About five years ago I read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son (2004) and laughed so helplessly and often my wife threw me out of bed. Sullivan’s humor can be grim and Irish, and he’s funniest writing about his father, Mike Sullivan, a doomed, charming, funny man who drank and smoked too much and made everyone laugh or cry. In 2008, Sullivan published in Harper’s a portrait of another self-destructive artist, guitarist John Fahey, a musical enthusiasm of mine more than forty years ago. “Unknown Bards: The Blues Becomes Transparent About Itself” has been collected in Best Music Writing 2009, edited by Greil Marcus.
Sullivan redefines memoir and reportage. He avoids self-absorbed hagiography and never turns his father or Fahey into victims. They’re given whole, the admirable and repellent, and Sullivan laces his work with learning as a sort of counterpoint to the central human stories. In Blood Horses he digresses entertainingly on thoroughbred racing, the Kentucky Derby, equine evolution, and Kentucky history and geology, all woven through his father’s story. Sullivan visits Guy Davenport in Lexington, in Bluegrass country, and the writer reminds him of a favorite Davenportian theme:
“All art is a dance of meaning from form to form.”
At the website of Hot Metal Bridge, a literary magazine published by the University of Pittsburgh, I found an interview with Sullivan. He brings up Davenport again after marveling that some people think they can write without first being “compulsive readers”:
“That said, how do you get to be a better reader? I asked Guy Davenport this question one time, because talking to him could really make a person despair; he just knew so much, he’d read so much in many languages, but not in a pedantic or scholastic way, in a really passionate way. He gave me what I thought was very solid advice, which was: first of all, start reading and don’t stop. The other thing is to follow your interest. He said there ought to be a phrase, `falling into interest,’ to go with falling in love.
“Follow your interest; follow the writers who energize you, not the ones who exert a sense of obligation on you. The books that do the one or the other will change, as time gone on. The landscape shifts. Don’t adhere to systems unless that feels good.”
Davenport said similar things to me in letters and during our one meeting at his home in Lexington, and of course his essays and stories embody this notion that every book is a covert conversation with at least one other book, a conversation any reader can join. Had he lived longer -- he died six years ago this month -- Davenport might have become a rare and precious citizen of the blogosphere. He would have loved how some of us “start reading and don’t stop,” as Sullivan says.
Here’s a recent example of the phenomenon Davenport and Sullivan describe: I’ve often written about John Williams’ Stoner (1965), a novel one tends learn about in the most pleasing fashion, by word of mouth. I know at least a dozen people who learned of the book from Anecdotal Evidence and were intrigued enough to read it. My former boss at Rice University wrote me on Sunday:
“I just finished Stoner, by the way, and loved the book. I read it over a weekend and a few days—something that’s unusual for me. I found it so compelling that I ignored many of the things that keep me from reading at other times.”
Three days earlier, Elberry had written:
“And i just read Stoner, many thanks for recommending it on your blog. It is a great work … [because] my tendency is for full-on, lavish baroque intensity i found Williams' understated power an interesting corrective…i was going to write a post about Stoner but seem in the grip of an almost total lack of interest in that kind of `public’ writing.”
Both of my friends are Davenport’s bookish offspring, reading what stirs, sometimes unaccountably, their interest. Sullivan adds:
“If you follow your interest, you’ll be adding to the store of things, examples, that make up your ideas. Read Plutarch because a list you read said he was important, and what if you get asked about him at a party, he’ll wash off. Read Plutarch because you’ve fallen in interest with him—because you’ve followed his successors back to him or his influences forward, or because you need him now to understand better some other writer whose work you love, however it happens, maybe a book of his falls open to a page and you’re fixed—in those ways he becomes part of your soul.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
`If One Has Something to Say'
Yvor Winters in a letter to Malcolm Cowley written July 7, 1958:
“So far as prose is concerned, I think that you and I could be classified as members of two schools which among the sixteenth century poets were known as the courtly and the plain. You belong to the courtly, I to the plain. The plain style poets—Wyatt and Jonson, for examples—believed that poetry should say something efficiently, and they believed that such saying was an art, and in their hands it was a very great art. Sidney and Spenser, however, were less interested in saying something than merely in saying with grace and ornament, and their poetry was inferior.”
And that’s just the first paragraph. Winters had a gift for calm, mannerly evisceration that sounds almost like fatherly advice. Cowley never transcended his niche as literary camp-follower. He associated with writers more gifted than himself – Hart Crane, Faulkner, Cheever – and glowed with some of their reflected light, but was also responsible for helping Kerouac see On the Road into print. For that, Dante devised the sixth and tenth bolgias.
“Say something efficiently” echoes Swift’s 1719 dictum: “Proper words in proper places, make the true definitions of a style.” So much writing is inert gas emitted merely to attract attention, like pheromones. Reading Winters’ poems, criticism and letters, we think: Here’s a man with something to say, something interesting and memorable, who possesses the gifts necessary for saying it with precision, concision and forcefulness. The drive behind much writing is the wish to have written something, and to be recognized for it. Later in the letter to Cowley, Winters writes:
“When you say that I don’t recognize prose as an art, you are dreaming. [Henry] Adams’ history is great art. So is Johnson’s introduction to his dictionary.
“What bothers me about your prose—not merely this one essay, but nearly everything I have read—is the elaboration of elegance, out of all proportion to what you are saying. I get bored very early, and stop. The same kind of poetry bores me equally.”
Winters’ diagnosis of Cowley’s work is exact, and might be broadened to include nearly all writing in most historical periods. The gift is rare. In his next-to-last sentence, Winters writes:
“One can write only if one has something to say (and exercises on nothing in particular are a curse), has talent, and acquires scholarship.”
[All quoted passages are from The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, edited by R.L. Barth, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000. The frontpiece photo is priceless: Winters is seated behind a desk, wearing a suit and tie, pen clipped in the jacket pocket, left arm in his lap, right slung over the back of his wooden chair. On the desk are two ashtrays, papers and a stack of books, including a fat edition of Moby-Dick and what appears to be a dictionary. Winters makes no concession to congeniality or public relations. (The photo is credited to the “News and Publications Service, Stanford University.”) He looks impatient and refuses to “sell” himself. His demeanor is the opposite of contemporary author photographs, all teeth and sincerity.]
“So far as prose is concerned, I think that you and I could be classified as members of two schools which among the sixteenth century poets were known as the courtly and the plain. You belong to the courtly, I to the plain. The plain style poets—Wyatt and Jonson, for examples—believed that poetry should say something efficiently, and they believed that such saying was an art, and in their hands it was a very great art. Sidney and Spenser, however, were less interested in saying something than merely in saying with grace and ornament, and their poetry was inferior.”
And that’s just the first paragraph. Winters had a gift for calm, mannerly evisceration that sounds almost like fatherly advice. Cowley never transcended his niche as literary camp-follower. He associated with writers more gifted than himself – Hart Crane, Faulkner, Cheever – and glowed with some of their reflected light, but was also responsible for helping Kerouac see On the Road into print. For that, Dante devised the sixth and tenth bolgias.
“Say something efficiently” echoes Swift’s 1719 dictum: “Proper words in proper places, make the true definitions of a style.” So much writing is inert gas emitted merely to attract attention, like pheromones. Reading Winters’ poems, criticism and letters, we think: Here’s a man with something to say, something interesting and memorable, who possesses the gifts necessary for saying it with precision, concision and forcefulness. The drive behind much writing is the wish to have written something, and to be recognized for it. Later in the letter to Cowley, Winters writes:
“When you say that I don’t recognize prose as an art, you are dreaming. [Henry] Adams’ history is great art. So is Johnson’s introduction to his dictionary.
“What bothers me about your prose—not merely this one essay, but nearly everything I have read—is the elaboration of elegance, out of all proportion to what you are saying. I get bored very early, and stop. The same kind of poetry bores me equally.”
Winters’ diagnosis of Cowley’s work is exact, and might be broadened to include nearly all writing in most historical periods. The gift is rare. In his next-to-last sentence, Winters writes:
“One can write only if one has something to say (and exercises on nothing in particular are a curse), has talent, and acquires scholarship.”
[All quoted passages are from The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, edited by R.L. Barth, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000. The frontpiece photo is priceless: Winters is seated behind a desk, wearing a suit and tie, pen clipped in the jacket pocket, left arm in his lap, right slung over the back of his wooden chair. On the desk are two ashtrays, papers and a stack of books, including a fat edition of Moby-Dick and what appears to be a dictionary. Winters makes no concession to congeniality or public relations. (The photo is credited to the “News and Publications Service, Stanford University.”) He looks impatient and refuses to “sell” himself. His demeanor is the opposite of contemporary author photographs, all teeth and sincerity.]
Saturday, January 29, 2011
`And Now in Age I Bud Again'
A lovely start to the day – and year. I opened the front door, ready to walk my seven-year-old to the bus stop Friday morning. To the right, against the front wall, is a low tree stump that sometimes hosts a beautiful scrambled-egg slime mold. Around it are heaped moss, dead leaves and needles, and decaying wood, out of which grows a cluster of snow drops, the first flower of the season. The genus is Galanthus, from the Greek for “milk flower,” and its six tepals (not petals) were glowing white in the fog and darkness. It felt like a reward for something I wasn’t aware of doing.
At work I’ve been carrying a small book in my jacket pocket – the Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Poems of George Herbert, the second edition from 1964. Please, like me, reread “The Flower,” especially these lines:
“And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write…”
At work I’ve been carrying a small book in my jacket pocket – the Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Poems of George Herbert, the second edition from 1964. Please, like me, reread “The Flower,” especially these lines:
“And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write…”
Friday, January 28, 2011
`Someone Laughing Through Clenched Teeth'
“It is strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.”
Among our obligations is remembering the worthy dead, and the truest homage to a dead writer is reading his work. The line above is from Anthony Hecht’s translation of “Cape Cod Lullaby” by Joseph Brodsky, who died on this date fifteen years ago at age fifty-five. I remember hearing the news on the radio and thinking, “How unfair,” as though fairness had anything to do with it. The Soviets had hounded him from his homeland in 1972 after bestowing on him their most prestigious encomium: “social parasite.” Brodsky said of himself: “I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an English essayist.”
By all accounts, Brodsky was a charming, deeply civilized man. He quickly befriended W.H. Auden and some of the best American poets, including Hecht, who included translations of two Brodsky poems in The Venetian Vespers (1979). Twice in “Cape Cod Lullaby,” Hecht tells us in a note, he echoes a line from a poem Osip Mandelstam dedicated to Anna Akhmatova: “Keep my words forever for their aftertaste of misfortune and smoke” (translation by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin). Of course, they fit Brodsky today.
In Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), Hecht dedicated “Exile” to Brodsky. The poem blurs the Russian with his biblical namesake, and generously welcomes him to his adopted land. Here are the final lines:
“You will recognize the rank smell of a stable
And the soft patience in a donkey’s eyes,
Telling you you are welcome and at home.”
The final poem in Hecht’s Flight Among the Tombs (1996), an elegy for Brodsky, “A Death in Winter,” echoes Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Here is last of its ten stanzas:
“Reader, dwell with his poems. Underneath
Their gaiety and music, note the chilled strain
Of irony, of felt and mastered pain,
The sound of someone laughing through clenched teeth.”
Among our obligations is remembering the worthy dead, and the truest homage to a dead writer is reading his work. The line above is from Anthony Hecht’s translation of “Cape Cod Lullaby” by Joseph Brodsky, who died on this date fifteen years ago at age fifty-five. I remember hearing the news on the radio and thinking, “How unfair,” as though fairness had anything to do with it. The Soviets had hounded him from his homeland in 1972 after bestowing on him their most prestigious encomium: “social parasite.” Brodsky said of himself: “I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an English essayist.”
By all accounts, Brodsky was a charming, deeply civilized man. He quickly befriended W.H. Auden and some of the best American poets, including Hecht, who included translations of two Brodsky poems in The Venetian Vespers (1979). Twice in “Cape Cod Lullaby,” Hecht tells us in a note, he echoes a line from a poem Osip Mandelstam dedicated to Anna Akhmatova: “Keep my words forever for their aftertaste of misfortune and smoke” (translation by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin). Of course, they fit Brodsky today.
In Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), Hecht dedicated “Exile” to Brodsky. The poem blurs the Russian with his biblical namesake, and generously welcomes him to his adopted land. Here are the final lines:
“You will recognize the rank smell of a stable
And the soft patience in a donkey’s eyes,
Telling you you are welcome and at home.”
The final poem in Hecht’s Flight Among the Tombs (1996), an elegy for Brodsky, “A Death in Winter,” echoes Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Here is last of its ten stanzas:
“Reader, dwell with his poems. Underneath
Their gaiety and music, note the chilled strain
Of irony, of felt and mastered pain,
The sound of someone laughing through clenched teeth.”
Thursday, January 27, 2011
`It Just Turned Me Around'
On under-caffeinated mornings, when internal fog rivals the external for opacity, music helps clear the fumes on the way to work. Sometimes it’s Satie or Paul Desmond, but my stationary front this week has been implacable so I enlisted Elmore James whose lyrics include: “The sun is shinin', although it's raining in my heart.” Today we celebrate his ninety-third birthday (he died in 1963, age forty-five) and listen to his signature song, “Dust My Broom,” recorded Aug. 5, 1951, for the Trumpet label in Jackson, Miss.
The song is Robert Johnson’s, by way of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, but the guitar riff is James’. Subsequently, it was paid the compliment of being turned into a blues cliché and recycled even by James himself in “Please Find My Baby” (recorded in 1953, and a greater, louder, harsher song). The title “Dust My Broom” is curious, and here’s Ted Gioia’s gloss in Delta Blues (2008):
“`Dust my broom’ signifies packing up one’s bags and leaving—much like the biblical passages [Luke 9:5, among others] about shaking the dust off one’s feet—and the song has come to symbolize in twelve-bar form the rambling ways of the blues musician.”
For a century listeners have noticed that blues, purportedly songs of misery and lament, often rouse our spirits and make us happy. James sings, “And I don't want no woman, /wants every downtown man she meets,” and we smile. Is it because we share the collective human pool of suffering, or is it James’ steamroller guitar and the contained hysteria of his voice? I remember at age fourteen finding “Dust My Broom” on a blues compilation album at the library. I didn’t know anything about downtown men and the woman who throws herself at them, but I loved the song’s energy. Like most of the other songs on the record, it was less polished and thicker with experience than most of the music I knew.
In “Falling Into Place” (The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing, 2008), Peter Guralnick (born 1943), the biographer of Presley and Sam Cooke, says he fell in love with the blues about the same time he resolved to become a writer. We share a lot:
“When I was fifteen, too, I fell in love with the blues: Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Blind Willie McTell. I lived it, breathed it, absorbed it by osmosis, fantasized it—don’t ask me why. It was like the writing of Italo Svevo or Henry Green [more enthusiasms I share with Guralnick]: It just turned me around in a way that I am no more inclined to quantify or explain today than I was then.”
The song is Robert Johnson’s, by way of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, but the guitar riff is James’. Subsequently, it was paid the compliment of being turned into a blues cliché and recycled even by James himself in “Please Find My Baby” (recorded in 1953, and a greater, louder, harsher song). The title “Dust My Broom” is curious, and here’s Ted Gioia’s gloss in Delta Blues (2008):
“`Dust my broom’ signifies packing up one’s bags and leaving—much like the biblical passages [Luke 9:5, among others] about shaking the dust off one’s feet—and the song has come to symbolize in twelve-bar form the rambling ways of the blues musician.”
For a century listeners have noticed that blues, purportedly songs of misery and lament, often rouse our spirits and make us happy. James sings, “And I don't want no woman, /wants every downtown man she meets,” and we smile. Is it because we share the collective human pool of suffering, or is it James’ steamroller guitar and the contained hysteria of his voice? I remember at age fourteen finding “Dust My Broom” on a blues compilation album at the library. I didn’t know anything about downtown men and the woman who throws herself at them, but I loved the song’s energy. Like most of the other songs on the record, it was less polished and thicker with experience than most of the music I knew.
In “Falling Into Place” (The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing, 2008), Peter Guralnick (born 1943), the biographer of Presley and Sam Cooke, says he fell in love with the blues about the same time he resolved to become a writer. We share a lot:
“When I was fifteen, too, I fell in love with the blues: Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Blind Willie McTell. I lived it, breathed it, absorbed it by osmosis, fantasized it—don’t ask me why. It was like the writing of Italo Svevo or Henry Green [more enthusiasms I share with Guralnick]: It just turned me around in a way that I am no more inclined to quantify or explain today than I was then.”
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
`In a Borgesian Series'
Tuesday mornings I meet two kindergarteners from the special-education program and read aloud to them in a corner of the school library. I pull books quickly from the easy-to-read shelves, trusting serendipity, and we consume six or eight titles in thirty minutes. One of the books I grabbed without realizing it was an early effort by a friend in New York City, Fran Manushkin – Hocus and Pocus at the Circus (1983), with pictures by Geoffrey Hayes.
I sat cross-legged on a rug shaped like a Mercator map of the globe and the boys sat facing me. They have speed-freak attention spans but focus when someone reads aloud, especially with funny voices and sound effects. We sped through a couple of Tana Hoban picture books, a Dr. Seuss knock-off, something about an old man dragged around town by a puppy on a leash, and others before finishing with Fran’s book, part of Harper & Row’s “An I Can Read Book” series.
Hocus and Pocus are sister witches. The former is “mean and nasty,” the latter a good-natured baby not successful at being like her sister. At the circus she casts a spell on the clowns and turns the balls they’re juggling into puppies. It’s a theme familiar from folk and fairy tales – the inept apprentice who does good in spite of herself. Like most kids, the boys enjoy blunders and silliness. They identified with the younger witch and secretly enjoyed, I think, the mean and nasty one. Badness is attractive when safely buffered by nonsense and ink. At the end Pocus conjures a giant ice cream cone for her sister. The story concludes:
“And they flew home by the light of the Halloween moon.”
The boys loved it. The quieter one asked to hold the book. He turned to the last page and stared at the sisters on their broomstick. The older sister holds her oversized ice cream cone. The quiet kid said, “I like her,” pointing at the little sister, and then put his face on the page, loudly pretending to eat the cone.
The best essay I know on bewitchment by books is Guy Davenport’s “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996), in which he writes:
“The world is a labyrinth in which we keep traversing familiar crossroads we had thought were miles away, but to which we are doomed to backtrack. Every book I have read is in a Borgesian series that began with the orange, black, and mimosa-green clothbound Tarzan brought to me as a kindly gift by Mrs. Shiflet in her apron and bonnet.”
I sat cross-legged on a rug shaped like a Mercator map of the globe and the boys sat facing me. They have speed-freak attention spans but focus when someone reads aloud, especially with funny voices and sound effects. We sped through a couple of Tana Hoban picture books, a Dr. Seuss knock-off, something about an old man dragged around town by a puppy on a leash, and others before finishing with Fran’s book, part of Harper & Row’s “An I Can Read Book” series.
Hocus and Pocus are sister witches. The former is “mean and nasty,” the latter a good-natured baby not successful at being like her sister. At the circus she casts a spell on the clowns and turns the balls they’re juggling into puppies. It’s a theme familiar from folk and fairy tales – the inept apprentice who does good in spite of herself. Like most kids, the boys enjoy blunders and silliness. They identified with the younger witch and secretly enjoyed, I think, the mean and nasty one. Badness is attractive when safely buffered by nonsense and ink. At the end Pocus conjures a giant ice cream cone for her sister. The story concludes:
“And they flew home by the light of the Halloween moon.”
The boys loved it. The quieter one asked to hold the book. He turned to the last page and stared at the sisters on their broomstick. The older sister holds her oversized ice cream cone. The quiet kid said, “I like her,” pointing at the little sister, and then put his face on the page, loudly pretending to eat the cone.
The best essay I know on bewitchment by books is Guy Davenport’s “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996), in which he writes:
“The world is a labyrinth in which we keep traversing familiar crossroads we had thought were miles away, but to which we are doomed to backtrack. Every book I have read is in a Borgesian series that began with the orange, black, and mimosa-green clothbound Tarzan brought to me as a kindly gift by Mrs. Shiflet in her apron and bonnet.”
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
`It Is Every Thing and Nothing'
A fifth-grader who in September was flummoxed when asked to write a sentence of minimum components – subject, verb, object, correctly spelled – on Monday wrote a coherent, grammatically correct paragraph of five sentences, all in less than thirty minutes. Even more pleasing and unexpected, it was interesting to read. Part of the explanation is my enforcement of unwavering attentiveness. We sit in a quiet room, door closed, alone with the language and our imaginations. Word by word, we craft sentences, no excuses accepted, in the same way we might learn to stucco a wall or prepare arroz con pollo.
The rest of the explanation, probably the greater part, taught me a lesson I already knew. On my first day with him, I asked if he had visited a park lately. He had, with his father. I asked him to describe the experience in a sentence or two and he choked. Literally, he couldn’t put a word on paper, so gradually I changed strategies. Instead of verbatim autobiography, I had him describe objects, other students and teachers, in enough detail to distinguish them from others. I wanted to avoid self-portraits and turn to still lifes, and had him write sentences about other people, real or imaginary, sometimes from their point of view.
On Monday, inspired by a book he’s reading, he wrote a story told in the voice of a young indentured servant (his words) in colonial Boston. He named the kid Pablo (“He’s Mexican!”). He works for a baker, cutting firewood, beating carpets (his words) and hauling water from the pond. Something about shedding the burden of self and entering the being of another set this kid free, at least with a pencil. He seems to have absorbed the lesson of John Keats who insisted “the poetical Character…it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character…”
This kid is no poet but the principle stands. Often the imagination flowers only when turned outward, where it flourishes in otherness. In his book length interview with Philip Hoy (Between the Lines, 2001), Anthony Hecht elaborate on Keats’ insight:
“…Keats, who said the poet had no personality of his own, no identity. In any case, this sort of thing is not for me. I have in fact tried to disguise myself in my poems, and have adopted the voices of persons wholly different from me, including women. Novelists do this sort of thing all the time, while many readers and critics seem to deny this privilege to the poet, or to doubt that he is able to do it. Some of the most grotesque misreadings of my poems have been made by those who assume that all my poems are voiced in propria persona.”
The rest of the explanation, probably the greater part, taught me a lesson I already knew. On my first day with him, I asked if he had visited a park lately. He had, with his father. I asked him to describe the experience in a sentence or two and he choked. Literally, he couldn’t put a word on paper, so gradually I changed strategies. Instead of verbatim autobiography, I had him describe objects, other students and teachers, in enough detail to distinguish them from others. I wanted to avoid self-portraits and turn to still lifes, and had him write sentences about other people, real or imaginary, sometimes from their point of view.
On Monday, inspired by a book he’s reading, he wrote a story told in the voice of a young indentured servant (his words) in colonial Boston. He named the kid Pablo (“He’s Mexican!”). He works for a baker, cutting firewood, beating carpets (his words) and hauling water from the pond. Something about shedding the burden of self and entering the being of another set this kid free, at least with a pencil. He seems to have absorbed the lesson of John Keats who insisted “the poetical Character…it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character…”
This kid is no poet but the principle stands. Often the imagination flowers only when turned outward, where it flourishes in otherness. In his book length interview with Philip Hoy (Between the Lines, 2001), Anthony Hecht elaborate on Keats’ insight:
“…Keats, who said the poet had no personality of his own, no identity. In any case, this sort of thing is not for me. I have in fact tried to disguise myself in my poems, and have adopted the voices of persons wholly different from me, including women. Novelists do this sort of thing all the time, while many readers and critics seem to deny this privilege to the poet, or to doubt that he is able to do it. Some of the most grotesque misreadings of my poems have been made by those who assume that all my poems are voiced in propria persona.”
Monday, January 24, 2011
`He Did Not Permit His Disappointment to Come Out'
As narrative, Herschel Parker’s two-volume, eighteen-hundred-page biography of Herman Melville (1996, 2002) is rudderless and without sails in a windless sea. Unlike Richard Holmes in his two volumes devoted to Coleridge, Parker never tries to reanimate his subject, and his prose is drab. Rather, he sucks up data like a dutiful vacuum cleaner, tens of thousands of facts, and arranges them in roughly chronological order. Thanks to detailed indexes, however, we can navigate a course through uncharted seas and scrimshaw our own little dramas. On page 20 of Volume 1, 1819-1851, we learn:
“In 1830, apparently, Allan [the writer’s father] raised a few dollars he could by auctioning off some of his finer books, including The Anatomy of Melancholy, purchased in 1816.”
Four-hundred seventy-nine pages later, in the chapter devoted to Melville writing Mardi, we read:
“On 10 April 1847 [the day Harpers announced publication of Omoo] at Gowan’s antiquarian bookstore Melville picked up a copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (not noticing that his father had owned that very copy).”
Another three-hundred fifty-one pages on, in the chapter devoted to the completion of Moby-Dick, Parker tells us:
“[On July 7, 1851] Melville inscribed in his copy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy a poignant discovery Allan [Herman’s younger brother] had made, a faint signature, `A. Melvill’: `I bought this book more than four years ago at Gowans’ Store in New York. Today, Allan in looking at it, first detected the above pencil signature of my father’s; who,--as it now appears—must have had the book, with many others, sold at auction, at least twenty-five years ago.—Strange!’”
Strange, indeed, for Burton ranks among the honorary fathers of Moby-Dick, joining the distinguished lineage of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Browne, Coleridge, Carlyle and Hawthorne. Poignant, too: Melville’s father’s financial fecklessness led indirectly to his son going to sea, and thus to the writing of Moby-Dick and the other books. Herman, too, knew money troubles.
In Volume 2, 1851-1891, Parker includes excerpts from an article by Oscar Wegelin published in the Summer 1935 issue of The Colophon. As a youth, Wegelin worked as an apprentice in the bookshop of Johnson Anderson Jr., on Nassau Street in Manhattan. He recalls Melville’s first visit to the shop, still hunting books, in autumn 1890. Wegelin describes the meeting as “the beginning of a brief but pleasant friendship” between the almost-forgotten author and Anderson, who recognizes his name. Forty-five years after the fact, Wegelin is unable to remember the title of the book Melville sought, only that “it was concerned with the sea.” Wegelin writes:
“I particularly recall his gentleness of manner and his pleasant smile. I never found him to be the misanthrope that many authorities accuse him of having been; it was difficult for me to believe that he was a disappointed man—if he was he did not permit his disappointment to come out into the open…”
How reassuring to think Melville had moments of contentment during his long eclipse, and that at least some of them were associated with the acquisition of books.
“In 1830, apparently, Allan [the writer’s father] raised a few dollars he could by auctioning off some of his finer books, including The Anatomy of Melancholy, purchased in 1816.”
Four-hundred seventy-nine pages later, in the chapter devoted to Melville writing Mardi, we read:
“On 10 April 1847 [the day Harpers announced publication of Omoo] at Gowan’s antiquarian bookstore Melville picked up a copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (not noticing that his father had owned that very copy).”
Another three-hundred fifty-one pages on, in the chapter devoted to the completion of Moby-Dick, Parker tells us:
“[On July 7, 1851] Melville inscribed in his copy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy a poignant discovery Allan [Herman’s younger brother] had made, a faint signature, `A. Melvill’: `I bought this book more than four years ago at Gowans’ Store in New York. Today, Allan in looking at it, first detected the above pencil signature of my father’s; who,--as it now appears—must have had the book, with many others, sold at auction, at least twenty-five years ago.—Strange!’”
Strange, indeed, for Burton ranks among the honorary fathers of Moby-Dick, joining the distinguished lineage of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Browne, Coleridge, Carlyle and Hawthorne. Poignant, too: Melville’s father’s financial fecklessness led indirectly to his son going to sea, and thus to the writing of Moby-Dick and the other books. Herman, too, knew money troubles.
In Volume 2, 1851-1891, Parker includes excerpts from an article by Oscar Wegelin published in the Summer 1935 issue of The Colophon. As a youth, Wegelin worked as an apprentice in the bookshop of Johnson Anderson Jr., on Nassau Street in Manhattan. He recalls Melville’s first visit to the shop, still hunting books, in autumn 1890. Wegelin describes the meeting as “the beginning of a brief but pleasant friendship” between the almost-forgotten author and Anderson, who recognizes his name. Forty-five years after the fact, Wegelin is unable to remember the title of the book Melville sought, only that “it was concerned with the sea.” Wegelin writes:
“I particularly recall his gentleness of manner and his pleasant smile. I never found him to be the misanthrope that many authorities accuse him of having been; it was difficult for me to believe that he was a disappointed man—if he was he did not permit his disappointment to come out into the open…”
How reassuring to think Melville had moments of contentment during his long eclipse, and that at least some of them were associated with the acquisition of books.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
`The Things I Want to Know Is in Books'
Dennis Friend Hanks, the cousin of Abraham Lincoln’s mother, was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, in 1799, the year of George Washington’s death. He lived with the Lincoln family in Indiana and married Lincoln’s stepsister, Sarah Elizabeth Johnston. He and the future president, ten years his junior, appear to have been genuinely friendly and close when young, but Hanks, an inveterate mythologizer who lived to age ninety-three, probably embellished his recollections. Scholars are wary and Hanks quotes young Lincoln, almost as a disclaimer, saying:
“Denny, when a story learns you a good lesson, it ain’t no lie. God tells truth in parables. They’re easier for common folks to understand and recollect.”
I take this from Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, (edited by Don E. and Virginia Fehrenbacher, Stanford University Press, 1996), a gathering of anecdotes about the president from men and women, prominent and otherwise, who knew him. It’s reminiscent of Johnsoniana: Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., a volume devoted to another backward, unlikely candidate for greatness. Lincoln and Johnson shared bookish tastes, yet lived squarely in their respective times and places. Here’s another sample of Hanks recalling Lincoln’s conversation, recorded in his ninetieth year:
“Denny, the things I want to know is in books. My best friend’s the man who’ll get me one.”
I’ve had many such “best friends.” Verbatim or not, it’s true to Lincoln – and to Johnson, son of a Lichfield bookseller. Today, almost on a whim, readers can find any book they fancy. In eighteenth-century England and nineteenth-century Kentucky and Indiana, books were precious and rare. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, reports the future president saying in the mid-eighteen-fifties, after buying a set of science books:
“I have wanted such a book for years because I sometimes make experiments and have thoughts about the physical world that I do not know to be true nor false. I may, by this book, correct my errors and save time and expense.”
How long has it been since a future president had such thoughts and acted on them? Johnson, too, was given to amateur science experiments. In the “Preface” to his great Dictionary, Johnson refers to his “fortuitous and unguided excursions into books.” Is there any other sort of literary excursion?
“Denny, when a story learns you a good lesson, it ain’t no lie. God tells truth in parables. They’re easier for common folks to understand and recollect.”
I take this from Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, (edited by Don E. and Virginia Fehrenbacher, Stanford University Press, 1996), a gathering of anecdotes about the president from men and women, prominent and otherwise, who knew him. It’s reminiscent of Johnsoniana: Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., a volume devoted to another backward, unlikely candidate for greatness. Lincoln and Johnson shared bookish tastes, yet lived squarely in their respective times and places. Here’s another sample of Hanks recalling Lincoln’s conversation, recorded in his ninetieth year:
“Denny, the things I want to know is in books. My best friend’s the man who’ll get me one.”
I’ve had many such “best friends.” Verbatim or not, it’s true to Lincoln – and to Johnson, son of a Lichfield bookseller. Today, almost on a whim, readers can find any book they fancy. In eighteenth-century England and nineteenth-century Kentucky and Indiana, books were precious and rare. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, reports the future president saying in the mid-eighteen-fifties, after buying a set of science books:
“I have wanted such a book for years because I sometimes make experiments and have thoughts about the physical world that I do not know to be true nor false. I may, by this book, correct my errors and save time and expense.”
How long has it been since a future president had such thoughts and acted on them? Johnson, too, was given to amateur science experiments. In the “Preface” to his great Dictionary, Johnson refers to his “fortuitous and unguided excursions into books.” Is there any other sort of literary excursion?
Saturday, January 22, 2011
`A Writer Who Never Let Down His Style'
“I write / to astonish myself.”
Geoffrey Hill’s audacity (Section XXIII, The Orchards of Syon) came to mind while reading David Myers’ tribute to Wilfrid Sheed, dead this week at age eighty. Sheed’s novels, especially Max Jamison and The Hack, were witty and very funny, though my favorite among his books may have been his last, The House that George Built (2007), a love song to Tin Pan Alley. It might have borne the title of his 1993 volume about baseball, My Life as a Fan.
Sheed was by disposition a quiet enthusiast who earned his late happiness the hard way, in the wake of polio, depression and addiction to drugs and alcohol. He was no creampuff. He wrote for the best of Johnsonian reasons – he was a pro, and in the sixties and seventies his byline was ubiquitous – but he also seemed to be having a marvelous time. Savor this gem about Norman Mailer from Essays in Disguise (1990):
“’Do not understand me too quickly,’ he says. Good grief, little danger of that.”
Or this from The Good Word and Other Words (1978):
“Of Ezra Pound, as of Bobby Fischer, all that decently be said is that his colleagues admire him. There is no special reason for anyone else to.”
Not every good writer is great. If Sheed was minor he shared at least one quality with the greats – memorability. The Mailer quip I’ve remembered for decades, longer than any eruption by Mailer. Myers’ concluding sentences likewise sound lasting:
“If you never permit your style to flag, if you never lower your standards for the parts of speech, you might even endure the worst of patches.
“There in a single nugget-like idea is the reason that Wilfrid Sheed deserves to be remembered. He was a writer who never let down his style.”
Sheed’s style, as the examples quoted suggest, was as honed, balanced and efficient as a Bowie knife. He was not flashy, his language never attention-gettingly recondite or slang-ridden. He had the gag-man’s gift for brevity and speed but seldom played the wise guy. Style, Myers suggests, is not filigree but language suffused with a writer’s sensibility. That’s real astonishment. In a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker (1953), A.J. Liebling formulates the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse, and I fancy Sheed might have joined me:
“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”
Geoffrey Hill’s audacity (Section XXIII, The Orchards of Syon) came to mind while reading David Myers’ tribute to Wilfrid Sheed, dead this week at age eighty. Sheed’s novels, especially Max Jamison and The Hack, were witty and very funny, though my favorite among his books may have been his last, The House that George Built (2007), a love song to Tin Pan Alley. It might have borne the title of his 1993 volume about baseball, My Life as a Fan.
Sheed was by disposition a quiet enthusiast who earned his late happiness the hard way, in the wake of polio, depression and addiction to drugs and alcohol. He was no creampuff. He wrote for the best of Johnsonian reasons – he was a pro, and in the sixties and seventies his byline was ubiquitous – but he also seemed to be having a marvelous time. Savor this gem about Norman Mailer from Essays in Disguise (1990):
“’Do not understand me too quickly,’ he says. Good grief, little danger of that.”
Or this from The Good Word and Other Words (1978):
“Of Ezra Pound, as of Bobby Fischer, all that decently be said is that his colleagues admire him. There is no special reason for anyone else to.”
Not every good writer is great. If Sheed was minor he shared at least one quality with the greats – memorability. The Mailer quip I’ve remembered for decades, longer than any eruption by Mailer. Myers’ concluding sentences likewise sound lasting:
“If you never permit your style to flag, if you never lower your standards for the parts of speech, you might even endure the worst of patches.
“There in a single nugget-like idea is the reason that Wilfrid Sheed deserves to be remembered. He was a writer who never let down his style.”
Sheed’s style, as the examples quoted suggest, was as honed, balanced and efficient as a Bowie knife. He was not flashy, his language never attention-gettingly recondite or slang-ridden. He had the gag-man’s gift for brevity and speed but seldom played the wise guy. Style, Myers suggests, is not filigree but language suffused with a writer’s sensibility. That’s real astonishment. In a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker (1953), A.J. Liebling formulates the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse, and I fancy Sheed might have joined me:
“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”
Friday, January 21, 2011
`In the Words of the Old [...] Spiritual'
The assembly celebrated the Jan. 15, 1929, birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The librarian read a children’s book devoted to his life, and the choir performed “Down By the Riverside” and “We Shall Overcome.” Students took turns reading passages from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963. The kids were hardly eloquent but their bumbling lent poignancy to King’s words, especially when they voiced his vision of
“…a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”
The five hundred students, staff and guests in the gymnasium amply embodied King’s dream. The kids closed with the speech’s rousing rhetorical crescendo, which still has the power to move some of us:
“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, `Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
What’s this? Something missing? Memory frays, but King’s words are too familiar – Greil Marcus calls them “the most powerful and beautiful minutes of oration the country has ever known” -- to be misquoted without notice. They left out the other “n-word” – “Negro,” as in “the old Negro spiritual.” Turn on the radio and you can hear the first “n-word,” and even read it in some editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but a nameless arm of the virtue police excised King’s linguistic choice, precise in its musical context. Elsewhere in the speech, as in the passages quoted above, King uses “black” a little ahead of his time. American newspapers wouldn’t move from “Negro” to “black” for another three years or so.
Censorship’s triumph is final when we’re unaware of having been the object of censorship. Kids in the room, born four decades after King’s murder, may never know “Negro” was deemed too indelicate for their ears.
“…a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”
The five hundred students, staff and guests in the gymnasium amply embodied King’s dream. The kids closed with the speech’s rousing rhetorical crescendo, which still has the power to move some of us:
“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, `Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
What’s this? Something missing? Memory frays, but King’s words are too familiar – Greil Marcus calls them “the most powerful and beautiful minutes of oration the country has ever known” -- to be misquoted without notice. They left out the other “n-word” – “Negro,” as in “the old Negro spiritual.” Turn on the radio and you can hear the first “n-word,” and even read it in some editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but a nameless arm of the virtue police excised King’s linguistic choice, precise in its musical context. Elsewhere in the speech, as in the passages quoted above, King uses “black” a little ahead of his time. American newspapers wouldn’t move from “Negro” to “black” for another three years or so.
Censorship’s triumph is final when we’re unaware of having been the object of censorship. Kids in the room, born four decades after King’s murder, may never know “Negro” was deemed too indelicate for their ears.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
`We Were Intently Listening'
Here is Nige ghost-writing a remote chapter of my autobiography:
“And yet, drug-soused though we might have been, we were intently listening, experiencing the music (and the words) with an intensity that is much harder to achieve in these days when whatever music you might want is instantly available and the technology makes it so much easier to flit from track to track and artist to artist than to settle down with one big piece of work and really get to know it.”
There was a quasi-religious devotion in the way some of us listened to music, popular and otherwise. Dope might intensify the absorption but the music was central. This leads to a thought I’ve entertained before but never articulated: Is it possible that listening intently to so many albums for so many years, puzzling out encrypted meanings in lyrics and dissecting the minutiae of Ginger Baker’s drumming, helped ready some of us to an approach to literature resembling explication de texte? At its worst, this led to Paul-is-Dead paranoia and magical thinking, but some of us didn’t take that seriously even in 1969. Rather, Dylan in particular encouraged us to toy with his words, heft them like rocks, plumb multiple levels of meaning, and wonder at the starkness of his best lines. Words, he suggested, are sometimes more than mere words. The leap from this:
“`No reason to get excited,’ the thief, he kindly spoke,
`There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.’”
to this:
“At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.”
is almost effortless for those of us with practiced ears.
“And yet, drug-soused though we might have been, we were intently listening, experiencing the music (and the words) with an intensity that is much harder to achieve in these days when whatever music you might want is instantly available and the technology makes it so much easier to flit from track to track and artist to artist than to settle down with one big piece of work and really get to know it.”
There was a quasi-religious devotion in the way some of us listened to music, popular and otherwise. Dope might intensify the absorption but the music was central. This leads to a thought I’ve entertained before but never articulated: Is it possible that listening intently to so many albums for so many years, puzzling out encrypted meanings in lyrics and dissecting the minutiae of Ginger Baker’s drumming, helped ready some of us to an approach to literature resembling explication de texte? At its worst, this led to Paul-is-Dead paranoia and magical thinking, but some of us didn’t take that seriously even in 1969. Rather, Dylan in particular encouraged us to toy with his words, heft them like rocks, plumb multiple levels of meaning, and wonder at the starkness of his best lines. Words, he suggested, are sometimes more than mere words. The leap from this:
“`No reason to get excited,’ the thief, he kindly spoke,
`There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.’”
to this:
“At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.”
is almost effortless for those of us with practiced ears.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
`Collected, Respected, Read and Loved'
In the cushioned envelope came the book I’ve been waiting months, and probably much longer, to read: Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers, the second edition, “corrected and enlarged,” published in 1952 by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto. My benefactor is Helen Pinkerton, who writes in an e-mail:
“I had three copies including an unmarked second copy of the 2nd edition, which I include. Reading this book when I was about 21 and at Stanford changed my life, I found in it the philosophical grounds for believing in God's existence, which delivered me from youthful atheism and have sustained my faith ever since. Though [her teacher, Yvor] Winters recommended reading Gilson's histories of philosophy, he did not mention this book. When I asked him in later years about it, he confessed that he had not read it. I wish that he had.”
In the accompanying package, a recycled Amazon.com box, the poet also sent a paperback copy of Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories (1946, revised 1986) by her friend Janet Lewis; Open to All: What the Library Means to Me (2007), edited by Molly Fisk, Steve Fjeldsted and Steve Sanfield; and Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith: Poems (2002), signed by the poet and inscribed with words too embarrassingly generous to be reported. In short, Pinkerton has shared precious pieces of herself and her identities as writer and human being. Words, as happens with increasing regularity, fail me.
Open to All is no random gift. It was published by Comstock Bonanza Press (words that constitute a core sample of the American West) of Grass Valley, Ca., for Nevada County Library and the Nevada County Library Foundation. Among its contributors are names familiar if not impressive – Gary Snyder, Utah Phillips, Anne Lamott – and two checked for emphasis by Pinkerton – John Church and Erica Light. In “My Library Home,” the former describes traveling as a boy between Montana and New Mexico with his salesman father, habitually visiting public libraries along the way. Much of his remembrance is devoted to the library in Butte, Mont., where, as Pinkerton says, “I first checked out books.” Church, a retired librarian, writes:
“As we left Butte in our car, we felt in spirit the joy of being `on the road again,’ which we chimed out in unison as we looked at the road ahead, knowing we would soon be in another library with books, a librarian, and a peaceful place to read.”
Light is a library assistant for Nevada County Library and Helen Pinkerton’s daughter. In “World of Connections” she writes:
“My world has always included at least one library. In our family books were collected, respected, read and loved.”
And in mine. Thank you yet again, Helen.
“I had three copies including an unmarked second copy of the 2nd edition, which I include. Reading this book when I was about 21 and at Stanford changed my life, I found in it the philosophical grounds for believing in God's existence, which delivered me from youthful atheism and have sustained my faith ever since. Though [her teacher, Yvor] Winters recommended reading Gilson's histories of philosophy, he did not mention this book. When I asked him in later years about it, he confessed that he had not read it. I wish that he had.”
In the accompanying package, a recycled Amazon.com box, the poet also sent a paperback copy of Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories (1946, revised 1986) by her friend Janet Lewis; Open to All: What the Library Means to Me (2007), edited by Molly Fisk, Steve Fjeldsted and Steve Sanfield; and Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith: Poems (2002), signed by the poet and inscribed with words too embarrassingly generous to be reported. In short, Pinkerton has shared precious pieces of herself and her identities as writer and human being. Words, as happens with increasing regularity, fail me.
Open to All is no random gift. It was published by Comstock Bonanza Press (words that constitute a core sample of the American West) of Grass Valley, Ca., for Nevada County Library and the Nevada County Library Foundation. Among its contributors are names familiar if not impressive – Gary Snyder, Utah Phillips, Anne Lamott – and two checked for emphasis by Pinkerton – John Church and Erica Light. In “My Library Home,” the former describes traveling as a boy between Montana and New Mexico with his salesman father, habitually visiting public libraries along the way. Much of his remembrance is devoted to the library in Butte, Mont., where, as Pinkerton says, “I first checked out books.” Church, a retired librarian, writes:
“As we left Butte in our car, we felt in spirit the joy of being `on the road again,’ which we chimed out in unison as we looked at the road ahead, knowing we would soon be in another library with books, a librarian, and a peaceful place to read.”
Light is a library assistant for Nevada County Library and Helen Pinkerton’s daughter. In “World of Connections” she writes:
“My world has always included at least one library. In our family books were collected, respected, read and loved.”
And in mine. Thank you yet again, Helen.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
`The History of His Barn Floor'
The day started with an aphorism from Nicolás Gómez Dávila, “Don Colacho”:
“We should only encourage someone to do something that is worth doing because it is worth it. Goodness for goodness’s sake, truth for truth’s sake, art for art’s sake.”
So evident, so common-sensical, so rare. Ours is the mercenary species, equipped to know truth and act on it but predisposed to self-seeking, to getting our way regardless of consequences. Don Colacho says “art for art’s sake” but he’s not writing as a hot-house aesthete. When press-ganged into a cause, art is no longer art and truth is in jeopardy.
Last month I wrote of George Minott, Thoreau’s neighbor, “the most poetical farmer.” On Monday I heard from one of Minott’s descendants, a 22-year-old law student. She read my post and gave Mary Elkin Moller’s Thoreau in the Human Community to her father for his birthday. She writes:
“My dad, a writer himself, has long known of the connection, but many of the passages Moller cites were new to him. The subject line of this email is a paraphrase of Thoreau's description of [Minott] and was new to my dad and his father… A vague sentiment, perhaps, but a powerful one: `He does nothing with haste or drudgery, but as if he loved it.’”
Nothing vague about it. Some people all the time and all of us at least occasionally live as though our lives consisted of “haste or drudgery.” This was anathema to Thoreau, who writes in the second chapter of Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…”
The passage about Minott occurs in Thoreau’s journal for Oct. 4, 1851:
“Minott is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer—who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer’s life—that I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking forward to the sale of his crops or any pecuniary profit, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields him. He has not too much land to trouble him, - too much work to do, - no hired man nor boy, - but simply to amuse himself and live. He cares not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well. He knows every pin and nail in his barn. If another linter is to be floored, he lets no hired man rob him of that amusement, but he goes slowly to the woods and, at his leisure, selects a pitch pine tree, cuts it, and hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill; and so he knows the history of his barn floor.”
The formidably bookish Thoreau adds: “Though he never reads a book,--since he finished the `Naval Monument,’ he speaks the best of English.”
Cranky, wayward Thoreau saw in Minott a man who did “something that is worth doing because it is worth it,” and followed his understated example. Minott’s descendant adds in her e-mail:
“I also wanted to mention my new appreciation for the novel Stoner [by John Williams], which I first heard about, of course, from you. In contrast to law school, where my study is so often done in both haste and drudgery, I bought the book in October and read and reread it with longing and wonder. Now, I often find myself reading passages aloud, alone on cold Iowa nights, and every few pages having to look up and catch my breath. What sort of feeling is this, I ask myself, and then in deep warmth it comes to me that I am in love, just as Archer Sloane said. I am 22, ever lost in scenes of inarticulated beauty, and, like William hearing Shakespeare, unable to speak, his fingers unclenching their hard grip on the desk-top, I can say little more. The novel is dear to me, perhaps my favorite fiction, if such a thing can be said about one who has read so few. My deepest thanks to you for this gift.”
“We should only encourage someone to do something that is worth doing because it is worth it. Goodness for goodness’s sake, truth for truth’s sake, art for art’s sake.”
So evident, so common-sensical, so rare. Ours is the mercenary species, equipped to know truth and act on it but predisposed to self-seeking, to getting our way regardless of consequences. Don Colacho says “art for art’s sake” but he’s not writing as a hot-house aesthete. When press-ganged into a cause, art is no longer art and truth is in jeopardy.
Last month I wrote of George Minott, Thoreau’s neighbor, “the most poetical farmer.” On Monday I heard from one of Minott’s descendants, a 22-year-old law student. She read my post and gave Mary Elkin Moller’s Thoreau in the Human Community to her father for his birthday. She writes:
“My dad, a writer himself, has long known of the connection, but many of the passages Moller cites were new to him. The subject line of this email is a paraphrase of Thoreau's description of [Minott] and was new to my dad and his father… A vague sentiment, perhaps, but a powerful one: `He does nothing with haste or drudgery, but as if he loved it.’”
Nothing vague about it. Some people all the time and all of us at least occasionally live as though our lives consisted of “haste or drudgery.” This was anathema to Thoreau, who writes in the second chapter of Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…”
The passage about Minott occurs in Thoreau’s journal for Oct. 4, 1851:
“Minott is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer—who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer’s life—that I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking forward to the sale of his crops or any pecuniary profit, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields him. He has not too much land to trouble him, - too much work to do, - no hired man nor boy, - but simply to amuse himself and live. He cares not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well. He knows every pin and nail in his barn. If another linter is to be floored, he lets no hired man rob him of that amusement, but he goes slowly to the woods and, at his leisure, selects a pitch pine tree, cuts it, and hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill; and so he knows the history of his barn floor.”
The formidably bookish Thoreau adds: “Though he never reads a book,--since he finished the `Naval Monument,’ he speaks the best of English.”
Cranky, wayward Thoreau saw in Minott a man who did “something that is worth doing because it is worth it,” and followed his understated example. Minott’s descendant adds in her e-mail:
“I also wanted to mention my new appreciation for the novel Stoner [by John Williams], which I first heard about, of course, from you. In contrast to law school, where my study is so often done in both haste and drudgery, I bought the book in October and read and reread it with longing and wonder. Now, I often find myself reading passages aloud, alone on cold Iowa nights, and every few pages having to look up and catch my breath. What sort of feeling is this, I ask myself, and then in deep warmth it comes to me that I am in love, just as Archer Sloane said. I am 22, ever lost in scenes of inarticulated beauty, and, like William hearing Shakespeare, unable to speak, his fingers unclenching their hard grip on the desk-top, I can say little more. The novel is dear to me, perhaps my favorite fiction, if such a thing can be said about one who has read so few. My deepest thanks to you for this gift.”
Monday, January 17, 2011
`I Am a Verb Instead of a Personal Pronoun'
“I said I had been adding to my book and to my coffin. I presume every strain of the mind or body is one more nail in the coffin.”
The writer is Ulysses S. Grant in the summer of 1885, at his cottage in Mount McGregor, N.Y., in the foothills of the Adirondacks. The previous October he had been diagnosed with throat cancer by Dr. John Hancock Douglas, who attended the former president until his death on July 23, 1885. In the final stages of the disease Grant was unable to speak and communicated with his doctor by handwritten note.
The Library of America, along with Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant and a selection of letters, includes ten pages of these notes to Douglas, who preserved them. Most are brief, one or two sentences, describing symptoms, pain, medication, life, writing and death. Grant is struggling to complete his Personal Memoirs. His painkilling regimen is harrowing – cocaine, morphine, laudanum, sometimes alcohol. Despite his reputation for hard drinking Grant was no junky or lush. He writes like a solider – stoic but not foolishly so. On June 26 he writes:
“I do not feel the slightest desire to take morphine now. In fact when I do take it it is not from craving, but merely from a knowledge of the relief it gives. If I should go without it all night I would become restless I know, partly from the loss of it, and partly from the continuous pain I would have to endure.”
And this, on July 7:
“I feel very badly probably because of a cross fire between opium and laudanum. If relieved of that I half hope to feel better.
“I feel as if I cannot endure it any longer. The alcoholic stimulants must absolutely be given up.”
The careful eloquence in the midst of pain, the resignation in the face of imminent death, reminds me of Chekhov. The last note, written in his final three days, is remarkable as literature and as a human document:
“I do not sleep though I sometimes dose off a little. If up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.”
I happened to read Grant’s final notes the same day I was rereading some of Melville’s poems, including “Lone Founts” from Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse. This was the last book Melville published during his lifetime, in 1891, the year of his death. It came out in a limited edition of twenty-five copies and was dedicated to the painter Elihu Vedder, whose portrait of Jane Jackson had inspired Melville’s “`Formerly a Slave'” in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). Here is “Lone Founts”:
“Though fast youth's glorious fable flies,
View not the world with worldling's eyes;
Nor turn with weather of the time.
Foreclose the coming of surprise:
Stand where Posterity shall stand;
Stand where the Ancients stood before,
And, dipping in lone founts thy hand,
Drink of the never-varying lore:
Wise once, and wise thence evermore.”
The writer is Ulysses S. Grant in the summer of 1885, at his cottage in Mount McGregor, N.Y., in the foothills of the Adirondacks. The previous October he had been diagnosed with throat cancer by Dr. John Hancock Douglas, who attended the former president until his death on July 23, 1885. In the final stages of the disease Grant was unable to speak and communicated with his doctor by handwritten note.
The Library of America, along with Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant and a selection of letters, includes ten pages of these notes to Douglas, who preserved them. Most are brief, one or two sentences, describing symptoms, pain, medication, life, writing and death. Grant is struggling to complete his Personal Memoirs. His painkilling regimen is harrowing – cocaine, morphine, laudanum, sometimes alcohol. Despite his reputation for hard drinking Grant was no junky or lush. He writes like a solider – stoic but not foolishly so. On June 26 he writes:
“I do not feel the slightest desire to take morphine now. In fact when I do take it it is not from craving, but merely from a knowledge of the relief it gives. If I should go without it all night I would become restless I know, partly from the loss of it, and partly from the continuous pain I would have to endure.”
And this, on July 7:
“I feel very badly probably because of a cross fire between opium and laudanum. If relieved of that I half hope to feel better.
“I feel as if I cannot endure it any longer. The alcoholic stimulants must absolutely be given up.”
The careful eloquence in the midst of pain, the resignation in the face of imminent death, reminds me of Chekhov. The last note, written in his final three days, is remarkable as literature and as a human document:
“I do not sleep though I sometimes dose off a little. If up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.”
I happened to read Grant’s final notes the same day I was rereading some of Melville’s poems, including “Lone Founts” from Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse. This was the last book Melville published during his lifetime, in 1891, the year of his death. It came out in a limited edition of twenty-five copies and was dedicated to the painter Elihu Vedder, whose portrait of Jane Jackson had inspired Melville’s “`Formerly a Slave'” in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). Here is “Lone Founts”:
“Though fast youth's glorious fable flies,
View not the world with worldling's eyes;
Nor turn with weather of the time.
Foreclose the coming of surprise:
Stand where Posterity shall stand;
Stand where the Ancients stood before,
And, dipping in lone founts thy hand,
Drink of the never-varying lore:
Wise once, and wise thence evermore.”
Sunday, January 16, 2011
`Never Milked a Cow or Goat'
Helen Pinkerton asked what I thought of Poetry, the magazine celebrating its centenary next year, and I said I’ve never read it regularly but its contents seem to reflect, with a few exceptions like Kay Ryan, the unrelieved awfulness of contemporary verse. “It’s really quite terrible,” she said, disdaining qualifications.
She’s right, of course. There’s a new and fashionable diversity to its awfulness but I defy you to read the January issue and find a single poem you might reasonably wish to memorize or even reread. Narcissism, tin ears, nihilism, sentimentality, pontificating, prose poems, refried romanticism, “the poetry of home-birth,” “Stars / are the campfires / of exiles.” What ingrown rubbish. Nothing written by adults for adults, nothing to do with life as I know it, nothing with music. These people seem to lead hermetically sealed lives.
As though for an antidote I’ve been reading The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, edited by R. L. Barth (Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2000), where I found this:
“I am constantly being bewildered by romantic lovers of the bucolic who have never milked a cow or goat, who have never trimmed a terrier, who cannot tell a finch from a thrush, who have never pulled a carrot fresh from the ground and eaten it raw, who have never had to battle with a natural and impulsive love for too much alcohol, and who never got any pleasure out of a fight with their bare fists. These things and others loosely related have been the great temptations of my life.”
You’ll find little of that in Poetry, which published Winters’ “Night of Battle” in December 1946.
She’s right, of course. There’s a new and fashionable diversity to its awfulness but I defy you to read the January issue and find a single poem you might reasonably wish to memorize or even reread. Narcissism, tin ears, nihilism, sentimentality, pontificating, prose poems, refried romanticism, “the poetry of home-birth,” “Stars / are the campfires / of exiles.” What ingrown rubbish. Nothing written by adults for adults, nothing to do with life as I know it, nothing with music. These people seem to lead hermetically sealed lives.
As though for an antidote I’ve been reading The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, edited by R. L. Barth (Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2000), where I found this:
“I am constantly being bewildered by romantic lovers of the bucolic who have never milked a cow or goat, who have never trimmed a terrier, who cannot tell a finch from a thrush, who have never pulled a carrot fresh from the ground and eaten it raw, who have never had to battle with a natural and impulsive love for too much alcohol, and who never got any pleasure out of a fight with their bare fists. These things and others loosely related have been the great temptations of my life.”
You’ll find little of that in Poetry, which published Winters’ “Night of Battle” in December 1946.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
`Even If It Overwhelms and Terrifies'
“Some nut wrecked the Pietà,” a friend said in the student union. I’ve looked up the date: May 21, 1972, Pentecost Sunday. The news was delivered in words remarkably similar to those informing me of President Kennedy’s assassination, when a driver stopped at my Safety Patrol post and shouted: “Some nut in Texas shot Kennedy!” The geologist who slammed Michelangelo’s Mary with a hammer fifteen times conformed to the Hollywood vision of craziness. “I am Jesus Christ – risen from the dead,” he proclaimed.
Once the bailiwick of the insane and Marcel Duchamp, art vandalism today is a career choice. Consider the recent self-righteous assault on Huckleberry Finn. Consider Helen Pinkerton’s “Literary Theorist” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002):
“Abusing its otherness, its soul and wit,
He rapes the text, claiming its benefits—
And that, inscrutable, it asked for it.”
When Zbigniew Herbert visited the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete he experienced “a surprise of the unpleasant kind such as I had never had in any museum or in the presence of any work of art.” He continues, in the title essay of Labyrinth on the Sea (The Collected Prose 1948-1998, 2010):
“I was not then a youth thirsting for originality, which as we know is easiest to achieve if you are an iconoclast, if you scorn recognized works and don’t respect either authorities or tradition. This stance has always been alien to me—even odious, if I leave aside the short phase between my fourth and fifth year that psychologists describe as the phase of negativism. I always wanted to love, to adore, to fall to my knees and bow down before greatness, even if it overwhelms and terrifies, for what kind of greatness would it be that didn’t overwhelm and terrify.”
An iconoclast, of course, is a breaker of icons – such as the Virgin Mary. Herbert rightly diagnoses the urge as childish. One might add petulant and self-dramatizing. Rather than gazing with wonder and gratitude at great works of arts, some grow angry and contemptuous, too proud and intimidated “to love, to adore.”
Once the bailiwick of the insane and Marcel Duchamp, art vandalism today is a career choice. Consider the recent self-righteous assault on Huckleberry Finn. Consider Helen Pinkerton’s “Literary Theorist” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002):
“Abusing its otherness, its soul and wit,
He rapes the text, claiming its benefits—
And that, inscrutable, it asked for it.”
When Zbigniew Herbert visited the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete he experienced “a surprise of the unpleasant kind such as I had never had in any museum or in the presence of any work of art.” He continues, in the title essay of Labyrinth on the Sea (The Collected Prose 1948-1998, 2010):
“I was not then a youth thirsting for originality, which as we know is easiest to achieve if you are an iconoclast, if you scorn recognized works and don’t respect either authorities or tradition. This stance has always been alien to me—even odious, if I leave aside the short phase between my fourth and fifth year that psychologists describe as the phase of negativism. I always wanted to love, to adore, to fall to my knees and bow down before greatness, even if it overwhelms and terrifies, for what kind of greatness would it be that didn’t overwhelm and terrify.”
An iconoclast, of course, is a breaker of icons – such as the Virgin Mary. Herbert rightly diagnoses the urge as childish. One might add petulant and self-dramatizing. Rather than gazing with wonder and gratitude at great works of arts, some grow angry and contemptuous, too proud and intimidated “to love, to adore.”
Friday, January 14, 2011
`What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive!'
For years I’ve kept notebooks in which I transcribe notable passages from my reading. These commonplace books used to be almost random, organized only by chronology, but they grew unwieldy because I never found time to devise useful indexes. They were diverting to browse but almost worthless if I sought a specific passage or topic. At some point I started dedicating discrete notebooks to large subjects – Trees, Birds, Samuel Johnson, Jazz, Shakespeare, Children/Education. One of the fattest is the Civil War, a subject that seized me as a kid during the centenary and never went away.
I’ve leafed through it the last several days, marveling at the amount of insight and first-rate writing devoted to the subject, the central event in our history, the one we’re still contesting. For a sobering insight, compare the mass of words inspired by the Vietnam War. Michael Herr? Tim O’Brien? The decline in sheer literary worth is embarrassing. To give an almost-random sample of what I’ve accumulated, I’ll limit the selection to several of the passages about the Battle of Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862). First, this from one of the great American books, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885):
“Shiloh was the severest battle fought at the West during the war, and but few in the East equaled it for hard, determined fighting. I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”
A remarkably similar image of Shiloh after the battle comes from U.S. Lt. John T. Bell’s Tramps and Triumphs of the Second Infantry, Briefly Sketched (1886):
“In places dead men lay so closely that a person could walk over two acres of ground and not step off the bodies.”
This is from A Boy at Shiloh (1896) by U.S. Col. John A. Cockerill:
“The blue and gray were mingled together. This peculiarity I observed all over the field. It was no uncommon thing to see the bodies of Federal and Confederate side by side, as though they had bled to death while trying to aid each other.”
And here is a poem Helen Pinkerton has called “exquisite” -- “Shiloh, A Requiem (April, 1862)” by Herman Melville:
“Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the fields in cloudy days,
The forest-field of Shiloh–
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched one stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh–
The church, so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foeman mingled there–
Foeman at morn, but friends at eve–
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.”
The act of transcribing such passages never feels tiresome but, instead, like an act of homage – an act renewed each time I read them.
I’ve leafed through it the last several days, marveling at the amount of insight and first-rate writing devoted to the subject, the central event in our history, the one we’re still contesting. For a sobering insight, compare the mass of words inspired by the Vietnam War. Michael Herr? Tim O’Brien? The decline in sheer literary worth is embarrassing. To give an almost-random sample of what I’ve accumulated, I’ll limit the selection to several of the passages about the Battle of Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862). First, this from one of the great American books, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885):
“Shiloh was the severest battle fought at the West during the war, and but few in the East equaled it for hard, determined fighting. I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”
A remarkably similar image of Shiloh after the battle comes from U.S. Lt. John T. Bell’s Tramps and Triumphs of the Second Infantry, Briefly Sketched (1886):
“In places dead men lay so closely that a person could walk over two acres of ground and not step off the bodies.”
This is from A Boy at Shiloh (1896) by U.S. Col. John A. Cockerill:
“The blue and gray were mingled together. This peculiarity I observed all over the field. It was no uncommon thing to see the bodies of Federal and Confederate side by side, as though they had bled to death while trying to aid each other.”
And here is a poem Helen Pinkerton has called “exquisite” -- “Shiloh, A Requiem (April, 1862)” by Herman Melville:
“Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the fields in cloudy days,
The forest-field of Shiloh–
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched one stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh–
The church, so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foeman mingled there–
Foeman at morn, but friends at eve–
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.”
The act of transcribing such passages never feels tiresome but, instead, like an act of homage – an act renewed each time I read them.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
`War Is a Little Hardening'
“In retreat, [Stonewall] Jackson would fight for a wheelbarrow.”
These are the tough, pithy, Chandleresque words of Confederate Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, master of a sugar plantation in Louisiana, brother-in-law of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and able author of Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (1879), from which the sentence above is quoted. Since reading Helen Pinkerton’s “Alike and Yet Unalike: General Richard Taylor Writes to Henry Adams” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002), I’ve wanted to learn more about Taylor and finally have read his memoir.
It’s stupidly arrogant to dismiss a book like Destruction and Reconstruction because its author owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. Taylor was a thoughtful man of his time, fond of the classics, devoted husband and father, and a gifted soldier though without formal military education. He led the Louisiana Brigade in Virginia during Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, and in 1864 his troops defeated a larger Union force led by Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks in the Red River Campaign. Taylor surrendered the last organized Confederate forces east of the Mississippi River.
In an age of hyper-specialization, one is surprised by the ease with which a non-professional – to call him an “amateur” sounds patronizing – could excel at farming, war and writing. As a writer he has a gift for clear, vivid description and sardonic understatement. Here’s Taylor on the conclusion of the Valley Campaign:
“We passed the night high up the mountain, where we moved to reach our supply wagons. A cold rain was falling, and before we found them every one was tired and famished. I rather took it out of the train-master for pushing so far up, although I had lunched comfortably from the haversack of a dead Federal. It is not pleasant to think of now, but war is a little hardening.”
Describing a fight with the German troops of Brig. Gen. Louis Blenker near Cedar Creek on June 1, 1862, Taylor writes:
“Sheep would have made as much resistance as we met.”
As Pinkerton explains in the notes to her poem, Taylor was working after the war in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist for Louisiana interests when he and Henry Adams became friends:
“…Adams was beginning his History of the United States in the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-91). They read one another’s work in manuscript. Taylor published an essay on George Mason, `A Statesman of the Colonial Era,’ in North American Review (February 1879). A lifelong sufferer from rheumatoid arthritis, he died of heart disease April 12, 1879, one week after publication of his memoir…”
Pinkerton’s poem, a dramatic monologue in the form of a ten-page letter from Taylor to Adams, is dated January 1879. It includes a moving account of the death of Stonewall Jackson, shot by Confederate pickets during the Battle of Chancellorsville:
“It was a night that seemed to some of us
To sum up all our losses. Our good man,
Our great man, downed by his own soldiers’ fire.
God’s humor seems sardonic as my own.”
Taylor writes as a veteran not only of the war but of an irrecoverable past, a world gone, and perhaps a civilization. His voice is close to our own (Taylor has been reading Adams’ first novel, Democracy):
“…these days
When none remember what we were, or what
We might have been, had the war never come.
Your manuscript held me from sleep all night,
For it seemed hardly fiction but the truth
About a generation without honor.”
ADDENDUM: A reader in Dallas writes: "I'll have to put Taken in Faith and Gen. Taylor's memoir on my list of things to read. My father's grandfather, 1st Sgt. Samuel H. Stribling, was part of Taylor's army when it surrendered. According to family tradition, he was made a sergeant when the company was organized in 1864 because he was one of the older enlistees. He turned seventeen just after the surrender."
These are the tough, pithy, Chandleresque words of Confederate Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, master of a sugar plantation in Louisiana, brother-in-law of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and able author of Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (1879), from which the sentence above is quoted. Since reading Helen Pinkerton’s “Alike and Yet Unalike: General Richard Taylor Writes to Henry Adams” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002), I’ve wanted to learn more about Taylor and finally have read his memoir.
It’s stupidly arrogant to dismiss a book like Destruction and Reconstruction because its author owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. Taylor was a thoughtful man of his time, fond of the classics, devoted husband and father, and a gifted soldier though without formal military education. He led the Louisiana Brigade in Virginia during Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, and in 1864 his troops defeated a larger Union force led by Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks in the Red River Campaign. Taylor surrendered the last organized Confederate forces east of the Mississippi River.
In an age of hyper-specialization, one is surprised by the ease with which a non-professional – to call him an “amateur” sounds patronizing – could excel at farming, war and writing. As a writer he has a gift for clear, vivid description and sardonic understatement. Here’s Taylor on the conclusion of the Valley Campaign:
“We passed the night high up the mountain, where we moved to reach our supply wagons. A cold rain was falling, and before we found them every one was tired and famished. I rather took it out of the train-master for pushing so far up, although I had lunched comfortably from the haversack of a dead Federal. It is not pleasant to think of now, but war is a little hardening.”
Describing a fight with the German troops of Brig. Gen. Louis Blenker near Cedar Creek on June 1, 1862, Taylor writes:
“Sheep would have made as much resistance as we met.”
As Pinkerton explains in the notes to her poem, Taylor was working after the war in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist for Louisiana interests when he and Henry Adams became friends:
“…Adams was beginning his History of the United States in the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-91). They read one another’s work in manuscript. Taylor published an essay on George Mason, `A Statesman of the Colonial Era,’ in North American Review (February 1879). A lifelong sufferer from rheumatoid arthritis, he died of heart disease April 12, 1879, one week after publication of his memoir…”
Pinkerton’s poem, a dramatic monologue in the form of a ten-page letter from Taylor to Adams, is dated January 1879. It includes a moving account of the death of Stonewall Jackson, shot by Confederate pickets during the Battle of Chancellorsville:
“It was a night that seemed to some of us
To sum up all our losses. Our good man,
Our great man, downed by his own soldiers’ fire.
God’s humor seems sardonic as my own.”
Taylor writes as a veteran not only of the war but of an irrecoverable past, a world gone, and perhaps a civilization. His voice is close to our own (Taylor has been reading Adams’ first novel, Democracy):
“…these days
When none remember what we were, or what
We might have been, had the war never come.
Your manuscript held me from sleep all night,
For it seemed hardly fiction but the truth
About a generation without honor.”
ADDENDUM: A reader in Dallas writes: "I'll have to put Taken in Faith and Gen. Taylor's memoir on my list of things to read. My father's grandfather, 1st Sgt. Samuel H. Stribling, was part of Taylor's army when it surrendered. According to family tradition, he was made a sergeant when the company was organized in 1864 because he was one of the older enlistees. He turned seventeen just after the surrender."
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
`The Pattern Stays, the Substance Gone'
“I found a little ancient fern
Closed in a reddish shale concretion,
As neatly and as charmingly set in
As my grandmother’s face
In a round apricot velvet case.”
This is “Fossil, 1919” by Janet Lewis, and I remembered it when a fifth-grader brought to class a shallow box six inches long, the sort that holds a bracelet or necklace. Inside on a setting of faux-velvet was a piece of limestone shaped like Oklahoma with a truncated Panhandle. Embedded in the stone was a perfect fossil of a fern, as clean and precise as a draftsman’s rendering. Something about these ancient impressions, especially one so life-like, is plangent, like sepia prints of long-dead strangers.
There’s a connection, a life-sense, a hint of immortality, and I stared at the kid’s treasure (an uncle had mailed it from New Mexico for Christmas) until another kid said it was a fake and the chorus started: “Plastic!” “You made it!” “Liar!” To his credit, the fossil-owner denied it and otherwise kept quiet. I hefted the stone and fingered the mineral image and had no doubt it predates us by millions of years. Half a century after the poem above Lewis wrote “Fossil, 1975”:
“Changed and not changed. Three million years.
This sunlight-this sunlight-summoned little fern
Closed in a cenotaph of silt
Lies in my hand, secret and safe.
In quiet dark transformed to stone,
Cell after cell to crystal grown,
The pattern stays, the substance gone.
Changed and not changed. Three million years
The Spirit, ranging as it will,
In sun, in darkness, lives in change.
Changed and not changed. The spirit hears
In drifting fern the morning air.”
In the title essay of The Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport writes:
“The imagination, like all things in time, is metamorphic. It is also rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus became our word culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall around the yard. The temple was too sacred to be entered. Washing the feet of a guest was as religious an act as sharing one’s meals with the gods.”
Cultus can mean “care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence," from the past participle of colere, “to till.”
Closed in a reddish shale concretion,
As neatly and as charmingly set in
As my grandmother’s face
In a round apricot velvet case.”
This is “Fossil, 1919” by Janet Lewis, and I remembered it when a fifth-grader brought to class a shallow box six inches long, the sort that holds a bracelet or necklace. Inside on a setting of faux-velvet was a piece of limestone shaped like Oklahoma with a truncated Panhandle. Embedded in the stone was a perfect fossil of a fern, as clean and precise as a draftsman’s rendering. Something about these ancient impressions, especially one so life-like, is plangent, like sepia prints of long-dead strangers.
There’s a connection, a life-sense, a hint of immortality, and I stared at the kid’s treasure (an uncle had mailed it from New Mexico for Christmas) until another kid said it was a fake and the chorus started: “Plastic!” “You made it!” “Liar!” To his credit, the fossil-owner denied it and otherwise kept quiet. I hefted the stone and fingered the mineral image and had no doubt it predates us by millions of years. Half a century after the poem above Lewis wrote “Fossil, 1975”:
“Changed and not changed. Three million years.
This sunlight-this sunlight-summoned little fern
Closed in a cenotaph of silt
Lies in my hand, secret and safe.
In quiet dark transformed to stone,
Cell after cell to crystal grown,
The pattern stays, the substance gone.
Changed and not changed. Three million years
The Spirit, ranging as it will,
In sun, in darkness, lives in change.
Changed and not changed. The spirit hears
In drifting fern the morning air.”
In the title essay of The Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport writes:
“The imagination, like all things in time, is metamorphic. It is also rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus became our word culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall around the yard. The temple was too sacred to be entered. Washing the feet of a guest was as religious an act as sharing one’s meals with the gods.”
Cultus can mean “care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence," from the past participle of colere, “to till.”
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
`The Trace of a Hand Seeking a Form'
Early in The Autobiography of an Execution, David R. Dow meets with a death-row inmate he suspects may not be guilty of murdering his wife, daughter and son. Henry Quaker played piano in church from the age of eight. In prison he has no keyboard but Dow notices him “strumming” the table as they talk. The lawyer, a knowledgeable jazz listener (already he has mentioned Frank Morgan, Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum), compares his soundless playing to Bud Powell’s. Quaker enjoys the compliment and says he misses the piano. Dow continues the conversation:
“I said, Most of your problems I can’t do anything about.
“He said, I know. That’s okay.
“I thought of a Zbigniew Herbert poem I’d been reading: I imagined your fingers / had faith in your eyes / the unstrung instrument / the arms without hands.
“And many verses later: heroes did not return from the expedition / there were no heroes / the unworthy survived.”
The poem is “To Apollo” from Herbert’s first collection, Chord of Light (1956), as translated by Alissa Valles (The Collected Poems 1956-1998). Once a god, Apollo has been reduced by history to a broken statue, incapable of speech (“silence— / a fissured neck / silence-- / a broken song”) and no longer able to play the lyre. Apollo’s attributes evolved over time but Greeks and Romans honored him as god of music and poetry.
Dow seems to recall the poem because Quaker has no access to a piano and his music is silenced. Later in the book, he admits Quaker is one of the few death-row inmates he has befriended and whose company he enjoys, among the more than one hundred whose cases he has handled. For Herbert, Apollo represents the poet undone by history. Gods and heroes are dead. Dow is too tough-minded and unsentimental to speak of heroes, though some might think of him in such terms. In the poem’s final lines:
“only an empty pedestal remains—
the trace of a hand seeking a form”
“I said, Most of your problems I can’t do anything about.
“He said, I know. That’s okay.
“I thought of a Zbigniew Herbert poem I’d been reading: I imagined your fingers / had faith in your eyes / the unstrung instrument / the arms without hands.
“And many verses later: heroes did not return from the expedition / there were no heroes / the unworthy survived.”
The poem is “To Apollo” from Herbert’s first collection, Chord of Light (1956), as translated by Alissa Valles (The Collected Poems 1956-1998). Once a god, Apollo has been reduced by history to a broken statue, incapable of speech (“silence— / a fissured neck / silence-- / a broken song”) and no longer able to play the lyre. Apollo’s attributes evolved over time but Greeks and Romans honored him as god of music and poetry.
Dow seems to recall the poem because Quaker has no access to a piano and his music is silenced. Later in the book, he admits Quaker is one of the few death-row inmates he has befriended and whose company he enjoys, among the more than one hundred whose cases he has handled. For Herbert, Apollo represents the poet undone by history. Gods and heroes are dead. Dow is too tough-minded and unsentimental to speak of heroes, though some might think of him in such terms. In the poem’s final lines:
“only an empty pedestal remains—
the trace of a hand seeking a form”
Monday, January 10, 2011
`With a Warm Tint of Ripe Plum'
Beautiful referents call for comparably beautiful words, and most languages oblige us when it comes to Lepidoptera, as Nige knowledgably notes. This followed from a reader in New York City:
“I asked my husband to give me the phonetic spelling of butterfly in Russian: BABOCHKA. The sound is close to BABUSHKA, grandmother. This reminds me of when I was a teenager in the 50s. Headscarves were often called `babushkas’ then, & my father sometimes made a slighting remark when I would go out with a scarf tied over my head. Of course we pronounced it wrong -- it should be BA-bush-ka, not ba-BUSH-ka.”
In Polish, Russian and other Slavic languages, an old woman is a baba. Think of Baba Yaga, the old witch in folktales. Growing up in Cleveland, I also heard stada baba. The baba/babushka connection always made intuitive sense, but a philologist might confirm a babochka/babushka connection. I’m neither entomologist nor etymologist but fancy a linkage: “Butterfly” in common usage signifies the adult insect. No one calls the eggs, larva or pupa “butterfly,” though it’s biologically correct. An old woman is mature, a biological culmination, like her lepidopteral counterpart, and free to fly if she wishes.
This site translates butterfly into hundreds of languages. The Albanian flutura is lovely, as are the Japanese choo, chou chou and chocho. In Polish it’s motyl, reminiscent of the English “motile,” meaning capable of movement, certainly a butterfly trait. Back to babochka: In 1921, while at Cambridge, Nabokov wrote “Babochka (Vanessa antiopa),” translated by Gavriel Shapiro and Dmitri Nabokov as “Butterfly (Vanessa antiopa)” (Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, 2000):
“Velvety-black, with a warm tint of ripe plum,
here it opened wide; through this live velvet
delightfully gleams a row of cornflower-azure grains,
along a circular fringe, yellow as the rippling rye.
It has perched on a trunk, and its jagged tender wings breathe,
Now pressing themselves to bark, now turning toward the rays…
Oh, how they exult, how divinely they shimmer! One would say:
a blue-eyed night is framed by two pale-yellow dawns.
Greetings, oh greetings, reverie of a northern birch grove!
Thrill, and laughter, and love of my eternal youth.
Yes, I’ll recognize you in a Seraph, at the wondrous meeting,
I’ll recognize your wings, their sacrosanct design.”
“I asked my husband to give me the phonetic spelling of butterfly in Russian: BABOCHKA. The sound is close to BABUSHKA, grandmother. This reminds me of when I was a teenager in the 50s. Headscarves were often called `babushkas’ then, & my father sometimes made a slighting remark when I would go out with a scarf tied over my head. Of course we pronounced it wrong -- it should be BA-bush-ka, not ba-BUSH-ka.”
In Polish, Russian and other Slavic languages, an old woman is a baba. Think of Baba Yaga, the old witch in folktales. Growing up in Cleveland, I also heard stada baba. The baba/babushka connection always made intuitive sense, but a philologist might confirm a babochka/babushka connection. I’m neither entomologist nor etymologist but fancy a linkage: “Butterfly” in common usage signifies the adult insect. No one calls the eggs, larva or pupa “butterfly,” though it’s biologically correct. An old woman is mature, a biological culmination, like her lepidopteral counterpart, and free to fly if she wishes.
This site translates butterfly into hundreds of languages. The Albanian flutura is lovely, as are the Japanese choo, chou chou and chocho. In Polish it’s motyl, reminiscent of the English “motile,” meaning capable of movement, certainly a butterfly trait. Back to babochka: In 1921, while at Cambridge, Nabokov wrote “Babochka (Vanessa antiopa),” translated by Gavriel Shapiro and Dmitri Nabokov as “Butterfly (Vanessa antiopa)” (Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, 2000):
“Velvety-black, with a warm tint of ripe plum,
here it opened wide; through this live velvet
delightfully gleams a row of cornflower-azure grains,
along a circular fringe, yellow as the rippling rye.
It has perched on a trunk, and its jagged tender wings breathe,
Now pressing themselves to bark, now turning toward the rays…
Oh, how they exult, how divinely they shimmer! One would say:
a blue-eyed night is framed by two pale-yellow dawns.
Greetings, oh greetings, reverie of a northern birch grove!
Thrill, and laughter, and love of my eternal youth.
Yes, I’ll recognize you in a Seraph, at the wondrous meeting,
I’ll recognize your wings, their sacrosanct design.”
Sunday, January 09, 2011
`Yourself the Concept in the Final Hour'
As a newspaper reporter I covered one capital murder trial, gavel to gavel, almost thirty years ago in Indiana. I have no outrages to report, no prosecutorial abuses, no defense incompetence, no railroading. I sat with the trial judge in his chambers minutes before he sentenced to death a man who, at age eighteen, had shot a police officer in the back with the officer’s revolver. The judge was a man of intellect, rectitude and dignity who reminded me in stature and bearing, and in his gift for plain speaking, of Abraham Lincoln. Never had I seen him so visibly shaken.
From Terry Teachout I learned of The Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow, a lawyer in Texas who has handled more than one hundred death-penalty cases. Most remarkable about the book is how well written it is. The prose is uncluttered, unmannered, impolite and vivid, and it reminds me unexpectedly of the Parker novels by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake). Here is Dow’s description of his meeting with a prisoner on death row who claimed to have information about an inmate Dow was representing:
“I do not like all my clients, and I did not like Green. He made the same mistake that death-penalty supporters routinely make. He assumed that because I represent guys like him, I must like guys like him. He assumed that because I am against the death penalty and don’t think he should be executed, that I forgive him for what he did. Well, it isn’t my place to forgive people like Green, and if it were, I probably wouldn’t. I am a judgmental and not-very-forgiving guy. You can ask my wife. I would have left midway through his tirade, except I wanted to know what he knew. It appeared he wasn’t going to tell me, so I didn’t have any more reason to stay. I stood up. I said, Have a nice life, asshole.”
As the passage suggests, Dow transcends politics and ideological posturing. He has stories to tell and is too honest and smart for slogans. In this he reminds me of the trial judge in Indiana – an independent conscience, so rare today. Here’s Dow:
“I used to support the death penalty. I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is.”
In 1933, David Lamson, a member of the Stanford University faculty, was accused of beating his wife to death. Lamson and his attorney Edwin V. McKenzie claimed Allene Lamson had fallen in the bathtub and bled to death. The poet and critic Yvor Winters, a professor at Stanford, co-authored a 103-page pamphlet in defense of Lamson, signed by twenty other professors at the university. After lengthy appeals and four retrials, the prosecution dropped the case against Lamson. Here’s Winters’ “To Edwin V. McKenzie,” subtitled “On his defense of David Lamson”:
“The concept lives, but few men fill the frame;
Greatness is difficult: the certain aim,
The powerful body, and the nervous skill,
The acquiring mind, and the untiring will,
The just man’s fury and uplifted arm,
And the strong heart, to keep the weak from harm.
This is the great man of tradition, one
To point out justice when the wrong is done;
To outwit rogue and craven; represent
Mankind in the eternal sacrament –
Odysseus, with the giant weapon bent.
“When those who guard tradition in the schools
Proved to be weaklings and half-learned fools,
You took the burden, saved the intellect.
Combatting treason, mastering each defect,
You fought your battle, inch by inch of ground.
When Justice had become an angry sound,
When Judgment dwindled to an angry man,
You named the limits of the civil span:
I saw you, mantled in tradition, tower;
You filled the courtroom with historic power;
Yourself the concept in the final hour.”
Winters’ McKenzie, I suspect, is somewhat idealized, and I don’t mean to suggest he’s a perfect gloss on Dow or the judge in Indiana. But all three recognize “the limits of the civil span.” The Autobiography of an Execution is one of the best new books I’ve read in years.
From Terry Teachout I learned of The Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow, a lawyer in Texas who has handled more than one hundred death-penalty cases. Most remarkable about the book is how well written it is. The prose is uncluttered, unmannered, impolite and vivid, and it reminds me unexpectedly of the Parker novels by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake). Here is Dow’s description of his meeting with a prisoner on death row who claimed to have information about an inmate Dow was representing:
“I do not like all my clients, and I did not like Green. He made the same mistake that death-penalty supporters routinely make. He assumed that because I represent guys like him, I must like guys like him. He assumed that because I am against the death penalty and don’t think he should be executed, that I forgive him for what he did. Well, it isn’t my place to forgive people like Green, and if it were, I probably wouldn’t. I am a judgmental and not-very-forgiving guy. You can ask my wife. I would have left midway through his tirade, except I wanted to know what he knew. It appeared he wasn’t going to tell me, so I didn’t have any more reason to stay. I stood up. I said, Have a nice life, asshole.”
As the passage suggests, Dow transcends politics and ideological posturing. He has stories to tell and is too honest and smart for slogans. In this he reminds me of the trial judge in Indiana – an independent conscience, so rare today. Here’s Dow:
“I used to support the death penalty. I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is.”
In 1933, David Lamson, a member of the Stanford University faculty, was accused of beating his wife to death. Lamson and his attorney Edwin V. McKenzie claimed Allene Lamson had fallen in the bathtub and bled to death. The poet and critic Yvor Winters, a professor at Stanford, co-authored a 103-page pamphlet in defense of Lamson, signed by twenty other professors at the university. After lengthy appeals and four retrials, the prosecution dropped the case against Lamson. Here’s Winters’ “To Edwin V. McKenzie,” subtitled “On his defense of David Lamson”:
“The concept lives, but few men fill the frame;
Greatness is difficult: the certain aim,
The powerful body, and the nervous skill,
The acquiring mind, and the untiring will,
The just man’s fury and uplifted arm,
And the strong heart, to keep the weak from harm.
This is the great man of tradition, one
To point out justice when the wrong is done;
To outwit rogue and craven; represent
Mankind in the eternal sacrament –
Odysseus, with the giant weapon bent.
“When those who guard tradition in the schools
Proved to be weaklings and half-learned fools,
You took the burden, saved the intellect.
Combatting treason, mastering each defect,
You fought your battle, inch by inch of ground.
When Justice had become an angry sound,
When Judgment dwindled to an angry man,
You named the limits of the civil span:
I saw you, mantled in tradition, tower;
You filled the courtroom with historic power;
Yourself the concept in the final hour.”
Winters’ McKenzie, I suspect, is somewhat idealized, and I don’t mean to suggest he’s a perfect gloss on Dow or the judge in Indiana. But all three recognize “the limits of the civil span.” The Autobiography of an Execution is one of the best new books I’ve read in years.
Saturday, January 08, 2011
`Making His Ending'
With awe and revulsion, two girls on the playground told me they had found a dead bird. It was in the corner on the sidewalk, in front of the door to the gymnasium – a house sparrow looking not diminished in death but somehow larger, as though life had constricted its spirit. Blood dotted beak and feathers. The head was twisted unnaturally, and it seemed to have slammed into the window of the door.
“Is it dead?” the more shaken of the girls asked.
I thought of its Latin name – Passer domesticus -- which always brings to mind Horace, and this time it sounded like a bilingual pun, for this sparrow had definitely passed. Had I been alone I might have dumped it in the trash can but the girls didn’t need to see that. Instead, I wrapped the bird in a plastic bag. We walked across the soccer field and into the woods, and I placed the bag under a mossy rock and sprinkled it with dead leaves. The girls liked that. I pointed to sparrows pecking and flitting about in the parking lot, and said, “There’s his brothers and sisters.”
The first poem in Moore Moran’s The Room Within (Swallow Press, 2010) is “Winter Arriving”:
“Down garden wall
at dusk today
a sparrow, bending
in a wild fall,
at my boot lay,
making his ending.
“Onto my thumb
his blood welled brown
staining my gaze;
I lingered numb
in the ice and haze
through which he’d flown
“his final burst.
Roused by dark’s hush
I laid him away,
then heard the first
calls from the brush
where sparrows stay.”
“Is it dead?” the more shaken of the girls asked.
I thought of its Latin name – Passer domesticus -- which always brings to mind Horace, and this time it sounded like a bilingual pun, for this sparrow had definitely passed. Had I been alone I might have dumped it in the trash can but the girls didn’t need to see that. Instead, I wrapped the bird in a plastic bag. We walked across the soccer field and into the woods, and I placed the bag under a mossy rock and sprinkled it with dead leaves. The girls liked that. I pointed to sparrows pecking and flitting about in the parking lot, and said, “There’s his brothers and sisters.”
The first poem in Moore Moran’s The Room Within (Swallow Press, 2010) is “Winter Arriving”:
“Down garden wall
at dusk today
a sparrow, bending
in a wild fall,
at my boot lay,
making his ending.
“Onto my thumb
his blood welled brown
staining my gaze;
I lingered numb
in the ice and haze
through which he’d flown
“his final burst.
Roused by dark’s hush
I laid him away,
then heard the first
calls from the brush
where sparrows stay.”
Friday, January 07, 2011
`To See with Another Person's Eyes'
A common complaint among my fourth- and fifth-grade reading students is that English has too many words. Our prodigious word-hoard irritates and frustrates them. They take no pleasure in the opportunities for music and precision presented by so much linguistic redundancy. Instead, they yearn for strict one-to-one correspondence between word and world, invoice and inventory.
Who needs “azure” if “blue” does the job? They’re tone-deaf to Hamlet’s “rhapsody of words.” Informed that Shakespeare used 31,534 different words in his plays and poems, and 14,376 of them only once, a boy feigned a yawn and said, “Whatever.” Who among writers deploys words with such prodigality today? Geoffrey Hill, perhaps? Alexander Theroux?
The size of one’s language corresponds in some manner to the size of one’s world. Linguistic poverty leaves our stock of reality malnourished, pinched, circumscribed. In the title essay of his new book, The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks notes that congenitally blind children “tend to have superior memories and be precocious verbally.” He continues:
“They may develop such fluency in the verbal description of faces and places as to leave others (and perhaps themselves) uncertain as to whether they are actually blind.”
Sacks quotes a woman who went blind in her forties: “`Too often people with sight don’t see anything!’” He concludes the book like this:
“There is a paradox here – a delicious one – which I cannot resolve: if there is indeed a fundamental difference between experience and description, between direct and mediated knowledge of the world, how is it that language can be so powerful? Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.”
Who needs “azure” if “blue” does the job? They’re tone-deaf to Hamlet’s “rhapsody of words.” Informed that Shakespeare used 31,534 different words in his plays and poems, and 14,376 of them only once, a boy feigned a yawn and said, “Whatever.” Who among writers deploys words with such prodigality today? Geoffrey Hill, perhaps? Alexander Theroux?
The size of one’s language corresponds in some manner to the size of one’s world. Linguistic poverty leaves our stock of reality malnourished, pinched, circumscribed. In the title essay of his new book, The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks notes that congenitally blind children “tend to have superior memories and be precocious verbally.” He continues:
“They may develop such fluency in the verbal description of faces and places as to leave others (and perhaps themselves) uncertain as to whether they are actually blind.”
Sacks quotes a woman who went blind in her forties: “`Too often people with sight don’t see anything!’” He concludes the book like this:
“There is a paradox here – a delicious one – which I cannot resolve: if there is indeed a fundamental difference between experience and description, between direct and mediated knowledge of the world, how is it that language can be so powerful? Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.”
Thursday, January 06, 2011
`The Liquid of the Long Enchantment'
Butterflies are to January, I suppose, as Christmas is to July – glittering gifts-within-gifts from the opposite pole of the seasons. Butterflies are beautiful, yes, and touching in their evanescence, and their life cycle embodies the promise of metamorphosis, from egg, to larva, to pupa, to adult – a natural emblem of hope, rebirth, even resurrection. In an interview granted in the last year of his life, Nabokov – no symbol-monger – said:
“In certain species -- this is going to be a metaphor -- in certain species, the wings of the pupated butterfly begin to show in exquisite miniature through the wing-cases of the chrysalis a few days before emergence. It is the pathetic sight of an iridescent future transpiring through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping into my books written in the twenties.”
In Landscape, Memory & the Poetry of Janet Lewis, a chapbook published in 1995 by Stanford University Libraries and the Department of English at Stanford, Brigitte Carnochan includes a poem by Lewis new to me, not included by R.L. Barth in Selected Poems (2000). “The Insect,” she says, was written Oct. 25, 1994, about two months after the poet’s ninety-fifth birthday (Lewis died at age ninety-nine):
“The power and mystery are there,
Relentless grandeur, as the wet insect
Struggles to rise, to cleanse the jointed foreleg,
Sleek the folded wings.
Bound in the liquid of the long enchantment,
Predestined from the days
When it crawled softly
With its many feet
On twig and stock and clung at last
To wind itself for sleep,
Imprisoned in its destiny, can it
Foresee the sunlit moment,
The lifting air beneath
The rainbowed wings?”
Why “The Insect” rather than “The Butterfly” or “The Moth” (both fit Lewis’ entomology)? Why the abstraction? Would the choice of “Butterfly” sound predictably pretty, too conventional? The title helps distance the poem from our literary expectations and lends it a scientific cast, like a label on a drawing in a biology text. “Sleek” makes a vivid verb. “The liquid of the long enchantment” is at once precise – the contents of a cocoon or chrysalis are, for awhile, undifferentiated mush – and fairy tale-like. The poem moves backward in time, from adult, to pupa, to larva, then forward again to the adult state in the final three lines.
Lewis is to “rainbowed wings” as Nabokov is to “iridescent future transpiring through the shell of the past.” Both were born in 1899.
“In certain species -- this is going to be a metaphor -- in certain species, the wings of the pupated butterfly begin to show in exquisite miniature through the wing-cases of the chrysalis a few days before emergence. It is the pathetic sight of an iridescent future transpiring through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping into my books written in the twenties.”
In Landscape, Memory & the Poetry of Janet Lewis, a chapbook published in 1995 by Stanford University Libraries and the Department of English at Stanford, Brigitte Carnochan includes a poem by Lewis new to me, not included by R.L. Barth in Selected Poems (2000). “The Insect,” she says, was written Oct. 25, 1994, about two months after the poet’s ninety-fifth birthday (Lewis died at age ninety-nine):
“The power and mystery are there,
Relentless grandeur, as the wet insect
Struggles to rise, to cleanse the jointed foreleg,
Sleek the folded wings.
Bound in the liquid of the long enchantment,
Predestined from the days
When it crawled softly
With its many feet
On twig and stock and clung at last
To wind itself for sleep,
Imprisoned in its destiny, can it
Foresee the sunlit moment,
The lifting air beneath
The rainbowed wings?”
Why “The Insect” rather than “The Butterfly” or “The Moth” (both fit Lewis’ entomology)? Why the abstraction? Would the choice of “Butterfly” sound predictably pretty, too conventional? The title helps distance the poem from our literary expectations and lends it a scientific cast, like a label on a drawing in a biology text. “Sleek” makes a vivid verb. “The liquid of the long enchantment” is at once precise – the contents of a cocoon or chrysalis are, for awhile, undifferentiated mush – and fairy tale-like. The poem moves backward in time, from adult, to pupa, to larva, then forward again to the adult state in the final three lines.
Lewis is to “rainbowed wings” as Nabokov is to “iridescent future transpiring through the shell of the past.” Both were born in 1899.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
`A Glittering Object'
About this recent post Dave Lull writes in an email:
“I don't think…the Internet causes me to be shallow, which I undoubtedly am, but rather I'm shallow to begin with and have finally found the best environment for my shallowness. But now and then I do think more deeply than usual because of a glittering object that so strongly captures my magpie attention that I can't easily extricate my thoughts and can't easily not return both to the glittering object and to the thoughts it stimulates.”
I’m suspicious of anyone claiming to spend his days always thinking deep thoughts. It’s not healthy, and probably symptomatic of a personality disorder like Chronically Annoying Syndrome. Even Wittgenstein liked Betty Hutton movies. Shallowness seldom gets the respect it deserves, as A.J. Liebling understood. In The Honest Rainmaker he writes, admiringly:
“The Colonel has always believed that fortune swims, not with the main stream of letters, but in the shallows where the suckers moon.”
Nor is shallowness -- which I suggested to Dave we rename “nimble-mindedness” -- antithetical to profundity. Most of us vacillate along the gradient defined by those termini, settling into a medium state we might call shallowly profound. In a lovely remembrance of Edgar Bowers in the July-August 2000 issue of Poets and Writers, Dick Davis writes:
“He is a hard man to describe, because he eschewed the eccentric and flamboyant, and was almost studiously `ordinary’ in everyday life. He had a deep distrust for the cult of `the poet’ and used to say trenchantly, `A man is only a poet when he is writing a poem.’”
A relentless running away from so-called shallowness is among the characteristic pathologies of our age. If only the rest of us were so ordinary, so shallow, as Edgar Bowers.
“I don't think…the Internet causes me to be shallow, which I undoubtedly am, but rather I'm shallow to begin with and have finally found the best environment for my shallowness. But now and then I do think more deeply than usual because of a glittering object that so strongly captures my magpie attention that I can't easily extricate my thoughts and can't easily not return both to the glittering object and to the thoughts it stimulates.”
I’m suspicious of anyone claiming to spend his days always thinking deep thoughts. It’s not healthy, and probably symptomatic of a personality disorder like Chronically Annoying Syndrome. Even Wittgenstein liked Betty Hutton movies. Shallowness seldom gets the respect it deserves, as A.J. Liebling understood. In The Honest Rainmaker he writes, admiringly:
“The Colonel has always believed that fortune swims, not with the main stream of letters, but in the shallows where the suckers moon.”
Nor is shallowness -- which I suggested to Dave we rename “nimble-mindedness” -- antithetical to profundity. Most of us vacillate along the gradient defined by those termini, settling into a medium state we might call shallowly profound. In a lovely remembrance of Edgar Bowers in the July-August 2000 issue of Poets and Writers, Dick Davis writes:
“He is a hard man to describe, because he eschewed the eccentric and flamboyant, and was almost studiously `ordinary’ in everyday life. He had a deep distrust for the cult of `the poet’ and used to say trenchantly, `A man is only a poet when he is writing a poem.’”
A relentless running away from so-called shallowness is among the characteristic pathologies of our age. If only the rest of us were so ordinary, so shallow, as Edgar Bowers.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
`Superb in Clarity and Confidence'
“Superb in clarity and confidence…”
That’s the first line of “On an Attic Red-Figured Kylix Depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx (470 B.C.) by the `Oedipus Painter’ in the Vatican Collections,” one of fourteen poems by Helen Pinkerton included in `The Harvesters’ and Other Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook published in 1984 by Robert L. Barth of Florence, Ky. The line succinctly suggests two of the defining qualities of Pinkerton’s poetry, the discovery of which was among the most pleasing gifts I received in 2010. Here’s the complete poem:
“Superb in clarity and confidence,
A cross-legged traveller, he sits at ease.
His thinker’s pose, ironically conceived,
Is subtly touched with dubious innocence.
That riddle solved won Thebes. Yet, who that raised
This wine-cup to the gods would not remember,
Oedipus, your quick rage where three roads crossed,
Iokasta’s cry, your blindness, and then see
The riddle of divine veracity?”
The poem is not included among the twenty-three in the section titled “Bright Fictions” in Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press, 2002), her de facto collected poems. It does appear in Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook of twenty-seven poems published by Barth in 1994. On Monday, nine days after Christmas, in the first mail delivery of 2011, I received both chapbooks and an assortment of other gifts from Pinkerton – a lovely omen for the new year. Chief among the others is another chapbook, by Pinkerton’s friend Janet Lewis – The Indian in the Woods, published in 1980 by Matrix Press of Palo Alto. Here is one of its fifteen poems, “Like Summer Hay”:
“Like summer hay it falls
Over the marshes, over
The cranberry flats,
Places where
the wild deer lay.
“Now the deer leave tracks
Down the pine hollow; petals
Laid two by two, brown
Against the snow.”
You know the final image is accurate if you’ve ever followed a deer in the winter woods. It evokes neither Bambi nor Hemingway, and was written by Lewis (1899-1998) when she was in her early twenties.
Among Pinkerton’s other gifts are Landscape, Memory & the Poetry of Janet Lewis by Brigitte Carnochan, a chapbook with photographs, published by Stanford University Libraries and the Department of English at Stanford in 1995; two reprints of essays by Pinkerton from The Southern Review: “The Theme of Loss in the Earlier Poems of Catherine David and Edgar Bowers” (1973) and “Contexts for `Being,’ `Divinity,’ and `Self’ in Paul Valéry and Edgar Bowers (1977); and photocopies of three articles about Bowers after his death in 2000, by the poets Dick Davis, Clive Wilmer and David Yezzi. Bowers’ work I’ve loved for forty years, Lewis’ for a decade or so and Pinkerton’s for hardly six months. The epigraph on the title page to Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art is from an unidentified work by Robert Bridges:
“Beauty that is the soul’s familiar angel…”
Great poets appear among us as frequently as angels, and we’re blessed by their unbidden generosity. Another Bright Fictions poem is “On Leonard Baskin’s Etching Benevolent Angel”:
“I, too, have felt the fire of being burn
Till all my flesh and my mind, too, seemed ash,
And I as if I were not. There, at the turn
Of what is not and of what is, forms flash
Out of and into being. So, from black
Seemingly shapes itself your angel’s white—
Arm, cheek, and plumage—while, equal in power
Black eye and wing emerge ready for flight.
For both the existential ground is bright.”
That’s the first line of “On an Attic Red-Figured Kylix Depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx (470 B.C.) by the `Oedipus Painter’ in the Vatican Collections,” one of fourteen poems by Helen Pinkerton included in `The Harvesters’ and Other Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook published in 1984 by Robert L. Barth of Florence, Ky. The line succinctly suggests two of the defining qualities of Pinkerton’s poetry, the discovery of which was among the most pleasing gifts I received in 2010. Here’s the complete poem:
“Superb in clarity and confidence,
A cross-legged traveller, he sits at ease.
His thinker’s pose, ironically conceived,
Is subtly touched with dubious innocence.
That riddle solved won Thebes. Yet, who that raised
This wine-cup to the gods would not remember,
Oedipus, your quick rage where three roads crossed,
Iokasta’s cry, your blindness, and then see
The riddle of divine veracity?”
The poem is not included among the twenty-three in the section titled “Bright Fictions” in Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press, 2002), her de facto collected poems. It does appear in Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook of twenty-seven poems published by Barth in 1994. On Monday, nine days after Christmas, in the first mail delivery of 2011, I received both chapbooks and an assortment of other gifts from Pinkerton – a lovely omen for the new year. Chief among the others is another chapbook, by Pinkerton’s friend Janet Lewis – The Indian in the Woods, published in 1980 by Matrix Press of Palo Alto. Here is one of its fifteen poems, “Like Summer Hay”:
“Like summer hay it falls
Over the marshes, over
The cranberry flats,
Places where
the wild deer lay.
“Now the deer leave tracks
Down the pine hollow; petals
Laid two by two, brown
Against the snow.”
You know the final image is accurate if you’ve ever followed a deer in the winter woods. It evokes neither Bambi nor Hemingway, and was written by Lewis (1899-1998) when she was in her early twenties.
Among Pinkerton’s other gifts are Landscape, Memory & the Poetry of Janet Lewis by Brigitte Carnochan, a chapbook with photographs, published by Stanford University Libraries and the Department of English at Stanford in 1995; two reprints of essays by Pinkerton from The Southern Review: “The Theme of Loss in the Earlier Poems of Catherine David and Edgar Bowers” (1973) and “Contexts for `Being,’ `Divinity,’ and `Self’ in Paul Valéry and Edgar Bowers (1977); and photocopies of three articles about Bowers after his death in 2000, by the poets Dick Davis, Clive Wilmer and David Yezzi. Bowers’ work I’ve loved for forty years, Lewis’ for a decade or so and Pinkerton’s for hardly six months. The epigraph on the title page to Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art is from an unidentified work by Robert Bridges:
“Beauty that is the soul’s familiar angel…”
Great poets appear among us as frequently as angels, and we’re blessed by their unbidden generosity. Another Bright Fictions poem is “On Leonard Baskin’s Etching Benevolent Angel”:
“I, too, have felt the fire of being burn
Till all my flesh and my mind, too, seemed ash,
And I as if I were not. There, at the turn
Of what is not and of what is, forms flash
Out of and into being. So, from black
Seemingly shapes itself your angel’s white—
Arm, cheek, and plumage—while, equal in power
Black eye and wing emerge ready for flight.
For both the existential ground is bright.”
Monday, January 03, 2011
`My Mind Is Magpie-Like'
I’ve never been a one-book reader, devoting attention to a single volume at a time, and have often suspected the reason was flightiness, some constitutional inability to concentrate for long. With time and a growing capacity for self-acceptance I’ve come to understand that the world shimmers with variousness and my appetite is too keen to settle for one dish. Literature is a vast buffet not an I.V. drip.
I’m also a connector who makes linkages, across time and space, between books. No book, after all, is an island. In an essay on the nature of evil Theodore Dalrymple describes his reading strategy, and in it I recognize my own:
“Often I read more than one book at a time. When I tire of one I fly to another. This is because the world has always seemed to me so various and so interesting in all its aspects that I have not been able to confine my mind to a single subject or object for very long; therefore I am not, never have been, and never will be the scholar of anything. My mind is magpie-like, attracted by what shines for a moment; I try to persuade myself that this quality of superficiality has its compensations, in breadth of interest, for example.”
On the table beside my bed are collections of essays and reviews by D.J. Enright, John Lahr’s Notes of a Cowardly Lion, Hilary Masters’ In Rooms of Memory, the poems of Janet Lewis and Yvor Winters, and Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades by Jonathan Phillips – no fiction, I’ve just noticed. That doesn’t count material I read online and strategic sorties into books on the shelves.
Like Dalrymple, I’m no scholar of anything but enjoy learning something about almost everything. In one of his essays, “Montaigne’s Bordeaux,” Masters refers to Shakespeare as “that keenest of cullers,” and in that I also recognize myself. To cull is to select with discernment, whether the sweetest strawberry or the tartest book.
I’m also a connector who makes linkages, across time and space, between books. No book, after all, is an island. In an essay on the nature of evil Theodore Dalrymple describes his reading strategy, and in it I recognize my own:
“Often I read more than one book at a time. When I tire of one I fly to another. This is because the world has always seemed to me so various and so interesting in all its aspects that I have not been able to confine my mind to a single subject or object for very long; therefore I am not, never have been, and never will be the scholar of anything. My mind is magpie-like, attracted by what shines for a moment; I try to persuade myself that this quality of superficiality has its compensations, in breadth of interest, for example.”
On the table beside my bed are collections of essays and reviews by D.J. Enright, John Lahr’s Notes of a Cowardly Lion, Hilary Masters’ In Rooms of Memory, the poems of Janet Lewis and Yvor Winters, and Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades by Jonathan Phillips – no fiction, I’ve just noticed. That doesn’t count material I read online and strategic sorties into books on the shelves.
Like Dalrymple, I’m no scholar of anything but enjoy learning something about almost everything. In one of his essays, “Montaigne’s Bordeaux,” Masters refers to Shakespeare as “that keenest of cullers,” and in that I also recognize myself. To cull is to select with discernment, whether the sweetest strawberry or the tartest book.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
`The Weirdest Entry in Our Lexicon'
The happily understated theme of Dick Davis’ A Trick of Sunlight (Swallow Press, 2006) is happiness, that elusive state pursued with dogged persistence by our species. Davis limns it like this in “Happiness”:
“The weirdest entry in our lexicon,
The word whose referent we never know --
A river valley from a Book of Hours
Somewhere in southern Europe long ago.
“Or once, to someone walking by the Loire,
A trick of sunlight on a summer's day
Revealed the Virgin in rococo clouds:
The peasants in the fields knelt down to pray.”
Happiness seems an unintended side effect, like hives or a dry cough, the occasional byproduct of right living. The praying peasants weren’t seeking happiness, it just happened, as etymology suggests – the Old English hap means “chance, fortune.” Happiness seems inversely proportional to the effort expended seeking it. Persons pursuing it relentlessly seem at least as grim as those pursuing unhappiness. Davis looks at the theme again in “Can We?”:
“Can we convincingly pretend,
And not to others but ourselves,
That we are happy? And if we could,
Would that mean we were, pro tem,
Uncomplicatedly, just that,
Happy? And what would that be like?
The mind runs through its obvious
Loved carnal candidates…Well, maybe.
But probably it would resemble
“Less some celestial debauch
With someone quite phenomenal
Than being in a symphony
By Haydn: having all of it—
It doesn’t matter much which one—
The whole ebullient edifice,
Just there, available and real,
Impossibly to hand, forever.”
Is happiness ever unmixed, a pure state like pain or terror? And doesn’t it tend to evaporate as we become conscious of its presence? It’s not synonymous with pleasure, though like some pleasures it seems dependent on self-forgetting. Aquinas says happiness is rooted in "goods of the soul." Davis’ idea that “being in” a Haydn symphony may constitute uncomplicated happiness is suggestive. “Being in” implies not passive hearing but engaged listening – but listening to what? Music that is elegant, ordered, intelligent and spirited, with an impression of unlikely inevitability. Davis’ friend Edgar Bowers put it like this in “From J. Haydn to Constanze Mozart (1791)”:
“I carry one small memory of his form
Aslant at his clavier, with careful ease,
To bring one last enigma to the norm,
Intelligence perfecting the mute keys.”
That’s when we, like the peasants in “Happiness,” happily give thanks.
“The weirdest entry in our lexicon,
The word whose referent we never know --
A river valley from a Book of Hours
Somewhere in southern Europe long ago.
“Or once, to someone walking by the Loire,
A trick of sunlight on a summer's day
Revealed the Virgin in rococo clouds:
The peasants in the fields knelt down to pray.”
Happiness seems an unintended side effect, like hives or a dry cough, the occasional byproduct of right living. The praying peasants weren’t seeking happiness, it just happened, as etymology suggests – the Old English hap means “chance, fortune.” Happiness seems inversely proportional to the effort expended seeking it. Persons pursuing it relentlessly seem at least as grim as those pursuing unhappiness. Davis looks at the theme again in “Can We?”:
“Can we convincingly pretend,
And not to others but ourselves,
That we are happy? And if we could,
Would that mean we were, pro tem,
Uncomplicatedly, just that,
Happy? And what would that be like?
The mind runs through its obvious
Loved carnal candidates…Well, maybe.
But probably it would resemble
“Less some celestial debauch
With someone quite phenomenal
Than being in a symphony
By Haydn: having all of it—
It doesn’t matter much which one—
The whole ebullient edifice,
Just there, available and real,
Impossibly to hand, forever.”
Is happiness ever unmixed, a pure state like pain or terror? And doesn’t it tend to evaporate as we become conscious of its presence? It’s not synonymous with pleasure, though like some pleasures it seems dependent on self-forgetting. Aquinas says happiness is rooted in "goods of the soul." Davis’ idea that “being in” a Haydn symphony may constitute uncomplicated happiness is suggestive. “Being in” implies not passive hearing but engaged listening – but listening to what? Music that is elegant, ordered, intelligent and spirited, with an impression of unlikely inevitability. Davis’ friend Edgar Bowers put it like this in “From J. Haydn to Constanze Mozart (1791)”:
“I carry one small memory of his form
Aslant at his clavier, with careful ease,
To bring one last enigma to the norm,
Intelligence perfecting the mute keys.”
That’s when we, like the peasants in “Happiness,” happily give thanks.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
`The Nativity of Our Common Adam'
On April 26, 1336, Petrarch, his brother and two servants climbed to the summit of Mount Ventoux in Provence. The poet has been called the first mountain climber, the first man to travel for pleasure, though his primacy in such matters is less important than the mingled sense of chastening and exhilaration he experienced at the peak, where he read a passage from the tenth book of St. Augustine’s Confessions:
"And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not."
The volume had been a gift from Petrarch’s friend and confessor Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro, an Augustinian monk and Doctor of Theology. In Petrarch and his World (Indiana University Press, 1963), Morris Bishop writes:
“Father Dionigi recognized in his charge’s spirit a state similar to that of St. Augustine in his youth. He gave Petrarch a pocket copy of the Confessions, which the poet had not read. The book was Petrarch’s cherished companion for forty years. It journeyed with him to a mountain top, and once, in its owner’s pocket, it was near drowning with him in the sea.”
Petrarch wrote a famous letter to Father Dionigi describing the ascent of Mount Ventoux, later collected in Epistolae familiars. About the effect of reading Augustine he says:
“I thought in silence of the lack of good counsel in us mortals, who neglect what is noblest in ourselves, scatter our energies in all directions, and waste ourselves in a vain show, because we look about us for what is to be found only within.”
While staying in Chambéry in the French Alps, I bought a Penguin paperback of Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories and dated it “7-24-73.” From the same small bookstore I bought the Signet edition of King Lear, which I’ve lost. Both I carried in a manila-colored filet with a ham sandwich and a bottle of vin ordinaire while walking up le Nivolet, topped with the famous Croix du Nivolet. I was self-consciously imitating Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux more than six hundred years earlier and one-hundred fifty miles to the southwest, but never made it to the summit. The wine and sun got the better of me. It was, as Petrarch writes, “a vain show.”
New Year’s Day is a sort of symbolic summit from which we can climb or descend, depending on contingencies and our inclinations and gifts. In “New Year’s Eve,” the most revealing of his Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb writes:
“No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.”
"And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not."
The volume had been a gift from Petrarch’s friend and confessor Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro, an Augustinian monk and Doctor of Theology. In Petrarch and his World (Indiana University Press, 1963), Morris Bishop writes:
“Father Dionigi recognized in his charge’s spirit a state similar to that of St. Augustine in his youth. He gave Petrarch a pocket copy of the Confessions, which the poet had not read. The book was Petrarch’s cherished companion for forty years. It journeyed with him to a mountain top, and once, in its owner’s pocket, it was near drowning with him in the sea.”
Petrarch wrote a famous letter to Father Dionigi describing the ascent of Mount Ventoux, later collected in Epistolae familiars. About the effect of reading Augustine he says:
“I thought in silence of the lack of good counsel in us mortals, who neglect what is noblest in ourselves, scatter our energies in all directions, and waste ourselves in a vain show, because we look about us for what is to be found only within.”
While staying in Chambéry in the French Alps, I bought a Penguin paperback of Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories and dated it “7-24-73.” From the same small bookstore I bought the Signet edition of King Lear, which I’ve lost. Both I carried in a manila-colored filet with a ham sandwich and a bottle of vin ordinaire while walking up le Nivolet, topped with the famous Croix du Nivolet. I was self-consciously imitating Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux more than six hundred years earlier and one-hundred fifty miles to the southwest, but never made it to the summit. The wine and sun got the better of me. It was, as Petrarch writes, “a vain show.”
New Year’s Day is a sort of symbolic summit from which we can climb or descend, depending on contingencies and our inclinations and gifts. In “New Year’s Eve,” the most revealing of his Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb writes:
“No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)