Endgame

Last Thursday I gave my six-year-old his first lesson in chess and since then we’ve played at least three games daily. He’s no nascent Bobby Fischer. He hasn’t come close to winning and I’m only a middling player, but his enthusiastic optimism is touching and very alien to me. At the conclusion of each losing game he shouts “Rematch!” and we set up the pieces again. We’ve played as many as five games in a row.

It’s an awful fault for a father to admit, and I probably ought to feel guilty, but I find games tedious and I’ve never had the killer instinct needed to excel at them. At some point, whether in chess or baseball, I’ve always concluded, “This is pointless. I don’t care if I hit the ball. I don’t care if I capture the queen.” I’m reminded of Joseph Epstein’s description of juggling – “No self-improvement, no end other than itself, sheer play, exquisitely useless.” – except he enjoys juggling.

I’ve never felt this way about about reading or writing, and the only competition I’ve ever felt is against myself. If not for Michael, I probably would never play chess again, though I enjoy reading about it. Nabokov is the great poet of the game, of course, especially in The Defense, but my favorite literary depiction of chess is hardly a game at all but a metaphor or evocative setting. Perhaps I’m fond of it because of the father-and-child theme, which comes in Act V, Scene 1, of The Tempest, from which Aldous Huxley cribbed the title of his most famous novel. Ferdinand and Miranda are playing. She says:

“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in it!”

Prospero, her father, with infinite gentleness for her naiveté, says, “’Tis new to thee.” Those four monosyllables never fail to move me. The game is almost beside the point, as it isn’t in Nabokov, Beckett and Stefan Zweig. In 1970, in an interview with Alfred Appel Jr., Nabokov came close to explaining the allure of the game. He explains why he wanted to print his chess problems alongside his Russian and English poems in Poems and Problems:

“Because problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.”

Those are some of the qualities I prize most in prose, but never in chess. When I asked Michael why he enjoys playing chess he answered without hesitation, “It’s fun.” I can barely remember feeling that way.

`To Live On and On with Our Wounds'

We envied, admired and feared older kids, boys and sometimes girls who had not quite graduated into adulthood but who would frustratingly remain forever our seniors, proof of Zeno’s paradox. The first older kid I remember lived next door to the house we moved from when I was not quite three years old. We often returned and they visited us, and I nursed my hero worship.

By the time I was a senior in high school, Robbie was in the Army and serving in Vietnam. He was killed early in 1970. At the funeral home, in front of his casket, Robbie’s grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack. When she fell, her false teeth rolled across the floor. Death is agony, yes, and the wounds it leaves never heal even with the proverbial aid of time, but it’s also grotesque and often in appallingly bad taste, and despite our best manners it can even be funny. Beckett said it: “Birth was the death of him.”

Beckett was neither cold nor cruel. He accepted death and its untidiness without palliatives. He wrote in a letter to his friend Alan Schneider when the latter’s father died:

“I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only the strange thing that may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.”

Long before Robbie’s death, I knew something about death’s weird gaucherie. I was five when my maternal grandfather died. At the funeral home, one of my mother’s older brothers, Virgil (suitable name), pulled me to the casket and touched my hand to my grandfather’s cheek. I recognized the feel of wax fruit, which my grandmother kept in a bowl on her dining room table. Wax fruit, a fortunately waning fashion, still reminds me of Tom Hayes’ funeral. In the presence of death, meaningless details – false teeth, wax fruit – assume inordinate significance. I have other similar stories but they are probably too offensive, even for me.

Writing about one of her funniest, most celebrated poems, “Not Waving But Drowning,” Stevie Smith wrote in 1956:

“I often try to pull myself together, having been well brought up in the stiff-upper-lip school of thought and not knowing either whether other people find Death as merry as I do. But it’s a tightrope business, this pulling oneself together, and can give rise to misunderstanding which may prove fatal [suitable word], as in this poem I wrote about a poor fellow who got drowned. His friends thought he was waving to them but really he was asking for help.

“Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

“Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

“Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.”

`Contractility is a Virtue'

Viewed with a careless eye they might be mistaken for buttons, and their color for humble brown. Observed closely, in the right light, snail shells are modestly iridescent spirals, elegant renderings of the Fibonacci sequence. With daily spring rain, flotillas ascend fences, walls, trees and, best of all for observation, windows. The journey is hazardous. Weather is volatile in Houston. Parching sun follows days of rain, leaving desiccated snails epoxied to the glass. They are not slow but methodical, a quality I admire. They can slide unhurt along the edge of a razor. So much for vulgar clichés -- “snail’s pace,” “snail mail.”

During my first visit to France, in 1973, after a lifetime of jokes and revulsion from a distance, I ate escargot twice. In Paris, the snails were prepared with minced garlic and served in the shell. Savory on the palate but the mind kept butting in. The second time, at a café somewhere in the south, they were served alive, in the shell. My companion, an Algerian-born Frenchman, instructed me in technique: shell in the left hand, lemon wedge in the right. Squeeze the lemon in the aperture, the creatures distends his head, slurp. With much beer and wine and who knows what else, I convinced myself I enjoyed it, just as I pretended the horsemeat I had been served in another French café rivaled filet mignon. I’ve returned to France but haven’t eaten snail in 34 years. No gastropods for this gastronome. Their only known predator around my house are my kids.

Shakespeare cites the snail nine times, usually as a synonym for slowness, never as foodstuff. My favorite is in King Lear, Act I, Scene 5:

“Fool: Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?

“King Lear: No.

“Fool: Nor I neither, but I can tell why a snail has a house.

“King Lear: Why?

“Fool: Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.”

The best poetic deployments of the snail is an early, Jamesian poem by Marianne Moore, “To a Snail”:

“If `compression is the first grace of style,’
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue. It is not
the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, `a method of conclusions’;
`a knowledge of principles,’
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.”

This seems true of the snail, true of superior writing, and true of Marianne Moore.

Memorial Day

I remember some excitement about Memorial Day, a holiday observed by fishing and drinking beer. It was a day off from school, of course, a prelude to three months of summer vacation – the short before the feature. In the morning was the parade down Pearl Road – brass bands, baton twirlers, floats, marching veterans from three or four wars. It ended at the cemetery where my mother now is buried. Prayers, solemn speeches, wreathes, the firing of a three-gun salute. One year it was Marines, firing bolt-action rifles. When they ejected the spent cartridges, a kid ran up, grabbed one from the grass and screamed when it burned his hand.

My last memory of Memorial Day at home dates from 1969 or 1970. I was 16 or 17, sullen beyond satisfaction, and conspicuously anti-Vietnam War. To the parade I carried Robert Lowell’s Notebook, with its cover the color of a UN peacekeeper’s helmet. From Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, I knew Lowell had marched on the Pentagon in October 1967, and that he had done time as a conscientious objector during World War II. My timid, bookish, passive-aggressive, silly protest. Here’s “Memorial Day,” by Daniel Mark Epstein:

“The library is closed – Memorial Day –
We honor men who died for our freedom
In wars that most of us cannot recall.
On the corner, men who should be schoolboys
Flag passing cars to deal cocaine.
The steel doors of the library are fit
For a vault. No windows figure in the wall
To let light shine on the books,
Just glass brick pocked by bullets
From drive-by shootings, thick glass
Cracked in spidery traceries
Like promises shattered. Light
From a million books burned in Berlin
Casts no shadow on the grey fortress
That is all this neighborhood will ever know
Of a library. Here the books are safe
But the readers are burning.”

`The Orgy is On'

On Friday in Houston, a 5-year-old boy was shot in the face and killed in the house where he lived. Earlier this month in Galveston, a 19-year-old was charged with burning his 2-month-old daughter in a microwave oven. Around the same time, an 11-year-old Houston boy was killed by a shotgun blast fired by a friend of his father. The city saw 377 homicides last year and we’re on course to match or exceed that number in 2007. Murders in Houston, unless carried out in an especially lurid manner, are relegated to briefs on the inside pages of the newspaper.

In 1938, Evelyn Waugh visited Mexico for two months, and the following year he published his findings in Robbery Under Law. The Roman Catholic Church was officially outlawed at the time in Mexico, and practicing priests were subject to execution. Waugh subtitled his book The Mexican Object-Lesson, meaning we might learn something from the chaos and butchery in that country. Of course, the real slaughter was just getting underway in Europe and Asia. Here’s what Waugh wrote on the final page of the book:

“Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilised man to keep going at all. There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come from merely habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on.”

Waugh’s moral vision here is unwavering and consistent. He includes himself and the rest of us among the “potential recruits for anarchy.” In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James calls Waugh “the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century, even though so many of the wrong people said so.” I think he’s probably right. He says of Waugh:

“Nobody ever wrote more unaffectedly elegant English; he stands at the height of English prose; its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.”

A fire-and-brimstone rant about man’s fallen nature earns a pew’s worth of listeners. In Waugh, we have a supernally accomplished writer, among the funniest in the language, addressing our propensity for “every conceivable atrocity.” The wife of the man accused of microwaving their daughter told a reporter that the devil made her husband do it. In a line worthy of Flannery O’Connor, another savagely funny Catholic writer, the reporter quoted the mother as saying:

“My husband quit running from God and decided he wanted to become a minister.”

Fun or Phun?

In 1973, the year of W.H. Auden’s death, his literary executor Edward Mendelson edited an excellent selection of the poet’s prose, Forewords and Afterwords. In one of the pieces, devoted to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Auden writes:

“Yet, for all its harrowing descriptions of squalor, crime, injustice and suffering, the final impression of Mayhew’s great book is not depressing. From his many transcripts of conversations it is clear that Mayhew was that rare creature, a natural democrat; his first thought, that is to say, was never `This is an unfortunate wretch whom it is my duty, if possible, to help’ but always `This is a fellow human being whom it is fun to talk to.’ The reader’s final impression of the London poor is not of their misery but of their self-respect, courage and gaiety in conditions under which it seems incredible that such virtues could survive.”

As literary criticism and psychology, Auden’s conclusions are astute. He quietly diagnoses condescension masking as charity and compassion; endorses the generous stance of a Whitman-like “natural democrat”; and compresses his endorsement of Mayhew into a single unexpected word: “fun.” Serious criticism seldom bothers with so unsophisticated and American-sounding a word. Samuel Johnson defined fun as “sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight,” but dismissed it as “a low cant word.” At least from the 16th century, fun often implied a hoax or practical joke. Shakespeare used it six times. In Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 2, Sir Toby Belch says:

“Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief;
it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and fun
of invention: taunt him with the licence of ink.”

And in The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, Ariel tells Prospero:

“I told you, sir, they were red-hot with drinking;
So fun of valour that they smote the air
For breathing in their faces…”

For the Elizabethans, “fun” came with an edge of cocky exuberance. Today, it still connotes unguarded pleasure, enjoyment that is childlike in its unconcern with consequence, often unaccompanied by lesson or purpose. In literature, Raymond Chandler is fun, Ernest Hemingway is not; Philip Larkin is fun, Robert Lowell is not; Samuel Beckett is fun, Eugene O’Neill is not. Fun is hardly the ultimate critical criterion, but it’s not to be snobbily dismissed. If his books did not reliably render fun, would we still read P.G. Wodehouse? Robert Frost is credited with saying, “All the fun is in how you say a thing.”

A disturbing recent shift in meaning is reflected in the formalization of fun, mandated fun, a fun industry. In this sense (should we spell it “phun”?), karaoke is fun. So are most parties and all clowns, Twister and Disneyland, the epicenter of fun. Last year, I took my middle son to a birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese, surely an anchor store in the Shopping Mall of Phun. During a momentary, unexpected break in the over-amplified music (a sure sign of phun), I heard another father earnestly say, “I love my Prozac. I’ve never felt so organized.” If phun is near, despair can’t be far away.

`Uncertain Clarity'

William Carlos Williams, whose sentimentality always triggers a wince of embarrassment, was deep in the schmaltz when late in life he wrote these lines from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”

No one in human history has died from such a lack. In fact, some poems are almost certain to make you sick. These unhappy truths gall the neo-Shelleyans who want a piece of the political action. Williams’ empty bromide sounds like the wishful thinking of the desperately insecure. Of course poetry has utility but it is, well, poetic, not world-historical. Zbigniew Herbert told an interviewer, “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.”

Ironically, if ever there was a poet who challenged Auden’s dictum that “poetry makes nothing happen,” is was Herbert. Almost uniquely among Polish writers of his generation, he never joined the Communist Party nor did he make moral accommodations with it, unlike the late and lately outed Ryszard Kapuściński. We shouldn’t be hasty to condemn Kapuściński, who remains a great journalist, especially in The Emperor. Who among us could have remained pure in the pressurized atmosphere of the Soviet Bloc? That Herbert was immune despite censorship and illness, and became a moral authority for dissidents while maintaining forbiddingly high artistic standards is miraculous. In “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination,” Herbert endorses an exacting prescription for poetry:

“Mr. Cogito’s imagination
has the motion of a pendulum

“it crosses with precision
from suffering to suffering

“there is no place in it
for the artificial fires of poetry

“he would like to remain faithful
to uncertain clarity”

We might be tempted to attribute Williams’ naiveté and sentimentality, and Herbert’s stoicism and sophistication to the traditional American/European divide, but that too is naïve. Not all American poets are soft-headed and puffed-up. Consider J.V. Cunningham, who with Edgar Bowers is the least known and most revered of our great poets. Cunningham’s austerity resembles Herbert’s. Both often wrote about themselves in the third-person; in part, I suppose, as a means of buffering the temptation to self-centeredness all of us share. In “The Journal of John Cardan,” Cunningham wrote that “a man must live divided against himself: only the selfishly insane can integrate experience to the heart’s desire, and only the emotionally sterile would not wish to.”

In the same essay, making no claims for the redemptive powers of poetry, Cunningham strictly spells out the boundaries of poetic accomplishment:

“No one will deny, what is overwhelmingly obvious, the immediacy and absoluteness
in itself of one's primary experience. But this is by definition self-sealed, isolated, and incommunicable. . . . To speak or to think or to write is to go beyond this. . . . For to write is to confront one's primary experience with the externally objective: first, with the facts of experience and with the norms of possibility and probability of experience; secondly, with the objective commonality of language and literary forms. To be successful in this enterprise is to integrate the subjectively primary, the immediate, with the objectively
communicable, the mediate, to the alteration of both by their conformation to each other, by their connexity with and their immanence in each other. It is the conquest of solipsism, the dramatic conflict of self with, on the one hand, reality in all its objectivity and potentiality, and, on the other, with philology in its old and general sense: or, with private and with public history.”

`A Gift You Couldn't Have the Wit to Choose'

On Wednesday I left work early to pick up my 4-year-old, who was running a fever and complaining of a bellyache. When I got to his preschool he was sleeping on the floor in the director’s office. His hair was damp and matted, and he was snoring loudly. When I lifted him he made a sound like a bilge pump but nothing else came out. In the car he fell asleep briefly, then woke talking about a friend’s upcoming birthday party. A kid’s notion of time and space, real and dream, is fluid and shifting, like the contents of a lava lamp. Kids rely on the predictable but enjoy surprises. Even being sick offers the short-lived solace of distraction.

At the kitchen table, David threw up the orange juice I’d given him and one blueberry. After a bath he wanted me to read to him but not from one of his books. He insisted I read one of the books on my nightstand. On top was a collection of Daniel Hoffman’s sonnets, Makes You Stop and Think. Fortunately, First Into Nagasaki, by George Weller, was on the bottom. I started with the second poem in the book because I have a prejudice against eccentric arrangements of words on a page, and the quatrains in the first poem, titled “The Sonnet,” are aligned at the center and resemble nail heads viewed from the side. Here’s “A Legacy”:

“Wakened by birdcalls, I stroll down our lane.
I touch the infinite sky, the barbarian sun.
I’m tousled by a breeze that smells of rain.
I do believe this day has just begun.
My legacy from History is Now:
I’ll take it – in the air, in the mouth, in the dandle-bed,
In the savor, in the spending, in the Times, in the apple bough,
In that dream I first dreamed when I was eleven,
A stifled cry, then joy! I am not dead! –
For reality is vintage and delicious
Especially when you taste it while it brews
Because it comes as love comes, heart-skip sudden,
Yet long as a lifetime in a once past wishes,
A gift you couldn’t have the wit to choose.”

David listened patiently but was unimpressed though I like the poem, especially “My legacy from History is Now.” This moment, good or bad, healthy or sick, is the irreducible reality. Everything preceding Now led to its evanescent haecceity, what J.V. Cunningham called “this absolute of fact.” Hoffman’s choice is to “take it,” embrace the given as evidence that life still pulses within. I remember the patter 40 years ago of a sideshow barker at the Cuyahoga County Fair, calling us to wonder at the Giant Rats of Sumatra: “Yes, folks, live, livin’, and breathin’!”

After Hoffman, we reverted to Captain Underpants, but even with a sick kid who demanded a peanut butter and jelly sandwich 20 minutes after throwing up, it’s still “A gift you couldn’t have the wit to choose.”

`Tiny, Precious Particles'

The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Romania. Eight years later the Nazis seized Czernowitz, his home town, killed his mother and deported Appelfeld and his father to a concentration camp in the Ukraine. He escaped and remained a fugitive for three years before joining the Red Army. Read some of the details in The Story of a Life, his emblematic chronicle of 20th-century horrors narrated by a voice as quiet and oblique as the voices in his novels. Where Piotr Rawicz, another Holocaust survivor, narrates scenes of unbearable cruelty in Blood from the Sky, Appelfeld’s aesthetic remains rooted in indirection. Even when his narrative is dry and factual, a mist clings to his words. I can’t think of another novel in which so much is left so eloquently unsaid as Badenheim 1939.

I met Appelfeld 20 years ago at a holocaust conference I was covering as a reporter. He was soft-spoken, laconic, avuncular. I introduced myself and we talked. I no longer have my notes but I remember how disarming his affability seemed. Did this explain his aesthetic, his reliance on absence as presence? How could a boy who lived by his wits from age 8 turn into so gracious a man? Other writer-survivors -- Jean Amery, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Primo Levi – have chosen suicide, and who is to condemn them? Appelfeld not only went on living but thrived. His friend Philip Roth has written that Appelfeld possesses the “playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” and I observed the same quality. In the Radov Lectures he delivered at Columbia University in 1991, published as Beyond Despair, Appelfeld says:

“All true art tirelessly teaches that the whole world rests upon the individual. That is its central point, whether it remains caught up with it or sets forth from it towards society or metaphysical space. The individual, with his own face and proper name, will always be the great subject matter of art.

“When people challenge me and ask what is the place of art in that sphere of death and horror, I reply: who can redeem the fears, the pains, the tortures, and the hidden beliefs from the darkness? What will bring them out of obscurity and give them a little warmth and respect, if not art? Who will take that great mass which everyone simply calls the `dreadful horror’ and break it up into those tiny, precious particles?”

Appelfeld’s artistic credo is bafflingly generous for a man of his experience. First, he insists on the primacy of the human. Art is about people – an observation that ought to be self-evident, but one that provokes sneering contempt in some quarters. Likewise, the artist’s role is sacramental . He “redeems” those who suffered obscurely, anonymously, and would otherwise be forgotten. Memory is holy.

Zbigniew Herbert likewise survived the Nazis and Soviets, and managed to preserve an emotional and aesthetic equanimity. I’ve cited this passage before, from “The Price of Art,” one of Herbert’s essays in Still Life with Bridle, but it resonates with Appelfeld’s words and reminds us of the resilience of the exceptional individual:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

`Awesome Ambush'

Stanley Rosen has written 14 books and is professor of philosophy at Boston University, and I’ve been interested in his work for several years though much of it eludes me because I’m not well read in Greek philosophy. I like Rosen’s brashness, his nose-thumbing at postmodernism and the clarity of his prose (itself a form of nose-thumbing), so I picked up a festschrift published last year, Logos & Eros: Essays Honoring Stanley Rosen, and have particularly enjoyed “Four Brief Essays for Stanley Rosen,” by Herbert Mason, a professor of history and religious thought at BU. The pieces are titled “Discourse,” “Argument,” “Friendship,” and “Ageing.” All are compelling and well within my capacity, especially “Ageing,” one long paragraph, 30 lines of meditation, not formal philosophy. Here’s a selection:

“One can no longer do or be seen by others as capable of doing what one used to do. One’s being seems to be going through an involuntary and undesired transformation. A force is at work that seems to be coming neither from God nor from others, one that ambushed one wholly by surprise from within. Call it grandly fate or banally time. It has been part of humanity’s experience always, and it reminds one of the bond one has across time with ancient humankind, mediaeval humankind, and so forth. It is a unifying revelation; this awesome ambush, that comes with a violence destroying vanities and hopes for further undertakings and involvements, pleasures and diversions, buildings and imaginings. It lays waste and leaves more devastation than the greatest of hurricanes, floods, fires, and wars, and overlooks neither groups nor individuals.”

Mason’s “awesome ambush” ought to be the ultimate egalitarian force, the great incentive for humility and communion with our fellows. Instead, we do our best to deny aging and its inevitable resolution, and too often turn middle age and old age into vulgar spectacles. The only comparable experience accompanies adolescence, but then we don’t shun our fate but dote obsessively on evidence, real or imagined, of incipient maturity. For me, the two sorts of awareness arrived simultaneously. I remember sitting in study hall, age 12 or 13, when the conviction of mortality arrived. It didn’t scare me so much as impress me, especially because it seemed to come ex nihilo, without prompting from anything external, such as a death in the family. In some sense, all of my life has been a growing into age and death without fearful morbidity. The continuum fits me like a tailored set of clothes. I told a friend last week as we watched squirrels dancing around an oak tree that I expect to be an exemplary “old guy,” in part because I have a gift for enjoying my company.

On Monday, when I was already thinking about Rosen and Mason, Dave Lull sent me the latest Open University blog post from the novelist Richard Stern. Stern’s head, as always, is stuffed with learning and convergences. He’s 79 years old and starts his post like this:

“Much to do, little time. And desire is greater than strength, will power, patience.

“Much of what one wanted for years is way out of bounds: flying a plane; becoming a skier; running a state.”

So far, conventional regrets and the maturity to accept them. Stern digresses into a book proposal pitched by an editor, and offers a writer’s credo: “There's so much one sees, hears, reads, and imagines which suggests other things.” What’s heartening is Stern’s forward-looking and the glee he takes in making connections. He’s still weighing his options, in contrast to those already serving a death-in-life sentence. Here’s Stern again:

“I've thought much recently about ways of living as an old person. One of my contemporaries, a brilliant economist, keeps up amazingly with what goes on in his field and in fields -- distant from economics -- where he sees problems that can be described and handled with economic tools. I've noticed that for the past few years, much of what he's published is collaborative. I mean to ask him if collaboration is a way of handling whatever years have done to or with his still very keen but perhaps altered way of thinking. Blogging is something I began nine months ago right here. I've gotten used to doing the short pieces I turn out. I think of them as etudes. Some have been in the form of playlets, a couple are poems. Usually `studies’ are studies for something larger. Mine are -- how I wish -- Chopinesque etudes, that is, ends in themselves.”

In context, that final phrase is a pun to savor, and please reread and enjoy the first sentence, which takes for granted that we have a choice in how we age – kicking and screaming, or simply enjoying the ride and learning something along the way. In A Sistermony, Stern's memoir of his sister who died from cancer in 1991, Stern insists on the importance of the distinction between dying and death. He uses “dying” not in the general sense that all of us are dying from the moment of birth, but specifically in connection with people stricken with a fatal illness. He writes:

“Days before her death, that is, when I saw her last, Ruth still wanted to be. Perhaps another way of saying this is that she was still herself. Dying can be an intense, even beautiful form of life, though the dier (a useful neologism) is seldom beautiful. Imagery for the – rare? – beauty of dying is drawn from autumn or the flare of embers.”

Mason says this about aging in his brief essay:

“One turns in age thus to the struggle not merely to preserve thought but to seek its fruition on a further, yet to be experienced level: a level barely imaginable, ironically, but for the gift of age. Yet to reach this level of perception, contemplation and understanding one must transform one’s focus of thought to perceive more deeply and more clearly than previously experienced. One must aim literally at the spirit of others and things and oneself, and one must seek knowledge of the source of all, including, and especially, the source of spirit; and one must be prepared, like the most ancient warriors of history and legend, who fought the monsters of forest, sea and selves, to overcome time with the spiritual weaponry of thought, which is, at last, all one really has.”

Stern talks about autumn imagery, Mason mentions “fruition” and “the gift of age,” and both inevitably remind us of Keats’ “To Autumn,” with its “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

[As a bonus, the Rosen festschrift features “Discourse: For Stanley Rosen,” by Geoffrey Hill, a poem first published in The New Criterion, later included in Without Title, and available online here.]

`The Cult of Celebrity'

Anyone who is well known, who in our culture is best known for being well known, whose commodity value is “celebrity” divorced from anything of value he or she has actually accomplished, is probably not worth knowing. This is rooted in common sense, of course, not merely a wish to revel in contrariness. If the culture we have inherited embraces corrupt values, and if fame is granted almost exclusively to those who reflect those values, why would I want to know anything about Paris Hilton or Puff Daddy? I choose those names almost at random, though their manifest silliness makes them irresistible. Even I, who am relatively immunized against the celebrity bacterium, who doesn’t watch television or listen to contemporary pop music, go to the movies or follow sports, have some attenuated notion of who these people are.

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending me an essay on celebrity by Theodore Dalrymple headlined “Pope Rosie? Pray for us,” published on Sunday – where? The New Criterion? City Journal? Nope: the Los Angeles Times, at the epicenter of the celebrity industry. Here’s Dalrymple’s conclusion:

“The cult of celebrity trivializes everything it touches. But then I ask myself: Was there ever a time in human history when people judged serious matters by serious criteria? If so, when was it, and when did it change?”

As a rhetorical device, questions unaccompanied by explicit answers are assumed to carry their own implicitly unhappy answers. Obviously, most people have never “judged serious matters by serious criteria.” Why is Jerry Falwell better known than Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Toni Morrison than Cynthia Ozick? Allen Ginsberg than Geoffrey Hill? Fame is conferred and acknowledged by a conspiracy of impoverished imaginations. In section 94 of Speech! Speech! Hill writes:

“Where are we? Lourdes? Some sodding mystery tour.
What do you mean a break? Pisses me off.
Great singer Elton John though. Christ
Almighty --- even the buses are kneeling!”

Elton John’s ascension in 1970 coincided roughly with the breakup of the Beatles. I’ve always thought of that as a significant hinge in rock history, one more symptom of decadence and decline. Hill’s snottiness, his linkage of fame with worship (a linkage Dalrymple also makes), is delicious. Boswell quoted Johnson as saying, “In civilized society, personal merit will not serve you so much as money will. Sir, you may make the experiment. Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.”

`A Constant if Phantom Presence'

That Joshua Cohen, at age 26, is a reliable book reviewer and literary journalist is remarkable; that he also writes first-rate fiction is cause for envy, wonder and gratitude. Read his biweekly essays in The Jewish Daily Forward and revel in his learning and maturity. That’s what I’ve done for years, and now I’ve gotten around to ordering The Quorum, a story collection published in 2005, and his newly published novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto. The Quorum is published by Twisted Spoon Press of Prague, Kafka’s birth place and Cohen’s base for several years when he worked as a journalist. Now he lives in Brooklyn.

Kafka is among the tutelary spirits of the first story in the collection, “Untitled: A Review.” A reviewer named Kline receives an unsolicited book, a “history” he calls it, consisting of “six million (6,000,000) plus pages (an estimation, an educated guess).” All are blank:

“Pure, virgin white, like the snow around Auschwitz. Six million-plus pages might as well be greater than or equal to the palest infinity.

“All of which is to write that in intent and execution this history without a title, this Untitled by Anonymous, is the best record of, and commentary on, the Holocaust this reviewer has yet encountered…”

With such a subject, tone is critical. Cohen never devolves into jokey cleverness, always maintains a Kafka-like narrative poise. Kline projects into the wordless book his own understanding of the Holocaust (“I know because I imagine.”), because it defies understanding. We learn Kline’s parents survived Auschwitz and he was born in “Amsterdam, city of Spinoza.” Of the six-million-page book he writes:

“…it is not a diary. This is not Anne being Frank. If anything, is an anti-diary, the opposite of selfish thoughts. The blankness actually discouarges writing, the pages resist filling.”

Untitled is a metaphor of infinite suggestiveness, a palpably present absence. It resonates like the Borges story, “The Aleph,” but with deeper sadness and awe:

“This is anyone and everyone’s book (drop by and pick it up, please), or no one’s book and it means everything, holds the light of the entire world like the facets of an infinite gemstone…the white pages are blinding, but I’ll never burn it, no, never, must not, would consume itself and nothingness cannot be consumed…It’s substance is Spinoza’s substance, holding in sheer attributes and modes all that was and all that will be, and it means nothing.”

In transparent fictional prose, Cohen is illuminating a point made by the philosopher Berel Lang in Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics:

“It is self-evident, at any rate, that no Holocaust writing gives preference to silence – although silence is itself, after all, a distinctive literary genre, one that Isaac Babel first named and mastered (and then fell victim to). Indeed, silence arguably remains a criterion for all discourse (Holocaust or not), a constant if phantom presence that stipulates that whatever is written ought to be justifiable as more probative, more incisive, more revealing, than its absence or, more cruelly, its erasure…the basic measure of any piece of Holocaust writing is not the possibility of alternative formulations – which may be beyond its author’s ken or will – but the erasure of what he or she has written, that is, silence.”

The final sentence of Cohen’s five-and-half-page fiction recasts the entire story, our understanding of it, and our understanding of the Holocaust. I’m reminded of a single, infinitely dense sentence from Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews:

“For the deportees one-way fare was payable; for the guards a round-trip ticket had to be purchased.”

`I Have to Do Something for Life'

In 1953, Edward R. Murrow contributed a foreword to This I Believe, a volume of testimonials edited by Edward P. Morgan. The book is based on a radio show of the same name hosted by Murrow from 1951 to 1955. NPR has revived the idea and name, and judging by the episodes I’ve heard the show is about as earnestly fatuous as you would expect. I came to the This I Believe volume through the back door, by way of Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice. Other contributors to the faithfest include A.J. Ayer, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck and Helen Keller – an unlikely mix – but the Irish poet’s contribution is worth pondering.

MacNeice takes the job seriously. He begins like an analytic philosopher, distinguishing questions of fact from questions of value, and choosing to address the latter. He rejects the strictly utilitarian approach and what he called the “de gustibus argument” (a sort of proto-postmodern assertion of the arbitrariness of all statements of belief), and then gets down to business:

“… I think that all human beings have a hankering for pattern and order; look at any child with a box of chalks. There are of course evil patterns or orders – which perhaps is the great problem of our time. What I do believe is that as a human being, it is my duty to make patterns and to contribute to order – good patterns and a good order. And when I say duty I mean duty; I think it is the turn of enjoyment, I believe that life is worth while and I believe that I have to do something for life.”

Without being smarmy about it, MacNeice is formulating an admirable credo. He implies that only by doing something for life does life become worthwhile -- a moral reciprocity: Only by giving it away, by serving as a conduit for our gifts, do we have any hope of keeping them. In “London Rain,” written in the uneasy summer of 1939, MacNeice says:

“Whether the living river
Began in bog or lake,
The world is what was given,
The world is what we make
And we only can discover
Life in the life we make.”





.

`A Stubbornly Conservative Mind'

Thanks to Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti for telling me about David Solway, a Canadian poet I had not heard of before. In an email on Tuesday Gilleland wrote:

“Have you ever read any of David Solway's poems? He's in the news these days because of his unfashionable political views, but apparently he also writes equally unfashionable, traditional verse. I can't find much of his poetry online.”

Nor could I, but fortunately my university library has one volume of his poems, Chess Pieces, and two collections of essays: Lying About the Wolf: Essays in Culture and Education and Random Walks: Essays in Elective Criticism. The poetry collection, published in 1999 and blurbed by Peter Davison and Richard Wilbur, is devoted entirely to chess, a game that possessed me briefly and violently when I was 12. Solway’s poems are memorable for their clarity, generosity and elegance of design. He is interested equally in human nature and his craft, and a casual player’s knowledge of chess will suffice for enjoyment. Here is “Handling the Chess Pieces,” dedicated by Solway to his father:

“From handling of the chessmen you infer
the secret springs of human character.
To pluck the enemy chessman between
your fingers and replace it with your own
reveals the cultivated, well-bred
killer who cannot stand the sight of blood;
knock the chessman over with a small click
of wood on wood tells of an aesthetic
craving for the fatal instrument,
of one more passionate than violent;
to push the piece from its intended square
is signal of aggressive character
and plainly indicates that power
is the motive for committing murder;
some will hold the captured piece and caress
it nervously: these kill from cowardice;
those who seem apologetic, taking pawns
reluctantly, kill for noble reasons;
and he who clears the board with one great sweep
of his hand will kill from lack of hope,
defeated by the prospect of defeat,
as did my father only death could mate.”

I like the patient logic of the poem, its wittiness and insight into human nature. Gilleland’s right: These are deeply unfashionable qualities, but there’s nothing fussy about Solway’s devotion to the rigors of form. His poems are tight yet relaxed, lapidary yet conversational. Had Montaigne written poems, they might have resembled Solway’s. A pleasant subsidiary surprise was learning that the estimable Eric Ormsby, poet and critic, wrote the introduction to Random Walks. The piece is available online, but I want to quote Ormsby’s words at length:

“It may seem gratuitous to call attention to Solway's prose. There is scarcely a sentence in Random Walks that does not call attention to itself, sometimes slyly but sometimes in the most bravura fashion. Solway's prose, like his marvellous poetry, never resembles the inert, exiguous, virtually comestible sentences of his contemporaries who write a prose so vapid that it dissolves as it is read and, like junk food, leaves neither taste nor nourishment behind. Solway's prose, by contrast, is memorable; it is also lithe, mischievous, shapely, impudent, and ceremonial. His is a style that manages to be magisterial and agitated, in equal measure and at the same time. In my view, this is because Solway presents the distinctive intellectual phenomenon of a stubbornly conservative mind incessantly drawn to risk itself. In Solway's risk-taking, it is form - the shape of a sentence, the shape of a poem - that rescues and exposes him at every moment. This concatenation of such disparate tendencies within a single sensibility lends a sense of danger to his writing.”

How rare the pleasures of beautiful prose devoted to anatomizing the beautiful prose of another. Much neo-formalist poetry seems constipated, uncomfortably seized up by form, but Ormsby is precise in his description of Solway’s “stubbornly conservative mind incessantly drawn to risk itself,” which might also be said of Henry David Thoreau. Solway apparently has been in the news of late because of his most recent book, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, a chronicle of his political and moral transformation since the 9/11 attacks. I haven’t read it yet but learned much about it from a recent interview Solway gave the online journal FrontPage Magazine, which was also new to me. Here’s a passage from near the end in which he sounds like a latter-day Samuel Johnson:

“The road to Heaven-on-earth passes through Hell and never re-emerges. This is the great lesson of the 20th century. All Utopian thought is deeply flawed, rooted in the Arcadian prepossession of the Western imagination, always sailing to Cythera and breaking up on the shoals. But the issue is even larger than this. The human mind is shadowed by mortality and wishes only to escape its condition, sometimes through the medium of love, sometimes through the promise of faith, most often through one or another form of forgetfulness—drugs, entertainment, even war. We kill because we have to die.

“As for the Utopian passion, it is only a reflection of this need for pyschic manumission. And, plainly, all such efforts are ultimately bound to fail. We cannot transcend our inherent debilities. Cruelty, fear, loneliness, aggression, envy, the temptations of authority are mitochondrial givens. For the fact is that whatever `human nature’ may be, it cannot be radically transformed, only to some extent modified. Politically speaking, barring the introduction of a new molecule into the gene plasm, we will have to make do with humility, a sense of limitation and a healthy dose of self-distrust. This does not mean that we cannot take sides—indeed, we must if we are to defend our nation, community, family or, for that matter, our very integrity—but we should always be ready to reconsider and adapt when new circumstances announce themselves or new information comes to light.

“Devotion to a cause does not preclude the retention of a certain cognitive flexibility. And in terms of social and political advocacy dedicated to improving the life of society, Karl Popper was absolutely correct when he wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies that beneficial and enduring social change can only occur through a process of `piecemeal social engineering.’ To rephrase Alexander Pope’s aphorism, we must not rush in where only angels do not fear to tread.”

I’m impressed with Solway as a writer of deep learning, honesty and common sense. The FrontPage interview is a rare public display of a man admitting his mistakes without, in the predictable manner of politicians and other celebrities, proclaiming his own victimization while reveling in the kudos he gets for "brutal honesty." David Warren, a writer for the Ottawa Citizen whom Gilleland also led me to, devoted a recent essay to The Big Lie. Here’s a sample:

“The larger truth he serves is the realization that we will get nowhere against the psychopathic, Islamist enemies of our civilization so long as we allow them to thrive parasitically on our own vacuous and craven left-liberalism -- parrying each new threat against us with evasion, conciliation, sophistry, and equivocation. (And on a point of honour both Christian and Jewish, the existence of Israel within defensible borders is non-negotiable.)”

How peculiar that the common sense of self-preservation should have been so anathematized. I owe a debt to Mike Gilleland for having introduced me to Solway and Warren. As I told him in an email, I feel Columbus-like, having discovered a new wonder-filled continent. In Chess Pieces, published two years before the 9/11 attacks, Solway includes a poem eerily prescient of his coming disillusionment and rebirth as a realist, titled “The Next Crusade”:

“So, returned from the wars,
few trophies, many scars;
have made obeisance
to my phlegmatic prince
and shuffled from the hall
blessed by the cardinal.
(The queen was rather brief,
gave me her handkerchief.)
The great lords risked little,
kept their tents in battle,
kept their heads to the last
and filled the treasure chest.
Nor have I love to spare
for all these cavaliers:
some went for adventure,
and others, I am sure,
because they loved to kill,
some to display their skill
at graceful caracole
or dye a lady’s shawl
in rich Saracen blood.
The common soldiers shed
some cold retreating sweat
but now have little doubt
of valour in the field.
I swear at times I’m filled
with treasure of contempt
to think that I have camped
with cowards, parasites,
shirkers, lordlings, prelates
and all that scurvy brood.
Just wait. The next crusade
I’ll hear a different drum,
enter Jerusalem –
but as a captive knight
and loyal proselyte.”

`The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things'

George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) was a Scottish poet, born in Stromness in the Orkney Islands. He lived there most of his life and for more than 20 years published a weekly essay in The Orcadian, the newspaper of the Orkneys. Readership: “1,600 townsfolk,” as Brown puts it in his introduction to Letters from Hamnavoe, the first of three published collections of his columns. The edition I have was published in 1975 by Gordon Wright of Edinburgh.

Newspaper writing is not always ephemeral hackwork. Consider Don Marquis, Flann O’Brien and Murray Kempton. Brown’s pieces, which he started writing in 1971, are neither pretentious nor patronizingly “folksy.” His eye is always on the local – people, livestock, the natural world, the sea. He writes in the Introduction:

“Look for no odysseys of the imagination in 400 weekly words of journalism. (Poetry with its rhythms, symbols, patterns, takes no harm from brevity). These `Letters from Hamnavoe’ are walks out of doors in all weathers. You meet this neighbour, that friend, and linger and gossip a little about the weather and the old days; drop into a shop for tobacco, maybe; look over a garden wall at green things growing. The sound of the sea is everywhere. You notice a new structure that must have something to do with oil in Scapa Flow. Then it is time to stroll home again, wondering mildly if the yeast has `taken’ in the bin of new ale.”

For an American who has never visited Scotland, there’s a danger of romanticizing life in the Orkneys, even in the nineteen-seventies, as somehow more real, more “in tune with nature,” than life lived in London, New York City or Houston. Something comparable happened with Synge and the Aran Islands in Ireland. But the modern world, in the form of North Sea oil, has already encroached on Brown’s world. In 1974, when he had been writing his column for three years, Occidental Petroleum started construction of an oil terminal on Flotta, one of the Orkney Islands, and oil becomes the background hum in his subsequent columns. Brown appears not to have been a particularly political animal. In a column dated May 10, 1973, he writes:

“It is the possibility of environmental pollution that is most disturbing of all; hills torn to pieces, fish floating belly-up in the sea, stenches in the wind.

“Whenever I feel utterly depressed by the prospect in front of us, I am cheered by a line of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins -- `There lives the dearest freshness deep down things….’ He lived at a time when industrialism was spreading its unutterable ugliness all over the pastoral hills and villages of England. What he is saying is: no matter how grievously men tear and rend and filthy nature, the essential roots and sources of life go very deep; so deep that they can never really be touched, and they will go on sending up new springs and new blossoms till the end. `There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’

“It is a consolation of a kind – less so, perhaps, when one has come to love a place, and only three-score-and-ten years are allotted; and it may take many centuries for the pristine freshness to overcome the entrenched rust, and steel, and concrete.”

The column is nicely titled “The Use of Poetry.” Brown was no peasant-poet. He makes passing reference to Joyce, Pound and Alfred Jarry (of all people), and frequently mentions Burns, Shakespeare and Wordsworth. The Hopkins line he quotes, and had used earlier in his March 23, 1972, column, is from the sonnet commonly called “God’s Grandeur”:

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Brown became a Catholic in 1961, and as a post-graduate student at Edinburgh University he wrote a thesis on Hopkins, but his literary enthusiasms are often admirably surprising. One wonders what his readers made of the essay from April 25, 1974, which begins “What can be done when the bookshelves begin to overflow with the mass of books I have accumulated over the past thirty years?” but turns into an unexpected paean to another writer:

“To only about a hundred books am I thirled with any passion – I could go on reading them, quite happily, over and over again, for the rest of my days. One of the authors I delight in is an old blind Argentinian called Jorge Luis Borges. He hasn’t written much – only a handful of stories (some of them very short indeed) and a few poems. But they are so perfectly imagined and wrought that they are models of their kind.”

“Thirled” is not a typo. It’s the past participle of “thirl,” with Old English roots from at least the 10th century, meaning to pierce or perforate. From there, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, meanings proliferated. By the 16th century it meant to enslave, to mortgage, to whirl around, to hurl. Judging from the context, Brown is saying only 100 books on his shelves captivate him, enslave him with passion.

`Greater Than Your Love of Consistency'

In his final collection, Boss Cupid, the late Thom Gunn included “To Donald Davie in Heaven,” about the English poet-critic who died in 1995. It starts anecdotally, with Davie telling Gunn he was reading Auden again, and Gunn reminding Davie that he formerly had disliked Auden’s work. For Gunn, this is evidence of Davie’s generous nature and willingness to reevaluate past judgments:

“That was what I admired about you
your ability to regroup
without cynicism, your love of poetry
greater
than your love of consistency.”

It’s a primal urge, especially when we’re young, to overestimate consistency in ourselves and scorn inconsistency in others. Cranky rigidity is a measure of insecure judgment, a tendency with unhappy political and religious implications. The limber sense of honesty Gunn lauds in Davie gets a comparable endorsement from Marilynne Robinson in her review of American Religious Poems, edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba, in the May issue of Poetry:

“An afternoon with the Vedas, an evening with The Drowned Book, another look at the Oresteia or the Psalms or at Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address would be more than sufficient to recall us all to a recognition of the fact that the Pat Robertsons and the Pat Buchanans of our moment do not epitomize religion.”

The alternative to scrupulous consistency, the thinking goes, is nihilism, the rejection of all standards and criteria of excellence. I was accused of this by an anonymous writer on Tuesday, who questioned how I could possibly write about John Milton and Bob Dylan, set their words side by side, in the same post. My answer: It's easy. I never claimed Dylan was as great a writer as Milton. That’s ridiculous, but juxtapositions can be useful and interesting. My taste in books and writers is inconsistent, promiscuous and guilt-free. My only loyalty is to what pleases me, what is worthy of my admiration, and I’ve derived reliable pleasure for many years from both Milton and Dylan. Open-mindedness doesn’t always imply anything-goes idiocy, nor does unyielding consistency necessarily imply good taste or sophistication. Last month, after writing about Geoffrey Hill, a reader accused me of being an elitist – a pleasing compliment to being called a Dylan-loving populist. Later in his poem Gunn lauds Davie’s “appetite unslaked/for the fortifying and tasty/events of reading.” When a young person asks what he or she ought to read, I say “Everything.” How else will you develop a dependable sense of discrimination and learn to trust your own appetites? In his essay “The Pleasures of Reading,” Joseph Epstein writes:

“A fair amount of reading, of a belletristic kind, I have come to believe, confers on one – or at least ought to confer on one – what I think of as `the literary point of view.’ This point of view, which is taught not by any specific book or author, or even set of authors, teaches a worldly-wise skepticism, which comes through first in a distrust of general ideas.”

That’s it: Shed your pigeonholing instincts. Enjoy Dylan, or Milton, or Hill on his merits. Or don’t.

`Things He Can See But He Just Cannot Touch'

My oldest son, who is finishing his sophomore year in college, sent me an email Monday morning with this message:

“What do you think about when you read this sonnet by Milton?

“When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

For his class in the epic, Joshua recently read Paradise Lost for the first time. I knew he had completed a paper on the significance of Milton’s blindness, but I was uncertain exactly what he was asking, so I wrote a quick reply:

“Apart from Milton's own blindness, in my mind it's always linked with the Battle of Britain, 1940, especially the famous final line. I associate it with quiet, unheralded courage -- the civilians who endured the Nazi raids.”

My reply was ridiculously idiosyncratic, one of those mental linkages we make that cannot be critically defended. It turns out Joshua focused largely on Paradise Lost in his paper, but cited Sonnet 19 in passing, and his professor had asked him to elaborate. I suggested he look at the theme of blindness in Sophocles and Shakespeare, in which the unseeing becomes a seer. Also, the sonnet’s first line inevitably recalls the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15, “When I consider every thing that grows…” When I asked Joshua what associations the sonnet carried for him, he said the last line in particular reminded him of Dylan’s lyrics on John Wesley Harding. I can hear the echoes and I’m sure Christopher Ricks (author of Milton’s Grand Style and Dylan’s Visions of Sin) would agree. Since it came out almost 40 years ago, I’ve always judged it among Dylan’s best albums. The lyrics have a hard, parable-like clarity, and seem to stand in the shadow of Vietnam without overt mention of the war. Like Milton’s sonnet, the songs allude densely to scripture. Keep “They also serve who only stand and wait" in mind as you read (or listen to) the second verse of “Dear Landlord,” which even brings in the theme of vision:

“Dear landlord,
Please heed these words that I speak.
I know you've suffered much,
But in this you are not so unique.
All of us, at times, we might work too hard
To have it too fast and too much,
And anyone can fill his life up
With things he can see but he just cannot touch.”

Joshua has pulled this and more together and elaborated on Milton’s blindness. Like me, he has a taste for linkage, charting continuities across centuries. On an undistinguished work day, attending to what’s in front of us, we take the time to commune with Milton and Dylan and others, and feel a little less disconnected, a little more human. Art blurs into our lives, becomes second nature. This resonates with something I had reread the night before, from Theodore Dalrymple’s essay “A Lost Art,” in Our Culture, What’s Left of It:

“Art, in its highest expression, explains our existence to us, both the particularities of the artist’s own time and the universals of all time, or at least of all human history. It transcends transience and therefore reconciles us to the most fundamental condition of our existence.”

`A Tale Worth Telling'

A writer’s first responsibility is to write well, an obvious point but one lost on most readers and many writers. Good writers know this intuitively, or otherwise they would have chosen computer science or truck farming as an occupation. Here are three contemporary writers on the artful use of language:

Clive James, in the chapter on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Cultural Amnesia:

“A good writer of prose always writes to poetic standards. (One of the marks of poetry in modern times is that the advent of free verse opened the way for poets who could not write to prose standards, but that’s another issue.) The good prose-writer’s standards, however, should include the realization that he is not writing a poem.”

Irving Feldman, from “Fragment,” Collected Poems: 1954-2004:

“The language isn’t saved by style
but by a tale worth telling.
Not, then, to purify the old words
but to bring new speech into
the lexicon of the tribe…”

Theodore Dalrymple, from “A Taste for Danger,” Our Culture, What’s Left of It:

“It is not surprising that emotion untutored by thought results in nearly contentless blather, in which – ironically enough –genuine emotion itself cannot be adequately expressed.”

`Impoverished Speech and Language'

From the land of Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson comes news that “Toddlers to get lessons in talking as TV kills conversation.” The Daily Mail reports:

“Research from the children's charity I CAN revealed last year that half of youngsters -- rising to 84 per cent in some areas -- begin formal education with `impoverished speech and language.’ They are unable to utter a whole sentence and can understand only simple instructions.”

What is more appalling: That a once-great nation, the fount of a language that today boasts almost one-million words, more than any other, raises children unable to string but a few dozen together, or that addle-pated politicians would propose spending money to teach children what their parents ought to have been teaching them all along? Fair or not, when we encounter a person unable to express himself well enough to be understood, let alone to enjoy the delights of conversation, we judge that person at least backward if not primitive and potentially dangerous. The inarticulate are often those quickest to resort to anger and even violence when their demands are not understood. Our ability to use language fixes the dimensions of our world. The wordless dwell in dark closets. I look forward to Theodore Dalrymple’s gloss on this latest abomination in his homeland. For now, here is Johnson in The Rambler No. 89, on Jan. 22, 1751:

"After the exercises which the health of the body requires, and which have themselves a natural tendency to actuate and invigorate the mind, the most eligible amusement of a rational being seems to be that interchange of thoughts which is practised in free and easy conversation; where suspicion is banished by experience, and emulation by benevolence; where every man speaks with no other restraint than unwillingness to offend, and hears with no other disposition than desire to be pleased."

`Preaching to the Converted'

I needed a laugh so I visited the Poets Against War web site again and was not disappointed. PAW favors what it calls “socially engaged poetry,” such as “Armless Iraqi Boy Bears No Grudges for U.S. Bombing,” by Brent Goodman. You know from the title alone the work in question is grim parody or shameless kitsch. Here’s a sample:

“We've replaced
his stomach with burning oil fields, his genitals
for expired reservist rations, his broken spine
with a chalk-blue contrail. This is
expensive business. We are lucky to have allies
who help us carry the bill. An armless torso
is difficult to look at. He bears no grudges.”

Even on its own terms – as clumsy, sub-Julius Streicher propaganda – this fails. One pities not the child described but the adult who wrote the manipulative, tone-deaf lines. Most of the poetry and prose at PAW shares the earnest ineptness of Goodman’s work, but nothing matches it for sheer pornographic lip-smacking. Two real poets have a few things to say about the distinction between poetry and propaganda. First, Basil Bunting:

“The effect of literature does not depend on its content. Its function is not propaganda, any more than the function of an analytical chemist is propaganda. Neither is its function to amuse the public. It is to explore the resources of language and make language available for all existing or potential thoughts. In doing so it must constantly bring into sight new thoughts whose relation to the immediate political and economic situation is so remote that no mind can trace it, and which do not depend for their truth or falsity upon the truth or falsity, usefulness or uselessness, of the sentiments they may incidentally inspire in a reader not a professional poet.”

This is from an unpublished manuscript, “Observations on Leftwing Papers,” written in 1935 and collected in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, edited by Carroll F. Terrell. The other passage is from a book-length interview Anthony Hecht gave Philip Hoy, who showed the poet one of his uncollected poems from 1972:

“Here lies fierce Strephon, whose poetic rage
Lashed out on Vietnam from page and stage;
Whereby from basements of Bohemia he
Rose to the lofts of sweet celebrity,
Being, by Fortune, (our Eternal Whore)
One of the few to profit by that war,
A fate he shared – it bears much thinking on –
With certain persons at the Pentagon.”

Hecht was an angry, principled opponent of the Vietnam War, as well as one of our finest poets. Here’s part of his response:

“Thank you for exhuming those buried lines. They do indeed express my impatience of those years with indignant, sanctimonious poets. Even when a poem’s speaker is, by common consent, in the right, this is uninteresting because he is preaching to the converted, and because his poem lacks the drama of antithesis, or the antimonies that Yeats so rightly and shrewdly cherished.”

`The Best Excuse for the Rogues Among Them'

For all the attention devoted to essays in recent years, few superior examples seem to get published. In part, this can be explained by a shortcoming built into the essay form as it has evolved since Montaigne’s day. The phrase “personal essay” has become a synonym for almost any first-person narrative. Montaigne was certainly personal but he was also Montaigne; that is, he possessed a mind of unusual learning, incisiveness and skepticism. When he deploys the first-person singular, you trust you’re getting more than a black hole of egotism. Most of his essayistic progeny have never learned that lesson because, well, self-centered blathering is so damn much fun.

The finest essayists working today are Cynthia Ozick and Theodore Dalrymple. Both use the “I” with discernment and never as the focus of an essay. It’s the writer’s vision we cherish, his or her stance before the world, not the “I” itself, and not even the ostensible subject matter of the essay. I love William Hazlitt’s “The Fight” and A.J. Liebling’s essays in The Sweet Science, and read them repeatedly while having no interest in boxing.

Ozick is known to all thoughtful readers, but the Good Doctor Dalrymple (whose given name is Anthony Daniels, and who is a retired English physician) is less well known, especially on this side of the Atlantic. In some quarters he has been pigeonholed as a political writer, a mouthpiece for a certain brand of fussy conservatism, but in fact his interests and sensibility are far broader and deeper than that. He is among those rare writers, like Montaigne and Samuel Johnson, who can tell us something new about the world and ourselves.

In the Spring 2007 issue of City Journal, Dalrymple characteristically takes on a writer once at the center of our common culture whose reputation and centrality have faded with time and fashion – Arthur Koestler. Dalrymple deems the author of Darkness at Noon “one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language.” I agree, with qualifications, though it hadn’t occurred to me to think so before Dalrymple pointed it out. I came to Koestler (1905-1983) long after he had served time as a Zionist, a Communist, and an anti-Communist, and had morphed into an all-purpose polymath who flirted with, in Dalrymple’s telling, “Indian mysticism, Lamarckian biology, non-reductionist science, and parapsychology.” In other words, by the late 1960s he seemed to have degenerated into a California-style twit. He even dropped acid. For many, that impression became lasting after Koestler and his wife committed suicide together and a posthumous biography revealed Koestler’s unsavory sexual predilections. But there was more to this mercurial intellect from Hungary than flakiness and aberrant sex, and that’s the thrust of Dalrymple’s essay:

“It is precisely because Koestler’s life and work so deeply instantiate the existential dilemmas of our age that he is a fascinating figure, unjustly neglected, and too often dismissed as a sexual psychopath. He was not a naturally good man (far from it), but he was struggling toward the good by the light and authority of his own intellect; unfortunately, as Hume tells us, reason is the slave of the passions, and Koestler was an exceptionally passionate man.”

Another admirable essayist, Clive James, devotes a chapter of Cultural Amnesia to the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (much admired by Dalrymple), who also committed suicide with his wife. As a critic, James is always generous, even empathetic. Writing about Zweig, he helps us understand Koestler and other problematic artists:

“Our lives are enriched by people who create works of art better than their personalities: the best excuse for the rogues among them, and the best reason for our raising the virtuous to the plane of worship.”

Part of a good essayist’s job is to reclaim a piece of the world we thought we understood and were finished with, and to remind us that humans are elusively complicated. We never exhaustively know anyone, even the first-person singular.

`While Someone Else is Eating'

Some of us this month will give a thought to what would have been the 90th birthday of John F. Kennedy. We know he was not a good man and in most ways he was a disastrous president, but I remember my parents’ excitement when he beat Nixon in 1960, one week after my eighth birthday. My mother was Irish, my father a lapsed Catholic and a union man, so the Kennedy demographic resonated in our customarily apolitical house.

The flood of literary efforts to frame Kennedy’s assassination, from elegies to potboilers, from Berryman and Zukofsky to Don Delillo and James Ellroy, is hardly worth remembering. Most wallow in sentimentality or pulp, and make the fatal mistake of literalness. At least one novelist, Richard G. Stern, respected the power of indirection, of approaching a subject sideways, as an absence not a too-conspicuous presence. The protagonist of Stitch, from 1965, is Edward Gunther, a self-destructive narcissist whose wife has left him. Stern accomplishes the difficult task of making a self-centered man at once sympathetic and terribly sad. Here’s the Kennedy passage:

“From the first hours, after the first shock wave had passed, it was clear to Edward that what had happened in Texas had to do with everything that had happened to him. It really struck him when he heard the first surfers the next day. They made the same bird noises, their shark boards still zoomed in over the waters; nothing had changed for them. The water was here, the sun was out, the tide was in. What did they have to do with what happened? With what ever happened? Their stock of the past was like the birds’ corralled into a few instincts plus a few syllables, automobiles, cans. Their memory was yesterday’s waves. Reality was what was in your sights. The past was what you desired right now.”

Like any narcissist, Gunther projects himself into people and events that have nothing to do with him. Rereading the passage gave me a pang in a way blood and noble words never could. It’s an attenuated allusion to W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” where suffering “takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

`The Many Beautiful Things in This World'

Much of Harvey Shapiro’s poetry is facile and slack, what R. Buckminster Fuller called “ventilated prose.” A Shapiro poem is likely to be a gag, anecdote or reminiscence, hardly more than a sketch for a real poem. Without line breaks, you’d never mistake it for anything but conversational prose. The reason I’m reading The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems, published in 2006 and containing more than 50 years of work, is that Shapiro is an old, feckless friend who can still surprise us and deliver the goods. Here, from the “New Poems” section, is the “Uses of Poetry”:

“This was a day when I did nothing,
aside from reading the newspaper,
taking both breakfast and lunch by myself
in the kitchen, dozing after lunch
until the middle of the afternoon. Then
I read one poem by Zbigniew Herbert
in which he thanked God for the many beautiful
things in this world, in a voice so absurdly
truthful, the entire wrecked day was redeemed.”

Poetry has limited utility. It can’t change the world or a mind that’s intractably made up, but it can remind us to pay attention to creation and its wonders. Herbert wrote many poems answering Shapiro’s description. As a Pole born in 1924, he endured Nazis, Soviets and their Polish sycophants, and decades of illness in a country where health care was criminally backward. But Herbert was a Stoic with a gift for gratitude. In his collection Epilogue to a Storm, published the year of his death, Herbert included four poems titled “Breviary,” any one of which could have been the poem referred to by Shapiro. Here’s the first, as translated by Alissa Valles, from The Collected Poems: 1956-1998:

“Lord
I give thanks to You for this whole jumble of life in which I have been
drowning helplessly from time immemorial, dead set on a constant
search for trifles.

“Praise be to You, that you gave me unobtrusive buttons, pins, suspenders,
spectacles, ink streams, ever hospitable blank sheets of paper, transparent
covers, folders patiently waiting.

“Lord, I give thanks to You for syringes with needles thick and hair thin,
bandages, every kind of Band-aid, the humble compress, thank you for
the drip, for saline solutions, tubes and above all for sleeping pills with
names like Roman nymphs,

“which are good, for they invite, imitate, substitute for death.”

Hofmann on Herbert

The poet-translator Michael Hofmann reviews The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert, in the May issue of Poetry. Hofmann idolizes Herbert but eviscerates his latest translator, Alissa Valles, and addresses the question of why John and Bogdana Carpenter, Herbert's longtime translators, were not given the task. Here's a sample of Hofmann's rage:

"Alissa Valles's Herbert is slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect. The original (I'm quite sure) is none of those things. This Collected Poems is a hopelessly, irredeemably bad book. The only solution to its problems would be a bulk reinstatement of the old translations. These things matter so much; it would be nice if they made a difference."

Purposefulness

For his birthday I ordered my brother the two collections of Zbigniew Herbert’s essays available in English – Barbarian in the Garden and Still Life with Bridle. The latter arrived Monday, 16 days after I ordered it and 12 days after my brother’s birthday. It came “illuminated”; that is, with copious underlining, and flowers drawn in the margins. The previous owner, Amy Murphy, felt strongly enough about Herbert’s work to sign the volume and get rid of it.

Buying the books for my brother renewed my interest in them. Herbert’s sensibility is stringent but not misanthropic, which made his words soothing after I had spent time exploring previously unknown regions of the literary blogosphere, looking for material and names to add to my blog roll. I returned empty-handed but with the renewed conviction that those with the least to say often spend the most time saying it. One fellow in particular, who seems intelligent and fairly well read, has posted miles of words that aspire after incoherence. His sentences begin as though he has something to tell you, only to dissolve like fog as the sun rises. In contrast, here is the conclusion of “The Price of Art,” from Still Life with Bridle:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

“Interhuman communication” is jargon, and I have no doubt Herbert’s original Polish is more graceful and, well, more human, but it serves to signify precisely the opposite intent of the long-winded blogger I mentioned earlier. About his work there is no suggestion of purposefulness, or even the possibility of purposefulness. Under the sway of some silly pseudo-philosophical creed, he would probably deny that “meaning” and “purpose” and “communication” (and probably “human”) have any meaning at all. In his review of Herbert’s The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 in the Washington Post, Anthony Cuda wrote:

“The new Collected Poems leaves no doubt about the place of Herbert's work in 20th-century letters, which rivals that of W. H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop in its originality, imaginative breadth and humane vigilance.”

I thought of Cuda and his mention of Auden when Herbert spoke so admiringly of the “old masters.” One of Auden’s anthology pieces is “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in December 1938, after the anschluss and the Munich capitulation.

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

“In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

`I See Things from the Under Side Now'

It’s Sunday afternoon as I write this, and summer has fallen on Houston. My six-year-old is at the YMCA swimming pool, which opened for the season last week. The temperature is 83 degrees; humidity, 72 percent. Green lizards bask on the window screens, reviving the cat’s predatory instincts. Lately we’ve woken to dismembered cockroaches on the carpet at the foot of the bed. Our nocturnal Nimrod catches the bugs, torments them, pulls off the legs and leaves them twitching on the floor. So much for the Peaceable Kingdom.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science last week announced a cockroach bounty. For every live roach you bring, they pay 25 cents. The curators need 1,000 roaches for an exhibit scheduled to open on Memorial Day. As of Saturday, only 49 roaches had been turned in. They bring a better return than recycled beer cans but I assume it’s tough to bring ‘em back alive.

The Homer of the cockroach is Don Marquis (1878-1937), a newspaper columnist and humorist I loved reading as a kid, especially when his “archy and mehitabel” poems were accompanied by George Herriman’s drawings. “archy” was the cockroach who climbed on Marquis’ typewriter each night and painstakingly wrote poems by leaping on the keys. All the letters were lower case as a pleasing jab at e.e. cummings, I suppose, but also because archy couldn’t work the shift key. “mehitabel,” the cat, was archy’s best friend.

Do people still read Marquis? My sense is that the American humorists of the 20th century, the ones I grew up reading – Marquis, Thurber, Benchley, Perelman, Ogden Nash -- have evaporated from respectable consciousness. As writers they were funny, not portentous or subversive (though humor, to those with an ear for it, is always subversive), so they are of little interest to an earnest age. Here’s an excerpt from “the coming of archy”:

“expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to before
there is a rat here she should get without delay”

`Life and Fate'

The United States has been blessedly free of war at home, and this may in part account for the scarcity of great American literature devoted to war. Our one exception to domestic tranquility, the Civil War, resulted in many books (Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore is the definitive chronicle) but none of the first rank, and I include The Red Badge of Courage, which to me has always seemed slight. The one exception, Shelby Foote’s three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, required a century of national pupation before its emergence as the national epic, our Iliad, as it has been misleadingly described. The less said about the American novels generated by World War II, the better.

In contrast, Russia has produced two superior novels that take war, specifically invasions of the Russian motherland, as their theme. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, of course, is more than a war novel, what today we might deride as a “historical novel.” What we remember are characters, as we remember our own family -- Prince Andrei Bolkonsky lying wounded on the battlefield and Pierre Bezukhov’s deranged plans to assassinate Napoleon. My oldest son confessed to falling in love with Natasha Rostov when he first read the novel last year.

I’m reminded of something William Maxwell said, as reported by Edward Hirsch: “I once said to Joe Mitchell that the only part about dying that I minded was that when you are dead you can’t read Tolstoy.” The novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read War and Peace aloud to Maxwell and his wife – the last novel either of them read. She writes: “There are sequences in War and Peace so affecting that one can hardly bear to read them.”

The other great Russian war novel, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, was self-consciously modeled on War and Peace. I wrote about Grossman here in January. Grossman claimed to have read Tolstoy’s novel twice while serving as a journalist with the Red Army. Life and Fate was published only posthumously, because of Soviet censorship, and not published in English until 1985. Perhaps in part because of its formidable Russian bulk – 871 pages – the novel’s reputation has languished, but its republication last year by New York Review Books augers well for literary justice, as does a splendid appreciation by Joseph Epstein in the May 5-6 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Epstein’s arch glibness can be off-putting, but for once he is sober and unironical, as Grossman and his novel deserve. His brief essay begins:

“No people have been put to the tests of suffering the way the Russians have. They have never known anything approaching decent government. Czars or commisars, their leaders have always treated them as if they were a conquered nation.”

Later he writes:

“To attempt a novel modeled on War and Peace is easy; to write one that is unembarrassing by comparison is not. Far from embarrassing, Life and Fate is one of the great novels of the 20th century.”

I urge you to read Epstein’s piece and then Life and Fate, a novel with all the virtues of Tolstoy and the other 19th-century masters of the form, as well as the moral witness of a man who covered the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin, and the liberation of the Treblinka and Majdanek concentration camps. There is nothing experimental or daring in its structure or language. Rather, there is moral passion and unblinking commitment to truth. Dr. Johnson, I think, would have comprehended the vast evil of the 20th century and, though no admirer of the novel as a genre, would have read Life and Fate with recognition and gratitude.

`At the Level of Style'

The scholarly summa of the young century must be Roger Lonsdale’s four-volume Clarendon Press edition of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, by Samuel Johnson, though it seems not to have been received with the jubilation it deserves. This reception has been somewhat rectified by William H. Pritchard’s review/essay, “Johnson’s Lives,” in the Spring 2007 issue of The Hudson Review.

Pritchard stresses the disproportionate ratio of Lonsdale’s commentary to Johnson’s original prose, which in the fourth volume is about 2.5:1. But he also encourages the reader to adopt a guilt-free laissez-faire approach to the text, reading what is useful and interesting and blithely skipping the rest:

“Eager to learn more about Milton or Dryden, I’m not so eager about William King or Richard Duke, the latter of whose poems Johnson wrote, `are not below mediocrity; nor have I found much in them to praise.’”

Pritchard cites a brief essay by Matthew Arnold with the same title as his own, included by Arnold as an introduction to his selection of the most substantial lives – Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift, and Gray. I had never known of its existence, and Dave Lull kindly supplied me with an electronic version. Of these six poets, Arnold approves only of Milton, and he finds Swift especially distasteful. But he endorses Johnson’s mingling of biography and criticism, and judges this an appropriate way to introduce student to the work:

“...of the real men and of the power of their works we know nothing! From Johnson's biographies the student will get a sense of what the real men were, and with this sense fresh in his mind he will find the occasion propitious for acquiring also, in the way pointed out, a sense of the power of their works.”

Pritchard encourages readers to view the Lives as a multifaceted work eliciting our appreciation as literary history, criticism, and veiled autobiography:

“But it is finally at the level of style – of the sentence, the paragraph – where we engage with Johnson most fully and unmistakably. Lonsdale speaks well in his introduction when he says that whatever Johnson’s critical limitations and idiosyncrasies, his `energy and trenchancy’ are always evident, particularly in passages from the Lives -- `in which his prose evokes, and even competes with, the qualities of the poetry he is describing.’”

In Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, Henry Hitchings makes a related point:

“Trenchant, opinionated and often deeply personal, the Lives proposes not so much a canon of essential authors as a continuation of the Dictionary’s unfurling of intellectual history. Moreover, unlike modern biographers, Johnson separates the events of his subjects’ lives from their achievements in poetry, rather than braiding them ingeniously. One of the results is a particular attention to writing per se: instead of extrapolating psychological points from the texts he examines, Johnson considers them as feats of language.”

Let Johnson have the final word, with this discussion of Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”:

“To mention the particular beauties of the Essay would be unprofitably tedious; but I cannot forbear to observe, that the comparison of a student’s progress in the sciences with the journey of a traveler in the Alps, is perhaps the best that English poetry can shew. A simile, to be perfect, must both illustrate and ennoble the subject; must shew it to the understanding in a clearer view, and display it to the fancy with greater dignity; but either of these qualities may be sufficient to recommend it”

`A Delightful Adjunct to Civilized Life'

I was in the university library on Tuesday waiting for an elevator when a librarian approached pushing a cart stacked with books. On top was Ideas of Order, by Wallace Stevens. It was the first edition, published by Knopf in 1936, 13 years after his first volume, Harmonium. The book is elegantly plain, unblemished by the tackiness marring book design today, and the sober cover is a pleasing contrast to the verbal flamboyance within.

I’m not covetous when it comes to first editions and other trophies of bibliomania, but I do enjoy the sensation of holding a rare volume I already love as literature, not as a commodity. In the Schaffer Library at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y., I leafed through first editions of Ulysses and Leaves of Grass and felt almost superstitiously reverent because they are books I know well and love. I also touched an early edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Mathematica, published in 1687, and while I was aware of the book’s age, importance and great value, I felt respect, not a worshipful tingle. I was impressed cerebrally, not emotionally, because I had never read the book and because Newton, despite his eminence, has never entered my private pantheon. Holding Ideas of Order for a trifling 10 seconds was a privilege, and it set off an immediate conditioned response to want to read Stevens again.

On Wednesday, William F. Vallicella at Maverick Philosopher posted “My Beef with Poetry” based on his reading of Stevens’ poem “The Latest Freed Man.” His initial reaction is reasoned and correct:

“One can see from this excerpt that Stevens is a very good poet indeed. And like most good poets, he knows enough not to send a poem on a prose errand, to borrow an apt phrase from John Ciardi. So one will look in vain for a clearly stated philosophical thesis packaged poetically.”

Vallicella then repudiates his own good sense and declares, “There is nonetheless philosophical content here.” He proceeds to critique the poem’s reputed “thesis,” citing Nietzsche and others, and writes:

“To come directly to my beef with poetry: what's the ultimate good of suggesting momentous theses with nary an attempt at justification? Of smuggling them into our minds under cover of delectable wordcraft?

“Poetry is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, but philosophy rules. It would be very foolish, however, to try to convince any poet of this.”

Vallicella seems to be reviving the old Platonic dismissal of poetry as the enemy of truth. His response is sour and beside-the-point. The best poetry is not about truth, at least not quantifiable truth, the sort a logician might respect. It is not by nature argumentative or didactic. Rather, a poem is a discrete addition to creation, something new and unprecedented in the world, like Stevens’ jar in Tennessee. When I held Ideas of Order in my hands, I anticipated the pleasure I would experience later that day while reading Stevens’ poems again. I gave no thought to their philosophical heft. If I want philosophy I read philosophy, not poetry; Santayana, not Stevens. In “The Reader,” from Ideas of Order, Stevens writes:

“The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.”

Is poetry “a delightful adjunct to a civilized life?” Of course, but so is philosophy, and embracing them is not an either/or proposition. Frank Wilson at Books, Inq. said it for me on Thursday: “If there is anything worthy of worship it [is] the mystery of being.”