An American children’s book published in 1908 reminded me of a metaphysical figment conjured by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is The Hole Book, written and illustrated by Peter Newell. A friend who collects vintage children’s books told me about it. The verse is serviceable doggerel, rhythmically regular enough to be memorized and recited by kids. The premise is simple and clever and the book would never be published today. Here are the opening verses:  “Tom Potts was fooling with a gun (Such follies should not be), When—bang! the pesky thing went off Most unexpectedly!   “Tom didn’t know ’twas loaded, and It scared him ’most to death— He tumbled flat upon the floor And fairly gasped for breath.   “The bullet smashed a fine French clock (The clock had just struck three), Then made a hole clean through the wall, As you can plainly see.”   We follow the path of the bullet through the remainder of the book as it passes through a boiler, a rope holding a swing, an aquarium, a Dutchman’s pipe, a sack of grain and a watermelon, among other things. Not a soul is wounded by the stray bullet. Newell is no poet but he’s a marvelous illustrator. My sons would have loved this book.   The professor who taught the eighteenth-century English novel and introduced me to Smollett and Sterne had a sense of humor that once would have been described as “bawdy.” She was enormously funny and insisted that literature is written to be enjoyed. It’s a lesson that has stuck with me for more than half a century. Something that came up in class reminded Donna of Sartre’s concept of “the hole.” She giggled through her brief explanation drawn from To Freedom Condemned: A Guide to His Philosophy (trans. Justus Streller, 1960):   “The hole is something which longs to be filled. The small child is drawn as if by magic to holes. He can not restrain himself from putting in his finger or his whole arm. He makes a symbolic sacrifice of his body to cause the void to disappear and a plenitude of being to exist. The fundamental tendency of human beings to stop up holes persists throughout life, symbolically and in reality,” and so forth in unapologetically Gallic silliness.

It’s not fair to think of our dead as “The Dead,” a demographic category that erases all distinctions but absence. My brother (d. 2024) and Jane Greer, the North Dakota poet who died this week, would have had little in common in life. Ken had no use for poetry and he framed paintings and photographs for a living. He was an artist manqué and I knew him all his life. Jane I knew only recently from her poems and the emails we exchanged. Each was a notable individual, distinct, not a statistic, worthy of memory. Memory salvages both from oblivion. In some of us, the elegiac impulse is powerful. By my count, the Summer issue of New Verse Review 2.3 contains at least ten poems memorializing or addressed to those who have died. Here is Victoria Moul’s “I.m. Andrew, October 2024”:  “Cozen me then, my restive Lord: The candles in the church blow out After only an hour or more. I have forgotten now which saint Was in which niche and in what stand I set my candle, when I paid A few coins, not quite the allotted price, Or even whom I named Sidelong while wondering too Whether the man who knelt Across from me was married; how We might afford that flat; or if I should buy leeks or aubergine. Attention is So short and slight a thing, a flame Snuffed as soon as lit, but all the same Someone, I think, heard the name I named.”   Moul adds a footnote: “This poem is in memory of Andrew Hurley, who died in Paris on 11th October 2024. Andrew’s encyclopaedic knowledge of, and unrelenting enthusiasm for French poetry are much missed by all who knew him.” She speaks for me: “the name I named.” John Talbot contributes “Epitaph of Menophilos” to New Verse Review:   “Such days as were my lot I passed in joy Buoyed in the quickening flux of poetry. Bacchus was never very far away, Or Aphrodite either. As to friends: Not one of them can tell of an offense I ever did them. I am Menophilos, A son of Asia, till I left to settle Far from home in the sundown hills of Italy. Here I held my ground, and now am held Among the dead. I never did grow old.”   Together, Moul and Talbot edited C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Here is Sisson’s “The Absence” (God Bless Karl Marx!, Carcanet, 1987):   “How can it be that you are gone from me, Everyone in the world? Yet it is so, The distance grows and yet I do not move. Is it I streaming away and, if so, where? And how do I travel from all equally Yet not recede from where I stand pat In the daily house or in the daily garden Or where I travel on the motor-way? Good-bye, good-bye all, I call out. The answer that comes back is always fainter; In the end those to whom one cannot speak Cannot be heard, and that is my condition. Soon there will be only wind and waves, Trees talking among themselves, a chuchotement, I there as dust, and if I do not reach The outer shell of the world, still I may Enter into the substance of a leaf.”   Chuchotement: French for “whisper.”

In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and critics the following question: “To what book published in the past ten years do you find yourself going back--or thinking back--most often?” I take the question personally because I turned thirteen that year and was already discovering contemporary literature, especially American fiction. If it’s possible to characterize the general sense of most of the responses, I would call them trendy, topical, pre-approved, fashion-conscious and largely, after sixty years, ephemeral. A similar pattern would be seen today. John Barth is honest and audaciously self-serving, naming his own early novels but graciously citing Pale Fire and Jorge Luis Borges’ stories (two of my own unsolicited votes from that era). Anthony Burgess likewise names Nabokov’s novel.  Too many responses are ridiculous – E.B. White’s essays, for instance, and Joseph Heller’s cartoon-novel, Catch-22. Some are merely boring – two votes for John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Teilhard de Chardin gets two votes. I’m reminded of the late D.G. Myers’ ten-year rule – not reviewing books until at least a decade has passed after publication. Otherwise, we risk errant idiocy.   Not all the responses are silly. Poet William Meredith names Auden’s prose collection The Dyer’s Hand. Walter Allen picks The Less Deceived (1955) by Philip Larkin, a rare choice endorsed by the subsequent six decades. Allen writes:   “[I]t is poetry of a remarkably pure kind, rooted in the actual and the unexceptional, although the unexceptional in this sense is very rare in poetry. I can think of no poet since Hardy in whom there is a more resolute honesty, a stronger determination to be himself, warts and all; and in a number of poems in The Less Deceived--in ‘Church Going’ most clearly perhaps--Larkin seems to me not inferior to Hardy.”

Occasionally one encounters two writers, each unknown to the other, expressing sentiments similar but varied enough to define their differences. There’s no question of influence or plagiarism. The first is C.H. Sisson, the English poet/critic/translator, explaining his tastes in reading at the start of his eighth decade. The interview appears in PN Review 39, as part of a 1984 Festschrift celebrating Sisson’s seventieth birthday:  “I like books of observation, memoirs, letters, anything that tells how people actually lived. Truth is certainly better than fiction, if you can get a bit of it.”   The other is William Maxwell, the American novelist, in his note introducing The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (1989), who says he didn’t review fiction for The New Yorker, where he served as fiction editor for forty years. That would have been a "busman's holiday":   “[D]iaries, memoirs, published correspondence, biography and autobiography . . . do not spring from prestidigitation or require a long apprenticeship. They tell what happened—what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.”   In his introduction to the 1997 edition of The Outermost Dream, Maxwell writes: “[S]tyle is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.” He often used the expression “breath of life” to describe the quality he most often looked for in books. Perhaps the common motivator here is age. I recognize this in myself – a hunger for the raw matter of life one finds in diaries, letters and other literary forms that are not forms. It’s their casualness, spontaneity, inadvertence and off-the-cuff observation that sometimes makes more formal, polished work so intriguing. I remember one of my philosophy professors saying if he could choose between a previously unknown dialogue of Plato’s and a transcript of conversation on an Athens street in the fourth century B.C., he would choose the latter.   I’ve been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters, part of my long-delayed discovery of that writer. Here he is on July 24, 1879, writing to Edmund Gosse:   “But who wrote the review of my book? whoever he was, he cannot write; he is humane, but a duffer; I could weep when I think of him; for surely to be virtuous and incompetent is a hard lot. I should prefer to be a bold pirate, the gay sailor-boy of immorality, and a publisher at once.”

Mike Juster tells me Jane Greer – “North Dakota Jane” – a gifted poet with an ever-ready sense of humor, has died, age seventy-two. In her final Tweet, Jane wrote on July 3: “I’ve been in the hospital and am not sure when they’ll release me. I have diverticulitis and a perforated colon. Prayers appreciated. Personally, I’m praying for and dreaming of large full cups of ice water.” After that, nothing. On July 4 I wrote to her in an email: “If you're still in the hospital tonight, I hope you can at least hear the fireworks.” More silence. I find no obituary as yet posted online.  The truest way to honor a dead writer is to read her work and keep it alive. Jane sent me signed copies of her most recent books, both published by Lambing Press: Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know it is Falling Away (2022). Collected in the latter volume is “First Elegy,” about the death of a mother by cancer, originally published in First Things in 1994. After surgery and chemotherapy, implacable death returns:   “We had barred all the doors to Death, so Death came in the window, bit through her heart in a moment, she was that easy to undo. It was no big deal to Death, so nonchalant, sure of itself,   “it knew lots of ways to do it, clever mongrel puppy worrying a rag, one eye on us, but the rag was mother, she's ruined now, we cannot press her back together, and our displeasure makes no difference. Death is happy.   Greer reminds us: “my relatives have all caught Death, sooner or later, / it’s in our chromosomes, it runs in the family.” She concludes the poem:   “.. . . she’s gone, she was here and then gone, and we seem to keep forgetting, she can’t mix us an old-fashioned, or buy us a perfect present, what we had is all we have, what we thought was forever isn’t, we phone each other often, but Death is always on call-waiting.”   I wrote about Jane and her work here, here and here.