'The Task of Doing Nothing Much at All'

I’ve always thought of goofing off as one of the American fine arts, up there with western movies and jazz. In high school, I worked summers and weekends in an aluminum casting plant owned by a friend of my father. The work was hot and dirty, and we sometimes worked twelve-hour shifts. I was generously paid, all cash and off the books. Most of my co-workers were a few years older than me and all were Puerto Rican. They spoke more English than I spoke Spanish, but we all spoke fluent goofing off. 

When the boss called a break, we went outside, walked down the alley and around the corner, and sat on overturned fifty-five-gallon drums, where one of the other guys lit up a joint and shared it. Now I think of Whitman: “I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.” We also goofed off less formally, one at a time, with the others acting as lookouts, either outside or in the filthy men’s room.

 

From that experience I learned the therapeutic importance of goofing off. Call it idling, lollygagging, malingering. The point was to maximize down time, stop working but not look like you might not go back to work for a couple of hours. Remain conscious and alert for the approach of the boss. We were living exemplars of the German philosopher Josef Pieper’s refutation of what he called “total work,” though none of us, I’m sure, yet knew Pieper or his book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948; trans., 1952 and 1998).

 

So, it’s not strictly an American pastime. In his poem “Fashion Statement” (Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Collected Verse 2008–2011, 2012) Clive James remembers his undergraduate years at the University of Sydney, Australia:

 

“. . . young men with no business. How it fills

My mind with longing now, the memory

Of lurking off with endless energy

 

“To read the poets – seldom on the course –

To write a poem – never quite resolved –

To be removed from Manning House by force –

It was where the women were – to be involved

Completely – never fear what might befall –

In the task of doing nothing much at all.”

'Influential Works That Are Almost Never Read'

John Ruskin would have a difficult time of it in what passes for literary culture today. First, he was phenomenally prolific, even by Victorian standards, and how many people would read all five volumes of Modern Painters or the idea-rich sprawl of Fors Clavigera? Second, Ruskin doesn’t conform to modern fashions in morality. He would be “cancelled” by the censorious and self-righteous. His marriage was unorthodox and unhappy. He fell in love with a ten-year-old girl. In the second volume of his Ruskin biography, Tim Hilton puts in bluntly: “He was a paedophile” -- by all accounts, unconsummated. This makes him a brilliant writer, a master of prose, who we are unable to read without soiling our delicate sensibilities. If we were truly to censor every writer of the past who offended us, literature would amount to a stack of pamphlets. And we could no longer read Ruskin’s Praeterita, one of the great memoirs in the language. 

In his review of Hilton’s biography, Guy Davenport writes of Ruskin’s vast and eccentric Fors Clavigera, his proto-blog:

 

“The book still belongs to the distinguished list of worthy and influential works that are almost never read even by those interested in literature and ideas: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, Horace Traubel’s Conversations with Walt Whitman in Camden, Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and the Bible.”

 

And Davenport sums up the force of nature that was Ruskin:

 

“Most of the problems Ruskin addressed are ours as well. The century that began in the year of his death saw the most terrible wars in all of recorded history; and cruelty, without shame or pity, has gone on disgracing humanity. For fifty years Ruskin tried to show us how to live and how to praise.”

 

Ruskin died on this date, January 20, in 1900 at age eighty.

[Davenport’s Ruskin essay, first published in Harper’s in 2000, is collected in The Death of Picasso (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).]

'I Love the Universe Because It’s Made of Stories'

The third issue of New Verse Review has just been published, and I take it all back: poetry is not dead. The journal is crowded with work by good poets familiar – Jane Greer, Jared Carter, Ernest Hilbert, Amit Majmudar, Alfred Nicol – and previously unknown, like Daniel Patrick Sheehan. Good to see two Aaron Poochigian poems, including “Not Atoms”: 

“When, strolling through the Village, I discover

“one lonesome shoe, a jeweled but dogless collar,

the crushed rose of a hitman or a lover,

barf like an offering, a half-burnt dollar,

'Scream' masks holding traffic-light-top vigil,

 loose lab rats among the morning glories

 or Elmo trapped inside a witch’s sigil,

 

“I love the universe because it’s made of stories.”

I’m reminded of another "list" or catalog poem, a sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges, “Things,” (Selected Poems, 2000) translated by Stephen Kessler:

 

“My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,

The obedient lock, the belated notes

The few days left to me will not find time

To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,

A book and crushed in its pages the withered

Violet, monument to an afternoon

Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,

The mirror in the west where a red sunrise

Blazes its illusion. How many things,

Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,

Serve us like slaves who never say a word,

Blind and so mysteriously reserved.

They will endure beyond our vanishing;

And they will never know that we have gone.”

 

Poochigian and Borges remind us of the world’s bounty, including good poems. The founding editor of New Verse Review, Steve Knepper, keeps all three issues available and free.

'That Gravity Stayed Him Somehow'

In the second volume of his Johnsonian Miscellanies (Clarendon Press, 1897), George Birkbeck Hill collects anecdotes from the writer and clergyman Thomas Campbell, including this:

“Talking of suicide, Boswell took up the defence for argument’s sake, and the Doctor said that some cases were more excusable than others, but if it were excusable, it should be the last resource; ‘for instance,’ says he, ‘if a man is distressed in circumstances . . .  he ought to fly his country.’ ‘How can he fly,’ says Boswell, ‘if he has wife and children?’ ‘What Sir,’ says the Doctor, shaking his head as if to promote the fermentation of his wit, ‘doth not a man fly from his wife and children if he murders himself?'’”

The glibness of Johnson’s response surprises me. Boswell reports a similar conversation in his Life, on April 21, 1773:

“We talked of the melancholy end of a gentleman who had destroyed himself. JOHNSON: ‘It was owing to imaginary difficulties in his affairs, which, had he talked with any friend, would soon have vanished.’ BOSWELL: ‘Do you think, Sir, that all who commit suicide are mad?’ JOHNSON: ‘Sir, they are often not universally disordered in their intellects, but one passion presses so upon them, that they yield to it, and commit suicide, as a passionate man will stab another.’ He added, ‘I have often thought, that after a man has taken the resolution to kill himself, it is not courage in him to do any thing, however desperate, because he has nothing to fear.’”

The most severely emotional wreckage I have ever seen was suffered by the families of two suicides. In neither case did the survivors suspect so profound a despair. All were shocked. Both families fractured – divorce, psychiatry, medication, crime, alcoholism. Ben Downing published “Suicides” in The Yale Review in 2013:

“I’ve known a few. Found one, in fact.

Surprising there aren’t more,

 

“when you stop to think of it.

I mean, it’s not hard to do,

 

“really, if one is intent,

and we are an impulsive species –

 

“what’s more natural than at some moment of great pain

to just say ‘Screw it’ and duck out?

 

“And yet it would seem that most of the time

there’s something holding us to life,

 

“a kind of gravity that stills or thwarts

all but the most determined.

 

“The one I found, he talked of it.

I didn’t try to dissuade him –

 

“he had his reasons.

But that gravity stayed him somehow,

 

“kept him in place through wave after wave of temptation,

until, quite suddenly, it didn’t.”

 

Downing discovered the body of his friend Tom Disch after the poet and science-fiction writer killed himself with a handgun on July 4, 2008.

'A Great or Wonderful Thing'

“Too greedy of Magnalities, we are apt to make but favourable experiments concerning welcome Truths.”

Sir Thomas Browne in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), also known as Vulgar Errors, dismisses such notions as the existence of unicorns and the impact of garlic on magnetism. In the sentence above, from Book 2, Chapter III, he rejects the misuse of logic we know as confirmation bias – seeking evidence confirming our hypothesis while ignoring contrary evidence. It’s a common human failing, a reminder that some of us substantiate our prejudices by treating truth like Play-Doh, a malleable substance. Thus, newspapers still publish horoscopes.

 

Browne’s most interesting choice of words is “Magnalities,” which he apparently coined.  Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines it as “a great thing; something above the common rate,” and the OED is even terser: “a great or wonderful thing.”

 

In Chapter III of Browne’s Garden of Cyrus (1658), two centuries before Darwin, he asks why some plants produce prodigious quantities of seeds or other modes of reproduction: “The exiguity and smallnesse of some Seeds extending to large productions is one of the Magnalities of nature, somewhat illustrating the work of the Creation, and vast production from nothing.”

 

With no knowledge of genetics or evolutionary adaptation, Browne concedes his ignorance and accepts that creation is “a great or wonderful thing.” After the glories of his prose, what I most admire about Browne is his questioning nature, the way he mingles science, skepticism and faith. He is not “scientific” by twenty-first-century standards – no experiments with repeatable findings are involved -- but neither is he uncritically credulous. He applies reason to some of his day’s more farfetched notions, something we don’t always do.

'They Require No Mortar'

“He is one of those writers for whom, if you care at all, you care immensely.”

This reader started in puberty as a serial monogamist, wedded briefly but intensely to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and turned in time into a guiltless polygamist. In junior-high school, sick at home with the flu, I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories. Fever fed pleasure. I’ve tried several times to recapture that bliss but the thrill is gone. Falling for a writer while an adolescent of any age is infatuation and like that first crush it will never come again. Literary promiscuity arrives only with maturity. The rapture of devotion to a single writer exclusively, with that degree of intensity, can never be replicated.

 

Above, Desmond MacCarthy is describing Walter Savage Landor, a writer I discovered in midlife and care for immensely. “His prose,” MacCarthy writes, “apart from its content, gives me more pleasure than that of almost any other writer. The Landorian period is built up of chiseled statements, without conjunctions or transitions; the blocks, as [English literary critic] Sidney Colvin pointed out, are so hard and well-cut that they require no mortar.”

 

I share MacCarthy’s taste for Landor, one of those eccentrically wayward writers who will never earn a broad audience, turned out periodically by the English. Others who inspire similar loyalty include Henry Mayhew, Charles Doughty, Henry Green and MacCarthy himself. I would never proselytize such writers to other readers. They write for a small number and must be discovered independently. MacCarthy continues in excellent prose:

 

“Great splendour in emphasis and great composure in tone are the characteristics of this prose; and when the reader’s mood is one in which contemplation is a state of recognition rather than of wonder; when his imagination does not hunger after either realism or mystery, but is content to rest in what is presented to it with perfect clarity and dignity, then he will not complain that Landor’s pathos does not always move, that his invective does not often kill, that the famous characters in his [Imaginary] Conversations have little individuality, and that Landor himself is a man of thoughts rather than a thinking man.”

 

[You can find MacCarthy’s essay on Landor in Memories (1953) at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]

'Art Is Wild As a Cat'

Nige tells me he attended a reading at Cambridge given by Stevie Smith not long before her death in 1971. “I remember [her],” he writes, “more for her extraordinary presence and her eccentric, but very effective way of reading her work. . . . [A]t the time I was a young anti-formalist idiot, who didn't at all approve of work like hers. More fool me. Even so, of all the readings I attended at that time, hers is the only one that really made an impression – a good impression, that is.” 

I envy Nige his memories. Smith is a poet I’m still surprised I admire and enjoy. I’m leery of most work in any form that feels like willful eccentricity, an adolescent grab after unearned attention. It’s a cheat and makes me more aware of the poet than the poem. Reading and rereading Smith’s poems and novels over the decades have made me forgiving of her idiosyncrasies. Long ago I accepted that she writes the way she does for the same reason I write in English, which is the only language I know. Kay Ryan explains:

 

“The reader of Stevie Smith can never for an instant forget that she is looking through the cock eyes of Stevie Smith. Everything that transpires does so in Stevie Smith’s universe, which is not one’s own. Meaning, none of the sufferings hurt and none of the pronouncements crowd the mind. Instead, they can be entertained; we can examine them as if they were toys although they are not.”

 

Consider a poem from Not Waving But Drowning (1957), “The New Age,” in which she writes:

 

“. . . the state of Art itself presages decline

As if Art has anything or ever had

To do with civilization whether good or bad.

Art is wild as a cat and quite separate from civilization

But that is another matter that is not now under consideration.”

 

Smith may not be gratuitously eccentric but she enjoys being contrary. That her art is “wild as a cat” is inarguable, though “wild” need not imply savage or incoherent. But art is certainly not “separate from civilization.” It’s the most civilized thing we do. In a note to the poem in All the Poems (New Directions, 2016), editor Will May tells us Smith informally dedicated the poem to Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer who developed the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars. Smith is not apocalyptic. She suggests we humans are both a blessing and a curse:

 

“Why should Man be at an end? he is hardly beginning.

This New Age will slip in under cover of their cries

And be upon them before they have opened their eyes.

Well, say geological time is a one-foot rule

Then Man’s only been here about half an inch to play the fool

Or be wise if he likes, as he has often been

Oh heavens how these crying people spoil the beautiful geological scene.”