“And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.”  Any sensibility able to produce such admirable thoughts I diagnose as sane. The writer is George Santayana in a May 24, 1918, letter to Logan Pearsall Smith. The Spaniard has just read Smith’s Trivia (1917). The book’s preface, in its entirety, gives a fair taste of the contents:   “‘You must beware of thinking too much about Style,’ said my kindly adviser, ‘or you will become like those fastidious people who polish and polish until there is nothing left.’   “‘Then there really are such people?’ I asked, lost in the thought of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed lady could give me no precise information about them.   “I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.”   As was Smith, who joins that small coterie of “minor” writers often more essential to me than some of the majors: Walter Savage Landor, Charles Montagu Doughty, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Walter de la Mare. Each qualifies as a sui generis thinker and stylist. Each ranks pleasure high among his responsibilities to readers. Life is too fleeting to squander it on, say, Noam Chomsky and Joyce Carol Oates.   I first learned of Smith (1865-1946), an American-born English essayist and critic, through his correspondence with Henry James. Later I read his best-known work, All Trivia (1933), which collects four earlier volumes published between 1902 and 1933 and includes this announcement across from the copyright page:   “These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that sub-order of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, and the gentle Chimpanzee.”   To speak of “best-known” in regard to anything Smith ever wrote recalls Dr. Johnson’s observation that a second marriage is “a triumph of hope over experience.” In our day, Smith and other “minor” (a patronizing word that shouldn’t be used qualitatively) writers of the past are stubbornly unfashionable, not forgotten but unknown, like those cold little planets said to be lurking beyond the orbit of Pluto. There’s a poignancy in their fate. They worked hard and often honorably. They can still give us pleasure if we make the effort to recover them. Of course, all writers are fated to slip into oblivion – if they are fortunate, only after they are dead. Santayana writes of Trivia, which had been called “immoral” by the poet Robert Bridges, then poet laureate of the United Kingdom:    “[I]]t is not immoral at all unless you take it to be complete and ultimate, which of course is the last thing you would think of pretending. Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental.”   Precisely the qualities in which Smith reveled. He prized precisely who he was and wrote like no other writer, as in “Humiliation”:   “‘My own view is,’ I began, but no one listened. At the next pause, ‘I always say,’ I remarked, but again the loud talk went on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, ‘I often think—'; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza or Abraham Lincoln.”   [Aaron James produced a fine appreciation of Smith “the Belletrist” in The Lamp.]

My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this one, my favorite image:  The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the tangled roots of a banyan tree. The place is Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, former capital of Siam and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. Founded in 1350, the city was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and today is known as Thailand’s Angkor Wat. It was abandoned until the 1950s.   I had seen the banyan/Buddha image once before, in black and white, accompanying a series of poems by the late Kenneth Fields, collectively titled “One Love,” a sort of travelogue documenting a visit to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Fields was a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and co-edited with him a poetry collection, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969). Fields doesn’t mention the Buddha head explicitly:   “Sacred figures draped in yellow Bas-reliefs crumbling away Wat overgrown returning to earth”   Fields’ memories rhyme with my own:   “Rolling through these jungles News footage in my head I don’t have to spell it out”   And this:   “I feared seeing it as a boy Then thought I never would Mekong The wake of empires Spreading out”   Fields reanimates the Imagist impulse:   “Magnificent ruins, Forest and culture In symbiotic rush”   Fields visited Cambodia in 2009, during the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison camp commander Kang Kek Iew, known as “Comrade Duch”:   “Duch is on trial today. Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old Party pols are trembling He’s not the only one”   From the beautiful landscape and temples, Fields move on to recent history and genocide:   “Decimated An entire country Many times over Some for wearing glasses”   Fields concludes the poem:   “The world is dark With us. Even Electricity darkens. Only a few— Honored in crumbling ruins Built by darkeners darkened In their turn— Only a wild heedlessness A spare carefulness for those we love Suffice”

“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.]