'That ’Twas Wonderful to See'

Here’s a book I haven’t read in some sixty years: Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals’ by Clifford Dobell, published in 1932 by Harcourt, Brace and Co. Reading it was the product of childhood obsessions colliding: biographies and microscopes. In some volume of potted lives I learned of Van Leeuwenhoek’s pioneering contributions to microscopy and microbiology. I remember reading that he was likely to have been the first person in history to have examined his own blood using a microscope. I was given a microscope for my twelfth birthday and looked at almost anything under its lenses: a butterfly wing, dirt from under my fingernails, creek water, cottage cheese and, yes, my own blood. 

I remember Dobell’s book being the kind I like, filled with interesting tidbits of information, the sort of thing some will describe as “trivia.” For instance, Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to suggest that motility – OED: “the power of active movement” -- is indicative of life. The microscopic “animalcules” he observed could move, therefore they were living things. Dobell writes: “Leeuwenhoek’s observations on the free-living Protozoa probably began with his discovery of certain ‘very little animalcules’ which he saw in fresh water in the year 1674.” Then he quotes from a letter the Dutchman sent from Delft to the Royal Society in London. There’s a childlike excitement in Van Leeuwenhoek’s observations that I find charming. I’ll quote some at length:

 

“[A]mong these there were, besides, very many little animalcules, whereof some were roundish, while others, a bit bigger, consisted of an oval. On these last I saw two little legs near the head, and two little fins at the hindmost end of the body. Others were somewhat longer than an oval, and these were very slow a-moving, and few in number. These animalcules had divers colours, some being whitish and transparent; others with green and very glittering little scales; others again were green in the middle, and before and behind white; others yet were ashen grey. And the motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various, upwards, downwards, and round about, that ’twas wonderful to see: and I judge that some of these little creatures were above a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones I, have ever yet seen, upon the rind of cheese, in wheaten flour, mould, and the like.”

 

I see Dobell dedicated his book to two writers I would come to read years later: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, author of On Growth and Form (1917), discovered thanks to Hugh Kenner, and Paul de Kruif, author of Microbe Hunters (1926). In No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems (Cormorant Books, 2011), the Canadian poet Bruce Taylor includes a ten-page poem, “Little Animals,” a lyric with the narrative drive of a good short story and the free-wheeling discursiveness of an essay or one of those marvelous prose curiosities from Van Leeuwenhoek’s seventeenth century – Religio Medici or The Anatomy of Melancholy. Looking through his microscope at the roiling ocean of life in a drop of water from the pond, Taylor writes:

 

“And there is no end to them,

no end in numbers,

and no end in strangeness,

no end to their appetites, and all of it

exactly as van Leeuwenhoek

described it to us all those years ago,

when he, being the first to look

became the first to see

that what the wise men said was wrong,

what gnaws at our lapsed and sinful

world is not death at all,

the old machinework mannequin

swinging his scythe, he is not there.”

 

Taylor’s poem is, among other things, a hymn to reading. He gives “Little Animals” an epigraph from Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women”: “On bokes for to rede I me delyt.”

 

Van Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632 (the same year as another Dutch lens grinder, Baruch Spinoza) and died on this date, August 26, in 1723.

'Again, Great Season'

Like the rest of us, poets often favor certain times of the year. They return to a season or month they find thematically or emotionally rich. Keats, obviously, was an autumn man. Winter I associate with Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. Howard Nemerov sub-specialized in autumn blurring into winter. In the North, that signifies October, with early echoes, some years, in September. At that time, out in the fields, the golden rod is tall and turning brown. The goldfinches are busy harvesting thistle seeds. The asters grow dense and bend to the ground. They will survive until after the first snow. I can remember snow falling on my birthday, October 26, when I was a kid in Cleveland. Here is Nemerov’s “Again” (The Western Approaches, 1975): 

“Again, great season, sing it through again

Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change

That makes October burn out red and gold

And color bleed into the world and die,

And butterflies among the fluttering leaves

Disguise themselves until the few last leaves

Spin to the ground or to the skimming streams

That carry them along until they sink,

And through the muted land, the nevergreen

Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor,

The wind go ashen, till one afternoon

The cold snow cloud comes down the intervale

Above the river on whose slow black flood

The few first flakes come hurrying in to drown.”

 

A single long sentence across fourteen lines, moving like the season itself, inexorably. In Texas, I miss the drama of seasonal change. Here it’s still high summer, near one-hundred degrees every day. This could last for months. Nemerov’s theme is change, nature’s perpetual self-renewal.

 

Duff is Homer Simpson’s beer of choice, a common surname and Arabic for “drum,” but the OED gives seven definitions -- four nouns, an adjective, two verbs – from “dough, paste” to “the buttocks, the backside” (as in “Get off your duff”). “Up the duff,” we learn, means “pregnant,” and “duff” in golf means “to perform (a shot) badly” (thus, “duffer”). Best of all, “duff” is the stuff on the ground in a forest, decaying leaves, needles, branches and bark, midway between living biomass and soil. This is Nemerov’s sense. Richard Wilbur uses it this way in “To Ishtar”:

 

“It is all we can do to witness

The waste motions of empty trees,

The joyless tittering duff, the grass-mats

Blanched and scurfy with ice.”

 

Here is another of Howard Nemerov’s poems dedicated to change and the arrival of his favorite time of year, “The Crossing” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

 

“I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

 

“Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

 

“The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.”

'Much to Enjoy and Admire'

I think we both sensed it might be our final conversation. We talked about the Cleveland we knew as kids – the main library downtown on Superior Avenue, Kay’s Books over on Prospect, a bar called Hernando’s Hideaway on Chester by the Greyhound station, Grabowski’s Music Studio where Ken started playing clarinet at age seven. And our Uncle Harry who, back in the Sixties, had wired his pickup truck for sound so, from blocks away, we heard him blasting polka music. And our cousin Lenny who had an electric guitar, though the only tune he knew how to play was the Twilight Zone theme. In retrospect, I see that what these random things had in common was some degree of amusement. No resentments or regrets. We weren’t recalling the miseries, painful and trifling. This wasn’t a conscious strategy. We shared the memories that bubbled to the surface. 

Sitting beside his bed in hospice, something moved me to bring up Montaigne, author of essays that are of central importance to me. Ken had never read the Frenchman. I spoke from memory, mostly half-remembering one of the early essays, “That our happiness must not be judged until after our death”:

 

“There are gallant and fortunate deaths. I have seen death bring a wonderfully brilliant career, and that in its flower, to such a splendid end that in my opinion the dead man’s ambitions and courageous designs had nothing so lofty about them as their interruption. He arrived where he aspired to without going there, more grandly and gloriously than he had desired or hoped. And by his fall he went beyond the power and the fame to which he had aspired by his career.”

Ken died in hospice on August 24, 2024. He had stopped talking several days earlier and entered a blank, frozen, apparently painless state. His son and I played music for him. Donald Frame writes in his biography of the great essayist: “Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”

[The Montaigne passage is from Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957). He is author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]

'Nothing is Redundant, Nothing Wanting'

In 1950, the poet J.V. Cunningham translated from the French a work by the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole, “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams.” The essay originally served as the introduction to an anthology, Epigrammatum delectus (1659), intended for use in classrooms. It omitted some poems by such epigrammatic masters as Martial and Catullus because they were “quite filthy and obscene,” Cunningham tells us in his introduction. He continues:

 “Young people are led by curiosity to read these, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such books; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth.”

 

We sense Cunningham, an epigrammatic descendent of Jonson and Landor, and translator of Martial and Catullus, is having a good time here. His own epigrams could be rather salty, as in “Epitaph for Someone or Other”:

 

“Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,

And naked was my pastime in between.”

 

And “The Lights of Love”:

 

“The ladies in my life, serially sexed,

Unscrew one lover and screw in the next.”

 

Epigram is from the Greek epigramma, “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something -- rare qualities in poetry today.

 

Another gifted epigrammist, R.L. Barth, republished Nicole’s essay in Cunningham’s forty-four-page translation, with notes, in 1997. Bob and Cunningham would concur with this passage near the conclusion of Nicole’s essay:

 

 “[O]f all the special capabilities of the epigram none is more difficult to realise or more rarely achieved than the adroit handling, the suitable and easy unfolding, of the subject so that nothing is redundant, nothing wanting, nothing out of order, obscure, or tangled up in verbiage, and yet at the same time nothing too unexpected, nothing not adequately prepared for. Martial is pre-eminent in this; he develops his subjects so aptly, clearly, and perceptively that he obtains for ideas of no special note otherwise a good deal of distinction by the charm of the handling.”

 

Cunningham translated Martial’s 4.33:

 

“You write, you tell me, for posterity.

May you be read, my friend, immediately.”

 

Here is Barth’s version of the same epigram:

 

“Your manuscripts are stacked, bookcases groan,

And yet you’ve published nothing of your own.

‘My heirs will publish . . .’ What? After you’re dead?

Sosibianus, it’s past time you’re read.”

 

Cunningham was born on this date, August 23, in 1911, and died in 1985 at age seventy-three.

 

[The books to get are The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books, 2024). Barth’s versions of Martial are collected in Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026).]

'Nothing to Be Despised'

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.” 

Leave it to Dr. Johnson to remind us of the vanity of our wishes. Human striving often comes to little or nothing. Above he writes of a poet whose posthumous place in English literature seems to confirm Johnson’s dismissive verdict. Perhaps a few eighteenth-century scholars still read the poetry of George Lyttelton. I know him almost exclusively through Johnson’s brief biography in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, most of which is devoted to Lyttelton’s public life as a Member of Parliament and Chancellor of the Exchequer, not his work as a poet.

 

Johnson speaks well of a single poem by Lyttleton, “Advice to Belinda,” also known as “Advice to a Lady.” It “contains,” he writes, “much truth and much prudence, very elegantly and vigorously expressed, and shews a mind attentive to life, and a power of poetry which cultivation might have raised to excellence.” Note the qualification. Lyttelton writes:

 

“Hard is the fortune that your sex attends;

Women, like Princes, find few real friends:

All who approach them their own ends pursue:

Lovers and ministers seldom are true.”

 

Even the praise is lukewarm. He writes: “Lord Lyttelton’s Poems are the works of a man of literature and judgment, devoting part of his time to versification. They have nothing to be despised, and little to be admired. . . . His little performances, whether Songs or Epigrams, are sometimes spritely, and sometimes insipid. His epistolary pieces have a smooth equability, which cannot much tire, because they are short, but which seldom elevates or surprizes.”

 

Lyttleton was born in 1709 and died on this date, August 22, in 1773 at age sixty-four.

'The Boundless Complexity of Life'

The poet W.S. Di Piero introduces Montaigne without mentioning his name: “‘Essay’ has embedded in it ‘assay,’ ‘weighing,’ ‘testing,’ ‘proofing,’ ‘trying out,” ‘attempting.’ When writing prose I’m arguing mostly with myself and the friends and predecessors whose voices are in my head.”

What passes for essay writing today too often looks like someone laying down the law, telling readers what they ought to be doing, thinking or saying. It comes off as bullying monomania. I want more from an essay than a cavalcade of opinions, which are usually the least important and interesting things I can know about you. Tell me about your experience. Tell me what you know. Share your learning. Don’t just spout off like the drunk at the end of the bar or some crank on A.M. radio. How long since you last read an essay that moved you or illuminated some aspect of your life that has been puzzling or troubling? For me it happened Thursday while reading Joseph Epstein’s “Turning Ninety” in the September issue of Commentary.

 

In his first paragraph Epstein writes: “I should like to have written an essay in which I toted up how age has brought me wisdom and given me a decidedly sunny view of life. Alas, it is not so.” Old Epstein hands will recognize the tune and hum along. The essayist will turn ninety in January and his situation report is neither rosy nor despairing. He writes like an adult, rare in contemporary letters:

 

“While I am grateful to be arriving at 90, life now seems less amusing. More and more, it seems about loss, loss both personal and of so many of the things that made life interesting and often amusing. The loss of friends, to begin with.”

 

Throughout “Turning Ninety,” I experienced little shocks of recognition like that. What Epstein recounts isn’t peculiar to his life. For instance:

 

“Then there are the many things I have lost interest in. Travel is high among them.”

 

“An ‘expert economist’ is an oxymoron. In the current day, few are the experts who aren’t already lined up for or against Donald Trump. Some peddle opinions full-time; it is their job.”

 

“[M]y walk, too, has changed, almost but nearly qualifying for Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks. I fear falling, which I have done three or four times, and so when out of doors walk looking down at the pavement. ‘Don’t fall’ is my mantra.”

 

“I, at any rate, live on the culture of the past: the great Russian and English novelists, French and Italian painters, the American Songbook.”

 

Epstein concludes with a fine resolution in the musical sense: “Allow me to close this essay—disquisition? diatribe? sustained groan?—with a toast. May all who have read it attain the age of 90 and as far beyond as seems to give them more pleasure than pain. May they end their days on neither a bang nor a whimper but a quiet smile in recognition of the boundless complexity of life.”

 

Epstein devoted an essay to the first essayist, Montaigne, in the March 1993 issue of Commentary. It too nicely resolves:

 

“By being a man on whom not much was lost, by studying the complex variousness of human nature through looking first into his own soul, by carefully considering his experience of the world, by not asking the impossible of himself and being suspicious of those who asked it of others, by understanding that man’s problem on earth is to attain such wisdom as will help him live a fit and reasonably happy life, Montaigne, for those who read him more than four centuries after he wrote, continues to lessen life’s terror and to add to its pleasure. More than this no writer can hope to do, and none has done it better than Michel de Montaigne.”

'The Pure Astonishment of Life'

A reader expresses surprise at my admission that I once read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “I thought you hated science fiction,” he writes. “You always seemed like a snob about it.” Guilty as charged, I guess. I read science fiction and related genres from roughly ages ten to fourteen. At some point I just lost interest. The arrival of puberty may have been an unrelated factor. A serious reader is forever culling aspects of his past, discarding previous favorites. Call it maturation or honing one’s critical gifts. The genre was no longer satisfying to read. I’ve never had a grand theoretical explanation for the change, though I retain a general lack of interest in any thesis-driven fiction -- 1984, for instance. 

I don’t recall why I read Gibson’s novel. I remember it getting a lot of attention when it was published in 1984, even in non-sci-fi circles. Perhaps a friend recommended it. Neuromancer is not the only novel I’ve read about which I remember nothing or almost nothing. The same can be said of books by such non-genre writers as Conrad Aiken, James Baldwin, Thomas Wolfe and others. In fiction I look for an ineffable but recognizable quality called by William Maxwell, in a note to his collection of reviews and essays The Outermost Dream (1989), “the breath of life.” He writes:

 

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”

 

No binding theory there, but I intuitively understand what Maxwell is getting at. In 1997, in the new introduction to The Outermost Dream, reissued by Graywolf Press, Maxwell writes: “[W]hen I read for my own enjoyment I cannot—or mostly do not—read authors whose way of writing doesn’t give me pleasure. But of course style is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.”

 

It’s a quality difficult to articulate and simple to perceive. Henry James’ fiction has it, as does Tolstoy’s and George Eliot’s. They convince us. We forget them and ourselves while reading. Science fiction no longer does that for me.