'How Much Can Be Accomplished'

Cleveland is traditionally divided between East Side and West Side. I’m a West-Sider, though I haven’t lived in the city since 1977. The designation suggests working-class neighborhoods, many of them Slavic. Ethnicity was important, and not usually in the sense of bigotry. I was second-generation Polish on my father’s side, which made me a Polack even though my mother was second-generation Irish. No one called me a Mick, despite my first name, and no one seemed to care that I was a Polack. The neighbors were Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Polish and Slovenian. The arrival of an Italian family in the neighborhood – including my classmate, Mario Lombardo -- was a notable event. 

My brother is a patient in the oncology unit of the Cleveland Clinic on the East Side. When I was a kid, the Clinic was a rumor, like the East Side itself. I remember passing it on the way to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Now it’s vast – 170 acres, and all the usual ratings rank it highly. I remember being encouraged to resent the East Side, thinking it was inhabited by snobs – a very human thing to do. Now I’m staying in one of its affiliated hotels. Every time I got lost on Monday, a doctor, nurse or volunteer (including a recent Boston University grad who is applying to medical schools) gave me directions. I don’t expect graciousness, patience and a smile in a hospital.

 

This spirit reminds me of a great hero of medicine, Dr. William Osler (1849-1919), a Canadian native. He was co-founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital and established the first residency program for medical students. He was also a bookman. A reader, yes, and sometimes a book collector, but without the taint of pedantry or snobbishness. Someone whose sensibility is suffused with books, language and learning. Years ago I found a third edition (1932) of Osler’s extravagantly titled Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine, first published in 1904. The title word means “equanimity” or “imperturbability.” At the end of the volume, Osler adds a “Bed-side Library for Medical Students.” His suggestions include the Old and New Testaments, Shakespeare, Montaigne and Plutarch, among others. He assures us a liberal education “may be had at a very slight cost of time and money,” urges medical students to “get the education, if not of a scholar, at least of a gentleman,” and suggests:

 

“Before going to sleep read for half an hour, and in the morning have a book open on your dressing table. You will be surprised to find how much can be accomplished in the course of a year.”

 

That BU grad who gave me directions was carrying a copy of Bleak House.

'The Courage to Face Reality Squarely'

I’m flying to Cleveland today to see my brother who has been diagnosed with cancer. It has already metastasized and he’s in the Cleveland Clinic, waiting to be admitted to their hospice program. Ken turned sixty-nine in April and is two and a half years younger than me. My neurotic reaction is: That’s not fair. I should go first. 

My friend D.G. Myers published the final post on his Commonplace Blog, “Choosing life in the face of death,” two months before his own death from cancer on September 26, 2014. At the time I read it with admiration. It was characteristically learned, loving and blunt. Now I read it as a sort of inverted self-help guide. I’m looking for answers to such questions as: What do I say and not say? How can I help? How can I ease some of my nephew’s burden?  How can I stop thinking about myself and my reactions?   

 

At the time of his diagnosis -- Stage IV metastatic prostate cancer -- David was given three years to live, tops. He lived another seven. David writes:

 

“[D]enial and despair are merely refusals to accept the responsibility of finding, under the sign of death, a new purpose and meaning to life. Denial and despair are rejections of what the great American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor calls ‘one of God’s mercies.’”

 

A decade later, David seems to hear my questions:

 

“We who are dying need from you what we should be demanding from ourselves—responsibility, honesty, the courage to face reality squarely. It matters less what you say to us than how you talk to us—face-to-face, as Moses spoke with God. And after all, who knows but that you might be the one, by your kindness and faith, to give us the strength to choose life in the face of death?”

'Butterflies Have Nothing to Do With Butter'

Call me an aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary: “A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears at the beginning of the season for butter.” Their seemingly gratuitous beauty, coupled with not stinging like bees or biting like ticks, wins butterflies the insect popularity contest even among non-entomological humans. 

In Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology (Oxford, 2024), the linguist Anatoly Liberman questions Johnson’s etymology of the word without dismissing it. His theory seems to be an example of folkloric entomological etymology. Word origins, Liberman tells up in his introduction, are “hard to penetrate or reconstruct.” He reviews some of the butterfly theories:

 

Butterfly was originally the name of a yellow species, such as the cabbage or brimstone, which later was extended to all species.

 

The first butterflies one sees, at least at the northern latitudes, are “butter-creamy” and arrive during  the “butter season,” March to November.

 

“Vats containing butter have special attraction for butterflies.”

 

“Or (perhaps the most common explanation) the popular superstition has it that witches turn into butterflies and steal milk and butter.”

 

Butterfly is a corruption of flutter-by.   

 

Their excrement resembles butter.

 

Liberman has a sense of humor: “In the past, some of those who had the courage to translate Dutch boterschijte (the main support for the excrement etymology) into English bemoaned the degradation of the butterfly: from Psyche (in Greek, psyche is both ‘soul’ and its incarnation ‘butterfly’) to a butter-shitter.” He neither dismisses nor endorses any of these theories, and notes that the Old English word for butterfly is buttor-fleoge. He concludes:

 

“[W]hen all is said and done, we should admit that butterflies have nothing to do with butter. To an etymologist, beautiful, fluttering butterflies are sometimes more dangerous than mad dogs: they don’t bite but are harder to catch.”

I remember a butter-related bit of folklore we learned as kids. We picked buttercups in the fields behind the house (where I also caught many butterflies) and held the blossoms against another’s throat. If their skin glowed yellow, it meant they loved butter. Today I can think of easier ways to gauge butter-love.

 

Naturally, I think of the twentieth-century’s most famous lepidopterist and his lifelong love of butterflies. This is the conclusion of Chap. 6 in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966):

 

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

'I Read You As I Listen to Rare Music'

Rare is the writer who captures our imagination when we’re young and still assembling our personal canons, and remains rereadable for the rest of our lives. For me that would include Swift, Defoe and a third English novelist, a rather exotic import from Poland: Joseph Conrad. I read him first as a writer of adventure stories, usually set aboard ships. That’s how he was marketed by publishers. I was not only young but a landlubber, and saw the ocean for the first time at age sixteen. Of course, I read Melville, Stevenson and Dana, but Conrad was different, somehow deeper. There was often swashbuckling. Consider Typhoon (1902), which I recently reread. But his novels and stories are all suffused with a dark moral tension. 

Henry James noticed this mingling of popular format with moral mystery. In a letter dated November  1, 1906, after Conrad had sent him an inscribed copy of The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions, James writes:

 

“I read you as I listen to rare music – with deepest depths or surrender, & out of those depths I emerge slowly & reluctantly again, to acknowledge that I return to life….But the book itself is a wonder to me really – for its so bringing home the prodigy of your part of experience; bringing it home to me more personally & directly, I mean, the immense treasure & the inexhaustible adventure. No one has known – for intellectual use – the things you know, & you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached. I find you, in it all, writing wonderfully, whatever you may say of your difficult medium & your plume rebelle.”

 

I also reread Conrad’s greatest novel, Nostromo, earlier this year. He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Apollo, was a Polish patriot and agitated against Russian rule. In 1862, the future novelist, not yet five years old, and his family were exiled to Vologda, north of Moscow. Conrad had a deep familial distrust and hatred for Russia. A major character in Nostromo, Martin Decoud, is a native of Costaguana, Conrad’s fictional South American country. He is a European-educated journalist, works for the newspaper Porvenir (“The Future”) and agitates for Costaguanan independence. In Part 2, Chap. 3, Decoud speaks for Conrad:

 

“Imagine an atmosphere of opéra bouffe which all the comic business of stage statesmen, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical stealing, intriguing, and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe. Of course, government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind; but really we Spanish-Americans do overstep the bounds. No man of ordinary intelligence can take part in the intrigues of une farce macabre.”

 

In his essay “Conrad’s Darkness” (The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad, 1980), V.S. Naipaul, a very Conradian novelist, writes: “And there are the aphorisms. They run right through Conrad’s work, and their tone never varies. It is the same wise man who seems to be speaking.”

 

Conrad died on August 3, 1924 at age sixty-six.

'Doing Valuable Work in Literary Criticism'

“Part of the drama of reading Boswell’s Life for the first time is that one can never (however much classical or Christian erudition one brings to the task) predict confidently how Johnson is going to respond to this or that specific question; yet of course by the end one knows that the answers will very largely be found to cohere if one works patiently enough.” 

It’s merely human to expect consistency in others, even critics, and it’s easy to mistake their likes and dislikes for dogma or at least a systematic set of literary values. That makes it easier to dismiss them as dictators and crackpots. Thoughtful critics and even common readers aren’t obligated to devise a rigorous critical system, weigh every work against it and issue ironclad judgments.

 

I remember the shock I felt when learning what Johnson said of Laurence Sterne: “Nothing odd will do long, Tristram Shandy did not last.” I had just read Sterne’s novel and Johnson's dismissal sounded foolish. For a baffling misstep, consider this passage in Johnson’s “Life of Swift”:

 

“In the poetical works of Dr. Swift there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact.”

 

At the top, John Fraser is writing in his essay “Yvor Winters: The Perils of Mind,” published in the Fall 1970 issue of The Centennial Review. Winters had died two years earlier at age sixty-seven. Fraser quotes him: “The number of people capable of doing valuable work in literary criticism is very small. A great critic, indeed, is the rarest of all literary geniuses . . . perhaps the only critic in English who deserves the epithet is Samuel Johnson,” followed by Fraser’s conclusion: "So too with Winters’ literary judgments.” I know a blogger who called Winters “a fanatic” and “a fascist.” He means Winters had rigorous standards and little use for shoddy work.

 

For Winters, a prerequisite for critical judgment is life experience. Literature is not an abstraction in an Erlenmeyer flask. I like Winters’ remark about a poem by J.V. Cunningham: “I confess that I retain a kind of bucolic distrust of all theories which seem to be in conflict with the facts of life.” He writes of  the overrated William Carlos Williams: “[He] was a thorough bore in print except on a few occasions.” That makes up for Winters' silly critical elevation of Charles Churchill, F. G. Tuckerman and Jones Very.

'A Collection of Scraps and Shards of Knowledge'

“During this time we know [John] Donne was collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of scraps and shards of knowledge known as a commonplace book.”

Like Donne (1572-1621), some of us are magpie-minded, collecting objects shiny and drab, often without obvious utility. Not physical objects. In that sense I’m among the least acquisitive of people, except when it comes to books. I refer to words used in memorable ways in books and magazines, and in movies, songs and conversation. My collection is democratic while remaining happily elitist.   

Years ago in cheap notebooks I began transcribing the words and sentences that caught my eye and ear. In 2006 I started Anecdotal Evidence and often drew on these notebook entries as raw material. I maintained no index and seldom dated the entries, so I've had to rely on a shaky memory. Fortunately, the blog comes with a search function. Anecdotal Evidence transcends the commonplace book by quoting from the accumulated passages and forming them into essay-like blog posts. I never wanted to be a mere quoter. My late friend D.G. Myers started his blog in 2008 and called it A Commonplace Blog.

The passage at the top is taken from Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) by Katherine Rundell, who combines a biography of the poet with a critical approach and writes well. She tells us the fate of Donne’s commonplace book remains a mystery. The poet left it to his eldest son, who left it to Izaak Walton’s son, who left it to Salisbury Cathedral. There the trail stops. Rundell writes:

“If it is ever found, it will cause great and joyful chaos among the Donne community. Because, simply, Donne wouldn’t be Donne if he hadn’t lived in a commonplacing [the first time I’ve seen the word used as a verb] era; it nurtured his collector’s sensibility, hoarding images and authorities. He had a magpie mind obsessed with gathering. In his work, as Samuel Johnson said disapprovingly, you find  the ‘most heterogenous ideas are yoked  by violence together.’”

A misjudgment by Johnson, one of the most trustworthy critics in our tradition. Rundell continues:

“The practice of commonplacing – a way of seeking out and storing knowledge, so that you have multiple voices on a topic under a single heading – colours Donne’s work; one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition, and ends up somewhere fresh and strange. It’s telling that the first recorded use of the word ‘commonplacer’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is Donne’s.”

My most common commonplace sources, analog and digital, likely are Montaigne, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Swift, Johnson, Nabokov and Guy Davenport.

'A Discussian of General Ideas'

A friend who is not a dedicated reader but has more common sense and worldly knowhow than I’ve ever possessed tells me he plans to reread Animal Farm and 1984. Neither have I read since junior-high school, probably the ideal time for such books, which are among the most overrated in our tradition. I don’t read fiction for “ideas.” In fact, ideas are preferably absent or minimal in novels and short stories, which are not allegories. For another example consider Uncle Tom’s Cabin – part melodrama, part sermon and all unreadable as literature, though its importance in history is undeniable. 

I read fiction for its “literary” qualities, which are admittedly difficult to define. As a stylist, Orwell is one-dimensional and ham-fisted. He is a propagandist. Fiction like his is too often judged by whether the reader agrees with the ideas contained in the text. Admittedly, Orwell wrote a handful of good essays, including those devoted to Dickens and Kipling.

 

Nabokov famously dismissed “Orwell’s clichés.” When a new edition of the second novel he wrote in English, Bend Sinister (1947),was reissued in 1963, Nabokov wrote in his introduction: “There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction.”

 

My friend reading Orwell noticed a post I had written recently about Turner Cassity and his first collection, Steeplejacks in Babel (1966). Something about my judgment of the book moved him to order a copy and he is enjoying the wittiest of American poets. I appreciate the total unexpectedness of his choice.