'Intensely Cultivated and Painstakingly Honest'

In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections (1955), Marianne Moore writes as good an apologia for her manner of writing, among others, as I’ve ever encountered:

“Silence is more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one’s admiration and one is tempted to write about it; if it is in a language other than one’s own, perhaps to translate it – or try to; one feels that what holds one’s attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait – a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false, to which the following pages attempt to testify.”

 

In The Journal of John Cardan (1961), J.V. Cunningham echoes and almost sounds like Moore: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.” Moore is the great pleasure-giver among the high-Modernists. She virtually patented the interpolation of quotations from other writers, often unidentified. In a January 18, 1925 letter to Moore, Yvor Winters praises the “intensity, perfections, & originality of your work, &, what is more astounding yet, the mass of uniformly achieved work & the almost complete absence of anything not achieved, impresses me more every time I think of it or look at it.” Though more expansive than Cunningham, Moore’s poems share with his a dedication to concision and precision. You’ll find little or no unsightly adipose tissue in their poems or prose.

 

In 1925, Winters reviewed Moore’s second collection, the presciently titled Observations, in Poetry. In the review, “Holiday and Day of Wrath,” he quotes five lines from her poem “A Graveyard” and writes:

 

“The poignancy, the connotative power, of such a passage should need no comment. The emotion is not ‘worked up’: there is no plea for sympathy, no covert attention to the audience, but the essential emotion remains, complete, profound, self-sufficient, bony, like that of Donne or Emily Dickinson. The balance of the entire poem is as perfect as the balance of any one of its lines.”

 

Those accustomed to Winters’ occasional ferocity as a critic may be surprised by the general tenor of his review and by what he writes of Moore’s poem “Black Earth”: “[T]he sound effects are as tremendous and incessant as thunder, and it is not an empty thunder; the verses are as packed with thought as with sound.”

 

Winters says of Moore’s style that it is “at once intensely cultivated and painstakingly honest, never fails to charm me, and whose mastery of phrase and cadence overwhelms me. It is a privilege to be able to write of one of whose genius one feels so sure.” In 1961, Moore returned the compliment. Her contribution to a special issue of the journal Sequoia dedicated to Winters was the poem “Yvor Winters--,” in which the title was the start of the poem’s first line:

 

“something of a badger-Diogenes—

we are indebted technically; and

attached personally, those of us who know him;

are proud of his hostility to falsity;

of his verse reduced to essence;

of a tenacity unintimidated by circumstance.

He does not hesitate to call others foolish,

and we do not shrink from imputations

of folly—of annoying a man to whom

compliments may be uncongenial;

--wise to be foolish when a sense of indebtedness

is too strong to suppress.”

 

Moore was born on this date, November 15, in 1887 and died in 1972 at age eighty-four.

[For the Winters letter see The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. For his review of Moore’s collection see Yvor Winters: Uncollected Essays and Reviews (1973), edited by Francis Murphy and published by Swallow Press.]

'The Postmodern Pigeonhole Is a Shuck'

With Tom Disch’s suicide in 2008 we lost not only one of our best poets, a fine writer of short stories and of one novel, Camp Concentration, but perhaps the most entertaining of our critics. His only recent rivals have been Turner Cassity and R.S. Gwynn. “Entertainment” and “criticism” are usually figured as incompatible as two protons but Disch was congenitally acerbic and honest and the heir to Randall Jarrell’s role as critic-as-wit.  Here is a brief sampler of his choicest mots on contemporary poetry:

“In the poetry establishment, as presently constituted, everyone gets a hug, and expects to get a Guggenheim.”

 

“Nothing can excuse dullness, except a critic intent on originality.”

 

“If deconstructive critics would only leave real literature alone and devote their entire attention to the like of the language poets, solipsism will have achieved its masterpiece, an academic ghetto that can do double duty as a quarantine ward.”

 

The book to acquire if you wish to read dozens more of such latter-day Menckenisms is Disch’s The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995). Now I find Disch also addressed the sorry state of recent fiction in “Double Talk, Double Dutch, Dutch Chocolate,” a review of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology in the Spring 1998 issue of The Hudson Review. Disch begins by pointing out “all the ways in which the modernists (not to mention the ancients) have anticipated most postmodern innovations.” His overview is useful:

 

“[I]f the postmodern pigeonhole is a shuck, so is the modernist pigeonhole. James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, and all the rest of the modernist Pantheon have as little in common as the politicians of the same era: i.e., celebrity and contemporaneity. Good artists are remarkable rather for their individuality and/or universality than for their adherence to a set of specs drawn up after the fact.”

 

This reminds me of Yvor Winters suggesting we read poems rather than poets. Academics love to cluster writers into readily recognized categories, a practice not unlike branding cattle. The individual is subsumed into the herd. Disch quotes writers who, based on the samples he provides, would never be read if not already corralled with other of their kind, as herded by English profs. J. Yellowlees Douglas, anyone? Disch neatly distills the post-mod aesthetic:

 

“These samplings are sophomoric not only in their humor (big words are thought to be  innately funny; likewise, body fluids, brand names, and unfamiliar food) but in their a priori hostility towards all forms of life other than sophomores. The message of postmodernism (as of Dada, back when) is that the Past is an oppressive burden that is best dealt with by inept parody that will show how dumb the past was.”

'No Secret Element of Gusto Warms Up the Sermon'

Gusto is one of my favorite virtues, especially among writers. Italo Svevo has it. John Steinbeck does not. A.J. Liebling has it. Woodward and Bernstein have never heard of it. Gusto is taking pleasure in the job at hand. About writers it suggests energy and enjoyment in playing with words and ideas. There’s something celebratory about gusto. It can be contagious, like a good laugh. One can be a dedicated pessimist or depressive and still evince gusto. It suggests but isn’t limited to a comic sense. The OED defines gusto (Italian for “taste”) as “keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action; zest.” Dr. Johnson gives us “the relish of any thing.” The basic texts to consult are, first, William Hazlitt’s “On Gusto” (1816): “Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object.” 

Hazlitt praises Titian’s use of color when painting the skin of his subjects as an expression of gusto: “Titian’s is like flesh, and like nothing else. It is as different from that of other painters, as the skin is from a piece of white or red drapery thrown over it. The blood circulates here and there, the blue veins just appear, the rest is distinguished throughout only by that sort of tingling sensation to the eye, which the body feels within itself. This is gusto.”

 

The other elemental text on gusto is Marianne Moore’s essay “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto” (1949): “All of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

 

She adds: “Humility is an indispensable ally, enabling concentration to heighten gusto.”

 

In the twelfth chapter of Across the Plains (1892), “A Christmas Sermon,” Robert Louis Stevenson gives us a nice build-up to his deployment of gusto: “A strange temptation attends upon man,” he writes, “to keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all his morals against them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age.” Scolds and busybodies emanate anti-gusto, sweating hard to eradicate primal human enjoyment. He continues:

 

“I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic — envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the back-biter, the petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life — their standard is quite different. These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not so wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in themselves that they reserve the choicest of their indignation.”

 

Stevenson was born on this date, November 13, in 1850 and died in 1894 at age forty-four.

 

[Moore’s essay is collected in Predilections (1955), A Marianne Moore Reader (1961) and The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (1986).]

'Taking Your Time, Angel of Death'

I like plain speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all unvarnished, no flowers, closer to a coroner’s report than a greeting card. A well-meaning reader has sent belated condolences for my brother’s death in August without once using any of the customary one-syllable words English gives us – died, dead, death. Instead, “passed,” “passing,” “passed on,” as though death were an interstate highway and his car is faster than mine. I’m grateful to my reader for thinking of me and remembering my brother but when I encounter such shadow-words I tend to think about them and not the subject at hand, death. Euphemisms are distracting. Perhaps they are appropriate when breaking the news to children but adults are best served by the unadorned truth. 

There are death-haunted writers. That doesn’t mean morbid or otherwise perverse. Montaigne is one of them. Laurence Sterne and Philip Larkin are others. So is the American poet Samuel Menashe (1925-2011). I’m reading his poems again and perhaps I’ve been sensitized by my brother’s death, but the subject recurs throughout his work, early and late. “The Visitation” reminds me of my brother’s final weeks, lying in bed in the hospice in Cleveland:

 

“His body ahead

Of him on the bed

He faces his feet

Sees himself dead,

A corpse complete

With legs and chest

And belly between

Swelling the scene

Of the crime you left,

Taking your time,

Angel of Death”

 

Blunt, though hardly a documentary. The word visitation I associate with children and divorce, prison, and funeral homes. Here the visitor is, in Hebrew, malakh ha-mavet: “The dancing Angel of Death often recited or sang; in his song he stressed the vanity of mortal and perishable values and contrasted them to everlasting and immortal merits and piety.” More realism in Menashe’s “What to Expect,” and not a euphemism in sight:

 

“At death’s door

The end in sight

Is life, not death

Each breath you take

Is breathtaking

 

“Save your breath

Does not apply –

You must die.”

 

One more, ‘Transfusion,” another return to that hospice in Cleveland:

 

“Death awaited

In this room

Takes its time

I stand by

Your deathbed

Making it mine”

 

One euphemism for death I still find amusing: “kicked the bucket.”

 

[The books to read are Menashe's New and Selected Poems (Library of America, 2005) and The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected Poetry of Samuel Menashe (Audubon Terrace Press, 2019).]

'And Then Became a Name Like Others Slain'

In a six-word paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden articulates the impulse that would drive his poetry for the next half-century: “I must go over it again.” Psychically, there was no Armistice. Whether to purge its memory or understand it, Blunden could never surrender the Great War as subject, not unlike millions of  combat veterans in other wars. To complacently call it PTSD, to express our non-combatant sympathy and gratitude – “Thank you for your service,” uttered as reflexively as Gesundheit! -- as though that settled anything, is futile and frequently patronizing. The memories are still returning to Blunden in the middle of “Ancre Sunshine,” written c. 1964: 

“Here half a century before might I,

Had something chanced, about this point have lain,

Looking with failing sense on such blue sky,

And then became a name with others slain.”

 

Undertones of War, Blunden’s Great War memoir, published a decade after the Armistice, is the finest we have, superior to Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston trilogy. Blunden saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918, and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. The first chapter of the memoir, “The Path Without Primroses,” begins “I was not anxious to go.”

 

The Somme chapter is titled “The Storm.” The 141-day battle started on July 1, 1916. British forces that first day suffered more than 57,000 killed or wounded. The dead numbered 19,240. In four months of fighting, some 1.25 million men were killed or wounded at the Somme. Blunden describes the Somme battlefield as “this satire in iron brown and field grey.” It is a “gluey morass . . . cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing . . . the deep dugouts . . . were cancerous with torn bodies.” Blunden refers to “the long finger of war,” suggesting the battle raged long after the Armistice.

 

In November 1968, little more than three years before his death, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”

'Curiosity to Inquire Into All Things'

“Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.” 

I could have signed my name to that when I was twenty. I wanted to visit every country in the world, even the most dangerous. I made plans to move to Ireland – a naïve dream rooted in its writers -- Swift, Yeats, Joyce. I gave no thought to the practicalities of money and job. I had none, I was a student and not a very dedicated one, utterly unmarketable. I don’t recriminate myself. I wished to escape and postpone a dutiful maturity. A career as a reporter was a suitable surrogate, with plenty of adventure and tedium. I grew up.

 

The swashbuckling fantasy above is from Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014), dated 1955. That’s the way young people, especially men, grew up thinking – life as adventurous romance, fueled by Stevenson and Verne. In my case, the “boundless curiosity” remains, though more bounded. Adventure need not be joining the Foreign Legion or traipsing after Kerouac. It can be internal and even domestic. There’s no footnote to the Montaigne allusion, though Oakeshott often cites the Frenchman in his notebooks. Curiosity is a recurrent theme in the Essays and Montaigne doesn’t always approve. Often he associates curiosity with confusion and distraction, but not always. Take this from “Of the Education of Children”:

 

“Put into his head an honest curiosity to inquire into all things; whatever is unusual around him he will see: a building, a fountain, a man, the field of an ancient battle, the place where Caesar or Charlemagne passed.”

'A Chronic Independence of Mind'

“A chronic independence of mind is unpardonable in any age; in our own it has certainly been safer to praise independence than to exemplify it.” 

Bracing words from one of literature’s inveterate outsiders, English poet and critic C.H. Sisson (1914-2003). He’s writing about another non-aligned figure, Wyndham Lewis. Sisson prizes Lewis, his fiction, polemics and paintings. It must be close to half a century since I first tried reading Lewis’ work – Self Condemned, a novel published in 1954. I failed. Periodically I’ve renewed the effort with The Apes of Gods, Time and Western Man, scattered nonfiction, The Revenge for Love. I can’t think of another writer whose work has so often defied my efforts. When I say I find most of Lewis unreadable, I’m being strictly honest.

 

Hell, I’ve read Finnegans Wake but can’t get any purchase on Lewis and I’m not even talking about such gems in his bibliography as “The Jews, Are They Human?” and “The Hitler Cult and How it Will End,” both published in that annus horribilis 1939. Lewis was one of the Literary Modernist “Men of 1914,” along with Joyce, Eliot and Pound. Pound is, on occasion, readable, but not by me, and Lewis has repeatedly defeated me.

 

In his essay “Ernst Mach Max Ernest” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), writing of “the styles I find most useful to study” (Hugh Kenner, Mandelstam, Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Charles Doughty), Guy Davenport writes: “All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses.” And yet I find Lewis' prose clunky and prolix.

 

Literary affinities are complicated. I owe half my education to Davenport but I can’t swallow his romance with Lewis and Pound. The same goes for Sisson. And Hugh Kenner, whose book on Lewis I’ve read. No critic speaks always and unequivocally for me. We have to read even criticism critically. Two sentences after the passage quoted above, Sisson writes:

 

 “The reading public at large is always more aware of reputations than of merits; a critic who combines a clear eye for merits with a knowledge of the mechanics of literary reputation is sure to be in trouble.” 

[Sisson’s essay served as the introduction to Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism by Wyndham Lewis (ed. C.J. Fox, Vision Press, 1977) and was collected in Sisson’s own The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays (Carcanet, 1978) and in In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers (Carcanet, 1990).]