Alum, Ice, Trees and War

My middle son and I spent Friday morning tramping around Alum Spring Park, 34 acres of trees and rocks adjoining the Fredericksburg Battlefield. I associate alum with a mouth-puckering gag in a Little Rascals episode, but in the 18th and 19th centuries it was used to preserve meat and tan hides. A web site maintained by the Central Rappahannock Regional Library offers this lesson in applied chemistry:

"Alum is any of a group of hydrated double salts, usually consisting of aluminum sulfate, water of hydration, and the sulfate of another metal. Today the various alums have many uses including the production of medicines, textiles, sugar, paper, paints, matches, deodorants, baking powder, and for water purification and waterproofing paper. The styptic pencil, a short medicated stick applied to a cut to stop bleeding, is often made of alum."

George Washington surveyed Alum Spring, part of a creek still known at Hazel Run, for a friend. The first grist mills were built in the 18th century. British and Hessian troops captured at Camden, N. J., were held here and, the library site says, "Ice taken from the large Alum Spring millpond was a prized commodity." We passed a weed-covered hole in the woods -- the site of a 19th-century ice house. What a wonder ice must have seemed in the summer in the pre-refrigeration age. In "The Pond in Winter" chapter in Walden, Thoreau describes ice-harvesting and his pond's unique color:

"Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers."

We stood on Alum Spring Rock, a lump of sandstone 400 feet long and 40 feet high, where I instructed Michael, who turns six today, in the manly art of skipping stones across the surface of Hazel Run. Almost 144 years ago, the great rock was the site of a more fearful gathering:

"The sandstone cliff was a cold but welcome refuge for hundreds of women and children during the bombardment of Fredericksburg in December of 1862. In happier times, Confederate reunions were held under the shadows of the cliff in August of 1885 and September of 1886."

There's little overlap between the trees in Virginia and those growing in Houston. Oaks predominate back there, but you never see beeches, with their smooth, unblemished bark, ideal for carving initials and romantic sentiments. The battlefield and Alum Spring Park are dense with holly trees. Sweet gums grow in both places, but Houston has more mosquitoes. Throughout our hike we heard blue jays and an unidentified bird with a harsh, gull-like call.
Regardless of the beauty of this place, visited on a perfect sunny morning in June, it's impossible to forget what happened here. In Specimen Days, Whitman included a piece, "After First Fredericksburg," describing the scene in the weeks after the battle:

"December 23 to 31.—The results of the late battle are exhibited everywhere about here in thousands of cases, (hundreds die every day,) in the camp, brigade, and division hospitals. These are merely tents, and sometimes very poor ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their blankets are spread on layers of pine or hemlock twigs, or small leaves. No cots; seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold. The ground is frozen hard, and there is occasional snow. I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.

"Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes. These are curious shows, full of characters and groups. I soon get acquainted anywhere in camp, with officers or men, and am always well used. Sometimes I go down on picket with the regiments I know best. As to rations, the army here at present seems to be tolerably well supplied, and the men have enough, such as it is, mainly salt pork and hard tack. Most of the regiments lodge in the flimsy little shelter-tents. A few have built themselves huts of logs and mud, with fire-places."

Whitman makes no mention of Christmas or the coming of the new year. The war raged for another 28 months.

In the Footsteps of Aldo and Walt

On Thursday morning, our first stop in Fredericksburg was the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. My younger sons needed books and my mother-in-law had loaned me her library card. Last September, when Hurricane Rita appeared to be aiming for Houston, I flew the boys up here for five days of, as it turned out, unneeded sanctuary. The storm swerved to the east, but the librarians still took pity on the orphans from storm. They let us sign out books on a temporary card, asking only for $10 as collateral. That was my opportunity to finally read Harry Franfurt's On Bullshit and Nixon at the Movies, by Mark Feeney.

This time I found Aldo Buzzi's A Weakness for Almost Everything. The Steerforth Press edition is subtitled "Notes on Life, Gastronomy and Travel" -- in other words, it's a typically delightful Buzzian melange. Only when I returned to my in-laws' house did I notice what someone had written in ink on the title page, between the main title and the subtitle: "Vulgar Don't bother." Buzzi is among the least vulgar writers I know. I can't begin to plumb the psychology of that marginalia, though it confirms one of my time-tested convictions: Never trust anyone with exquisitely neat handwriting.

How I love and occasionally rely upon serendipity. Included in Buzzi's collection is a sketchy travelogue, "From New York to Charleston, South Carolina, and Back (1956)." That was the year President Eisenhower signed into law the bill creating the interstate highway system. Buzzi, driving a Cadillac, relied on two-lane roads and enjoyed a more intimate, human-scaled visit to the United States. On the southbound leg of the trip he even stopped here in Fredericksburg, Va. Here's his note:

"Fredericksburg. Monroe's house, small, brick, very low, very comfortable, with a little garden behind and an old cemetery, and, scattered throughout the city, imitations (but larger) of Monroe's house."

I've visited Fredericksburg probably a dozen times in the last nine years but never knew James Monroe had a house here. Tomorrow, thanks to a writer from Italy, I plan to see it.

On the way to find his brother, wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg, Walt Whitman had a tougher time getting here from New York City than Buzzi. As described by Roy Morris Jr. in The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, after leaving his mother's house in Brooklyn, Whitman "crowded aboard a ferry to to Manhattan, took a second across the Hudson River to New Jersey, and caught the night train to Philadelphia. Pressing his way through a mob of fellow travelers, he had his pocket picked while changing trains, and he arrived in Washington without a penny to his name."

In a rented SUV, the first time I ever rode in one, my wife and I and the boys made it from Washington to Fredericksburg in one hour. Whitman, having no idea of his brother's whereabouts, or even if he was alive, wandered futilely for two days among the wounded in dozens of makeshift hospitals around the capital. With his gift for friendship, Whitman secured a little money and a pass to ride an Army train from Aquia Landing to Falmouth, Va., where he had heard Lt. George Whitman's regiment was recuperating. Morris explains:

"George, as it happened, was very much alive -- in fact he was in capital spirits. Not only had he survived the terrible battle with merely a scratch but his new promotion to captain had just come through. `Remember your galliant Son is a Capting,' he wrote to his mother with more pride than grammar. A shell fragment had cut a gash through his cheek -- `You could stick a splint through into the mouth,' Walt would observe a few days later -- but it did not seem to bother the imperturbable George."

Saving Lt. Whitman

We arrived in Fredericksburg, Va., early Wednesday afternoon. My in-laws live here, within musket range of the battlefield, just beyond the trees and ranch-style homes across the street. On Dec. 13, 1862, 13,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded during an insane frontal assault on a fortified Confederate position, Marye's Heights, about two miles from where I'm sitting. Within days, casualty lists appeared in Northern newspapers. Among the readers were Walt Whitman and his family, in Brooklyn, N.Y. In The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (2000), Roy Morris Jr. describes the scene:

"Walt was home with his mother on the morning of December 16, when the New York Tribune carried another list of regimental casualties. Among those cited for the 51st New York was `First Lieutenant G.W. Whitmore [sic], Company D.' There was no description of the type or severity of George's wounds, but Walt had seen enough operations at Broadway Hospital to fear the worst. Hurriedly packing a few clothes, some notebooks, and fifty dollars in cash from Mrs. Whitman's scanty nest egg, he left within the hour for Washington. Except as a visitor, he would never again return to Brooklyn. His `New York stagnation,' he told Ralph Waldo Emerson two weeks later, was over. The rest of his life, although he did not yet know it, had already begun."

For old Whitman hands, who already know how the most convulsive event in our history transformed the poet into a greater poet and a secular saint, Morris' book contains few revelations. But his writing is clean and he musters all the available information in a compact 270 pages. Morris' first sentence is memorably paradoxical, and he spends the rest of the book explaining it:

"The Civil War saved Walt Whitman."

Hoffer and Hoffman

Other than their similar-sounding Saxon surnames, Eric Hoffer and Daniel Hoffman would appear to have little in common. Hoffer was an autodidactic longshoreman. He never went to college and wrote cranky, hard-to-categorize books, some about the personal, pathogenic origins of mass movements. Hoffman is a poet, literary scholar and teacher, and by all accounts an urbane man of letters. By some impossible-to-foresee confluence of attention, I have been reading and enjoying both. Here are samples of the work of each man. Juxtaposed, their kinships and differences grow vivid. This is aphorism No. 206 from Hoffer’s The Passionate State of Mind:

“Death would have no terror were it to come a month from now, a week or even a day – but not tomorrow. For death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.”

And here, from Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems – 1948-2003, is Hoffman’s “Thought I Was Dying”:

“Like a bucket
With a hole

“I couldn’t find
Just felt the seeping

“Of my life
As it was leaving

“My wife my children
Drifting away

“My head empty
My hands my heart

“Drained and void
The bed cold

“I thought it’s hard
To leave my life

“With each breath
A little less

“In the veins whistling
Till the sun shone black

“As though I never
Could come back”

I would only add that in the Hoffman poem I cited two days ago, he refers to his Buddhist-sounding “empty mind” and to an “Empty-headed” chestnut tree. In this poem, he writes of “My head empty.” An odd phrase for so plainly erudite a man. Any takers, thesis-mongers?

Thinking Man

Some months ago Dave Lull, the omnipresent Wisconsin librarian, asked if I remembered Eric Hoffer. An aperture opened and I saw myself, age 15 or 16, seated at the desk in my childhood bedroom, clipping one of Hoffer’s syndicated columns from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, along with those of a local columnist, Don Robertson. I read them, underlined useful passages and pasted them in a scrapbook. They were the first bylines I learned to look for with pleasure and anticipation, the way I later sought Murray Kempton’s. Roughly 10 years later I was hired as editor of a small town weekly in northwestern Ohio – my first newspaper job, and in some attenuated way it is connected with the example set by Hoffer.

The “longshoreman philosopher” had a brief notoriety in the late 1960s, though his first and probably best known and most influential book, The True Believer, had been published in 1951. He worked the docks in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He never went to college. He credited a volume of Montaigne’s essays, found in a second-hand bookstore, with inspiring him to write. This is what appealed to me about Hoffer, I think. I was the first in my family to go to college. My father and his brothers were ironworkers. All of my mother’s brothers were housepainters. I had no models for being a writer, a lover of ideas, an intellectual – a term Hoffer detested. But a working-class guy who read Montaigne and Tolstoy and formulated his thoughts in words made sense to me, and he still does.

Hoffer’s central insight was his insistence on the personal, emotional reasons people – “true believers” -- devote themselves to mass movements, whether political or religious. Fanaticism, for Hoffer, is rooted in self-hatred. A person with genuine self-esteem, not the narcissistic sludge of pop psychology, feels little attraction to the collective. In the politicized late 1960s, Hoffer had something to say to alienate or offend almost everyone. He died in 1983, but his ideas remain pertinent. His work is appealing because his ideas are clear, common-sensical and free of anyone’s ideology. He tended to write aphoristically, to condense his thoughts in balanced, straightforward statements, without pretension or theory. His first loyalty was to the truth and his only subject matter was humanity.

Over the weekend I found a first edition of Hoffer’s second book, The Passionate State of Mind, published in 1955. In 151 pages, Hoffer gives us 280 aphorisms, many consisting of a single sentence. Here’s No. 266:

“The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.”

At 16, this would have made no sense to me, at least the part about self-disagreement. It’s a mature thought, rooted in experience and a rare degree of self-honesty. It’s not a bumper sticker. Here’s another, even harsher – No. 269:

“Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.”

That’s worthy of La Rochefoucauld. And here’s one to trouble the Left – No. 270:

“Widespread dissipation is the result rather than the cause of social decadence.”

So as not to play favorites, let me cite a longer aphorism to hector the Right. Essentially, Hoffer was not a political thinker. Those were not categories he recognized. No. 197:

“Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.”

When I read an aphorism, I immediately test myself against it. In Hoffer’s case, I sometimes find myself stung by the barb that accompanies his insight. He’s one of those writers who, taken in medicinal doses, serves as an inoculation against dishonesty and delusion. Thanks for the second opinion, Dr. Lull.

Audacious

Frank Wilson at Books, Inq. said something audacious last week: “I think Dan [Hoffman] is the greatest living American poet.” Usually one dismisses such claims as provocations, mere argument-starters, but years ago I had read Daniel Hoffman’s book with the annoying title, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, and liked it very much, in part because it had interesting things to say about Nabokov. I think it remains the only book about Poe I have ever read. I was dimly aware Hoffman was a poet but never got around to reading him. On Frank’s recommendation, I found Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems, 1948-2003 at the library, and now I have much catching up to do.

After reading 25 or 30 of his poems, picked at random, Hoffman impresses me as an enthusiast of life. He knows how to enjoy himself and how to share his enjoyment with us. He knows things about the world beyond poetry. He’s neither cheerleader nor scold. He actually seems to like poetry, his own and other’, and doesn’t merely endure it. Needless to say, he’s a craftsman. Here’s a poem, “Breathing Purely,” that reminds me of a Marx Brothers movie in the sense that each line is so good you’re at risk for missing the next one:

“Now, at last,
I carry nothing
In my briefcase
And an empty mind.
In the meadow

“Under the chestnut tree
I am part of what I see.
Swallows above the alder thicket
Skim mosquitoes from the haze,
And I’ve seceded

“From all committees, left
My Letters to the Editor unsent
No solutions, no opinions.
Breathing purely
Without ambitions, purged, awaiting

“Annunciations of the true.
The wind is up now and the swallows gone.
I’ll listen to the chestnut tree
Rustling
Empty-headed in the wind.”

I like “awaiting/Annunciations of the true.” I also like Hoffman’s way with nature imagery – chestnuts, swallows, mosquitos – that never descends into self-congratulatory nature mysticism, such as we find in, say, Mary Oliver. I also like the way it contrasts with the human workaday world – briefcase, committees, letters – yet the speaker with his “empty mind” echoes with the “empty-headed” chestnut trees. The poem is as well built and free of pretension as a Shaker chair. And here’s a poem of enormous momentum and humility alloyed with pride. I think it’s about the power of poetry to conjure the past and help keep us human. It’s called “Stop the Deathwish! Stop it! Stop!”:

“ – at least until the 21st century
because the present is too good to lose
a moment of – I would begrudge the time
for sleep, but dreams are better than they used
to be, since they enact the mystery
that action hides and history derides.
The past drains from the present like the juice
Of succulent clams left in the noonday sun.
I spent the better part of my youth
prenticed to arts for which there’ll be small use
in whatever work the future needs have done:
I can file a needle to a point
so fine it plays three sides before it burrs,
or split a hundredweight of ice to fit
the cold chest with a week’s worth in two blows;
is there a man around who knows
by rote the dismantled stations of the El,
or that the Precinct House in Central Park
was once a cote from which the lambing ewes
and spindly lambs and crookhorned rams set out
to crop the green? In one-flag semaphore
I can transmit, or signal in Morse code
by heliograph such urgent messages
as scouts and sappers a boyhood ago
squinted through binoculars to read.
I can still cobble rime royale by hand
and may, through now, about as few use rhyme
as wigwag or sun’s mirrored beam to spell
their definitions of the ways that Time
endows the present it consumes, or tell
how only in this moment’s flare we dwell
save when Memory, with her hands outspread,
brings back the past, like Lazarus, from the dead.”

The final seven lines, of course, are Hoffman’s jaunty nod to rime royale: seven lines of iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme ababbcc. Thanks, Frank, for the introduction.

`A Serious House on Serious Earth'

Philip Larkin is one of those rare poets I have always thought of as a friend. Poets, as a rule, are a self-involved bunch, even more so than the rest of us, but Larkin is someone whose judgment I trust, whose sense of humor is reliable, whose taste is usually worth respecting or at least learning from, and whose contempt for bullshit of all varieties is infallible. I can’t say the same of most other poets, even those whose work is inarguably greater – Auden, for instance, or Yeats. I envy Kingsley Amis his long friendship with Larkin. When Amis, the poet-turned-novelist, and Larkin, the novelist-turned-poet, shared a room, the air must have danced with wit and linguistic energy. What has thus far been published of their correspondence confirms Amis’ statement that he and Larkin were “savagely uninterested in the same things” – and wonderfully funny at the same time.

In the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, on Page P18, David Yezzi, poet and executive editor of The New Criterion, has published a sensitive, thoughtful reading of Larkin’s “Church Going,” which he calls “one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.” Yezzi’s assessment is surprising and just. Along with “Aubade,” I have always judged it Larkin’s finest poem. Considering the posthumous assault on Larkin after the publication of his letters and Andrew Motion’s biography – on exclusively political, not literary grounds – Yezzi’s conclusion is also courageous.

The poem, in Yezzi’s words, “begins in irony and ends with, if not a statement of faith, then at least a genuine reverence for life’s most serious questions: `marriage, and birth/And death. And thoughts of these.’” Here is “Church Going”:

“Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

“Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new
- Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
`Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

“Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

“Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

“A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

“Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation -- marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these -- for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”

When people asked Larkin about his faith or lack of it, his standard reply was, “I’m an agnostic, I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course.” Motion reports that Larkin felt some attraction to Roman Catholicism late in life (he died in 1985), though the attraction was never acted upon. The poem is a masterpiece of tone, as nuanced and subtly shifting as late Henry James. The speaker hates neither faith nor those who believe, like a vulgarly militant atheist, nor can he permit himself to relax into belief. He reminds me of what Hawthorne wrote of his friend Melville in 1856:

“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

If this sounds humorless – of the poem’s speaker, of Larkin, of Melville – consider what Christopher Ricks observed of the author of “Church Going”:

“He has for some of us that rare comic force which is a matter of the whole idea of him and his ways and his tones, so that just to imagine his cadences is involuntarily to smile to yourself.”

Back to Beckett

I know Tim Parks as the author of Judge Savage, a novel he published in 2003 that I liked very much, and a non-fiction collection, Hell and Back, that has useful things to say about writers as varied as Dante, Borges, Montale, Henry Green and Christina Stead. He is English and has lived in Italy for 25 years, and you can learn more about him and his work by visiting his web site. In the July 13 issue of The New York Review of Books, Parks has a review of recently published books by and about Samuel Beckett, whose centenary we observed April 13.

Beckett inspires admiration, even reverence, among unlikely writers, or at least writers whose opinion of Beckett I would be reluctant to assume. I put Parks in that category. His work, at least what I have read of it, is in no way “experimental” or “avant-garde,” whatever those terms may mean early in the 21st century. He creates characters (memorable in the case of Judge Savage), constructs a credible, compelling plot and deploys language skillfully without prattling on about signifiers. Here’s what he says of Beckett’s language:

“But while Beckett was granted his quietus in 1989, there is no closure for his readers and critics, nor would we want it; for if a death wish was central to his writing, no prose was ever livelier.”

Parks gets it. Beckett’s prose is the liveliest I know, at once concise and precise, often funny, always charged with thought and feeling. In Company he wrote: “Yet another then. Of whom nothing. Devising figments to temper his nothingness. Quick leave him. Pause and again in panic to himself, Quick leave him.”

In his review of Company, reprinted in Every Force Evolves a Form, Guy Davenport writes (typically, in parentheses): “(The only punctuation in this book is the period. Beckett gave up the semicolon years ago, and the comma several books back.)”

This is a rare slip for Davenport, as the passage I just cited contains a comma. Otherwise, the observation is correct. Like Joyce in the “Penelope” chapter of Ulysses, Beckett jettisons punctuation the way Molly Bloom pulls pins from her hair and drops them to the floor. His prose in bone, not soft tissue – what survives.

Parks deftly pinpoints why Beckett, who so frequently skirts nihilism, is steeped in the language and thought of such religious writers as St. Augustine, Dante and Milton: “With Beckett, it is the persistence of a `religious’ seriousness in the declared absence of any sustaining metaphysics that gives his work its special, for some, saintly, pathos.”

Realism is a notoriously sticky Tar Baby of a concept. Most of the theorizing and maundering about what is realistic and what is not seems sterile and unproductive. According to Parks’ unconventional accounting, one I would endorse, Beckett, especially in his later fiction, is a realist, though not in the Flaubertian or Dreiserian modes. We might call it philosophical realism, to distinguish it from literal-minded physical realism:

“Yet for all these aggressive experiments one is struck on rereading Beckett that he did not dispense with traditional realism tout court. Throughout his work we come across passages of haunting descriptive power in which we cannot help feeling the author has a considerable emotional investment.”

Reading Beckett’s work, at least from the time he wrote Watt, during World War II, is an emotionally engaging act. We identify with his characters – Watt, Molly, Malone, the Unnamable, Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov, Krapp – in a way postmodernists would say is trivial and silly, even impossible. But if Beckett were merely creating clever but ultimately empty word games, only the professors would still be reading him. Even with his abhorrence of sentimentality, Beckett remains a storyteller (anti-storyteller, if you must), and stories are about you and me.

Books for Sale

Twice a year, the newspaper where my wife works as an editor holds an in-house book sale to dispose of the accumulated review and promotional copies that no one has reviewed or promoted. In the two years we’ve been here, I’ve scored some very inexpensive prizes – Jonathan Bate’s John Clare, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and, among others, The Supplicating Voice, a collection of Samuel Johnson’s spiritual writings. These are books I probably would not have purchased at full price, especially the hard covers, but each has become a treasure.

On her first sweep, my wife picked up a stack of dirt-cheap books and CDs for the kids and Christmas cards for us. That was Wednesday. On Thursday, she staged another surgical strike and called me on the cell phone for backup. I rejected several finds, reminding myself not to get greedy, but leaped at a hard cover of Jean-Yves Tadie’s Marcel Proust: A Life, which I read soon after the English translation was published six years ago. A few months later I read a just-published biography with the identical title written by William Carter, an American Proust scholar. In retrospect, I’m unable to separate the books sufficiently to recommend one volume over the other. If you love Proust, you’ll read them both because you can’t get enough.

That was the entrée. The sides consist of three Penguins of the latest generation,with black covers (I can see Penguins on my shelves in six colors): excerpts from Plutarch titled On Sparta; Tolstoy’s Master and Man and Other Stories; and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Other Stories. The first is great: I own no Plutarch. The Tolstoy is also good because I count six of his books on the shelf, but they’re a hodge-podge, no uniformity, much overlap, but no “Master and Man,” a story the late novelist and editor William Maxwell adored. The poet Edward Hirsch quoted Maxwell as saying: “I once said to Joe Mitchell that the only part about dying that I minded was that when you are dead you can’t read Tolstoy.” That seems to me an immensely wise thing to say. The Tolstoy also felt right because my oldest son is reading War and Peace for the first time, having knocked off Anna Karenina earlier this year. He loves it. Who wouldn’t?

The Babel feels like a bait-and-switch swindle. It’s identical to the volume Penguin put out in 1994 titled Collected Stories (pale blue-green cover) – same translator, same stories. At least the new one has a better cover – a black-and-red montage of Russian pictures from the British Library. The old one had an unflattering close-up of Babel’s smiling face in which he looks like a sideshow attraction. I’ll accept the duplication philosophically – you can’t have enough Babel, the price was right, and I’ll pass it along to the appropriate reader.

After the Concert

Who wrote the following paragraph, which seems to me quintessentially representative of the author’s sensibility and style?

“The second half of the concert was given over to a performance of Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler’s last song cycle, which seems to me perfectly poised between the grandeur and pettiness of human existence, between resignation and protest, ecstasy and misery. It accords well with the mood of one whose intimation of impending cultural catastrophe coincides with his own declining vigor: in short, with the mood of someone like me.”

Faithful readers know my enthusiasm for the work of Theodore Dalrymple, dba Dr. Anthony Daniels, the English essayist and retired physician whose latest piece, “Out of the Time Machine,” appears in the June issue of The New Criterion. Unfortunately, the essay requires payment to be read online, but I suggest you buy the magazine at the newsstand for a mere $7.75.

The essay is not about Mahler or his “doom-laden apprehensions,” though actually I suppose it is. Dalrymple leaves the concert and steps “into the night of an English provincial city.” This is not insignificant, for the concertgoers have entered a “different, alien, and hostile world” consisting of “untold thousands of young people, dressed with a voluntary uniformity, [who] paraded themselves, raucous, drunken, exhibitionist, and volatile.” Every honest reader has shared the experience. Wednesday afternoon, crossing a parking lot and holding my youngest sons’ hands, I was headed for the entrance of my barbershop, when two punks standing at a bus stop began staring at us menacingly, five yards away. One, in camouflage pants, sleeveless t-shirt and bandana, began slamming a trashcan with a stick, never taking his eyes off us. Both leered. I walked a little faster and I don’t think my sons paid much attention, but life was coarsened by degrees and now I fear a little more for my sons and the world they will inherit.

Dalrymple’s nocturnal intimidation sets him to thinking of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The older, more civilized folk who enjoy Mahler become the Eloi; the drunken, threatening horde, the Morlocks. One of Dalrymple’s boldest gifts at a writer is fearlessness in pointing out the obvious. More putatively sophisticated commentators would dismiss the Wells template as simplistic. Dalrymple is as sophisticated a writer as is working today, but he doesn’t give a damn about appearing superficially simplistic. He’d rather be right.

Of course, I read The Time Machine and Wells’ other “scientific romances” as a kid, sixth grade to be precise, right after Jules Verne and just before Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed George Pal’s film version from 1960, with Rod Taylor as The Time Traveler, three years before he showed up in Hitchcock’s The Birds. I remember the rapidly changing scene in the dress shop across the road from the Traveller’s laboratory as he first experiments with the machine. I also recall the sound of sirens, echoing the “duck-and-cover” drills we rehearsed in school. In the movie, everything turned cheesy once the Eloi and Morlocks showed up. But I never thought of the story as a metaphor for our era.

Dalrymple never writes straightforward literary essays or book reviews. A book is an opportunity to probe the rapidly degenerating human condition. I hope an enterprising publisher some day collects his literary essays in a volume of their own. I also admire the way Dalrymple moves seamlessly and convincingly from a personal experience to a more general observation about the world. This looks simple – speaking as someone who has often tried the same shift in focus, with varying degrees of success – but in fact it is difficult to do without forcing too great a burden of significance on an event that may prove to be, after all, merely a trivial irritant, a pet peeve rather than a symptom of the Decline of the West. But Dalrymple’s method is subtler than that. The persona he adopts is part Everyman, part Jeremiah, and he’s not afraid on occasion to make himself look silly or pompous. But he remains a deadly serious writer. Near the end of the essay, referring to the antagonism between Eloi and Morlock, he writes:

“Is not the passion for ease and security as the summum bonum of human existence the explanation for Europe’s current combination of terrestrial immobilism and subterranean violence, a potentially terrible violence that is waiting to erupt through the calm crust of its society?” `

`Compellingly Beautiful'

My nightstand is even more crowded than usual with books, one of which is a professional obligation. As a result, blogging will remain consistent but probably briefer and more episodic for at least several days. I have been rereading Roger Scruton’s invaluable Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction, the revised edition from 2002. Scruton’s style is nearly as stripped-down as Spinoza’s:

“The free man is the one conscious of the necessities that compel him. Spinoza devotes many pages to describing the mental condition of such a person. He avoids hatred, envy, contempt, and other negative emotions; he is unaffected by fear, hope, and superstition; he is secure in the knowledge that virtue is power, power is freedom, and freedom is happiness. `A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’”

By Spinoza’s exacting standards, I remain a slave, especially when it comes to thoughts of death. Scruton again:

“Spinoza’s mother tongue was Spanish; he was a master of Hebrew and had an effective command of Portuguese and Dutch – perhaps also of French. However, none of those languages contained the wealth of scientific and philosophical argument that was contained in Latin, which language therefore became, for Spinoza, both the primary vehicle of his thought, and the symbol of his intellectual quest. In choosing the universal language of our culture, Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute -- `be cautious’ – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.”

In contrast to the enviably concise Scruton – his Spinoza book, including glossary and index, totals 124 pages -- Roger Penrose’s prose resembles the conversation of an immensely learned but charmingly scatter-brained professor, dense with diagrams, equations and anecdotes. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe tips the scales at 1,099 pages and some four or five pounds. When it comes to mathematics, I’m strictly a dilettante. I enjoy reading about math rather than in it, and my practical knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond balancing the checkbook. I like reading the biographies of mathematicians -- for instance, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth, by Paul Hoffman, and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, by Rebecca Goldstein.

Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. His latest book is admirable for its intellectual, Diderot-like hubris. It is self-consciously intended as a summa of all human knowledge of the universe. He proclaims the unchallenged rightness of Einstein’s general theory of relativity but calls for a thoroughgoing reexamination of quantum theory. The book is often witty and digressive, at once technical and highly personal. The book is designed to accommodate both well-educated specialists and non-mathematicians like me. I feel no guilt about prudently skimming and skipping. Among Penrose’s highest terms of praise are “beautiful” and “elegant,” as in these passages:

“…many of the ideas perceived to have achieved a major advance in physical theory will also be viewed as compellingly beautiful. There is the undoubted beauty of Euclidean geometry, which formed the basis of the first profoundly accurate physical theory, namely the theory of space formulated by the ancient Greeks. A millennium and a half later came the extraordinary elegance of Newtonian dynamics, with its deep and beautiful underlying symplectic geometry structure…”

This reminds me of Nabokov’s statement to an interviewer, giving the lie to those who would arbitrarily segregate the two most important human endeavors:

“I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.”

After the Flood

I have been treading deep waters, reading and writing about Spinoza and poets of the Holocaust, in particular Miklos Radnoti and Paul Celan. At the same time, parts of Houston are under deep water after rain that seemed equatorial, if not Biblical, as one local minister admonished. I saw a bayou Monday afternoon overflowing with raging brown water, though the sun by then was shining. Our neighborhood was spared but I thought of the opening lines of “The Dry Salvages,” a passage I always associate with Huck and Jim on the raft:

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.”

For solace, for fresh air and clear skies, I turned to one of my favorite poems of the last decade or so, a poem that both renders and encourages wonder. It serves as a reminder that to always expect the worst is to be as foolish, lazy and ungrateful as to always expect the best. This is “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney, the final poem in his 1996 volume The Spirit Level:

“And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

I love that poem, with its echoes of Yeats but with its roots sunk in the rocky Earth. It always reminds me of something Heaney said in 1995, in his Nobel lecture:

“….Yeats’s work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.”

Apropos of nothing that I have just written, except that it makes me happy, my oldest son sent me a gift for Father’s Day and it arrived Monday. He burned for me on four CDs the complete “Basement Tapes,” recorded in 1967 by Bob Dylan and The Band. The essential guide to these sessions is Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic, later retitled The Old, Weird America. As though that were not enough, my son also sent the complete “American Recordings” by Johnny Cash. These are some of the reasons I am proud to be an American – and a father. Thank you, Josh.

Defending Spinoza, Part 3

Spinoza lived in an era nearly as barbaric as our own. In 1672, Louis XIV of France invaded the Low Lands and declared war on the Dutch Republic. Some 170,000 French troops, armed with the latest muskets, spread across the country. The Dutch blamed the disaster on Jan de Witt, leader of the republicans and, since 1653, head of state. The most orthodox and intolerant of the Calvinists looked for salvation to the House of Orange, which did nothing to staunch rumors of de Witt's treachery with the French. On Aug. 20, 1672, a mob dragged de Witt and his brother Cornelius from a prison in the Hague. In Rebecca Goldstein’s words, in Betraying Spinoza:

“Jan de Witt, a friend of philosophy and thus of freedom, was, together with Cornelius, torn to pieces by the mob. The atrocities the crowd inflicted on their bodies is beyond the imagination to comprehend. They fed their organs to dogs and hung their severed limb from lampposts.”

The gentle, retiring Spinoza, learning of the savagery, made a placard reading “ULTIMI BARBARORUM” (“YOU ARE THE GREATEST OF BARBARIANS”) and planned to erect it at the site of the murders. His prudent landlord, van der Spyck, double-locked the doors and probably saved the philosopher’s life. After recounting these events, Goldstein turns immediately to Spinoza’s understanding of human suffering:

“The mystery of human suffering, its inevitability and extravagance – he had contemplated it often enough in his boyhood….But the mystery is no mystery. The world was not created with a view toward human well-being. Logic entails what it does, despite our parochial wishes. It’s not surprising that out of the vastness of logical implications there are a profusion that threaten our endeavor to persist in our being and to thrive. So nature will produce such illnesses and disasters as make men’s lives a misery. And so, too, men will through their blind bondage to their emotions compound the misery of their own lives and those of others. It is only reason that can save us. Why then, we might ask, did not God make men more reasonable? Why then did he not make them more intelligent? That is what the problem of evil comes down to: the stubborn stupidity of mankind. Why did God make men so stubbornly stupid?”

Goldstein’s account of Spinoza’s understanding of human suffering and barbarism is reconfirmed daily, in our hearts, in the house across the street, and continents away. Consider Miklos Radnoti, one of Hungary’s greatest poets. He was born in 1909, in Budapest, and, like Spinoza, he was a Jew. In May of 1944, two months after the Nazis occupied Hungary, Radnoti was pressed into a Jewish labor gang to build roads in Yugoslavia. That fall, as the Germans fled the Balkans, the work crews, weak from hunger and exhaustion, were ordered to march back to Hungary and into Austria. Of the 3,600 men who left the work camp in Yugoslavia, only 800 reached the Hungarian border. When Radnoti collapsed, in November, possibly on the 8th, he was shot in the neck by his Hungarian guards and buried with 21 others. Twenty months later, the mass grave near Abda in western Hungary was uncovered and Radnoti’s body exhumed. In the pocket of the raincoat he wore, officials found an address book, blood-stained and dirty, containing 10 poems Radnoti had written in the Yugoslav labor camp and on the death march. Their worth is both documentary and poetic. They are great poems as well as emblems of the fierceness of art in the face of unimaginable inhumanity. They are nearly impossible to read without weeping.

The last poems Radnoti wrote are fragments titled “Razglednicas” – Serbian, by way of Hungarian, for “picture postcards.” The final one, dated Oct. 31, about a week before his murder, has been translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner:

“I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,
tight already as a snapping string.
Shot in the neck. `And that’s how you’ll end too,’
I whispered to myself; `lie still; no moving.
Now patience flowers in death.’ Then I could hear
`Der springt noch auf,’ above, and very near.
Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.”

The translators gloss the German phrase this way: “these lines refer to Mikos Lorsi, a violinist comrade of Radnoti who was murdered at Cservenka by an SS man on a horse. Having been shot once, Lorsi collapsed; but soon after, he stood up again, staggering. `He is still moving,’ called the SS man, taking aim a second time, this time successfully.”

After the last passage from Goldstein quoted above, without a paragraph break, she quotes a excerpt from The Ethics:

“Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind. To those who ask why God did not so create all men, that they should be governed only by reason, I give no answer but this: because matter was not lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature are so vast, as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence, as I have shown.”

Defending Spinoza, Part 2

Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza remains compulsively readable, and not only because Spinoza’s life and thought are so timely and intriguing. Her strategy in crafting the book involves risks that in the hands of a less intellectually and stylistically confident writer might have turned it into self-involved mush. By chronicling her own involvement with Spinoza, starting at an all-girls yeshiva high school in Manhattan in the late 1960s, she dramatizes the degree to which Spinoza remains so threatening an apostate in certain quarters, despite having died in 1677:

“I first heard the name Baruch Spinoza uttered as an admonition, a cautionary tale of unbridled human intelligence blindly seeking its own doom.”

The warning comes from one of her teachers, Mrs. Schoenfeld. In her mind, Spinoza’s very brilliance, his cerebral audacity, made him “the first modern Jew. Spinoza headed the long line of yeshiva boys who were not as pious as they might have been. He was one of the so-called enlightened Jews, a so-called maskil, long before the term had been introduced.”

Mrs. Schoenfeld’s warning had the opposite of its intended effect, at least on Goldstein, for her synopsis of Spinoza’s philosophy “intrigued me, by reason of its very incomprehensibility, so that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” And she still can’t. This is why Goldstein’s idiosyncratic approach to Spinoza, guided by her own sustained involvement, works so successfully. Now a professor of philosophy who has been teaching Spinoza and the other 17th-century rationalists for years, she is in a sense still arguing with Mrs. Schoenfeld. It works because she’s not, in fact, writing autobiography but applied Spinozist philosophy – embodied thought. Much of the second chapter is an imaginary dialogue between Mrs. Schoenfeld and a bright secular Jewish girl – Rebecca Goldstein.

Fortunately for us, Goldstein is one of those rare writers who give serious, thoughtful, articulate interviews. When the interviewer at Next Book asks, “You've written five novels. How did that affect your approach to Betraying Spinoza?” she replies: ”I was trained to write philosophy in this voiceless, storyless, centerless, impersonal way. Once I started writing novels, that way of writing didn't interest me anymore. To find a way to write about philosophy that could bring to bear what I've learned as a novelist—a way that wouldn't falsify the philosophy but would somehow allow me to inhabit character and voice and mood and utilize all the tricks of a novelist—that's taken me a long time to find.”

Referring to the book’s title, the interviewer asks, “How are you betraying Spinoza?”: ”Let me count the ways. First of all, to try to understand his philosophy by looking at the man: Why would he have come to such a point of view? On philosophical grounds, that sort of approach is really forbidden, and especially on Spinozistic grounds. His is the most impersonal of all approaches to the truth, and to bring in the person seems to betray the very spirit of that point of view. The second betrayal is to look at him as a Jew—that kind of contingency is irrelevant on his terms. But I argue that we can better get at the full philosophical content of Spinoza if we actually look at him in the context of his history, which happens also to be Jewish history.”

Goldstein’s book is a forceful refutation of the biographical fallacy. To know something about Spinoza and the world that helped create him, then rejected him, I find is an aid to understanding his thought. Besides, the story of the Marranos (originally, “pigs” in Spanish, itself a borrowing from the Arabic muharram, “ritually forbidden,” like tref), who were driven from Spain and Portugal and sought refuge in Northern Europe, is an extraordinary story. Goldstein is not writing for scholars but for intelligent common readers interested in Spinoza, in Western philosophy, in Judaism, in Jewish and European history, and perhaps in all of these subjects. Goldstein herself aptly refers to Steven Nadler’s “magisterial biography of the philosopher,” Spinoza: A Life, and I would suggest it as the next stop for a reader newly interested in Spinoza. After that, the literature is vast, much of it forbidding to the nonspecialist. Like Goldstein, I would recommend Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Spinoza of Market Street,” probably the single short story I have most often read.

Let me quote Goldstein one last time, to give you a sense of how pertinent her book and Spinoza are to our human situation:

“Mrs. Schoenfeld had accused Spinoza of arrogance – the arrogance of thinking that the human mind exceeds all forms of intelligence. She happened to have been wrong about this. Spinoza believes [note the present tense] that our finite minds are limited because of their necessary finitude. Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself. We know the truth only to the extent that our ideas approach asymptotically closer to congruence with God’s infinite mind, which divine mind we should think of as the world’s being aware of its own explanation. As this infinite explanation exceeds any that we can arrive at by orders of magnitude, so, too, God’s mind exceeds ours by orders of magnitude.”

Defending Spinoza

In one of many misbegotten attempts at writing fiction, I drafted the story of a man who knew almost no Latin but was trying nevertheless to translate The Ethics of Spinoza. Today, I see the premise as a metaphor for trying to write fiction without the proper gifts and temperament. Back then, it had something to do with ripping off plot ideas from Isaac Bashevis Singer and William Gaddis, and making that part of the plot. All that remains of that 35-year-old project, mercifully abandoned after a few weeks, is a sustained interest in Benedictus de Spinoza.

His thought seems inhumanly subtle and demanding, yet Spinoza is among the most humanly compelling, even loveable of great philosophers, excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam at the age of 23. You might understand why a would-be fiction writer, himself only 18 or 19, could find Spinoza’s life and thought irresistible. Fortunately, Rebecca Goldstein is both a professor of philosophy and a novelist, with all the requisite scholarly and narrative gifts, and her new book, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, is pure pleasure. As of Friday evening, I had read only about 50 pages but her book has the what-comes-next? pull of a thriller, which it is in an intellectual and historical sense. In an interview with the California Literary Review, Goldstein said:

“Though he hadn’t published anything yet, he had managed to indicate to [the Jews of Amsterdam] that their project of refashioning themselves into fully observant Jews--obviously a project fraught with significance for former Marranos--was not one he deemed important. He was as obsessed as they were with how it is that we ought to remake ourselves in order to effect our personal salvation, but he would go on to think himself outside of all sectarian frames of reference, to think himself into the idea of secular salvation that could only be attained through the exercise of pure reason. Spinoza's `religion of reason’ is more arduous than any of the laws of Deuteronomy or Leviticus, since it asks each of us to cultivate and sustain a trait we find pretty difficult, namely to be reasonable.”

Imagine a brilliant young man forcefully, angrily exiled from a community that was itself already exiled from the larger Dutch, European and Christian communities of the time. The irony is, Spinoza was not by nature a firebrand. By nature he was an intellectual contemplative. As Goldstein writes in her prologue:

“The holy furor aroused by the name Spinoza is in contrast to the man’s predilection for peace and quiet. He confessed himself to have a horror of controversy. `I absolutely dread quarrels,’ he wrote an acquaintance, explaining why he had declined to publish a work that contains some of the main themes of The Ethics, titled Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. The signet ring he wore throughout his life was inscribed with the word caute, Latin for `cautiously,’ and it was engraved with the image of a thorny rose, so that he signed his name sub rosa. One might argue that the very form of The Ethics, written in the highly formalized `geometrical style’ inspired by Euclid’s Elements, is partially designed for the practical purpose of keeping out any but the most gifted of readers, rigorously cerebral and patiently rational.”

The first of two sonnets Borges wrote about the philosopher is titled simply “Spinoza”:

“Here in the twilight the translucent hands
Of the Jew polishing the crystal glass.
The dying afternoon is cold with bands
Of fear. Each day the afternoons all pass
The same. The hands and space of hyacinth
Paling in the confines of the ghetto walls
Barely exists for the quiet man who stalls
There, dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth.
Fame doesn’t trouble him (that reflection of
Dreams in the dream of another mirror), nor love,
The timid love women. Gone the bars,
He’s free, from metaphor and myth, to sit
Polishing a stubborn lens: the infinite
Map of the One who now is all His Stars.”

The other, also translated by Willis Barnstone, is “Baruch Spinoza”:

“A haze of gold, the Occident lights up
The window. Now, the assiduous manuscript
Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.
Someone is building God in a dark cup.
A man engenders God. He is a Jew
With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;
Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in
A river, is borne off by waters to
Its end. No matter. The magician moved
Carves out his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he’s begun
To construct God, using the word. No one
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.”

The second poem is especially touching, personalizing Spinoza’s notion of amor intellectus Dei, and reminding us how alone he was. Goldstein reminds us of the story, probably apocryphal, of the young Spinoza proposing to a non-Jewish girl, the daughter of one of his teachers, and offering her a pearl necklace. She refused. The story's reliability is uncertain, but we know he never married and probably never again proposed.

Poetry, Birds and Flat Tires

It’s my impression that literary anthologies have grown increasingly Balkanized in recent years. They seem aimed at narrow readerships that couldn’t amount to more than thousands or even hundreds of potential readers. The reason for this trend, of course, is the ascendancy of identity politics – people defining themselves by race, ethnicity or sex. Most such anthologies pose no temptation on the shelf, though I stumbled upon a worthy one Thursday at the University of Houston’s M.D. Anderson Library, and it came in very handy. The title, Birdsong, gives little away and, unusual for an anthology today, it bears no over-emphatic subtitle. As compiled by the bucolically named Dewi Roberts, it’s a collection of poetry and prose about birds written by Welsh writers.

It came in handy because as I was leaving the campus, my right rear tire went flat. I had driven over a nail. My two younger sons, 3 and almost 6, were in the back seat. I pulled into a university parking lot and called AAA, because I couldn’t remove the spare tire from the well in the trunk. The kids and I sat in the scant shade provided by the Newman Center and waited for the wrecker. They read books by Bill Nye the Science Guy and I read Welsh poetry about birds.

The selection ranges from The Mabinogion, a medieval collection of prose tales, to contemporary verse. The pieces are arranged by species or families – crows, larks, birds of prey, sea birds, game and farm birds. There are 20 poems about owls and eight about the nightingale. The big names are here – Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas, Vernon Watkins, Glyn Jones – but most of the names were new to me, including the appropriately named Peter Finch. Much of the work is of pleasing quality. Here’s an excerpt from Francis Kilvert’s diary, from 1870:

“On Easter Day all the young people come out in something new and bright like butterflies. It is almost part of their religion to wear something new on this day. It was an old saying that if you don’t wear something new on Easter Day the crows will spoil everything you have on.”

Here is Richard Poole’s “Circles”:

“Black upon azure, jackdaws wheel
above broken turrets of grey stone;
on loan from earth to sky, they return
when the fancy takes them, again feel
earthliness under their clawed toes.
So things go back to their origins –
creatures of feather, bone and skin
to the muck from which they arose.
Why cavil at simplicity,
The closing of the necessary circle?
Life cannot escape symmetry:
puddles vanish in sunlight, icicles
drip reluctant, lucid tears. They coldly
splash your childish hands, you drink them thoughtlessly.”

And here’s “Barn Owl” by the great R.S. Thomas:

“1
Mostly it is a pale
face hovering in the afterdraught
of the spirit, making both ends meet
on a scream. It is the breath
of the churchyard, the forming
of white frost in a believer,
when he would pray; it is soft
feathers camouflaging a machine.

“It repeats itself year
after year in its offspring
the staring pupils it teaches
Its music to, that is the voice
Of God in the darkness cursing himself
Fiercely for his lack of love.

“2
and there the owl happens
like white frost as
cruel and as silent
and the time on its
blank face is not
now so the dead
have nothing to go
by and are fast
or slow but never punctual
as the alarm is
over their bleached bones
of its night-strangled cry.”

The wrecker showed up but our troubles were not over. The driver, Fernando, couldn’t get the tire out of the truck either. For half an hour we banged and pried without success. The sky was almost cloudless and the official temperature was 93 degrees. The kids had drained our three bottles of water, when Fernando finally popped the fastener holding the tire in place. Changing it took two minutes. Fernando, a very sweaty gentleman with bruised hands, would not accept a tip. We had spent more than an an hour on the edge of that parking lot, surrounded, but for a strip of grass beside the Newman Center, by concrete and asphalt. In that time, I didn’t see, on the ground or aloft, a single bird.

Birdsong was published in 2002 by Seren, an imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd, of Bridgend, Wales.

From Duns to Dunce

Look at a word and see the world. The motto is mine, with apologies to the U.S. Navy, but the sentiment is Emerson’s, among others: “Language is fossil poetry.” I suspect one could start with any word and trace a chain of associations that, given sufficient time, resources and imagination, could contain the known universe and bring you back home to your desk. This Borgesian fancy came to me as I was reading The Dunciad, Alexander Pope's satire in which the goddess Dulness threatens to take over the world and make it even more like our own. “Dunciad,” of course, is Pope’s epical inflation of “dunce,” as in dunce cap – the conical hat teachers placed on the heads of slow-witted pupils.

Out of curiosity, and having no idea of its derivation, I looked up “dunce” in Webster’s Third, the dictionary with the spine that is not just broken but detached, that has been sitting on my desk for 33 years. I was at first pleased then offended to find the word is derived from the name of the 13th-century Scottish philosopher John Duns Scotus, about whom I wrote last month in connection with haecceity. Sixteenth-century English thinkers, flush with Renaissance arrogance, turned “Duns,” the theologian’s birthplace, into “dunce.” This subtle thinker had his name turned into a synonym for, according to Webster’s third definition, “a dull-witted and stupid person: dumbbell, dullard.”

I checked several dictionaries and histories of philosophy, and confirmed the derivation. Then I checked The Secret Lives of Words, an idiosyncratic word horde compiled by novelist Paul West, who begins his entry on “Dunce” with typical mordancy: “There is nothing so vindictive as punishing the terminal moraine left behind him by a philosopher.” Dating the first use of dunce caps to the 19th century, West continues:

“It is an odd historical spectacle, requiring over five hundred years to complete itself, as if the causuistical Scot had put a curse on his detractors, making them ever late (or re-tarded). Duns Scotus was one of the most ingenious thinker of the Middle Ages, but, when his devotees opposed the Renaissance that swept Europe, they rapidly became `duns men’ and got him a bad name.”

So, where does all this take us? There are many promising paths to follow, all discovered in less than 30 minutes of browsing in books and online. I learned that the eminent American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce extravagantly admired Duns Scotus. I noticed several references to the Islamic thinker Averroes, which reminds me of Borges’ story “Averroes’ Search.” How well did Duns Scotus know Averroes’ work, and did he serve as a conduit for Aristotlean or Islamic thought? I want to know more about the 18th-century Shakespeare scholar, Lewis Theabald, mocked by Pope as chief among the Dunces. Why did the Church wait until 1992 to beatify Duns Scotus? Why did he endorse the forced baptism of Jewish children? How well did Duns Scotus know the work of Maimonides? And so on. I’m back to Pope, but I’ll remind myself of these digressions the next time I feel bored and dunce-like.

To Live and Die in Paris

We spent much of our last visit to Paris, during the NATO bombing of Kosovo in the spring of 1999, wandering two of the city’s great cemeteries – Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse. I enjoy cemeteries, probably because I can still leave whenever I wish, and the sprawling ones in Paris, with their landscaping, neighborhoods and shrines, are reminiscent of cities within a greater city, ideally suited for walking and meditation.

It was Easter weekend, early in April, and the chestnut trees that line many of the streets in Pere Lachaise were in blossom. Mostly we wandered, though I wanted to visit Proust’s grave, which we found surrounded by elderly Italian women on tour. They spoke, took pictures and ate sandwiches wrapped in white paper. They were friendly and laughing and one agreed to photograph us as we stood beside the stone marking the resting place of Proust and his family. Randomly strolling the cemetery we found the graves of Apollinaire, Max Ernst, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde. The most shrine-like was Jim Morrison’s, where flowers, letters, candles, bottles, photographs and CD covers were heaped as though in preparation for a fire (Yes: “and our love become a funeral pyre”). Morrison’s stone and the others nearby were densely covered with grafitti, as they had been when I first saw them in 1973, two years after Morrison’s death.

I went to Montparnasse Cemetery mainly to visit Beckett’s grave. His stone resembles a low Japanese table cut from black marble. Its reflective surface returns the mourner’s stare and is marred only by the names and dates of Beckett and his wife, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil. Laid on the stone was a single desiccated red rose. Also in Montparnasse we visited the graves of Julio Cortazar, Alfred Dreyfus, Sartre and Baudelaire. We had trouble finding Baudelaire’s, because it is marked by a needle-shaped stone on which the largest name, near the apex, is Jacques Aupick, the poet’s detested step-father.

In his essay “Imagine Paris,” John Berger, who has lived in France for more than 30 years, writes:

“Often cemeteries are unexpectedly revealing about the life of the living. And this is true of Pere Lachaise. One needs a map, for it is large. Sections are built like towns – with streets, crossroads, pavements: each house is a tomb or a mausoleum. The dead rest there in furnished property, still protected from the vast exterior. Each tomb has a license and a number: Concession Perpetuelle Numero…It is the most urban and the most secular cemetery.”

After roaming the cemeteries and the city’s other sights, we sat for hours in sidewalk cafes and watched the human parade, and ate grand meals three times a day – French cuisine, of course, but also Italian and Argentine. In my bag I carried books by Borges and one of Paris’ closest observers, Walter Benjamin. Perhaps this is a useful prescription for living: Do not shun the dead. Remember, visit and honor them. But do not shun the living or their pleasures. In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, Berger writes:

“Human happiness is rare. There are no happy periods, only happy moments.”

Paris, for us, was a bundle of happy moments, one I have relived by writing this.

Three Dreams

The hosts of college radio programs often congratulate themselves on their eclectic musical tastes. A typical playlist might juxtapose Eric Dolphy, a Bulgarian women’s chorus, Hurricane Smith and Mercan Dede. The implication is that the host knows more about music than you do and is more welcoming of “diversity,” the cardinal virtue among cultural sophisticates. That the show will seem to most listeners at first briefly amusing, then irritatingly smug and turn quickly into unlistenable crap is proof to the host that he is hipper than thou.

Eclecticism is useful and interesting only when the similarities among the juxtaposed items are stronger and more interesting than the dissimilarities, and the items themselves are worthy of attention. In the summer issue of The Threepenny Review, Arthur Lubow’s brief essay, “Dream Books,” is based on the linkages among three books: I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years; Volume I: 1933-41, Volume II: 1942-45, by Victor Klemperer; Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays, by Winsor McCay; and Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. Those titles, coupled with Lubow’s opening sentences, assured me I was in good hands:

“Lying in bed one morning, on the blurry border of sleep, I realized that the three books I was currently reading all conjured up the fantastic realism of a dream. In each, incidents were depicted with hyper-lifelike clarity, but the story lines flagrantly, even preposterously, violated the rules by which we live, the very assumptions which our next step.”

I have read the Klemperer and Calvino volumes (the latter, several times), and know McCay’s masterpieces of comic strip art from other sources, though not the new and pricey ($125) edition edited by Peter Maresca that Lubow cites. My instinctive reaction to his premise was that I would enjoy the company of anyone with those books stacked on his night table. I want to meet such a rich, expansive sensibility and stay up late talking with him. This is a man who will not waste my time, though I might worry that I was wasting his. Among a critic’s foremost gifts is the ability to perceive similarities regardless of medium, genre, time or space, and taken together Lubow’s books form a useful core sample of the human mind in the 20th century.

Klemperer was a Jewish humanities professor who survived in Dresden under the Third Reich. Calvino was the author of elegant postmodern fiction. McCay was the greatest artist ever to work in comic strips. Speaking of the three books and their dream-like atmospheres, Lubow writes:

“Sequentiality itself was overthrown, or at least undermined. The narratives advanced, as if towards a crisis or climax, yet they seemed suspended in an aspic of frozen time. Or such was my dreamy epiphany. To a wide-awake mind, the books appeared at first to have almost nothing in common.”

Fortunately, Lubow’s essay is available online, so I’ll give nothing more away. If you don’t already know The Threepenny Review, browse the online offerings or buy the magazine, one I have been reading regularly since shortly after Wendy Lesser started publishing it more than 25 years ago. I interviewed Lesser in 2000, at her office in Berkeley, for a newspaper story I was writing about literature and the Bay Area. She possesses an editor’s most important gift – the ability to attract good writers.

As an aside, if you enjoy Winsor McCay’s comics you might be interested in Stephen Millhauser’s novella “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne,” collected in Little Kingdoms (1993). Millhauser, a friend and former neighbor of mine, based the story roughly on McCay’s life and work.

Gratitude and Despair

Another reason for gratitude is George Hunka’s decision to continue blogging, at least occasionally, at Superfluities. George is a playwright, and that work and other obligations weigh heavily on his time and energy. Thanks, George, for sparing a little room for us, readers who have come to depend on your insights, enthusiasm and taste. On Sunday, George linked to a BBC interview with English playwright Howard Barker, a writer new to me, and cited these lines in particular:

“I don't think [despair] is a negative quality in art. There are some times when one has to submit to despair, and I don't think I've ever heard a piece as despairing as [the lento from Bartók's String Quartet No. 2 (1917)]. ...

“Very desolate, utterly desolate. ... People don't particularly wish to be disturbed. One has to think about the theater and probably about music also not as entertainment, which is how it's regarded here from top to bottom virtually, but as a need, as a spiritual need, and that's a very different way to come at it. So if in a play of mine or in a piece of music as great as that, the experience is one of anxiety ... instead of saying, `Well, this just adds to the confusion and complexity of my life, I don't want it,’ but rather to say, `This deepens my feeling of life’ – that for every problem, we offer you another problem. That's not negativity. That's not pessimism. The whole idea of optimism and pessimism as critical terms of art seems to me to be completely redundant.”

I like everything about what Barker said, starting with the Bartok. How curious that a work so despairing, so diametrically the opposite of rousing (and what would that be: a Sousa march?) should be so piercingly beautiful. We might say the same of – what? Beckett comes to mind, yet I don’t think of his work as despairing. Grim, black, hopeless, but not despairing. I know at least one reader who, while seriously contemplating suicide, read Beckett, a writer he already knew well, and decided otherwise. Other factors influenced him as well, including biochemistry, and he never came to think of Beckett as the Hibernian Norman Vincent Peale, but there’s much in Beckett’s best work, especially the trilogy and the rest of the late prose, that is too funny, beautiful and stoically courageous to countenance suicide. A despairing work of literary art seems like a contradiction in terms – more so than music. To exert so much effort crafting words, arranging their music and meaning, would appear to refute despair, as Beckett does famously in the final words of The Unnamable: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The most despairing poem I know is John Berryman’s “He Resigns.” He wrote it early in 1971 while sober but severely depressed, and it was published in Delusions etc. after his suicide on Jan. 7, 1972:

“Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.
Her having gone away
in spirit from me. Hosts
of regrets come & find me empty.

“I don’t feel this will change.
I don’t want any thing
or person, familiar or strange.
I don’t think I will sing

“any more just now;
ever. I must start
to sit with a blind brow
above an empty heart.”

Chilling words from so garrulous a poet: “I don’t think I will sing/any more just now;/ever.” And yet, Berryman did sing – in this poem and the others he wrote in his final year, and on until his final day. In 1970, in his last book published during his life, Love & Fame, Berryman grappled with his faith, trying to find strength, meaning and purpose in his Roman Catholicism. The last section of that book is a heartbreaking poem titled “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” In the first address he writes:

“You have come to my rescue again & again
in my impassable, sometimes despairing years.
You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves
And I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.”

By January of 1972, the irresolvable contradictions proved too burdensome for Berryman. He could neither stay sober nor continue to drink, believe nor disbelieve, despair nor exult. His heart, at last, was empty. It sounds cold, but reading Berryman, as Howard Barker puts it, “deepens my feeling for life.”

O Canada!

Marketers toil, hoping to instill “brand loyalty” so you buy only Gulden’s Brown Mustard. I adhere to brand loyalty only when it comes to writers – in this case, Eric Ormsby. I would read and probably buy anything he wrote or recommended, which is the reason I have been reading Planet Earth, a selection of poems written by P.K. Page and edited by Ormsby. I had never before heard of Page (the P.K. stands for Patricia Kathleen), in part because she is Canadian and the permeable membrane between our two countries, at least in terms of literature, tends to flow one way (north, despite the firm of Atwood, Gallant, Munro, Davies and Cohen). Page was born in 1916, making her a contemporary of such American poets as Lowell, Berryman and Bishop, but the poet she most reminds me of, at least after a brief acquaintance, is the Australian, Les Murray, though her language is richer and her sensibility less pugnacious. Here’s an excerpt from “Poem Canzonic with Love to AMK” that reads like a credo:

“It is the writer’s duty to describe
freely, exactly. Nothing less will do.
Just as the painter must, from two make three
or conjure light, build pigments layer on layer
to form an artefact, so I must probe
with measuring mind and eye to mix a blue
mainly composed of air.
What is my purpose? This I cannot say
Unless, that I may somehow, anyhow
Chronicle and compare
Each least nuance and inconsistency.”

In his “Foreward,” Ormsby tells us Page is also a painter, which accounts not only for the reference to fashioning pigments but also for the acute, painstaking visual sense: “to mix a blue/mainly composed of air.” I like Page’s balance of exuberance and care. There’s nothing dry or academic in her lines, but neither do they reek of avant-garde posturing. Ormsby suggests that Page “should be read and savoured, with all the senses, with the tips of the fingers and the surfaces of the skin, with that utmost attentiveness earth itself demands from us.” She never mistakes emotion for truth. She has no sermons to preach, no ulterior politics, only poetry, and she throws us in medias res:

“I have coming here since I was born
never at my will
only when it permits me

“Like the Bodleian like the Web
like Borges’ aleph
it embodies all

“It is in a house
deeply hidden in my head
It is mine and notmine

“yet if I seek it
it recedes
down corridors of ether

Each single version
Is like and unlike
all the others

“a hidden place
in cellar or attic
matrix of evil and good

“a room
disguised as a non-room
a secret place

“I am showing it to you
fearful you may not
guess its importance

“that you will see only
a lumber room
a child’s bolt-hole

“Will not know it as prism
a magic square
the number nine”

This teasingly suggestive poem is titled “The Hidden Room,” and seems to be Page’s way of addressing the mysterious source of poetry itself, “mine and notmine.” I intend to read more deeply in Page, buying the two volumes of her collected poems. She turns 90 in November, which I trust will be celebrated in Canada as a national holiday. She reminds us that poetry can be celebratory, exciting, affirming and worthy of our trust, like a dependable friend. This is poetry for grownups, but not drudges.

And for another rousing dose of Ormsby, check out Page P8 of this weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. Ostensibly, Ormsby reviews Fighting Windmills, by Manuel Duran and Fay R. Rogg, but he doesn’t much care for the volume so he uses the opportunity to share his enthusiasm for Don Quixote, which he calls “the greatest novel in European literature.” The review appears not to be available online.

Happy Birthday, Dan

For me, Daniel Berrigan will always remain a minor poet, in the school of fellow Jesuit (and much greater poet) Gerard Manley Hopkins, who along the way took a detour into politics. I almost wrote “misguided detour,” but that’s neither fair nor accurate. One cannot imagine Dan other than he is, gifted with enormous energy, physical, artistic and moral. He has spoken softly on every occasion I have shared his company, but softly in the way a grieving man at a funeral speaks who does not wish to bother his fellow mourners. Not that Dan worries about bothering the right people. His voice is soft but never from weakness.

I heard a radio interview with Dan on Thursday, which prompted me to reread some of his poems. This one comes from his first collection, Time Without Number, published in 1957 and nominated for a National Book Award. The title is “Credentials”:

“I would it were possible to state in so
few words my errand in the world: quite simply
forestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves
largehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent order
decrees, says solemnly who he is
in the great thrusting limbs that are finally
one: a return, a permanent riverandsea.

“So the rose is its own credential, a certain
unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
visibly, it gives us heart too: bud, fulness and fall.”

Etymology helps. “Errand” is from the Old English for “messenger”—clearly a word Dan would use to describe his role. And “credential” shares a root with “credo” – “belief.” Almost 50 years ago, in his first book, Dan is defining his stance in the world. That final phrase is pure Hopkins. But in the end, this poem and most that Dan has published are dim shadows of Hopkins. His best work appears in his first four volumes, published between 1957 and 1966, the period immediately preceding his fulltime immersion in the antiwar movement. After that, the poems turn increasingly strident, didactic and journal-like – in effect, less poetic, a distinction Dan would not recognize.

Last month Dan celebrated his 85th birthday, and this year he celebrates 67 years as a Jesuit. I met him in the spring of 1991, in the wake of Desert Storm, when he spoke in Troy, N.Y. He autographed the books I handed him and we talked about Dostoevsky and Dorothy Day’s love of the Russian’s novels. I felt uneasy in his presence. I’m not a Catholic or any sort of believer, and perhaps I feared his reproach, which has never come.

The following summer and for the subsequent three summers I attended the weekend retreats Dan would lead at Pyramid Lake in the Adirondacks. Inevitably I was the only non-Catholic and surely the only atheist in attendance. As a group we would study a book of the Bible, always an Old Testament prophet, and meet to hear Dan’s idiosyncratic understanding of it. The schedule was loose, and I would spend a lot of time alone, reading, hiking, canoeing. Some of the others on the retreat (I thought of them as Berrigan groupies) monopolized Dan’s time, I felt, though he never complained. But by late Saturday afternoon we always seemed to meet informally, usually in the dining hall, and talked about books – Dickens, I remember, as well as the Russians, Frost, Eliot, Yeats, Hopkins. We also talked about a mutual acquaintance, the poet Carolyn Forche, whose talent he rated higher than I did. Besides the lake, the loons and the immense clarity of the night sky in the mountains, these talks were the reason I returned each summer

In 1971, Berrigan and the Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles published an edited transcription of their conversations, The Geography of Faith. Coles’ estimation of Dan resembles my own in that I see him as a complex, contradictory man:

“A man of culture and refinement, he has lashed out at the academic and artistic world. A man versed in logic, and in many ways an obvious rationalist, indeed a skeptic, he can become all of a sudden mystical. I never wanted to `analyze’ his personality, but its complexities kept appearing and never quite resolved themselves; I suspect they will grow and grow, and become the full-blown paradoxes that significant lives so often present to us.”

I don’t claim to have privileged understanding of Dan, either through our meetings or his books. To me, he remains an intriguing conundrum. He expressed contempt for the middle class and its values – not an unusual stance on the Left – and romanticized workers and natives of the Third World. This seems like self-loathing on the part of a highly educated, articulate, well read man. Most of all, I regret that Dan never devoted more time and psychic energy to poetry as poetry, not propaganda. I remember him dismissing the counterculture as hedonistic and self-indulgent, yet one of the poets he most resembles is Allen Ginsberg, who often blurred life and work in endless, apocalyptic, “Dear Diary” maunderings.

By the time of his 1969 collection False Gods, Real Men, Berrigan’s poetic manner has turned, often balefully, to Williams Carlos Williams. The lines are fragmented, the images isolated. In the midst of this sad poetic regression, in a poem titled “Farm,” Dan crafts an unlikely, inconspicuous self-portrait:

“four rotted berry crates
two screen doors
a broken barrow
a compost heap,
weeds springing, bold, ripe
unkillable, voracious for life.”

Skeezix

My parents used a private language my brother and I assumed was nonsensical and limited to our family. Much of it, I’ve slowly learned, was actually drawn from the popular culture of roughly the 1920s through the 1950s. When referring to an Everyman, an average Joe, my father would sometimes say “Joe Posidewalken” – and I’m not certain of that spelling. What seemed like gibberish I was able to decode last year after reading Douglas Bukowski's Pictures Of Home: A Memoir Of Family And City. Bukowski explained that Polish immigrants to the United States, at least in his native Chicago (and apparently in my native Cleveland), often lived in cheap basement apartments in which the only windows were at ground level, opening on the sidewalk. My father’s parents were born in Poland and came to the United State about a century ago. If they never lived in such an apartment themselves, they probably knew other newly minted Americans who did. In effect, “Joe Posidewalken” was Polish-American for a regular Joe, somebody like you an me.

Another word, also referring to an Everyman but with the implication of fecklessness or limited intelligence, and usually applied to a child (me, my brother), was “Skeezix.” With the publication of Walt and Skeezix, by Drawn &Quarterly Books, of Montreal, I’ve solved another minor childhood mystery. “Walt” is Walt Wallet and “Skeezix” is his adopted son in the 88-year-old comic strip “Gasoline Alley.” The strip was the creation of Frank O. King, and was first published in the Chicago Tribune in 1918. It started with the premise of Walt and his friends – Doc, Avery and Bill – repairing and talking about their automobiles, then still a novelty. Thus, “Gasoline Alley.”

According to some accounts, the Trib’s editor wanted to attract more female readers and told King to add a baby to the plot. Walt was a pear-shaped bachelor and grease monkey, but King solved the plot dilemma ala Moses and Tom Jones: On Valentine’s Day 1921, a baby in a basket showed up on Walt’s doorstep.

Drawn & Quarterly has produced a beautiful, candy box-shaped volume, reprinting all the strips from 1921-1922. The introduction by Jeet Heer, unfortunately, is cliched and unhelpful: “The falling leave remind us that change is a constant part of experience and one day the son will have a life apart from the father.” Thanks a lot. The publisher plans to print, incrementally over the next 20 years or so, all of “Gasoline Alley” so long as it was drawn by King, into the 1960s. The strip still appears in newspapers today, drawn by Jim Scancarelli, and the characters continue to age in real time. Walt later married. His wife, Phyllis Blossom, died in the strip on April 26, 2004, at the age of 105.

The strips from the 1920s have a leisurely, conversational pace, like the talk of guys idly working on their car. Often, very little happens, but the strips have a cumulative, novel-like impact over time. The day of Skeezix’s arrival goes like this: In the first frame, Walt wakes in bed and says, “What in blazes can anybody want – ringing my doorbell before daylight in the morning?” In the second, he has already donned his voluminous flowered robe and is squeezing into his slippers: “If Bill’s car has got stalled somewhere and he wants me to pull him out he’s out of luck!” Next, Walt is about to open his front door, and says, “And if it’s somebody’s joke I’ll show ‘em I’m hard boiled!” Finally, we see the sleeping baby in the basket on the snow-covered porch, a note saying “Walt” pinned to his blanket. With both hands, Walt holds his head, out of which flies a large, emphatic exclamation point.

Walt reminds me of two of his contemporaries, Laurel and Hardy. There’s the same innocence and good-heartedness, forever compromised by naivete. A “skeezix,” by the way, is supposedly a motherless calf, though Webster’s Third says the origin is unknown and gives “rascal” as a synonym – as in “Little Rascals” (“Our Gang”), created by Hal Roach,.as was the teaming of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. All of these products of American popular culture from the pre-Depression 1920s share a gentleness and essential simplicity and decency.

The strip indirectly intersects my life. My father was born two and a half months after Skeezix, on May 3, 1921. He probably breathed it in, along with Tarzan, Jack Benny and James Cagney movies. Here’s the strip that ran the day my father was born: Walt says to the black maid, Rachel, who is washing clothes: “I entered Skeezix in the baby contest, Rachel. You don’t think any other baby would have a chance to win out do you?” Rachel answers, “No, Mista Walt! Skeezix is the grandest baby ever was!” In the next frame, set in the alley, Walt’s buddies say, “Yessir, in a baby contest Skeezix ought to have a walkway!” and Walt replies, “That the way I feel about it.” In the third frame, Walt tell two well-dressed women, “Think Skeezix has a chance?” and they reply, “Certainly! He’s a perfectly marvelous child!” In the last frame, Walt is walking, smiling, head held high, and says, “I feel sorry for foolish parents who think there is the most wonderful baby!”

King’s humor is rooted in the familiar, in family and work. His art is never as dazzling as, say, Winsor McCay’s (“Little Nemo in Slumberland”) or George Herriman’s (“Krazy Kat”), but their styles would be inappropriate for King’s subject matter – the dailiness of American, working-class life. I stayed up too late last night reading Walt and Skeezix, partly as an indulgence in nostalgia. What I love about it is Walt’s growing father instincts and abilities (Holding up Skeezix to a woman at the door, Walt say, “Isn’t he a dandy?”), and the small details of American life, including the language, circa 1921. Walt mounts two flashlights on Skeezix’s baby stroller for night walks. A bootlegger tries to sell Walt a pint (“the real stuff”), but when Skeezix hiccups at the same time, Walt pulls him from his stroller and says, “Skeezix, you come up here and let me smell your breath!”

`Eerie Rhymes'

One of the reasons I became so fervent a reader of Vladimir Nabokov was the casual way he injected little hiccups of wonder into his narratives. Any competent writer can build self-forgetting momentum, especially in fiction, and Nabokov, despite his mandarin pose and meta-fictional credentials, knew how to move the reader along with the conventional engines of suspense and empathetic curiosity: What happens next? But Nabokov also enjoyed abruptly throwing a switch that shifted the narrative into another dimension, inducing a momentary sense of vertigo in the reader, as in the final sentences of Bend Sinister:

“I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.”

In Pale Fire, Nabokov created an entire novel that flickered between alternate dimensions. As a result, he spoiled some writers for me forever – Dostoevsky, Freud, Mann, among them – but he also alerted me to a more exalted class of writers who are fond enough of their readers to share with them the gift of delight. John Cheever does this for me. So do Steven Millhauser , Italo Calvino, Borges and early Updike.

This quality is rare in nonfiction. I see it occasionally in Ian Frazier, though I find it most consistently in the work of Lawrence Weschler. In fact, wonder is among his recurrent themes. He devoted an entire volume to it in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. Don’t confuse Weschler’s wonder with whimsy or infantile New Age ga-ga. He explains it best in the “Introduction” to his latest volume, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, citing the impact John Berger’s essay on the famous photo of Che Guevara’s corpse, surrounded by Bolivian brass, had on him. Berger glosses the picture, its set up and framing, as a re-creation of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson.

“Only, in the years since, and admittedly perhaps still in thrall to Berger’s way of seeing, I myself have increasingly found myself being visited by similarly uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections – sometimes in the weirdest places…The range in tone of these convergences was considerable: some were fanciful, others polemical; some merely silly, others almost transcendental. Some tended to burrow toward some deep-hidden, long submerged causal relation; other veritably reveled in their manifest unlikelihood.”

As a reporter and columnist, I have often followed such “eerie rhymes,” using Weschler, among others, self-consciously as my model. Weschler wrote a pioneering, admiring profile of the cartoonist Art Spiegelman for The New Yorker in 1986. Four years later, Spiegelman was giving a lecture at a library in suburban Albany, N.Y. I interviewed him in advance by telephone for my story, then spent several hours with him at the library setting up a display of items related to his extraordinary Holocaust comic, Maus. I told him in advance that much of what I knew about him and his work came from Weschler, whom Spiegelman praised profusely. He also praised my story, but was incensed by the mindless headline some editor had put on it. Clearly, Spiegelman was an artist in anger. He relished it. He settled down when I asked him to sign my first edition of Maus. Across from the copyright page is another page blank but for a quotation from Adolf Hitler: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.”

Spiegelman sketched himself as he appears in Maus – as a mouse, with a shirt and vest, smoking a cigarette. Smoke rises up the page, bisecting the quote and inevitably recalling the smoke of the crematoria. He wrote: “For Pat, Thanks for a swell write-up. All the best to your headline editor…best, Art Spigelman.”

I treasure that drawing and inscription, probably more than any writer's autograph I have. When I see it, I think of Spiegelman. I also think of Weschler, who hovers like a tutelary spirit in Spiegelman’s neighborhood. In broad terms, Weschler’s books can be divided into those devoted to politics (Solidarity in Poland, torture in South America) and those concerning art and artists (Robert Irwin, Boggs: A Comedy of Value), though others (Vermeer in Bosnia) blur the distinction. For a taste of Weschler in conversation, read his interview with Robert Birnbaum in the latest issue of The Morning News.