'After So Many Deaths I Live and Write'

One needn’t be a fetishist or even a book collector – reader is close enough -- to prize an “association copy,” a term neatly defined here: “A book that belonged to or was annotated by the author, someone close to the author, a famous or noteworthy person, or someone especially associated with the content of the work.” The full title of the volume in question is The Poetical Works of George Herbert. With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes, by the Rev. George Gilfillan, published by D. Appleton & Co., N.Y., in 1854. The front end paper is signed in black ink: “Helen A. Pinkerton 12-1945.” Poet, scholar, one-time student of Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham, Helen gave me the leather-bound volume in 2015 and died two years later. 

The only marks Helen left in the book are minute dots and checks beside the titles of eleven poems in the table of contents, including my favorite Herbert poem, “The Flower,” with the beginning of the sixth of its seven stanzas:

 

“And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write.”

 

Herbert renders encouragement to late-bloomers and anyone else who has been stalled, tired, sick, preoccupied or otherwise blocked by life. In 2019, just months away from his death by cancer, Clive James was introduced to “The Flower” by a friend, a gift he wrote about in an essay:

    

“[B]ack there in the middle of the 20th century I somehow missed it, when I was first reading Herbert in the Albatross Book of Living Verse, which we used to call the ‘Book of Living Albatrosses.’ How I ever missed anything in Herbert’s prolific output is a puzzle. He fascinated me from the jump, almost as much as Marvell. I blame Herbert for not calling himself Marvell every time. A poet called Herbert will occasionally be overlooked; call yourself Wonderful and everything will get into the list of contents.”

 

Herbert was born on this date, April 3, in 1593 and died in 1633 at age thirty-nine.

'To Guide Him in the Real World'

In 1899, Edwin Arlington Robinson read Thoreau’s Walking, a work based on an 1851 lecture published posthumously in 1862. Robinson was not impressed by his fellow New Englander. He condemned Thoreau’s “glorified world-cowardice” in a letter to his friend Daniel Gregory Mason: 

“For God’s sake says the sage, let me get away into the wilderness where I shall not have a single human responsibility or the first symptom of social discipline. Let me be a pickerel or a skunk cabbage or anything that will not have to meet the realities of civilization. There is a wholesomeness about some people that is positively unhealthy, and I find it in this essay.”

 

Starting as a teenager I idolized Thoreau. I read Walden many times and almost everything else he wrote, including the two oversized volumes of his Journals as published by Dover. I still think he sometimes wrote excellent prose (the poetry is refried Emerson, often unreadable) but his hippie ethos mingled with snobbery cooled my enthusiasm, beginning about fifteen years ago. His temperament was chilly. I suspect Thoreau is best read when we’re young and don’t yet understand our civil obligations. In 1844, when he accidentally started a forest fire and burned some three-hundred acres of woods in Concord, Thoreau expressed no remorse and never apologized to his townsmen. In his Journal in 1850 he wrote about the incident:

 

“Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself, ‘Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.’”

 

An impressive act of stiff-necked rationalization. “It has never troubled me,” he goes on, “from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it.” Scott Donaldson in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (2007) contrasts Thoreau with Robinson:

 

“Robinson required a commanding and fortified purpose to guide him in the real world. For him, there could be no worthy calling that did not help others. As a poet, he might not serve as overtly as a pastor comforting parishioners or a college professor mentoring students. Nonetheless he wanted desperately to believe that by writing poetry he would do some good in the world. . . .Time and again, as he was shaping his career, Robinson explicitly made the link between a life of poetry and a life of service.”

 

Trying to be a decent human being is a fulltime occupation that starts with our personal relations – family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Grandiose schemes of improvement are delusional. In an April, 2, 1897 letter to his correspondent Edith Brower, Robinson writes:

 

“I am doing what I can for myself and a little for others; and I am very glad to know that I have been to some slight service to them. There are two or three fellows whom I have really helped. I know it; they have told me so; and their actions prove the truth of what they say. And now you—a total stranger—tell me that  I have helped you. What more can I ask?”

'So a Fool Returneth to His Folly'

Grownups seldom credit children with insight into human psychology, thus treating them as smaller, more annoying versions of themselves. My father had an acquaintance even he knew was a fool. By admitting such knowledge, he was violating adult solidarity. His friend's customary epithet was “That Goofball Herb,” whose reaction to any stimulus, positive or negative, was a juicy, open-mouthed giggle. And yet, somehow, he had even reproduced. 

At a picnic, we watched as Herb spent half an hour trying to start a fire in a fire pit. Apparently, he was unfamiliar with kindling. Instead, he was throwing matches at logs and had attracted an appreciative audience. We watched as he opened the trunk of his car, removed a gasoline can, emptied the contents on the logs and threw a match. The ensuing “Whoomp!” knocked him “ass over tea kettle,” the American variation on the more colorful British “arse over tit.” He had singed away the hair on his forearms, his eyebrows and eyelashes, and left his face the color of a pomegranate. When people were certain Herb wasn't dead, everyone laughed, which suggests the enduring appeal of slapstick comedy. Best of all the fire promptly fizzled out, but he was back to work within minutes, bringing to mind Proverbs 26:11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”

 

Herb was a fool. Most of us recognize at least two species of fool – those like Shakespeare’s who are gifted with wisdom and the homelier sort like Herb who are merely foolish. In his lecture on As You Like It, W.H. Auden writes: “The fool is fearless and untroubled by convention [and good sense]—like a child, he isn’t even aware of convention. He’s not all there, but he is prophetic, because through his craziness he either sees more or dares to say more.” Auden blurs the distinction between the two sorts of fool. Herb, as I recall, never manifested wisdom.

  

It's April Fools’ Day, a favorite holiday when we were kids. It gave us permission to tell lies and to feel very un-foolish about it. Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary defines an April Fool as “the March fool with another month added to his folly.” In other words, there’s a continuity to foolishness. It doesn’t recede. The condition is chronic and we learn about it as children. Bierce’s definition of fool, one of the longest in his Dictionary, sounds like H.L. Mencken:

 

“A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent,” and so on. I prefer Rosiland’s exhortation to Jacques in As You Like It: “I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.”

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]

'To Make Her Smile and Keep Her in Their Game'

A friend called to chat while driving to Dallas to visit her mother. My friend is my age. Her mother is ninety-six years old. She lives on her own and only recently, after falling, did she agree to start using a cane. I’m not sure anyone is prepared to get old (or not get old). When young we’re oblivious. The elderly are easily ignored or, even better, made fun of. I didn’t know it then but as a kid I had little respect for my elders and shunned them when possible. 

My step-grandfather was an exception but he behaved like a kid. He shared with us one memory of service in Europe during World War I: having a turnip fight in a farmer’s field in France with other young soldiers. When I knew him he was perpetually, contentedly a little drunk. I never saw him angry – a rare accomplishment in my family. Kelly liked his beer and shared his heeltaps with us. He died alone in his apartment just weeks after I last visited him. He was a house painter by trade and I think he had a fairly happy life, as such things go.

 

Here's a sonnet, “The Way It Ended,” by the wonderful Louisiana poet Gail White:

 

“So time went by and they were middle-aged,

which seemed a cruel joke that time had played

on two young lovers. They were newly caged

canary birds – amused, not yet afraid.

A golden anniversary came around

where jokes were made and laughing stories told.

The lovers joined the laugh, although they found

the joke – though not themselves – was growing old.

She started losing and forgetting things.

Where had she left her keys, put down her comb?

Her thoughts were like balloons with broken strings.

Daily he visited the nursing home

to make her smile and keep her in their game.

Death came at last. But old age never came.”

 

A novel in fourteen lines. In the right hands, a poem can contain a lifetime. White comments on her poem: “Time is the strangest of the conditions we live in. Scientists, essayists, and poets can ring endless changes on this theme. Time has devastated the lives of the couple in this sonnet, but as Solomon told us long ago, love is as strong as death.”

'But They Are Very Bad Poems'

Eugenio Montale speaking with an interviewer, American poet W.S. Di Piero, in 1973: 

“Political ideas are best expressed in prose. Why should we express political ideas in such an abstruse language as poetry? If I were to write against the war in Viet Nam, I would write in prose, or I would do something else to oppose the war directly instead of just dressing up my poems with references to Viet Nam as if pouring a sauce over the poems to prepare them for public consumption. One cannot inject or force the Viet Nam War into poetry simply for effect. It serves no real purpose, and whoever does so finally fails in every way.”

 

The literary legacy left by the Vietnam War, both civilian and military, is modest. Compared to World War I, it is almost nonexistent. “Anti-war” poems that filled magazines, chapbooks, posters and broadsheets were simplistic, shrill and soon forgotten. Literary values were abandoned for the sake of self-righteousness. A rare exception was R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who sent me a recent poem, “Skating,” subtitled “Camp Reasoner”:

 

“It’s ninety-five degrees.

I’m just not running. Damn,

What’s Gunny gonna do,

Send me to Vietnam?”

 

Bob adds: “A good half the time, that line would have been capped by someone else saying, ‘There it is.’” The poem is written in the voice of a grunt, an enlisted man, not a purported deep thinker about war and geopolitics. Montale was not politically naïve. His early work was written while Mussolini was in power. The poet had no use for fascism. In the interview, Di Piero asks, “What about the poet's treatment of contemporary public events?” Montale replies:

 

“As to public events, I'm aware of the many poems which have been published about the war in Viet Nam. These poems have a very high moral value, but they are very bad poems.”

 

Montale explains an unpleasant and paradoxical fact, best represented by the fate of poetry in Poland during the Soviet occupation: “Poetry has everything to gain from persecution. If the state were to patronize or protect the arts, there would be such an abundance of pseudo-artists, pretenders to art, that you wouldn't know quite how to fend them off!”

 

[The Montale interview was published in the January/February 1974 issue of the American Poetry Review. Di Piero is “assisted” by Rose Maria Bosinelli.]

'Without One Wonder in the Sky!'

John Partridge (1677-1715) was an English shoemaker-turned-astrologer who claimed to have refined his “science.” Don’t smirk or pity our benighted forebears. Newspapers still publish astrology columns and dozens of astrological publications remain in print. See Modern Astrology Magazine and Stellar: The New Astrology Magazine. My maternal grandmother, not a stupid woman, subscribed to such things and sometimes made significant life decisions based on what she found in the stars. 

Partridge was a prolific writer in his field, a dedicated Whig and a harsh critic of “Popery” and James II. In the 1708 edition of his Merlinus liberatus, Partridge referred to the Church of England as the “infallible Church.” Jonathan Swift launched a protracted satirical assault on Partridge, using his pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff. It began with “Predictions for the Year 1708”:

 

“My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I will mention it, to show how ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns: It relates to Partridge the almanack-maker; I have consulted the stars of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.”

 

Swift then published a mock-obituary of Partridge’s death, “The Accomplishment of the First of Mr Bickerstaff's Predictions,” reporting that the prediction was correct. Except that Partridge died around 7 rather than 11 p.m. on March 29:

 

 “. . . Mr. Bickerstaff was mistaken almost four hours in his calculation. In the other circumstances he was exact enough. But whether he has not been the cause of this poor man's death, as well as the predictor, may be very reasonably disputed.”

 

This is a gag worthy of Evelyn Waugh. Scholars have viewed it as an April Fool prank. Swift subsequently published a poem on the affair, “An Elegy on the Supposed Death of Partridge, the Almanack-Maker.” It begins:

 

“Well, ’tis as Bickerstaff has guess’d,

Tho’ we all took it for a jest;

Partridge is dead, nay more, he dy’d

E’re he could prove the good Squire ly’d.

Strange, an Astrologer shou’d die,

Without one Wonder in the Sky!

Not one of all his Crony Stars

To pay their Duty at his Herse?

No Meteor, no Eclipse appear’d?

No Comet with a flaming Beard?

The Sun has rose, and gone to Bed,

Just as if Partridge were not dead:

Nor hid himself behind the Moon,

To make a dreadful Night at Noon.

He at fit Periods walks through Aries,

Howe’er our earthly Motion varies;

And twice a Year he’ll cut the Equator,

As if there had been no such Matter.”

'Read During Every Possible Free Moment'

A reader asks, “How did you learn to read so fast?” The answer is simple: I didn’t. I have always read slowly, often taking notes, which makes it even slower. This frustrated me when I was young, and I briefly contemplated enrolling in one of Evelyn Wood’s “speed-reading” courses. But reading for me has always been a deeply private and focused activity, and I don’t like it messed with. I’ve always been good at concentrating. I slip into a movie or book easily, and I’ve come to think of it as entering a sort of fugue state. It’s a pleasant immersion and blocks most distractions, and I’m not in competition with anyone, even myself. It’s not a race. 

If a book is good, why would I want to read it quickly? Wouldn’t I want to linger and prolong my pleasure? Imagine reading poetry quickly. That would be unfair to me and the author, assuming the poet was any good.  

 

Barton Swaim published a column in the Times Literary Supplment on June 27, 2014, in which he describes his own experience with slow reading. Swaim is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and one of the best in the business. He is erudite, well-read and a graceful writer. I recommend his book The Speechwriter (2015). He writes:

 

“The source of my impatience is slow reading. I just cannot read as fast as other people do. I was deeply self-conscious about it as a child. In school, I would have to read aloud in class and would halt over almost every word. ‘There are--more--things in--heaven and earth--Hora--Horat--Horatio.’ On aptitude tests, I would do well on the problems I answered, but I wouldn't answer many because it took me too long to read the questions.”

 

Swaim became a book reviewer, which would seem to be a risky way to earn a living for a slow reader. His way of dealing with it sounds familiar:

 

“The only thing to do was to read during every possible free moment. There weren’t many of those--I had a hectic job as a politician’s speech-writer at the time, and three young children at home. There were late nights and early mornings, and I always had a book any time I thought I'd have to wait for anything--the doctor’s office, the car line at my daughter’s school. But I had to take it far beyond that. I'd get a paragraph in waiting for a traffic light, and another while waiting in line at the post office. The half-hour I was allotted for lunch was strictly for reading, and on car trips I would get my wife to read aloud while I drove.”

 

Swaim adopted a practice I’ve seldom resorted to – reading while walking. There’s an added risk in my case – I use a cane. Holding it in my right hand and a book in my left would make me worryingly unsteady. I remain a sedentary reader.

 

To my reader who asked about fast or slow reading: slow works for me. It has never imperiled the pleasure I’ve always taken in good books.