'A Reassuring Survivor'

“As for a book to mark the settled sobriety of my advanced years, I keep Boswell’s Life of Johnson close by. Its praise of steady judgment, as well as its moral force, make it a reassuring survivor.” 

Here’s a reader/writer worth paying attention to. William M. Chace is a retired professor of English and university president of the old school, the sort who taught the books they loved and often reread. A reader sent me a link to a recent essay, “My Books,” published by Chace in Commonweal. The premise is a familiar one: after a life of accumulating books, what to keep? What to sell or give away? His choices overlap with mine, though not entirely. He’ll keep Shakespeare and Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide but also, sadly, The Catcher in the Rye and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Never have I encountered a reader whose tastes and fallibilities were identical to mine, though Chace’s are close.

 

“As for all the other books,” he asks, “why keep them? Because some were written by friends or colleagues, now dead; their knowledge and intelligence must be honored. Out of another kind of piety, I am keeping books inscribed and given to me. And a special space is being held for those books that, in their sheer monumentality, have represented to me intellectual or artistic achievement of the highest order: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joyce’s Ulysses, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and most of Henry James, Proust, Dickens, and Faulkner.”

 

Chace formulates an interesting category of “keepers”: “Their authors tell me that I have never known myself well and still haven’t dug deep enough to see what I’m truly made of.” For him that would include Franz Kafka, Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor. He also prizes some books as objects – “a formidable ingenuity of effort now dying away.”

 

I suspect that every serious reader ponders the post-mortem fate of his library. Will the collection remain intact? Will survivors divvy them up? Will some end up in the Dumpster? Of course, we’ll be past caring.

'Our Native Bumptiousness and Ebulliation'

The best thing about Independence Day in the United States is that no one is obligated to observe it. And if you do, regardless of how eccentrically or offensively, that’s your business. Don’t impose your protest or drunken shenanigans on me or my family but otherwise you have carte blanche to express your patriotism, or its absence, as you wish. That’s what “the freedom of speech” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” mean, according to the First Amendment of our Constitution.

For much of my life, the Fourth of July started with a parade. While living in upstate New York, that meant driving to Pittsfield, Mass., for its annual Fourth of July Parade, a tradition that started in 1801, just twenty-five years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. One year I watched a rather ample-figured U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy amble behind the American Legion band and glad-hand the crowd. A year later I stood on the sidewalk beside the singer Michael McDonald, chatting and cheering.

I rather dimly recall the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. I was living on the margin and drinking. I remember throwing firecrackers from the roof of someone’s garage. I don’t remember feeling much patriotism or much pain. In the September 1973 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the American poet L.E. Sissman published “The B.S. Bicentennial.”

“Given the kinds and numbers of problems our country has faced and flubbed over the last decade or two,” Sissman writes, “one might think that the forthcoming jubilee would be subdued, retrospective, elegiac, maybe even prayerful. Given our native bumptiousness and ebulliation, though, one might be certain that the party would be big, noisy, brash, and pointless.”

Never underestimate the genius of what Tom Wolfe celebrates as “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours.”  

Sissman was reacting not to the 200^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence but to the marketing and public relations industry already hyping the Bicentennial. He’s writing on the Fourth of July in 1973, and Watergate is monopolizing the front page. When finishing his column, Sissman tells us he plans to attend the Independence Day festivities of the town where he lives.

“I can hear the sirens of the volunteer fire department now,” he writes. “There’ll be a parade of fire trucks . . . a drum-and-bugle corps, a scattering of veterans in costumes of assorted wars, some more illicit cannon crackers and salutes, a League of Women Voters’ flea market, and a bright-red hot dog with bright-yellow ball-park mustard for me to eat and a bottle of cheap, but good, Genesee beer to drink.”

In other words, an old-fashioned American shindig. He adds: “Just moyen-apathétique eating, guzzling, watching, and generally enjoying themselves.”

[Sissman’s essay is collected in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the Seventies (Vanguard, 1975).]

'Pride Was Repelled By Sterner Pride'

In Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), the historian Allen C. Guelzo quotes the nineteenth-century English Liberal statesman Richard Cobden, who asked, “If the United States go wrong what hope have we of the civilized world in our turn?” Guelzo replies: 

“Preventing that wrong turn was what the preservation of the Union was about. Emancipating American slaves would remove the cause of that wrong, and make the Union worth preserving. But neither of them would be possible without the triumph of the Union armies. And Gettysburg would be the place where the armies of the Union would receive their greatest test, and the Union its last invasion.”

 

The question and Guelzo’s answer are always worth pondering. Are Americans willing to stand with the Union troops on Cemetery Ridge during Pickett’s Charge? This “greatest test” came on July 3, 1863, the third day of battle. The northernmost incursion by Confederate forces, into southeastern Pennsylvania, was repulsed, marking what came to be called “the high-water mark of the Confederacy.” Total estimated casualties in a single afternoon: 51,112 killed, wounded, taken prisoner.

 

Guelzo uses Herman Melville’s “Gettysburg: The Check” (Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866) as his extended epigraph and the likely source of his title: “God walled his power, / And there the last invader charged.” Melville’s rendering of Pickett’s Charge is a powerful reminder for every American, Southerner or Northerner:

 

“He charged, and in that charge condensed

  His all of hate and all of fire;

He sought to blast us in his scorn,

            And wither us in his ire.

Before him went the shriek of shells-

Aerial screamings, taunts and yells;

Then the three waves in flashed advance

  Surged, but were met, and back they set:

Pride was repelled by sterner pride,

  And Right is a strong-hold yet.”

'From the Caveman to Keats'

No writer’s death during my lifetime has so numbed me, left me unwilling to accept the news, as Vladimir Nabokov’s. On a muggy night in Youngstown, Ohio, while driving around the city, I learned from a radio report that “the controversial author of Lolita” (as newsman around the globe inevitably phrased it) had died in Swiss exile on July 2, 1977, age seventy-eight. No more Invitations to a Beheading, no more Pnins. The Original of Laura was still thirty-two years away and hardly worthy of our anticipation. Nabokov taught us to expect wonder in what we read. 

Nabokov was never a systematic critic of literature but his influence on my tastes was lasting. Dostoevsky remains “Dusty,” and Freud, more than ever, is the “Viennese quack.” The aim of reading and writing, he taught us, is “aesthetic bliss.” The day after his death I started rereading Ada, waiting for that passage about the shadows cast by leaves. Then I reread the sad, funny, tricky Pnin. Early on, the narrator tells us:

 

“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”

 

Almost 20 years later, in the last novel published during his lifetime, Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov’s hero writes “Death is silly, death is degrading,” -- a rhythmic and thematic echo of “Death is divestment, death is communion.” Happily, Nabokov was prolific. Mad Charles Kinbote writes in his commentary to line 991 of “Pale Fire,” the poem that lends its name to Nabokov’s greatest novel:

 

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats.”

'Leaves Must Be Green in Spring'

The Battle of Malvern Hill was fought near Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy, on July 1, 1862. Not as well remembered as Antietam or Gettysburg, it was the last of the Seven Days Battles in the Peninsula Campaign, and prompted Confederate General Daniel H. Hill to say: “It was not war -- it was murder.” Union artillery from its position on the hilltop slaughtered General Robert E. Lee’s troops. Confederate casualties in one day of fighting totaled some 5,550; Union, about 3,000. In a grim twist, Union General George B. McClellan and his forces, despite the victory, retreated to Harrison’s Landing on the James River and Richmond remained securely behind Confederate lines until the war was nearly concluded, almost three years later. 

Herman Melville’s “Malvern Hill” was included in his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). The poem is a dialogue between a Union soldier and the elm trees standing on the battlefield. It is notably unromantic and unconsoling: “Ah wilds of woe!” The speaker asks, “Does Malvern Wood / Bethink itself, and muse and brood?” The trees reply with the italicized stanza at the end of the poem:

 

“We elms of Malvern Hill

Remember every thing;

But sap the twig will fill:

Wag the world how it will,

Leaves must be green in Spring.”

 

R.L. Barth titles a four-line epigram, collected in Deeply Dug In (2003), with an unattributed quotation lifted from Melville’s poem: “Leaves must be green in spring”:

 

“Malvern elms, limbs sap-filled and leaves green,

Spring an easy consolation;

However, where may they turn, who’ve known a jungle

Blasted by defoliation?”

 

Barth writes as a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War. He refers to the decade-long use by American forces of chemical defoliants, the most widely known being Agent Orange. The goal was to strip trees of foliage to prevent the enemy from concealing supplies and encampments. Traditionally, spring is a consolation for another winter endured, a rebirth of nature and hope, and green is its color. Barth’s jungle is “blasted,” denuded, without “easy consolation.”

 

In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War veteran severely wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, defined war as: “a by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light.”

'To Glorify Things Just Because They Are'

My father by trade was an ironworker and on the side he ran a welding business. The garage was his workshop. There he kept the usual oxy-acetylene gear, used when he was making wrought-iron railings. For certain jobs he relied on the arc welder. Whenever the lights in the house flickered we knew he was using it. The drain on power was enormous. To this day, whenever the lights dim during an electrical storm, I think of my father and his welding shop. I also think of “Blacksmith Shop” by Czesław Miłosz: 

“I liked the bellows operated by rope.

A hand or foot pedal – I don’t remember which.

But that blowing, and the blazing of the fire!

And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,

Red, softened for the anvil,

Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,

Thrown into a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.

And horses hitched to be shod,

Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river

Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,

Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds.

I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:

To glorify things just because they are.”

 

A complicated set of memories and associations continues. As an American I think of Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” (“the muscles of his brawny arms / Are strong as iron bands”). Like my paternal grandparents, Miłosz, their younger contemporary, was born in Poland and emigrated to the U.S. My grandfather, whom I never met, was also an ironworker. I met a working blacksmith for the first time in 1998 at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., and spent an hour talking to the smithy as he made horseshoes. I already knew the Miłosz poem and remembered it while we talked. The concluding lines I have memorized: “It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are.” I can’t think of a more worthy calling – expressing a sense of gratitude for existence.

 

In “What the New Atheists Don’t See” (Not with a Bang but a Whimper, 2008), Theodore Dalrymple writes:

 

“If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.”

 

[“Blacksmith Shop” was translated from the Polish by Miłosz and Robert Hass and published in Provinces (1991). Miłosz was born on this date, June 30, in 1911, and died in 2004 at age ninety-four.]

'Sound Well and Go Well When Spoken'

I used to think that everyone knew it -- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” -- the same way everyone knew “And what is so rare as a day in June?” and “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.” Of the three, only the second, from James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” was memorized as a school assignment, in eighth grade English. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson were absorbed by osmosis. I don’t remember consciously memorizing those poems, the way I would lines by T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate, but they stick even after sixty years. 

I’m remembering Browning rather guiltily because June 29 is the anniversary of her death in 1861 and I know little of her work apart from #43 in Sonnets from the Portuguese:

 

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.”

 

Her sonnets, especially #43 (safely out of copyright), were stitched on pillows, printed in greeting cards and in little booklets with sequins and sewn-in bookmarks. Truly, I’m not making fun of such things. They recall a less cynical time, when a young man could declare his love for a woman, and vice versa, with poetry. Browning’s sonnet is conversational. Nothing in it would strain recitation. The only archaism is the repetition of “thee,” but it works. Most of the poem consists of monosyllables. I can pull out this poem while out for a walk or doing my exercises in PT.

 

I’m reminded of what Kingsley Amis wrote in his introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter, the anthology he edited in 1978. He wished to include “poems that sound well and go well when spoken in a declamatory style, a style very far indeed removed from any of those to be found at that (alas!) characteristically twentieth-century occasion, the poetry recital, with all its exhibitionism and sheer bad art.”

 

In tribute to Browning, here is her “Love”:

 

“We cannot live, except thus mutually

We alternate, aware or unaware,

The reflex act of life: and when we bear

Our virtue onward most impulsively,

Most full of invocation, and to be

Most instantly compellant, certes, there

We live most life, whoever breathes most air

And counts his dying years by sun and sea.

But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth

Throw out her full force on another soul,

The conscience and the concentration both

Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole

And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,

As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.”