In a 2009 interview with a publication in Barcelona, Spain, Adam Zagajewski is asked a question about political correctness, euphemisms and other debasements of language. He replies: “There is the harsher side of existence -- disease and death -- and the loftier reasons for poetry. In all writing, there is a clear tension between the ‘higher’ world, so to speak, and everyday life. The former is part of the world of dreams and ideals, while the latter describes the more terrible or laughable aspects of the human condition. If you keep to one side or the other, you'll be called a hypocrite.” Poets are not the only ones dealing with such tension. How do we, culture’s civilians, balance ideals, the wisdom we have derived from literature, philosophy and religion, and the growing horror of life in the twenty-first century. We’re privileged in the U.S., relatively safe and prosperous unlike residents of, say, Ukraine or Sudan. We’ve experienced nothing like the Poles who were serially raped by the Germans and Russians. That history is behind Zagajewski’s comment made elsewhere that his friend Zbigniew Herbert’s poems are “like a suitcase upholstered in soft satin; but the suitcase holds instruments of torture.” Zagajewski’s characteristic tone in poetry and prose is a gently skeptical irony. His style is plain-spoken (at least in translation) but learned and often wryly amusing. Among American readers and he has too often been mistaken for a “nice guy,” a safely inoffensive fellow. He’s seldom strident and is not by nature a dogmatist of any school. He is Roman Catholic down to the chromosome level but never a preacher. Consider this ingenious metaphor from the Barcelona interview: “An elevated style, which is devoid of a sense of humour and full of indulgence for our ridiculous, cruel and imperfect world, would be similar to the quarries of Carrara in Tuscany, from where all the marble has been extracted and there is only whiteness left. “ That’s the danger, coming off as superior, safely above the concerns of mere mortals. Such a tone is not exclusive to left or right. It might be called haughty, snobbish, cold. Zagajewski continues: “An elevated style comes from a constant conversation between two spheres: the spiritual sphere, the guardians and creators of which are the dead, and on the other hand, that of the eternal present, our path, our unique instant, the box of time that we have to live in. The elevated style acts as an intermediary between the spirits of the past, between Virgil and young people engrossed in rock, who slide around on skateboards on the narrow pavements of western cities. The honest writer must combine the ugliness of life with ‘the beauty it possesses in his work.’” “Fire” (trans. Renata Gorczynski, Tremor, 1985): “Probably I am an ordinary middle-class believer in individual rights, the word ‘freedom’ is simple to me, it doesn’t mean the freedom of any class in particular. Politically naive, with an average education (brief moments of clear vision are its main nourishment), I remember the blazing appeal of that fire which parches the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing those songs and I know how great it is to run with others; later, by myself, with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard the lie’s ironic voice and the choir screaming and when I touched my head I could feel the arched skull of my country, its hard edge.”   The exchange with the Spaniard concludes with the interviewer asking a fairly fatuous question: “To what extent should poets have firm and clear opinions about contemporary problems?” Zagajewski replies: “They must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don't think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.”   Zagajewski would have turned eighty today.  He was born in Lwów a month after the conclusion of the war in Europe. He died at age seventy-five in Kraków on March 21, 2021.

“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”  An interesting gauge of human sensibility, a sort of litmus test to judge personality and values, might be to place your subject in a large, well-stocked library (or bookstore), wire him for blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance, brain activity, etc., and monitor his reactions, followed by a questionnaire to be completed by the subject: Are you frightened? Do you wish to run away? Do you feel bliss? Boredom? Reverence?   The reverent one quoted above is Winston Churchill in “Hobbies,” one of twenty-three essays collected in Thoughts and Adventures (Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1932). This is the man who, while stationed in India from 1896 to 1898 read all 4,000 pages of Gibbon during his daily leisure time, followed by Gibbon’s autobiography, Macaulay’s six-volume History of England, the Lays of Ancient Rome, Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and volumes by Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin and Adam Smith, among others. Such heroic reading seems like preparation for the eventual forty-three books in seventy-two volumes Churchill would write, making him a rare deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.   Today we can’t imagine a world leader -- or even an English major -- who reads and writes on such a Victorian scale. Churchill confirms the truth of an observation made by Dr. Johnson, as recounted by Boswell: “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Churchill continues in the essay, describing his own reactions to a library visit:   “‘A few books,’ which was Lord Morley’s definition of anything under five thousand, may give a sense of comfort and even of complacency. But a day in a library, even of modest dimensions, quickly dispels these illusory sensations. As you browse about, taking down book after book from the shelves and contemplating the vast, infinitely-varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved, pride, even in its most innocent forms, is chased from the heart by feelings of awe not untinged with sadness. As one surveys the mighty array of sages, saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers whose treasures one will never be able to admire—still less enjoy—the brief tenure of our existence here dominates mind and spirit.”   Churchill convinces us he is a genuine bookman. We’ve all been taken in by frauds who brag of having read libraries, or at least the fashionable titles of the day – a deception especially common among politicians. But Churchill has the dedicated reader’s understanding that reading is deeply idiosyncratic, as individual as DNA, a reflection of who we truly are not who we wish the world to think we are:   “‘What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”

Last week Nige wrote about a book previously unknown to me: The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rev. 1922) by Holbrook Jackson. I’ve read only Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and browsed in some of his other book-related titles. I bought the Anatomy in 1998 from a used bookstore near the University of Chicago and soon gave up annotating because too many pages hold memorable aphorisms or allusions that demand to be followed. Not that my pleasure was unmixed. Jackson (1874-1948) cultivates a cloyingly tweedy persona, a variation on the unworldly English eccentric. He’s fond of archaisms. He often writes in a pastiche of seventeenth-century prose, aping Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, as he acknowledges.  The Eighteen Nineties is a better-written, more focused and disciplined work, devoted to an era Jackson lived through as a young man. The Nineties in literature tends to be treated as a homogenous period when dandyism and an occasional taste for decadence ruled. Jackson makes clear that Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Francis Thompson, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and early Wells and Conrad, among others, are a diversified bunch, no monolith. He writes:   “The use of strange words and bizarre images was but another outcome of the prevalent desire to astonish. At no period in English history had the obvious and the commonplace been in such disrepute. The age felt it was complex and sought to interpret its complexities, not by simplicity . . .”   Jackson dedicates his book to Max Beerbohm and devotes Chap. VII, “The Incomparable Max,” to him. At his best, Beerbohm is sui generis, a master ironist and writer of prose, unlike any of the other writers Jackson looks at. His masterpieces are the essays he produced after the Nineties, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially those collected in And Even Now (1920). Jackson writes:   “First and foremost, he represents a point of view. And, secondly, that point of view is in no sense a novelty in a civilised society. Every age has had its representative of a similar attitude towards life, in one a Horace, in another a Joseph Addison and, again, a Charles Lamb. In our age it is Max Beerbohm. He is the spirit of urbanity incarnate; he is town. He is civilisation hugging itself with whimsical appreciation for a conservative end.”   Jackson gets Beerbohm and places him in the history of the essay: “It does not matter what he writes about: his subjects interest because he is interesting. A good essayist justifies any subject, and Max Beerbohm as an essayist is next in succession to Charles Lamb. His essays, and these are his greatest works, are genial invitations to discuss Max, and you discuss him all the more readily and with fuller relish because they are not too explicit; indeed, he is often quite prim.”   Beerbohm is never strident or dogmatic. That would be vulgar and one can’t imagine him ever being vulgar. He respects his readers too much. The literal-minded and humorless need not bother reading him:   “[H]e pays you a delicate compliment by leaving you something to tell yourself; the end of his ellipsis, as in all the great essayists, is yourself. He is quite frank with you, and properly genial; but he is too fastidious to rush into friendship with his readers. They must deserve friendship first. He does not gush.”   The essay, that most formless of forms, is my favorite, providing a voice for those of us who can’t write fiction or poetry. No one does it better than Beerbohm.   “The real Max Beerbohm is, I fancy, an essayist pure and simple, the essay being the inevitable medium for the expression of his urbane and civilised genius. There are, he has told us, a few people in England who are interested in repose as an art. He is, undoubtedly, one of them. But he is also interested in the art of the essay, and his essays are exquisite contributions to that rare art. In them you see revealed the complete Max, interpreting deftly, by means of wit and humour, imagination and scholarship, that ‘uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures,’ to use his own words, which he admits preferable to books, and which, doubtless, he prefers better than any other view in life.”

I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains the Western world and beyond – our languages, values and literary forms, and who we are, whether or not we have read them.  My first Dante was John Ciardi’s Inferno, assigned, remarkably, by our English teacher in tenth grade. This was an American public high school in 1967, when things were already falling apart. On our own, several of us read and discussed the other two-thirds of Ciardi’s Divine Comedy. I’ve since read the Dante translations by Longfellow, Christopher Singleton, Robert and Jean Hollander, Clive James and, most devotedly of late, C.H. Sisson’s blank-verse version. In his review of Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, the American poet Andrew Frisardi notes the poem's continued popularity among common readers and translators: “Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be. . . . Dante's poem is many things, but first of all it is a gripping read. It pulls the reader in with its lively language and rhythms.” That has been my experience.   In a post from December 2009, I described my middle son’s first acquaintance with Dante. He’s now twenty-four, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and is visiting Italy with his younger brother for the first time. On Monday in Florence they toured the Dante Museum:      I know from my life and from my son’s that literary interests can enter dormant periods, all the while evolving and storing energy for future returns. About a decade ago I first read Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy, published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante. In his introduction, “On Translating Dante,” Sisson writes:   “. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”   Dante seems eternally housed in our memory and imagination. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath or the fight between Achilles and Hector.   Frisardi is a translator of Italian poetry, including Dante’s Vita Nova and the first fully annotated translation of his Convivio. In his 2020 poetry collection, The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press), Frisardi includes a beautiful Dantean sonnet originally a part of Vita Nova:   “You pilgrims walking by oblivious, Your minds, it seems, on something not at hand, Can you have come from such a distant land— The way you look suggests as much to us— That you’re not weeping, even as you pass Right through the suffering city, like that band Of people who, it seems, don’t understand A thing about the measure of its loss?   “If you’ll just stop, because you want to hear About it all—so says my sighing heart— Your eyes will fill with tears before you leave. For she who blessed the city is nowhere In sight: what words about her we impart Have force enough to make a stranger grieve.”   Frisardi adds a note: “Dante places this sonnet in the penultimate episode of his prosimetrum the Vita Nova, where not long after Beatrice’s death he sees pilgrims passing through Florence on the way to Rome. ‘She who blessed the city’ translates lowercase beatrice, which means she who blesses.’” [Photos by David Kurp.]