Anecdotal Evidence

Stalin is widely assumed to have said “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” though scholars can’t agree on the authenticity of the quotation. Its Wildean cynicism has always seemed too mannered, too polished, for the thug from Georgia, and who can imagine the “one man” whose demise Stalin might have honored as tragedy?

Morbid fascination led to me recall Stalin’s quip. I visited a Communist blog, which led me to another, and another, into a moral vortex. The technical quality of the writing varied, from rabid to academically congealed to eerily civilized and grammatically correct, but the themes remained consistent: Capitalism, imperialism, the United States and Israel -- bad; Marx, Muslims, the proletariat, sometimes Lenin, sometimes Mao, one time Stalin – good. I’m not as naïve as I was a few years ago but the experience was like learning the smallpox bacillus had spontaneously reappeared in the human population. The nadir, or one of the deeper nadirs, came when a self-described Marxist-Leninist mutated Stalin’s formulation and said the death of “Palestinian civilians” was a “tragedy” and the death of Israelis was a “necessity.”

A man who knew the blessings of the worker’s paradise first-hand, whose life was cut short by it, was Zbigniew Herbert, who at least had the satisfaction of outliving the Soviet Union. I wonder if he had Stalin’s one-liner in mind when he wrote “Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter):

“On the front page
a report of the killing of 120 soldiers

“the war lasted a long time
you could get used to it

“close alongside
the news of a sensational crime
with a portrait of the murderer

“the eye of Mr Cogito
slips indifferently
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with delight
into the description of everyday horror

“a thirty-year-old farm labourer
under the stress of nervous depression
killed his wife
and two small children

“it is described with precision
the course of the murder
the position of the bodies
and other details

“for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain

“too great a distance
covers them like a jungle

“they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction

“a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion”

It sounds like a grotesque joke: How many Israeli deaths does it take for a Marxist-Leninist to calculate “the arithmetic of compassion?”

In our hotel room at Lake Chelan, on the wall across from our bed, hung what appeared to be a reproduction of a painting by Richard Diebenkorn. There was no signature and the frame was sealed to the wall so I couldn’t examine the back, but it looked convincingly like a painting from the “Ocean Park” series – irregular pastel grids, like landscapes viewed from the air. It resembled this. I assume it was either a Diebenkorn reproduction or an anonymous ripoff of his style. Either way, I enjoyed its company.

Since returning home, while reading more about Diebenkorn and looking at his paintings, I came across two sentences reportedly scrawled on a scrap of paper and found in the artist’s California studio after his death in 1993, age 70. I haven’t documented the source but even if it’s apocryphal it’s intriguing and worthy of contemplation – like the painting in the motel room:

“I seem to have to do it elaborately wrong and with many conceits first. Then maybe I can attack and deflate my pomposity and arrive at something straight and simple.”

These are not the words of a young man. They have none of the willfulness, self-indulgence and impatience of youth, even brilliant youth. They reflect a full life’s experience, its dead ends, flops, erasures, detours, the inevitable depression and self-loathing, at least in passing – but not defeat or surrender. We could learn from them, especially from “elaborately wrong,” which is how many of us wrote and lived when young, congratulating our daring and individuality while slavishly serving the Zeitgeist.

At Lake Chelan I was reading the poems of Janet Lewis and her husband, Yvor Winters. The latter’s “To a Young Writer” seems apposite, in particular the final quatrain:

“Write little; do it well.
Your knowledge will be such,
At last, as to dispel
What moves you overmuch.”

Knowledge (experience) tempers emotional over-indulgence -- “What moves you overmuch.” The risk, of course, is over-compensation in the other direction, turning cold and sterile. In his note to the poem in The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters, R.L. Barth points out the poem was dedicated to Achilles Holt (1911-1993), a poet, fiction writer and student of Winters’. Barth writes: “Holt’s writing career ended relatively early with the onset of severe mental illness.” Yet he lived to the age of 82.

For what it’s worth, Diebenkorn, Lewis and Winters lived much of their lives in California, though none was a native, and all were associated with Stanford University.

It’s July in Helkovo, a dusty resort town in Russia, where Pavel Matveyitch Zaikin steps off the train with others, “mostly fathers of families,” Chekhov tells us. He is “perspiring, red in the face, and gloomy.” Zaikin is a lawyer, joining his wife and son at their summer villa. We know him from Gogol and Dickens – an irritable little man whose only pleasure is complaining. “I maintain, sir,” he tells a fellow traveler (dressed in “ginger trousers”), “that summer holidays are the invention of the devil and of woman.”

Only Petya, his 6-year-old son, is home. His wife, Nadyezhda [Hope] Stepanova, and her friend, Olga Kirillovna, have gone to rehearse a play. Petya collects insects and is full of questions about gnats. In a brilliant image, Chekhov has Petya give his father a box out of which comes the sound of buzzing and scratching:

“Opening the lid, he saw a number of butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and flies fastened to the bottom of the box with pins. All except two or three butterflies were still alive and moving.”

Pavel Matveyitch has already made his son cry and called him “a horrid little pig.” When he asks Petya who taught him to pin insects, he answers it was his mother’s friend. “Olga Kirillovna ought to be pinned down like that herself!...It’s shameful to torture animals,” he says.

The mother and her friend return in the company of two men who are also in the play. Pavel Matveyitch complains when she wishes to serve them “vodka and savouries.” Alone in his study he drinks tea and eats “a whole French loaf,” though he takes no pleasure in food or drink, nor does he kiss or embrace his wife and son. He feels no jealousy about the actors rehearsing with his wife and staying overnight in their villa -- merely irritation. His son asks more questions about insects and Pavel Matveyitch tells him to shut up. Finally, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, he walks outside and meets “Ginger Trousers,” his companion on the train, who says, “I am enjoying Nature.” His mother-in-law and nieces have arrived, and he is happy. “And you, too,” he asks, “are enjoying Nature?” Pavel Matveyitch agrees that he is and asks Ginger Trousers if he knows where he can find a tavern.

“Ginger Trousers raised his eyes to heaven and meditated profoundly.”

That’s how “Not Wanted” (in the Constance Garnett translation) concludes inconclusively. The pleasure of the story is in Chekhov’s ability to keep the pot simmering without bringing it to a boil. We’ve all felt like Pavel Matveyitch, and some of us have spoken the way he speaks to his wife and son. He’s not a bully or sadist. He’s quietly, undramatically unhappy, and Chekhov quietly, undramatically balances misery with comedy.

In 2006, theater/film critic Steve Vineberg delivered a lecture, “The Art of Surprise,” at the College of the Holy Cross, later published in The American Scholar. He writes:

“The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgement that we’re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It’s the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov’s stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter’s Tale. It’s the art of surprise, which can only come from the unpredictable—and what I mean by `unpredictable’ isn’t the preposterous (like the twists in M. Night Shmalayan’s movies) but the turn you don’t expect just because it’s so true to life, and life is never predictable, yet when you see it or hear it you think, `Of course.’”

When Pavel Matveyitch, instead of flying into a rage, merely fumes and sputters; and when he rants at his son and apologizes, then rants again; and when he wanders sleeplessly into the summer night, and asks for directions to a tavern and gets profound meditation instead of an answer – that is the surprise that does not surprise, artifice fashioned so subtly as to seem indistinguishable from life: “Of course.”

In his final book, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, completed when he was 88 years old, Viktor Shklovsky writes:

“Chekhov is the most desperate of all writers , he is the most straightforward one.

“He doesn’t want to soften, loosen the threads of life, he doesn’t want to be capable of bending them to make a false happy ending.”

“Nature has no nothing. To feel that it has is what we call the devil, the enemy. In Blakean words, our predicament is that we can exist and still not be, for being requires an awakeness from the dream of custom and of ourselves. The self is by nature turned outward to connect with the harmony of things. The eyes cannot see themselves, but something other. The strange and paradoxical rule of nature is that we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being. To love nothing is to be nothing, to give is to have.”

These sentences by Guy Davenport come near the conclusion of his essay about the American poet Ronald Johnson. Despite repeated tries I’ve been unable to share Davenport’s enthusiasm for Johnson’s work. It leaves me cold. I would never have made even a second attempt to enjoy and understand the poems had a critic other than Davenport spoken so admiringly of them. Even in disagreement, he’s a critic – a reader and teacher – one listens to and learns from. The passage above, which seems quite remarkable in its spirited refutation of solipsism, the postmodern epidemic, is almost an aside, a digression in what is, after all, merely a book review. Davenport could afford to be profligate with his gifts.

The paragraph jibes with everything I know about Davenport the man, his generosity, casual kindness and availability to others. It also resonates with his familiar themes and sources, Herakleitos in particular. Davenport translated the fragments left by the pre-Socratic thinker (in Herakleitos and Diogenes, 1979; later included in 7 Greeks, 1995), and much of his work is suffused with what he calls the “astuteness and comprehensiveness of [Herakleitos’] insight into the order of nature.” One fragment says: “The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen.”

The passage from the Johnson essay reminds me of J.V. Cunningham’s “For a Woman with Child”:

“We are ourselves but carriers. Life
Incipient grows to separateness
And is its own meaning. Life is,
And not; there is no nothingness.”

The choice of a pregnant woman is astute. At no other time is our moral connectedness to the separateness of another so dramatized: “we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being.” Having a child ought to signal the beginning of the end of self-absorption in both mother and father. The entry of a child into the world forever changes that world. Davenport says, “Nature has no nothing;” Cunningham, “there is no nothingness.”

Elsewhere, Davenport writes that Cunningham’s poems “are as well made as wristwatches.”

I don’t know anyone who reads the work of William Gerhardie (1895-1977), an Anglo- Russian writer of the remarkable generation that included Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Edith Wharton was among his champions. Gerhardie was born in St. Petersburg, where he served as a British military attaché during World War I and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution. His best novels – Futility, The Polyglots – have Russian characters, settings and themes. In 1923 he published Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study, the first book not written in Russian devoted to that writer. I wrote about it here.

Now I’m reading Memoirs of a Polyglot, published in 1931 when the author was 36. Gerhardie has a gift for distilled portraiture, for comedy and for treating his remarkable life as nothing out of the ordinary – not in a spirit of false modesty (the book’s first sentence is “Yesterday, at dinner, it suddenly occurred to me what a fine fellow I was.”), but rather in the manner of his master, Chekhov. Another of his incidental gifts is for off-the cuff literary criticism. In describing the departure of a British general with whom he served in Petrograd, Gerhardie writes:

“I was so attached, so devoted to the man that when I was alone in the street I hurried against the biting blizzard, which blinded me as I tore on, and sobbed. And if you think it `unmanly’ of me, let me tell you that the `larme facile’ is again in the fashion. All true humorists, moreover – Dickens, Gogol, Chekhov, Mark Twain, Proust, [Arkady Timofeevich] Averchenko, to name only a few at random – are lachrymose by the natural balance of things.”

The transition from personal anecdote to critical assessment is seamless and shrewd. For Gerhardie to place Proust among the humorists is inspired, and must have surprised his early readers. In the nineteen-twenties, while at Oxford, Gerhardie wrote most of Futility and the Chekhov study, and resisted pressure from classmates to become a Communist. After describing a Red friend’s proselytizing, and his later reconversion to democratic principles, he writes:

“Just as every political party considers itself a `centre-party’ threatened by revolutionaries on the left and reactionaries on the right, so every young writer tends to think his talent is compounded from the choicest ingredients. One hopes – and on what little ground! – that one incorporate the lucid sanity of a Bertrand Russell, without any of his liberal smugness; the bitter incisiveness of Bernard Shaw, without his sterility; the rich humanity of H.G. Wells, without his splashing-over; the analytical profundity of Proust, without his mawkish snobbism; the elemental sweep of D.H. Lawrence, without his gawky bitterness; the miraculous naturalness of Chekhov, without that sorry echo of the consumptive’s cough; the supreme poetic moments of Goethe unimbedded in the suet-pudding of his common day; the intimations without the imbecility of William Wordsworth; the lyrical imagery of Shakespeare, without his rhetoric; the pathological insight of Dostoevski, without his extravagant suspiciousness; the life-imparting breath of Tolstoy, without his foolishness; Turgenev’s purity in reproducing nature, without his sentimentalism; the lyrical power of Pushkin, without his paganism; the elegiac quality of Lermontov, without his `Byronism’; the humour and epic language of Gogol, without his provincialism; the spirit of Voltaire, without his tininess; the human understanding of Dr. Johnson, without his overbearingness; the dash of Byron, without his vanity; the faithful portraiture of Flaubert, without his tortuous fastidiousness. The list could be prolonged.”

There’s much here to quibble with (I’ll take Shakespeare’s rhetoric any day) but if a young writer or reader were to pursue each of Gerhardie’s observations – read the texts and come to his own conclusions – he would possess the rudiments of a first-rate literary education. That seems even less likely than it was in Gerhardie’s day. And here is what he writes in the middle of an assessment of H.G. Wells:

“…there is but one thing an original artist has in common with another – originality…style is the leaves of the tree. No tree, no leaves. A writer’s style is the measure of his personality, and cannot be acquired consciously. It shows unmistakably what you are: gives you away for what you are.”

One-hundred fifty-four years ago today, Walt Whitman published 12 untitled poems and a preface in an edition of 795 copies at a Brooklyn print shop owned by two Scottish immigrants, the brothers James and Andrew Rome. Within two weeks Emerson, one of Whitman’s many inspirations, praised Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” In later editions, Whitman mentions Independence Day – the birth of the nation, the birth of his book -- in “Song of Myself,” Section 15, near the conclusion to one of his catalogs, this one celebrating Americans of every stripe, from opium-eater and “quadroon girl” to the president:

“The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground...”

My favorite among Whitman’s evocations of July, without mention of the national holiday, can be found in Specimen Days, “A July Afternoon by the Pond”:

“The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air—the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go)—the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color’d dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all time, (are they not showing off for my amusement?)—the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes—occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly by—the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade—the quawk of some pond duck—(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)—then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek—(what was the yellow or light brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch’d legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?)—the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, and free space of the sky, transparent and blue—and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call `shoals of mackerel’—the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss’d hair, spreading, expanding—a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything—who knows?”

On the way home from Lake Chelan we drove through or near towns and villages with such names as Gold Bar, Entiat, Winesap, Grotto, Skykomish, Index, Sultan, Chumstick, Wilderness, Verlot and Robe. One of the joys of travel in the United States is the surreal poetry of its place names, the history of which, Names on the Land, was written by George R. Stewart. As we passed through Dryden, Wa., I wondered: Could it be named for John Dryden (1631-1700), author of these rousing lines from “Mac Flecknoe”:

“All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

When we stopped for the traffic signal in Dryden, I noticed we were waiting at the intersection of Dryden Avenue and Johnson Road. Surely, this was no coincidence. The early settlers of North Central Washington must have been stout-hearted readers. With more time I might have found Donne Drive or Pope Lane. Instead, at home, I returned to Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Dryden” and this insightful encomium:

“With his praises of other and of himself is always intermingled a strain of discontent and lamentation, a sullen growl of resentment, or querulous murmur of distress. His works are undervalued, his merit is unrewarded, and he has few thanks to pay his stars that he was born among Englishmen.”

John Muir the man -- the naturalist and explorer -- has always seemed more compellingly substantial than Muir the writer. His prose is workmanlike and unmemorable. His need to report what he knew -- and he knew a lot -- outweighed his gift for articulating it in an artful fashion, however humbly. His best books -- The Mountains of California and The Grand Cañon of the Colorado -- are indifferent as prose but even an undistinguished stylist, Janet Lewis suggests, can furnish our imaginations. In “For John Muir, a Century and More After His Time,” she meditates on how a writer’s vision can become as vital and real as our memories of personal experience: “…all these / In memory, both mine and borrowed, doubly rich are grown, / Till I can hardly tell his treasure from my own.”

Deep readers recognize the déjà vu-like sensation. The “mind’s eye” is creative, unreliable and opportunistic, and claims the work of others as its own. During my first visit to Paris, in 1973, I recognized people and scenes from Proust none involving rats). I’ve seen Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River” in Ohio, Indiana and upstate New York. Lewis superimposes childhood memories of Wisconsin, scenes of the Sierra Nevadas in Muir’s books and her own experience of those mountains as a longtime resident of California:

“These I truly know
That I have seen with my own eyes, and yet
There merges with them an unreckoned crowd
Of things more richly seen…”

Here at Lake Chelan I see a desert-like landscape already familiar from Lewis’ poems. Her novels mingle with my memories of two visits to France. Yet another reason for reading is to experiment with immense elasticity of the imagination. How much can it hold? Of Muir (and more) Lewis writes:

“Moments of wisdom and intenser sight.
And these I owe to one
Who built his campfire on the canyon rim,
Who woke at dawn, and felt surrounding him
The mind of God in every living thing,
And things unloving.”