When I moved to Montreal last August to begin doctoral studies, I gave myself a personal assignment to sift through Canadian literature. Elizabeth Hay’s 2006 novel Late Nights on Air stopped me, just like how a voice on the radio stops a character named Gwen:
“His relaxed, gravelly, conversational voice was so familiar that a decade of time dropped away and she was back in a place more vivid than the present. How rare it was, she thought, to hear someone on the radio who wasn’t glib or pushy or out to impress you.”
It was a surprise to realize how rare it is to stumble upon a good book like Hay’s. Many books succeed or fail at being great. Hay makes no such attempt. Hers is a heirloom novel, a keepsake, not to be sold.
Robertson Davies’s fiction is most entertaining, but The Merry Heart, a gathering of his speeches and fugitive pieces, moved me. It was so helpful to return to basics with him through a pair of lectures called simply “Reading” and “Writing.” He encouraged his audience to locate at least one good anthology of poetry, because “there will be times when nothing but poetry will satisfy your appetite, and you must have poetry readily at hand.” His counsel goes on to be more specific:
“Perhaps you like to keep up with what the young poets are doing, and that is admirable, but I urge you also to read some poetry that has been tested by time, and which does things that the moderns do not seek to do, or perhaps – I say this almost apologetically – cannot do.”
As a “modern” poet myself, this passage made me wince. But I take the pang I feel to mean that Davies’s observation functions for me as a spur to keep on fumbling.
Which is why it has been a comfort to read The Portable Emerson again this year, the 1946 Malcolm Cowley and Carl Bode edition. Emerson is a master fumbler, the consummate groper in the dazzling dark.
Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, Max Beerbohm’s essay “A Clergyman,” Winston Churchill’s essay “The Dream,” Agnes Repplier’s essays across many collections, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast, Chinua Acheve’s Home and Exile, and G. K. Chesterton’s Poems of 1916 are some of the joys of this year. But Edna Worthley Underwood’s 1930 The Taste of Honey: The Note Book of a Linguist is an astonishment. She discusses many books I will never read because they’re not available in English translation and because I won’t learn as many languages as she did. For a taste of her throwaway writing: She happened to arrive in Venience for the first time at night. There were, she wrote,
“No glare of electric lights. There were dim little lamps swinging in front of fabulous façades, sometimes painted. There was no sound save the hiss of our long black oars against blacker water. I all but lost my senses at the beauty and the strangeness of it—this divine, dead city which seemed dropping away, on the point of disappearing forever, beneath the water of the Adriatic.”
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