`Light Vessel of Consciousness'

The school assigned me two children on Friday, both third-graders. The girl is tall for her age, skinny, with black hair and large black eyes. She has Down’s syndrome and is sweet-natured and eager to please. The boy is autistic, always moving, seldom talking. Both are largely independent, able to use the bathroom unaccompanied and punch in their lunch-account numbers on the keypad in the cafeteria. I spent most of the day just watching. What surprised me was how protective some of the other kids were of my special-ed. charges.

In grade school we were vicious with conspicuously handicapped kids. We taunted a first-grader with polio who wore cumbersome steel-and-leather braces on his legs. Kids on the bus threw paper wads and pencils at a macrocephalic kid and called him “Watermelon Head” (he died a few years later). This is predictable behavior, what I would expect. Kindness is a recessive trait and always a surprise.

Two girls adopted the girl with Down’s. They helped zip her jacket and wiped maple syrup from her face after lunch. They hugged her and stroked her hair and played with her throughout recess. They were unself-conscious in their solicitousness. Among girls this is not surprising. I thought of Henry James’ explanation for choosing a female protagonist for What Maisie Knew:

“…I at once recognised, that my light vessel of consciousness, swaying in such a draught, couldn’t be with verisimilitude a rude little boy; since, beyond the fact that little boys are never so ‘present’, the sensibility of the female young is indubitably, for early youth, the greater, and my plan would call, on the part of my protagonist, for ‘no end’ of sensibility.”

The little girls I watched, otherwise indistinguishable from their fellows, displayed immense “sensibility,” but so did the boys with the autistic kid. The three of them shot baskets for 45 minutes, performing the usual safely masculine high-fives and arm pumping, but also hugged and walked hand-in-hand or with arms around each others’ shoulders. A teacher told me this had happened spontaneously. No one ordered them to be nice to the handicapped kid. I went home, more hopeful than usual, to my own kids and to David Myers’ post about children, reading and writers:

“Only recently, after the birth of four children in five-and-a-half years, as I sit exhausted and happy from changing diapers, winding up toys, cooking dinner, pulling pajama tops over fine-haired heads, reading bedtime stories, and picking clothes off the floor and turning off lights, have I begun to appreciate how very little of ordinary life—family life—gets into American writing.”

Perhaps because so much American literature has been devoted to (and often written by) “isolatoes,” to borrow Melville’s coinage (Moby-Dick, Chapter XXVII: “They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.”). Solitaries often don’t have kids, which is probably a good thing. The best novel I know about children and family life was set in the United States and written here – by an Australian: Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (Randall Jarrell wrote of it: “…if all mankind had been reared in orphan asylums for a thousand years, it could learn to have families again by reading [it].”).The best novel I know about a disabled child and a parental figure was written by a Hungarian -- György Konrád’s The Case Worker. The best novel I know filtered through the consciousness of a child is What Maisie Knew.

Myers’ list of American writers and their children or absence of children is intriguing, and there are many ways to read it. Let’s be grateful, for the sake of the offspring, that Chandler, Crane, Millay, Porter and Wolfe went childless, but pity the kids of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O’Neill and Steinbeck. Which raises another question: What role did alcohol play in all of this?
Having children ought to signal the beginning of the end of selfishness. Your wishes and desires, indulged for so long, seem beside the point and shrivel in importance unless you happen to be Beale and Ida Farange – Maisie’s father and mother. Here’s what the childless Henry James wrote in his preface to What Maisie Knew:

“Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.… Maisie’s terms accordingly play their part – since her simpler conclusions quite depend on them; but our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies.”

`I Like to Live in a Good Age'

Under the pretext of reviewing two recent biographies of Samuel Johnson, whose 300th birthday we celebrate Sept. 18, Adam Kirsch eulogizes what he calls “the age of the professional writer.” It’s over. If Johnson was among its earliest exemplars, the last of his descendants are alive today and almost certainly doomed to extinction without progeny. Kirsch writes:

“For the last three centuries or so, it was possible to make a living, and a name, by writing what the public wanted to read. The novelist, the essayist, the critic, the journalist—all these literary types flourished in that historically brief window, which now appears to be closing. In the future, if fewer people are interested in reading and few of those are willing to pay for what they read, all these kinds of writers may go the way of the troubadour and the scribe.”

A confluence of economics, technology and the human drift toward intellectual entropy virtually assures the demise of a happy human efflorescence once thought permanent. My interest is more than academic. Most of my life I’ve earned my living with words, as a journalist for newspapers and a wire service, a science writer for two universities and as a freelancer. Chief among the pleasures this life affords is an ongoing ad hoc education. The lure of a paycheck compels us to hone our gifts as polymathic generalists: I’ve always been learning something, whether nanotechnology or human nature. Good writers, in my experience, tend to be autodidacts who turn necessity into some degree of professional autonomy – and a modest but livable paycheck. Kirsch writes:

“Reading about his life makes clear that Johnson's hard-won independence was something different from the much-celebrated freedom offered by the Internet, which allows any literate person a platform in the form of a Web site or blog. The democracy of the new medium is a good thing, of course, but like our democratic society itself, the Internet tends to encourage amateurism and atomization. It is hard to see how a writer like Johnson could arise in a future when writing is something done casually, in brief blog bursts in one's spare time. And it may not be long before the kind of professional confidence and expertise that Johnson cultivated over a lifetime of paid work will appear as regrettably obsolete as books and newspapers themselves.”

Amen. Kirsch’s calm, matter-of-fact tone belies the severity and bleakness of what he’s describing – the coming of a new Dark Age for literacy and literature. It wasn’t always like this, and you don’t have to range as far back as Johnson to find an inspiring example of “professional confidence and expertise” among writers. A.J. Liebling turned the products of economic necessity into literature. He moved from newspapers to The New Yorker to a series of peerless books ranging in subject matter from boxing, food and France to Southern politics and press criticism. He was also, as his biographer Raymond Sokolov says, “the leading intelligence and stylist [a critical pairing for this sort of life] covering the European theater of the war.”

The first hardcover product of his war coverage for The New Yorker was The Road Back to Paris, already stale as (pre-D-Day) hard news by the time it was published in 1944, but splendid as a collection of raffishly written chronicles of war. The book is arranged in three sections with titles drawn from boxing: “The World Knocked Down,” “The World on One Knee,” “The World Gets Up.” Near the start of the third section, written when Allied victory was likely but not certain, Liebling writes a passage oddly consonant with Kirsch’s grim prognosis:

“Millions of men meriting better than I have lived and died in humiliating periods of history. Free men and free thinking always get a return match with the forces of sadism and anti-reason sometimes. But I had wanted to see a win, I had wanted my era to be one of those that read well in the books. Some people like to live in a good neighborhood; I like to live in a good age. I am a sucker for a happy ending – the villain kicked in the teeth, the stepchildren released from the dark basement, the hero in bed with the heroine. Maybe the curtain won’t go up on the same first act tomorrow night, but I won’t be in the audience.”

Liebling’s era does “read well in the books,” several of which he wrote.

`What an Absurd Task'

My readers are generous with their reading. An Australian sent me portions of a 1996 Boyer Lecture by Pierre Ryckmans, better known as the Belgian-born sinologist Simon Leys, author of the still revolutionary Chinese Shadows (1976). Coincidentally, I thought of Leys earlier in the week while speaking to the office manager of an elementary school where I worked. She was 50-ish and brusque in manner and wore a silk blouse printed with the plump visage of Mao Zedong.

Ryckmans’ thesis is that “great readings occupy a place no less significant than actual happenings.” Reading is no departure from life but a vital part of being alive, as real as school, family and work. Seasoned readers know this. Their mental and emotional lives are vast and amply populated, not stunted as conventional wisdom about “bookworms” has it. Ryckmans writes:

“...a long and adventurous journey through strange lands which you undertook in a certain year may in retrospect appear no less memorable than your first exploration of A la recherche du temps perdu, or again you might realise that your encounter with Anna Karenina or with Julien Sorrell [sic] proved more momentous than meeting most of your past acquaintances.”

This leads Ryckmans to conclude that a “true lover of literature only reads the books he loves.” He distinguishes such readers (who are “very rare indeed”) from literary scholars because a “scholar must read all the books that are relevant to his research however mediocre, dreary and boring.” This is dubious as a blanket statement though certainly true of cloistered English professors. Ryckmans quotes the Polish novelist-essayist Kazimierz Brandys, author of The Warsaw Diary: 1978-1981:

“I am now teaching Polish literature at Columbia University. I have some twenty students. My objective is to make them understand that they are in front of a man who is in total despair; a man who since he was a child always hated all analysis of literary works but who now needs to analyse literary works in order to earn a living. What an absurd task it is to teach people how to understand the work of literature. I have never read any book with the purpose of understanding it. To read and simultaneously to explain is as inconceivable for me as it would be to complete the act of love with a medical examination. I was not devouring books, books were swallowing me. They spoke to me about life and death, they spoke to me about myself, whereas I myself never have anything to say about them. I knew a student from Yale; one day as he saw Faulkner in front of a bookshop on a corner in Fifth Avenue, he had the impulse to go down on his knees and to kiss his hand. To my mind, such a gesture is exemplary. It is the only suitable attitude towards literature.”

I read this not as an ironclad stricture but an excellent antidote to reductive analysis. On Wednesday I overheard a high-school teacher repeatedly tell a student that Lady Macbeth’s hand washing was “a symbol of her guilt.” There was no mention of the play’s language, which Samuel Johnson said “ought to bestow immortality on the author, though all his other productions had been lost.” She treated Macbeth like a locked door to be opened with a key and WD40. Another teacher spoke to me of her frustration teaching Lord of the Flies: “I tell them it’s all about a Hobbesian universe, but do they listen?” Would you? At least one of us, I concluded, had gone quite mad. To reiterate Brandys:

“What an absurd task it is to teach people how to understand the work of literature.”

`Books Will Find Their Readers'

A reader responded to Tuesday’s post by passing along lines from the address Joseph Brodsky made in 1991 to the Library of Congress:

“Books will find their readers. And if they will not sell, well, let them lie around, absorb dust, rot, and disintegrate. There is always going to be a child who will fish a book out of the garbage heap. I was such a child, for what it’s worth.”

This sounds not like the phony rah-rah of a Poet Laureate but hard-won wisdom from a former citizen of the Soviet Union, hope of the most believable sort. How is it we find the books we need, and do we always know we need them before we find them? In the land of abundance and the First Amendment, where most of us can read any book we wish, it’s easy to forget or cynically dismiss the potential power of a book. Testimony is overwhelming that even a single poem can change a life for the better or worse.

The Ingersoll Foundation’s T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing went to Zbigniew Herbert in 1995, three years before his death. Herbert was ill and unable to accept the award in person but a friend delivered his acceptance speech, “Invisible but Present.” In it, Herbert chronicles his encounters with Eliot’s work, starting with his teenage discovery of an early poem, “La Figlia che Piange,” on a page torn from an anthology:

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

Another Polish survivor of the Nazis and Communists was the poet Aleksander Wat. In My Century he recalls reading the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, St. Augustine and other church fathers in a Moscow prison:

“…the books I read in Lubyanka made for one of the greatest experiences of my life. Not because they allowed me an escape but because, to a certain extent, they transformed me, influenced and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books; I came at them from a completely new angle. And from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.”

If only we, with our effortless access to torrents of print, could read even one book in the spirit of Wat’s “completely new understanding.” On Tuesday, in a much humbler though comparably pained and solitary situation, I witnessed a book’s restorative powers. I spent the day with a severely autistic third-grader. I’d been warned he bit, scratched and kicked. A woman in the office told me first thing in the morning: “You’re in for a long day.”

He spat and head-butted a couple of times but attrition was his weapon of choice. Repetitive shouting, jumping, pacing, rocking, rolling on the floor and spinning on his chair wore me down. I never lost my temper or said anything I regret but I was exhausted before lunch. A teacher suggested I give him a book -- such a novel suggestion in a school – and he picked a tie-in to the animated film Finding Nemo from a pile of what I took to be refuse in the corner of a classroom. Privately, I snorted – crass commercialism, that sort of thing – but the book tamed him, held him for hours. As Brodsky said:

“There is always going to be a child who will fish a book out of the garbage heap.”

`Treasure Ten Times Sealed'

“The saleswoman in Moline, Illinois, will go to the library and borrow Anna Karenina.”

In a modest, oblique way I watched Saul Bellow’s affirmation fulfilled. I spent most of Monday with a third-grader in the special-education program. He’s tall for his age, good-looking, silent most of the time, eyes averted, wary as a cat. He communicates elliptically, in murmurs. You could spend a long time with him and conclude he was mute.

We did two pages of math. He answered slowly and accurately, weighing his calculations with care. I assumed small talk was out of the question. On the playground he pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, walked the perimeter like a sentry and had no dealings with the dozens of kids running and yelling around him. In music class he was silent and motionless. Helping him to write a letter was almost futile. I gave him most of the words and he nodded in agreement or rejected them with a shake of his head. It didn’t help that he had a cold and was coughing much of the time.

After lunch the teacher suggested I take him to the library and look for books on astronomy. As I steered him toward the 520’s the student asked if I knew Pluto was no longer a planet, and could I identify Eris and the Kuiper Belt. He pulled a space atlas off the shelf, turned to the section devoted to KBO’s (Kuiper Belt Objects) and explained how they differ from true planets. “People still think Pluto is a planet but I explain to them that it’s not,” he said, and abruptly asked if I could find him a book about the Bermuda Triangle. There were two. He sat on a couch and read both in silence while I sat next to him, boning up on KBO’s. “I don’t think the Bermuda Triangle is real. I think it’s made up,” he said.

The Bellow line comes from “The Sealed Treasure,” an essay he published in 1960 in The Times Literary Supplement. In it, the novelist describes a journey he had made three years earlier through Illinois, on assignment for Holiday magazine. The piece that resulted from that trip, “Illinois Journey,” also appears in It All Adds Up (1994), Bellow’s collected nonfiction. As he describes his 1957 visit to rural Illinois in “The Sealed Treasure,” Bellow sounds like a sophisticated avatar of Sherwood Anderson, or rather George Willard, the newspaper reporter and central figure in Winesburg, Ohio. A quintessentially urban writer, Bellow is sympathetic to the rural people he meets. He’s free of condescension and projects himself imaginatively into their lives:

“I went to the public libraries and was not surprised to learn that good books were very much in demand and that there were people in central Illinois who read Plato, Tocqueville, Proust, and Robert Frost. I had expected this. But what I did not understand was what use these isolated readers were making of the books they borrowed. With whom did they discuss them? At the country club, the bowling league, sorting mail at the post office, or in the factory, over the back fence, how did they bring up Plato’s Justice or Proust’s Memory?”

My 8-year-old student may never read The Republic and I’m not likening accounts of the Bermuda Triangle to À la recherché du temps perdue. My point is that reading is often secretive and passionate, like an extra-marital affair. When I told the regular teacher of the kid’s binge on astronomy and the Bermuda Triangle, she acted surprised and skeptical, but it wasn’t the first time I’d met a devoted reader in an unexpected place. Of the three most ambitious readers I’ve known, only one was an academic. Autodidacts of every species – Civil War buffs, adepts of Spinoza and Schopenhauer, Latin freaks, closet readers of Austen and Trollope -- proliferate. Bellow writes:

“…the intelligence or cultivation of a woman in Moline, Illinois, would necessarily be her secret, almost her private vice. Her friends at the bridge club would think it very odd of her to think such things. She might not reveal them to her sister, nor perhaps even to her husband. They would be her discovery, her treasure ten times sealed, her private source of power.”

`They Get Their Guns On'

I came of age near the end of the great period of movie saturation when almost everyone I knew seemed cinematically literate, when going to the movies was more than an “entertainment option.” We knew the silents, the great Hollywood pictures of the studio era, Laurel and Hardy, film noir, Godard, John Ford, the Japanese, Russians and Swedes. In college I saw five or six movies a week counting film classes, television, the campus film series and two commercial theaters in town, and we talked about the movies we saw, often pretentiously but with passion, the way some of us talked about books.

That has changed certainly in my life but also I sense in the bigger culture. Since my middle son was born in 2000 I’ve seen perhaps eight movies in the theater, not counting children’s films. I seldom watch DVDs – again, not counting kid pictures. I drive past movie marquees without recognizing a single title, and feel none of the anxiety, the sense of missing something important, I would have felt 35 years ago. Books have almost entirely colonized the part of my sensibility where books and movies once peacefully coexisted.

On vacation last week I reread Daniel Fuchs’ Brooklyn novels from the nineteen-thirties – Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt and Low Company. His characters, mostly poor and working-class Jews during the Great Depression, are forever going to the movies and modeling their lives and speech on what they see. An adolescent boy affects the moves of Adolph Menjou and young women try on Garbo’s moody mystique. Of course, Fuchs gave up novel writing for screenwriting and won an Academy Award in 1955 for his work on Love Me or Leave Me. He occasionally wrote fiction after his move to Hollywood, much of it collected posthumously in The Golden West: Hollywood Stories (2005). His movie-soaked novels reminded me how we emulated the cool of Bogart, Cagney and Astaire, the glibness of Groucho, the verbal gymnastics and unexpected physical grace of W.C. Fields.

In the house where we stayed in Mexico was a big-screen television with hundreds of stations, and for the first time in years I indulged a whim to watch movies of my choice. My wife and I watched Witness for the Prosecution (1957) with Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich and Tyrone Power (his last credited role) -- a Billy Wilder film that moves with the deftness and precision of a thoroughbred, without an ounce of fat. By myself I watched The Godfather for the 20th time. It remains my favorite film, never disappointing, one I know almost by heart. It was 37 years ago next month I first saw it, with my father, while I was home for spring break. We went after dinner one slushy, foggy night to the Yorktown Theater in Cleveland. My father would watch anything with guns and preferably horses, so The Godfather qualified. It was a rare film we both enjoyed. Watching it again I recovered a faint taste of why movies were once so important in my life.

Elberry also helped. While I was still in Mexico we exchanged e-mails about another favorite movie, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (guns, horses). On Sunday, after watching the movie again, Elberry sent me his notes on the film. He points out similarities to Michael Mann’s Heat (guns, no horses) that had never occurred to me. Elberry, a movie buff though half my age, notes the frequency of laughter throughout the film. Of the scenes leading up to the climactic slaughter (scenes Elberry and I both find moving) he writes:

“Dutch's grin as he sees them emerge, instantly he knows they mean business. Pike grins back and Dutch cackles, then in silence they get their guns on. They all feel the same way. They tried to 'back off' from the precipice, to avoid danger and play it safe, to have a good time and forget about their friend; and they all feel the same way the next morning, that there is nowhere to back off to.”

Elberry’s final note:

“Laughter closes the film, not demonic laughter but hearty, dirty laughter.”

Some things only film, not even the best books, can give us.

`A Discipline of Knowledge'

Like David Myers I am a graduate of high-school Advanced Placement English classes, though my experience seems to have been more pleasurable and lastingly worthwhile than his. Junior year we read The Return of the Native, which induced an abiding dislike of Hardy’s fiction but also moved me to investigate the gloomy grandeur of his poetry. We read Dante’s Inferno in the Ciardi translation, Death of a Salesman, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and The Merry Wives of Windsor (minor Shakespeare but as a class we attended a professional production of the play). Only Miller’s play in this curriculum is negligible as literature.

Senior year we read Great Expectations, Kim, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Billy Budd. We read Hamlet and wrote lengthy papers on topics of our choice. I can’t remember my subject but a friend gifted with what A.J. Liebling called the “blarneying capacity” defended a novel thesis: The prince is fat. He cited “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt” and other passages to bolster his case. Our teacher, Jan Viscomi, loved it and gave my friend an A.

What I remember most fondly is Viscomi’s insistence on close readings of poems, with focused attention paid to metrics, rhyme, musicality, image patterns -- a sort of explication de texte lite. She also expected us to memorize, if not complete poems, then sizeable passages from Donne, Robinson, Frost and Yeats. For an in-class exam we were assigned to conduct a close reading of Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and for a lengthier take-home project I looked at Richard Eberhart’s “The Groundhog” (an experience I wrote about here). In order to give the poem an adequate reading I researched the lives of Alexander the Great, Montaigne and Saint Theresa of Avila, and looked into the biology of animal decomposition. My 40-year-old diligence, encouraged by the example of a high-school English teacher in suburban Cleveland, lends urgency to Myers’ concluding questions:

“Can it be admitted at long last, though, that English literature is a discipline of knowledge rather than a fine sensibility; that some works of English literature must be known before others; that there are even some works every civilized American should be familiar with, although there will be much disagreement over what they are; and that an AP English teacher who assigns `entertainment fiction’ instead is not doing her job?”

Even before I went to college and began to study English literature in a more systematic way, I had learned the rudiments of close reading. I also learned, though it was never formulated as such, that a body of literature exists which is worthy of such disciplined reading, despite Arthur Miller’s presence. I was a kid from an almost bookless family, soon to be the first among us to attend a university, and certainly unequipped with a “fine sensibility.” For the first time in my life, in those A.P. English classes, I was in the company of someone who took literature seriously enough to demand that I treat it with the same concentration and respect I gave to Latin verbs and calculus – more, in fact.

`New Images to His Reader'

We left for Mexico in the dark and returned home in the dark Friday night. Such symmetry is pleasing, a form of resolution. Our youngest turns six today and he coughed most of the way up the coast, from Loreto to Los Angeles to Bellevue. This morning he wakes to presents, a head cold and the certainty of a party with friends in the afternoon. Like all of us, he’s glad to be home, where the familiar is a comfort regardless of your age. Mexico, for David, was an opportunity to swim outdoors in February, stay up later than usual and eat tortillas every day. A reader urged me to “stop behaving like an American kid that suddenly finds himself out of his bubble and start enjoying the place [that is, Mexico] and taking it for what it is?” I thought I had. I started our vacation with a passage from Samuel Johnson, and for the sake of symmetry I close it with another, from The Idler #97:

“Every writer of travels should consider that, like all other authors, he undertakes either to instruct or please, or to mingle pleasure with instruction. He that instructs must offer to the mind something to be imitated, or something to be avoided; he that pleases must offer new images to his reader, and enable him to form a tacit comparison of his own state with that of others.”

`The Thought of Going'

The day started with a cruise ship anchored offshore, a hulk out of place against a blue cloudless sky and blue-green water. We had been warned: The ship’s arrival signals the invasion of Loreto by loud, drunken Americans with too much money. We kept our distance and they were gone by early evening.

I’d be happy never to visit Mexico again but don’t regret having seen it once, and already feel the melancholy of vacation’s end. When young we’re eager for novelty and change; older, we prize the familiar. Each course, pursued exclusively, turns into a cul-de-sac. Living for a week in a house on the beach, I appreciate the dual nature of the sea, its constancy and mutability. Like Sophocles, Matthew Arnold and a million others, Edgar Bowers looks at the sea and sees human destiny. Here is “An Afternoon at the Beach”:

“I’ll go among the dead to see my friend.
The place I leave is beautiful: the sea
Repeats the winds’ far swell in its long sound,
And, there beside it, houses solemnly
Shine with the modest courage of the land,
While swimmers try the verge of what they see.

“I cannot go, although I should pretend
Some final self whose phantom eye could see
Him who because he is not cannot change.
And yet the thought of going makes the sea,
The land, the swimmers, and myself seem strange,
Almost as strange as they will someday be.”

“The thought of going.” Bowers means death but each departure is a rehearsal for the final going, and each return a promise of hope. I’ve been rereading Daniel Fuchs’ Brooklyn novels this week, pleased that my younger self once enjoyed them so much I immediately reread them after reading them for the first time. The books are modest, funny and full of small wonders. In the first novel, Summer in Williamsburg, 20-year-old Philip Hayman returns home to Brooklyn after a disturbing visit with his older brother, a low-level gangster in the Catskills. Upstate is country and goyishe; Williamsburg is urban and Jewish. Hayman comes home on Friday evening, the start of the Sabbath, and though his family is “not very orthodox,” he witnesses an ancient ritual, itself a sort of return:

“Earlier, when the dark had first come, over his book he watched, without seeming to watch, his mother light one candle with a match and use this as a taper for the other two. This was, perhaps, a simple thing, but he always observed the ritual, and it affected him. She would soften the heels of the other candles with the flame, press them into the sockets of the candlesticks, and light them one after the other. Then she covered her head with a napkin, placed her fingertips to her eyelids, and moving her lips in a murmur, withdrawn for the moment and apart from the world, she recited the ancient prayer. There was always something strange, a little awesome, in the spectacle.”

`In a Very Unusual Form'

A warm wind moved in Wednesday morning, turning Loreto into a typhoon of dust. We coughed and felt the grit in our teeth and eyes. On a dusty walk into town we found Baja Books on the Paseo Hidalgo. The front room is a catch basin of English-language videos and books, mostly paperbacks. On a rattan book shelf I found such titles as The Tarot of the Bohemians, Sartre’s No Exit and Other Plays, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, The Fortune in Your Hand, They Cage the Animals by Night, two books by Krishnamurti, The Witches of Eastwick, two copies of King Lear, and Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s The Arts.

On the bottom shelf I noticed two volumes from a familiar imprint -- Everyman’s Library, in hard cover with shocking pink dust jackets. Such an unexpected discovery: George Borrow’s Lavengro and The Romany Rye. I first read Borrow 34 years ago when a friend whose reading was as intrepid as mine recommended The Bible in Spain. In three years studying English literature at a university, I had never heard his name. Borrow (1803-1881) was prized by A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, who judged him a precursor of their approach to nonfiction, a mingling of reportage and fictional techniques.

In the second room I met the bookshop’s owner, Alberto Perez, who was born in Mission, Texas, on the Rio Grande. He settled in Loreto 20 years ago, lives off his time-share properties, and opened the shop in 2005 with his wife, Jeannine, a potter and former special-education teacher. We talked about Texas, Mexico and drug violence along the border. He sat in an oversized wooden chair with wagon wheels on the sides, and drank from an ice-filled glass.

Both Borrow volumes come with introductions by Walter Starkie, the translator and biographer of Rimbaud. Perez looked at them, hefted them, murmured, “Hmm, pretty old books,“ and charged me 60 pesos, less than $5. Both printings date from the nineteen-sixties and both have stickers on the cover saying “A.S.U.C.L.A.” -- the Associated Students UCLA, the group that runs the student union and bookstore. How did the books get to Loreto? Who left them? Has anyone read them? If so, do they regret the loss of the books? If someone has read them, what do they remember of Borrow? Who reads Borrow today? In his preface to the first edition of Lavengro, Borrow writes, in words with implications for the blogosphere:

“In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe a dream, partly of study, partly of adventure, in which will be found copious notices of books, and many descriptions of life and manners, some in a very unusual form.”

ADDENDUM: Anonymous kindly notes that Enid Starkie, not her brother Walter Starkie, was the biographer and translator of Rimbaud. My apologies. Memory is unreliable but how good it is to have attentive readers.

`The Lighthouse Invites the Storm'

A former newspaper colleague in upstate New York writes:

“Enjoying your `dispatches’ from Mexico, which I’ve only visited once, long ago and briefly, on a trip I still recall with some revulsion.”

Revulsion often mingles with wonder and admiration in Mexico. We drove north from Loreto about 130 kilometers to Bahia Concepcion, a bay on the west coast of the Sea of Cortez. The landscape along the way is the most desolately beautiful I’ve known, like scenes from The Searchers. We encountered more teenagers with guns at a military checkpoint. They searched the interior of our rental car but never opened the truck.

We stopped at a beach called Playa El Requesón -- white sand, turquoise water. I led the boys into the scrub so they could pee and walked into a small mountain of trash -- bottles, cans, tires, mattresses. We waded along the beach, hunting for shells, until we came to a wall of mangroves. On the other side was a vast outdoor toilet.

We drove further north, mostly in search of gasoline. Our first glimpse of Mulegé was its lighthouse, a modest white tower on an island close to shore. I thought of Malcolm Lowry and his cantina in Under the Volcano -- the Farolito, Spanish for lighthouse. Lowry’s first, unpublished book of poems was titled The Lighthouse Invites the Storm. In his novel he writes of the Farolito:

“Only after he had grown to know it well had he discovered how far back it ran, that it was really composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell. These rooms struck him as spots where diabolical plots must be hatched, atrocious murders planned; here, as when Saturn was in Capricorn, life reached bottom. But here also great wheeling thoughts hovered in the brain; while the potter and the field-labourer alike, early-risen, paused a moment in the paling doorway, dreaming…”

Clearly, Lowry had Dante in mind -- and Mexico.

`The Eternal Note of Sadness'

The boat was too small for my taste but my wife and kids climbed aboard for a four-hour visit to an island in the Sea of Cortez -- Isla Coronado. The caretaker of the house where we’re staying, who had recommended the skipper, is named Ismael -- a bad omen when it comes to ocean-going craft. I remembered the reading lesson I taught last week to three high-school boys. We read aloud a passage which described the Caspian Sea as “landlocked,” a word none of them knew. As I explained it, I concluded I’m landlocked too. I like the unspoken reassurance of ground beneath my feet, not the fickleness of water. Unlike my forebears I probably would have stayed in Europe.

I took a long walk south along the beach. There’s a post-apocalyptic feel to Mexico, at least this portion of it. Nowhere else, not even in Houston, have I seen so many half-built or half-demolished buildings. I spoke the day before with a Napa-Valley-by-way-of-Oklahoma woman who lives in Loreto year-round. She described Mexico as “big dreams with no follow-through. Everything falls apart.” On the dunes above the beach I saw numerous walls and concrete foundations reclaimed by the sand. Vultures perched on the tops of dead palm trees. The beach was strewn with oil cans, shards of plastic foam, beer bottles, dead fish and gulls, even a dead chicken. You don’t have to listen carefully to hear “the eternal note of sadness.”

When my family returned we left to have lunch at Del Borracho Saloon and Grill, a name that brought back memories of Under the Volcano. The Napa Valley woman had recommended it but it was closed. We continued along the road to San Javier, the site of a 16th-century mission and another recommended restaurant, through a blasted landscape of rocks, cactus and mesquite that recalled Coconino County. The two-lane road was narrow but well maintained until, after about eight kilometers, it stopped. No more concrete, road signs or painted yellow lines. Beyond was rocks, cactus and mesquite. We returned to Loreto and had lunch at Mexico Lindo y Que Rico.

`Telescoped Similitudes'

My kids were excited because they thought they had discovered a sea anemone in the surf. Somewhere they heard these benign-looking creatures pack pain-inflicting venom in their spines. Some do, so I lifted it carefully from the water with a shell and realized it was a starfish, or sea star, with at least 20 stumpy legs. Out of the water, its legs sagged and its architecture lost elegance. It was drably brown and gray like a sparrow except for a spray of purple bumps on its top. In this it reminded me of Queen-Anne’s lace with its “purple mole,” as Williams Carlos Williams noticed. The longer out of water the more the starfish drooped and clenched itself into a bumpy sphere. In “Starfish,” Eric Ormsby accurately describes what my sons and I witnessed:

“The stellar sea crawler, maw
Concealed beneath, with offerings of
Prismed crimson now darkened, now like
The smile of slag, a thing made rosy
As poured ingots, or suddenly dimmed --
“I appreciate the studious labour
Of your rednesses, the scholarly fragrance
Of your sex. To mirror tidal drifts
The light ripples across or to enhance darkness
With palpable tinctures, dense as salt.
“You crumple like a puppet's fist
Or erect, bristling, your tender luring barbs.
Casual abandon, like a dropped fawn glove.
Tensile symmetries, like a hawk's claw.

“You clutch the seafloor.

“You taste what has fallen.”

The sea star is Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, one of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s titles -- “Our Lady, Star of the Sea.” The theme of this visit to Mexico is paying attention, looking closely at things you assume you already know and understand. Everything trails a cloud of associations, a vast nimbus of metaphor. My youngest saw a stone on the beach, held it to his throat, said, “It’s a bowtie,” and he was right. That’s what it looked like. Everything has form and meaning when observed with sufficient clarity and imagination. The boys figured out that some of the shells they’ve collected were still inhabited by their original owners. On their own they’ve started returning occupied shells to the water. The almost-6-year-old noticed the barnacles growing on the surface of rocks and shells and said they reminded him of little cities -- worlds within worlds, fractal being, the theme of another Ormsby poem, “Microcosm”:

“The proboscis of the drab grey flea
Is mirrored in the majesty
Of the elephant’s articulated trunk. There’s a sea
In the bed-mite’s dim orbicular eye.
Pinnacles crinkle when the mountain-winged, shy
Moth wakes up and stretches for the night.
Katydids enact the richly patterned light
Of galaxies in their chirped and frangible notes.
The smallest beings harbor a universe
Of telescoped similitudes. Even those Rocky Mountain goats
Mimic Alpha Centauri in rectangular irises
Of cinnabar-splotched gold. Inert viruses
Replicate the static of red-shifted, still chthonic
Cosmoi. Terse
As the listened brilliance of the pulsar’s bloom
The violaceous mildew in the corner room
Proliferates in Mendelian exuberance.
There are double stars in the eyes of cyclonic
Spuds shoveled and spaded up. The dance
Of Shiva is a cobbled-soled affair –
Hobnails and flapping slippers on the disreputable stair.
Yggdrasils
Germinate on Wal-Mart windowsills.”

That’s where we live, in “a universe/Of telescoped similitudes.”

`100 Best Blogs'

In today’s Times on Line, Bryan Appleyard generously includes Anecdotal Evidence in his story “A Guide to the 100 Best Blogs -- Part I.” Bryan also names, rightly so, D.G. Myers’ The Commonplace Blog and Frank Wilson’s Books, Inq. -- The Epilogue. Now it’s only fair that you should visit Bryan’s blog, Thought Experiments.

`Incessant Endeavour'

“Coastlines are where we learn the ocean’s tragedy:
Incessant endeavour, incessant panoply,
Broken down to crumbs of nothingness
And yet we want to bless
Each ragged repetition of the waves --

“So inconsolable, so close to us.”

Close, indeed. Our backdoor in Loreto is 20 yards from the Sea of Cortez. The ocean intimidates me as it has since the first time I saw it 41 years ago in Florida, though its smells, drone and shifting colors are consoling, its rhythms blood-like. It answers something in us, as the closing lines of Eric Ormsby’s “Coastlines” imply.

On the walk into town along a dusty road we passed a crew pouring cement for a new sidewalk and kids already were drawing on it. Nearby was a crowd of dressed-up people surrounding an above-ground swimming pool. A large girl in a shiny purple dress climbed a ladder and lowered herself gingerly into the pool. It was a baptism, total immersion.

Drivers in Loreto are almost as conscienceless as those in Houston. Motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles compete for dominance with pickup trucks. The most popular T-shirts seen Saturday: “Shut Up and Fish” and “D.E.A.: Drunk Every Afternoon.” The best part of the day was spent walking the beach. I taught the boys to skip stones. We collected sea glass, shells and drift wood. The ocean felt reassuring after the noise and dust of town. Elsewhere in his poem Ormsby says:

“Coastlines are where our opposites ignite
And no one can say, After all, it’s all right.”

Loreto

From the air Baja California is bi-chromatic. Our plane followed the east coast, where the Sea of Cortez is unnaturally blue and the land is the color of cinnamon. Cacti, mesquite and brown grass flank the runway in Loreto. Five Mexican soldiers in desert camouflage stood in front of the terminal as we crossed the tarmac. One turned and we could see the machine gun he was holding at a 45-degree angle, muzzle down. The soldiers stared at us and the other passengers as we passed. Loreto is dust, trash, unpaved streets, chickens in the yards, and stray dogs. Sam Peckinpah would have liked it here. The beach is rocks and coarse brown sand, and pelicans perch on the breakwall. I thought of lines from Eric Ormsby’s “My First Beach":

“…the white-ribbed wavelets bundle to the shore,
like old men emptying there pockets out…”

We walked into town for dinner, past campaign signs for someone named Yuan Yee and a clothing store, “Fashion’s [sic].” Dinner was good -- burritos, refried beans, rice -- and on the walk back to the house my almost-6-year-old lost his first tooth. It had fallen on the sidewalk and we couldn’t find it. The sun was setting and the mountains, which in silhouette are ragged like a mouthful of bad teeth, glowed pink around the edges.

Travel

We leave early this morning for Mexico, a country I have never visited. We change planes in Los Angeles, a city I have never visited. Like most journeys, this one will mingle new and old, familiar and alien, and that suits my temperament. When I was younger, I wanted to go everywhere and miss nothing, and I wouldn’t have refused an opportunity to explore the world’s malaria-ridden hell holes. Today, I like my exoticism domesticated. I’m immune to the charms of entire continents. Samuel Johnson reassures me in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland:

“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.”

`If We Want to Know What Other People Are Like'

The next time a reader asks for a reliable introduction to Chekhov I will suggest he read the stories, starting with “The Lady with the Dog” and “My Life,” and supplement them with “A Chekhov Lexicon” by the Scottish novelist William Boyd. Boyd’s form is productively arbitrary: He draws 26 subjects from Chekhov’s life and work and arranges them alphabetically, from “Anton” to “Zoo,” even finding something worthwhile to do with “X”:

“X-rays: an x-ray of Chekhov's lungs early in his life (had such a thing been available) would have showed the shadowy traces of the `tubercules’: latent walled-in lesions of the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Chekhov probably caught the disease in childhood. And he saw his brother Kolia die of it in 1889. Moreover, Chekhov was a doctor: he knew exactly what was in store for him. The bacilli lie dormant in the body, kept at bay by the immune system. At moments when the immune system is under stress or weakened, the bacilli break out of the tubercules and begin to spread extensively in the lungs. The lung tissue is then effectively eaten by the bacilli - consumed - hence the 19th-century name for the disease: `consumption’. In Chekhov's time - the pre-antibiotic era - the only cure was isolation, rest and good nutrition. In the last years of his life Chekhov's lungs became increasingly devastated. The amount of lung tissue available for the exchange of gases in the breathing process radically decreased. Chekhov died of breathing failure, exhaustion and general toxaemia (the tuberculosis had also spread to the spine).”

An indifferent writer would make a tedious hash of Boyd’s scheme, a random retelling of free-floating factoids. Instead, there’s drama, much research rooted in long and careful reading (Chekhov was six-foot, one-inch tall – towering for his time) and oblique literary criticism. Take “R”:

“Real lives. Chekhov said: `Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.’ By this I take him to mean that other people are fundamentally opaque, mysterious - even people you know very well, your wife or husband, your family. Janet Malcolm, who has written a profound and insightful book on Chekhov (Reading Chekhov), says that `We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other.’ This, it seems to me, is the great and lasting allure of all fiction: if we want to know what other people are like we turn to the novel or the short story. In no other art form can we take up residence in other people's minds so effortlessly. Chekhov tells us a great deal about his characters but, however, resists full exposure: there always remains something `blurry’, something secret about them. This is part of his genius: this is what makes his stories seem so real.”

A diet rich in Chekhov, consumed with Boyd’s additives, would ease much of the flatulent distress brought on by the strain of trying to define realism. I was speaking to a class of fifth-graders about the similarities between fiction and nonfiction, stressing that their boundaries are permeable though most readers and writers intuitively know the difference. A boy said he thought that was true because in some of the novels he has been reading, he knows the stories are “made up” but he “recognizes” people, places and things. When I asked which novels he said: “David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.” I found the specificity touching.

`Momentary Wonder'

The day started with an automated telephone call. I had gone to bed Monday night, newly hired by the school district as a substitute “para-educator,” confident no such call would wake me. Now I had two hours to report for duty. The streets were ice-covered and the school unprepared for the freeze. I was greeted by a janitor throwing salt from a coffee can, who told me to go inside and find traffic cones, and was assigned to a special-education class with two kindergarteners and four first-graders. All day I thought of Yeats’ poem:

“…the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.”

They wouldn’t let the goatish old fool anywhere near a school today, and I’m a private man and not yet sixty, but I was smiling most of the time. I can’t remember spending seven hours on my feet since my first job, in a carwash more than 40 years ago. I helped a 5-year-old master the letter “P.” In math class, I counted navy and pinto beans. During lunch duty I watched a 5-year-old consume the contents of a mayonnaise packet and ask for seconds. I read aloud a book about a mouse named Geronimo Stilton. All day, I monitored behavior (mine, theirs) and experienced the self-forgetting of useful work performed attentively.

In his thirties, Chekhov became the most generous of writers. He treated thousands of patients, mostly illiterate peasants, and never charged them. At his own expense he built a fire station, clinic and three schools. In an 1899 letter to his friend and editor Alexey Suvorin, Chekhov writes of the schools:

“…they are considered models of their kind. They are built of the best materials. The rooms are 12 feet high, they have Dutch stoves, the teacher has a fireplace and the teacher’s apartment is a decent size – three to four rooms [Chekhov’s childhood house had five rooms for a family of eight].”

One of the schools is in Yalta, where Chekhov moved in 1899, hoping for relief from the tuberculosis that would kill him in five years. The director of the school said that when his health permitted, Chekhov, who had no children of his own, visited every week and enjoyed sitting on a chair outside her office, talking with students.

`The True Poetical Enthusiasm'

Today we celebrate the 234th birthday of the most loveably vulpine of writers, Charles Lamb, who, when a doctor instructed him to take a daily walk on an empty stomach, asked, “Whose?” In 1827, two years after retiring from his 33-year clerkship at the East India House, Lamb prepared a brief third-person autobiography, not published until after his death. In it, he claims “his true works may be found on the shelves of Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred folios” – meaning the ledgers he kept as an accountant. We can be thankful his “true works” also include his letters and Essays of Elia (1823), models of voluptuous prose, wit, strange learning, eccentricity and compassion. Even in his day Lamb was judged fustian, modeling his style on those of his favorite writers – Burton and Browne. In “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” he says:

“…I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts. I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”

Despite his charm and brilliance, most of us would be reluctant to exchange our lives with Lamb’s. In 1795, age 20, he spent six weeks in a mental hospital. In September of the following year, his sister Mary fatally stabbed their mother with a table knife, and attacked their father. Charles obtained Mary’s release from lifelong imprisonment on the condition he take legal responsibility for her, and they lived together until his death, even collaborating on Tales from Shakespeare, which has remained in print since 1807. Mary Lamb suffered psychotic episodes for the rest of her life and outlived her brother by 12 years. In “All Fool’s Day” he writes:

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

Unlike his friends Coleridge, Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Hunt – who often made fools of themselves as a result -- Lamb had no interest in the momentous events of his day. About “Boney” – Napoleon Bonaparte – he wished only to know the dictator’s height (Lamb was built like a jockey). In a letter to his friend Thomas Manning (a mathematician who became a Chinese scholar and the first Englishman to enter Lhasa, where he met the ninth Dalai Lama, age 5), Lamb writes, “Public affairs – except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private – I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in.” This admirable sentiment would profit many a contemporary writer. For Lamb, to be civic-minded was to care for one’s family, friends and often strangers. He was a lifelong bachelor and so far as we know a celibate, though he once proposed marriage to the wonderfully named actress Fanny Kelly. His instinct for family, like Chekhov’s, was fierce. In “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis” he writes:

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

His compassion and charity were instinctive, not ideological. Nor were they rooted in a sense of religious obligation, which in Lamb’s case was rudimentary at best. In a March 9, 1822, letter to his childhood friend Coleridge, Lamb displays a sophisticated appreciation of moral complexity when he writes:

“One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child – when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not mendicant, but thereabouts – a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist [Mayhew and Dickens would have savored this]; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me – the sum it was to her – the pleasure she had a right to expect that I – not the old impostor – should take in eating her cake – the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, I wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like – and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.”

His assessment of the “look-beggar” is a form of applied psychology or theater criticism, disciplines at which Lamb excelled. How much writing on the theater remains readable even a week after publication, let alone two centuries? Lamb’s does. He was especially good when describing actors at work. Here he is in “On Some of the Old Actors,” remembering a Shakespearean:

“Of all the actors who flourished in my time -- a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader – [Robert] Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm -- the rarest faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet.”

A dedicated reader of Lamb grows to love him as a friend. In this, he reminds us again of Chekhov. He amuses us while earning our trust, and charms us into respect. We indulge his eccentricities, his old-fashioned ways, because they are expressions of a genuinely gentle and wayward sensibility, not affectations. “Hang the age!” he writes. “I’ll write for antiquity.” He found solace in the past without entirely ignoring the present, which he dismissed in 1825 as “this whiffling century.” Happy birthday, Charles.

The Eagle and the Idea of the Eagle

Last July 28, in observance of the 10th anniversary of Zbigniew Herbert’s death, Poland issued a postage stamp commemorating the poet. The first day cover includes an image of a stone on which is printed Herbert’s poem “Kamyk” in the poet’s handwriting. “Kamyk” is a perfect homophone of the English “comic,” though the poem’s title is customarily translated “The Pebble.” Here is Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz’s version:

“The pebble
is a perfect creature

“equal to itself
mindful of its limits

“filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

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

“ its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

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

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

Scott was among Herbert’s first English translators. In an interview he says:

“I would say that of all the many Polish poets I translated, Herbert was probably the easiest. This was because of the intellectual structure of his poetry which transcended language differences. His poetry of ideas was immediately accessible to Westerners; and did not depend, in the way that Miłosz’s did, on the uniqueness and syllabic density of Polish. For example the matter-of-fact lucidity of Herbert’s `kamyk jest stworzeniem / doskonałym’ is immediately transferable into English: `a pebble is a perfect creature.’”

“The Pebble” is from Herbert’s third book, Study of the Object (1961), and might be judged more private, more philosophical than his later work, in which the public realm – Poland and its burden of Communism – grows more insistent in its pressure. The “intellectual structure” of Hebert’s poems, Scott says, keeps them inexhaustible even in translation – an observation I accept on faith, as I don’t read Polish. But Herbert’s thought, steeped in the Western tradition and dedicated to preserving that tradition against barbarian encroachments, seems to me pan-national. Any thoughtful, educated reader can appreciate it. In “The Pebble” he praises the self-contained nobility of stones, implicitly contrasting them with human beings. A pebble, unlike us, is its essence.

Such heft of significance seems absent from much of the poetry written today – one of the reasons I return so often to Herbert. What American poet would praise, without irony or false sentiment, the nobility of anything? How long is it since we read a new poem (or essay, or novel, etc.) that achieved the degree of greatness Herbert’s so often did? Who writes essentially today? Who has the nerve? Why are we willing to settle for so little? In his Harper’s interview last year, essayist/critic Arthur Krystal addresses this failure of the age:

“You could argue that the idea of `greatness’ is itself a false category, an artificial and socially constructed yardstick. [It’s not, of course, and Krystal knows it.] But if we’re talking about the human need to create and respond to momentous works of human endeavor, then, please, show me a poet or a novelist of whom one can say, as Eliot said of Yeats: `He was one of those whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them?’”

“Momentous works of human endeavor?” Of late, precious few. I suggest Geoffrey Hill’s poems. Krystal continues:

“In talking about Energy, which he thinks the essential quality of poetry, Keats says `and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy–For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as truth.’ What an astonishing thing to say by a poet whose work is distinguished by imaginative imagery and sensuous particulars. But Keats himself doesn’t find a radical disconnect between intelligence and poetry. He believes the mind derives its character from the quality of the emotions it experiences. At the same time, he also recognizes that the real or the concrete, however beautiful, is still a hint, a foreshadowing, of the Ideal. The great thing about Keats is that he responds emotionally both to the eagle and to the Idea of the eagle.”

Krystal is quoting the letter Keats wrote to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, who had settled in Kentucky, on March 19, 1819. Here’s the context:

“Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel – By a superior being our reasoning[s] may take the same tone – This is the very thing in which consists poetry; and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy – For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a [in his interview, Krystal omits the indefinite article] truth – Give me this credit – Do you not think I strive – to know myself?”

After quoting lines from Milton’s Comus, Keats adds: “Nothing ever becomes real
till it is experienced – Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.”

The rapid-fire sequence of associations is typical of Keats. He starts with a street fight, condemns it but admires its passion. What he would like to see is not a rant or tantrum but a grace-filled argument – a rarity not only in poems. “It is not so fine a thing as poetry” -- “fine,” I think, is tinged with gentle sarcasm. As always, Keats’ sensibility is capacious, elastic enough to hold poetry and philosophy, eagles and truth. “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced”: not the words of an ethereal sprite. Keats is tough-minded, empirical, trained in medicine. He was already sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him less than two years later.

I’ve quoted this passage before, from “The Price of Art,” an essay by Herbert in Still Life with Bridle, but it always stirs me. I think Keats would have appreciated it:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary art declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

`Half-Past Its Prey'

Last week my 8-year-old dissected an owl pellet in science class and picked apart the compacted remains of five mice. He and a partner put on masks and gloves like surgeons, tore open the pellet and removed the contents with tweezers. True to their age, they reassembled the jumbled bones into a rodent Frankenstein’s monster: “We made it look like a mutated freak.” The next day, Dave Lull wrote to say:

“Every winter that we lived there [the first apartment Dave shared with his wife] a snowy owl perched for hours on a power pole at the edge of the woods. From our living room, through a picture window, we could sit comfortably and watch it sitting so still, though moving a little now and then, and sometimes we'd catch sight of it flying away. Beautiful.”

When my oldest son was a boy I took him almost every weekend to a state nature center in upstate New York. Mostly we went there to catch frogs but in the administrative building rangers had built a room-sized cage for Aristotle, a barred owl rescued from some calamity. In aggregate, over seven or eight years, we stared at that owl for a good day or two, waiting for him to move or say something, and neither of us considered that a waste of time. Dave Lull, who says he has been “on an R.S. Thomas kick lately,” sent me “Barn Owl” (from The Way of It, 1977):

“1
Mostly it is a pale
face hovering in the afterdraught
of the spirit, making both ends meet
on a scream. It is the breath
of the churchyard, the forming
of white frost in a believer,
when he would pray; it is soft
feathers camouflaging a machine.

“It repeats itself year
after year in its offspring
the staring pupils it teaches
its music to, that is the voice
of God in the darkness cursing himself
fiercely for his lack of love.

“2
and there the owl happens
like white frost as
cruel and as silent
and the time on its
blank face is not
now so the dead
have nothing to go
by and are fast
or slow but never punctual
as the alarm is
over their bleached bones
of its night-strangled cry.”

Thomas, a Welsh Anglican priest, was a dedicated birdwatcher and probably preferred the company of birds to men. In his poems, birds, especially raptors, are often a stand-in for God but his biographer, Byron Rogers, assures us “mostly it was to do with beauty.” Thomas wrote a second “Barn Owl,” part of a series titled “Bestiary” in No Truce with the Furies (1995):

“The owl call.
It is not Yeats’
owl; it moves
not in circles

“but direct through
the ear to the heart,
refrigerating it.
It belongs not

“to the mind’s order.
It was that which perched
on the boneless arm
of the scarecrow

“that life had set
up to keep death off.
As a poet I am
dumb; as painter

“my brush would shrivel
in its acetylene
eyes. What, as composer
could I do but mimic

“its deciduous notes
flaking from it
with a feather’s softness
but as frigidly as snow?”

The same series of poems, “Bestiary,” begins with “Owl.” Clearly, Thomas felt a temperamental affinity with these fierce nocturnal hunters:

“The owl has a clock’s
face, but there is no time
on it. No raptor ever
is half-past its prey.

“The talons revolve
and the beak strikes the
twelve sharp notes that are
neither midday nor midnight

“on the skull’s anvil
but links of a chain
that thought forges and thought
tries continually to break.”

Has faith ever seemed so fearsome?

`A Place Where People Read Together'

I, a financial illiterate, have discovered my first leading economic indicator: the going rate for books sold at Half-Price Books. Friday afternoon I carried in two large moving-company boxes filled with them. My wife wanted to get rid of cookbooks we no longer use and the Spanish-language titles she expects never to read again (including Ernesto Sabato’s Sobre héroes y tumbas, when I want On Heroes and Tombs). I threw in some odds and ends, and swelled the gross tonnage to 50 books. Angel, one of the clerks, told me to return in 30 minutes so I grazed with the other ruminants.

My fellow customers proved more interesting than the predictable selection of books. The aísles were crowded. People browsed but, more encouragingly, talked about books. Mysteries and science fiction sparked the most chatter. I heard a woman say “Samuel Delany,” and saw another, seated on a step ladder, reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina. She reminded me of my favorite letter writer, Charles Lamb, and the letter he wrote his friend Thomas Manning on Feb. 6, 1808. In it, Lamb managed to coin a punningly fanciful etymology for “college”:

“I think public reading-rooms the best mode of educating young men. Solitary reading is apt to give the headach [sic]. Besides, who knows that you do read? There are ten thousand institutions similar to the Royal Institution which have sprung up from it. There is The London Institution, The Southwark Institution, The Russell Square Rooms Institution, etc. College quasi Con-lege, a place where people read together.”

(See Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti for a recent selection from Lamb’s letters.)

After completing my rounds, I checked back with Angel who made me an offer: $15.50. I was parting with the most books I had ever sold to Half-Price Books and was, in return, receiving the smallest amount of cash. I took it, silently. I didn’t feel like repacking two boxes, carrying them back to the car and explaining why to my wife. I would have felt like Jack telling his mother about the magic beans, which I did anyway. Angel said, “Everybody’s selling books. They need the money. We can’t afford to pay ’em as much.” The supply and demand of used books: my first economic indicator.

Next in line was a very old woman with a severely curved spine. She had a stack of four or five mass-market paperbacks in front of her, with a John Gresham title on top. A clerk offered her one dollar. The woman looked at the clerk, the books, at me, and back at the clerk. “Oh,” she said, and her mouth remained in a small “O.” She took the money.

`I Listened More Than I Talked'

A friend and former colleague in upstate New York has lost her job with the newspaper where she worked for 28 years. Her anger vies with despair for dominance. Like me, she’s in her late fifties. She’s not naïve and knows journalism has always been a pitiless business. She never went to college, and started at the paper writing “chicken dinner” news for what used to be called the women’s pages. She learned everything on the job and excelled at it, and they let her go.

Commiserating can be touchy. Some people (I’m one of them) don’t want to hear it. Some want a sympathetic ear and nothing more (my jobless friend is among them). Some want you to fix their troubles and get angry if you don’t. Sympathy usually sounds dutiful and phony in my inner ear. And saying you know how they feel is presumptuous but you want to say something.

As usual of late I’m reminded of Chekhov. In March 1897, he was dining with his editor and friend Alexey Suvorin when he suffered a hemorrhage in his right lung. As a doctor and patient, Chekhov could no longer deny his tuberculosis, and he spent more than two weeks in a St. Petersburg clinic. V.S. Pritchett (in Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free) takes it from there:

“He was plagued by visitors, he said, who came to see him two at a time, each one begging him not to speak and at the same time pestering him with questions. The worst was Tolstoy, who did not stop talking about himself for four hours. The incurable egoist said he had given up writing Resurrection and had started a long book, clearing up, once and for all, the question of art.”

That was Tolstoy’s idea of comforting a sick acquaintance. As Simon Karlinsky writes in a footnote in Letters of Anton Chekhov: “The medical personnel at the clinic must have realized that Tolstoy’s visit was exciting and exhausting their patient, but there was nothing they could do: one didn’t ask Lev Tolstoy to leave.” In an April 16, 1897, letter to his friend Mikhail Menshikov, Chekhov describes the novelist’s visit (translation by Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim):

“Tolstoy came to see me while I was at the clinic and we had a most interesting conversation, interesting mainly for me because I listened more than I talked. We discussed immortality. He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can only imagine such a principle or force as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I, my individuality, my consciousness would merge with this mass – and I feel no need for this kind of immortality. I do not understand it, and Lev Nikolayevich was astonished that I don’t.”

Talking with a friend just sacked from her job is not the same, I know, as visiting an acquaintance with advanced tuberculosis. What the situations share is loss and fear, neither of them mine. The event is not about me, and I’m not there to lecture, meddle, fix or parade the depth of my sensitivity. For what it’s worth, Kathy cussed a lot and thanked me for doing the same. She said it felt good, which is better than commiseration.

`Holiday'

Maintaining a literary blog is like keeping a big band on the road during the waning days of swing music. The audience is aging and no longer guaranteed. They look elsewhere for diversion – television, bop or R&B. As the boss, you make sure the arrangements are in order, payroll is met, dates booked, players rehearsed and reasonably sober. You’re not Basie or Goodman but you’re a professional and people count on you. You’re never certain who’s listening, if anyone, but you still love the music and probably aren’t suited for doing anything else. Tomorrow’s another gig and you’ll be there.

I started Anecdotal Evidence three years ago today strictly as a soloist, not an ensemble player, which is the way I’ve gone about things for most of my life. If I had thought much about it, which I didn’t, I would have defined blogging as a lot of comping interrupted by occasional solos. I had forgotten that jazz musicians play best with an audience, and often the second show is better than the first, looser, more energized and inventive. Truly, no one is exclusively a soloist. Calling them sidemen sounds patronizing but I have a lot of partners to thank. First, as always, Dave Lull, mon frère, mon copy editor. And Bryan Appleyard, Buce, Laura Demanski, Elberry, Michael Gilleland, Joe, Jonathan, Joshua Kurp, Ken Kurp, Michael Leinz, D.G. Myers, Fran Manushkin, Nige, Brian Sholis, Ron Slate, Levi Stahl, Terry Teachout, Frank Wilson and all I’ve forgotten or who prefer to remain unacknowledged.

My brother sent a video of the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra performing Eddie Sauter’s “Holiday.” The band stayed together from 1952 to 1957 – tough years. For an idea of what blogging is like, listen to Bill Finegan’s intro and watch the percussionists.

Edgar Bowers

The poet Edgar Bowers died on this date in 2000. Go here to read "Living Together" and a brief commentary on it by the late Donald Justice.

`This Knot Intrinsicate'

A rabbi among my readers writes:

“Perhaps everyone knows it who cares for [Isaac] Babel, but I recall being stunned by its sad beauty: the line of self-description that opens Lionel Trilling's essay on Babel: `I was a boy with spectacles on my nose and autumn in my heart.’”

The well-known line is often misquoted, yanked from context and put in Babel’s mouth. In fact, the words are spoken by a rabbi in “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” a story in the Benya Krik cycle. Reb Arye-Leib addresses the narrator, Babel’s stand-in. The boy has been praising Benya Krik the gangster for his ruthless rise to eminence in the city. The two are seated, appropriately, on a cemetery wall. The rabbi says (in Peter Constantine’s translation):

“Why him? Why not the others, you want to know? Well then, forget for a while that you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your heart. Forget that you pick fights from behind your desk and stutter when you are out in the world! Imagine for a moment that you pick fights in town squares and stutter only among papers. You are a tiger, you are a lion, you are a cat. You can spend the night with a Russian woman, and the Russian woman will be satisfied by you. You are twenty-five years old. If the sky and the earth had rings attached to them, you would grab these rings and pulls the sky down to the earth. And your papa is the carter Mendel Krik. What does a papa like him think about? All he thinks about is downing a nice shot of vodka, slugging someone in their ugly mug, and about his horses – nothing else. You want to live, but he makes you die twenty times a day. What would you have done if you were in Benya Krik’s shoes? You wouldn’t have done a thing! But he did. Because he is the King, while you only thumb your nose at people when their back is turned.”

What Babel gives us is a rabbi admiring the thuggery of a Jewish gangster, rationalizing his charismatic violence. As usual with Babel, the language, especially dialogue, is extravagant and so is the psychology. He creates small dense knots of significance and defies us to untie them. He deals not in obscurity but lifelike, irresolvable complexity. I’m reminded of the queen’s final speech in Antony and Cleopatra, as she clutches the asp to her breast:

“With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool
Be angry, and dispatch.”

In the scene from “How Things Were Done in Odessa,” we see refracted images of Babel in both the rabbi and the boy. The glasses-and-autumn business is the rabbi’s putdown of the boy, Babel’s putdown of Babel. When I shared this reading with my reader the rabbi, he wrote back:

“My memories of Babel are from high school (still have the green covered [Walter] Morison translation with Trilling’s intro) though I haven’t read him in years. I remembered the ambivalence that touched me as an ambivalent Jewish teenager. I’d never be a football player, or a Cossack and part of me therefore devalued the physicality, but I knew as he did, there was something splendid about it.”

That’s the allure of Babel, his “knot intrinsicate.” That’s why he rode with the Cossacks and was thrilled and sickened by what he experienced. In his introduction, Trilling cites Hazlitt’s lecture on Coriolanus: “The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.” This is inarguably true in Coriolanus and other plays among the histories and tragedies, and is partially true in Babel’s stories, though its general applicability is dubious. Trilling doesn’t quote Hazlitt’s subsequent sentences:

“The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another.”

Clearly, Babel was an adept of the imagination, but understanding, in Hazlitt’s sense, is never entirely absent from his makeup. The moral centers in his stories are seldom slavishly admiring of violence, though his Cossacks and gangsters are. His narrators feel an ambivalent pull when it comes to raw power. Consider a scene from “Dolgushov’s Death” in Red Cavalry. One of the Cossacks, Dolgushov the telephonist, has been wounded and is propped against a tree (in Constantine’s translation):

“Without lowering his eyes from me, he carefully lifted his shirt. His stomach was torn open, his intestines spilling to his knees, and we could see his heart beating.”

Dolgushov wants his comrades to kill him, to “waste a bullet” on him, before the Poles arrive and “have fun kicking him around.” He tells the narrator, the war correspondent Kiril Lyutov, to write a letter to his mother explaining the “where, what, why” of his death. Lyutov refuses and Dolgushov says, “Then run, you bastard!”

Afonka Bida, the Cossack whom Lyutov considers a friend, takes papers from the wounded man and shoots him in the mouth. Lyutov, with a “pitiful smile,” tells Afonka he could never shoot a man. Afonka replies:

“`Get lost, or I’ll shoot you!’ he said to me, his face turning white. `You spectacled idiots have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse!’”

The glasses again, an emblem to the Cossack of cowardice, weakness, culture, education, perhaps Jewishness. Lyutov rides away, expecting to be shot in the back by Afonka. Babel, once a devoted reader of Maupassant, later lost his respect for his putative master. Maupassant, he said, “lacked heart.”

`A Group Portrait of Individuals'

Soon we leave for a week’s stay in Baja California Sur, in a house on the beach in Loreto -- my first visit to Mexico. The landscape of desert, rocks and sea sounds appealingly minimalist. I don’t fish, surf, snorkel, sunbathe or get drunk, which ought to leave plenty of time for reading and writing even with the kids doing some of the above. Being neurotic about the availability of printed matter, I’ve already planned my portable library, all of it rereading – The Brooklyn Novels by Daniel Fuchs, Boswell’s Life of Johnson and one book of poetry, probably The Poems of J.V. Cunningham. Obviously, I’m after bulk and density, something sustaining, like a diet rich in fiber.

The Boswell is an obvious, reliable choice, a volume as inexhaustible as life. Generations of readers have agreed, and for once we can sort of quantify a critical judgment. In Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001), H.J. Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto, examines 386 copies of the Life of Johnson in 126 editions printed between 1791 and 1994. She consulted not only rare-book libraries but undergraduate collections, and public and private libraries, in North America and the British Isles.

Roughly half the books she looks at have been marked by readers: 47 with signs of ownership only (initials, bookplates, signatures); 72, marks without notes; 72, annotations; 10, “extra-illustrations,” meaning “portraits or other images supplied by a reader.” About 40 percent of the Boswells she judges “marked in a substantive way,” and about half of them contain “discursive marginalia.”

These statistics impressed me but according to Jackson, a Coleridge scholar (she co-edited the six volumes of Coleridge’s Marginalia), they represent “modest results.” She has examined more than 500 titles heavily annotated by Coleridge, whose marginalia often amounted to another book, a sort of call-and-response echo of the volume in hand. In this, he resembles Leigh Hunt, the former owner of one of the Boswells inspected by Jackson. He heavily annotated all 10 volumes of the Croker edition:

“He freely sprinkled the text and footnotes with brief notes of approval or disapprobation: `Good,’ `Excellent,’ `Alas,’ et cetera. Longer notes are also quite common, and Hunt let them run over from one page to the next….Though the notes appear to have been written for his own amusement as he communed with his books, the way in which he refers to his life and opinions suggests that he must have been conscious also of the likelihood that they would fall into other hands eventually. At some point either Hunt or a later owner overtraced many of his penciled notes to preserve them.”

I’ve never taken to overtracing but when younger I annotated books with eternity in mind. My underlinings and allusions identified in my oldest copy of Ulysses were meant to be definitive, not just personally useful. The arrogance of youth is thinking you’re Joyce’s not-so-silent partner, completing the work he left incomplete. On the title page I find such invaluable information as the etymology of Odysseus, the definition of parallax (with diagram), an explanation of the punningly named Ormond Hotel in “Sirens,” and this sentence fragment: “the madnesses [sic] of Deasy, Lyons, Breen, Farrell.” I probably wrote this in 1972, and I don’t remember writing a word of it.

I stopped writing in books a long time ago. It came to seem like a form of vandalism, and when I’ve reread my annotations I was most impressed by their fatuity: “Symbolism!” “Foreshadowing!” That sort of thing. Jackson looked at numerous “association copies” of the Life of Johnson – noteworthy for who previously owned them. She examined Boswells from the libraries of Carlyle, G.H. Lewes, Thomas Hardy, J.P. Morgan, C.S. Peirce, Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens, T.H. White and Elizabeth Bishop, among others. Most of the annotations are unremarkable. Bishop checked and underlined many passages in her Modern Library edition from 1931 (the first one I read), but wrote only one comment: “Sounds like a note for Proust.” Jackson writes:

“I had been hoping, when I began this survey, that it would provide access to the articulate responses of the lay reader, that touchstone of criticism memorably invoked by Johnson himself when he asserted that `by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours [from the “Life of Gray”].’ And to a certain extent I found what I had hoped for – the comments of actual readers over a long stretch of time, with some consistent themes emerging.”

Jackson is struck by the frequency of seeming non sequiturs scrawled in the Boswells. One anonymous reader wrote a single comment in the 10-volume edition from 1835 housed in the British Library. Next to this innocuous statement by Johnson -- “A dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both are before him.” -- the reader wrote “He is quite wrong there.” Nothing further in all 10 volumes. Jackson’s conclusion to this chapter of Marginalia says something about the reasons we read and what we’re seeking:

“If it seems perverse to say that idiosyncrasy constitutes a pattern, it must at least be acknowledged that on the evidence of these annotated copies of the Life of Johnson, Boswell’s readers were looking for help with their own lives and were most struck by those places in which there was something at stake for them personally. If this is not the natural attitude of `all readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices,’ still it seems to have been consistently the main concern of readers of this great biography over two hundred years. Their collective profile can only be a group portrait of individuals.”

How rare and satisfying to have one’s intuitive conclusions confirmed by a scholar.

Looking in Purses

Isaac Babel is said to have paid prostitutes in Paris not for their conventional services but for the privilege of examining the contents of their purses. They must have thought him a fetishist but like many writers – at least those interested in the world beyond their cloistered selves -- Babel was a mostly benign species of voyeur. We see this impulse often in Red Cavalry, stories based on his experience as a war correspondent riding in 1920 with the Cossacks, and in 1920 Diary, the working notes Babel kept during the Polish campaign. The Cossacks’ savagery and anti-Semitism require Babel to mask his Jewishness in their presence, turning him into a fulltime spectator, vigilantly watching and listening. He sympathized with the Jews of Galicia when the Cossacks committed their outrages against them, but did little or nothing to help. This terrible tension energizes his books.

In “Two Ivans” from Red Cavalry, Babel’s narrator, Kiril Lyutov, stops to urinate in the dark. He feels a splash, lights his lantern and discovers he has urinated on the face of a dead Pole. Some men would freeze with horror at the inadvertent indecency. Others would walk away without a second thought. This is Lyutov’s reaction (in David McDuff’s translation):

“A notebook and fragments of the proclamations of Pilsudski lay beside the corpse. In the Pole’s notebook there were notes of minor expenses, the order of the shows at the Krakow Theatre and the birthday of a woman named Maria-Luiza. With one of the proclamations of Pilsudski, marshal and commander-in-chief, I wiped the stinking liquid from the skull of my unknown brother and walked away, bent under the weight of the saddle.”

The scene is remarkably dense with contradictory significance – the fastidious wiping of the dead man’s face, using a proclamation from the chief of state of the Second Polish Republic. More interesting is Lyutov’s apparently untroubled inspection of the dead Pole’s notebook. Lyutov opens the volume – not unlike Babel’s 1920 Diary – and glimpses not war secrets but the mundane details of civilian life. Lyutov reading the Pole’s jottings is Babel rifling a French whore’s purse.

As a newspaper reporter, that’s what I was paid to do for many years, and I was temperamentally suited for the job. Talking to strangers, asking impertinent questions while silently inspecting their homes or offices – all in a day’s nosy work, and often very satisfying. I was rereading Babel when Dave Lull sent me the latest essay by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), “Shelf Life,” in Standpoint. Daniels dissects the condescension implicit in intellectuals using grocery clerks as “a trope for the futility of existence at the lower end of the social spectrum.” Daniels defends them and those working the cash registers:

“The checkout staff are always pleasant too. Their job is far from uninteresting, contrary to what unimaginative intellectuals might suppose. Surely people's purchases, infinitely various in their combination, must tell you a lot about them. I don't think I would mind working on a supermarket checkout, at least for a few months.”

I’m an inveterate voyeur of the checkout line, self-righteously assessing the dubious purchases of others – beer, cigarettes and a six-pack of yogurt, that sort of thing. Of course nothing is more human and pleasurable than feeling superior to others – a perfectly harmless pastime so long as we keep it to ourselves. I do the same in traffic, reading decals and bumper stickers on the cars ahead of me, and speculating about the lives of the owners. If we possess a shred of sensitivity and imagination, we are, by nature, amateur psychologists. We want to know about the insides of others by reading their outsides – a useful if not foolproof strategy.

This is Babel’s method and recurrent theme – reading others, their horror and beauty, with cool dispatch. He records the urine dripping from a dead man’s mouth with the same neutrality as the theater schedule from Krakow. As critic Viktor Shklovsky put it:

“Babel’s principle device is to speak in the same tone of voice about the stars above and gonorrhea.”

The Pocket Watch

“Comparing Tolstoy’s Works to Babel’s is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch.”

This is a consumer warning and critical plaudit masking as an aphorism. In context – the second paragraph of “Babel in California,” published four years ago in the second issue of n + 1 -- Elif Batuman assumes for us that Babel deserves a place on the shelf with the canonical Russian writers (Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Lermontov, Pushkin), though Babel’s body of work (two volumes) is conspicuously smaller than Tolstoy’s (100 volumes in the “millennium” edition). Batuman’s economy of means is more Babel-like than Tolstoyan.

Somewhere online I read of Batuman’s essay and telephoned book and magazine shops around Houston looking for that copy of n+1, a journal new to me. A Barnes and Noble about 20 miles away had one and held it for me. I’ve never seen another copy of n+1, and the rest of the second issue is a waste of time, but I’ve hung on to it because of the pleasure “Babel in California” gives me each time I read it. The love of Babel I share with Batuman is much of the reason, but she’s also a real writer not an academic hack, in love with unexpected convergences, very funny, an essayist who can tell a good story.

Her first Babel was “My First Goose,” in a sophomore creative-writing class, and she was not impressed. Mine was “The Sin of Jesus,” in a forgotten anthology read in high school, and I was smitten. Her next exposure came in the doctoral program at Stanford. A friend suggested she take a class with Steven Zipperstein (author of a soon-to-be-published study of Isaac Rosenfeld):

“Already partially convinced, I consulted the syllabus and saw Boswell’s Life of Johnson – at the time, the key to all my mythologies – and registered for the class.

“I came for Boswell and stayed for Babel.”

(Go to Batuman’s webpage and link to an excerpt from the 40 page “Babel in California.”)

My reaction to first reading Batuman’s essay was elation – a good writer emotionally engaged by Boswell and Babel. It seemed too good to be true. The latter portions, devoted to a Babel conference and exhibit at Stanford in 2004, are comedy, especially when Babel’s daughters show up. He had Nathalie Babel with his wife, Evgeniya, and Lidiya Babel with the companion of his final years, Antonina Pirozhkova. Scattered throughout the essay are nuggets of critical devotion:

“The 1920 diary, there is something so precious and almost-lost about it – it’s perfect in its incompleteness, like Pushkin’s fragments. Even knowing nothing, or next to nothing, about Babel’s life, you still want to put it in your pocket and take it with you, to make sure it still exists.”

And this, as true of Batuman as Babel:

“Reading Babel, you never get the feeling – as you do with many great authors – that he omitted part of his observations because they didn’t fit with the story he wanted to tell.”

And back to that sentence I quoted at the beginning: “Comparing Tolstoy’s Works to Babel’s is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch.” A mixed blessing of metaphors. A long road can be exhausting but gives us much to see along the way. A watch is a machine without surprises, a model of predictability, but it’s small and elegantly crafted.