A reader is pressing Ezra Pound on me again. This happens semi-annually, like visits to the dentist. I find few writers as distasteful as Pound. My reasons are simple and not at all original. He was rabidly, tediously anti-Semitic and he betrayed his country. Earlier this year I borrowed Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II (ed. Leonard W. Doob, 1978) from the library. I had been aware of the book for a long time but never looked into it. I got morbidly curious and found Pound’s wartime broadcasts even more vile than I expected, but also tiresome. We’ve all encountered people maddened with hatred and we avoid them, at least in in part out of fear. Such characters are unpredictable. We don’t know when their words will turn into actions. By being broadcast, Pound’s words are action. I browsed among his transcripts but could not finish reading even one. Raving by definition is tiresome, unlikely to be of interest to anyone other than the raver. My Pound-advocating reader, as others have done previously, urges me to ignore the political and racial idiocies and focus on Pound as poet. That strategy doesn’t help his case. I recognize the poetic worth of stray lines and phrases in the Cantos and elsewhere. A copy of the Cantos sits on a nearby shelf and critics I admire – Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport – virtually beatify Pound among twentieth-century poets. I don’t get it. Trying to understand Pound’s chaotic writing isn’t worth the effort. His mandarin contempt for common readers and other poets has had a devastating impact on the art for more than a century. The late Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, in an interview published in 2004 in The Poetry Ireland Review, speaks for me: “[W]illful obscurity I disdain, not least because it arrogantly assumes rights to so much of the reader's meagre life-span, demanding absurdly large investments of time for what is usually a negligible or negative return. “One reason why much of the greatest poetry is so uncannily and transparently clear (and I don't mean facile) is because it is a record of those rare, transfixing moments when some normally opaque corner of existence is unveiled and we are granted a fleeting glimpse into ‘the heart of things.’ Poetry draws on depths of emotion and reserves of wisdom that are plumbed by instinctive, almost primitive, means – the opposite of conscious ‘cleverality.’”

“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live? Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer — not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new… read article

A reader asks what novels by William Makepeace Thackeray I would suggest he read. My answer is brief and not terribly helpful: Vanity Fair. It’s the only book by Thackery I have read, and that was a long time ago. I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Barry Lyndon in 1975. Thackeray remains a hole in my reading life, one I’m unlikely ever to fill. Among his contemporaries, I’ve read all of Dickens and Eliot, some of their titles several times, but only four by the relentlessly prolific Anthony Trollope and nothing by Wilkie Collins. Every reading life is idiosyncratic, alternating between heavy devotedness and shameful ignorance.  Jules Janin (1804-74), the French novelist, critic and feuilletoniste, gives readers like me an attractive excuse: “A gourmet is not a glutton.” It’s a truth too often disregarded in matters of food and books. A look at Nadar’s photo of Janin suggests he was by nature a gourmand. The Canadian translator Andrew Rickard has rendered into English a passage from L’Amour des livres (1844):      “In your reading become attached to this philosopher, to that poet; grow fond of both of them, and when you place them triumphantly on your bookshelf, bound in fragrant Russian leather, make sure that you can say: ‘Until next time. I know you well now, and I share the opinion of those great souls to whom you were a role model and a source of counsel!’”   My cop-out is “next time.” Most of my reading has become rereading, especially in fiction. The phenomenon is not unusual among people my age, and I can identify several reasons. Books that have already proved their worth are always attractive. Reading them means encountering our younger selves, lending the text a pleasurable subtext. It also means encountering the generations of readers who preceded us. In addition, we have entered one of those periodic literary dry spells. Little being published today looks interesting, and fiction seems nearly dead. This contrasts with my younger years when Nabokov, Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Maxwell and Cheever were at work.        Janin writes, “Read well, read little,” the mirror image of Yvor Winters’ “Write little; do it well.” As I get older, I find it easier to value quality over quantity, in books and other things, as did Janin who writes in early middle age:    “If someone is obliged to read everything he has bought in its entirety, he thinks twice before making a purchase; he is a little more wary of things that are rare and strange and sticks to the masterpieces that mankind holds in high regard. And so you will begin by acquiring — not haggling for — good and beautiful copies of those few, essential books that one reads and rereads again and again.”

In France, at the Lyon public library, I was surprised to bump into so many romans fleuves, whatever those are.  They were notable on the shelf because these long series of novels are now published in monumental, highly visible, omnibus editions.  The library assumes that you want to take all 2,400 or 4,800 pages homes at once for some reason.  I wish I had noted some of the authors, aside from Proust and Romain Rolland and Roger Martin du Gard.  There were so many others.  French literature went through a roman fleuve craze. Rolland and Martin du Gard both won Nobel Prizes but the latter’s Les Thibault (1922-40, 8 vols) never caught on in English and the former’s Jean-Christophe (1904-12, 10 vols) has withered.  I remember that thirty years ago the big, highly visible, Modern Library omnibus of Jean-Christophe was in every used bookstore.  I haven’t seen one for a while.  Sometimes literature seems to follow an ecological model, where the most successful species of the type (Proust) starves its competitors out of its ecological niche.  In France these books still have readers; the niche is clearly more resource-rich. The winner in British literature has been Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75, 12 vols), although this is a matter of definition, I know.  I take the family saga as a different species.  U.S. authors seem to prefer to occasionally revisit a character over time, as in John Updike’s Rabbit books (1960-90, a mere 4 vols), rather than intentionally plan out a long series.  But the river still flows so what is the difference, really?  I guess I do take intentionality as part of the difference, although I remind myself that In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927, 7 vols) was intended to be (1913-15, 3 vols) and in fact would have been if the war had not interrupted publication giving Proust years to “revise” his novel. And come to think of it, I can only think of two more British romans fleuves, Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose books (1992-2012, 5 vols) and A. N. Wilson’s Lampitt Chronicles (1988-96, 5 vols).  I’ve actually read that last one.  I had a little A. N. Wilson phase thirty years ago for some reason.  No, I know the reason, I read a good review of his novels.  I read a good review of the University of Chicago reissue of A Dance to the Music of Time which I have remembered ever since – I have never forgotten that the most prominent recurring character is named “Widmerpool” – although for some reason it did not inspire me to read the novels. But now I have read some of the Dance novels, the first four, which are: A Question of Upbringing (1951) A Buyer’s Market (1952) The Acceptance World (1955) At Lady Molly’s (1957) It took me a while but now I imagine I can at least write down some notes on Powell’s books.  Not that there is any hint of that in this preface.  Perhaps in the next post.  I will tack on the Nicholas Poussin painting that, along with Proust, inspired Powell, just to add a little color.

Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists’ lives to remind them that art, at its best, is “an occasion for unselfing”? And yet who could fault them: Not just their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of… read article