“The Brains Trust” was a BBC radio show popular in the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A panel of “experts” – among them Desmond MacCarthy, Kenneth Clark and Rose Macaulay – would answer questions submitted by listeners. The U.S. had similar radio programs at the time, such as “Information Please,” hosted by Clifton Fadiman. In 1942, Hutchinson and Co. published The Brain Trust Book, a collection of edited transcripts from the show, one of which was devoted to the “Classical Book-shelf.” Mr. D. E. Griffith of Compton Bassett, Wiltshire, asked the panelists to recommend “eight half-crown classics for a soldier to take on active service.” As I read the responses, I wondered how “experts” would answer in 2025.  C.E.M. Joad, though described as a “philosopher,” sounds more like a dubious media opportunist. He recommends taking “a book of understandable pleasant philosophy,” specifically the World Classics edition of Selections from Plato, introduced by Sir Richard Livingstone.   Commander A.B. Campbell was a naval officer, a veteran of the Great War and a radio celebrity. He answered: “I am glad I come in second. I fancy everybody will want to say this. I certainly think that Shakespeare’s works should be one book to take with him.”   I’m reminded of the answers politicians give when asked to name their favorite or most influential book. Shakespeare is a perfectly respectable answer but one is left to wonder.   Malcolm Sargent was a British conductor, organist and composer. His answer: “If I could take only one book, I would take the Bible.”   The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley replied: “I think it is good to have some good, long novel to get your teeth into and I should have thought that (especially for a soldier) Tolstoi’s War and Peace was unrivalled. You should also take a book of poetry and it should be a selection. If the Oxford Book of English Verse is in a cheap edition, that would be ideal. If not, The Golden Treasury.”   Joad seconds Huxley’s choice of War and Peace and adds two novels by Trollope. “They are,” he says, “both in the way of being classics and both are absolutely first-rate. History? I would like to suggest Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I think is the greatest history book ever written.”   Few would argue with that judgment but think of the enlisted man at El Alamein  carrying all six volumes -- 1.6 million words -- in his pack. Joad adds:   “One other suggestion I would like to make and it is this. I think Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of the greatest books ever written [and a well-known morale-booster]. It happens to be in Everyman, price 2/6, and it is extraordinarily topical. The last satire about the Divine forces and the human being who Swift called ‘Yahoo’ is extraordinarily apt to the moment. I won't say to what nation it happens to be apt. Let the soldiers read it and find out.”   Commander Campbell gets in the last word: “It may sound dry reading, but one of the most interesting books I’ve read has been Motley’s History [Rise] of the Dutch Republic.” That’s three volumes, roughly 300,000 words.

Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Wild Peaches” by Elinor Wylie appeared first on The American Scholar.

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On Sunday, a friend and I, after lunch at a favorite Mexican restaurant, visited Kaboom Books here in Houston. He left with a stack of books. I found one: Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press and Gulf Coast, 2018). I know her thanks only to Yvor Winters, who championed her work and rightly called her “a minor poet of great distinction.” Crapsey (1878-1914) reminds us that reputation is fleeting and uncertain. Only dedicated readers keep a writer alive. Without the occasional reader, Crapsey would be doubly dead. She devised a homegrown poetic form, the American cinquain, much influenced by traditional Japanese verse, and reminiscent of the work of her contemporaries, the early Imagists.  The editors, Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft, bring together a selection of Crapsey’s poems, excerpts from her study of metrics, letters and five essays by academics. Most of her poems are graceful and brief, feather-like in their delicacy yet often concluding with a sort of stinger at the end. Take “Triad”:   “These be Three silent things: The falling snow . . . the hour Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one Just dead.”   For Crapsey, who was ill for much of her life and died from tuberculosis at age thirty-six, death is a recurrent theme, as in “The Lonely Death”:   “In the cold I will rise, I will bathe In waters of ice; myself Will shiver, and shrive myself, Alone in the dawn, and anoint Forehead and feet and hands; I will shutter the windows from light, I will place in their sockets the four Tall candles and set them a-flame In the grey of the dawn; and myself Will lay myself straight in my bed, And draw the sheet under my chin.”   During her lifetime, Crapsey edited only one volume of her work, Verse, published in 1915, shortly after her death. Her range of subjects is narrow – death, dying, illness -- and family difficulties limited her growth as a poet. Yvor Winters, who survived tuberculosis, as did his wife Janet Lewis, wrote of Crapsey: “[T]he only known cure, and this was known to only a few physicians, was absolute rest, often immobilized rest. The disease filled the body with a fatigue so heavy that it was an acute pain, pervasive and poisonous.” We see Crapsey’s resistance to “immobilized rest” in her poem “To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window”:   “Why are you there in your straight row on row Where I must ever see you from my bed That in your mere dumb presence iterate The text so weary in my ears: ‘Lie still And rest; be patient and lie still and rest.’ I’ll not be patient! I will not lie still!”   Effective antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis wouldn’t become available until the nineteen-forties. A reader resists it, but there’s a pervasive sadness about Crapsey’s work, coupled with courage. It’s similar, though at a different level of accomplishment, to the what we experience when reading Keats and Chekhov. Tuberculosis killed both, at ages twenty-five and forty-four, respectively. “To the Dead . . .” concludes:     “And in ironic quietude who is The despot of our days and lord of dust Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop Grim casual comment on rebellion's end; ‘Yes, yes . . . Wilful and petulant but now As dead and quiet as the others are.’ And this each body and ghost of you hath heard That in your graves do therefore lie so still.”