Books: What to Do?

       During my first trip to Peru (now engaged to be married), I was given a bedroom at the front of the house. It had a wide arched window protected by wrought iron bars, ambient candlelight, fresh flowers, and a full stationery kit. I wrote some, but mostly I read: Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad (Ajax was terrifying) and Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (a spiritual Other World I’d never known and that would never leave me). To this day, each of those books instantly transports me, Madeleine-like, to the rooms—shape, size, furniture, drapery, smells—in which I first met them.

       As it happens, my father, an inveterate reader (like his father), had set me up for these pleasures. He would read at red lights. Having seen that as a child, I took up what suited me: Lassie Come Home, horse fiction (The Black Stallion series, My Friend Flicka) and fairy tales (collections of Andersen and Grimm that I have to this day). Along the way I tried Zane Gray and Tom Swift—nothing. Now and then I’d ask Pop the meaning of a word. Almost invariably he would send me to the dictionary; we had two until, when in college, I bought a third—Webster’s Second—into the house, followed by the unabridged Random House and the American Heritage (with its Usage Guide).  

       In elementary school I’d written a few stories—long ones, I thought, two or three hand-written pages. But when I decided to get serious, I took a book on the writing of mystery stories out of the local library and assiduously set out, not only reading it but making page after page of notes. That taught me to pay attention to technique, at least as far as I understood it at the time.

       A few years later, in my freshman year at Queens College of the City University of New York, in English 8 (the second of a two-semester required sequence), I encountered Wordsworth. Now he draws me to two books, English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Movement (ed. Woods, 1950) and Selected Poems and Prefaces (the Riverside paperback, ed. Stillinger, 1965). The first—an old-school, large format, thick anthology with prefatory engravings and small, double-column print: the kind one no longer finds—the first book puzzled me; I hadn’t bought it. But inside I saw the name C. P. Del Greco and remembered: he was a neighbor who became a tug boat captain on the East River. The book had been a gift.

       The second I did buy, for a course on the English Romantics. I do not recall that instructor, but the chap who taught English 8 (and, later, the Eighteenth Century), was Robert Towers, one of the very best professors I’ve ever known: a low key but engaged gentleman who clearly loved both teaching and his subject, and who respected his students.

       Now, upon summoning Wordsworth, I wondered if would I feel the same thrill that ran through me when first I encountered The Prelude, or “Intimations of Immortality.” Closer to the point, would I experience the same kind of thrill that drew C. S. Lewis, my earthly master, closer to belief in God, by way of what he designates as ‘Joy’, a desire calling us away from this world to the next? Moreover, I know now what I did not know back then about Wordsworth. He died a crotchety old man, a ‘conservative’, and was not all that nice to begin with. In The Personal Heresy, Lewis tells us that the poet’s character should not influence our judgments of the poet; a purely literary experience is not biography. And he’s right, I think. But ‘response’ is not ‘judgment.’ Does not a Voice sound from the page? And should not conviction and sincerity be part of that? Or are the poem and poet alternate realities? Old questions, sure; but each reading begets a new answer. First I would enter the thick book, hardcover and heavy . . . two hours later. Like a child I had been taken with the pictures first (surely an instance of Late Onset Comic Book Syndrome), then the Table of Contents: thirteen authors in Eighteenth Century Forerunners (230pp.) followed by the main text, thirty five authors (over 1000pp.), some of whom (e.g. Allan Ramsey) rang no bell whatsoever. Then an Appendix: Pope, Johnson, Burke. When it occurs to me to return to the main road, it is in the company of my old friend, the paperback Wordsworth.

       He revised over and again, both his short poems and the narratives; many were not published during his lifetime, and his long poem The Recluse was left unfinished, though we do have one whole part, “The Excursion,” written early, revised often, and published under varying names (“The Ruined Cottage,” “The Pedlar”). It would be a philosophy of mankind and its place in creation: “On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, /Musing in solitude, I oft perceive /Fair trains of imagery before me rise.” He will sing of “Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope” and of “that Intelligence which governs all— /I sing: —‘fit audience let me find though few.’” My response both then and now is the same: for this poem I am not among those few—as I am, for example, with Pope’s Essay on Man.

       That judgment is not the simple result of a preference for the eighteenth-century masters (even though I do prefer them). To check myself I re-visited Shelley in my big book; again he tells me that he falls upon the rose and bleeds, and bleeds, and, again, after more than fifty years, I just want to smack him. I’ve always seen the wisdom in Wordsworth’s judgment that poetry is intense emotion “recollected in tranquility.” But much of English Romantic poetry is not that; rather, too much of it (for me) seems self-indulgent posturing (pacem C. S. Lewis, a Shelley partisan).

       But not the early Wordsworth, whose “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” reminds us that “The rainbow comes and goes,/ And lovely is the rose.” Then, famously, we learn that we do not enter the world “in utter nakedness,/ But trailing clouds of glory” —only to find that “Shades of the prison house begin to close [cf. Lewis’s “The Prudent Jailer”]/ Upon the growing Boy.” That is at the fifth stanza; by the last, the eleventh, we know all is never lost: “And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,/ Forebode not any severing of our loves.” If read in the right mood, without haste, the poem can ravish. Can the same be said of “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud”? No, it cannot. But a reader, though lightly and briefly, can be taken out of oneself by it:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils. . . .

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. . . .
I gazed— and gazed— but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought . . . .
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

       And there we are, as though by a Vulcan mind meld, together seeing, feeling, hoping . . .

       Then—The Prelude, a deep and deepening, crypto-sermonic achievement of very great value. As a bildungsroman it will report mistakes and their emotional consequence. Books Nine, Ten and Eleven, for example, treat of Wordsworth’s time in France, where he travels from enthrallment to sadness over the Revolution: “a far more sober cause/ Thine eyes must see of sorrow in a land,/ Though with the wreck of loftier years bestrewn— /to the reanimating influence lost/ Of memory, to virtue lost and hope.” The end, however, Book Fourteen, strikes a different note. “What we have loved,/ Others will love, and we will teach them . . . / how the mind of man becomes/ A thousand times more beautiful than the earth/ On which he dwells, above this frame of things . . . / In Beauty exalted, as it is itself/ Of quality and fabric more divine.”

       With that Wordsworth closes the circle: we are reminded of the beginning. There, having compared himself to a “wandering cloud” away from the city, he has “shaken off” his “unnatural self.” He reckons his early childhood, when he “made one long bathing of a summer’s day.” As a boy he would row alone, and there came the famous “craggy steep . . . a huge peak, black and huge . . . like a living thing” that “strode after me.” Later he reports how the image haunted him. Pastoral images were replaced by “huge and mighty forms, that do not live/ Like living men.” They “moved slowly through the mind/ By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.” Approaching the end of Book One he mentions “first-born affinities that fit/ Our new existence to existing things . . . / The bond of union between life and joy.” Soon he reminds himself and us that, though some of the memories are gone, “witness of that joy/ Remained in their substantial lineaments.” The recollected hours, “the charm/ Of visionary things . . . throw back our life,” almost to “remotest infancy.”

       Of its kind there is, I think, nothing better: not more calmly stirring, nor more beckoning— nor instructive. Whether or not it elicits a cascade of Sehnsucht is, of course, entirely subjective. For me it does not quite make it. But it certainly did for C. S. Lewis, who without it could not have written Surprised by Joy: the Shape of My Early Life as he did, nor have become a Christian when he did. Moreover, Lewis is right: the poet’s ‘personality’ is utterly irrelevant; the sensibility is what matters, and that is the antithesis of crotchety.

       Today came this providential news. The Strand bookstore has been on Broadway and Twelfth Street for some seventy years: used books galore on three floors—world famous. And now, as of merely weeks ago—honest, true to its parent, well-stocked on two floors— a Strand bookstore appears on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-First Street. Hardly less convenient than Barnes & Noble, and far, far more interesting. For example, they have an entire, full-length rotating rack of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series, right there. By Saint George.

       Meanwhile, a very happy 250th birthday to you, brother William, and our thanks.

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