'Till Death Itself Is Less Than Change'

Edwin Arlington Robinson remembered his brother Herman’s death in 1909 from the combined effects of tuberculosis, alcoholism and poverty, and feared dying in the crowded ward of a public hospital. About the blunt reality of death itself he was more sanguine. In January 1935, friends secured him a room in the recently opened New York Hospital in Manhattan. Robinson, sixty-five, suspected he was suffering from colitis and perhaps ulcers. Tests were inconclusive and his doctor moved him into his own home. Back in the hospital on January 28, a surgeon performed an exploratory abdominal operation and discovered that inoperable pancreatic cancer had metastasized to his lungs. Friends were divided over whether he had been informed by the doctors of the diagnosis.

 

On March 25, Robinson dictated his final letter, to his niece Marie Robinson. Typically, he was more concerned about George Burnham, his oldest and closest friend from their time at Harvard. He writes:

 

“I seem to be a fixture in this place, until my rather obstinate phlebitis disappears. Perhaps I have never made it quite clear to you that I have been wrestling with a duodenal stasis, an inflamed pancreas, and phlebitis -- which should be enough for one visitation.”

All of his life Robinson had been supported, financially and otherwise, by friends, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who admired his poems. He had one vocation and was qualified for only one job: poet. “Robinson need not have feared dying alone or neglected,” Scott Donaldson writes in his biography of the poet. “Many friends and admirers came to see him in the hospital. His nurses and doctors felt themselves in the presence of a remarkable human being.” Interns and residents were eager to visit him, this American poet who had won three Pulitzer Prizes.

 

In 1956, the poet Winfield Townley Scott published a brief remembrance of his final visit to see Robinson: “And speaking of what so many critics had found to be a ‘philosophy of failure’ in his poetry, he said, ‘I’ve always rather liked the queer, odd sticks of men, that’s all. The fat, sleek, successful alderman isn’t interesting.’ He smiled and, said again, ‘He isn’t interesting.’”

 

Robinson died on April 6, 1935. The poet J.V. Cunningham described him as “a man almost without biography,” adding: “And he knew we do not really know about others; we do not know about him.” Inevitably, when thinking about Robinson’s last days I think about my brother and his final weeks in the hospital and hospice. Three doctors called me into the hall and confirmed what we already suspected. The cancer, first diagnosed in his esophagus, had metastasized to his lungs, liver and cerebrum. That day they moved him to hospice. For five days he was unconscious and then he died.

 

Among Robinson’s abiding themes is stoical endurance. My brother never complained. Robinson writes in “Hillcrest” (The Man Against the Sky, 1916):

 

“Who knows to-day from yesterday

May learn to count no thing too strange:

Love builds of what Time takes away,

Till Death itself is less than Change.”

'But There Is So Much Beauty'

School field trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art were annual events beginning in third grade. I don’t recall these visits being connected to the curriculum. I never took an art class. Rather, they date from an age when “culture” was judged “good for you,” like the bookmobile and Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” on television. 

At the museum we were on our own. There were no guided tours. I remember especially liking the work of two American artists – George Bellows and Grant Wood. Once, in high school, I was browsing in the museum bookshop with another student I didn’t know well. He surprised me by buying a book that looked serious, by a writer unknown to me – The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana, the philosopher’s first published work in prose. I have since read the slender volume several times and have always remembered Santayana’s definition of beauty as “objectified pleasure.”

 

The work that in my mind is inexorably linked to the Spaniard’s idea is not a poem or novel (not even Nabokov) but a piece of music: Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1.” It most closely for me possesses the notion of beauty as consolation. To put it crudely, a great work of art in any medium is a comfort. It redeems much of life, the parts that are sad, painful or ugly. I understand that beauty is often discredited today as something ephemeral, a waste of time. I can’t imagine life without a sense of beauty. This passage is taken from Santayana’s chapter titled “Form”:  

 

“Whenever beauty is really seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the eye has precision, the work has style, and the object has perfection. The kind of perfection may indeed be new; and if the discovery of new perfections is to be called romanticism, then romanticism is the beginning of all aesthetic life. But if by romanticism we mean indulgence in confused suggestion and in the exhibition of turgid force, then there is evidently need of education, of attentive labour, to disentangle the beauties so vaguely felt, and give each its adequate embodiment.”

 

Santayana came back to me when I encountered this sentence in an interview with Timothy Steele: “Life can be heartbreaking, but there is so much beauty.”

'He Will Soon Find Himself Left Alone'

“If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life,” Dr. Johnson tells Boswell, “he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.” Which begs the question of the precise nature of friendship. Among children the definition is fairly elastic: a companion who shares at least some of your interests and whose behavior is not intolerable. It gets more complicated and even mysterious as we grow up.

 I have little in common with one of my closest friends. He’s an enthusiastic surfer, fisherman and auto mechanic. He’s a digital wizard, not much of a reader and a devoted Baptist. He has a daughter and lives in a house inhabited exclusively by women. Based on those external qualities, we ought to be indifferent strangers. Ours is a friendship I never pursued. Like Topsy, it just grew. We talk daily via text.

 

What do I look for in a friend? Are there minimal requirements? A sense of humor, certainly. Generosity, the absence of virulent self-regard. Someone who conceives of conversation as more than an exchange of stridently held opinions. Most elusive but instantly demonstrable: an interesting mind.

 

A rare quality I share with Dr. Johnson is a motley crew of friends. They fit no preconceived template. I see little in common among them. They’re like a group of Hollywood extras, people we may never have known without having me (or Johnson) in common. Take Bennet Langton (1736-1801), twenty-seven years Johnson’s junior. When young, Langton read and admired The Rambler essays and befriended their author. John Wain writes in his life of Johnson:

 

“Not that Langton’s pedigree was Johnson’s reason for liking him; it was merely a spice to his good qualities. Gentle, unassuming, benevolent, he seems fully to have merited Johnson’s judgement that ‘the earth does not bear a worthier man than Bennet Langton.’ Johnson went further and paid Langton the highest tribute he could possibly have paid anyone—‘I know not who will go to Heaven if Langton does not.’”

 

Johnson often contrasted himself with his young friend and found the differences attractive. Wain: “Johnson recognized in Langton an instinctive goodness, deepened and strengthened by meditation and learning. Those qualities which he, Johnson, strove so hard to achieve, he felt Langton had by natural right. Convinced as he was of his own bad qualities, severely as he judged himself for sloth, wandering thoughts, fleshly temptations, tormented as he was by guilt and fear of the wrath to come, he deferred to Langton as a man God had chosen to make effortlessly good.”

 

Seemingly confirmation of the old “opposites attract” cliché.

'He Loved His Books and Loved Nature Better'

“The first time I was ever confronted by myself in print was one Sunday morning (please don't append an editorial note here, stating just how many years ago it was) when I opened the Sunday Journal and saw, stretching out through a column or two, an essay on ‘Some Personal Characteristics of Thomas Carlyle’ which Professor Hunt had given you to publish, quite without my knowledge.” 

It’s easy to be fashionably blasé about seeing one’s name in print. After the first two- thousand times it’s a bore, don’t you know. Above, Willa Cather’s fifty-three-year-old self is writing about her first bylined publication, at age seventeen. She was enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the essay was submitted by her teacher of rhetoric and oratory, Ebenezer W. Hunt, without her knowledge. She was still twenty-one years away from publishing her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912).

 

Her March 22, 1927 letter quoted above was written to Will Owen Jones, who was then associate editor of the Nebraska State Journal. The reader suspects she already identified with Carlyle, a difficult Scot:

 

“He was a recluse, not that he had any aversion for men, but that he loved his books and loved Nature better. He saw little of society; yet, though he never bent his knee to it, he never trampled upon its laws. He was merely indifferent to it, for he was one of the few men who can live utterly independent of it, while those who condemn it most severely, cling to it as the only thing which can give them zest or ambition enough to live.”

 

Cather ranks among the most independent and confident of American writers. One admires her unruffled poise, in life and in prose. I first encountered Carlyle not in the classroom but in Herman Melville, who likewise admired him. The prose texture of Moby-Dick owes something to the author of Sartor Resartus. As to the renowned Thomas vs. Jane Carlyle donnybrook, which rivals Leo and Sophia Tolstoy’s marriage for sheer animosity and misery, Cather sides with Thomas and makes no friends among latter-day feminists:

 

“It is well known that Carlyle’s married life was not strictly a happy one, and the Mrs. Carlyle sometimes complained bitterly of his indifference to her. The wife of an artist, if he continues to be an artist, must always be a secondary consideration with him; she should realize that from the outset. Art of every kind is an exacting master, more so even than Jehovah. He says only, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Art, science, and letters cry, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods at all.’ They accept only human sacrifices.”

 

In writing about Carlyle, one senses Cather is composing a personal apologia:

 

“This reverential seriousness of disposition was characteristic of him in literature, as in everything else. He never strove to please a pampered public. His genius was not the tool of his ambition, but his religion, his god. Nothing has so degraded modern literature as the desperate efforts of modern writers to captivate the public, their watching the variation of public taste, as a speculator watches the markets.”

'Art Must Be Giving Pleasure'

A reader asks if I can identify the quality in a work of literature that most quickly causes me to stop reading and put the book away. An interesting question, one that is not trivial and may help to define critical standards otherwise unexamined. My first thought was merely sloppy, dull writing – indifferent poetry or prose that lies inertly on the page like a cadaver. There’s no energy, no spark of life. The reader is given no encouragement to sacrifice his time and attention to work not even on life supports. 

To answer my reader’s question more directly, I think the quality described above, when combined with pomposity, kills any good will I can bring to a work of literature, even an individual poem or story read in isolation. Pomposity can be a matter of style or content. To cite a writer who combines both: Ezra Pound. His brand of literary Modernism has emboldened generations of poets and critics to write badly and hold readers in contempt. In his conclusion to Lectures on Shakespeare, perhaps as an antidote to any suggestion of artistic smugness (on his part or Shakespeare’s), W.H. Auden says this:

 

“I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude toward his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.”

 

I hadn’t thought of this until reading Auden’s observation. After more than four centuries, Shakespeare sounds “natural” – not contemporary, exactly, but without pretensions. He sounds like a reasonable guy talking to us.

 

Auden delivered his Shakespeare lectures in 1946-47 at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is the poet of the divided self, and he recognizes in Shakespeare a kindred poetic spirit. In addition, Auden was deeply immersed at the time in Kierkegaard, the most incisive psychologist.

 

When Lear calls man a “bare, forked animal,” he hints at our divided nature, and that is Auden’s starting point. Richard II, he writes, “is interested in the idea of kingship rather than in ruling. Like a writer of minor verse -- he is good at that – he is interested more in the idea than the act. He is good at presiding over a tournament, not at taking an action that means something, and his passion for ritual even embraces self-humiliation.”

 

We all know such people. Some of us recognize ourselves in Auden’s analysis. Among bloggers, poets and self-styled bohemians, the type is common – “interested more in the idea than the act.” In his lecture on the play he most admired, Antony and Cleopatra, Auden writes:

 

“Antony and Cleopatra’s flaw, however, is general and common to all of us all of the time: worldliness – the love of pleasure, success, art, ourselves, and conversely, the fear of boredom, failure, being ridiculous, being on the wrong side, dying. If Antony and Cleopatra have a more tragic fate than we do, that is because they are far more successful than we are, not because they are essentially different . . . Every day we get an obsession about people we don’t like but for various reasons can’t leave. We all know about intrigues in offices, museums, literary life. Finally, we all grow old and die. The tragedy is not that it happens, but that we do not accept it.”

 

At the end of his concluding chapter, Auden writes his final sentence: “But in order to continue to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.”

 

 [See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]

'Moving at Times Into Purpose or Direction'

When Dr. Johnson agreed to write The Rambler essays, he told friends they would serve as “relief” from the all-consuming work on his great Dictionary. For two years, beginning March 20, 1750, Johnson turned out essays every Tuesday and Saturday – 201 of them -- while continuing his solitary labor on the dictionary, which wouldn’t be published until 1755. Johnson’s wife died in 1752. 

Anyone who has written to a regular deadline – a column, blog post or review – will understand the peculiarly unremitting nature of the task Johnson assumed. The work nags and readily becomes obsessive. It also lends purpose and structure to one's life. If not writing, you think about what you will write. Johnson was famously plagued by a fear of idleness, which he associated with madness and defined as “laziness; sloth; sluggishness; aversion from labour.”

 

The title of the essays may sound unusual, perhaps even un-Johnsonian, suggesting self-indulgent incoherence, though others had produced The Tatler and The Spectator earlier in the century. The name should not suggest that Johnson wished his prose “to ramble” without direction. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate notes that he “never tired” of three books we still read today – Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. Bate writes:

 

“Between a pilgrim, who travels with ‘settled direction’ or aim, and the ‘straggler’ he at bottom felt himself to be (‘one who rambles without any settled direction’) – the definitions are from the Dictionary – there was a middle position, a ‘rambler,’ which would not be claiming too much but which would also not preclude moving at times into purpose or direction.”

 

The best essays mingle waywardness with a plan. Nearly anything can find a place in a good essay, including Johnson’s, but the choices can’t be too rigid or too arbitrary. Johnson navigates this deftly in his periodical essays, as do such later practitioners as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, Michael Oakeshott and Guy Davenport. Bate characterizes the distinctive tone of The Rambler as one of “psychological shrewdness and somber elevation, of humor and weight of experience, or irony and compassion.” Consider The Rambler #72, published November 24, 1750:

 

“Without good humour, learning and bravery can only confer that superiority which swells the heart of the lion in the desert, where he roars without reply, and ravages without resistance. Without good humour virtue may awe by its dignity and amaze by its brightness, but must always be viewed at a distance, and will scarcely gain a friend or attract an imitator.”

'They Knew More Then Than I Do Now'

More than forty years ago a newspaper editor warned me that the average American reads at a fifth-grade level and will stop reading a sentence if it exceeds fifteen words. Whether or not these statistics were accurate, his point was clear: Keep it simple, keep it brief, make Hemingway your stylistic ideal, not Faulkner. Define your terms. Don’t assume readers will understand your more arcane allusions (Who's “Faulkner”?) or rarified vocabulary (“Rarified”?). Ever since I’ve tried to remain sensitive to the uncertain nature of audience. We can never know precisely its identity, what readers know, and what constitutes “arcane” anyway. 

Not long ago I made a passing reference to Spinoza in a post and a reader wrote to say he didn’t know who that was and had to consult Wikipedia to find out. My reaction was mixed. I assumed the identity of the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher was sufficiently well known not to require a footnote. Likewise, I further assumed that once a reader learned his identity, he would dig a little deeper in order to learn more about the author of the Ethics. My reader, instead, basically accused me of making a snobbish faux pas.

 

A counter example: earlier this week another reader in an email referred to “brackets.” The context was no help. Why was he referring to an article of punctuation? I wrote back, confessed my ignorance and learned that “brackets” refers to college basketball, a subject about which I know nothing. Nor am I interested in pursuing it. For my reader it is a subject of intense interest.

 

I can’t think of an infallible rule to resolve this dilemma. On the one hand, I don’t wish to insult readers by reiterating what seems obvious (“Montaigne, a French writer”). My impression is that my readers are a rather intelligent bunch, often well-read and inquisitive. This is a site that advertises itself as “a blog about the intersection of books and life.” It’s not Twitter. On the other hand, I don’t wish to lose a reader because I’m being too obscure. Arthur Krystal addressed this situation in a 1999 American Scholar essay, “What Do You Know?” (collected in Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, 2002). He asks:

 

“Whence came the defiance required to face down facts, to regard with impunity what formerly was part of a traditional humanities education? A number of possible explanations come to mind: the decline of literacy; the ascendancy of technology; the recondite nature of modern science and the increasing specialization of all disciplines, including the humanities; the fall of the public intellectual and ‘man of letters’; the difficulty of texts that seek to explain why reading is so darned difficult; the popularization (and concomitant simplification) of ‘great’ writers; and the fact that many educators have no problem with putting quotation marks around the word great, even when referring to Shakespeare.”

 

Reading literature assumes a balance of confidence and humility on the part of the reader. You agree to read a text that may be alien, sophisticated, difficult. It may challenge your understanding and previous assumptions and exceed your present knowledge. At the same time, it’s an act of faith, especially if the writer is previously unknown to you.

“Inadequacy, of course,” Krystal writes, “can be rectified; the real problem is knowing whether one actually is inadequate where knowledge is concerned. Express dismay that I don’t know the title of the latest self-help book, the name of the hot new rock band, the CEO of some huge corporation, the capital of Mississippi, and my head remains high. Not my bailiwick, I respond cheerily. I don’t need to know that.”

 

Krystal doesn’t claim to supply an easy resolution. Ignorance can be a goad to learning while insulting and angering others. A reader needs to know what’s important to him. Krystal defines some of my my perplexity:

 

“With the exception of a few noted men of letters, we do not know the dead writers, and if we do, it’s a toss-up whether we know more than they did. Whenever I go back to Montaigne, Robert Burton, and Samuel Johnson, it occurs to me that they knew more then than I do now, despite my knowing them.”