`Texas Overture'

For readers who were paying attention, Greil Marcus shed the “rock critic” stigmata a long time ago, though he remains our most reliable contextualizer of John Winthrop, Bob Dylan, Herman Melville, Dock Boggs, Philip Roth, David Lynch, David Thomas and other essential Americans. His new book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is another step in Marcus’ ongoing project to connect everything.

He devotes more than 50 pages to David Thomas, a native of my hometown, Cleveland, and founder more than 30 years ago of Pere Ubu, a great American band that has remained resolutely obscure in the marketplace. Thomas is one of those artists dedicated to pleasing himself and maybe some friends and colleagues, and to staying true to his self-identified tradition, but is otherwise indifferent to whatever constitutes career advancement in the USA. Marcus writes that Thomas has created:

“…a personal culture of maps and talismans, locks and keys, within the greater culture of which you are a part whether you want to be or not. When you approach the greater culture with a personal culture, you do so with the knowledge that the greater culture can never satisfy you, and the knowledge of what an earthquake it would be if it did: if the greater culture could, even for an instant, truly satisfy anyone, and then nearly everyone, as, on occasion, as with the emergence of Charlie Chaplin or the Beatles, it has.”

Marcus quotes Thomas from one of their telephone conversations:

“Culture happen in secret, all art is secret. Ordinary people only see the ashes of art, or the failures, or frozen moments. Only rarely onstage do bands achieve reality; mostly it’s in rehearsals, in lost moments. Nobody ever sees that or knows anything about it.”

Here’s how Marcus glosses Thomas’ remarks, and the history of Pere Ubu:

“In a big, multifaceted democracy, you’re supposed to be able to communicate directly with everyone, yet many despair of being understood by anyone at all; the result is shame, rage, withdrawal, or maybe shooting up a school. Pere Ubu’s original recordings, Thomas has written, caught the sound of `the inward turning, defiant stance of a beleaguered few who felt themselves to be outside music, beneath media attention, and without hope of an audience.’”

Marcus moves on to Raymond Chandler, Moby-Dick, Dock Boggs and many other good, interesting American things, and I admire his efforts to reclaim American culture. Thomas and Pere Ubu have just put out a new album, Why I Hate Women (a title that ought to win legions of new fans). I haven’t yet heard the record but the lyrics are available at the band’s web site. Thomas often writes about food. Lately, the song my oldest son has listened to most often on his iPod is “I Hear They Smoke the Barbecue” (from Worlds in Collision, 1991). Here are the words to the final cut from the new album, “Texas Overture,” as fine a rendering of my present state as I can imagine. They will make you hungry and they make miss an America I don't remember:

“Wild flowers n gravel pit towers
Pecan-smoke 2 meat barbecue
Shotgun shack by the roadside...
Blacktop Texas is everything it will be
Loop road tornadas, hand grown tomatas
Post Office Lady, Flatonia Next Right
Two horses noddin at a leafless tree
waitin in vain to be taken from the rain
The Black Sky crow is walking on the road,
walking on the road
Pine Forest Cablevision
Apartment Now Leasin
Pop-a-Top Beverage & Bait Barn
Fireworks - Buy One Get Five Free
Texas is the land of the free

“Kreuz's is the king on the Lockhart rail line
A hall full of trestle tables
Fat soaked butcher paper
Beans sauerkraut soda pop beer
Rough paper hand towels in a roll on a stick
sittin upright on every table in the joint
Water fountain bags of chips german tata salad
Jalapenos in a brown bowl
The fires in the pit have never been put out
An old Texas lady slicin beef brisket
faded floral print dress covered by an apron
Is that enough? she says
She knows
No, I say, more please
Butcher paper one knife no fork white bread
Vegetarians Exit Now Please
Texas is the land of the free

“No Teeth Barbecue, Rockdale, Texas
The man in the window watches crop dusters next door
If I lived in Hutto I'd nearly be home now,
out among the farm roads,
headin for the county line,
lookin for the water towers, bringin in the sheaves
Texas is the land of the free

“Thelma's in Houston is closed on Sunday
The best catfish in all the state of Texas
The meat's pulled from the pit at the stroke of noon
The line grows long in a shack in an urban field
sittin in the shadows of the chrome
Man in a big hat born into a black suit says,
Pass a menu if you would please
One slab of ribs, one pound any Meat
Whole chicken 1/2 chicken ham ribs links beef
Green beans pinto beans tata salad cole slaw
Okra dirty rice or yams
2 slices white bread sealed in a ziplock
Peach sweet potato apple/lemon chocolate butter pie
Cheese peppers soda or tea
Texas is the land of the free

“Salt Lick in Driftwood is no beer family style
3 meat platter bowl of beans slaw tata salad
Onions pickles two slices white bread Texas style
Order in order out order online
Order by mail fax toll free anytime
The waitress is a middle age ex-hippie chick
who's found her a life in a hill country family schtick
Honey you will not leave eatin only that much
Bottomless refills more meat more beans whole lotta slaw please
Texas is the land of the free.”

`The Shadow of Humanity'

There’s much fretting about the moral component of literature, or its absence, and much of the confusion results from the failure to distinguish moral from moralistic. The capacity to make moral choices is what sets us apart from other species. Other animals act; humans choose then act. Moral constraints and distinctions, and the potential to ignore them and convince ourselves we haven’t ignored them, or have done so but for the best of reasons, or haven’t ignored them because they don’t exist, are the rude material of literary art.

If a writer’s principle motive is moralistic – in the vernacular, telling others how to run their lives, also known as sticking one’s nose where it doesn’t belong – he or she is no longer engaging in literary art, or at least is practicing a compromised, incapacitated version of literary art. Witness Tolstoy: Anna Karenina and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” are great art; The Kreutzer Sonata is bad art – a sermon, a rant, propaganda. The moral is nuanced and shaded; the moralistic, preachy, misleadingly binary and rooted in a power imbalance. My wife has just read Anna Karenina for the first time, and reread “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” We talk about Tolstoy’s people and the choices they made. Had she read The Kreutzer Sonata, we would have talked about the choices Tolstoy made. In literary terms, the great corrective to Tolstoy is Chekhov. In a Feb. 15, 1890, letter to his friend and editor Alexy Pleshcheyev, Chekov wrote of The Kreutzer Sonata:

“Reading it, you can scarcely forbear to exclaim: `That’s so true!’ or alternatively `That’s stupid!’ There is no doubt it has some irritating defects. As well as those you have listed, there is one for which it is hard to forgive the author, and that is his arrogance in discussing matters about which he understands nothing and is prevented by obstinacy from even wanting to understand anything.”

Cynthia Ozick, in “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” collected in Art & Ardor, addresses the moral/moralistic distinction with forthrightness and finesse:

“For me, with certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life. The exceptions occur in lyric poetry, which bursts shadowless like flowers at noon, with the eloquent bliss almost of nature itself, when nature is both benevolent and beautiful. For the rest – well, one discounts stories and novels that are really journalism; but of the stories and novels that mean to be literature, one expects a certain corona of moral purpose: not outright in the grain of the fiction itself, but in the form of a faintly incandescent envelope around it. The tales we care for lastingly are the ones that touch on the redemptive – not, it should be understood, on the guaranteed promise of redemption, and not on goodness, kindness, decency, all the usual virtues. Redemption has almost nothing to do with virtue, especially when the call to virtue is prescriptive or coercive; rather, it nis the singular idea that is the opposite of the Greek belief in fate: the idea that insists on the freedom to change one’s life.

“Redemption means fluidity; the notion that people and things are subject to willed alteration; the sense of possibility; of turning away from, or turning toward; of deliverance; the sense that we act for ourselves rather than are acted upon; the sense that we are responsible, that there is no deus ex machina other than the character we have ourselves fashioned; above all, that we can surprise ourselves. Implicit in redemption is amazement, marveling, suspense – precisely that elation-bringing suspense of the didactic I noted earlier, wherein the next revelation is about to fall. Implicit in redemption is everything against the fated or the static: everything that hates death and harm and elevates the life-giving – if only through terror at its absence.”

I quote Ozick at length because she is a great stylist and her language moves me. She bravely addresses the question of morality in literature -- a notion long out of fashion and derided by hipper-than-thou critics – but reminds us of the fundamental reason we read fiction: Because we like, and find comfort in, hearing and telling stories about each other. She goes on to condemn the philistinism of “uplift” and “affirmative” literature. She aptly quotes Henry James: “Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.”

Four Ways of Looking at Joseph Conrad

I am reading Collected Studies in the Use of English, by Kenneth Cox, and I will devote more time to writing about this delightful, densely written book. For now, I’m struck by Cox’s respectful treatment of Joseph Conrad, and also by how the great exiled Pole has touched so many other writers, and not only novelists. Faulkner loved his work, of course, especially The Nigger of the Narcissus, as I recall. Here is Cox, followed by three others on Conrad:

“Sailors, he said in Chance and he was thinking of conditions under sail, are great readers. In Youth the twenty-year-old second mate Marlow returns to his ship at Falmouth, after a spree in London, with a set of Byron. Extensive reading in works of travel and exploration is evident almost everywhere but sources are seldom named. One rare instance turns up in the unlikeliest place: Alfred Russel Wallace’s famous book on the Malay archipelago is cited in The Secret Agent. Somehow he kept up with modern fiction in French. He is not suspected of giving much time to the English lady novelists.”

V.S. Naipual, from “Conrad’s Darkness,” The Return of Eva Peron:

“And there are the aphorisms. They run right through Conrad’s work, and their tone never varies. It is the same wise man who seems to be speaking.”

Murray Kempton, from “As the World Turns,” New York Newsday, Dec. 10, 1989, collected in Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events:

“The cruelty and indifference of misgovernment explain the bandit’s of Conrad’s Costaguana [in Nostromo], and perhaps the same things explain the FMLN in El Salvador’s hills today. We must look to the novelist if we hope to understand. His is the matter of fact. Social science and intelligence reports are the mere poor stuff of an unadorned imagination.”

Henry James, from a letter to Conrad on Nov. 1, 1906, after Conrad had sent him an inscribed copy of The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions:

“I read you as I listen to rare music – with deepest depths or surrender, & out of those depths I emerge slowly & reluctantly again, to acknowledge that I return to life….But the book itself is a wonder to me really – for its so bringing home the prodigy of your part of experience; bringing it home to me more personally & directly, I mean, the immense treasure & the inexhaustible adventure. No one has known – for intellectual use – the things you know, & you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached. I find you, in it all, writing wonderfully, whatever you may say of your difficult medium & your plume rebelle.”

`Constellating Fragments'

I know from his books and the letters I received from him that Guy Davenport was constitutionally incapable of writing a dull sentence. Even the most functional was well built and animated with intelligent energy.

For the first time I have been looking at Cities on Hills: A Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a revision of the doctoral dissertation Guy wrote at Harvard, published in book form in 1983. For Guy, as for his friend Hugh Kenner, Pound was the central figure of modernism, the inescapable clearing house for 20th-century art. I’m less infatuated with Pound, for both poetic and political reasons. Even Guy, in his Foreward to Cities on Hills, refers to Pound’s “damnable prejudices and crankiness,” which I think goes very easy on the anti-Semite and Fascist sympathizer. However, Guy, as always, has much to say that possesses relevance far beyond a scholarly interest in Pound. Some of his Foreward reads like an apologia for his own work:

“There is the feeling, I believe, that readers see in him….a mind that foresaw our present peril of nuclear war, the confusion of our arts, our distress economic and civil, and the poignancy of our longing for past historical moments….Pound lived into our postliterate age, and saw it as a new barbarity.

“He even believed that history had somehow stopped, and that the present is a hiatus between historical periods. Poets have had this feeling before: Petrarch, Donne, Milton. It is a feeling that we are living entirely off the provender of the past, having none of our own. It is easy (if wrong) to see our age as one of retrospect, and that is so because Pound was right: something has perverted values. There is a difference between a stove and an altar. There is a great hunger for meaning.”

This passage sounds elegiac, almost wistful, not like the jeremiads Guy occasionally wrote. Earlier in the Foreward, he spends a paragraph ripping the IRS, and concludes, “Where there is no concern there is no civilization.” The decay of our culture enraged him. Guy goes on to describe The Cantos and subsequent Pound-influenced long poems by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, David Jones and Louis Zukofsky, as “transitional”:

“Transitional to what? We don’t know yet. Writing in a postliterate age is in the same situation as writing in a newly literate age, like the early Victorian. A sharply zoned hierarchy of texts displaces smooth similarities of style. At the top of the hierarchy we have those agreeing with Pound’s intuition that the art of our time must be inventive, exploratory, and uncompromising. Far from writing for an audience, they must create an audience. Such experimentation can be explained. The arts of our time have been making an inventory of our culture, with an eye to saving what can be saved, with an eye for resuscitation, with an eye for planning renovations.”

This sounds hopeful, if not optimistic. Guy might be describing some of the good work accomplished by bloggers. He goes on:

“The genius of the century has been for constellating fragments in an integral field: a quest for resemblance among differences, for an order, perhaps hitherto unsuspected, that will redeem plurality from mere repetition and randomness. The Cantos can be seen as a Cubist mural, to be read as one looks at a collage. At first it is a confusion. One by one, we note relations, until we can say why all the elements are there, and what kind of knowing has been made possible by a complexity of images.”

Guy almost makes me want to read Pound again and reassess his achievement. He also gives me hope for work that is “inventive, exploratory, and uncompromising,” like his own.

New Books, Old Books

Based on the content posted at various litblogs, I’ve concluded that many readers devote their time and energy almost exclusively to recently published books. This seems peculiar because while I loyally track certain contemporary writers – Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Greil Marcus – and read their work as soon as it’s published, and while I review new books for newspapers and thus get paid to do so, I tend to assume that most are a waste of time. In addition, the past is a much bigger place than the present, so it follows that most worthwhile books were published not last week but some time in the previous three millennia. Every minute devoted to reading the new and middling is a minute spent languishing away from the old and dependably superior.

I sound like what is known in jazz circles as a “moldy fig,” but I’m making no claims for the superiority of some mythical Golden Age of writing or publishing. Most of what came off the presses in 1906 or 1806 was rubbish, too. In fact, my observations are nothing new, and I cite as authority the 1825 essay “On Reading New Books,” from Vol. XVII of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, published in 1933 by J.M. Dent and Sons. Clearly, little has changed in almost 200 years. Hazlitt in his first sentence describes reading new books as a “rage” he cannot comprehend:

“If the public has read all those that have gone before, I can conceive how they should not wish to read the same work twice over; but when I consider the countless volumes that lie unopened, unregarded, unread, and unthought-of, I cannot enter into the pathetic complaints that I hear made, that Sir Walter Scott writes no more – that the press is idle – that Lord Byron is dead. If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. If it be urged that it has no modern, passing incidents, and is out of date and old-fashioned, then it is so much the newer; it is farther removed from other works that I have lately read, from the familiar routine of ordinary life, and makes so much more addition to my knowledge.”

In effect, Hazlitt is arguing that an old, unread book is newer than a new book one has already read. Part of literature’s value is the way it demands that we project ourselves out of the familiar and comfortable into the alien, that we willingly assume another’s point of view. This challenges our natural tendency to remain self-centered and coddle our assumptions. One potential blessing of reading broadly and empathetically in the past is to undermine the privileged status of our cozy, imperious, present selves.

I remember a college English professor, a specialist in the 18th century, complaining that most of her students had read almost nothing published earlier than Hemingway. In fact, Hemingway and the pared-down style he pioneered marked a demarcation beyond which her students could not and would not willingly venture. An elaborate, pre-modernist prose – not to speak of Chaucer or Shakespeare – was almost literally a foreign language. This was 35 years ago, and presumably we would have to bump up the new outer limit of literacy to – what? Salinger? Toni Morrison? Rick Moody?

Hazlitt published a companion essay, “On Reading Old Books,” which begins like this: “I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.” I think the great, aging essayist is playing the reactionary for the sake of provoking knee-jerk partisans of the new. In the same essay, however, he makes a sad admission:

“Books have in great measure lost their power over me; nor can I revive the same interest in them as formerly. I perceive when a thing is good, rather than feel it.”

I’m grateful for having never reached such an extreme of literary demoralization, a state comparable to losing all loved ones, family and friends, and being alone without hope of solace or pleasure. There’s always another book to read, old or new.

A Little Dickens

Without comment, my 19-year-old son, a sophomore at a college in Manhattan, today sent me this excerpt from Great Expectations, a novel he is reading for the first time:

"Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I wasn't allowed to speak (I didn't want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, hadhad the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldn't leave me alone."

I’m guessing that Joshua has fallen under the spell of the Dickens sentence, that great, unfurling contrivance that huffs and puffs and threatens to explode into gibberish but manages to carry the baffled reader like a steam engine into the train station of good sense and comedy. I know the feeling. Here’s an exchange between Alfred Jingle and Mr. Pickwick, from the second chapter of Pickwick Papers, that always makes me laugh:

“Heads, heads--take care of your heads!” cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. “Terrible place-- dangerous work--other day--five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round--mother's head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir?--fine place--little window--somebody else's head off there, eh, sir?--he didn't keep a sharp look-out enough either--eh, Sir, eh?”

“I am ruminating,” said Mr. Pickwick, “on the strange mutability of human affairs.”

“Ah! I see--in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, Sir?”

“An observer of human nature, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get. Poet, Sir?”

“My friend Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“So have I,” said the stranger. “Epic poem--ten thousand lines --revolution of July--composed it on the spot--Mars by day, Apollo by night--bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.”

I'm Walkin', Yes, Indeed

My favorite cities, the ones I know best, are the ones I have walked, often for many miles, over many years – New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris and, at the humbler end of the urban spectrum, Albany and Schenectady, in upstate New York. In 1975-76, I returned to Cleveland, my hometown, and I didn’t own a car. A friend and I walked everywhere, or rode the bus. We wore knapsacks, usually filled with books, and this earned us stares on Cleveland’s West Side, and an occasional rousting by cops, who work a peculiar algebra of their own: long hair + backpack = dope. Except we weren’t holding, because we weren’t entirely stupid, even in our 20s.

That’s how I navigated and explored the invisible maps of my seemingly familiar home turf. In a car, you sacrifice detail and nuance for speed and convenience. Walking, you have no buffers. From 30 years ago, I remember a poster for a martial arts tourament taped to the front door of a bodega: “Kung Fu for Christ.” I remember tramping past a vodka distillery and debating whether we could get a contact high from the emissions. I remember children feeding flies to spiders at a bus stop, like a vision out of Sam Peckinpah. I remember a hand-written sign in the window of a small grocery advertising “patatas” [potatoes]; stopping by a junk store and finding a volume of Eugene O’Neill’s plays signed by O’Neill; and a girl in a diner having a seizure while her mother slapped her and said, over and over, “Now you stop that!”

So much of the literature of walking is devoted to rural scenes. Walking, after all, is organic and prophylactic, isn’t it? What better way to traverse meadows and woodland glens? Look at Rousseau, Johnson and Boswell, Coleridge and other English Romantics, Thoreau and, more recently, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Well, yes, but what about Dickens, Baudelaire, Joyce and Walter Benjamin? What about the boulevardier, the man-about-town and the flaneur? I thought about this yesterday when I started reading Lights Out for the Territory, by Iain Sinclair, a visionary and very English chronicle of his tramps about London. The book defies description, and I’m enjoying it immensely. I’ve never read Sinclair before. He’s a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, and this book is big and elastic enough to contain anything Sinclair has ever seen, read or imagined while traipsing about London. Here’s a description of his method:

“Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no bull-shit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siecle decadence, a poetic of entropy – but the born-again flaneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything.”

This makes me envious of Sinclair for living in a walkable city. I live in Houston, the fourth largest city in the nation, and the largest without zoning. The latter fact makes for architectural and environmental monstrosities, but also for weird juxtapositions and eccentricities. But Houston, larger than El Salvador, is designed exclusively for the automobile. Pedestrians are an endangered species. The sprawl, coupled with work and family obligations, makes the sort of meandering all-day hikes without itinerary I used to make impossible. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin writes that the movements of the flaneur are characterized by “undecidedness” – a serendipitous quality that responds to chance encounters. To walk forgetfully as I used to do, without goal, open to random experience, is a pleasure I have sacrificed. Writing of Baudelaire, Benjamin said: “An intoxication overcomes the one who walks for a long time aimlessly through the streets.” Today, regretfully, I can’t afford to be less than sober.

`An Amiable Explainer'

I have always found pleasure in Charles Darwin as a writer of vigorous prose, apart from his obvious accomplishments as a scientist. I see him as of those ambitious, larger-than-life, hyper-energetic Victorians – think of Ruskin, Dickens, Eliot – with the temerity to conquer worlds and who, by doing so, create new worlds of their own. I have almost finished reading The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, by David Quammen, who wrote The Song Of the Dodo, one of the best science books ever written for non-scientific readers. Quammen is gracious enough to describe Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Darwin as “magisterial,” and his goal is not to challenge Browne’s eminence but to provide a brief (304 pages) but detailed life.

After acknowledging The Origin of Species as “one of the most influential books ever written,” exceeded only by the Bible, the Qur’an, the Mahabharata, “and a few other scriptural texts that have inspired millions of people to piety and bloodshed,” and placing it in the revolutionary company of works by Copernicus, Newton and Einstein, Quammen writes:

“Unlike those other great works of science, though, The Origin of Species is a book written in plain everyday language and meant by its author to speak to any attentive reader. Some of its grammatical constructions are a bit sinuous in the Victorian style; much of its writing is clear and crisp. Darwin was inconsistent as a literary stylist, sometimes bad, sometimes good, but even when bad he wasn’t esoteric. Occasionally he just tried to put too much into a single sentence, a run-on construction with syllogistic premises, qualifications, facts, stipulations, and conclusions all linked together by semicolons and dashes like a giant protein molecule folding back on itself. Once in a while he wrote something beautiful and brilliant. Mostly he was an amiable explainer and narrator presenting one of the more astonishing tales ever told.”

This is a fair and insightful estimate of Darwin’s prose – fair, because the biologist occasionally indulged in the Victorian sin of garrulousness, a failing that might in his case might be attributed, in part, to a surfeit of thought. Darwin saw more than most people and made more connections. Insightful, because Quammen describes Darwin as a storyteller, and evolution by natural selection is a great, endlessly told story. Likening one of Darwin’s sentences to a protein folding is brilliant. Here’s an example of that serviceable-but-attractive prose, chosen randomly from Chapter V, “Bahia Blanca,” of The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin has been cataloging the fauna of Argentina:

“The Trigonocephalus has, therefore, in some respects the structure of a viper, with the habits of a rattlesnake: the noise, however, being produced by a simpler device. The expression on this snake’s face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw any thing more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness.”

Words to Live By

Good advice from three great Americans:

“Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Keep the river road, all the way, and next time you tramp, take shoes and socks with you.” – Huckleberry Finn

“Well, if ya call her on the telephone, and she answers awful slow
Grab the first train smokin', if you have to hobo.” – Chester Burnett

The Poet of Unhappiness

Wendy Cope writes thoughtfully of A.E. Housman and assembles a generous sampler of his poems at the “Poet on the Poet of the Week” feature on the Carcanet Press web site:

“The despair in these poems is that of a man facing life and death without religious belief, and without marriage or a lover. Housman was a homosexual, in an age when homosexual behaviour was punishable by imprisonment. The bleak music of his poems about lost, unrequited or impossible love moves many readers, including me, to tears.”

I can’t think of another poet about whom I’ve had such wildly variable feelings. When very young, his melancholy and the seeming simplicity of his line attracted me. I found his poems “moody,” in what now seems the worst sense. And for that reason, I lost interest in his work after I discovered Eliot and Auden (both qualified admirers of Housman). Only in the last few years have I reevaluated his work and found it not only beautiful but heartbreaking – in the best sense. John Berryman was another unlikely admirer of Housman. In his Paris Review interview, a year before his suicide, Berryman told Peter A. Stitt:

“Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvelous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.”

Berryman, an inveterate Freudian, must have sensed his estimation of Housman, while heartfelt, was pure projection. For a more nuanced appreciation, here’s “Dream Song 205”:

“Come & dance, Housman’s hopeless heroine
bereft of all: I take you in me arms
burnt-cork:
your creator is studying his celestial sphere,
he never loved you, he never loved a woman
or a man, save one: he was a fork

“saved by his double genius & certain emendations
All his long life, hopeless lads grew cold
He drew their death-masks
To listen to him, you’d think that growing old
at twenty-two was horrible, and the ordinary tasks
of people didn’t exist.

“He did his almost perfect best with what he had
Shades are sorrowing, as not called up
By in his genius him
Others are for his life-long omission glad
& published their works as soon as he came to a stop
& could not review them.”

Between them, Berryman and Housman define “fork.” Yet another admirer of Housman was Philip Larkin, who judged him “the poet of unhappiness,” a title Larkin might have claimed as his own. As he said famously in his Observer interview:

“It’s very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable. And I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any – after all most people are unhappy, don’t you think?”

In his review of a Housman biography, Larkin cited “XXVII” from More Poems as evidence of Housman’s unhappy Muse:

“To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,
To lie flat and know nothing and be still,
Are the two trades of man; and which is worse
I know not, but I know that both are ill.”

Without the help of certain poets and their gift for unhappiness, would we even know what unhappiness is?

Covert Criticism

Slyly, in passing, Guy Davenport once wrote that Rudyard Kipling was the finest writer of stories in the language, a judgment many of us grew up knowing intuitively, as did Borges, Orwell and Randall Jarrell, among other readers. In another essay, “On Reading,” Davenport elaborated: “I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself.”

Consider, among Kipling’s stories, “Lispeth,” “The Story of Mohammed Din,” “Wireless,” “The Gardener,” “Mary Postgate” and “The Wish House.” Was there ever so “natural” a writer, one who knew what readers wanted and delivered it with great style, without pandering? Especially early in the 20th century, Kipling was supremely popular among common readers, rivaling Dickens in the loyalty and affection he inspired. This probably remains true for those works marketed as children’s literature – The Jungle Book and Just So Stories – which all three of my sons have loved. To this day I thrill to the sound of “the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River.” But how often do adults read Kim, “The Man Who Would Be King” (made by John Huston into a great movie with Sean Connery and Michael Caine) and Stalky & Co.?

Davenport also wrote, “What got Kipling a bad name among Liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.” I’m guessing that Davenport is correct, and that Kipling has been done in by politics, real and imagined, though this is hardly a recent development. Time, Auden was compelled to write, “Pardons Kipling and his views,” and that was in 1939. Again, politics undoes pleasure.

I was thinking about Kipling because I have been browsing in a collection of his “criticism,” Writings on Writing, edited by Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis (“Former Chairman of The Kipling Society”), published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. Kipling was no theorist, seldom wrote reviews and was pathologically averse to criticizing other writers, but Kemp and Lewis collect a miscellany of essays, speeches, letters and poems that reflect his literary preferences. They call it “Kipling’s covert criticism.” Consider this excerpt from a speech Kipling delivered in 1912 to 50 boys, including his son, at Wellington College. In this edition, it is 11 pages long. Imagine the thrill these kids must has felt, to have the author of Captains Courageous, who five years earlier had been the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, speak to them so intimately:

“We have times and moods and tenses of black depression and despair and general mental discomfort which, for convenience sake, we call liver or sulks. But so far as my experience goes, that is just the time when a man is peculiarly accessible to the influence of a book, as he is to any other outside influence; and, moreover, that is just the time when he naturally and instinctively does not want anything of a mid-taxing soul-stirring nature. Then is the time to fall back on books that neither pretend to be nor are accepted as masterpieces, but books whose tone and temper soothe your trouble for the time being. A man who knows you and your life may be able to recommend such books. Ask him.”

I love that tone of bluff, fatherly advice, delivered without condescension. And read this, from Kipling’s preface to Just So Stories:

“Some stories are meant to be read quietly and some stories are meant to be told aloud. Some stories are only proper for rainy mornings, and some for long, hot afternoons when one is lying in the open, and some stories are bedtime stories.”

The choice is tough, because I want to reread Kim, which Randall Jarrell said he did every year, but I think for tonight my bedtime story will be “Wireless.”

Ambushed by Surprise

One of the foremost pleasures of broad, unsystematic reading is unexpectedly recognizing oneself in the words of others. This can never be foreseen and, in my experience, cannot be forced. I can’t go looking for it because it happens when I’m reading in repose and without purpose. Mentally, I’m alert, as critical as ever, I suppose, but relaxed and responsive. This has happened several times lately, yet I can go weeks without that characteristic flash of self-illumination I’m talking about.

I read Richard Zenith’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude about two years ago, and an earlier translation back in the 90s, but while grazing through my Penguin paperback the other day I found this:

“Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by the laws we know about things. Every day they’re spoken of and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, their secret converting into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. What’s alien peeps at us from the shadows.”

For me, Pessoa is talking about mental phenomena, not intimations of the supernatural – the quirks of memory and awareness that flicker for nanoseconds in consciousness. Why am I humming that song? Why do I suddenly remember a face from decades ago? Why does the book that gave me pleasure last night no longer interest me? Why do I suddenly crave a cup of tea when I drink only coffee? Why did that sincere, well-intended resolution abruptly shrivel? Trying to trace such mental events back to their stimuli, whatever sparked them, is futile and humbling. None of them is significant, yet each seems uncanny. Pessoa’s insight feels deeply personal, as though he were confiding in me. Such is the power of great writing that a Portuguese poet who died more than 70 years ago can know something about me that I didn’t know.

And then there’s this, from John Clare, the wonderful English poet who at last came alive for me after I read Jonathan Bate’s biography:

“Truth is always asserted with the fewest words & falshood [sic] with the most protestations. Truth simply thinks you believe her & falsehood [sic] wishes to make you believe her [.]”

This comes from A Champion for the Poor: Political Verse and Prose, published by Carcanet Press in 2000, and edited by P.M.S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell. I find Clare’s personification of truth as a woman very touching. These sentences, taken from a handwritten manuscript and previously unpublished, confirm an intuition I have left unarticulated for years, one that gives the lie to marketing, advertising, public relations and all forms of “spin”: The truth, simple and unadorned, speaks confidently for itself. It doesn’t need our help. Have you noticed that people with the least to say take the most time saying it? And that what they say, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense, is often bullshit? Truth tends to be laconic, while lies are often garrulous.

Many of Clare’s lines in this collection are memorable. He is, strictly speaking, a “naïve” writer, whose work often straddles the not very useful divide between folk art and – what? High art? I’m not sure. He exercised artistic control, edited out material that didn’t please him, yet he was not a poet in the same sense as Keats, to choose an example from among his contemporaries. Anyway, here’s a passage that resonates for me, a citizen almost 54 years old who has exercised his right to vote only once and has regretted it ever since. Please make allowances for Clare’s unorthodox spelling and punctuation:

“I never meddle with politics in fact you would laugh at my idea of that branch of art for I consider it nothing more or less then a game at hide & seek for self interest & the terms wig & tory are nothing more in my mind then the left & right hand of that monster the only difference being that the latter lyes nearer the windfalls of wills for self interest then the other – that there are some & many who have the good of the people at heart is not to be doubted but with the others who have only the good of themselves in view when balloted I fear that will always be as the few….”

Belated Birthday

Monday was Samuel Johnson’s 297th birthday, a date I forgot until Garrison Keillor reminded me as I was driving to work. Naturally, Johnson would have forgiven my forgetfulness because, as he wrote in a Rambler essay, “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”

That’s my preferred Johnson – the forgiver of human frailty whose ready sense of forgiveness was rooted in a profound awareness of his own failings. Johnson always felt like a failure. To understand this feeling in purely psychological terms, as we moderns tend to do – as though human nature were a schematic diagram of pathology – is a reductive mistake that leaves out the moral and spiritual components of Johnson’s elusive personality. When he wrote in another Rambler essay, “A man writes much better than he lives,” he wrote as a man deeply suspicious of his own accomplishments as a writer.

To be human is to be divided. It’s a sloppy, inconsistent business, and a lot of work. John Wain, one of Johnson’s best biographers (has any writer been blessed with so many good ones?), is especially insightful about the tensions that make up Johnson as man and writer:

“The fact that his parents were incompatible did not prevent him from marrying in his turn. Even the fact that he had been unjustly beaten at school did not lead him to maintain that schoolboys should not be beaten. And here, already, we see a pattern that was to persist . Johnson, as an individual, was highly independent and unbiddable. He did not fit smoothly into any system. Intellectually, on the other hand, he approved of systems. Free of an starry-eyed notion of the natural goodness of man, he insisted on the need to keep up the outward forms and conventions that act as some check on man’s natural lawlessness because he felt its power in his own anarchic impulses.

“In this we see something of Johnson’s generous self-forgetfulness, his power to reach intellectual conclusions on impersonal grounds. Most people are entirely lacking in this quality.”

A uniquely illuminating relation exists between Johnson’s life and work. In the contemporary, self-infatuated sense, he was the least autobiographical of writers. When we know something of his life, however, the work glows with a new and compelling significance. It seems earned, like this passage from an Adventurer essay:

“To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next, is to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.”

`Absolute and Without Memorial'

The deaths of strangers, especially as we grow older and approach the inevitable, sometimes move us disproportionately. Samuel Beckett’s did that to me, and so, oddly, did Thelonious Monk’s and Joe Strummer’s. In each case the world seemed smaller and less habitable. Their absences pressed more heavily than many a presence. My oldest son reminded me yesterday that John Coltrane, had he lived, would be celebrating his 80th birthday on Sept. 23. The thought gives me vertigo. Admittedly, these people were strangers only in the sense that I never met them in person. Their work I knew well, over many years, and that may constitute the preferred way to know many people. And so, unexpectedly, I have been unable to stop thinking about Oriana Fallaci since she died on Friday.

Victor Davis Hanson, a good writer but hardly a political soulmate, has written movingly of her death: “I wish she were still alive to scoff at the politically correct, the appeaser, and the triangulator, but alas she is gone, defiant to the last.” And then I thought of lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens with, in this context, an appropriate title, “The Death of a Soldier”:

“Death is absolute and without memorial
As in a season of autumn
When the wind stops,

“When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.”

And reflect on this from “Technology and Poetry,” an essay by J.V. Cunningham:

“Consider the social act of death. This has so changed in my lifetime that any competent anthropologist would be forced to conclude that a whole society had been destroyed and replaced by invaders. Death is no longer ritualized. Men no longer train themselves to die a good death. We have no Ars Bene Moriendi. And when did you last see the black armband, the purple wreath? Formal mourning is out of style.”

R.I.P.

Oriana Fallaci was a throwback to an earlier, romantic generation of journalists. She was smart, tough-minded, tough-talking, courageous and beautiful. She hated power and its abuses, regardless of who was doing the abusing, whether the fascists were Italian or Muslim. That, plus a gift for words, is a useful equation for what constitutes a journalist – a long-forgotten formula. Fallaci must have been a difficult person and probably exhausting to know, but that’s hardly unusual among truth-tellers. An English translation of her Interview with History was published in 1976, and much of it reads today like an international roll call of monsters from the 1960s and 1970s – Henry Kissinger, Yasir Arafat, Ali Bhutto, General Giap and the Shah of Iran, among others. Words she wrote in the Preface might serve as her epitaph:

“…to the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality. I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of being born. I have always looked on the silence of those who do not react or who indeed applaud as the real death of a man or woman.”

Flummoxed

Who laughs out loud when alone? Children and the insane, I suppose. There’s a social component to laughter, almost as though it were meant to be shared. Only occasionally does a book or movie provoke laughter in solitude, but I’m reading a novel that caused me to pull a muscle in my side late the other night, when my wife and kids had been asleep for hours: The Dog of the South, by Charles Portis.

After much proselytizing from James Marcus and Ron Rosenbaum, I started Portis’ 1979 novel, and the experience reminds me of watching the Marx Brothers at their best – say, Duck Soup – when the jokes fly so relentlessly you miss some because you’re too busy laughing at the last one. Early in the novel, Ray Midge, in search of his runaway wife Norma and her ex-husband Guy Dupree, hooks up with a version of Melville’s Confidence Man, the seedy, enigmatic Dr. Reo Symes:

“I learned that he had been dwelling in the shadows for several years. He had sold hi-lo shag carpet remnants and velvet paintings from the back of a truck in California. He had sold wide shoes by mail, shoe that must have been almost round, at widths up to EEEEEE. He had sold gladiola bulbs and vitamins for men and fat-melting pills and all-purpose hooks and hail-damaged pears. He had picked up small fees counseling veterans on how to fake chest pains so as to gain immediate admission to V.A. hospitals and a free week in bed. He had sold ranchettes in Colorado and unregistered securities in Arkansas.”

Why is this funny? Lists, by nature, lend themselves to comedy, as does any human effort to be comprehensive. Partly, it’s the specificity of the list – not pears, but “hail-damaged pears.” More importantly, it’s Portis’ pitch-perfect control of Midge’s voice – flat, deadpan, finicky. Unyielding earnestness in the face of a juggernaut of absurdity is funny. There’s no underlining, no italics, just a methodical laundry list, as cool and dry as the prose in a phone book. Here’s Dr. Symes describing Ski, who may or may not be trailing them across Mexico:

“He’s a real-estate smarty. He makes money while he’s sleeping. He used to be a policeman. He says he made more unassisted arrests than any other officer in the colorful history of Harris County. I can’t vouch for that but I know he made plenty. I’ve known him for years. I used to play poker with him at the Rice Hotel. I gave distemper shots to his puppies. I removed a benign wart from his shoulder that was as big as a Stuart pecan. It looked like a little man’s head, or a baby’s head, like it might talk, or cry. I never charged him a dime. Ski has forgotten all that.”

Every sentence is plain: subject-verb-object, sparing with adjectives, no verbal pyrotechnics, just common American English. Prose like a police report, like Buster Keaton’s face. And like Keaton, hilarious. Portis is sui generis, at least in this novel. Once in a while he reminds me of Thomas Berger or Stanley Elkin, but their prose is more cranked up. Sometimes, oddly, I hear an echo of Tom Waits – the love of cliché and demotic American idiom. If you asked me what the book is “about,” what its themes are, I would be flummoxed.

Bunting's Voice

Thanks to Dave Lull, via Frank Wilson at Books, Inq., for the link to Basil Bunting reading his poem “At Briggflatts Meetinghouse” (1975), not to be confused with his masterpiece, Briggflatts, from 1966. Bunting said “poetry, like music, is to be heard,” and his reading of this typically densely crafted three-stanza poem introduces us to the rugged seductiveness of his Northumbrian accent.

I remember checking out Caedmon recordings from the library when I was a kid, and even then instinctively recognizing that some poets were masterful readers – Eliot, in particular, with his sepulchral voice – and others were histrionic frauds, like Dylan Thomas. I like a “straight reading,” appropriate to the work at hand, without attention-getting flourishes. If it is to be effective, the reading ought to reflect an understanding of the poem, just as some singers give the impression of having incorporated lyrics into their lives and now they are simply “telling” them, “living” them, like conversation. Bunting manages a balance between “telling” and “singing,” all the while following the musical score of his own devising.

Some Bunting admirers seem to be partisans of Olson, Creeley and Co., dreary poets who are fundamentally unpoetic, and this is unfortunate. Bunting was too great a poet to be shanghaied by lesser talents who serve only to scare off potentially appreciative readers. That’s why it was refreshing in April 2004, when Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry, published a useful essay on Bunting in The New Criterion. Without partisanship or theory, he laid out his attraction to Bunting’s work:

“I loved the aural imperative of the verse, which you hear before you understand, or which, in a sense, to hear is to understand. I loved the dense textures, the sculpted syllables, the way the lines seem almost to bristle with contempt for anything extraneous or merely ornamental. Most of all, I loved the way you can feel the form of this poetry over large stretches of verse, the way it accretes without losing precision, is in some major way as abstract as music yet never loses specificity.”

In other words, Bunting’s words give him pleasure, as poetry should. A clue to the authenticity of Wiman’s response is his use of the verb “love,” which defies theory. Hugh Kenner, like Bunting, had an acute ear. The scholar/critic befriended the poet and in 1979 recorded an interview with him for National Public Radio. I have never heard it – does any reader know where it might be found? – but Kenner said of Bunting’s talk:

“The voice of Basil Bunting was not shaped by all those decades of craft to the end that its simulacrum might lie pressed flat on a page.”

Listen, in other words, to Bunting. And listen to Guy Davenport, who wrote “For Basil Bunting”:

“Northumbrian master
of number and pitch

“honor far sent, a gift
of words only but meant

“to be Greek as a curl
on a flat cheek

“the coil of white
the Ismene lily

“spirals, hound’s tail
when his nose is down

“snail shell, paper nautilus
wavetop scroll

“ear, weather, world
this shape of turning

“for light through matter
makes it spin

“and all is round, rounding,
atom, sound, space

“through its curves, orbits
of Pluto, are long, long

“old wheat of Turkestan
stone age zea

“Pumpelly found
in the clay of an Anau pot

“when we had thought
Demeter of Enna

“took it from Enna
fire alive in fields, to eat

“and gave it to any
who listened with grief

“when she asked at door
had they seen her daughter?

“Pumpelly of the golden beard
last of the real Americans

“kept waiting in Japan
until the Shogun learned his rank

“Smokes a seegar, his man said,
with Ulysses S. Grant

“so they placed a rose and poem
before him and bowed flat

“learned Russian at seventy
to find the cultivation of wheat

“in Turkestan. Crossed China
quoting Confucius for his needs

“Great men have been among us
A few are with us still.”

(From Thasos and Ohio, North Point Press, 1986. “Pumpelly” is Raphael Pumpelly, the American explorer who surveyed the Gobi Desert. Pound refers to him in The Cantos.)

`Time's Relentless Melt'

Old photographs, even of strangers, have enormous power to move us. Out-of-focus family snapshots, poorly framed, under- or over-exposed, can be unbearably poignant. Their amateurishness even adds to their poignancy. In On Photography, Susan Sontag understood this phenomenon, though she blunts her own insight by contemptuously dismissing it as “nostalgia”:

“Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos….All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

If this is nostalgia, let’s cherish it. And let’s add another elegiac layer of resonance by processing long-forgotten film found in old cameras. That’s the idea behind the web site Lost Films, which carries a fitting epigraph from Henri Cartier-Bresson:

“Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”

And a fitting motto – “Capio Articulus!” – meaning, I think, “Seize the moment!”

I can’t figure out who runs the site, though he seems to be based in Westford, Mass. His idea is ingenious: Collect old cameras and the accompanying film, process it, digitalize and optimize the results, post them, and provides captions that are funny, opinionated and sometimes as sad as the photographs. Scroll down to the photo labeled “Tower Seven and death,” click on it and scroll down again to “Frame 1” -- a grainy, black-and-white photo of a woman standing in a cemetery. Here’s the caption:

“This 1960's lady was photographed in a graveyard somewhere. Most likely she resides in one herself today. I think the trappings of death were more important in America when this photo was taken.”

Memento mori, indeed. By an irony of purest chance, camera and film are preserved, and a stranger salvages the forgotten images and reanimates them. Photographer and subject, probably, are long dead. Above one photo the stranger writes:

“I'm a sucker for old cameras that have exposed film in them. I just have to buy them. You never know what you'll find on those ancient negatives from the time when the world was black and white. I'm full of hope that I'll find something of historical importance. Something that'll make me as rich as a baseball player.”

I’m reminded of something Philip Larkin wrote in 1955 at the request of D.J. Enright, who was compiling an anthology and wanted brief statements about poetry from the contributors:

“I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.”

Anyone who photographs (or writes about, or paints, or films) someone or something he loves, wishes to preserve it – the memory of the beloved, but also, in some primitive way, the thing itself. Elsewhere, Larkin referred to “Unresting death,” our great, unspoken foe. In a picture, our loved ones, and strangers, can rest, unchanging and perfect, forever.

“A photograph,” Sontag writes, “is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie.”

In 1978, John Berger wrote an essay, “Uses of Photography,” dedicated to Sontag and framed as a response to her book. Berger is a brilliant writer who too often mucks up his own brilliance with simplistic politics. At his best, he sticks to the human:

“What served in place of the photograph, before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done in reflection.”

What Lost Films does, in a sense, is reclaim memory and make us, in the absence of the original photographers, their proxy repository. It’s a trope worthy of cheap science fiction – or Borges: We claim the memories of others, give them a home.

My favorite Nabokov story is “A Guide to Berlin,” written in Russian in 1925. Nabokov called it “one of my trickiest pieces.” At the end of the story, the narrator and a friend are seated in a pub, looking into the proprietor’s apartment at the rear. A little boy sits at a table. His mother feeds him soup and he looks at a magazine. The narrator projects himself into the boy and looks back into the pub, at the narrator and his friend.

“He [the boy] has long since grown used to this scene and is not dismayed by its proximity. Yet there is one thing I know. Whatever happens to him in life, he will always remember the picture he saw every day of his childhood from the little room where he was fed his soup. He will remember the billiard table and the coatless evening visitor who used to draw back his sharp white elbow and hit the ball with his cue, and the blue-gray cigar smoke, and the din of voices, and my empty right sleeve and scarred face, and his father behind the bar, filling a mug for me from the tap.”

The narrator’s companion says, “I can’t understand what you see down there,” and the narrator thinks:

“What indeed! How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection?”

ADDENDUM: The indefatiguable Dave Lull reports that Lost Films "appears to belong to Gene McSweeney, who's quoted here and there on the web:

"`We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were. We don't know these lost people but if you look around, you'll find someone just like them.'"

Thanks, Dave.

`Everybody in the Room is Bored'

Some of the longest hours I have endured were spent in lecture halls, clubs and coffee houses, listening to poets read their work. Such occasions are exercises in communal delusion. The poet is a narcissist, his poetry is awful and the audience pretends to hang on each precious syllable. Or, worse, they genuinely love his deathless verse, and knowingly chuckle and swoon. I attended a “reading” by the late William Gaddis, in which the novelist spent an hour telling us, hilariously, why he hated readings and refused to give them. It was a hoot, and so is Wendy Cope, who nails these hideous events and the rituals surrounding them in “A Reading”:

“Everybody in this room is bored.
The poems drag, the voice and gestures irk.
He can't be interrupted or ignored.

“Poor fools, we came here of our own accord
And some of us have paid to hear this jerk.
Everybody in the room is bored.

“The silent cry goes up, 'How long, O Lord?'
But nobody will scream or go berserk.
He won't be interrupted or ignored.

“Or hit by eggs, or savaged by a horde
Of desperate people maddened by his work.
Everybody in the room is bored,

“Except the poet. We are his reward,
Pretending to indulge in his every quirk.
He won't be interrupted or ignored.

“At last it's over. How we all applaud!
The poet thanks us with a modest smirk.
Everybody in the room was bored.
He wasn't interrupted or ignored.”

Such behavior is nothing new, of course. Egomaniacs have always been indulged. Hans Brochner (1820-75) was a Danish philosopher, and a friend and distant cousin of Soren Kierkegaard’s. In his memoirs of the author of The Concept of Dread, Bochner recounted this dreadful poetry reading:

“S.K. once told me a curious story regarding his old uncle. The old uncle had a passion for writing verses, which were equally dreadful in both form and content. One day he came up to S.K., and after a brief preamble he brought forth a bundle of his verses, which he asked his nephew to read aloud. They then seated themselves next to each other on the sofa. The old man sat down, leaned back, and put on his glasses in order to follow the reading, evidently to make sure that nothing was skipped. Soren K. sat slightly bent forward with the papers, probably choosing this position in order to keep the old man from observing the treasonous smile on his face. He read the poems to the very end in a raised voice and with great pathos. The old man was completely delighted; touched as he was by the beauty of the verse, tears ran down his cheeks, and he parted from S.K. with the warmest thanks. I have often heard my old uncle’s verses; they were altogether peculiar, and had in particular the wonderful property that, with very minor changes, they could be used – or at any rate, they were used – on the most widely differing occasions. Thus the old man had once written a verse on the occasion of a granddaughter’s engagement. Not only was it used again for another engagement where, however, the personal situations of those involved were very different, but it was also intended to have been used, with only minor adjustments, on the occasion of my appointment to the university. That it was not used the was only because the old man had not yet learned it by heart on the evening when, a bit earlier than we had expected, my appointment was announced in Berlingske, and we happened to be at a party at the old man’s house. Sometimes, at his urgent request, the verses were sung by his guests. A melody would then be chosen which, with the use of a Procrustean method, could more or less fit the verses. It was hilarious to hear: first a large number of syllables all had to be swallowed in one mouthful, as it were, and then one single syllable had to be stretched out in accordance with Holberg’s prescription. But to the old man’s ears it always resounded like the loveliest of harmonies, and his face shown with delight.”

(From Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, collected, edited and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse; translated by Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen; Princeton University Press, 1996.)

Hope and History

In his Preface to Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas, Lawrence Weschler quotes from Seamus Heaney’s translation of The Cure of Troy:

“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can ride up
And hope and history rhyme.”

My reaction to those lines is excitement quashed at once by the memory of human nature. Heaney’s “Sophoclean rhapsody”, Weschler tells us, was composed in 1990, the same year as Calamities of Exile, “in the aftermath of that annum mirabilis, 1989, when everything seemed so much simpler and dictatorships everywhere seemed to be melting away. But then the floodtide passed over and things fell decidedly out of rhyme once again. Totalitarianism, though manifestly evil, turned out to be evil in a confoundingly complicated way, one that seemed to contaminate everything it touched – not least, all opposition to it.”

Weschler’s words are eerily prescient. Remember the euphoria of late 1989 (as opposed to Tiananmen Square, six months earlier)? Seldom has news so exhilarated me or given me reason to feel so hopeful. More than 70 years of orchestrated horror was ended. I remember thinking, with those superstitious cells even rationalists carry around in their brains, that if the news out of Russia and Eastern Europe was true, best not think about it – the dreamer might suddenly waken. No, the dreamer still sleeps, but you remember what Stephen Daedalus said about history.

On Dec. 10, 1989, Murray Kempton published a column in New York Newsday headlined “As the World Turns” that echoes the reversals and ironies of Weschler’s sentences above:

“Communism has been driven to yield over its Eastern European garrisons to an unknowable future not by force of arms but by the collapse of its will for further struggle under the weight of all the history that had piled up before it seized what it had felt assured would be its time. If there is such a thing as an inevitability in history, it is that those who think they can ordain what will henceforth be always end up finding themselves over come by what has ever been.”

Two Poets, One Theme

From War Music – An Account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer’s Iliad
By Christopher Logue

Impacted battle. Dust above a herd.
Trachea, source of tears, sliced clean.
Deckle-edged wounds: “Poor Jataphact, to know,” knocked clean
Out of his armour like a half-set jelly
“Your eyes to be still open yet not see,” or see
By an abandoned chariot a dog
With something like your forearm in its mouth;
A face split off,
Sent skimming lidlike through the crunch
Still smiling, but its pupils dots on dice:
Bodies so intermixed
The tremor of their impact keeps the dead
Upright with the mass. Half-dragged, half-borne,
Killed five times over, Captol – rose with his oar,
Sang as his rapt ship ran its sunside strake
Through the lace of an oncoming wave – now splashed
With blood plus slaver from his chest to chin,
Borne back into the mass, itself borne back
And forth across the bay like cherry froth.
Someone breaks out; another follows him;
Throws, hits, rides on; the first – transfixed –
Hauls on the carefully selected pole
Trembling within his groin, and drags
His bladder out with it;
Then doubles popeyed back into the jam.
Notice the cousins, Little A. & Big – some team!
Prince Little loves to tease them with his arse:
“I’ll screw your widow, Pellity,”
Shouting head down, his face between his knees;
And the angered Trojan throws, he throws,
Twisting and catching what the other threw
And has the time to watch his leaf divide
His fellow soldier from the light, then goes
“No third green generation from his tree,”
Whistling away.
The Greeks swear by their dead. The Trojans by their home.

“Mr. Cogito Thinks About Blood”
By Zbigniew Herbert
Translated from the Polish by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter

1

Reading a book
on the horizons of science
the history of the progress of thought
from the murk of faith
to the light of knowledge
Mr. Cogito came upon an episode
that has darkened
his private horizon
with a cloud

a tiny contribution
to the obese history
of fatal human errors

for a long time
the conviction persisted
man carries in himself
a sizable reservoir of blood

a squat barrel
twenty-odd liters –
a trifle

from this we can understand
the effusive descriptions of battles
fields red as coral

gushing torrents of gore
a sky that repeats
infamous hecatombs

and also the universal
method of cure

the artery
of a sick man was opened
and the precious liquid
let lightheartedly out
into a tin basin

not everyone lived through it
Descartes whispered in agony
messieurs epargnez –

2

now we know exactly
that in the body of each man
the condemned and the executioner
scarcely flows
four to five liters
of what used to be called
the body’s soul

a few bottles of burgundy
a pitcher
one-fourth
of the capacity of a pail

very little

Mr. Cogito
is naively astonished
this discovery
did not create a revolution
in the domain of customs

at least it should incline
people to reasonable thrift

we may not
wastefully squander as before
on battlefields
on places of execution

really there isn’t much of it
less than water oil
our resources of energy

but it happened otherwise
shameful conclusions were drawn

instead of restraint
wastefulness

the precise measurement
strengthened nihilists
gave a greater impetus to tyrants
now they know exactly
that man is fragile
and it is easy to drain him of blood

four to five liters
an amount without significance

therefore the triumph of science
did not bring for thought
a principle of behavior
a moral norm

it is small consolation
thinks Mr. Cogito
that the exertions of scientists
have not changed the course of affairs

they hardly weigh as much
as the sigh of a poet

and the blood
continues to flow

goes beyond the horizons of the body
the limits of fantasy

-- probably there will be a deluge

Word Lover

On a single page of On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William H. Gass celebrates (and echoes) the prose of two of my (and his) favorite fiction writers. Referring to the stone-sucking episode in Molloy, Gass writes, “Stones will never nourish us however patiently or hard we suck them. What fills us then, in such a passage?” He answers:

“It is Beckett’s wonderful rhythms, the way he weighs his words, the authority he gives to each, their measured pace, the silences he puts between them, as loving looks extend their objects into the surrounding space; it is the contrapuntal form, the reduced means, the simple clear directness of his obscurities, and the depth inside of every sentence, the graceful hurdle of every chosen obstacle, everywhere the lack of waste.”

Two paragraphs later, he writes:

“If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we’d never long for another, never wander away; where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood? Who else would robe us so richly, take us to the best places, or guard our virtue as his own and defend our character in every situation? If we were his sentences, we’d sing ourselves though we were dying and about to be extinguished, since the silence which would follow our passing would not be like the pause left behind by a noisy train. It would be a memorial, well-remarked, grave, just as the Master has assured us death itself is: the distinguished thing.”

The entire postmodern project leaves me cold, but I love Gass’s work as I have for more than 35 years. I met him once, at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the fall of 1994, when he read from his long and long-deferred novel The Tunnel, which was published the following year. After the reading, I shook his hand and thanked him for all the pleasure he had given me, and on the title pages of my first edition of Omensetter’s Luck (a library discard!) and the Nonpareil paperback of The World Within the Word, he wrote “For Patrick Kurp, William H. Gass,” almost as though he were giving the books to me a second time.

Go here for a useful interview with Gass published last year in The Believer.

`More Fun Than Knowing'

I had lunch recently with eight pleasant people, most of them my age or older, most of whom I didn’t know. My usual strategy to avoid engagement with strangers is to remain quiet but to say something funny when silence would be rude. Earnestness in such a setting is usually tiresome, and while I find the lives of other people interesting and strange beyond reckoning, my life is of little interest even to me.

One man asked what I thought about the language used by American journalists to describe democracy or its absence in Mexico. I know what he was getting at – media hypocrisy, Doublespeak, condescending to the Third World, etc. – but I have never visited Mexico, have no interest in doing so, and know almost nothing about the country. And that’s what I told him: I don’t know enough to offer an opinion worth listening to.

I hope I wasn’t rude. The exchange – or rather, my part of it – still bothers me. An axiom of polite conversation is that when asked a question it’s imperative to say something, and ignorance is not an acceptable excuse. I’ve had almost a week to think about this, and I know what I wish I had said, but now I have others who can say it better. Here’s the Irish essayist Hubert Butler, from “Beside the Nore,” collected in Escape from the Anthill:

“I have always believed that local history is more important than national history. There should be an archive in every village, where stories…are recorded. Where life is fully and consciously lived in our own neighbourhood, we are cushioned a little from the impact of great far-off events which should be of only marginal concern to us.”

I have often wished I could speak the way W.H. Auden wrote. It would save a lot of time and make me appear more intelligent than I am. Here are four stanzas from a late poem, “Archaeology,” published in Thank You, Fog:

“The archeologist's spade
delves into dwellings
vacancied long ago,

“unearthing evidence
of life-ways no one
would dream of leading now

“concerning which he has not much
to say that he can prove: --
the lucky man!

"Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing.”

More of Moore

We remember 1972 as the year of the Watergate break-in, Nixon’s re-election and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. The year further darkens if we recall its literary deaths. In the deep Minnesota winter, on January 7, we lost John Berryman – a shock if not a surprise. Five months later, on June 12, Edmund Wilson, once a critical deity, died. Two days after his 87th birthday, Ezra Pound, whom Hugh Kenner called “the center of modernism,” died in Venice, on Nov. 1.

For a shameful moment I forget the death of another writer that year -- Marianne Moore, whose best poems celebrate and express joy, a rarity among the modernists. In her Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, she quoted George Grosz: “How did I come to be an artist? Endless curiosity, observation, research – and a great amount of joy in the thing.” I love the precision and scrupulosity of her poems, their tendency to read like essays, their playfulness and humor and the way she stitches together the words of others and makes the resulting collage indelibly her own. Among the modernists, her only rival for giving pleasure is Wallace Stevens. In Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller, Hugh Kenner wrote of Fuller’s “ventilated prose” and compared it to Moore’s poetic method:

“He had discovered, in his own way, a mode of American poetry, the straightforward sentence collected out of energized units, and analyzed into them again by a visual aid. Marriane Moore, for one, understood this principle by 1921, the year of her first volume, Poems. (`What I write,’ she later wrote, `could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it.’) She had even discovered that the energized units need not be composed by the poet but could be borrowed from auction catalogues, magazine captions, technical leaflets – occasions when sincerity of perception (never mind whose) was engaged with some reality.”

Here, from 1920, is “Picking and Choosing”:

“Literature is a phase of life. If
one is afraid of it, the situation is irremedial; if
one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion -- the simulated flight

“upward -- accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re-
warding? that James is all that has been
said of him if feeling is profound? It is not Hardy
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man

“`interpreting life through the medium of the
emotions.’ If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the
critic should know what he likes. Gordon
Craig with his `this is I’ and `this is mine,’ with his three
wise men, his `sad French greens’ and his Chinese cherry -- Gordon Craig, so

inclinational and unashamed -- has carried
the precept of being a good critic to the last extreme, and Burke is a
psychologist -- of acute, raccoon-
like curiosity. Summa diligentia;
to the humbug, whose name is so amusing -- very young and very

“rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps `on the top of a
diligence.’ We are not daft about the meaning, but this familiarity
with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming-
bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying

“that you have a badger – remember Xenophon;
only the most rudimentary sort of behavior is necessary
to put us on the scent; `a right good
salvo of barks,’ a few `strong wrinkles’ puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.”

“Ventilated prose,” indeed. This seems to be a poem about itself, about the relation of poems and critics, written by a poet of “acute, raccoon-/like curiosity.” In a mixed review (collected in The Undiscovered Country) of The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003), edited by Grace Schuman, William Logan, when he’s not being snotty, is right on the money:

“You can love her for her maze of syntax alone, for the abstractions she turns on and off like a light switch, for descriptions out of Ovid’s metamorphoses (Moore’s embody the wish to be transformed), for logic that leaps about, in the way of her jerboa, `like the uneven notes/of the Bedouin flute.’ You can love her for all these things, because there’s something winning about a poet who makes poems out of magazine cuttings and horsehide glue – to the last she remained an outsider…Whatever other poets have done, they have done nothing like Marianne Moore. Her virtue is not only that she is peculiar, but that she is ours.”

Guy Davenport was another informed admirer (in “Marianne Moore,” collected in The Geography of the Imagination):

“Miss Moore is neither a sentimental collector nor a dabbler in wildlife [an apt description of too many American poets]. Behind her work is a love of -- it is unfair to have to speak for her – things cunningly made: for one, armored anteaters, and for another, Egyptian pulled glass bottles. Things that seem to defy description but which her art labors well to describe well: icosaspheres and paper nautiluses. Beauty – her triumph is that she has found it where few have before, and convinced us of it. Conciseness and symmetry. Liberty. Tough, even cantankerous individuality.”

Cunning, concision, symmetry, toughness, cantankerousness – weapons in the poet’s arsenal. With her funny hats, persnickety syntax and love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, readers of Life magazine thought she was a joke – a good cover for an artist who has work to do.

In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. proposes that we devote four or five of our bookshelves exclusively to what he calls “the life-affirming, celebratory works of the twentieth century.” Along with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff and Henry “Red” Allen, and the movies of Astaire-Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton, Appel suggests appropriate books:

“Ulysses should occupy a place of honor on the top, shortest Yes Celebratory Shelf, flush left against the varnished wood. Nabokov, a writer whose works I happen to love, should have seven or so inches to himself there, next to Joyce. Hardcover volumes of the collected poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur will be conspicuous for their handsome, durable spines.”

Appel is not suggesting we judge literature with a Happy Meter: Life-affirming, good; Nay-saying, bad. In fact, he admires Kafka while placing him, rightly, on the “No” shelf, probably next to Beckett. But assigning Moore to the Yes-saying shelf is appropriate. In 1966, in a letter to Writer’s Digest, she quoted John Cheever approvingly:

“I have an impulse to bring glad tidings. My sense of literature is one of giving, not diminishing.”

J.F. Powers

Here's a link to a fine piece about J.F. Powers, one of the funniest fiction writers I know, whose prose was as exact and crystalline as Evelyn Waugh's, and whose work seems shamefully forgotten.

Obsessed with Shakespeare

I am reading and soon will be reviewing The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum’s new book chronicling the dirty little wars that rage among scholars and editors of the Bard. As in his previous books and his column in the New York Observer, “The Edgy Enthusiast,” Rosenbaum has a loving obsession with footnotes, digressions, and scholarly arcana, and has produced a book that both pursues those obsessions and embodies them. While reviewing the history of modern editions of Hamlet, he celebrates the accomplishments of yet another of those Victorian over-achievers with three names: Horace Howard Furness (1833-1912). Here’s Rosenbaum on Furness’ edition of Hamlet:

“…a thrilling testament to the enduring power of Hamlet and Hamlet enigmas to engage the intellect and imagination, to the seductive lure of the textual and thematic labyrinth of the play. To plunge into one of the Furness Variorum’s multipage, tiny-type footnote compendiums of commentary is to lose oneself in the pleasures of the penumbral Hamlet, the extratextual Hamlet.”

A native of Philadelphia, Furness was editor of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, and incrementally published 14 of the plays between 1871 and 1913. Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia is named after him. His son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr. (1865–1930), succeeded him as editor of the project and donated his father's Shakespearean library to the University of Pennsylvania. The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library is now part of the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at that university. It has a useful, well-written web site, including a photograph of Furness, who resembles William Howard Taft, seated grandly at his desk. After Horace Junior’s death, the Variorum project was carried on by editors and publishers of the Modern Language Association.

My university library has an incomplete set of the New Variorum, but it does include the 14th (!) edition of Furness’ two-volume, 902-page Hamlet, which Rosenbaum dotes on. Footnotes frequently sprawl across four or five pages. Judging from his preface, written in March 1877, Furness was not only obsessive but pugnacious and funny. Here is the final paragraph:

“In conclusion, let me add that I do not flatter myself that this is an enjoyable edition of Shakespeare; I regard it rather as a necessary evil, -- so evil that I should sometimes question the propriety of its existence were it not that I am encouraged by the words of Dr Johnson, for whose Preface to his edition of Shakespeare advancing years add only increasing admiration.

“`Let him,’ says Dr Johnson, `that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the greatest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobold and of Pope. Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and read the commentators.”

Imagine such humility on the part of a literary scholar today.

Kenneth Cox

Based on a profile written by the American poet August Kleinzahler and published in the Australian online literary journal Jacket, I have ordered a book by an author I had never heard of before. The first paragraph of Kleinzahler’s piece was enough to grab me:

“The literary essays of the Londoner Kenneth Cox are among the finest essays written by anyone, on any subject, in English. As pure writing — literature, if you will — these essays deserve to be read and reread as one would attend to the essays of Hazlitt or Joseph Mitchell. At their best they are masterpieces of the genre. They refresh and delight. They are a tonic for the mind and are best approached in the morning hours. One’s entire day will be the better for it. As proposition, explication and argument of any given text they are without equal. Models of clarity, concision and insight, they make a mockery of almost all contemporaneous academic criticism, which by comparison will strike the reader as fuzzy, ham-fisted, self-aggrandizing, tendentious and dim. So it should come as no surprise that Cox’s book of essays, published in 2001, Collected Studies In The Use Of English, has been completely ignored in academic circles, where it would be of most use.”

Either Cox, who died in 2005 at the age of 89, is very good or Kleinzahler is a world-class bullshit artist, because I paid almost $40 to order the book and have it shipped from England. It won’t arrive for a month or so, but any writer ranked with Hazlitt and Mitchell is rare and worthy of attention, and so are essays that “refresh and delight.” As if to bolster what Kleinzahler says, I was unable to locate the book in any public or academic library in Texas. In fact, according to WorldCat, the vast world-wide library database, only 29 libraries in the world own a copy, mostly in the United States, with a few in England and Canada.

Cox represents a species of writer that interests and attracts me – the lone, largely self-taught, unaffiliated polymath. Professionally, he was a writer/editor for the BBC, and did not publish his first essay – on Basil Bunting – until 1966, when he was 50 years old. His principle interests were the High Modernists – especially Pound – and their step-children, the Objectivists – Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, among others. He was not attached to a university, and most of his work was first published in the English journal Agenda.

Besides Kleinzahler’s, Jacket #28 (October 2005) includes 11 other pieces by and about Cox, including memoirs, poems and criticism – more than enough to make me impatient for Cox’s book to arrive. Here’s a sampler, drawn from the Jacket festschrift, starting with Cox on Joyce:

“One of the few to have possessed the secret of melodious English Joyce is of all writers the most Mozartian. He made the life that originally filled him with horror appear in verbal recollection lovely and such fun. The difficulty with his writing is simply the limit set by human nature to the accumulation of aesthetic pleasure.”

And here’s an excerpt from a letter Cox wrote to Kleinzahler:

“I didn’t give a toss about the writer’s state of mind, all I cared for was the play of words. I would go round savouring a phrase to test it, taste it, till I could decide if it was ‘good’ or had to be spat out. That word taste is not a metaphor. People talk about the sound of language but the real thing is its taste, in the mouth, harsh crisp sweet pungent, produced by the movement of sound.”

And Cox on Lorine Niedecker, the wonderful Wisconsin poet:

“Her silences derive from an intellectual conviction that art, like science, demands total concentration on the object of attention.”

And two instructive paragraphs on the great Basil Bunting:

“He disdained the illusion of spontaneity and other tricks to wow groundlings. He kept separate the constituents of consonantal clusters, relishing sibilants and fricatives as much as plosives and liquids, and studied the duration of pauses as carefully as the duration of syllables. He had a way of pronouncing sweet that recalled sipping a liquid through a lump of sugar . . . Always intense and personal his response to any writing was determined by the pleasure and interest it afford him.

“The absence of this factor makes the academic study of literature a hollow sham, its presence a test of character and truthfulness. It is not true that Bunting’s work lacks message but it is the message of art. Older than religion and not openly moralistic its practice instils certain patterns of behaviour and inhibits others. Bunting’s ethos was skaldic and feudal with a Sufi glaze.”

In Jacket #22 (May 2003), in his review of Cox’s book, Peter Campion wrote:

“Collected Studies in the Use of English has neither a wide distribution nor an academic cachet. But for his capacious understanding, his taste, his curiosity and his first rate prose style Cox deserves his place alongside critics like Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport. If Cox’s readership is a small one, his book is built to last.”

Praise – especially the part about Kenner and Davenport -- doesn’t get much higher. Like many an autodidact, Cox sounds as though he could be cranky, even fierce. Kleinzahler writes:

“Cox was a formidable presence to be alone in a room with, discussing literature and the life of the mind. He tolerated my observations. I doubt they were of any real interest to him. At one point I decided to brave the observation that the closest model for the method and style of his essays seemed to be the 19th century British naturalists. This speculation evinced no little temerity on my part. Cox regarded me closely for a few moments and in a manner I had not experienced previously. It made me uneasy. Fortunately, I was correct and Cox later sent me this passage from Alfred Russel Wallace’s autobiography My Life.”

I won’t include the lengthy passage from Wallace. You can read it in Kleinzahler’s story. But it’s so beautifully and precisely written that a copy of Wallace’s two-volume My Life sits on my desk. I already respect Kenneth Cox and his critical judgment.

`We Crave Only Reality'

Thoreau’s is the most moving of deaths, for its dignity and stoical acceptance of the inevitable. His death was the final affirmation of his life. The man misunderstood by generations of readers as a hermit died at home, in bed, tended by his sister Sophia and visited by friends and neighbors. Sam Staples, who famously jailed Thoreau for one night in 1846, said he had never seen a man “dying with so much pleasure and peace.” When his Aunt Louisa asked whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.” On the morning of May 6, 1862, Sophia read him a passage from the “Thursday” section of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and he looked forward to the homeward trip in the “Friday” section, saying, “Now comes good sailing.” In his final utterance, only “moose” and “Indian” could be understood. In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Robert D. Richardson Jr. writes:

“No more satisfying deathbed utterance can be imagined for Thoreau than his reply to a question put gently to him by Parker Pillsbury a few days before his death. Pillsbury was an old abolitionist warhorse, a former minister who had left his church over the slavery issue, a man of principle and proven courage, an old family friend who, like [Harrison Gray Otis] Blake and Aunt Louisa, could not resist the impulse to peer into the future. `You seem so near the brink of the dark river,’ Pillsbury said, `that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.’ Thoreau’s answer summed up life. `One world at a time,’ he said.

“Henry Thoreau died at nine in the morning on May 6, 1862. Outdoors, where he could no longer see them, the earliest apple trees began to leaf and show green, just as they do every year on this day.”

Richardson’s treatment of Thoreau’s death is beautifully sensitive and nuanced, as is his rendering of Emerson’s death in Emerson: The Mind on Fire. He shows us what Thoreau meant when he wrote in Walden:

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”

The Answers, Please

One reader identified the authors of the passages in yesterday’s posting, but confessed to Googling the answers. The first was written by Henry David Thoreau in his journal on Jan. 21, 1853. I’ve been reading a few pages of the journal every day, almost off-handedly, hardly realizing I was plowing through Thoreau’s finest work, with no goal in mind but pleasure. Readers and critics tend to pigeonhole Thoreau as a naturalist, philosopher or political misfit with principles, when essentially he was writer, a vocation large and elastic enough to contain all the others and more. The excerpt I quoted impressed me as morbidly Gothic, and not conventionally Thoreauvian. Though he’s describing a dream, his revulsion is palpable and characteristically rooted in senory details.

The second comes from “Brooksmith,” a short story Henry James wrote in 1891. I chose it as a ringer because it’s so typical of late-middle-period or early-late-period James, or whatever we call the years immediately preceding the Guy Domville debacle. In capsule, it distills the concerns of the late novels, especially The Golden Bowl, with its emphasis on social veneer disguising the horror beneath. And the final, eight-word sentence is very funny, despite James’ undeserved reputation for humorlessness. There’s an exchange early in Daisy Miller, set in Switzerland, when the wonderfully named Winterbourne is speaking with Daisy’s little brother, Randolph, who says:

“`My father’s name is Ezra B. Miller. My father ain’t in Europe – he’s in a better place than Europe .’ Winterbourne for a moment supposed this the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial rewards. But Randolph immediately added: `My father’s in Schenectady. He’ got a big business. My father’s rich, you bet.’”

I lived in Schenectady for six years, and worked five years for the newspaper there. Trust me: It beats “the sphere of celestial rewards.”

The passage from “Brooksmith” also reminds just how popular and influential Byron was in the 19th century. He won my heart when I learned in college of his reverence, against the tide of most of the Romantics, for Swift and Pope. I second what Auden wrote in “Letter to Lord Byron”: “…I have, at the age of twenty-nine/Just read Don Juan and I found it fine.”

Byron also shows up in Daisy Miller. Daisy and Winterbourne visit the Castle of Chillon, set on an island in Lake Geneva, where Byron set “The Prisoner of Chillon.” And when Winterbourne visits the Colisseum in Rome for his last visit with the doomed Daisy, he remembers lines from Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred. They come from the title character’s soliloquy at the beginning of Act III, Scene iv: “upon such a night/I stood within the Coliseum’s wall,/’Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome.”