The Joy of Reading

chapter thirteen

Entre Deux Guerres

Entre deux guerres—the French phrase literally means “between two wars,” but it meant more than that at the time. World War I ended on November 11, 1918, when the guns were silenced on the Western Front. World War II, the second stage, began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, a country that the so-called Allies had agreed to protect. But in fact the war had never really stopped during those twenty-one short years of uneasy peace. Beginning as early as 1925, Germany had begun to rearm, as had France. England failed to take the threat seriously, and Americans of America First said there was no threat at all, a claim that President Roosevelt could not accept. They seemed to be proven right when no general hostilities broke out for six months, until, that is, Germany, in a lightning stroke, attacked France and forced her to her knees. Then most people realized that the big war was definitely on again, a fact that every American recognized when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

W.H. Auden, in his poem titled “September 1, 1939,” began by saying he was “…uncertain and afraid, As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” We were all afraid—myself included, since I was thirteen in 1939 and eighteen in 1944. E.B. White once wrote that “the worst thing that can happen to a man is to have a son twenty years before a world war.” That’s what happened to my father, and his hair turned white almost overnight. I survived the war and so did he. But I recall vividly the almost weekly advertisements in the New Yorker of an organization called “The Society for the Prevention of World War Two.” The photographs depicted the horrors of World War I and the text pleaded for political action as the threat of a new universal holocaust became more and more clear.

Despite that, many of the authors represented in this chapter, all but one of whom were born a few years before 1900, seemed to be able to concentrate on their own business, not that of the world. In many cases this business was fantasy or escapism. And why not? If the world was intent on destroying itself, as it almost did, wouldn’t it be sensible to have a little fun? The past and the future were both terrifying to think about, but somewhere, somehow, “there’s a helluva good universe next door,” as E.E. Cummings said in one of his poems, adding: “Let’s go!”

EUGEN HERRIGEL

1884–1955

Zen in the Art of Archery

Eugen Herrigel was born in Germany in 1884. A philosopher, he went to Japan during the 1930s to teach Western philosophy at the University of Tokyo and while there devoted himself to the study of Zen Buddhism. He did so by becoming a student of the Zen art of archery, which is the subject of his small book Zen in the Art of Archery.

Herrigel had long been interested, he tells us, in mysticism, and particularly in the type of mysticism that is associated with the East and Buddhism. And he supposed that it would not be so very difficult for him, who had studied and come to understand the philosophy of Kant and of Hegel, to study and comprehend the philosophy of Zen. But this, he discovered, would not be so.

Herrigel was fortunate to be accepted as a pupil by the great Master Kenzo Awa, who was regarded as perhaps the leading teacher of the art of archery in Japan. The lessons began with a description of the bow and the arrow, a description couched in strange and mystical phrases and sentences that Herrigel thought he understood but did not. The Master then stood, drew the bow, and released the arrow. It flew toward the target. He then asked Herrigel to do the same.

It looked easy. Obviously it was easy for the Master. But it was not easy for Herrigel, as he soon realized. In fact it was impossible. He could not draw the bow, in the accepted and traditional manner, without suffering pain and distress in the muscles of his arms and back. The position seemed strained and awkward. When he was finally able to release the arrow it never went where he expected or wanted it to.

He struggled for months to draw the bow in the right way. Only when he became desperate and asked for help in a humble spirit did the Master inform him that his trouble was that he did not know how to breathe. Many more months were required to learn how to breathe, but when he was finally able to do so he found that he also was now able to draw the bow, effortlessly and without pain.

Herrigel asked a friend why the Master had not told him about breathing at the very beginning. “A great Master,” his friend replied, “must also be a great teacher. Had he begun the lessons with breathing exercises he would never have been able to convince you that you owe them anything decisive. You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you.” Learning to breathe took Herrigel more than a year.

He could now draw the bow, but every time he released the arrow his right arm flew back from the string and his body was shaken, and the arrow flew erratically. Why, he wondered, could he not release the arrow as the Master did? He practiced for many months. Finally he became aware that the Master was trying to tell him, in various ways that he had considered enigmatic, that his problem was that he was trying to shoot the arrow, when in fact the arrow must shoot itself. One day he asked the Master:

“How can the shot be loosed if ‘I’ do not do it?” “‘It’ shoots,” he replied.

“And who or what is this ‘It’?”

“Once you have understood that, you will have no further need of me,” the Master said. “And if I tried to give you a clue at the cost of your own experience, I would be the worst of teachers.”

It took Herrigel more than three years to learn to release the arrow properly—or rather, to be able to wait patiently until the arrow released itself.

Not until then did he and the small class of which he was a member begin to shoot at a target. Here again there were puzzles and contradictions for this Western man. Although the Master always struck the target in the black (its central part), he did not seem even to look at the target when he shot (his eyes were more than half closed), and he insisted that it did not matter if his pupils hit it. “You can be a Master even if your arrows never hit the target,” he told them.

Master of what? Herrigel wondered. But he was beginning to understand. The Zen art of archery is not the art of shooting an arrow at a target and always hitting it—or, most abominable of misunderstandings, the art of striking nearer to the center than an opponent in a competition. Instead, it is—well, I shall not try to say. Herrigel is able to say, or to suggest what it is, and why it was so terribly important for him to learn the art, and why, in his opinion (he became a Master himself, after many years), it is terribly important for all Western men and women to learn it. If you wish to understand this yourself, you must read Zen and the Art of Archery, which will take you an hour—or study the Zen art, which will take you at least six years. The latter is preferable, but you may not have the time, and in that case the book is an excellent substitute. Reading it sympathetically and with understanding will make you better at whatever you do best.

ISAK DINESEN

1885–1962

Seven Gothic Tales

Karen Christence Dinesen was born in Denmark in 1885, the daughter of a family with ties to the old Danish nobility. In 1914 she married her cousin, Baron Blixen-Finecke, and went with him to Africa, where they established a coffee plantation in Kenya. Her aristocratic husband paid her little interest, but unfortunately he gave her a case of syphilis, which tormented her body for the rest of her life. They were divorced in 1921. She attempted to keep the plantation going, but falling world coffee prices bankrupted her by 1931. She returned to Denmark and wrote Out of Africa (1937), a moving account of life on the plantation and of her parting from it and from those who had served and worked with her during the African years.

She had been writing stories, too, and she began to publish them in a series of collections that attracted a passionate following. The stories in Seven Gothic Tales are set in a past without a date except that it is just out of reach, just beyond the memory of living persons—at any rate, in an older world that is now gone, where honor was of first importance and promises were kept both by gods and by men. The stories are complex, often containing, in forty or fifty pages, two or three levels of subplot: in short, stories within stories. Interspersed among the narratives, which are packed so tight that there hardly seems to be room for them, are asides and comments of great interest. For example:

“God,” she said, “when he created Adam and Eve, arranged it so that man takes, in these matters, the part of a guest and woman that of a hostess. Therefore man takes love lightly, for the honor and dignity of his house is not involved therein. And you can also, surely, be a guest to many people to whom you would never want to be a host. Now, tell me, Count, what does a guest want?” “I believe,” said Augustus, when he had thought for a moment, “that if we do, as I think we ought to here, leave out the crude guest, who comes to be regaled, takes what he can get and goes away, a guest wants first of all to be diverted, to get out of his daily monotony or worry. Secondly the decent guest wants to shine, to expand himself and impress his own personality upon his surroundings. And thirdly, perhaps, he wants to find some justification for his existence altogether. But since you put it so charmingly, Signora, please tell me now: What does a hostess want?”

“The hostess,” said the young lady, “wants to be thanked.”

Here loud voices outside put an end to their conversation.

That passage comes from the story “The Roads Round Pisa,” which may be the finest of the seven tales. (I’m not sure; I love them all.) The passage is utterly typical, as is this:

I have always thought it unfair to woman that she has never been alone in the world. Adam had a time, whether long or short, when he could wander about on a fresh and peaceful earth, among the beasts, in full possession of his soul, and most men are born with a memory of that period. But poor Eve found him there, with all his claims upon her, the moment she looked into the world. That is a grudge that woman has always had against the Creator: she feels that she is entitled to have that epoch of paradise back for herself.

Aristocracy has become, for us, an almost unintelligible institution. It has become nearly impossible for us to comprehend why any men and women of goodwill (ignoring the proud and the greedy, whose motives are quite understandable) could ever have felt that the social arrangements of the ancien régime were preferable to those of today’s equalitarianism—or egalitarianism, as they themselves would have named it. Our image of aristocrats is formed by Marx Brothers movies in which fat dowagers scowl at idiotic girls who dance with stupid, rich young men. And perhaps that image was the reality at most times and places of the aristocratic past. But aristocracy also conveyed an ideal that could not be conceived by egalitarians: an ideal of excellence, of freedom and ease, of taste and thought and good conversation, of probity and honor beyond everyday standards, of a complete disregard for wealth and a complete regard for a kind of justice based on individual merit. Isak Dinesen would not have been the last to admit that the reality was far from this idea. But the ideal was, in her view, worth remembering as better than anything the modern world can offer. And this is the ideal world of her Seven Gothic Tales.

You may not like them; they may offend you with their insolence, their impatience with mediocrity. I have known persons who disliked Isak Dinesen intensely, and others who were utterly unable to understand and appreciate her. Mind, you do not have to be an aristocrat, or even to desire to live in an aristocracy, to appreciate and understand her. At any rate, it is worth the gamble. If you are made captive, as a steady minority has been, by the tales of Isak Dinesen, you will be in interesting company.

If Seven Gothic Tales pleases you, go on to read Winter’s Tales, a second collection that was published during World War II. Most of these are distinctly inferior to the first seven, but one of them, “Sorrow-acre,” is fully comparable to them, and may in fact be the best of all.

Isak Dinesen died at Rungstedlunch, Denmark, her family home, in 1962. For many years she had been unable to eat much solid food, and she became thinner and thinner as she grew older. When she died she weighed no more than seventy pounds, and those who saw her in the last days had the feeling that she was not dying but simply fading away, passing from this into a better world, the creation of her own vibrant imagination.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

1882–1941

A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a noted critic, and the sister of Vanessa Bell. After their father’s death in 1904 the children moved with their mother to Bloomsbury where they formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group, which included many of the most important English authors and artists of the time. Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1915 and together, partly to allay the bouts of ill health that tormented her, they founded the Hogarth Press, which published many of her and their friends’ books.

Virginia Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. It was realistic, as was the next. But she continued to write novels, and Jacob’s Room, 1922, was recognized as a new development in its poetic impressionism. It was praised by T.S. Eliot and attacked by J.M. Murray for its “lack of plot.” It was followed by Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, published, respectively, in 1925, 1927, and 1931. She continued to write novels, stories, critical essays, many letters, and a diary that was published in six volumes after her death. She was a great writer and a hard worker. She was also very unhappy. She probably suffered from bipolar disorder, a type of schizophrenia, which is characterized by intermittent periods of profound depression and high spirits. She was probably aware in 1941 that a period of depression was imminent when she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the River Ouse, which flowed near her Sussex home, until the water was over her head.

Her death was a shock but not a surprise. For years she had grown more and more distressed by the way the world was going, and especially, perhaps, by the slowness with which the culture of her times was accepting women as writers and artists. She was much more than a mere feminist; she was an earnest student of the history of women in the Western World and a brilliant writer on the subject. Nothing she wrote on it, I think, is more powerful than A Room of One’s Own, a long essay in book form on the subject that was published in 1929. I don’t just recommend it, I urge you to read it, especially Chapter 3, in which Woolf describes what must have been the fate of Shakespeare’s (imaginary) sister who, she supposes, has been born with the same genius as her brother. It would have been impossible for her to write the plays, Woolf argues, for reasons that I think are unassailable.

Unless … Virginia Woolf could not have known about the current research into the life of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke and sister of Sir Philip Sidney. From several points of view her authorship is more credible than that of the Man from Stratford. Even so, it would not undermine Woolf’s brilliant argument. Mary Sidney was an aristocrat, well educated, and highly literate. There was only one of her in her time, and she probably didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays. In any case, you may desire to make up your own mind, but not about the dreadful condition of women in the sixteenth century and for three hundred years after. About that there is no doubt, as Virginia Woolf will make you see.

FRANZ KAFKA

1883–1924

The Trial The Castle

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the son of a gentle, affectionate, intellectual mother and a domineering, coarse, shopkeeper father who created in the imagination of his son a figure that was at once feared, loathed, and admired. Franz studied law and from this gained much material of use to him in his later career, but he did not complete his studies, going to work instead for an insurance company. He was an excellent worker, neat, careful, scrupulous, dependable, and he could have risen far except for his Jewishness and a certain strangeness familiar to his readers. He had suffered from tuberculosis for years when, in 1922, at the age of thirty-eight, he was forced to retire. He died two years later.

He had been writing for a long time—during his last years, at a feverish rate—but he had published hardly anything. In fact almost no one except his close friend Max Brod knew of the large pile of manuscripts hidden away in Kafka’s closet. On his deathbed Kafka demanded that Brod destroy those manuscripts. We must be grateful to Max Brod for his disobedience, else we would never have heard of Franz Kafka and would not have today The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and two or three dozen more of the more remarkable literary productions of the twentieth century.

The world of Kafka’s novels is a dream world, in which nothing ever happens in an ordinary way. In The Trial, the protagonist, Joseph K., suddenly is informed that he has been charged with a serious crime and that he must prepare his defense. What crime, he asks? This is not made clear to him. When and where will the trial take place? This too is not clear. What must he do to defend himself? This is not clear, either. What are his chances of acquittal? They seem not good, but from time to time his spirits are lifted by unreasonable hopes, which in turn are dashed by some further cruel judicial confusion. And the punishment if he is convicted? This alone is absolutely clear: it will be death.

In The Penal Colony, an earlier work of Kafka’s, punishments were inflicted thus: The convicted man was strapped into a bizarre machine, after which another machine began to write his crime upon his poor, tortured body—with death the final and inescapable result. That is terrible enough; but at least the crime is known. In The Trial it is never known. What am I being charged with? K. cries out in terror and longing. The answer may be, with living; or it may be that there is some other mysterious fault, unknown to K., that has placed him in peril of his life. Or is it that he knows very well what he has done and simply refuses, stubbornly, to admit it? We never find out, for The Trial is unfinished; but in fact such a book could not end, for there is no end to such a nightmare—unless we wake up. And Kafka was unable to awake from his dream …

Franz Kafka died before the horrors of twentieth-century judicial terror and torture were well known to the world; indeed, before some of them had been invented. Mussolini had marched on Rome, but Hitler was not yet the master of Germany, and the madness in Stalin’s brain had not yet overcome that most frightful of tyrants. (Kafka’s three sisters were to know the truth about Hitler; all three died in concentration camps during World War II.) Yet all seems to have been evident to the clerk in the Prague insurance office. He knew what was going to happen: the violent knocking on the door in the middle of the night, the absurd charges that are only excuses for torture and murder, the confusions about the place and time of trial, the vain efforts to defend oneself, the hopes that are never finally justified. Kafka is one of the prophets of our age.

The Castle is in many ways similar to The Trial, but it is even better, partly because the author’s skill is greater, the terror is more refined, and there is frequent relief in humor—a happy comic touch that is often surprising in this book. A land surveyor, again named K., has been ordered to report to the Castle, where it is expected that he will find employment. He must make an appointment to see the Baron. But he cannot find out how to do this. He calls the Castle on the telephone but usually his calls do not go through, and when they do there is confusion about who he is and whom he is calling. A secretary? What secretary? The secretary he has reached is not the right one, no one knows about K., his file has been lost, as far as the Castle is concerned he does not exist. But how that can be, K. cries? He has been ordered to report to the Castle. Such things happen, an official replies; there is nothing that can be done about it. He is sorry, but there is other work to do …

K. lives in an inn at the foot of the mountain on which the Castle stands, and his life is not without its pleasures. From time to time he even receives small “expenses” payments from the Castle. Each time this happens he is exhilarated, believing that at last the Castle has recognized, or conceded, that he exists. But these payments should not be interpreted in that way, an official explains. They are quite normal; they would be given to anybody. K. must not think that his dossier has been found or that an appointment has been made, or that one is likely to be made. He must wait; he must take his turn. Probably, the official says, everything will become clear in time, although, he adds, that cannot be guaranteed.

This is another nightmare that Kafka has had for all of us, snared in the red tape of the modern world, mired in the bureaucracy that seems to be our greatest invention. No one ever understood it better than Franz Kafka. If you think because you are a cheerful, good-hearted, law-abiding citizen and pay your taxes that you can escape it, then read The Castle. It will remind you that civilization, as we like to call it, does not solve all problems.

AUSTIN TAPPAN WRIGHT

1883–1931

Islandia

The life story of Austin Tappan Wright is in itself a romance. Born in 1883, in New Hampshire, he began creating his imaginary country, Islandia, occupying “the southern portion of the Karain subcontinent, which lies in the Southern Hemisphere,” while still a child. (His grandfather had also created an imaginary country, and Austin’s younger brother, exiled because of a childish infraction from Islandia, created one of his own.) By the time Wright died in an automobile accident in 1931, there were 2,300 pages of closely handwritten manuscript, including a lengthy discourse on the geography and geology of this country that never existed and a 135,000-word history going back to its imaginary beginnings in the ninth century. All of Wright’s family knew about Islandia almost from birth—the family boat was called Aspara, the Islandian word for seagull—but after Wright’s death some eleven years had to pass before the novel Islandia was published. It appeared in 1942, much cut and edited from the huge original manuscript by one of Wright’s children. It immediately attracted a small but growing following, until it became, during the Sixties, one of the great “underground” novels of the twentieth century. That is as it should be, for Islandia is a minor masterpiece.

Geographically, the country of Islandia is not very large—perhaps about the size of New England—and rather sparsely populated, with about three million people living for the most part on farms and in very small towns. There is one large town, called simply The City. The Islandians are advanced in some respects, being excellent builders, for example; their houses and public buildings are not only beautiful but also constructed for the ages, not the decades (some of the stone houses are a thousand years old); their woven cloth is exquisite in its soft strength and subtle colors; they have excellent doctors and practically no mental disease. In other respects they are very backward: they do not really like city life, and they have no trains, planes, or automobiles, no banks or credit cards, no newspapers or magazines, no radio, television, or cinema, no electronic musical instruments or games, no computers, and no highly refined forms of art. The art of Islandia is living itself; all Islandians are artists of life, paying much attention to how they live and what they live for. Worst of all, from the point of view of the unsympathetic representatives of the great Western nations who figure rather largely in the book, they have refused to accept Western civilization and to join the modern world. They wish to be what they have always been, which is happy, and they will fight to the death to remain so.

The hero of this extraordinary, perhaps unique utopian fantasy is John Lang, a member, like author Wright himself, of the class of 1905 at Harvard. During his freshman year Lang meets and grows to be a close friend of Dorn, one of the very few Islandians in the United States, who has been sent to Harvard to learn something about the Western world that is trying so hard to absorb Islandia and to exploit its vast buried mineral riches. Lang learns Islandian, a fact that helps him to obtain the post of U.S. Consul in Islandia; but the pressure brought to bear upon the State Department by his uncle, an influential New York businessman who wishes to “open up” Islandia, is, as Lang later learns, even more important. Lang undertakes the long, difficult ocean voyage to Islandia and attempts to be a good consul, which means above all subverting the country that is his generous and welcoming host. But from the very beginning Lang is ambivalent, largely because of his friendship with Dorn, and in the end the U.S. Consul becomes himself absorbed by Islandia and all it represents of rebellion against the world that we all know so well.

If you are inveterately positive about the way the world is going, if you cannot imagine living on a farm and being surrounded by a silence that for the first few months drives even Lang almost mad, if you believe it would be sheer folly to go back to riding horseback instead of sitting behind the wheel of a car, if you think you could not get through an evening, to say nothing of a month or year or ten years, without being entertained by some electronic miracle, above all if you are unwilling to face the great question of whether you should live as you do, and if not then how you should live—if all these things are true, then Islandia is not for you. But if they are not true of you, or even if some of them are not true, then you are already an Islandian, just a little, and you will like Islandia.

Austin Tappan Wright was a delightful, funny man. He loved puns and wordplay; he also adored his wife—when he spoke to her from a telephone booth he always, to the amusement of his children, removed his hat. I take off my hat to him, too. He was only an amateur—a lawyer and professor of law who wrote only one book, and that entirely for his own pleasure and amusement. But in Islandia all artists are amateurs, and no work of art is ever sold. This is just one more thing you will have to get used to when you travel there.

RINGGOLD “RING” LARDNER

1885–1933

Stories

Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan, in 1885. As a youngster he was already writing, then editing The Sporting News and contributing columns to various newspapers around the country. When he was just thirty he published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, in the form of letters from a bush league ballplayer to a friend back home. The joke was always on the player himself, although he never realized this, which was very funny and also somehow moving. The protagonist of this book (the letter-writer) kept appearing and reappearing in subsequent books by Lardner.

Haircut and Other Stories appeared a few years later. It includes many of the classic Ring Lardner stories. The title story is the only one I don’t like because of its cruelty. Ring could be cruel, but usually not to good people as he is here. However, I forgive him for the great stories, “Alibi Ike,” “A Day with Conrad Green,” “The Love Nest,” “Horseshoes,” and “Some Like Them Cold.” Come to think of it, some of these are merciless to pompous phonies, liars, and cheats, so I take back what I said about cruelty above.

I have to say that “Alibi Ike” is my favorite of all his stories. Ike is a ballplayer and a very good one, but he can never do anything, either good or bad, without apologizing for it. He always has an alibi even when he doesn’t need one. For example he admits to one of the other players that in the previous season he had batted .357, which is great, but he adds that he would have done better except that he had malaria. A listener remarks, “Where can I go to get malaria?” but of course Ike doesn’t get the point. (I hope you do!) One reason why I like “Alibi Ike” is that I’m always doing the same thing whereupon my wife calls me Alibi Ike.

A later book, The Young Immigrunts, is supposedly written by a kid who is just learning to write dialogue. Here is a taste: ‘“Daddy are we lost?’ the boy asks. ‘Shut up,’ he explains.” Ring Lardner died of TB in East Hampton, at the age of forty-eight. That was the worst of all his jokes. However, his son, Ring Lardner, Jr., survived him and also has had a fine career as a writer.

ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER

1887–1961

Nature and the Greeks

Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887 of a Bavarian family that had generations before settled in Vienna. Highly gifted and richly educated, he studied everything, including the history of Italian painting and almost all then-current theories of theoretical physics. An artillery officer in World War I, he took positions starting in 1920 at Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich—the last being his most fruitful period. His great discovery, the Schrödinger Wave Equation, which alas I do not understand, was made in 1926, the year I was born.

In 1927 he went to Berlin as Max Planck’s successor. The city was then a center of scientific activity, but, finding he could not continue to live in Germany, he went to Oxford, then Princeton, and back to Austria. After the Anschluss he escaped to Italy and arrived at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, where he worked until he retired in 1955. He continued to write important papers, however, almost until his death in 1961.

My interest in Erwin Schrödinger stems from my discovery in 1954 of his book, Nature and the Greeks, which was published in that year. The book originated in several lectures delivered in London by him several years before, the titles of which then and still are of exceptional interest. They are: “The Motives for Returning to Ancient Thought”; “The Competition, Reasons v. Senses”; “The Pythagoreans”; “The Ionian Enlightenment”; “The Religion of Xenophanes, Heraclitus of Ephesus”; “The Atomists”; and “What Are the Special Features?” Anyone who has read more or less carefully the first half of this book, and especially the first hundred pages, will recognize my debt to Schrödinger,, although I hope I have been able to add to what he says on various subjects. At any rate I recommend this little book—less than a hundred pages long—to anyone interested in the general subject of the history of science and particularly of its beginnings in Greek thought more than two thousand years ago.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

1883–1963

Selected Poems

Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, W.C.W. (as he is often called) was a New Jerseyan through and through (he died in Rutherford in 1963). His greatest work was a long poem—what might have been called an epic in an earlier age—that he called “Paterson.” Paterson is a city in New Jersey, of course, which contains all the kinds of people and human relations and evils and goods that can be found in New Jersey—and anywhere else in America, for that matter. That was the point.

Williams was a pediatric physician who established a practice in his hometown in 1910. He continued to practice medicine for many years and in his “spare time” wrote poems. Many of them are wonderful; some are just repetitive, in the vein of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” He adopted a posture he called “objectivist” and produced some of the most astonishing very short poems in the language. In this he seemed to be influenced by his friend Ezra Pound, although he believed Pound was a bad influence on everyone else.

W.C.W. produced many books of poems, criticism, plays, and stories. He even had time to write an autobiography (in 1951). His last book of poems, titled Pictures of Breugel, won him a Pulitzer Prize that should have come years before. But he was a curmudgeon who offended almost everyone in the poetic establishment, so critical approbation came late. As for being a curmudgeon—it’s not at all a bad thing for a poet to be.

My favorite among his books is Spring and All (1972). It contains one devastating long poem, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” and many fine short ones including “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This is Just to Say,” both of which are anthologized everywhere. They are easy to read but hard to feel. It’s important to know the circumstances in which “The Red Wheelbarrow” was written, although it isn’t enough to know. My own favorite poem is called “El Hombre.” This is it—all of it:

It’s a strange courage

you give me ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part!

MARIANNE MOORE

1887–1972

“Poetry”

“Marriage”

Marianne Moore was born in St. Louis in 1887. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909, working as a teacher for a while and as an assistant librarian in the New York Public Library, where she spent much of her time culling the stacks for odd sayings and surprising remarks, many of which found their way into her poetry. She was particularly delighted by the infinite variety of the animal world (which is no longer so infinite, alas). She spent most of her life in New York, later in Brooklyn, and produced many fine books. Collected Poems won her the Pulitzer Price and she received many other awards as well, dying in Brooklyn in 1972.

“Poetry” is a very famous poem, which probably annoyed Miss Moore. I have read it scores of times and led discussions of in my poetry course, and I don’t understand it completely. But I feel I do, and especially its wonderfully enigmatic lines, to wit:

not till the poets among us can be ‘literalists of

the imagination’—above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’

shall we have

it.

“Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” What an astonishing description of what constitutes real poetry! Does it make any sense to you? If not, think again; and if not even then, then think once more. It is needed, after all. Or you may just decide to chuck the poem into the wastebasket. But I hope you won’t.

“Marriage” is equally challenging. I’ll quote just the first few lines.

This institution,

perhaps one should say enterprise

out of respect for which

one says one need not change one’s mind about a thing one has believed in,

requiring public promises

of one’s intention

to fulfil a private obligation:

I wonder what Adam and Eve

think of it by this time …

And so it goes, referring in this long poem to dozens of ancient and modern sayings, remarks, lines of poetry, images, and so forth. It is Marianne Moore at her best and worst, the upshot of all being that she doesn’t like marriage, which she declined to enter into. Do you blame her? Well, once more think again, and avoid the wastebasket.

T. S. ELIOT

1888–1965

Selected Poems

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888, the descendant of an English family that had left East Coker, in Somerset, and moved to New England in the seventeenth century. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford universities, with an intermediary stint at the Sorbonne in Paris. He established himself in London in 1914 and became a British subject in 1927.

Eliot’s first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in the gloomy war year of 1917; the edition of five hundred copies, at a shilling a copy, took three years to sell out. But Eliot was beginning to make a name for himself as a critic, and when his poem The Wasteland appeared in 1922 he was suddenly famous. Dedicated to his fellow poet and poetical revolutionary Ezra Pound, Eliot’s Wasteland was shocking and innovative, but it also perfectly captured the mood of disillusionment of the early postwar period.

Eliot was confirmed in the Church of England in 1927 and thereafter wrote several works on religious themes, among them the poem “Ash Wednesday” (1930), his fine verse play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), and his more popular theatrical success The Cocktail Party (1949). The year before, in 1948, he had been awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI and had received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

For twenty years—from 1935 to 1955—T. S. Eliot was the most important literary figure in the English-speaking world. He wrote relatively little, but each small publication of new poetry or prose was an event of major importance. He was studied in every graduate department of English literature, and professors told their students that Eliot’s fame would endure until the end of time.

Now, three generations later, some of that enthusiasm has abated. There has been a flurry of interest because of an amazingly popular musical comedy made out of his charming book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and Eliot’s prose and verse are still widely read. But not many today would declare that he is one of the greatest English poets of all time.

If the estimate of him was too high when he was alive, it may be too low now. Eliot was a very good poet and an excellent writer of pellucid prose, and he remains exciting and challenging to read.

One of the problems with Eliot is that he was a bit pompous. Born in St. Louis, he moved eastward, first to Cambridge and Harvard, then to London. But he did not just live in London; he became a British subject and adopted a British accent. He became more English than the English and wrote about his adopted country as if it really were his own.

His poetry, nevertheless, is not “merely” English. It is dependent on the classical tradition of English literature but, like that tradition, it has universal aspects that raise it above the ordinary parochial level. After all, every “national” literature must be parochial to some extent, else it would not be national. And among national literatures, which one is greater than English literature? I do not think there is any. So to be English, as we say of Eliot, is no bad thing to be.

But it is the universal aspects in Eliot’s poetry that are most worthy of note and admiration. The dark side of things, as we see it in The Wasteland, is a side of things that not just English men and women have observed. The myth of a wasteland that comes down to us from the Middle Ages was the subject of learned discussion when Eliot was writing the poem; World War I had just ended, and many felt that it had turned a blooming civilization into a desert and that the world would never seem, or be, so rich and full of promise again. This was a universal, not just an English, insight; and the images of the poem are universal, too, comprising as they do remembered scenes from the history and literature of the whole world, not just England. What the poem says—that we can turn the world into a wasteland, and that we may even want to do that—was worth saying in 1922, and it is worth remembering today. We can still do it, we can do it more absolutely and completely than ever, and maybe we even want to do it, still.

Four Quartets is an even finer poem than The Wasteland, as well as being more English. No poem better expresses the way many persons felt at the end of the 1930s when, tired of the lying and the hatred, they were willing to fall into another great war—a more terrible war by far—rather than face their own selves. The war came and swept away many of the old things, not the least of them the old England, as Eliot had perceived it.

There was no coming back for him then; he had thrown in his lot with the English and would remain in Britain the rest of his life. There was not much more poetry, although the collections of small pieces of prose and verse kept appearing and winning plaudits. Those critical essays in immaculate prose are well worth reading, worth studying, if that is your bent. Two volumes, in particular, are noteworthy: The Sacred Wood (1920) and Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932). No essay of Eliot’s has been more influential than “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It is the prime statement of a classical view of literature and should not be ignored in the flood of novelties that so many prefer.

Looking back, there are a dozen or so other poems that are of lasting importance. The Wasteland, “Ash Wednesday,” and Four Quartets lead the list, but “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hollow Men,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Morning at the Window,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “Journey of the Magi,” “Marina,” and “Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears” belong on it, too, as well as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

EZRA POUND

1885–1972

Selections

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho, of Quaker parents, in 1885. His education was decidedly desultory but not the less thorough and far-reaching for that. He was probably the most widely read of poets, in English, French, Italian, and other Western languages, and Eastern (at least in transliterations) as well. In fact one of his most famous poems, and (I think) perhaps his best, is “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” which, he states in an afterword, “By Rihaku.” The poem is a letter from a young wife who married when she was still a child and is now old enough to know what love really is. Her beloved husband has gone away for a while, and she writes to ask him to tell her when he is returning: “Please let me know beforehand,” she says, “And I will come out to meet you/As far as Cho-fu-Sa.” We do not know why he has gone or whether in fact he will return, nor do we know how far Cho-fu-Sa is although it is apparently a long way from her home. These details are unimportant; what is important is the sense, almost tactile, of her longing and her devotion to this young man whom we know only through her loving eyes. I have read this poem perhaps fifty times and it never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

Pound’s life was in many ways a mess. At the end of it, during World War II, he broadcast pro-Fascist messages on Italian radio, was arrested after the war, tried, convicted, and imprisoned in a mental hospital. Thanks to a worldwide movement in his favor he was released and returned to Italy, where he died in 1958. But his poetic output had been large, and his influence inspired T.S. Eliot to describe him as “more responsible for the Twentieth Century revolution in poetry than any other individual.” There is no doubt, at least, of his great influence on Eliot and other contemporary poets. He was especially helpful to Eliot in his writing of The Wasteland, and Eliot dedicated the poem to him in these words: Al miglior fabbro—“To the better workman.” Pound’s establishment of the Imagist school of poetry is exemplified in one of the best known imagist poems (the title, “In a Station of the Metro,” is longer than the poem, to wit):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

There was a time, in my youth, when everyone I knew could recite those two lines. Strange? Maybe.

Pound’s major works are The Cantos and The Pisan Cantos, the latter written when he was confined in a mental hospital near Pisa, in Italy. The Cantos is a very long and immensely complex retelling (in a sense) of The Odyssey of Homer in something like Dantesque dress. Parts of it are wonderful, but to wade through the entire work is beyond most readers, including me.

EUGENE O’NEILL

1988–1953

Long Day’s Journey into Night

Eugene O’Neill was born in a Broadway hotel in New York City in 1888. He was the son of an actor and he grew up on the road. He spent a year at Princeton and then, to complete his education, sailed as a seaman, worked on the waterfront, and suffered from tuberculosis and alcoholism. He began to experiment with drama in 1913 and saw his first play, Bound East for Cardiff, produced by the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1916. In 1920 his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway and won him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. In 1936 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1953, the victim of a crippling disease that had ended his writing ten years before.

O’Neill’s most serious early dramatic works were self-conscious imitations of Greek tragedies They did not really work.

Long Day’s Journey into Night (written in 1941 but not produced until 1956) and its companion piece, The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, produced 1946), are also tragedies but of a different kind. They are not imitations of anything literary. They are tragedies of ordinary men and women in ordinary life—quotidian tragedies about life as we live it today. Gone is the necessity, seemingly imposed by the old Greek models, for “great” characters, dynastic events, monstrous cruelty, and bloodshed. There is tragedy enough, O’Neill knew, in ordinary families. Families like his own. Especially families like his own.

The Greek playwrights had also known, of course, that families were the place to look for tragedy. Family life is essential, indispensable, for human beings; but it is very hard to live in families. In fact, we almost do not know how to do it, at the same time that we know no other way to live that is anywhere near as satisfactory. What living soul has not at some time or other echoed Sophocles’ lament, in Oedipus at Colonus:

Best is not to be born at all.

Next best, to die young.

It is the conflicts of, and within, families that are most likely to bring us to such straits. Yet families are also where love and comfort and most joys that human beings know are to be found, as well as hatred and fear and loathing. Life can be desperately lonely even within families, but it is worse without them. Poor mankind!—as O’Neill would have been first to admit.

The Greeks had known, too, that small faults, often enough repeated, add up to great pain. Faults of character, we call these—the arrogance of Oedipus, repeated over and over, finally leads to his downfall. A single instance of such a fault is never, by itself, decisive. In O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey, the stinginess of James Tyrone Sr. is eminently forgivable—if he had only been stingy once. The drunkenness of his son James would be forgivable—if he had not been drunk so often. And Mary Tyrone, the mother—one drug episode, one morphine binge, would be forgivable and would have been forgiven. But there will be no end to those binges, short of the night to which our long day’s journey tends.

O’Neill’s play is somber but not unrelievedly dark. There is little happiness in the Tyrone household that day in August 1912—except for the spurious happiness produced by drugs, alcohol, or morphine. There are, however, as there must be in any genuine tragedy, moments of sudden insight that light up the darkness like a lightning flash. Most of these occur in the third act, which is where they should occur, of course, in a well-made play. Old Tyrone sees into his own soul as clearly as he ever has and shares his morbid vision with his oldest son. The latter, James Jr., also sees clearly, for perhaps the first time, the destructiveness in his love for his younger brother, Edmund. And Edmund—who is O’Neill himself, the author revealing to us, the audience, the devastating truths that he had first come to understand so many years before—sees his family shorn of illusions, hating one another, loving one another, struggling to be free in the prison of their own days.

Probably the most memorable figure in the tragedy is Mary Tyrone, the haunted wife and mother who bewails her lack of a proper home and drowns her sorrow in drugs. Does she, too, see into her own soul? Critics dispute about that; some say yes, some say no. Mary’s last words, at any rate, are enigmatic, which may suggest that what O’Neill wished us to feel was the puzzlement that he probably felt about his mother. How could she have become the woman she was? How could she have let it happen to her? Why did she not have the strength to withstand the drug? Yet she has all his sympathy, too, as she has the sympathy of her husband and her older son.

In The Iceman Cometh O’Neill had proclaimed that life is too hard to try to live it without illusions. The older you are the more likely you are to understand that. Long Day’s Journey goes far beyond Iceman in showing us—just for one day—life completely shorn of illusions, stripped bare for all to see.

The old Greeks knew another thing about tragedy: Viewing it provides a kind of catharsis, which relieves us of the dreadful necessity of enduring tragedy ourselves. The more deeply we feel the fate of Oedipus, Aristotle suggested, the less likely we are to suffer as he did. This is the keynote, the unforgettable effect, of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Here the artist reaches down deep into his own pain to find a kind of salvation for us. It is no wonder that we almost worship great artists and writers who give us such gifts.

NANCY MITFORD

1904–1973

Madame de Pompadour

Nancy Mitford was born in London in 1904, the daughter of a nobleman and sister of a remarkable collection of brilliant women. Almost in her nonage she began to write novels, the first of which to succeed was The Pursuit of Love (1945), in which the lovely Linda describes the scabrous love affairs of her six cousins. This was followed by Love in a Cold Climate and Don’t Tell Alfred.

The novels were slight, as was Noblesse Oblige: an enquiry into the identifiable characteristics of the English aristocracy (1956), which, with Encounter (1955), introduced the tongue-in-cheek concept of “U” and “Non-U” vocabulary, although these books were a lot of fun. Much more important, I think, were her four biographies of notables of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France. I read them all some years ago, and the one I remember best is the life of Madame de Pompadour, the first mistress of Louis XV. Hers was an extraordinary life.

The next-to-last Louis, like his grandfather (Louis XIV) and son (Louis XVI), was in almost constant need of female companionship and maintained a “Deer Park” where his provider of sexual services, the venerable Duc de Richelieu, produced and trained a new bedmate every night of the year. Mme de Pompadour had begun in February 1745 as a casual sexual playmate, but her health was not up to the constant calls upon her body, and she promoted herself before the lazy monarch to the position of private secretary, in which she almost single-handedly ruled an empire that, at the time, was the richest in the world. Her taste was excellent, and she in effect designed the style we call Louis Quinze, but she also protected the king from the never-ending turmoil of the court that threatened them both. She was an intellectual and although she could not have a salon she directed the intellectual and literary affairs of the kingdom, as well as its political and military affairs, from her outpost at Versailles.

None of this lasted very long. Nine years later, in February 1754, she was very ill, and the king, during her last days, hardly left her room. He wished to be there when she died, but her confessor refused to allow this. She died in the company of a single priest, who, as he was leaving the room, heard her say “Wait for me, Abbé, I am going with you,” which were her last words for she died a few moments later.

The book is wonderful and beautiful, as was its subject. Nancy Mitford spent the rest of her life in Paris and died there in 1973.

C.S. LEWIS

1898–1963

Out of the Silent Planet

Perelandra

That Hideous Strength

Many people are unaware that C.S. Lewis produced three of the finest science-fiction novels. They comprise a trilogy, with profound and moving theological overtones—or undertones.

Lewis, born in Belfast in 1898, was an Oxford don, an authoritative scholar of medieval literature and of the literature of the English Renaissance. He wrote several definitive studies in his field. He was also an eloquent and, in the case of one book, The Screwtape Letters (1942), a bestselling Christian apologist. The Screwtape Letters is a very good book and a pleasure to read. So is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, though it is written for children. But neither is as good as the trio of science-fiction novels Lewis wrote between 1938 and 1946, when that genre, which has now been exploited beyond all expectations, was young.

The first book in the series, Out of the Silent Planet, introduces us to Ransom, the ordinary Englishman who might be C.S. Lewis himself and who might be Christ—if Christ had been an Englishman. Ransom is called to an adventure that he does not quite understand, but he knows he must go. He leaves the Earth—the Silent Planet, because it is shrouded in a cloud of evil that we may, if we wish, take as Original Sin—and embarks on a space voyage that is quite unlike any space voyage in any other science-fiction novel, and also quite unlike the real thing. Nevertheless, you may agree with me when you read Out of the Silent Planet that Lewis’s imagined voyage is better than the real thing, and even—strange as it may be to say so—more real.

Ransom has various adventures on Mars (Malacandra), his first port of call, and eventually learns that he must travel to Venus, or Perelandra, as the third planet in the solar system is called. Perelandra is also the name of the second novel in the trilogy.

On Perelandra, Ransom has further adventures of a profound allegorical significance. There is a Lady, not otherwise named, who lives on an island floating on the Venusian sea. There is a rival for her favors, Dr. Weston, a dark and evil being. Ransom knows that eventually he will have to fight Dr. Weston, and he does so. He triumphs, but he is wounded in the heel, and the wound cannot be cured. Recapping the story fails to convey the excitement of this trial and this battle between evil and good.

The third novel, That Hideous Strength, finds Ransom back on Earth, where the conflict has been transferred and now manifests itself in an ordinary struggle in a university town between a very modern National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) and some ancient traditions and institutions, including the seer Merlin, buried beneath the ground. There is also a group of animals that derive the kind of comfort from Ransom’s presence among them that the birds used to receive from Saint Francis. One of these, the bear, Mr. Bultitude, is quite capable of breaking your heart. In fact, your heart may not survive reading this wonderful concluding novel of the series. And when the great angels come, swimming through the murkiness of air, you will gasp, as Dante gasped to see the Angel come down into Hell to quiet the demons so that he might pass.

Indeed, there is every sort of echo and reminder in these three fine books of literary events, and of religious ones as well. Dante and Milton somehow stand in the background, applauding this use of them by the Oxford scholar; and the Bible and Aquinas are part of the chorus, too. The more you know about Christian apologetics and about classical literature, the better will these three books seem to you. But they will be very satisfying reading whatever you know, or do not know.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

1882–1933

The Hobbit

The Lord of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien, born in England in 1892, was a professor of English language and literature at Oxford for many years. He published several philological studies—of Beowulf, for example—and was known by his friends and students as a retiring and very learned, almost timid, man. But one of his friends knew he was something very different, and as it turned out, very great. The friend was C.S. Lewis, his colleague at Oxford, who was the only one who knew that Tolkien had been working for many years on two books that are based on a mythology all his own.

The first of the books was The Hobbit. Hobbits live in the Shire, which is like the English countryside but not quite. If you stand in the middle of a pleasant English meadow and look around you at the grass and the trees and perhaps a sparkling little stream meandering in the near distance you may not see the Hobbits who live there, because they are not visible to us unless … well, unless Professor Tolkien tells us about them.

As it turns out, the Shire is threatened by a terrible force that has to be overcome by two of the Hobbits, the redoubtable Frodo and his friend and servant, Sam. Of course Frodo and Sam can’t defend their world all by themselves, but they find glorious allies, both men and women (and trees, as well, who speak to them). Their foe also has vicious allies that “fly through the night in the howling storm,” to quote a great poem by William Blake, who would have loved Tolkien. There is a Ring, of course, that Frodo loses and must find again, with Sam’s help, and then must throw into the great fire at the center of the mountain of their enemy. Of course they succeed …

I probably don’t have to say any more, because you or your children have probably seen the three Lord of the Rings films that were made in New Zealand and distributed worldwide. Since I’m a Hobbit myself I have to admit I didn’t like the films as much as I liked the books when I read them for the first time many years ago, but that is by the by.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

1896–1940

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, the son of relatively impecunious parents who nevertheless managed to send him to St. Paul’s and Princeton. The experience may have been good for his intellect, but the moral lesson was, unfortunately, too clear to him: the rich, of whom he was not one, were unlike him, which is to say that they could afford to enjoy life whereas he could not. At Princeton his discontent was multiplied by the fact that he failed to make the football team.

So he left without a degree and joined the army. Again life deprived him of a rich reward: he was not sent overseas. Instead he was stationed in Alabama. There he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, but her family would not take a poor man to its bosom. There were many things to complain of, and Fitzgerald returned to the writing that he had begun at Princeton. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920, after the famous editor Maxwell Perkins had told him to take home the first draft and completely rewrite it. The book was an instant success; it seemed to express the hidden desires and fears of an entire new generation of frustrated and rebellious youth. Fitzgerald now had an income, and Zelda agreed to be his wife.

Two volumes of short stories and a second novel, all published by 1922, helped to establish Fitzgerald as a leading spokesman of his time. But none of these books was really very good. The true genius of Scott Fitzgerald was revealed in 1925, with the publication of The Great Gatsby. It marked the peak of the young author’s achievement, and from then on everything was downhill. He spent the next ten years wandering about Europe and America, often drunk, almost always morose, in part because of the increasing insanity of Zelda. Tender Is the Night appeared in 1933, but it was largely ignored (although I liked it very much when I read it in Paris years ago). Fitzgerald was determined to make money if he could not have fame. He went to Hollywood and lost his soul there, as so many had done before him and would after him. He was struggling to finish still another novel when he died in Hollywood late in 1940. He remains to this day the very symbol of his time.

The extraordinary thing about The Great Gatsby is that it reveals that its author understood all these things perfectly clearly, although he was unable to act on that understanding. Jay Gatsby, like his creator, is even more a symbol than he is a man. He too pursues an unattainable goal; he too is defeated by the reality of life, against which he has no defense. The famous last lines of the book express this:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The book is American to the core. In it, rich and poor seem to converge, to touch, but in reality they never do. In it, everyone is obsessed with money and hope; if they lose one, they also lose the other. In it, there is the constant refrain of expectation: a solution to every problem is just around the corner.

These are not only American feelings and fears; they are human. It is the humanity of Gatsby, as compared to the relative inhumanity of Tom and Daisy, the man he befriends and the woman he loves, that shores up the book and establishes its power. The language would be different, the names, the occupations, the preoccupations, if this story took place in another time, another place. But the basic human aspirations and the suffering would be the same.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

1899–1961

The Short Stories of Ernest

Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a comfortable suburb of Chicago. He never got over his birthplace. The memory of Oak Park and his profound understanding of its cultural and moral insularity haunted Hemingway, and he spent his life trying to flee it. Partly as a result, his life was a great and continuous adventure. This was also due, however, to the fact that he lived during one of the most eventful times in history. He wrote about that in the Preface to The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1938):

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Those are two of the best sentences ever written by any writer about writing. No modern writer has a more distinctive style than Hemingway; you recognize him after the first few words. It is impossible to describe this style, or to define it; you have to read some Hemingway prose and then you will recognize it, too. The style is vigorous and masculine but also very sensitive. That is a hard contradiction to maintain, and Hemingway does not always succeed in doing so. None of his novels, it seems to me, not even The Sun Also Rises, which I think is the best of them, is able to maintain this contradiction for long, certainly not throughout the entire book. It is like a balancing act done on a high wire in a strong wind—without a pole. It cannot go on for very long without the acrobat falling.

There are wonderful things in the novels, especially in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms (read out loud to yourself the first page and the last page of the latter) and even in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is too long. But the true Hemingway jewels are in the volume of short stories that he published in 1938. I especially would recommend “Big Two Hearted River,” Parts I and II; “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and also the shortest of Hemingway’s novels, just a long short story, actually, The Old Man and the Sea, for which Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Not everyone appreciates “Big Two-Hearted River.” It is about a man who returns from the big world into which he has journeyed and where he has become famous. He comes back to a river that he fished long ago and fishes it again. Nothing happens but that. He sees no one and talks to no one; he just sets up his tent and makes his supper and sleeps there by the river, and the next day catches a bottle full of grasshoppers for bait and then fishes for the trout that are plentiful in the river. At the end of the day he goes away. There is no simpler story but also, it seems to me although I can’t say exactly why, no more perfect one. (Even if you don’t like to fish, which I do not.)

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is only five pages long. I have read it many times, but each time I read it shivers go up and down my spine. It is about “a nothing that he knew too well.” The Spanish word for nothing is nada. This word rings through the story like a death knell. Hemingway knew about death. He was obsessed with it.

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is also about death—the death of a man in Africa of gangrene brought on by a small untreated wound. The story is also about stories, for the man, in his final delirium, remembers all the stories he wanted to write but could not. As such it is a kind of tour de force, but a magnificent one.

Hemingway wrote “Old Man at the Bridge” in 1937 or 1938, during the Spanish Civil War. He had always loved Spain and had written extraordinary things about the country and its people and about bullfights. Now Spain was tearing itself to pieces, and he went back as a journalist, because he couldn’t stay away. He saw everything and would write For Whom the Bell Tolls about that war, which, as he knew very well and predicted often, was only a rehearsal for the greater war that would follow, throughout all of Europe and indeed the whole world. He sent back the four pages of “Old Man at the Bridge” by cable from a town in the delta of the Ebro River. The story tells of an old man who is caught by the war, trapped between the two sides in that brutal civil conflict, even though, as he says, he has no politics. “I was taking care of animals,” he says. Two goats and a cat and four pairs of pigeons.

“The cat, of course, will be all right,” the old man says. He is so tired that he cannot walk any longer, even if the enemy comes. “A cat can look out for itself, but I cannot think what will become of the others.”

That sentence sums up, for me, all the terror and cruelty and sadness of war. It was the sort of thing that Hemingway knew more about than almost any writer of our time.

E.B. WHITE

1899–1985

Charlotte’s Web

Elwyn Brooks White was always called Andy by his friends, doubtless because no grown man should have to be called Elwyn.

White was born in 1899, five years after James Thurber. The two became friends during the 1920s, and began to write books together, notably Is Sex Necessary? in 1933. They also worked together on the New Yorker. Thurber produced his cartoons and White wrote the opening page or so of “The Talk of the Town” and performed other necessary editorial chores. White’s casual pieces for the New Yorker during his many years of association with the magazine are among the finest things of the sort ever written in America, and several collections of them—The Second Tree from the Corner, for example, and The White Flag—retain the same liveliness that they had when they first appeared. A feature he wrote for Holiday magazine called “Here Is New York” may also be the best thing ever written about that fabulous, perilous city.

Such works by E.B. White are, however, mere ephemera compared to his two children’s novels, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. The latter is so obviously and ineluctably a classic that it almost does not need to be recommended to anybody. But you may have missed it as a child. In that case, do not wait even one minute more. White must have had his tongue in his cheek when he came to dream up the story of Charlotte’s Web. But maybe he did not; maybe he had done some very astute research into the history of children’s literature. He would have found that although some classic works for children have “nice” characters in them, many do not, like The Wind in the Willows and the Peter Rabbit stories and White Fang and Where the Wild Things Are—to name only a handful of famous children’s books about creatures very different from good little boys and girls and sweet little puppies and kittens. At any rate, White came up with a trio of characters that must have shocked his editors: a pig, a spider, and a rat. But he wove out of their lives together a story that will last forever.

Wilbur is the pig. He is a timid creature, very fat and frightened, and he never changes although he risks his life for his friend at the end of the book, and that is a brave and heroic thing to do. Charlotte, of course, is the spider. She is a unique creation; there is nothing else like her in literature. She is very spidery and yet she is lovable, too. Templeton is the rat. He is completely unlovable. Yet we love him anyway. So it is with the books of E.B. White. He has us in his spell and we cannot escape.

If you read Charlotte’s Web when you were a child, but are embarrassed to be seen reading it now when you are grown up, there is a simple solution. Have a baby, and read the story to him or her. That way you will share a great pleasure.

JAMES THURBER

1894–1961

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

James Grover Thurber—who was Jim to everyone, including me, a friend—was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894. He was educated at Ohio State University and like so many Midwesterners at the time gravitated to New York, where he tried to make a living as a writer and illustrator. He was hired as managing editor of Harold Ross’s new magazine, the New Yorker. It was not long before he captured E.B. White. They wrote books together, and Thurber published his extraordinary, sardonic cartoons. The New Yorker was known for its cartoons and many of the cartoonists became famous, but none more so than Thurber. He never stopped drawing his incredible men and women and his even more incredible dogs even after he became blind, or almost blind—he could see large black lines on a yellow background, which was enough. Well, not really enough, because Thurber became angry at the world that had let him go blind and took it out in all sorts of ways that are irrelevant here.

Thurber also wrote stories for the New Yorker. Many are well known, especially those in a wonderful book called Fables for Our Time. It is very Thurberish, which is a very good thing to say about it. His best-known and probably best-written story was called “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Mitty is a shy, hen-pecked man who can’t rebel against his wife’s determined tyranny but at least can imagine he could. He is driving the car and his wife is driving from the back seat, and he imagines all kinds of wonderful alternative lives, as a surgeon about to conduct a difficult operation, for example, or an Air Force ace in the World War. The story was the basis of a musical comedy and a film, which were fun but not as much fun as the story. Thurber also wrote a successful Broadway play called The Male Animal, which was produced in the little Connecticut town in which I live and where he lived too, with me playing the male lead. Jim and his wife Helen sat in the front row. Thurber applauded and said it was the best performance of the play he had ever seen, which was nonsense of course but satisfying even so. For me it was a very Thurberish experience.

Thurber died in 1961, after a long period of frustrated unhappiness. The New Yorker had stopped publishing his stories, which were probably not as good as those he had written in the Thirties. He was now totally blind and dependent on his wife, who was also unwell. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died and said goodbye but not in so many words. A good selection of his funniest works are to be found in The Thurber Carnival (1945).

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

1892–1982

Selected Poems

Archibald MacLeish was born in a Chicago suburb in 1892, the scion of a wealthy Midwestern mercantile family. He graduated from Yale in 1915 and, after army service in the World War, gained his Ll.B. from Harvard in 1919 and practiced law for three years until, in 1923, he decided to write poetry full time. An expatriate during the 1920s, he moved in the literary circle of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others. He published two books of poems that were influenced by Pound and Eliot. In the 1930s he became deeply concerned about the threat to American society and to world democracy. Conquistador, 1932, was the first of his “public” poems and won him the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes. America Was Promises, 1939—the title was intended to shock readers into an awareness of the threat the country faced—was followed by The Irresponsibles. He was named Librarian of Congress, 1939-44, and was an Assistant Secretary of State, 1944-5, when he aided in the foundation of UNESCO. His Collected Poems, 1952, won another Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and his hit Broadway play, J.B. (1958), won a Pulitzer for drama. He taught at Harvard from 1949 to 1962 and was a lecturer at Amherst from 1964 to 1967.

It was a great career, and he was a wonderful man. In their later years he and my father were best friends and recorded several conversations on videotape. He also wrote two wonderful poems that deeply influenced my understanding of poetry and life. One, “You, Andrew Marvell,” was a kind of response to Marvell’s famous carpe diem poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” In the poem a man lies on a beach in Massachusetts and imagines the passage of the evening from Ecbatan to Kermanshah, from Baghdad through Arabia to Palmyra, Lebanon, and Crete, over Sicily, and “Spain go under and the shore/Of Africa, the gilded sand,” and now “the long light on the sea—And here, face downward in the sun/To feel how swift, how secretly,/The shadow of the night comes on…” It is, simply, magical.

“Ars Poetica” is just as good. The title is taken from Horace’s famous Art of Poetry, and it describes a way of writing poetry that not everyone has adopted but is wonderful all the same. The poem lists some things a poem should be, for example, “Motionless in time/As the moon climbs,” “equal to,/Not true,” “For all the history of grief/An empty doorway/and a maple leaf,/For love,/The leaning grasses and two light above the sea,” and concludes

A poem should not mean

But be.

The poem demands a great deal from you, the reader, but it is worth whatever is asked. For example, the lines, “For all the history of grief/An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” Why is the doorway empty? Who has gone through it perhaps never to return? Is the maple leaf green or red—is it summer or autumn? What did the leaf mean?

MARK VAN DOREN

1894–1972

Selected Poems

My father was born in a small rural town in Illinois in 1894, the son of a country doctor. He went to New York for graduate study shortly before World War I and after he returned from the war to complete his studies and to teach at Columbia University. This made him a New Yorker; but he much preferred to New York the abandoned farm in Cornwall, Connecticut, that he and my mother bought in 1923 and about which he wrote many of his poems. He was a professor of literature and the author of many volumes of criticism, novels, short stories, and literary biographies. But the main business of his life, as he saw it, was writing poems. He walked across a meadow to an old mill near his farmhouse and wrote almost every day. He usually tried to complete a poem, or a part of a poem, each day. He used to say that anyone can start a poem, but it takes a poet to finish it.

These industrious efforts produced many hundreds of poems, of which a certain number are good—it is hard for me, as it was always hard for him, to choose among them. In his case, it is probably best to read a fairly large number of poems, most of which are short and deceptively simple. His poetic styles were varied; he was constantly experimenting with new styles and could write in almost any meter. His subjects were equally varied. He especially liked animals, all animals, and wrote fine poems about them. For example, “The Animals”:

So cunningly they walk the world,

So decently they lay them down,

Who but their maker sees how pride

And modesty in them are one?

He wrote about other natural things; “Former Barn Lot” was a good example:

Once there was a fence here,

And the grass came and tried,

Leaning from the pasture

To get inside.

But colt feet trampled it,

Turning it brown;

Until the farmer moved

And the fence fell down.

Then any bird saw,

Under the wire,

Grass nibbling inward

Like green fire.

He wrote about people, those whom he knew and loved, and also about people he had not known but still loved—those he called “My Great Friends,” for example Hamlet, Achilles, Don Quixote.

He wrote about death, his own personal, physical death and also the death of the world. He was acutely, painfully aware that for the first time in history human anger and folly could destroy the home of man. In a well-known poem, “So Fair a World It Was,” he expressed his fears about this:

So fair a world it was,

So far away in the dark,

the dark Yet lighted, oh, so well, so well: Water and land,

So clear so sweet;

So fair, it should have been forever.

He expressed another aspect of the same fear in what has become probably his best-known poem, in which he played with the notion that his private world and the world at large are much the same thing. He called the poem, simply, “O World”:

O world, my friend, my foe,

My deep dark stranger, doubtless Unthinkable to know;

My many and my one,

Created when I was and doomed to go Back into the same sun;

Mark Van Doren published some fifty books, of which more than twenty were collections of his poems. In 1967 he issued a small volume called 100 Poems, which is a good introduction to his work. It does not contain poems from his two later books of poetry, That Shining Place (1969) and Good Morning: Last Poems (1973). The latter includes poems written during his last decade of life; these show no diminution in power and charm. He died in Cornwall in 1972.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

1900–1944

The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born into an impoverished family of French aristocrats in Lyons in 1900. His real life began in 1922, when he received his pilot’s license; from that time on he was only really happy when he was behind the controls of an airplane. He flew—often (and preferably) alone—over much of the world, helping to inaugurate airmail routes over North Africa, the south Atlantic, and South America. He was forced several times to crash-land the small, undependable planes that were the lot of airmen of those days, and once he and his plane were not found for many days; as he lay, badly hurt, on the burning Sahara sands he began to have delusions. Perhaps these were, after all, the source and inspiration of The Little Prince.

It was his last book, but there were others before it; the only other thing that Saint-Exupéry liked to do besides flying was to write about flying. Two of his best are Vol de Nuit (Night Flight, 1931) and Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939). These works share a quality that no one else, perhaps, has ever brought to the subject of flight: as you read the sound of the engine seems to die away, and you are suspended in midair, the Earth far below and almost forgotten, alone with yourself in a novel element dreamed of by man forever but never before conquered.

Saint-Exupéry joined the French Air Force as soon as World War II broke out in 1939; when France fell he escaped to the United States and there, in 1943, wrote The Little Prince.

A pilot is downed upon the sand. His plane has crashed; he is trying to repair it. Hot, thirsty, hungry, he sees a very small person, dressed like a prince, walking toward him. The small person speaks, the pilot responds, and they are soon friends. The prince tells many stories about his adventures, and they are the main substance of the book.

He has journeyed from his own planet, the little Prince explains, which although it is a very small one is also very important to him, because of a threat that the planet suffers. On his small planet seeds of the giant baobab tree have taken root, and the trees have grown so large that they are likely to split the planet in half. This would not be such a tragedy, the Prince admits, except that also on his planet there grows a single rose, beautiful and proud and red, and he, the little Prince, is deeply in love with her. He must save her, and he has come all the way to Earth to find a way.

The pilot lies in the sun, exhausted, and sometimes he doesn’t pay attention. “You must pay attention,” the Prince says, “otherwise I will not come to see you anymore. Whenever I come to you, you too must be there, so that I can grow used to you.” The pilot nods. “That is right,” he agrees.

Once, the little Prince says, he saw a fox in an orchard. The fox was fascinated by the Prince’s golden hair, and he came to see him the next day. But the Prince was not to be seen. When the fox came again he chastised the little Prince. “You must tame me,” he explained, “by always being there when I expect you. I will come every day at four o’clock, and you will be there every day at four o’clock, and we will be fast friends.” The little Prince remembers that the rose had tamed him in the same way, and so he tames the fox. It is indeed how friends are made.

Finally, the little Prince must depart and the pilot, too, for he has managed to repair his plane. The pilot will go back to such civilization as the world still affords, and the little Prince will try to return to his small planet and to his rose. It is a difficult journey and there is only one way to go on it and that perilous; the little Prince may not make it, after all. There is a way to know whether the little Prince succeeds in reaching his rose, but I am afraid that is for you to discover when you read the book.

You may agree with the pilot in thinking that the question is more important than any other question in the world. And you will ever after look upon the stars in a different way.

Saint-Exupéry himself was restless and uncomfortable in America. He wanted to return to France and fly for his country. He went back late in 1943 and began to fly reconnaissance missions over Africa and southern France. He should not have been flying at all; he was too old, though only forty-four, and too fat. But he insisted and no one stopped him. He set out on a mission over the Mediterranean on the night of July 31, 1944, from which he never returned.