In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and critics the following question: “To what book published in the past ten years do you find yourself going back--or thinking back--most often?” I take the question personally because I turned thirteen that year and was already discovering contemporary literature, especially American fiction. If it’s possible to characterize the general sense of most of the responses, I would call them trendy, topical, pre-approved, fashion-conscious and largely, after sixty years, ephemeral. A similar pattern would be seen today. John Barth is honest and audaciously self-serving, naming his own early novels but graciously citing Pale Fire and Jorge Luis Borges’ stories (two of my own unsolicited votes from that era). Anthony Burgess likewise names Nabokov’s novel.  Too many responses are ridiculous – E.B. White’s essays, for instance, and Joseph Heller’s cartoon-novel, Catch-22. Some are merely boring – two votes for John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Teilhard de Chardin gets two votes. I’m reminded of the late D.G. Myers’ ten-year rule – not reviewing books until at least a decade has passed after publication. Otherwise, we risk errant idiocy.   Not all the responses are silly. Poet William Meredith names Auden’s prose collection The Dyer’s Hand. Walter Allen picks The Less Deceived (1955) by Philip Larkin, a rare choice endorsed by the subsequent six decades. Allen writes:   “[I]t is poetry of a remarkably pure kind, rooted in the actual and the unexceptional, although the unexceptional in this sense is very rare in poetry. I can think of no poet since Hardy in whom there is a more resolute honesty, a stronger determination to be himself, warts and all; and in a number of poems in The Less Deceived--in ‘Church Going’ most clearly perhaps--Larkin seems to me not inferior to Hardy.”

Occasionally one encounters two writers, each unknown to the other, expressing sentiments similar but varied enough to define their differences. There’s no question of influence or plagiarism. The first is C.H. Sisson, the English poet/critic/translator, explaining his tastes in reading at the start of his eighth decade. The interview appears in PN Review 39, as part of a 1984 Festschrift celebrating Sisson’s seventieth birthday:  “I like books of observation, memoirs, letters, anything that tells how people actually lived. Truth is certainly better than fiction, if you can get a bit of it.”   The other is William Maxwell, the American novelist, in his note introducing The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (1989), who says he didn’t review fiction for The New Yorker, where he served as fiction editor for forty years. That would have been a "busman's holiday":   “[D]iaries, memoirs, published correspondence, biography and autobiography . . . do not spring from prestidigitation or require a long apprenticeship. They tell what happened—what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.”   In his introduction to the 1997 edition of The Outermost Dream, Maxwell writes: “[S]tyle is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.” He often used the expression “breath of life” to describe the quality he most often looked for in books. Perhaps the common motivator here is age. I recognize this in myself – a hunger for the raw matter of life one finds in diaries, letters and other literary forms that are not forms. It’s their casualness, spontaneity, inadvertence and off-the-cuff observation that sometimes makes more formal, polished work so intriguing. I remember one of my philosophy professors saying if he could choose between a previously unknown dialogue of Plato’s and a transcript of conversation on an Athens street in the fourth century B.C., he would choose the latter.   I’ve been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters, part of my long-delayed discovery of that writer. Here he is on July 24, 1879, writing to Edmund Gosse:   “But who wrote the review of my book? whoever he was, he cannot write; he is humane, but a duffer; I could weep when I think of him; for surely to be virtuous and incompetent is a hard lot. I should prefer to be a bold pirate, the gay sailor-boy of immorality, and a publisher at once.”

Mike Juster tells me Jane Greer – “North Dakota Jane” – a gifted poet with an ever-ready sense of humor, has died, age seventy-two. In her final Tweet, Jane wrote on July 3: “I’ve been in the hospital and am not sure when they’ll release me. I have diverticulitis and a perforated colon. Prayers appreciated. Personally, I’m praying for and dreaming of large full cups of ice water.” After that, nothing. On July 4 I wrote to her in an email: “If you're still in the hospital tonight, I hope you can at least hear the fireworks.” More silence. I find no obituary as yet posted online.  The truest way to honor a dead writer is to read her work and keep it alive. Jane sent me signed copies of her most recent books, both published by Lambing Press: Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know it is Falling Away (2022). Collected in the latter volume is “First Elegy,” about the death of a mother by cancer, originally published in First Things in 1994. After surgery and chemotherapy, implacable death returns:   “We had barred all the doors to Death, so Death came in the window, bit through her heart in a moment, she was that easy to undo. It was no big deal to Death, so nonchalant, sure of itself,   “it knew lots of ways to do it, clever mongrel puppy worrying a rag, one eye on us, but the rag was mother, she's ruined now, we cannot press her back together, and our displeasure makes no difference. Death is happy.   Greer reminds us: “my relatives have all caught Death, sooner or later, / it’s in our chromosomes, it runs in the family.” She concludes the poem:   “.. . . she’s gone, she was here and then gone, and we seem to keep forgetting, she can’t mix us an old-fashioned, or buy us a perfect present, what we had is all we have, what we thought was forever isn’t, we phone each other often, but Death is always on call-waiting.”   I wrote about Jane and her work here, here and here.

With an old friend I was reminiscing about the remarkably stupid things we did when young. Neither of us had much money when we were students – this was in the early seventies – and we didn’t own cars. To travel any significant distance, we thought nothing of hitchhiking. I often rode across the state on the Ohio Turnpike. The distance from Bowling Green to Youngstown was 180 miles. The typical driver was a young male, often a fellow student.  Once a guy picked me up who wore his hair in a crewcut. That was noteworthy in 1972. He was about my age, lanky and wore a white t-shirt tucked into blue jeans. In retrospect, I picture him as Charles Starkweather. Mostly he delivered a monologue about himself. He had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps and bragged about it. Life had been very unfair to him. That was his favorite theme. I was bored but not particularly frightened until he pulled up the right leg of his jeans and removed from his boot a long, thin knife. He pointed out the groove that ran up the length of the blade and told me that was to make it easier for the blood to drain.   I was seated beside him on the front seat. He never pointed the knife at me or overtly threatened me with it, but clearly he was playing out some obscure narrative in his head. He was almost gleeful. After a while when his inner weather eased, he put the knife away and returned to his monologue. He let me off near Cleveland and I resumed hitchhiking.   In Walking Backward (1999), the late Paul Lake has a poem titled “Two Hitchhikers” in which the speaker and a friend pick up the title characters:            “And when they spoke, it was with more than words. I heard a sudden snickering of steel, Then saw the knife blade nipping my friend’s ribs As he clutched the wheel, and sensed near my own chin The warm unsteady hand poised at my throat And just the slightest kiss of silvery blade.”   The driver and his friend are let go safely, after indulging fantasies of mayhem – attempted escape, a fumbling brawl, murder. The hitchhikers just wanted a lift to the liquor store. Lake ends his poem like this:   “That's how a tale should end--in dizzying laughter, Though some won’t be arranged to end that way.”