'You Not There'

Must condolences, words of consolation, be as sweet and gentle as words of endearment? Do people want to be assured that the pain of grief and loss will go away, some day? I don’t have an answer. When a friend loses a loved one and I buy the inevitable sympathy card, I mouth the usual sentiments and never feel I’ve said quite the right thing. I become inarticulate. Too often, I feel self-centered, writing out of obligation, repeating the same old words, covering my ass so I’m not accused of thoughtlessness or indifference. Walter de la Mare in “Away” (Memory and Other Poems, 1938) suggests another way to look at the dilemma: 

“There is no sorrow

Time heals never;

No loss, betrayal,

Beyond repair.

Balm for the soul, then,

Though grave shall sever

Lover from loved

And all they share;

See the sweet sun shines

The shower is over,

Flowers preen their beauty,

The day how fair!

Brood not too closely

On love, on duty;

Friends long forgotten

May wait you where

Life with death

Brings all to an issue;

None will long mourn for you,

Pray for you, miss you,

Your place left vacant,

You not there.”

 

Bleak, comforting words. Think of the passing of grief following your death and mine – a blessing to survivors, easing their pain. My brother would have turned seventy-one today. I remembered “Flowers preen their beauty” while watching hummingbirds collecting nectar in the garden.

'Particular Persons and Situations'

Edwin Arlington Robinson is likely to remain a one-poem poet for most readers, assuming he is read at all. Of course, one poem is more than most poets are remembered for. Simon and Garfunkel didn’t help when they recast “Richard Cory” as a strident diatribe about envy and class bitterness: “With political connections to spread his wealth around.” That line and most of the rest of the song don’t appear in Robinson’s poem.  I’m unable to find any evidence of political sentiments in Robinson’s work.

The writer whose work comes to mind when I read “Richard Cory” is Robinson’s contemporary, O. Henry. The poet was deeper and more sophisticated but started out writing fiction before turning to poetry. He even came up with a potential title for his stories, if they were ever published: Scattered Lives. Like a fiction writer, Robinson focuses in his poetry on characters. He was fond of narrative. The final line in “Richard Cory” clicks like a trick ending in one of O. Henry’s weaker stories. I like poems that tell a story, and some of Robinson’s are in a league with Kipling’s short stories. If Robinson writes in the first person, it’s in the voice of a character. No revelations of the poet’s sensitivity. In an 1894 letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, Robinson writes:

 

“There is more in every person’s soul than we think. Even the happy mortals we term ordinary or commonplace act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to believe in the light of our prejudices.”

 

In his biography of Robinson, Scott Donaldson tells us “Richard Cory” was probably inspired, at least in part, by a suicide in the poet’s hometown of Gardiner, Maine. He quotes an April 24, 1897 letter to Smith: “Frank Anne blew his bowels out with a shot-gun. That was hell.” And in a letter that year to his friend Edith Brower he wrote: “I’ve written a nice little thing called ‘Richard Cory.’ . . . There isn’t any idealism in it, but there’s lots of something else—humanity, maybe. I opine that it will go.” And it has. Donaldson writes: “Its popularity became a source of annoyance to Robinson while he lived and has probably done his reputation harm.”

 

It was the first Robinson poem I encountered and the only one read as a classroom assignment. In his 1948 monograph on Robinson, Yvor Winters describes the poem as “a superficially neat portrait of the elegant man of mystery” that “builds up to a very cheap surprise ending.” As to Robinson’s larger accomplishment, Winters writes:

 

“[Nearly] all of Robinson’s best poems appear to deal with particular persons and situations; in these poems his examination is careful and intelligent, his method is analytic, and his style is mainly very distinguished. . . . he became on certain occasions one of the most remarkable poets in our language.”

'I Hopped All Over the Canon'

“There was no pattern to my reading. It was all hand-to-mouth.”

When young I was indiscriminate, reading anything I fancied and that chance put in front of me, from Julius Caesar to Philip K. Dick. If one’s critical sense is to amount to more than mere snobbery, I don’t know any other way to develop respectable tastes later in life. I’m almost saying, “Junk is good for you,” at least in moderation and in the narrow sense of giving you something against which to contrast good writing. Any book, potentially, can teach you something, even if it’s only never to read it again.

 

In passing on Thursday I mentioned reading while in high school Jews, God and History by Max I. Dimont. A reader wrote to ask if I was Jewish and, if not, “Why did you read it? It seems like an unusual choice for a high-school student.” No question, I was an unusual high-school student. And not Jewish. I had always been interested in Judaism and Jewish history, I had Jewish friends and the Six-Day War likely had something to do with it. Dimont’s book in its day was a bestseller. There was nothing exotic about it. I bought the Signet paperback (95¢).

 

The passage at the top comes from an interview with the late Irish poet Michael Longley, who appears to have had a mind that habitually made linkages. In this, he reminds me of my brother who very early developed an interesting Borgesian method for selecting the next book to read. The current book would provide the inspiration. In it he would find an allusion, a footnote, a passing reference to another work, and there you were. I remember once a book on the paintings of Albrecht Dürer led him to a biography of the American photographer Weegee. The interviewer asks about Longley’s early reading in poetry and the poet replies:

 

“At Trinity I hopped all over the canon. As a classicist much of it was new to me. I read George Herbert as though he'd been published the previous week. (And I never had to answer an exam question on him!) From Britain the three contemporary volumes that meant most to me were Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived, Ted Hughes’ Lupercal and Geoffrey Hill’s For the Unfallen. . . . Likewise Richard Wilbur. A matchless virtuoso. I bruised my brain trying to write Wilburese.”

'Your Face Broods From My Table'

My nephew texted me Monday afternoon to say a student had committed suicide in my old high school. She shot herself in the cafeteria. As usual, news of suicide, especially of a young person and despite my total ignorance of the facts, left me looking in vain for explanations. Drugs, mental illness, plain old despair? The school is closed for two days and the district is offering “grief counseling.” Police have not released the identity of the 18-year-old. I find little follow-up news and don’t expect to see much. What’s to report?

 I ate hundreds of lunches in that cafeteria. During one of them a guy tried to convince me that Ayn Rand could write. With a girl I had known since kindergarten I debated the merits of “Give Me Just a Little More Time” by Chairmen of the Board. There I read Max I. Dimont’s Jews, God and History and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. And, for the first time, The Dream Songs of John Berryman, who would commit suicide two years later. He writes in “Dream Song 172,” regarding the suicide of Sylvia Plath:

 

“Your face broods from my table, Suicide.

Your force came on like a torrent toward the end

of agony and wrath.”

'I Know No Pleasure Like That of Books'

All I ask is that a book be well-written and teach me something – two conditions admittedly rather vague and subjective. This is no critical credo and I’m not proposing conditions others should follow. I’m reacting to a second reading of a book I first read more than twenty years ago and found interesting: The Book of Disquiet (trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin, 2003) by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese poet famous for turning out poems by a cast of heteronyms. 

Pessoa’s book might be likened to Giacomo Leopardi’s much superior prose masterwork, Zibaldone, published in its entirety in English for the first time in 2013. The Italian title is customarily translated “hodge-podge” or “miscellany,” though “grab bag” or “gallimaufry” might lend an appropriately vernacular touch to what is, after all, a vast gathering of fragments. The same applies to The Book of Disquiet. Both are characteristically modern in being unified only by each author’s sensibility. They are books so elastic and seductive that you can open them anywhere, read a passage at random and lose yourself for hours.

 

Pessoa, however, is too often guilty of intellectual cuteness. He sometimes comes off like an overweening graduate student showing off for his adviser. He’s overly fond of paradoxes and likes to formulate contrarieties that we know he doesn’t believe, only to vex the reader. Consider this:

 

“To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.”

 

The first sentence is inarguable. The second is true but of dubious importance. The third is nonsense. Now try this:

 

“I know no pleasure like that of books, and I read very little. Books are introductions to dreams, and no introductions are necessary for one who freely and naturally enters into conversation with them. I’ve never been able to lose myself in a book; as I’m reading, the commentary of my intellect or imagination has always hindered the narrative flow. After a few minutes it’s I who am writing, and what I write is nowhere to be found.”

 

Here the sagacity and nonsense are mixed. The final sentence is pure show-off pretentiousness. One more:

 

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.”

 

No, to write is to remember. Writing and reading are the opposite of slumber, though both can enable self-forgetting. Now I realize my first sentence above is a variation on what Dr. Johnson wrote in his review of Soame Jenyns’ A Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1756): “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

 

Pessoa is still occasionally able to rouse my enthusiasm, as when he writes of my favorite Dickens novel: “One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)”

'The Long Habit of Living'

“Perfect weather. And to think that on such a day people are still dying!” 

Sometimes I suspect the human imagination is by nature Gothic, though histrionic may be a better description. We like to dramatize things. Death is supposed to occur in the shadows, away from the reassuring touch of sunlight. Thunder cracks, rain fills the streets, tall trees fall.

 

The day my brother died in a Cleveland hospice was beautifully sunny, about 80 degrees, no rain, low humidity, a perfect day in August near the shore of Lake Erie. I had opened the curtains so the afternoon sunlight could fall on Ken. He had been unconscious for several days but he would have enjoyed it. I’ve just seen a characteristic photo of my brother – almost smiling, head cocked ironically, Old Testament-looking -- posted by our friend Gary Dumm.

 

The passage at the top is the April 20, 1909 entry in Jules Renard’s Journal. His tone, like Ken’s, is essentially comic but also a little cranky. Renard’s other entry that day: “My faithfulness as a husband, a comical thing, which adds to my literary reputation.”

 

Mostly for the sheer pleasure of his prose I’m reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial  (1658) again:

  

“If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer conformity into it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying; when avarice makes us the sport of death, when even David grew politickly cruel, and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age.”

 

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

'A Beautiful and Consoling Thought'

The only speeding ticket I have ever received was issued by a police officer in Bellevue, Wa., about fifteen years ago. He clocked me doing thirty-five on a street with a posted speed limit of twenty-five mph. It’s almost embarrassing, so pitiful an infraction. I was careless, not in a hurry. I’m virtually religious about obeying the speed limit. As a reporter, I once rode in a police cruiser in Indiana with a sheriff’s deputy who was chasing a hit-and-run driver. I peered over her shoulder and the speedometer seemed to read about 130 mph. She later confirmed her top speed was 133 mph. She caught the guy and I nearly soiled myself. Any residual fantasy about imitating James Dean had vanished. 

On April 19, 1936, Max Beerbohm broadcast a BBC radio talk titled “Speed.” He begins with an anecdote about the poet W.E. Henley (1849-1903), who was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis at age twelve and his left leg was amputated below the knee. Last year at my fifty-fifth high school reunion, I spoke with my eighth-grade English teacher and thanked her for having us memorize “Invictus.” Together we recited “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.”

 

Beerbohm recounts the one-legged Henley’s love of riding in a fast car: “At last Henley went swinging over hill and dale. The Mercédes was for him a glorious revelation, an apocalypse. His Muse vibrantly responded . . .”

 

Beerbohm sees speed infecting every aspect of life, even dining: “They certainly eat much faster; insomuch that if I am invited to meet some of them at luncheon or dinner I find at each course that I have only just begun when they have all finished; and when I reach my home I ask, ‘Are there any biscuits?’” And he goofs on mock-outrage, always an amusing spectacle:

 

“We are constantly told by the Press that we must be ‘traffic-conscious’. But there is really no need to tell us we must be so. How could we be otherwise? How not be concussion-apprehensive, annihilation-evasive, and similar compound words? When the children of this generation, brought up in fear, shall have become adult, what sort of nervous ailments will their progeny have, one wonders? Many of the present children won't grow up at all. Very old people and very young people form the majority of those who are annually slaughtered upon our roads.”

 

My old speeding ticket, though deserved, now seems absurd. Beerbohm consoles me by noting the Earth rotates at a rate of between 1,037 and 1,670 mph. The essayist puts it at 1,110 mph, and concludes:

 

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed a beautiful and a consoling thought—a thought for you to sleep on, to dream of. Sleep well. Dream beautifully. In fact—Good Night.”

 

[“Speed” is collected in Mainly on the Air (Heinemann, 1946; rev. 1957).]