`Dippable-Into'

In a letter written Dec. 22, 1920, Max Beerbohm tells his longtime friend Reggie Turner he has mailed him two recently published books as Christmas presents – Herbert Beerbohm Tree [Max’s half-brother]: Some memories of him and his art collected by Max Beerbohm and And Even Now, Max’s best essay collection. Beerbohm tells Turner they are:

“Bedside books. Dippable-into.”

There’s charming modesty at work here, but we know what he means. Dedicated readers keep handy “dippable-into” books, if not at bedside, at least on nearby shelves. To my mind, if not Beerbohm’s, a book must already have been read straight through, recently or long ago, to be “dippable-into,” with the exception of dictionaries and other reference works. “Dippable-into” suggests the volume has already proven its worth as a source of pleasure or instruction.

Each reader, naturally, assembles his own “dippable-into” library, adding and discarding titles across a lifetime. My predicable catalog includes Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, Montaigne and Lamb, Thoreau’s journal, Religio Medici, Shakespeare, poems by Cunningham and Swift. A recent addition is Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers. All are bookish equivalents of “comfort food,” toothsome sustenance.

Among their company is Beerbohm’s own And Even Now. He’s not to every reader’s taste and not all of him is to mine. He can be dandyish and mannered but also thoughtful, witty, gentle, avuncular, even wise, as in this passage from the final essay in And Even Now, “Laughter”:

“Come to me in some grievous difficulty: I will talk to you like a father, even like a lawyer. I’ll be hanged if I haven’t a certain mellow wisdom. But if you are by way of weaving theories on some one who will luminously confirm or powerfully rend them, I must, with a hang-dog air, warn you that I am not your man. I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than any other. This is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one that I can make head or tail of.”

`Chaos Men'

Here is a happy book: The Humorists: From Hogarth to Noël Coward (2010) by the English historian Paul Johnson. Not happy in the sense of untroubled or mindlessly blithe. Johnson, who clearly loves to laugh, warns on his final page:

“And all jokes are liable to provoke discomfort if not positive misery among those laughed at. Hence any joke is liable to fall foul of hate laws. The future for humorists thus looks bleak, at the time I write this. The ordinary people like jokes, often crude ones, as George Orwell pointed out in his perceptive essay on rude seaside picture postcards. But are ordinary people, as opposed to minor officials, in charge anymore? Democracy doesn’t really seem to work, and people are insufficiently dismayed at its impotence.”

So much for a laff riot. Johnson understands that comedy is rooted in attraction to, and terror of, incipient anarchy. “The force is chaos,” he writes, “contemplated in safety.” Laurel and Hardy he calls “chaos men,” and the same might be said of most of the others he profiles, including Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Chesterton, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. Humor is one way clever people adapt to the almost impossible task of living with others in the world. Johnson writes of Dr. Johnson, who despite his reputation for solemnity was regularly seized with fits of hilarity:

“Indeed it is likely that Johnson’s greatest explosions of fun went unrecorded, for explosions they were, difficult to put down in words, or even to remember the gist of them. They occurred quite spontaneously, when something struck Johnson as irresistibly funny. Then he would go on fantasizing and laughing, until exhausted.”

That hilarity can mingle with madness, and laughter can make one sick to a pitch exceeding embarrassment, are facts of life for some of us. Helpless, full-body laughter is not pretty or polite. Johnson quotes with approval Charles Lamb on the subject: “Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

Most of the jokes I remember, and those I hear that make me laugh hardest, are unsuitable for delicate contemporary sensibilities. I can share them with my wife and brother, but too many people are too good to demean their dignity with laughter. The funniest subjects – death, sex, shit, pride – are off limits. In New York, I went to the same barber for almost twenty years. He never went to college, probably never voluntarily read a book, and played golf obsessively, even in January, and remained my reliable monthly source of jokes so good, some made me weep. Not one of them would I recount on this blog, but my barber was a dependable conduit to humanity’s honest id, and I miss him.

We can quibble over who is funny and what makes us laugh, and even that can be funny. To my tastes, Johnson overrates Chaplin, Damon Runyon, Thurber and Coward, and I might have included Swift, Buster Keaton, Liebling and Flann O’Brien, but at least his taste in comedy largely avoids the sentimental (despite Chaplin) and didactic. What he says of Chesterton is true of most funny people:

"He was a total individualist, seeing everything, as if for the first time in history, with his own eyes, and nobody else's."

`Compounded of Esteem and Love'

First among the new poems in his Collected Poems (1997) Edgar Bowers placed “John,” a remembrance of an otherwise nameless poet, dead from “the disease.” This tactful anonymity lends power to the elegy without diminishing the sense of personal loss. I’ve since learned the poem’s subject is the poet John Finlay, who died of AIDS in 1991, age fifty. The poem is solemn and generous in praise, never mawkish or pleading. His teacher, Yvor Winters, said Bowers “was still a great devotional poet, but of a sort that George Herbert would not have understood.” Finlay is not a martyr, a political victim, but a friend and poet gone too soon. I’ve just learned that Bowers’ final lines refer to the poem Finlay dictated to his sister in his final months. Here are the closing lines of “John”:

“Then, on his darkened eye, he saw himself
A compact disk awhirl, played by the light
He came from and was ready to reenter,
But not before he chose the way to go.
And so it was, before his death, he spoke
The poem that is his best, the final letter
To take to that old country as a passport.”

The “final letter” is Finlay’s “A Prayer to the Father”:

“Death is not far from me. At times I crave
The peace I think that it will bring. Be brave,
I tell myself, for soon your pain will cease.
But terror still obtains when our long lease
On life ends at last. Body and soul
Which fused together should make up one whole
Suffer deprived as they are wrenched apart.
O God of love and power, hold still my heart
When death, that ancient, awful fact appears;
Preserve my mind from all deranging fears,
And let me offer up my reason free
And where I thought, there see Thee perfectly.”

Bowers was denied the comforts of faith Finlay finally embraced, but remained a “religious” poet of deep seriousness. His empathy was large and forgiving. His admiration for Finlay embodies the notion of friendship described by Samuel Johnson in The Rambler #64:

“…friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness, and its permanence from the other; and therefore requires not only that its candidates should gain the judgment, but that they should attract the affections; that they should not only be firm in the day of distress, but gay in the hour of jollity; not only useful in exigencies, but pleasing in familiar life; their presence should give cheerfulness as well as courage, and dispel alike the gloom of fear and of melancholy.”

[Go here for a fine remembrance of Finlay by his friend and editor David Middleton.]

`Sail Away'

One song, like a silent accompaniment, played as I reread Melville’s “Benito Cereno”: Randy Newman’s “Sail Away.”

`A Certain Formality and Enhancement of Emotion'

Reading its subtitle, I almost returned the book to the library shelf without opening it: A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (edited by Annie Finch, Story Line Press, 1994). I pegged it for yet another ghettoized anthology that diminishes poets by treating them not as writers but demographic case studies. Finch includes much that is “formal” only according to the most elastic of definitions, and many of the legitimately formal poems are not very good. Being female and writing what Finch calls “poetry that foregrounds the artificial and rhetorical nature of poetic language,” are no guarantee of first-rate poetry.

I was pleased, however, to discover that Finch had included two poems and a brief prose apologia by Helen Pinkerton. In the latter, she defends her own poetic practice and offers a grim assessment of much recent verse:

“My view of form is that it is essential to the art of poetry, both in meter and in rhetorical structure. I have always written in standard English meter, never abandoning it for variations into accentual or syllabic meters, still less for so-called `free verse’ or lineated prose. Since about 1950 poetry as an art has nearly been destroyed by the almost universal loss by readers and writers of the perception of the standard English metrical line, as practiced by poets from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Frost, Robinson, Bogan and Winters. Whether poetry as an art can be recovered is questionable, but true recovery can only be based on recovery of the metrical line.”

Over time, after much reading and self-examination, I’ve come to accept Pinkerton’s precepts. There’s a price to be paid for writing “free verse.” Finch selects two poems by Pinkerton from her “Bright Fictions” series, first published in `The Harvesters’ and Other Poems on Works of Art (R.L. Barth, 1984): “On Dorothea Lange’s Photograph `Migrant Mother’ (1936)” and “On Vermeer’s `Young Woman with a Water Jug’ (1658) in the Metropolitan Museum.” Here is the former, dedicated “(to my Aunt Nora)”:

“Remembering your face, I see it here,
Eyes weary, unexpectant, unresigned.
Not wise, but self-composed and self-contained,
And not self-pitying, you knew how to give
And when to take and, waiting, not despair.
During bitter years, when fear and anger broke
Men without work or property to shadows
(My childhood’s world), you, like this living woman,
Endured, keeping your small space fresh and kind.”

In a conversation I had with Pinkerton this week, she several times scorned self-pity as the least dignified of emotions, and praised a poet of her acquaintance for overcoming this defect of character in middle-age. The woman in Lange’s photograph, Florence Owens Thompson, was thirty-two years old and the mother of seven when the picture was taken in Nipomo, Ca. Pinkerton sees in the prematurely aged face of Thompson a memory of her aunt’s stoicism and good nature in difficult times. One can readily imagine the stridently sentimental political statements many poets, female and male, formal and “informal,” would impose on Lange’s picture.

Finch includes in her anthology “Time and Music” by Pinkerton’s friend Janet Lewis, who also contributes a three-paragraph essay, “A Kind of Celebration,” which begins like this:

“In the beginning poetry can be a kind of celebration that calls for a certain formality and enhancement of emotion. It is not a prose statement. And as a creation it demands music of its own, or in itself. Just as there are dance forms the body is happy in, I think there are forms, such as the sonnet, the villanelle, and the other stanza forms, in which the language is happy. And the mind is happy to find these forms in language. They are artificial like dancing but they do something for the emotions, for it gives us pleasure to move in these forms.”

`Become What You Are, Having Learned It'

Helen Pinkerton dedicates Taken in Faith: Poems (2002) to Alison, “daughter and friend,” and adds a tag from Pindar (Pythian 2, 72). When we spoke again I asked for a translation of the Greek, and from memory she quoted the version made by her friend E.L “Roy” Bundy (Studica Pindarica, 1962):

“Become what you are, having learned it.”

Another translator gives:

“Learn and become who you are.”

We’re forever evolving, or should be, and our personalities, whatever is becoming essentially us, remains a work in progress, never to be finished. It’s a lovely blessing on a child, though bad news for some. Study, learning, attentiveness and growth mean work, an unhappy prospect for the lazy and arrogant. Dr. Johnson says as much in Idler #94:

“It is the great excellence of learning, that it borrows very little from time or place; it is not confined to season or to climate, to cities or to the country, but may be cultivated and enjoyed where no other pleasure can be obtained. But this quality, which constitutes much of its value, is one occasion of neglect; what may be done at all times with equal propriety, is deferred from day to day, till the mind is gradually reconciled to the omission, and the attention is turned to other objects. Thus habitual idleness gains too much power to be conquered, and the soul shrinks from the idea of intellectual labour and intenseness of meditation.”

Helen, I learned, is a great admirer of Johnson. She said of his essays, and of Montaigne’s:

“When you read them, you can’t believe someone is actually thinking the way you do, that such a connection is possible.”

`I Retain a Kind of Bucolic Distrust'

The label on the shelf in the used bookstore, black letters on white, reads:

“COMMUNISM, SOCIALISM, MARXISM, IDEALISM ETC.”

Intent and tone can’t be read in so small a sample of text, but surely the inclusion of “IDEALISM” suggests irony or naiveté. Under the label were the usual suspects – a dozen copies of The Communist Manifesto, a German edition of Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, selections from Das Kapital, The State and Revolution (hardcover, mint condition), the Little Red Book (small-format paperback, much worn), One-Dimensional Man, no Mein Kampf. A library of shame with the still-potent power to attract fools, busy-bodies and other idealists. As Eric Hoffer writes, “The true believer is without wonder and hesitation.”

I’m reading for the first time the final book Yvor Winters published in his lifetime, Forms of Discovery (1967), which carries the subtitle Critical & Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English. Winters’ prose is punchy, cool and dry. There are moments when his critical writing lifts into something resembling wisdom literature, as in this common-sensical sentence from the section he devotes to J.V. Cunningham:

“I confess that I retain a kind of bucolic distrust of all theories which seem to be in obvious conflict with the facts of life.”

“Bucolic” is priceless.

`Among Those Whom I Love'

Tributes, as Lincoln understood, are best when brief. David, my youngest son, turns eight today and shares his birthday with W.H. Auden, who turns one hundred and four. In “Notes on the Comic,” collected in The Dyer’s Hand (1962), Auden writes:

“Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”

`You Rocket Into the Day'

The romance of flight never seduced me. When other kids built model airplanes, I stuck to earth-bound tanks and halftracks. The first book I wrote, age nine, was a biography of John Glenn, but I treated it like a John Ford movie in the exosphere. I never imagined myself in Glenn’s place, or Lindbergh’s, or Eddie Rickenbacker’s, and flew for the first time when I was almost thirty. Our latest visit to the Museum of Flight in Seattle was mostly for the boys.

Upstairs, almost as an afterthought, is an exhibit devoted to non-human precursors to flight – birds, of course, and bats, but also a display of twenty-six mounted insects, mostly butterflies but also dragonflies, beetles and cicadas. My favorite was a damsel fly, Megaloprepus coerulatus, with the largest wingspan, more than seven inches across, in the order Odonata. This specimen was collected in Peru, my wife's homeland. The tips of its forewings look dipped in egg yolk. The head is inky and mostly eye, and resembles a misshapen blackberry. Most impressive is the abdomen, a long skinny black stick sculpted by Giacometti. This dead insect shared the skeletal fragility of early aircraft, and I’ve seldom seen anything so beautiful, certainly not in the museum. In “The Dragonfly,” Louise Bogan had it right, the tough, evanescent beauty:

“You are made of almost nothing
But of enough
To be great eyes
And diaphanous double vans;
To be ceaseless movement,
Unending hunger
Grappling love.

“Link between water and air,
Earth repels you.
Light touches you only to shift into iridescence
Upon your body and wings.

“Twice-born, predator,
You split into the heat.
Swift beyond calculation or capture
You dart into the shadow
Which consumes you.

“You rocket into the day.
But at last, when the wind flattens the grasses,
For you, the design and purpose stop.

“And you fall
With the other husks of summer.”

`A Presence of Palpable Reality'

Asked in a 1983 interview with The Southern Review (Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations, edited by Cynthia Haven) what he looked for in a good poem, Czesław Miłosz replied:

“I look for a considerable dose of reality. Not subjective states, feelings, emotions of a persona or a poet. But something palpable, a presence of palpable reality.”

As examples, Miłosz cites Whitman’s “To a Locomotive in Winter” and Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” The Pole’s criterion is not rigorously critical but every honest reader knows what he means, though we might dicker over which poems best render reality. There’s some in Whitman’s paean to the locomotive (“black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel”) but his gushing tone and the proliferation of “thy’s” scuttle the effect. Cavafy’s poem is an inspired choice, one I’ve always thought Miłosz’s fellow Pole, Zbigniew Herbert, had in mind when he wrote “Report from the Besieged City.”

After a prolonged rereading of Louis Zukofsky in preparation for writing a review, I needed to rekindle my taste for poetry and turned to Marianne Moore, among others. Witty, elegant, learned, allusive, morally attuned, tough-minded -- all characterize Moore’s best work, but she also delighted in the sheer buzzing variety of the world. She was no dreamer or fantasist. Her poems are anchored in and render the “palpable reality” prized by Miłosz. Here’s a passage from her 1920 poem “England”:

“…America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the
street in the north; where there are no proof readers, no silkworms, no digressions;

“the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country—in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

`A Sojourn in Wales'

The unavoidable writers – Milton, say, and Melville – we take in like oxygen. They are there, our natural inheritance. Others are delivered serendipitously, by way of critics, friends or a moment of grace among the library stacks. By these means I happened upon, respectively, William Mayhew, Edward Dahlberg and Tadeusz Borowski. Every serious reader cobbles together a personal canon, unique and unaccountable to critics and other kibbitzers. It takes only attentiveness.

Theodore Dalrymple, whom I discovered online about twelve years ago, recounts in his latest City Journal essay, “The Welsh Chekhov,” the fortuitous path he followed to a Welsh writer once new to him, still new to me – Rhys Davies. Dalrymple found him “while scouring the secondhand bookshops during a sojourn in Wales.” But for the geography, half of these blog posts could begin with those words. When a writer is described as “The [Welsh, Cowboy, Lesbian, Left-Handed, Philatelist, take your pick] Chekhov,” it usually means only that he writes short, under-plotted fiction. According to Dalrymple, the affinities between Davies and his Russian precursor run deeper and truer:

“Without making exaggerated claims on Davies’s behalf, one can see the parallel with Chekhov in the similarity of the two writers’ intellectual outlooks. Both abominated cruelty but depicted human frailty without censoriousness or expressions of hatred. Both valued truth above convenience."

Dalrymple also says Davies, an acquaintance of D.H. Lawrence, “had a subtler mind and sensibility than Lawrence did,” but that wouldn’t be difficult. Dalrymple convinces me Davies and his books have been unfairly neglected and remain worthy of reclamation. Our public library has two of his novels in its collection – Nobody Answered the Bell (1971) and the posthumously published Ram with Red Horns (1997) – and I’ve placed both on hold. Out of such happily serendipitous alignments – essay, library – is a reader’s life fashioned.

`You Cannot Open Your Jack-Knife'

Recently I learned a new word for a previously nameless weather phenomenon, and as often happens I was given the opportunity to use it with a fair degree of precision. "Graupel" is from the German for graupel – snow pellets, angular bits of snow softer than hail, harder than snowflakes. As I was hauling trash bins to the curb late in the afternoon, it abruptly started falling and made a muted clicking sound hitting the pavement and car. In aggregate, it sounded like thousands of hamburgers frying two blocks away. I found the word last week in a science magazine at school and filed it away, hoping to confuse someone with a word combining sonic elements of “grapple,” “scrapple,” “growl” and “grope.”

One etymology derives the word from the German Graupe, “hulled grain,” and another dictionary says the German is probably from the Serbo-Croat krupa and the Russian for “peeled grain,” krupá. This makes sense, as the sound of graupel falling recalls Gene Krupa’s brush work. In appearance it recalls Thoreau’s journal work, a passage from Nov. 24, 1860:

“The first spitting of snow—a flurry or squall—from out a gray or slate-colored cloud that came up from the west. This consisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. These drove along almost horizontally, or curving upward like the outline of a breaker, before the strong and chilling wind. The plowed fields were for a short time whitened with them. The green moss about the bases of trees was very prettily spotted white with them, and also the large beds of cladonia in the pastures. They come to contrast with the red cockspur lichens on the stumps, which you had not noticed before. Striking against the trunks of the trees on the west side they fell and accumulated in a white line at the base. Though a slight touch, this was the first wintry scene of the season. The air was so filled with these snow pellets that we could not see a hill half a mile off for an hour. The hands seek the warmth of the pockets, and fingers are so benumbed that you cannot open your jack-knife. The rabbits in the swamps enjoy it, as well as you. Methinks the winter gives them more liberty, like a night.”

At its best, Thoreau's prose resembles graupel -- hard, angular and a little chilly.

`As If in Sport and Frolic'

The assignment looked straightforward, almost a give-away: Read the photocopied article – “Hooray for Weeds!” – and write a three- or four-sentence summary. The two fifth-grade boys were baffled and bored. They make no distinctions among summary, paraphrase, “creative” writing and plagiarism. The article ran about five-hundred words, the average length of these blog posts, and started like this: “Weeds are the uninvited guests of the plant world.” Clichéd, yes, and strictly speaking not quite accurate, but more interesting than the usual writing-fodder the curriculum de jour inflicts on grade-school kids. And, for once, no green or multicultural pleading, just watered-down botany. I suggested they read the article – moans – with a high-lighter in hand – more moans – and mark “the main idea and relevant details,” as the rubric instructed.

“Who cares about words?” one kid moaned. “I mean weeds.”

No, I think he spoke honestly the first time – and the second. Words are to these kids as weeds are to suburban lawn fetishists -- objects of irritation deserving to be pulled and discarded. Words are weeds – and I tend to agree. But then, I like weeds. My favorite flower is the dandelion, as it was Chesterton’s. I would pay a dollar to see a live, blooming chicory plant on my desk. A weed is a plant judged to be growing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Words are weeds, and so are some writers, Thoreau among them. In his journal for Sept. 1, 1850, he writes:

“Roman wormweed, pigweed, amaranth, polygonum, and one or two other coarse kinds of grass reign now in the cultivated fields.”

“Though the potatoes have man with all his implements on their side, these rowdy and rampant weeds completely bury them, between the last hoeing and the digging. The potatoes hardly succeed with the utmost care: the weeds only ask to be let alone a little while. I judge that they have not got the rot. I sympathize with all this luxuriant growth of weeds. Such is the year. The weeds grow as if in sport and frolic.”

`I Cannot Settle My Spirits To It'

On Sunday, through the living room window, I noticed my seven-year-old riding his scooter down the street, one hand on the handlebars, the other holding the book he was reading. Parental instincts clashed – alarm at the recklessness, pleasure in the devoted bookishness. I soothed myself with the knowledge he was wearing a helmet and not using a cell phone while driving, thus avoiding two criminal acts in the city where we live.

On Monday, on the school playground, I watched a girl reading a book with furious attention while she expertly twirled a hula-hoop around her waist – one of those unrecognized feats of human agility that will never make the Olympics. Minutes later, another girl was pushing a hula-hoop with her feet through a long puddle of water at the edge of the playground – while reading, of course. I was impressed by the smoothness of her stride. She never broke rhythm or looked up from the page, even as I gazed in admiration at her grace and concentration.

I know the lure of books, their all-consuming, world-denying seductiveness. When consciousness and text conjoin, there’s little that can sunder them. I remember riding as a reporter on a Navy weather-observation plane about a week before Christmas 1988. We flew out of the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine, and headed south, seeking ocean storms off the Carolina coast. The sound was deafening and the plane replicated for its occupants the experience of a rock in a rock tumbler. The crew was fine but a civilian meteorologist vomited at impressive length. I spent the 12-hour flight, when not taking notes or talking to crew or scientists, finishing Little Dorritt.

Just as I’m a deep sleeper, I’m a deep reader, able to submerge without ballast and stay there until pulled to the surface. However, I can’t read in a moving automobile, though buses are fine, nor can I read for any length – of time or distance -- while walking. It’s difficult to visually focus and I fret about walking into trees and trucks. In this, as in much else, I feel affinity with Charles Lamb, as he expressed it in “Detached Thought on Books and Reading”:

“I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.”

`Very Cat-Like in the Face'

Like Nige, I see and hear hawks with some regularity, red-tails in particular, but I’ve lived in Washington for nearly three years without seeing or hearing an owl except online. Our neighborhood is dense with trees but also houses, automobiles, bright lights, whining children and the occasional blast of music, none of which is amenable to birds with nocturnal habits. Feeding opportunities are limited. I’ve seen the likely owl menu -- squirrels, mice, raccoons, chipmunks, rabbits, Chihuahuas and other rats -- but only sparingly. Most of our fauna is non-mammalian – songbirds, slugs, insects, spiders.

Once I assisted a state biologist in the dissection of owl pellets. He was interested in declining owl populations in that part of upstate New York. Owls swallow prey whole but their stomach acids can’t dissolve hard tissue, so they regurgitate bones, claws, bills and the shafts of feathers. The leftovers typically come up wrapped in fur and feathers, and each pellet represents one animal, one meal. Mice were popular that season.

In his journal entry for October 28, 1855, Thoreau describes an adventure one can’t imagine any other major American writer ever having. He’s in his canoe, paddling “under the Hemlock bank” around 3 p.m., when he spies a screech owl sitting on a hollow hemlock stump, about three feet off the ground. They stare at each other and Thoreau records a precise description of the bird’s eyes (“great glaring golden iris”). After ten minutes, Thoreau lands his canoe “two rods above” (Thoreau was a surveyor), sneaks up behind the still-perched bird and grabs it. It snaps at him, “making quite a noise,” and he wraps the owl in his handkerchief and takes it home. As he writes, the owl sits in the cage he has built for it, staring at him. Thoreau continues:

“A remarkably squat figure, being very broad in proportion to its length, with a short tail, and very cat-like in the face with its horns and great eyes. Remarkably large feet and talons, legs thickly clothed with whitish down, down to the talons. [The preceding eight words might come from a Hopkins sonnet.] It brought blood from my fingers by clinging to them. It would lower its head, stretch out its neck, and, bending it from side to side, as if to catch or absorb every ray of light, strain at you with complacent yet earnest scrutiny. Raising and lowering its head and moving it from side to side in a slow and regular manner, at the same time snapping its bill smartly perhaps, and faintly hissing, and puffing itself up more and more,--cat-like, turtle-like, both in hissing and swelling. The slowness and gravity, not to say solemnity, of this motion are striking. There plainly is no jesting in this case.”

Picture Henry James snatching a screech howl and taking it home wrapped in his handkerchief.

`By One Single Electric Shock'

In a letter to Allen Tate in 1927, Yvor Winters writes:

“My belief is that it is possible to touch certain obvious physical facts of existence in such a way as to invoke -- or evoke -- or expose -- as by one single electric shock an entire existence or phase of existence.”

The date is pertinent. Winters was abandoning his use of Imagist techniques and adopting more traditional forms, willing himself into being a major poet, and soon he would write “The Marriage,” “The Journey” and “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills.” Later in the letter he tells Tate:

“If there is any perfection in [my] poems it is, I fear, the product of labor rather than dexterity. It is only recently…that I have felt myself to move neatly and freely. The rest is an infinitely slow and painful accretion -- I cannot begin to tell you how painful -- sheer agony.”

What's most interesting about Winters’ letter is his mention of “one single electric shock,” the power that rare poems possess to evoke “an entire existence or phase of existence.” As examples he cites Dickinson’s “The last night that she lived,” Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” and Williams’ “To Waken an Old Lady” (Sour Grapes, 1921) and “By the road to the contagious hospital” (Spring and All, 1923). The Dickinson is a marvel, a novel in twenty-eight lines. The second stanza:

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

The poem justifies Winters’ judgment of Dickinson in In Defense of Reason: “But except by Melville, she is surpassed by no writer that this country has produced; she is one of the greatest lyrical poets of all time.” Of course, Winters judges poems, not poets. In the same essay, he writes:

“Her meter, at its worst—that is, most of the time—is a kind of stiff sing-song; her diction, at its worst, is a kind of poetic nursery jargon; and there is a remarkable continuity of manner, of a kind nearly indescribable, between her worst and her best poem.”

True of Dickinson, and of Melville, both home-schooled American prodigies and eccentrics. Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” is a great solemn moment, a poem made to be memorized and grown into. As to the Williams’ poems, I partially dissent, as Winters himself often did. When he reviewed Sour Grapes in Poetry in 1922, he judged “To Waken an Old Lady” “as perfect and final as Herrick.” I don’t see it (where’s the wit, the music?), though in “By the road to the contagious hospital” Williams successfully evokes existence: “One by one objects are defined.” Most of Williams’ poems are too anemic to evoke anything other than the words on the page.

Inevitably, one is tempted to think of poems that pass Winters’ “single electric shock” test. A few nominees: George Gascoigne's "Soone acquainted, soone forgotten," Fulke Greville’s “In night when colours all to black are cast,” Edgar Bowers’ “Autumn Shade,” Ben Jonson’s “To Heaven,” Wallace Stevens’ "The House was Quiet and the World was Calm” and Winters’ “A Summer Commentary.”

`The Time of Patience'

In the Pacific Northwest, February is like January but shorter. We had a pleasant frost one morning, prompting my seven-year-old as we crossed the crunchy lawn to say it sounded as though we were walking on snails. No snow has fallen since early January, and that was a pathetic dusting. Early mornings are uniformly gray. Dawn is a lighter shade of gray. Fog lifts mid-morning.

In upstate New York I looked forward to February’s brief thaw, knowing March could turn into a monster. You could smell the earth again and the skunk cabbage flourished. Not here. The seasonal spectrum is narrow. The sun is still low, little higher than at the solstice. Signs of spring are modest – more juncos, a few snow drops. For these reasons I was pleased to discover Fantastics: Serving for a Perpetual Prognostication (1626) by Nicholas Breton (c. 1555-c. 1626). In his day Breton, friend to Shakespeare and Jonson, was a bestseller of sorts, a popular writer in an age when even a smaller percentage of the population than today was able to read. He wrote verse and prose prolifically, and seems to have been nearly forgotten within a generation of his death.

In Fantastics, Breton produced a prose grab bag, an early incarnation of the “character book,” witty profiles of human types, a form championed later in the seventeenth century by John Earle, Thomas Fuller and Sir Thomas Overbury. Breton includes a prose calendar, giving each month a character of its own, and in doing so becomes a pioneering nature writer:

“It is now February, and the sun is gotten up a cock-stride of his climbing. The valleys now are painted white, and the brooks are full of water. The frog goes to seek out the paddock, and the crow and the rook begin to mislike their old makes. Forward coneys begin now to kindle, and the fat grounds are not without lambs. The gardener falls to sorting of his seeds, and the husbandman falls afresh to scouring of his plowshare. The term-travellers make the shoemaker’s harvest, and the chandler’s cheese makes the chalk walk apace. The fishmonger sorts his ware against Lent, and a lamb-skin is good for a lame arm. The waters now alter the nature of their softness, and the soft earth is made stony hard. The air is sharp and piercing, and the winds blow cold. The taverns and the inns seldom lack guests, and the ostler knows how to gain by his hay. The hunting horse is at the heels of the hound, while the ambling nag carrieth the physician and his footcloth. The blood of youth begins to spring, and the honor of art is gotten by exercise. The trees a little begin to bud, and the sap begins to rise up out of the root. Physic now hath work among weak bodies, and the apothecary’s drugs are very gainful. There is hope of a better time not far off, for this in itself is little comfortable. And for the small pleasure that I find in it, I will thus briefly conclude of it: it is the poor man’s pick-purse, and the miser’s cut-throat, the enemy to pleasure, and the time of patience. Farewell."

The prose is sweet, not soppy, attuned to English folkways and the natural world, town and country. Breton is not profound but his tone is intelligently folksy, more like E.B. White (whose appeal has always baffled me) than Thoreau. His description of February comes closer to March or even April in the Northeast, except for that second-to-last sentence. “The time of patience” sounds like February in the Northwest.

`All Interweavingly Working Together'

Chapter 47 of Moby-Dick, “The Mat Maker,” opens with a scene of unlikely domesticity on the deck of the Pequod. Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a “sword-mat” for use as “additional lashing to our boat.” Ishmael says he is “the attendant or page of Queequeg,” and they appear like a long-married couple who anticipate each other’s thoughts and complete each other’s sentences. Queequeg moves his wooden “sword” (an oak paddle) and Ishmael’s hand serves as the shuttle as he muses: “…it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.” He goes on:

“…this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—no wise incompatible—all interweavingly working together.”

What is literal and what metaphorical in this remarkable chapter? Melville specializes in this blurring of realms, linguistic and metaphysical. He starts with a mundane object or act and turns it into an occasion of philosophical meditation, usually laced with humor. Ishmael, the Pequod’s sole survivor, writes with knowledge of his fate, Moby Dick’s, Ahab’s, the crew’s. Melville paces and arranges his book beautifully. In defiance of conventional critical wisdom, Yvor Winters writes in “Herman Melville and the Problems of Moral Navigation” (In Defense of Reason, 1947) that Moby-Dick is:

“…beyond a cavil one of the most carefully and successfully constructed of all major works of literature; to find it careless, redundant, or in any sense romantic, as even its professed admirers are prone to do, is merely to misread the book and to be ignorant of the history leading up to it.”

In the next chapter, “The First Lowering,” the first whale of the voyage is sighted and the reader and the crew meet Fedallah (“Ahab’s shadow”), the harpooner on Ahab’s boat. This careful and complicated fabric of fate and plot “all interweavingly working together,” woven from Melville’s mania for metaphor, reminds me of an early Janet Lewis poem, “Days”:

“Swift and subtle
The flying shuttle
Crosses the web
And fills the loom,
Leaving for range
Of choice or change
No room, no room.”

In Pierre: or, The Ambiguities , the almost unreadable novel Melville published the year after Moby-Dick, he writes that if our actions are “foreordained…we are Russian serfs to Fate.”

`Of the Unmaking of Many Books'

A month ago I ordered four books for my seven-year-old, and Eric Ormsby’s Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (Porcupine’s Quill, 2010), from Amazon.com. Some time later I received an e-mail saying shipment was delayed because of the Ormsby title. Last week, my son’s books arrived, sans Ormsby. On Wednesday another e-mail appeared:

“Due to a lack of availability from our suppliers, we will not be able to obtain the following item(s) from your order…[a link to the Ormsby title at Amazon.com follows]…We've cancelled the item(s) and apologize for the inconvenience.”

Ormsby is among our finest poets and critics, and I use “our” in the broadest collective sense, for he was born in Georgia, was a longtime resident of Canada and now lives in London, where he is professor and chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. He is a citizen of the English language and holds visas with several others.

The book cancellation is a farcical déjà vu. More than three years ago I had similar difficulties with Amazon.com when ordering Ormsby’s Time's Covenant: Selected Poems (Biblioasis, 2006). I finally ordered it through Amazon.ca, the Canadian cousin, and now it’s among my favorite collections by a living poet. At the time I lived in Houston. Now I live a hundred miles from the Canadian border. In an excerpt I found online from the title essay of Fine Incisions, Ormsby complains of the “weariness,” in the “Ecclesiastes” sense, associated with reviewing books:

“It's a fatigue which comes from the application of considerable ingenuity, concentration, and judiciousness to a supremely ephemeral object: the composition of a thousand or so words—more if you're lucky—which may catch a reader’s attention for a few minutes and then be quickly forgotten. Vanity of vanities, indeed! In fact it gets worse. Only the most clueless critic imagines that those books which arrive day after day in the mail will themselves last forever, let alone long endure. The review is little more than a snowflake riding the back-draft of a book’s larger meltdown. Only a few books will survive their blurbs. Of the unmaking of many books there is also no end.”

This reader has discovered another.

`To Take Us Lands Away'

Along with the usual story books, I took a chance and pulled two volumes of poems off the shelves in the school library. Both were selected – by the purchasing librarian, by me -- with children in mind, but only one was written with children in mind: Peacock Pie by Walter de la Mare, in print since first published in 1913. This was a 1989 reprint from Henry Holt and Co., with indifferent illustrations by Louise Brierley.

The second, part of the “Poetry for Young People” series from the Sterling Publishing Co., was Emily Dickinson (1989), edited by Frances Schoonmaker Bolin, illustrated almost as indifferently as the de la Mare by Chi Chung. Dickinson, perhaps our greatest poet, I chose as a challenge. Could I hold the attention of kindergarteners with her gnomic eccentricities? I played it safe and started with stories – four titles in the “Pig Pig” series by David McPhail, which offered many opportunities for deep nasal oinking. Then on to de la Mare, a poem chosen almost at random (I was going for brevity and funny-sounds appeal) because I had no time to review the material – “The Bees’ Song”:

“Thousandz of thornz there be
On the Rozez where gozez
The Zebra of Zee:
Sleek, striped, and hairy,
The steed of the Fairy
Princess of Zee.

“Heavy with blossomz be
The Rozez that growzez
In the thickets of Zee.
Where grazez the Zebra,
Marked Abracadeeebra,
Of the Princess of Zee.

“And he nozez that poziez
Of the Rozez that grozez
So luvez'm and free,
With an eye, dark and wary,
In search of a Fairy,
Whose Rozez he knowzez
Were not honeyed for he,
But to breathe a sweet incense
To solace the Princess
Of far-away Zee.”

It went on a little too long so I silently elided some lines in the middle, but all the “Z” sounds were a big hit, as was the bee I made with my right hand, stinger/index finger extended, buzzing and stinging. While reading it, I remembered Dickinson often wrote about bees, so I was pleased to find several bee poems in the Schoonmaker selection, including:

“The Bee is not afraid of me.
I know the Butterfly.
The pretty people in the Woods
Receive me cordially --

“The Brooks laugh louder when I come --
The Breezes madder play;
Wherefore mine eye thy silver mists,
Wherefore, Oh Summer's Day?”

An excellent poem on another rainy morning in February in the Pacific Northwest. And this, an old favorite, the one I always remember when encountering the word “revery”:

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”

And this:

“The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.”

I bagged explications and played up the iambs. Most of the kids listened. Dickinson isn’t conventional kindergarten-fodder but the poems are brief and rhymed, so I virtually sang them. By then, time was up. I have no illusions about planting poetry seeds. TV and DVDs are more seductive, and father of one kid is a computer-game designer. I’ve met the guy, and I’m fairly certain there’s no Dickinson or de la Mare on his shelves. The Dickinson volume, however, offered consolation:

“There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry --
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll --
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.”

`The Worms Who Have Infested Thee'

One spring day twenty years ago, for reasons I prefer not to remember, I drove a professor of English from Albany to New York City, ushered him around for five or six hours (including a visit to a Manhattan bar where he met with the poet Jackson Mac Low, who was even more incoherent in person than on the page), and drove him one hundred fifty miles back to Albany. He was a dull, dull man convinced of his cleverness and erudition. For most of the drive south he lectured me on his conviction, self-evident to him, that Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick as a cautionary fable about the predations of capitalism. Naively, I thought at first he was joking.

As I reread the novel, much impresses me: the language, of course, in which I’m hearing frequent precognitive echoes of Bellow; Ishmael’s comic sense; the plot’s heady clip, even for a reader who knows how it ends; Melville’s gift for inhabiting and distinguishing characters who embody a cross-section of humanity (except women); metaphysical wit akin to Shakespeare’s. Among the undisputed masterworks, can you think of another more closely approximating that mythical beast, the “good read?”

That professor, who had never performed a day of physical labor in life and came unembarrassed with his glib Marxist gloss, was among the fulfillments of “To Herman Melville in 1951,” the couplet Yvor Winters wrote for the centenary of Moby-Dick:

“Saint Herman, grant me this: that I may be
Saved from the worms who have infested thee.”

`Growing Grim Around the Mouth'

I’m reading Moby-Dick again, as is my custom, though less often than in younger years. There were times in my twenties when I felt it was the only book, an unholy gospel that held me like hypnosis or religious fervor. I’ve collected most of “The Writings of Herman Melville,” the uniform editions published starting in 1965 by Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. Many I bought in the gift shop at Arrowhead, the house in Pittsfield, Mass., where Melville and his family lived from 1850 to 1863, and where he wrote most of Moby-Dick. Next to the gift-shop cash register was an ink pad and whale-shaped stamp. I would stamp the first page of the volumes as I bought them and inscribe the date.

I’m simultaneously skimming Melville’s Journals (edited by Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth, 1989). Collected are the unpolished, fragmentary notes Melville kept while traveling. In 1856-57, five years after the resounding silence set off by the publication of Moby-Dick, Melville traveled to Britain, the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Middle East. Twenty years later, he published the principle literary product of the journey -- Clarel, an 18,000-line poem. The journals, however, are fascinating in themselves for the inclusiveness of Melville’s curiosity and for what they reveal about the grimness of his emotional/metaphysical state. Often the broken prose is poetic in a peculiarly modern sense. Here’s a portion of the entry for Dec. 14, 1856, written in Istanbul (Constantinople):

“Went towards the cemeteries of Pera [“across” in Greek]. Great resort of summer evenings. Bank of the Bosphorous—like the Brooklyn heights. From one point a superb view of Sea of Marmora & Prince Isles & Scutari.—Armenian funerals winding through the streets. Coffin covered with flowers borne on a bier. Wax candles burn on each side in daylight. Boys & men chanting alternately. Striking effect, winding through the narrow lanes.—Saw a burial. Armenian. Juggling & incantations of the priests—making signs &c.—Nearby, saw a woman over a new grave—no grass on it yet. Such abandonment of misery! Called to the dead, put her head down as close to it as possible; as if calling down a hatchway into a cellar; besought—Why don’t you speak to be? My God!—It is I! Ah,--speak—but one word!’—All deaf.—So much for consolation.—This woman & her cries haunt me horribly.—”

In their notes, Horsford and Horth tell us Melville is describing “the great Moslem and Armenian cemeteries on the heights above the Bosporus,” and refers readers to a passage from The Crescent and the Cross (1844) by Eliot Warburton. The view from Pera, he writes, is:

“one of the finest in the world: here all the gay people of the Frank [European] city assemble in the evening, and wander among the tombs with merry chat and laughter; or sit beneath the cypress-trees, eating ice and smoking their chibouques [long-stemmed Turkish tobacco pipes with clay bowls].”

About the grieving woman on the new grave, the editors cite a passage from the euphoniously named Emelia Bithynia Hornby’s In and Around Stamboul (1858): “…the women usually take a last adieu within the walls of the house, tearing their hair and garments with loud lamentations, after the fashion of the East.”

The apparent discordance of grieving Armenians and “gay” Europeans touring the cemetery (Orientalism!) is resolved by context. In the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, large cemeteries served as parks and places of contemplation. Families toured the graves and picnicked nearby. Death, then, was part of life, as it was for the great New Yorker non-fiction writer Joseph Mitchell. In “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The Bottom of the Harbor, 1961) he describes an old black community on Staten Island where he enjoys visiting the cemetery and studying its wildflowers. The story begins like this:

“When things get too much for me, I put a wildflower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries there.”

Do you hear any echoes in that passage? Does it sound familiar? Does this help?:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”

`Do the Moths Eat Anything?'

“The author feels apologetic that the book is so large. However, it does not contain much more than any intelligent country child of twelve should know of his environment; things that he should know naturally and without effort, although it might take him half his life-time to learn so much if he should not begin before the age of twenty.”

The words, witty and wise, are Anna Botsford Comstock’s in her preface to Handbook of Nature Study (1911). I have the 1986 revised edition of eight hundred eighty-seven pages published by Cornell University Press. Comstock (1854-1930) was the first female professor at Cornell, though she was never granted a full professorship. She was an amateur (in the etymological sense) with large gifts, scientific, artistic and literary, and her book, which I first read around age eleven, is charmingly anachronistic, published long before the revolutions in genetics and molecular biology. It would drive a biological positivist nuts, but if you’ve ever held a toad in your hand and looked at him, you’ll approve of Comstock’s style:

“The toad’s face is well worth study; its eyes are elevated and very pretty, the pupil being oval and the surrounding iris shining like gold. The toad winks ins a wholesale fashion, the eyes being pulled down into the head; the eyes are provided with nictitating lids, which rise from below, and are similar to those founds in birds. When a toad is sleeping, its eyes do not bulge but are drawn in, so as to lie even with the surface of the head.”

As an artist paints from life, so Comstock writes from life closely observed. I have no doubt she stared eye-to-eye with Bufo americanus. The passage reminds me of Thoreau’s description, in his journal entry for Sept. 3, 1858, of a snake swallowing a toad:

“It is a singular sight, that of the little head of the snake, directly above the great, solemn, granitic head of the toad, whose eyes are open, though I have reason to think that he is not alive, for when I return some hours later I find that the snake has disgorged the toad and departed.”

Who to judge the more skillful writer is obvious (“great, solemn, granitic head”), but that’s not the point. Comstock, born in upstate New York less than a decade before Thoreau’s death, is writing for the children and teachers of her time, not posterity. Her intentions are not “literary,” but her book is literature, and there’s a lesson in there somewhere. In her suggested classroom exercise on the cecropia moth she writes:

“Make a water-color drawing or describe in detail the fully expanded moth, showing the color and markings of wings, body, and antennae.”

followed by

“Do the moths eat anything?”

Comstock knew her entomology – and children. To draw or write in detail about a plant or animal is the happiest, most efficient way to learn about it. A child drawing a cecropia (the largest native North American moth) would naturally observe the adults have no mouth parts and thus are unable to feed, though the caterpillars are ravenous.

Comstock cites Thoreau fifteen times in her text, mostly from the journals; Darwin, four times; Emily Dickinson, three times; Emerson, twice; Linnaeus once. This easy mingling of what we now call “science” and “the humanities” was, until recently, the lingua franca of educated people, whether or not they attended a university. Comstock’s declaration that her book contains little more than what “any intelligent country child of twelve should know of his environment” is audacious and humbling. Her chapter devoted to “The Skies” begins like this:

“For many reasons aside from the mere knowledge acquired, children should be taught to know something about the stars. It is an investment for future years; the stars are a constant reminder to us of the thousands of worlds outside our own, and looking at them intelligently lifts us out of ourselves in wonder and admiration for the infinity of the universe, and serves to make our own cares and trials seem trivial.”

Thoreau writes in the “Economy” chapter of Walden:

“The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles!”

`No Shoddier Than What They Peddle'

Among the folk arts, blogging ranks somewhere between scrimshaw and tatting. Practitioners are harmless folk, furtive and deficient in social graces but trainable with patience, understanding and a firm hand. Some are gainfully employed and support families. Others remain editors and minor humorists. Five years ago today, in my first post at Anecdotal Evidence, I wrote:

“Literature is sustenance, best enjoyed meal by meal, in the company of comparably hearty fellow diners. An ornithologist once shared with me his conviction that birds often sing for the sheer arbitrary pleasure it gives them, not merely to defend turf or attract a mate. An aesthetic capacity, he speculated, has evolutionary value. Who can conceive of a life lived without beauty, whether making it or enjoying it? Come, join us at the table.”

The invitation stands. Some have taken a seat and claimed it as their own. Among my generous guests – collaborators – are Gary Baldridge, Roger Boylan, Buce, Guy Davenport, Elberry, Roger Forseth, Mike Gilleland, Cynthia Haven, Joe of New York, Jonathan of British Columbia, Melissa Kean, Joshua Kurp, Ken Kurp, Ann Lugg, Dave Lull (“—mon semblable,—mon frère!”), James Marcus, Fran Manushkin, David Myers, Nige, Stephen Pentz, Helen Pinkerton, Bill Sigler, Levi Stahl, Jay Stribling, Susan of New York City, Terry Teachout, Eric Thomson, Frank Wilson and others slipped from fraying memory.

Today’s post is number 2,021. Some have been trifling. To most I lent all the seriousness a minor humorist can muster. If a day were to pass without a thought worthy of nurture, I would be a sorry writer. Arranging words in pleasing shapes, like a folk artist snipping tin for a weather vane, is what we do. As one of this blog’s tutelary spirits puts it:

“There is no use in indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle. After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another.”

`Gone Sadder Ways'

In 1932, Yvor Winters became Western editor of The Hound and Horn, a literary quarterly founded in 1927 by two Harvard undergraduates, Lincoln Kirstein and Varian Fry. The magazine served as an American showcase for literary Modernism, and its contributors included some of the movement’s prominent usual suspects, many of whom then or later met with Winters’ disapproval. He starts an Aug. 6, 1932, letter (The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, 2000) to Kirstein like this:

“I vote against all the enclosed mss. Unreservedly and regardless of what else does or does not come in. It is better to get out a smaller issue, or an all-critical issue than to run stuff like this.”

Winters then gets serious. A poem submitted by Walter Lowenthals he dismisses as “a bastard compromise between bad poetry and bad expository prose.” Another, by Paul Eaton Reeve, is “Dead flat meter, utterly ludicrous and amateurish grandiloquence.” Winters thanks Kirstein for accepting a poem by twenty-one-year-old J.V. Cunningham, and urges him to publish Louise Bogan and Allen Tate, among others. Then he adds:

“In the interests of controversy also, I suggest that you reread in the current Poetry, my wife’s poem `The Clock,’ which you rejected a year or more ago because you did not like its rhythms. Do not write me and tell me you now like it. Don’t mention it at all. Study it. No one in my generation, and I do not except Tate or Crane, is capable of such firm and masterly rhythm. Set this down to egoism, but keep on studying the poem. I would gladly sacrifice my reputation to civilize the H. and H. Incidentally, my wife has no poems for sale at present.”

Winters’ wife, of course, is Janet Lewis. A spouse’s devotion and advocacy, particularly in a public forum, is always touching and worthy of emulation. Disloyalty is another name for a selfish, ungenerous spirit. I likewise admire Winters’ refusal to endorse, even tacitly, Kirstein’s editorial judgment. In fact, he rubs his nose in its trendiness and bad taste. Winters doesn’t deny husbandly nepotism, but like any good teacher advises Kirstein to “study the poem.” Winters’ final sentence is worthy of Swift. Here’s Lewis’ poem, “The Clock” (Poems Old and New 1918-1978):

“Whose is the clock that strikes the hours,
And strikes them true?
Above my beds of gaudy flowers,
Of mint and rue,

“The sound floats like a light that left
A turning glass
To flicker along a wall, more deft
Than hands that pass,

“Having laid down the mirror’s round,
To coil soft hair,
Brushed on a summer morning, smooth
To summer air.

“Is it the clock we hid away
Whose busy sound
Startled so loud our dreamy day,
Cocoon-like wound,

“And ever overlaid our lives,
Mechanic, clear,
With ticking gossip of their lives
Who first dwelled here?

“Deep in the attic does it bide,
Chatting alone,
By the warm rafter’s roughened side,
In monotone;

“A heart, a recollection even,
Of happy days
For those, since it was relegate to heaven,
Gone sadder ways?

“Or is it but some neighbor’s clock,
Some neighbor’s, far
Across still fields, whose silver shock
Floats the warm air?”

The effect is of a benign “Tell-Tale Heart.” The poem’s second and third stanzas are masterful. The poem is five sentences, four of them questions, answerless. The mention of “rue” reminds me of Ophelia’s mad catalog of wildflowers and herbs: “There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me.” What of the “firm and masterly rhythm” singled out by Winters? The poem contemplates the obscure temporal rhythms that rule our lives. Listen to the sound of “the clock we hid away”:

“Mechanic, clear,
With ticking gossip of their lives
Who first dwelled here?”

Lewis matter-of-factly renders a mystery so familiar we fail to see the mystery. “Gone sadder ways.”

`Who Else, What Else, Can Animate It?'

On this date in 1859, Thoreau devoted a page in his journal to one sentence:

“Five minutes before 3 P.M., Father died.”

On the next page, he describes a scene almost unimaginable today:

“After a sickness of some two years, going down-town in pleasant weather, doing a little business from time to time, hoeing a little in the garden, etc., Father took to his chamber January 13th and did not come down again. Most of the time previously he had coughed and expectorated a great deal. Latterly he did not cough, but continued to raise. He continued to sit up in his chamber till within a week before he died. He sat up for a little while on the Sunday four days before he died. Generally he was very silent for many months. He was quite conscious to the last, and his death was so easy that we should not have been aware that he was dying, though we were sitting around his bed, if we had not watched very closely.”

John Thoreau was born in Boston on Oct. 8, 1787. In 1821, his brother-in-law, Charles Dunbar, discovered a graphite deposit in Bristol, N.H. Two years later he and John Thoreau set up a factory manufacturing pencils in Concord, Mass. When Dunbar left the business its name was changed to John Thoreau & Company. Henry manufactured, packaged and shipped pencils for much of his adult life. Has any writer ever practiced a more satisfyingly symbolic profession? Guy Davenport writes:

“Thoreau’s method of composition was to draft passages daily in his journal, often at the point of observation, writing with an implement he and his father invented, the lead pencil exactly as we have it now (a stem of ground graphite and clay encased in a cedarwood tube).”

The father of Nancy Hernandez, our friend in Houston, died in Michigan on Jan. 5, age eighty-eight. We never met her father and knew almost nothing about him until we read the obituary Nancy wrote for the Los Angeles Times. Suddenly, an abstract presence becomes a man, a representative American, someone we wish we had known. In the paragraph following the one cited above, Thoreau writes:

“I have touched a body which was flexible and warm, yet tenantless,—warmed by what fire? When the spirit that animated some matter has left it, who else, what else, can animate it?”

`Any Rougher Than Ben Jonson'

In a comment on Sunday’s post devoted to a passage from a letter by Yvor Winters, Helen Pinkerton notes that her friend and former teacher “was stating his judgment of the bulk of a poet's work. One should also look to his judgment of individual poems throughout his essays.” She cites a sonnet by Sidney as an example of a poem he admired and taught, despite dismissing the poet as “inferior.”

I’ve revised some of my preconceived and largely unexamined notions about Winters since reading his Selected Letters. He arrived at critical judgments after long study and thought, and those judgments were more nuanced and likely to evolve over time than most of us could honestly claim. His judgments on poets tended to stick to individual poems. He admired Wallace Stevens not whole, indiscriminately, but for eight or ten poems. Let’s be honest: Stevens, a great poet, wrote some very silly poems.

Winters’ critical language, as displayed in the letters, is sometimes intemperate, often amusingly so. “I see no reason why I should be any rougher than Ben Jonson,” he writes Donald Davie in 1950. Winters could be very funny and had no sympathy for sentimental, slipshod or self-indulgent work.

Three times in the published letters, across more than thirty years, Winters refers to Richard Crashaw, the seventeenth-century poet and Catholic convert. In 1924 he writes to Marianne Moore:

“I have, however, been reading a little Crashaw, during the past few days, and find him very beautiful. My knowledge of him had been extremely fragmentary. This sort of thing:

“`Be it enacted then
By the fair laws of the firm pointed pen,
God’s services no longer shall put on
A sluttishness for pure religion:
No longer shall our Churches’ frighted stones
Lie scattered like the burnt and martyred bones
Of dead Devotion; nor faint marbles weep
In their said ruins; nor Religion keep
A melancholy mansion in those cold
Urns.’”

The lines are from “On a Treatise of Charity.” On Christmas Day 1928, Winters writes to Allen Tate:

“I am hypnotized by the cadences in Crashaw: cadences like the definitions of Aquinas.”

Finally, in a 1956 letter to Malcolm Cowley, who urges Winters to translate Paul Valéry (one of the poets Winters most admired), he writes:

“Stay with Valéry. I have to get back to Crashaw. You are in far better company.”

The movement from “beautiful,” to “hypnotized” to the unapologetic preference for Valéry, is subtle, discerning and honest, neither dismissing nor expansively embracing. Winters is a careful critic, no matter how hot-headed and vehement he may sound. I don’t always agree with his judgments but more often than with most other critics, they shine an unfamiliar light on poems and teach me something. What would Winters make of such an inexplicable darling of today’s critics as John Ashbery? Here’s what he wrote to the editor/publisher Harry Duncan in 1950, referring to some of his students at Stanford:

“Most of my poets will never be poets, but they know a damned sight more about poetry right now than most of their critics. Meanwhile I taught [J.V.] Cunningham, Miss [Helen] Pinkerton, [Edgar] Bowers, and [Lee F.] Gerlach. They are better poets than the imitators of Tate, Ransom, and Eliot, such as Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Berryman. When somebody else comes up with a better kennel-full I shall be glad to see it.”

Besides being a poet, critic and teacher, Winters bred and showed Airedale terriers.

`I Seem to Inhale Learning'

With pleasing regularity, Nige distils thought and feeling into anecdotes reminding us of what it must have been like to share a world with gentlemen, at least as that world is glossed by Shirley Robin Letwin (The Gentleman in Trollope, 1982):

“The gentleman’s world does not require a choice between rebellion and submission, violence and reason, alienation and unity, struggle and apathy, certainty and nihilism. It is a world full of nuances. Everything depends on fine distinctions – between wilfulness and originality, rigidity and discipline, distortion and disagreement. Nothing stands still but there is no sign of chaos. Order rests on proportion, harmony and continuity, not uniformity or changelessness.”

Nige’s most recent defense of “proportion, harmony and continuity” is a love song, or swan song, to libraries, one of my favorite endangered habitats. Like Nige, I worked in a library, though for only two years. My sons and I visit one at least twice a week. Public libraries are the essential greenhouse of democracy, and they’re probably the only reason I’ve never filed for bankruptcy. Nige, again like me, trusts and defends library serendipity:

“It was through public libraries that I found my way into reading - real reading - and as often as not it was a book picked off the shelf on little more than a whim that changed everything, opening up a new path that would enlarge my mind and soul and become part of my life.”

Nige is describing some of my earliest, most influential library experiences, as well as more recent encounters. I discovered Kafka that way – a book (The Castle, in the Muir translation) that looked interesting on a library shelf (Parma Heights, Ohio, circa 1966). That’s the sort of opportunity a library offers daily, free of cost, and the sort of opportunity pared away by budget cuts and institutional illiteracy. I first encountered James Joyce in the same unregulated manner, and Updike, Tolstoy, Svevo, Chesterton, Borges and Babel – as an unknown title on a shelf.

Nige describes his fateful, unplanned meeting with Molloy. Mine also happened in high school but in a bookstore (James Books, on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio, circa 1966), with the old Grove Press edition of Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). What attracted me was the look of the book, the starkness of its white cover, the paucity of paragraphs. Library or bookstore, the principle is the same: the ineffable attraction of serious reader to book, an elective affinity untouched by marketing or psychology. A reader and his book is a sovereign country, open to treaties but jealously autonomous. Only such autonomy permits the paradisiacal pleasure one knows in libraries, as rendered by Charles Lamb in “Oxford in the Vacation”:

“I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”