Many critics, including a few of the best, see their job as almost strictly punitive. There’s plenty of literary rubbish to defenestrate, of course, probably more than ever, especially when it comes to poetry. Correcting bad or mediocre taste is always an admirable goal, and critics as different as Yvor Winters, Randall Jarrell and William Logan deserve medals for defending the commonweal. I’m not that sort of critic and probably no critic at all except in the trivial sense that anyone who chooses to read some books and balks at reading others is implicitly performing a critical act. In “The Rest is Criticism,” David Yezzi defines the narrow critical niche I comfortably inhabit:
“…it can be an act of generosity, a mitzvah, an opportunity to draw attention to a poet or a work that might otherwise be passed over or ignored—criticism as recuperation.”
Don’t confuse my predilection for praise with happy talk. It’s not that I don’t recognize crap; I just prefer not to spend a lot of time identifying it. I assume every serious reader can tell Tony Hoagland and Ron Silliman are bad poets and Charles Olson was no poet at all. If you disagree, fine. Reading Olson is its own punishment, and one reads for pleasure not martyrdom. I’ll leave it to more patient, analytical minds to muster evidence proving these self-evident truths. In this passage from C.H. Sisson’s free translation of Horace’s Epistle II.3, “Ars Poetica,” the poet describes the acts of a “friend.” Substitute “critic”:
“The man who can actually tell when a verse is lifeless
Will know when it doesn’t sound right; he will point to stragglers,
And equally put his pen through elaboration;
He will even force you to give up your favourite obscurities,
Tell you what isn’t clear and what has got to be changed,
Like Dr. Johnson himself. There will be no nonsense
About it not being worth causing trouble for trifles.
Trifles like that amount in the end to disaster,
Derisory writing and meaning misunderstood.”
Among contemporary poets, nothing is more pleasing than the recognition and relative popularity enjoyed by Kay Ryan. Her work is brainy, funny, musical, ethically freighted and wondrously constructed. We’re honored by her company, as we are, among the living, by Geoffrey Hill and Les Murray. But how to account for the almost subterranean reputation of Helen Pinkerton? Sharing her work with readers is the sweetest mitzvah I can perform. Near the end of her great dramatic monologue “Crossing the Pedigral” (Taken in Faith, 2002) Pinkerton has Mary Custis Lee, in the final days of the Civil War, address her husband, Robert E. Lee. She might be articulating her own poetic strategy:
“To follow an ancient trace when there seems none
And no light given; to push on through the dark,
Knowing the right direction against the wind;
Simply to keep on at the given task,
Its time and place set by God’s providence..."
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
`The Sincerely Insincere'
Writing at age seventy in Midnight Oil (1972), the second volume of his memoirs, V.S. Pritchett gives a clear-eyed assessment of youth:
“To be young is painful but exhilarating: to be certain and to pass into uncertainty and on to new certainties; to be conscious of the changes from one hour to the next; to be intolerant of others and blindly interested in oneself. It is so hard to remember youth, simply because one loses dramatic interest in oneself. One is harsh; one is all sentiment.”
“Dramatic interest” is shrewd. No one sheds self-interest for good but one’s sense of fatedness, of standing among the anointed, must pass. Prisons are filled with people unwilling to accept their ordinariness. The toughest part of growing up is feeling unprepared, not knowing the world’s expectations and the mundane skills of living. One moment, blazing certainty; the next, bafflement. Pritchett writes later in the same paragraph:
“I used to feel, as young people do, older than my years. I had (I thought) seen too much. The trap was that I had not experienced it. I saw people as trapped in their own natures and divided into those who go for power and dominance and those who do anything to keep the peace and make secrecy their defense. There is a theory among psychologists which is less flattering: that an eldest child (and I was that creature) finds himself isolated, leaps at his freedom, becomes even adventurous and self-sufficient—but, untrained by conflict, breaks in a crisis, disperses himself and goes to pieces. I have certainly had to deal with that.”
So have I, though I’m reluctant to turn anyone’s life, even mine, into a schematic diagram. We’re slipperier than that, pooling like mercury and dripping through the cracks. Among fiction writers, only Chekhov, Pritchett’s master, chronicled the human muddle, the unhappy comedy of dailiness, with comparable acuity. No scheme, they know, can deliver us from folly, and without folly there's little room for art. Like Pritchett I had moments in youth of feeling old beyond my years – a pleasant experience, like safely trying on another’s life, a fair description of the writer’s task. Earlier in Midnight Oil, after quoting an overwritten passage from an early story, Pritchett writes:
“One must grant the passion for words in themselves: I am not ashamed of that. But what a bombardment! What is the cause of all this show of strength and affectation? Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere."
“To be young is painful but exhilarating: to be certain and to pass into uncertainty and on to new certainties; to be conscious of the changes from one hour to the next; to be intolerant of others and blindly interested in oneself. It is so hard to remember youth, simply because one loses dramatic interest in oneself. One is harsh; one is all sentiment.”
“Dramatic interest” is shrewd. No one sheds self-interest for good but one’s sense of fatedness, of standing among the anointed, must pass. Prisons are filled with people unwilling to accept their ordinariness. The toughest part of growing up is feeling unprepared, not knowing the world’s expectations and the mundane skills of living. One moment, blazing certainty; the next, bafflement. Pritchett writes later in the same paragraph:
“I used to feel, as young people do, older than my years. I had (I thought) seen too much. The trap was that I had not experienced it. I saw people as trapped in their own natures and divided into those who go for power and dominance and those who do anything to keep the peace and make secrecy their defense. There is a theory among psychologists which is less flattering: that an eldest child (and I was that creature) finds himself isolated, leaps at his freedom, becomes even adventurous and self-sufficient—but, untrained by conflict, breaks in a crisis, disperses himself and goes to pieces. I have certainly had to deal with that.”
So have I, though I’m reluctant to turn anyone’s life, even mine, into a schematic diagram. We’re slipperier than that, pooling like mercury and dripping through the cracks. Among fiction writers, only Chekhov, Pritchett’s master, chronicled the human muddle, the unhappy comedy of dailiness, with comparable acuity. No scheme, they know, can deliver us from folly, and without folly there's little room for art. Like Pritchett I had moments in youth of feeling old beyond my years – a pleasant experience, like safely trying on another’s life, a fair description of the writer’s task. Earlier in Midnight Oil, after quoting an overwritten passage from an early story, Pritchett writes:
“One must grant the passion for words in themselves: I am not ashamed of that. But what a bombardment! What is the cause of all this show of strength and affectation? Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere."
Sunday, November 28, 2010
`The Unifying of the World'
“They ate in the cafeteria with the gilded front. There was the same art inside as outside. The food looked sumptuous. Whole fishes were framed like pictures with carrots, and the salads were like terraced landscapes or like Mexican pyramids; slices of lemon and onion and radishes were like sun and moon and stars; the cream pies were about a foot thick and the cakes swollen as if sleepers had baked them in their dreams.”
This is metaphor as celebration of the world’s bounty and the bounty of the mind lavishing so much electric insight on readers. The writer is almost profligate. Showing off is permitted, even encouraged, in one so gifted but we are tempted to say, “Enough, I think,” as we welcome the next efflorescence. The passage is from Seize the Day, Saul Bellow’s short novel from 1956.
“He was a short, deep, wide man, with grey hair kinked as if there were negro in him. His skin was kippered by a life of London smoke but it quickly flushed to an innocent country ruddiness at the taste of food: his face was bland, heavy of jowl, formless and kind, resting on a second chin like a bottom on an air cushion. It was the face of a man who was enjoying a wonderfully boyish meal, which got better with every mouthful; but in the lips and in the lines from the fleshy nose there was a refined, almost spiritual, arresting look of insult and contempt.”
Like Bellow, a practiced describer of bodies and faces, reflecting as they do the souls within, this writer skirts caricature. He lets verbs do the work of adjectives – “kippered” is priceless. We move without fuss from “flushed” to “bottom,” while the attentive smile. We know the sort of doughy man he describes and how greasy-fingered gluttony, the fat man's guilty pleasure, turns nasty. We know this from life and from books --from Dickens, of course. This is V.S. Pritchett’s sketch of the title character in Mr. Beluncle (1951).
“He spotted Mopiani from the Caddy as he drove up, the man pneumatic in the cop’s criss-crossed leather that bound Mopianai’s tunic, the thick straps and ammunition loops potted with bullets, the long holster like a weapon, it’s pistol some bent brute at a waterhole, the trigger like a visible genital, the uniform itself a weapon, the metal blades of Mopiani’s badge, the big key ring with its brass claws, a tunnel of handcuffs doubled on his backside, the weighted, tapered cosh, the sergelike grainy blue hide, the stout black brogans, and the patent-leather bill of his cap like wet ink.”
Mopiani bristles with hardware like a Transformer. Where does man end and metaphor begin? Mopiani is a walking, talking mass of metaphor, a landslide of simile. Like all good metaphors, these are memorable and work both ways. Now a puddle of ink looks like patent-leather. Excess never sounded so good. This is Stanley Elkin in The Franchiser (1976).
This gathering of metaphorical greatest hits was prompted by a passage in Leon Wieseltier’s review of Bellow’s Selected Letters:
“Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition.”
A good metaphor is witty and catalytic. It mingles surprise and recognition. In his Poetics, Aristotle says “command of metaphor” is “the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” True enough but there’s also joyousness in metaphors, writing and reading them, a satisfying sense that things may connect after all: “slices of lemon and onion and radishes were like sun and moon and stars.”
This is metaphor as celebration of the world’s bounty and the bounty of the mind lavishing so much electric insight on readers. The writer is almost profligate. Showing off is permitted, even encouraged, in one so gifted but we are tempted to say, “Enough, I think,” as we welcome the next efflorescence. The passage is from Seize the Day, Saul Bellow’s short novel from 1956.
“He was a short, deep, wide man, with grey hair kinked as if there were negro in him. His skin was kippered by a life of London smoke but it quickly flushed to an innocent country ruddiness at the taste of food: his face was bland, heavy of jowl, formless and kind, resting on a second chin like a bottom on an air cushion. It was the face of a man who was enjoying a wonderfully boyish meal, which got better with every mouthful; but in the lips and in the lines from the fleshy nose there was a refined, almost spiritual, arresting look of insult and contempt.”
Like Bellow, a practiced describer of bodies and faces, reflecting as they do the souls within, this writer skirts caricature. He lets verbs do the work of adjectives – “kippered” is priceless. We move without fuss from “flushed” to “bottom,” while the attentive smile. We know the sort of doughy man he describes and how greasy-fingered gluttony, the fat man's guilty pleasure, turns nasty. We know this from life and from books --from Dickens, of course. This is V.S. Pritchett’s sketch of the title character in Mr. Beluncle (1951).
“He spotted Mopiani from the Caddy as he drove up, the man pneumatic in the cop’s criss-crossed leather that bound Mopianai’s tunic, the thick straps and ammunition loops potted with bullets, the long holster like a weapon, it’s pistol some bent brute at a waterhole, the trigger like a visible genital, the uniform itself a weapon, the metal blades of Mopiani’s badge, the big key ring with its brass claws, a tunnel of handcuffs doubled on his backside, the weighted, tapered cosh, the sergelike grainy blue hide, the stout black brogans, and the patent-leather bill of his cap like wet ink.”
Mopiani bristles with hardware like a Transformer. Where does man end and metaphor begin? Mopiani is a walking, talking mass of metaphor, a landslide of simile. Like all good metaphors, these are memorable and work both ways. Now a puddle of ink looks like patent-leather. Excess never sounded so good. This is Stanley Elkin in The Franchiser (1976).
This gathering of metaphorical greatest hits was prompted by a passage in Leon Wieseltier’s review of Bellow’s Selected Letters:
“Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition.”
A good metaphor is witty and catalytic. It mingles surprise and recognition. In his Poetics, Aristotle says “command of metaphor” is “the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” True enough but there’s also joyousness in metaphors, writing and reading them, a satisfying sense that things may connect after all: “slices of lemon and onion and radishes were like sun and moon and stars.”
Saturday, November 27, 2010
`The Past is All We Are'
Dr. Johnson masquerades as a past-loving, present-loathing crank, dwelling in delusory nostalgia for a Golden Age. When Boswell asks him to compare their England to the England of Johnson’s youth, he replies:
“Ah, sir, hadst thou lived in those days! It is not worth being a dunce now, when there are no wits.”
This he uttered in 1769 at the age of sixty (while discussing Pope's Dunciad), and one longs to hear what he would make of our wit-less century. One of the pleasures of reading Johnson, of living with him across a lifetime, is the reassuring certainty he will eventually contradict himself, or seem to, for he is like us, always human, only more so. Consistency can be so inhibiting and dull. In 1783, age seventy-four, Johnson tells Boswell:
“I am always angry when I hear ancient times praised at the expense of modern times. There is now a great deal more learning in the world than there was formerly; for it is universally diffused. You have, perhaps, no man who knows as much Latin and Greek as Bentley; no man who knows as much mathematicks as Newton; but you have many more men who know Greek and Latin, and who know mathematicks.”
Like any thinking, feeling person of advanced middle years, Johnson feels the passing of time like a nagging ache in the joints. He neither denies the discomfort nor longs for radical remedies. Rather, his prescription is palliative care. He soothes symptoms, for the diagnosis is invariably chronic and fatal. The past is neither unblemished nor worthy of scorn. His concern is conserving what is best, not obstructing the new because it’s new. Familiarity, Michael Oakeshott wisely notes, is what we esteem in the present, not the past. These thoughts are prompted by a protracted reading of C.H. Sisson’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1998), including “In the Silence” from 1993, when Sisson turned seventy-nine:
“The future is too far:
The past is all we are.”
“Ah, sir, hadst thou lived in those days! It is not worth being a dunce now, when there are no wits.”
This he uttered in 1769 at the age of sixty (while discussing Pope's Dunciad), and one longs to hear what he would make of our wit-less century. One of the pleasures of reading Johnson, of living with him across a lifetime, is the reassuring certainty he will eventually contradict himself, or seem to, for he is like us, always human, only more so. Consistency can be so inhibiting and dull. In 1783, age seventy-four, Johnson tells Boswell:
“I am always angry when I hear ancient times praised at the expense of modern times. There is now a great deal more learning in the world than there was formerly; for it is universally diffused. You have, perhaps, no man who knows as much Latin and Greek as Bentley; no man who knows as much mathematicks as Newton; but you have many more men who know Greek and Latin, and who know mathematicks.”
Like any thinking, feeling person of advanced middle years, Johnson feels the passing of time like a nagging ache in the joints. He neither denies the discomfort nor longs for radical remedies. Rather, his prescription is palliative care. He soothes symptoms, for the diagnosis is invariably chronic and fatal. The past is neither unblemished nor worthy of scorn. His concern is conserving what is best, not obstructing the new because it’s new. Familiarity, Michael Oakeshott wisely notes, is what we esteem in the present, not the past. These thoughts are prompted by a protracted reading of C.H. Sisson’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1998), including “In the Silence” from 1993, when Sisson turned seventy-nine:
“The future is too far:
The past is all we are.”
Friday, November 26, 2010
`The More Everything Matters'
“The fragment is the medium of expression of one who has learned that man lives among fragments.”
So writes Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Don Colacho, the eminent Columbian composer of fragments, a form, or absence of form, much romanticized and scorned. In English, the word dates from the early fifteenth century, rooted in the Latin fragmentum, “a fragment, remnant,” literally “a piece broken off,” from frangere, “to break.” A fragment is a shard from a greater whole, damaged and incomplete, a trace of something lost, the part left to imply what once was intact. In The Pound Era (1971), Hugh Kenner writes of ancient Greek literature, what can be pieced together from rotting bits of papyrus, and how the modernists put their example to use:
“There was virtue in scraps, mysterium in fragments, magical power in the tatter of a poem, sacred words biting on congruent actualities of sight and feeling and breath.”
In Kenner’s words from A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973), “The less there is, the more everything matters…” He says of the short prose pieces Beckett wrote later in life:
“They exact a new order of attention, entailing as they do the reconstruction of whole worlds out of minimal fragments. We examine one as a geologist might the sole piece of some exploded planet…”
Beckett, of course, wasn’t writing fragments. His craft was rigorous. Each story and play is whole, though hinting at fragmentation. Stirrings Still (1988) suggests the plangency of an ancient text:
“Was he then now to press on regardless now in one direction and now in another or on the other hand stir no more as the case might be that is as that missing word might be which if to warn such as sad or bad for example then of course in spite of all the one and if the reverse then of course the other that is stir no more.”
The recovery of incomplete ancient texts, pages of Sappho filled with textual lacunae, contributed to the modern taste for the castoff, threadbare and unfinished, a shard aesthetic, the collage. No writer worth attention strives to leave fragments. Each sentence written by Don Colacho is dense with experience and thought. He wasn’t writing fragments after all. An aphorism or any words highly compacted – whether prose by Montaigne, La Rouchefoucauld or Wittgenstein, or poems by J.V. Cunningham or Edgar Bowers – contain more matter than most books. From the shard aesthetic we learn:
The depth of a sentence (paragraph, stanza, post, chapter, book) is not to be judged by its length.
A single sentence, even a word in the right hands, may possess a vast wholeness.
An aesthetically pleasing whole can be built of discrete parts, a pulling together of resonant fragments.
This is a shard aesthetic and we might think of it as a blog aesthetic. This is from Erich Auerbach’s chapter on Montaigne in Mimesis (translated by Willard R. Trask, 1953):
“Originally his book was a collection of the fruit of his reading, with running commentary. This pattern was soon broken; commentary predominated over text, subject matter or point of departure was not only things read but also things lived—now his own experiences, now what he heard from others or what took place around him. But the principle of clinging to concrete things, to what happens, he never gave up, any more than he did his freedom not to tie himself to a fact-finding method or to the course of events in time.”
Less important than fragments is the gift for fusing them into a luminous whole.
So writes Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Don Colacho, the eminent Columbian composer of fragments, a form, or absence of form, much romanticized and scorned. In English, the word dates from the early fifteenth century, rooted in the Latin fragmentum, “a fragment, remnant,” literally “a piece broken off,” from frangere, “to break.” A fragment is a shard from a greater whole, damaged and incomplete, a trace of something lost, the part left to imply what once was intact. In The Pound Era (1971), Hugh Kenner writes of ancient Greek literature, what can be pieced together from rotting bits of papyrus, and how the modernists put their example to use:
“There was virtue in scraps, mysterium in fragments, magical power in the tatter of a poem, sacred words biting on congruent actualities of sight and feeling and breath.”
In Kenner’s words from A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973), “The less there is, the more everything matters…” He says of the short prose pieces Beckett wrote later in life:
“They exact a new order of attention, entailing as they do the reconstruction of whole worlds out of minimal fragments. We examine one as a geologist might the sole piece of some exploded planet…”
Beckett, of course, wasn’t writing fragments. His craft was rigorous. Each story and play is whole, though hinting at fragmentation. Stirrings Still (1988) suggests the plangency of an ancient text:
“Was he then now to press on regardless now in one direction and now in another or on the other hand stir no more as the case might be that is as that missing word might be which if to warn such as sad or bad for example then of course in spite of all the one and if the reverse then of course the other that is stir no more.”
The recovery of incomplete ancient texts, pages of Sappho filled with textual lacunae, contributed to the modern taste for the castoff, threadbare and unfinished, a shard aesthetic, the collage. No writer worth attention strives to leave fragments. Each sentence written by Don Colacho is dense with experience and thought. He wasn’t writing fragments after all. An aphorism or any words highly compacted – whether prose by Montaigne, La Rouchefoucauld or Wittgenstein, or poems by J.V. Cunningham or Edgar Bowers – contain more matter than most books. From the shard aesthetic we learn:
The depth of a sentence (paragraph, stanza, post, chapter, book) is not to be judged by its length.
A single sentence, even a word in the right hands, may possess a vast wholeness.
An aesthetically pleasing whole can be built of discrete parts, a pulling together of resonant fragments.
This is a shard aesthetic and we might think of it as a blog aesthetic. This is from Erich Auerbach’s chapter on Montaigne in Mimesis (translated by Willard R. Trask, 1953):
“Originally his book was a collection of the fruit of his reading, with running commentary. This pattern was soon broken; commentary predominated over text, subject matter or point of departure was not only things read but also things lived—now his own experiences, now what he heard from others or what took place around him. But the principle of clinging to concrete things, to what happens, he never gave up, any more than he did his freedom not to tie himself to a fact-finding method or to the course of events in time.”
Less important than fragments is the gift for fusing them into a luminous whole.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
`But for the Common Sunshine'
Turkey, of course. Mashed potatoes and gravy, oyster stuffing, family and friends, good health, money to pay the bills and a little left over, readers, coffee, new shoes, old gloves, a warm coat and cat, Aaron Copland and Art Pepper, C.H. Sisson and D.J. Enright, what little Latin I know, Aldo Buzzi and Guy Davenport, “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” rare good teachers, rarer good students, memory minimally frayed, crows and dark-eyed juncos, snow and sun, the spider in the cobwebbed corner and “Te Deum” by Charles Reznikoff:
“Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.
“Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.”
“Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.
“Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.”
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
`Christmas Fox'
Our friends at The Dabbler have news of another tempting competition, this one seasonal.
`Witty, Eternal, and Eternally Available'
“Byron once suggested that `the end of all scribblement is to amuse.’ Auden retorts, in his Letter to Lord Byron, `Art, if it doesn’t start there, at least ends, / Whether aesthetics likes the thought or not, / In an attempt to entertain our friends.’ The notion of such a conversation, witty, eternal, and eternally available, is what I think of as the meaning of civilization.”
This comes from the preface to Epic and Epigram: Two Elizabethan Entertainments (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), a mock-epic poem by David R. Slavitt and his free translations of Latin epigrams by John Owen (ca. 1563-1622). I felt at least on the margins of civilization on Tuesday during a half-hour telephone conversation with the poet Helen Pinkerton, who has been reading Ezra Pound, of all people. She quoted one of Pound’s more influentially pompous injunctions -- “Make it new!” – and said, “That’s one of the worst pieces of literary advice ever uttered. Think of the damage it’s done.”
Not “Make it good!” or even “Make it excellent!” Instead, encourage novelty as an end in itself. Pinkerton writes sparingly, with an eye on the masters – Jonson, for instance, and Melville, and such friends as Yvor Winters, J.V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers. We spoke at length of Bowers, of the impacted beauty of his early poems and how some of them defy us after decades of reading, though we keep returning to them. She noted the frequent mention of journeys and friends in Bowers’ later work, and wondered if it derived, in part, from the poet’s reading of Horace. Here is Pinkerton’s elegy “For Edgar Bowers” (Taken in Faith, 2002):
“I heard that you were dead, Edgar, and wept.
I thought of times at Miramar we watched
The sun go down, the southern stars emerge,
Hearing the long roll and the crash of surf,
While we sat talking, laughing, drinking till dawn.
“Your ashes lie now by the western sea,
Quiet as those of Winters and Valéry.
“Your poems live, the spirit’s breath and seed.
Hades, who would take all, spare them his greed.”
Conversation again. Pinkerton adds, below the title, “After Callimachus,” a reference to the third-century-B.C. Greek poet. I hear an echo of lines from a Callimachus poem titled “On Himself” in The Greek Anthology (translated by Peter Jay, 1973). The poet was born in Cyrene, in modern Libya, and sometimes called himself Battiades, “son of Battos,” after the mythical founder of Cyrene:
“You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,
Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy
Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.”
Pinkerton and I agreed “Autumn Shade” (The Astronomers,” 1965) ranks among Bowers’ finest poems: “Thinking of a bravura deed, a place / Sacred to a divinity, an old / Verse that seems new, I postulate a man / Mastered by his own image of himself.” Bowers’ title recalls Pinkerton’s “Autumn Drought,” an elegy for Winters, her teacher and friend.
Like any civilized person, Pinkerton suggested books to read and said she would mail another packet of essays and poems. Why is Pinkerton so little read? I know at least three readers who have ordered her book based on my enthusiasm, but for each of them hundreds read the brand-name poets whose poems are unreadable. Perhaps John Owen, Shakespeare’s contemporary, had the answer. Here is David Slavitt’s translation of “To My Readers—II, 1”:
“You write for fools if you write to please everyone.
These poems of mine are not meant for the mob.
If I have a few readers, that’s good. If I have
One, that’s even better. And if no one at all
Glances at what I write?
That’s fine and dandy.”
[“Ne placeant stultis, quorum sunt Omnia plena,
Carmina non multis nostra placer volo.
Sat mihi sunt pauci lectores; est satis unus:
Si me nemo legat, sat mihi nullus erit.”]
This comes from the preface to Epic and Epigram: Two Elizabethan Entertainments (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), a mock-epic poem by David R. Slavitt and his free translations of Latin epigrams by John Owen (ca. 1563-1622). I felt at least on the margins of civilization on Tuesday during a half-hour telephone conversation with the poet Helen Pinkerton, who has been reading Ezra Pound, of all people. She quoted one of Pound’s more influentially pompous injunctions -- “Make it new!” – and said, “That’s one of the worst pieces of literary advice ever uttered. Think of the damage it’s done.”
Not “Make it good!” or even “Make it excellent!” Instead, encourage novelty as an end in itself. Pinkerton writes sparingly, with an eye on the masters – Jonson, for instance, and Melville, and such friends as Yvor Winters, J.V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers. We spoke at length of Bowers, of the impacted beauty of his early poems and how some of them defy us after decades of reading, though we keep returning to them. She noted the frequent mention of journeys and friends in Bowers’ later work, and wondered if it derived, in part, from the poet’s reading of Horace. Here is Pinkerton’s elegy “For Edgar Bowers” (Taken in Faith, 2002):
“I heard that you were dead, Edgar, and wept.
I thought of times at Miramar we watched
The sun go down, the southern stars emerge,
Hearing the long roll and the crash of surf,
While we sat talking, laughing, drinking till dawn.
“Your ashes lie now by the western sea,
Quiet as those of Winters and Valéry.
“Your poems live, the spirit’s breath and seed.
Hades, who would take all, spare them his greed.”
Conversation again. Pinkerton adds, below the title, “After Callimachus,” a reference to the third-century-B.C. Greek poet. I hear an echo of lines from a Callimachus poem titled “On Himself” in The Greek Anthology (translated by Peter Jay, 1973). The poet was born in Cyrene, in modern Libya, and sometimes called himself Battiades, “son of Battos,” after the mythical founder of Cyrene:
“You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,
Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy
Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.”
Pinkerton and I agreed “Autumn Shade” (The Astronomers,” 1965) ranks among Bowers’ finest poems: “Thinking of a bravura deed, a place / Sacred to a divinity, an old / Verse that seems new, I postulate a man / Mastered by his own image of himself.” Bowers’ title recalls Pinkerton’s “Autumn Drought,” an elegy for Winters, her teacher and friend.
Like any civilized person, Pinkerton suggested books to read and said she would mail another packet of essays and poems. Why is Pinkerton so little read? I know at least three readers who have ordered her book based on my enthusiasm, but for each of them hundreds read the brand-name poets whose poems are unreadable. Perhaps John Owen, Shakespeare’s contemporary, had the answer. Here is David Slavitt’s translation of “To My Readers—II, 1”:
“You write for fools if you write to please everyone.
These poems of mine are not meant for the mob.
If I have a few readers, that’s good. If I have
One, that’s even better. And if no one at all
Glances at what I write?
That’s fine and dandy.”
[“Ne placeant stultis, quorum sunt Omnia plena,
Carmina non multis nostra placer volo.
Sat mihi sunt pauci lectores; est satis unus:
Si me nemo legat, sat mihi nullus erit.”]
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
`So Silent and Sudden a Change'
In front of the school, three crows defied steel and ice to pick at something dead in the road – a cat, I saw, as I slowed to stare like any rubber-necker. One bird gave a final tug on a string protruding from the abdomen and flew off complaining when I was almost on him. What would remain of the cat by the time kids started arriving at school?
Drivers, children and school administrators grew frenzied with the season’s first snow. To and from school I witnessed an over-the-curb spinout and the aftermath of three two-car wrecks. By evening less than four inches of snow had fallen – hardly a flurry in Cleveland and upstate New York, home of stout-hearted men. On the playground I stopped a fourth-grader from eating snow she had scraped off the rim of a trash barrel. Boys rolled one-third of a snowman across the soccer field. It measured a meter in diameter and by the time it reached the playground was the color of cigarette ash. Others heaved sand-and-snowballs at close range. We had no nurse in the building.
In his journal entry for Nov. 28, 1858, Thoreau composed one of my favorite accounts of early winter:
“A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds—tree sparrows and chickadees—than usual about the house. There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now by 2 P. M., a regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?”
I’ve known winter days like that but Monday wasn’t among them. No silence and too much anxiety and agitation, like those crows tearing at the dead cat. No, the day felt more like the one Anthony Hecht describes, with a Gothic touch, in “Birdwatchers of America” (The Hard Hours, 1967).
Drivers, children and school administrators grew frenzied with the season’s first snow. To and from school I witnessed an over-the-curb spinout and the aftermath of three two-car wrecks. By evening less than four inches of snow had fallen – hardly a flurry in Cleveland and upstate New York, home of stout-hearted men. On the playground I stopped a fourth-grader from eating snow she had scraped off the rim of a trash barrel. Boys rolled one-third of a snowman across the soccer field. It measured a meter in diameter and by the time it reached the playground was the color of cigarette ash. Others heaved sand-and-snowballs at close range. We had no nurse in the building.
In his journal entry for Nov. 28, 1858, Thoreau composed one of my favorite accounts of early winter:
“A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds—tree sparrows and chickadees—than usual about the house. There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now by 2 P. M., a regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?”
I’ve known winter days like that but Monday wasn’t among them. No silence and too much anxiety and agitation, like those crows tearing at the dead cat. No, the day felt more like the one Anthony Hecht describes, with a Gothic touch, in “Birdwatchers of America” (The Hard Hours, 1967).
Monday, November 22, 2010
Anthony Powell Redux
Among the chief pleasures of the timing of my birth was coming of age as a reader as the final volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time cycle were being published – Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975). My fondness for the twelve novels only grows, as does the pleasure I take in anticipating my next go at them. My understanding of twentieth-century English social history is intimately linked to Powell’s long sad comedy.
My friend Levi Stahl works for the University of Chicago Press, publisher in four compendium volumes of A Dance. Levi wrote on Monday to say that starting Dec. 1, the Press will begin publishing Powell’s roman a fleuve in e-book form, and throughout December will give away the first novel in the series, A Question of Upbringing, for free. Levi writes:
“I don't expect that e-books are any more your cup of tea than they are mine, but I figured that as a Dance fan you could at least see why we're excited: as I'm sure you know, the hardest part of drawing new readers to the series is getting people to overcome its daunting length and give it a try.”
Levi’s right about my lack of enthusiasm for e-books but I have proof Powell’s masterwork can seduce the proper reader for a lifetime. If the digital option enlists new readers, I’m all for it. Go here for more information.
My friend Levi Stahl works for the University of Chicago Press, publisher in four compendium volumes of A Dance. Levi wrote on Monday to say that starting Dec. 1, the Press will begin publishing Powell’s roman a fleuve in e-book form, and throughout December will give away the first novel in the series, A Question of Upbringing, for free. Levi writes:
“I don't expect that e-books are any more your cup of tea than they are mine, but I figured that as a Dance fan you could at least see why we're excited: as I'm sure you know, the hardest part of drawing new readers to the series is getting people to overcome its daunting length and give it a try.”
Levi’s right about my lack of enthusiasm for e-books but I have proof Powell’s masterwork can seduce the proper reader for a lifetime. If the digital option enlists new readers, I’m all for it. Go here for more information.
`On the Hunt Restlessly Among the Words'
I mistook the first snow of the season for sleep-blurred vision. It was 7 a.m. Sunday, my wife was already at work, the youngest was reading on the couch after eating the breakfast he made for himself (turkey sandwich), and the ten-year-old was still asleep. I was pouring water for coffee when I noticed a gray, vertical fuzziness through the kitchen window. I wake with the alacrity of a glacier. I rubbed my eyes in cartoon disbelief and there it was – the lackadaisical drift of snowflakes, the frozen cognate of a drizzle.
The seven-year-old whooped loud enough to wake his brother, who joined in the whooping. Look at it from a boy’s perspective – snowball fights, money for shoveling sidewalks, the dream deferred of a day off from school. I too like snow but this didn’t stick around long. It upholstered the ivy and the windows of my car, melted and returned briefly through the day. I associate snow and cold feet with reading, though I associate almost everything with reading. A friend in Dallas contemplates his first go through Proust, and even Dallas gets snow every few years. I read Anthony Powell for the first time in winter, a happy convergence lending charm to both.
Of late I’ve been reading a mélange of things – Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark, the Latin epigrams of John Owen as translated by David R. Slavitt, Richard Slotkin’s No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater 1864 and stories by Tolstoy and V.S. Pritchett – hearty winter fare, I suppose, the bookish equivalent of chowders and stews. Here’s a passage from Pritchett’s story “The Liars” (Blind Love, 1969):
“It was a February afternoon. Under her black wig, the old lady upstairs was sitting up in bed reading her father’s Baudelaire. She read greedily; her eyes, enlarged by her glasses, were rampaging over the lines; with her long nose and her long lips sliding back into her cheeks, she looked like a wolf grinning at the smell of the first snow and was on the hunt restlessly among the words.
“`Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies
Pauvres soeurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains’
“she was murmuring avidly as she read. All over the bed were books, French and English, papers, detective novels that she had picked up and pushed away. On and off, in the long day, she had looked to see what was going on in the street; sleet had emptied it. The only thing that still caught her eye was an old blackbird gripping the branch of the plane tree outside her window; its wings hanging down, alone.”
The French is from the final stanza of Baudelaire’s “Femmes damnées” (translated by William Aggeler):
“You whom my spirit has followed into your hell,
Poor sisters, I love you as much as I pity you.”
The seven-year-old whooped loud enough to wake his brother, who joined in the whooping. Look at it from a boy’s perspective – snowball fights, money for shoveling sidewalks, the dream deferred of a day off from school. I too like snow but this didn’t stick around long. It upholstered the ivy and the windows of my car, melted and returned briefly through the day. I associate snow and cold feet with reading, though I associate almost everything with reading. A friend in Dallas contemplates his first go through Proust, and even Dallas gets snow every few years. I read Anthony Powell for the first time in winter, a happy convergence lending charm to both.
Of late I’ve been reading a mélange of things – Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark, the Latin epigrams of John Owen as translated by David R. Slavitt, Richard Slotkin’s No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater 1864 and stories by Tolstoy and V.S. Pritchett – hearty winter fare, I suppose, the bookish equivalent of chowders and stews. Here’s a passage from Pritchett’s story “The Liars” (Blind Love, 1969):
“It was a February afternoon. Under her black wig, the old lady upstairs was sitting up in bed reading her father’s Baudelaire. She read greedily; her eyes, enlarged by her glasses, were rampaging over the lines; with her long nose and her long lips sliding back into her cheeks, she looked like a wolf grinning at the smell of the first snow and was on the hunt restlessly among the words.
“`Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies
Pauvres soeurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains’
“she was murmuring avidly as she read. All over the bed were books, French and English, papers, detective novels that she had picked up and pushed away. On and off, in the long day, she had looked to see what was going on in the street; sleet had emptied it. The only thing that still caught her eye was an old blackbird gripping the branch of the plane tree outside her window; its wings hanging down, alone.”
The French is from the final stanza of Baudelaire’s “Femmes damnées” (translated by William Aggeler):
“You whom my spirit has followed into your hell,
Poor sisters, I love you as much as I pity you.”
Sunday, November 21, 2010
`This Effectual Close'
On the stones below the front window, almost lost among the fallen leaves, lay a sooty bit of fluff, a willow goldfinch, the state bird of Washington. He was smaller than a cotton boll, black and yellow feathers ruffled and wet from rain. Perhaps he slammed into the glass, driven by recent wind storms. His legs were bent, almost retracted, and looked pitifully stick-like. His eyes and beak were shut. I wrapped him in a big-leaf maple leaf, buried him in the backyard and thought of Cowper’s goldfinch who gives thanks “for this effectual close / And cure of ev'ry ill!”
Thoreau reserved a special fondness for the goldfinch and his song, describing it as “sprightly and varied” and a “fine, sprightly, richly warbled strain.” On July 24, 1852, he writes in his journal:
“I heard this afternoon the cool water twitter of the goldfinch, and saw the bird. They come with the springing aftermath. It is as refreshing as a cup of cold water to a thirsty man to hear them, now only one at a time.”
Thoreau reserved a special fondness for the goldfinch and his song, describing it as “sprightly and varied” and a “fine, sprightly, richly warbled strain.” On July 24, 1852, he writes in his journal:
“I heard this afternoon the cool water twitter of the goldfinch, and saw the bird. They come with the springing aftermath. It is as refreshing as a cup of cold water to a thirsty man to hear them, now only one at a time.”
Saturday, November 20, 2010
`We Discussed Immortality'
Let’s remember Tolstoy by rereading him (it’s “Hadji Murat” for me) and watching these ghostly films of the great writer who died one-hundred years ago today. In 1897, Tolstoy visited Chekhov in his medical clinic at Melikhovo, and Chekhov wrote to his friend Mikhail Menshikov on April 16:
“Every cloud has a silver lining. I had a visit in the clinic from Lev Nikolayevich, and we had an exceptionally interesting conversation – exceptionally interesting for me at any rate, because I listened more than I spoke. We discussed immortality. He accepts the idea of immortality in the Kantian sense, proposing that all of us (human beings and animals) will continue to live on in some primal state (reason, love?), the essence and purpose of which is a mystery hidden from us. However, this primal state of force appears to me to be a shapeless mass of jelly, into which my `I,’ my individuality, my consciousness, would be absorbed. I don’t feel any need for immortality in this form. I don’t understand it, but Lev Nikoleyevich finds it astonishing that I don’t understand it.”
Who but Chekhov can condescend so charmingly to Tolstoy and his strident fuzziness? The anecdote, from Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, Penguin, 2004), illustrates the way two comparably gifted artists – let’s call them geniuses -- can coexist like alien species. Genius is singular.
[Thanks to Joshua Kurp for the Tolstoy film.]
“Every cloud has a silver lining. I had a visit in the clinic from Lev Nikolayevich, and we had an exceptionally interesting conversation – exceptionally interesting for me at any rate, because I listened more than I spoke. We discussed immortality. He accepts the idea of immortality in the Kantian sense, proposing that all of us (human beings and animals) will continue to live on in some primal state (reason, love?), the essence and purpose of which is a mystery hidden from us. However, this primal state of force appears to me to be a shapeless mass of jelly, into which my `I,’ my individuality, my consciousness, would be absorbed. I don’t feel any need for immortality in this form. I don’t understand it, but Lev Nikoleyevich finds it astonishing that I don’t understand it.”
Who but Chekhov can condescend so charmingly to Tolstoy and his strident fuzziness? The anecdote, from Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, Penguin, 2004), illustrates the way two comparably gifted artists – let’s call them geniuses -- can coexist like alien species. Genius is singular.
[Thanks to Joshua Kurp for the Tolstoy film.]
`The Heart of Every Human Being'
This would be even funnier if it weren’t so appalling:
“And so it is with the Russian Revolution. Was it perfect? We all know it wasn't. Was it a huge step, a 73-year-long series of huge steps, toward building the kind of society we all want, the kind of society that the whole planet needs if it and we are to survive? It most certainly was.”
It reads like parody but is written in a spirit of deadly earnestness. Thanks to Cynthia Haven I’m reading Stalin’s Genocides by Norman M. Naimark, who writes in his introduction:
“As the result of Stalin’s rule in the 1930s and early 1940s, many millions of innocent people were shot, starved to death, or died in detention and exile. It is long since time to consider this story an important chapter in the history of genocide.”
How damning of our species that such reminders remain necessary. I tried an informal name-recognition test on four of my fifth-grade reading students this week. Not one had heard of, let alone identify with some degree of detail, some of the last century’s leading killers -- Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, among others. Hitler they knew, vaguely.
A friend in Houston writes:
“I thought of you the other day. I was in a very fancy hair salon, getting my roots touched up. You may not know anything about this, so I will tell you that it's a tedious process involving harsh chemicals and many pieces of foil wound through the hair. You have to sit still for about a half an hour, so I always have a book. This time I was reading a hardbound copy of The Gulag Archipelago, and I was lost in it.
“I gradually became aware that several other women were near me, and when I lifted up my eyes I saw their look of horror. It turned out that they were reacting to the large photograph of Solzhenitsyn on the back cover, which, to be fair, really is kind of scary. They were baffled as to why I would be reading such a thing, so I gave them about a three-minute exegesis. Now they were truly mystified. It does sound like a ghastly thing to read, doesn't it?
“In a fumbling effort to justify my choice to these extremely chic ladies, I stammered out what I think is one of the most important things in Solzhenitsyn's writings, the quote that ends with `the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.' To my very great surprise, this hit them like a bombshell. All three vigorously exclaimed the truth of it and wondered that they had never thought of it. Then they wandered back to their chairs for blow-drys. I don't know what to think.”
Here is the larger passage in The Gulag Archipelago my friend excerpts from – Part I, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps”:
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
“During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
“Socrates taught us: `Know thyself.’
“Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
“From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
“And correspondingly, from evil to good.”
“And so it is with the Russian Revolution. Was it perfect? We all know it wasn't. Was it a huge step, a 73-year-long series of huge steps, toward building the kind of society we all want, the kind of society that the whole planet needs if it and we are to survive? It most certainly was.”
It reads like parody but is written in a spirit of deadly earnestness. Thanks to Cynthia Haven I’m reading Stalin’s Genocides by Norman M. Naimark, who writes in his introduction:
“As the result of Stalin’s rule in the 1930s and early 1940s, many millions of innocent people were shot, starved to death, or died in detention and exile. It is long since time to consider this story an important chapter in the history of genocide.”
How damning of our species that such reminders remain necessary. I tried an informal name-recognition test on four of my fifth-grade reading students this week. Not one had heard of, let alone identify with some degree of detail, some of the last century’s leading killers -- Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, among others. Hitler they knew, vaguely.
A friend in Houston writes:
“I thought of you the other day. I was in a very fancy hair salon, getting my roots touched up. You may not know anything about this, so I will tell you that it's a tedious process involving harsh chemicals and many pieces of foil wound through the hair. You have to sit still for about a half an hour, so I always have a book. This time I was reading a hardbound copy of The Gulag Archipelago, and I was lost in it.
“I gradually became aware that several other women were near me, and when I lifted up my eyes I saw their look of horror. It turned out that they were reacting to the large photograph of Solzhenitsyn on the back cover, which, to be fair, really is kind of scary. They were baffled as to why I would be reading such a thing, so I gave them about a three-minute exegesis. Now they were truly mystified. It does sound like a ghastly thing to read, doesn't it?
“In a fumbling effort to justify my choice to these extremely chic ladies, I stammered out what I think is one of the most important things in Solzhenitsyn's writings, the quote that ends with `the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.' To my very great surprise, this hit them like a bombshell. All three vigorously exclaimed the truth of it and wondered that they had never thought of it. Then they wandered back to their chairs for blow-drys. I don't know what to think.”
Here is the larger passage in The Gulag Archipelago my friend excerpts from – Part I, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps”:
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
“During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
“Socrates taught us: `Know thyself.’
“Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
“From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
“And correspondingly, from evil to good.”
Friday, November 19, 2010
`Like a Philosopher and Friend'
“I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.”
In a blindfold test, this might be mistaken for the confessions of a solipsist, the sort of self-absorbed twit for whom “blog” is a four-letter word for “me.” In fact it comes from “Of Experience,” Montaigne’s final essay, and thus illustrates the fine line dividing ego and art, self-centeredness and self-knowledge. When reading a flannel-mouthed blogger or blog-commenter who proclaims himself a lineal descendent of the man who defined essai and, in the process, what it means to be human, my respect for our bottomless delusional capacity is renewed.
Montaigne mingles friendliness, the promise of good company, with an implied indifference to the reactions he elicits in readers. He seeks neither to make us love him, as a sycophant might, nor to gratuitously offend us with contrariness – two strategies common among writers with niggling gifts. He is gracious but never cloyingly ingratiating, and his self-confidence seldom turns cocky. He’s too preoccupied with the task at hand – tracing the nature of his nature in sentences reflecting every illumination and blind alley – to fret over “audience.” This is where Sarah Bakewell goes wrong, in How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer and in her posting on The Paris Review blog:
“There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it.”
Montaigne did not write “spontaneously and ramblingly.” His was not a Romantic or Beat temperament. He was an inveterate rewriter. His essays wander and digress with care and precision, unlike much of Bakewell’s book and post which are blemished with fuzziness. I enjoyed much of How to Live but found it frustrating because it could have been improved by more attention paid to the master’s lessons. When writing about himself, Montaigne is simultaneously writing about us, drawing general truths from particulars and giving the eerie impression of discovering who we are. The world “loving” him for it would have made no sense. Hazlitt limns Montaigne wonderfully in “On the Periodical Essayists”:
“He does not converse with us like a pedagogue with his pupil, whom he wishes to make as great a blockhead as himself, but like a philosopher and friend who has passed through life with thought and observation, and is willing to enable others to pass through it with pleasure and profit. A writer of this stamp, I confess, appears to me as much superior to a common bookworm, as a library of real books is superior to a mere book-case, painted and lettered on the outside with the names of celebrated works.”
Bakewell rightly praises Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and, among other heirs of Montaigne, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne, but also lauds “the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people, emerges in Anglophone writers from Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen, from Annie Dillard to David Sedaris” – mediocrities all. Even worse, Bakewell betrays a remarkable depth of ignorance in referring to Samuel Johnson as “pompously classical.” As Johnson writes in The Rambler #137:
"Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves.”
In a blindfold test, this might be mistaken for the confessions of a solipsist, the sort of self-absorbed twit for whom “blog” is a four-letter word for “me.” In fact it comes from “Of Experience,” Montaigne’s final essay, and thus illustrates the fine line dividing ego and art, self-centeredness and self-knowledge. When reading a flannel-mouthed blogger or blog-commenter who proclaims himself a lineal descendent of the man who defined essai and, in the process, what it means to be human, my respect for our bottomless delusional capacity is renewed.
Montaigne mingles friendliness, the promise of good company, with an implied indifference to the reactions he elicits in readers. He seeks neither to make us love him, as a sycophant might, nor to gratuitously offend us with contrariness – two strategies common among writers with niggling gifts. He is gracious but never cloyingly ingratiating, and his self-confidence seldom turns cocky. He’s too preoccupied with the task at hand – tracing the nature of his nature in sentences reflecting every illumination and blind alley – to fret over “audience.” This is where Sarah Bakewell goes wrong, in How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer and in her posting on The Paris Review blog:
“There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it.”
Montaigne did not write “spontaneously and ramblingly.” His was not a Romantic or Beat temperament. He was an inveterate rewriter. His essays wander and digress with care and precision, unlike much of Bakewell’s book and post which are blemished with fuzziness. I enjoyed much of How to Live but found it frustrating because it could have been improved by more attention paid to the master’s lessons. When writing about himself, Montaigne is simultaneously writing about us, drawing general truths from particulars and giving the eerie impression of discovering who we are. The world “loving” him for it would have made no sense. Hazlitt limns Montaigne wonderfully in “On the Periodical Essayists”:
“He does not converse with us like a pedagogue with his pupil, whom he wishes to make as great a blockhead as himself, but like a philosopher and friend who has passed through life with thought and observation, and is willing to enable others to pass through it with pleasure and profit. A writer of this stamp, I confess, appears to me as much superior to a common bookworm, as a library of real books is superior to a mere book-case, painted and lettered on the outside with the names of celebrated works.”
Bakewell rightly praises Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and, among other heirs of Montaigne, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne, but also lauds “the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people, emerges in Anglophone writers from Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen, from Annie Dillard to David Sedaris” – mediocrities all. Even worse, Bakewell betrays a remarkable depth of ignorance in referring to Samuel Johnson as “pompously classical.” As Johnson writes in The Rambler #137:
"Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves.”
Thursday, November 18, 2010
`That Peculiarly Metallic, Clangorous Sound'
The reed section, eight pieces, heavy on tenor and baritone, tuned up behind us, out of sight, plumbing the comic vision of Antoine-Joseph “Adolphe” Sax. A first-grader pointed north and announced: “Ducks!” She meant Canada geese but her sharp-eyed “land-ho!" heartiness confirmed an observation Thoreau made in his journal on Nov. 8, 1857:
“I saw through my window some children looking up and pointing their tiny bows into the heavens, and I knew at once that the geese were in the air. It is always an exciting event. The children, instinctively aware of its importance, rushed into the house to tell their parents. These travelers are revealed to you by the upward-turned gaze of men. And though these undulating lines are melting into the southwestern sky, the sound comes clear and distinct to you as the clank of a chain in a neighboring stithy.”
“Stithy” means an anvil or blacksmith’s forge, and the sound of chain on the smithy’s stithy is surely as distinctive as geese on the wing. They are nature’s aural comedians (rivaled only by frogs and pigs), though rather uncomedically nasty in close encounters. Thoreau admired their raucousness, the geometry of their flight formations and their migratory precision. In an entry from 1859 he refers to the honking of geese as “that peculiarly metallic, clangorous sound.” In the sentences immediately following the passage cited above Thoreau writes:
“So they migrate, not flitting from hedge to hedge, but from latitude to latitude, from State to State, steering boldly out into the ocean of air. It is remarkable how these large objects [adult wingspan: up to 1.7 meters; weight: up to 19.8 pounds], so plain when your vision is rightly directed, may be lost in the sky if you look away for a moment,--as hard to hit as a star with a telescope.”
“I saw through my window some children looking up and pointing their tiny bows into the heavens, and I knew at once that the geese were in the air. It is always an exciting event. The children, instinctively aware of its importance, rushed into the house to tell their parents. These travelers are revealed to you by the upward-turned gaze of men. And though these undulating lines are melting into the southwestern sky, the sound comes clear and distinct to you as the clank of a chain in a neighboring stithy.”
“Stithy” means an anvil or blacksmith’s forge, and the sound of chain on the smithy’s stithy is surely as distinctive as geese on the wing. They are nature’s aural comedians (rivaled only by frogs and pigs), though rather uncomedically nasty in close encounters. Thoreau admired their raucousness, the geometry of their flight formations and their migratory precision. In an entry from 1859 he refers to the honking of geese as “that peculiarly metallic, clangorous sound.” In the sentences immediately following the passage cited above Thoreau writes:
“So they migrate, not flitting from hedge to hedge, but from latitude to latitude, from State to State, steering boldly out into the ocean of air. It is remarkable how these large objects [adult wingspan: up to 1.7 meters; weight: up to 19.8 pounds], so plain when your vision is rightly directed, may be lost in the sky if you look away for a moment,--as hard to hit as a star with a telescope.”
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
`Write What You Like'
If a poem doesn’t rhyme it’s not necessarily a bad one but the poet has to work harder to make it a good one. An unrhymed poem must compensate by drawing on other resources – of language and music, thought and emotion – if it's not to fade into mere prose, and probably not very good prose. Without rhyme and the other creative restraints of form, the poet is tempted to say something, to make a point at the expense of making a poem. Like every other work of art, each poem must prove itself to each reader, and by doing so prove it’s a poem.
The presence of “manifesto” in its title virtually guarantees I won’t read something, whether or not it’s modified by “Communist,” but I’ve made an exception for “Presto Manifesto!” by the American poet A.E. Stallings. She demolishes the notion that rhyme inherently hobbles “creativity.” In fact, she makes you wonder why a poet would choose not to rhyme. Here’s a witty and common-sensical sample:
“There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them.”
Apropos of poets “making a point,” Stallings says tersely:
“Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say.”
Consider “Turtle” (Flamingo Watching, 1994) by Kay Ryan, one of the best, subtlest and funniest rhymers around:
“Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.”
“Graceless” and “places.” “Slope” and “hopes.” “Lottery” and “pottery.” “Wings” and “things.” Ryan’s poems are sound-tapestries, and rhyme is only the most obvious of her threads. As Stallings says: “There are no forbidden rhymes.”
In another essay, “Crooked Roads Without Improvement: Some Thoughts on Formal Verse,” Stallings defends what she calls “artifice,” which she convincingly argues makes art “effective and direct,” hardly news to Jonson, Pope and Cunningham. She refers to “…another little adage of mine, which is, don’t write what you know (I think this is better suited for prose writers) [sometimes], write what you like, the sort of stuff you actually enjoy reading, fashionable or not.”
This too seems like common sense, doubly unexpected coming from a poet. Why do writers choose to write according to a blueprint that inevitably results in dreariness? They can’t possibly enjoy reading (or writing) the stuff. Stallings speculates on the worship of tedium:
“Why, by the way, is the sense of pleasure in the arts so little valued by our intellectuals? Sure, it is easy to poke fun at the (perhaps disingenuous) `I don’t know about art, but I know what I like.’ But how much sadder the phrase, `I know volumes about art, but I don’t know what I like.’ Any criticism not based, at some level, on `This work pleases me because . . .’ or `I find this work distasteful on account of . . .’ should be viewed with suspicion. It is of no practical value, and possibly dishonest.”
The presence of “manifesto” in its title virtually guarantees I won’t read something, whether or not it’s modified by “Communist,” but I’ve made an exception for “Presto Manifesto!” by the American poet A.E. Stallings. She demolishes the notion that rhyme inherently hobbles “creativity.” In fact, she makes you wonder why a poet would choose not to rhyme. Here’s a witty and common-sensical sample:
“There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them.”
Apropos of poets “making a point,” Stallings says tersely:
“Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say.”
Consider “Turtle” (Flamingo Watching, 1994) by Kay Ryan, one of the best, subtlest and funniest rhymers around:
“Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.”
“Graceless” and “places.” “Slope” and “hopes.” “Lottery” and “pottery.” “Wings” and “things.” Ryan’s poems are sound-tapestries, and rhyme is only the most obvious of her threads. As Stallings says: “There are no forbidden rhymes.”
In another essay, “Crooked Roads Without Improvement: Some Thoughts on Formal Verse,” Stallings defends what she calls “artifice,” which she convincingly argues makes art “effective and direct,” hardly news to Jonson, Pope and Cunningham. She refers to “…another little adage of mine, which is, don’t write what you know (I think this is better suited for prose writers) [sometimes], write what you like, the sort of stuff you actually enjoy reading, fashionable or not.”
This too seems like common sense, doubly unexpected coming from a poet. Why do writers choose to write according to a blueprint that inevitably results in dreariness? They can’t possibly enjoy reading (or writing) the stuff. Stallings speculates on the worship of tedium:
“Why, by the way, is the sense of pleasure in the arts so little valued by our intellectuals? Sure, it is easy to poke fun at the (perhaps disingenuous) `I don’t know about art, but I know what I like.’ But how much sadder the phrase, `I know volumes about art, but I don’t know what I like.’ Any criticism not based, at some level, on `This work pleases me because . . .’ or `I find this work distasteful on account of . . .’ should be viewed with suspicion. It is of no practical value, and possibly dishonest.”
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
`Made Merry With the Hardy Laurel'
What’s the natural restorative for a cold, dripping, under-caffeinated Monday morning? Laurel and Hardy, who arrived at dawn via e-mail, thanks to Dave Lull. The scene is from Way Out West (1937). The boys have just arrived by stagecoach in Brushwood Gulch, and in front of the saloon the Avalon Boys are singing “At the Ball, That's All” – at least on the original soundtrack. The version Dave sent is roughly synched to Santana’s cover of Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va.”
For my money, no one is funnier than Laurel and Hardy, especially when they dance. “Slapstick” is misjudged a broad form of comedy, clumsy and heavy-handed, but the art of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy is one of delicacy and grace in the service of idiocy. Watch the way Stanley flutters the tails of his coat as though shooing away slow children and the tenderness of Oliver’s gesture when he lowers his bent leg with one finger applied to the knee. I’ve always envied the rakish tilt Oliver achieves with his bowler. If ballet were funny, it would be Laurel and Hardy.
I’m convinced another admirer, Samuel Beckett, had Laurel and Hardy in mind when writing Mercier and Camier (1946). Keep in mind the boys dancing while reading this scene:
“Even side by side, said Mercier, as now, arm to arm, hand in hand, legs in unison, we are fraught with more events than could fit in a fat tome, two fat tomes, your fat tome and my fat tome. Whence no doubt our blessed sense of nothing, nothing to be done, nothing to be said.”
In his “Addenda” to Watt (written in occupied France during World War II, published 1953) Beckett includes this lightly encrypted encomium:
“I helped to lay out this darling place, said the old man.
“In that case, said Arthur, perhaps you can tell me the name of this extraordinary growth.
“That’s what we calls a hardy laurel, said the old man.
“Arthur went back into the house and wrote, in his journal: Took a turn in the garden. Thanked God for a small mercy. Made merry with the hardy laurel. Bestowed alms on an old man formerly employed by Knott family.”
For my money, no one is funnier than Laurel and Hardy, especially when they dance. “Slapstick” is misjudged a broad form of comedy, clumsy and heavy-handed, but the art of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy is one of delicacy and grace in the service of idiocy. Watch the way Stanley flutters the tails of his coat as though shooing away slow children and the tenderness of Oliver’s gesture when he lowers his bent leg with one finger applied to the knee. I’ve always envied the rakish tilt Oliver achieves with his bowler. If ballet were funny, it would be Laurel and Hardy.
I’m convinced another admirer, Samuel Beckett, had Laurel and Hardy in mind when writing Mercier and Camier (1946). Keep in mind the boys dancing while reading this scene:
“Even side by side, said Mercier, as now, arm to arm, hand in hand, legs in unison, we are fraught with more events than could fit in a fat tome, two fat tomes, your fat tome and my fat tome. Whence no doubt our blessed sense of nothing, nothing to be done, nothing to be said.”
In his “Addenda” to Watt (written in occupied France during World War II, published 1953) Beckett includes this lightly encrypted encomium:
“I helped to lay out this darling place, said the old man.
“In that case, said Arthur, perhaps you can tell me the name of this extraordinary growth.
“That’s what we calls a hardy laurel, said the old man.
“Arthur went back into the house and wrote, in his journal: Took a turn in the garden. Thanked God for a small mercy. Made merry with the hardy laurel. Bestowed alms on an old man formerly employed by Knott family.”
Monday, November 15, 2010
`A Little Space of Order'
My brother has posted a striking photograph he took behind his house in suburban Cleveland, the house in which we grew up, at dawn on Saturday. It may resemble a lighthouse in Maine or an Egyptian obelisk but in fact the black tower seen in silhouette is the chimney my father erected forty years ago when he built a fireplace in the bedroom my brother and I once shared. In 1964, we had moved into our own rooms on the second floor and the bedroom became a family room. The fireplace occupies the space where my bed once stood, where I looked out the window in search of Explorer I and listened late at night to the crystal radio I built and grounded on the radiator.
We’ve always joked about the oversized dimensions of the chimney, the fireplace and everything else our father built (including us). The black line in the lower right corner of the photo is a steel beam added to brace the chimney. The fireplace, built of stone and brick, looks substantial enough to smelt iron but couldn’t be used because it filled the house with smoke. My father’s most benign legacy to me was a sustaining aversion to the large, ungainly and ponderous (rock operas, house trailers, Charles Olson). In general my preference is for the small-scaled, graceful and understated. In “The Goldsmith,” the English poet Clive Wilmer suggests the sensibility I’m describing:
“To stay anxiety I engrave this gold,
Shaping an amulet whose edges hold
A little space of order: where I find,
Suffused with light, a dwelling for the mind.”
At some level I judge most works of art against the ideal of “A little space of order.” I’m pleased Wilmer chooses “amulet” over “necklace” or “bracelet.” An amulet is charmed. More than a beautiful object, it possesses powers, supernatural or otherwise, like any work of art. Wilmer also edited Unto this Last, and Other Writings (Penguin, 1986), a selection from Ruskin’s work. In a passage Wilmer takes from The Stones of Venice, Ruskin writes:
“But the working of the goldsmith, and the various designing of grouped jewellery [sic] and enamel-work, may become the subject of the most noble human intelligence.”
[The text accompanying my brother’s photograph comes from an interview with another "noble human intelligence," Muddy Waters: “Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich.”]
We’ve always joked about the oversized dimensions of the chimney, the fireplace and everything else our father built (including us). The black line in the lower right corner of the photo is a steel beam added to brace the chimney. The fireplace, built of stone and brick, looks substantial enough to smelt iron but couldn’t be used because it filled the house with smoke. My father’s most benign legacy to me was a sustaining aversion to the large, ungainly and ponderous (rock operas, house trailers, Charles Olson). In general my preference is for the small-scaled, graceful and understated. In “The Goldsmith,” the English poet Clive Wilmer suggests the sensibility I’m describing:
“To stay anxiety I engrave this gold,
Shaping an amulet whose edges hold
A little space of order: where I find,
Suffused with light, a dwelling for the mind.”
At some level I judge most works of art against the ideal of “A little space of order.” I’m pleased Wilmer chooses “amulet” over “necklace” or “bracelet.” An amulet is charmed. More than a beautiful object, it possesses powers, supernatural or otherwise, like any work of art. Wilmer also edited Unto this Last, and Other Writings (Penguin, 1986), a selection from Ruskin’s work. In a passage Wilmer takes from The Stones of Venice, Ruskin writes:
“But the working of the goldsmith, and the various designing of grouped jewellery [sic] and enamel-work, may become the subject of the most noble human intelligence.”
[The text accompanying my brother’s photograph comes from an interview with another "noble human intelligence," Muddy Waters: “Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich.”]
Sunday, November 14, 2010
`No Sense of the Dark, the Foul, the Base'
Stephen Pentz reminded me of a classic Bellow one-liner from “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” (1982), spoken by the story’s narrator, Herschel Shawmut:
“A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, `Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?’”
Evil can’t be philosophized, psychologized or historicized away. It’s at least as real as human goodness and all of us carry its seed. In Bellow’s story, the UBC professor’s blather is echoed in a venomous parody of Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist “Twaddle!”
I wish I’d remembered Shawmut’s wisecrack last summer while reading the two volumes of selections from Emerson’s journals published by the Library of America. Emerson’s prose is often dazzling, packing essays into sentences, and I prize him for that, but his understanding of human nature is dangerously, laughably naïve, the air-headed lunacy of a Unitarian. Henry James, creator of Gilbert Ormond and Madame Merle, Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant, had his number. In 1887, in a review of A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Elliot Cabot, James writes:
“..he had no great sense of wrong – a strangely limited one, indeed for a moralist – no sense of the dark, the foul, the base. There were certain complications in life which he never suspected.”
“A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, `Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?’”
Evil can’t be philosophized, psychologized or historicized away. It’s at least as real as human goodness and all of us carry its seed. In Bellow’s story, the UBC professor’s blather is echoed in a venomous parody of Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist “Twaddle!”
I wish I’d remembered Shawmut’s wisecrack last summer while reading the two volumes of selections from Emerson’s journals published by the Library of America. Emerson’s prose is often dazzling, packing essays into sentences, and I prize him for that, but his understanding of human nature is dangerously, laughably naïve, the air-headed lunacy of a Unitarian. Henry James, creator of Gilbert Ormond and Madame Merle, Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant, had his number. In 1887, in a review of A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Elliot Cabot, James writes:
“..he had no great sense of wrong – a strangely limited one, indeed for a moralist – no sense of the dark, the foul, the base. There were certain complications in life which he never suspected.”
Saturday, November 13, 2010
`Go Talking and Have Easy Hours'
I met Stephen Pentz, proprietor of First Known When Lost, for lunch on Friday at a nearby mall, and he presented me with a copy of Saul Bellow’s just-published Letters. This was our first non-digital meeting and the next two hours evaporated with talk almost exclusively of books – Bellow, of course, and Edward Thomas, Larkin and Amis, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Elizabeth Bishop, Kay Ryan, Walker Percy, Derek Mahon, Bob Dylan, John Cheever and so on. We agreed the allure of Yeats and Frost has palled, that Louis MacNeice is underrated and the blogosphere can be an uncivil place. Like Bellow in his letters, our talk was bookish, a rare indulgence.
It’s to Stephen I owe my recent discovery of C.H. Sisson, and I wish to return the favor. With our meeting place in mind – a “bar & grille” in a suburban shopping mall – I offer Sisson’s translation of Horace’s Ode II.15 (In the Trojan Ditch: Collected Poems and Selected Translations, 1974):
“There will be nothing soon for the plough
But huge bulks everywhere. On all sides
Wider than lakes, the city
Lamp-standards drive out the elms,
“Planes, beeches. Once it was fertile here.
Edges of violets circumscribed
The grove; there was everywhere something for the
Nostrils, but now there is nothing.
“Where there were once forests a region of
Concrete. Until quite recently
There were meadows at Westminster.
The salmon leaped where Raleigh was beheaded.
“Once there was only nature for ornament.
Then there was ornament and art flourished;
Now there is only the South Bank
And, of course, the Arts Council.
“It was not laws but a less abstract
Technology made the turf spring.
The churches in those days, you may
Remember, were built of stone.”
Sisson’s reworking of Horace and our talk of Larkin reminded me of the latter's “Going, Going” (The High Windows):
“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”
Many thanks, Stephen. May we continue to “Go talking and have easy hours.”
It’s to Stephen I owe my recent discovery of C.H. Sisson, and I wish to return the favor. With our meeting place in mind – a “bar & grille” in a suburban shopping mall – I offer Sisson’s translation of Horace’s Ode II.15 (In the Trojan Ditch: Collected Poems and Selected Translations, 1974):
“There will be nothing soon for the plough
But huge bulks everywhere. On all sides
Wider than lakes, the city
Lamp-standards drive out the elms,
“Planes, beeches. Once it was fertile here.
Edges of violets circumscribed
The grove; there was everywhere something for the
Nostrils, but now there is nothing.
“Where there were once forests a region of
Concrete. Until quite recently
There were meadows at Westminster.
The salmon leaped where Raleigh was beheaded.
“Once there was only nature for ornament.
Then there was ornament and art flourished;
Now there is only the South Bank
And, of course, the Arts Council.
“It was not laws but a less abstract
Technology made the turf spring.
The churches in those days, you may
Remember, were built of stone.”
Sisson’s reworking of Horace and our talk of Larkin reminded me of the latter's “Going, Going” (The High Windows):
“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”
Many thanks, Stephen. May we continue to “Go talking and have easy hours.”
Friday, November 12, 2010
`A Burden to Me'
This makes me laugh, as it did the first time I read it thirty years ago:
“I suppose I read Aristotle in college but not to know I was doing it; the same with Plato. I don’t have the kind of mind that can carry such beyond the actual reading, i.e., total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me. So I couldn’t make any judgment on the Summa, except to say this: I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during the process and say, `Turn off that light. It’s late,’ I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, `On the contrary, I answer that the light, being eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,’ or some such thing.”
I too am blessedly unburdened by my education. The university was no more than an intellectual match-making service, an instrument of exposure – to writers and a large library that permitted me to read them. I remember the reassuring thrill of knowing the campus library was open twenty-four hours a day. If I needed Tertullian, Hobbes or George Herbert at 3 a.m., they were a short walk away.
For the purposes of education, I found most fellow students an irritation to be endured, which I suppose taught me something. Even with several excellent teachers I remained, for good and ill, an autodidact but not always, I hope, a know-it-all. I was acutely aware of my ignorance but resented most intermediaries – critics, interpreters, systematizers – and felt only aversion for grand theories. To this day I like to meet a book on my terms, without a middle-man, because most of the best books teach me how to read them. My request is simple: Don’t tell me what to think; show me what you know.
The passage quoted above is from a letter Flannery O’Connor wrote to “A.” on Aug. 9, 1955 (The Habit of Being, 1979). Here are the subsequent sentences:
“In any case, I feel I can personally guarantee that St. Thomas loved God because for the love of me I cannot help loving St. Thomas. His brothers didn’t want him to waste himself being a Dominican and so locked him up in a tower and introduced a prostitute into his apartment; he ran her out with a red-hot poker. It would be fashionable today to be in sympathy with the woman, but I am in sympathy with St. Thomas.”
O’Connor speaks of loving Aquinas, and love is always the engine driving a true education.
“I suppose I read Aristotle in college but not to know I was doing it; the same with Plato. I don’t have the kind of mind that can carry such beyond the actual reading, i.e., total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me. So I couldn’t make any judgment on the Summa, except to say this: I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during the process and say, `Turn off that light. It’s late,’ I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, `On the contrary, I answer that the light, being eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,’ or some such thing.”
I too am blessedly unburdened by my education. The university was no more than an intellectual match-making service, an instrument of exposure – to writers and a large library that permitted me to read them. I remember the reassuring thrill of knowing the campus library was open twenty-four hours a day. If I needed Tertullian, Hobbes or George Herbert at 3 a.m., they were a short walk away.
For the purposes of education, I found most fellow students an irritation to be endured, which I suppose taught me something. Even with several excellent teachers I remained, for good and ill, an autodidact but not always, I hope, a know-it-all. I was acutely aware of my ignorance but resented most intermediaries – critics, interpreters, systematizers – and felt only aversion for grand theories. To this day I like to meet a book on my terms, without a middle-man, because most of the best books teach me how to read them. My request is simple: Don’t tell me what to think; show me what you know.
The passage quoted above is from a letter Flannery O’Connor wrote to “A.” on Aug. 9, 1955 (The Habit of Being, 1979). Here are the subsequent sentences:
“In any case, I feel I can personally guarantee that St. Thomas loved God because for the love of me I cannot help loving St. Thomas. His brothers didn’t want him to waste himself being a Dominican and so locked him up in a tower and introduced a prostitute into his apartment; he ran her out with a red-hot poker. It would be fashionable today to be in sympathy with the woman, but I am in sympathy with St. Thomas.”
O’Connor speaks of loving Aquinas, and love is always the engine driving a true education.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
`The Memory Lets Escape What is Over and Above'
My only living link with the First World War was my maternal step-grandfather, James Aloysius Kelly, a diminutive house painter who maintained his good nature despite advancing age and dedicated drinking. I wish I had paid better attention as a child, as only two of Kelly’s war stories survive in memory. In one, he described a restaurant near the Army base where he underwent basic training in 1917. In the window hung a sign: “No Dogs or Irish.” The other is set in France. His unit had pitched camp in a beet field, where Kelly and other doughboys staged a beet fight. No recollections of combat, as with my father in the next war.
More than nine million died in four years, exceeding five-thousand five-hundred for every day of the war, an unprecedented slaughter exceeded two decades later. On Tuesday I asked three of my fifth-grade reading students what Veterans Day was about. “Soldiers,” one said. Had they ever heard of Armistice Day? No recognition. What about Verdun, the Marne and the Somme? Who fought whom? Nothing, as though the Great War had never happened.
As a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Welsh poet and artist David Jones served on the Western Front from December 1915 to March 1918. In Part 7 of In Parenthesis he writes:
“The memory lets escape what is over and above---
as spilled bitterness, unmeasured, poured-out,
and again drenched down---demoniac-pouring:
who grins who pours to fill flood and super-flow insensately,
pint-pot---from milliard-quart measure.”
Another of Kelly’s war stories comes to me: “Ypres” he pronounced “YIP-pers.”
More than nine million died in four years, exceeding five-thousand five-hundred for every day of the war, an unprecedented slaughter exceeded two decades later. On Tuesday I asked three of my fifth-grade reading students what Veterans Day was about. “Soldiers,” one said. Had they ever heard of Armistice Day? No recognition. What about Verdun, the Marne and the Somme? Who fought whom? Nothing, as though the Great War had never happened.
As a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Welsh poet and artist David Jones served on the Western Front from December 1915 to March 1918. In Part 7 of In Parenthesis he writes:
“The memory lets escape what is over and above---
as spilled bitterness, unmeasured, poured-out,
and again drenched down---demoniac-pouring:
who grins who pours to fill flood and super-flow insensately,
pint-pot---from milliard-quart measure.”
Another of Kelly’s war stories comes to me: “Ypres” he pronounced “YIP-pers.”
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
`Contentment Out of Nothing'
In exchange for some framing work a gallery owner gave my brother an etching by the Hungarian artist Jenő Tarjáni Simkovics (1895-1995). The title is “Philosopher” – a balding, aging man, sleeves rolled to the elbows, right hand holding left forearm, looking more like a worker than a thinker, an ascetic Eric Hoffer. My brother found the etching in an unsorted file of prints and other works, and immediately claimed it.
Measuring about seven inches by five inches, in black, white and sepia, it gives the impression of being, in my brother’s words, “bathed in an other-worldly light.” He gave it a three-quarter-inch black frame. The planes in the background recall late Cezanne, and Ken says the crosshatching looks like Klee’s work. Hinted at in the online image but more conspicuous in the original is the image of an owl, the classical emblem of wisdom, perched behind the philosopher.
What especially pleases me is that Simkovics gives his philosopher the look of a happy man, not a conventionally tormented one. As my brother said, “There’s a look of contentment about him.”
First I thought of Wallace Stevens and his homage to his friend George Santayana --
“The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome…”
-- but I’ve been reading C.H. Sisson’s poems for the first time and finding likenesses of Simkovics’ thinker in many, including this from a sequence titled “Autumn Poems”:
“I am looking for contentment out of nothing
For new things are made out of what is new
And I have none except this: the birds' song,
The rain, the evening sky, the grass on the lawn.”
Measuring about seven inches by five inches, in black, white and sepia, it gives the impression of being, in my brother’s words, “bathed in an other-worldly light.” He gave it a three-quarter-inch black frame. The planes in the background recall late Cezanne, and Ken says the crosshatching looks like Klee’s work. Hinted at in the online image but more conspicuous in the original is the image of an owl, the classical emblem of wisdom, perched behind the philosopher.
What especially pleases me is that Simkovics gives his philosopher the look of a happy man, not a conventionally tormented one. As my brother said, “There’s a look of contentment about him.”
First I thought of Wallace Stevens and his homage to his friend George Santayana --
“The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome…”
-- but I’ve been reading C.H. Sisson’s poems for the first time and finding likenesses of Simkovics’ thinker in many, including this from a sequence titled “Autumn Poems”:
“I am looking for contentment out of nothing
For new things are made out of what is new
And I have none except this: the birds' song,
The rain, the evening sky, the grass on the lawn.”
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
`Back Then Time Was Still Harmony'
My brother framed a drawing of the young Schubert for his father-in-law, a German-born lover of Germanic music. I asked if the composer was wearing his trademark glasses, which I’ve always thought resembled an instrument of torture. No, this was a rendering of Schubert at age fourteen, sans specs. Ken asked if I knew that the designer of Schubert’s glasses also built an ear trumpet for Beethoven and invented the metronome -- a wonderful musical convergence and all news to me.
The inventor in question had a name almost as wondrous: Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who embodied equal parts engineer, entrepreneur and conman. I hope someone writes his life but “metronome” had stopped me. It’s one of those catalytic words that sets off a chain of associative reactions, in this case sending me back half a century to my Uncle Richard and Aunt Nancy’s basement – black and white linoleum, stacks of National Geographic, a rattan basket beneath the laundry chute into which we once stuffed a parrot, and an upright piano with a black Bakelite metronome ticking on top. Seated at the keyboard, practicing her Czerny études, is my cousin Julie, a secret crush. She was two years my senior and in reveries I imagined we had been kidnapped from a much more refined milieu. Julie always beat me at chess. I know she’s married and worked for Jane Goodall, and I’ve haven’t seen her in forty years, but part of me is still seated on the couch behind her, listening, in love.
She and Chopin, Czerny and metronome, sound a chord of memory, at which point I enter the realm of Donald Justice, poet, musician, magician of memory. Here is “The Pupil” (The Sunset Maker, 1987):
“Picture me, the shy pupil at the door,
One small, tight fist clutching the dread Czerny.
Back then time was still harmony, not money,
And I could spend a whole week practicing for
That moment on the threshold.
Then to take courage,
And enter, and pass among mysterious scents,
And sit quite straight, and with a frail confidence
Assault the keyboard with a childish flourish!
“Only to lose my place, or forget the key,
And almost doubt the very metronome
(Outside, the traffic, the laborers going home),
And still to bear on across Chopin or Brahms,
Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms
Of C# minor and the calms of C.”
The inventor in question had a name almost as wondrous: Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who embodied equal parts engineer, entrepreneur and conman. I hope someone writes his life but “metronome” had stopped me. It’s one of those catalytic words that sets off a chain of associative reactions, in this case sending me back half a century to my Uncle Richard and Aunt Nancy’s basement – black and white linoleum, stacks of National Geographic, a rattan basket beneath the laundry chute into which we once stuffed a parrot, and an upright piano with a black Bakelite metronome ticking on top. Seated at the keyboard, practicing her Czerny études, is my cousin Julie, a secret crush. She was two years my senior and in reveries I imagined we had been kidnapped from a much more refined milieu. Julie always beat me at chess. I know she’s married and worked for Jane Goodall, and I’ve haven’t seen her in forty years, but part of me is still seated on the couch behind her, listening, in love.
She and Chopin, Czerny and metronome, sound a chord of memory, at which point I enter the realm of Donald Justice, poet, musician, magician of memory. Here is “The Pupil” (The Sunset Maker, 1987):
“Picture me, the shy pupil at the door,
One small, tight fist clutching the dread Czerny.
Back then time was still harmony, not money,
And I could spend a whole week practicing for
That moment on the threshold.
Then to take courage,
And enter, and pass among mysterious scents,
And sit quite straight, and with a frail confidence
Assault the keyboard with a childish flourish!
“Only to lose my place, or forget the key,
And almost doubt the very metronome
(Outside, the traffic, the laborers going home),
And still to bear on across Chopin or Brahms,
Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms
Of C# minor and the calms of C.”
Monday, November 08, 2010
`Took Up Books As If They Were People'
When Montaigne retired from public life in 1571, age thirty-seven, he moved into the Château de Montaigne in the Dordogne and claimed one of its fortified towers as his redoubt (his wife occupied the other tower). He turned the ground floor into a chapel and added an inner spiral staircase. The next floor became his bedroom and the next his library, his bookish sanctum sanctorum. Sarah Bakewell describes it in How to Live:
“The most striking feature of the main library room, when Montaigne occupied it, was his fine collection of books, housed in five rows on a beautifully curving set of shelves. The curve was necessary to fit the round tower, and must have been quite a carpentry challenge. The shelves presented all Montaigne’s books to his view at a single glance: a satisfying sweep. He owned around a thousand volumes by the time he moved into the library, many inherited from his friend [Étienne de]La Boétie, others bought by himself. It was a substantial collection, and Montaigne actually read his books, too. Today they are dispersed; the shelves too have gone.”
The final sentence is a reminder that we don’t truly own possessions; even the best of us merely take care of them for a short time. With sufficient wealth and good taste, Montaigne fashioned the perfect boy’s club house -- for one boy. I don’t say this derisively. Some people put knotty-pine paneling, a pool table and bar in the basement and declare it a sanctuary. Who can blame them? Montaigne, a veteran administrator during a time of religious civil war, needed something else – quiet, distance, perspective, time. Bakewell’s line is perhaps unintentionally funny: “…and Montaigne actually read his books, too.”
I know a man, still young, who has accumulated so many books he stores them, at considerable expense, in the climate-controlled space he rents on the other side of the city where he lives. He visits them as he might a convalescing aunt but the books remain in sealed, unlabeled, acid-free boxes. Once I mentioned Jonathan Galassi’s translation of Montale’s Collected Poems 1920-1954. He got excited and said he bought it in hardcover when it was published in 1998, but had never found time to read it. It’s in one of the boxes.
I understand the collecting mania and had a mild case of it when young, and I also understand the cachet even unread books bestow on their owners. There was a time when I would have been consumed with envy over so many virgin volumes. The difference between the suburban storage-unit and Montaigne’s tower is a difference of sensibility, yes, but also of need. My library, perhaps five thousand volumes, is a fluid work in progress. I own a few valuable volumes – valuable mostly because their authors signed them for me -- but some of the most precious are broken-spined paperbacks I’ve owned and read for years – J.V. Cunningham’s Collected Essays and Pascal’s Pensées in a 1961 Penguin edition. I don’t own a single book I wouldn’t give away to the appropriate reader.
Bakewell says Montaigne “took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family.”
“The most striking feature of the main library room, when Montaigne occupied it, was his fine collection of books, housed in five rows on a beautifully curving set of shelves. The curve was necessary to fit the round tower, and must have been quite a carpentry challenge. The shelves presented all Montaigne’s books to his view at a single glance: a satisfying sweep. He owned around a thousand volumes by the time he moved into the library, many inherited from his friend [Étienne de]La Boétie, others bought by himself. It was a substantial collection, and Montaigne actually read his books, too. Today they are dispersed; the shelves too have gone.”
The final sentence is a reminder that we don’t truly own possessions; even the best of us merely take care of them for a short time. With sufficient wealth and good taste, Montaigne fashioned the perfect boy’s club house -- for one boy. I don’t say this derisively. Some people put knotty-pine paneling, a pool table and bar in the basement and declare it a sanctuary. Who can blame them? Montaigne, a veteran administrator during a time of religious civil war, needed something else – quiet, distance, perspective, time. Bakewell’s line is perhaps unintentionally funny: “…and Montaigne actually read his books, too.”
I know a man, still young, who has accumulated so many books he stores them, at considerable expense, in the climate-controlled space he rents on the other side of the city where he lives. He visits them as he might a convalescing aunt but the books remain in sealed, unlabeled, acid-free boxes. Once I mentioned Jonathan Galassi’s translation of Montale’s Collected Poems 1920-1954. He got excited and said he bought it in hardcover when it was published in 1998, but had never found time to read it. It’s in one of the boxes.
I understand the collecting mania and had a mild case of it when young, and I also understand the cachet even unread books bestow on their owners. There was a time when I would have been consumed with envy over so many virgin volumes. The difference between the suburban storage-unit and Montaigne’s tower is a difference of sensibility, yes, but also of need. My library, perhaps five thousand volumes, is a fluid work in progress. I own a few valuable volumes – valuable mostly because their authors signed them for me -- but some of the most precious are broken-spined paperbacks I’ve owned and read for years – J.V. Cunningham’s Collected Essays and Pascal’s Pensées in a 1961 Penguin edition. I don’t own a single book I wouldn’t give away to the appropriate reader.
Bakewell says Montaigne “took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family.”
Sunday, November 07, 2010
`Always Forming New Wholes'
Eliot writes in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921): “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” Both essay and sentence are lastingly influential and often quoted, but the subsequent sentences prove even more interesting:
“When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”
I would stretch “poet” to “writer.” Along with linguistic gifts – that is, a taste for words -- the writer’s essential tool is a hearty appetite for experience and a synthesizing imagination. Nothing is lost, no matter how small, and all potentially is useful. Experience is to a writer as krill is to a whale.
At last I’m reading How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) by Sarah Bakewell. Don’t let the tacky subtitle (most likely a publisher’s ploy) deter you. We’ve needed a popular life of the essayist since Donald Frame published his more scholarly biography in 1965. I’ve only just started reading Bakewell’s book (a belated birthday present) but already have noted a number of passages, including one that reminded me of Eliot’s observation:
“Montaigne wanted to drift away, yet he also wanted to attach himself to reality and extract every grain of experience from it. Writing made it possible to do both. Even as he lost himself in his reveries, he secretly planted his hooks in everything that happened, so that he could draw it back at will. Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.”
“When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”
I would stretch “poet” to “writer.” Along with linguistic gifts – that is, a taste for words -- the writer’s essential tool is a hearty appetite for experience and a synthesizing imagination. Nothing is lost, no matter how small, and all potentially is useful. Experience is to a writer as krill is to a whale.
At last I’m reading How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) by Sarah Bakewell. Don’t let the tacky subtitle (most likely a publisher’s ploy) deter you. We’ve needed a popular life of the essayist since Donald Frame published his more scholarly biography in 1965. I’ve only just started reading Bakewell’s book (a belated birthday present) but already have noted a number of passages, including one that reminded me of Eliot’s observation:
“Montaigne wanted to drift away, yet he also wanted to attach himself to reality and extract every grain of experience from it. Writing made it possible to do both. Even as he lost himself in his reveries, he secretly planted his hooks in everything that happened, so that he could draw it back at will. Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.”
Saturday, November 06, 2010
`How Much Does Memorability Matter?'
“Wallace Stevens’s poetry is more beautiful, and Robert Frost’s often more powerful, than Eliot’s, but the latter’s, once read, refuses to leave the mind. How much does memorability matter in literature? A vast deal, I suspect, and in poetry above all. And here, in the realm of the memorable, Eliot has left a greater literary residue than any other poet of the 20th century.”
You can argue with Joseph Epstein’s assessment of the last century’s poets (Eliot’s work, for this reader, is more beautiful than Stevens’ and more powerful than Frost’s) but his point about memorability is critical to a discussion of literary worth. The good, if not always the best, persists, as does some of the less good. Epstein’s observation is personally noteworthy because Eliot was the first “grown-up” poet I resolved to memorize.
Around the time of his death in January 1965, I bought paperback copies of Selected Poems and Four Quartets. The latter remained hermetically sealed for years but I set out committing to memory chunks of “Prufrock,” “Preludes” and “The Hollow Men.” Pieces of “The Waste Land” followed naturally, after repeated readings. The motive was pleasure. I liked saying the words to myself, silently, especially when walking to and from school or in the woods. Later I added bits of Whitman, Yeats, Donne, Larkin and Tate. My effort, probably secret (I don’t remember reciting to anyone), was still bolstered by teachers in mid-sixties when we were expected to remember lines by Shakespeare, Emerson and Longfellow. Such an addition to the curriculum today would be judged child abuse.
On Friday in the school library I noticed on the shelf a welcomingly fat volume in green library binding – Favorite Poems Old and New, edited by Helen Ferris and published by Doubleday in 1957, the year I entered kindergarten. After more than half a century the book is stained and creased, and its five hundred ninety-eight pages have the well-thumbed softness of a beloved volume. How pleasing to see the number of poems I know by heart at least in part – Poe’s “The Bells,” Stevenson’s “The Land of Counterpane,” Sandburg’s “Fog,” Emerson’s “The Humble-Bee,” Lewis Carroll’s “The Lobster Quadrille” and, among others, Eliot’s “The Rum Tum Tugger.” Except for the Poe, I don’t remember trying to memorize any of these poems. Like pop songs and commercial jingles, they entered memory, sometimes willingly, for good.
Here’s one new to me I want to memorize for my kids and students, by Nabokov’s friend at Cornell, Morris Bishop, “Song of the Pop-Bottlers”:
“Pop bottles, pop-bottles
in pop shops;
The pop-bottles Pop bottles
Poor Pop drops
“When Pop drops pop-bottles
Pop-bottles plop!
Pop-bottle-tops topple!
Pop mops slop!
“Stop! Pop'll drop bottle!
Stop, Pop stop!
When Pop bottles pop-bottles,
Pop-bottles pop!”
You can argue with Joseph Epstein’s assessment of the last century’s poets (Eliot’s work, for this reader, is more beautiful than Stevens’ and more powerful than Frost’s) but his point about memorability is critical to a discussion of literary worth. The good, if not always the best, persists, as does some of the less good. Epstein’s observation is personally noteworthy because Eliot was the first “grown-up” poet I resolved to memorize.
Around the time of his death in January 1965, I bought paperback copies of Selected Poems and Four Quartets. The latter remained hermetically sealed for years but I set out committing to memory chunks of “Prufrock,” “Preludes” and “The Hollow Men.” Pieces of “The Waste Land” followed naturally, after repeated readings. The motive was pleasure. I liked saying the words to myself, silently, especially when walking to and from school or in the woods. Later I added bits of Whitman, Yeats, Donne, Larkin and Tate. My effort, probably secret (I don’t remember reciting to anyone), was still bolstered by teachers in mid-sixties when we were expected to remember lines by Shakespeare, Emerson and Longfellow. Such an addition to the curriculum today would be judged child abuse.
On Friday in the school library I noticed on the shelf a welcomingly fat volume in green library binding – Favorite Poems Old and New, edited by Helen Ferris and published by Doubleday in 1957, the year I entered kindergarten. After more than half a century the book is stained and creased, and its five hundred ninety-eight pages have the well-thumbed softness of a beloved volume. How pleasing to see the number of poems I know by heart at least in part – Poe’s “The Bells,” Stevenson’s “The Land of Counterpane,” Sandburg’s “Fog,” Emerson’s “The Humble-Bee,” Lewis Carroll’s “The Lobster Quadrille” and, among others, Eliot’s “The Rum Tum Tugger.” Except for the Poe, I don’t remember trying to memorize any of these poems. Like pop songs and commercial jingles, they entered memory, sometimes willingly, for good.
Here’s one new to me I want to memorize for my kids and students, by Nabokov’s friend at Cornell, Morris Bishop, “Song of the Pop-Bottlers”:
“Pop bottles, pop-bottles
in pop shops;
The pop-bottles Pop bottles
Poor Pop drops
“When Pop drops pop-bottles
Pop-bottles plop!
Pop-bottle-tops topple!
Pop mops slop!
“Stop! Pop'll drop bottle!
Stop, Pop stop!
When Pop bottles pop-bottles,
Pop-bottles pop!”
Friday, November 05, 2010
`One Half of a Dialogue'
An England-born teacher I know exchanges weekly letters with her sister in London, real letters, written by hand with a pen on paper. The sisters also use e-mail but reserve it for what they call “emergencies” – a missing recipe ingredient, say, something factual that can be communicated in a sentence or two. Their letter-writing is self-consciously anachronistic, a defiant nod to another age.
They wish to preserve an account of their bi-continental lives and the evolving state of their relationship, a legacy for their descendants. E-mails, the teacher says, are by nature ephemeral, and their ephemerality influences the manner in which they are written – quickly, sloppily, without reflection or style, often without regard for precision or logic. A perfectly satisfactory e-mail is the opposite of a good letter, dense with detail and digression, an invitation to storytelling, a tracing of the mind’s wanderings for a specific reader. Their personal or semi-personal nature makes them ripe for comedy and its cousin, invective. A good letter in the old-fashioned sense – one by Cowper, Keats or O’Connor, for instance – has more in common with a good blog post than a good e-mail.
I first read excerpts from Anthony Hecht’s letters in True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound, by Christopher Ricks. They are, like his poems, learned, charming, critically astute, funny and enviably fluent. An edition of Hecht’s letters is in preparation and The Hopkins Review has published a selection, three of which have been posted at Little Star Journal. All of the qualities of good letters described above are evident. Here, from a 1951 letter to his parents, Hecht describes the experience of having his poems read in manuscript by W.H. Auden:
“He feels that details are an ornamental embellishment to verse, and should never be allowed to distract the reader’s attention from the main line of discourse, whereas I believe that the details should be made to subsume, to contain, to embody, to incarnate the point and meaning of the poem. In a way, I think we’re working towards the same goal from opposite directions, but my way is better suited to me than his.”
Hecht’s point is prescient of his best future work. (Read “A Letter,” a dramatic monologue in epistolary form from The Hard Hours, 1967). Despite the opulence of his style, his poems are seldom marred by “ornamental embellishment.” At age twenty-seven, Hecht is appreciative of Auden’s criticisms and confident enough to dissent from them. In a poet, the balance is remarkably mature. How else would we know the details of such a meeting of great poets without Hecht’s letter? So much for the impermeable membrane separating life and work.
In “Letter from Palo Alto,” published in The New Compass: A Critical Review, Helen Pinkerton sketches a personal history of the verse letter from Wyatt, Donne, Jonson and Pope to her friends associated with Stanford University and the Palo Alto “literary tradition” – Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, J.V. Cunningham and Kenneth Fields, among others. She writes:
“Poets and rhetoricians noted the freedom of the form to take up any subject of interest to the writer and/or recipient, whether personal, even intimate, matters or those more general but of mutual concern. For the verse letter is, as traditionally observed, one half of a dialogue.”
Pinkerton does not mention that some of her own best poems are dramatic-monologues-turned-verse-letters, including “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell” and “Crossing the Pedregal” (both collected in Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002). She writes in her New Compass essay:
“The letter, while self-revelatory, ought not to be narcissistically self-obsessed, for that would leave out the other half of the dialogue, the presence of the friend.”
Or sister. My friend the teacher told me:
“We write letters because it helps us feel close together. We think of it as talking to each other with our pens.”
They wish to preserve an account of their bi-continental lives and the evolving state of their relationship, a legacy for their descendants. E-mails, the teacher says, are by nature ephemeral, and their ephemerality influences the manner in which they are written – quickly, sloppily, without reflection or style, often without regard for precision or logic. A perfectly satisfactory e-mail is the opposite of a good letter, dense with detail and digression, an invitation to storytelling, a tracing of the mind’s wanderings for a specific reader. Their personal or semi-personal nature makes them ripe for comedy and its cousin, invective. A good letter in the old-fashioned sense – one by Cowper, Keats or O’Connor, for instance – has more in common with a good blog post than a good e-mail.
I first read excerpts from Anthony Hecht’s letters in True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound, by Christopher Ricks. They are, like his poems, learned, charming, critically astute, funny and enviably fluent. An edition of Hecht’s letters is in preparation and The Hopkins Review has published a selection, three of which have been posted at Little Star Journal. All of the qualities of good letters described above are evident. Here, from a 1951 letter to his parents, Hecht describes the experience of having his poems read in manuscript by W.H. Auden:
“He feels that details are an ornamental embellishment to verse, and should never be allowed to distract the reader’s attention from the main line of discourse, whereas I believe that the details should be made to subsume, to contain, to embody, to incarnate the point and meaning of the poem. In a way, I think we’re working towards the same goal from opposite directions, but my way is better suited to me than his.”
Hecht’s point is prescient of his best future work. (Read “A Letter,” a dramatic monologue in epistolary form from The Hard Hours, 1967). Despite the opulence of his style, his poems are seldom marred by “ornamental embellishment.” At age twenty-seven, Hecht is appreciative of Auden’s criticisms and confident enough to dissent from them. In a poet, the balance is remarkably mature. How else would we know the details of such a meeting of great poets without Hecht’s letter? So much for the impermeable membrane separating life and work.
In “Letter from Palo Alto,” published in The New Compass: A Critical Review, Helen Pinkerton sketches a personal history of the verse letter from Wyatt, Donne, Jonson and Pope to her friends associated with Stanford University and the Palo Alto “literary tradition” – Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, J.V. Cunningham and Kenneth Fields, among others. She writes:
“Poets and rhetoricians noted the freedom of the form to take up any subject of interest to the writer and/or recipient, whether personal, even intimate, matters or those more general but of mutual concern. For the verse letter is, as traditionally observed, one half of a dialogue.”
Pinkerton does not mention that some of her own best poems are dramatic-monologues-turned-verse-letters, including “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell” and “Crossing the Pedregal” (both collected in Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002). She writes in her New Compass essay:
“The letter, while self-revelatory, ought not to be narcissistically self-obsessed, for that would leave out the other half of the dialogue, the presence of the friend.”
Or sister. My friend the teacher told me:
“We write letters because it helps us feel close together. We think of it as talking to each other with our pens.”
Thursday, November 04, 2010
`Face That When You Come to It'
Four or five girls on the playground last week surrounded a boy and kicked him repeatedly. One of them grabbed his glasses and snapped the frame in half. Two girls received one-day in-school suspensions, which amount to sitting all day in the principal’s office, reading and doing homework.
“Behavior: it all reduces to a moral issue. We must not want something from another so much that we steal it; cannot kill another and benefit.”
Last Friday a kid reported a fight on the basketball court. I turned and saw twelve or fifteen boys in a roiling cluster, kicks and punches flying. The epicenter was one of my reading students who had been suspended two weeks earlier for urinating in the girls’ restroom and staging a curse-filled, chair-throwing tantrum when confronted. He received a two-day at-home suspension and showed up tardy Wednesday morning. Others lost recess for a week.
“Talent, knowledge, humility, reverence, magnanimity involve the inconvenience of responsibility or they die. To the bonanza, the legacy, the professional hit, it would be well if our attitude were that of the Brazilian dazzled by unearthing a caldeirão (cluster of diamonds): `My Lord and Heavenly father, if this wealth endangers my soul, let it vanish.’”
On Tuesday a boy holding his upper thigh said a girl had hit him with a rock, the same girl who broke the other boy’s glasses. She told me she had been aiming for his head. I escorted him to the nurse and took the girl to the principal’s office. Back on the playground, a sobbing boy holding his right shoulder said another girl had hit him with a rock. I took him to the nurse. The rock throwers said it was revenge for being ratted on for the glasses-breaking incident.
“Example is needed, not counsel; but let me submit here these four precepts:
“Feed imagination food that invigorates.
“Whatever it is, do it with all your might.
“Never do to another what you would not wish done to yourself.
“Say to yourself, `I will be responsible.’
“Put these principles to the test, and you will be inconvenienced by being overtrusted, overbefriended, overconsulted, half adopted, and have no leisure. Face that when you come to it.”
[The quoted passages are from “Profit is a Dead Weight,” an article Marianne Moore published in the October 1963 issue of Seventeen and collected in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore.]
“Behavior: it all reduces to a moral issue. We must not want something from another so much that we steal it; cannot kill another and benefit.”
Last Friday a kid reported a fight on the basketball court. I turned and saw twelve or fifteen boys in a roiling cluster, kicks and punches flying. The epicenter was one of my reading students who had been suspended two weeks earlier for urinating in the girls’ restroom and staging a curse-filled, chair-throwing tantrum when confronted. He received a two-day at-home suspension and showed up tardy Wednesday morning. Others lost recess for a week.
“Talent, knowledge, humility, reverence, magnanimity involve the inconvenience of responsibility or they die. To the bonanza, the legacy, the professional hit, it would be well if our attitude were that of the Brazilian dazzled by unearthing a caldeirão (cluster of diamonds): `My Lord and Heavenly father, if this wealth endangers my soul, let it vanish.’”
On Tuesday a boy holding his upper thigh said a girl had hit him with a rock, the same girl who broke the other boy’s glasses. She told me she had been aiming for his head. I escorted him to the nurse and took the girl to the principal’s office. Back on the playground, a sobbing boy holding his right shoulder said another girl had hit him with a rock. I took him to the nurse. The rock throwers said it was revenge for being ratted on for the glasses-breaking incident.
“Example is needed, not counsel; but let me submit here these four precepts:
“Feed imagination food that invigorates.
“Whatever it is, do it with all your might.
“Never do to another what you would not wish done to yourself.
“Say to yourself, `I will be responsible.’
“Put these principles to the test, and you will be inconvenienced by being overtrusted, overbefriended, overconsulted, half adopted, and have no leisure. Face that when you come to it.”
[The quoted passages are from “Profit is a Dead Weight,” an article Marianne Moore published in the October 1963 issue of Seventeen and collected in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore.]
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
`Such Work-Dulled Eyes and Gestures'
The dirtiest, most mind-numbing work I’ve ever done was in high school when I had a weekend job in an aluminum foundry. The owner was a friend of my father and I was paid in cash, under the table. My co-workers, all of them older by several years, were black and Puerto Rican, and happy to have jobs. Previously I had delivered newspapers and worked as a towel-man in a carwash, but nothing prepared me for this. The owner once chewed me out when he found me slumped in a corner late in the day, almost passed out from exhaustion.
The experience taught me several things: I liked making money for myself, I enjoyed the art of bantering with co-workers, and I knew I never wanted to work that hard again, which may explain why I became a journalist. I learned that hard work is neither ennobling nor degrading, though I can’t imagine I would still be alive if I had stuck with that foundry job from more than forty years ago. All of which leads me to Helen Pinkerton’s “On Breughel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565) in the Metropolitan Museum” (Taken in Faith, 2002):
“Little thanksgiving here. To labor, feed,
Quickly, to sleep, rise, scythe and gather grain—
The swathe and shocks still to be done again—
Leaves only the blunt will to survive and breed.
Fatigue, deep as disease, maims mind and bone.
Such work-dulled eyes and gestures I have known.
My Celtic folk, brothers to these, do you
Rest well, incorporate with the crops you grew,
Or do you live in me, singing now—in my ease.”
Half of my forebears were Irish, the rest Polish. The fellow sprawled beneath the tree (“Fatigue, deep as disease”) might be among them. He looks incapacitated from illness or drink. Into the twentieth century many in my family labored as grindingly as Breughel’s harvesters, without a choice in the matter. Their entry into the middle class was deferred by history. What Pinkerton – and Breughel – describe contains much of human history. The tone is anti-heroic but not as a pretext for political posturing. Breughel renders his people from a perspective slightly above ground-level, panoramically, none in close-up. They represent a community that disappears into its work, apparently without complaint: No work, no food, “the blunt will to survive and breed.”
In Barbarian in the Garden, Zbigniew Herbert contrasts Piero della Francesca’s foregrounding of his figures with the way Breughel treats them almost like pieces of the landscape:
“Knowing that geometry devours passion, Piero never placed important events in perspective (unlike the ironist Breughel, vide The Death of Icarus). The significant figures of his dramas stand in the foreground as if right in front of footlights.”
Breughel’s people, and mine, are obscure, anonymous and exhausted.
The experience taught me several things: I liked making money for myself, I enjoyed the art of bantering with co-workers, and I knew I never wanted to work that hard again, which may explain why I became a journalist. I learned that hard work is neither ennobling nor degrading, though I can’t imagine I would still be alive if I had stuck with that foundry job from more than forty years ago. All of which leads me to Helen Pinkerton’s “On Breughel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565) in the Metropolitan Museum” (Taken in Faith, 2002):
“Little thanksgiving here. To labor, feed,
Quickly, to sleep, rise, scythe and gather grain—
The swathe and shocks still to be done again—
Leaves only the blunt will to survive and breed.
Fatigue, deep as disease, maims mind and bone.
Such work-dulled eyes and gestures I have known.
My Celtic folk, brothers to these, do you
Rest well, incorporate with the crops you grew,
Or do you live in me, singing now—in my ease.”
Half of my forebears were Irish, the rest Polish. The fellow sprawled beneath the tree (“Fatigue, deep as disease”) might be among them. He looks incapacitated from illness or drink. Into the twentieth century many in my family labored as grindingly as Breughel’s harvesters, without a choice in the matter. Their entry into the middle class was deferred by history. What Pinkerton – and Breughel – describe contains much of human history. The tone is anti-heroic but not as a pretext for political posturing. Breughel renders his people from a perspective slightly above ground-level, panoramically, none in close-up. They represent a community that disappears into its work, apparently without complaint: No work, no food, “the blunt will to survive and breed.”
In Barbarian in the Garden, Zbigniew Herbert contrasts Piero della Francesca’s foregrounding of his figures with the way Breughel treats them almost like pieces of the landscape:
“Knowing that geometry devours passion, Piero never placed important events in perspective (unlike the ironist Breughel, vide The Death of Icarus). The significant figures of his dramas stand in the foreground as if right in front of footlights.”
Breughel’s people, and mine, are obscure, anonymous and exhausted.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
`The World is Refreshed Till All Is Done'
Everyone oohs and ahs over autumn leaves when the sun shines. It’s a social obligation, like telling your host the steak is grilled to perfection though you’re not really much of a carnivore. It’s also an aesthetic obligation, as indifference to fall foliage (or “foilage,” as I heard a teacher say on Monday) might appear unrefined, even politically suspect in some quarters. Look at the leaves in a gray rain, through the fog, under a pewter sky. In short, look at them as we do most days in the Pacific Northwest. The effect is muted, subtler and more complicated, not postcard fodder but an invitation to impressionism with a small “i.”
The denigration of the grimmer months is related to the growing conviction that every day not a day on the beach at Maui is a disappointment, a failure of the world to deliver. Hardier folk know better. The yellow leaves of a maple faded in the mist remind us of the pale greens of spring. Add rain and leaves to dark pavement and you have – nature’s découpage! We honor the cycle of seasons and know there’s always a price to pay. May is sweeter for November and even Maui knows tsunamis. “So the world is refreshed till all is done,” as the late C.H. Sisson writes in “Another Autumn.”
The denigration of the grimmer months is related to the growing conviction that every day not a day on the beach at Maui is a disappointment, a failure of the world to deliver. Hardier folk know better. The yellow leaves of a maple faded in the mist remind us of the pale greens of spring. Add rain and leaves to dark pavement and you have – nature’s découpage! We honor the cycle of seasons and know there’s always a price to pay. May is sweeter for November and even Maui knows tsunamis. “So the world is refreshed till all is done,” as the late C.H. Sisson writes in “Another Autumn.”
Monday, November 01, 2010
`We Must Eat a Peck Before We Die'
One could trade favorite passages from Keats’ letters for a lifetime without risk of flagging enthusiasm or exhausting the lode, as Nige and I appear to be doing. (And enjoy how Nige lets Keats comment by not commenting on Kay Ryan.) Keats’ genius for poetry and prose is almost indecent, an affront to journeymen, especially coming from a man who died at age twenty-five. Here’s Nige on the letters:
“That's the joy - one of the joys - of Keats's letters. You never know what's coming next, as he slides and swerves from sense to nonsense, from his inner to his outer life, from cod Latin to a few dismissive words that suddenly introduce, in this case, his last great poem, the Ode to Autumn. There's an added frisson here, as his throwaway remarks on bowing foreshadow that heartbreaking last farewell, a little over a year later: 'I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow...'”
As Nige says, and as might be said of the great essayists (Lamb, Hazlitt), “You never know what’s coming next.” Here’s an example, from March 19, 1819, a Friday (it’s nice to know such things). The poet writes to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats:
“Yesterday I got a black eye - the first time I took a Cricket bat. [Charles] Brown who is always one's friend in a disaster applied a leech to the eyelid, and there is no inflammation this morning though the ball hit me torn on the sight - 'twas a white ball. I am glad it was not a clout. This is the second black eye I have had since leaving school - during all my school days I never had one at all - we must eat a peck before we die…”
The anecdote is antidote to the libelous legend of Keats the ethereal wraith. He’s twenty-three, already infected with the bacillus that will kill him in less than two years, but two months away from writing the great odes. Here’s a man who takes a cricket bat in the eye, submits to leeching without complaint and concludes before moving on to his next digression, “we must eat a peck before we die…” – followed by:
“-- This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless: I long after a stanza or two of Thompson's Castle of indolence. My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this side of faintness - if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies I should call it langour - but as I am - especially as I have a black eye - I must call it Laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown.”
Stout fellow. Keep in mind his youth.
“Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of counteance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase [!] - a Man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.”
Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon at age sixteen. What follows is a heartfelt application of “Negative Capability”:
“I have this moment received a note from [William] Haslam in which he expects the death of his Father - who has been for some time in a state of insensibility - his mother bears up he says very well - I shall go to town tomorrow to see him. This is the world - thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure - Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting - While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events - while we are laughing it sprouts it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck - Even so we have leisure to reason on the misfortunes of our friends; our own touch us too nearly for words. Very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of Mind: very few have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of others - in the greater part of the Benefactors to Humanity some meretricious motive has sullied their greatness - some melodramatic scenery has fascinated them - From the manner in which I feel Haslam's misfortune I perceive how far I am from any humble standard of disinterestedness - Yet this feeling ought to be carried to its highest pitch as there is no fear of its ever injuring Society - which it would do I fear pushed to an extremity - For in wild nature the Hawk would loose his Breakfast of Robins and the Robin his of Worms - the Lion must starve as well as the swallow. The greater part of Men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the Hawk. The Hawk wants a Mate, so does the Man - look at them both they set about it and procure one in the same manner. They want both a nest and they both set about one in the same manner - The noble animal Man for his amusement smokes his pipe - the Hawk balances about the Clouds - that is the only difference of their leisures. This it is that makes the Amusement of Life - to a speculative Mind.”
Knowing what we know, and longing for what might have been, the words are heartbreaking.
“I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass - the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along - to what? the Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. But then, as Wordsworth says, `we have all one human heart’ - there is an ellectric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.”
One is tempted to go on transcribing the words without pause, to look at the reader and point at the words and say, “See, it’s all here. Here is a man.” His humility, his human witness, is appalling. Imagine, without the braggadocio, Whitman’s “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”
“That's the joy - one of the joys - of Keats's letters. You never know what's coming next, as he slides and swerves from sense to nonsense, from his inner to his outer life, from cod Latin to a few dismissive words that suddenly introduce, in this case, his last great poem, the Ode to Autumn. There's an added frisson here, as his throwaway remarks on bowing foreshadow that heartbreaking last farewell, a little over a year later: 'I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow...'”
As Nige says, and as might be said of the great essayists (Lamb, Hazlitt), “You never know what’s coming next.” Here’s an example, from March 19, 1819, a Friday (it’s nice to know such things). The poet writes to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats:
“Yesterday I got a black eye - the first time I took a Cricket bat. [Charles] Brown who is always one's friend in a disaster applied a leech to the eyelid, and there is no inflammation this morning though the ball hit me torn on the sight - 'twas a white ball. I am glad it was not a clout. This is the second black eye I have had since leaving school - during all my school days I never had one at all - we must eat a peck before we die…”
The anecdote is antidote to the libelous legend of Keats the ethereal wraith. He’s twenty-three, already infected with the bacillus that will kill him in less than two years, but two months away from writing the great odes. Here’s a man who takes a cricket bat in the eye, submits to leeching without complaint and concludes before moving on to his next digression, “we must eat a peck before we die…” – followed by:
“-- This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless: I long after a stanza or two of Thompson's Castle of indolence. My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this side of faintness - if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies I should call it langour - but as I am - especially as I have a black eye - I must call it Laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown.”
Stout fellow. Keep in mind his youth.
“Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of counteance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase [!] - a Man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.”
Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon at age sixteen. What follows is a heartfelt application of “Negative Capability”:
“I have this moment received a note from [William] Haslam in which he expects the death of his Father - who has been for some time in a state of insensibility - his mother bears up he says very well - I shall go to town tomorrow to see him. This is the world - thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure - Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting - While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events - while we are laughing it sprouts it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck - Even so we have leisure to reason on the misfortunes of our friends; our own touch us too nearly for words. Very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of Mind: very few have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of others - in the greater part of the Benefactors to Humanity some meretricious motive has sullied their greatness - some melodramatic scenery has fascinated them - From the manner in which I feel Haslam's misfortune I perceive how far I am from any humble standard of disinterestedness - Yet this feeling ought to be carried to its highest pitch as there is no fear of its ever injuring Society - which it would do I fear pushed to an extremity - For in wild nature the Hawk would loose his Breakfast of Robins and the Robin his of Worms - the Lion must starve as well as the swallow. The greater part of Men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the Hawk. The Hawk wants a Mate, so does the Man - look at them both they set about it and procure one in the same manner. They want both a nest and they both set about one in the same manner - The noble animal Man for his amusement smokes his pipe - the Hawk balances about the Clouds - that is the only difference of their leisures. This it is that makes the Amusement of Life - to a speculative Mind.”
Knowing what we know, and longing for what might have been, the words are heartbreaking.
“I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass - the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along - to what? the Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. But then, as Wordsworth says, `we have all one human heart’ - there is an ellectric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it: as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.”
One is tempted to go on transcribing the words without pause, to look at the reader and point at the words and say, “See, it’s all here. Here is a man.” His humility, his human witness, is appalling. Imagine, without the braggadocio, Whitman’s “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”
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