Weekend Read: The Last Post

No, by The Last Post, I’m not suggesting, over this first weekend of May, that you curl up with Ford Madox Ford’s novel of that name; rather, I mean to say that this particular post will be my last in this space.

One year ago, with the very generous welcome of this old and excellent magazine, I began compiling these notes on reading and writing. The ambition was simple: to take some of the sorts of things I tend to exchange with writer friends via email and place them, regularly, before the public.

My expectations were low: I did not think that my thoughts on such matters would be of any wider interest to any larger group of readers than those dozen with whom I already privately corresponded. And yet, as my electronic mailbag has made clear, a larger group of readers than we’ve lately been told should care about such things did take an interest. I’ve been lucky to engage in a lively correspondence off the page with readers who, as often as they’ve written to take vigorous issue with an idea (or outright error) of mine, have also generously directed me to books I hadn’t heard of much less read (and am now reading).

According to the webmaster, some hundreds of thousands of people (or “unique visitors,” in the creepily Rumsfeldean turn) have read my posts over the year. Yes, in the web-world, where a nipple slip can net you a million sets of eyes in a breathless blink and click, these are Lilliputian numbers. In my world, however, those are towering digits, enormous for what they might say about the reading life: that there is still, in our noisy culture, a quiet but forcible interest in finding good books to read, and in debating what makes books good.

We “unique readers” know this, in our solitary hours. But it is pleasing, at times, to have company in that knowledge, to know that one isn’t alone in one’s enthusiasms. For my part, I have taken great pleasure in the enthusiasm of readers for this space, and am grateful for the time you’ve spent here. For now, know that I’m turning my attention to other tasks, with the expectation, at some point future, of returning to one not unlike this.

With thanks, and wishing you many good things to read,

A Certain, Wandering Light

From the July 1882 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

“What is the hardest task in the world?” The question is Emerson’s, in his essay, “Intellect.” His answer?

To think. I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant, who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example, a man explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his mind without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We say, I will walk abroad, and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and composed attitude of the library, to seize the thought. But we come in, and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth appears. A certain, wandering light appears, and is the distinction, the principle we wanted. But the oracle comes, because we had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood,—the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity, and see what the great Soul showeth.

Emerson did not have email, could not tweet, did not date online, could not stream video from his favorite strippercam. Emerson was not distracted, therefore, in the modern way. Whatever did, in his era, stand between him and his setting his mind to that hardest task, the problem of focus is surely nothing new, despite the novel methods we’ve lately heard about its treatment.

I am suspicious, then, about those cultural diagnosticians who pretend to know the error of our ways. My sense is that thought is hard these days because thought is merely hard, is always brute work that bears late fruit. Or, as Emerson says it better, “the oracle comes, because we had previously laid siege to the shrine.” I write today in praise of the siege mentality.

It’s Very Childlike

What is literary criticism for? The question came up years ago as the subject of a London Review of Books 25th anniversary forum that included Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, Zadie Smith and James Wood. “The ‘What is it for?’ question is interesting, it’s very childlike, isn’t it?” Eagleton said. “You know: What are people for? What is the moon for? —we’re all card-carrying functionalists.” Nonetheless, the question is useful, if not for obtaining its answer, than for segregating our expectations about the form.

My early sense of the medium was as a question answering form: input a novel, output a report on the nature of that novel and, more largely, the nature of novels, what they are for. I sense that I still expect this of criticism, and don’t think I’m wrong to. What I think was wrong in my early thinking about what such reports should provide was my once belief that one could muster, through quantity and quality, so overwhelming a report of one’s findings about a given work that it would yield not merely a truth about a work but the truth of it— an objective aesthetic truth.

These days, I expect that the form should produce questions more than answers. I know that my thinking about the medium has changed, because my feelings about James Wood’s criticism have changed. When I wrote about his work in these pages in 2003, I was already a great admirer of his essays, those several scores of shorter pieces that had appeared in the Guardian in the 90’s, and the still quite many, but much longer, pieces he had been writing for the New Republic. And yet, I was often frustrated then by Wood’s work, feeling as I then did that there was a kind of shortsightedness in his purview, a narrowness of taste that rendered some writers–too different from what he liked–invisible.

In retrospect I was shortsighted in my view of Wood– not my diagnosis of what he liked, but what the use of those well-delineated preferences were. Though Updike’s much-ballyhooed catholic literary tastes were certainly a strength, Wood’s narrower kingdom has come to be, for me at least, a much more worthwhile place to visit (and as he has written more the argument that his kingdom is that narrow becomes much harder to credit at all: while not quite the literary democrat that Updike was, to ignore the variety of good writing Wood has championed in the past twenty years is to maintain a bias without proving a bias). Anyway, it’s agreeable to disagree, I’ve come to conclude, particularly when the point of view of the person with whom you don’t see eye to eye is so scrupulously well-substantiated. Wood manages to be interesting even when I disagree, perhaps especially when I disagree, for the very reason that he opens up a second or third way to think of reading a book that I wouldn’t have come to on my own.

Lately, with Wood’s small fame– small, I mean to say, in the way that to be a famous literary critic is not to be very famous, in our culture, at all– has come an enormous reaction from some younger writers in the blog-world who take on Wood at every turn. We needn’t pity Wood for being so often scolded by such small hands. Rather, we can pity ourselves for missing the very point of literary criticism despite our passion for it: to present not the answer to a book but a very good series of questions about it. No other critic I read these days has the regular, consistent capacity to remind me not why I read but how one can: with– among many virtues– care.

Weekend Read: «Cliquez ici pour visualiser le séquence!»

I’ve been unabashedly ludditic this week, arguing for (or, at least, expressing a love of) the handmade book. Just to reassure you that I’m every bit the modern guy, I should also confess to having spent an inordinate amount of my e-lunch-hours this week in virtual France. If you haven’t heard, a six-year project has come to fruition in which the 4,500 manuscript pages of Madame Bovary, archived at the University of Rouen, have been loosed on the Web. As the Independent reported:

The project was launched six years ago as a tool for literary scholars. The municipal library in Rouen, which holds the Flaubert manuscripts, appealed to academics to help transcribe the hand-written texts. It was rapidly decided to open up the transcription process to enthusiastic amateurs and to make the site suitable for the general reader as well as the specialist.

The manuscripts were shared out for transcription between 130 volunteers, aged from 16 to 76, in a dozen countries, including France, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Ivory Coast, and New Zealand. “They range from sixth- formers to a cleaning lady and an oil prospector,” said Professor Danielle Girard, who co-ordinated the transcription work.

As beautifully communist as that operative approach surely is, the result for the rest of us is just as beautifully functional–the Internet at its best. To use the thing, first you go here, where you’ll see this:

Then, you pick a chapter, say Chapter One, part one, “Entrée de Charles au collège,” which will take you to the below, where, if you move your cursor over a section of the text, it gets hi-lit…

And then, once you cliquez, you get this pot of gold:

Yes, a split-screen that gives you Flaubert’s manuscript page and a transcription thereof–4,500 of them! Mais oui: c’est tout à fait extraordinaire. I propose it as your weekend read.

Currents from the Moor

If the illustrated book for adults can, when the illustrations are undertaken by a hand less sophisticated than those of the author, produce an effect on the reader of distrust of the whole, the handmade book is one which aspires to, and regularly manages to, exalt the ideal of the book. Not that long ago, all books were handmade; now, most of the work is performed by armies of cleverly machined presses and binderies. Lost, in that consumptive progression, is not the beautiful book–for many special books made by machine do manage to be beautiful objects that function well. Lost is the ordinary book being routinely beautiful.

If the art of the handmade book is less available to the common reader, we must content ourselves with the uncommon pleasures it presents when we find them. Letterpress type is beautiful not merely because it is an expression of the earliest products of movable type, but because type that has been pressed into paper is often, to my eyes, more readable than text made up of ink applied to it or sprayed on it (much less the boondoggle of e-ink and its alleged readability). Several MFA programs across the country still teach the old art of movable type–and the making of paper, and the art of sewing books in signatures so that the pages of a beloved book don’t–as your favorite hardcovers of late do–fall out after two readings.

University of Iowa’s Center for the Book (UICB) has been minting, of late, graduate students who go on to to do beautiful work, as I recently learned. Talented book and print maker Lucy Brank produced, as her first handmade book as a student a small and lovely creature called Rimbaud/Verlaine, Marine/Seascape. Twelve pages long and printed, as Brank says in her colophon, “on a mysterious, unidentifiable Fabriano paper anonymously donated to UICB”, the book unites, for the first time, two poems of the same title by friends Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

Brank begins studiously, with facing pages of French and English versions of each poet’s poem, using hand-set Bembo type.

As the translator of this version of “Marine,” Rimbaud’s little poem from his Illuminations, I find it an unusual pleasure to see the poem vividly set …

…and then reset so vividly as to make its translator not reproach its fidelity to the original (for once — translations are never fully satisfying to anyone, not least to their translators):

Fabulous fun though such crafty scruple is for the eye, Brank is up to more, in her Rimbaud/Verlaine, than rare clarity. She also has an artful ambition to make of two poems something more still, as one finds upon turning further:

Where we see the poem’s atoms begin to degrade, rising out of place and into space:

More fun still is the way Brank marries Verlaine and Rimbaud’s two poems on facing pages, producing a kind of typo-poetical cross-polination, a collision of not two but three artists’ visions. Faced with such beauty and rare industry, one can only look forward to more of Brank’s creations.

Woefully Too Small

Writers labor to make the visual world visible in fiction. There are many ways to do it. Here’s how William Makepeace Thackeray, age 33, made us see the world, in an incidental moment in Barry Lyndon:

On Sunday, no sooner was my mother gone to church, than I summoned Phil the valet, and insisted upon his producing my best suit, in which I arrayed myself (although I found that I had shot up so in my illness that the old dress was wofully too small for me), and, with my notable copy of verses in my hand, ran down towards Castle Brady, bent upon beholding my beauty. The air was so fresh and bright, and the birds sang so loud amidst the green trees, that I felt more elated than I had been for months before, and sprang down the avenue (my uncle had cut down every stick of the trees, by the way) as brisk as a young fawn. My heart began to thump as I mounted the grass-grown steps of the terrace, and passed in by the rickety hall-door. The master and mistress were at church, Mr. Screw the butler told me (after giving a start back at seeing my altered appearance, and gaunt lean figure), and so were six of the young ladies.

There are many obvious, and utterly unremarkable, visual touches: “the green trees”; “the rickety hall-door”; “grass-grown steps”; “gaunt lean figure”. None of these four is memorable writing, that is to say not one of them seems like a piece of invention that sets in one’s mind a way of writing about trees, or doors or a figure that we haven’t seen before (while, perhaps, “grass-grown steps” approaches the memorable with those atoms of alliteration colliding within three short syllables). Not memorable, in the main, but visible and, perhaps, one could argue, more visible than writing that might belabor description to the end of creating something verbally memorable— and here one thinks of a description, by a contemporary writer that gives us a pictures of, well, see for yourself:

He is walking from her dormitory; it is the first time they have slipped their hands into each other’s pants. He is walking through the town square, a meticulously planted conglomerate of trees, lawns, and flowerbeds, which the Midwestern college maintains to remind itself of its less progressive Eastern brethren. It is morning. The clouds extend practically to the top of the leafless oaks and a light drizzle sweeps in out of nowhere as if to remind the pedestrian of what clouds are all about. And yet, in one of the vagaries of Midwestern weather, this overcast February morning suddenly achieves an unlikely springlike temperature, conveyed through a wind as warm as the gust of a hair dryer.

Memorable, that description of unlikely February wind, “wind as warm as the gust of a hair dryer.” But as writing goes that’s just a lot of hot air: it shows us nothing so much as a man writing. Naturally, some will find the writing above beautiful because you can see the writer exerting himself so strenuously, so conspicuously. Philosophically, I prefer writing that shows its effects more discreetly, that exerts itself more, to my mind, purposefully– to the purpose of allowing the reader to be complicit in the process of imagining the seen. An inevitability, you’ll say, such complicity: we will all imagine different hair dryers … when envisioning this writer’s unlikely wind. My ultimate feeling about such hot-air writing is that it illustrates a scene too conspicuously, rendering it less– not more– visible.

As such, you might imagine that I’m not a big fan of illustrated editions of books for adults. You know the ones: Dos Passos’s USA, illustrated by Reginald Marsh, say, seems like a desecration: all those literal scribbles (made at the request of Dos Passos, himself an illustrator) of novelistic moments that need no amplification. Precisely one of the great pleasures of fiction reading is the way words, well-ordered, achieve their own local power while, as well, sparking the distant tinder in a reader’s head, that warehouse of images we all log from a life of looking.

But, just as there are some more gongoristical writers of prose who manage, nonetheless, to achieve an effect in their writing that trumps any bias I may bring to reading, there are also examples of illustrated books that trump my dislike of the idea. The latest in this category has, so far, nothing to do with the books and everything to do with their illustrator, the painter Lucian Freud.

Rizzoli has just put out Lucian Freud on Paper which, in addition to its expected hoard of marvels by the great British artist contains, for me at least, unexpected news: In his twenties especially, Freud contributed illustrations to a number of book covers as well as to one book of poems (The Glass Tower by Nicholas Moore) and one novella (The Equilibriad by William Sansom). I’m not at liberty to display any of these images here, but there is one image from the Sansom available to view on the web, here, in a miserably small and unrevealing resolution. What makes these illustrations unusual in the history of illustrated books is that the books have been greatly eclipsed by their illustrator. At the very least, they suggest that for an illustrated book to serve more than a merely decorative function the author and the illustrator must be doing equal work, contributing materially to the success of the whole.

Weekend Read: “Sure as the stars return again”

A friend called the other day from a bench in New York’s Hudson Valley to report that the weather was, at last, perfect for reading outside. As his first book of spring, he’d chosen Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It took a few days for his good weather to reach where we are, but today has been, at last, an outdoor reading day. Not least of the pleasures of reading outside is one of the most prosaic: the light’s really good. No pettifoggery with lampshades or lightbulbs required.

Yes, as I say, prosaic stuff, whereas Whitman’s 1855 version of the poem remains anything but. For those of you properly afraid of the great outdoors, preferring the safety of your basement apartments to the terrors of burgeoning nature, why not head over to the Whitman Archive and read a scanned version of a first edition of Whitman’s enduring poem. You’ll find it here, whereas you’ll find me here (or somewhere like it), weekend reading.

Our Idleness, Pride, and Folly

TAX

1. An impost; a tribute imposed; an excise; a tallage.
2. Charge; censure.

To TAX

1. To load with imposts.
2. To charge; to censure; to accuse.

—A Dictionary of the English Language, 1766, by Samuel Johnson

To TAX

1. To law, impose or assess upon citizens a certain sum of money or amount of property, to be paid to the public treasury, or to the treasury of a corporation or company, to defray the expenses of the government or corporation, &c.

We are more heavily taxed by our idleness, pride and folly, than we are taxed by government.

1. To load with a burden or burdens.

2. To assess, fix or determine judicially, as the amount of cost on actions in court; as, the court taxes bills of cost.

3. To charge; to censure; to accuse; usually followed by with; as, to tax a man with pride. He was taxed with presumption.

—The American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, by Noah Webster

Lodged Within the Heart

A great sense of occasion is present when a friend publishes a book, but there’s a particular pulse of pleasure I’m getting from the arrival of Erik Reece’s An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God. Erik has published two fine essays with this magazine, the second of which, “Jesus Without the Miracles”, I got to read in manuscript on a packed and rainy miserable ride on a commuter train some years ago. Against my better impulses as a civically-minded human, I did dial my cellphone that afternoon while squeezed between other unhappy commuters, and did tell Erik that the essay was extraordinary.

What did I like about it? Consider this paragraph:

[W]hen I first discovered the Gospel of Thomas about a decade ago, I was shocked to find a version of Christianity that I could accept and one that, moreover, could serve as a vital corrective to my grandfather’s view that we live helplessly, sinfully, in a broken world. According to Thomas’s Jesus, humankind never suffered an irredeemable Fall. The world only appears to be a realm of separation from the Creator and from one another. When Thomas’s Jesus tells his followers that “Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you,” he is implying that Adam’s first sin was to take on the knowledge of good and evil–the knowledge that continues to divide the world into us and them. The stunning message of Thomas’s gospel is that such divisions are arbitrary, destructive, and, finally, unnatural. Only the talking animals believe in them. Thus Adam’s sin, ironically, was simply ignorance. True, that ignorance proved to be congenital, but it wasn’t terminal and it didn’t demand divine intervention. What it demanded was a realization on the part of each individual that he or she still possesses a divine light lodged within the heart, and that light can reveal the world to be a beautiful, undivided wholeness.

Erik’s style of writing is a style of thinking, artfully clear and passionately plain, plain in the way of Shaker furniture where form is a distillation of purpose. Erik has turned his past attention to matters that matter most to him, the land and man’s role in it in Lost Mountain (which began as an essay for this magazine, “Death of a Mountain”), and now looks, in An American Gospel, to man’s role in God’s kingdom, which Reece asks us to consider might better be thought of as Planet Earth.

That’s too simple a parsing of what is much more complicated terrain, much in the way that the stamp of “memoir” is too diminishing a category for the kind of long intellectual essay that An American Gospel occupies—an essay that also manages to tell Erik’s own complex family story about the role that faith played for his fundamentalist Baptist preacher grandfather and Baptist minister father. It’s a very rare writer who can manage to mix a deep knowledge of scripture (secular and non-) with a naturalist’s sense of nature’s textures and an activist’s righteous anger and produce from them an intellectually serious and artfully rigorous book like An American Gospel.

Weekend Read: Frederick Seidel, “A Poet of Great Innocence”

Seidel. Copyright Mark Mahaney.

Every day in America, on public radio stations across the land, a short program airs called “The Writer’s Almanac.” Hosted by the writer, musician and impresario Garrison Keillor, the show’s five minutes begin and end with a ceremonious progression of melancholic piano chords. Between these bookending strains, in his lulling baritone, Keillor catalogues the high-points of the date in literary history: which writer was born, what book appeared, who passed away. And then, before bidding us adieu (“Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”), Keillor reads a poem. Though the authors he includes vary in age and gender, race and reputation, the poems themselves share a kind of soothing sameness–if not of subject or style or accomplishment then surely in the tone in which Keillor delivers them. Warm, winsome, tolerant, reassuring: whether the poem is one of longing or of losing, of joy or of grief, Keillor’s tone seems aimed at providing an almost analgesic relief to the listener — at proving that poetry is the balm that can heal any wound.

I find that tone a toxic thing, for it makes poetry into a kind of pillow, something puffed up and upon which one comes tiredly to rest. Whereas poetry at its best is a vigorous thing, an enlivening art, vibratingly alive, alive in its language and its music, a field of force and of forces. A poem in the collection Sunrise by American poet Frederick Seidel, suggests as much, concluding with the following lines, lines that give a potent sense of poetry’s better purpose:

At a very formal dinner party,

At which I met the woman I have loved the most

In my life, Belleville

Pulled out a sterling silver–plated revolver

And waved it around, pointing it at people, who smiled.

One didn’t know if the thing could be fired.

That is the poem.

Frederick Seidel, for fifty years and across ten collections, has been writing our most serious, beautiful, and essential poems, poems that are shocking in their art and astonishing in their truth, and that remind us, in their forms, why poetry was once a vital part of cultural life (and not, as Keillor seems to have it, a respite from it). This week, Seidel’s collected Poems 1959-2009 appears, 500 pages of astonishments that renew the cultural definition of what a poem is: a thing that wakes us, shakes us, moves us, and pays equal attention to the details of living and the art of poetry.

The collection is already receiving intelligent attention. This magazine’s Christian Lorentzen has a fine essay in The National. Harper’s readers will also recall Benjamin Kunkel’s excellent essay on Seidel’s previous book,Ooga-Booga. As Kunkel wrote perceptively in these pages:

The suave tone setting up the shock, the excellent table manners combined with a savage display of appetite: this is what everyone notices in Seidel. Yet he wouldn’t be so special or powerful a poet of what’s cruel, corrupt, and horrifying had he not also lately shown himself to be a great poet of innocence. Critics have tended to miss or dismiss this in him, skipping ahead, as it were, to the good stuff. But for now let us go back to what, for Seidel, is clearly the beginning: the innocent oblivion that precedes everything. It seems that for him it is an important feature of a spoiled person, country, or planet (”Contorted and disfigured nature in the dying days of oil”) that at one time these things were nothing at all, and might just as easily have been almost anything else.

Poems 1959-2009 allows all of us to go back to Seidel’s beginnings, on his terms. This book of cunning art is itself a cunning thing: Seidel has organized his collected works backwards. Whereas one typically reads through a collected poems in the order that the collections first appeared, Seidel has ordered his from the most recent work to the most distant. Thus we begin by reading his new poems, those of the limited edition chapbook Evening Man, and march steadily backwards to Seidel’s first collection, Final Solutions. The effect of such inversion is an inversion of expectations: great poets’ early poems tend, when compared with those of the more mature writers they must become, to suffer by comparison. In Seidel’s case, what one notices as one reads towards his beginnings is how much of his present sensibility and capacity were already alive in his early work, and how dedicatedly he has tuned and challenged that sensibility as he has continued to surpass himself.

This Sunday, as your weekend read, I propose you spend a little time with Seidel. First, you can read many of Seidel’s poems online in the Google Preview of Poems 1959-2009, here. Begin, why don’t you, with “Boys”, a poem first published in Harper’s. And then, in the New York Times Magazine, you can read my profile of Seidel, wherein are included recordings of Seidel reading from his collected works (making it admittedly a weekend listen as much as a weekend read). Bon weekend.

My Book is a Painting

Readers familiar with Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, and Lectures on Don Quixote, know that Nabokov had a very vivid way of reading the texts that he taught his students. A poor but passionate illustrator, Nabokov would sketch visual details from the various works he taught. Reproductions of his sketches appear in the published version of the lectures, and thus we see his drawing of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in his metamorphosed state (whether “vermin” or “insect” or “cockroach” or Nabokov’s preferred “beetle” is another matter), a floor plan of the Samsa apartment, as well as the sort of skating costume that Kitty would have worn in Anna Karenina, or the sleeping car in which Anna rode from Moscow to St. Petersburg in same. The very useful and practical idea that one can get out of looking at Nabokov’s crude, charming illustrations of the text is that a work of literature is something to be looked at carefully, a thing one needs very much to learn, dedicatedly, how to see.

I suspect that Nabokov, first among many, would have found painter and writer Eric Karpeles’s wonderful recent book Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to “In Search of Lost Time” something to be treasured. Karpeles takes as his very simple organizing principle the ambition to collect in one volume every painting Proust mentions in his large novel, a novel crammed with such references. “My book is a painting,” Proust wrote in a letter to Jean Cocteau, and Karpeles’s book is the first and only complete exhibition of those other painters upon whom Proust’s hungry eye came to feed.

A simple idea, but doubtless a cumbersome editorial task that Karpeles manages beautifully. He marches us through the novel’s seven parts and quotes the passages that mention each image or artist pairing them with the appropriate reproduction thereof (the text he uses is the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation from Modern Library). Karpeles does a great service to readers in creating so practical and useful a book, one that enriches our appreciation and comprehension of the visual underpinnings of verbal art.

Paintings in Proust also happens to be one of the very prettiest examples of commercial publishing I’ve seen in a while. Produced (in China) with all the lavishness of a monograph, the book is sewn in signatures and printed on heavy glossy stock and lies open on a lap or a table. Fittingly, it will last forever.

Tricks of Demeanor and Speech

“How one pines for a translation of Proust by the hand of Nabokov,” wrote Christopher Hitchens a few years ago in a review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Swann’s Way. Hitchens’s remark seems so sensibly surefooted that you hardly notice the subtleties he merrily tramples past. Yes, it might well seem that Nabokov, who admired Proust, whose French was fluent, and whose own English prose–with its sensitivity to color, its priority on evoking sensory states, its resourceful music, and its syntactical complexity–would have seemed the ideal medium in which to reproduce Proust’s French effects. And yet, to pine for such an advent is to overlook Nabokov’s very complex identity as a translator.

In 1922, Nabokov was a liberal hand, translating Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland into Russian (which Russianists can read online). He strove to reproduce Alice’s rhythm and rhyme. For the benefit of those of us unable to read his Anya v strane chudes (Anya in the Land of Wonder), the translator’s wife Véra explained in The American Years, the second volume of Brian Boyd’s great Nabokov biography, that her husband had worked hard to impersonate Carroll’s “tricks of demeanor and speech.” Puns and portmanteaus that would have been deadly if translated literally were liberally recast. Details of British history sure to baffle Russians were replaced with local color (the “French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror” became a mouse left behind during Napoleon’s retreat). Now considered the finest of the seventy substitute Alices that have proliferated through the reading world, the twenty-three year-old Nabokov’s translation showed him already exceptionally able at acting “the real author’s part.”

In age, Nabokov grew conservative, attempting, in his 1964 four volume Bolingen translation of Eugene Onegin, to offer a version that impersonated no one’s tricks. Instead, it gave scholarly access to the exact meaning of the original Russian. It was a translation, but not one that aspired to being a text one read for pleasure: it was a resource for readers, an intellectual gift to an aesthetic marvel, but not itself an aesthetic marvel.

In the quote above, therefore, we can assume that Hitchens was hoping for marvels in translation, not for resourcefulness. Whereas my sense has long been that good translations are always marvels of resourcefulness. On that admirable list I count Davis’s version of Swann’s Way, as I do Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s, Terence Kilmartin’s revision of the Moncrieff, D.J. Enright’s revision of Kilmaertin’s Moncrieff, and even James Grieve’s more flamboyant transposition.

Weekend Read: “He wanted the overtones as well”

This week, I’ve posted around the uncontroversial contention that literary criticism is nothing if it isn’t reading closely, quoting abundantly, and parsing carefully. In the course of commenting on such concerns, one reader wrote to say he thought I was suggesting that Guy Davenport wasn’t a good literary critic. Although I still find myself unconvinced that I made any such suggestion, if even one reader could suppose such a thing, I feel I’m duty bound to make the following statement: Find me a better literary critic than Davenport in the past 50 years and I’ll buy you a pony.

The confusion, I suppose, comes from Davenport’s multiple capacities. He was a painter, an illustrator, a draftsman, a carpenter; a poet, a translator, a fiction writer, an essayist; and, too, he was a literary critic. But the fortune-cookie wisdom of “jack of all trades, master of none,” surely does not apply in Davenport’s case. He was simply deeply able at most of the activities to which his attention turned. He was capacious, capable de tout.

One piece of criticism (of many) of Davenport’s to which I return every year is “Another Odyssey,” a 1967 review of Richard Lattimore’s translation of The Odyssey that first appeared in Arion and was later collected in Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination: 40 Essays on Literature and Art. As much as the essay is a showcase for Davenport’s gifts as a reader and a writer, it’s also an object lesson in active reading and clear writing thereabout.

In Davenport, you get an eye and ear tuned this sharp and fine:

So as your weekend read, I propose Davenport’s “Another Odyssey,” available online here, or available, in paper form, with 39 other, very varied pieces of criticism and personal essay, here.

The Evil Thoughts of Man

American birds from 1877. Not starlings.

Monday, I mentioned close reading as a practice indivisible from literary criticism. The thought was sparked by a letter I’d just received in response to an essay of mine in The New York Review of Books on Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy. To give you a little context on the reader’s letter, here’s a paragraph that he referenced from Morrison’s novel:

One day… an eagle laid her eggs in a nest far above and far beyond the snakes and paws that hunted them. Her eyes are midnight black and shiny as she watches over them. At the tremble of a leaf, the scent of any other life, her frown deepens, her head jerks and her feathers quietly lift. Her talons are sharpened on rock; her beak is like the scythe of a war god. She is fierce, protecting her borning young. But one thing she cannot defend against: the evil thoughts of man. One day a traveler climbs a mountain nearby. He stands at its summit admiring all he sees below him. The turquoise lake, the eternal hemlocks, the starlings sailing into clouds cut by rainbow. The traveler laughs at the beauty saying, “This is perfect. This is mine.” And the word swells, booming like thunder into valleys, over acres of primrose and mallow. Creatures come out of caves wondering what it means. Mine. Mine. Mine. The shells of the eagle’s eggs quiver and one even cracks. The eagle swivels her head to find the source of the strange, meaningless thunder, the incomprehensible sound. Spotting the traveler, she swoops down to claw away his laugh and his unnatural sound. But the traveler, under attack, raises his stick and strikes her wing with all his strength. Screaming she falls and falls. Over the turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, down through the clouds cut by rainbow. Screaming, screaming she is carried away by wind instead of wing.

One character tells this fable as a bedtime story, and I cited it in the essay to the end of discussing Morrison’s own, larger project in A Mercy—a novel about America’s beginnings that I found rampantly unconvincing. To corroborate my findings, I spent a fair amount of essayistic space picking out moments in Morrison’s prose where her characters were presented with such stylistic variance as to become incoherent as fictional beings. Much of the piece, therefore, was a close reading of the ways that Morrison’s novel can be said to fail along aesthetic lines.

But, I learned via the mail, there’s close reading, and then there’s close reading. For while, to my mind, the language of the fable above seemed—unlike that in much of the rest of the book—appropriately undistracting, Jack Kligerman, a Professor Emeritus of English who taught at Lehman College, CUNY, for 35 years, wrote to say that the passage actually contains a real whopper if you know a thing or two about birds.

Though the scene above is told by a native American in the late 1680s, Mr. Kligerman, also a birder and photographer, informed me that starlings wouldn’t have been in North America for another 200 years. As you can learn, starlings only arrived in North America in 1890, thanks to “a group dedicated to introducing to America all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works” and which released one hundred European Starlings into Central Park.

A lone anachronism, of course, isn’t going to murder any serious work of art, any more than an error in local color can dependably kill our interest (the first page of Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person features a Statue of Liberty in whose raised hand not a lantern but sword is held aloft). But what is interesting to me in Mr. Kligerman’s get is how a detail of fact in a historical fiction was to him as distracting as my own concerns were to me. So many things, is the upshot, can reasonably take a reader out of a reading experience. Novelists should always be their own closest readers, and the best of them typically are.

Another Sensibility

Though it’s amazing to imagine, there are some people who are against close reading in literary criticism. A friend who attended a panel on long-form book reviewing recently reported that many of the panelists, a number of them editors who oversee the publication of long review essays, preferred their reviewers to limit the practice (to be clear, close reading is an editorially encouraged feature of reviews of fiction that run in this magazine). I wasn’t privy to the debate that may have followed, but the notion that one wouldn’t spend a good percentage of one’s critical real estate on a careful examination of a writer’s prose and its effects is, from where I sit, a real jaw-dropper.

It may well be that, like “ultimate fighting,” “close reading” may not mean the same thing to all comers. And yet, as I type that attempt at large-heartedness, I sense it’s misplaced. I think it more likely that there’s a philosophical difference out there over what responsibility a reader has to a book. “For the real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility,” wrote Guy Davenport, “to give oneself over to Henry James or Conrad or Ausonius, to Yuri Olyesha, Basho, and Plutarch.” That suspension in the reading process, the floating state of being not of one’s own mind, is a pleasure that some, superstitiously I suppose, might not wish to probe too precisely. The rationale would be that to look too carefully would be to demystify this magical levitation, to send the thing crashing to the ground.

That’s pure malarky. Criticism that doesn’t read closely isn’t literary criticism. If it’s anything, it’s personal essay—a perfectly admirable category of thing, and a perfectly reasonable form in which a writer can write about reading as an experience—but not literary criticism. Consider Guy Davenport’s personal essay, “On Reading,” in which one finds the following:

Last year I met a young man in his twenties who is illiterate; there are more illiterates in Kentucky than anywhere else, with the possible exception of the Philippines and Haiti. The horror of his predicament struck me first of all because it prevents his getting a job, and secondly because of the blindness it imposes on his imagination. I also realized more fully than ever before what a text is and how it can only be realized in the imagination, how mere words, used over and over for other purposes and in other contexts, can be so ordered by, say, Jules Verne, as to be deciphered as a narrative of intricate texture and splendid color, of precise meaning and values. At the time of the illiterate’s importuning visits (I was trying to help him find a job) I was reading Verne’s Les enfants du capitaine Grant, a geography book cunningly disguised as an adventure story, for French children, a hefty two volume work. I had never before felt how lucky and privileged I am, not so much for being literate, a state of grace that might in different circumstances be squandered on tax forms or law books, but for being able, regularly, to get out of myself completely, to be somewhere else, among other minds, and return (by laying my book aside) renewed and refreshed.

Good and clear and right as this is, it is a description of the reading experience, and a stipulation of the pleasures of such experience, not an anatomy of a particular reading experience. That’s something we go to criticism for: to see how something works when it works well, and to point to and probe at things that one doesn’t feel work at all. Either maneuver demands precision, and “close reading”, so called, is a description, however vague, of the attitude such an undertaking demands: a nearness to the thing, a nearness that requires quotation and scrutiny thereof.

Of course, one needn’t read literary criticism to be a good reader, any more than one needs to understand pH levels in garden soil to enjoy a good garden tomato. But if you plan on growing your own, or presume to advise those who do….

Weekend Read: “What went wrong in Germany”

Jonathan Littell’s second novel, The Kindly Ones, has gotten a good deal of attention. There has been no shortage of reviews, from which composite one can glean a picture of the book and of the author’s ambition. I should say I have read some of the novel, have not finished it–though I have had long conversations about it with someone close to me as she marches slowly through its pages. I’ll finish the book at some point, though not with the expectation that I’ll find a novel I’ll treasure (of course I welcome the possibility of being surprised).

The long review essay of the novel that so far speaks most to my ideas of how a novel works or doesn’t is by Ruth Franklin. I often disagree with Franklin’s takes, but find such disagreements profitable: they clarify why I believe what I do, while nonetheless allowing me to respect what she does.

Franklin sounds only sensible in her report of the Littell. Early, she tells us:

The Kindly Ones is not an important novel, because it fails absolutely to add anything of significance to our understanding of its subject, which is nothing less than the most perplexing question of modernity. How could human beings undertake–and successfully carry out–an unprecedented systematic program of mass extermination against other human beings? Over the course of the sixty-four years since the end of World War II, this question has been examined energetically, if not exhaustively, by historians, philosophers, novelists, poets, psychologists, and politicians. In her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt set the terms of the debate by arguing that the majority of the Nazis were not– as psychologists had previously believed– monsters in some form: sadists, psychopaths, perverts, or homicidal maniacs. They were, the overwhelming majority of them, unremarkable men, “small cogs” in a killing machine, who showed little initiative of their own but were prepared to obey orders unquestioningly and then go to dinner.

Franklin is also at work on a book about the literature of the Holocaust, so the Littell is located within her current critical wheelhouse. I’ll be curious to see how this essay gets changed to fit the exegeses of her finished book–but for now I suggest you read her “Night and Cog” as your weekend read.

Similar Incapacities

Above you’ll see the prettiest of gatefold title pages of one of the most useful (out of print) books I know, The Craft and Context of Translation. As the fine print boasts, the book is a symposium on the subject, put together by William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck held in 1959, and put forth in 1961 by The University of Texas Press. Only 1500 copies of this lovely and useful book were printed, and it seems that a wise publisher would reprint this volume of essays by Shattuck, Arrowsmith, Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Howard and others.

The benefit of this gang approach to the subject is how it expands our idea of the discipline. Not only will a reader come upon translations one hadn’t heard of (it was in this book, twenty years ago, that I first came upon the sacred name “Christopher Logue”), but also problems one hadn’t realized one had. Denver Lindley’s essay, “The Editor’s Problem,” begins: “The whole subject of translation, for those who are professionally involved in it, is a potpourri of hesitation, exasperation, compromise, headache and occasional thrills and satisfactions. From the editorial side of the desk, these difficulties bear a different weight”—which weight Lindley goes on to measure.

Measuredness is the mood of the book, a series of discourses one reads for pleasure because of the fineness of the various writer’s styles. Richard Howard, for example contributes “A Professional Translator’s Trade Alphabet.” For the letter ‘I’, Howard gives us …

ISOLATION: See Other Translators.

… whereunder we find:

OTHER TRANSLATORS: I have never had the opportunity of discussing my work with other translators. As I suggest in Articles of Faith, I believe I am unable to read French writing in translation fairly, and I suspect other translators of similar incapacities where I am concerned. Even so, however, I am curious about my confreres. Though I know a number of scholars, many editors and even one or two reviewers who have done translations, I do not know any of the men and women of my profession. I often wonder about them—do they have as paranoiac a sense of me as I of them? What would we have to say to each other at a party, not to mention a panel?

“Grammar and Style!”

Some of my favorite passages of English prose appear in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Written in French and translated into English by Beckett and Patrick Bowles, the novel’s language is, to my ear and mind, perfection at every turn. I prefer the English version, probably because I knew it first. When I got to the French original, I couldn’t help but think of it as subordinate to the translation.

“Translation” is a funny word to think of when thinking of Beckett: he chose to write in French to escape the mastery he had in English. Why Beckett would have wanted to escape mastery is clarified by time spent with his 1932 first novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women. The novel’s style apes Joyce’s at its more playful:

Behold Belacqua an overfed child pedalling, faster and faster, his mouth ajar and his nostrils dilated, down a frieze of hawthorn after Findlater’s van, faster and faster till he cruise alongside of the hoss, the black fat wet rump of the hoss. Whip him up, vanman, flickem, flapem, collop-wallop fat Sambo. Stiffly, like a perturbation of feathers, the tail arches for a gush of mard. Ah… !

And what is more he is to be surprised some years later climbing the trees in the country and in the town sliding down the rope in the gymnasium.

In French, Beckett took refuge from his gifted ear, tuning it to a simpler inner music. Thus we get this, in translation, in Molloy:

I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but here there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come. For what possible end to these wastes where the light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night. These things, what things, come from where, made of what? And it says that here nothing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir, except myself, who do not stir either, when I am there, but see and am seen. Yes, a world at an end, in spite of appearances, its end brought it forth, ending it began, is it clear enough? And I too am at an end, when I am there, my eyes close, my sufferings cease and I end, I wither as the living can not.

Another way of explaining Beckett’s exodus from English appears in the fantastic new The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940. The first of four projected, this first volume is a marvel. Here’s a paragraph from a letter of Beckett’s to Axel Kaun, as translated from the German by Martin Esslin Viola Westbrook:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as, for example, the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? An answer is requested.

Weekend Read: “Frenzy finds its weapons”

There is no translation of any worthwhile book that hasn’t had its sometimes vigorous detractors. Jerome, who gave us the Vulgate, was forced to flee Rome to finish his work in Bethlehem when the Roman clergy got wind of his decision to translate from Hebrew sources (and, worse still, into the everyday Latin of Romans). Tyndale, who gave us the first English Bible with wide distribution was strangled and burned at the stake for his trouble (the charge was heresy). So it goes.

The Aeneid is a different sort of holy book. It has found its English voice countless times. The most recently heralded version was done by Robert Fagles, and written about approvingly in these pages by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi. I like the Fagles too, but first liked the Fitzgerald. He hooked me early in that unfinished epic’s first book with a series of lines I love. The moment comes as Aeneas, who had fled Troy during its destruction by the Greeks, is later marooned by a storm on an unknown shore. Through wilderness and woods, he comes upon a glorious city. Beautiful though it is, he worries that he and his hidden ship will be taken for infidels and destroyed like so much else they’ve already lost. Still brave, Aeneas enters the temple at the city center in the hope that he might make himself known to its elders. While he waits uneasily, he notices that upon the walls of the temple are many murals. The scenes that they depict seem familiar to Aeneas, and so he examines them. He does not believe his eyes: they are panoramas of Troy. Of the great war, the battles with the Greeks, the terrible invasion, the torching of the city—images of Trojan bravery even in defeat, everywhere visible within this foreign shrine:

Here Aeneas

Halted, and tears came.

“What spot on earth…

Is not full of the story of our sorrow?

Look, here is Priam. Even so far away

Great valor has due honor; they weep here

For how the world goes,and our life that passes

Touches their hearts. Throw off your fear. This fame

Insures some kind of refuge.”

He broke off

To feast his eyes and mind on a mere image,

Sighing often, cheeks grown wet with tears…

He stood enthralled, devouring all in one long gaze.

Here, Aeneas finds solace in the ordered universe of art in the wake of life’s disorder. Sarah Ruden, who has also done versions of Lysistrata and The Satyricon, now has done an Aeneid (Yale) that gives readers another chance to find solace in Virgil. Ruden’s approach is very different, as is the yield. “This is the first translation since Dryden’s that can be read as a great English poem in itself,” Garry Wills wrote of the Ruden recently. While I wouldn’t disagree that Ruden’s version, taken in as a whole, coheres as poem, and a rich one, to say it is the first that can be read as a great English poem is going too far. Both the Fagles and the Fitzgerald did that (and still do that) for me.

Ruden’s Virgil seems notable instead for a kind of austerity, a Roman plainness. Here are her versions of the lines I like from Fitzgerald:

He halted, weeping: “What land isn’t full

Of what we suffered in that war, Achates?

There’s Priam! Even here is praise for valor,

And tears of pity for a mortal world.

Don’t be afraid. Somehow our fame will save us.”

With steady sobbing and a tear-soaked face,

He fed his heart on shallow images.

A very different flavor comes through, and one better appreciated not in small tastes but in a full plate. So, for your Weekend Read, I suggest Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by Sarah Ruden (PDF download). Thanks to Yale University Press for permission to reprint.

Remote in Time, or Alien in Language

From the National Archives, 1936

I’m inhabiting a pleasant little temporal interim right now, the lucky space that opens up when a new Bob Dylan record is announced. Dylan’s readers (more upon that apparently errant word in a moment) have been very lucky lately that his records have been coming out not merely with such regularity but with such great quality. Like Roth, he’s proving to be an inspiringly enduring manufacturer, to such an extent that calling current Dylan “late Dylan” miscasts the ageless place that the last 15 years of song have been coming from.

Even the casual reader (that word again) of Dylan’s work will appreciate the sort of WPA project that Dylan assigned to himself in the early 90s to true his art back to its sources. That project has borne all kinds fruit both delicious and strange. Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong featured Dylan alone on acoustic guitar, covering traditionals and favorites, the two records providing a subsidiary, scholarly pleasure similar to the one a reader would get browsing a catalog of Joyce’s personal library: these were songs that fed him, fortified his art, delighted his ear and mind.

Dylan has always been an uncommonly literate writer, one who’s been happy to lard his lines with reference both explicit and tacit. In this way, he’s like Lowell, who understood that “experience” could include both what one did and one read, or, put another way, that reading was no less significant a kind of doing. After Lowell, there’s been, in a lot of American poetry, a great flight away from that category of inclusion–as much, I suspect, a matter of a recent rancid fear of seeming a certain way (”snobbish”) as a more telling incapacity to write a certain way. Whereas the result of Dylan’s very explicitly freighted lines has been, lately, the accusation that he’s been, wait for it, plagiarizing the work of other poets. It points to a clear gulf in our understanding of what poets do and have done and the popular sense of such work. Poets, T.S. Eliot expained in his essay on Philip Massenger, borrow:

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal.

When Dylan’s 1998 2001 record Love and Theft came out, one could read, in the Wall Street Journal, about how Dylan was a thief of lines; and when Modern Times appeared in 2006, the pilfered poet was no longer Junichi Saga, but Ovid and Henry Timrod, who Suzanne Vega—who should know better—”defended” in the New York Times, editorializing in low dudgeon that Dylan had stolen Timrod’s work. Yawn.

Dylan does have better readers, thank goodness, of what more than ever we can see as writings sewn with sound. As a few lyrics from the new record have come online, the useful hub Expecting Rain has been charting all the chatter. This led me to the very fine postings by Scott Warmuth over at the Fairfield Weekly that seem to predict the latest round of outcry that will accompany the release of Dylan’s April, Whitmanically-titled (scroll down a bit in the following link) record, Together Through Life. Warmuth has been tracing Dylan’s reading of David Wright’s version of The Canturbury Tales, which seems to have informed the new songs (and some from “Modern Times,” too).

Literary criticism aside, I can’t wait to hear the record. Whereas smart and lucky Alex Ross didn’t have to (wait).

The Forces of Conservatism and Obstruction

Quinn astride a horse, 1913

In a long letter from T.S. Eliot to John Quinn, dated July 9, 1919, one finds the following:

I am sorry to say that I have found it uphill and exasperating work trying to impose Joyce on such “intellectual” people, or people whose opinion carries weight as I know, in London. He is far from being accepted, yet. I only know two or three people, besides my wife and myself, who are really carried away by him. There is a strong body of critical Brahminism, destructive and conservative in temper, which will not have Joyce. Novelty is no more acceptable here than anywhere else, and the forces of conservatism and obstruction are more intelligent, better educated, and more formidable.

How very nice it is to read such phrases as “He is far from being accepted, yet,” and “I only know two or three people, besides my wife and myself, who are really carried away by him.” Ha-ha, one thinks. For there is great retrospective pleasure of seeing the individual vindicated by history. This is pretty plain, but there is also the practical pleasure of seeing how the individual, in literary history, is always making a mark despite, and often on behalf of, better things and people. Here, Eliot and Quinn were doing their little part, one piece of the job of enjoying art. Being loud about it, when you like it, matters a good deal, it turns out (and sure, it helps to have a good voice).

Quality is the key to any serious literary endurance, yes, but friendship is underrated as a critical tool. Anyone can write a blurb extolling, adverbially, the “fearlessly brilliant” and “daringly brave” (?) qualities of some someone’s latest something. But not everyone will write and circulate defenses of under-known works and undervalued artists, try to raise cash for the strapped genius, advocate in public and push in private for the virtues of the great but obscure.

Eliot did, and Pound, and Ford, and Quinn, and a great many more. We forget, now and again, in the careerist whirl of the weird little business that is made of writing, how much altruism there is among those who do this sort of work. Half the fun comes in passing the literal or figurative hat when one believes in the virtues and virtue of something rare. “Critical Brahminism” (not to say profligate moronism) meets many, merry dooms.