Sometimes all it takes for me to pull a book off the shelf is a provocative or otherwise interesting title. While retrieving a collection of William H. Pritchard’s reviews in the university library I noticed a nearby slender volume titled In Praise of the Half-Forgotten and Other Ruminations. My first thought: what a fine epitaph could be made of that, and I too am one of nature’s ruminators. The author is George Brandon Saul (1901-86). The book was published by Bucknell University Press in 1976. I know little about Saul except that he taught English for many years at the University of Connecticut and often wrote about Yeats and other Irish writers.  The book title attracts me because “half-forgotten” books attract me. Of course, most books today are on the way to being fully forgotten. A writer’s reputation, a nebulous thing at best, is often manufactured by marketers, publicists and malleable critics; not the true critics, the only ones who matter, serious readers. Saul says he hopes his books “may help plug a few holes in literary history.” His title essay consists of brief reviews – he calls them “critical brevities” – of six poets, only one of whom I’ve ever heard of – Dubose Hayward (author of the 1925 novel Porgy, the source of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess).   Saul devotes essays to the criticism of James Stephens, the poetry of A.E, Coppard, English metrics, the poems of Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, A.E. Housman, and Stevenson and Henley as lyricists. Many fine writers but none critically or academically fashionable, except perhaps Housman for extra-literary reasons. I’m especially pleased that Saul includes “Autumn Nights: The Prose of Alexander Smith.” If remembered at all, Smith (1830-67), a Scot, is remembered as a poet but he excels as an essayist. The book to find is Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (1863). Like his mentors Montaigne and Charles Lamb, Smith may be an egotist, yes, but a benign egotist, as contradictory as that sounds. His work starts with self but extends outward to absorb the bigger, more interesting world. Egotism is not the same as narcissism. Among Smith’s essays is “On the Writing of Essays,” with observations readily applicable to blogs:   “The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with.”   For further confirmation of Smith’s naturalness and literary sophistication as an essayist, read this from “A Shelf in My Bookcase” on the virtues of Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “It is quite impossible to over-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your existence.”   Saul tells about half the story when he describes Smith as “a lover of simplicity and quiet, of gentleness and village gossip, of books and meditation in still gardens.”

The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of other living creatures who too will die in turn, and yet we press them hard against the body of the world, against each other’s bodies, against the canvas and the keyboard and the cambium of life. This is the cruel contract of all experience, of aliveness itself — that in order to have it, we must agree to let it… read article

Eric McHenry investigates a century-old crime preserved in music The post What Lies Beneath the Levee Camp Holler appeared first on The American Scholar.

“In those days when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of holyday ramblers, I have been a visitor there. Though a boy, I was not altogether insensible of the misery of the poor captives, nor destitute of feeling for them.”  The English poet William Cowper, a veteran of multiple suicide attempts and confinements in asylums, describes a common eighteenth-century recreation: viewing the “antics” of the insane for entertainment in Bedlam. He’s writing to his friend the Rev. William Newton on July 19, 1784:   “But the madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so.”   I’m skeptical of any claims of moral progress, though by the late twentieth century touring the nut house seems to have been curtailed  as an entertainment option. Of course, today we have “reality television,” professional sports and the drug-addled and schizophrenic homeless on the street. A man could earn a respectable living by corralling such people in an updated version of the carnival sideshow.   As a kid, the closest I came to such spectacle was the Cuyahoga County Fair in Berea, Ohio. Some time in the early sixties my brother and I were seduced into viewing the Giant Rat of Sumatra, behind walls of painted canvas. The barker’s pitch I still remember: “Live, livin’ and breathin'.” All I recall seeing is a fat rat in a pit filled with saw dust. As a bonus we viewed an enormously tall, skinny man dressed in cowboy duds and a tiny woman seated beside him. I think of her when I reread Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget. I recall an overwhelming sense of sadness – people living narrow, blighted lives.  The sadness has its origin in the understanding that in the future I might join them.

In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelves stubbornly remote from utility, lacking the intimacy of possession, and a third in which I had never read a key section. The first was Peter Handke's Crossing the Sierra del Gredos, a 472-page novel narrated by a writer employed by financial operative to write something about her and which I abandoned eighteen years ago retaining no memory of its content. This time, I read page after page in a reverie of detachment. 1 Then there was Geoffrey Hill's collected poems Broken Hierarchies, a book whose word choice and subject matter is fiercely English and Christian or, perhaps more accurately, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon, which despite being English and culturally Christian, remains alien to me. Why did I think a huge edition like this presented and read in chronological order would enable something previously declined? No doubt I assumed from immersion some sort of knowledge or at least familiarity was to be gained. Perhaps I might draw closer to the distinction of my ancestral lands. Reading from where I left off provoked the same cool reverie and with it the assumption of gain fell away. Thirdly, there were the pages prefacing Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation: italicised dialogue and commentary I have always skipped, or read without memory of having read, in a book otherwise opened so often it is held together by masking tape; skipped not only because of the tightly-bound typeface – why do italicised paragraphs repel our eyes? – but because they are abstract and anonymous; there is no listing in the table of contents and no names or titles cited to orientate us within a recognisable discourse, only mundane and hyperbolic expressions of weariness and what weariness means in context. If I were to insert an example quotation here it would only to betray what I began writing this to say, and indeed to name these books let alone summarise them obscures what I experienced.  In this empty time such reading, hardly reading at all actually, closer to passive looking, attentive only to the space opening before my eyes in the steady progress of lines and sentences, I chanced upon what felt like the pure mode of literature, an experience apart, an effortless drift from rational comprehension into the enchantment of a pale expanse, with no wish continue and no wish to stop.   Note  The original title is Der Bildverlust, oder, Durch die Sierra del Gredos. Why FSG chose to exclude the first part of the title, coined it appears by this novel and which translates as The Loss of Images, is unknown, but predictable (later we saw it with Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady reduced by Jonathan Cape to Montano). Imagine a German edition of Melville's novel abridged to Der Wal.↩