My brother’s yahrzeit – the first anniversary of his death last summer – is approaching. His death was the most intimate I have experienced. I spent most of the last two weeks of his life with him, in hospital and hospice, and observed the moment of his death.  Ken could be difficult. He was contrary and often bitter. We several times went years without speaking, and our relations were often a test of character. He brought out some of my own bitterness, but also our blackest senses of humor.  He started smoking cigarettes at age twelve, never seriously gave them up, and they killed him at age sixty-nine. In hospice I offered to buy him a carton of Raleighs (our mother’s brand: “Save the coupons!”) and that was the last time I saw him laugh. We were brothers and blood won in the end.   Thanks to Mike Juster I’ve learned of the poet Jean L. Kreiling who has just published a seven-poem sonnet sequence, “My Brother’s Last Year,” in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. In the first sonnet she writes:   “But he retains his reason and his wit, so much so that it seems clear he’ll survive; they say he won’t.”   Kreiling’s poems are a detailed account of the mundane things surrounding dying and death. I remember in the hospital my brother was still reading books, able to hold his granddaughter and talk about Montaigne. His mind was intact, which, despite all the evidence, suggested he would eventually get out of bed and return to his life. As Kreiling puts it, “He’s still him.” By the time he entered hospice he could no longer speak or, apparently, listen. His son and I sang to him but I don’t think he heard.   Survivors savor their survival. We can’t help it. The life instinct is powerful. Kreiling tells us: “To grow old is a gift.” She writes:   “This may assuage my sense there’s nothing I can do, although a visit’s nearly nothing. Yes, I care; that’s what my presence demonstrates, I know, but it will make him strain for things now rare or difficult: the teasing repartee, a walk outdoors, shared meals and memories. He reassures me that he feels okay, though I watch him declining, by degrees.”   The death of a loved makes us pause to assess the state of our own values. We ask, “What is Important?” Kreiling’s final sonnet:   “Not long before the end, he made it clear: there was so little that he wanted — just  to stay with those he loved, not disappear into the latter part of dust to dust. So many of us want so much: we crave the shiny toy, the extra buck, and more when less would do — stuff that will never save our souls or bodies. I knew that before my brother’s diagnosis, and today I can’t claim to have unlearned pointless greed. I find, though, that it’s easier to weigh the worth of things desired, to measure need, to understand there isn’t much I lack. He wanted only time. I want him back.”

“You either fell under his spell and loved the wild ride of his prose, or you shunned or ignored it.”   Infatuation of the literary sort is likely possible only among the young. That’s my experience. I have discovered good writers in recent decades – Yvor Winters, C.H. Sisson – but the attraction was more balanced. I could see their weaknesses while continuing to read and admire them. While still in my teens and twenties, I would fall hard for certain writers and almost subconsciously rationalize their failings. I think of Thomas Pynchon and Sherwood Anderson, an unlikely pair. But my hardest fall was for Edward Dahlberg, a writer unknown to most readers.   Dahlberg (1900-77), an American, defied categories and most literary expectations. Between 1929 and 1934 he published three novels usually labeled “proletarian.” If that had been all he published, I would never have fallen for him. He knew all the Modernists in Paris, including Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. By 1941, when he published Do These Bones Live (retitled Can These Bones Live when republished in 1960), Dahlberg had transformed himself into -- what? In the words of Jules Chametzky, a writer of “[a] wildly baroque, some would say ornate and affected high style.” Dahlberg wrote prose in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne and Robert Burton, writers I was reading around the same time.   I wrote my name and the date of purchase in my copy of Can These Bones Live: “8-6-75.” Much of the text is underlined and annotated. Here’s a typical marked passage, from a chapter titled “Randolph Bourne: In the Saddle of Rosinante”: “All dogmas lead men to the Abyss; doctrine is the enemy of vision and the denial of the past.” By Dahlberg’s customary standards, that’s both thoughtful and moderate. He could be a real crank, like one of his heroes, Henry David Thoreau, of whom he writes:   “Great lives are moral allegories and so soon become deniable myths because we cannot believe tat such good men could have existed in such an evil world.”   The guy who first introduced me to Dahlberg, in 1974, was Mike Phillips. Eighteen years ago I wrote a post on this blog asking if anyone knew Phillips or his whereabouts. So far, silence. I’ve read most of Dahlberg’s published work. Especially good is his 1964 autobiography, filtered through the unhappy life of his mother, Because I Was Flesh. Dahlberg’s essential theme was himself. The memoir works because the focus is shifted to his mother. I’ve shed my infatuation and can value for his best work. Here is another underlined passage accompanied by a half-century-old exclamation point: “There are no abstract truths—no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man.”     [Two quotes, including the one at the top, are taken from Jules Chametzky’s Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers: a Cultural Memoir (2012).]

Once I patronized a library book sale where volumes were sold not by age, condition, whether paperback or hard cover, and certainly not by literary worth but by weight. On the table by the exit was a scale, the flat-topped sort associated with butcher shops. The arrangement was a gimmick the librarians found endlessly amusing, with much joking about “adding another pork chop.” Most of the books on sale, as usual, were self-help and popular fiction, and I found nothing to buy, which disappointed me because I would have enjoyed owning a volume valued in so egalitarian a fashion. Late in life, Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen) wrote the column “Bones of Contention” for The Nationalist and Leinster Times in Ireland, using yet another pseudonym, George Knowall. Earlier he had written the better-known and generally funnier column “Cruiskeen Lawn” for The Irish Times. O’Brien (1911-66) is one of the funniest writers in the language (see At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, et al.). In 2012, the Lilliput Press published Myles Away from Dublin, a selection of the later columns. Here is one titled “Weighty Volume”: “At this sixpenny barrow I bought the autobiography, in two volumes, of Henry Taylor. When I got the books home, I weighed them on my wife’s balance in the kitchen and they weigh four and a quarter pounds. I have never heard of Henry Taylor but the books were published in 1885 Longmans, Green and Co. I have not read Mr Taylor’s account of himself but a furtive glance at one volume gives me the suspicion that this man was a poet, or thought he was. A frontpiece portrait shows him looking very old and sporting an enormous white wig. Why did he waste so much valuable time growing so very old and writing that poetry that nobody nowadays reads and probably never read? “The subtitle of the first volume intrigues me. Just this modest phrase – ‘Vol. I: 1800-1844’. Forty-four years of abject futility, squeezed into one volume, weighting over two pounds avoirdupois.” Yes, Henry Taylor (1800-86) was a genuine poet, dramatist and a clerk in England’s Colonial Office, and like O’Brien/Knowall I’ve never read a word of his work. O’Brien was a master of the blackest of Irish black humor and wrote authoritatively of “abject futility.”

A reader is pressing Ezra Pound on me again. This happens semi-annually, like visits to the dentist. I find few writers as distasteful as Pound. My reasons are simple and not at all original. He was rabidly, tediously anti-Semitic and he betrayed his country. Earlier this year I borrowed Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II (ed. Leonard W. Doob, 1978) from the library. I had been aware of the book for a long time but never looked into it. I got morbidly curious and found Pound’s wartime broadcasts even more vile than I expected, but also tiresome. We’ve all encountered people maddened with hatred and we avoid them, at least in in part out of fear. Such characters are unpredictable. We don’t know when their words will turn into actions. By being broadcast, Pound’s words are action. I browsed among his transcripts but could not finish reading even one. Raving by definition is tiresome, unlikely to be of interest to anyone other than the raver. My Pound-advocating reader, as others have done previously, urges me to ignore the political and racial idiocies and focus on Pound as poet. That strategy doesn’t help his case. I recognize the poetic worth of stray lines and phrases in the Cantos and elsewhere. A copy of the Cantos sits on a nearby shelf and critics I admire – Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport – virtually beatify Pound among twentieth-century poets. I don’t get it. Trying to understand Pound’s chaotic writing isn’t worth the effort. His mandarin contempt for common readers and other poets has had a devastating impact on the art for more than a century. The late Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, in an interview published in 2004 in The Poetry Ireland Review, speaks for me: “[W]illful obscurity I disdain, not least because it arrogantly assumes rights to so much of the reader's meagre life-span, demanding absurdly large investments of time for what is usually a negligible or negative return. “One reason why much of the greatest poetry is so uncannily and transparently clear (and I don't mean facile) is because it is a record of those rare, transfixing moments when some normally opaque corner of existence is unveiled and we are granted a fleeting glimpse into ‘the heart of things.’ Poetry draws on depths of emotion and reserves of wisdom that are plumbed by instinctive, almost primitive, means – the opposite of conscious ‘cleverality.’”

A reader asks what novels by William Makepeace Thackeray I would suggest he read. My answer is brief and not terribly helpful: Vanity Fair. It’s the only book by Thackery I have read, and that was a long time ago. I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Barry Lyndon in 1975. Thackeray remains a hole in my reading life, one I’m unlikely ever to fill. Among his contemporaries, I’ve read all of Dickens and Eliot, some of their titles several times, but only four by the relentlessly prolific Anthony Trollope and nothing by Wilkie Collins. Every reading life is idiosyncratic, alternating between heavy devotedness and shameful ignorance.  Jules Janin (1804-74), the French novelist, critic and feuilletoniste, gives readers like me an attractive excuse: “A gourmet is not a glutton.” It’s a truth too often disregarded in matters of food and books. A look at Nadar’s photo of Janin suggests he was by nature a gourmand. The Canadian translator Andrew Rickard has rendered into English a passage from L’Amour des livres (1844):      “In your reading become attached to this philosopher, to that poet; grow fond of both of them, and when you place them triumphantly on your bookshelf, bound in fragrant Russian leather, make sure that you can say: ‘Until next time. I know you well now, and I share the opinion of those great souls to whom you were a role model and a source of counsel!’”   My cop-out is “next time.” Most of my reading has become rereading, especially in fiction. The phenomenon is not unusual among people my age, and I can identify several reasons. Books that have already proved their worth are always attractive. Reading them means encountering our younger selves, lending the text a pleasurable subtext. It also means encountering the generations of readers who preceded us. In addition, we have entered one of those periodic literary dry spells. Little being published today looks interesting, and fiction seems nearly dead. This contrasts with my younger years when Nabokov, Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Maxwell and Cheever were at work.        Janin writes, “Read well, read little,” the mirror image of Yvor Winters’ “Write little; do it well.” As I get older, I find it easier to value quality over quantity, in books and other things, as did Janin who writes in early middle age:    “If someone is obliged to read everything he has bought in its entirety, he thinks twice before making a purchase; he is a little more wary of things that are rare and strange and sticks to the masterpieces that mankind holds in high regard. And so you will begin by acquiring — not haggling for — good and beautiful copies of those few, essential books that one reads and rereads again and again.”