`With Unusual Satisfaction'

We spent the day helping a friend and her daughter move out of their house and into an apartment. The sky was cloudless and the thermometer topped ninety degrees. It was the first time this year I felt the heat radiating off sidewalks, cars and building. The day before, professionals with a truck had moved the heavy stuff, including her recently tuned spinet piano. During a break from hauling boxes, she sat on the bench, riffled through sheet music and played Handel’s “Sarabande,” the “Moonlight Sonata” and Für Elise. She’s had a rough time of late and seemed utterly absorbed in her music. When she finished she turned around to look at me and said, “The acoustics are really good in here. That was satisfying.” 

James Boswell, who died on this date, May 19, at age fifty-four in 1795, writes in his London Journal (1950) on Feb. 2, 1763: “I read, wrote, and played on my violin with unusual satisfaction.” In a footnote to this sentence, the editor, Frederick Pottle, points out: 

“It must seem rather odd that Boswell has not previously mentioned the fact that he could play the violin, or that he had a violin with him. At various times in his life he played the violin, the flute, and the bass viol, but probably none of them very well, for there is no record of his playing with others. He loved to sing, and had a good ear and a good voice.” 

Our friend does play well. Above her piano on the wall hangs a framed black-and-white photograph of her thirteen-year-old daughter playing the bass clarinet.

`An Exponent of Character'

I watched my boss looking up at something outside the office window. When I rapped on the glass and shrugged my shoulders in the “What gives?” gesture, she waved me outside. In the tree next to our building, twenty feet above the ground and almost level with the second-floor windows, is a large (at least eighteen inches in diameter), raggedy-looking nest of sticks, dry grass, leaves and scraps of plastic. No bird is visible, though the occupant must be sizeable, larger than a blue jay or Northern mockingbird; perhaps one of the great-horned owls on campus. This is speculation, and I thought of that passage in Finnegans Wake: “But enough of greenwood's gossip. Birdsnests is birdsnests.” In the first chapter alone, Joyce weaves a thousand avian allusions, including “a parody’s bird” (paradise bird, or bird of paradise). My knowledge of birds is a parody (parroty?) of an ornithologist’s. 

Regardless, I recommend that you read and savor America’s Other Audubon (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012) by Joy M. Kiser, who tells the story of Genevieve “Gennie” Jones and her family who researched, wrote, painted and published Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio. In 1876, at the World’s Fair in Philadelphia, Gennie saw hand-painted engravings from John James Audubon’s Birds of America. She resolved to complete Audubon’s project by painting the nests and eggs he left out. Back in Circleville, Ohio, her brother collected the nests and eggs, her father (a physician) paid the publishing costs, and Gennie and a friend learned the art of lithography. Gennie died of typhoid fever in 1879 at the age of thirty, before the project could be completed. Her family and friends labored another seven years to finish her dream. Go here to see Gennie’s painting of a wood thrush’s nest holding four blue eggs. Here is an excerpt from the accompanying test: 

“The nest was taken from a haw tree in a damp wood without much undergrowth. The light, fluffy leaves of the foundation, the mossy branches and emerald foliage, the boggy earth and rank grass beneath, together formed a picture beautiful and rustic, a fitting symbol of the quiet wood, the drear repose in which this brilliant songster so much delights.” 

About ninety copies of the lithographs were produced, most of which have vanished. Among the subscribers in 1886 were former President Rutherford B. Hayes and Teddy Roosevelt, who was still a student. One set was on display in 1995, when Kiser went to work as a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She spent fifteen years researching the project and interviewing descendants of the Jones family members. Her book is large format, eleven by thirteen inches, so the reader can study the reproductions and notice the details. You can note that the branches have been neatly separated from their trees, probably with a saw or large knife. In the painting of the “Quail-Bob-White” nest, built on the ground and holding eight white eggs, you can recognize four red clover flowers. For the volume’s epigraph, Kiser uses a passage from the introduction Howard Jones, Gennie’s brother, wrote for Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio: 

“In their eggs the birds center their whole existence. They work unceasingly and intelligently for a place where they can lay them, and guard them with their lives. Thus the nest, aside from its expression of ingenuity, skill, and patience, becomes an exponent of character.”

`What Lewd, Naked and Revolting Shape is This?'

The copy of A Little Treasury of American Poetry I borrowed from the library was tied with a dirty white ribbon and bow, like a gift from a shabby-genteel friend. That’s almost the way I think of its editor, Oscar Williams (1900-1964), a forgettable poet but memorable anthologist. I bought my copy in paperback almost fifty years ago. It and others edited by Williams (A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, Immortal Poems of the English Language) served as my Introduction to Poetry. The library copy is signed by its former owner, the literary critic and scholar Frederick J. Hoffman, and dated July 9, 1948, the year of its publication. The cover has detached from the binding and been repaired with white medical tape. In his introduction, Williams intones a familiar lament: 

“For poetry should be the expression of the whole people, not a private matter. Unfortunately, the American public, like some other modern publics, does not care for, nor understand serious poetry. Moreover, the special audience for poetry even among, let us say, those who have gone through college, is incredibly small.” 

One wishes to raise his hand and ask: “And why shouldn’t it be?” Williams’ selection reflects the triumph of Modernism. He includes Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (heavily annotated by someone in pencil) and Canto I, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. A century after Modernism first stirred, and putting aside for the moment their literary worth, these poems remain heavy going, even (perhaps especially) for “those who have gone through college.” Such work could never be as broadly popular as that written in the nineteenth century by Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, who, in Williams’ judgment, “produced only watered-down versions of English verse,” that was “by serious standards…second-rate.” 

Williams divides his anthology into three sections: “American Indian Poetry” (eleven pages), “The Chief Poets from Colonial Times to the Present Day” (719 pages, from Anne Bradstreet to Delmore Schwartz) and “Poetry of the Forties” (113 pages). Immodestly, Williams includes eight of his own poems in the second section and five by his wife, Gene Derwood, in the third. One sample from Williams’ “The Seesaw” will suffice: 

“Divine seesaw! Ply thy twin ways of higher!

The valley of the grave upholds the stars.” 

On second thought, this, from “Shopping for Meat in Winter,” is too good not to share: 

“What lewd, naked and revolting shape is this?

A frozen oxtail in the butcher’s shop

Long and lifeless upon the huge block of wood

On which the ogre’s axe begins chop chop.” 

I wish I could remember my reaction to this stuff back in 1965. Did I read it straight or suspect parody? Probably the former. I was naïve and unschooled, and very much in thrall to what Flannery O’Connor called litachur. Even if a poem was pretentious and boring, I wouldn’t have admitted it for fear of sounding dim and unsophisticated. Williams the anthologist offered me the start of an education. In particular I was taken by E.A. Robinson, Louise Bogan and W.H. Auden, as well as a poem by Karl Shapiro, “Scyros,” that I still like but don’t claim to fully understand. Williams did all that any decent teacher can do. He opened the book and pointed at the page.

`One Which Makes the Heart Run Over'

What if Johnson had never met Boswell? What if they had detested each other on sight? What if Boswell had stayed in Scotland as his father wished or died young of the clap or the D.T.s, or at the hands of an irrate husband? What would we remember of either man? Readers know them with familial intimacy, and their absence from our literary and moral inheritance is unimaginable. But without the other, who would disappear? Clearly, Johnson’s reputation is fittest for survival. Without Boswell, we would still have the “Life of Swift,”  “London: A Poem” and The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia for our pleasure and consolation. 

Two-hundred fifty years ago today, on May 16, 1763, Boswell met Johnson for the first time in Tom Davies’s Bookshop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, London. Johnson was fifty-three and already a formidable literary eminence, author of The Dictionary of the English Language; Boswell, at twenty-two, was a lawyer from Scotland given to drinking and whoring. Their time together was brief but Boswell used it well, turning great stretches of his journal into a repository for Johnsoniana. They never met during Boswell’s Grand Tour from August 1763 to March 1766. For most of the next eighteen years of Johnson's life, Boswell remained in Edinburgh and Johnson stayed in London, Oxford or Lichfield. In the fall of 1773 they spent eighty-three days touring Scotland and the Western Islands, their longest time together. During the twenty-one years of their friendship, scholars have calculated they shared company for fewer than one-thousand days.

Macaulay famously thought it “immoral” that so great a book as the Life of Johnson should be authored by such “a great fool.” For Macaulay, Boswell was an idiot savant of literature, a moral leper who somehow turned himself into a writer of genius. Macaulay’s censure postponed a proper assessment of Boswell’s achievement for more than a century.  The discovery of Boswell’s journals in the 1920s and 1930s, and the publication of the London Journal 1762-1763 in 1950, followed by subsequent volumes in the series, sparked an ongoing reassessment. In A Life of James Boswell (1999), Peter Martin writes: 

“At first, the journals appeared to confirm the nineteenth-century perception of Boswell as a compulsive womanizer, drinker and gambler, a habitual gallant who only seemed happy when acting the fool. But readers soon began to see him as a highly complex figure, someone they thought they understood and with whom they were prepared to travel the extra mile. His honesty, sincerity, geniality, sensitivity, and desire to become a better human being are partly responsible for this change of perception. His journals also show him to be a conscientious and talented writer. Perhaps most importantly, they reveal the degree of mental suffering he endured for most of his lifetime.” 

He was, in short, Johnson writ small. There’s a well-known passage in the Life of Johnson still disputed by scholars. The attribution is ambiguous. Is Johnson or Boswell the speaker?: 

“We cannot tell the precise moment when a friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over.” 

I savor the confusion. How appropriate that so fine an observation on the nature of friendship might have been written by either friend. It sounds like Johnson, who came to love and understand his young, wayward friend. In “What Johnson Means to Me” (Samuel Johnson After 300 Years, 2009), the poet David Ferry writes: 

“Johnson is, to my mind, in his prose and in his verse, one of the masters of pity, unsentimental pity founded on his awareness of our situation in a universe we cannot fully explicate; and it is founded on his awareness that our limitations, our vulnerability, are what we, all fellow creatures, share, the actualities of our natures and of our circumstances. In thinking of Johnson’s writing, pity is a name for looking steadily at things. The evidence is everywhere in him, in the Ramblers, in The Vanity of Human Wishes, in the `Life of Pope,’ in the Tolstoyan severity and sympathy of the `Life of Savage,’ his Hadji Murad.”

`My Reading Was Voracious But Unsystematic'

We feel another good book purging coming on, and for once the medical metaphor is apt. As Paul Johnson writes in To Hell with Picasso and Other Essays (1996): “The urge to buy books is a chronic disease, which is cured only by bodily annihilation.” For once, most of the avoirdupois to be culled is the boys’ not mine. They outgrow books quicker than shoes. Both, I believe, at 10 and 12, have left Harry Potter and other childish things behind, though they follow Artemis Fowl and Skullduggery Pleasant, satisfyingly long chains of science-fiction/fantasy novels by Eoin Colfer and Derek Landy, respectively, both Irish.

They read comic books gussied up as “graphic novels.” The younger one is partial to biographies and books about music. His brother is reading Hamlet for the first time, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism for the second, and volumes about computers, physics, the oil industry, espionage and finance. Sometimes I think: Where did I go wrong? But I know it’s healthy for a child's tastes in books to grow waywardly. The bookish life is rooted in the willingness to experiment, to test one’s mettle against popular tastes and certified “classics.” Otherwise, reading turns from pleasure into Gradgrindian obligation and eventually into abstention (that's what public schools are for). All my sons have been inoculated against the doltish aversion to books common among their peers. Oliver Sacks writes in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001): 

“My reading was voracious but unsystematic: I skimmed, I hovered, I browsed, as I wished, and though my interests were already firmly planted in the sciences, I would also, on occasion, take out adventure or detective stories as well. My school, The Hall, had no science and hence little interest for me—our curriculum, at this point, was based solely on the classics. But this did not matter, for it was my own reading in the library that provided my real education.” 

We’ve run out of decent shelf space. That’s the reason for the ruthless purge. I have some bookcase tops still collecting only dust, and I can stack more books up there, horizontally, which is unpleasant for practical and aesthetic reasons. But the boys’ shelves are filled, and they’ve crammed all the available spaces in their closets and stacked books like unmortared bricks against their walls. These are teetering. Books passionately read and reread just a few years ago – Captain Underpants (and anything else by Dav Pilkey), Big Nate, Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series – are being held in escrow against future readers yet unidentified. Some we’ll give away to the few kids we know who actually read. The others we’ll probably sell to Half-Price Books, and use the proceeds to buy more books. I’ll contribute a few expendables, volumes mistakenly sent to me. Just last week the University of Chicago Press shipped Thresherphobe, a new book of prose-lineated-as-poetry by someone I had never heard of before (Mark Halliday) – unreadable stuff another reader might enjoy reading. Paul Johnson writes in “The Art of Writing a Column”: 

“I do not claim to have read all or even most of the books I own. Some I read many years after purchase, others never. But I have looked into all of them. I know what they contain. All are for potential use, as well as pleasure.”

`Insect Vexations, Which Sting Us and Fly Away'

“I've been thinking how much of life is absorbed with `small cares’ that seem overwhelmingly important at the time--or at least disabling--which are forgotten in the sequel: the headaches, stomach aches, the traffic jams, the appointments which are late. Do these take up the majority of our time? They almost never make it into literature, and in fact literature seems an unstinting propaganda on behalf of the dramatic occurrences of human life.” 

So writes David Myers in an email, bringing to mind a fantasy I’ve nursed in recent days – a nagging nostalgia for old troubles, what David calls “small cares.” With high-definition acuity I remember sitting at my desk writing a story for my high-school creative writing class. It was the first-person account of a blameless “prisoner of metaphysics,” the pretentious spawn of Kafka, Malamud and utter inexperience of life. The words came in a constipated sputter that amazes me today. I’m never blocked for words – the lasting gift of decades in journalism. But I remember the struggle, the halting creep of sentences, the histrionic despair, and think: “How romantic. How dedicated. How young and serious I was, how unaware of projecting my narcissism into the narrative.” I felt nostalgia for a time when trivia seemed important because importance otherwise seemed absent from life. 

In defiance of the “unstinting propaganda,” the masters of depicting “small cares” mingle the serious and the comic – Chekhov, Joyce and Bellow. Each redefines drama with comedy. Misail Poloznev in Chekhov’s “My Life” dreams he will have a ring inscribed “Nothing passes” after his wayward wife has her ring inscribed “Everything passes.” Leopold Bloom is a cuckold who buys a pork kidney, fries and eats it. He moves his bowels, attends a funeral, tries to place an ad in a newspaper and meets an anti-Semite. Moses Herzog takes his name from a minor character in the “Cyclops” chapter in Ulysses.  Herzog says: “We love apocalypses too much...and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no, I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.” A repudiation of the dramatic, the heightened and over-hyped, almost an endorsement of the prosaic. Herzog, too, recalls with aching fondness his childhood in the slums of Montreal. Dr. Johnson writes in The Rambler #68: 

“The main of life is, indeed, composed of small incidents and petty occurrences: of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence; of insect vexations, which sting us and fly away; impertinencies, which buzz a while about us, and are heard no more; of meteorous pleasures, which dance before us and are dissipated; of compliments, which glide off the soul like other music, and are forgotten by him that gave, and him that received them.”

`Like Wine Compared to Beer'

I bought and planted a peach sapling about two feet tall in January. It leafed out and flowered in February and in March the dog bit off the top and left it dangling. With duct tape and a dowel rod I performed emergency splinting, and it seemed to be recovering until the dog snapped it again. The leaves had withered so I removed the old stem surgically, but another with shiny green leaves and small buds almost ready to burst has sprouted and the little peach tree seems to be on the mend. This confirms my allegiance to cats.
 
I haven’t eaten a good peach in years. They seem even harder and less flavorful than most apples. Our neighbor when I was a boy was a German woman who owned two lots side by side, one for her house, the other for her vast garden, a veritable neighborhood of sub-gardens with corn, cabbage, tomatoes and beans. Standing at its center was a Y-shaped peach tree. In memory, her peaches were small but sweet and juicy enough to stain your T-shirt. Thoreau in his journal on this date, May 13, in 1858, noted a neighbor’s peach trees were in bloom: 

“[They have] the richest, highest color of any tree’s bloom, like wine compared to beer; the trees, bare of leaves, one mass of pink, some dark, some light, almost flame-like seen against green hillsides or the red ground where the woods have just been cut. How much more beautiful than the life of the peach-raiser! No such rich pink bloom falling through cracks in the dark shutters irradiates his soul. If only such a peach-bloom hue suffused the dark chambers of his soul! Large masses of bloom with the delicate tint which commonly belongs to minute plants only.” 

Only Thoreau would liken a peach blossom to a neighbor’s soul, to the detriment of the latter. One year earlier, on May 19, 1857, he smelled the formic acid given off by ants and concluded “it is not at all sickening, but tonic, and reminds me of a bitter flavor like that of peach-meats.”