This is the second movie review that I’ve written — but the first dual review, of Jean Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion” (1937) and John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance” (1962). The comparison is unequal; “La Grande Illusion” is a great movie, one of the greatest ever made, while “The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance” is merely a first rate movie, the masterpiece of one of America’s greatest directors. Maybe that isn’t much of a difference.

These movies are so different in their historical settings and their cinematic styles that I had to watch each of them several times before I became aware of their similarity of theme — that of the necessary disappearance in the course of history of an aristocratic type of human being.

An aristocracy is a privileged social class that earns its privileges, such as exemption from taxes, by shouldering important public responsibilities. As de Tocqueville pointed out in L’Ancien Régime et La Révolution Française, an aristocracy can maintain its privileges as long as it is seen to be earning them, but let it become otiose and its privileges will be seen as illegitimate. This is what happened to the French aristocracy when it moved from the land to Versailles and devoted itself to distractions: it became merely parasitical. The middle and commercial classes, which had been growing in wealth and political importance, demanded privileges and recognition in proportion to their real importance, and sought them through revolution. But first, a partial description of each movie.

La Grande Illusion is set in the early months of the First World War. It relates the attempts of a small group of officers in the French army to escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp. The commandant of the camp is an aristocratic Prussian officer named von Rauffenstein (played by the great Eric von Stroheim). Although von Rauffenstein treats his prisoners according to the conventions of war, he singles out one of them, an aristocrat named de Boildieu, (played by the distinguished Pierre Fresnay), for preferred treatment, going so far as to invite him to his chamber for cigarettes and conversation. During one discussion, von Rauffenstein, reflecting on the various costs of the war, says that whichever side wins, it will be the end of the little that is left of the aristocratic order that produced the likes of us, de Boildieu and von Rauffenstein — and won’t that be a shame? De Boildieu reflects a moment and says, “maybe”; but aren’t his fellow French officers excellent soldiers, plebeian in origin though they may be? “Jolis cadeaux de la Revolution Francaise”, replies von Rauffenstein scornfully. (“Pretty presents from the French Revolution.”)

Von Rauffenstein was right, of course; the “Great War”, whatever its outcome, would be the end of the European aristocracy, with its code of honor, its stylized manners, its anti-intellectualism, its trans-national outlook. “And don’t you find that a pity?” asks Von Rauffenstein? “Perhaps,” says de Boldieu. The rest is spoilers.

.John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance” deals with the end of an American aristocracy, that of the men who, through force of character and handiness with a rifle, could provide frontier settlements with a minimum of order and a rough ad hoc justice.

The movie begins with the funeral of one such man, Tom Doniphon (played by John Wayne), who had tried to protect the raw frontier community named “Shinbone” from the depredations of the outlaw Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin). The funeral is attended by Ransom Stoddard (played by Jimmy Stewart) his wife Hailie (played by Vera Miles). Years before, Stoddard, fresh out of law school, had come to Shinbone intending to civilize it by applying the ordinary processes of law. Doniphon had laughed at him, saying that a gun was the only thing that Liberty Vallance respected. The tension between Doniphon and Stoddard is increased by their common interest in Hailie, who marries Stoddard. The rest is spoilers.

de Boldieu, Von Rauffenstein, Tom Doniphon, are admirable men for whom the world no longer has much use. Neither Jean Renoir nor John Ford protests their obsolescence; but they do ask us to ponder the loss of grace and honor that the world has suffered with their passing.

These two movies are also united by use of a device that Renoir and Ford had the tact and judgement not to lean on too heavily: a flower. Von Rauffenstein cultivates a geranium in his quarters; “C’est la seule fleur dans la fortresses,” he replies when de Boldieu praises the care he has been taking of it. When Tom Doniphon is courting Hailie, he presents her with a wild cactus rose that he has found flourishing in the desert.

I prefer not to think of John Ford’s cactus rose as a reference to Jean Renoir’s geranium. I see it as a mark of the natural affinity that the genius of one true artist has for the genius of another.

See these movies.

 

 

 

 

 

W. H. Auden’s book A Certain World was published in 1970, making it one of the last books that this amazing writer produced — he died in 1973. The book’s subtitle is A Commonplace Book, which means that it is a scrapbook of poems, quotations, short essays, word puzzles, and pieces of information that the compiler of the commonplace book wanted to have available for future use. In most cases, very little of such a book is in the complier’s own words; Auden’s book is an exception. At the same time, such a compilation can be intimately revealing of its author’s likes, dislikes, interests, obsessions and fears.

Commonplace books are something like the diary of a mind, and thus are mostly intended only for, at most, a small circle of readers. Ralph Waldo Emerson compiled a commonplace book devoted to poetry and titled it Parnassus. It is a strange book, evidently meant for his family circle, because a large number of the poems included in it are second rate and apparently sentimental favorites of one or more members of the family.

A Certain World is obviously intended for the public. The entries in it are almost without exception fresh, surprising, and, to use a flabby inexcusable word, interesting. They are grouped into 173 named sections, arranged alphabetically.

I can think of two groups of readers whom this book might interest: students of Auden’s mind, who hope to be able to discover something about the workings of that mind from the items in this miscellany; or, people who simply enjoy the poems, word puzzles, or odd scraps of information that Auden enjoyed. I belong to the second group of readers.

I especially enjoy several different kinds of items in A Certain World; first, aphorisms:

”Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.” Hugo von Hoffsmanthal

”God loves all men but is enchanted by none.” W. H. Auden

”Men are not punished for their sins but by them.” E. Hubbard

”Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks that it is Don Quixote.” Stanislas Lec

”Our notion of symmetry is derived from the human face. Hence we demand symmetry horizontally and in breadth only; not vertically or in depth.” Blaise Pascal

Then there are quotations from the works of poets I was only slightly acquainted with or didn’t know at all: John Betjamin, William Barnes, John Clare.

Then there are excerpts from essays about things that Auden was interested in: hangmen, Napoleon, moles, book reviews, food, the medieval cosmos, poetry.

And, not surprisingly since Auden was a convinced and practicing Christian, reflections on God, by Auden and others.

The extremely miscellaneous character of the entries in this book bears the message of this book, if it has one: this world is odd, enchanted, surprising, disturbing, and worth attending to.

Unfortunately, A Certain World is out-of-print and fairly scarce, but scrounging for it online can turn up reasonably priced copies.

To wish to be someone else is to wish to cease to be, and I cannot say that I wish that there were an end to John Breithaupt, the person who I am. But when I read the scholarly works of W. P. Ker (1855 – 1923) and read about his life, I envy him his being who he was.

Ker was fortunate above most mortals in being able to do the thing he loved all his adult life, without distraction or financial anxiety. This was, to study the western world’s poetry and stories and write about them engagingly. He once described his calling as “a pleasant duty that I have been chosen as one of the captains of a band of adventurers whose province is the ocean of stories, the fortunate Isles of Romance, the kingdoms of wonder beyond the furthest voyage of the Argo.”

He was born in Glasgow and educated in Scotland and at Oxford University. He was trained to be a classicist but his interests turned to European literature of the period between end of the classical world and the start of the renaissance, or roughly 500 to 1500 A. D. He read widely and always in the original languages; his learning was said to surpass even that of the polymathic critic George Saintsbury.

His first book, Epic and Romance, was published when he was 42; it established him as the leading scholar in this field. The publication of this book was followed by many honors, including an appointment as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a position whose only requirement is that the occupant deliver three lectures on poetry a year. Oxford then elected him a fellow of All Souls College, where he was a don without students, his only duty being that he spend a certain amount of time in the college each year. This was a lifetime appointment.

Ker had his limitations, of course; he was not himself a creative writer; his prose was clear and readable, but not distinguished; and in most cases he was content merely to quote poems rather than analyze them. But his love for and insight into what he read lifted what he wrote above the level of routine scholarship.

W. H. Auden wrote eloquently about his debt to Ker:

what good angel glured me into Blackwell’s one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost.

He was fortunate in living in a time when a life devoted to the study of poetry and stories was not thought to require justification. He once wrote, however, that

Imagination and the pure delight in stories drive out fear.

He was reticent about his religious beliefs, but once, when he was out walking with a student, he pointed to a bird snd said, “There is a woodcock.”

”That’s not my idea of a woodcock,”:the student replied.

Ker replied, “It’s God’s idea”

I have copies of several of his books: Epic and Romance, The Dark Ages, Form and Style in Poetry, and Medieval English Literature. I haven’t read any of them straight through. I leave them around the house where I can pick them up and read five or ten pages at whim. They have the merit of all the best criticism, in making you put down the criticism and take up the originals. In this case, though, a caveat is in order: a sudden passion for Boethius can be disruptive of your life’s ordinary routines..

I recently had a discussion about global warming with several people who believed that they had done all that they needed to do to have a sound opinion about the subject. They had read State of Fear, a novel by Michael Crichton about a group of environmentalists who plot mass murder to publicize the dangers of global warming. Although the book is fiction, it includes charts, graphs, and a bibliography in support of its view that climate change is a hoax or is at least far less a danger than the environmentalists think.

When I mentioned other books on the subject that they might want to read, they asked me why they should bother. State of Fear was, in their opinion, final and authoritative. When I pointed out that Michael Crichton was not a climate scientist, and that books written by people who are climate scientists would be better guides to the subject, they replied that climate scientists are academic bureaucrats saying whatever they need to say to get grant money. Their belief in the truth of this was unshakeable.

This discussion made me think, quite naturally, of Matthew Arnold, and in particular of his book Culture and Anarchy (1869). There may be a sense in which any work of literature is an implicit criticism of the civilization in which it has its roots; Arnold’s book explicitly criticizes the civilization where it has its roots, that is, the civilization of Victorian England.

Arnold criticized England by proposing “culture” as an ideal and “anarchy” its opposite. Culture, Arnold says, is

a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

”Anarchy” is the state that a civilization falls into when its members are satisfied with their opinions simply because they are theirs. They believe that they are in possession of the best that has been thought and said on whatever subject. It follows from this that a person can have any opinion about anything, and is justified in standing by it. There is no umpire of thought or feeling, no striving for perfection. There is anarchy.

Arnold’s book was controversial when it appeared. Hadn’t Macaulay shown in his History of England that the English people, despite their crimes and follies, were solidly in the path of progress? Who is this sniping critic Matthew Arnold who tells us that we lack “culture”? Aren’t the subscriptions to our concert series routinely sold out? And look at the enormous sums that we spend on education.

All that is the sort of complacency that we don’t need a Matthew Arnold to recognize and deplore. And who is to say what is in fact the best that has been thought and said about any particular subject? These are serious criticisms and Arnold did not successfully refute them, as far as I know. Culture then is a mirage and anarchy simply the natural state of a healthy snd strong civilization.

.So I concluded, twenty years ago, after reading the attractive copy of Culture and Anarchy that I had bought at Myopic Books in Providence, Rhode Island.

And then it struck me more and more that although Arnold had not succeeded is defining what culture is very clearly, its absence can always be felt unmistakably. The civilization of the United States of America is profoundly anarchic and the chief Anarch is Donald Trump.

Arnold wrote:

One must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find how much, in our present society, a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it.

Trump’s days lack solidity and value in large part because he doesn’t read. There is no free play of fresh ideas on his stock beliefs.

But can we hold Trump in contempt without ourselves sinking into anarchy? Is there a free play of fresh ideas that we could turn on our stock ideas about Trump? Isn’t it the case, for example, that as president he did not once use our country’s military might to force upon another country our own ideas of right? Reflections in this vein might lead us to more complicated and nuanced ideas about Trump.

No, the left has its own stock ideas and shibboleths and stands condemned of not loving culture enough. Even so, I have known cultured leftists. In the 1980s I was active in the nuclear freeze movement, the members of which held to their convictions passionately. The leader of our local group was a brilliant woman whose dedication to the cause was of a strength and purity such as I had never seen before. But one day she told our group that some nights she can’t sleep for fearing that “we might be wrong.” From somewhere, she had tapped into a fresh — and unsettling — play of new ideas that challenged her most settled convictions. That was culture.

But we are an anarchic nation, and Pope supplies our epitaph:

Lo! Thy dread Empire, Chaos! Is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

The Silken Tent, by Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent 
At midday when the sunny summer breeze 
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, 
So that in guys it gently sways at ease, 

And its supporting central cedar pole, 
That is its pinnacle to heavenward 
And signifies the sureness of the soul, 
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound 
By countless silken ties of love and thought 
To every thing on earth the compass round, 
And only by one's going slightly taut 

In the capriciousness of summer air 
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

Robert Frost’s superb poem “The Silken Tent” isn’t exactly unknown to most lovers of Frost. It sometimes makes it into the anthologies, although not nearly as often as “The Road Not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. Randall Jarrell did not include it in his famous list of Frost’s fourteen best poems, but it can of course be found in every copy of Frost’s Complete Poems. The poem is hiding in plain sight.

Why isn’t so extraordinarily beautiful and moving a poem better known?

The poem can be dismissed as a mere conceit: the comparison of a beloved woman to a silken tent. But poems of this type have become well-known and well loved; for example, Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”

It can be dismissed as a mere tour de force (albeit an astonishing one), for it is a sonnet (Shakespearean) consisting of a single sentence that moves effortlessly from an initial statement of the terms of the comparison through all the points of likeness. But the poem’s doing a difficult thing so easily can hardly seem to explain the poem’s comparative neglect.

The poem no doubt puzzles a certain type of reader who needs to add a haec fabula docet to the end of every poem that they read. But what does this poem really teach, beyond the fact of a woman’s being like a tent in certain respects?

I have carefully considered the possible reasons for this poem’s comparative neglect and have concluded who the hell cares. Back to the poem:

The poem begins with the only line in which there is the slightest dislocation of words from their normal order in speech:

She is as in a field a silken tent

This line seems to announce, by its slightly dislocated word order, that what is to follow will be an exercise in ingenuity, something cerebral in the line of John Donne and his fellow metaphysical poets. But with one slight exception, the word order in the following lines is perfectly natural and unforced. The contrast between the oddness of the first line and the flowing naturalness of the rest of the poem develops with a certain bravado, but a very subdued bravado, unlike Donne’s unapologetic kind. Ars est celare artem.

I read this poem several times, and thought I knew it well, before I realized that it is a sonnet. It is seldom printed as a sonnet, as I have done above, but that is not why I missed so important a feature of the poem. I missed this feature because in most English sonnets the form is conspicuous, and conspicuous for a reason: the sonnet form was not invented with the English language in mind..

The sonnet form was created for Italian poets, whose language has so little variety in word endings that rhymes can go unnoticed. The sonnet form makes the rhyme scheme intricate so that rhyming can become, in Italian, a matter of skill.

That was very well for Italian poets. but English poets, eager to show that they, too, could write sonnets, soon found that writing them in their own rhyme-poor language was an exercise of considerable technical difficulty. It is seldom that an English sonnet does not convey a sense of difficulty overcome, however gracefully. An English sonnet, then, is an exercise in bravado.

Frost’s poem “A Silken Tent”, however, overcomes the difficulties of form so easily that it conveys no sense of difficulties overcome at all. And that is true bravado.

I don’t read much literary criticism; I prefer my own mistakes about books to those of the learned. I make an exception for Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age (1952), which I have read so often that I nearly have it memorized. Jarrell knew how poems are made, having made quite a few himself; and he could tell good poems from bad, having made quite a few of both.

As a critic of new books, he inclined more to justice more than to mercy. It is said that when he died, in 1965, scores of unpublished manuscripts emerged from desk drawers. His damning reviews of books were all the more feared by the books’ authors because of the very great likelihood that he was right. His friend Robert Lowell said “Randall was so often right that we started to think that he was always right.”

But there is little of the fierce and feared critic in the essays gathered in Poetry and the Age. This collection includes a pair of once famous essays, “The Age of Criticism” and “Poetry and the Age”, in which he laments how little people read anymore, and how little of what they read is worth reading. This is a familiar complaint; and the one thing that people are still reading is books about the lamentable decline of reading.

But Jarrell’s sadness at the decline of reading seems genuine and wholly disinterested. It bothered him that manual laborers on their lunch hour don’t pull volumes of Shelley or Hardy out of their lunch pails and enjoy them along with their coffee and baloney sandwiches. The poems of Shelley and Hardy, after all, are naturally good, like hot coffee, like baloney sandwiches. Why are people denying themselves the pleasure?

His effort as a critic was to make people see what they could see for themselves if they would only look — that the large and generous imaginations of our poets and writers have left us a store of consolation and wisdom that we wrong ourselves to overlook. His poem “Children Selecting Books in a Library” ends with these lines:

What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann's
Way better than our own, and trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to — to — somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another's sorrow for our own; another's
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own…
"I am myself still?" For a little while, forget:
The world's selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.

We have invented for ourselves many way to avoid what waits for us in books; Jarrell would have had unforgettable things to say about the electronic distractions which we have chosen to give ourselves to. Another way of avoiding the good in books is to make the reading of them a business. He had this to write about a distinguished but burdened critic of his acquaintance:

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!”

Poetry and the Age also includes essays about Robert Frost and Walt Whitman that made the learned world blush that it had ever condescended to these great poets, and an essay about Jarrell’s mentor, John Crowe Ransom, that is the best thing about Ransom that I have ever read.

Criticism such as Jarrell’s is full of insights about writers and reading, but its great merit, in my opinion, is that it makes you set criticism aside and turn to the poems and stories that we live less fully and joyously by neglecting.

Incredibly, the classic stories of James Thurber are no longer the several decades old that they were when I first got to know them. They are close to a century old. This monstrous fact does not take from them any of their freshness, however. They live by their truth. And their truth is the tragic and painful truth of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, transposed into comedy.

Thurber was not a happy man. His unhappiness made him rather cruel; his cruelty destroyed his marriages; and the failure of his marriages made him unhappy. The irony of all this did not escape his attention.

In the small cramped office at the New Yorker magazine that he shared with the saintly E. B. White, Thurber began to commit his despair to paper, drawing pictures of people contending with their daily embarrassments and humiliations — and in the case of men and women together, contending with each other. Thurber was blind in one eye and was rapidly losing sight in the other. His drawings consisted of wild loops suggesting masses of flesh in motion and short deft strokes that captured the essence of the souls of men and women in the throes of bewilderment.

Because Thurber drew only to relieve his own misery, he saved nothing. Instead, he crumpled the paper on which he had drawn, and threw the crumpled paper into his waste basket. E.B. White, however, believing that no product of Thurber’s troubled imagination could be without interest, started to fish Thurber’s crumpled sketches out of the wastebasket. He smoothed the paper flat, inked in the penciled lines, and either asked Thurber to supply captions or supplied captions himself.

White then showed the inked-in, captioned sketches to Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s editor, suggesting that the magazine publish them as cartoons. Ross said no — these sketches were too amateurishly drawn, too odd, and too disturbing. White persisted, however, and Ross finally relented.

The first drawings by Thurber appeared in the magazine in 1930. They were of a dog (either dead or in a trance) and a seal that disappointed its owner by showing no interest in balancing a ball on its nose. They illustrated a short facetious advice column for people who were baffled by their pets. Thurber began to take his sketches seriously, and from then on a “Thurber cartoon” was a regular and deeply relished feature of the magazine.

But this post is about “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”. I am discussing Thurber’s drawings in this post because they, along with “Mitty” (and the stories in My Life and Hard Times) seem to me to be Thurber’s masterpieces. The cartoons and this story express with economy and brilliant originality the bafflement and embarrassment and fears of ordinary men snd women who do not welcome the irrational into their lives but there it is.

Chances are good that you know, more or less, what “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is all about, and chances are equally good that you’ve never read it or haven’t read it for a long time. Read it now, for its economy, its matchless construction, its pathos, and its humor.

Thurber is a minor writer. He does not probe the human soul as deeply as his literary hero Marcel Proust, nor does he marshal the particulars of character and circumstance as well as his greatest hero, Henry James. And so what if he wasn’t Proust or James? He was Thurber!

I suspect that most of my friends and acquaintances do not believe that there is a second order of existence apart from this present one in which we are born, work, pay taxes, and die. There may not be. Very likely there isn’t. But I at least wish that there were such an order.

I am a reluctant unbeliever. When I read the Sermon on the Mount, or the parable of the Good Samaritan, I cannot help feeling that this teaching must have a source outside this quotidian order of things.

But my faith —or aspiration toward faith — stumbles over the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. And I don’t need any help from Hume to doubt miracles.

All this means that I am left with two choices: either to stop thinking about ultimate questions, or to adopt a faith in something provisionally, undogmatically, hopefully, doubtfully. Not thinking is easy; the immediate demands of daily life almost require it. But sometimes, in quieter moments, I can’t stop thinking about ultimate questions, and there I am: a provisional, undogmatic, hopeful, and doubtful something or other.

In such mood, I often turn to the writings of Evelyn Underhill (1875 -1941), an Anglican authority on mysticism and prayer. In her best known book Mysticism (1911), she wrote

A direct encounter with absolute truth, then, appears to be impossible for normal non-mystical consciousness. We cannot know the reality, or even prove the existence, of the simplest object: though this is a limitation which few people realize acutely and most would deny. But there persists in the race a type of personality which does realize this limitation: and cannot be content with the sham realities that furnish the universe of normal men. It is necessary, as it seems, to the comfort of persons of this type to form for themselves some image of the Something or Nothing which is at the end of their telegraph lines: some “conception of being,” some “theory of knowledge.” They are tormented by the Unknowable, ache for first principles, demand some background to the shadow show of things.

For better or worse, modern life distracts us from seeking “a direct encounter with absolute truth” and for most people this is a very good thing. The person who has had such an encounter can easily forget that they are still human, that is, a quite shabby disreputable sort of being. Among the side effects of mystical experience is megalomania; Walt Whitman, for one, did not entirely evade it. Our culture, being largely unacquainted with mystical experience, has no tried and assured disciplines to offer the mystic to keep him from distressing (to others as well as to himself) experiences.

One thing I try to remember when reading Evelyn Underhill: she is not, for the most part, writing about the psychology of religion. She is not advocating the cultivation of that self-referential mess called “spirituality”. She is writing about the objective existence of the Other, which is the “background of the shadow show of things.”

So what do I get out of reading Evelyn Underhill? Certainly the pleasure of reading her distinguished prose — but anything more? Perhaps it is simply a desire to keep alive in myself the instinct that knows the world to be derivative, deceptive, and stale. For whenever I start to find it bright, original, and absolute, then I will know that my nature has been subdued to what it works in like the dyer’s hand. And that would be a pity.

My favorite among all the Modern Library Giants that I have acquired over the years is “The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It”, edited by Edmund Wilson. The title is taken from a line by Herman Melville: For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

In my copy, this generous selection of essays by mostly American writers about American writers runs to 1290 pages. It was first published in 1943. It is now out of print; inexpensive copies are available on line.

For anyone interested in American literature, or literature generally, or writing of any sort, or just life, this book is a wide deep bowl of fresh salted peanuts. That it should be available only in inexpensive second hand copies speaks to the degree to which educated Americans are curious about their country’s literary past.

The value of this book is partly one of convenience: it gathers together in one place a number of easily available essays, such as Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classical American Literature.” It also includes a number of unfamiliar or hard-to-find essays, such as John Jay Chapman’s essay on Emerson, or Henry James’s essay on Hawthorne, or H. G. Wells’s essay on Stephen Crane.

A book such as this is open to the objection that it includes nothing written by women or by members of minority groups. This limitation, while regrettable, does not make the book any less rewarding as far as it goes.

I would find it hard to say which of the essays in this book is my favorite — but not impossible. “My Mark Twain” by William Dean Howells is a masterpiece of celebration, and one of the few things by Howells that departs from his usually equable tone and displays real passion.

As editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Howells was one of the first members of the east coast literary establishment to give Twain recognition, both by printing his writing and by reviewing it favorably. He was one of the first to perceive the seriousness and the genius of this popular platform performer from the uncouth west. Twain became his unshakably loyal lifelong friend.

Howells ended his memoir with a peroration as eloquent as it was just:

Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
took a man’s share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.

It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
the sole present help of the weak against the strong.

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes–I knew them all and all the rest of our
sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
of our literature.

Among the things I inherited from my Uncle Bob, apart from an inborn need for an unfailing day long supply of snack food, was a dozen or so paperback copies of the novels of Peter De Vries (1910 – 1993). I have been going through them with gratitude to my uncle, who recommended them to me with missionary zeal.

The novels of Peter De Vries are comedies set in a world that is essentially tragic; most are told from the point of view of a bright young man who is beneath his surroundings socially but superior to it intellectually, like the bright young man who reads to his upper-class girlfriend an essay he has written about Sir Thomas Brown, prompting her to exclaim, “Christ, you’re a smart son of a bitch!”

De Vries’s heroes inevitably find that being a smart son-of-a-bitch profiteth little in this world where the race is not always to the swift, anyway you care to understand that word. Accordingly, the humor that a De Vries hero resorts to as an anodyne inclines to the sardonic. And if you aren’t sure what the words “anodyne” and “sardonic” mean, you will be sure when you finish any De Vries novel.

In the preceding paragraph, I lapsed into Biblical rhetoric, and this was natural because Christian faith, or the loss of it, is a leitmotif in the world of Peter De Vries. If you are of little faith, and regret it, but have realized that you are not going to be able to change that, nor will Anyone with supernatural powers ever care to help you out, you are in a good way to enjoy Peter DeVries.

Religious themes, however, are a backdrop in De Vries novels, with the exception of The Blood of the Lamb, which De Vries wrote shortly after he lost his young daughter to cancer. In this one novel, the tragic burden nearly overwhelms the author’s comic muse — certainly would have, if the hero of the story had not found a way to express his anger against God in a manner drawn from the Keystone Cops.

As a comic novelist, De Vries derived much comfort from the fact that the human race is divided into two sexes. Here too pain and laughter are beautifully mingled. I can’t imagine needing to explain this to any of you.

De Vries was a staff writer at the New Yorker for many years. You can Google him to find out how much he was esteemed by his fellow writers (lots) and by the book buying public (less so). But reading him would be more rewarding.