Bloggers and others writers can learn much from Emerson’s journal, surely a proto-blog. His style, at first, can grate and disorient. An Emerson paragraph—in the journal and in published work – often consists of sentences with seemingly little sequential logic. At times, his thought appears to restart with each sentence. At its best, his prose is spontaneous, lapidary, an interactive map of his mind. The following passage dates from 1862—the second year of the Civil War, the year his difficult friend Thoreau died:
“The art of the writer is to speak his fact & have done. Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing, because you have omitted every word that he can spare. You are annoyed – are you? – that your fine friends do not read you: they are better friends than you knew, & have done you the rarest service. Now write so that they must. When it is a disgrace to them that they do not know what you have said, you will hear the echo.”
Write so your friends must read you: Brave, audacious, common-sensical advice from Emerson, who always surprises with the extremity of his wisdom. He is judged a Yankee fuddy-duddy, yet he says nothing about pleasing your friends. Rather, compel them. His followers – Thoreau, Whitman – have for so long eclipsed him in accomplishment (he wrote nothing to rival Walden or Leaves of Grass), but both acknowledged his inspiration, and we ought to heed him, with caution, as they did.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Comfort
On Wednesday, I made meatloaf and green peas for dinner, and my wife came home and said, “Ah, comfort food.” I hadn’t thought of the meal that way but she was right, and not just because certain dishes remind us of our paradisiacal childhoods. My mother was a dangerously incompetent cook, so such associations are lost on me. Some food pleases and nourishes, in every sense, at a pre-rational level. I brooded on that and it occurred to me that if we find reliable comfort in certain foods, why not in books or writers? The late poet Karl Shapiro is my comfort food, in part because he was probably the first “grownup” poet I seriously read, after Robert Frost. I discovered him in an anthology edited by the indefatigable anthologist Oscar Williams, a Washington Square Press paperback with oval portraits of the poets on the inside covers.
Shapiro’s distinctly American choice of subject matter attracted me. He wrote about car wrecks, drugstores, getting a haircut, honkytonks, Thomas Jefferson and a waitress, as well as combat in the South Pacific. In Essay on Rime, writing about his great influence W.H. Auden but in fact formulating his own poetic practice, Shapiro said:
"For the first time the radio,
The car, the sofa and the new highway
Came into focus in a poem as things,
Not symbols of the things. The scenery changed
To absolute present and the curtain rose
On the actual place, not Crane's demonic city
Nor Eliot's weird unreal metropolis,
But that pedestrian London with which prose
Alone had previously dealt."
An early, smoothly sexy poem titled “Buick” opens like this:
“As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.”
There’s much 1940s period detail in Shapiro’s poems, as there is in the novels of Raymond Chandler. Of course, Shapiro is best known for writing about combat in the South Pacific during World War II. His first three books were published while Shapiro was still in the Army. How many American poets have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a Bronze Star?
Shapiro was great at opening lines. Here’s the first stanza of “The Fly”:
“O hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man’s nose,
Climb with the fine leg of the Duncan-Phyfe
The smoking mountains of my food
And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife.”
Note the traditional rhymes and metrics, vulgar matter elegantly fashioned and, again, the American subjects (the “Duncan-Phyfe”/”wife” rhyme is priceless). “Elegy for Two Banjos” sounds like Kipling in New Guinea:
“Haul up the flag, you mourners,
Not half-mast but all the way;
The funeral is done and disbanded;
The devil’s had the final say.”
Three years ago, Joseph Epstein, in The Weekly Standard, reviewed a selection of Shapiro’s poems made by John Updike. Epstein, who drew the title of a short story collection, Fabulous Small Jews, from Shapiro’s poem “Hospital,” had this to say:
“One of the first things to be said about Shapiro's poetry is that, various though it is, it is never gloomy. A pleasure in life, in its richness, variety, and oddity, informs many of his poems, even those that verge on the dark, such as `Auto Wreck,’ a poem about coming upon an auto crash as a young man on his way home after leaving the bed of a lady friend.”
Epstein nails it. Throughout his work, even in his later, crankier, slacker, less accomplished poems, Shapiro has an enormous appetite for life, and wants to share it with us. In no banal sense is Shapiro’s poetry uplifting or inspirational, but his enthusiasms and sympathies are contagious. He actually enjoys the world outside of Karl Shapiro, which would make him a prodigy among today’s self-referential poets. Life-changing trouble started for this Jewish-American wunderkind in 1949, when Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos was nominated for the first Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Shapiro was on the jury. Initially, he voted for Pound. After “wrestling with his soul,” Shapiro switched his vote to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson II, saying Pound’s “moral and political philosophy ultimately vitiated the Cantos and lowered the literary quality of the work.” Shapiro’s reasoning seems flawless, but he lost a lot of friends and became marginal to what passes for literary culture in the United States.
No question, Shapiro was a provocateur. He published collections of essays titled In Defense of Ignorance and To Abolish Children. Some of his poems – “The Nigger,” “Mongolian Idiot,” “Red Indian,” among others – would fail the litmus test of political correctness, and some would find his raucous, randy sense of humor offensive. On that question, I would refer you to Ted Cohen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 1999, he published Jokes, a slender volume that carries the broad subtitle Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. It’s a thoughtful, funny examination of what makes us laugh – traditionally, a mirthless subject (see Freud and Bergson) – and it’s filled with great jokes. Cohen’s defense of offensive, tasteless joke applies, I think, to some of Shapiro’s poems:
“Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing. And it is at least possible, sometimes, that the jokes themselves do help something. Perhaps they help us to bear unbearable affronts like crude racism and stubborn prejudice by letting us laugh while we take a breather.”
Shapiro does much more than make us laugh. He was one of the first writers to show me that life and books are mortally bound, and that crafting language might be a worthwhile calling. He remains on my shortlist of writers I return to regularly, for pleasure, nourishment and comfort, like good meatloaf and green peas.
Shapiro’s distinctly American choice of subject matter attracted me. He wrote about car wrecks, drugstores, getting a haircut, honkytonks, Thomas Jefferson and a waitress, as well as combat in the South Pacific. In Essay on Rime, writing about his great influence W.H. Auden but in fact formulating his own poetic practice, Shapiro said:
"For the first time the radio,
The car, the sofa and the new highway
Came into focus in a poem as things,
Not symbols of the things. The scenery changed
To absolute present and the curtain rose
On the actual place, not Crane's demonic city
Nor Eliot's weird unreal metropolis,
But that pedestrian London with which prose
Alone had previously dealt."
An early, smoothly sexy poem titled “Buick” opens like this:
“As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.”
There’s much 1940s period detail in Shapiro’s poems, as there is in the novels of Raymond Chandler. Of course, Shapiro is best known for writing about combat in the South Pacific during World War II. His first three books were published while Shapiro was still in the Army. How many American poets have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a Bronze Star?
Shapiro was great at opening lines. Here’s the first stanza of “The Fly”:
“O hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man’s nose,
Climb with the fine leg of the Duncan-Phyfe
The smoking mountains of my food
And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife.”
Note the traditional rhymes and metrics, vulgar matter elegantly fashioned and, again, the American subjects (the “Duncan-Phyfe”/”wife” rhyme is priceless). “Elegy for Two Banjos” sounds like Kipling in New Guinea:
“Haul up the flag, you mourners,
Not half-mast but all the way;
The funeral is done and disbanded;
The devil’s had the final say.”
Three years ago, Joseph Epstein, in The Weekly Standard, reviewed a selection of Shapiro’s poems made by John Updike. Epstein, who drew the title of a short story collection, Fabulous Small Jews, from Shapiro’s poem “Hospital,” had this to say:
“One of the first things to be said about Shapiro's poetry is that, various though it is, it is never gloomy. A pleasure in life, in its richness, variety, and oddity, informs many of his poems, even those that verge on the dark, such as `Auto Wreck,’ a poem about coming upon an auto crash as a young man on his way home after leaving the bed of a lady friend.”
Epstein nails it. Throughout his work, even in his later, crankier, slacker, less accomplished poems, Shapiro has an enormous appetite for life, and wants to share it with us. In no banal sense is Shapiro’s poetry uplifting or inspirational, but his enthusiasms and sympathies are contagious. He actually enjoys the world outside of Karl Shapiro, which would make him a prodigy among today’s self-referential poets. Life-changing trouble started for this Jewish-American wunderkind in 1949, when Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos was nominated for the first Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Shapiro was on the jury. Initially, he voted for Pound. After “wrestling with his soul,” Shapiro switched his vote to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson II, saying Pound’s “moral and political philosophy ultimately vitiated the Cantos and lowered the literary quality of the work.” Shapiro’s reasoning seems flawless, but he lost a lot of friends and became marginal to what passes for literary culture in the United States.
No question, Shapiro was a provocateur. He published collections of essays titled In Defense of Ignorance and To Abolish Children. Some of his poems – “The Nigger,” “Mongolian Idiot,” “Red Indian,” among others – would fail the litmus test of political correctness, and some would find his raucous, randy sense of humor offensive. On that question, I would refer you to Ted Cohen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 1999, he published Jokes, a slender volume that carries the broad subtitle Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. It’s a thoughtful, funny examination of what makes us laugh – traditionally, a mirthless subject (see Freud and Bergson) – and it’s filled with great jokes. Cohen’s defense of offensive, tasteless joke applies, I think, to some of Shapiro’s poems:
“Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing. And it is at least possible, sometimes, that the jokes themselves do help something. Perhaps they help us to bear unbearable affronts like crude racism and stubborn prejudice by letting us laugh while we take a breather.”
Shapiro does much more than make us laugh. He was one of the first writers to show me that life and books are mortally bound, and that crafting language might be a worthwhile calling. He remains on my shortlist of writers I return to regularly, for pleasure, nourishment and comfort, like good meatloaf and green peas.
Friday, April 28, 2006
From the Grave
Just weeks after his centenary, scholars have discovered a previously unknown dramatic work by Samuel Beckett. Possible title: Stop.
With Walt, Part 2
I wrote about With Walt Whitman in Camden the other day, forgetting Guy Davenport’s thoughts on the subject. When Gary Schmidgall, a Whitman biographer, published a selection from the original nine-volume, 5,400-page edition of Whitman’s 1,458 conversations with Horace Traubel, Davenport reviewed it for Harper’s Magazine. The review was later collected in The Death of Picasso, the last book he published before his death on Jan. 4, 2005.
Davenport never merely reviewed a book in the conventional sense. The book under consideration was a pretext for an extended, discursive, immensely learned meditation on whatever subjects had captured his fancy. He was our premiere essayist, rivaled only by Cynthia Ozick. Even when he wrote of people or things that held little interest for me (Charles Olson, J.R.R. Tolkien), he earned my interest.
In the Whitman review, he paints the context of Whitman’s final years – ill health, poverty, growing fame and adulation mingled with obscurity and scandal – and gives us the shamefully protracted publishing history of the Whitman/Traubel corpus. He notes that the 14 volumes of Thoreau’s journals were not published until 44 years after his death, while The Dispersal of Seeds (an indispensable “new” book from Thoreau) had to wait 130 years. Davenport describes his own difficulty in purchasing all of the volumes, then adds, winningly:
“A long book must become a habit, a kind of ritual (and reward) away from the day’s other demands. A bedtime book, as it turned out: as many pages an evening as kept my attention.”
Davenport describes the room where Whitman sat in the little house on Mickle Street, in Camden, N.J. The floor is “ankle-deep in letters manuscripts, newspapers, and books.” From the mess, Traubel randomly salvages letters from Emerson and Tennyson. Twice, the heap caught fire. Besides being a scholar, Davenport knows how to tell a story. Traubel he describes as “a thirty-year-old autodidact, school dropout, and ardent Socialist. After the Whitman years he became a newspaper editor and third-rate poet.”
Davenport deftly deals with the question of homosexuality: “That Whitman was aesthetically and erotically pleased by young males is no longer disputed.”
Regarding some of the older Whitman’s racist jibes and theories, Davenport is equally deft: “Idle and relaxed conversation is not a diplomatic telegram. The `scholars’ who read authors’ private mail – who hold up `the real Larkin,’ for instance, as disgraced and exposed – disgrace only themselves. Walt’s standing as a prophet of democracy cannot be diminished by an old man’s obiter dicta on evenings by the stove.”
Note the “Walt.” Throughout this posting, I have wished to write “Guy,” not “Davenport.” I had a small, highly valued acquaintance with Guy. I interviewed him by telephone in the summer of 1988, in connection with a story I was writing about Paul Metcalf, a writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. Metcalf’s best book, Genoa, appeared in 1965 and received two reviews – one by Guy, the other by William H. Gass. Both loved it. In our first conversation, after I identified myself as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., Davenport mentioned he had been reading Francis Parkman’s description of the Indian massacre at Schenectady. What was the city like today?
I quickly wrote him a fan letter, and Guy as quickly replied – correcting my spelling of Edgar “Allen” Poe and a sloppy reference I had made to Goethe. Coming from Guy, what in another professor might come across as bullying pedantry felt like knowledge shared. I knew he wasn’t scoring cheap points; he wanted me to know some of what he knew, and this communion of knowledge, not merely with his students at the University of Kentucky, gave him immense, quiet pleasure.
We corresponded sporadically for several years, and I am even more grateful for this exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he exchanged letters. In June of 1990, a friend and I took an open-ended trip across the Midwest, starting from upstate New York. We camped outside Lexington, Ky., and the next morning I visited Guy at his home at 621 Sayre Ave. He was pleased with a review I had written of his latest book, A Balthus Notebook. We spoke of Montaigne, Robert Burton and Kafka. He showed me a painting he had made of Gertrude Stein. I told him that the night before, while doing laundry at the campground, I had been reading the hefty, black Library of America edition of Whitman. A teenage boy approached, asked to see the book, I obliged, and he said, “We have a book, too, you know – The Book of Mormon.” Guy laughed until he wept.
We talked for several hours, and I wish I had had the foresight of Traubel and kept better notes. I do have the two books I brought along for Guy to inscribe – The Geography of the Imagination and Apples and Pears. In the former, in his fine draftsman’s hand, he wrote “For Patrick Kurp, Lexington, 18 June 1990.” We were talking so much, he forgot to sign his name and I didn’t notice until I was back in the car. I’ve regretted that for almost 16 years, but since his death the absence of his name seems appropriate.
In the Harper’s review, his description of Walt’s 70th birthday party is a hoot. Letters from William Dean Howells and other worthies were read aloud. The one from Mark Twain congratulated the poet on having lived long enough to witness many “great births,” including “the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal-tar.” I think of Guy as among the best teachers I have ever had.
Davenport never merely reviewed a book in the conventional sense. The book under consideration was a pretext for an extended, discursive, immensely learned meditation on whatever subjects had captured his fancy. He was our premiere essayist, rivaled only by Cynthia Ozick. Even when he wrote of people or things that held little interest for me (Charles Olson, J.R.R. Tolkien), he earned my interest.
In the Whitman review, he paints the context of Whitman’s final years – ill health, poverty, growing fame and adulation mingled with obscurity and scandal – and gives us the shamefully protracted publishing history of the Whitman/Traubel corpus. He notes that the 14 volumes of Thoreau’s journals were not published until 44 years after his death, while The Dispersal of Seeds (an indispensable “new” book from Thoreau) had to wait 130 years. Davenport describes his own difficulty in purchasing all of the volumes, then adds, winningly:
“A long book must become a habit, a kind of ritual (and reward) away from the day’s other demands. A bedtime book, as it turned out: as many pages an evening as kept my attention.”
Davenport describes the room where Whitman sat in the little house on Mickle Street, in Camden, N.J. The floor is “ankle-deep in letters manuscripts, newspapers, and books.” From the mess, Traubel randomly salvages letters from Emerson and Tennyson. Twice, the heap caught fire. Besides being a scholar, Davenport knows how to tell a story. Traubel he describes as “a thirty-year-old autodidact, school dropout, and ardent Socialist. After the Whitman years he became a newspaper editor and third-rate poet.”
Davenport deftly deals with the question of homosexuality: “That Whitman was aesthetically and erotically pleased by young males is no longer disputed.”
Regarding some of the older Whitman’s racist jibes and theories, Davenport is equally deft: “Idle and relaxed conversation is not a diplomatic telegram. The `scholars’ who read authors’ private mail – who hold up `the real Larkin,’ for instance, as disgraced and exposed – disgrace only themselves. Walt’s standing as a prophet of democracy cannot be diminished by an old man’s obiter dicta on evenings by the stove.”
Note the “Walt.” Throughout this posting, I have wished to write “Guy,” not “Davenport.” I had a small, highly valued acquaintance with Guy. I interviewed him by telephone in the summer of 1988, in connection with a story I was writing about Paul Metcalf, a writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. Metcalf’s best book, Genoa, appeared in 1965 and received two reviews – one by Guy, the other by William H. Gass. Both loved it. In our first conversation, after I identified myself as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., Davenport mentioned he had been reading Francis Parkman’s description of the Indian massacre at Schenectady. What was the city like today?
I quickly wrote him a fan letter, and Guy as quickly replied – correcting my spelling of Edgar “Allen” Poe and a sloppy reference I had made to Goethe. Coming from Guy, what in another professor might come across as bullying pedantry felt like knowledge shared. I knew he wasn’t scoring cheap points; he wanted me to know some of what he knew, and this communion of knowledge, not merely with his students at the University of Kentucky, gave him immense, quiet pleasure.
We corresponded sporadically for several years, and I am even more grateful for this exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he exchanged letters. In June of 1990, a friend and I took an open-ended trip across the Midwest, starting from upstate New York. We camped outside Lexington, Ky., and the next morning I visited Guy at his home at 621 Sayre Ave. He was pleased with a review I had written of his latest book, A Balthus Notebook. We spoke of Montaigne, Robert Burton and Kafka. He showed me a painting he had made of Gertrude Stein. I told him that the night before, while doing laundry at the campground, I had been reading the hefty, black Library of America edition of Whitman. A teenage boy approached, asked to see the book, I obliged, and he said, “We have a book, too, you know – The Book of Mormon.” Guy laughed until he wept.
We talked for several hours, and I wish I had had the foresight of Traubel and kept better notes. I do have the two books I brought along for Guy to inscribe – The Geography of the Imagination and Apples and Pears. In the former, in his fine draftsman’s hand, he wrote “For Patrick Kurp, Lexington, 18 June 1990.” We were talking so much, he forgot to sign his name and I didn’t notice until I was back in the car. I’ve regretted that for almost 16 years, but since his death the absence of his name seems appropriate.
In the Harper’s review, his description of Walt’s 70th birthday party is a hoot. Letters from William Dean Howells and other worthies were read aloud. The one from Mark Twain congratulated the poet on having lived long enough to witness many “great births,” including “the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal-tar.” I think of Guy as among the best teachers I have ever had.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Let's Talk
My wife is a newspaper editor, and yesterday she sent me an Associated Press story – “blog fodder,” she called it -- about the Oxford English Corpus, a massive language research database associated with the Oxford English Dictionary. The database has officially logged its one-billionth English word – an exhilarating and sobering milestone for our language.
The accomplishment calls for clarification, which the Oxford Web site provides: “If all the words in the Oxford English Corpus were laid out end to end (measuring on average 1cm), the total would stretch from London to New York, around 10,000 km. Because the corpus is a collection of texts, there are not one billion different words: the humble word 'the', the commonest in the written language, accounts for 50 million of all the words in the corpus!”
My first response to the news was a swelling sense of pride that I was born into such linguistic bounty. My birthright is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Johnson, Keats, Dickens, Whitman, Joyce and Beckett. Think of Shakespeare’s brash linguistic confidence, deploying some 17,000 words – about four times the number of a typical, well-educated native speaker. He was so verbally spendthrift (Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII: “And then this `should’ is like a spendthrift sigh,/That hurts by easing.”) Shakespeare could afford to use more than 7,000 words only once – more than appear in the King James version of the Bible. The OED credits him with introducing almost 3,000 words to the language – more than some of today’s college graduates will use in their entire life. Shakespeare had little formal education and lived in an age when English had no dictionaries and the language was fluid and unstable. The first book even resembling a dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was compiled by Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster, in 1604 – the year Othello was first performed.
We are only one linguistic generation removed from Shakespeare’s English, but high school students with a stunted sense of the potency of language whine about its impenetrability. The basic linguistic principles, however, remain largely unchanged. Some words have dropped from the language, but that difficulty is resolved by intelligent footnotes. I remember learning much English vocabulary by studying Latin – “celerity,” “propinquity” and “sylvan” come to mind – but Shakespeare also made contributions. Reading Romeo and Juliet in 10th grade, I added “jocund” to my repertoire: In Act III, Scene 5, Romeo says, “Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day/Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
This suggests why the one-billionth-word mark, though exciting, is also depressing. How often do we read a contemporary writer or hear a contemporary speaker employ a vocabulary extending much beyond a few hundred words? In an age of imaginative impoverishment and diminished expectations, for a novelist, poet or politician to write or speak eloquently is to court professional suicide. In the May 11 issue of The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker reviews Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller, whose prognosis for good talk is grim. Baker, who largely agrees with Miller’s assessment, writes:
“Many factors unrelated to political fury are working to stop conversation, and some of them go very deep. One is the decline of the love for language and phrasemaking, which used to be as common among the plain people of America as among English majors. People incapable of taking pleasure in expressing themselves are not likely to be much good at conversation.”
So many people, among them cynical politicians who don’t wish to appear uppity in a climate of debased populism, speak in verbal shorthand. “Cool” signifies agreement. “Whatever” implies contemptuous indifference. Pausing to think before speaking, choosing one’s words with care, editing along the way, qualifying, intelligently digressing – all are impatiently dismissed as tedious or elitist. It wasn’t always that way. In his review, Baker describes the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which focused largely on the most contentious issue in American history – slavery – as “one of the best conversations ever heard.”
The accomplishment calls for clarification, which the Oxford Web site provides: “If all the words in the Oxford English Corpus were laid out end to end (measuring on average 1cm), the total would stretch from London to New York, around 10,000 km. Because the corpus is a collection of texts, there are not one billion different words: the humble word 'the', the commonest in the written language, accounts for 50 million of all the words in the corpus!”
My first response to the news was a swelling sense of pride that I was born into such linguistic bounty. My birthright is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Johnson, Keats, Dickens, Whitman, Joyce and Beckett. Think of Shakespeare’s brash linguistic confidence, deploying some 17,000 words – about four times the number of a typical, well-educated native speaker. He was so verbally spendthrift (Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII: “And then this `should’ is like a spendthrift sigh,/That hurts by easing.”) Shakespeare could afford to use more than 7,000 words only once – more than appear in the King James version of the Bible. The OED credits him with introducing almost 3,000 words to the language – more than some of today’s college graduates will use in their entire life. Shakespeare had little formal education and lived in an age when English had no dictionaries and the language was fluid and unstable. The first book even resembling a dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was compiled by Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster, in 1604 – the year Othello was first performed.
We are only one linguistic generation removed from Shakespeare’s English, but high school students with a stunted sense of the potency of language whine about its impenetrability. The basic linguistic principles, however, remain largely unchanged. Some words have dropped from the language, but that difficulty is resolved by intelligent footnotes. I remember learning much English vocabulary by studying Latin – “celerity,” “propinquity” and “sylvan” come to mind – but Shakespeare also made contributions. Reading Romeo and Juliet in 10th grade, I added “jocund” to my repertoire: In Act III, Scene 5, Romeo says, “Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day/Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
This suggests why the one-billionth-word mark, though exciting, is also depressing. How often do we read a contemporary writer or hear a contemporary speaker employ a vocabulary extending much beyond a few hundred words? In an age of imaginative impoverishment and diminished expectations, for a novelist, poet or politician to write or speak eloquently is to court professional suicide. In the May 11 issue of The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker reviews Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller, whose prognosis for good talk is grim. Baker, who largely agrees with Miller’s assessment, writes:
“Many factors unrelated to political fury are working to stop conversation, and some of them go very deep. One is the decline of the love for language and phrasemaking, which used to be as common among the plain people of America as among English majors. People incapable of taking pleasure in expressing themselves are not likely to be much good at conversation.”
So many people, among them cynical politicians who don’t wish to appear uppity in a climate of debased populism, speak in verbal shorthand. “Cool” signifies agreement. “Whatever” implies contemptuous indifference. Pausing to think before speaking, choosing one’s words with care, editing along the way, qualifying, intelligently digressing – all are impatiently dismissed as tedious or elitist. It wasn’t always that way. In his review, Baker describes the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which focused largely on the most contentious issue in American history – slavery – as “one of the best conversations ever heard.”
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
With Walt
I have been skimming Vol. 8 of With Walt Whitman in Camden, the nine-volume transcription of Whitman’s conversation kept by Horace Traubel during the poet’s final, illness-plagued years. Like many others, Traubel was mesmerized by Whitman, surely among the most charismatic and likable men who ever lived. He visited the author of Leaves of Grass at his home in Camden, N.J., almost daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman's death in 1892. He started taking notes of their talks in March 1888, and transcribed them nightly. Traubel published three volumes of Whitman’s conversation before his own death in 1919. The final two volumes did not appear until 1996, more than a century after Traubel wrote them.
Whitman was an enthusiastic self-mythologizer and windbag. He anonymously reviewed his own books and wasn’t shy about advertising himself, years before Norman Mailer. He shamelessly turned Emerson’s private letter – the most famous private letter in American literature -- into a blurb: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” In most other writers, such self-promotion -- “I celebrate myself,” indeed – would be offensive; in Whitman, it usually is charming.
Early in 1990, on the eve of his 90th birthday, I interviewed Harold Blodgett, a Whitman scholar and editor who had had just donated his papers to the Schaffer Library at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Blodgett lived alone in a small apartment and was a generous host, rather like Whitman himself. Unlike many academics, he never burned out, and remained enthusiastic about Whitman. From memory, in a quavering voice, he recited the opening lines of “Song of Myself.” He drove me through the icy streets to the Union College campus, where he escorted me to the library. In the special collections department, he opened a box containing the first edition of Leaves of Grass – a copy Whitman had printed himself, in Brooklyn, on July 4, 1855. Blodgett and a nervous librarian watched as I leafed through its pages. As an unexpected bonus, the librarian also let me open a first, powder-blue edition of Ulysses.
After Blodgett died, his daughter called me at the newspaper where I worked. She wanted to thank me for my visit and the story I had written. Her father, she said, had enjoyed my company and my excitement over Whitman. In fact, the pleasure was all mine. Not only had I held Whitman’s work in my hands – I had heard his words spoken by a man who knew them as well as anyone then alive. Blodgett was born less than a decade after Whitman’s death.
Here are some passages from Vol. 8 of Traubel, all from 1891:
Feb. 12: “[Gen. and President Ulysses S.] Grant hated show – liked to leave things unsaid, undone – liked to defy convention by going a simple way, his own.”
March 30: “Think of Jesus – outcast, anarchist, no family, free, despised, stoned – everything that is low and vile in the eye of the average. Then of the preachers in his name, swearing to the technique at 10,000 or 20,000 a year, living sumptuous lives. What are they to each other?”
April 5: “I ought to say now – as I always have said – that I care nothing for the public, yet in a sense care for it a good deal. The public has little to do with my acts, words, deeds. I long ago saw that if I was to do anything at all I must disregard the howling throng – must go my own road, flinging back no bitter retort, but declaring myself unalterably whatever happened.”
May 2: Traubel told him of a debate about the future of American literature he had witnessed the night before. One speaker declared that American poetry “would no doubt be built on some great English model.” When he heard this, Whitman exploded: “Damn the Professor! Damn the model! Build on hell! No, no, no – that is not what we are here for – that is not the future – that’s not Leaves of Grass – opposite to all that – opposite, antagonist – to fight it, if need be, to a bloody end – stands life, vitality, the elements. And on this must everything, everything that belongs to our future, appear, be justified. But how can anyone understand Leaves of Grass, the new genius, nature – the principles, if we may call them such, by which we came – except by knowing the certain background out of which Walt Whitman appeared? Here, Horace – here in Leaves of Grass – are 400, 430 pages, of let-fly. No art, no schemes, no fanciful, delicate, elegant constructiveness – but let-fly.”
Whitman was an enthusiastic self-mythologizer and windbag. He anonymously reviewed his own books and wasn’t shy about advertising himself, years before Norman Mailer. He shamelessly turned Emerson’s private letter – the most famous private letter in American literature -- into a blurb: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” In most other writers, such self-promotion -- “I celebrate myself,” indeed – would be offensive; in Whitman, it usually is charming.
Early in 1990, on the eve of his 90th birthday, I interviewed Harold Blodgett, a Whitman scholar and editor who had had just donated his papers to the Schaffer Library at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Blodgett lived alone in a small apartment and was a generous host, rather like Whitman himself. Unlike many academics, he never burned out, and remained enthusiastic about Whitman. From memory, in a quavering voice, he recited the opening lines of “Song of Myself.” He drove me through the icy streets to the Union College campus, where he escorted me to the library. In the special collections department, he opened a box containing the first edition of Leaves of Grass – a copy Whitman had printed himself, in Brooklyn, on July 4, 1855. Blodgett and a nervous librarian watched as I leafed through its pages. As an unexpected bonus, the librarian also let me open a first, powder-blue edition of Ulysses.
After Blodgett died, his daughter called me at the newspaper where I worked. She wanted to thank me for my visit and the story I had written. Her father, she said, had enjoyed my company and my excitement over Whitman. In fact, the pleasure was all mine. Not only had I held Whitman’s work in my hands – I had heard his words spoken by a man who knew them as well as anyone then alive. Blodgett was born less than a decade after Whitman’s death.
Here are some passages from Vol. 8 of Traubel, all from 1891:
Feb. 12: “[Gen. and President Ulysses S.] Grant hated show – liked to leave things unsaid, undone – liked to defy convention by going a simple way, his own.”
March 30: “Think of Jesus – outcast, anarchist, no family, free, despised, stoned – everything that is low and vile in the eye of the average. Then of the preachers in his name, swearing to the technique at 10,000 or 20,000 a year, living sumptuous lives. What are they to each other?”
April 5: “I ought to say now – as I always have said – that I care nothing for the public, yet in a sense care for it a good deal. The public has little to do with my acts, words, deeds. I long ago saw that if I was to do anything at all I must disregard the howling throng – must go my own road, flinging back no bitter retort, but declaring myself unalterably whatever happened.”
May 2: Traubel told him of a debate about the future of American literature he had witnessed the night before. One speaker declared that American poetry “would no doubt be built on some great English model.” When he heard this, Whitman exploded: “Damn the Professor! Damn the model! Build on hell! No, no, no – that is not what we are here for – that is not the future – that’s not Leaves of Grass – opposite to all that – opposite, antagonist – to fight it, if need be, to a bloody end – stands life, vitality, the elements. And on this must everything, everything that belongs to our future, appear, be justified. But how can anyone understand Leaves of Grass, the new genius, nature – the principles, if we may call them such, by which we came – except by knowing the certain background out of which Walt Whitman appeared? Here, Horace – here in Leaves of Grass – are 400, 430 pages, of let-fly. No art, no schemes, no fanciful, delicate, elegant constructiveness – but let-fly.”
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
`A Disparate Library'
A line from an essay by Adam Zagajewski, “Vacation’s End,” published in A Defense of Ardor, has rekindled an old anxiety: “Trips remind us that we read too much, that rich fields of reality spread beyond the library.” Zagajewski is careful in his phrasing. He does not say that books and libraries represent unreality, as opposed to the great, inarguably real “out there.” He says they are but one part of reality, though obviously an important part coming from so book-intoxicated a man. But, what is “too much” reading? Is a life dedicated to books no less real, no more foolish or irresponsible, than a life spent woodworking, praying or making lots of money?
The question nags: What have I missed by spending so much of my life between the covers of books? Asking it assumes I have misspent, if not actually wasted, my time. What would I have chosen to do instead? Watch television? Hunt deer? Shoot baskets? Collect stamps? Attend NASCAR races? Run for public office? All of that is ridiculous and none of it interests me. It seems dull and ungrateful, a waste of the time given me. I was born with an unlikely inclination, coming as I did from a family that read little and placed no value on scholarship, learning or even speaking articulately. My father distrusted books, even feared them. When he asked my best college friend what he was studying, Scott said he was a history major, and my father responded, “I don’t study history. I make it.” He was not a humorous man, but a man frightened in ways he could not understand.
After our father’s death, my brother deduced from old records that he had never graduated from high school. He read the newspaper, magazines, a few history books – World War II (in which he fought), the American West. How could he have understood a teenage aesthete who read Flaubert and George Santayana? The anxiety Zagajewski’s observation sparks in me is part of my inheritance from my father, as surely as my voice and the shape of my head.
My brother and I were lucky. We have always proceeded by the law of contraries: Told to do something, we go out of our way to do the opposite. Ken is a musician who can sight-read and play almost any instrument. He can draw, paint and even put up Sheetrock. Professionally, he’s been a picture framer for more than 30 years. He knows more about Durer than I will ever want to know. Last weekend, he went to a library book sale in suburban Cleveland and bought the The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for $2, plus a book about Venice. In this sense at least, though probably in no other, my brother and I are Emersonians. We have followed our own gifts and passions, and thus created our own eccentric and very American lives.
Late in life Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Over time, one’s memory forms a disparate library, made of books or pages whose reading was a pleasure and which one would like to share.” My memory is amply stocked. Its contents are drawn from mundane, day-to-day existence and from movies, television, music and most of all books. Some of the images I carry around are of uncertain parentage: Novel? Painting? Dream? Real life? Besides the pleasure Borges mentions, I have a densely populated mental landscape, more like Mexico City than rural Utah. On most occasions, I enjoy my company. I have no good excuse for being bored.
Happy birthday, Ken.
The question nags: What have I missed by spending so much of my life between the covers of books? Asking it assumes I have misspent, if not actually wasted, my time. What would I have chosen to do instead? Watch television? Hunt deer? Shoot baskets? Collect stamps? Attend NASCAR races? Run for public office? All of that is ridiculous and none of it interests me. It seems dull and ungrateful, a waste of the time given me. I was born with an unlikely inclination, coming as I did from a family that read little and placed no value on scholarship, learning or even speaking articulately. My father distrusted books, even feared them. When he asked my best college friend what he was studying, Scott said he was a history major, and my father responded, “I don’t study history. I make it.” He was not a humorous man, but a man frightened in ways he could not understand.
After our father’s death, my brother deduced from old records that he had never graduated from high school. He read the newspaper, magazines, a few history books – World War II (in which he fought), the American West. How could he have understood a teenage aesthete who read Flaubert and George Santayana? The anxiety Zagajewski’s observation sparks in me is part of my inheritance from my father, as surely as my voice and the shape of my head.
My brother and I were lucky. We have always proceeded by the law of contraries: Told to do something, we go out of our way to do the opposite. Ken is a musician who can sight-read and play almost any instrument. He can draw, paint and even put up Sheetrock. Professionally, he’s been a picture framer for more than 30 years. He knows more about Durer than I will ever want to know. Last weekend, he went to a library book sale in suburban Cleveland and bought the The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for $2, plus a book about Venice. In this sense at least, though probably in no other, my brother and I are Emersonians. We have followed our own gifts and passions, and thus created our own eccentric and very American lives.
Late in life Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Over time, one’s memory forms a disparate library, made of books or pages whose reading was a pleasure and which one would like to share.” My memory is amply stocked. Its contents are drawn from mundane, day-to-day existence and from movies, television, music and most of all books. Some of the images I carry around are of uncertain parentage: Novel? Painting? Dream? Real life? Besides the pleasure Borges mentions, I have a densely populated mental landscape, more like Mexico City than rural Utah. On most occasions, I enjoy my company. I have no good excuse for being bored.
Happy birthday, Ken.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Swallows
We took another rock-collecting trip Sunday morning to Lake Livingston, 70 miles north of Houston. Among the beer cans and dead fish we found much petrified wood and rose quartz but no arrowheads. We stopped for gasoline a few miles from the lake, and in the men’s room my sons and I saw this magic-markered on the wall: “Jews must DIE!”
A family was camping on the beach. An adolescent boy sat in a lawn chair, shooting an air rifle at the swallows swarming beneath the bridge that crosses the lake. A man in a Rodinesque pose was sitting nearby on a box, fishing. On his hip was a holstered pistol. On the way home, in front of a modular home business, we saw a sign saying “FEMA Checks Accepted.” Another lot was called Repo Depo, and we saw a roadside stand selling swords and knives, and many more selling fireworks.
I could see all of these things, no doubt, in Ohio or Vermont (except maybe the swords), but probably not within a 10-mile radius. This is Texas, a place of concentrated baroque weirdness. We ate lunch at Whataburger.
What I’ll remember best from Sunday’s visit to Lake Livingston are the swallows, hundreds of them diving in long arcs under the bridge and over the beach. My wife and I had a plot in a community garden near our house in upstate New York, and when I would go out in the evening to weed, water or harvest, I watched the swallows swooping, gathering their own harvest of insects. They are not like pigeons, which fly in dense, synchronized flotillas. Swallows appear to be less social than pigeons. They swarm like oversized mosquitoes, clusters of individual birds rather than choreographed groups, and seem to have no leaders. Is this why Yeats chose them from among all the birds in Ireland to use in his poem “Coole Park, 1929?”
“I meditate upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature's spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.
“There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well set and excellent company.
“They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman's powerful character
Could keep a swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it withershins.
“Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate - eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade -
A moment's memory to that laurelled head.”
William Maxwell took the opening phrase of the third stanza for the title of his second novel, They Came Like Swallows, published in 1937. Implicit in the poem and the novel is the notion of swallows as somewhat solitary nomads – perhaps here today, but certainly gone tomorrow. Rock doves (pigeons) or crows would not have worked Yeats was not a naturalist – after all, the physical world is merely maya -- but he knew enough about swallows to use them accurately as symbols. Swallows find “certainty upon the dreaming air” – at least until an owl or hawk nails them.
In 1939, the year Yeats died, Eugenio Montale wrote a poem in which swallows figure. This is “Lindau,” as translated by Jeremy Reid:
“Unfailingly the swallows maintains life,
returning here beak needling with a straw.
At night by the piers, slack water
Sluggishly wears through the eroding shale.
Torches smoke, their gusty shadows
Played out fluently on the lifeless shore.
In the plaza a saraband strikes up.
Listen, the wheels of the paddleboats wail.”
James Marcus at House of Mirth has done much translation from the Italian, including a poem by Aldo Buzzi. Last week, we exchanged notes about the poetry of Montale and Cesare Pavese. James’ characterization of Montale’s poems as “oblique, glimmering, cryptic” precisely describes “Lindau.” Human and animal life hardly touch, and a swallow can build a nest without worrying about air rifles
A family was camping on the beach. An adolescent boy sat in a lawn chair, shooting an air rifle at the swallows swarming beneath the bridge that crosses the lake. A man in a Rodinesque pose was sitting nearby on a box, fishing. On his hip was a holstered pistol. On the way home, in front of a modular home business, we saw a sign saying “FEMA Checks Accepted.” Another lot was called Repo Depo, and we saw a roadside stand selling swords and knives, and many more selling fireworks.
I could see all of these things, no doubt, in Ohio or Vermont (except maybe the swords), but probably not within a 10-mile radius. This is Texas, a place of concentrated baroque weirdness. We ate lunch at Whataburger.
What I’ll remember best from Sunday’s visit to Lake Livingston are the swallows, hundreds of them diving in long arcs under the bridge and over the beach. My wife and I had a plot in a community garden near our house in upstate New York, and when I would go out in the evening to weed, water or harvest, I watched the swallows swooping, gathering their own harvest of insects. They are not like pigeons, which fly in dense, synchronized flotillas. Swallows appear to be less social than pigeons. They swarm like oversized mosquitoes, clusters of individual birds rather than choreographed groups, and seem to have no leaders. Is this why Yeats chose them from among all the birds in Ireland to use in his poem “Coole Park, 1929?”
“I meditate upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature's spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.
“There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well set and excellent company.
“They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman's powerful character
Could keep a swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it withershins.
“Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate - eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade -
A moment's memory to that laurelled head.”
William Maxwell took the opening phrase of the third stanza for the title of his second novel, They Came Like Swallows, published in 1937. Implicit in the poem and the novel is the notion of swallows as somewhat solitary nomads – perhaps here today, but certainly gone tomorrow. Rock doves (pigeons) or crows would not have worked Yeats was not a naturalist – after all, the physical world is merely maya -- but he knew enough about swallows to use them accurately as symbols. Swallows find “certainty upon the dreaming air” – at least until an owl or hawk nails them.
In 1939, the year Yeats died, Eugenio Montale wrote a poem in which swallows figure. This is “Lindau,” as translated by Jeremy Reid:
“Unfailingly the swallows maintains life,
returning here beak needling with a straw.
At night by the piers, slack water
Sluggishly wears through the eroding shale.
Torches smoke, their gusty shadows
Played out fluently on the lifeless shore.
In the plaza a saraband strikes up.
Listen, the wheels of the paddleboats wail.”
James Marcus at House of Mirth has done much translation from the Italian, including a poem by Aldo Buzzi. Last week, we exchanged notes about the poetry of Montale and Cesare Pavese. James’ characterization of Montale’s poems as “oblique, glimmering, cryptic” precisely describes “Lindau.” Human and animal life hardly touch, and a swallow can build a nest without worrying about air rifles
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Two Poets
In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, in a review of The Poem That Changed America, James Bowman further dismantles the fraud that was Allen Ginsberg. The book is a collection of essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of “Howl, ” which Bowman deftly exposes as dishonest, hysterical and disastrously influential:
“For not only has poetry since Ginsberg tended to concentrate on emotional truth to the exclusion of other kinds, so has the popular culture. `Howl’ is the direct ancestor of every self-pitying rock ballad ever written. Indeed, practically every line turns up a potential rock-group name: The Angry Fix (which actually exists), The Angelheaded Hipsters, the Starry Dynamos, the Machinery of Night. What do all these locutions have in common? Evocative meaninglessness. Their meaninglessness is their meaning.”
In poetry, as in most discourse, we expect concision and precision of expression. Ginsberg gives us neither quality. His pastiche of Blake, Whitman, hipster argot and Buddhist nonsense is intended as a refutation of intelligible discourse. Clarity, of course, is another manifestation of bourgeois repression.
“People used to speak of Victorian poetry as `sustaining,’” Bowman writes. “They read it and memorized it because it offered them a combination of moral truth, spiritual comfort and beautiful language. It got them through the daily struggle with Moloch. Ginsberg’s adolescent pretense – that Moloch can simply be repudiated – robs poetry of that sustenance. All that’s left is guilt that we haven’t, like him and his fellow `best minds,’ transcended reality with some spectacularly imagined act of self-destruction. That’s a big change, all right, but not one that anyone out of his teens should welcome.”
On a more encouraging note, Adam Zagajewski talks with Cynthia Haven at poetryfoundation.org. If you don’t know the work of this Polish poet, the immediate heir of Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, do seek out his work, both in poetry and prose (he is a masterful essayist, most recently in A Defense of Ardor). Zagajewski splits his year between Krakow and her in Houston, where he teaches at the University of Houston.
Citing “many contradictory explanations’’ to account for the great legacy of Polish poetry in recent decades, Zagajewski says, “One of the main ones is that the attention given to the meaning of human life in radical circumstances, as opposed to the hermetic direction or to a purely formal quest.” Polish poetry “after the World War II catastrophe . . .gave the dying Modernism a new energy. It `rehumanized a highly sophisticated but a bit empty palace of modern poetry.”
Zagajewski continued: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank, but I also need to distance myself from `professional’ Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”
After Ginsberg’s puerilities, Zagajewski sounds like a grownup, in addition to being a great world poet.
“For not only has poetry since Ginsberg tended to concentrate on emotional truth to the exclusion of other kinds, so has the popular culture. `Howl’ is the direct ancestor of every self-pitying rock ballad ever written. Indeed, practically every line turns up a potential rock-group name: The Angry Fix (which actually exists), The Angelheaded Hipsters, the Starry Dynamos, the Machinery of Night. What do all these locutions have in common? Evocative meaninglessness. Their meaninglessness is their meaning.”
In poetry, as in most discourse, we expect concision and precision of expression. Ginsberg gives us neither quality. His pastiche of Blake, Whitman, hipster argot and Buddhist nonsense is intended as a refutation of intelligible discourse. Clarity, of course, is another manifestation of bourgeois repression.
“People used to speak of Victorian poetry as `sustaining,’” Bowman writes. “They read it and memorized it because it offered them a combination of moral truth, spiritual comfort and beautiful language. It got them through the daily struggle with Moloch. Ginsberg’s adolescent pretense – that Moloch can simply be repudiated – robs poetry of that sustenance. All that’s left is guilt that we haven’t, like him and his fellow `best minds,’ transcended reality with some spectacularly imagined act of self-destruction. That’s a big change, all right, but not one that anyone out of his teens should welcome.”
On a more encouraging note, Adam Zagajewski talks with Cynthia Haven at poetryfoundation.org. If you don’t know the work of this Polish poet, the immediate heir of Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, do seek out his work, both in poetry and prose (he is a masterful essayist, most recently in A Defense of Ardor). Zagajewski splits his year between Krakow and her in Houston, where he teaches at the University of Houston.
Citing “many contradictory explanations’’ to account for the great legacy of Polish poetry in recent decades, Zagajewski says, “One of the main ones is that the attention given to the meaning of human life in radical circumstances, as opposed to the hermetic direction or to a purely formal quest.” Polish poetry “after the World War II catastrophe . . .gave the dying Modernism a new energy. It `rehumanized a highly sophisticated but a bit empty palace of modern poetry.”
Zagajewski continued: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank, but I also need to distance myself from `professional’ Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”
After Ginsberg’s puerilities, Zagajewski sounds like a grownup, in addition to being a great world poet.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Louise Bogan
I first heard of Louise Bogan in 1969 when I read The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, by Alan Seager. I was 16 and outrageously taken by such Roethke lines as “What's madness but nobility of soul/At odds with circumstance?” which today reads like a bumper sticker scripted by R.D. Laing. Forty-three years after his death, Roethke is a big precocious baby. Bogan once had an affair with him and acted briefly as his poetic mother confessor. She was a fine, highly mannered writer of metric verse and for 38 years, until the year before her death in 1970, was poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.
The poet Mary Kinzie has edited A Poet’s Prose, an ungainly collection that throws together fragments of Bogan’s fiction, selections from her journal, letters, criticism and, despite the title, poems and drafts of poems, much of it juvenilia. A lot of this has already been published, though her letters, reviews and journals are long out of print. I like Bogan best in small doses, especially her letters and reviews, and I have been poking about in the book for a week. The fiction is mostly autobiographical and awful, but a slim anthology of apercus, especially about Henry James, one of her favorites, might be gleaned from the heap.
From a July 10, 1925, letter to Edmund Wilson:
“I have been reading Henry James very swiftly, so that I might, if such a thing were possible, get the color without too much of the sense. I am enchanted by the absolute sureness in method. – Even though he does the thing all wrong sometimes, he is always sure of how he wants to do it. The people that mirror the action never slip up, lose their outline, and become Tom, Dick, or Harriet.”
From a 1944 review of F.O. Matthiessen’s Henry James: The Later Phase:
“From one point of view, The Golden Bowl, written in the same year (1905) as Debussy’s La Mer, is one of Impressionism’s triumphs. Both works are formal accomplishments `of magnificent scope’ of that school. And the later James must be approached in the same way as one approaches music. Soon any surface stylistic oddity disappears. The center continually shifts, but the development of theme never stops for a moment and never errs. As in great music and in tragic life, the shifts are always toward the larger and unsuspected capacity, modulation, event; and toward a final major resolution.”
From a March 2, 1962, letter to Ruth Limmer, after seeing the film The Innocents (an adaptation of James’ “The Turn of the Screw"):
“Good old Henry J.! I came straight home and read the original story straight through. How wonderfully managed it is! And that `frame’ bit -- at the beginning! What the old boy knew – and was determined to express – was the hypocrisy of children, as well as the delusions of suppressed old maids. . .Read the preface to [The Portrait of a Lady]: see H.J. holed up in Venice, trying to get the book finished, but continually running to the window to watch the life and the color, outside. Most moving.”
And, on a non-Jamesian subject, this from an Oct. 20, 1960, letter to Ruth Limmer:
“The event of the week was my reading of John Updike’s new novel, Rabbit, Run (Knopf). The boy is a genius. Every sentence counts. The story is rather contrived, but one believes every word of it. And the flashes of weather, and of the `American scene’: drugstores, highways, main streets, factories, used car lots! And the passion and the grief! The sex gets out of hand, once in a while; but for the most part he uses the sexual aberrations to striking purpose. And he believes in God (`something there’)! Do get it at once; it’s worth buying – ($4.00).”
I love that: “it’s worth buying – ($4.00).” Updike’s last novel, Villages (2004), his 21st, retailed at $25. Bogan is wonderfully prescient about Updike’s entire career.
The poet Mary Kinzie has edited A Poet’s Prose, an ungainly collection that throws together fragments of Bogan’s fiction, selections from her journal, letters, criticism and, despite the title, poems and drafts of poems, much of it juvenilia. A lot of this has already been published, though her letters, reviews and journals are long out of print. I like Bogan best in small doses, especially her letters and reviews, and I have been poking about in the book for a week. The fiction is mostly autobiographical and awful, but a slim anthology of apercus, especially about Henry James, one of her favorites, might be gleaned from the heap.
From a July 10, 1925, letter to Edmund Wilson:
“I have been reading Henry James very swiftly, so that I might, if such a thing were possible, get the color without too much of the sense. I am enchanted by the absolute sureness in method. – Even though he does the thing all wrong sometimes, he is always sure of how he wants to do it. The people that mirror the action never slip up, lose their outline, and become Tom, Dick, or Harriet.”
From a 1944 review of F.O. Matthiessen’s Henry James: The Later Phase:
“From one point of view, The Golden Bowl, written in the same year (1905) as Debussy’s La Mer, is one of Impressionism’s triumphs. Both works are formal accomplishments `of magnificent scope’ of that school. And the later James must be approached in the same way as one approaches music. Soon any surface stylistic oddity disappears. The center continually shifts, but the development of theme never stops for a moment and never errs. As in great music and in tragic life, the shifts are always toward the larger and unsuspected capacity, modulation, event; and toward a final major resolution.”
From a March 2, 1962, letter to Ruth Limmer, after seeing the film The Innocents (an adaptation of James’ “The Turn of the Screw"):
“Good old Henry J.! I came straight home and read the original story straight through. How wonderfully managed it is! And that `frame’ bit -- at the beginning! What the old boy knew – and was determined to express – was the hypocrisy of children, as well as the delusions of suppressed old maids. . .Read the preface to [The Portrait of a Lady]: see H.J. holed up in Venice, trying to get the book finished, but continually running to the window to watch the life and the color, outside. Most moving.”
And, on a non-Jamesian subject, this from an Oct. 20, 1960, letter to Ruth Limmer:
“The event of the week was my reading of John Updike’s new novel, Rabbit, Run (Knopf). The boy is a genius. Every sentence counts. The story is rather contrived, but one believes every word of it. And the flashes of weather, and of the `American scene’: drugstores, highways, main streets, factories, used car lots! And the passion and the grief! The sex gets out of hand, once in a while; but for the most part he uses the sexual aberrations to striking purpose. And he believes in God (`something there’)! Do get it at once; it’s worth buying – ($4.00).”
I love that: “it’s worth buying – ($4.00).” Updike’s last novel, Villages (2004), his 21st, retailed at $25. Bogan is wonderfully prescient about Updike’s entire career.
Friday, April 21, 2006
Life, Straight
Why do we enjoy – and the appropriateness of that verb is what this posting is all about – reading about suffering? One answer, of course, is the pleasure of sadism. Related to sadism is the vulgar frisson even the non-sadistic among us experience reading descriptions of human suffering, especially when its victims are those we believe deserve to suffer. No one is immune to such feelings, though witnessing pain vicariously and enjoying the sensation amounts to moral slumming.
Another explanation, one many religious people would endorse, is that suffering can be edifying. Christ’s agony on the cross is the embodiment of his message. Suffering can serve as penance, as moral witness (think of the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in Vietnam), and as a goad to humility. In a related though vulgarized form, this idea turns into the cult of victimhood, in which one’s suffering, real or imagined, is worn proudly as a badge of honor, a sign of one’s privileged status. Suffering confers bragging rights, the antithesis of humility.
Here’s a description of suffering, physical and moral, without a hint of sadism (or masochism), edification or self-preening victimhood:
“I finally quit the glue sniffing, but I kept taking black-and-whites. I’d take sixteen or eighteen of them every morning in my cell with my coffee. With black-and-whites you lose your equilibrium. You fall down and run into things. There were three or four of us who’d been taking them, hanging out together. One day I was sitting with these guys on the yard, sitting on one of the domino tables, and I dropped my cigarette. I went to pick it up. I bent down and fell off the table. I cut my head and got all bloody. When blood is drawn it’s a serious thing. The guards think you’ve killed somebody somebody’d shanked you, so my friend stood around me while one of them got a wet rag and cleaned my forehead. I’m goofing around and right away I fall off the table again and hit my head in the same place. Now, they get a guy to sneak in the hospital and get some bandages to stop the bleeding. That night we’re all lined up to go into our cells. I get into line, and we round a little bend. I go to take a step and I step too high. I fall back, hitting my head on the cement. The guards rush out and grab me and take me to the hospital. They interrogate me. Finally they put me back in my cell. The next morning walking out of my cell on the fourth tier, I walked straight out and smashed into a bar. If I hadn’t hit the bar I would have fallen over and killed myself.”
As Beckett writes in Endgame, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” The above passage is from Straight Life, the autobiography of Art Pepper, the great alto saxophone player. It is the best book I know written by a jazz musician. It is also a chronicle of almost unrelieved suffering, from child abuse, heroin addiction and other drug abuse, and the degradations of prison and the criminal life. Pepper became addicted to heroin in 1950 when he was 25 years old (he was already alcoholic), was arrested in 1953, and for the next 13 years spent more time in prison than not. After five years in San Quentin, Pepper hit bottom and put himself in Synanon. He joined a methadone program, remarried and, near the end of his life, wrote this book and resumed playing and recording. Pepper died in 1982 at the age of 57.
When Whitney Balliett reviewed Straight Life in The New Yorker in 1980, he juxtaposed a passage from Pepper’s book with one from Henry Mayhew’s London Poor, and concluded that, “Pepper has the ear and memory and interpretive lyricism of a first-rate novelist.”
Here’s how Balliett finishes his review: “He has no illusions. (`And that’s what I will die as – a junkie.’) Nor does he have any remorse or self-pity. He has lived the inverse of the straight life, and he has lived it as well as he knows how. He does not rail against the laws that treat addicted human beings as criminals: the straight world has its hang-ups. He is an eloquent and gifted man.”
Part of the answer to the first question I asked – Why do we enjoy reading about suffering? – is a matter of motivation: I read Art Pepper’s book not because he suffered but because he was a great musician who happened to live a life filled with pain – as well as much pleasure and, rarely, joy. Junkie Lit – someone must already have christened the genre – holds no attraction. Pepper never indulges in the romantic mystique of the suffering artist. He never claims to have suffered for his art. He makes no excuses and expects none from his readers. He never poses as a hero. He never got entirely straight and, at the end of the book, even sings the qualified praises of cocaine. Here’s what he says on the book’s second-to-last page:
“I was given a gift. I was given a gift in a lot of ways. I was given a gift of being able to endure things, to accept certain things, to be able to accept punishment for the things I did wrong against society, the things that society feels were wrong. And I was able to go to prison. I never informed on anyone. As for music, anything I’ve done has been something that I’ve done `off the top.’ I’ve never studied, never practiced. I’m one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it.”
Another explanation, one many religious people would endorse, is that suffering can be edifying. Christ’s agony on the cross is the embodiment of his message. Suffering can serve as penance, as moral witness (think of the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in Vietnam), and as a goad to humility. In a related though vulgarized form, this idea turns into the cult of victimhood, in which one’s suffering, real or imagined, is worn proudly as a badge of honor, a sign of one’s privileged status. Suffering confers bragging rights, the antithesis of humility.
Here’s a description of suffering, physical and moral, without a hint of sadism (or masochism), edification or self-preening victimhood:
“I finally quit the glue sniffing, but I kept taking black-and-whites. I’d take sixteen or eighteen of them every morning in my cell with my coffee. With black-and-whites you lose your equilibrium. You fall down and run into things. There were three or four of us who’d been taking them, hanging out together. One day I was sitting with these guys on the yard, sitting on one of the domino tables, and I dropped my cigarette. I went to pick it up. I bent down and fell off the table. I cut my head and got all bloody. When blood is drawn it’s a serious thing. The guards think you’ve killed somebody somebody’d shanked you, so my friend stood around me while one of them got a wet rag and cleaned my forehead. I’m goofing around and right away I fall off the table again and hit my head in the same place. Now, they get a guy to sneak in the hospital and get some bandages to stop the bleeding. That night we’re all lined up to go into our cells. I get into line, and we round a little bend. I go to take a step and I step too high. I fall back, hitting my head on the cement. The guards rush out and grab me and take me to the hospital. They interrogate me. Finally they put me back in my cell. The next morning walking out of my cell on the fourth tier, I walked straight out and smashed into a bar. If I hadn’t hit the bar I would have fallen over and killed myself.”
As Beckett writes in Endgame, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” The above passage is from Straight Life, the autobiography of Art Pepper, the great alto saxophone player. It is the best book I know written by a jazz musician. It is also a chronicle of almost unrelieved suffering, from child abuse, heroin addiction and other drug abuse, and the degradations of prison and the criminal life. Pepper became addicted to heroin in 1950 when he was 25 years old (he was already alcoholic), was arrested in 1953, and for the next 13 years spent more time in prison than not. After five years in San Quentin, Pepper hit bottom and put himself in Synanon. He joined a methadone program, remarried and, near the end of his life, wrote this book and resumed playing and recording. Pepper died in 1982 at the age of 57.
When Whitney Balliett reviewed Straight Life in The New Yorker in 1980, he juxtaposed a passage from Pepper’s book with one from Henry Mayhew’s London Poor, and concluded that, “Pepper has the ear and memory and interpretive lyricism of a first-rate novelist.”
Here’s how Balliett finishes his review: “He has no illusions. (`And that’s what I will die as – a junkie.’) Nor does he have any remorse or self-pity. He has lived the inverse of the straight life, and he has lived it as well as he knows how. He does not rail against the laws that treat addicted human beings as criminals: the straight world has its hang-ups. He is an eloquent and gifted man.”
Part of the answer to the first question I asked – Why do we enjoy reading about suffering? – is a matter of motivation: I read Art Pepper’s book not because he suffered but because he was a great musician who happened to live a life filled with pain – as well as much pleasure and, rarely, joy. Junkie Lit – someone must already have christened the genre – holds no attraction. Pepper never indulges in the romantic mystique of the suffering artist. He never claims to have suffered for his art. He makes no excuses and expects none from his readers. He never poses as a hero. He never got entirely straight and, at the end of the book, even sings the qualified praises of cocaine. Here’s what he says on the book’s second-to-last page:
“I was given a gift. I was given a gift in a lot of ways. I was given a gift of being able to endure things, to accept certain things, to be able to accept punishment for the things I did wrong against society, the things that society feels were wrong. And I was able to go to prison. I never informed on anyone. As for music, anything I’ve done has been something that I’ve done `off the top.’ I’ve never studied, never practiced. I’m one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it.”
Thursday, April 20, 2006
In the Heart of the Heart of the Prose
Read the following passages, each by a different American writer, all born in the 20th century or late in the 19th century:
“Of the literary arts, the one most practiced in Draperville was history. It was informal, and there was no reason to write it down since nothing was ever forgotten. The child born too soon after the wedding ceremony might learn to walk and to ride a bicycle; he might go to school and graduate into long pants, marry, move to Seattle, and do well for himself in the lumber business; but whenever his or his mother’s name was mentioned, it was followed inexorably by some smiling reference to the date of his birth. No one knew what had become of the energetic secretary of the Chamber of Commerce who organized the Love-Thy-Neighbor-As-Thyself parade, but they knew why he left town shortly afterward, and history doesn’t have to be complete.”
“We came to this house when I was still a small boy. We had no electricity for years, just kerosene maps. No radio. I was remembering how my mother used to love her kitchen. Of course, it was very different then, with an icebox and a pump sink and a pie safe and a woodstove. The old table is about all that is the same, and the pantry. She had her rocker so close to the stove that she could open the oven door without getting up. She said it was to keep things from burning. She said we couldn’t afford the waste, which was true. She burned things often enough anyway, more often as the years passed, and we ate them anyway, so at least there wasn’t any waste. She loved the warmth of that stove, but it put her to sleep, especially if she’d been doing the wash or putting up preserves. Well, bless her heart, she had lumbago, and she had rheumatism, too, and she did take a little whiskey for it. She never slept well during the nights. I suppose I got that from her. She’d wake up if the cat sneezed, she said, but then she’d sleep through the immolation of an entire Sunday dinner two feet away from her. That would be on a Saturday, because our family was pretty strict on Sabbath-keeping. So we’d know for an entire day beforehand what we had to look forward to, burned peas and scorched applesauce I remember particularly.”
“Outside was a magic night of crisp twinkly stars, snow-muffled cottages and white trees. Aunt Lois drew the sled down the middle of the icy pavement, for the sidewalks were filled with drifts. This was indeed growing up, Marcia felt, to be out after bedtime in the dead of night and in the middle of the street. She sat in front of the sled with Lena’s legs around her and a blanket tucked around them both, their breath curling out in the frosty like smoke. Sounds were grown-up sounds, too, at this hour; the constant jangle of engine bells, a warm jolly sound that cut through blizzards and darkness like a dog’s welcome bark. Aunt Lois’ arctics crunched swiftly over the snow, and the snowflakes whirled like tiny stars around the street lamps. Down the street they could see their house with all the lights on, downstairs and up, as if it was Christmas Eve. Night was the best time of all to be outdoors, they thought, especially in winter and in London Junction where the smell of train smoke mingled with the snowflecked air and tickled the nose. Darkness, snow, smoke and stars made a special London Junction smell, just as mittens and their wool mufflers drawn tightly up to their noses and moist from chewing had a fuzzy snowball taste.”
I suggested yesterday that you read “The Prose Sublime,” so it seemed only fair that I reread Donald Justice’s essay. Good prose from poets, even good poets, is rare, and good prose about good prose from poets is even rarer. Perhaps this should not be surprising, for prose and poetry are radically different disciplines, and what is virtue in one (concision in poetry) may prove a damning fault (anemic minimalism in prose) in the other. It’s helpful to remember Justice’s subtitle: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” The sublimity he describes, admittedly, is mysterious and probably highly subjective, resistant to clinical criticism.
For instance, he cites a Hemingway passage as embodying this quality, and I don’t see it. Justice writes, “Intense clarity: one-dimensional – everything rendered on a single plane. Whatever beauty the passage has – and it has as much as any passage of this scope can probably bear – depends less on the words themselves and the care taken with them than on this very sense that great care is in fact being taken.” Justice’s liking for this passage may be related to his age. He was born in 1925, when Hemingway was already creating his mythology and assuming the stature of a deity among readers, writers and critics. I was born 27 years later, and Hemingway to me has always sounded mannered, phony, precious, sometimes embarrassing.
Speaking of a passage from Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White, Justice says “the plain style of it I find quite unofficially beautiful as well. Such a passage seems hardly to bother with understanding at all; it is a passage of unspoken connections, unnameable affinities, a tissue of associations without specified relations.”
To varying degrees, the passages I cited above share these qualities. I chose them because all come from novels I enjoy and value highly. Only afterward did it occur to me that all three are set in the American Midwest, as is Anderson’s. The first comes from Time Will Darken It, by William Maxwell, 1948; the second, from Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, 2004; the third, My Home is Far Away, by Dawn Powell, 1944. Maxwell was born in Illinois; Robinson, Idaho; Powell, like Anderson, in Ohio.
In isolation, Powell’s passage suffers. Its beauty is sabotaged by sentimentality (“fuzzy snowball taste”) bolstered by cliché (“twinkly,” “a warm jolly sound”). But the whole is far better than the parts. Powell was a born satirist at war, in My Home is Far Away, with a story rooted in nostalgia and pain – her own childhood. She is a less exquisite writer than the others, but no less talented and enjoyable.
The Maxwell and Robinson excerpts work in isolation and as tiles in the bigger mosaics surrounding them. Both share the plain style pointed out by Justice, which can probably be traced, at many removes, to the King James Bible. Both passages are tightly controlled yet natural sounding. Both resonate with the Anderson passage, as Justice describes it:
“In it, connections, if any, remain unstated; likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the esthetic blush.”
A story or novel made up exclusively of such passages would probably be unreadable, but so would a story or novel without any. To see into the heart of things is a fleeting gift.
“Of the literary arts, the one most practiced in Draperville was history. It was informal, and there was no reason to write it down since nothing was ever forgotten. The child born too soon after the wedding ceremony might learn to walk and to ride a bicycle; he might go to school and graduate into long pants, marry, move to Seattle, and do well for himself in the lumber business; but whenever his or his mother’s name was mentioned, it was followed inexorably by some smiling reference to the date of his birth. No one knew what had become of the energetic secretary of the Chamber of Commerce who organized the Love-Thy-Neighbor-As-Thyself parade, but they knew why he left town shortly afterward, and history doesn’t have to be complete.”
“We came to this house when I was still a small boy. We had no electricity for years, just kerosene maps. No radio. I was remembering how my mother used to love her kitchen. Of course, it was very different then, with an icebox and a pump sink and a pie safe and a woodstove. The old table is about all that is the same, and the pantry. She had her rocker so close to the stove that she could open the oven door without getting up. She said it was to keep things from burning. She said we couldn’t afford the waste, which was true. She burned things often enough anyway, more often as the years passed, and we ate them anyway, so at least there wasn’t any waste. She loved the warmth of that stove, but it put her to sleep, especially if she’d been doing the wash or putting up preserves. Well, bless her heart, she had lumbago, and she had rheumatism, too, and she did take a little whiskey for it. She never slept well during the nights. I suppose I got that from her. She’d wake up if the cat sneezed, she said, but then she’d sleep through the immolation of an entire Sunday dinner two feet away from her. That would be on a Saturday, because our family was pretty strict on Sabbath-keeping. So we’d know for an entire day beforehand what we had to look forward to, burned peas and scorched applesauce I remember particularly.”
“Outside was a magic night of crisp twinkly stars, snow-muffled cottages and white trees. Aunt Lois drew the sled down the middle of the icy pavement, for the sidewalks were filled with drifts. This was indeed growing up, Marcia felt, to be out after bedtime in the dead of night and in the middle of the street. She sat in front of the sled with Lena’s legs around her and a blanket tucked around them both, their breath curling out in the frosty like smoke. Sounds were grown-up sounds, too, at this hour; the constant jangle of engine bells, a warm jolly sound that cut through blizzards and darkness like a dog’s welcome bark. Aunt Lois’ arctics crunched swiftly over the snow, and the snowflakes whirled like tiny stars around the street lamps. Down the street they could see their house with all the lights on, downstairs and up, as if it was Christmas Eve. Night was the best time of all to be outdoors, they thought, especially in winter and in London Junction where the smell of train smoke mingled with the snowflecked air and tickled the nose. Darkness, snow, smoke and stars made a special London Junction smell, just as mittens and their wool mufflers drawn tightly up to their noses and moist from chewing had a fuzzy snowball taste.”
I suggested yesterday that you read “The Prose Sublime,” so it seemed only fair that I reread Donald Justice’s essay. Good prose from poets, even good poets, is rare, and good prose about good prose from poets is even rarer. Perhaps this should not be surprising, for prose and poetry are radically different disciplines, and what is virtue in one (concision in poetry) may prove a damning fault (anemic minimalism in prose) in the other. It’s helpful to remember Justice’s subtitle: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” The sublimity he describes, admittedly, is mysterious and probably highly subjective, resistant to clinical criticism.
For instance, he cites a Hemingway passage as embodying this quality, and I don’t see it. Justice writes, “Intense clarity: one-dimensional – everything rendered on a single plane. Whatever beauty the passage has – and it has as much as any passage of this scope can probably bear – depends less on the words themselves and the care taken with them than on this very sense that great care is in fact being taken.” Justice’s liking for this passage may be related to his age. He was born in 1925, when Hemingway was already creating his mythology and assuming the stature of a deity among readers, writers and critics. I was born 27 years later, and Hemingway to me has always sounded mannered, phony, precious, sometimes embarrassing.
Speaking of a passage from Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White, Justice says “the plain style of it I find quite unofficially beautiful as well. Such a passage seems hardly to bother with understanding at all; it is a passage of unspoken connections, unnameable affinities, a tissue of associations without specified relations.”
To varying degrees, the passages I cited above share these qualities. I chose them because all come from novels I enjoy and value highly. Only afterward did it occur to me that all three are set in the American Midwest, as is Anderson’s. The first comes from Time Will Darken It, by William Maxwell, 1948; the second, from Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, 2004; the third, My Home is Far Away, by Dawn Powell, 1944. Maxwell was born in Illinois; Robinson, Idaho; Powell, like Anderson, in Ohio.
In isolation, Powell’s passage suffers. Its beauty is sabotaged by sentimentality (“fuzzy snowball taste”) bolstered by cliché (“twinkly,” “a warm jolly sound”). But the whole is far better than the parts. Powell was a born satirist at war, in My Home is Far Away, with a story rooted in nostalgia and pain – her own childhood. She is a less exquisite writer than the others, but no less talented and enjoyable.
The Maxwell and Robinson excerpts work in isolation and as tiles in the bigger mosaics surrounding them. Both share the plain style pointed out by Justice, which can probably be traced, at many removes, to the King James Bible. Both passages are tightly controlled yet natural sounding. Both resonate with the Anderson passage, as Justice describes it:
“In it, connections, if any, remain unstated; likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the esthetic blush.”
A story or novel made up exclusively of such passages would probably be unreadable, but so would a story or novel without any. To see into the heart of things is a fleeting gift.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
So American
The only contest I can remember ever winning was a radio trivia quiz in the summer of 1970. The host of the afternoon talk show on WERE in Cleveland was Bill Randle, a polymath conversant in Thaddeus Stevens, Ethel Waters, Elvis Presley, science fiction and Marshall McLuhan, all of which he talked about extemporaneously between Bob Dylan and rockabilly records – a brilliant, literate, entertaining man who would not be permitted near a microphone today.
I don’t remember the question, but I was manager of a miniature golf course that summer, in the limbo between high school and college, and I had nothing to do but read and listen to the radio. I called in quickly because the prize Randle offered was a first edition of Dark Laughter, a novel by Sherwood Anderson. (Can you imagine a radio announcer giving away such a prize today? Even in 1970 it was peculiar.) I had discovered Anderson earlier that summer and fallen in love. That’s not hyperbole. My swoon was helpless, embarrassing and against my will. I had already read Winesburg, Ohio; Poor White; Windy McPherson’s Son; Horses and Men; The Triumph of the Egg; and the odds and ends collected in The Portable Sherwood Anderson, edited by Horace Gregory. The latter included a nostalgic bit of journalism, “The American County Fair,” which I adored.
That fall, in my dorm room, I was reading Winesburg, Ohio yet again. My roommate, whose father was Slovak and whose mother was Austrian – both born in Europe – asked why I was reading Anderson again instead of studying for my classes. I don’t remember what I said but I remember how Mike replied: “You are so American!” He was right. That was the year of the incursion into Cambodia and the killings at Kent State (only 50 miles from where I lived). I hated the war and hated the prospect of getting drafted if I lost my college deferment. But I never stopped loving what was best about America – Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Eugene Debs, Charles Ives, Buster Keaton, and so on -- unlike many of my contemporaries. To that list, for a brief time, I added Anderson’s name.
I loved the rhythm of his prose, its simplicity and plain speaking. He had learned something from Gertrude Stein but also from the way people spoke in small Ohio towns late in the 19th century. In 1981, I would get a job as a reporter for the Gazette in Bellevue, Ohio, about 50 miles west of Cleveland. Five miles further west along Route 20 was Clyde, where Anderson had lived as a youth and which served as his mental template for the fictional Winesburg. But by that time, the love affair had soured. I found his prose cloying and faux naïf. His Freudianism was second-hand, and heavy-handed to boot. I had been spoiled by the elegant likes of Nabokov. Anderson was a hick from Ohio.
And he was. But he was also a fine writer, and it took an even better writer to remind me of that fact. Several years ago, I read a collection of prose by one of my favorite poets, the late Donald Justice. Oblivion included an essay, “The Prose Sublime.” I don’t have a copy (nor, sadly, do I own a single volume of Anderson’s, not even Dark Laughter) but in it, Justice, without apology, cited excerpts from Anderson’s fiction as examples of, well, sublime prose, and declared his love for Anderson’s work, as I had decades earlier.
In his review of Justice’s posthumous Collected Poems, Adam Kirsch wrote in The New Republic, “His model would no longer be Walter Scott but Sherwood Anderson, whose brevity, homeliness, and compassion Justice often emulates in his narrative poems. `If Sherwood Anderson, one of my favorite writers, seems never to have had an idea longer than thirty or so pages,’ he declared, `my own ideas come up even shorter.’
“Brevity, homeliness, and compassion”: A writer could pledge allegiance to shabbier virtues. I have since reread Wineburg, Ohio, though I was no longer able to read it so unguardedly as I had at 17 and 18. The sentimentality, especially, and the homespun bohemianism, made the going difficult sometimes, but I wished to be indulgent and forgiving. It’s a wonderful, imperfect book, and so American.
Addendum: Dave Lull has kindly provided me with a link to Donald Justice's "The Prose Sublime."
I don’t remember the question, but I was manager of a miniature golf course that summer, in the limbo between high school and college, and I had nothing to do but read and listen to the radio. I called in quickly because the prize Randle offered was a first edition of Dark Laughter, a novel by Sherwood Anderson. (Can you imagine a radio announcer giving away such a prize today? Even in 1970 it was peculiar.) I had discovered Anderson earlier that summer and fallen in love. That’s not hyperbole. My swoon was helpless, embarrassing and against my will. I had already read Winesburg, Ohio; Poor White; Windy McPherson’s Son; Horses and Men; The Triumph of the Egg; and the odds and ends collected in The Portable Sherwood Anderson, edited by Horace Gregory. The latter included a nostalgic bit of journalism, “The American County Fair,” which I adored.
That fall, in my dorm room, I was reading Winesburg, Ohio yet again. My roommate, whose father was Slovak and whose mother was Austrian – both born in Europe – asked why I was reading Anderson again instead of studying for my classes. I don’t remember what I said but I remember how Mike replied: “You are so American!” He was right. That was the year of the incursion into Cambodia and the killings at Kent State (only 50 miles from where I lived). I hated the war and hated the prospect of getting drafted if I lost my college deferment. But I never stopped loving what was best about America – Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Eugene Debs, Charles Ives, Buster Keaton, and so on -- unlike many of my contemporaries. To that list, for a brief time, I added Anderson’s name.
I loved the rhythm of his prose, its simplicity and plain speaking. He had learned something from Gertrude Stein but also from the way people spoke in small Ohio towns late in the 19th century. In 1981, I would get a job as a reporter for the Gazette in Bellevue, Ohio, about 50 miles west of Cleveland. Five miles further west along Route 20 was Clyde, where Anderson had lived as a youth and which served as his mental template for the fictional Winesburg. But by that time, the love affair had soured. I found his prose cloying and faux naïf. His Freudianism was second-hand, and heavy-handed to boot. I had been spoiled by the elegant likes of Nabokov. Anderson was a hick from Ohio.
And he was. But he was also a fine writer, and it took an even better writer to remind me of that fact. Several years ago, I read a collection of prose by one of my favorite poets, the late Donald Justice. Oblivion included an essay, “The Prose Sublime.” I don’t have a copy (nor, sadly, do I own a single volume of Anderson’s, not even Dark Laughter) but in it, Justice, without apology, cited excerpts from Anderson’s fiction as examples of, well, sublime prose, and declared his love for Anderson’s work, as I had decades earlier.
In his review of Justice’s posthumous Collected Poems, Adam Kirsch wrote in The New Republic, “His model would no longer be Walter Scott but Sherwood Anderson, whose brevity, homeliness, and compassion Justice often emulates in his narrative poems. `If Sherwood Anderson, one of my favorite writers, seems never to have had an idea longer than thirty or so pages,’ he declared, `my own ideas come up even shorter.’
“Brevity, homeliness, and compassion”: A writer could pledge allegiance to shabbier virtues. I have since reread Wineburg, Ohio, though I was no longer able to read it so unguardedly as I had at 17 and 18. The sentimentality, especially, and the homespun bohemianism, made the going difficult sometimes, but I wished to be indulgent and forgiving. It’s a wonderful, imperfect book, and so American.
Addendum: Dave Lull has kindly provided me with a link to Donald Justice's "The Prose Sublime."
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Dream On
My brother and I were talking yesterday about the evanescence of dreams. He remembers no dreams from childhood except one that is exceedingly sketchy, while I remember several, including the vision I had in second grade when I was anesthetized and having my tonsils removed. My most vivid and lasting dream happened when I was eight or nine. I was floating down the first-floor hallway in our childhood home – hovering in a slow, stately fashion like a balloon in the Macy’s parade. I rounded the corner into the kitchen and looked at the telephone – a heavy, black model mounted on the wall. At the center of the dial, where the white disk with our phone number was usually affixed, was an unblinking eye, like a misplaced Masonic symbol. I remember this dream, I think, because it combines the mundane and the unexpected, like a Magritte painting. Nothing is so forgettable as a dream that is nothing but dreamlike – like a Dali painting – and nothing, in general, is so boring as another person’s dreams. Evelyn Waugh, in a diary entry from the autumn of 1962, explained why:
“One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.”
In spite of this, Waugh left a memorable description of a dream, recorded in his diary on March 21, 1943:
“A night disturbed by a sort of nightmare that is becoming more frequent with me and I am inclined to believe is peculiar to myself. Dreams of unendurable boredom – of reading page after page of dullness, of being told endless, pointless jokes, of sitting through cinema films devoid of interest.”
Even in his dreams Waugh was a snob. Veterans of Waugh will remember the torment Tony Last endures in A Handful of Dust: Deep in Amazonia, he must read Dickens aloud to Mr. Todd. The novel was published nine years before the diary entry, and I’ve always thought that scene among the nastiest pieces of literary criticism ever conceived.
Here’s another, more conventional sort of nightmare, recorded by John Ruskin in his Brantwood Diary on Oct. 29, 1877. Knowing what we know of Ruskin’s psychopathology, it’s hardly surprising:
“Half sleepless night again – and entirely disgusting dream, about men using flesh and bones, hands of children especially, for fuel – being out of wood and coals. I took a piece to put on someones [sic] fire, and found it the side of an animals [sic] face, with the jaw and teeth in it.”
Ruskin is also the source of one of the most frightening dreams I know, recorded in his diaries on December 27, 1875:
“Up in good time after sound sleep, though first disturbed by the ghastliest nightmare of dream I ever had in my life. After some pleasant, or at least natural dreaming about receiving people in a large house, I went to rest myself in a room full of fine old pictures; the first of which, when I examined it – and it was large – was of an old surgeon dying by dissecting himself! It was worse than dissecting -- tearing: and with circumstances of horror about the treatment of the head which I will not enter.”
I have never recorded my dreams. While they can be entertaining, they possess no other significance. I’m even reluctant to share dreams with my wife, for fear of boring her. Regaling others with our dreams possesses all the charm of trimming one’s toes in public. It’s slightly indecent. Part of the bittersweet fascination of dreams is their fleeting quality, like life itself.
“One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.”
In spite of this, Waugh left a memorable description of a dream, recorded in his diary on March 21, 1943:
“A night disturbed by a sort of nightmare that is becoming more frequent with me and I am inclined to believe is peculiar to myself. Dreams of unendurable boredom – of reading page after page of dullness, of being told endless, pointless jokes, of sitting through cinema films devoid of interest.”
Even in his dreams Waugh was a snob. Veterans of Waugh will remember the torment Tony Last endures in A Handful of Dust: Deep in Amazonia, he must read Dickens aloud to Mr. Todd. The novel was published nine years before the diary entry, and I’ve always thought that scene among the nastiest pieces of literary criticism ever conceived.
Here’s another, more conventional sort of nightmare, recorded by John Ruskin in his Brantwood Diary on Oct. 29, 1877. Knowing what we know of Ruskin’s psychopathology, it’s hardly surprising:
“Half sleepless night again – and entirely disgusting dream, about men using flesh and bones, hands of children especially, for fuel – being out of wood and coals. I took a piece to put on someones [sic] fire, and found it the side of an animals [sic] face, with the jaw and teeth in it.”
Ruskin is also the source of one of the most frightening dreams I know, recorded in his diaries on December 27, 1875:
“Up in good time after sound sleep, though first disturbed by the ghastliest nightmare of dream I ever had in my life. After some pleasant, or at least natural dreaming about receiving people in a large house, I went to rest myself in a room full of fine old pictures; the first of which, when I examined it – and it was large – was of an old surgeon dying by dissecting himself! It was worse than dissecting -- tearing: and with circumstances of horror about the treatment of the head which I will not enter.”
I have never recorded my dreams. While they can be entertaining, they possess no other significance. I’m even reluctant to share dreams with my wife, for fear of boring her. Regaling others with our dreams possesses all the charm of trimming one’s toes in public. It’s slightly indecent. Part of the bittersweet fascination of dreams is their fleeting quality, like life itself.
Monday, April 17, 2006
`Another Thing'
Here’s a fine, puzzling poem by Eric Ormsby; “Another Thing,” from Daybreak at the Straits:
“To live in the body like a nervous guest;
To be confined in fingers and in feet;
To swing on the pendulum of what to eat;
To be subject to south and east and west . . .
“Behind my skullbone lives another thing
That fidgets anxiously as I barge by,
That swivels skyward its chameleon eye
For the interest in the twitches of a wing.
“My inmost dweller is predacious root;
Ransacks reality for steadfastness;
Adores the constancy of all dark stars;
Refuses thirst and thrives upon the brute
Benedictions of the wolf and lioness;
Loves the futility of fountains; preens scars.”
Reading this poem for the first time, I thought of a review of three volumes of Borges translated into English that Ormsby published in 1999 in The New Criterion. The review is titled “Jorge Luis Borges & the Plural I” and this is how it begins:
“It was ironic of fate, though perhaps predictable, to allow Jorge Luis Borges to develop over a long life into his own Doppelgänger. In a 1922 essay entitled `The Nothingness of Personality,’ Borges asserted that `the self does not exist.’ Half-a-century later, an international personality laden with acclaim, he had to depend on wry, self-deprecating quips to safeguard his precious inner nullity. `Yo no soy y’ (`I am not I’), wrote Juan Ramón Jiménez; this was a proposition that Borges not only endorsed but also made a fundamental axiom of his oeuvre. In his story `The Zahir,’ written in the 1940s, he could state, `I am still, albeit only partially, Borges,’ and in `Limits,’ a poem from the 1964 collection aptly entitled The Self and the Other, he ended with the line (as translated by Alastair Reid), `Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.’
The notion of a divided self or, more accurately, a discrete, separate self, is a trope familiar to longtime Borges readers. Where Ormsby differs in this poem from the Argentine master is in the otherness of “another thing” – not “another I” -- that dwells within. I thought at first it might represent soul confined within a corporeal being – the traditional duality of Christianity. But Ormsby’s “other’’ is “predacious” – a hunter. This entity is primitive and dangerous. “Chameleon eye” reminds me of “lizard brain.” But Ormsby is no D.H. Lawrence or Ted Hughes, celebrating blood lust and animal wiles. There’s no “Iron John” swagger in the poem. Rather, the speaker seems to respect this primordial “inmost dweller.”
So, this poem is really not like Borges at all, for Borges – who is not without machismo in his celebration of the gauchos – is at heart obsessed with epistemology. Not Ormsby. The poem hinges on the speaker’s assessment of this “other,” and the assessment is mixed and only hinted at. That it “ransacks reality for steadfastness,” on the face of it, sounds almost commendable. Isn’t that what all of us do, and should do? Adoring “the constancy of all dark stars?” Less commendable, certainly, though hardly damning. And “preens scars?” I thought of Coriolanus and his refusal to do so: “To brag unto them, thus I did, and thus;/Show them the unaching scars which I should hide,/As if I had received them for the hire/Of their breath only!”
In the end, what is “another thing?” Good poems, unlike pop songs and children’s riddles, have no definitive key that opens them like a rusty lock with an audible click. The poem resonates for me because I have learned that parts of me, some of which I remain unaware of, dwell within, autonomously, perhaps dangerously, and forever other.
“To live in the body like a nervous guest;
To be confined in fingers and in feet;
To swing on the pendulum of what to eat;
To be subject to south and east and west . . .
“Behind my skullbone lives another thing
That fidgets anxiously as I barge by,
That swivels skyward its chameleon eye
For the interest in the twitches of a wing.
“My inmost dweller is predacious root;
Ransacks reality for steadfastness;
Adores the constancy of all dark stars;
Refuses thirst and thrives upon the brute
Benedictions of the wolf and lioness;
Loves the futility of fountains; preens scars.”
Reading this poem for the first time, I thought of a review of three volumes of Borges translated into English that Ormsby published in 1999 in The New Criterion. The review is titled “Jorge Luis Borges & the Plural I” and this is how it begins:
“It was ironic of fate, though perhaps predictable, to allow Jorge Luis Borges to develop over a long life into his own Doppelgänger. In a 1922 essay entitled `The Nothingness of Personality,’ Borges asserted that `the self does not exist.’ Half-a-century later, an international personality laden with acclaim, he had to depend on wry, self-deprecating quips to safeguard his precious inner nullity. `Yo no soy y’ (`I am not I’), wrote Juan Ramón Jiménez; this was a proposition that Borges not only endorsed but also made a fundamental axiom of his oeuvre. In his story `The Zahir,’ written in the 1940s, he could state, `I am still, albeit only partially, Borges,’ and in `Limits,’ a poem from the 1964 collection aptly entitled The Self and the Other, he ended with the line (as translated by Alastair Reid), `Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.’
The notion of a divided self or, more accurately, a discrete, separate self, is a trope familiar to longtime Borges readers. Where Ormsby differs in this poem from the Argentine master is in the otherness of “another thing” – not “another I” -- that dwells within. I thought at first it might represent soul confined within a corporeal being – the traditional duality of Christianity. But Ormsby’s “other’’ is “predacious” – a hunter. This entity is primitive and dangerous. “Chameleon eye” reminds me of “lizard brain.” But Ormsby is no D.H. Lawrence or Ted Hughes, celebrating blood lust and animal wiles. There’s no “Iron John” swagger in the poem. Rather, the speaker seems to respect this primordial “inmost dweller.”
So, this poem is really not like Borges at all, for Borges – who is not without machismo in his celebration of the gauchos – is at heart obsessed with epistemology. Not Ormsby. The poem hinges on the speaker’s assessment of this “other,” and the assessment is mixed and only hinted at. That it “ransacks reality for steadfastness,” on the face of it, sounds almost commendable. Isn’t that what all of us do, and should do? Adoring “the constancy of all dark stars?” Less commendable, certainly, though hardly damning. And “preens scars?” I thought of Coriolanus and his refusal to do so: “To brag unto them, thus I did, and thus;/Show them the unaching scars which I should hide,/As if I had received them for the hire/Of their breath only!”
In the end, what is “another thing?” Good poems, unlike pop songs and children’s riddles, have no definitive key that opens them like a rusty lock with an audible click. The poem resonates for me because I have learned that parts of me, some of which I remain unaware of, dwell within, autonomously, perhaps dangerously, and forever other.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Beckett Redux
Samuel Beckett’s gravity has pulled me back into his orbit. I was rereading Parade’s End several days ago, but the music of Ford Madox Ford’s prose, which I usually find irresistible, felt like a forced march and I realized I was hearing Beckett’s rhythms everywhere, in part because Thursday was the centenary of his birth. Much has been written about him and much of it is beside the point, but I have enjoyed several mentions of the man and his work.
One of the best is Eric Ormsby’s review in the New York Sun of The Grove Centenary Edition of Beckett’s work and some other Beckett-related books. Faithful readers know my regard for Ormsby’s work as poet and critic is immense. It’s reassuring to know he loves Beckett:
“Beckett often is caricatured as a `prophet of despair,’ a nihilist of a grimly Irish sort, and such scenarios reinforce this superficial impression. But the language, whether in French or English, fairly leaps from the page; his prose and dialogue possess astonishing vigor. The bare words say one thing but their shape and rhythm and intonation say quite another; however bleak the message, it is delivered with pungent vitality.”
Ormsby is a delightful poet, very much in the mode of Wallace Stevens, with a love of rare words, comedy and elegant phrasing. Here is a poem from his most recent collection, Daybreak at the Straits, ostensibly about the author of The Imitation of Christ, yet it might easily be about Beckett. Here is “Lines Written After Reading Thomas a Kempis”:
“Take comfort from your nothingness.
Inconsequence is not futility.
Get pleasure from becoming less.
“Such diminution is not mimicry:
the cloud is cloudier than all cloudedness
but gets a pleasure in becoming less.
“At night the skin of love becomes a sea
Yet takes a comfort from its nothingness
(in consequence is not futility);
“a sea that stipples at the cloud’s caress
takes pleasure in becoming ever less.
Solace lies in what the lucent sea
“Gives up by gaining all translucency:
Take comfort from your nothingness,
Get pleasure from becoming less.”
Read in the context I have suggested, the poem reminds us that Beckett, though utterly unreligious and often blasphemous, shares themes with religious writers. He asks many of the same questions but arrives at very different answers. The Christ story haunts his work, most famously in Waiting for Godot.
Henry Green, among my favorite novelists, is not conventionally associated with Beckett, his close contemporary. Yet in Romancing, his biography of Green, Jeremy Treglown makes the linkage:
“Samuel Beckett was born only a year after Henry Green, and there are resemblances between their work, especially in Party Going’s emphasis on obsession, loneliness, and the impossibility of truly communicating with or knowing anything certain about other people. There are many cadences in the novel that Beckett seems to have heard. `After all,’ Julia say, as Max shuts the hotel window on the crowd seething below, `one must not hear too many cries for help in this world.’’’
The echo, to my ears, is distant, but I hear it.
On Thursday, George Hunka at Superfluities, himself a playwright, had heartfelt things to say about Beckett, his followers and about a book about Beckett – The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, by John Calder, a friend of the writer. I had not read it before, but George is right: It’s useful and well written. Here is Calder on Watt, the novel I have been rereading:
“It is the most unfinished of his novels, but also one of the funniest and, in its discursions, the most theatrical. Read aloud, it is a delight.”
Beckett seems to have so permeated the culture and been loved and championed by so many people, writers and non-writers alike, that traces of his influence, his voice, his example, can be found almost everywhere, as though he were radioactive and possessed an immensely long half-life.
One of the best is Eric Ormsby’s review in the New York Sun of The Grove Centenary Edition of Beckett’s work and some other Beckett-related books. Faithful readers know my regard for Ormsby’s work as poet and critic is immense. It’s reassuring to know he loves Beckett:
“Beckett often is caricatured as a `prophet of despair,’ a nihilist of a grimly Irish sort, and such scenarios reinforce this superficial impression. But the language, whether in French or English, fairly leaps from the page; his prose and dialogue possess astonishing vigor. The bare words say one thing but their shape and rhythm and intonation say quite another; however bleak the message, it is delivered with pungent vitality.”
Ormsby is a delightful poet, very much in the mode of Wallace Stevens, with a love of rare words, comedy and elegant phrasing. Here is a poem from his most recent collection, Daybreak at the Straits, ostensibly about the author of The Imitation of Christ, yet it might easily be about Beckett. Here is “Lines Written After Reading Thomas a Kempis”:
“Take comfort from your nothingness.
Inconsequence is not futility.
Get pleasure from becoming less.
“Such diminution is not mimicry:
the cloud is cloudier than all cloudedness
but gets a pleasure in becoming less.
“At night the skin of love becomes a sea
Yet takes a comfort from its nothingness
(in consequence is not futility);
“a sea that stipples at the cloud’s caress
takes pleasure in becoming ever less.
Solace lies in what the lucent sea
“Gives up by gaining all translucency:
Take comfort from your nothingness,
Get pleasure from becoming less.”
Read in the context I have suggested, the poem reminds us that Beckett, though utterly unreligious and often blasphemous, shares themes with religious writers. He asks many of the same questions but arrives at very different answers. The Christ story haunts his work, most famously in Waiting for Godot.
Henry Green, among my favorite novelists, is not conventionally associated with Beckett, his close contemporary. Yet in Romancing, his biography of Green, Jeremy Treglown makes the linkage:
“Samuel Beckett was born only a year after Henry Green, and there are resemblances between their work, especially in Party Going’s emphasis on obsession, loneliness, and the impossibility of truly communicating with or knowing anything certain about other people. There are many cadences in the novel that Beckett seems to have heard. `After all,’ Julia say, as Max shuts the hotel window on the crowd seething below, `one must not hear too many cries for help in this world.’’’
The echo, to my ears, is distant, but I hear it.
On Thursday, George Hunka at Superfluities, himself a playwright, had heartfelt things to say about Beckett, his followers and about a book about Beckett – The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, by John Calder, a friend of the writer. I had not read it before, but George is right: It’s useful and well written. Here is Calder on Watt, the novel I have been rereading:
“It is the most unfinished of his novels, but also one of the funniest and, in its discursions, the most theatrical. Read aloud, it is a delight.”
Beckett seems to have so permeated the culture and been loved and championed by so many people, writers and non-writers alike, that traces of his influence, his voice, his example, can be found almost everywhere, as though he were radioactive and possessed an immensely long half-life.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Damned
James Marcus at House of Mirth was reading Cyril Connolly’s essay on Jonathan Swift, and yesterday posted lines from both writers. The quotation from a letter Swift wrote to his friend Charles Ford in 1708 is especially choice. Coincidentally, I have been working my way again through The Complete Poems of Swift, edited by Pat Rogers, which includes all 280 poems authenticated as Swift’s, only 50 of which appeared during his life. I first learned of this wonderful, brick-shaped edition through the English poet James Fenton, who read it during the journey he took with Redmond O’Hanlon that resulted in the latter’s book, Into the Heart of Borneo. Reading Swift in that jungle hell made exquisite sense, and no travel writer is funnier than O’Hanlon. Read them all, including the polymathic Fenton.
Many of Swift’s poems are occasional in the strictest sense, and require some critical apparatus to decrypt. They involve personalities, customs and details of politics and history lost on all but 18th-century specialists. Rogers’ to-the-point notes come in handy, but some of Swift’s poems are more general in their appeal and accessibility. Rogers tells us Swift first published “The Place of the Damned” as a broadside, in 1731 – five years after the publication of Gulliver’s Travels. He also clarifies the meaning of “flammed,” the last word in line 15, which looks like a modern typo: “deceived by a sham story,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is the poem:
“All folks who pretend to religion and grace,
Allow there's a hell, but dispute of the place;
But if hell may by logical rules be defined,
The place of the damned -- I'll tell you my mind.
“Wherever the damned do chiefly abound,
Most certainly there is hell to be found;
Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,
Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;
Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires,
Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars;
Damned villains, corrupted in every station;
Damned time-serving priests all over the nation.
And into the bargain I'll readily give you
Damned ignorant prelates, and counsillors privy.
Then let us no longer by parsons be flammed,
For we know by these marks, the place of the damned:
And hell to be sure is at Paris or Rome.
How happy for us that it is not at home!”
Marcus writes of the Swift letter he quotes, “Certain writers behave like grumpy old men from the moment they set pen to paper, especially knee-jerk misanthropes, whose disgust for the human race might seem unfounded coming from a relative youngster.” Swift was 41 when he wrote the letter Marcus cites. This poem he wrote when he was 67, and it is less redolent of scatological disgust than of his trademark saevo indignatio. It’s also notably less cloacal in its obsessions. To my taste, Swift’s pre-romantic clarity, his black humor, his fixation on the particulars of the social/political world, are invigorating – most of the time, at least. Read the first four lines of a poem titled “Ireland,” and see what you think:
“Remove me from this land of slave,
Where all are fools, and all are knave;
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for naught…”
Many of Swift’s poems are occasional in the strictest sense, and require some critical apparatus to decrypt. They involve personalities, customs and details of politics and history lost on all but 18th-century specialists. Rogers’ to-the-point notes come in handy, but some of Swift’s poems are more general in their appeal and accessibility. Rogers tells us Swift first published “The Place of the Damned” as a broadside, in 1731 – five years after the publication of Gulliver’s Travels. He also clarifies the meaning of “flammed,” the last word in line 15, which looks like a modern typo: “deceived by a sham story,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is the poem:
“All folks who pretend to religion and grace,
Allow there's a hell, but dispute of the place;
But if hell may by logical rules be defined,
The place of the damned -- I'll tell you my mind.
“Wherever the damned do chiefly abound,
Most certainly there is hell to be found;
Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,
Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;
Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires,
Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars;
Damned villains, corrupted in every station;
Damned time-serving priests all over the nation.
And into the bargain I'll readily give you
Damned ignorant prelates, and counsillors privy.
Then let us no longer by parsons be flammed,
For we know by these marks, the place of the damned:
And hell to be sure is at Paris or Rome.
How happy for us that it is not at home!”
Marcus writes of the Swift letter he quotes, “Certain writers behave like grumpy old men from the moment they set pen to paper, especially knee-jerk misanthropes, whose disgust for the human race might seem unfounded coming from a relative youngster.” Swift was 41 when he wrote the letter Marcus cites. This poem he wrote when he was 67, and it is less redolent of scatological disgust than of his trademark saevo indignatio. It’s also notably less cloacal in its obsessions. To my taste, Swift’s pre-romantic clarity, his black humor, his fixation on the particulars of the social/political world, are invigorating – most of the time, at least. Read the first four lines of a poem titled “Ireland,” and see what you think:
“Remove me from this land of slave,
Where all are fools, and all are knave;
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for naught…”
Friday, April 14, 2006
Independent Spirit
The other day I was trying to pin down something I’d read about Chekhov, someone’s renegade but essential insight into his unfamiliar role as an indignant writer, morally outraged but in no way political – a rarity in our world and even rarer in 19th-century Russia. The source eluded me so I dropped it. From experience, I know that’s the only way I would ever recover the reference and, sure enough, it bubbled up this afternoon: Hubert Butler, the great Irish essayist, in his 1948 essay “Materialism Without Marx: A Study of Chekhov.”
Do you know Butler? I first learned of him 10 years ago, when Philip Lopate included several pieces by him in an anthology of essays. The prose was crystalline and the tone was calm, assured, faintly patrician. This was a writer, I sensed, who had earned the privilege of writing with authority and could earn our trust. His range of subject was vast – Irish and family history, archaeology, Russia, the Balkans, the literatures of many nations. He often wrote out of personal experience, but his essays were never cloyingly self-referential like those written by so many contemporary Americans.
Butler was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Kilkenny, in 1900, and died there in 1991. He traveled widely as a young man – the Soviet Union, the Baltic and Balkan countries, the United States, China – but returned to his ancestral home in Kilkenny and remained there. For half a century, he published widely in newspapers and journals, mostly in Ireland. His first book of essays, Escape from the Anthill, was published by Antony Farrell of The Lilliput Press, in 1985. Farrell also brought out The Children of Drancy (1988); Grandmother and Wolf Tone (1990); and, posthumously, In the Land of Nod (1996). Butler was not published in the U.S. until 1996, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought out Independent Spirit, which was drawn from the four Irish volumes and which I immediately bought.
Butler has had his admirers: Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson and R.F. Foster, the great biographer of William Butler Yeats – all estimable writers. But his reputation in the U.S. seems wispy at best, in part, I think, because his voice is so reasonable, so rigorously devoted to the ethical heft of his subjects without turning preachy. Elizabeth Sifton, the editor of the American collection, put it this way in her introduction: “The melodious clarity of prose, his intellectual virtuosity, the large nature of his concerns about the human condition encourage us to appreciate him as a truly international writer.” Butler was quietly sui generis, owing no allegiance to Left or Right. In the Irish context, he espoused, in Sifton’s words, “an Irish republicanism that was hardly congenial to most people in his Anglo-Irish world, and he lived his robust Irish Protestantism throughout a lifetime in fiercely Roman Catholic Eire.” He makes no concessions to non-Irish readers expecting a histrionic stage Irishman. His equipoise, I imagine, must enrage the dogmatic and hysterical of all persuasions. I would love to read his biography.
I haven’t done Butler the justice he deserves. Please, find his books. The Lilliput Press editions, which I have borrowed from several libraries, are elegant works of bookmaking, a pleasure to hold and touch and read. And what was the recalcitrant reference to Chekhov? The entire essay, really, but these sentences will do:
“His book Sakhalin Island, the result of this journey, has only recently been translated, because it is in conflict with the accepted Chekhov legend. It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that, in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic of all his writings. He believed that it was worthwhile to be passionately indignant about remediable injustice and that to remedy injustice was not the task of the statistician, the trained welfare officer, the experienced committeeman, it was the task of every man of sensibility and integrity.”
Do you know Butler? I first learned of him 10 years ago, when Philip Lopate included several pieces by him in an anthology of essays. The prose was crystalline and the tone was calm, assured, faintly patrician. This was a writer, I sensed, who had earned the privilege of writing with authority and could earn our trust. His range of subject was vast – Irish and family history, archaeology, Russia, the Balkans, the literatures of many nations. He often wrote out of personal experience, but his essays were never cloyingly self-referential like those written by so many contemporary Americans.
Butler was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Kilkenny, in 1900, and died there in 1991. He traveled widely as a young man – the Soviet Union, the Baltic and Balkan countries, the United States, China – but returned to his ancestral home in Kilkenny and remained there. For half a century, he published widely in newspapers and journals, mostly in Ireland. His first book of essays, Escape from the Anthill, was published by Antony Farrell of The Lilliput Press, in 1985. Farrell also brought out The Children of Drancy (1988); Grandmother and Wolf Tone (1990); and, posthumously, In the Land of Nod (1996). Butler was not published in the U.S. until 1996, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought out Independent Spirit, which was drawn from the four Irish volumes and which I immediately bought.
Butler has had his admirers: Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson and R.F. Foster, the great biographer of William Butler Yeats – all estimable writers. But his reputation in the U.S. seems wispy at best, in part, I think, because his voice is so reasonable, so rigorously devoted to the ethical heft of his subjects without turning preachy. Elizabeth Sifton, the editor of the American collection, put it this way in her introduction: “The melodious clarity of prose, his intellectual virtuosity, the large nature of his concerns about the human condition encourage us to appreciate him as a truly international writer.” Butler was quietly sui generis, owing no allegiance to Left or Right. In the Irish context, he espoused, in Sifton’s words, “an Irish republicanism that was hardly congenial to most people in his Anglo-Irish world, and he lived his robust Irish Protestantism throughout a lifetime in fiercely Roman Catholic Eire.” He makes no concessions to non-Irish readers expecting a histrionic stage Irishman. His equipoise, I imagine, must enrage the dogmatic and hysterical of all persuasions. I would love to read his biography.
I haven’t done Butler the justice he deserves. Please, find his books. The Lilliput Press editions, which I have borrowed from several libraries, are elegant works of bookmaking, a pleasure to hold and touch and read. And what was the recalcitrant reference to Chekhov? The entire essay, really, but these sentences will do:
“His book Sakhalin Island, the result of this journey, has only recently been translated, because it is in conflict with the accepted Chekhov legend. It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that, in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic of all his writings. He believed that it was worthwhile to be passionately indignant about remediable injustice and that to remedy injustice was not the task of the statistician, the trained welfare officer, the experienced committeeman, it was the task of every man of sensibility and integrity.”
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Happy Birthday, Sam
“Be born, that’s the brainwave now, that is to say live long enough to get acquainted with free carbonic gas, then thanks for the nice time and go.”
from Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
April 13, 1906 – Dec. 22, 1989
Also, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin today opens an online exhibition celebrating Beckett’s centenary. The Web exhibition traces Beckett’s career, using materials from the Ransom Center’s collection.
from Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
April 13, 1906 – Dec. 22, 1989
Also, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin today opens an online exhibition celebrating Beckett’s centenary. The Web exhibition traces Beckett’s career, using materials from the Ransom Center’s collection.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
I Read It in the Paper
On June 19, 1988, deep in the Reagan-Gorbachev Era that now seems nearly as remote as the Roosevelt-Stalin Era, Murray Kempton published a column in New York Newsday that reads like a prescient vision of the demise of the Soviet Union, though that epochal event did not occur until more than three years later. For me, however, the column is most interesting for literary reasons. Kempton – he writes of himself in the third person, as “the visitor” to Moscow – recounts a conversation with a Soviet journalist, Alexi Adzhubei, who was also Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law. Adzhubei asked Kempton if he is a Sovietologist, and he answers, to Adzhubei’s delight, “To me, the only Sovietologist who is always up to date is Anton Chekhov.”
Part of the joke, of course, is that the great storywriter and playwright died 13 years before the bloody birth of the Soviet Union. The rest of the joke is that few Westerners have understood Chekhov well enough, as Kempton did, to appreciate his grasp of what used to be called the “Russian Soul,” not to mention the human soul. Those who reduce Chekhov to a few bittersweet satires of bourgeois life fail to understand him.
(Parenthetically, do American readers still fall in love with Mother Russia, by way of its great writers, especially those of the 19th century? It was for me a passionate, stormy affair that started with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ((I remain faithful to the latter)), and it developed into dalliances of various degrees of devotedness with Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, Nabokov and Mandelstam, among others. Within the last several weeks, my 18-year-old son read his first Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, in just a couple of super-heated days, the way I did, then interrupted his Russian interlude with The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow ((whose parents emigrated from Russia in 1913)), and resumed his Russian idyll with Anna Karenina. Like father, like fortunate son.)
Kempton continues:
“None of us could be so bold as to advance a particular Chekhov story as the greatest of all but `My Life’ would be a splendid candidate. At one juncture, its hero marries a young woman of wealth, who is transiently possessed by an itch to go back to the land. They go off to convert her estate into a working farm and spend a horrid few months until, disgusted by the crafts and coarseness of the peasants, she abandons all lofty notions and flees to London to study singing.
“From there, she writes to ask for a divorce and to report that she has bought herself a ring engraved in Hebrew, `All things pass away,’ and that it would be her talisman against future infatuations. And he reflects: `If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be, “Nothing passes away.”’
“And nothing seems ever to pass away in Moscow. Russian history asserts itself there as all but immutable and immovable, and so it asserted itself for Chekhov in 1900. The on-again, off-again harryings of Andrei Sakharov and Boris Pasternak would have been for him the oldest of tales.”
For the rest of the column – I nearly called it an essay – Kempton plays and plays again with the ironies of Russian history, the ironies he borrows from Chekhov. Near the end, he even turns Karl Marx on his head – not an easy feat, for Marx knew irony when he saw it, except in the particulars of his own life. I remember reading Kempton’s piece as it appeared in New York Newsday, a tabloid. It was thrilling – a journalist citing Chekhov but not as an excuse for showing off his erudition. The column works because for Kempton, who died in 1997, literature is a part of life and life, in turn, permeates literature. What we observe and learn in each realm helps us get along in the other – a grand symbiosis.
For the record, I had read “My Life” just a couple of years before I read Kempton’s column. In the 1980s, when the Ecco Press incrementally published the Constance Garnett translations of Chekhov’s stories, I bought all 13 volumes as they appeared plus, in uniform editions, Notebooks of Anton Chekhov and The Unknown Chekhov. “My Life” appears in volume eight, The Chorus Girl and Other Stories. Garnett’s translations of Chekhov and other Russian writers have been criticized as too stiff, too “literary,” too Victorian. But her labors during the teens of the last century were immense and hugely influential. Chekhov’s entry into English powerfully touched and stirred such writers as Virginia Woolf, Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett. One can hardly imagine the short story in English without the potent example of Chekhov.
Kempton’s column, titled “Hostage to History,” was later reprinted in his 1994 omnibus Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. In that volume, you can find a similar Kempton effort, published six months after the Chekhov piece, titled “As the World Turns.” I’ll say nothing else, but here’s a one-sentence tease:
“The most enlightening guide I have found to Central America is not the product of a social scientist’s research but Nostromo, the novel Joseph Conrad published in 1904 when his direct experience with the neighborhood was nearly thirty years past and had never extended beyond a tarrying or so in ports when he had sailed as a schooner deck officer in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Part of the joke, of course, is that the great storywriter and playwright died 13 years before the bloody birth of the Soviet Union. The rest of the joke is that few Westerners have understood Chekhov well enough, as Kempton did, to appreciate his grasp of what used to be called the “Russian Soul,” not to mention the human soul. Those who reduce Chekhov to a few bittersweet satires of bourgeois life fail to understand him.
(Parenthetically, do American readers still fall in love with Mother Russia, by way of its great writers, especially those of the 19th century? It was for me a passionate, stormy affair that started with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ((I remain faithful to the latter)), and it developed into dalliances of various degrees of devotedness with Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, Nabokov and Mandelstam, among others. Within the last several weeks, my 18-year-old son read his first Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, in just a couple of super-heated days, the way I did, then interrupted his Russian interlude with The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow ((whose parents emigrated from Russia in 1913)), and resumed his Russian idyll with Anna Karenina. Like father, like fortunate son.)
Kempton continues:
“None of us could be so bold as to advance a particular Chekhov story as the greatest of all but `My Life’ would be a splendid candidate. At one juncture, its hero marries a young woman of wealth, who is transiently possessed by an itch to go back to the land. They go off to convert her estate into a working farm and spend a horrid few months until, disgusted by the crafts and coarseness of the peasants, she abandons all lofty notions and flees to London to study singing.
“From there, she writes to ask for a divorce and to report that she has bought herself a ring engraved in Hebrew, `All things pass away,’ and that it would be her talisman against future infatuations. And he reflects: `If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be, “Nothing passes away.”’
“And nothing seems ever to pass away in Moscow. Russian history asserts itself there as all but immutable and immovable, and so it asserted itself for Chekhov in 1900. The on-again, off-again harryings of Andrei Sakharov and Boris Pasternak would have been for him the oldest of tales.”
For the rest of the column – I nearly called it an essay – Kempton plays and plays again with the ironies of Russian history, the ironies he borrows from Chekhov. Near the end, he even turns Karl Marx on his head – not an easy feat, for Marx knew irony when he saw it, except in the particulars of his own life. I remember reading Kempton’s piece as it appeared in New York Newsday, a tabloid. It was thrilling – a journalist citing Chekhov but not as an excuse for showing off his erudition. The column works because for Kempton, who died in 1997, literature is a part of life and life, in turn, permeates literature. What we observe and learn in each realm helps us get along in the other – a grand symbiosis.
For the record, I had read “My Life” just a couple of years before I read Kempton’s column. In the 1980s, when the Ecco Press incrementally published the Constance Garnett translations of Chekhov’s stories, I bought all 13 volumes as they appeared plus, in uniform editions, Notebooks of Anton Chekhov and The Unknown Chekhov. “My Life” appears in volume eight, The Chorus Girl and Other Stories. Garnett’s translations of Chekhov and other Russian writers have been criticized as too stiff, too “literary,” too Victorian. But her labors during the teens of the last century were immense and hugely influential. Chekhov’s entry into English powerfully touched and stirred such writers as Virginia Woolf, Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett. One can hardly imagine the short story in English without the potent example of Chekhov.
Kempton’s column, titled “Hostage to History,” was later reprinted in his 1994 omnibus Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. In that volume, you can find a similar Kempton effort, published six months after the Chekhov piece, titled “As the World Turns.” I’ll say nothing else, but here’s a one-sentence tease:
“The most enlightening guide I have found to Central America is not the product of a social scientist’s research but Nostromo, the novel Joseph Conrad published in 1904 when his direct experience with the neighborhood was nearly thirty years past and had never extended beyond a tarrying or so in ports when he had sailed as a schooner deck officer in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Poetry -- It's a Bargain
The New Criterion never disappoints. Consistently, it publishes the best arts writing of any periodical in the United States, and the special poetry section in the April issue confirms my otherwise dubious resort to hyperbole.
William Logan, whose The Undiscovered Country recently received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, files a partial minority report with “Elizabeth Bishop Unfinished.” Typical sample: “Her early poems, stuffed with allegories and fables, betray too close a reading of George Herbert – sometimes she seems a Metaphysical, Third Class. (Her juvenilia here shows she hadn’t yet learned to trust or instincts – worse, she didn’t know she had instincts.)”
Up next is, for me, the centerpiece: the delightful Eric Ormsby’s “An Austere Opulence,” devoted to his attendance at a poetry reading given in February, at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, England, by Geoffrey Hill, surely the greatest living poet in the language. How I wish I had been there. Hill is 73 years old and in the last decade has published seven books of poetry and a collection of essays. I am not a believer, but I laud Ormsby for having the courage to state the obvious:
“Although the dogma of diversity piously excludes `Englishness’ as a recognized category, it is, I think, Hill’s strenuous Christianity that forms the major obstacle to acceptance. His work not only is steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but take it very seriously; his poetry can neither be confronted nor understood apart from it.”
Next comes “Defeating the Poem” by Denis Donoghue, a critic and professor of literature at New York University: “In class, many students are ready to talk. But they want to talk either about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading. They are happy to denounce imperialism an colonialism rather than read `Heart of Darkness,’ Kim, and A Passage to India in which imperialism and colonialism are held up to complex judgment.”
Then, we have “Johnson’s Divided Mind,” by poet-critic Adam Kirsch, author of The Thousand Wells. Kirsch’s piece starts as a review of the new edition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, which the reviewer describes as majestic: “This balancing of clauses, with its symmetry and solidity, embodies its own reproach to the eccentricities of Cowley and Cleveland. Over the hundreds of pages of the Lives, such balance becomes more than a syntactical principle: it shows the deep constitution of Johnson’s mind, and helps to explain the high value he places on balance, moral and aesthetic, in the poems he discusses.”
Finally, David Yezzi, poet and executive editor of The New Criterion, gives us “The Unrealists’ Return,” a rare defense of reason and intelligence in poetry in the 21st century: “The abandonment of logic and reason in poetry, like the abandonment of traditional meter, is nothing new,” he writes, and proceeds to prove his case.
Also in the April issue is a poem, “A Science Fiction Writer of the Fifties,” by Brad Leithauser. On the newsstand, The New Criterion costs $7.75 – less than most movie tickets and far more entertaining, challenging and enduring.
William Logan, whose The Undiscovered Country recently received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, files a partial minority report with “Elizabeth Bishop Unfinished.” Typical sample: “Her early poems, stuffed with allegories and fables, betray too close a reading of George Herbert – sometimes she seems a Metaphysical, Third Class. (Her juvenilia here shows she hadn’t yet learned to trust or instincts – worse, she didn’t know she had instincts.)”
Up next is, for me, the centerpiece: the delightful Eric Ormsby’s “An Austere Opulence,” devoted to his attendance at a poetry reading given in February, at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, England, by Geoffrey Hill, surely the greatest living poet in the language. How I wish I had been there. Hill is 73 years old and in the last decade has published seven books of poetry and a collection of essays. I am not a believer, but I laud Ormsby for having the courage to state the obvious:
“Although the dogma of diversity piously excludes `Englishness’ as a recognized category, it is, I think, Hill’s strenuous Christianity that forms the major obstacle to acceptance. His work not only is steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but take it very seriously; his poetry can neither be confronted nor understood apart from it.”
Next comes “Defeating the Poem” by Denis Donoghue, a critic and professor of literature at New York University: “In class, many students are ready to talk. But they want to talk either about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading. They are happy to denounce imperialism an colonialism rather than read `Heart of Darkness,’ Kim, and A Passage to India in which imperialism and colonialism are held up to complex judgment.”
Then, we have “Johnson’s Divided Mind,” by poet-critic Adam Kirsch, author of The Thousand Wells. Kirsch’s piece starts as a review of the new edition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, which the reviewer describes as majestic: “This balancing of clauses, with its symmetry and solidity, embodies its own reproach to the eccentricities of Cowley and Cleveland. Over the hundreds of pages of the Lives, such balance becomes more than a syntactical principle: it shows the deep constitution of Johnson’s mind, and helps to explain the high value he places on balance, moral and aesthetic, in the poems he discusses.”
Finally, David Yezzi, poet and executive editor of The New Criterion, gives us “The Unrealists’ Return,” a rare defense of reason and intelligence in poetry in the 21st century: “The abandonment of logic and reason in poetry, like the abandonment of traditional meter, is nothing new,” he writes, and proceeds to prove his case.
Also in the April issue is a poem, “A Science Fiction Writer of the Fifties,” by Brad Leithauser. On the newsstand, The New Criterion costs $7.75 – less than most movie tickets and far more entertaining, challenging and enduring.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Tasting the Language
The Scottish Poetry Library asked American poet August Kleinzahler to name some of his “old favourite” books, and this is how he answered:
“Old favorites, gee . . . Moby-Dick, Isaac Babel's stories. I could go on. I seem to respond to closely written texts, sentence by sentence, where I can taste the language, experience the musculature of the syntax.”
How telling that a poet’s first choices are prose writers, though not, fortunately, writers of “poetic prose,” from the tribe of Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac and John Updike at his most preciously self-regarding. I share Kleinzahler’s taste, though not exclusively. In the wrong hands, “closely written texts” turn into purple prose or high-compression avant-garde inertia, with language so dense it emits no light, like a black hole. Some prose ought to be transparent – look at Swift, Orwell (in his essays and reviews) and Waugh. But the yeasty, Elizabethan gusto of Melville and Babel’s lyrical modernism are always rich and nourishing – like meatloaf and potatoes after a regimen of, say, the soy milk and sprouts of Raymond Carver or Richard Ford.
Moby-Dick is a great black comedy brought to life by the rowdy, philosophical, undomesticated, masculine voice of Ishmael. No voice, no book: It’s a tall tale told by a mad autodidact – the antiauthoritarian voice of American democracy, the counterpoint to Ahab’s ravings. Take Chapter 95, “The Cassock,” a three-paragraph jape that begins:
“Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, -- longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.”
That’s Melville’s way of saying “whale penis.” The comedy slowly builds as a sailor known as a mincer chops it up, cuts arm holes and dons the cassock “in the full canonicals of his calling.” Melville won’t let go of the religious analogy, calling the mincer “a candidate for an archbishoprick” – a blasphemously phallic pun. Much of Moby-Dick is like this – highly textured, bawdy language out of Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne (all of whom Melville read before writing his great book).
Kleinzahler’s choice of Babel is perfect. Even in translation, his prose is lapidary, words set like stones in a mosaic. This comes from “The Cemetery in Kozin,” in Red Cavalry, as translated by Peter Constantine:
“Gray, abraded stones with letters three hundred years old. The rough contours of the reliefs cut into the granite. The image of a fish and a sheep above a dead man’s head. Images of rabbis wearing fur hats. Rabbis, their narrow hips girded with belts. Beneath their eyeless faces the wavy stone ripple of curly beards. To one side, below and oak tree cleft in two by lightning, stands the vault of Rabbi Asriil, slaughtered by Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks. Four generations lie in this sepulcher, as poor as the hovel of a water carrier, and tablet, moss-green tablets, sing of them in Bedouin prayer.”
Babel’s sentences, many without verbs, are fitted into the paragraph like the stones in the graveyard – muteness transformed into eloquent sadness by the “musculature of the syntax.” I remember something similar in Gogol’s style, which animates the inanimate. The language crackles and glows with an energy appropriate to the grotesque lives of the characters.
The opposite of Kleinzahler’s “closely written texts,” of course, is most genre fiction and other forms of popular writing – newspapers, magazines, advertising and, to be honest, most blogs. Either the writers are unable to write or they take a reverse pride in writing badly.
I prefer Kleinzahler’s prose to his poetry. His nonfiction collection, Cutty, One Rock, is a raffish melding of Basil Bunting and Raymond Chandler in which you can, as he says, “taste the language.” This is from a hilarious piece called “Too Bad About Mrs. Ferri,” in which Kleinzahler as a boy tries to get an autograph from one of his neighbors, the comedian Buddy Hackett, in the Palisades section of Fort Lee, N.J.:
“He was barely taller than I was, and I was seven years old. He was red-faced and breathing moistly and with some difficulty, like a toy bulldog on a sultry day. `Whuh da you want, kid?’ he asked in one of America’s most distinctive voices. I identified myself, told him where I lived, and asked for his autograph. He glared at me, incredulous, for a few moments (I could sense the wife and maid cowering inside) and said, `Fuck you, kid; talk to my agent!’ and slammed the door in my face.”
It gets even better. It’s not Melville or Babel, but it’s sharp, energetic, artfully calibrated prose.
“Old favorites, gee . . . Moby-Dick, Isaac Babel's stories. I could go on. I seem to respond to closely written texts, sentence by sentence, where I can taste the language, experience the musculature of the syntax.”
How telling that a poet’s first choices are prose writers, though not, fortunately, writers of “poetic prose,” from the tribe of Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac and John Updike at his most preciously self-regarding. I share Kleinzahler’s taste, though not exclusively. In the wrong hands, “closely written texts” turn into purple prose or high-compression avant-garde inertia, with language so dense it emits no light, like a black hole. Some prose ought to be transparent – look at Swift, Orwell (in his essays and reviews) and Waugh. But the yeasty, Elizabethan gusto of Melville and Babel’s lyrical modernism are always rich and nourishing – like meatloaf and potatoes after a regimen of, say, the soy milk and sprouts of Raymond Carver or Richard Ford.
Moby-Dick is a great black comedy brought to life by the rowdy, philosophical, undomesticated, masculine voice of Ishmael. No voice, no book: It’s a tall tale told by a mad autodidact – the antiauthoritarian voice of American democracy, the counterpoint to Ahab’s ravings. Take Chapter 95, “The Cassock,” a three-paragraph jape that begins:
“Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, -- longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.”
That’s Melville’s way of saying “whale penis.” The comedy slowly builds as a sailor known as a mincer chops it up, cuts arm holes and dons the cassock “in the full canonicals of his calling.” Melville won’t let go of the religious analogy, calling the mincer “a candidate for an archbishoprick” – a blasphemously phallic pun. Much of Moby-Dick is like this – highly textured, bawdy language out of Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne (all of whom Melville read before writing his great book).
Kleinzahler’s choice of Babel is perfect. Even in translation, his prose is lapidary, words set like stones in a mosaic. This comes from “The Cemetery in Kozin,” in Red Cavalry, as translated by Peter Constantine:
“Gray, abraded stones with letters three hundred years old. The rough contours of the reliefs cut into the granite. The image of a fish and a sheep above a dead man’s head. Images of rabbis wearing fur hats. Rabbis, their narrow hips girded with belts. Beneath their eyeless faces the wavy stone ripple of curly beards. To one side, below and oak tree cleft in two by lightning, stands the vault of Rabbi Asriil, slaughtered by Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks. Four generations lie in this sepulcher, as poor as the hovel of a water carrier, and tablet, moss-green tablets, sing of them in Bedouin prayer.”
Babel’s sentences, many without verbs, are fitted into the paragraph like the stones in the graveyard – muteness transformed into eloquent sadness by the “musculature of the syntax.” I remember something similar in Gogol’s style, which animates the inanimate. The language crackles and glows with an energy appropriate to the grotesque lives of the characters.
The opposite of Kleinzahler’s “closely written texts,” of course, is most genre fiction and other forms of popular writing – newspapers, magazines, advertising and, to be honest, most blogs. Either the writers are unable to write or they take a reverse pride in writing badly.
I prefer Kleinzahler’s prose to his poetry. His nonfiction collection, Cutty, One Rock, is a raffish melding of Basil Bunting and Raymond Chandler in which you can, as he says, “taste the language.” This is from a hilarious piece called “Too Bad About Mrs. Ferri,” in which Kleinzahler as a boy tries to get an autograph from one of his neighbors, the comedian Buddy Hackett, in the Palisades section of Fort Lee, N.J.:
“He was barely taller than I was, and I was seven years old. He was red-faced and breathing moistly and with some difficulty, like a toy bulldog on a sultry day. `Whuh da you want, kid?’ he asked in one of America’s most distinctive voices. I identified myself, told him where I lived, and asked for his autograph. He glared at me, incredulous, for a few moments (I could sense the wife and maid cowering inside) and said, `Fuck you, kid; talk to my agent!’ and slammed the door in my face.”
It gets even better. It’s not Melville or Babel, but it’s sharp, energetic, artfully calibrated prose.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Occasional Doggerel
The Valediction
I hear their sighs and mutters
When I slow their happy momentum.
Youth is hungry and cruel.
I calculate per centum.
Coin by coin, I count my change.
They think me slow and mean.
I dodder for their benefit.
It’s hard when you’re eighteen.
Then I smile and take my leave,
And put away my purse.
“Fuck you,” I say, as I nod my head
And, as always, keep my blessing terse.
I hear their sighs and mutters
When I slow their happy momentum.
Youth is hungry and cruel.
I calculate per centum.
Coin by coin, I count my change.
They think me slow and mean.
I dodder for their benefit.
It’s hard when you’re eighteen.
Then I smile and take my leave,
And put away my purse.
“Fuck you,” I say, as I nod my head
And, as always, keep my blessing terse.
`I Was No Longer Young'
Samuel Johnson was not among the great letter writers in the language. He was not, in other words, John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson or Flannery O’Connor. We read his letters because they detail the mundanities of Johnson’s life, especially finances and literary politics, and not in expectation of wit or memorable turns of phrase. For Johnson, letters were an expedient means of communication, not a rehearsal for literature. But close reading turns up gems of observation, those casual insights into human nature that were Johnson’s gift to us. On July 20, 1762, Johnson wrote his friend Giuseppe Baretti:
“Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My playfellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young.”
Johnson was 52 when he wrote this of Lichfield, as I was when I visited my hometown last October for the first time in many years. My brother and his family live in the house we grew up in, but only three neighbors remain from our childhood. One who moved away long ago was acquitted last year of murdering his wife. Many are dead, though I effortlessly remember faces, clothes, gestures, even scraps of conversation from almost 50 years ago. One theory of memory posits that it is aided, made adhesive, when associated with strong emotion. If this is so, why are so many early memories so mundane, so memorable for being so unmemorable, though no less precious to me?
I visited Pearl Road Elementary School, in Parma Heights, Ohio, where I started kindergarten in 1957 and left the sixth grade in 1964. It was a Saturday, so I could not go inside, and the October sun was brilliant and blinded the windows with glare, but I peered into my third-grade classroom, where I spent a year with Miss Shaker. This was the room in which we watched President Kennedy’s inauguration on televison – the fire in the dais, Robert Frost reading “The Gift Outright” from memory. Here, Lynn Kilbane leaned over kissed me on my left shoulder. And on the roof above the room was the civil defense siren that screamed during “duck-and-cover” drills. All of these memories seem as vivid as my sons’ faces.
I apologize for my middle-aged self-indulgence. Perhaps such memories are made to remain private, to be replayed on the exclusive screen in our heads. Johnson, I think, would have been forgiving. In The Rambler, on Aug. 7, 1750, he wrote:
"So few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate to the mind of man, and so frequently are we in want of present pleasure or employment, that we are forced to have recourse every moment to the past and future for supplemental satisfactions, and relieve the vacuities of our being by recollections of former passages, or anticipation of events to come."
“Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My playfellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young.”
Johnson was 52 when he wrote this of Lichfield, as I was when I visited my hometown last October for the first time in many years. My brother and his family live in the house we grew up in, but only three neighbors remain from our childhood. One who moved away long ago was acquitted last year of murdering his wife. Many are dead, though I effortlessly remember faces, clothes, gestures, even scraps of conversation from almost 50 years ago. One theory of memory posits that it is aided, made adhesive, when associated with strong emotion. If this is so, why are so many early memories so mundane, so memorable for being so unmemorable, though no less precious to me?
I visited Pearl Road Elementary School, in Parma Heights, Ohio, where I started kindergarten in 1957 and left the sixth grade in 1964. It was a Saturday, so I could not go inside, and the October sun was brilliant and blinded the windows with glare, but I peered into my third-grade classroom, where I spent a year with Miss Shaker. This was the room in which we watched President Kennedy’s inauguration on televison – the fire in the dais, Robert Frost reading “The Gift Outright” from memory. Here, Lynn Kilbane leaned over kissed me on my left shoulder. And on the roof above the room was the civil defense siren that screamed during “duck-and-cover” drills. All of these memories seem as vivid as my sons’ faces.
I apologize for my middle-aged self-indulgence. Perhaps such memories are made to remain private, to be replayed on the exclusive screen in our heads. Johnson, I think, would have been forgiving. In The Rambler, on Aug. 7, 1750, he wrote:
"So few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate to the mind of man, and so frequently are we in want of present pleasure or employment, that we are forced to have recourse every moment to the past and future for supplemental satisfactions, and relieve the vacuities of our being by recollections of former passages, or anticipation of events to come."
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Thoughts After Mitchell After Ruskin
I happened upon a poem I rather like by a writer new to me, Elma Mitchell. She is English, born in Scotland in 1919, and that’s all I knew about her until my guardian angel, Dave Lull, supplied me with everything but her blood type. Sometimes, less context means more enjoyment, and this poem wins or loses you on its merits, like a building once the scaffolding has been removed. Here is “Thoughts After Ruskin”:
“Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places.
Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverizing,
-- All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.
“Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the nags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool around their knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.
“Their huge hands! Their everywhere eyes! Their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,
Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,
Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,
Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!
“And when all’s over, off with overalls,
Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essences of lilies and of roses.”
What first attracted me was the mention of Ruskin in the title. I love so much of his work but acknowledge that, sexually speaking, he was a world-class weirdo. His biographer, Tim Hilton, flatly identifies him as a pedophile, and his unconsummated marriage was scuttled by his apparent inability to accept that women, unlike marble statues, have pubic hair. In other words, early in the 21st century, Ruskin is an easy target for any pipsqueak armed with an ideology set on full auto, though such an approach doesn’t come close to explaining why Praeterita and Fors Clavigera, among others, are such beguiling works of art.
Had I found Mitchell’s poem in an anthology of feminist poetry, or even women’s poetry – though I’m unlikely ever to open such ghettoized volumes – I probably would have passed. Context can be important, and Mitchell’s poem is good enough to transcend the familiar context of angry female screed. I like poems containing stories, and “Thoughts After Ruskin” distills much of a life. To her credit, Mitchell renders a woman, not Woman. I also like writing that pays close attention to the details of daily life. The cumulative force of all those gerunds – 34, by my count, in a poem of 36 lines – turns a life into vigorous, ceaseless activity, most of it in the cause of serving husband and children. It’s a Homeric catalog of the home front, not Troy.
The ending is a little too pat, too eager to romanticize feminine self-esteem and turn old Ruskin on his patriarchal Victorian head. It’s the patient chronicling of a woman’s thankless life – in this, at least, she reminds me of Larkin and Alan Brownjohn -- that I like so much. Later, digging around in the midden that is Fors Clavigera, I unearthed a passage for which Mitchell’s poem serves virtually as a gloss:
“Then, for my meaning as to women’s work, what should I mean, but scrubbing furniture, dusting walls, sweeping floors, making the beds, washing up the crockery, ditto the children, and whipping them when they want it, -- mending their clothes, cooking their dinners, -- and when there are cooks more than enough, helping with the farm work, or the garden, or the dairy? Is that plain speaking enough? Have I not fifty times over, in season and out of season, dictated and insisted and asseverated and – what stronger word else there may be – that the essentially right life for all womankind is that of the Swiss Paysanne?”
He could be a condescending bastard, couldn’t he?
“Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places.
Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverizing,
-- All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.
“Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the nags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool around their knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.
“Their huge hands! Their everywhere eyes! Their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,
Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,
Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,
Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!
“And when all’s over, off with overalls,
Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essences of lilies and of roses.”
What first attracted me was the mention of Ruskin in the title. I love so much of his work but acknowledge that, sexually speaking, he was a world-class weirdo. His biographer, Tim Hilton, flatly identifies him as a pedophile, and his unconsummated marriage was scuttled by his apparent inability to accept that women, unlike marble statues, have pubic hair. In other words, early in the 21st century, Ruskin is an easy target for any pipsqueak armed with an ideology set on full auto, though such an approach doesn’t come close to explaining why Praeterita and Fors Clavigera, among others, are such beguiling works of art.
Had I found Mitchell’s poem in an anthology of feminist poetry, or even women’s poetry – though I’m unlikely ever to open such ghettoized volumes – I probably would have passed. Context can be important, and Mitchell’s poem is good enough to transcend the familiar context of angry female screed. I like poems containing stories, and “Thoughts After Ruskin” distills much of a life. To her credit, Mitchell renders a woman, not Woman. I also like writing that pays close attention to the details of daily life. The cumulative force of all those gerunds – 34, by my count, in a poem of 36 lines – turns a life into vigorous, ceaseless activity, most of it in the cause of serving husband and children. It’s a Homeric catalog of the home front, not Troy.
The ending is a little too pat, too eager to romanticize feminine self-esteem and turn old Ruskin on his patriarchal Victorian head. It’s the patient chronicling of a woman’s thankless life – in this, at least, she reminds me of Larkin and Alan Brownjohn -- that I like so much. Later, digging around in the midden that is Fors Clavigera, I unearthed a passage for which Mitchell’s poem serves virtually as a gloss:
“Then, for my meaning as to women’s work, what should I mean, but scrubbing furniture, dusting walls, sweeping floors, making the beds, washing up the crockery, ditto the children, and whipping them when they want it, -- mending their clothes, cooking their dinners, -- and when there are cooks more than enough, helping with the farm work, or the garden, or the dairy? Is that plain speaking enough? Have I not fifty times over, in season and out of season, dictated and insisted and asseverated and – what stronger word else there may be – that the essentially right life for all womankind is that of the Swiss Paysanne?”
He could be a condescending bastard, couldn’t he?
Friday, April 07, 2006
The Pleasure Principle
It’s important that each of us assembles a shelf of authors whose work delivers guilt-free, unalloyed pleasure, on demand. They are not necessarily the best writers (though they may be the best of their kind) or even our favorite writers, but the very recollection of their existence, when we are miles or days away from reading them, should inspire a consoling sense of anticipation: “Oh, I must read him again soon!” My shelf is brief and, I notice, exclusively English. I don’t know what to make of this, except that English writers often have a way of being charmingly serious or, perhaps, seriously charming, especially to American readers.
First on the list is P.G. Wodehouse. No writer is funnier and none more gracefully eludes practitioners of explication du texte. Try to gloss a Wodehouse passage, and analysis dissipates like a bucket of steam. Here, chosen at random, is the opening of Chapter 2, Section III, of his 1929 novel, Summer Lightning:
“By the way,” said Ronnie, the flood of eloquence subsiding. “A thought occurs. Have you any notion where we’re headed for?”
“Heaven.”
“I mean at the moment.”
“I supposed you were taking me to tea somewhere.”
Philip Larkin is another, and not just for his poetry. Do yourself a good turn and read his letters and All What Jazz, his collected jazz reviews. Larkin is reliably funny and contrary, full of good sense and no respecter of delicate sensibilities. This is from a letter he wrote to Winifred Bradshaw on Nov. 16, 1976:
“You sound as if you keep busy – or are kept busy – and this keeps misery at bay to some extent. I tend to take to drink in such circumstances (incidentally, Patsy Strang, later Patsy Murphy, is now reputedly an alcoholic in Dublin. Another of my friends has been in hospital for the same thing. So I watch it). And of course work, paradoxically enough, is a comfort. One wakes up wanting to cut one’s throat; one goes to work, & in 15 minutes one wants to cut someone else’s – complete cure!”
Next, of course, is Evelyn Waugh, master of prose and bile. Here is a sample set in Paris from Labels, his first travel book, published in 1930:
“I need hardly say that directly I felt strong enough, which was before noon next day, I left the Crillon for cheaper accommodation. My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls. The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through.”
I could include others – Anthony Powell, much of Kingsley Amis – but my final exhibit is Henry Green, less known than the others and probably less accessible because of his beautifully modulated, idiosyncratic prose. James Wood has lauded his “gentle comic reticence,” and I rank him among the great novelists of the last century. Here’s a snippet from his second novel, Living, published in 1929:
“Mr Craigan had gone to work when he was nine and every day he had worked though most of daylight till now, when he was going to get old age pension. So you will hear men who have worked like this talk of monotony of their lives, but when they grow to be old they are more glad to have work and this monotony has grown so great that they have forgotten it. Like on a train which goes through night smoothly and at an even pace – so monotony of noise made by the wheels bumping over joints between the rails becomes rhythm – so this monotony of hours grows to be the habit and regulation on which we grow old. And as women who have nits in their hair over a long period collapse when they are killed, feeling so badly removal of that violent irritation which has become stimulus for them, so when men who have worked these regular hours are now deprived of work, so, often, their lives come to be like puddles on the beach where tide no longer reaches.”
Some readers may wonder how such a passage fits my prescription for “guilt-free, unalloyed pleasure,” and I admit the comedy is grimmer than Wodehouse’s and the syntax more demanding. But Green’s prose, once you leap in like an inexperienced dancer and learn to move to his rhythms, is addictive and quite often laugh-out-loud funny. He was the creator of great characters from all classes, each with a patented manner of speaking, and his later novels are composed almost entirely of dialogue (putting him in surprising company: Ivy Compton-Burnett and William Gaddis). Green published nine novels and a memorably elliptical memoir. He brings out my inner proselytizer.
First on the list is P.G. Wodehouse. No writer is funnier and none more gracefully eludes practitioners of explication du texte. Try to gloss a Wodehouse passage, and analysis dissipates like a bucket of steam. Here, chosen at random, is the opening of Chapter 2, Section III, of his 1929 novel, Summer Lightning:
“By the way,” said Ronnie, the flood of eloquence subsiding. “A thought occurs. Have you any notion where we’re headed for?”
“Heaven.”
“I mean at the moment.”
“I supposed you were taking me to tea somewhere.”
Philip Larkin is another, and not just for his poetry. Do yourself a good turn and read his letters and All What Jazz, his collected jazz reviews. Larkin is reliably funny and contrary, full of good sense and no respecter of delicate sensibilities. This is from a letter he wrote to Winifred Bradshaw on Nov. 16, 1976:
“You sound as if you keep busy – or are kept busy – and this keeps misery at bay to some extent. I tend to take to drink in such circumstances (incidentally, Patsy Strang, later Patsy Murphy, is now reputedly an alcoholic in Dublin. Another of my friends has been in hospital for the same thing. So I watch it). And of course work, paradoxically enough, is a comfort. One wakes up wanting to cut one’s throat; one goes to work, & in 15 minutes one wants to cut someone else’s – complete cure!”
Next, of course, is Evelyn Waugh, master of prose and bile. Here is a sample set in Paris from Labels, his first travel book, published in 1930:
“I need hardly say that directly I felt strong enough, which was before noon next day, I left the Crillon for cheaper accommodation. My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls. The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through.”
I could include others – Anthony Powell, much of Kingsley Amis – but my final exhibit is Henry Green, less known than the others and probably less accessible because of his beautifully modulated, idiosyncratic prose. James Wood has lauded his “gentle comic reticence,” and I rank him among the great novelists of the last century. Here’s a snippet from his second novel, Living, published in 1929:
“Mr Craigan had gone to work when he was nine and every day he had worked though most of daylight till now, when he was going to get old age pension. So you will hear men who have worked like this talk of monotony of their lives, but when they grow to be old they are more glad to have work and this monotony has grown so great that they have forgotten it. Like on a train which goes through night smoothly and at an even pace – so monotony of noise made by the wheels bumping over joints between the rails becomes rhythm – so this monotony of hours grows to be the habit and regulation on which we grow old. And as women who have nits in their hair over a long period collapse when they are killed, feeling so badly removal of that violent irritation which has become stimulus for them, so when men who have worked these regular hours are now deprived of work, so, often, their lives come to be like puddles on the beach where tide no longer reaches.”
Some readers may wonder how such a passage fits my prescription for “guilt-free, unalloyed pleasure,” and I admit the comedy is grimmer than Wodehouse’s and the syntax more demanding. But Green’s prose, once you leap in like an inexperienced dancer and learn to move to his rhythms, is addictive and quite often laugh-out-loud funny. He was the creator of great characters from all classes, each with a patented manner of speaking, and his later novels are composed almost entirely of dialogue (putting him in surprising company: Ivy Compton-Burnett and William Gaddis). Green published nine novels and a memorably elliptical memoir. He brings out my inner proselytizer.
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