'The Everyday Dignity of Our Town'

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.” 

As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly before I turned thirteen. I’d been a reader all along, certainly more so than my family and kids I knew at school. But books were strictly entertainment, a natural alternative to television. But that year, after reading his obituary, I discovered T.S. Eliot. I have no idea why he so quickly meant so much to me, why I personalized him as though he were my uncle. Soon I discovered Updike, Kafka and, among other things, the poetry anthologies of Oscar Williams.

 

In one of them I found the poem “Scyros” by Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), fell for it, heavily, and proceeded to read everything by him I could find. At first I concentrated on the poems he wrote while serving with the Army in the Pacific. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), written while he was stationed in New Guinea. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year and he went on to serve as editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner. I lost interest in “Scyros” and came to admire the most characteristic portion of Shapiro’s body of work. I think of it as his “American Scene” verse, including “Buick,” “Pharmacy,” “Hospital,” “Haircut,” “Girls Working in Banks,” “Manhole Covers.”

 

Shapiro could be silly. He underwent a midlife hipster crisis. He praised Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams. He abandoned meter and rhyme and had good things to say about the Beats. His sole novel, Edsel, is unreadable.

 

Shapiro came to disappoint me, which is ridiculous. He gave us a handful of the best American poems and he helped initiate me into literature. Today, he appears to be virtually forgotten. The lines at the top of this post are from “Poet in Eclipse,” written by Louis D. Rubin Jr., published in the Fall 1991 issue of The Sewanee Review and dedicated to Shapiro. That’s nine years before Shapiro’s death. We all know that the literary industry is driven by fashion, which by definition is fickle and unfair. The entire first stanza of Rubin’s poem:

 

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter

About him at cocktail parties.

Critics do not debate his latest heresies.

The turncoat anthologists have dropped him

From the canon of those who matter.

There is apathy when his books come out.

It has been years since anyone asked him

Why modern poetry is so difficult.

His own clear translation of the everyday

Has long since given way

To more convolute and crepuscular

Enactments of postmodernist despair.

Elaborate candelabra now flare

Where he was once the Muse's bright day-star.”

 

In the third stanza, Rubin celebrates the “American Scene” poems:

 

“Still, there are those who see the lucence

Of what he wrote in much we now possess:

He found the language that could bring alive

The everyday dignity of our town,

Learned to make the astounding adjective

Infuse the colorless, neutral noun

And called into luminous elegance

What all had thought drab hitherto.

He claimed our untitled circumstance

For poetry, fixed its impress

Equally for high romance

As any ivied castle, campus, salon,

Requiring no prelate nor Helicon

Nor claim to privileged view.”

'Distance Only Cannot Change the Heart'

The digital age has enabled a new and more generous definition of friendship. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary component. It’s a truism that making new friends becomes more difficult with age, but at seventy-three I have more friends than at any time in my life. I’m not bragging. I still have friends I’ve known for more than sixty years but with the internet, distance is erased. Common interests, civility, a sense of humor, temperamental affinities – these become the criteria that shape a friendship, not sharing an office or riding the same bus to work.

 

On July 9, 1785, William Cowper was writing a letter to the Rev. John Newton. It’s typical Cowper – gossipy, affectionate, cranky and utterly devoted to his friend: “No man’s disapprobation would have hurt me more. Your favourable sentiments of my book [The Task] must consequently give me pleasure in the same proportion.” Originally, Cowper intended to write a poem to Newton. Instead, he wrote him a letter and redirected the poem to another friend, Joseph Hill, whom he had known since childhood. Hill was an attorney who served as the poet’s legal and financial adviser, even when Cowper attempted suicide and was committed to an asylum. “An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq.” begins like this:

 

“Dear Joseph,— five and twenty years ago—

Alas! how time escapes — ’tis even so!—

With frequent intercourse and always sweet

And always friendly we were wont to cheat

A tedious hour, — and now we never meet,

As some grave gentleman in Terence says,

(’Twas therefore much the same in ancient days,)

Good lack, we know not what to-morrow brings,—

Strange fluctuation of all human things!”

 

Cowper celebrates not merely his affection for Hill but the importance of friendship in general: “Changes will befall, and friends may part, / But distance only cannot change the heart.” He might be writing about friendships formed and sustained thanks to the internet. Cowper’s lines can be lachrymose and rigidly predictable but at his best he is piercingly human.

 

That a suicidally tormented man should have written letters and poems that are still readably charming, funny and moving after more than two centuries, defies the modern understanding of human personality. As poet and man, Cowper can’t be reduced to clinical categories for easy comprehension. Though depressed and reclusive, comfortable only among a small circle of friends and family, and then only in a rural setting, Cowper wrote letters that rival Keats’ as the finest in the language (that both poets suffered lends a plangent quality to everything they wrote, though that alone is not sufficient to explain their literary qualities). They carry philosophical and emotional freight lightly -- never a sermon or treatise, always a conversation. The English poet Norman Nicholson in 1951 published William Cowper, a study of the poet, in which he writes:

 

“His was a strange life and a strange personality; witty, and yet warped; warm-hearted, impulsive, and yet timid and reserved; sociable, and yet solitary; sympathetic, tolerant, understanding, and yet bigoted; gay and yet pathetic; endearing and lovable and yet never receiving all the love he needed. . . . Not even Chekov, carefully selecting significant trivia, could tell us more about his characters than Cowper tells about himself in a chance remark on a hat or cat, a chair or a hare. Strange as he was, most poets are strangers compared with him. His very oddness is so companionable that we can understand his freaks and foibles better than we can understand the normal actions of saner men.”

'The Blameless Life'

How pleasing to learn that friends, seemingly unknown to each other -- compartmentalized as friendships often are -- intersected before we knew either of them. Sixteen years ago today, the late D.G. Myers published on his Commonplace Blog thirteen epigrams written more than twenty-five years earlier. I had no idea David had written poetry. The publisher of the 1984 chapbook A Patch of Weeds was R.L. Barth. The poems suggested how much the two writers had in common, besides a tartly satirical voice and a taste for epigrams – Martial, J.V. Cunningham, Dr. Johnson, Robert Herrick. Here is David’s rendering of Martial’s 3.71: 

“I know, yes. How? I didn’t read your mind.

He’s sore between the legs and you, behind.”

 

And here is Bob’s version of the same poem, included in his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026):

 

“Naevolus, your boy’s ass is sore; your prick is too.

Although I am no seer, I know just what you do.”

 

Here is David’s “To J.V. Cunningham,” about the poet and scholar David studied under at Washington University in 1976:

 

“Take these, the work of quiet days,

In place of what I owe you—measured praise.

As you have made my mind your own device

To honor you I epigrammatize.”

 

And here is David’s “Dr. Johnson on the Death of His Mother” (Idler, 41):

 

“If you have tears, whoever you may be,

Enough to drop for mourners filing by,

Then let this train be your last cause for grief:

The last steps of an inoffensive life.”

 

David died of cancer on September 26, 2014 at age sixty-one. Johnson writes in the Idler essay cited by David:

 

"The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”

'It's a Perfectly Cromulent Word'

“Perhaps you know this word, but I didn’t: ‘cromulent.’ I've seen examples of it used to describe players of different sports.” 

So writes a friend. The word was new to me, so I went to the OED for the definition: “acceptable, adequate, satisfactory.” Not unlike “a gentleman’s C.” You pass but without distinction, like most American presidents. More interesting is the adjective’s extra-literary origin: “frequently used humorously or ironically in recognition of its origin as an invented word in the television programme The Simpsons.” Here is the pertinent dialogue from the 1996 episode:

 

“[Mrs. Krabappel] Embiggens? Hm, I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield. [Ms. Hoover] I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”

 

The word sounds authentic, a little old-fashioned and stuffy, perhaps Johnsonian. That’s the key to lastingly successful coinage. Forty years ago a fellow reporter and I working for a newspaper in Indiana challenged each other to work arcane words into our copy. I covered courts, he covered city government, so exotic lingo would be conspicuous. Our only stipulation was that the words be rare but legitimate, words that might sound invented. Once I described a county commissioner as “freaming” a comment. The word has a distinguished pedigree. In 1575, George Gascoigne wrote “a Bore freameth,” and the commissioner was certainly a bore. The OED defines the verb fream as “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar.” A timid copy editor changed it to the anemic “said.”

'Sweetness to My Sense'

R.S. Gwynn takes a story related by Izaak Walton in The Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670) and turns it into a poetic  fable of humility and service. Here is “Music at Midnight,” published in the Summer 2016 issue of The Sewanee Review and dedicated “After Walton, for W. Brown Patterson”: 

“Mr. Herbert entered, so befouled with mud and shit

His Tuesday consort, ready with their silent lutes,

Were all aghast, save one who asked, with a wag’s wit,

‘Crawled you here from Old Sarum’s pits or on worser routes?’

 

He said, ‘I came upon a poor man and his horse.

The wretched beast had fallen underneath its load;

I engaged to right him and set both upon the road,

And the hour going, in this fair state resumed my course.

 

“‘I tell you this as fact. In all humility

I take no credit for the deed yet must confess

Had I not stopped today for them I could not bless,

In faith, the wafer and the wine. Thus this shall be

For me, music at midnight, sweetness to my sense.

Now, gentlemen, time flies. Let's tune our instruments.’”

 

What a fine way to evaluate a virtuous act and a day of blessings. John Drury borrowed the title of his 2013 biography of the poet, Music at Midnight: The Life & Poetry of George Herbert, from the Walton anecdote:

 

“In another walk to Salisbury, he saw a poor man with a poorer horse, that was fallen under his load: they were both in distress, and needed present help; which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load, his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and was so like the Good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse; and told him, ‘That if he loved himself he should be merciful to his beast.’ Thus he left the poor man; and at his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert, which used to be so trim and clean, came into that company so soiled and discomposed: but he told them the occasion. And when one of the company told him, ‘He had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment,’ his answer was, ‘That the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience, whensoever he should pass by that place: for if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practice what I pray for. And though I do not wish for the like occasion every day, yet let me tell you, I wou1d not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or shewing mercy; and I praise God for this occasion. And now let’s tune our instruments.’”

 

My arthritis has grown more severe. I’ve used a cane for seven years but the pain in my knees has colonized my right shoulder and elsewhere. On Thursday, while walking to the entrance of the library at Rice University, an athletic-looking young man asked if he could carry my book bag. I was almost at the door so I demurred and thanked him. On Sunday, in the grocery store parking lot, while pushing the cart with my left hand and holding my cane in the right, a black woman not much younger than me, obviously dressed for church, asked if I needed a hand. I declined and thanked her. There’s so much unsuspected kindness in the world.

'A Reassuring Survivor'

“As for a book to mark the settled sobriety of my advanced years, I keep Boswell’s Life of Johnson close by. Its praise of steady judgment, as well as its moral force, make it a reassuring survivor.” 

Here’s a reader/writer worth paying attention to. William M. Chace is a retired professor of English and university president of the old school, the sort who taught the books they loved and often reread. A reader sent me a link to a recent essay, “My Books,” published by Chace in Commonweal. The premise is a familiar one: after a life of accumulating books, what to keep? What to sell or give away? His choices overlap with mine, though not entirely. He’ll keep Shakespeare and Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide but also, sadly, The Catcher in the Rye and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Never have I encountered a reader whose tastes and fallibilities were identical to mine, though Chace’s are close.

 

“As for all the other books,” he asks, “why keep them? Because some were written by friends or colleagues, now dead; their knowledge and intelligence must be honored. Out of another kind of piety, I am keeping books inscribed and given to me. And a special space is being held for those books that, in their sheer monumentality, have represented to me intellectual or artistic achievement of the highest order: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joyce’s Ulysses, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and most of Henry James, Proust, Dickens, and Faulkner.”

 

Chace formulates an interesting category of “keepers”: “Their authors tell me that I have never known myself well and still haven’t dug deep enough to see what I’m truly made of.” For him that would include Franz Kafka, Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor. He also prizes some books as objects – “a formidable ingenuity of effort now dying away.”

 

I suspect that every serious reader ponders the post-mortem fate of his library. Will the collection remain intact? Will survivors divvy them up? Will some end up in the Dumpster? Of course, we’ll be past caring.

'Our Native Bumptiousness and Ebulliation'

The best thing about Independence Day in the United States is that no one is obligated to observe it. And if you do, regardless of how eccentrically or offensively, that’s your business. Don’t impose your protest or drunken shenanigans on me or my family but otherwise you have carte blanche to express your patriotism, or its absence, as you wish. That’s what “the freedom of speech” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” mean, according to the First Amendment of our Constitution.

For much of my life, the Fourth of July started with a parade. While living in upstate New York, that meant driving to Pittsfield, Mass., for its annual Fourth of July Parade, a tradition that started in 1801, just twenty-five years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. One year I watched a rather ample-figured U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy amble behind the American Legion band and glad-hand the crowd. A year later I stood on the sidewalk beside the singer Michael McDonald, chatting and cheering.

I rather dimly recall the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. I was living on the margin and drinking. I remember throwing firecrackers from the roof of someone’s garage. I don’t remember feeling much patriotism or much pain. In the September 1973 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the American poet L.E. Sissman published “The B.S. Bicentennial.”

“Given the kinds and numbers of problems our country has faced and flubbed over the last decade or two,” Sissman writes, “one might think that the forthcoming jubilee would be subdued, retrospective, elegiac, maybe even prayerful. Given our native bumptiousness and ebulliation, though, one might be certain that the party would be big, noisy, brash, and pointless.”

Never underestimate the genius of what Tom Wolfe celebrates as “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours.”  

Sissman was reacting not to the 200^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence but to the marketing and public relations industry already hyping the Bicentennial. He’s writing on the Fourth of July in 1973, and Watergate is monopolizing the front page. When finishing his column, Sissman tells us he plans to attend the Independence Day festivities of the town where he lives.

“I can hear the sirens of the volunteer fire department now,” he writes. “There’ll be a parade of fire trucks . . . a drum-and-bugle corps, a scattering of veterans in costumes of assorted wars, some more illicit cannon crackers and salutes, a League of Women Voters’ flea market, and a bright-red hot dog with bright-yellow ball-park mustard for me to eat and a bottle of cheap, but good, Genesee beer to drink.”

In other words, an old-fashioned American shindig. He adds: “Just moyen-apathétique eating, guzzling, watching, and generally enjoying themselves.”

[Sissman’s essay is collected in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the Seventies (Vanguard, 1975).]