`Time Wearing Out Memory'

For 19 years I lived in upstate New York, in and around Albany, and for most of that time I worked as a newspaper reporter. That meant I was on the road a lot and got to know more of the region and its people than many natives. The most beautiful place in all of that history-drenched area is Schoharie County, the sparsely populated northernmost reach of the Catskill Mountains, a landscape of limestone ridges and flat, black-soiled valleys. It’s the longest continuously farmed area in the state. If I could earn a living, I would live there.

How surprised I was to find a book in our library, a continent away, titled Time Wearing Out Memory: Schoharie County (2008), a collection of black-and-white photographs taken by Steve Gross and Susan Daley. They document the old Schoharie of hops-drying barns, churches, sap houses, smoke houses, Grange and Masonic halls, covered bridges, general stores, one-room schoolhouses and outhouses. Many have collapsed or sunk into earth and underbrush, though one wonders how today’s buildings will fare in 150 years.

The dominant architectural style is Greek Revival, which persisted through most of the 19th century. Gross and Daley found a clapboard-covered Dutch Reformed Church dating from about 1815 and located in the wonderfully named Breakabeen. Such place names – an American Esperanto of Dutch, English, German, American Indian and what not -- bring back fond memories of their places: Gilboa, Blenheim, Bouck’s Falls, Howe’s Cave, Argusville, Sharon Springs, Middleburgh, Patchin Hollow and Esperance. Some of the photos, particularly interiors, recall the work of Walker Evans and Wright Morris. In their “Photographers’ Note,” Gross and Daley, who have lived in Schoharie since 1987, write:

“The prints were made using traditional chemistry [I love that phrase] on gelatin silver paper. For this particular project, the medium and subject matter were especially in harmony. Using a wood, metal, and glass camera of nineteenth-century design, the process was slow and careful but not complicated.”

Here is their explanation of the title:

“In John M. Brown’s 1823 history of Schoharie County he used the phrase `time wearing out memory’ to describe how even back then there was the feeling that memory fades and places are forgotten, lost to time. These photographs are a record of our own moment of being here in this changing landscape of hills and curving roads and tenuous old buildings.”

Reading that, I thought of “The Mountain Cemetery,” a poem from Edgar Bowers’ first collection, The Form of Loss (1956); these lines especially: “What we of time would threaten to undo/All time in its slow scrutiny has done.”

Gross and Daley’s exquisite photos of an almost vanished America remind us of what Bowers elsewhere in the poem calls “The enormous, sundry platitude of death.”

`Calm, Contemplative and Animal'

Renowned literary critic Joseph Stalin lauded Maxim Gorky as “the great humanist” and fighter for “all progressive humanity” [sound familiar?], Solomon Volkov notes in The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. In contrast, Volkov writes:

“Chekhov had been more concerned with the happiness of the individual; in the opinion of many people, he did not fight for anything. He simply sang the mundane – that was how he was perceived by critics and readers. They did not like the fact that Chekhov, unlike Tolstoy (and later Gorky and Solzhenitsyn), did not aspire to be a leader or teacher of life. Contrary to the Russian cultural tradition, he was not a prophet, or a yurodivy (holy fool), or dissident. That is why Chekhov became so popular on the stages of Europe and the United States. The West is mistaken when it takes Chekhov for a typical Russian writer.”

A writer’s job is writing not fighting (contra Ishmael Reed). Writing well is difficult enough, and few have written better than Chekhov. I don’t know what someone might mean by “typical Russian writer” or “typical American writer.” The best artists are a demographic of one and represent only themselves, not a nation or other superfluous group. Volkov’s observation reminds me of an interview I had with a scholar of Japanese cinema. I told him Ikiru was among my favorite films and he informed me that Kurosawa was the least Japanese of Japanese directors, which accounted for his popularity in the West. I was supposed to feel chastened.

Thursday was Chekhov’s 149th birthday, which I observed by finishing Rosmund Bartlett’s Chekhov: Scenes from a Life and reading three of his stories. He wrote “In the Horsecart” in 1897 while living at Melikhovo, his beloved country estate 45 miles south of Moscow. Maria Vasilyevna is a village schoolteacher, born in Moscow, unmarried, resigned to the loneliness and squalor of life in the provinces. Chekhov begins his story by contrasting the beauty of a Russian spring with Maria Vasilyevna’s dull misery (as translated by Robert Payne in Forty Stories):

“The highway was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding a fierce warmth on the earth, but there was still snow in the ditches and the forests. The long, dark, cruel winter had only just come to an end, spring came suddenly, but for Maria Vasilyevna sitting in the horsecart, there was nothing new or interesting in the warmth of the sun, or in the languid, luminous forests warmed by the breath of spring, or in the flocks of dark birds flying over the puddles in the fields – puddles as large as lakes – or in the marvelous and unfathomable sky into which it seemed one could plunge with such joy.”

Joy is not a state we associate with a “typical Russian writer” – another clichéd notion Chekhov happily ignores. Later in the story, Maria Vasilyevna experiences a brief hallucinatory vision of joy, heightened by its contrast with her stifling world of drunken peasants, larcenous bureaucrats and mud. In a letter he wrote one spring at Melikhovo (in Bartlett’s translation), Chekhov expresses a similar mingling of oppressiveness and rapture:

“Living in the country is inconvenient, the intolerable rasputitsa [mud season, described by Bartlett as “a glorious word conveying a sense of roads literally coming undone”] has begun, but something is going on in nature which is so amazing and moving that it makes up for all the inconveniences of life with its poetry and novelty. Every day brings a surprise better than the one before. The starlings have landed, water is gurgling everywhere, there is green grass already on thawed ground. The day stretches like eternity. It feels like I’m living in Australia, at the edge of the world; my state of mind is calm, contemplative and animal, in the sense that I’m not worried about what happened yesterday and am not thinking about tomorrow.”

Bartlett portrays a man sick for 15 years with tuberculosis, dead at 44, who reveled in fishing, flowers, croquet, good food, women, conversation and the Russian language, and who worked with extraordinary ferocity on his stories and plays. She gives us one of literature’s rare heroes, whose work is typical only of Chekhov. Happy birthday, Anton Pavlovich!

`Into What Company They Were to Fall'

Who knows why people read what they read instead of something else? Their motives are as mysterious as mine to me, but I wondered who might be moved by John Updike’s death to investigate his work, to visit the library and sample his half-century of fiction. As of Wednesday afternoon there was no run on it: two and a half broad shelves crammed without gaps. A look at the online catalogue seemed to confirm the impression.

Much has been made of Updike’s loyalty to one publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and the uniformity of his books’ design. A complete run of his titles, roughly 60 of them in first editions, arranged chronologically on a shelf, would doubtless be an impressive sight, recalling the cemetery Allen Tate’s "Ode to the Confederate Dead":

“Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element…”

Given the nature of a public library – capricious budgets, hard use of books by indifferent hands (“the element”) – the Updike collection looks as worn as headstones in acid-rain country. The Knopf template is barely discernable amid the paperbacks, library bindings and two copies of the steroidal Everyman’s edition of Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. There’s no aura of a dignified, decades-spanning oeuvre. It looks like a library of castoffs in an Adirondack fishing cabin. But think what that means: Since 1957 (the library has a circulating first of The Poorhouse Fair), enough readers have borrowed Updike’s books, dog-eared the pages, split the spines and left them in the sun to bleach, to move a money-strapped public institution to regularly restock its shelves with inferior but perfectly readable replacements. Even a recent volume, The Terrorist (2006), is a cigarette-stinking wreck. The Same Door, published in 1959, is represented by a hard-cover fourth printing from 1991.

The beaten-up appearance of his books might have pleased Updike. It confirms Benjamin Franklin’s practical endorsement of democracy when he opened the first public lending library in the country, in Updike’s home state of Pennsylvania. Readers are true critics, for good or ill. Art is never democratic but reading always is. We might call Thoreau a conflicted democrat, an anarchist with contempt for the ungoverned, including ungoverned readers. Here’s how he put it in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

“When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not truly cumulative treasure, where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is, I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! That so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole.”

Ballots to decide the question whether Updike’s books are “the work of a true poet” are available on the shelves on your public library.

`Every Sentence Counts'

“The event of the week was my reading of John Updike’s new novel, Rabbit, Run (Knopf). The boy is a genius. Every sentence counts. The story is rather contrived, but one believes every word of it. And the flashes of weather, and of the `American scene’: drugstores, highways, main streets, factories, used car lots! And the passion and the grief! The sex gets out of hand, once in a while; but for the most part he uses the sexual aberrations to striking purpose. And he believes in God (`something there’)! Do get it at once; it’s worth buying – ($4.00).”

That’s from a letter the poet Louise Bogan wrote to her friend Ruth Limmer on Oct. 20, 1960, when Updike was 28 and the author of two novels, a collection of stories and a volume of poems. Bogan has already gleaned some of the essential Updike mannerisms and themes – the too-exquisite prose (“Every sentence counts.”) and “contrived” plots, the eye for detail, the devoted chronicling of American angst and, of course, the sex. But who could have foreseen the “boy’s” longevity and Jamesian fecundity?

I started catching up with Updike about five years after Bogan. What I read first and what I’m guessing will remain the core of his lasting accomplishment are the early stories collected in The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962) and The Music School (1966). In 1972, asked to identify traces of “inspiration” in recent fiction, Nabokov chose “The Happiest I’ve Been” (from The Same Door) and wrote:

“I like so many of Updike’s stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”

Last night I reread “The Happiest I’ve Been,” one of the best stories I know about the cusp of adulthood, the American limbo between high school and college. The closing lines of the final paragraph still move me:

“There was the quality of the 10 a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility – you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element – and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state – as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.”

Here is a writer of contradictory gifts – a realist of the Howellsian school chronicling the American middle class, coupled uneasily with a poet of wistful delectation. My honeymoon with Updike lasted about 10 years, during which his books served as markers in my life. The first of his titles I bought in hard cover, at age 16, was Midpoint and Other Poems in April 1969 (cover price: $4.50). I gave Museums and Women (1972) to a girlfriend for her birthday. The last Updike novel I read while it was still new was A Month of Sundays (1975), when I was married to that girlfriend. I’ve read none of his novels after The Coup (1978) and don’t know why precisely. The famous style came to seem tacked-on, an after-thought. His rate of production remained Oatesian but his gift had grown facile and – ever the bright Harvard boy -- too often topical. He never had a late-career blossoming such as his contemporary Philip Roth experienced in the 1990s. Roth wrote his best work after the age of 60, when Updike’s was long past. Is it possible that, despite the sexual notoriety of such books as Couples (1968), Updike is essentially a young person’s writer, and that he exhausted his richest vein of material – his own childhood and young manhood – too early? I worry if some of my sadness at his death is misplaced sadness for my own vanished youth, of which his work was a part.

The best of his reviews are another matter, for in that form he was an indefatigable teacher, an enthusiastic clearing house for world literature. From him I learned of Nabokov, Henry Green, Muriel Spark, Kierkegaard and Witold Gombrowicz – an eclectic grab bag from a literary omnivore whose tastes often surprised you. Updike the reviewer was a generous quoter who suggested that every review contain at least two quotes from the book under consideration – advice I’ve followed. Indulge me in an Updike nonfiction sampler:

On Henry Green:

“Disease is present in his works not only in the specific manifestations that rather comically carry off characters but also in the underlying weakness and, as it were, incurability of the human condition. He saw us, all tenderly, in a desperate Pascalian light.”

On Nabokov, in praise of the class list in Lolita:

“We have sat in those classes, Nabokov had not; yet it was he who put one into literature, along with so many other comic, correct details of his adopted `lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country.’”

On Daniel Fuchs:

“Fuchs resembles Bellow in his admiration of energy, however ill expended. He anticipated Bellow’s rapid easy tumble of imagery and dialogue, with its sometimes breathtakingly fresh adjectives: `this world of celebrity, of fast movement and shiny living’; `the larceny in his eyes, as he devoted himself to the girl, wooing her and getting her rosy [note the deft, generous quoting].’ There is the same acceptance, both offhand and religious, of people as the messy, troublesome spirits they are. Bellow, however, sometimes takes positions, presses a point – Herzog writing all those querulous letters to the mighty – where Fuchs maintains an unblemished cool, an unblinking, unblaming candor and, with all his street smarts, an innocence.”

On William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows:

“The novel is not simply autobiographical; the lies of fiction were employed to get at the nearly unbearable heart truth. Maxwell was ten when the flu seized his family and his mother died; his alter ego in the novel, Bunny, is eight. The subtracted two years sharpen the child’s vulnerability and simplify his picture of events.”

Moments before learning of Updike’s death Tuesday morning I was reading in Borges’ Selected Poems the sonnet “Things” (translated by Stephen Kessler):

“My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.”

Now the poem will be fused in memory with Updike’s death. My guess is that his best work in short fiction and nonfiction “will endure beyond our vanishing.”

`We Know the Difference'

In the dentist’s waiting room I read this passage in Rosamund Bartlett’s Chekhov: Scenes from a Life:

“[Nikolai] Leikin was a journalist first and foremost, and he wanted material that fitted the template of his journal: stories had to be short and funny, and cranked out without too much deliberation. Chekhov was never going to be a writer in Leiken’s mould. He was an elegist as much as a comic, with a poetic temperament, and he found it increasingly difficult to write to order.”

I brooded on this through the teeth cleaning and the drive home, where I answered an e-mail from an acquaintance of Kay Ryan who had read and enjoyed some of my posts on Ryan and Chekhov. The leap across space and time between these writers is, I suppose, immense – 21st-century American and 19th-century Russian, poetry and prose, female and male, gay and straight, and so forth. The spirit of the age tells us they share nothing of substance, their identities are mutually exclusive, and their readers know of course that this is rubbish. As artists, both are masters of concision and came up from the “provinces,” away from the centers of literary taste-making. Both toy with the permeable membrane between the elegiac and comic, and relish using sly, gentle irony without turning it into a weapon. Both revere the natural world, and for both of them pretentiousness is anathema and words are never filigree. In the middle of a review of a volume by Ryan, David Yezzi writes:

“Chekhov is another modern writer who keeps us laughing until the moment we are brought up short by the opposite of laughter.”

Consider Ryan’s “Great Thoughts” (from Say Uncle, 2000):

“Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

“Like the eucalyptus
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

“Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.”

For certain writers, “great thoughts” are like fossil fuels – non-sustainable and polluting. Russia seems particularly susceptible to such bombast, expecting her writers to play the roles of prophet and seer. Chekhov would have none of this, which earned him the scorn and incomprehension of prominent critics. He was briefly seduced by Tolstoy’s crackpot social and religious ideas but eventually wrote, “Reason and justice tell me that there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstinence from meat.”

Ryan no doubt harbors as many political and social sentiments as the rest of us, but they make no discernable appearance in her work. Her job is words not thoughts, great or small. Her work is philosophically rich but never thesis-driven. If she wrote fiction she might say as Chekhov did in a May 30, 1888, letter to Alexey Suvorin:

“It doesn’t seem to me that it is the job of writers of fiction to decide questions like God, pessimism, etc. The writer’s task is only to describe those who have said or thought something about God and pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist should not be a judge of his characters or what they say, but an impartial witness.”

In Poetry, Ryan published a humorous essay about humor in verse (not necessarily humorous verse), “Laugh While You Can: A Consideration of Poetry.” In it, she distinguishes “great thoughts” and sincerity from poetry in a way Chekhov would have appreciated:

“All feelings must go through the chillifier for us to feel them in that aesthetically thrilling way that we do in poetry. Poetry’s feelings are not human feelings; we know the difference.”

`An Amiable Thing'

“most of the interesting things around us are above street level”

So writes Nige in “Nature Again.” “Above street level” covers a lot of ground, so to speak – windows, traffic signals, billboards, rooftops, treetops, birds, helicopters, clouds, the moon and celestial bodies. It’s a rather crowded place. Nige was rightly awestruck by a solar halo, as I was not long ago by a double rainbow – another sample of nature’s gift for redundancy when it comes to beauty. Both phenomena show up in John Shade’s “Pale Fire” in Nabokov’s Pale Fire:

“My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule—when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged--
For we are most artistically caged.”

Years ago my professor of English Romanticism asked us to imagine Shelley and Keats walking along a woodland path. The former makes grand gestures at the heavens, marveling at the vastness of the cosmos. Keats’ eyes are focused on the ground, noting mushrooms, the shape and color of flowers, the glistening web of an orb weaver. Temperamentally, I’m closer to Keats but as soon as I wrote that I recalled a glorious Shelleyan event I witnessed 10 years ago.

We had attended a performance of Handel’s Semele in Montreal with my wife’s aunt and uncle, who live 60 miles east of the city, near the Vermont border. It was late. My wife and her uncle had fallen asleep in the back seat. Her aunt was driving when the black sky exploded into sheets of gaudy color, an abrupt sensory shift not unlike an acid trip. In seconds I recognized the aurora borealis but I hadn’t expected it to look so big, to fluctuate so rapidly or to give an impression of three dimensions. The northern lights looked like a light show in a big room, simultaneously beautiful, frightening and vulgar – rather like life, it occurs to me now. Something else occurs to me too – a wonderful passage from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations:

“By the very right of your senses you enjoy the World. Is not the beauty of the Hemisphere present to your eye? Doth not the glory of the Sun pay tribute to your sight? Is not the vision of the World an amiable thing?”

We woke Sunday to snow so fine it resembled dust, melting on pavement, clinging to grass. The kids rolled one-third of a snowman in the front yard – a grassy, leafy head. They were enjoying the World.

`A Landscape Painter -- in Prose'

Nabokov almost had it right when he described Chekhov’s prose in Lectures on Russian Literature:

“His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial – the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crème-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. He was not a verbal innovator in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit.”

When Chekhov takes on the comedy of human failings, the ephemeral nature of happiness – and he writes of little else -- his language is economical and modest. The only occasions when it soars, when he indulges his lyrical gifts, comes when his attention turns to landscape. The marvelous “Difficult People” (1886) might almost be a play. Dialogue carries it and physical description is sparse. The story of a weak but tyrannical father and his family is claustrophobic until the son flees yet another argument:

“Going out of the house, the student walked along the muddy road towards the open country. The air was full of a penetrating autumn dampness. The road was muddy [this is the Constance Garnett translation – one wonders if the repetition of “muddy road” is present in the Russian], puddles gleamed here and there, and in the yellow fields autumn itself seemed looking out from the grass, dismal, decaying, dark. On the right-hand side of the road was a vegetable-garden cleared of its crops and gloomy-looking, with here and there sunflowers standing up in it with hanging heads already black.”

At least through the scrim of translation the language is almost fulsome, and once you’re aware of it you see Chekhov’s landscape lyricism everywhere. Here it is in “The Black Monk” (1894), in the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation:

“Following the path that ran down the steep bank past the bared roots, he descended to the water, disturbing some snipe and scaring away two ducks. The last rays of the setting sun still glowed on the gloomy pines, but there was already real evening on the surface of the river. Kovrin crossed the river on some planks. Before him now lay a wide field covered with young, not yet flowering rye. No human dwelling, no living soul in the distance, and it seemed that the path, if one followed it, would lead you to that unknown, mysterious place where the sun had just gone down, and where the sunset flamed so vastly and majestically.”

In Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (2004), Rosamund Bartlett looks at the writer through the lens of geography, visiting his birth place in Taganrog, on the steppes of southern Russia; Moscow, where he moved at age 17; St. Petersburg; Siberia, where he visited the penal colony on Sakhalin Island; his country estate of Melikhovo; and so on. I’ve read only the first 80 pages, but Bartlett states her theme early: “…Chekhov was a landscape painter – in prose.” She writes:

“Chekhov hid his lyrical persona carefully, but it is there to find in his letters [Bartlett translated Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters with Anthony Phillips], and particularly in his short stories. It was the landscape which occasionally provoked him to utter the word `poetic,’ the highest accolade in his vocabulary [as in Nabokov’s], and it was the landscape which was responsible for some of the happiest moments in his life.”

Bartlett is excellent on the significance of the steppes for both Chekhov – who was the first Russian writer to treat them at length since Gogol - and Russia:

“The old Russian word steppe, meaning `lowland,’ has no equivalent in other languages, but the word combination used by the Japanese, `ocean of land,’ conveys well the fundamental features of the vast treeless plain that extends all the way from the Danube in the west, through Central Asia to Mongolia and China.”

The story Chekhov considered his first “serious” work is “The Steppe” (1888), an account of a nine-year-old boy’s journey across the emptiness. On the evening of the second day, the narrator briefly leaves Egorushka to survey his surroundings (from the Pevear/Volokhonsky version):

“On the way you come upon a silent old barrow or a stone idol set up God knows when or by whom, a night bird noiselessly flies over the ground, and steppe legends gradually come to your mind, stories of passing strangers, tales of some old nanny of the steppes, and all that you yourself have managed to see and grasp with your soul. And then, in the chirring of the insects, in the suspicious figures and barrows, in the blue sky, in the moonlight, in the plight of a night bird, in everything you see and hear, you begin to perceive the triumph of beauty, youth, flourishing strength, and a passionate search for life…”

Bartlett speculates that in such passages we hear Chekhov’s voice. Only in such surroundings, so reminiscent of his childhood, does he sing. I’m reminded occasionally of Willa Cather’s Nebraska novels, Conrad Richter’s The Sea of Grass and of Melville’s little-known “John Marr” (1888). The last is a story about a retired sailor who has settled on the prairies at the heart of the United States. The Indians and buffalo are gone, leaving “the plain a desert, green or blossoming indeed, but almost as forsaken as the Siberian Obi.”

The Obi is a river surrounded by marshes. Odd that Melville would turn to Russia, the easternmost end of the steppe, farthest from Chekhov’s, for his metaphor.

`Inconsequence Is Not Futility'

Thirty-eight years ago I read The Imitation of Christ at the suggestion of a history professor who was an eccentric of the old school. He also urged me to read Maimonides, Averroes, Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche. None of these writers was part of the formal curriculum in either of the classes I took with him, nor was I a history major but someone had suggested I sign up for courses based on the sensibility of the professor not the subject.

I enjoyed Dr. Ogilvie because his classes were learned, unscripted and discursive. He told stories for an hour and some weeks they had a tangential connection to our reading. He had spent time traveling in Italy and those visits informed his lectures – too stuffy a word for his classroom digressions. I can still hear the way he pronounced Cimabue, relishing the syllables and adding some of his own. About five years after I left the university, I heard from another of his former students that Dr. Ogilvie had asphyxiated himself in his garage – a suicide. I never heard an explanation.

I thought again of Dr. Ogilvie and The Imitation of Christ as I was rereading a poem by Eric Ormsby, “Lines Written after Reading Thomas à Kempis.” I read the books my old professor suggested but I remember nothing about The Imitation of Christ. Here’s the first stanza of Ormsby’s poem, which I think might apply to blogging and other sorts of writing:

“Take comfort from your nothingness.
Inconsequence is not futility.
Get pleasure from becoming less.”

`I Shall Not Miss the Things I Miss'

The premise of Poet’s Choice, edited by Paul Engle and Joseph Langland, and published in 1962, is simple and appealing: 100 American and English poets pick their favorite from among the poems they have written and append a comment. Forty-seven years later, the book makes for melancholy reading because most of the poets are dead, including some of the best – John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Robert Frost, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Marianne Moore, Karl Shapiro and Allen Tate. Among the rare survivors are Philip Levine, Alastair Reid and Richard Wilbur.

Poet’s Choice is melancholy for another reason: Today, one would have to think very hard and probably bend one’s standards beyond recognition to name 100 living poets whose work is worth reading and rereading. Even some of the minor poets in the Engle/Langland volume – X.J. Kennedy, for instance, and John Ciardi – are a pleasure to read.

Not surprisingly, the only poet whose poem and comment fit on a single page is Cunningham, master of concision. With retrospective appropriateness (he died in 1985) his selection is titled “Epitaph”:

“When I shall be without regret
And shall mortality forget,
When I shall die who lived for this,
I shall not miss the things I miss.
And you who notice where I lie
Ask not my name. It is not I.”

Of the poem’s 41 words, 36 are monosyllables. As with many of his poems, and as with thousands of headstone inscriptions I’ve read in New England and upstate New York, the jauntiness of “Epitaph” belies its grimness: “I shall not miss the things I miss.” According to Timothy Steele, editor The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, “Epitaph” was written at Palo Alto in the summer of 1942. It was published in The Judge is Fury (1947) as the eleventh in a sequence of 43 brief poems titled “Epigrams: A Journal.” In his edition, Steele reprints the sentence Cunningham contributed to Poet’s Choice:

“I like this poem because it is all denotation and no connotation; because it has only one level of meaning; because it is not ironic, paradoxical, complex, or subtle; and because the meter is monotonously regular.”

“Epitaph” is a study in iambs, an elegantly satisfying structure, written as though William Carlos Williams had never lived and Ben Jonson were still alive. The affectless tone of Cunningham’s commentary is a provocation. He parodies the critical jargon, the uncomprehending language of reviewing, of his day. By 1962 you can already hear the barbarians inside the gates. Allen Ginsberg contributes a section of “Howl,” and his commentary begins:

“`Part II, Howl’ – took 4 buttons of dried Peyote in apartment on Nob Hill, S.F….”

`No Social Function'

I didn’t intend to belabor the awfulness of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem but my thoughts have returned to it as they do to an act of vandalism one witnesses in a public place. Millions of Americans, I fear, will confuse Alexander’s platitudes and pieties with poetry. For many it will suffice as the only sanctioned poem they hear or read this year and perhaps until the next presidential inauguration. “Praise Song for the Day,” in fact, is not poetry but an inferior species of prose. It is what one expects from an earnest junior-high-school student with little gift for language, or from a professor at Yale. Hearing it, I thought of the words of a genuine poet:

“Power and sycophancy, sycophancy in power:
power’s own cringing to extrapolation
and false prophecy.”

These lines are Geoffrey Hill’s, from Section CXLIII of The Triumph of Love. Writing a poem for a ceremonial event of such importance must be extraordinarily difficult but writing a poem for any reason – a good if not great poem – is always extraordinarily difficult. There’s an ancient tradition of sucking up to one’s patron on such occasions, and in this at least Alexander honors tradition. The only boat she rocks is poetry’s. About my glancing mention of her performance in Wednesday’s post, a friend writes:

“I am amazed at how many American writers pretend to themselves that they are `speaking truth to power’ when they attack Bush. Nothing bad is going to happen to them. In fact, they'll be applauded. I can't help feeling you wouldn't hear a thing from such people if this really were a repressive state.”

In an interview Hill gave last year after a conference in his honor at the Collège de France, he described "poésie engagée" as “suspect.” The interviewer, Anne Mounic, asked “What is the role of the poet in our world?” His answer, particularly after Alexander’s performance on Tuesday, seems apropos:

“He has none. In London, when a taxi driver who loves to talk with his passengers, asks me what I do, I tell him I am a retired university professor. It is best to leave that I am a poet to the last. The driver would collapse with total laughter while driving and that would be dangerous. The great poet has no social function. The mediocre, yes, he finds himself delivering fashionable platitudes to the public. The true poet is completely isolated.”

Stefan Kanfer has a useful appraisal at City Journal.

`Sovereign and Fearless'

While my wife watched the inauguration in the living room – professional obligation: she’s a journalist – I was in the office listening to Seamus Heaney read the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. She called me out to hear Aretha Franklin sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” (badly, I’m afraid) and I fled before I had to hear the prose banalities of Elizabeth Alexander, the inaugural poet, and returned to Herbert, a real poet.

Heaney reads from Collected Poems: 1956-1998, translated by Allisa Valles. His selection spans much of Herbert’s career, from “To Apollo” in the first book, Chord of Light (1956), to “I Gave My Word” in the last, Epilogue to a Storm (1998). Heaney notes that Herbert accepted the Horatian duty to “delight and instruct,” and suggests that many of his poems are oblique elegies for the youth he lost to the savagery of the 20th century. That’s clearly the case with “I Gave My Word,” one of Herbert’s final poems:

“I was very young
and common sense told me
not to give my word

“I could easily say
I’ll give it some thought
what’s the big hurry
it’s not a train schedule

“I’ll give my word
after graduation
after military service
after I make a home

“but time exploded
there was no before
there was no after
in the blinding present
you had to choose
so I gave my word

“a word –
a noose round my neck
an ultimate word

“in the rare moments
when everything is light
and becomes transparent
I think to myself:
`my word
how I’d like
to take my word back’

“it doesn’t last for long
the world’s axis screeches
people pass away
as do landscapes
colored rings of time
but the word I gave
is stuck in my throat”

By “time exploded” Herbert means the tag-team assault on Poland by Hitler and Stalin, when the poet was not yet 15 years old. In comparison, the political posturing of many American poets is a national embarrassment. In the November/December issue of Boston Review, Alissa Valles published “The Testament of Mr. Cogito,” a useful tool in coming to understand Herbert, his politics and the misuse of his politics by others:

“In a time when the language of American public life is shamefully inaccurate and inexpressive, and its poetry too often narcissistic and unambitious, Herbert is a powerful tonic, a reminder that poetry can be sovereign and fearless. His life was accompanied by great personal and intellectual risk, and his work demands similar risk from us.”

ADDENDUM: A reader notes, regarding Elizabeth Alexander: "She would have been better off reading `The Charge of the Light Brigade.'" “Was there a man dismay'd?” You bet. Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along Adam Kirsch's assessment of the inaugural poet.

`Full of Light and Serious Joy'

Last week my brother posted a rebus even more gnomic than usual. The name spelled out in pictures is Piero della Francesca, the 15th-century Italian master. The post was prompted, he told me, by a rereading of “Piero della Francesca,” the only essay in Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarian in the Garden devoted to a single artist. Herbert is the most civilized of poets. When friends ask him to “tell us what you’ve chosen for yourself, who is the painter closest to your heart, the one you’d never exchange,” Herbert replies, “Piero.”

The first of Piero’s paintings Herbert sees – he calls it a “meeting” -- is "The Nativity" in London at the National Gallery, “an unusual composition full of light and serious joy.” Fortunately for his readers, Herbert was an autodidact of art history, not an academic. His reactions are informed by a deep knowledge of technique but remain essentially emotional, or rather they issue from that place in the sensibility of a civilized person where the emotional, aesthetic and intellectual share space:

“The sensation was similar to my first Van Eyck. It is difficult to define such an aesthetic shock. The picture roots you to one spot. You cannot step back or move closer or (as with modern painting) smell the paint and examine the facture treatment.”

Herbert moves on to Piero’s homeland with typical charm and abruptness:

“Goethe’s wise dictum: `Wer den Dicther will verstehen, muss in Dichters Lande gehen.’ As the fruits of light, paintings should be viewed under the artist’s native sun….Hence the pilgrimage to Piero della Francesca. Since my means were modest, I surrendered to chance and adventure. The story does not follow a chronology so relished by historian.

“Perugia. The sombre town dwells in the green-golden Umbrian landscape.”

Herbert wanders around central Italy, relishing its weather and cultural wealth – and his freedom. His visits came in the immediate wake of the 1956 thaw in the Soviet Bloc. Herbert, a Pole, was in his thirties, still healthy and, like “The Nativity,” “full of light and serious joy.” His essays, unlike most of his poems, are filled with carefully chosen pieces of his life, and we see a chronically under-oxygenated man breathing the fresh air of freedom and culture. Herbert is writing about Piero but it reads like a poetic credo:

“The key to Piero’s mystery: he was one of the most impersonal, supra-individual artists in history. Berenson compares him to the anonymous sculptor of the Parthenon and to Velázquez...The absence of psychological expression unveils the pure artistic movement within mass and light…over the battle of shadows, convulsions and tumult, Piero has erected lucidus ordo – an eternal order of light and balance.”

In his collection Shocked Stars (2006), the Australian poet William Rush includes an homage to Piero with a title borrowed from for one of the artist’s most vividly human works, “Madonna del Parto.”

“Piero’s mother also waited here
in Monterchi for her son. He would
walk, as we are walking, past
lines of walnut and olive, noting the
axis of tiled roof and cypress,
leaving his pastel, most serene
saints, scattered over Umbria.”

This is pleasing but thin and sentimental, the opposite of Herbert’s earthy account of the same painting:

“It is certainly one of paintings most provocative Madonnas. Her hair, pressed to her skull, uncovers large ears. She has a sensual neck and full arms, a straight nose and a hard, swollen mouth. Her eyes are lowered, her eyelids drawn over black pupils which stare into her body. She wears a simple, high-waisted dress open from breast to knees. Her left hand rests on a hip, a country bridesmaid’s gesture; the right hand touches her belly but without a trace of licentiousness, as though touching a mystery. Piero has painted for the Monterchi peasants the tender, eternal secret of every mother. Two angels briskly draw aside the drapery like a stage curtain.”

Never has the Virgin seemed so human, so womanly and motherly, so like a Polish peasant. Everyone who has ever lived with a pregnant woman will recognize the stance Piero paints and Herbert describes – one arm akimbo, the other holding her belly “as though touching a mystery.” Herbert, who practiced no religion and had both Christian and Jewish forbears, enthusiastically embraces a great Christian artist who, like him, was “one of the most impersonal, supra-individual artists in history.” Near the end of the essay Herbert writes:

“It is impossible to place him in a romance. He hides so thoroughly behind his painting and frescoes that one cannot invent his private life, his loves and friendships, his ambitions, his passion and grief. He has received the greatest act of mercy by absent-minded history, which mislays documents and blurs all traces of life. If he still endures, it is not through anecdotes of the miseries of his life, his madness, his successes and failures. His entire being is in his oeuvre.”

`The Overarching Mystery of Poetry'

This is “Ink,” a sonnet by David Slavitt from Falling from Silence (2001):

“Poised above the paper, the pen’s nib
is gravid with ink, a tremulous black droplet
by which one can learn to calibrate fluctuations
of weather, inner and outer, as if it were crimson
liquid that lives in thermometers’ wells: a poet’s
day is not merely his own, for clouds as they drift
across his skies will darken or brighten your own.
Or is it yet stranger? When San Gennaro’s dried

“blood liquefies in the phial, the people of Naples
offer up prayers of thanks, but the miracle’s true
work is within their own hearts where freshets of faith,
of hope, and even of charity run renewed.
His drop of ink can do that too: it dries
but later flows elsewhere in your tears, in your blood.”

“Ink” is one of those time-released poems that on first reading seems pleasant and skillful enough but undistinguished. With time you recall an image or phrase or even a word (in this case gravid, which I first learned 40 years ago in Light in August, and which in the context of the poem seems at first inappropriate and then acutely right), and you return to the poem to discover the nature of its hold on you. In the six or seven years since I first encountered “Ink” I’ve read it perhaps a dozen times and it remains inexhaustible. The poem’s rapid transubstantiation of liquids goes ink, “crimson liquid” (mercury), “clouds” (water), blood, ink, blood. For more about San Gennaro (Saint Januarius) go here. The poem embodies its theme – that a poem can have a transforming, prayer-like impact on readers.

At Dave Lull’s suggestion I read Slavitt’s prose collection, Re Verse (2005), a mingling of criticism, memoir and gossip. Slavitt addresses “Ink” in the final essay, “The Poetry of Grief.” Before reproducing the poem he addresses “the overarching mystery of poetry, which is that a poet can write something quite private and readers can respond to it, supplying from their own lives those energizing details that the literary work invites and exploits.”

This merely but memorably states the obvious: A work of art is collaborative. The best readers are active readers, responding in complex and often private ways to a poem. Not all understandings are equal and some are plain wrong but the reader is not a tabula rasa, a passive receptor. A good reader works. After “Ink,” Slavitt writes:

“Eliot says somewhere that in bad poetry, those things that ought to be conscious are left unconscious, and those things that ought to be left unconscious are made conscious. Another way of describing this mysterious business is to think of a poem as an act of discovery. (Frost used to say, `No surprise for the writer; no surprise for the reader.’) If the poet knows what he is going to discover, the poem is probably not worth writing [or reading]. What I did not realize during the writing of [“Ink”] was its connection with an earlier poem about my mother’s murder, in 1982.”

Slavitt inserts another poem, “Bloody Murder,” but I stopped reading. For years I had been enjoying a poem, never suspecting it touched on the murder of his mother or even that his mother had been murdered. This was a shocking reminder of poetry’s oblique mystery. The most powerful poems often work by indirection. Literalness can be numbing and diffuse, a particularly apt thought prompted as it is by an essay titled “The Poetry of Grief.” Immediately after “Bloody Murder,” Slavitt writes:

“The blood at the end of `Ink,’ then, is not mere blood, but relates to that of my mother and, through her, that of Jesus.”

`Sadness, Absurdity, and Humanism'

“I remember Isaac Rosenfeld, the most winning of all American Jewish writers, once explaining to me with comic solemnity that Chekhov had really written in Yiddish but Constance Garnett, trying to render him respectable, had falsified the record. Anyone with half an ear, said Rosenfeld, could catch the tunes of Yiddish sadness, absurdity, and humanism in Chekhov’s prose – and for a happy moment it almost seemed true.”

I read this passage for the first time in Irving Howe’s Selected Writings 1950-1990 and laughed out loud. It’s from “Strangers,” an uncharacteristically autobiographical essay first published in The Yale Review in 1977, not long after Howe’s World of Our Fathers had become an unexpected bestseller. D.G. Myers tells me Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing by Steven J. Zipperstein will be published in March. Rosenfeld was a wonderful writer, best known for his 1946 novel Passage from Home. He died in 1956 at age 38, seemingly loved by everyone who knew him. One hopes Zipperstein’s book sparks a revival of interest in Rosenfeld’s work. His boyhood friend Saul Bellow writes:

“He swayed his friends with an unknown power. We called it ‘charm,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘genius.’ In the end, with a variety of intonations, we could find nothing to call it but ‘Isaac.’… He enlarged his power to love. Many loved him. He was an extraordinary and significant man.”

It’s Howe’s anecdote that interests me here, “the tunes of Yiddish sadness, absurdity, and humanism” in Chekhov’s stories. I’m not a Yiddish speaker and I read Chekhov only in translation, but I’ve often heard those tunes, at least as I’ve come to recognize them through the sound system of Jewish American writing. I’ve never heard them in Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. I hear them in “Difficult People” (1886), which might almost have been written by Bernard Malamud. Pyotr is a student who has just argued with his father about money for clothing and books, and who goes for an aimless walk on the steppe:

“…at once he caught himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping with his gloomy mood. Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and wild duck do. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they may be, it’s hard for an outsider’s eyes to see them; they are a secret.”

“Difficult People,” in fact, was translated into Yiddish in 1903, with Chekhov’s permission and at the request of Solomon Rabinovich, better known as Sholom Aleichem. The story is told in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973), translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky. Here’s the footnote by Karlinksy that sets it up:

“The great Yiddish storyteller wrote to Chekhov asking him to contribute a story to a collection he was editing and which was to be published in Warsaw for the benefit of the victims of the recent atrocious pogrom in Kishinyov. Since Chekhov was not able to supply a new story, Sholom Aleichem selected his earlier piece, `Difficult People,’ which was translated into Yiddish and included in the collection.”

And here is Chekhov’s letter in response, dated June 19, 1903:

“Dear Solomon Naumovich,

“I’m writing nothing or very little these days, so I can make you only a conditional promise: I’ll be glad to write the story if my illness doesn’t prevent it, As for stories of mine that have already been published, they are entirely at your disposal, and I will be nothing if not deeply gratified to see them translated into Yiddish and printed in a miscellany for the benefit of the Jewish victims in Kishinyov.

“With my sincere respect and devotion,

“A. Chekhov”

In a second footnote, Karlinsky reports:

“On August 6, 1903, Chekhov wrote to Sholom Aleichem again, offering to help place a Russian translation of one of Sholom Aleichem’s stories in any journal of his choice.”

Chekhov died less than a year later, on July 15, 1904.

`Touch It So Lightly'

“A dark violet plum,
the last one on the tree,
thin-skinned and delicate as the pupil of an eye,
that in the dew at night blots out
love, visions, shivering,
and then at the morning star the dew
grows weightless: That
is poetry. Touch it so lightly
that you don’t leave a fingerprint.”

A plum tree grew outside our backdoor. Hemmed in by the house and a wall of tall elms, it was stunted and came to resemble an oversized toilet brush, but its fruit was juicy, sweet and bountiful. The skin of the plums was deep purple, the fruit yellow-orange. When plums fell to the ground and bruised or split, wasps and yellow jackets feasted. Plums in the grocery are hard and flavorless measured against the fruit of our twisted little tree.

“Poetry,” the poem above, was written in Yiddish in 1954 by Abraham Sutzkever, and translated by Chana Bloch (in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Poetry, edited by Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse and Khone Shmeruk). Sutzkever was born in Lithuania in 1913 and grew up in Siberia, where his parents fled during World War I. In the 1930s he belonged to the Young Vilna group of writers and artists. He escaped the Vilna Ghetto in 1943 and joined the partisans. After the war he lived in Moscow and Łódź, and immigrated to Israel in 1947. That a man who endured so much history could write so delicate a poem is remarkable. That his theme is the essential delicacy of poetry is doubly remarkable:

”Touch it so lightly
that you don’t leave a fingerprint.”

Sometimes a spindly, boxed-in tree bears the sweetest fruit.

`He's a Bloody Genius and So On'

Two books in recent years -- Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists and Richard Lingeman’s Double Lives: American Writers’ Friendships – squandered the promising premise of tracking intersecting literary careers. Both books are dutifully written, at best (Cohen’s is pretentious, Lingeman’s plodding), and both foundered, in part, because of the artists they chose to examine. Who cares about James Baldwin, John Cage, Norman Mailer and Gertrude Stein (in Cohen’s case), and Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (in Lingeman’s)? By choosing mediocre (albeit fashionable) writers, Cohen and Lingeman compromised their claims on the respect of readers. One of Lingeman’s subjects, Herman Melville, wrote “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” and there’s nothing mighty above Baldwin, Cassady, etc.

Let me suggest an alternative set of writers whose relations are more worthy of study. Consider Yvor Winters -- an influential critic and poet, and a one-man social network. He and his students and other acquaintances, including Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, Donald Justice and Janet Lewis, would constitute a book unto themselves.

What I have in mind is not a dry, obligatory recitation of dates and tired anecdotes but a work in the spirit of Richard Holmes’ two-volume life of Coleridge, an act of sympathetic, imaginative re-creation, like superior fiction. See how Holmes describes the single meeting between Coleridge and Keats, all drawn from primary sources, corroborated by secondary sources, and as vivid and amusing as a good story. He quotes a letter Keats wrote to his brother George, saying Coleridge “broached a thousand things,” then renders a comic account of the older poet’s conversation: “-- let me see if I can give you a list. – Nightingales, Poetry – on Poetical sensation – Metaphysics – Different genera and species of Dreams – Nightmare – a dream accompanied by a sense of Touch – A dream related – First and Second Consciousness,” and so forth for another five lines.

Now consider how the preeminent American novelist and poet of the postwar era, Saul Bellow and John Berryman, were excellent, sustained friends. Their mutual respect and the love of each man for the other is a refreshing exception to the customary jealousies and backstabbing of the literary life. Bellow contributed an affectionate forward to Berryman’s posthumously published novel Recovery. Berryman had died a suicide on Jan. 7, 1972. Bellow begins:

“He wrote in one of his last letters to me, `Let's join forces, large and small, as in the winter beginning of 1953 in Princeton, with the Bradstreet blazing and Augie fleecing away. We're promising!’”

They enjoyed each other’s work and company immensely. Bellow agonized over Berryman’s alcoholism and general self-destructiveness:

“He knocked himself out to be like everybody else – he liked, he loved, he cared, but he was aware that there was something peculiarly comical in all this. And at last it must have seemed that he had used up all his resources. Faith against despair, love versus nihilism, had been the themes of his struggles and his poems. What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit. He drew it out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive. Forces were not joined. The cycle of resolution, reform, and relapse had become a bad joke that could not continue.”

Berryman had read The Adventures of Augie March in manuscript, and when prominent reviewers were uncomprehending, Berryman published “A Note on Augie” in The New York Times Book Review on Dec. 6, 1953:

“I would guess that the effect of the sharpness and acrobatic freedom of Augie March ought to be salutary, as Crane’s naturalism was [Berryman had published Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography in 1950].”

In her memoir Poets in Their Youth, Berryman’s former wife, Eileen Simpson, recalls the arrival of Augie:

“A few days later John came home with the typescript of Saul's new novel and said, `I'm going to take the weekend off to read this.’ Seated in his red leather chair, immobile for hours except to light a cigarette, make a note on a small white pad, run the corkscrew he liked to toy with through his fingers, or let out a high-pitched `eeeeeeeeeeeee,’ which meant he was laughing so hard he couldn't get his breath, he trained his intelligence on The Adventures of Augie March, giving it the kind of reading every writer dreams of having. After the first chapter, he said, `It's damn good.’ When he finished, `Bellow is it. I'm going to have lunch with him and tell him he's a bloody genius and so on.’”

Most importantly, in the first volume of his master work, 77 Dream Songs, Berryman dedicated “Dream Song 75” to Bellow:

“Turning it over, considering, like a madman
Henry put forth a book.
No harm resulted from this.
Neither the menstruating stars (nor man) was moved
at once.
Bare dogs drew closer for a second look

“and performed their friendly operations there.
Refreshed, the bark rejoiced.
Seasons went and came.
Leaves fell, but only a few.
Something remarkable about this
unshedding bulky bole-proud blue-green moist

“thing made by savage & thoughtful
surviving Henry
began to strike the passers from despair
so that sore on their shoulders old men hoisted
six-foot sons and polished women called
small girls to dream awhile toward the flashing & bursting
tree!”

What a year, 1964: 77 Dream Songs and Bellow’s Herzog.

`Security and Exhilaration'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along links to Kay Ryan's interview with The Paris Review and a poem in the same issue, "The Walking Stick Insect." Ryan is the antithesis of most contemporary poets -- she's funny, self-deprecating and her poems make sense and are a pleasure to read. Here are two of her observations:

“I think there’s too much poetry out there. I don’t need to add to the waste stream.”

“It seemed like I was going to be Henry Darger. The poems would have been stuck in my room. I’ve gotten a lot of my subject matter from failure. I began to think of myself as a terrific underdog. There’s a certain security and exhilaration in that.”

`Wrinkled As an Old Paper Bag'

I remember the sentence that stopped me, knocked me envious and left me wanting to write something as good:

“She was as wrinkled as an old paper bag, an autocrat, hard-shelled and jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik, her small ribboned gray feet immobile on the shoekit and stool Simon had made in the manual-training class, dingy old wool Winnie whose bad smell filled the flat on the cushion beside her.”

Almost overripe, the prose is saved by Bellow’s attentiveness to visual reality, comedy and a wide-ranging sense of history. I like the casual, playful allusiveness, Bellow’s trademark mingling of high and low. When I read the sentence for the first time at age 15, every day I was carrying my lunch to school in an old paper bag. “Autocrat” I knew – that was my father. The lower-case “j” in “jesuitical” threw me – a put-down, like Eliot’s lower-case “j” in “jew?” Why “pouncy?” An autocrat, a jesuit and a Bolshevik? I recognized and thrilled to the Joycean jettisoning of commas in “small ribboned gray feet.” “Manual-training class” meant wood shop, and my Winnie was named Mike. Literal-minded spell-check software won’t recognize “jesuitical,” “pouncy,” “ribboned” and “shoekit.”

As I reread The Adventures of Augie March, I relive some of that 40-year-old rush of excitement, possibility and recognition. Some readers claim to get it from On the Road but the comparison is no good for the simplest of reasons – Kerouac couldn’t write. His prose is prosaic. Consider the sentence that follows the one cited above:

“If wit and discontent don’t necessarily go together, it wasn’t from the old woman that I learned it.”

Kerouac had no wit and little sense of humor, and could never have crafted those two sentences or put them side by side. When I interviewed Robert Coover – hardly a Zolaesque naturalist – he said two novels published in the 1950s galvanized him and his friends and opened doors for subsequent fiction writers – Augie March (1953) and William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955). By the time I caught up with the former, I had already worked my way through the tradition of American fiction Bellow was surpassing, from Twain and Dreiser through Farrell and Dos Passos. During my first reading on the novel, Augie seemed like the articulate, intelligent, sober offspring of Studs Lonigan.

I was looking for a way, in words, to make sense of my American existence, and Bellow and Augie showed me one. Most of the stories I wrote in high school shamelessly borrowed Bellow’s language and his free-wheeling ways with plot. One, “The Resurrection of Vinnie Armstrong,” opened with the title character dismantling a mechanical pencil and ended with him stealing a car and driving west. My enthusiasm was boosted by the thrill of finding the name of my home town in the text. I remember I was in my room, lying on the bed, when I read it for the first time:

“The traffic dived and quivered past me, and when I reached a place near Ashtabula, Ohio, where the Nickel Plate line approaches the highway, I saw a freight going toward Cleveland with men sitting on the boxcars, and in the flats, and in under-angles of gondolas, and eight or ten guys shagging after and flipping themselves up on the rungs.”

`Lunching on Olympus'

A most fortunate man, Steven L. Isenberg had lunch with W.H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin and William Empson. In the winter issue of The American Scholar he writes about his meetings with eminent writers in "Lunching on Olympus":

"As I have grown older, read more, and now teach, becoming what J. D. Salinger called a `lifetime English major,' how many times I’ve wished for another meeting with each of them, because I have so much more to ask. And to hear again how each was so indelibly himself, to say some thanks to them for their part in making my teaching years full, to show them how much these meetings meant to me."

`Beauty Triumphing Over Skill'

When I started Anecdotal Evidence almost three years ago the first words I posted were not mine but William Hazlitt’s, from “The Fight.” This was an act not of humility but gratitude. The essay is the literary form I value most, from Montaigne and Johnson to Lamb and Liebling, and Hazlitt stands high in their company. According to his latest biographer, Duncan Wu, “The Fight” was something new in the world – part reportage, part memoir, part prose poem. Here is the passage I used to introduce this blog:

“…we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

Odd that lines from an account of a bloody, bare-knuckle fight should serve as my welcome to readers. In William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, Wu notes that Hazlitt and some 25,000 other spectators became, in effect, accessories to a criminal act. Boxing had been outlawed in England since 1750 (83 years before the abolition of slavery), but Hazlitt’s tastes were raffish and he enjoyed rubbing shoulders with dubious characters.

Wu describes the secrecy that surrounded the fight between Tom “The Gas-man” Hickam and Bill Neate on Dec. 11, 1821. Boxing aficionados from all classes were known collectively as the “Fancy.” Hazlitt had trained as a boxer under Bill Richmond, “a man of colour, and a native of America,” and relied on such connections to locate the fight and arrange to get there. The owner of a tavern in Chancery Lane, the Hole in the Wall, sent him to Hungerford in Berkshire, 70 miles away. On the coach he met John Thurtle, proprietor of the Black Boy tavern in Long Acre where, Wu says, “he entertained so many brawling, disreputable customers that his license was revoked.” He was executed for murder in 1824. Back to Wu:

“Hazlitt’s description of the match is a virtuoso display of technique, the like of which had not previously been seen; he even coined a phrase now known to every sports fan around the world: `In the first round every one thought it was all over.’ The challenge he gives himself is: can I replicate in words the cut and thrust of a fist? He did so magnificently, in a manner sportswriters have imitated ever since.”

And here’s a sample of Hazlitt’s prose:

“Neate seemed like a lifeless lump of flesh and bone, round which the Gas-man's blows played with the rapidity of electricity or lighting, and you imagined he would only be lifted up to be knocked down again. It was as if Hickman held a sword or a fire in the right hand of his, and directed it against an unarmed body. They met again, and Neate seemed, not cowed, but particularly cautious. I saw his teeth clenched together and his brows knit close against the sun. He held out both his arms at full-length straight before him, like two sledge-hammers, and raised his left an inch or two higher. The Gas-man could not get over this guard -- they struck mutually and fell, but without advantage on either side.”

Wu speculates that the vividness of Hazlitt’s prose in “The Fight” owes something to his experience as a painter and his study of such masters as Titian and Raphael. That’s unconvincing. Instead, I would suggest that by 1821 Hazlitt had mastered the art of the English sentence, as few writers have, and he chose an event suited to his gifts. It was a superbly timed encounter between artist and subject.

Inevitably one thinks of Liebling’s accounts of boxing matches collected in The Sweet Science. Liebling, of course, knew Hazlitt’s essay, though he ranked it below the work of his “fistic" mentor Pierce Egan, author of Boxiana. I should mention that I’m not a boxing fan and have never seen a fight but I’m a fan of good prose. When Hazlitt sent the finished essay to the New Monthly Magazine, its editor, Thomas Campbell, “racked his brains to think of some reason for rejecting it,” Wu reports. (Hazlitt had once rightly accused Campbell of plagiarizing a line in one of his poems.) Campbell said:

“The subject is thoroughly blackguard! It gives currency to a disgraceful, demoralizing species of vulgar exhibition that brands England just as the bull-fight does Spain with disgrace in the sight of all civilized nations.”

Campbell’s motives are dubious and ultimately he agreed to publish “The Fight,” but I sympathize with his assessment of bare-knuckle boxing and bullfighting. Hazlitt’s account is exciting, but it also gives some notion of the violence on display: “…the other returned it with his left at full swing, planted a tremendous blow on his cheek-bone and eyebrow, and made a red ruin of that side of his face.”

Hazlitt was among the first writers to treat popular culture in a literary manner, without condescension or moralizing. He did the same in “The Indian Jugglers.” What he writes of the art of juggling in that essay serves as an apt assessment of Hazlitt’s own art:

“It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill.”

`Wry, Ironical, Guarded'

Only rarely has D.J. Enright’s name shown up at Anecdotal Evidence and for that I apologize. He was a model of sorts for this blog and for a life in writing, a thoroughly decent man, civilized, without pretensions, of necessity opposed to the drift of his time. He was, perhaps, the last man of letters in the old sense – poet, novelist, critic, memoirist, translator, teacher – and died on New Year’s Eve 2002 at age 82. The following November, Paul Dean published “Writing for Antiquity: the Ironies of D.J. Enright,” in which he distills Enright’s charm as a writer:

“He cultivated a doggedly unfashionable persona and quoted with approval Charles Lamb’s reaction to an editorial letter of rejection: `Damn the age! I will write for Antiquity.’”

Dean thinks less of Enright’s poetry than I. Here’s a favorite, a self-portrait-in-disguise, “Dreaming in the Shanghai Restaurant”:

"I would like to be that elderly Chinese gentleman.
He wears a gold watch with a gold bracelet,
But a shirt without sleeves or tie.
He has good luck moles on his face, but is not disfigured with fortune.
His wife resembles him, but is still a handsome woman,
She has never bound her feet or her belly.
Some of the party are his children, it seems,
And some his grandchildren;
No generation appears to intimidate another.
He is interested in people, without wanting to convert them or pervert them.
He eats with gusto, but not with lust;
And he drinks, but is not drunk.
He is content with his age, which has always suited him.
When he discusses a dish with the pretty waitress,
It is the dish he discusses, not the waitress
The table-cloth is not so clean as to show indifference,
Not so dirty as to signify a lack of manners.
He proposes to pay the bill but knows he will not be allowed to.
He walks to the door like a man who doesn't fret about being respected, since he is;
A daughter or granddaughter opens the door for him,
And he thanks her.
It has been a satisfying evening. Tomorrow
Will be a satisfying morning. In between he will sleep satisfactorily.
I guess that for him it is peace in his time.
It would be agreeable to be this Chinese gentleman.”

Enright spent much of his teaching life outside England, in Egypt, Japan, Thailand and Singapore. His sensibility seems to have been very English but, like Kipling and Empson, peculiarly open to other cultures – thus, the Chinese gentleman. He was prolific, and picking a favorite among his books is a challenge. In the U.S., his best known volume is probably The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (1986). I favor The Collected Poems: 1948-1998 and his three final, unclassifiable books: Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995), Play Resumed: A Journal (1999), and the posthumously published Injury Time: A Memoir (2003). Here’s Dean’s description:

“Part journal, part anthology, part essay, part newspaper scrapbook, part collection of aphorisms, with some poems thrown in too, their unity is one of tone and personality: the tone wry, ironical, guarded, with melancholy never far away and the shadow of Death looming with increasing menace over the last book; the personality complex, playful and somber at once, in the manner of Montaigne or Robert Burton, both of whom Enright admired. Their style is oblique, compact, often epigramatic, full of sudden shifts of subject or perspective.”

When I said at the start that Enright was “a model of sorts,” these are some of the qualities I had in mind. We can think of him as another proto-blogger, like Montaigne, Thoreau and Ruskin. We could use his gentleness, toughness and formidable learning in the blogosphere. I was moved to finally write about him as I started reading Duncan Wu’s recently published William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Both men turned journalism into an art form. What Wu says of Hazlitt – “From an early age he was a citizen of the world.” and “…called upon for the smallest contribution to a newspaper column, he would give generously of his talents to produce something unique, amusing, and thought-provoking.” -- is likewise true of Enright.

`A Spiritual Strength of the Nation'

At D.G. Myers’ prompting I’ve read Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, a 1975 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg told from multiple points of view, largely by Union and Confederate officers. Only a ridiculous prejudice against historical fiction kept me from it. I visited the battlefield for the first time with my family in 1963, a month after the battle’s centennial, and have returned four times. There's no point in wasting words trying to convince you of Gettysburg’s centrality to American history and the emotional impact it has on an informed visitor. Lincoln said “we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground,” and as usual he was right, and not merely rhetorically. The ground had been hallowed four and a half months before he arrived in Gettysburg.

One of the novel’s most likeable and admirable figures is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, in civilian life a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College and “sometimes professor of `Natural and Revealed Religion,’ successor to the chair of the famed Professor Stowe, husband to Harriet Beecher [author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin].” Early in the novel, on the eve of the battle, Chamberlain must decide what to do with 120 “mutineers” from his home state of Maine. Before Chamberlain speaks to the men, Shaara tells us:

“He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth when the man mattered more than the state.”

These are stirring words, as is the speech Chamberlain addresses to the soldiers he has been authorized to execute if they don’t follow orders. All but six of them choose to join Chamberlain in the looming battle. The passage I’ve quoted suggests my notion of patriotism -- the least hip of sentiments – one that transcends politics. In Chamberlain’s musings I hear Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, my American forbears, though most of my ancestors didn’t arrive in the U.S. until 40 years after the Civil War.

I was primed for The Killer Angels by an e-mail on Saturday from a reader in British Columbia. Seldom does a reader point out something about what I’ve written that takes me by surprise – and is, incidentally, accurate and pleasing. He writes:

“I often think people become self-conscious when discussing a love of country - as if there is something scandalous or naive in expressing such sentiment.

“There's an old creative writing cliché (you are no doubt familiar with) that says `show don't tell.’ I can't know if you intend to show your love of country in your posts, but I tend to see it in your writing.

“That stores can ask customers for help with Russian translation (with both hope and expectation of finding it) says so much about the society you live in. Russian neighbours, Thai barbers, Romanian good Samaritans. You notice and remark about America in a way that leads us (your readers) to gradually recognize some of what you love about your country.

“I hope I'm not being too forward by saying that I prefer your more silent appreciation of the United States' international citizenry than I do more overt and NASCAR-appropriate gestures of patriotism. Not because it is more silent, but because it speaks to a spiritual strength of the nation rather than a physical one.

“And although it can be intimidating to some, I find that stepping onto a bus and hearing seven or eight different languages being spoken a better measure of a nation's greatness than is the ability to field an army.”

Often others see us more acutely than we see ourselves and sometimes express themselves more eloquently. Patriotism has been corrupted, burdened with opposed meanings freighted with nonsense and vulgarity. One fears being misunderstood but knows misunderstanding is inevitable. Being an America means “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Whitman was in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 1863, as news of the battle arrived. In his diary he noted:

“I walked on to Armory Hospital -- took along with me several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup -- good and strong, but innocent; went through several of the wards; announced to the soldiers the news from Meade; and gave them all a good drink of the syrups with ice water – quite refreshing; prepared it all myself and served it around.

“Meanwhile the Washington bells are ringing their sundown peals for Fourth of July, and the usual fusillades of boys' pistols, crackers, and guns.”

`A Tale Worth Telling'

In the waiting room of the ballet school where my middle son was in class Saturday morning, I read early Chekhov from Love and Other Stories, in the fusty old Garnett translation. The stories date from his twenties, when he wrote comic sketches for newspapers with names like Oskolki (Splinters) and Novoye vremya (New Time). Chekhov was a medical student and his family’s chief breadwinner. He wrote prolifically and with enviable facility – 262 pieces for Oskolki, 29 for Novoye vremya. This is not the Chekhov we revere and think we know, the author of “My Life,” “Gusev” and “Ward No. 6,” but signals of his imminence are everywhere.

“A Work of Art” (1886) is amusing and obliquely sexy, an exercise in the comedy of human futility, but readers savoring guilty pleasures will be reminded of O. Henry. From the same year, “A Story Without an End” is a Gothic tale of attempted suicide and an actor’s inability to stopping acting and merely live. It features a writer as its self-conscious narrator, and toys with metafictional gimmicks, but concludes in the tones of the mature Chekhov. The narrator asks, “How will it end?” – Vassilyev’s life and the story we’re reading -- and he answers with the final paragraph:

“Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the drawing-room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on that man’s account on that terrible night. It is as though I had lost something….”

Even through the clunky though endearing medium of Garnett’s translation, we recognize “Chekhov,” his inveterate mingling of comic and doleful without verbal ostentation. A flashy style would seem ephemeral and distract from the stripped-down goings-on, for these stories are as economical as silent comedies. I like some rich, meaty, attention-getting styles, but in Chekhov the bareness and reticence suit the material. Irving Feldman puts the matter of style like this in “Fragment” (from The Life and Letters, 1994):

“The language isn’t saved by style
but by a tale worth telling.
Not, then, to purify the old words
but to bring new speech into
the lexicon of the tribe,
to tell, for example, how they
received their names -- the gods –
who die in every generation
--the world ends—
and are revived under new vocables
as yet unknown to us
and in other, still unguessable shapes
--that must be the world renewed, the new world.
Or even to tell--if we can tell
no more than this -- how they came to die
and lost their names and their allure, were husks
hardly able to hold our whispers,
even this allows us a kind
of communion, a beginning of sorts,
a way to keep feeling alive.”

`Just Walking Dully Along'

As I parked my car an ambulance with lights flashing stopped at the entrance to the supermarket. I walked in behind three burly EMTs carrying a stretcher, canvas bags and oxygen tank. They strode with purpose but didn’t run, and appeared well rehearsed in the routine of injury and death. They turned left and I walked past the checkout counters before doing the same. Between cash registers I could see them standing over a figure on the floor, in front of the lottery-ticket vending machine. I couldn’t see enough to determine if it was male or female, child or adult, and I thought of Auden, his Old Masters and how they understood the “human position” of suffering. Two elegant young women in heels, one with a cell phone to her ear, clattered past, unseeing – “just walking dully along,” as Auden puts it.

Finished with my rubber-necking, I went looking for dental floss, deodorant and a plastic spray bottle for shooting water at the cat when he claws the couch. A female voice over the public-address system asked Russian-speaking shoppers to please report to the customer-service desk. I chose the checkout line closest to the EMTs and their patient, a woman in her mid-30s with spiky black hair and smeared mascara, now sitting against the lottery-ticket machine. A teenage grocery clerk in a soiled white apron leaned over her, speaking Russian.

In a letter written Oct. 11, 1899, to Grigory Rossolimo, a fellow physician and professor of neuropathology at Moscow University, Chekhov writes:

“I have no doubt that my involvement in medical science has had a strong influence on my literary activities; it significantly enlarged the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose true worth to a writer can be evaluated only by somebody who is himself a doctor…”

Auden told Joseph Brodsky he thought Chekhov was the only Russian writer with common sense.

`As New a Miracle as the First Crocus'

Ours is stout-hearted weather here in the Pacific Northwest. The locals think so. Snow, then rain and a brief hail storm, but mostly rain. In 24 hours I cleared the sewer grate in front of our house three times. By the third time, backed-up water had “ponded” (a verb I learned in Houston) to the middle of the street. Nearby towns have flooded but we’ve been spared. At its noontime brightest, the sky is pewter-colored. What snow remains is sooty, the name Ernest Shackleton gave one of his sled dogs.

The narrow strip of ground between the sidewalk and our rented house is covered with reddish, clinker-like stones, the by-product of some industrial process, like slag. As I returned from retrieving the trash bins in the rain I noticed a fleck of white in the red. It was a crocus, a single white blossom, bowed like a woman in mourning. I judge the seasons against the Midwest and Northeast where I’ve spent most of my life. According to my internal field guide, this was a sport of nature. Like the first robin, a crocus is supposed to signal spring, even on January 8. That’s Geoffrey Hill’s understanding, too, in the first stanza of “In the Valley of the Arrow” (from Without Title):

“First flowers strike artificial at first sight,
the colours appear concocted, perhaps they are.
Crocus for starters soon looks pretty
much washed out.”

The same flower shows up in one of Hill’s poems from Tenebrae, “Veni Coronaberis”:

“The crocus armies from the dead
rise up; the realm of love renews
the battle it was born to lose,
though for a time the snows have fled

“and old stones blossom in the south
with sculpted vine and psaltery
and half-effaced adultery
the bird-dung dribbling from its mouth;

and abstinence crowns all our care
with martyr-laurels for this day.
Towers and steeples rise away
Into the towering gulfs of air.”

The poem’s dedication reads “A Garland for Helen Waddell.” Earlier in the day, by odd coincidence, I had pulled out Waddell’s The Desert Fathers and The Wandering Scholars. A friend introduced me to her books 35 years ago and I’ve always prized them. Look what she writes in The Wandering Scholars:

“There is no beginning, this side the classics, to a history of medieval Latin; its roots take hold too firmly on the kingdoms of the dead. The scholar’s lyric of the twelfth century seems as new a miracle as the first crocus; but its earth is the leafdrift of centuries of forgotten scholarship.”

`A Small Girl Almost Smiled'

The daughters of a woman who works with my wife spent the afternoon with us on Wednesday when their school was closed because of flooding. The girls are roughly the ages of my younger sons and they’ve become compatible if not best friends. Both girls are bright, articulate, personable and affectionate – kids whose company is easy to enjoy. At the library they collected their stacks of books and we met at a table in the children’s section. The girls favor manga, Japanese comic books about which I know nothing. My 5-year-old and the younger of the girls sat on my lap as the older one showed us the back-to-front layout of the manga.

A library patron, a woman of about 35, was watching us – watching me. My arms were around the kids and I had the uncomfortable sensation of being evaluated as a possible pedophile, if not already convicted. It was the glare of the relentlessly virtuous, and here was my dilemma: Do I do what comes naturally and what I would do without a second thought at home – that is, go on holding the kids? Or do I loosen my embrace and move them away – subtly, as if that would somehow absolve my guilt in the eyes of this woman? And why do I care what she thinks? She’s a nosy, suspicious stranger, someone whose opinion ought to mean nothing to me. I waffled and told the kids we were leaving – sooner than any of us wished. My discomfort in the library was hardly unique. D.G. Myers at The Commonplace Blog has touched on this uneasy subject:

“The denigration of normal men is not the only consequence of the general dirty-mindedness. When all men are potential perverts, actual perverts disappear into the crowd, losing their special brand of evil. They can no longer be distinguished from other men.”

In other words, more is at stake than my occasional uneasiness. David was responding, in part, to an essay at Pajamas Media by Mary Jackson, who writes of the corresponding situation in England:

“It is acceptable — just — for a woman to talk to someone else’s child in a public place, but a man who does the same thing must be a pervert. Has it come to this? How many perverts are there, for goodness sake?”

I resent the intrusion of the virtue police in our lives. Even more, I resent that I have internalized their intrusion and learned to question and stifle my nature. “Don’t smile please,” by the late D.J. Enright, dates from the early nineties and nails this phenomenon with rueful precision:

“Since the primary school is next door
You can’t help passing the playground
But don’t you smile at the children
Whether a small girl or a little boy
Don’t you even look
You know what people will think
And you really can’t blame them.

“What a world we live in! What went wrong?
If there’s another world to come
Let’s hope it’s one where people smile
And you can smile back safely.

“Once they asked you to return their ball
It had sailed over the palings –
Eyes cast discreetly upwards, you stepped
Into the street and were nearly run down
Still, a little boy said `Thank you, mister’
A small girl almost smiled.”

There it is: “You know what people will think.” Life grows a little grimmer when we mind the business of others.

`The Furniture of Other Minds'

A Canadian reader, after the dustup sparked by the “Best American Fiction, 1968-1998” list David Myers and I assembled, asks:

“Finally, a question: Where does James Salter fit into your considerations? I've always enjoyed his writing. Don't worry, Patrick, I won't throw a tantrum and start posting on other sites if you don't share my estimation of him. I'm just curious how more experienced readers than myself perceive Salter. I 'discovered' Salter long before I'd ever heard of Malamud or Bellow, so there's one reason he quickly sprung to my mind when I read your list. Incidentally, there's something to discuss another time - how do readers encounter great writers. For myself it was from lists such as the one you and Mr. Meyers have compiled. I've never met anyone who has talked about reading Bellow or Malamud.”

I’ve read several of Salter’s novels, including A Sport and a Pastime, around which a cult of devotees has assembled. I interviewed him 11 years ago and he signed a copy of his memoir, Burning the Days, as a gift to my father-in-law who was a pilot and remains interested in aviation. Salter was restrained and plain-spoken, like his fiction, and I’ve read nothing else by him. That’s it – no distaste, no spark.

I’m more interested in the other question Jonathan poses: “how do readers encounter great writers?” Naïve? Not really. Lists can be helpful but misleading, depending on the list makers, their motives, the extent of their reading, their tone. Are they sharing enthusiasms or proselytizing? Are they generous or snobbish?

With Jonathan I could have said, “I've never met anyone who has talked about reading Bellow or Malamud.” I came from a family of non-readers, though I didn’t start autonomous reading from scratch. There were fairy tales, nursery rhymes, Bible stories, whatever caught my eye or ear in the library. William Gass calls this “shelf-shopping.” That’s how I first read Kafka, Dickens, Tom Disch, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, Herbert Gold, Sax Rohmer, Freud, Ezra Pound and others – a magpie’s nest of authors chosen according to happy serendipity. While looking for one book, Gass says in “A Defense of the Book,” he finds another:

“But right beside it, as well as two shelves down and five volumes to the right…well, I discovered another gold mine. That is why I stroll through the encyclopedia, why I browse the shelves. In a library, we are in a mind made of minds – imagine – all man has managed to think, to contrive, to suppose, to scheme, to insinuate, to lie about, to dream…here…within reach of our hand.”

I still use the library that way, walking through the front door with a list of titles in hand, finding them and drifting purposefully. Books are promiscuous. Books beget books. Poe led me to Baudelaire, Proust to Ruskin. I was the first in my family to go to college, where I wandered the largest library I had ever visited. I can no longer trace the thousands of connections but I know George Steiner connected me to Elias Canetti, Herman Broch and Paul Celan, and through Hugh Kenner I met Wyndham Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. Later, already in my thirties, Guy Davenport became a reliable scout. My favorite professor was a scholar of 18th-century English literature and her love of Sterne, Pope and Dr. Johnson proved contagious.

So, “How do readers encounter great writers?” A purposeful trust in the vagaries of chance is a good start. It helps to be an omnivore, at least at first. Fine-tune the bullshit detector and learn who you can trust. Don’t worry about occasionally getting burned. You don’t have to finish reading every book you start. Accept no one else’s taste as gospel. Know what you enjoy and what’s tiresome. On that final point, another friend wrote Tuesday evening:

“I read in large part to experience what is impossible otherwise--the furniture of other minds.”

The Year of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along news of The Year of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, a gift of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Here is their explanation:

"Welcome to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, a word-a-day dictionary from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, [1755]), one of the first dictionaries to document the daily working life of the English language.

"In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth in 1709 [on September 18], a definition from the first edition of the dictionary will be posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight, beginning on January 1, 2009. Words will be taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections, which is held in the collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

"To celebrate Johnson’s tercentenary, the Beinecke Library will be offering an exhibition on the writing of Boswell’s Life of Johnson in July - September, 2009, drawing on the Beinecke’s Boswell Family Papers collection. As a contribution to the tercentenary festivities, and in support of scholarship on Johnson and Boswell, the Beinecke will be scanning the entire James Boswell segment of the Boswell Family Papers and making the collection available in its Digital Images and Collections. Further information on the Boswell Family Papers can be found in the finding aid for the collection.

"If you should have any questions, please contact Kathryn James, the Beinecke Library’s Assistant Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts & the Osborn Collection, at kathryn.james@yale.edu."

`The Familiar Hearts of Strangers'

Early in Stanley Elkin’s 1976 novel The Franchiser, Ben Flesh visits his godfather, Julius Finsberg, in a swanky hospital suite in New York City. The old man, who made his fortune as a theatrical costumer, is dying. He lies in an oxygen tent: “Ben could hear the frightful crinkle of his respiration. He sounded as if he were on fire.” Next comes one of Elkin’s great set pieces, an extended riff on the wonders of existence and the cosmic odds against ever becoming one’s self. It’s a prelude to Finsberg telling the unsuspecting Flesh of his inheritance. He’s a foul-mouthed Lear in the ICU:

“`How crowded is the universe,’ his godfather said and moved the plasma arm vaguely. `How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap. Consider, Ben. You could have been a pencil or the metal band that holds the eraser to the wood, the wire of lead that runs through it. The black N in `Number 2’ stamped along one of its six sides. Or one of its six sides. Or the thin paint on another. You might have been a vowel on a typewriter or a number on a telephone dial or a consonant in books. There are thousands of languages, millions of typewriters, billions of books. You might have been the oxygen I breathe or the air stirred by this sentence. It is a miracle that one is not one of these things, a miracle that one is not a thing at all, that one is animal rather than mineral or vegetable, and a higher animal rather than a lower.”

And so on, gloriously, hilariously. I read Elkin’s novels as they were published, starting with his third, The Dick Gibson Show, in 1971, through Mr. Ted Bliss, which came out the year Elkin died, 1995. My timing was perfect for watching the flowering of a great writer’s career. I feel gratitude for the chance to have shared a time and place with Elkin, Nabokov, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, Philip Roth and some of the other writers Andrew Seal will not be reading in 2009: “I would like to resolve to read no novels or poetry by white American men for the next year.”

Renunciation of earthly pleasure is admirable – good for the soul, as they used to say -- though its effectiveness as a goad to humility is probably compromised by so public an announcement. I wish Andrew well, though I will be unable to follow his example. Call me hedonistic but I’m weak and rather attached to my modest, old-fashioned pleasures. In my lexicon, literature without pleasure is a self-canceling proposition.

Because art doesn’t recognize the efficacy of affirmative action, neither do I. Not once have I entered a bookstore or library and said, “I want to read a book by a Congolese writer.” The only African writer on the shelves of my home library is St. Augustine. I have said, if one can actually be said to say such things, “I want to read a novel set in Africa,” and proceeded to read Heart of Darkness and Naipaul’s great A Bend in the River (neither a White American Male). David Myers is more analytically and polemically gifted than I, blessed with the rare, recessive trait of logical argument. In this case he speaks for me:

“What you are matters nothing in literature. It is how you write that makes all—and I do mean all—the difference.”

I started this post with The Franchiser because I’m rereading it and because Elkin (Jewish American Male) is a useful example of a writer whose style makes all the difference. A potted précis of The Franchiser would go something like this: With his inheritance (the prime interest rate – 1.45 percent – for 1950) Ben Flesh buys franchises like Howard Johnson’s and Fred Astaire dance studios and…Forget it. It’s beside the point. You can reduce Joyce Carol Oates’ 327th novel to a nugget of plot, render soap from its fat, and you’re not missing much. But Elkin is “word-besotted” (borrowed from Cynthia Ozick, JAF), even more than his friend William Gass (WAM), but immensely funnier. Literature is the part you can’t distill into a Cliff-Notes essence. Reduce this from Finsberg’s monologue:

“It’s incredible really. Amazing. Who could believe it? You weren’t aborted, you didn’t end up in a scum bag. You survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio, mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD….And even without parents you’ve got clothes, shelter, sex, what to eat – you know, the drives, the hydramatics of being, four on the floor and more where they came from. Yes, and you get the point of jokes and have a favorite movie and maybe even the room where you stay is done up in your best color. My God, lad, you’re a fucking celebration!”

It can’t be done. This is a surfeit of metaphor, a hemorrhage of metaphor, a fucking celebration of metaphor, and Andrew will miss it and a thousand other delights. Imagination trumps politics every time. Let’s give a woman, Ozick in “Metaphor and Memory,” the last word:

“Through metaphor, the past has the capacity to imagine us, and we it. Through metaphorical concentration, doctors can imagine what it is to be their patients. Those who have no pain can imagine those who suffer. Those at the center can imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine the weak. Illuminated lives can imagine the dark. Poets in their twilight can imagine the borders of stellar fire. We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers.”

`Some Amateur Not in the Business'

“On the shelf in my head are the few books I live with.
Chaucer’s clerk of Oxenford had twenty,
Which sounds about right. (Chaucer’s is one of them, surely.)
The rest are failures, the writer’s or mine, good manners
would prefer not to admit. Or else, like clothing,
say I have somehow outgrown them. The closet, too,
indicts with its profusion: what was I thinking?”

David R. Slavitt’s dilemma, as described in “Culls” from Falling from Silence (2001), will be familiar to dedicated readers. We acquire books for many reasons, respectable and less so – out of habit or boredom; to comfort ourselves with possessions or the unearned reputation for learning they imply to the naïve; to study; as investments; to ease loneliness; to read and enjoy. And for sentimental reasons, as the song says. If we live long enough and accumulate enough volumes, their bulk and the memories they emanate can grow burdensome. Tastes change. We chastise and negotiate with our younger selves. Slavitt, who is 73, writes:

“What will I re-read, or even consult?
Let us admit that, for all their heft on the shelves,
books are flighty, become souvenirs of themselves,
appealing no longer to intellect and taste
but playing to sentiment. Why else keep on hand
Look Homeward, Angel, except in the in the hope that the schoolboy
who turned its pages may show up some afternoon?”

He hits close to home. I remember a brief, passionate affair with Thomas Wolfe at age 12 going on 13. I walked around intoning “Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?” Then I discovered Kafka and unrequited love. Unlike Slavitt, I got rid of the evidence a long time ago, but I understand the nagging sentimentality. He asks:

“What remains when we finish reading a book?
The impression is vague, like the aftertaste of wine
Or the scent a woman was wearing that stays in the room
Which seems to remember and then imagine her presence.
Such residues, I used to assume, compounded,
changing, enriching the reader. And an education
was what persists and accumulates. The figure
is homelier now: imagine a porcelain sink
that over the years hard water has stained; look up;
and see what wisdom the face in the mirror has earned.”

A good reason for owning the essential books, the bottomless ones, is convenience of refreshment. Even a work we know well, across much of a lifetime, is an accumulation of impressions, often unreliable. My library is always evolving, though it seems to have reached a quantitative equilibrium. When I acquire new titles, as I did at Christmas, I cull others, selling or giving them away. In “Culls,” Slavitt speaks of not wishing to burden his survivors with so many books: “I ought not/presume to impose my tastes on his wife or children/and grandchildren.” For me that’s a minor concern. I’m spurred by tidiness. I don’t like clutter and have no wish to own a book I have no intention of reading or rereading (mostly the latter).

Look at cull: From the Latin colligere, “gather together,” by way of the Old French coillir, “collect, gather, select.” Its modern English cousin is “colander.” We cull white-tail deer. It implies selection not random decimation. The word sounds ominous to my ear, a mingled echo of skull and kill.

Slavitt gets around to the copies of his own books on his shelves, and “their silent/baleful reproaches.” He mostly ignores them, or claims to, and says, refreshingly, “A few I don’t dislike.” He hopes “a few…/found somehow/against all odds, a home…” Then he writes:

“That home I like to imagine my books may find
is not my house but in that of some amateur
not in the business, not a writer, reviewer,
editor, critic, or teacher – who every so often
has to do this, go through this dreary process
and cull. Instead, he keeps in his single bookcase
those few volumes he has made part of his life,
that speak to him somehow and in his head
resonate. And one of them is mine.”

Slavitt, in other words, writes to reach us, the sometimes forgotten common readers.

`Meticulous Humanity'

In June of 2000 my very pregnant wife and I drove to Concord, Mass., to attend a reunion at her prep school. I went to public school and had a dim notion that prep schools entailed snobbery and sodomy. I was prepared to feel uncomfortable but enjoyed myself immensely, thanks largely to two of my wife’s former teachers. She had always said prep school was a more significant part of her education than Georgetown but I was skeptical. When I met her former history teacher, he wanted to talk about the Civil War, particularly Walt Whitman’s involvement as a nurse in the Union field hospitals. So that’s what we did for an hour or so – former students and their spouses, including several well-informed Civil War buffs, seated at desks in a classroom, swapping stories. My self-imposed outsiderness quietly evaporated.

Her English teacher read aloud John Cheever’s story “Reunion,” published in The New Yorker in 1978. I’ve always admired its concision – two lives anatomized in three pages – its mingling of humor and sadness, and the way Cheever captures the stifling embarrassment we feel when someone we love does something foolish and embarrassing. Everyone present participated. Most seemed personally involved in the story, recognizing in it some aspect of their lives. For me it was a rare communal appreciation of a literary work. When the narrator reunites with his divorced father in New York City for the first time in three years, he writes:

“He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together.”

Of course, the story we were reading was precisely that record, which becomes piercingly poignant when we come to the story’s final sentence:

“`Goodbye, Daddy,’ I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.”

I remember people agreeing that the emotional impact of “Reunion” was made more powerful by its brevity. It was the length of a story you might tell an intimate friend. By the end of the session in my wife’s old classroom, I felt benignly tired, as one does after any meeting that engages the emotions. Later in the day, as we ran into others who had been there, we smiled like old friends, though we’d never met before. The prep school story came back to me as I’ve been rereading Cynthia Ozick’s essays. In “A Short Note on `Chekovian,’” for instance:

“[Chekhov] is not reticent, and his people are often charged with conviction, sometimes ludicrously, sometimes with the serious nobility of Chekhov himself. But even when his characters strike us as unwholesome, or exasperating, or enervated, or only perverse (especially then), we feel Chekhov’s patience, his clarity – his meticulous humanity, lacking so much as a grain of malevolence or spite.”

Of course, many readers, writers and critics would deny the possibility of “meticulous humanity” in so ephemeral and artificial a thing as a story. In a footnote to the title essay in Metaphor & Memory, Ozick charmingly nails such tiresome readers to the wall:

“Certain novelists claim that fiction must express a pure autonomy – must become a self-sufficient language-machine – in order to be innovative; others strip language bare of any nuance. These aestheticians and reductionists, seeming opposites, both end inevitably at the gates of nihilism. A certain style of poetry is so far committed to the exquisitely self-contained that it has long since given up on that incandescent dream we call criticism of life. Abandoning attachments, annihilating society, the airless verse of self-scrutiny ends, paradoxically, in loss of the self. A certain style of criticism becomes a series of overlapping solipsisms…”

`He Has No Mind'

I’ve already introduced my younger sons to Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, and thought it was time for Buster Keaton. He’s funnier than Chaplin and Lloyd, less sentimental, more athletic and always a pleasure to watch in motion, like a thoroughbred or Fred Astaire. I was concerned about the slower pacing compared to recent films and the absence of speech -- not “silence” because there’s always a piano soundtrack. They’re not ready for The General so from the library I borrowed a DVD of Keaton Plus, a delightful mishmash of shorts, excerpts, television appearances, home movies and commercials. The prize is Hard Luck, a short from 1921. The Keaton character tries to commit suicide by hanging, drinking poison and lying on a trolley track. In the best scene it’s night, headlights approach and Keaton sits on the road in their path. The headlights turn out to be not one automobile but two motorcycles. No wonder Beckett loved him.

Unprompted, my 5-year-old said he thought Keaton was funny because “he has no mind.” I asked what he meant and it seemed to boil down to this: When Keaton jumps from a roof or tumbles down stairs he doesn’t flop about or try obviously to protect himself. He moves gracefully and without emotion, like a well-oiled machine. I think David has been reading Bergson again.

For an adult of my temperament there’s another layer of appreciation when I watch silent films. Hard Luck was made the year my father was born. We’re watching a vanished, unimaginable world. Joyce and Eliot are readying masterpieces for publication the following year and Louis Armstrong will soon perform his first recorded solo on “Chimes Blues.” Wilson or Harding is president and all the people we see on the screen are long dead. Even the funniest silent film gives off a halo of sadness. Imagine seeing film of the Civil War. Michael McFee, a poet from North Carolina, captures this sense of evanescence and the great comedian’s nobility in “Buster Keaton”:

“Into the frenzy of falling bodies
and chaos of pastry, apollonian
and sober even as an infant,
he came, just as decades later
he would calmly step into a frame
and never leave. In the curious
oracle of his face, distant and mute
and abstracted perfect as statuary,
the lesson of his life could be seen:

“Patience. Be humble. Believe in grace
And miracles of our own foolish making.
Words are mostly waste. Laughter,
Like love, is a rigorous discipline.
Think slow. Act fast. Persevere.

“After the sacred grove of Hollywood
has babbled, flushed, and scattered,
his image quietly endures, surviving
even when the small boat of his career
launches bottomward sudden as an anchor,
his body stubborn as a buoy or pile
fixed on the horizon, until he sinks
(soon to return, grave-faced) beneath
His hat floating on the water.

“Or angled over some final tombstone:
The god of light, poetry, and movies
Still laughs at that one, Buster.”

I supplemented the DVD with a superb children’s book, Keep Your Eyes on the Kid (2008) by the English writer-illustrator Catherine Brighton. She follows Keaton through his vaudeville years, meeting Fatty Arbuckle and arriving in Hollywood. I also recommend Silent Echoes by John Bengston, who painstakingly tracked down locations in Keaton’s films and juxtaposes movie stills with recent photographs of the same scenes – contemporary Los Angeles as a ghost town. Beautiful, impressive and sad. Brighton cleverly uses a line from Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels as her epigraph (the bracketed word is hers):

“To the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little, this picture [book] is affectionately dedicated.”

`The Faintest Clamor of Celestial Horselaugh'

“Every new sentence, every new fragment of imaginative literature born into the world, is a heart-in-the-mouth experiment, and for its writer a profound chanciness; but the point of the risk is the continuation of a recognizably human enterprise.”

That Cynthia Ozick is a formidably intelligent writer is obvious to anyone even glancingly familiar with her fiction and essays. That formidable intelligence is not a prerequisite for being a first-rate writer, particularly a novelist, is likewise apparent. Consider two of our best – Willa Cather, William Faulkner. Neither was a bona fide intellectual, praise be. The reverse, too, is true. Brilliance of intellect doesn’t assure brilliant fiction. Exhibit A: David Foster Wallace.

The passage quoted above is from “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” included in Ozick’s first essay collection, Art & Ardor (1983). It amounts to a rearguard defense against experimentation in fiction for its own sake, and is a conflation of two earlier essays. The first, “Some Antediluvian Reflections,” dates from 1971, when meta-fictionists like Barth and Barthleme, and such lesser lights as Ronald Sukenick, Harry Mathews and Joseph McElroy, were all the rage. In the portion of “Innovation and Redemption” salvaged from that earlier essay Ozick writes:

“What is today called `experimental’ writing is unreadable. It fails because it is neither intelligent nor interesting. Without seriousness it cannot be interesting, and without mastery it will never be intelligent.”

This is delicious, little has changed, and I wish I had read it back in 1971. It might have saved a lot of time and energy in my subsequent reading life. I doubt it, though: I was young and impressionable and unable to distinguish idiosyncratic mastery (Beckett, Stanley Elkin) from kneejerk novelty (Coover, Vonnegut). In those years, avant-garde or experimental fiction took on a quasi-political or religious portentousness. I was 18-19, cocksure and unaware that I wallowed in bad faith. Not liking Catch 22, admitting it was mostly dull and unfunny (Nabokov added “seditious”), would have been tantamount to not liking The Beatles. Today, I recognize my thinking, or non- thinking, as a familiar, oxymoronic syndrome: rebelling as part of a herd, substituting the tastes of others for original thought, dissenting according to fashion. Without realizing it, I had set up a convenient and very unliterary (moral, in fact) duality -- experimental vs. “conventional.” The scare quotes give it all away. Ozick is good on this:

“The idea of the experimental derives from the notion of generations: a belief in replacement, substitution, discontinuity, above all repudiation…There are, in fact, no `generations,’ except in the biological sense. There are only categories and crises of temperament, and these crisscross and defy and dent chronology. The concept of generations, moreover, is peculiarly solipsistic: it declares that because I am new, then everything I make or do in the world is new.”

I think of Ozick’s essay, in particular this passage, as a repudiation of John Barth’s silly, influential “The Literature of Exhaustion,” published in 1967 in The Atlantic Monthly, and perhaps of Robbe-Grillet’s notions in For a New Novel. Barth wrote that “to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect.” Well, no. This would imply that writers, like physicians, must “know the literature,” and if they don’t they ought to get out of the business. I trust good writers to choose their own best precursors, as Faulkner chose Conrad. An absurd syllogism: Henry James read Tristram Shandy; Sterne perfected self-subverting fiction; ergo, James should never have written The Portrait of a Lady. Influence is not always anxiety. Look at Ozick and her longtime immersion (“adoration, ecstasy, and awe”) in James. No one would confuse Ozick’s fiction with The Forsyte Saga. In “Innovation and Redemption” she writes:

“The will to fashion a literature asserts the obliteration of time. The obliteration of time makes `experiment’ seem a puff of air, the faintest clamor of celestial horselaugh.”

The Things You Find in Books! Part 2

“What’s this, Dad?” asked my 8-year-old. He had been reading a Bionicles paperback from the library, a series spun off from a plastic building set manufactured by Lego. For an adult reader, they’re impenetrable, like Blake’s Prophetic Books or the Book of Mormon. Tucked inside was an endorsed check for $120, dated Dec. 12, 2008, and a filled-out deposit slip. Michael, unlike his father, was innocent enough not to briefly contemplate larceny. I found a telephone number matching the name on the slip but instead reached another honest person – same name, different guy. After a little more digging I found the rightful owner and mailed him the check but didn’t have the nerve to ask if he reads Bionicles.

Earlier the same day in the Half-Price Books nearest our neighborhood I had spoken with a couple of clerks about the unliterary objects they find in books. In the spirit of Eugene Henderson’s father, cash is common. Another employee had recently found several thousand dollars in a volume. She called the seller, who claimed the money but didn’t bother to reward the honest clerk. Also commonly found, they told me, are compromising photographs – low-tech homemade porno. “I want to know if the girl in the picture leaves it in the book,” one clerk said, “or the guy who took the picture. And which one gets pissed off.”

I’ve written about book dreck before, and there’s at least one website devoted to it.

`Thicket-Whisperer'

With the disappearance of snow in the last few days came the reappearance of birds. The backyard was crowded with dark-eyed juncos, crows and a lone robin working the dead grass like golfers in search of a ball. Through the front window we watched a war. Trash collectors, because of the ice and snow, haven’t visited our neighborhood in three weeks. The people across the street leave their open-topped trash bins at the curb. Crows and two species of gulls tore open the plastic trash bags and pulled out stinking riches. Gulls are bigger but crows are smarter and better organized. One crow would feed while two or three of his companions formed a defensive perimeter, repelling the swooping gulls. It looked like an avian reenactment of the charge of the French Cuirassiers against the British squares at Waterloo.

The loveliest seasonal poem I know about birds is “To a Bird in Winter” by Eric Ormsby (from Time’s Covenant):

“Thicket-whisperer, you
Cherish austerity,
Your small claws blue
Beneath the raggedy

“Habit of subzero
Song. And you will
Tutor me, flit-hero,
Accentual icicle,

“Prophet-minor of cold-
Crunched twigs and nettle-
Skeletons; your bold
Coal-chip pupil settle

“On me, where I follow
You, farther into hiddenness,
Aswarm in the swallow
Villas now left summerless.

“Remembrance of the sun
Glitters your retices;
Icy octaves bangle your dun
Beak that curettes crevices.”

“Cauterized, chipper, astute,
You concentrate the frigid waste
In fierce fluff, my modest flute
That whistles to the holocaust.”