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Last week Nige wrote about a book previously unknown to me: The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rev. 1922) by Holbrook Jackson. I’ve read only Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and browsed in some of his other book-related titles. I bought the Anatomy in 1998 from a used bookstore near the University of Chicago and soon gave up annotating because too many pages hold memorable aphorisms or allusions that demand to be followed. Not that my pleasure was unmixed. Jackson (1874-1948) cultivates a cloyingly tweedy persona, a variation on the unworldly English eccentric. He’s fond of archaisms. He often writes in a pastiche of seventeenth-century prose, aping Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, as he acknowledges.  The Eighteen Nineties is a better-written, more focused and disciplined work, devoted to an era Jackson lived through as a young man. The Nineties in literature tends to be treated as a homogenous period when dandyism and an occasional taste for decadence ruled. Jackson makes clear that Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Francis Thompson, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and early Wells and Conrad, among others, are a diversified bunch, no monolith. He writes:   “The use of strange words and bizarre images was but another outcome of the prevalent desire to astonish. At no period in English history had the obvious and the commonplace been in such disrepute. The age felt it was complex and sought to interpret its complexities, not by simplicity . . .”   Jackson dedicates his book to Max Beerbohm and devotes Chap. VII, “The Incomparable Max,” to him. At his best, Beerbohm is sui generis, a master ironist and writer of prose, unlike any of the other writers Jackson looks at. His masterpieces are the essays he produced after the Nineties, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially those collected in And Even Now (1920). Jackson writes:   “First and foremost, he represents a point of view. And, secondly, that point of view is in no sense a novelty in a civilised society. Every age has had its representative of a similar attitude towards life, in one a Horace, in another a Joseph Addison and, again, a Charles Lamb. In our age it is Max Beerbohm. He is the spirit of urbanity incarnate; he is town. He is civilisation hugging itself with whimsical appreciation for a conservative end.”   Jackson gets Beerbohm and places him in the history of the essay: “It does not matter what he writes about: his subjects interest because he is interesting. A good essayist justifies any subject, and Max Beerbohm as an essayist is next in succession to Charles Lamb. His essays, and these are his greatest works, are genial invitations to discuss Max, and you discuss him all the more readily and with fuller relish because they are not too explicit; indeed, he is often quite prim.”   Beerbohm is never strident or dogmatic. That would be vulgar and one can’t imagine him ever being vulgar. He respects his readers too much. The literal-minded and humorless need not bother reading him:   “[H]e pays you a delicate compliment by leaving you something to tell yourself; the end of his ellipsis, as in all the great essayists, is yourself. He is quite frank with you, and properly genial; but he is too fastidious to rush into friendship with his readers. They must deserve friendship first. He does not gush.”   The essay, that most formless of forms, is my favorite, providing a voice for those of us who can’t write fiction or poetry. No one does it better than Beerbohm.   “The real Max Beerbohm is, I fancy, an essayist pure and simple, the essay being the inevitable medium for the expression of his urbane and civilised genius. There are, he has told us, a few people in England who are interested in repose as an art. He is, undoubtedly, one of them. But he is also interested in the art of the essay, and his essays are exquisite contributions to that rare art. In them you see revealed the complete Max, interpreting deftly, by means of wit and humour, imagination and scholarship, that ‘uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures,’ to use his own words, which he admits preferable to books, and which, doubtless, he prefers better than any other view in life.”

Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates… read article

I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains the Western world and beyond – our languages, values and literary forms, and who we are, whether or not we have read them.  My first Dante was John Ciardi’s Inferno, assigned, remarkably, by our English teacher in tenth grade. This was an American public high school in 1967, when things were already falling apart. On our own, several of us read and discussed the other two-thirds of Ciardi’s Divine Comedy. I’ve since read the Dante translations by Longfellow, Christopher Singleton, Robert and Jean Hollander, Clive James and, most devotedly of late, C.H. Sisson’s blank-verse version. In his review of Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, the American poet Andrew Frisardi notes the poem's continued popularity among common readers and translators: “Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be. . . . Dante's poem is many things, but first of all it is a gripping read. It pulls the reader in with its lively language and rhythms.” That has been my experience.   In a post from December 2009, I described my middle son’s first acquaintance with Dante. He’s now twenty-four, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and is visiting Italy with his younger brother for the first time. On Monday in Florence they toured the Dante Museum:      I know from my life and from my son’s that literary interests can enter dormant periods, all the while evolving and storing energy for future returns. About a decade ago I first read Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy, published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante. In his introduction, “On Translating Dante,” Sisson writes:   “. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”   Dante seems eternally housed in our memory and imagination. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath or the fight between Achilles and Hector.   Frisardi is a translator of Italian poetry, including Dante’s Vita Nova and the first fully annotated translation of his Convivio. In his 2020 poetry collection, The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press), Frisardi includes a beautiful Dantean sonnet originally a part of Vita Nova:   “You pilgrims walking by oblivious, Your minds, it seems, on something not at hand, Can you have come from such a distant land— The way you look suggests as much to us— That you’re not weeping, even as you pass Right through the suffering city, like that band Of people who, it seems, don’t understand A thing about the measure of its loss?   “If you’ll just stop, because you want to hear About it all—so says my sighing heart— Your eyes will fill with tears before you leave. For she who blessed the city is nowhere In sight: what words about her we impart Have force enough to make a stranger grieve.”   Frisardi adds a note: “Dante places this sonnet in the penultimate episode of his prosimetrum the Vita Nova, where not long after Beatrice’s death he sees pilgrims passing through Florence on the way to Rome. ‘She who blessed the city’ translates lowercase beatrice, which means she who blesses.’” [Photos by David Kurp.]

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