'To Be the Symbol of a Great Largesse'

Sometimes I suspect I’m a country man marooned in the city, though I grew up in the suburbs. Years ago I read an anthropologist who theorized that our species’ ideal setting, given our birth on the plains of Africa, is a pasture, meadow or prairie bordered by forest. We can hunt – and find shelter among the trees. That’s how I picture the perfect surroundings. Always with trees and optional water, which is why deserts seem so disturbing. The absence of green. A crew of Guatemalans trimmed our trees last week, juggling chain saws while suspended by ropes. They evened up three oaks and one pine in the front and a lone oak in the back. Our Houston neighborhood is called Oak Forest. 

In the essay “The City Shepherd’s Calendar” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s, 1975), L.E. Sissman writes as a lifelong city dweller who has moved with his wife to the country and adapted Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). For the month of May in the North he writes:

 

“All flower names: iris, including the incomparably haughty blue flags in the stream bed; lilac, sweet white, not quite cloying lavender, grape purple; tulips, all looking forbiddingly manmade; dandelions [much celebrated by Chesterton], tough, independent, beautiful; last daffodils; first buttercups. The sound of cows; the smell, cutting across the lilacs, of fields freshly fertilized. At night, the largest and pearliest of possible moons.”

 

A pastoral dream, one likely derided today. We’re fortunate: Houston, to my amazement twenty-two years ago on first arriving, is an enormously green city. From the air that’s what you first see: a carpet of dark green, mostly live oaks and water oaks. They flank the streets, their branches meeting overhead, creating a dappled tunnel effect. In the cloud-diffused light of late afternoon, it feels like a vast theme park devoted to photosynthesis. I’ve read evolutionary explanations for the soothing qualities possessed by green. I don’t know about that, though I know that massed quantities of green buoy my spirits. I associate it in some pre-rational way with solace and contentment. In “Green” (Collected Poems 1943-2004, 2004), Richard Wilbur calls it “a great largesse”:

 

“Tree leaves which, till the growing season’s done,

Change into wood the powers of the sun,

 

“Take from that radiance only reds and blues.

Green is a color that they cannot use,

 

“And so their rustling myriads are seen

To wear all summer an extraneous green,

 

"A green with no apparent role, unless

To be the symbol of a great largesse

 

“Which has no end, though autumns may revoke

That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.”

'Provocative Openness of Mind and Limitless Curiosity'

I think I understand a reader who fails to share my pleasure in reading Montaigne. It’s easy to think of the Frenchman as a blowhard whose essays are formless rambles stuffed with other men’s words, sometimes embarrassingly self-involved (more complaining about kidney stones?). Is he a precursor to a million contemporary narcissists? Perhaps, but don’t blame Montaigne. 

Few writers have so winningly mingled learning and life, books and experience. He’s never stuffy. A good essayist’s job is to reclaim a piece of the world we thought we understood and filed away on a shelf, and to remind us that humans are elusively complicated. We never exhaustively understand anyone, even the first-person singular.

 

The most stirring of Montaigne’s virtues for this reader is his relentless curiosity about the world. One wonders if he was ever genuinely bored. He is one of nature’s democrats. He will speak with anyone, including prostitutes and common laborers – and Pope Gregory XIII. He is fascinated by the commonplace – food, lodging, manners, the cost of everything. He writes a portion of his travel journal in Italian. Such omni-inquisitiveness is rare in any century, and seems almost freakish in our age of specialization, but think of such a sensibility enduring the sixteenth-century wars of religion in France, when perhaps as many as four million died. A wonderful contemporary essayist, Victor Bombert, writes in “Lessons of Montaigne”:

 

“[H]e surprises his reader by his provocative openness of mind and limitless curiosity. At the opening of one of his most celebrated essays, ‘Of experience,’ he remarks that there is nothing more natural than the desire for knowledge. Montaigne’s desire is, however, not satisfied by mere facts and affirmed certitudes. He relishes playing with ideas and delights in unsettling his reader and himself by challenging commonly held moral and intellectual convictions. His tolerance for views opposed to his own helps him revise his opinions.”

 

Montaigne is the opposite of a modern-day idealogue. He has beliefs and convictions but no air-tight theories. He’s no dogmatist. It’s easy to think of him as just a smarter, more learned and deep-feeling version of ourselves. His humanity is always front and center.

 

To my skeptical reader I say: For now, leave Montaigne alone. Perhaps when you’re older and life has had its way with you, you’ll return to the old boy, chastened and grateful.

 

[The book  to have is The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'Thinking of Young Men Whom I Had Known'

In 1943, at age forty-three, Yvor Winters was safely beyond draft age but tried to secure a commission in the U.S. Army. He was turned down because of the tuberculosis contracted more than twenty years earlier. A guilty sense of patriotic obligation nagged him. While teaching at Stanford, he joined the Citizens’ Defense Corps and served as its zone warden for Los Altos, Calif., where he lived. The Corps was organized in 1941 as an emergency war agency and some 11 million American civilians volunteered. In a May 10, 1943, letter to his friend the poet Louise Bogan, Winters writes: 

“I could probably go into the merchant marine as a crew member, but I can hardly take a job voluntarily that will pay me too little to support my family . . . Meanwhile I sit around & watch the kids go. All I can do for civilization is try to counteract a little of the effect of Lewis Mumford & our new School of Humanities, which is a god-awful mess.”

 

A month later, in a letter to the Los Altos postmaster, Winters writes: “I gave courses at the Los Altos grammar school, which 35 [Civil Defense] workers out of a possible 200 completed. Since I have been Zone Warden, I have spent on an average of 12 or 14 hours a week driving about the Zone, or on trips to San Jose, on problems of organization. Most of the Precinct Captains have contributed a great deal of time and some money . . .”

 

In “Moonlight Alert,” dated June 1943, Winters recounts a night during wartime on the West Coast:

 

“The sirens, rising, woke me; and the night

Lay cold and windless; and the moon was bright,

Moonlight from sky to earth, untaught, unclaimed,

An icy nightmare of the brute unnamed.

This was hallucination. Scarlet flower

And yellow fruit hung colorless. That hour

No scent lay on the air. The siren scream

Took on the fixity of shallow dream.

In the dead sweetness I could see the fall,

Like petals sifting from a quiet wall,

Of yellow soldiers through indifferent air,

Falling to die in solitude. With care

I held this vision, thinking of young men

Whom I had known, and should not see again,

Fixed in reality, as I in thought.

And I stood waiting, and encountered naught.”

 

Today in the United States we observe Memorial Day.

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]

'Visited by the Bookstore Angel'

“Such places are not merely shops. They are glorious strongholds of true civilisation. They refuse to flatter the customer, to congratulate him for being there, to ‘educate,’ ‘affirm,’ or ‘challenge’ him with the unctuous do-goodery tone favoured by the Anglo-American retail class. They simply present the books—magnificent, absurd, profound, forgotten, indispensable—and trust that an adult may sort through them with whatever discernment God has seen fit to bestow.” 

The author is J.J. Kimche, proprietor of the newsletter “The Jew from Nowhere,” writing in “A Land Flowing with Books and Paradoxes,” his celebration of Israel as “a country of bookstores.” I read it before my middle son and I visited Kaboom Books here in Houston on Saturday. “I have long resigned myself,” Kimche writes, “to the tragic deracination of the book-purchasing experience in the English-speaking world. Bluntly put, bookstores these days are a disgrace.” Kaboom is a happy exception. I have never left the shop without having purchased at least one book I would be unlikely to find in any other bookstore in the city.

 

This visit I found The Rash Act (1933) by Ford Madox Ford, a novel reprinted in 1982 by Carcanet with an introduction by C.H. Sisson, who calls the book “a technical masterpiece” and “a piece of contemplation under the guise of fiction.” I remember it as a first-rate novel I plan to reread. The owner of Kaboom, John Dillman, told me the book was among the 14,000 volumes he recently purchased from a dying man who wished to leave the money to his widow. Not a title I would find at Barnes & Noble. Kaboom is an affirmation of what Kimche writes about Israel’s bookstores:

 

“Only in such establishments may one still hope to be visited by the Bookstore Angel: that benevolent, impish daemon who nudges the hand towards volumes one did not know one needed, or perhaps did not know existed. After a brush with such a creature, one finds oneself departing not with a modest paperback but with an armful of medieval theology, deranged memoirs, seditious polemics, and other long-forgotten treasures. Entire cultures have been perpetuated on less.”

'Our Self-Important Postures'

My middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, is visiting for a few days. The conversation turned to nostalgia. He’s young and contemptuous, as I used to be. He used the verb I would have used: “wallow.” The young believe in the future. Nostalgia represents a used-up yesterday, a distraction from today’s important business. 

The word arrived in English in the eighteenth century, though our modern sense evolved late in the nineteenth. The OED defines that usage as “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” In other words, an unearned longing for something that likely never existed, a comforting pipedream.

 

But memories are precious as we get older. I don’t cherish some mythical Golden Age in my life or the world’s. Memories can be a goad to gratitude – the teachers who encouraged us, friends and lovers, family now gone. In the closet are boxes of old letters, photographs, clippings of newspaper stories I wrote almost half a century ago, a copy of the underground paper that published my review of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. I keep these things, in part, to remind me how fortunate I have been. And how foolish.

 

Timothy Steele concludes his poem “Old Letters” (Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986) after warning us “to adjust / Our self-important postures,” like this:

 

“Likewise, to return the letters finally

   Back to wherever they belong

Is to admit how much of life's gone wrong

Because of vanity and discontent,

   And is as well to envy

Those who refuse to hunger for event

And who accept the wisely unbegun,

Just wishing decently to get through life

And trying not to injure anyone.”

'Fury at Death and Its Imbecile Trick'

In the early evening of January 22, 1900, Jules Renard learns that his older brother, Maurice, who works for the State Railways, has fainted and cannot be revived. Their father had similar spells and Renard thinks, “I’ll bring him round, give him a good shake, tell him when you’re unwell you must go to bed.” A fat man “wearing his legionnaire pin” (Renard is a man for details), tells him: “‘Your poor brother is very low.’ Then, in my ear so that Marinette [Renard’s wife] will not hear: ‘Dead.’ The word means nothing.” 

My reaction while watching my brother die in hospice. You don’t forget seventy years of coexistence. As I wrote at the time: “I watched as his eyes closed and he stopped breathing. There was another sense, too, of a sudden diminishment, a departure leaving only flesh and blood.” Briefly, I waited for him to wake up, to issue another wisecrack. Renard goes to see his brother:

 

“Here he is, stretched out on a pale green sofa, mouth open, one knee raised, his head resting on a telephone directory, in the attitude of a man who is tired. He reminds me of my father. On the floor, water stains, a rag.”

 

I remember the cracks in the linoleum beside Ken’s bed, the spot where a urine stain had been mopped, sunlight after I had opened the curtains, the absence of any smell despite the presence of so much sickness and death.

 

“He is dead,” Renard writes, “but it will not sink in. Marinette cries a little, cannot breathe, asks where is the doctor. . . . He had complained several times of the heat, of stomach cramps. . . . Not a word was spoken. In two or three minutes it was all over.”

 

My brother had been unconscious for four days. Death was a shock but no surprise.

 

“I sit down,” Renard writes, “and manage a few tears. Marinette embraces me, and I read in her eyes the fear that, a couple of years hence, it will be my turn.

 

“All I feel is a kind of fury at death and its imbecile trick.”

 

My reaction was a little different. I felt as though an injustice had been committed – a child’s response. Ken was almost three years younger than me. I should have gone first.  

 

“Marinette and I sit with him until four in the morning. From time to time I lift the handkerchief. I look at his slightly open mouth. He is going to breathe in. He does not breathe in.”

 

My nephew and I sat with the body, waiting for the guy from the funeral home.

 

Jules Renard would die on this date, May 22, in 1910 – a grim year for literature. Also dead were Tolstoy, Mark Twain, William James and O. Henry.

 

[The Renard quotes come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Abundant, if Somewhat Precious Wit'

In Wednesday’s post I quoted an 1895 profile of Max Beerbohm in which the anonymous writer referred to Beerbohm’s reputed “passion for paradox and marivaudage.” This was the first time I had ever published a word with a definition unknown to me: marivaudage. I couldn’t even guess its meaning. I checked the OED but left it undefined because I was curious to see the reaction of readers, most of whom I assumed would likewise be ignorant of its meaning. As Nige put it in a comment: “Marivaudage! There’s a wonderful word, and new to me.” 

When I encounter a previously unknown word I normally take a guess based on context then consult the dictionary. Marivaudage left me baffled. The OED: “Exaggerated sentiment expressed in affected language, after the style of Marivaux; a verbose and affected style.” Another perplexity: I recognized the name “Marivaux” but had never read any of his work and wasn’t even certain when he was alive. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763) was a French playwright and novelist, who appears never to have had much of a reputation in the English-speaking world.

 

The dictionary’s first citation, from a letter by Horace Walpole, dates from two years after Marivaux’s death: “an established term for being prolix and tiresome” – certainly not terms one would use to describe Beerbohm’s prose. Next, from 1882, is a passage from George Saintsbury’s Short History of French Literature:

 

“All the work of Marivaux, dramatic and non-dramatic, is pervaded more or less by a peculiarity which at the time received the name of Marivaudage. This peculiarity exists partly in the sentiment, and partly in the phraseology. The former is characteristic of the eighteenth century, disguising a considerable affectation under a mask of simplicity, and the latter (sparkling with abundant, if somewhat precious wit) is ingeniously constructed to suit it and carry it off.”

 

A very mixed review. The final citation is drawn from Frederic Raphael’s Byron, a 1982 biography of the poet: “Their romance dwindled into a matter more of ardent marivaudage than of passionate demonstration.”

 

Again, unjust when applied to Beerbohm but useful when considering thousands of insufferably precious rom-coms.