DISCOVERIES

THE ELSEWHERE COMMUNITY By Hugh Kenner; Oxford University Press: 163 pp., $18.95 Some writers create by staring at a blank wall. Others, like Hugh Kenner, have made a community of Elsewhere, writing to fill in their end of an imaginary dialogue throughout their creative lives with writers they admire. Perhaps it’s obvious: “[W]hat we don’t know yet, what we don’t know here, is to be found Elsewhere.” People travel, Kenner explains in these five brief essays, to discover “what they do not know.” When he was a doctoral student at Yale in the late 1940s, Kenner visited Ezra Pound at the hospital in Washington, D.C., where the poet, whose pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts had put him out of favor with the American government, was being treated for insanity. “You have an obligation,” Pound told him, “to visit the great men of our time.” The inspired graduate student would go on to dedicate a large part of his life to writing about Pound, who became his mentor, and about Pound’s work.

Kenner also traveled the world visiting writers he admired: T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams and others, what he refers to as his “Grand Tour” in the classical tradition. His education proved invaluable: From Beckett, he learned the meaning of elegance: “start with short words, progress in short, clear increments”; from Pound he learned the true meaning of modernism: “simple words placed in natural order”; and from Williams, he learned that “any truly intended utterance will move into poetry.” In the final essay, Kenner welcomes the Internet, born of the need for an Elsewhere community. “It’s pointless,” he writes, in this day and age, “to complain of rootlessness, restlessness.” Create your own Grand Tour is the subtext of these essays. Enter a dialogue about literature. Visit the writers you admire.

THE BROWSER’S ECSTASY A Meditation on Reading By Geoffrey O’Brien; Counterpoint: 130 pp., $24

Readers get fruity. Happens to the best of us and the worst. If writers complain endlessly of writer’s block, why can’t readers whine about reader’s block? Geoffrey O’Brien’s little folly, “The Browser’s Ecstasy,” is a sensory experience, rather like opening a tin of something that’s been stored on a high shelf for a season and breathing in the first whiff. It’s as if you opened up a repressed reader to expose all the judgment and pretense and frustration and carbon dioxide it takes to be on the passive side of the reader-writer relationship. The great thing about it is O’Brien’s defense of reading-by-browsing as a fine and conscious art, not the kind of thing Barbie dolls do in the dentist’s office but rather a common conceit of straight readers. “I know,” says O’Brien of browsing, “that I am doing something a machine can’t do.” “Proper reading,” he writes, “in a straight line, is something else again. That is a task, with its procedures, regulations, orders.” Browsing, he claims, is the “constant shifting of attention from one object to another . . . like a bird’s way of looking.” He describes a “mist of words,” “madly swirling fish that have not yet sensed the presence of the fisherman.” But reader beware: This is the part that makes sense. The rest is a confection involving an imaginary warehouse full of books and dreams and demons. Much of it is best browsed.

BODIES IN MOTION AND AT REST On Metaphor and Mortality By Thomas Lynch; W.W. Norton: 278 pp., $23.95

Thomas Lynch, one of our most elegant cogitators, claims he writes because he doesn’t golf. “You don’t need a caddy or a designated driver or a bag full of cameras. All you need is a little peace and quiet and the words will come to you--your own or the other’s. Your voice or the voice of God. Perspiration, inspiration. It feels like a gift.” If you must know, Lynch is a funeral director in Milford, Mich., as was his father and his father’s father before that. It would be almost worth dying to have him preside at your funeral, not only because of his humor (like Garrison Keillor’s, but richer) but mainly because he is the living opposite, the embodiment of an antidote to our increasingly impersonal world. Lynch has his finger on the bloody pulse of creation, and what makes him such a fine essyist is that it’s just the business of everyday life and death to him. Death is so much a part of creation that it’s hardly even an ending, and Lynch writes most beautifully in these essays about passage and about echoes throughout generations. He writes about his battles with alcohol and his son’s. He writes about divorce: “What good is it to have your mother’s eyes when your father does not love them?” It’s clear that he’s found some peace and quiet and that his god speaks through him. “Requiems and prosodies, sonnets and obsequies, poems and funerals--they are all the same,” Lynch writes, “an effort at meaning and metaphor.”