'Laugh from the Centre of Things'

One of the qualities I most esteem in a friend, apart from brains and adequate hygiene, is the ready ability to make me laugh. When we ponder friendship we tend to emphasize its heavier aspects: confidence, trust, shared values and interests. But those traits, when combined with a plodding, literal-minded, humorless manner, are heavily compromised if not erased. Not that humor is inconsistent with a generally dark world view. I remember the late Terry Teachout describing himself as an “ebullient pessimist.” The one time we met, over lunch here in Houston, we laughed through our meal. Here is Jules Renard in his journal on April 8, 1896:

 “One must laugh from the centre of things. In other words I do not laugh at politics per se, because there may be some good in it, of which I am ignorant. But I laugh at the politicians I know, at first hand, and at the politics they practice in front of my eyes.”

 

Laughter may be our most potent weapon against not only politicians but do-gooders, self-identified experts of any stripe and yentas in general. Renard goes on:

 

“Rather than frivolity, laughter must be serious and informed, and philosophically awake! You have a right to cry with laughter only when you have already wept. The ridiculous belongs to the moment, and nothing is entirely or permanently ridiculous.”

 

I’m aware that a gift for inducing laughter can, like any human capacity, be used destructively. Extreme comics tend to become nihilists, mocking the worthy with the contemptible. “[French critic Ernest] Renan said," Renard writes, ‘The mockers will never rule.’ Which is true, they laugh at the very idea of ruling.”

 

Bill Coyle in “Table Talk” from The God of This World to His Prophet (2006) describes the unlikely T.S. Eliot/Groucho Marx pas de deux, and in doing so illuminates the complicated nature of a good laugh, or its absence:

 

“It was a meeting of two modern masters

when Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot,

mutual admirers, sat down to dinner,

but brilliant conversation it was not.

 

“Each man, it seems, was too in awe of the other,

Eliot eager to demonstrate that he

knew scores of Groucho’s jokes by heart and Groucho

that he was versed in Eliot’s poetry.

 

“Still, I’d give anything to hear them chatting.

Groucho, with perfect seriousness would say,

‘Who is the third who is always beside you?’

and Eliot, laughing, ‘if I could walk that way . . .’”

[All quoted prose passages are from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'I Now Believe in Hell'

Anton Chekhov was thirty-one years old and had experienced his first haemoptysis (blood coughed from the lungs) seven years earlier, when he visited Pompeii and climbed to the summit of Mount Vesuvius on April 6, 1891. The most recent significant eruption of the volcano, which remains active, had occurred in 1872. Chekhov writes to his sister Maria on April 7: 

“What a torture it is to climb Vesuvius! Ashes, mountains of lava, congealed waves of molten minerals, mounds and all sorts of nasty things. You take one step forward and fall a half step back. The soles of your feet hurt; you have trouble breathing. You keep going and going, and the summit is still far off. You start thinking you ought to turn back, but you’re ashamed to for fear of ridicule.”

 

Two words come to mind to describe Chekhov’s climb up an active volcano while already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him thirteen years later: intrepid and foolish. Knowing Chekhov with his omnivorous sense of curiosity, frequent disregard and even denial of ill health, and his courage, we shouldn’t be surprised. Who wouldn’t want to peer into a smoking caldera? He continues:

 

“Vesuvius’s crater is several sazhens [one sazhen = seven feet] in diameter. I stood at its edge and looked down into it as if I were looking into a teacup. The earth surrounding it is covered with a thin coating of sulphur and gives off a dense vapor. A noxious white smoke pours out of the crater, sparks and red-hot rocks fly everywhere. While Satan lies snorting beneath the smoke.”

 

Chekhov was touring Italy with his editor and friend Alexi Suvorin. One year earlier, he had traveled to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, 4,000 miles east of Moscow. He would publish his nonfiction masterpiece, Sakhalin Island, in 1895. Chekhov continues his letter to Maria:

 

“There is quite a mixture of sounds: you hear breakers beating, thunder clapping, railroad trains pounding, boards falling. It is all quite terrifying, and at the same time makes you want to jump right down into the maw. I now believe in Hell. The lava is of such high temperature that a copper coin will melt in it.”

 

There’s a tradition of writers visiting Vesuvius, starting with Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the most famous eruption, in 79 A.D., the one that buried Pompeii, and described what he saw in a letter to Tacitus. Later visitors included Goethe, Chateaubriand, Byron and Walter Scott.

 

My favorite description can be found in an unlikely source, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) by Charles Montagu Doughty. The passage comes in Chap. XV, “Nomad Life Upon the Harra.” Doughty studied geology at Cambridge, and it shows. In 1872, on his way to Arabia, he stops in Italy and climbs Vesuvius, which he recalls in his description of the Arabian Aueyrid Harra, a desolate tract of volcanic rock he calls “a wilderness of burning and rusty horror.” Here is a brief excerpt from the passage: 

 

“In the year 1872 I was a witness to the great eruption of Vesuvius. Standing from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain, that day in which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle-deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava; in the midst was a mammel-like chimney, not long formed, fuming with a light corrosive breath; which to those in the plain had appeared by night as a fiery beacon with trickling lavas. Beyond was a new seat of the weak daily eruption, a pool of molten lava and wherefrom issued all that strong dinning noise and uncouth travail of the mountain; from thence was from time to time tossed aloft, and slung into the air, a swarm of half-molten wreathing missiles.”

 

Doughty's Vesuvius passage continues for another two pages, inserted digressively into an account of lava fields in Arabia. Most noteworthy is Doughty’s language. His word choice is often unexpected, as in “flour of sulphur” and “uncouth travail.” You won’t mistake Doughty’s prose for anyone else’s, though he lacks Chekhov’s comic sense.

 

[The translators of the quoted Chekhov passages above are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973).]

'One Should Carry His Stick Also'

“From the first he walked through intrigue, pretention, flunkeyism, and despotic arrogance, and, by blasting these qualities with his tongue, became a personage among their exponents.” 

What a marvelous word, flunkeyism. It’s a quality we all recognize, especially on the job. The OED defines a flunkey as “a person who behaves obsequiously to persons above him or her in rank or position; a ‘lackey’, toady.” First cousin to the ass-kisser and brown-noser, flunkies are the grease that keeps organizations functioning. Where would bosses be without them?

 

The writer above is E.Powys Mathers in the introduction to his translation of Maxims and Considerations of Chamfort (1926), available free of charge thanks to Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books. Nicolas Chamfort (1741-94) is one of the great aphorists, a practitioner of that difficult form favored by realists with a gift for condensing unfortunate truths.

 

It’s probably significant that maxim has so many close synonyms – aphorism, aperçu, adage, epigram, apophthegm, proverb. People like to hear truth expressed pithily and memorably, often with a twist. For a while, the French specialized in this sort of thing. Think of Pascal, Joubert, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues. I remember several years ago reading an attack by some academic hack on aphorisms and the notion that truth can be expressed in a mere handful of words. Compared to La Rochefoucauld, I find Chamfort a little wordy and vague. He too often fails to attain that dense concision of the first-rank aphorists. Take CCCVII in the Mathers translation:

 

“Evil by nature, mankind has become much more so through Society, whose every member contributes the defects, first of humanity, then of the individual, and lastly of the social order to which he belongs. These shortcomings grow more pronounced with time, so that a man, offended by them in others, as his age advances, and made unhappy by their presence in himself, conceives a contempt for both Mankind & Society, and has to direct it against one or other.”

 

We can’t argue with the truth of Chamfort’s observation but wish it had been formulated more pithily. It reads more like a miniature essay than a pungent moral stab. The same goes for CCLXXXIX:

 

“Nearly all men are slaves, for that reason which the Spartans gave for the slavery of the Persians, because they cannot pronounce the single syllable no. To be able to say this word and to be able to live alone are the two sole means of retaining liberty and character.”

 

Aphorists treat unflattering truths as a given. No need to prevaricate or make excuses. In this, Chamfort is often very good. Here, in CCLXXVII, he might be describing himself:

 

“An intelligent man is lost if he does not add strength of character to his intelligence. When one has the lantern of Diogenes, one should carry his stick also.” 

 

In CCLVIII he is likewise, we suspect, being autobiographical:

 

“To have an accurate idea of things, we must understand words in an opposite sense to that which Society gives them. For example, Misanthropist means Philanthropist; a bad Frenchman means a good citizen who has been drawing attention to monstrous abuses; and a Philosopher is a simple-minded man who knows that two and two make four.”

 

Such a thinker can’t expect to live a long life. Chamfort was born on this date, April 6, in 1741, and died in 1794 at age fifty-three, yet another victim of the French Revolution.

'Thank You. Thank Everything'

I happened to be reading the poet-historian Robert Conquest when a friend called to tell me her troubles – health, romance, job, the usual life distresses. She’s not by nature a whiner so I listened, seldom interrupting. Her manner resembles my own – articulating a problem, then apologizing as she skirts self-pity, then moving on to the next complaint. Some of us still loath an emotional wallow. 

Conquest published his poetry collection Between Mars and Venus in 1962. “On the Middle Thames” is a lovely poem of celebration, perhaps appropriate for Easter, though Conquest does not mention the event. The poem concludes:  

 

“— Life finds its way to sing

Beyond all self, all sense:

This mere experience,

This chime of the most real.

Thank you. Thank everything.”

'Our Spruce Manor Way of Life'

I’ve learned that a next-door neighbor from my childhood has died at age ninety-eight: Gert Pirko. Like us, she and her husband and three kids moved into the neighborhood in the summer of 1955. Parma Heights was a working-class suburb on the West Side of Cleveland. There’s a photo somewhere of the middle child Karen and me standing in the backyard of their house, holding hands, the grass nearly as tall as our three-year-old selves.

 Our doors were seldom locked. We could enter their house without knocking. I remember borrowing a quart of milk from Mrs. Pirko, the whole glass bottle. Ken, the oldest kid, collected hot rod magazines and I heard “Telstar” for the first time when he played the 45 for me in the basement. Johnny was the youngest.  He and I once walked to Kroger's, selected a bottle of catsup and a box of Cheerios, and blithely walked out the door. The manager stopped us and called Mrs. Pirko, who came to get us in her Chevy. Most women in the neighborhood didn’t drive. The Pirkos moved to Illinois in 1964 and they still show up in my dreams.

 

The indefatigable Isaac Waisberg, proprietor of IWP Books, has just posted Phyllis McGinley’s 1951 poetry collection, A Short Walk from the Station (along with three earlier McGinley volumes). Many of her poems are set in Spruce Manor, a fictional suburb not unlike Larchmont, near New York City where she and her family lived. It joins such mythical literary locales as Winesburg, Ohio, and Spoon River, Illinois. The book’s ten-page prose introduction, “Suburbia, Of Thee I Sing!”, is less a defense than a celebration of life in the suburbs, already seventy-five years ago a punching bag for the snobbery of hipsters and litterateurs. McGinley refutes most of the clichés associated with life in the suburbs:  

 

“I think that someday people will look back on our little intervals here, on our Spruce Manor way of life, as we now look back on the Currier and Ives kind of living, with nostalgia and respect. In a world of terrible extremes, it will stand out as the safe, important medium.”

 

In his review of the book, Jacques Barzun called McGinley “a feminine Horace.” I love the fiction of John Cheever and Richard Yates but there’s another way to think about suburbia and its inhabitants, like Gertude Pirko. Two of McGinley’s poems that might have been drawn from my life:

 

“Local Newspaper,” because once I delivered three newspapers – two dailies and a weekly:

 

“Headlines, a little smudged, spell out the stories

That stir the Friday village to its roots:

town council meets for may, miss babcock marries,

shore club to ban bikini bathing suits.

While elsewhere thunders roll or atoms shiver

 ultimate tyrants into dust are hurled,

Weekly small boys on bicycles deliver

News to our doors of this more innocent world –

A capsule universe of church bazaars

Where even the cross-stitched aprons sell on chances,

Of brush fires, births, receptions, soda bars,

Memorial Day parades, and high-school dances,

And (though on various brinks the planet teeters)

Of fierce disputes concerned with parking meters.”

 

And a remembrance of a much-cherished sound and sight, “Good Humor Man”:

 

“Listen! It is the summer’s self that ambles

Through the green lanes with such a coaxing tongue.

Not birds or daisy fields were ever symbols

More proper to the time than this bell rung

With casual insistence – no, not swallow

Circling the roof or bee in hollyhock.

His is the season’s voice, and children follow,

Panting, from every doorway down the block.

So, long ago, in some such shrill procession

Perhaps the Hamelin children gave pursuit

To one who wore a red-and-yellow fashion

Instead of white, but made upon his flute

The selfsame promise plain to every comer:

Unending sweets, imperishable summer.”

'Me Thinks It Is No News'

In his final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), the dying Yvor Winters briefly mentions the allegorically named poet Philip Pain: “Of Pain nothing is known beyond what we learn from his Daily Meditations. It was begun in July of 1666 and was published in Massachusetts in 1668, and was written ‘By Pain: Who, lately, suffering Shipwrack, was drowned.’” “Meditation 8”: 

“Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear

Some one or other’s dead; and to my ear

Me thinks it is no news: but Oh! did I

Think deeply on it, what it is to die,

My Pulses all would bear, I should not be

Drown’d in this Deluge of Securitie.”

 

Winters admired the poem enough to include it in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), the posthumously published collection he co-edited with Kenneth Fields. We know little about Pain with much certainty, even his nationality and place and date of birth (usually given as “c. 1647-c. 1667”). In 1936, the Henry E. Huntington Library published a 36-page facsimile edition with an introduction by Leon Howard, the Melville scholar. Howard calls Pain a “lost” author. He is unable to substantiate claims that his little book, Daily Meditations, is the first original American verse published in the English Colonies. Here is “Meditation 54”:

 

“The sons of men are prone to forget Death,

And put it farre away from them, till breath

Begins to tell them they must to the grave,

And then, Oh what would they give but to have

 

“One year of respite? Help me, Lord, to know

As I move here, so my time moves also.”

 

Winters writes: “He was obviously influenced by George Herbert, and there are traces of other metaphysical influences. The poems are very devout and fairly well executed . . . [“Meditation 8”] conveys a profound insight into the human predicament, whether Christian or other, and it should be retained in our literature.”

 

Pain’s poems remind me of the work of another death-haunted poet, Stevie Smith. Both emphasize the evanescence of life. Here is “Some Are Born” (The Frog Prince and Other Poems, 1966):

 

“Some are born to peace and joy

And some are born to sorrow

But only for a day as we

Shall not be here tomorrow.”

 

In an almost too-clever epigram from her first collection, A Good Time Was Had by All (1937), Smith writes:

 

“All things pass

Love and mankind is grass.”

From the King James Bible, 1 Peter 1:24: “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”

'Curiosity Matters More Than Any Syllabus'

I can think of many reasons someone might wish to assemble a reading list and share it with others. Most obviously, teachers drawing up a syllabus for students. I remember taking a class in “The Modern Japanese Novel” and getting the list of seven books by writers I had never heard of (except for Yukio Mishima, for extra-literary reasons), including one who would become a favorite: Natsume Sōseki. 

And never underestimate the compulsion to show off. Our age grows more post-literate by the hour but in certain circles there remains a cachet attached to reading, especially “hard books,” so-called classics or the literary hit du jour. You can get a lot of attention in the small world of readers with a solemn suggestion to snuggle up with Finnegans Wake.

 

Finally, there’s the simple wish to share the wealth with others, especially young readers. This can be an act of generosity. I still periodically reread Tristram Shandy thanks to one of my professors and her enthusiasm for Sterne more than half a century ago. In the April issue of New English Review, G. Murphy Donovan publishes “A Reading List for a Curious Mind”:

 

“Not long ago I had a conversation with the son of a longtime friend about books—what to read, where to begin, and how someone builds a library. It is the sort of question that deserves more than an off-the-cuff answer, so afterward I promised him I would put together a short reading list.”

 

You’ll find no surprises on Donovan’s list and a couple of clams (jazz slang for wrong notes). He acknowledges that six of his ten titles are novels, suggesting that the supremacy of long fiction since the eighteenth century remains in place.

 

Another reason someone might share a reading list is to elicit objections to his selections. That’s inevitable, so let’s get it out of the way: Dune is sub-literary junk, topical pulp fiction. Vladimir Nabokov denounced Catch-22 as “anti-American” and “seditious.” He left out “sophomoric.” One Hundred Years of Solitude, written by Fidel’s pal, is among the most overrated books of the twentieth century. Tedious refried Faulkner. I applaud Donovan’s choice of poets – Homer, Dante, Dickinson.

 

Do reading lists work? Do they get non-readers to read? Impossible to say. I do know that children who see their parents reading are likelier to become enthusiastic readers, though my own experience, in part, refutes that claim. My parents were not readers and we had few books in the house. Donovan closes with a reality-based endorsement of autodidacticism:

  

“If you want an education, find something that genuinely interests you and pursue it relentlessly. No school will do that work for you.

 

“Reading widely helps, but curiosity matters more than any syllabus. A good book does not give you answers so much as it teaches you how to ask better questions.”