Thursday, March 28, 2024

'Not At All Reliable for Climbing On'

Decades ago I interviewed a guy who had climbed all forty-six of the high peaks in New York’s Adirondack Mountains in his bare feet. Surprisingly, he completed the shoeless stunt without serious injury. It was one of those Ripley’s-Believe-It-or-Not accomplishments that seems impressively ridiculous. I can’t remember his name but I remember two things about him: he was related to John Cheever and he was the first person I ever heard use the word scree in conversation.

 

The OED defines it as “a steep, often unstable slope on a mountainside formed by a mass of stone fragments and other debris” and “the material composing such a slope.” It’s an oddly incomplete-seeming word, two-thirds of scream, screech and screed. The Dictionary tells us it’s rooted in “early Scandinavian.” I think of scree as a hillside covered with loose stones, always treacherous to traverse. Dick Davis uses the word in a poem titled “Words” (Love in Another Language, 2017):

 

“Words are like scree – abraded, hard, but not

Not at all reliable for climbing on;

Just look how far you’ve slipped back, trusting them.”

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

'I Am Entirely Sure That I Like It'

On March 27, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt had just started his second term as president of the United States when he wrote a letter to a little-known poet living in Boston: 

Dear Mr. Robinson:

I have enjoyed your poems especially The Children of the Night so much that I must write to tell you so. Will you permit me to ask what you are doing and how you are getting along? I wish I could see you.

Sincerely yours,

Theodore Roosevelt

 

A teacher at Groton School, Henry Howe Richards, was an early admirer of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetry and shared his enthusiasm with his students. Among them was Kermit Roosevelt (1889-1943), the president’s second son, who in turn recommended that his father read Robinson’s second collection, The Children of the Night (1897; reissued 1905). Roosevelt read some of the poems aloud during a cabinet meeting (“no doubt to the astonishment of the secretaries,” according to Robert Mezey) and invited Robinson to the White House. At the time, Robinson was living in poverty. In his biography of the poet, Scott Donaldson writes:

 

“Robinson was thunderstruck. His clothes were so shabby that he could not accept the president’s implied command to visit him. He responded at once, though, noting that ‘getting along’ barely did justice to his precarious existence.”

 

Roosevelt told advisers, Donaldson writes, “he might be able to locate ‘some position in the Government service, just as Walt Whitman and John Burroughs were given Government positions.’” The president offered him jobs as an “immigrant inspector” in Montreal and Mexico City. Robinson declined, though he eventually accepted a job at the New York Customs House, with a $2,000 a year stipend. Mezey writes, “It was understood by everyone that this was a sinecure; Robinson’s job was to write poetry. He went to the Custom House every morning, read the newspaper, folded it neatly on his desk, and left. I cannot think of another American president who has been so disinterestedly generous to a great writer.”

 

Roosevelt reviewed the second edition of The Children of the Night in The Outlook and wrote: “I am not sure I understand ‘Luke Havergal,’ but I am entirely sure that I like it.” In 1910, Robinson dedicated The Town Down the River to Roosevelt.

 

The Children of the Night contains some of Robinson's best and best-known poems: "House on the Hill," "Richard Cory," and “The Clerks.” Here is “Zola,” about the French novelist and courageous Dreyfusard:

 

“Because he puts the compromising chart

Of hell before your eyes, you are afraid;

Because he counts the price that you have paid

For innocence, and counts it from the start,

You loathe him. But he sees the human heart

Of God meanwhile, and in His hand was weighed

Your squeamish and emasculate crusade

Against the grim dominion of his art.

 

“Never until we conquer the uncouth

Connivings of our shamed indifference

(We call it Christian faith) are we to scan

The racked and shrieking hideousness of Truth

To find, in hate’s polluted self-defence

Throbbing, the pulse, the divine heart of man.”

 

In a letter to his friend Edith Brower on March 14, 1897 (Edwin Arlington Robinson's Letters to Edith Brower, 1968), the poet writes:

 

“Art for art’s sake is a confession of moral weakness. Art for the real Art’s sake is the meaning and the truth of life. This is just beginning to be understood, and it is on this understanding that the greatness of future literature stands. If [William Dean] Howells could realize this, he might write novels that would shake the world; as it is, his novels shake nothing but his own faith. I have the greatest admiration for the man, but I pity him. Zola is a parallel case, but his objective power is so enormous that his work must eventually have a purifying effect.”

 

Robinson is unfair to Howells (see Indian Summer, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes) but shrewd about Zola. Purification followed just three years later in the form of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Robinson virtually predicts the waning of the genteel tradition and the coming of naturalism and other more robust strains of literature. In another letter, Robinson refers to Zola as “the greatest worker in the objective that the world had ever seen.” Personally, I think Zola’s novels are largely second-rate but I read them the way some people read thrillers.

 

[See The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999), edited and with an excellent introduction and notes by Robert Mezey, and Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (Columbia University Press, 2007) by the late Scott Donaldson.]

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

'That Excellent Judge, Posterity'

A reader can sometimes judge the true worth of a writer by the quality of his detractors. Take Dwight Macdonald on James Gould Cozzens. And then consider Arnold Bennett (1867-1931). Today he’s judged a respectable but minor English novelist, something of a documentarian, if he’s remembered at all. In his time, Bennett was a celebrated bestseller. Of his thirty-four novels, the finest I’ve read are The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Riceyman Steps (1923). Bennett’s reputation among right-thinking readers was torpedoed by Ezra Pound in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920) and Virginia Woolf in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.Brown” (1928). High Modernism and snobbery derailed him. 

Bennett wrote on an industrial scale – fiction, plays and screenplays, journalism. In that final category are titles that might qualify as “self-help” --  How to Become an Author: A Practical Guide (1903) and Mental Efficiency, and Other Hints to Men and Women (1911). I returned to a curious little volume he published in 1908, Literary Taste: How to Form It -- a sort of Miss Manners guide for strivers after an air of bookishness but also for people legitimately looking for literary guidance. After admitting that “literary taste thus serves two purposes: as a certificate of correct culture and as a private pastime,” Bennett adds:

 

“People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilized mankind. Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living.”

 

I was looking for a passage I half-remembered in Literary Taste, and found it in Chap. IV, “Where to Begin.” He proposes an imaginative act of time travel. Bennett urges an open mind when it comes to contemporary works and the literature of the past:

 

“In every age there have been people to sigh: ‘Ah, yes. Fifty years ago we had a few great writers. But they are all dead, and no young ones are arising to take their place.’ This attitude of mind is deplorable, if not silly, and is a certain proof of narrow taste. It is a surety that in 1959 gloomy and egregious persons will be saying: ‘Ah, yes. At the beginning of the century there were great poets like Swinburne, Meredith, Francis Thompson, and Yeats. Great novelists like Hardy and Conrad. Great historians like Stubbs and Maitland, etc., etc. But they are all dead now, and whom have we to take their place?’”

 

Bennett is looking forward half a century from 1908. For us, 1959 is even farther away, sixty-five years in the past. Think of the wonderful writers then at work – Nabokov, Borges, Vasily Grossman, Auden and Eliot, Rebecca West, Zbigniew Herbert, J.V. Cunningham and Richard Wilbur, Eugenio Montale, A.J. Liebling, Isaac Bashevis Singer and others.

 

“It is not until an age has receded into history,” Bennett continues, “and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is—as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced. The total amount of fine literature created in a given period of time differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore, beware of disparaging the present in your own mind. While temporarily ignoring it, dwell upon the idea that its chaff contains about as much wheat as any similar quantity of chaff has contained wheat.”

 

I endorse the impulse but don’t entirely share Bennett's rather touching spirit of optimism.

Monday, March 25, 2024

'Poets Who Are Plain and Gladsome'

Being or pretending to be a philistine is great fun. It was one of Philip Larkin’s favorite ruses (“Books are a load of crap”). It’s certain to rile the pompous and pretentious, so all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the sputtering. I’ve happened on a first-rate anthology of verse designed to vex graduate students and others among the flatulently affected: What Cheer: An Anthology of American and British Humorous and Witty Verse Gathered, Sifted, and Salted (1945; reprinted in 1946 as The Pocket Book of Humorous Verse), edited by David McCord (1897-1997). 

In his introduction, McCord explains why he rejects the phrase “light verse”: “A great deal of light verse is little more than a facile and charming exercise in the technique of rhyme and meter. . . . It pleases the eye and ear, reads well aloud, is polished as a pipkin—but is not necessarily funny or witty.”

 

This rings true. So much light verse is nonsense verse in disguise or an indulgence in the cheaply topical. You might briefly enjoy it if you agree with the sentiment but it seldom inspires helpless laughter and is unlikely to be read a second time. Granted, those are high standards. Much that we find “funny” merits a grunt of approval rather than tears-and-snot laughter.

 

“Laughter,” McCord writes, “is a basic commodity, an old affair in the world, an abstraction and reaction about which few will quarrel. So this book is based on nothing less — on the laughter of humor, something audible and contagious; on the laughter of wit, with something swift and sudden in the queer little reflex tightening about the eyes.”

 

Much of the chapter titled “Life & Letters” consists of poems puncturing literary pomposity – basically, Modernism and its offspring. Here is “After Reading the Reviews of Finnegans Wake” by Melville Cane:

 

“Nothing has been quite the same

Since I heard your liquid name,

Since it cast a magic spell,

Anna Livia Plurabelle.

 

“Maid or river, bird or beast,

Doesn’t matter in the least;

Quite enough that tongue may tell

Anna Livia Plurabelle.

 

“What you’ve done, you’ll never guess,

To my stream of consciousness!

Hang the meaning! What the hell!

Anna Livia Plurabelle.”

 

Here is “A Salute to the Modern Language Association, Convening in the Hotel Pennsylvania, December 28th-30th” by Morris Bishop, the historian, biographer and Nabokov’s closest friend at Cornell. It suggests that self-important pretentiousness is nothing new with the MLA:

 

“The Modern Language Association

Meets in the Hotel Pennsylvania,

And the suave Greeters in consternations

Hark to the guests indulging their mania

 

“For papers in ‘Adalbert Stifter as the Spokesman of Middle-Class Conservatism,”

And ‘The American Revolution in the Gazette de Leyde and the Affaires de l’Angleterre at de l’Amerique,”

And ‘Emerson and the Conflict Between Platonic and Kantian Idealism,’

And ‘Dialektgeographie und Textkritik,’

 

“And ‘Vestris and Macready: Nineteenth-Century Management at the Parting of the Ways,’

And ‘Pharyngeal Changes in vowel and Consonant Articulation,’

And ‘More Light on Molière's Theater in 1672-73, from Le Registre d’Hubert, Archives of the Comédie-Française,

And ‘Diderot’s Theory of Imitation.’

 

“May culture’s glossolalia, clinging to

In Exhibit Rooms in Parlor A,

Sober a while the tempestuous singing

Of fraternal conventions, untimely gay:

 

“May your influence quell, like a panacea,

A business assembly’s financial fevers,

With the faint, sweet memory of ‘Observaciones sobre la aspiración de H en Andalucia,’

And ‘The Stimmsprung (Voice Leap) of Sievers.’”  

 

Both poems were originally published in The New Yorker in 1939 and 1938, respectively. Another one from that magazine, in 1939, “The Reader Writes” by Carl Crane (a pseudonym for the great Peter de Vries):

 

“What poets mean by what they mean

Is tougher than it’s ever been.

 

“Some swear that Ezra Pound’s the ticket;

I get lost in Ezra’s thicket.

 

“I’m stumped by what the lilacs bring

To T.S. Eliot in the spring.

 

“I sit up late at night deciding

What goes on in Laura Riding.

 

“Ah, never will the masses know

What Auden means, who loves them so.

 

“Rare is the nugget I can fish out

From subtleties the poets dish out;

 

“In fact, I think it’s time we had some

Poets who are plain and gladsome,

 

“Who shun the effort it must cost

To seem more deep than Robert Frost.”

Sunday, March 24, 2024

'First of All a Student of Human Nature'

“Desmond MacCarthy, like Dr. Johnson, was first of all a student of human nature.” 

The best writers, the ones who compel us to read their work across a lifetime, whose thoughts become our own and who at last become teachers and companions, are those who work in two media: words and people. They love language the way a sculptor loves marble or bronze. In their hands, it resists and complies. They don’t necessarily love their fellow humans (think of Swift) but find them irresistibly interesting. Our contradictory nature and propensity for good and evil, when observed and reflected on, compels them to craft an artful accounting, thus completing the circle.

 

Above, Lord David Cecil is writing in his preface to MacCarthy’s Humanities (MacGibbon & Kee), published in 1953, a year after the critic’s death at age seventy-five. MacCarthy is the one figure associated with the Bloomsbury Group who remains readable. In the passage immediately preceding the excerpt cited above, Cecil writes:

 

“He is usually described as a literary critic. Indeed, he was one of the best that England ever produced. But the phrase does not portray him completely; for it implies one primarily interested in the art of literature . . .” Followed by: “Because he loved and appreciated  good writing, he particularly enjoyed studying men as they revealed themselves through the medium of books. But he was just as ready to study them directly in actual persons and events and just as equipped to record his observations in the form of a memoir or short story.”


A thought occurs to me: How can you respect and trust a critic who writes badly? It subverts every judgment he makes.


As a literary journalist, MacCarthy resembles V.S. Pritchett in his independence, non-alignment with universities, vivid prose, mingling of life and work in the profiles and reviews, and broad taste in books. None of MacCarthy’s books appears to be in print. Here’s a sampler that might encourage you to seek out his books:

 

“Sydney Smith 1771-1845” (Humanities):  “Like Voltaire he was intensely social  and only lived intensely when he was busy or in company; like the greater man he was an admirable friend. He could hardly have been more benevolent, but he was also kinder than the prophet of eighteenth century bourgeois morality. It did not make him chuckle to give pain, though he loved a scrap.”

 

“Conrad” (Portraits, 1931): “The length of his head from cine to crown struck me, and this was accentuated by a pointed greyish beard, which a backward carriage of his head on high shoulders projected forward. Black eyebrows, hooked nose, hunched shoulders gave him a more hawk-like look than even his photograph had suggested. His eyes were very bright and dark when he opened them wide, but unless lit  and expanded by enthusiasm or indignation, they remained half-hidden, and as though filmed in a kind of abstruse slumberous meditation.” [Written after meeting Conrad in 1922, two years before the novelist’s death at age sixty-six].”

 

“Trollope” (Portraits): “Johnson said that no man could be written down except by himself: he meant that no man can destroy his literary reputation except by writing badly. But a man can also, though it seldom happens, injure his fame by being exceptionally honest and unpretentious about his own work.”

 

“Henry James” (Portraits): “When I look up and see the long line of his books, the thought that it will grow no longer is not so distressing (he has expressed himself) as the thought that so many rare things in the world must now go without an appreciator, so many fine vibrations of life lose themselves in vacancy.”

Saturday, March 23, 2024

'I’m Tickled to Death When They Call Me Comic'

Like porkchops, fame is highly perishable. Writers once read by millions – think of James Michener and, at a far more accomplished level, James Gould Cozzens – have evaporated from literary memory. Newspaper writing and journalism in general are especially biodegradable. Who wants yesterday’s papers, let alone those published a century ago?

Franklin Pierce Adams, known to the public as F.P.A., was once a durably familiar name in American popular culture and a prolific writer of light verse. From 1913 to 1937 his column, “The Conning Tower,” was published in the Herald Tribune and other New York newspapers. With Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman, he was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he joined the panel of experts on the popular radio show “Information, Please” in 1938. Readers and non-readers alike could quote “F.P.A.isms,” the way they quoted Ogden Nash. Perhaps Adams’ most famous line: “To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.” His was an era when wit, not stridency, was prized by a broad potion of the American reading public.

 

Among many other volumes, Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized eight of F.P.A.’s poetry collections published between 1911 and 1936. Much of Adams’ light verse is, admittedly, doggerel, just not very good, but he hated free verse and remained loyal to meter and rhyme. That alone makes much of his poetry more readable than most of the sludge published today, though some of the topicality will lose readers. “Why Don’t You Do Something Big?” is the prefatory poem to Weights & Measures (1917) and stands as Adams' poetic apologia:

 

“The Comic Bard is supposed to sigh

For the skill and the power to make you cry:

He’s supposed to yearn, when he has the time,

To make you sob as you read his rhyme.

That thought in many a bard may be;

I only know how the thing strikes me.

For mine aim is low, mine ambish [ambition] atom:

I’m tickled to death when they call me comic.”

 

Adams loved words, which ought to be an obvious thing to say about any poet. Often the strategy energizing his light verse is to undercut grandiosity while not indulging in it. Here is “To a Thesaurus” (The Melancholy Lute: Selected Songs of Thirty Years, 1936):

 

“O precious codex, volume, tome,

Book, writing, compilation, work

Attend the while I pen a pome,

A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

 

“For I would pen, engross, indite,

Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,

Record, submit – yea, even write

An ode, an elegy to bless –

 

To bless, set store by, celebrate,

Approve, esteem, endow with soul,

Commend, acclaim, appreciate,

Immortalize, laud, praise, extol.

 

“Thy merit, goodness, value, worth,

Expedience, utility –

O manna, honey, salt of earth,

I sing, I chant, I worship thee!

 

“How could I manage, live, exist,

Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,

Be present in the flesh, subsist,

Have place, become, breathe or inhale.

 

“Without thy help, recruit, support,

Opitulation, furtherance,

Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,

Favour, sustention and advance?

 

“Ala Alack! and well-a-day!

My case would then be dour and sad,

Likewise distressing, dismal, gray,

Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.

 

“Though I could keep this up all day,

This lyric, elegiac, song,

Meseems hath come the time to say

Farewell! Adieu! Good-by! So long!”

 

Opitulation is a new one on me (and my spell-check software): from the Latin, “help, aid, assistance.” From the same Adams volume comes “Broadmindedness,” which has a newfound applicability in the twenty-first century:

 

“How narrow his vision, how cribbed and confined!

How prejudiced all of his views!

How hard is the shell of his bigoted mind!

How difficult he to excuse!

 

“His face should be slapped and his head should be banged;

A person like that ought to die!

I want to be fair, but a man should be hanged

Who’s any less liberal than I.”


Adams died on this date, March 23, in 1960 at age seventy-eight.

Friday, March 22, 2024

'Domestic Privacies"

Marilyn Sides won this reader’s heart in the third paragraph of her 2018 essay “The Consolations of Literature,” when she refers to Dr. Johnson as “grand master of English prose.” She also practices what Anecdotal Evidence preaches: “the intersection of books and life.” We might think of her essay as an exercise in applied literary studies rather than the more fashionable and boring theoretical school. Sides’ mother is dying and she awaits the inevitable telephone call. In the meantime, she teaches selections from Johnson’s work to a class of undergraduates. She writes: 

“One of Johnson’s most quoted aphorisms: ‘Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ Standing up, in one hour and thirty-five minutes, before twenty students to discuss Johnson can feel like a form of public hanging. So I concentrate my mind. First, lower expectations. I’m a pinch hitter for the eighteenth-century survey; the expert is on sabbatical.”

 

An appealing quality in an essayist or memoirist: self-deprecating humility. With a braggart, an egotist, we quickly lose sympathy. Of course, every writer is an egotist. Some recognize it and carry on. Others nourish it because they have nothing else. Sides reviews the reading list for her impending lecture, including The Rambler No. 60:

 

“Johnson is fascinated by the incidents ‘of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory and are rarely transmitted by tradition’; the ‘invisible circumstances . . . more important than public occurrences’ that make ‘a life’ come alive. . . . Point out Johnson’s insistence on the greater importance of ‘domestic privacies’ over ‘those performances and incidents, which produce vulgar greatness.”

 

Shes proceeds with a thematic collage of texts from the assigned works by Johnson, including the “Life of Pope,” one of his small masterpieces. Her mother, like Johnson, she tells us, accepts the reality of hell:

 

“My mother did believe in hell, though I’m pretty sure she didn’t feel in much danger of ending up there. (But my young nephews, if my sister didn’t baptize them, that was another story!) I think she simply didn’t want to die or die without a fight. Johnson’s ringing challenge to death upon his deathbed was hers, too: ‘I will be conquered, I will not capitulate.’

 

“I suddenly laughed and cried. Samuel Johnson and my mother, so unlike in temperament and talents, were yet very much alike. Both so long tortured and let down by the body, yet for that very reason, both seasoned warriors of the drawn-out battle. Although dying for decades, they insisted on persisting, preferring to remain alive as long as possible in the world they so passionately embraced.”

 

More than three-hundred years after Johnson’s birth, a reader discovers a shared humanity. Johnson embodies such humanity. He is like the rest of us, only more so. He accepts and celebrates his commonality, as he does in his “Life of Gray”:

 

“In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

 

Perhaps my favorite among all of Geoffrey Hill’s books, the one I return to most often, is The Triumph of Love (1998), in which he echoes the title of Sides’ essay. See this passage from CXLVIII, narrated in the tongue-in-cheek voice of Hill the schoolmaster:

 

                                                “I ask you:

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad

and angry consolation. What is

the poem? What figures? Say,

a sad and angry consolation. That’s

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry

consolation.”

 

[Sides published “The Consolations of Literature in the Fall 2018 edition of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics.”]