'Without Any Hope of Fame or Money'

Friends and relatives, people whose judgment I actually trust, have urged me to move Anecdotal Evidence from Blogger to Substack and I don’t understand why. All I need is a place to write, the “platform” is of no importance. I’d do this in a notebook, like in the old days, if nothing else were available. Blogger is temperamental but after almost twenty years I’ve learned her funny little ways. As in a long, mostly happy marriage, one gets comfortable. I think of Michael Oakeshott’s definition of being conservative: 

“. . . to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

 

I didn’t retire after almost half a century as a newspaper reporter and science writer – a professional -- in order to “monetize.” In 1903, G.K. Chesterton wrote a brief monograph on Robert Browning as part of the English Men of Letters series. In Chapter IV, “Browning in Italy,” Chesterton describes the poet’s devotion to painting, his dedication to “the obstetrics of art,” which enabled him to write poems about painters and their work:

 

“He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed.”

 

Even a professional can be an amateur.

'It Is Always Summer, Always the Golden Hour'

I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished basement. I take that image from my childhood home. The walls and floor were bare concrete. Stacks of newspaper and lumber felt flesh-like with dampness. Down there it was always chilly, even in summer.

The poet Jane Greer is seventy-two and lives in North Dakota. For twelve years she edited the Plains Poetry Journal. She is a poet of domesticity and technical rigor, Midwestern in her good-humored seriousness, a Roman Catholic who reveres the wonder of creation. I’m from Ohio, a semi-Midwestern state, but there’s nothing homogenous about the Midwest and its people. She’s rural, I’m urban/suburban. Most of the stereotypes don’t hold, though Midwesterners indulge them and laugh. I remember being surprised when a buddy and I got lost in Illinois trying to outrun a tornado that never happened. We found ourselves in Lewiston, where Edgar Lee Masters moved with his family at age twelve. It served as his model for Spoon River. And the surrounding fields of corn felt almost claustrophobic.

 

I read Those Days: An American Album By Richard Critchfield (1931-94) when it was published in 1986. Like Greer, Critchfield was a North Dakota native, and the book recounts his family’s history in that state and Iowa. I remember associating it with Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Greer, I discovered, reviewed the book in the April 1987 issue of Chronicles, and it begins with a passage any writer would be delighted to hear:

 

“This is a book I wish I’d written, a love story of the largest and best kind. Like most people, I remember my childhood, that eternal summer, in a glow of happy forgetfulness, simply out of pleasure. Richard Critchfield ‘remembers,’ as if he had been there, his parents' lives and society before he was born, and shows why it’s important to remember and to go back even further than our own birth: Because like it or not, we are attached. We are not historyless like Adam, breathed out of nothing; we’re drawn from the narrow end of a real and compelling vortex—history—vivid with blood and bone, passion and fear, as it touches down to make us in the here and now. Part of everything that was and will be, we move up the funnel of history to make room for those whose history we will be.”

 

I envy Critchfield’s reconstruction of his family’s history, in part because most of mine is a blank. I know almost nothing about my father’s family and only unconnected shards about my mother’s. These people didn’t talk about the past, whether out of guilt or abject indifference, and bequeathed little living memory to their descendants. I’m left with all the questions I didn’t ask.

 

“This is no vague nostalgic trek back to the nonexistent ‘good old days,’” Greer writes, “or mere homage to a loved mother, but a gifted writer’s careful examination of all available resources, to reconstruct the rhythm and immediacy of the past—its sounds and smells, human passions and disappointments. Critchfield has resuscitated those days, given them breath and pulse, and made their relevance to us, now, evident.”

 

Here is “The Light As Thick As Clover Honey,” the first poem in Greer’s third collection, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022):

 

‘Here is the square pink house on the green street.

Here is the long back yard sloped to the alley.

Here is the rusty swing, and here is the pup-tent

bleaching the grass. Here is the happy family

like all the others. Here is the sunburnt child

on her blue bike whose streamers are the reins

of a great stallion; here they gallop the world

from home to grandmother’s and home again

on odd brick streets, around the painted bandstand,

through the gap in in the church’s high trimmed hedge.

Here is the small town hugging the river bend,

cicadas rasping out their alien urge,

the light as thick as clover honey. Here

it is always summer, always the golden hour.”

“Eternal summer” in the review, “it is always summer” in Greer’s poem.

"Some of His Work Was Gold'

From a dusty, thoroughly disorganized Houston bookstore I bought a copy of Turnstile One: A Literary Miscellany (Turnstile Press, 1948), edited by V.S. Pritchett. Much of its literary quality shames today's readers and writers. It collects poems, stories, essays and reviews published between 1931 and 1948 in England’s New Statesman and Nation. I browsed in a library copy years ago, mostly drawn by Pritchett’s name, but now I have read all the pieces that looked interesting. "Our more modest aim," Pritchett writes in his foreword, "is to entertain." Here is a poem by the novelist and non-poet E.M. Forster, “Landor at Sea” (1938): 

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;

Reason I loved, and, next to Reason, Doubt;

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;

And put it out.”

 

Some readers will recognize the epigram as a snide attempt to parody Landor’s best-known poem, “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher”:

 

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.”

 

Forster’s poem reflects the then-fashionable Marxist-fading-to-sentimental-Fabian-Leftist blush present in some of the pieces collected in Turnstile One. That same year, Forster wrote in his essay “What I Believe”: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster’s self-congratulatory soft-headedness could have been expressed last week.

 

Collected in Turnstile One are poems by Auden, MacNeice, Walter de la Mare, Roy Campbell and John Betjeman, as well as Henry Reed’s well-known “Naming of Parts.” There’s a Pritchett short story, “The Invader,” one by Elizabeth Bowen, "Unwelcome Idea,” and stories by Chekhov (“A Fishy Affaire,” translated by the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler) and Mikhail Zoshchenko.

 

Best of all are the essays and reviews. Here’s a passage from a wrong-headed piece by Rebecca West on Kipling: “Some of his work was gold; and the rest was faery gold,” she writes. West acknowledges the greatness of Kim but adds “[A]ll his life long Kipling was a better poet than he was a prose writer, though an unequal one.”

 

David Garnett writes of Charles Montague Doughty’s largely unread poetry, as opposed to his masterpiece in prose, Travels in Arabia Deserta. The latter, he writes, is “told in a personal style, with so rich a vocabulary that the book which is difficult at first, gains with every re-reading. . . . The individual word was all-important to Doughty.”

 

Desmond MacCarthy takes on Chekhov’s work for the stage: “To watch a Chekhov play is to recapture one’s youth, that most uncomfortable yet enviable time when there was intensity even in moments of lassitude, when self-torture did not seem vain, when hope alternately lit up and took the shine out of the present, and when time at once seemed endless and yet impossible to fill worthily.”

 

There’s also an essay on the wonderful novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, “An Austere Fiction,” by the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor: “Though she could never become a best-seller, there must be many people (particularly among those who do not much care for modern novels in general) who, if they knew of her, would cheerfully undertake the continuous intellectual exercise of reading her books for the sake of the continuous intellectual exhilaration—and something more—which is its reward.” Shawe-Taylor adds, emphasizing the role of a book review as a public service: “It is to them, and not to the convinced Compton-Burnett fans, that this review is addressed.”

 

The copy of Turnstile One I bought is inscribed with a fountain pen on the front end-paper:

 

“To Dora and Franz

with love

from

Ljuba and Erich.

December, 1951”

'Absolute Anthology'

The American poet Len Krisak asks a question common to all serious readers, one that, if posed privately, serves as an honest way to reveal one’s deeper tastes without the social pressures of fashion and snobbery. Think of it as a variation on the “Desert Island” parlor game. It helps to pare down to essentials what we really value and cull the dross: 

“What are the poems one returns to, always taking pleasure? Or to put it slightly differently, what poems would enjoy the place of honor in one's Absolute Anthology (no fair including warhorses, chestnuts, and poems one is supposed to like)?”

 

Let’s limit this to three English-language poems. My first nomination required no thought: “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), Samuel Johnson’s imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. There’s a sturdy elegance to Johnson’s lines. His biographer, W. Jackson Bate, describes the poem as “strangely powerful.” The title traces its lineage to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling Johnson’s abiding theme.

 

Next, “A Summer Commentary” (1943) by Yvor Winters. Return to the question posed in the second stanza: “Where is the meaning that I found?” The answer is the poem and the experiences it recalls. “A Summer Commentary,” like any great poem, defies glib paraphrase. It immerses us in sensory detail (auditory, visual, even olfactory and gustatory) while connoting emotional and intellectual maturity. It renders a life’s education in twenty lines.

 

Finally, “A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950) by Richard Wilbur. Selfishness, despair and ingratitude forever tempt us. In this poem, Wilbur embraces the sensory world. His is not the way of the Desert Fathers. The world has worth and should not be scorned. After all, the Incarnation occurred in this world, as Wilbur observes in the poem’s final stanza. His title is adapted from a passage in Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, called by C.S. Lewis “almost the most beautiful book in English."

What, no Larkin? No Shakespeare, Pope, Landor, Dickinson, Housman or Robinson? Wait for a second revised edition of the Absolute Anthology.

'I Should Never Mention It'

Spoken by a man after my own heart: 

“You must grant me a dispensation for saying any thing, whether it be sense or nonsense, upon the subject of politics. It is truly a matter in which I am so little interested, that, were it not that it sometimes serves me for a theme when I can find no other, I should never mention it.”

 

I’ve come to think of politics as no more than a pretext people use for getting angry. They enjoy the illusion of self-righteous power it gives them. It’s a handy stand-in for religion, sports, musical tastes, anything enabling that rush of disapproving emotion and self-aggrandizement. A reader asks—neutrally, I think—for my assessment of President Trump’s second administration thus far. Because I don’t pay much attention to such things, my judgment is worthless, a waste of time. I’ve never defined myself with such categories and I don’t think my opinions are of any importance simply because they are mine. The author of the credo above is the English poet William Cowper, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton on July 5, 1784. He continues:

 

“I would forfeit a large sum, if, after advertising a month in the Gazette, the minister of the day, whoever he may be, could discover a man who cares about him or his measures so little as I do. When I say that I would forfeit a large sum, I mean to have it understood that I would forfeit such a sum if I had it.”

 

Cowper is the poet of spectatorship, of diffidence expressed as a willingness to observe the world, not plunge into its swelter. He was a high-strung man, affectionate and loyal to his friends but haunted by depression and suicidal thoughts. His sense of humor was subtle and often heavily disguised. He barely recognized civic affairs and remained blithely immune to politics. His passions were poetry and religion, not meddling. Like me, I think he understood the role of government to be filling potholes and arresting bad guys, or the comparable obligations of his day. I’m reminded of Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Workers. Asked by a reporter why she didn’t vote, Day is supposed to have answered: “Because it only encourages them”

'A Great Euthanasia'

I can’t think of another poet who wrote so often or so amusingly about death as Thomas Disch. I once tried tallying his death-themed poems and lost count. Here’s a sample: “How to Behave When Dead,” “Symbols of Love and Death,” “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written a decade before her death) and “Death Wish IV.”

And then there’s the suggestively named Endzone, an online "LiveJournal" Disch kept from April 26, 2006 until July 2, 2008, two days before his death by suicide. Look at these titles from his final month: “Letters to Dead Writers,” “Back from the Dead!” “In Memoriam,” “Why I Must Die: A Film Script,” “Tears the Bullet Wept,” “Ding-Dong! The witch is dead!” When it comes to death poems, here is my favorite, from ABCDEFG HIJKLM NOPQRST UVWXYZ (1981), “The Art of Dying”:

“Mallarmé drowning

Chatterton coughing up his lungs

Auden frozen in a cottage

Byron expiring at Missolonghi

and Hart Crane visiting Missolonghi and dying there too

 

“The little boot of Sylvia Plath wedged in its fatal stirrup

Tasso poisoned

Crabbe poisoned

T.S. Eliot raving for months in a Genoa hospital before he died

Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs

 

“The execution of Marianne Moore

Pablo Neruda spattered against the Mississippi

Hofmannsthal's electrocution

The quiet painless death of Robert Lowell

Alvarez bashing his bicycle into an oak

 

“The Brownings lost at sea

The premature burial of Thomas Gray

The baffling murder of Stephen Vincent Benét

Stevenson dying of dysentery

and Catullus of a broken heart”

 

I never sense morbidity behind Disch’s lines. That may sound ridiculous but Disch deems death a worthy opponent, deserving of our laughter. True laughter suggests sanity. Try reading aloud “The execution of Marianne Moore” and “Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs” and not at least tittering. Read the following passage from Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) and see how Disch falls into his scheme:

“The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! -- so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please -- at that which is unhappy.”

 

Disch’s laughter and much of the laughter he inspires is the mirthless sort. Only occasionally does he supply us with a jolly good time. Consider this thought: “. . . to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia . . .” That was written by the happiest, most mentally fit of writers, Max Beerbohm, in “Laughter,” the final essay in his final collection of essays, And Even Now (1920). The inability to laugh, or to laugh only as a gesture of social obligation (the robotic ha ha of the cocktail party or board meeting), is an ailment clinically associated with psychic constipation. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders  in its most recent edition glosses the condition as “tight-ass to the max; a real bummer.” A related symptom, according to the DSM-5-TR, is habitual use of the acronym LOL and in more severe cases, LMAO. Sufferers are to be approached with the utmost caution. Seek professional assistance.

 

That Disch committed suicide on July 4, 2008 -- Independence Day – has been interpreted by some as a gesture of contempt for the United States. I don’t agree. Some souls get worn out and tired earlier than others. For now, put aside Disch’s death and read his poems, novels and stories, and remember at least occasionally to laugh.

'Lord, Make Me Not Too Rich. Nor Make Me Poor'

“In spite of the Deconstructionists who say that communication is not really possible, we most of us manage to honor stop signs, and we all honor the dollar sign, whether or not we are willing to admit it.” 

In 1995, R.L. Barth published The Golden Calf: Poems of Money, edited by the poet Turner Cassity and Mary Ellen Templeton, a fellow librarian of Cassity’s in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta. The subject is a rare one among poets – so crass, after all, and so bourgeois. Contrast that absence with the ubiquity of the quest for wealth in the novels of the nineteenth century, from Balzac to Henry James and beyond. Even crime novels, whether pulpy or sophisticated, are frequently driven by the desire for loot. The editors have found moolah poems by thirty-three American and English poets writing between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, without including Ezra Pound’s crackpot ravings in the Cantos.

 

The statement at the top is drawn from Cassity’s introduction. As ever, his tone is arch, erudite, almost campy and very amusing. “[W]hile it has been easy to find poems about begging, borrowing, and stealing, as well as gambling and privateering,” he writes, “it has been very difficult to find poems about simply earning or making money.”

 

Many of us spend half our lives earning money, and yet few poets show much interest in the subject. “Human envy being what it is,” Cassity writes, “Erato and Mammon will probably never lie down together in any degree of comfort, but no topics as central as avarice and ambition can fail to engage a really serious writer, as the Renaissance, the 17^th, and the 18^th centuries were well aware.” Several of the poets and poems in C&T’s anthology are new to this reader. Take “Worldly Wealth” by the Welsh poet Rowland Watkyns (1616?-64), with the subtitle “Natura paucis contenta” (“Nature is satisfied with little”):

 

“Wealth unto every man, I see,

Is like the bark unto the tree:

Take from the tree the bark away,

The naked tree will soon decay.

Lord, make me not too rich. Nor make me poor,

To wait at rich mens’ tables, or their door.”

 

Given that money is often a pretext for comedy, some of the collected poems qualify as light verse. Take Ebenezer Elliott’s (1781-1849) “On Communists,” written while Karl Marx, who never held down a regular job and lived off the largesse of Friedrich Engels, was still alive:

 

“What is a Communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings;

Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing

To fork out his penny and pocket your shilling.”

 

Here you’ll find well-known names too: George Herbert, Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling and E.A. Robinson. Here is another poem by yet another non-job-holder, though not a sponger like Marx, Emily Dickinson:

 

“Because ’twas Riches I could own,

Myself had earned it -- Me,

I knew the Dollars by their names --

It feels like Poverty

 

“An Earldom out of sight to hold,

An Income in the Air,

Possession -- has a sweeter chink

Unto a Miser's Ear.”

 

Cassity provides an “Afterword,” his poem “A Dance Part Way Around the Veau d’Or, or, Rich Within the Dreams of Avarice.” It is collected in Hurricane Lamp (1986) and The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (1998).