My friend and sometime-editor Terry Hummer triumphantly posted on Facebook that he had managed to buy four Robinson Jeffers stamps on ebay, after the first sale was cancelled because the seller was “out of stock.”

Perhaps it’s a good sign that there’s a demand for Jeffers – even if only in stamp form. Few American poets have undergone quite so much disparagement and neglect (I wrote about that here).  Like Walt Whitman, however, Jeffers always had his fans.  As I wrote a few years ago:

“Unlike most contemporary American poetry, his legacy has been kept alive by individuals who love his work, not by academia’s class-assignment sales. Such luminaries as Stanford’s late Yvor Winters, who in 1947 declared Jeffers’s work ‘unmastered and self-inflicted hysteria,’ effectively banned him from the curriculum.”

Thoughts of Jeffers and the U.S. postal service turned me weighty tome that arrived in my mailbox a few days ago – the 1,100 page second volume of Jeffers’ letters (covering 1931 to 1939), and newly published by Stanford University Press.

I wrote about the earlier volume of letters here, which included the years of his courtship and marriage to Una Kuster.

“I’ll say he’s the most important poet of the 20th century, but nobody’s buying that yet,” said James Karman, editor of the projected 3-volume series. “No one in the 20th century came near to what he was trying to do. The sheer scope of his endeavor is unrivaled. There’s nothing like it in American literature in the 20th century.”

According to Tim Hunt, editor of Stanford University Press’ five-volume Collected Poetry, Jeffers is “the least understood of the major American poets from the first half of the 20th century.”

The volumes include a substantial number of letters from Una Jeffers, as well as her husband. You can get a good feel for both the Jeffers in even their most casual notes.  Here’s her Christmas thank-you to Bennett Cerf in January 1938:

Now thanks very much for the two Christmas {books} I’ve just finished the Iceland book [that is, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice‘s Letters from Iceland] tonight & O but its clever! & its packed full of information too   I never expected to like Auden as well as I do this very moment!  As for the New Yorker – I must confess I stand alone almost in not being its enthusiastic reader. It is funny – but so all alike & always taking people down is so easy & in the end so humiliating to every human. & bathtubs & fat ladies bulging out of their lacey lingerie, & over-fed dogs & betrayed & betraying businessmen husbands are tiring to keep one’s mind on.

But I suspect that I make myself disliked by carping at the New Yorker.

Here’s his 1933 letter to a Mr. Pumphrey from the Jeffers’ legendary home, Tor House in Carmel (definitely worth a visit if you haven’t been there):

Thank you sincerely for your letter; but I have not time to copy the verses. You lose nothing by that, for my handwriting – you see – is neither beautiful nor easy to read.

And I am sorry not to be able to answer your question. One can say that Mount Everest is higher than Mont Blanc, but there is no way to measure poetry. I cannot even tell whom I prefer to read – sometimes Yeats, sometimes some other.

The publisher’s website promises “a full account of the 1938 crisis at Mabel Dodge Luhan‘s home in Taos, New Mexico that nearly destroyed their marriage.”  A crisis that has not disturbed my sleep to date.  Can’t wait.

Postscript:  I  had thought the Jeffers stamp was a new issue.  Silly me.  Terry corrected me quickly.  It came out in the 1970s.  The new ones for 2012 are described here.

Postscript on 12/9:  I got a note from David Rothman, president of the Robinson Jeffers Association: “I don’t know if you’ve seen our website, at www.robinsonjeffersassociation.org – it’s quite thorough and you might enjoy it. Also, I wrote a review of the first volume of the Letters that you can see here, if you’re curious: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sewanee_review/summary/v119/119.1.rothman.html.”

By the by, if you live in the area and haven’t been to see Jeffers’s Tor House in Carmel … well, you must.  You really must.  The poet learned stonecutting so he could build it himself.  It is a peculiar kind of Pacific perfection.

The centenary for Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz has been a year-long, international saga for many of us who knew him, translated him, or wrote about him – but it’s finally winding to a close this month.

Think of tomorrow night as one of your last chances to get in on the act.

On Wednesday, December 7, I will be speaking at the San Francisco Public Library for a Celebration of Czesław Miłosz – and also a celebration of An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz – from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. in the Latino-Hispanic Meeting Room at the library on 100 Larkin Street. The book will be for sale at the event.

Here’s what’s going to happen:  the host of a weekly KUSF radio show Zbigniew Stanczyk will be interviewing me and one of the Polish poet’s earliest translators, Peter Dale Scott, poet, author, and former Canadian diplomat in Warsaw.

But here’s the deal:  Pan Stanczyk also knew Miłosz, and there’s a few questions I’d like to ask him, too.

What’s more, I’m sure the audience will have a few questions to ask us about the renowned poet who spent four decades of his long life in Berkeley – and I’m sure some of those in the room also knew Miłosz, so I hope we’ll have some time to hear from them, too.

It will all be very democratic.  With luck, even Miłosz himself will have a say.  I have some video clips to play, if I can get the whole techno-thing working right.

So come along for a evening of readings, recollections, and books.  It should be fun.

Last call.

Postscript on 12/7:  And a fine event it was.  As you can see from Caria Tomczykowska‘s cellphone photo at right, I spoke in the shadow of giants.

And it was indeed very democratic!

A brilliant article in today’s Quarterly Conversation offers a fresh take on Lev Loseff‘s much-discussed Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life. Marbled with impressive insights, it represents the finest standards of literary journalism, and should establish a new highpoint for the rapidly disappearing genre … let me dissemble no further, dear reader, I myself wrote the review.

A hackneyed opening gambit, I know … So let’s cut to the chase with a little shameless plugging via an excerpt:

“For Brodsky, poetry was a ticket out of this world. And in Russia, the poet is godlike. To know both is to understand the context for this erudite and often wise book—a work more likely to find readers among current fans, rather than find new ones. Yet Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life is simultaneously enlightening, perplexing, and exasperating. The knowledgeable reader is left feeling rewarded and cheated at once, as if invited to a sumptuous banquet and offered only canapés. The protean figure remains beyond the range of these pages. The door remains at once half open and half closed to us.

You’ll read no secrets in Loseff’s volume. But neither will you get Brodsky’s bewildering, mesmerizing blend of hubris and humility, charm, and abrasiveness. Brodsky was a Catherine Wheel of metaphysical brilliance, scathing insults, and intellectual splendor.

Russia’s longing for pure poet-heroes held an incandescent grip on the Russian psyche, and the nation bleaches its bards to an unearned whiteness. Writers have always claimed special moral exemptions for themselves—wishing to be something grander than simply a guy who wields a ballpoint or stares at an empty computer screen. Brodsky upped the ante.

He told Loseff that the lesser cannot comment on the greater, the mice cannot review the cat. Was he exempting himself from criticism? Certainly. But Brodsky was also the first to bend his knee to those he saw above him on the ladder—from Ovid to Auden. The sense of hierarchy may rub against the egalitarian Brodsky who once wrote, ‘Evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another,’ but the contradiction can be chalked up to his complex humanity as easily as his self-blindness.”

Read the rest here.

Quarterly Conversation is run by Scott Esposito. It’s another valiant online effort to sustain serious literary criticism – and that’s no hyperbole.

It’s gotten some rave reviews, from The Nation, among others.  From Columbia University Press: “It would not be a stretch to say that The Quarterly Conversation has come to be one of the better places—online or in print—to turn to for literary and cultural criticism.”  According to Canongate Books’s “Meet at the Gate”: “If a website was able to drool, Meet At The Gate would be drooling over The Quarterly Conversation. It’s what online literary magazines are meant to be.”

The always insightful Patrick Kurp, by the way, reviews Denise Gigante‘s The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George in the same issue – it’s here (and the Book Haven Q&A with Denise is here).  An excerpt from Patrick’s review:

… despite Gigante’s standing as an academic in a major university English department, she is a writer, not a slinger of theory or political poseur. Out of primary documents she reanimates a major poet and his world, and crafts a transatlantic adventure story with a novelist’s gift for moving narrative along. In brief, Gigante convincingly demonstrates that George Keats, the poet’s junior by sixteen months, served as John’s “muse.” In an 1818 letter to Ann Wylie, John says: “My brother George has ever been more than a brother to me, he has been my greatest friend.”

More cramped than it looks (Photo: C.L. Haven)

In the summer of 2009, I visited C.S. Lewis‘s digs about two miles outside Oxford.  Having seen Shadowlands, the movie based on his life (it must have been filmed somewhere else), I must say I was expecting something a little grander.  Not grand, just grander.

I knew the author had never been rich, but I wasn’t expecting a place quite so cramped and makeshift, quite so… well … “adequate.” But what struck me most on the personal tour is how William Nicholson‘s play and subsequent film misrepresented a life that was not a passionless, solitary bachelorhood, but crowded with people and noise and human obligations, whether to the bad-tempered mother of a dead friend who lived at Kilns with him and his alcoholic brother, Warren, or the rotating tribe of teenage wards who came to crowd the quarters.

A fateful night on Addison's Walk (Photo: C.L. Haven)

Some of the obligations were self-imposed. As Tom O’Boyle wrote recently in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette:

One discipline he kept as a result was replying to the 20-30 letters he received each day from fans on the day of receipt. It’s estimated he wrote as many as 20,000 letters during his lifetime. Maintaining this practice consumed hours every day and was especially taxing as his health began to fail.

I reviewed the 1,800+ page third volume for the Washington Post here, and mentioned the same. Lewis wrote everyone, including T.S. Eliot, the sci-fi maestro Arthur C. Clarke, and the American writer Robert Penn Warren.  “Other letters were from cranks, whiners and down-and-out charity cases; he answered them all,” I wrote.

“’The pen has become to me what the oar is to a galley slave,’” he wrote of the disciplined torture of writing letters for hours every day. He complained about the deterioration of his handwriting, the rheumatism in his right hand and the winter cold numbing his fingers. In the era of the ballpoint, he used a nib pen dipped in ink every four or five words.”

For me, Jack Lewis is the patron saint of labor.  And the turning point was a warm September night in 1931, when he took an after-dinner walk with Oxford chums Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien. The three strolled on Addison’s Walk, a beautiful tree-shaded path along the River Cherwell (I’ve walked it often on my Oxford visits), and got into an argument that lasted until 3 a.m.  It resulted in his conversion.

The charms of Cherwell (Photo: C.L. Haven)

As O’Boyle put it:

The effect of this conversion was explosive. Before it, Lewis’ ambition to be a great writer had been hampered by the fact that he hadn’t found anything worthwhile to say. The ledger of pre- vs. post-conversion literary output is hard to fathom. Pre: two slim volumes of verse; post: a torrent of books, essays, novels and radio talks – more than 30 published titles – all works with obvious Christian themes.

After conversion, he also prodded Tolkien to pull together and complete his tales about the private universe that had preoccupied him … Middle-earth.

Not a quiet life, nor a lazy one

Two slim volumes of verse.  A couple decades ago, at least, I remembering sitting on a sunny afternoon on a balcony outside a small library, idly thumbing through a volume of C.S. Lewis‘s poetry.  The magical lightness, the imaginative leaps, the quicksilver sense of the miraculous everywhere which colors Till We Have Faces, The Space Trilogy, The Great Divorce, and the Narnia books was nowhere to be found.

As I recall it, the poems had the solid, leaden consistency of a bowl of porridge.  So I was eager to alter my opinion with his recently published fragments of Virgil‘s Aeneid, a translation project that was interrupted by his death, the same day that John F. Kennedy was shot, Nov. 22, 1963. I haven’t had time to give it a fair shake, but I haven’t seen much to change my mind.

Not the whole story

In Books and Culture, Sarah Ruden agrees.  She wrote that, in his preference for archaic language and stilted locutions in his poetry showcase “Lewis at his narrowest.”

I know the narrowest (he disliked not only Eliot’s verse, but Evelyn Waugh‘s prose), but find virtues that more than offset them in the man as well as in the prose. (Besides, people say the same about Jane Austen – and really, isn’t that’s one of the reasons she’s delightful?)

Steve King, in a Barnes & Noble review, “Remembering C.S. Lewis,” on Lewis’s Nov. 29 birthday last week, recalled his prodigious memory:  “Meetings often lost focus as Lewis galloped through whatever books, ideas, allusions, and quotations sprang to mind. Few could keep up on the scholarly ride,” though others found it great fun.  According to his student Alastair Fowler:

Lewis has been called “bookish” — a dumbed-down response. Of course he was bookish; hang it, he tutored in literature. Even standing on the high end of a punt in a one-piece swimming costume with a single shoulder strap, about to dive, he had time for a quotation….”

And maybe there is even something to be said for “Lewis at his narrowest.”  From Fowler again:

He had been laughed at for offering himself as a specimen of Old Western culture. But he proved in actuality to be one of the last of a threatened species. Before he died, he wrote, optimistically, of the tide turning back to literature. In the event…[u]niversities submitted to bureaucratic management, dons morphed into accountants, training replaced education, and Theory displaced literature. Reading simplistic codes, supplying false contexts, pursuing irrelevant indeterminacies or tell-tale “gaps”: these have proved no substitute for the memorial grasp of literature.

A belated happy birthday, Jack.

Not one.

Take heart, rejected writers everywhere!

This is too delicious to pass up:  Flavorwire has 10 nasty rejection letters to eminent writers.  (We wrote about famous rejection letters some time ago here.)

Here’s a 1912 rejection for Gertrude Stein by publisher A.C. Fifield:

Dear Madam,

I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”

Sincerely Yours,

A.C. Fifield

Here’s another for the manuscript that eventually became Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer‘s The Estate and The Manor, rejected by Knopf editor Herb Weinstock in 1959:

It’s Poland and the rich Jews again.

With endless editorial work and endless serpentine dealings with Moshe Spiegel, the willing translator-adapter, this might be turned into an English novel nearly as good and nearly as salable as The Family Moskat. I honestly do not think it worth Knopf’s time and effort … Personally, I’d reject.

"You are scum."

Have to agree with the Guardian Books Blog on this one, which isn’t technically a rejection letter. It’s Hunter S. Thompson‘s letter to his biographer, William McKeen, following the biography’s publication in 1991. It opens:  “McKeen, you shit-eating freak.”

I warned you not to write that vicious trash about me —

Now you better get fitted for a black eyepatch in case one of yours gets gouged out by a bushy-haired stranger in a dimly-lit parking lot. How fast can you learn Braille?

You are scum.

HST

The Guardian blog noted that McKeen now has the letter, framed, on his wall: “That’s one way to deal with rejection.”

Buzzfeed is providing a useful service:  Reviving little known punctuation marks, although I’m pretty sure the folks at Buzzfeed made some of them up out of their heads.

Here are a few:

The exclamation comma.  As the site explains: “Just because you’re excited about something doesn’t mean you have to end the sentence.”  I think I’m going to use that one a lot.

The “interrobang” – “It’s a combo-Exclamation/Question mark, and it’s awesome. It is the glorious punctuational equivalent of saying OMGWTF?!”  Well, yes … I think they made that one up.

The third is very useful, and much more evocative than a parenthetical “snark” or the annoyingly ubiquitous  “lol.”  According to Buzzfeed: “Also called the Percontation Point and the Irony Mark, this one’s used to indicate that there’s another layer of meaning in a sentence. Usually a sarcastic or ironic one. So it is essentially a tool for smart people to use to make stupid people feel even stupider. Which makes it the best punctuation mark of all.”

Read ten more here.  (Comments are kind of fun, too.)