`Be Humble'

Thirty years ago a friend suggested I read Death of the Fox, a novel by George Garrett about Sir Walter Ralegh and Elizabeth I. I demurred, despite Phil having tastes in books pleasingly congruent with my own. My explanation was simple and I stand by it: I dislike historical fiction. Around the time of Phil’s recommendation, E.L. Doctorow published Ragtime and it became a bestseller and, a few years later, a lousy movie – sadly, Jimmy Cagney’s last. I tried to read the novel and found it pretentious and dull, and somehow that confirmed my feelings about Garrett’s novel specifically and costume-drama fiction in general.

I see the most significant flaw in my reasoning, though it’s probably not reasoning at all we’re talking about but harmless prejudice, a matter of taste. If I were consistent, I would not read, enjoy and admire work by Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Lampedusa, Vasilii Grossman, Isaac Babel and Thomas Pynchon – all of whom wrote, strictly speaking, historical fiction. And what about Henry James, in The Princess Casamassima; Philip Roth, in American Pastoral; Penelope Fitzgerald, in The Blue Flower? When I think of historical fiction, I think first of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper – both of whom Mark Twain disposed of. Then I think of genre writing – Zane Grey and Patrick O’Brian. The latter, I know, has respectable admirers, Terry Teachout among them, but I found his seafaring books impossible to read. I felt about them the way I feel about sports: Why bother?

This is all a long, digressive way of saying I still haven’t worked my way back to Death of the Fox, but I have stumbled upon George Garrett’s work as a poet. I found Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments in the library, and based on name recognition alone I pulled it from the shelf and read poem after poem while standing amid the stacks. Garrett’s poems are smart, often funny, and traditional – usually rhymed and metric -- and there’s no avant-garde hoo-ha in sight. The poems are actually written to be read and enjoyed, and I have been enjoying them. Here’s one titled “Swift,” about the author of Gulliver’s Travels, not the bird:

“Swift has been misunderstood, his rage
called everything but simple honesty,
the buzzing in his brain identified
as everything but the lightning of God.

“Now scholars nod over the burning page,
with pencils poised, fidget and warble
their footnotes wild, and Stella is
and she isn’t, and God knows

“Swift had marbles in his head –
tall sculptured figures posing there,
naked and shining, the image of
the rare and endless possibility of man.

Follow him, if you can, with eyes
Wide open. Sketch for a skeptic age
the contours of his anger and his love.
Be humble if he, furious, replies.”

I admire, first, the conversational injunction to simply read Swift and take him at his word – “simple honesty.” I like the play on a cliché – “He lost his marbles” – turned into an elegant image of a sculpted ideal. I’ve always thought of Swift, like the novelist William Gaddis, as a wounded idealist. Satirists are not nihilists. The greatest satirists are conservative in the original sense, though not necessarily Republican. I love the final quatrain.

What a pleasant discovery. I intend to read more of Garrett, including Death of a Fox. What Samuel Johnson wrote of Swift’s poems aptly describes Garrett’s:

“They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There seldom occurs a hard-laboured expression, or a redundant epithet; all his verses exemplify his own definition of a good style, they consist of proper words in proper places.”