`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.