A former colleague reminded me of the babysitting job I was given by a newspaper editor some forty years ago. I was the court reporter, covering every level from city police court to the New York Court of Appeals, plus the federal court in the beautiful Art Deco building on Broadway in downtown Albany. An exchange program with an English-language newspaper in Pakistan permitted a young reporter from that country to shadow me for several weeks. His name was Hassan Jafri. He accompanied me on my rounds and I introduced him to judges, attorneys, secretaries, police officers, law clerks and courtroom hangers-on.  One day we were sitting in police court (generally, the most entertaining of the venues I covered), waiting for the action to start. Most of our talk up to this point had been professional, with me briefing him on such things as journalistic standards in the U.S. compared to Pakistan and the constitutional basics. Hassan told me that before flying to Albany from Karachi, he had visited Baltimore. Relatives, I assumed. No, he was making a pilgrimage of sorts, not religious but literary. He wanted to visit three “shrines”:   Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, the H.L. Mencken House and the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald and his family lived while he completed Tender Is the Night. Hassan was more deeply and appreciatively read in American literature than most of my fellow native-born reporting and editing colleagues. I was surprised and delighted. I could talk books with a guy from the other side of the world. I felt a certain patriotic shame remembering the words attributed to Mencken:   “The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.”

Metempsychosis is another word I learned from Ulysses. Up till then I used the more plebian-sounding reincarnation. In the fourth chapter, “Calypso,” Molly Bloom is in bed reading a novel, Ruby: Pride of the Ring. She encounters metempsychosis in the text and asks Leopold, who has been serving her tea and toast, what it means. She fumbles the pronunciation and Joyce later puts a pun in her mouth: “met him pike hoses.” The word shows up in three other chapters and is a theme -- ever-changing forms -- in the novel.  In the Winter 2006 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the poet, painter and translator Nicholas Kilmer published “Fragments from a Correspondence,” a selection from the letters written to him by Guy Davenport between 1978 and 1983. Davenport had died the previous year. Kilmer is the grandson of the poet Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,” killed by a sniper’s bullet during the Second Battle of the Marne. Davenport knew as much about Ulysses (among other things) as anyone I have known. In a letter dated Sept. 6, 1980, he writes to Kilmer:   “Your theory of metempsychosis through things. It explains so much. I know drab people who have been tenement sinks and public water fountains in Arkansas. I may well have been the Wright Brothers Flyer No. 1. You know my theory that I'm a janitor in all my activities? I janitor, for instance, the Kenyon Review; and my writing is all simply the tidying up of the Modern Period, a bit of string here neatly rolled up, scraps of notes thrown away by Joyce, things dropped by Ez Pound. So I must have been a janitor sometime.”   Davenport is joking, sort of, but the theme of forms changing and evolving across time is recurrent in his essays and fiction. Among the aphorisms of the pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos he translated is this: “Change alone is unchanging.” And this: “Everything flows; nothing remains. [Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]” He borrows the title of his 1987 essay collection, Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays, from Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. In a footnote to the excerpt from Davenport’s letter, Kilmer explains: “My theory of metempsychosis is that, all things having souls, we shuttle back and forth between animal, vegetable and mineral.”   [The Herakleitos quotes come from Davenport’s Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979; included in 7 Greeks, New Directions, 1995).

Boys of my age grew up fighting Nazis and Japs. We inherited our fathers’ war and were too old to “play Army” – always the phrase – by the time Vietnam heated up. A German refugee, Mrs. Becker, lived next door and we were ordered to kill only Japs if we were playing near her house. Most of our weapons and tactics were taken not from our fathers but from movies and television (Combat! and The Gallant Men).  I remember only one “war story” told by my father from his four years (1942-46) in the Army Air Corps. He was severely sunburned while stationed in North Africa and made a hammock of a rubber sheet filled with olive oil to ease the burn. That’s it. He never spoke of combat, and I have no idea where he was on June 6, 1944. We understood that was terra nullius and never asked questions.   I read Howard Nemerov early, as part of that remarkable postwar generation of American poets who fought in World War II, including Karl Shapiro, Edgar Bowers and Anthony Hecht. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov flew fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. He published “D-Day + All the Years,” first in The Sewanee Review in 1986 and collected it in War Stories the following year:   “What Daddy did on Opening Day? Yes, well,  He led the squadron out before first light  Over the Channel as far as Cap Gris Nez  And turned to port along the Frisian shores  Up past Den Helder and Terschelling where  We had lost a few, and so on up as far  As the Bight of Heligoland and distant Denmark  Where Hamlet and the others used to live,  And so wheeled homeward on a parallel track  To land at Manston in Kent for an early lunch.    “Pleasant and warm under the perspex canopy  Of the office fifty feet above a sea  Hammered and brazen as on the world’s first day,  A peaceable morning. And the sky was blue.    “And Daddy sitting there driving along  Under his silly hat with the stiffener out,  Wearing the leather gauntlets flared heroic  Over the white silk elbow-length debutante’s gloves  They used to wear then whatever the weather was,  And more or less the way you see him now.”   The poem’s addressees are likely Nemerov’s three children, including art historian Alexander Nemerov. What’s not stated is at the heart of the poem. Nemerov describes the mission in some detail without overtly mentioning the Normandy invasion taking place nearby on that day: “A peaceable morning.” No heroics, no war stories.       To put the Allies’ accomplishment on D-Day into historical context, here is Victor Davis Hanson writing in The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017):   “The D-Day invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord) was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC. It dwarfed all of history’s star-crossed beach landings from Marathon to Gallipoli (April 1915). Normandy would serve as a model for large subsequent American seaborne operations from Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April 1945) to Inchon (September 1950). It made all prior iconic cross-Channel invasions in either direction—Caesar’s (55 BC), William the Conqueror’s (1066), Henry V’s (1415) or the British landing in Flanders—seem minor amphibious operations in comparison.”

Interviews with writers are now accepted as a discrete literary form, like rondeaus and villanelles, probably for the same reason people read the biographies of writers whose work they have never read. I suppose the Paris Review encouraged the trend starting in the Fifties by publishing an interview in each issue – T.S. Eliot! Evelyn Waugh! – and lending them further respectability by periodically collecting them between hard covers. The point of an interview is to encourage an impression of intimacy with people we are unlikely ever to meet, though most writers in my  experience are not memorably articulate speakers. I’m not being a snob. If I admire and enjoy a writer, I will seek out and usually read his or her interview, just as I read the biographies of cherished writers. I have no problem with the higher gossip, so long as I don’t take it too seriously.  A reader recently sent me an interview with an American novelist he likes whose name I had never heard before. That’s not unusual because I don’t read much contemporary fiction. To put it bluntly, this guy came off as a Barnum-esque self-promoter, with a few safe political platitudes and slogans thrown in for the hell of it. There was no literary talk, no mention of favorite books or writers, no discussion of technique or language. He was there strictly to sell books.   On this date, June 5, in 1962, Vladimir Nabokov and his wife disembarked from the Queen Elizabeth in New York City. He was in town to attend the premiere of Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of his novel. He met with several journalists in his room at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Nabokov was famous for demanding questions from interviewers in advance, and for preparing his responses in writing. The first question in the edited transcript: “Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating person. Why is that so?” Nabokov, who had recently published Pale Fire, replies:   “I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.”   I take Nabokov’s answer as an effective subversion of the interview form and, in general, the celebrity-making industry. Next question: “Still there must be things that move you -- likes and dislikes.” The response:   “My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”   I suspect that post-Lolita, Nabokov had little interest in or need for marketing. By then he was a wealthy writer having a good time. I’ve read all his published interviews and he seems to be consistently enjoying himself. He had an ego, of course. But that was muted with humor and leg-pulling. In an essay titled “Going Public” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975) the American poet L.E. Sissman compares a writer to a baseball pitcher or concert pianist:   “He must practice; he must work hard; he must sacrifice mere pleasure to the demands of art; he must be, in a sense, both single-minded and monastic. Unless he is a polymath of the most formidable proportions, he cannot afford or support a second career as a public figure.”   Sissman adds:   “In a word, the serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim. A vow of silence, except through his work. A vow of consistency, sticking with writing to the exclusion of other fields. A vow of ego-chastity, abstaining from adulation. A vow of solitude, or at least long periods of privacy. A vow of self-regard, placing the self as writer before the self as personality.”