`We Look at Nature With New Eyes'

On our morning walks to the bus stop we devote most conversations to what the natural world is offering – spiders, fog, dwindling chlorophyll, rabbits, the smell of apple trees and ozone. As usual, I emphasize connections – why crows tolerate human company, why lichens grow more heavily on dead and dying trees.

Such talk irritates the father of a girl who shares a bus with my ten-year-old. A self-described “nature-lover,” he believes nature is there for us to respect, and knowing too much about it—“dissecting” it, he calls it – disrespects nature. Those are my words but they don’t seriously misrepresent his incoherence. We might call him a Romantic shading into a Mystic (though he’s an atheist). Nature is a sort of idol to be worshipped, not explored or understood, and is best worshipped from a distance (slugs and slime mold are too icky).

On Wednesday, following up on a discussion of crows and ravens, I tried to explain to my neighbor the attraction taxonomy holds. He would have none of it: “Scientists are always trying to ruin nature for us.” I thought of him later when Dave Lull alerted me to a story in the Guardian about biologists editing the list of known flowering plants from one million to about four-hundred thousand. The three-year process consolidates known species and eliminates redundancy, which appeals to my innate tidiness and fondness for precision without inhibiting my love of flowers. The Guardian reporter, Juliette Jowet, writes:

“In one example, researchers calculated that for the six most-used species of Plectranthus, a relative of the basil plant, a researcher would miss 80% of information available if they looked under only the most commonly used name. On another database, they found only 150 of 500 nutritionally important plant species using the names cited in current literature.”

The more I know, the more understanding and enjoyment can grow. Knowledge doesn’t suppress an appetite but whets it. Early in life, Thoreau embodied the Romantic/Scientific distinction my neighbor divvies out among antagonists, but his thinking evolved. By his last decade, much of the grosser Transcendentalist fluff had worn off. He never numbered among the scientists but saw more than most of them. Thoreau’s eyes aspired to hawkish acuity. He read and assimilated On the Origin of Species while remaining a specimen collector for one of Darwin’s chief scientific antagonists, Louis Agassiz. By his final years, Thoreau resolved the false dichotomy between loving nature and respecting science. In his journal for Dec. 4, 1856, he writes:

“My first botany [book], as I remember, was [Jacob] Bigelow’s [Florula Bostoniensis, A Collection of] Plants of Boston and Vicinity, which I began to use about twenty years ago, looking chiefly for the popular names and the short references to the localities of plants . . . I also learned the names of many, but without using any system, and forgot them soon. I was not inclined to pluck flowers; preferred to leave them where they were, liked them best there . . . But from year to year we look at Nature with new eyes. About half a dozen years ago I found myself again attending to plants with more method, looking out the name of each one and remembering it . . . I remember gazing with interest at the swamps about those days and wondering if I could ever attain to such familiarity with plants that I should know the species of every twig and leaf in them, that I should be acquainted with every plant . . . I little thought that in a year or two I should have attained to that knowledge without all that labor.”

`The Only Possible Return'

The poet Helen Pinkerton mailed photocopies of two Melville-related essays she published in Sewanee Review and included a “poem-card” of “Early Morning” by her “dear, longtime friend” Janet Winters:

“The path
The spider makes through the air,
Invisible
Until the light touches it.

“The path
The light takes through the air,
Invisible
Until it finds the spider’s web.”

In a note Pinkerton explains she was prompted to send Lewis’ “charming (profound?)” poem because of a recent post of mine about spiders. “Early Morning,” with its delicate evocation of light, reminds me of another charming, profound poem about light, Pinkerton’s own “Degrees of Shade.” I’ve written about it (here) and the epigraph from Aquinas she appends to it: “…every creature stands in relation to God as the air to the light of the sun.”

Because of something I had written about trees she suggested a poem by Robert Bridges, friend of Hopkins and his posthumous editor. She assured me, “It is worth looking up.” I didn’t know the poem but she’s right:

“The hill pines were sighing,
O'ercast and chill was the day:
A mist in the valley lying
Blotted the pleasant May.

“But deep in the glen's bosom
Summer slept in the fire
Of the odorous gorse-blossom
And the hot scent of the brier.

“A ribald cuckoo clamoured,
And out of the copse the stroke
Of the iron axe that hammered
The iron heart of the oak.”

“Odorous gorse-blossom” and “ribald cuckoo clamoured” are pleasing, as is the echo of iron, and the final lines recall the offstage sound of axe blows in the final scene of The Cherry Orchard. Pinkerton’s envelope in the mailbox fulfills, in human terms, the concluding lines of her poem “The Gift”:

“Grace is the gift. To take it my concern—
Itself the only possible return.”

At `The Dabbler'

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`Unstrenuous Gravity'

On Sunday I was rereading The America of George Ade (1960), a collection of the Indiana humorist’s work edited by the great Hoosier-born radio storyteller Jean Shepherd, when Dave Lull passed along a PDF file of an essay, "A Sadness Unto the Bone," in the summer issue of the Sewanee Review, part of a special section called "Fiction: Our Spectacle, Our Suspense, and Our Thrill." The author, Mel Livatino, is new to me but his subject, John Williams’ novel Stoner (1965), is familiar. Only to a few other works of fiction – much of Chekhov and James, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Bellow's Seize the Day – am I so emotionally attached. Livatino writes:

“In nearly fifty years of reading fiction, I have never encountered a more powerful novel—and not a syllable of it sentimental. Williams performs this feat by attending carefully to the soul of William Stoner and the tragic circumstances of his life.”

I wish Livatino’s essay were available online. His reading of Stoner is unabashedly emotional, albeit critically rigorous, though I can’t imagine a rigorous reading of Williams’ novel that isn’t emotional. What distinguishes Stoner from a sob story is that its emotional impact is earned. Like his protagonist, William never cheats. Livatino rightly calls the title character, who is born to a poor farm family in Missouri and becomes an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, a “hero.” He adds:

“The novel is unspeakably sad, but it is also happy in the sense the Stoics would have understood that word, for, against all the harm that comes his way, Stoner prevails in his integrity as a man, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, and finally as a human being of noble dimensions. Stoner’s name and accomplishments may be erased, but we who have known his life will be forever moved and inspired by it.”

No doubt such sentiments are unfashionable and will be scorned by readers whose attention can be riveted by the unplumbed depths of Donald Barthelme, but the loss is theirs. In his introduction to the Ade collection, Shepherd says “the Midwest has been swimming in a turgid sea of Futility,” and that note almost captures Stoner’s plight. But as Livatino points out, though Stoner may have known futility, he possessed the rarer stuff of nobility. It’s Elberry, of all people, who comes closer to the mark. Several weeks ago, while reading the poems of Helen Pinkerton, he wrote to me:

“i was searching for a word, for the voice, and settled on `noble’. i think Wallace Stevens, in a strange prose work, the name of which escapes me, talks about `nobility’ as a quality lacking in modern literature. It is, however, strong in Pinkerton - the sense of an unstrenuous gravity, a purpose. It's somehow at the opposite end of the spectrum to the very strenuous & mannered purpose of politically-motivated `writers’, who are as it were all light & noise and no heat. i suppose the difference is the noble are usually content to be obscure or read by only a few, knowing that after death the two-handed engine will sort the wheat from the chaff.”

Precisely what Livatino has done for us.

`Flying Leaps'

To the fourth- and fifth-graders in the special-education room where I work I read an old favorite of my younger sons – The Mystery of Eatum Hall (2004) by John Kelly and Cathy Tincknell. It’s a rarity among recent children’s books in that it has no ideological axe to grind, makes no claims to "sensitivity," isn’t afraid to be comically violent (a wolf is baked in a pie, Titus Andronicus-fashion, of his own devising), indulges in rather sophisticated wordplay and is funny without having any point to prove.

Horace and Glenda Pork-Fowler are a married pig and goose who live to eat. They receive an invitation from Dr. Hunter, the new owner of Eatum Hall, to “a weekend of free gourmet food!" Gluttony blinds them to the trap, despite ample clues, but they happily stuff themselves, avoid being ingested by a wolf dining society and return home satiated and oblivious.

None of the students I work with is a confident reader, and much of their spoken language is a hash of lazy slang. None is articulate and most of their humor is on the burp-and-fart level (not unlike my own). The book choice was an experiment. It’s not the sort of title most of them would choose from the library, assuming they use the library. I prefaced the reading with explanations of words – “glutton,” “fowl,” “gourmet” – and such things as dinner invitations, surveillance cameras and pie-baking but needn’t have worried. Not one of them understood the trap set by the wolf or how Horace and Glenda avoided it, but all stared quietly, mouths agape, as I read the story. I read with animation, inserting appropriate sound effects and funny voices, but that alone couldn’t explain their attentiveness. Nor could the likelihood that most of them probably have never been read to at home.

Purely by happenstance William James provided a partial explanation. Friday night, hours after reading the story aloud, I was rereading Chapter 9, “The Streams of Thought,” in James’ Principles of Psychology (1890). This I found in a footnote:

“We think it odd that young children should listen with such rapt attention to the reading of stories expressed in words half of which they do not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. But their thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both of us make flying leaps over large portions of the sentences uttered and we give attention only to substantive starting points, turning points, and conclusions here and there. All the rest, 'substantive' and separately intelligible as it may potentially be, actually serves only as so much transitive material. It is internodal consciousness, giving us the sense of continuity, but having no significance apart from its mere gap-filling function. The children probably feel no gap when through a lot of unintelligible words they are swiftly carried to a familiar and intelligible terminus.”

Not only a philosopher and psychologist, James was a son, brother and father. Chances are his observations are rooted not in experimentation but family observation. He recognized “flying leaps” when he saw them.

`Something Trumpery'

Unexpectedly a word shows up in my head and I’m uncertain whether it is a word, where I heard it and why it appears now. It happened Saturday: trangam, a word that looks suspiciously like an anagram (Ma Grant?) and almost is an anagram of “anagram.” The sound provides few clues. A tribal council in northern Thailand? A pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty? Ernie Trangam, short stop for the Cubs?

Webster’s Third offers this: “[origin unknown] archaic: an odd device or puzzle: trinket, gimcrack.” The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1911) includes the variant spelling trangram and this definition: “Something trumpery, unusual, or of no value; a gimcrack.” It also cites three usages:

William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1677): “But go, thou Trangame, and carry back those Trangames, which thou hast stol’n or purloin’d.”

John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull (1727): “What a devil’s the meaning of all these trangrams and gimcracks, gentlemen?”

And Walter Scott’s The Abbott (1820): “`But, hey-day, what, have you taken the chain and medal off from my bonnet?’ `And meet time it was, when you usher, vinegar-faced rogue that he is, began to inquire what popish trangam you were wearing.’”

It’s a word I’m unlikely ever to use again, except perhaps while playing Scrabble, though I’m grateful for the chance to navigate so amusing ("vinegar-faced rogue") an etymological cul-de-sac. Follow a word long enough and it dissolves into sound without meaning, “a bubble in a bathtub,” as an eminent philologist once put it. I invite readers to chart a course from two words I found on the same page as “trangam” in The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia:

Trank: “In glove-making, an oblong piece taken from the skin, from which the shape of the glove is cut by a knife in a press.” And even better, tranka: “A long cylindrical box balanced and juggled by the feet of an acrobat.”

ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along the entry for "trangam" in the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989):

"Obs. An odd or intricate contrivance of some kind; a knick-knack, a puzzle; a toy, trinket; a gewgaw, trumpery ornament. Applied to anything which the speaker views with contempt.

"a1658 CLEVELAND Engagement Stated 21 When neither Arts nor Arms can serve to fight, And wrest a Title from its Law and Right, Must Malice piece the Trangum? and make clear The Scruple? 1672 EACHARD Hobbs' State Nat. 21 A Cause is a certain pack or aggregate of trangams, which being all packed up and chorded close together, they may then truly be said in Law to constitute a compleat and essential pack. 1676 WYCHERLEY Pl. Dealer III. i, But go, thou Trangame, and carry back those Trangames, Which thou hast stol'n or purloin'd. 1678 A. BEHN Sir P. Fancy IV. iii, Get you gone, and finefy your knacks and tranghams. 1679 OLDHAM Sat. Jesuits iv. (1682) 85 These [pretended sacred relics] are the Fathers Implements, and Tools, Their gawdy Trangums for inveigling Fools. [1686 GOAD Celest. Bodies III. ii. 399 He, who looks upon Architecture and Fortification to be only Trangunims, is a Wise Man.] 1712 ARBUTHNOT John Bull III. vi, Hey day, what's here? What a Devil's the meaning of all these Trangams and Gimcracks, Gentlemen? 1719 J. ROBERTS Spinster 349 If they should rise from the dead now, and see you dressed up in your painted trangums, and East India rags, while all the poor Spinners hung about you crying for bread and for work. 1820 SCOTT Abbot xix, When yon usher..began to inquire what Popish trangam you were wearing... This comes of carrying Popish nick-nackets about you."

ADDENDUM II: My brother tells me we had a game or puzzzle when we were kids called Tangram. It involved making figures out of geometric shapes such as triangles and squares. I have no memory of this.

`Abstraction Has a Kind of Eternity to It'

One of the best things I’ve read lately about a poem – not poetry, not poets, not “poetics” – is this interview with Phillis Levin devoted to “The Transparent Man,” the title poem of Anthony Hecht’s 1990 collection. Levin is a poet and possesses a rare critical gift for pinpointing quickly and without self-indulgent folderol a work of art’s essential accomplishment:

“One of the curiosities of the poem is that the speaker, this young woman, is not interested in reading books any more. And I think that is one of the reasons the poem is so interesting: Anthony Hecht, a consummate master of poetry, a great reader, a great aesthete, a great lover of the arts—he knew a lot about music and painting, as well as literature—takes on the persona of a young woman who would rather look out the window at trees than read another book.”

This has always been among the great attractions of dramatic monologues, whether Browning’s, Frost’s or Hecht’s – the opportunity to shed self and project a voice into someone unlike the poet. It’s a fiction writer’s gift, I suppose. To appreciate Hecht’s achievement, imagine almost any other recent poet adopting the persona of a woman dying of cancer. Imagine the indecent sentimentality. Then consider Hecht’s stringent realism:

“Though they mean only good,
Families can become a sort of burden.
I've only got my father, and he won't come,
Poor man, because it would be too much for him.
And for me, too, so it's best the way it is.
He knows, you see, that I will predecease him,
Which is hard enough. It would take a callous man
To come and stand around and watch me failing.”

“Predecease,” an obituary writer’s euphemism, is a word no one would ever naturally utter, and is used perfectly. Levin is good on Hecht’s virtuosity with blank verse. It looks so simple but the failings on both sides – prosy dullness or excessive artificiality – are daunting to navigate. Either way, the subject – in this case, a young woman who knows she is soon to die – would be compromised and the poem would fail as a poem and a human document. In the following passage, Levin as critic does something rare: She rises, through an act of empathetically close reading, to a level of insight worthy of the poem:

“The underlying metrical pattern, which is the frame, is an abstraction. Think of Mondrian. As Mondrian develops, his work grows more and more abstract; he formulates a geometry. But if you look at a landscape, or if you look at a painting by Cezanne, you see a landscape, and you see its geometry. You can say here you have this abstraction, which is the blank verse, and then you have the living speech pattern. But the poem slowly unveils a young woman who is dying, who is going to be a skeleton, and underneath it all is the skeleton of the blank verse: you have the abstraction, you have the pattern. Abstraction has a kind of eternity to it, but it's also a kind of death because it's separated from the organic, living, pulsing moment. And you have the pulsing moment in her speech patterns and in the variation, the deviation from the pattern.”

Hecht died almost six years ago, on Oct. 20, 2004, of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and he would have approved of Levin’s reading and been grateful.

`Things That Lack Something Are Thereby Ugly'

When it comes to architecture I’m with the third of the Three Little Pigs: brick is best. A brick building feels substantial, less tentative than a wood-frame house or a box of glass and steel. It inspires confidence. The house I grew up in is built of brick as is Pearl Road Elementary School, where I labored as a young scholar from 1957 to 1964. The building dates from forty years earlier, before artists replaced architects and when there was no shame in a school looking like a factory or mill. We went to school, after all, as our fathers went to work.

The elementary school where I work is of the modern school, insubstantial and tacky, an architect’s idea of a “nurturing [not learning] environment.” Its model is not a factory but a shopping mall. Some sixty years ago the eminent Irish architectural critic Myles na gCopaleen (Further Cuttings, 2000) diagnosed the mind responsible for such flotsam:

“This type of lad has got a feminist psychology, hence his preoccupation with pretty coloured bricks, glass blocks, tinted slates, strange foreign timbers, `plastic’ materials that will submit to sweet fancy in shape, colour and surface. His manipulation of these materials is, of course, frilly, `poetic’ and undisciplined. His is the decorative obsession. Ask him to give you a building and he will go to work on his `façade,’ hoping that when that is approved it will be possible to squeeze in some sort of building behind it.”

The only redeeming quality of such buildings as my school is their Kleenex-like evanescence. Accelerated decay and squalor are built into the plans as surely as “Mother Earth” murals, surveillance cameras and urinals that turn reliably into geysers. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime:

“Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.”

It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences:

“Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”

Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (translated by T.C. O’Brien):

“Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”

`It Isn't Ever Delicate to Live'

Some mornings the spruces, pines and cedars look like cut-out silhouettes, shadows cast on a wall of fog. It’s a trompe-l'œil effect we note almost daily on the way to the bus stop. Wednesday morning, against a sky of pale-gray clouds and fog, we saw what suggested the skeleton of a jellyfish, though jellyfish are boneless. Ten feet above us in a big-leaf maple, an orb-weaver’s web billowed in the soft wind like a hole-filled sail, intact but uninhabited, its filaments a geometry lesson written on the sky. Not surprisingly, Kay Ryan knows her spiders in “Spiderweb” (The Best of It, 2010):

“From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.”

Life is bruising but delicacy sometimes possesses the tensile strength of spider silk. I gave the bee-fearing girl in Wednesday’s post a bag of sidewalk chalk. She pulled out a blue stick, wiped sand from a spot on the playground blacktop with her hand and with one stroke drew a circle about eight inches across. A face? She added two loops at the top. A rabbit? No, a flower, a kid’s rendering of “flowerness,” a daisy, I suppose, with symmetrical and symmetrically arranged petals. She added a stem of stacked chevrons – quite elegant – a line for the ground and pale yellow highlights. Quickly – recess was nearly over – more flowers sprung up, smaller ones around the first blue daisy. As the bell was ringing she drew an orange oval, striped it and added smaller, perpendicular ovals on the sides – I thought it was a butterfly --and a long thorn on the end. She stood, smiled, stomped on the drawing and said, “It’s a bee!”

`The Deepest Thing About One'

Some children disdain others their age and seek the company of adults. Every playground has one. Mine is a five-year-old Japanese-American girl, a kindergartener with a gritty voice, Hollywood’s notion of a precocious tomboy, a Tatum O’Neal. Her hobbyhorse is bees, a subject she’s researching in the library. A girl she knows was stung last summer and she’s still twitchy, scanning the air when we stand in the middle of the flowerless, sand-covered soccer field. She stands close and moves around me in a geosynchronous orbit.

I know from the staff she’s an only child and her parents are busy people. They probably don’t know what to do with so bright a girl, and so she has learned what to do with herself. She’s proud, self-reliant, sarcastic and lonely. I don't think she suffers from the one-size-fits-all diagnosis, depression. I’m grateful I enjoy her company because she certainly enjoys mine.

In an Oct. 2, 1900, letter to his friend Morton Fullerton, the future lover of another friend, Edith Wharton, Henry James makes an extraordinary admission:

“The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life—and it seems to be the port also, in sooth to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness, (since I mention it!)–what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else: deeper than my `genius,’ deeper than my `discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep countermining of art.”

Fullerton’s preceding letter to James is lost and we can only speculate that the novelist was consoling Fullerton, an enthusiastic roué (the irony is best overlooked). It’s useful to remember that James at the time was writing his masterpiece, The Ambassadors. The editor of James’ letters, Leon Edel, reminds us he was working on Lambert Strether’s speech in Part V to Little Bilham:

“Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular as long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.”

Loneliness is not the unhappiest state we’re susceptible to. Not living with enough spirit and attentiveness probably is. Most of us survive being lonely, only to know it again another day, and companionship is not the only or best antidote. I’m bringing a bag of sidewalk chalk to school so a five-year-old can draw and and live a little more, with others or alone.

`Those Vibrating Chords'

In his comment on Monday's post, Nige describes the following as “pretty much the quintessential Jamesian sentence”:

“I recall a little those vibrating chords.”

He’s right – a sentence of seven simple words starting in memory attended by modest qualification (“a little”), resonant italics and a metaphor drawn from music. So much is happening in so seemingly small a space, though James is the master of connotation and emotional glow, much like an exacting poet, crafting sentences that create spaces, inward and out, half-convincing the reader they’re his sentences, drawn from his memory and experience. James traces consciousness with words, dutifully registering its halts, reveries and deceptions. He begins Chapter IVX, “Florida,” in The American Scene (1906) with a passage recapitulating the very process of Jamesian composition:

“It is the penalty of the state of receiving too many impressions of too many things that when the question arises of giving some account of these a small sharp anguish attends the act of selection and the necessity of omission. They have so hung together, have so almost equally contributed, for the fond critic, to the total image, the chapter of experience, whatever such may have been, that to detach and reject is like mutilation or falsification; the history of any given impression residing often largely in others that have led to it or accompanied it.”

This sounds like his brother Williams’ notion of the “stream of consciousness,” with Henry rowing against the current. Of course, “quintessentially Jamesian” is a tricky matter, as James was not a three-string banjo player but an orchestra. His work after about 1897, including The American Scene, is composed in his famous “later” manner but he was perfectly capable of writing straightforward passages that hum with consciousness. Consider the sentence I judge the saddest in literature, the concluding paragraph of Washington Square (1880):

“Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were.”

Not a word beyond the ken of a bright eight-year-old. “Morsel” – from the French marceau, “a small bite” – with its customary food association, is perfect, an unhappy irony compounded by “fancy-work.” Catherine Sloper has resigned herself to a life of merest sustenance. The dying fall of “as it were” is heartbreaking.

Readers vary in their understanding of “Jamesian,” as they should. Like Shakespeare, James is a continent and a lifetime devoted to its exploration could easily overlook a canyon or arroyo. Thom Gunn used the word as the title of a rhyming eight-word couplet in The Man with Night Sweats (1992):

“Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.”

The real irony is that I almost omitted the sentence Nige admires. I had already cited the pertinent portion of the notebook entry, devoted to trees and the American city, but couldn’t resist the sound:

“I recall a little those vibrating chords.”

And they echoed in my mind with words from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861):

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

`The Sight of a Living, Green Tree'

When Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) pulls back from the unhappy story of his mother Lizzie in Because I Was Flesh (1964) to describe the city where he spent much of his childhood, he sings of its trees. Here is the first sentence:

“Kansas City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses; the maple, alder, elm and cherry trees with which the city abounds are songs of desire, and only the almonds of ancient Palestine can awaken the hungry pores more deeply.”

Dahlberg was a reflexively cranky writer and man, easily wounded, a grudge-carrier, savage and sex-maddened, but when he loves, whether books, landscapes or friends, he does so devotedly. Sixteen pages into the first chapter he writes:

“Lizzie rented a furnished bedchamber in a rock-ribbed house on McGee near Admiral Boulevard. McGee was a poor humble street, lined with elms, maples and oaks – what bread and meat there is in the sight of a living, green tree. There were many yards and vacant lots covered with tangled grass and rough, acrid sunflowers, and the latticed porches and sun-fed wooden steps were a comfort to people.”

I’ve read Because I Was Flesh, by far Dahlberg’s finest book, five or six times since I discovered it thirty-five years ago but never before noted the frequent association of trees with solace and plenty. The book’s grimness probably obscured it but even in Dahlberg – no nature lover, no tree-hugger – I hear an echo of what Richard Wilbur, in a poem about trees and their greenness, calls “a great largesse / Which has no end.”

In 1905, when Dahlberg was living in Kansas City and not yet five years old, Henry James was visiting the United States after a twenty-year absence. The published result was The American Scene (1906) but in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, 1987) I hear a similar theme sounded. In an entry written in Coronado Beach, Ca., dated March 29, 1905, and mingling memories of James Russell Lowell, the recent reunion with his brother William and much else, James, like Dahlberg, associates trees and cities with the good life:

“…the two facts of the immense rise in the type and scope and scale of the American house, as it more and more multiplies, and of the special amenity of the effect, for the `streets,’ of the large tree-culture. The over-arching clustered trees, the way dignity and style were helped by them, the embowered city—cities—of the future. I recall a little those vibrating chords.”

`A Scheme of Merriment'

With free tickets from school we went to the Puyallup Fair and effortlessly dropped a hundred bucks on parking, lunch and rides for the kids. Sherwood Anderson called the American country fair a “pagan outbreak” but if almost everyone’s a pagan where does that leave the rest of us? This was Snopes and Gudger country, superb for people-watching, with a notably high tattoo-to-human ratio.

While the boys rode bumper-cars the carny-in-charge played Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love.” My favorite t-shirt of the day showed a smiling Clark Gable-like visage pointing at the viewer, saying, “I drink to make YOU look good!” I talked to a man in the rabbit barn whose seventeen-year-old daughter has three rabbits entered in the judging. His grandparents owned an eighty-five-acre farm nearby and raised beef cattle and horses. He inherited the land, sold it off in parcels and lives on the remaining four. He works as a computer programmer. “It makes me sad to think about,” he said, leaning against a wall of rabbit cages.

My kids came home with bird whistles, the kind you fill with water and blow to annoy your parents. We saw a pumpkin that weighed four hundred thirty-two pounds and looked like it was molded from plastic. We saw a large woman seated on a bench and another embracing her. Both were crying loudly and without embarrassment. Samuel Johnson noted in The Idler #58:

"Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment."

`Out of Disorder They Evolve Order'

We lost count of spiders and webs. The first of the morning – web, that is – wrapped across my face as I carried out the trash. We limboed under another slung between my car and a shrub. Dewy and struck by shafts of low morning sun they glistened in trees twenty feet off the ground and among the power lines. In a fat azalea next to my second-grader’s bus stop we logged dozens, waiting motionless at the centers of their concentric webs.

Orb-weavers assembling new webs are as reliable a herald of autumn as wooly bears and honking geese. Even arachnophobes ought to be impressed by the elegance of the architecture. The great Fabre writes in “A Builder of Webs” (The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre, 1949):

“Now which of us would undertake, off-hand, without much preliminary experiment and without measuring instruments, to divide a circle into a given quantity of equal width? [Orb-weavers]…though tottering on threads shaken by the wind, effect the delicate division without stopping to think. They achieve it by a method which seems mad according to our notions of geometry. Out of disorder they evolve order.”

There is madness or at least a furious rationality in the fall. Spring is tame and incremental in comparison. Spiders must feed to spawn another generation of their kind. They will die soon. Already the mornings are cool and damp and the spiders appear torpid until the next meal arrives. They live furiously in preparation for death, and they’re not alone. Think of the final stanzas of Adam Kirsch’s “Arcadia (Autumn)” (The Thousand Wells, 2002):

“Nothing this morning more incredible
Than the one fact in which we must believe,
That everything human and celestial
Moves only in a limited reprieve

“From the common sentence; as the stars above
Totter in turn and fall, so here below
This pageantry of nature and of love
Lives in its dying. May its death be slow.”

`This Singular Honor'

“Almost everything I know is glad
to be born -- not only the desert orangetip,
on the twist flower or tansy, shaking
birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked
warbler nestling, head wavering toward sky,
and the honey possum, the pygmy possum,
blind, hairless thimbles of forward,
press and part.”

On the playground the girls are the naturalists.

“Almost everything I've seen pushes
toward the place of that state as if there were
no knowing any other -- the violent crack
and seed-propelling shot of the witch hazel pod,
the philosophy implicit in the inside out
seed-thrust of the wood sorrel. All hairy
saltcedar seeds are single-minded
in their grasping of wind and spinning
for luck toward birth by water.”

One of the girls hunts “roly polies,” what I grew up calling sow bugs, pill bugs and potato bugs, so many names for so singular and ancient a creature –Armadillidiidae. Fossils suggest they date from the Silurian period, early land-colonizers, and their resemblance to armored dinosaurs may account for their popularity among kids. That and their proclivity for the undersides of rocks and rotting logs.

“And I'm fairly shocked to consider
all the bludgeonings and batterings going on
continually, the head-rammings, wing-furors,
and beak-crackings fighting for release
inside gelatinous shells, leather shells,
calcium shells or rough, horny shells. Legs
and shoulders, knees and elbows flail likewise
against their womb walls everywhere, in pine
forest niches, seepage banks, and boggy
prairies, among savannah grasses, on woven
mats and perfumed linen sheets.”

Another girl has monitored the rust-colored sawdust on the rotting rails of a wooden fence since I told her it was the byproduct of carpenter ants eating dinner. She keeps a daily ant census and vows never to kill one.

“Mad zealots, every one, even before
beginning they are dark dust-congealings
of pure frenzy to come into light.”

Two girls tend a patch of wood fungus on the same fence, keeping it moist on dry days and peeling off the dry edges they judge ugly. All of these girls are five years old and quite devoted to their tasks. Others jump rope, climb the monkey bars or wander aimlessly, bumping into things. They go about their biophiliac business. The Armadillidiidae fancier broadened her interests on Thursday to include Opiliones – daddy longlegs, the non-spider arachnids, properly called harvestmen.

“Almost everything I know rages to be born,
the obsession founding itself explicitly
in the coming bone harps and ladders,
the heart-thrusts, vessels and voices
of all those speeding with clear and total
fury toward this singular honor.”

The author of the poem quoted in full above is Pattiann Rogers (Eating Bread and Honey, 1997). I liked its intelligent deployment of biological information, absence of nature mysticism, the lines “the philosophy implicit in the inside out / seed-thrust of the wood sorrel,” and its celebration of what we might call the universal birth-urge. Nature is fecund. I also like any reference to tansy, which always recalls John Clare:

“And where the marjoram once, and sage, and rue,
And balm, and mint, with curl'd-leaf parsley grew,
And double marigolds, and silver thyme,
And pumpkins 'neath the window climb;
And where I often, when a child, for hours
Tried through the pales to get the tempting flowers,
As lady's laces, everlasting peas,
True-love-lies-bleeding, with the hearts-at-ease,
And golden rods, and tansy running high,
That o'er the pale-tops smiled on passers-by.”

The girls on the playground, Rogers and Clare share this deep attraction to life, “this singular honor.”

`Often Within the Most Limited Power'

The proprietor of Don Colacho’s Aphorisms also contributes to a collaborative blog, The Guild Review. On Tuesday, Stephen described a “gigantic used book sale” that rendered only two books worth purchasing – an experience I’ve had many times, one comparable to patronizing a Chinese buffet and finding only Jell-O in the steam tables. After aptly citing Samuel Johnson and Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Stephen concludes:

“In every age, there is an abundance of information, but so little wisdom.”

That, in short, is the human condition. Its corollary is the scarcity of quality in every human endeavor. Good writers and books are rare. So are good readers. On the day Stephen posted, a friend in Houston sent an account of her latest tragi-comic effort to scavenge books for a Jesuit-run high school aimed at kids from poor families. (I wrote about her book-run to Dallas here.) This time it was a large public high school in Houston “going digital,” and thus throwing away all of its books. She writes:

“I drove straight there, not stopping at home, and found a scene that I can't get out of my mind. It was noon, and there were about ten or twelve students in the about-to-be-abandoned library, grabbing books to sell at the local Half-Price Bookstore. They were gone as soon as lunch was over and I was alone with the books. It felt very odd, like getting a notice that Rome would be sacked three hours hence, so save what you can.

“I tore through the place, making snap judgments, dirty and sweaty, still in the heels and dress I'd worn on the plane, but frantic to get done before the students got out of class. Going through the shelves several things became clear. There had once been a librarian (or series of librarians) here, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, who built a collection based on a powerful understanding of the difference between good books and bad books. Let me just give you a random sample of a few I picked up for the Christo Rey library: The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams; The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays by Auden; Walter Jackson Bates' biography of Coleridge; an abridged edition of Ruskin's Stones of Venice; the Complete Notebooks of Henry James; the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse edited by Larkin; and etc. Once this person (or people) were gone, the quality of the collection plunged. (Let me also say that there is nothing more useless than out-of-date books on the social sciences--and they go out of date fast. I wouldn't recommend buying any.) [Fat chance.]

“Over the course of the next several hours I took several hundred books, mostly history, literature, biography, and natural sciences. I was still there when classes ended and the swarm returned. First came the ones who wanted to grab books to sell. They were not conspicuously good at this--they snatched up whatever they could carry from the shelves closest to the front. Ironically, these were almost all crappy, outdated social-science books. They were all out the door within ten minutes. Then a group of girls, quite obviously from wealthier families, showed up. They were looking for the thickest books they could find--old chemistry handbooks. They told me that they would cut holes in them so as to hide their dope from their parents. I probably shouldn't have been shocked, but I was. I wish I had the words to describe what this scene felt like. It was public-school squalor plus blatant disrespect flowing in all directions plus greed plus the most profound and depressing ignorance. It felt barbaric, almost apocalyptic, and somehow pregnant with meaning. It felt like being inside a parable--`The Kingdom of Heaven is like a woman picking her way through an abandoned library’--but without understanding at all what the parable is about. I've thought about it for a couple of weeks now and I still don't know.

“I do know a couple of things, though. First, the only people who helped me in any way were the janitors, who held doors for me and intervened with the cops so I could load the heavy boxes into my car. Second, there were a few kids who came after school who were desperate to get books. Several girls told me they wanted to become vets and were looking for books about animals. We found some good ones. Third, the wonderful books I managed to get have arrived safely in the library of a school that serves some of the poorest kids in Houston and expects them to be able to learn to really read. Fourth, it seems that the ground we occupy is smaller than I thought it was. That's about it.”

It’s humbling to read about what my friend, in her unpublicized way, is doing. Needless to say, she’s not making a dime off her sweaty, dirty work. If she didn’t do it, likely no one else would. It makes whining about some lousy book feel unseemly. And it makes quoting her well-written prose (how often do you get an e-mail that reads so well?) a pleasure. In his post, Stephen cites an apt passage from The Rambler #106. With my friend in mind I would add words from Johnson’s next Rambler essay, #107:

“To wipe all tears from off all faces is a task too hard for mortals; but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power: yet the opportunities which every day affords of relieving the most wretched of human beings are overlooked and neglected with equal disregard of policy and goodness.”

`The Iridescence of His Last Perception'

First I saw it in the shower, among the bubbles, then, with the properly angled shaft of sunlight, on the wings of a gray-brown moth mimicking a pinned specimen on the kitchen window. At school, directing traffic in the drop-off lane, I saw it on the head of crow working the parking lot for morsels, then on the surface of my cold coffee. “Iridescence” is a lovely word for a gratuitously lovely phenomenon and even its etymology is lovely: from iris (like the flower and the circle in the eye, which can also be iridescent), Greek for “rainbow.” I was alert for its occurrence after reading the title poem in Amy Clampitt’s What the Light Was Like (1985).

The poem’s speaker is a summer visitor to Maine. It’s June and a lobsterman she knew from earlier visits is dead. The previous October, he set off in his boat as usual and never returned. He was found adrift, dead from a stroke. The poem, twenty-three six-line verses, is typically opulent and filled with detailed observations of the natural world. Clampitt uses “iridescent” twice and “iridescence” once, each time in a different context. First, in the second stanza, which starts with a description of lilac scent: “gusting a turbulence of perfume, and every year the same / iridescent hummingbird.” When I think of iridescence, I think first of the alarming number of hummingbirds, with their jewel-like sheen, who visited our garden in Houston.

Second, in the ninth stanza, a beautiful description of dawn breaking over the Atlantic: “straight into the sunrise, a surge of burning turning the / whole ocean iridescent.”

Third, in the twenty-first stanza and most memorably, the speaker imagines the death of the lobsterman, alone on the water: “I find it / tempting to imagine what, / when the blood roared, overflowing its cerebral sluiceway, / and the iridescence / of his last perception, charring, gave way to unreversed, / irrevocable dark.” What a phrase: “the iridescence / of his last perception,” followed immediately by darkness. Clampitt’s poems, like Anthony Hecht’s and Helen Pinkerton’s, often oppose light and dark. For Clampitt, as for a great painter, life is light, and vice versa. The poem’s final word is “hummingbird.”

[On the cover of the Knopf first edition of What the Light Was Like is one of my favorite paintings by one of my favorite painters – Calm Morning (1961) by Fairfield Porter.]

`Let Us Seek Them There in the Shadows'

I was told to report to the school music room where a student was “behaving dangerously.” I pictured impalement on a double-bass but it proved merely a second-grade boy seated on a turned-over piano stool. He was silent, wouldn’t respond to my requests that he stand up, and then cartwheeled across the room. The music teacher hustled out the other kids while mine shimmied up a carpet-covered pole almost to the ceiling. His grace was eland-like and he remained silent. An aide showed up and we carried the boy firefighter-fashion to the school psychologist.

A middle-aged man and an elderly woman huddled at the table in the waiting room of the office, furiously studying a thick sheaf of papers. Across the room, alone, sat a woman reading a booklet titled “Defusing Power Struggles.” I was told a court order had been issued against the father, mandating him to stay away from his kindergarten son. The old woman was his mother and the woman across the room his estranged wife. I know their son and he seems a remarkably affable child given the storm raging over his head. Then I was called to the playground to retrieve a kid who wouldn’t reenter the building, and as I was leaving a police officer arrived.

The recalcitrant boy on the playground turned out to be the kid from the music room. For the first time I heard him speak. He said his classroom was too hot and he could only breathe outside. On my radio I called the psychologist and sat on a bench as the boy kicked a red ball across the blacktop. When the psychologist arrived the boy moved across the playground, up a flight of concrete steps, over the railing and into a dense copse of pines. We followed but kept our distance and he scooted fifteen feet up a pine with the effortlessness of a spider monkey. I radioed the principal who said she would call the fire department and the kid’s parents. Mom beat the fire truck and talked him down.

The most troubling event of my early schooldays was the sight of so many kids my age with polio, wearing cumbersome braces of leather and cast steel. I remember the sound of a boy in my first-grade class, his feet scraping across the plank floor. Two years later, his twin sister leaned over in class and kissed me on the shoulder, an event we never acknowledged. Four years after that, when the three of us were in seventh grade, her brother, the kid with polio, died, and no one acknowledged that either. In his first book, The Summer Anniversaries (1960), Donald Justice included “On the Death of Friends in Childhood”:

“We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.”

At `The Dabbler'

My first contribution to The Dabbler appears today. Many thanks to Brit, Gaw, Nige and Co.

`Fatten, Hide Slugs, Infestate'

How odd and pleasing to read a poem for the first time and the following day to discover it illustrated in a quite literal fashion in one’s non-reading life. These things usually work the other way around for me. Here’s what I mean: I’ve seen references to the English poet Jon Silkin (1930-1997) but like sweet corn, he and many of his compatriots don’t seem to travel well. There are exceptions, hearty hybrids such as Hill and Hughes, but like most American readers I’m ignorant of much recent verse in England. Once again we’re separated by a common language. In an otherwise undistinguished anthology I found Silkin’s “Dandelion,” and have since discovered Gaw at Ragbag has already posted the poem, though we take opposing views of the flower in question:

“Slugs nestle where the stem
Broken, bleeds milk.
The flower is eyeless: the sight is compelled
By small, coarse, sharp petals,
Like metal shreds. Formed,
They puncture, irregularly perforate
Their yellow, brutal glare.
And certainly want to
Devour the earth. With an ample movement
They are a foot high, as you look.
And coming back, they take hold
On pert domestic strains.
Others' lives are theirs. Between then
And domesticity,
Grass. They infest its weak land;
Fatten, hide slugs, infestate.
They look like plates; more closely
Life the first tryings, the machines, of nature
Riveted into her, successful.”

I encountered the poem Thursday evening and rather liked it. Friday morning, I walked my seven-year-old to the bus stop, one block from our house on a corner dominated by a hulking white pine. In the crack between the curb and the road surface sprawled several fat dandelions and on one of them luxuriated a fat slug about five inches long, mottled in shades of brown. One can hardly call such a creature drab. When I lifted him by his midriff (I think), he retracted to one-third his elongated size but soon relaxed and out came the pale, swaying antennae, the mucus trail and the slow implacable journey up my fingers. Disgust and fascination vied in the faces of the kids waiting for the bus, but it was nothing new for my youngest son. “He does that kind of thing all the time,” he assured them.

What a rare audio-video convergence of poem and wildlife, but I’m fond of finding beauty among such scorned things as weeds and vermin. The dandelion is my favorite flower, in part because it is, as Silkin says, “successful,” adept at adaptation. Chesterton shared my sentiment and often cited the dandelion as a worthless aspect of creation in which he found much worth. In his Autobiography he writes:

“…what I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed.”

Plaintively he has Syme ask in Chapter XV of The Man Who Was Thursday:

“`Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe?’”

`A Trunkful of Books'

Of a comedian and actor who never attended high school and started performing professionally as a juggler at age fifteen, his biographer writes:

“[He] always traveled with a trunkful of books, an eclectic mix of popular and classical fare that belied his public image as an uneducated man. `In the three decades of our friendship, we have never stopped swapping books,’ `Bucky’ Taylor wrote in 1942. `Before O. Henry had been published in England, I received the works of that supreme story-teller from Fields. He introduced me also to Rex Beach, George Ade, Irvin S. Cobb, Stewart Edward White, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, and many others.’”

The comedian, of course, is W.C. Fields (1880-1946), probably the funniest human being who ever lived. Rivals for the title? Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, P.G. Wodehouse, Buster Keaton, Flann O’Brien, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Samuel Beckett, Zero Mostel, Jonathan Winters. The passage above is drawn from W.C. Fields: A Biography (2003) by James Curtis, who goes on to write:

“Fields’ own traveling library, which he reconstructed from memory in 1934, included a Webster’s dictionary, several books on grammatical construction, translations of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil, and copies of Dickens, Thackeray, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton, Thomas Paine, Washington Irving, and, of course, Mark Twain.”

In other words, some of the contents of any educated person’s basic library. Fields was no savant and his formal education was almost non-existent but he was blessed with, in addition to comedic genius, an average man’s curiosity and drive for pleasure and self-improvement. Curtis writes:

“He also carried his own hand-lettered dictionary, a loose-leaf notebook in which he recorded words he found particularly interesting [Hart Crane did the same thing], sounding them out in capital letters (PAN-E-GYRIZE, PA-NEG-Y-RIS, PER-TI-NA-CIOUS) and adding terse definitions to guide their usage.”

Curtis adds: “Fields used books to assuage loneliness on the road, retreating into one between shows and rarely acknowledging the surrounding commotion.”

I resent the psychologizing and Curtis’ tacit assumption that to become absorbed in a book is to “retreat,” when sometimes reading is the deepest form of engagement with the world. Of Fields’ most famous movie role, as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield (1935), Curtis writes:

“Fields wasn’t English, but he was undeniably Dickensian. David Copperfield was a favorite book, and enough of Micawber had invaded him over time so that it became a perfect marriage of actor and role. `I’ve been playing Micawber all my life, under a lot of different names, and never knew it,’ he said.”

`To Read is to Dream'

“To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.”

I’m not sure about the “profound” part but Fernando Pessoa and his profusion of heteronyms otherwise make sense in this passage from The Book of Disquiet (translated by Richard Zenith), the Portuguese poet’s major prose work. It’s a seductive book, one I can’t stop reading whenever I pick it up, an experience that certainly feels like being “guided by someone else’s hand.”

The way people read, their methods and expectations, often are intriguing. Seduction, the feeling of being swept away, comes unexpectedly, as with Pessoa and, of late, Cowper and Yvor Winters. I remember feeling that way with The Golovlyov Family, the stories of Giovanni Verga and William Dean Howells’ Indian Summer. I expected little of these books, and none is a masterwork, but I surrendered happily to their charms. To a reader in Canada I recently suggested he try The Golden Bowl, one of my favorite novels. He always intends to read it, he confesses, but it keeps slipping away. He writes:

“Good intentions aside, I never manage to be systematic in my reading. So while I finished three [William] Maxwell novels in Volume 1 of the [Library of America] edition, I didn't immediately go on to Volume 2. Instead I read two by John Berger. When those were done, instead of reading the two others of his I owned, I reread Richard III. The sense of freedom this 'method' provides has the unfortunate effect of my not getting as quickly to some books as I would like. I tell myself this is necessary when reading great novels - like with any rich and satisfying experience…”

Is this rationalizing waywardness or a reading “method” in disguise? The latter, I hope, because my reader describes my customary practice. If there exist connections among the books I read and the order in which I choose to read them, it’s news to me. Except for the few times I’ve read a writer’s work systematically – Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, Henry James – I’ve always followed an intuitive path. Mentioning Dickens reminds me of another Pessoa observation in The Book of Disquiet:

“One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)”

`I Can Lie a Dreaming with a Boke'

In a corner of the resource room I was administering math placement tests to fourth-graders when I noticed a poster on the wall, a watercolor of a boy lying on his stomach reading a book beneath autumn trees. The sentence below the picture is attributed to Francis Bacon:

“It is a great thing to start Life with a small number of Really Good books which are your Very Own.”

Online, the quote seems popular among library and reading advocacy groups but I’m unable to identify the source, though earlier this year I read Bacon’s Essays and found this in “On Studies”:

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

I don’t know how Bacon defines “Really Good books” (like Shakespeare’s plays, the phrase doesn’t sound Baconian). Might he mean beloved children’s books, regardless of literary worth? Or the Bible? Homer? Seneca? Growing up in a bookless house, I hoarded them – almanacs, dictionaries, field guides, biographies, James Thurber – and was soothed knowing they were my “Very Own.”

At school we chronically underestimate the reading gifts and tastes of students. The instructional texts are tricked out with graphics and sidebars but expect for the obligatory patina of multiculturalism the stories are mired in the same old Dick-and-Jane dullness I knew half a century ago. I’m heartened to see hopelessly devoted readers around school, kids wrapped in bookish cocoons, reading on the playground while two-hundred classmates scream. When I see them I see myself. Edward Dahlberg writes in “Allen Tate, The Forlorn Demon” (Alms for Oblivion, 1964):

“As for me, I can find little or no contentment save in the balsam of poetry or criticism or belles lettres; let it be Raleigh or Swift or Hazlitt or The Forlorn Demon, for I can lie a dreaming with a boke, and imagine myself stretched upon that oxhide in Iberia where Menelaus once slept.”

`O Sweet Retirement'

Read this excerpt from a long poem and approximate its date of composition:

“Suburban villas, highway-side retreats,
That dread th' encroachments of our growing streets,
Tight boxes neatly sash'd, and in a blaze
With all a July sun's collected rays,
Delight the citizen, who gasping there,
Breathes clouds of dust, and calls it country air.
O sweet retirement, who would balk the thought
That could afford retirement, or could not?”

When most contemporary poets deign to write of suburbia it’s to denigrate the place where millions of people dwell in comfort and some degree of contentment. “Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!” froths Ginsberg, and the credulous mob chants: “Moloch!” It’s useful to remember that “suburb” entered English around the time of Chaucer’s birth and “suburban” close to Shakespeare’s death.

Snobbery had already tinged the word by Keats’ lifetime but the lines above were published a generation earlier by another English poet, William Cowper, in 1785. The source is his masterwork, The Task, and his admiration, even envy, for suburban life is striking. Cowper endured one of literature’s notably miserable lives – poverty, manic depression, suicide attempts, confinement in mad houses. “Suburban villas” were Cowper’s Xanadu. He takes a satirical jab at the citizen who sucks in dust only to call it “country air,” but the target is pretentiousness and the human capacity for delusion, not the suburbs.

Cowper has entered my small clutch of poets whose work I reread in steady rotation. I make no claims for his greatness, merely his congeniality. He is funny (especially in his letters) and observant of social custom and nature. He was a technically proficient poet on the cusp of Romanticism. I was reading The Task in school on Wednesday, in my worn green-covered Everyman’s edition. Visible through the window in my school room is a line of treetops, mostly conifers, above the roofs of a subdivision. The resulting green-black horizon looks like the teeth of a broken comb, and I read this in The Task:

“Nor less attractive is the woodland scene,
Diversified with trees of every growth
Alike yet various. Here the gray smooth trunks
Of ash, or lime, or beech, distinctly shine,
Within the twilight of their distant shades;
There lost behind a rising ground, the wood
Seems sunk, and shortened to its topmost boughs.
No tree in all the grove but has its charms,
Though each its hue peculiar; paler some,
And of a wanish gray; the willow such
And poplar, that with silver lines his leaf,
And ash far-stretching his umbrageous arm;
Of deeper green the elm; and deeper still,
Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak.
Some glossy-leaved and shining in the sun,
The maple, and the beech of oily nuts
Prolific, and the line at dewy eve
Diffusing odours: nor unnoted pass
The sycamore, capricious in attire,
Now green, now tawny, and ere autumn yet
Have changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright.”

Outside the classroom window, except for the trees, it was strictly suburban.

`While He Stirs His Fire'

My days are filled with music and I’m the soundtrack, a chronic singer/whistler/hummer, like Glenn Gould minus the piano and usually silent when conditions call for it. I don’t mean classics though I find myself humming Satie’s third “Gymnopédies” with growing frequency. Show tunes, Dylan and The Band, the Billboard Top Forty for 1968, “Dixie” and “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” Christmas carols, fifty-year-old television theme songs and commercials (Moola Coola?), Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus,” all spliced together by whimsy and free-association.

Tuesday’s Song of the Day was “Greenland Whale Fisheries,” a sea shanty I know from Peter, Paul and Mary, The Pogues and Van Dyke Parks. Often the reason a song enters my head is a mystery but this time I knew the origin. On Monday my brother- and sister-in-law hosted a barbecue and introduced us to their new au pair. She’s Greenlandic, the first of her nation I’ve ever known. We spent an hour looking at photographs of Greenland on her computer. It’s a beguiling, elemental landscape of ice, sky, sea and rocks, and now I want to visit. It’s the world’s largest island and the least densely populated country, the national dish is seal and its fourth-largest city is named Qaqortoq.

My other literary association with Greenland is Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, #186, “Anningait and Ajut; a Greenland history,” and #187, “The History of Anningait and Ajut concluded.” Johnson’s curious little tale is one of his familiar calls to gratitude but hardly flattering to Greenland:

“A native of England, pinched with the frosts of December, may lessen his affection for his own country by suffering his imagination to wander in the vales of Asia, and sport among the woods that are always green, and streams that always murmur; but if he turns his thought towards the polar regions, and considers the nations to whom a great portion of the year is darkness, and who are condemned to pass weeks and months amidst mountains of snow, he will soon recover his tranquillity, and, while he stirs his fire, or throws his cloak about him, reflect how much he owes to Providence, that he is not placed in Greenland or Siberia.”

`First Out of Pride, Then Out of Humility'

More wisdom from the desk of Nicolás Gómez Dávila at Don Colacho’s Aphorisms:

“Literature does not die because nobody writes, but when everybody writes.”

Why do people write when they have nothing worthwhile to say and are unable to say it? The same reason we sing in the shower, when at least we have the courtesy to keep the door closed.

“The writer cannot pride himself on the successes he attains, but on the mistakes he avoids.”

Writing is mostly culling. Most of it ought to be erased before we presume to inflict it on others. That way, in Beckett’s words, we “fail better.”

“To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discrete life among intelligent books, loving a few beings.”

Who can imagine a higher calling?

“Without dignity, without sobriety, without refined manners, there is no prose that fully satisfies. We demand of the book we read not just talent, but also good breeding.”

Clarity is courtesy. Muddle is ill-mannered.

“When the desire for other places, other centuries, awakens in us, it is not really in this or that time, in this or that country, where we desire to live, but in the very phrases of the writer who knew how to speak to us of that country or that time.”

Montaigne, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Christina Stead. How often, across a life, do we encounter an essential story, essay or poem, not to mention an essential book – that is, one’s whose absence would diminish us?

Finally, read these non-consecutive aphorisms by Don Colacho:

“Journalism is writing exclusively for others.”

“A genuine vocation leads the writer to write only for himself: first out of pride, then out of humility.”

And keep them in mind as you read this passage by Yvor Winters from his introduction to The Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), edited by Winters and Kenneth Fields:

“Our best writers live fully in the knowledge that language is at once personal and public; they know that only by precisely controlling the public medium of language can they realize private experience. For each of us language is the essential intermediary between the isolated self and the world of others; rather than trammeling the mind and affections, it sets them free, giving them proper objects.”

[All of the passages cited above are taken from the section of Don Colacho's Aphorisms titled “The Art of Writing.”]

`The Home Place'

More than the houses and apartments I’ve occupied, libraries are my true home, and that’s not just a figure of speech. I’ve lived in five states and in dozens of cities and small towns within them, and I’ve always colonized the libraries. I remember how books were arranged, the systematic vagaries of Dewey and Library of Congress ordering, in libraries that no longer exist. I remember the bottom shelf on which in the late nineteen-sixties I found Herbert Gold’s The Man Who Was Not with It (1956) in a red library binding and started reading it there on the floor on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Cleveland.

I’ve been looking again at one of Wright Morris’ pioneering “photo-texts,” as he called them – God’s Country and My People (1968). Morris is best known for his novels but was a superb photographer. The picture that grabbed me over the weekend is a close-up of two shelves, twenty-five books, in what appears to be a public library. It’s the “L” section in fiction, with titles by Sinclair Lewis on the top shelf – Dodsworth, Elmer Gantry, Main Street, Babbitt, Ann Vickers. All are worn from use, the bindings loose and lumpy. Many have had the title and author’s name written on the spine by a librarian.

On the lower shelf is a later novel by Lewis, Kingsblood Royal, from 1947, which helps date the photo. The dust jacket is missing but it appears in nearly mint condition: “Random House” is plainly visible. The one book lying horizontally on top of others was unknown to me -- Old Home Town (1935) by Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like Lewis’ novels and Morris’, its setting is the American Midwest. Also shelved are Josephine Lawrence’s If I Have Four Apples (1935), The Sound of Running Feet (1937) and Let Us Consider One Another (1945), and Jennette Lee’s The Mysterious Office (1922), among others.

In short, Morris has photographed a typical selection of popular fiction in an American public library, probably in a Midwestern town, circa 1948. It may also represent veiled autobiography. Morris was born in Central City, Neb. His earlier photo-text volumes – The Inhabitants (1946) and The Home Place (1948) – are largely devoted to Midwestern scenes, as is some of his best fiction – The Field of Vision (1956) and Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960). Perhaps he’s taking his place among Midwestern peers but with a hint of pride, as his work surpasses the authors of the well-thumbed volumes in the photo, despite his critical and readerly eclipse since his death in 1998.

When I saw Morris’ photo I felt welcome, even if the titles pictured don’t reflect my tastes. The plank shelves are as worn as the books. A public library is a well-used public space, recognizably democratic and American, part of our informal education, so of course I was welcome. To borrow one of Morris’ titles, it's The Home Place.

`Kindred Poets: Kay Ryan and Marianne Moore'

My essay “Kindred Poets: Kay Ryan and Marianne Moore” appears in Issue 21 of The Quarterly Conversation.

`A Plentitude Adjusted to the Eye'

“I believe about the universal cosmos, or for that matter about every weed and pebble in the cosmos, that men will never rightly realize that it is beautiful, until they realize that it is strange….Poetry is the separation of the soul from some object, whereby we can regard it with wonder.”

Hugh Kenner in his first book, Paradox in Chesterton (1947), quotes this passage from a Chesterton title I have never read, Christendom in Dublin (1932). The sentence before the ellipsis restates familiar Chestertonian themes – the strangeness of the world, anything existing rather than nothing, that all is beautiful when perceived with sufficient wonder. It’s the second sentence that caused me to trip, fall, turn around and look again. I’m denied the full context but I understand Chesterton to be referring primarily to the poet’s soul, not the reader’s. The poet requires distance from his subject, not immersion, if he is to imbue it with sufficient wonder for us, the readers, to share the experience. Here is Kenner’s next sentence:

“With the sense of strangeness came the sense of gratitude; not only because, amid so many potentialities, the object at hand might not have been, but also because in its limited being it participated in all Being: in God. He was thankful for a lamp-post because it was not a limpet, but he would have been equally thankful for a limpet.”

This sounds like a recipe for mental health and what Kenner elsewhere calls "philosophical realism," and reminds me of recurrent themes in Helen Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith: Poems (2002), a volume I lived with for several weeks in August. By “lived with” I mean read and reread daily, and wrote about on occasion. “The Return” dramatizes a soul's argument with itself. Pinkerton writes of the poem’s premise:

“The narrator returns to Montana [Pinkerton’s birthplace]. While there she finds herself able to dramatize her long internal conflict in terms of two voices in a dialogue. It is truly an `inner dialogue of self with self.’ `He’ is a dramatization of the Christian Catholic Thomistic interpretation of reality. `She’ dramatizes the Romantic, self-oriented, atheistic rejection of that interpretation. Each has been an `old voice’ in the narrator’s consciousness and now she wants, by fleshing out the two sides, to reach some kind of conclusion about which voice to listen to and agree with.”

It’s as though Pinkerton were taking literally Chesterton’s assertion that “Poetry is the separation of the soul from some object” – in this case, from itself. Near the poem’s conclusion, “He” echoes Chesterton, Aquinas and Pinkerton’s own frequent use of light as metaphor:

“Being as given to every living thing
Is like the light of middle morning sun,
A plenitude adjusted to the eye,
Not darkness nor the radiance of noon,
Too strong for sight. Being is always here;
Nothingness is not, though your mind and will
Conspire to conjure fictions of the void.”

In his footnote to the passage from Christendom in Dublin, Kenner adds a sentence from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: “Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.”

[After I wrote about Taken in Faith last month Elberry ordered a copy and said in a note: “Helen Pinkerton’s poems arrived - a real find, this, I had no idea a poet of this stature was out there, previously unknown to me. What people call the `voice’ hits you right away - at times it reminds me of the mature Eliot but really it´s fully itself.”]

`Fair Material Properly Trained'

“It is a fact of nature that there are more born poets than born teachers. But the world’s work cannot depend on genius; it must make do with talent, that is to say, fair material properly trained.”

Painted on the concrete of the playground at my grade school are outlines of the United States, the continents and an oversized computer keyboard complete with space bar, “ALT” and “ESC.” I watched a group of fifth-graders, boys and girls, playing a variation of hopscotch among the keys and laughing uproariously. From a distance I could discern no pattern to their jumping and as I approached they giggled guiltily. None would explain the game until a boy said, “Watch this,” and leaped gracefully from “F” – now I had it figured out – to “U” to “C” to “K,” and bowed. I admired the quietly subversive sense of comedy -- swearing, in effect, like mimes – and couldn’t bring myself to admonish them. “Don’t do it when the little kids are around,” I warned rather weakly.

"In bearing, in manner of thinking and talking, a teacher should quite naturally appear to be a person with a mental life, a person who reads books and whose conversation with colleagues is not purely business shop; that is, not invariably methods and troubles, but substance as well."

Later, I told a teacher about my playground encounter and she asked, “Did they spell it right?”

[The passages quoted above are from Jacques Barzun’s 1991 essay “The Art of Making Teachers” (A Jacques Barzun Reader, 2002).]

`To the Right Place'

“…the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”

No one thinks of Henry James as a nature writer. Most of his world was urban and indoors, with little room for birds and trees. Even in the passage above, from “New England: An Autumn Impression,” the first chapter in The American Scene, the metaphor is recognizably Jamesian – social and familial. If it weren’t so witty and right, we might suspect parody. It's never prudent to underestimate James' sense of the comic.

His interest in the outdoors is not scientific but painterly. One senses in his scattered accounts of the natural world an opportunity to transpose Turner to the New World, to out-Ruskin Ruskin on his native landscape. James characterizes himself throughout The American Scene as “the restless analyst,” and he imbues even his prettiest purple set-pieces with a twist, a hint of piquancy, elegy or satire. Later in the same paragraph he writes:

“The apple-tree, in New England, plays the part of the olive in Italy, charges itself with the effect of detail, for the most part otherwise too scantly produced, and, engaged in this charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and delicate.”

In an act of covert patriotism, the native returns, Johnny Olive-Seed, to recolonize the former colony while celebrating the home-grown produce. For almost twenty years I lived in and around Albany, N.Y., where James’ grandfather, an Irish immigrant, made his fortune, and where James and his siblings spent their childhood summers. Geologically and ecologically – in all senses but the governmental – this portion of upstate New York is New England, renowned for its bounty of excellent apples. James continues:

“What [the apple] must do for the too under-dressed land in May and June is easily supposable; but its office in the early autumn is to scatter coral and gold. The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard; they have `run down’ from neglect and shrunken from cheapness--you pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-coloured pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you note their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gaiety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.”

James subverts the pastoral while indulging in it. He’s a painter of the American landscape with a “strange-coloured” palate. The forested granite of New England becomes an “analogy, in short, with every typical triumph of the American landscape `school,’ now as rococo as so many squares of ingenious wool-work, but the remembered delight of our childhood. On terra firma, in New England, too often dusty or scrubby, the guarantee is small that some object at variance, cruelly at variance, with the glamour of the landscape school may not `put out.’ But that boat across the water is safe, is sustaining as far as it goes; it puts out from the cove of romance, from the inlet of poetry, and glides straight over, with muffled oar, to the--well, to the right place.”

Troubled by the changes exacted on the United States during his twenty-year absence, James paints his homeland with fondness, nostalgia and, occasionally, incomprehension.

`To Be Moved to a Report of the Matter'

On a bright cold winter morning some fifteen years ago I was rereading The American Scene, Henry James’ account of his return to the United States in 1904-05 after twenty years of living in Europe, specifically Chapter Nine, “Philadelphia.” Throughout the volume James has referred to himself in the third-person by some variation of “the restless analyst”:

“To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically, minded--over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-colored picture of things--is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to
give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.”

I marked the passage in my copy (Indiana University Press, 1968, with introduction and notes by Leon Edel), and distinctly remember lying on my couch – I was single and lived two minutes from my newspaper office – and feeling stirred by James’ words, the notion of “a mystic meaning” given off by certain dwellings, even arrangements of furniture, books on shelves. James had named an undefined sense I had known since childhood, a recognition of rooms suffused with human auras. I don’t mean hauntings, a phenomenon James toyed with memorably in “The Jolly Corner.” I mean traces of lives imbued in “objects and places.”

Later that morning a photographer and I drove to a rural crossroads in Saratoga County, N.Y. – a clapboard church and its outbuildings, the parish cemetery, a general store and a few houses. I specialized in writing about such forgotten places and got lucky with this one. The church caretaker, an old man with the build and intensity of a jockey, was digging a grave in the partially frozen soil with a borrowed backhoe. He knew the deceased and his ancestors. Talking to him was like reading the family Bible, complete with handwritten genealogy, for an entire hamlet. Of course, I thought of Hamlet and Yorick. Afterwards, the old man let us look around the church and the barn-like garage behind it, packed ceiling to floor, wall to wall, with pews, hymnals, candle sticks, collection plates, choir robes and wooden tables and chairs. None of it was junk, all of it seemed precious, worthy of preservation, redolent of “a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out.” As a writer I felt excited but daunted by this core sample of a gone world, as gone as the person whose remains would soon occupy the fresh grave across the road. James goes on in The American Scene:

“That perverse person [for writing surely is a perverse occupation] is obliged to take it for a working theory that the essence of almost any settled aspect of anything may be extracted by, the chemistry of criticism, and may give us its right name, its formula, for convenient use. From the moment the critic finds himself sighing, to save trouble in a difficult case, that the cluster of appearances can have no sense, from that moment he begins, and quite consciously, to go to pieces; it being the prime business and the high honor of the painter of life always to make a sense--and to make it most in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose or confused.”

As I read The American Scene again, my pleasure is augmented by new layers of association and memory. The old gravedigger has probably joined his customer in the cemetery, “mindful of th' unhonour'd dead.” Acid rain and long upstate winters have further erased its stones. Perhaps the church has burned down, as so many old country churches do. These wayward thoughts were roused by James and his exacting sentences. Nige notes parenthetically, “(one of the joys of growing older is that the distinction between reading and rereading becomes ever more blurred).” This is precisely put and I would add that the intersection of books and life grows ever richer and more complicated, like James’ prose. Reread these lines, the ones cited above, and think of their object not as old furniture but old books, the ones we have read before and that lure us with bonds of fond memory and “mystic meaning”:

“…subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out.”

Nothing Personal

Each day I receive dozens of spam e-mails in the form of comments to posts at Anecdotal Evidence. Some are written in languages and alphabets I cannot read. Few conform to any grammar I recognize. Many consist of nothing but URLs. Some hawk pharmaceuticals and pornography. Often they read like Language Poetry. Tuesday evening I was removing the accumulated trash and inadvertently deleted a number of recent legitimate comments. It was nothing personal and I regret the error.

`I Have Written a Number of Good Sentences'

On the first page of “Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum,” written by P.G. Wodehouse in 1921, we overhear this exchange between Bertie Wooster, still abed, and his redoubtable valet:

“How’s the weather, Jeeves?”

“Exceptionally clement, sir.”

“Anything in the papers?”

“Some slight friction threatening in the Balkans, sir. Otherwise, nothing.”

Jeeves’ digest of the news constitutes what journalists know as a “standing head” – an ever-green, endlessly reusable headline never in need of revision. “Some slight friction” is always threatening somewhere – dependably in the Balkans, of course. It also constitutes the reason the news seldom holds my interest though I remained a journalist for a quarter-century. The profession’s first attraction was a regular paycheck in return for words. Second, a degree of independence unmatched in, say, ladies’ apparel or the Coast Guard. Finally, I'm seldom bored so long as I’m able to listen to and observe my species.

I thought of Jeeves when an anonymous writer accused me of being a “dilettante” and (speaking of standing heads) “fascist” because I possess no “sympathy for the oppressed,” no “political zeal.” “How can you ever have been a journalist?” my reader asks, echoing a question I often ask myself. Honestly, I can’t come up with a convincing answer. The best journalists I’ve known –misfits with a taste for ink – have always represented an endangered species and most fell into the business by accident, not foresight.

In every realm of human endeavor I’m increasingly attracted to the informal, amateur, self-driven, wayward, unregulated and independent, particularly in writing. In 1977, six years before his death at age eighty, Eric Hoffer writes in his notebook:

“Disraeli felt that `nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age.’ Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences--nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.”

I most admire Hoffer’s freedom and the way he revels in it and uses it so productively.