'To Have Something to Say'

“It might be too much to say that no one who cannot write prose should be allowed to write verse, but certainly no one should be admitted to any of those myriad courses which purport to teach the writing of verse, until he has read at least one book each of Swift and Defoe and can write a page which is not too utterly disgraceful by their standards.”

When writing prose, the supreme virtue is most often clarity, a quality embodied in the writings of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). Apprentice writers still learning the trade can challenge themselves to write as precisely and plainly as these masters. Begin with this assumption: I want you to understand something. I don’t want to confuse you, nor do I want to be misunderstood. Too many words, too few words, poorly chosen words – all can result in a chaos of sense. As Swift put its “A Letter to a Young Clergyman,” written in 1719: “Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.” Once the basics are incorporated, you can write as eloquently as you wish. Think of the first step as erecting a scaffolding of sense, so individual style can then flourish. Consider this from the sermon “On Brotherly Love” preached by Swift in 1717:  

 

“I shall mention but one ill consequence more, which attends our want of brotherly love; that it hath put an end to all hospitality and friendship, all good correspondence and commerce between mankind. There are indeed such things as leagues and confederacies among those of the same party; but surely God never intended that men should be so limited in the choice of their friends: However, so it is in town and country, in every parish and street; the pastor is divided from his flock, the father from his son, and the house often divided against itself. Men’s very natures are soured, and their passions inflamed, when they meet in party clubs, and spend their time in nothing else but railing at the opposite side; thus every man alive among us is encompassed with a million of enemies of his own country, among which his oldest acquaintance and friends, and kindred themselves, are often of the number; neither can people of different parties mix together without constraint, suspicion, or jealousy, watching every word they speak, for fear of giving offence, or else falling into rudeness and reproaches, and so leaving themselves open to the malice and corruption of informers, who were never more numerous or expert in their trade.”

 

Swift might be describing our own fractious time. That final sentence is 112 words long, punctuated twice by semi-colons and beautifully organized for sense. It ought to leave no one confused, no one uncertain of its meaning.

 

Defoe is best known, of course, for Robinson Crusoe (1719) and perhaps for A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Moll Flanders (1722). These are brilliant, entertaining proto-novels but Defoe was also a prolific polemicist who seemed adept at taking on almost any subject, for which he paid a price. He was pilloried and served time in prison for seditious libel.  Here is a passage from a pamphlet, “A Vindication of the Press,” published in 1718:

 

“First, it may be Objected that the numerous Writings tend more to confound the Reader, than to inform him; to this I answer, that it is impossible there can be many Writings produced, but there must be some valuable Informations communicated, easy to be Collected by a judicious Reader; tho’ there may be a great deal superfluous, and notwithstanding it is a considerable Charge to purchase a useful Library, (the greatest Grievance) yet we had better be at that Expence, than to have no Books publish’d, and consequently no Discoveries; the same Reason may be given where Books in the Law, Physick, &c. are imperfect in some Part, and tend to the misleading Persons; for of two Evils the old Maxim is, always chuse the least. The only Objection that I do not take upon me to Defend, is, that against Lewd and obscene Poetry in general; (for sometimes the very great Wit may make it excuseable) which in my Opinion will admit of but a slender Apology in its Defence.”

 

Like Swift, Defoe composes lengthy sentences, stitched together with many commas and semi-colons, that never drift into incoherence. The spelling and some of the syntax are dated but the pamphleteer’s sense is clear.

 

The passage at the top is taken from C.H. Sisson’s essay “Poetry and Sincerity.” As a deft master of poetry and prose, his observations are steeled with experience and common sense. He writes:

 

“The first necessity is to have something to say, but even this will be present only as an impending cloud, and to assert its necessity is to make an ex post facto analysis. The moment announces itself by words conveying a rhythm or, it may be, by a rhythm conveying a few words.”

 

[Sisson’s “Poetry and Sincerity” was published in the Times Literary Supplement on September 12, 1980, and collected in Anglican Essays (1983), In Two Minds (1990) and A C.H. Sisson Reader (2014).]

'A Yellow Flower Growing in the Grass'

Dr. Johnson’s definition for pissabed is genteel and a little vague, though nicely trochaic: “a yellow flower growing in the grass.” At first I thought Johnson was making a politely metaphorical reference to urine, which turns out to be true but only indirectly. The OED gets medicinally specific: “The dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, formerly well known for its diuretic properties.” Dictionaries contain words, of course, but words sometimes contain dictionaries.

Among the citations in the OED is one from Samuel Beckett’s Watt: “Of flowers there was no trace, save of the flowers that plant themselves, or never die, or die only after many seasons, strangled by the rank grass. The chief of these was the pissabed.” Read on for another definition: “a bed-wetter.” That’s how Beckett’s friend James Joyce uses it in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses: “Pope Peter’s but a pissabed.” It gets even nastier. Lord Byron uses the word as an adjective in an 1820 letter to his publisher, John Murray, referring to “Johnny Keats’s p-ss a bed poetry.”

 

Thanks to the reader so delighted to have discovered pissabed that she had to tell me about it.

'Bracing and Beautiful'

“The world is so various and rich that there are universes of knowledge that I will never touch (bird watching, mountain climbing, knitting patterns, on and on) but the knowledge that knowledge is endless is bracing and beautiful.” 

I suppose it ought to intimidate or shame us, how little we know. Instead, it’s a goad to further learning. I recall in a rush of puberty-driven pride resolving, like Doc Savage, to know everything – Chinese history, welding, herpetology. More than sixty years later, I still know almost nothing about those disciplines and remain strictly amateur. I’m left with a mind like a prospector’s pan, revealing the occasional nugget of ore but mostly stones.

 

The learned man quoted at the top is Rabbi David Wolpe, writing on, of all places, Twitter – proof that wisdom might be encountered almost anywhere humans choose to venture. Among the saddest spectacles I know is an incurious mind, one without a sense of wonder or intellectual hunger, especially among young people. They face the prospect of a barren, tiresome existence. You hear it argued that learning beyond the purely utilitarian is a needless luxury, a waste of time leading to discontent – as though only the privileged are worthy of learning. It’s when studying – lately, Aristotle and Italian – or reading any challenging text that I feel most in touch with my forebears, the writers and thinkers who came before me. Learning never occurs in a vacuum, at least for this reader. We're always accompanied by teachers. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson telling him:

 

“Why, Sir, that knowledge may in some cases produce unhappiness, I allow. But, upon the whole, knowledge, per se, is certainly an object which every man would wish to attain, although, perhaps, he may not take the trouble necessary for attaining it.”

'Poetry Instructs by Delighting'

“There are persons in society with whom we put up and others for whom we pull up a chair by the fire; there are volumes of poetry that we pore through dutifully and others to which we return with a sociable pint of beer and a chunk of Stilton.” 

That’s the late Fred Chappell’s way of saying that with some poets – and I would widen the category to include writers other than poets – we form a lasting companionable bond. Their work we read and reread, perhaps memorize, and read yet again. Seasoned readers may have dozens of such reliable relationships -- Shakespeare, Yeats, Robinson, others.

 

Sometimes such bonds take years to mature. With others, it’s instantaneous surrender. That’s how, about twenty years ago, I fell for the poems of Helen Pinkerton. The book was Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press), published in 2002. The fourth poem in the collection, “Red-Tailed Hawk,” was the first to grab me:

 

“Your hawk today floated the loft of air

That lifts each morning from the valley floor.

Dark idler, predator of mice and hare

And greater vermin, as I watched him soar

 

“Out of my sight, taking a certain path,

Knowing from ancient blood, instinctive might,

How to survive beyond the present drift,

He seemed to shift from nothingness toward flight.

 

“Yet it was real, the warm column of air—

Like being, unrecorded, always there.”

 

The shift in the final couplet, like the hawk’s effortless course correction, is breathtaking. No longer is the bird the focus, but the thermal, “the warm column of air,” the invisible shaft of energy buoying the bird. Hawks, like all creation, move from nothingness to being, invisibly. All of Helen’s work carries a similar philosophical charge.

 

In early 2011, a package arrived containing Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers, the second edition, “corrected and enlarged,” published in 1952 by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto. Helen sent the book and an email:

 

“I had three copies including an unmarked second copy of the 2nd edition, which I include. Reading this book when I was about 21 and at Stanford changed my life, I found in it the philosophical grounds for believing in God’s existence, which delivered me from youthful atheism and have sustained my faith ever since. Though [Yvor] Winters recommended reading Gilson’s histories of philosophy, he did not mention this book. When I asked him what in later years about it, he confessed that he had not read it. I wish that he had.” 

 

Helen’s emails were always surprising, often legitimate works of literature in their own right. Once she wrote to say she had just finished reading Vasily Grossman’s great novel Life and Fate. She went on to liken certain passages to others she had marked in The Gulag Archipelago, and that started an exchange on Solzhenitsyn. She was a scholar of Herman Melville and the Civil War, which always gave us something to talk about. We shared an admiration for Ulysses Grant's Personal Memoirs. She had studied with Yvor Winters at Stanford and befriended Janet Lewis, J.V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers. Here is another of her poems, “Visible and Invisible”:

 

“In touching gently like a golden finger,

The sunlight, falling as a steady shimmer

Through curling fruit leaves, fills the mind with hunger

For meaning in the time and light of summer.

 

“Dispersed by myriad surfaces in falling,

Drawn into green and into air dissolving,

Light seems uncaught by sudden sight or feeling.

Remembered, it gives rise to one's believing

 

“Its truth resides in constant speed descending.

The momentary beauty is attendant.

A flicker of the animate responding

Shifts in the mind with time and fades, inconstant.”

 

Helen died December 28, 2017, age ninety. Chappell writes, “Poetry instructs by delighting. So says our ancient wisdom, and I’m not yet fool enough to attempt contradiction.”

 

[The Fred Chappell passages are taken from “Attempts Upon Delight: Six Poetry Books,” published in the Summer 1990 issue of The Kenyon Review.]

'I Have No Puling Apology to Make'

People used to get sick and die of exotically named diseases we have never heard of. We have cancer and congestive heart failure. They had quinsy and squinsy (two of the Seven Dwarfs), dropsy, catarrh, French disease, gleet and bone-break fever. It was a more colorful time. As S.J. Perelman puts it: “I've got Bright’s Disease and he’s got mine.” 

Leave it to Charles Lamb to die of erysipelas, from the Greek for “red skin,” also known as St. Anthony’s Fire and “the rose.” It occurs when streptococcus enters a break in the skin. Today it would be quickly cured with a simple course of antibiotics. Lamb died on December 27, 1834, five days after tripping on a stone on Edmonton High Street in London and slicing open his face. He was probably returning from the nearby Bell Tavern, a favorite drinking spot. Eric G. Wilson in Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb (Yale University Press, 2022) tells us:

 

“Wounds, in particular face wounds, are a common conduit for the bacteria. Within forty-eight hours, a hot, painful rash appears at the point of infection, and it swells and spreads. Its texture resembles an orange peel, frequently dotted with blisters and vesicles. Fever, chills, headaches, and vomiting ensue. Sometimes the lymph nodes swell. Those with compromised immune systems are most susceptible to the condition, such as older people and alcoholics.”

 

At age fifty-nine, Lamb was unquestionably an alcoholic. He admitted as much in his essay “Confessions of a Drunkard” (1813; rev. 1822): “Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see them all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it.” For a certain species of alcoholic, humor is the mask used to deny or minimize the problem, and Lamb was a notably funny writer. In a letter to Robert Southey, Lamb once wrote: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

 

Wilson continues: “[E]rysipelas can intensify into necrotizing fasciitis, a ‘flesh-eating’ infection causing hideous coloring, corrosion, and death. Charles Lamb likely died disfigured and in agony.” That Lamb drank to excess, that he was a tippler, a toper, a tosspot, seems inarguable. In his final letter, composed on the day of his fall, Lamb writes to the wife of his friend George Dyer and closes with a typical Lambian wisecrack:

 

“I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or left at your house on Thursday. It was the book I went out to fetch from Miss Buffam’s, while the tripe was frying. It is called [Edward] Phillip’s Theatrum Poetarum; but it is an English book. I think I left it in the parlour . . . If it is lost, I shall never like tripe again.”

'The Happy Morning Is Over'

“Well, so that is that.” 

W.H. Auden captures the hangover, alcoholic or otherwise, of the day after Christmas. As I’ve gotten older the holiday’s passing is no longer so profoundly disappointing, but as a kid disappointment inevitably followed on disproportionate expectations. The presents were never quite what we had hoped for. Some were already broken. The dolor of Christmas afternoon had mostly passed, replaced by the dread of school’s resumption, though most of the arguing had ceased. Every year the predictable emotional roller-coaster: hope and good cheer frittered away. Remembering this exercise in ingratitude remains a little uncomfortable. The passage at the top is taken from the final section of Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (1942):

 

“Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –

Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school. There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully –

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.”

 

And this:

 

“In the meantime

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,

Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem

From insignificance. The happy morning is over . . .”

'That Late Death Took All My Heart for Speech'

I’m not by nature a brooder. My brother died sixteen months ago yesterday, enough time for his death to have taken its place in the region of memory I think of as a reliquary. Precious but not to be fiddled with too often. On Tuesday at Kaboom Books here in Houston I was talking to the owner, John Dillman. For some reason the topic was the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I told John a friend and I cut school in the spring of our senior year in high school to attend the first Earth Day – April 22, 1970. In a downtown church, Ferlinghetti spoke and read some poems, of which I remember nothing.

Memory, of course, is a series of linkages. My talk with John reminded me that my brother once had a cat he named Lawrence Ferlingkitty, which I hadn’t thought about in years. Coupled with the nearness of Christmas another memory returned. My mother was a notoriously indifferent housekeeper. Clutter accumulated on every horizontal surface. We even felt sorry for the Christmas tree, freighted with too many ornaments, too much tinsel. One year, my brother and I bought a sack of hotdog buns and hung them all from the tree without telling anyone. No one noticed, not parents or visitors, so it became an annual tradition. That may be my favorite memory of my brother. The final stanza of Yeats’ “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”:

 

“I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind

That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind

All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved

Or boyish intellect approved,

With some appropriate commentary on each;

Until imagination brought

A fitter welcome; but a thought

Of that late death took all my heart for speech.”