'He Loved What He Was Doing'

In junior high school, in a closet-like room just off the cafeteria, was a bookstore displaying several dozen paperbacks arranged on wire racks. A student sat behind a small table with a cash box. There I bought T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems (60 cents) not long after the poet died in January 1965. At the time I had two paper routes, so I was flush. Out of curiosity (the driver of all worthwhile education) I chose another book because of its title: George Gamow’s One, Two, Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (50 cents), published in 1947. I didn't recognize C.P. Snow’s silly notion of “Two Cultures” and still don’t. Literature and science are two expressions of the same impulse, available to all human beings. 

Later, from the public library I borrowed and read other Gamow titles, including The Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) and Biography of the Earth (1941). I was simultaneously investigating literature, reading for the first time Kafka, Plato and much of Shakespeare. Those early forays into books might be compared to Lewis and Clark’s exploration and mapping of the American West. I was orienting myself and, like Gamow, seemed driven by curiosity and a capacity for delight. When reviewing a biography of Charles Darwin, Guy Davenport awarded the biologist his supreme accolade: “He loved what he was doing, and he did it out of pure curiosity.”

 

The astronomer George Greenstein published “The Magician,” a profile of Gamow, in the Winter 1990 issue of The American Scholar. Gamow was born in Odessa (then in Russia, now in Ukraine) on this date, March 4, in 1904, and died August 19, 1968, age sixty-four. He was a theoretical physicist and, eventually, a cosmologist. In 1933, Gamow and his wife, also a physicist, defected from the Soviet Union. The following year the couple moved to the United States. They became naturalized American citizens in 1940.

 

Gamow developed the English physicist Ernest Rutherford’s insights into radioactivity. He was interested in stellar evolution and the early history of the solar system. He worked in quantum theory while writing popular science books like One, Two, Three ... Infinity. Greenstein writes:

 

“Gamow’s work is marked by a remarkable inventiveness and originality. In each of the disciplines in which he worked, he imposed his own special stamp. Most scientific papers break little new ground and are chiefly concerned with cleaning up one or another messy detail. But, in Gamow's writings, one finds insight upon insight, particularly in his shorter papers.”

 

Interestingly, given the shared concerns of science and the humanities, Greenstein lauds Gamow as a writer: “These papers are a pleasure to read. While many are heavily technical, others contain not a single equation or mathematical symbol. These are unusually short -- often a mere three or four paragraphs -- and they are marked by an intense compression of thought. Every sentence says something new. It is a style much in favor among scientists, who could never be accused of garrulity in their scientific communications. But my own impression is that Gamow developed the style to an unusual degree. He published papers in German, French, and English, but never, curiously enough, in his native Russian.” One thinks of another Russian émigré to America, Vladimir Nabokov.

 

In 1953, when almost fifty years old, Gamow read Watson and Crick’s just-published paper detailing the structure of the DNA molecule, which sparked another transition in his career, from astrophysics to biochemistry. Greenstein writes:

 

“In an age of specialization, Gamow was a generalist. All of science was his province. Furthermore, the very style of his work kept changing. He made no attempt to come to what we normally think of as an intuitive understanding of radioactivity, contenting himself rather with developing a theory based on the magical formalism of quantum mechanics. His work on cosmology, on the other hand, was wholly an effort to develop a physical comprehension; avoiding philosophical speculation and mathematical formalism, he worked to comprehend the big bang in all its details. In his biological studies his role was that of the puzzle solver (one of his popular books was on puzzles), and he focused attention on the abstract, mathematical aspects of the problem of the genetic code.”

 

Can you see why an unsophisticated, twelve-year-old working-class kid might be interested in Gamow – and in T.S. Eliot? Here’s Greenstein’s conclusion to his profile:

 

“Common to all of Gamow’s work are the qualities of playfulness and inventiveness, and a resolute refusal to be trapped within a ponderous consistency. The gleam I imagine in his eye as he worked out the solution to a scientific problem is the same gleam I see as he recited the poetry of Pushkin by the hour or demonstrated to an impromptu audience some new and ingenious trick of magic. Towards the end of his life, recalling his perilous flight across the Black Sea in a frail canoe [during an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to defect], one particular image stood out in his recollections: that of a porpoise he had glimpsed, momentarily suspended in a wave illuminated by the setting sun. How Gamow-like!”

'All with Precious Jewels Strow'd'

Let’s start with the title of Jonathan Swift’s 1723 poem “Pethox the Great.” A Greek general? A biomed startup? This being Swift, it’s an anagram of “the pox,” meaning syphilis. Even Swift’s close friend Patrick Delany, after noting the poem contains “many fine strokes of satire as any in Hogarth’s,” added, “I only wish, the subject had been less disagreeable, and the colouring in some places, less strong.” Addressing the disease directly, Swift writes: 

“Thy fair indulgent Mother crown’d

 Thy Head with sparkling Rubies round:

 Beneath thy decent Steps, the Road

 Is all with precious Jewels strow’d.”

 

The “sparkling Rubies” and “precious Jewels” are the sores known as chancres that eventually become, if untreated with antibiotics, ulcers anywhere on the body. For his satirical purposes, Swift is describing late-stage tertiary syphilis, though the disease has been called “the great imitator” because it can manifest itself with many symptoms that can initially resemble other diseases. I remember a boy in junior high showering after phys. ed. class. He had severe acne over much of his body, and another kid mocked him as having “syph.” Swift is graphic even in disguise:

 

“Proteus on you bestow’d the boon

To change your visage like the moon;

You sometimes half a face produce,

Keep t’other half for private use.”

 

In the tertiary stage, which can develop ten to thirty years after the initial infection, lesions called gummas develop and can result in severe disfigurement. In high-school health class, the teacher – a basketball coach, of course – passed around a World War II-era Army manual devoted to the subject, amply illustrated with grotesquely malformed faces and penises.   

 

Swift takes a swipe at the French, commonly assumed by the English in the eighteenth century, to have brought the disease to their country: “as the learn’d contend, / You from the neighbouring Gaul descend.” Thus, “French disease,” French pox,” “French-sick.” Or blame it on the Italians: “Or from Parthenope [ancient name for Naples) the proud, / Where numberless thy votaries crowd.” In Part III, Chap. 8 of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib and observes:

 

“As every person called up made exactly the same appearance he had done in the world, it gave me melancholy reflections to observe how much the race of human kind was degenerated among us within these hundred years past; how the pox, under all its consequences and denominations had altered every lineament of an English countenance; shortened the size of bodies, unbraced the nerves, relaxed the sinews and muscles, introduced a sallow complexion, and rendered the flesh loose and rancid.”

 

There’s no convincing evidence that Swift suffered from any venereal disease, though he often returns to the theme in his work. In “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1734) he writes:

 

“With gentlest touch, she next explores

Her shankers, issues, running sores,

Effects of many a sad disaster;

And then to each applies a plaister.

But must, before she goes to bed,

Rub off the dawbs of white and red;

And smooth the furrows in her front

With greasy paper stuck upon’t.”

 

Swift refers to “parti patches,” adhesive patches applied to the face in the eighteenth century, even by members of the upper classes, to conceal sores.

'Reading, Thinking and, Eventually, Writing'

Last week I wrote about a new book by Nicholas Tate, Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (Ludovika University Press, Budapest), and over the weekend Tate sent me an article he had written for Hungarian Conservative magazine, “Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Montaigne of the Andes, on Books and Reading.” Gómez (1913-94) was a Colombian philosopher and crafter of more than 13,000 of what he called escolios (scholia or comments), available in English at Don Colacho’s Aphorisms. That’s how I discovered them more than a decade ago. Gómez is largely unknown in English and few have written about him, which is a shame because we can use his uncompromising wisdom. Gómez was not a political creature. Tate quotes one of his escolios: “Being a reactionary is understanding that man is a problem without human solutions.” 

Gómez Dávila’s sensibility was not constituted for Twitter-like venom or frivolity. He was classically educated, deeply read in at least eight languages and amassed a personal library of more than 30,000 books. Gómez was no misanthropic hermit. Tate writes:

 

“Although not a recluse—he was married with three children, a polo player, and had many friends within the Bogotano haute bourgeoisie—he turned down offers of political or diplomatic posts and spent most of  his time reading, thinking and, eventually, writing. It was in his library that he often read late into the night. It was in his library that he hosted friends at tertulias (literary soirées). It was into his library that his bed was brought when he was unwell and it was there, surrounded by the legacy of a civilization on which he had come to believe the world had turned its back, that he died.”

 

Each of his aphorisms is concise, often barbed, dense with thought. Our thinking has grown increasingly binary, a predisposition encouraged by the nature of “social media” and the more fashionable neighborhoods of the digital world: “like” as a substitute for “think.” With Don Colacho, his aphorisms, read individually, are calls to self-examination. They betray our will to dishonesty and cowardice, intellectual and otherwise. Only superficially are they Tweet-like. They are “sculpted,” precise and inspired. All the dross has been removed. Even when we find him mistaken, Don Colacho is usefully mistaken. Tate places him in the lineage  of the great French moralistes, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Chamfort and Joubert.

 

Take this aphorism: “The true reader clings to the text he reads like a shipwrecked man to a floating plank.” An American reader may remember this: “The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.” Ishmael, of course, but the author of the aphorism is Gómez and he too is a survivor, doubly so. He endured the wreckage of Western Culture and wrote amidst the rubble, and now, slowly, thanks to readers and writers like Tate, who work like medieval monks in splendid isolation, his work is rediscovered, translated and can be newly appreciated. Tate explains Don Colacho’s advocacy of books as more than a merely personal taste:

 

“At the heart of this view of philosophy and of a philosophical way of life was reading books. Gómez was insistent that reading should not become an ‘opium of the spirit’ and substitute for living. Its purpose was to help us to live more consciously, seeing through the fictions and simplicities that surround us in our daily lives and keeping our critical and reasoning faculties in good order. If we read mainly for utilitarian reasons or for light entertainment our existing prejudices will just be confirmed.”

 

Gómez had no systematic philosophy of life, no program or ideology. In this he reminds me of Michael Oakeshott, another aphoristic writer and a thinker as independent and apolitical as can be imagined in our age. Neither could be a loyal member of any political party.  

 

“He was [. . . ] consistent in his distaste for modernity," Tate writes, "as a phase in which humanity, threatened on all sides by ‘the state, technology’ and (as ever) the temptations of ‘the devil’, lies imprisoned ‘like an animal in a trap.’”

'Give Thanks for All Things'

“It is the province of poems to make some order in the world, but poets can’t afford to forget that there is a reality of things which survives all orders great and small. Things are. The cow is there. No poetry can have any strength unless it continually bashes itself against the reality of things.” 

So much contemporary writing is a refutation of this helpful reminder. It recalls my first encounter, as a college freshman, with the thought of Bishop George Berkeley and his subjective form of idealism. I was seventeen and thought it was ridiculous, but only later did I encounter its definitive refutation. Boswell recounts speaking with Dr. Johnson about Berkeley and his “ingenious sophistry.” Johnson kicks a large stone with “mighty force” and says, “I refute it thus.” In the first stanza of "Epistemology" (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950), Richard Wilbur endorses Johnson’s reasoning:

 

“Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.”

 

We can think of Wilbur as the Poet Laureate of Reality. In his verse he is no fantasist or dreamer. His subject is creation, what exists, and his manner is celebration and gratitude. At a poetry conference at Bard College in 1948, Louise Bogan and William Carlos Williams discussed poetic form and Wilbur replied to them in an essay, “The Bottles Become New, Too” (Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976) – the source of that passage at the top. Here is “Psalm” from his final collection, Anterooms (2010):

 

“Give thanks for all things

On the plucked lute, and likewise

The harp of ten strings.

 

“Have the lifted horn

Greatly blare, and pronounce it

Good to have been born.

 

“Lend the breath of life

To the stops of the sweet flute.

Or capering fife,

 

“And tell the deep drum

To make at the right juncture,

Pandemonium.

 

“Then, in grave relief,

Praise too our sorrows on the

Cello of shared grief.”

 

Again, gratitude follows on accepting the real. In his Paris Review interview, Wilbur says:

 

“To put it simply, I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude. My feeling is that when you discover order and goodness in the world, it is not something you are imposing—it is something that is likely really to be there, whatever crumminess and evil and disorder there may also be. I don’t take disorder or meaninglessness to be the basic character of things. I don’t know where I get my information, but that is how I feel.”

 

Wilbur was born on this day, March 1, in 1921, and died on October 14, 2017, at age ninety-six.

'The Rarest of Achievements'

“According to his own statement it was as an escape from the boredom begotten by retirement that the idea of meddling with authorship occurred to Montaigne. What doubtless confirmed him in the idea, however, was the satisfaction which every born literary artist feels in communicating himself to others. As he read the moralists who were most admired, he must have become conscious of a strength that could march abreast of theirs.”

Writing is a reliable antidote to boredom. A well-crafted sentence, an elegantly framed argument, a neatly arranged set-up and punchline focus our attention and feel substantial, even permanent, even when we know otherwise. In addition, every act of writing is a reply to a predecessor, one half of a conversation – a lesson taught by Guy Davenport. Literature is a vast kinship network of precursors. Readers and writers have no excuse for feeling alienated, apart from self-pity.

 

The author quoted above is Jacob Zeitlin (1883-1937), a professor of English at the University of Illinois who in 1934-36 published a three-volume translation of Montaigne’s Essays. The passage is taken from Zeitlin’s introduction to his translation, published as a separate volume and republished online by Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books.

 

In retirement from public life (as mayor of Bordeaux, etc.), Zeitlin tells us, “. . . Montaigne looked forward to living the brilliant, unencumbered life of the châtelain, cutting a fine figure among the gentlemen of his neighbourhood, ruling over his domain like a little king, and imparting to this life the distinction of an intellectual and studious application ‘in the bosom of the learned Virgins.’” Not exactly how I foresaw my retirement, beginning last year. Mostly I took it to mean more time to read and write. The moralists cited by Zeitlin above include Seneca, Plutarch and Lucretius, among others I’ve been rereading thanks to Montaigne.

 

In 1983, Guy Davenport wrote the introduction to a North Point Press reissue of Montaigne’s Travel Journal (trans. Donald Frame), collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). He writes: “It has been said of Montaigne, and can be said of Plutarch, that in reading him we read ourselves.”

 

That’s my lingering impression, based on decades of reading and rereading. Humans are innately interested in other humans. Knowing them, we come to know ourselves in small ways, assuming we are attentive, reflective readers. Clearly, Plutarch and Montaigne made a lasting impression on Davenport. In the same essay he writes:

 

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”

 

Davenport likewise revised accepted literary history: “Plutarch invented the essay, and wrote seventy-eight of them; Montaigne invented its name in French and English.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defined essay as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” Which, in the cases of Plutarch, Montaigne, Johnson and Davenport is not derogatory.

 

One of the enduring attractions of reading Montaigne is the way he eludes academic pigeonholing. He can’t be reduced to an ideology or philosophical category. This is because he writes as a man, with all the contradictions implicit in that identity. He is like us, only more so. Zeitlin writes:

 

“One wonders if there ever was another writer like Montaigne, who, while avowing the utmost sincerity in the expression of his feelings and opinions and offering an almost transparent honesty of character as his guarantee, nevertheless created such contradictory impressions in the minds of his readers concerning both his ideas and his character.”

 

Again, another sign of Montaigne’s essential humanity. Zeitlin concludes the introduction with a long, masterfully organized two-sentence paragraph:

 

“The essential core of Montaigne’s wisdom remains in the doctrine that the meaning and beauty of life consist in an inner quality of consciousness that brings to its owner the greatest satisfaction and serenity of which a human being is capable, and not in the external signs by which the world commonly appraises us. In this spirit he keeps proclaiming that to live for the sake of living is not only the most fundamental but the most eminent part of our occupation, and that he himself has no other trade and art than to live; that to live for the sake of one’s real being is very different from living for appearances; that the road of those who aim at honour is not the same as that which is held by those who profess order and reason for their good;  that our duty is to compose our characters, to win not battles and provinces, but regularity and tranquillity in our conduct; that the soul shows its greatness not so much in mounting high and pressing forward, as in knowing how to control and circumscribe itself, and shows its elevation by preferring a moderate level to eminence; that the life he praises is one that glides soberly and silently, with goodness, moderation, equability, and constancy, and without bustle and ostentation; and that life well-regulated even in its most private recesses is the rarest of achievements.”

 

Montaigne was born on this date, February 28, in 1533, and died in 1592 at age fifty-nine.

'I Don't Think Much of It'

Many of us share a fascination with last words, the final utterances especially of people we admire or detest. Do such words distill the wisdom of a lifetime, spew braggadocio, beg forgiveness or signify cerebrum-atrophied gibberish? 

Deathbed gems inspire skepticism. We’re told the last words of William Hazlitt, a brilliant essayist and notably difficult human being, were, “Well, I’ve had a happy life.” Is that mythology? Would so cranky a man, in effect, repudiate the thrust of his own life? Could a man tell a lie at the moment of death? Could the immanence of death so chasten him? Was he feeling guilty? Or do we have Hazlitt all wrong? Or take Walter de la Mare, who is quoted as saying “Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.” Sounds just too pat and polished, a little like Rodney Dangerfield on a mediocre night. I’m especially fond of Wyndham Lewis’s swan song. When dying he was asked about the condition of his bowels and replied, “Mind your business!” Good man.

 

Robert Phillips has written a poem, “Famous Last Words” (Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems, 2006), composed entirely of the exit lines of well-known figures and dedicated to Dana Gioia. Most cryptic is Henry James: “So it has come . . . The Distinguished Thing.” Most predictable is Lytton Strachey’s final hiss: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” How’s that for life-affirming gratitude?

    

Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957) is mostly a collection of Max Beerbohm’s radio broadcasts. The volume concludes with a lecture Beerbohm delivered in 1943 devoted to Strachey, whom he knew and about whom he has reservations. He writes:

 

“It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey's, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There's nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

 

Beerbohm’s final words are reported to have been, “Thanks for everything.”

'There Is No Wisdom Here; Seek Not For It!'

A reader objects to my frequent dismissal of nature mysticism. I say this as someone who has spent much of his life tramping through woods and fields, collecting insects and plants and studying biology. I’m happiest among trees and one of their byproducts, books. I just find mushy paeans to nature naïve and tiresome. Somone capable of responding to the natural world only by way of New Age “spirituality” might as well be blind. My professor of English Romanticism distinguished Shelley and Keats like this: If the pair of poets were walking together in the woods, Shelley would be effusing about spirit and sensitive plants, and Keats would frequently pause to study a flower or a butterfly. 

I’m no hardcore adherent to scientism. The world remains a mystery and our knowledge is forever limited. I’m with Keats, the one-time medical student, in his “Negative Capability” letter: “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” No admirer of Keats or Shelley, Yvor Winters writes in his chief critical work, In Defense of Reason (1947):

 

“The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve a kind of mystical union with the Divinity . . .”

 

Such themes are frequently present in Winters’ poems. In “On Rereading a Passage from John Muir,” he writes:

 

“This was my childhood revery: to be

Not one who seeks in nature his release,

But one forever by the dripping tree,

Paradisaic in his pristine peace.”

 

And in “The Manzanita,” about the arbutus or madrone, a tree common on the West Coast, Winters writes:

 

"This life is not our life; nor for our wit

The sweetness of these shades; these are alone.

There is no wisdom here; seek not for it!

This is the shadow of the vast madrone."

 

I’ve recently happened on a poem with a similar theme by a very different sort of poet, John Wain. Here are the final lines of “Reason for Not Writing Orthodox Nature Poetry”:

 

“To moderns who devoutly hymn the land.

So be it: each is welcome to his voice;

They are a gentle, if a useless, band.

 

“But leave me free to make a sterner choice;

Content, without embellishment, to note

How little beauty bids the heart rejoice,

 

“How little beauty catches at the throat.

Simply, I love this mountain and this bay

With love that I can never speak by rote,

 

“And where you love you cannot break away.”