`The Dustbin of History'

Had Anton Chekhov not succumbed to tuberculosis in 1904, and had he lived on until 1928, he would have been 68 years old, a retired physician and grand old man of world literature, when Josef Stalin solidified his murderous grip on the Soviet Union. Would he still have lived in Russia? For how long would this most principled of writers have stifled his outrage? And for how long would Stalin have tolerated him? Theodore Dalrymple inspired these uncharacteristic considerations of alternate history in an essay savaging a theater reviewer for The Guardian. Of a production of The Cherry Orchard, Lyn Gardner wrote:

“Perhaps more than any other production I’ve seen, it suggests that the first thud of axe against tree trunk is a blow for a revolution that will eventually sweep Madame Ranevskaya and her family into the oblivion they deserve. It’s a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.”

That final phrase chillingly recalls the taunt Trotsky threw at the doomed Mensheviks: “You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!” Dalrymple is rightly appalled by the casual, dismissive violence of Gardner’s conclusion, though her case is hardly idiopathic. A tolerance amounting to tacit approval for the crimes of Stalin, Mao, even Hitler, is hardly unknown among the educated classes.

Dalrymple cites the familiar litany of Soviet literary martyrs: “Gumilev was shot on Lenin’s orders, Bunin went into exile and never returned, Gorky went into exile and was killed on his return, Mayakovsky killed himself in order to escape from his inevitable arrest, Mandelstam died in the Gulag, Tsvetayeva committed suicide, Yesenin cut his wrists and then hanged himself.”

He forgets Isaac Babel and one of Stalin’s indirect victims -- Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, father of the novelist, assassinated in Berlin in 1922 by Russian monarchists. The elder Nabokov was mistakenly murdered as he tried to shelter the real target, Pavel Milyukov, an exiled leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party. His son offers an excellent corrective to Gardner’s vulgar misunderstanding of Chekhov:

“What really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the Russian idealist. . . a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worth while living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything--a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes--in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people--all through Chekhov's stories.”

Either Gardner is historically illiterate – meaning she ought to be fired as incompetent --or, as Dalrymple suggests, she is a dilettante of nihilism, happy to let others do the killing for her. He writes:

“I think it is very unlikely that the theatre critic was so ignorant that she had no idea of what went on while the winds of change blew. No one is that ignorant. This being the case, we must conclude that she actually approved of what the winds of change wrought. This is a most uncomfortable thought, for it means that the impulses of nihilistic hatred that brought about the catastrophes of the 20th century are with us still, particularly among the intelligentsia.”

Gardner’s moral and historical ignorance is compounded by aesthetic catatonia. She has no understanding of Chekhov, who, on Oct. 4, 1888, wrote to his friend Alexy Pleshcheyev:

“The people I am afraid of are those who continually sniff between the lines seeking out tendencies, and who try to put me down as a definitive liberal or conservative. I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, I’m not a gradualist, nor a monk, nor am I indifferent. My sole desire is to be a free artist, nothing more, and I regret that God has denied me the strength to be one. I detest lies and violence in all their forms…I regard all trademarks and labels as badges of prejudice. My holy of holies is the human body, good health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and complete freedom -- freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form these last two may take.”

Some 40 years later, in Stalin’s Russia, such a letter, a declaration of human freedom and aspiration, would have amounted to a death sentence. In 1955, in another act of moral blindness, Lillian Hellman edited a volume of Chekhov’s letters, including the letter just cited. Hellman was a hack, a chronic liar and unreconstructed Stalinist who had the nerve, in her introduction, to praise Chekhov as “a man of balance, a man of sense,” and deliver a crackpot summary of 19th-century Russian history and culture. Of the play Gardner reviewed Hellman writes:

“The Cherry Orchard is sharp comedy. Nowhere else does Chekhov say so clearly that the world these people made for themselves would have to end in a whimper.”

`Decay with Imprecision'

Good writers distrust words as they revel in their music and power. Eliot embodied this ambivalence in the “Burnt Norton” portion of Four Quartets:

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”

The tendency of language to “Decay with imprecision” – willfully or through indifference – accelerates with each commercial and press release. On Thursday I received an e-mail from somewhere in my university consisting of a single sentence: “This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not a real message.” This text, which you and I have just read as though it were real, is a symptom of our madness. The great slang-collector Eric Partridge wrote in Usage & Abusage:

“The more a person studies the subtle variations in the meaning of common words, the more he will be convinced of the dangerous nature of the tools he has to use in all communication and arguments; the more careful should he therefore be in his use of words.”

Geoffrey Hill’s poetry hinges on this ambivalence – distrust and exuberance. In “On the Sophoclean Moment in English Poetry,” collected in Without Title, he writes: “Words are never stone/except in their appearance.” Used well, with devotion to clarity and truth, words baffle an illiterate age. Beckett said it: “All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence.”

R.S. Thomas: `More Than Enough'

R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet-priest, would have celebrated his 94th birthday today. A flinty, difficult man and writer, he was born in Cardiff on March 29, 1913. He retired from the church in 1978, and died on Sept. 25, 2000. This excerpt is drawn from his 1990 collection Counterpoint:

“I think that maybe
I will be a little surer
of being a little nearer.
That’s all. Eternity
is in the understanding
that that little is more than enough.”

Coleridge the Blogger

In the April 12 issue of the New York Review of Books, Richard Holmes reviews The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, by Adam Sisman, a chronicle of the mercurial relations between two great poets. Holmes, of course, has written unsurpassed lives of Shelley and Coleridge, and the marvelous Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage. His review of Sisman’s book is both admiring and qualified, but this passage caught my attention:

“Yet there again, Coleridge’s Notebooks, still insufficiently known, may be considered as an inspiration to all confessional writers, and may even become – in their wild informality – the secret bible of Internet bloggers. (Apparently there are over fifty million of these.)”

Five fat volumes of Coleridge’s Notebooks, each accompanied by a comparably hefty doppelgänger of notes, were edited by the late Kathleen Coburn and published by Bollingen between 1957 and 2002. That’s 10 volumes and more than 8,000 pages -- a good 50 pounds of “wild informality.” If it sounds daunting, be grateful to Seamus Perry, who edited the manageably svelte Coleridge’s Notebook: A Selection, published in 2002. It 264 pages, it tips the scale shy of one pound.

Coleridge, especially his prose, is an acquired taste, one I acquired in 1973 when I first read Biographia Literaria. It’s lush, antiquarian, anything-can-happen prose, difficult to emulate well. Melville learned from it, and one of the products of his apprenticeship is Moby-Dick – but so is the unreadable Pierre.

It’s fine to write like Coleridge if you possess his genius. That’s where Holmes’ likening of the Notebooks to blogging falls apart. By nature, notebooks are potting sheds in which some seeds germinate and others wither. Coleridge differs from bloggers in that he wrote privately, for his own consumption, not in a public forum, not even for posterity. We read Coleridge’s withered seeds only because Coleridge wrote them. In his sovereign preserve he could write as wildly, ungrammatically and self-pityingly, and with as much pretentiousness and embarrassing candor, as he wished. Not so in the public realm of blogging. Our thoughts can be unformed, preliminary, tentative, experimental, and so forth, but they ought to be at least provisionally well written. Often I don’t understand a subject until the discipline of articulation permits me to do so. Writing is not therapy. Without editors, bloggers double as their own editors – always a dubious arrangement. Of the 50 million bloggers cited by Holmes, how many are worth a keystroke?

Read the Notebooks for the bottomless fund of surprises they deliver, as do the best blogs. Coleridge wrote not in one voice but many. Even in the throes of opium addiction, when not raging or feeling sorry for himself, he can turn a memorably desolate phrase:

“Whirled about without a center – as in a nightmare – no gravity – a vortex without a center.” And “We all look up to the blue Sky for comfort, but nothing appears there – nothing comforts nothing answers us – & so we die –”

Sometimes he records one-liners:

“Wine – some men = musical Glasses – to produce their finest music you must keep them wet –"

And aphorisms:

“To be sure, some good may be imagined in any evil – as he whose house is on fire in a dark night, his Loss gives him Light to run away –“

And details observed in nature:

“The beautiful Milk Thistle with the milk-blue-white veins or fibers up & athwart its dark green Leaves.”

And unclassifiable fancies:

“Lie with the ear upon a dear friend’s grave –“

Who else could have written this:

“Amid the profoundest and most condensed constructions of hardest Thinking, the playfulness of the Boy starts up, like a wild Fig-tree from monumental Marble.”

Hill, at Last

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along a link to Adam Kirsch's review of Without Title, by Geoffrey Hill, in today's New York Sun. I ordered the book more than a year ago from England, Hill's native land, but only now has it been published in his adopted home, the United States. We can be grateful to Yale University Press for bringing it to American readers, even with a price tag of $26. For several years, Hill had been without an American publisher. It's a scandal that the greatest poet of the era has been treated so shabbily.

`Calling Into Darkness'

I who fear tall buildings and speeding automobiles have no fear of spiders and insects. I don’t like mosquitoes and fire ants but they don’t inspire loathing. At least one scorned species, however, I positively admire -- bats. I was taking out the trash at sunset Monday when I noticed them dipping and soaring above the treetops, harvesting insects. It’s the smooth certainty of their motions, guided by the enviable gift of echolocation, I find most beautiful. They move with confident grace, like Fred Astaire.

I remember spelunking once in upstate New York in the middle of winter, when the temperature below ground was a uniform 43 degrees F. We entered a narrow room and turned our flashlights on a wall of hibernating brown bats, thousands of them. Soundless, they fluttered like leaves and we turned off our lights. They looked small and vulnerable, as though we had entered a nursery.

Last week I brought home from the library a recent collection of poems by A.E. Stallings, Hapax. The title, from the Greek and also known as hapax legomena, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A word or form of which only one instance is recorded in a literature or an author.” In her epigraph, Stallings defines the original Greek as “once, once only, once for all.” She studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University, and now lives in Athens, Greece. I didn’t open her book until Tuesday, when I was pleased to find a sonnet, “Explaining an Affinity for Bats,” that nicely articulates my thoughts about the flying mammal:

“That they are only glimpsed in silhouette,
And seem something else at first—a swallow—
And move like new tunes, difficult to follow,
Staggering towards an obstacle they yet
Avoid in a last-minute pirouette,
Somehow telling solid things from hollow,
Sounding out how high a space, or shallow,
Revising into deepening violet.

That they sing—not the way the songbird sings
(Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—
But travel by a sort of song that rings
True not in utterance, but harkenings,
Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.”

Thanks to Stallings, bats have become metaphors for artists, poets in particular, “calling into darkness/To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.” It’s a densely layered conceit that, before it unfolds, pleases the ear. The final line is perfect and very satisfying iambic pentameter. The next poem in the collection, “Variations on an Old Standard,” also includes a reference to bats:

“The bats inebriate the sky,

“And now mosquitoes start to tune
Their tiny violins.”

The verb “inebriate” is rare and useful, though the lines about mosquitoes are trite. Because I’ve spent weeks sequestered with more stringent sensibilities – Spinoza, Zbigniew Herbert – Stallings’ mix of musicality and wit has been a pleasant diversion. Her poems remind me of lines from “The Poems of Our Climate,” by Wallace Stevens:

“The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”

`Literature Shares with Man His Solitude'

I had lunch on Monday with Ewa Thompson, a research professor in Slavic Studies at Rice University and a longtime friend of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. Last week, on a whim, I sent her a link to my review of Herbert’s The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She wrote back to say that she, too, had reviewed the volume, had known Herbert since she was teenager in Poland, and had accepted the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing on his behalf in 1995, when he was too ill to receive it in person. Herbert died in 1998.

The Ingersoll Foundation has awarded its prize annually since 1983, and its winners have included Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Powell, Walker Percy, Muriel Spark, Geoffrey Hill – a more consistently deserving list that the largely discredited Nobel Prize for Literature. The award totaled $20,000, and Thompson said Herbert, who lived in near-poverty in Poland, gave away half the money.

Thompson was born 70 years ago in Poland, and immigrated to the United States in 1963. As a teenager, she wrote a fan letter to Herbert, and they continued to correspond and often met when Thompson visited Europe. Her books include Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, Understanding Russia: the Holy Fool in Russian Culture, The Search for Self-Definition in Russian Literature, and the Twayne volume on Witold Gombrowicz. She edits Samaritan Review, a scholarly journal on the history, culture, and society of Central and Eastern Europe.

Like many natives of the Soviet Bloc, Thompson’s thinking is dominated by hatred of Communism. Her love of Herbert’s work is driven more by politics and history than aesthetics, and she calls him “Our Knight in Shining Armor.” She gave me a copy of Herbert’s acceptance speech for the T.S. Eliot Award, “Invisible but Present,” which she had translated into English and I had never read. In it, Herbert chronicles his encounters with Eliot’s work, starting with his teenage discovery of an early poem, “La Figlia che Piange,” on a page torn from an anthology:

“The first encounter did not take place in the silence of a library but in the midst of a raging war, with barbarism let loose. At that time, universities, libraries, museums seemed to belong to the world of mythology and fantasy rather than to everyday reality….It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast: the world of chaos and fury that surrounded me, and this poem in a soft and elegiac key, so abounding in delicacy and tenderness.”

As in his poetry, the tone of Herbert’s speech is at once cerebral and history-minded, yet oddly down-home and jargon-free. His virtues are the humblest of human virtues. The critic Al Alvarez put it this way in a 1985 review of the English translation of Report from the Besieged City:

“Herbert is the only contemporary poet I know who can talk about nobility and, more important, sound noble without also sounding false. It is a note that is rare in the arts of any period. The Romans had it, so did Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. But it hasn’t been much in evidence in recent years and perhaps it took someone who has witnessed close-up -- `with a calm and very clear eye’ – some of the worst horrors of this century to speak out for virtù and endurance without sounding sentimental.”

Herbert’s delicate sense of “nobility” is evident everywhere in his acceptance speech:

“I said I got acquainted with Eliot’s poem by chance, but on second thought this is not true; in fact, it would be blasphemous to say so. Even today, I strongly feel that this first poem was a gift, that it was bestowed on me by fate.

“Please forgive me if I speak un unfashionable language, one ill-adjusted to the analytical epoch in which we live. Yet I think that literature should not yield to the temptation of `keeping up with the times’ and genuflecting before the advances of scientific research. Literature is ruled by its own laws, and it disciplines itself according to its own rules; it addresses itself to the regions of the soul untouched by scholarly analysis. Words such as `progress’ and `advance,’ so ardently worshiped today, do not provide a key to literature. Such is my conviction, and also the justification for my work.”

Herbert, the most unostentatiously learned of poets, tells stories of Cicero, Wordsworth, Newton and Kant, and none of it feels like name-dropping, as it would from the lips of most writers. For Herbert, it always comes back to the human:

“Literature and its only subject matter, the only game it pursues: the human person. Literature has pursued this game for millennia. It keeps pulling out of the anonymous human mass an individual (always in the singular, never in the plural) to whom it gives the body and soul, face and character, and whom it leads through a certain course of events toward, perhaps, an immortality. It pursues that person’s earthly fate. It lights up the brief moment between two dark unknowns: before and after. It insists that the individual whose life it illuminates is unrepeatable, that he is a person, and thus different from anything else in the universe. It diligently researches that person’s virtues and trespasses, dreams and crimes. Sometimes it offers forgiveness, at other times it is unyielding and austere as if it itself had to answer for its judgments to a higher authority.

“Literature is down-to-earth, but it yields a sympathetic ear to dreams. It understands solitude and human solidarity. It holds sovereign power over time. T.S. Eliot expressed it best as he discovered the undercurrent of poetry under the pedestrian rules of grammar:

“`Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.’”

I can’t think of a less fashionable yet inarguable truth than this sentence from the end of Herbert’s speech:

“Literature shares with man his solitude and the urge to oppose evil.”

`A Mournful Echo of the Prophetic Psalms'

I spent much of the weekend reading Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind, by Steven Nadler, author of Spinoza: A Life, the standard biography in English. The book focuses on the philosopher’s cherem, his expulsion from the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656, when he was 23 years old, had written little and published nothing (his great work, The Ethics, was published posthumously). Nadler reproduces the proclamation that was read in Hebrew, on July 27 of that year, in front of the ark of the Torah in a crowded synagogue. Here’s an excerpt of this chilling document:

“Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.”

Nadler devotes the balance of his book to placing the cherem and its unprecedented ferocity in a dense political, historical, religious and philosophical context – all in fewer than 200 pages. He writes with admirable clarity and his book is accessible to thoughtful, non-specialist readers. That’s an accomplishment to inspire our gratitude. Spinoza’s philosophy is difficult but peculiarly attractive. His brief, often lonely life seems almost to have been scripted to illustrate the intellectual daring of his thought. Here are the final sentences of Nadler’s book:

“Does the cherem mean that there is no portion in the world to come for Spinoza’s soul? We know well what Spinoza would say to such a question.”

Indeed we do, and many writers have been attracted to Spinoza as much for his principled, almost saintly life as for his thought. What follows are impressionistic responses to the philosopher, all pulled from my memory or the books on my nearest shelves. Shelley, for instance, translated Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus – some measure of the book’s radically tolerant politics -- and George Eliot translated The Ethics. Coleridge long wrestled with Spinoza, whom he punned on badly as “Spy Nozy.” Eventually, he concluded that Spinoza was inimitable to Christianity, but in the fall of 1798, from his cottage at Nether Stowey, he wrote in a letter:

“Our little Hovel is afloat – poor Sara tired off her legs with servanting – the young one fretful & noisy from confinement exerts his activities on all forbidden Things – the house stinks of Sulphur – I however, sunk in Spinoza, remain as undisturbed as a Toad in a Rock; that is to say, when my rheumatic pains are asleep.”

Spinoza shows up once, cryptically, in Melville’s Journals, but the notation leads nowhere: “Spinoza, Rothschild &c. &.”

The Spanish thinker Miguel de Unamuno wrote in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations:

“Let us take the man Spinoza, the Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland. Read his Ethics for what it is, a desperate elegiac poem, and tell me if you do not hear, beneath the unadorned, but seemingly serene, propositions set forth more geometrico, a mournful echo of the prophetic psalms. This is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair.”

Jorge Luis Borges wrote two great sonnets about Spinoza and announced his intention to write a book titled Key to Spinoza. In a 1974 interview, he said, “I am preparing a book on Spinoza's philosophy, because I have never understood him. He has always attracted me, less than Berkeley, less than Schopenhauer, but I cannot understand Spinoza.”

Even so, when asked in 1979 to name his favorite historical character, Borges answered, “Spinoza, who committed his life to abstract thought.”

On Sunday I took my 4-year-old to a birthday party for one of his preschool friends, held in a gymnastic studio thundering Abba and Village People covers over the sound system. After pleasantries, I sat in the bleachers and resumed reading Nadler’s book. An older man sat nearby and opened a volume of his own. I couldn’t see the cover but he was reading intently. During a quiet spell I leaned over and asked what he was reading. He held up a biography of Andrew Jackson and asked about my book. He had never heard of Spinoza but seemed to be listening to my explanation with more attentiveness than mere politeness demanded. As I finished describing the cherem and Spinoza’s resulting isolation, he said, “Sounds like a man of principle. Like Old Hickory here.”

`A Citizen of the Earth'

Two writers from radically different worlds shared a reverence for the cave paintings in southwestern France dating from the Upper Paleolithic, some 40,000 years ago. The largest collection of such work, some of the oldest surviving art objects created by our species, are found in Dordogne, most famously at the Lascaux caves, near Montignac. Four teenage boys discovered them on Sept. 12, 1940, three months after the Nazis overran France.

For Guy Davenport, such works are “not in the least primitive or unsophisticated.” In his essay “The Symbol of the Archaic” (published in The Geography of the Imagination) Davenport traces an unbroken line from the Paleolithic to the High Modernist. Referring to the skepticism that greeted the antiquity of similar cave paintings found almost half a century earlier in Spain, he writes:

“There was, however, a silent believer from the beginning of his career, who saw prehistoric art with eyes which would influence all other eyes in our time. When [L’Abbé] Breuil was copying the ceiling of bulls in the Spanish cave Altamira, a young man from Barcelona crawled in beside him and marveled at the beauty of the painting, at the energy of the designs. He would in a few years teach himself to draw with a similar energy and primal clarity, and would incorporate one of these enigmatic bulls into his largest painting, the Guernica. He was Pablo Picasso.”

One of Davenport’s earliest published stories, “Robot” (included in Tatlin!), is a densely themed mediation on human aggression and the continuity of aesthetic instinct. It’s also an adventure story about four boys searching for a lost dog, the eponymous Robot, who instead find treasure. The Resistance uses the caves to conceal a cache of weapons – another, less benign repudiation of barbarism. The story opens like this:

“Down there the ochre horse with black mane, black fetlocks, black tail, was prancing as if to a fanfare of Charpentier, though it would have been the music of shinbone fife and a drum that tickled her ears across the tall grass and chestnut forests along the Vézère.”

Davenport is no facile believer in progress, aesthetic or moral. We have lost much in the last 50 millennia or so. In the essay “Prehistoric Eyes,” also in The Geography of the Imagination, Davenport writes:

“Man, it would seem, does not evolve; he accumulates. His fund of advantages over nature and over the savage within is rich indeed, but nothing of the old Adam has been lost; our savagery has perhaps increased in meanness and fury; it stands out even more terribly against a modern background.”

The other writer who revels in Paleolithic art as a reflection of human excellence is Zbigniew Herbert. His essay “Lascaux,” in Barbarian in the Garden is, in part, a happy travelogue of a journey into antiquity. His metaphors are ironically Christian. He refers to various rooms in the cave as naves and apses, and describes L’Abbé Brueil as “the pope of pre-historians.” Herbert was a survivor of humanity’s most vile aspirations, yet the conclusions he draws from his visit to Lascaux are remarkably stirring. Based on his close encounter with our species at its aesthetic best, Herbert writes:

“I returned from Lascaux by the same road I arrived. Though I had stared into the `abyss’ of history, I did not emerge from an alien world. Never before had I felt a stronger or more reassuring conviction: I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity.”

America, by Way of Poland

Zbigniew Herbert led me to Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish writer I hadn’t previously known, who by way of a notebook chronicling his visit to the United States has led me back to Zbigniew Herbert. Circularity makes for reliable navigation.

Tyrman was born in Poland in 1921. I know little about him except that he spent time in German and Soviet prisons during World War II, and was a journalist who worked for anti-regime newspapers in Soviet-era Poland. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1966, founded a conservative think tank and monthly journal, and died in 1985. I found his Notebooks of a Dilettante in the library. Most of its contents were first published in The New Yorker in the nineteen-sixties, including “American Diary.”

Tyrman arrived by ship in New York City in January 1966 – a pivotal American moment -- and traveled around the country. He is amazed by mundane realities the natives never notice. Most of the police officers he saw in Washington, D.C., for instance, were black, and they were armed. As a Pole, fed a steady diet of anti-American propaganda, he had no understanding of the Second Amendment or America’s racial complexity. His naïveté and honesty are touching:

“I never read in the Communist press that there were Negro policemen in America. Maybe I don’t really know anything about the Negro problem here?”

Like many foreign visitors, Tyrman is overwhelmed by American abundance and scale. He wills himself into accepting and trying to comprehend American reality. His openness is admirable, as is his refusal of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, still the default mode of so many European intellectuals. Tyrmand lights us when he arrives in Houston. He visits a Rotary meeting, a barbecue, the Astrodome, the University of Houston, a Pirandello production at the Alley Theatre, and the Manned Spacecraft Center, and all the while has a marvelous time. Even when he observes the American brand of poshlust, defined by Nabokov as the “falsely important, the falsely beautiful, falsely clever, the falsely attractive,” he never condescends. His instinct is to enjoy and understand. By seeing us clearly, he better understands himself and fellow Europeans:

“The most exhausting feature here is the method of communication. Americans ignore our general principle for communicating important matters – the rule that not all is said. There are things, mainly wishes, that we do not express but rather make felt. To Americans one has to speak directly. Allusion, which constitutes the only possibility of accepting before being asked or without having to ask, is unknown. If you want to be invited to an American’s home, you must tell him so – something that in Europe would be unthinkable.”

In miniature, Tyrmand describes the premise of The American and a dozen other novels and stories by Henry James: American bluffness and plain dealing versus European wiles and indirection. But he also offers insight into the aesthetic method of his friend Zbigniew Herbert: “There are things, mainly wishes, that we do not express but rather make felt.” Here’s a prose poem, “Angels of Civilization,” translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles:

“At the turn of the century it seemed that angels were leaving us forever and that every trace of them would be lost. They were still employed here and there by funeral services. They also held up unfashionable canopies. But essentially they went pale from inertia and slowly turned into pink powder.

“The real renaissance of angels came with the development of airline companies. You could say without exaggeration they came back to earth and took on the flush of life. They provide aid in crossing a footbridge hung high above the oceans. From the intercom systems of airports their high unreal voices trickle smoothly as if they wanted to persuade us there's still some salvation.

“They speak all tongues, but they have one laugh for ascension and catastrophe.”

As practiced by American poets, most prose poems are artfully incoherent and unpoetic. Herbert was a master of the form. In his hands it was fable-like, worthy of Kafka. To use Tyrmand’s distinction, “Angels of Civilization” makes much felt while overtly expressing little. The angels, so benign in folklore, so helpful through most of the poem, laugh inappropriately, when planes crash and civilizations fall. Here’s an excerpt from an interview Herbert gave The Manhattan Review that I have cited before, but it’s worth a reprise:

“Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. `Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

An un-American but not anti-American sentiment.

`The Best Fertilizer for Poetry'

Last month I mailed my brother an uncorrected proof of The Complete Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert, a book I reviewed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ken called Wednesday to say he had created a series of 10 assemblages titled “Ten Things Made After Reading Herbert” -- collages on wood incorporating texts, including all of one poem, “Nothing Special,” and four lines from another, “Mama.”

My brother is broadly read but not literary. By trade he is a picture framer. He knows wood and art history, particularly Albrecht Durer. He is self-taught, like me, and non-academic. He is suspicious of herd-thinking and fashion mistaken for truth. I asked why he liked Herbert’s austere poetry:

“The clarity of it. Something just meshes with my gears. And I understand the sheer shit of the first part of his life. I like the humor, too. It’s not boastful humor.”

Here’s “Nothing Special,” as translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles:

“nothing special
boards paint
nails paste
paper string

“mr artist
builds a world
not from atoms
but from remnants

“forest of arden
from umbrella
ionian sea
from parkers quink

“just as long as
his look is wise
just as long as
his hand is sure –

“and presto the – world –

“hooks of flowers
on needles of grass
clouds of wire
drawn out by wind”

Herbert, too, works “not from atoms/but from remnants,” and so does my brother, and so do I, I suppose. In Herbert, the remnants are never selected arbitrarily. Take “forest of arden.” Yes, Shakespeare, but Herbert is more cunning than that, and his airy-looking texts are always dense with associations. He published an earlier poem titled “Forest of Arden,” and here’s the note that accompanies it in the Collected Poems:

“In Polish the title refers both to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the Ardennes forest in Belgium and northern France. During World War II, much of the Polish resistance to the Nazi and Soviet occupations took the form of partisan groups based in the wide expanses of forest in what is now the territory of Belorussia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine, where the Herbert family lived until 1944.”

Herbert is an erudite poet who deploys his erudition modestly. I suspect this is a matter of temperament and contingency. Joseph Brodsky subverted the culturally condescending label “Eastern Europe” by calling it “Western Asia.” Herbert was a Europe-facing Pole, an inheritor of Western Civilization and its glories, at the same time he was disinherited from the very heritage that sustained him. His indelibly divided nature, his outsider credentials, may account for some of the attraction Herbert holds for my brother and me. His friend, the Polish novelist Leopold Tyrmand, described in a diary passage from 1954 (two years before Herbert published his first book of poetry) how Herbert worked as an accountant-timekeeper for a cooperative that manufactured bags, toys and boxes:

“The serenity with which Herbert endures that drudgery – him, a man with degrees in three fields – is straight from Early Christian hagiography. That serenity is a carefully crafted mask -- it conceals the despair of a man who fears that he gambled away his life in History’s absurd game of poker, where the stakes were honor and ideological attachments.”

And later in the diary, after Herbert has gone to work in the Central Peat Industry Bureau:

“Herbert read his new poems this evening. Looks as though working in peat is having a fertilizing influence on him. There is nothing to do there, you can’t read newspapers during the office hours, so Zbyszek sits at his desk and writes poems and fables. Everybody thinks he’s an exemplary and zealous worker, while Zbyszek struggles with his obsession – that of a wasted life, which, as we know, is the best fertilizer for poetry.”

I’m not equating my experience or my brother’s with Herbert’s. Neither of us endured a world war or the misery of Stalinism. We are well-fed, pampered Americans. But both of us, I suspect, empathize with the poet-in-disguise at his desk. The mask of a drone is useful. The finery and poses of a bohemian are not. You can accomplish much sitting at a desk, head down, absorbed in some important-looking matter. We come from that forgotten reservoir of discipline and resentment, the working class. Our father was an ironworker. I was the first in our family to attend college. No one expected us to be bookish, artistic or articulate. The absence of all expectations, a doltish complacency, too, is an excellent disguise. Of late, my brother has enjoyed “In Praise of Limestone,” by W.H. Auden, and has created another assemblage based on these lines by Osip Mandelstam: “I do not sing of stone/now, I sing of wood.”

Herbert reminds us in “The Power of Taste”:

“So in fact aesthetics can be an aid in life
One shouldn’t neglect the study of beauty.”

`Grief Too Will Make Us Idealists'

The grief-stricken heart of Ulysses is the death of Rudy Bloom, the 11-day-old son of Leopold and Molly Bloom, in December 1893, more than 10 years before Bloomsday, June 16, 1904, the day on which the events of the novel take place. In the sixth chapter, “Hades,” Leopold Bloom ruminates during Paddy Dignam’s funeral:

“Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling that would be. From me.”

Eleven chapters later, at the conclusion of “Circe,” set in Bella Cohen’s brothel, Bloom has a vision:

“(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he [Bloom] stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)

“BLOOM (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) `Rudy!’

“RUDY (Gazes unseeing into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauveface. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet howknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)”

I have no recollection of this scene from my first reading of Ulysses as a teenager. The father-son theme that dominates the novel and the significance of Bloom “adopting” Stephen Dedalus were lost on me, I’m sure. I was not yet a father and I suspect the almost unendurable pain of this scene probably left me untouched. Today, as the father of three sons, “white lambkin” is almost more than I can bear.

I thought of this pivotal moment, ignored by critics too dazzled by Joyce’s technical effects, while reading Emerson’s Essays: Second Series, specifically “Experience.” Early in 1842, Emerson’s oldest son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever. Two weeks earlier, Henry Thoreau’s brother, John, had died of lockjaw. Waldo’s death damaged Emerson forever. On his deathbed, in 1882, he was reported to have said, “Oh that beautiful boy.” In the immediate wake of Waldo’s death, Emerson wrote an elegy, “Threnody,” in which he says “I mourn/The darling who shall not return.” Then he wrote “Experience,” a puzzling, painful, zigzagging essay. Emerson had always embodied contradiction and inconsistency, and in this he mirrored the shape-shifting republic that preceded him in birth by a mere 27 years. His paragraphs, culled sentence by sentence from his journals, shift persona and mood a dozen times, one of the reasons he is so congenial to moderns. In “Experience” he writes:

“Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, -- neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.”

The force of emotion behind those words, and the effort to contain it, is stunning. Even for Emerson, the range of metaphor is impressive. In five sentences on the death of a child, he draws from law, finance and biology. “Caducous” is revealing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “Applied to organs or parts that fall off naturally when they have served their purpose; fugacious, deciduous.” In context, the definition is chilling. For a proponent of pop psychology, that one-size-fits-all balm of idiocy, to intone that Emerson is “in denial,” that he is not “in touch with his feelings,” that he’s in need of “closure,” would be an abomination. More so than Whitman, his most attentive student, Emerson “contained multitudes.” Here’s the conclusion to “Experience”:

“We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! -- it seems to say, -- there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”

Oddly, the essay never founders in despair. No conventional believer in an afterlife, Emerson sounds remarkably like William James: “It is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.”

William James had been born on Jan. 11, 1842, 16 days before Waldo’s death. Later that year Emerson agreed to be William James’ godfather.

`A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day Three)'

Jewcy has published the third installment of `A Kibitz on Pure Reason,' an exchange between Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Michael Weiss.

Where Did Nature Go?

In the Spring 2007 issue of The Threepenny Review, Elizabeth Tallent reviews D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, by John Worthen. Lawrence and his work are unpalatable, and I know nothing about Tallent except that she likes Lawrence a little too much, but at the conclusion of her review she makes a provocative assertion:

“Losing Lawrence, we relegate his list of necessary relationships – with `stone, earth, trees, flower, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures’ – to outworn modes of fiction. If young writers can rarely name more than a dozen plants within a ten-mile radius of their writing desks, this isn’t seen as detrimental to their work’s verisimilitude, since the nonhuman world plays almost no part in contemporary fiction. It’s as if this silence in fiction anticipates a hundred thousand species’ extinction in the actual world. Lawrence would be enraged.”

Fortunately, we can disregard Lawrence’s rage and his nonsense about “blood consciousness” and still take Tallent seriously. She’s right about the “denatured” state of American fiction. Our national library, fiction and nonfiction, at least from Emerson to Faulkner, is dense with casually deployed knowledge of the natural world. Even housebound Emily Dickinson knew her wildflowers and birds. While Pynchon’s novels are freighted with lore from a dozen disciplines, and he can joke about “a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof,” it’s all a goof – nature as postmodern shtick. Our writers have come a long way from Shakespeare, who was no botanist but names more than 175 plants in his work.

For many of us nature is a “recreation option,” like softball or video games, or an intrusion, like mosquitoes and dandelions. Our gaze is inward, our surroundings artificial. As a result nature writing has become a marketing genre, like romance. Edward Abbey is gone. Edward Hoagland, John McPhee and Annie Dillard remain, but even they were never strictly nature writers. Most of the rest can be divided into nature mystics and nature pedants. Both camps are self-conscious, humorless and polluted with politics.

I suggest Thoreau as an alternative, a nature mystic who, through discipline and study, evolved into an able field biologist who supplied Louis Agassiz with specimens, and our best writer on the natural world. Thoreau systematically taught himself botany, using the textbooks and field guides of his day, and weighed what he learned from them against what he saw in the fields and woods around Concord. His first use of a plant’s Latin name in his Journal seems to have been on Sept. 12, 1842, when he identified climbing hempweed as Mikania scandens. He was 25, a Harvard graduate and, more importantly, a dedicated autodidact. In a Journal entry from Dec. 4, 1856, he writes:

“I remember gazing with interest at the swamps about those days and wondering if I could ever attain to such familiarity with plants that I should know the species of every twig and leaf in them, that I should be acquainted with every plant (excepting grasses and cryptogamous ones), summer and winter, that I saw. Though I knew most of the flowers, and there were not in any particular swamp more than half a dozen shrubs that I did not know, yet these made it seem like a maze to me, of a thousand strange species, and I even thought of commencing at one end and looking it faithfully and laboriously through till I knew it all. I little thought that in a year or two I should have attained to that knowledge without all that labor.”

As Thoreau’s knowledge grew, the easy moralizing so common in his his early Journal entries diminished. Some readers lament Thoreau’s evolution into a proto-scientist, and even Thoreau himself had misgivings. In his Christmas Day Journal entry for 1851, he writes, “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?” And the following July 13, he writes in a letter to his sister Sophia, “I have become sadly scientific.”

For Thoreau, learning his surroundings, accurately naming its components, was an expression of his truest vocation: writer. A writer catalogues his world by observing and collecting its details. Readers and critics pigeonhole Thoreau according to their own hobbyhorses: naturalist, environmentalist, abolitionist, vegetarian, anarchist, Yankee crank, saint. He was all those things, of course, but essentially a writer.

`A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day Two)'

The second installment of the conversation between Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Michael Weiss is available at Jewcy.

One War, Two Sides

Diaries kept by soldiers in wartime are often most interesting for their inconsequential details, the scraps of normalcy their authors observe or remember and have chosen to record. As a lifelong civilian with no experience of combat, I can only speculate that anything unrelated to imminent violence and death must appear worth cherishing regardless of how mundane it might seem on the home front. What follows are passages from diaries kept by two soldiers on opposing sides in World War I.

First is Edward Thomas, born of Welsh parents in London in 1878. He worked as a freelance writer before the war, and all the poetry we know him for was written in little more than two years, most of it after he had enlisted in the artillery. Thomas was killed in France during the Arras offensive, in April 1917. This diary entry is dated March 14, 1917, less than a month before his death:

“Ronville O.P. Looking out towards No Man’s Land what I thought first was a piece of burnt paper or something turned out to be a bat shaken at last by shells from one of the last sheds in Ronville. A dull cold morning, with some shelling of Arras and St. Sauveur and just 3 of us. Talking to Birt and Randall about Glostershire and Wiltshire, particularly Painswick and Marlborough. A still evening – blackbirds singing far off – a spatter of our machine guns – the spit of one enemy bullet – a little rain – no wind – only far-off artillery.”

Robert Musil was born in 1880 in Klagenfurt, Austria. He served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army throughout the war, but already had a reputation as a fiction writer by the time he enlisted, having published Young Törless in 1906. The diary of the future author of The Man without Qualities is a more finished, ironical, “literary” document than Edward Thomas’, but no less filled with homely detail. This is from Oct. 23, 1915:

“Patrol combat action. The dead man’s few possessions lie wrapped in a shred of newspaper on our dining-table. A purse, the rose from his cap, a short, small pipe, two oval tin boxes containing ready-cut Toscani – cigar-like cigarettes – a small, round pocket mirror. From these objects streams a heavy sadness…

“Italian picture postcards, taken from the prisoners. Not probable that this nation’s desire for war is already exhausted. The cards show their soldiers in the favourite heroic poses; they are still nothing but a soldier’s game. Particularly fetching is a card subtitled `The Destruction of Austria’s Frontiers.’ An officer stands – quite small, his men behind him – on an upturned black and yellow frontier post. Approximately in the `sortie’ position. In his left hand the flag, in his right hand his spadone [a sword], lowered. He is shouting. Shouting into the void…Another sign of how much they still love war is reflected in the fact that the cards depict la patria and d’Italia in very erotic fashion: always as a young, tender, rather forlorn looking girl, who does not really look very Italian. Here a feeling previously unknown breaks through to the surface.”

`A Kibitz on Pure Reason'

Dave Lull has sent me a link to "A Kibitz on Pure Reason" at Jewcy, a site new to me. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Michael Weiss conduct "a sort of epistolary book review and kibitz on Spinoza’s life and philosophy."

From Russia with Alice

Michael Leinz has sent me a link to a story in The Moscow Times about Lewis Carroll in Russia. He singles out this sentence:

"The dark-blue book with a key on its cover was coveted by everyone, and its black-market price amounted to an engineer's monthly salary."

And adds: "If only books were prized that way here and now!"

Opossum in the Backyard

While I was weeding in the backyard Sunday morning, an opossum appeared in one of the tall shrubs that grow along the wooden fence at the rear of our lot. Like koalas, opossums are too stuffed-animal-like for their own good. Giving humans something cute and cuddly – Easter chicks and bunnies come to mind – often amounts to a death sentence. When I was a kid in Cleveland, I remember the old German widow who lived next door cussing loudly one summer evening in her native language. We investigated, and found her slamming a opossum into a bloody pancake with the blade of a shovel.

By the merest coincidence I had been reading Spinoza’s Ethics a few hours earlier – Part IV, Proposition XXXVII, particularly Note I, which begins: “He who, guided by emotion only, endeavours to cause others to love what he loves himself, and to make the rest of the world live according to his own fancy, acts solely by impulse, and is, therefore, hateful, especially to those who take delight in something different, and accordingly study and, by similar impulse, endeavour, to make men live in accordance with what pleases themselves.”

The pertinent passage comes in the subsequent paragraph, in which Spinoza dismisses laws against slaughtering animals as “founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason.” Note Spinoza’s reasoning: “…we have the same rights in respect to them [animals] as they have in respect to us. Nay, as everyone’s right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still, I do not deny that beasts feel: what I deny is, that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours, and their emotions are naturally different from human emotions.”

Spinoza’s argument is admirable. He blesses neither animal abuse nor sanctification. Were a poverty-stricken neighbor to shoot Pogo, cook him and serve him to his hungry children, he would have Spinoza’s blessing – and mine. Were the same neighbor to spend his afternoon torturing the opossum – you get the idea.

I was looking into Spinoza, as I often do, because on Sunday I linked to my review of The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert. With his learned devotion to 17th-century Dutch culture, Herbert often returns to the lens grinder-philospher. In the 1970s he published “Mr Cogito Tells of the Temptation of Spinoza,” a fable about the meeting of Spinoza and the conventional deity whose existence he denied. It’s God who tempts Spinoza with the ways of the world. He curries favor like a hustler:

“—you’re a good talker Baruch
I like your geometrical Latin
and the clarity of your syntax
the symmetry of your proofs
but let us speak
of Things Truly
Great”

And nags like a yenta:

“—think of
a woman
who will give you a child”

The O. Henry-ish ending to the poem may remind you of a well-known scene from The Wizard of Oz. More powerful, though, is a brief prose piece, “Spinoza’s Bed,” that Herbert called an “apocrypha” and published in Still Life with a Bridle. In it, Herbert recounts a puzzling episode in Spinoza’s life after the death of his father in 1656. His stepsister and her husband tricked Spinoza out of his inheritance. Instead of acquiescing, he turned litigious. He sued his family in an effort to recover virtually every object from his father’s house. “Then he requested objects without any value,” Herbert writes, “explaining that he had an emotional attachment to them.” Spinoza, one of the saints of philosophy, seemed to be motivated by Trumpish greed. Instead, once he won the suit, he kept only his mother’s bed and returned the rest to his family, his recently defeated legal adversaries. Here’s Herbert’s gloss on Spinoza’s baffling actions:

“No one understood why he acted this way. It seemed an obvious extravagance, but in fact had a deeper meaning. It was as if Baruch wanted to say that virtue is not at all an asylum for the weak. The art of renunciation is an act of courage – it requires the sacrifice of things universally desired (not without hesitation and regret) for matters that are great and incomprehensible.”

Despite the noise my younger sons and the neighbor’s dog were making, the opossum remained in the shrub, 12 feet or so off the ground, for half an hour or so. Then, slowly, without grace, he climbed on a power line and passed behind our house and the nextdoor neighbor’s garage, pausing to pull down a branch with his paw and chew some leaves. I watched him waddle away, never in a hurry, then I pulled some more weeds, and the next time I looked he was gone.

Review

My review of The Collected Poems: 1956-1968, by Zbigniew Herbert, appears today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Pollen

Our neighborhood in Houston is Oak Forest, and every lot in the subdivision is home to at least one oak, post or live. We have three. The fourth – a fat, 75-foot post oak -- we had cut down on Easter two years ago when it leaned against the side of the house, squashing the gutter and putting a 10-inch vertical crack in the wall of my youngest son’s bedroom. That was four months before Hurricane Katrina.

March is pollen season, and the oaks shed it like golden dandruff. The cars appear camouflaged for desert warfare. I’ve seen ponds in upstate New York so evenly covered with pollen they resembled large custards.Until I swept it Saturday afternoon, the driveway was stuccoed with an unsightly brown impasto of pollen, catkins, azalea blossoms, leafmeal and the general airborne filth of Houston, marinaded in last week’s rain and baked for two days in the sun. Even I was sneezing, though none of us is clinically allergic to the stuff.

Pollen produces the male gametes of seed plants, which have been around for more than 300 million years. Without them, no oxygen. Without oxygen, no you and me. Science can help us keep things in perspective. Thoreau gloried in pollen as a sign of nature’s profligacy – survival assured by overabundance. In the “Spring” chapter of Walden he noted:

“The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. This is the `sulphur showers’ we bear of. Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of `rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus.’ And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.”

Like nature’s auditor, Thoreau notes the pollen fall around Concord each year in his Journal. The entry for March 28, 1853, doesn’t get around to pollen until the final sentence, but it’s suggestive of the way his mind habitually worked:

“My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers, which however I did not promise to do. Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard through the partition shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, `Think of it! He stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn’t read the life of Chalmers.’”

“6 A.M—To Cliffs”

“Too cold for the birds to sing much. There appears to be more snow on the mountains. Many of our spring rains are snow-storms there. The woods ring with the cheerful jingle of the F. hyemalis. This is a very trig [Webster’s defines this archaic word as “spruce, smart”] and compact little bird, and appears to be in good condition. The straight edge of slate on their breasts contrasts remarkably with the white from beneath; the short light-colored bill is also very conspicuous amid the dark slate; and when they fly from you, the two white feathers in their tails are very distinct at a good distance. They are very lively, pursuing each other from bush to bush. Could that be the fox-colored sparrow I saw this morning,—that reddish-brown sparrow?

“I do not now think of a bird that hops so distinctly, rapidly, and commonly as the robin, with its head up.

“Why is the pollen of flowers commonly yellow?”

Thoreau’s eye was so fine and his taxonomic bent so pronounced, he could identify the sources of pollen. From the Journal for March, 25, 1855:

“Fever-root one foot high and more, say a fortnight or three weeks. Scared a screech owl out of an apple tree on hill; flew swiftly off at first like a pigeon woodpecker and lit near by facing me; was instantly visited and spied at by a brown thrasher; then flew into a hole high in a hickory near by, the thrasher following close to the tree. It was reddish or ferruginous. Choke-cherry pollen on island, apparently two or three days. Hemlock pollen, probably to-morrow; some in house to-day; say to-day; not yet leafing. Aralia nudicaulis, perhaps two days pollen. Cornus florida, no bloom. Was there year before last? Does it not flower every other year? Its leaf, say, just after C. sericea. Tupelo leaf before button-bush; maybe a week now. Red oak pollen, say a day or two before black. Swamp white oak pollen.”

In the beautiful essay he wrote after the death of Thoreau, Emerson marveled at the acuity of his best friend’s senses:

“One day, walking with a stranger, who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, `Everywhere,’ and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground. At Mount Washington, in Tuckerman's Ravine, Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the Arnica mollis.”

`Look Into Everything, Keep the Best'

As a biweekly book reviewer for the New York Sun, Eric Ormsby may have the most enviable job in the world. He rarely reviews a lousy volume and (even better and not unrelated) often reviews the great writers of the past as they are published in new editions, or as biographies and critical works about them appear. Within the last year he has weighed the worth of Shakespeare, Casanova, Samuel Johnson, Hart Crane, Samuel Beckett and R.K Narayan, among other delights. The books he reviews would constitute the foundation of an excellent library, though I’m certain he could amusingly demolish the day’s pretentious trifles. His enviable selectivity seems preferable to the widely accepted convention of reviewing books simply because they are new, regardless of their insignificance.

Ormsby is a poet, practiced in the arts of precision and concision, and he freely exercises his gift for aphoristic pithiness. Each review contains nuggets to be relished, even out of context, apart from the book at hand. In the March 14 Sun, in his review of Gillian Darley’s John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, he writes:

“John Evelyn might seem of interest only to specialists in 17th-century manners. Nothing could be more mistaken. Not only does the fascination of the man himself grow with acquaintance, but his approach to life offers a tacit rebuke to our own. Compared to him, we look narrow in our interests. An extraordinary openness to life in all its manifestations was his defining feature.”

We take pleasure in the company of knowledgeable, animated, limber-minded, well-read people. Boredom is boring, and “an extraordinary openness to life,” as Ormsby puts it, seems a likely antidote, for openness is aligned with gratitude, and gratitude quells world-weariness. But I can’t help thinking I am “narrow,” and I’m not certain I would have it otherwise. Much that life offers an American living early in the 21st century holds no attraction, but don’t think me ungrateful. I give thanks for antibiotics, black coffee, indoor plumbing and libraries that promise access to any book I wish. I even like the Internet, something I couldn’t have said a decade ago.

But I remain closed, by choice, to much that occupies the attention of my fellow Americans. I’m not interested in opening myself to sports and games, automobiles, advertising, the greater part of television and popular music, fast food, gambling, pop religion, incivility, a vulgar and freely expressed indulgence in anger, pornography, politics as practiced, tobacco and most other mood-altering drugs. I recoil from this list of diversions principally out of indifference, not moral revulsion. And yet, despite my whittling away of options, I have no time to pursue all my interests. I’m reminded of a dream Emerson recorded in a letter, reported by his best biographer, Robert D. Richardson:

“I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, `This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.”

When Virginia Woolf reviewed Emerson’s Journals, she said “he cannot be rejected because he carries the universe within him.” That spirit of bottomless thirst for the world, never slaked by the tawdry or counterfeit, I adopt as my own. Based on Ormsby’s enthusiasm (and that’s what the best critics do: instill enthusiasm), I checked out Darley’s newly published life of Evelyn from the library. I’ve read only the introduction, but that was enough to learn Evelyn’s personal motto, one he inscribed in all of his books for 80 years:

“Omnia explorate, meliora retinete.”

Darley gives this translation:

“Look into everything, keep the best.”

`That Which is Difficult Preserves Democracy'

I’m getting around to the March issue of Poetry, which includes five new poems by Geoffrey Hill, our greatest living poet. One of them, “On Reading Crowds and Power,” is based on Elias Canetti’s confounding study of mass movements, a sort of nonfiction sequel to his novel Auto da Fé. The second of the poem’s three stanzas is a reworked paragraph from the chapter on “Fame” in Crowds and Power. The third contains a forthright statement of Hill’s poetics:

“But hear this: that which is difficult
preserves democracy; you pay respect
to the intelligence of the citizen.”

In a profile of the poet by Robert Potts, published in The Guardian in 2002, Hill makes a similar point:

"Hill says of the accusation of `inaccessibility’ that `the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people's use of the word.’

“`In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together.’”

The arts, of course, are not democratic in any sense. While difficulty is no guarantee of poetic greatness – witness Charles Olson – much of the greatest poetry rejects an easily assimilated transparency. Think of Donne, Dickinson and Hopkins. The best poems express something that cannot be expressed in other words. Change a word, a syllable, and you’ve changed the expression. If I can read a poem with the same ease and certainty as I do a billboard or newspaper, it’s probably not a poem, though it may be propaganda.

A poem is music embodied in words. Something is fatally lost in paraphrase, and deferred understanding is the essential nature of reading poetry. Hill compliments us when he makes us work hard, because our hard work pays off. In the same issue of Poetry, the poet Anne Stevenson’s essay, "The Unified Dance," touches on this issue. She begins with her love of Yeats, which dates from childhood, then bafflingly writes with admiration of a poet I find unreadable, Frank O’Hara. She acknowledges “the disciplined art” of a Yeats poem and “the clever tone and pacing” of one by O’Hara, and ascribes the contrast to “a difference of purpose.” She continues:

“What do you want poetry to do? What do you think poetry is for? Those are questions, of course, that people who care about poetry have to answer for themselves. It's no good trying to wean people away from their tastes. Quarreling about what poetry should or shouldn't be usually ends up with poets hotly defending their own brand of the product.”

This is a useful, realistic observation, though Stevenson’s point can easily be bastardized into something like this: “I think Rod McKuen [or Frank O’Hara, or Charles Olson] is great. He speaks to me. Geoffrey Hill is boring. He’s an elitist” Can I reply to that, mustering evidence for Hill’s greatness and McKuen’s manifest awfulness? Sure. Do I want to? Never.

`Being Human'

Here's a provocative list of questions posed by Thomas Mallon at The American Scholar. Sanity is always refreshing.

Perchance to Meme?

I have been "tagged," as we say in Blogspeak, by Frank Wilson at Books Inq., to receive the "Thinking Blogger Award" and to nominate five of my fellows for the same honor. Frank, of course, is too kind, but I'm happy to draw more attention to five blogs I read daily:

1. Laudator Temporis Acti, the creation of Michael Gilleland, was one of my primary inspirations for starting Anecdotal Evidence. He's well and widely read, and enjoys sharing his pleasures with the rest of us.

2. James Marcus, at House of Mirth, was another inspiration. Sometimes it's eerie the way James and I share enthusiasms -- Flann O'Brien, Aldo Buzzi, Eugenio Montale, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among many others.

3. At The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, Greg Perry gleans the best from Thoreau's bottomless journal, the true work of his lifetime, and we are the daily beneficiaries.

4. Today in Letters is the brainchild of Brian Sholis who posts a letter or journal entry from the past corresponding to today's date. I wish I had thought of that.

5. Brad Bigelow deserves some sort of award for selfless service to both readers and writers. The Neglected Books Page rescues authors and books, prominent and obscure, from total extinction. At least somebody remembers.

`Their Rectitude is Chastening'

My doctor graduated with his B.S. in 1949, three years before I was born, from the university where I work. In June he will celebrate his 80th birthday and retire after practicing medicine for 50 years. I’ve known him for less than three years but he’s the first doctor whose company I don’t dread and who makes me feel like an adult. When he enters the examination room, I stand, we shake hands, he pulls up a chair and we talk and laugh for five or 10 minutes – family, the weather, what we’ve been reading. He enjoys listening to a good story as much as he does telling one. He enjoys words the way some people savor a lemon candy. Two years ago, when a harmless spike showed up on my EKG, causing me to consult a cardiologist, I called it an “anomaly,” and he laughed and claimed the word as his own and repeats each time I see him. Eventually, we get around to the state of my health, which is so tiresomely uneventful I’m tempted to invent ailments so I don’t lose his interest.

I saw Dr. B. again Wednesday, probably for the last time. I asked about his plans and he said, “Tomatoes. I grow them. And roses.” His children live in Virginia, Oklahoma and the Bay Area of California, and he and his wife plan to take leisurely road trips to visit them all. “We’ll take two weeks to drive to San Francisco. I love to drive and we enjoy seeing the country.” His father was a doctor, and so was his late brother, and so is his late brother’s son, who’s in practice with Dr. B. and who will inherit me as a patient. My doctor plans to keep his license because he wants occasionally to volunteer at a nearby clinic.

In the waiting room, before my exam, I was rereading Assorted Prose (1965), probably the first book I read by John Updike. The pieces he wrote in the fifties and early sixties for “The Talk of the Town” inevitably betray his influences – especially E.B. White – but all are amusing and justify my return to them periodically. One brief piece from May 1958, “Upright Carpentry,” seems pertinent to the retirement of one physician and the end of an era it signals for me and the rest of his patients:

“The bookcase and kitchen counter and cabinet he left behind stand perfectly up-and-down in a cockeyed house. Their rectitude is chastening. For minutes at a stretch, we study them, wondering if perhaps it isn’t, after all, the wall that is true and the bookcase that leans. Eventually, we suppose, everything will settle into the comfortably crooked, but it will take years, barring earthquakes, and in the meantime we are annoyed at being made to live with impossible standards.”

`The Couch of Sloth'

On Saturday, my 4-year-old was sick and fell into an atypical three-hour nap, so my 6-year-old and I went to the library to give my wife a break. The downtown Houston Public Library, the central repository with the largest collection of books, has been closed since last April for renovations and isn’t scheduled to reopen for at least another nine months, so we rely on small branch libraries around the city. I do most of my catalogue-searching in advance, from home, because the computers in the libraries are usually out of service or monopolized.

This visit was more spur-of-the-moment, so when Michael announced he wanted books about dragons, I went in search of a computer to access the catalogue. I couldn’t find one unoccupied, so I spoke with a librarian in the children’s department who said only one terminal in the building was dedicated to catalogue searches, and it was on the second floor, and it was not working. She kindly searched the collection from her own computer, but I was puzzled and asked: What are all these patrons doing on the computer? I had seen at least 20 occupied terminals. “Oh, searching the Internet,” she said. “You know.” Well, no, I didn’t. One more illusion punctured.

I tried to look casual as I strolled about the library, both floors, looking over shoulders at computer screens. Most were filled with games. Two older women were occupied playing Idiot’s Delight – solitaire. I saw only one screen otherwise used: a rather scruffy fellow seemed to doing his taxes, which I thought was a nice touch because he and the others were motoring the Information Highway at taxpayers’ expense. Am I the only one disturbed by dusty library books and standing-room-only computer terminals? By people with sufficient idle time to squander it within spitting distance of bookshelves? By a public library system that subsidizes mindless diversion – i.e., games? Samuel Johnson had a cogent answer more than 250 years ago, in The Rambler No. 178, on Nov. 30, 1751:

"Knowledge is praised and desired by multitudes whom her charms could never rouse from the couch of sloth; whom the faintest invitation of pleasure draws away from their studies; to whom any other method of wearing the day is more eligible than the use of books, and who are more easily engaged by any conversation than such as may rectify their notions or enlarge their comprehension."

Parlour Game

As a parlor game, it must be at least two centuries old, judging from William Hazlitt’s “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen.” The premise is simple and inviting: Name the person from the past you would most like to meet, and give your reasons. Hazlitt’s essay was published in 1826, and he says the party in question had occurred about 20 years earlier. The game was proposed by Charles Lamb, who promptly rejected the nominations proposed by another guest: Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke.

Lamb argues that both, indeed, were “the greatest names,” “but they are not persons.” Pressed to explain, Lamb said: “`That is…not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the Essay on the Human Understanding, and the Principia, which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see any one bodily for, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individual, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet curious to know.”

Lamb’s distinction is shrewd, perhaps informed by personal disillusionment. I know from experience that meeting an object of one’s enthusiasm can be unpleasant and disillusioning. I once interviewed by telephone a renowned jazz pianist, a musician I respected if not loved, though he is loved by many others. He was unabashedly rude, offensive and narcissistic. That was more than 20 years ago, and since then I have not once listened voluntarily to his music. Obviously, a one-man embargo against one jazz musician is business as usual. Who care? This guy forgot about me shortly after picking up the telephone to take my call.

Back to Hazlitt: The guests push Lamb to name his choices “from the whole range of English literature,” and he obliges:

“Lamb then named Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the floor of his apartment in their nightgowns and slippers, and to exchange friendly greetings with them.”

The other guests laugh and Lamb explains:

“`The reason why I pitch upon these two authors is, that their writings are riddles, and they themselves the most mysterious of personages. They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in dark hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them the meaning of what no mortal but themselves, I should suppose, can fathom. There is Dr. Johnson; I have no curiosity, no strange uncertainty about him; he and Boswell together have pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit: my friends whose repose I should be tempted to disturb (were it in my power), are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable.”

Here I reluctantly part company with Lamb, because Dr. Johnson would be on my short list of people from the past I would wish to meet. Among my criteria would be a temperament compatible with my own, and while Johnson could be ferocious I flatter myself in thinking I would not burden him with tedious questions or unfair expectations. I would simply revel in his company, in his twitches and bon mots, and would hope I could amuse him.

Who else? Montaigne. Spinoza. Keats. Whitman. Thoreau. Henry James. Anton Chekhov. Isaac Babel. Osip Mandelstam. Samuel Beckett. Only Beckett’s life overlapped mine. My overriding fear with all of them would be that I would bore them. The likeliest to be indulgent and curious are Whitman and Chekhov.

I can’t resist quoting Hazlitt quoting a little more of Lamb. Here he is justifying his choice of Sir Thomas Browne:

“`When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition, the Urn-burial, I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it. Besides, who would not be curious to see the lineaments of a man who, having himself been twice married, wished that mankind were propagated like trees!”

And you, dear reader? Who among the writers of the past would you invoke?

`Pretty Twinklings'

Who reads L.E. Sissman today? Had he not died in 1976 at the appalling age of 48, Sissman might have become a Grand Old Man of American Letters, if such a notion is not already extinct, though his sensibility would have been too ironical to take seriously so exalted a title. Like Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, Sissman was an artist-in-disguise, a poet in a three-piece suit. He worked in advertising, the bane of sensitive plants, and wrote some of the best mid-century American poems.

He paid the ultimate price in order to write his finest work. In 1965 Sissman was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, and three years later he published his first book, Dying: An Introduction. For 11 years he fought cancer and, until his final year, continued writing poems, many chronicling his disease and impending death, but his work is never mawkish. He didn’t indulge in that dismayingly popular sub-genre, the “victim” poem. Sissman was too urbane to think suffering and death confer nobility. He knew he was facing a commonplace inevitability. This is from “A Deathplace”:

“Very few people know where they will die,
But I do: in a brick-faced hospital,
Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,
Into three parts….”

I’m reminded of what Charles Lamb wrote on Sept. 9, 1826, in a letter to his friend John Bates Dibdin: “The Tyranny of Sickness is nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence: tis to have Thirty Tyrants for one.”

“Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite” was published posthumously in his collected poems, Hello, Darkness. Sissman favored poems written in suites, as his punning title suggests. One need not have cancer or any mortal illness, nor know someone who does, to appreciate Sissman’s wit and craft. Again this is not poetry written by a victim, for victims. For the Greeks, Clotho was the youngest of the Fates, who spun the threads of life for all men and women. Here’s the first movement:

“Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,
A vacuum waiting for rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us into Erewhon. This room
Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall
An empty elevator clangs its doors,
Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,
Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air
Outside, a trembling, empty brightness falls
In hunger on those whom it would devour
Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls
And rises silently up the steel stairs
To the eleventh and last floor, where I
Reside on sufferance of authorities
Until my visas wither, and I die.”

Formal mastery offsets nothingness, at least for the length of 16 lines. One of my favorite Sissman poems is “American Light: A Hopper Retrospective,” another suite-poem. This is the first movement:

“A man, a plan, a spandrel touched with fire,
A morning-tinted cornice, a lit spire,
A clapboard gable beetled with the brow-
Shadows of lintels, a glazed vacancy
In shut-up shopfronts, an ineffably
Beautiful emptiness of sunlight in
Bare rooms of which he was the sole inhabitant:
The morning and the evening of his life
Rotated, a lone sun, about the plinth
On which he stood in granite, limned by light
That lasted one day long and then went out.”

In Sissman’s poems there is always exuberance, a spilling over of energy and mind. He doesn’t threaten you, but reminds you that life is the real gift. Again, Lamb comes to mind, this time in a letter he wrote on Nov. 13, 1798, to another friend, Robert Lloyd:

“You say that `this World to you seems drain’d of all its sweets!’ At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar! But I am afraid you meant more. O Robert, I don’t know what you call sweet. Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness by turns. Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things….You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall. The Bees are wiser in their generation than the race of sonnet writers and complainers, Bowle’s and Charlotte Smiths, and all that tribe, who can see no joys but what are past, and fill people’s heads with notions of the unsatisfying nature of Earthly comforts. I assure you I find this world a very pretty place.”

Lamb

How pleased I was to open the May 10-11 issue of the Wall Street Journal and find, of all unlikely things, a story by Thomas Mallon on the joys of reading Charles Lamb’s letters. The article is doubly unlikely because it is gratuitous in the best sense; that is, unpegged to the anniversary of a birth or death, or the publication of a new edition. The essay is available online only to subscribers, but try to find a copy of the newspaper (Page P12). Mallon’s enthusiastic love of Lamb is pure pleasure:

“If the letters of Keats, his younger contemporary, are prescriptions for living, tickets into the world, Lamb’s mood-driven miniatures are respites from it, little globes unto themselves, complete and welcoming and, for all that, still hard to bear:

“`The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved – old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school, -- these are my mistresses.’”

We will never know Shakespeare the man. The evidence is too sparse, his genius too formidable and elusive. But even behind the single ramshackle, Sternean sentence quoted by Mallon shimmers a specific human being – playful, clever, strikingly modern, skirting self-pity but eluding it with the winning self-deprecation of that final phrase. I have pulled down the three volumes of The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by E.V. Lucas and published by Yale University Press in 1935, and identified the recipient of that letter as William Wordsworth. It was written on Jan. 30, 1801. The sentences preceding and following the one quoted by Mallon are instructive. Before:

“My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or I have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies.”

And after:

“Have I not enough without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing. Your sun & moon and skys and hills & lakes affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestries and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the Beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh & green and warm are all the inventions of men and assemblies of men in this great city.”

I say this as an admirer of Wordsworth at his best, but haven’t you been tempted, once or twice, perhaps when mired somewhere deep in The Prelude, to shout something like this at the old windbag? Lamb says it with infinitely more humor, charm and grace, and he doesn’t need to shout.

Rereading Again

Despite what you’ve heard, aging has its consolations. Chief among them is rereading books we remember with fondness and curiosity, and return to with a sense of bittersweet anticipation. It’s a densely layered experience involving many levels of time and self. I was tempted to say its pleasures resemble those of an archaeological excavation, but that’s misleading. A dig is alien, not personal, and anything it uncovers remains inert. A reread book is an echoing hall of memories, and the very act of rereading revives them.

I have reread William Hazlitt’s 1821 essay “On Reading Old Books” for the second time in six months, and I ought to say that Hazlitt is a writer whose allure for me is always growing. I didn’t read him attentively when young so that sort of resonance isn’t there, but his language is vigorous and often unexpected, and he possesses a rare amalgam of good sense and whimsy. He makes excellent company and never is boring. Here, Hazlitt expresses what I’m trying to get at:

“In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of the critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.”

Vladimir Nabokov, too, believed in rereading. He demanded it – at least of his students and, by extension, all good readers. Lectures on Literature opens with “Good Readers and Good Writers,” an introductory lecture Nabokov delivered to his students at Cornell University. Like Henry James’ prefaces, it’s a rare discussion of fiction by a practitioner of the craft that gives pleasure:

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

In this act of writing about rereading, in which I have reread a passage devoted to rereading, I’m tempted to quote reread Nabokovian gems at length. Here’s a too-brief sampler, but read the entire lecture:

“In reading, one should notice and fondle details.”

“A book, no matter what it is – a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) – a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.”

“We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you right now that the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one.”

Theodor Haecker

Sentences we read absently, almost in spite of ourselves, can clarify a dim idea that has flickered for decades, especially if your mind, like mine, is foggy and rarely pierced by illumination. That’s why people like William F. Vallicella, proprietor of Maverick Philosopher, are so helpful. Last week, Vallicella quoted a passage from a writer, Theodor Haecker, who was only a name to me. Now I’m reassured that even this late in the game, good writers, good people, remain to be discovered. Here’s how Vallicella translated Haecker’s German:

“A writing style that is at once both personal and good is a natural unity of two natures, the nature of the author and the nature of the language in which he writes. Though natural, this unity is often achieved only by great artfulness since these two natures are not identical and their unity is usually only to be achieved through mutual compromises. A butcher of the language can write in a stimulating personal style while a good schoolboy can achieve a good style without betraying anything personal. The great writer, however, is the one in whose style both natures have become one and indeed in such a way that no one is able to prise them apart again.”

Like much good sense, Haecker’s observation seems self-evident after the fact. It was intriguing enough to send me to the university library, which has 14 titles by Haecker but only two in English – Journal in the Night and Kierkegaard the Cripple. Haecker was a German writer and critic, a convert to Catholicism who translated Kierkegaard into German, and an opponent of the Nazis. He remained in Germany throughout the war.

What little I know about him I draw from the introduction to Journal in the Night, translated by Alexander Dru and published by Pantheon Books in 1950. Haecker wrote his journal at night, at his home in Munich, and smuggled it to safety with the help of a friend. He was arrested by the Gestapo, but released. His house was destroyed during the bombing of Munich early in 1944, and he moved to a village near Augsburg, where he lived alone. His daughter visited him occasionally from Munich. His oldest son was a prisoner in England, and the younger was reported missing on the Russian front. His vision began to fail. He died, alone, on April 9, 1945. Three weeks later, Hitler committed suicide. V-E Day was May 9. Haecker’s was an emblematic 20th-century life. Here are the first two entries in his Journal, from 1939:

“Joy untouched by thankfulness is always suspect.”

“Rejoinder: The most powerful means of forwarding the events of the world seems to be stupidity, the stupidity of the Führer, of the Leader, and the stupidity of the led.”

Haecker scorned Germany, not merely the Nazis. In his introduction to the Journal, speaking of Haecker’s earlier writing (1914-1920), published as Satire und Polemik, Pru writes:

“The vituperative power of these articles is considerable, and I doubt anyone but Karl Kraus, in Vienna, with whom Haecker later became friends, could have surpassed him in violence. There was nothing reserved about Haecker’s style, and though he soon after turned his back on `polemics’ for very different fields, what he wrote always had an edge.”

His conversion to Catholicism in 1920 seems to have ameliorated his “violence,” without taming his intellectual passion. Contrast that early Krausian vituperation with this Journal passage from 1940:

“Indiscriminate work is a very uncertain remedy against ennui. The one sure means of dealing with it is to care for someone else, to do something kind and good.”

I’m reminded of something a friend told me many years ago. When he found himself feeling put-upon, wallowing in a delicious bath of self-pity, he would “do a good turn and not get found out.” His example was picking up soiled paper towels others had left on the floor in a public washroom. Had my friend suggested I, too, pick up trash, I would have ignored him. Instead, he simply told me what he had done.

`The Shadow of the Waxwing Slain'

My boss called Wednesday morning to report a cedar waxwing had slammed into one of the windows in her office. The birds had been feeding on the berries of the yaupons planted around our building. The yaupon bush is native to the southeastern United States, and it has one of my favorite Latin names: Ilex vomitoria. About 75 waxwings were perched in a tree in the quadrangle adjoining our building. They were silent and all faced southwest. They resembled tasteful ornaments on a very stark Christmas tree. In 1990, the once-defunct, now recently revived Rice University Press published an elegantly slender little volume titled Birds of Houston, written by B.C. Robison. The entry on the cedar waxwing is a gem:

“The bird is a flying confection. Its head, neck, and upperparts are butterscotch brown. The short, squared-off tail has a lemon-yellow band across the tip, and bright cherry-red waxy-looking spots dot the tips of the secondary flight feathers, giving the bird its name. The waxwing’s crested head sports its signature broad black eyemask. The plumage always looks silky smooth and unruffled.”

Cedar waxwings commonly crash into windows, sometimes fatally, perhaps because fruit-bearing shrubs often grow near buildings and the birds mistake the reflection for the real thing. The idea intrigued Vladimir Nabokov. In the best-known waxwing appearance in literature, he starts John Shade’s poem “Pale Fire” in his novel of the same name like this:

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of the ashen fluff – and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

The late Larry Levis wrote poems that are flat, formless and too rooted in autobiography, but one of them, “In 1967,” starts with a passage devoted to cedar waxwings:

“Some called it the Summer of Love, & although the clustered,
Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the same
As ever, the same as they did every summer, in 1967,
Anybody with three dollars could have a vision.
And who wouldn’t want to know what it felt like to be
A cedar waxwing landing with a flutter of gray wings
In a spruce tree, & then disappearing into it,
For only three dollars? And now I know; its flight is ecstasy.
No matter how I look at it, I also now know that
The short life of a cedar waxwing is more pure pleasure
Than anyone alive can still be sane, & bear.
And remember, a cedar waxwing doesn’t mean a thing,
Qua cedar or qua waxwing, nor could it have earned
That kind of pleasure by working to become a better
Cedar waxwing. They’re all the same.
Show me a bad cedar waxwing, for example, & I mean
A really morally corrupted cedar waxwing, & you’ll commend
The cage they have reserved for you, resembling heaven.”

Thoreau knew the cedar waxwing as the “cherry bird,” and the species shows up at least six times in his journals. Unlike Levis, whose birds are generic and almost featureless, Thoreau details the appearance and behavior of the birds with precision. It strikes me that Levis could have chosen any common species of songbird for use in his poem. Thus, as he writes, “They’re all the same.” This passage is dated June 14, 1855:

“A cherry-bird’s nest and two eggs in an apple tree fourteen feet from the ground. One egg, round black spots and a few oblong, about equally but thinly dispersed over the whole, and a dim, internal, purplish tinge about the large end. It is difficult to see anything of the bird, for she steals away early, and you may neither see nor hear anything of her while examining the nest, and so think it deserted. Approach very warily and look out for them a dozen or more rods off.”

This is from Aug. 26, 1859:

“I see a cherry-bird peck from the middle of its upright (vertical) web on a bush one of those large (I think yellow-marked) spiders within a rod of me. It dropped to the ground, and then the bird picked it up. It left a hole or rent in the middle of the web. The spider cunningly spreads his net for feebler insects, and then takes up his post in the centre, but perchance a passing bird picks him from his conspicuous station.”

Thoreau worked as a surveyor, and so was accustomed to measuring ground by the rod, one of which equals 16.5 feet – another indication of Thoreau’s devotion to exactitude, a quality he shares with Nabokov and B.C. Robison, author of Birds of Houston:

“Waxwings will occasionally eat insects, but berries and fruit from trees and shrubs are the mainstays of their diet. Among their favorites are mulberry, pyracantha, loquat, and the cedar. The bird, therefore, forages within the city around areas marked by ornamental and native fruit-bearing vegetation, like neighborhoods, parks, and woodland edges.”

`Sense the Solving Emptiness'

My campus adjoins the largest medical district in the world, home to 13 hospitals, two medical schools, 45 other medicine-related facilities, and more than 5 million patients each year. Its proximity is a comfort, I suppose, knowing care is near, but also a goad to Schadenfreude in the sense of relief, not sadistic enjoyment of another’s suffering. One learns not to hear the auditory memento mori of helicopters and ambulances. Not hearing is a way of implicitly saying, “It’s not me this time.” Or, “It’s not me this time.” Such strategies and reflections are the invisible terrain Philip Larkin stamped as his own – the drab, uneasy, unacknowledged moral accommodations each of us makes with self and world. Here is Larkin’s “Ambulances”:

“Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

“Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

“And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

“For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

“At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.”

“Ambulances” gives the lie to the notion that Larkin is a heartless cynic. He’s not sentimental and doesn’t conform to conduits of conventional feeling, and some readers confuse this with coldness. The passing of the ambulance prompts us to “sense the solving emptiness/That lies just under all we do.” “Solving” is masterful. Larkin turns a daily bit of bad news into a communally human act. Patients ride in vehicles “Closed like confessionals.” and “lie/Unreachable inside a room.” We, the passersby, pause to look at the ambulance which “Brings closer what is left to come,/And dulls to distance all we are.”

Goldstein on Bellow

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along this Los Angeles Times review of Saul Bellow's Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

`But I Want Some Reading'

On Monday, between sessions at a conference on “Emerging Libraries” at the university where I work, I eavesdropped on a spirited conversation among four men and women I presumed to be librarians. They were discussing a program encouraging illiterates to learn to read by paying them. I thought it was a joke at first, a sample of grim librarian humor, but the talk was earnest and everyone agreed that cash is an excellent incentive. Call me old-fashioned but I thought literacy, like virtue, was its own reward. Judged strictly on utilitarian grounds, and leaving aside such intangibles as culture and pleasure, learning to read would seem like a prerequisite for getting a job, and thus earning money, even in the “service sector.”

I was reminded of my favorite among Charles Dickens’ novels, Our Mutual Friend, which is obsessively concerned with money. In Chapter Five, “Boffin’s Bower,” Noddy Boffin (a trash hauler – i.e., member of the service sector) and his wife, who have received an unexpected and undeserved inheritance, hire Silas Wegg, whom they invariably call the “literary man with the wooden leg,” to teach Noddy how to read. It all comes down, of course, to money. Noddy says:

“`Now, it's too late for me to begin shovelling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar-books. I'm getting to be a old bird, and I want to take it easy. But I want some reading --some fine bold reading, some splendid book in a gorging Lord-Mayor's-Show of wollumes,’ (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas); `as'll reach right down your pint of view, and take time to go by you. How can I get that reading, Wegg? By,’ tapping him on the breast with the head of his thick stick, `paying a man truly qualified to do it, so much an hour (say twopence) to come and do it.’

“`Hem! Flattered, sir, I am sure,’ said Wegg, beginning to regard himself in quite a new light. `Hew! This is the offer you mentioned, sir?’

“`Yes. Do you like it?’…

“`Half a crown,’ said Wegg, meditating. “`Yes. (It ain't much, sir.) Half a crown.’

“`Per week, you know.’

“`Per week. Yes. As to the amount of strain upon the intellect now. Was you thinking at all of poetry?’ Mr Wegg inquired, musing.

“`Would it come dearer?’ Mr Boffin asked.

“`It would come dearer,’ Mr Wegg returned. “`For when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind.’”

It’s an exchange worthy of William Gaddis, especially in JR – another novel the newly literate and affluent might enjoy.

`Memory Cedes Its Place to Analogy'

Save for its portentous, thesis-like subtitle (let’s blame it on the publisher), Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life, by Geoffrey O’Brien, is an essential book for those who grew up in the era of rock, and for whom, for better or worse, it remains a muted echo in our lives. O’Brien’s credentials, high and low, classic and pop, are impeccable. He’s a poet, a movie and music critic, and editor-in-chief of The Library of America. Much of his prose defies classification (The Brower’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading), but his first published prose volume was Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. He’s a cultural gourmand with taste.

I bought and read O’Brien’s book when it was published three years ago, and ever since have dipped into it randomly the way I read a familiar book of poems. It amounts to a history of popular music from the listener’s perspective – a male listener born mid-century in the United States – and does not pretend to be musicology or “rock criticism.” It is to pop music what The Arcades Projects is to 19th-century Paris, sans Baudelaire and Benjamin’s Marxist gibberish. It is a core sample of an emblematic American life. Besides being an enthusiastic listener, O’Brien was blessed with a grandfather who had a Depression-era dance band, a father who was a Top 40 DJ, and a brother who was a rock drummer. Speaking of the music his parents listened to, O’Brien writes:

“Memory cedes its place to analogy: it is no longer a question of what happened but of what could well have happened. In the same way that pieces of their possible lives are depicted in old photographs and postcards – the town, the street, the cars, the entrance to the mine, the bridge under construction, Armistice Day at the local school – the rhythm and lyrics of their lives are incised on vinyl, waiting to be revived in the imagination of their descendants. It is the parallel world of song. There is a reality of sound that survives in the form of artifacts, that can be reconstructed week by week, session by session.”

By plumbing his own memory, O’Brien taps into a generation’s collective memory of music and more. Into the mid-seventies, I date the years according to books, of course, but also by albums and songs. Nothing evokes the past with such precision and vividness as music:

“Our record collections are libraries not only of lost sensations but of lost ideas, lost theories about the nature of things. A fragile metaphysic – the gossamer speculations of a stretched-out and mostly pleasurable afternoon – was sustained, perhaps provoked, by certain chord changes. Now all we have are the chord changes. We value them inordinately because they are connected to something even more valuable that we can’t quite have but can only approximate through this token, like the uniquely suggestive bit of driftwood carried home from Montauk so as to import the seaside to Second Avenue. The effect is all the more frustrating because most of these ideas and understandings were never spelled out in the first place. They hovered in the air around the record player. There was perhaps a smile of mute assent, mute because it did not seem necessary at the time to speak. Instead we communicated through our selection of tracks, like in the Godard movie where the quarreling lovers carry on a conversation by pointing to the titles of books.”

I remember with disturbing clarity the soundtrack of my first weeks as a college freshman in the fall of 1970. My roommate and I listened to Blonde on Blonde, Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits and Bitch’s Brew, Joe Cocker’s cover of “Cry Me a River,” George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, The Band’s Music from Big Pink and The Band, Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire, Smetana’s Má Vlast, Leoš Janáček’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the inevitable Beatles, Stones, Cream, Hendrix, among other things. By being eclectic, we were being conventional for the time. Several years ago, back in New York, I heard the Cocker song over the PA in a grocery and promptly told my former roommate, who has lived for almost 30 years in Denver. He still has the original 45 we listened to mailed me the garish pink cover.

Music, the most insubstantial of arts, lingers stubbornly in memory to soothe or torment us decades later. In O’Brien’s words, “Music drowns out sound, or drowns out self.” And, “Silence is what was just interrupted.”

And, even more memorably: “As death approaches, even the mention of Bach or Mozart can be a profound palliative, however brief the effect. To evoke even the idea of their music is to bring timelessness and freedom into a room defined by time and necessity.”

`The Making of the English Language'

Broad-mindedness in a reader should not be confused with critical passivity or the absence of standards and taste. Having an open literary mind means preserving an experimental spirit, a willingness to read work that at least initially is alien, difficult, offensive or otherwise unpleasant. Not that one will necessarily wish to reread the work in question, or even finish it the first time. Most of us can quickly smell inept or fraudulent writing. In the case of offensiveness, some writers are beyond excuses, at least in some of their work – I think immediately of Ezra Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. I return to Pound’s Cathay and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort à crédit, despite the raving anti-Semitism in some of their other works. Here’s a classic statement of this notion from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University (II. iii. 3.):

“We may feel great repugnance to Milton or Gibbon as men; we may most seriously protest against the spirit which ever lives, and the tendency which ever operates, in every page of their writings; but there they are, an integral portion of English Literature; we cannot extinguish them; we cannot deny their power; we cannot write a new Milton or a new Gibbon; we cannot expurgate what needs to be exorcised. They are great English authors, each breathing hatred to the Catholic Church in his own way, each a proud and rebellious creature of God, each gifted with incomparable gifts.”

How many readers and critics possess such generosity of spirit? Note the following passage a few paragraphs later, and further note that of the writers cited only Pope, we know with certainty, was Roman Catholic (I’m familiar with the arguments regarding Shakespeare, and remain unconvinced):

“Certain masters of composition, as Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, the writers of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, Hooker and Addison, Swift, Hume, and Goldsmith, have been the making of the English language.”

And this subsequent passage:

“How real a creation, how sui generis, is the style of Shakespeare, or of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, or of Swift, or of Pope, or of Gibbon, or of Johnson! Even were the subject-matter without meaning, though in truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and original a work as Euclid's elements or a symphony of Beethoven.”

What's the Big Idea?

With a straight face, a young engineer recently told me that science, with a boost from high-performance computers, soon will eradicate all human disease, and just the other day I heard a woman on the radio earnestly promise that human strife, from domestic abuse to world war, would promptly cease if everyone practiced transcendental meditation. Both reminded me of Trotsky’s boast that after the revolution, “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”

Let’s briefly ponder Marx’s inclusion in such company, then move on to the main event: Hubris has never been in short supply and gurus are never without followers. Some people need all-inclusive explanations, the wackier and more comprehensive the better. In the latest issue of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple looks at the latest claimant to the Unified Field Theory of human behavior: Neuroscience. The Good Doctor attended a recent conference on neuropsychiatry, and uses the occasion to examine the messianic claims for imminent human self-understanding. In “Do the Impossible: Know Thyself,” he writes:

“Those who say that we are on the verge of a huge increase in self-understanding are claiming that enlightenment will suddenly be reached under the scientific bo tree. The enlightenment will have to be sudden rather than gradual because, if it were gradual, we should already be able to point to an increase in human contentment and self-control brought about by our already increased knowledge. But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally.”

I admire Dalrymple’s ease at taking a mundane event – a scientific conference – and turning it into an anatomy of human nature, and doing it concisely and with wit and broad learning. Two years ago, the BBC ran a contest to name the “greatest philosopher,” and the twits among its listeners chose the aforementioned Karl Marx. Running a distant second was the rightful winner, David Hume, and at the end of his essay, Dalrymple rallies Hume to his cause:

“In my opinion, the great philosopher David Hume understood why human self-understanding was forever beyond our reach. It is not a coincidence that he always expressed himself with irony, for the deepest irony possible is that of the existence of a creature, Man, who forever seeks something that is beyond his understanding.

“Hume was simultaneously a figure of the enlightenment and the anti-enlightenment. He saw that reason and consideration of the evidence are all that a rational man can rely upon, yet they are eternally insufficient for Man as he is situated. In short, there cannot be such a thing as the wholly rational man. Reason, he said, is the slave of the passions; and in addition, no statement of value follows logically from any statement of fact. But we cannot live without evaluations.

“Ergo, self-understanding is not around the corner and never will be. We shall never be able seamlessly to join knowledge and action. To which I add, not in any religious sense: thank God.”

`A Sort of Addiction'

I know a woman, raised a Roman Catholic, who exulted two years ago while Pope John Paul II was dying. She was torn between wanting him to be dead and wanting him to go on living and suffering, thus further fueling her histrionic rage and glee. This is a woman blind to nuance and moral shading. Her world is a simple place, where allies and enemies are easily identified, the latter far outnumber the former, and there are no insurgents in civilian clothes. Without knowing it she is a neo-Manichean, but her professed religion is astrology.

Within minutes of meeting her almost 10 years ago, she asked my “sign” and proffered, unsolicited, a capsule review of my character and fate. (I can’t remember a thing she said.) Like a true sectarian, she reviles many of her co-religionists, especially those who swear by the daily horoscope in the newspaper with its cookie-cutter prognostications and advice. She is not stupid but she is blind to her true selves, revels in the impulse of the moment and uses her intelligence vulgarly. Spinoza would have deemed her a slave.

It’s another philosopher, however, who made me think again about this woman. But for the vehemence and tedium of her rants, William James probably could have mustered more tolerance than I can, and accepted her monstrous inconsistency as merely human, further evidence of the fiercely human will to believe. I’ve been rereading The Selected Letters of William James, the selection edited by Elizabeth Hardwick in 1960, and dabbling in several volumes of the grand 12-volume Correspondence of William James, published by the University of Virginia Press. I’ll quote a passage from Hardwick’s introduction, though I don’t care for the smug tone of the first sentence:

“Religion: sometimes an embarrassment to James’s reasonable admirers. His nuts and cranks, his mediums and table-tappers, his faith healers and receivers of communications from the dead – all are greeted by James with the purest, melting latitudinarianism, a nearly disreputable amiability, a broadness of tolerance and fascination like that of a priest at a jam session….Religion, on the other hand, was a sort of addiction for James, and all of his personality is caught up in it, his unique ambivalence, his longing, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, `for a chasm from which might appear a phenomenon without phenomenal antecedents.’”

I consider myself a “reasonable admirer” of James but his interest in religion causes me no embarrassment, though his credulity regarding spiritualism and the other bunkum outlined by Hardwick does. For James, the essence of such beliefs was immortality – for him, the great calmative. When his beloved sister Alice was dying, he wrote her:

“When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life till then eclipsed and kept down. I can hardly imagine your transition without a great oscillation of both `worlds’ as they regain their new equilibrium after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you yourself will be more surprised than anybody else.”

Only a sociopath would challenge these words. They are loving and brave, and probably comforted William more than Alice. In 1884, the American Chapter of the Society for Psychical Research was organized, and James remained a member until his death in 1910 (and perhaps beyond). This is where I part company with William James, where sympathetic imagination fails me. I recognize the deep attraction such beliefs hold for many, but they leave me cold. What I do appreciate in the “psychical” James is the delight he took in debunking frauds. He wrote that he “spent the most hideously inept psychical night, in Charleston, over a much-praised female medium who fraudulently played on the guitar. A plague take all white-livered, anaemic, flaccid, weak-voiced Yankee frauds. Give me a full-blooded red-lipped villain like dear old D. – when shall I look upon her like?”

I’m not familiar with James’s assessment of astrology, but he believed in testing every belief by life, against life. By that standard, in the case of the woman I described above, a belief in the influence of the planets and stars on human beings is an appalling failure.




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A Few Words Over Dinner

I saw My Dinner with Andre with a friend when it came out in 1981. She was a museum curator, reliably smart and laconic, and she hated the film and threatened to leave the theater before it was over. She found it pretentious and dull, and I enjoyed it. Two guys sitting in a restaurant and talking for 110 minutes sounds daunting, but the writing is rich, relaxed and cleverly satirical, and Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory (who share screenwriting credits) are fine actors willing to make fun of themselves. That’s where my friend and I disagreed. The character played by Gregory, perhaps a stylized version of himself, is a full-of-himself gasbag. He reminds me of countless former acidheads, smug and histrionic, who have seated themselves among the Illuminati. The self-doubting Shawn character is the Sancho Panza of the film, earthbound ballast for the gassy, transcendental Gregory. A writer or filmmaker runs a risk when he creates an insufferable character – the story or film may turn insufferable.

I watched the film again Tuesday night on DVD, and I came to several conclusions: Gregory -- who in real life is the director who gave Shawn his first professional break as a playwright -- remains insufferable. He’s the sort of narcissistic charmer who seduces naïve young people, male and female, and not necessarily for sex. His type is common in Manhattan, where the film is set, but he has cousins in Omaha and Pensacola. He’s a cult leader looking for a cult, an actor whose role is permanent. The film makes this clear – as does the Shawn character from the start. Shawn is reluctant to meet Gregory again after many years but agrees out of guilt-ridden loyalty. In voiceover he says:

“It was obvious that something terrible had happened to Andre, and the whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous. I mean, I really wasn’t up for this sort of thing. I had problems of my own. I couldn’t help Andre – was I supposed to be a doctor, or what?”

The notion of a playwright asking if he is supposed to be a doctor reminds us of Chekhov, who was both. In 1994, Shawn and Gregory worked together in Vanya on 42nd Street, also directed by Louis Malle, about an acting company staging Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the same voiceover at the start of the film, Shawn says he will deal with his anxiety by assuming the role of private investigator and asking Gregory a lot of questions – a comfortable role I know well as a journalist, and one that Chekhov often employed. Asking empathetic questions exonerates one from feeling empathy. It’s a risk-free stance, and with a world-class talker like Gregory, guaranteed to succeed. In other words, Shawn is not being honest with himself or Gregory – which is not the same as lying. The film is subtle look at the mixed, self-deceiving emotions and motives, the white lies and rule-bending, we engage in daily.

I’m reminded again of Chekhov, a rather cool customer. In 1890, he traveled 6,500 miles by train, horse-drawn carriage and river steamer to the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, and spent three months interviewing convicts and settlers. The resulting book, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, has been read as a crusading documentary on the appalling conditions in which Russian prisoners lived. True, but here’s what Chekhov wrote in a letter to his friend Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov shortly before embarking:

“I am not going in order to observe or get impressions, but simply so that I can live for half a year as I have never lived up to this time. So don’t expect anything of me, old fellow; if I have the time and ability to achieve anything, then glory be to God; if not, don’t find fault with me.”

The first two-thirds of My Dinner with Andre consists of one far-fetched Gregory story after another. Shawn asks an occasional question, or grunts, or emits one of his squeal-like laughs. There’s a clear imbalance of power, with Gregory on top. But Shawn reaches a point where he’s heard enough -- one too many tales of all-night revels, giant vegetables and fauns in the forest. He finally, haltingly, speaks up and challenges Gregory’s juggernaut of bullshit. I quote from the published screenplay:

“You know, the truth is, I think I do know what really disturbs me about this work that you’ve described – and I don’t even know if I can express it, Andre – but somehow, if I’ve understood what you’ve been saying, it somehow seems that the whole point of the work that you did in those workshops, when you get right down to it and ask what it really was all about – the whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then be able to experience somehow just pure being….And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think it’s our nature to do things. I think purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure. And to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots; but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree. I mean, it would just be a log.”

In other words, dead. One feels like cheering, as we do when Dr. Johnson refutes the idealism of Bishop Berkeley by kicking a stone. It’s the triumph of humanity and good sense over preeningly cerebral and arid ideology. Shawn goes on to defend his use of an electric blanket against Gregory’s smug asceticism, and the exchange is hilarious.

In his notebooks, Chekhov writes, “The more refined the more unhappy.”