when you pick the book up.”

'Poetry That Is Not Noticeably Eccentric'

Two poets seldom linked came together in the New York Times on September 8, 1912. The writer was Joyce Kilmer, known forever as the author of “Trees,” who would die six years later during the second battle of the Marne. His subject was Edwin Arlington Robinson, age forty-one, by then author of four collections of poetry and such poems as “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Cory.” 

 Kilmer hailed Robinson as “a classic poet.” “Not as a prophet, not as a teacher,” he writes, “but as a student of mankind does Robinson hold his place among poets. Always he looks at humanity patiently, earnestly, searchingly. His poems . . . are compounded of sympathy and humor.” That’s as good an encapsulation of Robinson’s sensibility as I’ve encountered. He has a fiction writer’s devotion to character that recalls Chekhov’s. In a thank-note to Kilmer, Robinson wrote: “You say things in it that I have been waiting for someone to say.”

 

Almost four years later, on April 9, 1916, the Times published Kilmer’s interview with Robinson. “But why is it,” Kilmer asks, “that a great poet is without honor in his own generation where mediocrity is immediately famous?” Robinson replied: “It’s hard to say. Many causes prevent poetry from being correctly appraised in its own time. Any poetry that is marked by violence, that is conspicuous in color, that is sensationally odd, makes an immediate appeal. On the other hand, poetry that is not noticeably eccentric sometimes fails for years to attract any attention.”

 

Acknowledging that free verse was already in its ascendancy, and after taking a swipe at Robert Browning’s “eccentricities,” Robinson says: “I can’t get over the impression that these post-impressionists in painting and most of the vers libristes in poetry are trying to find some sort of short cut to artistic success. I know that many of the new writers insist that it is harder to write good rhymed poetry. And judging from some of their results, I am inclined to agree with them.”

 

Asked if the work of Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters and Rupert Brooke reflected “a real renascence of poetry,” Robinson agreed and said, “I am sufficiently childlike and hopeful to find it very encouraging.” Kilmer questioned him on the state of poetry in England. Robinson at first demurs then says: “Within his limits, I believe that A.E. Housman is the most authentic poet now writing in England. But, of course, his limits are very sharply drawn, I don’t think that anyone who knows anything about poetry will ever think of questioning the inspiration of A Shropshire Lad.”

The interview concludes: “Sometime ago you asked me how I accounted for our difficulty in making a correct estimate of the poetry of one’s own time. The question is a difficult one. I don’t even say that it has an answer. But the solution of the thing seems to me to be related to what I said about the quality of finality that seems to exist in all real poetry. Finality seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself to any great extent.”

'Plain in Thy Neatness'

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediately nullified by his own incompetence. Why take the word of a critic who can’t write? This was a matter of fundamental things like noun-verb agreement, spelling and the refusal to resist a cliché. 

There’s nothing new about this, of course. In the issue of The Tatler published on September 28, 1710, Jonathan Swift sets up his essay with a letter he received complaining of “the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style.” Swift, of course, is the letter’s author, as he is of the letter excerpt included by the first fictional correspondent – a parody of illiterate prose, followed by this commentary:   

 

“[T]hese are the beauties introduced to supply the want of wit, sense, humour, and learning, which formerly were looked upon as qualifications for a writer. If a man of wit, who died forty years ago, were to rise from the grave on purpose, how would he be able to read this letter?”

 

I often have similar thoughts: How would Swift react to a comparable contemporary bit of gobbledygook? Or, more recently, Yvor Winters or Michael Oakeshott, masters of prose clarity? Swift's letter continues: 

 

"I should be glad to see you the instrument of introducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life, which the politer ages always aimed at in their building and dress, (simplex munditiis) as well as their productions of wit. It is manifest, that all new, affected modes of speech, whether borrowed from the Court, the Town, or the theatre, are the first perishing parts in any language, and, as I could prove by many hundred instances, have been so in ours.”

 

Simplex munditiis, “elegant in simplicity,” is a Horatian tag used by Ben Jonson as the title of a poem:

 

“Still to be neat, still to be drest,

As you were going to a feast;

Still to be powder'd, still perfumed:

Lady, it is to be presumed,

Though art's hid causes are not found,

All is not sweet, all is not sound.

 

“Give me a look, give me a face

That makes simplicity a grace;

Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:

Such sweet neglect more taketh me

Than all th' adulteries of art;

They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.”

 

It’s also the title of a poem by Yvor Winters: 

 

“The goat nips yellow blossoms

shaken loose from rain—

with neck extended

lifts a twitching flower

high into wet air. Hard

humility the lot of man

to crouch beside

this creature in the dusk

and hold the mind clear;

to turn the sod,

to face the sod beside his door,

to wound it as his own flesh.

In the spring the blossoms

drown the air with joy,

the heart with sorrow.

One must think of this

in quiet. One must

bow his head and take

with roughened hands

sweet milk at dusk,

the classic gift of earth.”

 

Around 1930, Winters famously changed his poetic style. This poem dates from that period. We might call it late early Winters or early late Winters. The title is from Horace’s Ode I, 5, rendered by Milton as “Plain in thy neatness.”

 

Winters’ poems are sometimes autobiographical but not in the banal sense. The poet kept and milked goats and raised and showed Airedales. For so formidably intellectual a man, he had an earthiness about him. He was drawn to the elemental, in language and life, suggested by the intermingling in his poem of joy and sorrow. Here is my favorite line, the most evocative, implying the fear of madness or “The Brink of Darkness” (the title of his only published fiction): “One must think of this / in quiet.” The bowing of the head while milking, leaning against the goat’s flank, suggests prayer and “Hard / humility.”

'Books Consoled Me When I Was a Child'

It’s a commonplace to say you can read a serious reader’s autobiography on his bookshelves. For some of us you can say the same of the libraries we’ve patronized across a lifetime. Last year I wrote about the first in that multi-state chain, when the public library in Parma Heights, Ohio, on the West Side of Cleveland, was slated for demolition. My brother and I were there in 1963 when the building was dedicated and now its replacement is open for business. 

The old building was notably ugly, with its “Space Age” design, and the new one isn’t much better. What do we expect of modern architecture? Still, I admit to feeling a bit sentimental about the place where I first discovered Tom Disch, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain and John Updike. I’ll get over it. It’s less for the titles I read in the building than the feeling of sanctuary I always sensed there. It was a serious place without the distractions and anxieties of home and school. I’m reminded of Philip Larkin in “Church Going”: “A serious house on serious earth it is.”

 

In his 1994 collection The Color Wheel, Timothy Steele include two poems about libraries. In the first, “Homage to a Carnegie Library,” he writes:

 

“Companionable room,

In that early darkness

You stood in promise

Of a sunnier time.”

 

“Companionable” is precisely chosen. That’s how I have always thought of the important books in my life: as companions, sometimes closer to me than many of their two-legged counterparts. This is from “The Library”:

 

“Yet books consoled me when I was a child,

And seeing words and software joined and sync-ed,

Even philosophers might be beguiled.

And if I relish verses nimbly linked,

Here flowing, there concluded with a twist,

It was a Greek librarian-archivist

Who had an odd pedantic inspiration

Make prose and poems textually distinct

And first gave metric units lineation.”

'There Were the Late'

The most casually intelligent person I have ever known was D.G. Myers, who died on this date, September 26, in 2014. I prize intelligence but it’s not a virtue that can be valued in isolation. We’ve all known very bright people who are insufferable, who insist on reminding you of their brilliance and behave like intellectual bullies. No question, David was opinionated and loved a good argument but he also appreciated and embodied what Timothy Steele called “reasoned self-forgetfulness.” It was never about his precious ego. Here is Steele’s poem, “Dedication,” dedicated to his friend the poet-novelist Vikram Seth: 

“We enter life and thus inherit

The kingdom of the human voice.

The Word is Word because we share it.

Wonder encourages our choice

To sort out life’s conflicting data,

To come to terms with its traumata,

To shape ourselves to nothing less

Than reasoned self-forgetfulness.

For years we've traded rhyme and measure,

And if our poems are books today,

It is in hopes that others may

Take from them solace, sense, or pleasure,

Though years pass with their wonted speed

And though the times we shared recede.”

 

What David and I traded were not “rhyme and measure” but ideas, books, insights, encouragement and mutual respect. For six years, except on shabbat (David was an Orthodox Jew), we exchanged emails almost daily and occasionally telephone calls. We met only once in person, here in Houston in 2012, in a Mexican restaurant, and the talk never stopped. We covered the conversational waterfront – kids, wives, jobs, Jews, cancer, students, the professoriat, Stanley Elkin, J.V. Cunningham, Irving Howe, David Horowitz, Marilynne Robinson, L.E. Sissman, Toni Morrison’s pathetic prose, Las Vegas and the fate of the codex. We laughed so loud diners at nearby tables had the nerve to stare at us. When we parted, David quoted Yvor Winters at me -- “Write little; do it well.”

 

In 2009, David posted the notes he kept during a class with J.V. Cunningham in 1976 at Washington University. Among them was “How difficult it is to write in praise!” David wasn’t shy about chastising the dishonest, inept and just plain stupid and boring among writers, politicians, et al., but he was also an expert bestower of praise. He loved Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Lewis, Charles Portis, Henry James, Whittaker Chambers, Saul Bellow, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, Michael Oakeshott, Isaac Bashevis Singer, L.E. Sissman, Peter DeVries and Philip Roth, among many others.

 

It’s not an exercise in cheesy rhetoric to say I miss David every day. We had each other’s back. I’ve never had so brief, immediate and deep a friendship. All of us have an obligation to remember our significant dead and share that memory with others. As old Artur Sammler says in one of David’s favorite novels: “Wherever you looked, or tried to look, there were the late. It took some getting used to.”

[The Steele poem can be found in Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986).]