Robert Conquest writing thirty-one years ago:  “Literature is the expression of our whole past, of our whole context in life and time – and not only ours. Anatole France said that the word pleurer (to cry, to weep) in French is different from the same sort of word in every other language, if only because of its use by Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse or other of the great French amoureuses. Every word carries the history of literature, the feel of the whole country. It follows then with us language is losing its edge for lack of proper education and because of constrictive doctrine. The art world is being penetrated by narrow dogmatism in the same way.”   Take Delmore Schwartz’s sonnet “The Beautiful American Word, Sure.” In the American context, the monosyllable connotes can-do optimism, endorsement, respect, a ready willingness to help. You say, “May I hold the door for you?” and I say, “Sure.” Call it shared etiquette or civic agreeability. It implies a degree of certainty in an uncertain world. “Can you loan me five bucks?” “Sure.” Words are more than sounds or signifiers. Each packs a history, “the feel of the whole country.”   Conquest was participating in a forum, “The Humanities, in Memoriam,” held in April 1994 at Stanford University, with the remarks published in Academic Questions. Other participants included Richard Wilbur, Czesław Miłosz and René Girard. True education was already dissolving. Our ability to communicate with others was eroding. The past had never seemed so remote. For some, it never existed. Dante and Henry James had become extinct species.   Conquest is the great chronicler of Soviet crimes. As a historian, he gave us accounts of a regime that lived by a “narrow dogmatism” that sought to erase the past in the name of creating a “worker’s paradise." In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Conquest writes:   “All in all, unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities. The accompanying falsifications took place, and on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, real statistics, disappeared into the realm of fantasy. History, including the history of the Communist Party, or rather especially the history of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons disappeared from the official record. A new past, as well as new present, was imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet population, as was, of course, admitted when truth emerged in the late 1980s.”   Conquest writes of our age in lines from his great polemical poem “Whenever”:   “An age of people who are concerned, or care, With schemes that lead to slaughter everywhere.   “An age of warheads and the KGB, An age of pinheads at the Ph.D.   “When churches pander to advanced regimes Whose victims fill our nightmares with their screams,   Age that ignored the unavenged Ukraine ‘Imperialist Britain’ seething in its brain,   An age of art devised for instant shock an age of aestheticians talking cock.”   Conquest was born on this date, July 15, in 1917 (soon after the July Days when the Bolsheviks were agitating in Petrograd, and three months before the October Revolution) and died in 2015 at age ninety-eight (twenty-four years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union).   [“Whenever” can be found in Conquest’s Collected Poems (ed. Elizabeth Conquest, Waywiser Press, 2020.]

One of my friends is reliably cheerful. We should all have friends like him. His emails and telephone calls are never annoyingly cloying, in the sense that they knock me out of whatever self-centered snit I’m nursing. Without ever saying so, he reminds me that I have it pretty good, certainly better than most of the human race. He’s not obnoxious about his gregarious nature and never tries to impose it. That’s part of his charm. His good nature is contagious and has been for more than fifty years, since I first met him. I thought of him while again reading Montaigne’s “On Some Verses of Virgil”: “My judgment keeps me indeed from kicking and grumbling against the discomforts that nature orders me to suffer, but not from feeling them. I, who have no other aim but to live and be merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one good year of pleasant and cheerful tranquillity. A somber, dull tranquillity is easy enough to find for me, but it puts me to sleep and stupefies me; I am not content with it. If there are any persons, any good company, in country or city, in France or elsewhere, residing or traveling, who like my humors and whose humors I like, they have only to whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone.” That describes my friend more than me. I think of it as an aspiration, a sort of moral, emotional ideal. For him, it’s a gift. I need perpetual reminding. My favorite among all of Theodore Dalrymple’s thousands of essays and columns remains “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” published in the December 13, 2003, edition of The Spectator: “I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”

In comparison to the late D.G. Myers, I’m a quietist, waiting for something to happen rather than stepping on the accelerator myself. He supplied me with more ideas and inspirations than I was ever able to offer him. A longtime reader reminds me of “The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time,” a project David started and together we  organized almost sixteen years ago. That’s sufficiently remote in time to make it feel like a pottery shard dug up from a kitchen midden. David and I and eleven other writers/bloggers responded to a list of nine questions or prompts we had formulated, plus a summing up written by David. The resulting symposium is at once familiar and eerily alien. In 2009, I see I was already thinking of book blogging retrospectively, as a done deal. Here is one of the questions I formulated and my response:  “Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?”:   “There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: ‘You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.’ To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.”   Glib but true. Here is the late Terry Teachout’s reply to the same question:   “Er, who are all those ‘famous’ book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.”   Go to David’s blog, A Commonplace Blog, and scroll down to the bottom of the left column to read the entire symposium.

How do we reconcile the saddest of English writers being at the same time among the wittiest? And when I say “saddest,” I don’t mean depressed or suicidal; rather, wistful, ever aware of human ephemerality, calibrating his words until they attain the precise edge of irony he seeks, which is never cold or savage. It is, rather, sad, and not a psychiatric diagnosis to be treated pharmaceutically.  I’ve heard from a reader who tells me his idea of a great essayist is Susan Sontag. I won’t touch that. He questions why I value the essays of Max Beerbohm. “He’s a lightweight,” my reader writes. “His effects are cheap. He seems to know nothing about the world around him. He’s a minor humorist.” I won’t deny “minor” but “cheap” is way off. I dare you to detect a wrong note anywhere in Beerbohm’s prose, even a single clunker. Consider “No. 2. The Pines” (And Even Now, 1920), written in 1914. Beerbohm is describing his youthful visits with Charles Algernon Swinburne, beginning in 1899. The essay’s title refers to the address of Swinburne’s home in Putney. Beerbohm writes:    “It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one third of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual number is still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was unimportant to me in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course; but even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that of one’s actual happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a remnant clings about one!”    Few writers could sustain that tone of melancholy reflection without resorting to self-pity. It reminds me of Msgr. Ronald Knox beginning his essay “Birmingham Revisited” (Literary Distractions, 1958) like this: “It is alleged by a friend of my family that I used to suffer from insomnia at the age of four; and that when she asked me how I managed to occupy my time at night I answered ‘I lie awake and think of the past.’” Beerbohm might have written that. V.S.  Pritchett writes in “A Dandy” (Complete Collected Essays, 1991):   “Among other things, in the wide-eyed persona he invented, there is sadness. Was it the sadness of not being a genius on the great scale, like his admired Henry James? Possibly. Was it the sadness of knowing that his work must be perfect – as that of minor writers has to be – because fate made him a simulacrum? Or was he simply born sad?”

An old friend has grown uncharacteristically introspective and is finding much to regret. It’s a function of age. A widower in retirement from teaching high school, he seems no longer the buoyant social creature I’ve always known. In fact, I envied his gregariousness when we were young. Still funny, still curious, well-read and attentive to the world, he looks back at missed opportunities, doubts, things he should have done or not done. We all do that, at least the non-sociopaths among us, but I fear my friend is growing obsessive. Such self-scourging worries me. I’m no psychiatrist but I do respect depression, especially when it’s not merely an insidious mutation of self-pity.  Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem when he was a little older than we are -- “Things That Might Have Been” (trans. Alastair Reid, The History of the Night, 1977). Here we find the musings of a man who was among the great writers of the last century:   “I think of the things that might have been and were not. The treatise on Saxon mythology that Bede did not write. The unimaginable work that Dante glimpsed fleetingly when the last verse of the Commedia was corrected. History without the afternoon of the Cross and the afternoon of the hemlock. History without the face of Helen. Man without the eyes which have shown the moon to us. In the three labored days of Gettysburg, the victory of the South. The love we do not share. The vast empire which the Vikings did not wish to found. The world without the wheel or without the rose. The judgment of John Donne on Shakespeare. The other horn of the unicorn. The fabled bird of Ireland, in two places at once. The son I did not have.”   The tone is objective, almost clinical, a catalog. All of these events are historical, not personal, until the eighth item on his list: “The love we do not share.” Is he speaking as a generic human being or as Borges? It’s left ambiguous, at least in translation. Only in the final line does the first-person singular assert itself: “The son I did not have.” We know Borges had no children. Hoyt Rogers also translated Borges’ poem, first in the March 1999 issue of The New Criterion, then in Selected Poems (ed. Alexandr Coleman, 1999). Some of the differences in word choice are interesting:   “I think about things that might have been and never were. The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write. The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed As soon as he corrected the Comedy’s last verse. History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross. History without Helen’s face. Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon. Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South. The love we never shared. The vast empire the Vikings declined to found. The globe without the wheel, or without the rose. John Donne’s judgment of Shakespeare. The Unicorn’s other horn. The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once. The child I never had.”   “Child” instead of “son.” Like Borges, my friend has no children.