`I Want My Eyes'

“Pseudophakia of both eyes – primary.” 

That’s my ophthalmologist’s judgment, three weeks after the second of two cataract surgeries. Now I have an updated prescription for bifocals, one that should eliminate the chronic head-tilting and eyeglass removal I’ve resorted to for the interim. But it’s the deliciously Greek word I like – pseudophakia. At first it sounds redundant – something like doubly fake, ersatz-ersatz or bogus-bogus. Or, better yet, not fake at all but pseudo-fake or genuine. So, of course, I had to look it up. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t include the word but a medical dictionary gives us “artificial lens implantation after cataract surgery” and “a condition in which an aphakic eye has been fitted with an intraocular lens to replace the crystalline lens.” The OED does offer “phakic” and “aphakic”—with or without a lens, respectively – both from ϕακός (phakos), meaning “lentil.” Millennia ago, some folk poet noticed the resemblance between a legume and a lens. 

The miraculous nature of the procedures I’ve undergone is finally sinking in. A few painless minutes under a focused beam of light have improved and preserved my vision. My doctor explained that if you live long enough, you’ll probably get cataracts, and for centuries that condemned you to at least partial blindness. In the Contemporary Poetry Review, James Matthew Wilson reviews two new books of poems by David J. Rothman, and quotes one titled “Not My Leg”: 

“Not my eyes,

Dear God, not my eyes.

Don’t poke them out,

So I grope about

Like Homer, Milton, Joyce.

If you have to be blind

To have such a voice,

I find

I want my eyes.” 

Let’s add Borges to the catalog of blind poets. Would I sacrifice my vision to sit among the immortals? Would I willingly enter “this dark world and wide?”

`The Man Who Wants to Tell the Truth'

Requests for advice on a “writing career” bring out some of the best and much of the worst in me. One wishes to encourage, but just short of lying. Warnings about solitary hours, ass-punishing labor, unreliable paychecks and uncomprehending editors must be dispensed gingerly, with tact. I may soon be in the position to hire freelance writers at my university, and don’t wish to drain the talent pool even before I begin. I’ve been reading the Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1998) of C.H. Sisson (1914-2003) again, and his understanding of the writing life, if not inspirational, is at least truthful and head-clearing, like a cold shower. In one of his “Pocket-Sized Poems” from the early nineteen-eighties he writes: 

“When I thought what I could do

Fifty years ago, I knew

There must be something I'd do well,

What it was I could not tell;

I had not done it, that was clear.

Nor have I now. How can there be

Ignorance enough left to me

For hope to feed on, when there isn't

Enough delusion for ambition?” 

Not exactly a writerly pep talk but one values Sisson’s no-nonsense insights into the human capacity for self-fabulation. And put this poem into biographical perspective: Sisson published almost thirty volumes of poetry, numerous translations from four languages, a novel and much critical work, much of it written while holding down a job as a civil servant (about which he published a standard text, The Spirit of British Administration, in 1959). In “No Address” from the early nineteen-seventies, Sisson writes: “Pliny, Horace, Cicero, talk to me; / I am a dead language also. / The poetry owners cannot make me out. / Nor I them.” In “The Trade” (the writing trade, presumably) from Who and What (1994), he writes: 

“The language fades. The noise is more

Than ever it has been before,

But all the words grow pale and thin

For lack of sense has done them in. 

“What wonder, when it is for pay

Millions are spoken every day?

It is the number, not the sense

That brings the speakers pounds and pence.” 

In 1965, Sisson published an essay on the Dorset poet William Barnes (1801-1886), who was hugely prolific and often wrote in dialect.  Sisson says Barnes was “not a local poet except by accident,” one who “exploited the natural speech of his boyhood.” He writes: 

“His use of dialect probably enabled him to maintain his liberty of feeling amidst the uncomprehending pressures he must have faced from his social superiors. Barnes is not there to encourage a factitious oddity, but on the contrary to demonstrate that the poet has to develop in a straight line from his origins, and that the avoidance of literature is indispensable for the man who wants to tell the truth.” 

When Sisson published his collected essays in 1978, including the piece on Barnes, he titled the volume The Avoidance of Literature.

`Perhaps Someone Will Write Their Story One Day'

“Byways are to me as important as highways.” 

So says Theodore Dalrymple in “Notes of a Bibliomaniac,” an essay that begins like a memoir of bookishness and wends quietly into a meditation on historical humility, concluding appropriately with the sentence quoted above. Dalrymple’s gift for turning the commonplace (a fondness for old books) into common-sense moral reflection (“history should not be read as the backward projection of our current discontents, or of our grievances”) remains the source of his abiding charm and persuasiveness. 

Dalrymple finds an 1857 volume published by Dr. Peter Hood, The Successful Treatment of Scarlet Fever. About the once-devastating disease, Dalrymple says, Hood “discovered nothing new.” His research was a medical cul-de-sac, one of many. With the introduction of antibiotics in the twentieth century, the disease became, according to Dalrymple, “rare.” But not eradicated. Scarlet fever saved Primo Levi’s life. 

In January 1945, with Soviet troops approaching, the Nazis evacuated the healthy prisoners – that is, ambulatory -- held in Auschwitz. Most of them died during the subsequent march or later in Buchenwald or Mauthausen. Sick with scarlet fever in the camp infirmary, Levi was left behind. Soviet troops arrived ten days later, on January 27. Levi describes that gap between Nazi evacuation and Soviet arrival in the final chapter of his first book, If This Is a Man (1947, also titled Survival in Auschwitz): 

“All the healthy prisoners (except a few prudent ones who at the last moment undressed and hid themselves in the hospital beds) left during the night of 18 January 1945. They must have been about twenty thousand, coming from different camps. Almost in their entirety they vanished during the evacuation march. Alberto [Dalla Volta, Levi’s friend] was among them. Perhaps someone will write their story one day.”

`As the Random Fancy or the Feeling Directs'

Marginalia permits us to commune with our younger selves, to peer over the shoulder of that teasingly familiar and alien creature, to mingle with our annotator as he blinks between first and third person in our minds. I no longer mark up books. Instead, I write comments on separate sheets of paper that I insert in the volume, a practice I started in the fall of 1972 while reading Ulysses for the second time. To read notes and underlinings from forty years ago, however, is at once touching and comically embarrassing. My oldest copy of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a Penguin paperback dated “6-18-72.” I remember buying it at the long-defunct Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue in Cleveland. I was nineteen. The pages now are brown and the text is densely and uselessly over-underlined. I had read Tristram Shandy for the first time in an eighteenth-century English novel class a few months earlier and fallen in love.  

In the preface, which Sterne in effect makes the seventh chapter, I’ve placed a vertical line down the right margin of the first paragraph and written “Locke.” I’ve underlined the final phrases – “…we lie under so many impediments to communicating our sensations out of our own sphere, as often amount to a total impossibility.” Beside this I write “Beckett” – evidence of another recently acquired literary enthusiasm. Such marks are meaningless now, but at the time I think they amounted to laying claim to turf, staking out foreign territory, planting a flag and making it mine. Several pages later in the chapter titled “The Remise Door,” I underline, in a spirit of Sternean self-referentiality, “with a look which  I thought a sufficient commentary upon the text.” I had also recently read Pale Fire for the first time. In another chapter, titled “The Remise,” I underline “to make love the first moment, and an offer of his person the second,” and write “—in the coach, like Emma Bovary.” I was an insufferably bookish young man. Later notes refer to Cervantes, Borges, Smollett, David Hume, Gogol and Shakespeare. With an asterisk and underlining I mark what remains my favorite line in Sterne’s novel: “I think there is a fatality in it—I seldom go to the place I set out for.” 

In Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale University Press, 2001), H.J. Jackson writes: “We would do well to consider the example of the sociable readers of the eighteenth century and later who shared their annotated books and looked on readers’ notes as value added.” Rereading my old markings, I think of Charles Lamb’s essay, “The TwoRaces of Men,” in which he comically complains of the marks left in his books when he loans them to his childhood friend Coleridge, a chronic marginalia-ist. On this date, Dec. 9, in 1796, Charles Lamb writes to Coleridge, as I might write to my younger book-marking self: 

“There is a pensive state of recollection, in which the mind is disposed to apostrophise the departed objects of its attachment, and, breaking loose from grammatical precision, changes from the 1st to the 3rd, and from the 3rd to the 1st person, just as the random fancy or the feeling directs.”

`Like Dr. Johnson Himself'

One of my favorite anthologies, a book I pull out when I’m between other books, or when I seek the solace of familiarity, is Horace in English, a Penguin paperback edited by the late D.S. Carne-Ross and Kenneth Haynes, and published in 1996. In his fifty-eight-page introduction, Carne-Ross, by outlining the history of Horace translations in English, is at the same time reviewing much of the history of poetry in English, from Jonson, Herrick and Milton through Kipling, Ferry and Hecht. It’s a two-for-the-price-of-one anthology and the introduction is as good an essay as I know on any theme spanning half a millennium of literary history. No stick-in-the-mud pedant, Carne-Ross writes: 

“Those accustomed to the modern versions that professors call faithful (the translator can read Latin but cannot write English) may be startled by the liberties permitted and almost expected in the great ages of classical translation from the second half of the seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth.”

To suggest the grandeur of Horace in English, Carne-Ross is inspired to give us the Ars Poetica (Epistle II.3) as a sort of quilt stitched together sequentially, in chronological order, by ten poets – Jonson, the Earl of Roscommon, John Oldham, Thomas Creech, Philip Francis, Francis Howes, Lord Byron (in Hints from Horace), John Conington, Roy Campbell and C.H. Sisson. Sisson’s, published in 1975, is “free” by almost any standard and wonderfully readable. Here’s a sample: 

“The man who can actually tell when a verse is lifeless
Will know when it doesn’t sound right; he will point to stragglers,
And equally put his pen through elaboration;
He will even force you to give up your favourite obscurities,
Tell you what isn’t clear and what has got to be changed,
Like Dr. Johnson himself. There will be no nonsense
About it not being worth causing trouble for trifles.
Trifles like that amount in the end to disaster,
Derisory writing and meaning misunderstood.” 

Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on this date Dec. 8, in 65 B.C., and died on Nov. 27, 8 B.C.

`He Is Simply a Singer'

Enjoy a happy convergence of reader and writer when Willa Cather, not yet twenty-four, reads A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad within months of its publication in 1896. Cather had moved to Pittsburgh that year and gone to work as managing editor of The Home Monthly, founded after Ladies Home Journal proved a circulation success. The first edition of Housman’s volume was self-published in England, and one wonders how Cather found a copy of so obscure a volume so quickly. She became the first American editor to republish some of Housman’s verses. In a recurring feature titled “Old Books and New,” she quotes poem XXXIX in Housman’s sequence -- “’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town” – and writes: 

“Pretty verses, are they not? I found them in a little volume entitled, A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman. Who Mr. Housman may be I know not, save that he is an Englishman and that he has written some of the most musical lyrics that have been done in England for many a long day. They are mostly quiet, unpretentious things like the one I have quoted, and very few of them even have titles. So simple are they that he who runs may read, and so shadowed by a gentle melancholy that the swiftest reader may not outrun the saddest of them.” 

Many of the reviews and articles Cather wrote for The Home Monthly are apprentice work, perfunctory and column-filling, the sort of thing young journalists are expected to crank out like so much sausage. But one senses her temperamental and artistic affinity with Housman. She responds to the seeming simplicity of his lines and to his characteristic note of muted melancholy:    

“There is something which makes Mr. Housman different from the poets of the time and sets him quite apart; I should say that is largely because he is simply a singer, and for the most part poets have become philosophers. Like Heine, he has `done nothing but be a poet,’ and like Heine, there is a touch of quiet, grim despair about him which sometimes quite makes you fancy that you are hearing again that voice of bitter melody from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where for so many years the sweetest of German singers lay stricken with a mortal malady.” 

This is perceptive, for Housman acknowledged his debt to Heine. (See Housman and Heine: A Neglected Relationship, ed. Jeremy Bourne, 2011). In 1902, during her first visit to Europe, Cather made a literary pilgrimage to sites in Ludlow and Shrewsbury associated with the Shropshire poems and visited Housman at his rather drab boarding house in Highgate. One of Cather’s American travelling companions apparently monopolized the conversation and the visit was less than successful. The following year, however, Cather self- published her first book, April Twilights, a collection of verse in which Housman’s example is plain. Here is a stanza from “In Media Vita”:      

“Lads and their sweethearts lying

      In the cleft o' the windy hill;

 Hearts that hushed of their sighing,

      Lips that are tender and still.

 Stars in the purple gloaming,

      Flowers that suffuse and fall,

 Twitter of bird-mates homing,

      And the dead, under all!” 

Not good poetry but suggestive of the pastoral, elegiac strain in Cather’s future novels. In Willa Cather: A Life Saved-Up (1989), her biographer Hermione Lee relates the novelist to the tradition of Virgil’s Georgics: 

“Like his later epic writing, Virgil’s pastoral is weighted with the sense of `the tears there are in things’: sunt lacrimae rerum. It was that tone which attracted Cather to Virgil and to the pastoral writers – Robert Burns, Turgenev, Sarah Orne Jewett, George Eliot, Housman, Robert Frost – who found, in their quite different contexts, Virgilian ways of reconciling rural hardship and suffering with a tender retrospect on lost youth, with a celebration of dignified human endeavor…” 

Willa Cather was born on this date, Dec. 7, in 1873, in Virginia, and died on April 24, 1947, in New York City. 

[See poems on Housman by W.H. Auden, Kingsley Amis and John Berryman.]

`Filching Fire from the Gods'

“He was incapable of reading one classic without relating it to another. . .” 

We bridle at “classic,” a marketing term used by people who’ve have never read one. The public library branch nearest our house shelves Atlas Shrugged, To Kill a Mockingbird and Slaughterhouse-Five in “Classics.” What William Giraldi means is a book of lasting worth, one that sustains both individual readers and their culture. Tested by time, classics are kept alive not by teachers or critics but by the dwindling ranks of uncommon common readers, an exclusive, self-identifying fraternity. Elsewhere in “The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia,” Giraldi calls them “golden books,” with an echo of the volumes we prized as children. When his essay appeared last summer I sent a link to Helen Pinkerton, the poet and Melville scholar, who said Melville’s notations “reveal[ed] his deep commitment to (and rivalry with) his literary predecessors. Many are the hours that I spent tracking Melville's difficult handwriting in those sources that were available in early studies on his work. He was, indeed, an enthusiastic reader.” 

Melville, Giraldi says, was a writer “who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.” To gauge the breadth of Melville’s reading, go to his page at LibraryThing and follow the link to a catalog of his reconstructed personal library. After his death in 1891, Melville’s collection was dispersed among relatives, friends and book dealers. Of the original one thousand or so volumes, fewer than three hundred have been located by scholars. Go here to see a recent acquisition, The Sonnets of Europe: A Volume of Translations. 

Giraldi is unable to imagine a worthwhile writer who doesn’t read. A novelist, he says, will “spend decades training herself in canonical literature.” Even Hemingway, whose books are not notably bookish, was an omnivore of printed matter. Writers who don’t read are like the residents of Flatland, dwelling in two dimensions. Books spawn books. Guy Davenport was convinced every book, consciously or otherwise, was a reaction to some other book. Giraldi asks: 

“How can a nonreader imagine himself an author, the creator of an artifact that he himself admittedly would have no interest in? Can you fathom an architect who's not fond of impressive buildings, or a violinist who has never listened to music? The erroneous assumption among the multitude is that writing doesn't demand specialized skills.” 

This compliments something Helen Pinkerton wrote in her email: “In my teaching days, whenever I taught a course in the writing of poetry (or gave individual advice) I often used the analogy of the hard training for ballet or musical performance to urge the student to work hard to master the techniques of traditional verse, if they hoped to write good poetry.” 

[A reader responds to Thursday's post: “Melville is the antipodes of Emerson and Whitman, and the rest of the happy choristers. Sure, you’re right: Emerson and Whitman are more palatable. As Jeffers says, `They flatter the human race.’ They also lie. I find I can’t read Emerson or Whitman any more. Melville, however, sees with a different and, to me, more acute vision. He believes in the existence of evil, (`God who make shark one dam injun.’) and he knows, also, that one of the best ways to delay the plunge into chaos is to purge oneself of this notion of moral progress and cling sedulously to the old wisdoms. It seems to me we threw Apollo’s bust into Mammon’s kiln some years ago.”]