'We Caught the Christmas Beetle'

I understand why people might be repelled by a poem titled “When We Were Kids.” A wallow in nostalgia can prove deadly. But the language in Clive James’ twelve stanzas cataloging an Australian childhood is exotic enough to interest this American reader, apart from their poetic worth (some of the rhymes are amusing). The occasional footnote would be helpful: 

“When we were kids we played at cock-a-lorum.

Gutter to gutter the boys ran harum-scarum.

The girls ran slower and their arms and legs looked funny.

You weren’t supposed to drink your school milk in the dunny."

 

The OED tells us cock-a-lorum is “a children’s game in which one set of players jumps on to the backs of another set of players, calling out ‘hi cockalorum, jig, jig, jig’.” And dunny is Australian slang for “a toilet; esp. an outside toilet, usually without plumbing; a privy, an outhouse.” In other words, a jakes.

 

I happened on the poem because a reader told me of the Christmas beetle, an insect indigenous to Australia that I had never heard of. After consulting some etymological sites I happened on James’ poem. Some of the thirty-five species, part of a larger group called “metallic beetles,” are peculiarly beautiful. Their wings reflect light and can render a mirror image. James writes:

 

“When we were kids we caught the Christmas beetle.

Its brittle wings were gold-green like the wattle.

Our mothers made bouquets from frangipani.

Hard to pronounce, a pink musk-stick cost a penny.”

 

Beauty of this sort, so beguiling and unexpected, inevitably raises the question: why? Our Darwinian assumptions suggest we look for the evolutionary advantages, though I’m convinced much of the beauty found in the natural world and elsewhere is purely gratuitous. Beauty is its own nonutilitarian reward. It’s there for us to enjoy. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson’s dinner on March 31, 1772 with General Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot exiled in London. The wide-ranging conversation settled on aesthetics:

 

“We then fell into a disquisition whether there is any beauty independent of utility. The General maintained there was not. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was; and he instanced a coffee cup which he held in his hand, the painting of which was of no real use, as the cup could hold the coffee equally well if plain; yet the painting was beautiful.”

 

To risk a rather silly rhyme, beauty is a gratuity, perhaps chief among life’s consolations. To be without an aesthetic sense is to be impoverished. The absence of such a sense and its impact on the moral life would make an interesting study and might help explain much human behavior.

'Why Not Get Out of This Rut?'

"Books offer what may be called a standing solution to the eternal and infernal Christmas-present problem.” 

Well, yes and no. I’m a graceless gift giver and receiver, especially when it comes to books. People like my middle son are inspired and have a knack for choosing appropriate gifts. He reliably picks titles previously unknown to me that prove readable. Examples from recent years include The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich and The Walls of Israel by Jean Lartéguy. Some friends and relatives assume that because I’m a reader, choosing the perfect title is a cinch. It’s not. I’m neurotically specific when it comes to the books I want. You’re not likely to find something at Barnes & Noble I might actually want to read or else I already have it.

 

In the passage quoted at the top, H.L. Mencken oversimplifies things. He’s writing in his Baltimore Evening Sun column for December 20, 1910. His examples suggest how radically times and tastes have changed in a mere 114 years:

 

“The same old books are bought and given year after year. Go into the bookstores and you will see huge pyramids of the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Fitzgerald’s Omar (in a score of gaudy and painful bindings), the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Motley’s ‘Rise of the Dutch Republic,’ Fenimore Cooper’s atrocious romances, the essays of Emerson, cheap reprints of Kipling’s earlier and uncopyrighted stories, Shakespeare in trashy near-leather, Wilkie Collins, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, De Maupassant, Dumas Pere, Sienkiewicz and Charles Garvice—stupid and silly ‘gift’ books innumerable.”

 

Still true but not a single title or author cited by Mencken will you find under this year’s Christmas trees with the possible exception of the unreadable Poe (“We are cured of Poe by 18”). That’s good news, except we’ve substituted our own predictable catalog of bestsellers and default “classics.”

 

“Such stuff,” Mencken writes, “is bought by the wagon load every Christmas. Very little of it, I fancy, is ever read. What civilized human being, in this year of grace 1910, actually enjoys Bulwer-Lytton?” I’ve never read him and like most of you I know only the much-parodied opening line from his 1830 novel Pierre: “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”

“Why not get out of this rut?” Mencken asks. “Why not break away from the hideous ‘presentation’ books, the ghastly ‘sets’ of soporific novels, the dull poetry, the childish books of travel, the plush-and-onyx editions de luxe which burden the book counters at this season?”

 

Amidst all the dreck, Mencken does suggest good stuff as well, including Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and titles by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.

'Bring on the Vitamines'

When I returned to college in 2002, thirty years after dropping out a year before graduating, I took a class in something called “psychological anthropology.” The teacher was personable and the class was a sort of catch basin of random learning. We could write about any stray hobbyhorse we chose. Because of her interest in the treatment of mental illness, I gave the teacher a VHS copy of Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies. In turn, she encouraged me to write about John Berryman and his Dream Songs because she found his alcoholism and its impact on his poetry interesting. 

One observation she made in class sticks with me: food inspires more myths, obsessions, weird ideas and eccentricities than any other part of our lives, even sex. I often think about that when I encounter one of my own unexamined prejudices. I don’t like red meat and most sweets apart from fruit. I find milk revolting. Three foods I hated as a kid – onions, mushrooms, spinach – I like today. Rationally, I can’t defend these things but that was my teacher’s point: they’re my aberrancies and I’m sticking with them.

 

Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was an American poet, novelist and anthologist who published more than 170 books, mostly mysteries and volumes for children. I’ve written about her before. In 1936 she published The Book of Humorous Verse. In the section called “Banter” she includes a poem, “Amazing Facts About Food,” by the prolific “Unknown.” It’s preceded by: “The Food Scientist tells us: ‘A deficiency of iron, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and the other mineral salts, colloids and vitamines of vegetable origin leads to numerous forms of physical disorder.’”:

 

“I yearn to bite on a Colloid

With phosphorus, iron and Beans;

I want to be filled with Calcium, grilled,

And Veg'table Vitamines!

 

“I yearn to bite on a Colloid

(Though I don't know what it means)

To line my inside with Potassium, fried,

And Veg'table Vitamines.

 

“I would sate my soul with spinach

And dandelion greens.

No eggs, nor ham, nor hard-boiled clam,

But Veg'table Vitamines.

 

“Hi, Waiter! Coddle the Colloids

With phosphorus, iron and Beans;

Though Mineral Salts may have some faults,

Bring on the Vitamines.”

Wells gives us an early satirical treatment of health food faddism. Related poems in her anthology include “If We Didn’t Have to Eat” by Nixon Waterman, “How to Eat Watermelons” by Frank Libby Stanton, and “Salad” by Sydney Smith.

'It's Uncanny. The Past Is Not Dead.'

 “The Ferryman’s Due,” my article about Andrew Rickard and his Obolus Press, is published in the January 2025 issue of The New Criterion:

“Rickard often encounters such passages, in which the author he is translating seems to speak for him. ‘It’s uncanny. The past is not dead,’ he says. ‘Even the obscure dead who preceded us are still alive through their words.’”

'Humour Is Reason Itself'

The saddest man I know wishes more than anything to be thought of as a comedian, a jokester, the reliably funny guy at the party. The sadness derives from his inability to say or do anything even modestly amusing. People will laugh aloud at something he says out of pity and an awkward sense of politeness. You can tell he’s trying to be funny because he always laughs at his own failed witticisms. He would never understand what Jules Renard writes in his journal on February 23, 1910, just three months before his death: 

“Humour: modesty and wit combined. It is the everyday clothing of the mind. I have formed a high opinion, moral and literary, of humour.”

 

Let’s define our terms when we say someone has “a good sense of humor.” The man I described above reminds me of the little boy who says “underwear” or “poopy” at the dinner table and waits for the grownups to crack up -- "Ain't he cute?" -- so let’s rule out compulsive giggling and joke-telling, and dirty words with nothing behind them but a pre-pubescent’s desire for attention. Max Beerbohm in his great essay “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920) identifies incongruity as “the mainspring of laughter.” Comedians have a tough job because we know in advance they want to make us laugh. Humor thrives on unexpectedness. Most of the funniest people I’ve known are soft-spoken, poker-faced and not clownishly desperate for laughs. Often they are introverted, mordant-minded or even depressed. A sense of humor is more than a social grace; it is a way of looking at the world, and may not always provoke raucous laughter. Renard goes on in the same journal entry:

 

“In short, humour is Reason itself. Man regulated and corrected. No definition of it ever satisfied me. Besides, everything is contained inside humor.”

 

Renard  suggests that a well-exercised sense of humor is a symptom of sanity. By implication, the earnest and humorless are nuts. Beerbohm wrote his essay after reading Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), a work which begins unpromisingly: “What does laughter mean?” A post-mortem on laughter is comparable to a light-hearted look at prostate surgery. Beerbohm confesses that Bergson, like Schopenhauer and William James, leaves him baffled. He instead endorses his own mature capacity for laughter, in contrast to his buttoned-up, youthful demeanor – what today we might call hip coolness. Laughter can be risky, especially in regard to pomposity and unearned self-regard, and nothing beats mockery for effectiveness in combatting earnestness.

 

Boswell in his Life recounts his great friend’s laughter: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’” Some seem embarrassed to laugh, and do so only when socially sanctioned by their betters. How human it is that grief and laughter both elicit tears.

 

[The Renard passages are drawn from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'On the Cello of Shared Grief'

With the deaths of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No thought for family or friends, or even other readers, merely one’s sense of personal betrayal. That’s how I felt seven years ago when Richard Wilbur died at age ninety-six, as though he hadn’t already given us more than we deserve. Then I had a chance to write publicly about Wilbur and his work, which might qualify as a form of that recent fashion for “grief counseling.” But that sounds melodramatic. 

Today I read Wilbur the way I read Edgar Bowers or Donald Justice -- on multiple levels, recalling earlier readings and misreadings, with that increasingly common sensation of another contemporary gone. We build a history with such writers. Poets at this level of achievement are absorbed into ourselves and become pieces of our sensibilities. There’s often a sense of déjà vu. Good poems are forever time-released and never give away everything. Included in the last collection Wilbur published during his lifetime, Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (2010), is “Psalm”:

 

“Give thanks for all things

On the plucked lute, and likewise

The harp of ten strings.

 

“Have the lifted horn

Greatly blare, and pronounce it

Good to have been born.

 

“Lend the breath of life

To the stops of the sweet flute

Or capering fife,

 

“And tell the deep drum

To make, at the right juncture,

Pandemonium.

 

“Then, in grave relief,

Praise too our sorrows on the

Cello of shared grief.”

'A Half-Buried Sense for Poetry'

It’s easy to mistake geniality for prevarication. So rare a quality seems suspicious or naively unprofessional, a mask worn to conceal the shark within, especially among literary types. Of course, critics are born to be severe, nobody’s pal. How many critics can you name whose virtues include friendliness on the page and off? First in line is V.S. Pritchett, whose longtime friend and fellow lover of Spain, Gerald Brenan, writes in one of his memoirs, A Personal Record, 1920–1972 (1975): 

“To me he is the most friendly and genial of men. Though highly strung, one cannot imagine him ever being angry or impatient. No one has ever been snubbed by him, no one brushed off in a review. He is completely without bad feelings or malice. Then his conversation is very stimulating -- witty and full of fantasy yet also balanced and judicious. The hard struggle he had to survive in his early years caused him to mature early and it also rubbed off the rough corners so that he has no eccentricities, but is always sanity itself. One can sum him up as a man who keeps down to earth, a man without false hopes or illusions, an accepter and recorder of things as they are. Yet the imagery in his writings often betrays a half-buried sense for poetry.”

 

Readers like myself who never met Pritchett but grew up reading his stories and reviews readily recognize him in Brenan’s snapshot. About Pritchett’s poetry, which among prose writers most often reminds me of Dickens’, try this:

 

“To those who are in danger of reacting too violently against the great botanists of our hidden flora, I recommend the cure offered by the works of Italo Svevo. He is laughter at last. Here Hamlet raises a smile, Oedipus is teased away from his fate . . .”

 

And of Ford Madox Ford’s finest works – The Good Soldier, the Fifth Queen trilogy and the Parade’s End tetralogy – he writes:

 

“They vindicate his happy yet tortured incapacity to go straight from a starting-point, for he had none. They put his lack of self-confidence, his shortness of spiritual breathe, his indolence, to use. They brought out and exploited with full resource the price he had to pay for his extraordinary cleverness: the emotion of anguish.”       

 

The American edition of Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991) is 1,321 pages long. With the 1,221-page Complete Collected Stories (1990), his novel Mr Beluncle (1951) and his memoirs (A Cab at the Door, 1968; Midnight Oil, 1971), they constitute the essential core of his writing. But the books on Spain, the biographies of Turgenev and Chekhov and other odds and ends are all worth pursuing. Like any good critic, Pritchett is a generous teacher who wishes to share with students what gives him pleasure. From him I first learned of the great Portuguese novelist José Maria de Eça de Queiroz and the Spaniard Benito Pérez Galdós. Pritchett closes his essay about the latter, “A Spanish Balzac,” with words that read like an epitaph of praise and perhaps his final judgment on his first literary love, the great nineteenth-century realistic novels: “The fact is that Galdós accepts human nature without resentment.”

 Pritchett was born on this date, December 17, in 1900, part of the generation of English writers that included Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell and Henry Green. He died on March 20, 1997 at age ninety-six.

'Just to Sweeten the Cup'

“It is to be remembered,” Ford Madox Ford writes in The March of Literature (1939), “that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.” 

I’ve often pondered Ford’s remark and tried to accept it matter-of-factly as Gospel but I can’t. I love the great prose stylists in various schools. Badly written prose gives me a headache and makes reading virtually impossible. But prose must have a scaffolding of meaning. Prose is not music, as Ford suggests, but it ought to be musical. Words without content are nonsense. I do acknowledge that good prose can make palatable a subject that doesn’t otherwise interest me. Take A.J. Liebling on boxing or Michael Oakeshott on politics. To them add Izaak Walton on fishing. I haven’t fished since I was a boy but I’ve often reread The Compleat Angler (1653), a book that can be legitimately described as charming: “Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery elements are made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration.” I enjoy the thought and its witty expression while denying its truth.

 

Ford writes later in The March of Literature, “[J]ust to sweeten the cup, let us take leave of our Jacobean writers with a passage from Walton . . .” and quotes a paragraph drawn from Chapter 4 of The Compleat Angler:

 

“Look; under that broad Beech-tree, I sate down, when I was last this way a fishing, and the birds in the adjoyning Grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an Eccho, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hallow tree, near to the brow of that Primrose-hil, there I sate viewing the silver-streams glide silently towards their center, the tempestuous Sea . . ."

 

Walton died on this date, December 15, in 1683 at age ninety.