Wallace Stevens on the poet's audience:

"Time and time again it has been said that [the poet] may not address himself to an elite. I think he may. The poet will continue to do this: to address himself to an elite even in a classless society, unless, perhaps, this exposes him to imprisonment or exile. In that event he is likely not to address himself to anyone at all. He may, like Shostakovich, content himself with pretence. He will, nevertheless, still be addressing himself to an elite, for all poets address themselves to someone and it is of the essence of that instinct, and it seems to amount to an instinct, that it should be to an elite, not to a drab but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, not to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one's own, if there are enough of one's own to fill a gallery. And that elite, if it responds, not out of complaisance, but because the poet has quickened it, because he has educed from it that for which it was searching in itself and in the life around it and which it had not yet quite found, will thereafter do for the poet what he cannot do for himself, that is to say, receive the poetry."

—The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

I’m not well read in poetry. In fact, that’s far too generous. Apart from Philip Larkin and Wallace Stevens—both of whom I love to read—I’ve barely sample any poetry at all. I’m thirty-one. A reader. Almost no poetry.

In the last couple of months, I’ve been reading the little remembered American poet L.E. Sissman. As with Stevens, some of his poems sail right over my head, or “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” as Stevens once rather mysteriously said poetry should do. I’m not sure how much intelligence Sissman is up against in this case.

Those poems of Sissman’s I most enjoy don’t require Talmudic scrutiny, though it helps to have a dictionary at hand. In addition to his poetry and criticism—he published with some regularity in the New Yorker—Sissman was (similar to Stevens in this respect) a businessman. He died at 47 of lymphoma and many of his most affecting poems deal with sickness and death. Among the most bracing is Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite:

“Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,

A vacuum waiting for a rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us to Erewhon. This room
Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall
An empty elevator clangs its doors,
Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,
Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air
Outside a trempbling, empty brightness falls
In hunger on those whom it would devour
Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls
And rises silently up the steel stairs
To the eleventh and last floor, where I
Resided on sufferance of authorities
Until my visas wither, and I die.”

One of my favorite passages in Sea Room touches on the fluidity of the past:

“There is a temptation to imagine the past as essentially static and the present as essentially mobile and disrupted. Nothing could be further from the truth. The peopling of the Shiants is only one fragment of an endless chain. That is why this crossing of a potentially alarming sea, at a moment which is picked because the weather is kind and the spring is coming, because the tide running with you and the sun is out, when you can see where you are going and you have everything you need, is one of the deepest of historical experiences. Don’t imagine the past as a place full of catastrophe and horror. This is it’s colour: a chance fairly taken, a sense of happiness in the light of spring.”

I think of that passage in relation to another nautical book I’m in the middle of (I don’t know why two; I’m not interested in sailing) Samuel Eliot Morrison’s Columbus: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Nowadays, Columbus is a hated figure ranked among history’s most portentous villains. Morrison published his biography in 1942, and that's not his prejudice. Later in life, Columbus jumpstarted a grisly slave trade and governed—I’m told—disastrously, but early on he’s simply an adventurer (a visionary, a bit of a crank) taking a fair chance with the wind at his back. I saw his small coffin held aloft in the Seville Cathedral; he can’t have been much over five feet tall. 

I’m reading Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides by Adam Nicolson. Nicolson is the son and grandson of a tribe of writers, the most famous of whom is probably his paternal grandfather, the diplomat Harold Nicolson (author, among other things, of Good Behaviour, being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, 1955). In the early 20C, Adam’s father, Nigel, answered a newspaper ad for the sale of three islands in the Hebrides, the Shiantes, and paid 1,900 pounds for them. When he was twenty-one, Adam inherited the islands like one might age into a trust fund. The upshot, thirty years later, is this unusual, somewhat shaggy book—part memoir and part history, with forays into archeology, botany, boat-making, oceanography, ornithology, even housekeeping. Throughout, Nicolson is a companionable host, showing us around his favorite spots and scrutinizing his beloved birds; dishing rich descriptions without ever boring us (or me). The best travel writer makes one want to visit the place he’s describing. Midway through Sea Room, I really do find myself wanting to stroll across the windswept Shiants, stopping to examine the grassy ruins, to dip—if it's the ripest part of summer and not too chilly—into the peaty pools, and sit and watch the sea birds wing around the cliffs.

Joseph Epstein has a book coming out about charm this fall—Charm: The Elusive Enchantment— and this is what he has to say about his subject: “Charm is magic of a kind; it casts a spell. In the presence of charm the world seems lighter and lovelier. A charming person can cause you to forget your problems, at least temporarily, to hold the world’s dreariness at bay. Charm is a reminder that the world is filled with jolly prospects and delightful possibilities. Watching Fred Astaire dance, or listening to Blossom Dearie sing, or reading the poems of C.P. Cavafy, or merely looking at Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, one recalls that the world can be a pretty damn fine place.”

I’ve been dipping into the work of the Indian writer R.K. Narayan again and believe charm—casting a spell—to be one of his chief virtues. It isn’t an unearthly charm, like the dancing of a Fred Astaire or the beauty of a Rita Hayworth, but of a  more mundane variety. It consists in the humor and gentleness with which he treats his characters. The book I’m reading is The Bachelor of Arts, the second short novel in a quartet bound together by the Modern Library. The central character, Chandran, is at first a ruthlessly overachieving student, who after graduation discovers the only reading plan worth putting into action:

“He became a member of the Town Public Library and read an enormous amount of fiction and general literature. He discovered Carlyle. He found that after all Shakespeare had written some stirring dramas, and several poets were not as dull as they were made out to be. There was no scheme or order to his study. He read books just as they came. He read a light humorist and switched on to Carlyle, and from there pounced on Shakespeare, and then wandered to Shaw and Wells. The thing that mattered most to him was that the book should be enjoyable, and he ruthlessly shut books that threated to bore him.”

I’ve finished An Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and noodliest—some critics believe the best—of Montaigne’s essays. In my translation by Donald M. Frame it runs a stout 170 pages, whereas few of the other essays measure much longer than 10 or 20. It’s as though Montaigne prefers the to run the quarter mile, but mid-way through track season, decides to take up the marathon.

It’s a peculiar riffing essay and has little to do with the medieval Christian apologist of its the title, whose book Montaigne had translated at his dying father’s request. “It was a very strange and a new occupation for me,” Montaigne writes, “but being by chance at leisure at the time, and being unable to disobey any command of the best father there ever was, I got through it the best I could; at which he was singularly pleased, and ordered it to be printed; this was done after his death.”

In an introductory essay, Frame notes: “Less than one tenth of the chapter deals with Sebond at all. Primarily it is a sustained argument of the impotence of unaided human reason…”

It is addressed to a princess whom Frame believes to be Margaret of Valois, who—the theory goes— asked Montaigne to publish a defense of the thinking of the man he had translated. What a response she got instead!

Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a biography of Nikolai Gogol that I'm about to receive in the mail, said of his fellow Russian: "Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange." That's the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition of Dead Souls, trans. by Robert A. Maguire. True to Nabokov's reckoning, Dead Souls is a very strange book. The plot is simple: "a gentleman of the middling sort"—"not good looking, but not uncomely in appearance either, not overly fat, nor overly thin"—arrives in a nameless provincial town with an unspoken purpose that gradually reveals itself: to buy the legal rights to the deceased serfs of neighboring landowners. The sleepy town is aroused by this visit from a stranger whom the gentry speculate to be a millionaire; the officials of the town fete and flatter him. Meanwhile Chichikov—that's the name of Gogol's "hero"—drives around in a britska, getting lost and waylaid, paying visits to the landowners and, without revealing why he wants to purchase the dead souls, tries to wheedle them into making a sale.

As one might expect from this description, Dead Souls is a funny book. Gogol's style is wonderfully discursive without coming unglued. He conjures up a world not only through Chichikov's various adventures, and the pen-portraits of the strange landowners he visits, but from wild similes that can end up being small stories of their own, dream-like images, or compose little moral sermons, even attacks on middle-brow taste. Here's an example taken from Chichikov's visit to the demented hermit Plyushkin:

"...suddenly across that wooden face glided a warm ray. It was not a feeling that had found expression, but some pale reflection of a feeling, a phenomenon like the unexpected appearance of a drowning man on the surface of the water, which evokes a joyful shout from the crowd gathered on the bank. But in vain do the rejoicing brothers and sisters throw a rope from the bank and wait for another glimpse of the back or the arms exhausted from struggling—his one appearance was the final one. Everything is quite dead, and thereafter the becalmed surface of the unresponsive element becomes even more dreadful and desolate. So too the face of Plyushkin, in the wake of the feeling that had glided across it for just and instant, became even more unfeeling and more ordinary."