'A Forlorn Hope'

Published in the February 1950 issue of Partisan Review was a “symposium” -- always a feature beloved by editors and loquacious respondents – this one titled “Religion and the Intellectuals.” Such things tend to be heavy on posturing and vast generalizations. I might have been more interested had the symposium been called “Religion and the Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeants" or “Religion and the Emergency Room Nurses.” The editors stack the deck in their introduction: “The aim is to submit an important issue to  the best intellectual opinion.” Normally I run at the arrival of “issues,” but the participants include James Agee, Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Marianne Moore and the reliably tiresome John Dewey. 

Auden’s response is by far the longest – nine pages as printed in the original magazine -- followed by Agee’s at seven and a half pages. The briefest, at one page, is Moore’s. All of her responses are pithy. Her answers are consistently shorter than the editors’ questions. The third question is actually seven questions, which boil down to “Can culture exist without a positive religion?” Here is Moore’s reply:

 

“Culture so far has not existed without religion and I doubt that it could. Religion that does not result first of all in self-discipline will never result in ‘social discipline’ and could be the prey of any form of tyranny. Can culture be purely Christian? It partakes of varied cultural elements.”

 

The editors’ fifth question is five sentences long. They drag in Heidegger and Malraux. What they pose has something to do with separating “religious consciousness (as an attitude toward man and human life) from religious belief.” Moore responds:

 

“If everything literary were deleted, in which there is some thought of deity, ‘literature’ would be a puny residue; one could almost say that each striking literary work is some phase of the desire to resist or affirm ‘religion.’”

 

As an afterthought or clarification, Moore adds:  

 

“That belief in God is not easy, is seemingly one of God's injustices; and self-evidently, imposed piety results in the opposite. Coercion and religious complacency are serious enemies of religion -- whereas persecution invariably favors spiritual conviction. But this is certain, any attempted substituting of self for deity, is a forlorn hope.”

 

Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1887 and raised in the manse of its First Presbyterian Church, where her maternal grandfather served as pastor. Unlike many Modernists of her generation, Moore remained a Christian all of her life.

'The Sum of All the Losses'

Abraham Lincoln was six feet, four inches tall, making him the tallest of U.S. presidents (LBJ was half an inch shorter). The crown of his trademark top hat – a stovepipe, it was called -- measured twelve inches in height. Allowing for the silk hat settling on his head, the hatted president would have been nearly seven feet tall. Historians calculate that the average height of a Civil War soldier was five feet eight. 

The hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater is now in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Lincoln added the black silk mourning band after the death from typhoid fever of his youngest son, Willie, in 1862. In “Lincoln’s Hat,” the American poet Herbert Morris (1928-2001) begins by disparaging biography if we’re looking for insights into historical figures (or perhaps anyone). It “will be to no avail / none whatever.” Rather:

 

“Look, instead, to the edges, to the borders,

where a thing is itself but something more

(always somehow becoming something more),

to the peripheral, the inadvertent,

something no doubt at first glance partly missed,

or wholly missed, in our hunger to search

that face for clues, to take that map of anguish

(slowly, carefully) in one’s hands and read it . . .”

 

Look for insights in Lincoln’s “borders”; for example, “perhaps, the hat, / that hat by which, two blocks away, a stranger / might know, gait aside, who it was approaching.” Morris weaves into his poem a letter a child might have written to Lincoln. She asks why he wears such a hat, “which seems to all but hide your face beneath it,” and adds:

 

“My three little brothers, Momma and me

are of one mind in this--we take true pride

in you as President. You are a good man.

Yrs. truly. [P. S. Momma says to tell you

Poppa is fighting with the Union forces

at Petersburg and he thinks likewise too.]

We remember you each night in our prayers.”

 

Herbert includes no reply from the president. As usual, his blank verse recalls Henry James’ late prose, as in The American Scene (1906). The style is halting, endlessly qualifying, as though revealing the effort it takes to articulate the speaker’s thought. The final section of the poem’s 124 lines is grim, with Willie’s death, Mary Todd Lincoln’s torment and the ever-growing list of war casualties:

 

‘. . . muttering to herself,

to him, of the frightful burden of evil

in the world, o the weight of it, of darkness

falling, falling, forever falling, of how

no grief, no mourning, none, proves quite sufficient,

ever, to match the sum of all the losses,

those suffered yesterday and, worse, much worse,

losses yet to be suffered, still to come).

The blackness rises, rises slowly, straight up,

undermining those definitions, rising,

having to do with inadvertence, edges,

borders, peripheries, those preconceptions

we carried here with us, making us question

what part, biographer, is hat, pure hat,

pure real but imagined hat, what part,

rising, rising, immense, blacker than black

(more than one knows what to do with), is Lincoln.”

  

His law partner and biographer, William H. Herndon, wrote that Lincoln was “a curious – mysterious – quite an incomprehensible man.”

 

[Morris published “Lincoln’s Hat” in the Winter 1987 issue of The Hudson Review and collected it in The Little Voices of the Pears (1989).]

'We Enter Again November'

The final stanza of Howard Nemerov’s “Elegy of Last Resort” from his second collection, Guide to the Ruins (1950): 

“We enter again November; cold late light

 Glazes the field, a little fever of love,

 Held in numbed hands, admires the false gods;

 While lonely on this coast the sea bids us

 Farewell, and the salt crust hardens toward winter.”

 

The poem first appeared in the Autumn 1948 issue of The Sewanee Review, three years after Nemerov's discharge from the service at age twenty-five. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, he had flown fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. As we expect with the work of  a young poet, we hear self-conscious echoes – of Eliot and Auden, and an allusion to Death in Venice. The poem evokes life entering dormancy and suggests the tawdry sadness of Atlantic City in the off-season (“The boardwalks are empty, the cafes closed,” it begins.)

 

In “The Consent,” published more than thirty years later in Sentences (198o), Nemerov returns to November, this time recounting the odd behavior of ginkgo trees: They drop all of their leaves on a single night:

 

“Late in November, on a single night

Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees

That stand along the walk drop all their leaves

In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind

But as though to time alone: the golden and green

Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday

Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

 

“What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?

What in those wooden motives so decided

To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,

Rebellion or surrender? and if this

Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?

What use to learn the lessons taught by time,

If a star at any time may tell us: Now.”

 

Ginkgo biloba first evolved in East Asia during the Middle Jurassic epoch some 170 million years ago. We think of them, figuratively, as living fossils. In recent years they have gained popularity in the West for their reputed health benefits. Their fan-shaped leaves turn a buttery yellow in the fall and are the most beautiful in the world. Nemerov mentions none of this. He reminds us that we are as mortal as leaves. We dismiss determinism and proudly parade our free will. What force beyond us might some early winter night erase us from creation? Clearly, apart from their beauty, gingkoes intrigued Nemerov.

 

Poets and other writers develop private lexicons of reference. Some dwell on October. Whether consciously or otherwise, November appears throughout Nemerov’s work, an uneasy spell between autumn and winter.

'The Whole Point of Literature'

I learned of some twits who see no reason to read Tolstoy because he was such a terrible human being, as though this constituted recently declassified information. Such an understanding of literature and literary history, if followed to its logical conclusion, will result in a reading list consisting of three titles by Sally Rooney and a reprint of What Is to Be Done? Here’s what the English poet-critic C.H. Sisson wrote to a would-be poet in 1976: 

“[I]t is the whole point of literature—or a large part of the point—that it can cure one a little of the follies of one’s own time, which one imagines at first are not follies. Thus by reading the appropriate masters one can learn that people in Roman times, in the middle ages, or in the seventeenth century, had quite different—yet related—ways of thinking about things, yet were human entirely, and as good as we are or, in the case of the surviving master-writers, much better.”

 

Reading is undertaken, especially with writers from the past, in a spirit of humility, not unlike the way a student approaches a respected teacher. Sure, plenty of wretches have written books, some of which are masterpieces. The only way you’ll find out is by reading them. Trust me: the proportion of saints among writers is infinitesimal. Here’s how Joseph Epstein ranks the author of War and Peace in The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books, 2023):

 

“Tolstoy was, in my view, the greatest of novelists, perhaps the greatest writer of all time and among all genres. Every character he created comes alive, every novel and story he wrote stirs one’s imagination, making one want to read on to learn how things will come out for the people he has created.”

 

[Sisson’s letter to Clare Holland is published in the Spring 2010 issue (dedicated to Sisson’s work) of Agenda, the English poetry journal.]

'About As Approachable As a Porcupine'

The large bay window facing the garden in front of our house is better than television. No commercials, no dependency on internet whims, no bills to pay. That’s where I do most of my reading (best lighting in the house). From the couch I watch the show in the garden. Butterflies, moths and skippers. The occasional Northern mockingbird or cardinal. Squirrels, hummingbirds and this year a bumper crop of lizards – green and brown anoles. Not to mention the occasional human neighbor. Ten-thousand little comedies and dramas. 

One of the qualities I most admire in Theodore Dalrymple’s writing is the pleasure he takes in observing commonplace things. That’s a virtue I associate with curiosity and evenness of temper, a mature sensibility, one immune to more fashionable distractions. His latest essay is “On the Preservation of Wonderment,” and as usual he covers a lot of ground in a small space, beginning with Byron Rogers’ biography of the Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas, The Man Who Went Into the West (Aurum, 2006). I bought the book eighteen years ago after reading Dalrymple’s review in City Journal. The biography is an often amusing account of a difficult, notably humorless man who happened to be a brilliant poet. In a 1962 letter to Robert Conquest, Philip Larkin referred to him as “our friend Arsewipe Thomas.” Dalrymple writes in the new essay:

 

“He was both an impossible and a perfect subject for a biography: impossible because he was so secretive and prickly, and perfect for the very same reason. Thomas was about as approachable as a porcupine, but Rogers, who met him several times, manages to pluck out, if not the heart, at least the pericardium of his mystery.”

Thomas detested the modern world and preached a harsh asceticism (no central heating – in Wales). “Thomas was more interested in birds than in his fellow-humans,” Dalrymple writes. “They were for him a consolation for the ugliness of life, especially in its modern, suburbanised form.” After many digressions (all interesting) along the way, Dalrymple gets to the subject of wonder and quotes lines from “Swifts,” a poem in Thomas’ 1966 collection Pietà:

 

“The swifts winnow the air.

It is pleasant at the end of the day

To watch them. I have shut the mind

On fools. The ‘phone’s frenzy

Is over. There is only the swifts’

Restlessness in the sky

And their shrill squealing.

Sometimes they glide,

Or rip the silk of the wind

In passing. Unseen ribbons

Are trailing upon the air.

There is no solving the problem

They pose, that had millions of years

Behind it, when the first thinker

Looked at them.

Sometimes they meet

In the high air: what is engendered

At contact? I am learning to bring

Only my wonder to the contemplation

Of the geometry of their dark wings.”

 

Dalrymple finally settles on the subject of wonder vs. scientific observation and study, a subject close to my professional heart:

 

“To study [swifts and other birds] scientifically, according to Thomas, would be to dilute or soil our wonderment, to make what is marvellous prosaic. . . . As on many questions, I face both ways. I know what they mean: we need to maintain our wonderment at Creation, and it is terrible if we lose it or never have it in the first place (a condition that social media promotes).”

 

All true. Dalrymple is close to identifying a primal division among people. My thoughts? Science complements wonder. The more I learn about the family Dactyloidae (anoles, and check out that etymology) the more wondrous they seem.

Dalrymple concludes:

 

“On the other hand, to know more about the nature of reality can merely push the wonderment one question further back. A child at a certain stage of development asks an adult Why? and, on receiving an answer, asks again Why? How many questions does it take to reach the stage of unanswerability, and therefore of wonderment? No doubt Thomas would say, then, why bother to find out why? Why not just stop at the wonderment evoked by mere observation?

 

“I am glad that there are poets who ask this question, as I am glad that there are people who did not stop to ask it.”

'Winter Came in August Killing Fruit and Seed'

A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The American Scholar: 

“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”

 

It reads like the epitaph on a stone in a cemetery one will never again visit. Who is Case? Why have I never heard of him? How did he die? Here is the accompanying poem, “As Grammarians”:

 

“This life which is a sentence

Is also a declaration.

We make the sense of it

In our own terms.

As grammarians

We assert our meaning,

In what we decline,

In what we affirm,

In the conjugation of love,

In the predicates

And imperatives

And ambiguities

Of prosaic choice

We essay briefly

To define ourselves

Before the stop.”

 

A clever exercise in double-meanings. Not a syllable out of place. The author has taken pains to make it work. No filler and nothing to excess. It leaves me wanting to read more by this guy. Here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“The pearly throat of that peacock age was torn

In summer and its shriek yet grows, screaming

Unheard in all our days and deeds, like static

From a falling star, unseeming as the dust

Of space, yet crying murder as it bleeds.

So the voiceless moon imparting gravity

To frivolous tides roils the world unseen

But never hides its light nor ever slows.

 

“Slain then the nightingale and the steed,

The garden wall then fallen, the enchanted

Wood a tiring room for weary death

And summer’s lawn sown to widows’ weed.

For winter came in August killing fruit and seed.

In that broken season forever died the rose.”

 

“Winter came in August”: The Great War changed everything and we’re still dealing with its repercussions. Case’s poem reminds me of Ford Madox Ford, who enlisted in the Welch Regiment in 1915 at age forty-two. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle, he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by the explosion of a German shell, suffered memory loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated.

 

Ford was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid. For the rest of the war he was stationed on the North Yorkshire coast, where he helped train troops. Ford was promoted to lieutenant and then to captain, and in 1918 held the temporary rank of brevet major. On Armistice Day, Ford was still in North Yorkshire. He was discharged in 1919. Ford went on to write the greatest of all Great War fiction, the tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28).

 

In a 1931 letter to T.R. Smith, Ford writes: “The world before the war is one thing and must be written down in one manner; the after-war world is quite another and calls for quite different treatment.”

 

Does anyone know anything about Edward Case?

'Till Love and Fame to Nothingness Do Sink'

Dr. Johnson thought the first aim of biography was utilitarian: “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” The reader reads the life of another, reflects on it and applies the lessons he deduces to himself. In the early pages of his 1963 biography John Keats, W. Jackson Bate likens the life of the poet to an unexpected figure: Abraham Lincoln. Both overcame unpromising beginnings unlikely to encourage achievement, and succeeded. In this they resemble another artist, Louis Armstrong, and Johnson himself. Bate writes: 

“Of no major writer, in any language, have the early years more closely paralleled the traditional folktales of the orphan forced to seek his own fortune. No self-conscious fear of sentimentality, no uneasy wriggle backward into the sophistications or timidities of detachment, can minimize this moving and unexpected beginning.”

 

The notion of Keats as an ethereal sprite, Romanticism’s darling, was wrong from the start. He was a tough Cockney whose medical training helped fortify him for a life of sickness and early death, and who crafted some of the richest lines in the language. Consider his sonnet written in January 1818 when he was twenty-two:

 

“When I have fears that I may cease to be

   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

   That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

 

John Berryman took the title of his 1970 volume Love & Fame from the final line. Keats is gloomily realistic but unpitying. Talk about adversity: When Keats was nine his father died after falling from a horse. His grandfather, with whom the Keats children had gone to live, died the following year. When the future poet was fifteen his mother died of tuberculosis, and his brother Tom died eight years later of the same disease. By that time, Keats had also contracted TB, which would kill him in 1821 at age twenty-five. If anyone had an excuse to indulge in self-pity, it was Keats, though his family history was hardly unusual in early-nineteenth-century England.

 

And yet, when we read his letters, he often sounds like the family cheerleader. For Keats, happiness was almost a moral imperative. A taste of earthly Hell tests us, shriveling some of us into hard, spiky cinders, annealing others into strength and resilience. Among major writers Keats is a rarity. Like Chekhov, also trained in medicine and prematurely dead from tuberculosis, he is remarkably free of the writer’s curse: megalomania. I’ve often thought Keats in his renowned “Negative Capability” letter is expressing less a literary theory than a reflection of his own sensibility:

 

“[I]t struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

 

Here Keats is writing to his friend Charles Brown on September 30, 1820, aboard a brig bound for Italy where he would die five months later:

 

“I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and Sea, weakness and decline are great seperators [sic], but death is the great divorcer for ever.”

 

Keats was born on this date, October 31, in 1795 and died February 23, 1821.

 

[The quote from Johnson is taken from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).]