'A Universally Acknowledged Truth'

Boswell recalls several observations made by Johnson on September 22, 1777: “Dr. Johnson advised me to-day to have as many books about me as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon which I had a desire for instruction at the time. ‘What you have read then (said he,) you will remember; but if you have not a book immediately ready, and the subject moulds in your mind, it is a chance if you again have a desire to study it.’ He added, ‘[I]f a man never has an eager desire for instruction, he should prescribe a task for himself. But it is better if a man reads from immediate inclination.’” 

It’s less of a problem now than it would have been two and a half centuries ago. We have digitalized texts, public and university libraries, e-books and online book dealers, which occasionally offer same-day delivery. Never have I been unable to find a book I wanted to read. Best of all, of course, are the books you find serendipitously in used-book stores. For me, this is the source of the problem identified by Gail White in her poem “The Space Dilemma”:

 

“A universally acknowledged truth

is that one cannot have too many books.

But one can have too little space. A booth

or two would help. I’ve filled up all the nooks,

 

“the space beneath the stairs, stacks by the doors,

the staggered piles on tables by the bed,

corners of rooms, boxes on closet floors…

I separate the read from the unread,

 

“I look for ways to prune them, give away

the surplus, start to read them all again,

can’t part with my old favorites, what the hey,

they’re so much better company than men…

 

“Storage be damned. As long as there’s a track

just wide enough for me and my cat’s tail,

I can edge my way from stack to stack.

Want to browse with me at the library sale?”

 

I’m impulsive only about books, though I’ve learned , on occasion, to exercise discipline. I limit myself to four quarterly visits to Kaboom Books, the best in Houston. This is where I found an early edition of Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travel in Arabia Deserta in hardcover, a book I had wanted for decades. The ratio of horizontally shelved to vertically shelved books has grown alarmingly. I don’t like stacking books, even on shelves. I haven’t been to a good library sale in a long time.

 

[White’s poem is published in the Fall/Winter issue of the journal Light.]

'As Though Nothing But Joy Came After!'

At the back of the first American edition of his Great War memoir Undertones of War (1929), Edmund Blunden appends a selection of thirty-one poems he titles, with perhaps mock-formality, “A Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations.” Often the poems describe not combat but intervals between engagements and knowledge that the respite will be brief. As always, Blunden observes the pastures, livestock and orchards of the French countryside, and the ravages they have sustained in the fighting. Here is “At Senlis Once”: 

“O how comely it was and how reviving,

When with clay and with death no longer striving

Down firm roads we came to houses

With women chattering and green grass thriving.

 

“Now though rains in a cataract descended,

We could glow, with our tribulation ended--

Count not days, the present only

Was thought of, how could it ever be expended?

 

“Clad so cleanly, this remnant of poor wretches

Picked up life like the hens in orchard ditches,

Gazed on the mill-sails, heard the church-bell,

Found an honest glass all manner of riches.

 

“How they crowded the barn with lusty laughter,

Hailed the pierrots and shook each shadowy rafter,

Even could ridicule their own sufferings,

Sang as though nothing but joy came after!”

 

Senlis is a village about thirty miles northeast of Paris. It had been captured by the Germans in September 1914, and marked the limit of their advance on the French capital. In the prose portion of Undertones of War, Blunden writes of his unit’s approach to the village in 1916:

 

“[M]y own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled, one spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember. We were merry when at length the relief was sent in and we went along the road in pale daylight to Senlis, a village six or seven miles behind the line.”

 

Blunden follows this with a brief reprieve from war: church bells, beer and chocolate, and soldiers admiring “with determination” the French girls who sold it to them. The “prime gift of eccentric heaven” was an invitation to a divisional concert party. Without transition, Blunden continues:

 

“Soon enough, from the huts in the orchard, from the mud-walled barns by the church, from the blankets in the straw or the mahogany beds with the mountainous straw mattresses, we were marching eastward again, and with little to recommend our future to us.”

 

A frequent complaint from the men: where are we going? Blunden and the others follow orders with little knowledge of their destination or purpose.

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., the 108^th anniversary of the Armistice. An estimated 9.7 million military personnel died in four years of fighting. Starting in the early 1980s and for the next thirty years or so, R.L. Barth would write at least one epigram each Veterans Day. They now number more than one hundred. In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. Here is one of his epigrams, untitled:

 

“'Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be?

Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.”

 

And this is “Epitaph”:

 

“Tell them quite simply that we died

Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified."

 

Bob wrote to me this week: “My favorite WWI poet is and always has been Sassoon. However, the WWI poet I feel closest to is Blunden. Why? Take whichever of these reasons you prefer: he is the one poet who could never let go of the war, or he is the one poet the war would never let go.” Bob honors a kinship with soldier-poets who wrote of wars fought before he was born. Take “A Letter to the Dead”:

 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two week’s rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

According to the U.S. Marine Corps History Division: “The Vietnam War was costly to the U.S. Marine Corps. From 1965 to 1975, nearly 500,000 Marines served in Southeast Asia. Of these, more than 13,000 were killed and 88,000 wounded, nearly a third of all American causalities sustained during the war.”

'War Is an Ancient Imposter'

“It was a sunny morning, that of July 1, 1916. The right notes for it would have been the singing of blackbirds and the ringing of the blacksmith’s anvil.” 

Without his experience during the Great War, Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) might have become a nature poet. He loved John Clare’s poetry (he named two of his children John and Clare) and Gilbert White. He was a nineteenth-century man in many ways, born to write pastorals. Instead, as his friend Siegfried Sassoon said, Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. The passage above begins his essay “The Somme Still Flows,” written in 1929 and collected in The Mind’s Eye (Jonathan Cape, 1934). He continues:

 

“But, as the world soon knew, the music of the sunny morning was the guns. They had never spoken before with so huge a voice. Their sound crossed the sea. In Southdown villages the school-children sat wondering at that incessant drumming and the rattling of the windows. That night an even greater anxiety than usual forbade wives and mothers to sleep. The Battle of the Somme had begun.”

 

Just as many say the true Sixties started November 22, 1963, with the murder of President Kennedy, so my private calendar suggests the abattoir that would become the twentieth century started on July 1, 1916. The 141-day Battle of the Somme would result in more than one million casualties (killed, wounded, missing).

 

In 1915, a year after the start of the war, Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army’s Roy Sussex Regiment. Soon after he was sent to France and posted to its 11^th Battalion, part of the 116^th Brigade of the 39^th Division. Once he was gassed but otherwise never wounded during his almost two years on the Western Front.

 

“Villages, wiped out in a few hours, earned reputations for hopeless horror when our men rose in the daylight from their already destroyed positions and moved to capture them. Some of them they did capture. Few who survived long enough under German guns and machine-guns to enter the trenches opposite could have retained any illusions.”

 

Blunden is seldom graphic in his descriptions of men wounded or killed. He refers to the battle as “a slow slaughtering process.” Blunden closes his essay like this:

 

“War had been ‘found out’, overwhelmingly found out. War is an ancient imposter, but none of his masks and smiles and gallant trumpets can any longer delude us; he leads the way through the cornfields to the cemetery of all that is best. The best is, indeed, his special prey. What men did in the Battle of the Somme, day after day, and month after month, will never be excelled in honour, unselfishness, and love; except by those who come after and resolve that their experience shall never again fall to the lot of human beings.”

'But You Call This Instinct'

Tucked into a brief section at the back of The Poems of Edmund Blunden (Cobden-Sanderson, 1930) titled “Occasional Pieces” is “Under a Thousand Words,” a poem that seems at first to have little to do with Blunden’s service in the Great War. At age nineteen, Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He served for almost two years on the Western Front, took part in the engagements at Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. 

“‘A thousand words on Courage.’—This request

Dropped on me like a bomb on a sandbag shelter,

And after much vague mental repetition

Ranging from La Boisselle to Lord Macaulay,

And metaphysical cross-examination

On memories of conspicuous gallant conduct,

I gave it up.

That afternoon our boat

Touched on a mud-flat, which we chose to cross.

And as we waddled through it, a three-inch crab

Disputed progress; one of his arms was gone;

The other he held ready like a boxer.

And backed and sidled to our every movement.

His one arm ready; and to command full view

Of the two monsters who had crossed the frontier.

He strained his body backward, and stood titled,

Parrying every stroke we acted at him.

Eyeing us, holding the line.

‘But you call this Instinct.’”

 

During the week of Veterans Day (November 11), high-minded editors often call for comparably high-minded, embarrassingly idealistic think pieces on Patriotism and Courage – stuff to inspire the folks on the home front. In my experience, veterans snort at such concocted marzipan. Blunden is mostly polite about it. One clue as to his true subject (this is not a nature poem) is the reference to La Boiselle, a village in France contested during the opening days of the Battle of the Somme. On the first day, July 1, 1916, British forces alone suffered more than 57,000 casualties, including more than 19,000 killed. Andrew Roberts writes in Elegy: The First Day on the Somme (Head of Zeus, 2015):

 

“It has been calculated that it would take three and a half days for the 888,246 British  and Commonwealth troops who died in the First World War to march past the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, even at four men abreast.”

[I read Elegy. It is excellent.]

'His Discreet Irony'

An old friend tells me he’s reading Sir Thomas Browne for the first time – Religio Medici (1643) – and having a wonderful time. If you like your first taste of Browne, you’re likely to stick around for the full banquet. His prose is rich and nutritious. I’m pleased that another writer I admire agrees. Rose Macaulay is best known, if known at all, for her novels but in 1931 she published an excellent little book, Some Religious Elements in English Literature (Hogarth Press). She writes of Browne: 

“This charming doctor, distinguished among writers of the day by not being a clergyman, produced, in the most exquisite and splendid prose of the century, the best and most agreeable confession of the Anglican religion ever, before or since, published.”

 

Browne is not writing a straightforward tract in Religio Medici, so don’t be frightened. He perfected the digression in English. There’s something almost childlike about his sense of curiosity. Everything seems to interest him. As Guy Davenport put it, “Curiosity, I’m convinced, is intelligence.” Macaulay celebrates “the delicate, amused, philosophically ironic mind of the most charming writer of his time.” Here is a passage from Religio Medici, an extended analogy, I found quoted recently in a non-literary, musical context:

 

“[T]here is a musick where ever there is a harmony, order, or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the Sphears; for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my self, not only for my obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.”

 

Though Browne was a scientist, according to the learning of his day, no one reads Browne looking for information about astronomy or the biosciences. As Macaulay writes:

 

“Sir Thomas is an odd mixture of the wild beliefs of his age, in astrology, witches, demoniacal possession, and so on (and though as to all these things we can never take him at his face value, for his discreet irony lies sometimes very deeply hid in the suave turn of a phrase, he is by no means playing at witch-belief), and of a sane and advanced modernism as regards, for instance, the nature of dreams, and hell.”

 

In other words, Browne must be judged as a writer, not as a theologian or scientist. He not only loved words, he invented many of them for English speakers. Among the writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited 775 times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian.

'A Future Close Enough to Smell'

One of my favorite contemporary poets is Deborah Warren, who lives in Massachusetts. She’s smart, technically adroit, has a musical ear and a sense of humor – rare qualities among poets today. Some of her poems stick with me, memorability being a prerequisite of first-rate verse. My mind is associative. One thing leads to another, not always for conscious or logical reasons, though sometimes the linkage is obvious, as with her poem “Down-to-Earth”: 

“In the field the coyote yip-yips imminent danger;

the dog in the kitchen rumbles a basso growl;

the field sends back a shrill elastic baying;

the kitchen gives a soprano howl.

 

“These two aren’t discussing climate change,

war, flu, layoffs; in this dialogue

a well-informed coyote’s not relaying

to a pessimistic dog

 

“grounds for worry—national cases of mange,

the mountain lion population swelling,

a cougar-sighting fifteen miles away—

only a future close enough to smell.”

 

I had been thinking, rather absently, about my brief spell of working as a copy editor at the newspaper in Schenectady, N.Y. This meant knocking off at midnight. The newspaper’s office stands on a bluff above the Mohawk River. When I pulled out onto Maxon Road and headed home, pairs of piercing white lights stared at me, from the pavement and among the trees and tall grass at the side of the road. My previous experience with coyotes was confined to Western movies. The lights stood, unmoving, and I always stopped driving to watch. Furtively, without hurry, they disappeared. Usually, I encountered several more down the black road.

 

Though it occurred in a city, a thoroughly urban environment, where Thomas Edison founded the General Electric Co., this experience ranks high in my encounters with the natural world – up there with a monarch butterfly landing on my shoulder and a squirrel who climbed up my arm when I leaned over to offer him a peanut.

'Hope, Indeed, Is Very Fallacious'

Some years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’s a symptom-less and in most cases benign disorder, but it can be a precursor to multiple myeloma. It means I see the oncologist once a year, pee in a cup and have six vials of blood drawn. Cancer has consumed a larger portion of my consciousness since it killed my brother two years ago. 

On Thursday, I saw a new doctor, a young woman who worked hard to cheer me up, even though I wasn’t feeling particularly dispirited. In fact, her bubbly approach was annoying but I kept it to myself. Near the end she enthused, like a slightly demented cheerleader, “There’s always hope!” Tell that to my brother.

 

I’m of at least two minds when it comes to hope. On one side, there’s the famous list prepared by the great Soviet writer Varlam Shalamov, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps,” after he survived seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. Here is number eighteen: “I learned why a man lives neither on hope — there are no hopes at all, nor on will — what will?, but only on the instinct of self-preservation, the same as a tree, a rock, an animal.”

 

Similarly, here is a portion of a 1984 interview the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert gave to two of his American translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, in the wake of Jarugelski’s neo-Stalinist crackdown and the rise of Solidarity:

 

Q: “What is the main reason why you write?”

 

A: “Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. ‘Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

 

Shalamov and Herbert survived Communism. You could say their experiences were too extreme, not typical of humanity’s lot. That’s one way to ignore human nature and its results in the twentieth century.

 

On the other hand, there’s Dr. Johnson, many years before the rise of totalitarianism, writing in the November 6, 1750, issue of The Rambler:

 

“Hope, is indeed, very fallacious, and promises what it seldom gives; but its promises are more valuable than the gifts of fortune, and it seldom frustrates us without assuring us of recompensing the delay by a greater bounty.”

 

My MGUS remains stable: no cancer.