'The Exotic is Everywhere'

A pink violet is growing in the front yard, not planted by us but likely the offspring of a seed carried by the wind. For a native Northerner, its existence, including the color, is unlikely and utterly un-Christmas-like, though it brings to mind candy. When I sent a friend in Schenectady, N.Y., a photo of the flower she wrote: “That’s amazing. I’m jealous.” She’s already tired of this season’s snowfall. 

I happened to be reading Amy Clampitt, whose poems can sometimes be a little too rich for my blood but in “Nothing Stays Put” she writes: “The strange and wonderful are too much with us.” Her observation works on several levels. If we accept that wonder is our inheritance, we start to experience it everywhere: a violet growing outdoors five days before Christmas? On a more mundane level, the world has been thoroughly globalized. Anything might be anywhere. My youngest son, a Peace Corps volunteer, bought a bag of Doritos in Caraz, a town in West Central Peru with a population of some 14,000. Clampitt writes: “The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us / before there is a yen or a need for it.” And this, at the poem’s conclusion:

 

“Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.

All that we know, that we’re

made of, is motion.”

'With Such Beauty'

The common word I can least imagine my father ever uttering, at least as supplied by his threadbare lexicon and in the presence of family, is beauty. Not that he was without a rudimentary aesthetic sense. He once made me a bookcase welded out of slender iron rods, crowned with the letter “K” in a circle above the top shelf. From a sheet of steel he cut out a piece shaped like a Scottish terrier, stenciled our street address on it and posted it in front of the house. It’s still there, though new owners moved in long ago. By trade he was an ironworker and welder and worked in metal. Everything he made was heavier than it needed to be. 

His ruling aesthetic, if he had one, was practicality. The things he made were functional and they lasted. He would never have associated beauty with something as inert as a sonnet or sonata. None of this is intended as criticism of my father. He responded to life with what he was given and had no capacity for or interest in theory. The scarlet leaves of a maple in the fall might have struck him as “pretty,” but that was of little consequence and probably gave him little pleasure.

 

B.H. Fairchild (b. 1942) has a poem, “Beauty” (The Art of the Lathe, 1998), which begins with the speaker and his wife in Florence, looking at Donatello's David in the Bargello Museum. He thinks “how very far we are now from the machine shop / and the dry fields of Kansas.” Fairchild meditates on beauty and masculinity and memory, and his poem reads, in part, like a joint autobiography of my father and me. It concludes:

 

“. . . and we walk

to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen

along the casement, and looking out, we see the city

blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings

taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way

the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her,

would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty.”

'It Has a Kind of Toughness'

Asked why wit was so characteristic of British writing, at least as of 1998, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald replied: 

“Wit means self-concealment, meiosis, self-deprecation, a recognition that things are too desperate to be comic but not serious enough to be tragic, a successful attempt to make language (and silence) take charge of the situation, and all these are British habits.”

 

Sometimes you want to be blunt, whether or not you are British. You want to eliminate any lingering hint of ambiguity in what you wish to say. Your purpose is to dismiss or even hurt the object of your displeasure. You have no wish to be understanding or empathetic. You already understand. Your target hasn’t earned an imaginative projection into tolerance. You don’t even try to be tactful. Nazis and Hamas don’t deserve your sensitive insights.

 

But most of a morally healthy person’s emotional life is not consumed with such hatred. Most of us are not the world’s policemen. To conduct our time on earth as though we were surrounded daily by felons in need of chastisement is childish, tiresome and self-defeating. We risk becoming what we abhor. Fitzgerald’s definition of wit, that elusive quality some of us recognize and appreciate when we see it, suggests we maintain a distance between ourselves and our petulant inner child. It is the deft deployment of language. “Self-concealment,” for instance, suggests maintaining a cool distance, not indulging in easy emotional gratification, deploying a scalpel rather than a bazooka.

 

Meiosis is the rhetorical device with which we intensify by minimizing. We understate and make something smaller and less important than it actually is. Again, another step in self-concealment. This is why one of Dr. Johnson’s definitions of wit is “imagination; quickness of fancy.” Think of the wittiest writers in the language – Alexander Pope, Evelyn Waugh, Fitzgerald herself, et al.

 

In his essay on Andrew Marvell, T.S. Eliot says of wit: “It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of experience; and it is confused with cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience.”

 

Truly cynical wit soon grows tiresome and ineffective. Think of true wit as muted mockery. The sting it packs may be time-delayed but it will last.

'What Mattered Most to Him Was Writing'

A friend wrote first thing Wednesday morning telling me Norman Podhoretz had died at age ninety-five. It was like hearing the last sequoia had fallen. “I read him religiously for 50 years,” my friend added. My observance of Podhoretz’s work was more secular but at least as long-lived. He was among the earliest critics I read as a teenager, along with Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. He helped take reviewing and criticism out of the graduate seminar and put it into the magazines of the day, and into the lives of common readers, where they belong. Among his teachers were Trilling and F.R. Leavis, and the seriousness with which they treated books rubbed off on their apt pupil.

Podhoretz wrote for Commentary and served as its editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995. His son John Podhoretz, the current editor-in-chief of Commentary, writes on the magazine’s website a brief remembrance of his father:

 

“What you really need to know is that what mattered most to him was writing. Great writing. Good writing. Clear writing. Honest writing. He was the most literate man I have ever known, possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the written word in our time and in times past, who found true moral, intellectual, and aesthetic purpose in the act of reading and deciphering and comprehending. And he was himself a prose stylist of magnificence. There is no other word for it, and anyone who says otherwise is judging him not by his sentences but by views he held they do not like. That was a sin against honesty he never committed. There were many writers whose views he abhorred, but whose gifts he would absolutely acknowledge and ruefully refuse to deny.”

  

Consider his review of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Subterraneans, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” published in the Spring 1958 issue of The Partisan Review. Podhoretz points out the author’s “simple inability to say anything in words.” He writes of Kerouac’s style, his much-vaunted, nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody,” in these self-indulgent messes masquerading as novels:

 

“Strictly speaking, spontaneity is a quality of feeling, not of writing. . . . It isn’t the right words he wants (even if he knows what they might be), but the first words, or at any rate the words that most obviously announce themselves as deriving from emotion rather than cerebration, as coming from ‘life’ rather than ‘literature,’ from the guts rather than the brain. (The brain, remember, is the angel of death.)”

 

And this:

 

“Solipsism is precisely what characterizes Kerouac’s novels. [They] are so patently autobiographical in content that they become almost impossible to discuss as novels; if spontaneity were indeed a matter of destroying the distinction between life and literature, these books would unquestionably be It.”

 

Podhoretz’s politics were commonsensical: he loved America, he loved Israel and hated terror and totalitarianism. He was indifferent to or actively opposed the political fashions of the nineteen-sixties, the Hate-America-First bandwagon. He started as a boilerplate liberal and slowly grew up politically, in public. I regret only that he hadn't written more about literature, though he was always right about murderous Muslims.

 

Take this from a review Podhoretz wrote of a novel in 1953: “He is trying to put blood into contemporary fiction and break through the hidebound conventions of the well-made novel. This is a herculean job that will have to be done if we are to have a living literature at all.” Sounds like Emerson welcoming Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

This is from Podhoretz’s review of Saul Bellow’s The Adventure of Augie March in the October 1953 issue of Commentary. Podhoretz was no gusher. The very next line in the review sounds the traditional Podhoretz note: “But our sympathy with Mr. Bellow’s ambition and our admiration for his pioneering spirit should not lead us to confuse the high intention with the realization.” Always cautious, always qualifying his judgment, which is a critic’s obligation.

 

As a young reader I was intoxicated by Bellow’s word-geysers. He was the educated man’s Thomas Wolfe. Podhoretz goes on:

 

“But the feeling conveyed by Mr. Bellow’s exuberance is an overwhelming impulse to get in as many adjectives and details as possible, regardless of considerations of rhythm, modulation, or, for that matter, meaning. Like Milton in Paradise Lost, who was trying to do the near impossible too, Mr. Bellow seems frightened of letting up; a moment’s relaxation might give the game away. The result is that we are far more aware of the words than the objects, of Mr. Bellow than of the world—which is the reverse of how he would like us to respond. His language lacks the suction to draw us into its stream.”

 

It took guts to write and publish this, especially in Commentary. Here are the review’s final sentences: “Mr. Bellow has the very genuine distinction of giving us a sense of what a real American idiom might look like. It is no disgrace to have failed in a pioneer attempt.”

'The Habit of Reading Something More Lasting'

“It is in order to help the young who are entering on careers, and those of all ages who desire to extend those delights and spiritual developments of their lives, that I have written the book called The March of Literature.” 

Ford Madox Ford is Modernism’s great publicist and raconteur, an enthusiast forever boosting books and writers from across the millennia. He has little of his confrère Ezra Pound’s stridency and bullying, and none of his anti-Semitism. Like Anton Chekhov, Ford is one of literature’s blessed ones, almost saintly in his service to letters and fellow writers, though a highly fallible man. In the introduction to the last of his more than eighty books, The March of Literature (1938), he describes himself as “an old man mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.”

The passage at the top is taken from the transcript of a radio talk, “The Commercial Value of Literature,” broadcast by Ford on NBC on October 14, 1938, eight months before his death. The March of Literature is not an encyclopedia or any sort of reference work but a biased, idiosyncratic, highly entertaining encomium, published on the cusp of World War II, for the books that had sustained Ford since childhood:

 

“It is not for nothing that the growing barbarism of the world has synchronized with the decay of the art of reading. Reading is probably at a lower ebb at this moment than it has ever been in this world. The reading, that is to say, of such literature as is in fact literature, and not the merest escape from immediate personal problems. Heaven forbid that you should take me as recommending you to become exaggeratedly highbrow!”

 

That’s typical of Ford – expressing a seemingly mandarin taste in the language of the common man. Nearly eighty years ago, and serious reading is already in jeopardy. At this point in his radio talk, Ford adopts a preacherly tone:

 

“The favorite reading of today, after the sports columns of the newspapers, is that of detective or mystery stories. And there is nothing whatever against the reading of mystery stories when you need another relaxation on account of the fatigues of the life of today. But to obtain the spiritual and material benefits of which we have hitherto been talking, it is necessary that you should make the habit of reading something more lasting. Do not believe that the great classics have anything of the repulsive or the super-highbrow about them!”

 

I might have written this during a minor spell of crankiness. Converts are few but I do hear from the occasional renegade or oddball, someone who reads, say, Swift or Conrad, perhaps on a whim. Or Ford’s own fiction, The Good Soldier (1915) or the World War I tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28).

 

“[E]veryone has a right to his own tastes. If you do not like the philosophy of Dante, bathe in the lighthearted pococurantism [OED: “indifference, carelessness, nonchalance”] of Shakespeare’s comedies, or the irony of Swift’s Gulliver, or the greathearted sympathies of Dickens for the poor and distressed, or find fascination from the mental refinements of the greatest of all American writers, Henry James, or the verbal felicities and exactitudes of Miss Katherine Anne Porter, or Mrs. Virginia Woolf, and the respective schools of all such writers.”

 

Ford was born on this date, December 17, in 1873, and died in 1939 at age sixty-five.

'The Complex and Indwelling Emotion'

In a conversation with a well-read friend I had a disturbing realization: my love of American literature is rather constricted. I feel almost treasonous admitting this. It has nothing to do with politics. I remain a patriot, a lover of the Constitution, but my admiration for the classics of the American canon, dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is small. Henry James, above all. Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Cather, Eliot, Frost, a few others. I’m not sure why it took me so long to reach this conclusion. So many of the American writers I read enthusiastically when very young mean little or nothing to me today – Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Stephen Crane, et al. 

The corollary question: Where does my loyalty lie? I hardly have to contemplate an answer: English literature. I think of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson and George Eliot as mine and it has nothing to do with citizenship. My first loyalty is to the language. In terms of national literatures, Russian comes next, then probably Italian. I can’t tell you how shocking these admissions are to me. Without giving it much thought, I have unself-consciously practiced what used to be called “comparative literature.” National origin has never meant much to me – with books or people.

 

My friend and I were talking about Edwin Arlington Robinson when these thoughts came to me. He remains one of my favorite American poets. I liked his work when young. Now I prize it. Constance Rourke writes in American Humor: A Study in the National Character (1931):

 

“Character had always been the great American subject—character enwrapped in legend, from the Yankee of the fables and the fabulous Crockett to the novels of Henry James. Character is of course Robinson’s great subject . . .”

 

In this, Robinson is almost novelistic. We can read him for his stories, most rooted in revelations of character. When we think of Robinson we think of his people: “Luke Havergal,” “Aaron Stark,” “Isaac and Archibald,” “Bewick Finzer” and the rest. Rourke goes on:

 

“His main concern has been with those elements of the mind which have made an almost continuous American preoccupation. For a poet he is singularly unengaged by the outer world: the look of his people, like his touches of landscape or other effects of setting, is drawn in a few brief, intense passages: his genuine subject is fantasy, the evocation, the obsession, the complex and indwelling emotion. He has placed the psychological narrative within the realm of poetry in a new and modern sense, and is an heir of both Hawthorne and Henry James . . .”

 

Take this poem about the English poet “Thomas Hood” (1799-1845) from Robinson’s second collection, The Children of the Night (1897):

 

“The man who cloaked his bitterness within

This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,

God never gave to look with common eyes

Upon a world of anguish and of sin:

His brother was the branded man of Lynn;

And there are woven with his jollities

The nameless and eternal tragedies

That render hope and hopelessness akin.

 

“We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel

A still chord sorrow-swept,—a weird unrest

And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,

As if the very ghost of mirth were dead—

As if the joys of time to dream had fled,

Or sailed away with Ines to the West.”     

'Something to Be Found Out'

If I had the right to design a friend, someone to possess all the qualities I most value in a companion, my first ingredient might be curiosity, an unapologetic interest in the world, in particular his fellow humans. I sense that many of our problems are caused by people afflicted with boredom coupled with pseudo-sophistication. Nothing impresses them, nothing rouses their interest or admiration. To feel something, they resort to anger. The chief motive for anger is that rush of power it lends an otherwise sluggishly indifferent person. Perhaps an unacknowledged component in curiosity is humility, an admission that we don’t know everything. Here is Desmond MacCarthy on Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy: 

“He was at any rate born with the most reliable prophylactic against tedium – consuming curiosity. This is the passion after all that the Universe is most obviously fitted to satisfy. His curiosity was not scientific in method; but one trait he had in common with men of science, he could be happy correlating phenomena.”

 

MacCarthy suggests that we have evolved to be curious, that our world is there for our “amusement” – perhaps the wrong word. “Understanding” might be preferable, or even “wonder” or “delight.” We are at home in precisely the right universe for us. No need to feel alienated. If we’re fortunate, we meet two or three people in a lifetime whose sensibilities are driven by curiosity for its own sake. It is its own reward. Such minds are forever sparking.

 

Don’t confuse them with the social frauds who try to flatter you with feigned attention – the tilted head, the focused gaze, the empty questions indifferently posed. The absence of respectful curiosity kills conversation. Curiosity is not nosiness. The person I’ve met who most essentially embodies the virtue of curiosity is Guy Davenport, who once wrote, “Curiosity, I'm convinced, is intelligence.” The man I spent several hours with was tirelessly curious and a tireless provoker of curiosity in others. There was never a lapse in conversation, even with me, a stranger he would never meet again. He once said in an interview:

 

“My range of interests may be accounted for by my being 75.  It's really a very narrow range. There ought to be a psychology that studies indifference, the ‘flat affect’ of non-response. Response is, beyond the usual culturally-trained and biological reactions to the things of the world, the result of education carried on by curiosity.”

 

The late Richard Wilbur delivered the commencement address at Lawrence University in 1960. Weigh his observations with the state of American curiosity in the twenty-first century:

   

“Still another virtue of the educated person is curiosity: the feeling that there is something to be found out, and that one perhaps can find it. There’s no need to say why curiosity is a good thing; and the quantity of research, discovery, and invention reported every year would indicate that we are still a vigorously curious nation.”

 

Wilbur mentions an unnamed Italian novelist who had recently visited the U.S.: “[H]e felt that the American intellectual class has lost the habit of adventurous general reading. . . . I'm afraid it's true that our educated people in general have ceased to have that breadth of curiosity which we remember in the Franklins, the Jeffersons, the John Quincy Adamses -- the great readers, lookers and tinkerers of an earlier America.”

 

And that was sixty-five years ago. Wilbur adds: “Too many of us have conceded the butterfly to the lepidopterist.”

 

[MacCarthy’s essay on Burton is collected in Portraits (1931), available at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]