Book by Book Page 3

  James Hynes, The Lecturers Tale

  Richard Russo, Straight Man

  And just a handful of stories, memoirs, and plays:

  Saki, “The Schwartz-Metterclune Method”

  Jesse Stuart, The Thread That Runs So True

  George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys”

  Cyril Connolly, “A Georgian Boyhood” in Enemies of Promise

  Lionel Trilling, “Of That Time, Of That Place”

  Bernard Malamud, “A Summer’s Reading”

  Ronald Harwood, “The Browning Version”

  HUMANE SOCIETY

  Every child should be taught what used to be called the social graces: good manners, clear speech, the art of dinner-table conversation, sketching, singing, competence in playing a musical instrument, and even ballroom dancing. Upon such simple foundations as these, true civilizations are built.

  Certainly I’ve come to believe that educated men and women should be—take a deep breath—tolerant, courteous, acquainted with the world’s history, art, and literature, knowledgeable of modern science, “concerned” and active citizens, thoughtful about philosophical and religious questions, able to express strongly held views with clarity and force, devoted to family, and conscientious in the performance of their work.

  That said, many of the world’s artists and visionaries, overreach-ers and revolutionaries—the people who aim to improve society, enlarge our imaginations, or win our battles—will be anything but ladies and gentlemen. (In the stark wisdom of Horace Walpole: “No great country was ever saved by good men because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary”) Obsession has its place, and our lives would be the poorer without our saints and superstars. Still, moderate character traits—temperance, studiousness, deliberation, appropriateness, prudence—should provide the ground for general civilized behavior. The cardinal virtues offer a bulwark against the temptations of fanaticism, whether in the form of religious zealotry or political jingoism, ruthless ambition or mindless conformity. As the Victorian poet William Cory neatly wrote, one of the underappreciated benefits of education is that it “enables you to express assent or dissent in graduated terms.” Sometimes we may need to violate these mild, humane precepts, sometimes we do need to fight, but our reasons had better be good ones and subject to periodic reevaluation. Picasso, who could draw with the grace and beauty of line of a Renaissance master, knew perfectly well the rules he might choose to violate.

  “Become who you are” went an ancient adage. Learning should lead to an independence of mind built on solid knowledge and a capacity for critical thinking. Unfortunately, ours is a society where doing well on examinations and standardized tests has grown so overemphasized that we have forgotten the importance for a young person to simply flounder about, try out various daydreams, make and learn from mistakes. “It is a rule of God’s Providence,” said John Henry Newman, “that we succeed by failure.” Certainly the motto for any school, for any student of whatever age, should be Samuel Beckett’s noble paradox: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

  Three

  WORK AND LEISURE

  No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life.

  — ALBERT CAMUS

  SLOWING DOWN

  Long ago Henry David Thoreau observed—in probably his most famous single sentence—that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Certainly a sense of alienation, of being disconnected from our truest selves, of having somehow lost our way is now so common that many of us simply take it for granted. It’s the human condition, the fault of original sin, the fallout from a con-sumerist culture, or the result of a narcissistic preoccupation with our own egos.

  Lying awake at 2 A.M., though, even the most apparently sue cessful among us might wonder: Did I somehow take the wrong turn in the road? What went wrong? How did I come to be so dissatisfied with everything? A good deal of this malaise can be blamed on the American cult of speed. We are always on deadline, rushing from one appointment to the next, grabbing a quick bite at our desks, constantly multitasking, repeatedly checking our personal digital assistants and e-mail, weeping with road rage when the traffic slows, logging in ten or twelve hours at work, day after day. “No time to say hello, goodbye,” sang out Disney’s cartoon White Rabbit. “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.”

  How many of us live on that edge, that fraying edge? In every aspect of our daily routines we feel overbooked, overscheduled, and overextended. “The cost of a thing,” also wrote Thoreau, “is that which I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.”

  A hundred years ago, the great polymath William Morris confessed, “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” The poet-political activist-designer frankly loathed “the swinish luxury of the rich” and, perhaps more surprisingly, thought no better of the middle classes: “It is their ambition and the end of their whole lives to gain, if not for themselves yet at least for their children, the proud position of being obvious burdens on the community.” When imagining the human future, he even prophesied our own shoddy world of computers and concrete: “Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder heap?”

  In polemics like “How We Live and How We Might Live” and “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” Morris blasts “the puffery of wares, which has now got to such a pitch that there are many things which cost far more to sell than they do to make.” But what, then, is true wealth? “Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment, and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful—all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth.”

  Throughout his writings, Morris hammers away at the simple point that “the chief source of art is man’s pleasure in his daily necessary work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself.” “Have nothing in your house,” he also pleads, “that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Once called in by a duke to offer his views on the furnishings in the nobleman’s palatial home, Morris suggested burning everything in it on a huge bonfire.

  VOCATION/VACATION

  An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.—Honoré de Balzac

  We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.—Alexis de Tocqueville

  So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else’s.—Friedrich Nietzsche

  Consider the person who lets frivolities dominate him completely, until he becomes quite beside himself with all his pointless amusements and stupid crazes; such an individual may believe himself to be living happily, but the more he is convinced that this is so, the more desperately miserable his existence really is. —Cicero

  It was not by gentle sweetness and womanly self-abnegation that she had brought order out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail; by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will.—Lytton Strachey (describing Florence Nightingale)

  One’s greatest pleasures are derived from the uneducated part of one’s personality.—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  An 1890s decadent once met a young girl, of about twenty, “with a lithe body like a snake, a great red dangerous mouth, and enormous dark amber eyes that half shut and then expanded like great poisonous flowers. ‘Nuffing amuses me,’ she said, with her curious childish lisp, ‘everyfing bores me. Nuffing ever did amuse me. I have nuffing to amuse me, nobody to be amused with. I don’t ca
re for men, women’s talk always bores me. What am I to do? I don’t know what to do with myself. All I care for is to sleep. Tell me what is there that will give me a new sensation?’ And she lay back, and gazed at me through her half-shut lids. I bent down and whispered, ‘Opium.’”—Arthur Symons

  We refilled our glasses with cognac, after which all things seemed possible.—William Gerhardie

  The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.—Samuel Johnson

  It’s odd how soon one comes to look on every minute as wasted that is given to earning one’s salary.—P. G. Wodehouse

  The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.—Friedrich Nietzsche

  If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.—G. K. Chesterton

  It should not be forgotten how much the loser contributes to almost any game.—Lord Dunsany

  The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be “happy” or thought that mortal man could be happy—Hannah Arendt

  Sunday, July 19, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life. —Franz Kafka

  Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness. —D.H. Lawrence

  TO WORK IS TO PRAY

  How should one spend a day? Or a lifetime? In truth, how we divide up work and leisure is a far more vexing question than it might initially seem. Work, for instance, can be of two major kinds: that which we like to do and that which we must do. Leisure, similarly, can restore our minds, spirits, and bodies, or it can sap those same minds, spirits, and bodies.

  As with exercise and lovemaking, what matters in proper work is intensity. Generate enough intensity long enough, and you pass “into the zone,” “the sweet spot,” “the flow.” After dogged effort there suddenly descends a pervasive sense of what is almost grace, transcendence, an inner nonchalance. Everything simply falls into place without effort, as though we were—temporarily—a gifted natural athlete or creative genius. After all, Mozart never needed to agonize over whether he was setting down the right notes: Whatever notes he set down were bound to be the right ones. This is genius, yes. But something similar arises with those who have studied, persisted, and broken through.

  Goethe insisted that “no blessing is equal to the blessing of work. Only lifelong work entitles a man to say: I have lived.” Similarly, Balzac asserted that constant, steady work was the law of both life and art. The great French novelist would labor through the night, fueled by cup after cup of coffee, writing the first drafts of his Comédie Humaine, then spend much of the day—after a brief nap—correcting, amplifying, and reworking the printer’s proofs of his books somewhat farther along in the publishing process. (There is a thrilling description of Balzac’s work habits—and his work habit, too, for he took to wearing a monk’s robe at his desk— in Stefan Zweig’s old, slightly romanticized biography, Balzac.) No surprise that such a demiurge died at fifty-two, from drinking—it was said—fifty thousand cups of coffee, though overwork, lack of exercise, and an impressive girth doubtless played their parts too.

  When nothing matters but to realize their vision, writers and artists often tend to become such dynamos of intensely focused energy. Stendhal produced La Chartreuse de Panne, a peak of French fiction, in just fifty-three days; the perfectionist Gustave Flaubert would worry his sentences day after day, spending hours deciding whether to use a comma or a semicolon; Marcel Proust hardly left his cork-lined room once he’d plunged into his “search for lost time.” Some imaginations only seem to kick in when their possessors bring to bear almost supernal fervor. An awed interviewer once exclaimed to the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, “You do amazing things on the saxophone, Mr. Parker.” The musician replied, “I don’t know about amazing—I practiced for fifteen hours a day for a few years.” Centuries earlier Michelangelo complained that people wouldn’t be so astonished at his sculpture if they knew how hard he’d had to labor to achieve his mastery.

  The point is: You generally can’t wait for inspiration, so just get on with the work. Discplined, regular effort will elicit inspiration, no matter what your field.

  Anthony Trollope didn’t write quite as much as Balzac, but he was hardly a slouch, producing nearly fifty novels, and mostly thick Victorian novels at that. For Trollope a writer is a man (or woman) who makes his way to a desk each morning and . . . writes. Before heading off to his regular, full-time job as an administrator for the British postal system, Trollope awoke at 5:30, day after day, drank a cup of coffee, and sat down before a quire of paper, pen in hand:

  All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then, he should have so trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours—so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom ... to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour.

  So nearly every twenty-four hours—even when traveling (to Egypt, the West Indies, Australia)—Trollope produced on average 3,000 words.

  Before beginning a project, he prepared a diary in which he calculated the number of weeks the book would require, then each day he entered the number of pages written. With this system, he explained, “if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied.” Trollope was that admirable and rare phenomenon, an absolute professional. “In the bargain I have made with publishers ... I have prided myself on completing my work exactly within the proposed dimensions. But I have prided myself especially on completing it within the proposed time,— and I have always done so.”

  W. H. Auden said that a poet must keep hidden his passion for his shop, Evelyn Waugh that even revision and the correcting of publisher’s proofs must be done con amove. The flamboyant genius Colette adopted as her writing motto “La règie guérit tout”— discipline cures everything. Find the right work, these great artists remind us, the work you should be doing, and you will have largely solved the key question of how to spend your life.

  This doesn’t mean you will be happy all the time. But the work will become an inner citadel to which you can retreat during times of crisis, as well as a reliable rampart from which to face the world and misfortune. As the historian R. H. Tawney once wrote, “If a man has important work to do, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.” Yet almost any work can be important. With an admiration bordering on envy, the contemporary poet Philip Levine used to observe a clothes presser in a Detroit tailor’s shop: “I read in his movements not a disregard for this work but, rather, the affirmation that all work was worth doing with elegance and precision and that necessary work granted dignity to the worker. For me he was both a pants presser and the most truly dignified person I’d ever met, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

  Levine’s words call to mind the classical imperative: “Do what you are doing.” That is, whether you are preparing dinner or playing tennis or tuning a car’s engine or sweeping a room, really focus your whole self on just that. Do it well, and you can invest even the most trivial activities with significance, transforming the mundane into the spiritual.

  A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

  The best book ever written about the relationship between work and
leisure remains Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. (If you’ve never read it, read it now.) Its opening chapters and its conclusion, in particular, remind us that what matters in life is to become who we are, and that the only failure is to shrink from this duty and follow instead the dictates of family, society, or religion.

  Thoreau writes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, so that when I came to die I would not discover that I had not lived.” That last clause indicates the cost of refusing to acknowledge what one is. Too many people, Thoreau was convinced, allow their lives to be used up in the pursuit of needless wealth and social status; hence his advocacy of simplicity and his advice to keep wants to a minimum. Throughout Walden Thoreau persistently asks us to think about a single question: What really matters? Our answer determines how we live, how well we spend those days and nights given to each of us alone. As he reminds us in a famous sentence: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to that music which he hears, no matter how measured or far away.”

  DOWNTIME

  The ancients believed that leisure was, in the words of the modern philosopher Josef Pieper, “the basis of culture.” Otium—the Latin for leisure—was essential not only to philosophic inquiry and spiritual receptivity, but also to artistic creativity. Over the centuries writers have regularly written “In Praise of Idleness” (as Robert Louis Stevenson titled one of his best essays). Without periods of downtime, or daydreaming, we find ourselves growing dull, mechanical, enslaved to a routine. We need what Italians call il dolcefar niente—the pleasure of doing nothing.

  Our inner lives are, after all, remarkably wasteful. To come up with a good idea, whether for a building or a poem, a garden or a new hairstyle, requires the mind to explore its options, try out notions, and allow the subconscious to gradually perform its magic. Eventually, there may be a “Eureka” moment, when the scales drop from the eyes and a course of action grows clear. More often, we may simply come up against a deadline and need to start producing.