I remember figuring out in college that October, not April, is the true month of poetry. Today, Halloween, is the birthday of John Keats, born Oct. 31, 1795. Here are some others:
Wallace Stevens: Oct. 2, 1879
Flann O’Brien: Oct. 5, 1911
James Whitcomb Riley: Oct. 7, 1853
Marina Tsvetaeva: Oct. 9, 1892
Eugenio Montale: Oct. 12, 1896
E.E. Cummings: Oct. 14, 1894
Publius Vergilius Maro: Oct. 15, 70 BCE
Mikhail Lermontov: Oct. 15, 1814
Oscar Wilde: Oct. 16, 1854
Les Murray: Oct. 17, 1938
Arthur Rimbaud: Oct. 20, 1854
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Oct. 21, 1772
John Berryman, Oct. 25, 1914
Andrew Motion: Oct. 26, 1952
Dylan Thomas: Oct. 27, 1914
Sylvia Plath: Oct. 27, 1932
Zbigniew Herbert: Oct. 29, 1924
Paul Valery: Oct. 30, 1871
Ezra Pound: Oct. 30, 1885
I could have stretched the category “poet” and included Groucho Marx, Art Tatum, Sir Thomas Browne and Evelyn Waugh, but I figured I had already stretched it enough by including Riley, Thomas and Plath.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
`Wave From the Fat Book Again'
William Meredith, who died last May at age 88, was a fine poet who counted John Berryman among his closest friends. About a year after Berryman’s death by suicide in January 1972, I remember reading Meredith’s poem about his friend, “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs,” in the Saturday Review. I was 19 when Berryman died and his was probably the first public death I took personally, as though I had known him. Meredith’s poem expressed some of the hurt and incomprehension I felt, but also my gratitude for the work Berryman left us, especially The Dream Songs. That’s the spirit in which Meredith ends his elegy:
“I do what's in character, I look for things
To praise on the riverbanks and I praise them.
We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,
But this book is full of marvelous songs.
Don't let us contract your dread recidivism
And start falling from our own iron railings.
Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.”
I’ve been skimming Poems Are Hard to Read, a collection of Meredith’s essays and reviews published in 1991. Three pieces are devoted to Berryman – a review of 77 Dream Songs and two elegiac memoirs – but his traces are everywhere. Meredith met him shortly after World War II, at Princeton, but their friendship blossomed in 1962 at Bread Loaf. Berryman was burning with Dream Songs, which wouldn’t be published in book form until 1964. In a piece titled almost identically to the poem mentioned above, “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of the Dream Songs,” Meredith writes:
“That evening was the first time I heard “Dream Songs” read, though I was to hear them at all hours for the next several weeks. Once he came to my room at 4 a.m. for what was supposed to be a private reading of a song just finished. The acoustics of the big wooden house made it an unpopular public event. When John read aloud, the etymology of the word aloud was brought forcibly home.”
Meredith moves on to their final visit, in May 1971. Without denying or excusing Berryman’s alcoholic self-centeredness and histrionics, he writes with love and tenderness of his friend, of their temperamental affinities despite Meredith’s reticence and seemingly good-natured sense of moderation. They shared “a yearning for decorum, even for old-fashioned manners. I’m not speaking about our social behavior, which is dubious in both cases, but about a social ideal. At heart, Berryman was a courtly man, though usually (like most of us) he could act out only a parody of that. The forms of behavior that attracted him were as traditional as the forms of prosody.”
Meredith wrote about Berryman directly in at least two other poems, besides the one cited above. “John and Anne” is preceded by an excerpt from Berryman’s “The Development of Anne Frank,” an essay collected in The Freedom of the Poet:
“I would call the subject of Anne Frank’s Diary even more mysterious than St. Augustine’s, and describe it as: the conversion of a child into a person …. It took place under very special circumstances which – let us now conclude as she concluded – though superficially unfavorable, were in fact highly favorable to it; she was forced to mature, in order to survive; the hardest challenge, let’s say, that a person can face without defeat is the best for him.”
In light of Berryman’s own compromised maturity, self-sabotaging and ultimately his suicide, these words are heartbreaking. He must have been an impossible human being, as drunks are, yet Meredith, Saul Bellow, Donald Justice, Edward Hoagland and Robert Lowell, among many others, loved him and have attested to his charm, generosity, brilliance and humor. Meredith recalls that on the night before their final meeting, Berryman had “endured a crisis” in his hotel room in Hartford, Conn. The experience is described in a poem, “The Facts & Issues,” published in Berryman’s posthumous collection, Delusions, Etc. In Berryman’s telling, the crisis sounds more spiritual than merely emotional or biochemical. The poem begins:
“I really believe He’s here all over this room
In a motor hotel in Wallace Stevens’ town.”
Meredith says of this great, wracked poem: “It ends with the baffling spectacle of a man fending off torrents of a grace that has become unbearable. It is an heroic response to that crisis, as I think his death was too.”
Obviously, like Meredith, I judge Berryman a major poet, probably the major poet of their embattled generation, which included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. Earlier in the same essay, Meredith puts Berryman in an interesting poetic context, one that seems self-evident to me but will irk some readers:
“It is a curious fact about modern poetry that many of its large figures have been men of enormous intelligence (we couldn’t have made good use of Tennyson) supported by enormous reading, and that they want to restore rather than overthrow traditions. With our lesser poets, it has mostly been the other way around – average intelligence, average or below-average literacy, and enormous radicalism. The radicalism often seems, by comparison with Pound or Auden or Berryman or Lowell, naïve.”
He might be describing most of American poetry today. All of the poets cited by Meredith were scholars of various sorts, brilliant men for whom literature was a matter of blood and conviction. With few exceptions – Geoffrey Hill comes to mind -- their species appears to be almost extinct.
“I do what's in character, I look for things
To praise on the riverbanks and I praise them.
We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,
But this book is full of marvelous songs.
Don't let us contract your dread recidivism
And start falling from our own iron railings.
Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.”
I’ve been skimming Poems Are Hard to Read, a collection of Meredith’s essays and reviews published in 1991. Three pieces are devoted to Berryman – a review of 77 Dream Songs and two elegiac memoirs – but his traces are everywhere. Meredith met him shortly after World War II, at Princeton, but their friendship blossomed in 1962 at Bread Loaf. Berryman was burning with Dream Songs, which wouldn’t be published in book form until 1964. In a piece titled almost identically to the poem mentioned above, “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of the Dream Songs,” Meredith writes:
“That evening was the first time I heard “Dream Songs” read, though I was to hear them at all hours for the next several weeks. Once he came to my room at 4 a.m. for what was supposed to be a private reading of a song just finished. The acoustics of the big wooden house made it an unpopular public event. When John read aloud, the etymology of the word aloud was brought forcibly home.”
Meredith moves on to their final visit, in May 1971. Without denying or excusing Berryman’s alcoholic self-centeredness and histrionics, he writes with love and tenderness of his friend, of their temperamental affinities despite Meredith’s reticence and seemingly good-natured sense of moderation. They shared “a yearning for decorum, even for old-fashioned manners. I’m not speaking about our social behavior, which is dubious in both cases, but about a social ideal. At heart, Berryman was a courtly man, though usually (like most of us) he could act out only a parody of that. The forms of behavior that attracted him were as traditional as the forms of prosody.”
Meredith wrote about Berryman directly in at least two other poems, besides the one cited above. “John and Anne” is preceded by an excerpt from Berryman’s “The Development of Anne Frank,” an essay collected in The Freedom of the Poet:
“I would call the subject of Anne Frank’s Diary even more mysterious than St. Augustine’s, and describe it as: the conversion of a child into a person …. It took place under very special circumstances which – let us now conclude as she concluded – though superficially unfavorable, were in fact highly favorable to it; she was forced to mature, in order to survive; the hardest challenge, let’s say, that a person can face without defeat is the best for him.”
In light of Berryman’s own compromised maturity, self-sabotaging and ultimately his suicide, these words are heartbreaking. He must have been an impossible human being, as drunks are, yet Meredith, Saul Bellow, Donald Justice, Edward Hoagland and Robert Lowell, among many others, loved him and have attested to his charm, generosity, brilliance and humor. Meredith recalls that on the night before their final meeting, Berryman had “endured a crisis” in his hotel room in Hartford, Conn. The experience is described in a poem, “The Facts & Issues,” published in Berryman’s posthumous collection, Delusions, Etc. In Berryman’s telling, the crisis sounds more spiritual than merely emotional or biochemical. The poem begins:
“I really believe He’s here all over this room
In a motor hotel in Wallace Stevens’ town.”
Meredith says of this great, wracked poem: “It ends with the baffling spectacle of a man fending off torrents of a grace that has become unbearable. It is an heroic response to that crisis, as I think his death was too.”
Obviously, like Meredith, I judge Berryman a major poet, probably the major poet of their embattled generation, which included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. Earlier in the same essay, Meredith puts Berryman in an interesting poetic context, one that seems self-evident to me but will irk some readers:
“It is a curious fact about modern poetry that many of its large figures have been men of enormous intelligence (we couldn’t have made good use of Tennyson) supported by enormous reading, and that they want to restore rather than overthrow traditions. With our lesser poets, it has mostly been the other way around – average intelligence, average or below-average literacy, and enormous radicalism. The radicalism often seems, by comparison with Pound or Auden or Berryman or Lowell, naïve.”
He might be describing most of American poetry today. All of the poets cited by Meredith were scholars of various sorts, brilliant men for whom literature was a matter of blood and conviction. With few exceptions – Geoffrey Hill comes to mind -- their species appears to be almost extinct.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
A Nation of Poets
My vision of England is large, vivid and uncorrupted by experience. I have never been there. For me, England is a land compounded of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Keats, Dickens, Auden and a hundred other writers. I am its heir not only because English is my inheritance but because England’s writers, in particular her poets, remain unsurpassed. Chief among their accomplishments is the collective fabrication of “England,” which I intend as praise, not mockery. As an American, which makes me part of another collective work-in-progress, I am the grateful offspring of “England's green and pleasant land.” With thoughtful pride, Bryan Appleyard has written “Poetry and the English Imagination,” a movingly learned, non-academic hymn of praise for his nation’s poetic tradition. It appears in the Autumn 2007 issue of The Liberal, and it’s the best thing I’ve read online in weeks:
“Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words `We defy augury.’ Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.”
Think of John of Gaunt’s death speech in the second act of Richard II, moving even to an American, in which lament for England’s decay -- “This other Eden, demi-paradise” -- is already being sounded:
“This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas’d out – I die pronouncing it –
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”
Appleyard is no jingoist. Amusingly, honestly, he admits an “unfortunate fact: in the 20th Century, English poetry became American. After Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, England produced only one further uncontestably great poet – W.H. Auden. Ted Hughes seldom works for me and Philip Larkin is superbly second rank. But Eliot, though an aspirant Englishman, never stopped being American.” In his magnanimity, Appleyard goes on to overvalue John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, American nobodys, but neglects England’s own Geoffrey Hill, the supreme poet in the language since Yeats, Eliot and Auden. And don’t forget R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet/priest, and Basil Bunting. Appleyard continues:
“`Poetry’, wrote Auden, `makes nothing happen’ – but, he added, `It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’” Poetry is England’s way of happening.
“And yet few now know this. Poetry is barely taught and, when it is, the emphasis is always on the ‘accessible’. What on earth does this mean? That the poem should wallow only in the familiar? Children exposed to such supposed difficulty at an early age have no trouble with real poetry. My daughter understood Stevens’ ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ better at ten than I did at 45.”
The Auden line, from his great elegy for Yeats, is often contested, though I take it literally when referring to political or social change. Bullets and occasionally even ballots may change things, but not poetry. The late American poet William Meredith takes Auden to task in “Talking Back (To W.H. Auden),” arguing that poetry’s power is circumscribed but undeniable:
“What it makes happen is small things,
Sometimes, to some, in an area
Already pretty well taken
Care of by the senses.”
Meredith means the power of metaphor to augment the senses. To Auden he says:
“The exact details of our plight
In your poems, order revealed
By the closest looking, are things
I’m changed by and had never seen,
Might never have seen, but for them.”
Try to imagine your emotional, sensory and intellectual lives without the gift of English poetry. This “thought experiment,” as Appleyard might call it, would leave us hobbled, crabbed, hard of hearing, nearly blind and dumb. There are lessons here for Americans. The nation is awash with certified college graduates who have never read Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, but who likewise know nothing of Whitman, Dickinson and Stevens. Appleyard is generous in celebrating jazz and movies as America’s gift to the world, as poetry is England’s. He laments England’s burgeoning illiteracy but, with the aid of an American poet, suggests a solution to our “shameful conquest” of ourselves:
“Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England. Perhaps that is the way it must be: `The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days’ (Ashbery) must sweep all away. But, though the signs are not good, English poetry is buried too deep in English soil ever to be quite eradicated; and so, like Hamlet, we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night.”
“Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words `We defy augury.’ Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.”
Think of John of Gaunt’s death speech in the second act of Richard II, moving even to an American, in which lament for England’s decay -- “This other Eden, demi-paradise” -- is already being sounded:
“This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas’d out – I die pronouncing it –
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”
Appleyard is no jingoist. Amusingly, honestly, he admits an “unfortunate fact: in the 20th Century, English poetry became American. After Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, England produced only one further uncontestably great poet – W.H. Auden. Ted Hughes seldom works for me and Philip Larkin is superbly second rank. But Eliot, though an aspirant Englishman, never stopped being American.” In his magnanimity, Appleyard goes on to overvalue John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, American nobodys, but neglects England’s own Geoffrey Hill, the supreme poet in the language since Yeats, Eliot and Auden. And don’t forget R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet/priest, and Basil Bunting. Appleyard continues:
“`Poetry’, wrote Auden, `makes nothing happen’ – but, he added, `It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’” Poetry is England’s way of happening.
“And yet few now know this. Poetry is barely taught and, when it is, the emphasis is always on the ‘accessible’. What on earth does this mean? That the poem should wallow only in the familiar? Children exposed to such supposed difficulty at an early age have no trouble with real poetry. My daughter understood Stevens’ ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ better at ten than I did at 45.”
The Auden line, from his great elegy for Yeats, is often contested, though I take it literally when referring to political or social change. Bullets and occasionally even ballots may change things, but not poetry. The late American poet William Meredith takes Auden to task in “Talking Back (To W.H. Auden),” arguing that poetry’s power is circumscribed but undeniable:
“What it makes happen is small things,
Sometimes, to some, in an area
Already pretty well taken
Care of by the senses.”
Meredith means the power of metaphor to augment the senses. To Auden he says:
“The exact details of our plight
In your poems, order revealed
By the closest looking, are things
I’m changed by and had never seen,
Might never have seen, but for them.”
Try to imagine your emotional, sensory and intellectual lives without the gift of English poetry. This “thought experiment,” as Appleyard might call it, would leave us hobbled, crabbed, hard of hearing, nearly blind and dumb. There are lessons here for Americans. The nation is awash with certified college graduates who have never read Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, but who likewise know nothing of Whitman, Dickinson and Stevens. Appleyard is generous in celebrating jazz and movies as America’s gift to the world, as poetry is England’s. He laments England’s burgeoning illiteracy but, with the aid of an American poet, suggests a solution to our “shameful conquest” of ourselves:
“Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England. Perhaps that is the way it must be: `The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days’ (Ashbery) must sweep all away. But, though the signs are not good, English poetry is buried too deep in English soil ever to be quite eradicated; and so, like Hamlet, we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night.”
Monday, October 29, 2007
`Passionate Men'
That one man has been the subject of the two finest biographies in the language is evidence of his excellence as a writer and human being. It also suggests he inspires excellence in others. I suppose worthless biographies of Samuel Johnson have been written, but they remain unknown and unread by me. James Boswell and W. Jackson Bate give the lie to the notion that biography is a strictly parasitic art. Readers with little knowledge of Johnson or his work can enjoy and learn from The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Samuel Johnson (1977) as works of literary art. Bate (1918-1999) also wrote indispensable lives of Keats and Coleridge. Like Johnson, he possessed a finely calibrated moral compass, which is why the following story is so disappointing. Peter Breslau, in Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, relates an anecdote told by Harry Levin, the Harvard professor, pioneering Joyce scholar and author of The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958):
"Stevens was very conscientious about coming up for the Visiting Committee meeting [at Harvard] though in the questioning of the department he never said anything. He was one of the appointed members; we always had some writers and scholars. On one occasion, after dinner and after the speeches and questions at the Harvard Club, we adjourned to the rathskeller. A relatively small group, two or three people in the department and Stevens. He was really very glad to have a stiff drink or two. I have the impression that because of his shyness, he sometimes relied on this to break the ice. At any rate, he then began to talk, and he told us one or two smoking-car stories. They wouldn’t be considered anything today, but in those days they might have been considered slightly risqué. My colleague Walter Jackson Bate was there. He’d always had a very good sense of humor, but with each joke he grew grimmer. Stevens finally said, `I’m afraid I’m not amusing you, Mr Bate.’ And Bate, who was then very much the enfant terrible of the department, said, `You’ll have to be funnier than that to make me laugh, Stevens!’ Poor Stevens was quite humiliated, got very red, and stopped talking."
Context here is minimal. Was Bate under the influence? Was this typically priggish behavior or an aberration? Did he and Stevens have a history of antagonism? I once worked with a reporter who had studied under Bate at Harvard, more than 30 years after the unpleasantness Levin describes, and the scholar he knew was always a gentleman and a gentle person. I wonder: Had Bate, at the time of the Stevens contretemps, read this passage from The Rambler #11, published April 24, 1750:
"There is in the world a certain class of mortals, known, and contentedly known, by the appellation of passionate men, who imagine themselves entitled by that distinction to be provoked on every slight occasion, and to vent their rage in vehement and fierce vociferations, in furious menaces and licentious reproaches. Their rage, indeed, for the most part, fumes away in outcries of injury and protestations of vengeance, and seldom proceeds to actual violence, unless a drawer or linkboy falls in their way; but they interrupt the quiet of those that happen to be within the reach of their clamours, obstruct the course of conversation, and disturb the enjoyment of society."
The story, of course, doesn’t detract from my admiration for Bate and his work, though it does boost my fondness for Stevens. It’s nice to know the inscrutable poet/insurance executive could unbutton his vest, enjoy drinks with the boys and tell off-color stories. In other words, when not writing poetry he was almost like the rest of us.
"Stevens was very conscientious about coming up for the Visiting Committee meeting [at Harvard] though in the questioning of the department he never said anything. He was one of the appointed members; we always had some writers and scholars. On one occasion, after dinner and after the speeches and questions at the Harvard Club, we adjourned to the rathskeller. A relatively small group, two or three people in the department and Stevens. He was really very glad to have a stiff drink or two. I have the impression that because of his shyness, he sometimes relied on this to break the ice. At any rate, he then began to talk, and he told us one or two smoking-car stories. They wouldn’t be considered anything today, but in those days they might have been considered slightly risqué. My colleague Walter Jackson Bate was there. He’d always had a very good sense of humor, but with each joke he grew grimmer. Stevens finally said, `I’m afraid I’m not amusing you, Mr Bate.’ And Bate, who was then very much the enfant terrible of the department, said, `You’ll have to be funnier than that to make me laugh, Stevens!’ Poor Stevens was quite humiliated, got very red, and stopped talking."
Context here is minimal. Was Bate under the influence? Was this typically priggish behavior or an aberration? Did he and Stevens have a history of antagonism? I once worked with a reporter who had studied under Bate at Harvard, more than 30 years after the unpleasantness Levin describes, and the scholar he knew was always a gentleman and a gentle person. I wonder: Had Bate, at the time of the Stevens contretemps, read this passage from The Rambler #11, published April 24, 1750:
"There is in the world a certain class of mortals, known, and contentedly known, by the appellation of passionate men, who imagine themselves entitled by that distinction to be provoked on every slight occasion, and to vent their rage in vehement and fierce vociferations, in furious menaces and licentious reproaches. Their rage, indeed, for the most part, fumes away in outcries of injury and protestations of vengeance, and seldom proceeds to actual violence, unless a drawer or linkboy falls in their way; but they interrupt the quiet of those that happen to be within the reach of their clamours, obstruct the course of conversation, and disturb the enjoyment of society."
The story, of course, doesn’t detract from my admiration for Bate and his work, though it does boost my fondness for Stevens. It’s nice to know the inscrutable poet/insurance executive could unbutton his vest, enjoy drinks with the boys and tell off-color stories. In other words, when not writing poetry he was almost like the rest of us.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
`The Fiction of Happiness'
The elementary schools attended by my younger sons, ages 4 and 7, held Fall Festivals on Saturday. Houston, of course, has no fall in the strict sense, merely less humidity and fewer mosquitoes, though I’ve observed some Houstonians mark the season by stringing their houses with Christmas lights, assuming they took them down last year. Leaves remain green. One maple at the entrance to our subdivision is turning yellow, but from disease. In the afternoon, we found the cast-off skin of a three-foot snake on the side of our house.
The festivals consist largely of games, food, loud children and louder adults. Among the games is a variation on bowling in which the pins are upright gourds and the balls are small pumpkins. Every bowler, regardless of prowess, is rewarded with a plastic trinket manufactured in China, so no tender sensibilities are bruised. My kids enjoyed several variations on Mr. Bouncety Bounce – inflatable plastic cages in which children ready themselves for the mosh pit. Music was provided by a band whose members wore pinstripe suits, and whose playlist was unconventional: “Tiny Bubbles,” “Mustang Sally,” “Poke Salad Annie” and “To Sir, With Love,” among others. The cuisine was narrow: nachos, Tootsie Rolls, sausage-on-a-stick and Sno cones. I had some water.
Most distressing were the crowds in heated pursuit of amusement – weeping children, angry parents. The latter appear to be getting ever younger and wearing more tattoos and less clothing. I’ll give the last word to Dr. Johnson, from Idler #18, published Aug. 12, 1758:
“To every place of entertainment we go with expectation and desire of being pleased; we meet others who are brought by the same motives; no one will be the first to own the disappointment; one face reflects the smile of another, till each believes the rest delighted, and endeavours to catch and transmit the circulating rapture. In time, all are deceived by the cheat to which all contribute. The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue, and confirmed by every look, till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel, consent to yield to the general delusion, and, when the voluntary dream is at an end, lament that bliss is of so short a duration.”
The festivals consist largely of games, food, loud children and louder adults. Among the games is a variation on bowling in which the pins are upright gourds and the balls are small pumpkins. Every bowler, regardless of prowess, is rewarded with a plastic trinket manufactured in China, so no tender sensibilities are bruised. My kids enjoyed several variations on Mr. Bouncety Bounce – inflatable plastic cages in which children ready themselves for the mosh pit. Music was provided by a band whose members wore pinstripe suits, and whose playlist was unconventional: “Tiny Bubbles,” “Mustang Sally,” “Poke Salad Annie” and “To Sir, With Love,” among others. The cuisine was narrow: nachos, Tootsie Rolls, sausage-on-a-stick and Sno cones. I had some water.
Most distressing were the crowds in heated pursuit of amusement – weeping children, angry parents. The latter appear to be getting ever younger and wearing more tattoos and less clothing. I’ll give the last word to Dr. Johnson, from Idler #18, published Aug. 12, 1758:
“To every place of entertainment we go with expectation and desire of being pleased; we meet others who are brought by the same motives; no one will be the first to own the disappointment; one face reflects the smile of another, till each believes the rest delighted, and endeavours to catch and transmit the circulating rapture. In time, all are deceived by the cheat to which all contribute. The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue, and confirmed by every look, till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel, consent to yield to the general delusion, and, when the voluntary dream is at an end, lament that bliss is of so short a duration.”
Saturday, October 27, 2007
`Give Me Books'
The Friends of the Fondren Library, at Rice University where I work, held their annual book sale on Friday, thoughtfully coinciding it with my birthday. As I entered the Great Hall in Rice Memorial Center, where long rows of tables were packed with books and already mobbed by readers, I felt familiar symptoms – sweaty forehead and palms, tingling scalp, dry mouth. Conspicuously, my heart pounded. This is what hunters feel when they take to the field.
I reconnoitered for 45 minutes, trying to appear nonchalant, and bagged my biggest catch almost immediately: the boxed, two-volume set of The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, published in 1958 by Harvard University Press. Finally, I can give away the paltry paperback selection I’ve had for years. Its original price was $20, the Friends charged twice that amount, and I would have happily paid more for volumes graced with some of my favorite prose, by one of the heroes of the language. This comes from a letter Keats wrote his sister Fanny on Aug. 28, 1819:
“Give me Books, fruit, french wine and fine whether [sic] and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know…”
Note that Keats capitalizes “Books” but leaves “french” in the lower case. Here’s what else I found:
The Modern Library edition of The City of God, by St. Augustine, with an introduction by Thomas Merton. The Penguin paperback I’ve had for 34 years is held together with a rubber band.
The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, by Henry James. This was edited by John Sweeney, and published in 1956, in London, by Rupert Hart-Davis. Across from the title page is a photograph of James, taken by Alice Boughton, I had never seen before. The Master stands in front of a small portrait, hanging on a wall, of what appears to be a man in profile. James’ nose is perhaps 10 inches from the canvas. He wears a long coat and a tall black hat is on his head. With hands behind his back, he holds gloves and a cane or walking stick. In profile, and except for the clothes, James resembles a Roman emperor
A hardcover copy of Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1977), by John Wain, which I have read several times but never owned.
A first edition of James Boswell: The Early Years 1740-1769 (1966), by Frederick A. Pottle.
Another prize, my favorite after the Keats: a first edition of Robert Chandler’s translation (1985) of Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman. This is among the supreme works of fiction of the last century. Now I can give my New York Review Books paperback to some deserving reader. In the Grossman, between pages 158 and 159, I found the Delta Air Lines boarding passes of Bonnie and John Bauer. They were bound for Atlanta.
For my kids I found two Dr. Seuss titles, Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, and The Knobby Boys to the Rescue (1965), by Wende and Harry Devlin – all hardcovers.
All this bounty for $59, and the money goes to the library. Happy birthday, indeed.
I reconnoitered for 45 minutes, trying to appear nonchalant, and bagged my biggest catch almost immediately: the boxed, two-volume set of The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, published in 1958 by Harvard University Press. Finally, I can give away the paltry paperback selection I’ve had for years. Its original price was $20, the Friends charged twice that amount, and I would have happily paid more for volumes graced with some of my favorite prose, by one of the heroes of the language. This comes from a letter Keats wrote his sister Fanny on Aug. 28, 1819:
“Give me Books, fruit, french wine and fine whether [sic] and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know…”
Note that Keats capitalizes “Books” but leaves “french” in the lower case. Here’s what else I found:
The Modern Library edition of The City of God, by St. Augustine, with an introduction by Thomas Merton. The Penguin paperback I’ve had for 34 years is held together with a rubber band.
The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, by Henry James. This was edited by John Sweeney, and published in 1956, in London, by Rupert Hart-Davis. Across from the title page is a photograph of James, taken by Alice Boughton, I had never seen before. The Master stands in front of a small portrait, hanging on a wall, of what appears to be a man in profile. James’ nose is perhaps 10 inches from the canvas. He wears a long coat and a tall black hat is on his head. With hands behind his back, he holds gloves and a cane or walking stick. In profile, and except for the clothes, James resembles a Roman emperor
A hardcover copy of Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1977), by John Wain, which I have read several times but never owned.
A first edition of James Boswell: The Early Years 1740-1769 (1966), by Frederick A. Pottle.
Another prize, my favorite after the Keats: a first edition of Robert Chandler’s translation (1985) of Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman. This is among the supreme works of fiction of the last century. Now I can give my New York Review Books paperback to some deserving reader. In the Grossman, between pages 158 and 159, I found the Delta Air Lines boarding passes of Bonnie and John Bauer. They were bound for Atlanta.
For my kids I found two Dr. Seuss titles, Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, and The Knobby Boys to the Rescue (1965), by Wende and Harry Devlin – all hardcovers.
All this bounty for $59, and the money goes to the library. Happy birthday, indeed.
Friday, October 26, 2007
`The Celestial Blueness of Those Distant River Reaches'
On Oct. 26, 1852, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal:
“There are no skaters on the pond now. It is cool today & windier. The water is rippled considerably. As I stand in the boat the farther off the water the bluer it is. Looking straight down it is dark green. Hence apparently the celestial blueness of those distant river reaches – when the water is agitated – so that their surfaces reflect the sky at the right angle. It is a darker blue than that of the sky itself. When I look down on the pond from the peak, it is far less blue.
“The blue stemmed & white golden rod apparently survive till winter – push up & blossom anew – And a few oak leaves in sheltered nooks do not wither. A. undulatus [wavy-leaf aster] -- Very few crickets for a long time. At this season we seek warm sunny lees & hill sides – as that under the pitch pines by Walden shore – where we cuddle & warm ourselves in the sun as by a fire -- where we may get some of it reflected as well as direct heat.
“Coming by Hadens – I see that the sun setting its rays which yet find some vapor to lodge on in the clear cold air impart a purple tinge to the mts in the NW. Methinks it is only in cold weather I see this.
“Richard Harlan M.D. in his Fauna Americana 1825 says of man that those parts are `most hairy, which in animals are most bare, viz. the axillae and pubes.’
“Harlan says the vespertilio [parti-colored bat] catch insects during the crepusculum.
“Harlan says that when white is associated with another color on a dog’s tail that it is always terminal -- & that the observations of [Anselme Gaëtan] Desmarest [French zoologist, 1784-1838] confirm it.”
These were Thoreau’s thoughts 100 years before the day I was born. Those expecting a Yankee prig are surprised Thoreau even notices the absence of skaters. In fact, he skated enthusiastically and mentions it twice in Walden. With the painterly eye of Ruskin, he notes the effect of light on water and landscape. The man who boasted he could identify the day of the year by reading its fauna recognizes the late-autumn stalwarts (how I miss the asters and golden rod of upstate New York), and then shocks us with his choice of verb: Who would expect Thoreau to “cuddle?” Back to sunlight, then he tells us what he’s been reading: Dr. Richard Harlan (1796-1843), who was born in Philadelphia, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and at age 25 became professor of comparative anatomy at the Philadelphia Museum. Thoreau acknowledges the existence of armpit and pubic hair, the twilight feeding habits of bats and the color of a dog’s tail.
Thoreau reminds me that the only sane response to one's birthday is gratitude. We’ve made it another year, which certainly beats the alternative, and think of how much we have left unlearned. Think of the books unread or in need of rereading. Think of the details we have missed, out of exhaustion, laziness or apathy. Think of the remarkable Dr. Harlan. A cursory web search reveals that, among other things during his 47 years [Thoreau died at 44], he translated Jean-Nicolas Gannal's History of Embalming from the French, the free online text of which is available here. With all of these gifts, how can a birthday be anything but happy?
“There are no skaters on the pond now. It is cool today & windier. The water is rippled considerably. As I stand in the boat the farther off the water the bluer it is. Looking straight down it is dark green. Hence apparently the celestial blueness of those distant river reaches – when the water is agitated – so that their surfaces reflect the sky at the right angle. It is a darker blue than that of the sky itself. When I look down on the pond from the peak, it is far less blue.
“The blue stemmed & white golden rod apparently survive till winter – push up & blossom anew – And a few oak leaves in sheltered nooks do not wither. A. undulatus [wavy-leaf aster] -- Very few crickets for a long time. At this season we seek warm sunny lees & hill sides – as that under the pitch pines by Walden shore – where we cuddle & warm ourselves in the sun as by a fire -- where we may get some of it reflected as well as direct heat.
“Coming by Hadens – I see that the sun setting its rays which yet find some vapor to lodge on in the clear cold air impart a purple tinge to the mts in the NW. Methinks it is only in cold weather I see this.
“Richard Harlan M.D. in his Fauna Americana 1825 says of man that those parts are `most hairy, which in animals are most bare, viz. the axillae and pubes.’
“Harlan says the vespertilio [parti-colored bat] catch insects during the crepusculum.
“Harlan says that when white is associated with another color on a dog’s tail that it is always terminal -- & that the observations of [Anselme Gaëtan] Desmarest [French zoologist, 1784-1838] confirm it.”
These were Thoreau’s thoughts 100 years before the day I was born. Those expecting a Yankee prig are surprised Thoreau even notices the absence of skaters. In fact, he skated enthusiastically and mentions it twice in Walden. With the painterly eye of Ruskin, he notes the effect of light on water and landscape. The man who boasted he could identify the day of the year by reading its fauna recognizes the late-autumn stalwarts (how I miss the asters and golden rod of upstate New York), and then shocks us with his choice of verb: Who would expect Thoreau to “cuddle?” Back to sunlight, then he tells us what he’s been reading: Dr. Richard Harlan (1796-1843), who was born in Philadelphia, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and at age 25 became professor of comparative anatomy at the Philadelphia Museum. Thoreau acknowledges the existence of armpit and pubic hair, the twilight feeding habits of bats and the color of a dog’s tail.
Thoreau reminds me that the only sane response to one's birthday is gratitude. We’ve made it another year, which certainly beats the alternative, and think of how much we have left unlearned. Think of the books unread or in need of rereading. Think of the details we have missed, out of exhaustion, laziness or apathy. Think of the remarkable Dr. Harlan. A cursory web search reveals that, among other things during his 47 years [Thoreau died at 44], he translated Jean-Nicolas Gannal's History of Embalming from the French, the free online text of which is available here. With all of these gifts, how can a birthday be anything but happy?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
`The Chair was Just a Chair'
Morning is grim but coffee and a few good bloggers ease the transition back to humanity. On Wednesday, Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posted a lovely poem by Ivor Gurney, “Common Things,” and still-life paintings on related themes by two 19th-century American realists – Claude Raguet Hirst and William Michael Harnett. Mike uses the first line of Gurney’s poem as his title -- “The Dearness of Common Things” – which distils a sense I’ve had since childhood that certain objects, through long acquaintance, take on an aura of benevolence. Something of us rubs off on them. As a boy I was an animist, convinced my toys, especially toy soldiers, came to life in my absence. As father of three sons, I know my fantasy was not unique. More recently, I’ve had similar thought about books, that they grow promiscuous when I’m out of the room, accounting for my burgeoning dearth of shelf space.
In Hirst’s painting, “Companions,” we see a pile of four volumes, a pipe, a tobacco sack, a glass holding five stick matches and a vase with a recumbent stag on the lid. I’m not a smoker (neither is Gilleland) and I’m not fond of bric-a-brac. Nevertheless, the painting suggests home, leisure and comfort, as well as an appealingly old-fashioned sense of masculinity. This feels like a portrait by way of a still life. Hirst, by the way, despite the first name, was a woman. In one of his posthumously published lectures on education, Emerson wrote:
“We learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life. Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things, that we cannot enough despise--call heavy, prosaic, and desert. The time we seek to kill: the attention it is elegant to divert from things around us. And presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts -- then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God.”
For “facts,” substitute objects, and we hear a theme common to Whitman, Rilke, Francis Ponge and the Polish masters, Herbert and Milosz – the warm, pulsing life of the inanimate. The daily, taken-for-granted thing – the lamp, the coffee cup, the book – is always more than functional and inert in its human setting. In Painting and Reality, Étienne Gilson writes:
“Whether its origin be Dutch or French [or, presumably, American], the things that a still life represents exercise only one single act, but it is the simplest and most primitive of all acts, namely, to be….Always present to that which is, this act of being usually lies hidden, and unrevealed, behind what the thing signifies, says, does, or makes. Only two men reach an awareness of its mysterious presence: the philosopher, if, raising his speculation up to the metaphysical notion of being, he finally arrives at this most secret and most fecund of all acts; and the creator of plastic forms, if purifying the work of his hands from all that is not the immediate self-revelation of the act of being, he provides us with a visible image of it that corresponds, in the order of sensible appearances, to what its intuition is in the mind of the metaphysician.”
Gilson specifies the plastic arts, though on occasion we see it in language, particularly poetry, words at their most precise and conscise. Singling out objects, as Gurney does – “Beech wood, tea, plate-shelves” – illuminates them as though from within. Their being shines on us. Gurney’s poem assumes the permeability of the human and inanimate. In a comic key, they resemble the bicycles and their riders in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.
Miller Williams wrote a sonnet, “Things,” about his visit to the house of John Ciardi, after the poet and Dante translator’s death in 1986:
“The day we went to visit the house of the poet
I sat in the chair he sat in when he died
to look at the last things he looked at:
the cribbage board; the blue wall; the clock,
the slow brass pendulum; the deck of cards;
the small Picasso, slapdash black on white,
almost oriental, one foot by two;
the black round telephone with the circular dial;
the rug with wine roses; books on the floor.
I sat until the pendulum took my attention
to feel what he might have felt, sitting there.
“For nothing, of course, for all my foolishness.
The dying gave the room its brown meaning.
When he sat down, the chair was just a chair.”
Even in death, traces remain, if only we have the corresponding sense to know them. “Brown meaning” is suggestive, and not just because of the palette of Hirst’s painting. The wall, Williams specifies, is blue, and the Picasso is black on white. The human is brown, of the earth, wood, coffee, grain and warm Dutch interiors.
In Hirst’s painting, “Companions,” we see a pile of four volumes, a pipe, a tobacco sack, a glass holding five stick matches and a vase with a recumbent stag on the lid. I’m not a smoker (neither is Gilleland) and I’m not fond of bric-a-brac. Nevertheless, the painting suggests home, leisure and comfort, as well as an appealingly old-fashioned sense of masculinity. This feels like a portrait by way of a still life. Hirst, by the way, despite the first name, was a woman. In one of his posthumously published lectures on education, Emerson wrote:
“We learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life. Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things, that we cannot enough despise--call heavy, prosaic, and desert. The time we seek to kill: the attention it is elegant to divert from things around us. And presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts -- then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God.”
For “facts,” substitute objects, and we hear a theme common to Whitman, Rilke, Francis Ponge and the Polish masters, Herbert and Milosz – the warm, pulsing life of the inanimate. The daily, taken-for-granted thing – the lamp, the coffee cup, the book – is always more than functional and inert in its human setting. In Painting and Reality, Étienne Gilson writes:
“Whether its origin be Dutch or French [or, presumably, American], the things that a still life represents exercise only one single act, but it is the simplest and most primitive of all acts, namely, to be….Always present to that which is, this act of being usually lies hidden, and unrevealed, behind what the thing signifies, says, does, or makes. Only two men reach an awareness of its mysterious presence: the philosopher, if, raising his speculation up to the metaphysical notion of being, he finally arrives at this most secret and most fecund of all acts; and the creator of plastic forms, if purifying the work of his hands from all that is not the immediate self-revelation of the act of being, he provides us with a visible image of it that corresponds, in the order of sensible appearances, to what its intuition is in the mind of the metaphysician.”
Gilson specifies the plastic arts, though on occasion we see it in language, particularly poetry, words at their most precise and conscise. Singling out objects, as Gurney does – “Beech wood, tea, plate-shelves” – illuminates them as though from within. Their being shines on us. Gurney’s poem assumes the permeability of the human and inanimate. In a comic key, they resemble the bicycles and their riders in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.
Miller Williams wrote a sonnet, “Things,” about his visit to the house of John Ciardi, after the poet and Dante translator’s death in 1986:
“The day we went to visit the house of the poet
I sat in the chair he sat in when he died
to look at the last things he looked at:
the cribbage board; the blue wall; the clock,
the slow brass pendulum; the deck of cards;
the small Picasso, slapdash black on white,
almost oriental, one foot by two;
the black round telephone with the circular dial;
the rug with wine roses; books on the floor.
I sat until the pendulum took my attention
to feel what he might have felt, sitting there.
“For nothing, of course, for all my foolishness.
The dying gave the room its brown meaning.
When he sat down, the chair was just a chair.”
Even in death, traces remain, if only we have the corresponding sense to know them. “Brown meaning” is suggestive, and not just because of the palette of Hirst’s painting. The wall, Williams specifies, is blue, and the Picasso is black on white. The human is brown, of the earth, wood, coffee, grain and warm Dutch interiors.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
`Matter Aye and Spirit Too'
For laughs I go to Fred Chappell, the Last American Man of Letters, who is not recognized as such because he makes us laugh and that means he can’t be serious. His masterwork, Midquest (1981), is a gathering of four earlier volumes of poetry – River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, Earthsleep – intended from the start as a unified work, a “verse novel,” Chappell calls it, a 20th-century Dantean comedy, a “growth of a poet’s mind” without Wordsworth’s prim portentousness. The Dante figure is “Ole Fred” or “I,” a version of Chappell never banally autobiographical, and his guide is Virgil Campbell. Chappell has written that he “never experienced such unalloyed joy” as he did while writing Midquest, and it shows. Joy need not be sanctimonious. I open Midquest at random and this shines forth:
“`My mind’s about as sprightly as a shelf of Dreiser.’”
I’m reminded of Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night, in which a character uses Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, a tombstone of a book, as a weapon. Here’s a longer passage from the same section of Midquest:
“I’ll say this about the Book of Earth,
The guy who wrote it didn’t cheat a jot,
Even the footnotes are brimming over with matter,
Matter aye and spirit too, each
And every page is chock to stupefying,
Any page as good as any other.
. . . Oh sure, Jean-Paul, there’s a chapter on `Misery,’
And one on `Disease,’ a deadly dark one, `Torture,’
But tell you what, I’ll trade mine for which
Ever one you choose, I’ll still break even.
Bring me your tarred, your poor, your muddled asses,
I’ll bear the burden on’t. What I care, bo?
It’s only the suffering of children that truly hurts,
Most of the others just ain’t learned to read good yet.
Lemme check the Index, what’ll I find,
Hemorrhoids, aw rite, fetch it hither,
I got a gut of cheerful iron, believe.
Can’t be worse than reading William Buckley.”
In it’s anything-that-fits inclusiveness, in its easy mingle of high and low, I hear Melville and Twain in this demotic brew, but most of all I hear the voice of a poet born and raised in North Carolina, who ventured into the world, read everything, forgot nothing, and turned it all into colloquial speech jolted into poetry. This may account for Chappell’s paltry acclaim beyond the borders of the Tar Heel State. He’s no Johnny One Note in terms of tone and character, perhaps because of his parallel career as a fiction writer. His work is as sensitive to dynamics as a Bill Evans solo. Just 12 lines after the Dreiser crack, he writes:
“I ride the clashbutt hayrake to the barn,
Which is heaven. Barn is home. Home is heaven.
The barn resounding like a churchbell in
The rain, home, home, home.”
I love the rumble of monosyllables. I Googled “clashbutt” and came up empty, not even a stray misspelling, and it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but who would wish Chappell had not used it? It sounds like my favorite name for a musical instrument, “sackbut,” which brings me to something Chappell said in an interview on the subject of music:
“My musical experience is passive—if that’s what listening and enjoying can be called. I have no real training, though I have read a fair amount of musical history, biography, criticism, and so forth. I can read music fairly well but have not all that much occasion to. I use music in a number of ways—to organize poems and stories by rough analogy. (I know the fallacies associated with this silly practice, but I still find the ploy useful.) And as Walter Pater remarked, all art aspires to the condition of music—that is, the other arts envy its totality of expressiveness, its immediacy, its direct access to emotion, and its purity of expression. What it lacks is definable content—which is the advantage that words have over both music and plastic art.”
Chappell is no hick crafter of gimcrack folk art, though he seems to enjoy playing the role for sophisticates. Here’s another insight into Chappell’s art: He closes Midquest with an exchange between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, from Twelfth Night,
an exchange he recycles in his 1999 novel Look Back All the Green Valley:
“Sir Toby: A false conclusion: I hate it as an unfilled can. To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes. Does not our life consist of the four elements?
“Sir Andrew: Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.
“Sir Toby: Thou art a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink. Marian, I say! a stoup of wine!”
The OED defines “stoup” – which flourished in the 16th century but fizzled in the 19th --variously as “a pail or bucket,” “a drinking-vessel” and “a vessel to contain holy-water.” Chappell is a writer comfortable with all those shades of meaning.
“`My mind’s about as sprightly as a shelf of Dreiser.’”
I’m reminded of Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night, in which a character uses Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, a tombstone of a book, as a weapon. Here’s a longer passage from the same section of Midquest:
“I’ll say this about the Book of Earth,
The guy who wrote it didn’t cheat a jot,
Even the footnotes are brimming over with matter,
Matter aye and spirit too, each
And every page is chock to stupefying,
Any page as good as any other.
. . . Oh sure, Jean-Paul, there’s a chapter on `Misery,’
And one on `Disease,’ a deadly dark one, `Torture,’
But tell you what, I’ll trade mine for which
Ever one you choose, I’ll still break even.
Bring me your tarred, your poor, your muddled asses,
I’ll bear the burden on’t. What I care, bo?
It’s only the suffering of children that truly hurts,
Most of the others just ain’t learned to read good yet.
Lemme check the Index, what’ll I find,
Hemorrhoids, aw rite, fetch it hither,
I got a gut of cheerful iron, believe.
Can’t be worse than reading William Buckley.”
In it’s anything-that-fits inclusiveness, in its easy mingle of high and low, I hear Melville and Twain in this demotic brew, but most of all I hear the voice of a poet born and raised in North Carolina, who ventured into the world, read everything, forgot nothing, and turned it all into colloquial speech jolted into poetry. This may account for Chappell’s paltry acclaim beyond the borders of the Tar Heel State. He’s no Johnny One Note in terms of tone and character, perhaps because of his parallel career as a fiction writer. His work is as sensitive to dynamics as a Bill Evans solo. Just 12 lines after the Dreiser crack, he writes:
“I ride the clashbutt hayrake to the barn,
Which is heaven. Barn is home. Home is heaven.
The barn resounding like a churchbell in
The rain, home, home, home.”
I love the rumble of monosyllables. I Googled “clashbutt” and came up empty, not even a stray misspelling, and it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but who would wish Chappell had not used it? It sounds like my favorite name for a musical instrument, “sackbut,” which brings me to something Chappell said in an interview on the subject of music:
“My musical experience is passive—if that’s what listening and enjoying can be called. I have no real training, though I have read a fair amount of musical history, biography, criticism, and so forth. I can read music fairly well but have not all that much occasion to. I use music in a number of ways—to organize poems and stories by rough analogy. (I know the fallacies associated with this silly practice, but I still find the ploy useful.) And as Walter Pater remarked, all art aspires to the condition of music—that is, the other arts envy its totality of expressiveness, its immediacy, its direct access to emotion, and its purity of expression. What it lacks is definable content—which is the advantage that words have over both music and plastic art.”
Chappell is no hick crafter of gimcrack folk art, though he seems to enjoy playing the role for sophisticates. Here’s another insight into Chappell’s art: He closes Midquest with an exchange between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, from Twelfth Night,
an exchange he recycles in his 1999 novel Look Back All the Green Valley:
“Sir Toby: A false conclusion: I hate it as an unfilled can. To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes. Does not our life consist of the four elements?
“Sir Andrew: Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.
“Sir Toby: Thou art a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink. Marian, I say! a stoup of wine!”
The OED defines “stoup” – which flourished in the 16th century but fizzled in the 19th --variously as “a pail or bucket,” “a drinking-vessel” and “a vessel to contain holy-water.” Chappell is a writer comfortable with all those shades of meaning.
Mystery Writer: Marilynne Robinson
One reader correctly identified the writer I cited in Tuesday's post: Marilynne Robinson. The essay comes from Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (1990), edited by Alfred Corn. Robinson wrote of the First and Second Epistles General of Peter.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
`A Harrowing Dream'
Please read the following paragraph from the sixth page of an 11-page essay:
“Humankind is an extraordinarily isolated creature, whose history must appear from any distance a harrowing dream of frustration and fear and self-contempt, itself villain, itself victim. We have no other enemy, yet we are needlessly assaulted and besieged. This state of affairs is neither recent nor local, nor does it show signs of melioration. Everywhere harm is done on ingenious pretexts, even now when every risk is insupportable. With Utopia precluded fully and finally, truce would be accomplishment enough. But that has no hold on the imagination, perhaps because it cannot be made a pretext for violence.”
I cite this excerpt because in its admirably precise, measured way it states an unpleasant truth about our species and, though published less than 20 years ago, echoes faintly with the stern prophetic voice of such 19th-century figures as Carlyle and Melville. With some writers, Emerson among them (though this passage is decidedly un-Emersonian), the reader can detach blocks of copy, savor their self-contained rigor out of context, and lose nothing in the process. This is not a criticism. As an experiment in prose logic, now read the paragraph that precedes the one just cited:
“Now, at what must be very nearly the end of history, reading these old documents, I fall to thinking how little seems to have happened. It is as true of Christendom as of humankind that its fall came so briskly on the heels of its creation as to make the two events seem like one. If a hint of divine origins has always been discoverable, the fact is owed to the continuous sense of failure, of falling short, that makes meaning float beyond the reach of language, that makes beauty slide away from every form we try to give it, that makes giant loneliness the measure of small love. The shape of what we ought to be, which we cannot fill, remains our nimbus, the best claim we have to our own loyalty.”
Even without the moorings of its home-essay, this is the work of a confident, thoughtful writer. The prose is rare, purposefully metaphoric, devoted to the task at hand, free of purple lapses. It expresses sublime understanding of the human lot without sentimentality and never pleads the depth of its own sincerity – a self-sabotaging error in so much contemporary prose. A self-assured writer with the burden of a truth to relate is coolly indifferent to readers’ reaction. Now, finally, continuing the backward journey, here is the predecessor to the last paragraph:
“I imagine primordial crones, husking and stemming the weedy staples of a tenuous life and telling old stories until they become strange and perfect. This to my mind is not at all incompatible with divine inspiration. It is no demystification to say that from the first the Bible feels steeped in human experience. So early the people of the Bible were ready to concede to one another innocence and dignity, not compromised by evil, only obscured by it. Their stories are a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways. The spirit of the stories is a revelation in itself.”
The writer addresses not merely the origin and purpose of scripture, I think, but of any significant narrative. Isn’t the human instinct to tell stories precisely that -- “a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways?” Think of Moby-Dick and Molloy, by writers, not coincidentally, steeped in the Bible. Do you know who wrote these three paragraphs?
“Humankind is an extraordinarily isolated creature, whose history must appear from any distance a harrowing dream of frustration and fear and self-contempt, itself villain, itself victim. We have no other enemy, yet we are needlessly assaulted and besieged. This state of affairs is neither recent nor local, nor does it show signs of melioration. Everywhere harm is done on ingenious pretexts, even now when every risk is insupportable. With Utopia precluded fully and finally, truce would be accomplishment enough. But that has no hold on the imagination, perhaps because it cannot be made a pretext for violence.”
I cite this excerpt because in its admirably precise, measured way it states an unpleasant truth about our species and, though published less than 20 years ago, echoes faintly with the stern prophetic voice of such 19th-century figures as Carlyle and Melville. With some writers, Emerson among them (though this passage is decidedly un-Emersonian), the reader can detach blocks of copy, savor their self-contained rigor out of context, and lose nothing in the process. This is not a criticism. As an experiment in prose logic, now read the paragraph that precedes the one just cited:
“Now, at what must be very nearly the end of history, reading these old documents, I fall to thinking how little seems to have happened. It is as true of Christendom as of humankind that its fall came so briskly on the heels of its creation as to make the two events seem like one. If a hint of divine origins has always been discoverable, the fact is owed to the continuous sense of failure, of falling short, that makes meaning float beyond the reach of language, that makes beauty slide away from every form we try to give it, that makes giant loneliness the measure of small love. The shape of what we ought to be, which we cannot fill, remains our nimbus, the best claim we have to our own loyalty.”
Even without the moorings of its home-essay, this is the work of a confident, thoughtful writer. The prose is rare, purposefully metaphoric, devoted to the task at hand, free of purple lapses. It expresses sublime understanding of the human lot without sentimentality and never pleads the depth of its own sincerity – a self-sabotaging error in so much contemporary prose. A self-assured writer with the burden of a truth to relate is coolly indifferent to readers’ reaction. Now, finally, continuing the backward journey, here is the predecessor to the last paragraph:
“I imagine primordial crones, husking and stemming the weedy staples of a tenuous life and telling old stories until they become strange and perfect. This to my mind is not at all incompatible with divine inspiration. It is no demystification to say that from the first the Bible feels steeped in human experience. So early the people of the Bible were ready to concede to one another innocence and dignity, not compromised by evil, only obscured by it. Their stories are a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways. The spirit of the stories is a revelation in itself.”
The writer addresses not merely the origin and purpose of scripture, I think, but of any significant narrative. Isn’t the human instinct to tell stories precisely that -- “a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways?” Think of Moby-Dick and Molloy, by writers, not coincidentally, steeped in the Bible. Do you know who wrote these three paragraphs?
Monday, October 22, 2007
`I Kicked a Rock'
My 7-year-old announced last week he likes poetry and wants to write it. His self-declared models are Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky (the “Children’s Poet Laureate,” whose work is superior to Charles Simic’s), Mother Goose, limericks and the singsong gibberish coming out of my mouth. Michael has asked me to publish one of his poems. Please, be kind. This is juvenilia and should be judged “experimental” in the best sense, by a young poet whose voice is still evolving. Unlike the work of the influences cited above, this poem is written in vers libre, with but a single rhyme (not counting the internal rhyme). With the author’s permission, I have titled it “Untitled”:
“I saw a pumpkin when I was trick or treating.
I kicked a rock.
The cake she baked made me sick with food poisoning.
I saw a black duck.
I saw a pickup truck.”
I savor the Johnsonian allusion in the second line and the sly send-up of Texas, our adopted state. At the risk of violating a confidence, let me suggest an unlikely influence: Tadeusz Różewicz. The other day I watched clandestinely as Michael examined the books on my nightstand. On top was the new Archipelago Books edition of Różewicz’s New Poems, translated from the Polish my Bill Johnston. Różewicz is a poet I have been unable to enjoy as much as I do his compatriots Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, but Michael apparently feels otherwise and perused the volume for a good 10 minutes. You decide. This excerpt is from “the wheels are going around,” collected in 2004 in exit:
“yesterday between apocalypse and idyll
I heard across the ether
that the greenhouse effect
is caused
not only by the automobile industry
but also by cowpats”
ADDENDUM: Michael asked me to append this poem, "Oh, Dragon," as more representative of his work:
"Oh, dragon!
Oh, dragon!
What makes you a dragon?
Is it your firey breath or
Your wings that fly gently through the sky?
What makes you a dragon?'
“I saw a pumpkin when I was trick or treating.
I kicked a rock.
The cake she baked made me sick with food poisoning.
I saw a black duck.
I saw a pickup truck.”
I savor the Johnsonian allusion in the second line and the sly send-up of Texas, our adopted state. At the risk of violating a confidence, let me suggest an unlikely influence: Tadeusz Różewicz. The other day I watched clandestinely as Michael examined the books on my nightstand. On top was the new Archipelago Books edition of Różewicz’s New Poems, translated from the Polish my Bill Johnston. Różewicz is a poet I have been unable to enjoy as much as I do his compatriots Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, but Michael apparently feels otherwise and perused the volume for a good 10 minutes. You decide. This excerpt is from “the wheels are going around,” collected in 2004 in exit:
“yesterday between apocalypse and idyll
I heard across the ether
that the greenhouse effect
is caused
not only by the automobile industry
but also by cowpats”
ADDENDUM: Michael asked me to append this poem, "Oh, Dragon," as more representative of his work:
"Oh, dragon!
Oh, dragon!
What makes you a dragon?
Is it your firey breath or
Your wings that fly gently through the sky?
What makes you a dragon?'
Sunday, October 21, 2007
`To Crave and to Have'
I remember, while reading the slender black Penguin edition of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia in college, that I underlined more sentences than not. The book seemed dense with wisdom and learned observation, rooted in Johnson’s humane sensibility, and I feared missing something. It is, after all, the story of a young man and his teachers, in some ways like my life at age 19, and to that degree I was an ideal reader and wished to live up to Johnson’s accomplishment as a writer. What I feared most was failing him, and I worked hard to be worthy of his book. In a sense that labor has never ceased. Here’s a passage, chosen almost randomly, from Chapter 4 of Rasselas:
“His chief amusement was to picture to himself that world which he had never seen; to place himself in various conditions; to be entangled in imaginary difficulties, and to be engaged in wild adventures: but his benevolence always terminated his projects in the relief of distress, the detection of fraud, the defeat of oppression, and the diffusion of happiness.”
That was a model I hoped to emulate, but my success has always been compromised. My earnestness was matched only by my laziness and bad faith. I know with certainty that nonfiction can be a source of wisdom. Consider Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Johnson, Emerson and William James. But what about fiction? Can a novel or story still dispense wisdom in our skeptical, ironical age? This passage come from Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1980:
“Imagine a Carthage sewn with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need for slaking. For need can blossom into the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as alike as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole.”
With allowances for differences in language, though both writers are rooted in the Bible, Robinson is channeling Johnson late in the 20th century. The passage is doubly persuasive because it grows organically out of the themes, characters and events of Housekeeping, and is not tacked on arbitrarily like a superimposed sermon. Robinson’s words echo a reiterated theme in Johnson’s work. Look at this, from Adventurer No. 67, published June 26, 1753:
“That the happiness of man may still remain imperfect, as wants in this place are easily supplied, new wants likewise are easily created; every man, in surveying the shops of London, sees numberless instruments and conveniences, of which, while he did not know them, he never felt the need; and yet, when use has made them familiar, wonders how life could be supported without them. Thus it comes to pass, that our desires always increase with our possessions; the knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed, impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.”
As another example of wisdom in fiction, consider the words of the narrator of William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It (1948). He is garrulous, not afraid to stop the proceedings in a manner that recalls a more reticent version of George Eliot’s narrator. This reader, at least, welcomes his interpolations. In Part 4, Section 9, he writes:
“The truth is necessarily partial. Every vision of completeness is a distortion in one way or another, whether it springs from sickness or sanctity. But in the visions of saints there are voices that speak reassuringly of the cloud of Unknowing.”
Wisdom is not moralizing and I’m not calling for a revival of fiction-as-tract. When Tolstoy lost his artistic nerve and put on the mantle of prophet, he repudiated fiction and wrote screeds. At their best, novelists like Robinson and Maxwell possess the imaginative confidence to include wisdom among their pleasures, without sacrificing the supreme pleasure, which is aesthetic. Listen to Johnson again, this time from his life of Dryden:
“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”
“His chief amusement was to picture to himself that world which he had never seen; to place himself in various conditions; to be entangled in imaginary difficulties, and to be engaged in wild adventures: but his benevolence always terminated his projects in the relief of distress, the detection of fraud, the defeat of oppression, and the diffusion of happiness.”
That was a model I hoped to emulate, but my success has always been compromised. My earnestness was matched only by my laziness and bad faith. I know with certainty that nonfiction can be a source of wisdom. Consider Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Johnson, Emerson and William James. But what about fiction? Can a novel or story still dispense wisdom in our skeptical, ironical age? This passage come from Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1980:
“Imagine a Carthage sewn with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need for slaking. For need can blossom into the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as alike as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole.”
With allowances for differences in language, though both writers are rooted in the Bible, Robinson is channeling Johnson late in the 20th century. The passage is doubly persuasive because it grows organically out of the themes, characters and events of Housekeeping, and is not tacked on arbitrarily like a superimposed sermon. Robinson’s words echo a reiterated theme in Johnson’s work. Look at this, from Adventurer No. 67, published June 26, 1753:
“That the happiness of man may still remain imperfect, as wants in this place are easily supplied, new wants likewise are easily created; every man, in surveying the shops of London, sees numberless instruments and conveniences, of which, while he did not know them, he never felt the need; and yet, when use has made them familiar, wonders how life could be supported without them. Thus it comes to pass, that our desires always increase with our possessions; the knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed, impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.”
As another example of wisdom in fiction, consider the words of the narrator of William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It (1948). He is garrulous, not afraid to stop the proceedings in a manner that recalls a more reticent version of George Eliot’s narrator. This reader, at least, welcomes his interpolations. In Part 4, Section 9, he writes:
“The truth is necessarily partial. Every vision of completeness is a distortion in one way or another, whether it springs from sickness or sanctity. But in the visions of saints there are voices that speak reassuringly of the cloud of Unknowing.”
Wisdom is not moralizing and I’m not calling for a revival of fiction-as-tract. When Tolstoy lost his artistic nerve and put on the mantle of prophet, he repudiated fiction and wrote screeds. At their best, novelists like Robinson and Maxwell possess the imaginative confidence to include wisdom among their pleasures, without sacrificing the supreme pleasure, which is aesthetic. Listen to Johnson again, this time from his life of Dryden:
“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”
Saturday, October 20, 2007
`Slap Up Against the Reality of Fiction'
My boss asked me to recommend a title by Henry Green, a novelist I’ve praised zealously and often, stopping just short of proselytizing, I hope. Enlightened common readers know his work, of course, and Dalkey Archive Press has returned four of his books to print, but I’ve often fancied that Green resides in a private literary preserve, open only to members, and the key is in my pocket. That’s a measure of my jealous fondness for his work. To Ann I suggested starting with Loving, his 1945 masterpiece set in an Irish country house during World War II. It’s a fairy tale, a contrapuntal suite of voices, a comedy of class. I loaned her the Hogarth Press second edition, its wartime pages brown and soft as wool.
Recommending favorite books, like handing out any sort of advice, is risky. You’re putting pressure on your reader. If they like the book, of course, everyone is happy, unless you feel they don’t like it enough. If they don’t like it, or if the book defeats them, they may conclude you are an idiot. Or, they may feel guilty and not wish to admit their disappointment, so they make up a cover story, and then grow cool and distant. Friendships, even marriages, have foundered on less. All you can do is remain true to your honest judgment , which is not the same as your socially tactful judgment, and wish your reader happy reading. In a note to his collection of essays and reviews, The Outermost Dream, William Maxwell gives his criteria for judging a book worthy of your attentiveness:
“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”
All of these reasons are on display in Green’s Loving, except possibly “intolerable suspense,” an overrated quality. Green is especially good with dialogue. “Rapture” as a critical criterion reminds me of “aesthetic bliss,” proposed by Nabokov, whose stories were edited by Maxwell at The New Yorker. In the same note, Maxwell the novelist explains why he never reviewed fiction:
“Too much of a busman’s holiday. Also, after you have said whether it does or does not have the breath of life, what standards are you going to invoke when confronted with a thing that, like a caterpillar, consumes whatever is at hand? A long narrative requires impersonation, hallucinating when you don’t know the answer, turning water into wine, making a silk purse out of a string of colored scarves and extracting a white rabbit from a sow’s ear, knowing how to and when to hold the carrot in front of the donkey’s nose, and sublime confidence. ` The house was full of that poetic atmosphere of dullness and silence which always accompanies the presence of an engaged couple.’ That sort of thing will keep any reader from escaping out the side door.”
Maxwell’s mention of “the breath of life” will rile the sophisticates, but seasoned readers know what he’s talking about. It’s an unmistakable quality in fiction, like tenderness in a steak, and probably can be recognized in books from any genre or era, whether the author is William Gass or Emile Zola. In his celebration of Green, James Wood writes:
“As far as is possible in fiction, he tried to live off the fat of his characters. Though his prose is intensely distinctive, it strives to so mold itself around the characters of his novels that it might be the plausible emanation of those characters themselves.”
Eudora Welty, in a review from 1961, makes a finer, bolder point:
“His work indeed does not represent life, it presents life. What you discover about it is not the `key’ to it, not the `secret’ of his work, which is his only, anyway, but the experience of giving your regard to beauty, to wonder. There you have come slap up against the reality of fiction.”
Welty’s sly final phrase captures Green’s novels nicely. Fiction makes up less of my reading today than ever before. I’m impatient with much of it, less tolerant and open to new experience than I am with poetry and nonfiction. If a novel’s stance (tone, deportment, flavor) is too cute, too ironic, too thin or dense, too smug, too preachy, too humorless or jokey, I give up after a couple of pages – a liberating twist on the reading experience. Green -- author of nine novels, a peerless memoir and a collection of uncollected odds and ends – remains among that diminishing remnant of fiction writers who retain their charm and reliably render Maxwell’s “rapture.” I hope my boss agrees.
Recommending favorite books, like handing out any sort of advice, is risky. You’re putting pressure on your reader. If they like the book, of course, everyone is happy, unless you feel they don’t like it enough. If they don’t like it, or if the book defeats them, they may conclude you are an idiot. Or, they may feel guilty and not wish to admit their disappointment, so they make up a cover story, and then grow cool and distant. Friendships, even marriages, have foundered on less. All you can do is remain true to your honest judgment , which is not the same as your socially tactful judgment, and wish your reader happy reading. In a note to his collection of essays and reviews, The Outermost Dream, William Maxwell gives his criteria for judging a book worthy of your attentiveness:
“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”
All of these reasons are on display in Green’s Loving, except possibly “intolerable suspense,” an overrated quality. Green is especially good with dialogue. “Rapture” as a critical criterion reminds me of “aesthetic bliss,” proposed by Nabokov, whose stories were edited by Maxwell at The New Yorker. In the same note, Maxwell the novelist explains why he never reviewed fiction:
“Too much of a busman’s holiday. Also, after you have said whether it does or does not have the breath of life, what standards are you going to invoke when confronted with a thing that, like a caterpillar, consumes whatever is at hand? A long narrative requires impersonation, hallucinating when you don’t know the answer, turning water into wine, making a silk purse out of a string of colored scarves and extracting a white rabbit from a sow’s ear, knowing how to and when to hold the carrot in front of the donkey’s nose, and sublime confidence. ` The house was full of that poetic atmosphere of dullness and silence which always accompanies the presence of an engaged couple.’ That sort of thing will keep any reader from escaping out the side door.”
Maxwell’s mention of “the breath of life” will rile the sophisticates, but seasoned readers know what he’s talking about. It’s an unmistakable quality in fiction, like tenderness in a steak, and probably can be recognized in books from any genre or era, whether the author is William Gass or Emile Zola. In his celebration of Green, James Wood writes:
“As far as is possible in fiction, he tried to live off the fat of his characters. Though his prose is intensely distinctive, it strives to so mold itself around the characters of his novels that it might be the plausible emanation of those characters themselves.”
Eudora Welty, in a review from 1961, makes a finer, bolder point:
“His work indeed does not represent life, it presents life. What you discover about it is not the `key’ to it, not the `secret’ of his work, which is his only, anyway, but the experience of giving your regard to beauty, to wonder. There you have come slap up against the reality of fiction.”
Welty’s sly final phrase captures Green’s novels nicely. Fiction makes up less of my reading today than ever before. I’m impatient with much of it, less tolerant and open to new experience than I am with poetry and nonfiction. If a novel’s stance (tone, deportment, flavor) is too cute, too ironic, too thin or dense, too smug, too preachy, too humorless or jokey, I give up after a couple of pages – a liberating twist on the reading experience. Green -- author of nine novels, a peerless memoir and a collection of uncollected odds and ends – remains among that diminishing remnant of fiction writers who retain their charm and reliably render Maxwell’s “rapture.” I hope my boss agrees.
Friday, October 19, 2007
`Hold It Not a Sin to Regain Your Cheerfulness'
I have exchanged e-mails with a high-school acquaintance I haven’t seen since graduation in 1970. Like me, he stumbled into journalism and now edits a weekly newspaper in Georgia. We weren’t friends, precisely. We met in a writing class but I was morbidly bookish and Mark was socially well-adjusted, even athletic. We cut school together on April 22, 1970, in observance of the first Earth Day. It was sunny and warm in Cleveland, excellent for truancy, and we attended a poetry reading/revival meeting conducted by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a church downtown.
Mark and I caught up quickly and he told me his sister was murdered several years ago in Los Angeles, and he has become the family advocate in the case against her killer. It seemed inappropriate to ask for details, something I could do as a reporter without hesitation. Here’s a guy who always impressed me as unnaturally happy and big-hearted. After 37 years, I still picture him smiling, showing lots of teeth, like the logo for optimism. Now his sister is dead and he wants to know about my life.
Of all people, Mark reminds me of John Keats. When the poet was nine, his father died after falling from a horse. His grandfather, with whom the Keats children had gone to live, died the following year. When Keats was 15, his mother died of tuberculosis, and his brother Tom died eight years later of the same disease. By that time, Keats had also contracted TB, which would kill him in 1821 at the age of 25. If anyone had an excuse to indulge in rapacious self-pity, it was Keats, though his family history was hardly unusual in early-19th-century England. When we read his letters, however, he often sounds like the family cheerleader. On Oct. 14, 1818, six weeks before Tom’s death, in a letter to his brother George, Keats writes:
“Our’s are ties which independent of their own Sentiment are sent us by providence to prevent the deleterious effects of one great, solitary grief. I have Fanny [Keats, their sister] and I have you – three people whose Happiness to me is sacred – and it does annul that selfish sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort – the tears will come into your Eyes – let them – and embrace each other – thank heaven for what happiness you have and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.”
For Keats, happiness was a moral imperative. A taste of earthly Hell tests us, shriveling some into hard, spiky cinders, annealing others into strength and resilience. Ten months before the letter cited above, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats formulated his notion of “Negative Capability,” which he defined as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” This is conventionally glossed as the kernel of Keats’ aesthetic, though it might shed light on his irrepressibility.
As I was writing this, my oldest son sent an mp3 of “Young But Daily Growin’,” a traditional ballad covered by Bob Dylan on the Basement Tapes. The performance is masterful and heartbreaking. Dylan’s control of tune, sustained over seven verses and more than five and a half minutes, is flawless. Here is the second-to-last verse:
“At the age of sixteen, he was a married man,
And at the age of seventeen he was a father of a son,
And at the age of eighteen years, 'round his grave the grass grew long
Cruel death had put an end to his growin’.”
Mark and I caught up quickly and he told me his sister was murdered several years ago in Los Angeles, and he has become the family advocate in the case against her killer. It seemed inappropriate to ask for details, something I could do as a reporter without hesitation. Here’s a guy who always impressed me as unnaturally happy and big-hearted. After 37 years, I still picture him smiling, showing lots of teeth, like the logo for optimism. Now his sister is dead and he wants to know about my life.
Of all people, Mark reminds me of John Keats. When the poet was nine, his father died after falling from a horse. His grandfather, with whom the Keats children had gone to live, died the following year. When Keats was 15, his mother died of tuberculosis, and his brother Tom died eight years later of the same disease. By that time, Keats had also contracted TB, which would kill him in 1821 at the age of 25. If anyone had an excuse to indulge in rapacious self-pity, it was Keats, though his family history was hardly unusual in early-19th-century England. When we read his letters, however, he often sounds like the family cheerleader. On Oct. 14, 1818, six weeks before Tom’s death, in a letter to his brother George, Keats writes:
“Our’s are ties which independent of their own Sentiment are sent us by providence to prevent the deleterious effects of one great, solitary grief. I have Fanny [Keats, their sister] and I have you – three people whose Happiness to me is sacred – and it does annul that selfish sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort – the tears will come into your Eyes – let them – and embrace each other – thank heaven for what happiness you have and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.”
For Keats, happiness was a moral imperative. A taste of earthly Hell tests us, shriveling some into hard, spiky cinders, annealing others into strength and resilience. Ten months before the letter cited above, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats formulated his notion of “Negative Capability,” which he defined as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” This is conventionally glossed as the kernel of Keats’ aesthetic, though it might shed light on his irrepressibility.
As I was writing this, my oldest son sent an mp3 of “Young But Daily Growin’,” a traditional ballad covered by Bob Dylan on the Basement Tapes. The performance is masterful and heartbreaking. Dylan’s control of tune, sustained over seven verses and more than five and a half minutes, is flawless. Here is the second-to-last verse:
“At the age of sixteen, he was a married man,
And at the age of seventeen he was a father of a son,
And at the age of eighteen years, 'round his grave the grass grew long
Cruel death had put an end to his growin’.”
Thursday, October 18, 2007
`Happy As a Monkey in a Monkey Tree'
The grandfather of a junior-high-school friend lived with his family. The old man was Hungarian and his English was brusque and heavily accented. Whenever I visited, he was seated at the kitchen table with a bottle and a shot glass. In a 40-year-old memory, he resembles Maxim Gorky. He had a white mustache and gnarled hands, wore a cardigan sweater over his work clothes, and always asked the same question: “What they teach you in school besides bullshit?”
With a dash of Akim Tamiroff thrown in, it was the old man’s voice I borrowed Wednesday morning when I read Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina, at my 4-year-old’s preschool. My kids love this book, published in 1940, about a peddler whose caps, worn in a tall stack on top of his head, are stolen by a tree full of monkeys when he takes a nap. Through inadvertent cleverness, he gets his caps back, and the resolution always reminds me of the line from “Sail Away,” Randy Newman’s song: “You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.”
Slobodkina was Russian, born in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, in 1908, and grew up in Manchuria. She immigrated to the United States on a student visa in 1929, enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and so was spared Stalin’s most malevolent horrors. Esphyr is Russian for “Esther,” the great heroine of the Old Testament, whose name in Hebrew means “hidden.” The Biblical Esther was a Jew in Persia, modern Iran. Slobodkina was a Russian Jew in the United States, who died in 2002. Her modest story of a cap peddler, a free-lance entrepreneur, a parasite on the working class, would not have pleased the apparatchiks. For more about her and her work, go to the Slobodkina Foundation web site.
Here’s the peddler’s sales pitch, intoned four times in the 40-page book: “Caps! Caps for sale. Fifty cents a cap.” “Cap,” in Tamiroff-inflected Hungarian, is pronounced “Kyep,” to rhyme roughly with “hep,” as in cat. My youngest son knows the book by heart. I read it from the stage in the cafeteria to three classes from his Montessori preschool. Each time I came to the sales pitch, David yelled from the audience: “Fifty cents a kyep.” I faced 60 kids who, as the story proceeded and their uncertainty about this big stranger ebbed, stomped their feet and threw their imaginary kyeps to the floor. In the book, when the monkeys taunt the peddler, Slobodkina has them utter a knot of Slavic consonants: “Tsz, tsz, tsz.” This I rendered as “Tsh, tsh, tsh,” and the kids went along with it.
So, here’s what I gave them: some laughs, a brief Russian history lesson, a digression into the meaning of “peddler,” foot-stomping and sound effects. And the teacher promised they could make caps out of construction paper and practice throwing them on the floor.
“What they teach you in school besides bullshit?”
With a dash of Akim Tamiroff thrown in, it was the old man’s voice I borrowed Wednesday morning when I read Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina, at my 4-year-old’s preschool. My kids love this book, published in 1940, about a peddler whose caps, worn in a tall stack on top of his head, are stolen by a tree full of monkeys when he takes a nap. Through inadvertent cleverness, he gets his caps back, and the resolution always reminds me of the line from “Sail Away,” Randy Newman’s song: “You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.”
Slobodkina was Russian, born in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, in 1908, and grew up in Manchuria. She immigrated to the United States on a student visa in 1929, enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and so was spared Stalin’s most malevolent horrors. Esphyr is Russian for “Esther,” the great heroine of the Old Testament, whose name in Hebrew means “hidden.” The Biblical Esther was a Jew in Persia, modern Iran. Slobodkina was a Russian Jew in the United States, who died in 2002. Her modest story of a cap peddler, a free-lance entrepreneur, a parasite on the working class, would not have pleased the apparatchiks. For more about her and her work, go to the Slobodkina Foundation web site.
Here’s the peddler’s sales pitch, intoned four times in the 40-page book: “Caps! Caps for sale. Fifty cents a cap.” “Cap,” in Tamiroff-inflected Hungarian, is pronounced “Kyep,” to rhyme roughly with “hep,” as in cat. My youngest son knows the book by heart. I read it from the stage in the cafeteria to three classes from his Montessori preschool. Each time I came to the sales pitch, David yelled from the audience: “Fifty cents a kyep.” I faced 60 kids who, as the story proceeded and their uncertainty about this big stranger ebbed, stomped their feet and threw their imaginary kyeps to the floor. In the book, when the monkeys taunt the peddler, Slobodkina has them utter a knot of Slavic consonants: “Tsz, tsz, tsz.” This I rendered as “Tsh, tsh, tsh,” and the kids went along with it.
So, here’s what I gave them: some laughs, a brief Russian history lesson, a digression into the meaning of “peddler,” foot-stomping and sound effects. And the teacher promised they could make caps out of construction paper and practice throwing them on the floor.
“What they teach you in school besides bullshit?”
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Spurious
When it’s more than a mere parlor game, parody is a symptom of healthy irreverence. Take Spurious, an anonymous blog by someone possibly named Lars (perfect) who writes prolifically about nothing. With pitch-perfect precision, the author captures the pretentiousness and narcissism, the mind-numbing emptiness and self-regard, of trendy adepts of postmodernism. He drops all the right names – Blanchot, Lacan, you know the others – and even the blog photo, of a woman with messy hair and avian features, says: “I’m among the chosen and you’re not.” On Tuesday, I was pleased to learn I’m not alone in my appreciation of Lars’ deadly wit. Mary Jackson at The Iconoclast, the community blog of the New English Review, shared her enthusiasm for Spurious. Thank you, Mary, and thank you, Lars, for reminding me to take myself a little less seriously.
`I Love No Leafless Land'
Our neighborhood, deep in a subdivision with one entrance, dense with oaks, some of them 80 feet tall, and with a secondary canopy of magnolias, pines and palms, is shaded, quiet and green. My first surprise about Houston, glimpsed from a seat in a 737, was the preponderance of green, and not just golf courses. I expected a brown palette, as I’d seen in Albuquerque years before, but that was just Northern ignorance.
My brother and I talked last weekend about the centrality of trees to our imaginations, how so many early memories include them, at least on the periphery, and how their presence is somehow reassuring, rooted in primal memories of security. We grew up in an older suburb and our lot adjoined a 20-acre wooded tract owned by the City of Cleveland. I remember the elms that blockaded our backyard before Dutch elm disease killed them in the late nineteen-fifties. I remember a summer evening when my foot jammed in the branches of a tall ash I was climbing, and how I screamed until men in the neighborhood, out mowing their lawns, got me down. We collected buckets of fine summer dust, hauled them to treetops, dumped them into mushroom clouds of brown and called them “A-bombs.” When I first read “Burnt Norton,” I understood what Eliot meant by “Ascend to summer in the tree.”
A mile south of our Houston neighborhood is a typical urban intersection. The corners are occupied by two gas stations, a bank and a block-long strip mall (podiatrist, liquor, cell phones). About 18 months ago, developers bought the larger strip mall at the northwest corner and tore it down, leaving only the gas station. With uncharacteristic speed and efficiency for Houston, they cut down the trees, razed the buildings, smashed the parking lot and sidewalks, and hauled it all away. Within days, only a long rectangle of bare soil that turned alternately to dust and mud remained. The crass violence of the operation was impressive. This week, more than a year after the promised completion of a replacement strip mall, surveyors and dump trucks are on the scene and a sign announcing the imminent arrival of a Starbucks has been posted. In a city without zoning regulations, this is how greed abets ugliness and waste.
A.E. Housman is not conventionally judged a “nature poet,” but an unexpected number of his poems express implicit pleasure in trees, hedgerows and green pastures. He celebrates an older, greener England, as in the first stanza of “VIII” from More Poems:
“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land.”
My brother and I talked last weekend about the centrality of trees to our imaginations, how so many early memories include them, at least on the periphery, and how their presence is somehow reassuring, rooted in primal memories of security. We grew up in an older suburb and our lot adjoined a 20-acre wooded tract owned by the City of Cleveland. I remember the elms that blockaded our backyard before Dutch elm disease killed them in the late nineteen-fifties. I remember a summer evening when my foot jammed in the branches of a tall ash I was climbing, and how I screamed until men in the neighborhood, out mowing their lawns, got me down. We collected buckets of fine summer dust, hauled them to treetops, dumped them into mushroom clouds of brown and called them “A-bombs.” When I first read “Burnt Norton,” I understood what Eliot meant by “Ascend to summer in the tree.”
A mile south of our Houston neighborhood is a typical urban intersection. The corners are occupied by two gas stations, a bank and a block-long strip mall (podiatrist, liquor, cell phones). About 18 months ago, developers bought the larger strip mall at the northwest corner and tore it down, leaving only the gas station. With uncharacteristic speed and efficiency for Houston, they cut down the trees, razed the buildings, smashed the parking lot and sidewalks, and hauled it all away. Within days, only a long rectangle of bare soil that turned alternately to dust and mud remained. The crass violence of the operation was impressive. This week, more than a year after the promised completion of a replacement strip mall, surveyors and dump trucks are on the scene and a sign announcing the imminent arrival of a Starbucks has been posted. In a city without zoning regulations, this is how greed abets ugliness and waste.
A.E. Housman is not conventionally judged a “nature poet,” but an unexpected number of his poems express implicit pleasure in trees, hedgerows and green pastures. He celebrates an older, greener England, as in the first stanza of “VIII” from More Poems:
“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land.”
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
`Unvisited Tombs'
People write and paint and compose for some of the same reasons lovers carve their initials on the bark of beech trees – to announce their existence and leave a trace of it behind. Art is like DNA, our biological graffiti, and if it’s any good it might endure and move and encourage others to create a new generation of books, paintings and songs.
A writer whose work I love deeply is the late William Maxwell, longtime fiction editor for The New Yorker and author of some of the loveliest, most mysterious books in American literature, especially the novels Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow, the latter published in 1980 when Maxwell was 72. I have started reading William Maxwell: A Literary Life, by Barbara Burkhardt, and in her introduction, she quotes from her first interview with the novelist, in 1991. Maxwell preferred to be interviewed in person but to answer with his typewriter. Here’s how he explained his compulsion to write at that first meeting:
“I have a melancholy feeling that all human experience goes down the drain, or to put it more politely, ends in oblivion, except when somebody records some part of his own experience – which can of course be the life that goes on in his mind and imagination as well as what he had for breakfast. In a very small way I have fought this, by trying to recreate in a form that I hoped would have some degree of permanence the character and lives of people I have known and loved. Or people modeled on them. To succeed this would have to move the reader as I have been moved. This is the intricate, in and out, round and round, now direct and now indirect process that comes under the heading of literary art.”
Maxwell’s art, more than most writers’, is rooted in loss. When he was 10, in 1918, his mother was among the 100 million people who died in the worldwide Spanish influenza epidemic. That he considered his work a form of preservation or reclamation is no surprise to devoted readers. The figure of the dying mother recurs throughout his work. Maxwell’s fiction is deeply autobiographical but not in the banally literal sense. It’s as though he tried again and again to resolve his life’s primal scene, only to try again from another angle, using other characters with different names.
I like Maxwell’s inversion of the narcissistic instinct shared by artists and non-artists alike, as though he wished to carve not his initials but his mother’s on that beech tree. As a journalist, I often witnessed a similar impulse, knowing I was writing about someone in the pages of a newspaper who would leave no other public trace of their lives. Journalism is seldom literature, but thousands of people I interviewed didn’t know that, and surely part of the reason they agreed to speak with me was to “leave their mark” – a telling figure of speech. George Eliot honored such people in her goodbye to Dorthea Brooke, in the final paragraph of Middlemarch:
“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
A writer whose work I love deeply is the late William Maxwell, longtime fiction editor for The New Yorker and author of some of the loveliest, most mysterious books in American literature, especially the novels Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow, the latter published in 1980 when Maxwell was 72. I have started reading William Maxwell: A Literary Life, by Barbara Burkhardt, and in her introduction, she quotes from her first interview with the novelist, in 1991. Maxwell preferred to be interviewed in person but to answer with his typewriter. Here’s how he explained his compulsion to write at that first meeting:
“I have a melancholy feeling that all human experience goes down the drain, or to put it more politely, ends in oblivion, except when somebody records some part of his own experience – which can of course be the life that goes on in his mind and imagination as well as what he had for breakfast. In a very small way I have fought this, by trying to recreate in a form that I hoped would have some degree of permanence the character and lives of people I have known and loved. Or people modeled on them. To succeed this would have to move the reader as I have been moved. This is the intricate, in and out, round and round, now direct and now indirect process that comes under the heading of literary art.”
Maxwell’s art, more than most writers’, is rooted in loss. When he was 10, in 1918, his mother was among the 100 million people who died in the worldwide Spanish influenza epidemic. That he considered his work a form of preservation or reclamation is no surprise to devoted readers. The figure of the dying mother recurs throughout his work. Maxwell’s fiction is deeply autobiographical but not in the banally literal sense. It’s as though he tried again and again to resolve his life’s primal scene, only to try again from another angle, using other characters with different names.
I like Maxwell’s inversion of the narcissistic instinct shared by artists and non-artists alike, as though he wished to carve not his initials but his mother’s on that beech tree. As a journalist, I often witnessed a similar impulse, knowing I was writing about someone in the pages of a newspaper who would leave no other public trace of their lives. Journalism is seldom literature, but thousands of people I interviewed didn’t know that, and surely part of the reason they agreed to speak with me was to “leave their mark” – a telling figure of speech. George Eliot honored such people in her goodbye to Dorthea Brooke, in the final paragraph of Middlemarch:
“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Monday, October 15, 2007
`An Art of Empathy'
Zbigniew Herbert is among those writers – Geoffrey Hill and Henry Green are others, to cite an unlikely pair – who inspire appetites that can never be sated. I want to read everything by and about them, even journalism and juvenilia. In Herbert’s case, hunger is compounded by the vagaries of translation. The shelves in my university library are packed tight with his untranslated work – poems, drama, prose – that might as well be locked in a vault for those of us without Polish. Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski and recently published by Trinity University Press, gives us a meal just sumptuous enough to temporarily ease the peckishness.
Zagajewski includes work from 25 writers, several of whom are new to me, but first I went to the Herbert selection – six letters he wrote in the early fifties to his teacher and mentor, Henryk Elzenberg (1887-1967), and an interview from 1986 with Renata Gorczynski, “The Art of Empathy.” All are translated by Alissa Valles, who earlier this year translated his Collected Poems: 1956-1998. In the letters, one is struck by Herbert’s reverence and respect for Elzenberg, who taught philosophy, a discipline Herbert studied with conviction and nearly accepted as a vocation. Of philosophy he writes:
“I put to myself – in answer to your letter – the question what I really look for philosophy. The question is rather Faustian and perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask what philosophy demands of me, what responsibilities the discipline lays on me.
“The answer to the first, more my own version, turns out to be extremely compromising for me. I look for emotion. Powerful intellectual emotion, painful tensions between reality and abstraction, yet another rending, yet another, deeper than personal, cause for sorrow. And in that subjective cloud, respectable truth and sublime measure are lost, so I’ll never be a decent university philosopher. I prefer living through philosophy to brooding on it like a hen.”
Born in 1924, Herbert was not yet 30 when he wrote these letters, yet his sources and themes are already in place. He is openly contemptuous of Marxism. He worships classical literature – Homer, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius – and already is devoted to Shakespeare and Pascal. All of them show up in his mature poetry. Here are some other selections:
“…it’s not so important whether you find truth (in this I’m a skeptic), but what philosophy does to a person.”
“My God, we don’t even know how religious we are.”
“I don’t like philosophy that explains, I love the kind that makes one’s head spin. I put in this confession so that you won’t be deluded: Nothing will come of me.”
“Coherence isn’t necessarily an intellectual principle, it often signifies fear, a closure to another image of the world. In the end one can live with two images; one practical, for everyday use, another dazzling, for when hypotheses are proven true, when one goes from darkness into the light, or from the half-dark into a great darkness.”
And this, from the interview:
“We made a kind of pact with our readers, which I would like to respect. But I also try to make it clear that the author doesn’t appear in his own person. He creates a certain poetic persona, which – sadly – is better than he is. Because I think man isn’t who he really is – who knows who he is – but who he would like to be. That is my fundamental discovery in the sphere of psychology. That’s why I feel sympathy for elderly people who make themselves look younger, for people with bow legs who happen to like dancing. I sympathize with people who have bad voices but never let an occasion slip in company to sing the Virgin’s Prayer. It’s moving, this striving, this attempt to outstrip oneself, that’s what literature is. It’s a longing for a better `I’ that I thought up, and that then takes its revenge on me.”
And one more:
“In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy – that is, entering into others. You can’t write novels, which I don’t read much anyway, because I don’t have a taste for them, unless the author manages to divide himself into several characters – a protagonist, an antagonist, or whatever they’re called. That’s elementary from my point of view and doesn’t require further explanation. It’s probably my lacking, because I don’t have that kind of reliable capacity for fantasizing, that kind of imagination. The ability to put oneself in the position of another person is very useful in life.”
Zagajewski includes work from 25 writers, several of whom are new to me, but first I went to the Herbert selection – six letters he wrote in the early fifties to his teacher and mentor, Henryk Elzenberg (1887-1967), and an interview from 1986 with Renata Gorczynski, “The Art of Empathy.” All are translated by Alissa Valles, who earlier this year translated his Collected Poems: 1956-1998. In the letters, one is struck by Herbert’s reverence and respect for Elzenberg, who taught philosophy, a discipline Herbert studied with conviction and nearly accepted as a vocation. Of philosophy he writes:
“I put to myself – in answer to your letter – the question what I really look for philosophy. The question is rather Faustian and perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask what philosophy demands of me, what responsibilities the discipline lays on me.
“The answer to the first, more my own version, turns out to be extremely compromising for me. I look for emotion. Powerful intellectual emotion, painful tensions between reality and abstraction, yet another rending, yet another, deeper than personal, cause for sorrow. And in that subjective cloud, respectable truth and sublime measure are lost, so I’ll never be a decent university philosopher. I prefer living through philosophy to brooding on it like a hen.”
Born in 1924, Herbert was not yet 30 when he wrote these letters, yet his sources and themes are already in place. He is openly contemptuous of Marxism. He worships classical literature – Homer, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius – and already is devoted to Shakespeare and Pascal. All of them show up in his mature poetry. Here are some other selections:
“…it’s not so important whether you find truth (in this I’m a skeptic), but what philosophy does to a person.”
“My God, we don’t even know how religious we are.”
“I don’t like philosophy that explains, I love the kind that makes one’s head spin. I put in this confession so that you won’t be deluded: Nothing will come of me.”
“Coherence isn’t necessarily an intellectual principle, it often signifies fear, a closure to another image of the world. In the end one can live with two images; one practical, for everyday use, another dazzling, for when hypotheses are proven true, when one goes from darkness into the light, or from the half-dark into a great darkness.”
And this, from the interview:
“We made a kind of pact with our readers, which I would like to respect. But I also try to make it clear that the author doesn’t appear in his own person. He creates a certain poetic persona, which – sadly – is better than he is. Because I think man isn’t who he really is – who knows who he is – but who he would like to be. That is my fundamental discovery in the sphere of psychology. That’s why I feel sympathy for elderly people who make themselves look younger, for people with bow legs who happen to like dancing. I sympathize with people who have bad voices but never let an occasion slip in company to sing the Virgin’s Prayer. It’s moving, this striving, this attempt to outstrip oneself, that’s what literature is. It’s a longing for a better `I’ that I thought up, and that then takes its revenge on me.”
And one more:
“In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy – that is, entering into others. You can’t write novels, which I don’t read much anyway, because I don’t have a taste for them, unless the author manages to divide himself into several characters – a protagonist, an antagonist, or whatever they’re called. That’s elementary from my point of view and doesn’t require further explanation. It’s probably my lacking, because I don’t have that kind of reliable capacity for fantasizing, that kind of imagination. The ability to put oneself in the position of another person is very useful in life.”
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Book as Universe
In 2001, New York Review Books brought out a paperback edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a volume with the dimensions and heft of a brick. It’s an attractive piece of bookmaking, with Philippe de Champaigne’s Vanitas (skull, hourglass) on the cover, but it remains essentially impossible to read. In fact, to read Robert Burton’s masterpiece in this edition (of about 1,400 pages) would amount to destroying it. The spine would crack and eventually split into discrete, pocket-sized sections, approximating the three partitions into which Burton organized his unorganizable work. Buying the NYRB edition amounted to vanitas on my part. I already owned the three-volume Everyman’s Library edition – my reading copy – and the one-volume, all-English edition, edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan Smith in 1927. The latter features larger type but some of the translations from Latin seem shaky, so I tend to avoid it – another act of vanitas, I suppose – but it’s the edition a Cleveland friend and I used to read aloud when we were young and had gotten sufficiently drunk. We did the same with Whitman.
When NYRB put out the new edition, the novelist William Monahan reviewed it for Bookforum, an enviable assignment. His was a rare review that one actually remembers with a fondness that becomes suffused into the book itself. Clearly, Monahan has not merely read The Anatomy of Melancholy, but lived with it and in it:
“No prose writer – ever -- has been more of a universe than Robert Burton, self-curing author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), an essay on the humors that went utterly out of control and became the craziest, best entertainment ever written in English -- far more important than the King James Bible in terms of effect on alpha-class letters.”
All the right people have loved Burton, and Monahan cites them – Johnson, Keats, Lamb – and he might have added Swift, Sterne and Joyce. He makes it clear that Burton was book-drunk and word-drunk, mad with learning, but his work, in its timelessness, is as much about us as it was about his Elizabethan contemporaries:
“Burton's seventeenth-century observations evoke a world that you may consider different from ours only if you wish to remain in a state of parochial deformity. All men in all times, it seems, are prone to wind, lust, fidgets, fanaticism, credulity.”
Burton’s prose is dense and chewy, like black bread fresh from the oven, and comparably satisfying and nourishing. Any honest writer could learn from Burton’s erudite example. Monahan says:
“The Anatomy is a great mine to lay in the paths of the paraliterate. If you know anyone, a `writer,’ possibly, who thinks English began and ended with Strunk and White, give the Anatomy to them, and a little while later you will see them wandering toward a monastery, the nearest bottle, or a job as a gardener. The boldest adept—the reader with Ovid in his pocket, who might even know that Henry IV once stood barefoot in the snow with his wife at the gates of Canossa, may yet never achieve the summit of this book. You may think you have planted your flag on it, but you are perpetually at base camp, playing poker with Sherpas by a spirit stove, occasionally stepping out of the tent to look at what you've gotten yourself into. Opened randomly, the Anatomy can produce a kind of vertigo and sudden unconsciousness, after which you find yourself standing dazed in the next room, worrying with Burton—whether you dropped the volume an hour or three years ago—that Scandberg's death was possibly insufficiently lamented in Epirus. Yet opening at random is what this book, like the Bible, or Ulysses, is ultimately for.”
If you need permission, or encouragement, to read the Anatomy, take it from Monahan, or from me, or from Burton:
“Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, whereas in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, falls, periods of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c.”
When NYRB put out the new edition, the novelist William Monahan reviewed it for Bookforum, an enviable assignment. His was a rare review that one actually remembers with a fondness that becomes suffused into the book itself. Clearly, Monahan has not merely read The Anatomy of Melancholy, but lived with it and in it:
“No prose writer – ever -- has been more of a universe than Robert Burton, self-curing author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), an essay on the humors that went utterly out of control and became the craziest, best entertainment ever written in English -- far more important than the King James Bible in terms of effect on alpha-class letters.”
All the right people have loved Burton, and Monahan cites them – Johnson, Keats, Lamb – and he might have added Swift, Sterne and Joyce. He makes it clear that Burton was book-drunk and word-drunk, mad with learning, but his work, in its timelessness, is as much about us as it was about his Elizabethan contemporaries:
“Burton's seventeenth-century observations evoke a world that you may consider different from ours only if you wish to remain in a state of parochial deformity. All men in all times, it seems, are prone to wind, lust, fidgets, fanaticism, credulity.”
Burton’s prose is dense and chewy, like black bread fresh from the oven, and comparably satisfying and nourishing. Any honest writer could learn from Burton’s erudite example. Monahan says:
“The Anatomy is a great mine to lay in the paths of the paraliterate. If you know anyone, a `writer,’ possibly, who thinks English began and ended with Strunk and White, give the Anatomy to them, and a little while later you will see them wandering toward a monastery, the nearest bottle, or a job as a gardener. The boldest adept—the reader with Ovid in his pocket, who might even know that Henry IV once stood barefoot in the snow with his wife at the gates of Canossa, may yet never achieve the summit of this book. You may think you have planted your flag on it, but you are perpetually at base camp, playing poker with Sherpas by a spirit stove, occasionally stepping out of the tent to look at what you've gotten yourself into. Opened randomly, the Anatomy can produce a kind of vertigo and sudden unconsciousness, after which you find yourself standing dazed in the next room, worrying with Burton—whether you dropped the volume an hour or three years ago—that Scandberg's death was possibly insufficiently lamented in Epirus. Yet opening at random is what this book, like the Bible, or Ulysses, is ultimately for.”
If you need permission, or encouragement, to read the Anatomy, take it from Monahan, or from me, or from Burton:
“Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, whereas in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, falls, periods of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c.”
Saturday, October 13, 2007
`Cheerful, Hardy, Ingenious'
Self-assessments are always dubious but I conclude that no writer has influenced me so significantly, especially when I write about books and music, as the late jazz critic Whitney Balliett. In today’s climate, “critic” is misleading, suggesting, as it does, wet blankets and jargon. I don’t think of myself as a critic – more as an essayist whose subject is the intersection of books and life -- and I don’t go to Balliett primarily for his critical assessments, though they are almost invariably reliable. The best reason for reading Balliett is the joy of his prose and the way he impressionistically yet with great detail renders the lives of musicians and their music. I have been rereading Alec Wilder and His Friends (1974), a collection of profiles from The New Yorker of the composer and his informal circle, a group Balliett (after E.M. Forster) calls a “small aristocracy.” As always, Balliett is generous with quotations from his subjects, who are often world-class talkers. The quotes sometimes go on for pages and are never too long. Referring to his method, he writes in the introduction:
“Different technical approaches, governed by the situation and subject, have been used in the book. In all cases, though, the subjects’ words and voices rightly carry their narratives. There is no New Journalism; Boswell invented modern literary reporting, and we have all been improvising on him ever since.”
So far, that’s Forster and Boswell, and off the top of my head I can remember Balliett likening a Bill Evans performance to Henry James, and Art Pepper’s oral autobiography to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor. There’s nothing show-offy about Balliett’s approach. He was a deeply literate writer, never afflicted with snobbery or reverse-snobbery, for whom the only critical standard that counted was excellence. It had nothing to do with high culture or low culture, only good culture. The first piece in the collection is “The Key of D is a Daffodil Yellow,” a profile of Marian McPartland. Here’s a sample, which characteristically opens with a parenthetical phrase:
“(Her sheer inventiveness is frightening; her ceaseless ideas sometimes trample one another.) Her slow ballads suggest rain forests. The chords are massed and dark and overhanging, the harmonies thick and new and almost impenetrable. And her slow blues are much the same: the tremolos are mountainous, the arpeggios cascades, the blue notes heavy and keening. But her slow blues also have a singular Celtic bagpipe quality. Her foliage is thinner at faster tempos. There are pauses between the stunning, whipping single-note melodic lines, and her chords, often played off beat, are used as recharging way stations. Her notes have room to breathe, and her chordal passages are copses rather than jungles.”
In the spring of 1998, I spent more than an hour with McPartland, while her piano was being tuned, in a jazz club in upstate New York, where she would perform later that evening. I found her intelligent, imperious and in a mood to celebrate Balliett. When I mentioned I had just reread his profile of her, she said, “It’s still amazing. He saw things I never saw, and heard things I never heard, and when I read it I knew he was right. I envy him as a writer.”
Balliett also profiles the late Ruby Braff, whom he calls “the most intense, inventive, and eloquent trumpeter/cornetist we have,” adding, “This is not to displace [Bobby] Hackett, whom Braff admires enormously; Hackett’s beauties are mathematical and reflective. He is a Pope, and Braff a Blake.”
A computer scientist whose office is down the hall from mine is the nephew of Braff, who died in 2003. Last year, I loaned him a copy of Alec Wilder and His Friends after learning of their relation. He returned it a few days later and said, “Yeah, he captured Ruby, all right. Except he forgot to mention he was an asshole.”
Now Balliett is dead and so are most of the people he writes about in Alec Wilder and His Friends. The survivors are McPartland (now 89), Tony Bennett (81) and Bob Elliott (84) of the great comedy team Bob and Ray. Probably the least-known figure in the collection is Marie Marcus, a pianist and protégé of Fats Waller. She died in 2003 at the age of 89. Balliett begins his profile of Marcus, “In the Wilderness,” with a beautiful, extended paean to small-time jazz musicians, people who never make it big, perhaps never record, whose followings end at the town limits. I’ve known many of them, often superb players, and Balliett does them great honor:
“The number of jazz musicians in this country who piece out their lives in the shadows and shoals of show business has always been surprising. They play in roadhouses and motel lounges. They play in country inns and small hotels. They appear in seafood restaurants in ocean resorts and in steak houses in suburban shopping centers. They play in band shells on yellow summer evenings. They sit in, gloriously, with famous bands on one-night stands when the third trumpeter fails to show. They play wedding receptions and country-club dances and bar mitzvahs, and they turn up at intense Saturday night parties given by small-town businessmen who clap them on the back and request `Ain’t She Sweet,’ and then sing along. Occasionally, they venture into big cities and appear for a week in obscure nightclubs. But more often they take almost permanent gigs in South Orange and Rochester and Albany. There is a spate of reasons for their perennial ghostliness: The spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak; their talents, though sure, are small; they may be bound by domineering spouses or ailing mothers; they may abhor traveling; they may be among those rare performers who are sated by the enthusiasms of a small house in a Syracuse bar on a February night. Whatever the reasons, these musicians form a heroic legion. They work long hours in seedy and/or pretentious places for minimum money. They make sporadic recordings on unknown labels. They play for benefits but are refused loans at the bank. They pass their lives pumping up their egos. Some of them sink into sadness and bitterness and dissolution, but by and large they remain a cheerful, hardy, ingenious group who subsist by charitably keeping the music alive in Danville and Worcester and Ish Peming.”
The celebratory yet elegiac tone sustained throughout this passage is ubiquitous in Balliett’s work, like blue notes and a minor key. He died in February but his books, to our good fortune, remain “cheerful, hardy, ingenious.”
.
“Different technical approaches, governed by the situation and subject, have been used in the book. In all cases, though, the subjects’ words and voices rightly carry their narratives. There is no New Journalism; Boswell invented modern literary reporting, and we have all been improvising on him ever since.”
So far, that’s Forster and Boswell, and off the top of my head I can remember Balliett likening a Bill Evans performance to Henry James, and Art Pepper’s oral autobiography to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor. There’s nothing show-offy about Balliett’s approach. He was a deeply literate writer, never afflicted with snobbery or reverse-snobbery, for whom the only critical standard that counted was excellence. It had nothing to do with high culture or low culture, only good culture. The first piece in the collection is “The Key of D is a Daffodil Yellow,” a profile of Marian McPartland. Here’s a sample, which characteristically opens with a parenthetical phrase:
“(Her sheer inventiveness is frightening; her ceaseless ideas sometimes trample one another.) Her slow ballads suggest rain forests. The chords are massed and dark and overhanging, the harmonies thick and new and almost impenetrable. And her slow blues are much the same: the tremolos are mountainous, the arpeggios cascades, the blue notes heavy and keening. But her slow blues also have a singular Celtic bagpipe quality. Her foliage is thinner at faster tempos. There are pauses between the stunning, whipping single-note melodic lines, and her chords, often played off beat, are used as recharging way stations. Her notes have room to breathe, and her chordal passages are copses rather than jungles.”
In the spring of 1998, I spent more than an hour with McPartland, while her piano was being tuned, in a jazz club in upstate New York, where she would perform later that evening. I found her intelligent, imperious and in a mood to celebrate Balliett. When I mentioned I had just reread his profile of her, she said, “It’s still amazing. He saw things I never saw, and heard things I never heard, and when I read it I knew he was right. I envy him as a writer.”
Balliett also profiles the late Ruby Braff, whom he calls “the most intense, inventive, and eloquent trumpeter/cornetist we have,” adding, “This is not to displace [Bobby] Hackett, whom Braff admires enormously; Hackett’s beauties are mathematical and reflective. He is a Pope, and Braff a Blake.”
A computer scientist whose office is down the hall from mine is the nephew of Braff, who died in 2003. Last year, I loaned him a copy of Alec Wilder and His Friends after learning of their relation. He returned it a few days later and said, “Yeah, he captured Ruby, all right. Except he forgot to mention he was an asshole.”
Now Balliett is dead and so are most of the people he writes about in Alec Wilder and His Friends. The survivors are McPartland (now 89), Tony Bennett (81) and Bob Elliott (84) of the great comedy team Bob and Ray. Probably the least-known figure in the collection is Marie Marcus, a pianist and protégé of Fats Waller. She died in 2003 at the age of 89. Balliett begins his profile of Marcus, “In the Wilderness,” with a beautiful, extended paean to small-time jazz musicians, people who never make it big, perhaps never record, whose followings end at the town limits. I’ve known many of them, often superb players, and Balliett does them great honor:
“The number of jazz musicians in this country who piece out their lives in the shadows and shoals of show business has always been surprising. They play in roadhouses and motel lounges. They play in country inns and small hotels. They appear in seafood restaurants in ocean resorts and in steak houses in suburban shopping centers. They play in band shells on yellow summer evenings. They sit in, gloriously, with famous bands on one-night stands when the third trumpeter fails to show. They play wedding receptions and country-club dances and bar mitzvahs, and they turn up at intense Saturday night parties given by small-town businessmen who clap them on the back and request `Ain’t She Sweet,’ and then sing along. Occasionally, they venture into big cities and appear for a week in obscure nightclubs. But more often they take almost permanent gigs in South Orange and Rochester and Albany. There is a spate of reasons for their perennial ghostliness: The spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak; their talents, though sure, are small; they may be bound by domineering spouses or ailing mothers; they may abhor traveling; they may be among those rare performers who are sated by the enthusiasms of a small house in a Syracuse bar on a February night. Whatever the reasons, these musicians form a heroic legion. They work long hours in seedy and/or pretentious places for minimum money. They make sporadic recordings on unknown labels. They play for benefits but are refused loans at the bank. They pass their lives pumping up their egos. Some of them sink into sadness and bitterness and dissolution, but by and large they remain a cheerful, hardy, ingenious group who subsist by charitably keeping the music alive in Danville and Worcester and Ish Peming.”
The celebratory yet elegiac tone sustained throughout this passage is ubiquitous in Balliett’s work, like blue notes and a minor key. He died in February but his books, to our good fortune, remain “cheerful, hardy, ingenious.”
.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Post Haste
The U.S. Mail on Thursday brought treasure. A book I had ordered, Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000, by R.S. Thomas, finally arrived. These are autumnal works from the last 12 years of the great Welsh poet-priest’s life. Published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004, the volume is beautiful -- the cover is a detail from John Knapp-Fisher’s painting “Sunset – North Pembrokeshire Coast – and substantial, like Thomas’ poems. Here are the concluding lines of “Homage to Wallace Stevens”:
“Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
At an altar you never aspired
To, celebrating the sacrament
Of the imagination whose high-priest
Notwithstanding you are.”
Also in the mail was the summer issue of Raritan, sent to me by the journal at the request of James Marcus, proprietor of House of Mirth. In it is James’ translation of a brief piece, “Key West,” by the inimitable Aldo Buzzi. If you don’t know Buzzi’s work, I will say it is charming and learned in a way that resembles no other writer’s. It is digressive, droll, filled with acute detail and profound without ever taking itself seriously. Accompanying the piece is a drawing by Buzzi’s old friend, Saul Stenberg, whose work is at least as sui generis as Buzzi’s. Here’s a sample of James’ Buzzi:
“I came late to writing, so now, despite my age [he turned 90 in August], I can in a certain way consider myself a young writer, one who still learns by reading, not yet tired of learning. But nonetheless tired due to old age.”
Raritan is not available online, so please shell out $8 and enjoy Buzzi, Steinberg and Marcus, which sounds like a law firm or a vaudeville act.
ADDENDUM: Dave Lull reminds me that James has posted some of his other Buzzi translations here and here.
“Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
At an altar you never aspired
To, celebrating the sacrament
Of the imagination whose high-priest
Notwithstanding you are.”
Also in the mail was the summer issue of Raritan, sent to me by the journal at the request of James Marcus, proprietor of House of Mirth. In it is James’ translation of a brief piece, “Key West,” by the inimitable Aldo Buzzi. If you don’t know Buzzi’s work, I will say it is charming and learned in a way that resembles no other writer’s. It is digressive, droll, filled with acute detail and profound without ever taking itself seriously. Accompanying the piece is a drawing by Buzzi’s old friend, Saul Stenberg, whose work is at least as sui generis as Buzzi’s. Here’s a sample of James’ Buzzi:
“I came late to writing, so now, despite my age [he turned 90 in August], I can in a certain way consider myself a young writer, one who still learns by reading, not yet tired of learning. But nonetheless tired due to old age.”
Raritan is not available online, so please shell out $8 and enjoy Buzzi, Steinberg and Marcus, which sounds like a law firm or a vaudeville act.
ADDENDUM: Dave Lull reminds me that James has posted some of his other Buzzi translations here and here.
`A Skeptic in Dialogue with Hope'
My personal acquaintance with the late poet Howard Nemerov is attenuated but quite real. When I worked for the newspaper in Schenectady, N.Y., I ate lunch almost daily in a diner on the other side of the Mohawk River, in Scotia. Another regular was co-owner of a nearby steel-fabrication business. He wore a tie but fancied himself a working stiff and littérateur. His son had graduated in English from Washington University, in St. Louis, and among his teachers had been William H. Gass, Stanley Elkin and Nemerov. My fellow-diner said he had met all of them while visiting his son, and had not been impressed by the first two: “But Nemerov, he was a mensh, a real mensh.”
In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten gives three definitions for mensh, the first being “A human being,” and thus a synonym of its German cognate, Mensch. Next: “An upright, honorable, decent person.” Finally, and this is the meaning I think my friend intended: “Someone of consequence; someone to admire and emulate; someone of noble character.” Rosten adds:
“The key to being `a real mensh’ is nothing less than – character: rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous. Many a poor man, many an ignorant man, is a mensh.”
Based only on years of reading Nemerov’s work, I’m certain my diner friend was right. Most of Nemerov’s poems are formal, with rhyme and meter, and devoted to what we unsophisticates know as “the real world.” Even when writing light verse, Nemerov is almost never frivolous. He’s serious but not humorless or earnest. In his foreword to The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov, Wyatt Prunty writes:
“Nemerov was a skeptic in dialogue with hope. He cast a longing eye toward neoplatonism, window-shopped the Aristotelian aspects of Aquinas, but ended up viewing America’s mid-century suburbs through the lens of process philosophy, where formulas were more reliable than forms and the logos was more verb than noun.”
Nemerov was productive though not long-lived. He died at 71 in 1991. His Collected Poems, all 516 pages, sits on my shelf, but like Wordsworth and Tennyson, he’s a poet improved by careful selection. Out of curiosity I picked up the Selected Poems, prudently edited by Daniel Anderson and published in 2003 by Swallow Press, and re-discovered a poet who writes for grownups. In the final stanza of “The Blue Swallows,” Nemerov says:
“O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.”
No theories. No preening or self-dramatizing. Just lyrical, down-to-earth intelligence, an engagement with reality tempered by coolness, a little like late Yeats. Nemerov had a taste for elegies and sonnets. His is a homely, competent voice, technically deft but without pyrotechnics, one I find congenial. Here’s a passage from “September, the First Day of School”:
“A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare’s Plays.
As from the integers comes Euler’s Law,
As from the whole, inseparably, the lives,
“The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.”
Nemerov often navigates Cheever/Yates country, but more meditatively, without their desperation. He has poems about lawn sprinklers, telephone books, model airplanes, burning leaves, the town dump, and many about trees. Here’s one, “Blue Suburban,” that might be set in Bullet Park or on Revolutionary Road:
“Out in the elegy country, summer evenings,
It used to be always six o’clock, or seven,
Where the fountain of the willow always wept
Over the lawn, where the shadows crept longer
But came no closer, where the talk was brilliant,
The laughter friendly, where they all were young
And taken by the darkness in surprise
That night should come and the small lights go on
In the lonely house down in the elegy country,
Where the bitter things were said and the drunken friends
Steadied themselves away in their courses
For industrious ruin or casual disaster
Under a handful of pale, permanent stars.”
Finally, another favorite, one that might usefully be taught in poetry “workshops,” titled “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry”:
“Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
“And there came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.”
In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten gives three definitions for mensh, the first being “A human being,” and thus a synonym of its German cognate, Mensch. Next: “An upright, honorable, decent person.” Finally, and this is the meaning I think my friend intended: “Someone of consequence; someone to admire and emulate; someone of noble character.” Rosten adds:
“The key to being `a real mensh’ is nothing less than – character: rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous. Many a poor man, many an ignorant man, is a mensh.”
Based only on years of reading Nemerov’s work, I’m certain my diner friend was right. Most of Nemerov’s poems are formal, with rhyme and meter, and devoted to what we unsophisticates know as “the real world.” Even when writing light verse, Nemerov is almost never frivolous. He’s serious but not humorless or earnest. In his foreword to The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov, Wyatt Prunty writes:
“Nemerov was a skeptic in dialogue with hope. He cast a longing eye toward neoplatonism, window-shopped the Aristotelian aspects of Aquinas, but ended up viewing America’s mid-century suburbs through the lens of process philosophy, where formulas were more reliable than forms and the logos was more verb than noun.”
Nemerov was productive though not long-lived. He died at 71 in 1991. His Collected Poems, all 516 pages, sits on my shelf, but like Wordsworth and Tennyson, he’s a poet improved by careful selection. Out of curiosity I picked up the Selected Poems, prudently edited by Daniel Anderson and published in 2003 by Swallow Press, and re-discovered a poet who writes for grownups. In the final stanza of “The Blue Swallows,” Nemerov says:
“O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.”
No theories. No preening or self-dramatizing. Just lyrical, down-to-earth intelligence, an engagement with reality tempered by coolness, a little like late Yeats. Nemerov had a taste for elegies and sonnets. His is a homely, competent voice, technically deft but without pyrotechnics, one I find congenial. Here’s a passage from “September, the First Day of School”:
“A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare’s Plays.
As from the integers comes Euler’s Law,
As from the whole, inseparably, the lives,
“The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.”
Nemerov often navigates Cheever/Yates country, but more meditatively, without their desperation. He has poems about lawn sprinklers, telephone books, model airplanes, burning leaves, the town dump, and many about trees. Here’s one, “Blue Suburban,” that might be set in Bullet Park or on Revolutionary Road:
“Out in the elegy country, summer evenings,
It used to be always six o’clock, or seven,
Where the fountain of the willow always wept
Over the lawn, where the shadows crept longer
But came no closer, where the talk was brilliant,
The laughter friendly, where they all were young
And taken by the darkness in surprise
That night should come and the small lights go on
In the lonely house down in the elegy country,
Where the bitter things were said and the drunken friends
Steadied themselves away in their courses
For industrious ruin or casual disaster
Under a handful of pale, permanent stars.”
Finally, another favorite, one that might usefully be taught in poetry “workshops,” titled “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry”:
“Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
“And there came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.”
Thursday, October 11, 2007
`Look It Up in Burton, Lad'
People speak glibly of books changing their lives, though I suspect it seldom happens. The explanations such readers give usually sound self-serving and melodramatic, crafted to make them appear more thoughtful or intelligent than they could ever hope to be. It’s a common strategy among politicians and other celebrities, and the book they cite most often, of course, is the Bible.
I’ve read thousands of books since I learned to read 50 years ago and that, certainly, has had a cumulative impact on my life – all that time I could have spent bowling or watching the History Channel -- but I can’t identify a single volume that possessed such transformational power. Books have helped populate my interior landscape, overhauled my imagination, buffered me against loneliness and despair, kept me amused, honed my critical faculties – but in what sense are such things life-changing? In the aggregate, they mean something; in isolation, little or nothing. That I can recall much Shakespeare and Eliot is a great comfort because it leaves me no excuse for boredom, but I can also pull up lyrics to pop songs and commercial jingles from 1961. So what?
One of the rare convincing testimonials to the power of reading in this sense is given by the English critic and story writer V.S. Pritchett, a reader of heroic proportions. In the first volume of his wonderful memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968) – a rather unbookish book from so bookish a man, but filled with great stories – he describes his Uncle Arthur, “the skeptic and man of knowledge,” who learned to read as an adult:
“A passion for education seized him. He took to learning for its own sake, and not in order to rise in the world. He belonged – I now see – to the dying race of craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last he found it: he taught himself to read by using [Robert] Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He reveled in it. `Look it up in Burton, lad,’ he’d say when I was older. `What’s old Burton say?’ He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument. And he would add, from his own experience, a favorite sentence: `Circumstances alter cases.’
“Burton [vicar of St. Thomas Church at Oxford] was Uncle Arthur’s emancipation: it set him free of the Bible in chapel-going circles. There were all his relations – especially the minister – shooting texts at one another while Uncle Arthur sat back, pulled a nail or two out of his mouth and put his relatives off target with bits of the Anatomy. He had had to pick up odds and ends of Latin and Greek because of the innumerable notes in those languages, and a look of devilry came into his eyes under their shaggy black brows. On top of this he was an antiquarian, a geologist, a bicyclist and an atheist. He claimed to have eaten sandwiches on the site of every ruined castle and abbey in Yorkshire. He worshiped the Minster [cathedral] and was a pest to curators of museums and to librarians.
“In short, Uncle Arthur was a crank.”
And what a charming, irresistible crank he must have been. Most cranks are merely cranky, seldom charming, bores forever chastising the world with theories and convictions. But what sort of man remains illiterate until adulthood, chooses Burton as his primer and turns it into surrogate scripture, an anti-Bible? This is Olympic-class crankiness, enabled but not caused by one book. It might have been another (Mein Kampf? Das Kapital? Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures?), though not likely one so charming and benign. Burton put it like this:
“As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books: we are oppressed with them; our eyes ake with reading, our fingers with turning.”
I’ve read thousands of books since I learned to read 50 years ago and that, certainly, has had a cumulative impact on my life – all that time I could have spent bowling or watching the History Channel -- but I can’t identify a single volume that possessed such transformational power. Books have helped populate my interior landscape, overhauled my imagination, buffered me against loneliness and despair, kept me amused, honed my critical faculties – but in what sense are such things life-changing? In the aggregate, they mean something; in isolation, little or nothing. That I can recall much Shakespeare and Eliot is a great comfort because it leaves me no excuse for boredom, but I can also pull up lyrics to pop songs and commercial jingles from 1961. So what?
One of the rare convincing testimonials to the power of reading in this sense is given by the English critic and story writer V.S. Pritchett, a reader of heroic proportions. In the first volume of his wonderful memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968) – a rather unbookish book from so bookish a man, but filled with great stories – he describes his Uncle Arthur, “the skeptic and man of knowledge,” who learned to read as an adult:
“A passion for education seized him. He took to learning for its own sake, and not in order to rise in the world. He belonged – I now see – to the dying race of craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last he found it: he taught himself to read by using [Robert] Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He reveled in it. `Look it up in Burton, lad,’ he’d say when I was older. `What’s old Burton say?’ He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument. And he would add, from his own experience, a favorite sentence: `Circumstances alter cases.’
“Burton [vicar of St. Thomas Church at Oxford] was Uncle Arthur’s emancipation: it set him free of the Bible in chapel-going circles. There were all his relations – especially the minister – shooting texts at one another while Uncle Arthur sat back, pulled a nail or two out of his mouth and put his relatives off target with bits of the Anatomy. He had had to pick up odds and ends of Latin and Greek because of the innumerable notes in those languages, and a look of devilry came into his eyes under their shaggy black brows. On top of this he was an antiquarian, a geologist, a bicyclist and an atheist. He claimed to have eaten sandwiches on the site of every ruined castle and abbey in Yorkshire. He worshiped the Minster [cathedral] and was a pest to curators of museums and to librarians.
“In short, Uncle Arthur was a crank.”
And what a charming, irresistible crank he must have been. Most cranks are merely cranky, seldom charming, bores forever chastising the world with theories and convictions. But what sort of man remains illiterate until adulthood, chooses Burton as his primer and turns it into surrogate scripture, an anti-Bible? This is Olympic-class crankiness, enabled but not caused by one book. It might have been another (Mein Kampf? Das Kapital? Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures?), though not likely one so charming and benign. Burton put it like this:
“As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books: we are oppressed with them; our eyes ake with reading, our fingers with turning.”
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
`September Song'
I’ve been listening to a CD of 19 Kurt Weill songs, Life, Love and Laughter: Dance Arrangements, 1927-50, performed by Das Palast Orchester, a very tight 12-piece ensemble that recreates the sound of “sweet jazz” with a Weimar strain. The singer, a light tenor, is Max Raabe, and the musical director is H.K. Gruber. When my 4-year-old first heard the music in the car he said, “Little Rascals music,” and he was right. The sound is reminiscent of the soundtracks to the Our Gang shorts, which in 1994 were recreated on CD as The Beau Hunks Play the Original Little Rascals Music: 50 Roy Shield Themes.
Anyway, I’ve listened repeatedly to the Weill songs, particularly “September Song,” which has more meaning now than it did when I was a kid and I found it mawkish and boring. I’ve listened again to versions I have by Walter Huston, Lotte Lenya and Urs Affolter, and I find it haunting though almost schlocky. The schlockiness worries me, so I consulted American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, Alec Wilder’s learned, witty and often acidic anatomy of the American soundtrack to the 20th century and beyond. He mentions Weill only in passing but provides an excellent antidote:
“I happen not to be a Kurt Weill fan. I don’t swoon at the mention of `The Three Penny Opera,’ as I’m told I should; I don’t weep at the downbeat of September Song; and I find Mack The Knife no more than one more proof of the appeal of the sixth interval of a scale. Part of my irritation in listening to his music stems from my feeling that there was no personal involvement on his part.”
He has a few good things to say about Weill's "Speak Low," from One Touch of Venus. Otherwise, that's it.
Anyway, I’ve listened repeatedly to the Weill songs, particularly “September Song,” which has more meaning now than it did when I was a kid and I found it mawkish and boring. I’ve listened again to versions I have by Walter Huston, Lotte Lenya and Urs Affolter, and I find it haunting though almost schlocky. The schlockiness worries me, so I consulted American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, Alec Wilder’s learned, witty and often acidic anatomy of the American soundtrack to the 20th century and beyond. He mentions Weill only in passing but provides an excellent antidote:
“I happen not to be a Kurt Weill fan. I don’t swoon at the mention of `The Three Penny Opera,’ as I’m told I should; I don’t weep at the downbeat of September Song; and I find Mack The Knife no more than one more proof of the appeal of the sixth interval of a scale. Part of my irritation in listening to his music stems from my feeling that there was no personal involvement on his part.”
He has a few good things to say about Weill's "Speak Low," from One Touch of Venus. Otherwise, that's it.
Basho x 30
Thanks to the Bureau of Public Secrets, by way of Frank Wilson, for this exercise in quiet beauty and comparative translation.
`Elegant, Lifting Celebrations of Life'
If you had been a young man living in Oklahoma City in the nineteen-thirties – not a place and time often recalled with fondness -- this is what you remember:
“In those days I lived near the Rock Island roundhouse, where, with a steady clanging of bells and a great groaning of wheels along the rails, switch engines made up trains of freight unceasingly. Yet often in the late-spring night I could hear [Jimmy] Rushing as I lay four blocks away in bed, carrying to me as clear as a full-bored riff on [Oran] `Hot Lips’ Page’s horn. Heard thus, across the dark blocks lined with locust trees, through the night throbbing with the natural aural imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains, departing bells, lonesome guitar chords simmering up from a shack in the alley, it was easy to imagine the voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments of the Blue Devils Orchestra and all the random sounds of night arose, affirming, as it were, some ideal native to the time and to the land.”
Ralph Ellison’s evocation of his youth makes it sound like an earthly paradise – spring, the windows open, Jimmy Rushing’s voice drifting down the street. This comes from “Remembering Jimmy,” first published in the Saturday Review in 1958 and collected in Shadow and Act (1964). Both men were born in Oklahoma City – Rushing in 1903, Ellison 10 years later. Rushing sang with Jelly Roll Morton, Bennie Moten and, for 13 years, Count Basie. He and Ellison were friends, and one wonders if Rushing ever read Invisible Man. Ellison self-deprecatingly describes his remembrance of Rushing as a “shamelessly nostalgic outburst,” but it’s more than that. He gives a close reading of Rushing’s style and its historical context, celebrates jazz, and works at dispelling the notions that all blacks were poor and benighted and black culture was second-rate. He writes of Rushing:
“…one of the significant aspects of his art is the imposition of a romantic lyricism upon the blues tradition (compare his version of `See See Rider’ with that of Ma Rainey), a lyricism which is not of the Deep South, but of the Southwest: a romanticism native to the frontier, imposed upon the violent rawness of a part of the nation which only thirteen years before Rushing’s birth was still Indian territory. Thus there is an optimism in it which echoes the spirit of those Negroes who, like Rushing’s father, had come to Oklahoma in search of a more human way of life.”
Only a writer as sensitive to words as he was to music could have pulled off this analysis:
“Jimmy [Rushing] has always shown a concern for the correctness of language, and out of the tension between the traditional folk pronunciation and his training in school, he has worked out a flexibility of enunciation and a rhythmical agility with words which make us constantly aware of the meanings which shimmer just beyond the limits of the lyrics.”
Rushing’s voice is a calmative and a mood-elevator, excellent for city driving. I’ve been listening to two CDs – Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You and Who Was It Sang That Song? – recorded almost 40 years ago, on Oct. 30, 1967, by the Jimmy Rushing All Stars. On hand for a party in Manhattan’s Great Northern Hotel were such comrades-in-arms as Buck Clayton on trumpet; Dickie Wells, trombone; Julian Dash, tenor; Sir Charles Thompson, piano; Jo Jones, drums; Gene Ramey, bass. Much of the lineup and material are drawn from the old Basie band. Rushing, accompanying himself on piano, revives his old warhorse “Tricks Ain’t Walking No More,” which the late Whitney Balliett described as “an ingratiating piece of Americana.” In 1957, in a review of the album The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing Esq., Balliett wrote:
“Jimmy Rushing, the huge, suave blues shouter, has always sounded as if he were wearing spats and a morning coat and had just had a good laugh. His supple, rich voice and his elegant accent have the curious effect of making the typical roughhouse blues lyric seem like a song by Noel Coward.”
Balliett, as usual, captures an artist’s essence in a minimum of words, all stylish. Rushing’s manner and voice distill the elegant-versus-raffish tension Balliett identifies. Here’s what the jazz critic wrote for The New Yorker at the time of Rushing’s death, on June 8, 1972. It’s a perfect characterization of the singer’s one-of-a-kind voice:
“Jimmy Rushing, the great blues singer, died yesterday, at the age of sixty-eight. He was a short, joyous, nimble, invincible fat man who shouted the blues as if he were wearing kid gloves and carrying a swagger stick. His diction was faultless; in fact, it had an elocutionary quality, for his vowels were broad and sumptuous, his `b’s each weighed a pound, and he loved to roll his `r’s. His lyrics had a pearl-gray, to-the-manor-born cast to them. His voice – light, tenorlike, sometimes straining – was not much, but it was hand-polished and it could be, despite his dandyish style, extraordinarily affecting, as in the mourning, deep-blue `How Long Blues’ he recorded in memory of his friend Hot Lips Page. But most of the time Rushing’s blues were elegant, lifting celebrations of life, and he sang them that way – his voice finally almost threadbare – until the day he died.”
What a pleasure to celebrate three masters – Rushing, Ellison, Balliett. Here’s how Ellison closed his appreciation of Rushing:
“…the abiding moods expressed in our most vital popular art form are not simply a matter of entertainment; they also tell us who and where we are.”
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a video from Youtube of Rushing singing "I Left My Baby" on the CBS show "The Sound of Jazz," from 1957. Enjoy the company Rushing keeps: Count Basie, Ben Webster, Dickie Wells, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Vic Dickenson, among others. And enjoy the smile on Rushing's face.
“In those days I lived near the Rock Island roundhouse, where, with a steady clanging of bells and a great groaning of wheels along the rails, switch engines made up trains of freight unceasingly. Yet often in the late-spring night I could hear [Jimmy] Rushing as I lay four blocks away in bed, carrying to me as clear as a full-bored riff on [Oran] `Hot Lips’ Page’s horn. Heard thus, across the dark blocks lined with locust trees, through the night throbbing with the natural aural imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains, departing bells, lonesome guitar chords simmering up from a shack in the alley, it was easy to imagine the voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments of the Blue Devils Orchestra and all the random sounds of night arose, affirming, as it were, some ideal native to the time and to the land.”
Ralph Ellison’s evocation of his youth makes it sound like an earthly paradise – spring, the windows open, Jimmy Rushing’s voice drifting down the street. This comes from “Remembering Jimmy,” first published in the Saturday Review in 1958 and collected in Shadow and Act (1964). Both men were born in Oklahoma City – Rushing in 1903, Ellison 10 years later. Rushing sang with Jelly Roll Morton, Bennie Moten and, for 13 years, Count Basie. He and Ellison were friends, and one wonders if Rushing ever read Invisible Man. Ellison self-deprecatingly describes his remembrance of Rushing as a “shamelessly nostalgic outburst,” but it’s more than that. He gives a close reading of Rushing’s style and its historical context, celebrates jazz, and works at dispelling the notions that all blacks were poor and benighted and black culture was second-rate. He writes of Rushing:
“…one of the significant aspects of his art is the imposition of a romantic lyricism upon the blues tradition (compare his version of `See See Rider’ with that of Ma Rainey), a lyricism which is not of the Deep South, but of the Southwest: a romanticism native to the frontier, imposed upon the violent rawness of a part of the nation which only thirteen years before Rushing’s birth was still Indian territory. Thus there is an optimism in it which echoes the spirit of those Negroes who, like Rushing’s father, had come to Oklahoma in search of a more human way of life.”
Only a writer as sensitive to words as he was to music could have pulled off this analysis:
“Jimmy [Rushing] has always shown a concern for the correctness of language, and out of the tension between the traditional folk pronunciation and his training in school, he has worked out a flexibility of enunciation and a rhythmical agility with words which make us constantly aware of the meanings which shimmer just beyond the limits of the lyrics.”
Rushing’s voice is a calmative and a mood-elevator, excellent for city driving. I’ve been listening to two CDs – Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You and Who Was It Sang That Song? – recorded almost 40 years ago, on Oct. 30, 1967, by the Jimmy Rushing All Stars. On hand for a party in Manhattan’s Great Northern Hotel were such comrades-in-arms as Buck Clayton on trumpet; Dickie Wells, trombone; Julian Dash, tenor; Sir Charles Thompson, piano; Jo Jones, drums; Gene Ramey, bass. Much of the lineup and material are drawn from the old Basie band. Rushing, accompanying himself on piano, revives his old warhorse “Tricks Ain’t Walking No More,” which the late Whitney Balliett described as “an ingratiating piece of Americana.” In 1957, in a review of the album The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing Esq., Balliett wrote:
“Jimmy Rushing, the huge, suave blues shouter, has always sounded as if he were wearing spats and a morning coat and had just had a good laugh. His supple, rich voice and his elegant accent have the curious effect of making the typical roughhouse blues lyric seem like a song by Noel Coward.”
Balliett, as usual, captures an artist’s essence in a minimum of words, all stylish. Rushing’s manner and voice distill the elegant-versus-raffish tension Balliett identifies. Here’s what the jazz critic wrote for The New Yorker at the time of Rushing’s death, on June 8, 1972. It’s a perfect characterization of the singer’s one-of-a-kind voice:
“Jimmy Rushing, the great blues singer, died yesterday, at the age of sixty-eight. He was a short, joyous, nimble, invincible fat man who shouted the blues as if he were wearing kid gloves and carrying a swagger stick. His diction was faultless; in fact, it had an elocutionary quality, for his vowels were broad and sumptuous, his `b’s each weighed a pound, and he loved to roll his `r’s. His lyrics had a pearl-gray, to-the-manor-born cast to them. His voice – light, tenorlike, sometimes straining – was not much, but it was hand-polished and it could be, despite his dandyish style, extraordinarily affecting, as in the mourning, deep-blue `How Long Blues’ he recorded in memory of his friend Hot Lips Page. But most of the time Rushing’s blues were elegant, lifting celebrations of life, and he sang them that way – his voice finally almost threadbare – until the day he died.”
What a pleasure to celebrate three masters – Rushing, Ellison, Balliett. Here’s how Ellison closed his appreciation of Rushing:
“…the abiding moods expressed in our most vital popular art form are not simply a matter of entertainment; they also tell us who and where we are.”
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a video from Youtube of Rushing singing "I Left My Baby" on the CBS show "The Sound of Jazz," from 1957. Enjoy the company Rushing keeps: Count Basie, Ben Webster, Dickie Wells, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Vic Dickenson, among others. And enjoy the smile on Rushing's face.
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