“Happiness is the search for happiness.”  I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no happy lives, only happy moments. Those moments seem to be the byproduct of right living. A life dedicated fulltime to achieving happiness is likely to be filled with respites of pleasure, long stretches of disappointment and much unhappiness for others, like second-hand smoke. Some people, like spoiled children, confuse happiness with getting their own way. Most of us never learn what’s best for us and others. You can see the very human fallacy built into that effort: demands can only grow more insistent.   In an 1895 entry in The Journal of Jules Renard (ed. and trans. By Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964,) Renard writes: “I desire nothing from the past. I do not count on the future. The present is enough for me. I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness.” Hard to say just how tongue-in-cheek that passage is. Renard was a master ironist. He always impresses me as a realist, a rejector of pie-in-the-sky grandiosities. Bogan writes in her preface:   “Renard’s passion for factual truth and stylistic exactitude, once formed, remained central to his work throughout his career. This preoccupation never hardened into obsession; one of the great pleasures of reading Renard is the certainty, soon felt by the reader, that nothing is being put down in meanness or malice.”   Renard died on this date, May 22, in 1910, exactly one year after writing the aphorism-like entry at the top in his journal. He was forty-six years old.   [The quote at the top comes from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there is only about a ten-foot shelf of books which can be read again and again in later life . . .”  More like eight and a half feet of slender, small-print editions, along the lines of Everyman’s Library. Excellence among human creations is rare; in literature, especially prose fiction, it can be measured by the micron on that mythical shelf. And don’t get me started on poetry.   The lawgiver here is Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82), a middling poet, essayist, journalist and literary raconteur. In the Sixties he published a series of brief essays called “Classics Revisited.” Among them was one devoted to Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy Parade’s End, published sequentially between 1924 and 1928. Rexroth defends the ability of readers to experience and find rewarding literature produced in other times and places – a rebuttal to presentism and academic sectarianism:   “Any cultivated person should be able to accept temporarily the cosmology and religion of Dante or Homer. The emotional attitudes and the responses to people and to the crises of life in most fiction come to seem childish as we ourselves experience the real thing. Books written far away and long ago in quite different cultures with different goods and goals in life, about people utterly unlike ourselves, may yet remain utterly convincing — The Tale of Genji, The Satyricon, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Burnt Njal, remain true to our understanding of the ways of man to man the more experienced we grow. Of only a few novels in the twentieth century is this true. Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is one of those books.”   For once, I agree with Rexroth. Ford’s novel is one of those books you read and at the same time look forward to rereading. Of how many twentieth-century novels can that be said? Think of Conrad, Kipling, Cather, Proust, Joyce, Svevo, Lampedusa, Nabokov. It’s notable that Rexroth includes relatively few Americans on his list, some of whom are rather dubious – Prescott, Poe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Parkman, Stowe, Douglass, Twain, Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams. No American fiction from the twentieth century. That tends to confirm my impression that England produced more excellent, rereadable fiction in the last century than the United States – Ford, of course, and Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Kingsley Amis.   Assembling such lists is an entertaining parlor game, made to challenge and inform readers. It’s not a “canon” or literacy test. Snobs need not play. Rexroth concludes his Ford essay like this:   “The result is a little as though Burnt Njal had been rewritten by the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. There is the same deadly impetus, the inertia of doom, riding on hate, that drives through the greatest of the sagas. There is the same tireless weaving and reweaving of the tiniest threads of the consequences of grasping and malevolence, the chittering of the looms of corruption, that sickens the heart in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The reader of either novel, or the saga, emerges wrung dry. The difference in Ford’s book is compassion. The poetry is in the pity, as Wilfred Owen said of the same war."   [Rexroth wrote eighty-nine “Classics Revisited” essays for Saturday Review between 1965 and 1969. Sixty were reprinted as Classics Revisited (1968). The other twenty-nine were included in The Elastic Retort (1973). After his death, More Classics Revisited (1989), containing those twenty-nine essays plus other book reviews and introductions, was published. Rexroth wrote another essay on Ford.]

My brother’s yahrzeit – the first anniversary of his death last summer – is approaching. His death was the most intimate I have experienced. I spent most of the last two weeks of his life with him, in hospital and hospice, and observed the moment of his death.  Ken could be difficult. He was contrary and often bitter. We several times went years without speaking, and our relations were often a test of character. He brought out some of my own bitterness, but also our blackest senses of humor.  He started smoking cigarettes at age twelve, never seriously gave them up, and they killed him at age sixty-nine. In hospice I offered to buy him a carton of Raleighs (our mother’s brand: “Save the coupons!”) and that was the last time I saw him laugh. We were brothers and blood won in the end.   Thanks to Mike Juster I’ve learned of the poet Jean L. Kreiling who has just published a seven-poem sonnet sequence, “My Brother’s Last Year,” in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. In the first sonnet she writes:   “But he retains his reason and his wit, so much so that it seems clear he’ll survive; they say he won’t.”   Kreiling’s poems are a detailed account of the mundane things surrounding dying and death. I remember in the hospital my brother was still reading books, able to hold his granddaughter and talk about Montaigne. His mind was intact, which, despite all the evidence, suggested he would eventually get out of bed and return to his life. As Kreiling puts it, “He’s still him.” By the time he entered hospice he could no longer speak or, apparently, listen. His son and I sang to him but I don’t think he heard.   Survivors savor their survival. We can’t help it. The life instinct is powerful. Kreiling tells us: “To grow old is a gift.” She writes:   “This may assuage my sense there’s nothing I can do, although a visit’s nearly nothing. Yes, I care; that’s what my presence demonstrates, I know, but it will make him strain for things now rare or difficult: the teasing repartee, a walk outdoors, shared meals and memories. He reassures me that he feels okay, though I watch him declining, by degrees.”   The death of a loved makes us pause to assess the state of our own values. We ask, “What is Important?” Kreiling’s final sonnet:   “Not long before the end, he made it clear: there was so little that he wanted — just  to stay with those he loved, not disappear into the latter part of dust to dust. So many of us want so much: we crave the shiny toy, the extra buck, and more when less would do — stuff that will never save our souls or bodies. I knew that before my brother’s diagnosis, and today I can’t claim to have unlearned pointless greed. I find, though, that it’s easier to weigh the worth of things desired, to measure need, to understand there isn’t much I lack. He wanted only time. I want him back.”

“You either fell under his spell and loved the wild ride of his prose, or you shunned or ignored it.”   Infatuation of the literary sort is likely possible only among the young. That’s my experience. I have discovered good writers in recent decades – Yvor Winters, C.H. Sisson – but the attraction was more balanced. I could see their weaknesses while continuing to read and admire them. While still in my teens and twenties, I would fall hard for certain writers and almost subconsciously rationalize their failings. I think of Thomas Pynchon and Sherwood Anderson, an unlikely pair. But my hardest fall was for Edward Dahlberg, a writer unknown to most readers.   Dahlberg (1900-77), an American, defied categories and most literary expectations. Between 1929 and 1934 he published three novels usually labeled “proletarian.” If that had been all he published, I would never have fallen for him. He knew all the Modernists in Paris, including Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. By 1941, when he published Do These Bones Live (retitled Can These Bones Live when republished in 1960), Dahlberg had transformed himself into -- what? In the words of Jules Chametzky, a writer of “[a] wildly baroque, some would say ornate and affected high style.” Dahlberg wrote prose in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne and Robert Burton, writers I was reading around the same time.   I wrote my name and the date of purchase in my copy of Can These Bones Live: “8-6-75.” Much of the text is underlined and annotated. Here’s a typical marked passage, from a chapter titled “Randolph Bourne: In the Saddle of Rosinante”: “All dogmas lead men to the Abyss; doctrine is the enemy of vision and the denial of the past.” By Dahlberg’s customary standards, that’s both thoughtful and moderate. He could be a real crank, like one of his heroes, Henry David Thoreau, of whom he writes:   “Great lives are moral allegories and so soon become deniable myths because we cannot believe tat such good men could have existed in such an evil world.”   The guy who first introduced me to Dahlberg, in 1974, was Mike Phillips. Eighteen years ago I wrote a post on this blog asking if anyone knew Phillips or his whereabouts. So far, silence. I’ve read most of Dahlberg’s published work. Especially good is his 1964 autobiography, filtered through the unhappy life of his mother, Because I Was Flesh. Dahlberg’s essential theme was himself. The memoir works because the focus is shifted to his mother. I’ve shed my infatuation and can value for his best work. Here is another underlined passage accompanied by a half-century-old exclamation point: “There are no abstract truths—no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man.”     [Two quotes, including the one at the top, are taken from Jules Chametzky’s Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers: a Cultural Memoir (2012).]