`Whom No Poet Sings'

Bad poetry hurts, even more than bad prose. The latter may fulfill some utilitarian purpose – documentation or the simple communication of data. If its badness doesn’t compromise understanding, it can be excused as artless but functional. Basil Bunting put the distinction like this:

“Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry's business.”

When poetry is bad, it’s often because the poet ignores Bunting’s stricture and attempts with too much force and too little grace to convey meaning. The music and wit are disregarded. I’ve just finished reading and reviewing a new anthology of poetry that I found frustratingly inconsistent in this regard. The anthologist lards it with too much verse that barely meets the minimum standards of prose, and yet includes some of the great poems in the language – by Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop and J.V. Cunningham, among others. Living with the book for a month or so, I forced myself to read and reread the dreck while inevitably returning to the pearls. The bad poems hurt. Michael Drayton’s single entry did precisely the opposite. Reading it over and over was a form of bliss. Here is Sonnet 6:

“How many paltry, foolish, painted things,
That now in coaches trouble every street,
Shall be forgotten, whom no Poet sings,
Ere they be well wrapt in their winding-sheet!
Where I to thee eternity shall give,
When nothing else remaineth of these days,
And Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.
Virgins and matrons, reading these my rhymes,
Shall be so much delighted with thy story
That they shall grieve they lived not in these times,
To have seen thee, their sex's only glory.
So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng,
Still to survive in my immortal song.”

While seducing his beloved with flattery and simultaneously insulting her, Drayton flatters and seduces us, his readers.

`The Forgotten Obvious'

It’s heartening to see Bryan Appleyard reading Geoffrey Hill, his country’s greatest living writer. If our offspring remain literate – never a certainty-- this squalid era may be remembered as the Age of Hill. Readers who complain about “inaccessibility” confuse literature with “entertainment options.” Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Alexander, like television sit-coms, are accessible. Hill is merely a supremely powerful poet who deals in unpleasant truths and can do anything with language.

The lines Bryan quotes are from “On Reading Crowds and Power,” Hill’s meditation on Elias Canetti in A Treatise of Civil Power (2007). Note the reiteration of “power.” In the same volume, from “A Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power,” come these lines:

“Civil power now smuggles more retractions
than hitherto;public apology ad libs its charter,
well-misjudged villainy gets compensated.
I still can't tell you what that power is.
The statute books
suffer us here and there to lift a voice,
judge calls prosecutor to brief account,
juries may be stubborn to work good
like a brave child
standing its ground knowing it’s in the right.”

Here we recognize the lineaments of early-21st-century power – in particular its dishonesty -- without the simple-minded stridency of most public literature. As an experiment, however, substitute “poetry” or “literature” for “power.” The indictment holds.

The students in a high-school class where I recently worked were reading – and listening to – The Tortilla Curtain (1995) by T. Coraghessan Boyle. The novel is no worse than most books read in public schools but the recording made plain the dullness of its prose, the movie-saturated mundanity of its plot and characterizations, and the didacticism of its themes (illegal Mexican immigration, etc.). As the reader recited his lines, I would try to anticipate the next word, phrase or sentence, and often got it right -- the literary counterpart of Paint-By-Numbers. Teachers and students alike treated the book as no more than a dramatization of ideas, a plot-driven confrontation between “sides.” A teacher spoke of “good guys” and “bad guys.” Everyone in the classroom looked bored. Back to Bryan and the lines he quoted from Hill:

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

Thinking about the complexity of Hill’s vision and poetry, and the wide-spread resistance to it, I was reminded of a passage in W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson, from the chapter on Johnson’s Shakespeare:

“As in his moral writing, the drama of his literary criticism lies in the power [that word again] with which he moves at once to that rarest of all things for frightened and confused human nature – the obvious. The catharsis, or relief, as in all good drama, lies in the fact that nothing is being disregarded as he walks toward the forgotten obvious….For every civilization, there was a time before it existed; and it would not have developed without the `intellectual light’ that literature – taken as a whole – was able to provide. That `intellectual light’ may certainly `enable us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape by condemning himself to perpetual darkness?’”

Hill’s dark, difficult poetry enlightens, brings light.

`The Schoolboy in Love with Animals'

A brief conversation last week with a chemistry teacher who said she started as an entomologist and still enjoys collecting beetles sent me back to one of my earliest heroes, J. Henri Fabre (1823-1915), friend to Pasteur and John Stuart Mill, and who, out of a lifelong love of insects, blurred the always dubious line between amateur and professional. With Montaigne and Proust, he is among my favorite French writers, author of the 10-volume Souvenirs Entomologiques (more than 2,500 pages, almost 850,000 words). Darwin called him an “incomparable observer,” though Fabre never accepted the theory of evolution. I pulled out The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre, the selection edited by Edwin Way Teale in 1949 that I read as a kid.

Fabre was an autodidact in an age when enthusiasts with little or no formal training could do pioneering work in science and elsewhere. He blithely anthropomorphizes. His descriptions of field work sound like miniature dramas. They’re reminiscent of the epic battle between the ants in Walden, minus the portentousness. Fabre’s entomological equipment was laughably primitive and served him well. In “Wasps of the Bois des Issarts” he writes of his early insect studies (translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos):

“A fig for Mariotte’s flak and Toricelli’s tube! This is the thrice-blest period when I cease to be a schoolmaster and become a schoolboy, the schoolboy in love with animals. Like a madder-cutter off for his day’s work, I set out carrying over my shoulder a solid digging-implement, the local luchet, and on my back my game-bag with boxes, bottles, trowel, glass tubes, tweezers, lenses and other impedimenta. A large umbrella saves me from sunstroke.”

Fabre’s pieces on the predatory wasps – Sphex wasps, or diggers -- are probably his best known work. The wasps sting and paralyze other insects, hoard them in underground burrows and lay their eggs on them. When they hatch, the larvae go to work on the well-stocked pantry. In “The Hunting Wasp,” Fabre writes:

“A quarry that is not too big to permit the effort of flying makes the Yellow-winged Sphex a semi-social species, that is to say, one seeking the company of her fellows; a quarry too heavy to carry through the air makes of the Languedocian Sphex a species vowed to solitary labour, a sort of savage disdainful of the pleasures that come from the proximity of one’s kind.”

I brought Fabre with me to school and the latter portion of this passage seemed applicable to the student I minded for seven hours on Monday. He was serving an in-school suspension, and except for bathroom and lunch breaks we remained the entire time in a small conference room, at opposite ends of a table.

I was more than a babysitter but less than a tutor. He fumed when I told him to get rid of the iPod and cell phone. He was suspended for pushing a female teacher last week. He had homework but would read only a driver’s manual, claiming he wanted to get his license because his uncle was giving him a car. A counselor told me this kid had recently gotten a girl pregnant and had no intention of marrying her or raising the child. With a straight face, the same counselor said he had “anger issues.” His conversation was rudimentary -- mutters and grunts delivered with a whining inflection. He was full of grievances and hardly seemed part of the same species as sweet-natured Fabre. When I got home I sought “Wasp,” a prose poem Zbigniew Herbert included in his second collection, Hermes, Dog and Star (1957). Here is the translation by Alissa Valles:

“When the flowered tablecloth, honey, and fruit were mowed from the table in one fell swoop, the wasp made an attempt to fly off. Wrapped in stifling clouds of net curtain, it went on buzzing for a long time. Finally it made it to the window. Again and again it beat its weakening body against the cold welded air of the pane. In the last movement of its wings there lingered the same faith that the body’s unrest can raise a wind carrying us to longed-for worlds.

“You who have stood under a beloved’s window, you who have seen your happiness on display – can you find it in yourselves to extract the sting of this death?”

In Herbert’s poetry I find flies, bees, wasps and beetles but no butterflies.

Of and From Readers

One way to recognize a civilized person is by the easy grace of his thought. Emotion is present but never predominant, tempered by reason, learning and good manners. Ideas flow effortlessly, often by spontaneous association. The stance is never aggressively ideological but leaves room for disagreement and elaboration. The thinking is open-ended, collaborative, generous, encouraging, confident, humorous and never pretentious. Consider two paragraphs from an e-mail I received Sunday from a retired professor of English:

“In my copy of E. H. Coleridge's edition of Coleridge's poems I found `My Godmother's Beard’ (Vol. 2, p.976), which includes such Chaucerian lines as, Pallas `bade a length of hair / In deep recess her muzzle hide’ and `To snatch a kiss were vain (cried Pallas) / Unless you first should shave your beard.’ The textual note tells us that this jeux d'esprit was inserted by the poet in Gillman's copy of `Omniana’ of 1812. Unfortunately someone showed it to his godmother `in consequence of which he was struck out of her will.’ Not the first of Coleridge's misjudgments -- nor his last.

"Sam, our beloved cat of 21 years, recently died. It, among other things, amazes me the hold a pet can have on one. Frank MacShane, in his biography of Raymond Chandler, tells us that Chandler's cat sat on his desk while he wrote. He never quite got over its death -- and his writing showed it. For comfort I turned not to Eliot but to Christopher Smart (I'd as soon pray with [the mad] Kit Smart as anyone, Johnson told Boswell), to `Of Jeoffry, His Cat’ from the `Jubilate Agno’: `For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. etc.’ It's a wonderful work by very fine poet, one of the multitude of mad writers during the Age of Reason.”

I’m floored sometimes by my good fortune. Only through the gift of the internet and this belated blog was I introduced to such excellent people. Good common readers are out there, quietly reading and going about the rest of their business, feeling little or no compulsion to proselytize or otherwise behave like egotists. Here is an excerpt from another e-mail received on Sunday, this one from a Canadian reader:

“A while back, Patrick, you wrote about used bookstores, and I recalled that post when I recently visited my favourite in Vancouver after an absence of several years. This store has only the most rudimentary sorting system - barely alphabetical. The over-stuffed shelves and the stacks on the floor always made browsing there difficult, yet fun. There was no way of knowing what discovery you would make. Time and the internet have apparently taken their toll. The aisles were clear and empty and there were now empty areas on the shelves. It would appear that either the owners have curtailed their buying of used fiction or people no longer bring them to the store. I still found some interesting books: Bloodshed and Three Novellas by Cynthia Ozick; a collection of Ruskin's essays; and The Book of Daniel. Yet I was struck by several things. First, the new employees seem ignorant of how annoying it is to be repeatedly asked by a cheery, bubbly worker if I need help while browsing in a used bookstore. Second, as books are bought and not replaced it becomes easier to discern which authors have fallen out of favour with the contemporary reader. I found it a little sad to see so many novelists ignored. Row upon row of I, Claudius, Lawrence Durrell, Margaret Drabble, Galsworthy and Dickens. On the positive side, however, I couldn't see one Nabokov and only one Ford Madox Ford.”

A reader grateful for not finding books by writers he admires: That too is one way to define a civilized person. In contrast, I think of the heatedly competitive conversations, most often about politics or some backwater of popular culture, I’m often extorted into overhearing. I’m rereading a favorite family history, Bowen’s Court (1942) by Elizabeth Bowen. As she chronicles the fortunes of one Anglo-Irish family, we slowly realize we are witnessing the fall of an entire civilization into modernity:

“And to what did our fine feelings, our regard for the arts, our intimacies, our inspiring conversations, our wish to be clear of the bonds of sex and class and nationality, our wish to try to be fair to everyone bring us? To 1939.”

`The Smudge of the Ashen Fluff'

We were watching a movie with the boys Friday evening when something crashed into the front window. Outside on the gravel was a motionless song sparrow. I lifted it by a wing and saw that it clutched a piece of gravel with each of its feet. One fell immediately and the other fell as I walked around the corner of the house and opened the gate. I lifted the lid on the plastic yard-waste bin and dropped the bird inside, where it landed on a bed of leaves and grass clippings. I felt lousy but didn’t want a neighborhood cat to tear it up and leave the mangled body for the kids to see. Naturally, I thought of the opening lines of “Pale Fire,” from the novel of the same name:

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

Saturday morning I took out the trash, including a handful of banana peels. I opened the yard-waste bin again and the sparrow exploded, shooting past my head, around the magnolia and over the fence. My “smudge of ashen fluff” had “lived on.” A reader who is losing his vision and faces another surgery writes: “I am hope-filled but not naïve.”

`Superficially, If I May So Say, Omniscient'

Twenty-five years in journalism turned me into a professional extravert without touching my essential introversion. I can talk to anyone. Or rather, I can listen to anyone, as the lives of others are invariably more compelling than my own. The topic over lunch in the faculty lounge was Star Trek, a subject about which, as Charles Lamb writes, “I am a whole Encyclopedia behind the rest of the world.” It’s not the first time. I know nothing about television, sports, and the movies and pop music of the moment – the lingua franca of students and faculty. I would be found out immediately if I tried to fake a knowing familiarity with such matters, so I nod, smile, emit the occasional throaty laugh and think of what else Lamb wrote in “The Old and the New Schoolmaster”:

“Not that I affect ignorance -- but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; every body is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.”

Don’t get me wrong: When the topic turns to something I know something about – children, for instance, or Zbigniew Herbert – I’m right there in the thick of it. Or when teachers turn to their other favorite subject (bitching about students, administrators and other teachers), or when students turn to theirs (bitching about teachers and “The Man” in general), I’m a fount of empathetic reciprocity. As Lamb goes on to say:

“The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of every thing, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of any thing. He must be superficially, if I may so say, omniscient.”

`The Paradigm of Civilization and Proportion'

“Dr [Johnson’s] dogmatisme was the façade of consternation. The 18th century was full of ahuris [“bewildered people”] – perhaps that is why it looked like the age of `reason’ – but there can hardly have been many so completely at sea in their solitude as he was or so horrifiedly aware of it – not even Cowper. Read the Prayers & Meditations if you don’t believe me.”

At last, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940 has arrived, and my first act was to look up the other Samuel, Johnson, in the index, where I found 35 citations. The passage above is from a letter to his friend Thomas McGreevy, written Aug. 4, 1937. Beckett spent several years in the nineteen-thirties researching Johnson’s life and work, focusing on his relationship with Mrs. Thrale. The result was an abandoned play, “Human Wishes,” not published until 1984 as a “dramatic fragment” in Disjecta.

Of growing interest to me are the occult kinships and unacknowledged convergences between writers separated by time and space. This relates to Guy Davenport’s notion that every text is a response to another text, whether or not the author announces it or is even aware of it. Everyone knows Beckett revered his countryman, James Joyce, but how many of Beckett’s avant-garde-minded admirers know of or share his lifelong fascination with Dr. Johnson? The letters’ editors (the first of a projected four volumes) tell us Beckett visited Johnson’s birthplace in Lichfield by himself on Aug. 1, 1935. The following year he translated Johnson’s famous letter to Lord Chesterfield into German. He also suggests that a film of Johnson’s life be made, with Charles Laughton in the starring role. All of this suggests Beckett felt a deep emotional identification with his fellow scholar and melancholic. In How It Was, her memoir of a 30-year friendship with Beckett, Anne Atik writes:

“Johnson was the one subject most certain to animate Sam, no matter how despondent he’s been before. There were many evenings, as mentioned, when he could say nothing [much like Johnson – and Cowper], show nothing, would hide his eyes and answer mechanically, albeit with his never-failing courtesy, until Johnson’s name came up (I’d bring it out like whiskey, or medicine). He dipped into Johnson constantly, for sheer pleasure; it was a source of relief, and, for the sake of our conversations, he was very glad that I considered it such, too.”

Atik continues:

“He had innumerable books concerning Johnson, as well as a 1799 edition of his Dictionary. One day he came in with a delighted expression on his face, giving a quick rub to his nose, smoking his cigar, saying, `Just read this in Johnson’s Dictionary – his definition of `lamentation’: `audible wail’…Johnson’s conversation – in spite of his notorious rages – was for Sam the paradigm of civilization and proportion; his kindness and hospitality to the poor and helpless, exemplary.”

Beckett’s mention of Cowper (1731-1800) is unexpected, though it shouldn’t be, given the poet’s history of depression and failed suicides. He mentions having read Lord David Cecil’s 1930 biography of Cowper, The Stricken Deer (in an Aug. 7, 1936, letter to McGreevy), but adds: “How did he ever manage to write such bad poetry?” I wonder if Beckett knew Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” in particular the final stanzas:

“Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram's.

“Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground.”

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull passes this along:

"Anne Atik in How It Was also wrote of SB: `Sam never asked tokeep any book I lent him . . . .' `But there was one he did want to keep: . . . in the fall of 1988 . . . the relatively recent biographyof Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate . . . .' `I pressed the book on him, knowing that there was material there which he couldn't possibly have read. I did not have to wait long for his reaction. For the first and only time he asked whether he could keep it, looking at me very intently, his eyes all but declaring, 'No way, sorry, you can't sayno.' `We talked about it at subsequent meetings, going over favourite titbits: Johnson's miserable time in Oxford, his shame at not having the proper shoes; the time that - as I kept reminding him - Oliver Edwards, one of Johnson's fellow students, said, on meeting him again, 'You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to bea philosopher but I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.' Or the extraordinary George Psalm-anazar, etc...[Ms. Atik's ellipsis] Sam often spoke of those in any way connected to Johnson or his period - 'Kit' Smart ('I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else') and his circle of friends, Garrick, Burney, Goldsmith etc. - as though he'd known them intimately. He did.'" (pages 78-79)

"I enjoy knowing this for some reason."

Me too, Dave.

`Fortune Layes the Plot'

“Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulatory Track and narrow Path of Goodness…”

The sentiment is familiar enough, echoing the tired admonition that we keep to the “straight and narrow path.” What holds my attention is the first adjective, funambulatory – a silly walk? That’s not far off. It refers to tightrope walking or rope dancing, as in a circus. The sentence comes near the conclusion of A Letter to a Friend (c. 1672, published posthumously) by Sir Thomas Browne. The word choice is typical of Browne – drawn from what today we would call “popular culture” but used in the context of applied morality. Trying to lead a moral life is like walking the highwire, presumably without a net.

Reading Browne’s prose -- as dense and sweet as fruitcake, without the queasiness -- is like one of those nagging reminders that we use only one- tenth of our brains. Most of us wallow about in the linguistic shallows while Browne plumbs the Mariana Trench. Dave Lull passed along news that novelist/essayist William H. Gass was to speak last night at Columbia University on “Baroque Prose”:

“Gass listed John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, and Thomas Hobbes as early devotees of Baroque prose. He would be their evangelist today. Indeed, when he compared their works with those by `old young people’ currently writing, his enthusiastic preference for the former came through: `A sermon of Donne’s often has more ideas, more energy, certainly more art, than these writers’ entire books. And the meters of Sir Thomas Browne are confounding and should astonish everyone.’”

And go here for an interview with Gass at Columbia, in which he says:

“It is a performance prose, associated, though not exclusively, with the sermon… and it makes its way to the U.S. through Emerson and triumphs in our time with Henry James. It is an oral prose, not a `written’ but a `spoken’ one, hence it is dominated by rhetorical rather than poetic structures.”

So I packed The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne with my turkey sandwich and read around in it over lunch at school. In the section titled “Essays and Observations from Notebooks,” editor Norman J. Endicott includes a short piece, “The Line of Our Lives.” I noted this sentence:

“Fortune layes the plot of our adversities on the foundation of our felicities; blessing us in the first quadrate to blast us more sharpely in the last: and since in the highest felicities there lyeth the capacitie of the lowest miseries, shee hath this advantage of our precedent happinesse, to make us truly miserable.”

It’s notable that Gass, a nonbeliever and longtime proponent of experimental fiction, should so admire Browne, a devoutly religious man, physician and scholar whose sensibility was expansive enough to comfortably contain such a crowd. Gass and Browne are word-drunk men. Elsewhere, Gass called him “Dr. Style.” Browne might speak for both when he writes in Religio Medici:

“I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent myself.”

`The Integrity of the Printed Work'

The most shameful piece of writing I have ever committed to print was a review published early in 1974 of Hugh Kenner’s A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. My copy is filed away in storage so I’m unable to quote specifics but it amounted to an assault on critics living parasitically off the bodies of real writers. I didn’t review the book at hand but what it represented to my 21-year-old, drug-addled mind. I knew Kenner’s work well, and only a year or so earlier had read his masterwork, The Pound Era. I admired him immensely and already thought of him as that rarest of critics – one from whose prose style I could learn something.

Just months before, I had dropped out of my university after three years as an English major. My temperament at the time was fueled by an amalgam of drugs, alcohol and self-centered anger – a volatile cocktail -- and a Freudian might make something of my assault on a writer I already respected as the paterfamilias. Despite my lingering shame I still accept, with qualifications, a germ of thought in my review: A prerequisite for good criticism is humility before great writing. In the caste system of literature, the critic is of secondary importance, at best, after the novelist, poet and dramatist. This does not imply obsequiousness before bad or mediocre work. To dissect the shoddy or dishonest is to celebrate their opposites.

I conducted a lengthy telephone interview with Kenner in December 1994. He was generous with his time and utterly entertaining as a conversationalist. We started with Yeats and ranged across the universe, touching lightly on Beckett. I considered confessing my 20-year-old misdemeanor but thought better of it. How prideful and grandiose to drag out such a triviality, expecting understanding and forgiveness. The review had been published in Exit (a Beckettian name, I suppose), a small-circulation underground magazine that went defunct a few months later. The review’s most lasting impact was my long-standing inability to reread Kenner’s book – a guilty blockage. Now, 35 years later, I’ve read it with pleasure, admiration and small shame.

The book was part of the “Reader’s Guide” series published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a virtual prescription for academic dullness. Kenner dispels that anxiety with the first sentences of his introduction:

“The reader of Samuel Beckett may want a Guide chiefly to fortify him against irrelevant habits of attention, in particular the habit of reading `for the story.’ Beckett does not write mood-pieces or prose-poems; he has always a story, though it is often incomplete and never really central to what we are reading.”

Not a wasted word or empty promise, and as good a Beckett distillation as I can imagine in 53 words. Kenner’s book totals 208 pages, counting both indexes. It can be enjoyed by a novice or an old Beckett hand, and can be read without strain in a single evening. There’s no muck about existentialism. Kenner never mentions Heidegger or Sartre. His prose is rigorously clear, like Beckett’s, and almost aphoristic:

“Beckett’s sensibility is profoundly conservative, and nowhere is he more traditional than in his regard for the integrity of the printed work, the scrupulousness of its phrasing, the accuracy of its proof-reading, the exemplary adequacy of the translations.”

And you have no need to wait 35 years to read it.

`Keep Me from Burning'

The school day started with a fire in the student restroom. The boy I was escorting said, “I’m not going in there,” so I went in there and found it empty of students. Burning was a plastic wastebasket in the corner. The flames were disappointingly feeble but smoke was filling the room and pouring into the hall. I pulled the wastebasket to the sink and threw water into it with my cupped hand. Left on the bottom was a soggy black mess of semi-molten plastic. I briefed the vice principal and returned to the classroom, though I still needed to use the restroom.

I had brought with me to school a poetry anthology I’m reviewing, and spent odd moments grazing around in it, concentrating on poets whose work I don’t know well. Among them was Katherine Philips (1632-1664), most of whose poems were addressed to “Lucasia” -- in fact, her friend Ann Owen. Included in the anthology is “To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship,” which, after the restroom adventure, seemed appropriately smoldering. The final stanza reads:

“Then let our flames still light and shine,
And no false fear control,
As innocent as our design,
Immortal as our soul.”

Fire (as ardor, combustion, inspiration) is an unacknowledged theme of the anthology, as I suppose it is generally in poetry. Next I found “Bethsabe’s Song” by George Peele (1556-1596), from a verse tragedy, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599). I particularly like this couplet:

“Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning,
Make not my glad cause cause of mourning.”

(Spell-check, of course, objects to “cause cause.”) In the afternoon I accompanied another student to chemistry class, where I learned the word stoichiometry and found these sentences defining “limiting reactant” on the board: “The reactant in a chemical reaction that limits the amount of products that can be formed. The reaction will stop when all of the limiting reactant is consumed.” To illustrate this point, the teacher poured three fingers of light-green ethanol into a beaker and put a match to it. The resulting flame was pale blue and, from a distance, almost invisible. She tipped the beaker and the flames grew higher and turned orange. “Oxygen is the limiting reactant,” she said.

The boy sitting at the next desk assured me the fire in the restroom started when a kid smoking a joint thought he was about to be caught, and in a panic threw it in the wastebasket.

`A Childlike Love of Fun'

The boys and I celebrated the first anniversary of our arrival in Washington with a good roll down a hill. We selected a grassy slope in the downtown park, free of trees and rocks, though planted here and there with dog shit. The technique is the same I employed as a boy – lie parallel to the top of the hill, arms against your sides, and give yourself a little push. If the slope is steep enough, gravity does the rest. The idea is to roll fast and far enough to get giddily dizzy but not vomit. Hill rolling was my first experiment in the “systematic derangement of the senses” advocated by Rimbaud – cheaper than beer or hashish, no proof of age required. My only unpleasant experience was once rolling over a patch of white clover and having a honey bee sting me on the shoulder.

There’s solid literary precedent for our hill rolling. In 1764, at the age of 54, Samuel Johnson accepted an invitation from the writer Bennet Langton to visit his family home in Lincolnshire. Langton, with Johnson, was among the founding members of The Club, the London dining and social organization whose other members included Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate sets the scene:

“For whatever reason, Langton never told it to Boswell, though he passed on so much other information to him. Perhaps he simply thought Boswell would not have understood it. But he always remembered it, and as an elderly man told the story to a friend of his son when they were out walking and came to the top of a very steep hill. Back in 1764 Johnson and the Langtons had also walked to the top of this hill, and Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to `take a roll down.’ They tried to stop him. But he said he `had not had a roll for a long time,’ and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length, `turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom.’”

Those who unimaginatively pigeonhole Johnson as a Tory stick-in-the-mud have no sense of the whole man. He contained multitudes. Among writers, who might have joined Johnson and taken “a roll down?” George Eliot? T.S Eliot? Marcel Proust? Hardly. But Charles Lamb might have had a go, and Thoreau, certainly. In the sentence preceding the passage above, Bate writes:

“Time and again, when he was with others, he could climb out of the prison house of self that he so loathed, and emerged with an exuberance and a childlike love of fun for which, said Mrs. Thrale, she never saw an equal.”

ADDENDUM: My brother makes this useful suggestion.

`A Library Fit for a Man'

When very young I asked my mother what sort of job would permit me to read books all day, and her reaction was to laugh loudly and for what seemed like a very long time. She laughed not at my naïveté but at the very idea of wanting to read in a spirit that coupled earnestness and languorous pleasure. Ours was an almost bookless house. Books were objects of suspicion and grudging admiration. They were not deemed a reliable source of escapism, as in mysteries or romances. Movies served that need. No, for a book to be acceptable it had to be useful – an almanac, or an encyclopedia purchased in weekly installments from the grocery. That I can read at all, let alone blissfully and out of need, seems miraculous.

I still carry in my head a vision of the ideally bookish life. The setting is an English country house. The ceilings are tall, light ample, colors muted, walls solidly ranked with books. The vision includes no catalog but every title I might feel an abrupt need to read at, say, 2:30 a.m., can be readily found. Multi-volume hard-cover sets predominate – all of Johnson, Hazlitt, Ruskin, Emerson and Kipling are here, organized according to my understanding of subject and author, not Dewey or the Library of Congress (Montaigne, Lamb and Thoreau are neighbors on the shelf). A fastidious fondness for cleanliness and order, coupled with an intuitive sense of kinship among writers, are the chief organizing principles.

Borges was an ideally bookish man, and he would have understood my fancy. From the age of 38 he worked as a librarian in his native Argentina, eventually becoming director of the National Library in Buenos Aires (around the same time his blindness became almost absolute). His well-stocked mind was a library. In 1962, in his prologue to “Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain,” Borges writes:

“Each in his own way imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an infinite library, because anything infinite is somewhat uncomfortable and puzzling, but as a library fit for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would allow for the pleasure of rereading, the serene and faithful pleasure of the classics, or the gratifying shock of revelation and of the foreseen.”

Borges reminds me of an essential library ingredient I omitted from my vision – “there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover.” In other words, the perfect library includes books whose existence you don’t even suspect. A perfect library leaves room for the joy only serendipity can supply.

`How to Rectify These Aversions'

During a brief, unexpected gap in the school day I took a textbook off the shelf, the fetchingly titled Elements of Literature, Fourth Course. Like most textbooks it was fat, overpriced and heavily illustrated, with numerous sidebars and other chopped-up bits of textual distraction. The contents, too, were predictably dubious, selected mostly according to sexual, racial and ethnic quotas (Malcolm X?). The usual sub-literary genre writers were also represented – Louis L’Amour, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Anne Rice. The book reminds me of the programming on “Classic Rock” radio stations. There’s no context, no sense of history or chronology, only fragments floating in a void loosely labeled “Literature.”

The book’s token inclusions based on literary merit included Julius Caesar, a poem by Emily Dickinson, Chekhov’s “The Bet” (in the Constance Garnett translation – the copyright lapsed long ago), Bernard Malamud’s “The First Seven Years,” and Borges’ “The Book of Sand.” In the last, the narrator trades a Wyclif black-letter Bible and his pension check for an infinite book, a volume without a first page or last. This story about infinity runs less than four pages. The narrator becomes a “prisoner of the Book” – an anxiety all dedicated readers share – and considers setting fire to it, “but I feared that the burning of the infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet in smoke.”

Instead, he takes the book to the National Library in Buenos Aires, which houses 900,000 books, and sneaks into the basement. He hides it “on one of the library’s damp shelves; I tried not to notice how high up, or how far from the door.” The infinite, in Borges, is a source of wonder and terror. Most of his best tales are metaphysical horror stories (“The Aleph, “The Library of Babel”). Instead of leaving the horror alone and letting it resonate, however, the textbook editors append questions and observations to the story “to facilitate discussion.” One, under the rubric “Writer’s Notebook,” suggests:

“Think of a time when, like the narrator in Borges’ story, you made a decision that involved a problem or an issue.”

Much of the thrill in reading Borges is the sense of epistemological vertigo he instills. An infinite book? A book that subsumes the universe? Why must the editors turn the frisson of pure storytelling into a lesson into dull pop psychology? Literary sabotage is nothing new. Guy Davenport, born in 1927, writes in “On Reading” (included in The Hunter Gracchus):

“Students often tell me that an author was ruined for them by a high-school English class; we all know what they mean. Shakespeare was almost closed to me by the world’s dullest teacher, and there are many writers whom I would probably enjoy reading except that they were recommended to me by suspect enthusiasts. I wish I knew how to rectify these aversions.”

`To Make Sense of What Takes Place'

“With how many moles of sulfur do 6.2 moles of iron react?”

For the first time in 41 years I entered a classroom where chemistry is taught and found that bewildering sentence written on the “smart board” (slate’s digital replacement). My chemistry teacher in high school was a Ukrainian immigrant who, mid-semester, broke both of her wrists when she fell on an ice-covered sidewalk while walking her dogs. Her casts were so bulky she couldn’t lift a pencil or test tube, though she sparked my small but enduring interest in her subject.

I was back in chemistry class to assist a special-ed. kid – take notes, help with the math and so forth. He hadn’t done the homework, ignored the in-class exercises, wouldn’t write down the homework assignment and spent the class, feet on the desk in front of him, reading Siddhartha. I didn’t care for this kid to begin with but his devotion to Hesse cinched it. With two or three exceptions his classmates were loud and dim, and didn’t have the math required to solve equations in chemistry.

While eating lunch in the faculty lounge, I had read John Cheever’s “The Geometry of Love,” a story about Charlie Mallory, a “free-lance engineer” who decides to manage his life with the aid of Euclidian geometry. Like Spinoza, he uses the rigors of mathematical logic to plumb and organize the world. Cheever writes:

“He felt much better He felt that he had corrected the distance between his reality and those realities that pounded at his spirit. He might not, had he possessed any philosophy or religion, have needed geometry, but the religious observances in his neighborhood seemed to him boring and threadbare, and he had no disposition for philosophy. Geometry served him beautifully for the metaphysics of pain.”

Another substitute, a woman born in Bombay, joined me at the lunch table. She, too, was reading Siddhartha but with the understanding it was a biography, not fiction. “This is not how I remembered his story,” she said. I haven’t read Hesse since I last studied chemistry so I wasn’t much help. At one point, Charlie Mallory resolves to write a book -- Euclidean Emotion: The Geometry of Sentiment – and I take it Cheever would have been amused by the recent efforts of “Darwinians” to understand every human act, thought and emotion in terms of evolutionary advantage.

I had enough time at lunch to also reread “The Country Husband,” in which the main character, Francis Weed, is told by a psychiatrist to take up woodworking as a therapeutic hobby. Weed discovers “some true consolation in the simple arithmetic involved and in the holy smell of new wood.”

The chemistry teacher was exceptional, the best I’ve worked with – confident without cockiness, enthusiastic without being annoying about it. She expected a lot of the kids but never cajoled or threatened, and kept her cool when most of them disappointed her. I complimented her after class. She told me she was a first-year teacher but her contract was not being renewed because of a “budgetary shortfall.”

Included in Collected Stories and Other Writings, one of the Cheever volumes recently published by Library of America, is “What Happened,” an essay from 1959. I found my day and this blog neatly distilled in this passage:

“…I was happy for I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together incidents as disparate as a dance in Minneapolis and a backgammon game in the mountains so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.”

The answer to the question I started with, by the way, is 9.3 moles.

`The Beautifullest Harmonies'

Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life can be read as a familiar cautionary tale for American writers: how to write, how not to live. We think we know the story, having learned it long ago from the examples of Hart Crane and John Berryman. But Cheever, who wrote some of our best short stories – “The Sorrows of Gin,” “The Country Husband,” “The Swimmer,” “Reunion” – perfected a mode of self-destruction violently at odds with the vision of upper-middle-class propriety he chronicled, idealized, satirized and struggled to live. It’s hard to imagine a more conflicted human being. For Cheever, the simplest things were never simple. Every impulse and value contained its negation -- goodness undone, selfishness occasionally mitigated by grace. Even in his final seven years, sober at last, there was no stillness in Cheever.

With a sense of relief, on the day I finished reading Bailey’s elegant account of an inelegant life, I read a poem by Frank Wilson, “Still Point,” about the very stillness that forever eluded Cheever:

“All of his life he had known how
To keep in touch, but never did
Except by chance: Something would bid
Him glance its way, a drooping bough,
A flitting bird, and he would stand
Entranced, as everything spun round
About the silence that he found
He had become. All seemed so grand.
Sparrow would fly, the oak tree bend,
And he, alive awhile, attend.”

I thought immediately of the title of a book I’ve never read – The Unwobbling Pivot, Ezra Pound’s translations from Confucius. Frank, I know, feels a kinship with Taoism, and “the silence that he found / He had become” reminds me of the Taoist notion of wu wei, or “non-action.” The character described in the poem comes “alive awhile” through the attentiveness he pays the simplest of events – a bird flies from a branch. It’s a scene painted on a Chinese screen.

Next I thought of a passage from the title essay in Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination:

“When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the procession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.”

“To pay attention to the pace of thing” is to be mindful of natural rhythms, of birds and trees and dogs, of the Tao. The Tao Te Ching is said to date from between the sixth and third centuries B.C., and Heraclitus lived from roughly 540 to 480 B.C. Ideas, like men, have natural lives and rhythms. In his translation of Heraclitus’ fragments, Herakleitos and Diogenes, Davenport articulates a thought that helps us understand Cheever and his stories:

“Opposites cooperate. The beautifullest harmonies come from opposition. All things repel each other.”

`By Accidents and Sagacity'

Some revelations are dateable. One occurred on a Sunday afternoon in September 1970, when my parents drove me to Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, and left me there, a frightened, backward, book-crazy 17-year-old. I retain the bewildering memory of wearing a yellow sweater. My dormitory roommate was my best friend from high school. My parents and his had never gone to college. None of this was revelatory. That came later in the day when I entered the university library for the first time and set up house for the next three years.

It hadn’t occurred to me that its differences from the public libraries of my youth would be more than quantitative. Like the ocean, its collection had unsuspected depths. Here was everything a beloved poet or novelist had written and seemingly everything ever written about him. In that first semester I discovered Samuel Beckett, Hermann Broch, Flann O’Brien, B.S. Johnson and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. I even read some of the stuff assigned by my professors.

Dave Lull passed along an essay by William Gass, “Shelf Life,” that conjured these happy memories. Gass recounts his lifelong devotion to libraries, in particular the one at Cornell where he attended graduate school:

“I had a carrel—a small nick in the wall of the stacks that held a mean metal chair and a bulb, a sheet of steel to write or rest a book on, a rack in front of my face for volumes taken from the shelves (but on one’s honor not to be removed from the building) and a jar of hard candy whose contents were dangerous when wet. To take notes, `pencils only’ was a rule I was willing to observe, since, unlike those of the Navy, it made sense. The building resembled a ship in some ways and bore me off smoothly… sitting there, day after day in dusky light; my conception of Eden began to change. It had no location on a map, but was a destination determined by the Dewey Decimal System.”

Part of Gass’ definition of a “great library” is one that “will permit me to poke about in its innards as long and as often as I like.” I’ve often indulged the Borgesian fancy that all libraries are one, separated only by trivial matters of space and time, and that I’ve never left the sixth floor of BGSU’s library, nor the Cleveland Public Library, nor the one here in Bellevue, Wa., nor any in the five states where I’ve lived. Great libraries are home to scholars and their laser-guided research, but the ablest citizens of the stacks are those guided only by waywardness and intuition; in a word, by blessed serendipity. Lest you think I’m endorsing dilettantism, consider Paul West’s entry for “serendipity” in The Secret Life of Words:

“Coined in 1754 by English writer Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who had read a popular romance entitled The Three Princes of Serendip, whose leading characters, as Walpole put it, `were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.’ Serendip, by the way, is an old name for Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka. Even science needed this word, for its faculty of making happy inadvertent finds, such as penicillin.”

That’s my digressive way of saying a life spent adrift in libraries is, like penicillin, good for you. As Gass puts it:

“…book dipping is great fun, and not a day passes that I don’t blindly pick a prize and then read a page of it to be mystified, informed, surprised, delighted and affronted.”

`Proceed with Daring Synapses'

Spring break is over and the boys and I are back in school after nine days together. Monday started with a fine meditation by Nige on Samuel Beckett as nature writer, on the occasion of the Irishman’s 103rd birthday. Nige cites a delicious passage from Watt – the book that unlocked the great trilogy soon to come – and writes:

“Perhaps Beckett's attention to nature is all the sharper for his sense of man's inescapable alienation from it - it is a scene across which a man passes but of which he can never fully be (or feel himself) a part.”

By implication, Nige poses an interesting question: Why is reading Beckett always a pleasure while most “avant-garde” writing remains stillborn on the page? A few explanations: comedy, triviality eschewed, concision and precision of language, a religious sensibility by way of via negativa. Except for some juvenilia, I never feel I’m wasting time with Beckett. He respects his readers enough to expect much of them, and always rewards their perseverance. So much experimental writing amounts to a bait-and- switch scheme. Beckett never cheats.

At school I alphabetized 1,313 student emergency medical forms – surely a Beckettian number. I sharpened almost as many pencils and remembered that Thoreau, who manufactured pencils with his father, could reach into a case of them and always come up with an even dozen – adroitness Beckett would have admired in his American nature-writing cousin (all great writers are kin). At home I found that Dave Lull, in remembrance of Beckett’s birthday, had sent a link to Hugh Kenner’s 1983 review of Worstward Ho in The New York Times. Kenner was Beckett’s friend and most lucid elucidator:

“Patterns of elegance: Is reality perhaps as evanescent as those patterns?”

Worstward Ho is elegant, yes, and starkly beautiful – in the best sense, prose as poetry:

“Less. Less seen. Less seeing. Less seen and seeing when with words than when not. When somehow than when nowhow. Stare by words dimmed. Shades dimmed. Void dimmed. All there as when no words. As when nowhow. Only all dimmed. Till blank again. No words again. Nohow again. Then all undimmed. Stare undimmed. That words had dimmed.”

Guy Davenport writes in “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (in The Geography of the Imagination):

“For making these particulars cohere I tried to learn from certain highly elliptical writers how much can be omitted from the texture of a page. If it is of any interest, the styles I find most useful to study are those of Hugh Kenner, Osip Mandelstam, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Charles Doughty. All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses.”

`Loved Old Things'

I own one car, two computers, three pairs of shoes, four suit jackets/sport coats and five neckties. I may own six of something but know for certain I have an indeterminate number of socks, ballpoint pens, old photographs and garden tools. Even my CDs amount to mere dozens. The only thing I own in volume are volumes. Books are my solace, my pleasure, my buffer from and entry into the world.

They also inspire a nagging sense of attachment to material things: They own me at least to the same degree I own them, what with shelving, shipping, dehumidifiers and cubic footage of space. Bookish acquisitiveness has always bothered me but I can take comfort in what I find in a book (where else?) by Borges, one of the great readers, writers, bookmen and librarians. Here is “June, 1968” from his 1969 collection In Praise of Darkness (translated by Hoyt Rogers):

“In the golden afternoon, or in
a serenity the gold of afternoon
might symbolize,
a man arranges books
on waiting shelves
and feels the parchment, the leather, the cloth,
and the pleasures bestowed
by looking forward to a habit
and establishing an order.
Here Stevenson and Andrew Lang, the other Scot,
will magically resume
their slow discussion
which seas and death cut short,
and surely Reyes will not be displeased
by the closeness of Virgil.
(In a modest, silent way,
by ranging books on shelves
we ply the critic’s art.)
The man is blind, and knows
he won’t be able to decode
the handsome volumes he is handling,
and that they will never help him write
the book that will justify his life in others’ eyes;
but in the afternoon that might be gold
he smiles at his curious fate
and feels that peculiar happiness
which comes from loved old things.”

By pulling two thoughts from this poem I ease my mind. First, “we ply the critic’s art” by the presence of certain books on our shelves, and the absence of others. Dreck never lingers. Each of my books I can imagine rereading. Scan my shelves and know who I am. Second, I know “that peculiar happiness / which comes from loved old things.” I own a few firsts and autographed editions but the true value of my volumes is intrinsic. This is a reader’s library, weeded better than any garden, so it can flourish. Elsewhere, Borges says, “Reading has to be a happiness…”

`What We Know Not to Be Possible'

In his commonplace book A Certain World (1970), W.H. Auden writes:

“Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.”

Despite the severe reasonableness of this statement, Auden had already written some 20 years earlier a great poem devoted to Good Friday and the mundane human realities surrounding the Crucifixion. “Nones” is the fourth of the seven-part “Horiae Canonicae,” written between 1949 and 1954. The overall title refers to the canonical hours of the day when specific prayers are said, and Auden’s section titles refer to these offices: “Prime,” “Terce,” “Sext,” “Nones,” “Vespers,” “Compline,” and “Lauds.” One needn’t be a Christian or any sort of believer to find the poems beautiful and moving. Here is the opening of “Nones”:

“What we know to be not possible,
Though time after time foretold
By wild hermits, by shaman and sybil
Gibbering in their trances,
Or revealed to a child in some chance rhyme
Like will and kill, comes to pass
Before we realize it: we are surprised
At the ease and speed of our deed
And uneasy: It is barely three,
Mid-afternoon, yet the blood
Of our sacrifice is already
Dry on the grass; we are not prepared
For silence so sudden and so soon;
The day is too hot, too bright, too still,
Too ever, the dead remains too nothing.
What shall we do till nightfall?”

Auden was a devout if idiosyncratic Christian who had returned to the faith of his childhood while in his thirties. That he proscribed Good Friday poetry while writing it (see also George Herbert’s “The Sacrifice” and Geoffrey Hill’s “Canticle for Good Friday”) is no surprise to seasoned readers of Auden’s work and life. Arthur Kirsch, in Auden and Christianity, cites a passage from draft notes the poet left on religion and theology:

“To-day, we find Good Friday easy to accept: what scandalizes us is Easter: Modern man finds a happy ending, a final victory of Love over the Prince of this World, very hard to swallow.”

Finding Good Friday “easy to accept” is a terrible indictment, one already identified and described in “Nones”: “we are surprised / At the ease and speed of our deed.” Later in the same poem he writes: “The hangman has gone to wash, the soldiers to eat; / We are left alone with our feat.”

As a reluctant nonbeliever, I find the oblivious double-dealing of the poem’s speaker absolutely convincing. Evil can be weak and acquiescing, as well as savage with all the Hollywood trappings:

“Soon cool tramontana will stir the leaves,
The shops will re-open at four,
The empty blue bus in the empty pink square
Fill up and depart: we have time
To misrepresent, excuse, deny,
Mythify, use this event
While, under a hotel bed, in prison,
Down wrong turnings, its meaning
Waits for our lives…”

Kirsch quotes a letter to Clement Greenberg in which Auden says faith is the opposite of “a withdrawal from the world.”

`Completely Accurate Description'

“I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous.”

This is Elizabeth Bishop, one of the masters of the sort of verbal description she describes. The occasion is “As We Like It: Miss Moore and the Delight of Imitation” (1948), in which she celebrates one of the seldom-noted joys of reading. Bishop writes of her beloved mentor, Marianne Moore, and cites examples from Shakespeare and Hopkins (“Star-eyed strawberry breasted / Throstle…”).

Someone ought to edit an anthology of such passages devoted to the observable world. Bishop is right to add “at least the effect of being spontaneous.” If such a description appears labored or mannered or just goes on too long, it feels self-conscious and even self-congratulatory, and one’s attention shifts from the description and its aptness to the writer of purple prose. Flowery words can’t render flowers; disciplined eyes and ears can. Thoreau did it 10,000 times in prose and almost never in poetry. This is from his journal entry for Sept. 11, 1851 (precisely 150 years before “our” 9/11):

“The grape vines over running & bending down the maples form little arching bowers over the meadow 5 or 6 feet in diameter like parasols or the ladies of the harem.”

And this is John Ruskin at his most painterly, in Fors Clavigera (Letter XXVI):

“The gable end of a barn was mantled with ivy, centuries old, and sparrows made their home in its leafage; an ancient wall, old as the Norman tower at the other end of the town, was rich in gilly-flowers; a wooden shed, with red tiles, was covered by a thriving `tea tree,’ so we called it, which in summer was all blossom, pendant mauve-colored blossoms.”

To cite another Victorian, here is Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle, describing a toad he observed in Bahia Blanca:

“If we imagine, first, that it had been steeped in the blackest ink, and then, when dry, allowed to crawl over a board, freshly painted with the brightest vermilion, so as to colour the soles of its feet and parts of its stomach, a good idea of its appearance will be gained.”

This is from Briggflatts, Basil Bunting’s poem dense with such passages:

“Rime is crisp on the bent,
ruts stone-hard, frost spangles fleece.”

And this from Geoffrey Hill’s “In Ipsley Church Lane 2” (from Without Title):

“Sage-green through olive to oxidized copper,
the rainward stone tower-face. Graveyard
blossom comes off in handfuls – the lilac
turned overnight a rough tobacco brown.”

And, of course, Bishop herself, chosen almost at random from a 1957 story, “The Baptism”:

“The water was muddy, very high, with spots of yellow foam. The sky was solid grey cloud, finely folded, over and over. Flora saw the icy roots of a tree reaching into the river, and the snow-banks yellow like the foam.”

`Have, Get, Before It Cloy'

After living 20 miles from it for almost a year we finally visited Snoqualmie Falls. First you hear it, a dull drone like a billions bees as the water drops 268 feet, then you see the shifting clouds of spray far below. Wordsworth’s description of a falls in The Prelude is rooted in close observation:

“Of woods decaying, never to be decayed
The stationary blasts of water-falls…”

The falling water appears motionless, a liquid column driving two power plants, generating 41,990 kilowatts of electricity. Impressive – but the “woods decaying, never to be decayed” even more so. The half-mile trail to the base of the falls passes through a forest of conifers carpeted with moss the color of duckweed and fresh avocado. The mossy trees resemble enormous growths of coral. The air is scented with rot, confirmation of spring’s coming: “Nothing is so beautiful as spring.”

The line in Hopkins’ sonnet I most value is “Have, get, before it cloy, / Before it cloud…”: a glimpse of Eden and an entreaty to savor it mindfully. Elizabeth Bishop used Hopkins’ opening line -- “Nothing is so beautiful as spring.” – as the epigraph to her poem “A Cold Spring.” She notes the “Greenish-white dogwood,” which we saw in the forest near the falls, and I remembered as a kid reading a book about medicinal plants that noted traces of quinine in the bark. The Indians used it to treat malaria. The petals of the tree’s flowers, Bishop writes, appear “burned, apparently, by a cigarette butt.” They look flawed, and that enhances their beauty.

Enough

“One of the most frequently recurring words in [Samuel] Johnson’s work is the verb `fill.’ It appears in many psychological contexts: `filling the time’ alternating with `wearing out the day’; `filling’ the imagination’; `filling the mind.’ To some extent, these years [1766-1781] were now `filled’…”

Few readers would note the frequency of so common a word as “fill” in so prodigious a writer as Johnson; particularly of an Old English word in a writer renowned for Latinisms. W. Jackson Bate, author of the Johnson biography that rivals Boswell’s in thoroughness and literary merit, was one. This throwaway observation comes from Bate’s first book on the good doctor, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955). As I was rereading it I recalled, with strained memory, such a use: “Such was the Scorn that fill'd the Sage's Mind, / Renew'd at ev'ry Glance on Humankind…”

The first definitions of fill in Johnson’s dictionary are “To store till no more can be admitted; to store abundantly; to satisfy; to content; to glut; to surfeit…” To be filled implies plenitude, copiousness, bounty – and by implication, generosity and thankfulness. One must be grateful for the overflowing gifts of creation, which reminds me of Passover. Often, I’ve been the only goy present at Seder, and I’ve always been made to feel generously welcome. That seems an essential quality of the ceremony. According to one Haggadah:

“So, as we fill our cups, we also fill a special cup for Elijah. According to the ancient legend, one day Elijah will join us at the Seder, and when he arrives he will bring peace to all the world.”

The italics are mine. One fills a real cup for a potential guest – this is true welcoming. The funniest literary account of a Seder I know, and it involves a lone goy as a celebrant, is in Isaac Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home (1946). Willy is the guest. His antagonist is the narrator’s father – a stern, almost humorless man. The narrator, a boy, is tipsy on three cups of wine – the third one slipped to him by Willy. “It was to wine,” says the boy, “rather than the history of my people, that I owed my sense of reverence.” The ceremony continues despite the boy’s well-mannered drunkenness and the tension between Willy and the father:

“He and Willy came into conflict at the very point where the Seder is as gay as comic opera. The point, that is, where the Israelites offer up their great digressions, the better to sing their deliverance. We extol the Lord’s virtues one by one and list the blessings bestowed on us, claiming, after each, that had this been the only blessing, it would have been enough: Daiyenu.”

There follows, as the narrator says, “a song in the manner of The House that Jack Built. It grows like a rolling snowball, picking up verses on its way, each devoted to a cat, a dog, a stick, fire, water, an ox, and a ritual slaughterer – until the angel of death comes and with the stroke of the fierce and tribal Jehovah sets things right by ending them.”

Enter Willy, who keeps time striking a wine glass with a knife. (“`Careful, you’ll break the glass,’ said my father.”) There’s a pause in the song and Willy pipes in:

“I believe in the good old Bible,
I believe in the good old Bible,
I believe in the good old Bible.
And it’s good enough for me.”

It’s “Old-Time Religion,” a song I first heard in Stanley Kramer’s film version of Inherit the Wind. Willy sings more verses and almost everyone revels (the grandfather “beams and melts”). Rosenfeld continues:

“Willy got up and stomped around the room, the children after him. The wine glasses trembled; the decanter threw off its rainbow in a fury of winking.”

Everyone but the father (“diminished, defeated, utterly dispossessed”) is filled with joyousness. Daiyenu.

`The Most Glorious Pastime'

Among my readers is an 81-year-old retired professor of English who lives with his wife in the Midwest. I’ve previously described his bedtime regimen of reading a Shakespeare sonnet or one of Keats’ letters on alternating nights, but now he has modified his strategy of civilized hedonism and moved on to Keats’ poems. He was also planning to read Brad Gooch’s recent biography of Flannery O’Connor until – well, let him explain:

“…but [I] got sidetracked by Liebling's Between Meals. My wife (she's feeling much better, by the way) and I both find ourselves rereading it about once a year. She started again, quoting from it, so I'm off also. He has a genius for making the most trivial things seem important.”

The professor exemplifies the sort of sensibility I most admire -- well-stocked and elastic, unmindful of fashion, allergic to freeze-dried thinking and stinginess of spirit. Elsewhere in his e-mail he writes of Cowper (“very rewarding, both the verse and the man”), Beckett and Coleridge (“in my permanent personal anthology”). He adds, bless his heart: “And don't get me started on Shelley!”

In the introduction to Nonrequired Reading, her collected reviews of unabashedly unliterary books, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska explains why she couldn’t write conventional reviews and didn’t want to:

“…I am and wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan, unburdened by the weight of ceaseless evaluation. Sometimes the book itself is my subject; at other times it’s just a pretext for spinning out various loose associations. Anyone who calls these pieces sketches will be correct. Anyone insisting on `reviews’ will incur my displeasure.”

Don’t mistake Szymborska for an I-know-what-I-like-dammit Philistine. Her decades of newspaper reviews are funny, unpretentious and quietly subversive of accepted literary fashions. She has, as my friend says of Liebling, “a genius for making the most trivial things seem important.” She is, in short, an excellent essayist. Later in her introduction she might be writing of the retired professor and thousands of other dedicated readers:

“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised…Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he’s capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words that he’ll keep for a lifetime. And, finally, he’s free – and no other hobby can promise this – to eavesdrop on Montaigne’s arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic.”

Szymborska turns 86 later this year, the professor is pushing 82, and they’re just the sort of octogenarians I hope to become.

`A Member of the French Nation'

While looking for something else I happened upon the website of the Rousseau Association, “formerly known as the North American Association for the Study of Rousseau.” I was under the impression the last word on this subject had been uttered 70 years ago, on March 13, 1939, when Flann O’Brien published At Swim-Two-Birds. His narrator and some friends are leaving a pub when:

“a small man in black fell in with us and tapping me often about the chest, talked to me earnestly on the subject of Rousseau, a member of the French nation. He was animated, his pale features striking in the starlight and his voice going up and falling in the lilt of his argumentum.

“I did not understand his talk and was personally unacquainted with him. But Kelly was taking in all he said, for he stood near him, his taller head inclined in an attitude of close attention. Kelly then made a low noise and opened his mouth and covered the small man from shoulder to knee with a coating of unpleasant buff-coloured puke. Many other things happened on that night now imperfectly recorded in my memory but that incident is still very clear to me in my mind. Afterwards the small man was some distance from us in the lane, shaking his divested coat and rubbing it along the wall. He is a little man that the name of Rousseau will always recall to me.”

`An Unexpected Angle'

“I couldn't read prose in any sustained fashion. Nothing held my attention. One day my wife […] came back from the library and gave me a book of Robert Bly's poetry that a well intentioned librarian recommended. I gave it a go and though I'm not schooled enough to offer insightful criticism I have to say I found Bly's stuff to be gibberish. But there were a few phrases in Bly that gave me something to chew on. Next my wife brought home a library edition of Blake and he was great fun and I was hooked. My youngest daughter asked me the other day what it was about poetry that I liked so much. As best I could explain it, I said that poetry helps me see my world from an unexpected angle.”

So writes a reader facing a nightmarish reality – severe vision impairment, despite multiple surgeries. How many of us similarly challenged would turn to poetry for solace – particularly those not formerly readers of verse? For most, I suspect, mysteries and other genres renowned for their “escapist” powers would prove likelier fare, if not television. Now he’s reading Les Murray, Zbigniew Herbert and Constantine Cavafy, reminiscent of Mill recovering from his “mental crisis” by reading the Romantic poets. That my reader recognizes Bly’s flatulence as “gibberish” almost restores one’s faith in humanity.

Not long ago I reread Guy Davenport’s A Balthus Notebook, which contains a paragraph I at first found gnomic but, after actively living with it for some time, feels celebrative of art and its place in our lives:

“A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn how to read it. Meaning is latent, seemingly hidden, There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed. A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful. It follows that a work of art has one meaning only. For an explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind of treason, a betrayal. The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake that closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.”

A masterful reader and critic, Davenport is warning off predatory, proprietary critics (and like-minded readers in general) who come between a work of art and its readers, viewers, listeners, etc. My reader above, blessed with “curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery,” has, on his own, charted a course that mingles confidence and humility. When he writes that “poetry helps me see my world from an unexpected angle,” he implies this is a rare and valuable quality, something to be sought for its strangeness, something from which he can learn. In The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hill asks, “What ought a poem to be?” “Answer, a sad and angry consolation.”

Dr. Johnson in Japan

For a Cub Scout project my 8-year-old has been recording the temperatures at 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. The thermometer hangs on the trunk of a fir in the backyard, and most days last week it was stuck in the 40s. Something happened Saturday. The morning reading was 32 degrees (frost on the car windows); the evening, 55 degrees (daffodils, dandelions). On Sunday, it was 69 by mid-afternoon: The kids wore shorts and rode bikes, fat red buds burst on the maples – more reliable confirmations of spring’s arrival than the vernal equinox.

Three-hundred twenty years ago last week, early in another spring, Matsuo Bashō left Edo (old Tokyo) with his friend and disciple Sora and started a nine-month journey through the highlands north of the capital. They shifted westward to the coast of the Japan Sea and turned inland again toward Lake Biwa, near Kyoto. Bashō’s account of the first half of the journey is titled Oku-no-hosomichi, translated by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu as Back Roads to Far Towns (Mushinsha, 1968). Our library has a lovely first edition with the Japanese text facing the English, and watercolors by Hayakawa Ikutada. The passage corresponding to April 5 reads, in part:

“Dense, a long way through the valley, pine and cedar thick massed, moss oozing, Uzuki [April: “lit. month of the U flower,” notes Corman] sky chilly. Where the ten views ended, crossed a bridge and entered by temple gate.”

But for the temple gate, Bashō might be writing of our neighborhood. In a haiku from the same passage, he includes a woodpecker, such as we have hammering daily on our house:

“even woodpecker
can’t break into this hut
summer grove”

Corman, an American who lived for much of his life in Japan (he died in Kyoto, age 79, in 2004), is a gracious host. His introduction and notes are useful and learned, and he often cites Western cognates for Japanese words, ideas and customs. For instance, Bashō catalogs the possessions he carries on the journey, including “unavoidable hanamuke, etc., somehow hard to let go of, part of the trouble in travelling inevitably.” Corman defines hanamuke as “farewell gifts” – the presents his friends and admirers gave him as he was leaving Edo. In a note at the end of the text, Corman quotes Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands in connection with hanamuke:

“…it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags, and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight burthen; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him every thing but himself.”

Corman cites a ragbag of Western writers – Callimachus, Leopardi, Louis Zukofsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Martin Buber, Pound – but none so often as Johnson, who emerges as an unexpected sub-theme in the commentary. When Bashō visits the ruins of a castle at Maruyama he writes:

“At bottom, ruins of main gate, etc., and seeing them so, eyes fill, and at old temple hard-by, family graves. Tombs of young wives of two sons most felt. The story of their heroism, though women, has come down, sleeve at my eyes.”

Corman glosses “the story of their heroism” like this:

“Cf. Johnson again in his travels with Boswell (which have many interesting overlays with Bashō’s journal and the differences also tell much): `To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona’!”

Basho’s generous inclusion of poems by Sora and others in Back Roads to Far Towns elicits from Corman a passage from Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (1765):

“Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and in its true proportions; a close approach shows the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.”

Corman is the sort of scholar/critic I prize, independent and polymathic, one who makes connections across space and time, in the manner of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport (whose “Fifth-Seven Views of Fujiyama” includes Bashō’s journey among its storylines). This is from Corman’s introduction:

“Most of [Bashō’s] poetry (and it is within the tradition which he himself was shaping) evokes a context and wants one. The poems are not isolated instances of lyricism, but cries of their occasions, of some one intently passing through a world, often arrested by the momentary nature of things within an unfathomable `order.’”

`To Hear a Blackbird Whistle'

The letters of William Cowper are new to me and unexpectedly wonderful. The writing is elegant, conversational and often funny, in the manner of Lamb’s letters and essays, with hardly a suggestion of the suicidal depression that dogged him for decades. This, from a letter Cowper wrote his friend John Newton on Feb. 18, 1781, might serve as an abstract for an especially readable blog:

“My dear friend I send you Table Talk. It is a medley of many things, some that may be useful, and some that, for ought I know, may be very diverting. I am merry that I may decoy people into my company, and grave that they may be the better for it. Now and then I put on the garb of a philosopher, and take the opportunity that disguise procures me to drop a word in favour of religion. In short, there is some froth, and here and there a bit of sweetmeat, which seems to entitle it justly to the name of a certain dish the ladies call a trifle. I did not choose to be more facetious, lest I should consult the taste of my readers at the expense of my own approbation ; nor more serious than I have been, lest I should forfeit theirs.”

I admire the slyness and humility of Cowper’s voice – a rare combination – and the way he mingles friendliness and wit. The same tone predominates when he writes about his practice of poetry. This is from a letter to Joseph Hill on May 9, 1781:

“When I can find no other occupation I think, and when I think I am very apt to do it in rhyme. Hence it comes to pass, that the season of the year which generally pinches off the flowers of poetry unfolds mine, such as they are, and crowns me with a winter garland. In this respect, therefore, I and my contemporary bards are by no means upon a par. They write when the delightful influences of fine weather, fine prospects, and a brisk motion of the animal spirits, make poetry almost the language of Nature ; and I, when icicles depend from all the leaves of the
Parnassian laurel, and when a reasonable man would as little expect to succeed in verse as to hear a blackbird whistle”

It’s typical of Cowper’s humor to turn “seasonal affective disorder” to his poetic advantage. When he reads Dr. Johnson’s “Life of Pope,” he agrees with the great critic’s mixed assessment. On Jan. 5, 1782, Cowper writes William Unwin:

“[Pope] was certainly a mechanical maker of verses, and in every line he ever wrote we see indubitable marks of most indefatigable industry and labour. Writers who find it necessary to make such strenuous and painful exertions are generally as phlegmatic as they are correct; but Pope was, in this respect, exempted from the common lot of authors of that class. With the unwearied application of a plodding Flemish painter, who draws a shrimp with the most minute exactness, he had all the genius of one of the first masters. Never, I believe, were such talents and such drudgery united.”

The poet who wrote “There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know” (from The Task) writes to his friend Unwin on Jan. 17, 1782:

“To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, and without seeming to displace a single syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.”

`Inexplicable Sense'

I happened upon a novel by an Irish writer new to me – Brian Lynch. Dalkey Archive Press has just published The Winner of Sorrow, based on the life of an English poet who has always interested me but seems not to be read much anymore – William Cowper (1731-1800). We all know something of his work without knowing him – “I am monarch of all I survey” and “God moves in mysterious ways / His wonders to perform.”

I’ve only just started reading Lynch’s novel but his mastery of voice makes it quietly compelling. Despite the Dalkey Archive imprimatur, The Winner of Sorrow is not an exercise in empty experimentation, formal showing off to no purpose. Cowper was insane periodically throughout his life, chronically depressed, and three times tried to take his own life. Lynch renders his consciousness with admirable restraint and without sensationalism or sentimentality. Here’s an example. Cowper, at the end of his life, sleeps with a portrait of his mother, who died when he was a boy, at the foot of his bed. He wakes at night, sees the painting and remembers lines from a poem he wrote years earlier, “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture”:

“Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass’d
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me
Voice only fails, else, how distinct they say,
`Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!’”

Lynch follows the excerpt with this:

“It had cost him a great deal of argument with himself to write `Voice only fails’, but now he could not remember what it meant. It made inexplicable sense, which was the way of poetry.”

“Voice only fails” might be late Beckett. The crushing sadness of Cowper’s life is tempered by the solace of poetry, though it can turn without warning into torment. And here’s the line by Lynch I’ve already memorized: “It made inexplicable sense, which was the way of poetry.” I read this just hours before a reader sent an e-mail that includes this passage:

“I have to read with a magnifying glass and a whole lot of artificial light which is to say very slow reading indeed; however, I feel like a safe cracker when I read a poem because I'm able to slow down and savor each phrase. I've even begun the practice of reading aloud poetry to my children. Prior to my eye troubles I used to work in a steel mill something far removed from the glory of literature.”

Cowper’s mad existence in provincial English towns seems “far removed from the glory of literature,” but he left us lines like this (from The Task):

“'Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,
To peep at such a world; to see the stir
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;
To hear the roar she sends through all her gates
At a safe distance, where the dying sound
Falls a soft murmur on the uninjur'd ear.”

`A Failure to Be Enchanted'

Almost the only depressing part of my job in schools is witnessing the institutionalization of waste. Put aside intellectual waste for now and consider food. I supervised three lunch periods in a grade school on Wednesday and saw wheelbarrow loads of fresh consumable food bagged with the trash. The school menu is weirdly contradictory. As a sop to the nutrition police the lunch line begins with fresh vegetables and fruit – broccoli, carrots, Romaine lettuce, apples, oranges. A lot of kids have been indoctrinated: They load up their recyclable plastic trays with fiber and minerals and that’s usually where they stay -- on the tray. Already they’ve learned the usefulness of self-deception.

The entrées on Wednesday were corn dogs and small pizzas resembling quiche. For our overseas readers let me explain the American corn dog: a breaded hot dog deep-fried on a stick. I’ve eaten less than one in my life and that was out of professional obligation, while covering a county fair as a reporter in upstate New York. I wanted to know what the fuss was all about. Two bites told me (the first missed the hot dog).

I didn’t see one meal consumed in its entirety. Lunch period typically lasts 25 minutes and most of that time is taken up with fooling around, not expedited food consumption. Afterwards, the bags of waste resemble compost or hog slop. There’s a separate garbage can for leftover white and chocolate milk. As they did when I was in public school, kids complain chronically about the quality of the food.

When it comes to waste I’m hardly blameless. Earlier in the day I used a die-cut machine for the first time. I punched out shapes from construction paper for use on bulletin boards – flowers, stars, umbrellas. Some of the punches were dull and I wasted reams of colored paper, tossed into a recycling can. In the middle of this a teacher asked, “Is this recyclable?” She held a transparent block of plastic with a steel spring inside. I said, “Why not?” and she dumped it in the plastics can.

“Without gratitude there is no happiness.”

That’s how Theodore Dalrymple concludes his essay in the latest New English Review, “Attitude or Gratitude?” He, too, writes of waste and its depressing significance. Don’t be alarmed: The good doctor hasn’t turned into a Gore-ite neo-puritan busybody, as he’s eager to clarify:

“My dislike of waste does not arise from any appreciation of the ecological need to preserve, heal or (worse still) save the planet. I wish the planet, as I wish humanity, no harm, but find it too large and nebulous an entity to have any genuine feelings towards it: Gaia means nothing to me. And even if it could be proved that wastage was exceedingly good for the planet, I still should not like it.”

I share Dalrymple’s nuanced understanding of the matter. Waste is a phenomenon that induces self-righteousness in all of us, meaning it’s readily politicized. (I’m reminded of Thoreau’s journal entry for April 24, 1852: “That which interests a town or city or any large number of men is always something trivial, as politics.”) Like me, Dalrymple isn’t writing an ecological screed. He’s writing not about waste but contrasting ways of looking at the world and its relation to the individual. We might call these approaches the spiritual and the self-centered (my words, not his):

“After a little reflection, I came to the conclusion that my dislike of waste arises from a whole approach to life that seems to me crude and wretched. For unthinking waste – and waste on our scale must be unthinking – implies a taking-for-granted, a failure to appreciate: not so much a disenchantment with the world as a failure to be enchanted by it in the first place. To consume without appreciation (which is what waste means) is analogous to the fault of which Sherlock Holmes accused Doctor Watson, in A Scandal in Bohemia: You see, but you do not observe.”

We’re back to gratitude, our ethical touchstone, as a prerequisite of happiness. Dalrymple reminds us of Samuel Johnson, whom he reveres. I see a veiled allusion to Johnson in this essay – “touching for the King’s evil (scrofula)” – and am reminded of an observation reported by Boswell:

“That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment."

`Protracted Woe'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along a link to an excellent essay by Thomas Keymer in The Times Literary Supplement on Johnson's Rasselas. Keymer examines Johnson's view of happiness and its elusive, dangerous qualities:

"In personal terms no less than philosophical outlook, happiness was far from Johnson’s reach when Rasselas was composed. Ten years earlier, in `The Vanity of Human Wishes', he had produced a monumental yet also heartfelt statement about the inevitable defeat of worldly ambition. Life in the poem is a condition of relentless struggle, in which mankind `Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, / That life protracted is protracted woe'. This resonant couplet, with its equation between living and suffering, set the tone of Johnson’s writing for a decade. Closer in time to Rasselas, he famously declared (in his pulverizing review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, a fatuous Panglossian treatise on the benevolence of Providence) that `the only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it'. Here was a formula that would re-emerge in Rasselas, in even more grimly antithetical style, with the poet Imlac’s account of life as `every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed'."

`He Would Take It for Heaven'

A small and unexpected windfall last weekend permitted a rare bookstore visit that proved an exercise in futility and gratitude. Most of the stock is used, with some remainders and review copies, and the prices are seldom outlandish. I brought my mental wish-list, including Plutarch, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form, a biography of Piet Mondriaan, Wyndham’s Lewis’ Self-Condemned, a sturdy hardcover of The Prelude and Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White, among others. I found none of them, which prompted memories of the books I once owned but sold or gave away (Plutrach, Anderson), and fumbled opportunities to buy others (Thompson long ago in Boston, Wordsworth two years ago in Houston).

Hardly a tragedy and I know from experience my best finds are often serendipitous. At a library sale in upstate New York about 20 years ago I happened upon a battered first edition of Kerouac’s On the Road priced at 50 cents. I detest Kerouac but I’m not stupid: I sold it to a dealer for $150. I resumed my search and found Letters of Anton Chekhov in hardcover, translated and edited by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, a book I’ve read and consulted many times but never owned. Price: $8.98.

That was my only happy discovery. I spent almost an hour in the shop – an eternity with two kids in tow – and ended up buying the boys a stack of books and comics. I couldn’t even feel virtuous about that, knowing I would have squandered everything on me if the right books had been in stock. I pouted some and posed the predictable adolescent questions -- Why can’t they put more good books on the shelves? Why do they stock so much crap? -- until a few days later Guy Davenport set me straight, as he often does. In Nov. 1993, in a letter to James Laughlin, he writes:

“Imagine Duns Scotus in an American bookstore. He would take it for heaven.”

Sure, the shelves are bowed with dreck but consider the Chekhov, and the public library (including the miracle of interlibrary loan), and online dealers, and my own blessed shelves overflowing with books.

`We're Away in a Hack'

Flann O’Brien, né Brian Ó Nualláin, aka Brian O’Nolan, aka Myles na gCopaleen, died on April Fool's Day 1966. In At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), characters created by novelist-within-the-novel Dermot Trellis, including the hero Finn MacCool, talk among themselves:

"I will relate, said Finn.

"We're off again, said Furriskey.

"The first matter that I will occupy with honey-words and melodious recital, said Finn, is the reason and the first cause for Sweeney's frenzy.

"Draw in your chairs, boys, said Shanahan, we're right for the night. We're away in a hack."

`A Series of Punches on the Nose'

Ancestors, genetic and spiritual, aren’t so terribly distant. I was reminded of this when the latest A.J. Liebling collection from the Library of America arrived in the mail and I reread his introduction to The Sweet Science (1956), which opens like this:

“It is through Jack O’Brien, the Arbiter Elegantiarum Philadelphiae, that I trace my rapport with the historic through the laying-on of hands. He hit me, for pedagogical example, and he had been hit by the great Bob Fitzsimmons, from whom he won the light heavy-weight title in 1906. Jack had a scar to show for it. Fitzsimmons had been hit by Corbett, Corbett by John L. Sullivan, he by Paddy Ryan, with the bare knuckles, and Ryan by Joe Goss, his predecessor, who as a young man had felt the fist of the great Jem Mace. It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose.”

Kinship is no respecter of bloodlines. Linkage to nominal strangers, those with a distant genotype, can prove more vital than mere phenotype. Who wouldn’t wish to prune one’s family tree? An illustration of elective affinities:

I shook hands with Guy Davenport, who shook hands with Ezra Pound, who shook hands with Henry James, who shook hands with George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert. Davenport also shook the hand of Samuel Beckett, who had shaken the hand of James Joyce, who had shaken the hand of Italo Svevo. Likewise, I shook hands with William H. Gass who shook hands with many worthies; perhaps foremost among them, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the genius of the last century and a half is a conventional gesture of polite greeting.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to David Myers for pointing out "Jean" Mace ought to be "Jem" Mace. The error was mine, not Liebling's.