'Old Men Are Generally Narrative'

A blunt fact of modern life: When young, everyone we knew – family, friends, neighbors – lives nearby. Our lives are well-populated. With age, that alignment of geography and acquaintance attenuates. Live long enough and our birthplace turns incrementally, across the decades, into a ghost town. I’ve just learned that the last high-school teacher I remained in touch with has died. No surprise. She was eighty-three. She introduced me to Yeats. I introduced her to Nathanael West.

In September I’m returning to Cleveland for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, and I had planned to meet with my teacher for coffee, as we last did in 2016. The good news is I will spend time with my nephew, my niece and her baby, and one surviving friend. I haven’t lived in Cleveland since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983, though they remain “home” in some primal sense. 

In his Rambler essay for August 7, 1750, Dr. Johnson writes: “[T]he images which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature, the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all attempts of erasure or of change.”

 

In other words, people and places persist in memory as we knew them, not as they are. Inevitably, there’s a clash of expectation and reality. The old map is no longer reliable. Familiar scenes seem somehow “wrong,” not quite accurate. Johnson understands this discordance, though he was only forty when writing his essay:

 

“The time of life, in which memory seems particularly to claim predominance over the other faculties of the mind, is our declining age. It has been remarked by former writers, that old men are generally narrative, and fall easily into recitals of past transactions, and accounts of persons known to them in their youth. When we approach the verge of the grave it is more eminently true . . .”

'Every Garden Is a Vast Hospital'

 On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted eight butterfly species there this summer and found a monarch chrysalis hanging from a tropical milkweed plant. Brown and green anoles have densely colonized the garden, which has never been so lush. 

Because of the ample lighting I usually read while seated on the couch by the oversized front window. The garden is a comfort. Framed by the window, it’s like a slow-motion movie. The appeal is less aesthetic than – what? Metaphysical? I like to be reminded of life’s profusion and persistence, the opposite of sterility. There’s little difference between “weed” and “flower.” I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005):

“What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”

 

A reminder that poets ought to know the names of wildflowers, according to Seamus Heaney. Not every poet would agree. I was looking for something in Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi’s 2,500-page commonplace book kept between 1817 and 1832, when I happened on a passage from April 1826 that only Leopardi could have written:

 

“Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems. Even in the mildest season of the year. You will not be able to look anywhere and not find suffering. That whole family of vegetation is in a state of souf-france [suffering], each in its own way to some degree. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts. There a lily is sucked cruelly by a bee, in its most sensitive, most life-giving parts.”

 

Leopardi’s understanding of biology is limited but his Zeitgeist remains consistent. He goes on for a full page turning a mini-Eden into a raging Hell:

 

“The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first go into this garden lifts your spirits. And that is why you think it is a joyful place. But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or rather, were to feel, surely not being would be better for them than being.”

It's almost as though Leopardi had read the crackpot bestseller The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first encountered Leopardi more than half a century ago in Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1931). The Irishman refers to the Italian’s “wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Beckett quotes two lines from “A se stesso” (“To himself”): “In noi di cari inganni, / Non che la speme, il desiderio e ’spento.” (“Not only our hope / but our desire for dear illusions is gone.” Trans. Jonathan Galassi, Canti, 2010).

 

Melville, too, found a kindred spirit in Leopardi. In his 18,000-line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Part I, Section 14, “In the Glen,” he writes:

 

“If Savonarola’s zeal devout

But with the fagot’s flame died out;

If Leopardi, stoned by Grief,

A young St. Stephen of the Doubt

Might merit well the martyr’s leaf.”

 

[Zibaldone was edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, translated into English by seven translators, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013.]

'A Writer Relies on Instinct and Intuition'

V.S. Pritchett is asked in his Paris Review interview, “Do you think living and writing conflict?” – a rather silly question -- and he replies: “I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.” Spoken like the kind of reader and writer I can respect. Escape reading is fine. I don’t have much instinct for it–science fiction, thrillers, romance—but I think I understand the attraction. Life is tough. Work and family responsibilities can be exhausting. Nice to get away for an hour or two and find refuge in a make-believe universe. Call it distraction or biding time – an innocent way to briefly forget about commitments, pain and life’s disappointments. 

Pritchett’s statement above is a more eloquent way to articulate the founding slogan of Anecdotal Evidence: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” I formulated that in reaction to the revulsion I felt for a variety of literary dead-ends: dilettantism, propaganda, academic myopia, cheap fashion. Since I was a kid I’ve always assumed good books and life cannot be surgically separated without injuring one or both, often fatally. It’s not usually the prime reason I read a novel or poem, but the desire to learn something about the world, about humans and their motivations, is at least latent in my choice of book.

 

Pritchett published his first book, Marching Spain, in 1928. At age twenty-six, in the spring of 1927, he had walked three-hundred miles across Spain, from Badajoz to Vigo. Earlier, he had been sent to Spain to report on the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That’s when he taught himself the language and first read contemporary Spanish literature – Azorin, Pio Baroja, Perez de Ayala, Unamuno. In an introduction he wrote for a new edition of Marching Spain in 1988, Pritchett tells us: “Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life became my Bible.” (I can second that observation when I was even younger than Pritchett.) His comparison is not idle. Pritchett was a secular man with a strong interest in, but no formal attachment to, organized religion.

 

During his long walk across Spain, Pritchett made a pilgrimage to Salamanca, where Unamuno served as rector of the University of Salamanca from 1900 to 1924, and 1930 to 1936:

 

“I felt that in Salamanca,” Pritchett writes, “I should in some unexplained way breathe of the spirit of Unamuno, who in these days was exiled from Spain by the unutterably stupid dictatorship. The crassest of all pilgrimages this, walking two hundred miles to find a man who had been forced out of his country because he happened to prefer liberty to generals. ‘God give thee not peace, but glory,’ he writes at the end of The Tragic Sense of Life. One is always one’s own hero; if I did not find peace I might at least blunder into glory.”

 

He met both Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset. For Pritchett, travel and immersion in a foreign country serve as his literary apprenticeship. Two decades later he returned to Spain and in 1954 published a much better book, The Spanish Temper. This most English of writers came alive as a writer elsewhere. He had a reporter’s appetite for gossip, landscape, history and conversation, coupled with a non-cloistered bookishness.

 

It was Pritchett who introduced me to many previously unknown writers, including Spain’s Benito Pérez Galdós. (Guy Davenport played a similar role in my education, especially for urging me to read Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta). Pritchett writes in his introduction to the 1988 edition of Marching Spain:

 

“Now, when I re-read my first book, I forgive myself for the patches of rhetorical writing. After all, I reflect, the famous foot-sloggers, like Hazlitt, Stevenson, Meredith, not to mention the poets of the Open Road school, had always harangued the scenery and the people they met as they clumped along, talking and even declaiming to themselves.”

 

In the second volume of his memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), half a century after his first visits to Spain, Pritchett writes:

 

“[P]resently I saw that literature grows out of literature as much as out of a writer’s times. A work of art is a deposit left by the conflicts and contradictions a writer has in his own nature. I am not a scholarly man; and I am not interested for very long in the elaborate superstructures of criticism. Some of my critics speak of insights and intuitions; the compliment is often left-handed, for these are signs of the amateur’s luck; I had no choice in the matter. Anyone who has written a piece of imaginative prose knows how much a writer relies on instinct and intuition.”

'The Shakespeare of the Essay Form'

“ordinary sanity in extraordinary prose” 

The phrase is the American poet David Mason’s in his essay “The Freedom of Montaigne.” In characterizing the Frenchman and his essays, Mason describes an ideal seldom attained and occasionally scorned. Today, extreme, sweeping statements seem to get all the attention. You don’t attract readers by being, as Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame puts it, “basically conservative, not radical, an accepter, not a reformer, seeking harmony, not conflict, within.” A New Immaturity has taken over. Intensity of expression is confused with human truth. We’re all back on the playground again, taunting and bullying our playmates, leaving little room for understanding and empathy.

 

Mason seems especially taken with the essay “Of Cruelty” (1578-80), in which Montaigne writes: “Among other vices, I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices. But this is to such a point of softness that I do not see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and I cannot bear to hear the scream of a hare in the teeth of my dogs, although the chase is a violent pleasure.”

 

Typically, Montaigne is honest, a perennial adult. Like some of us, he’s a softy, even with the wars of religion raging around his home in France. He acknowledges the thrill of the hunt while feeling pity for the game. His age, like ours, was barbarous – that’s merely human nature, which hasn’t changed. Only the scale of cruelty during the twentieth century and after would have surprised him, not its lingering impulse. For one example, he lived through the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and wrote about the public executions he witnessed.

 

Mason knows Shakespeare read Montaigne and found him useful, as we do. He describes Montaigne as “the Shakespeare of the essay form” – the highest critical praise possible. Both writers can never be exhausted. We read and reread them across a lifetime and they remain new and vital, as though we were reading them for the first time, even at an advanced age. Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:

 

“I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an ‘escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.”

 

[Mason’s essay is published in the Autumn 2017 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in Incarnation & Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? (Paul Dry Books, 2023). The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957). Frame is the author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]

'A Ten-pound Life Will Give You Every Fact'

On this, the tenth anniversary of poet-historian Robert Conquest’s death at ninety-eight, let’s recall the sonnet he wrote about the treachery of biographers, “Second Death”: 

“A ten-pound Life will give you every fact

-- Facts that he’d hoped his friends would not rehearse

To a condign posterity which lacked

Nothing of moment, since it had his verse.

Or so he thought. But now we come to read

What his more honest prudence had held in:

Tasteless compulsion into trivial deed,

A squalor more outrageous than the sin,

 

“Piss on that grave where lies the weakly carnal? . . .

– Hopeless repentance had washed clean his name,

His virtue’s strength insistent on a shame

Past all the brief bravados full and final.

Without excuses now, to the Eternal,

He makes the small, true offering of his fame.”

 

According to his widow, Elizabeth “Liddie” Conquest, her husband wrote the poem after reading Charles Osborne’s W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1979), which he found disgraceful. I read it when first published and remember it being a workmanlike assemblage of facts with no revelations of character and little understanding of the poetry and prose. Osborne reported on Auden’s homosexuality, which wasn’t exactly news to attentive readers. The book reminded me of Joseph Blotner’s two-volume biography of William Faulkner, published five years earlier – a transcription of isolated facts, a practice that has become predictable in recent decades. The biographer becomes an indiscriminate vacuum cleaner. Liddie, who reports her husband modeled his sonnet on Auden’s own “Who’s Who,” is presently collecting and editing a large collection of Conquest’s letters.

 

[Thank you, Cynthia Haven. Find “Second Death” in New and Collected Poems (1988) and Collected Poems (2020). Conquest died on August 3, 2015.]

'Delight Crowns All My Days, and Here I’ll Die'

R.L. Barth has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century Roman poet Martial, as we know him – for more than forty years and now has self-published a collection of 104 of his translations (of the 1,561 Latin originals extant): Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial. Bob and Martial share similar sensibilities. Both are tough-minded, skeptical of authority figures and human duplicity, not even remotely “poetic,” and they value concision in their poems perhaps more than any other quality. Their epigrams are pithy and barbed, and there’s nothing stuffy or academic about Bob’s translations. The poems are classical, the translations are contemporary, all-American and never genteel. Here is II.83: 

“Catching the cuckhold, you unsheathed your knife

And went to work on him who screwed your wife,

Lopping his nose and ears. Pure vengeance gained?

No, one of his appendages remained.”

 

As an epigraph to the collection, Barth takes a line from “The Undeceived,” an essay on Martial by his late friend Turner Cassity published in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review: “If Martial is minor we had better re-define major . . .” The passage continues:

 

“ . . . and I for one am perfectly willing to. Martial offers no vision, advances no program, embodies no archetype. He hoots at philosophy, is too uninterested in religion even to mock it, mocks at love, enjoys violence, ignores landscape, refuses to sentimentalize sex. He flatters the Emperor Domitian in the exact spirit and in the exact degree of honesty with which present day academics fill out grant applications. He understands the social and behavioral dimensions of money better than any writer before Edith Wharton, his fellow in pornography; he penetrates further into the mystery of death than anyone before or since, stripping away veil after veil to reveal it as, finally, the handmaiden of inheritance. What he gives us, stunningly undiminished across nineteen hundred years and the barriers of a language embalmed, is self-recognition. The Romans were not like us: they were us. Now that our own era, so far out of the closet and so close to Elagabalus, can no longer plead his obscenity, we shall have to come to terms with him.”

 

For Barth and Cassity, Martial is a poetic precursor, a sort of unholy father figure and unwelcome guest at the party. The two dozen Martial epigrams cited by Cassity in his essay were translated by Bob, who includes a poem of his own, “To Martial,” in the new collection:

 

“After your death, Pliny wrote praising you

For genius, satire, wit, and candor too.

Now, take this note across the centuries:

Tribute from one of your lesser legatees

Who, Pliny-like, would also recommend

Your poems, you—good company, good friend.” 

 

Bob takes the title of his collection from Martial’s IX.81:

 

"Readers and listeners praise my books:

You swear they’re worse than a beginner’s.

Who cares? I always plan my dinners

To please the diners, not the cooks.”

 

The collection concludes with “Martial in Bilbilis to Juvenal in Rome.” Martial was born in Bilbilis, located in what is now Spain. Bob appends a note to the poem: “I would say of my use of Martial XII.18 what Samuel Johnson said of his two great versions of Juvenal [“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” “London”]: ‘a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable, and the parallels lucky.’ Or simply call it riffing on Martial XII.18.” I think it’s one of Bob’s finest poems:

 

“Know what, dear Juvenal? While you are slogging

Across the racket of Suburra or dogging

Diana’s hill, jostled by pimps and whores,

Catamites, muggers, thugs in darkened doors,

Property speculators, politicians

And lawyers, Romans without inhibitions—

All those types who activate your spleen—

Your good friend Martial’s nowhere to be seen.

My friend, stand in your toga drenched with sweat

(However much you flap it, it stays wet)

Waiting at thresholds of your high-powered friends.

I’m back in Bilbilis, making amends

For all the sleep lost. I’m a gentleman;

After the long years gone, my city can,

And does, take to her bosom her lost son.

I have no clients here nor anyone

Disturbing peaceful sleep, at least till nine!

I wear no toga, any old clothes of mine

Suffice when I awake. There’s a fire burning

In the hearth, laid by my steward, and my yearning

For a good breakfast’s quickly satisfied

By his wife’s breakfast, almost countrified.

A little later comes my housemaid, who’d

Have you, friend, drooling to end her maidenhood

As she cleans up the bowls and sweeps the floors.

My young attendants start their daily chores.

Thus home, city of iron and gorgeous gold!

(You know, if you will let me be so bold,

I’d say that epithet describes my epigrams.)

I hear you snarling a long string of damns!

I’m sorry, Juvenal, but this is why

Delight crowns all my days, and here I’ll die.”

 

Cassity writes in his essay: “As the entire tradition of English poetry runs directly counter to the characteristics I have enumerated, he is very difficult to translate, though he is frequently honored by plagiarism. There is no Martial famous as Pope’s or Chapman’s Homer is famous. The translations I shall quote here have been newly done by R.L. Barth, aiming for both the precision of thought and utterance, and the absolute freedom of expression. Martial’s concision has been a brake on his reputation as on his translators. Criticism tends to equate brevity with triviality, and in nine out of ten literary eras it is flatulence that carries the day. Epigrams will never have the attention epics have, inflating the racial consciousness being outside their scope.”

[ADDENDUM: Several readers have asked how they can attain a copy of Pleasing the Diners. On his copyright page Barth has printed this: "20 copies hors de commerce." The poems are not for sale.]

'A Book That Everybody Can Understand'

A partner at the Houston law firm where my youngest son is working as an intern this summer has loaned him two nineteenth-century law books. Both were compiled by John G. Wells (1821-80) and were bestsellers in their day, long before the practice of law was fully professionalized: 

Every Man His Own Lawyer, and Business Form Book: A Complete Guide in All Matters of Law, and Business Negotiations, for Every State in the Union (H.H. Bancroft & Co. of San Francisco, 1867).

 

Every Man His Own Lawyer; or, the Clerk and Magistrate’s Assistant. This is the “tenth edition, improved,” published by William Wilson of Poughkeepsie in 1844.

 

Both are the size of mass-market paperbacks and bound in leather, which is scuffed and worn. Both are in delicate condition. The front cover of the former has detached from the spine and the pages in both are foxed but legible. Wells writes in his “Introductory” to the former:

 

“This work, prepared some years ago, was received with great favor by the public, attaining a larger sale, it is believed, than any work of this kind ever published. Lapse of time has brought material changes in the statutes of many of the States; the war has not only altered the social conditions of some of them, but has introduced the Internal Revenue system, National Banks, modifications of the Tariff, [13th and 14th] amendments to the Constitution of the United States, emancipation of the slaves, and the General Bankrupt law.”

 

The book is organized by occupation and social role, making it user-friendly. Chapters are devoted to farmers, mechanics, discharged soldiers and sailors (two years after the Civil War), immigrants, and married men and women. Wells includes templates for such documents as “Order of Commissioners to lay out a Highway” and “Deed by a Sheriff of an Equity of Redemption sold at Auction.” The emphasis is not on law in the abstract but on the minutiae of legal documentation. The books are eminently practical, as useful as dictionaries, and are aimed not just at lawyers but at average American citizens. They are early examples of a well-known category of books today: “Self-Help.”

 

The autodidactic impulse among Americans was once very strong. People seemed to assume they could teach themselves almost anything – a trade or craft, science, engineering, medicine, the Western literary tradition. “Experts” were not automatically deferred to. One could, like Abraham Lincoln, attach himself as an apprentice to an experienced professional. Few Americans attended a college or university or even completed their secondary education. 

 

Lincoln practiced law for twenty-three years before he was elected president. He may have consulted Wells’ guides. He never attended law school – not unusual for the mid-nineteenth century -- and was entirely self-taught. He handled cases ranging from debt to murder at the justice of the peace, county, circuit, appellate and federal levels, and kept an office in Springfield, Ill.

 

Consider that even in his own day, Lincoln was judged by some a hick, born in 1809 on the frontier in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Now we know he was educated and well-read by the standards of his day, and through strict application became one of the great American writers of prose. In 2007, Robert Bray published “What Abraham Lincoln Read—An Evaluative and Annotated List” in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Bray’s research determined which books were read by Lincoln. Among others he confirmed were John Bunyan, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, William Cowper, Daniel Defoe, Euclid, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Gray, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope and much of Shakespeare. In 2010, Bray published Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press), in which he writes:

 

“From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself.”

 

Bray emphasizes that Lincoln as an adult read “deeply rather than broadly.” In his own words, he went to school “by littles” and his reading was full of holes, but he read deliberately and what he read he remembered. He read like a writer – learning, testing, gleaning, absorbing, assimilating. Serious writers, when they read, are always weighing and assessing: “This works. This I can use. Forget that.”

 

Lincoln’s mind was deeply analytical, coupled with a gift for pithily articulating his thoughts – essential gifts for a successful lawyer and an embodiment of the democratic ideal. In his “Introductory,” Wells describes his guide as “a book that everybody can understand, and that will enable every man or woman to be his or her own lawyer.”