The Best American Poetry

Emerson on the poor and the "wicked dollar" (with a comment from Michael Schiavo)

A powerful and perhaps surprising moment in Emerson's great "Self-Reliance":
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Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
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Michael Schiavo comments:

Of course the phrasing is important, and something that many people overlook, in Emerson, and particularly in this passage. It's not "the poor" but "my poor." We all have obligations to specific people. There's also this passage from "Circles":

"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty, another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty, and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker! there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?"

--October 27, 2011

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

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There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime.
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I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

"Film Noir" [by Sean Speers]

Why me?

Editor's Note: This is, I submit, the epitome of film noir in a two-word sentence. James Stewart says it in Vertigo, Edmund O'Brien says it in DOA, and Janet Leigh never gets the chance in Psycho. --DL

Great Blurbs de Nos Jours [by Mitch Sisskind]

Mitch Sisskind's candidates:

". . . an excellent blurb line is, "i put this book in my son's/daughter's suitcase when he/she went of to Harvard/Yale/Berkeley." it shows you have a family, which makes many people feel closer to you, and it also shows that you trust the book enough to put in in the hands of your kids -- in whom you have a huge financial investment.

another good line is, 'if you read only one book this year, make it this one.' Because that sort of gives them permission not to buy any more books this year. but if it's getting close to the end of the calendar year this line could look funny -- in that case make sure you say 'if you only read one book this fiscal year....' "

Nabokov on Chess

You wrote this marvellous novel The Luzhin Defence: are you a very good chess player? And what do you think of [Bobby] Fischer’s attitude?

Forty years ago I was a good enough player of chess, not a grandmaster, as the Germans say, but a club player sometimes able to set a trap for a heedless champion. What has always drawn me in chess is the trick move, the hidden combination, and that’s why I gave up live play to devote myself to composing chess problems. I don’t doubt that there exists an intimate link between certain mirages of my prose and the texture, at once brilliant and obscure, of enigmatic chess problems of which each one is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia. I especially like so-called suicide problems, where White forces Black to win.

Yes, Fischer is a strange being, but there’s nothing abnormal in the fact of a chess player’s not being normal. There was the case of the great player Rubinstein, at the start of the century: an ambulance would drive him each day from the insane asylum, his home, to the café room where the tournament was taking place, and then drive him back to his dark cell after the game. He didn’t like to see his opponent, but an empty chair across the chessboard also irritated him, so they put a mirror there, and he saw his own reflection.

See https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/melting-with-tenderness/

Oscar Levant Nails It Again: "A politician is a man who. . ." [by DL]

Oscar Levant, who "knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," defined a politician as a man who will "double-cross that bridge when he gets to it." Has anyone read his book Memoirs of an Amnesiac?. It's the sort of book I must have read, but I can't remember doing so. I have a feeling that I would have liked it. I am sure of it in fact. Putnam published it in 1965. Three years later came The Unimportance of Being Oscar, another bravura performance -- not too wild, not too earnest, but full of self-deprecatory wit and wisdom. "I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients," he confided. He was very fast, very smart and knowing, a good guest on a talk show, a mordant foil to Gene Kelly's native optimism in "An American in Paris." He wrote these lines that he says in the movie: "It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character." He also wrote "Blame it on My Youth" and other songs and was a buddy of George Gershwin. The jokes were spontaneous and delivered deadpan. When he said that he knew Doris Day "before she was a virgin," it was a valuable reminder of the band singer's brilliance -- with the Les Brown Orchestra in the 1940s, as Ruth Etting in "Love Me or Leave Me," in duets with Sinatra in "Young at Heart" -- which preceded the virginal image projected in the sugary pillow-talk movies of the 1960s. After Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism, Oscar said, "now that Marilyn Monroe's kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her." -- DL

 

From Pity to Wisdom to Coercion [by Lionel Trilling]

 

 

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Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

from The Liberal Imagination 

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Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

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Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

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All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

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For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

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[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

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The painting on the right is by Gail Campbell, 2016.

Why the English love to live in ancient Greece? [by Virginia Woolf]

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It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

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​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

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​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

On the Act of Blaming [by Lionel Trilling]

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He [Scott Fitzgerald] really had but little impulse to blame, which is the more remarkable because our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. 'Forbearance, good word," is one of the jottings in his notebook."
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--Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)

Quote of the Day: On Inspiration [by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky]

"Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy." 

            Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Discuss.

--sdl

from "'Meditations in an Emergency" [by Frank O'Hara]

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

-- Frank O'Hara

View of Manhattan from the Smith/9th St. subway station (photo by Stacey Harwood)

Gastronomical Perfection [by M. F. K. Fisher]

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   I feel now that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.
   Three or four people sometimes attain perfection either in public or in private, but they must be very congenial, else the conversation, both spoken and unsaid, which is so essential a counterpoint to the meal's harmony, will turn dull and forced. Usually six people act as whets, or goads, in this byplay and make the whole more casual, if, perhaps, less significant.
   The six should be capable of decent social behavior: that is, no two of them should be so much in love as to bore the others, nor at the opposite extreme should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put poison on the plates all must eat from. A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better acquainted diners could sharpen their questioning wits.
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-- M.F.K Fisher
   An Alphabet of Gourmets

Quiz:  Name the poem written by W. H. Auden in response to this passage. --- sdh

The Critic [by Kenneth Tynan]

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The critic knows the way but can't drive the car.

-- Kenneth Tynan, famous critic

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Auden on the Difference Between Authors and Critics

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There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics.

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W. H. Auden, "Reading" (in The Dyer's Hand, 1962)

William Holden tells it like it is in the "Executive Suite" [by David Lehman]

"Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?"

William Holden in Executive Suite (1954) with Barbara Stanwyck & Louis Calhern (pictured, left,enjoying a smoke off camera) & with Fredric March, June Allyson always bright and merry, Walter Pidgeon, the world's greatest number two man, Paul Douglas, dour Dean Jagger, long-suffering Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, elegant as ever, and playing a better hand than in "An American in  Paris." 

With screenplay by uncle Ernest Lehman. -- DL

Epigraph of the Month: James Baldwin, "Another Country"

from James Baldwin’s Another Country:

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. 

            -- Henry James

Epigraph of the Month: "Tremor of Intent"

Anthony Burgess's Tremor of Intent (1966), his satire of espionage novels, bears a double epigraph. The first is from W. H. Auden:

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But between the day and night
The choice is free to all, and light
Falls equally on black and white.
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The second, from T. S. Eliot (pictured, right):

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The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. >>

Epigraph of the Month: "Dusty Answer"

Rosamond Lehmann took the title of her novel Dusty Answer (1927) from George Meredith's "Modern Love." This quotation serves as the book's epigraph:

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Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!
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Hypothesis: a good epigraph makes you want to read not only the book it prefaces but also the work from which it is taken. -- DL

Hart Crane's Epigraph for "A Streetcar Named Desire" [Epigraph of the Month by DL]

Tennessee Williams chose these lines from Hart Crane's poem "The Broken Tower" as the epigraph for’ A Streetcar Named Desire:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

 -- Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower”