If I had been in the house all day reading during a long Ohio winter, invariably my mother would say, “Go outside and blow the stink off.” My parents took a kid reading as a reproach, something unnatural and probably unhealthy – one more reason for me to be secretive. When I was twelve, getting a room of my own with a door that locked was a godsend.  Three years ago I wrote about a poem by Walter de la Mare titled “Books” published in the July 1906 issue of The Bookman. It includes the lines: “Books—to wax solid on, to wane less fat; / To grasp what long-gone Wisdom wondered at.” Now I find he published another poem with the same title and collected it in one of his books for children, This Year: Next Year (1937). The 289-line poem is composed in rhyming couplets and begins:   “A boy called Jack, as I’ve been told, Would sit for hours — good as gold — Not with a pie, like Master Horner, And plums, for dainties, in his corner. But silent in some chosen nook. And spell-bound — by a story-book!”   In my case it wasn’t always stories. I also favored biographies and nature guides. I read about people like Mark Twain and Marie Curie, and learned to identify butterflies, trees and wildflowers. I saw no disconnect between what I read and what I experienced in the real world. Today, that’s basically an article of faith, one of the reasons I so dislike the way most academics treat literature, as though books were cadavers and they were pathologists.   Jack’s mother in the poem echoed mine: “How often his mother would sigh, and cry — / ‘Up, Jack, and put that trumpery by! / See, Spring is in the sky! / The swallow is here, the thorn’s in blow — / Crimson, pink, and driven snow; / Lambs caper in the fields . . .” We didn’t have a lot of lambs in Cleveland but the message was identical. Jack, you see, “In books found marvellous company, / Wonder, romance, and mystery.” De la Mare cites fairy tales (Andersen, Grimm) and nursery rhymes, the earliest texts most kids encounter, followed by Gulliver’s Travels (bowdlerized, of course), the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe. Nice to see the poet reproducing my boyhood reading list fifteen years before I was born. De la Mare lends Jack a sort of poet’s apprenticeship:   “Never believe it! What Jack read Refreshed his senses, heart, and head. Words were to him not merely words — Their sounds rang sweet as bells, or birds; Nor could he tell, by any test, Whether he loved — he once confessed — Their music, or their meaning, best.”   Dela Mare reminds us that books are more than escape, for children and adults -- an understanding that trivializes the power of reading. Sure, they fill idle moments, and that’s perfectly respectable. Consider de la Mare’s closing lines:   “This seems to me at least to hint. That if we give what wits we have To Books, as Jack himself them gave — To all we read a willing slave — The while we dream, delight, and think. The words a precious meat and drink. And keep as lively as a spink. There’s not much harm in printer’s ink.”   A spink, by the way, is a finch, often the chaffinch. A lovely phrase in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “Like a summer flye or Spinxes winges, or a raigne bow of all colours.”

Can we be privately embarrassed in the solitude of our skulls, without an audience? Embarrassment seems like a response to a social setting. In that sense, it resembles involuntary amusement. To laugh helplessly, out loud when alone, is rare among the sane. I think embarrassment is different, though perhaps more easily concealed.  My handwriting has always been not only inelegant but often unreadable, even by me. A graphologist once described it as “bulbous.” She seemed to feel sorry for me. I had a friend, a fellow reporter, who since he was a boy had collected celebrity autographs. His proudest possession was a check written by Moe Howard of The Three Stooges to a dry cleaner in Los Angeles. Moe’s handwriting was draftsman-like, elegantly neat and utterly un-bulbous. That was privately embarrassing.   Reporters jealously guard their notes, made in those narrow, pocket-able, spiral-bound notebooks peculiar to journalism. I was less worried than others that someone might read my precious notes, which might as well have been encrypted. Here’s the story of an earlier journalist, Joseph Addison, as he reported it in the April 23, 1711, issue of The Spectator. He begins with the reporter’s perpetual quest for news:   “When I want Materials for this Paper, it is my Custom to go abroad in quest of Game; and when I meet any proper Subject, I take the first Opportunity of setting down an Hint of it upon Paper. . . . By this means I frequently carry about me a whole Sheetful of Hints, that would look like a Rhapsody of Nonsense to any Body but myself. There is nothing in them but Obscurity and Confusion, Raving and Inconsistency. In short, they are my Speculations in the first Principles, that (like the World in its Chaos) are void of all Light, Distinction, and Order.”   In other words, Addison makes notes, which are often fragmentary and seemingly random. He accidentally drops a sheet of his notes in a coffee house. A “Cluster of People,” he writes, find it and begin “diverting themselves with it.” In other words, reading it aloud. Addison reproduces some of his notes, including:   “Letters from Flower-Pots, Elbow-Chairs, Tapestry-Figures, Lion, Thunder–The Bell rings to the Puppet-Show–Old-Woman with a Beard married to a smock-faced Boy–My next Coat to be turned up with Blue–Fable of Tongs and Gridiron–Flower Dyers–The Soldier’s Prayer–Thank ye for nothing, says the Gally-Pot–Pactolus in Stockings, with golden Clocks to them–Bamboos, Cudgels, Drumsticks.”   It reads like a transcript of Yeats’ automatic writing or Allen Ginsberg on an especially garrulous day. I have no idea whether Addison is strictly reporting what happened or if he’s making it all up. “The reading of this Paper,” Addison tells us, “made the whole Coffee-house very merry; some of them concluded it was written by a Madman.” He must have had better penmanship than I do. He takes the paper from the boy who had read it aloud, pretends to read it attentively while shaking his head disapprovingly and . . .   “I twisted it into a kind of Match, and litt my Pipe with it. My profound Silence, together with the Steadiness of my Countenance, and the Gravity of my Behaviour during this whole Transaction, raised a very loud Laugh on all Sides of me; but as I had escaped all Suspicion of being the Author, I was very well satisfied, and applying myself to my Pipe, and the Post-man, took no [further] Notice of any thing that passed about me.”   Clearly, Addison was privately embarrassed but played the straight man and avoided public embarrassment. The few times I had to share notes with editors, who invariably enjoyed mocking my handwriting, my face burned red with embarrassment and I was back in second grade again.

Catharine Savage Brosman describes her late husband, Patric Savage, like this:  “I am bereft   “of curator, you see, of one who cared tremendously— for books, for me—but would have sacrificed the whole collection for my sake.”   The poem is “Pat Curating His Library” (Arm in Arm, 2022). In 2008, Brosman remarried Savage, her first husband, a lifelong dedicated reader who died at age eighty-eight in 2017. In his obituary, presumably written by his widow, listed among Savage’s pastimes is “reading (omnivorously).” Her poem uses her husband’s bibliophilia as the scaffold on which to build a love poem. Her bookish elegy is touching but what most impresses me is how much I seem to have had in common with Patric Savage, at least regarding books, though our tastes overlap only occasionally, judging by the authors she mentions:   “Mostly men’s authors. But lots of poetry as well, hard-bound, great names both British and American, some French, and poets of our time—Heaney, of course, Sylvia Plath (hardly in my view, whatever others think, a worthy name to stand with those of Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Poe, Eliot, Yeats).”   I’m with Brosman on Plath and can’t stomach Poe. Savage favored history and books of exploration, always good reading. “He had two books out, always, sometimes / three, in different rooms and chairs.” Of course. Obviously. Who can read one book at a time, except perhaps while traveling or hospitalized?   “So I see him standing there, before a bookshelf, reading sideways down the spines, or taking out a first book, then a second, checking or comparing,   “rectifying misalignment, laying aside a jacket to be mended or discarded (though he held them always in a high regard and preserved them carefully for years—they also should be read, a paratexte).”   One is always fussing, shuffling among the shelves. I’m reminded of a friend with a sizeable collection of books, mostly jazz and humor, who promptly threw away dust jackets when he brought home new ones — an uncharacteristic lapse into insanity. The poem’s closing lines choked me up: “Now, I return the favor as I can, bestowing on him fresh creations—full of his own Irish spirit, often. I select a gorgeous book of his, leaf through, and find the makings of new poems and the reason I should make them, writing, shaping tombs in words.”

Dinant is a small city in the Walloon region of Belgium, on the Meuse River. It is one of those otherwise obscure places (Fort Pillow, Lidice, My Lai) that has lent its name to an atrocity. On August 23, 1914, in the early weeks of World War I, German troops slaughtered almost seven-hundred Belgian civilians – men, women, children – and burned down most of the buildings in the city. In her “Dinant, August 1914” (Arm in Arm, 2022), Catharine Savage Brosman describes the massacre as “foreshadowing the trenches.” True, but it also foreshadows the second round of German barbarism less than thirty years later.  “Late June ’14: an Austrian archduke died by an assassin’s hand. A pawn, that’s all. The chessboard changed; alliances and pride moved pieces toward an end none could forestall.   “Mid-August, Feast of the Assumption: war now two weeks old. In Belgium, on the Meuse, Dinant had been contested twice before. This time the Teuton forces would not lose.   “French fighters occupied the Citadel, when Jägers, with machine guns, overcame them, leaving one-half dead. The stronghold fell again that very day—a deadly game   “foreshadowing the trenches. Germans massed Their troops, secured pontoons. First, raids at night. The 23rd, they crossed: blast after blast, grenades and cannon, houses fired, to spite   “resistance. In one month, a thousand dead civilians, pillage, executions, rape, two libraries in ruins—and ahead four years of butchery, with no escape.   “To what avail were pacts, with Europe, torn, gouged out, perhaps nine million soldiers killed? Though time grew late, the peace was never born. War is the poisoned fruit that we have willed.”   In The Times on September 2, 1914, in response to Dinant and other German atrocities – known collectively as “The Rape of Belgium” – Rudyard Kipling published “For All We Have and Are”:   “Our world has passed away, In wantonness o’erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone!”