“At bottom Chekhov is a writer who has flung his soul to the side of pity, and sees into the holiness and immaculate fragility of the hidden striver below.”  In his letters to family and friends, Chekhov can be harsh, hectoring and even smutty, though seldom in the stories except in the occasional voice of a character. His documentation of human types, after all, is encyclopedic. But Cynthia Ozick gets Chekhov, unlike his original critics and lazy-minded readers today. Without being sticky-sentimental, he is forgiving of human failing, not a wrathful prophet, unlike his friend and misguided critic Tolstoy. Ozick writes in her two-page essay “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’” (Metaphor and Memory, 1989):   “Chekhov is as much a master of the observed as he is of the unobserved. And he is, besides, the source of unusual states of wisdom, astonishing psychological principles. He can transfigure latency into drama, as in ‘Ward No. Six,’ which belongs with Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’ among the great expositions of self-disclosure. And this too is Chekhov: he teaches us us.”   As does Ozick, who turns ninety-seven today. I admit to preferring her essays to her novels and stories. She is seldom autobiographical in the banal sense. She’s brainy and passionate and never dry. Her prose is sometimes purplish (not purple), overripe, almost over-written, as in the late manner of her master, Henry James. But it’s never passive or merely utilitarian. In my 2004 review of Ozick’s novel Heir to the Glimmering World I wrote: “The crafting of such language, potent with muscle and brain, lends objective shape to the act of consciousness itself.”   In her title essay in Metaphor and Memory, Ozick articulates what Chekhov frequently accomplished. By creating metaphors, she writes, “We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers,” which in turn “transforms the strange into the familiar.” Which sounds like both a literary and a moral obligation.   I met Ozick in 1987 when she took part in a conference on literature and the Holocaust at the state University of New York at Albany. Also on the panel were the novelist Aharon Appelfeld and historian Raul Hilberg. Ozick’s girlish voice surprised me. In person as in print, she comes off as charming and tough, not a frivolous person. She was not afraid to say she would never visit Germany or buy a Volkswagen, which bothered some people sitting near me.   Ozick signed my copy of The Messiah of Stockholm, then recently published. Appelfeld and Hilberg also signed books for me -- a memorable day. Ozick’s demeanor and everything she said confirmed my respect for her work. In his Paris Review interview, Guy Davenport said he would read anything written by Ozick, and as usual his judgment is unassailable. She may be the only living writer whose published work I have read in its entirety.

Several years have passed since I last entered a bookstore selling new books, such as Barnes and Noble or the late Borders. Long ago they stopped feeling like home and a visit usually turned out to be a waste of time. Serendipitous discovery was rare. The portion of the goods on their tables and shelves that might potentially interest me was small. Most of the good stuff I already owned or didn’t want, and I could smell the algorithms mandating the stock. I’m seldom in the market for greeting cards, coffee mugs or tote bags.  So, like thousands of other readers, I rely on the few remaining used-book shops, online dealers and the occasional library sale. Much is lost, including a sentimental attachment to “real” bookstores, with their romantically crusty proprietors and bookshop cats, though something is sometimes gained – convenience, occasionally cheaper prices. Kingsley Amis’ “A Bookshop Idyll,” from his fourth book of poems, A Case of Samples (1957), reads like a report from a vanished kingdom. That was not his intent while writing it almost seventy years ago, but time sometimes adds layers of new meaning to literary works. It begins:     “Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY     Comes the brief POETRY shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology     Offers itself.   “Critical, and with nothing else to do,     I scan the Contents page, Relieved to find the names are mostly new;     No one my age.”   Amis is ever alert to the predations of ego (including his own). The anthology is not a threat to the speaker. He continues:   “Like all strangers, they divide by sex:     Landscape near Parma Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,     So does Rilke and Buddha.   “‘I travel, you see’, ‘I think’ and ‘I can read’     These titles seem to say; But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,     Poem for J.,   The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter     For several seconds; From somewhere in this (as in any) matter     A moral beckons.”   That some works are written for and marketed to women, and the same for men, is obviously true, but the lines have blurred since Amis’ time. With the growth in interest in “spiritual” matter and pop religion, no one would be surprised if a woman bought a copy of Rilke and Buddha. I once knew a woman who said the only poet she ever read was Rilke because he was “so spiritual.” Such a silly-sounding title might be written or read today by a man or woman. The poem concludes:   “Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart     Or squash it flat? Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;     Girls aren’t like that.   “We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff     Can get by without it. Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;     They write about it,   “And the awful way their poems lay open     Just doesn’t strike them. Women are really much nicer than men:     No wonder we like them.   “Deciding this, we can forget those times     We sat up half the night Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts,     names, rhymes, and couldn’t write.”   Amis’ poem isn’t about books or bookstores or even poems after all. It’s about men and women and the truths and stereotypes that characterize us. Women possess certain advantages denied men, Amis suggests. With his echo of Byron’s Don Juan, he anatomizes us at our most hypocritical, vain and posturing but doesn’t dismiss us. For Amis, literature is meant to be interesting, amusing, even entertaining – qualities anathema to certain species of sticks-in-the-mud. That doesn’t mean lowbrow or one-dimensional. Consider Lucky Jim, Girl, 20, and Ending Up. He doesn’t harp but his focus is society and the social order, manners and morals. A consistent quality in Amis’ work, fiction or verse, is a comic surface with serious undertones.     Amis was born on this date, April 16, in 1922, and died in 1995 at age seventy-three.

“The Brains Trust” was a BBC radio show popular in the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A panel of “experts” – among them Desmond MacCarthy, Kenneth Clark and Rose Macaulay – would answer questions submitted by listeners. The U.S. had similar radio programs at the time, such as “Information Please,” hosted by Clifton Fadiman. In 1942, Hutchinson and Co. published The Brain Trust Book, a collection of edited transcripts from the show, one of which was devoted to the “Classical Book-shelf.” Mr. D. E. Griffith of Compton Bassett, Wiltshire, asked the panelists to recommend “eight half-crown classics for a soldier to take on active service.” As I read the responses, I wondered how “experts” would answer in 2025.  C.E.M. Joad, though described as a “philosopher,” sounds more like a dubious media opportunist. He recommends taking “a book of understandable pleasant philosophy,” specifically the World Classics edition of Selections from Plato, introduced by Sir Richard Livingstone.   Commander A.B. Campbell was a naval officer, a veteran of the Great War and a radio celebrity. He answered: “I am glad I come in second. I fancy everybody will want to say this. I certainly think that Shakespeare’s works should be one book to take with him.”   I’m reminded of the answers politicians give when asked to name their favorite or most influential book. Shakespeare is a perfectly respectable answer but one is left to wonder.   Malcolm Sargent was a British conductor, organist and composer. His answer: “If I could take only one book, I would take the Bible.”   The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley replied: “I think it is good to have some good, long novel to get your teeth into and I should have thought that (especially for a soldier) Tolstoi’s War and Peace was unrivalled. You should also take a book of poetry and it should be a selection. If the Oxford Book of English Verse is in a cheap edition, that would be ideal. If not, The Golden Treasury.”   Joad seconds Huxley’s choice of War and Peace and adds two novels by Trollope. “They are,” he says, “both in the way of being classics and both are absolutely first-rate. History? I would like to suggest Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I think is the greatest history book ever written.”   Few would argue with that judgment but think of the enlisted man at El Alamein  carrying all six volumes -- 1.6 million words -- in his pack. Joad adds:   “One other suggestion I would like to make and it is this. I think Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of the greatest books ever written [and a well-known morale-booster]. It happens to be in Everyman, price 2/6, and it is extraordinarily topical. The last satire about the Divine forces and the human being who Swift called ‘Yahoo’ is extraordinarily apt to the moment. I won't say to what nation it happens to be apt. Let the soldiers read it and find out.”   Commander Campbell gets in the last word: “It may sound dry reading, but one of the most interesting books I’ve read has been Motley’s History [Rise] of the Dutch Republic.” That’s three volumes, roughly 300,000 words.

On Sunday, a friend and I, after lunch at a favorite Mexican restaurant, visited Kaboom Books here in Houston. He left with a stack of books. I found one: Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press and Gulf Coast, 2018). I know her thanks only to Yvor Winters, who championed her work and rightly called her “a minor poet of great distinction.” Crapsey (1878-1914) reminds us that reputation is fleeting and uncertain. Only dedicated readers keep a writer alive. Without the occasional reader, Crapsey would be doubly dead. She devised a homegrown poetic form, the American cinquain, much influenced by traditional Japanese verse, and reminiscent of the work of her contemporaries, the early Imagists.  The editors, Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft, bring together a selection of Crapsey’s poems, excerpts from her study of metrics, letters and five essays by academics. Most of her poems are graceful and brief, feather-like in their delicacy yet often concluding with a sort of stinger at the end. Take “Triad”:   “These be Three silent things: The falling snow . . . the hour Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one Just dead.”   For Crapsey, who was ill for much of her life and died from tuberculosis at age thirty-six, death is a recurrent theme, as in “The Lonely Death”:   “In the cold I will rise, I will bathe In waters of ice; myself Will shiver, and shrive myself, Alone in the dawn, and anoint Forehead and feet and hands; I will shutter the windows from light, I will place in their sockets the four Tall candles and set them a-flame In the grey of the dawn; and myself Will lay myself straight in my bed, And draw the sheet under my chin.”   During her lifetime, Crapsey edited only one volume of her work, Verse, published in 1915, shortly after her death. Her range of subjects is narrow – death, dying, illness -- and family difficulties limited her growth as a poet. Yvor Winters, who survived tuberculosis, as did his wife Janet Lewis, wrote of Crapsey: “[T]he only known cure, and this was known to only a few physicians, was absolute rest, often immobilized rest. The disease filled the body with a fatigue so heavy that it was an acute pain, pervasive and poisonous.” We see Crapsey’s resistance to “immobilized rest” in her poem “To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window”:   “Why are you there in your straight row on row Where I must ever see you from my bed That in your mere dumb presence iterate The text so weary in my ears: ‘Lie still And rest; be patient and lie still and rest.’ I’ll not be patient! I will not lie still!”   Effective antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis wouldn’t become available until the nineteen-forties. A reader resists it, but there’s a pervasive sadness about Crapsey’s work, coupled with courage. It’s similar, though at a different level of accomplishment, to the what we experience when reading Keats and Chekhov. Tuberculosis killed both, at ages twenty-five and forty-four, respectively. “To the Dead . . .” concludes:     “And in ironic quietude who is The despot of our days and lord of dust Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop Grim casual comment on rebellion's end; ‘Yes, yes . . . Wilful and petulant but now As dead and quiet as the others are.’ And this each body and ghost of you hath heard That in your graves do therefore lie so still.”

Had I been more clever or alert I might have heard and recorded my brother’s last words before he died last August in hospice. A reader asks about this, and I admit I blew it. For the last week or so of his life, Ken was unconscious, occasionally moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed. It’s customary to focus on last words. Perhaps we expect wisdom, reassurance, a lifetime’s lesson pithily expressed. There is precedent. William Hazlitt, not the happiest of men, is reported to have said while dying, “Well, I've had a happy life.” Assuming its accuracy, I find that enormously touching. And there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, dying of typhoid fever: “I am so happy, so happy.” Delusion or gratitude? I prefer to avoid the cynical interpretation.  I’ve just finished reading Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth, 1993) by Theresa Whistler. I’ve grown deeply interested in de la Mare and his work in the last several years. The poet would die on June 22, 1956 at age eighty-three. He had been ailing for several years. On the evening of June 21, Whistler reports de la Mare told his nurse: “Oh, N [Sister Natalie Saxton], I do feel seedy!” To the end, interesting word choice. He had suffered another coronary thrombosis, was given oxygen and repeatedly pulled off the mask. He slept intermittently. Sir Russell Brain, the eminent neurologist and close friend of de la Mare, visited. “He was bright, even happy,” Whistler writes, “and joked: ‘I think we shall cheat them yet.’”   To a pretty nurse, de la Mare said, “It’s a long time since me met – you must have come out of a dream.” With prompting, de la Mare recited his poem “Fare Well.” Whistler writes:   “The longest day drew in quietly, and the short night fell. N had gone out of the room for a brief rest. The nurse who had taken her place tucked him in – it was 2 a.m. – and bent over him. She asked if he was quite comfortable. ‘Yes, I’m perfectly all right,’ he answered – then he caught his breath in one gasp and died. There was no time to fetch N or the others. The nurse could only wake them and tell them he was gone.”