Nine Lives (of the Poets): Horace!

Our book today is Archibald Campbell's big fat dense opinionated 1924 volume Horace, which is, pound for pound, my favorite book on Quintus Horatius Flaccus, that most beloved and approachable of Roman poets. So approachable, in fact, that Campbell's book had to win its spot in my heart against some incredibly fierce competition: there have been thousands of good books written about Horace in the last three hundred years, arguing over every single possible aspect of the poet and his work - from the details of his life to the order of his poems to his influence on every poet who's come after him.  W. Y. Sellar, Gil Highet, D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Eduard Fraenkel ... the list of first-rate scholars, writers, and popularizers who've taken Horace as their subject is very long. Campbell himself is alive to this fact (he himself was writing in Sellar's shadow) and fills his donnishly chatty book with reasons why Horace would enjoy such an appeal:

He is certainly a great artist; the purest Roman literature can show us, Virgil having more of genius and inequality. Horace has indeed, as I have remarked already, a strictly limited array of themes; though all are good ones. He has even, if my analysis of his form is not most grossly out - he has even, in by far the greater portion of his maturest and most characteristic work, but one single type of poem! Yet not even by his own custom can his infinite variety be staled. It is what he does that tells, and he hardly ever does the same thing twice. His subjects he repeats innumerably, he almost never repeats himself. What the ancients cared about in poetry was two things: the soul of the poem, and its body; the structure, and the surface; the composition, and the style. His treatment is always unique, his language always individual. He takes over all the conventions that were available for him; but he used them for his own ends; they are but a medium for his meaning. He cannot be translated; metre and language are fused into his work; the effect cannot be extricated from them.

But many writers sing Horace's praises - the fact that Campbell does that isn't the only reason I go back to his book over and over. No, the rest of the reasons are harder to pin down. I like the fact, for instance, that he under-estimates Horace ("Horace's poetry is good for this age; but not sufficient"), as so many scholars tend to do - it makes both him and Horace seem more human; I like the fact that he seems to have discovered the semi-colon about ten minutes before his book went to the printers and over-uses it like a child running wild on Christmas morning; I like the fact that his book is unapologetically soup-to-nuts, giving us Horace's life and times, a complete overview of poetry's place in the ancient world (an excursus he actually tells readers they can skip if they like! Let's hope none of them did!), and a full explication of everything Horace wrote; and I like the old-world certainty with which Campbell assumes his readers already know their Horace. That last one is a pleasure rapidly vanishing from the world of classical studies, if it isn't entirely vanished already: the assumption of classical knowledge on the part of the reader. Writers who make such an assumption might occasionally paraphrase things in French, but they'll feel no obligation to translate anything older:

We see, then, that the standpoint vulgarly known as classical is that which Horace is opposing; and more explicit proof soon follows. Horace, too, in his turn, appeals to the Greeks; but he uses the appeal of antiquity in the right way. In language which ought never to be forgotten he tells his generation that the great classics were in their own day great innovators:

quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset

quam nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?

That is unanswerable.

The same is true for Campbell's anecdotes (believe it or not - and in the context of the rest of this entry, how on Earth could you? - he's actually quite a funny writer, happily willing to tweak the noses of snobs and dilettantes alike), which gain their maximum punch through the fact that our author doesn't feel the need to stop and annotate them:

There is not getting over the fact that, as Pindar pointed out, Typhon does not like music; and people who do not care for music are generally, I think, not fond of Horace's Odes.

I'm not sure there are 100 readers left in the world today who would smile, as I did, at that reference - who would nod upon seeing it and then keep reading. Probably not everybody in Horace's own reading public got such a reference, but the audience he had always in his mind while he wrote understood him perfectly - or so he hoped.

Campbell goes over every single line of Horace with minute and comprehensive attention, and that, too, is refreshing. Sometimes the raw work of scholarship happening right in front of you is the perfect anecdote for an afternoon spent re-writing textbooks for schoolchildren. As noted, other studies of Horace have come and gone since this one was published ninety years ago, but work and thought and spirit like this are evergreen, or should be.

books! Of all kinds!

Books of all shapes and sizes cross our desks here at the palatial offices of stevereads, and here is where an editorial that starts in such a manner would limp home with something like 'and we can't possibly read them all.'

Needless to say, we're made of sterner stuff here at stevereads. We can, in fact, read them all - and we do, we do. We burn through books with the speed (and beady eye towards the stash) of an addict. Er, that is, of a BIBLIOMANCER.
Talking about all these books here on this site would take forever, and it would be crushingly demoralizing to all you slow-readers out there (actually, it might be even more demoralizing to the comparatively fast-readers among you, for obvious reasons).

So we pick and choose which books to mention here, which ones to blurb here, which ones to pan here, and, more rarely, which ones to review at length here. It's a mysterious process, and of course no part of it is open to debate ... although, in our more sentimental moments, we sometimes wonder what all you marmosets would say, if you had a voice in the running of this kingdom; would you cry out for more book reviews, more book blurbs, more books, books, books? Or would you opt for more political commentary, with no books involved? Or would you have it be video game commentary, all the time?

Ah, but such sentiment always passes, and the burden of sole leadership descends once again across our shoulders. So here's what we're offering for your interest today:

"A Call to the Sea" by Claude Berube and John Rodgaard - this is the first full-length biography of Captain Charles Stewart, whose career as a naval officer stretched from the American Revolution to the Civil War.

The authors do a very workmanlike job assembling their materials - they know they're breaking ground and setting precedent, and they're determined to leave no ceremony out.

Neither one can write worth a scupper's cup, but that must be forgiven - especially since Charles Stewart is extremely unlikely to receive the attention of a truly skilled biographer. He's just one of many countless excellent skippers throughout the ages who will never get the book they deserve - in fair truth, it's something of miracle he got even this much.

This is much: Berube and Rodgaard's book is heavily sourced and footnoted, a dutifully balanced and written acount, and thoroughly hagiographic.

Stewart was a wonderful man, despite the repeated efforts of his two hagiographers to assure you so: he was stupid, funny, totally loyal, wonderfully funny when drunk, totally fearless, and, what's to the point, an absolutely first-rate eviscerator of his enemies on the open water.

It's amazing, in its own minor key, that our two authors manage to drain the events of Stewart's life so deeply of the drama that filled it. Stewart wasn't just a great sea lord - he also has the distinction of being the greatest master that dear, mighty warship, the U.S.S. Constitution, has ever had.

Some of you will know that we here at stevereads dream of some day saving the funds necessary to spend a vacation week in the great city of Boston, Massachusetts. It's a long way from our native Indianapolis, but the trip would be vindicated by one experience alone: walking the deck-plates of this lethal lady of the sea-lanes. Not a replica, not a museum ride, but the ship herself, surpassed by the crafts of later days but not out-done by any of them, not one single one of them.

There were years, there were decades, there were, above all, battles wherein the fate of America itself depended on the actions of this one ship.

She found her perfect commander in Stewart. He could feel her every shift and mood under his feet. And he USED that connection - something seldom felt by the privateers and British place-seekers against whom he fought - to perform battles that in retrospect look like miracles.

None moreso than the spectacular victory he achieved against the Cyane and the Levant simultaneously. If you loyal readers of stevereads had the patience of judges, oh! the tale we could tell you, of that grand and totally impossible battle!

Stewart did it with incredible Robert-E.-Lee style itution and pure balls, only a fraction of which actually make their way into this staid account, but no matter. It's a worthy book, though not one we here at stevereads can recommend to the general reader.

"Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris - here, in a book the slender length of a long letter, is the argument Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" SHOULD have been.

My esteemed colleague Hippolyta recommended the booklet to me, and she was right: Harris is fantastic in the clear, fearless way he takes on organized religion - he never overreaches, never antagonizes the crackpots, and his narrative method, addressing his polemic to an imagined 'you' representing Christian America, gains power and momentum very subltly as the pages go by.

He makes some devastating points, and unlike Dawkins, he never glories in them. He points out that no matter how you view the destruction of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the doomed faithful trapped in their attics as the waters rose were 'talking to an imaginary friend' when they prayed to a God who was either impotent or vindictive. He relentlessly points out how the Bible itself never shows any sign of having been written or inspired by anbody with any more advanced knowledge of the world than the first century of the present era - no hint of higher mathematics, no suggestion of future science, literature, or even morality (he's particularly hammering on the Good Book's benevolence toward the practice of slavery).

It's a damning portrait, and one that Christians would counter by saying God wrote only a book the minds of his followers could understand at the time. Harris has an answer for this - that surely a kind deity would take into account how chary He'd be with future Revealed Texts and throw in at least something about the Crusades, or World War One, or the bird flu.

The book is broadside short mainly because that's all it NEEDS to be, if its author eschews the throwing of stinkbombs and sticks to his task. This author does, magnificently so - again, not a book to give to Aunt Bertha (unless you're lucky enough to have a COOL Aunt Bertha, but that's not likely), but definitely something to give to any of the young faithful you might know. If it gets under their skin, good - the world can use both more atheists and more thoughtful Christians. It's thorough, conscientious case for the opposition, and you can tell them I said so.

But make sure to CREDIT me! That admonition really comes home after reading Richard Posner's tiny new book, "The Little Book of Plagiarism," in which the big subject is explored with rigor, candor, and an appealing prose style.

Judge Posner quickly and intelligently shows us that the concept of plagiarism is far more complex than simple copying, and it's amazing how much ground he illuminates in only 110 pages. No matter what you think of the several high-profile plagiarism cases to make the news in recent years, you'll find this book thought-provoking.

It has only one lacuna, and it's a puzzling one. Judge Posner likes to tout himself as a take-no-prisoners intellectual, but on the subject of plagiarism, he lets Alan Dershowitz off with barely a slap on the wrist. Dershowitz plagiarized huge, iceberg-sized chunks of his book "The Case for Israel" from Joan Peters' book "From Time Immemorial," and yet neither these books nor Peters' name is even mentioned in Posner's book.

We here at stevereads have long wondered why Dershowitz didn't lose his job over "The Case for Israel." True, he generously cites Peters' book, but he also generously steals from it even when NOT citing it, and the point-by-point comparisons were brought to the public's notice in several periodicals. And yet, there Dershowitz is today, still publishing every word that crosses him mind, and here, in a book on plagiarism that actually mentions him, the case isn't even discussed. So the mystery goes on ...

No mystery involved in our last item, "World Poetry," an anthology of world verse edited by Katherine Washburn, John Major, and Clifton Fadiman. The only question some readers may have is why I'd buy a copy of a book I already own.

Ah, thereby hangs a tale. You see, years and years ago, I was wooing a young poet (my rival was his own time-wasting narcissism, a formidable foe), and this big, fat anthology was our sacred text. Many's the night we'd drunkenly read choices from the gushing cornucopia herein represented!

As a result, my original hardcover grew tattered, despined, and drenched in wine-stains. Ordinarily, this would be no bar to citizenship on my bookshelves (I'm not, as some of you may know, the most fastidious person on Earth) - except that in this case, young poet or no young poet, I still love and regularly consult "World Poetry" - which is difficult to do, when a book is falling apart. Hence, the new volume.

But oh! New volume or no, the old charms remain! Here again are all the poems my young poet and I read back and forth in our giddiness to become friends! We ranged the whole of the world and back, but you loyal readers need only be patient for the two poems I feel safe in calling our favorites:

Drinking Alone in the Moonlight

Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine,
No friends at hand, so I poured alone;
I raised my cup to invite the moon,
Turned to my shadow, and we became three.
Now the moon had never learned about drinking,
And my shadow had merely followed my form,
But I quickly made friends with the moon and my shadow;
To find pleasure in life, make the most of the spring.

Whenever I sang, the moon swayed with me;
Whenever I danced, my shadow went wild.
Drinking, we shared our enjoyment together;
Drunk, then each went off on his own.
But forever agreed on dispassionate revels,
We promised to meet in the far Milky Way.

That's of course Li Po, translated by Elling Eide. And here's the other:

Late Night Ode

It's over, love. Look a me pushing fifty now,
Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,
The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,
The sour taste of each day's first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling
A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,
Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark
along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good's my cut-glass conversation now,
Now I'm so effortlessly vulgar and sad?
You get from life what you can shake from it?
for me, it's g and t's all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level
At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,
Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,
And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There's your hound from heaven, with buccaneer
Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.
His answering machine always has room for one more
Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I've laughed so hard the tears
won't stop. Look at me now. Why now?
I long ago gave up pretending to believe
Anyone's memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? and why do I dream
Almost every night of holding you again,
Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,
Through the bruised unbalanced waves.

That's an adaptation from Horace by J. D. McClatchy, and it's concluded many a wonderful late-night talk between that young poet and myself. The thing is beautiful in itself (although its defeatism and cynicism are in no way a mirror to Horace), made all the moreso by that sweet, sentimental association.

And there you have it, but a small sampling of some of our most recent books! Some are in print, some aren't yet published, some out of print - and more such notices to come, in due time ...

books! an addition to the ranks!

I whole-heartedly approve of Blacks, Latinos, gays, and even Freemasons mixing willy-nilly in our schools, businesses, and playgrounds. I'm a fervent believer that all humans are equal (of course, those of you who know me well know that in my mind, I phrase it 'all humans are equally evil' - but the point's effectively the same).

But when it comes to my books, I segregate ruthlessly.

There are four rings. In the outermost, the rectum of my collection, are the books steadily being culled from the shelves for a more-or-less permanent cycle of selling and trading. This cycle is of course vital to the life of my collection, but it's ironic, since my GOAL is to buy only those books I intend to keep forever. My outer ring is a wry, permanent testament to the fact that even when it comes to book-buying, my judgement isn't perfect (control your shock, my young Jedi!).

The next ring is by far the biggest: my collection at large. These are the dozens and hundreds of books lining the shelves of all my various dog-chewed bookcases. These are the books that take an afternoon to move on moving-day. These are the books I prowl every day, the books I re-arrange, the books that sometimes surprise me by simply being there ('when did I get THAT?')(or, as I confess I often find myself saying, 'when did I get YOU?'). Of course it's FROM these books that the to-sell books come, but that's not a worry: 95 percent of these titles are safe from any purge.

They're a miracle, really. In virtually all ages prior to this one, such a library - relatively minuscule (I'm fairly certain at least a couple of you in the Silent Majority have larger ones) - would have been the world's own envy of every reading individual.

And those individuals YEARNED for it, make no mistake. Books were rare and costly and unwieldy, and even the most avid readers usually didn't possess more than a couple dozen. And I'm always grateful for that, I am. History provides few more intelligent, hungry-minded individuals than Henry VIII, and I currently have ten times the number of books he owned in his lifetime. I have ten times the number of books Henry VIII had. This circle gets what the kids call mad props.

The next circle is far more exalted - they're the four or five dozen books that are invited into my room, whatever room I'm sleeping in, in whatever apartment I happen to live.

Some of you will know the tiny little nerd-haven I make of whatever room I happen to occupy. The outer apartment is one thing, but my room ... well, that's where the books I most treasure are. The ones I like to SEE every day. The ones I USE, which is the ultimate dream of every book ever written (and who knows if maybe a whole LOT of them don't get that distinction? After all, my room is duplicated by prisoners' under-beds and teenagers' window-sills, and they're filled with Stephen King and law books and Nora Roberts).

This is where you'll find my Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (a free book to the first of you who can tell me how many tons Thundra can lift - and no fair peeking! Do it from memory! Honor system, people!). Here you'll find my Readers Digest guide to North American wildlife. Here you'll find Clifton Fadiman's Little Brown book of anecdotes. Here you'll find all the good volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History. Here you'll find my beautiful Penguin collected Jane Austen (one big fat beautiful volume). Here you'll find my Chapman's Homer.

The books in this circle are exalted. They get boxed first and most lovingly in all moves. They get consulted, frequently. They never get sold and almost never get given away. They're heavily bookmarked, heavily annotated. They're my working books.

Today I had the rare and incredibly sweet pleasure of adding a book to that ring. Today I found Tom McArthur's edition of the Oxford Companion to the English Language, and I knew instantly that I'd found an addition.

This book is wonderful, plain and simple. It's the quintessential browser's paradise, since its brief rather predictably sprawls all over creation. After all, there's nothing in the world that doesn't fall under the rubric of 'The English Language.'

There's no way to fully convey the wonders of this volume. It roams, it digresses, it fulminates, it sneers. The entry on Shakespeare is worthy of independent publication, the entry on Old English could double as an introductory course on the subject. And the quips are just as good. Take this one on the subject of Humor:

As there are stereotypes of national humour with some support in cultural fact, so there are widely accepted if not wholly reliable notions about humour in former ages. England before the Norman Conquest, for example, is nobody's idea of a country full of wags and wisecrackers....

Hee.

So without further ado, I log in and add a book to the second circle. Of course, this entails removing a second circle book already on duty. In this case it's a volume called High Seas given to me by my young friend Sebastian (his comment at the time? 'You've been a-sea and all, right? I thought you might enjoy this more than I - sounds frightfully WET to me...'). Sebastian is a) too fragile and b) too distractable to roger, so his time in this room is extremely limited - he'll never notice the switch).

I know, I know - this entry leaves unnamed one further circle. The Oxford Companion to the English Laguage succeeds seamlessly into my second circle, but some of you might be asking, what about the first circle?

Well, the first circle, as some of you may know, are my Essential Books. These are the books I not only use but NEED. Several of them are the books I've travelled the world with, during my 'lost years' ... Here, in one bookcase, are my ... well, my indispensables: my King James Bible, my Ovid (in the original and five translations), my Juvenal, my Dryden and Byron and Sheridan and Shaw and Spenser and Tacitus and Ariosto and Jeremy Leven and Graves and Browning and Livy and Huizinga and Syme and Morison and the Venerable Bede .... my Homer and my Tasso, my Horace ... my Horace.

It's very, very rare that I make an addition to this circle, and it's always a cause of intense joy. The last addition was the Oxford World Classic paperback of Boswell's Life of Johnson, the original volume of which I VERY mistakenly leant out to a young well-wisher who a) will never admit that it's out of their depth and b) never sheepishly give it back.

So additions to this particular ring are exceedingly rare. You can be sure you'll hear all about it, if this blog lasts long enough to record it (and judging from the anemic level of reader-comments, that's damn unlikely)

And in the meantime, let's all welcome this addition to the second-most exalted rank of my book-world! Of course I invite all of you loyal readers to comment at length about your own book-circles! I know you have them - I've been in enough of your apartments - and I urge you to make a clean breast of it!