A reader asks what I hope to accomplish in retirement. I’m not one for making grand plans or resolutions. No golf and little travel. It’s more likely I’ll continue what I’m already doing – writing, reading, family matters – just more of it. More Montaigne, J.V. Cunningham, Shakespeare, Rebecca West. Luke O’Sullivan writes in his introduction to Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014):  “What [Montaigne] had to offer, he believed, was not a consistent set of arguments with which to answer problems of the human condition, but (like Aristotle) a feeling for balance and an ability to live without the need for certainty. Moreover, he had a sense of his own integrity; late in life, Oakeshott made a note of Montaigne’s remark that ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.’”   The Montaigne quote is from the essay “Of Solitude,” written around 1572, and it seems applicable to late-life retirement. The previous year Montaigne had retired from public life to the Château de Montaigne. In its tower he kept his books and found the privacy he needed to write his essays. Like Montaigne, I’m no hermit but I need quiet and a moderate amount of solitude to get done what I want to do. I understand some retirees get bored and start drinking and preparing themselves for a premature death. They have never learned “how to belong to oneself.” In his Notebooks, Oakeshott writes:   “We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”   Montaigne echoes Oakeshott in his essay “Of Physiognomy” (c. 1585-88):   “[D]eath is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an end unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct, and suffer itself. Among the many other duties comprised in this general and principal chapter on knowing how to live is this article on knowing how to die; and it is one of the lightest, if our fear did not give it weight.”

Certain writers inspire profound ambivalence. We admire them for something – often style – and they let us down by writing something stupid, dull or otherwise offensive. It’s easier dealing strictly with good guys (Chekhov, for instance) and bad guys (like Louis-Ferdinand Céline). Among the bothersome I think first of Thoreau, whose prose is frequently superb until his snobbery and general contempt for his fellow humans gets the better of him.  Another is H.L. Mencken. For some of us, he is a prose phase we live through. His style can be addictive, particularly when you’re young and impressionable. As a rookie newspaper reporter, I remember aping his prose almost to the point of plagiarism. Still, his anti-Semitism rankles. Such a foolish prejudice for so intelligent a man. And his repeated denunciation of his fellow Americans for their purported idiocy grows quickly tiresome. Yet Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes (in his letters) and Mencken.   In 1941, the marvelous, doomed critic Otis Ferguson reviewed Newspaper Days, the second of Mencken’s three memoirs. He wrote in The New Republic: “I would call Mencken a peculiarly American article, not only for his labors in establishing the language and the mildly ribald history of the press; but for the place he stands in, as a force for a certain liberation when we were only beginning to wake up, as a healthy explosion on the whole field of letters, as an exact and original writer and a man whose intolerant courage was at the service of others at a time when it did much good in clearing the air.”   In prose, Mencken is pure energy. Reading him at his best – the memoirs, The American Language (1919), a hundred or more essays – is a rejuvenating experience. In “On Being an American” (Prejudice: Third Series, 1922), Mencken concedes his agreement with many critics of the United States and asks:   “Well, then, why am I still here? Why am I so complacent (perhaps even to the point of offensiveness), so free from bile, so little fretting and indignant, so curiously happy? Why did I answer only with a few academic 'Hear, Hears' when Henry James, Ezra Pound, Harold Stearns and the emigrés of Greenwich Village issued their successive calls to the corn-fed intelligentsia to flee the shambles, escape to fairer lands, throw off the curse forever? The answer, of course, is to be sought in the nature of happiness, which tempts to metaphysics. But let me keep upon the ground. To me, at least (and I can only follow my own nose) happiness presents itself in an aspect that is tripartite. To be happy (reducing the thing to its elementals) I must be:   “a. Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.   “b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men.   “c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste.”   This is classic Mencken, effortlessly muting the outrageous by making it sound so reasonable. Among the cruelest of ironies are his final years. Never stricken with writer’s block, always a reliable geyser of prose, Mencken suffered a stroke on the evening of November 23, 1948 at his stenographer’s house in Baltimore.  He was sixty-eight and would live for another eight years, severely impaired. “All he could do now,” Terry Teachout tells us in his biography of Mencken, “was sign his name, scrawl an occasional one-sentence note full of misspelled words, and recognize the names of people he knew when he saw them in the paper, though he had trouble remembering them otherwise.” This most facile of writers, almost pathologically prolific, was silenced. Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956.   [The Ferguson review is collected in The Otis Ferguson Reader (December Press, 1982). Terry’s biography is The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002).]

“Except for a certain saving humor, I should indeed have been a full monster.”  One definition of a friend is someone with whom you can share any joke or other comic effort without fear of offending him. It may not be funny – the only pertinent criterion for judging humorousness – but it’s not hateful (a word thrown around promiscuously these days). Friends understand us. They don’t necessarily approve but neither do they throw a tantrum, get uppity and admonish us.   The line at the top is by the poet Louise Bogan, writing a letter on January 28, 1954, to another poet, May Sarton. Bogan struggled with severe depression for more than forty years and was hospitalized for it several times. Bogan is one of our finest American poets, and that she was able to write so well under such conditions is heroic. The book to read is Elizabeth Frank’s biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1986).   What most interests me about Bogan’s sentence is “a certain saving humor.” Never known as a humorist, Bogan was highly intelligent, thoughtful and witty. With close friends she could be herself. Bogan seems to be confirming a theory I’ve pondered for most of my life – that a well-exercised sense of humor is often symptomatic of mental health, if not always sanity.   I’ve been reading X.J. Kennedy again, including “More Foolish Things Remind Me of You,” published in the July/August 2006 “Humor Issue” of Poetry. It’s a laugh-out-loud poem (This is a test!), especially these lines: “Lines sliced to little bits by deconstruction, / Loose gobs of fat removed by liposuction.”   You may have noticed the subtitle: “With apologies to Eric Maschwitz.” He was the lyricist for the 1935 standard “These Foolish Things” under the pseudonym “Holt Marvell.” I suggest listening to at least one of these recordings of the song before reading Kenney’s parody, so you get the melody in your head: Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra.

Robert Chandler has rescued, through translation, much of Russian literature for the Anglophone world – Pushkin, Andrey Plantonov, Teffi, Lev Ozerov and Vasily Grossman, among others. Most of Chandler’s own prose I've read has been in the form of brief introductions and notes. Several years ago he alerted me to a piece about Rudyard Kipling’s poetry he had published in Granta, and I wrote about it. Now I find two other essays published in the same journal – one on Grossman, the other one devoted to an English poet previously unknown to me: “Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger,” by Randall Swingler. Chandler assures us the book contains Swingler’s “best work,” much of it devoted to his experiences as a British soldier during World War II.  One of the most gratifying pleasures I know as a reader is learning of a writer new to me and finding him worthy of attention. The passages quoted by Robert look more than promising. My university library has only one book by Swingler in its collection: The God in the Cave. It’s a twenty-three-page poetry collection published in 1950 by Alan Swallow of Denver (publisher of Yvor Winters), and I’ve put a hold on it. Through interlibrary loan I will request a copy of The Years of Anger. My only hesitancy is that Swingler was a communist, an affiliation not associated with the writing of first-rate poetry. Robert quotes the central stanza of “The Day the War Ended”:   “There is a moment when contradictions cross, A split of a moment when history twirls on one toe Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal And happiness could be impartial for once.”