'But I Had to Keep Going'

The Polish poet Aleksander Wat (1900-67) was arrested, yet again, in 1940 by the NKVD and moved from prison to prison, first in Lwów, then in Kyiv, a city he describes as “bucolic” compared to previous confinements. Wat impresses me as an “ebullient pessimist,” a phrase the late Terry Teachout applied to himself. The more common species of pessimist is the crank smitten by his own gloominess. He is spiritually lazy, easy on himself and unforgiving of the world, an adept at Schadenfreude. He’s a disappointed lover who turns rebarbative and has learned that he can get a lot of attention by raining on picnics. 

That’s foreign to Wat’s nature. At his most disheartened he invariably experiences an epiphany, a sort of restorative enlightenment. Born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism. Wat is never naïve. He knows the epiphany won’t last but for the moment he experiences relief. In his understanding of the modern world, he sometimes reminds me of the more melancholic Whittaker Chambers who wrote in an October 8, 1956, letter to William F. Buckley:

 

“The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.”

 

Wat can accept Chambers’ premise without fatally despairing. He arrives in Kyiv in a prison train and is shuttled around the city in a Black Maria.  Between 1918 and 1920, Kyiv had changed hands sixteen times. In 1934, it became the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The Germans occupied it from 1941 to 1943. In 1941, Babi Yar. Wat continues:

 

 “Golden autumn. Everything quiet and deserted. When a human form flitted past, it would be dark, indeterminate. The hands on the clock had stopped for good or had been broken off. The clatter and rumble of our vehicle was accompanied by dead silence. We must have passed some trees, but I didn’t notice them; birds must have been chirping, but I didn’t hear them.”

 

The landscape and broken clock recall a surrealist painting, an unlikely celebration of Keatsian autumn:

 

“A broad lawn, in the center of which was an enormous, branching, bird-filled tree. ‘Tree, tree, tree,’ I repeated aloud as if I had just learned the word until finally my escort, who was used to my being silent, as required by regulations, began looking at my lips in amazement. The leaves had curled into golden scrolls under and around the tree. Had I been able to stop and lie down under the maple tree, to listen to its million leaves rustling and the birds singing in that beautiful October twilight, then all my exhaustion, all the sweat and nightmares of Zamarstynov [site of an NKVD prison in Lwów] would have fallen away from me. But I had to keep going.”

 

In that final sentence, Wat sounds like Beckett’s Unnamable: “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”

[All passages by Wat are taken from My Century (trans. Richard Lourie, 1988). The Chambers excerpt comes from Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969).]

'When You Desperately Need Other People'

I was the designated driver for the wedding in Connecticut. It was 1991. One of my passengers was a fellow reporter at the newspaper in Albany, N.Y. The other was a friend of the bride and groom who made me think of Alexander Pope. The name of his diagnosis I don’t remember but he was very small and used an undersized wheelchair. I drove a sedan and lifted him into the passenger's seat, adjusted his seatbelt and stowed his chair in the trunk. 

Along the way we stopped at a diner so he could use the bathroom. I lifted him from the car, carried him inside and seated him on the toilet. I was strong but had never carried an adult male – he was about my age – in so intimate a manner. (My son at the time was almost four, and roughly the same size.) He was utterly unembarrassed and I tried to take my emotional cues from him, which helped. We repeated the routine at the church and then at the church hall where the wedding reception was held, and at the same diner on the return trip. At the reception, I remember talking to him about the American historian Francis Parkman, whom he was reading at the time.

 

For decades I’ve been reading Dr. Bert Keizer in The Threepenny Review. He’s a Dutch physician and author of Dancing with Mr. D: Notes on Life and Death (1996). Here is a passage from a 2023 column, “On Loss,” that reminded me of Connecticut. Keizer describes one of his patients:

 

“With the help of a sliding-board and a rope from the ceiling, she still managed to get from her bed into the wheelchair without help. And in that way she could use the toilet too, without having to be ‘hoisted across like a sack of potatoes.’  But when she turned eighty, she lost this last straw of independence and wanted her life to end. People who walk around, who wash and brush themselves when they feel like it, board a train or a plane without giving it a thought, even pee and poo without having to ask anyone to place them on the seat, and who moreover wipe their behind in their own fashion—such people do not realize what a terrible thing it is when you desperately need other people all of the time to help you perform these tasks.”

 

No wonder we have so many writers who were doctors – Keats, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Oliver Sacks, among others. The job descriptions overlap. Both specialize in human beings.

'Like This Little Patch of Yellow Wall'

Robert Mezey includes in his edition of The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999) a section titled “Robinson Speaking,” which he describes as “various comments on life and the art of poetry. . . from letters and the memoirs of friends.” Sources are not otherwise identified. Most surprising is a passage from Proust’s The Captive, the 1927 English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff of La Prisonnière (1923), the fifth novel in the seven-volume sequence Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time): 

“All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.”

 

The painting is Vermeer’s View of Delft (c. 1660). Bergotte, a writer much admired by the narrator, is dying but a critic’s mention of a detail in Vermeer’s painting moves him to leave his sickbed and view the cityscape. Bergotte tells us he already knew the painting but did not remember the “patch of yellow wall.” Bergott grows dizzy and says (not quoted by Robinson): “‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’” 

 

And here is Robinson’s comment: “That comes nearer to being one hundred per cent true than anything I have heard in a long time.” I had no idea Robinson read Proust. Scott Donaldson never mentions it in his 2007 biography of Robinson. Robinson’s approval suggests he has reached an understanding that mingled grimness and equanimity in regard to his poetry and life. Can anyone identify the source of Robinson’s observation?

'Very Little a Truly Moral Voice Can Say'

No one knew where Dachau was or how to get there. My companion spoke good German. Mine was threadbare but enthusiastic. We would stop a likely looking person on the street in Munich and ask for directions. Suddenly they lost the power of speech in any language and moved along. The same with waiters in cafes. This was the summer of 1973, less than a year after eleven Israeli athletes had been slaughtered at the city’s Olympic Village by Palestinian terrorists. Finally, we asked the right person, an American, who told us where to meet the bus that would take us to the concentration camp, just eleven miles away. Early the next morning, we and a dozen other tourists met at the bus stop. 

Among our fellow passengers were two schoolteachers from Chicago, both gay. One carried a Frisbee and told the rest of us to expect no solemnity out of them. They were going to Dachau to have a little fun and not be coerced into hypocritical reverence. They told us they were Jewish. I, like the rest of the passengers, kept my mouth shut. I felt angry, powerless, embarrassed as an American, a reader of history, a human being.

 

At the camp, the pair from Chicago played Frisbee and laughed. We saw the foundations of the barracks where prisoners were kept and the crematorium. It was a beautiful summer day, blue skies and sunshine, and we walked around the place where at least 40,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered. The normalcy of the day and our historical awareness could not be reconciled. The universe seemed out of whack, as in one of those inexplicable dreams in which you no longer recognize the face of someone you’ve known all your life. Mark Kurlansky published "Visiting Auschwitz" in Partisan Review (Vol. LXI, No. 2) in 1994. He writes:

 

“The place remains incomprehensible and its questions as unanswerable as those of Job. . . . The problem is that there is very little a truly moral voice can say.”

 

And this:

 

“Auschwitz shows things that are beyond commentary – human hair, the eyeglass frames, the piles of toothbrushes, an unremarkable-looking oven, like a bread oven, gallows where prisoners were hanged and walls where they were shot and laboratories where they were worked on. Somehow families drift through this. Many of the visitors weep. Others look stunned. Some look like bored tourists shuffling from exhibit to exhibit, taking snapshots to mark each spot.”

'It Was a Mild, Clammy Evening . . .'

The marvelously named Edmund Arnold Greening Lamborn (1877-1950) is yet another writer whose existence I never suspected until I stumbled upon a book he edited in 1928: Present-Day Prose. If the title and year of publication suggest Joyce and Eliot, forget it. Though he does include William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence among the Modernists, Lamborn’s anthology is largely retrospective. Typical of the titles of his own books are The Story of Architecture in Oxford Stone (1912) and Towns and Town-Planning, Ancient & Modern (1923). He was on the margins of the English literary world and in Who’s Who in Oxfordshire (1936) claimed to be “educated by Books, Buildings and the Companionship of Wild Animals.” In the anthology he includes pieces by Beerbohm, Conrad and Chesterton, along with a dozen writers unknown to me. 

The gem is “The Automatic Machine” by Walter de la Mare, a short story I had never read. It’s less than three pages long and barely qualifies as an anecdote. What impresses me is the brevity and near-plotlessness of the story, coupled with de la Mare’s gift for suggesting something mysterious without making it explicit. In his poetry and fiction he’s a master of mood-setting and subtle, almost nonexistent menace. The narrator enters a taproom where two other patrons are already seated:

 

“It was a mild, clammy evening; and the swing-door of the taproom stood wide open,” the story begins. “The brass-oil lamp suspended from the rafter had not yet been lit. A small misty drizzle was drifting between the lime-washed walls and the overarching trees on the further side of the lane; and from my stool at the counter I could commune, as often as I felt inclined, with the wild white eye of the Blue Boar which fleered in at the window from the hanging sign.”

 

The other patrons are “a smallish man with an unusually high crown to his head, and something engagingly monkey-like in his face; and a barrel-shaped person who sat humped up on a stool between us in an old shooting-jacket and leather leggings, his small eyes set close together on either side a red nose.”

 

In the corner is an “automatic machine.” De la Mare is never explicit but the machine seems to combine elements of an anachronistic videogame and a peepshow. “It was a machine of an unusual kind,” he writes, “since it gave its patronisers nothing tangible for their penny—not even their ladylove on a slip of cardboard, or a clinging jet of perfume.”

You insert a penny and one of two figures appears: if you lose, “a hump-backed mommet in a rusty-black cowl”; if you win, “a nymph attired in skirts of pink muslin” who “danced a brief but impassioned pas seul.” The enticement seems sexual, though de la Mare withholds anything so blunt.

 

“[I]f the nymph responded to your penny, you were invited to slip yet another coin into another slot—but before you could count ten. This galvanised the young lady into a giddy pursuit of the numbskull in the black hood—a pursuit, however, which ended merely in the retirement of them both behind the scenes.”

 

With minimal means and beautiful prose, de la Mare creates a dream-like memory that will last. Very traditional storytelling and vivid prose, stripped to the essentials.  

'Trained Not to Argue But to Look'

Finally, a readable article in The New York Review of Books. That hasn’t happened at least since the death of V.S. Pritchett in 1997. Wyatt Mason portrays Guy Davenport as an industrious correspondent in "An Epistolary Critic." “[A]s I came to learn, and was not surprised to learn," Mason writes, "Davenport would reply to anyone who wrote him,” including me. Mason tells us of the Davenport collection at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center:

 

“Between 1944 and his death at age seventy-seven, Davenport amassed . . . more than 2,300 correspondents. They amount to what the Ransom Center calls, hyperbolically but not unjustifiably, ‘a twentieth-century publisher’s rolodex.’”

 

This suggests Guy was a small-d democrat, a virtuoso of what Michael Oakeshott calls conversation, “in which the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing.”

 

I had a small but highly valued acquaintance with Guy. I interviewed him by telephone in 1988 for a profile I was writing of Paul Metcalf, a writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville who lived in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Metcalf’s best book, Genoa, appeared in 1965 and received two reviews – one by Guy, the other by William H. Gass. Both loved it. In our first conversation, after I identified myself as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., Davenport mentioned he had been reading Francis Parkman’s description of the Indian massacre at Schenectady. What was the city like today? I would come to learn that Guy, in private life as in his writing, was endlessly curious and generous with his learning – a natural-born teacher in the old-fashioned sense.

 

I quickly wrote him a fan letter and Guy as quickly replied – correcting my spelling of Edgar “Allen” Poe and a sloppy reference I had made to Goethe. Coming from Guy, what in another professor might come across as bullying pedantry felt like knowledge shared. I knew he wasn’t scoring cheap points or putting me in my place. He wanted me to know some of what he knew, and this communion of knowledge, not merely with his students at the University of Kentucky, gave him immense, quiet pleasure. 

 

We corresponded sporadically for several years, and I am even more grateful for this exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he exchanged letters. In June 1990, a friend and I took an open-ended trip across the Midwest, starting from upstate New York. We camped outside Lexington, Ky., and the next morning I visited Guy at his home at 621 Sayre Ave. He was pleased with a review I had written of his latest book, A Balthus Notebook. In a letter he had already told me, “You probably make it out to be a better book than it actually is; I’m not complaining.” Pro forma modesty? I'm not sure.

At his home we spoke of Montaigne and Robert Burton. He showed me a painting he had recently made of Gertrude Stein. I felt privileged to be in the artist’s studio for a private showing. Davenport wrote me (he was a master of flattery you hoped was true): “You paid more attention to my paintings than five other people together. Most folks look the other way, and change the subject.” I told him that the night before, while doing laundry at the campground, I had been reading the hefty, black Library of America edition of Walt Whitman. A teenage boy approached, asked to see the book, I obliged, and the kid said, “We have a book, too, you know – The Book of Mormon.” Guy laughed until he wept. 

 

On February 3, 1990, Guy wrote to me, after I sent him an obituary/column I had written following Samuel Beckett’s death: “Thanks for the Beckett obit. Good touch, the [Vaclav] Havel [to whom Beckett dedicated his play Catastrophe (1984)]. I imagine George Bush could not identify Sam even as a writer, much less as our greatest since Joyce. (is it known that GB has ever read a book?)” 

 

I had been reading Guy, at first in such journals as The Hudson Review, since the 1970s. I remember the delight I experienced in 1981 when by chance I saw a brand-new copy of Guy’s The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press) in the window of a lesbian bookstore in Manhattan. Nine years later, Guy would sign my copy of the essay collection along with Apples and Pears (North Point Press, 1984), a collection of stories. Mason glosses Guy’s intent in all of  his work: 

 

“Geography provides an education in the same good-humored voice as the letters, refined for the varied subjects of the essays, all of which, despite their variety, can be said to be about the same thing: finding. Davenport’s essays are a set of paths that lead us to places we haven’t been. All it took, he said, was an open eye. ‘I was never trained to argue,’ Davenport told me. ‘I only observe.’ But observation requires curiosity, and one of the remarkable features of Davenport’s essays—which overwhelmingly explicate ‘difficult’ modernist texts by Joyce and Pound, though they are no less interested in Welty, Joyce Kilmer, and Tarzan—is how his writing moves the reader into darknesses in their knowledge that yield to illumination. A text is revealed to be a cave into which an intelligence has descended, by torchlight, to make marks that, once discovered, will require some work to see: an inversion of Plato’s gloomy allegory.” 

 

An illustration of Oakeshott’s point that two people engaged in conversation “may differ without disagreeing”: Guy’s devotion to writers I find repellant, such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. It didn’t seem to matter that our thinking so radically differed. I am even more grateful for our exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he corresponded. At his home in Lexington he told me of his delight when he learned that Franz Kafka’s eyes were blue. 

 

As a gift I brought him a duplicate copy of Steven Millhauser’s latest story collection, The Barnum Museum (Poseidon Press, 1990). Subsequently I sent him my review, which he thanked me for in a July 7 note. His letter dated July 20, 1990, must have been in response to me congratulating him on winning the MacArthur Fellowship: “Thanks! As for who’s responsible, at least three have claimed credit so far. Many committees chew through the lists, I believe.” 

 

And a concluding suggestion: “Why don’t you do a survey of contemporary writers, in the manner of Hazlitt (and parallel to Ved Mehta’s ‘Fly and the Fly Bottle’)? JC Oates writing three books at once, Paul [Metcalf] in his little house. That is, subvert the worn-out interview format and go for the writer as human. ALL observation.” 

 

Mason distills an essential part of Guy’s method: “Trained not to argue but to look.” Which is much of the reason Guy, in person and in print, was almost never boring – a rare quality in my experience.

'A Natural and Grave Distinction of Air'

In the Imaginary Conversation he stages between John Milton and Andrew Marvell, Walter Savage Landor has the latter say:

“Good prose, to say nothing of the original thoughts it conveys, may be infinitely varied in modulation. It is only an extension of metres, an amplification of harmonies, of which even the best and most varied poetry admits but few. Comprehending at once the prose and poetry of Milton, we could prove, before ‘fit audience,’ that he is incomparably the greatest master of harmony that ever lived.”

Ours is an age when tin-eared poets, not to mention prose writers, know little or nothing of “an extension of metres,” One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s wisecrack: “George Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.” The best prose is harmonically and rhythmically arranged like a musical score, but without drawing attention to itself. It’s subtle and seductive. A heavy, self-conscious string of iambs or a virus-like proliferation of alliteration (a practice often judged “poetic”) ought to provoke laughter.

Sidney Colvin (1845-1927) is best remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, but he also contributed two volumes to the English Men of Letters series – one devoted to Keats (1887), the other to Landor (1881). Landor’s epigrams are the best written in English between Ben Jonson and J.V. Cunningham, but Colvin, unlike many readers, favors Landor’s prose style:

“There was not the simplest thing but received in his manner of saying it a charm of sound as well as a natural and grave distinction of air; there was not the most stupendous in the saying of which he ever allowed himself to lose moderation or control. His passion never hurries him, in prose, into the regular beats or equidistant accents of verse; he accumulates clause upon clause of towering eloquence, but in the last clause never fails to plant his period composedly and gracefully on its feet. His perfect instinct for the rhythms and harmonies of prose reveals itself as fully in three lines as in a hundred.”

The comparison with music is inevitable, In prose, Landor almost never fails to resolve a passage and harmonize at least two themes simultaneously. As an example, Colvin offers this passage:

“A bell warbles the more mellifluously in the air when the sound of the stroke is over, and when another swims out from underneath it, and pants upon the element that gave it birth.”

According to my ears, that passage comes off as a little overripe. I prefer this sample made by Colvin, with Landor’s second-nature use of classical references:

“There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.”

Let’s give Colvin the last word on Landor: 

“[H]armony and rhythm are only the superficial beauties of a prose style. Style itself, in the full meaning of the word, depends upon something deeper and more inward. Style means the instinctive rule, the innate principle of selection and control, by which an artist shapes and regulates every expression of his mind. Landor was in English prose an artist comparable with the highest in their respective spheres; with Milton in English verse, or with Handel in music."