Robert Penn Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975):  “The will to change: this is one of the most precious heritages of American democracy. We have the story of the young Washington, who studied surveying and could, by the exercise of his skill, buy ‘Bullskin plantation,’ his first one, at the age of sixteen. Thus far he had merely changed his condition. But he had the will to change himself as well, and with the same furious energy, he studied the Roman Stoics that he might achieve the admirable character he desired.”   This is part of the folklore I grew up with, like the story of young Washington and his cherry tree. I don’t consciously remember learning any of this. The lives and thought of the early presidents were like holy writ, to be studied and emulated. The first book I wrote as a kid was a collection of presidential biographies (through Kennedy), each one-page long, handwritten on lined paper, happily cribbed from encyclopedias. Perhaps this accounts for my enduring sense of patriotism, a devotion to the American ideals, despite all our all-too-human errors. Warren continues:   “So we have the long list of autodidacts, including Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Dreiser — men who, with all their failings and complications, willed a change deeper than that of an objective condition. We admire those autodidacts, but the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”   All too true, even half a century ago. The embodiment of the autodidactic approach to life for me is Eric Hoffer (1902-83). He started as a migrant worker in the West, worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco and wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), an essential guide to the world we inhabit today. I first encountered him at age fifteen. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, and moved on to his books. My father was an ironworker and high-school dropout; my mother, a tax clerk. No one in my family had gone to college. I felt an immediate personal identification with Hoffer. He was my first model of autodidacticism, proof that education was up to me.   I’m reading Daniel J. Flynn’s Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011). Flynn devotes a chapter to Hoffer, calling him “the definitional autodidact.” He wrote prose that got “straight to the point. Efficient and crisp. Hoffer’s words stood out against the opaque, verbose, circuitous style that increasingly characterized the prose of intellectuals. If readers found his style original it was because they had never come across French writers—Pascal, Montaigne, Renan, de la Rochefoucauld—whom he imitated.”   Hoffer was part of the reason I wanted to write and why I became a newspaper reporter. He was no snob. He seemed from the start like the kind of guy I could talk to.

We like a neat and predictable understanding of our fellows. No surprises. An honest man never lies and an angry man is never forgiving -- convictions rooted in naïveté about human nature, which is willful and contradictory. Few of us even understand our own motives. Here is James Boswell writing of his friend in May 1775:  “I passed many hours with him on the 17th, of which I find all my memorial is, ‘much laughing.’ It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularity and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily. We may suppose, that the high relish of a state so different from his habitual gloom, produced more than ordinary exertions of that distinguishing faculty of man, which has puzzled philosophers so much to explain.”   I can hear the chorus of amateur psychologists: “bipolar.” After all, every human complexity can be “solved” and even “cured.” There’s plenty of precedent for funny men living in “perpetual gloom.” S.J. Perelman nominates himself in everything he ever wrote, including the Marx Brothers scripts. Think of Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce. To paraphrase a very funny and serious man, Kingsley Amis, the opposite of funny is not serious but unfunny. Take this untitled epigram by X.J. Kennedy:   “Have I ‘matured’ at last? My blood congeals.  Have I so soon discarded my ideals?”   The humor is in the adolescent defiance of the couplet and the reader's recognition of himself in its lines. And another one, “A Farting Babbler,” also from the Fall 1992 issue of The Classical Outlook:   “His gaseous anus, though it give offense,  Comes closer than his mouth to making sense.”   We all know the type, which despite conventional wisdom is not limited to politicians. Fill in the blank. One more, about the incestuous world of writers, especially poets:   “Swap got a wildly favorable review Written, of course, by some kiss-ass he knew To whose last work he’d suckled up in turn. Better to marry, said St. Paul, than burn.”   Happy birthday, Joe. Kennedy, our funniest serious poet, turns ninety-five today. Boswell continues the passage above from his Life of Johnson like this: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’”

“If you will look in on me sometime in the summer of 2026, I may be able to tell you whether my things are going to last.”  This is Edwin Arlington Robinson at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, writing to a friend on August 20, 1926. In effect he is proposing a fanciful literary experiment, and there was a time when I would have said he was being disingenuous. Of course his best work would survive, I thought, along with Emily Dickinson’s, T.S. Eliot’s and Yvor Winters’. But the culture has moved on and most of us no longer value poetry and other forms of literature as central to our values. We are, in effect, rejecting ourselves and the inheritance that made us. I’ll wager that Robinson is seldom taught in American high schools and universities, apart from "Richard Cory," thanks to Simon and Garfunkel.   Like many writers, Robinson’s character mingled thoughtfulness and modesty with egotism. What distinguishes him from most is his determination to remain his own man. No one owns him. In his poems and letters I detect no slavish following of fashion and no rah-rah politics. As a poet, he never raises his voice or turns hectoring. His stance as a solitary, diffident man and artist with, ironically perhaps, a gift for friendship, is likely unique in American literary history. He once told a correspondent: “I never could find any poetry in gathering apples. It is the worst work I know except washing dishes and listening to a debate.” Among his childhood chores in Gardiner, Maine, was picking apples in his family’s orchard.   Take one of Robinson’s finest poems, “Isaac and Archibald,” from Captain Craig: A Book of Poems (1902). It reads like a short story (he wrote fiction before writing poetry). Yvor Winters described it as “a kind of New England pastoral and is extraordinarily lovely.” It encourages us to inhabit the lives of four characters – the old men of the title, the narrator and his younger self. This arrangement of sympathetic ties mirrors life and the way we preserve it and transform it in memory. Robinson’s poem is closer to the way a great novelist works – say, Tolstoy or James – than to a typical lyrical poet. Here is Isaac speaking of himself in the third person, as though he were already dead, urging the narrator to remember; the narrator’s act of remembrance as a man of the boy he was; and the boy’s tacit sense that Isaac’s words are important and deserve to be remembered:   “’Look at me, my boy, And when the time shall come for you to see That I must follow after him, try then To think of me, to bring me back again, Just as I was to-day. Think of the place Where we are sitting now, and think of me— Think of old Isaac as you knew him then, When you set out with him in August once To see old Archibald.’—The words come back Almost as Isaac must have uttered them, And there comes with them a dry memory Of something in my throat that would not move.”   Robinson’s imaginative projection into people unlike himself makes our human sympathy possible. Put bluntly, we want to know who these people are, why they do what they do, and why we share so much with them.   In February 1996, Robinson writes to his friend Harry De Forest Smith: “Three or four days ago, I took the liberty to borrow Henry James’s The Lesson of the Master and have read it to find that H. J. is a genius. No smaller word will do it for the man, who produced such work as this. Did you read it? If you didn’t, you must. If there is any more of his stuff out there let me know, and I shall try to read it, though I must take a rest for a time.” I savor the notion of reading Henry James’ “stuff.” Winters writes of Robinson in his 1946 monograph devoted to the poet:   “[H]is closest spiritual relatives, at least in America, are to be found in the writers of fiction and of history in his generation and the two or three generations preceding. I have called attention to his having certain more or less Jamesian vices as a narrator, but I am thinking now of his virtues: of the plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued irony, the high seriousness and the stubborn persistence. In respect to one or another of these qualities, one may find him related to such a mind as that of Henry James, but perhaps more obviously to Edith Wharton and [John Lathrop] Motley and Francis Parkman, and perhaps even at times to Henry Adams. He is, it seems to me, the last great American writer of their tradition, and not the first of a later one; and the fact that he writes verse is incidental . . . . Robinson is more closely comparable to the great masters of prose than to the minor poets.”   I think of another Maine native, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), and her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Her narrator observes: “In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”

Eccentricity, it appears, is an inheritable trait, like dimples and hemophilia. Take the case of the Sitwells. I know Dame Edith and her brothers, Sir Osbert and Sir Sacheverell, largely by reputation, and they impress me as an eccentric English phenomenon that has never successfully crossed the Atlantic. Dame Edith, the family poet, even published an amusing volume of prose, The English Eccentrics (1933).  Until recently I knew nothing about their father, Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943), who is clearly responsible for passing along the eccentricity gene. Inevitably, he is identified as an antiquary, a vast sub-category among eccentrics. Sir Harold Acton, no mean eccentric himself, described Sir George as “the strangest old bugger you ever met.” Even Dame Edith and Sir Osbert judged Daddy as the oddest of ducks and not always a pleasant fellow. In her 1965 autobiography Taken Care Of, Dame Edith said of her mother and father: “[T]hey were parents I would not recommend to anybody.” “I doubt,” wrote Sir Osbert of his sister in his five-volume autobiography, “whether any child was ever more mismanaged by her parents.” One of Sir George’s books was titled Idle Fancies in Prose and Verse. In the fourth volume of his autobiography, Laughter in the Next Room (1948), Sir Osbert writes of his father:   “The general atmosphere, which was always menacing, the interruptions, the scenes, the surprises, and the ambushes laid, the fussing, the necessity my father felt both for consulting and contradicting me, the economies, the extravagances, all put it beyond possibility to write a line when he was in the house.”   In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Sir George served as a Conservative politician in the House of Commons. He banned electricity in his house until the nineteen-forties. Visitors were issued candles. His only sustenance late in life was roasted chicken. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography refers to “his active, inventive, but erratic mind,” and quotes Sir George as saying, “I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.”   Sir George redesigned the garden at Renishaw Hall, the family seat in Derbyshire. In 1909 he purchased the Castello di Montegufoni, near Florence, restored the building and made it his residence in 1925. That same year he published On the Making of Gardens, republished in 1949. On this date, August 19, in 1951, Marianne Moore – a benign example of American eccentricity -- reviewed the new edition in the New York Times Book Review. She writes:   “Poetic implacability was never seen to better advantage than in the style of Sir George Sitwell, in which nicety is barbed with a kind of decorous ferocity, as when he says, ‘Forgery in art is not a crime unless it fails to deceive.’”   Moore recognizes the eccentricity of Sir George’s thinking in the garden book: “Sir George Sitwell shows us in this glittering treatise how to look at what we see; his stately observations are applicable to small as well as to great gardens; and throughout, an inescapable lesson is afforded us—that discipline results in freedom.”   One way to gauge the liberality of a nation is to examine its treatment of eccentrics, even those who are not themselves liberal-minded. Using that measure, twentieth-century England comes off as an often marvelously tolerant place.   [Moore’s review can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]

A friend tells me he and three other men have for a decade met monthly for lunch and conversation. All work or worked in the past for the same government agency in Washington, D.C. Conversation tended toward the traditionally male – politics, sports, health. Inevitably, opinions differed but relations remained amicable until recently. One of the four failed to show up two months in a row. Why? It turns out he was boycotting the lunches because of politics. In a word, Trump. I suspect the same thing is happening all over the country, even within families. As I wrote to my friend:  “I hate what politics does to people. Or, rather, what people do with politics, making it divisive, using it as a weapon. It could, of course, just as well be religion or baseball. It's beyond my understanding.”   People get angry when they want to exercise or recover a sense of power, even among friends and loved ones. Some take differences of opinion very personally. They feel snubbed or dismissed. A psychiatrist, of all people, states an immutable truth in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949):   “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”   My reaction to my friend’s situation is a sense of sadness that someone would sacrifice long-standing friendship on something as ultimately inconsequential as politics. People are more important than their opinions. The only way to reach a respectful equilibrium with people holding opinions unlike our own is to talk about it. In a passage from 1944, Michael Oakeshott writes in Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014, Imprint Academic):   “We live in an age of dogmatism, which has only to continue in the way it is going, to bring us to a new dark age of enlightenment: what may save us is conversation.”