`An Age is Ending with Me'

Even the most inconsequential among us lives in history, and we resign ourselves to dwelling in its benign obscurity. Occasionally we meet someone whose private history has intersected History in the grander sense, and the collision, we learn with relief or alarm, depending on our temperament, is often unhappy. On Tuesday, I spent an hour speaking with a professor emeritus of aerospace engineering who was born in Italy in 1922. That’s the year Mussolini came to power and four years before Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket – two events that shaped the professor’s life.

He was born in Formia, a small city on the Golfo di Gaeta, 90 miles southeast of Rome. The professor still detests Il Duce, especially for the reckless alliance he formed with Hitler. While an engineering student at the University of Rome, he was conscripted into the Italian army and with 500 other officers, most of whom were callow and thoroughly uncommitted to fascism, were shipped to Yugoslavia where they were eventually taken prisoner by Mussolini’s putative allies, the Germans. They were put on a train bound for Germany and the professor jumped off somewhere in northern Italy and walked back to Formia. The fate of the other Italian officers remains a mystery. He eventually arrived, after five years in Argentina, in the United States, in 1952 – perfect timing for an aerospace engineer, with the boom years just beginning.

I asked the professor – a charming man who turns 85 in August, loves to talk, and resembles the elderly Borges – about his education as a boy, and he said, “Greek and Latin. The best engineers in Italy are not those who go to the technical schools but the ones who study the classics. We know more about the world.”

I asked if he read Dante in grade school, as I had heard Italian students do. He said, “The whole mumbo-jumbo. Inferno is best. We liked that. The rest…,” he said, making a dismissive gesture with his arm. He had heard the name Eugenio Montale but knew nothing of the poet’s work. The professor has spent a career devising algorithms to solve optimal-control problems in aircraft. He has accommodated himself to the computer, he said, and this reminded me of a poem in Montale’s Diario Postumo, in which a computer makes an unexpected appearance. It always brings to mind another engineer I interviewed years ago who researched artificial intelligence and was dedicated to creating narrative-generating software – stories from machines. Not surprisingly, he published several science-fiction novels, which read as though they were already being written by machines. Here is Jonathan Galassi’s translation of “Nel Duemila,” “In the Year 2000,” written by Montale in 1972:

“We were undecided
between exulting and fear
at the news the computer
will replace the poet’s pen.
In my case, not knowing
How to use it, I’ll depend
On notecards drawn from memory,
and shuffle them at random.
But what does it matter now
If the gift is dying out –
An age is ending with me.”

Poets Against War

Art, of course, has nothing to do with politics, and the artist who dabbles or throws himself and his work headfirst into the political realm probably had little interest in creating worthwhile art in the first place, and risks fatally compromising whatever small artistic gift he may possess. These self-evident truths occurred to me on Monday, when I happened upon the web site of Poets Against War, an organization new to me. I used Google to double-check, but found no evidence of Pipe Fitters Against War or Osteopaths Against War.

The egotism of the self-described political artist is appalling. Good sentiments make bad art, and they generally change nothing except to further inflate the already swollen ego of the artist. Fortunately, art is not democratic. In fact, it’s autocratic, despotic and thoroughly unfair. Good intentions count for nothing. All that matters is grace and hard work. The rest is delusion.

Not surprisingly, the poets featured at Poets Against War are bad poets – i.e., propagandists. First up is an essay by Adrienne Rich, “Poetry & Commitment.” You know trouble is coming when an essayist quotes Shelley in the first sentence. Next is a photo of a participant in the “January 27 March: Beauty and Dissent!” The benign looking fellow carries a photo of Pablo Neruda, winner of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. When Stalin died that year, Neruda wrote an ode for the man responsible for an estimated 20 to 60 million deaths, among whom was the poet Osip Mandelstam. Neruda’s poem contains the lines “To be men!/That is the Stalinist law!” (Note the consistent use, across generations, of the exclamation mark – for emphasis, I think.) Neruda also called Lenin the “the great genius of this century.”

Elsewhere on the site, Poets Against War publishes poems submitted by – people with no gift for poetry, it seems. Among them is Nancy Johanson, 57, of Cincinnati. Here’s the bio accompanying her poem, spelling and punctuation retained:

“I am a poet, writer and mother of five, grown children. I have a healing energy practice in Cincinati and my husband and I work together to bring healing and restoration to land and houses.”

And here’s one of her poems, “Death Poem”:

Oblique trees stand
wrapped in fog
like bandaged soldiers

Ghost people
returning from Iraq

Missing limbs
so many
leaves lost

Perhaps Johanson could take some of that good Ohio healing energy and apply it to the language she has abused. I happened to be rereading W.H. Auden’s The Prolific and the Devourer the day I stumbled on Poets Against War. It’s a book of aphorisms and reflections the poet worked on for much of 1939, abandoning it a few weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland. The full text wasn’t published until 1981, eight years after Auden’s death.

The year was pivotal for the world and Auden. He was shedding the vestigial sentimental Marxism he had once embraced and began his return to the committed Christianity of his childhood. In the words of Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and editor of The Prolific and the Devourer, late in 1939 the poet “began to turn from an optimistic humanism to a pessimistic Christianity.” Almost 70 years on, Auden is remarkably astute on the subject of art and politics. Here’s a selection of his thoughts:

“In our political activities there is a larger element of old-fashioned social climbing than we care to admit. To receive social approval, to have one’s work praised, even for the wrong reasons, is always gratifying, but it does not make for either artistic or political success.”

“There are many people, and they number some artists among them, who today seek in politics an escape from the unhappiness of their private lives, as once people sought refuge in the monastery and convent. Driven by envy and hatred they spread discomfort wherever they go and ruin everything they touch. A wise political party will have nothing to do with them.”

“Artists and politicians would get along better in a time of crisis like the present, if the latter would only realize that the political history of the world would have been the same if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted or a bar of music composed.”

“If the criterion of art were its power to incite to action, Goebbels would be one of the greatest artists of all time.”

By 1941, Auden had rejected the pacifism he clings to in The Prolific and the Devourer, and he told Stephen Spender:

“I have absolutely no patience with Pacifism as a political movement, as if one could do all the things in one’s personal life that create wars and then pretend that to refuse to fight is a sacrifice and not a luxury.”

Political art fails as both art and politics, and no one cares about it save a small coterie of misguided friends. In a lengthy commentary he posts on the web site, Poets Against War founder Sam Hamill asks, agrammatically, “May our poems continue to speak for the conscience of our country, as we asked in founding Poets Against War four years, countless lives. “

Speak, please, for yourself.

Mike Phillips: All Points Bulletin

In 1973-74, I briefly knew a man in his early 20s who seemed as serious and ambitious a reader as I was. We both lived in Bowling Green, Ohio, and his name was Mike Phillips. I can’t remember how we met, but it may have been through the restaurant where I worked and in which I eventually invested some money – Sam B’s Sandwich of the Absurd. Named after Samuel Beckett, it was located across the street from the campus of Bowling Green State University, where I had gone to school for three years. I think some permutation of it still exists.

I remembered Mike Phillips today when I visited the library and checked out The Desert Fathers, by the Irish writer Helen Waddell. Mike was the first person to mention Waddell’s work to me, which I soon read and enjoyed. He also introduced me to Edward Dahlberg’s work, which became a fierce, brief passion. I remember talking with him about Kierkegaard, Robert Burton and Osip Mandelstam.

My point is not nostalgia but information. After roughly 33 years, I’d like to locate Mike, in part to thank him for good conversations and reading suggestions. Here’s a portrait of a guy I haven’t seen in more than three decades and never knew well: His manner was friendly but mildly pedantic. He was not shy about correcting minor errors of fact or grammar. He would probably be about my age, 54. He was white, with short, straw-colored hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He impressed me as tidy, not a difficult impression to make on a college campus in the early seventies. He played guitar and I think he was associated with the school of music at BGSU.

Because his first and last names are so common, Google searches have proved futile. If the elusive but influential Mike Phillips sounds familiar, please be in touch.

`Clarity, Individuality, Beauty of Writing'

Dr. Oliver Sacks edited The Best American Science Writing 2003, and in his introduction he describes the avalanche of printed matter, specialized and popular, from the Journal of History of Neurosciences to The Atlantic Monthly, that buries his desk. Serious readers will share his mingled sense of satisfaction and alarm. Here’s how he decides what to read:

“An omnivore, yet selective, a sort of filter-feeder, I will extract intellectual nutrients from the articles as I extract nutrients from my dinner. Every so often, however, I am arrested by an article because it contains not just new information but a highly individual point of view, a personal perspective, a voice that compels my interest, raising what would otherwise be a report or a review to the level of an essay marked by clarity, individuality, beauty of writing.”

When I approach a known literary quantity, a writer whose work I already enjoy and respect – say, William Faulkner – I’m likely to be a less discriminating filter-feeder. I’ll read most anything by Faulkner, at least once, even ingesting a little grit (in Faulkner’s case, A Fable) for the sake of the nutrition-rich krill. Yet faux-Faulkner, second-hand Faulkner that is hardly more than pastiche – Cormac McCarthy, for instance – is pure grit. His highly stylized murk is more pretentious than one of those productions of Richard II in Wehrmacht uniforms, and more tedious.

Sacks rightly singles out “clarity, individuality, beauty of writing” as the qualities he looks for, even in journalism. Nit-pickers will argue that all three qualities are highly subjective, and of course they are, but any sensitive reader recognizes them when he sees them. I’m thinking about this because of a generous (in length, in thoughtfulness) e-mail Dave Lull sent me on the subject of William James and Jacques Barzun, among other things. Dave read a bit of James some years ago, and concedes “the impressive style of James’s writing,” but has since felt no urge to return to his work. The difference between us – Dave and I – may be that I will pursue style, at least for a while, for its own sake. I don’t think of style as a manner imposed arbitrarily on language – as in Cormac McCarthy – but as the sound of a sensibility. It expresses an inimitable stance toward the world. It’s not a given, and it can’t, strictly speaking, be learned. As a writer becomes acquainted with himself, grows into who he is, he sooner or later will exude style in language. Here’s how Barzun puts it in A Stroll with William James:

“James achieved ecumenical expression, as other have done, by tireless revision and rewriting. A wording that really exhausts the author’s intention comes only from an effort that exhaust’s the author, too.”

And this:

“Whether in spoken or printed prose, the forward movement that makes it attractive comes from the author’s offering his thought not as made but as being made. In possessing that quality, James’s style is the perfect mirror of his philosophy, where `what really exists is not things made but things in the making.’”

`This Dumb Region of the Heart'

An enterprising videographer has posted a brief interview with Robert D. Richardson, author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. It shows up, improbably, on YouTube, more often the home of adolescent idiocy (and some wonderful music). Richardson was speaking in November at the Harvard Bookstore, in Cambridge, Mass. The piece is choppy and hardly more than three minutes long, but it gives Richardson time to comment on James’ understanding of conversion, his role as “one of the unacknowledged founders” of Alcoholics Anonymous, and his “belief in belief.” Richardson impresses me as thoughtful, articulate without glibness, casually erudite and not afraid to find failings in a man he clearly admires. He also seems charmingly nervous in front of the camera, and his speech echoes the precision of his prose. He talks about James the way you and I might talk about a teacher we admire.

What makes James such a convincing thinker and writer, whose thoughts are compelling even when they sometimes seem ridiculous (the psychic phenomena business), is their lived-in quality. His thought is rooted in his life, and his life was often painful and sorely tested. His low point came early in 1870, around the time of his 28th birthday, and we might diagnose it as a particularly complicated form of manic-depression (something his father also probably suffered from). Famously, James documented his case of “vastation” anonymously, in 1902, in the chapter on the sick soul in The Varieties of Religious Experience. James was already thinking in a way we might call “holistic.” He views the physical, the psychological and the spiritual as part of one inextricable package. In his biography, Richardson quotes at length from a diary entry James made on April 30, 1870. Here’s Richardson quoting James:

“`Hitherto,” [James] writes, `when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into.’ In a flash, like a person impulsively jumping a brook, James is on the other side. `Now I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power.’ Not only must he act, he must believe in his actions. And in order to believe, he must reformulate the question for himself. Resiliency, the ability, even when down – especially when down – to regroup and move forward, is the central fact of the life of William James. `My belief to be sure can’t be optimistic;’ he concludes, `but I will posit it, life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be built [on] doing and creating and suffering.”

I find this stirring, in part because it resonates with events that occurred five years after James’ death in 1910. In the fall of 1915, with slaughter of unprecedented magnitude raging in Europe, the poet laureate of England, Robert Bridges, asked Henry James to contribute to an anthology of extracts from the work of philosophers and poets to be titled The Spirit of Man and intended as a boost to England’s wartime morale. Instead of choosing from his own work, the ailing, 72-year-old novelist, whose death was only three months away, suggested several paragraphs written by William in 1895. The passage comes at the end of an essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” (collected in The Will to Believe, in 1897), and it includes these lines:

“…If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and our unwillingnesses, our faiths and our fears…. These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

Henry’s humble deferral to William is noble, and the choice of text is noteworthy for several reasons. It’s a public homage to his beloved brother, with whom he had sparred for decades, especially over the matter of Henry’s “third manner” – the stylistic convolutions of such late works as The Golden Bowl. More importantly, it’s significant that Henry did not mine his own published oeuvre, notably lacking in uplift and inspiration. John Marcher’s morbid passivity in “The Beast in the Jungle” was hardly likely to rally England’s flagging wartime spirits, though one of Lambert Stretcher’s more rousing set-pieces in The Ambassadors might have served the purpose.

There’s also a deeply personal irony in James’ selection, one probably not lost on this subtlest of novelists, whose fiction is peopled with onlookers, life’s spectators, many of whom end up regretting their misspent, unlived lives and suffer John Marcher’s “arid end.” The reluctance of such “poor sensitive gentlemen” to participate vigorously in life, to risk the vulnerability of a passionate existence, is the very opposite of William’s entreaty to “Be not afraid of life,” and likewise the opposite of Henry’s lifelong devotion to his art. Just seven months before his death, after H.G. Wells had mocked and parodied James in his satire Boon, James replied to Wells in a letter: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance….and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its processes.”

William James, the pragmatist for whom doing determined being, was a proponent of the “strenuous life.” In Principles of Psychology, he condemned “the habit of excessive novel-reading and theater going…even the habit of excessive indulgence in music.” Such pastimes produce that “contemptible type of human character…who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly thing.” Allowing for hyperbole and a certain lack of charity (and his own lifelong devotion to “novel-reading”), William might have been writing about Henry.

The matter is not so simple as manly William and prissy Henry. Throughout his work, Henry James’ treatment of acting versus observing, dynamism versus passivity, is nuanced and unschematic. His passive characters are seldom wholly admirable or wholly contemptible; rather, they test our sympathy and our scorn. The consumptive Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady is a perfect Jamesian onlooker, a semi-invalid who arranges with his father to leave Isabel Archer a generous inheritance as a sort of experiment. He wishes to see what his American cousin, so dedicated to unencumbered freedom, will do with her fortune. This act lead Graham Greene to call him the “the sainted Ralph,” yet it’s Touchett’s seemingly benign plotting that results in Isabel’s disastrous marriage to the monstrous Gilbert Osmond.

In Awakenings, Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote admiringly, if briefly, of both William and Henry James. Here’s a passage from the volume not specifically about the Jameses but pertinent to their relationship, and echoing their thoughts and words:

“Kinship is healing; we are physicians to each other -- `A faithful friend is the physic of life’ ([Sir Thomas] Browne). The world is the hospital where healing takes place.

“The essential thing is feeling at home in the world, knowing in the depths of one’s being that one has a real place in the home of the world.”

Cosy

Some words can’t be salvaged from comedy. They are serviceable but tainted with silliness. Such a word is “cosy,” about which the Oxford English Dictionary tells us little: “Orig. Sc. (and perh. north. Eng.): derivation unknown.” The first citation of its use as an adjective dates to 1709, when it was used exclusively “Of persons: Comfortable from being warm and sheltered; snug.” In 1837, Dickens used it in The Pickwick Papers: “After Mr. Bob Sawyer had informed him that he meant to be very cosey.”

“Of a place: a. Sheltered and thus warm; this passes into the sense of b. Sheltering, keeping warm, in which one is warm and comfortable. Often both notions are involved,” is first reported in 1785, used in a letter by Robert Burns.

The first negative – and, thus, comic -- use of “cosy” wasn’t reported until 1927, in Max Beerbohm, and defined like this: “Warmly intimate or friendly; sentimental; freq. in pejorative sense: complacent, smug, unadventurous, parochial.” Then comes “cosy corner,” “cosy stove,” “cosy seat,” “cosy carriage” (“a small kind of omnibus”) and, best of all, “A quilted covering placed over a tea-pot to retain the heat; more fully, tea-cosy. A similar covering to keep an egg warm, an egg-cosy.”

To an American ear, such words are amusing and quintessentially English. I can’t imagine many an American using a tea cosy without campy intent. Doing a Google search for “cosy,” the first hit is the Church of Scotland Youth (nice touch, with the word’s apparent Scotch origin). Also, the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany has a site dedicated to COSY (“the cooler synchrotron and storage ring for protons in the momentum range between 600 and 3700 MeV/c”). In medical imaging it stands for “correlation spectroscopy.” There was also the late jazz drummer homophonically named Cozy Cole.

I’ve prolonged this digression because I came upon a lovely, non-comedic use of “cosy” in a remembrance of W.H. Auden written by Oliver Sacks and published in 1975 in W.H. Auden: A Tribute, edited by Stephen Spender. In April 1972, Sacks and a friend helped Auden pack his books and other belongings as the poet prepared to move his winter home from New York City to Oxford, England. He had lived in the U.S. since 1939. At the airport, a stranger recognized Auden (could any face be more inimitable?) and effusively thanked and blessed him for his work and his prolonged American residency.

“As the decorous stranger discretely retired, I asked Wystan how he experienced the world, whether he thought of it as being a very small or a very large place. `Neither,’ he replied. `Neither large nor small. Cosy, cosy…(and, in an undertone)…like home.’

They embraced, Auden kissed the cheeks of both men (“the kiss of a godfather embracing his godsons: a kiss of benediction and farewell”) and boarded the plane. Sacks, a scientist attuned to the worth and weight of words, continues:

“Cosy, cosy – it was one of his favourite words, one of the words he most used when chatting. (He was dissatisfied by its coverage in the great OED, and thought of re-doing this, making an anthology of the cosy, giving the word its full and proper world-embracing power.) Whenever he said `cosy’ in his peculiar voice, it seemed to acquire a special richness of evocation and meaning. Once we saw a bird fly to it nest atop a sooty lamp-post in St Mark’s Place: `Look!,’ exclaimed Wystan. `It’s gone home to its nest. Think how cosy it must be in its nest!” For a moment I felt (I fancied I felt) exactly what the bird felt – cosy, protected, at home, in its nest. And Wystan’s apartment in the East Village, though squalid and cluttered and dilapidated and dirty, this too was cosy, wonderfully so: it had the cosiness of a human nest.”

Sacks goes on to describe his first meeting with Auden, in 1969, when the poet’s teapot was in a tea-cosy and his egg in an egg-cosy. Sacks was driving a BMW with a jacket around the fuel tank, when Auden admired as an automobile-cosy.

“That afternoon,” Sacks writes, “sensitized me to the concept of cosiness, and amongst other things, drew my attention to something which runs through all his poems, but which I had never properly seen before then; his delight in the cosiness of language itself, the fitting-together of words and ideas, the way in which phrase is fitted into phrase into phrase into phrase, the way in which every word is embodied, encysted, nested cosily into its right and proper place, where it belongs, at home, in the body of the poem.”

Sacks inspires me to reevaluate “cosy,” to reclaim it from mere campiness. So often, English words resonate with contradictory meanings. That’s part of the glory of our inheritance. A fussy concern with keeping the tea sufficiently hot for one’s guests may be laughable but remains at the same time thoughtful and respectful. As Sacks says, “Words became palpable, solid, alive, when Wystan used them, both things in themselves and expressions of himself…”

Sacks never saw Auden again, for the poet died 17 months later, in Vienna. Find a copy of W.H. Auden: A Tribute and read all of Sacks’ “Dear Mr. A….,” a touching evocation of cosiness in the best sense.

`A Very Trifling Incident'

The husband of a friend goes to the hospital for some heart work next week. We – my friend, her husband and I – are the same age. She and I forgo the sentimental rubbish, the dishonest palliatives, and joke about illness and death, and agree that suffering seems a grimmer prospect than extinction, though neither of us awaits it with mirth. She is, rightly, scared.

I began thinking of useful observations regarding mortality (so many are useless) that I had read of late. The older one gets, the more extravagantly such observations seem to proliferate. This one comes from an interview Oliver Sacks, the psychiatrist, neurologist and author, gave the Dutch journalist Wim Kayzer. It was included in A Glorious Accident, published in 1997:

“When my mother died of a heart attack, I’m afraid my immediate thought was: Fucking plumbing. I got annoyed at the notion of a blocked artery putting an end to human existence. It seemed outrageous. I have many patients in their nineties, sometimes in their hundreds, many of them religious, who sometimes say: `My life has been full. Lord, I’m ready. Nunc dimittis.’ I can’t quite imagine that. I’m not ready yet, though I don’t know what would happen to me if I became ill. This poor friend of mine – who is sort of a twin, we were born on the same day – was in the middle of his best work ever, he was a geneticist. He got cancer of the stomach, and that was it.

“I don’t know how reconciled he was. He seemed deeply sad all the way through, although I think there was also a sort of resignation. The sort of death I like the idea of most is Pavlov’s. Pavlov used to have these sudden tremendous bursts, these hurricanes of energy and creativity, when he would get the whole lab going. Everyone was full of creative excitement and the world seemed to be created anew for him and for them when it happened. When he was very ill and tossing and turning in a final pneumonia delirium, his face suddenly changed and he cried, `To work!’ with this wonderful creative look. Then he fell back dead.”

In A Stroll with William James, which I remember staying up all night to read when it was first published, the way some read mystery novels, Jacques Barzun writes:

“James’s heroism, then, was both of the public and the quotidian kind, which is not spectacular, barely describable, except perhaps in the admirable words of William’s sister Alice: `the only thing which survives is the resistance we bring to life and not the strain life brings to us.’ In William, the last record of fortitude is the remark of his final days that his death `had come to seem a very trifling incident.’”

Given our innate egotism, the courage to accept the inevitability of death – one’s own and others’ – seems super-human, even inhuman. But we have the testimony of many to suggest it’s possible. Both Sacks and Barzun conclude that the stance one assumes toward dying seems inextricably meshed with one’s manner of living. Passion, a consuming focus of meaning and interest – love and work being the obvious candidates – appears to be essential. Courage, I suspect, doesn’t exist in an emotional vacuum but is necessarily linked to a nimbus of other qualities in our character. Later in his interview, Sacks says:

“Sometimes in periods of severe depression, people appear to me to be automata. I can no longer imagine intention or vitality or autonomy. Similarly, in this mood, if I look at poetry, I see a sort of mosaic of words, but no meaning. The poem doesn’t let me in, because I don’t let it in. Even at our most cognitive and intellectual we have to be informed by passion, by all sorts of passion, whether a personal passion or the Einfühlung of which Einstein speaks. Basically I think we all need to be zoologists. After all, we are all forms of life.”

In 1971, W.H. Auden dedicated a poem to Oliver Sacks. Here’s the final stanza of “Talking to Myself,” addressed by the speaker to his body:

“Time, we both know, will decay You, and already
I’m scared of our divorce: I’ve seen some horrid ones.
Remember: when Le Bon Dieu says to You Leave him!,
please, please, for His sake and mine, pay no attention
to my piteous Don’ts, but bugger off quickly.”

Poetic Streets

On Wednesday, W.H. Auden’s 100th birthday, I went only slightly out of my way in order to drive down Auden Street, a north-south thoroughfare here in Houston. The neighborhood is known as University Place and is located slightly west of the Rice University campus.

I have visited two cities, Paris and San Francisco, that make a dedicated effort to publicly memorialize writers. During my first visit to the former, I stayed in a small hotel just off the Rue de Hector Berlioz – a composer, yes, but his memoirs are delightful. In Paris, the cemeteries are tourist attractions for book lovers. Here lie Baudelaire, Proust and Beckett. And San Francisco has streets named for Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Frank Norris, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac, among others. I didn’t say good writers, though the city boasts a Joseph Conrad Memorial Triangle (a small park formed by the intersection of three streets).

Houston is an unlikely site for literary commemorations, but Auden Street is intersected by Browning Street, Arnold Street, Marlowe Street, Coleridge Street, Tennyson Street and Milton Street. Nearby are Byron Street, Ruskin Street, Wordsworth Street, Shakespeare Road, Dryden Road, Addison Road, Goldsmith Road, Watts Road and Sheridan Road. I’d be grateful to an enterprising reader who could tell me which developer or city father with a literary bent came up with the names and had the muscle to make them official.

Normally, naming anything after a well-known person, whether airport or bingo hall, seems dubious, smacking of a cult of personality, such as existed until recently in Turkmenistan. Before his death in December, the nation’s beefy-faced despot, President for Life Sapurmurat Niyzov, plastered his name and image across everything in the country. I was reminded of what Vladimir Nabokov said when an interviewer asked him to describe his “political creed”:

“It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters.”

What would he make of today’s omni-present music, most of it awful, not to mention pictures and chatter, equally awful? No, keep the names of politicians – the acknowledged legislators, so to speak – off the highways and convention centers. But a poet? A harmless, droning arranger of words whose verse “makes nothing happen?” I confess to an obscure tingle, a minor jolt of pleasure, when I see the name “Auden” or “Dryden” on a street sign, especially in a comfortable residential neighborhood of brick houses, manicured lawns and magnolias. In “Walks,” a poem from 1958, Auden wrote:

“A lane no traveler would use,
Where prints that do not fit my shoes
Have looked for me and, like enough,
Were made by someone whom I love.”

Happy Birthday, Wystan!

Today we celebrate the centenary of the birth of W.H. Auden, the modern poet whose technical facility and gift for aphorism remain unrivalled. Above all, he is poet as comforter and dispenser of wisdom in difficult times. But as Auden often reminds us, writers are merely conduits. It’s the words, not the man, that matter. A Christian who wrestled with his faith, Auden could be truculent and many observers confirm that his grooming left much to be desired. However:

“Biographies of writers, whether written by others or themselves, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste. A writer is a maker, not a man of action. To be sure, some, in a sense all, of his works are transmutations of his personal experiences, but no knowledge of the raw ingredients will explain the peculiar flavor of the verbal dishes he invites the public to taste: his private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends.”

That’s from the Foreword to A Certain World, the commonplace book Auden published in 1970, three years before his death. In one of the rare comments Auden appends to an entry, in this case “Bores,” he writes, “Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one’s own.”

All true, except Auden includes no headings in his commonplace book for poetry, prosody, literature, books, or reading, though there is a brief section on writing – in other words, little shop talk except by metaphor or as it leaches in from other subjects. The volume is eccentric, unsystematic, absorbing, revealing and sometimes frustrating. Apart from identifying authors, Auden doesn’t specify sources, except indirectly on the acknowledgement pages at the back of the book.

Auden has favorites – seven entries from Samuel Johnson, eight from Karl Kraus, four each from Chekhov and Kierkegaard. He quotes most lavishly (18 entries) from Goethe, a writer who has never traveled well to the English-speaking world. There are no passages from Shakespeare, Keats, Lincoln, Whitman, Freud, Joyce, Eliot, Pound or Wallace Stevens, and only one each from Emerson, Hazlitt, Kafka and Henry James. This is among the book’s strengths. Like many of the best writers, Auden’s interests are not exclusively literary, and neither are his sources. Many of the books he draws from are unfamiliar even to ambitious readers. Auden pedantically files one of my favorites under “Lead Mine, Visit to a.” It’s attributed to T. Sopwith and runs to an unaphoristic six pages – the longest entry in the book. A little digging reveals it come from the diary kept by Thomas Sopwith (1803-1879), chief agent for a lead mining company in England.

Auden was born in York but his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, when he was a year old. As a child, Auden was imaginatively absorbed by the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. One of his brothers became a geologist and Auden’s poetry is studded with geological, mining and industrial references. Among his finest poems is “In Praise of Limestone.” In Forewords and Afterwords he writes:

“I spent a great many of my waking hours in the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining.”

His best biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, writes:

“He took his landscape seriously, and asked his mother and other adults to procure for him textbooks with titles such as Machinery for Metalliferous Mines, maps, guidebooks, and photographs; and he persuaded them to take him down a real mine if ever there was a chance. He especially relished the technical vocabulary of mining, the names of mines and of the veins found in them, and the geological terms relating to mining.”

I linger over Auden’s inclusion of the lead mine passage because it reveals something about his formative landscape, but also displays a quality I value in any writer – passionate attention paid to the details of the real world. In A Certain World, Auden includes such geological headings as “Alps, The,” “Climber, An Amateur,” “Climber, A Professional,” “Eruptions,” “Landscape: Basalt” and “Landscape: Limestone.” In the poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” he writes:

“Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.”

Auden’s choice of headings for his commonplace book is vast and varied – “Anesthesia,” “Conception, The Immaculate,” “Homer and Seeing,” “Inverted Commas, Transformation by,” “Kilns,” “Madness,” “World, End of the,” which creates, in the aggregate, a joyous ad hoc celebration of the world in all its plenitude. Marianne Moore wrote of Auden: “He is a notable instance of the poet whose scientific predilections do not make him less than a poet – who says to himself, I must know.” Edward Mendelson called Auden the first poet to feel at home in the 20th century. Of course, it’s quintessentially modern to embrace the outmoded, the fragmented, the abandoned, and to feel nostalgia for what is no longer modern – for “Tramlines and slagheaps.” In “Epithalamium,” written in 1965 for the wedding of his niece, Auden again reveals his breadth of interests, including the geological and biological:

“For we’re better built to last
than tigers, our skins
don’t leak like the ciliates’,
our ears can detect
quarter-tones, even our most
myopic have good enough
vision for courtship

“and how uncanny it is
we’re here to say so,
that life should have got to us
up through the City’s
destruction layers after
surviving the inhuman
Permian purges.”

In his Foreword to A Certain World, after derogating literary biographies, Auden admits his commonplace book is “a sort of autobiography” and, in an interesting astronomical/geological metaphor, “a map of my planet” – presumably, his sensibility, his life. Around the same time, in August 1969, Auden was writing “Moon Landing,” about the Apollo 11 mission. It’s not a celebration of the voyage of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins:

“Homer’s heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
was excused the insult of having
his valor covered by television.”

But it is, four years before his death, another Auden affirmation of poetry and its consolations:

“Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.”

Happy birthday, Wystan! Thanks for the blithing.

Happy birthday, David! My youngest is four years old today.

Rereading

The most eccentric and enjoyable book about etymology I have ever read is Anatoly Liberman’s Word Origins…and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone. The Russian-born Liberman is professor of German, Scandanavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, and a throwback to the age of Victorian polymaths. He specializes in linguistics and folklore, translates Russian poetry (Tyutchev, Lermontov) and is working on an immense dictionary of English etymology. No desiccated pedant, his bibliography includes an article winningly titled “Gone with the Wind: More Thoughts on Medieval Farting.” His sense of humor is Rabelaisian and he exudes enormous pleasure in what he is doing. “Language is always at play. Creating words may be the most delightful game of all,” he writes in Word Origins, and illustrates his point by citing an episode from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. Here are the final sentences in Liberman’s book:

“Many things said in the early chapters will appear in a new light now that the end is known. A book not worth rereading is not worth reading even once.”

I stumbled over the middle of the second sentence because of the unexpected time reversal, but the sentence would not be worth uttering without it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown increasingly jealous of the time I’m able to devote to reading. A frivolous book wastes time, so most of the books I chose I’m actually rereading or they are likely candidates for rereading in the future – in accordance with Liberman’s dictum. Unlike many readers, I seldom think of books as a means of escape. A worthy book is about engagement – with the book and its author, with its language, with the books that preceded and somehow influenced it, with the books that succeed it, and with the world. In theory, I have nothing against books read strictly for diversion but I feel a sense of urgency, especially as life grows more demanding.

One good book inevitably links to others, forming a vast Borgesian web we can never trace. The Internet, of course, complicates matters while simplifying them. I’m reading William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert D. Richardson’s new biography of the philosopher, which makes me want to return to James’ Principles of Psychology and Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll with William James, and also to Emerson and Henry James. Too many choices, when unmediated by taste, discipline and a serviceable memory, result in paralysis and futility. I’m reminded of the way Jakov Lind begins Counting My Steps: An Autobiography:

“The world is a maze of bookshops and libraries, editorial offices and universities, studios and stages, stuffed with literature and culture like a rhinoceros with formaldehyde.”

And that reminds me, sadly, of Lind’s death last week. Years ago, I read his early works – Soul of Wood, Landscape and Concrete, and two of his three memoirs – then he seemed to vanish. An Austrian Jew, he wrote first in German then, after emigrating to London, in English. I hadn’t thought of him in years until Joshua Cohen published a fine appreciation of Lind in the Feb. 6 edition of the Forward, keyed to Lind’s 80th birthday on Feb. 10. Here’s Cohen’s conclusion:

“Entirely out of print in English, two of the books I purchased in preparation for this essay had been autographed (“To Albert,” “To Alfred”). They sold for a dollar apiece — that’s how little he’s known. But fiction that must be followed by fact that must, in turn, be followed by silence, then disappearance, is a reduction we readers cannot accept, or allow — though that might be the daily-felt fate of the writer. Jakov Lind doesn’t deserve to be read — he’s necessary, both in the vicissitudes of his life and, too, in the work it created. His books are the last late bloom of the European Jewish landscape, straining sunward through the concealing concrete.”

Lind died Feb. 17. Here’s a cheap irony: The headline over Cohen’s story is “Paying Tribute to a Living Legend.” Now I want to read Lind again.

`Hammering Energies'

I am enjoying William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert D. Richardson, author of beautifully written, well-researched lives of Thoreau and Emerson. Thus far, my only quibble with the James biography is the absence of the wonderful drawings by Barry Moser that garnished the earlier volumes. That writers as inimitable as William and Henry James should have been brothers, and that the rest of their family should have been so enduringly interesting, if less accomplished (their sister, Alice, and father, Henry Sr., have already merited biographies), seems almost miraculous and makes them the obvious candidate for the title of America’s First Family (Adamses and Kennedys, move over). The James siblings were, Richardson reminds us, “first and last, citizens of the James family.” Here’s Richardson, in his Prologue, placing William James as a writer:

“In place of the mythological world of fixed ideas, James has given us a world of hammering energies, strong but evanescent feelings, activity of thought, and a profound and relentless focus on life now. For all his grand accomplishments in canonical fields of learning, James’s best is often in his unorthodox, half-blind, unpredictable lunges at the great question of how to live, and in this his work sits on the same shelf with Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. James’s best is urgent, direct, personal, and useful. Much of his writing came out of his teaching, and it has not yet lost the warmth of personal appeal, the sound of the man’s own voice.”

Save Spinoza, is any philosopher so lovable? When Richardson describes James family gatherings, with their lively contentiousness, good humor and “hammering energies,” we feel jealousy and disappointment for having not been invited. Like many sovereignties, the Jameses coined a language of their own:

“The whole family lived and communicated in a blizzard of pet names and nicknames, egged on by the gleeful parents. Garth Wilkinson James, the next-to-youngest brother, was Wilky, Wilkie, Wilk, and Wilkums. Robertson, the youngest brother, was Bob, Bobbins, Robby, Bobby, and Hoppergrass Bob. Thirteen-year-old Wilky addressed a letter home to “Dearest of the Daddybusses and Mommybusses on earth …. Alice had the most pet names, many of them showered on her by her older brother Willy. He called her Sweetlington, Sisterkin, Cherie de Soeur, Cherie de Jeune Bal, Beautlet, my Dearest darling Alice, the noiseless Alice, most kissworthy Alice, you lovely Babe, Dearest Child, la seule que j’aime, Cherie, charmante de Bal, and countless others.”

After the Jameses, the most idiosyncratically memorable (in this case, fictional) family in literature is the Pollitts, the swarm that inhabits Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. The father, Samuel Clemens Pollitt, is a tempestuous, loving, self-pitying, utterly self-absorbed man-boy who likewise speaks a language of his own. I wonder if Stead had the James family – especially the obliviously eccentric Henry Sr. -- in mind as a remote model for the Pollitts. Here’s a sample of Sam Pollitt:

“`By Jiminy!’ ejaculated Sam, who had strange oaths, since he could never swear foul ones, `genius burns: nothing succeeds like success! And did Dirty Jack jerk back his head and give me one of those looks of his with his slugs of eyes, to intimidate me; whereas, no one noticed him at all, at all, poor old Dirty Jack.’ He began to hum with his walking, `Oh, my darling Nelly Gray, they have taken you away.”

In his generous introduction to the 1965 republication of The Man Who Loved Children (25 years after its first appearance), Randall Jarrell wrote:

“Every family has words and phrases of its own; that ultimate family, the Pollitts, has what amounts to a whole language of its own. Only Sam can speak it, really, but the children understand it and mix phrases from it into their ordinary speech. (If anyone feels that it is unlikely for a big grown man to have a little language of his own, let me remind him of that great grown man Swift.) Children’s natural distortions of words and the distortions of Artemus Ward and Uncle Remus are the main sources of this little language of Sam’s. As we listen to Sam talking in it, we exclaim in astonished veneration, `It’s so!’ Many of the words and phrases of this language are so natural that we admire Christina Stead for having invented them at the same instant at which we are thinking, `No, nobody, not even Christina Stead could have made that up!’ – they have the uncreated reality of any perfect creation.”

Richardson quotes part of a letter 19-year-old William James wrote to Kitty Temple, who had mailed a photograph of herself:

“Wheeeeew! oohoo! a ha! la la! [here he drew a musical staff and a flourish] boisteroso triumpissimo. Chassez to the right, cross over, forward two, hornpipe and turn summerset. Up came the fire engines, but I proudly waved them aside.”

We’re not far from Swift’s “little language” to Stella, and Finnegans Wake – both productions of Ireland, likes the Jameses.

`Poetry is Not the Thing Said But a Way of Saying It'

In 1933, in a lecture he delivered at Cambridge University, A.E. Housman formulated several simple, reliable tests for distinguishing poetry from things that merely resemble poetry:

“Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us….Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act, This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, `everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’ The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.”

Housman’s humor in “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” as in much of his verse, is sly, deadpan and largely unrecognized. In the same lecture he says: “Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not. If it were, the eighteenth century would have been able to write it better.”

I bring up Housman, though I don’t agree with his apparent lack of regard for Pope, Swift and Johnson, because his poetry-verification tests have proven useful as I’ve been reading The Apparitioners, by George Witte, published in 2005 by Three Rails Press. This is not a young man’s poetry, and I would have known that even without reading in the Author’s Note that Witte is editor in chief of St. Martin’s Press. He writes about family and the near-at-home natural world without the inveterate complaints of youth. He makes free verse look easy and never confuses bafflement with shopping-mall nihilism. Here’s the book’s final poem, “Yours Truly”:

“The undersides of things are ticklish:
palms, bellies, backs of knees,
surfaces scored with nerves,
concave, convex, any place
you lift or turn to touch.
A stone dead but for its lichen
thrives underneath, a mine
of wriggling kin. Too much
sexy stuff for some (exclaiming Oh!
they slam the lid down, screw it tight);
for others – okay, for me – hope:
that every shape must have its mate,
the counter-curve to true it up.
So you’re shy, yet your secret tongue –
doesn’t it? – savors this note’s envelope.”

Witte crafts lines pleasing to the tongue and ear – “concave, convex, any place.” Note his deployment of s’s in the two lines starting with “sexy stuff,” and the play of s’s and o’s in the final two lines. Seeing hope in “the underside of things” is a conceit worthy of Donne, though the echoes I hear most often are of Wordsworth and Stevens, and he reminds me of a less starchy David Ferry. Witte seems to possess the hope promised by religion, the acceptance of linkage and meaning in the world, without an overtly declared theology.

Landscape here means geology, human habitation and a sense of immanence. In “Talus Slope,” he points out “a single/Crystal hardens like a bus dew-/Wet with origins, hieroglyph/Of a secret life.” As you live with the poems after reading them attentively, a muted sense of alarm, a metaphysical anxiety cloaked by the beauty of the ordinary world, grows apparent. I wish I had written the first poem in the collection, “An Open Letter.” I can’t do it justice by quoting fragment, but the last three lines, which resonate with experience, stand as an elegant echo of the opening three lines, which suggest an impossible innocence:

“There’s something to be said, and something else
to be kept quiet and cool:
the lake at dawn, before the fog burns off.”

As Housman said in the lecture mentioned above, “Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.” Note the indefinite article.

Brits on Yanks

“I would rather, however, have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.”

Lord Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, June 8, 1822

“And, at this day, though I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles.”

John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Vol. I. Letter 10, 1871

Like Father, Like Son

My oldest son, Joshua Kurp, has launched a blog, Five Best, "Where blog is just a four-letter word." Enjoy.

`A Portrait of the Whole Man'

Like all books, biographies ought to be well written, but there are so many tempting ways to write them badly. Much noted is the recent tendency to mistake facts for insights and to indiscriminately lard biographies with trivia. I first noticed this self-indulgent trend more then 30 years ago when Joseph Blotner published his flatulent life of William Faulkner and managed to quote every obtuse review the author of Light in August ever received. I’m not prepared to conclude, however, that the art of biography is a waste of time, as the ever-contentious Dan Green at The Reading Experience appears to believe:

“…biographies of artists and writers, and especially biographies of the junk heap variety (if a scrap of information exists, throw it on), are by and large a waste of time. No `calibrating’ of life and art is necessary. The dreary reckoning of the `business of living’ is never going to equal in its interest value the `dynamic’ experience of works of art and literature, and I finally just don't understand why anyone finds it helpful to supplement the experience of art with investigations into the lives of artists. Why would I want to read about `pettiness and tedium,’ no matter how much they've been gussied up by the biographer's `insight’?”

Transcription is not biography. About this, Dan and I and most other sensible readers can agree. The best biographies are written by authors who not only know many things about their subjects but don’t allow what they know to get in the way of understanding them and writing well. Ideally, a biographer performs much reading and research and arrives at an informed, sympathetic understanding of his subject before he writes his first word. This would seem to be the method of Robert D. Richardson Jr., one of our finest literary biographers. His lives of Thoreau, Emerson and, most recently, William James, are models of economical narrative, prudent marshalling of facts, the deployment of an organizing theme, and graceful prose. Here’s a representative sample from Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

“On March 9, 1862, the Monitor and the Merrimack fought to a draw, and the age of the wooden sailing warship was over. On April 6 and 7 twenty-three thousand men died in the bloody battle of Shiloh. A month later, Concord suffered a nearer loss. Henry Thoreau died of tuberculosis; he was forty-four. Emerson wrote and delivered the eulogy for the man he would always remember as his best friend, even when his memory loss was so far advanced that he could not pull up the name. `Thoreau’ is Emerson’s last sustained major piece of writing. A great prose elegy, as good in its way as `Lycidas,’ this is Emerson’s best, most personal biographical piece and it remains the best single piece yet written on Henry Thoreau.”

This passage, 19 pages from the end of a 573-page biography, distills in miniature what Richardson accomplishes across the entire book. It places Emerson and Thoreau in a historical context, and by doing so adds poignancy to the death of the latter and the bereavement of the former. By citing Milton’s poem, Richardson performs a generous act of criticism and scholarship, placing Emerson’s elegy in the larger context of world literature. He notes the profound and sometimes mutually baffled bond of friendship, mentorship and respect that existed between the two men, while reminding us of Emerson’s own sad decline. In his preface to the Emerson biography, Richardson offers clues to his method:

“My approach to both Thoreau and Emerson has been to read what they read and then to relate their reading to their writing. The story, however -- and it is a story – of Emerson’s intellectual odyssey turned out to be incomprehensible apart from his personal and social life. The result is an intellectual biography as well as a portrait of the whole man.”

Good biographies contribute to our understanding of the men and women we admire and about whom we naturally feel curious. We wish to prolong our stay in their company. Such biographies address a humbler, less exalted but perfectly understandable question: How do mere mortals create works of genius that touch, even after centuries, the minds and emotions of other mere mortals? As Richardson notes, they also tell a story, preferably a compelling human story.

Richardson is not alone in accomplishing these things. I rank as exceptional such biographies as Jonathan Bate’s John Clare, W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson, Frederick Brown’s Flaubert, Jonathan Coe’s Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, Richard Holmes’ lives of Shelley and Coleridge. And, of course, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Talking About Spinoza

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a link to the PRI radio show "Open Source," hosted by Chris Lydon. In this edition, Rebecca Goldstein and Antonio Damasio discuss one of my favorite subjects -- Spinoza.

`Merely Beautiful'

The sustaining conviction of Anecdotal Evidence has been my belief that books and life are irreparably conjoined, like most Siamese twins. They are not discrete, self-sustaining organisms. In biological terms, their relation is symbiotic, mutually sustaining. To sever them is to risk endangering both. Literature is typically sabotaged by writers succumbing to one of two great temptations: delivering a compromisingly emphatic “message,” writing propaganda, subverting the literary with extra-literary purposes; and creating pointless parlor games, hothouse orchids, airless rooms which neither sustain life nor expand consciousness. The common reader, who reads for the best of reasons (sustenance, pleasure), loses either way. Two writers, read serendipitously on the same day, bolstered my conviction, though it hardly needed bolstering. In The Dragons of Expectation, the historian and poet Robert Conquest writes:

“Literature exists for the ordinary educated man, and any literature that actively requires enormous training can be at best of only peripheral value. Moreover, such a mood in literature produces the specialist who only knows about literature. The man who only knows about literature does not know even about literature.”

That final sentence is the crux. The cleverness of Oulipoean games, their occasional mathematical elegance, is at first impressive but ultimately freakish and dull. The sensible reader, once he gets the joke, will inevitably ask, “Who cares?” Mark Van Doren – who remembers him? – wrote a brief article, “Literature and Propaganda,” collected in The Private Reader (1942). He observes:

“The trouble with mere propaganda is that it is merely didactic; and from the merely didactic, as a witty scholar of Oxford has said, nothing can be learned. The trouble with mere literature is that it is merely beautiful; and from the merely beautiful, there is no living pleasure to be had.”

I might quibble with Van Doren’s characterization of the “merely beautiful.” There are significant stretches of Wallace Stevens’ work I find incomprehensible and thus “merely” ravishingly beautiful, and that’s fine with me.

Zola

Occasionally we happen upon a book by a writer who is a stranger, or a previously unknown book by one whose work we thought we knew, and the volume turns into an unexpected pleasure, like a belated birthday present. This happened to me 11 years ago when I found The Belly of Paris, by Emile Zola, in a bookstore in Albany, N.Y. I had read several of Zola’s novels, mostly the better-known titles – L’Assommoir, Nana, Germinal – and had enjoyed them, and had recently read Frederick Brown’s Zola: A Life. I was predisposed to appreciating the great naturalist by frequent childhood viewings of The Life of Emile Zola, with Paul Muni in the title role. His Zola, the author of “J'accuse,” was a crusading hero for truth, tolerance and a free press – less a novelist than a moral force, in typical Hollywood fashion.

The 1996 paperback edition of The Belly of Paris (the third in Zola’s 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series) was put out by Sun & Moon Press, a now-defunct publisher in Los Angeles. It seemed an odd choice for a house heavy with Language Poets and other avant-garde grinds, but their revival of a forgotten 19th-century novel was inspired. I raced through it in a couple of days and loaned it to a friend. In the presence of facts, Zola seemed to experience an erotic thrill. His text is dense with Parisian history and data drawn from agriculture, finance and food – especially food. I can’t think of another novel more devoted to descriptions of growing, transporting, selling, buying, preparing and consuming food. Zola’s protagonist, Florent – a deported political prisoner on the lam – returns to Paris in a wagonload of turnips and carrots, and becomes Inspector of Fish for the city’s enormous central market, Les Halles.

The friend never returned the novel and soon moved, without notice, to the other end of the continent, so my memory of the book – the lingering aura surrounding any volume we have read -- was tinged with sadness and a ghostly unreality. Then, in the fall 2005 issue of The Threepenny Review, I was surprised to see a brief “Table Talk” essay by Irene Oppenheim devoted to Ernest Alfred Vizetelly’s translation of Le Ventre de Paris. Her reaction, like mine, had been one of shameless pleasure. She smartly paraphrases the novel, quotes several of Zola’s food descriptions that left her “queasy,” and reports the unexpected fate of the edition I had once owned. The Sun & Moon Press reprint, originally priced at $14.95, was long out of print and now available only at various internet sites for as much as $350. I don’t claim to understand the demands of the market, but how does a relatively obscure translation of a novel by Emile Zola fetch such appallingly inflated prices? I suppose that’s a back-handed compliment to Zola’s genius. Two years ago I requested the copy in the Houston Public Library’s collection, and it turned up missing, probably stolen. Oppenheim concludes her essay like this:

“There is one circulating edition in the Los Angeles library system, and I was able to purchase a somewhat less expensive copy from an internet seller in Detroit. How the book reached that least epicurean of cities remains a mystery.”

I’ve had several fine meals in Detroit, especially in Greektown. Oppenheim’s swipe at the Motor City is gratuitous, and she has obviously never eaten in Columbus, Ohio. But here’s the good news: The Belly of Paris is back in print. I found it in a bookshop here in Houston on Monday. The publisher is Green Integer, run by Douglas Messerli, the founder of Sun & Moon Press. The volume is the size of a large bar of soap and has the heft of brick. On the cover is a photograph of Zola’s face, scowling, bearded, and wearing a pince-nez. The price is $15.95. This story has several heroes – Zola, of course; Messerli; and, I’d like to think, Oppenheim.

Fathers and Sons

I have just reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in the new Penguin translation by Martin Hammond. In the best sense, the book is “inspirational.” Marcus Aurelius did not believe in an afterlife. Death signifies only oblivion. Marcus was, however, dedicated to a life of service and duty, and served as emperor of Rome from A.D. 161 to 180. He was that rarest of men – a statesman and a philosopher. His death signaled the end of the Pax Romana. He was succeeded by his son, Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus, whom he had named Caesar in 166 and made co-emperor in 177.

What a curse for so thoughtful a father: Commudus was an idiot of the most egocentric sort. He believed himself the reincarnation of Hercules and had statues of himself made in that role. He was a connoisseur of the gladiator arena, and even fought as a gladiator himself, sometimes against handicapped people, those with missing limbs who were literally “unarmed.” He gave them sponges to throw, in lieu of swords and clubs. In A.D. 192, Commodus was strangled in his bath by a wrestler named, deliciously, Narcissus.

I have three sons, all of whom seem bright and balanced, without a hint of the moronic self-centeredness that characterized Commodus (such an unfortunate name, with its hint, in English, of “commode”). I returned to Edward Gibbon to read again his account of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“Nothing…was neglected by the anxious father, and by the men of learning and virtue he summoned to his assistance, to expand the narrow mind of young Commodus…but the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. The influence of a polite age, and the labour of an attentive education, had never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish mind the least tincture of learning….Commodus, from his earlier infancy, discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal. The masters of every branch of learning, whom Marcus provided for his son, were heard with inattention and disgust.”

One more thing to worry about.

Happy Birthdays

Today we celebrate the 198th birthdays of two men whose lives touched the lives of every person reading this post. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, through the rare serendipity of history, were born Feb. 12, 1809 – Darwin in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England; Lincoln, three miles south of Hogdenville, Ky., U.S.A. I have visited the latter, and the homeliness of the surroundings is conspicuous and appropriate. Both men epitomize their homelands. Both were prey to melancholy, and both were exceptional writers and readers. Of how many scientists and statesmen can we say that today?

Here’s Darwin, in his Autobiography, on his reading habits:

"Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that its nauseated me….On the other hand, novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily – against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.”

Lincoln’s taste for Shakespeare and Robert Burns, appropriate for an American of his time, is well documented. Likewise, we know he read the King James Bible, Robinson Crusoe, and Blackstone’s lecture on English law. He is supposed to have said, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read,” but I’ve not been able to trace the source. It sounds too folksy to be true, as though scripted by one of our current president’s handlers. Another story, possibly apocryphal, claims Lincoln, after he became president, was asked for the story of his life, and he is supposed to have said: "It is contained in one line of [Thomas] Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard': 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"

`What Is Hidden Everywhere'

In traffic, waiting for the light, I smelled diesel exhaust from the bus in front of me and then it’s 1964, I’m 12 years old, and I’m riding the No. 51 bus on West 25th Street, headed downtown to visit bookstores and a magic shop, none of which has existed for decades. That’s my working-class American version of a madeleine dipped in tea, with Cleveland as my Combray. One of my history professors often said he would rather have five minutes of conversation from the streets of Athens in the age of Pericles than a newly discovered dialogue by Plato. That’s how I feel about 1964 – five minutes of quotidian Middle America, only the trivial things -- Rice-A-Roni, slang, the color of our socks, the strange newness of saying “President” Johnson, my grandmother’s crabbed left hand two years after her stroke, and a pile of Doc Savage reprints from Bantam. Here’s Howard Moss in The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust:

“We contain within ourselves every lost moment of our lives. It is necessary to be made aware that they are lost before we can regain them. Music informs us of this loss without specifying the nature of what we have relinquished. Like time, it tells us everything and nothing.

“Involuntary memories are forms of ecstasy, `mnemonic resurrections’ that do not contain earlier experiences so much as new truths. Sensations of the past are not duplications but sensation itself. Destroying the material world temporarily, they put in its place a world of revelation akin to the spiritual experiences of mystics…”

Such rare transports possess more conviction and vividness than any movie. My oldest son reminded me that Saturday was the 43rd anniversary of the first appearance by the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. He, born in 1987, sent me the YouTube video, and said, “It’s so simple but it still gives me chills.” No kidding – little things, like Paul and George sharing a chorus on “All My Loving” and Ringo’s moronic grin. This mental conceit of recapturing the past (the mirror image of kids wishing they were grownups) is common, especially among the middle-aged and elderly, who have more past to recapture. In an untitled poem, Samuel Menashe, now 81, writes:

“Always
When I was a boy
I lost things –
I am still
Forgetful –
Yet I daresay
All will be found
One day.”

And from another Menashe poem, “Reeds Rise from Water”:

“At every instant I expect
what is hidden everywhere.”

Memory contains – or creates – more than we suspect.

Tohu-Bohu

While reading W.H. Auden’s Collected Poems the other night I came upon a word I don’t remember having seen before, nor could I decipher its meaning from the context. Here’s the stanza in question, from “In Sickness and in Health,” written in 1942:

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command – Rejoice.”

This was written after Auden’s move to the United States, in New York City, and it reflects his shedding of politics and his evolving return to Christianity. It is an epithalamion for his friends Maurice and Gwen Mandelbaum. The word that threw me was “tohu-bohu,” which sounds like the name of an island in the South Pacific, maybe the one where Melville jumped ship. In fact, it’s a compound of two Hebrew words meaning, respectively, “formlessness” and “emptiness,” and is used in Genesis 1:2 – “without form and void.” In other words, the primordial “stuff” that existed before creation – a notion understood intuitively by both physicists and the faithful.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “tohu-bohu” as “That which is empty and formless; chaos; utter confusion.” The OED’s earliest English citation dates from 1613, and it cites four more uses from the 17th century, but no more until the 19th century (Gladstone, Browning, L.S. Houghton), and none at all after that. My Webster’s Third cites an undated, 20th-century usage by Walter Lippman: “bringing order out of the tohubohu of human relations.” This is speculation, but the word was probably most often used during the centuries when educated writers of English were most likely to possess some familiarity with the original Hebrew – particularly the second sentence of the Bible.

The OED also cites the word as being used in French by Rabelais (1548) and Voltaire (1776). Interestingly, another 19th-century appearance (1871) of the word comes in the third stanza of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”):

“Et les Péninsules démarrées
N'ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.”

Here’s the line in English, as translated by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock:

“Drifting peninsulas
Were never prey to such formidable commotion!”

How is it possible that such a useful, comic-sounding word never bobbed to the surface of my consciousness before? I’ve been reading Auden and Rimbaud since I was a teenager. Now I see the word all over the Internet. It was even the name of a short-lived Canadian television show. I draw several conclusions from my ignorance: I am sometimes a lazy reader, skimming over words I don’t know; my memory is not to be trusted; English is so abundantly rich it can permit delightful words like “tohu-bohu” to evaporate.

`Time Deserves an Honorable Mention Here'

Thanks to Dave Lull for alerting me to a characteristically colloquial, slight-feeling new poem by Wislawa Szymborska, “A Greek Statue,” published in the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The translation from the Polish is by Joanna Trzeciak:

“With the help of people and other disasters,
time has worked pretty hard on it.
First it took away the nose, later the genitals,
one by one fingers and toes,
with the passing of years arms, one after the other,
right thigh and left thigh,
back and hips, head and buttocks,
and what fell off, time broke into pieces,
into chunks, into gravel, into sand.

“When someone living dies this way,
much blood flows with each blow.

“Yet marble statues perish pale
and not always all the way.

“Of the one we are speaking of, only a torso remains,
like breath held under exertion
as it now must
draw unto
itself
all the grace and weight
of what has been lost.

“And it pulls this off,
pulls this off still,
pulls us in and dazzles,
dazzles and endures –

Time deserves an honorable mention here,
as it stopped midway
and left something for later.”

I say “slight-feeling” because Szymborska’s manner is casual and slangy despite the philosophical heft of her poems. Like Jane Austen, she wears the mask of a clever but conventional woman, a strategy that permits her to take on weighty matters while clandestinely puncturing over-inflated inflated ideas and reputations. “A Greek Statue” reads like a cheeky repudiation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with its presumptuous final sentence: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” (“You must change your life.”) When I read that, I want to tell Rilke to mind his own damn business and change his own damn life.

Szymborska likes endings. Her poems often are organized around a single idea, with endings like ambiguous punch lines. When they succeed, her poems often conclude with a distilled nugget of insight or a koan-like aphorism. When they fail, they often trail off into whimsy. In “A Greek Statue,” the notion of time stopping “midway” is a grim, humbling metaphysical joke – especially the conceit of leaving “something for later.” Here are some other memorable Szymborska finales:

“The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.”
(from “The Joy of Writing”)

“I might have been myself minus amazement,
That is,
Someone completely different.”
(from “Among the Multitudes“)

“The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.”
(from “Autonomy”)

“Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.”
(from “Psalm”)

“An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.”
(from “Miracle Fair”)

`I Should Like for My Work to be Human'

That endangered species, the man of letters, may be best represented in the United States by a writer out of North Carolina, Fred Chappell, who is 70 years old and since the nineteen-sixties has published novels, short fiction, poetry and much readable criticism. Chappell is a formidably bookish man who taught for 40 years at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, but his criticism is less formal scholarship than reviews and personal essays, published in newspapers and literary journals alike. In other words, he loves books and loves writing about them, rare qualities among today’s academics.

Over the years I’ve read most of Chappell’s work and have reviewed one of his novels, so browsing through The Fred Chappell Reader, published in 1987, feels like going to a family reunion where you actually like most of the people in attendance. The book’s afterword, “A Pact with Faustus,” is a chronicle of Chappell’s enduring love for Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a book he first read as a boy growing up in “the grimy little town of Canton, North Carolina (pop. eternally 5,000; tucked away in the folds of the far western mountains of the state).” It’s a superb essay on two levels – as a bittersweet evocation of his boyhood friendship with Harry “Fuzz” Fincher, a musician (like the hero of Mann’s novel, Adrian Leverkuhn) and fellow Tarheel aesthete; and as a meditation on the interdependence in our lives of reading and writing. Chappell admits that he eventually had to suspend his emotional projection into the figure of Leverkuhn, whom Mann based on Arnold Schoenberg:

“It is clear that I am no figure of literary `importance,’ that I have not the means and no longer any desire to transform the outer contours of the art. In my case adventurous experimentation with form seems to lead to overintellectualization, to desiccation, of content. I have got to where I should like for my work to be human, and I do not much care if it even becomes sentimental. Perhaps it would be nice if a few artists in our time decided to rejoin the human race, and I think that I would be glad to do so, however much I disagree with its politics.”

Chappell’s candor feels like pure oxygen after three days in a mine shaft. I think of a writer like John Barth, whose early novels I briefly loved, but who became unreadable for me about 25 years ago. I still think of Barth as a supremely intelligent, very funny novelist who could write crystalline prose that sometimes reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s. But, like a dirigible, Barth’s books tend to be big and empty and often in danger of blowing up. They are cold performances, not “human” in Chappell’s formulation, and you can easily understand why they appeal to some academics and theorists of “metafiction.” Chappell continues:

“New heroes come to me, figures I wish I had known how to long to emulate as a lad. Spinoza is a lovely and brilliant man; there is more worth for me in Robert Browning than in a platoon of John Berrymans; I don’t see how Carl Ruggles can be much less a composer than Mann’s imaginary figure; Chaucer is a supreme artist, full of grace and light and wisdom and humanity. Is he really so much less a poet than Dante? Is consistent System so much greater a good than superabundant spirit?

“As soon as I set these rhetorical questions down, they no longer look rhetorical. There are probably sufficient critical reasons to prefer Dante over Chaucer and maybe even Berryman over Browning….But I have been through that, and it has seemed important to me to set, however regretfully, strict critical necessity aside. It is only my temperament that makes me say so, of course, but sooner or later an artist must take account of his temperament as one of his basic materials. There are already so many artists whom one admires more than he likes. Am I the only reader who finds in the achievement of James Joyce something that is – well, a little obtuse? Who sees Chekhov as being in some intimate way not only better, but greater?

“Probably not.”

All heresy, of course, but aren’t some of our purported literary tastes rooted in snobbery and defended with a reverence that is almost religious in nature? Aren’t many acolytes of Gertrude Stein and Finnegans Wake the literary counterparts of biblical inerrants, staunch protectors of texts they defend without understanding? And isn’t the prose of Stein and late Joyce a species of glossolalia – that is, talking in tongues, understood only by the initiated?

Chappell may be wrong about Berryman, but he’s right about Browning, Chaucer and Ruggles, and he’s certainly right about admiring some artists more than we like them. Especially among the young, admiration can seem more important, more sophisticated, than mere enjoyment. Saying you enjoy Pound’s Cantos is like saying you enjoy the taste of Scotch. No one believes you. The Joyce vs. Chekhov contest, fortunately, is not an either/or proposition. I love Joyce at his best (Dubliners, Ulysses), and not to love Chekhov is to foreswear one’s essential humanity. When it comes to books, I feel no compulsion to be consistent.

`That Whole Damned War Business'

I had a conference with my 6-year-old’s first-grade teacher Tuesday morning. Like his father, Michael has lousy handwriting so I assured her it was a genetic failing and there was nothing we could do about it. We were laughing and marveling at Michael’s newfound insatiability for books when I asked how her son was. She has two sons but she knew which one I meant – the one in the Marine Corps. She froze and her eyes watered. They learned last week her 19-year-old will ship out for Iraq on Feb. 28.

She and her family knew it was coming but there’s no way to prepare for news like that. I could offer no consolation and she asked for none, though she thanked me for being interested. I worry every day when I drop my younger sons off at their schools, and I worry about my 19-year-old son at college in New York City. Stripped of sentiment, being a parent amounts to little more than anxiety management, whether the threat is drunken drivers, pedophiles, the kids’ own foolishness or the fanatics in Iraq.

As a sick old man, living on Mickle Street in Camden, N.J., Walt Whitman talked a Niagara of recollections – nine volumes, thus far – to his friend Horace Traubel. Whitman spoke often of his years as a volunteer nurse in Civil War field hospitals. He told Traubel on Dec. 13, 1888, a little more than three years before his death:

“I was in the midst of it all – saw war where war is worst – not in the battlefields, no – in the hospitals: there war is worst: there I mixed with it: and now I say God damn the wars – all wars: God damn every war: God damn ‘em! God damn ‘em! … I shouldn’t let myself go – no, I shouldn’t – but I say God damn ‘em anyway!”

Later the same day, Whitman said:

“O God! That whole damned war business is about nine hundred and ninety nine parts diarrhea to one part glory: the people who like the wars should be compelled to fight the wars : they are hellish business, wars – all wars.”

`But Quirky, My God!'

It’s bracing and probably healthy to watch as one’s enthusiasms – in this case, esteemed writers – get roughed up by critics and readers of proven wit and learning. Admiration is not abject worship, and a great writer can always take the heat. After all, I love Joyce despite Finnegans Wake. Here’s Fred Chappell, in a 1992 interview, on one of my favorite poets:

“Wallace Stevens, who thought very strongly about poetry and felt strongly about it, writes the most illogical essays in the world. They make no sense. They’re wonderful from sentence to sentence, but the paragraphs don’t make any sense. So one should learn to write logically. I must say, in regard to Stevens, that the material that he wrote for his insurance work doesn’t make any sense either. I read a talk about insurance that is included in his Opus Posthumous. It made no sense whatsoever. It was nice and empty.”

It’s reassuring to have one’s inadequacies affirmed. I’ve never been able to figure out what Stevens was going on about in most of his essays. In this, he reminds me of Emerson. Judged by the sentence or phrase, Emerson crafted some of the grandest prose in the language. But ask me to paraphrase “The Poet,” and I’m blank.

James Lees-Milne (1908-1997) was an English historian, especially of architecture, and voluminous diarist. Each volume of his published diary takes its title from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” In 1996, Lees-Milne published a collection of profiles, Fourteen Friends, including “Henry Yorke and Henry Green.” That represents one person, by the way, for the author of Loving was a Yorke by birth. Lees-Milne writes of Green’s prose style:

“It is always staccato, enigmatic, and maddeningly elusive. One episode slides into another. The reader is perpetually brought up against blank walls. At the finish of every novel the story is unresolved, and the reader is left in the air. In venturing these criticisms I do not mean to imply that Green’s style is a bad one. Far from it. Quite apart from being – to employ a pedantic term – sui generis, it is seldom strained. It is damnably direct, colloquial and powerful. But quirky, my God! Moreover, and this is why I persevered in reading everything he wrote, the novels contain poetry of a morbid kind. They are embellished – if that is the right word – with passages that take the breath away, passages that could be extracted from the book without in the least affecting the book’s theme.”

Lees-Milne’s reservations about Green’s work sound oddly like some of my reasons for enjoying it so much.

Golfing with Jim 'n' Sam

It's not subtle but it is funny, thanks especially to the actor playing James Joyce. Go here for "Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce 'n' Beckett."

`A Different Name for Conversation'

Take up Tristram Shandy and open to Book II, Chapter XI (page 79 in my old Everyman’s Library edition), and read:

“Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; -- so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would pressure to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.”

The conversation at Anecdotal Evidence commenced one year ago today. It was one-sided at first, the monologue of a man with a head full of books and a desire to talk about them. I lacked technological confidence, and still don’t know how to add links to my blog roll, but I taught myself to blog in what I fancy is the old-fashioned American way – by doing it, making a lot of mistakes, and paying attention to them. I’m a natural-born blogger who spent a lifetime waiting for the technology to catch up.

Now to acknowledge many debts: Most obviously, Dave Lull, proofreader, surrogate conscience, friend; and Frank Wilson, who let me go on doing what I was already doing but with better editing and pay. Also, among others, Maxine Clarke, Michael Coppola, Michael Gilleland, George Hunka, Joshua Kurp, Kenneth Kurp, James Marcus, Brian Sholis, Terry Teachout, many nameless librarians, and readers, named and anonymous, in the U.S., Canada, Israel, Iran, England, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, and even a few lonely outposts in Texas.

I’ve enjoyed the discipline of posting daily, but that only requires me to do what I was already doing, except now I take the time to write down the words I was allowing to languish in my head. What have I not enjoyed? Occasionally having to wrestle with Blogger, a temperamental mistress. Tantrums from obstreperous readers rooted, naturally, in politics. And spam in the form of blog comments. At first that was limited to solving my credit worries and making large sums of money doing absolutely nothing. Now it’s usually for dubious computer software, dubious pharmaceuticals and dubious women.

A few of the unspoken assumptions I’ve learned thanks to blogging for a year: truth exists and is knowable; language used honestly and with grace separates the civilized from the barbarian; not all opinions are equal, and some are more equal than others. A passage in an essay by George Garrett on Fred Chappell’s poetry distills this project. Substitute “blogging” for “poetry,” and “blogger” for “poet”:

“St. Augustine said, and poets for more than a thousand years never saw any good reason to question the validity of his statement, that the purpose of poetry was to tell the truth – truth being caritas (charity), the love and peace that pass all understanding. Its opposite is cupiditas (sin), which blooms brightly in the false garden, in the soil of untruth. This beautiful simplicity is complicated by the shifty and constantly shifting, mutating shapes of appearance and reality and by the fact that any poetry can contain this meaning. It cannot exist separately from the poem. It lives in and from the poem.”

Thank you, readers, and happy birthday!

`A Whole Manhattan of Indifference'

My oldest son is a college sophomore in New York City, and one of his friends, a fellow student, was raped last week by a man she had met at an art gallery. They went barhopping and suddenly the police were at her apartment. The event is shocking only in its ordinariness. Abuse is casual, off-handed, as though it were a minor, easily given-up indulgence, like eating peanuts. Once we have children, all pretext of invulnerability evaporates. The world can hurt us now in ways we never imagined. Here’s a stanza from “Score,” a poem by Fred Chappell:

“The midnight of the needle
And the nickel. The fairway suburbs send
Their shaken daughters out to wheedle
The ominous stranger and habitual friend.
She delivers her snowy intelligence;
Her empty eyes declare
A whole Manhattan of indifference,
A whole Miami of despair.”

Chappell explicitly addresses drugs but the poem has another resonance. “Snowy” suggests both illicit powders and innocence. Strangers ominous and affable haunt the streets. Even the bottomless, enviable pride of youth is no protection. Predators deal in pride as though it were just another drug. Eudora Welty, of all people, spelled it out for us:

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

The Impressionist

My first expectation of a critic – of any writer – is that he write well. A critic who writes indifferent prose nullifies his judgments. Why should I take seriously the word of a man who, with each word he writes, announces his lack of a gift for crafting words?

Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz writer for The New Yorker, the magazine that treated him with so little gratitude at the end, died on Thursday at the age of 80. Few writers, at the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, article and book levels, have given me so much pleasure and so much encouragement to strive to write well and thus give pleasure to others. Before interviewing the jazz musicians I knew Balliett had written about long before – Elvin Jones, Sonny Rollins, Dave McKenna, others – I always reread Balliett’s originals. This ritual was simultaneously humbling and energizing. It helped me shed any notion that I could out-Balliett the master, but it also spurred me to see something different in the subject, something Balliett had missed or ignored. Sometimes, of course, I ended up writing a Balliett pastiche. In his introduction to Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000, Balliett wrote:

“I was and am an impressionist, and as such have been told that I come closer to delineating the music than any notator, that, anyway, jazz, with its odd non-notes and strange tones and timbres, is almost impossible to translate into notes on paper.”

“Impressionist” is misleading. As paintings, Impressionist works emphasize color over line. Their subject is often evanescent – the effects of changing light on a field or barn, as opposed to the field or barn itself. To that degree, Balliett, by finding metaphors corresponding to the improvised sounds of highly skilled musicians – sounds that will never be heard in precisely that form again -- was an impressionist. But he didn’t leave out the field or barn. Too often, “impressionist” is a term of derogation, meaning a lazy, second-best rendering.

“Pointillism” may be preferable as a way to describe Balliett’s method. By assembling a multitude of small daubs of primary color (words), he rendered a whole and created the impression of numerous secondary tones. He “shaded,” an effect not easily accomplished in paint or words. If “impressionist” implies vagueness, “pointillist” implies painstaking precision. Here’s Balliett in a 1961 piece about the alto player Johnny Hodges:

“Hodges’ bent toward sweetness did not emerge until the mid-thirties, when he began recording, with Ellington, a series of slow ballad solos. On such occasions, which he still indulges in, Hodges employs a tone that seems to be draped over the notes like a lap robe. Hodges does little improvising in these ballads. Instead, he issues languorous statements of the melody and long glissandi topped by an almost unctuous vibrato. Hodges’ Edgar Guest strain is generally well concealed, though, and it is nowhere in sight when he plays the blues, which have long provided his basic materials.”

Anyone familiar with Hodges can only nod his head. Balliett perfectly conveys the tightrope Hodges walked between the heart-piercing and the “unctuous,” and the Edgar Guest reference is pure gravy -- priceless, exact and funny. In a seemingly less poetic, more technical vein, here’s Balliett’s description of Big Joe Turner singing a blues at the 1971 Newport Jazz Festival:

“Turner will go at a slow blues this way: He spreads out the first phrase behind the beat, and he uses just two notes (Turner is not a melismatic singer) – one for the first and last words of the phrase, and one for its middle section. Then he pauses a full measure, goes on to his second phrase, pauses again, briefly, and completes the line. He repeats the line, with slight melodic variations, subtracting one of the pauses and rearranging the lyrics in an almost sleight-of-hand way.”

Notice how the sentence beginning “Then he pauses” precisely echoes the way Turner is singing, down to the use of “briefly,” cordoned off by commas, to describe the pause. This is sophisticated writing about a sophisticated art form – Kansas City blues – that probably had never been so lovingly appreciated in The New Yorker (or many other places) before.

I’m ashamed to say that on the day of Balliett’s death, but before I had learned of it, I started reading Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones, by Robert Greenfield. Rather, I tried to read it but that proved impossible because Greenfield can’t write. Clunky, tone-deaf, clichéd, pretentious – he commits every writerly sin and turns what ought to be a fascinating chronicle of the making of a great album into a forced march across the desert. Music deserves better. Let’s return, gratefully, to the oasis of Whitney Balliett:

“Milt Jackson is an improviser of the rank of Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker and Teddy Wilson, and his years with the Modern Jazz Quartet suggested what might have happened if Joyce had joined the Bloomsbury group….He is a prolix, free-floating performer, and learning how to fit into the M.J.Q. must have taught him a good deal about self-editing, a skill few jazz musicians learn.”