`His Page Is Always Luminous'

“Johnson’s main criterion for judging the worth of a writer is: Does the writer have a knowledge of the heart, by which he means the passions that animate man?”

It’s a good point Stephen Miller makes in an essay published in the Winter 1999 issue of The Sewanee Review, “Why Read Samuel Johnson?” In his “Life of Addison,” Johnson says: “He had read with critical eyes the important volume of human life, and knew the heart of man from the depths of stratagem to the surface of affectation.” It’s a metaphor that comes naturally to Johnson: Man is a book to be read and understood. The wise writer – Addison, for instance – has made a study of humanity. He perceives the subtexts and isn’t taken in by the amusing cover. We come to trust a wise writer even when his life off the page is dubious or repellent. Think of Evelyn Waugh.  

Along with Johnson’s “main criterion” goes another, comparably rare quality: the ability to write clearly, vividly and forcefully. (Again, Waugh, the finest prose writer of the last century, comes to mind.) When writers are indifferent to their medium, even attentive readers will give up on them. Here is Johnson on Addison:

“His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not groveling; pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. Addison never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous [Waugh], but never blazes in unexpected splendour.”

From a credulous writer, one for whom theory displaces knowledge, we can expect only silliness. As Miller writes, “Johnson’s best writing still holds its power because it reveals a profound understanding of the perplexity of man’s contending passions.” On this date, Sept. 23, in 1758, Johnson takes on one of his favorite subjects, friendship in The Idler #23:

“The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.—Those who are angry may be reconciled; those who have been injured may receive a recompense: but when the desire of pleasing and willingness to be pleased is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless; as, when the vital powers sink into languor, there is no longer any use of the physician.”

`Attention to the Minutiae of Life and Manners'

A capsule job description for any writer worthy of being read: “Such was his attention to the minutiae of life and manners.” Avoid the heady stuff that invites pomposity. Stick to life as lived, not life as cerebrated. Ford writes about Christopher Tietjens, not geopolitics. The Golden Bowl recounts human selfishness and deceit, not the capitalist patriarchy. Larkin articulated it in his defense of Barbara Pym and her novels:

“I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in the little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ‘big’ experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour.”

The source of the sentence quoted at the top is James Boswell, speaking of Dr. Johnson on this date, Sept. 22, in 1777. As usual, Boswell is baiting his friend, this time regarding a Mrs. Macaulay. Elsewhere in the Life, Johnson dismisses her as “a great republican,” a defender of “the levelling doctrine,” like one of today’s “inequality” obsessives. Johnson resists Boswell’s efforts to instigate a debate between him and Macaulay, and says, prudently, “. . . no man has a right to engage two people in a dispute by which their passions may be inflamed, and they may part with bitter resentment against each other.”

Johnson goes on to complain of a mutual acquaintance who “keeps a bad table.” We all know the type – chintzy when it comes to supplying guests with food and drink. Sensibly, Johnson says, “`every body loves to have things which please the palate put in their way, without trouble or preparation.’ Such was his attention to the minutiae of life and manners.”

Johnson continues in what Coleridge called his “bow wow manner,” but clearly he is having a good, provocative time. Unlike bores, Johnson is enjoying what a musician might call modulating his dynamics. He can speak out of genuine anger, and then slip into an ironic, self-amusing register his opponent is likely not to recognize. After all, eviscerating cranks is one of the supreme pleasures society affords us, whether or not they appreciate it. Boswell notes of his friend: “Johnson seemed to be more uniformly social, cheerful, and alert, than I had almost ever seen him. He was prompt on great occasions and on small.” In keeping with his “bow wow manner,” Johnson enters into an amusing debate over the ideal shape of a bulldog. He even throws in a stereotypically Latinate Johnsonian word and promptly translates it into plain English: “TENUITY— the thin part.” Unexpectedly, Boswell offers a moving apologia for his devotion to Johnson, “the minutiae of life and manners,” and his project:

“I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost. Though a small particular may appear trifling to some, it will be relished by others; while every little spark adds something to the general blaze: and to please the true, candid, warm admirers of Johnson, and in any degree increase the splendour of his reputation, I bid defiance to the shafts of ridicule, or even of malignity.”

`Human Work, Human Presence'

Houston is forever defacing itself with newness. Nothing here feels old. A bank I watched being built twelve years ago has been torn down and hauled off in a day, and the beams for a new bank are already stacked on the site. My car drowned on the first night of Hurricane Harvey. I had it towed to a mechanic’s shop, he declared it “DNR” and gave me $200. He has already sold it for parts. One day I was driving my reliable, ten-year-old car; the next, it was being cannibalized.

In “Two Books” (Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, 1995), Adam Zagajewski praises a book of essays by one of his mentors, Zbigniew Herbert: Barbarian in the Garden (trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985).

“Herbert speaks of old paintings with the greatest love. It is a love that extends to the entire world of objects bearing traces of human work, human presence. The stone steps into which passersby have pressed the delicate arches of erosion. The smiles of medieval angels. But also the little café in Siena, benches, homes, squares.”

Herbert’s essays are based on his visits to France and Italy from his native Poland in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Herbert is almost giddy with the history that suffuses everything he sees. “. . . his feelings about history—and historicism—are unusually tender,” Zagajewski writes. “Historical memory, and especially the loveliest component of it, which have been preserved in works of art, is something absolutely vivifying.” Here, from Herbert’s chapter titled “Siena,” is the café mentioned by Zagajewski:

“A low, sombre hallway leads into a café. Instead of doors, strings of wooden beads rattle pleasantly under my touch. The padrone greets me as if we were old school-mates. Wonderful, aromatic cappuccino pours brightness into one’s head and makes one’s limbs recover from tiredness. The padrone recounts a story with an intricate plot sprinkled with numbers. I understand little but listen with pleasure, though the tale may concern his financial ruin. However it is difficult to sense a drama beyond these childish sounds: diciotto, cinque, cinquanta, settanta.”

It’s hard to love plastic, glass and chrome – the surfaces of our world, at once disposable and permanent. Wood and stone feel welcoming. The stone steps in the oldest building on my campus, Lovett Hall, built in 1911, are warn smoothly concave by generations of students and staff, speaking not on the geological but the human scale. A colleague, Argentinian by birth, recently visited Greece for the first time. While climbing the Acropolis, she felt humbled by its age compared to anything in Buenos Aires or Houston. I remember hiking near Chambéry (birthplace of Joseph de Maistre) in the French Alps on a summer day in 1973. I was hot and sweaty and wanted to sit in the shade. On the side of the road was a small structure that resembled a bus stop made of stone. I sat, cooled off and enjoyed the view. Only later did I learn my bus stop was part of a Carolingian crypt, built, as I recall, in the ninth century.

`Who For the Rapier Drop the Cudgell'

In 1858, Walter Savage Landor published a collection of epigrams he titled Dry Sticks, Fagoted. Please understand that fagoted (or faggoted) refers to sticks bundled or bound together for use as fuel. I remember our tenth-grade giggles over all the attention devoted to “gathering faggots” in The Return of the Native. Landor’s title is self-deprecatingly perfect. In his brief preface he writes:

“Among the Dry Sticks many are so slender that they seem to have been cut after a few years’ growth; others are knottier and more gnarled than are usually carried to market, but give out great heat and burn longer . . . . Here are light matters within; twigs, broken buds, and moss: but who, in taking up a volume, has not sometimes had reason to complain of a quality the reverse of lightness? and who is ignorant that the lightest is the best part of many?”

I’m reading the epigrams as collected in Vol. VIII of the nine-volume Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (1876). Only one do I remember reading before:

“Around the child bend all the three

Sweet Graces: Faith, Hope, Charity.

Around the man bend other faces;

Pride, Envy, Malice, are his Graces.”

Landor can be grim-minded, and some would say cynical, so he is well-suited to the writing of epigrams. There’s little sweetness in him, or happy talk. He was hot-headed and contentious, given to tantrums. He possessed the gift of offending almost everyone he met, though Carlyle, who knew bile and crankiness when he saw it, perceived in Landor “stirring company: a proud irascible, trenchant, yet generous, veracious, and very dignified old man.” In “Old-Fashioned Verse,” Landor traces his poetic family tree:

“In verse alone I ran not wild

When I was hardly more than child,

Contented with the native lay

Of Pope or Prior, Swift or Gay,

Or Goldsmith, or that graver bard

Who led me to the lone church-yard.

Then listened I to Spenser’s strain,

Till Chaucer’s Canterbury train

Came trooping past, and carried me

In more congenial company.

Soon my soul was hurried o’er

This bright scene: the `solemn roar’

Of organ, under Milton’s hand,

Struck me mute: he bade me stand

Where none other ambled near . . .

I obey’d, with love and fear.”

In Landor: A Replevin (1958), Malcolm Elwin reports the poet first wished to call his volume of epigrams Dry Leaves, and then Dry Sticks Fagoted by the late Walter Savage Landor, though he lived for another six years after publication. For some of the poems in Dry Sticks he was sued for libel, prompting him to return to Italy for the remainder of his life. Landor could never walk away from a fight, or he walked away too late. His wit was savage and often amusing, though he knew little of moderation or tact. Here is “My Wit Scanty”:

“I have but little wit, all they

Whose brains are close and curdy say;

They relish best the broadfaced jokes

Of hearty, burly, country-folks,

And are quite certain those must judge ill

Who for the rapier drop the cudgell [sic].”

      

I’m reminded of another gifted writer of epigrams, R.L. Barth, whose “Don't You Know Your Poems are Hurtful?” is collected in Deeply Dug In (2003):

“Yes, ma’am. Like KA-BAR to the gut,

Well-tempered wit should thrust and cut

Before the victim knows what’s what;

But sometimes, lest the point be missed,

I give the bloody blade a twist.”  

`Aye Better Than the Chilly Green of Spring'

“It is picture and no more.”

What an odd thing to say about a poem, even one written by an Imagist. In fact the observation was made by an Imagist about a sturdily non-Imagistic poem, John Keats’ “To Autumn.” You’ll find it in Amy Lowell’s two-volume biography of the poet, John Keats (1925). Lowell is quite smitten by Keats, but about the ode she writes:

“Its emotion, so far as it has any, is the mere delight of sensation received through the eyes, ears, nose, and even touch, the touch of wind and sun on an eager skin. To Autumn is an almost completely impersonal poem. The poet himself is merely an exquisitely sensitive recording medium. The charm of the poem lies in just this fact, that nothing comes between us and the day Keats wished us to see. There are no echoes, no literary images, all is clear, single, and perfectly attuned.”

One seldom encounters so blindly mistaken a reading of a poem. Lowell seems to unquestioningly accept the Romantic claptrap about inspiration. That Keats was inspired, I have no doubt. That he labored at his ode and didn’t merely transcribe it from on high is also true. On this date, Sept. 19, in 1819, Keats wrote “To Autumn,” the last and greatest of his odes. That day he had walked along the River Itchen near Winchester. Two days later, in a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, he describes the experience:

“How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now – Aye better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.”

That is, he wrote “To Autumn.” Keats was not yet twenty-four years old, and would be dead in another seventeen months. It is his last indisputably great poem, and is in no way “impersonal.” My favorite memory from my return to the university to complete my B.A. occurred in the fall of 2002. I was doing independent study in Henry James. My professor’s office was on the third floor of a building in upstate New York, on a campus thick with red and black oaks. Most of the leaves had turned dark red. We chatted about the view and she recited the opening line of the ode, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” I joined her and promptly garbled the final two words: “fruitful mellowness.” I mentioned that Nathan Zuckerman quotes the poem in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and we resumed, limping through the rest of the poem, filling in when the other blanked on the next phrase, getting only the first stanza complete.

`Pigwiggen Was This Fayrie Knight'

One of the great charms of our language is the mystery of so many word origins. When I was young and reading the Oxford English Dictionary, and happened on the phrase “origin unknown,” I felt cheated. I was naïve, and assumed all knowledge was rooted in mathematical certainty. I deferred disproportionately to authorities. Now that I know even less about the world, and little with certainty of any sort, I admire honestly earned expressions of ignorance.  

Consider pigwidgeon. The unholy union of a pig, a pigeon and a widget? A marker in some obscure game? Perhaps one of those faintly comic words, like thingamajig, for an object forgotten or defying description. The OED pleads ignorance but speculates that the first syllable comes from pug, meaning “a term of endearment for a person” (and later, prostitute). The first definition of pigwidgeon is “fairy, dwarf, imp, or elf.” The second, labeled “derogatory,” is “a small or insignificant person or thing; a stupid or contemptible person.” (We’ll never run out of uses for that.)

I consulted the OED this time by way of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. His definition of pigwidgeon amounts to a one-sentence essay: “This word is used by Drayton as the name of a fairy, and is a kind of cant word for anything petty or small.” The OED cites Michael Drayton’s “Nymphidia” (1627): “Pigwiggen was this Fayrie knight, / One wondrous gratious in the sight / Of faire Queene Mab, which day and night, / He amorously obserued.”

This writer longs to find the appropriate context for such a delicious word. Also, for the word that precedes it in Johnson’s Dictionary: pigsney. His definition, ripe with misunderstanding: “A word of endearment to a girl.”

Dr. Johnson was born on this date, Sept. 18, in 1709. 

`Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur'

My review of Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study by Robert Bagg and Mary Bagg appears in issue #49 of The Quarterly Conversation.

`We Are Alone'

On this date, Sept. 17, in 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany invaded the country from the west. The invasion had been secretly agreed upon less than a month earlier with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by Oct. 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Zbigniew Herbert published “September 17” in Paris in 1982, during the rise of Solidarity, when Poland was yet again threatened with invasion from the east. Herbert dedicates the poem to Józef Czapski, who survived the Katyn massacre in 1940 and whose memoir, The Inhuman Land, was published in English in 1951. Here is “September 17” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, Report from the Besieged City, 1985):

“My defenseless country will admit you invader

where Jaś and Mary went walking to school

the path won’t be split into an abyss

“Rivers are too lazy not quick to flood

knights sleeping in the mountains continue to sleep

so you will enter easily uninvited guest

“But sons of the earth will gather at night

funny carbonari plotters of freedom

they will clean old-fashioned weapons

will swear on a bird on two colors

“And then as always—glows and explosions

boys like children sleepless commanders

knapsacks filled with defeat crimson fields of glory

the strengthening knowledge—we are alone

“My defenseless country will admit you invader

and give you a plot of earth under a willow—and peace

so those who come after us will learn again

the most difficult art—the forgiveness of sins”

In their notes to the poem, the Carpenters report: “The carbonari were a secret political association organized in Italy in the nineteenth century to establish a republic.”