'That We May Look Unflinchingly on Death'

My wife vows never to shop again at our neighborhood grocery, less than a mile from our house. I agree that a semi-Third World atmosphere pervades the place. Once I found a puddle of urine on the floor in produce. I watched a woman stuff a bottle of wine into her yoga pants. The customer ahead of me in the checkout line screamed when the guy packing her bag dropped a cantaloupe on the eggs she had just paid for. Twice I’ve witnessed fist fights in the aisles. 

I’m certain plenty of people in the world would marvel at our grocery shelves. So much bounty, so much redundancy and waste. I remember as a kid seeing photos of empty shelves in Soviet stores, with a babushkaed woman staring forlornly. Cold war propaganda? Of course. But accurate, not staged.

 

When I go grocery shopping I assume the role of anthropologist. Much of today’s world is a foreign country to me. I see stuff my parents wouldn’t recognize as food – sushi, plantain, kale, pico de gallo, canned menudo. The last item my father might actually have enjoyed. Like Mr. Bloom he “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

 

In “Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket” (The Blue Swallows, 1967), Howard Nemerov treats the modern American grocery as an exercise in mathematics, divine grace and the denial of mortality:

 

“This God of ours, the Great Geometer,

Does something for us here, where He hath put

(if you want to put it that way) things in shape,

Compressing the little lambs into orderly cubes,

Making the roast a decent cylinder,

Fairing the tin ellipsoid of a ham,

Getting the luncheon meat anonymous

In squares and oblongs with all the edges bevelled

Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).

 

“Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance

Upon our appetites, and on the bloody

Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,

Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes

Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,

Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives

They come to us holy, in cellophane

Transparencies, in the mystical body,

That we may look unflinchingly on death

As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.”

'A Kind of Aesthetics'

Almost twenty years ago the late poet and Melville scholar Helen Pinkerton urged me to read Wisdom and Wilderness: the Achievement of Yvor Winters (1983) by the English-born poet Dick Davis. She had been a student of Winters at Stanford in the Forties and remained loyal to his work and memory. Helen judged Davis’ book the most reliable written on the too-often-forgotten poet-critic (admittedly, not a crowded field). Then I learned that Davis was a gifted poet and famed translator of Persian verse. 

Interviews with poets tend to be exercises in pablum and self-promotion, but Elijah Perseus Blumov’s with Davis at New Verse Review is a pleasing exception. Blumov describes Davis as “a true master of verse craft.” We learn his favorite poets are Chaucer, Hardy and Auden: “I like them because they are brilliant technicians.” About Winters he says:

 

“[T]he fact that you could write poetry in the plain style is something that I got from Winters. Also, the sense that—and this sounds trite and obvious but it’s not something that was talked about when I was young—that you can think in poetry. Winters is very keen on people thinking. He loves Fulke Greville, for example, who actually thinks as the verse goes along, and you can see him pondering and changing his mind. I wasn’t aware of that strand of poetry, and Winters’ work introduced me to the plain style, to thinking in verse, and also to taking poetry seriously.”

 

Davis befriended another former student of Winters, Edgar Bowers:

 

“His personality was quite mercurial in many ways. He was very funny when he disapproved of people, and he would say things like, ‘Oh, he couldn’t tell a good poem from a hole in the wall!’ I actually remember him saying that about someone. He would speak with utter contempt about people. He hated people who showed off and didn’t have anything to show off about—that really infuriated him.”

 

And here is Davis beginning with autobiography and turning quietly to philosophy:

 

“I was a very moralistic young man, a rather unpleasant young man, I think– always telling people how to live and what to do. I really dislike people who do that nowadays. Aesthetics and morality don’t seem to me to be opposites. Morality—this is going to sound hopelessly precious—but morality, in a way, is a kind of aesthetics. It’s an instinct for what is appropriate and right, which is what aesthetics is too. So I don’t see them as totally separate.”

 

Davis has written several poems about Edgar Bowers, including “Edgar,” which carries the dedication “(i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924-2000)”: 

 

“A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:

 

“A stately ’80s Buick; hearing a car

Referred to by a coaxing soubriquet--

’ Now come on, Captain, don’t you let me down.’

French spoken in a conscious southern accent;

An idiom calqued and made ridiculous

(’Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin’).

’Silly,’ dismissive in its deep contempt,

’Oh he’s a silly; an amiable silly,

But still a silly.’ The words I first

Encountered in your captious conversations,

’Tad,’ ‘discombobulated,’ ’cattywampus.’

The usage that you gave me once for ’totaled’–

’Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totaled me.’

 

Most recently, in Cleveland’s art museum,

The French Medieval Tapestries brought back

Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,

And how, for once, you’d stood there almost speechless,

Examining Time’s Triumph inch by inch,

Enraptured by its richness, by the young man

Proud in his paradisal place, until

You saw what his averted gaze avoided--

The old man, beaten, bent double by fate’s blows,

Driven from youth’s charmed, evanescent circle:

And how you’d wanted to be sure I’d seen him.”

 

To read Davis’ work find Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2017).

'Enlightened Spectators'

In his 1825 essay “On Old English Writers and Speakers,” William Hazlitt rather uncharacteristically waves the Union Jack in rousing defense of English literature in contrast to the French. He begins by browsing a Paris bookstall and seeing French books stacked “to the height of twenty or thirty volumes.” He goes on (and on):

“There is scarcely such a thing as an English book to be met with, unless, perhaps, a dusty edition of [Samuel Richardson’s] Clarissa Harlowe lurks in an obscure corner, or a volume of [Laurence Sterne’s] the Sentimental Journey perks its well-known title in your face.”

Seldom has prose mastery been so wedded to crankiness, but that’s part of Hazlitt’s charm. He’s passionate about almost everything. What distinguishes him from run-of-the-mill ranters is the deftness of his language. The essay continues:

“We sympathise less, however, with the pompous and set speeches in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille, or in the serious comedies of Moliere, than we do with the grotesque farces of the latter, with the exaggerated descriptions and humour of Rabelais (whose wit was a madness, a drunkenness), or with the accomplished humanity, the easy style, and gentlemanly and scholar-like sense of Montaigne. But these we consider as in a great measure English, or as what the old French character inclined to, before it was corrupted by courts and academies of criticism.”

Hazlitt has the gall (sorry) to make the French essayist a sort of honorary Englishman. It’s almost as though he were precognitive. His son, also named William Hazlitt, would edit and publish Montaigne’s Complete Works in the Charles Cotton translation in 1842. William Carew Hazlitt, the essayist’s grandson, revised his father’s edition in 1877.

Clearly, the paterfamilias is a lineal descendent of the great Frenchman. In his 1819 essay “On the Periodical Essayists.” Hazlitt writes:

“There is no one to whom the old Latin adage is more applicable than to Montaigne, Pereant isti qui ante nos nostra dixerunt [“May they perish, who said first what we were going to say.”]. There has been no new impulse given to thought since his time.”

The ideal essay, Hazlitt writes, “ . . . takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.”

At the conclusion of the “On Old English Writers” essay, Hazlitt generalizes and returns to his patriotic theme:

“Man, whatever he may think, is a very limited being; the world is a narrow circle drawn about him; the horizon limits our immediate view; immortality means a century or two. Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bound countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown. A little importation from foreign markets may be good; but the home production is the chief thing to be looked to.” 

Hazlitt was born on this date, April 10, in 1778, and died in 1830 at age fifty-two.

[A recommendation: I rely on Selected Essays of William Hazlitt (Nonesuch Press, 1934). It’s a sturdy hardcover with legible print and an excellent selection of essays by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, a surgeon and literary scholar.]

'We Talked of Old Age'

Boswell and Johnson dined on April 9, 1778, at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Other guests included the Bishop of St. Asaph and Edward Gibbon. Topics of conversation ranged from Oliver Goldsmith (Johnson: “his intention to blurt out whatever was in his mind”) to rural living (“No wise man will go to live in the country”). And then, Boswell reports: 

“We talked of old age. Johnson (now in his seventieth year) said, ‘It is a man’s own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.’ The Bishop asked, if an old man does not lose faster than he gets. JOHNSON. ‘I think not, my Lord, if he exerts himself.’”

 

Someone not identified by Boswell observes that “he thought it was happy for an old man that insensibility comes upon him.' JOHNSON. (with a noble elevation and disdain) ‘No, Sir, I should never be happy by being less rational.’ BISHOP OF ST. ASAPH. ‘Your wish then, Sir, is [original in Solon’s Greek, as reported by Plutarch: ‘I grow in learning as I grow in years”]. JOHNSON. ‘Yes, my Lord.’”

 

Call it wishful thinking but Johnson and Plutarch have something here. Reading, writing, pondering, learning, unto themselves, will not promote longevity though they will make life more interesting -- and worth living. People are forever looking for magic cures, even for mortality. The internet is infected with ads promoting this sad silliness. At the other end of the life span, when my sons were young, there was a vogue for playing Mozart to boost infant intelligence. Thelonious Monk seems to have done no harm.

 

Take R.S. Gwynn’s poem “Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry.” It’s an ingenious composite of lines lifted from twenty-eight poems, rhymed and metrically consistent. Here is the conclusion: 

 

“Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Downward to darkness on extended wings,

Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

 

The first quoted line comes from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” followed by, respectively, Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” Tennyson’s "Break, Break, Break," Shakespeare’s Richard II, and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

 

[Gwynn’s poem is collected in No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000 (Story Line Press, 2001).]

'Laugh from the Centre of Things'

One of the qualities I most esteem in a friend, apart from brains and adequate hygiene, is the ready ability to make me laugh. When we ponder friendship we tend to emphasize its heavier aspects: confidence, trust, shared values and interests. But those traits, when combined with a plodding, literal-minded, humorless manner, are heavily compromised if not erased. Not that humor is inconsistent with a generally dark world view. I remember the late Terry Teachout describing himself as an “ebullient pessimist.” The one time we met, over lunch here in Houston, we laughed through our meal. Here is Jules Renard in his journal on April 8, 1896:

 “One must laugh from the centre of things. In other words I do not laugh at politics per se, because there may be some good in it, of which I am ignorant. But I laugh at the politicians I know, at first hand, and at the politics they practice in front of my eyes.”

 

Laughter may be our most potent weapon against not only politicians but do-gooders, self-identified experts of any stripe and yentas in general. Renard goes on:

 

“Rather than frivolity, laughter must be serious and informed, and philosophically awake! You have a right to cry with laughter only when you have already wept. The ridiculous belongs to the moment, and nothing is entirely or permanently ridiculous.”

 

I’m aware that a gift for inducing laughter can, like any human capacity, be used destructively. Extreme comics tend to become nihilists, mocking the worthy with the contemptible. “[French critic Ernest] Renan said," Renard writes, ‘The mockers will never rule.’ Which is true, they laugh at the very idea of ruling.”

 

Bill Coyle in “Table Talk” from The God of This World to His Prophet (2006) describes the unlikely T.S. Eliot/Groucho Marx pas de deux, and in doing so illuminates the complicated nature of a good laugh, or its absence:

 

“It was a meeting of two modern masters

when Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot,

mutual admirers, sat down to dinner,

but brilliant conversation it was not.

 

“Each man, it seems, was too in awe of the other,

Eliot eager to demonstrate that he

knew scores of Groucho’s jokes by heart and Groucho

that he was versed in Eliot’s poetry.

 

“Still, I’d give anything to hear them chatting.

Groucho, with perfect seriousness would say,

‘Who is the third who is always beside you?’

and Eliot, laughing, ‘if I could walk that way . . .’”

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

'I Now Believe in Hell'

Anton Chekhov was thirty-one years old and had experienced his first haemoptysis (blood coughed from the lungs) seven years earlier, when he visited Pompeii and climbed to the summit of Mount Vesuvius on April 6, 1891. The most recent significant eruption of the volcano, which remains active, had occurred in 1872. Chekhov writes to his sister Maria on April 7: 

“What a torture it is to climb Vesuvius! Ashes, mountains of lava, congealed waves of molten minerals, mounds and all sorts of nasty things. You take one step forward and fall a half step back. The soles of your feet hurt; you have trouble breathing. You keep going and going, and the summit is still far off. You start thinking you ought to turn back, but you’re ashamed to for fear of ridicule.”

 

Two words come to mind to describe Chekhov’s climb up an active volcano while already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him thirteen years later: intrepid and foolish. Knowing Chekhov with his omnivorous sense of curiosity, frequent disregard and even denial of ill health, and his courage, we shouldn’t be surprised. Who wouldn’t want to peer into a smoking caldera? He continues:

 

“Vesuvius’s crater is several sazhens [one sazhen = seven feet] in diameter. I stood at its edge and looked down into it as if I were looking into a teacup. The earth surrounding it is covered with a thin coating of sulphur and gives off a dense vapor. A noxious white smoke pours out of the crater, sparks and red-hot rocks fly everywhere. While Satan lies snorting beneath the smoke.”

 

Chekhov was touring Italy with his editor and friend Alexi Suvorin. One year earlier, he had traveled to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, 4,000 miles east of Moscow. He would publish his nonfiction masterpiece, Sakhalin Island, in 1895. Chekhov continues his letter to Maria:

 

“There is quite a mixture of sounds: you hear breakers beating, thunder clapping, railroad trains pounding, boards falling. It is all quite terrifying, and at the same time makes you want to jump right down into the maw. I now believe in Hell. The lava is of such high temperature that a copper coin will melt in it.”

 

There’s a tradition of writers visiting Vesuvius, starting with Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the most famous eruption, in 79 A.D., the one that buried Pompeii, and described what he saw in a letter to Tacitus. Later visitors included Goethe, Chateaubriand, Byron and Walter Scott.

 

My favorite description can be found in an unlikely source, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) by Charles Montagu Doughty. The passage comes in Chap. XV, “Nomad Life Upon the Harra.” Doughty studied geology at Cambridge, and it shows. In 1872, on his way to Arabia, he stops in Italy and climbs Vesuvius, which he recalls in his description of the Arabian Aueyrid Harra, a desolate tract of volcanic rock he calls “a wilderness of burning and rusty horror.” Here is a brief excerpt from the passage: 

 

“In the year 1872 I was a witness to the great eruption of Vesuvius. Standing from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain, that day in which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle-deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava; in the midst was a mammel-like chimney, not long formed, fuming with a light corrosive breath; which to those in the plain had appeared by night as a fiery beacon with trickling lavas. Beyond was a new seat of the weak daily eruption, a pool of molten lava and wherefrom issued all that strong dinning noise and uncouth travail of the mountain; from thence was from time to time tossed aloft, and slung into the air, a swarm of half-molten wreathing missiles.”

 

Doughty's Vesuvius passage continues for another two pages, inserted digressively into an account of lava fields in Arabia. Most noteworthy is Doughty’s language. His word choice is often unexpected, as in “flour of sulphur” and “uncouth travail.” You won’t mistake Doughty’s prose for anyone else’s, though he lacks Chekhov’s comic sense.

 

[The translators of the quoted Chekhov passages above are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973).]

'One Should Carry His Stick Also'

“From the first he walked through intrigue, pretention, flunkeyism, and despotic arrogance, and, by blasting these qualities with his tongue, became a personage among their exponents.” 

What a marvelous word, flunkeyism. It’s a quality we all recognize, especially on the job. The OED defines a flunkey as “a person who behaves obsequiously to persons above him or her in rank or position; a ‘lackey’, toady.” First cousin to the ass-kisser and brown-noser, flunkies are the grease that keeps organizations functioning. Where would bosses be without them?

 

The writer above is E.Powys Mathers in the introduction to his translation of Maxims and Considerations of Chamfort (1926), available free of charge thanks to Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books. Nicolas Chamfort (1741-94) is one of the great aphorists, a practitioner of that difficult form favored by realists with a gift for condensing unfortunate truths.

 

It’s probably significant that maxim has so many close synonyms – aphorism, aperçu, adage, epigram, apophthegm, proverb. People like to hear truth expressed pithily and memorably, often with a twist. For a while, the French specialized in this sort of thing. Think of Pascal, Joubert, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues. I remember several years ago reading an attack by some academic hack on aphorisms and the notion that truth can be expressed in a mere handful of words. Compared to La Rochefoucauld, I find Chamfort a little wordy and vague. He too often fails to attain that dense concision of the first-rank aphorists. Take CCCVII in the Mathers translation:

 

“Evil by nature, mankind has become much more so through Society, whose every member contributes the defects, first of humanity, then of the individual, and lastly of the social order to which he belongs. These shortcomings grow more pronounced with time, so that a man, offended by them in others, as his age advances, and made unhappy by their presence in himself, conceives a contempt for both Mankind & Society, and has to direct it against one or other.”

 

We can’t argue with the truth of Chamfort’s observation but wish it had been formulated more pithily. It reads more like a miniature essay than a pungent moral stab. The same goes for CCLXXXIX:

 

“Nearly all men are slaves, for that reason which the Spartans gave for the slavery of the Persians, because they cannot pronounce the single syllable no. To be able to say this word and to be able to live alone are the two sole means of retaining liberty and character.”

 

Aphorists treat unflattering truths as a given. No need to prevaricate or make excuses. In this, Chamfort is often very good. Here, in CCLXXVII, he might be describing himself:

 

“An intelligent man is lost if he does not add strength of character to his intelligence. When one has the lantern of Diogenes, one should carry his stick also.” 

 

In CCLVIII he is likewise, we suspect, being autobiographical:

 

“To have an accurate idea of things, we must understand words in an opposite sense to that which Society gives them. For example, Misanthropist means Philanthropist; a bad Frenchman means a good citizen who has been drawing attention to monstrous abuses; and a Philosopher is a simple-minded man who knows that two and two make four.”

 

Such a thinker can’t expect to live a long life. Chamfort was born on this date, April 6, in 1741, and died in 1794 at age fifty-three, yet another victim of the French Revolution.