My first high-school reunion was postponed for a year by the COVID-19 lockdown. We met in 2021 for the fifty-first at a supper club on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. Lake Erie was a hundred yards to the north and when conversation lagged, I could watch the ore boats moving down the river. The Cleveland skyline, much of it unrecognizable from childhood, started on the other side of the Cuyahoga. It was a perfect late-summer evening, and we sat on the patio, trying to talk over the “classic rock” blaring from the overhead speakers. I didn’t like the Guess Who in 1970, and that hasn't changed. Nostalgia has become an industry.  I met three of my former teachers, including Linda Wagy, my eight-grade English teacher from 1965-66. It had been her first year teaching and she thoughtfully pretended to remember me. Most of the classmates I had hoped would be there did not attend. The highlight was meeting a woman I knew from thirteen years of public school but hadn’t seen in fifty-one years. I recognized her immediately and even remembered her name. I wrote about our conversation the following day. The dreariest encounter came when I met a guy who has changed his name (his birth name, he explained, had “too many consonants”) and is now a lawyer in Cleveland. He was boring in 1970 and remains so. Boring in a very earnest, strident, self-centered way. It took a long time to shake him so he could bore someone else.   The organizers have announced a fifty-fifth-year reunion to be held in September at the Cleveland Yachting Club, and I plan to go. Mostly I’m curious. In high school I was shy and usually a loner. What friends I had were those I knew from the A.P. classes. My only social involvement was editing the school literary magazine – no dances or sports. There are risks, of course, the principal one being another consonant-free nudnik. The wittily acerbic Louisiana poet Gail White feels otherwise. In “Why I Failed to Attend My High School Reunion,” she says:   “Because it would have gone like this: Hello, hello, hello. (You never liked me, did you? Where was this friendship 15 years ago?) You’re looking wonderful. I wouldn’t kid you about it – you look great. (You hefty cat.) And Jeffrey – are you married? Oh, you are! Three kids? However did you manage that? (For God’s sake, someone point me to the bar.) Me? I’ve just spent the summer in Tibet learning some basics from a Buddhist nun. It’s an experience I won’t forget. (As if you cared.) More crab dip, anyone? (And here’s the Great Class Bore. You’re still the same.) Forgive me. I can’t quite recall your name.”   White explains her poem is “humor based on truth. I’m now 78 and have never been to a class reunion. Nobody who likes me would be there. I didn’t make real friends until I went to college and started meeting people who read books.”

Another request for a reading list from a young reader. Any reply will be incomplete and risk discouraging aspiring literati. The only infallible inducement to literature is personal pleasure, a notoriously subjective criterion. I love Gibbon and Doughty, and you may find them appallingly tedious. I favor the time-tested and rely on books carrying the seal of approval from generations of readers, and your interests may be strictly contemporary. It’s not dismissive to tell a young reader: jump in anywhere. Like Borges, I assume that one book is potentially all books. That is, gamble a little, select a book that sounds interesting and see where it leads. There’s no shame in closing a book if it disappoints.  In 1909, the English novelist Arnold Bennett published Literary Taste: How to Form It, a sort of self-help guide to English literature. Bennett includes a list of several hundred recommended books, arranged chronologically and giving their prices as of 1909. This is not a snob’s list (though it includes Gibbon and Doughty), and at least a third of the books I have never read. Bennett’s opening sentences:   “At the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path. Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment, by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves finally fit as members of a correct society. . . . This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste.”   Neither Bennett nor I wish to impose a “canon” on anyone. We merely know some of the books that have given us pleasure and perhaps taught us something. We’re small-d democrats. We’re not here to lecture, especially to young readers. Bennett is honest about the potential audience for reading the best books:   "A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive for any ethical reason. It does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would not kill it. It survives because it is a source of pleasure, and because the passionate few can no more neglect it than a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read ‘the right things’ because they are right.”   So much for fashion.

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.