`Books Think for Me'

Anne Fadiman is an enthusiast, and that serves her well when she writes about writers. The best essays in her new collection, At Large and at Small, are devoted to Coleridge and Charles Lamb. Unfortunately, most of her familiar essays, as she calls them, are given over to such subjects as ice cream and coffee, which bring out in Fadiman the fussy, the cute (even her Lamb essay is titled “The Unfuzzy Lamb”)and the self-regarding. Her essays take on sovereignty only when she devotes them to people other than Anne Fadiman.

Lamb (1775-1834) is her perfect subject. Despite a life that would break the strongest among us, he too had a gift for enthusiasm. In 1795, Lamb spent six weeks in a mental hospital. In September of the following year, his sister Mary fatally stabbed their mother with a table knife, and attacked their father. Charles obtained Mary’s release from lifelong imprisonment on the condition he took legal responsibility for her, and they lived together until his death, even collaborating on Tales from Shakespeare, which became a bestseller. His masterpiece is Essays of Elia (1823), which gives the lie to what Fadiman calls “his undeserved reputation for being namby-pamby and fuddy-duddy.” He ranks with Samuel Johnson and his friend William Hazlitt among the supreme essayists in the language. Here’s Fadiman:

“Let me consent at the outset that I have a monumental crush on Charles Lamb. My fantasies are not exactly adulterous, but neither are they devoid of sensuality. Though never married and probably celibate, Lamb knew how to seize eros by the throat, give it a few sublimational shakes, and transform it into some of the most voluptuous prose ever written.”

I’m skeptical of the psychosexual business but “voluptuous,” with its suggestion of almost too much of a good thing (like zaftig used to describe a woman), is perfect. Here’s a passage from “All Fool’s Day” that demonstrates Lamb’s gift for empathy. Fadiman could learn from this, for Lamb is simultaneously observer and observed:

“I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.”

Another of Lamb’s gifts is his felicitous use of unexpected, almost-wrong words and phrases – “honest obliquity of understanding,” “palpable hallucination,” “a dram of folly in his mixture.” His essays seem almost out of control – again, that word “almost.” Lamb is always skirting excess, and the resulting tension energizes his prose. That, too, is a lesson for Fadiman. Her prose is serviceable but seldom pleasure-giving in itself. At root, it’s prosaically journalistic, and her quotes from Lamb put her words to shame. Even when addressing ostensibly more serious subjects, Lamb is never less than witty. This comes from “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis”:

“Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not.”

I love those last two lines for the way they embody Lamb’s compassionate wit and his gift for projecting himself into the lives of others. He had no talent for hatred or contempt. Lamb – or his persona, Elia – engages us in conversation and confides in us. He seems fond of us, and we grow fond of him. In “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” Lamb expresses the thoughts of many a book lover while also opening a well-lit little window into his teeming mind:

“I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

“I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

“In this catalogue of books which are no books -- biblia a-biblia -- I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which `no gentleman's library should be without’: the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.”

Let’s thank Anne Fadiman for being “so catholic, so unexcluding” as to introduce new readers, and re-introduce old ones, to the pleasures of Lamb’s company. Who else would banish Hume and Gibbon to the same non-book realm as Scientific Treatises and Almanacks?

`The Greatest Otherness of All'

In a review of new books by two young poets published at Contemporary Poetry Review, Adam Kirsch, after taking well-deserved swipes at the unreadable Anne Carson and Jorie Graham, makes the following claim:

“Putting new wine in old bottles is better than shattering the bottles, but it brings us no closer to an authentic experience of the past. Few periods have been less interested than our own in escaping the provincialism of the present; despite all our reflexive praise of the Other and otherness, we are shy of history, which is the greatest otherness of all.”

Kirsch refers specifically to the imaginative use of the past by poets and other writers, though I think his point is more inclusive. Those mired exclusively in the present, which is a very small place and in no sense a culmination, are indeed provincial. For them the past is nonexistent or so forbiddingly foreign as to be terra incognita, yet the past has never been so present. Though our technology offers effortless access to virtually anything we wish to read, look at or listen to, the gifts of the past go squandered. This, too, is nothing new: The present has traditionally regarded the past with arrogance, as youth does the aged.

In 1963, Flannery O’Connor wrote an essay, “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade,” prompted by parental protests against the novels students were assigned to read in O’Connor’s native Georgia. The writers in question were earnest mediocrities -- John Steinbeck, John Hersey – though O’Connor doesn’t address their lack of literary merit directly:

“In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.”

Of course, things have gotten worse than even O’Connor could have imagined, and English majors graduate from universities without having read Shakespeare or Milton. Books are quaint artifacts, literary daguerreotypes. O’Connor continues:

“No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James, and Crane [we can quibble with the names; I certainly quibble with Cooper’s inclusion], and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.”

No perspective, indeed. To know the past is not to be enslaved but liberated by knowing the best and worst we have accomplished. A present without a past feels at once claustrophobic and vertiginous, like falling forever in an empty room. Here’s the conclusion of O’Connor’s essay:

“The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

“And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”

`Mighty Scarce'

I recently wrote about books that make me laugh and forgot to put the works of J.F. Powers on the list. He’s a writer fated to remain invisible because readers and critics have fatally pigeonholed him as a “Catholic writer,” he returns repeatedly to the subject of priests while never descending into salaciousness, his stories are comic without being nihilistic, and, I suspect, because his prose is painstakingly exact and never flamboyant. His masters were Joyce and Waugh, and his approach might fairly be described as comic realism. His stories occasionally remind me of V.S. Pritchett’s, but are funnier. When an interviewer in 1959 asked Flannery O’Connor, “Is humor as scarce as seriousness in Catholic writing?” she answered, “Mighty scarce it is; but there is J.F. Powers with both.” In her essay “Catholic Novelists,” collected in Manners and Morals, O’Connor said this of his work:

“The Catholics that Mr. Powers writes about are seen by him with a terrible accuracy. They are vulgar, ignorant, greedy, and fearfully drab, and all these qualities have an unmistakable Catholic social flavor. Mr. Powers doesn’t write about such Catholics because he wants to embarrass the church; he writes about them because, by the grace of God, he can’t write about any other kind. A writer writes about what he is able to make believable.”

The good ones do, that is. O’Connor’s final point will, no doubt, rile the avant-garde contingent but the element of believability is essential to writing, especially in fiction. It’s a quality shared by writers as various as Zola, Chandler and Borges, and Powers had the gift of instilling conviction in readers. His landscape is recognizably mid-century Midwestern, and his humor is rooted in characters and the way they speak. His priests are not prodigies of spirituality. They’re like us, in fact, only more so. As I can attest, you need not be Catholic to love his work.

After Powers’ death in 1999, New York Review Books returned all of his work to print: The Stories of J.F. Powers, Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green. Powers was not prolific, in part because he was the sort of writer who agonized over the best use of a comma. The writer Jon Hassler quoted Powers as saying, “I know a page is satisfactory when it doesn't make me throw up any more,” and the effort shows in his prose, with its Waugh-like precision and stringency. His two novels have been faulted for being stitched-together short stories, though the same accusation has been thrown, unconvincingly, at Faulkner. Both wrote some of the best stories in the language, including, in Powers’ case, “The Presence of Grace,” “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” and a late story without a priest, “Look How the Fish Live.” And some of the funniest. Here’s a brief sample, selected at random from “Zeal”:

“`I suppose you know Macaulay’s England, Bishop.’”

“`No.’ There was something to be gained by a frank admission of ignorance when it was assumed anyway.”

`Worth Noticing'

I have a weakness for artfully stuffed grab bags of learning. Consider Montaigne’s Essays, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Tristram Shandy, Biographia Literaria, Moby-Dick and Ulysses. Joyce’s novel is composed with the precision of a geometry text but the others are sumptuous miscellanies. What they have in common is an easy-going capaciousness. All are bottomless enough to accommodate anything their authors wish to place inside them. They also encourage readers, especially rereaders, to dip in at any point and enjoy a few pages or the entire volume.

Evan S. Connell is a prolific and mysteriously under-read writer, now almost 83 years old. He made a splash in 1984 when North Point Press published Son of the Morning Star, his book about Custer and the Little Big Horn. Even that book skirts the category I’m describing, but I’m thinking principally of White Lantern (1980) and A Long Desire (1988), with their unclassifiable essays devoted to explorers, visionaries and other obsessives, and his two volumes of “poetry,” Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (1962) and Points for a Compass Rose (1973). Though the latter two are published in discrete “stanzas” of prose with ragged-right margins, Connell has always insisted they are not poetry. Despite his demurral, Compass Rose was nominated for the 1974 National Book Award in the poetry category. Written during the final years of the Vietnam War, parts of it remain his most politically strident work. Here’s a passage from late in the book that illustrates Connell’s principle of juxtaposition:

“Tell me frankly: do you think the Universe
is unfolding as it should?
Or perhaps in your opinion
everything works out for the best.

“The Commandant of the United States Forces in Vietnam
despatched a congratulatory message to the company
responsible for My Lai. How much he knew about it
he alone knows. The official brigade accounts mentions
14 enemy troops killed, 3 rifles captured. Nothing else.
Consequently, address him as General William Blameless
if you like. I choose not to.

“General Order No. 10620, issued October 28, 1970,
by the United States Army cites 21 soldiers
for meritorious service in connection with military
operations against a hostile force from January
to November. Among those receiving the Bronze Star
was a dog: Griffin M. Canine, 096-31-3225, SSG HB,
3rd Bn, 13th Fld Arty, 25th Infantry Division.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst Vergebens.
Are we expected to know everything?”

One source translates the line from Schiller as “Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.” The method here, probably deriving distantly from Pound, is typical of Connell, not the sentiment or the didacticism. Here’s a more typical passage:

“Here’s a demonstrable fact. The capacity
of the Circus Maximus was 385,000.
More instructive is this: Roman amphitheaters
during the Middle Ages were often used as barns,
and crops were planted in the ancient arenas,
and farmers were astounded by the prodigious growth
--unaware that the earth had been steeped in blood.
Now tell me, what changes? Anything?

“At a time when Rome was collapsing
Beneath the assaults of barbaric tribes
Christians objected to service in the Legions.
Would you say that sounds familiar?

“Well, these have been a few grains
From my warehouse. Devour them, disseminate them,
Do as you please. Wenige wissen, wieviel
man wissen muss, um zu wissen,
wie wenig man weiss.

“5:30 p.m. Legends grow mixed
and distorted. All I know with certainty
is that the hour of apprehension opens with the advent
of darkness. Videmus nunc per specul[um] . . .”

The Latin is the truncated beginning of I Corinthians, 13:12: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” Or “For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I have been known.” In a fine example of literary resonance, of kindred spirits unknowingly echoing each other, another lover of learning, Jorge Luis Borges, devoted a brief essay to the same line from St. Paul. In “The Mirrors of Enigma,” writing of Léon Bloy, Borges concludes:

“It is doubtful that the world has a meaning; it is even more doubtful that it has a double or triple meaning, the unbeliever will observe. I understand that the hieroglyphic world postulated by Léon Bloy is the one which best befits the dignity of the theologian's intellectual God.
“No man knows who he is, affirmed Léon Bloy. No one could illustrate that intimate ignorance better than he. He believed himself a rigorous Catholic and he was a continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs.”

In fact, that’s not an inappropriate category in which to place Evan Connell. His heresy is to be learned, to write well, to remain independent and not to fit complacently into anyone’s category. In “Various Tourists,” the first essay in A Long Desire, Connell might be writing of himself:

“It is the singular person, inexplicably drawn from familiar comforts toward a nebulous goal, lured often enough to death – it is he, or she, whose peregrinations can never be thoroughly understood, who is worth noticing.”

`Let's Say It's Damned Tiresome'

In no other part of my life am I as belligerently self-centered as in my choice of which book to read next. I’m guided exclusively by pleasure-seeking whim. I’ve operated this way for so long I even resent reading a lousy book for review, despite the incentive of a paycheck. Five years ago I returned to college and fulfilled the science requirement by taking Human Genetics. The massive textbook, complete with CD-ROM, cost $95, and after one failed attempt never read it again. The prose recalled Theodore Dreiser translated into Swedish and back into English. I took thorough notes during lectures, met often with the professor and lab instructor, and got my only “B.” Obviously, students should disregard my example, though I draw moral support from an unlikely pair of writers.

Late in life, Walt Whitman, one of mankind’s prodigious talkers, yakked away in his little house on Mickle Street in Camden, N.J., to his friend Horace Traubel, who took notes. Whitman was a windbag by nature, in poetry, prose and conversation, but often an entertaining windbag. Here’s what he said on July 19, 1888:

“Let’s be honest with each other, even if the book is a bigwig. If we think a book’s damned tiresome let’s say it’s damned tiresome and not say `how do you do? – come again.’”

Reviewers, take note.

In 1910, Joseph Conrad devoted a brief essay to circulating libraries, later collected in Notes on Life and Letters. The gloomy Pole’s sense of humor favored the heavy-handed but on occasion he makes me smile, as he does here on the subject of “common, hired books”:

“A few of them (not necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written by a humorist) I only met once. But there is infinite variety in the noise books do make. I have now on my shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before I have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw. I am inconsolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all about, for the buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced to give up ere the end of the page is reached.”

It’s amusing to speculate on the author of Conrad’s “buzz-saw” book, but I checked and confirmed that Rick Moody wasn’t born until 1961.

Huck in the Ozarks

So much contemporary fiction is artsy without being artful, heavy with plot but light on attention to character. A narrative indifferent to people is, at best, a parlor game, an airless room or a screed. For evidence see the review I linked to on Sunday. I don’t have a theory to explain this, though the ascension of “creative writing” probably contributes to the scarcity of good fiction – too many people with a will to write and a minor gift for mimicry but nothing to say.

I’m pleased to have stumbled upon an exception, Daniel Woodrell, who in his seventh novel, The Death of Sweet Mister, published in 2001, has much to say about his corner of the Ozarks. Woodrell narrowly skirts the trap of white-trash cliché, the trailer-park/meth lab/incest culture of movies and bad jokes, but two qualities redeem his vision – language and an ability to create engagingly unlikely characters. In this novel, the qualities are twinned in the narrator, Shug Akins, a fat 13-year-old who lives with his mother and jailbird stepfather and tries to make sense of the savagery and crime accepted as a way of life in his debased culture. Red, the stepfather, is on parole and uses Shug, Fagin-fashion, to burglarize houses and businesses for dope and anything he can fence. Here’s Shug describing a typical night with Red and his halfwit friend Basil:

“Red had beat his guitar since midnight. Red and Basil had got happy on some kind of dope in the kitchen. They did get happy and the guitar did get beat and parts of songs flew from it. They each smoked cigarettes and burned enough cigarettes to send smoke signals from the kitchen. Their happy had run wild all night and they had not begun yet to fizzle towards bed. By the sun it had turned breakfast time but on their clocks run by dope they seemed to be at another hour, another hour around early night when fun stuff had just got started. The kind of happy they had got was the kind that would get loose and would slop about into the way of everybody else.”

Shug’s voice owes something to Faulkner and, ultimately, to his fellow-Missourian, Mark Twain. It’s a carefully modulated voice, combining innocence, savvy and humor. I like Shug and want him to prevail, though that seems unlikely. I read half the novel in one setting Saturday night, and can already see Woodrell working out the implications of his title, for Shug’s mother calls him “sweet mister.” It’s a matter of waiting to see what species of hell awaits Shug, who apparently survives to tell his story. For an added dash of Southern Gothic, Shug and his family live in a hovel in the middle of a cemetery. Shug’s job is to mow the grass:

“The cemetery offered more than one look, more than one feel. The tombstones came in a variety of ways. The oldest needed to be read with fingers, the words and numbers had been blown off by the years and the stuff years throw at a thing, so the names were only a letter here and a letter there, though the rock still stood. In the newer parts the tombstones tended to shine and stand clean and easy to read as a stop sign. There were lots of names hammered into those tombstones of all ages that had the same names as many of the streets of town that I would walk on when I went around. Same names as streets and stores and car lots and grade schools. I shaved the fuzz from the entire dead, one and all, if I ever had heard of them, or never had, I gave the same shave to each.”

How long since you read intimations of mortality, a hymn to the democracy of death, in prose so rich and unlikely?

`Divisadero'

My review of Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero appears today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Birthday

Much of Saturday was consumed with a birthday party for my almost-7-year-old, whose official nativity date is July 1 but for obscure reasons we held the celebration eight days early. Birthday parties for children are no longer held at home, which is deemed too prosaic. I’ve carted my kids to gymnastics studios, a pottery-painting shop and a Chuck E. Cheese. I remember only two parties held in private homes, and one of them included a visit from a very tired female clown who smelled of cigarettes. The other featured one of those inflatable rooms in which kids jump around until someone gets sick.

We had the party on Saturday at a rock-climbing gym. This is a building with steep ceilings and plastic walls meant to simulate El Capitan. The kids put on harnesses resembling bondage-and-domination gear, get hooked up to pulley-and-rope contraptions and dream they’re ascending the Matterhorn. Climbers split evenly between dim-witted macho overachievers and the rest, like me, who get nosebleeds four feet off the floor. The most amusing part is not the screaming, frightened children but the adults, usually fathers, who come on like Teddy Roosevelt.

Our group was representative of Houston and, I suppose, the rest of the country. We had two Iranian-American kids, one Mexican-American, and the rest were mongrel-Americans (“white”). The mother of the Iranian girls is shy, soft-spoken, limited in English and quite charming. With her daughters, who except for being notably polite are like any American kids, she speaks a seamless amalgam of English and Farsi. I’ve known her for several years and have never even seen her husband, though they live a block away from us. She was baffled by the American eagerness to have little girls climb plastic walls, but she remained good-humored and encouraging. She and the rest of this unlikely scene, which I could never have imagined as a kid in the nineteen-fifties, reminded me of a passage in Marianne Moore’s poem “England” devoted to the United States:

“. . . America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the
street in the north; where there are no proof-
readers, no silk-worms, no digressions;
the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, language-
less country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not
in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

We find a darker, less approving version of Moore’s America in Henry James, one of her favorite writers. James left the U.S. in 1883, when he was 40, and did not return until 1904, when he was almost 61. One of the products of that homecoming, and one of the great books about America, is The American Scene. The 1907 American edition of the book omits a passage from its conclusion that did appear in the English edition, “whether through editorial carelessness or design we do not know,” according to James’ biographer, Leon Edel. Here’s part of the once-omitted passage:

“You touch the great lonely land – as one feels it still to be – only to plant upon it some ugliness . . . . You convert the large and noble sanities that I see around me, you convert them one after the other to crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed; and you so leave them to add to the number of the myriad aspects you simply spoil, of the myriad unanswerable questions you scatter about as some monstrous unnatural mother might leave a family of unfathered infants on doorsteps or in waiting rooms.”

`His Own Particular Fond Absurdity'

A reader has been quietly urging me to read The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, edited by Jay Tolson, and though I have no intention of reading it cover to cover I have enjoyed browsing around in it, especially among Foote’s letters. My enthusiasm for Percy, especially for The Moviegoer, was strongest around the time he published Love in the Ruins, in 1971. I lost interest by the late nineteen-seventies, after Lancelot. The novels seemed thin and not humanly compelling, whereas Foote’s three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative feels ripe for a second reading. My preference extends to the letters: Foote’s voice is stronger, earthier, funnier, more profane and opinionated. This comes from a letter he wrote on Feb. 3, 1980:

“Semiotics is an utter mystery to me and is likely to remain so. I can scarcely even comprehend the definition in the dictionary, let alone what’s behind it. I’m much more interested in the way people behave psychologically than I am in what underlies that behavior. Also I don’t much like looking into things that I’m not sure have an answer – like whether God has withdrawn behind the stars. Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne and Browning and John Crowe Ransom are my kind of writers; plus Proust – always Proust, who just may be the top knocker of them all aside from Shakespeare. Yeats for example is a really good writer but it’s despite his special interests, which have to be ignored before you can really get down to the beauty of what he’s saying. Some of them can only be admired when they are what they would call `misunderstood.’ To understand Yeats is to go along with a lot of hogwash and moonshine. `Byzantium’ for instance is a very great poem if youll [sic] only refrain from understanding what he’s saying, and the same thing is even more true of the earlier `Sailing to Byzantium.’ A goddam mechanical bird, of all things!”

That’s the voice of a man who long ago gave up youthful pretensions, assuming he ever had any. He knows what he likes and doesn’t care if you approve. Of course, he and Percy had been friends for 50 years by the time of the letter. Both would turn 64 that year, and they remained friends until Percy’s death in 1990, the year Foote became a celebrity for his role in Ken Burns’ Civil War television documentary. In a letter written March 3, 1984, Foote congratulates Percy for finally beginning to read Proust:

“Despite the almost twenty-year gap when I was engaged almost exclusively with my War, 1954-74, I have read Things Past eight times from start to finish – six times before the War, twice afterward. In fact, whenever I feel I have earned it (completing a novel, say, or moving into a new house) I immediately reward myself by taking off six weeks and reading Proust again from start to finish, always with a heightened admiration and widened wonder at his talent and his skill in demonstrating it . . . .his primary skill, which is his unalterable concern with moving that story forward; he had it to a degree that matches Dickens’ and Dostoevsky’s, which everybody recognizes (though not nearly enough where Dostoevsky is concerned) but without seeing it in Proust.”

Foote proceeds to offer Percy a 10-point outline of “Budding Grove,” as he calls it, and assures his friend that Proust’s method is not random, “depending on his charm to hold the reader.” Like a cheerleader he writes:

“For these and other reasons it does what all great books do, and does it superbly: that is, enlarges life. Do for God’s sake stay with it to the finish. Dont [sic] be put off by any foolish notion that it seems `loose’ or undisciplined. It’s altogether the tightest, best-constructed and most disciplined novel I ever read. Youll [sic] think so too, if you stay with it, and most of all if youll [sic] reread it as soon as that first reading has had time to sink in.”

I’m struck by the congruence of my tastes and Foote’s. Our most heartfelt admirations are nearly identical – Shakespeare, Proust, Chekhov. This is from a Dec. 27, 1988, letter:

“Chekhov. My God, my God, what a writer! How he does it is a mystery you cant [sic] solve by analyzing it – he just does it; does it out of being Chekhov. You can say of other great writers, even Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, that if they hadnt [sic] come along, someone else would have filled their places. Not him; he landed running and never looked back, a highly individual man with his own particular fond absurdity that enabled him to see it in others when he wrote about them . . .”

`Call Down the Corridors of Time'

Recently I watched the best Shakespeare screen adaptation I know, Chimes at Midnight, directed by Orson Welles, who also plays Sir John Falstaff. Welles stitches together scenes from both parts of Henry IV with others from Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V, and excerpts from Shakespeare’s source for the history plays, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Welles’ Falstaff is seldom the cartoonish buffoon we expect. He’s somber, more tired and sad than lusty and rambunctious. The role is subtly comic but rarely laugh-out-loud funny.

With this viewing, my third or fourth since I first saw Chimes at Midnight on public television in the early nineteen-seventies, what most impressed me was Welles’ 10-minute recreation of the Battle of Shrewsbury. It was fought July 21, 1403, in what is now Shropshire, with Henry IV and his men facing a rebel army led by Henry “Hotspur” Percy, from Northumberland. Most of us know the battle best as the climax of Henry IV, Part 1, and in my case, Welles’ film.

His scenes of fighting are chaotic and noisy – the crash of armor and swords, men and horses screaming – and with few Hollywood heroics. Welles transposed the summer battle to winter, so the armies clash on ice and snow and the air is clouded with condensed breath. It reminded me of comparable sequences in Eisenstein, Kurosawa and Polanski’s MacBeth, and of Olivier’s staging of the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V, but seemed harsher because of the rapid editing and the clamor on the soundtrack. I also heard non-Shakespearean literary echoes. Take this passage from Briggflatts, published by Basil Bunting in 1966, the year after Chimes at Midnight premiered. It describes the death of Eric Bloodaxe at Stainmore in 954:

“Loaded with mail of linked lies,
what weapon can the kind lift to fight
when chance-met enemies employ sly
sword and shoulder-piercing pike,
pressed into the mire,
trampled and hewn till a knife
-- in whose hand? – severs tight
neck cords? Axe rusts. Spine
picked bare by raven, agile
maggots devour the slack side
and inert brain, never wise…”

Bunting’s lines are music – so many one-syllable words enjambed, so much alliteration, each line ending with the long “I” sound. He renders the chaos of medieval battle with densely patterned lines. The other poet Chimes at Midnight brought to mind was Christopher Logue, in his ongoing translations from Homer’s Iliad. Logue’s battles are graphically savage. This is from War Music:

“Impacted battle. Dust above a herd.
Trachea, source of tears, sliced clean.
Deckle-edged wounds: `Poor Jataphect, to know,’ knocked clean
Out of his armour like a half-set jelly
`Your eyes to be still open yet not see,’ or see
By an abandoned chariot a dog
With something like your forearm in its mouth;
A face split off,
Sent skimming lidlike through the crunch
Still smiling, but its pupils dots on dice:
Bodies so intermixed
The tremor of their impact keeps the dead
Upright with the mass.”

In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum, who adores Chimes at Midnight, tells of his interview with Keith Baxter, the actor who played Prince Hal to Welles’ Falstaff and John Gielgud’s Henry IV:

“Baxter told some wonderful tales about Welles’s Falstafian filmmaking. But when I asked him about specific acting directions Welles had given, Baxter told me, `Orson didn’t give suggestions, but the one thing he did say, the night before we started shooting, was, `We want to call down the corridors of time with this.’”

And he did.

`Leave Me Your Books'

My estate, such as it is, will probably remain a modest affair. Assets outweigh liabilities, but so long as my idea of financial planning is putting the bills in my wallet in order by denomination, no one will mistake me for a shrewd investor. The possessions I value most, my books, would hardly pay the cost of shipping if my survivors put them on the auction block at eBay. They could never mean as much to another, even if he or she were a seasoned, dedicated reader, as they do to me. They constitute my ad hoc autobiography, a history of my consciousness, transparent to me and forever opaque to others.

I found a stray volume of poems, It’s Her Voice That Haunts Me Now, drawn from the first 10 years of Literary Review, a journal published in London and formerly edited by the late Auberon Waugh. All the poems are traditional in form and often in sentiment, and I’m afraid many are not very good. Two of them, however, address the theme of books as legacy, as the summing-up gift of a lifetime – one from the giver’s perspective, the other from a hopeful recipient. The first, the better of the two, is “To My Daughter, My Books,” by Maureen Jeffs:

“When I have vanished like a dream
And sleep beneath some Fenland sod,
Don’t bring me wreaths of evergreen
Or weep and wail and blaspheme God.
I leave you treasure that was mine,
The culture of each bygone age,
Laid down in books like vintage wine,
Pouring out from every page.
Books were my life’s delight and led
To riches far beyond my dreams:
Not earthly wealth, but fountainheads
Of philosophic thought, bright seams
Of wisdom, voices of the past
Which lit my way, sometimes amused
Or caused a tear to fall. A vast
Miscellany. Take them and use
Them well, each one has been a friend,
And may the truths you find console.
In these, and in the books I’ve penned,
You’ll find the substance of my soul.”

Yes, “life’s delight.” It’s yet another symptom of the vanity of my human wishes, but I want my kids to read my Montaigne, my Shakespeare, my Thoreau. How silly, and embarrassing to admit. But is it vain to provide children with a proven source of consolation, a sparse commodity in so many lives? I like Jeffs’ notion of bequeathing books as friends. The other poem, by Angela Greenhill, is “December Legacy”:

“Leave me your books: like you the year is dying,
The jasmine flowers but I am desolate –
Black dawns, black days and sorrow at the gate,
Eyes all puffed up and red from too much crying.

“Leave me your books, my loneliness forestalling;
So brave they stand, like soldiers on their mark
To chase the paper tigers of the dark
And see off Death himself if he comes calling.

Leave me your books: you’ll live between their covers
Now and for ever: what is time, indeed?
You will be always with me as I read.
Leave me your books, last legacy of lovers,

“So I may find, as grief plays out his part,
The winter jasmine flowering in my heart.”

`The Mirthless Laugh'

A colleague played a Youtube video of a Jay Leno routine he found riotously funny and that I thought was ponderous and never came close to stimulating even the sympathetic-laugh reflex that usually smoothes over such awkward moments – I mean the social laugh, which can be executed only in the company of others, at a party or in a movie theater, and only when nothing funny is going on. Try simulating social laughter when you’re alone. It’s a hollow sound, mildly embarrassing, and probably predictive of a mental disorder.

If I hope to get along with someone, the nature of his or her sense of humor is essential information, more important than mere opinions. Normally this colleague and I are comedically compatible. So, what makes me laugh, and I mean a full-body laugh, not a smug little titter (itself a funny word)? Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Tristram Shandy, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Blazing Saddles, Flann O’Brien, Portnoy’s Complaint, Stanley Elkin, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor, Waugh’s Scoop, Thomas Berger, John Candy and Eugene Levy as the Schmenge Brothers, P.G. Wodehouse and so on – but none of these things on every occasion. What do they have in common? I have no idea.

In Le Rire, a predictably unfunny examination of what is funny, Henri Bergson claimed laughter “poses a challenge to philosophical speculation.” What provokes laughter is elusive, yet we recognize it immediately and involuntarily. It has something to do with surprise and release, delight in unexpected juxtapositions, a mingling of high and low, a capacity to appreciate the anarchic and offensive – but not always. Humor thumbs its nose at authority, but compulsive nose-thumbing quickly becomes unfunny. In Watt, his first genuinely funny book, Samuel Beckett anatomizes laughter like this:

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

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “dianoetic” as “Of or pertaining to thought; employing thought and reasoning; intellectual.” It has nothing to do with L. Ron Hubbard. Of Beckett’s three laughs, the dianoetic is the quietest, the least corporeal, the least like a laugh. But it’s the mirthless laugh that has saved my life and my sanity.

Tuesday afternoon, walking through the stacks in the library, I heard over my footfalls and the buzz of fluorescent lighting a low, feral sound. As I got closer, I realized it was someone snoring. Sprawled in a chair, head back and mouth wide open, deep in American Literature, a young man, probably a student, emitted long, moist choking sounds, like the spit-sucker used by dentists – “down the snout,” indeed. It reminded me of the sound W.C. Fields makes when he’s asleep on the porch in It’s a Gift and a brat drops grapes down his throat. I laughed. The kid, obviously, was unaware of the racket he was making, and seemingly indifferent to it, and that made the scene even funnier. His chin and the corners of his mouth were froth-flecked. He was surrounded by books and his laptop, vulnerable and free of embarrassment. A young woman walked past, unsmiling and clearly disgusted, and that made it funnier still. Here’s the punch line: The books on the table in front of him, all those I could see, were by and about Toni Morrison.

`Mortified Language'

Spoken clichés are annoying but sometimes forgivable. We can be charitable and assume the speaker is tired or confused, at least the first time. All of us slip, and a conscious life devoted to the vigilant avoidance of clichés would be indistinguishable from madness. So, let’s ignore the mindlessness of “Cool!” as all-purpose punctuation and the presumptuousness of “No problem!” in response to “Thank you.” It won’t be easy, but let’s be strong, and after all it’s the written cliché by people who ought to know better that’s truly bothersome.

Go here to read about the Infuriating Phrases Competition sponsored by the Telegraph. The newspaper asked readers to compose paragraphs dense with verbal rubbish. The winning entries, though submitted largely by English readers, sound remarkably familiar to American ears – an unforeseen consequence of television and the Internet, I suppose. Only a few phrases were new to me, and none sounded particularly “English.” I suspect the Telegraph contest, admirable though it is, will have little impact on anyone’s habits of speech, even in the land of Shakespeare. Ranting about clichés has, as they say, a fabled past. In his chapter in Cultural Amnesia devoted to Karl Kraus, a world-class aficionado of clichés, Clive James writes:

“His satirical attack was based on the analysis of clichés: in politics, in the arts and above all in journalism. He did for German what Swift [see his Polite Conversation] had once done for English, and Flann O’Brien would do again. Nothing got past him. He was a one-man watch committee, the hanging judge of the sottisier. Anyone who let slip a loose phrase lived to rue it if Kraus caught him. As the self-appointed scourge of self-revealing speech, he was a linguistic philosopher before the fact, a blogger before the Web.”

We wish more bloggers wrote like Kraus, who gave us the following aphorisms, taken from Harry Zohn’s translations in Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half-Truths:

“Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.”

“The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.”

“The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.”

Flann O’Brien, writing in mufti as Myles na gCopaleen, was keeper of the Catechism of Cliché. O’Brien was less cerebral than Kraus, but funnier and comparably savage. This comes from The Best of Myles:

“A cliché is a phrase that has become fossilized, its component words deprived of their intrinsic light and meaning by incessant usage. Thus it appears that clichés reflect somewhat the frequency of the incidence of the same situations in life. If this be so, a sociological commentary could be compiled from these items of mortified language.

“Is not the gun-history of modern Ireland to be verified by the inflexible terminology attaching to it? A man may be shot dead but if he survives a shot, he is not shot but sustains gun-shot wounds. The man who fires the shot is always his assailant, never his attacker or merely the gun-man. The injured party is never taken to hospital but is removed there (in a critical condition). The gun-man does not escape, even if he is not caught; he makes good his escape.

“Oddly enough – unnecessary phrase – a plurality of lawbreakers behave differently; they are never assailants but armed men. When they are not caught, they do not make good their escape; they decamp. If there be defenders on the scene, shots are exchanged. And the whole affair is, of course, a shooting affray. You see, there is no other kind of affray. If it is not a shooting affray, it is not an affray at all. But it might be a fracas.”

How striking that most of the Irish clichés cited by Myles remain current in the United States after 60 years. This substantiates the unstated moral of Cultural Amnesia: The impoverishment of language, intentional and otherwise, is insidiously omnipresent. It’s easier to express oneself with recycled persiflage than it is to carefully match word to thought. James devotes chapters to such professional language-corruptors as Hitler, Goebbels and Trotsky, and such defender-purifiers as Kraus, Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein and Evelyn Waugh. In the Lichtenberg chapter he writes:

“If language deteriorates in journalism, the damage will be felt sooner or later in writing that pretends to more distinction.”

James, a journalist, is not being a snob. His motive is pragmatic and ultimately moral. Too much “style,” often understood as the opposite of dull, lazy, cliché-ridden prose, is not the answer. Later in the same chapter, James writes:

“To make an idea come alive in a sentence, some of its words must be left for dead: the penalty for trying to bring them all alive is preciousness at best. If such preciousness is not firmly ruled out by the writer, there will be readers all to keen to supply it.”

Flann, Meet Jorge

Among the first reviewers of Flann O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, was Jorge Luis Borges, who published “Cuando la ficción vive en la ficción” (translated as “When Fiction Lives in Fiction” by Esther Allen, in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger) in El Hogar [Home], on June 2, 1939. The odds against an intersection of such kindred sensibilities are staggering. In 1936, Borges had taken a job as editor of the “Foreign Books and Authors” page in a Buenos Aires weekly magazine aimed, according to Weinberger, at “the Argentine middle- and upper-class housewife.” Weinberger continues:

“Although Borges was at his lightest and perhaps wittiest in El Hogar, he by no means limited the range of his subject matter, nor curtailed his habit of citing texts in various languages without a translation. It is remarkable that Borges’ page lasted for three years.”

This is roughly equivalent to Cosmopolitan devoting a page to the latest work by William H. Gass. The unlikelihood of the O’Brien/Borges convergence starts in London, where At Swim-Two-Birds had been published, selling 244 copies before Longman’s warehouse was destroyed in the blitz. Despite near-oblivion, the novel numbered among its early and enthusiastic readers James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene and S.J. Perelman.

Borges’ review amounts to a brief history of self-reflexive art, starting with the painting on a biscuit tin he remembered from childhood. The tin’s Japanese scene included a rendering of an identical tin, “and so on (at least by implication) infinitely.” He cites Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Velázquez, Cervantes, The Thousand and One Nights, Shakespeare, Corneille, Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem and, finally, O’Brien’s novel, of which he writes:

“I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds. A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student. At Swim-Two-Birds is not only a labyrinth: it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths; also a literary Proteus) is undeniable but not disproportionate in this manifold book.

“Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.”

Borges’ perceptiveness and prescience (he was a year or two away from writing “The Garden of Forking Paths”) are remarkable. That his sympathetic reading appears in a Buenos Aires women’s magazine is a trope worthy of At Swim-Two-Birds. How, on the eve of World War II, did this meeting of two 20th-century giants come about? And did O’Brien, far away in deepest Dublin, ever learn of Borges and his work? As The Good Fairy says in At Swim-Two-Birds, “There is no answer at all to a very good question.”

`Beware of Culture, Reader'

My father maintained that Father’s Day, like its maternal counterpart, was a conspiracy organized by a cabal of greeting card and chocolate magnates, and like rubes on the midway we predictably fell each June for their sentimental pitch (guilt masquerading as filial piety). Of course, my father also thought the move to adopt the metric system in the United States was a Bolshevik subterfuge. As a son, and as the father of three sons, a la Fred MacMurray, my understanding of Father’s Day is a little more complicated: I detest the familial schmaltz but like the payola.

This year my oldest son, soon to turn 20, obliged admirably, shipping me a Howlin’ Wolf twofer, The Real Folk Blues and More Real Folk Blues on a single disc. Of all voices, Wolf’s is the one I most covet, and his rendering of Chicago blues is the only music I wish played at my funeral. His sound is honest, lusty, celebratory, sometimes scary, a force of nature, the sound of a man happy with his work and happy to be sharing it with us. Take the Willy Dixon gem “Built for Comfort,” recorded on the Chess label Aug. 14, 1963, with J.T. Brown on tenor, Donald Hankins on baritone, the enviably named Lafayette Leake on piano, the incomparable Hubert Sumlin on guitar, Buddy Guy on bass, and Sam Lay on drums. And consider Dixon’s lyrics, written with the outsized Wolf in mind:

“Some folks are built like this,
Some folks are built like that,
But the way I’m built, don’t call me fat.
‘Cause I’m built for comfort, I ain’t for speed,
But I got everything that a good girl need.”

Take that, Ezra Pound. The words, like the performance by Wolf and the other musicians, give us another reason to go on living. There’s no pretension, no straining after profundity, no “statement.” A bluesman of sorts from Ireland lends credence to my love of Wolf and kindred artistic spirits. That would be Myles na gCopaleen, author of the “Cruiskeen Lawn” column in the Irish Times for 25 years. In 2003, the Dalkey Archive Press (a name borrowed from the final novel by Flann O’Brien, one of Myles’ alternate identities), published At War, a selection of columns written between 1940 and 1945. This comes from one published March 21, 1944:

“One should remember that the great artistic feats accomplished in medieval times were carried out by people who conceived themselves to be decent workmen, people who simply did not know how to do a bad job. On Sundays they put on their best clothes and went to Church. Nowadays your `artist’ is a neurotic imbecile; he has the cheek to discern in his own dementia the pattern of a universal chaos and it is no coincidence that most of his books are dirty and have to be banned. Beware of `culture,’ reader; of `art’ and `artists’ be careful and apprehensive. Such things were very fine when they came out first, they were part of the commonplace shape of life and nobody could possibly take exception to them. But when isolated in our own day to become merely a self-conscious social cult, and excuse for all sorts of bad behaviour, a pretext for preciosity and worse – know then that words like `culture’ and `art’ do not mean what they meant.”

Wolf, certainly, was a decent workman unprepared to do a lousy job, though I’m uncertain as to his church attendance. I’m also uncertain whether Wolf could define or even spell “culture,” but I’d put him up against Philip Glass, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Cecil Taylor any day. Wolf was an artist blessedly unburdened with the knowledge that he was an artist. Here’s more of Myles writing about Howlin’ Wolf, about whom I’m certain he never heard:

“It cannot be too strongly stressed that a true aesthetic perception is part of the essential equipment of mankind and when one nowadays meets an oddly-shirted gossoon who blathers self-consciously about `art,’ one sees at once that he is a deficient type, one who has receded from the primitive norm. The instinct for propriety and beauty is highly developed even in animals. Hens, for example, are skilled in the plastic arts and can produce works of art that are not only impeccable in design and delicately coloured, but edible. The bee produces – albeit by a process that seems unnecessarily complex – an exquisite yellow and nourishing mess, faultlessly packed and ready for market. I do not find, however, that either the hen or the bee, by reason of mere mastery of a particular art-form, claims to be entitled to clarify the contemporary situation. The truth is, of course, that no such clarification is possible, nor is the word `contemporary’ of any significance. The essentials of life do not – indeed cannot – vary from one century to another, for life itself means reproduction and repetition; to hold otherwise is to confuse life itself with the temporary vessels which contain it very temporarily.”

`Thankful for a Limpet'

In his first book, Paradox in Chesterton, published in 1947, with an introduction by fellow-Canadian Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner wrote:

“It is in this way that Chesterton sees paradox rooted in being, and the created world rooted in God; so that he could never see a lamp-post without the instinct to praise. `I believe,’ he wrote, `about the universal cosmos, or for that matter about every weed and pebble in the cosmos, that men will never rightly realize that it is beautiful, until they realize that it is strange….Poetry is the separation of the soul from some object whereby we can regard it with wonder.’ With the sense of strangeness came the sense of gratitude; not only because, amid so many potentialities, the object at hand might not have been, but also because in its limited being it participated in all Being: in God. He was thankful for a lamp-post because it was not a limpet, but he would have been equally thankful for a limpet.”

Even to my dull, secular understanding, this makes beautiful sense -- the natural transition we make from recognizing the strangeness (the uniqueness, the unrepeatability) of all creation to the gratitude we feel for its existence. I experienced this Friday afternoon, walking back to my office from the library, with Kenner’s book and others in my tote bag. The bag is from the gift shop at Jefferson’s Monticello. I walked in the fluttering shade beneath a canopy of live oaks. Ball moss hung from their limbs. I clucked and two squirrels approached, expecting to be fed. The air was windy and warm, which reminded me of the Chet Atkins song of the same name, as performed by Doc and Merle Watson. The sidewalk was macadam – river stones embedded in pavement, the same pebbles Chesterton cited for their beauty. That in turn reminded me of a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, “Pebble,” here translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott:

“The pebble
is a perfect creature

“equal to itself
mindful of its limits

“filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

“with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

“its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

“I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

“-- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye”

Herbert admires and honors the most humble and ignorable of natural objects. Unlike humans, Herbert’s pebbles are dignified, self-contained, equivalent to their essence. Chesterton cites pebbles and weeds in the passage quoted above by Kenner, who goes on to point out these lines from the final chapter of Chesterton’s Autobiography:

“…I asked through what incarnations or pre-natal purgatories I must have passed to gain the reward of looking at a dandelion…What I said about the dandelion is exactly what I would say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed….”

In a world big and various enough to contain Kenner, Chesterton and Herbert, dandelions, pebbles and squirrels, live oaks, the Monticello and Doc Watson, who can be ungrateful? Who can be bored? There’s something almost sinful, it would seem, about boredom.

`No Nonsense About Them'

The late Hugh Kenner’s Gnomon, published in 1958, includes “Remember That I Have Remembered,” a reassessment of Ford Madox Ford’s great World War I tetralogy, Parade’s End, published in separate volumes between 1924 and 1928, and reissued in one volume in 1950. Kenner’s concern is fixing Ford prominently in the modernist firmament. Half a century later the job remains unfinished. Educated readers know The Good Soldier, and thanks to William H. Gass a few have read The Fifth Queen. Fewer still have enjoyed his James and Conrad reminiscences, and perhaps The March of Literature. But Ford was compulsively prolific and published more than 80 volumes, and I don’t absolve myself from neglecting the bulk of his production. Since reading The Good Soldier in 1971, I have by my count read 12 Ford titles, counting the contents of Parade’s End as one book. Here’s Kenner’s assessment of Ford:

“Such writing, page by page, phrase by phrase, mass by mass, employing every wile with utterly self-effacing virtuosity, can scarcely be equaled in English.”

I read this passage Wednesday afternoon, riding the campus shuttle to pick up my 6-year-old at day camp, chilled by the miracle of air-conditioning, with the temperature outside topping 93 degrees, and my reactions were several: how great a critic and writer Kenner was, with an underrated gift for appreciation; how much pleasure Ford has given me in the last 36 years; how little read he is; how much I wish to read and re-read his work. Then, blessed serendipity: How pleasant Thursday morning to read Bryan Appleyard’s encomium, “For Fordy”:

“T.S. Eliot said Ford Madox Ford's `Antwerp’ was the best poem written about the First World [War]. It's certainly the best I've read. Ford's The Soul of London - which I have just finished - is also the best book I've read about London.”

Appleyard links to “Antwerp,” but I would point out this passage from the fourth section of the poem:

“With no especial legends of marchings or triumphs or duty,
Assuredly that is the way of it,
The way of beauty . . .
And that is the highest word you can find to say of it.
For you cannot praise it with words
Compounded of lyres and swords,
But the thought of the gloom and the rain
And the ugly coated figure, standing beside a drain,
Shall eat itself into your brain.”

In 1971, Basil Bunting, who had worked as an assistant to Ford in 1923 at the transatlantic review, edited Ford’s Selected Poems. Bunting, always tartly candid in his opinions, made no outsized claims for Ford’s poems, but in the Preface he wrote:

“He tried to write as he would speak, informally, and added to conversational diction the rhythms of conversation. That was rare in 1910, almost unknown.

“It is difficult to compose so without letting the poem sag. Ford sweated up his halliards like a sailor. He took a fresh purchase and another swig again and again till the sail’s last wrinkle was smoothed out.”

Frank Wilson, linking to Appleyard’s post, seconds Bunting’s conclusion and writes of “Antwerp”: “It is a great poem - language authentically encountering reality, the sort of utterance that makes all discussions of style and technique sound foolish.”

Thanks to Appleyard I am re-reading the poems and have ordered The Soul of London. “Antwerp,” no simple-minded “antiwar” poem, reminded me that Ford had served during the Great War as a lieutenant in the 38th Infantry Brigade. He was 40 years old when the war started. In 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, he was shell-shocked and was shipped home the following year. Ford’s best work, in addition to the implicit pleasure it provides, is proof that a civilized man and his works endure. Here’s Kenner’s testimony:

“The artist who can actually get down on paper something not himself – some scheme of values of which he partakes – so that the record will not waver with time or assume grotesque perspectives as viewpoints alter and framing interests vanish, has achieved the only possible basis for artistic truth and the only possible basis for literary endurance. Homer so registered values and was the educator of Greece. It is the hardest and rarest of jobs. This or that novel which we in haste mistake for a mirror of the age – The Forsyte Saga, for instance – usually turns out to be a reflection in moving water. Language alters, connotations slither, the writer leans on what his audience understands, and that understanding does not endure.”

This reminds me of a passage in Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. Together, Ford and Conrad had collaborated on The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of a Crime (1909). In his notoriously unreliable though often moving memoir Ford wrote:

“We had the intimate conviction that two and only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst. The very worst, securing immediate attention by way of some trick, gradually fade from the public memories; the very best, being solid and ship-shape productions of solid and ship-shape men with no nonsense about them, remain. We attempted then to turn out solid and ship-shape books.”

That’s it: “No nonsense about them.”

`The Invisible Collection'

Thanks to Sam at Golden Rule Jones for suggesting I read “The Invisible Collection,” a story by Stefan Zweig first published in 1925. I found a translation by Eden and Cedar Paul in Fantastic Night & Other Stories, published in 2004 by Pushkin Press. It’s a pleasingly old-fashioned story, heavy with plot and pathos. Zweig even uses the hoary device of a frame story, one I associate with Victorian ghost stories and Conrad’s Marlow tales, and find somehow comforting. The first paragraph, italicized and set apart by an extra space, is in the voice of a nameless narrator who meets an elderly art dealer from Berlin on a train:

“Enough introduction. I will let him tell the story in his own words, without using quotation-marks – to avoid the complication of wheels within wheels.”

The subsequent 12 pages are narrated by the dealer, Herr Rackner, who, like many in post-World War I Germany, is scrambling to survive hyperinflation. Zweig lends a specific historical context to his story, noting that “war profiteers have developed a taste for old masters (Madonnas and so on).” The dealer’s stock is depleted, and he sifts through old receipts hoping to identify financially strapped former customers willing to part with their collections. He settles on an elderly man in Saxony who had previously done business with his father and grandfather:

“All indications showed that he must have been one of those antiquated eccentrics, a few of whom survive in German provincial towns. His writing was copperplate, and every item in his orders was underlined in red ink. Each price was given in words as well as figures, so that there could be no mistake. These peculiarities, and his use of torn-out fly-leaves as writing paper, enclosed in a scratch assortment of envelopes, hinted at the miserliness of a confirmed backwoodsman.”

Rackner travels to Saxony and finds Franz Kronfeld, now in his eighties, living with his wife and daughter. All of his life, this veteran of the 1870-71 war with France has denied himself and his family all but the necessities in his compulsion to collect drawings and etchings. He has amassed hundreds, including Rembrandts and Dürers, but Kronfeld went blind during World War I. With the coming of Weimar inflation his wife and daughter began secretly selling off the collection to keep the household afloat, and replaced the artworks with blank sheets of paper.

Kronfeld wants to show off his collection to Rackner, who is alerted to the subterfuge by the daughter. She begs Rackner not to reveal the ruse, fearing the shock would kill her father, and so begins a narrative tour de force. For hours, Kronfeld, who knows his collection intimately even in blindness, displays the contents of 27 portfolios to Rackner, who goes along the charade:

“[Kronfeld] turned the sheet over and pointed at the back so convincingly that involuntarily I leaned forward to read the nonexistent inscription.

“`The stamp of the Nagler collection, followed by those of Remy and Esdaille. My famous predecessors never thought that their treasure would come to roost in this little room.’

“I shuddered as the unsuspecting enthusiast extolled the blank sheet of paper; my flesh crept when he placed a fingernail on the exact spot where the alleged imprints had been made by long-dead collectors. It was as ghostly as if the disembodied spirits of the men he named had risen from the tomb.”

The scene is half O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” and half King Lear, the Dover Cliff scene with Glouchester’s imagined fall, though it’s the poignancy of the latter that predominates. The old man is ecstatic, Rackner appalled. Kronfeld tells him he will add a codicil to his will stipulating that Rackner’s firm will handle the auctioning off of the collection after his death. As Rackner leaves the house, the old man leans out the window and wishes him a pleasant journey back to Berlin. Rackner muses:

“The illusion I had helped to sustain made life good for him. Was it not Goethe who said:

“`Collectors are happy creatures!’”

Zweig resolves the story on a note of ironic irresolution, leaving the last word to the greatest of all German writers. This is quintessential Zweig, delusory contentment, a rueful mingling of comedy and melancholy. In his appreciation of Zweig, “A Neglected Genius” (collected in Our Culture, What’s Left of It), Theodore Dalrymple writes:

“Two main themes pervade Zweig’s writings. The first is the part that passion plays in human life. If reason, as Hume says, is and should be the slave of the passions, how can we control and reconcile our passions so that we may live decently together in society? And if, as Zweig’s works suggest, the need for control and the need for expression are in constant tension, there is no abstract or perfect solution to man’s existential plight. Any attempt to resolve the contradictions of our existence by dogmatic reference to a simple doctrine (and, compared with life, all doctrines are simple) will thus end in monomania and barbarism.”

Zweig denies us the sop of a conventional happy ending. No one has learned anything. An old man is the object of what amounts to an elaborate practical joke. The daughter calls it “a well-intentioned fraud.” She and her mother await his death, when his pension will end. The once-priceless art collection has already been sold for a fraction of its worth. Who is to blame?

“Wife and daughter accompanied me to the door. They did not venture to speak, but tears were flowing down their cheeks. I myself was in little better condition. An art-dealer, I had come in search of bargains. Instead, as events turned out, I had been a sort of angel of good-luck, lying like a trooper in order to assist in a fraud which kept an old man happy. Ashamed of lying, I was glad that I had lied. At any rate I had aroused an ecstasy which seems foreign to this period of sorrow and gloom.”

`What Vast Yeasty Eructation of Egotism'

Fitzsimmons, a loyal reader, noted my Myles na gCopaleen citation with approval and told me her father, a man “who could look at the sea for hours,” shared my enthusiasm for the journalist whose column, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” appeared in the Irish Times for a quarter-century. A note on his name: It might be translated “Myles of the Ponies” or “Myles of the Little Horses.” And a further note, on the name of the column: “The Full Little Jug of Ale” or “The Overflowing Little Jug.” And a further note yet: He was born Brian Ó Núalláin, or Brian O’Nolan, and readers of At Swim-Two-Birds know him as Flann O’Brien. With Beckett, he was the funniest and blackest of comic writers, and a man who, as the profusion of names suggests, lived by concealment and indirection.

The argument goes that Myles na gCopaleen’s accomplishments as a journalist signaled Flann O’Brien’s doom as a novelist. This may be so, but drink had much to do with both of their declines. Several “Cruiskeen Lawn” selections have been published and all are worth discovering. Take this, from Flann O’Brien At War: Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945:

“I am, as you know, an Irish person and I yield to gnomon in my admiration and respect for the old land.”

And, from The Best of Myles, one of his Catechisms of Cliché:

“—In what can no man tell the future has for us?
-- Store.
-- With what do certain belligerents make their military dispositions?
-- Typical Teutonic thoroughness.
-- In what manner do wishful thinkers imagine that the war will be over this year?
-- Fondly.
-- Take the word, `relegate.’ To what must a person be relegated?
-- That obscurity from which he should never have been permitted to emerge.
-- What may one do with a guess, provided one is permitted?
-- Hazard.
-- And what is comment?
-- Superfluous.”

That Myles/Flann/Brian anatomized empty language in the pages of one of its reliable founts – the daily newspaper – is subversion of the most delicious sort. In his Catechisms of Cliché, he makes the vapid appear at first strange and agrammatical, as though clumsily translated from another language, which sets us up to wince and laugh at each correct response. I dare you to read one and not become self-conscious of your linguistic laziness. Common speech begins to sound like an attack of hiccoughs – involuntary and without meaning. In a fine appreciation, the late Gilbert Sorrentino wrote:

“Flann O'Brien is one of the half-dozen or so greatest comic writers in the English language of this or any other century, the equal of such geniuses of comedy as Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Waugh, and Firbank. His mastery of comedic prose, its nuances, tropes, and subversions, is of such high degree that the merest gesture of his stylistic hand can turn a sentence or phrase from its course as sober conveyor of information to sabotager and ridiculer of that same information. Done the right way (and O'Brien invariably does it the right way), such writing can virtually collapse referential material and transform it into brilliant constellations of devastating hilarity. Little can stand before comedy of such purity, comedy so intensely focused and authorative that it rises above ideology, factionalism, religion, and the bloated niceties of propaganda and `right thinking.’ Inventors, or if you please, marshals of such anarchic laughter are dangerous people indeed, informed, as they are, by love, hatred, and, above all, perhaps, a salutary shame for the human species and its ridiculous pettinesses and pretensions.”

No doubt O’Brien was tormented by his facility at journalism. Wouldn’t we rather have another At Swim-Two-Birds or The Third Policeman than more volumes of recycled columns? It was not to be, but we can comfort ourselves with the peculiarly interactive nature even of O’Brien’s minor work. His humor has self-reflexive bite and it implicates us while we laugh. Consider this, fellow bloggers, from The Best of Myles:

“Assuming that to `write’ is mechanically to multiply communication (sometimes a very strong assumption, particularly when one writes a book about peasants in Ireland) what vast yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people he has never met and who may resent being pestered with his `thoughts?’”

`Outside the Sphere of One's Own Personality'

Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), the Viennese feuilletonist much admired by Musil, Kraus, Schnitzler and Thomas Mann, collected postcards instead of paintings, just as he wrote brief, unclassifiable prose works instead of novels. Not essays, stories or sketches, they seem to have no precise literary counterpart in English-language traditions. Peter Wortsman translated a selection, Telegrams of the Soul, published two years ago by Archipelago Books. One piece, a single long paragraph, is titled “Peter Altenberg as Collector.” Like much of his work its tone and speaker are fluid and shifting. The narrator tells us he has:

“. . . for many years been an absolutely fanatic collector and have, just like the millionaires, managed through abundant sacrifices to amass a cherished, painstakingly selected, exquisite gallery of pictures: 1,500 postcards, 20 Hellers apiece, in two lovely Japanese cabinets, each with six compartments.”

The speaker realizes that “the truly cultivated individual had to divest himself of his treasures so as to be able to experience while still alive that most profound, that peerless pleasure of `giving,’ of `bestowing’ a thing of value upon a beneficiary.” So he ships the collection to “a young woman in Hamburg, the only one among all women able to appreciate such a present.” Altenberg, a womanizer of no fixed abode, a reliably undependable patron of Vienna’s coffee houses, is having a little joke. As he writes at the end of the piece:

“`Collecting’ means being able to concentrate on something situated outside the sphere of one’s own personality, yet something not quite so perilous and thankless as a beloved woman --.”

As a newspaper features writer I developed a sub-beat devoted to collectors. When someone organizes his life around a quest, devoting much time and money to acquisition, sometimes sacrificing family, friends, and conventional notions of happiness and fulfillment, the result is irresistible to a writer who fancies himself a student of human folly. I interviewed a man who collected money issued by leper colonies, and a woman who collected sand. She had hundreds of samples, in precisely labeled pharmaceutical bottles, arranged by continent and mineral content. Both collected things that were, at least symbolically, worthless. Who visits leper colonies, and what would you buy there? What do you do with sand, except protect it from the wind?

I’ve interviewed collectors of refrigerator magnets, Bakelite radios, cocktail napkins, ’49 and ’50 Mercurys, jigsaw puzzles, Gone With the Wind memorabilia, matchbooks and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. What these objects share is homeliness, a scorned humility of purpose. They’re not Fabergé eggs but all are benignly evocative of the past, of simple pleasures, of, as Altenberg puts it, “something situated outside the sphere of one’s own personality.” My maternal grandmother collected kitschy salt and pepper shakers (when I see one today, I think of her), and I know a guy who collects books, tens of thousands of them, and rents climate-controlled space for their storage, and seldom reads anything. Both organized a chaotic and otherwise insignificant corner of existence. In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin writes:

“Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.”

`My Life Been a Doggone Curse'

My oldest son periodically sends me anthologies of songs he likes and that he assumes I will also enjoy. His selection is always eclectic and includes a cut or two I’ve never heard. Last week’s disc was heavy on blues – “This Old Fool,” by Buddy Guy; “Tell Me,” Howlin’ Wolf; “The Woman I’m Loving, She’s Taken my Appetite,” Lightnin’ Hopkins; “Mother Earth,” Memphis Slim; “The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Muddy Waters; “Stack O’ Lee Blues,” Mississippi John Hurt.

He also included Hüsker Dü, Mothers of Invention, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Jordan, Otis Redding, Fats Domino, Neil Young, the Everly Brothers, etc. But Joshua knows my love for the blues, and I in turn envy his ease of availability when I remember trying to collect blues records in the 1960s. Middle-class white kids like me discovered these sounds out of Mississippi, by way of Chicago and London, and only slowly and incompletely did record companies supply the demand for Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Bukka White and the musicians I cited earlier. One bluesman whom I didn’t hear of until much later, and then only thanks to Bob Dylan, was Blind Willie McTell, whose name Dylan gave to one of his greatest songs in 1983. Ten years later, Dylan covered McTell’s “Broke Down Engine” on World Gone Wrong. On the CD Joshua sent me he burned McTell’s “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,” which includes these lyrics (courtesy of Harptab.com) about a gambler named Jesse dying after the police shoot him:

“He had a gang of crapshooters and gamblers at his bedside
Here are the words he had to say
Guess I ought to know
Exactly how I wants to go (How you wanna go, Jesse?)
Eight crapshooters to be my pallbearers
Let 'em be veiled down in black
I want nine men going to the graveyard, Bubba
And eight men comin' back
I want a gang of gamblers gathered 'round my coffin-side
Crooked card printed on my hearse
Don't say the crapshooters'll never grieve over me
My life been a doggone curse”

The song amounts to a 12-bar short story, like a chapter lifted from Faulkner’s Sanctuary, and McTell’s voice, unusually precise and well enunciated for a blues singer of his time and place, serves it well. McTell captures the bravado of a little man (later in the lyric he’s called “Little Jesse”) on his deathbed. In the essay “Dylan as Historian,” collected in The Dustbin of History, Greil Marcus writes of Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell”:

“It’s long been obvious that Bob Dylan can no longer be listened to as any sort of avatar; `Blind Willie McTell’ makes it clear that his greatest talent is for bringing home the past, giving it flesh – and proving, as the ethnologist H.L. Goodall, Jr., puts it, that `in addition to the lives we lead we also live lives we don’t lead.’ Art is made partly to reveal those lives – to take their lead. And this is what happens in `Blind Willie McTell.’”

McTell reveals Little Jesse’s life as Dylan reveals McTell’s. In 2004, New York Review Books reissued Constance Rourke’s American Humor, first published in 1931, with a new introduction by Marcus. In her chapter on minstrelsy, written when McTell was 30 years old, she writes:

“Defeat could be heard in the occasional minor key and in the smothered satire. Hitherto the note of triumph had been unmistakable and unremitting among American comic characters. The sudden extreme of nonsense was new, and the tragic undertone was new.”

McTell died of a stroke in 1959, in Milledgeville, Ga., where Flannery O’Connor lived and where Oliver Hardy had operated the town’s first movie theater, in 1910.

`Negative Creation'

When I woke Saturday my copy of The Dyer’s Hand, a collection of reviews, essays and lectures by W.H. Auden, rested on my nightstand with a business card marking pages 148-149, near the start of an essay on detective stories titled “The Guilty Vicarage.” I’d reread only three pages of the piece Friday night before going to bed, stopping at a sub-section titled “Why Murder?” which includes this memorable sentence:

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.”

When I fetched the newspapers from the driveway Saturday morning, I was pleased to resume my interrupted meditation on murder when I found in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal a Five Best titled “Behind the Plots,” assembled by Theodore Dalrymple. Of the five books he recommends I have read only On Murder, a collection from Oxford University Press of Thomas De Quincey’s writings on the subject. Dalrymple writes:

“Everyone loves a good murder, so long as it happens at a distance. The English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was most likely the first person to express the thought in print.”

The good doctor modestly omits his own So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer, a brief and nasty novel published in 1996. It’s a satire of contemporary English morals masking as the supercilious confessions of a psychopath. Dalrymple seduces us into sympathizing, on occasion, with the logic of Hannibal Lecter’s English cousin.

In 1985, I interviewed in his jail cell a murderer convicted of kidnapping a stripper in Indianapolis, killing her in a cornfield, and raping and sodomizing the remains. He, too, was convinced he had rendered a public service and deserved our gratitude. Auden writes in “The Guilty Vicarage”:

“Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer.”

`A Thousand Tons of Jam'

Straight talk and plain dealing are always in short supply, particularly in the arts, and even more particularly among poets, so it’s refreshing when one of them drops all the happy talk about the joys of language and describes with unvarnished realism the horrors of life as a poet. I’m speaking, of course, of Franz Wright, whose Walking to Martha’s Vineyard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 2004. In an interview last fall at Poetry Daily, Wright refused to spare the delicate sensibilities of readers:

“My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even. It made me feel that hey, I have a right to exist . . . My in-laws like me better than they did before. I've got more money. It doesn't change anything about the writing process. It's as great a mystery and as a great a source of anguish and uncertainty and despair as it ever was.”

Such honesty, though admirable, is painful to behold. Is poetry, a few splendid lines, worth the cost in human suffering? I draw a line and say, “No, never again!” I’ve found an unexpected ally in Myles na gCopaleen, an Irish journalist who’ll have no more of this madness. He writes, in a selection of his work titled The Best Of Myles:

“Having considered the matter in – of course – all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life. But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable. Futhermore, poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies.”

Rest easy, Mr. Wright. Put away your pen. Your in-laws and the rest of us will be grateful.

`Whim His Master'

When I’m reading a book professionally – that is, to review it – and especially when it’s a book I’m not enjoying but feel morally obligated to finish, I’m always dreaming of the next book I want to read exclusively for pleasure. That happened this week and I knew precisely the writer-as-reward I was awaiting. For me, the category-defying fiction of Robert Walser represents undiluted enjoyment. Start reading one of his stories and give up all expectations about your ultimate destination. His prose shares with Emerson’s, of all people, a loose-limbed, good-natured spirit of improvisation. It’s not like the surrealists and their grim experiments with automatic writing. Walser is nearly always playful and without agenda. His stories often begin with the narrator taking a walk, and their rhythm has the serendipitous spirit of a ramble without itinerary.

At random I opened Masquerade and Other Stories, translated by Susan Brodsky, with a foreword by William H. Gass, to a one-and-a-half-page sketch, “Food (I),” written in 1911. Here’s how it opens:

“Veal fricandeau is frightful stuff. Beef à la mode is horrid. Cheese eaten with tea is splendid. Some people like to eat fried potatoes with cheese. Macaroni? My favorite dish. But it has to be reeking with cheese, has to be absolutely dripping with cheese. Actually I’m fascinated by kitchens; I’d probably have made a good cook or chef. The poetry I’d have cooked up would have been far better, far tastier than what springs from the cold, pointy nib of my pen. I’d have been able to serve a duke to satisfaction.”

Do you see how quickly this sort of thing could turn awful? Without Walser’s carefully modulated discursiveness and tone of wonder, any stumble into irony, earnestness or self-conscious cuteness would make it insufferable. How often does prose make us simultaneously salivate and laugh? In his foreword, Gass gets its right:

“His is the perfect stroller’s psychology. To his eye, everything is equal, to his heart, everything is fresh and astonishing; to his mind, everything presents a pleasant puzzle. Diversion is his principal direction, whim his master, the serendipitous the substance of his daily routine.”

Another story, from 1919, “The Last Prose Piece,” begins like this:

“This is likely to be my last prose piece. All sorts of considerations make me believe it’s high time this shepherd boy stopped writing and sending off prose pieces and retired from a pursuit apparently beyond his abilities. I’ll gladly look about for another line of work that will let me break my bread in peace.”

And here’s the poignantly prophetic conclusion:

“`What one man doesn’t like may still please another,’ I reasoned and sent the piece off to Cuba, which showed not the slightest interest. I think the best thing for me would be to sit in a corner and be silent.”

This is a good time to again recognize the ongoing efforts of Golden Rule Jones to bring Walser to a wider English-language audience. Chief among them is his translation-in-progress of Carl Seelig’s Wanderungen mit Robert Walser. Here’s a sample from Seelig’s first meeting with Walser, at the nursing hospital of Appenzell-Ausserrhoden in Herisau, on July 26, 1936:

“From an adjoining building came the esteemed 58-year old poet, accompanied by the warden. I was struck by his childlike expression, red-flushed cheeks, blue eyes, and trim, golden mustache. He was already turning gray at the temple. His well-worn collar and necktie were set somewhat crookedly, his teeth not in the best condition. When Dr. Hinrichsen wanted him to button the top button of his vest, Robert rebelled: `No! The top button must remain open!’”

Sam’s most recent addition to “Wandering with Robert Walser” is a bibliography of Walser’s work in English translation. His blog has become a clearinghouse for Walseriana. Sam’s work is the truest, most useful form of criticism.

Two Poets

Two unusually intelligent and contrarian essay/reviews about two unusually great poets were published this week: In The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson writes about Les Murray, and Alan Jacobs remembers W.H. Auden at Christianity Today.

Chiasson uses the publication of Murray’s latest volume, The Biplane Houses, to launch a brief retrospective look at the Australian’s work. That’s a useful and necessary service because American readers seem unaware of Murray’s pugnacious pyrotechnics. As with Auden, you suspect Murray has claimed the English language as his proprietary turf and remade it in his own image. He’s one of those rare writers (Whitman and Melville are others) whose work is big and elastic enough to contain any subject matter, any word or emotion. His sensibility is omnivorous, his verbal energies Shakespearean. Each of Murray’s books is dedicated “to the glory of God.” Chiasson writes:

“[Murray] read Hopkins and Eliot early on and, the biography tells us, devoured the poetry of John Milton in a single weekend. Those three authors govern Murray’s entire career. You hear Hopkins in the homemade compounds and heavy consonants (“Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees, / cobs and crusts of it, their glory box”); you sense Milton behind Murray’s larger-scale works, notably his 1998 verse novel, “Fredy Neptune”; but most of all you detect the presence of Eliot, whose self-monitoring Christianity suggests an inner untidiness too vast to be tamed by ordinary secular means.”

Here’s “Poetry and Religion,” from The Daylight Moon (1987):

“Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

“into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

“A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

“Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

“You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

“fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

“that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

“or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.”

There’s much to marvel at here, starting with the use of “concert” as a verb in the first line and continuing through the ingenious bird metaphor in the final stanza. In an age of Lilliputian poets, Murray is a truculent giant.

Jacobs, who teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois, writes enthusiastically and non-academically about Auden, especially after his move to the United States in 1940, a period that in the eyes of many critics signaled the start of Auden’s poetic decline. In his defense of the American Auden, Jacobs has begun an admirable reclamation project:

“…here at the centenary I think the most important thing to note is this: in the early 1940s Auden began writing poems that scarcely anyone knew how to read—that scarcely anyone even today knows how to read.”

Jacobs is on to something here. After all, isn’t “In Praise of Limestone,” written in 1948, one of the great poems in the language? Jacobs cites numerous factors that contributed to the critical devaluation of Auden’s later work – his newly fortified Christianity, his homosexuality, his Americanness, his abandonment of knee-jerk left-wing politics – but cites another, more poetic reason:

“Auden had always been a critic of Romanticism and an aficionado of earlier and less fashionable poetic movements: from the beginning he had drawn on medieval literature -- which he had come to love after hearing some lectures at Oxford by an Anglo-Saxonist named Tolkien -- and had celebrated Alexander Pope and Lord Byron -- the one Romantic poet Auden admired, in part because everyone else treated him as a minor poet who had been over-celebrated in his lifetime. Auden despised Shelley especially, often singling out for scorn the notion that `poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ It was a model of poetic power that, he saw, many of the great modernists had accepted as well, for all their vocal anti-Romanticism.”

Auden was a public poet in an era when the accepted model of a poem was the personal lyric, usually composed in the first-person, usually with a one-to-one correspondence between poet and speaker. On this business of Romanticism here’s “Contra Blake, from the last book of poems published during his life, Epistle to a Godson:

“The Road of Excess
leads, more often than not, to
The Slough of Despond.”

And from the same volume, from “Shorts II”:

“No, Surrealists, no! No, even the wildest of poems
Must, like prose, have a firm basis in staid common-sense.”

In his indispensable Auden and Christianity, Arthur Kirsch offers an intriguing explanation for the seeming bifurcation in Auden’s poetic career:

“…Auden’s restraint of his vast lyric powers and his consequent disciplinary focus upon metrical virtuosity, as well as the revisions of his poems and canon, may also be understood as acts of religious humility, acknowledgements that poetry is not magical or sacred, and that all things of this world it is a vanity. Auden’s doubts about his art are Christian doubts, and the American Auden is emphatically a Christian Auden – which may be yet another, and often unacknowledged, reason for the depreciation of the achievement of his later poetry.”

`And Then I Started Drawing on Them'

Mass e-mailings at the office are written solely to be deleted but this one contained magic words in the subject line: “Free Books.” An artist had created an “installation” (when did artists stop painting?) using thousands of donated books, and the surplus volumes were free for the taking in the campus gallery. By the time I got there, three women were picking over the books, which had been arranged spines-up in cardboard boxes along a narrow hallway. I found some paperbacks for my kids but the selection was heavy on best-sellers, textbooks and computer manuals, none of which had aged well. I know from experience that the surreal lurks beneath the ordinary and the random, so I noted some of the titles:

Mary-Kate & Ashley Starring in Switching Goals, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, Bat Mitzvah: A Jewish Girl’s Coming of Age, Weetzie Bat, Religion and Economic Action: A Critique of Max Weber, Upchuck and the Rotten Willy: The Great Escape, Frommers Thailand ’92-’93, and I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed (the last by Jesse Ventura).

In the gallery foyer is “When the Animals Rebel,” the installation assembled by Mike Stilkey, who is 32 and lives in Los Angeles. His web site assures us that Stilkey’s work is “reminiscent of Weimar-era German expressionism and his style has been described by some as capturing features of artists ranging from Edward Gorey to Egon Scheile [sic].”

Against a 44-by-16-foot wall, Stilkey has stacked books in tall, irregular shapes and painted cartoon-like humans and animals in acrylics on the spines. The human figures are pale and ghostly and resemble the fashionably anorexic cousins of Pugsley and Wednesday Addams. Is this a statement about animal rights? The animal nature of humans? The state-subsidized destruction of books by National Socialism? The title card on the wall next to the installation is helpful:

“Stilkey is a passionate collector of old records, cameras and especially books, to which he is attracted `sometimes by the title, or more the look of it, the antiqueness of it, or the wear and tear of it. Sometimes there’s a weird illustration. I’ve got these books and I’ll never read them, but I want them for some reason and I’ve never know why. And then I started drawing on them.’”

In Cleveland, we called that vandalism. I nag my 4-year-old to stop drawing in his books, and here’s Stilkey making his living doing the same thing. Judging a book by “the look of it” is like judging a painting by its smell (“Ah, a late Tanguy”). I know a book dealer in upstate New York whose legitimate trade is amply supplemented by wealthy non-readers who buy books by the yard to adorn their walls, based exclusively on the elegance of their bindings. The same dealer sold books to Martin Scorsese’s production company when he was filming The Age of Innocence in the neighborhood. You can see them on the shelves in Mrs. Mingott’s mansion.

“When the Animals Rebel” is set back about 10 feet behind a plate-glass window, so reading the defaced titles of the books is difficult. I noticed some vintage James Micheners, Maeve Binchys and Sidney Sheldons. Perhaps, I thought, briefly, Stilkey’s graffiti doesn’t threaten the net literacy of the nation. Then I saw it, near the middle of the installation, on the giraffe’s leg, I think, the book about which W.H. Auden wrote: “There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.” Yes, it was Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy about the Great War and the passing of a civilized world. Stilkey had incorporated one of the supreme literary works of the last century into an almost-life-size caricature of a giraffe. Had I underestimated him? Was this a subtle allusion to Ford’s hero, Christopher Tietjens, a loving hommage to “the last English Tory?” This charitable thought faded as I remembered Stilkey’s deathless prose:

“I’ve got these books and I’ll never read them, but I want them for some reason and I’ve never know why. And then I started drawing on them.”