Often, I hardly recognize my younger self. I did foolish things I would never contemplate today. My self-centeredness was appalling, my taste frequently shameful, even in books. I read critics uncritically and was cowed by their fame and influence. Taste doesn’t arrive congenitally. You have to work at it and learn to know yourself, capacities rare among the young. Dr. Johnson understood: “Of many writers who filled their age with wonder, and whose names we find celebrated in the books of their contemporaries, the works are now no longer to be seen, or are seen only amidst the lumber of libraries which are seldom visited, where they lie only to show the deceitfulness of hope, and the uncertainty of honour.”   As a teenager and beyond I read too many contemporary writers, so my larger literary education suffered. I often mistook fashion for brilliance. Admittedly, some of our best writers were at work back then – Nabokov, Auden, Singer – and I dutifully read them as they published new work, but my lack of taste was best exemplified by my devotion to Norman Mailer. His egotism was as dense and unpalatable as last year’s fruitcake. To read him today is to confront a writer whose pretentiousness makes him almost literally impossible to read. Usually, that description is a metaphor, a measured dose of satirical exaggeration. Try reading him today, with a post-adolescent’s sensibility.   Consider Mailer’s 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?, written in a hipster’s pidgin English borrowed from William Burroughs, another crime against literature. I remember taking the novel with me on a family camping trip shortly after its publication and convincing myself that I enjoyed it. I was a bookish poseur, dim and dishonest enough to blatantly lie to myself with a straight face. My behavior was not atypical. Much of the literary world – writers, readers, critics -- remains an elaborate masquerade, people signaling their hipness and sophistication by endorsing an approved brand. I still encounter the occasional advocacy of Mailer’s work, including a critic who not long ago launched a defense of his Apollo 11 book, Of a Fire on the Moon (1970). Johnson on Mailer and others:   “Of the decline of reputation many causes may be assigned. It is commonly lost because it never was deserved; and was conferred at first, not by the suffrage of criticism, but by the fondness of friendship, or servility of flattery. The great and popular are very freely applauded; but all soon grow weary of echoing to each other a name which has no other claim to notice, but that many mouths are pronouncing it at once.”       [The passages from Johnson are taken from The Idler essay published June 2, 1759.]

R.L. Barth, our finest living epigrammist (admittedly, not a vast job description), has sent me his translation of a well-known epigram by Martial, the Roman master of the pithy form. Bob found it among his papers and doesn’t remember making it. “[T]ranslating something [Ben] Jonson had translated?” he writes in an email. “Not to mention other famous names? I must have had a touch of hubris. (I think the first one I ever read was [Henry Howard, Earl of] Surrey's, back when I was an undergraduate.)” Here is Bob’s version of X.47 by Marcus Valerius Martialis:  “The things which make a life of ease, Martial, my dearest friend, are these: The patrimony’s easy yield; A thriving fire and fertile field; Neither the courts nor formal dress; Good health; a wise judiciousness; Some friends whose conversation’s able To dignify your simple table; A wife with neither forwardness Nor prudery; deep sleep to press Over the shadows in swift flight; Ability to see you’re right When you’re content; and, with head clear, Face death without desire or fear.”   The epigram is addressed to the poet’s friend, Julius Martialis. It reminds me of the “gratitude list” an old friend urged me years ago to draw up periodically, an exercise to reduce one’s fondness for whining. I’ve experienced many of the things in Martial’s catalog of gifts, at least briefly. That’s remarkable considering he wrote two-thousand years ago. I have no “fertile field,” but do have a flower garden – with accompanying lizards, butterflies, squirrels and hummingbirds -- that I meditate on each morning. I do miss “Some friends whose conversation’s able / To dignify your simple table,” though email and the telephone help.   Bob passed along a link to the original Latin of Martial’s epigram and thirty-three translations into English made across almost half a millennium.

Some five years before his death from cancer, Clive James published the poem “Change of Domicile” in one of the lesser-known literary magazines – the British Medical Journal’s Supportive and Palliative Care, the September 2014 issue. Coincidentally, that’s the month my friend D.G. Myers died from cancer. The poem begins:  “Installed in my last house, I face the thought That fairly soon there will be one house more, Lacking the pictures and the books that here Surround me with abundant evidence I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.”   Sensitive readers, of course, will be offended: how morbid. Others will be riled by even a hypothetical account of an afterlife. James’ poem reminds me of the parlor game my brother and I played in hospice, shortly before cancer killed him. One of the things I miss most about him is his sense of humor. All our lives we carried on as though anything can be funny and be made fun of. That doesn’t mean we broadcasted. Gentle souls are so easily distressed. Our premise, one pondered by Egypt’s pharaohs, was simple: assuming we survive after death, what do we bring? Another way of looking at it is to ask what we would miss if we didn’t bring it. We limited the choice to inanimate objects. I’ll skip the more salacious stuff. Ken’s immediate answer was music. He was a musician and once owned enough record albums to fill half a garage – Beethoven, Schoenberg, Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Leon Russell, you name it — all favorites.   Not surprisingly, I said books, my constant companions in life. Among the assorted torments of Hell would be the strict absence of volumes. Or an infinity of books, all written by Joyce Carol Oates.   In a 1997 essay, “Nearing Ninety,” William Maxwell expressed his only regret associated with death: “[W]hen people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke.” The last book he read, in the final months of his life, was War and Peace. When he had read a third of the book his eyesight began to fail, and the novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read the remainder of Tolstoy’s novel to him aloud.  She recounts the experience in an essay collected in A William Maxwell Portrait (2004):    “Reading War and Peace with Bill allowed me a rare and privileged view of how a great writer reads. I had, I suppose, known that anyone who writes above a certain level must read differently from most of us. Nabokov, in the introduction to his Lectures on Literature, asks what a reader needs in order to read a book properly. . . . His four correct answers: imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”

“You say truly, that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love, but I really think those have the worst of it who are left by us, if we are true friends. I have felt more (I fancy) in the loss of Mr. Gay, than I shall suffer in the thought of going away myself into a state that can feel none of this sort of losses.”  If Alexander Pope is read today, he’s read as a manufacturer of elegantly barbed witticisms, a crafter of technically perfect verse. What is The Dunciad but an assault on his sorry contemporaries, exemplars of “Dulness”? Pope himself  wrote “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth."   Pope writes above in a letter to Swift on April 2, 1733. John Gay, the poet and playwright, had died less than four months earlier. The letter continues:   “I wished vehemently to have seen [Gay] in a condition of living independent, and to have lived in perfect indolence the rest of our days together, the two most idle, most innocent, undesigning poets of our age. I now as vehemently wish you and I might walk into the grave together, by as slow steps as you please, but contentedly and cheerfully: whether that ever can be, or in what country, I know no more, than into what country we shall walk out of the grave.”   Pope would live another eleven years; Swift, another twelve. As a boy, tuberculosis of the spine left Pope stunted and in pain. He never grew taller than four feet, six inches. If his physical suffering accounts for his satirical gift, it also helps explain his love for and dependence on Swift and his other friends. They “help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life.” He also faced the English laws banning Roman Catholics from teaching, attending university, voting and holding public office. Pope to Swift on September 15, 1734:   “I have ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew . . . When the heart is full, it is angry at all words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, since most accounts I have give me pain for you . . .”   My niece tells me she is reading Pope’s poetry and asked what I thought of him. In my private pantheon he is one of the supreme English poets and terribly unfashionable. Our age could use him. Hannah gave me a little hope.

Andrew Taylor on Charles Montagu Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888): “He appealed instinctively to the past, against what he saw as the corruption of language, manners and morality of his own time, but Travels in Arabia Deserta is not backward-looking for its own sake. The achievement of the book lies in the way that language, style, rhythm and structure are all directed towards the end of accuracy in presenting landscape, characters, mood and atmosphere.” Timothy Fuller in his introduction to Michael Oakeshott on the Human Condition (Liberty Fund, 2024): “He had minimal regard for any features of modern life. The computer did not exist for him. He thought most modern inventions had done the human race little good. He wrote everything by hand. From his cottage one looked out on the country of Hardy. One felt oneself transported back before World War I, even to the nineteenth century, to a world where one might meet Jude the Obscure coming down the path. This is exactly how Oakeshott wanted to feel. Life was, to him, sweeter then.” The Taylor passage is taken from God’s Fugitive: The Life of C.M. Doughty (Dorset Press, 1999). During an electrical storm Wednesday morning we lost our internet connection and it hasn’t been restored. Possibly tonight. I wrote this on my phone. Try to ignore the irregularities. Blogger is even more intractable on a smartphone.