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.”

Why did my teachers devote more class time to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell – American exemplars of the Age of Thrice-Named Writers -- than to Lord Byron? After more than half a century, I can only speculate. Literary patriotism? We spent a lot of time reading such certified American products as Ralph Waldo Emerson (not Thoreau), William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and "The Man Without a Country." In retrospect I can see this reading list had likely been in place for nearly a century. We dabbled in the English Romantic poets, especially Keats and Wordsworth, but no Byron. Was the taint of scandal still attached to his name? I’m not dismissing Whittier & Co. Most are minor writers in a young country. I want to address an imbalance.  My late father-in-law left me a small library of books, including those he had won as prizes while a student at St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ontario. Among them is the Oxford edition of The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, the 1952 reprint, which he was awarded four years later. I’m using it to sample Byron, reading among his poems experimentally. I did something similar a few years ago with Robert Browning, another void in my education.   I do love Don Juan (1819-24), especially for its wit, occasional vulgarity and inspired rhymes. He I the inheritor of Alexander Pope’s gift. Take Canto I, Stanza 22:   ‘T is pity learnéd virgins ever wed With persons of no sort of education, Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred, Grow tired of scientific conversation: I don’t choose to say much upon this head, I’m a plain man, and in a single station, But — Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?”   In Canto III, Stanza 88, Byron writes thoughtfully, colloquially, racily :   “But words are things; and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link      Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.”   In a 2002 essay titled “My Roommate Lord Byron,” the Byronic poet Tom Disch writes:   “It would have pleased Lord Byron to know that, having been the most renowned, imitated, and execrated of the Major Romantic Poets, he is now, almost two centuries later, the least honored, the most ignored and deplored of that select few. For he thrived on giving offense. He was a sexy, swaggering contrarian whose wisecrack answer to the earnest inquiry of Concerned Virtue, ‘What are you rebelling against?,’ would have been the same as Marlon Brando’s: "What have ya got?’”   I should have read Byron decades ago but I wouldn’t have recognized him as a lineal descendent of Dryden and Pope.

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.”