The Useful Critic

Literary critics, the best ones, are fellow readers, pilgrims treading a parallel path, looking for joy and flimflam and reporting back to us with their discoveries. They share enthusiasms and aversions. Their experiences in life and literature equip them to sniff out the fraudulent, dull, pretentious and mediocre, but do not render them impervious to pleasure. At some point, they must answer the impulse to celebrate.

That’s why Alfred Kazin remains vital to me. His joy is apparent everywhere is his lyrical prose. He never pretends to be a clinician. He writes not about books pinned like butterflies in a specimen case but as they really are – moving about in the flux of life, intersecting the trajectories of readers’ lives. This comes from a 1981 essay, “To Be a Critic”:

“Keats is one of the few writers on Shakespeare who help me to read him and not just to read about him. Shakespeare is entirely real to Keats, and so Keats makes Shakespeare less unreal to me. That is what I look for in a critic – his use to me; I can use critics whose general point of view is outrageous to me, but who in specific matters have this capacity for making a writer real and a text real. A useful critic is someone who has already begun to use a text in a significant personal way, who is not in doubt about his fundamental reaction, who is not arbitrary but is convinced, in his reading of Shakespeare (or Dos Passos), that he knows what there is to know…If I ever make an anthology of criticism, it will be called The Useful Critic, and will feature only writings that have helped me.”

Kazin goes on to cite examples from this dream anthology: the conversation of Johnson, Goethe and Auden, and an early comment on Nabokov by Isaac Babel. The art criticism of Baudelaire and music criticism of Nietzsche. Whitman in conversation with Horace Traubel on Emerson’s essential genius as a “critic or diagnoser.” Marx on Balzac, Emerson of “The Poet,” William James on Emerson and Henry Adams. Melville on Hawthorne and Henry James’ great preface to The Portrait of a Lady. Eliot on Pascal, Lawrence on Hardy, Jarrell on Frost, Conrad Aiken on Faulkner, Wallace Stevens “for his general reflections on intellectual nobility,” and Robert Penn Warren on Conrad, among many others.

One is struck by the variety of sources, their notable failure to form anything resembling a school, and also by the preponderance of poets, of whom Kazin writes, “poets make my favorite critics; they have the most intense personal consciousness of art.” To be so receptive to the diversity of useful insight, without succumbing to the contemporary vogue for exclusionary critical tribalism, is a gift Kazin is happy to share with us, fellow readers. No wonder this passage from Thoreau’s journal, dated May 6, 1854, was among his favorites:

“All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love, -- to sing; and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love. This alone is to be alive to the extremities.”

`I Saw Eternity the Other Night'

The most detailed and rhapsodic account I know of a young person discovering the vocation of reading, of books opening worlds with a fierceness comparable to some religious experiences, is found in the first of three loosely linked memoirs by the late Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City, published in 1951. When I first read it, about 20 years later, I had already undergone my own conversion but I felt a sense of kinship with Kazin, one of the great critics of American literature, that shook me like the aftershocks of an earthquake, like Melville’s “shock of recognition.”

Kazin was a teenager in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, in the early, deep years of the Depression. He had his first job, collecting specimens from drugstores and delivering them to a urinalysis lab. He had already been reading Dickens, Gogol, even T.S. Eliot. On the steps of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, he accepted a "New Testament" from a man who spoke Yiddish to him, and the young Kazin, a partially secularized Jew, found he admired and even loved his fellow Jew, Jesus or Yeshua. But it was the language that seized him:

“It was like heaping my own arms with gifts. There were images I did not understand, but which fell on my mind with such slow opening grandeur that once I distinctly heard the clean and fundamental cracking of trees. First the image, then the thing; first the word in its taste and smell and touch, then the thing it meant, when you were calm enough to look. Images were instantaneous; the meaning alone could be like the unyielding metal taste when you bite on an empty spoon. The initial shock of that language left no room in my head for anything else.”

Passages in the "New Testament" give him the “same sense of instant connectedness” as the "O altitudo!" he found in a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne, the cathedral chapter in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, the opening line of Henry Vaughn’s “The World” (“I saw eternity the other night”), and these lines from Blake:

“When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Kazin goes on to cite the opening sentences of A Farewell to Arms, “indescribably dry and beautiful with the light on those pebbles in the plain,” and Whitman’s lines from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”:

“Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain
from its shroud in the dark brown fields uprisen.”

I sought out all of these lines on the strength of Kazin’s witness, and tested them against my own experience and tastes. The Browne, Vaughn, Blake and Whitman I still love; the Lawrence and Hemingway leave me cold. But it’s not important whether we approve of Kazin’s examples. He writes here not as a critic but as a man, naked before life and literature. As he says of the lines from Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “I had found another writer I could instinctively trust.”

Later in the same book, Kazin writes a paean to public libraries and the life-changing impact they have on some young people:

“On those early summer evenings, the library was usually empty, and there was such ease at the long tables under the plants lining the windowsills, the same books of American history lay so undisturbed on the shelves, the wizened, faintly smiling little old lady who accepted my presence without questions or suggestions or reproach was so delightful as she quietly, smilingly stamped my card and took back a batch of new books every evening, that whenever I entered the library I would walk up and down trembling in front of the shelves. For each new book I took away, there seemed to be ten more of which I was depriving myself.”

Nuts and Hard-Boiled Eggs

Yesterday I mentioned Laurel and Hardy, which reminded me to watch one of their best shorts, “County Hospital” (1932). I have played the video so many times, my younger sons act out the good parts -- Stanley sitting on a hypodermic needle; Oliver hanging from the ceiling with a broken leg while his doctor, played by Billy Gilbert, hangs by a cord out the window; Stanley’s gift to Oliver – nuts and hard-boiled eggs in a paper sack. The camera doesn’t move as Stanley, seated beside Oliver’s bed, cracks a hard-boiled egg, shells it, salts it with a shaker pulled from his pocket and meticulously eats it to the last crumb – a miracle of slow comedy.

I remembered a poem, “Stan Laurel,” I had read years ago by the English poet John Mole:

“Ollie gone, the heavyweight
Balletic chump, and now
His turn to bow out, courteous,
A perfect gentleman who
Tips his hat to the nurse.

“Or would, that is, if he were
Still in business. She
Adjusts his pillow, smooths
The sheets until their crisp-
And-even snow-white starchiness

“Becomes his cue. It’s time
For one last gag, the stand-up
Drip-feed: Sister,
Let me tell you this
I wish I was skiing,

“And she, immaculately cornered
For the punch-line: Really
Mr. Laurel, do you ski? A
chuckle –
No, but I’d rather I was doing
That than this,

“Than facing death, the one
Fine mess he’s gotten into
That he can’t get out of
Though a nurse’s helpless
laughter
Is the last he hears.”

Mole took Laurel’s last words from a biography I have not read – Stan, by Fred Lawrence Guiles. I hope the story is true. It helps us understand Samuel Beckett’s love of Laurel and Hardy and his reported wish that they play Didi and Gogo in an early production of Waiting for Godot. Who can read Mercier and Camier without thinking of Laurel and Hardy? When I am dying, and if I remain serviceably sentient, I hope someone plays “County Hospital” for me, and “Our Wife,” and “Big Business,” and perhaps reads a bit of Beckett.

Going, Rarely, to the Movies

My wife and I finally watched Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River the other night, more than two years after the rest of the world, and we agreed the movie was disappointing, over-wrought and at times incoherent. I write as a longtime Eastwood fan, but he started taking himself too seriously at least 15 years ago, certainly by the time of Unforgiven, which I, a lover of Westerns, seem to have been almost alone in finding dull. Of course, he had already made Bird, which was ridiculous. I almost gave up on Mystic River after 45 minutes. Eastwood didn’t seem to be having much fun, and neither was I.

The Eastwood I prefer is the maker, as actor and/or director, of honest genre pictures, especially Westerns (Joe Kidd, High Plains Drifter) and crime films like Dirty Harry and Tightrope. Hollywood is hopeless and embarrassing when it reaches after Significance and, worst of all, Art. Most of my favorite Hollywood movies – say, Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate, the first two Godfather films, Chinatown – are eminently artistic but not self-proclaimed Art. They are pulp that transcends pulpiness.

Manny Farber is good on this phenomenon, as on so many things. This is from his 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”:

“Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the first half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions toward gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”

Farber writes in a critical language all his own, and it can be opaque on first reading (and twenty-first). What he means is that good movies have more to do with the energy, single-mindedness and hard work of their creators than high-toned artistic pretensions or the desire to deliver a Message. I especially like the passage because Laurel and Hardy and the Bogart-Bacall version of Raymond Chandler’s first novel are loves of mine.

Many poems have been written about the movies, and most of them are not very good because they are written in a spirit of camp or nostalgia. A surprising number of John Berryman’s Dream Songs (7, 9, 222, 363, among others) deal knowingly and fondly with movies. The best movie poem I know is “In Defense of Poetry,” by the late Edgar Bowers, from the 1990 volume For Louis Pasteur:

“Childhood taught us illusion. When I saw
On Frederic March’s hands the fierce black hair
And long sharp nails of Mr. Hyde, I ran
Screaming from the theater, his twisted face
Demonic behind me brighter than the day;
Then begged to stay up past bedtime, for fear
Boris Karloff wake me and, near despair,
I run to consolation through the dark.
And while Miss Hinton taught us spelling, grammar,
Multiplication – all like lovely guides
To bring us safely from the labyrinth
Of self and self’s intelligence – it seemed
I heard the voice that mocked them. `There is no
Language,’ it whispered, `no A on tests, no trust
To keep you from the presence of my face.
Parents and children die, anguish will be
Greater than its hard sum and no familiar
Voices deliver you from Mr. Hyde,
However Dr. Jekyll seem secure.’

Now in a bright room in a building named
For one who taught the art of politics,
Three days a week I listen to the stories
My young friends write, remembering that my father
Loved stories and especially those he told.
Intelligent and brave, they risk their way
By speech from childhood anguish, formal candor
An old light shining new within a world
Confusing and confused, although their teachers
Deny the worth of writing – my latest colleagues,
Who hope to find a letter in the mail,
Are happy if their children study Shakespeare
At Harvard, Penn or Yale, write articles
To prove all writing writers’ self-deception,
Drive Camrys, drink good wines, play Shostakovich
Or TV news before they go to bed,
And when their sleeping or their waking dream
Is fearful, think it merely cinema,
Trite spectacle that later will amuse.
But when my mind remembers, unamused
It pictures Korczak going with his children
Through Warsaw to the too substantial train.”

Bowers acknowledges the raw power of movies to grip us, to create dreams and to haunt them. It also acknowledges our weakness for blurring movies and reality, for shuffling and thus demeaning images from both realms – “merely cinema/Trite spectacle that later will amuse.” As the title suggests, poetry offers an artistic alternative, permitting young writers (and old writers, I suppose) to “risk their way/By speech from childhood anguish.” Bowers cites Dr. Janusz Korczak, the Polish physician, writer and teacher who ran a school for orphans in the Warsaw ghetto and accompanied the doomed children to Treblinka. Andrzej Wajda made a movie, Korczak, about him. Mystic River, too, deals with abused children and the legacy such abuse engenders. But Eastwood’s film turns abuse into tabloid melodrama. Every frame is too emphatic, too loud, too cartoonish, too insistently certain of its own bravery in the face of evil.

You Don't Say

A review appeared in the weekend Wall Street Journal of Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller, who is a contributing editor at the Wilson Quarterly. According to the reviewer, Moira Hodgson, among Miller’s culprits is the recent profusion of gadgets – iPods, instant messaging, e-mail and cell phone -- which Miller describes as “conversation avoidance devices.” Never have people talked so much and had so little to say. Many, under the influence of television but unaware of it, substitute one-liners and sitcom patter for conversation.

Hodgon writes: “In Mr. Miller’s view, moreover, we live in a contentious, polarized atmosphere, where conversations veer between shouting matches on the one hand and touchy-feely nonjudgmental exchanges on the other.”

Miller celebrates some of the great talkers in what he calls “the conversible world” – Cicero, Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, David Hume, Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Virginia Woolf. Imagine that bunch gathered around a congenial, well-stocked table. Most of us, if invited to pull up a chair, would lapse into shameful silence. Today, Miller says, we have retreated into “anger communities,” and true conversation exceeds our abilities.

This feels accurate. People confuse a sputtering, one-sided rant, which turns quickly into huffy defensiveness when challenged by a listener, with conversation. As Thoreau said in Walden, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Another difficulty, not addressed in Hodgson’s review, is choice of subjects. What are the most tedious, conversation-stopping topics of conversation? Sports, of course. Automobiles, television shows recalled in excruciating detail, professional and domestic woes, almost anything to do with money or politics. Three-quarters of all conversations revert inevitably to at least one of these dead-end subjects, and speakers remain oblivious to the boredom they arouse.

In 1820, William Hazlitt wrote an essay titled “On the Conversation of Authors.” In its sequel, “The Same Subject Continued,” Hazlitt wrote: “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as being heard.” Yes, delusional self-centeredness, the conviction that one’s words are timeless and one’s listeners are rapt, is conversational euthanasia. Hazlitt continues: “Lively sallies and connected discourse are very distant things. There are many persons of that impatient and restless turn of mind, that they cannot wait a moment for a conclusion, or follow up the thread of any argument. In the hurry on conversation their ideas are somehow huddled into sense; but in the intervals of thought, leave a great gap between.”

This combination of distracting electronic toys, egotism and a shrinking fund of worthwhile subjects has effectively killed most true conversation. Nor am I immune. Many of my most compelling, idea-filled, wide-ranging conversations take place through e-mails – a safe, semi-anonymous way to speak and, sometimes, to hide.

Tempted

The April/May issue of Bookforum arrived yesterday and I, usually immune to advertising, have been stricken with covetousness. On Page 21 is a half-page ad for The Grove Centenary Editions of The Works of Samuel Beckett, a boxed set of four volumes commemorating his April 13 centenary. The first volume, “Novels I,” includes Murphy, Watt and Mercier and Camier, with an introduction by Colm Toibin. The second, “The Dramatic Works,” has an introduction by Edward Albee. The third, “Novels II,” includes Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and How It Is, comes with an introduction by Salman Rushdie. The fourth, “The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism,” has an introduction by J.M. Coetzee. The project’s general editor is Paul Auster. The price tag is $100, though Amazon.com is offering it for $63, which makes it even more tempting. Grove is also publishing a new bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot/En attendent Godot.

What tempers my greed are the introductions by Rushdie and Co. Why should I be interested in what this quartet has to say about Beckett? I know nothing about Toibin but the others are middling talents, more fashionable (formerly fashionable, in Albee’s case) than worthy. Grove Press must figure that extended blurbs by brand-name writers would seduce waffling readers of Beckett into forking over $100 for his tombstone. It reminds me of Columbia putting “Positively 4th Street” on Dylan’s first Greatest Hits album, when the song was otherwise available only as a single.

Rushdie, in particular, with his clever garrulousness and trendy politics, seems the antithesis of Beckett’s rigor and stoicism. The same issue of Bookforum includes an essay on Beckett by Rushdie that I assume to be his introduction to the Grove volume. The piece, predictably, is more about Rushdie than Beckett, and some of it is written in a manner meant to imitate Beckett’s voice, I think.

I still own the original Grove Press paperback of Beckett’s trilogy I bought more than 30 years ago. I remember the allure of all those pages of small print, much of it unparagraphed, and the stark white cover. The Grove imprint (publisher of Henry Miller, William Burroughs and other rubbish) lent it a tingle of disreputableness, like a Playboy under the mattress. Today, the spine is cracked, the cover yellowed and my marginalia embarrassing (“Theme: Silence!”). The cover price: $1.45. I’ve traveled far with this book. The crack in the spine opens to Molloy, pages 168 and 169:

“But before I launch my body properly so-called across these icy, then, with the thaw, muddy solitudes, I wish to say that I often thought of my bees, more often than my hens, and God knows I thought often of my hens.”

How I love that halting, pedantically exacting syntax, like a fastidious drunk trying hard to make certain he is understood but always just on the cusp of losing the thread of coherence. On my shelf are 25 volumes by Beckett, several of them post-Nobel first editions, most of them battered from wear. But, let’s not turn Beckett into just another commodity, a badge of cultural vanity, like an unread Proust.

Alms for Oblivion

Houston is a city of appalling wealth and squalor. For these reasons and others, it is the ugliest city I know, embodying an ugliness both aesthetic and moral. Hovels adjoin skyscrapers and beggars stand beside 10-lane highways. Most of the latter beg with the aid of cardboard signs, like those used by hitchhikers. A sign I saw Friday morning, with correct spelling but no punctuation (like much advertising copy), is typical: “Homeless Hungry God Bless.” Appeals to the guilt-triggers of piety and patriotism are common. Many beggars assert their status as Vietnam vets. They advertise sick spouses (wives, that is – I seldom see female beggars in Houston), job loss or house fires.

Later on Friday, I stopped for a red light along a freeway access road. On the corner stood a tall, middle-aged, grim-faced man holding a rectangle of cardboard reading: “I NEED A BEER. WHY LIE?” His stone face and his pitch – a postmodern parody of begging signs? – made me laugh out loud. I wonder if the deadpan humor works. Is philanthropy stimulated by wit? Or does his honesty confirm, at least to the hard-hearted, that beggars can be juicers?

Henry Mayhew, author of the four-volume London Labour and the London Poor, based on stories he wrote for the Morning Chronicle newspaper, was an anatomist of Victorian beggary and other lowlife. More than 30 years after I first read it, I remember his description of the “scaldrum dodge,” in which beggars mutilated themselves to augment the pathos of their appeal. Mayhew’s contemporary, Charles Dickens, mined his work for stories and details of life and language. Here’s a beggar Mayhew calls “An Imposter”:

“This man, who has been seventeen times apprehended by the Society‘s constables, and as many more by the police, was taken into custody for begging. He is an old man, and his age usually excites the sympathy of the public; but he is a gross impostor, and for the last fifteen years has been about the streets, imposing upon the benevolent. He has been convicted of stealing books, newspapers, and on one occasion an inkstand from a coffee house. His appeals to the benevolent in the streets are very pertinacious, and persons frequently give him money for the purpose of getting rid of him. He had, when last taken into custody, 2l. 9s. 4d. secreted about his person, part in his stockings, which he stated had been given to him to enable him to leave the country, and a variety of what he represented to be original verses.”

Here’s Mayhew’s pithy, straight-faced description of a female beggar: “A woman with twins who never grew older sat for ten years at the corner of a street.”

And here’s the words of 22-year-old man who, when not begging, worked as a birds'-nest seller:
“Mother died five years ago in the Consumption Hospital at Chelsea, just after it was built. I was very young indeed when father died; I can hardly remember him. He died in Middlesex Hospital: he had abscesses all over him; there were six-and-thirty at the time of his death....I'm a very little eater, and perhaps that's the luckiest thing for such as me; half a pound of bread and a few potatoes will do me for the day. If I could afford it, I used to get a ha'porth of coffee and a ha'porth of sugar and make it do twice. Sometimes I used to have victuals given to me, sometimes I went without altogether; and sometimes I couldn't eat. I can't always.”

Wordsworth wrote poems about beggars and so did William Butler Yeats. Here, from the 1914 collection Responsibilities, is “Beggar to Beggar Cried”:

“`Time to put off the world and go somewhere
And find my health again in the sea air,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`And make my soul before my pate is bare.’

“`And get a comfortable wife and house
To rid me of the devil in my shoes.’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`And the worse devil that is between my thighs.’

“`And though I’d marry with a comely lass,
She need not be too comely – let it pass,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
But there’s a devil in a looking-glass.’

“Nor should she be too rich, because the rich
Are driven by wealth as beggars by the itch,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`And cannot have a humorous happy speech.’

“`And there I’ll grow respected at my ease,
And hear amid the garden’s nightly peace,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`The wind-blown clamour of the barnacle geese.’”

Often and rather surprisingly, Yeats recalls the loquacious, goatish wretches of his younger countryman, Samuel Beckett. Christopher Ricks, in a 2000 review of Beckett's theatrical notebooks later collected in Reviewery, writes of another scholar's lecture: "It brought together two great writers: Beckett and Wordsworth. A surprise, and one that was then made good. `Resolution and Independence'; `Old Man Travelling'; `Animal Tranquility and Decay'; `Argument for Suicide'; `Beggars'; `Incipient Madness'; `The Recluse'. . . : the Wordsworthian titles speak of, and to, the lasting apprehensions of solitude, ageing, exacerbation, induration, distance, and distaste. True, there are urgent differences: Beckett is inconceivable without a sense of humor, and Wordsworth inconceivable with one."

Edgy Enthusiast

One is always gratefully surprised by evidence of intelligence, wit and culture in the pages of a newspaper. Long gone are the days when H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell and Murray Kempton -- newspapermen, yes, but literary men as well – practiced their craft in the dailies. Their books stand on my shelves. They wrote for a mass audience, yes, or at least for publications aimed at the masses, but in prose that was nuanced, funny, allusive and that, especially in Kempton’s case, easily transcended today’s stylistic lockstep of subject (preferably “I”)-verb-object, with a pop-culture reference thrown in to hook the cretins. Unlike so many journalists today, steeped in self-perpetuating cynicism, they didn’t treat readers as backward fifth-graders.

Neither does Ron Rosenbaum, longtime columnist for the New York Observer. His subjects are often so refreshingly arcane, so literate and literary, so dependent on a fund of knowledge deemed “elitist” by the fashionably egalitarian, that his long-running column, “The Edgy Enthusiast,” constitutes a miracle of loyalty on the part of his newspaper. Some of his work is available online but I would suggest a visit to the library or book dealer to locate, in particular, The Secret Parts of Fortune, a generous helping of his journalism from the Observer and other publications. In it are pieces devoted to Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Helen Vendler and John Keats, Lucretius (in which Rosenbaum begins studying Latin in middle age), Murray Kempton (whom Rosenbaum called “the best writer of prose in America”), and Shakespeare, as well as a brief and memorable detour into Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy. I am emphasizing his purely literary pieces but Rosenbaum is also good on politics, crime, even celebrities (Bob Dylan, Roseanne Cash, Jack Nicholson).

What returned me to Rosenbaum was my recent reimmersion in Hart Crane. In 1997, Rosenbaum wrote a piece titled “Hart Crane’s Hieroglyphs: The Unmentionable Truth” – a title which does not, mercifully, refer to Crane’s homosexuality. When was the last time you read an explication of a poem as cryptic as “At Melville’s Tomb” – or any poem, for that matter -- in a newspaper? Rosenbaum adores Crane and lives up to his columnar persona, “The Edgy Enthusiast,” right from the first paragraph:

“The lost language of Crane: I love the sound of that phrase (its resonance indebted to the David Leavitt novel title). I’m speaking of the lost language of Hart Crane, to my mind the great American poet of the twentieth century, inventor of a unique ecstatic poetic language that is at once maddeningly elusive and crazily exhilarating, a language I can’t always decipher but one that always speaks to me, a haunting, cryptic poetic rhetoric, a supremely literate glossolalia, a speaking-in-tongues that registers on levels of intelligibility both deeper and more elevated than quotidian speech.”

Even if you have never read Crane’s work, don’t you want to dive in headfirst to share in some of Rosenbaum’s enthusiasm? While you’re at it, find Explaining Hitler, Rosenbaum’s idiosyncratic look at attempts by historians, philosophers, biographers and others to understand the Nazi leader, and Those Who Forget the Past, a collection of essays examining the recent resurgence of anti-semitism, much of it coming from the political left. The book is edited by Rosenbaum and contains a brilliant afterword by Cynthia Ozick.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Terry Teachout posts wisely today on readers disagreeing with critics. Like Terry, I’m baffled by people who fly off the handle and launch ad hominem assaults simply because my judgment differs from theirs. Here’s a characteristically mature sample:

“Perhaps the most common complaint I get is from people who claim that my writings are full of `unsubstantiated pronouncements’ (or nastier words to that effect). This never fails to throw me. Virtually all criticism, after all, is full of `unsubstantiated pronouncements.’ They're called opinions, and yours are as good as mine. The only difference is that I get paid to write mine down. To be sure, I like to think that my opinions have at least some validity, based as they are on a lifetime of intense professional involvement with the world of art. In the end, though, you must be the judge. If my opinions rarely tally with your perceptions, then chances are you'll stop taking my criticism seriously, no matter how cleverly written it may be. Conversely, if I have a history of steering you straight (or at least making you think twice), then chances are you'll be inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt when I praise a book you haven't read, or a play you didn't see. That's the main reason why I write criticism: I want to share my pleasures. Yes, I sometimes feel the need to smite the heathen, but I'd be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life writing solely and only about things I like.”

Same Old Stories

Like nature, my 3-year-old son abhors a vacuum, especially in his knowledge and understanding. If you ask him a question, he always answers, convincingly and in vivid detail, whether he knows the correct answer or not. Psychologists call this fabulation to distinguish it from garden-variety lying. He believes what he says. He is not knowingly trying to deceive. He is still largely free of guile, unlike his 5-year-old brother who recently started telling fibs on an experimental basis, testing the results. What the 3-year-old is doing is something all of us do throughout the day, I suspect, though perhaps with more sophistication or attention paid to believability, and that is telling stories. Blanks in knowledge are bothersome, and we like to fill them. We like linkage and resolution. Our minds are like artists working in collage, bringing together disparate materials and crafting them into pleasing wholes.

Some of these ideas comes from a book I read several years ago by Mark Turner, The Literary Mind. The title is intentionally misleading, because this is not a study of writers, at least not principally. Rather, Turner argues that humans, even non-writing humans, by nature, possess literary minds. His book is a work of cognitive science, not literary criticism or biography. Stories, he argues, are almost our essence.

“Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories,” Turner says. I’m not convinced of this idea in a scientific sense but I find it useful. While reading the book and for some time afterward, I saw and heard stories everywhere – in random street scenes, banal conversations and even in seemingly non-narrative poems.

I thought about this in connection with poetry because I seem to be reading a lot of it, and I’m seeing stories whose existence is no more than implied. This seems like a great strength of poetry, especially in short forms, a strength that goes unused by poets too eager to bang home their meaning. Most fiction advertises itself as story. In poetry, story is often smuggled in unannounced, like contraband.

Here is “Here,” in which an entire life is implied, by the famously concise Samuel Menashe:

“Ghost I house
In this old flat --
Your outpost –
My aftermath”

And Geoffrey Hill, who writes that “Wild Clematis in Winter” is written “i.m. [im memorium] William Cookson,” the English poet and longtime editor of the journal Agenda:

“Old traveller’s joy appears like naked thorn blossom
as we speed citywards through blurry detail –
wild clematis’ springing false bloom of seed pods,
the earth lying shotten, the sun shrouded off-white,
wet ferns ripped bare, flat as fishes’ backbones,
with the embankment grass frost-hacked and hackled,
wastage, seepage, showing up everywhere,
in this blanched apparition.”

And finally, “An Elegy Is Preparing Itself,” by Donald Justice:

“There are pines that are tall enough
Already. In the distance,
The whining of saws; and needles,
Silently slipping through the chosen cloth.
The stone, then as now, unfelt,
Perfectly weightless. And certain words,
That will come together to mourn,
Waiting, in these dark clothes, apart.”

Distilling a world into a clutch of sentences, suggesting more than the words can ever say without being excessively elliptical or resorting to a private language, suggests poetry is a species of very dense matter, freighted with potential meaning. Is “story” the author’s intent or merely the presumption of the reader? Yesterday, when I asked my 3-year-old what he had been doing, without hesitation he answered, “I see Michael [the 5-year-old] in New York. We go to the zoo and eat pizza.” We hadn’t left our house in Houston and pizza was not on the menu.

Everyday People

The carpet cleaner came yesterday morning, 10 minutes early, so I had to flee my office for the front room and its hardwood floors. I grabbed a magazine and a book of poems off my desk almost randomly – the April 6 issue of The New York Review of Books and Kay Ryan’s Say Uncle – for something to read while the cleaner tried to remove the stains my kids leave behind like carbon dioxide.

In the Review, Robert Hughes writes about Rembrandt van Rijn, a subject I would think daunting because of over-familiarity. But Hughes is a writer who, thanks to immense learning and a disciplined eye, ever unfazed by mere fashion, always brings something unexpected to and out of his ostensible subject. We can say of Hughes what Guy Davenport once said of his own reasons for writing: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” In this case, Hughes concerns himself with the most notoriously slippery of aesthetic categories, realism:

“Certainly Rembrandt van Rijn did not feel an obligation to make his human subjects noble, let alone perfect. That is why, though not always a realist, he is the first god of realism after Caravaggio. And why so many people love him, since he was so seldom rivaled as a topographer of the human clay.”

The language is quintessential Hughes, simple, straightforward and vigorous, free of artspeak, unafraid of metaphor or informed generalization. I like the unforced linkage, separated by more than a sentence, of “god” and “human clay.” Hughes is also generous, for aren’t we among those who love Rembrandt, and for such a good reason?

Now we come to my favorite sentence in an article liberally sprinkled with good ones: “He was a singular connoisseur of ordinariness, and some of his self-portraits are eloquent proof of this.” And a little later: “Nor did he ever treat the human form as a means of escape from the disorder and episodic ugliness of the real world. Reality was always breaking into celestial events.” William Blake might have written the latter sentence, had he been sane.

Without putting words in Hughes’ mouth, I would like to propose a generalization of my own: Much of the art that most moves us is rooted in ordinariness, in the recognizably quotidian lives of human beings. The is true even of the seemingly fantastic world of Dante. The more attenuated the human connection, the more likely abstraction will dilute the emotional and moral impact of the work. It may remain formally admirable, even beautiful, but only in the most clinical sense. What I propose is not a schematic for simple-minded “social realism,” nor is it the only useful way to enjoy and assess art. Rather, art that jettisons the human risks emotional aridity and often betrays its worthiest purposes.

In Kay Ryan’s book of poems, Say Uncle, I found some substantiation for these thoughts. Ryan’s poems are brief, even laconic, but never ostentatiously oracular, like Robert Creeley’s anorexic offerings. Ryan is funny and smart. Her wit is Metaphysical and her subjects, invariably, are you and me. Here’s a poem about the most human of subjects, “Failure,” that uses what we might call scientific observation:

“Like slime
inside a
stagnant tank

its green
deepening
from lime
to emerald

a dank
but less
ephemeral
efflorescence

than success
is in general.”

Even better, three pages later, is “Failure 2”:

“There could be nutrients
in failure –
deep amendments
to the shallow soil
of wishes.
Think of the
dark and bitter
flavors of
black ales
and peasant loaves.
Think of licorices.
Think about
the tales of how
Indians put fishes
under corn plants.
Next time hope
relinquishes a form,
think about that.”

Here, the “disorder and episodic ugliness of the real world” – that is to say, our world, the human world – is turned by Ryan quite modestly into a celestial -- that is to say, everyday – event. And now my carpet is clean.

O Youth and Certainty!

In 1975-76, in the benighted days before e-mail, I corresponded almost daily with a friend who lived in another part of Ohio and whom I saw in person only rarely. Temperamentally, we were at odds. He sipped, for instance, and I chugged. We once set out on a pub-crawl across Cleveland, loosely based on Hart Crane’s like-minded wanderings 50 years earlier, and it was Phil who called a cab and I who retched on a sidewalk somewhere off East Ninth Street. What brought us and kept us together was books and our arrogance about them. Between us, we were certain we had read everything worth reading.

Phil once challenged me to name the three greatest short stories ever written – not “favorite,” mind you; “greatest.” Americans in their early-20s think in superlatives. My nominations came to mind immediately: Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart,” Faulkner’s “Red Leaves” and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Spinoza of Market Street” – all worthy candidates. Today, however, I would drop the Faulkner without hesitation and the Flaubert with regret. The Library of America’s recent publication of Singer’s three-volume Collected Stories makes choosing even a baker’s dozen of his best confoundingly difficult. So, let’s chalk in a reserved spot for Singer (maybe “A Crown of Feathers”).

Next, we need one Henry James. Again, the choices are many – “The Middle Years,” “In the Cage, “The Altar of the Dead” – but I’ll be strong: “The Beast in the Jungle.” This is not a young person’s selection. Only the middle-aged feel the pangs of regret for opportunities lost and the bitterness of self-delusion, and understand that such things can color an entire life.

For the coveted third spot, the winner is: Isaac Babel’s “Guy de Maupassant,” though it could just as well be “Salt,” or “My First Goose,” or “Di Grasso.” I choose “Guy de Maupassant” for its humor, sexiness and its most often quoted line: “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place” (Peter Constantine’s translation).

Of course, I have omitted Chekhov, and this is unforgivable, but I already have no room for Joyce, or Tolstoy, or Turgenev, or Hawthorne, or Kipling, or Cheever, or J.F. Powers, or Peter Taylor…Things were so much easier when I was 23.

`London! London!'

In context, this entry from the diary of Arthur Graeme West, dated September 6, 1916, is unspeakably sad. Read it first, and I will explain:

“I have succeeded in getting leave…We reached London about seven. The sun was setting as I crossed Waterloo Bridge, a red bubble behind the Houses of Parliament, but in Waterloo station the sunlight had still been intense, though of that thick, almost palpable radiance that low sunbeams have from autumn suns seen through glass. After the journey almost the vividest happiness is over: the ever-nearing imminence of London, the outlying commons dotted with children’s figures playing, one I remember standing up amid a bush of dark green gorse, wearing a little read Corot-like cap.

“You approach the wilderness of roofs, see the tall buildings so familiar to you far away over them, the train winds and twists bumpily over points and switches, you lean out of the window and look up the long vertebrate rod of carriages, watch them turn and tail round the curves, you pass Battersea and Vauzhall, more and more widths of line, shunting engines, pointsmen, forests of signals, the signal boxes perched right up above the line; the arch of the great station opens before you dark and gloomy beneath the dirty glass, the ends of the platforms stretch forth to meet you, you wonder which it will be, this side, this side, in you glide past the long line of porters and waiting friends: you alight, everyone is welcomed, you make your way out. London! London! I think the first piece of conscious unhappiness comes when you realize how alone you are.”

West was 25 when he wrote these words almost 90 years ago. He had been educated at Highgate School, Blundells and Balliol College, Oxford. Clearly he knew his Ruskin. His prose is nuanced and highly personal, but without cloying self-regard. He describes a literal twilight but also the twilight of a world already disappearing, though he may not have known this. His eye and mind are shrewd, practiced and attuned to gradations of light and shade but also to gradations of feeling. He knew the comforts and desolations of home, when London was the capital of the civilized world.

In October 1914, still at Oxford, West applied for a commission but was rejected for poor eyesight. He enlisted as a private in the Public Schools Battalion in 1915. He was sent to France that November, became a lance corporal and saw repeated action. The following April, West was accepted for an officer training course in Scotland. In August 1916, the month before we wrote the above passage, West was made a second lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He drafted a letter refusing to rejoin the army but did not post it. He returned to France, rose to the rank of Acting Captain, and was killed by a sniper’s bullet near Bapaume on April 3, 1917.

I find West’s diary more poignantly affecting than much of the poetry of such contemporaries and fellow soldiers as Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. Who might Arthur Graeme West have become?

`Verse is Not Easy'

David Yezzi is a good poet (see The Hidden Model) and executive editor of The New Criterion, which consistently publishes better arts writing and poetry than any magazine in the country. In this weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, Yezzi uses the approach of April and National Poetry Month as an occasion to reconnoiter the terrain of contemporary poetry and, to no one’s surprise, finds the enemy has not only breeched our defenses but severed our supply lines, while the reservoirs of lousy poetry remain bottomless.

Yezzi points out the usual sources of mediocrity – so-called “experimental poetry,” the fetishism of politics and what he calls “folksy, first-person ruminations of the poet who feels that every mundane observation will be of interest to others.” Not all is grim, however. Yezzi applauds Poetry magazine in its recently born-again incarnation under the editorship of Christian Wiman, and cites as evidence a sharp, funny poem by Kay Ryan from a 2005 issue.

What’s most invigorating about Yezzi’s essay, however, is the way he musters J.V. Cunningham to the cause. Cunningham was a poet, epigramist and scholar whose work, in the context of contemporary poetry, is a cold mountain stream blithely flowing past a landfill. He is one of my favorite poets, and it’s invigorating to see Yezzi revive this poet of wit and sanity. Here’s a pertinent sample titled “For My Contemporaries”:

“How time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.

“But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,

“Depise me not,
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.

But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.”

Horace and Ben Jonson, not Tony Hoagland or Jackson Mac Low, live in such lines. Ten years ago, the poet Timothy Steele edited a sumptuous edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, complete with notes and a useful introduction. Here’s another tart little poem from Cunningham:

“And what is love? Misunderstanding, pain,
Delusion, or retreat? It is in truth
Like an old brandy after a long rain,
Distinguished, and familiar, and aloof.”

Lines like that, and there are hundreds more, bolster the tempered optimism with which Yezzi concludes his piece:

“Holding poetry at a certain remove helps readers to resist the sentimental and meretricious. It is precisely this skeptical weather eye that most reliably discovers a place for the genuine. The finest poetry overcomes our wariness and our repeated disappointments. To shed light on experience, to discover language for our most complex emotions, to reveal such emotions to us fully for the first time: I suspect that J.V. Cunningham would have agreed that these are pretensions that the best poems can hope to satisfy.”

That Other Internet

The Internet, of course, is nothing new. The late Guy Davenport believed every book was created by its author, often unknowingly, as a response, one half of a virtual dialogue, sometimes disguised, to an already existing book. If we accept this highly ecological premise, and I do, then every book is linked inevitably to every other book in a vast Borgesian weave of overt and occult connections.

I thought of this as I was rereading W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson, my favorite among all biographies. Not long ago, in the New York Sun, Eric Orsmby reviewed the latest installment in “The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson” and Henry Hitchings’ Defining the World, a chronicle of Johnson and his great dictionary. Ormsby is a fine poet somewhat in the manner of Wallace Stevens, one of our best book critics and a professor in McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies in Montreal.

In the course of his review, Ormsby cited a poem by Ben Downing, a poet I did not know. The poem bears the Keatsian title “On First Looking into Bates’ Life of Johnson.” The lines Ormsby quoted sounded intriguing, so I ordered Downing's book, The Calligraphy Shop, and was not disappointed. The poem is written in four sections of four stanzas each, and is that rarest of works: Each line is temptingly quotable. Here is a two-stanza sample:

“And from your perusal of your own work I
had already come to venerate the high
gloss you put on things, your peerless prose
with its lapidary dominoes

augustly toppling, clause after clause
unspooling like the costliest kilim
to welcome us in. Your full avoirdupois
I had presumed to feel, Gruff Pachyderm.”

I, too, had to look up “kilim.” It’s a Turkish word, Webster’s Third tells us, and refers to “a pileless tapestry; woven carpet, mat, or spread made in Turkey, Kurdistan, the Caucasus, Iran and western Turkestan.” Ormsby and Downing, like Davenport, Johnson, Bate, Stevens (whom Davenport called “a philosophical landscapist”) and Keats (whose biography Bate also wrote), are unafraid to use a seemingly exotic but in fact precisely useful word. For, if all is connected, if every book is a knot in a vast golden net, then nothing is truly exotic, everything is familiar, and all of it is ours.

Thoreau and His `Titmen'

Apropos of my posting yesterday on libraries and their willingness to pander to popular tastes, Thoreau again comes to my aid. This is from the chapter titled “Reading” in Walden:

“I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating of a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.”

Thoreau can be a prig. He is certainly a classic New England crank – a breed I know well and remain fond of. His tone here skirts snottiness but his reasoning remains sound. Those who, having read the Bible, feel no need to enjoy other worthy, worldly volumes can be usefully likened to readers who confine themselves to science fiction, automobile repair manuals or the novels of Anthony Trollope. These books have their merits. In fact, I love Trollope – a taste I developed only in middle age, and a good taste to have for he was hugely prolific. But I would never devote my attention exclusively to his novels.

Our culture faces a reading crisis – not merely the ability to translate symbols on a page, but to recognize which combinations of symbols are useful and beautiful and worthy of our attention. We are in danger of losing our past, that which is best about us. Libraries, once a redoubt of reading culture, have increasingly become part of the problem they, seemingly out of the best of intentions, purport to address. Extra copies of Stephen King and more computer screens tuned to video games – all at taxpayers’ expense -- solve nothing. A few pages later in “Reading,” Thoreau goes on:

“We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of titmen, and soar but little higher than the columns of the daily paper.”

First, a lexical clarification: My Webster’s Third defines “titman” as “a puny person; one stunted physically or mentally.” Thoreau, to my knowledge, was not a breast fetishist. “Titman” derives from “titmouse,” the small arboreal bird. Thoreau the naturalist obviously knew the avian connection, for he extends the metaphor by having his titmen “soar.”

When I read “children and feeble intellects,” I flash on the baffling phenomenon that is Harry Potter. In an age when librarians, teachers and parents point with self-satisfaction to Rowling’s swollen volumes as evidence of a renaissance in reading, I’m reminded, unexpectedly, of Karl Marx, who reasoned that quantity becomes quality in the later stages of capitalism. So as not to leave the impression that I am in any sense a Marxist, let us conclude with Thoreau:

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!”

If a flinty New Englander like Thoreau resorts to an exclamation point, we ought to pay attention.

That's My Boy!

My oldest son is 18 and a freshman at a college in upstate New York. It’s spring break. On Wednesday, he visited a friend at Bard College. His own campus is normally about one hour away, but an accident on the New York State Thruway left him stuck in traffic for four hours. How did he occupy his time? Here’s an excerpt from his e-mail: “During the waiting period, I actually began and finished Orwell's Animal Farm. Now, I'm reading Henderson the Rain King.”

Bookless Readers, Readerless Books

I love libraries. I have spent years of my life in them, both public and university, more than in churches, theaters and taverns combined. Libraries are democracy’s finest flowering, the enduring legacy of Franklin and Jefferson, a living reproach to ignorance and censorship, an antidote to boredom, an incentive to dwell in imagination and live the life of the mind.

Almost two years ago, my wife and I and our sons visited the Houston Public Library and got our library cards the day after we moved from New York to Texas. That eased the transition. I like to know where I can get the books I need and who is taking care of them. Now that sense of solace is challenged by one of modernity’s usual suspects – progress. The library has launched a $14.9 million renovation of its central downtown building. Last week, the library closed two of its four floors normally open to the public. Books from major portions of the collection – arts, science, social sciences, business – can no longer be browsed. Rather, we must request specific titles from already overworked librarians. The wait can be considerable and the happy inspiration of serendipity is erased. This is especially unfortunate for young people just learning the joy of randomly discovering books on the shelf. When I was 13, that’s how I stumbled upon John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, in a suburban Cleveland library. After more than 40 years, it remains one of his best books.

Cutting off direct access to part of the collection compounds a problem that already existed at the main Houston library. Many books, especially older titles (older than a decade or so, that is), are placed in “Stacks”; that is, they are shelved on floors without public access. The thinking seems to be, if we have limited space let’s devote it to new books, not good, important, enduring or useful books. If I want to read Samuel Beckett’s fiction, or Anthony Powell’s, or Ford Madox Ford’s, or Laurence Sterne’s, or Ivan Turgenev's, or Christina Stead's, or Henry Green's, I must ask a librarian to fetch it for me. These authors and thousands of others are effectively banished from the hands of many readers, especially those unaware of their existence or inexperienced in the mysteries of the library and its cataloging system.

The entire central library will close on April 3, “and is expected to reopen by the end of 2007,” according to the carefully hedged language of a library press release. “For full library service during the renovation, library customers are encouraged to use their neighborhood libraries.” There are 36 such branch libraries in the city, all with small collections weighted toward the new and popular. Again, I don’t want to mislead: I will still be able to get the books I wish to read, but that will take more time and I will receive only the specific titles I request, nothing discovered by random good fortune. Interlibrary loan will remain, and it is a blessing. The Houston library has located books for me from collections as far away as Indiana and Arizona, as well as cities and universities all over Texas.

“Improvements and changes will be made to public services, creating a better library experience,” the press release assures us. There’s no mention in it of more books being added to the collection, which would seem to be a library’s principal obligation. Rather, not surprisingly, most of the money will be spent providing patrons with “access to state of the art technology.” Translation: More computers in a library where most computer screens, based on my frequent observation, are occupied by solitaire and other games, not scholarship. In addition, money will be spent to move a sculpture now displayed on the plaza in front of the library – Claes Oldenburg’s iron bric-a-brac, “Geometric Mouse X” – down the block “where it will be more prominent.” How I wish an army of art critics with cutting torches would make it less prominent.

Consider Thoreau’s words in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

“When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not truly cumulative treasure, where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is, I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! That so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole.”

Only figuratively is the Houston Public Library a dust-hole, though that’s the sense Thoreau intends. Books without readers are merely potential books, and readers without books are unhappy people. It’s going to be a long 21 months.

Gators and the Disciplines of Prose

From an innocuous distance – say, 10 yards across a brown, slow-moving tributary of the Brazos River – they don’t look so much harmless as inert, like logs stuck in the mud. You can’t see their eyes – “eel-gray with vertical pupils,” Edward Hoagland assures us -- until you move closer, but by then you are less likely to be noting anatomical niceties with precision. Park signs, red letters on white background, are posted everywhere: “DO NOT APPROACH ALLIGATORS.”

Yesterday, for the first time, I saw alligators in the wild, in Brazos Bend State Park, one hour southwest of Houston. By my count, we saw 24 of them, ranging from carry-on-luggage size to one monster as long as my Bonneville. To my Northern eyes, they look too exotic, too computer-generated to be "live, livin' and breathin," as I remember a sideshow barker say of his Giant Rats of Sumatra. We heard one crashing through the tall brown reeds on the far side of the river until it stopped, stolid and ancient, at the water’s edge. Alligators are like firefighters -- their lives are long stretches of inactivity and tedium broken only by moments of frenzy. A park ranger, who had let us pet a baby alligator back at the visitor’s center, said they are smarter than their reptilian cousins, turtles and snakes, and they seem to have a memory and a primitive ability to learn. But their brains are peanuts, she said, and they act strictly out of instinct, like most killers.

I approached within six feet of a small one, four feet long and lying perpendicular to the river, head cocked to the left so he could watch me with one unblinking eye. Like a fool, I wanted to take his picture. When I stopped, I could see long, crooked teeth jutting from his upper jaw over his lower lip – an orthodontist’s nightmare. Only later did I read one of the more detailed park signs, which urged humans and dogs not to approach within 30 feet of a gator.

Hoagland, a nature writer with little taste for the mystical rubbish that compromises so much contemporary nature writing, clearly likes alligators. In the 1960s he wrote a short story which is not very good as a story (you can see why he switched to writing essays), but which is very good on the subject of alligators. “The Final Fate of the Alligators” concerns a guy who raises one in his New York City apartment. Here’s a sample:

“The alligator, like an overgrown brown invalid confined to bed, lived in the big bathtub. If an outsider had been invited in to look at it, he would have gaped, because this was no ten-inch plaything but an animal of barrel-like girth, with a rakish, pitiless mouth as long as a man’s forearm and a tail as long as his legs. The cut of the mouth, however, was no clue to the alligator’s mood since, like the crocodile mask that a child wears in a school play, it was vivid but never changed. The eyes, eel-gray with vertical pupils, were not as static. They seemed to have a light source within them, and the great body, scummed slightly with algae, was a battlefield shade, the shade of mud.”

This is over-written and under-realized, clotted with gratuitous metaphors. But clearly, Hoagland has looked at an alligator. He’s not writing about a symbol of primeval life force or some such nonsense. “Rakish, pitiless mouth” is very nice. I saw one of those yesterday.

In a much later essay, “In Okefenokee,” the writing is pared-back and efficient:

“Their heads were flat-looking and grimacey because of the long mask of their mouths – a grin that is two hundred million years old. Swimming alligators have horsey heads, however, the eyes and high nostrils are emphasized, instead of their fixed somber smiles. They look more like a sea horse than a sea horse does (though the inches between their nostrils and eyes denote their total length as measured in feet).”

Separated by more than 20 years – an eternity in the life of a writer’s style – the excerpts tell the tale of a maturing artist. There is continuity – in both he mentions masks – but there is growth and discipline also, less willingness to indulge in eloquence for its own sake.

`Memory and Credence'

Except for Walt Whitman, I can think of no American writer who has inspired so many poets or been the subject of so many first-rate poems as Henry James. The good and great include works by Auden, Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn, James Merrill, Richard Howard and Herbert Morris, among many others. (One by Erica Jong is not worth mentioning.) Auden’s “At the Grave of Henry James” is well known. Here’s the final stanza:

“All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead:
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling, making intercession
For the treason of all clerks.”

Justice wrote “American Scenes (1904-1905).” In the last of its four sections, James is staying in the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, as he actually did during his first visit to the United States in 20 years. Here’s the fourth section, titled “Epilogue: Coronado Beach, California”:

“In a hotel by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster,
Only a sort of freshness being lost –
Or should he go on calling it Innocence?
The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;
Wall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense
Novel in all this waiting to be done,
But not, not – sadly enough – by him. His talents,
Such as they may be, want an older theme,
One rather more civilized than this, on balance,
For him now always the consoling dream
Is just the mild dear light of Lamb House falling
Beautifully down the pages of his calling.”

Herbert Morris reanimates James in “House of Words,” a 657-line dramatic monologue set in 1906, in which the Master chronicles a nightmare of regret. James has just examined proofs of his portrait taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn, the American photographer whose ghostly, atmospheric pictures illustrate the New York Edition. The poem, which suffers from excerpting, can be found in Morris’ collection What Was Lost. James’ mood is sadly resigned, autumnal, teetering on the edge of self-pity, but he continues to write. In a dream, James returns to the 1880s, the early years of his residence in London, where he boards a carriage he thinks is bound for a dinner party in Mayfair. Instead, he enters a hellish London, the “City of Regret,” that recalls T.S. Eliot’s Unreal City in “The Wasteland,” with Morris echoing James’ halting, obsessively qualified syntax. Gazing at the swarming crowds, the dream-James muses:

“…there are lives, one’s own not least among them,
which seem, which come to seem, utterly wasted,
lived by the wrongs means for the wrong ends, lived
at the edge, at some safe edge, at those edges
far from the center where most lives are lived,
where one’s store of passion lodges, resides,
heat essential heat, core of what is human.”

Many of these poems share with James’ own work a sad, elegiac, autumnal tone, but never an indulgence in self-pity. As Christopher Ricks writes, “In James’ hands, the imagination is a continual victory over negation. He turns to positive advantage things which loom negatively.”

Richard Howard, a wonderful poet and very Jamesian prose writer, argues that one of James’s “continual victories” has been his pervasive but largely unacknowledged influence on poets. In a 1988 essay, “The Resonance of Henry James in American Poetry” (collected in Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1955-2003), Howard convincingly quotes passages from Auden (Caliban’s speech to the audience in The Sea and the Mirror), Elizabeth Bishop, Hecht, Howard Moss and John Hollander. None of Howard’s exhibits is a poem about James; rather they are, in his words, “…Jamesian, insofar as the Jamesian tone, the muster of language under the ravaging wing of memory and credence, will afford an access to the physical world which prosody has flunked.”

Henry Before He Was Henry

In his affectionate profile of Henry James written four years after the novelist’s death, the poet and critic Edmund Gosse, who had also worked as the librarian for the House of Lords, told a story dating from 1905 (collected in Aspects and Impressions): “What really did thrill him was looking down from one of the windows of the Library on the Terrace, crowded with its motley afternoon crew of Members of both Houses and their guests of both sexes. He liked that better than to mingle with the throng itself.”

Gosse is not a subtle psychologist, and he draws no insights from the anecdote except to wish that James had “written a superb page” describing the scene. And yet, it’s an arresting image, one that remained with Gosse after 15 years and that remains with seasoned readers of James: the novelist invisibly observing the human swarm below him. Temperamentally, James was no mingler, in a throng or on the page. Even at dinner parties, where he habitually collected gossip for enjoyment and source material for his work, one always senses in James a reticence, a cool, analytical reserve. For such a sensibility, one many of us share, there is comfort and power (godlike, Flaubertian) in distance, as a scene composed by James more than 30 years before Gosse’s vignette suggests.

For newcomers to James, intimidated and disoriented by his reputation and sprawling body of work, a good place to start is the novella “Madame de Mauves,” which I have just reread. Its centrality to James' work was first suggested to me by the novelist Steven Millhauser. James wrote it in 1873, in his 30th year, and it appeared in his first published volume, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales. Like the better-known “Daisy Miller,” “Madame de Mauves” concerns a young American man, prosperous and free in Europe. In both cases, the title character is female but the consciousness through whom the narrative is largely filtered is a young American man simultaneously attracted to this woman and suspicious of his attraction. Longmore, in “Madame de Mauves,” is aptly named, for seldom has a character spent more time longing for what he does not and finally cannot have. He lives in a perpetual state of baffled anticipation.

Characteristically, the novella opens with a spectator and a view. Longmore is seated on a terrace in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, surveying the “dusky vastness” of the city below him, his eyes “fixed in idle wistfulness on the mighty human hive before him.” The positioning of spectator and scene strikingly recalls Gosse’s recollection of the mature James at the library window. In the ninth sentence of “Madame de Mauves,” still in the first paragraph, we are told: “Though not in the least a cynic, he was what might be called a disappointed observer; and he never chose the right-hand road without beginning to suspect after an hour’s wayfaring that the left would have been the interesting one.”

On that same terrace, Longmore meets a young American woman, Euphemia de Mauves, nee Cleve – a delightfully ridiculous name for such a sad figure (among his other distinctions, James must be the champion namer in all of fiction). She is the wife of a dissolute French baron, Richard de Mauves, a faded epigone of the nobility. Cold-bloodedly, he has married the naïvely romantic Euphemia, who is heir to her father’s timber fortune. The Baron seeks her ample inheritance in order to pay off his creditors – he is a gambler -- and live the life of a libertine. What follows is social comedy, Balzacian melodrama and an early statement of themes and style that James will return to and perfect over the next 40 years and more. I will give away nothing further. Please read this wonderful story with your full compliment of emotions at the ready.

A Hell of a Poet

John Ciardi’s was my first Dante, in high school. I read his Inferno as though it were a species of adventure story, and I suppose it is. Since the 1950s his Divine Comedy has become an unlikely bestseller, and earned Ciardi and his heirs (he died in 1986) a minor fortune, at least by a poet’s standards. But as a poet, Ciardi seems the forgotten man of his much-celebrated generation – Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, Jarrell, Schwartz, Wilbur, Shapiro. His poetry is unapologetically enjoyable (a sin in some quarters), thoughtful, often funny, never academic or dogmatically obscure. He was a poet of family, of love and marriage, of nature, especially of birds, and a fine writer of limericks and poetry for children. He made no apologies for being Italian-American but neither did he posture as though his ethnicity conferred sentimental status. I think of him as a grown-up, a poet of the middle class, and he reminds me of L.E. Sissman, another poet for whom poetry was one half of a dialogue, the other half being life itself.

Here’s one of my favorites by Ciardi, “An Aspect of the Air,” from his 1964 collection, Person to Person:

“Through my hemlocks and the spruce beyond,
mist hangs and closes. What change is this?
Not a bird dares it. Not so much as a frond
stirs in the shadowless absence
of this light I see by, not knowing what I see,
there in the green caves and up into a sky
that isn’t there, except as there must be
some source for any light. I don’t see, I
conjecture sources. It is too still
not to be thinking out from things, not to feel
a presence of the unreality that will
mystify what encloses us. Mist is not real;
not by the handful. And thought is not
fact, nor measurable. It is simply there.
An inclosing condition. A dimension taught
The sourceless light. An aspect of the air.”

Doug Ramsey is the proprietor of Rifftides, the premier jazz blog. He is author of Jazz Matters, a book I reviewed ecstatically back in 1989, and last year of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (funny, but I’ve always associated Desmond with L.E. Sissman – for their dryness and wit, I suppose). Recently, Ramsey has posted several times on his fondness for Ciardi as poet, etymologist and dictionary maker, and public radio broadcaster. Visit Rifftides to learn more about Ciardi, and stay for the celebration of music.

Occasional Doggerel

Dad always took me to the movies.
Our tastes were democratic –
Cowboys, gangsters, Eastwood,
All sublimely cinematic.

Other fathers and their kids
Went fishing or trifled with a ball.
We spent our Saturdays indoors,
Pale and happy, in a theater at the mall.

I would sicken with suspense,
Shedding disbelief a happy task.
Dad grew thoughtful as he sipped
From his surreptitious flask.

As the screen announced “The End,”
We critiqued the ugly, good and bad,
Then braced ourselves for the big review:
Mom panned the movies, drink, and Dad.

Happy Birthday, Sam

On April 13, we celebrate the 100th birthday of the unsaintly patron saint of writers, Samuel Beckett, born in Foxrock, near Dublin. Read a fine memory of Beckett in today's Guardian by Edna O'Brien. Here's a typically discerning sample:

"Much is made of Beckett's despairingness, his Cartesian soul nailed to its Cartesian cross, yet he is not a depressing writer, not depressing in the way Henri de Montherlant or Thomas Bernhard can be, because, as with Shakespeare, his darkest words are shot through with beauty and astonishment, his impassioned keenings the best witness that there is to the human plaint, his disgusts brimful with exhilaration. He was a maniac who managed with consummate skill to convert that mania into lasting poetry."

Critics and other readers compelled to demarcate writers by their supposed ideological loyalties (aesthetic, political, ethnic), as though writers swear allegiance to warring tribes, are directed to James Knowlson's biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, in which he describes a mutually admiring meeting in Paris of the Irishman and Saul Bellow -- prose fiction's chief gifts to the world in the latter half of the 20th century. Writers, more often than putative critics, are the most reliable critics. Beckett loved Humboldt's Gift. Both men answered to one writerly obligation -- to write well.

Savor Christopher Ricks' admonition: "We need Beckett hugely, but not least in his bringing home how much else we need no less."

The Blog of Disquiet

If we can judge a man by his blog, read his character and draw conclusions about the quality of his mind, Ricardo Azevedo is a man worth knowing. He is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston, and I interviewed him two days ago for a newspaper story I have since filed. During our conversation, I argued that a physicist today might easily never read a single word written by Isaac Newton, yet who can imagine a biologist having never read at least excerpts from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species? Azevedo politely disagreed (about physicists reading Newton, that is) but didn’t press the point.

Serendipitously, as these things often happen, I discovered Azevedo’s own blog, Newton’s Binomium, which he bills as “Thoughts on science, literature, music, food, politics and anything else I might feel compelled to impose on an unsuspecting public.”

This gets even better: When I learned he is Portuguese, I asked Azevedo if he was familiar with the great and profoundly weird poet Fernando Pessoa. It turns out the name of his blog comes from a poem Pessoa wrote in 1926. Or rather, a poem Alvaro de Campos wrote in 1926. Uniquely in all of the literature I know, Pessoa created heteronyms – poetic personae with their own names, life histories, themes and styles. These are not pseudonyms; they are discrete poetic entities, like characters in a Flann O’Brien novel coming alive and writing their own novels. His three main figures are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos. Pessoa also had a “semi-heteronym,” Bernardo Soares. He credited his enormous output of poetry and prose in English to Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon, and his writings in French to Jean Seul.

Alvaro de Campos once wrote, “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”

On his blog, Azevedo quotes the poem from which he took its name, first in Portuguese then in his own English translation:

“Newton’s binomium is as beautiful as the Venus de Milo.
The problem is that precious few people notice.”

In his own words, Azevedo adds, “I love this poem because it places science firmly within our culture. As a scientist myself, I couldn’t agree more. (Regrettably, Pessoa engaged in a good deal of pseudo-science and mysticism himself, but I like to think that Campos was above all that.)”

In a nice Pessoan touch, Azevedo includes a thumbnail photo of himself on his blog that manages to reveal almost nothing. We see a man in a t-shirt, sunglasses tucked in the collar, and the top of a wide-brimmed hat. The man – Azevedo? – is looking down – out of shyness? Reverence? Contrariness? We see nothing of his face.

I started reading Pessoa about 15 years ago, after reading Jose Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which Pessoa and his heteronym, Reis, conduct a sort of extended dialogue in pre-war Lisbon. It’s the only novel by Saramago, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize for literature, I whole-heartedly love. Let me also recommend one of my favorite books, Pessoa’s huge and chaotic prose work, The Book of Disquiet, in the Richard Zenith translation from Penguin – a book so elastic and seductive that you can open it anywhere, read a passage at random and lose yourself for hours.

Darwin and Beyond

Yesterday, for a newspaper story I am writing, I spent almost an hour interviewing an evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston. Ricardo Azevedo is co-author of an article recently published in Nature, exploring the evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction. Why is asexual reproduction, though it persists in a few species of aphids, lizards and other organisms, an apparent evolutionary dead end? Azevedo and his colleagues speculate that sexual reproduction better serves as a “genetic waste disposal” mechanism, helping to protect a species from harmful genetic mutations.

The best interviews turn into conversations, and Azevedo and I quickly discovered our shared enthusiasm for Charles Darwin as scientist and writer. We have both read Janet Browne’s magisterial, two-volume biography of the naturalist, and both of us mourn the quality of most contemporary scientific prose. Our talk sparked a faint memory of a piece about Darwin as writer by the great martyred Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. I tracked it down in The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, published in 1979 by Ardis. In a 1932 article, “On the Naturalists, ” published in the chillingly named Moscow newspaper For a Communist Education to mark the 50th anniversary of Darwin’s death, Mandelstam wrote:

“Darwin’s scientific descriptions are amazingly true to life. He utilizes sunlight, air, and shadows, as well as carefully calculated distances to produce the greatest possible effect in his writing. The result is an intriguing picture of some animal or insect caught unawares, as if on camera, in its most characteristic posture.” To bolster his point, Mandelstam quotes a passage from Darwin’s Journal of Researches describing an elater or click beetle. Of Darwin’s prose style, the poet writes:

“The remarkable prosaic quality of Darwin’s works was preconditioned, to a large extent, by history. Darwin purged the scientific language, eradicating every trace of bombast, rhetoric, and teleological pathos. He possessed the courage to be prosaic precisely because he had so much to say and did not feel obligated to express rapture or gratitude to anyone.” Mandelstam lauds Darwin’s use of “multitudinous examples exploding like cartridges,” and goes on to write:

“Darwin’s attitude toward nature resembles that of a war correspondent, an interviewer, or a daring reporter furtively pursuing a news story at the scene of the event. Darwin never described anything, he only characterized. In this sense Darwin, the writer, incorporated the popular tastes of the English reading public into natural history. We must not forget that Dickens and Darwin were contemporaries and that both were popular with the reading public for the same reason.”

I love the notion of Darwin as war correspondent. This seemingly fanciful image reminded me of another Russian-Jewish writer murdered by Stalin, Isaac Babel. In 1920, Babel rode as a correspondent with the Red Cavalry during their disastrous incursion into Poland. The result was his magnificent collection of stories, Red Cavalry, and, published posthumously, 1920 Diary. All three men – Darwin, Mandelstam, Babel – are united in their courage and, in their different ways, dedication to humane civilization in the face of ignorance and barbarism.

About 15 years ago, while working as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., I was assigned to quickly dig up, from scratch, a feature to run the following day, Thanksgiving. I don’t remember how I settled on the idea, but I visited an apartment house subsidized by local Jewish organizations. Its occupants were elderly recent émigrés from the Soviet Union, soon to be Russia again. They spoke Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and most spoke at least a little English. I came to ask what they understood of Thanksgiving, a distinctly American holiday, and what they felt thankful for.

At first they were reluctant to speak, perhaps confused and most likely suspicious, given their experience with men asking a lot of impertinent questions in the Soviet Union. When I figured out that many of the émigrés had come from Odessa, Babel’s birthplace, I brought up his name and Mandelstam’s, though he was born in St. Petersburg.

The old people whispered the names like a furtive prayer: “Babel! Mandelstam!” Some laughed. Some cried. What American knows such things? An old woman hugged me and others shook my hand and patted my shoulders. I had uttered sacred names, and the old people were filled with thanksgiving.

Three Types of Ambiguity

I usually bring a book when I visit a doctor or dentist. Furnished with old magazines, dripping children and televisions tuned to medical infomercials, their waiting rooms are temples of tedium. This morning, my 3-year-old had a routine checkup with his pediatrician, and I grabbed Montale in English, a collection of the Italian poet’s work as rendered by various translators. The book, published by Handsel, is edited by Harry Thomas, who provides a useful introduction to the history of Montale translations in English, the first of which came as surprisingly early as 1927. The book reminds me of the equally useful Horace in English, edited by D.S. Carne-Ross and Kenneth Haynes.

I know little Italian, and most of what little I know depends on my fading reserve of Latin cognates. Still, it’s always pleasant to pick through a poem in the original, even if only to catch a muffled echo of its music. Waiting for the nurse to fetch us, I skimmed through the collection and settled on three translations of a single poem Montale included in his 1956 volume La Bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Poems). In his version, Edwin Morgan gives the title as “Brief Testament;” Robert Lowell and Ben Belitt, “Little Testament.”

I liked the poems on first reading for their mingling of the accessible and the hermetic. The title, at least in English, suggests both the scriptural and the legal, and several of the poem’s central images are drawn from the natural world – a snail’s trail, a spider, a storm. It's the end of the poem I find most interesting, and here it is, excerpted from the three versions:

Edwin Morgan:

“Hardly a heritage – nor is it a mascot
For standing up to onslaughts from monsoons
On the mere spider’s thread of memory –
But it is only in ashes that a story endures,
Nothing persists except extinguished things.
It was the sign all right: the one whose luck
Is to see it can never miss you again.
Each recognizes his own: the pride
Was not an escape, the humility was not
A meanness, the ghostly flash that was struck
Down there was not the spark of a match on a box.”

Robert Lowell:

“It’s hardly an heirloom or charm
that can tranquilize monsoons
with the transparent spider web of contemplation –
but an autobiography can only survive in ashes,
persistence is extinction.
It is certainly a sign: whoever has seen it,
Will always return to you.
Each knows his own: his pride
Was not an escape, his humility
Was not a meanness, his obscure
Earth-bound flash
Was not the fizzle of a wet match.”

Ben Belitt:

“This thing that I leave is no charm
against hurricane
hung on a cobweb of memory:
but histories end and begin in a cinder
and only extinction is viable.
The sign was a lucky one: whoever has seen it
Cannot fail to retrieve you.
Like calls to like: our pride was no trick
Of escape, nor our meekness
Ignoble, and the tenuous glimmer
That we grated down there was not struck by the stick of a match.”

Read strictly as poems in English, Lowell’s fares the poorest, though I like “the transparent spider web of contemplation” (with its echo of Lowell’s own “Mr. Edwards and the Spider”). I most enjoy Morgan’s version, which dates from 1959 (Lowell’s and Belitt’s are from 1961 and 1962, respectively – obviously an era when the English-speaking world was discovering a great world poet).

In part, this has been a depressing exercise. I sense that something essential in Montale’s original Italian has been lost, never to be adequately understood or enjoyed by me or any other non-Italian speaker. Good translation must rank among the supreme human accomplishments, like chess, Bach and Shakespeare – to be true to the original while honoring one’s own language by writing well.

By the way, in his most recent volume of poetry, Without Title, Geoffrey Hill includes his own bracing translation of “La Bufera,” “The Storm.” He dedicates the book “in omaggio a/Eugenio Montale.”

Jonathan Swift, Poet

In The Guardian, Irish poet Derek Mahon has published a fine celebration of fellow-Irishman Jonathan Swift as poet:

“Widely perceived as a sort of anti-poet and critically disregarded for two centuries as offering nothing very dense or visionary to the scholarly mind or the inquiring spirit, he has since been read anew as one of the great eccentrics; despite his aspiration to a tough-minded detachment, there is great emotion in his work, great turmoil under the hard, glittering surface. Admirers of Augustan elegance and postmodern `cool' will find him remarkably hot-headed, a flamboyant character as colourful as Wilde or Yeats…”

Mahon has Swift right, though he seems to contradict the portrait of Swift in The Lives of the English Poets, by Dr. Johnson, who also has him right:

“His style was well suited to his thoughts, which are never subtilised by nice disquisitions, decorated by sparkling conceits, elevated by ambitious sentences, or variegated by far-sought learning. He pays no court to the passions; be excites neither surprise nor admiration; be always understands himself: and his reader always understands him: the peruser of Swift wants little previous knowledge; it will be sufficient that be is acquainted with common words and common things; be is neither required to mount elevations, nor to explore profundities; his passage is always on the level, along solid ground, without asperities, without obstruction."

Of Luddy-Duddies, Mooncalves and Jabbernowls

From the library I have borrowed Samuel Johnson’s Insults, an Augustan Age ``Jokes for the John.” As edited by Jack Lynch, a Johnson scholar at Rutgers University, the author of “The Vanity of Human Wishes” comes off like an 18th-century Don Rickles, all one-liners and nasty retorts. This has never been the Johnson who mattered most to me, though I admire the chutzpah of the man who wrote “Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault” and who dismissed Henry Fielding as “a blockhead.”

Judging by the quantity Johnson includes in his Dictionary, 18th-century English had even more synonyms for blockheads and other worthless, contemptible people than Yiddish does today. Here’s an alphabetical sampling from Lynch’s selection: asshead, bull-calf, clodpate, droil, enthusiast. fon, garlickeater, hilding, idler, jackalent, knuff, losel, malthorse, ninnyhammer, oysterwench, puppy, quean, rakehel, scomm, thickskin, underfellow, wantwit, zany. My spell-check fails to recognize 18 of the 23 words cited – a significant loss to the English arsenal in a mere two and a half centuries, considering that Shakespeare, Dryden, Swift and Pope used most of these words. In an age of cowardly, politicized sensitivity, a dip into the 18th-century lexicon is a reminder of the wit and good sense of our ancestors and of our own impoverishment.

I almost chose “moon-calf” to represent “m” in my list because W.C. Fields used it memorably in The Bank Dick: “Don’t be a luddy-duddy. Don’t be a mooncalf. Don’t be a jabbernowl. You’re not those, are you?” I’m also reminded of the marathon insult exchanges, in English and French, that John Barth included in The Sot-Weed Factor.

Johnson was never a bully, nor was he a hypocrite, dishing out insults but whining when his critics responded in kind. On the contrary, Johnson seemed to relish a worthy opponent. When he published Taxation No Tyranny, an attack on the American colonists, Johnson responded that their anger was insufficient: “I think I have not been attacked enough for it. Attack is the re-action; I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds.”

`The Pleasure of Looking'

A month ago, at the suggestion of a rock-collecting editor for whom I sometimes work, we drove north to Lake Livingston to hunt for stones and petrified wood along its shore. My 5-year-old has reached the enviable stage in a little boy’s life when science has more to do with looking and finding than knowing. Science, for him, is three parts wonder to one part greed.

A dam cracked during one of last year’s hurricanes and the level of the lake has dropped, exposing banks and beaches. Within two minutes of our arrival, I found a hide scraper fashioned centuries ago from shiny, honey-colored stone. It was lying on the sandy mud, like an exclamation point without the period. I showed it to a fisherman who showed me a perfect arrowhead he had just discovered along the water’s edge. He lives nearby and over the years, without actively looking, has collected spear points, arrowheads and shards of pottery.

For two hours, the four of us moved slowly along the beach, foraging for anything anomalously rare and unusual. We found petrified wood and 15 pounds of pretty, lake-smoothed stones but no more Indian relicts. I have never gone hunting and probably never will but I understand the heightened sense of vigilance and the honing of the senses that must accompany the tracking of game. It lends my mind a clarity and purpose it seldom otherwise possesses.

One of Guy Davenport’s loveliest and most personal essays is “Finding,” collected in The Geography of the Imagination. It describes his family’s weekend outings “to look for Indian arrows,” as they called it. This was in southern South Carolina and northern Georgia, in the 1930s and 1940s. “We were a foraging family,” he writes, “completely unaware of our passion for getting at things hard to find. I collected stamps, buttons, the cards that came with chewing gum, and other detritus, but these were private affairs with nothing of the authority of looking for Indian arrowheads.”

Davenport captures the heightened awareness that accompanies purposeful looking: “What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things – earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem never to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of rabbit tobacco, beggar’s lice, lizards, the inevitable mute snake, always just leaving as you come upon him, hawks, buzzards, abandoned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plums.

``Thoreauvian, because these outings, I was to discover, were very like his daily walks, with a purpose that covered the whole enterprise but was not serious enough to make the walk a chore or a duty. Thoreau, too, was an Indian-arrowhead collector, if collector is the word. Once we had found our Indian things, we put them in a big box and rarely looked at them. Some men came from the Smithsonian and were given what they chose, and sometimes a scout troop borrowed some for a display at the county fair. Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.”

That’s it -- ``the search was the thing.” My hide scraper sits in a ceramic bowl with some of the red stones we found at Lake Livingston, collecting dust. I hardly look at it. For me, the pleasure was in the concentrated sense of looking, briefly interrupted by mere finding. Thoreau, the least acquisitive of Americans, understood this, as have Davenport and others – Darwin and Ruskin come to mind. “The pleasure of looking.”

`Favourites' in Dotage

Few writers possess as unlikely and proportionate a mingling of passion and common sense as William Hazlitt. His work is always amusing, whether read in isolated samples as I have been doing this morning, or great chunks. Here’s a passage from his essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in which he spends nearly as much time on the pleasure of loving and admiring, the way doctors study the diseased in order to learn more about the healthy:

“I am half afraid to look into Tom Jones, lest it should not answer my expectations at this time of day; and if it did not, I would certainly be disposed to fling it into the fire, and never look into another novel while I lived. But surely, it may be said, there are some works that, like nature, can never grow old; and that must always touch the imagination and passions alike! Or there are passages that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become favourites, and we are fond of them to a sort of dotage.”

Hazlitt was 48 years old when he wrote that – nearly “dotage” in the third decade of the 19th century. I test his theory against my own experience in my sixth decade, and it proves him, as usual, correct. I have never read anything by Kenneth Burke, but I have always liked his description of literature as “equipment for living.” Hazlitt’s “favourites” are just that. The old cherished titles sustain us, like the Roman armies with their impedimenta.

Pleased To Meet You

I enjoy reading accounts of great writers meeting, though such occasions are often comically mundane. Joyce and Proust met at a dinner party in 1922, three months after the publication of Ulysses, and according to William Carlos Williams, the greatest novelists of the 20th century commiserated over hypochondria. Why are we surprised? Genius resides on the page. The rest is mere humanity – children, sore feet, money woes.

Henry James and Edith Wharton met often and remained mutually admiring friends. In a 1905 letter, James told Wharton he thought The House of Mirth “carried off with a high, strong hand & an admirable touch, finding it altogether a superior thing…The book remains one that does you great honour – though it is better written than composed; it is indeed throughout extremely well written, & in places quite `consummately.’ I wish we could talk of it in a motor car.” The last sentence refers to the time Wharton drove James about in her then-novel automobile and both had a whooping good time.

That excursion is my favorite anecdote about the supposedly starchy Master, though James reading Walt Whitman aloud to Wharton rivals it. Here’s how she describes the scene in A Backward Glance:

“James's reading was a thing apart, an emanation of his inmost self, unaffected by fashion or elocutionary artifice. He read from his soul, and no one who never heard him read poetry knows what that soul was. Another day some one spoke of Whitman, and it was a joy to me to discover that James thought him, as I did, the greatest of American poets. `Leaves of Grass’ was put into his hands, and all that evening we sat rapt while he wandered from `The Song of Myself’ to `When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed’ (when he read `Lovely and soothing Death’ his voice filled the hushed room like an organ adagio), and thence let himself be lured on to the mysterious music of `Out of the Cradle’, reading, or rather crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy till the fivefold invocation to Death tolled out like the knocks in the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony.

``James's admiration of Whitman, his immediate response to that mighty appeal, was a new proof of the way in which, above a certain level, the most divergent intelligences walk together like gods. We talked long that night of `Leaves of Grass’, tossing back and forth to each other treasure after treasure; but finally James, in one of his sudden humorous drops from the heights, flung up his hands and cried out with the old stammer and twinkle: `Oh, yes, a great genius; undoubtedly a very great genius! Only one cannot help deploring his too-extensive acquaintance with foreign languages.’”

The most sublime meeting of writers I know of occurred serendipitously, on April 11, 1819. John Keats had just returned from Scotland and was reading Dante and starting to write “Hyperion.” His brother Tom had died from tuberculosis four months earlier and Keats himself was suffering early symptoms of the disease. He was walking on the Heath when he encountered Samuel Taylor Coleridge, strolling with J.H. Green, who had been one of Keats’ instructors at Guy’s Hospital and who introduced the poets.

The meeting ought to possess a sense of ceremony, of poetic succession, with one generation handing on the tradition to the next. It does not. Retrospectively, we know Keats will be dead at the age of 25 in less than two years. Coleridge, his finest poetry already written, lived another 15 years.

Richard Holmes, in the second volume of his biography of Coleridge, Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, gives the best account of the meeting. He cites a letter Keats wrote to his brother George, in which the younger poet confirms our impression of Coleridge as a charmingly inspired windbag. He “broached a thousand things,” and Keats renders a comic account of Coleridge’s conversation: “-- let me see if I can give you a list. – Nightingales, Poetry – on Poetical sensation – Metaphysics – Different genera and species of Dreams – Nightmare – a dream accompanied by a sense of Touch – A dream related – First and Second Consciousness,” and so on, for another five lines.

The meeting, in Holmes’ words, “seems to have galvanized [Keats] into life.” The doomed poet wrote a sonnet, “A Dream,” and, more importantly, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” within 10 days of the meeting. “In May and June Keats went on to write his great odes, which have many half-conscious echoes of Coleridge’s Stowey poems,” Holmes writes. Both poets write, famously, of nightingales.

For his part, Coleridge claimed to have told Green, after the poets parted, “There is death in that hand.” Coleridge was an inveterate fabulator, but Holmes is inclined to credit his seeming precognition. He tells us Coleridge later read “Hyperion,” and chillingly cites the last line of the first stanza: “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.”

My love of both poets, my sympathy for their often difficult lives, is only enhanced by this story. Coleridge could have snubbed Keats, sensing in him an overpowering poetic rival. For his part, Keats could have dismissed Coleridge as a blowhard well past his poetic prime. Instead, both reacted with admirable generosity of spirit.