'Shut Not Thy Purse-Strings'

Unlike his friends Coleridge, Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Hunt, who often made fools of themselves as a result, Charles Lamb had little interest in the momentous events of his day. About “Boney” – Napoleon Bonaparte – he wished only to know the dictator’s height, unlike Hazlitt, who published a four-volume biography of the diminutive Corsican. In a letter to his friend Thomas Manning on March 1, 1800, Lamb writes: “Public affairs – except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private – I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in.” This admirable sentiment would profit many of our contemporaries. It’s easily mistaken for self-centeredness, but nature’s busybodies, those preoccupied with politics and power, are the truly selfish. 

For Lamb, to be civic-minded was to care for one’s family, friends and strangers – to be a generous host. Though he was a lifelong bachelor, his instinct for family was fierce and he dedicated his life to caring for his matricidal sister, “Mad” Mary Lamb. He practiced charity and compassion as non-proselytizing virtues. In one of the Elia essays, “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,” he writes:

 

“Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the ‘seven small children,’ in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not.”

 

His compassion is instinctive, not ideological. Nor was it rooted in a sense of religious obligation, which in Lamb’s case was rudimentary. In a March 9, 1822, letter to his childhood friend Coleridge, Lamb displays a sophisticated appreciation of moral complexity when he writes:

 

“One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child – when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not mendicant, but thereabouts – a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me – the sum it was to her – the pleasure she had a right to expect that I – not the old impostor – should take in eating her cake – the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, I wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like – and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.”

 

Lamb recognizes that his younger self was “virtue-signaling,” performing a kindly act because it would make him look good. He was being what Joseph Epstein has called a “virtucrat.” He was among the wisest of foolish men.

'The Secret Hidden From Yourself'

Howard Nemerov was born on Leap Year Day in 1920 – February 29 -- meaning his birthday can be accurately observed only every fourth year – a nice metaphysical conundrum. This reminds me of a cousin who was bitter because she was born on Christmas Day and felt she was getting less attention and loot than she deserved. Let’s celebrate Nemerov today. 

We no longer expect poets to be intelligent and learned, to respect form and craft, or to have a sense of humor and little interest in politics. Nemerov inherited no Modernist fashion for obscurity. His poems are accessible in the sense that they don’t revel in self-indulgent opacity. He’s seldom pretentious and never condescends to the reader. Often his concerns are ours. He writes to us and for us, not other poets or fellow academics. Take “Runes” from New Poems (1960), with an epigraph from St. Augustine’s Confessions: “insanibam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter.” Roughly, “I was healthily insane and vitally dying.” Here is the first of Nemerov’s fifteen fifteen-line stanzas:

 

“This is about the stillness in moving things,

In running water, also in the sleep

Of winter seeds, where time to come has tensed

Itself, enciphering a script so fine

Only the hourglass can magnify it, only

The years unfold its sentence from the root.

I have considered such things often, but

I cannot say I have thought deeply of them:

That is my theme, of thought and the defeat

Of thought before its object, where it turns

As from a mirror, and returns to be

The thought of something and the thought of thought,

A trader doubly burdened, commercing

Out of one stillness and into another.”

 

Nemerov cherishes paradox, seeing it as somehow the nature of reality. Thisness is forever in flux. What exists today contains tomorrow. He gently hints at Aquinas’ understanding of potentia. Here is the poem’s final, meditative stanza:                                                                   

 

“To watch water, to watch running water,

Is to know a secret, seeing the twisted rope

Of runnels on the hillside, the small freshets

Leaping and limping down the tilted field

In April's light, the green, grave and opaque

Swirl in the millpond where the current slides

To be combed and carded silver at the fall;

It is a secret. Or it is not to know

The secret, but to have it in your keeping,

A locked box, Bluebeard’s room, the deathless thing

Which it is death to open. Knowing the secret,

Keeping the secret--herringbones of light

Ebbing on beaches, the huge artillery

 Of tides--it is not knowing, it is not keeping,

 But being the secret hidden from yourself.”

 

I would also like to plug Nemerov’s three novels, which seem to get little attention: The Melodramatists (1949), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954) and The Homecoming Game (1957). The last is especially good, and I say that as a sports-hater. In a February 18, 1957 letter to Nemerov, Vladimir Nabokov wrote of the novel: “It is full of true wit, and its structure—the intricate and satisfying interlacing of themes—is admirable.”

 

Montaigne was born on this date, February 28, in 1533. A Nemerov poem in Gnomes & Occasions (1973) shares a title with Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience”:

 

“Nature from life by piece and piece

Gently disparts us; power fails

Before desire does. It needs not sex

To illustrate what Montaigne saith.

But only what’s befallen X—

Now he no longer has his teeth

He can no longer bite his nails.”

 

Montaigne writes in the essay, as translated by Donald Frame:

 

“We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He must know how to use them together and blend them. And so must we do with good and evil, which are consubstantial with our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one element is no less necessary for it than the other. To try to kick against natural necessity is to imitate the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook a kicking match with his mule.”

 

[Washington University, where Nemerov taught for thirty-two years until his death in 1991, has announced the donation of 513 letters from the family of Nemerov’s lover, Joan Coale of Philadelphia, written between 1972 and 1990.]

'The Delicate, Invisible Web You Wove'

Who wrote this about whose poetry?: 

“For here the water buffalo may rove,

The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound

In the dark jungle of a mango grove . . .”

 

I might have guessed Kipling or some forgotten Georgian poet. Perhaps it’s a verse omitted by Eliot from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Exotic animals: a mungabey, a West African monkey, and kinkajous, those impossibly cute, tree-dwelling mammals native to Latin America. These lines, near-light verse or verse for children, follow:

 

“. . . And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree --

The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)

Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

 

“And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn

Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,

At not quite time for bed?”

 

The author of “To Walter de la Mare” is T.S. Eliot. It was his contribution to Tribute to Walter De La Mare on His Seventy-fifth Birthday, published by Faber in 1948. Eliot’s echoes of de la Mare’s style and subject matter are obvious. Not quite a pastiche, the poem suggests de la Mare’s dreaminess and whimsy. Is it for children or adults? That’s a question we often ask about de la Mare’s poems – and some of Eliot’s, who had largely stopped writing poetry by the end of the nineteen-forties. Eliot was childless but seems to empathize with them and the poet he is honoring, without condescension. Here is de la Mare in a brief essay, “Children and Childhood,” published in the September 20, 1930 issue of The Saturday Review:

 

“Though it doesn’t appear to be usually taken into account, it is certain that children, both in mind and imagination, however little it may be apparent, are likely to be more different from one another even than men and women are different from one another. What is no less certain, or what seems no less likely, is that in certain respects children are even less different from full-sized human beings than they are generally supposed to be. They take the world —and themselves—at least as seriously. They realize their oughts no less sharply than their crosses; and this even though they are midgets in a land of giants who have forgotten much of their language and whose right is often founded solely on force majeure.”

 

At the poem’s conclusion, Eliot asks who to call when it’s story hour? Who will permit “Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?” He answers, addressing de la Mare directly:

 

“By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

 

“By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practised with natural ease;

 

“By the delicate, invisible web you wove -

The inexplicable mystery of sound.”

'Like an Occupying Army'

Two unrelated situations bring poems, song lyrics and old television commercial jingles to mind, seemingly out of nowhere: on first waking in the morning and while preparing a meal in the kitchen. None is summoned. They blip to the surface like bubbles in a pond. Last weekend I was greeted to the new day by Tennyson’s warhorse, “Break, Break, Break.” Not the entire poem but the final stanza: 

“Break, break, break

         At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

         Will never come back to me.”

 

Accompanying Tennyson’s lines was a memory of a ferry ride we took around Puget Sound some fifteen years ago. I see no linkage between the two things except water.

 

While cooking dinner a few weeks back, I hosted an earworm from 1966: the frat-house favorite “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” by the Swinging Medallions. Specifically: “She loved me so long and she loved me so hard / I finally passed out in her front yard (whoo).” With it came a memory of passing out on the lawn of my friends Gary and Laura Dumm in the summer of 1975. One thing about preparing a meal – it’s largely mindless. You follow a long-known formula, which leaves plenty of room for whatever’s floating around inside. Clearly, memory is not a reliable critic.

 

While taking a break from writing on Tuesday, I was sitting on the couch by the front window reading and watching nothing, preoccupied with my turkey sandwich. From somewhere came the lyrics to a sixty-year-old commercial for “Mighty Mo,” a toy cannon sold by the Ideal Toy Co.: “Off we go / With Mighty Mo, / Greatest cannon of them all was Mighty Mo . . .” I’m unable to find a video of the jingle but years ago, while reading Dore Ashton’s A Joseph Cornell Album (1974), I found a photo of Cornell seemingly window-shopping in front of a toy store. And there was a box holding the toy I lusted after as a kid.

 

In the Winter 1998 issue of The Threepenny Review, Edith A. Jenkins has a brief “Table Talk” essay about the unbidden arrival of poetry in one’s memory: “It happens that I am blessed or cursed with a memory for lines of poetry, lines that accost me unsolicited and sometimes haunt me like music from an old stuck record.”

 

Some poems I worked at memorizing, especially during my teenage years – Tennyson, Kipling, T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate. That’s the blessed part mentioned by Jenkins. “When I am cursed,” she continues, “a whole dreadful poem can take over like an occupying army.”

'To Show the Poetry of the Commonplace'

A friend in Schenectady, N.Y. worked as a lineman for the telephone company for almost half a century, into his seventies. He was the guy who strapped on a belt and spikes and climbed those sliver-making poles, and later showed rookie linemen the ropes. On the side, Bob was an amateur painter, mostly still lifes. He was self-taught and gifted but shy about his pastime. I once admired a watercolor hanging in the studio at the back of his garage -- black wooden frame, simple white matting -- and he gave it to me: 

Against a plank floor, white wainscotting, and a blue and brown abstract wall that suggests a cloudy sky stands an old-fashioned washing machine with a hand-cranked wringer. On the lid are three green tomatoes -- the touch that cinched my admiration. Bob had painted it a few years earlier, in 1994. It was based on a real scene he found in a long-abandoned farmhouse near Cooperstown. He wanted the focus on the washing machine, so the background is featureless. The machine is painted from life, his only addition being the tomatoes. He added them on a whim, as a green contrast to all the whites and icy blues, and by doing so created my favorite painting among those hanging on our walls. Bob never titled his paintings.

 

On this day, February 25, in 1894 – precisely one-hundred years before Bob painted his farmhouse scene – Edwin Arlington Robinson enclosed a draft of his villanelle in trimeters “The House on the Hill” in a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith. From the time Bob gave me the painting thirty years ago, I’ve always associated the scene with Robinson’s poem, especially the closing stanza:

  

“There is ruin and decay

In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.”

 

Yet Bob found something to say about it. Robinson describes his poem in the letter to Smith as “a little mystical perhaps and is an attempt to show the poetry of the commonplace.” Villa: from the Latin for “country house.” Villanelle: the same, by way of Italian for “rural, rustic.” (OED)

'One Passionate Note of Victory'

“The dangers for the poet in addressing so composite an audience are enormous: cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension are only the most obvious ones.”

 

In 1976, Anthony Hecht wrote the preface for a new edition of Walter de la Mare’s Songs of Childhood (1902). He doesn’t ghettoize de la Mare, children’s poetry, or children, though young people are always ripe for condescension. Instead, Hecht celebrates de la Mare’s ear, his musicality, noting that children are “particularly sensitive to verbal rhythms, as Iona and Peter Opie have splendidly demonstrated in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.” (The Opies’ volume is wonderful.) Take de la Mare's “The Mother Bird”:

 

“Through the green twilight of a hedge

I peered, with cheek on the cool leaves pressed,

And spied a bird upon a nest:

Two eyes she had beseeching me

Meekly and brave, and her brown breast

Throbb'd hot and quick above her heart;

And then she oped her dagger bill,—

'Twas not a chirp, as sparrows pipe

At break of day; 'twas not a trill,

As falters through the quiet even;

But one sharp solitary note,

One desperate, fierce, and vivid cry

Of valiant tears, and hopeless joy,

One passionate note of victory:

Off, like a fool afraid, I sneaked,

Smiling the smile the fool smiles best,

At the mother bird in the secret hedge

Patient upon her lonely nest.”

 

As a kid, I knew guys who delighted in killing small animals – snakes, any insect, earthworms, shrews and mice. In one case, cats. This was not hunting, merely savagery for its own sake. I’ve killed my share of mosquitoes and roaches, and as a kid I collected butterflies and moths. No more. This was no conscious moral decision on my part. I was responding to a sense of revulsion. The poem's speaker flees without harming the bird or her brood. The “one solitary note” is “one passionate note of victory” – a very de la Marean touch. “Off, like a fool afraid, I sneaked, / Smiling the smile the fool smiles best.” His reaction – and mine – suggest conscience can occasionally alter behavior for the better. Along with the charm of his music, de la Mare respects children enough to trust their moral capacity. Hecht writes:

 

 “His work has the honest candor of the border ballads and the fairy tales: as well as unmitigated joys, they are full of the dangers and horrors and sorrows that every child soon knows to be part of the world, however vainly parents try to veil them. A child’s curiosity about the forbidden will insist on being satisfied; and better by verse than otherwise.”

'Unforgiving and Bearish'

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over the historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.” 

Of the three points made by English novelist Julian Barnes, the first is dubious, the second and third inarguably true. To say someone is not in control of his temperament is usually an after-the-fact excuse for misbehavior. Only the mentally ill and very young children may have persuasive explanations. The “historical moment” is beyond every individual's control and an aesthetic is a wrestling match between a writer’s gift and his perseverance. Even the best writers sometimes disappoint. Titus Andronicus, anyone?

 

Barnes has published fourteen novels. I’ve read his third, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which carries the only blurb ever written by Steven Millhauser. The sentence quoted above is from the pages devoted by Barnes to Jules Renard in his 2008 memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He also selected and introduced Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, riverrun, 2020). Barnes describes Renard as “one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives.” He recounts the Frenchman’s difficult childhood. His father didn’t talk to his mother for the last thirty years of his life. Jules, one of three children, “was used as a go-between and porte parole [spokesman]: an unenviable role for a child, if an instructive one for a future writer.”

 

Renard’s Journal is laced with familiarities. Reading it seems like reading a diary I kept long ago and forgot. He knew Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, Rostand and Gide. “Yet he could be a sombre presence in such company,” Barnes writes, “unforgiving and bearish.” Barnes quotes a “sophisticate” who describes Renard as a “rustic cryptogram.” Renard’s father takes his own life with a shotgun – both barrels – in 1897. His brother suffers a fatal heart attack four years later. ("The writer cannot help noting the improvised cushion on which his dead brother’s head is resting: a Paris telephone directory.”) In 1909, Renard’s mother is seated on the brickwork of the village well. She falls in backward and is killed. Barnes writes:

 

“Renard cannot determine whether it was an accident or another suicide; he calls his mother’s death ‘impenetrable.’ He argues: ‘Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible, is the strongest argument for His existence.’ He concludes: ‘Death is not an artist.’”

 

Renard would die on May 22, 1910 at the age of forty-six.