Anecdotal Evidence

`This More Delicate Belle of the Swamp'

2012-01-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Spring arrived in Houston shortly after 8 o’clock Monday morning, when the sky was blue and almost free of clouds, and the air warm enough to turn my thoughts to germinating seeds. I had an appointment with a post-doc in bioengineering but I was early, so I took off my jacket and took my time.

On the far side of campus, literally in the shadow of the Texas Medical Center, I passed through a low, marshy pocket I had never visited before, where shade has kept it moist even through the drought. Thousands of cars pass daily, as do students, patients and joggers. Nearby are the soccer stadium, tennis courts and baseball diamond, but here is one of those in-between places left over when we’ve paved everything else. Misleadingly, it’s judged “vacant.”

Two rabbits retreated into the tall grass as I approached. A pigeon working the bare patch along the sidewalk stayed put. A Northern mockingbird perched in a newly planted sapling, and below, near the wettest spot, grew a patch of lanceleaf tickseed (Coreopsis lanceolata). The yellow, daisy-like flowers reminded me of the “fringed orchis” (probably Platanthera psycodes) Thoreau jealously savored in his journal on June 9, 1854:

“It is remarkable that this, one of the fairest of all our flowers, should be one of the rarest,--for the most part not seen at all. I think that no other but myself in Concord annually find it. That so queenly a flower should annually bloom so rarely and in such withdrawn and secret places as to be rarely seen by man! The village belle never sees this more delicate belle of the swamp.”

Coreopsis is not so rare as Thoreau’s orchid, except when we choose not to see it. I mentioned my discovery of the flower blooming in January to the bioengineer, a recent transplant from Cambridge, Mass., where Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1839, and she was polite. Spring, after all, is almost two months away. Thoreau carries on about his fringed orchis:

“How little relation between our life and its. Most of us never see it or hear of it. The seasons go by to us as if it were not. A beauty reared in the shade of a convent, who has never strayed beyond the convent bell. Only the skunk or owl or other inhabitant of the swamp beholds it. In the damp twilight of the swamp, where it is wet to the feet. How little anxious to display its attractions! It does not pine because man does not admire it. How independent on our race! It lifts its delicate spike amid the hellebore and ferns in the deep shade of the swamp. I am inclined to think of it as a relic of the past as much as the arrowhead, or the tomahawk I found on the 7th.”

`Always, the Past is Heard'

2012-01-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

One notices the changes first – the new white window casings, the branch missing from the post oak, the spinning pinwheel stuck in the ground by the sidewalk. Only then does the scene’s familiarity sooth, a little, the shock of change. Without knowing I remembered them, I recognized the bend in the roof, the brown shingles and black fence. The past returns with a pang we have no right to regret. It’s like longevity: We want to live forever but don’t want to grow old. We want to revisit the past but avoid the ache of its pastness.

Our former neighbors invited me to lunch. They live across the street from the house we bought in 2004 after leaving New York and moving to Houston. Our sons were almost four and not yet two. Now they’re eleven and nearly nine. It’s the first house they remember, the template against which they will measure every subsequent house. All their memories are happy, as best I can judge. Our cat adopted us here. Michael learned to ride a bicycle on this street. This blog started here almost six years ago. I planted lemon and key lime saplings in the backyard. On Easter morning seven years ago another post oak leaned against the side of the house, and a crew worked until after dark taking it down.

The couple who bought the house from us almost four years ago still lives there, and they’ve had a child of their own, triggering in me a shameful flash of resentment, as though they were vandals or thieves. Then I remember the old lady from whom we bought the house. Her husband had recently died and she was moving to be closer to her son and his family. She and her late husband had bought the house new in 1955, and she lived there for almost half a century. Her flowers, chosen so at least one species in the yard was blooming every day of the year, are still blooming.

Clive Wilmer conducted a series of interviews with fellow poets for BBC Radio 3 from 1989 to 1992, and the transcripts were published as Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994). In his talk with C.H. Sisson, Wilmer notes one of Sisson’s poems ends with the line “Only the past is true.” He asks, “Could we begin by looking at your poetry in the light of that discovery?” and Sisson answers:

“Well, the future is imaginary, the present is happening and that only leaves the past to be true; and it leaves the past as, in a sense, all of a piece. Once a thing is done, it belongs to the past.”

In one of Sisson’s great late poems, “In the Silence,” he writes:

“In every spoken word,
Always, the past is heard.”

`Dedicate the Attention So to One Small Thing'

2012-01-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

Frank Wilson reminds us that Saturday was the 787^th birthday of St. Thomas Aquinas and commemorates the date with a sentence he attributes to the philosopher:

“All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.”

The passage about the “unius muscae,” drawn from Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, humbles our pretensions to understanding by summoning the humblest of creatures. The fly is small, ubiquitous and scorned. Only entomologists lavish attention on it. A man could devote a lifetime not to Drosophila as a biological abstraction but to a fly as an individual, and still know ignorance. We learn enough to swat one when it lights on the dinner plate but not enough to envy the compound eyes or marvel at the elegance of its architecture, as the poet-priest Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) did in The Kingdom of God:

“The Creation of Insects affords us a Clear Mirror of Almighty Power, and Infinite Wisdom with a Prospect likewise of Transcendent Goodness. Had but one of those Curious and High Stomached flies, been Created, whose Burnisht, and Resplendent Bodies are like Orient Gold, or Polisht Steel; whose Wings Are So Strong, and Whose Head so Crowned with an Imperial Tuff, which we often see Enthroned upon a Leaf, having a pavement of living Emrauld beneath its feet, their contemplating all the World…the Infinit Workmanship about his Body the Marvellous Consistence of his Lims, the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts, the Subtile and Imperceptible Ducture of his Nerves, and Endowments of his Tongue, and Ears, and Eyes, and Nostrils; the stupendious union of his Soul and Body, the Exact and Curious Symmetry of all his Parts, the feeling of his feet and the swiftness of his Wings, the Vivacity of his quick and active Power...”

Traherne could have rhapsodized the anatomy of any creature, but the smallest suited his purposes. The earliest practical microscopes appeared during his life. For the first time, men could observe in detail the multiplicity of worlds previously invisible, “the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts.” The first microscopic description of living tissue appeared in 1644 -- in Giambattista Odierna's L'occhio della mosca (The Fly's Eye).

In her 1930 poem “Lines to a Kitten” (Poems 1924-1940, 1950), Janet Lewis memorably describes her cat as a “Morsel of suavity.” It sits on her knee and intently watches a fly from six feet away:

“Only the great

And you, can dedicate

The attention so to one small thing.”

`Poetry is Form'

2012-01-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

It looks less like a pamphlet of poems by one of the last century’s great poets than a modest tract from a Bible society. The pale green cover is made of card stock and is turning lichen-brown around the edges. The publisher is The Tryon Pamphlets of Tryon, N.C. On the back cover are small announcements for other pamphlets in the series -- Happy Farmers by John Crowe Ransom and Psyche in the South by R.P. Blackmur. Each costs 25 cents, as does the book in hand: Before Disaster by Yvor Winters. An online dealer is selling it for $275.

The 26-page booklet published in 1934 contains a four-page prose foreword and twenty-one poems, including some of Winters’ best and best-known -- “To a Young Writer,” “On Teaching the Young,” “Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost Two Years Since in the Salt-Marsh” and “Before Disaster” (subtitled “Written early in the winter of 1932-33,” when Hitler was coming to power). The copy I have, bound in cardboard covers, is from the Fondren Library. A label at the front says the book was a “Gift of George G. Williams September 1954.” It hasn’t circulated in sixteen years.

Before Disaster consolidates Winters’ evolution from early free-verse Imagism to his mature work, traditional in meter and rhyme. He’s a rare poet who matured in the best sense, abandoning youthful avant-garde pretensions to evolve a sensibility that crafted poetry for adults, poetry that lasts. In his foreword Winters writes:

“I cannot grasp the contemporary notion that the traditional virtues of style are incompatible with a poetry of modern matter; it appears to rest on the fallacy of expressive form, the notion that the form of the poem should express the matter. This fallacy results in the writing of chaotic poetry about the traffic [as opposed to “Before Disaster”]; of loose poetry about our sprawling nation [Whitman, Crane]; of semi-conscious poetry about semi-conscious states…Poetry is form; its constituents are thought and feeling as they are embodied in language; and though form cannot be wholly reduced to principles, there are certain principles which it cannot violate.”

Almost eighty years after Winters wrote them, the words are more bracing and probably more futile than ever, an implicit call to seriousness, good sense, respect for tradition and dedication to craft. Rolfe Humphries begins his review of Before Disaster in the February 1935 issue of Poetry with this admission:

“This attractively-priced paper pamphlet will beguile you into more study than you bargain for.”

`As If It Had Made Up Its Mind to Stay'

2012-01-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

Two mornings in a row I observed the silhouette of a puffed-up, ample-breasted bird perched in a shrub outside my office window. The branch bobbed in the wind fifteen feet over the sidewalk. Featureless in the early-morning murk, the robin-sized bird remained as impassive as a duck decoy. The second day I walked outside and confirmed he was a robin, Turdus migratorius (not what you think: turdus is Latin for “thrush”). He reminded me of a small pen-and-ink sketch I bought many years ago in an Indiana antiques shop: “Round Robin.”

Where I grew up in Ohio, the robin was a seasonal alarm clock, an early herald of spring we started looking for in February. Not so in Texas. B.C. Robison writes in Birds of Houston (Rice University Press, 1990):

“…in southeast Texas it is a harbinger of the deep winter. The bird starts moving into the Houston area in December, and it remains fairly numerous through March. Robins begin to migrate back north in April, and by late summer they are seldom seen in the city.”

By repute, the robin is the gentlest of birds, an honorary dove, at least to humans, though I’ve watched them pull meters of earthworm from the lawn. Between 1824 and 1826, John Clare composed a series of “Natural History Letters” (The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, edited by Margaret Grainger, 1983) to his friend James Augustus Hessey. Among them is a lengthy description of a robin he befriended as a boy growing up in Helpston:

“…in winter it will venture into the house for food & become as tame as a chicken—we had one that usd [sic] to come in at a broken pane in the window three winters together I always knew it to be our old visitor by a white scar on one of the wings [del. which might have been an old wound made by some cat] it grew so tame that it would perch on ones [sic] finger & take the crumbs out of the hand…it would never stay in the house at night tho it would attempt to perch on the chair spindles & clean its bill & ruffles its feather & put its head under its wing as if it had made up its mind to stay”

`The Annual Wreckage'

2012-01-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

The storms that blew through Houston on Wednesday started a day earlier as afternoon fog, skies like dirty milk and rising temperatures through the evening. That ominous sense of nature behaving in counterintuitive ways. A muggy chill. At dawn, muted yellow light and the stink of ozone and sewage. Wind pushing dry leaves along the pavement, making scratching sounds. Among them tumbled in the street near my car not tumbleweed but an uprooted, shrub-sized pokeweed. The lovely and toxic purple berries were gone but the racemes and leaves held on. I put it in the trunk to look at later.

Pokeweed is a poet’s dream, too pat an emblem for something – sustenance and poison, beauty and danger. An opportunist, flourishing where soil is disturbed, adaptable as a cockroach. Whitman finds it in a gone-to-seed pasture without hinting at its toxicity: “And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.” There’s much to admire in weeds, their tenacity and refusal to hew to human wishes. Amy Clampitt likes and respects them in “Vacant Lot with Pokeweed” (The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, 1997):

“Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs

“of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing--and look! here's

“a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into

“raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage.”

The poem is a patchwork of harmonious fragments, like weeds in vacant lots. “Weeds do not / hesitate.” The “wayfarer” ("some vagrant") is a mockingbird or cardinal, at once harvesting and sowing.

`Eager to Share What He Deemed Best'

2012-01-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

Yvor Winters died on this day in 1968, a year of turmoil and grief, at the age of sixty-seven. His great poem “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills” concludes:

“The driver, melting down the distance here,
May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer
Or pass the faint head set perplexedly.
And man-made stone outgrows the living tree,
And at its rising, air is shaken, men
Are shattered, and the tremor swells again,
Extending to the naked salty shore,
Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.”

Charles Tomlinson, the English poet born in 1927, visited Winters at his home in Palo Alto in December 1959, and recounts the meeting in “Beginnings” (Some Americans: A Personal Record, 1981):

“…the striking thing about Winters’s conversation that day was its lack of precisely that quality of ratiocinative abstraction that he professed to admire in poetry. His talk consisted of a celebration of the concrete: Californian wines, Californian trees and the shapes of their leaves, local topography and the changes the vicinity had undergone, the habits of airedales [sic], the migration of birds, the kinds of birds that visited Palo Alto, the distinguishing peculiarities of the older Californian culture.”

In other words, the world he knew and cherished. Tomlinson admits to feeling apprehensive about meeting this “reputedly unaccommodating man,” but concludes:

“The day was an entire success. The dignity and dimension of the man unmistakably communicated themselves, as did a capacity for friendship, rather than friendliness. Winters showed no desire to please, but, as in his urging to try a particularly fine wine, he was eager to share what he deemed best.”

`Godfather to an Insect'

2012-01-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

“They will have enough to do without having to memorize Latin declensions.”

The author is James S. Miller, and he’s defending the world’s poor overworked biologists. There’s something embarrassing about the dean and vice president for science of the New York Botanical Garden carrying on so in public. Bilingual whining is still whining. Imagine Darwin or some other sturdy Victorian conducting himself in so undignified a fashion. As of Jan. 1, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature has discarded its requirement that botanists provide a Latin description of a new species. No word on whether fauna will follow flora. Compare Miller’s display with a 1943 poem, “On Discovering a Butterfly,” by Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist:

“I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer—and I want no other fame.

“Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

“Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.”

Nabokov gave Latin genus and/or species names to twenty butterflies and moths. Other lepidopterists have bestowed thirty-nine names that allude to Nabokov or one of his books. Some of the latter are obvious: Itylos pnin, Nabokovia ada, Paralycaeides shade; others, more recondite: Leptotes delalande, Leptotes krug, Madeleinea nodo. Nabokov’s best-known godchild is Lycaeides melissa samuelis, the Karner blue butterfly, the endangered species he immortalized in 1943 and re-immortalized in 1957 in Pnin:

“A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

Almost uniquely, Nabokov took sublime zest in both butterflies and words. Though otherwise luxuriantly multilingual, his Latin was purely functional, a biologist’s “taxonomic Latin.” Its precision reflects the genius of binomial nomenclature, the system devised by Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) that permits the particular to take its rightful place in the general. In An Autobiography (1913), Theodore Roosevelt writes:

“My first knowledge of Latin was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I collected.”

That was my experience as well. Among the first I learned, even before formally studying Latin: Acer saccharum (sugar maple) and Passer domesticus (house sparrow). In The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2010), Douglas Brinkley tells us Roosevelt as a boy studied Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum and Systemae Naturae. He writes:

“By the time Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, scientists and explorers seeking glory ranged far and wide in the remote wilderness, racing to discover organisms that could be named after themselves.”

Brinkley cites a passage by Nancy Pick in The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (2004):

“The Linnaean system eliminated the confusion of having, for example, a butterfly called the mourning cloak in the United States, the yellow edge in Canada, and the Camberwell beauty in Britain. People all over the world, whatever their language, can understand Nymphalis antiopa.”

Or could, until recently. The point is, no one would wish to eliminate the profusion of common names for plants and animals. They constitute a form of folk poetry, one of the glories of English. But neither should we eliminate the more rigorous poetry of Latin plant descriptions. The world always outstrips our capacity to adequately describe it.

[Go here for Curious Taxonomy and here for a blogger at Scientific American defending the elimination of Latin “diagnoses” of new plant species.]

`This I Find Unbearable'

2012-01-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

You have to admire a reader equipped with sufficient enterprise to find something amusing in so dreary and obnoxious a writer as Jean-Paul Sartre. Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti quotes two characters discussing Hell in the Frenchman’s 1944 one-act No Exit (Huis Clos):

“GARCIN: Are there books here?

“VALET: No.”

The only infernal torment more insidiously cruel would be a library consisting exclusively of L'idiot de la famille and Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Forty year ago, my professor of 18th-century English literature read aloud in class a characteristically opaque passage from Sartre’s L'étre et le néant devoted to the subject of holes. She tried valiantly not to laugh, but soon all of us were giggling. She and Mike read Sartre in the only spirit I find palatable.

The prospect of a bookless life (or death), however, is genuinely frightening. In 1997, at the age of eighty-eight, William Maxwell published an article in the The New York Times Magazine in which he writes:

“…when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke. One might as well be –”

The dash abruptly interrupts Maxwell’s thought, then he resumes in a more enthusiastic vein:

“Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and Isaac Babel and Sybille Bedford’s The Sudden View and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the autobiographies of William Butler Yeats.”

Even sadder than a bookless eternity is voluntary booklessness in this life. We inhabit an age of bookish wish fulfillment. If you can think of a volume, you can probably get your hands on it, often free of cost. Think of digitalized texts and interlibrary loan. Think of life without Amis, Boswell and Chekhov, without Xenophon, Yates and Zweig.

`You Can Refute Culture Only With Culture'

2012-01-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

Over Christmas I read Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar by the Soviet critic Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893-1984), a great admirer of Laurence Sterne and of Sterne’s other great admirer, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. He relates an anecdote about his friend the Tolstoy scholar Boris Mikhailovich Eichenbaum (1886-1959). One winter morning during the 872-day siege of Leningrad, Eichenbaum walked to Radio House, the government broadcasting studio on Rakova Street near Nevsky Prospect, and asked if he could address the German army. Here is an excerpt from his broadcast:

“I am an old professor. My son Dmitri is at the front. My son-in-law was killed. I live with my wife, daughter, and grand-daughter in a single room and write a book about Tolstoy. You know him--he is the author of War and Peace. I know you are afraid of Tolstoy—you have read his book about victory after defeat.

“I left my desk with frozen ink to come here and tell you I despise you. You can refute culture only with culture. We have cannons too—you can’t prove anything with cannons. You can’t destroy our culture, you can’t break into our city.”

It’s an act of principled defiance from a man almost sixty years old. Eichenbaum was no conventional Soviet propagandist. The weapon he brandished was carefully chosen – Tolstoy’s account of Napoleon’s defeat by the Russian winter, the Russian people and his own hubris, one-hundred thirty years earlier. In a sense, Eichenbaum was wrong – you can prove a lot with cannons. What stuck in memory was his off-hand mention of frozen ink – if literal, a measure of the hardships Soviet civilians endured; if figurative, an emblem of the writer’s impotence before savagery. And yet, Eichenbaum never stopped writing. After the war, this champion of true Russian culture was hounded by the Soviet authorities for his “rootless cosmopolitanism” – that is, for being a Jew.

Eichenbaum’s frozen ink reminded me of a passage in A Voice from the Chorus, Andrei Sinyavsky’s account of the seven years he spent in a Soviet forced labor camp. Near the conclusion, he writes:

"I dreamed of the paper I am now writing on as of an open field or a forest: oh to be able to lose myself in it, to take off and run on breathlessly and, without reaching the end or even the middle, put down somewhere at the edge or in a corner just a few rapid lines. . ."

Unlike many lesser writers, Sinyavsky refused to let the blankness of the page intimidate him. Rather, it serves as a spur to his imagination, to the one thing that makes a writer a writer:

"You need paper to lose yourself in its whiteness. Writing means diving into a page and coming up with some idea or word. Blank paper invites you to dip down into its artless expanse. A writer is like a fisherman. He sits and waits for something to bite. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and, without even thinking, let alone understanding why, I am sure to be able to fish something out of it."

These paper-and-ink linkages came to me while reading a very un-Russian text, Thoreau’s journal, more than two-million words that ceased only when the writer could no longer lift his pen and dip it into the ink bottle. One-hundred fifty-five years ago today, on Jan. 23, 1857, Thoreau writes:

“The coldest day that I remember recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. Ink froze.”

Shklovsky writes of Eichenbaum:

“Eichenbaum had a great ability to see anew each time he read something. He spent endless hours reading without rushing through, and after being persuaded by his discovery, he labored on it as though his work had just begun.

“His index cards never got stale.”

`Where Civility Encounters Nature'

2012-01-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

As with everything else, I’m a dedicated dilettante when it comes to mathematics. I play with it for amusement, for the sense of limbering up mentally, stretching under-used muscles and setting off the resulting rush of intellectual endorphins. I’ve never recognized the silly left brain/right brain distinction. For years I read Scientific American mostly for Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column. I still need help calculating percentages but recreational math is a lark, like music.

Clive Wilmer makes the math/music linkage in “A Baroque Concerto,” subtitled “to Edgar Bowers, at 70”—that is, in 1994. Actually, he lets Bowers, his friend and fellow-poet, make the connection. The sonnet is collected in New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012):

“`Pure mathematics!’ That’s what you exclaimed

Across the polite applause to me, enthused

By a forgotten opus hardly famed

In its own time or place. Not being used

To seeing you moved and vulnerable then brought
Another harmony into my head,
The divisions of your verse, its metres taut,
Drawn from the order trusted to the dead.

“A love of the abstract…yet you evoke,

Through poignant scenes of Europe sketched in youth,

An order that’s the sharper for the smoke;

“And, later on, make your locality—

The golden coastline where civility

Encounters nature—witness to the truth.”

In a note to his sonnet, Wilmer rightly calls Bowers, who died in 2000, “one of the great poets of modern times.” The “poignant scenes of Europe,” Wilmer says, refer to poems in Bowers’ first collection, The Form of Loss (1956), “which draw on his experiences as an American soldier in Germany at the end of the Second World War.” “Your locality,” he says, is a reference to a sequence of poems from the nineteen-eighties, “Thirteen Views of Santa Barbara” (1989, included in Collected Poems, 1997), about “civic order and the natural environment in Southern California.”

At its best, poetry, like music, is a species of mathematics. What is prosody but respectful attention paid to the music of numbers? William James, of all people, in an 1879 lecture observed, “The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.” And an acute description of the poetic practice of Edgar Bowers: “witness to the truth.” In “Numbers,” from the sequence titled “Mazes” in Collected Poems, Bowers writes:

“Though the order of real numbers seem enough

For astronauts, as it seemed once for him

Who, from an apple’s sudden fall, inferred

A universe at poise; though business men,

Through all the sums from nine to zero, add

And multiply their hopes and fears; and though
Musicians, when they play duets and trios,
Be satisfied with their Pythagoras,
Each of them, should he contemplate desire,
Its spins and its velocities, its racy
Particles and unlinear lines, will need
Imaginary numbers.”

`Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-Doux'

2012-01-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

I thanked Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti for posting “A Greek Botanical Catalogue.” In return I sent him Yvor Winters’ “Time and the Garden,” which includes catalogues of fruit-bearing plants and seventeenth-century English poets, and told Mike, “I’m a sucker for lists.” He replied:

“I don't know much about the origins of writing, but weren't some of mankind's earliest writings lists and inventories? Lists, possibly the earliest literary genre. The second book of the Iliad is one big list. Whitman is of course the great poetic list-maker.”

The appeal of lists or catalogs is the impression they give of bounty and comprehensiveness, whether serious or comic. A list can be grand, as when Homer dutifully names the twenty-nine Achaean contingents, their geographic origins and forty-six captains, and tallies 1,186 ships. The effect can also be boastful and inadvertently comic, as in “Song of Myself,” which frequently threatens to turn into a blowhard's catalogue of catalogues. In “Jubilate Agno,” Christopher Smart wrote virtually nothing but lists, including the sublimely moving section called “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.”

A list can be brief, musical and deftly somber, as in Edgar Bowers’ “The Mountain Cemetery”:

“The enormous, sundry platitude of death
Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same.”

The effect can be comic, as in the final lines of Swift’s “Description of a Shower”:

“Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.”

In The Dunciad, another tour de force of cataloguing (the practice seems suited to satire), Pope gives us a list of competitive theatrical effects, designed to bring in the crowds:

“Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth,
A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball,
Till one wide Conflagration swallows all."

And, of course, Belinda’s mock-epic toilet in “The Rape of the Lock”:

“The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
Transform'd to Combs, the speckled and the white.
Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.”

As this catalogue of poetic catalogues swells to dangerous proportions, let’s return to Mike Gilleland who asks in his email: “On lists, have you read Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists? I haven't, although it's on my `list’ of books to read.”

Mine, too, Mike, thanks to you.

`Ciphering Out How the Grass Grew'

2012-01-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

While writing about the usefulness of pocket knives, Gene Logsdon at The Contrary Farmer recalls a favorite pastime:

“As boys, we used our knives mainly to play a game we called `mumblety-peg.’ (I have a hard time believing this, but Merriam-Webster says the first known use of that word, mumblety-peg, was in 1647, and that it first referred to what the loser in the game had to do— pull a peg out of the ground with his or her teeth.)”

In Cleveland we knew the game as “mumbley-peg,” one of thirty-seven variant spellings recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary. Rules vary. We played by balancing the point on the tip of the index finger and flipping the knife so it stuck in the ground, sometimes aiming at a circle scratched in the dirt. Skill was required but the real attraction was the potential for injury to self and others. The romantic allure of knives is strong among boys, and owning one confers a heady sense of adultness. I keep a Swiss Army knife in the glove compartment.

The OED entry is a veritable encyclopedia of cutlery folklore. The word derives from an archaic usage of “mumble,” “to bite or chew with toothless gums,” confirming the derivation Logsdon cites. The Dictionary specifies that the loser is “required to draw out of the ground with the teeth a peg which has been driven in with a certain number of blows with the handle of the knife.” As boys, we bypassed etymology and imposed no such penalty, though Iona and Peter Opie describe it in Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969):

“In former times it was the victor’s privilege to drive a peg into the ground with as many blows of his knife-handle as the loser required additional throws to complete the game; and the vanquished, by way of penance, had to pull the peg out of the ground with his teeth.”

Children live by ritual and an Old Testament sense of justice. The detail of matching pounds to the peg to the number of fumbles sounds right, though we never played it that way. It reminds me of a passage in Thoreau’s journal from late summer 1850 that may refer indirectly to mumblety-peg:

“There was a cross-eyed fellow used to help me survey,--he was my stake-driver,--and all he said was, at every stake he drove, `There, I should n’t like to undertake to pull that up with my teeth.’”

Characteristically, Thoreau follows up with this: “It sticks in my crop. That’s a good phrase. Many things stick there.”

The OED gives ten citations for “mumblety-peg” dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including one from “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” a humorous piece Mark Twain published in 1870 in The Galaxy magazine: “If anybody caught him playing ‘mumble-peg’ by himself, after the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be ciphering out how the grass grew.”

Sinclair Lewis used it in Main Street (1920): “While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota.”

On my own I discovered that Charles Courtney Curran (1861-1942), whose customary subject was diaphanous ladies, painted “Mumblety Peg” in 1885. Eleven years later, Twain published Tom Sawyer, Detective, in which he mentions the game in the first paragraph:

“The frost was working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer and going in a-swimming.”

I enjoy seeing the continuity of the game across centuries, appealing as it does to primal boyish instincts. Some scholars see a game of mumblety-peg between two boys in the lower right corner of Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games (1560). The guy on the left clearly holds a knife pirate-style between his teeth, and the one on the right seems to be protesting. Either they’re playing the game or about to rumble. The way we played as kids, it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference.

`The Something That You Say'

2012-01-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Not a poet in America today could match Virgil. Few, if any, of us historians could write with the flair and judgment of a Tacitus. But how would we know that — or care — if we did not read?”

We wouldn’t, of course, and do not. Reading ought to humble us, not swell us with self-satisfaction. “Reading is not a means of self-affirmation, but of self-denial.” We, readers and writers alike, are neither novel nor unprecedented: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Of course, we would have to read to know that thought, and to know it’s so. Seldom do the unread read themselves well, though having read much is no guarantee of self-knowledge.

“Regress — material, intellectual, and moral — can be as common as progress, if each new generation proves a poor custodian of the laws, behavior, knowledge, and learning inherited from those now gone.”

On the day I read Victor Davis Hanson’s sober elegy, Clive Wilmer’s New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012) arrived in the mail. He titles a brief poem “To George Herbert”:

“Time and again I turn to you, to poems
In which you turn from vanity to God
Time and again, as I at the line’s turn
Turn through the blank space that modulates –
And so resolves – the something that you say.”

Wilmer’s placement of “the line’s turn” is witty and humble, as is “turn / Turn,” in which some of us hear another wayward allusion to Ecclesiastes. The word “conversation” has lately been debased, turned into a feel-good token, but Wilmer, like any good writer, carries on a conversation with the good writers who preceded him. “The something that you say”: All is vanity, not excluding pretensions to originality.

“Nothing that we experience has not happened before; the truly ignorant miss that, hypnotized by sophisticated technology into believing that human nature has been reinvented in their own image.”

Wilmer titles another recent poem “Shakespeare” (“In Memoriam: E.E.I.”):

“I must have been just eight – it was 1953 –
When in some parlour of my mind he pulled a chair out
Like a book from a packed shelf, then sat down and got going.
Fifty-eight years have passed and he hasn’t finished talking
Nor I listening. My father was already dead,
My mother’s now been dead for thirty years. Who else
Have I got to know like him, learnt more from, loved more freely?”

Oliver Hardy, Father and Son

2012-01-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

On this date in 1892, Oliver Hardy, né Norvell Hardy, was born in Harlem, Ga. In 1910, age eighteen, he moved to Milledgeville, Ga., later the home of Flannery O’Connor. In 1952, on Hardy’s sixtieth birthday, another ample-figured comic actor, Curly Howard, né Jerome Lester “Jerry” Horwitz, died of a stroke in Los Angeles. Hardy died five years later, on Aug. 7, 1957.

Hardy’s father, Sgt. Oliver Hardy, enlisted at age nineteen in the 16th Georgia Infantry, took part in sixteen engagements and was wounded at the Battle of Antietam, on Sept. 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 23,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing.

Among the more conventionally rousing poems Melville included in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is “The Victor of Antietam,” a celebration of Gen. George B. McClellan: “The one-armed lift the wine to you, McClellan, / And great Antietam's cheers renew.” President Lincoln was less enthusiastic. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation five days after the battle, and six weeks later removed McClellan, an emancipation opponent, from his command.

Sgt. Oliver Hardy died three days before Thanksgiving in 1892, ten months after the birth of his son, the future partner of Stan Laurel. History is a small, often intimate place.

`Read the Book of Scattered Lives'

2012-01-17T06:01:00.000-08:00

Scouting for likely neighborhoods Monday morning, south and west of downtown Houston, I noticed a ranch-style house with two live oaks in front and the most orderly looking yard sale I’ve ever seen extending from the garage, down the driveway to the street. It looked like an outdoor Sears Roebuck, with chrome-covered racks of men’s and women’s clothing arranged on hangers by type of apparel, neat rows of shoes and a dining room table polished to a gloss with six chairs, centerpiece and candles. A price tag hung from each item. I parked, wondering if I should wipe my shoes before entering, and remembered Tom Disch’s “Garage Sale” (Dark Verses & Light, 1991):

“Once someone thought he’d want to read this book,
And here’s a chess set minus just one rook;
A Sunbeam toaster sans its cord; the Life
Of Who’s-It by his unforgiving wife.
Como singing `Dance, Ballerina, Dance’;
The buttons off a hundred shirts and pants;
A rug unfaded where a bed has been
With traffic patterns marked in olive green.
There are few takers, though the prices cry,
`Remember, stranger, someday you must die.’”

A wooden chess set was set up on a board on a butcher-block table in the garage – all four rooks present – and beside it sat an old man in chinos, short-sleeve Madras shirt buttoned to the throat, sleeveless sweater and pristine running shoes. His regimental mustache was white and neatly trimmed and his white hair stood up almost straight. He didn’t smile. But for the gold-rim glasses, he looked like Dashiell Hammett, tall and cool. “Morning,” he said, nodding carefully.

I moved across the spotless garage floor to a card table of books, mostly paperback thrillers arranged by size and held up with bookends. Both hard covers were Modern Library – the unlikely hybrid of Donne and Blake (a “Giant” I owned as a kid), and The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (1999), edited by Robert Mezey. “My wife’s,” said the old man as I looked at them. “She reads poetry?” I asked. “Never understood it myself,” he said, and paused before adding, “She’s gone now.” He had priced the books at one dollar each. I only wanted the Robinson but gave him two dollars and took both volumes.

The Blake/Donne is scuffed but intact. The Robinson is as pristine as the old man’s shoes except for four lines in “Calverly’s” underlined in pencil on page 59:

“No fame delays oblivion
For them, but something yet survives:
A record written fair, could we
But read the book of scattered lives.”

`Onto a Small Flat Canvas'

2012-01-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I am an elderly man in a straw hat
Who has set himself the task of praising God
For all this welter by setting out my paints
And getting as much truth as can be managed
Onto a small flat canvas.”

“Devotions of a Painter” (The Transparent Man, 1990) is a marvel of blank verse, an undramatic dramatic monologue and an artistic credo by Anthony Hecht. Today, “devotion” most often suggests romantic loyalty, fidelity to a spouse or friend. The word carries religious connotations, as in a prayer or other private act of worship – etymologically, a vow of allegiance. Hecht hints at these meanings and others.

He refers to a statement attributed to John Constable (1776-1837) by C. R. Leslie in Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Composed Chiefly of His Letters (1843). In reply to “a lady who, looking at an engraving of a house, called it an ugly thing,” the painter said:

“There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, — light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”

Late in the poem, Hecht piles up images of wealth – “crushed jewel,” “oily golds,” “immense loose change,” “moldering gold,” culminating in “corrupted treasures” in the final lines:

“I am enamored of the pale chalk dust
Of the moth’s wing, and the dark moldering gold
Of rust, the corrupted treasures of this world.
Against the Gospel let my brush declare:
“`These are the anaglyphs and gleams of love.’”

Hecht reverses, without blasphemy, Matthew 6:19-20: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

The artist – painter, poet – transmutes the ugly and transitory into something beautiful and lasting. An anaglyph is a stereoscopic photograph in contrasting colors. When viewed through corresponding filters, it creates the impression of a three-dimensional image:

“…getting as much truth as can be managed
Onto a small flat canvas.”

Hecht was born on this date in 1923 and died Oct. 20, 2004.

`Eternity Is Here'

2012-01-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade is a literary novelty with serious intent, a treat for seasoned readers of Nabokov’s novel. Gingko Press of Berkeley has extracted the 999-line poem by the fictional John Shade, printed it in chapbook format with facsimiles of the index cards on which Shade (like his creator) composed his poem, and a booklet with essays by Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd and poet R.S.Gwynn. All of this is handsomely boxed and illustrated by Jean Holabird, who conceived the project. Earlier, Holabird created Vladimir Nabokov — Alphabet in Color, a visual realization of the novelist’s much-celebrated synesthesia.

Beyond its novelty appeal, the project’s serious intent is its defense of “Pale Fire” as a poem and Shade/Nabokov as a poet. Boyd writes in his essay: “We have not paid Shade and his poem the respect, the care in reading, they deserve.” When I first read Pale Fire in high school more than forty years ago, the critical consensus seemed to be that the poem was little more than doggerel, a pretext on which to hang Charles Kinbote’s mad reading. I was confused because I liked the poem, starting with its instantly memorable opening couplets:

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

I was also moved by the sad story of Hazel Shade, the poet’s daughter, and even then I could hear echoes, admiring or parodic, of Pope, Eliot and Frost. For me, a teenager drunk on literature, the poem and surrounding apparatus seemed like great fun. In his essay “`And if my private universe scans right’: `Pale Fire’ and Its Creative Context,” Gwynn considers the unpromising state of American poetry half a century ago when Nabokov published his novel – the confessional school, Beats, and so forth. Gwynn writes:

“Nabokov was a spirited observer of and sometime combatant in various literary skirmishes, and I contend that `Pale Fire’ represents a counterpoise between the academic orthodoxy of Eliot and the assault of the poetic barbarians who Nabokov doubtless felt were at the gates. Its full stature as a poem of its times has not, I feel, been appreciated, for it has often been seen by critics as merely another Nabokovian conceit, a literary `excuse’ for Kinbote’s fantastic commentary.”

Gwynn goes on to make an intriguing suggestion: Nabokov may have modeled Shade, at least in part, on the poet-critic-teacher Yvor Winters. The novelist and his wife Véra met Winters and his wife, the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, in 1941 (the year Lewis published her finest novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre). Nabokov had come to teach Russian literature and creative writing at Stanford University, where Winters had arrived as a graduate student in 1927 and would remain as a professor until his retirement almost forty years later. Gwynn describes their “cordial social relations,” and suggests why they may have remained friends:

“…they were both fluently multi-lingual, both somewhat displaced in their respective academic departments, both politically liberal but aesthetically conservative, and both firmly married to lifelong partners. Both also wrote important treatises on English prosody. Like Nabokov, Winters made statements about his contemporaries that were sometimes brutally candid, and he did not hesitate to refer to the shortcomings of fellow writers with whom he was personally friendly, among them Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and Malcolm Cowley.”

Gwynn devotes three pages to his conjecture, judging Winters “a plausible choice” as a model for Shade: “The most striking confluence between the real poet and fictional one is to be found in their scholarship and use of meter and form.” Winters, he notes, became “a serious metricist who worked in the couplet, quatrain, and sonnet until the end of his career. The heroic couplet became his form of choice, and some of his best poems employ it.”

Gwynn quotes lines from a poem Winters composed around 1930, “The Marriage,” and cites others. In one of the last poems Winters ever wrote, “A Song in Passing,” dating from the early nineteen-fifties, I hear echoes of the themes Shade/Nabokov will weave into “Pale Fire” a decade later:

“Where am I now? And what
Am I to say portends?
Death is but death, and not
The most obtuse of ends.

“No matter how one leans
One yet fears not to know.
God knows what all this means!
The mortal mind is slow.

“Eternity is here.
There is no other place.
The only thing I fear
Is the Almighty Face.”

It's a comfort to think of two literary masters of the last century becoming friends, and remaining so in the fictional realm. Gwynn concludes:

"It is easy to see why Nabokov may have found [Winters] compatible both socially and aesthetically, and I have little doubt that some elements of John Shade's life and biography honor the memory of this encounter of like minds."

`Wild Civility'

2012-01-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

Clive James covers much ground in a small space in “Technique’s Marginal Centrality,” and surely that’s part of his message – deft, understated mastery earned through discipline. James combines a serious theme, nicely condensed in his title, with casually broad learning, sharp wit (the Yoko Ono crack is priceless) and anecdotal ease, deploying a remarkable range of reference from Hokusai to Herrick:

“…the general assumption that beginning poets had to put in their time with technical training, like musicians learning their scales, is everywhere regarded as out of date. This near-consensus is wrong, in my view, but you can see why it prevails. And it does have one big advantage. Though a poet who can’t count stresses and syllables might write mediocre poetry, there is a certain kind of bad poetry that he won’t write.”

That James’ essay shares space in the January issue of Poetry with precisely the sort of bland, prosy, under-crafted or non-crafted poems he indicts (excluding some by David Ferry and A.E. Stallings) is an irony sweet to savor. Writing verse is rapidly becoming a lost art, like making a dovetail joint or a good meatloaf. Earlier this week, at a site devoted to the art of gnomonics – making sundials – I found a fitting passage from an essay written in 1940 by Hilaire Belloc:

“Civilization loses its treasures by an unconscious process. It has lost them before it has appreciated that they were in the way of being lost; and when I say 'its treasures' I mean the special discoveries and crafts of mankind."

Surely that includes poetry, though not all the loss is unconscious. Many are forthright about writing, reading and admiring bad poetry. Because the stuff is so easy and slipshod, non-poets crank it out like sausage. James notes the “clear division between poets who are hoping to achieve something by keeping technical considerations out of it, and other poets who want to keep technique out of it because they don’t have any.” Writing poetry is the most difficult task I have ever undertaken, and I stopped trying long ago. I don’t have the chops. I learned only enough technique to “count stresses and syllables,” never enough to conceal it.

James makes an acute point when he notes that Pope gets credit for perfecting couplets, though Herrick “invent[ed] the possibilities.” In the final lines of “Delight in Disorder,” Herrick writes:

“A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.”

Like most apprentice poets, many of whom never retire, I couldn’t achieve that note of “wild civility.”

`Memorability and Concision'

2012-01-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Phillips, whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty pow'r, and hapless love,
Rest here distress'd by poverty no more,
Find here that calm, thou gav'st so oft before.
Sleep, undisturb'd, within this peaceful shrine,
Till angels wake thee, with a note like thine.”

In his welcome appreciation of Samuel Johnson the poet, Clive Wilmer praises the seldom-anthologized “An Epitaph on Claudy Phillips, a Musician” as a “moving tribute.” In his biography of Johnson, David Nokes identifies Phillips as a Welsh violinist. The never-wealthy poet wishes for the impecunious musician, Nokes says, “a glimpse of posthumous bliss after which both must, if only occasionally, have dreamt.” Johnson’s virtues as a man – compassion, clear-sightedness, outrage at injustice – double as writerly virtues. The elegy and epitaph, poetic tributes and memorials, came as natural impulses to Johnson. Nokes writes:

“As he entered his fourth decade his prospects seemed distinctly gloomy. The men he had cherished for their enlivening wit were either dead like Ford or gone like Savage, and what memorials would ever record them? In the [Gentleman’s] Magazine he turned to epitaphs, which became a favorite subject for him since `every man may expect to be recorded in an epitaph.’ The pyramids of Egypt were epitaphs. Erected by the pharaohs in attempts to preserve their own memory; but `the best subject for epitaphs is private virtue…exerted in the same circumstances in which the bulk of mankind are placed.’ In that conviction he thought not only of the epitaphs of famous men, like Newton, but of Claudy Phillips and even Epictetus, a beggar, cripple, and a slave, remembered as `the favourite of heaven.”

Remembering the praiseworthy dead is among the obligations of the living. Contrasting Johnson’s style with that of Pope’s, Wilmer writes:

“Where Pope is waspish, mordant and suavely elegant, Johnson is grave, compassionate and severe. His poetic style has the same sturdy eloquence as his prose and has been praised for observing the prose virtues, though this should not blind us to his poetic qualities, above all memorability and concision.”

Wilmer includes several of Johnson’s poems and excerpts from others. Go here for the complete text of “London: A Poem,” and here for “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” his masterpieces as a poet.

`I Love the Music Fine'

2012-01-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

Dave Lull sent me a link to “Pickin’ and Trimmin’,” a video by Matt Morris about a barbershop in Drexel, N.C., where musicians gather in the back room to play blue grass and old fiddle tunes. The barber, Lawrence Anthony, has been cutting hair for sixty years. Of the musicians he says “These fellas are independent,” and one of the players says: “I love the music fine. It’s my friend.”

The confluence of haircutting and music making is not without precedent. In 1866, Thomas Hicks (1824-1890) painted The Musicale, Barber Shop, Trenton Falls, New York, now in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. The painting appeared on the cover of a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, accompanied by a brief article about Hicks by Dr. Thomas B. Cole.

Hicks was the younger cousin of Edward Hicks, the Quaker painter best known for The Peaceable Kingdom (1826). This portrait of harmony in creation is almost a visual transcription of Isaiah 11:6-8:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.”

All three works, with allowances made for historical and artistic change – Morris’ video and the paintings by the Hickses – might be titled The Peaceable Kingdom. Fred Chappell was born in Canton, N.C., not far from Drexel, and served for five years as the Poet Laureate of North Carolina. In Midquest (1981), his masterwork of homecoming and harmony, Chappell includes “The Peaceable Kingdom of Emerald Windows,” in which he imagines spending eternity with Gilbert White, William Bartram, Colette and “rare Ben Franklin.” In the poem, a boy cutting hay says:

“Barn is home. Home is heaven.”

[Drexel is about fifty miles south of Deep Gap, the home of flatpicking guitarist Doc Watson.]

`Etymological Opaqueness'

2012-01-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

I met a friend for lunch who, when I arrived, was reading her new ebook. I’d never seen one before and asked if I could hold it to get a sense of its heft. She’s an Orthodox Christian and her book has internet access, so she was reading the Dynamic Horologion and Psalter – a guide to the Daily Offices and other devotional services of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The word was new to me but I worked a fast etymology and guessed that horologion is from the Greek and means “Book of Hours.”

After lunch I checked the Oxford English Dictionary and confirmed my hunch. The dictionary leaves out horologion (my spell-check software also doesn’t recognize it) but includes more than a dozen etymologically related words with multiple meanings, such as horology, “the art or science of measuring time,” and horologic, a word I learned as a kid in connection with morning glories: “Of a flower: Opening and closing at certain hours.”

In my book bag was a volume I had just taken from the campus library: An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) by Anatoly Liberman. Among other things, words are tools. When I use a tool – say, a belt sander -- I like to know how to use it properly, so no one gets hurt. More to the point, I enjoy knowing some of the history packed into words, what Emerson called their “fossil poetry.” That makes etymology a branch of paleontology, or better, archeology, a sifting through strata. Each word echoes with many words, and a good writer learns to orchestrate the echoes, though even experts don’t hear all of them. Liberman writes in the introduction to his dictionary, which traces the origins of fifty-five words across 360 pages:

“The common denominator of all fifty-five words is their etymological opaqueness. The solutions offered here are, of necessity, controversial. If the history of bird, cockney, slang, and the rest were less troublesome, their etymology would have been discovered and accepted long ago.”

Liberman devotes almost five double-column pages to so mundane a word as bird, proving it’s not mundane after all (fuck, incidentally, merits ten pages). When looked at with such intensity, words we use casually, even carelessly, come to resemble densely packed stars of meaning. On Monday, Nige devoted a post to the 101st birthday of Gypsy Rose Lee and used another word new to me – espieglerie. As he puts it: “What charm, what finesse, what espieglerie - what a dame!”

The OED gives us “Frolicsomeness, roguishness,” and cites an 1816 usage by Sir Walter Scott: “A pretty young woman with an air of espieglerie which became her very well.” The other usage dates from 1852, when Francis Edward Smedley writes: “Which act of un-English-woman-like espiéglerie must be set down to the score of a foreign education.” Both refer to women, the first with approval, the second with xenophobic distaste.

The root is French, espiéglerie: “mischievousness, impishness, roguishness; piece of mischief, prank.” But the French is borrowed from the name of the trickster figure in German folklore, Till Eulenspiegel, the source of Strauss’ tone poem. In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), Till makes his first appearance in English literature as “Howelglas” – that is, owl glass or, roughly, Eulenspiegel.

`The Lightning Teased Again'

2012-01-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

I got water in my shoes on Monday while navigating a flooded street on the way to the library, not a problem I’ve had since returning to Houston. I squeaked my way through the shelves. Back in the office I wrung out my socks, draped them over the back of a chair and stuffed my shoes with paper towels. I haven’t worked barefoot in years.

Texas had its driest year on record in 2011. The statewide average rainfall was 14.88 inches. Across the last century, Texas averaged 27.92 inches of rain per year. On Saturday I drove past a small city park that until several months ago was a dense grove of loblolly pines. The drought killed them and the city cut them down. Now it’s as flat and bare as a parking lot.

We woke to lightning and distant thunder Monday morning, but we’ve been teased so often I ignored the fuss. I was already on campus when rain started falling in earnest. Winds pushed it through the cloistered walkways between buildings, and through my window I could see it moving horizontally. Some areas got 4.5 inches of rain in a few hours. Soon, each tree stood in a puddle like a fancy swizzle stick in a big cocktail. Birds and squirrels disappeared. Grass turned green again and I could smell the earth.

Over the weekend I learned of the death of Marion Montgomery at the age of eighty-six in November. He was a poet, novelist and critic who taught at the University of Georgia for more than thirty years. He was a man of the South, a traditionalist and a serious Roman Catholic. Last year I read his two-volume work about his friend Flannery O’Connor, Hillbilly Thomist (McFarland & Co., 2006). Here is the title poem in his first collection, Dry Lightning (University of Nebraska Press, 1960):

“`If…if it don’t rain soon,’ he said
And kicked his foot in the dust to finish out the threat.
The grey puffs settled on his shoes,
Cracked like the bottom where corn sagged

“`If it don’t rain soon…’
A hot breeze rustled in the field,
On beyond the line of hills dry lightning raised a noncommittal glow.
`If it don’t rain…’
The lightning teased again.”

[Go here to read an interview with Montgomery.]

The Other Coleridge

2012-01-09T11:01:00.000-08:00

The daughter of one famous writer, Anne Fadiman, writes about the son of another, Hartley Coleridge, in “The Oakling and the Oak.” Read his “To a Cat,” which concludes:

“The world would just the same go round
If I were hang'd and thou wert drown'd;
There is one difference, 'tis true, --
Thou dost not know it, and I do.”

`They Are There Again'

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Hard-headed Yankee pragmatism. It’s the sort of thing Robert Frost might have said, and probably did, though Thoreau said it first, in his journal entry for Nov. 11, 1850, where it stands alone, a self-contained paragraph without thematic context. Annotators suggest it might refer to an 1849 dairyman's strike in parts of New England, when milk was suspected of being watered down. I file it on the common-sense shelf with Dr. Johnson’s refutation of Bishop Berkeley.

I thought of Thoreau’s one-liner when reading Richard Wilbur’s “Hamlen Brook.” The speaker prepares to drink from the stream when he sees “A startled inchling trout / Of spotted near-transparency.” The fish flits among stones and fallen leaves. Dragonflies skim the surface. He sees reflections of clouds and birches on the water. He never takes that drink but asks: “How shall I drink all this?” and answers with the final stanza:

“Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.”

Here, Wilbur reads the poem and comments: “So many things are perceptible at once.” Creation’s supply is bottomless. The joy-minded – the attentive and grateful – are “dumbstruck” with nature’s bounty. Thoreau’s trout is the end of something; Wilbur’s, only the beginning. Late in 1816, recently turned twenty-one, Keats completed an untitled poem known by its first line, “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill.” Leigh Hunt reports the poem was “suggested by a delightful summer-day, as [Keats] stood beside the gate that leads from the Battery on Hampstead Heath into a field of Caen Wood.” Keats’ celebration of nature’s profligacy reads like a young man’s word-drunk precursor to Wilbur’s poem:

“…swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams,
To taste the luxury of sunny beams
Temper'd with coolness. How they ever wrestle
With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand.
If you but scantily hold out the hand,
That very instant not one will remain;
But turn your eye, and they are there again.”

`Both Screen and Gateway'

2012-01-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Each of her pieces is both an assemblage of brightly colored bits and a naturalistic rendering of the world around us. Is the truth to be found in the fragments or the whole, the materials or the narrative content, the ancient religious and cultural subjects she draws upon or the familiar intimacy of the contemporary men and women she portrays?”

Both, of course, and all. Mary McCleary’s work eludes reductive commentary. Though often dense with text, her collages don’t come with annotations. Even her titles tease. Getting her allusions doesn’t ensure you get her. Viewing the works of some artists once exhausts them, like knock-knock jokes, the sort kids love.

I saw an exhibit of her collages in October (see here and here), and felt anxious about the time. I wanted to linger with each before moving on to the next, but didn’t have all day. I tried to stifle the urge to interpret and pigeonhole, knowing such impulses are defensive, intended to defang what disturbs. I sensed McCleary’s collages judging me, weighing my prideful pretensions, the way I felt more than forty years ago when a high-school English teacher loaned me her college anthology of short stories. That’s how I first encountered Flannery O’Connor – “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

The passage quoted above is from Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age (ISI Books, 2011) by Gregory Wolfe, who devotes a chapter to McCleary, as he does to Geoffrey Hill, Evelyn Waugh and Marion Montgomery, among others – prestigious company. Wolfe notes the frequency with which McCleary applies toy eyes to the surfaces of her collages. The eyes, he writes,

“intimate that there may be an unseen presence—an order of grace and truth—hidden in the very fabric of being. Those eyes may be interpreted as full of judgment, especially when the subject of the painting is sin and folly, but they can also be interpreted as symbolic of an ordered love that transcends our fallen world and encompasses it. The grid [of eyes] is both screen and gateway.”

As Wolfe notes, McCleary’s collages are neither didactic nor preachy. They embody what O’Connor called “the moral sense and the dramatic sense.” They tell engaging stories, usually in media res, and provoke laughter. McCleary is very funny, as is O’Connor. And like another Catholic writer, she revels in paradox, defined by Chesterton as “truth standing on its head to gain attention.”

`A Curious Remedy for Present Cares'

2012-01-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I cannot profess to be a genuine collector of books, I know nothing of positive bibliography; small books, I call octavos, and large ones quartos. Folios I seldom carry home, out of a growing sympathy with my weary body. But so far as my preferences in size and weight are satisfied, I am a willing rescuer of books.”

This is Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) in his essay “Bringing Them Home” (The Mind’s Eye, 1934), writing in a tone of disingenuously attractive modesty. In his biography of the poet, Barry Webb devotes a chapter to “Book Collecting,” and says Blunden “was never without the company of books.” Webb reports he “sought solace” in Charles Lamb and Paul Verlaine in the trenches during the Great War. He was a bibliophile and reader, identities that don’t always overlap, never a book-snob. Nor was he greedy. He routinely shipped review copies to a Japanese friend and culled unwanted volumes from his collection. Book rescue was a critically altruistic impulse in Blunden, who was instrumental in restoring or maintaining the critical reputations of William Collins, Lamb, John Clare and others. Webb writes:

“He collected for two reasons: to build up a `working’ library and to rescue volumes he felt others would ignore. He believed that an adequate library of English literature could be established without paying more than sixpence a volume in 1920 – a price he allowed to increase to two shillings and sixpence in 1930 and ten shillings in 1950 – and by this means he created a library of 10,000 volumes by 1965.”

I’ve known collectors who never part with books, regardless of their literary value. Theirs is a warehouse aesthetic. The volume of their volumes is a source of pride, and any dreck will do if it fills out the shelves. Hoarders are not collectors. The largest personal library I’ve ever seen was also the most comprehensive, tastefully selected and well-used. It was, in Blunden’s sense, a “working library,” not a vanity project to impress visitors. From the owner I borrowed and came to value books by Tacitus, Thomas Traherne, Madison Jones, Sergey Aksakov, Nikolai Leskov, Thomas Kinsella, Konstantin Paustovsky, Sherwood Anderson, V.S. Pritchett and Edward Dahlberg.

Webb dutifully logs the contents of Blunden’s “working library” – 39 Chaucer volumes, 200 Shakespeare, 50 Milton, 40 Dryden, 70 Pope, 75 Swift, 90 Johnson, 150 Coleridge, and so on. Also, the “`rescued’ minor poets,” hardly known by modern readers – eight editions of Charles Churchill, seventeen of Samuel Rogers, twenty-eight of Christopher Smart, twenty-five of William Collins, ten of Francis Quarles, eighteen of William Barnes, twenty of Edward Young.

Blunden also collected books for their bindings and typography – an admiration I share, though I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a volume solely for its design. He acquired Lamb’s Milton and Byron’s copy of The Rolliad, copiously annotated most of his books (in pencil), and left inscriptions in books owned by other people, often without telling them. His existence, in short, was thoroughly bookish – not a bad thing in a man so gentle and good-natured. His friend, the formidably well-read Rupert Hart Davis, called Blunden “the most accomplished book-hunter I have ever known.” To his credit, Blunden was not a packrat or dilettante, but read and reread what he collected. In “Bringing Them Home” he writes:

“The resourcefulness of those who have made books through the centuries often makes me forget the serious business of reading, and a book comes home simply because it took my eye in some way. Later on, I endeavour to square accounts by examining the author’s share, and in this way I have made the acquaintance of far too many hands.”

Blunden’s personal library remains intact at Ohio University. This is his poem “In a Library” (Choice or Chance, 1934):

“A curious remedy for present cares,
And yet as near a good one as I know;
It is to scan the cares of long ago,
Which these brown bindings lodge.
In black print glares
The Elizabethan preacher, heaping shame
On that ubiquitous gay hell, the stage;
And here’s another full of scriptural rage
Against high Rome. Fie, parson, be more tame.
This critic gnashes his laborious teeth
At that, whose subtlety seems no such matter;
This merchant bodes our economic death,
The envoy hastens with his hard-won chatter;
Age hacks at youth, youth paints the old town red—
And in the margin Doomsday rears his head.”

`The Glance, the Pause, the Guess'

2012-01-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

To be emotionally moved by a poem, especially one written as late as 1937, comes as a happy and wistful surprise. We’ve grown accustomed to flat affect or hysteria in poetry, two sides of one dull coin, and hardly recognize the quiet emotional power once expected of first-rate verse. Here is “Lonely Love,” one of four poems by Edmund Blunden chosen by Philip Larkin for inclusion in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (1973):

“I love to see those loving and beloved
Whom Nature seems to have spited; unattractive,
Unnoticeable people, whose dry track
No honey-drop of praise, or understanding,
Or bare acknowledgement that they existed,
Perhaps yet moistened. Still, they make their world.”

“She with her arm in his—O Fate, be kind,
Though late, be kind; let her have never cause
To live outside her dream, nor unadore
This underling in body, mind and type,
Nor part from him what makes her dwarfish form
Take grace and fortune, envy’s antitone.

“I saw where through the plain a river and road
Ran quietly, and asked no more event
Than sun and rain and wind, and night and day,
Two walking—from what cruel show escaped?
Deformity, defect of mind their portion.
But I forget the rest of that free day of mine,
And in what flowerful coils, what airy music
It led me here and on; these two I see
Who, loving, walking slowly, saw me not,
But shared with me the strangest happiness.”

Probably nothing is so difficult to write about well, with delicacy and precision, as human disability, a subject irresistible to lazy, sentimental writers. The devastating line in Blunden’s poem of muted devastations is “Deformity, defect of mind their portion.” Blunden uses “portion” in its unmodern sense. Today it refers almost invariably to food preparation or diet, as in “portion control.” Blunden’s usage suggests “A person's lot, destiny, or fate,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites Milton:

“Such place Eternal Justice has prepared
For those rebellious; here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set.”

Blunden writes not of disability but of love and its astonishing persistence. He writes of the couple as subject like the rest of us to Fate, not as genetic victims or medical oddities: “Still, they make their world.” To feel pity and then stop feeling, judging pity to be an obligation fulfilled, is self-congratulatory, costs nothing and can prove devastating (see Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel Beware of Pity). Blunden takes the next brave, empathetic step and shares in the couple’s “strangest happiness.” In Edmund Blunden: A Biography (1990), Barry Webb quotes the first section of “Lonely Love” and writes:

“Edmund’s distance from the world of modern literature was part of his distrust and fear of the aggressive – either in personality or on the page. His instinct was always to look towards the lyrical, the hidden, the forgotten – an expression of his philosophy of following `the glance, the pause, the guess.’”

`Wondrous in Themselves'

2012-01-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

In his BBC interview Geoffrey Hill reads brief excerpts from Section 26 of his most recent collection, Clavics (Enitharmon Press, 2011). All of its poems are typographically shaped, rather like George Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” Here are the lines Hill reads:

“As to the ant when chance disturbs the State,

Divisions huge, minute, crude, delicate,

Like egg-and-spoon

White grub – rice grain –

She works her reach

With pitch and stretch,

Staithed in that giant crèche.

No metaphor.

The butterflies, high flyers on high winds;

Invisible to us they plane and soar

Beyond our minds’

Troubled conventioning and do not err.”

The ant’s appearance brings to mind those rare, coherent lines in Pound’s “Canto LXXXI”:

“The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry…”

In his Literary Essays, Pound writes, in a passage pertinent to Hill’s late work: “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.” Clavics is the most willfully difficult of Hill’s books, but the butterflies signal a rare “radiant gist,” to borrow William Carlos Williams’ phrase from Paterson – an illuminated moment in the murk.

Odd to think of butterflies as invisible. We value their colorful flitting and evanescence, and their attraction to comparably brilliant flowers. If butterflies possessed the bulk and solidity of, say, cows, would we still cherish them? They are, with birds, the most visually appealing of animals, and part of the appeal is their diminutive fragility. And yet, for Hill, they move “Beyond our minds’ / Troubled conventioning and do not err.” This echoes my private mythology, composed as a boy lepidopterist: Butterflies represent beauty, delicacy, toughness and mutability. Consider Hill’s ant: “huge, minute, crude, delicate.” I saw a fritillary on campus less than two weeks before Christmas.

Thanks to Nige I’m reading The Butterfly Isles (Granta, 2010), in which Patrick Barkham recounts his lifelong love of the insect and his quest to see all fifty-nine species native to Britain in a single year. In his introduction Barkham writes:

“Wondrous in themselves, for their own will to survive, butterflies are also colourful canvasses for all our projections.”

`Their Flawless Shambles'

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I allowed my love of the comedians to get into my work.”

This is spoken in a recent BBC interview by Geoffrey Hill, who in The Triumph of Love (1998) lauds Laurel and Hardy for “cutting, pacing, repacing / their flawless shambles.” They are, in other words, fellow craftsmen, like the great poets, with a sense of anarchy rooted in strict form and discipline.

Hill’s reputation among careless readers is for Miltonic solemnity. He is dismissed, when assessed at all, as “a solemn, dry-as-dust intellectual,” as he tells the interviewer, Stephen Smith. He claims to be, rather, “a rip-roaring fantasist.” One senses Hill, who turns eighty in June, is putting on Smith and his interviewer’s tone of self-impressed portentousness. Hill out-condescends Smith by wearing an impish mask, rather like Stan Laurel.

The poet agrees with Smith that future scholars of his work should consider his debt to comedians, including Ken Dodd, an English comic previously unknown to me. Hill says, “I leave a lot of heavy hints, the way a comic will seem to stress the grammatically unimportant word.” As the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, Hill says with a visage like Father Mapple’s ("in the hardy winter of a healthy old age”), he hopes to perform “one-thousandth as well as Ken Dodd.”

In April 2009, Dodd unveiled a bronze statue of Laurel and Hardy in Ulverston, Cumbria, the birthplace of Arthur Stanley Jefferson, better known as Stan Laurel, and home of the Laurel and Hardy Museum.

[Hill was knighted this week, an honor never granted Stan Laurel.]

`A Little More, Please'

2012-01-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Waiting for me on my return to Houston:

Cool, dry weather with a promise of frost.

A Hank Williams medley on the radio.

A semi-flat rear tire on the car, laptop and email troubles, sub specie aeternitatis.

The first Spanish I’ve heard in two and a half weeks, spoken at the deli counter in Kroger’s: “Un poco más, por favor.”

Three books in the mail, including a collection of poems for review shipped from England.

A red sunset. Any sun at all, in fact, after seventeen days in the state of Washington, where I did, however, see a double rainbow last week, albeit briefly.

A Christmas card from Helen Pinkerton with a photograph by André Kertész, “Washington Square, Winter” (1954), on the front.

The January issue of First Things, containing a review by Paul Kane of Les Murray’s new collection, Taller When Prone, and a new poem by him, “The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864,” which starts like this:

“‘Stone statues of ancient waves

tongue like dingoes on shore

in time with wave-glitter on the harbor

but the shake-a-leg chants of the Eora

“are rarely heard there any more

and the white man who drew their nasals

as footprints on five-lined paper

lies flat away up Pitt Street,

“lies askew on gravel Pitt Street.”

`To Keep the Narrative Going Along'

2012-01-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

Back to Houston today after two and a half weeks in the rain. Travel once felt like discovery, something new around every corner. Some of that sense of adventure remains, but travel also means leg cramps and proximity to witless conversation. Departures spell sadness, the glum knowledge that something has concluded and assumed its place in memory, so I always fortify myself with buoyancy wherever I can find it, just as I pack my suitcase. In the car on Saturday I heard Sinatra’s recording of Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” lyrics by Dorothy Fields:

“Some day, when I'm awfully low,
When the world is cold,
I will feel a glow just thinking of you...
And the way you look tonight.”

This is not world-weary Sinatra, nor Sinatra the swaggering hedonist, but a character more seasoned, more tempered and more like the rest of us. It’s a great recording, superior even to Fred Astaire’s, Billie Holiday’s, Benny Goodman’s and Peggy Lee’s, but for me the song belongs to Erroll Garner, king of buoyancy. This recording dates from 1949.

Garner represents a species of artist nearing dodo-like extinction. Above all, he wants to please listeners, not baffle or intimidate them. His aim is pleasure. He titled a 1956 album The Most Happy Piano. Garner reminds us that jazz is about the joyful, painful and unexpected -- that is, life. Whitney Balliett titled his profile of Garner “Being a Genius,” and while describing the pianist’s appearance, hints at the source of his appeal:

“Garner was short and was shaped like a wedge. He had fullback shoulders and long arms. His hands were rangy and long-fingered and loose. They moved like thieves on the keyboard. He wore his hair patent-leather style, and he had a narrow face and a beaked nose. He looked like a pirate. He had a blue-black beard and a huge brush mustache and heavy lidded eyes. When he played, his music was refracted through his face and body. His body kept time. He gave ecstatic smiles, popped his eyes, made `O’s with his mouth, and peered crazily at his sidemen, his eyes half shut with delight. All the while, he issued a stream of loud basso-profundo rhythmic grunts.”

“Ecstatic.” “Delight.” On Sunday, while preparing for today’s flight and puttering around the house, I listened to Garner, actively listened, not as one plays background music to fill the silence. What Kingsley Amis says of Henry Fielding can justly be said of Garner:

“Apart from his wit, and, I think, attractive though sometimes heavy irony, he seems to be very concerned not to bore the reader, to keep the narrative going along.”

Garner died on this date in 1977 at age fifty-three.

`That It Serves Another's Good'

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Work is solace, even raking leaves, scrubbing the tub or assembling a blog post. Measureable results – leaf-free lawn, white enamel, clean prose – always satisfy. One of the pleasures of journalism is the built-in discipline of working within tight constraints. It’s two-thirty, the editor says: “I need that story, fourteen inches, three-source minimum. By four o’clock.” No excuses, no negotiating, just do it. With time, the good writer becomes his own editor, his own keeper of deadlines, just as a good editor prays for his own obsolescence.

While researching The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006), Zachary Leader discovered an untitled, unpublished poem in the writer's archives. Amis was a workhorse – twenty-five published novels, seven poetry collections and much else in forty-some years. For Leader to express surprise at Amis wishing to “serve another’s good” is ridiculous. Few twentieth-century writers so consistently supplied readers with laughter and bullshit-proof integrity. Here’s the portion of Amis’ poem that impresses me:

“There once was an answer:
Up at the stroke of seven,
A turn round the garden
(Breathing deep and slow),
Then work, never mind what,
How small, provided that
It serves another's good.”

Yes, work is solace, but more importantly it “serves another’s good.” A writer, if gifted and disciplined, educates, edifies, clarifies, angers, challenges and/or amuses. Good writers don’t write in mirror-covered rooms (nor on the public square). In those final lines, Amis suggests in thirteen words what it took Samuel Johnson nineteen to distil definitively:

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

`Many Are Disappointed'

2011-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Four men bicycle across the English countryside. One of them, Harry, has plotted their route to a tavern along an old Roman road. They dream of beer and the youngest, Bert, of women. Ted, the oldest and the only married man, “said all he hoped was that the Romans had left a drop in the bottom of the barrel for posterity.”

The tavern is a tea shop. The hostess, “a frail, drab woman, not much past thirty, in a white blouse that drooped low over her chest,” explains that she doesn’t sell beer. The nearest pub, The Queen’s Arms, is ten miles away in Handleyford, a town the men have already bicycled through. They are disappointed, almost angry, and Ted thinks:

“Ease up, take what you can get. `Queen’s Arms’ – he remembered looking back. The best things are in the past.”

Not the thoughts of a young man. The story is V.S. Pritchett’s “Many Are Disappointed.” In nine pages, the English Chekhov delineates six characters, including the young daughter of the hostess. Almost nothing happens. The title is spoken by the woman:

“`You don’t sell beer,’ said Bert. He looked at the pale-blue-veined chest of the woman.

“`No,’ she said. She hesitated. `Many are disappointed,’ she said, and she spoke like a child reciting a piece without knowing its meaning. He lowered his eyes.”

“The best things are in the past.” “Many are disappointed.” Thoughts appropriate for the bottom of the year. Tonight is Amateur Night, when non-drinkers drink, a difficult night of revelry for many. The lonely grow lonelier. Desolate celebrators will wake with sick heads. A time to beware of the cozy seductiveness of the past and the disappointments we already plot for the future. Charles Lamb, no stranger to disappointment, was certain the best was in the past:

“No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.”

`To Lay His Axe at the Root'

2011-12-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

To make room for a $11.3-million, three-story parking garage, the public library has cut down two dozen sycamores and tulip trees planted by its landscapers little more than a decade ago. Tulips are among the loveliest trees, particularly when their leaves turn buttery yellow in autumn. Their trunks are models of rectitude and in the spring the blossoms have a citrus-like fragrance. They please every sense except, perhaps, taste.

On this day one-hundred sixty years ago, Thoreau watched the dismantling of a 100-foot pine at the bottom of Fair Haven Hill. Though disapproving of arborcide, even Thoreau is caught up in the drama and suspense of waiting for the giant to fall:

“There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks, advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushed to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear.”

My wife began reading Walden this week and after the first chapter said, “He’s a little self-centered, isn’t he? It’s all about him.” True enough. More than most writers, Thoreau requires us to learn how to read him properly, an education in which he both assists and hinders. He can be tiresome, especially if read as a philosopher, social commentator or literal autobiographer. He often writes like a Yankee prig. He’s best as a comedian and close observer of the natural world. Had they met him, most of his admirers would quickly have found him insufferable. At his best he’s a pure writer, an almost peerless arranger of words. It’s the self-righteous snottiness that’s most difficult to swallow. Both qualities mingle in the pine passage from his journal:

“A plant which has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing to lay his axe at the root of that also.”

By noting the absence of mourners, Thoreau is really saying: “Only I, among all the citizens of Concord, am sensitive enough to mourn the passing of a tree.” Adolescent posturing is embarrassing in a man of thirty-four, even in the privacy of his journal.

"What These Can Only Memorize and Mumble'

2011-12-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

My friend in Juba, South Sudan (“the world’s newest nation,” he reminds us), assumed I had read “Grandeur of Ghosts” by Siegfried Sassoon, a poet I know mostly by reputation, not experience. My friend’s taste in poems is reliably good and this one he calls “a keeper.” I read it the same day I learned of someone who compared reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to “watching paint dry” (a stupid judgment and a cliché, facts not unrelated). Here is “Grandeur of Ghosts”:

“When I have heard small talk about great men
I climb to bed; light my two candles; then
Consider what was said; and put aside
What Such-a-one remarked and Someone-else replied.

“They have spoken lightly of my deathless friends,
(Lamps for my gloom, hands guiding where I stumble,)
Quoting, for shallow conversational ends,
What Shelley shrilled, what Blake once wildly muttered ....

“How can they use such names and be not humble?
I have sat silent; angry at what they uttered.
The dead bequeathed them life; the dead have said
What these can only memorize and mumble.”

The only way to speak of great writers is humbly, with gratitude, which doesn’t mean uncritically. Sassoon proposes not ancestor worship or genuflecting before someone’s canon but good manners, good sense and openness to the notion that we are small people inhabiting a small and rather mediocre backwater in history. We are desperately in need of instruction. Some of our forebears, Sassoon’s “deathless friends,” forgot more than we’ll ever know. To ignore them is discourteous and suicidal.

The cult of the new is self-regarding and delusory, though it forms the unexamined rationale for most bookchat (“small talk about great men”), online and elsewhere. David Myers often suggests a ten-year moratorium on critically examining works of literature. If enforced, a good ninety percent of the bookish blogosphere would evaporate in a yoctosecond, a happy prospect. Look at it common-sensibly: Little written in any era is worth reading. The past is a hell of a lot bigger than the present. Even if we dwelled in a Golden, not Leaden Age, most books worthy of our time would have been written decades or centuries ago. In his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau exhorts us to “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all” (every reader’s most dire anxiety, save blindness).

By the way, all of Shelley and most of Blake are unreadable. And I’m not overly fond of Sassoon.

`Blown Up in a Steam Masheen'

2011-12-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

One could dedicate a life to remembering the dead. Their numbers never dwindle. They remain as we knew them, fixed like photographs. Perhaps remembering them, celebrating some and condemning others, is an apprenticeship, wishful training for our own demise. If I remember the pre-deceased (a delicious obituary word made current since I wrote my first obit more than thirty years ago about a man named Miller, first name forgotten), am I likelier to be remembered? Probably not, but think how much life we already spend behaving in such a way as to ensure our remembrance, ill or fond. No “unvisited tombs” for us.

On Tuesday we remembered Osip Mandelstam and Charles Lamb. Today, it’s Maurice Ravel, Theodore Dreiser, Fletcher Henderson and Sam Peckinpah (death endorses diversity). Lamb wrote to P.G. Patmore (father of the poet Coventry Patmore, you may remember) on July 19, 1827:

“I am so poorly, I have been to a funeral, where I made a Pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners, and we had wine. I can’t describe to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash [Lamb's dog] could, for it was not unlike what he makes.”

Lamb, you’ll remember, laughed at Hazlitt’s wedding. He meant no disrespect; or rather, disrespect from Lamb was a compliment. Genealogy says otherwise, but I’ve always suspected an Irish branch in the Lamb family tree. He was on to something with his hybrid of stoicism and comedy as a formula for facing death – and life. Later in his letter, Lamb briefs Patmore on his friends’ conditions:

“Procter has got a wen growing out of the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to cut off, but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence: like his poetry, rather redundant. Hone has hang’d himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets. Moxon has fal’n in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid. Becky takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam masheen. Coroner found it `Insanity.’”

The only true item in this litany concerns Moxon, the editors tell us, but do we really care? Would we otherwise remember Becky’s father and his “steam masheen?”

`I Shall Never Like Tripe Again'

2011-12-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

Characteristically, in the last letter he ever composed, written five days before his death on Dec. 27, 1834, Charles Lamb enquired of Mrs. George Dyer about the whereabouts of a misplaced volume:

“I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or left at your house on Thursday. It was the book I went out to fetch from Miss Buffam’s, while the tripe was frying. It is called [Edward] Phillip’s Theatrum Poetarum: but it is an English book. I think I left it in the parlour. It is Mr. Cary’s book, and I would not lose it for the world. Pray, if you find it, book it at the Swan, Snow Hill, by an Edmonton stage immediately, directed to Mr. Lamb, Church-street, Edmonton, or write to say you cannot find it.”

That same day, Dec. 22, while on a stroll, Lamb tripped, fell and landed on his face. A modern biographer, Lord David Cecil, describes the aftermath: “He was taken back bruised and bleeding. A day or two later alarming symptoms began to show themselves.” Lamb had contracted erysipelas, an acute streptococcal infection. Because of the resulting reddening of the skin, the condition is known as ignis sacer (“holy fire”) and St. Anthony’s fire. One of Lamb’s friends, Thomas Talfourd, hurried to see him. Cecil reports:

“He found Lamb not apparently suffering but half-conscious and murmuring unintelligibly. Soon he fell asleep and died.”

Another soul, one of millions, who could have been saved with a regimen of antibiotics. Lamb was fifty-nine. Five months earlier, Coleridge, his friend since they met as schoolboys at Christ’s Hospital, had died. Wordsworth was convinced the shock hastened Lamb’s death. Lamb’s eulogy is heartbreaking:

“When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world, that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve; but since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations.”

Since 1796, Lamb had cared for his matricidal sister Mary, who periodically had to be removed to a madhouse in Islington. Mary was entering another bad spell when her brother suffered his fatal fall. She lived until 1847.

“St. Charles” may be pushing the matter, but Lamb strikes me as an exemplary human being. He wrote like an angel and dedicated his life to caring for Mary. Yes, he drank to excess, a pastime he extolled in letters and essays, but he seems never to have been malicious or gratuitously hurtful. Count, if you can, the writers who still make us laugh after almost two centuries. In the final sentences of that final letter about the missing book, Lamb writes:

“I am quite anxious about it. If it is lost, I shall never like tripe again.”

`Mendelian Exuberence'

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

A superior Christmas haul: The Baboons of Hada: Selected Poems by Eric Ormsby, Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade, Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson and a 10-DVD Laurel and Hardy collection. The other stuff is practical and not worthy of mention.

We were invited by the in-laws to a Christmas brunch, and while there a windstorm blew across the city. The streets and lawns were festooned with garlands of fir, pine and cedar. The air was scented with pitch, and our hands crusted with it after we cleaned up the yard. We carried the fragrance indoors, petting the cat so he could spread the Yuletide cheer, and my fingers are sticking to the keys. Without deploying the word, Ormsby suffuses the day and his poem with Christmas wonder in “Microcosm”:

“The proboscis of the drab grey flea
Is mirrored in the majesty
Of the elephant’s articulated trunk. There’s a sea
In the bed-mite’s dim orbicular eye.
Pinnacles crinkle when the mountain-winged, shy
Moth wakes up and stretches for the night.
Katydids enact the richly patterned light
Of galaxies in their chirped and frangible notes.
The smallest beings harbor a universe
Of telescoped similitudes. Even those Rocky Mountain goats
Mimic Alpha Centauri in rectangular irises
Of cinnabar-splotched gold. Inert viruses
Replicate the static of red-shifted, still chthonic
Cosmoi. Terse
As the listened brilliance of the pulsar’s bloom
The violaceous mildew in the corner room
Proliferates in Mendelian exuberance.
There are double stars in the eyes of cyclonic
Spuds shoveled and spaded up. The dance
Of Shiva is a cobble-soled affair –
Hobnails and flapping slippers on the disreputable stair.
Yggdrasils
Germinate on Wal-Mart windowsills.”

By fractal correspondence, each conifer sprig is a tree. Its pitchy oils hold terpenes, reacting with air molecules to form particles called aerosols – the smell of Christmas. The aerosols turn water vapor, visible as mist and fog, into clouds. The clouds cool the Earth, drop their rain and nurture the firs, pines and cedars.

“The smallest beings harbor a universe
Of telescoped similitudes.”

`Where the Torn Bracken Lies'

2011-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

For almost half a century Jean Burden (1914-2008) was the poetry editor of Yankee magazine, a publication my mother subscribed to and one seldom prized by the cognoscenti. I enjoyed its Farmer’s Almanac folksiness and reminders of New England’s rural past, mingling maple syrup and granite. Robert Frost was born in California and fixed New England in smoky amber. Burden lived and died in California and polished the homely jewel. After her death Poetry published one of her poems in memoriam in its September 2008 issue:

“This much we do without thought,
without eyes:
it is a wood to be gone through at night
with no road to follow,
with no light

“We know no more than what our hands can touch,
but put one foot before the other,
surely, forest-wise,
feeling where the reed is bent,
where the torn bracken lies.”

I hear echoes of Frost’s best-known poem but mostly I hear a quiet allusion to Dante’s “una selva oscura” (“a forest dark,” in Longfellow’s English). The metaphor of life as a journey through dark woods is hardwired into some of us. Think of dreams and the Brothers Grimm. For our ancestors, a primal woodland signified lumber and plentiful game as well as savages, brigands and “no road to follow.” Maine-born Longfellow gives us “the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

Burden suggests we’re not the first to venture through this forest. We merely remain attentive, maintain momentum, follow the almost-invisible path blazed by others – the bent reed, the broken fern. As in life, so it is in writing. None of us is the first down this path. Guideless, we cover much ground without progress, wandering in diminishing circles, living

“…the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the desolate little soul.”

[The quoted passage is from Zbigniew Herbert’s “Animula,” from Labyrinth on the Sea, in The Collected Prose 1948-1998.]

`With Nothing But New Words'

2011-12-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

Seventy-three years ago this week, Osip Mandelstam was starving, sick and out of his mind in the frozen transit camp at Vtoraya Rechka near Vladivostok, where he had been transported for “counter-revolutionary activity.” He was a Jew, a poet and a citizen of Western Civilization. He was buried in a common grave and his brother was notified of his death three years later. We think he died Dec. 27, 1938.

Even before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West, the poet’s widow Nadezdah Mandelstam, in her 1,100-page memoir (published in English as Hope Against Hope, 1970, and Hope Abandoned, 1974), chronicled Stalin’s industrial-scale erasure of blameless people, among whom was her husband. During those years of putative détente, Clarence Brown translated The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (1965) and in 1973 published Mandelstam, the first study in English of the poet. In 1974, Brown and W.S. Merwin translated his Selected Poems. Reading these books in 1974 was like discovering a new continent, one whose existence had been elided from history. In the words of Arthur A. Cohen (in Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: An Essay in Antiphon, 1974) he was “the greatest and most difficult poet of modern Russia.”

In “Mandelstam” (One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems, 2011), Glyn Maxwell describes a devotion to Mandelstam and his work that recalls my own:

“Knowing no word of his I embrace his every
word. They're all there is. He died for only
them. I imagine the obstinate syllables
of his name like a bothering hand on the lapels
of Stalin now and then. I imagine him
having it brushed away. Neither of them
strikes me as caring greatly about the dull
ache the other makes elsewhere in his skull,
not even when those closest to them come
wondering What are you going to do about him?

“Only a slow accrual of discomfort
can do it, and only at night at a point where hurt
and thought converge and clarify the future
with nothing but new words, whether a line
begun forever or one jotted sentence.”

For Guy Davenport in “The Man Without Contemporaries” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), it also comes down to words, the next word:

“Mandelstam wrote anywhere and everywhere. We can scarcely begin to realize his world in which the pencil stub and the three pieces of paper you have is all the pencil and all the paper you are ever going to have.”

`The Season of Mirth and Cold Weather'

2011-12-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

One strives haphazardly after charity, good will and a bright festive spirit. These are the moral amenities of the season, a joy to recognize in others, a trial to achieve in one’s self. Even Charles Lamb, who with Dickens is the writer I most readily associate with the happy observance of Christmas, found the task difficult. In a Dec. 23, 1822, letter to his friend Bernard Barton he writes:

“Christmas, too, is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning skull. It is a visiting, unquiet, unquakerish season. I get more and more in love with solitude, and proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holidays at this period. I have one day,--Christmas Day; alas! too few to commemorate the season. All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times hard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing,--to go about soothing his particular fancies.”

One commiserates with Lamb, especially in his characterization of the season as “visiting, unquiet, unquakerish.” Later in the same letter he asks Barton “where I could pick up cheap Fox's Journal?” Barton was a Quaker, a poet and writer of hymns, a serious fellow fortunate to have so unserious a friend as Lamb. That same year, Charles Lamb published in London Magazine the essay he was born to write, “A Few Words on Christmas”:

“Oh! merry piping time of Christmas! Never let us permit thee to degenerate into distant courtesies and formal salutations. But let us shake our friends and familiars by the hand, as our fathers and their fathers did. Let them all come around us, and let us count how many the year has added to our circle. Let us enjoy the present, and laugh at the past. Let us tell old stories and invent new ones--innocent always, and ingenious if we can. Let us not meet to abuse the world, but to make it better by our individual example. Let us be patriots, but not men of party. Let us look of the time--cheerful and generous, and endeavour to make others as generous and cheerful as ourselves.”

Like all of us, Lamb was a fractured soul. He longed for solitude and preached Yuletide bonhomie. He was no hypocrite, merely a man. In “A Few Words” he asks, “And what is Christmas?” and supplies his own answer:

“Why, it is the happiest time of the year. It is the season of mirth and cold weather.”

`P Raises His Head, Fixes the Audience'

2011-12-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Age and physique unimportant.”

The stage direction is repeated three times, applied to three of the four characters in Beckett’s brief play Catastrophe, written and first performed in 1982. We never see the fourth character, Luke, “in charge of the lighting,” though he speaks two lines offstage. When I heard of Vaclav Havel’s death on Sunday, I thought of the play, dedicated by Beckett to the Czech playwright and dissident, then in prison. After his release in 1983, Havel returned the favor, dedicating his play The Mistake to Beckett.

“Age and physique unimportant”: Under the Czech communists – or Cuban, or North Korean, or any utopians – everything about the individual is unimportant. Reckoned by totalitarian logic, the collective, an abstraction, is the only reality; the individual, the only reality, is a pernicious abstraction. In Catastrophe, a stringent parody of theater and governance, the Director (D) and his assistant (A) manipulate the Protagonist (P) as he stands mutely on a stage. Until the final stage direction, he remains as malleable as clay in the sculptor’s hands, a motor to be tinkered with at the whim of the mechanic, “the engineer of human souls.”

In the play-within-a-play, A asks if P should wear “a little . . . gag?” D replies: “For God's sake! This craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death! Little gag! For God's sake!”

Throughout the play, P’s head has hung submissively downward, and P and A arrange his hands and clothing as though he were a man-sized doll. In Catastrophe’s most grimly funny line, D says: “Could do with more nudity.” Beckett conceals the play’s muted hint of hope between brackets, in the final stage direction:

“[Pause. Distant storm of applause. P raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies.
Long pause.
Fade-out of light on face.]

Beckett died in Paris on Dec. 22, 1989, age eighty-three, as Ceauşescu delivered his final speech in Romania and the Brandenburg Gate reopened in Berlin. Seven days later, Havel was elected the last president of Czechoslovakia by the nation’s Federal Assembly. Shortly after the first of the new year I reminded Guy Davenport, in a letter, of Beckett dedicating Catastrophe to Havel. Davenport, who had met the Irishman and corresponded with him, replied:

“Beckett was not a political man. He was a compassionate man.”

`Its Intrusion, Its Siege, Its Intense Presence'

2011-12-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Whoever comes here with the palette of an Italian landscape painter will have to abandon all sweet colors. The earth is burnt by the sun, parched from drought, it has the color of bright ash, sometimes of gray violet or violent red.”

The Texas Forest Service reports as many as half a billion trees have died as a result of the state’s “unrelenting drought.” The species hardest hit in Harris County – that is, Houston – is the loblolly pine, a native of the Southeast, a tall, scrappy-looking tree that resembles a bottle brush. More than 5,000 dead trees, most of them loblollies, have already been cut down in Memorial Park. This greenest of cities has grown two-tone, with unbecoming bald patches. Loblolly means “mudhole” or “mire.”

“The landscape is not only before your eyes but beside you, behind you, and you feel its intrusion, its siege, its intense presence. Tall trees are rare; occasionally a lofty oak – the Zeus of trees. Clumps of greenery cling to the slopes, small bushes stubbornly struggling to survive. On the roads, on gentler hills, the wild olive tree with its slender leaves mobile as fingers, silver-green underneath. Low against the earth, thyme and mint—the aromas of heat.”

In “Attempt at a Description of the Greek Landscape” (Collected Prose: 1948-1998), Zbigniew Herbert writes of the Mediterranean world he loved and honored. For him it represented the root of civilization, the harsh, dry garden of our culture. As a Pole who survived Nazis and Stalinists to practice his craft, he knew humans can flourish in arid, unpromising landscapes, just as they can wither in well-watered places.

`The Tug and Its Barges Will Sink With Us'

2011-12-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

In the Dec. 27, 1941, issue of The New Yorker – published less than three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the issue on the newsstands Christmas Day – appears a “Talk of the Town” piece, a feature customarily breezy, feuilleton-like and as was the magazine’s custom, printed anonymously. The author was Wolcott Gibbs, for more than thirty years one of the magazine’s reliable warhorses. The piece appears in Backward Ran Sentences (Bloomsbury, 2011), a generous selection of Gibbs’ work edited by Thomas Vinciguerra. Gibbs starts his thirty-line “casual” with characteristic (of the magazine, of Gibbs) indirection:

“Christmas, of course, is an anachronism in New York. It belongs to non-converted brownstone houses and gaslights and streets banked high with snow, to a day when there were still suburbs on Manhattan Island. The perpendicular city has no place for it.”

The tone is familiar, nostalgia vying politely with au courant fashion, a muted protest against modernity. Only slowly does the author’s true subject become apparent. Not once is Hitler mentioned, nor the impending fall of the Philippines and Indochina to the Japanese, yet the war suffuses each sentence like incense at High Mass. Gibbs, who loved Long Island and lived for years on Fire Island, quietly echoes Fitzgerald: “The picturesque past is attached to the thrusting present, like a barge to a tug, moving at a constant interval with it through time.” No preaching, no rabble-rousing, no sentimental appeals. The even tone, never strident, never slips. Gibbs turns on his own metaphor:

“When we try to imagine the times and the people who will look back on the grotesque complexity of New York in 1941 and say Christmas was really Christmas in those simple, far-off times [I have the eerie sense he is speaking here directly to us, not to an abstract “readership”], our mind rejects the whole impossible picture. The terrible unborn who are going to remember us as quaint and cheerful figures in an old daguerreotype are as unthinkable to us as men from Mars [the single false, hackneyed phrase in the piece, despite the then-recent Welles/Wells allusion]. We give them up. In fact, we give up the entire complicated analogy; as far as we’re concerned, the tug and its barges will sink with us. In the final perspective of history, it may well be that you are enjoying a nice, old-fashioned Christmas right here and now. We leave you with this thought, for whatever comfort you may find in it, but it sounds like lunacy to us.”

Always tonally agile, Gibbs mastered many voices. The writer who occasionally rises to near-sublimity was also a gifted parodist, film and theater critic, and “humorist” (a dicey designation). Gibbs begins “The Man and the Myth,” published Dec. 22, 1928, with a line that made me laugh out loud: “Santa Claus was born in Latvia on May 8, 1831.”

Collecting Gibbs (1902-1958), whose reputation has evaporated, is a welcome act of literary reclamation. Jacques Barzun called him “a man of courage.” He was a contemporary of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell at The New Yorker. They rank among the greatest American writers in any genre. Gibbs is a lesser figure but a reminder of the magazine’s glory years, roughly 1940 through the early nineteen-sixties. He holds up better than such better-known colleagues as Thurber, Benchley, Parker and Perelman. Before Backward Ran Sentences, the only Gibbs I had read was More in Sorrow, the collection he was reading in proofs when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

The New Yorker in its most recent incarnation reflects the nation around it – self-absorbed, politically strident, smitten by celebrity, ultimately trivial. Worse, most of it is badly written. Gibbs’ nimbleness and clarity are long gone. The magazine’s tug and barge sank a long time ago.

[Go here to read a review of the Gibbs anthology by one of his literary descendants, Joseph Epstein.]

`Happy in Himself'

2011-12-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I'm one of those readers who love old and sometimes half-forgotten books and who do a lot of rereading, one of those who shun best sellers and can't understand their fellow travelers opening shiny volumes that they bought 10 minutes earlier in an airport bookstore.”

Adam Zagajewski transcribes my thoughts during the flight from Houston on Friday. I spent most of the five hours rereading Richard Yates’ A Good School (1978). My seatmate, a woman of about my age, divided her time between playing solitaire on her laptop and reading what appeared to be fiction on another handheld device. I’m guessing, of course, because she didn’t encourage conversation (fine by me) and because I could see blocks of text on the screen, short declarative sentences, many in dialogue form. Among our fellow passengers, also engaged in “opening shiny volumes,” she had much company. In his novel, set in an Eastern prep school in the nineteen-forties, Yates refers to “the tireless, self-renewing business of horsing around.”

Zagajewski is among the fifty readers who, on Saturday, told the Wall Street Journal “what they enjoyed reading in 2011.” Especially enticing are the titles suggested by Richard Holmes (the great Coleridge biographer) and Marilynne Robinson (soon to publish a collection of essays appropriately titled When I Was a Child, I Read Books). Zagajewski selects the Scottish poet John Burnside who, he says, “creates a world in which dreams and realities mix up, and yet we recognize in his verses our thoughts, aspirations and reveries.” In the first stanza of “The Good Neighbour,” Burnside describes one sort of reader:

“Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself.”

`The Friendly Fat of Days'

2011-12-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

The plane took off from Houston at 7 p.m. (CST) Friday when the sky was already a light-absorbing blue-gray, and for five hours we unsuccessfully chased the sun and landed in unambiguous night in Seattle just before 10 p.m. (PST). On Wednesday the sun will rise here at 7:55 a.m. and set at 4:20 p.m. Later that night, at 9:30, when the axial tilt of the North Pole is furthest from the sun (23° 26'), we will, without feeling a thing, pass the winter solstice, and so begin the longest night of the year.

On both Wednesday and Thursday we will know eight hours, twenty-five minutes and 17 seconds of day – that is, sunlight, the skim-milk sort that reaches us west of the Cascades. On Friday, the cycle resumes and we’ll enjoy an additional six seconds of day. Calendars and clocks come down to fine calibrations of angularity, and without effort or knowledge our lives conform to planetary motions, until one day we leave the grand cycle behind. Among the sonnets in John Updike’s Americana and Other Poems (2001) is “December Sun”:

“December sun is often in your eyes,
springing a foliage of lashy rays
and irritating dazzle, to replace
the foliage now stripped from all the trees.
The planet rolls and tilts beneath our feet;
the tilt obscurely works to clip the day
a minute shorter; coldness infiltrates
the web of sticky seconds and we freeze.

“The year! We’re chained to it as to a wheel
that breaks us, but so slowly we don’t feel
a thing except at sunset, or sunrise,
when shallow angles form a kind of knife
that slices through the friendly fat of days
and bares the clockwork guts that make us die.”

[Go here to read all of John Donne's "A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day, cited by Helen Pinkerton in her comment.]

`He Is Nothing of Any Thing'

2011-12-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

Boswell reports that Johnson is characteristically common-sensical, with a moral twist, when it comes to holiday observances:

“Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.”

Johnson here is less concerned with ecclesiastical niceties than with human nature. We procrastinate (see The Rambler #134). I have Christmas presents yet to buy, eight days before the big day, but here is a fitting and convenient way to assuage Johnsonian anxieties: Samuel Johnson Christmas ornaments. I’m partial to the Hodge, made of “high quality porcelain”:

“Instantly accessorize bare wall-space with our Hodge Ornament (Oval) Oval Ornament. Makes great room or office accessories, fun favors for birthday parties, wedding or baby shower Ornaments, or adding a unique, special touch to gift-wrapped packages. Comes with its own festive red ribbon for hanging. Hang 'em up!”

Also tempting are “Daddy’s Little Lexicographer” and the cucumber ornament, with an inscription edited down from this passage in Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:

“It has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

But I’ve settled my mind on the ornament inscribed “A man may be so much of every thing that he is nothing of everything.” This comes late in Boswell’s Life, when Johnson is seventy-four and a year away from death. Here is the full passage:

“I shall here insert a few of Johnson’s sayings, without the formality of dates, as they have no reference to any particular time or place.

“‘The more a man extends and varies his acquaintance the better.’ This, however, was meant with a just restriction; for, he on another occasion said to me, `Sir, a man may be so much of every thing, that he is nothing of any thing.’”

Prudent words. Well-roundedness, like open-mindedness, has its limits. In small type, J.V. Cunningham’s epigram might almost fit on a cheery Christmas ornament:

“This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

`An Appreciation of Close-work'

2011-12-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

“A comparatively modern word: not found before 17th cent.”

So says the Oxford English Dictionary of canny, a word written more often than spoken, at least in the U.S., though its first cousin, uncanny, is a Madison Avenue word, pretentious hyperbole. With canny I think clever, competent, crafty, up for the task, shrewd. Richard Stark’s Parker is canny, a con man and ex-con. Odysseus is the model of canniness and cunning. Lawrence I. Lipking writes in his life of Samuel Johnson:

“Actually Johnson never set foot on Grub Street. Yet he enjoys identifying with Odysseus, the canny hero who is never more dangerous than when he masquerades as nobody [“μή τις,” as he tells Polyphemus].”

Canny connects with can (“know how to”) and ken (“knowledge”). Among the more obscure definitions is “Of humour: Quiet, sly, ‘pawky’,” a meaning “used by English writers as characteristic of Scottish humour.” Sly is good, foxlike, dissembling. The title of the American poet Campbell McGrath’s “An Irish Word” refers to canny. Here are the opening stanzas:

“Canny has always been an Irish word
to my ear, so too its cousin crafty,
suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work,
fine-making, handwrought artistry,

“but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive,
stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions,
`silence, exile, and cunning,’ in Joyce’s admonition,
ferret-sly, fox-quick, silvery, and elusive.”

Sticking with Joyce for the moment, canny shows up three times in Finnegans Wake, most suggestively in a phrase that reverses the initials of the novel’s protagonist, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker:

“Ear canny hare for doubling through Cheeverstown they raced him, through Loughlinstown and Nutstown to wind him by the Boolies.”

“Ear, can he hear?” Anyone can play this game. Canny scholars have built careers around it. Joyce advised in the Wake: “Wipe your glosses with what you know.”

`The Great Hearsay of the Past'

2011-12-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Guy Davenport writes in “The Concord Sonata,” his mingling of essay and story collected in A Table of Green Fields (1993):

“We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past.”

“The Concord Sonata” is a meditation on that cryptic passage in Walden in which Thoreau recounts his loss of “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove,” and his long search to recover them. Davenport glosses “this beautiful parable” with the help of a passage written by the Confucian philosopher Mencius (372-289 B.C.) that Thoreau may have read.

The scholarly acuity of Davenport’s conclusion doesn’t concern me here, though I’ve spent decades pondering the teasing multiplicity of meanings Thoreau packs into so small a space. Rather, it’s the sentence quoted above, in particular “the great hearsay of the past,” that haunts me the way Thoreau haunted Davenport. In his next sentence Davenport writes: “Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes.” It’s this embodiment of tradition, of being most ourselves when we enter the thought of another, an act of sympathetic imaginative projection, I find most interesting and, finally, at my age, comforting and true. Davenport describes Diogenes as “an experimental moralist” – a precise characterization of Thoreau.

When young, each of us is Adam. We mistake ignorance for vision and sincerity for truth. We’re taught from every direction and remain proudly unteachable. Age, of course, confers no guarantee of remission from this state. Old fools are nearly as common as young ones. Without a living tradition, an elective affinity with the past, we vaporize, “atom by atom, helplessly.”

This meditation on “the great hearsay of the past” started not with Davenport, Thoreau or Diogenes, but James Boswell, something he reports in his Life of Johnson:

“I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. Johnson: `There is nothing, Sir, too little for a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’”

`Content to Be My Guest'

2011-12-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

The Christmas season officially arrived at 7:12 a.m. (CST) Tuesday when I heard Louis Armstrong on the car radio “talking to all the kids from all over the world at Christmas time” – that is, reciting Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known as “T’was the Night before Christmas.”

Away from my kids, Christmas had thus far felt abstract, like Election Day. Tinsel and trees went on sale in the drugstore before Halloween, when three holidays (including Thanksgiving) shared shelf space, but that didn’t count. Snow in Houston is a rumor. Houses on my street have been decorated, but most are strung with white lights, a Unitarian custom more sepulchral than festive.

Later in the day I was reading Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs (1979), his first book of autobiography, when I happened upon another reminder of the season:

“The Christmas beetles and cowboy beetles held jamborees around the street-lights, battering themselves against the white enamel reflectors and falling into the street. They lay on their backs with their legs struggling. When you picked them up they pulsed with the frustrated strength of their clenched wing muscles.”

The Christmas beetle was new to me, a six-legged jewel native to James’ birthplace, Australia. Some thirty-five species belong to the genus Anoplognathus and earn the common name by entering the adult stage of their life cycle at Yuletide. Despite their beauty, they’re deemed pests because of their bottomless appetite for eucalyptus foliage. They are creatures of the antipodal summer solstice, corresponding to our June bugs.

After a little searching I found another Australian poet, Les Murray, had included a poem titled “Christmas Beetle” in his first collection, The Ilex Tree (1965):

“From the cool night this glossy stranger came,
Attracted by the candle’s yellow flame,
Blundering in jerky flight around our room.
Dazed by the light his bronze wings noisily fanned,
And lest he burn into an odorous fume
I caught and held him prickling in my hand
And threw him back into his home, the night.
A pebble dropped and then whirred into flight.”

I like Murray’s sense of seasonal hospitality. Many would swat a bug into a smear on the wall. Instead, the poet takes him safely home. The final phrase puns, appropriately, on “word into flight.” Christmas is about homecoming, or at least finding a home. Among the most eccentric Christmas poems I know is Marianne Moore’s “To Pierrot Returning to His Orchid,” which is addressed to another sort of arthropod, a spider, and closes like this: “You are here; apparently / Content to be my guest — Say so. / It is Christmastime.”

`The Circus and Menagerie Combined'

2011-12-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

The squirrels on campus have grown sleek and fat like landlocked otters, and I’ve taken to filling my jacket pockets with peanuts to keep them looking prosperous. They’ve become spoiled and have learned to gather in packs when they see me coming. They sit upright, looking expectant, paws extended in gestures of entitlement, aping their human cousins, waiting for a handout.

Campus is home to two species -- eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) and eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger). The fur of the latter is brownish-gray, like the hair of an aging redhead. It’s the largest North American squirrel and the most common around Houston.

They’re brazen. Some will take a peanut from my hand. Others wait for me to throw it. They’re roguish, grabbing one peanut, darting to conceal it under dead leaves and running back for another. Then one of his colleagues snatches the hidden nut and the first guy runs after him, sometimes with another nut already in his mouth. I’ve seen four peanut-stuffed squirrels spiraling up the trunk of an oak, furious with greed, though it looks like courtship playfulness to us.

Thoreau enjoyed the company of squirrels and recognized the role they play in oak propagation. In a fascinating journal entry from Sept. 4, 1851, one that suggests how his writing mind worked, Thoreau first likens us to squirrels, then squirrels to us:

“In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts,--something for conversation in winter evenings. I love to think then of the more distant walks I took in summer.

“At the powder-mills the carbonic acid gas in the road from the building where they were making charcoal made us cough for twenty or thirty rods.

“Saw some gray squirrels whirling their cylinder by the roadside. How fitted that cylinder to this animal! `A squirrel is easily taught to whirl his cylinder” might be a saying frequently applicable. And as they turned, one leaped over or dodged under another most gracefully and unexpectedly, with interweaving motions. It was the circus and menagerie combined. So human they were, exhibiting themselves.”

Thoreau refers to the Acton Powder Mill in Concord where gun powder was manufactured. In his journal entry for Jan. 7, 1853, he describes the aftermath of an explosion at the factory that killed three workmen. The 1851 passage is playful but already with a hint of danger. The gaseous form of carbonic acid is an odorous but nontoxic byproduct of gunpowder production, here stored in iron cylinders. The squirrels spin on them like unknowing clowns.

`Whoever Owned It Before Me'

2011-12-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I watched the 1987 movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road and then stayed up too late reading the book by Helene Hanff (1970) on which it's based – a multi-media first for this reader. The film, nicely acted by Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, is modest and quietly moving, and Bancroft’s wordless scene near the end, in which her character reflects on what she has lost and what she might have had, wrung a few tears out of this jaded admirer of the Terminator films.

The movie seldom strays far from the letters exchanged by Hanff, a New York City writer and lover of antiquarian books, and Frank Doel, the chief buyer for a book dealer in London, between 1949 and 1968. The two never meet, and the film more than the book hints at a nascent stirring of epistolary romance. The scene in which Doel sits in his office reading a love poem by Yeats, though quite lovely, has no counterpart in the book.

Could a comparable friendship happen today? “Love is multiform,” John Berryman writes in “Canto Amor,” but could it endure in an age of online book dealers and PayPal? The technology of book acquisition has changed more since 1987, when the movie appeared, than it had in the preceding four decades. Hanff mails cash to London, where a bookkeeper enters her account balance by hand in a ledger like Bob Cratchit – or Charles Lamb at the British East India Company.

In her first letter to Marks & Co., Booksellers, written Oct. 5, 1949, Hanff requests essays by Hazlitt, Stevenson and Leigh Hunt, and a Latin Bible. Today, I could have them all by midweek and never touch a human being, even digitally. I’m not succumbing here to nostalgia. We’ve lost something, yes, but gained much. Most of us in Hanff’s place seek books, not a friend, and I don’t necessarily want to meet the person who fetches a volume for me off a shelf in the Amazon.com warehouse. But I might.

Interestingly, the book and movie offer little evidence that Frank Doel is anything more than a desultory reader. He’s a knowledgeable, conscientious tradesman. The only thing we see him read, other than letters and invoices, is the Yeats poem. Unlike Hanff, he never romanticizes books and reading. In the fourth of her letters reproduced in the book, Hanff writes:

“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to `I hate to read new books,’ and I hollered `Comrade!’ to whoever owned it before me.”

`The List Would Fill the Book'

2011-12-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Talking, drinking, and smoking go better together than any three other pleasant things upon this earth. And they are best enjoyed in company, which is almost as much as to say they are not best performed at home.”

I love conversation (with the proper company), no longer drink, and never smoked, but otherwise heartily endorse Arthur Ransome’s prescription in Bohemia in London (1907) for a civilized gathering. The English are better at this sort of thing than we Americans. Perhaps it’s our inveterate one-upmanship. Especially among men, conversation soon turns competitive and boastful, often in an un-playful manner. As one person speaks, the other treads water, waiting to rebut what his friend hasn’t yet finished saying. Conversation with women is always easier and usually more interesting.

Ransome suggests we adjourn to a coffee-house or tavern: “Get you and your company into a cosy room, with a bright fire and a closed door, where you may be free before the universe.” Freedom: that’s the essential ingredient for a successful kaffeeklatsch or kegger of conversation. No censors or dullards, no scripts, no policing for political correctness. What I’m describing is an exclusionary democracy, where the First Amendment applies only to those already admitted to the club. Ransome channels Charles Lamb:

“Then may your words express the mood you feel, the liquor hearten you, and the smoke soothe you in argument; and if with that you are not happy, why, then, the devil fly away with you for a puritanical, melancholiac spoilsport, whom I would not see with my book in his hands, no, not for four shillings and sixpence on the nail.”

There are such places. One is literature. Another is its anteroom, the more bookish precincts of the blogosphere. I work for a university and so have few opportunities to meet happily well-read, well-spoken people. Instead, I look to the blog roll on the left. No excuses for dull company accepted. Ransome writes:

“What an illustrious company is ours: Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Herrick, Congreve—the list would fill the book.”

`Buying Groceries Instead of Buying Dreams'

2011-12-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

A quick pass through the campus “bookstore” where I purchased two hooded sweatshirts as Christmas presents, was, as always, dispiriting. The book department consists of six shelves of publications by faculty and staff. Some are heavily technical, and I’m not qualified to judge their worth. The one title I’ve actually read was written by a friend but I can recommend it without bias. (In conversation, the author has described the Fugitive poet Donald Davidson, who figures in her Vanderbilt chapter, as “a stone-cold racist.”) The rest, having bypassed remaindering, await pulping.

Just that morning I had read the excerpts from Bohemia in London posted by Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti. I had never read Arthur Ransome but was intrigued enough to get the book from the library. It’s the first American edition, published in 1907 by Dodd, Mead & Company. I found the passage in “The Bookshops of Bohemia” where Mike left off, and resumed reading:

“There is something more real about this style of buying books than about the dull mercenary method of a new emporium. It is good, granted, to look about the shelves of a new bookshop, to see your successful friends and the authors you admire outglittering each other in smart, gold-lettered, brilliant-coloured bindings; to pick up pretty little editions of your favourite books—what pretty ones there are nowadays, but how sad it is to see a staid old folio author compelled to trip in a duodecimo--; all that is pleasant enough, but to spend money there is a sham and a fraud; it is like buying groceries instead of buying dreams.”

For book lovers and dedicated readers, Ransome’s chapter is a respite from the looming loss of literacy. With approval he quotes Lamb on reading. He describes Charing Cross Road as “the only street whose character is wholly bookish,” and writes:

“By these shops alone are there always a crowd of true bookmen. There are the clerks who bolt their lunches to be able to spend half an hour in glancing over books. There are reviewers selling newspaper copies. There are book-collectors watching for the one chance in ten thousand that brings a prize into the four-penny stall. There are book-lovers looking for the more frequent chance that brings them a good book at a little price, or lets them read it without buying it.”

`And You Don't Know Chickadees?'

2011-12-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

On a Monday morning about a month ago I entered the engineering quadrangle and observed a great hole in the air. All that remained of a forty-foot water oak (Quercus nigra) was a low stump and a scattering of wood chips. Over the weekend a grounds crew had erased the great tree, leaving a hint of their motives: at the heart of the stump, filling half of its four-foot diameter, was a gaping wound of rot extending eighteen inches into the ground. The tree had been ailing and an earlier crew had already trimmed away the dying branches. It came as no surprise, especially as our eight-month drought persists, but there’s always sadness when a giant falls.

In her final book of poems, Silence Opens (1994), Amy Clampitt concludes “Green” with these lines:

“Petals fall, leaves hang on all
summer; chlorophyll,
growth, industry, are what they hang
on for. The relinquishing

“of doing things, of being occupied
at all, comes hard:
the drifting, then the lying still.”

A failing tree, like a failing person – “The relinquishing / of doing things” – is hard to watch, and most of us some day will learn the lesson with varying degrees of aptitude. Thursday morning I watched six freshmen demonstrate a tree-watering system they had devised in their introduction to engineering design class. Their design was simple and elegant – a ten-foot length of PEX bent into a circle for fitting around a tree trunk, a connector and two ball valves. They calculated the optimal size for drilling spray holes (.043 inches) and their spacing (10 centimeters). After three prototypes it works beautifully, and the university arborist is interested in adopting their design.

All this greenery – 4,200 trees (minus one) and shrubs representing eighty-eight species on 295 acres – makes the campus an inviting way station for birds, migratory and otherwise. On the way to the library at lunch on Thursday, I heard the crisp tapping of a woodpecker high in a post oak. I had to stand and wait until he moved into sight before I could identify him as a downy – small, white-bellied and fuzzy-looking. I’ve learned that an earth-science professor leads an almost daily birding walk on campus, and I hope to join him. The group has observed 111 species since September, and at least 15 of them were first-time sightings.

In an essay that started as a 1986 lecture, “Predecessors, Et Cetera,” Clampitt recalls a stay at Yaddo, the artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., when she saw “a fair number of nuthatches and tufted titmice, and lots of chickadees.” (I lived two miles from Yaddo, and can confirm her list.) She asks, “Does anybody here not know chickadees?”

One day, as she’s walking around the grounds with another Yaddo resident, she mentions the chickadees. “What are those?” the other writer asks, and Clampitt writes:

“Well, that did give me pause. If the writer had been a poet, I think I might have said, `Man, you call yourself a poet and you don’t know chickadees?’ But he wasn’t, and I didn’t.”

`Not Another Best-of-the-Year List'

2011-12-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

David Myers at Literary Commentary asked some of us to contribute to his “Not Another Best-of-the-Year List.” The company is excellent, including Joseph Epstein, Terry Teachout, Ruth R. Wisse and David himself.

`Immune to Certain Social Conventions'

2011-12-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

By the time a writer is given a newspaper column, in most cases that means his work is no longer readable. Exceptions are few. The first columnist whose work I awaited with eagerness was Eric Hoffer. His “Reflections” was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped them and pasted them in a scrapbook. From them I moved on to Hoffer’s books, in particular The True Believer, and I suspect Hoffer, a longshoreman by trade, was among the reasons I became a newspaper reporter.

The work of another columnist, Thomas Sowell, never attracted me until I read his piece eight years ago on Hoffer, who I sensed had been virtually eclipsed from cultural memory. Sowell distilled Hoffer’s vision and used his insights to presciently diagnose the ebbing “Occupy” fad:

“People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: `A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,’ Hoffer said. `When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.’”

Now Kevin D. Williamson has written a fine essay/review devoted to Sowell at Commentary:

“One of the great and brilliant things about Thomas Sowell is that he, like most nerds, appears to be simply immune to certain social conventions. This is a critical thing about him—because the social conventions of modern intellectual life demand that certain things go studiously unnoticed, that certain subjects not be breached, or breached only in narrow ways approved by the proper authorities.”

The same might be said of Hoffer.

`Cauterized, Chipper, Astute'

2011-12-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

In some people, appearance and deportment conspire to suggest an animal, a zoological reflection of their truer selves. Jimmy Cagney is a pug and Samuel Beckett a hawk. Likewise, some animals suggest human types, a linkage known at least since Aesop. Eric Ormsby toys with avian allegory in “Some Birds”:

1
“Observe that heron’s hyperbolic stride,
the sinister way in which it seems to glide
on underwater rollerblades until
it halts and leans to peep across the sill
of the cattails and hypodermics its kill –
speared bullfrog or a bream. The great blue
is terrible and righteous when it pierces,
a marshy critic with a malice-javelin
deflating the fat white bellies of its catch.
I loath, yet am infatuated with, that heron.

2
“The gallinules will shame me for my ponderous
approach to life. They have a buoyant levity
as they paddle plumply on the rank canal.
I hope to apply against my debacles
their aqueous placidity. Their horned feet
trundle the muddy depths to keep afloat.

3
“Anhinga rookeries with their
brash, almost crackly chatter
set my arm-hairs on edge and give me
the gags,– that putrescent glitter
of fish-skin against gray twig,
under the leisurely parade of
self-important cumulus, leaves a
tufted taste in the mouth.”

All three are indigenous to Ormsby’s native Florida and the American Southeast, and all, even the heron, are faintly exotic birds but familiar human types. The giveaway with the great blue heron is “a marshy critic with a malice-javelin.” Whether book reviewer or office colleague, we know him – biting in a machine-like way, predatory, mean for the sake of meanness. “Hypodermics” as a verb is nice, suggesting euthanasia, viciousness masquerading as mercy. All of us know the sort, “terrible and righteous when it pierces.” The final line acknowledges our fascination (a form of envy?) with the type.

Ormsby gives gallinules a more admiring treatment. They are as we wish to be -- “buoyant levity” and “aqueous placidity.” They “trundle the muddy depths to keep afloat,” not avoiding the troublesome murk we prefer to ignore. Despite their seeming equanimity, ornithologists tell us the purple gallinule “usually retreats quickly under cover if disturbed,” and their voice is characterized as “a gruff `kruk-kruk-kruk-kruk.’”

For Ormsby, the anhinga is a more ambiguous figure, heron-like but less nasty, its doubleness signaled by its common names -- water-turkey and snake-bird. Audubon describes it as “indefinitely gregarious,” yet the poet is almost sickened by its appearance: “putrescent glitter.” Audubon admires the anhinga’s cunning and grace, which go unmentioned by Ormsby:

“[It] is the very first of all fresh-water divers. With the quickness of thought it disappears beneath the surface, and that so as scarcely to leave a ripple on the spot; and when your anxious eyes seek around for the bird, you are astonished to find it many hundred yards distant…”

With Ormsby I share a north/south binocular vision. The north is plain and even harsh; the south, flamboyant and sometimes corrupt. A native of Florida, the poet lived for decades in Canada, now in England. I’m Ohio-born, a long-time resident of upstate New York, living in the sub-tropics of Houston. Ormsby anatomizes three water-dwelling birds of the South, but may reveal more in another bird poem, a northern one, “To a Bird in Winter” (Time’s Covenant, 2006 ):

“Thicket-whisperer, you
Cherish austerity,
Your small claws blue
Beneath the raggedy

“Habit of subzero
Song. And you will
Tutor me, flit-hero,
Accentual icicle,

“Prophet-minor of cold-
Crunched twigs and nettle-
Skeletons; your bold
Coal-chip pupil settles

“On me, where I follow
You, farther into hiddenness,
Aswarm in the swallow
Villas now left summerless.

“Remembrance of the sun
Glitters your retices;
Icy octaves bangle your dun
Beak that curettes crevices.

“Cauterized, chipper, astute,
You concentrate the frigid waste
In fierce fluff, my modest flute
That whistles to the holocaust.”

For Ormsby we coin a new job description: ornithological/Theophrastian maker of verses.

`In the Smithy of My Soul'

2011-12-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

An Irish-born professor and former dean of engineering, Michael Carroll, celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday on Tuesday, and we organized a party for him in one of the lab buildings. He’s a mechanical engineer but has also written two plays, both of which have been staged, and has composed crossword puzzles for the New York Times and various magazines. He’s a word lover and storyteller, and grew up speaking English and Irish. He loves Flann O’Brien (Keats and Chapman in particular) and is the only person I’ve known who has read An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) in the original.

The graphic designer and I put together a birthday card. On the front is a picture of Thurles, the town where Michael was born in North Tipperary, with Breithlá sona duit! (“Happy birthday!”) bridging the River Suir. Inside we inscribed Saol fada chugat! (“Long life to you!”). The same blessings appear on the birthday cake, in icing.

Several months ago Michael stopped by my office to talk about a story I was writing. He interrupted our digressions-within-digressions to ask if I remembered a passage in Joyce, something about “the smithy of my soul.” I did, for personal reasons, and I referred him to Chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

I read A Portrait in ninth grade and had marked the passage. Its romantic grandiosity echoed in my adolescent bosom. A few years later, as a college freshman, I saw the sentences on a poster under a photograph of a young man with a guitar standing like Stephen Daedalus on the strand, gazing at the snotgreen sea. I bought it and taped it to the wall in my dormitory room.

On the back of the card, in a minute typeface, we added the phrase Tá m'árthach foluaineach lán d'eascanna. In English that’s “My hovercraft is full of eels,” which I knew Michael, a Monty Python enthusiast, would understand. What a blessing it is to have friends who get your jokes.

`That Is About Enough'

2011-12-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

I spend most hours of most days alone, in the company of a cat, which is not at all the same as being alone. Like most of her species she is imperious and opportunistic. She is aggressively affectionate, especially when I’m trying to write, when she’ll walk across the keyboard, back arched, tail twitching, and perform a feline variation on the surrealist pipe-dream of automatic writing. Then she’ll snub me with frosty hauteur. Like Jeoffrey, she moves with “elegant quickness.”

In short, she is company, the sort I prefer when living two-thousand miles from my family. My thoughts on company are distilled in Les Murray’s poem of that name (from Lunch and Counter Lunch, 1974):

“Where two or three
are gathered together, that
is about enough.”

A comic variation on Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Murray’s poem echoes my allergy to collectives, whether rock concerts or anything bearing the prefix “Occupy.” Sharing Murray’s title is one of Beckett’s prose works, Company (1980), in which at one point he might be speaking of a cat:

“Crawling on all fours. Another in another dark or in the same crawling on all fours devising it all for company. Or some other form of motion. The possible encounters. A dead rat. What an addition to company that would be! A rat long dead.”

Beckett captures the uneasy, compromising nature of much company:

“Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point.”

Boswell reports Johnson saying of Jeoffrey’s master, the mad poet Christopher Smart:

“I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”

`The Keats Brothers'

2011-12-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

My review of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante appears in Issue #26 of The Quarterly Conversation.

`A Whole Family of Him'

2011-12-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

The Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker writes March 19, 1956, to Louis Zukofsky:

“I take down not my Bible but Marcus Aurelius and follow up with Lucretius and Thoreau’s Journal (The Heart of) and why couldn’t somebody like Thoreau—a whole family of him—have ever settled near me?”

More than two years later, on June 1, 1958, she writes again to Zukofsky:

“Cleaning the old cupboard I placed three books together that mean most to me—Marcus Aurelius, Thoreau’s Walden and Japanese Haiku and standing beside that is [Zukofsky’s] Test of Poetry.”

Niedecker and Thoreau – American Isolatoes (Melville: “not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own”). Both lived by water and wrote about it -- Thoreau on the rivers and Walden Pond, Niedecker on Black Hawk Island (“The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes.") Both celebrated silence and wrote of neighbors with suspicion, envy and gratitude. Many of Niedecker’s neighbors, as well as relatives, were unaware she wrote poetry. The citizens of Concord knew Thoreau as a surveyor, pencil maker and oddball in a time and place of oddballs. The “Visitors” chapter in Walden begins:

“I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.”

Niedecker asks “why couldn’t somebody like Thoreau—a whole family of him—have ever settled near me?” Impossible. Thoreau made his final doomed journey to Minnesota, Wisconsin’s neighbor, but there was never anyone “like” him. Like her he was sui generis, a cast-iron eccentric, for better and worse. He would have wandered off into the marshes after turtles.

In her home library Niedecker owned copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. The latter is the 1927 Everyman’s edition. On a sheet of paper tucked into the volume is written in Niedecker’s hand:

“Of Thoreau - He chose to be rich by making his wants few. – Emerson”

`Hardheaded, Realistic, Past Surprise'

2011-12-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Among Helen Pinkerton’s recent gifts is the Fall/Winter 1997 issue of Hellas: A Journal of Poetry and the Humanities, dedicated to the poet-critic John Finlay who died of AIDS at age fifty in 1991. Included are twelve poems and a brief prose piece by Finlay, and work by Edgar Bowers, Janet Lewis, David Middleton and Clive Wilmer, among others.

Helen’s essay “Acts of Resistance: Finlay on Winters’s `To the HolySpirit’” is an admiring partial disagreement with Finlay’s reading of Winters’ great devotional poem (as collected in Finlay’s Hermetic Light: Essays on the Gnostic Spirit in Modern Literature and Thought, 1994, which Helen also sent). Also in the Finlay issue of Hellas is a poem by R.L. Barth, who was then editing The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters (1999) and The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), both published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. The poem is “To Yvor Winters, While Editing His Selected Poems”:

“What strikes me now most deeply is your trust.

Hardheaded, realistic, past surprise,

You turned a withering, harsh verse on lies,

Betrayed ideals, subverted justice, lust,

And scourged the statesman, scholar, poet, fool.

But even through the anger you were cool

“In your assurance there were absolutes, by

However mindlessly ignored; the true

Was always just that, true; and some men grew

In hard-won wisdom which no Hell confutes.

Somehow such men, though few in number, would

Both keep alive and perpetuate the Good.

“Now you are dead these thirty years, and I,

Though none admires you more, am cynical

And unregenerate, product of all

The types you scorned, and say the great must die.

Attempting to refocus oversight,

I wait, Maestro, knowing which one is right.”

Winters is “Maestro” as Henry James is “The Master.” Both hold us as writers and readers to uncompromisingly high standards, by “withering, harsh” dismissals of the mediocre, yes, but more importantly by the rigor of their work. In a letter, Winters says he tends toward “a predisposition on behalf of the hard, the brave, the reticent, and the stoical.” In an autobiographical piece collected in The Occasions of Poetry (1999), Thom Gunn (like Pinkerton and Bowers, a former Winters student) writes:

“He was a man of great personal warmth with a deeper love for poetry than I have ever met in anybody else. The love was behind his increasingly strict conception of what a poem should and should not be. It would have seemed to him an insult to the poem that it could be used as a gymnasium for the ego.”

Such gymnasiums proliferate in contemporary poetry, driving out the groceries and shoe stores, the services we need. In his selection Barth, a Marine veteran of Vietnam, includes Winters’ “To a Military Rifle," which begins:

“The times come round again;
The private life is small;
And individual men
Are counted not at all.
Now life is general,
And the bewildered Muse,
Thinking what she has done,
Confronts the daily news.”

No flag-waving, no suicidal appeasement, "hardheaded, realistic, past surprise."

`Ingenuous, Possibly Childish Love of Literature'

2011-12-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Overheard at the Friends of the Fondren Library’s biennial book sale, uttered by an elderly man in a broad Texas drawl, who was holding three empty canvas book bags:

“I was hoping to get enough to last me the winter, but I don’t know if I’m gonna find enough to make it to Christmas.”

No, it wasn’t like back in ’07. The selection was thin and indifferently organized, with an unhappy paperback-to-hardcover ratio, slanted toward best sellers, cook books, overpriced art books and well-thumbed encyclopedias. A librarian explained: “It all depends on who dies during the year.” In other words, if a dead alumnus or faculty member with a substantial library bequeaths it to the Fondren, pickings improve.

I watched dealers swoop like hawks over the tables, some taking photographs of individual books and emailing them for evaluation back to the shop. I heard one say: “I only sell three of these a year. Do I really need to buy six more?”

For my kids I found a stack of cartoon books and Mad magazine paperback reprints. For myself I found three volumes, all of which I’ve read before, two of them among my favorite books: a first edition of Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a seventh printing of Witness by Whitaker Chambers, and the North Point Press reissue of The Senses of Walden by Stanley Cavell. For a librarian friend I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s Home, and on her own she found a hefty music encyclopedia.

Here’s what Bellow wrote in a letter to Philip Roth on Dec. 12, 1969, after Roth had read Mr. Sammler’s Planet for the first time:

“Your note did me a lot of good, though I haven’t known what or how to answer. Of course the so-called fabricators will be grinding their knives. They have none of that ingenuous, possibly childish love of literature you and I have. They take a sort of Roman engineering view of things: grind everything in rubble and build cultural monuments on this foundation from which to fly the Bullshit flag.”

`The Joyless Tittering Duff'

2011-12-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

I don’t have a copy of One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe (2010), edited by Molly McQuade, but its premise is inviting: “What one word means the most to you, and why?” Most of us, if honest, would answer I, the word we utter most often in conversation (and in blog posts). Eric Ormsby’s answer is more inspired, the “supple conjunction” or. He writes:

“It's not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuance and ambiguity. Or stands like a squat bouncer at the revolving door of the disjunction. It bears the yoke of alternatives—`to be or not to be’—with all the robust orotundity of an ox.”

Shakespeare deployed or in his works 2,562 times, compared to 28,944 appearances by the, 27,317 by and, and 14,945 by a. Joyce uses or 958 times in Ulysses and 930 times in Finnegans Wake. In the latter novel, of course, Joyce gives pride of place (the last word, so to speak) to humble the, as he had more famously to Molly Bloom's yes in Ulysses, though the Wake circles back to its beginning. The novel’s final eleven words are common English monosyllables, as though even Joyce were getting tired of all the quadrilingual puns:

“A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”

Like Ormsby, I too would select a suggestively simple word, one I’ve been rationing for the appropriate occasion: duff. I like the silly sound, the bounty of meanings and its ease of rhyme: bluff, buff, chough, chuff, cuff, fluff, gruff, guff, huff (Groucho in Duck Soup: “You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff”), luff, muff, puff, rough, ruff, scruff, scuff, slough, snuff, sough, stuff, tough and tuff.

Duff is also Homer Simpson’s beer of choice, a common surname and Arabic for “drum,” but the Oxford English Dictionary gives seven definitions -- four nouns, an adjective, two verbs – from “dough, paste” to “the buttocks, the backside” (as in “Get off your duff”). “Up the duff,” we learn, means “pregnant,” and “duff” in golf means “to perform (a shot) badly” (thus, “duffer”).

Best of all, “duff” is the stuff on the ground in a forest, decaying leaves, needles, branches and bark, midway between living biomass and soil. Richard Wilbur uses it in this sense in “To Ishtar”:

“It is all we can do to witness
The waste motions of empty trees,
The joyless tittering duff, the grass-mats
Blanched and scurfy with ice.”

In “Again,” Howard Nemerov writes of “Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor.” In his essay “Bears, Bears, Bears” (Red Wolves and Black Bears, 1975), Edward Hoagland says of a Minnesota biologist looking for black bear:

“If he’s near one of them and wants a glimpse, he lifts a handful of duff from the ground and lets it stream lightly down to test the wind before beginning his stalk.”

In the whimsical spirit of the word itself, Aldo Leopold writes in A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (1949):

“Incoming [pine] needles take office in June, and outgoing needles write farewell addresses in October. All write the same thing, in the same tawny yellow ink, which by November turns brown. Then the needles fall, and are filed in the duff to enrich the wisdom of the stand. It is this accumulated wisdom that hushes the footsteps of whoever walks under pines.”

`An Immense Heap of Little Things'

2011-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

“An essay is a thing which someone does himself; and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality.”

I was hooked by the time I hit the semi-colon but few readers are likely to share my enthusiasm. Perhaps the sentiment is too quintessentially English, too quaint or proudly imbued with amateur status. It’s not incisive but recalls my decades of newspaper training to become a dedicated generalist. Some reporters relish beats, and I briefly served time covering law and medicine, but there’s even a name for the non-specific journalistic specialty I most enjoyed: “general-assignment reporting.”

The job description suggests competence, a Boy-Scout preparedness to make the best of one’s materials, no excuses accepted. For many, an essay (or op-ed piece, or blog post) is an occasion of homiletic solemnity. I recall a blogger who was offended that I “happened upon” a book and that I habitually trusted in such serendipity. I was being distressingly unsystematic, as though writing were a branch of applied mathematics.

The author quoted above, immensely popular and prolific in his time but unknown to me before this week, is the English essayist and poet Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925). Like many productive people he appears to have been notably unhappy, proving that misery can be an effective goad to good work. The “charm of personality” he mentions is in the writing, not necessarily the writer. A few sentences later, Benson says of crafting a good essay:

“The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules.”

Gusto is a quality cherished by writers as various as Hazlitt, Marianne Moore and A.J. Liebling. It suggests enthusiasm, imaginative dexterity and a capacity for enjoyment. Benson lauds Charles Lamb because he “treated romantically the homeliest stuff of life, and showed how the simplest and commonest experiences were rich in emotion and humour.” Besides intelligence, wit and good manners, what’s missing from many blogs is writing suffused with pleasure in life and in its own creation. Think of Liebling overheard chuckling at his typewriter. The impulse to say something becomes tiresome unless accompanied by the means to say it well. Speaking of which (how’s that for an unsystematic transition?), here’s a passage I happened upon from a letter Coleridge sent his friend John Thelwell on Oct. 14, 1797:

“I can at times feel strongly the beauties, you describe, in themselves, & for themselves -- but more frequently all things appear little -- all the knowledge, that can be acquired, child's play ---the universe itself -- what but an immense heap of little things? -- I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little --!”

I know Coleridge, characteristically, is making a more grandiose point but doesn’t writing, for most of us, result in nothing more substantial than “an immense heap of little things?”

`Backward Into Dubious Time'

2011-11-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

Two mornings in a row on the way to work I waited in line for a freight train to pass, an inexpensive variation on the drive-in theater. Only on Monday did I get a front-row seat, but even on Tuesday I was close enough to read the graffiti. I’m never in a hurry when driving, and a miles-long string of reefers, boxcars and gondolas (“Lugging cattle, coal, and lumber, / Crying, `alack, alack.’”) is always a stirring sight. Houston is a dense weave of train tracks, as John Bainbridge, a staff writer for The New Yorker, observed fifty years ago in his book about Texas, The Super-Americans:

“Along with its big-city overtones, Houston has a few small-town undertones, such as the fact that there are some three thousand grade crossings within the city limits; it is not unusual, when driving about town, to be obliged to stop while a train goes by.”

That mélange of big city and small town is one of the qualities I most appreciate about Houston. Trains remind us of the city’s nineteenth-century origins, and railroad sidings are weedy, disregarded places that suggest moving on and staying put. It’s tempting to lull one’s self into sepia-tinted reveries when watching trains pass, but as Eric Ormsby cautions in “Railway Stanzas” (Coastlines,1992):

“I do not write this from nostalgia.
I who once revered as a mercy of
certitude the benignity of fact
am skeptical of every reverie
that leads me backward into dubious time.”

`Dirt Still Clinging to Their Roots'

2011-11-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

“It is the roots of things that fascinate me—their bulbs, their rhizomes, etymologies.”

This is A.E. Stallings, an American poet living in Greece, in a piece she wrote for Poetry, “All the Greens Whose Names I Do Not Know.” Her prose is unusually good for a contemporary poet, not silly, earnest or pretentious. To extend her metaphor a little, her prose, like her poetry, feels rooted in the real world. Every writer ought to be so roots-minded.

A few hours before I read Stallings’ greens piece, my boss told me a story about her recent encounter with rooted greenery. Several inches of rain fell last week at the farm, enough for her drought-dried pond to accumulate a few inches of water. The fish are gone, probably consumed by passing herons, but the rain revived the shrubs growing around the pond’s edge. She and her husband call them “coffee bean plants,” which in fact is one of the common names for Sesbania drummondii, better known as rattlebox. They remind me of black locust but are classified as toxic legumes.

The shrubs block the cows’ right of way to the pond, but rattlebox roots sink eighteen inches or more into the drought-parched ground. Pulling them by hand is a waste of time, so my boss’ husband welded together a de-rooter from chain and scrap-iron and fastened it to the tractor. One of the welds broke, then the tractor got mired in the newly moistened pond, and he hooked up their second tractor, this one with four-wheel drive, to the first, which started to tip over with my boss at the helm. They righted it and spent too much time pulling too few roots from the ground. The cows seem uninterested in rattlebox as fodder, so the de-rooting can resume without urgency next weekend.

Stallings says she was browsing in a glossary of Linear B, “the pre-alphabetic system of writing used by Mycenaean Greeks,” and found

“…among the hardware of war and the tackle of trades…the flavors of daily fare and feasts, the containers of wine and oil and flour. Here I find ko-ri-ja-da-na (coriander), mi-ta (mint), pa-ko-we (sage), se-ri-no (celery), ma-ra-tu-wo (fennel)—words nearly identical to the modern Greek three millennia later. How fresh and fragrant these ancient syllables are, as if someone just harvested them this Monday morning and put them on a truck bound for the farmers’ market in Neos Kosmos, with the Cretan, Attic, and Laconic dirt still clinging to their roots. I go out with my shopping basket, to make my own anthology.”

The root of root, crusted with centuries of rich linguistic soil, is in Old English: “Nim horsellenes rota & eftgewæxen barc, & dry swyðe & mac to duste.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces this tidbit to the deliciously named Thomas Oswald Cockayne’s deliciously named three-volume Leechdoms, Wortcunning, & Starcraft (1864-66). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says of Cockayne, famed for his researches in Anglo-Saxon:

“Although Cockayne was a gifted and productive philologist, his pugnacious personality and abrasive ad hominem attacks on influential critics closed the doors to higher academic positions. He was a well-intentioned but impolitic man whose life was driven by a love of language but whose life was ultimately ruined by the unbridled use of language.”

`Metre Is a Brain-Altering Drug'

2011-11-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant.”

One outgrows such thinking, usually by age sixteen, about the time we start feeling guilty for having fallen for the flummery of Dylan Thomas. The poet who wrote the lines above, P.K. Page, died last year at age ninety-six. She wrote them, in “Falling in Love with Poetry” (collected in The Filled Pen: Selected Non-fiction), in 2005. Some of us mature more slowly than others.

In the best, most memorable poems, sound and sense are inseparable. It’s not surprising that among the first poems to excite me as a boy were Poe’s “The Bells” and "Annabel Lee,” the usual well-oiled suspects. Today, I can’t read Poe on a bet, and for diametrically opposite reasons I can’t read Allen Ginsberg. At the start of her essay, Page suggests an explanation for our early, faulty infatuations:

“I fell in love with poetry before I knew what poetry was. I loved the rhythms and the rhymes.”

Bad poetry can be very powerful and seductive, whether transparently bad like Poe’s or “skillfully obscure” like Hart Crane’s, in the words of Yvor Winters. Too much emphasis on sound results in nonsense; too much on sense, propaganda that might as well be prose. One reason we can’t fall in love with contemporary poetry is that most of it possesses too much sound and too little sense, or vice versa. Good poems dwell in a taut equilibrium. Formlessness invites self-indulgent senselessness. We need something to chafe against, in literature as in life. Free verse, in most hands, is slavery. Sonnets liberate. In another essay, “A Writer’s Life,” Page says:

“I suspect that metre is a brain-altering drug – one we ignore at our peril. Just consider what we know, but take for granted: that iambic is the lub-dub of the heart, and iambic pentameter that lub-dub repeated five times – roughly the number of heartbeats to a breath. It is difficult for me to believe this is accidental.”

You can dispute Page’s understanding of physiology but not her conclusion. Just read, at random, a poem by William Carlos Williams. With few exceptions, it’s thin, anemic, tuneless stuff, undistinguished even when transcribed as prose. In his introduction to the anthology English Renaissance Poetry (1963), John Williams, author of Stoner, writes of Ben Jonson's verse:

“It is, finally, a language that has passed from the starkness and bareness of outer reality through the dark, luxuriant jungle of the self, and has emerged from that journey entire and powerful.”

`A Book With a Local Lineage'

2011-11-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

At thirty-seven thousand feet, with snow-covered mountains glowing below us, and books from a public library in Washington and a university library in Texas stacked on my tray-table, I read these cheering words:

“If the idea of a public library was civilizing, so was the place, with its comforting quiet, its tidy shelves, its knowledgeable, dutiful employees who weren’t teachers. The library wasn’t simply where one had to go to get the books, it was a kind of exacting haven to which a city youngster willingly went for his lesson in restraint and his training in self-control. And then there was the lesson in order, the enormous institution itself serving as instructor. What trust it inspired—in both oneself and systems—first to decode the catalogue card, then to make it through the corridors and stairwells into the open stack, and there to discover, exactly where it was supposed to be, the desired book.”

That's Philip Roth, from an op-ed piece he published in The New York Times in 1969. In the wake of the riots that gutted the black neighborhoods in Roth’s home town, Newark, N.J., in 1967, the city council voted to remove from the budget $2.8 million already allocated to maintain the city museum and public library. Public protest, including Roth’s letter, eventually persuaded council to reverse its decision. The letter is collected in Roth’s Reading Myself and Others (1975), which I was reading in a copy borrowed from the King County Public Library in Bellevue, Washington.

I think of public libraries as the frontline of American democracy, places where any of us by virtue of simple citizenship can read any book we wish, without a penny in our pocket, pursue any bookish whim, meet the great minds that shaped us, no college degree or bank statement required, and become better citizens. Roth ups the ante by adding civilization to democracy. I first read Roth in a library, even before he published Portnoy’s Complaint – Goodbye, Columbus in the Parma Heights Public Library.

Sometimes I think the direst threat facing public libraries comes from within. I refer to administrators who cull from their collections books they’ve never read, while stocking video games, Desperate Housewives DVDs, books about zombies and vampires, and collections of criticism devoted to writers whose books are not on their shelves. I’m not convinced it’s even possible for most of us to achieve full literacy without access to well-stocked public libraries (including interlibrary loan). Without them, my hunger for books might never have evolved, let alone ever had a chance of being satisfied. Roth writes:

“For a ten-year-old to find he actually can steer himself though tens of thousands of volumes to the very one he wants is not without its satisfactions. Nor did it count for nothing to carry a library card in one’s pocket; to pay a fine; to sit in a strange place, beyond the reach of parent and school, and read whatever one chose, in anonymity and peace; finally, to carry home across the city and even into bed at night a book with a local lineage of its own, a family tree of Newark readers to which one’s name had now been added.”

`Any Greenness is Deeper Than Anyone Knows'

2011-11-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Through Harry Levin, Nabokov met the poet Richard Wilbur, whose work he came to rate very highly. Wilbur had read in Partisan Review Nabokov’s memoir `First Poem,’ and commented on the extraordinary minutiae, such as a drip glissading from a wet leaf’s tip, that Nabokov’s memory preserved for decades. Alas, every detail was true, Nabokov replied, because he was a victim of total recall.”

So Brian Boyd reports in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. “First Poem” appeared in Partisan Review in 1949 and eventually became the eleventh chapter of Speak, Memory, the most beautiful autobiography in the language. Nabokov describes a day at Vyra, the family estate, in July 1914, on the cusp of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution that would destroy his world. Boyd notes that Nabokov had actually been writing poems in three languages for several years, and that the “first poem” he describes, “The Rain Has Flown” (Дождь пролетел), was actually composed in 1917. Perhaps it was “first” in a deeper, non-chronological sense as Nabokov implies by making it the first poem in Poems and Problems (1969). Here is Nabokov’s translation of his Russian original:

“The rain has flown and burnt up in flight.
I tread the red sand of a path.
Golden orioles whistle, the rowan is in bloom,
the catkins on sallows are white.

“The air is refreshing, humid and sweet.
How good the caprifole smells!
Downward a leaf inclines its tip
And drop from its tip a pearl.”

Here, from Speak, Memory, is Nabokov’s rendering of the event that inspired the poem. Note, as Wilbur notes, the “glissading” of the water drop:

“Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip relief—the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes.”

No wonder Wilbur admired “First Poem.” With Nabokov he shares an acuity of eye and ear. For both, knowledge and mystery coexist. Creation deserves attentiveness. To be less than devoted to detail is to be lazy, soft-headed and immune to the gifts around us. Nabokov saw a poem in a plant. “The Beautiful Changes” is the title poem of Wilbur’s first collection, published in 1947:

“The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.”

In a footnote to the passage quoted at the top, Boyd adds:

“Once when Wilbur came to Cornell for a poetry reading, arriving weary and unfed after a delayed flight, he looked down and saw Nabokov `sitting alone in the very front row, and passionately wished I had eaten something, that I felt better, that my poems were better.’”

`In the Throes of Self-Discovery'

2011-11-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

A passage in John Cheever’s journals read on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, though ostensibly having nothing to do with the holiday, pushed to the surface an early Thanksgiving memory. Cheever is writing in 1955:

“The child is vomiting. Into town on a Sunday night to get an antidote. For this corner drugstore, a Sunday night is its finest hour. All its prosperous competitors have shut. It is the only lighted store on the street. The jumble of displays in the window—a picture of Pythagoras, Venus in a truss, douche bags and perfumes—is continued in the store itself. It is like a pharmaceutical curiosity shop, a fun house, a storeroom for cardboard women anointing themselves with suntan lotion, cardboard forests advertising pine-scented soap, bookshelves and bins filled with card-table covers and plastic water pistols, and a little like a household, too, for the druggist’s wife is at the soda fountain, a neat, anxious-looking woman with photographs of her three sons in uniform arranged on the shelf at her back.”

One Thanksgiving not many years after the events recorded above I overindulged in shrimp cocktail (an exotic appetizer in our family), pickles, olives and dinner rolls even before the entrée was on the table, and proceeded to vomit on the floor in the bathroom and, eventually, into the toilet. We were out of Pepto-Bismol. For some reason my father took me with him to Avallone’s Pharmacy. I was woozy and sweaty but remember that the familiar drugstore, our home away from home for comic books and candy bars, cheered me more than the dose of pink stuff. The Thanksgiving Days of childhood were surrogate Sundays, days of dolor and dullness, and the sanctuary of the drugstore came as relief that exceeded the merely medicinal.

Cheever sketches an unmistakably American scene, one that mingles medicine and consumer bounty, hospital and home. Karl Shapiro begins his “Drug Store” (1942) with this line: “It baffles the foreigner like an idiom.” After bookstores, good drugstores were my favorite. They promised not only pleasure (polar air conditioning in summer) but a delicious discomfort in the face of adult mysteries (tubing and unguents, half-torsoed mannequins in trusses). The pharmacist at Avallone’s, in bow tie and pale blue lab coat, was Chuck. His business and the world that sustained it is long extinct. When he leaves the drugstore, Cheever observes a group of “hoods” swaggering down the street, “stinking of marijuana and baying like she-wolves at the new moon.” He writes:

“The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.”

`The Liberty of Any Things'

2011-11-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

While pushing the grocery cart back to the cart-corral I noticed a crow hopping off but not flying away. As I turned to the car he launched an impressive spew of corvine invective, strutting ever closer to me. The spectacle of so small a creature haranguing one twenty times his size is always amusing. In his journal Thoreau consistently modifies caw with “angry.” Such self-indulgence we would never tolerate in humans. In a crow it’s charming. I realized my cart had blocked the crow’s access to a plump Kaiser roll getting sodden in the rain, so I moved the cart. In his “In a Bird Sanctuary” (The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, 1947), Richard Wilbur almost gets it wrong:

“It's hard to tell the purpose of a bird:
for relevance it does not seem to try.
No line can trace no flute exemplify
its traveling: it darts without the word.
Who wills devoutly to absorb, contain,
Birds give him pain.”

They are not us but sometimes resemble us. I entirely understood the “purpose” of the parking lot crow. He wasn’t dumb and I wasn’t deaf. His caws caused me to act, so he was not entirely “without the word.” I drove the next day to our storage unit to fetch the Christmas lights and decorations. On the roof of the building across from ours, two crows observed as I loaded boxes in the trunk. They muttered and nodded, interested in my doings, Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo to my Mr. Interlocutor. They seemed to want nothing but got all the best lines. Wilbur says in his final stanza:

“The liberty of any things becomes
the liberty of all. It also brings
their abolition into anythings.
In order’s name let’s not turn down our thumbs
on routine visions; we must figure out
what all’s about.”

`Have a Book Open on Your Dressing Table'

2011-11-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

“For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to overtake him. Self-centered, self-taught, he leads a solitary life, and unless his every-day experience is controlled by careful reading or by the attrition of a medical society it soon ceases to be of the slightest value and becomes a mere accretion of isolated facts, without correlation.”

On the self-help shelf in the library bookshop I found a third edition (1932) of William Osler’s extravagantly titled Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine, first published in 1904. We no longer expect doctors to be literate (or writers to know anything about medicine and science), though recently I interviewed the nation’s top thrombosis man and learned not only that he once treated Mikhail Gorbachev but has read all of Solzhenitsyn in English. At my urging he’s now reading Dead Souls. He had never heard of Osler (1849-1919).

I paid four dollars for the book. On the endpaper in black ink is inscribed “Ralph M. Lechausse, Richmond, Va. 1935.” Below that, in the same hand: “To A.B. – Montreal Oct. 1936.” The identity of “A.B.” is revealed at the bottom of the endpaper in another hand: “A. Bernard Gray.” Tucked between pages 436 and 437 is a memo written on the letterhead of “Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, U.S.A.” It’s dated “Nineteen Thirty-Five,” addressed “Dear Doctor,” and begins:

“Together with congratulations on your attainment of a medical degree, this volume of addresses by Sir William Osler, who adorned your profession in the United States for many years, is cordially presented.”

Here is the third of four paragraphs:

“May you share with him his `relish of knowledge’ and his absorbing love and passionate, persistent search for truth.”

One can hardly imagine the world suggested by this gift and message, even if we dismiss it as promotional boilerplate. It implies respect for a physician dead sixteen years and a pharmaceutical company’s understanding that a collection of his medical addresses might constitute “graft.” Also, that a doctor might be engaged in a “search for truth.”

One of Osler’s lectures is titled “Men and Books,” from which the passage quoted above is taken. In it he quotes or alludes to Dr. Johnson, Bunyan, Milton, Cotton Mather, Horace, James Russell Lowell, Washington Irving and many physicians. Osler writes: “I should like to see in each library a select company of the Immortals set apart for special admiration.” At the end of the volume, perhaps to clarify that by books he means more than just medical texts, Osler adds a “Bed-side Library for Medical Students.” A liberal education, he assures us, “may be had at a very slight cost of time and money.” He urges medical students to “get the education, if not of a scholar, at least of a gentleman,” and suggests:

“Before going to sleep read for half an hour, and in the morning have a book open on your dressing table. You will be surprised to find how much can be accomplished in the course of a year.”

Here is Osler’s prescription for a liberal education:

I. Old and New Testament.
II. Shakespeare.
III. Montaigne.
IV. Plutarch’s Lives.
V. Marcus Aurelius.
VI. Epictetus.
VII. Religio Medici.
VIII. Don Quixote.
IX. Emerson.
X. Oliver Wendell Holmes—Breakfast-Table Series.

[An eagle-eyed reader in Dallas informs us that Dr. A. Bernard Gray, an orthopedic surgeon, died last March at the age of ninety-eight: "During his lifetime of medical practice he treated many patients who were unable to pay, and performed many unique and creative surgical procedures. Bernard was not only a man of great professional accomplishment and dedication, he was a loving patriarch. His family was his greatest pleasure." Read his complete obituary here.]

`It Domiciliates Me in Nature'

2011-11-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

Shuttling between homes, I’ve come to understand that the Pacific Northwest is meteorologically (and culturally) antipodal to Houston. While Texas remains in a protracted drought, we wake to the purr of rain on the roof, the sound of Puget Sound, its elevator music. With it comes a socked-in feeling and the certainty of limits – welcome reminders. Last week my brother posted a photo of the sun setting behind a neighbor’s house in suburban Cleveland. Turneresque displays are routine in Houston; in Seattle they would make the front page, if anyone still read the newspaper.

Residents at both ends of my bipolar existence complain about the weather, of course, and most everything else. Chesterton reminded us that “travel narrows the mind,” a side-effect I’m encouraging. I like to like where I am, even if I’m deluded, in contrast to the scout leader I spoke with on Saturday who explained to me that the abundant rain in Washington is the result of “climate change.” From the drought and unceasing rain I’ve relearned something about proper proportions, personal and species-wide.

Thoreau took a walk in the rain on May 17, 1858. He watched a farmer try to finish his planting “while slowly getting a soaking, quietly dropping manure in the furrows.” Thoreau implicitly approves of the farmer’s uncomplaining stoicism, and writes:

“The rain is good for thought. It is especially agreeable to me as I enter the wood and hear the soothing dripping on the leaves. It domiciliates me in nature. The woods are the more like a house for the rain; the few slight noises sound more hollow in them; the birds hop nearer; the very trees seem still and pensive. The clouds are but a higher roof. The clouds and rain confine me to near objects, the surface of the earth and the trees.”

“Domiciliates” – makes a home for – is a word Thoreau the Latinist deploys with pleasure. He, too, made a home in nature, first in 1845, and then for the rest of his life.

`He Seldom Mentions Sin'

2011-11-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

The only proselytizing I experienced was the passive sort, the mingled scents of coffee and fresh-cut cedar and pine in the lobby of the Lutheran church. My eight-year-old was the top seller of wreathes, garlands and centerpieces in his Cub Scout pack, which meets at the church. We were there to deliver greens to the parishioners he had sweet-talked last week.

At the center of the lobby were two tables set with coffee urns, another for tea, and many platters of cookies. Nearby, already bagged, were the Yuletide trimmings, redolent of the forest where just a week ago they were growing. A scout leader and I checked the list of orders, collected money, and piled her son and mine with trash bags of greenery so they could help customers carry them out to their cars.

We were an L-shaped corridor away from the sanctuary where the service was underway. Hanging from the ceiling in the lobby was a video screen broadcasting the hymn-singing and sermon. The camera was set up in the second-floor balcony and aimed down the middle aisle at the altar. We could see a miniature image of the minister in white robes. If I understood his sermon properly, the theme was encouragement – we all need it, we’re all obliged to dispense it to others. His message, a sort of sacred-but-almost-secular pep talk, sounded characteristically American: Strive, work hard, persevere, help others in their striving. There was no darkness in the minister’s words. He sounded like a good, friendly man, like all the other Lutherans I met. He was no Father Mapple.

I thought of ministers in the novels of Peter De Vries and of a sonnet by a much-neglected poet, once among the most celebrated in the nation, Phyllis McGinley. She published in The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal, as well as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Auden loved her and wrote an introduction to Times Three (1960), her collected poems that went through seven printings in six years. Here is “This Side of Calvin”:

“The Reverend Dr. Harcourt, folk agree,
Nodding their heads in solid satisfaction,
Is just the man for this community.
Tall, young, urbane, but capable of action,
He pleases where he serves. He marshals out
The younger crowd, lacks trace of clerical unction,
Cheers the Kiwanis and the Eagle Scout,
Is popular at every public function,

“And in the pulpit eloquently speaks
On divers matters with both wit and clarity:
Art, Education, God, the Early Greeks,
Psychiatry, Saint Paul, true Christian charity,
Vestry repairs that shortly must begin—
All things but Sin. He seldom mentions Sin.”

McGinley’s satire is gentle, as is mine.

`Such Is November'

2011-11-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

The kids had raked some of the leaves and left them in piles around the yard, but more had fallen and everything was coated with a thin veneer of ice. The grass crunched and kept precise footprints until the low sun had risen enough to soften the outlines but not erase them.

“The sunlight is a peculiarly thin and clear yellow, falling on the pale-brown bleaching herbage of the fields at this season. There is no redness in it. This is November sunlight.”

We raked and lifted leaf piles frozen into ragged clumps. Dumped into the bin they remained in sheets liked rotting plywood and had to be tamped down with rakes and brooms. The bare spots under the leaves gave off the earthy fragrance of a mid-winter thaw, rich with rot.

“Much cold, slate-colored cloud, bare twigs seen gleaming toward the light like gossamer, pure green of pines whose old leaves have fallen, reddish or yellowish brown oak leaves rustling on the hillsides, very pale brown, bleaching, almost hoary fine grass or hay in the fields, akin to the frost which has killed it, and flakes of clear yellow sunlight falling on it here and there, -- such is November.”

Leaf-covered grass, denied sunlight, bleaches into pale tubers. Among the exposed roots, earthworms writhe in the cold and a shiny black beetle skitters for shelter. Fingers ache with the cold and damp.

“The fine grass killed by the frost, withered and bleached till it is almost silvery, has clothed the fields for a long time. Now, as in the spring, we rejoice in sheltered and sunny places. Some corn is left out still even.”

[The quoted passages are from Thoreau’s journal for Nov. 18, 1857.]

`All Our Ladies Read Now'

2011-11-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

Another flight to Seattle, another calibration of print requirements: How to carry sufficient reading matter to fill the four-hour-and-forty-minute flight, plus time seated in the terminal, but not over-burden one’s self with cargo, and yet to budget thirty minutes or so for the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine? Such are the trials facing the savvy traveler, especially one accustomed to reading three or four books simultaneously, and who likes to mix genres and subjects.

The latest issue of First Things arrived Thursday, and I was strong – I saved it for the flight. Next, Janet Lewis’ first novel, The Invasion (1932), which I recently bought with birthday money and started reading on Thursday. Call it consumer testing: I like to be certain a book will occupy my attention. How frustrating to start one midair and find out it’s unreadable (hardly likely with Lewis – I’ve read all of her other novels and poetry). Not only could I not read it, I’d have to lug it around for the rest of the trip unless it was so bad I gave it to my seatmate, which I once did with a much-touted George V. Higgins novel.

I’m also packing the latest volume by the prolific Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (Bloomsbury Press, 2010). In the first essay, “Why Study War?” he writes: “Few classicists seemed to remember that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen—from Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophon—had served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea and that such experiences permeated their work.”

The new books I carry are devoted to old themes and the old ones read like new. In the latter category is Boswell’s Life of Johnson in the zaftig little Everyman’s edition. I know it as though it were my biography, and that’s a comfort. Why risk reading a bestseller or some unreadable title that reflects an “established convention of literary culture in America?” Boswell reports Johnson’s table talk on April 29, 1778:

“`It has been maintained that this superfoetation, this teeming of the press in modern times, is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much of what is of inferiour value, in order to be in the fashion; so that better works are neglected for want of time, because a man will have more gratification of his vanity in conversation, from having read modern books, than from having read the best works of antiquity. But it must be considered, that we have now more knowledge generally diffused; all our ladies read now, which is a great extension. Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients. Greece appears to me to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance.’”

`To Fill a Great Barrel of Silence'

2011-11-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

When Boswell complained of attending a dinner “without hearing one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered,” Johnson replied, “Sir, there seldom is any such conversation,” and in two and a half centuries, the conversational well has only run drier. Ours is a noisy but empty age. Chatter is not conversation. A friend on campus writes:

“I was thinking about you today while getting a manicure. They had three televisions on, all tuned to a ladies' talk show. I can honestly say I've never seen anything so imbecilic, so completely vacuous, in my entire life. It was so painfully stupid that I was embarrassed to be watching it even though I had no choice. And this is how the Vietnamese manicurists learn English! God help us.”

The problem, of course, is democracy. Because they have a right to speak, people feel obliged to do so when they have nothing to say. Egos throb and blather proliferates. It’s a shame, because good conversation ranks among the chief pleasures of civilization.

Helen Pinkerton has passed along Exemplary Lives (University of George Press, 1990) by the late David Levin, a scholar of American literature whose teachers included Perry Miller and F.O. Matthiessen at Harvard and Yvor Winters and Wallace Stegner at Stanford.

When Levin arrived at Stanford in 1952, he was writing his Ph.D. thesis on four American historians – Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman. On their first meeting, Winters, then age fifty-two, asked Levin, who was twenty-seven, “Which one was the best?” Knowing Winters by reputation, he reluctantly answered, “I suppose Parkman was the best historian.” Winters replied, “Parkman’s the worst. Motley’s the best.” Some would judge Winters’ forthright pugnacity a conversation-killer. Not Levin. That first conversation was, he says, “an epitome of the most exemplary service that Winters’s criticism and his personal conduct performed for me and others.”

I sense that the model for most contemporary conversation is the therapy session: “And how did that make you feel?” Or, the flip side of that inanity, the drunken rage. Both parts are scripted and neither calls for listening or thinking. Levin goes on:

“That first laconic exchange also left me with the feeling that I was somehow obliged to fill a great barrel of silence, which Winters himself had opened. Even after I had come to know him well, he remained one of several friends who left silences for others to fill, friends whose mute, expectant bearing suggested that their own silence had been provoked by the inadequacy of their interlocutors. Winters was not at ease in idle conversation. He frequently spoke with startling wit, and he was an excellent raconteur, but casual speech often seemed to make him uncomfortable. He preferred to write, and he often did.”

In Winters we have a man who embodied an old-fashioned strain of American laconicism. No one is obliged to talk – or listen. “The young are quick of speech,” he reminds us, as are the middle-aged and older. In another poem Winters writes:

“That in this room, men yet may reach,
By labor and wit’s sullen shock,
The final certitude of speech
Which Hell itself cannot unlock.”

`Let Nothing Be a Toy Too Small'

2011-11-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

Chris Arthur, an Irish essayist whose work I recently discovered, was born in Belfast in 1955 and is a literary descendant of the great Hubert Butler. His latest collection is Irish Elegies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For the book’s epigraph Arthur uses the sestet of a sonnet by John Hewitt (1907-1987), also born in Belfast and previously unknown to me. Here is the complete poem, “Nourish Your Heart,” from The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Blackstaff Press, 1991):

“Nourish your heart through all the ports of sense;
let sight’s salute constrain them to come in
that furtive lurk in shadow; let touch spin
her dragging spider-threads with diligence,
no anchor-cable these, a net to freight,
meshed close as flesh, from the reluctant tide
the veering atomies; let the rest provide
all they can bundle through each closing gate.

“See you miss nothing proffered. Name and store
and set in order all. Let nothing be
a toy too small, a trophy overpast
the weighing palm that reckons less or more;
for all you know, or I know, these must last
the slow attritions of eternity.”

Reading the final six lines unaccompanied even by title, with only the poet’s name and the dates of his birth and death, I recognized a voice I wanted to pursue. The diction is faintly old-fashioned – “proffered,” “overpast” – but charmingly so, finicky and unostentatiously wise. “Atomies” are minute particles, atoms or motes. Shakespeare writes in As You Like It: “It is as easie to count Atomies as to resolue the propositions of a Louer.” Soon it came to mean a fairy or mite, a diminutive being. Even “veering atomies” are worthy of perception.

“Nourish Your Heart” was first collected in Time Enough: Poems New and Revised, published in 1976 when Hewitt was almost seventy. Its title is off-putting, setting us up for pop medicine or New Age confections. Hewitt has sustenance in mind, but something substantial. In a word, attentiveness. Once a friend urged the Buddhist notion of mindfulness on me, openness, a refusal of dullness and sensory passivity: “Name and store / and set all in order.” It’s a Thoreauvian injunction. See this from the journal for June 13, 1851:

“We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear [Matthew 11:15, Mark 4:9]. Employ your senses.”

In Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (1873), William Ellery Channing writes that his friend’s “senses lived twice.” Like Hewitt, Channing resorts to gustatory metaphors:

“He loved the multum in parvo [much in little] or potluck; to boil up the little into the big. Thus, he was in the habit of saying,--Give me healthy senses, let me be thoroughly alive, and breathe freely in the very flood-tide of the living world. But this should have availed him little, if he had not been at the same time copiously endowed with the power of recording what he had imbibed. His senses truly lived twice.”

A writer lives everything twice, at least.

`His Old Man's Thoughts Like Embers'

2011-11-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

Helen Pinkerton tipped me off to another poem about Samuel Johnson, found in a book she is reading for review – Under the Pergola (Louisiana State University Press, 2011) by Catharine Savage Brosman. "Dr. Johnson in the Hebrides" has six eight-line stanzas and is too long to quote in full, but Helen expresses a fondness for the final stanza that I share. Here’s part of it:

“Then to Oban and Glasgow,
leaving the prison of the isles, the water’s hazards,
turning home, his old man’s thoughts like embers,
ruddy in the sunset’s radiance, brighter still
in darkness—deepening, illuminating times
that would not be again, an old and honest order
lost, life mostly gone, but washed and fired by grace.”

Johnson was sixty-three when touring Scotland in 1773 with Boswell, and would live another eleven years. In an earlier passage, Brosman writes: “Worn by work, by words, / yet he had not tired of London, Litchfield, Streathem, / nor of life.” She silently echoes Johnson’s declaration in Boswell’s Life: “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

More than most people in our time and even his, Johnson contemplated his mortality. He found it a subject of bottomless terror and fascination, and it fueled his life, as did the fear of madness. His appetite for life was directly proportional to his dread of death – a rare sort of human algebra. Boswell asks, as reported in the Life: “But is not the fear of death natural to man?” Johnson replies: “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.” Brosman’s stanza is tactful. The closest she gets to writing “death” is “life mostly gone,” a Beckett-like phrase. Her best image: “his old man’s thoughts like embers.” That is, softly glowing, providing dim illumination but still likely to flare and burn. More than twenty years before the journey to Scotland, Johnson writes in The Rambler #111:

“A perpetual conflict with natural desires seems to be the lot of our present state. In youth we require something of the tardiness and frigidity of age; and in age we must labour to recall the fire and impetuosity of youth; in youth we must learn to respect, and in age to enjoy."

Despite his reputation for gloom and ferocity, Johnson was a world-class enjoyer. Brosman, who cites John Wain’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography as her source, writes in the second and third stanzas:

“…he sought a time and place
half-known, remote: wild prospects, feudal law,

“savage battles in the glens, fierce independence,
Stuart pride, and landscapes like no other, stony, harsh,
and mountainous, with treeless wastes for miles,
and then the sea.”

That reads like an external reflection of Johnson’s internal landscape.

`They Are Always Reactionary'

2011-11-15T06:11:00.000-08:00

On the conclusion of the recent unpleasantness on Wall Street:

"Rowdies are never revolutionaries, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests. Demonstrators at American universities care as little about education as football fans who smash up subway stations in England care about soccer. All belong to the same family of goofy hoodlums--with a sprinkling of clever rogues among them."

[From the interview Vladimir Nabokov gave Philip Oakes in The Sunday Times, June 1969; collected in Strong Opinions, 1973.]

`The Part That Sings'

2011-11-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Beauty – her triumph is that she has found it where few have before, and convinced us of it. Conciseness and symmetry. Liberty. Tough, even cantankerous individuality.”

The writer is Guy Davenport and the object of his celebration is Marianne Moore, born 124 years ago today in St. Louis. Like Aaron Copland, whose 111th birthday we observed on Monday, Moore is a pleasure giver among American Modernists, an artist who never settles for a monochromatic palette. Look and you’ll find silver and gold shimmering among the grays and blacks of sorrow and loss: “Beauty is everlasting / and dust is for a time” (“In Distrust of Merits,” written during World War II).

In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. assembled what he termed a “Yes Celebratory Shelf” of Modernism ranging from Louis Armstrong and Laurel and Hardy to Ulysses and Richard Wilbur. Among them he includes, with supreme appropriateness, Marianne Moore.

In “The Pleasures of Music,” an article he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in 1959, Copland lauds Beethoven as “one of the great yea-sayers among creative artists” and Bach for the “marvelous rightness” of his work. He celebrates adroitness, energy, what Moore praises as “gusto”: “All of us … can understand and feel the joy of being carried forward by the flow of music. Our love of music is bound up with its forward motion.”

Both artists note the primacy of song, the most joyous of human expressions. In the final verse of “What Are Years,” Moore writes:

“So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.”

In his introduction to Music and Imagination (1952), the published version of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard, Copland says:

“…if poets and composers take flight from a similar impulse, then perhaps I am more of a poetry professor than I had thought. The music of poetry must forever escape me, no doubt, but the poetry of music is always with me. It signifies that largest part of our emotive life—the part that sings.”

[Go here to listen to Copland’s “Quiet City,” and here, here and here for his “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.”]

`A Connoisseur's Sense of Things for Their Own Sake'

2011-11-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

“The land is full of what was lost.”

I grew up a hunter-gatherer, with the emphasis on hunter. Truly, hunting is the thing, not the gathering. Stalking the butterfly is the adventure, not the netting, pinching and pinning. Trolling the dim shelves of a book shop, alert and expectant, outweighs the pleasure of finding the three-volume Everyman’s edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy priced at $10. Ordering the same from Amazon.com is not the same. My Burton carries an addendum of happy memory, a covert connection to an autumn afternoon in Schuylerville, N.Y.

The line quoted above is from A.E. Stallings’ “Arrowhead Hunting” (Hapax, 2006). For her, hunting connects us with the anonymous past, with ancestors whose existence we could otherwise never have guessed. Stallings notes that hunting for arrowheads echoes the archaic hunter’s hunt for game. She puns on “hart,” and in time’s lost-and-found she finds futility and hope:

“And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year,

Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.”

Pressed to name the literary work with the most lasting influence on my thinking, I might propose “Finding,” an essay by Guy Davenport published in Antaeus in 1978 and later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). It recounts the weekend expeditions his family took “to look for Indian arrows.” Davenport was born in 1926 in Anderson, S.C. His essay is a delicate balance of memoir and meditation on many things – family, lost time, the importance of attentiveness and the formation of sensibility. Go here and scroll down to read it.

Davenport says he hopes the meaning of those childhood expeditions “elude[s] me forever,” that he will never find the meaning of finding. But he can’t help speculating:

“Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake.”

We learn best by doing and by watching others do. Learning one thing (finding arrowheads) later may teach us another (reading texts, writing others). Davenport writes:

“I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.”

You Must Raise Your Hat'

2011-11-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Frank Wilson and Dave Lull for alerting me to a wonderful conversation with Jacques Barzun about his arrival in New York City in 1920. Barzun, who celebrates his 104^th birthday on Nov. 30, embodies civilization. He seems to have read everything and his memory for detail is phenomenal. He recalls that wristwatches were for “sissies” until American soldiers returning from Europe after the Armistice were seen wearing them. Spaghetti was an “exotic dish” until almost overnight it became thoroughly Americanized. Barzun moves on to hats:

“Men always wore hats. There was a famous businessman who was interviewed as he landed back from a trip to Europe and he was asked what the great movements were that he was apprehensive about. He said, `Communism and hatlessness!’”

President Kennedy forty years later is often credited with pushing the nation, at least the male portion, into hatlessness. In photos of my father taken after World War II, in which he’s dressed up for some formal occasion (wedding, funeral), he’s usually wearing a variation on the homburg, along with a brown pin-stripe suit and a wide, garish tie that barely reaches his navel. In the preface to his Collected Stories (1977), John Cheever’s remembrance of New York City in the nineteen-thirties, when he was starting out as a writer, includes this:

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

Here is A.J. Liebling on the denizens of Izzy Yereshevsky’s cigar store at Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue in the nineteen-thirties:

“Most of Izzy’s evening guests – their purchases are so infrequent it would be misleading to call them customers – wear white felt hats and overcoats of a style known to them as English Drape. Short men peer up from between the wide-flung shoulders of these coats as if they had been lowered into the garments on a rope and were now trying to climb out.”

Yes, this is civilization. As Barzun says:

“This is a very strange thing, isn’t it, to have given up hats altogether? I remember hats on the streets. Certainly when I first came, everybody wore a hat. I wore a hat in college. What would you do if you met a lady of your acquaintance or of your family’s acquaintance? You must raise your hat.”

`Airy, Rounded Masses of Light Green'

2011-11-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

I love the poetry of botanical language, the Latinate specificities and richness of useful metaphor. In “Olives,” A.E. Stallings refers to “A rich and dark and indehiscent meat / Clinging tightly to the pit.” The rare word, “indehiscent,” refers to “fruits that do not split open when mature, but retain the seed till they decay.” Olives, like other indehiscent plants, do not open when ripe. The word's root is the present participle of dehiscere, “to open in chinks, gape, yawn.”

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of “indehiscent” to 1832, when John Lindley (1799-1865) writes in An Introduction to Botany: “Cells one-seeded, indehiscent, dry, perfectly close at all times.” Logically, “dehiscent” showed up much earlier, in 1649. Think of the distinction in human terms. A dehiscent person, when mature, opens to the world and gives something. One who is indehiscent first must rot or otherwise be compelled to open and deliver his gift.

Take the botanically related word “caducous,” from cadere, “to fall.” The OED defines it as “Applied to organs or parts that fall off naturally when they have served their purpose [in both plants and animals]; fugacious, deciduous,” Examples are the calyx of the poppy and gills of a tadpole.

Early in 1842, Emerson’s oldest son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever. In his essay “Experience,” published two years later, Emerson says his son’s death “falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caduceus.” When I first wrote about this passage more than four years ago, I was more forgiving than I am today. Judging the grief of another, especially at the loss of a child, is probably indecent, but Emerson’s blithe Yankee coolness is creepy, as is the use of a precise but clinical word.

A final example from botany: “falcate.” This means sickle-shaped, usually referring to leaves, from the Latin falx for scythe or sickle. I know it from Quercus falcata, the Southern red oak, but I can’t help thinking of the Grim Reaper. In a journal passage from Aug. 5, 1858, about a boating excursion along the Assabet River, Thoreau writes:

“The black willows are perhaps in their best condition, - airy, rounded masses of light green rising one above another, with a few slender black stems, like umbrella handles, seen here and there in their midst, low spreading cumuli of slender falcate leaves, buttressed by smaller sallows, button-bushes, cornels, and pontederias, -- like long green clouds or wreaths of vapor resting on the riverside. They scarcely leave the impression of leaves, but rather of a low, swelling, rounded bank, even as the heaviest particles of alluvium are deposited nearest the channel. It is a peculiarity of this, which I think is our most interesting willow, that you rarely see the trunk and yet the foliage is never dense.”

Leave it to Thoreau to precisely observe the phenomenon of seeing something he can’t see or not seeing something he can.

[Go here for a “Dictionary of Botanical Epithets” and here for a “Dictionary of Botany.”]

`But Words He Loved and Mastered'

2011-11-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

Early in the life of Anecdotal Evidence, I proposed that someone assemble an anthology of poems about Henry James, starting with Auden’s elegy to the “Master of nuance and scruple,” and now I suggest a second festschrift, a gathering of verse about Samuel Johnson. His life of scholarship, labor, torment and triumph supplies ample material for good poems.

I’ll get things started with Ben Downing’s “On First Looking into Bate’s Life of Johnson” (The Calligraphy Shop, 2003), which lauds his “peerless prose / with its lapidary dominoes / augustly toppling, clause after clause.” Johnson shows up in several poems by David Ferry, and in Howard Baker’s “Samuel Johnson,” which suggests “We are all Boswells harkening the worms.”

A reader who identifies himself as Donald volunteered a poem in a comment on last Sunday’s post. “Samuel Johnson Talking” is by R.F. Brissenden (1928-1991), an Australian previously unknown to me, and carries the subtitle “Two things he was afraid of--madness and death...”:

“His great body shambled, groaned and stank,
Kicked stones, climbed mountains, rolled through
London streets;
Or snorted clumsy joy between the sheets
With ageing Tetty. When he ate and drank
Sweat dewed the straining forehead. Every breath
With every year grew harder: the huge frame,
Always ungovernable, in the end became
An enemy he hated more than death.

“But words he loved and mastered: when he talked
Confusion died; the world grew still to hear
His voice commanding chaos into art.
Language became the tight-rope which he walked
Above the mindless rush of guilt and fear
That thundered like Niagara in his heart.”

The final line in the first stanza reminds us of Johnson’s final coherent words, as reported by his friend and biographer Sir John Hawkins, which remind us of the gladiator’s salutation to Caesar: “Iam moriturus” – “I who am about to die.” In Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998), Lawrence Lipking describes a scene shortly before his death:

“Bloated with dropsy, Johnson tries to discharge the water by stabbing his legs with a lancet and scissors until the bedclothes are covered with blood. He even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.”

Johnson ranks among those writers whose life, at least for some readers, eclipses the work. That’s the curse of being the subject of the greatest of all biographies, but in Johnson both life and work are inextricably bound together, compelling and worthy of lifelong study. Brissenden brings his poem back to the work – “when he talked / Confusion died” and “His voice commanding chaos into art.”

Go here for an archive of poems and prose about Johnson from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and please pass along additional contributions to the Johnson anthology.

`Your Country Consists of Two Things'

2011-11-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

Helen Pinkerton writes:

“I was in the middle of the Boswell-Johnson tour of the Hebrides, when I had to stop, and now I can resume reading it. What a delight it is! though neither man really seems to be interested in the birdlife or plants, except Johnson's lament at the lack of trees on those barren islands.”

Boswell and Johnson spent eighty-three days in the summer and fall of 1773 touring Boswell’s homeland, an irresistible target for Johnson’s prickly sense of humor. Scotland was his favorite punch line, the eighteenth-century counterpart to Polish jokes, and now he was touring the butt of his comedy in person for the first time, as though collecting ammunition. He was sixty-three, Boswell thirty-two, and together they visited Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Inverness, Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, and Glasgow. Helen may be referring to this passage in Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), though there are several to choose from:

“A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice. At St. Andrews Mr. Boswell found only one, and recommended it to my notice; I told him it was rough and low, or looked as if I thought so. This, said he, is nothing to another a few miles off. I was still less delighted to hear that another tree was not to be seen nearer. Nay, said a gentleman that stood by, I know but of this and that tree in the county.”

The solitary Scottish tree reminds me of the opening stage direction in Waiting for Godot: “A country road. A tree.” In1785, the year after Johnson’s death, Boswell published his own account of their visit to Scotland, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The paucity of trees is revived as a topic of conversation in the entry for Aug. 20:

“We went and saw Colonel Nairne’s garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree. Unluckily the Colonel said, there was but this and another large tree in the county. This assertion was an excellent cue for Dr. Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it. He had expatiated to me on the nakedness of that part of Scotland which he had seen. His Journey had been violently abused, for what he had said upon this subject. But let it be considered, when Dr. Johnson talks of trees, he means trees of good size, such as he was accustomed to see in England; and of these there are certainly very few upon the eastern coast of Scotland.”

Part of the fun is watching Boswell navigate his conflicting loyalties to Johnson and the land of his birth, which explains why the italicized phrase in the sentence just quoted is amusing. In 1993, Yale University Press made the job easier by publishing an interleaved edition of the two books, Johnson and Boswell in Scotland, edited by the eighteenth-century scholar Pat Rogers. Corresponding passage in the texts can be read and compared on facing pages, and Rogers amply quotes from their correspondence and other books. In his introduction Rogers writes:

“For both men the trip had been a challenge and an experiment. Johnson wanted to see an area about as remote from London as Tibet is today; he had never been out of England before, though he was to make short peregrinations to north Wales and to Paris in later years. He wished to explore a more primitive landscape…”

Despite the exertions of travel, Johnson enjoyed himself, in part because he encountered so many opportunities to pester Boswell and his fellow Scots. Boswell quotes him in the Journal saying:

“Your country consists of two things, stone and water. There is, indeed, a little earth above the stone in some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping out.”

And later, in the Life of Johnson:

“What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?"

`No Blanks, Just Thanks'

2011-11-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

As a reporter I wrote thousands of profiles varying in length from a phrase to many pages of copy. It’s a form – no, it’s not a form. That’s presumptuous. A profile is not a sestina. The rules of composition are dictated by the subject and the writer’s sensibility, not an objective set of strictures. Call it a template or simply another good excuse for writing. Whatever we call it, a profile is an approach I’ve always found congenial.

I had plenty of models, from Chekhov and Pritchett to Liebling and Balliett. A gifted writer of profiles works in two equally essential media – words and human beings. People are almost the only mysteries I’m interested in reading. When writing a profile, you’re forced to push yourself out of the way and try to get close to your subject. A good profile can be revelatory of the writer but only indirectly. The focus is fixed on the subject – good discipline for writers, a notably narcissistic crowd.

Recently I was given a dangerous assignment. Next month, my in-laws celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, testimony to modern medicine and the wonder of human adaptation. My wife asked me to write the story of her parents’ half-century marriage. I’ve known them for fourteen years and picked up much of the story incrementally along the way, but the act of formally interviewing them in two sessions totaling ninety minutes helped me find a latent narrative.

Their lives hardly resemble mine, at least in externals. Canadian by birth, Peruvian by residence, trilingual, well-traveled on three continents, they are cosmopolitans. My mother-in-law was a registered nurse. My father-in-law was a pilot, owned an oceanfront marina and for forty years has sold commercial real estate. They live down the hill from the battlefield in Fredericksburg, Va. The challenge was to make it cohere and amuse without offending.

I’ve been reading No Second Eden, the late Turner Cassity’s collection from 2002. The concluding lines of “The Grateful Minimalist” stand as a stoically amusing life summation, especially the final lines:

“Few works;
Some quirks.

“No blanks,
Just thanks.”

That concluding rhyme brought to mind Auden’s “Lullaby,” a late poem, a sort of self-elegy or settling of accounts, an acceptance of one’s life and death. These lines are from the start of the third stanza:

“Let your last thinks all be thanks:
praise your parents who gave you
a Super-Ego of strength
that saves you so much bother,
digit friends and dear them all,
then pay fair attribution
to your age, to having been
born when you were.”

`And Now in Age I Bud Again'

2011-11-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

I had just walked out of the library with two books in my bag – The English Poems of George Herbert (edited by Helen Wilcox, Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (1969) – when I noticed a spring-like spray of white flowers on the lawn outside the entrance to the Fondren Library. They grow in sparse irregular patches in the northwest corner of the quadrangle, and I knelt on the grass to get a closer look.

Each blossom has four white petals and is about the diameter of an 18-point “O.” The leaves are ovate and green, though some are tinged reddish-purple on their undersides. The plant grows close to the soil and forms a dense spidery mat in the surrounding grass. The roots are shallow and I easily pulled one from the dry ground. I wasn’t able to identify it online, and suspect it may have been cultivated as ground-cover. It could be indigenous to anywhere in the world, though I’m hoping it’s a native species.

I’m still floored by plants flowering in the second week of November. When we lived in Houston the first time, we bought a house from a lady who had lived in it since she and her husband had it built in 1955. She had landscaped the yard so at least two or three species were flowering every day of the year.

Wilcox, an English professor at Bangor University in North Wales, quotes with approval a critic who describes the sixth stanza of George Herbert’s “The Flower” as “the most perfect and most vivid stanza in the whole of Herbert’s work”:

“And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.”

I picked two blossoms from the flower I brought back to my office and marked “The Flower” (pages 566-567) with them. If you find these nameless pressed beauties, please let me know.

`The Realm of Hope'

2011-11-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

Two emails arrived almost simultaneously on Sunday. The first was from an old friend and former newspaper colleague, Bob Whitaker. Both of us were friends with Chris Ringwald when we worked together as reporters more than twenty years ago in upstate New York. Inexplicably, Chris committed suicide on Sept. 26. Bob was writing to tell me of a college fund set up by another friend for Chris’ three children. At the end of his email, Bob says:

“I know I am still in shock. I just can't quite imagine how this came to be.”

As always, Bob is precise with words: When I think about Chris and his final moments, reality staggers even my imagination. It’s like trying to contemplate a previously unknown color or the experience of my own death, and I can’t do it. In the Life, Boswell asks, “But is not the fear of death natural to man?” and Johnson answers: “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.”

The second email came from a stranger, Rhoda Koening, a New York-born writer who has lived in England for twenty-five years. She told me about her new book, The New Devil's Dictionary: A New Version of the Cynical Classic (Lyons Press). It’s her reworking of Ambrose Bierce’s vitriolic lexicon, written “to celebrate its centenary,” she said, “and full of peppy pessimism for our times.”

I find Bierce’s savoring of imbecility a little cheap and self-righteous. (He defined "self-esteem" as "an erroneous appraisement.") Even when he’s right, or almost right, his lip-smacking seems indecent. Yes, he spent almost four years in the Union army during the Civil War, fought at Shiloh, Stones River and Chickamauga, and was wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and thus earned his right to cynicism honestly. But his connoisseurship of human failing too often stinks of Schadenfreude. Here’s his definition of “present,” as in this moment:

“That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.”

`I Have to Admire Somebody Like That'

2011-11-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

One stoned night – probably morning – some forty years ago we sat around the living room, as sophomores will, playing with ideas and issuing diktats. Sense is fluid in such settings, alternately ignored and imposed, and at some point the subject of privileged times and places materialized: If you could transport yourself to any time anywhere in history, when and where would that be?

A friend, a history major and today a museum curator, promptly chose Munich, November 1923. His object was at once noble and romantic. He would kill Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch before he could be sent to Landsberg and write Mein Kampf.

My time-travel fantasy was equally romantic but less focused and, typically, rooted in books: London, circa 1760. I had recently been introduced to eighteenth-century England by a professor and had fallen hard for it (and her, in my customary unrequited fashion). I had no mission in mind and just wanted to hang around with Johnson, Boswell, Sterne, Hogarth, Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith and Burke. A few decades earlier it would have been Swift and Pope. The thought that most of these men would have had nothing to do with an ill-mannered, underbred youth from the Colonies never entered my head.

If the parlor game were revived today, my reply would remain the same, and I’m pleased to know the poet-novelist Fred Chappell shares my taste in historical eras and is more articulate about it than I could ever be. Asked to pick an alternate time and place by Irv Broughton (The Writer’s Mind: Interviews with American Writers, Vol. III, 1990) he explains:

“In the eighteenth century, there was the freedom to be a writer. It’s the first time we had professional writers, and also I admire the thought and impulse of the eighteenth century. Rationalism seems to me a tenable way of thought…That was the clearest period of human thought—the most detailed, the most involved, sometimes the most despairing. But it gave us, besides all the eighteenth-century literature we usually think of, it gave us our American Constitution.”

I wish I had said that, and he almost makes me contemplate changing my answer to late-twentieth-century North Carolina, but Chappell is just warming up. Asked to name his favorite eighteenth-century thinker, he replies:

“Samuel Johnson. I like a man who knows his own mind. I don’t like these wishy-washy guys who pussyfoot around with their statements. I like somebody who says something definite. I like all The Lives of the Poets. The judgments sometimes seem to us right on and sometimes they seem to us scatterbrained these days. Nevertheless, the authority of the prose, the ability to handle abstractions in such a way that they don’t seem abstract in the least but have the conviction of concrete statements, the ability to read and perceive the inner outlines, the inner structure of work, that seems to me to be very rare; and the ability to put things in definite form with seeming ease, even in conversation—I have to admire somebody like that.”

I might add to Chappell’s explanatory list of virtues Johnson’s human sympathy, his humility, his humor and ferocity, and the enormity of his learning. Few people have known as much about so many bodies of knowledge, from chemistry and theology to lexicography and the history of English poetry, as Johnson. Who wouldn’t want to meet him?

`A Realization of the Poignancy of Light'

2011-11-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

The morning was clear and bright. The unaccustomed chill lent a New England crispness to an autumn morning in Houston. A shaft of sunlight flickered through the live oak behind the house and illuminated a patch of wooden deck. Casting small shadows across the grain of the wood were two fallen leaves and a stick – a random still life of unexpected beauty and, true to the season, wistfulness.

In 2009, the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco published Edward Hopper & Company, a collection of three Hopper oils, four watercolors and three drawings, accompanied by forty-four photographs taken by eight photographers. In his introduction, Jeffrey Fraenkel explains that none is a “Hopper imitator.” Rather, the photographers are “artists who had found aspects of Hopper’s spirit echoing in their own sensibilities.”

The pictures in the volume are selected and organized with remarkably good taste. One of the photographers, Robert Adams, famed for his depiction of the “New West,” contributes a brief essay, “The Difference a Painter Makes.” He describes growing up in New Jersey and moving with his family at age 12 to Wisconsin, where he first saw Hopper’s paintings in a magazine:

“The pictures were a comfort but of course none could permanently transport me home. In the months that followed, however, they began to give me something lasting, a realization of the poignancy of light. With it, all places were interesting.”

In this video, Adams talks about the centrality of light, as energy and metaphor, to human life. In “Celebration” (Taken in Faith, 2002), Helen Pinkerton writes:

“In this loved scene being and essence shine,
It is and is itself, like Dante’s wheel,
While whole and part, each subatomic spark,
Dependent for existence, undivine,
Disclose the self-existent, first and real.
Light springs from light and not from primal dark.”

`Peoples the Vacuum with American Light'

2011-11-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

Hotel lobbies are transient places, or places that accommodate transience. We pass through them on the way to somewhere else. They simulate the rootedness and comfort of a living room – couches, lamps, carpets – while resonating with adventure, illicit or otherwise. Think of all the hotel lobbies in films noir. This is from Raymond Chandler’s final complete novel, Playback (1958):

“The main part of the lobby was up three steps and through an arch. There were people in it just sitting, the dedicated hotel lounge sitters, usually elderly, usually rich, usually doing nothing but watching with hungry eyes. They spend their lives that way.”

On the second page of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956), Tommy Wilhelm passes through the lobby of the building where he lives in Manhattan, the Hotel Gloriana:

“After breakfast the old guests sat down on the green leather armchairs and sofas in the lobby and began to gossip and look into the papers; they had nothing to do but wait out the day.”

Edward Hopper painted “Hotel Lobby” in 1943. I’ve just read Harriet G. Warkel’s Paper to Paint: Edward Hopper’s `Hotel Lobby’ (2008), published by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which owns the painting. Warkel works there as curator of American painting and sculpture, and her monograph supplies interesting details about the evolution of the painting. She notes, for instance, that the fourth figure in picture, the night clerk whose face is barely visible above the lamp shade on the right, was a late addition. She says:

“The final placement of the shadowy clerk may be the artist’s suggestion of the mystery surrounding people waiting in a hotel lobby.”

Well, yes. Like many Hopper paintings, “Hotel Lobby” suggests an enigmatic narrative, and the clerk adds another layer of mystery. But Warkel, like many who write about art, consumes much space saying little. There’s a lot of psychological speculation, many paragraphs about “alter egos” and “the inner workings of the artist’s mind,” but sixty pages devoted to a single painting have to be filled with something. When she writes “Perhaps this explains why a Hopper painting is difficult to interpret even though it is rooted in reality,” she fails to see that the two parts of that sentence don’t go together.

A deeper reader of Hopper’s paintings is L.S. Sissman. In the first section of “The West Forties: Morning, Noon, and Night,” titled “Welcome to Hotel Majesty (Singles $4 Up),” Sissman renders a Bellow-like portrait of another Broadway hotel lobby. Its guests carry bags

“…containing their one best
Suit, shirt, tie, Jockey shorts, and pair of socks,
Half-empty pint, electric-razor box,
Ex-wife’s still-smiling picture, high-school ring,
Harmonica, discharge, and everything.”

Among his other gifts, Sissman shares Hopper’s eye for evocative detail. He admired Hopper’s paintings, as “American Light: A Hopper Retrospective” (Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman, 1978) suggests. Describing “Sun in an Empty Room,” painted by Hopper four years before his death in 1967, Sissman writes:

“…leaving a sizeable memorial
To his life and to the state he lived in:
A green tree blowing outside; streaming in
Through the two-light window, forming cream oblongs
On window wall and alcove wall and on
The bare wood floor, a shaft of morning sun
Peoples the vacuum with American light.”

`A Great Scythe Laid Down There and Forgotten'

2011-11-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

The last book Sherwood Anderson published during his lifetime was Home Town (1940), a collection of photographs from the archive assembled during the Great Depression by the Farm Security Administration. Pictures by Dorthea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Anderson’s impressionistic essay, along with seven by Walker Evans. The other photos seldom rise above the level of competent photojournalism, while the classical austerity and absence of sentimental pleading in Evans’ work distinguish it from the rest of the book, prose and photos. Evans turns documentary into art or, rather, he makes art that happens to have documentary value.

For more than forty years I’ve casually associated Anderson and Evans, and it’s pleasing to learn their indelibly American art overlapped. Since then, Edward Hopper and Donald Justice have joined this informal, non-critical gathering of kindred American artists. All reflect on nostalgia for a passing or gone America, with varying degrees of fondness and disaffectedness. Anderson’s work, the most severely marred by sentimentality, mingles nostalgia and alienation. In a magazine piece from 1929, “In a Strange Town,” he writes:

“I may stay here in this town another day or I may go on to another town. No one knows where I am. I am taking this bath in life, as you see, and when I have had enough of it I shall go home feeling refreshed.”

Corny and unconvincing, I know. But read the entire piece, which amounts to little more than a string of folksy anecdotes written by a one-time acquaintance of Gertrude Stein, and you can hears whispers of the loneliness sometimes captured by Evans. Justice, a Florida native, admired both Anderson and Evans. To “Mule Team and Poster” (The Sunset Maker, 1987), he adds “on a photograph by Walker Evans (Alabama, 1936).” Some critics have read Evans’ photograph as a critique of racial segregation and the tawdriness of life in the South, but that’s misguided. Justice sees something more interesting and sublime. Here are the closing lines of his poem:

“And a long shadow- / the last shade perhaps in all of Alabama- / Stretches beneath the wagons, crookedly, / like a great scythe laid down there and forgotten.”

Evans was born on this date in 1903 in St. Louis, Mo., birthplace a generation earlier of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore.

`The Bite of Word on Reality'

2011-11-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

“And so the barriers fell: now nearly everyone in the developed world is literate, there is plenty to read, and reading material is dirt cheap. But still people don’t read. Why? The obvious answer—though one that is difficult for us to admit—is that most people don’t like to read.”

The truth is bitter but preferable, I suppose, to sweet lies. The writer, Marshall Poe, posits a “Reading Class,” about which I’m skeptical. He says its members make up “a good portion of the cultural elite in the developed world,” and adds: “We love reading.” That’s wishful thinking. I know a lot of smart people, ostensibly part of the “cultural elite,” who don’t read, and plenty of dullards who do, and political-economy, fashionable or otherwise, has nothing to do with it.

It may seem I’m introducing Poe only to dismiss him, but I endorse his core conclusion – “most people don’t want to read and, therefore, don’t read.” It’s his proposed causes and solutions for this state of affairs that I reject. For instance:

“Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read.”

Nor were we evolved to perform microsurgery or compose the Brandenburg Concertos. Natural selection can’t account for everything, particularly in highly evolved organisms. Darwin wasn’t a vulgar determinist, despite what some of his acolytes claim. People don’t read for many complicated reasons. Chief among them is that reading is work, active engagement, which suggests odious labor. Other diversions, though less rewarding, are seductively passive and easy. Poe writes:

“…we have misidentified the `problem’ facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.”

This is self-flattery, nothing more. I see no correspondence between the number of books read and the quantity of wisdom acquired. Knowledge, of course, is not wisdom. Too many readers, or at least people who like to talk about the books they claim to have read, are as comparably foolish as their bookless brethren. Reading a good book presents us with the opportunity to acquire wisdom, scholarship and common sense – in addition to pleasure -- but we’re under no obligation to accept it.

Inevitably, Poe gets around to digital solutions, “using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.” That we /they dichotomy still rankles, the presumption that “we” are morally obligated to enlighten the blinkered masses:

“We need to face facts: people do not want to read, they want to watch and listen. Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds.”

How is this different from force-feeding Mozart, like musical spinach, to infants? We’re readers, not missionaries. Like most people, I resent being proselytized. If you tell me I have to read something, unless I’m paid to do so I probably won’t. There are other ways to make palatable “the best which has been thought and said,” beginning with reading it ourselves and not frittering away time on J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter books. Dumbing down is never the answer, assuming there is an answer. Action, not words: Read good books and share your enthusiasm. Read bad books and share your distaste. Don’t be shy and don’t be cowed by any class, reading or otherwise. The only lifetime reading plan that ever worked for me was organized serendipity. Here, for example, is something I reread on Monday, on the final page of Hugh Kenner’s A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973), a book I reviewed thirty-eight years ago:

“He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes, and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for a reader’s attention. In the modern history of literature at least he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.”

`The Portentous Manner in Which He Said It'

2011-11-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

From Anthony Hecht’s The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Harvard University Press, 1993) I’ve learned that Auden coined a word useful enough to be enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary: soodling. From sound alone, without a context, what do you think it means? First I thought of noodling, as in a musician idly playing, working out a part or simply killing time. The same goes for doodling, another idle pastime. Because of its faintly comic sound, I guessed it might refer to that fine American folk art, goofing off.

In fact, the OED defines “soodling” as an “adj. poet. Rare” meaning “flows or moves slowly.” Auden uses it in the poem “Under Sirius” in Nones (1952): “…the baltering torrent / Shrunk to a soodling thread.” The dictionary says the word is “Of obscure origin,” but goes on to cite two uses from 1821, both by John Clare in his poem “The Village Minstrel”: “To go so soodling up and down the street” and “While I as unconcern'd went soodling on.” Hecht apparently is incorrect when he describes Auden, a lifelong reader of the OED, as “inventing” the word.

The OED also gives soodly, “adj. dial. leisurely, slow,” and cites the same poem by Clare: “The horse-boy, with a soodly gait, / Slow climbs the stile.” Soodling is a word we would expect Clare to use. When not in the insane asylum he was an inveterate soodler, a wanderer in nature, at once drifting and attentive to plants and animals. He writes in a letter: “…I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbors who are insensible to every thing but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.”

Clare is cited 765 times in the OED; Auden, 749 times. Among the latter is Auden’s use of “baltering” in the line from “Under Sirius” quoted above. The first sense of “to balter” is defined as an intransitive verb meaning “To tumble about, to dance clumsily.” In his biography of the poet, when describing Auden’s undergraduate days at Christ Church, Humphrey Carpenter reports:

“In his conversation as in his poetry, he used a vocabulary drawn from scientific, psychological and philosophical terminology, and from his discoveries among the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary. Words like 'glabrous', 'sordes', 'callipygous', 'peptonised' (which all appeared in his poetry during this period) delighted him but disconcerted his listeners. ‘I did not understand much of what Wystan said,’ recorded one undergraduate contemporary, who nevertheless `felt it was important because of the portentous manner in which he said it.’”

Even if he didn’t coin the word we can surely describe Auden as a devoted soodler in the OED.

`The Kindly Mirrors of Future Times'

2011-10-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

Forty-one years ago last month I went away to college, the first in my family to do so, when I was seventeen and ridiculously unprepared. I had read too much and comprehended too little. For two years I lived in Rodgers Quadrangle, a men’s dormitory on the campus of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. This is where I first rehearsed adult living, the scene of many rites of passage, most of them embarrassing to recall. The dorm was demolished last year to make way for a new one. A friend sent me a brief video of the destruction and I found another.

It’s not nostalgia I feel. That’s an indulgence I instinctively resist. Rather, knocking down the dorm leaves me with another mental map that no longer corresponds to an existing place. My memory is spatial. I remember rooms and the arrangement of objects in rooms. I remember the corner of my dorm room where I taped a sepia-toned picture of Kafka. I remember where we put the stereo and listened to An American in Paris and “Layla” for the first time. I remember the gooseneck lamp I used so as not to bother my roommate while I annotated Ulysses. And I remember the blanket on which I sat while reading Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.

My favorite among Nabokov’s stories is “A Guide to Berlin,” written in Russian in 1925 and not translated into English (by the author and his son Dmitri) until 1976, when it was published in Details of a Sunset. It’s about the creation of memories and the possibility of willing ourselves into the memories of others. The narrator says:

“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: To portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."

`Prophecy Is a Matter of Seeing Near Things'

2011-10-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

Seeing an artist’s work for the first time in person after viewing it for years online or in books is risky, a set-up for disappointment. Before entering the gallery I recalibrate expectations and try to shed them, knowing it’s not possible but hoping to simulate a first-time experience. If the work is mediocre or lousy, I’ve lost nothing, only a little time. If it’s as good as I had hoped, or better, my pleasure is heightened by the sense of discovery and surprise.

Mary McCleary’s collages are better than I could have expected, more technically accomplished, more densely layered, more exuberant, funny, frightening and “literary” than I could have wished for. Twenty-seven of them are on display at Art League Houston through Nov. 12, and most can be seen on McCleary’s website.

Take “The Fall of Rome,” a small mixed-media collage from 2006. McCleary divides her rectangle into two triangles, blue above, white below, night sky and snow. Moving downward left to right along the diagonal is a herd of twelve reindeer, perhaps Santa’s. That’s it, except for a multi-colored strip of text running like ticker-tape around the perimeter of the picture. The text is small and unobtrusive, integrated unpretentiously into the design. Typed on it is the poem by W.H. Auden that lends its title to the collage. The final stanza comes as a sort of punch line to McCleary’s picture:

“Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.”

By taking Auden’s image literally, McCleary permits us to read his 1947 poem as if for the first time. She does something comparably comic and inspired in “Time the Painter,” a large (59-3/4 inches by 45-1/4 inches) collage from 2006. A man in overalls stands on a ladder (McCleary is fond of diagonals), painting a clapboard house. I should note that though her collages look like paintings from a distance and in reproduction, each is meticulously assembled from thousands of three-dimensional objects. Along the top edge of the collage is another of McCleary’s ticker-tape texts, this one unidentified but instantly identifiable--

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

--as the opening lines of “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets. Another of my favorites among her works is “Trotline” (2009), in which a man watches as nine boys “bob” for apples hanging by strings from a trotline. Several of the boys have tags hanging from strings around their necks. One is labeled “2 Cor. 11:14.” In the King James Bible: “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” A trotline is a long fishing line strung with shorter lines, each ending with a baited hook. If, instead of being a Christian Scientist, Joseph Cornell had been an apocalyptically minded reader of the Book of Revelation, his work might have come to resemble McCleary’s.

Her collages are always reminding me of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. I don’t know whether she has read O’Connor or feels any conscious kinship, and I’m not suggesting anything so banal as “influence.” In an essay from 1960, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” O’Connor writes of grotesque characters in contemporary fiction (principally her own, we infer):

“They seem to carry an invisible burden; their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity. I believe that they come about from the prophetic vision peculiar to any novelist whose concerns I have been describing. In the novelist's case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque.”

Images of paradise lost, of hell with a happy face, proliferate in McCleary’s collages. In near things she sees signs and portents.