I have just started Joseph Brodsky’s book On Grief and Reason. Let me say I have only read one essay in a collection of thirty, and I flipped through the book, sizing up the chapters, actually counting the pages, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7—yes, this one’s good, it only has seven pages. This hardly counts as being familiar with Joseph Brodsky, reading seven pages and the jacket bio, yet I can tell you that his essay In Praise of Boredom is one of the best things I have ever read; that I think you would be stimulated and moved by it; that I’d be happy to direct you to a copy of it; and that I know know this of Brodsky: he really liked Robert Frost. He was particularly infactuated with the line The only way out is through. He quoted it in this one essay, and then when I flipped through the book looking for another essay I wasn’t intimidated by, I found the same quote again.
That’s how it is. That’s how it always is. In a handful of pages we can see a writer’s defining twitch: One has a fondness for ellipses; one constantly references his jumpiness (Thurber); another fancies single-word sentences; another has a sloppy habit of overusing the word surprisingly; still another leans on a Robert Frost quote. Perhaps Brodsky never thought the two essays, which contained that reference, would end up in a bound volume. (One would have hoped the editor would have picked up on this, and at least separated the essays more substantially. It’s tragic, really. When my work is left to be poked through, will it be painfully obvious that I gravitated toward semicolons, and frequently wrote about coincidences and doughnuts with sprinkles?) If Brodsky used that quote in those two essays, we can be sure he brought it up at dinner parties; at a literary conference in Turin; over coffee with an old chum from the University of Michigan.
—Amy Krouse Rosenthal, “Brodsky, Joseph”
Transcribed by me (much as some of those extra commas pained me) from pages 42–43 of my first edition copy of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life [Volume One], © 2005 Crown Publishers (Random House), New York.
Tweet: One-word sentences; overuse of ellipses; word repetition: what’s your twitch?
Tweet: A collection of essays reveals a writer’s habits.
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