'A Great or Wonderful Thing'

“Too greedy of Magnalities, we are apt to make but favourable experiments concerning welcome Truths.”

Sir Thomas Browne in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), also known as Vulgar Errors, dismisses such notions as the existence of unicorns and the impact of garlic on magnetism. In the sentence above, from Book 2, Chapter III, he rejects the misuse of logic we know as confirmation bias – seeking evidence confirming our hypothesis while ignoring contrary evidence. It’s a common human failing, a reminder that some of us substantiate our prejudices by treating truth like Play-Doh, a malleable substance. Thus, newspapers still publish horoscopes.

 

Browne’s most interesting choice of words is “Magnalities,” which he apparently coined.  Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines it as “a great thing; something above the common rate,” and the OED is even terser: “a great or wonderful thing.”

 

In Chapter III of Browne’s Garden of Cyrus (1658), two centuries before Darwin, he asks why some plants produce prodigious quantities of seeds or other modes of reproduction: “The exiguity and smallnesse of some Seeds extending to large productions is one of the Magnalities of nature, somewhat illustrating the work of the Creation, and vast production from nothing.”

 

With no knowledge of genetics or evolutionary adaptation, Browne concedes his ignorance and accepts that creation is “a great or wonderful thing.” After the glories of his prose, what I most admire about Browne is his questioning nature, the way he mingles science, skepticism and faith. He is not “scientific” by twenty-first-century standards – no experiments with repeatable findings are involved -- but neither is he uncritically credulous. He applies reason to some of his day’s more farfetched notions, something we don’t always do.

'They Require No Mortar'

“He is one of those writers for whom, if you care at all, you care immensely.”

This reader started in puberty as a serial monogamist, wedded briefly but intensely to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and turned in time into a guiltless polygamist. In junior-high school, sick at home with the flu, I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories. Fever fed pleasure. I’ve tried several times to recapture that bliss but the thrill is gone. Falling for a writer while an adolescent of any age is infatuation and like that first crush it will never come again. Literary promiscuity arrives only with maturity. The rapture of devotion to a single writer exclusively, with that degree of intensity, can never be replicated.

 

Above, Desmond MacCarthy is describing Walter Savage Landor, a writer I discovered in midlife and care for immensely. “His prose,” MacCarthy writes, “apart from its content, gives me more pleasure than that of almost any other writer. The Landorian period is built up of chiseled statements, without conjunctions or transitions; the blocks, as [English literary critic] Sidney Colvin pointed out, are so hard and well-cut that they require no mortar.”

 

I share MacCarthy’s taste for Landor, one of those eccentrically wayward writers who will never earn a broad audience, turned out periodically by the English. Others who inspire similar loyalty include Henry Mayhew, Charles Doughty, Henry Green and MacCarthy himself. I would never proselytize such writers to other readers. They write for a small number and must be discovered independently. MacCarthy continues in excellent prose:

 

“Great splendour in emphasis and great composure in tone are the characteristics of this prose; and when the reader’s mood is one in which contemplation is a state of recognition rather than of wonder; when his imagination does not hunger after either realism or mystery, but is content to rest in what is presented to it with perfect clarity and dignity, then he will not complain that Landor’s pathos does not always move, that his invective does not often kill, that the famous characters in his [Imaginary] Conversations have little individuality, and that Landor himself is a man of thoughts rather than a thinking man.”

 

[You can find MacCarthy’s essay on Landor in Memories (1953) at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]

'Art Is Wild As a Cat'

Nige tells me he attended a reading at Cambridge given by Stevie Smith not long before her death in 1971. “I remember [her],” he writes, “more for her extraordinary presence and her eccentric, but very effective way of reading her work. . . . [A]t the time I was a young anti-formalist idiot, who didn't at all approve of work like hers. More fool me. Even so, of all the readings I attended at that time, hers is the only one that really made an impression – a good impression, that is.” 

I envy Nige his memories. Smith is a poet I’m still surprised I admire and enjoy. I’m leery of most work in any form that feels like willful eccentricity, an adolescent grab after unearned attention. It’s a cheat and makes me more aware of the poet than the poem. Reading and rereading Smith’s poems and novels over the decades have made me forgiving of her idiosyncrasies. Long ago I accepted that she writes the way she does for the same reason I write in English, which is the only language I know. Kay Ryan explains:

 

“The reader of Stevie Smith can never for an instant forget that she is looking through the cock eyes of Stevie Smith. Everything that transpires does so in Stevie Smith’s universe, which is not one’s own. Meaning, none of the sufferings hurt and none of the pronouncements crowd the mind. Instead, they can be entertained; we can examine them as if they were toys although they are not.”

 

Consider a poem from Not Waving But Drowning (1957), “The New Age,” in which she writes:

 

“. . . the state of Art itself presages decline

As if Art has anything or ever had

To do with civilization whether good or bad.

Art is wild as a cat and quite separate from civilization

But that is another matter that is not now under consideration.”

 

Smith may not be gratuitously eccentric but she enjoys being contrary. That her art is “wild as a cat” is inarguable, though “wild” need not imply savage or incoherent. But art is certainly not “separate from civilization.” It’s the most civilized thing we do. In a note to the poem in All the Poems (New Directions, 2016), editor Will May tells us Smith informally dedicated the poem to Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer who developed the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars. Smith is not apocalyptic. She suggests we humans are both a blessing and a curse:

 

“Why should Man be at an end? he is hardly beginning.

This New Age will slip in under cover of their cries

And be upon them before they have opened their eyes.

Well, say geological time is a one-foot rule

Then Man’s only been here about half an inch to play the fool

Or be wise if he likes, as he has often been

Oh heavens how these crying people spoil the beautiful geological scene.”

'I Learned Most By the Subject Matters'

Fifty years ago this month I walked into Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, and asked for a job. I was a twenty-two-year-old college dropout and for the previous year and a half had worked as a cook in a restaurant. I had been coming to Kay’s as a customer for more than a decade. I knew books and knew how the three-floor store was organized but not much else. 

You walked in the front door and there was a raised platform where the owner, Mrs. Kay – Rachel Kowan -- looked down on everyone. Augie March’s description of Grandma Lausch holds for Mrs. Kay: “an autocrat, hard-shelled, jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik.” Mrs. Kay was famous for changing – that is, raising – the price of a book when a customer handed one to her. She was short, walked like a beer-truck driver and always wore a blue blouse, black slacks and flamenco-dancer heels. Her silver-blue hair was permed into a helmet. My job interview consisted of Mrs. Kay handing me a stack of books pulled randomly from the shelves and having me alphabetize them by the author’s last name. That’s how Mrs. Kay determined I was literate.      

 

I worked on the second floor with Gary Dumm, already a veteran clerk at Kay’s, who remains a good friend. Gary is a cartoonist who worked on the late Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland-based comic American Splendor. In Gary’s first comic, Flaming Bologna, there’s a buried allusion to me. One of the characters is reading Thomas Pynchon, formerly one of my enthusiasms. Gary wrote to me on Monday: “I spent almost 10 years there and felt that I learned most by the subject matters that the customers turned me onto.”

 

One of the sections on the second floor, alongside science fiction, equine science and sociology, was soft core-porn – stacks of old cheesecake magazines with black and white photos, usually falling apart. We had a regular customer who always showed up in suit and tie, wearing a homburg. He spent hours browsing the porn, talking to himself and sometimes slapping his chest and face. Occasionally we stepped in and asked him to settle down. Otherwise, he was harmless. There was also a small selection of hardcore stuff available on request to select customers. We had an eight-millimeter reel of film purported to be a snuff flick and a paperback section devoted to enema porn. I remember that several of those titles were written by Colin Lavage. Also, gay titles, like Delivery in the Rear. Gary’s right about the “subject matters.” And yet on the same floor I found and bought three titles by Owen Barfield. Kay's was an education on several fronts.

 

The neighborhood was raffishly seedy. Across the street was June Bug’s shoeshine stand. Next door was the Domino Lounge, patronized mostly by blacks. A portion of the Kay’s basement was under the bar and you could hear the jukebox (“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” was still a favorite), people talking and dancing, and toilets flushing. Next came an Army-Navy store, where I bought cheap gloves that winter, and then the Savoy, where I drank Scotch for lunch on Saturdays. We worked six days a week for pitifully low wages and in some ways it was the best job I ever had.

'Thy Auld Damn'd Elbow Yeuks Wi' Joy'

It’s the sheer unembarrassed redundancy of English I love. We have a dozen ways or more to say everything. Synonyms are never scrupulously identical, and each encourages us to refine our expression and avoid the lazy articulation of the herd. Even so childishly slangy a word as yuck carries a load of precise choices, whereas I thought of it only as a statement of disgust, as in “Spinach! Yuck!” While reading in John Florio’s translation of Montaigne (1603), the first in English, I found this: “He would . . . make a whippe to yarke and lash, as cunningly as any Carter in France.” Spelling and meaning were still fluid. A century and a half later, Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary (1755) defines the word simply as “itch” and roots it in Dutch.

The OED gives eleven primary definitions for yuck as noun, verb, interjection and adjective, and numerous sub-definitions for each. The contemporary sense dates only from 1966: “an expression of strong distaste or disgust.” The Dictionary records such uses as “a fool; a boor; anyone disliked or despised” (used by Raymond Chandler); “to vomit”; a variation of yoke; “to stitch together the parts of a boot or shoe”; “to laugh loudly or uproariously, esp. in an exaggerated or contrived fashion” (cited to Groucho Marx); “to retch, hiccup, sob, or make any similar noise produced in the throat. Also occasionally with up: to cough up.” Also, Johnson’s sense, “to itch,” identified as “Scottish and northern dialect,” citing Robert Burns: “Ah! Nick . . . Thy auld damned elbow yeuks wi’ joy, / And hellish pleasure,” from his “Poem on Life”:

 

“Poor man the flie, aft bizzes bye,

And aft as chance he comes thee nigh,

Thy auld damn’d elbow yeuks wi’ joy,

And hellish pleasure;

Already in thy fancy's eye,

Thy sicker treasure.”

 

Burns’ poem concludes:

 

“But lest you think I am uncivil,

To plague you with this draunting drivel,

Abjuring a’ intentions evil,

I quat my pen:

The Lord preserve us frae the devil!

Amen! Amen!’

The language we are born into strongly suggests we consider what we are trying to say.

'I Find a Demanding Medium Liberating'

One can argue that the essential purpose of art, despite what the humorless say, is to give pleasure to its consumers. If so, I rather uncharacteristically denied myself a lot of it by not discovering the poems of Turner Cassity until the final year of his life. He is a poet allergic to cliché and verbal flab, as every good writer ought to be but seldom is. He is reliably funny, often with a campy flavor. In general, I dislike campiness. It panders while the best humor is unexpected and harsh, but most times Cassity carries it off. He also writes a poet’s prose – not “poetic” but balanced, with every word doing its part to energize sentences that carry the thought. This becomes important when your nature, like Cassity’s, is indelibly contrary. Like any honest writer he is often politically incorrect. At the time of his death, Cassity left two unpublished books of poems: Hitler’s Weather and Poems for Isobel. Cassity’s literary executor, the poet R.L. Barth, sent me copies of the manuscripts. “Clausewitz of the Drawing Board” is from Hitler’s Weather:

“Is it significant that War and Peace

Are housed in buildings equally inept?

The Pentagon, the League of Nations morgue,

The UN in its Babel of the T-square?

Geometry, Geneva, Hope's "one world"

High Mannerism, all of them too trite

To serve as logos. Chateau Frontenac

Is where Defense Department ought to be,

A pseudo-citadel with lots of thralls.

Contemporary with the League Palais

At least three buildings on the Shanghai Bund,

That is, the "International" Settlement,

Could more appropriately have housed the corpse

Than who defeated Le Corbusier

In the design contest. Predestination?

Not for nothing Calvin's capital.

Having designed an opera house (the Met),

Is Wallace Harrison to be forgiven

Building earlier our East Side house

For diplomatic comic opera?

His Follies stage? Developed World or Third,

We really should do better. Working by

Whatever measure--cubits, inches, feet,

Pyramid inches--raise a folly that

Of many styles and none can say it all:

By other means continued, Peace is War.”

 

I urge you to look for Cassity’s collections. They are technically adept, funny and are actually about something other than Turner Cassity. They have identifiable subjects. A former student of Yvor Winters at Stanford, Cassity revels in knowing things and sharing them with readers. In this he reminds me of another Southerner, Guy Davenport, who wrote: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” In 1988, Cassity wrote a 106-page autobiographical essay for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He writes:

 

“In forty years I have seen no evidence that they [‘aspiring poets’] have the willingness or the ability to create characters to have relationships. It is not altogether their fault. They have no models. The English lyric is too relentlessly first person and too relentlessly centered on the internal. . . . The possibility that poetry might deal with settings and characters as well as drama or fiction is alien. . . . I find a demanding medium liberating rather than otherwise. The more secure the technique the wider range of subjects I am prepared to deal with. Few poems I read, however, have a subject.”

 

Cassity was born in Jackson, Miss., on this date, January 12, in 1929 and died on July 27, 2009 in Atlanta at age eighty.

'Look at This, It's Wonderful'

There’s a written nonfiction voice I find especially repellent. For the sake of convenience I’ll call it “institutional.” I encounter it most often in academic writing, but it has leaked into the larger culture.

For almost sixteen years I worked as a science writer for a university. In that time I read thousands of technical papers, usually composed in both words and equations, and laced with a highly specialized vocabulary – chemical names, for instance, or words drawn from genomics. This is understandable. Mathematics, truly, is the universal language and such papers are composed largely for fellow researchers, for some of whom English may be a distant second or third language. Such prose can be justified by its precision and universality for a select audience. It doesn’t matter if you or I as laymen can readily understand it, though the quality of such language can radically vary. I had the advantage of often knowing the authors and having access to them for questions.

What I’m talking about are papers – and books, magazine articles, blog posts -- written in the broadly defined humanities. Literary criticism, of course, has long been polluted with various fads and political eccentricities. This class of writing, like the scientific dialect described above, is assembled for a sort of ghetto of teachers, critics and students. It tends to be dogmatic, predictable and ugly, with a total disregard for readers. There’s a sad irony in critics unable to write but judging what the rest of us ought to be reading. If they can’t recognize their own mediocrity, how can we trust anything they write? What’s missing is the aesthetic dimension, the beauty of language in the hands of artful writers. In other words, pleasure for readers. In 2015, William Pritchard reviewed three books by Clive James (1939-2019) in the Autumn issue of The Hudson Review:

“More so than [Aldous] Huxley, James’s writing is consistently entertaining, thereby making him suspect to those who insist that a truly significant writer not be too entertaining. But James is never more serious than when joking, and his appeal is always to the ear as well as the eye and the mind. When he admitted recently to trying ‘not to write anything that can't be read aloud,’ he was referring specifically to his work as a poet, but the determination extends to everything he writes.”

The only objection to writing that’s “entertaining” – a highly elastic category – I can think of is pure snobbery. Why set out to be opaque and prove your own tiresomeness? Near the conclusion of Latest Readings (2016), James writes: “’The critic should write to say not ‘look how much I’ve read’ but ‘look at this, it’s wonderful.’” Or awful. Contemporaries with gifts comparable to James’ are Joseph Epstein, Gary Saul Morson, Theodore Dalrymple, Dominic Green and Peter Hitchens, and among the recently dead, Guy Davenport, John Simon, Roger Scruton and Oliver Sacks.