`This Great Absence'

When I first read R.S. Thomas seriously, accumulating as many of his books of poetry and prose as I could find and afford, his work persistently reminded me not of George Herbert or Wordsworth or the other poets he cited as elective affinities, but of Ingmar Bergman. I’m not certain the Welsh poet-priest saw a single film in his life, but I’m not talking about influence. Poet and director shared a Northern landscape and a temperamental bleakness, and both returned obsessively to the theme of the via negativa. Here’s what I wrote about the “negative way” last year:

“God, by definition is ineffable and defies language, a feeble human creation. Those following the via negativa attempt to express knowledge of God by describing what He is not – a rhetorical strategy known as apophasis (`to say no’). In one of his sermons, Meister Eckhart said: `God is nameless, because no one can say anything or understand anything about him.’”

Bergman died on Monday, though it feels as though he died decades ago – a feeling we experience when an artist we enthusiastically discovered in our youth is suddenly gone. My favorite among Bergman’s films remains the first one I saw, on public television, in the late nineteen-sixties – Winter Light. A pastor, Tomas (played by Gunnar Bjornstrand), undergoes a crisis of faith. He is still in love with his dead wife but carries on an affair with a school teacher, Marta (the great Ingrid Thulin). A parishioner, Jonas Persson (the equally great Max von Sydow) is a fisherman tormented by the fear of nuclear annihilation. He visits the pastor seeking reassurance and Tomas tells him:

“Every time I confronted God with the reality I saw, he became ugly, revolting, a spider god – a monster. That’s why I hid him away from the light, from life. In my darkness and loneliness I hugged him to myself – the only person I showed him to was my wife. She backed me up, encouraged me, helped me, plugged up all the holes. Our dreams. (He gives a sudden laugh).”

Persson, understandably, leaves. Alone in his church, Tomas says: “No. (Pause) God does not exist any more.” And then: “I’m free now. At last, free.” I’m quoting from A Film Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, The Communicants (Winter Light), The Silence, translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin and published in 1967.

Bjornstrand looks nothing like R.S. Thomas, yet their images, in memory, align perfectly. Thomas’ wife of 51 years, Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, died in 1991. Thomas lived another nine years, wrote some of his most heartbreakingly personal poems, and died at age 87. Both artists defied us to bow to the pressure of the age and understand their work psychologically rather than spiritually. There’s the same craggy austerity in both (Tomas and Thomas, as in “Doubting”), the same dourness broken by fits of passion. Tomas’ words in Winter Light are less artful than Thomas’, of course, but they express a similar spiritual torment. Compare them with a poem from Thomas’ Frequencies (1978), “The Absence” (which might have served Bergman as a title):

“It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

“from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?”

`Broad, Bizarre and Bold'

My 7-year-old and I saw The Simpsons Movie on Sunday, and we laughed so hard we cried and snorted and wished we had brought tissues but were glad the darkness of the theater concealed our dripping embarrassment. We missed jokes because we were too busy laughing at the last one or two – an experience I remember from the first time I saw Duck Soup and other Marx Brothers movies. My sons and I are longtime fans of the show, and my oldest son saw the movie in Manhattan on opening night, last Thursday at midnight. He’s a leaking reservoir of Simpson trivia, a true fan boy.

The writer who most reminds me of Matt Groening’s creation is Tobias Smollett, the 18th-century novelist and physician, author of Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker and Peregrine Pickle, among other raucous and cartoon-like comic novels. A professor of 18th-century English literature introduced me to Smollett about 35 years ago, and I read and enjoyed a shelf of his works but have never read him again, or even been seriously tempted, just as I probably won’t see The Simpsons Movie again. The books merge into a single swollen Smollett narrative, all chamber pots, floggings and gluttony – that is, all surface, albeit an entertaining surface, as in a good cartoon. In one of his essays on Smollett, V.S. Pritchett wrote:

“His coarseness, like that of Joyce, is the coarseness of one whose senses were unprotected and whose nerves were exposed. Something is arrested in the growth of his robust mind; as a novelist he remains the portrayer of the outside, rarely able to get away from physical externals or to develop from that starting-point into anything but physical caricature.”

And this, on Smollett’s sense of comedy: “It is imaginative, festive and, like all Smollett’s comedy, broad, bizarre and bold.”

Like The Simpsons.

`Rapidly Passing Away'

I have lived in four states, in many small towns and cities, but the place that remains in memory most restful, most temperamentally compatible, most like “home,” though I lived there for only six of my almost 55 years, is Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Out-of-towners know it for the thoroughbred track, the mineral springs and their spas, and for its links to the American Revolution, but I think first of its small scale (I could run a Saturday of errands in one hour), the walkable downtown (with benches, ideal for people watching), the first-rate bookstore (Lyrical Ballads, owned by John DeMarco) and canopies of trees on nearly every street. This was where my wife and I lived when we married, where we bought the first house either of us had ever owned, and where our youngest sons were born.

In the Aug. 11, 1870, edition of The Nation, 27-year-old Henry James published “Saratoga,” a brief travel piece. His Saratoga is not precisely mine, though I recognize the outlines. Much has changed in more than 130 years – the grand hotels with James’ beloved piazzas are long gone -- and James and I traveled in different circles:

“The piazza of the Union Hotel, I have been repeatedly informed, is the largest `in the world.’ There are a number of objects in Saratoga, by the way, which in their respective kinds are the finest in the world. On of these is Mr. John Morrisey’s casino. I bowed my head submissively to this statement, but privately I thought of the blue Mediterranean, and the little white promontory of Monaco, and the silver-gray verdure of olives, and the view across the outer sea toward the bosky cliffs of Italy. The Congress water, too, it is well known, are excellent in the superlative degree; this I am perfectly willing to maintain.”

James pokes fun at boosterism, small town Babbitts dealing habitually in hot air, and refers to “the dense, democratic, vulgar Saratoga of the current year.” Morrisey, a former prize fighter from Troy, N.Y., opened the Club House (now called the Canfield Casino) in 1870 in what is now called Congress Park, where we used to walk on Sunday evenings in summer to hear outdoor band concerts – show tunes, light classics, patriotic songs, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. James the cosmopolitan weighs Saratoga against Europe. In another 14 years, he will return to Europe and not revisit the United States for another 20 years. The spawn of that final return of the native, in 1904-05, will be The American Scene, his final masterpiece. In “Saratoga” he writes:

“On the piazza, in the outer multitude, ladies largely prevail, both by numbers and (you are not slow to perceive) by distinction of appearance. The good old times of Saratoga, I believe, as of the world in general, are rapidly passing away. The time was when it was the chosen resort of none but `nice people.’ At the present day, I hear it constantly affirmed, `the company is dreadfully mixed.’”

Or at least it was until the “dreadfully mixed” Kurps left town.

`The Permanence of These Bound Words'

William Faulkner wrote poetry and had the good sense to stop. Joyce, too, wrote poems, some of them modestly affecting (“Ecce Puer”), but they would be long forgotten without Dubliners and Ulysses. John Williams, the author of Stoner, published two slender volumes of verse – The Broken Landscape (1949) and The Necessary Lie (1965, the same year as Stoner). He also edited an anthology, English Renaissance Poetry, published in 1963, that suggests the sources of Williams’ poetic method and the reasons prose fiction, not poetry, was his rightful medium.

The Broken Landscape is 36 pages long and was published by Alan Swallow in Denver. The book is the size and shape of a birthday card and has cardboard covers. It contains only 19 poems, and yet is long enough to have an erratum page. The poems are traditional – metered, rhymed – and, I regret, quite dull. They’re reminiscent of the poems Williams anthologized, especially Ben Jonson’s, and also those of another poet published by Alan Swallow, J.V. Cunningham, but without their hardness, concision, wit and technical deftness. They often deal with the travails of love – a subject he returned to masterfully in Stoner. One poem, “Knowledge is Power,” from a series called “Five Epigraphs,” offers early insight into Williams’ evolving aesthetic:

“The permanence of these bound words is goad,
We say: they whip us to formulable ends.
From fixed penumbras we grub glinting fact;
Wrought truth is winter-brittle, yet it bends,
To our flat need conforms. We say and act
What we can never know: to act, our code.”

William Stoner, too, adopts a code of action, with the twist that he turns inaction into a mode of action. He resigns himself to the hell of a loveless marriage. He never sets out to have an affair with a younger woman but it happens. In an interview, Williams maintained Stoner was “a real hero,” and said, “I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly.”

The Necessary Lie is a more substantial work, put out by Verb Publications of Denver. The book is 48 pages long, with paper covers and blurry type, and recycles some poems (including “Five Epigraphs”) from the earlier volume. The theme of tormented love returns, as do insights into Stoner. Here’s “The Measure of Violence”:

“Passive within the heart
Our primal anger lies
And waits, secure, apart
From what it shall despise.

“Mirrored upon the brain,
It is what it has lacked:
Inversion of disdain,
Equivalent to act,

“It is the self’s assent
Beyond the active will.
Beyond self’s vanquishment
We feed upon our kill.”

Again, Williams toys with action vs. paralysis vs. acceptance – “the self’s assent.” One poem, “An Old Actor, to His Audience,” is subtitled “Ford Madox Ford: 1873-1939,” and amounts to a statement of artistic purpose masking as a monologue by the aging novelist. Here’s an excerpt:

“Out of these creaking boards
I once created worlds that you could not conceive
And peopled them with what you might have been,
Showing a fairer image of yourself
Than you would dare to dream, and given you
Some instant plucked from time that was your own.
From your deep heart’s most lonely need, I have
Dissembled shadows that become your selves
And let them stroll as if they were alive
In the Roman ruins of your northern fields.”

The poem is lovelier than anything in the earlier volume and reads like a prophecy of Williams’ accomplishment in Stoner. It’s significant that Williams channels his voice through Ford, for clearly he was a writer who needed the distance, the buffering, offered by characters manifestly not himself. The poems often fail, like many poems, because the poet and the speaker are one. The first-person singular appears effortless and yet nothing could be more difficult to do well. In an interview, John McGahern said of Williams: “His method is to go as far as possible from the self and towards the other, and then find his way back through the self.” Only through the rigors of prose fiction could Williams overcome the trap of self posed by the lyric. In his introduction to English Renaissance Poetry, Williams wrote of Ben Jonson:

“It is, finally, a language that has passed from the starkness and bareness of outer reality through the dark, luxuriant jungle of the self, and has emerged from that journey entire and powerful.”

`The Tradition is Civilization'

A friend recently finished reading Stoner, by John Williams, after I had written about it, and concluded it was the best novel she had ever read. It’s the sort of near-perfect but perennially forgotten book, old-fashioned and decidedly unfashionable, that inspires ardency. Also, my friend has reached early middle age, roughly Williams’ age when he wrote the novel, and that is precisely the time when a reader may be ready to appreciate and perhaps even empathize with such a profoundly sad story. Younger people are too impatient, too full of untested hope, to recognize its “terrible beauty,” to borrow Yeats’ phrase. The late John McGahern, in his introduction to the recent New York Review Books edition, quotes from an interview Williams gave in 1985, 20 years after Stoner was published:

“You never know all the results of what you do. I think it all boils down to what I was trying to get at in Stoner: You’ve got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization.”

Coincidentally, I’ve just read an interview with McGahern (where he also praises Williams) in which he says something similar:

“Tradition, when all is said and done, is civilization, which needs to be continually renewed and revitalised; and what proves to be good or useful in the new will become part of tradition.”

If I understand Williams’ comments correctly, he’s speaking on at least two levels. He refers to Stoner in his role as university teacher, to his “sense of a job,” his dedication to his students, his love for them and for the works of literature he teaches. Williams says:

“It’s the love of the thing that’s essential. And if you love something, you’re going to understand it. And if you understand it, you’re going to learn a lot. The lack of that love defines a bad teacher.”

My sense is that “love” and “teaching” is a rare pairing of words today, and perhaps it has always been that way. Stoner and, by likely implication, Williams, felt a calling to pass on the love of literature as something of mortal consequence. It’s not an intellectual game or some other species of diversion. As he complains elsewhere in the interview, students too often are encouraged to behave “as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced.”

On a second, deeper level, when he stresses the importance of keeping “the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization,” Williams perhaps refers to his own efforts as a writer and the efforts of all serious writers. No obvious literary influences on Stoner come immediately to mind. Rather, I’m reminded of works suffused with a kindred sensibility, by writers with a comparably serious purpose. I think of stories and novels by Chekhov, Edith Wharton and William Maxwell – and John McGahern. But in its cumulative power and sadness, Stoner reminds me of nothing so much as Henry James’ final, hopeless sentence in Washington Square: “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were.”

`That Sweet Accord is Seldom Seen'

I owe much of my literary education to a man I never met who died in 1964, the year I turned 12. Oscar Williams was not a memorable poet but his anthologies have sold in the millions and helped educate generations of students and autodidacts. For a long time, if an English-language poet was not included in a Williams anthology, I probably had never heard of him. I still remember buying The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, published by Washington Square Press, at James Books Store on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio. That would have been around 1965. The store was owned by Lenny James, a raffishly dubious guy who wore his shirt outside his pants and who was reputed to sell dirty books and take bets on the side. We liked him because his books were cheap, often with the front cover torn off and the reduced price scrawled in black marking pen on the title page – inelegant but inexpensive. It was in Lenny’s store that I graduated from comic books (Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos) to Immortal Poems of the English Language, also from Washington Square Press, and The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, published by Pocket Library.

I bring this up because I happened upon another poetry anthology, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), selected by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields, and began to think about how useful and influential anthologies can be, especially for those of us who come as innocents to literature, as I suppose all of us do. I read the Williams collections naively, front to back, as though they were novels. That had the advantage of giving me a sense of the grand sweep of poetry in English. Simultaneously, I was figuring out which poets I liked, which I disliked, and which left me confused: Pope, good; Swinburne, bad; Hopkins, inconclusive. That ranking still reflects my tastes, except I’ve upgraded Hopkins.

The Winters-Fields strategy is more didactic, less inclusive and superbly readable – an excellent albeit eccentric introduction to poetry for students. You’ll find none of the canonical Romantic poets, not even Keats, and only one from the 18th century – Charles Churchill. After Churchill (1731-1764), the next selection is an American, Jones Very (1813-1880). You’ll find Stevens and Williams but no Whitman, Hopkins, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Moore, Crane, Bunting, Auden, Bishop, Berryman, Larkin, Hecht or Hill. The book includes 185 poems, by 48 poets from the last 450 years. Fields calls them “the most remarkable poems in English.” The editors say the poems “share important qualitative resemblance,” and go on:

“The kind of poetry which we are trying to exemplify does not consist in a specific subject matter or style, but rather in a high degree of concentration which aims at understanding and revealing the particular subject as fully as possible….in selecting our anthology we have tried to find writers whose attitude toward their art resembles Ben Jonson’s, as we see it in one of his best love poems:

“`And it is not always face,
Clothes, or fortune gives the grace,
Or the feature, or the youth;
But the language and the truth…’”

There’s not a mediocre poem in the volume, which begins with Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503-1542) and ends with two poems by N. Scott Momaday. The poet represented with the most poems – 16 -- is one of Winters’ former students, J.V. Cunningham. He’s among the supreme American poets, along with another former Winters student included in the anthology, Edgar Bowers. The editors and Fields took this Cunningham poem from Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted:

“I had gone broke, and got set to come back,
And lost, on a hot day and a fast track,
On a long shot at long odds, a black mare
By Hatred out of Envy by Despair.”

Again, from the introduction:

“And whatever else poetry may be, its medium is language – poetry is communication. Those poets who fail in their responsibilities to the public aspects of language, concentrating instead on the private or eccentric aspects, impair their ability to reveal, to themselves as well as to their readers, the reality of their experience. Such poets, however brilliant, are landlocked and are accordingly out of touch with life….If a poet concentrates exclusively on the public nature of language, the result will usually be the cliché; if he concentrates on the private nature, the result will be obscurity. In either case, reality has eluded him, his mind is dead. The poets of this anthology, on the other hand, are consistent in one respect: they are interested in understanding and revealing, are interested in the language and the truth. They are engaged in the quest for reality.”

This is an admirably sane conception of poetry, perfectly reflected in the poets and poems selected for inclusion, and perfectly crafted as an introduction to poetry and literary history for young people. The resulting anthology is the best I know, better than Williams’. It’s also a useful corrective to today’s tin-eared poetry. Consider the poems used at epigrams to Quest for Reality. First, Wyatt:

“Throughout the world, if it were sought,
Fair words enough a man shall find;
They be good cheap, they cost right nought,
Their substance is but only wind.
But well to say, and so to mean,
That sweet accord is seldom seen.”

Then, oddly, George Turberville (c. 1540-c. 1610), whose work is not included elsewhere in the anthology. Here is “To the Reader”:

“I thee advise
If thou be wise
To keep thy wit
Though it be small;

“’Tis rare to get
And far to fet
’Twas ever yit
Dear’st ware of all.”

As Fields writes in the introduction:

“Such triumphs of language are always rare and necessarily emerge from a great deal of unsuccessful writing. And if the exceptional poem is a rare occasion, so too is its appreciation.”

`To Hide the Ruin of His Dreams'

In 1970, Triquarterly published a festschrift for Vladimir Nabokov and that’s how I first heard of Morris Bishop, the man responsible in 1948 for hiring the Russian novelist to teach at Cornell University, where Bishop was professor of Romance literature. In his 11 years at Cornell, Nabokov wrote, edited or translated Pnin, Lolita, Conclusive Evidence, The Song of Igor’s Campaign, Eugene Onegin, and various poems, stories and articles on lepidoptera. Bishop and Nabokov became fond friends, and here’s Bishop’s summary of the Russian’s years in Ithaca:

“On the whole, I think the Cornell years were useful for the artist. He gained security, time for abundant production, and knowledge of the American background, which he turned splendidly to account. He immersed himself in the mainstream of American bourgeois culture, and thus learned a whole subject-matter. The Cornell experience was a good thing for Nabokov; his presence was also a very good thing for Cornell.”

Later, I came to know Bishop as a writer of light verse, a craft unfairly relegated to the same artistic gulag as découpage. If you can, find a copy of The Best of Bishop, his collected poems published in 1980, seven years after his death. Here’s a link to “How to Treat Elves,” with this memorable dénouement:

“I lifted up my foot, and squashed
The God damn little fool.”

Some years ago, in Joseph Epstein’s Life Sentences, I read “La Rochefoucauld: Maximum Maximist,” an essay devoted to the 17th-century French writer of maxims. In it, Epstein referred glowingly to Bishop’s The Life and Adventures of La Rochefoucauld, which I am finally reading. Epstein described the book, published in 1951, as “belles-lettristic” in the best old-fashioned sense. One might think of it as an extended literary essay as opposed to an academic biography, and it might remind readers of V.S. Pritchett’s book-length essays on Turgenev, Balzac and Chekhov. There are no footnotes and only a brief “Bibliographical Note.” Best of all, here’s the note Bishop published at the front of the book:

“The author has interpolated in his text 242 of the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld, usually without quotation marks or other acknowledgement.”

This would probably drive academics nuts, but for Bishop the life and work are inseparable and he expects the common reader to accept this as an obvious truth. La Rochefoucauld published more than 700 maximes, none longer than half a page and most consisting of two or three sentences. They possess the compact resonance of poetry. Contrary to their reputation, the maxims are not gratuitously cynical. They are unsentimental and unsparingly honest but rooted in La Rochefoucauld’s desire for his readers to shed illusions about themselves. Theodore Dalrymple wrote a winning essay about La Rochefoucauld in which he writes:

“La Rochefoucauld’s major contribution to humanity’s knowledge of itself was his clearsighted recognition of the protean manifestations of self-interest and amour-propre. His little book—not a hundred pages of modern print—tells us more about human nature than thousands of pages of Freud, and incidentally undermines completely any claim of the Freudians that their hero discovered the workings of the unconscious.”

That’s the same Freud whom Nabokov rightly dismissed as “the Viennese quack,” and here’s an example of how Morris melds maxims seamlessly into his narrative:

“La Rochefoucauld, oppressed by the sense of his isolation, was forced to retire to the refuge of his own heart. What ordinarily hinders us from displaying the depths of our hearts to our friends is not so much our distrust of them as the distrust we feel of ourselves.”

La Rochefoucauld’s genius was to make the unpleasant truth about human nature, our devotion to self-protection and self-regard at any cost, sound so familiar: “Yes, that’s me,” we say as we read the maxims, even as we congratulate ourselves on our splendid insight. There’s no escaping La Rochefoucauld’s moral x-ray vision. Here’s one of his best known maxims, first in French, then in the recent Oxford translation by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, and Francine Giguère:

“Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui.”

“We all have enough strength to bear the troubles of other people.”

La Rochefoucauld’s final years were eased by the devotion of Madame de La Fayette, the author of La Princesse de Cléves. She came to the aging author by way of his Maximes, which Bishop said “gave her three months of liver trouble.” Their unlikely relationship is one of the great literary love stories. In the final chapter Bishop writes:

“The old restless ardor burned in him unquenched. He was still in imagination the knight-errant out of Astrée, terrible in war, submissive and faithful in love. Yes, he was a disillusioned cynic, of course, but when the trumpet sounded he was also Roland, he was Amadis de Gaule. The fact is that in his secret heart he was not a disillusioned cynic at all. He was a romantic dreamer who had adopted cynicism to hide the ruin of his dreams.”

La Rochefoucauld died in 1680 at age 66. Bishop titles his final chapter “Few Know How to Be Old,” from La Rochefoucauld’s own “Peu de gens savant être vieux.”

He Talks

A gift for writing only rarely accompanies a gift for eloquent speech. In my experience, most writers are about as mumble-mouthed as the rest of humanity. Not so Terry Teachout. Contentions, the group blog at Commentary, has posted the first in a series of monthly video interviews with Terry, so we can now see, hear and read the brains behind About Last Night.

`Yes, Because Life is Like That'

Tim Parks has published 14 novels and seven works of nonfiction, and has translated many books from the Italian. I’ve read only his 2003 novel Judge Savage and a handful of his essays and reviews, but I like some things he said in an interview with CBC Radio in 1998:

“The reason why we like a book is because we say, Yes, because life is like that, and the reason why we stop reading certain kinds of childish books is because we say, Good story but life’s not like that. The whole question of recognition is terribly important and that’s why as you get older your reading experience inevitably gets richer because you have more of your own experience to bring to it.”

Parks is not espousing theory or laying down the law. What he’s saying is worthy of our attention because of the way it conforms to common experience. He proscribes nothing. I like the way he echoes, intentionally or not, St. Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (I Corinthians 13:11) Some readers, as recent events attest, recognize themselves in the Harry Potter series. Some will eventually put those books aside as being “childish things.” Other will remain loyal. Among the childish things I put aside a long time ago are science fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Parks and I now respond with a “Yes, because life is like that,” to stronger, more sustaining stuff. From the same interview:

“Obviously, you’re receptive to this seduction. Henry Green, Samuel Beckett, and more recently the last person who has completely bowled me over, Thomas Bernhard. What’s fascinating to me is the way he sets up these characters who have the impossible task of getting their minds round something, and then breaking into that are all kinds of domestic tragedies which rearrange the mental furniture.”

What’s noteworthy about Parks’ examples is that none is even remotely a conventional realist. All, in fact, have been certified as Modernist or postmodernist, all pose difficulties for lazy readers and none could be confused with soothing beach reading. Yet Parks and I enthusiastically respond, on the level of quotidian humanity, to the works of these writers. As Parks wrote last year in a review of books by and about Beckett in the New York Review of Books:

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

Later in the CBC interview, Park says: “One always says one is introduced to Shakespeare too young, but is one ever old enough to read Shakespeare? ….One is never really old enough to read certain things but one is always old enough.”

`I Looked Into His Eyes'

On Sunday we took the boys to the aquarium, which in Houston is an amusement park without pretensions to science. It’s crammed downtown under the city’s noisome, ubiquitous freeways. There’s a Ferris wheel, carousels and a narrow-gauge railroad that runs through a transparent tank filled with sharks, where the train stops and you listen to a recorded sermon about the shark as an endangered species. There’s also a restaurant where you sit beside an enormous fish tank and watch grouper swimming in schools while you eat their cousins. It’s crowded and kitschy and all the concrete simulates an outdoor convection oven. In “For the Union Dead,” Robert Lowell remembers childhood visits to the South Boston Aquarium:

“Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.”

The fish and rays we saw were, indeed, “cowed, compliant.” Even the sharks looked dull, bored and unshark-like. Grouper are comically snub-faced and metallic-looking – robot fish. We walked down a staircase that spiraled around a water-filled cylinder, home to a school of grouper. One the size of my youngest son paused in his endless crawl to look at me, or so it seemed. Like the young Lowell I stopped and put my nose to the glass. No cross-species transaction occurred, no revelation. We stared until we grew bored, and I remembered why Lowell’s friend, Elizabeth Bishop, was the superior poet:

“I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.”

That’s from the middle of her great poem “The Fish.” Characteristically, Bishop is focused on the near-at-hand, unlike Lowell whose attention is all over Western Civilization and Robert Lowell. The speaker of Bishop’s poem admires the fish as a fighter, a tired survivor, with evidence of five earlier catches fused to its jaw. The speaker and the fish are fellow-adults. I’m reminded of V.S. Pritchett, that great literary essayist, who admired writers like Fielding and Austen “who face life squarely.” Of their kind he writes:

“They are grown up. They do not cry for the moon. I do not mean that to be grown up is the first requirement of genius. To be grown up may be fatal to it. But short of the great illuminating madness, there is a power to sustain, assure, and enlarge us in those novelists who are not driven back by life, who are not shattered by the discovery that it is a thing bounded by unsought limits, by interests as well as by hopes, and that it ripens under restrictions. Such writers accept. They think that acceptance is the duty of man.”

`Nothing is So Beautiful'

For a writer to presume to offer hope – intelligent, reasoned hope, not dishonest, feel-good optimism – is an act of audacity. And for that same writer to rally us around the cause of culture, long after the barbarians have breached the walls and started burning down the libraries, is surely to act more courageously than we deserve or could hope to emulate.

Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, strikes me as a serious man who suffers fools and dupes with little equanimity. In his new book, Culture Counts, Scruton musters more patience for the death-cultists trying to destroy the Middle East and, if they have their druthers, the rest of the world, too, than he does for their fellow-travelers back here in what remains of the civilized world. By the way, he has good things to say about the United States – and I mean the culture, not necessarily the current administration:

“Take away America, its freedom, its optimism, its institutions, its Judeo-Christian beliefs, and its educational tradition, and little would remain of the West, besides the geriatric routines of a now toothless Europe.”

One of Scruton’s definitions of culture is “the literary, artistic and philosophical inheritance that has been taught in departments of humanities both in Europe and America, and which has recently been subject to contemptuous dismissal (especially in America) as the product of ‘dead white European males.’”

In other words, by the usual suspects. In other words, our precious inheritance, the best our species has produced, what we once took for granted as the knowledge shared by all educated men and women. I'm reminded of what Ford Madox Ford wrote in The March of Literature:

"The quality of literature, in short, is the quality of humanity. It is the quality that communicates, between man and men, the secret of human hearts and the story of our vicissitudes."

I learned of Scruton’s new book from Bryan Appleyard, who describes him as as “a philosopher with a genius for clarifying issues that vested interests often don’t want clarified.” In other words, the usual suspects.

If Culture Counts has begun to sound like a thousand other doomsday screeds, here’s where the other half of Scruton’s argument, the hard-won hope, comes in:

“To speak of a `clash of civilization,’ as Samuel Huntington famously did, is to assume that two civilizations exist. But one of the contenders never turned up on the battlefield. The clash that we witness is between Western secularism and a religion which, because it has lost its self-conscious part, can no longer relate in any stable way to those who disagree with it. It is precisely the loss of its culture that has permitted Islam to enter the modern world with so much death in its heart – death of others, which hides and excuses the death of self.

“We in the West are more fortunate. Our culture has schooled us in the need for toleration, and prepared us for the new secular world – and it has preserved in these unlikely circumstances a precious legacy of moral knowledge. It matters less that the mass of people are ignorant of this culture than that an elite is still being recruited to pass it on. Like every form of knowledge, that embodied in a culture spreads its benefits even over the ignorant, and those who make the effort to acquire that knowledge are not merely doing good to themselves: they are the saviors of their community.”

I can already hear the self-righteous whining about Scruton’s reference to an “elite,” but consider the context: The West’s traditional repository of learning, inquiry and cultural transmission, the university, is compromised, perhaps beyond redemption. Scruton doesn’t mention it explicitly, but the Internet, including the untapped potential of blogs, may offer an alternative to the self-defeating repudiation of culture. Despite appearances, there’s more to online discourse than pornography, narcissism, illiteracy and rage. Consider Michael Gilliland’s post on Saturday, "Comfort Books." A thoughtful reading of the titles on Mike’s list sounds like the foundation of an education superior to many offered by the nation’s swankier grad schools. As for comfort, consider the unpalatable truths Scruton spells out, then his suggestions for a way out, then these words from one of the writers on Mike’s list:

“Greatness of soul consists not so much in striving upward and forward as knowing how to find one’s place and draw the line. Whatever is adequate it regards as ample; it shows its sublime quality by preferring the moderate to the outstanding. Nothing is so beautiful, so right, as acting as a man should; nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well. And the most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.”

Fipple

Thanks to a poem by Kenneth Fields, I have learned a new and very silly-sounding word: fipple. I’ve seen this rhyme with “nipple” and “triple” before, because I’ve read Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, one of the great poems of the last century, but it never, despite its baby-talk silliness, stuck. Here’s Fields’ “Poetic,” the last poem in his 2005 collection Classic Rough News. The poem is preceded by “with a line from Basil Bunting” and the unattributed sentence “It might be from a handbook on recorders”:

“For one thing, its on the air, you can hear music,
Knowing inflected by the ear. Not wood,
Not even mouthpiece, but the lovely fipple
(“Hey, that’s like nipple,” my little daughter laughs),
And the conveyor of this joy’s a player,
Whose breathing tunes the hollow that she fills,
Empties and fills again. I am caught up
In the roll and the hull, this ecstasy of naming,
This gathering up of more than fifty years
In a wide harbor, a life made of words,
All of them here before we finally heard them,
And consolation rolling upon the tide:
As the player’s breath warms the fipple the tone clears.
Ardor, attend us as our stars descend.”

The italicized line come from Section IV of Briggflatts:

“As the player’s breath warms the fipple the tone clears.
It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti
condensed so much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence,
never a boast or a see-here; and stars and lakes
echo him and the copse drums out his measure,
snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight
and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.”

Bunting, too, condenses much music into “so few bars.” To a significant degree, poetry was music to Bunting’s acute ear. Here’s what he wrote in 1966, the year he published Briggflatts:

“Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life, just as music, on the stave, is no more than instructions to the player.”

Back to fipple: The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the plug at the mouth of a wind-instrument, by which its volume was contracted.” The first citation, from 1626, is drawn from Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or a Naturall Historie. I looked it up, so here's the lovely passage it’s drawn from:

“Let there be a recorder made with two fipples, at each end one; the trunk of it of the length of two recorders, and the holes answerable towards each end; and let two play the same lesson upon it at an unison ; and let it be noted whether the sound be confounded, or amplified, or dulled. So likewise let a cross be made of two trunks, throughout, hollow; and let two speak, or sing, the one long-ways, the other traverse: and let two hear at the opposite ends; and note whether the sound be confounded, amplified, or dulled. Which two instances will also give light to the mixture of sounds, whereof we shall speak hereafter.”

The OED’s second definition is identified as “northern dialect”: “The underlip in men and animals, when it hangs down large and loose….to look disappointed, discontented, or sulky; also, to weep.” The third definition, dating from 1892 and attributed to “Northumbria” and “Gloucestershire”: “After stooks of corn remain standing for a time, the bottoms of the sheaves become naturally longer on the outside than the inside, which is called their ‘fipple.’” These latter meanings may be relevant to Bunting who was born in Scotswood-on-Tyne, in Northumberland, now part of Newcastle upon Tyne. Briggflatts and much of his other work is a celebration of Northumbrian dialect.

As to etymology, the OED suggests we compare fipple to the Icelandic flipi, meaning “lip of a horse.” As an intransitive verb, fipple is described as “Scottish” and “obsolete,” meaning “To whimper, whine; to slaver, dribble,” and we are instructed to compare it to the Swedish flipa,” to weep with distortion of the mouth.” William Dunbar, in the musically titled The tua mariit wemen and the wedo, used it in this sense in 1508: “He feppillis like a farcy aver, that flyrit on a gillot.”

Wikipedia says fipples are found in flagelots, gemshorns, ocarinas, recorders, tin whistles (or penny whistles), diples (or dvojnice), fujara, and organ pipes – more new words. There’s even a web site dedicated to tin whistles called Chiff and Fipple. But back to Fields: He’s new to me, one of the “Stanford poets” who studied with Yvor Winters. Among the others were Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn and Donald Justice – distinguished company. I like his phrase “this ecstasy of naming,” which reminds me that a tour of the universe can begin with a single word. I also like “a life made up of words,/All of them here before we finally heard them.”

Like fipple.

`Certain Moments Will Never Change'

In November of 1904, during his first visit to the United States in 20 years, Henry James, all alone, visited “that unspeakable group of graves,” as he called them, where his parents and his sister Alice were buried in Cambridge Cemetery. The scene, as described in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, is desolate and heartbreaking:

“Everything was there, everything came; the recognition, stillness, strangeness, the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion and the divine release of tears. William's inspired transcript, on the exquisite little urn of Alice's ashes. William's divine gift to us, and to her, of the Dantean lines—

“`Dopo lungo exilio e martiro
Viene a questa pace—‘”

William James took the lines for their long-suffering sister’s epitaph from the Paradiso, Canto X, lines 128-129: “And she, from martyrdom and exile, came to this peace.” The essa – “she” – Dante refers to is actually the soul (feminine in Italian) of Boethius, the sixth-century philosopher, author of Consolation of Philosophy. James’ notebook entry continues:

“took me so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one's knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache. But why do I write of the all unutterable and the all abysmal? Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past? It does, poor helpless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side. Basta, basta! x x x x x”

We remember John Marcher in James’ 1903 story “The Beast in the Jungle.” He visits the grave of May Bartram and for the first time awakens to his “arid end” and perceives “the sounded void of his life.” I knew most of this late in the winter of 1993, when I visited the Cambridge Cemetery, in Cambridge, Mass., to pay my respects to William and Henry James and their family. The day was sunny and cold. Much snow had melted but what remained had refrozen, and the brown grass was crunchy. I felt an overpowering sense of history and loss and gratitude as I stood by the graves of the writers who had helped form in me the capacity to feel the very emotions I was feeling so deeply. It was a Sunday morning like any other. In memory it remains a crystallized Jamesian moment, “approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past.”

All of this returned to me Wednesday as I was reading a poem by Donald Justice, “My South,” which is preceded by the lines from James’ notebook beginning “But why do I write…” and concluding with “Basta, basta!” Justice’s poem is a four-poem sequence, the second of which is a sonnet titled “At the Cemetery”:

“Above the fence-flowers, like a bloody thumb,
A hummingbird is throbbing….And some
Petals take motion from the beaten wings
In hardly observable obscure quiverings.
My mother stands there, but so still her clothing
Seems to have settled into stone, nothing
To animate her face, nothing to read there –
O plastic rose O clouds O still cedar!
She stands this way for a long time while the sky
Ponders her with its great Medusa-eye;
Or in my memory she does. And then a
Slow blacksnake, lazy with long sunning, slides
Down from its slab, and through the thick grass, and hides
Somewhere among the purpling wild verbena.”

The other quotation preceding “My South” is attributed to “Q. Compson,” that is, Quentin Compson, who, at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, says, “I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” “It,” of course, is the South. Justice, born in Miami, Fla., denied he was a “Southern poet” but he returned with regularity in his poetry and prose to the Florida of his childhood, the nineteen-thirties. He was, in fact, our great poet of memory, of cherished nostalgia. Here’s what he wrote in the poem “Thinking About the Past”:

“Certain moments will never change nor stop being –
My mother’s face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune –
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.”

How many layers of memory, one within another like matryoshka dolls, have I described in this post?

`Without the Nine'

After a day spent editing prose like this:

“The force produced by the comb-drive actuator is calibrated by relating the voltage-displacement response of the device loaded with no specimen to the stiffness of the tether beams. A major advantage of using this design scheme is that we can adjust the capacity of the maximum load and displacement fairly easily with the adjustment of comb drive and tether beam arrangements. Another advantage is the capability of performing experiments under both monotonic and cyclic loadings.”

it’s a relief and a pleasure to come home in the evening and read prose like this:

“In it, connections, if any, remain unstated; likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the esthetic blush.”

That’s by the poet Donald Justice, the final words of the essay I linked to on Wednesday, “The Prose Sublime,” which bears an interesting sub-title: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” In the excerpt, Justice is referring to a passage in a novel by Sherwood Anderson and contrasting it to a Joycean epiphany. Of course, Justice’s prose, too, is sublime, an aesthetic quality no longer recognized by sophisticates. In his 1822 essay “On the Prose-Style of Poets,” William Hazlitt expressed disappointment at most of the prose composed by poets:

“The habits of a poet’s mind are not those of industry or research: his images come to him, he does not go to them; and in prose-subjects, and dry matters of fact and close reasoning, the natural stimulus that at other times warms and rouses, deserts him altogether. He sees no unhallowed visions, he is inspired by no day-dreams. All is tame, literal, and barren, without the Nine.”

I love Hazlitt but this time he’s wrong. Look no further among his poetic contemporaries for enduring marvels of prose than the letters of Keats and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Prose by poets need not be conventionally “poetic prose,” all empty, purple and desperately attention-grabbing. Good prose by anyone, poet or not, is likely to possess some combination of precision, concision, musicality and evocativeness. Consider this excerpt from “Life of Sir Philip Sidney,” by Fulke Greville:

“For my own part, I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod, as the proverb is, but to those only that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world, such as having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands; and if, in thus ordaining, and ordering matter and form together for the use of life, I have made those tragedies no plays for the stage, be it known, it was no part of my purpose to write for them, against whom so many good and great spirits have already written.”

I chose this passage because David Yezzi, in the interview I linked to on Tuesday, referred to Greville citing “the black ox (of melancholy),” and I was curious to track down the source. The sentence is beautiful, certainly, but concise? I would argue it is, even at 129 words, for Greville, in a single paragraph renders an apologia pro vita sua. For another example of concision from this contemporary of Shakespeare, consider his self-composed epitaph: “Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, friend to Sir Philip Sidney.” Greville published none of his poetry or prose during his life.

The finest poet-critic of our age, of course, was Randall Jarrell. Like many readers, I prefer his criticism to his poetry and consider his novel, Pictures from an Institution, among the funniest books in the language. (A friend read it for the first time recently and reported laughing so hard she injured something in her side.) Like Jarrell, I love Rudyard Kipling, especially Kim and the stories (Jarrell claimed he reread Kim each year). Here’s what he says in “On Preparing to Read Kipling,” from 1961:

“After you have read Kipling’s fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories. Chekhov and Turgenev are two who immediately come to mind; and when I think of their stories I cannot help thinking of what seems to me the greatest lack in Kipling’s. I don’t know exactly what to call it: a lack of dispassionate moral understanding, perhaps – of the ability both to understand things and to understand that there is nothing to do about them.”

That’s honest and true, and Jarrell’s prose replicates the contours of his thinking, the give and take, the claims and concessions, and gives us what Justice called “the esthetic blush.” How often does that happen while reading mere criticism?

`A Ceremonial, Small Mystery'

We remain loyal to certain writers despite their obvious failings and the persuasiveness of critics who note these failings and rightly condemn them. In my case, two sorts of nostalgia account for most of these irrational fidelities – a nostalgia for the world described by such writers and for my younger self’s joy at first discovering them. My foremost example is Sherwood Anderson, a writer whose reputation, if one exists beyond a few scholars, depends on a single, very good book, Winesburg, Ohio.

In 1965, the University of Chicago Press reprinted Anderson’s first published novel, Windy McPherson’s Son (1916), with a new introduction by Wright Morris. I had been rereading Morris, but made a detour into rereading Anderson, a writer at his best in small, prudently selected units. He wrote sentences, paragraphs, occasionally chapters but never novels. In his lovely essay “The Prose Sublime,” the late poet Donald Justice admires a brief passage from another Anderson novel, Poor White, and says:

“It is no more than a broken-off piece of a whole, but a whole in this case that really cannot be said to exist, a novel which survives, if it does, only in pieces, perhaps by now only in this very piece. Anderson seems never to have had a thought longer than thirty pages or so, and in the novel this paragraph rises toward whatever life and beauty it possesses out of a context truly flat and torpid.”

This is exquisitely and honestly phrased. I agree with Justice’s verdict, and go on loving Anderson, as evidently he did. Here’s the opening paragraph of Windy McPherson’s Son:

“At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall, big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand.”

There’s a smeary lack of focus in Anderson’s words. Read the opening phrase and you might expect Faulkner, but the prose is essentially pre-Modernist, lacking the hardness and precision we associate with the best of, say, Faulkner and Cather. Too many adjectives, too many adverbs, too little animating energy. It’s prose that brings out the red pencil in me. Here’s what Morris says about it:

“This picture of a thirteen-year-old barefoot boy is now closer to parody than portraiture, to Norman Rockwell than it is to life…Sam is closer to Huck Finn than Holden Caulfield. Little but the Mississippi seems to lie between Huck Finn and young Sam…When not literature, Windy McPherson’s Son is history.”

That last observation is shrewd, and probably accounts for my abiding fondness for Anderson. He was born in Camden, Ohio, in the nation’s centennial year, nine years before Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and 11 years after the Civil War. Joyce was born six years later; Pound, nine; Eliot, 12; Faulkner, 21. Anderson remains rooted in the 19th century, while Joyce and company helped fashion the 20th. Anderson, like Sam, is a barefoot boy, and this Ohio innocence lends his work a powerful pathos. Here’s Justice again, on the passage from Poor White:

“The experience has the character of a ceremonial, small mystery; and I would add that what we experience seems to involve a perception of time. It is a classic instance of things coming together even as they pass, of a moment when things may be said to associate without relating. The feeling raised by this perception is one of poignancy; perhaps that is the specific feeling this type of the prose sublime can be expected to give rise to. Made up of unspoken connections, it seems also to be about them. Probably it is not peculiarly American, but I can recall nothing in European novels, not even in the Russians, which evokes and gives body to this particular mood.”

This almost eerily describes my feelings about Anderson, which Morris seems to have shared. He dedicated his 1952 novel, The Works of Love, “to the memory of/Sherwood Anderson/pioneer in the works of love.” In an interview, Morris said he felt a kinship with Anderson and “his muted, groping characters,” and he later referred to his father as “a Sherwood Anderson tragic figure—full of the froth of American dreams but hardly any of the facts.” Morris, a Nebraska native, was an infinitely more sophisticated man and writer than Anderson, but attuned to his themes. As the epigraph to God’s Country and My People (1968), the third of his photo-texts, Morris used a passage from Beckett’s Molloy:

“From things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out of sight, no, I can’t do it.”

A sensibility that can encompass both Beckett and Anderson is rare and worthy of respect. Unlikely as it seems, Morris and Anderson (and Justice, for that matter) applied their various gifts to “things about to disappear.”

Yezzi Speaks

It's rare today to hear anything worthy of your attention said about poetry. A pleasant exception is an interview David Yezzi, a poet and executive editor of The New Criterion, gave last week to Mensnewsdaily.com. Yezzi has good things to say about Geoffrey Hill, Kay Ryan and other great living poets. Here's a sample of Yezzi's common-sensical understanding of poetry:

"Fortunately, poems have always been written in traditional verse, even in the free-verse heyday of the later twentieth century. I suspect they always will be. Good poems are nigh impossible [to] write, and any poet who abandons certain time-tested and powerful tools and techniques (on political or aesthetic grounds) does so at his peril. Formal verse technique is strong medicine—the most precise instrument we have for calibrating shades of meaning and emotion. Doing without it is not just playing tennis with the net down (as Robert Frost said) but playing without a ball. I’m not opposed to free verse, but I am opposed to those who are reflexively for it to the exclusion of all else."

`A Report of the Matter'

I was born in Cleveland and lived there until I was 17 and for brief spells over the next few years, so I was pleased when I discovered Wright Morris had taken a typically elegant and mysterious photograph in my hometown. It’s titled “Starfish and Portrait, Cleveland, Ohio,” and is dated to the 1940s, the decade before I was born. I’m unable to find the image online but I will describe it: We see a table, perhaps a sideboard or dresser, covered with a white cloth heavily creased from ironing, probably in the parlor or front hallway. At the lower left are three postmarked letters, the one on top addressed to “Mary A. Finfrock, 3186 Oak Road, Cleveland Heights, Cleveland, Ohio” – no zone and no ZIP code, of course. The return address is in Covington, Ohio. Behind the letters are a small, framed photograph of a grim-looking elderly woman and a glass vase painted with violets. To the right is a glass goblet holding four pens or pencils. At the center of the photo is a large starfish leaning against the wall, a souvenir of the distant beach. The wall is covered with floral-print paper.

Often, especially in the homes and workplaces of other people, we observe spontaneous, unposed still-lifes, but unlike Morris most of us don’t take the trouble to photograph them. We don’t know if Wright staged this arrangement of objects or shot what he found. If random, the set-up was fortuitous, for we can read the picture as an exercise in fanciful autobiography. Morris was both a writer and a photographer. Two of his books from the 1940s – The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948) – were in a hybrid form he pioneered, the “photo-text.” One leg of the starfish rests near the photograph of the old lady, the other near the goblet holding the writing implements. Morris – the “star” – is straddling two artistic worlds. Farfetched? Probably, but Morris’s eye was too acute not to have noticed.

As the epigraph to The Home Place, Morris chose a passage from Henry James’ The American Scene, a book he rhapsodizes in his wonderful study of American literature, The Territory Ahead. The James volume is notably dense, written in his elaborate late manner – Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order” – and it is probably the best book ever written about the United States, the one I would give curious strangers. Here’s the passage Morris selected:

“To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytical, minded – over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-colored picture of things – is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of there own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.”

I take that as license to read meaning into Morris’ picture of the starfish. As a native Clevelander, someone born there not long after he took the picture, I am, as James says, “at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.” The scene is quintessentially American and, I’m guessing, already a little old-fashioned in a shabby-genteel way by the 1940s. The old woman was born no later than the Civil War. The setting is working-class or lower-middle-class – the cloth is clean and ironed, the wallpaper pattern is tacky – and it all seems perfectly familiar from my childhood. More than any medium, photos are suffused with pathos. This well-lit, tightly focused photograph renders a world long gone, and like much of the best art it does so without tricks, with a peculiarly resonant directness.

`Traces of Human Events'

Ryszard Kapuściński makes an excellent traveling companion. Like any good journalist, his curiosity is a powerful engine. He’s forever speculating about the behavior of his fellow humans but seldom coming to definitive conclusions. This is not out of laziness or lack of learning but humility. He’s bookish – the heaviest object he carries around India and China in the nineteen-fifties is a sack of books – but he knows that human beings are his principal medium. They are slippery and opaque, as Kapuściński is to himself, as we are to ourselves. In Travels with Herodotus, he quotes the opening of the Greek historian’s Histories, in the English translation by Robin Waterfield:

“Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.”

Clearly, Kapuściński sees himself as an avatar of Herodotus, and he notes that a more accurate title for the Greek’s great work might be “Enquiries” – precisely what a good reporter is always making. In 1957, after a particularly frustrating posting in China, and always accompanied by his copy of the Histories, a gift from one of his newspaper editors, Kapuściński wonders what motivated Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.:

“Herodotus admits that he was obsessed with memory, fearful on its behalf. He felt that memory is something defective, fragile, impermanent – illusory even. That whatever it contains, whatever it is storing, can evaporate, simply vanish without a trace…Without memory one cannot live, for it is what elevates man above beasts, determines the contours of the human soul; and yet it is at the same time so unreliable, elusive, treacherous.”

His identification with Herodotus, who “wanders the world, meets people, listens to what they tell him,” is profound. Kapuściński’s sensibility reduces the world of flux to essence. He calls the Great Wall of China the “Great Wall of Metaphor,” and digresses on the importance of walls to the Chinese psyche. He conflates memory, myths and history, and distills them all to: “People sit around the fire and tell stories.” He continues:

“Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listeners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality.

“They listen, the fire burns, someone adds more wood, the flames’ renewed warmth quickens thought, awakens the imagination. The spinning of tales is almost unimaginable without a fire crackling somewhere nearby, or without the darkness of a house illuminated by an oil lamp or a candle. The fire’s light attracts, unites, galvanizes attentions. The flame and community. The flame and history. The flame and memory.”

I find this unbroken linkage of modern humans with our Neolithic ancestors, with Herodotus and the Greeks, with all subsequent humans, this relation of story telling and fire, oddly encouraging. Perhaps we’re less diverse than we insist. I’m also reminded of Anthony Powell’s overture to A Dance to the Music of Time. In the first paragraph of A Question of Upbringing, the first of the 12 novels in the cycle, the narrator observes workmen at the corner trying to keep warm around a burning bucket of coke. In the next paragraph he writes:

“For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined."

`An Obsesion with Allusion'

The late Ryszard Kapuściński was a rare wonder, a journalist whose work stands as literature. The Emperor, an account of the fall of Haile Selassie, and his other books were widely read as allegories of life in the Soviet Bloc. Censorship and harsher measures awaited writers who produced more direct accounts of life in the worker’s paradise. Necessity turned all honest writers into the children of Kafka.

I’ve read only the early chapters of Kapuściński’s recently published Travels with Herodotus, in the translation from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska, but already he has offered insights into the life of writers in a totalitarian regime. In 1951, as a student at Warsaw University, Kapuscinski studied ancient Greece but Herodotus was never mentioned. A Polish scholar had translated the Histories in the mid-1940s but the manuscript languished without explanation at the publisher. In late 1951, it finally was shipped to the typesetter but didn’t go to press for another three years and appeared in Polish bookstores only in 1955. Kapuściński speculates that Stalin’s protracted illness and death and the uncertainty of the subsequent thaw probably account for the delay in publishing what would seem an unlikely candidate for state censorship. A.J. Liebling, another journalist who produced literature, once wrote: “Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.” Even in death Stalin wielded the power of fear:

“But Herodotus? A book written two and a half thousand years ago? Well, yes: because all our thinking, our looking and reading, was governed during those years with an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed. Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous – from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye. The man who wrote had difficulty communicating with the man who read, not only because the censor could confiscate the text en route, but also because, when the text finally reached him, the latter read something utterly different from what was clearly written, constantly asking himself: What did this author really want to tell me?”

Kapuściński’s gloss is useful in understanding the work of Zbigniew Herbert, who wrote poems about classical history, mythology and Dutch painters that simultaneously hovered in a zone of meaning rooted in his time and place. In “Why the Classics,” Herbert writes about another Greek historian, Thucydides:

“for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile

“exiles of all times
know what price that is”

Only the dimmest of Herbert’s readers would fail to recognize the doubleness of his words. He was a rare poet who worked successfully in the particular and the timeless.Critics have noted that totalitarian regimes tend to value the written word more highly than democracies, and pay it the compliment of censorship. In a tyranny, every word is valuable and dense with potential meaning.

`Only Vacant Houses are Inhabited'

A friend who lived and went to school in Iowa and who recently returned to visit family entertained me with stories and rekindled memories of a part of the country few envy or even acknowledge as part of the country. The Midwest is blithely pigeonholed as the Great Blank, an absence filled with corn and pigs that one must endure on the way to somewhere else more important and interesting. She reminded me of Wright Morris, a writer and native Nebraskan whose once considerable reputation seems to have evaporated to another Great Blank, but whose work helped form and clarify my image of the Midwest and its place in the American imagination.

In the 1940s, Morris pioneered something he called “photo-texts,” books that mixed his own stark photographs, usually of houses and other buildings, seldom of human beings, with blocks of prose. The relation of image to word isn’t simple illustration, as in a children’s book or encyclopedia. Rather, Morris’ juxtapositions set off an evocative resonance rooted in memory and myth. The text is not a continuous narrative, and often blurs fiction and essay. His first work in this genre was The Inhabitants (1946), which I have in front of me, followed by The Home Place (1948), and God’s Country and My People (1968). The title of The Inhabitants is drawn from a passage in the “Economy” chapter in Walden, which Morris uses as an epigraph to the volume:

“What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder – out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life…it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are.”

The first picture in The Inhabitants is a barn photographed squarely from the front. To the left is a leafless tree, a section of fence and a wooden shed. To the right, in the middle distance, is a stone fence. The horizon is a distant tree line, a gray smudge. The barn is immaculate clapboard geometry – a rectangle topped by a triangle. In the center is a door opening on what appears to be a stall. Above is the window in the hayloft – another rectangle topped by a triangle, echoing the roof line. The text on the facing page, too, is an echo – of the epigraph from Thoreau:

“Thoreau, a look is what a man gets when he tries to inhabit something – something like America.

“Take your look – from your look I’d say you did pretty well. Nearly anybody would say you look like a man who grew up around here – but I think I’d say what there is around here grew up in you. What I’m saying is that you’re the one that’s inhabited.”

A longer paragraph, in which we find these wonderful sentences, follows: “In all my life I’ve never been in anything so crowded, so full of something, as the rooms of a vacant house. Sometimes I think only vacant houses are inhabited.”

The barn resembles a church – a small, weathered country church. When I drive past such places, I always want to trespass, and I use that verb in a double sense. There’s legal trespass, violating another’s property, but there’s also violation of lives lived, of memory sanctified, knowing that generations of families lived here, inhabited this space, accreted their lives in the planks and lathing, yet entering anyway. I, the stranger, become a voyeur of the invisible. I know modern, lived-in houses that feel history-free, disinfected of memory, with walls fashioned of some synthetic substance to which nothing can bind.

The last photo in The Inhabitants is a close-up of rough-hewn, unpainted timbers, probably at the corner of a building that might be Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. The wood is notched and piled alternately so it stands without nails. The background is black but for a weed, a lattice-work of shadows and two wooden wagon wheels, ghostly in the deep shade. The text on the left is titled “What it is to be an American”:

“There’s no one thing to cover the people, no one sky. There’s no one dream to sleep with the people, no one prayer. There’s no one hope to rise with the people, no one way or one word for the people, no one sun or one moon for the people, and no one star. For these people are the people and this is their land. And there’s no need to cover such people – they cover themselves.”

These might be a preacher’s words, Father Mapple’s (Moby-Dick) or the Rev. John Ames’ (Gilead), more chanted or sung than recited. We no longer talk or write that way.

`Turning Every Sentence to a Song'

The Internet is a blessed gift for a mind in love with linkage across time and space, but like anything mechanical it is dumb, literal and narcotic. Only a wary mind can keep it useful and honest, and resist confusing information with truth. On the way to something else I learned of Sean Rafferty, a Scottish poet (1909-1993). I wanted to know more so I Googled his name, which I learned he shares with a BBC broadcaster, an archaeologist, an actor, a mortgage planner, and a “coastal outreach specialist,” among many others. Though I found little hard information about the poet, he sounded interesting and my library has a copy of Collected Poems, published by Carcanet two years after Rafferty’s death. They also have Smoking and Culture: The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America, written by the above-mentioned archaeologist.

So, I come cold to Rafferty’s poems. They impress me as sharply observed, concise, quietly funny and melancholic. He seems to have lived on the margin, away from the literary world and the media, publishing little until 1973. He became a publican in Devon, and after a fallow spell returned to poetry in the early nineties. The Carcanet edition includes an interview Rafferty gave to his editor, the poet Nicholas Johnson. The poets he speaks of most excitedly are Catullus, John Donne, George Herbert and John Dryden, though he knows the moderns – Pound, Eliot, MacDiarmid. He seems to have been an autodidact, educated but not in any conventional academic manner. He admits to having read Wittgenstein but says:

“…when I tried to read Wittgenstein it was farcical. I simply couldn’t understand it, but in a curious way I realised it was a marvellous way to write poems. Because he writes in such short paragraphs.”

I detect no false humility or straining after cleverness. Rafferty seems his own man, a gentle man, and isn’t much bothered by what others think. Of his decades keeping a pub he says:

“Oh yes…it wasn’t as bad as that in the pub. I quite liked the pub in a sort of way. I liked the language…it’s gone now I think. Some people still talk it...It was beautiful, and funny. They had these curious similes. Weak as a robin. Wild as a hawk. Maized as a wheelbarrow.”

Many of Rafferty’s poems are untitled, another act of humility. Here are four lines from a 13-line poem (page 110):

“I have been happy watching happiness
visit a room as simply as the sun
turning a gesture into a caress
and turning every sentence to a song.”

And this (page 121):

“The candles yawning and the fire gone out.
Silence, your sin; let silence make amends.
You will not write a line and if you wrote
What would you write but epitaphs and ends?”

And on the next page:

“Say your say to earn the silence
soon must pay a lodge and bed
words will never win you. Settle.
And the worm be satisfied.”

I had already heard echoes (not influences or imitations) of fellow Celts R.S. Thomas and especially Samuel Beckett, and the next page seemed to confirm it:

“Not to be, not to be born is best
So the chorus sing.

“Room for a beggar man.

“What but a crown of thorn
could cap the suffering
marks out that wounded brow?

“This man was once a king.
He begs no kingdom now.

“A dark low ceilinged room
A single bed and rest.
Let the chorus sing
Not to be born is best.”

And here’s the final poem in the collection:

“Poets you may read it in
Williams Yeats or Hölderlin:
care for language, learn your trade
nothing is that is not made
made to stand, transparent, fine,
like the glass that holds the wine.”

Thanks to the Internet I learned of Sean Rafferty without looking for him. It didn’t tell me a lot but it told me enough. So do Rafferty’s poems.

`Nothing To Do But Make the Trip'

I’m not a patriot in the conventional sense. I don’t like parades, political conventions, baseball games or any activity that involves the collective, a gathering together with people I don’t know and probably won’t like. My understanding of patriotism is rooted in paradox: I feel loyalty and affection for a collective I refuse to join. That, of course, is quintessentially American.

What I’m talking about is not a nation-state or government or particular administration. Rather, it’s an unruly tradition, a crazy-quilt of individuals whose life and work inspire and instruct. Here’s a spontaneous list: Lincoln, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Henry and William James, Louis Armstrong, Faulkner, Charles Ives and so on. Except for its American patrimony, the list is heterogeneous, and you can formulate few useful generalizations about this crowd except that all disregarded the will of the crowd.

I started thinking about this while rereading Huckleberry Finn and trying to understand how Twain put the book together. By Jamesian standards, it’s an ungainly mess, like most of Twain’s books, but Huck’s voice, like Ishmael’s in Moby-Dick, is a triumph of pragmatism, a classic of American improvisation. There’s a passage in his posthumously published Autobiography that reveals something of Twain’s method, or non-method, at least after the fact:

“With the pen in one’s hand, narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow AS flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; . . . a book that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarter of a mile around . . . but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip, the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.”

I recently re-watched Straight No Chaser, the documentary about Thelonious Monk, another name to add to the list above. Monk’s eccentricity is well known, and in the film we see him on stage, when not at the keyboard, performing a dance reminiscent of those performed by autistic children. His speech and behavior were peculiar but, more importantly, so was Monk’s music, both as composition and performance. He once said something that reminds me of the passage from Twain’s Autobiography: There are no wrong notes. Anyone familiar with Monk’s music knows the odd, unexpected, dissonant notes he invariably played. In context, they work beautifully – for Monk. In the wrong hands, wrong notes are wrong notes, a license for sloppiness and self-indulgence, as J.D. Salinger proved when he channeled Huck Finn and called him Holden Caulfield. The linking of Twain and Monk is apt. Huck’s language is riddled with wrong words that work perfectly. As he says:

“I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time came; for I’d noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone.”

`Gorgeous Flaws and Terrible Genius'

I had forgotten how sloppy and inconsistent Mark Twain’s prose and general approach to craftsmanship could be. His best biographer, Ron Powers, speaks of Twain as “a purer product of America in his gorgeous flaws and terrible genius than most of his celebrants would ever want to consider.” Folksy stretches of Huckleberry Finn read like boilerplate cornpone, reminiscent of George Washington Harris’ Sut Lovingood tales and other works by the “Southwestern Humorists” that Twain is supposed to have transcended. Sometimes you despair of ever reading him again and then he surprises you:

“I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny – the hands was gone to the field; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering – spirits that’s been dead ever so many years – and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing, it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.”

The falling cadence of the final phrase is masterful. This passage, the first paragraph of Chapter XXXII, reintroduces the theme of ghosts and haunting, and reminds us that Huck is at least as superstitious as Jim and most of the other people he meets along the river. It’s Twain’s genius not to set the scene in the middle of the Gothic night. It’s “all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny,” but the light of reason counts for little in Huck’s world. Out of such passages come William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison. Powers is admirably honest on Twain’s gifts and their limits. This is from Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain:

“As a writer he had seldom shown concern for the received aesthetic demands of his craft. Form inconvenienced him; bother form; a Twain book, especially a Twain novel, went drifting like a river, from change to change, until it ended. Likewise consistency of tone, or consistency of anything: He would be uproarious one minute, maudlin the next, turgidly `historical’ the moment after that, and then the writerly voice might disappear utterly into a Cheshire smile of reportage. The characters in his novels could be shockingly cardboard, grown-up ones especially and grown-up females most especially of all. In this, too, he was distinctly American; form, the nuances of character and the edgy implications of gender were worse than precious; they were downright French.”

For me, seeing the Mississippi River from the air or land is always a powerful occasion. It’s the one natural feature I would suggest a stranger visit for insight into America and our history. The river is mercurial, at once powerful and serene. In Chapter VII of Huckleberry Finn, there’s a lovely river reverie, after Huck has faked his murder and is drifting in a canoe:

“I laid there and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky, not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before.”

I remembered some lines in a poem written by another Missourian:


“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god -- sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
The only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities -- ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.”

`Like Big Friends from Home'

Chief among the traits that distinguish Homo sapiens from other species is not language or the opposable thumb but the ability to lie to ourselves. Rationalization, a capacity to sincerely believe the obscenely moronic, is a uniquely human quality. You’ll never meet a self-respecting chimpanzee who has taken membership in the Stalin Society, whose members deny the “Ukrainian famine-genocide myth” and Stalin’s show trials, and blame the Katyn Forest massacre on the Nazis. One of his 20 million, perhaps 30 million, victims, Osip Mandelstam, wrote of Stalin, in a translation by W.S. Merwin: “He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries./He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.”

`That Is the Bare Bodkin'

I am reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn again, on a last-minute whim, in the bloated University of California Press edition, published in 2003 and tarted up with maps, photos, E.W. Kemble’s drawings, glossary, “explanatory notes,” “documentary appendixes,” and “textual apparatus.” Scholars have turned my grandfather’s ’59 Studebaker Lark into a ’59 Cadillac Eldorado, but despite the extras I’m enjoying Twain’s novel, as always. I’m struck by how funny Huck’s voice is and how horrifying it must have been, for whites and blacks, to live in his time and place. But mostly I’m reveling in Twain’s exuberant, limitless pleasure in language. Take the scene in Chapter XXI, in which the Duke is rehearsing Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“So he went to marching up and down, thinking – and frowning, horrible, every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he’d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back looking up at the sky – and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth – and after that, all through his speech he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before.”

Huck as drama critic. Or rather, Mark Twain issuing his declaration of independence from – what? High culture? The European tradition? That’s not how I read it. It’s an act of American cultural audacity, in solidarity with Melville and Whitman. Twain is joining the big boys, the biggest of all, in fact – Shakespeare. Of course, Shakespeare was wildly popular in 19th-century America, so the Duke and Dauphin scenes are historically plausible. In 1849, partisans of two Shakespearean actors rioted in New York City. The militia was called, and at least 20 people were killed and 100 wounded. Twain knew his nation and his era, its passions and pretensions. The version of Hamlet’s soliloquy he puts in the Duke’s mouth, a pastiche of half-remembered Bard, is still a howler:

“To be, or not to be: that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane …”

And so on for another 22 delicious lines, ending with “But get thee to a nunnery – go!”

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Twain 1,700 times, making him one of its six most quoted modern writers. For pure verbal vivacity in English, Twain is in a league with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Joyce. It’s fitting that Twain corresponded with Sir James A.H. Murray, the OED editor, and visited him in Oxford in 1900, according to Murray’s granddaughter and biographer, “with the excuse that as a last resort he was thinking of making a dictionary, and wanted to see how it was done.”

`Without Forgetting that Art is Frivolous'

That we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions seems to be the first principle of human psychology. The best among us are divided, dishonest and delusional by choice – often, if not always. We bolster the self at any cost. Shakespeare built a career on these truths. The best and most entertaining introductory guide to Shakespeare, after the plays and poems, of course, is W.H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Kirsch and published for the first time in 2000. He delivered the lectures in 1946-47 at the New School for Social Research, in New York City. Auden is the poet of the divided self, and he recognizes in Shakespeare a kindred poetic spirit. In addition, Auden was deeply immersed at the time in Kierkegaard, the most incisive psychologist.

Publication of the lectures is a literary miracle. None of Auden’s manuscripts survives. Kirsch reconstructed the lectures from painstaking notes kept by one of Auden’s students, Alan Ansen, who later became the poet’s secretary and friend. No one thought to record Auden on Shakespeare. When Lear calls man a “bare, forked animal,” he hints at our divided nature, and that is Auden’s starting point. Richard II, he writes, “is interested in the idea of kingship rather than in ruling. Like a writer of minor verse -- he is good at that – he is interested more in the idea than the act. He is good at presiding over a tournament, not at taking an action that means something, and his passion for ritual even embraces self-humiliation.”

All of us know such people, and some of us recognize ourselves in Auden’s analysis. Among bloggers, poets and self-styled bohemians, the type is common – “interested more in the idea than the act.” In his lecture on the play he most admired, Antony and Cleopatra, Auden writes:

“Antony and Cleopatra’s flaw, however, is general and common to all of us all of the time: worldliness – the love of pleasure, success, art, ourselves, and conversely, the fear of boredom, failure, being ridiculous, being on the wrong side, dying. If Antony and Cleopatra have a more tragic fate than we do, that is because they are far more successful than we are, not because they are essentially different . . . Every day we get an obsession about people we don’t like but for various reasons can’t leave. We all know about intrigues in offices, museums, literary life. Finally, we all grow old and die. The tragedy is not that it happens, but that we do not accept it.”

And in his Henry IV, Part 1 lecture, Auden approvingly quotes Falstaff on Hal: `Thou art essentially mad without seeming so,” and adds, “Hal is the type who becomes a college president, a government head, etc., and one hate their guts.” That must have gotten a good laugh at the New School, deep in the heart of Greenwich Village. In his concluding lecture, as an antidote to any suggestion of artistic smugness (on his part or Shakespeare’s), Auden says this:

“I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude toward his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.”

“Writer of minor verse,” indeed. To write is to juggle chutzpah and humility. Writing mirrors our divided human state, a recurrent theme for Auden, especially after his return to Christianity in the late thirties and early forties. In 1946, just months before he gave the Shakespeare lectures, Auden wrote “Under Which Lyre” as the Phi Beta Kappa Poem at Harvard. In it, he again links division with a Shakespeare allusion:

“Related by antithesis,
A compromise between us is
Impossible;
Respect perhaps but friendship never:
Falstaff the fool confronts forever
The prig Prince Hal.”

`A Little Taste of Power'

In a top-10 poll conducted by Sight and Sound in 2002, the English critic Robin Wood named Rio Bravo (1959) the best film ever made. Rankings, of course, are silly and arbitrary, and subject to mere politics and the shifting whims of critics and other moviegoers. But they can move us to view films we have missed or reevaluate those we have already seen. In the case of Rio Bravo, I won’t rank it by number but will happily include it among the top 10 or 15 most enjoyable movies I know. I would toss another film by Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep, into the pot, along with the first two Godfather pictures, Chinatown, The Wild Bunch, Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, Yojimbo, The Searchers, the original Manchurian Candidate, It’s a Gift (W.C. Fields) and County Hospital (a Laurel and Hardy short). An odd bunch, I know, but the principle criterion for inclusion is artistic inexhaustibility. All are movies I have seen many times and look forward to seeing again.

Rio Bravo did not disappoint. The cast is perfect: John Wayne, Dean Martin (in the best role of his career), Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan and Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez. In his monograph on the movie in the Film Classics series from the British Film Institute, Wood says a lot of dubious things about Rio Bravo, mostly assertions about homosexual and Cold War subtexts, but his love for the movie and what he calls its “joyousness” is genuine and admirable.

In this viewing I was struck by a scene near the middle of the film to which Wood also devotes considerable attention. Dude, played by Martin, is a former gunslinger now ravaged by the bottle. He has become the town drunk, and his humiliation by a pack of halfwits at the start of the film is the engine that drives the plot. Dude has been deputized to help guard a killer, Joe Burdette (played by Claude Akins), in the town jail. Burdette’s brother (John Russell) and his henchmen attempt to ride into town, and Dude orders them to turn in their guns. When one of them keeps riding, Dude shoots the reins out of his hands. When Burdette points out that he’s outnumbered, Dude coolly responds that he will be the first man he shoots. This exchange follows:

Burdette: “You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?”

Dude: “Mr. Burdette, get going, I have no more to talk to you about.”

Burdette: “You should enjoy it, Dude. Every man should have a little taste of power before he’s through.”

Only a man with a gun in his hand, who feels confident he has tipped the balance of power, would say such a thing. Burdette is patronizing the town drunk, an extension of the humiliation his brother started the night before, and at the same time threatening him. Dude, fighting with himself to stay sober (Martin was soon to patent his boozy persona, but by then it was only shtick), his sense of self-respect sorely frayed, resorts to the gun as a last resort. Its presence, his reputation for using it, and his gift for diplomatic language, are enough. For a story that couldn’t take place without firearms, Rio Bravo boasts a remarkably short list of victims. The only sympathetic character to die is Pat Wheeler (played by Ward Bond), and his role is small. The characters in Rio Bravo talk (and sing) more than they shoot. Hawks, the director, claimed Rio Bravo was his answer to High Noon (1952), in which the sheriff (played by Gary Cooper) faces the bad guys alone. The people he serves betray him. In Rio Bravo, the sheriff (Wayne) is aided by a motley group of locals and outsiders. Even Wayne’s character, tough and commanding as ever, first tries reason, then the gun. The mix of characters and the alliances they forge – romance, camaraderie -- are the heart of the film.

What often came to mind as I watched Rio Bravo this time was the poetry W.H. Auden wrote on the eve and at the start of World War II, especially “New Year Letter,” which he dated Jan. 1, 1940. Here’s a pertinent passage from Part One:

“Though language may be useless, for
No words men write can stop the war
Or measure up to the relief
Of its immeasurable grief,
Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents
Approaches that are too intense…”

And this:

“But where to serve and when and how?
O none escape these questions now:
The future that confronts us has
No likeness to that age when, as
Rome’s hugger-mugger unity
Was slowly knocked to pieces by
The uncoordinated blows
Of artless and barbaric foes…”