`To Oneself at Night'

I’ve heard fiction writers of varying levels of accomplishment read their work aloud – William Gaddis, Stephen Millhauser, John Gardner, Chinua Achebe, Peter Taylor, William Gass, John Hawkes, Ralph Ellison, Cynthia Ozick, William Kennedy, Robert Coover, Anthony Burgess, Jerzy Kosinski, Guy Davenport (the last was a private reading with an audience of one) -- and none was memorable as a self-contained literary event. Reading aloud added little or nothing to my solitary experience of the text, even when I was pleased to share the company of writers, several of whom I admired. Prose as performance, I've concluded, is a species of show business – sometimes enjoyable but not as literature, despite Dickens’ fabled readings. The same goes for recordings. Joyce reading from “Anna Livia Plurabelle” highlights the humor and musicality of the words, and simply hearing his nimble tenor is a thrill, but my understanding has not deepened. Imagine Henry James reading aloud from The Golden Bowl. 

Two explanations come to mind. Writers, probably at a higher proportion than in the general population, are exhibitionists. They shamelessly seek attention. In their minds, a reading is not about the words on the page but about the one who arranged those words. For that segment of the audience to whom the prose is the focus, the result is embarrassment shading into boredom, and the writer will play to the groupies in the crowd. Secondly, I suspect prose is private, the writing and the reading of it. It’s intimate, conducted in an autonomous theater of the mind with a tight spotlight, with all the special effects supplied by the reader’s memory and imagination. Henry Green is one of my favorite writers of fiction, one whose prose is made for pondering, though hardly to everyone’s taste. Here’s a pertinent passage from his memoir, Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940): 

“Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself at night, and it is not quick as poetry, but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of stone.”

That last is a bit much, a bathetic stretch unworthy of Green at his best. Tears belong in and near eyes, not in stones, but I won’t forget that “long intimacy between strangers.”

`In Close Conversation With the Old Cat'

Relax, suspend disbelief and imagine you have just opened a letter from an old friend that begins with these words: 

“It is a sort of paradox, but it is true: we are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure; nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger. Both sides of this apparent contradiction were lately verified in my experience.” 

Depending on the friend we might judge this a mild indulgence in Chestertonian paradox or an ironic sabotage of same. Is our friend being clever or mocking the sort of cleverness that blurs into sententiousness? Hard to say. Let our friend continue: 

“Passing from the greenhouse to the barn I saw three kittens (for we have so many in our retinue) looking with a fixt attention at something which lay on the threshold of a door nailed up. I took but little notice of them at first, but a loud hiss engaged me to attend more closely, when behold -- a viper! the largest I remember to have seen, rearing itself, darting its forked tongue, and ejaculating the aforementioned hiss at the nose of a kitten, almost in contact with his lips.” 

Now he has our attention. Our correspondent has a story to tell, and a rather good one, and he knows how to milk the suspense. Will the snake bite a kitten? Try to swallow it? Will the kittens maul the snake? What does this have to do with our previously mentioned complacency when it comes to security? Keep reading: 

“I ran into the hall for a hoe with a long handle with which I intended to assail him, and returning in a few seconds, missed him. He was gone, and I feared had escaped me. Still however the kittens sat watching immoveably upon the same spot. I concluded therefore that sliding between the door and the threshold he had found his way out of the garden into the yard.” 

Our friend knows how to tell a story in words cinematically, one frame after another. This is how we’ve learned to pace our storytelling, seamlessly juxtaposing scenes and points of view. Next scene: 

“I went round immediately, and there found him in close conversation with the Old Cat, whose curiosity being excited by so novel an appearance, inclined her to pat his head repeatedly with her forefoot, with her claws however sheathed, and not in anger, but in the way of philosophical enquiry and examination. To prevent her falling a victim to so laudable an exercise of her talents, I interposed in a moment with the hoe, and performed upon him an act of decapitation, which though not immediately mortal, proved so in the end.” 

Our friend is a subtle comedian whose humor is linguistic – “in the way of philosophical enquiry and examination.” He reminds us of A.J. Liebling, who referred to heavyweight boxing as “the laying-on of hands” and described Archie Moore as “a late-maturing artist, like Laurence Sterne and Stendhal.” And how does our friend know his chop of the hoe blade was “not immediately mortal?” He concludes: 

“Had he slid into the passages, where it is dark, or had he, when in the yard, met with no interruption from the cat, and secreted himself in any of the outhouses, it is hardly possible but that some of the family must have been bitten; he might have been trodden upon without being perceived, and have slipped away before the sufferer could have distinguished what foe had wounded him. Three years ago we discovered one in the same place, which the barber slew with a trowel.” 

So our friend’s caution against delusive security was not ironic. We have reason to be careful. As a serious and deeply emotional Christian, we know our friend may harbor primal fears regarding serpents. We’re grateful for the otherwise unidentified  barber, but wonder what he was doing with a trowel. Our friend is William Cowper, the poet and hymnist, writing to his friend the Rev. William Unwin on Aug. 3, 1782. Cowper didn’t leave the story there, though he probably should have. He also turned it into a mock-heroic poem, “The Colubriad” (meaning, roughly, “snake-saga”), a bit of doggerel about cats.

`Many Forgotten Human Curiosities'

Andrew Rickard at Graveyard Masonry has posted an excerpt from a book previously unknown to me (as most of his books are, for which I’m grateful) that might have been lifted from my life forty years ago. E.M. Martin in Wayside Wisdom: A Book for Quiet People (Longmans, Green & Co., 1920) describes an old woman “in Workhouse bonnet and shawl” who furtively reads Pascal's Pensées while standing in front of a second-hand bookshop, “lost to the noise of the street or the mud that splashed upon the pavement.” In 1975, I worked for nine months as a clerk in Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue in Cleveland. Eight years ago, shortly after launching Anecdotal Evidence, I wrote about the experience, and just two weeks ago I received a comment on the post (eight in eight years!) from a former Kay’s patron. 

Most days I worked on the second floor, a sprawling arrangement of tables and shelves holding Mrs. Kay’s stock of science fiction and mysteries, veterinary medicine, political science, mathematics, The Anarchist Cookbook, biography, Civil War history, economics, pharmacology and Iceberg Slim novels. Martin’s anecdote reminded me of two customers, both deserving of remembrance and understanding. The first was a young black man usually dressed in checkered bell-bottoms, platform shoes, turtleneck and knit cap, even in summer. His efforts to appear cool and street-smart were no match for his drug habit. He twitched and sweated and always looked worried. Mrs. Kay never disguised her contempt for blacks of any variety, let alone junkies, and if our patron slipped past her perch on the first floor and walked the long concrete stairway to the second, he was safe for a little while and would stand by one of the rotating display stands and read Iceberg Slim, sometimes for an hour or more, until his connection arrived. They would retire to a far corner, invisible to us, and conduct their transaction. The young man never caused a problem. We never suspected him of theft, spoke to him or learned his name. He wanted to read Iceberg Slim and get high. 

The other memory concerns a man whose name I do remember, though I won’t use it. He was fifty-ish, white (exceedingly pale, in fact), and always dressed in suit and tie, rain coat and homburg. In profile he reminded me of an anemic Dick Tracy, and he might have passed for an insurance agent or Methodist minister. He was expressionless and never made eye contact. I didn’t mention that much of the second floor at Kay’s was taken up with stacks of old magazines and the pornography section. The latter consisted largely of racks of paperback books subdivided into genres (B&D, S&M, shemales, enemas, etc.). This was uncharted territory and made me squeamish. Our man in the rain coat, who always arrived mid-afternoon, went to the bins of old skin magazines from the fifties and sixties – softcore, black and white, and always rather sad. There he would spend an hour or so, leafing through the pages, murmuring and, as he grew more agitated, hitting himself on the chest and face. He never bought anything and seldom spoke with anyone other than himself. We left him alone, partly out of fear, I suppose, but occasionally Mrs. Kay would come upstairs and chase him out of the store.

Based on Andrew’s post, I took Wayside Wisdom from the library. In the first sentence, Martin speaks well of “that greatly abused person, the wayside tramp.” I know nothing else about Martin, who seems to be a more wistful, genteel descendent of greater forebears, Cobbett and Borrow. Think of the young man and the middle-aged man in the bookstore forty years ago when reading this sentence, the one that immediately precedes the passage selected by Andrew: “For through the doorway of such shops pass, in the slow procession of the years, many forgotten human curiosities; and the seller, waiting expectant among the books he has learned to love, never knows to what strange adventure the day may not give birth.”

`Not the Same as Shallowness'

In his three-part essay “Inside the Whale” (1940), George Orwell looks first at Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a self-indulgent mess that seemed racy to bookish boys of my generation. Today, Miller’s prose possesses the discouraging properties once attributed to saltpeter. In the guise of a book review, Orwell’s essay looks at trends in English-language literature published between the end of World War I and the start of World War II. When I first read it in 1968, I was still a year away from reading Miller (in the pulpy, smudged Grove Press edition), but I had read A.E. Housman, Orwell’s next subject, thanks to my eighth-grade Latin and English teacher, Miss Clymer. Her timing was perfect. On one hand, I fell for the seductive melancholy of A Shropshire Lad, as only a thirteen-year-old can. On the other, I also fell for the deceptive simplicity and music of Housman’s lines, the way they make sadness seem almost jolly, and was moved to memorize some of my favorites. He was one of those poets who made me think (wrongly) that even I could write poetry. Orwell quotes LIV, “With rue my heart is laden,” and writes: “It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the bubble always burst?” 

Fortunately, it doesn’t always. Kingsley Amis provocatively named Housman his favorite poet. If not my favorite – not even close, in fact – Housman remains on the short list of poets I’m frequently rereading, dipping into as inspiration strikes. Shropshire becomes a familiar neighborhood in one’s imaginative landscape. Sensibly, Orwell says, “There is no need to under-rate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago.” Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) in "The Tragi-Comedy of A. E. Housman” eludes that tempting trap: 

“There is no great originality of thought in Housman. That is to say there are no underlying insights that have never been expressed before; but the demand that there should be such would have silenced all poets since Shakespeare at the latest. A lack of originality is not the same as shallowness. And similar deep emotions are capable of an infinite variety of expression. Indeed, that is one of the tests of their depth.” 

Daniels here reclaims vast swathes of poetry disinherited by the deep-thinkers of literature. Consider the critical reputations today of Cowper, Gray (mentioned later by Daniels), Tennyson, Chesterton and de la Mare, among many others. All wrote too much and too hastily, and all in their best lines are profoundly moving. Daniels is correct to see in Housman’s “strangely consolatory bleakness” a kinship with Larkin, who judged Housman “the poet of unhappiness,” a title Larkin might have claimed as his own. As he said in his 1979 interview with the Observer: 

“It’s very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable. And I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any – after all most people are unhappy, don’t you think?” 

When it doesn’t tip into self-pity, and when it hints at some of Larkin’s comic delectation of unhappiness, Housman’s rendering of low-grade melancholia, along with his flawless technique, is the source of his poetry’s perennial re-readability. He skirts aloofness on one side and tearjerking on the other.  Daniels is aware that such nuances are alien to most contemporary poets and their readers: 

“His reticence about himself (in part, of course, the consequence of his homosexuality) was famed. Nothing could be more remote from him than a fashion for incontinent public confessional which combines exhibitionistic frankness with moral and other forms of dishonesty. But it was his reticence that enabled him to sublimate his powerful emotion into poetry that struck a universal, or at least a very common, chord. If he had either wanted or been able to express his emotion outwardly, he would not have been able to write his poetry—or at least not the poetry that he did write.”

`O My Onely Light'

That the band performed “I Saw the Light” was no surprise, even in a church sanctuary during Mass: 

“I was a fool to wander and a-stray
Straight is the gate and narrow the way
Now I have traded the wrong for the right
Praise the lord I saw the light.” 

Even “Your Cheatin’ Heart” has what we might stretch and call a subtext of sin and suffering: 

“When tears come down,
Like falling rain,
You'll toss around,
And call my name,
You'll walk the floor,
The way I do,
Your cheatin' heart, will tell on you.” 

But the rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Houston felt moved to offer a throat-clearing apology in advance for “Hey, Good Lookin’”: 

“Hey, hey, good lookin’,
Whatcha got cookin’?
How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?
Hey, sweet baby,
Don't you think maybe
We could find us a brand new recipe?” 

Trinity billed the show as a “Big Country Mass,” complete with a six-piece band (including fiddle and steel guitar) performing much of the Hank Williams songbook (though not my favorite among his lyrics: “Well, I don't care who thinks we’re silly / You be daffy, I’ll be dilly / Well order up two bowls of chili, / Settin' the woods on fire”). We left the church in the company of a retired physician who celebrated his ninetieth birthday last week. As I helped him with his raincoat he said, “We could have had that service in that vacant lot over there,” and I’m not certain if he approved of Hank Williams in church or not.  After all, we know George Herbert could testify, if not exactly honky-tonk, and we know he saw the light: 

“And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

             I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing: O my onely light,

                                      It cannot be

                                      That I am he

             On whom thy tempests fell all night.”

`But Happiness Rarely Stays in Place'

“Nothing will come and steal from us this hour
unless it’s our nagging, aggravating will
to think of things always as worse than they are”

The student was unhappy, and enthusiastically happy to tell me all about it. He came to my office for other reasons but his need to share news of his unhappiness took over. A thumbnail sketch: Exceptionally bright, gifted in mathematics and computer science, articulate, neat and well-groomed, conspicuously good teeth, impatient for success in business, convinced his parents and teachers failed to appreciate his destiny and were conspiring to sabotage his future. Without hesitation he said (verbatim – I wrote it down): “Everybody’s trying to make me unhappy.” He hinted that their motive was jealousy.

I’m no counselor. In this case, I wasn’t even much of a sympathetic listener, though I kept my thoughts to myself.  What impressed me was his conviction that he was entitled to happiness, that it was his birthright as a very bright fellow, and that others were out to deny him that right. Boswell reports Dr. Johnson saying: “That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.” This young man, I’m certain, never forgets himself, even for a little while. A wise old man once told me when I was whining about something that happiness is never the goal. Rather, it’s the occasional byproduct of living correctly. Striving after it virtually assures its elusiveness.

“But happiness rarely stays in place. These are
the happiest days.”

The quoted lines are from “These Are the Happiest Days” by Erica McAlpine in the March issue of The New Criterion.

`By Any Man in Virtue of His Badness'

I came to Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) indirectly, by way of a more interesting writer, Herman Melville. I had never read Carlyle in school and he seemed more remote and alien, as many Victorians and late Romantics do, than the great writers of the previous century. But Melville had read Sartor Resartus (1831), and its thick rhetoric added a pinch of ponderous humor to the recipe that eventually became Moby-Dick (1851). According to his biographer Hershel Parker, Melville also read On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) “for a sardonic verbal playfulness and a depiction of the physical universe as emblematical, but also for the depiction of Cromwell, which gave him hints for his tyrannical captain.” One of this blog’s readers thought I might be interested in what Carlyle had to say about another Scotsman, one I admire, James Boswell, and he sent me an excerpt from Carlyle’s 1832 review of a new five-volume edition of the Life of Johnson, edited by John Wilson Croker. My reader writes: 

“…the usually fulminating Carlyle admits that Boswell’s book about Johnson is a masterpiece in spite of Boswell’s flaws, not because of them. In the end Boswell possessed talent and skill (always a good thing for a writer to have), and he had what Carlyle called the most important virtue: Reverence. In this case reverence for Johnson. We know how gnarled and knotted Carlyle’s prose can be, though, to me, a short excursion into Carlyle land can be invigorating. I actually laughed when I read some of the words and phrases Carlyle uses to describe Boswell, his description having a Shakespearean rowdiness about it, as Hal having a go at Falstaff.” 

“Fulminating” is apt. Carlyle could be disproportionately ferocious. Consider this, from a Nov. 2, 1831, entry in his Notebooks: 

“Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom fool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms, and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for: more like a convulsion fit than natural systole and diastole. Besides he is now a confirmed shameless drunkard: asks vehemently for gin-and-water in strangers' houses; tipples until he is utterly mad, and is only not thrown out of doors because he is too much despised for taking such trouble with him. Poor Lamb! Poor England where such a despicable abortion is named genius!” 

One can hardly imagine two specimens of Homo sapiens less compatible. Carlyle turned sputtering rage into an art form, while Lamb boasted: “Anything awful makes me laugh.” On another occasion, Carlyle referred to Lamb and his sister Mary as “a very sorry pair of phenomena” and characterized Charles’ conversation as “diluted insanity” and the man himself as an “emblem of imbecility bodily and spiritually.” Interesting that Melville acknowledged his fondness for both writers. Of course, Carlyle may have known that Lamb affected to hate Scots, rather in the manner of Dr. Johnson. Three months before his first meeting with Carlyle, in 1821, Lamb had published “Imperfect Sympathies,” later included in Essays of Elia (1823). In it he writes: “I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.” Elia/Lamb maintains that all the “Caledonians” he has known are what we might call “black-and-white thinkers”: 

“Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him--for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong.” 

Sound familiar? Lamb could be a shrewd judge of character. But then, so could Carlyle, if the subject was right. Here he is on Boswell, mixing brimstone and honey, but acknowledging his gift as a writer, author of the supreme biography in the language: 

“His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthly in him, are so many blemishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but Reverence, which is the highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have found his way from Boswell's environment to Johnson's: if such worship for real God-made superiors showed itself also as worship for apparent Tailor-made superiors, even as hollow interested mouth-worship for such, the case, in this composite human nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity! But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last article of Faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worth the name: That neither James Boswell's good Book, nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof.” 

A wise reminder. Our natures are contradictory. The best among us may produce nothing of worth and some of the worst are touched by genius.