'Only Santayana Can Make Me Laugh Aloud'

We’ve all known people for whom laughter is a childish distraction, a shameful shortcoming produced by an essentially trivial mind. Of all people, George Santayana thinks otherwise: 

“Laughter rings the recess-bell in school hours; and then perhaps some ugly little seeds of learning, sown in us against our will, spring up beautiful, free and unrecognized in the playground of the mind.”

 

The metaphor is precise in my case. A friend and I in grade school often laughed convulsively by making faces and obscene gestures at each other. Trying to keep our little party silent and clandestine merely intensified the laughter. Tears flowed, faces reddened, bodies shook. (Come to think of it, viewed out of context with the audio turned off, a person violently laughing might be mistaken for an epileptic suffering a seizure.) Our sixth-grade teacher was a good one and we both liked her but she was not notably susceptible to the humor of eleven-year-olds. Santayana continues in The Realm of Spirit (1940), the concluding volume of his tetralogy Realms of Being:

 

“Pure laughter is not malicious, not scornful; it is not a triumph of one self over another, but of the spirit over all selves. It is the joyous form of union with our defeats, in which the spirit is victorious. The bubble once pricked, everybody stands on homelier and firmer ground.”

 

Here I disagree with the great Spanish philosopher. As we grow up, we learn that laughter can be weaponized. Even more than criticism or reasoned disagreement, there’s nothing a prig hates more than the subversiveness of mocking laughter. Of laughter among kids, Santayana writes: “In passing, there is exultation at having rung the dirge of something unreal. This pleasure is dear to children, even if a little shrill. They, poor creatures, are being cheated so regularly by their elders, by one another, and by their own fancies, that it is sweet to turn the tables for once and to mock the solemn fools in return.”

 

Few things are funnier than righteously costive seriousness. Take R.L. Barth’s epigram “Don’t You Know Your Poems Are Hurtful?” (Deeply Dug In, 2003), which virtually defines the form pioneered by Martial:

 

“Yes, ma’am, like KA-BAR to the gut,

 Well-tempered wit should thrust and cut

 Before the victim knows what’s what;

 But sometimes, lest the point be missed,

 I give the bloody blade a twist.”

 

That takes care of the virtue-signaling, self-approving crowd. In case the notion of Santayana as a student of humor and even something of a humorist eludes your understanding, I cite John McCormick and his definitive biography, George Santayana (1987):

 

“Some philosophers can bring a smile, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein among them. Some, like Nietzsche, terrify, although not for the reasons he thought he was terrifying. Only Santayana can make me laugh aloud. Insofar as a biographer can determine, he was a happy man and his happiness was contagious . . . He was not elusive but fastidious, one whose distinctions were subtle but wonderfully available, and not only to specialists.”

'Slobber, Booger, Spit, and Blob--'

What happened to the colorful names of yesteryear? Around 1959 a family moved into the house two doors away. Their surname was “Opalka,” Polish like many of the families in the neighborhood. The father was a truck driver who, when not on a run, would park his tractor on the front lawn. For some reason he was called “Boston Blackie,” and was renowned for burning his son’s collection of Mad magazines in the backyard. The daughter was my age and conventionally named Sandy but the younger son was called Bimbo by everyone, even his mother (Nellie). I can’t remember his birth name. 

By the time he was age nine, you could already have described his manner as “raffish.” When his father told him to stop using the word “fart,” Bimbo invented a new word: “fartkabola.” He rewrote Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” starting with the line “Fighting creampuffs from the sky.” This is a family blog so I can’t recount the rest. We usually called Bimbo “Bim,” later the name of a character in Samuel Beckett’s final play, What Where. After Bim joined the Navy in 1971 and he would come home on leave, he described his job as “blips.” That meant he was a radar man.

 

My father was an auxiliary police officer and most of the guys he hung around with were cops. Two were named Doc (a detective, not a physician) and Hump (his given name was Marion, so you can understand). One of my classmates, Oscar, had a younger brother deservedly named Stinky. To the list I can add Goob and Buff.    

 

One of our funniest and most gifted poets is R.S. “Sam” Gwynn, a native of Eden, North Carolina, who lives in Beaumont, Texas. Southerners are more likely than the rest of us to be blessed with colorful names. Here is “Lament for the Names Lang Syne” (Dogwatch, Measure Press, 2014), subtitled “Leaksville, N. C. (1797–1967)”:

 

“Bootie, Cootie, Hootie, and Red,

Rooster, Jeepy, Sny, and Spoon,

Hambone, Corky, and Swimmyhead,

Greenie, Weenie, Puss, and Moon,

Stinky, Winky, Goat, and Spud,

Pinky, Toodie, and Greasy J.,

Buddy-ro, Buddy, and just plain Bud--

Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

“Strangler, Babbie, Sis, and Twat,

Eekie, Ikey, Bum, and Buck,

Squabby, Knobby, Monk, and Squat,

Preacher, Rabbit, Punch, and Duck,

Buster, Fire Chief, Goof, and Jake,

Doodie, Rubber, Deuce, and Trey,

Whitey, Blackie, Bull, and Snake--

Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

Puddin’, Oggie, Bugg, and Tick,

Hoovie, Groovie, Ape, and Gam,

Buster, Punkin’, Goat, and Slick,

Meatball, Big Train, Nub, and Ham,

Eudie, Stumpy, Chunks, and Shag,

Eeenie, Meenie, and Whaddaysay,

Mustard, Turbo, Crab, and Rag--

Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

“Prince, Pedro, and Buffalo Bob,

Little Annie and A.O.K.,

Slobber, Booger, Spit, and Blob--

Timor mortis conturbat me.”

 

The Latin, “fear of death disturbs me,” is probably best known from “Lament for the Makers” by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1530).

'A Small Number of Books That Are Something More'

I find it helpful to think of literature not as an academic exercise or a dialectical matter of statement, counterstatement and truth pinned in a glass case like a dead butterfly, but as one man’s experience of life shared with us, total strangers. As humans we are akin to each other. We implicitly endorse the old saw, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto – “I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me.” We are less students than open-minded companions, eagerly trying to make sense of the ever-shifting but very real world. Great writers are like us, only more so. Works of genius are not solitary but inclusive. Arbitrary identities – racial, sexual, ethnic, linguistic, whatever – are merely distracting. 

“We think of Montaigne as the begetter of the English secular sensibility at its most acute, and we trace his influence on Shakespeare and Bacon and Locke; but we must not forget that his great popularity in seventeenth-century England also helped to form the peculiarly English tradition of sweet-tempered spirituality.”

 

What a pleasing phrase: “sweet-tempered spirituality.” The American poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82) is writing of Montaigne, who endured the savagery of the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-century France, an era that reminds us of nothing so much as our own twentieth and twenty-first centuries And yet Rexroth suggests a strain of English writing that includes George Herbert and Thomas Traherne, though I find no formal confirmation that these writers knew of Montaigne's essys. Rexroth continues:

 

“Hooker, Browne, Jeremy Taylor, even William Law and the Quaker Barclay learned from Montaigne to respond with an amiability new to the Christian Church to the old questions that burned men alive — the older, and newer, answer that turns away wrath.”

 

“Turns away wrath” – another nice touch. I seldom read Rexroth though I’m grateful for Kenneth Knabb’s Bureau of Public Secrets and its extensive Rexroth archive. I had filed him away in a drawer labeled “Beatnik-Lite,” which is probably unfair but reading is a Darwinian enterprise that winnows out the weak, and even a hearty reader has finite patience and time. Rexroth’s poetry still seems trifling, too voluble and slack, too sentimental, too in thrall to Pound and his Cathay translations, but the literary essays, especially Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited, are admirably enthusiastic and personal, though sometimes garrulous – rather like Montaigne himself.

 

Rexroth had lived a long time with most of the books he writes about. He was not a dabbler. As critic or literary journalist, Rexroth is sometimes old-fashioned, sometimes bohemian, sometimes both simultaneously, but it’s safe to say he was more deeply read than most of his countercultural admirers. He’s no Kerouac, who often sounds illiterate. Rexroth’s literary essays entered the world as journalism, not scholarship, and were published first in such periodicals as Saturday Review, The Nation and the San Francisco Examiner. In his Introduction to Classics Revisited (1968) he writes:

 

“Men have been writing for over five thousand years and have piled up a vast mass of imaginative literature. Some of it is just writing that happens to have lasted physically. There are, however, a small number of books that are something more. They are the basic documents in the history of the imagination; they overflow all definitions of classicism and, at the same time, share the most simply defined characteristics.”

 

The significant phrase is “a small number of books that are something more.” Rexroth is writing on the eve of the ascension of institutional nihilism, when scorning the supreme accomplishments of humanity would become fashionable. His unspoken opponent is not today’s tenured radical but yesterday’s conventional illiterate, though the two are easily confused. He writes of his French predecessor:

 

“Montaigne, writing of the most gruesome subjects, radiates an active joy. His scruples are those of the chemical laboratory, never of the couch or confessional. The dilemmas that create the tensions in Marcus Aurelius are met by Montaigne with the simplest possible solutions of ethical activism, the commonplace relations of a country gentleman with common people, with Henri IV or the woodcutter on the estate."

'No Shade, No Shine, No Butterflies, No Bees'

November is the weak sister among the months. October is the true Poetry Month and grabs all the attention thanks largely to Keats. December has Christmas but I have a sentimental attachment to November. The first time I saw my name in print, in 1968, was in my high school literary magazine, Lit Bits (sorry). My contribution to the magazine I edited was a prose-poem titled “November.” The language was lush about a decidedly un-lush month and said absolutely nothing. It was an effusion written under the sway of Thomas Wolfe and his Look Homeward, Angel, an influence my writerly auto-immune system soon threw off, but not before I compared the color of the November sky to “tarnished pewter.”

Unfairly, Thomas Hood (1799-1845) is barely remembered today. The title of one of the English poet’s collections gives you a taste of his approach to verse: Whims and Oddities (1826). He was an eccentric humorist, a friend to Charles Lamb. Let’s avoid that troublesome word “minor.” Stevie Smith admired him extravagantly. In her 1988 biography of Smith, Frances Spalding writes:

“So great was Smith’s admiration for Hood, both his ‘deathly addiction to punning’ as well as his straight, non-punning verse, such as his famous ‘Song of the Shirt’ which she praised for its ‘admirable simplicity’ and ‘careful observation’, that she later [1946] wrote a radio programme on him.”

Consider “No!”, Hood’s poem on the eleventh month:

“No sun—no moon!

        No morn—no noon—

No dawn—

        No sky—no earthly view—

        No distance looking blue—

No road—no street—no ‘t’other side the way’—

        No end to any Row—

        No indications where the Crescents go—

        No top to any steeple—

No recognitions of familiar people—

        No courtesies for showing ’em—

        No knowing ’em!

No traveling at all—no locomotion,

No inkling of the way—no notion—

        ‘No go’—by land or ocean—

        No mail—no post—

        No news from any foreign coast—

No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility—

        No company—no nobility—

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

   No comfortable feel in any member—

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,

        November!”

 

The punchline arrives in the twenty-fourth line. English poetry is rich in good “minor” poets. Personally, I would rather read Hood than, say, most of Coleridge or almost anything by Robert Lowell. In his introduction to Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets (1966), W.H. Auden said Hood was “like nobody but himself and serious in the true sense of the word.”

'In Those Old Marshes Yet the Rifles Lie'

“But before he could install himself in his Oxford college, Britain declared war on the Central Powers, and soon this quiet young poet and literary scholar found himself commissioned in the Royal Sussex Regiment, where his shyness won him the nickname Bunny but his bravery won him the Military Cross.” 

An inattentive reader might assume that generic creature, the “Great War Poet,” was being described, whether Owen, Graves, Brooke, Sassoon, Rosenberg or Thomas, or some homogenized melding of them all. The story in its general outline is that familiar. In fact, Paul Fussell is profiling a lesser-known poet and veteran of that war, Edmund Blunden. “Miraculously he survived two years at the front,” Fussell reminds us, “perhaps because he was sent home a gas casualty before he could be killed.”

 

World War I has come to seem like the hinge on which Western Civilization turned toward its own protracted demise. Out of it grew the Russian Revolution, Stalin, Hitler, World War II, the Holocaust, Mao, the Cold War . . .  It’s the war we’re still fighting.

 

By all accounts, Blunden was a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy man, who would name two of his children, John and Clare, after the mad poet John Clare. He saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918 and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. Take these lines from his poem “1916 Seen From 1921”:

 

“I sit in solitude and only hear

Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,

The lost intensities of hope and fear;

In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,

On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,

The very books I read are there—and I

Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

 

“Its wounded length from those sad streets of war

Into green places here, that were my own;

But now what once was mine is mine no more . . .”

 

Blunden’s prose memoir of his two years’ service on the Western Front, Undertones of War (1928), is the best we have, far superior to Graves’ better-known Good-Bye to All That (1929):

 

“Do I loiter too long among little things? It may be so, but those whom I foresee as my readers will pardon the propensity. Each circumstance of the British experience that is still with me has ceased for me to be big or little . . . Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm.  He spoke, grinned and shivered; we passed; and duly the sentry was hit by a shell. So that in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents, which characterized the time. The art is rather to collect them, in their original form of incoherence.”

 

Fussell’s essay, “Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden,” was published in the Fall 1986 issue of the Sewanee Review. His essential volume is The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Blunden was born on this date, November 1, in 1896, and died in 1974 at age seventy-seven.

 

About five years ago, R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, wrote a poem titled “Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)”:

 

“A shepherd in a greatcoat (the MC

Appended, unacknowledged) you patrolled

Old battlefields, the trenches, no man’s land,

The rear, the transports, nature all despoiled,

The shattered houses, farms, and roadside shrines,

But most of all you celebrated: troops,

The comrades you remembered all your life.

You would not, could not, let the horror go,

Nor undermine affection for your friends.

I honor you for that. I understand.”

 

“MC” is the Military Cross.

'I Hold It Towards You'

Only once as an adult have I worn a costume on Halloween. Even as a kid I relied on the minimalist (cheap) approach: Army guy (Ike jacket, holstered .45) or Emmet Kelly-style hobo (burnt cork, bindle on a stick). In the nineties I was dating a woman who worked as a registered nurse at the V.A. hospital. One of her friends invited us to a Halloween party/costume contest. Not wanting to spend any money on a costume, I had my girlfriend borrow a white lab coat, stethoscope and latex gloves from the hospital. I carried a can of Crisco, went as a proctologist, won first prize and didn’t have to spend a dime.

Just following family tradition. More than thirty years earlier, my parents went to a Halloween costume party. My mother rented a full-body rabbit costume, complete with reinforced ears and bushy tail, and my father wouldn’t stop complaining about the rental cost. He wore his old Ike jacket (the one I would wear in another year), holstered .45 (a real one) and a fake beard made of cotton gauze and shoe polish. He took the topical approach and went as Fidel Castro.

There’s more to Halloween than Halloween. Let’s remember John Keats, doctor and poet, born October 31, 1795, and dead at age twenty-five. In December 1819, Keats scrawled some of his final lines on the manuscript of another poem. They wouldn’t be published for eighty years:

“This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.”

 

One thinks of that line from “The Fall of Hyperion”: “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.”

'And the Memory I Started At—'

“My memory is the best guardian of my past.” 

That’s Nabokov, speaking with a defiant certainty almost arrogant. His boast is self-protective. He was remembering his paradisial life in pre-Soviet Russia and wished to preserve it from the predations of the Bolsheviks, for whom even the past could be destroyed. Memory – of bliss, of horror -- is sacred. We dwell in the past as certainly as we do in the present, and more so than in the future. Think of Robert Browning in “Memorabilia” (1855):

 

“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you?

And did you speak to him again?

How strange it seems, and new!

 

“But you were living before that,

And you are living after,

And the memory I started at—

My starting moves your laughter!

 

“I crossed a moor, with a name of its own

And a certain use in the world no doubt,

Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone

’Mid the blank miles round about:

 

“For there I picked up on the heather

And there I put inside my breast

A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—

Well, I forget the rest.”

 

Browning was age nine when Shelley died in 1822. Browning’s stand-in spoke with a man who met the older poet. The linkage in memory [Shelleyàstand-inàspeaker (Browning)] causes him to “start,” a reaction the storyteller finds amusing. Kinship is no respecter of bloodlines. Linkage to nominal strangers, those with a distant genotype, can prove more vital than mere phenotype. Who wouldn’t wish to prune one’s family tree? Here's one of my pleasing sets of elective affinities:

 

I shook hands with Guy Davenport, who shook hands with Ezra Pound, who shook hands with Henry James, who shook hands with George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert. Davenport also shook the hand of Samuel Beckett, who had shaken the hand of James Joyce, who had shaken the hand of Italo Svevo, who shook the hand of Eugenio Montale. Likewise, I shook hands with William H. Gass who shook hands with many worthies; foremost among them, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

 

And here's a pleasingly closed loop: I shook hands with Steven Millhauser, who shook hands with Lionel Trilling, who shook hands with Whitaker Chambers, who shook hands with Louis Zukofsky, who shook hands with Davenport, who shook hands with me (many sub-loops could be traced, leading us to Auden, Barzun and Bellow, among others). I’m tempted to start another such chain of affinity beginning with my introduction to Ralph Ellison but that’s enough phantom associations for now.

 

[Nabokov was speaking with an Italian journalist, Claudio Gorlier of Corriere della Sera, on October 30, 1969. The interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]