Two of the three copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson I own were gifts from my brother. He loved garage sales and thrift shops and had no shame about looking for second-hand bargains. He liked the English expression “jumble sale.” Ken wasn’t cheap but never seemed to have enough money. My final loan to him he never repaid before his death on August 24, 2024. I’m not bitter about that. In fact, I now find it endearing. It is quintessential Ken, one more confirmation of his personality. I’m glad he felt he could ask.  There was a lengthy spell when we stopped talking. Friends tell me this is hardly unusual between siblings, though it never felt comfortable. His daughter Hannah in 2005 (she was then about ten) wrote me a letter saying that both of us ought to grow up. Besides, she wanted to meet her uncle. Ken didn’t fly so I made an annual trip to Cleveland to visit him and his family. A family friend, Rumanian-born Giorgiana Lascu, always known as "George," posted a nice remembrance of my brother:   “Dinner always at 5:30, which nobody ever missed for the good conversation, we never talked about our feelings, but we talked about Philip Larkin or smack to each-other or about the news, or whatever people were reading. Everyone was always reading something. Sometimes dinner was followed by a lively drum circle, conducted on the table top. We were always welcome, though feeding two extra girls during a recession must have been hard.”   The first Boswell Ken gave me was the boxed, three-volume Heritage Press edition from 1963. I remember lugging it through the airport in my suitcase along with other books I had purchased in Cleveland. The other copy is a heavy, one-volume, leather-bound brick of a book. It’s an American reprint of the English edition edited by John Croker in 1831, the one Macaulay famously savaged. It’s an extravagantly ugly book, printed in blindness-inducing small print, and if anyone other than my brother had given it to me, I would have unloaded it long ago. Ken also gave me two hardcover volumes of Boswell’s journals -- yard-sale treasures.   Sadness mingles with a diffuse sense of guilt and the pleasures of memory. Every day I think of something I what to tell Ken that would make him laugh or at least snort. Death resolves little or nothing. Johnson writes in his Rambler essay on September 22, 1750:   "When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."

“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne’s own.” If pressed to name my favorite literary form I would choose the essay, the form without a strict form, seemingly designed for free spirits with brains and emotional depth – “a knowledge of men and of books,” as W.E. Henley puts it above. The most unlikely things can be successful essays – reviews, memoirs, scientific papers, recipes, fiction. The best ones have a point, even an argument or lesson, but never hector or harangue the reader. An essayist confides. Without condescending, he puts his arm around your shoulder and talks softly, turning you into the sole member of his audience, a person worthy of his trust.   Sure, Montaigne started it all (except for Plutarch and Seneca), but the English came to perfect it – Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson, Chesterton, Beerbohm and the rest. William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) will never be a member of that front rank. He was a poet, lauded in his day, and will always be remembered for a poem my eighth-grade English teacher had us memorize sixty years ago: "Invictus." It’s a natural for recitation, up there with Kipling.   The passage at the top is taken from Henley’s “Essays and Essayists” collected in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1892).He writes:   “Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function ‘to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.’ He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable.”   Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849. His friend Stevenson, who based the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883) on the one-legged Henley, wrote him a letter from Nebraska on August 23, 1879 -- the poet's thirtieth birthday. Stevenson writes a brief, impromptu essay from Willa Cather's (b. 1873) future turf:   “I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae.”

Robert Penn Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975):  “The will to change: this is one of the most precious heritages of American democracy. We have the story of the young Washington, who studied surveying and could, by the exercise of his skill, buy ‘Bullskin plantation,’ his first one, at the age of sixteen. Thus far he had merely changed his condition. But he had the will to change himself as well, and with the same furious energy, he studied the Roman Stoics that he might achieve the admirable character he desired.”   This is part of the folklore I grew up with, like the story of young Washington and his cherry tree. I don’t consciously remember learning any of this. The lives and thought of the early presidents were like holy writ, to be studied and emulated. The first book I wrote as a kid was a collection of presidential biographies (through Kennedy), each one-page long, handwritten on lined paper, happily cribbed from encyclopedias. Perhaps this accounts for my enduring sense of patriotism, a devotion to the American ideals, despite all our all-too-human errors. Warren continues:   “So we have the long list of autodidacts, including Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Dreiser — men who, with all their failings and complications, willed a change deeper than that of an objective condition. We admire those autodidacts, but the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”   All too true, even half a century ago. The embodiment of the autodidactic approach to life for me is Eric Hoffer (1902-83). He started as a migrant worker in the West, worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco and wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), an essential guide to the world we inhabit today. I first encountered him at age fifteen. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, and moved on to his books. My father was an ironworker and high-school dropout; my mother, a tax clerk. No one in my family had gone to college. I felt an immediate personal identification with Hoffer. He was my first model of autodidacticism, proof that education was up to me.   I’m reading Daniel J. Flynn’s Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011). Flynn devotes a chapter to Hoffer, calling him “the definitional autodidact.” He wrote prose that got “straight to the point. Efficient and crisp. Hoffer’s words stood out against the opaque, verbose, circuitous style that increasingly characterized the prose of intellectuals. If readers found his style original it was because they had never come across French writers—Pascal, Montaigne, Renan, de la Rochefoucauld—whom he imitated.”   Hoffer was part of the reason I wanted to write and why I became a newspaper reporter. He was no snob. He seemed from the start like the kind of guy I could talk to.

We like a neat and predictable understanding of our fellows. No surprises. An honest man never lies and an angry man is never forgiving -- convictions rooted in naïveté about human nature, which is willful and contradictory. Few of us even understand our own motives. Here is James Boswell writing of his friend in May 1775:  “I passed many hours with him on the 17th, of which I find all my memorial is, ‘much laughing.’ It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularity and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily. We may suppose, that the high relish of a state so different from his habitual gloom, produced more than ordinary exertions of that distinguishing faculty of man, which has puzzled philosophers so much to explain.”   I can hear the chorus of amateur psychologists: “bipolar.” After all, every human complexity can be “solved” and even “cured.” There’s plenty of precedent for funny men living in “perpetual gloom.” S.J. Perelman nominates himself in everything he ever wrote, including the Marx Brothers scripts. Think of Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce. To paraphrase a very funny and serious man, Kingsley Amis, the opposite of funny is not serious but unfunny. Take this untitled epigram by X.J. Kennedy:   “Have I ‘matured’ at last? My blood congeals.  Have I so soon discarded my ideals?”   The humor is in the adolescent defiance of the couplet and the reader's recognition of himself in its lines. And another one, “A Farting Babbler,” also from the Fall 1992 issue of The Classical Outlook:   “His gaseous anus, though it give offense,  Comes closer than his mouth to making sense.”   We all know the type, which despite conventional wisdom is not limited to politicians. Fill in the blank. One more, about the incestuous world of writers, especially poets:   “Swap got a wildly favorable review Written, of course, by some kiss-ass he knew To whose last work he’d suckled up in turn. Better to marry, said St. Paul, than burn.”   Happy birthday, Joe. Kennedy, our funniest serious poet, turns ninety-five today. Boswell continues the passage above from his Life of Johnson like this: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’”

“If you will look in on me sometime in the summer of 2026, I may be able to tell you whether my things are going to last.”  This is Edwin Arlington Robinson at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, writing to a friend on August 20, 1926. In effect he is proposing a fanciful literary experiment, and there was a time when I would have said he was being disingenuous. Of course his best work would survive, I thought, along with Emily Dickinson’s, T.S. Eliot’s and Yvor Winters’. But the culture has moved on and most of us no longer value poetry and other forms of literature as central to our values. We are, in effect, rejecting ourselves and the inheritance that made us. I’ll wager that Robinson is seldom taught in American high schools and universities, apart from "Richard Cory," thanks to Simon and Garfunkel.   Like many writers, Robinson’s character mingled thoughtfulness and modesty with egotism. What distinguishes him from most is his determination to remain his own man. No one owns him. In his poems and letters I detect no slavish following of fashion and no rah-rah politics. As a poet, he never raises his voice or turns hectoring. His stance as a solitary, diffident man and artist with, ironically perhaps, a gift for friendship, is likely unique in American literary history. He once told a correspondent: “I never could find any poetry in gathering apples. It is the worst work I know except washing dishes and listening to a debate.” Among his childhood chores in Gardiner, Maine, was picking apples in his family’s orchard.   Take one of Robinson’s finest poems, “Isaac and Archibald,” from Captain Craig: A Book of Poems (1902). It reads like a short story (he wrote fiction before writing poetry). Yvor Winters described it as “a kind of New England pastoral and is extraordinarily lovely.” It encourages us to inhabit the lives of four characters – the old men of the title, the narrator and his younger self. This arrangement of sympathetic ties mirrors life and the way we preserve it and transform it in memory. Robinson’s poem is closer to the way a great novelist works – say, Tolstoy or James – than to a typical lyrical poet. Here is Isaac speaking of himself in the third person, as though he were already dead, urging the narrator to remember; the narrator’s act of remembrance as a man of the boy he was; and the boy’s tacit sense that Isaac’s words are important and deserve to be remembered:   “’Look at me, my boy, And when the time shall come for you to see That I must follow after him, try then To think of me, to bring me back again, Just as I was to-day. Think of the place Where we are sitting now, and think of me— Think of old Isaac as you knew him then, When you set out with him in August once To see old Archibald.’—The words come back Almost as Isaac must have uttered them, And there comes with them a dry memory Of something in my throat that would not move.”   Robinson’s imaginative projection into people unlike himself makes our human sympathy possible. Put bluntly, we want to know who these people are, why they do what they do, and why we share so much with them.   In February 1996, Robinson writes to his friend Harry De Forest Smith: “Three or four days ago, I took the liberty to borrow Henry James’s The Lesson of the Master and have read it to find that H. J. is a genius. No smaller word will do it for the man, who produced such work as this. Did you read it? If you didn’t, you must. If there is any more of his stuff out there let me know, and I shall try to read it, though I must take a rest for a time.” I savor the notion of reading Henry James’ “stuff.” Winters writes of Robinson in his 1946 monograph devoted to the poet:   “[H]is closest spiritual relatives, at least in America, are to be found in the writers of fiction and of history in his generation and the two or three generations preceding. I have called attention to his having certain more or less Jamesian vices as a narrator, but I am thinking now of his virtues: of the plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued irony, the high seriousness and the stubborn persistence. In respect to one or another of these qualities, one may find him related to such a mind as that of Henry James, but perhaps more obviously to Edith Wharton and [John Lathrop] Motley and Francis Parkman, and perhaps even at times to Henry Adams. He is, it seems to me, the last great American writer of their tradition, and not the first of a later one; and the fact that he writes verse is incidental . . . . Robinson is more closely comparable to the great masters of prose than to the minor poets.”   I think of another Maine native, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), and her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Her narrator observes: “In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”