'In Constant Repair'

“In the streets I saw two men meet after a long separation, it was plain. They came forward with a little run and LEAPED at each other’s hands. You never saw such bright eyes as they both had. It put one in a good humour to see it.”

Yet again I’ve heard the small-minded slur that people whose contact is strictly digital cannot be considered genuine friends. If that were the case, woe is me, I’m a miserably friendless hermit. Those who say such things underestimate the human capacity for intimacy and trust. I think of Helene Hanff, Frank Doel and their epistolary friendship as documented in the former’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970) – and the 1987 film version with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. They never met yet it’s fair to call their friendship a love story.

Friendships begin and evolve though natural selection, regardless of environmental conditions. I prefer the company of people who are smart, not infatuated with themselves, at least a tad bookish and reliably able to make me laugh. Those friendships tend to survive and even reproduce. Whether the friend lives in Houston or Burkina Faso makes no difference. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s unlikely but enduring friendship with Henry James.

The passage at the top is from a letter Stevenson wrote to his friend Fanny Sitwell on October 4, 1873. Stevenson was young, not quite twenty-three, and a little infatuated with Sitwell, married and eleven years his senior. Unlike many of us, Stevenson had a positive gift for friendship. To some degree I think we choose as friends people who can entertain us. Who wants the company of dullards? Friendship is not a form of charity, nor is it passive. It requires maintenance. I don’t always follow Dr. Johnson’s advice to Boswell: “If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.” Every time I read that sentence, I tell myself: “I really should call So-and So.”

In Chapter 4 of Lay Morals (1889), Stevenson tells us “. . . no man is useless while he has a friend,” even if that friend is a scattering of electrons on a screen.

'There Are Many Real Things of Beauty Here'

A reader sent me a screed against beauty he had found online. The writer wasn’t advocating its opposite, ugliness, exactly, though his prose definitely leans in that direction. Only a graduate-school alumnus could come up with such silly ideas. Rather, he seemed to be saying that beauty is an impertinence, a distraction from the important things. You can guess what they are. 

I try to avoid generalizations because men and women are by nature complicated and even contradictory, and understanding is always contingent, but I’ve observed a correlation between the absence of an aesthetic sense and a severe humor deficit. Agreed: beauty is often sentimentalized. It isn’t all kitty cats and daisies (though those things are often beautiful). In fact, it’s one of life’s great consolations.

 

Days before his death my brother pointed to the window from his hospice bed. Outside was a black locust tree. We had one in our yard as kids. It was a sunny, breezy day in Cleveland and the window was open. The leaves of a locust are described by botanists as “pinnately compound” – pairs of leaflets arranged, fern-like, on a stem. The tree was fluttering in the breeze and Ken, who was almost beyond language, smiled and said: “Look at the tree!” It was one of the last things he ever said.

 

In the March 1948 issue of Horizon, the late William Jay Smith published a poem, “Independence Day,” with a memorable opening:

 

“Life is inadequate, but there are many real

Things of beauty here: the flower-peddler’s cart

Adrift like an island in the city streets,

The peddler’s mare, lifting her mighty hoof

Aware of all that beauty. And the slate

Where the schoolboy draws his forty-eight

States, ready to make room for the world.”

 

And then, in the second stanza: “There are real things of beauty; all / These things were yours.” And in the third: “There are real things of beauty / Here; and sorrow is our praise.”

'You Have to Read the Words'

“Tolstoy was so much better than any other writer who ever lived that you couldn’t even remotely compare anyone to him.” 

I first read War and Peace in the eighth grade in a paperback abridgement. I remember reading it in science class, half-heartedly hiding the book behind the girl who sat in front of me. The teacher, a basketball coach and thus not much of a teacher, got angry and loudly told me to put it away. I was reading it like a thriller, strictly for plot, so I resented the interruption. Like generations of previous male readers I had fallen in love with Natalya Ilyinichna Rostova -- Natasha. War and Peace had the intimidating reputation for being that big book, which was part of the reason I was reading it, as I would Ulysses a few years later. My late brother on his Blogger profile said of his favorite books: “I like ’em big.”  

 

I was falling for Russian literature – again, like generations of earlier readers. The swoon remains in effect. A part of me still thinks that every other literature – even Shakespeare and his contemporaries -- are secondary to the Russians, somehow not quite serious. Who can rival them for gravitas of sensibility? Shakespeare? Proust? No American, not even Melville or Henry James, comes close. Even as I name them, they seem somehow inadequate. Clarence Brown, translator and advocate for the Mandelstams in the West, edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (1985), a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In his introduction he says provocatively and correctly:

 

“I now look back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will prevent your sharing. These writers, after all, continue in our time the tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of the three supreme literatures of the world.”

 

In college I read the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of War and Peace, unabridged. Later came the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky version. It’s a novel that lastingly populates your imagination. A reader has written to ask if he should read War and Peace. Is it as good as its forbidding reputation suggests? The sentence quoted at the top is from an interview with Gary Saul Morson. Don’t be intimidated, I’ve told my reader. Morson is a thoughtful, prudent man, not given to hyperbole. See his discussion of War and Peace in his most recent book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russians on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press, 2023). Tolstoy’s people are Ur-humans; in short, us. Clive James writes in his review of the BBC’s film version of War and Peace:     

 

“Tolstoy’s greatest book is the way it is because he thought he was everybody. He had pretensions to philosophy – screen versions sensibly leave all that out – but his universality was not just intellectual, it was instinctive. No human feeling was unknown to him, but looking at the pictures can give you only some of that: you have to read the words.”

'Speak Knowledge Meagerly and Piteously'

“Montaigne is heavy going, it has to be said.” 

For once the commonsensical Jules Renard is wrong. There’s no context for the remark in his journal (October 1, 1898), so I take his words as given. Montaigne’s prose, at least in translation, seems clear and readily understood. The classical tags can slow you down but his essays often read with a modern clarity and verve. His sensibility is quick and curious, and he’s blessed with a spacious memory. One thought leads rapidly to the next and then to a remark by Plutarch or Seneca. His mind is a river. In a late essay, “Of Physiognomy,” he returns to his recurrent theme – preparations for our deaths:

 

“We trouble our life by concern about death, and death by concern about life.  One torments us, the other frightens us. It is not against death that we prepare ourselves; that is too momentary a thing. A quarter hour of suffering, without consequence, without harm, does not deserve any particular precepts. To tell the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations for death.”

 

The theme may be “heavy going” but not its expression. The prose is as clean and orderly as a syllogism. He next takes up the trial and death of Socrates. After quoting the philosopher at length he writes: “Besides, isn’t the method of arguing that Socrates uses here equally admirable in its simplicity and its vigor? Truly it is much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than it is to talk and live like Socrates. There lies the extreme degree of perfection and difficulty; art cannot reach it.”

 

Montaigne is unashamedly devoted to scrutinizing his “I.” Can you think of another writer who takes himself as his principal subject and yet is not a narcissist? Next he reflects on his own reliance on allusions, most often classical. This is one of those moments in Montaigne when we sense the presence of a living, breathing, fretting, pondering man sitting across the table from us and talking:

 

“Even so someone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other people’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them. Indeed I have yielded to public opinion in carrying these borrowed ornaments about on me. But I do not intend that they should cover and hide me; that is the opposite of my design, I who wish to make a show only of what is my own, and of what is naturally my own; and if I had taken my own advice I would at all hazards have spoken absolutely all alone. I load myself with these borrowings more and more heavily every day beyond my intention and my original form, following the fancy of the age and the exhortation of others. If it is unbecoming to me, as I believe it is, no matter; it may be useful to someone else.”

 

Here it seems that Montaigne speaks for me. We quote because someone else has already said it better. Montaigne’s proud humility is inspiring: “I speak ignorance pompously and opulently, and speak knowledge meagerly and piteously, the latter secondarily and accidentally, the former expressly and principally.”

 

A Howard Nemerov poem in Gnomes & Occasions (1973) shares a title with Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience”:

 

“Nature from life by piece and piece

Gently disparts us; power fails

Before desire does. It needs not sex

To illustrate what Montaigne saith.

But only what’s befallen X—

Now he no longer has his teeth

He can no longer bite his nails.”

 

Dispart is a rare word meaning "to separate" or "divide."

 

[The Renard sentence comes from his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020). The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]

'In a More Just World'

Our youngest son’s bedroom has lately turned into an overstuffed warehouse. Last year, as a junior at Rice, he lived off-campus in an apartment. This year he’s back in a dormitory so most of his “housewares” – clothing, dishes and utensils, tchotchkes – have been heaped in his room. Books were stacked on every horizontal surface. My job on Sunday was to organize them on the shelves. They reflected every era of David’s twenty-one years, from R.L. Stine to A Presocratics Reader. 

One book surprised me: a first edition, without a dustjacket, of The Just and the Unjust, James Gould Cozzens’ 1942 novel about a murder trial. David is in prelaw so finding the book among all the others makes sense. I rank it as Cozzens’ second-best novel after Guard of Honor (1948), though I haven't read Cozzens in years. Once a bestseller, his reputation has evaporated among critics and general readers. I won’t even try to rally the troops. Cozzens might as well have written in Linear B.  

 

Cozzens (1903-78) dedicated the novel to Edward G. Biester. Poking around online, I see that Biester was a lawyer who served as prosecutor and judge in Pennsylvania. He and Cozzens met during a trial in 1939 and became friends. Cozzens relied on him for legal accuracy. In his defense of Cozzens’ work, Joseph Epstein writes of The Just and the Unjust: “A very strong sense emerges of how the law in its daily operations works which I, for one, find fascinating.” The novel, as I recall it, has a documentary flavor without losing its narrative momentum.

 

Beneath the dedication, Cozzens adds a Latin tag, “Cuilibet in arte sua perito est credendum,” which he attributes to “Coke on Littleton, 125.” A rough translation: “Everyone must be trusted as an expert in their craft.” Coke I recognized as Sir Edward Coke (1551-1634), the English barrister, judge and legal scholar. The volume referred to is The Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628-44), one of the basic texts of common law.

 

Biester was likely “an expert in [his] craft,” as was Cozzens. As Epstein puts it: “In a more just world, James Gould Cozzens would be accorded a volume in the Library of America . . .”

'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers'

“All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche in literary history -- Henry Green’s Loving and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune's Maggot have both deservedly achieved this status through the persistence of a small band of admirers.” 

I understand the impulse but question it. It’s easy to get abusively idealistic. What’s the use of plumping for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa or the Goncourt Brothers if people no longer read or remain merely “voracious readers,” to use Nige’s phrase? That’s a question I’ve stopped asking myself after coming up with an answer that will satisfy no one, including me: We do it out of self-respect and, if you’ll pardon the expression, love. Some of us still love good books and sharing our enthusiasm with like-minded people. It feels like an obligation. The impulse is a good one, at least until we start getting resentful if no one is listening. Ours is the age of reduced literacy and a renewed enthusiasm for ”cancelling” the past. Sometimes it seems as though all writers are, to use Michael Holroyd’s word cited above, “unfashionable.”

 

Holroyd is the author of a two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey and four volumes devoted to the life of George Bernard Shaw. His essay “Out of Print” is published in the Spring 1970 issue of The American Scholar. Holroyd’s first book was a 1964 critical biography of Hugh Kingsmill, one of many forgotten English critics and anthologists. Six years later Holroyd published The Best of Hugh Kingsmill: Selections from his Writings. His introduction begins:

 

“Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of the opposition.”

 

In the essay, Holroyd’s tone is politely combative, but it’s no longer 1970 when a critic could still ask, “[W]hy doesn't someone start a library of autobiographies, from Benjamin Haydon to Edwin Muir and Gerald Brenan's A Life of One's Own? A country that neglects such books doesn't deserve to have them.” And, in effect, doesn’t have them.

 

[Holroyd’s essay serves as a sort of introduction to “Comments on Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years” in the same issue of The American Scholar. The editors ask fifty-three writers and critics to identify books deserving of rescue.]

'The Censure of Knaves and Fools'

“Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sense of gloomy wretchedness.” 

And that’s just from the introduction to his Life of Johnson. Anyone who dismisses James Boswell as a sort of idiot savant, “a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect,” as Macaulay famously wrote of him, is naïve about human nature. Boswell is describing Dr. Johnson’s father, Michael (1657-1731), an excellent bookman, a good father and a poor businessman in Lichfield.

 

I found the Boswell passage above in a most unexpected place: as the epigraph to David Mamet’s most recent book, Everywhere an Oink Oink (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which carries one of those fashionably long subtitles, presumably concocted by an editor: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood. I like Mamet’s prose. He’s a master of American Demotic. He’s funny, smart and uninhibited. I’ve never seen one of his plays on the stage but I enjoyed three movies he wrote and directed: House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1997).

 

I haven’t yet started reading the book but I wanted to see if Mamet develops the Boswellian or Johnsonian theme. In the index there is a single reference to to Johnson -- nine paragraphs of footnote on Page 174.The first begins “For the artist all criticism is devastating . . .”  Here’s part of the fourth:

 

“Samuel Johnson said the censure of knaves and fools is applause: a phrase rendered in the vernacular as ‘Fuck ’em all but six for pallbearers, and fuck them, too.’”