Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader Read Online Free PDF

reading public might not even recognize.) The Fadiman oeuvre was uniformly bleak. One sonnet written at fifteen, about a seedy section of Hollywood Boulevard upon which I had cast my cynical gaze while waiting in a movie line, ended with the couplet “While in the movie many people died / I saw more death while killing time outside.” It scanned well.
    All this time, like Molière’s
bourgeois gentilhomme
, who congratulated himself for having spoken prose all his life, I was under the impression that I was writing poetry. My sonnets looked like poems. They quacked like poems. But at seventeen, when I got to college and my critical faculties suddenly kicked in, I had to admit that they weren’t really poems. I had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles, anagrams, and Scrabble. Since that awful realization, I haven’t written a single poem aside from the doggerel I trot out at friends’ weddings. How I envy Mr. Kunstler for the suspension of disbelief that has enabled him to carry on for half a century!
    The question remains: During my brief career as a soidisant poet, why did I restrict myself almost entirely to sonnets? In retrospect, I believe I saw the form as a vindication of both my temperament and my physical self. I was small and compulsive; I was not suited to the epic or to free verse; in work as in life, I was fated to devote myself not to the grand scheme but to the lapidary detail. The sonnet, with its epigrammatic compression and formal structure (never twelve lines, never sixteen), hearteningly proclaimed that smallness and small-mindedness need not go hand in hand. A sonnet might
look
dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O. J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.
    That was why I was particularly drawn to two Wordsworth sonnets about the sonnet. One was called “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room.” Its theme is the paradoxically liberating power of restriction. Just as a nun does not feel cramped in her cell because, however tiny, it is roomy enough to admit God, so the poet may find his imagination emancipated by the sonnet’s modest compass: “In truth, the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me, / In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”
    In the second poem, “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” Wordsworth summoned a glorious procession of poets—Shakespeare, Petrarch, Tasso, Camoëns, Dante, Spenser—who, tormented by lost love, exile, or depression, had found consolation in the sonnet form. He ended with Milton, who wrote his greatest sonnets after he went blind in his early forties: “… when a damp / Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand / The Thing became a trumpet.”
    T he theme of the sonnet’s consolatory power has special meaning to me because of what happened to my father two years ago, when he was eighty-eight. Over the period of a week, he had, for mysterious reasons, gone from being able to read
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
to being unable to read the
E
at the top of an eye chart. I took him from the west coast of Florida, where he and my mother live, to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami. He was informed there that he had acute retinal necrosis, improbably caused by a chicken-pox virus that had been latent for more than eighty years. He was unlikely to regain much of his sight.
    I spent the night on a cot in my father’s hospital room. We talked about his life’s pleasures and disappointments. At some point after midnight, he said, “I don’t wish to be melodramatic, but you should know that if I can’t read or write, I’m finished.” Never retired, he was accustomed to working a sixty-hour week as an editor and critic.
    “Well, Milton wrote
Paradise Lost
after
he
went blind,”