'An Absurd Depravity'

While reading Sir Thomas Browne again it occurred to me that an epidemic of envy seems to be loose in the land. Envy is an emotion I like to joke about, sort of. I’ll see a photo of someone’s bookshelves – old university press editions, multi-volume sets, no paperbacks – and I’ll experience a rush of another of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust, followed immediately by the more temperate, longer lasting, easier to ignore sin, Envy. I can say I covet the books and give the craving a silent ha-ha, thus pretending I’m getting myself off the hook. But I really want those damn books. I encountered this in Browne’s “A Letter to a Friend” (written in 1665, published posthumously in 1690): 

“Let Age, not Envy, draw Wrinkles on thy Cheeks: be content to be envied, but envy not, Emulation may be plausible, and Indignation allowable; but admit no Treaty with that Passion which no Circumstance can make good. A Displacency at the good of others, because they enjoy it, altho we do not want it, is an absurd Depravity, sticking fast unto humane Nature from its primitive Corruption . . .”

 

Again: “which no Circumstance can make good.” Politics today seems driven overwhelmingly by envy. People want what others have, whether or not they worked for them or otherwise deserve to possess them. Envy has displaced gratitude for what is already ours. I see no cure, no moral foodstuff to ease the hunger. It seems irredeemably human, like the rest of the Deadly Sins. Joseph Epstein concludes his monograph Envy (Oxford University Press, 2003) like this:

 

“If theological thinking is unavailable to you, if the very notion of ‘sin,' original or unoriginal, as damning simply makes no sense to you, I would invite you instead to consider envy less as a sin than as very poor mental hygiene. It blocks our clarity, both about oneself and the people one envies, and it ends by giving one a poor opinion of oneself. No one can see clearly anything he or she envies. Envy clouds thought, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart—reasons enough to fight free of it with all one’s mental strength.”

'Bearing His Hard and Chambered Hurt'

Nearly forty years ago I drove to Beaversprite, a nature reserve near Dolgeville in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, to interview the caretaker. The founder, known for taming beavers and permitting some to live in her house, had recently died and the fate of the sanctuary was uncertain. I spent much of the day speaking with the caretaker and tramping around the grounds, and late in the afternoon started the drive back to Albany. 

On the way, at a dip in the road, I watched the driver ahead of me swerve abruptly to the right. He hit something, a dark object, and it spun off into the roadside grass. He drove away and out of curiosity I pulled over to investigate. In the grass was a mud turtle, already heading for the muddy ditch paralleling the road. I picked him up and found only a scuff on the right rear portion of his shell. He seemed otherwise unharmed. The malevolent driver had aimed and missed, delivering a glancing blow with his tire. I set the turtle back in the grass, aiming him at the ditch, and off he went.

 

If I were to have an animal guide, according to Native American custom, it would be a turtle. I admire their patient gift for momentum. They keep moving slowly and with focus, like me. They are nature’s implacable Stoics. Only death – perhaps delivered by an automobile tire – slows them down. I can’t imagine ever wanting to kill a turtle. In “The Mud Turtle,” Howard Nemerov writes:

 

“. . . there is no help for him

As he makes it to his feet again

And drags away to the meadows edge.

We see the tall grass open and wave

Around him, it closes, he is gone

Over the hill toward another water,

Bearing his hard and chambered hurt

Down, down, down, beneath the water,

Beneath the earth beneath. He takes

A secret wound out of the world.”

 

[Go here to read a selection of turtle stories solicited by Levi Stahl, including one I submitted about a memorable encounter with a snapping turtle.]

'The Heart, Ravaged, Grieves'

Few of us knew of the American poet Catherine Breese Davis (1924-2002). She was a lost soul, little more than a rumor among readers. Her academic pedigree was impeccable. Among her teachers were Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, J.V.  Cunningham, Yvor Winters and Donald Justice, but her life was a private torment. There was nothing poetically romantic about her suffering. Her father went to prison for armed robbery when she was an infant and she never saw him again. Her mother was a police-blotter monster. Davis suffered a mild case of cerebral palsy, misdiagnosed as polio. When her mother discovered Davis was a lesbian, she threw her out of the house and never saw her again. She suffered from mental illness, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s disease, and she was a brilliant poet. 

The book to get is Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press, 2015). Before its publication, Davis as a poet and woman hardly existed. As of 3:24 a.m. (CST) today, summer has arrived, and in the past I celebrated its coming with childhood memories of blue skies and blissful freedom. School was over for three months and we could swim, collect butterflies, play Army and read what we wanted. Davis has a poem, “The Summer Leaves,” in which the title is the start of the poem’s first line:

 

“nothing unscathed. Desires,

once tender stalks, grow brittle;

the first and clear-eyed dew

that clung thereto

expires.

 

“The summer leaves—the trees’

dense growth—that, dying little

by little, turn red, brown,

go down and down

and these

 

“still leaves long winds will shake

and put me on my mettle—

here, rusted as dead blood,

there, bright, my good—

both make

 

“the most of light. And then,

as, torn, the leaves resettle,

and the heart, ravaged, grieves,

the summer leaves

again.”

 

At first, “leaves” is a verb. In the second stanza it's a noun. This is no celebration of picnics on the beach. Inherent in summer’s arrival is its departure. Along the way, “the heart, ravaged, grieves.” The source of such suffering is never specified. Some souls cannot ignore the hurt at the heart of existence. In an essay included in the collection mentioned above, the late Helen Pinkerton, who knew Davis and tried for years to get her work published, writes:

 

“Much of her best poetry deals with the theme of loss – that is, it concerns itself with evil in the older sense of privation of being and, hence, with experiences that range from the perception of death to the awareness of personal shortcomings. She deals with loss almost as a metaphysical absolute.”

 

As Helen notes, Davis is a rigorously formal poet with a “faultless command of the traditional iambic line.” She doesn’t gush in free verse. Her poems, though often hinting at the most difficult emotions, do so with exacting discipline.

'Can Essays Still Be Written in Our Time?'

Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books introduced me to the work of Erwin Chargaff three years ago. Chargaff was a German-born biochemist who fled Hitler, became an American citizen and did pioneering work with DNA. He was an old-fashioned humanist, broadly read in Western literature. 

Isaac publishes three of Chargaff’s books of more general interest than genetics. Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections (1986) is a collection of thirty-three brief essays about such topics as “Genetic Engineering,” “Death” and “Sex Life of Grammar.” Chargaff had a sense of humor. Montaigne’s name appears as a leitmotif throughout the essays. In his preface Chargaff writes:

 

“Montaigne, the greatest master of latitudinal thinking, roamed widely, if not always profoundly: there was virtually nothing that could not serve him as a hook on which to hang his thoughts, his reminiscences and remarks. His Essays have been greatly admired for nearly four hundred years; whether they still are read widely I do not know.”

 

“Latitudinal thinking” I take to mean open-minded, broadly ranging thought, non-specializing, perhaps more intuitive than rigidly logical – a useful approach for an essayist. In the chapter titled “Amateurs,” Chargaff writes:

 

“Whatever went into [Montaigne’s Essays] had to pass through the prism of one character, one temperament; it is the self of Montaigne that remains the only element of order in that vast collection of memories, experiences, quotations.”

 

That’s an accurate description, one that still defies common sense. It sounds like a recipe for narcissistic drivel, one man talking obsessively about his precious self. Yet the Essays is among the most readable, wise and entertaining books in our tradition. In “Quintessence,” Chargaff tells us “a good essay is the quintessence of good prose" and goes on to rightly identify Montaigne as the progenitor of essays in multiple languages and cultures. In English he starts with the obvious – Bacon, Addison, Steele – and continues:

 

“. . . Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson with his Rambler, Charles Lamb and his contemporary, one of the greatest of all essayists, William Hazlitt. The tradition continues: Sydney Smith and De Quincey, Carlyle, Macaulay and the Edinburgh Review, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Bagehot, Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, and in our days Virginia Woolf and George Orwell.”

 

You can quibble with some of the names but it’s bracing to see someone whose first language was not English celebrate the tradition we effortlessly inherited. Charaff is amusingly pessimistic:

 

“Can essays still be written in our time? I believe they can; they may, in fact, be the only literary form that is not yet worn and exhausted. But are they still being read? Is the kind of reading in which I spent my life still possible? I must confess, I do not know the answer. In the midst of the most murderous century known to history, seers, drunk with visions of a future that I shall be glad to leave to them, have proclaimed the end of the book. It would be interesting to see what else will come to an end.”

 

Chargaff died on this date, June 20, in 2002 age ninety-six.

'I Should Have Read Nothing But Good Books'

“Every book I read is a not altogether negligible portion of my lifetime reading. Why did I not follow a careful program? Why did I give free reign to my curiosity? Why did I allow myself to engage in those wild sprees of desultory and promiscuous reading? Why did I not limit myself strictly to good books?” 

I’ve asked myself similar questions. I am the least systematic of readers. The only writers I have ever read sequentially, first work to last, in order, are Shakespeare and Melville. I’m no scholar. I haven’t even read all of Henry James.

 

The passage at the top is from the essay “On Reading Books: A Barbarian's Cogitations” by Alexander Gerschenkron, published in the Summer 1978 issue of The American Scholar. Gerschenkron (1904-78) was an American economic historian born in Odesa, Ukraine. He kept a reading list, logging all the titles he read, something I have never done. On his website, Art Garfunkel keeps a list of every book he has read since 1968, a practice that never tempted me. Much of what he read was rubbish. After admitting much of his reading was strictly professional, including books for review, Gerschenkron writes:

 

“But surely, when it comes to the vast area of literary art, there at least I should have read nothing but good books -- provided, of course, that I knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meal from the bran. I suppose I should have known. I certainly do now. I have reliable yardsticks that I daresay will not satisfy the literary expert who looks for fine and subtle distinctions. But an economist, a barbarian by definition, an average reader of belles lettres, can do with three simple criteria: A good book must be (1) interesting, (2) memorable, and (3) rereadable.”

 

Excellent criteria, recalling Nabokov's. Most of the lousy books I read came in my younger years. My tastes were still amorphous, my critical faculties weak or nonexistent. Also, if I started reading a book, I had to finish it – a practice I now see as masochistic. I would never recommend a book to someone because I thought it would be “good for him,” like broccoli. Gerschenkron is good on memorability:  

 

“By and large, memory can be relied upon to retain what is worth retaining. A book that evaporates without leaving a trace may be safely considered poor, even though it may have engaged one's interest as long as one kept turning its pages.”

 

There’s an interesting metaphysical category: the books we have read, perhaps devoting days to the task, which leave not a trace in our consciousness. They probably number in the hundreds, but we’ll never know. I admire Gerschenkron and sense in him a kindred spirit:

 

“Well-remembered books are also eminently rereadable. I have read War and Peace at least fifteen times, and it is still as rereadable as ever. I do not think it contains a paragraph that appears unfamiliar to me as I come across it. Yet on every perusal I never fail to discover something new in this inexhaustible store of observations, insights, ideas, and images that the previous readings have failed to reveal -- to say nothing of the infinite pleasure of drifting again along the stream of that language, so simple and so beautiful, so true to the Horatian ideal of simplex munditiis. A book like this is rereadable senz altro, and at least twice I began rereading War and Peace at once, starting again after having read the last page.”

'And Mailed This Guy Gold Every Time'

“By all accounts,” writes Erik Bader, “[Guy Davenport] wrote a legit stack of letters every single day, and would respond to literally anyone -- and here’s an anecdote to confirm.” Dave Lull alerted me to Bader’s account of Davenport and an unlikely correspondent that mirrored my own experience with the Kentucky writer and polymath: 

“Many years ago I wrote an obit on Davenport for a local newspaper and a strange and shy old dude showed up at the bookstore where I worked a few days later. Apparently he lived in a halfway house and said he was moved by my piece and that he used to correspond with Davenport for many years -- he had just written him one day and the dude always wrote back. Yeah right, I thought. Incredibly, he showed up a few days later with a stack of the letters and they were some of the most incredible things I have ever read to this day - the level of care, love, and knowledge dropped into every single one was off the charts. Some were handwritten. Some were illustrated. Every single one had at least one line that outclassed entire careers. It was clear from the letters that Guy knew he was just responding to some lonely weirdo with possible me[n]tal problems --but he didn’t give a shit, he put his A-game into ever[y] single letter, and mailed this guy gold every time. Next time any of y’all think a comment on yr stack ain’t worth responding to -- think of Guy, and think again!”

 

I had been reading Davenport since the seventies. I collected his books, at least the editions I could afford, and my timing was good, as North Point Press started publishing his work in 1981. Seven years later, as a reporter for an upstate New York newspaper, I was writing a profile of Paul Metcalf, author of Genoa (1965), who lived across the state line in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. I knew from an essay in The Geography of the Imagination that Guy admired Metcalf’s work, so I looked up his number and interviewed him by telephone. What I recall is instant openness and intelligent volubility. He gave me precisely what I was after. I asked for his address in Lexington, Ky., and that started an exchange of letters. I have seldom encountered such unqualified acceptance by a stranger. It exceeded mere politeness.

 

In 1990, a buddy and I went on an uncharted road trip. First night, a campground in Cumberland, Maryland (birthplace of J.V. Cunningham, whose poems, Guy wrote, were “as well made as wristwatches”). Second night, a campground in Lexington, Ky. I called Guy and he told me to stop by his house on Sayre Avenue the following morning.

 

We talked for several hours. I wish I had kept notes. I do have the two books I brought along for Guy to inscribe – The Geography of the Imagination (1981) and Apples and Pears (1984). In the former, in his fine draftsman’s hand, he wrote “For Patrick Kurp, Lexington, 18 June 1990.” We talked so much, he forgot to sign his name and I didn’t notice until I was back in the car. He did sign the other volume.

 

I can’t claim to have much insight into Davenport the man. I knew him as a writer and teacher, though never in a formal sense. With me he was always generous and encouraging. When I reviewed his 1989 volume A Balthus Notebook (Ecco Press) and sent him the clipping, he replied with a letter of gratitude in which he didn’t exactly correct me but expanded on what I had written. His first instinct was to share knowledge. It was a memorable exercise in tact and courtesy. As a newspaper reporter I had met and interviewed many “celebrities.” None was so charming and just plain interesting as Guy Davenport. I’m not one to fetishize books, writers or dates on the calendar but I do, every June 18, give thanks for Guy and his work.

'Sea-shell and Leaf Alike'

As the human world seems to grow more chaotic, as though entropy were finally triumphant, I look for evidence of pattern and design in nature and among writers I admire.

In his short story “The Bicycle Rider,” Guy Davenport arranges a still life evoking order, including two shells: “A glass jar of acorns. A nautilus shell. Shale slab with a fossil gingko leaf. A Greek coin from Metaponton in Sicily. A snail shell.” In the same story, Davenport writes: “Luck has nothing to do with happiness, which comes from rhythms, order, clarity.” In his poem “For Basil Bunting,” Davenport celebrates the spiral, which you will find everywhere if you take the time to look: 

“to be Greek as a curl

on a flat cheek

 

“the coil of white

the Ismene lily

 

“spirals, hound’s tail

when his nose is down

 

“snail shell, paper nautilus

wavetop scroll

 

“ear, weather, world

this shape of turning”

 

In his essay “Marianne Moore,” Davenport says the poet loved things “cunningly made.” See her poem “The Paper Nautilus.” Here is the opening sentence of his short story “The Dawn in Erewhon”:

 

“The Dutch philosopher Adriaan Floris van Hovendaal was arranging the objects on his table, a pinecone to remind him of Fibonacci, a snail’s shell to remind him of Ruskin, a drachma to remind him of Crete.”

 

Leonardo Bonacci of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci (c. 1170-c. 1250), lent his name to the sequence known as the Fibonacci numbers. Starting with 0 and 1, each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Thus: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, and so on. The ratio between each term and its predecessor approaches 1.618 . . ., the golden ratio, which appears commonly in nature and art.

 

The Fibonacci numbers suggest, at least to this non-mathematician, the presence of design principles in the universe, perhaps one of nature’s structural default modes. The notion, I know, appealed to Davenport, from whom I first learned of Fibonacci decades ago in “The Dawn of Erewhon”:

 

“The Fibonacci number following thirty-four is fifty-five. A set of thirty-four helix curves radiating from a common center clockwise crossing a set of fifty-five helix curves rotating counterclockwise from the same center gives the finely meshed honeybrown redgold spiral net panier of the Grote Zonnebloem, Helianthus annuus.

 

“Adriaan had one on his desk, others in a wicker basket at his feet. If one spiral is a rotation of thirteen helices, then the counterspiral is twenty-one. Fibonacci, both. And he [Fibonacci] had brought the ancient Indic naught, the Arabian number unoccupied by quantity, to be our zero.

 

“Fibonacci harmonies ran through the pinecone which he kept on his table, through the snail shell.”

 

Helianthus annuus is the sunflower, in which each floret is positioned toward the next at an angle of about 137.5 degrees, the golden angle. This produces the pattern of interconnecting spirals described by Davenport. Botanists speculate that the arrangement results in the most efficient packing of seeds.

Clearly, this pattern fascinated Davenport – and Marianne Moore, though she doesn’t name it. In her poem “The Pangolin,” she notices the creature’s skin with “scale / lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity.” In fact, the scales on cones are arranged in alternating spirals, like the sunflower, with the number of spirals always representing two adjoining numbers in the Fibonacci sequence – say, three and five, or eight and thirteen. Because Fibonacci numbers approximate irrational numbers, the scales do not line up precisely, and weaken the arrangement. There’s structural integrity in regular irregularity. Science overlaps with aesthetics. As Paul Valéry puts it in Sea Shells (1936, trans. Ralph Mannheim):

 

“Run off by the billions, each different from the rest (though the difference is sometimes imperceptible), they offer an infinite number of solutions to the most delicate problems of art, and of absolutely perfect answers to the questions they suggest to us.”

 

Another poet, Howard Nemerov, in “Figures of Thought” (Sentences, 1980), celebrates the patterns hiding in plain sight:

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —

 

How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship — that is the beautiful

In Nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

 

[Davenport’s poem appears in Thasos and Ohio (North Point Press, 1986). His story “The Bicycle Rider” is collected The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (North Point Press, 1987). The Moore essay is in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). “The Dawn in Erewhon” is collected in Davenport’s first story collection, Tatlin! (Charles Scribner’s Son, 1974).]