'Flow, Like Waters After Summer Show’rs'

“As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation; one says, ‘It is very fine weather,’ and the other says, ‘Yes;’—one blows his nose, and the other rubs his eye-brows; (by the way, this is very much in Homer’s manner;) such seems to be the case between you and me.” 

All of us recognize that uncomfortable moment when conversation flags and two brains feel empty. This is not the same as an imbalance between speakers, one of whom is a bore. The job of the other then becomes sneaking away while trying to minimize discourtesy. We excuse the silence when friends talk, knowing it will resume.

 

William Cowper is writing a letter on July 27, 1780 to his friend the Rev. William Unwin. They met when Unwin was an undergraduate in theology at Cambridge and Cowper lodged with Unwin’s parents at nearby Huntingdon. When the father died in 1767, the widow, her daughter and Cowper moved to Olney at the invitation of the Rev. John Newton, the evangelical preacher. Cowper had already attempted suicide three times and been confined to an asylum. His mental state was never secure and without friends he likely would have succeeded in eventually taking his life.

 

Cowper conceived of conversation as a form of fellowship. He would agree with Hazlitt: “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.” Today, it’s too often reduced to mummery, a recitation of mutually approved opinions, a tiresome ritual. There’s no surprises and nothing is learned. Real conversation is less like a sermon than a Lester Young improvisation. Cowper writes in his poem “Conversation” (1781):   

 

“ . . . souls that carry on a blest exchange

Of joys they meet with in their heav’nly range,

And with a fearless confidence make known

The sorrows sympathy esteems its own,

Daily derive encreasing light and force

From such communion in their pleasant course,

Feel less the journey’s roughness and its length,

Meet their opposers with united strength,

And one in heart, in int’rest and design,

Gird up each other to the race divine.

But Conversation, chuse what theme we may,

And chiefly when religion leads the way,

Should flow, like waters after summer show’rs,

Not as if raised by mere mechanic powers.”

'Painstakingly Logical and Precise'

A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right: 

“In the course of a reading life, one often stumbles on excellent prose writers never before encountered; such discoveries, however, are less likely in poetry. First-rate poetry is a more manageable quantity. Unlike with prose, it is possible to read all, or virtually all, of the decent verse in the language.”

 

Perhaps it’s because poetry is somehow more vulnerable than prose, its form more essential to its nature. For attentive readers, bad verse immediately announces its wretchedness, whether from narcissism or a tin ear. The ability to write first-rate poetry is among the rarest of gifts.

 

The first virtue a reader finds in prose is clarity, which is not the same as Dick-and-Jane simplicity. It means no muddle, no ambiguity where none is intended. The writer knows what he wishes to say and says it without fumbling. One recalls Jonathan Swift’s diktat in “A Letter to a Young Clergyman” (1720): “Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style,” but adds:

 

“Professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meanings to those who are not of their tribe: a common farmer shall make you understand in three words, that his foot is out of joint, or his collar-bone broken, wherein a surgeon, after a hundred terms of art, if you are not a scholar, shall leave you to seek. It is frequently the same case in law, physic, and even many of the meaner arts.”

 

There’s no all-purpose template for prose, whether workmanlike or excellent. One thinks of Edward Gibbon, William Hazlitt, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell, all masters of their craft, none of whom could be mistaken for the others. My friend Douglas Dalrymple, proprietor of the Loose Canon blog, recently wrote of his namesake, Theodore Dalrymple:

 

“Not only is his adopted surname my actual surname, and his natural conservatism cousin to my own – and not only is he worth admiring as perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose – but the man loves dogs.”

 

That too is good prose. The author of the passage at the top is the poet-critic David Yezzi, writing of another in his essay “The Seriousness of Yvor Winters.” It’s easy to quibble with Winters’ more eccentric judgments, some of which may have been issued as provocations, always a useful device in upsetting unexamined critical assumptions. Winters’ prose, like his poems, is masterful – forthright and plainspoken. In reference to “the greatest poems of the plain style,” Yezzi writes of Winters and his final book, Forms of Discovery (1967):

 

“Such poems, for Winters, are good because they display themes ‘broad, simple, and obvious, even tending toward the proverbial, but usually a theme of some importance; a feeling restrained to the minimum required by the subject; a rhetoric restrained to a similar minimum’ as opposed to the Petrarchan use of ‘rhetoric for its own sake.’ The argument of the poem is painstakingly logical and precise. The rhythm is restrained in its careful adherence to the metrical norm, a heavily stopped line, and a strong caesura.”

'To Be Made Out of Emotions, Colors, Life Itself'

“[Robert Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else was disturbing the quiet little cemetery of English literature.”

 

That’s David Pryce-Jones writing in Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime (Encounter Books, 2020), his collection of anecdotes of writers who gave him inscribed copies of their books. Pryce-Jones reflects on Conquest (1917-2015), the poet and historian who signed his 1968 history of Stalin’s purges, The Great Terror. He writes: 

 

“The question with Bob is whether he was a poet who happened to be a Sovietologist or a Sovietologist who happened to be a poet. I tend to think the former, because poetry answered to his view of making whatever there is to be made out of emotions, colors, life itself.” 

 

In 2009, already in his nineties, Conquest published Penultimata, a collection of new poems. Among them is “Last Hours,” nine stanzas of three lines each. Pryce Jones quotes the poem’s final stanza, which he says “best expresses the let’s-get-on-with-it Bob that I knew and liked”: 

 

“Dead in the water, the day is done

There’s nothing new under the sun,

 Still less when it’s gone down.” 

 

Has there ever been a less grim, more serious poet and historian? One reads Conquest and feels reassured that life is good, so let’s enjoy it. I feel the same way about Larkin and Amis – congenitally funny writers who are deeply serious. No sense in being gloomy or pretentious. I’ve been rereading some of Conquest’s books, including The Abomination of Moab (1979). The title essay is a demolition of the bad poetry translations that became fashionable in the twentieth century – Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Lowell and others. Of Zukofsky’s ridiculous Catullus translation, Conquest writes:

 

“Now, on its merits, Zukofsky's stuff is obviously not worth bothering about. We might pass on, merely hoping—and it is no more than a hope—that no one will find a way of being sillier still. But it is after all significant, in the mere fact that some allegedly expert voices have been raised in its favour. That this is the case about something so ostentatiously, so uncompromisingly awful, already tells us a good deal about the general standards now prevailing.” 

 

Conquest is reliably invigorating to read. Pryce-Jones tells us he knew Conquest from 1963. The latter was foreign editor of the Spectator, and he was its literary editor. He and Conquest shared a commonsensical moral sense:

  

“Communism was to the 20th century what sorcery had been to the Middle Ages. The claim of the foundational doctrine of Marxism to be a science was pure witchcraft. Something known as the dialectic was said to be the key to progress, but nobody could make sense of this figment. The state was supposed to wither away, leaving us all to look after ourselves as though back in the Garden of Eden, yet in the starkest of contradictions the Communist state granted itself ever more total power over the individual in every aspect of daily life. The organizing principle of class became a sentence of death, exile, or dispossession for tens of millions of men and women defined as bourgeois, capitalist, kulak, or whatever could be profitably exploited.”

'A Noble Unconsciousness Is in Him'

A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s correct. “I think people are too cynical to have heroes today,” she continues. “They’re embarrassed to say someone is a hero. Nobody’s good enough. Everybody wants to look for failure and weakness.” Again, correct. A kind of corrosive skepticism is taken for sophistication. It’s self-promotion masking as fashionable cynicism. 

Many people I admire but heroes are distinguished by their indifference to approval or disapproval. They don’t make up their minds by reading reviews or waiting for poll results. They don’t play to the audience, which rules out politicians. Their values are solid and coherent but not autocratic. They possess a sort of courageous commitment to honesty, while being human and thus susceptible to self-delusion. A hero would be embarrassed to be called a hero. Without thinking deeply about it, my pantheon: Jonathan Swift, Yvor Winters, Whittaker Chamber, Simon Leys, the Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila (known as Don Colacho).

 

Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) includes the lecture “The Hero as Man of Letters,” in which Carlyle lauds the absence of fuss in Dr. Johnson, the indifference to impressing his fellows and polishing his image. Making the world better is too often the slogan of those who would destroy it. Johnson had no interest in utopia-building. Carlyle writes:

 

“Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his ‘sincerity.’ He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere, — of his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or ‘scholar’ as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live — without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him.”

 

With his fears of idleness and madness, Johnson often self-prescribed work as the cure. That too seems a characteristic common to heroes. Carlyle calls the attitude “rude stubborn self-help,” and we are its beneficiaries: “Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. . . . There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.”

 

[See Matthew Pheneger’s essay “Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the ‘Authentic Reactionary.’”]

'O Deliquescence of Our Quartz-like Loves!'

A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. It entered English in the eighteenth century and its original context was strictly scientific: deliquescence occurs when a substance absorbs moisture from the air and becomes a liquid solution. Salts, for instance, are readily deliquescent. Figuratively, it came to mean, the OED tells us, “dissolving, disappearing, or melting away . . . Frequently humorous.” The Dictionary tells us Sydney Smith used it in a letter: “Striding over the stiles to Church, with a second-rate wife—dusty and deliquescent—and four parochial children.”

We can all think of poets who would find a place for deliquescent and its related forms – Wallace Stevens, Turner Cassity, Richard Wilbur, among others. A brief search uncovered it in Eric Ormsby’s  “Six Sonnets on Sex and Death” (Daybreak at the Straits, 2004). Here are the final lines of the fifth sonnet:

 

“Mortality was frisky in the lines

of telephones where drowsy mourning doves

felt final conversations in their claws

transmitted in designer valentines.

 

“O deliquescence of our quartz-like loves!

His heartbeat hovered in two grimy paws.”

 

I also happened on the word in Louise Bogan’s review of Finnegans Wake in the May 6, 1939 issue of The New Yorker. Comparing the novel to Ulysses, she writes:

 

“Finnegans Wake takes up this technical skill as it existed at the end of Ulysses and further elaborates it. Then Joyce’s mastery of structure and his musician’s feeling for form and rhythmic subtlety are here in a more advanced—as well as a more deliquescent—state of development.”

 

[Bogan’s review is collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]

'Every Departure Destroys a Class of Sympathies'

As a boy I was spared most deaths. I've read of people who lose parents, siblings and close friends when young, and wonder how they adapt to unprecedented loss. They have nothing to compare it to. The death that hit me hardest was President Kennedy’s, a month after my eleventh birthday. He wasn’t much of a president but a touch of horror lingers, as does the sense that everything changed after Dallas. 

With age the losses accumulate and they are no longer abstract, as though I were reading history. Last month, in our neighborhood newspaper, I saw that a doctor who had treated me five years ago was dead. He had a military bearing and was strictly no-bullshit. I liked him. He was my age and died horribly of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. What is it like for a doctor to die slowly and painfully, while knowing exactly what was happening to him? Here is Charles Lamb on March 20, 1822 writing to William Wordsworth:

 

“Deaths overset one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died, within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies.”

 

A world dies with every person. September 26 will be the tenth anniversary of D.G. Myers’ death. It was no surprise but still a hard shock. We knew each other for only six years but talked like lifelong friends. Terry Teachout died on January 13, 2022. I knew him for almost twenty years, though I met him and David only once. Everyday I think of something that I wish I could tell them. Lamb continues:

 

“One never hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence,--thus one distributes oneself about; and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve; I want individuals. . . . The going-away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them, as there was a common link. A, B, and C make a party. A dies. B not only loses A, but all A's part in C. C loses A's part in B, and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.”

'He Signs His Name in Sparks'

By trade my father was an ironworker for the City of Cleveland’s Municipal Light, always called “Muny Light." At home he was a welder, specializing in wrought-iron railings. His aesthetic sense could be summarized in a single word: big. Or heavy. Everything he built was oversized. Steel and iron were always preferable to aluminum or wood. When I was collecting butterflies he built a display case for me out of galvanized sheet metal, large enough to hold perhaps forty pinned specimens. It must have weighed fifty pounds. 

In the garage he had the equipment for both oxyacetylene and arc welding. The latter drew enough electricity to melt iron and dim all the lights in the house. That’s how we knew what kind of work he was doing. His body was covered with small wounds from the sparks. They would bleed, leaving red dots on the bed sheets. His work clothes were perforated with tiny holes. I never learned to weld. Not being handy, always feeling awkward with tools, was my passive protest.

 

Len Krisak is better known as a translator, especially of Latin verse and Rilke, but he’s a fine  poet in his own right. I happened on “Welder,” originally published in the March 2000 issue of The English Journal:

 

“This spear of light ignites a blade whose flame

 Is so intense the night relents around

 It: this is what he cuts the junker’s frame

 With, slicing through the steel that marks the ground

 With one gigantic X. He signs his name

 In sparks right on the spot, a dotted line

 So hot that specks of fire spit upon

 The darkness, arcing out. Their spite designs

 The black surround, and then . . . his torch is gone.

 As for the dying-down acetylene,

 The oxygen whose bottled force goes dead,

 This welder wrenches shut the one that’s green

 And throttles down the other that was red.

 His visor up, he walks away, unseen.”