`The Great Improviser'

That Constance Rourke devoted more than nine pages to Walt Whitman in a book titled American Humor is another reminder that the author of Leaves of Grass not only contained multitudes but that some of those swarming selves are yet to be appreciated by readers and critics. One continues to hear of Walt the pious blowhard, patron saint of the laboring classes and hippie precursor. That Whitman encouraged such blurrings and misreading, and comfortably coexisted in multiple bogus selves does not excuse our failure to read him. What we risk losing is our respect for Whitman’s mastery of language, the poet’s essential gift. Rourke writes:

“He was indeed the great improviser of modern literature. He had turned the native comic rhapsody, abundant in the backwoods, to broad poetic forms.”

Rourke’s use of “improviser” is superb, as is “comic.” She published American Humor in 1931, when jazz and Louis Armstrong were in their vigorous prime. The musician who gave us “West End Blues” was an improviser of genius, but that gift too is misunderstood. Great improvising is spontaneous composition, not self-indulgent noodling. The composer Alec Wilder was in awe of jazz improvisation: “I don’t believe the layman has any notion of the miraculous chain of events which occurs when a jazz musician plays.” The same goes for Whitman at his best, though no other great poet – not even Wordsworth or Tennyson – noodled so often.

Today we celebrate Walt’s 190th birthday. What other poet can so readily be identified by first name? Surely not “Tom” or “Wallace,” though perhaps “Hart.” Whitman encourages us to become his "Camerado," so I’m pleased to introduce a friend and former newspaper comrade, Jim McGrath, the chief editorial writer at the Albany, N.Y., Times Union. In today’s editorial he celebrates Walt’s birthday and other notable New York anniversaries in 2009. Tonight, in Albany’s Washington Park, by the statue of Robert Burns, some of Walt’s admirers will read “Song of Myself” aloud. Jim writes:

“Summer, then, can begin tonight with a collective reading and appreciation of a 15,000-word poem that Mr. Whitman had written in hopes of bringing a sense of unity to a nation that was on the verge of going to war against itself.”

The sincerest birthday present we can give our national poet is a deep reading of his deepest poems, and “Song of Myself” is an excellent place to begin. Here are the last of its 15,000 words:

“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

`Particles of Their Mystery'

In high-school physics class, while students plotted pressure versus density on a graph, I read Zbigniew Herbert’s touchingly autobiographical “Prayer of the Traveler Mr Cogito” (from The Collected Poems 1956-1998, translated by Alissa Valles):

“Lord
I thank You for creating the world beautiful and various

and for allowing me in Your fathomless goodness to visit places which were not the sites of my daily torment”

[I enjoy the echo – unintended, I’m certain -- of John Berryman’s “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” the first section of which begins

“Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,
inimitable contriver,
endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,
thank you for such as it is my gift.”

and behind the Berryman, Hopkins. The second stanza recalls Herbert’s frequent visits to Western Europe, where he studied and reveled in the glories of our civilization, as inexpensively as possible – museums, cathedrals, libraries, Neolithic caves, taverns and restaurants. These he celebrates in his poems and essays. Herbert was a profoundly, fatally civilized man and poet. The next stanzas assemble anecdotal evidence to this effect.]

“—that at night in Tarquinia I lay in the square by the well and a gunmetal
pendulum rang out from the tower Your wrath or forgiveness

“and that a little donkey on the island Corkyra sang to me from the
unfathomable bellows of its lungs the melancholy of the landscape

“and that in the ugly city of Manchester I discovered kindhearted and sensible people

[On one level, this is travelogue. Herbert was a Pole but his soul was in Italy, Greece and England – a pan-Western nation not found on a map. Manchester is the city of Thomas de Quincey, Engels, Anthony Burgess and Elberry. He recites the names and attributes of holy places.]

“nature repeated its wise tautologies: the forest was a forest the sea the sea a cliff a cliff

“stars revolved and it was as it ought to be –Iovis omnia plena

[The Latin tag is from a line in Virgil’s Eclogues: “From the god Jupiter is the beginning; all things are full of the god.” For Herbert, the classical world is contemporary.]

“—forgive me – that I thought only of myself while the lives of others cruel and inexorable turned around me like the great astrological clock of St Pierre in Beauvais

“that I was lazy distracted too timid in labyrinths and caves

[These lines gloss Herbert’s first essay collection, Barbarian in the Garden. Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais: Famously uncompleted, the Gothic cathedral, parts of which date from the 10th to the 19th centuries, encapsulates European and Church history. Herbert humbles himself before its grandeur.]

“and forgive me also that I did not fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of oppressed peoples and studied only the rising moon and museums

“—I thank you that works created for Your greater glory yielded to me particles of their mystery and that with great presumption I thought that Duccio Van Eyck and Bellini painted for me also

[My favorite lines in the poem. Great artworks, at best, yield “particles of their mystery.” A Van Eyck can’t be reduced to essence. Its essence is irreducible mystery. In his essay “Siena,” Herbert approvingly quotes Berenson, who called Duccio “The last great painter of antiquity.” In his own words he describes Duccio as “one of those who produce new syntheses. The latter group is often underrated because they are less expressive. To notice them means to be thoroughly acquainted with their epoch and its artistic background.” Herbert might have been writing about himself.]

“and also that the Acropolis which I never fully understood patiently revealed to me its mutilated body

“—I ask You to reward the gray old woman who unbidden brought me fruit from her garden on the sunburned native island of the son of Laertes

[That is, Odysseus – like Herbert, the wanderer who always returns home.]

“and Miss Helen of the foggy island of Mull in the Hebrides for offering Greek hospitality and asking me to leave a lamp lit at night in the window facing Holy Iona so that the lights of earth would greet each other

[Herbert refers to five islands in the poem – six, if we count England.]

“and also those who gave me directions and said kato kyrie kato

[The Greek phrase is “that way, sir, that way.]

“and take under Your protection Mama from Spoleto Spiridion from Paxos the good student from Berlin who saved me from oppression and then when we met unexpectedly in Arizona drove me to the Grand Canyon which is like a hundred thousand cathedrals standing on their heads

[I would love to have accompanied Herbert the tourist at the Grand Canyon, a sight I have never seen. Even a geological wonder is likened to that pinnacle of Western architecture, the cathedral. In his essay “A Stone from the Cathedral,” Herbert writes, “Millions, millions of tons of stone” – a pithy description of the Grand Canyon.]

“—Lord let me not think of my moist-eyed gray deluded persecutors when the sun sets on the truly indescribable Ionian Sea

“let me understand other people other languages other sufferings and above all let me be humble that is to say one who longs for the source

“I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness”

[In Greece, his true home, Herbert prefers not to think of the Stalinist thugs, the “moist-eyed gray deluded persecutors,” back in Poland. His prayer is the artist’s prayer of humility, a variation on St. Francis’, asking to understand rather than to be understood. Herbert is that rare bird, the compassionate cosmopolitan.]

Beneath her plotted graph, the girl seated beside me in physics class wrote: “Density is the mass of an object divided by its volume.”

`The Very Sewers of the Intellect'

The words written on the blackboard of the high-school history class left me chilled:

“All Quiet on the Western Front
Idealism vs. disillusionment”

With visions of Lew Ayres and his damned butterfly dancing in my head, I briefly contemplated a career in the carwash industry. I wondered who had resurrected this pious claptrap when the answer walked in the door. She wore a generously cut Hawaiian shirt, delivered “high fives” to students and addressed one of them as “man.” After more of the same she launched into a Power Point-assisted lecture devoted to the 20th century. I’ve preserved the most lustrous of her pearls:

“A depression is kind of like a low budget of money.”

“Out of [World War I] came these who, like, say, `How does this happen?’”

“James Joyce reflected Freud’s ideas about the mind.”

“[Nietzsche] was very out there in his thinking.”

“During the war there was a wonderful poet there. He wrote A Raisin in the Sun. What was his name?”

“Stalin was in charge in Russia during World War I. What was his buddy’s name? Lenin!”

“Mussolini was an arrogant sort of guy. Very talkative.”

“A Farewell to Arms is about Italy during World War II.”

“I think my brother has read Mein Kempf [sic] nine times. He was an economics major.”

All of this was accompanied by the non-stop, non-sequitur commentary of the students – those who were conscious. At one point, a boy spat on the girl seated next to him and she punched him in the head. The teacher made her stand in the hall and “breathe deeply” for several minutes. At the end of class she played 15 minutes of All Quiet on the Western Front, though not the happy ending to Remarque’s pieties and Ayer’s over-emoting. I’m reluctant to bring out the big guns, but three years before Remarque published his novel in Germany, H.L. Mencken wrote “The Lower Depths,” a still-timely excoriation of “the slums of pedagogy,” specifically English teachers:

“It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?”

`Happy Recognitions'

A well-organized, intelligently written, amply illustrated field guide rivals a good dictionary for compulsive readability. The primal appeal of such books, as with dictionaries, is their implied comprehensiveness, the sense they impart of being the definitive statement on some microcosmic sample of creation. I seldom take a field guide into the field, where they get in the way. Perhaps, as I use them, they ought to be called arm-chair or couch guides. With one exception, that’s how I’ve used Field Guide to the Sedges of the Pacific Northwest, published last year by Oregon State University Press and written by botanists with the Carex Working Group. Carex is the genus name of plants in the family Cyperaceae – known familiarly as sedges.

About 20 years ago I spent a day in the bogs around Oneonta, N.Y., in the company of a botanist. I was writing about the threats faced by these delicate ecosystems but the sedges are what I remember best. The botanist asked if I could distinguish sedges, grasses and rushes. I couldn’t, so he taught me a rhyme: “Sedges have edges. / Rushes are round. / Grasses have nodes from the top to the ground.” Most of us, if we pay attention at all, look at a plot of sedge and dismiss it as mere grass. Cut a stem in half and look at the cross-section. If it’s solid, not hollow, and roughly triangular (“edges”), it’s probably sedge. Grasses are hollow and usually round.

The book is simple to use once you’ve mastered basic terminology – and that’s part of the attractiveness of a good field guide. You learn new words and experience a new connectedness with previously blank, undefined pieces of the natural world. The common and ignorable take on the glow of significance. Most sedges are so undistinguished and indistinguishable they have no common names. The editors write in their introduction:

“Sedges have a reputation for being devilishly difficult to identify. Much of the challenge comes from the fact that the plant parts used to identify most sedges are tiny, show great similarity between different species, and have unfamiliar names such as `perigynium’ [`a specialized bract that surrounds the achene, characteristic of Carex and Kobresia’].”

The field guide carries three epigraphs, the first by Annie Dillard:

“I would like to know the grasses and sedges – and care. Then my least journey into the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions.”

Next, Thoreau:

“I would like to [interesting to note that both passages begin with the same four words, and that Dillard’s husband, Robert D. Richardson, is Thoreau’s biographer] go into perfectly new and wild country. I wish to lose myself amid reeds and sedges and wild grasses that have not been touched.”

The third is by ever-reliable “Anon.”:

“Botanically, where there’s sedge, there’s confusion.”

The Dillard, which I like for “happy recognitions," is from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The Thoreau is taken from an Aug. 31, 1852, journal entry. With the anonymous line, all three epigraphs suggest the unfamiliar familiarity of sedges, and the first and third emphasize the difficulty of identifying them. Sedges show up five times in Walden, never to great effect. In the “Sounds” chapter Thoreau points out “the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither…”

“Sedge” is an attractive word, more pleasurable to say than mere “grass.” It echoes with said, hedge and sedulous, and is rooted in the Old English secg, meaning sword. One can’t imagine Whitman writing Leaves of Sedge. Go here to visit the Carex Working Group website, which includes a page devoted to “Sedges in Literature.” Among the finds are Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Yeats’ “He Hears the Cry of the Sedge” and four Shakespeare citations.

I’ve made one reasonably positive identification with the assistance of the field guide. Our backyard is a permeable membrane of wild and domestic plant species, and the boundary is an irregular wooden fence. Along its length grow a big-leaf maple, a shrub-like magnolia, several sprawling hostas and a small ornamental cherry tree. Most of the soil along the base of the fence is shaded for more than half the day, covered with last year’s leaves and always moist. In a particularly sunny spot grow several bunches of elegant yellowish-green “grass,” with an inflorescence (the stubby flowering portion) that lends each stem the appearance of a small bottle brush.

A little leafing about in the field guide has convinced me I share space with Carex arcta Boott, which actually has a common name: Northern clustered sedge. A digression in the “Comments” section notes that Carex have been reported to have 54, 58 or 60 chromosomes per cell. This irregularity is attributed to “diffuse centromeric activity,” a trait sedges share only with wood thrushes, bees and wasps:

“If their chromosomes break, the pieces need not be lost during cell division. Rather, each piece can function as a chromosome. In contrast, broken human chromosomes result in loss of part of the DNA, often causing birth defects.”

One of many advantages sedges and bumblebees have over us.

`Shockingly Mellifluous Musicality'

Seldom is a review worthy of its subject (except if the book is lousy); even more rarely does one rival or exceed its subject in excellence. Randall Jarrell wrote a few of the latter and so has Christopher Ricks, author of the unmatched Keats and Embarrassment. In The New York Review of Books, Ricks publishes a review of Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography notable for grace, generosity and casual scholarship. It is written by a gentlemanly critic:

“It is a mark of this biography's distinction that there is so much that I for one (and not alone) would wish to address in gratitude.”

When Plumly published his book last year, I was surprised. I attended a reading he gave at my university almost 40 years ago that was memorable for leaving almost no memories, negative or otherwise. Subsequent attempts to read his poetry confirmed its unmemorable quality but his Keats volume is a masterpiece of empathetic brilliance, a late-career masterpiece – and Ricks is his master reader. No critic is so attuned to the sound of words in poetry. His hearing is acute but while exercising it he never sacrifices the poet’s humanity:

“Thanks to acts of arbitration that are not simply arbitrary, [Plumly] is able to exercise to the full his own shaping spirit of imagination, and to have each chapter be `formed from a single image, theme, or object relative to Keats's vulnerabilities as an individual and his strengths as an artist.’ The happy result, sensitive to the darkest unhappinesses, is a work that is markedly personal, while never becoming self-conscious, idiosyncratic, or eccentric.”

In an e-mail to me on Monday, Bill Sigler writes:

“I myself always get knocked upside the head by Spenser, whose shockingly mellifluous musicality always gives me a visceral response, kinda like what [Geoffrey] Hill said about the way the mouth moves as the key to poetry. Granted, Spenser had access to a lot of words that are no longer in the English language.”

“Shockingly mellifluous musicality” also deftly captures the sound of Keats’ best verse. Keats, of course, was a great admirer of the author of The Faerie Queen. His earliest surviving poem is titled “Imitation of Spenser” (1814), and he put a portrait of Spenser on the title page of his first published book of poems. The poet’s friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, describes Keats’ reaction when he introduced him to Spenser:

“It were difficult at this lapse of time, to note the spark that fired the train of his poetical tendencies; but he must have given unmistakable tokens of his mental bent; otherwise, at that early stage of his career, I never could have read to him the `Epithalamium’ of Spenser; and this I remember having done, and in that hallowed old arbour, the scene of many bland and graceful associations -- the substances having passed away. At that time he may have been sixteen years old; and at that period of life he certainly appreciated the general beauty of the composition, and felt the more passionate passages; for his features and exclamations were ecstatic.... like a true poet, too -- a poet `born, not manufactured,’ a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent.”

Reading Ricks’ review moves one to reread Plumly’s life and Keats’ poems and letters, which suggests how potent reviews can be, though they seldom are.

`Life is Shorter Than Summer'

The father of the rabbi among my readers recently died. I offered my feeble e-mailed condolences and the rabbi replied:

“I was very lucky – the sadness is a measure of the blessing I suppose, and the blessing was extravagant, abundant. He was a wonderful man.”

These are the words of a generous, grateful spirit, one who recognizes sorrow as a barometer of human goodness – a reassuring paradox. The e-mail arrived while I was in the park with my younger sons on a sunny Memorial Day afternoon. They ran around the playground. I sat on a bench, smeared with sun-block, reading Emily Dickinson, including #1506 from The Complete Poems, dated “c. 1880”:

“Summer is shorter than any one –
Life is shorter than Summer –
Seventy Years is spent as quick
As an only Dollar –

“Sorrow -- now -- is polite -- and stays –
See how well we spurn him –
Equally to abhor Delight –
Equally retain him –”

For Dickinson all things contain their opposite. Like Thoreau, she relished paradox – a deeply religious gift. The first two lines make metaphysical if not mathematical sense. Rather unexpectedly, a rabbi makes an appearance in one of Dickinson’s poems, #433, the one that begins “Knows how to forget!” Here is the last of its six stanzas:

“If it be invention
It must have a Patent.
Rabbi of the Wise Book
Don't you know?”

`The Real War Will Never Get in the Books'

Memorial Day was a preview of coming attractions, a day off from school just weeks before the start of summer vacation. It meant a parade in the morning and a cookout in the afternoon, and I can’t recall a moment of reflection or gratitude. We were impatient with patriotism. Anything that drew our attention to the past we found oppressively beside-the-point. In the arrogance of youth only the moment existed. Past and future were fiction. Even our obsession with the Civil War centennial – reading Bruce Catton and Fletcher Pratt, visiting Gettysburg, collecting Civil War trading cards – felt like just another hobby, like collecting stamps or butterflies. In the epilogue to the third volume of The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote writes:

“Once a year at least – aside, that is, from regimental banquets and mass reunions, attended more and more sparsely by the middle-aged, then old, then incredibly ancient men who dwindled finally to a handful of octogenarian drummer boys, still whiskered for the most part in a clean-shaven world that had long since passed them by – these survivors got together to honor their dead. Observed throughout the North on May 30, Memorial Day hopscotched the calendar in the South, where individual states made their choices between April 26, May 10, and June 3. In any case, whenever it came, this day belonged to the veterans and their fallen comrades, and they made the most of it, beginning with their choice of a speaker, always with the hope that he would rival the `few appropriate remarks’ Lincoln had uttered at Gettysburg on a similar occasion.”

Foote goes on to recount a speech given on Memorial Day 1884, at Keene, N.H., by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935). As an army captain during the Civil War, Holmes had been seriously wounded three times. Twenty years before his speech, when Lincoln had stood on a parapet at Fort Stevens, Holmes is supposed to have yelled, “Get down, you damn fool!” In 1884, speaking to fellow Civil War veterans, Holmes said Memorial Day was “the most sacred of the year,” and would always be observed by Americans. He continued:

“But even if I am wrong, even if those who are to come after us are to forget all that we hold dear, and the future is to teach and kindle its children in ways as yet unrevealed, it is enough for us that to us this day is dear and sacred….For one hour, twice a year at least – at the regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves – the dead come back and live with us. I see them now, more than I can number, as I saw them on this earth.”

Perhaps it’s the nature of a civil war, of a conflict within a nation, especially one so young, to impel memorials as aids to memory. Most of my ancestors didn’t arrive in the United States until decades after the Civil War, but I feel most American when reading Whitman, Lincoln, Foote or some other gifted witness, participant or historian of the war. The Civil War feels like a death in the family, but it’s important not to confuse memory and commemoration with understanding or empathy. That we’ll never have, as Whitman, the Civil War hospital nurse, suggests in Specimen Days (1882):

“Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official surface courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles) of the Secession war; and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books. In the mushy influences of current times, too, the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten.”

`Essential Pleasures'

My review of Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, edited by Robert Pinsky, appears in Issue 16 of The Quarterly Conversation. Thanks to Levi Stahl, the journal’s poetry editor, for giving me the assignment.

`His Reputation for Holiness'

The middle-aged man with the metal detector pulled off his head phones as I approached him on the lawn by the abandoned seminary. I asked him the question I ask fishermen -- “Any luck?” -- and like a fisherman he bragged while trying to sound modest: “Not much. Mercury dimes. A slew of ’em over by those trees. Some other coins. No jewelry.” Had he ever found anything related to the seminary? “A gold-plated crucifix once, on a gold chain.”

Behind us was Saint Edward Seminary, closed 33 years ago by the Archdiocese of Seattle and now part of Saint Edward State Park. The four-story building with walls of multi-colored bricks and a terra cotta roof is a reassuringly substantial contrast to the grim-faced recreation going on all around us – joggers, bicyclists in Spandex, volleyball players. The seminary opened in 1931 and was run by priests of the Society of Saint Sulpice. It shut down in 1976 and the state bought it the following year.

Most of the first-floor windows were covered with plywood or patched with duct tape, but through one I saw a room almost filled, wall to wall, ceiling to floor, with old wooden desks, tables and bookshelves. The sunlight slanting through the window gleamed with dust. Above the main door was a bas relief of Christ flanked by the alpha and omega. Above his head was the inscription “Pro Eis Sanctifico Me Ipsum” (from John 17:19: “And for them do I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.”)

The seminary was named for Saint Edward the Confessor (1003-1066), son of the marvelously named Ethelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy. Edward was the next-to-last Anglo-Saxon king of England, and is the patron saint of kings, difficult marriages and separated spouses. The forest surrounding the old seminary grounds was dense with cedars, firs and maples. In the shade we saw hundreds of glistening black slugs. I pushed over a 15-foot dead cedar. Its insides had been reduced by ants and bacteria to an orange-red powder that looked like rust. Along the trail my 8-year-old noticed an inscription on the end of a sawn-down tree, written with a marker across the exposed rings:

“I am thine savior
thine reaper
thine harrower.”

Our 6-year-old said, “I never saw graffiti in the woods before.” We walked to the shore of Lake Washington and watched a yellow seaplane take off and land again and again, and picked up another trail, steep and treacherous with tree roots, and returned to the seminary grounds. The guy with the metal detector waved me over to show me his latest trophy – what he thought was a Sacajawea dollar that turned out to be a John Adams dollar. “Well, dang me,” he said. Back home I looked up Edward the Confessor in The Oxford Dictionary of Saints and found this tidbit in his entry:

“His reputation for holiness, which began during his life, was based on his accessibility to his subjects, his generosity to the poor, and his supposedly unconsummated marriage with Edith, the daughter of Godwin, earl of Wessex.”

My parents’ names were Edward and Edith.

`It's Runnin', Ain't It?'

The special-education class where I worked Friday was rehearsing for an upcoming talent show. Five kids, five acts. The sole girl honed her contortionist’s routine to a recording of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” A boy assembled, disassembled and reassembled a model truck. Another spun five hula-hoops around his waist for two minutes. His friend did an interpretive dance he called “The Tuna.”

My favorite performer, however, was a boy singer. He marched around the room singing an up-tempo and highly repetitive lyric with a familiar melody. I asked him to slow down and sing more clearly, I couldn’t understand the words. “It's in Russian,” he replied. Well, that made sense. Could he sing it again, this time in English? He launched lustily into “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”

Over lunch in the staff room I was rereading a collection of Whitney Balliett’s profiles of jazz musicians. In “Big T,” devoted to the great trombonist-singer Jack Teagarden, whose hobby was tinkering and inventing things, Balliett writes:

“Sometimes he built machines simply for the sake of building them. He constructed one that filled a room, and when he was asked what it did he replied, `Why, it’s runnin’, ain’t it?’”

`Terribly Funny Like Life'

Among my readers is a Canadian who wishes to become a priest and will enter a Roman Catholic seminary in Wisconsin in September. The alignment of a priestly calling and the upper Midwest brought one writer, the late J.F. Powers, to mind. I asked my friend if he knew Powers’ fiction, and of course he did. Most recently he read the second novel, Wheat That Springeth Green:

“It was the right book to be reading while thinking about the priesthood, for it does not romanticize spiritual life. I especially liked those episodes where the priest has failed and I the reader am prepared to judge him, but then find on reflection that he has acted thoughtfully and with a wish to do well, though perhaps giving too much thought to his dignity. Then I am inclined to not pass blame; but then I see again how failure still hangs over him. His selfishness and selflessness are mixed together. It seems to me to be very like life. Terribly funny like life, where terribly is not merely an intensifier.”

If my Canadian friend’s plans should change, he might contemplate a career in literary criticism. He thinks before he writes – a novel pleasure – and appreciates “the intersection of books and life.” I asked him why so many of the funniest fiction writers were Catholic, citing Joyce, Waugh, Flann O’Brien, Flannery O’Connor and Powers. In his reply he added two names I had neglected, Muriel Spark and Walker Percy, and wrote:

“If there is a talent for being funny that is especially Catholic, could it have something to do with the Catholic genius for seeking the world of spirit and meaning without dissolving the world of matter and sense? Perhaps dogmatic belief that Creation has its own being is a foundation for a habitual attention to detail. And perhaps dogmatic belief that this world of details is upheld and infused with the order of Personal Love produces the conviction that the details matter, that there is an underlying story and moreover a comedy. For it seems to me that what I find most funny are events or saying that are truer than they know; as, for instance, when Flannery deliciously lets her character name herself Hulga, or when John writes of Pilate parading out a beaten man in bloody purple and saying, Here is your king. I have to take care not to snicker when that text is read during the Good Friday liturgy.”

My friend may be Powers’ ideal reader, situated by temperament and spiritual configuration to get the novelist’s best jokes while appreciating their true-to-life humanity: “Terribly funny like life, where terribly is not merely an intensifier.” In an early Powers story, “Zeal,” a Bishop accompanies a contingent of Rome-bound pilgrims on a train between Minneapolis and Chicago. In their company is a self-dramatizing priest, Father Early, whose on-the-make vulgarity the Bishop dislikes intensely. The train follows the course of the Mississippi River, past a wall of limestone caves:

“The Bishop, spying a whole row of caves, thought of the ancient Nile. Here, though, the country was too fresh and frigid. Here the desert fathers would’ve married early and gone fishing. The aborigines, by their fruits, pretty much proved that. He tried again to interrupt Father Early. `There must be a cave for you up there, somewhere, Father.’”

`Undiscovered Regions of Thought'

I can’t accept Emerson whole, wheat and chaff, burning images and hot air, as I can Thoreau and Whitman. No single essay – not even his most deeply felt, “Experience” -- is satisfactory, as Walden and “Song of Myself” are satisfactory. Emerson’s unit of composition, and probably of thought, is the word. From there he builds with accelerating rightness to the phrase and sentence. At that level he is frequently inspired and wild, but after that he begins to fall apart, though we ought to recall that most writers never succeed beyond a word or two.

Dave Lull has passed along a review by Dale Salwak of First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson, who has already given us splendid biographies of Emerson, Thoreau and William James. Salwak rightly identifies Emerson as author of “some of the most remarkable sentences in English,” then quotes some of them on the subject of writing, without citing sources. He includes one of my favorites, from Charles J. Woodbury’s seldom-read Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890), based on conversations they had in Williamstown, Mass., in 1865:

“The most interesting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. Try and leave a little thinking for him; that will be better for both . . . A little guessing does him no harm, so I would assist him with no connections.”

This constitutes a healthy antidote to earnest, overly emphatic sermonizing, and nicely characterizes Emerson’s own best work, in particular the early essays in Nature (1836). It sounds a distinctly American democratic note, an endorsement of jazz-like improvisation, open-endedness and comradely respect for the reader. In “Nature,” in a passage not cited by Salwak, Emerson writes:

“Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of the truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.”

“Sentences which contain glimpses of the truth” amounts to a description of Emerson’s compositional method. His best work is fragmentary in the best sense – aphoristically distilled. One sentence will not predict the next – usually. I’ve posted before about Emerson’s heartbreaking “Experience,” written after the death of his son Waldo. On Jan. 30, 1842, two days after the boy died, Emerson wrote this bleak dialogue in his journal:

“Mamma, may I have this bell which I have been making, to stand by the side of my bed.

“Yes it may stand there.

“But Mamma I am afraid it will alarm you. It may sound in the middle of the night and it will be heard over the whole town, it will be louder than ten thousand hawks all over the world.

“It will sound like some great glass thing which falls down & breaks all to pieces.”

This might be Kafka transcribing a dream. The passage has a dreamlike inevitability rare in Emerson. The prose is straightforward and clear. “Some great glass thing” has, after all, shattered.

`Like a Stem Through the Rubbish'

I’ve made the acquaintance of William A. Sigler, poet, translator and proprietor of Poet Tree, which he describes as “a daily poetry blog with virtually no traffic.” I recognize kinship when I see it. There is a delusionally fine line between hobby and blog, private pleasure and public utility. As Sigler puts it in an e-mail, “Like yourself, I am an outcast in the Borgesean virtual Library of Babel.” The tough part is not growing in-grown. It’s time to quit when you echo your own echoes, a sure symptom of Blogger’s Syndrome, or B.S.

V.S. Pritchett has a funny six-page story, “The Voice,” in which an unfrocked Welsh priest, the Rev. Morgan, is trapped in a bombed-out church during the Blitz. His only company is a bottle of whiskey, and he passes the time singing hymns while his rescuers dig through the rubble:

“The voice had not stopped singing. It went on, rich, virile, masculine, from verse to verse of the hymn. Shooting up like a stem through the rubbish the voice seemed to rise and branch out powerfully, luxuriantly and even theatrically, like a tree, until everything was in its shade. It was a shade that came towards one like dark arms.”

Pritchett has something else in mind, and I haven’t even mentioned the current pastor of the church, Morgan’s rival, accuser and would-be savior, the Rev. Lewis, but Morgan’s whiskey baritone rising from the ruins is a fine metaphor for blogging. Sigler, who heard Jorge Luis Borges read at Johns Hopkins in 1984, adds this to his e-mail:

“I’ll just give you a web-exclusive translation of something Borges once wrote, by way of explaining myself:

"While writing I feel justified; I think: this is my destiny as a writer, even beyond the value of my writing. And if I were told all my writing would be forgotten, I don't believe I would receive this news with happiness, with satisfaction, but I would continue writing. For whom? For no one, for me alone."

I thought at once of David Ferry’s “Rereading Old Writing,” in which he says “writing / Is a way of being happy.”

`An Impulse That is Essentially Poetic'

Nige reminds us of the blessing who was V.S. Pritchett, the English essayist and fiction writer born with the last century, its resident for more than 96 years, and author of some of its best stories and criticism. Nige is rereading the first volume of Pritchett’s memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968), in which Pritchett credits Ford Madox Ford and the journal he edited, The English Review, with sparking his youthful interest in literature. Nige writes:

“Suddenly young Victor's imagination is awakened; he becomes a reader - and determines to be a writer. Pritchett's account of this awakening, and of his early reading, is wonderfully vivid - the amazed discovery of a raging hunger the existence of which had been entirely unsuspected. In his case, the overused term 'voracious reader' is no exaggeration; he is a ravening reader.”

I number Pritchett among my essential teachers, setting him in a book-lined room beside Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. They presented attractive models of reading and writing for a would-be autodidact, and were always generous with enthusiasms. Thanks to Pritchett I came to read José Maria de Eça de Queirós, George Gissing, George Meredith, Benito Pérez Galdós, Giovanni Verga and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Pritchett seems a very English writer to this American reader, though he claimed his success was “due to having something of a foreign mind.” Whitney Balliett counted him, with A.J. Liebling, among his “non-musical heroes.” Like Coleridge, Pritchett never earned a university degree, and that has always charmed me. He worked as a leather buyer and a shop clerk, and once walked across Spain. His Complete Short Stories and Complete Collected Essays are mandatory civilized reading. In the second volume of his memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), Pritchett writes:

“…presently I saw that literature grows out of literature as much as out of a writer’s times. A work of art is a deposit left by the conflicts and contradictions a writer has in his own nature. I am not a scholarly man; and I am not interested for very long in the elaborate superstructures of criticism. Some of my critics speak of insights and intuitions; the compliment is often left-handed, for these are signs of the amateur’s luck; I had no choice in the matter. Anyone who has written a piece of imaginative prose knows how much a writer relies on instinct and intuition.”

In the same book, Pritchett, a master of comic realism in his short fiction, who wrote only one first-rate novel (Mr. Beluncle), explains the attraction of writing stories:

“There is the fascination of packing a great deal into a very little space. The fact that form is decisive concentrates an impulse that is essentially poetic.”

Pritchett’s off-hand digression suggests why some of us go on writing.

`Strongholds of the Imagination'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along an interview with Geoffrey Hill, “Strongholds of the Imagination,” from The Oxonian Review. Here’s a sample:

“I believe that poets should be self-taught, based on an intensive programme of preferably serendipitous reading.”

“Obviously the poet’s public role is to be first and foremost a poet. But it is not ‘philosophically’ wrong for a poet to be deeply, or heavily, involved with journalism and/or politics; it all turns on the matter of intrinsic quality. The public role of the poem is to be a stronghold of the imagination.”

“There are obviously devoted readers, but it’s all rather subterranean, a bit like wartime resistance.”

“I greatly admire [John Milton’s] political sonnets. I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy.”

“Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood.”

`The World Has Moved On'

Joseph Roth has reminded me that I was hired for my first newspaper job 30 years ago this summer. The publisher of a weekly in Northwestern Ohio took a chance on a drunken 26-year-old college dropout who had never studied journalism and whose resume was paper-clipped to a stack of 5-year-old book reviews. I had worked for a car wash, a gas station, a miniature golf course and a sub shop, and as a clerk in a book store and a clerk/custodian for a library. I couldn’t type and still can’t. I had never met a deadline and couldn’t speak the Anglo-Saxon-sounding argot of the trade – slug, hed, lede, graf, widow. With that preparation I edited the Montpelier Leader-Enterprise for the final 16 months of its existence.

In a used bookstore on Sunday I found The White Cities: Reports from France 1925-1939, the English edition of Roth’s Report from a Parisian Paradise, which I read about five years ago. The title piece, which starts as a professional memoir and wanders into a contemplation of modernity, begins like this:

“I became a journalist one day out of despair over the complete inability of all other professions to satisfy me. I was not part of the generation that marked the beginning and end of its adolescence by scribbling poems. Nor did I belong to the very newest generation, which reaches sexual maturity by way of soccer, skiing, and boxing. I could never do more than ride a bicycle – I couldn’t even freewheel – and my literary talent was confined to making precise entries in a diary.”

That’s an accurate précis of me, circa 1979. I couldn’t do anything else very well so I went to work for a newspaper, and I have no regrets. It’s a young person’s business and requires stamina. I didn’t mind working 60 or 70 hours a week. It seemed exciting and glamorous even in the heart of the corn-and-soybean belt. I had an assistant editor (a home town girl, just out of college), a part-time sports editor who taught high-school science, and a society editor who also set headlines and sold classified ads. It was a picture-perfect small town paper except for me, the big-city kid with no interest in politics and government but who wanted to write about people (my models: Sherwood Anderson and A.J. Liebling). I covered town council and cops while writing features about the R.V. salesman who spent his weekends with a metal detector, hunting treasure, and the visionary pet-shop owner who thought tarantulas were the next big thing.

I didn’t know how good a time I was having – learning to write, interviewing strangers, riding with cops, on occasion even earning grudging respect. And I had a desk and typewriter of my own. Roth, a great novelist, writes:

“The `good observer’ is the sorriest reporter. He meets everything with open but inflexible eyes. He doesn’t attend to what’s going on in himself. But he should. Then at least, he would be able to report on the voices he hears. What he records is the voice of a single second. But who’s to say what other voices might sound as soon as he’s left his post? And by the time he’s set down his impression, the world has moved on.”

`Our Common Humanity, Mine and Yours'

The first thing we learn to read is the human face, a notoriously treacherous text. I have photos of my oldest son, now almost 22, taken the day after his birth. I’m holding him in front of me with my tongue extended, and he sticks out his tongue in imitation. When we meet a stranger our scan centers on the face, where we seek external clues to internal states. Dickens and Bellow specialized in such correspondences. Working with special-education kids I’ve become less confident in my ability to read the surfaces of human beings.

One kid spends most of his day in a wheelchair. He’s ambulatory but volatile and howls much of the time. He bites, kicks and scratches, and I was warned to keep my distance even when feeding him. I watched him bite his shoes and the edge of a table. In repose, his face is flawless; one wishes to say angelic. To view him out of his habitat – chair, restraints, helmet – would be to see a red-cheeked choir boy, a lovely little kid. When the storm rages inside he’s a monster.

Another boy – at six and a half, the same age as my youngest – is also in a chair, one packed densely with the technology that sustains his life, including a ventilator. It’s difficult to discern the human-machine demarcation. The lenses in his glasses are soda-bottle thick and his mouth hangs open in a perpetual “O.” His nurse is a coolly efficient Vietnamese woman who strokes his arms and hair, and talks to him softly. She handed me a miniature wooden bowling set to arrange on the table in front of him – a ball, six pins – and with our heavy assistance he bowled. I read nothing in his face – pain, pleasure, boredom, relief. He’s mute but the nurse has taught him to communicate with his eyes – one blink, yes; two blinks, no. His linkage with the world is strictly binary, leaving no room for nuance or ambiguity.

On June 6, 1880, Walt Whitman attended Episcopal services in an insane asylum in London, Ontario. He was the guest of an acolyte, Dr. Richard Bucke, a Canadian psychiatrist and author of Cosmic Consciousness. Whitman sat in an armchair beside the pulpit, facing the congregation. He recorded the experience in Specimen Days:

“O the looks that came from those faces! There were two or three I shall probably never forget. Nothing at all markedly repulsive or hideous—strange enough I did not see one such. Our common humanity, mine and yours, everywhere…yet behind most, an inferr’d arriere of such storms, such wrecks, such mysteries, fires, love, wrong, greed for wealth, religious problems, crosses—mirror’d from those crazed faces (yet now temporarily so calm, like still waters,) all the woes and sad happenings of life and death…”

`Homely Beauty'

What I most admire about Thoreau’s mature descriptions of the natural world is their unself-conscious mingling of poetic and scientific precision. Typically, he observes a plant or animal, describes it closely, cites its Linnaean name, relates it to previous experiences (often encyclopedic) and is never afraid to intelligently speculate when hard knowledge is exhausted. This journal passage, from Nov. 23, 1852, is not unusual:

“Among the flowers which may be put down as lasting thus far, as I remember, in the order of their hardiness, are yarrow, tansy, these very fresh and common, cerastium [mouse-ear chickweed], autumnal dandelion, dandelion, and perhaps tall buttercup, the last four scarce. The following seen within a fortnight: a late, three-ribbed golden-rod, blue-stemmed golden-rod (these two perhaps within a week), Potentilla argentea, Aster undulates, Ranunculus repens, Bidens connate, and Shepherd’s purse. I have not looked for witch hazel nor Stellaria media [common chickweed] lately.”

This more closely resembles poetry in its precision and concision than what usually passes for prose poetry – or poetry poetry. It also resembles a biologist’s unusually well-written field notes. And how many of us during a snow-covered Thanksgiving week, at the latitude of Concord, Mass., could identify so many flowers and weeds?

We don’t customarily think of Whitman as a nature writer, and for good reason: He didn’t know much about the natural world. His habitat was urban. His ventures into fields and woods are less rigorous and informed than Thoreau’s but for that reason they have a charm Thoreau’s can only occasionally match. I’ve been rereading Specimen Days, Whitman’s 1882 prose grabbag that collects memories of youth, Civil War writings (the heart of the book), travel diaries and anything else pleasing to the chronically ill writer, whose best poetry was behind him. Specimen Days makes virtues of sloppiness, immediacy and even scientific ignorance. The over-sized edition I’m reading was published in 1971 by David R. Godine, with vintage photos (was any writer more proudly photogenic than Whitman?) and an appreciative introduction by Alfred Kazin. This is from nature notes the poet made after the Civil War:

“As I journey’d to-day in a light wagon ten or twelve miles through the country, nothing pleas’d me more, in their homely beauty and novelty (I had either never seen the little things to such advantage, or had never noticed them before) than that peculiar fruit, with its profuse clear-yellow dangles of inch-long silk or yarn, in boundless profusion spotting the dark-green cedar bushes—contrasting well with their bronze tufts—the flossy shreds covering the knobs all over, like a shock of wild hair on elfin pates. On my ramble afterward down by the creek I pluck’d one from its bush, and shall keep it. These cedar-apples last only a little while however, and soon crumble and fade.”

Whitman is probably writing about the Eastern red cedar, Juniperus virginiana. What charms me is his unmediated love of its “homely beauty,” with none of Thoreau’s taxonomic musings. Whitman seems aware that fragility intensifies beauty. In his introduction, Kazin notes that Whitman “suffers from that strange inarticulateness at times” but adds:

“Yet since Whitman, even when he nodded, was a wholly original writer, he could often, despite his strange lethargies and divagations, find the idiosyncratically right word and phrase that was his essential strength – the symbol of his wholly personal way of seeing.”

`I'm Never Bored'

The autistic girl I accompanied on Wednesday plays cello in her school orchestra, and for 90 minutes I sat in the middle of a string section rehearsal, surrounded by a Beethoven concerto and a swing piece titled “Levitation.” The start-and-stop nature of rehearsals can be frustrating for a listener but the sensation of being surrounded by music and the enthusiasm of young musicians was more than compensation. Not unusually for a kid with autism, my charge is by nature solitary and inward, inhabiting an autonomous region. Being one cellist in the midst of 20string players and a teacher/conductor will never be her natural state. When not playing she rocked and quietly hummed, rather like Glenn Gould, and she was undeniably happy.

On Thursday, after sitting through video documentaries on President Kennedy’s assassination and the Taliban (shown in lieu of get-off-your-ass teaching), I accompanied an autistic boy to his stained-glass class. I had never heard him speak. His file assured me he was physically capable of speech but his shy, uncomprehending muteness was never in my presence broken with words – until we went to work on his stained-glass window. This is a craft I know nothing about but within minutes, together, we were cutting glass, lead and zinc, and soldering the whole mess together. This kid has no observable artistic gifts. Every line is crooked, every solder a puddle, but he was talking, laughing and strutting. He wanted to take it home, unfinished, to his mother. His body and voice crackled with the opposite of boredom, the narcoleptic state of his non-autistic classmates.

I associate chronic boredom with narcissism, ingratitude and poverty of imagination. The world is dense with boring people and situations but seldom – not even during the hundreds of public meetings I covered as a newspaper reporter – have I felt obliged to be bored. Frank Wilson made this distinction in his column this week:

“Boredom inheres in the person who is bored, not in others or things or circumstances. It is not boring. You are bored.”

Reading, musing and watching fellow humans, not to mention more rigorous pursuits, are mine when I want them. Creation is bottomless mystery. In my favorite among his hundreds of essays and columns, Theodore Dalrymple writes:

“…a man who came to interview me for a publication the other day pointed out that I was never bored. I hadn’t thought of that before, but it’s true: I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”

On the radio, on the way home from school, I heard Louis Armstrong sing “La Vie en Rose,” and I’d never before noticed how much he makes it sounds like “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”

`He Improved the Landscape with Words'

Writers write – a self-evident, much ignored truth. They make artfully pleasing arrangements of words. Failure to acknowledge this truth has consequences, the most annoying of which is a surfeit of bad writing. Another is that gifted writers, even some of the best, are radically misunderstood. This is certainly true of Walt Whitman, who has been treated by his less literary-minded readers as a radical democrat, cosmic-consciousness raiser, prophet of labor and gay poster boy. Of course, Whitman encouraged most of these misunderstandings but who ever said the motives of even a great writer are pure?

Something similar has happened with Whitman’s contemporary, Henry David Thoreau, long the adopted son of faddists, nature mystics and adolescents. The ever-fatuous Bill McKibben has said Thoreau is “where American environmentalism begins.” Can you imagine a less likely father of anything? American writers seem peculiarly susceptible to misappropriation by pious cranks of every school. In his review of a silly-sounding novel based on a trivial incident in Thoreau’s life, David Myers at The Commonplace Blog makes this point:

“First and last, Thoreau (who pronounced his name thorough, by the way) was a writer. He contributed to the country’s development just as much as the railroad builders; he improved the landscape with words. His subject is not nature, `infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us,’ but our relation to nature. Some men wanted to open it to new channels of highly lucrative trade; he wanted to open it to new channels of highly verbal thought.”

Last summer, when Buce of Underbelly invited me to contribute to his Book Fair, I wrote something similar:

“Thoreau is read as a naturalist, folksy philosopher, proto-environmentalist, anarchist, cranky Yankee and abolitionist. All are true but incomplete.”

Only Henry James among the American greats was so thoroughly (thank you, David), irreducibly a writer. For Thoreau there is an intimate linkage among body, mind and words. In Walden he writes, “My head is hands and feet.” Writing and thinking are physical acts, like surveying and cutting ice. Note this Sept. 2, 1851, passage from his journal:

“We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”

Such a passage mingles the later, more science-minded Thoreau with the still-callow Transcendentalist. We see glimpses of a young writer (he is only 34) at last prevailing in his protracted love-hate match with Emerson. As a writer Thoreau was a force of nature, particularly in the journal, and we have yet to take his true measure. Myers says “he improved the landscape with words,” but that’s just not enough for some people.

`Yet Some of Them Did Rise and Rise'

A reader reasonably asks of Tuesday’s post, “Why isn't Whitman's mother mentioned? Who was she descended from?” The answer is misogyny-free: I was striving for brevity and wished to avoid “housewife” or “homemaker.” Like her husband, Louisa Van Velsor descended from Dutch forebears who settled on Long Island in the 17th century. Robert Roper in Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brother in the Civil War (2008) gives a more fleshed-out response:

“His [George Whitman’s, Walt’s brother] letters home to his mother – a poorly educated, stay-at-home woman whom Whitman biographers have woefully mischaracterized as ignorant, incurious, and `almost illiterate’ – are peppered with military terms of art that George, himself, must only recently have learned. The old mother back in her Brooklyn kitchen understood everything – this was the first fact of the Whitman family – Mrs. Whitman’s power of understanding – and the reason why George addressed his detailed reflections on military strategy, his confessions of fear, his exaltation in victory, when he and his comrades did `terrible execution’ upon the bodies of their enemy, to her.”

My emphasis at the start of Tuesday’s post was on the frequency of mental illness among Whitman’s siblings, in order to emphasize the sheer unlikelihood of Whitman’s brilliance as a poet. Roper’s book usefully focused on the complexities of the Whitman family:

“The Whitmans of Brooklyn were a troubled, brilliant, poor, aspiring, declining, woefully afflicted, remarkably successful clan. The darkest terrors of the nineteenth century shadowed their hearth. Madness touched several of their number, and congenital disorders and incurable infections harrowed them. Yet some of them did rise and rise.”

The Whitmans, in other words, resembled many families of their time and ours, but for the genius in their midst. Roper calls Walt “America’s most brilliant poet, author of the most influential book of poetry in English of the last century and a half,” but devotes much time to George, Walt’s junior by a decade. Soon after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, George joined the local militia and enlisted in the Fifty-first New York Volunteers. Walt’s calling as a nurse to sick and wounded soldiers started with his journey to Falmouth, Va., after the Battle of Fredericksburg, where George was wounded. George also served at New Bern, Antietam, Second Bull Run, the Wilderness, and Petersburg, and left the army a brevetted lieutenant colonel. Roper’s book opens during the Battle of Antietam, on the eve of the bloodiest day in American history:

“The scent of pennyroyal, crushed by soldiers’ shoes, remained intense as a false twilight came. A large force of Union troops had been stymied all day by rebels holding the high ground, and as the sun set early behind the wooded Maryland ridge, a shadowy time of error and anxiety arrived.”

Roper can write, and Now the Drum of War (the title is from the closing lines of Walt’s “City of Ships”) makes vivid a story we thought we knew well. He revivifies another brother, Thomas Jefferson “Jeff” Whitman, who had a self-taught gift for mathematics and went on to an engineering career, helping to develop the water and sanitation systems in Brooklyn and Saint Louis. Roper follows every member of the Whitman family, and the later years, the illnesses and deaths, make for doleful reading. Whitman experienced the death of his 78-year-old mother in 1873 as, in Roper’s words, “the one loss never to be gotten over.” In a footnote Roper writes:

“Mrs. Whitman died after several weeks of progressive weakening…Hearing that she had taken a turn for the worse, Walt traveled to Camden by train and was with her for her last three days. A friend of the family’s, Helen E. Price, recalled the funeral in George’s house in a newspaper article published in 1919: `On taking my seat among [the mourners], I noticed a curious thumping at intervals that made the floor vibrate beneath my feet. I was so absorbed in my own grief that at first I was hardly conscious of it. I finally left my chair, and going to [another room]…I saw the poet all alone by the side of his mother’s coffin. He was bent over the side of his cane, both hands clasped upon it, and from time to time he would lift it and bring it down with a heavy thud on the floor.’”

Eight years after his mother’s death Whitman published Songs of Parting, which includes “As at Thy Portals Also Death,” not mentioned by Roper. The poem recreates the coffin scene described by Price, minus the cane, and is disturbingly intimate, even by Whitman’s standards:

“As at thy portals also death,
Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,
To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
(I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,
I sit by the form in the coffin,
I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin;)
To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best,
I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,
And set a tombstone here.”

`Even Admiration Feels Like Insolence'

Few great American writers were born into so unpromising a family as Walt Whitman. His father, a descendent of some of the earliest Dutch settlers on Long Island, is optimistically described as a housebuilder. Born in Huntington Township, L.I., Walt was one of eight children who survived infancy. Jesse, born in 1818, one year before Walt, is usually termed “unstable,” and died in a lunatic asylum in 1870. Hannah Louisa, born in 1823, was probably psychotic; Andrew, 1827, alcoholic; Edward, 1835, “feeble-minded.”

In Whitman’s less euphemistic age, his siblings would have been known as “idiots.” Whitman used the word twice in one of his greatest poems, “The Sleepers,” an early version of which appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The first mention, as it appears in the final version of the poem, comes in the first section:

“The wretched features of ennuyes, the white features of corpses, the
livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists,
The gash'd bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their
strong-door'd rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging
from gates, and the dying emerging from gates,
The night pervades them and infolds them.”

And he uses the word again in the sixth section of “The Sleepers”:

“The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wrong'd,
The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the dark,
I swear they are averaged now--one is no better than the other,
The night and sleep have liken'd them and restored them.”

In both cases, one is touched by Whitman’s sense of human inclusiveness. No one, regardless of gifts or circumstances, is left out. All are worthy of celebration, a thought I remembered Monday while working in a large, loud special-education center with kids Whitman would have recognized and probably joined on the floor during play period. Over lunch I reread Randall Jarrell’s great Poet Reclamation Act of 1952, “Some Lines from Whitman.” It dates from an era when Whitman was still on probation in the academy, his place in American literature only tentative. I thought of the lines above when Jarrell writes:

“It is only a list – but what a list!...occasionally one of these lists is metamorphosed into something we have no name for; the man who would call the next quotation a mere list – anybody will feel this – would boil his babies up for soap.”

If readers remember Jarrell, it’s for his reputation as a hitman-cum-critic (and for “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”). His demolitions are vicious and funny but I think Jarrell’s finest essays are acts of celebration. Read his pieces on Kipling, Frost, Marianne Moore and Christina Stead, and stray remarks about Chekhov, Elizabeth Bishop, Proust and Wordsworth. None is an unambiguous stamp of approval; each is written by a man in love with the seldom-realized perfection some writers, on rare occasions, achieve. Read what Jarrell writes about the son of obscure Long Islanders, brother to idiots, after citing a passage from “Song of Myself”:

“In the last lines of this quotation Whitman has reached – as great writers always reach – a point at which criticism seems not only unnecessary but absurd: these lines are so good that even admiration feels like insolence, and one is ashamed of anything that one can find to say about them. How anyone can dismiss or accept patronizingly the man who wrote them, I do not understand.”

`A Man of Capricious Culture'

In the May issue of The New Criterion, in an otherwise inoffensive review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, Denis Donoghue writes:

“It has been claimed that Beckett was immensely learned. He wasn’t. He would never have made a good professor; he had no time for method, system, or communication. The writers who meant most to him were Dante, Milton, Swift, and Samuel Johnson. He tried with no success to write a play about the relations between Johnson, Hester Thrale, her husband, and Gabriel Piozzi, whom she married after her husband’s death. I doubt that he ever read the Complete Works of any of these writers. He was an intellectual, a man of capricious Culture rather than of Nature.”

Three things offend: (1.) The claim that Beckett was not “immensely learned.” (2.) The implication that every “good professor” is “immensely learned,” and that a professor less than “immensely learned” could not be “good.” (3.) The suggestion that having “no time for method, system, or communication” disqualifies one from being a “good professor.”

As to (1.): Had Beckett read only Dante, Milton, Swift and Johnson (odd that Donoghue does not include Shakespeare and Joyce), and read them deeply and across a lifetime, he would qualify as “immensely learned.” Of course, Beckett didn’t stop there. Few writers have woven their learning so inextricably into the texture of their work.

(2.): Several of the best, most influential professors I’ve known were intelligent, well-read people with a gift for instilling their enthusiasms in students. Some of them were at least as learned as Beckett, though none was the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University. “Immensely learned” is a rare quality in any demographic, on or off campus.

(3.): Presumably, “method, system” refers to the secondary business of literature – namely, criticism and theory. Beckett wrote criticism in his early years, the most substantial and useful example of which is his 1930 monograph, Proust. However, when Vladimir and Estragon trade insults, as Prof. Donoghue surely knows, the latter says (“with finality”) “Crritic!” and Vladimir can only answer “Oh!” (“He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.”)

Donoghue’s claims stink of professorial snobbery. That Beckett chose writing over teaching inspires only our gratitude. No one mourns the academy’s loss.

`The Precipice On Which We Stand'

Another art museum from which art is banished, another exhibit celebrating the whimsical destruction of books. The Nazis took book burning seriously -- though they surely enjoyed reducing language and thought to ashes -- but I doubt they pretended their desecrations were works of art. We visited the Bellevue Arts Museum for the first time on Friday and saw the usual conceptualist bric-a-brac – a decorated meter maid’s cart, a stack of steel chairs, wall hangings that resembled soiled toilet paper, and “The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book.” The closest thing to art on display was a room hung with quilts.

Thirty-one artists, using books as their medium, have made unbook-like objects – a Buddha head, a recumbent human body, a scale-model of a canyon, a circular object resembling a cross-section of tree trunk, you name it. The poster at the entrance tells us:

“These days much of the reading we do is done on a computer screen, and as we shift towards the digital as our primary means of conveying information, it seems timely to examine the precipice on which we stand.”

You will, of course, note the graceful flow of the prose. We had the echoing galleries to ourselves, except for a sleepy-looking guard. The kids wondered why somebody had wrecked so many books. “You can’t read them now,” our 6-year-old observed, and I wondered if any of the artists had read their books before destroying them, or if they read any books at all. One artist, Casey Curran, betrayed a glimmer of talent. His works, “The Whale” and “Pretence,” reminded us of Joseph Cornell’s boxes. The former includes a wire model of a whale and pages cut from Moby-Dick and pasted into a collage. I noticed the opening of Chapter 108, “Ahab and the Carpenter”:

“Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shinbones.”

A handsome old copy of Ben-Hur was inlaid into “Pretence,” as well as a horoscope cast for someone born at 9:30 a.m. PDST, on July 9, 1951. Curran’s work showed some wit and draftsman-like care in execution. In the museum gift shop I asked to look at a copy of the catalogue for “The Book Borrowers.” The clerk said they were sold out, more were on order, would I like to put one on hold?

When presumably educated people mangle books and turn them into ugly objects, and other presumably educated people pay money to look at those ugly objects, and critics flatter themselves into appreciating their Duchampian daring, who is left to read books and look at pictures? The museum had on display not a single oil painting, watercolor or acrylic; no still lifes, portraits or landscapes; no figurative or abstract sculptures. Most of the galleries were as empty as the parking garage where we left the car. Is there room for those semi-mythical beasts, the art lover and common reader?

“You can’t read them now,” our 6-year-old observed.

`The Rebellion of Particulars'

I was saddened to learn of the death of Robin Blaser, the American-born poet who became a citizen of Canada. Next week he would have turned 84. An early friend and colleague of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, he was not the sort of poet I would typically read but in 1994, in preparation for a telephone interview with him, I ordered The Holy Forest, his de facto Collected Poems. I found little to understand but much to charm me. Blaser was best appreciated as a poet of fragments and illuminating phrases.

I remember our interview on a Friday evening in October. I resented the lateness of the weekend hour but the interview turned seamlessly into conversation. We spoke at unexpected length about Whitman and Yeats. Blaser seemed flattered that a newspaper reporter from upstate New York knew his work. He was courtly, deferential and funny. See what the Canadian poet George Bowering says of his friend:

“Robin did not put up with any crap from politicians or poets who put themselves before the world and its languages. And he did everything in style. When one of us would push him in his wheelchair and down to his chosen spot outside the hospital for a cigarette, he wore his favourite beret. When we gathered at the hospice to be with his sleeping person in the last couple of days, we shared martinis and Blaser stories. Now, I would like to suggest that we honour Robin today by spending the early afternoon in our housecoats, and reading Maimonides.”

I had attended a memorial service for a friend, a much-loved professor of English, and arrived shortly before the start of Blaser’s reading. Clearly, he was a raconteur, a performer-poet who loved being on stage. His reading was more conversation than recitation, and I observed he was a serious chain-smoker. Afterwards, he shook my hand, embraced me, said he loved the story I had written, and asked why I came late. When I explained about the memorial service, he ignored the poetry groupies and asked me to tell him all about my dead friend. As he was ushered off to a reception which I didn’t want to attend, I asked Blaser if he would sign my copy of The Holy Forest. Here’s what he wrote:

“for Patrick, Robin Blaser [I assume: it’s a scrawl], first meeting 26 Oct. ’94.”

That was my 42nd birthday and our final meeting. This is from his “Dreams, April, 1981”:

“so it is death is the
condition of infinite form –
the rebellion of particulars,
ourselves and each thing,
even ideas, against that infinitude,
is the story of finitude…”

`A Liquor of More Body'

I proctored an English literature exam for 25 high-school students and envied them the labor. The essay portion of the test laid out poems and prose like corpses awaiting autopsy while the students sat with scalpels poised. For one essay they were told to discuss a passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson contrasting the prose styles of Addison and Johnson. Boswell uses a favorite metaphor – alcohol:

“Addison’s style, like a light wine, pleases everybody from the first. Johnson’s, like a liquor of more body, seems too strong at first, but, by degrees, is highly relished…”

Next they were given Emily Dickinson’s “The last Night that She lived,” a poem that reads from the first stanza like a highly compacted short story:

“The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying—this to Us
Made Nature different”

Has any great poet ever written with such concerted oddness? I thought of a stray remark by Geoffrey Hill in his essay “Alienated Majesty: Ralph W. Emerson”: “She knew that Amherst society is mildly prurient and that she is herself regarded by these strangely respectable folk as a fey reclusive creature.” Now read the second of Dickinson’s six stanzas:

“We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as 'twere.”

That last line floors me. When the students turned in their finished essays I noticed one boy had responded to Dickinson’s poem with a single sentence: “Death, in general, is viewed as bad.” The passive voice speaks, as they say, volumes. It’s difficult to imagine life without Dickinson, that strange woman gifted with one of my favorite senses of humor. If I could write poetry worth reading I would wish most to write like Dickinson.

At home I found Dave Lull had sent me a link to an excellent review by Daniel E. Pritchard of Geoffrey Hill’s Selected Poems. Ten of Hill’s books sit on my desk. He sustains me, like Dickinson, a trusted friend. Read the entire review with Dickinson in mind, in particular Pritchard’s summation:

“…more than any other poet writing today, Hill’s vision of poetry is powerful, meaningful to every edge and nook of our society, and idiosyncratic: that radical atonement of emotion, intellect, history, and language, is an unparalleled achievement in our time.”

`Metaphysical Newmown Hay'

In 1960, when she was 72 years old, Marianne Moore published “Tell Me, Tell Me” in The New Yorker, and it became the title poem of a collection she published six years later. It begins memorably, with rhymes that recall Emily Dickinson: “where might there be a refuge for me / from egocentricity / and its propensity to bisect, / mis-state, misunderstand / and obliterate continuity?” (I won’t even try to replicate Moore’s indentations, because Blogger will remove them.)

In the second stanza appears a phrase in quotation marks, a trademark of Moore’s verse: “`breathed inconsistency and drank / contradiction.’” In her notes, Moore identifies the source, approximately: Henry James’ Autobiography. In fact, James never published a book with this title. In 1958, Frederick W. Dupee edited a volume that collects three autobiographical works James wrote in the six years before his death in 1916: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917). The first was written at the request of the widow of his brother, William James, who died in 1910. None of the books was reprinted until Dupee’s 1958 edition, under the title Autobiography.

The passage containing the phrase quoted by Moore appears on page 124 of that volume, in Chapter XVI of A Small Boy and Others. It comes in a passage describing the father of Henry, William and their siblings, Henry James Sr., a memorably eccentric Swedenborgian who had a theory about everything. James says their father’s approach to education could never have “conduced to the formation of prigs”:

“Our father’s prime horror was of them [prigs] – he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was so bright among us – though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a flight as need have been – that we fairly grew used to allow, from an early time, for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched, to the extent of happily `discounting’ them…”

Reading sentences written in James’ late style can be like watching the accretion of a coral reef in a time-lapse film, but your attentiveness is rewarded – in this case, with humor: “he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself.” The passage cited is written in a manner that recapitulates its matter: “...we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions.” In its American swagger and inclusiveness, the phrase echoes Whitman’s boast in Section 52 of “Song of Myself”:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

James was an enthusiastic admirer of Whitman, effectively blurring the old paleface-versus-redskin dichotomy long accepted as gospel in American literary studies. Earlier in A Small Boy and Others, James refers to the poet as “that happy genius,” and Edith Wharton in A Backward Glance recounts James’ pleasure in reading Whitman aloud:

“James's reading was a thing apart, an emanation of his inmost self, unaffected by fashion or elocutionary artifice. He read from his soul, and no one who never heard him read poetry knows what that soul was. Another day some one spoke of Whitman, and it was a joy to me to discover that James thought him, as I did, the greatest of American poets. `Leaves of Grass’ was put into his hands, and all that evening we sat rapt while he wandered from `The Song of Myself’ to `When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed’ (when he read `Lovely and soothing Death’ his voice filled the hushed room like an organ adagio), and thence let himself be lured on to the mysterious music of `Out of the Cradle’, reading, or rather crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy till the fivefold invocation to Death tolled out like the knocks in the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony.`

"James's admiration of Whitman, his immediate response to that mighty appeal, was a new proof of the way in which, above a certain level, the most divergent intelligences walk together like gods. We talked long that night of `Leaves of Grass’, tossing back and forth to each other treasure after treasure; but finally James, in one of his sudden humorous drops from the heights, flung up his hands and cried out with the old stammer and twinkle: `Oh, yes, a great genius; undoubtedly a very great genius! Only one cannot help deploring his too-extensive acquaintance with foreign languages.’”

How reassuring to hear of the Master “crooning,” and perhaps swooning, “in a mood of subdued ecstasy.” Sometimes I think everything we think we know about literary history, in particular American literary history, is wrong, and someone ought to draw a new map of the territory. Convergences and correspondences are everywhere if we pay attention and read deeply. Later in “Tell Me, Tell Me,” Moore writes “I am going / to flee; by engineering strategy -- / the viper’s traffic-knot – flee / to metaphysical newmown hay, / honeysuckle, or wood fragrance.” “Metaphysical newmown hay” is cousin to Leaves of Grass.

When Moore read “Tell Me, Tell Me” at a literary event in New York City, a woman is supposed to have asked, “Miss Moore, what is `metaphysical newmown hay?’” and the poet is supposed to have answered, “Oh, something like a sudden whiff of fragrance in contrast with the doggedly continuous opposition to spontaneous conversation that had gone before.”

`Charmed by an Author'

Two of the four students whose computer-science exams I was assigned to proctor never showed up and the others were late, one by more than half an hour. Neither apologized and the first fell asleep at his table. I graded the multiple-choice portion of their exams while they worked on the essays. One scored nine correct answers out of 40; the other, 11. I calculated they could have scored higher by writing down random answers. At home, for a free-lance job, I edited 10 articles for length and style. Here’s a sample of the raw product I was dealing with:

“The prototypes were application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, that were designed solely for encryption. Unlike the general-purpose microprocessors that power PCs and laptops, ASICs are designed for a specific purpose, and they are `embedded’ by the millions each year in a growing constellation of products like automobiles, cell phones, MRI scanners and electronic toys.”

During the proctoring and after the editing I read Marianne Moore, who sometimes is my favorite 20th-century poet. In “Qui S’Excuse, S’Accuse” [“He who excuses himself accuses himself” or “He who apologizes condemns himself”], she writes: “Art is exact perception.” This dates from 1910, when Moore was 22 and already gifted with the insight that would guide the writing of her poems and prose for the next 60 years. In her introduction to The Poems of Marianne Moore, Grace Schulman glosses this line in a manner that applies, with minor modifications, to artists and scientists alike:

“Hers is emphatically an art of exact perception: to feel deeply is to see clearly, to peer beyond surfaces, and to explore permanent truths. The poet amasses facts, remarks, observations, details from guidebooks and manuals, in pursuit of answers to the mysteries of modern love, of nobility, of timeless values that she probes and probes again.”

Why is exactitude so pleasing? Why does it humble and exhilarate us as readers, writers and people who feel and think? Its rareness alone can’t account for it, nor its difficulty. Precision suggests finality, inevitability, a summing-up, an essence captured. In her essay “Feeling and Precision,” Moore says “…precision is both impact and exactitude, as with surgery.” In the Paris Review interview, Donald Hall asks Moore about her fondness for incorporating the words of others into her poems and prose. She answers:

“I was just trying to be honorable and not to steal things. I’ve always felt that if a thing has been said in the very best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I’d take it but give the person credit for it. That’s all there is to that. If you are charmed by an author, I think it’s a very strange and invalid imagination that doesn’t love to share it. Somebody else should read it, don’t you think?”

As usual, Moore is both sly and sincere. “Reading her criticism,” Kenneth Burke writes, “is like borrowing a book from the personal library of a skilled reader who underlined all the good spots.” Hers is an art of verbal quilt-making, of selection and pleasing juxtaposition. As though to answer her own final question, Moore responds at length to Hall’s next query, about the influence of “prose stylists” on her poetry:

“Prose stylists, very much. Doctor Johnson on Richard Savage: `He was in two months illegitimated by the Parliament, and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the oceans of life only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks…it was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added that, he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.’ Or Edmund Burke on the colonies: `You can shear a wolf ; but will he comply?’ Or Sir Thomas Browne: `States are not governed by Ergotisms.’ He calls a bee, `that industrious flie,’ and his home, his `hive.’ His manner is a kind of erudition-proof sweetness. Or Sir Francis Bacon: `Civil war is like the heat of fever; a foreign war is like the heat of exercise.’ Or Cellini: `I had by me a dog black as a mulberry…I swelled up in my rage like an asp.’ Or Caesar’s Commentaries, and Xenophon’s Cynegeticus: the gusto and interest in every detail! In Henry James it is the essays and letters especially that affect me. In Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance: his definiteness, his indigenously unmistakable accent. Charles Norman says in his biography, Ezra Pound, that Pound said to a poet: `nothing, nothing, that you couldn’t in some circumstance, under stress of some emotion, actually say.” And Ezra said of Shakespeare and Dante: `Here we are with the masters; of neither can we say, “he is the greatest”; of each we must say, “he is unexcelled.”’”

`The Gaiety of the Word in His Veins'

A phrase in V.S. Pritchett’s “Kipling’s Short Stories” is useful in describing my pre-critical reaction to writers whose work I admire and enjoy even before I’m able to articulate why. Kipling, he says, “had the gaiety of the word in his veins.” We recognize this quality immediately – Kipling surely has it, as does Pritchett in the best of his stories and essays. The prose is sprightly, not leadenly literal. It doesn’t parade a sense of whimsy, self-importance or uncertainty. The fat in the words and thought have been jettisoned. The cord connecting language and life strangles neither.

Remarkably, this unmediated sense of pleasure can survive even the wringing-out process of translation. I see it everywhere in the novels of José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), whose work was judged superior to Flaubert’s by Zola. I’m reading the latest to be translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, The City and the Mountains, in which a quality identified by Pritchett in his essay on Eça de Queirós, “A Portuguese Diplomat,” is everywhere evident:

“Under the irony and the grace, there are precision and sudden outbursts of ecstasy and of flamboyant pride in a prose that coils along and then suddenly vibrates furiously when emotion breaks through, or breaks into unashamed burlesque.”

The City and the Mountains (1895) is gentle, nuanced satire – not what one expects of a novelist usually pigeonholed as a Naturalist (Pritchett notes Eça de Queirós’ mixture of “poetry, sharp realism and wit”) – narrated by, Ze Fernandes, the main character’s best friend. Jacinto, a Portuguese born in Paris, is wealthy and idealistic – a seeker after truth. The narrator loves his friend but is amused by his naiveté and zeal for self-improvement and doing good. The late-19th-century world Eça de Queirós chronicles resembles our own in its infatuation with money, conspicuous consumption and technology. Here a sample from early in the novel of the affectionate fun Eça de Queirós has at Jacinto’s expense:

“…I escaped, breathless, into the Library [of Jacinto’s house in Paris]. What a storehouse of the products of Reason and the Imagination! There lay more than thirty thousand volumes, all doubtless essential to anyone wishing to be considered a cultivated human being. At the entrance I noticed, in gold on a green spine, the name of Adam Smith. This, then, was clearly the Economists’ section. I ventured further in and walked, wondering, past more than twenty-six feet of Political Economy. Then I spotted the Philosophers and their commentators, who filled a whole wall, from the pre-Socratics to the Neo-Pessimists. These shelves were piled high with over two thousand systems of thought, all contradicting each other. You could guess the doctrines from the binding: Hobbes, near the bottom, was heavy in black leather; Plato, up above, glowed in soft white calf.”

On it goes on for another three serpentine sentences until we arrive at the start of the next paragraph:

“Beyond, though, in pale morocco leather, glowed friendlier shelves devoted to the Poets. Like a respite for the spirit grown weary of all that positive knowledge, Jacinto had created a cosy corner, with a divan and a lemonwood tables as glossy as the finest enamel and covered with cigars, oriental cigarettes and eighteenth-century snuff-boxes.”

I’m reminded of the book dealer I interviewed in upstate New York who sold volumes by the yard to wealthy customers who wanted classy-looking shelves. Eça de Queirós reminds us that no species of human vanity is novel, and he does so with a writerly smile.

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull refers us to Books By the Foot.

`Our Better Education'

Frank Wilson has devoted much thought to education and how to distinguish it from vocational training, and I witness almost daily the sabotage of true education, in Frank’s sense:

“The idea that a person should go to school in order to learn to appreciate life and art, and to think clearly and speak what he thinks clearly and eloquently is alien to our society. How many people with Ph.D.s today spend any time listening to Beethoven's late quartets or even stop into a museum to see a favorite painting by a favorite artist - a Chardin still life, shall we say, or a Sargent watercolor? How many read the classics? Such things are not mere entertainments. They are a means of enriching the soul.”

Such language will seem quaint to those whose education was nonexistent or strictly utilitarian, and who have never read Montaigne, Burton and Nirad C. Chaudhuri – the last, author of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). Chaudhuri (1897-1999) is one of the great charmers of the 20th century, the patron saint of provincials and late-bloomers. He was born in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, son of a lawyer who thought Nirad was the one among his six sons who would never succeed. At the start of the chapter devoted to his father, Chaudhuri paints an oblique portrait of a truly educated person:

“The thing my father was primarily interested in was education. He never tried to define his idea of good education, but his casual remarks on this subject, his verdicts on men and things, and his emotional reactions to the different kinds of human activity, made it plain that what he understood by education was acquisition of knowledge, accompanied by and inseparable from the training and development of all the mental faculties, and more especially the intellect. These two aspects of education were to him not only equally essential but, as he seemed to assume, automatically contributory to each other’s growth. He not only felt that the one was useless without the other, he also felt that they were, like the twin gods of Aryan mythology, always present together and always to be worshipped together.”

A 19th-century Indian lawyer shares a sensibility with one of Frank’s favorites, Albert Jay Nock, an unclassifiable American thinker who was a close contemporary. Chaudhuri’s father probably would have appreciated Nock’s distinction between formative and instrumental knowledge. Chaudhuri writes of his father, in language that recalls both Frank’s and Nock’s:

“…what he had assumed was that worldly success would attend us as a corollary to our better education without being made its primary purpose. He was not disposed to treat education as the means to an end or as vocational training.”

Every day I meet people whose training for life has been narrowly and systematically focused, and who seem almost without exception to be bored, lonely and without purpose. After 13, or 17, or more years in school they have succeeded in remaining uneducated.

`Clarity and Design and Order'

On the drive into Seattle I caught the last of Charlie Christian’s four choruses on “I Got Rhythm,” the version recorded by a disc jockey in a Minneapolis club in September 1939. Think of the timing: Hitler has just invaded Poland, and Christian, a 23-year-old out of Texas and Oklahoma, is already “the father of the electric guitar,” as Whitney Balliett says. A month earlier Benny Goodman had hired him to join his Orchestra and Sextet. Christian stayed with Goodman for almost two years until tuberculosis hospitalized him for the rest of his life. He died in 1942 at age 25, “a moth extinguished by his own flame,” as Balliett puts it.

Christian’s style is clean and precise, a combination that can sound sterile in the hands of a less rhythmically inventive musician. That’s the reason I’m largely indifferent to jazz guitarists but for Christian, Reinhardt, Jim Hall and a few others. Jazz guitarists tend to court loquaciousness, so the tedium goes on and on.

When I got home I looked up Balliet’s 1972 review of Solo Flight: The Genius of Charlie Christian, the LP that seriously introduced me to the guitarist. You can find the review on page 363 of Balliett’s Collected Works. It’s classic Balliett – beguilingly written but as packed with information as an encyclopedia entry. This passage grabbed me:

“His style was a model of clarity and design and order. It had the wastelessness and purpose of geometry, the flow and logic of Albers. But the laconic exterior was frequently ruffled, for Christian freely transmitted the emotions that drove him – those unfathomable, nameless emotions that compel all first-rate music – and he did it without ever disturbing the master plan each solo seemed to follow.”

The artist who came to mind as I read Balliett’s words was Chekhov – a master of reticence and understatement who also died prematurely of TB. Balliett’s “laconic” is the perfect adjective for both adjective-shy artists. It’s good to be reminded that eloquence needn’t be long-winded or flowery. Recall what Nabokov writes of Chekhov in Lectures on Russian Literature:

“… in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

`The Demands and Inspiration of Form'

We spent the morning at the storage unit, consolidating earthly possessions, contemplating a smaller space, haggling, poking in boxes. Outside, I watched the swallows harvest insects. At random I opened a drawer in a file cabinet and found a folder labeled “Books.” On a whim I took it home and browsed through a hodgepodge of newspaper reviews and stories, mostly mine, the earliest from 1985. Here was the column I wrote when Beckett died almost 20 years ago -- “Beckett’s artistry was based on compression and exactitude of phrase.” -- that isn’t sufficiently compressed or exact. And here was the far superior column Christopher Ricks published in New York Newsday on the same occasion: “Beckett marveled at `the haze of our smug will to live,’ at `the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains’ – all the pains we take to go on being in pain.”

And here was the feature from 1995 I wrote about Harry Staley, then 71, a retired professor of English who had just published a volume of poems. I quoted him as saying, “I love the demands and inspiration of form. Form is wonderful to help you find the truth of the matter.”

And my 1996 review of Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler, recipient the following year of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction: “Millhauser is almost unique among contemporary American writers in having a prose style that is instantly recognizable.” [I also found my reviews of Millhauser’s The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993) and Enchanted Night (1999).]

In a 1990 review of Stanislaw Baranczak’s Breathing Under Water and Other East European Essays, I quote with approval Baranczak saying: “A poet who is offended by the course of modern History doesn’t even have to write political poetry to find an appropriate response to it. It’s enough that he write his poems well.”

In a 1991 review of A Neutral Corner, a posthumous collection of boxing pieces by A.J. Liebling, I write: “Liebling, like any writer worth his prose, was an inveterate prickly individualist. He lived up to one of his own sentences, now taped to the Cartier-Bresson photograph of Liebling hanging above my desk: `The way you write is well, and how is your own business.’”

In a 1999 profile of Russian-American writer Mikhail Iossel, I quote him as saying: “I wanted to limit the scope of my self-expression. Samuel Beckett said he began to write in French because he knew too many words in English. In Russian, I’m too fluent, too many words, too much emotion.”

And in a 1990 review of A Balthus Notebook by Guy Davenport (which I mailed to Guy, and he claimed to enjoy), I write: “He is the Ezra Pound of our age, in the sense that he reanimates our cultural inheritance and makes it new. Thanks to Davenport we can read, among others, Sappho, Fourier, Welty and Beckett with a new mind.”

I hope this isn’t nostalgia. I find reading old work instructive. I look back in mingled disgust and relief, as though it could have been much worse. The themes survive the years. My values in literature and life remain essentially the same but my ability to articulate them has improved. What I write today doesn’t embarrass me nearly so often as what I wrote then.

`Goods Intended for the Public'

Good things I found this week when I wasn’t looking for them:

“As I age, I grow more punctilious about my aesthetic debts: in Paris a few years ago I met Arthur Waley and thanked him for translating the Tale of Genji.”

--from The Earl of Louisiana by A.J. Liebling

“Also saw Jim [J.F.] Powers, and had a marvelous time, talking ironic banter with him, just as though no time had passed. Wonderful moment, John [Berryman] in his exaggerated way and unbelievable accent, saying, `Why this man is the best prose writer in America. He is as good as Chekhov. His “Lions and Hartes” [sic: “Lions, Hearts, Leaping Does”] is like “The Bishop!”’ Then Jim smoking, saying slowly face unchanged, `I don’t know, I always thought Chekhov wrote too much.’ Jim, buried in St. Cloud all these years is as confident as Randall [Jarrell], though all is irony. Now his novel [Morte D’Urban] is coming out [after] 11 years and should be a masterpiece.”

--from a letter by Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, April 14, 1962, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

“Ever since I retired from medical practice, I buy at least a half of my books in charity shops, which accounts for the somewhat miscellaneous nature of my current reading.”

--from “Second Life” by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) in the May issue of Standpoint

“Absence of heart – as in public buildings—
Absence of mind – as in public speeches –
Absence of worth – as in goods intended for the public…”

--from “The Chimeras” by W.H. Auden

“She said that books are already an accessory, you decorate your house with books and people have giant libraries displaying all that they've read and know. It shows that they are smart and well read. True. But when you tear out the pages and use the book cover as a bag, what does that say about you? That you can't read and only care about looks?”

--from “Caitlin Phillips is a Book Snob,” sent to me by an old friend at Rice University, who knew I would enjoy the atrocity. “Just please don't ask me how I wound up at this website. Porn would be less embarrassing, I think,” she said.