'Honest Before Anything Else'

A reader doesn’t understand how tastes in books and writers might evolve across a lifetime, how indifference might replace enthusiasm and love, indifference. He mentions Hart Crane, a poet I’m unlikely ever to reread. I swooned over The Bridge in high school, spurred on by our shared ties to Cleveland and alcohol. A friend and I mapped a route among the downtown bars that Crane may have visited, some of which still existed half a century ago, then undertook a pub crawl, toasting him along the way. Crane is not a bad poet. That’s not the point. His Library of America collection is on the shelf beside me. He just no longer writes for me. 

My poetic main man around that time was John Berryman. It’s not a stretch to say I was obsessed with him and his work, far more than Crane. I read and collected every biographical and critical scrap about him I could find, including the July 21, 1967 issue of Life magazine, which features a story about him and photos of the poet in Ireland. After his suicide in 1972 I bought his posthumous novel, Recovery (1973); his essay collection, The Freedom of the Poet (1976); Henry's Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972 (1977) and first editions of the poetry. Of the latter I’ve kept only The Dream Songs (1969), which brings together 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream His Rest (1968).

 

What changed? Alcohol had something to do with it, the romantic appeal of the tormented poète manqué. I genuinely admired Berryman’s gifts while overlooking how he abused them. Today I understand that much of the incoherence in the Dreams Songs is drunken self-indulgence. Like every alcoholic, Berryman was a walking or stumbling disaster, hurting and disappointing everyone he encountered, including himself. I stopped drinking in 1979 and slowly over those early years of sobriety, Berryman’s appeal faded.

 

The opposite of the Crane/Berryman syndrome is Louis MacNeice. I was indifferent to the Irishman when young, though devoted to his friend W.H. Auden and his countryman Yeats. What a mistake I made. Clive James, writing of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), calls it “an intoxicating cocktail of classical metres, conversational rhythms and reportorial detail.” In his introduction to it, MacNeice writes: “Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” MacNeice writes about us, common working people, in ways Berryman never approached:

 

“Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers,

              The workman gathers his tools

For the eight-hour day but after that the solace

              Of films or football pools

Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory

              Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,

The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking

              In the empty glass of stout.”

 

Whereas Berryman in the elegy for MacNeice, “Dream Song” 267, can’t forget himself long enough to rather feebly mourn the poet who died in 1963. “Can Louis die? Why, then it’s time to join him /again, for another round, the lovely man.”

'Still to Suruiue in My Immortall Song'

Many of the best things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of their disappearance. If fortunate, we learn this lesson early. Their transitoriness becomes part of their charm, whether a cat, a garden or a brother. We are grateful and enjoy them accordingly, knowing they and we will vanish, leaving only, perhaps, memories. Here is a sonnet by Michael Drayton written around 1619: 

“How many paltry, foolish, painted things,

That now in Coaches trouble eu’ry Street,

Shall be forgotten, whom no Poet sings,

Ere they be well wrap’d in their winding Sheet?

Where I to thee Eternitie shall giue,

When nothing else remayneth of these dayes,

And Queenes hereafter shall be glad to liue

Vpon the Almes of thy superfluous prayse;

Virgins and Matrons reading these my Rimes,

Shall be so much delighted with thy story,

That they shall grieve, they liu’d not in these Times,

To haue seene thee, their Sexes onely glory:

So shalt thou flye aboue the vulgar Throng,

Still to suruiue in my immortall Song.”

 

It’s a familiar trope in Horace and in English poetry. Drayton lauds his beloved, assuring her that his words and her memory will last. Other women -- “paltry, foolish, painted things” (I love that phrase) – will not be so honored and immortalized. Often in Drayton’s verse is an awareness of the world’s fleetingness. Things – people, objects, poems – are doomed to oblivion. Memory is a curse and blessing. While seducing his beloved with flattery, he flatters and seduces us, his readers.

 

Drayton’s major work is Poly-Olbion (1612), a poem of almost 15,000 lines written as survey of Great Britain’s geography and history composed in alexandrine couplets. As poetry, it’s often clunky, veering close to prose, but the subtitle suggests both its grandiosity and charm: A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests and other Parts of the Renowned Isle of Greate Britaine with intermixture of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same: Digested in a Poem.

 

Drayton catalogues the birds (“even the echoing Ayre / Seemes all compos’d of sounds.”), flowers, fish and trees of Great Britain, and damns the destruction of the natural world, especially the trees:

 

“Foreseeing, their decay each howre so fast came on,

Under the axes stroak, fetcht many a grievous grone,

When as the anviles weight, and hammers dreadfull sound,

Even rent the hollow Woods, and shook the queachy ground.”

 

Drayton observes that many trees have been cut down and burned to smelt iron:

 

“These yron times breed none, that minde posteritie,

Tis but in vaine to tell, what we before have been,

Or changes of the world, that we in time have seen;

When, not devising how to spend our wealth with waste,

We to the savage swine, let fall our larding mast.

But now, alas, our selves we have not to sustaine,

Nor can our tops suffice to shield our Roots from raine.”

 

Think of it as proto-environmentalism. Drayton was born a year before Shakespeare and died on December 23, 1631 at age sixty-eight.

'There Are No Millers Any More'

I’ve just learned of the suicide of a woman I knew casually a long time ago. Such news is always unsettling, as though a fundamental law of nature had been violated. Given what we know of the person, and it may be very little, we apply her circumstances to our own and conclude, “There had to be another way.” But there wasn’t. Such events remind us of our ignorance, our lack of insight into the lives of others, even those we think we know well. Thirteen year ago a friend drove to the top of a hospital parking garage and jumped – an act that seemed utterly antithetical to his nature, or what I had confidently concluded was his nature. I know the common explanations – depression, alcoholism, money troubles. That doesn’t help. 

In his poems, Edwin Arlington Robinson tends to obliquely hint at suicide, as in “Luke Havergal,” “The Growth of ‘Lorraine,’” and “The Man Against the Sky.” Only in his most famous poem, “Richard Cory,” does he bluntly describe it. In “How Annandale Went Out,” the cause of death is ambiguous, as was the death of his eldest brother, Dean, a doctor addicted to laudanum who may have purposely overdosed. In “The Mill” (The Three Taverns, 1920), Robinson reminds us that his earliest serious writing was prose fiction, and he remained a storyteller in verse: 

 

“The miller's wife had waited long,

The tea was cold, the fire was dead;

And there might yet be nothing wrong

‘There are no millers any more,’

Was all that she had heard him say;

And he had lingered at the door

So long that it seemed yesterday.

 

“Sick with a fear that had no form

She knew that she was there at last;

And in the mill there was a warm

And mealy fragrance of the past.

What else there was would only seem

To say again what he had meant;

And what was hanging from a beam

Would not have heeded where she went.

 

“And if she thought it followed her,

She may have reasoned in the dark

That one way of the few there were

Would hide her and would leave no mark:

Black water, smooth above the weir

Like starry velvet in the night,

Though ruffled once, would soon appear

The same as ever to the sight.”

 

As technology changes, as workers are unable to adapt to new circumstances and their skills are no longer needed, some disappear – a reality that seems remarkably pertinent today: “There are no millers any more.” Robinson was born on this date, December 22, in 1869 and died at age sixty-five in 1935.

'We Caught the Christmas Beetle'

I understand why people might be repelled by a poem titled “When We Were Kids.” A wallow in nostalgia can prove deadly. But the language in Clive James’ twelve stanzas cataloging an Australian childhood is exotic enough to interest this American reader, apart from their poetic worth (some of the rhymes are amusing). The occasional footnote would be helpful: 

“When we were kids we played at cock-a-lorum.

Gutter to gutter the boys ran harum-scarum.

The girls ran slower and their arms and legs looked funny.

You weren’t supposed to drink your school milk in the dunny."

 

The OED tells us cock-a-lorum is “a children’s game in which one set of players jumps on to the backs of another set of players, calling out ‘hi cockalorum, jig, jig, jig’.” And dunny is Australian slang for “a toilet; esp. an outside toilet, usually without plumbing; a privy, an outhouse.” In other words, a jakes.

 

I happened on the poem because a reader told me of the Christmas beetle, an insect indigenous to Australia that I had never heard of. After consulting some etymological sites I happened on James’ poem. Some of the thirty-five species, part of a larger group called “metallic beetles,” are peculiarly beautiful. Their wings reflect light and can render a mirror image. James writes:

 

“When we were kids we caught the Christmas beetle.

Its brittle wings were gold-green like the wattle.

Our mothers made bouquets from frangipani.

Hard to pronounce, a pink musk-stick cost a penny.”

 

Beauty of this sort, so beguiling and unexpected, inevitably raises the question: why? Our Darwinian assumptions suggest we look for the evolutionary advantages, though I’m convinced much of the beauty found in the natural world and elsewhere is purely gratuitous. Beauty is its own nonutilitarian reward. It’s there for us to enjoy. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson’s dinner on March 31, 1772 with General Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot exiled in London. The wide-ranging conversation settled on aesthetics:

 

“We then fell into a disquisition whether there is any beauty independent of utility. The General maintained there was not. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was; and he instanced a coffee cup which he held in his hand, the painting of which was of no real use, as the cup could hold the coffee equally well if plain; yet the painting was beautiful.”

 

To risk a rather silly rhyme, beauty is a gratuity, perhaps chief among life’s consolations. To be without an aesthetic sense is to be impoverished. The absence of such a sense and its impact on the moral life would make an interesting study and might help explain much human behavior.

'Why Not Get Out of This Rut?'

"Books offer what may be called a standing solution to the eternal and infernal Christmas-present problem.” 

Well, yes and no. I’m a graceless gift giver and receiver, especially when it comes to books. People like my middle son are inspired and have a knack for choosing appropriate gifts. He reliably picks titles previously unknown to me that prove readable. Examples from recent years include The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich and The Walls of Israel by Jean Lartéguy. Some friends and relatives assume that because I’m a reader, choosing the perfect title is a cinch. It’s not. I’m neurotically specific when it comes to the books I want. You’re not likely to find something at Barnes & Noble I might actually want to read or else I already have it.

 

In the passage quoted at the top, H.L. Mencken oversimplifies things. He’s writing in his Baltimore Evening Sun column for December 20, 1910. His examples suggest how radically times and tastes have changed in a mere 114 years:

 

“The same old books are bought and given year after year. Go into the bookstores and you will see huge pyramids of the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Fitzgerald’s Omar (in a score of gaudy and painful bindings), the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Motley’s ‘Rise of the Dutch Republic,’ Fenimore Cooper’s atrocious romances, the essays of Emerson, cheap reprints of Kipling’s earlier and uncopyrighted stories, Shakespeare in trashy near-leather, Wilkie Collins, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, De Maupassant, Dumas Pere, Sienkiewicz and Charles Garvice—stupid and silly ‘gift’ books innumerable.”

 

Still true but not a single title or author cited by Mencken will you find under this year’s Christmas trees with the possible exception of the unreadable Poe (“We are cured of Poe by 18”). That’s good news, except we’ve substituted our own predictable catalog of bestsellers and default “classics.”

 

“Such stuff,” Mencken writes, “is bought by the wagon load every Christmas. Very little of it, I fancy, is ever read. What civilized human being, in this year of grace 1910, actually enjoys Bulwer-Lytton?” I’ve never read him and like most of you I know only the much-parodied opening line from his 1830 novel Pierre: “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”

“Why not get out of this rut?” Mencken asks. “Why not break away from the hideous ‘presentation’ books, the ghastly ‘sets’ of soporific novels, the dull poetry, the childish books of travel, the plush-and-onyx editions de luxe which burden the book counters at this season?”

 

Amidst all the dreck, Mencken does suggest good stuff as well, including Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and titles by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.

'Bring on the Vitamines'

When I returned to college in 2002, thirty years after dropping out a year before graduating, I took a class in something called “psychological anthropology.” The teacher was personable and the class was a sort of catch basin of random learning. We could write about any stray hobbyhorse we chose. Because of her interest in the treatment of mental illness, I gave the teacher a VHS copy of Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies. In turn, she encouraged me to write about John Berryman and his Dream Songs because she found his alcoholism and its impact on his poetry interesting. 

One observation she made in class sticks with me: food inspires more myths, obsessions, weird ideas and eccentricities than any other part of our lives, even sex. I often think about that when I encounter one of my own unexamined prejudices. I don’t like red meat and most sweets apart from fruit. I find milk revolting. Three foods I hated as a kid – onions, mushrooms, spinach – I like today. Rationally, I can’t defend these things but that was my teacher’s point: they’re my aberrancies and I’m sticking with them.

 

Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was an American poet, novelist and anthologist who published more than 170 books, mostly mysteries and volumes for children. I’ve written about her before. In 1936 she published The Book of Humorous Verse. In the section called “Banter” she includes a poem, “Amazing Facts About Food,” by the prolific “Unknown.” It’s preceded by: “The Food Scientist tells us: ‘A deficiency of iron, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and the other mineral salts, colloids and vitamines of vegetable origin leads to numerous forms of physical disorder.’”:

 

“I yearn to bite on a Colloid

With phosphorus, iron and Beans;

I want to be filled with Calcium, grilled,

And Veg'table Vitamines!

 

“I yearn to bite on a Colloid

(Though I don't know what it means)

To line my inside with Potassium, fried,

And Veg'table Vitamines.

 

“I would sate my soul with spinach

And dandelion greens.

No eggs, nor ham, nor hard-boiled clam,

But Veg'table Vitamines.

 

“Hi, Waiter! Coddle the Colloids

With phosphorus, iron and Beans;

Though Mineral Salts may have some faults,

Bring on the Vitamines.”

Wells gives us an early satirical treatment of health food faddism. Related poems in her anthology include “If We Didn’t Have to Eat” by Nixon Waterman, “How to Eat Watermelons” by Frank Libby Stanton, and “Salad” by Sydney Smith.

'It's Uncanny. The Past Is Not Dead.'

 “The Ferryman’s Due,” my article about Andrew Rickard and his Obolus Press, is published in the January 2025 issue of The New Criterion:

“Rickard often encounters such passages, in which the author he is translating seems to speak for him. ‘It’s uncanny. The past is not dead,’ he says. ‘Even the obscure dead who preceded us are still alive through their words.’”

'Humour Is Reason Itself'

The saddest man I know wishes more than anything to be thought of as a comedian, a jokester, the reliably funny guy at the party. The sadness derives from his inability to say or do anything even modestly amusing. People will laugh aloud at something he says out of pity and an awkward sense of politeness. You can tell he’s trying to be funny because he always laughs at his own failed witticisms. He would never understand what Jules Renard writes in his journal on February 23, 1910, just three months before his death: 

“Humour: modesty and wit combined. It is the everyday clothing of the mind. I have formed a high opinion, moral and literary, of humour.”

 

Let’s define our terms when we say someone has “a good sense of humor.” The man I described above reminds me of the little boy who says “underwear” or “poopy” at the dinner table and waits for the grownups to crack up -- "Ain't he cute?" -- so let’s rule out compulsive giggling and joke-telling, and dirty words with nothing behind them but a pre-pubescent’s desire for attention. Max Beerbohm in his great essay “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920) identifies incongruity as “the mainspring of laughter.” Comedians have a tough job because we know in advance they want to make us laugh. Humor thrives on unexpectedness. Most of the funniest people I’ve known are soft-spoken, poker-faced and not clownishly desperate for laughs. Often they are introverted, mordant-minded or even depressed. A sense of humor is more than a social grace; it is a way of looking at the world, and may not always provoke raucous laughter. Renard goes on in the same journal entry:

 

“In short, humour is Reason itself. Man regulated and corrected. No definition of it ever satisfied me. Besides, everything is contained inside humor.”

 

Renard  suggests that a well-exercised sense of humor is a symptom of sanity. By implication, the earnest and humorless are nuts. Beerbohm wrote his essay after reading Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), a work which begins unpromisingly: “What does laughter mean?” A post-mortem on laughter is comparable to a light-hearted look at prostate surgery. Beerbohm confesses that Bergson, like Schopenhauer and William James, leaves him baffled. He instead endorses his own mature capacity for laughter, in contrast to his buttoned-up, youthful demeanor – what today we might call hip coolness. Laughter can be risky, especially in regard to pomposity and unearned self-regard, and nothing beats mockery for effectiveness in combatting earnestness.

 

Boswell in his Life recounts his great friend’s laughter: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’” Some seem embarrassed to laugh, and do so only when socially sanctioned by their betters. How human it is that grief and laughter both elicit tears.

 

[The Renard passages are drawn from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]