'How Does It Go From There?'

“A lot of people claim that it does no good to cram one’s head with facts, but I hope that this little essay has proved that facts may be very fascinating things if properly assembled.” 

Even as a young man I suspected pedantry would not make me popular with the ladies. But what else did I have to offer? I could recite the capitals of all the states and the names of all the U.S. presidents (in order) and counted myself a pretty charming guy. Try telling that to one of the forty-three girls on whom I had an unrequited crush.

 

Readers of mostly forgotten humorists may recognize the tone of the sentence quoted at the top. Robert Benchley’s literary M.O. was making asinine claims with a straight face, like a painfully sincere Boy Scout. Benchley (1889-1945) was among the first “grownup” writers I read as a boy, along with Thurber and Twain. S.J. Perelman came a little later. Above I quote from “Literary Notes,” written in 1935 and collected in Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949). The piece begins, like any squib in a magazine with literary pretensions:

 

“This being the centenary of the death of Mrs. Felicia Hemans, perhaps we ought to give a thought to the Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck, and possibly, if time remains, to the Breaking Waves Which Dashed High. Those who do not wish to join in this sport will find falcons and shuttlecocks in the Great Hall. Ask Enoch to give them to you.”

 

It’s not necessary to know that Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835) was a real English poet, and that the two lines cited by Benchley are taken from “Casabianca” and “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,” respectively. At least some of Benchley’s readers ninety years ago would have gotten the allusions but would they have found “Hemans” a perfect name for a poetess? Benchley continues:

 

“Everyone knows how Mrs. Heman's famous poem begins:

 

“The boy stood on the burning deck,

Whence all but him had fled;

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.

 

“The question is: How does it go from there? Darned if I know.

 

“How typical this slipshod knowledge of great literary works is! How often do we find ourselves able to recite the first four lines of a poem, and then unable to keep our eyes open any longer!”

 

No question, much of Benchley is dated. Some of his film work remains amusing. Take a look at “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928). Admittedly, my enjoyment of his writing is tinged with nostalgia because I first read him when very young. Try reading “Literary Notes” again, this time substituting, say, Adrienne Rich’s name for Mrs. Felicia Dorthea Hemans’, and see if he still has a point.

'Pretty Twinklings'

How to cheer up a friend without sounding like a sap? Too often pep talks come off fake, obligatory and patronizing, as though composed by AI. How to preserve the essential human touch, the fondness we feel for someone we care about, without being glib or laying it on too thick? I don’t know. Charles Lamb delivers a template for such an effort in the letter he wrote to his friend Robert Lloyd on November 13, 1798: “You say that ‘this World to you seems drain’d of all its sweets!’ At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar! but I am afraid you meant more.”

 All of us see only ugliness and waste on occasion, but there’s a class of people unwilling or unable to see anything else. I once worked for an editor who returned from his first visit to Montreal and complained about the scratchiness of the hotel towels. Lamb goes on:

 

“O Robert, I don’t know what you call sweet. Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness by turns.”

 

Citing examples of “sweetness” – the gratuitous blessings of the world – is strategically shrewd. Who could argue with such bounty? Plenty of people, you say? You’re right, of course. But specifics, rather than airy encouragement and appeals to another’s sense of logic, seem likelier to buoy a burdened spirit. Lamb continues:

 

“Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things. . . . You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall. . . . I assure you I find this world a very pretty place.”

 

Lamb earned the right to encourage a friend and have his words carry conviction. Three years earlier, he had spent six weeks in an asylum. In 1796 his sister Mary fatally stabbed their mother. For the rest of his life, Lamb, who never married, remained her legal guardian. Consider this passage from “New Year’s Eve” (1821) among his Essays of Elia:

 

“A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”

'Luck Is That Part of Art Practice Replaces'

Spontaneity is overrated, in art as in life. Children are spontaneous and their productions are unlikely to please anyone but their doting parents. (I recall little of my sons’ wit and wisdom from their youngest days. Bright, entertaining kids but hardly Shakespeare.) When Hollywood shows a writer in thrall to his Muse, they give us a convulsive flurry of keyboard hammering. Visually speaking, writing is a bore. They seldom show forehead-wringing, perpetual revising, staring at the wall, consulting the dictionary or chug-a-lugging vodka. 

There’s an irony here, familiar to all honest writers. To lend poetry or prose the impression of spontaneity is hard work, while a spew of words is likely to seem wordy, labored and clumsy. So much for “spontaneous bop prosody” and our inheritance from the Romantics (Keats worked slavishly). The late Clive James writes in Poetry Notebook (2016):

 

“There is a dangerous half-truth that has always haunted the practice and appreciation of the arts: too much technique will inhibit creativity. Despite constant evidence that too little technique will inhibit it worse, the idea never quite dies, because it is politically too attractive.”

 

Thus, Allen Ginsberg is a bore, Alexander Pope remains a thrill. A new literary journal, Portico, publishes a poem by Boris Dralyuk, “Dino Dozes,” prefaced by a note: “In old age Dean Martin ate dinner every Sunday night at the counter of the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard”:

 

“While Dino dozes Jerry pulls new faces.

Skinny’s backstage and mentions that the place is

crawling with scouts. They need their act to click,

so Jerry hones the fine points of his schtick.

Luck is that part of art practice replaces.

 

“But luck is Dino’s long suit. It embraces

his ease and swagger, looms like an oasis

before the average schmoes—they feel so slick

while Dino dozes.

 

“Next thing you know, he’s in the world’s good graces.

And then he’s not. These days Dino retraces

his groggy steps. One, two—ain’t that a kick?

All gone. Not that he cared for it to stick.

What ghosts may rise the Hamlet’s Scotch erases

while Dino dozes."

Boris crafts a conversational ease, anecdotal casualness, a good story between friends. It could have been slop, little more than Hollywood gossip. Clive James goes on: 

 

“The elementary truth that there are levels of imagination that a poet won’t reach unless formal restrictions force him to has largely been supplanted . . . by a more sophisticated (though far less intelligent) conviction that freedom of expression is more likely to be attained through letting the structure follow the impulse.”

'This Interplay of Past and Present'

Luigi Galvani (1737-98) was an Italian physician from the age of non-specialization, when a curious, enterprising man or woman could do basic science and make lasting contributions to human knowledge. Galvani was interested in a new and still controversial phenomenon – animal electricity. Using an electrostatic machine and a Leyden jar he was able to make the legs of a dead frog “dance” when touched with an electric charge. What he had discovered, without quite realizing it, was that the nervous system was a means of delivering electric impulses through the body of the frog and, by extension, other animals. From his name we get galvanism – electricity generated by chemical action. His work was further developed by another Italian, Alessandro Volta, leading to development of batteries. 

As a kid I was a dedicated reader of books of potted biographies, brief summaries of celebrated lives. Scientists and inventors especially interested me – Marie Curie, for instance, and Thomas Edison. In one such volume I read about Galvani but what I remember is the illustration that accompanied the biography – an old engraving of frog legs hanging from a sort of miniature gallows with a disembodied hand holding a wire. Something about the confluence of animate and inanimate, with perhaps an echo of the electric chair, left me mildly disturbed. Even after sixty-five years I remember that picture and the book – red cover, oversized, but with no memory of title or author.

 

In the Autumn 2002 issue of The Hudson Review, the brilliant translator, critic and essayist Tess Lewis reviewed Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (incidentally, the first book I ever ordered through Amazon). Lewis writes:

 

“[N]o one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific time in one's life, and the particular book’s smell, typeface, and paper can be as much a part of the experience as one’s physical and emotional circumstances. The spell cast by a book can be broken as easily by different illustrations as by the changes brought by adulthood.”

 

Scratch smell but the rest stands. The other day when I encountered a passing reference to Galvani in something I was reading, the whole thing came back in a satisfying Proustian rush – a vivid image, the sense of curiosity piqued, of understanding commenced, of a hole in knowledge filled. This might be mistaken for a trivial pursuit, yet another mundane example of pedanticism. In my experience, knowledge metastasizes like out-of-control cells. Learning feeds off itself. I would love to find a copy of the book I was reading in 1962 or so but the qualified memory too is consolation. Later in her review Lewis writes:

 

“[Lesser’s] ideal books were those to which, as she read, she could feel her older and younger selves reacting simultaneously but differently. This interplay of past and present is Lesser's primary source of literary vertigo, and she abandons herself to it with relish.”   

'And All Are Lucky Just to Be Alive'

The writer who has died since I launched Anecdotal Evidence, whose subsequent nonexistent work I’ve missed the most, is probably Tom Disch (1940-2008). There’s an irony here because Disch is best known as a writer of science fiction, a genre I largely gave up around age thirteen, though his novel Camp Concentration (1968) remains rereadable. 

Close readers of his poetry had little reason to be surprised by his suicide. Death remained his abiding theme. He titled a 1973 story collection Getting Into Death. With Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989) and About the Size of It (2007) on my desk, I began tallying poems devoted to death but quickly lost count. Instead, consider some representative titles: “Symbols of Love and Death,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written almost a decade before her death), “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “The Art of Dying,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “How to Behave when Dead” – and that’s just Yes, Let’s. About the Size of It includes “Death Wish IV” but also “The Vindication of Obesity,” with this memorable simile -- “cheeses rank/as death” and this final line: “With news of the deliciousness of death.” Disch could make death, at least in his poems, amusing.

 

In the Autumn 1994 issue of The Kenyon Review I happened on “Trees in the Park,” a poem aware of mortality but in Dischian terms a celebration of life and its variousness:

 

“Each is so visibly its own history,

The thrust or tilt of the trunk

A geologic record of some slow event

We have been too impatient

To observe, whether an alteration

Of the supporting mineral mass beneath

Or the cumulative effect of leaves

Thirsting for the fractal vagaries

Of light and rain. The results

Are there in their varying

Perpendicularities, the choice

Of where each branch has felt impelled

To go. So with us: we show

Where we have been in the conformation

Of cheek and jowl, lip and jaw,

The stride or the slouch that declares

This one needed more love at age eleven,

That one read the wrong book at twenty-five,

This other lacked a certain vitamin,

And all are lucky just to be alive.”

'Release from the Relentless Consciousness of Self'

Seamus Heaney somewhere said true poets always know the names of wildflowers. Certainly, he knew “Lupines,” and his poem “A Herbal” is a veritable bouquet:  

“Between heather and marigold,

Between spaghnum and buttercup,

Between dandelion and broom,

Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle . . .”

 

I’ve just learned that Ruth Schottman, an Austrian-born biologist and author of Trailside Notes: A Naturalist's Companion to Adirondack Plants (1998), died last month at age ninety-eight. She lived in Burnt Hills, N.Y., north of Albany. I interviewed her several times, wrote about her book, accompanied her on tramps through the woods, especially in the spring, and relied on her when I had a botanical question. Though not a poet, she lived up to Heaney’s claim and confidently identified every flower, tree, sedge, grass and fungus we encountered. Remarkable, considering that her first language was German and so many plants are known by common, folk and scientific names. Her obituary quotes a passage from Trailside Notes:

 

“I have learned one general principle from observing nature and reading about it: there are many ways of coping with life. For some of us, nature watching is a release from the relentless consciousness of self. We find joy in empathy with other organisms. . . .  No matter how old you are, new discoveries—new to you—await you on every outing.”

 

The Louisiana poet Gail White speaks for the rest of us, the bumblers in the woods who wish we knew more, in “I Come to the Garden” (Asperity Street, 2015):

 

 “I can name so few flowers. This is why

I’m not a better poet. Shakespeare knew

oxlip and gillyvor and eglantine,

while I, beyond camellia, violet, rose,

and lily, am reduced to saying, ‘There,

those crinkly yellow things!’ Out on a walk

with mad John Clare, I’d learn a dozen names

for plants, and bless the wonders underfoot.

‘More servants wait on man,’ George Herbert said,

‘than he’ll take notice of.’ I know it’s true,

 although I’ve never had observant eyes.

 Would I care more if my heart’s soil were deep

 enough for herbs and loves to take firm root?

 Mine is a gravel garden, where the rake

 does all the cultivation I can take.”

'They Are Read When They're No Longer There'

One of my annual jobs as a boy, self-assigned, was tending the portulaca that grew along both sides of the driveway -- hundreds of plants in narrow plots flanking the gravel. In the fall I harvested the black seeds, each a little larger than a salt crystal. It took several days, plucking the pods and rolling them between my fingers so the seeds fell into one of my father’s empty pipe tobacco cans. There was always a bumper crop. The following spring, once the snow had passed, I reversed the process and sowed the seeds.

 

To this day I enjoy some of the jobs – those with satisfyingly identifiable beginnings and ends -- that others deem tedious. I’m reassured by the completion of projects. The only person who paid attention to my portulacas was the old, red-haired German widow, Elsie Becker, who lived next door. She occupied two lots, one of which was an ambitious vegetable garden surrounded, European-style, by flowers. At the center was a peach tree that reliably produced fruit, which she shared with the neighborhood kids. She was a library of folklore and plant lore. I thought of my portulacas and Frau Becker when rereading “The Sweet Peas” (Toward the Winter Solstice, 2006) by Timothy Steele:

 

“The season for sweet peas had long since passed,

And the white wall was bare where they’d been massed;

Yet when that night our neighbor phoned to say

That she had watched them from her bed that day,

I didn’t contradict her: it was plain

She struggled with the tumor in her brain

And, though confused and dying, wished to own

How much she’d liked the flowers I had grown,--

And when she said, in bidding me good night,

She thought their colors now were at their height --

Indeed, they never had looked lovelier --

The only kind response was to concur.

 

“Thereafter, as a kind of rite or rule,

Each autumn when the days turned damp and cool,

I’d sow peas gathered from the last year’s pods.

I’d watch as young plants, bucking storms and odds,

Mounted the net and buds appeared on stems

While, using self-supporting stratagems,

Fine tendrils twined in mid-air, each to each,

Or to the mesh of screens within their reach

Until the vines and blossoms waved aloof

Of net and eaves in full view of the roof,

As if reporting, situated so,

News of the heavens to the yard below.

 

“And I’d recall her, who had loved their scent,

But who, in spite of my encouragement,

Was shy of picking them until I said

They flowered the more that they were harvested.

(Red blooms came earliest, and, when they’d peaked,

The purples followed, and the salmon-streaked;

All equally attracted moth and bee.)

Meanwhile, her phone call gathered irony:

If, at the end, she’d summoned back somehow

Those vanished sweet peas, their descendants now

Returned the favor, having been imbued

With her departed grace and gratitude.

 

“When blossoms -- each with banner, wings, and keel --

Stir in the warmth above me while I kneel

And weed around the bottom of the plants,

I sometimes think that, if they had the chance,

They’d sail off after passing bird or cloud.

I sometimes hope that, if it was allowed,

She felt within her what she loved when she

Passed from this to that other mystery

And kept, by way of comfort, as she went,

The urge to complication and ascent

Which prints such vivid signatures on air

That they are read when they’re no longer there.”

 

It was Frau Becker who taught me that portulaca is also known as purslane, which is grown as a salad vegetable. The English gardener and diarist John Evelyn translated The Compleat Gard’ner (1693) from the French of Jean de La Quintinie. In it he writes: “Purslain is one of the prettiest Plants in a Kitchen-garden, which is principally used in Sallets, and sometimes in Pottages.”