'Full of Assertions and Contradictions'

In 1995, R.L. Barth published a slender chapbook titled Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands. Included are twenty-three of Johnson’s poems prepared by ten poets including Turner Cassity, Timothy Steele, John Finlay and Barth himself. Steele’s translation is titled “Pater benigne” (“Kind Father”):

“Kind Father, always and supremely kind,

Relieve the guilt that weighs so on my mind

Grant me true contrition; may I lead

My life according to what You’ve decreed;

Direct with holy light my steps, my will,

Protect me, banish soul-corrupting ill.

To a sincere petitioner, release

The grace petitioned and the joys of peace

That, tranquil, he may trust You, who are free

Of Human error and anxiety.

Grant this which Christ, in dying, won for me.”

 

Seldom is piety so human. This most tormented of men asks not for carte blanche absolution but for “true contrition.” He understands that human pleas are so often conditional: “Just forgive me and I’ll never do it again.” Cassity’s translation is titled “Summe dator vitae” (“He is the Supreme Giver of Life”):

 

“Highest Giver of Life, Eternal King,

From Whom, link unto link, all causes flow,

Regard one whom both age and pain of age

Inform, whose life the end of life constricts.

Look on his useless days, his real regrets,

And punish, that You may forgive, Just Lord.”

 

Johnson was forever fearful of idleness, which he equated with madness. Boswell reports his friend saying: “Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” This is the man who gave us his Dictionary, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays, Rasselas, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and who edited Shakespeare. He was among the most learned men of his age, despite poverty, illness and the absence of a university degree. Yet he chronically feared idleness.

 

I recently discovered the English literary journalist Henry Oliver, whose website carries the Johnsonian title “The Common Reader.” On May 4 he posted an essay called “Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years.” Oliver understands Johnson was profoundly human, like us, only more so, and fully embraces his contradictions:

 

“Above all, this man was full of assertions and contradictions. He was so often an outsider who became an insider. About him, there are open questions of masochism and insurrection. He had no degree but became the foremost scholar of his times. He had no wife for much of his life, but wrote powerfully about marriage. He was so genuinely troubled by the thought that he might go insane, that he asked his friend Hester Thrale to lock him in his room all day (he performed mathematical calculations to keep himself occupied). He wrote his own prayers. He worried, more and more darkly as he aged, with an increasingly real terror, that he would go to hell.”

'Before the Clouds Darken the Horizon'

A longtime reader, a retired attorney in Philadelphia, writes: 

“[A]n intrusive suggestion for a blog post: what books MUST your readers read before reaching the end zone? Or what have they required themselves to read before the clouds darken the horizon? Also, anent the above, do your readers shape their day around their reading ? Quite simply, in what works do readers discover ‘Joy in the Morning’?”

 

The “MUST” part annoys me but I get the idea. Reading is strictly a laissez faire way of life. I always resent being told what I must read, though I’m wide open to interesting suggestions. I’d like to think that everyone will get around to reading Proust. I do keep a mental list of writers and books I intend someday to read. In no particular order:

 

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, William James’ Principles of Psychology, George Santayana’s The Last Puritan, Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, at least a couple of Anthony Trollope’s novels, Winston Churchill’s The River War.

 

Like other resolutions, this list is probably  a delusion, exposing my childish, deeply selfish strategies for reading. I’ve never had anything like Clifton Fadiman’s “Lifetime Reading Plan.” The way I read is so subjective, so curiously unpredictable even to me, that not reading any of these books will not surprise me. I’ve set out to read in their entirety, chronologically, the works of only two writers: Shakespeare and Melville. But I was young and had bottomless energy. By chance, also on Saturday, I happened on an interview with the poet Aaron Poochigian. Asked to name a book everyone ought to read, he replies:

 

“It’s thick, but I would recommend the English poet W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems. It’s like a Bible for living in our contemporary world. He turns the British idioms of his day into incantatory magic. He captures the Zeitgeists of the several ages he lived through. Still more, he was so clearly a good person. His conscience spoke loudly in him, and he refused to become desensitized to violence and other vices that recur in the human condition.”

 

Poochigian says Yeats’ The Tower had the biggest influence on him: “W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin are my heroes. Yeats is my god. When I assess the merits of my own work, I ask myself, ‘Is this poem good enough to be in Yeats’ Tower.’ He is my weathervane and lighting rod.”

 

He tells us he is rereading Shakespeare: “I started with the earliest plays, the ones about the Wars of the Roses. I have just finished Henry VI, Part III. It gives me great pleasure to see Shakespeare emerge as a genius as I make my way chronologically through his works.”

'The Worldly Wisdom of the Foolish Man'

 My ignorance often burns holes in my pride, turning self-congratulation into embarrassment. A reader asks for my opinion of the English poet Francis Quarles. Friday was the 434th anniversary of his baptism, meaning this younger contemporary of Shakespeare was likely born two or three days earlier. I remembered almost nothing about Quarles. Even a minor poet deserves better. 

I consulted a book Helen Pinkerton recommended to me long ago, Louis L. Martz’s The Meditative Poem: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse (1963). The volume complements Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1954). Helen encountered the latter book in the 1950s as a grad student. Quarles is best remembered for his Emblems (1634). Martz includes Emblem VII from Book 2:

 

“The world’s a Floore, whose swelling heapes retaine

The mingled wages of the Ploughmans toyle;

The world’s a Heape, whose yet unwinnowed graine

Is lodg’d with chaffe and buried in her soyle;

All things are mixt; theu usefull with the vaine;  

The good with bad; the noble with the vile;

The world’s an Ark, wherein things pure and grosse

Present their lossefull gaine, and gainfull losse,

Where ev’ry dram of Gold containes a pound of drosse.”

 

Martz notes that “Floore” is a threshing floor, “soyle” is dirty or waste matter and “Ark” refers to a chest or coffer. Emblem entered English from Latin in the fifteenth century and meant “a drawing or picture expressing a moral fable or allegory; a fable or allegory such as might be expressed pictorially.” The OED cites the first sentence of Quarles’ “To the Reader” in Emblems:

 

“An Emblem is but a silent parable: Let not the tender eye check, to see the allusion to our blessed SAVIOUR figured in these types. In holy Scripture he is sometimes called a Sower; sometimes a Fisher; sometimes a Physician; And why not presented so as well to the eye as to the ear? Before the knowledge of letters, God was known by hieroglyphics. And indeed what are the Heavens, the earth, nay, every creature, but Hieroglyphics and Emblems of his glory? I have no more to say; I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing. Farewell, Reader.”

 

The dedication and many of Quarles poems suggest a gracious, down-to-earth quality. His first readers would understand the harvesting of grain both as Biblical allegory and from a way of life rooted in agriculture. Each Emblem is a paraphrase from scripture. There’s little reaching after dazzling conceits. As Quarles says, “I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing,” and for once the sentiment is convincing. Martz includes six other selections from Emblems, including this:

 

“The worldly wisdom of the foolish man

Is like a Sive, that does alone retaine

The grosser substance of the worthlesse Bran;

But thou, my soule, let thy brave thoughts disdaine

So coarse a purchace: O, be thou a Fan

To purge the Chaffe, and keep the winnow’d Graine;

Make cleane thy thoughts, and dress thy mixt desires;

Thou art heav’ns Tasker, and thy GOD requires

The purest of thy Floore, as well as of thy fires.”

 

Thanks to the reader who asked about Quarles. In Martz’s anthology, he comes between George Herbert and John Milton, greater poets, but Quarles has his rewards. “I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing."

'All I Do Is Laugh at Ourselves'

I can’t listen to music while writing. For a break I might play the video of a song that had been nagging my memory. More often I’ll select a comedy clip – Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, Blazing Saddles, Jackie Mason, Jonathan Winters or, most often, Don Rickles. All, especially the latter two, pass the tear test. They have a gift for making me, while seated alone in my office, laugh until tears fall from my eyes. It says something about human nature that grief and comedy can make us cry.

Rickles was born one-hundred years ago today. His humor never gets old. He's called an insult comedian but that’s the least of it. He’s a truth-teller in the sense that he subverts politeness and other social niceties. He reminds us that clichés are lazy and empty. I tried to think of a literary analogue to Rickles. What writer most resembles him? I would suggest Stanley Elkin, whose novels are often crazed monologues. His verbal energy and relentless rudeness recall Rickles. Try reading a page of The Dick Gibson Show or The Franchiser aloud and imagine them coming out of Rickles’ mouth.    

 

Go here to watch a video of Rickles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972. The other guest, typical for Cavett, is the operatic soprano Beverly Sills, whom Rickles treats deferentially. Rickles reminds us that politeness and self-conscious displays of sensitivity -- we might call it “virtue signaling” --are not funny. They quickly become displays of vanity and snobbery. “All I do is laugh at ourselves,” Rickles tells Cavett. “I make fun of life.” Rickles was all show-biz and all the while mocking show-biz. There was nothing countercultural about him. I suspect hippies would not have approved. He was not George Carlin.

 

Rickles was born May 8, 1926, in Queens and died April 6, 2017, in Los Angeles at age ninety.

'The Finest Collection of Shabby Books'

Once I dropped a copy of Ian Frazier’s The Fish’s Eye into a bathtub full of water. While reading a paperback of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned, the spine snapped as I was marking a passage, turning it into two volumes. The same thing happened with my copy of Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues. The cover of my Webster’s Third, a gift from friends in 1973, detached, turning the fat dictionary into a paperback. My old copies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are held together with rubber bands. Once I left Edward Dahlberg’s Can These Bones Live on the ground after a picnic. By the time I realized it was missing and turned the car around to retrieve it, rain had swollen the book into a pulpy blob.

I try to soothe my conscience by recalling that Dr. Johnson was a serial book abuser. He routinely tore the covers off books to make them easier to read. Books were tools to be used, not trophies. He never reformed. I have, mostly. I strive to no longer be a clumsy vandal. I don’t even write in books. I keep notes in a notebook. I’m a reader, not a collector, but I’m mildly neurotic when it comes to treating books with finicky delicacy. Not Charles Lamb. Consider Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary entry for Jan. 10, 1824:

“I looked over Lamb’s library in part. He has the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of first-rate works of genius, but filthy copies, which a delicate man would really hesitate touching, is I think nowhere to be found. I borrowed several books.”

 

That final sentence, amusingly understated, articulates a true reader’s credo. In a pinch, a dirty, torn or otherwise unsightly book will be sufficient. In one of his Essays of Elia, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” Lamb confirms Robinson’s observations:

 

“Thomson’s Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day’s needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?”

 

Like Lamb, I enjoy reading copies of previously owned books – the inscription, underlinings, marginalia. A book is incomplete without readers. Their fleeting presence confirms one’s sense of gratitude and solidarity. In another essay, “Two Races of Men,” Lamb writes of the perils of lending books to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his friend since childhood. He condemns “borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes,” but reverses himself and writes of his friend, a compulsive writer of marginalia:

 

 “Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. -- he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury: enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his -- (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) -- in no very clerkly hand -- legible in my Daniel: in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands. ---- I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C.”

'The Cosiness of a Human Nest'

I’ve never consciously ranked coziness – the OED prefers cosiness -- high among the literary qualities I most admire in books and writers. Many of my favorite writers – Swift, for instance, and Larkin – are anything but cosy. Early uses of cosy date from the eighteenth century and all are positive, true to the earliest definition: “of a place: sheltered and thus warm.” The first negative – and, thus, comic -- use was reported in 1927, in a letter by Max Beerbohm, and defined, rather ambiguously, like this: “warmly intimate or friendly; sentimental; freq. in pejorative sense: complacent, smug, unadventurous, parochial.” 

In a remembrance of W.H. Auden published in 1975 and included in W.H. Auden: A Tribute, edited by Stephen Spender, Dr. Oliver Sacks writes: “. . . I asked Wystan how he experienced the world, whether he thought of it as being a very small or a very large place. ‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘Neither large nor small. Cosy, cosy . . . (and in an undertone) . . . like home.”

 

That’s close to my positive sense of the word. For a native Northerner it conjures winter – wind and snow outside, warmth and contentment inside, likely under a blanket, book in hand. Then the negative creeps in: complacent, disdainful of others who are less cozy. The latter connotation can even carry a political taint. I thought of coziness while reading an essay by Leigh Hunt, “My Books” (1823). The English essayists suggest coziness, Lamb more often than Hazlitt, and even Lamb’s sense of humor sometimes detracts from the mood. Hunt, a lesser writer, sustains the mood:

 

“Sitting, last winter, among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me,—to wit, a table of high-piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet,—I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books; how I loved them, too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them.”

 

There’s nothing hip or postmodern about Hunt. He wants to please his readers by sharing his sense of intimacy with books. Sacks would understand:

 

“Cosy, cosy – it was one of his favourite words, one of the words he most used when chatting. (He was dissatisfied by its coverage in the great OED, and thought of re-doing this, making an anthology of the cosy, giving the word its full and proper world-embracing power.) Whenever he said ‘cosy’ in his peculiar voice, it seemed to acquire a special richness of evocation and meaning. Once we saw a bird fly to its nest atop a sooty lamp-post in St Mark’s Place: ‘Look!,’ exclaimed Wystan. ‘It’s gone home to its nest. Think how cosy it must be in its nest!” For a moment I felt (I fancied I felt) exactly what the bird felt – cosy, protected, at home, in its nest. And Wystan’s apartment in the East Village, though squalid and cluttered and dilapidated and dirty, this too was cosy, wonderfully so: it had the cosiness of a human nest.”

'Loving the Past But Settled in the Living'

In 1994, the late Helen Pinkerton published Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook of twenty-seven poems about paintings, sculptures, pottery and photographs. Her publisher was the poet R.L. Barth. Helen’s ekphrastic poems are not art criticism or mere descriptions of subject matter. They are more fanciful than that and sometimes read like contemplative fables. Helen projects her imagination sympathetically into the works and their creators. One of my favorites in the series is about an artist unknown to me before first reading her poem some years ago: “On Gari Melchers’s ‘Writing’ (1905) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” Helen uses the first line (and the third line and the title) of Wallace Stevens’ “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” as the poem’s epigraph: 

“How often did she make such quiet, one wonders,

This woman writing at a covered table—

Full summer light warming the roseate hues,

Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.

A Wedgwood pier glass shows three Roman figures

In ritual dance—cool neoclassic Graces—

Beside a clay pot of geraniums.

Her taste eclectic—like our modern lives—

Loving the past but settled in the living,

 

“She seems meticulous—even, perhaps,

Like Edith Wharton, passionate for order,

Feeling, as she did, that in house and novel,

‘Order, the beauty even of Beauty is.’

Stevens, though you sought order in the sea

And grander heavens, the threat of nothingness

Unmanned you. Most women have no time for such,

For fate constrains them to immediate means,

The quiet art of keeping calm the house.”

 

When viewed for the first time, Melchers’ palette is stunning – “roseate hues, / Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.” Often, portraits of writers at work indoors are heavily shadowed, very serious and almost grim. Melchers’ painting is a sumptuous celebration of the writer and writing – and of painting. Outside, it’s summer. Indoors, facing the faceless woman are the Graces – the goddesses of beauty, grace and charm – the virtues of all good art. The quoted line is taken from Thomas Traherne’s “The Vision.”

 

Imagining the writing woman as Edith Wharton (whom Helen’s teacher, Yvor Winters, thought superior to Wharton’s friend Henry James) is inspired. I especially admire Helen’s knock at Wallace Stevens, who could be awfully fey when entering his philosophical mode. Call it noble feminism – or simply dismissing a clichéd notion about sexual roles. The poem’s first line – “How often did she make such quiet, one wonders” – suggests we may be witnessing not a routine event but a privileged moment. What she’s writing we’ll never know.

 

[You can find the poem in Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) and in A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016, (Wiseblood Books, 2016). Helen died on December 28, 2017, at age ninety.]